Richard hangs up, but only because he’s a showoff, and needs to always have the final word. He’s in love with the sound of his own voice cutting out, and imagining what that absence sounds like in my ear, but by the time I get to his place he’ll be out of his snit, and ready to be good to me. He may even offer to pay for my cab.
WEEKEND AWAY
Steven’s calling. He does this once or twice a month, depending how things are going for him. Three times means pretty bad. We haven’t had one of those in a while. If he ever called four times I might be worried or curious enough to pick up.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, rings if it’s on the charger, and I’ll look at it and see it’s him and not answer. I haven’t spoken to him in ten and a half months, which I prefer to think of as a year, since we are coming up on our one-year “anniversary” anyway. What he does is leave a voice mail and then not two minutes later call again and leave another, so each “call” is actually a pair of them: binary stars.
You can imagine what a hurry I’m in to go retrieve these messages. Sentimental reminiscences, mostly, slurred by drink and tending toward the graphically sexual. The rare wild plea for another chance.
I do love knowing how deep in him I run, still. My lasting power in and over his duplicitous heart. That in the depths of his misery this is what he comes back around to: some vision of me that makes him throb.
He stirs things up in me, too, that’s true, but I can endure what I feel when I hear his recorded voice in my ear. At this point, the urge only serves to further chasten.
I am something of a stoic, these days, and Steven lives down in Sacramento with the woman he left me for.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning and my first thought is how funny—and funny is the right word—it is that I probably will never see him again.
We will speak, sooner or later. Even though I know I shouldn’t pick up the phone—and to my credit, so far I haven’t, not even once—the fact is that one of these days I will. I’ll pick up the phone and say hello to him and then—what?
But probably we will never again meet face-to-face, in real life.
I mean, if I knew he was going to be somewhere, I wouldn’t go.
Real life. What a funny concept. When I think about it—This is it! Happening! Now! Andnowandnowandnow!—there’s nothing that can keep me from bursting out laughing, sometimes until my sides ache. If he could somehow see me in that state he’d get a sort of nostalgic look on his face and take this tone he has, the one that on the surface says, “I’m feeling wistful” but really means, “Pity me and submit.” In that tone he’d say, “I used to be able to make you laugh that way,” and then I’d say “Oh, but Steven, don’t you see that you still do?”
“They call it Rose City,” he said. “This place was made for us.”
I was in Florida, where we’re both from. I was living with my mother for a while and starting to not believe myself when I would repeat my mantra: You are not moving across the country for this man.
“I mean, it’s your goddamn name,” he said. “How can this not be just perfect?”
I forget whether that was the conversation when I said all right, here I come, or if I didn’t fully cave for a while longer.
Enough. It is a new day, bright and crisp, and I will not waste it dwelling on old bad memories. I drive a car with a top that goes down and I’m getting in it and I’m going. I’m gone.
But I do want to say one more thing about it. Steven is the one who left me. That’s true. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t sometimes think about leaving him, because I did. I had even started to look, in a hypothetical sort of way, at the different neighborhoods in the city and try to figure out which were the ones where I could afford something decent on my own and also not have to cross paths with him much. (This, obviously, was before I knew what his plans were.)
I didn’t once think about going back to my mother’s, or to Florida at all.
It’s March. The sky is clear and the air is still cold. Too cold to keep the top down for long, but I will for awhile. I don’t care. I always hated the hot sticky Floridian wind. Keep your swamps and outlet malls. If Steven did one good thing for me—and there was plenty of good between us, even if I don’t think about it much—what he did was get me out of Florida.
Thanks, Steven.
Right when I wish for a hitchhiker I get one. Maybe it’s my lucky day. I should buy lottery tickets. I see him from a distance and slow down so I don’t overshoot him. I sidle right up, a pro at this.
“Hey there,” I say. “Been doin’ some hard travelin’?”
“I thought you knowed,” he says. I love him already. His black, messy hair mostly covers his ears. He’s wearing dark skinny-fit jeans and a brown tee shirt with a stencil of a broken machine gun on it and the all-caps directive to MAKE LEVEES NOT WAR. There’s a hole in one of the armpits of the shirt. He’s five-seven in his boots.
“Come on, get in,” I say. “There’s a whole mess of discs without cases in the glove box. Woody’s in there if you can find him.”
“Or we could plug in my iPod,” the hitchhiker says. “I’ve got a car adaptor cord in my bag.”
Bruce is nineteen, a student at the visual arts school in Portland, and trying to get to Tolovana Park. All I know about that place is that it’s the next town south of Cannon Beach, which is where I’m headed.
I ask him if Tolovana Park is where he’s from. No, but his mom lives there now. She runs an antiques shop in Cannon Beach that does most of its business during tourist season, which officially kicks off Memorial Day weekend. She sent him money for a bus ticket, but he spent it all on art supplies. Later, after we’ve spent some time riding and sung a few songs together with Woody, he reveals that the school provides him with most any art supply he could ever want and what he really spent the money on was pot.
We’re on the Sunset Highway, US 26 West, half an hour past Staley’s Junction, where I picked him up, so about halfway to where we’re going. Out here, the highway is a two-lane road, cut into the earth in such a way that on some stretches the bases of the huge trees are at eye level on both sides.
Bruce digs around in his pack and produces a little wooden pipe and a film canister. As soon as the canister is open a marshy green sex smell fills my car.
I steer with one hand and hold the pipe to my lips with the other. I let Bruce work the lighter for me. I draw in deep, then break out in a coughing fit that pops the cherry from the bowl and shoots it into Bruce’s lap. He lets out a surprisingly girlish noise and starts swatting at himself. My eyes are squeezed shut tight with coughing and I accidentally swerve the car hard left, wait for the sensation of the crash, remember there is nobody else on the road anywhere near us, then feel a different sensation, from underneath the car, realize that while I am still going more or less in the direction of the road I have now gotten off it entirely and am driving in the grass, which, thankfully, is flat here and not some runoff ditch or something.
I force my eyes open, pull back onto the shoulder, bring the car to a stop.
“Holy shit,” I say. “I am so sorry.”
There’s a small scorch on Bruce’s jeans about mid-thigh.
“Where’s your mom’s shop?” I say. “Is it open? I’ll drop you.”
“You want to have burgers or something?” Bruce says.
We go to the lobby restaurant of the first beachfront hotel we come to and I decide this will be my hotel for the weekend. There are a row of them up and down the beach, most still closed for the season. We are the only people in the place, but I think it would feel vast even if it were full. The ceilings are too high. The windows that look out on the beach must be ten feet tall and half again as wide. I wonder if I’m the only guest. I mean, if I will be after I check in.
We are ravenous and make short work of our burgers. We pour so much ketchup on our fries they get soggy and cold. That’s okay. They’re good that way, maybe better. Two refills apiece of our Cokes.
&nbs
p; When the bill comes Bruce goes for his wallet.
“Are you kidding?” I say, and pluck the check up off the table.
“Listen,” Bruce says. “Let me come up to your room with you.”
“Bruce, I think it’s time we get you home.”
“But I’m all gross,” he says. “From the road. Let me take a shower and change my clothes.”
I don’t know what time it is. “Your mom,” I say. Bruce bursts out laughing and can’t stop. I don’t know how long the laughing lasts, only that I’m laughing too. The light in the room is thick like soup. It looks the way pot smells. Pot smells the way it feels inside you. The way it feels inside you is the way you feel in the ocean. The way the ocean feels, all around you. It is still too cold to swim in this ocean. I came all the way out here just to stare. “No,” I say. In my head: Jesus, complete the thought. “I mean, won’t she be worried. I mean, I’m sure she is worried.”
“I don’t think it honestly matters,” Bruce says.
You can pretty much always swim in the ocean in Florida. Even when it’s as cold as it gets it’s still not nearly as cold as it is here.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask Bruce. “You’ve got this place to go be and you want to be there, I mean you put all this effort into getting there, but now you want to be here.”
“Why shouldn’t I want to be here?” Bruce says. “You’re pretty and we’re having fun. You know, you haven’t even asked why I’m going home.”
“Why are you going home?”
“I’m not telling you,” he says. “It’s nothing good, that’s for sure, but it’s also nothing that can’t wait a day. Does that make sense?” He’s packing another bowl as he says this.
Does that make sense? Does it not make sense?
Doesn’t it have to be one way or the other one?
Well—does it?
I’m a late sleeper. I always have been. I heard Bruce stirring and though he was quiet I heard the door open and click shut behind him. I did not rouse myself. I drifted back down.
As a parting gift, I see now, he left me a single expertly rolled joint on top of the pad of hotel stationery on the nightstand. Sweet, sweet boy. I get dressed and go to the sea.
I’m wearing two sweaters. It’s about noon and icy and gray.
I have the joint with me but no lighter or match, not that either would stand much of a chance against this wind coming off the water. I sit down in the sand. When my rear gets too cold to sit anymore I stand up, brush the damp sand off myself, then wander down by the edge of the water and look at the anemones clinging to the sides of rocks, the little fishes trapped in tide pools and the crabs. They scuttle up out of the sand, then over it, down in again somewhere else.
I turn away from the sea, cross the dunes, go around the side of the hotel, and come to the Cannon Beach main drag, such as it is. I walk. Most everything is closed, except convenience stores attached to gas stations. Oh here and there a shop is open, but there’s nothing I need or that so much as interests me, at least until I come to a little place I am sure is the right one.
It’s warm inside and musty, packed to the gills with—stuff.
I had pictured the sort of establishment that deals in well-kept relics, things people knowingly overpay for because they’re just perfect for that empty space on the wall opposite the guest bed, or the mantel over the fake fireplace. This isn’t that at all. What this is brings the word rummage to mind. There are weird recovered castoffs in various states of completeness. There are wooden baskets full of paperback bodice rippers, covers stripped. Unmatched dishes and glasses, beat-up pots. Bolts of fabric that look at least a decade old, priced not by the foot but by the bolt. On a low shelf, about waist high, a wooden stereoscope rests atop a pile of cards for it. I don’t lift the thing up to try it out for fear of breaking it, but the top picture—two pictures, really, but identical—is of Portland around the turn of the last century. Beside it stands a ceramic figurine, maybe a foot tall: a crow with a jaunty smile and a black top hat that matches his feathers. A bow tie below his chin turns his folded wings into the suggestion of a tuxedo jacket. I think I will buy this for a present for Jack.
This is the first I’m mentioning Jack. I know that. He’s the guy I’ve been seeing since a few months after Steven left. He’s a strong, tender lover and a good man. I have this problem where whenever he’s not around I forget he exists, until some random moment when I remember that I’m not just a wronged lonely woman and in fact am loved by somebody, somebody in every way better—anyway, better to me—than the person I lost. The heart can be funny but the mind can be even funnier.
Funny is almost certainly not the right word.
I put the crow down on the counter next to the register. I ding the little silver ser vice bell. “One second,” calls a voice from the back room, and then a tallish woman emerges from behind the curtain. She has long graying red hair, masculine shoulders, and wears a pair of horn-rimmed glasses she might well have found among her own stacks, unless she bought them new, say thirty years ago.
She keeps one hand on the figurine as she rings me up, and strokes it gently, the way you would a small tired dog. I put my hand on top of her hand and give it a squeeze.
“You’re Bruce’s mother,” I say. Her eyes go to slits even as they zero in on me.
“Who are you?” she says.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m a psychic, actually. When our hands touched I knew you had a son named Bruce.”
“You expect me to stand here and take this?” she says. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have said anything. But it’s hard being psychic. You get these bursts of true insight and then nobody believes anything you say. I know I’m right. If I wasn’t right you wouldn’t be looking at me like that.”
“Well, if you’re so psychic what else can you tell me?”
“It doesn’t work that way. I can’t just—well, there’s something bad that’s happened in your family recently and Bruce has been deeply affected. He’s trying to be strong for you but he isn’t sure if he’s strong enough. You should be patient with him, and kind. Does any of that make sense?”
“None,” the woman says. “I don’t have a son named Bruce.”
Back at the hotel, I smoke the joint like you would a cigarette: just keep taking drags until the whole thing is gone.
I get myself into a lot of trouble, going overboard like this.
Sometime after the last glints of sunlight slip below the horizon I realize I’m bored staring out at dark water, and then I realize that this is actually a normal, coherent thought, and this makes me think maybe the worst has passed. I think I’ll go down to the restaurant, order something not too greasy and a coffee, then check out and start back home. A nice night drive. Become nothing but a pair of headlights cutting swiftly through the silken dark. Mmm.
What can I eat that won’t be too greasy?
Some kind of sandwich, which would also go well with the coffee. I want lots of mustard, so much spicy brown mustard that everybody in the place can smell it and they all gawk, and if there are no other customers to gawk then only the waiter will, and I am more ready for this coffee and sandwich and drive than for anything I have ever been ready for, even as I feel myself slipping off to sleep, curled up in the chair there with the bed so close but also far away and the last thing I realize is having not decided between smoked turkey and roast beef.
Bruce is in the room with me. He’s over by the bed, pack slung over one shoulder and his whole form—body, clothes, everything—is incandescent, flickering like old film. “Hey,” I say. “I thought I saw your mother today.”
“I don’t have a mother. I’m not even a college student, just a traveling kid. Here’s what happened: I woke up early this morning, took forty dollars out of your wallet—you can check if you want—then walked back to the highway and started hitching again. A man in a light blue ’89 Dodge van wit
h no windows picked me up, took me to some lonely place he knows about, messed me up pretty bad, and then left me there. I died. Also, my name isn’t Bruce it’s Malachi.”
The ghost gives me this look of ultimate affection and some pity, like he’s sorry how fucked up this is but it’s all in perspective, or would be if you could see it from where he’s standing.
“Of all the people to visit,” I say, “why me? Or is it more like you’ve got some list and I’m pit stop number whatever.”
“You’re the one who wanted to be psychic,” Bruce says. Now he’s laughing at me. “Look Rose, I’m sorry I made up that story. I’m not really dead.”
“You promise?”
“Oh yeah, for sure, though the thing about my name is true. What actually happened was after I left your place I tried to shoplift some breakfast from a gas station candy rack but the cashier saw me and there happened to be a cop nearby and when they searched me they found some other stuff I didn’t tell you about, and now I’m in county lockup, two towns over, and even though you’re not a psychic, it turns out that I am. I’m visiting you via astral projection, which sort of makes my body look like it’s having a low-grade seizure on my cot, not that anyone’s checking. Anyway, I’ve come to tell you I accidentally left my iPod in your car and I’d really like to get it back, though I guess they won’t let me have it while I’m in here so I don’t really know what to say.”
I give the ghost my phone number. If he ever calls I’ll know this wasn’t a dream.
“Thanks, Rose,” he says. “You were really good to me.”
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