by Barbara Hall
“I hope you’re happy,” she said. “I trusted you.”
I looked away from her. I stared at Hallie, who was concentrating on her shoes.
Dorothy said, “My husband is a well-respected man. The last thing we need is a scandal. So I’m more than willing to let this all go if you promise never to get within a hundred yards of my daughter again.”
I trained my eyes on Dorothy at last.
“So now she’s your daughter?”
“She told me everything. I know who you are. I know what I know.”
“And I know what I know. Maybe we should just leave it at that.”
“You artists. Real life is not enough for you. You just have to embellish, don’t you?”
“I’m not an artist.”
“Stay away from us. Do you understand?”
She marched away from me, and I watched her go. I stared at Hallie until I thought her skin might bleed. She wouldn’t look at me at all. I walked away and I didn’t turn, even after I heard her running toward me. She grabbed my arm and I still wouldn’t turn.
She said, “Don’t you see how you messed everything up?”
“Let go of me.”
“They almost made me leave. I can’t leave. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
I still couldn’t look at her. But I said, “I tried to help you.”
“I didn’t ask you to help me.”
“Sometimes people help without being asked.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But then it’s not a gift. It’s a burden.”
I shook her hand off my arm and unlocked my car door.
I didn’t look at her again until I had her framed in my rearview mirror. She was following Dorothy, her arms crossed and her head bowed to the ground. I saw, or thought I saw, a look of grim determination on her face. As if all of life was a battleground and she was planning her next move.
15
NOWHERE IN ANY BIOGRAPHY I have ever read is there the chapter where the courageous but troubled protagonist decides to abandon her life’s mission and focus instead on her affair with a twenty-eight-year-old bass player.
This is the course my life takes after my Christmas Eve encounter with Patrick. Any reservations I’d had about it in the past disappeared once he told me that I did not extend myself. It became my single-minded mission to prove him wrong.
So I extended myself with Clive. I extended myself in ways I had previously not thought possible. There are probably words in French to describe the ways in which I extended myself. It wasn’t about love or even about sex. It was about “I’ll show him.” And it’s possible that this course of action exists in every person’s story, but the biographer wisely leaves it out. How admirable can it possibly be? How can it be explained in the course of someone’s spiritual journey? But I am here to tell you that some of my best work, certainly my most creative work, was accomplished right there in my trailer park, after a round or two of margaritas or martinis. What I’m thinking is this: Certainly, great accomplishments have been sparked by a headstrong desire to prove someone wrong. Maybe all of them.
It isn’t difficult to introduce Clive back into my existence. I simply swallow my pride and call him. I tell him I want to discuss the possibility of forming a band. He falls for the bait and comes over to my place. After a few drinks, he falls for bait of a different kind, and in the morning he sits up in bed, rubs his goatee thoughtfully, and says, “Hey, what about that band?”
“What about it?”
He grins and says, “There ain’t no band, is there?”
“No, there apparently ain’t.”
He doesn’t complain.
No one at work has a clue, least of all Franklin. He simply notes that I am in a better mood than usual and credits it, in fact, to Clive’s absence.
“I told you that guy was bringing everybody down,” he says.
I just smile.
He has hired a surly, washed-up forty-year-old session musician to take Cive’s place. A woman, as it turns out. She is classically trained on the guitar but has abandoned it for the bass in recent years, and the fact that she is becoming uglier and surlier by the minute has driven her out of her chosen profession. No one was hiring her anymore, she complained to me as we stacked how-to videos together. They were jealous, she said, because she was too good at her craft. They were threatened. They hated women. They didn’t understand the instrument. No one appreciated the bottom end anymore. She was just as devoted to the rhythm section as Clive, but her enthusiasm had decayed into a sour dismissal of all other instruments, and ultimately of music itself.
“It’s all just bullshit,” she says to me. Her name is Josie. She has a jaundiced complexion and doughnut-colored hair. She is shaped like a doughnut, too. This has earned her the name Krispy Kreme behind her back. (Ernest’s creation. He likes to assign people nicknames behind their backs. Mine is Pearls Before Swine, just because it is easy and because I’m not supposed to know it. I never informed him that I’d endured a version of that nickname since kindergarten.)
“What’s bullshit?” I ask her, just to pass the time.
“Music, that’s what. We all act like it’s a career. A valuable way to spend our time. But it’s just an excuse not to grow up. There are people doing real jobs in the world. We’re just fucking around. We might as well be doing finger painting for a living. It’s schoolyard shit. Let’s face it, we’re all where we are because we didn’t want to get a real job. Now it’s too late to turn back. Hell, I can’t even type. I’m stuck with music.”
I like to hear her talk. She swears like a sailor, which is funny coming from a woman who looks like an embittered librarian. And I have endless patience for anything because I am getting laid on a regular basis by a man who has rock-hard abs and a seemingly permanent erection.
Patrick is giving me a wide berth at work. He seems to think he has gained some kind of upper hand with me. Occasionally I catch him smiling at me sympathetically, from across the room, as if he knows the mysterious origin of my deep sadness. What he doesn’t notice, because he doesn’t notice things, is that I have relinquished my deep sadness.
For about a month, I haven’t talked to him at all. He is waiting for me to break. I don’t break. One evening when we are closing up together, counting money in the cash register and sorting time cards, he says in a psychologist’s voice, “How are you doing, Pearl?”
“I’m doing fine, Patrick.”
He nods, as if he expects that kind of denial from me. Then he says, “Are you doing any work outside the shop?”
“A little,” I say. It is true. I still do occasional session work and sit in with a country swing band once a month. But I know he isn’t really asking about work. He is wondering if I am having a life. Extending myself.
“What about you?” I ask. “Are you moonlighting?”
He laughs, as if it is a ridiculous concept, and says, “One job is enough for me.”
“Well, good. That’s the best way to be.”
When our work was done, we walk out together and he locks the door. He says, “Do you want to get something to eat?”
“No, I have to get home.”
“What for?”
“I have a date,” I say simply.
A look of surprise registers on his face before he can stop it.
“With who?” he blurts out.
“No one you know.”
His face goes through a variety of expressions before he settles on indifference.
“That’s good,” he says in his psychologist voice. “I’m happy for you.”
“Why?”
He laughs. “Why am I happy for you?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugs. He doesn’t know. This former physics professor who plays every instrument is stumped.
He says, “I don’t think it’s good for people to be alone too much.”
“Good night,” I say. And I walk away from him.
The funny thing is, he is right. And I am right
. It’s not nearly as much fun when both parties are right.
But that happens more often than not, I am forced to admit.
CLIVE CAN’T LET the issue of the band go. He mentions it when we are eating pizza in front of a Lakers game in my trailer.
He says, “I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life teaching music. I want to do something, Pearl.”
Clive is giving bass lessons from his apartment and in the homes of his students. It took him only a few weeks to match his salary at McCoy’s, but he is now so busy he doesn’t have time to pursue his own music. This is his constant complaint. I have endless patience for it. He is twenty-eight. He is supposed to long for something.
“I agree. You should do something,” I say. “But you don’t need me to start a band.”
“Maybe you could learn to sing,” he suggests. “Clubs pay more for bands with a chick singer. You’re still hot. You could put on a miniskirt.”
If you think I’m not flattered by being described as hot, you’re wrong. Not to mention the idea that he is picturing me in a miniskirt.
“I don’t sing,” I tell him.
“I bet you could. Sheryl Crow wasn’t a great singer when she started. She was just hot.”
“She was young.”
“You’re not much older than that.”
It occurs to me that he doesn’t know how old I am.
I put my slice of pizza down and lean back into the couch.
“How old do you think I am?”
He shrugs. “That doesn’t matter to me.”
“Pick a number,” I say.
He thinks. It’s a struggle for him. Clive is not a thinking man.
He says, “Thirty-four.”
I laugh.
His smile fades. “What? Am I high or low?”
I am not an idiot. I won’t give him a number.
His smile fades further. “How far off am I?”
“What difference does it make? Age is just a number,” I say.
“You’re right,” he admits.
I kiss him, and the evening progresses, and sometime in the middle of the night, while we’re lying too close together on my foldout couch, he says next to my ear, “Just give me a ballpark.”
“Jesus, you aren’t going to let this go.”
“It won’t make a difference,” he says.
“Of course it will.”
“I promise,” he says, and his voice sounds quivery, like a teenager’s.
Now I spend a few seconds thinking. Do I tell him? And what would be the problem in telling him? He might leave. I always knew he might leave, and I have made a halfhearted promise to myself that I won’t care. What’s more, I have a high-minded ideal that I want to be honest, want a man to accept me for who I am, warts and lines and accumulated wisdom and all. If I can’t tell him how old I am, it diminishes our relationship in some important way.
It is in that moment that I realize I have grown attached to him. I never saw that coming.
I turn over to look at him. It’s dark, but I can see the outline of his facial features. They are perfect in the way that all facial features are perfect before the judgment of time. His nose is a little crooked, but not too much, and his eyes sit where they should in the sockets— not sunken in yet, nor obscured by dark circles or puffy imbalances of fat. There are no lines, no creases. His goatee is as soft as a baby’s hair. The rest of his beard is peeking through, but it is soft also, not stiff and grizzled the way a man’s beard eventually gets. His eyebrows are smooth and obedient, not unruly and sprouting off in all directions. He is not old. He is not even mature. He is in the prime of his life, and looking at him in this moment I realize that I might be a little bit selfish, using up his best years in this way, when he believes I’m thirty-four.
The next thought that comes to me actually steals my breath. I think I might be a tiny bit in love with him. Not because he is young—youth has never really seduced me. I look at my young students with a degree of contempt, feeling that they aren’t actually people yet because they have experienced nothing of any importance. Even Hallie, with all her hardships, struck me as someone who knew nothing about the roller coaster of life. I loved her in spite of her age, not because of it.
No, I am in love (if I am) with Clive because his laughter sounds like a fountain trickling, and because he delights in small victories (such as when the pizza arrives on time and hot), and because he cares to a ridiculous degree about the rhythm section (he goes into a fugue state when I put on a Little Feat record), and because he tells funny stories and laughs at my jokes, and because he knows how to fix his own car, and because he watches the news with a serious expression on his face, as if it is all true and it all matters, and because he remembers that I like to be kissed on the back of my neck, and because he puts the toilet seat down, and because he’s very quiet in the morning when he leaves, so he won’t wake me. Clive is a lovable person, not just a good lover, and I have secretly fallen under the spell of him, and now I am in a horrible place, the place I never like to find myself, wherein I have something to lose.
The moment that I realize I am invested in him, and in his opinion of me, I also realize that I am not playing games. I have lost my original intention, to show Patrick or Franklin or Mark something, and now I am engaged in a relationship, if you interpret the concept, and I do, as a situation in which two people are dependent upon each other for certain needs.
“Forty,” I say.
His face stalls. Everything about him stalls. He says, “Forty what?”
I laugh. “Forty years. I’m forty years old.”
“Get out!” he says.
“You can leave now,” I tell him. He might as well. It’s a trial, the two of us attempting sleep in these close quarters, in this thing that doesn’t even qualify as a bed. I am going to miss him.
He raises himself up on an elbow. He looks like Adonis, I promise you, in the pale light that is spilling in through my one window. His chest is smooth and broad and muscled. He smells good, like some kind of soap, and I can’t resist the urge to run my fingers through his soft hair, one last time.
He says, “Why would I leave?”
“Because. I’m forty.”
He leans forward and kisses me hard on the mouth, in a way that actually scares me some. It’s a determined kiss, almost an angry kiss, and I wonder if he’s going to hit me. I wonder if he’s going to say something like, You bitch, you led me on.
Instead, he pulls me on top of him. He is strong. I am caught off guard. I say, “What are you doing?”
“What do you mean?” he asks. “We’re awake, aren’t we?”
“But I’m forty.”
“That just makes it better,” he says.
I bury my face against the soft skin on his neck.
16
I HAVE A NEW STUDENT. His name is Lance. He is eleven years old and can play the violin like someone who was born to do it. He is shorter than he should be, and his hair is platinum blond and he has pale blue eyes and dimples. He is not angry or frustrated, and his parents are extremely middle-class. His mother is a nurse; his father is a car mechanic. They can afford his lessons, though just barely, and the only thing his mother ever says to me when she drops him off for lessons is, “Tell us how we can help him develop his talent. We want this for him.”
It is almost too good to be true, and it takes the place of the hole that Hallie left in my life. Lance does not have the fire that she did. Nor does he have the heartbreaking backstory. But he is good, he likes to work, and he listens to everything I tell him. I can see how it will unfold. I will keep on teaching him until his late teens. Then he and his parents will decide he needs to pursue this further, and they will take him away from me. There is nothing much to hook into. He is simply going to be my charge for a few years, and then he will move on.
I don’t mind this for the same reason that I don’t mind anything. Because I am with Clive. Because just about every evening, I can go home and
fall into the arms of a young man who thinks it is fabulous that I’m forty. Our relationship is progressing. He wants me to meet his parents. Fortunately, they live in Arizona now and don’t come out much. But Clive is preparing for the day. He wants to get us out in the open. He wants to make us official.
I like that, but some days I am confused by it. I can’t really have a future with him, yet I am thoroughly unwilling to give him up. He is getting me through this life. He is making the ugliness of my existence go away. Surely we are going to hit a roadblock. Surely, any day now, the exact number of my age will register with him and he will realize how impossible it is.
For example, Clive wants to have children, and he brings it up now and then. I say, “I’m too old for that.”
He tells me how he’s read articles in Newsweek that assure him a woman can have a baby into her fifties if she’s motivated. I don’t tell him that it takes a certain willingness on the part of the woman. Sometimes he tries to talk me into abandoning birth control. When he does that, I say, “Clive, I have no desire to be pregnant.”
He says, “My friends with babies tell me life doesn’t even start till you have them.”
I say, “My friends with babies tell me that life ends when you have them.”
“Oh, you’re just being weird,” he says.
The discrepancy is moving in on me. He wants; I don’t want. He expects; I have given up on expectations. I accept, and he just desires, late into the night, scanning the ceiling with his young and hopeful eyes.
When I start teaching Lance, I start staying at the store later and later. I have started teaching him two nights a week, more often than I usually teach students. He has soccer practice three times a week, so I have to make allowances. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I stay until seven o’clock, teaching him. That means I don’t get home until eight. Sometimes I find Clive pacing in front of my trailer, smoking, irritated, anxious.
He doesn’t reprimand me, and I always joke him out of his bad mood or lift his spirits by bringing home pizza or Chinese food. He is so young he can actually be won over by such things. Young people have short attention spans, and I have learned how to use this in my favor. We don’t fight much because I can deflect his anger or frustration without much effort, and in the rare instances when he clings to something, I can always coax him away from it with sex.