Live a Little

by Kim Green

  Go Jump In a River

  Fifteen stories below, the water churns itself into angry hillocks, the tips peaked like frothy meringues. The river looks black and cold and slightly oily, cut with iridescent puddles of sage and purple that shouldn’t be there. On the left-hand bank stands a thicket of fans. At the moment most of them are silent or murmuring softly to one another in their puffy parkas, their frivolity tamped by dread.

  “Remind me why we’re doing this?” I try to sound jokey. Below, an ambulance pulls up. A medic gets out, wrestling with one of those wheeled stretchers, as if death is a foregone conclusion.

  Laurie smiles tightly and glances back at the coterie of producers and lackeys who are charging around in a dither, trying to look preoccupied and important. I can only imagine the tactics discussed at the pre-event strategy meeting: So, it’s pretty straightforward: Lauren and Mrs. Rose are going to leap off the bridge into space and hurtle toward the icy water at sixty miles per hour. Camera one—if Lauren is unable to maintain eye contact through the apex, then cut to camera two. And for God’s sake, shoot her from the side. We don’t want a repeat of the chunky-thighs incident. Now, I want the background music to kick in just as Raquel’s screams crescendo.

  No, don’t worry about which side you shoot her from, just make sure somebody brings the heavy powder for her T-zone.

  I spy Cleo and Jonesie behind the barrier and give them a thumbs-up. Shiny Pony stands off to the side, alone with her trusty clipboard, eyes glistening behind her standard-issue rectangular hipster glasses. I’m sure if something horrible happens—if Laurie’s cable snaps and she plummets into the rock-strewn river, floating away like a broken doll—Shiny will plod onward in Laurie’s memory. I can see her wielding the microphone—with its untouched commemorative Laurie lipstick marks—like a consummate professional, ascending the dais with the hushed reverence my sister deserves.

  “Can’t we just use stunt doubles, like on TV?” Where’s my Chardonnay now, Shiny twit?

  “That wouldn’t inspire people, would it?” Laurie leans over and allows a slightly homelier Shiny clone to clip a small microphone to her chest. “Just remember, we’re doing it for a good cause. I think pledges hit two hundred and fifty thousand dollars this morning. It’s a show record. And it’s all going to the Bay Area Breast Cancer Alliance.” We are into round two of our ongoing BC fund-raising effort.

  “What if something goes wrong?” I mutter.

  We interrupt this programming to inform you that the celebrated Schultz sisters, TV host Lauren White and artist and breast-cancer activist Raquel Rose, died today from multiple injuries sustained in a bungee-jumping accident. The sisters, who attended Bella Sierra High School in Santa Clara, though only Lauren served on the cheerleading squad, are survived by their mother, Ma; their stepfather and family asshole, Eliot Abramson of Abramson Integrated Foods; their husbands, renowned plastic surgeon and hottie Ren White and cheating Ph.D. dropout Phil Rose; Mr. Rose’s mistress, Hilary Swank butt double and Botox addict Tate Trimble; and Mrs. Rose’s children, number one and number two. Bob “Iceman” Gundershmoover of Grungy Bungee attributes the tragic accident to human error. “We calibrated their jump cords to the women’s weights,” he told us from his office in Dixon’s Smitty’s Bar. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Rose underreported her total body mass by an estimated forty-five pounds, causing catastrophic equipment failure. It’s the saddest day for us here at Grungy. Our deepest condolences go out to the women’s families and Mrs. Rose’s creditors . . .”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Laurie tells me. “Don’t be negative.”

  Before I can retort that somebody has to be negative to balance out her excessive optimism, the bungee guy, a scrawny fellow whose John Deere cap and grease-grooved knuckles convey the impression of a moonlighting farmer, gives our harnesses a final once-over and goes over procedures with us again. Laurie asks smart questions while smiling gamely for the cameras. She looks good in her gray jumpsuit, sexy and vaguely scientific, like Laura Dern in Jurassic Park. Due to the unfortunate combination of larger proportions and surplus bronzer, I, on the other hand, resemble a beefy Latino sanitation engineer. I twine my legs together and try not to pee through my panty liner, an accessory I cannot seem to do without since the last baby popped out in 1989.

  “Great,” says Bungee Farmer. “Let’s rock and roll!”

  He leads us to the edge of the bridge. Cameras one and two follow us. I pray for two things: one, that the cables do indeed hold; and two, that I, too, benefit from the kindness of diagonal shooting. If a misdirected camera could make my sister’s Gabrielle Reece legs look chunky, mine could be declared an endangered tree species under the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act.

  Laurie steps out onto the diving platform. My sister closes her eyes and whispers something in Mandarin. That and the wind ruffling her honey mane with cinematic precision cause the paparazzi to go into a feeding frenzy. She extends her hand to me. Like everything else about Laurie, her manicure is perfect: short, pale pink, and classy. I grasp her hand and feel my ass draw involuntarily back toward land, issuing my own prayer—for a well-timed natural disaster or fan heart attack that requires an immediate cessation of this endeavor.

  Laurie leans forward with smile intact. “Quel, come on! We have to jump now.”

  “I think I’ve changed my mind. I’ll just, you know, watch you do—”

  Before I finish my thought, I am hurtling toward the water. I don’t know if Laurie pulled me off the ledge for ratings or if I tried to run and tripped. What I do know is that somebody’s going to have to pay to put my internal organs back in their rightful spots, and it’s not going to be me.

  “AAAAAAHHHHH!” I think I yell. The world around me is a kaleidoscope of sound and light. I am vaguely conscious of my feet flying above my head, the wrong place for them, in my humble opinion.

  Just before my face smashes into the water, a giant hand yanks me back, and I shoot upward. To my horror, a thin stream of vomit flies out of my mouth before I even decide I’m nauseated. Next to me, Laurie is a dark blob with Goldilocks hair, shooting upward like a human javelin. After repeating this exercise five, six, a hundred times, we settle at the bottom, swinging gently over the river, which smells earthy and moist, like the rabbit-pellet-sprinkled mud pies we used to make when we were kids.

  “Smile!” Laurie says. “Over there. Look over there!” Being upside down doesn’t prevent her from waving cheerfully at her onshore fans. Except for a hint of voluminous bedhead and an excited flush in her cheeks, Laurie looks completely

  normal. I am sure the same cannot be said for me.

  I am about to issue a retort when the bridge breaks.

  No fucking shit, people. One minute we’re rocking like babies on the bough; the next, a slashing groan emanates from the bridge pillar we’re attached to, and we drop precipitously closer to the seething current.

  Several things occur in quick succession. A couple of people scream. Bungee Bob starts yelling orders at people. Shiny Pony keens out something that sounds like “Nooooo!” The medic plunges into the river, managing to drop his emergency kit, which bobs once, then twice, before disappearing into a froth of rapids. Defeated handily by Mother Nature, he staggers back to shore, leaving us without a clear savior.

  “Oh my God!” Laurie yells.

  “Are we still supposed to smile?” Ever the quipper.

  The plank of metal holding us up creaks down another foot. Being taller, I hit the water first. The icy cold kisses my forehead, ruining my spiky gelled bangs, which have just grown long enough to style. I have to hunch upward in a curl to keep from going under. All I can say is, I hope I have the abs to show for it when they cut us down.

  “Oh my God,” Laurie says again, this time a little more plaintively, as if the Supreme Being she is imploring is no longer an intimate.

  “We are so fucked. I can’t believe this,” I manage to grunt as I count off the equivalent of my hundredth crunch.<
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  “They’ll get us down in a minute. See? Bob’s on it. I know he’s on it. That’s him on the bridge, right?” Laurie attempts to peer upward at the monstrous jumble of creaking metal from which we are swinging. Bob can actually be seen quite clearly at the top. In a mysterious manifestation of riverside acoustics, we hear him say, “Whaddaya mean they ain’t got a crane?”

  This development causes Laurie to change her Pollyanna tune. “God, what an idiot! This is outrageous! The station’s going to sue Bob’s ass!”

  The supporting beam busts down another notch. In a flash, regrets pour through my mind, paramount among them that I’ll never get to secure proper birth control for Taylor, meet my grandchildren, or sit astride Viggo Mortensen in an abandoned grain elevator.

  “This reminds me of The Crucible,” I say as we dangle. “Don’t you think? We’re being punished for not knowing our place. I’m Winona Ryder and you’re Joan Allen. She was the judgmental one,” I add unnecessarily.

  “Raquel.”

  “Yeah?” My abs are really hurting now, and I don’t think I can hold myself in the air much longer.

  “You have to tell me something.”

  I turn to look at Laurie, inadvertently working my right oblique, which issues a loud shriek in protest. “What?”

  “Did you ever sleep with Ren?”

  In the distance, sirens pierce the air. From this unique position, I am able to see that a chunk of vomit is clinging to my shoulder harness. Damn.

  “Raquel! Did you? Please, I have to. . . I just need to know.” Laurie, a begging novice, sounds eloquent and human, good at it just as she is everything else.

  “Uh . . .” I swipe at the vomit. It smears.

  “Quel, we could die here. I can deal with it if it happened, if you and Ren were together that way. I’ve been working on it. I know it was a long time ago. But I just need to know the truth. I think it would be better for all of us. I’m sure—my therapist is sure—that we’ll all feel better afterward. Just tell me what happened, okay?”

  It would be simple if I could just say yes. Part of me wants to say yes (yeah, that part). The truth is substantially more embarrassing. The truth—honest to God—is that I don’t know if I slept with my brother-in-law. Officially. Perhaps he doesn’t, either. Maybe that’s why, as we dangle from a bridge, Laurie is asking me instead of tying Ren to a chair at home and threatening his elegant surgeon’s hands with a claw hammer.

  But let’s start at the beginning.

  Set the scene. College. Southern California. Early eighties.

  The summer of 1982 is giving in to the approaching fall, crisp green leaves slowly crinkling into papery oranges and reds. Like most college campuses, U.C. Santa Barbara pales into an off-season version of itself during summer session, students sprinkling the vast lawns and cavernous lecture halls like ghosts.

  Rachel Schultz is nineteen years old. She is taking two classes, Physiology 10 and Rhetoric 1B, both to satisfy general education requirements. Although she has found a social niche with a ragtag group of friends from the dorm (Sue) and class (tattooed, bodacious Tawny Schuessler, who later marries an astonishing series of four minor rock stars), Rachel doesn’t want her college experience to spill toward the now standard five years. She has a feeling her life won’t begin in earnest until she is living in the city on her own, sculpting. She has a feeling of her life being on hold. Also, the job she planned on at a gallery in San Francisco fell through, and she couldn’t imagine herself spending the summer at home in Santa Clara, being dragged around to high school senior Laurie’s preseason cheerleading practice or track meets, arguing with Ma about whether frozen yogurt was or wasn’t fattening, helping Dad mow the lawn down to pristine lushness. So she enrolled in summer school. And got a cashier gig at the Meat Shanty, where she had to sling burgers only when both Octavio and Martin, the cooks, had the night off.

  Then there’s the guy.

  Loren. That’s his name: Loren.

  Even though they’ve never spoken—okay, not exactly true; there was that time he muttered “excuse me” to her in the bustling thicket of students leaving class, his voice sending a shot of lustful terror up her spine—she knows his name because their TA, a waifish yet tyrannical postdoc out of NYU, insists on taking roll every section. By July the guy’s name rolls off her tongue like a honey lozenge: Loren. Loren White. White, Loren. L. White. Mr. Loren White. Lor-en-zo the White.

  Of course he is beautiful, Loren White. Rachel, with her extensive study of beautiful men based on thousands of hours watching romantic films and reading novels by Kathleen Woodiwiss and Shirlee Busbee, has dissected the source of his beauty. It is important to her, this task, because she doesn’t want to be the type of girl who falls in love with surface splendor, much as she appreciates it in her work. So she watches Loren White, catalogs the way he makes deep, prolonged, respectful eye contact with everyone, even the shrill Andrea Dworkin–quoting girl who buries her unhappiness under a veneer of bisexuality and the grumpy engineer with the textbook pustule-pocked cheeks and surprisingly fluid prose. Rachel notes the almost affectionate manner he employs with their bitter hag of a TA, how, by the end of the session, the scrawny nutcase is eating out of his hand. Part of his appeal, she believes, maybe the most important part, is his reluctant inaccessibility. It’s as if he wants to be open, believes passionately in the ideal of openness, but ultimately can’t breach the boundaries of social entitlement that restrain him. Because what Loren White and everybody who meets him knows is that his gifts—physical, social, familial, financial—drive a wedge between himself and others just as surely as if he spoke ancient Greek instead of English. The fact that Loren White is tall— he dwarfs Rachel by at least two inches— handsome in an architected, pedigreed way, earnest, popular, athletic, and premed doesn’t detract in any way from his essential complexity, she thinks. The fact that a girlfriend has not presented herself— some tanned, willowy blonde or aristocratically pale redhead in sexy sorority sweats with a brand name printed on the buttocks—only adds to Rachel’s case. Perhaps he is saving himself for someone more . . . singular?

  Their first encounter is so magically perfect that Rachel cries afterward, convinced the gods have finally awakened from their long sleep and smiled on her.

  Encounter 1: They are assigned partners for a paper to be crafted and defended in teams. Rachel’s partner—a thin, jumpy Beverly Hills product whose name Rachel remembers until at least the mid-nineties due to her role in the ensuing good fortune—excuses herself from class one brilliantly sunny day to pee and never returns. Loren’s partner, the grumpy engineer, receives a late acceptance to Berkeley, where he has been wait-listed for a year, and departs to find housing in a habitat more suited to his obsessive personality, accepting an incomplete in the course. With a dreary wave, the TA—who, they are later to discover, has been stalking the course’s professor, a married Cuban rumored to have been with Che in Bolivia in 1967— sanctions their union. Rachel and Loren exchange hellos for the first time on August 16, 1982.

  Encounter 2: Rachel and Loren agree to meet after her shift at the Meat Shanty. The pimple that was threatening to erupt on Rachel’s nose miraculously recedes, leaving behind just the barest residue of pink, which she conceals easily under a layer of Sue’s makeup. The extra shirt she brings with her, a not-trying-too-hard boatnecked sky-blue tee with strategic tears across the abdomen, is deemed “muy sexy” by Martin, who, if his own heavily notched track record with the opposite sex is any indication, can be trusted to judge a book’s cover.

  Encounter 3: After dispensing with the business of the paper—whose topic, the case for legalization of marijuana, is to remain close to Rachel’s heart in the years to come— Rachel and Loren segue seamlessly into a discussion of Soul Asylum, who they agree is the most underrated band of the era, quite possibly the decade. Expecting some degree of verbal paralysis in the face of such stunning yet sensitive maleness, Rachel is surprised to find that not only do words flow out of
her in his presence with the sleek levity of liberated helium balloons, they are—fated miracle!—the right words. Later, when she replays their conversation in her mind, instead of the crushing regret she usually registers after an encounter with a desirable male person, she experiences only a tingly sense of pleasure. See how right they are together, how seamless? How their thoughts slide into one another like keys in a lock?

  “What kind of medicine are you going to practice?” she asks him.

  They are sitting six inches from each other at Mesa Beach, on a Tahitian blanket. It is their fourth study session. Rachel wants to call it a date—don’t the flask of Captain Morgan and the presence of the fat, sensual strawberries warrant it?— but allows herself only occasional forays into that particular fantasy.

  Loren nips from the flask. With his gleaming yet untamed forelock and tatty lacrosse jersey, Rachel is reminded— thrillingly—of the delicious Finny from A Separate Peace. Loren is that beautiful. So what if Rachel cannot match his careless elegance? The clash of them, of distilled beauty against graceless need, is what will enflame his patrician senses.

  Loren takes a moment to let the profundity of his mission sink in before he speaks. “Tropical diseases, maybe. Biostatistics or epidemiology. Did you know that diarrheal diseases have killed more people in sub-Saharan Africa in the last ten years than all war casualties since World War Two? It’s a disgrace.”

  The idea—not the diarrhea but the intended eradication of it—sounds ripe and sexy. Rachel closes her eyes briefly. She is not sure what the African climate will do to her skin, but she is fairly confident that Loren—witty, generous, incandescent Loren—will write her a prescription. She has already read Out of Africa. Several years later, she will rent the video, watching in a disbelieving swoon as Robert Redford tenderly rinses the soap from Meryl Streep’s hair; she is conjuring Loren’s hands twined in her own thick brunette locks.

  “Rachel.” He says her name with reverence, as if he has been practicing it in the shower. In the intervening seconds, he has moved closer, is looming over her. Loren’s eyes, she realizes, are an unpredictable hazel, rimmed in amber, green where one would have forecast blue. His nose is so aquiline and fine, it has to be real. She hopes her slightly nobler version does not injure it in the forthcoming tussle.