Читать книгу Widow's Dozen - Marek Waldorf - Страница 11

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I started seeing her. On a Wednesday, Ash Wednesday in fact. For a nonbeliever, the sight of all those foreheads smudged with crosses materializing and vanishing inside a crowd of well-heeled strangers brought a charge that was immodest, esoteric, serene. Not one: we are none of us as unique as we like to think.

She was bringing two beers from the counter back to our table when she knocked over a stool and spilled onto some woman’s new leather jacket. And it became clear: her mood swings, the careful attention and broad hints from her best friend. It made perfect sense. I was all nerves and trepidation. That wasn’t unusual either. At this stage, failing to make a pass would have counted as a silent but definitive no. I’d been toying with the idea, I said to her half an hour later, walking toward Market while she decided whether to invite me home for the night, or “hanging it out to dry.”

Back at her place, we spoke piecemeal for a few hours before we began (tentatively) to unfold.

Six months earlier she had shown up at the crisis counseling office where I worked to begin her temporary assignment. I’d answered the door when she rang and informed her (nobody else around) she was a day ahead of schedule. She appeared nervous, as who wouldn’t be on her first day of work. She did a rabbit-twitch with her nose and mouth, then left—or, to suit my fancy, vanished back into the hat. I noted four things about her then: that she was got up all in black, including the greased and dyed hair; she was breaking out; the lip-stick, a damson shade thickly applied, seemed too much for her small, pursed mouth. Fourth, I noted her eyes, a chastening blue. Several days earlier, I’d spent the morning of my thirty-first birthday with my mom (visiting from back east) and grandmother at Pilgrim’s Haven, in Palo Alto, where my grandmother, blind and bedridden by a stroke, spent the time conjuring what sense she could from the voices on the large television set in a metal bracket in the upper left-hand corner of her room, jumbling up the soaps, the sitcoms, the cop dramas, the cartoons, the game and talk shows, the movies of the week, and the commercials, and waiting for her daughters to call so that she could yell or plead for them to come take her home, as she hadn’t been told the family house, designed by my grandfather in the 1920s, had been sold, torn down and replaced with a near-windowless monstrosity that, in accordance with the fashion around Stanford at the time, resembled nothing so much as a mausoleum. Pilgrim’s Haven was comprised of flat-roofed, elongated bungalows, prefab-looking with a light metal coat of robin-blue over the siding, connected by open walkways along meager plantings of flowers. There were no trees anywhere. There were, however, several broad, boring lawns.

My birthday fell on the thirteenth. Given the reversal, thirty-one seemed to promise new beginnings or the auspicious overturning of old habits. Later at work I was given a chocolate cupcake with a single candle shoved into the top, and a hibiscus. I didn’t really understand why they’d included the flower. I stayed home that night and watched TV or read, one or the other.

Brigid and I hit it off quickly, a rapport built on shared work assignments, common interests (music mainly), and of course the fact we both smoked. Before finding a post at the crisis center, I’d been transcribing worker’s comp psych-evaluations at a mom-&-pop shop playing both sides of the fence. It hadn’t lasted long. For one thing, I’d been optimistic about my typing speed, hoping it wouldn’t matter. The near tapless slur of the two other receptionists’ keyboards quickly disabused me of that fantasy. I also got the sense that something about my bathing habits bothered my employers, or the state of my laundry, the thrift-store jacket and birthday ties. Neither psychiatrist liked confrontation much, but they had their receptionists well trained.

“Why?” Brigid asked. “What is it you want out of this?” Her tiny hands fists in the pockets of a blue-and-green tweed jacket. I could have said I didn’t have much to lose, and she had the most beautiful neck, a dancer’s neck, but why? “I’ve examined the situation closely,” I noted, “and found certain aspects to my liking.” “Such as?” Girls! Ultimately she bought my act, or tolerated it. As sold on me as I was on her, but in her own way and with whatever scruples she supposedly possessed. Also she had a cat.

A semblance of carelessness coupled with the sense that, however silly what she said seemed, she’d laid down the law. On the phone she sounded younger, scarcely thirteen. “You don’t even try not to be difficult,” in a voice that was high, equable, reedy. She’d meant it (she hastened to add) as a compliment. The best people were all impossible, supposedly. Or “supposively”: that’s just how she said it.

Nob Hill Sunday: our first together, in a cupboard park at the top of the stairs of one of the city’s premier hills, stretched out on a crowded lawn. I turned myself from back to stomach with the regularity of rotisseried meat. The park was tithed into uneven quads by radial paths bricked neatly through the grass. We’d stationed ourselves at a fairly isolated spot away from Grace Cathedral. She would tell stories, assuming I cared, no, I cared, not opening up exactly but telling me enough about her childhood to give me an idea of the role she wished to inhabit. A survivor . . . we strayed into the topic of suicide, which she’d attempted (age thirteen) by swallowing a bottle of aspirin then going next door to play. She’d landed in therapy, which became an ongoing thing.

Obtained from eight years of treatment, as far as I could tell, was the ability to talk about her upbringing without embarrassment, self-pity or for that matter much emotion at all showing through. Abuse . . . she skirted the word, and so would I.

As I said, chiefly as I saw it then. There was no edge to the conversation to drift back from, but we did move on to other matters, wherein she laid claim to telepathy, a guardian angel, the gift of second sight. My head rested on a black bag loaded with books. I shifted them a bit, bag and head, beneath leafage affording patchy relief from the surplus of light granted between fog and bay. It seemed a lull entered. We were learning how to become comfortable with one another, and silence (an easy one) was part of the process. I noticed something I had failed to after seven months of working together: she was extremely judgmental. People-watching with a view to picking apart fashion blunders was a favorite pastime. I joined her games with the savagery I often mistake for wit—she found me funny enough, in any case, if somewhat slow-witted . . . “Can’t you keep up?” she might say, but not in a mean way.

Later, I showed her the beginning of a story I was working on, written in the first person: a young man named Fellows goes into a pawn shop, where he discovers a large fossilized beetle, a scarab, and buys it without a second thought. Taking the subway home, he notices that all seven people in the car are wearing wigs, while only three of them are old. I told Brigid this had happened to me once. “On the BART?” she said in disbelief. “No, not here, in New York—it was the last car but in the afternoon.” “Did you have a wig on?” she asked. “No—of course not.” “Then not everybody in the car was wearing a wig,” she said, pleased with herself.

I was to meet her at her apartment, after work, and she was late returning from ballet class. I waited at her building gate for half an hour, walked down to Market, came back to her foyer, waited some more. A pool hall on the second floor of the building opposite. Paddles of ceiling fans visible through the open windows, and a RACK ’EM sign flashing orange to green. I decided to wait another ten minutes, then leave. The time passed and as I walked down the street—approaching Market—I saw her at the far corner, and even though she saw me turn around and knew I had seen her, she began to run, not clumsily but endearingly off-kilter. She told me dancers were often clumsy. Sure, I watched her practice: she wasn’t shy like that.

Features that (once they operated on me) were difficult to forget. She tapered sharply at her extremities. Taking her hand in mine, the fingers extended no further than the first joint of mine. Her feet were just as small, her head as well. The neck, her favorite item, long and set at a forward angle. Twice while we were together, she’d hacked her hair short in back. Just taken a wedge between her fingers and ridden the scissors through . . . the dreaded “bowl” haircut. It was becoming too glamorous, she’d inform me after the fact. Once she did it because she hated the haircut I got, clipped a half-inch from my scalp. She had a round face. Her aquiline nose started high and sloped steeply on each side to close-set eyes and her blondish lashes bolstered with mascara, a night’s sleep making horror-film bruises out of the sockets. She bruised easily. Knees, shins, thighs. In photographs taken years earlier, in unhealthy pours of sunlight producing a squint, with beach-length hair, she looked older, wearing a self-critical expression that seemed to confirm the worst. Part of her attraction was the innocence chiding any effort to honor or appease it. To which she owed so much incredible experience I felt like the ingénue—no, I was the ingénue, we both agreed.

When she told me her breasts were “torpedo-shaped,” I agreed. Pointy with wrinkled, red-brown aureoles around the nipples. They suited a figure brisker than slender, erotic in the androgynous fashion of the day. The year of the flapper had finally arrived.

Like in a cabaret, a fly had glued itself to her face. I was caught short by a sneezing fit, three in succession.

We repaired to the public restrooms in the Fairmont, she to pee and I to get toilet paper for my nose. The Ovaltine-toned lobby: carpeting, drapes, lifeless frippery, lounge seats and sofas in plasmal upholstery. She called it the hotel for rich white trash, where her grandparents, aunts and uncles on her mom’s side stayed whenever they came through town. She seemed to know her way around.

She told me about her father’s belief system, sketched out its laws and his personal enforcement techniques. It was pretty bad, from where I stood—but she said he loved her and had adopted her as his own daughter. He worked part-time out of the house, as a financial advisor. Up until twelve, she received regular whippings with a belt. “Buckle end?” “No, but he used all his strength. I’d have to take down my underpants because he thought that might serve as padding.” “How many times?” Afterward, I cringed at the questions I asked. “I don’t know. I think I blocked it out after three.”

The infractions were trivial, she said, failing to sweep the yard, forgetting to clean her room. On several occasions he’d slapped her using the back of his hand. Off a chair once. And once in the bath so she knocked her head against the faucet. She showed me the small scar deviating out of that. She was thirteen when the marriage ended and her father went into therapy. A period of tremendous remorse for him. For her a frantic reassessment of everything and everything’s implications—her rage and mistrust and the suicide attempt followed. I don’t understand this, but she stayed with him after the marriage to her mom ended. When I asked why, she said she stuck around to keep an eye on her half-brother. “I thought he was with your mom most of the time.” But this was all she wanted to give me, and for once I didn’t press.

I followed her down a white hallway, its walls lined with mezzotint photos of the Fairmont pre and post the 1906 earthquake, past a faux-marble bust backlit inside a glassed-off cubby, down a wide flight of stairs. My face on the wall-length bathroom mirror looked sallow, unimpressive. We found an empty banquet room, and she went into it with no purpose but to flag her own presence in its white-rose glamour, while I remained at the door, waiting to be busted or maybe admiring her as she walked through the empty banquet room.

* * *

Dancing, she moved as she had been trained to move. Sometimes in class, she’d add minor embellishments of her own invention. Outside the studio, silliness came to the fore. I liked her arches, from her eyebrows plucked above the bridge of her nose (where otherwise they would have met) to the soles of her feet, whose toes she let me suck on. The big toe was the most fun. Years of dancing en pointe had caused it to swell to the proportions of a fat cartoon thumb banged with a hammer.

New landmarks. Her last name was no good, she said, it had to change, and I felt duty-bound to have a go. Whenever conversation came to a standstill, I’d toss out a couple and wait for her unfailing disapproval. Sometimes I’d show up at her apartment with a single word on my lips, her new name, and she’d look back at me, not comprehending until she caught on. “Better luck next time!” Clemente. Comstock. Leitner. Haab. Radley. Versanova. Quimby. Nodabendon. This last, of course, being the name of heaven or the star system that the heavens of old evolved into, according to her father. He belonged to a local congregation of earth channelers who had distilled the varieties of religious experience into a sort of science of belief. Currier. Fairview. Lessing. Greene. Of course, she had her own ideas on the subject, and the name she at last found (I could only admit) trumped my whole lousy list. It didn’t sit so well next to the first name, but otherwise . . . she decided to become “Ms. Landmark.”

The fiend with two faces. Her silver belt buckle monogrammed with the letter F—I asked what it stood for. “Fiend,” she said, sliding the belt from her pant loops and slipping down to underwear in preparation for bed. I should’ve guessed: “fiend” was her watchword, her favorite noun for herself. In greeting and farewell, or just as punctuation, her friends would flash the “fiend sign,” raising an index and pinkie on one or both hands. Me, I felt awfully remote from such things. Brigid took things a step further by claiming to be a Satanist: she was consistently advocating on behalf of “the universal destruction of mankind.”

Brigid’s naughty secret. Her other hallmark being her double (bipolar, when returning from her therapist) nature: born a Gemini. One side or the other laid claim to “an old soul.” Whose? It didn’t show. This proved something of a paradox: selfish yet generous to a fault—closed-off yet almost impossibly self-revealing—unforgiving yet with a long roster of hard-kept friendships—sexually experienced yet uncomfortable with the whole process, at least around me, and so on. I tried to imagine Brigid’s therapist based on the advice she gave her, but it was hard. And Brigid would have been furious if she’d known what I was up to with my questions. Up the block from her apartment, at the corner, a porn theater whose marquee never changed. One of the posters behind the locked glass in the entry was for a movie called Brigid’s Naughty Secret, which she tried to purchase on several occasions without success.

Between moons. Between one moon and another, there never could be a choice. One an angel disguised as fiend; the other, friend. One disguise as good as another. How could I care? Either way I knew how it would end.

Smog. Not long after we broke up, I discovered that this universal destruction of mankind thing came from the liner notes of a local band whose drummer she had a crush on. A brawny beanpole, he attacked his set with great flair, with his back to the audience. I remember listening to the tape she’d made for me, high, on a shitty portable deck. Since I hadn’t damaged my hearing yet, it sounded pretty good. Reverb was a sort of possession back then. She liked them, The Sea and Cake, Madonna, Elliott Smith, and the Cramps more than me, My Bloody Valentine about the same, and The Bats, Nearly God and the Dirty Three less. I remember listening to Daddy’s Highway a lot, and The Doctor Came at Dawn once we were apart, as well as the novel science fiction of Julius Caesar: “she said I could do it without protection,” the singer-songwriter would keep arguing, “that’s not a woman at all.”

Starcrossed. She wanted to be her own star, solitary but capable of defining (to some infallible degree) the orbits of those around her. “Others are free to feel differently,” she conceded. “Others,” I said, “including me.” Because of this, I would call her “a free spirit” later, yes, meanly. Prime mover would’ve been more accurate: originating but not involved. “I don’t want to have an impact on your life. Maybe I’m not saying that right.” I told her she wasn’t. “But don’t you see yourself at least partially—and I’m not saying fully—responsible for the neuroses you claim to deplore? Can’t you see what a fantasy ‘no impact’ is?” I couldn’t come out and say it, but I felt I had offered her the simplicity she said she wanted to introduce into her life—and that simplicity, perhaps flawed by definition, was me—and here she was, rejecting it. But of course it was more complicated than that. We were returning from a disappointing dance performance. In some pieces, the dancers were suspended from wires against a wall that frondlike patterns of orange, green and blue were projected onto. The music was New Age chant, and there was a twenty-minute slide show. A long walk back down Mission, deserted enough to allow me to piss into a lot through the diamond of a chain-link fence. I was arguing that all dance performances should be done in silence, but at some point lost sight of the fact that she was no longer refuting me. At Van Ness I stopped at a cash machine, where we were pestered by two drunk homeless men. Brigid took the opportunity to explain why she couldn’t give them anything tonight. She had a bad habit of seeing what she could get away with, offering her guileless empathy as substitute for an empty purse. This time it didn’t work. One of the men began to mimic her high voice, and when she took offense, he responded with some nasty insults. The kindest being, “Ooooh, the little princess.” After that the evening was shot. Knowing her fairly well, I would recognize her humiliation in the stiffness of her gait. She was quiet during dinner and increasingly disagreeable. I watched her take down one barrier and put up another, and I waited for her to strike out, not as most people would with an angry outburst, but with some cold flash of artificial insight, about me, the substance of which she would keep secret for days. Recognizing the con didn’t matter. “I’ll let you know,” she said, lying next to me later, “if I decide it’s real and not something I’m mind-fucking myself about. Now if you’ll let me get some sleep . . .”

Michael and the entity Michael. The next morning, we talked about her last or last real boyfriend, Mike, and the entity Michael, a bitter angel hovering over our planet of tears, according to the earth channelers. “Tall, dark, and oafish” was how she described the former: “what more could a girl want?” Even though he was a control freak, a sadist, and a retroactive greaser, she’d stayed with him for three years—longer than anybody else, or than she’d ever want to again, she said—because of the coincidence of names, or so she believed. Michael and the entity Michael. It was something you could say over and over. He’d taught her things about herself and about sex, and where the two coincided, that she didn’t want to remember, at least not with me.

The lightweight pounding of the California surf over the yellow sand, pulling in, pushed back, the rubbing of two not totally incompatible surfaces against one another. Basically it was the sunlight, the oddly paramount light all day. The sky rustling up a cloud only to throw it far out over the ocean. A smog-blue suit. Their neighborhood consisted of hobbity homes buried in mineral-green hills and low cypress canopies: cottages resembling driftwood, immaculate white bungalows and rowdier structures feistily painted. But, basically, something felt “off.” The climate for one thing: like it had stalled thirty miles from tropical paradise. The smog and clammy belching of the ocean made the air sit heavy. As in much of Southern California, smoking became a joyless habit, pure need. Perdidas Lagoon was separated from the inland flats of Orange County—as paved-over and packed with strip malls and freeways and rivetingly ugly homes as any suburb I’d seen, and I thought myself an expert—by a chain of pockmarked hills. The corniche north led through a brief deserted stretch of cliff-top dunes, then ran into thickly posted traffic, signals, retail clutter. To convey small-town atmosphere, the council had provided for a “greeter” who wandered the central limits dispensing hippie homilies, daisies, and Cheetohs. The wrongness seemed to seep out from within. And the inhabitants . . . bumpkins with the manners of gods.

While big enough, the sole bathroom in the bungalow lay smack between the kitchen and her parents’ bedroom (since the divorce, a study) and separated from each by a flimsy sliding balsam door. Brigid had mentioned listening to both her parents’ noisy farting while growing up. In fact, her mom’s flatulence was a regular theme. But the total lack of privacy didn’t register until we went down to visit. There was the kitchen counter where her father would spend hours chopping, dicing, and mixing for the evening meal. There were cupboards stocked with pastas, grains, and spices from Trader Joe’s. And then, behind that nothing wall, was the toilet where the three of them did their business. I had a hard enough time pissing with her father audible at the cutting board, on the opposite side. The idea of pulling down my pants . . . no, no, it couldn’t be done. Narrow though it was, the kitchen was the hub of activity, and more inviting than the living room cramped with antiques and knickknacks. The tall shrubbery in the garden kept the sun off most windows, but it also blocked the breezes. Relatively cool, but also a bit stifling. Her room felt particularly stuffy—the few windows in it high and slim, and the sliding glass door typically locked.

At least ten months had passed since my two nights at her father’s house before I decided to draw from memory a floor plan. There were a number of sliding doors in the place. The bedroom was two steps above the living room. Inside a stand-alone glass display case on the landing between rooms sat an intricately detailed model of an early-nineteenth-century clipper ship three feet in length, with raked masts. It wasn’t a room that accommodated outsiders. The majority of the oil paintings and charcoal sketches on the walls were by her father’s grandfather, Impressionism stiffening into Fauvism. Over time the pigments had darkened to a creosote-type finish, including on Brigid’s favorite—the most cheerful of the lot—a cockatoo with paradisiacal plumage. Of course, I took note of the bookshelf, which contained the California legal codes in thick blue volumes, and an assortment of travel- and law-related nonfiction. Given its own place of pride on a slanted lectern was Channels of the Earth, a massive tome. Next to the bookshelf hung a pair of Balinese shadow puppets.

Part of what made the room feel so uninviting was the antique furniture. It looked too delicate to sit on. As an outsider myself, I had to wonder what Brigid felt her place to be in that room, what pride she could take from the family tradition which her father—the stepfather who’d adopted her, as I was sometimes in danger of forgetting—so lovingly detailed and preserved. Her biological father had died of alcohol poisoning in Baltimore years after her mom divorced him.

One of the first things I noticed was the name Nodabendon burnt into a piece of driftwood above the pi-shaped Japanese gate into their yard. I asked her more about her stepfather’s beliefs, many of which she’d been forced to share or contemplate while growing up. She remembered very little of it, but that meant nothing, she was never good when it came to remembering things. Her enthusiasm on the subject was genuine: unforced, if a bit starry-eyed. What I already knew was that they’d shared the shower, on and off, until she was nine, and that her first vibrator came from him. She called herself a daddy’s girl, and it was true. Throughout much of our five-month relationship, she was barely on speaking terms with her mom.

A short walk down the hill to a Safeway, an L-shaped annex, the back-bar the supermarket, and, on the side, three or four small shops, one of them a pizza parlor. Teens out front, caps turned back, skateboards flipped up. Across the four-lane coastal road, waist-high hedges effectively hid the ocean. The bushes and the streetlamps deflected any sense that one was up against—literally, feet from—a serious body of water. Crossing the road and wading through those low hedges, one felt the rush when a curtain was swept aside. The purple depths foamed up at spiny cliff tails. We could see for what seemed miles—watching the misdirected spotlights from helicopters swoop the erratic line of the washed-against land . . .

Back in the Tenderloin she pulled out a high-school yearbook, and I looked over her shoulder as she flipped pages. She pointed out guys she had dated, kissed or made out with, at least one (always an upperclassman) per page. At thirteen she lost her virginity—a one-night stand about which there was some confusion—to a boy who left for Mexico the next day. “He was Mexican?” “No—listen, can’t you keep up? He was travelling there over summer break.”

The following year she joined the cheerleading squad. That was one photo she tried unsuccessfully to skip past. The year of her first real coup, a three-month relationship with the senior on campus, who she clipped because he was “too boring.” The eight or so jocks, water polo players, surfers who followed left scribbles in memory, the kind one might jot beneath their predictable faces: “dork,” “reject,” “sleazy.” She quit cheerleading after four months.

Came a time of all-night partying—beer parties, pot, ’shrooms— . . . at one she burned the inside of her wrist with the lighted end of a cigarette. A dare. I see you, see? You first. Something of that ilk.

* * *

In tenth grade the best friend of her boyfriend of two weeks committed suicide. The circumstances were bizarre: he’d been fighting with his dad and stormed out of the house. Later, when he returned, he found the old man dead. But what the neighbors discovered days after were two bodies, the boy’s stiff between the toilet and the tub. And no note. In the winter of 1991 she fell for a skater punk who’d have sex only in his closet. It was hard not to get confused by her tales. She had a habit of coming flat-out with the most telling details, leaving the rest for rough imagining. When pressed further, her memory would dry up. She did tell me that if she were to have any regrets, it would have to be him, Eric, if only because things ended on a sour note. The details deserted her. She knew I was writing all this down. It had to be an experiment. Up until then she’d had trouble keeping the novelty intact, and when the “rose-colored glasses” came off, the flaws stood out. A sentence she’d read past. Love, like all sentences, has its period: hence our little experiment. But she began to worry about getting a reputation. It would start with the other girls— she was sensitive to the way they checked each other out, following her own habits, the rapid surveys and the unpitying mental calculations that took place all around them—and filter through to the male population, where the term “slut” had its own categorical charge. Mike was next. He’d trained her to experiment with him for three years. After they split up, he’d been taken in hand by a woman fifteen years his senior (“sort of like you,” said Brigid), though he called her from time to time, claiming he still loved her . . . Brigid and only Brigid.

“Earthquake weather.” “Yes?” I knew what she meant, had read her mind: I thought I could do that then.

The apartment beneath us suddenly filled with rowdy partiers—music and thuds making the floor shake.

“Well,” she asked, “what do you think?” “What do I think? It’s your building. I think you should go down and tell them to shut up,” I said. Instead, we went to see a Japanese movie about a guy whose face gets burned off, and how he goes crazy when he’s given a new one. “I hate science fiction that turns the future into an allegory of the present,” I said walking back from the Castro. Maybe that’s not fair—maybe all sci-fi’s like that. What it meant in the movie, at any rate, was everybody explaining what every stupid thing meant. When the man-with-the-new-face picked up a knife, you knew who he was going to stab and when. Introduce a brother and sister and . . . after they’d fucked near the end, she drowned herself in the ocean while he watched and was zapped into a Francis Bacon meat-monstrosity. “Why do you drag me to these things and then try to pull me out halfway through?” Brigid complained when I met her outside. She had a cigarette going. I took it out of her mouth, took a drag, and handed it back.

When I was her age and living in New York after college, I was called to my father’s side while he struggled to survive leukemia complicated by Von Willebrand disease. A bout of early chemo pleurisy had landed him in the hospital, originally. I say struggled, and he did, but the incursions he suffered moved slower than that. When they’d tortured him all they could at B— Memorial, he was transferred to Rochester, where our family gathered in the waiting area with other sad cases, and where I read . . . The Bonfire of the Vanities

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