Given World

by Marian Palaia

  “Maybe we should come back later. Isn’t it lunchtime or something?”

  Phượng stopped and gave me a look. “Don’t want to go back? Don’t go.”

  “I have to.”

  “Tại sao?”

  “Tại vì.” I knew how childish it was to answer a Why with a Because, but at that moment, I did not care.

  Phượng called me on it. “Lousy reason.”

  “It’s all I’ve got,” I said. But it wasn’t.

  Aside from the beers and the cigarettes and the suicidal, helmetless motorcycle excursions with Luc up Highway 1 toward Phan Thiết or through the rice paddies west of town over slick wooden and rail-less bridges, there was that guy and his dog, so sweet and so safe, refuge; in a place I might get to go, to pull back and start—what do you call it?—living.

  I called again. He answered anyway. He was still alone. Or he was alone again. This time I tried to explain what had happened to me, or to us, or hadn’t, or . . . He said, “Yeah, babe, come on home,” and I blithely skipped right over the hesitant part—the part where he was lying—because I didn’t recognize it as meaningful, because it was something I had never heard before.

  Love is something I do not, obviously, know how to do, but some recalcitrant tendency keeps driving me to make the attempt. Because sometimes I think what will cure me is to be surrounded, consumed, crushed, forced to feel something besides the all-too-familiar duality of rootless and pointless. Luc was sweet, but he was crazy, and he was going back to Paris. He asked me to go, but I couldn’t learn another language. Words I already knew I would never know.

  • • •

  After eighteen months, I had finally done what I’d first gone to Vietnam to do: ridden out to Củ Chi on the back of that Russian motorcycle, roamed the tunnels, the command rooms, the underground hospitals, the reencroaching jungle. Tried to figure out which turn Mick must have taken last and how it could possibly be that he hadn’t left me a message. In a Tiger beer bottle. Carved with a sharp stick into a red-mud wall or with a bayonet into a tree.

  But there was nothing. It didn’t even feel like a war zone. It felt like a museum, or a theme park. It didn’t feel real enough for anything important to have been lost there. No heart. No mind. No life. No war.

  It had a souvenir stand. That killed me. I wanted to kill something back.

  I rented an AK-47. Paid for a handful of bullets. Obliterated the target of an American bomber from fifty yards. The tunnel guides were impressed. “America number one,” they said. “American girl số một! ”

  After a kiss from Luc, American Girl Number One put the gun down and said so long. Au revoir. Hẹn Gặp Lại. Sixty kilometers. Three hours. Ten shells. Done and done.

  But I could still, too easily, avert my gaze and picture him setting up camp somewhere, living off the land. Maybe in Thailand. From where he could send a postcard. At least.

  It came to me how tired I was of pretending I could see any distance at all. I thought maybe if I could find my way back to a clear image I could start over from there, and tried to figure how far back that would be. It turned out to be as far back as Mick, at eighteen, in a cave in Montana, a piece of quartz etched with a dinosaur-feather imprint, shining in his palm. I saw myself on the roof at home, aiming a plain gray rock, hitting him with it, and blood, but no one died; I saw us both in Missoula, hiking into the hills for another geology lesson. Then much blur, with highlights.

  The two or so months after Củ Chi were necessarily (I told myself) but still only semi-blurry, and after finally trading all but my last few hundred bucks for thirty-six hours of airports, airplanes, counterfeit Valium, and three or four tiny bottles of bourbon, I was back in San Francisco, trying somewhat desperately to gain traction on slippery pavement in a very steep city. In addition to being jet-lagged and exhausted, I found that Frank was not there, this time, for me. He was done waiting. He tried to let me back in, but he couldn’t trust me an inch, and what he was waiting for was for me to go. Now. Not once he’d gotten used to having me around again.

  When I was three days back, he got home from work and pulled my duffel bag out of the closet. He set it on the bed and unzipped it. He said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Riley. I really do. But you need to leave me alone for a while.” I started to pack. I took my time. I felt like I was drowning, waiting for the ocean floor to show up under my feet. He didn’t help or try to stop me.

  He was right to give me the boot, but it still hurt, a lot. I didn’t ask him how long a while was but decided all by myself to believe that if I really needed him to, someday he’d let me back in. I don’t know why I thought I had to believe this about him. Us. Whatever we were. But I did. It helped a little. Enough to operate.

  I had never told him why I went away so far and stayed gone so long. To do that would have required words, turned to sentences, I had no clue how to string together. And something told me it wouldn’t matter anyway. I was never meant to be Frank’s replacement ballerina, but no one can tell me I didn’t try.

  Tried for the first time ever to say I was sorry for being so utterly useless when Lucas died. He told me not to worry about it.

  “Honey child, it was the eighties,” he said. “No one was right.” I knew it still hurt him, ten years down the line, and that his studied nonchalance, about love, men, sex, friendship—anything ever meant to be serious—was a front, and one that might never come down. But he took me in, and he made me laugh. I began looking at ads in the paper for a place to settle. Regroup. Sleep. And if the dreams were going to be sad, or scary, quit dreaming them.

  • • •

  Since using telephones in Saigon had run five dollars a minute, I’d braved them only a few times, and they still unnerved me. When I call the number in the ad, though, the welcoming, soft southern accent on the other end of the line gives me the courage to speak. I manage to say hello and to ask if the room is still available.

  “Sure, come on over. Can you make it this morning?”

  “Yes.” I leave it at that, and an almost-whispered “Thank you,” so as not to sound too anxious or dazed or unbalanced. His name is Christopher, he says, and he is looking forward to meeting me.

  Eddie comes along because he has a car and can give me a ride, but mostly for moral support and as evidence, I tell him, that I am not some sociopathic closet homophobe. When I say the last part, he looks at me so closely and earnestly, I think for a second he might put a hand to my forehead, to check for fever. “You get that you are in San Francisco, right?”

  I nod, in what I hope is a convincing manner.

  “You know it is not normal for you to imagine people might think that, right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  The place I am going to see is actually on a side street off Potrero Avenue, meaning it is not technically a Potrero Hill flat, but I can understand why anyone in search of a renter would advertise it as one. Down here in the flatlands, life is much more industrial, much less picturesque and trendy than it is up higher. But flat land is fine by me: level ground will probably come in handy for the more dissociative times, and those times will surely come around. Despite this new and somewhat disconcerting yen for stability, I know I’ll always look forward to—and if necessary find a way to manufacture—the occasional tectonic shift; the feeling of stepping off the curb and for a moment, due to certain smells or sounds or whatever other trigger, not knowing where the hell I am.

  The street feels eerily quiet. It is the weekend, but even so, it seems as though there should be more people around, more noise, more traffic. I think about Saigon, the incessant sensory overload, and suppose anything short of an ongoing riot is going to seem strange for a while.

  Here there are houses just like on any other block, but also a fair number of businesses, ones that do not cater to the Sunday-afternoon-stroll crowd: auto repair and machine shops, a fenced-in truck rental compound, a Texaco station, a screen printer’s studio in a pale-blue building at th
e corner. It isn’t really a neighborhood—is nothing at all like the blocks to the east, on which the coffee shops and florists and boutiques blend right in; they fool you into thinking maybe you aren’t in a city at all but in some lovely suburb made to look like one.

  I think about trying to relate this bit of insight to Eddie, but don’t. I know there is probably something wrong with my reasoning but am unclear as to which parts I should leave out, or what I could add that would change that. It is good enough for now to be able to recognize this place is a little bit outside, and even though I can’t explain the concept (outside of what?), I can accept this recognition as a small but adequate step toward reentry.

  I think of a Rickie Lee Jones song, part of a tape I once played over and over in my car. It is about a gas station, and about love, about running out of possibilities. I haven’t heard it in forever. Haven’t listened to Rickie Lee Jones since Lu went off the grid.

  We ring the bell, and a vision appears. He is wearing cutoff jeans, a pale-yellow sweater vest that sets off beautifully the ornate “Mamma Mia” tattoo covering his left shoulder, fluffy white bunny slippers, and at least a dozen silver rings on each hand. His thick, platinum-blond hair is swept up into a configuration that falls somewhere between pompadour and bouffant. Combined with his shockingly high cheekbones and eyelashes long enough to brush them when he blinks, he looks like the cover girl on some outrageous Norwegian girlie magazine.

  A voice from the top of the stairs—the voice from the phone—calls down, “You forgot your boa, baby. I thought you were trying to make an impression.”

  The door answerer lifts his chin and rolls his eyes. He holds his hand out to each of us in turn, palm down and wrist bent, as if expecting a curtsy and a kiss.

  “Max,” he says. “At your service.”

  Eddie simply shakes Max’s hand, but I take hold of it with both of mine, because this is apparently one more thing I have forgotten how to do. Max cocks his head and eyes me appraisingly, seeming to decide only now to let us in. He stands back from the door and motions us up the stairs.

  “You may ignore the skinny brunette if you’d like. She hasn’t had her pill yet this morning.”

  The “skinny brunette” is indeed both of those things, but with his fine, longish hair and horn-rimmed glasses, he looks, in comparison and just in general, totally unastonishing. Eddie, I’m sure, doesn’t differentiate one way or the other. Boys. The more the merrier.

  Christopher says, “He made that up, about the pill. In case you were wondering.”

  “Oh no,” I say. “I wasn’t wondering.”

  Eddie says, “Yes she was. I was too. I was wondering if you’d share.”

  Everyone laughs, except Max, who is only halfway up the stairs. “Don’t start the party without me, wenches.” He sounds serious.

  In the living room are a leather sofa, a huge TV, two brocaded armchairs by the window, a coffee table made of a four-inch-thick slab of what looks to be polished concrete, and the biggest cat I have ever seen. Big and fat. Black and white and enormous.

  I say, “That must weigh a ton.”

  “That is Annabelle,” Max says. “Don’t hurt her feelings. She has a thyroid problem.”

  “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean her. I meant the table.”

  I bend down and knock on it. It’s embedded with hundreds of tiny multicolored pebbles, and is indeed made of cement somehow buffed to glossy smoothness.

  “Wow. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “No one has,” Christopher says. “It’s Max’s only family heirloom. His father made it. Allegedly.”

  “Nothing alleged about it.” Max sits down on the couch, runs his fingers admiringly along one polished edge of the table, and crosses one bunny-slippered foot over his knee. “My father had a very unique sense of style.”

  Christopher squeezes Max’s knee and smiles at Eddie and me. “Runs in the family,” he says. “You may have gathered.”

  We talk about Montana, as the boys seem fascinated by what little they’ve heard of it, and have it in their heads that all the sidewalks are still wooden there, and people get from place to place on horseback. I feel strangely at ease, drugged almost, but still able to hold up my side of a conversation. I write it off to jet lag and go with it.

  “Some do,” I tell them, “But in the cities, they’ve graduated to buggies. They still need horses to pull them though.”

  Max slits his eyes at me and cocks his head. “They have cities?”

  “Oh, yeah. Huge. Four-story buildings and everything.”

  Max presses a manicured index finger to the hollow below one sharp cheekbone. “You are completely full of shit, aren’t you?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “Sometimes.”

  Eddie leans in. “Always.”

  “Not always.”

  Max says, “I vote for always.”

  No one is the least bit interested in Vietnam, or why I went there, and that is fine with me.

  The boys converse for a while about new bars in the Castro and the Fillmore district, and when that topic is played out, Max offers a proclamation.

  “I like this one,” he says, motioning toward me but speaking to the cat, who by now is draped upside down over his lap, belly flapping out to either side, love-child composite of cat and manta ray. She peers up at Max and does not protest. Christopher’s smile is sweet and guileless, and I am blown away. Honored. Dizzy as we head for the car.

  “Welcome home,” Eddie says.

  “Home,” I repeat after him, as if it is some kind of incantation that will eventually take.

  • • •

  The house is a typical, semi-run-down Victorian, ivory white with barely visible traces of rose and turquoise trim. Our flat is on the second level, above the downstairs apartment and the garage. The hardwood floors still shine in places, and the ceilings are twelve feet high. In the living room, along with the leather sofa and the huge TV, is a fireplace with two mantels, one below a large mirror and one above it. My bedroom is already fitted out with lace curtains over an entire wall of windows, and through them I can just see a few blocks up the street to the iron picket fence bordering SF General.

  The eighties, blessedly, took with them the carnage of boys dying by the thousands on Ward 5B. Some nights, though, I can’t help picturing the white coroner’s vans making their way from the hospital to the morgue downtown, past this very block. I imagine processions, van after van, each containing one body only, though back then they could probably have—and maybe sometimes needed to—fit three to a gurney. I see tiny gold hoop earrings, meticulously placed and unostentatious in right ears. Hair perfect, streaked, coiffed, still. Things my unruly hair has never been. Of course Christopher and Max are okay, and Eddie, by some miracle. This generation of boys has surely learned how to play it safe, not kill themselves and each other in the name of love, or its likeness.

  They have taken me back at the bar, again, so there is that familiarity; something of a comfort. I go in four days a week, on the bus, which lets me off on Bayshore at the bottom of Cortland. From there I can walk, or wait for a different bus, but it hardly ever seems to come. The hill is steep and long, and after I climb it, most days, I am light-headed but clear. A fancy coffee shop has just opened where Ellsworth comes down off the heights, and if I am not running late, I’ll stop in for a cup and a bagel or a scone, pretend I am one of those self-possessed San Franciscans not paralyzed by a simple question like “Room for cream?” The first time someone asked me that, I had no idea what she was talking about.

  The bar feels both cozy and cavernous before I open, before I turn up all the lights and open the front door, and I like it quite a lot that way. Many days I catch myself wishing there was some way to actually avoid opening, because if I could do that, people wouldn’t come in and want things, even though wanting things is fine, but they also want to talk, and that part really isn’t. The problem is, I have forgotten how to chat up the clientele. My mouth simply
doesn’t work that way anymore.

  Before I left, I was good at it. Now it is a shock every time my mouth opens to let out something resembling coherent English. I have to believe that eventually I will stop hearing everything I say echo back, strange and brittle, but, for now, it is almost as if someone else is talking, using my voice without permission.

  “What can I get you? Anchor Steam? Sure. That’ll be three dollars, please.”

  “I’m sorry, you can’t play your guitar in here, but there’s a garden out back where you can, if no one objects.”

  “Nope, no babies allowed. Twenty-one and over. Twenty-one years.”

  One day a customer drops to the floor after she’s had a couple of beers, starts doing push-ups and accompanying herself loudly: “You had a good home, but you left. You’re right! Jody was there when you left. You’re right! Your baby was there when you left. You’re right!”

  For a minute I am so stunned I don’t know what to do, until a beer glass I’m holding breaks from being held too tightly. I lean over the bar.

  “Hey. Hey! Get off the floor. Stop that. Now!” A handful of customers have been standing around staring; they all step back when I raise my voice. The girl pauses, resting on her forearms, and looks up.

  “What’s your problem?”

  “I,” I tell her, “do not have a problem. You, on the other hand, have five seconds to sit your ass on a bar stool, quietly, or you’re out of here. Got it?” I see her think about arguing. “Now. Time’s up.”

  She removes herself from the floor, drains her beer, scowls briefly at me, and slams out into the cold. I wash the blood off my hand and bandage it. I have to wear gloves, now, to wash glasses. I hate those gloves—that rubbery, confined feeling.

  The rest of the day, I replay over and over the tape of me saying “Now” and “Stop” and “Ass on bar stool.” It sounds okay, like I actually was the one in control. I suppose there will be more of these moments, and even when I still feel the need to test them for legitimacy, that will be a safer bet for sure than just coming completely unhinged and throwing heavy things at breakable other things. I do not replay the glass shattering in my hand or the stone panic I felt listening to the cadence of that marching song.