Paper
Moon | Alan Rifkin
I.
It was exactly the right hour to pass groups of twenty-somethings
leaving the bars, which was one of the comforts of 1985 in Los Angeles.
The women dressed so much smarter than the men it made them look lonely,
like girls too tall in sixth grade. Nancy was past thirty but wore
an army jacket with a white work shirt untucked like a boy’s and cigarette
pants she was too wide for, half youth cadet, half spinster, and I
said I’d drive her home from Ports because she was the city’s “designated
non-driver,” one of my better tries at being witty back then but it
never stuck. When she first arrived from D.C. she actually bought
a car, but she resold it to the dealer the next week, and despite
the impossibility of getting around L.A. except by cab, she never
wavered. We were in the dirt lot air outside the Pan Pacific Theatre’s
ruins looking for wherever my car last had been, leaving the ghostly
señora who owned Port’s framed in the doorway of the bar.
Nancy’s voice kept shivering though she wasn’t cold. “Ohh, is that what sagebrush smells like?” I grunted — showing that names of plants were charmingly out
of my male reach — always wishing I could be a lug instead of a writer.
And when I didn’t say more, she tried to take responsibility for missing
my meaning, with a slow, catching-on laugh. I always had the benefit
of the doubt with Nancy. A legend about Nancy was that at age six, on a swing set in South
Carolina, she promised herself never to be married or have kids, chanting
NO KIDS every time the swing carried her skyward. But she could not
recall a triggering event. It didn’t help to ask, because what Nancy
didn’t know about herself, she didn’t know. And despite how unimportant
she considered herself to be, she could shut down a topic with as
little apology as a White House spokeswoman. At the magazine where Nancy encouraged other people’s creativity
all day, the first story I wrote was about being a boy so naive in
the San Fernando Valley that I asked for a Buick Riviera from a Christmas
charity. The piece went through a lot of less-honest drafts, and Nancy
said the mortifying truth was what finally pierced her. That plus
a poor-fitting pair of slacks I’d bought on Hollywood Boulevard the
same day, from a touristy clothier who had shoe-polish ads in the
window. I strode into his store against every pulsing neon omen, determined
to believe he could make me look more substantial than L.A. Nancy
asked if I wore the slacks to make girls swoon — like that, we were
on my turf. And when I realized she might have a crush, not just on my writing,
my wires were as crisscrossed as hers. She was material for what I
drank to as the legend of my twenties, about being a young writer
in what people would someday agree was the most fascinating city in
the world. My dad’s generation had adulthood forced upon them, the Great
Depression, a world war, then hedonism, and there was something hermetic
about his car and the songbook of his life, his outstanding talent
for driving more slowly than all the other lanes — I used to see all
of Ronald Reagan’s deinstitutionalized phantoms stirring in their
blankets when my dad drove us past them, their eyes looking for mine,
but I wanted only to be glib in 1985. Inside her upper duplex, Nancy switched on a light and opened all
the windows and slid into a reclining chair that was beanbag low,
making her look like the drunk one of us, and started right in channeling
questions from the ceiling. “How do writers do it?” she asked at one
point. “Do they all go crazy about breaking paragraphs in the perfect
spot?” She said that at work, she’d sometimes hear Stephen Bates pounding
on the walls of a typing room to get out a story — which I said made
perfect sense: Didn’t he throw a Hollywood Hills party every time
he finished anything? I’d been invited to one, filled with smart,
sexy Stephen-groupies — magazine writers had swag in 1985 — and his
quotable aside that night was, “You know how many wrong directions
a first sentence can go? Infinity — I counted.” “Wait,”
Nancy pouted, stuck one beat behind. “How does someone get to be a
‘smart, sexy’ woman?” I volunteered Katherine Hepburn’s advice: “Use good posture and think
dirty thoughts.” But that made Nancy sadder — not her style. She went on to other riddles, playing a tragic game of footsie. Why
did her best friend take a stranger into the clichéd bathroom stall
to fuck? Why did Nancy’s first boyfriend laugh with her about all
the lemmings from the art department lured to the gorgeous, troubled
Eurasian intern, until the day he fell in bed with her himself? The lure of the wrong! in other words.
The cruelty of nature. Was everyone like that? Nancy was asking me this in
a writerly, student-of-life way — not that it ruled out feeling wounded
when the boyfriend betrayed her. And enough men at parties had left
with Nancy’s sister’s phone number that Nancy essentially stopped
talking to men at parties. It was late enough or I was drunk enough to marvel at things without
talking, just to slump into Nancy’s no-fault world, when she said,
“Have you ever made love to a fat girl?” To say I was honoring the sacredness of the proposition would be
giving me too much credit. In 1985, I didn’t know men could say no.
She leaned over me and we kissed, and the hardness of her kiss felt
fresh, like it might hurt in a good way later. Almost immediately
we were in the hallway, shuffling sidewise between towers of books,
until she was turning on a bright papier-mâché lantern
that was her night lamp. “Yes?” she asked. “We really are?” It felt less presumptuous to unbutton her shirt than my own, I didn’t
know why. She was thick and round, which I already knew, but firmer
than I was worried she’d be. Velvety, figureless. When I got to me,
she admired each phase of stripping away: “You’re so long!” That got me going, well enough for her to climb on top with me inside
her. But then the novelty cruelly faded. With each jolt, a ghost of
faith was shaken loose, and we were both bouncing, half passed out,
with me silently praying to start over. There are no atheists in a
bedroom that has lost the orchestra. I never came. “I shouldn’t have forced things,” she said. “You were being kind.” “No,” I said. Which was true: The only ego I’d been concerned about
was mine. But I watched her take hope from the perfectly rational idea that
there’d be plenty more chances in bed. “Agh!”
she said, and bounced to her feet, zipping on the thin black jeans.
“You’ve at least got to take some of these books off my hands.” Into a canvas bag, she slid all the right things — a couple of advance-reader
galleys of novels, a paperback manual on Zen and a clip of manuscript
pages by a hotshot writer named Cody Castille,
who she said should meet me (although of course it was the other way
around). But when she moved toward some art books, I almost insulted
her. “Seriously,” I said. “I’m tone-deaf to paintings.” Painting was
Nancy’s hobby. “I mean, some photography speaks to me, the way photos
can make all of us look like lost souls. But with paintings?” I went
further. “Do men even go to museums by choice? Why go to stare at
paintings in a gallery when you can stare as long as you want to in
a book?” “Because they’re the right size?” Her answer came out so free of malice, so like a guess, that we both
burst out laughing like idiots, and that was that. Maybe none of my
missteps affected how likable I was. If she was a genius about editing,
why not people? And I drove home with the book bag next to me, thinking how much
better it was to have a care package from Nancy than from any of the
people who raised me. It was soul food for my hungry and newly imagined
self. Not that she had any special access to my dreams. For people
who’d failed in bed, we weren’t that comfortable being friends, either.
Though for that reason alone, our connection felt more important than
just a friendship. And, after all, I hadn’t technically shut the door
on a relationship. II. Only twenty-five, he’d dazzled everyone — New York editors,
famous rappers, music journalism prize committees — but he also made
it a point to offend them. Riding over, Nancy said Cody only did what
most of his editors fantasized about doing — insisting his stories
run verbatim or not at all, and being fine if they refused, to the
point of laughing through his nose. We sat on folding chairs at sundown in his living room, waiting for
gumbo, me trying to feel I belonged and constantly tugging my pant
legs to cover my socks, not convinced the dorkiness could pierce anyone
but Nancy. Cody’s painter girlfriend, Dehlia,
had the whole couch, and she sat tall in the center, a bright package
no one had claimed. She had haunted eyes and a wavering voice that
would have created tension even if she weren’t an alarming beauty
in a clingy Asian dress. But her zany smile said being introduced
with a handshake was about the funniest custom ever invented, and
when she laughed it seemed possible she thought the dress was only
campy. “How did you two meet?” I asked Dehlia,
because she looked like she was fielding questions. A lot of playful throat-clearing from Cody, between trips to the
kitchen stove. “He
overstayed his welcome,” Dehlia
said, as if teaching us the words. Her laugh was as high as the front
end of a sneeze. “To be more accurate, I did what she was wishing I’d do. I was interviewing
her, what, six months before her Robert Johnson exhibit, before anyone
knew her, and I thought, She’s alone? Not
anymore!” “Exactly, Cody. That’s exactly how you thought.” “You
mean it was my job to leave? Why would I leave?” “Yes, Cody. Why would you leave?” Her smile widened to an incredulous Sheeesh that was so dazzling it scared me into
looking down. “This was in Albuquerque,” Nancy said, for my benefit. I asked how Dehlia discovered the
famous blues man. “From me!” Cody yelled from the kitchen. “I stole her from her rich
girl life!” “You can say that again!” Dehlia zinged. I got up from my chair — so nervous among real urban artists that
the border between sitting and standing had actually been erased —
and roamed with my beer to the kitchen to offer help. But Cody was
already heading back. So I paused, studying their belongings, catching
my breath. Taking voyeuristic notes. Their kitchen had posters of
whiskery authors; my childhood was wallpapered with skeleton-key themes.
Through a window, the first evening lights stretched down Virgil Avenue
south of Sunset, brocading a district of auto shops and warehouses,
all so pretty and indifferent, still linked up by pastel flags from
the ’84 Olympics. Of course, there were real families out there, too, Mexicans whose
kids went to school with last year’s backpacks, a
destiny I felt worrisomely connected to, without knowing why. I lacked
the self-belief of either a rich son or a poor one. But a few beers
could open up a third narrative, in which all the oddness on your
family tree would be vindicated, celebrated, and you’d be allowed
to skip all the grades you’d never passed in the school of life. I’d chugged the rest of one beer and opened another and was back
to the living room springing along as Cody was putting on a record
— enacting a very ceremonial silence, for someone garrulous. The needle
touched down and we heard long-distance silence, steel guitar, trembling
strings. “This is the Ry Cooder!” Nancy said. “The
one Cody’s writing his novel to.” Was I supposed to give my reaction to the manuscript? I’d barely
started reading it. Nancy went another direction. “What about Elvis
Wilson’s profile of Cooder last week? Did
you guys read it? I’m not sure I even liked it.” “You didn’t,” Cody assured her, and then he smiled. “Seriously,
Elvis may be the most self-referential earthling in Los Angeles.” “Tell them about that party,” said Dehlia. “Jesus! The party,” Cody said, passing around this bit of
contraband. “Dehlia had got there late,
from visiting her high school friend who had lymphoma, and Elvis —
I’m not making this up — said, ‘Oh, this is eerie, I was interviewing
Governor Deukmejian last week and I used that very word, lymphoma,
as a metaphor.’ For real. Just Elvis being Elvis.” “Maybe that figures,” Nancy said. “His interview kind of went
after Ry Cooder for no reason. You know
what I think, Cody? You should publish your novel’s prologue as a
profile. And never mention Cooder by name!
I told my boss that. I printed it for Alan, by the way.” Cody looked pleased to hear it, but only in a supportive way,
as if acknowledging some good news for Alan. “Who’s editing your Valley
column?” he asked me — and when I told him, he pronounced me lucky
not to have so-and-so — someone who’d recently “poured rum all over
himself” in an essay about the role of a Novelist. Then he looked
at his watch. “I’m putting the gumbo on simmer and skateboarding to
the liquor store,” he said and zipped a hoodie over his T-shirt, uncapping
the last Corona. “Smokes, anyone? You need a pack of Vantages, Alan?” “No, that’s all right, thanks. Unless — I mean, if you’re
—” “Smokes for Alan,” he chuckled. Dehlia’s voice was tentative but
urgent: “Cody, you can’t. No skating with a beer.” “Au contraire. That lawyer said it’s legal if it’s covered.” “Which it isn’t.” “Details.” “The police literally stopped him last month.” Even annoyed,
there was a thrill in Dehlia’s eyes. “An
open-container warning,” Cody said. “She makes it sound
like drunk driving.” “Ach!” Much of her humor involved saying things in a loopy,
Germanic head voice. “Would I care if you skateboarded into a bus? I just don’t want
another $60 ticket.” But he’d conceded. He set the bottle beside the stereo and
was gone down the stairs. We heard the clack of his wheels along the
sidewalk. III. At our first story meeting, we’d crossed Santa Monica Boulevard
from a glass mid-rise office building to a ferny bistro where it seemed
like every woman had a yellow bikini strap under her dress. Nancy
seemed to feel lucky to work in a bubble where fun was the point,
or she was too idealistic to notice it wasn’t. I was focused instead on the hypnotic Dehlia.
“I should have told him to get a dessert!” she shouted, rummaging
the freezer with chill air roaring out. Her fingers were coarse and
hard for someone so fragile. Like a dowry of strength she might never
know she had. They were fingers that could need you to stroke them,
drag a bowstring across the tendons of her sorrow. “I absolutely don’t need dessert,” Nancy said with a happy
sigh. “I don’t need anything at all.” Nancy asked Dehlia to update us on her
recent series of “white paintings” (was this an inside joke? polar
bears in the snow?) — and, given the floor,
Dehlia turned ridiculously self-serious,
launching into a quavering dissertation on the content and context
of white painting. Her eyes looked like she was waving a flashlight
across a haunted cornfield toward safety. Then she led us out the kitchen door downstairs to the garage,
where a dozen white canvases stood, bearing just the palest silver
scribbles. One painting, Dehlia said, was
of a snow angel; another was a neighbor child’s knee prints in cement. There were also some non-white paintings, stacked five- or
ten-deep like loaves. Spindly skeletons, fuzzy dice, African masks
and one of Robert Johnson as the “Cat in the Hat.” That kind of thing
was getting mainstream already, but Nancy said Dehlia
got there first, only to be out-hustled by artists with braggadocio. Tying her black hair into insane artist mode, Dehlia jerked a chain to an overhead bulb — she might have
been unveiling a show car, albeit half expecting the light bulb to
explode — and leaping into sight from the back wall was a seven-foot
canvas that after all of two minutes studying art you’d have recognized
was a Dehlia. It was an aggrieved pink so blatant you almost had to look
sideways to see its subject — cowled, tarot-like: The Madonna? A vagina? The grim reaper, in taffeta? Nancy was still studying the snow angels, broaching some earnest
formulation. “Oh, Dehlia, you have to announce
a white show — don’t you think?” Which made Dehlia
step backward, like a widow seeing a cat burglar. “Yes — well. I might
give myself a deadline for spring.” Spring was eight months away. Her fingers were coarse and hard for someone so fragile. Like a dowry
of strength she might never know she had. “See?” Cody was back, following our voices downstairs. “See what
I’m up against? She hasn’t done a show since New Mexico.” I had stepped close to the pink painting’s card, which actually
read Pink Painting.
“I’d seriously like to buy this one,” I announced. Nancy froze in questioning approval. “Dude!” Cody congratulated. IV.
I just said, “It’s so fucking good,”
and covered my mouth to pretend I was sorry about letting fuck slip
out. But that was as far as I had the nerve to let that kind of thing
go. I might even have respected the painting. At least the part
of me that yearned to be adventurous and artistic enough to house
a painting this disturbing. The point was, Dehlia was floating
now, businesslike, a Cinderella seamstress-shopgirl.
“We’ll figure out a day that’s good for you,” she said, both prolonging
the good news and pivoting from it. “If you want, I’ll deliver it
in my hatchback.” “Did you decide to drink and skateboard?” Nancy sighed to
Cody as we all tromped to the kitchen. “I wanted to! But I had a six pack in each arm.” “You must be getting old!”
said Dehlia, merry. “With that face?” Nancy said. “He’ll be dead before those
Lucky Strikes stain his teeth.” “He barely inhales.” Cody puffed at us. “It’s his white-boy version of selling his soul to the devil,” Dehlia said. “A cigarette.” He lifted the gumbo off the stove as we assigned ourselves
back to the folding chairs. It was the first I realized they didn’t
actually have a table. “For the record,” Cody said, “Robert Johnson wasn’t thinking
so much about souls or devils. It was the actual meaning of a crossroads.
As in, being willing to jump the next train. You should always know
exactly how many steps you’ve drifted from the courage of the crossroads.” Nancy made a finicky face. “That feels like more over-serious
criticism.” “How about there’s just a chemical truth to how someone gets
that good at guitar. Not just technically good — transcendent. You
see why a jealous husband might have shot him.” “Cody would rather die than be the other guy in that equation,”
Dehlia said, crossing her legs like an analyst. “Exactly wrong!” Cody said passing around the bowls. “I don’t
never want to die!” He had
two women heckling him, and he was enjoying it. “Why did Jerry West
want the last shot with a basketball game on the line? He was scared
of some teammate deciding his fate. Being scared is what confirms
you’re unafraid — I think I just proved that!” He dragged a chair
in for himself and straddled it. “The head spins,” Dehlia said, kneading
her temples. “Maybe I should tell them the story of your knife fight.” “No one’s stopping you.” He rubbed out his cigarette, half
smoked. “It’s a bigger deal to you than me.” “Never believe a man who says that,” said Nancy. “Hope to die!” he added, making everyone groan. “I’ll just
correct her when she attaches a bogus moral.” “What bogus moral, exactly?” Dehlia
said. “Aren’t you planning to say all wars are fought because men
are little boys?” As part of the happy audience for a war story, I worried I
was pushing my luck. The memories that came up were of my dad, a ship’s
doctor who never saw battle in World War II, and whose street-brawling
past, my mom had liked telling me, consisted of telling a rival through
her sorority-house door, “I can talk to you fine from right here.” “How do I start?” Dehlia asked.
“I was drying the dishes in Albuquerque when Cody bounded up the stairs
roaring drunk with our neighbor —” “Miguel.” “I hadn’t forgotten: Miguel. And Cody was screaming, Give
me the chopping knife! There’s these guys!” “These guys!” Nancy guffawed, like a judge who’d now heard
it all. “They hijacked the parking space I kept for guests,” Cody explained.
“And they were walking over toward the Rialto Theatre.” “Art movie bullies?” asked Nancy. “I know!” said Dehlia. “Not to mention,
they’d gone their way. But Miguel — who Cody worships, because he
never does anything but get drunk restocking beer for another party
the next day — Miguel explains that Cody had threatened to slash the
other guys’ tires, and that they promised they’d find him if he did.” Cody shrugged. “And suddenly I’m reasoning on his level! I’m saying, ‘Cody,
sweetheart, you know I would never deny you a sharp implement the
moment you asked, but —” “Were you guys laughing?” I asked. “Well, Cody was. But he also could have been about to cry.
He downed a beer and started searching through the knife drawer and
then he and Miguel went tearing down the stairs and you could hear
… voices. And possibly giggling, as they’re possibly gutting a tire.
But there are hanging branches blocking my view and it’s a very dark
night. Then Miguel says, very concerned, in a stage whisper: ‘I don’t
know — I think their car was gray!’” “Oh, no,” Nancy said. “The guys came back with a bag from the liquor store — apparently
they weren’t going to the movie at all — laughing so hard they were
practically peeing, because Cody slashed the wrong car’s tires.” Cody said amiably, “Now is the good part.” “I think it was Cody who charged one of them, and all I know
is I’ve got to call 911, because that’s what a grown-up does —” She
socked Cody on the knee. “But I even hesitated, worrying he’s the
one who’ll get arrested.” “Oh,” Cody said, “I remember Miguel’s moment now. He looked
like he’d suddenly forgotten to be drunk, and he shouted, ‘I’ll get Arnulfo!
— wait, Arnulfo’s in prison.’” Dehlia seemed unanxious
to say more. “Tell what happened to the other guys,” Cody said. “You’re so proud. Yes, this is the epilogue Cody hopes you’ll
remember. He chased them off three times from getting their car until
the police finally helped them.” “Cody didn’t get arrested?” I asked. “Even after slashing
the tire?” “Guess whose car it was,” Dehlia said,
devoid of joy. Nancy and I were speechless. “I made him buy me four new
tires.” “The moral is don’t fuck with me,” Cody said. “That’s the
moral. Not that it cost you four new tires.” A pause. “You’re not
going to correct me?” “Why? You got off more than I did, afterwards.” “OOOOh Cody,” she pretended, and
kissed him sloppily on the neck. “Don’t make fun if you’re making fun of yourself!” He banged
a drum solo on his knees. “You’re drunk again,” was all she could say. Cody curtsied and Dehlia’s face
composed itself like the face of a boxer who is taking the count.
Now Cody seemed sympathetic. He touched the back of her hair, and
at first I thought he might have been pushing, downward, with pressure.
But when I looked closer, he was stroking her neck. “I go too far.
She’s right. Why do you get into it with me? I go too far, and I’m
sorry.” He gathered a couple of empty bowls. “Notice who does the
cooking and the dishes?” V. I’d finally thought of one. I was afraid it was going to end
more like a poem than an adventure — but I tried. Once, my friend
Scott and I took a speedboat around the perimeter of Lake Powell,
2,000 miles of continuous shoreline. After an hour, somewhere shaded
by cliffs, we cut the motor and drifted with the current all the way
up into a kind of winding fractal with canyon walls that rose straight
up. As far in as there was, we reveled in the hear-your-own-heartbeat
pool of our arrival. Half hideaway, half dungeon. Then, with dusk
falling, Scott couldn’t restart the motor. We exhausted ourselves
failing to row our way out, then blowing our emergency whistles till
our faces ached and the temperature dropped like lead. Eventually,
inexplicably, we got the motor to start. That was all. I tried to stretch the story out with jokes
about cannibalism (“Who really wins?”). But what I wished I could have pondered
out loud, preferably alone with Nancy, was how the prospect of death
felt more like an absence than a presence. How the sky looked exactly
as inviting as ever but farther away, because you’d done something
unforgivable and it was no longer yours. There Scott and I had sat,
like both of our lovers had left us. With the whole smarter, happier
world on the other side of its sandstone partition. I also could have admitted to Nancy how dependent I’d been
on Scott, who was no survivalist himself, but by comparison I’d felt
as useful as a prow sculpture. Seriously: Why did we survive? It was
like we’d been chosen for life, but not in a flattering way. Of course,
there are no explanations for good fortune or bad, none that we’ll
ever understand, as God told Job. Although even there, the Bible was
obliged to add an explanation in the form of a backstory: a bet with
the devil, from which the Lord could not back down. Gambler, knife-fighter
that he was. A veritable genius on guitar. Much later in life I have come to learn that the instinct
to survive proves strangely familiar when we find ourselves finally
in need of it. Had Scott and I not restarted the boat’s motor, I would
have paddled, then anchored for a time to gather strength, then paddled
10 feet more, and so on, until we were in whistle range. But this
kind of faith had not been summoned at 19. So the way Scott and I
got out was by luck, by entitlement — I rode on the back of Scott’s
certainty that the lake was ours. He piloted us back to the docks
by moonlight, soaring over whitecaps. VI. He even got to meet Nancy — once at Farmer’s Market when he
was three years old, and then again at eighteen, at her apartment,
when he was starting to become diagnosably
ill. She turned him on to a CD by Gang of Four, and he sank back on
one of her chairs, feeling the same no-fault ease I had felt there
years before. She was in her sixties then, heavy as ever, and when
we left, he volunteered that he thought she was cute. Sometimes I think that, all along, when I was clinging so
instinctively to the self-aware moments of feeling young and alive
in the 1980s, I was trying to filch them for this future son. House-sitting in what was starting to be Koreatown. I lay
around like a Zen master with my flip-flops beneath a wood-frame bed.
Through some white steel security screens, you could see vines and
dirt, practically taste the beauty of neglect. San Francisco on a rare hot day. At Golden Gate beach, the
twenty- and thirty-somethings would emerge from hibernation with their
ice chests. The water would be cold enough to bend bones, and the
men wore plaid swimming trunks in homage to their fathers, embracing
the capitalism they would never outrun. Most of these comforts were lies, “Mad Men” ads — when so
much violence and hardship, both here and abroad, was going on, too.
But when you’re young, and death is just a topic swirled in a glass,
ignorance makes an almost moral argument for itself. Why not savor
all the selfishness that you can? To still see ignorant comfort as an open night sky instead
of just a canvas one — maybe that’s a stage of evolution that Americans
have now seen pass. Or I could be projecting my stage of life on the
culture at large. Indeed, in another part of the world, people today
might feel the way that one used to feel living here. In either case,
my son and I sometimes bond over this idea,
and my past feels almost more alive for his not having it. She was looking straight at Dehlia,
woman to woman, disqualifying herself from telling a story while already
telling it somehow. I felt a sense of deferred doom, realizing that
buying Dehlia’s painting entailed hanging it up in my home. A girl in Japan, Nancy said, had gone high-diving on the army
base without a cap. Either the girl’s onyx hair got inhaled by the
suction of the pool’s drain, or its weight jerked back on entry, snapping
her neck. Whichever version Nancy really told means I must have made
the other one up—I don’t even remember whether Nancy saw the tragedy
firsthand. What I know is that she remembered the girl, because she
envied the hair so miserably. (“It swirled
even when dry,” Nancy
said.) And that the girl was so exotic it made her exist almost entirely
to be brooded over by Nancy’s unanswerable questions. Is gorgeousness a talent? Are bodies intelligent, like brains? How
do divers know exactly where to turn in midair? Do bodies have brains
of their own? Incredibly, though, she could not recall what happened next. Had the long-haired diver even died? Was there blood coughed up? CPR? “She was exactly your type of gorgeous!” Nancy
told Dehlia, maybe trying to reconnect to
the original event. While that awful comparison settled in, she shook
her head. “No, I’d remember if she died!” She steadied her
hand against Dehlia’s arm, as though promising, unconvincingly, not to
burst out laughing. “I’m sure of it now. She only got her neck broken!” Dehlia’s eyes looked like she might
run off and cry, but that could have been suppressed laughter — soon
Nancy was laughing, helplessly. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be gorgeous
like you,” she assured Dehlia, reaching
for some meritorious pain. VIII. At
home, I wrote a humor piece inspired by the concept of time-sharing
another man’s girlfriend. It was in the voice of an ethical beggar
who’d anticipated a little pushback and had thought through the questions,
negotiating for stolen moments at the head of the couple’s bed, a
few prolonged thigh-level hugs goodbye. It was funny. It got printed. No one brought up the sale of the painting right away, and
it would have been embarrassing for Dehlia
to pressure me. But Nancy and I soon brought her with us to a show
at Club Lingerie while Cody was on deadline; afterward I drove Nancy
home first. Both hands gripping the steering wheel with the motor
running, I offered to walk her up — she declined. From how polite
I must have seemed to Dehlia, and making
a monastic show of not drinking, I think one could see what was shaping
up. “I can walk you up,” I said to Dehlia
as well, turning the ignition off as we rolled slowly to her curb.
Jasmine all around. “Don’t be silly,” she said, and we performed one of her hilarious
handshakes. “I’d have you up but Cody’s turned off the lights.” “Well, Nancy has really nice friends,” I said, a close-up of tragic
respect. With each one’s neediness locating the other’s,
like pilgrims to an ancestral monument, it was delivery day for the
canvas. I played assistant and Dehlia worked,
unroping the hatchback of her car while I credibly inspected
the knots. In my unit, I almost got annoyed at her for not helping
arrange where the painting should go; she only leaned it somewhere
stable, and acted overly absorbed in that act, maybe to drown out
thinking: Here we are. As I leaned in to kiss her, she gave a nervous, questioning
giggle but never moved. Making out was an opera of mmms
and ahhs, siblings eating sundaes, pulling
away to look — you look worried — are you okay—
then realizing it was less awkward to kiss some more than to screw
things up by talking. I did not want to go further yet than kissing.
I was panicked; I hadn’t planned this far ahead. So I whispered, “again,
soon,” and we got to walk to her car in a memorable stupor. Back upstairs, the painting’s glare filled the room like an
illness. Looking for an offhand view, trying to catch my home in the
act of being a home, I turned on the TV — truthfully my usual reason
for turning on the TV. Why hadn’t she talked me out of this? Art involved
danger, but did that mean a customer should build his one-room life
around it? She might as well have left me a newborn. But to give back the painting implied I could never be her
equal, or Cody’s. I resolved that I would reframe the painting’s horror
as adventure, be made brave by it, and this plan got me as far as
the next afternoon, when I gave up. The phone call went fine. We would swap the picture out for
one of her African ones. Nor did she judge me the way I judged myself.
In fact, she sounded giddy, far along — she’d entered Joshing Dehlia
mode, quick with that high, Germanic laugh that said you were just
kids, playacting romance. That Christmas, we went to her mom and stepdad’s ranch house in Escondido.
The country scene could have been one of the comforts of 1985, except
for the mother, whose every offstage question
to Dehlia, sotto voiced and clinical, sounded
like both Dehlia’s beauty and her prospects
might fade within the week. By then I’d learned that her biological
father was a suicide, that the best canvas she’d ever almost finished
(a Louis Armstrong) she subsequently blackened by overpainting, one
fevered starless night. The stepfather sat Lincolnian
in a recliner, while her mom busied herself in that sentence-serving
way of second wives; she was a PSA for ignoring one siren call of
death to answer another. She’d landed in picturesque safety, determined
to pull Dehlia aboard, but she could not
make her lifeboat look like life. Maybe I was a symbol of hope to those parents. Just well-raised enough
in my polo shirt and jeans. Because they’d seen Cody bully Dehlia in their driveway — not with fists, but scaring her
that he might, shoving her along once free of the car when she was
jammed between staying or going. IX. During his late innings with Dehlia, Cody had taken me on jaunts to record stores, trading
in review CDs for old jazz finds, several of which he’d toss to me,
as a sign of his largesse. After their final quarrel, he came over
and paced my bedroom floor (African painting and all) as if in perpetual
mid-conversation. Had he no male friends? To say the least, I saw
both sides. But I’d always known, like a journalist, to keep comments like that
to myself. Finding his handheld tape recorder smashed to pieces, Cody
said, he’d confronted Dehlia in calm disbelief:
“Did you do this?” — one of those small,
obvious questions that makes clear it means the world. And only my
agreeing that the outcome made no sense at all (Dehlia
denied all wrongdoing) could console him. Something in my blood had
always dreamed, maybe known, that my brooding and envying nature could
also be my strength. Although I also sensed I might never be the kind
of winner whose win comes first. I don’t condemn or excuse Cody. I think of him brandishing
that tape recorder, and I think of Dehlia’s
pride and cowering shame at having done it, and what I see is their
raw desperation for each other. That was great love. It gave Dehlia
and me its long, parental shadow, like the legend of an earlier generation. The day after dinner at Cody’s, when Nancy called to ask how I’d
enjoyed it, I broke into a sweat and avoided all that was true. Nor
did she act hurt when I started seeing Dehlia.
Except in whatever way she’d always seemed hurt, and wanting to explore
whatever the mystery was of being young and hurting. I’m not even
saying Nancy wasn’t a little uncaring, letting me blunder into an
explosive relationship with Dehlia. She
sent me tapes of songs, and letters in her chunky cursive, and still
I almost never thought of Nancy, except on the occasions when I’d
write for her. |