San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  The photographs are a necessary component of their liturgy. Zoë knows they can only see one another by laminated representations. It would be too disturbing and intrusive if they could actually perceive one another without artificial mediation. They communicate by email, fax, and newspaper clippings. The telephone is unbearable. They only use it to arrange an imminent unplanned meeting.

  “Marvin’s jowls are definitely gone.” Clarissa studies the thin strip of four facial shots. “You have cheekbones. Are those implants? Jesus. You’re gorgeous. You never looked this good, not at sixteen, even. Cosmetic surgery already.”

  “We’re breathing on forty,” Zoë says, bewildered. Certainly Clarissa comprehends the necessity of proactive facial procedures. This is San Francisco and Clarissa is an entertainment business attorney with a penthouse office above a Chinese bank. Is Clarissa in denial? Are her medications interfering with her functioning on so obvious and rudimentary a level?

  “I thought you had to wait as long as possible.” Clarissa’s words are slurred.

  “After you psychologically remove the slap across the face, and its more damaging verbal resonances—” Zoë begins.

  “And that takes decades and costs what? A quarter of a million?” Clarissa is still staring at the strip of photographs.

  “Then the next step is actual surgical removal. It’s a natural progression. It’s how to treat emotional cancer. Keep them,” Zoë says. “Get some reference points.”

  They sit on a bench on the south side of the pier, sun tamed and restrained. The water is becoming agitated. White caps like mouths opening, baring teeth. The bay reminds Zoe of women in autumn in a medical imaging office. First the locker, the paper bathrobe, the chatty blonde with the clipboard who walks you into the room containing the mammogram machines. Then the stasis before the X-rays are read. Yes, the bay is waiting for its results. Poppies encrusted with resins or blood float like prayer offerings in the dangerous toxic waters.

  “We used to walk here. What were we? Eleven, twelve?” Clarissa asks. Her mood is also shifting. They’re both still drunk.

  Zoë and Clarissa, gauze and bandages on their shoulders, hold hands. Zoë’s childhood is sequences of yellows composed of trailer park kitchen cabinets and the invisible poisons leaking from the pores of fathers undergoing chemotherapy. Take a breath of rancid lemon. You’ve seen the Pacific, reached the end of the trail and don’t linger at the edges of death too long. They had a final punctuation for that. It was called the iron lung.

  “They hadn’t invented a vocabulary for us yet,” Clarissa says to the waves. “Dysfunctional families. Latchkey children. Remember when I lost my key? What my father did? Jerry tied me up in the carport in pajamas for a week.”

  “I brought you a canteen with orange juice. A bottle of vitamins,” Zoë recalls. “And a few joints. I cut up a cantaloupe in tiny pieces. You were handcuffed. I fed you like a sick bird.”

  “How did you get a canteen?” Clarissa asks.

  “I took it from the hospital outpatient closet,” Zoë says. Her head is throbbing.

  She stares at sea swells that are the process by which autumn becomes water. If you understand the bay, it smells of slow-burning cedar. Midnight currents are actually leaves brushing the ocean with russet and amber. Only adepts recognize this. Waves answer to the moon and immutable laws of spin and fall. They don’t get dinner on the table at the appointed hour. They don’t carpool or pick up the suits on time, have the cuff links and invitations ready.

  “Only you know,” Clarissa says. She looks like she may vomit again.

  Zoë nods. Yes, only I was at ground zero when it happened. This is why we tattooed ourselves. Who else could comprehend adolescence in the margins of a hardscrabble town in the conceptual latitudes? The late ’50s and their village was subdivided wood frame houses and stucco bungalows nailed in rows like the fruit trees above gashes of alley, oranges and lemons so bitter they burned your mouth.

  “We sat next to each other in homeroom,” Zoë says.

  It was seventh grade and they were learning about cities. Their names were Sherry and Judy then but they do not ever mention this.

  “We rode buses, trying to find the city,” Clarissa remembers. “We had library cards.”

  True, Zoë thinks, but they could not find their geography or circumstances in literature. Nature was oaks and maples, not a riot of magenta bougainvillea, not a blaze of red and yellow canna bursting through bamboo fences sticky with pink oleander. Families had two parents and pastel houses behind lawns with white picket fences where characters experienced angst rather than hunger and rage. Such children did not sift through trashcans in dusk alleys searching for glass soda bottles redeemable for two cents apiece. Gather enough glass and you had bus fare. On a fortunate hunt, you could trap enough coins for lunch.

  “Remember digging for bottles for food money?” Zoë asks.

  “I remember what you said,” Clarissa smiles. “You said Holden Caulfield would have taken a taxi.”

  Zoë laughs. “Remember our black berets? We were trying to meet Ginsberg and Kerouac. We wore those berets every day. We got lice.”

  Clarissa shrugs. “We looked for beatniks right here, on this pier. Boys with sketchbooks and guitars. We said we were French. We practiced our accents at recess.”

  Recess in the region of broken families, of divorcées and single mothers, of stigma and words that could not be spoken out loud. Alcoholism. Cancer. Child abuse. Illegitimacy. Domestic violence. The special yellow smell of Sunday evenings when the mothers who worked as secretaries poured peroxide on their hair. The tiny implications of illumination from the one lamp you were allowed to turn on. Electricity was an extravagance. Their San Francisco was a medieval oasis, ocean at your face, desert at your back. There were warlords at the utility companies with incomprehensible capabilities and powers. Phones were instruments of terror. It cost money every time you touched them. Long distance calls were rationed, like chocolate during a war. The world as it was, before hotlines that could put your father in prison.

  “I still have nightmares about the apartment in Daly City,” Clarissa reveals. “At every St. Regis and Ritz, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, I wake up shaking. At the Bora Bora Lagoon Resort Hotel. At the Palazzo Sasso in Ravello, for Christ’s sake. The plot complications vary but somehow I’m back there.”

  “Remember the neighbors?” Zoë asks. They lived next door, with a cement hall between them. She is dizzy. Her arm burns.

  “The wetbacks and hillbillies? The identical blondes with drawls?” Clarissa is unusually bright. “It was still the Depression. I had a friend once. Another friend, not like you, Zoë. A hillbilly. Jerry found us listening to the radio. It was Elvis. Jerry started yelling, You’re playing colored music? You’re putting colored music in my house? He threw the radio at my face. Took out my front tooth. That’s how I discovered caps.”

  “That was me,” Zoë corrects. “It was Marvin, not Jerry. And he used the ‘n’ word.”

  “We had the same father, metamorphically. A barbarian with bad grammar who thought a yarmulke was a ticket to prison. A guy who could plaster and drywall. They were house painters. When they were employed. House painters.” Clarissa stares at the bay.

  “Like Hitler,” Zoë points out. Then, “Had your mother run away yet?”

  “Rachel? She was on the verge. She was becoming River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”

  Zoë remembers Clarissa’s mother. A woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, rarely spoke. Jerry had pushed her out of a moving car. He kicked in her ribs and put her in a cast. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the hibiscus and night-blooming jasmine beside the alleys, sheathed in long skirts, shawls, and kimonos. She was younger than they are now.

  Then Clarissa had a family of su
btraction. Zoë envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families. The brothers in juvenile detention. The sisters who disappeared. Soon, if Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. Perhaps she could escape the anomalous caste consigned to stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind wires and no white picket fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even secondhand cars were an aberration. If she got placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight As and then won the poetry and science competition. Maybe she could be given a new name with syllables that formed church steeples on your lips, like the women in books. A stay-at-home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies could call her Elizabeth or Margaret or Christine.

  “Did you realize we were Jewish?” Zoë wonders.

  “I was instructed to never to reveal this. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa answers. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”

  “I wanted a bat mitzvah,” Zoë suddenly remembers. “I don’t know how I even knew the word. Marvin said, You mean a Jew thing? It costs a fortune to get into that club. They inspect you first. You have to shave your head and show them your penis.”

  “Speaking of Marvin’s penis, remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a thirteen-year-old?” Clarissa asks.

  It happened in California. It was front-page news in an era when newspapers were read and discussed. The details were graphic and comprehensive, indelible like a personal mutilation.

  “Jerry said, I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5'2”. He’s got a three-inch dick. He mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers.” Clarissa repeats the demonstration for her. “Then he said, Why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a dick that small?” Clarissa turns back to the bay.

  “Is that when it happened? When you moved away? You disappeared. The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” Zoë tries to form a chronology.

  “Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. Jerry thought a ditch with a turnip in it was a party. I was chattel. Rachel left and he just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were hanging in their closet. My pajamas were folded on their bed. Then he found us an apartment in Oakland. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”

  “But she came back for you,” Zoë says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”

  “You don’t get out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”

  Zoë examines the bay. There is less agitation, swells softer; a haze grazes what was amethyst. The diagnosis has come. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.

  “Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa suddenly asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”

  “Mommy did it, actually. She was between mental hospitals that month. Maybe a weekend pass. Her contemptuous glare. It cut right through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out. She said, Marvin, look, that kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands? I remember precisely. She said, You think you’re a neurosurgeon? You think you’re a symphony conductor? You’re not even human. Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers and they took her in the ambulance.”

  They are quiet. The bay, too, is still. Through haze, the sun is lemon-yellow on the heavy waters. There are floating orchards rooted in sand. Wave break and dog bark are a language. Accuracy is a necessary requirement of civilization. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s an elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. The way you are no longer blind, cold, bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.

  Zoë and Clarissa’s fingers entwine. Clarissa wears a platinum set Tiffany diamond of at least four carats. And a gold Rolex with the oyster diamond setting. She withdraws her hand.

  “You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets and red silk jackets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”

  “So you transcend the genre?” Zoë is enraged.

  “What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adoles-cences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa stares at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars that are like tiny metallic studs or hooks—they help you shred flesh.

  Zoë considers their shared childhood in the already faltering city without seasons. Their parents were Jews who had been disenfranchised for generations; pre-urban and unprepared in a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Plumbing and appliances amazed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately closed. What if it burned out? Then their offspring, who became mute with shock, there in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow hibiscus and magenta bougainvillea, behind banks of startled red geraniums and brittle canna.

  “We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus, and coyotes. We are the indigenous spawn of this saint. His bastards,” Zoë realizes.

  “We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”

  They stand and everything is suspended. The bay is barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just been wheeled back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung over. Or in a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.

  “But we have instincts.” Zoë is exhausted. Her arm with the gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, an outcropping that is Marin and Sonoma, and a suggestion of something beyond.

  “We understand ambushes and unconventional warfare. We’re expert with camouflage,” Clarissa agrees, offering encouragement.

  “They’ll never take us by surprise,” Zoë laughs. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.

  Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Sudden vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. They are beyond known choreography. One must relentlessly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.

  “I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces. “But you look stunning. I’m impressed. Have you considered a wardrobe update? Do schmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that don’t fit right. They were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”

  “That’s okay,” Zoë manages. This is emotional aerobics for the crippled, she thinks. Then, “I appreciate the gesture.”

  “I don’t have a generous impulse in my repertoire.” Clarissa seems tired. “This is a search-and-destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. And we must end our reunion with a celebratory benediction.”

  This is their ritual of conclusion. They exchange tokens of mutual acceptance. It’s how they prove their capacity to transcend themselves. It’s the equivalent of boot camp five-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.

  “I brought you a postcard you sent me from Fiji sixteen years ago.” Zoë produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s nude breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.” Zoë offers the postcard to Clarissa.

  “I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t sound surprised. “That was Anna. We don’t speak anymor
e. I don’t know where she lives. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona.”

  Zoë takes the postcard back. She is convinced their reunions are conceptually well-intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were considered purifying and curative. Also barbequing women at the stake. And garlic for vampire protection.

  There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madame Curie, and the extent of her fatigue. Then Zoë says, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”

  “When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then détente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And as an afterthought, asks, “What about you?”

  “I’m getting married,” Zoë says. “I’m moving to Pennsylvania.”

  “Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your half-way-house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.

  “Fuck you.” Zoë is incensed.

  “I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have extreme difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances. It’s unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”