by Kim Green
I was in love.
Not the fearless, ravenous, consuming, if-I-can’t-have-you-I-might-have-to-eat-you variety that had afflicted me with Ren White. I can safely go on record as never wanting to eat Philip Atticus Rose. Kill him, yes. Ingest him, no. Nevertheless, in my twenty-second year, not quite fresh out of college but not yet stinking with inertia, I’d lived and loved enough to know
the tart pang of attraction when I felt it.
Attraction.
Isn’t it ironic that the crucial ingredient of attraction, mystery, is not only the enemy of marriage, it’s the enemy of human relationship? When there’s mystery, there’s horniness. When there’s mystery, there’s hope. When there’s mystery, he just might turn out to be Viggo Mortensen with a side of monogamy.
Once I was young and Phil was mysterious. And it was good.
But before we get into it, a confession: My sister isn’t the only Schultz sister with a celluloid life. It may seem corny, but I tend to see my own existence as a sort of epic blend of Pollock and Love Story. Okay, actually, it’s more like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, except without the clothes, great bodies, and excitement. Just the mess.
Set the scene: San Francisco. It’s 1985, and the city is in the throes of Indian summer . . .
Sweet curls of pot smoke waft up between the weeping trees in Golden Gate Park. Joggers and Rollerbladers zigzag down the Embarcadero, the city’s Goliath bridges rising up around them with utter majesty. That fall, the city simmers with the flavors of love: Chinese, Indian, Italian, El Salvadoran, Thai, the exotic, spicy thrill of it all scenting the skin. Rachel— Raquel— is a young sculptor living the bohemian dream in the Mission District, a squalid, rousing pastiche of artists, Central American immigrants, drug addicts, homeless, hippies, dykes, and urban-minded sorts who prefer the rainbow-colored sunny side of the city to its more rarefied hills and heights (Nob, Russian, Pacific).
Her loft, which she shares with an aspiring chef named Sue Banicek, opens languidly to the city’s exquisite light. It sits on top of a taqueria-tamale parlor. The tamales are filled with ropy cheese and succulent chicken, salty carnitas and juicy cactus. The tacos are pliant and plump, bursting with shredded meat and haphazard salsa and fat, meaty pinto beans. Raquel and Sue eat dozens of them each week, washing them down with draft beers from San Francisco’s very own Anchor brewery. Sue likes Liberty Ale; Quel prefers the Summer Beer, a paler wheat.
The girls—women—are blooming with youth and beauty. Best of all, after years of self-doubt and real or imagined social ostracization, they know it. Finally removed from the blandly insidious comfort of institutional food, Raquel is sleek and tan, almost firm, she thinks. In fact, sometimes, peering at herself in the cracked full-length mirror that’s propped against the loft’s exposed brick wall, she almost likes her body. Her breasts are still too full and heavy, her stomach more pillowy than the unyielding flatness required for blithe exposure. But her best features buoy her as never before. At last, she thinks, she looks like someone. Someone with enough exoticism to capture the attention she so desperately craves. Her hair falls, black and shiny, to midback, snaking waves that don’t quite break into ringlets but don’t frizz, either. That year everybody is cutting their hair short, spiking it out in dyed tufts. Raquel, correctly sensing disaster were she to follow suit, sometimes fastens her thick mane into a ponytail on the side of her head; mostly, she wears it long and loose, contrary to fashion. Against the olive backdrop of her smooth skin, her eyes are slate blue, striking if she wears makeup, unnerving and pale if she doesn’t. That year she wears a corset with a miniskirt or Levi’s, dark, high-waisted jeans that make her legs look even longer, paisley blouses and flat jeweled slippers she buys in Chinatown. She has three pairs of huaraches. She carries a battered black bag whose decay she takes an inexplicable pride in, which she decorates with buttons proclaiming APARTHEID SUCKS and TRAVOLTA IS REVOLTA.
One night Sue pokes her curly head into Quel’s studio— the part of the loft shielded by a wall of torn Oriental screens— and waves a set of tickets in Quel’s face.
“I won!” she yells, knowing Quel will understand. Sue has phoned in to the local new-wave radio station every day for the past five months, hoping to win concert tickets they can’t afford. Now they are going to R.E.M.
Quel puts down the chunk of metal she has been blowtorching and wipes her face of the sweat rolling down her forehead, stinging her eyes. The odor of charred steel is bitter, intoxicating, hopeful; years later, she witnesses a fatal car fire from a safe street corner perch and thinks, inexplicably and guiltily, of art and youth.
Together, the girls—women—dance around, reveling in the kiss of pure gladness. Sue’s hot-pink prom dress swirls around her small waist, highlighting her plump white arms. She is wearing red Converse high-tops.
“I’m going to marry Michael Stipe,” Sue chants over and over.
Later, at the concert, the girls are touched by a sort of wild enchantment that spirals into near perfection as the evening slides into night. Dancing in the tight crush of bodies at the front of the Cow Palace auditorium, they are tugged onstage by the band’s bass player, where they abandon the final shreds of their inhibition and gyrate like the rock stars they habitually dream about as banks of cameras record their joy.
Back on the ground, panting with uncharacteristic exertion, Raquel feels her feet skid in the manic swirl of sweaty dancers. The alcohol pulsing through her veins—two pre-dinner glasses of Cab, a few rum and Cokes, enough beer to wash down a cheap tapas meal— has rendered her clumsy and bovine. She struggles against the undertow surge of the
crowd. A small flame of fear licks at her gut.
“Hey, you okay?”
The voice, pleasantly bland and Californian—L.A.? Orange County?—and slightly raspy, wafts from behind her left ear. Her back is pressed against the guy’s chest, so tightly she can feel an obstinate ridge of belt buckle against her tailbone. Glancing down, she registers a pair of forearms crossed over her waist. They are tanned, the hair bleached by sun, thick and soft-looking, like animal fur. Their hold on her feels surprisingly comfortable, no more obtrusive than a timeworn cardigan. Her heartbeat slows; her feet are back on the ground.
“You smell good,” the guy with the furry arms says, his voice nuzzling her ear. “Like figs.” He’s wrong— her bath gel is infused with linden— but the fact that a stranger with a big carnal belt and a sexy voice would even try to name her scent astounds and intrigues her. At his words, a tendril of attraction unfurls from her belly up into her core. She has yet to see his face.
The guy’s name, he tells her eighty-five minutes later over late-night tamales and beers at the taqueria, is Phil. He has just returned to California after two years in the Peace Corps teaching English to traumatized Hutus and Tutsis who carry machetes in their back pockets like driver’s licenses. The abundance of sound, food, unnatural light, expectations here at home unnerves him. He is still reeling from the plunge back into modern life. He is not used to talking to white people; they are so aggressive. Greedy. Coarse.
“I’m in a Ph.D. program at Cal,” he offers, putting down the bulk of his burrito uneaten. “Artificial intelligence. What are you working on?” he goes on, as if he finds the standard-format career question distasteful.
“I’m an artist.” For the first time ever, Raquel says it without flinching.
Later, their naked bodies dappled in neon light from the taqueria sign, Raquel feels herself kiss the scar that curves above Phil’s green eyes. It is bumpy and fresh. She knows the kiss is too tender. Raquel wants him to leave so she can start planning distractions for when he doesn’t call her.
“Africa?” she says, tracing it with her finger. She conjures emaciated children rioting in the streets with blood dripping from moon-shaped blades, acid shouts rising like dust from Jeep wheels.
He grimaces. “Garage door.”
They laugh together.
“Raquel?”
Th
e image of Phil BCE (Before the Collapse of Expectations) dissolves and is replaced by something infinitely more photogenic: Duke the Surfer grinning at me from under a fringe of unkempt bangs. He plunks himself down on a bar stool. I wonder what he’d say if I told him the truth: I love my kids and I love my husband. It’s just that they, not cancer, are killing me.
“How did you decide to get into surfing?” I say, and immediately feel foolish. Pretending it constitutes a thoughtful career change is not going to make the boy any older.
Duke humors me. “I grew up in Kansas City. But once I came out here and got into it, I knew it was the right thing. I’ll never live inland again.”
“The girls think you’re a good instructor.”
“Girls usually do.”
“Modest, I see.”
He looks pained. “No, I just mean it’s easy to impress little girls here, if that’s what you want. I’m not into them, myself.”
The motive for his attention becomes clear. God, what an idiot I am. One person’s flirtation is another’s pity party, I
suppose.
“So, does your boyfriend surf, too?”
“My boyfriend?” His lips pause at the neck of his Bohemia.
“Oh, I just thought because of what you said—”
Duke laughs. “You thought I was gay because I don’t date high school girls?”
“Well, I couldn’t think of any other reason. . . you know.”
“What?”
“Why you’re, you know, always talking to me.” I feel my cheeks redden and wonder briefly if my bald head blushes, too.
Duke scooches his stool closer to mine. His non-beerholding hand drops to my thigh, shooting a dart of terrified lust through my body. “I like talking to you. You’re smart. You’re weird. You make me laugh.”
My eyes begin that weird guilty darting dance that eyes do when you are doing something the morals police would not approve of. I pray that the girls are still waiting for the check at their final unchaperoned Mexican dinner. The mere idea of my daughter and her friends absorbing the sordid snapshot of me, Taylor’s fat bald mother, with her leg trembling under the hand of a surfing instructor, is enough to send my blood pressure soaring.
“I’ve always liked older women,” Duke says under the buzz. “You’re so real. You’ve got experience. I can tell”—the hand emigrates to the nape of my neck, rubbing—“the way you look at me. . . you remind me of Diane Lane in that movie where she cheats on her husband with the Russian guy.”
I don’t bother to correct Olivier Martinez’s nationality. We both know what Duke’s talking about, and it’s not perestroika.
“What about my hair?” I say stupidly, which is not, in all likelihood, what Diane Lane would have said. Something has shifted; I relegated this person to kindergarten, and all of a sudden he has matriculated.
Duke the Demented leans back and studies me for a second. “I like it. Makes you look insane. Tall. Like an Amazon. Hey”—he nuzzles my neck—“do you read The New Yorker?”
“The second it hits my mailbox,” I tell him, though my subscription has lapsed. The statement provides relief; it is almost true.
I slide Teen People out from under a sleeping Taylor’s hand and slip it inside the copy of The New Yorker I bought for the equivalent of twelve dollars at the Puerto Vallarta airport. Now I can brush up on Hilary Duff’s methods of applying self-tanner in a taxicab while the rest of the plane thinks I’m contemplating Alan Greenspan’s position on third-world debt relief.
However, instead of reading, I gaze out the window as we bank upward through strings of jet stream. I’ve done nothing wrong. This I’m quite confident about. Infidelity involves certain transgressions. Hands on thighs don’t qualify. Fantasies don’t qualify. Flirtations on pristine beaches don’t qualify. If there were an entry exam for adultery, I would have failed it. There’s just one thing I don’t understand: If I’ve done nothing wrong, why, as I stare blindly out the smooth oval of airplane window, is my soul painted over with what seems to be regret?
CHAPTER 9
It’s Fakakta, Is What It Is
For a second the naked woman’s large, dark eyes meet mine, and I feel myself plummet into her pain as if shoved off a cliff. Then I wrest my gaze away and continue wrapping the dripping sheet of plastered fabric around her bare torso.
“It’s cold,” she says. “I’m always cold now.”
She is waiting for my commiseration. This is how it works: tit for tat. Or, as the case may be, tit for no tit.
“I used to wear flip-flops all winter. Now I have to bundle up just to go shopping. And I hate the frozen-food aisle,” I say. I tuck the end of the wrap under itself.
The woman, a Pacifica mother of two who clerks in a dentist’s office, nods her cueball head. Her skin, a tawny coffee, has yellowed a bit from chemo. My fraudulence must glow off my skin like nuclear offal, I think. But perhaps to others, expecting cancer, it just looks real?
I say, “There. Now we just wait for it to dry. Do you want a drink? I have some cookies here.” Sue keeps my makeshift studio in her backyard cottage filled with goodies for my subjects and, unwisely, me.
“Do you have some—”
“— wine?” I finish for her, prompting a laugh. I pull a chilled bottle of buttery Chardonnay out of the mini-fridge and pour two ample glasses. I’ve always worked better with a drink or two in me, and work is what I need to do if I’m to make Saskia Waxman’s July deadline for my show.
“This is kind of embarrassing, but would you mind if we turn on the TV?” my subject asks. “There’s this show I always watch at ten A.M.”
I gesture toward the remote and busy myself cleaning up my tools. I need to get out of here by eleven o’clock if I am to get home in time to pick up the food for tonight’s party.
A few seconds later, my sister’s dulcet tones fill the room. I feel my eyes pull toward the television. During Laurie’s tenure as the queen of local talk shows, I have learned that you cannot not watch someone you know on the box: It’s not humanly possible.
Laurie has on a screamingly expensive creamy pantsuit with strappy medium-heeled pumps. Her lapel is pierced by an apple-green ribbon. I try to recall what cause that color signifies but am distracted by a flash from one of my sister’s ears. Diamond studs. Big ones. I wonder if they are a gift from Ren. As the years have gone by without any children, and Laurie’s otherwise flawless smile has gotten incrementally tighter—though no less dazzling—the baubles have gotten bigger.
“I’m addicted to it,” the Pacifica woman says apologetically. “Have you ever watched? She’s so great. So inspiring. She always finds a way to talk about people’s problems without making them feel bad about themselves.”
True, I think but don’t say as I slide spatulas under water, she left that part to Ma.
“. . . happy birthday to YOU!” we shout. I raise my voice so as not to be accused of being one of those birthday-song stragglers. Ma sits stoically throughout, peering at us from behind her reading glasses, which she habitually keeps on to read food nutrition labels.
“Yeah, yeah, all right,” she says, waving her hand at us. “Thanks, kids. Now you”—she tugs Micah’s ear, which pokes out from under his tumble of shaggy light brown Phil hair— “tell me about that soccer tournament in Pleasanton. Your mom said you scored on a corner.”
After a quick survey to make sure the food and drink platters are fully stocked, I escape to the kitchen. Sue follows me.
“So, tell me about this surfer,” my best friend says after she grabs a deviled egg and pops it in her mouth. She says it several (dozen) notches too loudly.
I shush her and slide a tray of homemade—by Draeggers’s pastry chefs, but so what?—brownies in the oven to warm. The punch needs to be refreshed, so I start slicing oranges and lemons on the cutting board.
“Didn’t I tell you about Duke already?” All the lying I am doing has my internal information-tracking software in a dither.
Sue widens her gray eyes toward the heavens. “Duke? Oh my God. She slept with an underage dog’s name.”
“I didn’t sleep with him!” I recall the smooth feel of young hand against my own increasingly withered flesh and unsuccessfully suppress a smile. “We just made out. Not even that, really. It was more like, you know, an innocent kiss.”
“Oh my God,” Sue moans. “Innocent, my ass! Tell me everything. I want details!”
In a hushed torrent, I relay the minutiae of our last night in Mexico: how, at the bar, Duke’s hand migrated leisurely across mostly visible parts of my body while we discussed the whimsical logic of Malcolm Gladwell; the terror of being spotted that did wonderful things to my already panicky state of lust; the drunken high-school-girl moment when I swayed against the boy on his salt-cured doorstep, refusing his unspoken physical entreaty to join him in bed; the cool relief of starched sheets rising up with each of Taylor’s inhalations as I slipped, too awake for sleep, into our shared bed. Sue took it all in with bright, enthusiastic, scandalized eyes. The intimacy and lava-flow urgency of the conversation make me feel even younger than Duke’s good-night kiss, which, as kisses go, was relatively chaste.
“So you didn’t do anything with him? What a waste.” Sue sighs.
“For God’s sake, Sue, give me some credit.” I open the oven and press a toothpick into the brownies. It sticks. Fuck. Overdone.
“I know. I know. I just wanted to wallow in something fabulous and lurid. It’s been so goddamn long. I’m between books,” she explains. Sue’s literary taste runs toward the pornographic and bodice-ripping.
My stepfather pops his head in. “Rachel? What are you doing in here?” He frowns at the picked-over spread of brownie crumbs and shakes his head. “Those carbs’ll kill you. I hope you used whole-grain flour. Oy, they think they’re going to live forever! Ren’s looking for you. He’s out back.” Eliot darts out again.