Because They Wanted To: Stories (9 page)

“You’ll find something,” said Mark. “It’ll be all right.”

She sat a moment. “I once blew a guy for money,” she said. “In San Francisco. It was a nightmare. He said he’d give me fifty bucks, but he only gave me ten, and then he hit me.”

“Yeah?”

“And he tasted funny too. Like there was something wrong with him.”

“Elise, God, you shouldn’t let ’em come in your
mouth.”

“Well, I didn’t
want
to; it just happened.”

Mark put down the pants and thought. “Well,” he said, “this girl who sells roses in Gas Town has been paying me twenty dollars to clean them for her. Like, take off the thorns and the old petals? If you wanted to help me, I could pay you five dollars. Do you want to do that?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.” She sniffed. “Thank you, Mark.”

“It’s okay.”

She went into the kitchen and raided the refrigerator. She got olives, cheese, tiny green peppers, and cold white rice from an old Chinese take-out box and put it all on a plate and carried it to her room.

The next day she walked by the apartment building, on the opposite side of the street. There was no one sitting on the porch. She looked up at Robin’s window; it was open, as it had been when she left. She pictured Robin coming home and screaming, “Oh, my babies!” She pictured Andy and Eric at the foreign man’s table, eating dishes of ice cream. Then she turned the corner and headed for Granville Street, her rubber dime-store sandals hitting her dirty heels with each fleet step.

Margot had not seen Patrick for sixteen years, so it was a mild shock to run into him in Seattle, on the sidewalk outside an esoteric video rental store. She had stopped to halfheartedly examine the items of clothing a street vendor had arranged on a large blanket on the side-walk in front of the store, as well as on some auxiliary coat hangers hung on a parking lot fence. She was considering buying a used print blouse, and thinking how ridiculous it was for someone her age to make such a purchase, when a big man in an expensive suit spoke her name. He was thin-skinned and pale like an old onion, his forehead large and strangely fraught. The muscles of his brows and eyes were tightly bunched together, and their combined expression extended all the way out to the tip of his long nose. She wondered how this oddball knew who she was, but then he extended his hand to her with the debonair fatuity of a very handsome man, and she recognized him. Patrick had been quite a beautiful boy.

“What’re you doing here?” Her voice came out high and flirtatious, and she blushed. “I mean, in Seattle?”

“I moved here three years ago. I moved from San Diego.”

They stood there smiling, their hands still clasped. The wind blew trash about their feet; Patrick shook his ankle to release a piece of pink cellophane, turned his head to watch it run up the street, then
turned back to her and grinned. “You’ll never guess what I’m doing now.”

“I’m a social worker,” she blurted. “How about that?”

His smile surged again and she felt a pulse of warmth come through his hand into hers, then fade quickly, as if a cat had leapt onto her lap, changed its mind, and leapt off. “That doesn’t surprise me. I mean, it’s great, but—you know what?—it’s also funny, because I’m a psychopharmacologist.”

“No!”

“Isn’t that a kick?”

Margot and Patrick had met when they were undergraduates at the University of Michigan. He was studying to be an actor and she was studying English lit. Margot was generally more interested in girls than in boys, but she, like everyone, had been arrested by Patrick’s attenuated, almost feminine appearance. He had pale-brown hair, full, blurrily defined lips, and wide hazel eyes with blunt, abundant lashes. His skin was live and sensitive as the surface of a breathing young plant. He had a curious, light-footed poise, which in certain acute moments he would discard with a subtle inward movement, as if startled or disgusted or fascinated by something only he could see.

He said that almost immediately after graduating he’d landed a supporting role in a popular movie Margot had never seen, and that “people” had gotten “excited” about him. But when he moved to Los Angeles, he found Hollywood too horrible to bear. “The vanity,” he said, “the falsity. It’s so base, I can’t even tell you. You lose every-thing, you turn into this creature. I lost the ability to act. I’d go meet these people and do these readings and I’d just choke.” Like a fastidious girl, he tucked a piece of pale hair behind his ear. “Maybe if I’d hung in, I would’ve adjusted and I’d be a star by now. But at a crucial moment my mother died, and I sort of flipped out. She’d always wanted me to go to medical school. So I became a psychopharm.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “It’s boring, but it’s good because I’m really helping people. It’s really good to be helping people. You know?” There was an unctuous inflection in his voice that to Margot seemed a poor cousin to his former grace.

They stood and talked for several moments, each moment a triangular wedge that started small, widened, and reached a set limit. He asked if she was “with someone.” She was not; in fact, a woman named Roberta, whom she had been planning to move in with, had recently dumped her for someone else. Patrick, on the other hand, had just left a relationship with a phlebotomist—a “total masochist” whose life was a vector of disaster and misery—for a chiropractor named Rhoda. Now Rhoda wanted to marry him, and even though he loved her, he knew it would never work out.

“She’s a wonderful kook,” he said, “but she’s a kook. She goes on goddess retreats and Tibetan bell festivals. But
I’m
actually more open-minded than she is. Her friends are shocked that she’s involved with a psychopharm.” He laughed, Margot thought nervously. “They solemnly come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got a long path ahead of you.’ I mean, please.” He sighed. “She’s at a harmonic convergence retreat now, trying to get ‘centered’ enough to leave me. But I’m afraid I’m just going to pull her back.” He sighed deeply and then blinked as if suddenly aware that they were in public. “Am I telling you more than you need to know?”

“No,” she said. “It’s good to see you, Patrick.”

They exchanged numbers and agreed that maybe they should eat dinner together. Margot walked away in a mild disorientation that lasted some blocks. She looked into the coffee shops she passed every day as if she hadn’t realized what they were before. Listlessly dressed young people sat in them, their expressions hovering between public and private. Their coarsely groomed young faces appeared deliberately inchoate, as if in passive resistance to their own identities. A cosmetic redhead stared back at Margot, her gaze a slim, tingling thread of sensory thought. She self-consciously stroked her dyed hair. The sleeve of her loose pink sweater fell to the elbow of her slim forearm. Margot suddenly remembered the street vendor’s little print blouse and reversed her steps back into the wind.

In Ann Arbor, Margot had answered an ad for a roommate and, as a result, had moved into a house with Patrick, his sister Dolores, and a perpetually consternated math major named Donald. The house
was small, but an inept system of hallways gave it a neurotic, spindly sprawl. Margot’s room was a humble cube with three brown cork-board squares affixed to one wall in a slanting shape of dumb symmetrical ascension. One of the house phones sat on a crippled little table outside her door, and since the math major, Donald, shared the first floor with her, it was he that she most often heard, usually having the same dark, fiercely muttered conversation, apparently with the same loathed person whom he invariably hung up on. Whenever Margot remembered the house, she thought of it as dark and a little too cold; she remembered squatting over the heat vent in her room in the morning with big wool house slippers on her feet, working up to getting dressed.

But the kitchen was large and bright, and it was there that the household gathered for its disorganized breakfasts and late-night snacks. At first it was Dolores whom Margot most noticed. Dolores was twenty-eight, which Margot thought was fascinatingly old and ruined. She was tall, with narrow hips and shoulders but a lot of fat on her rear. She had a pained, sardonic countenance, and her skin was prematurely lined. She had just been released from a mental hospital, where she had been sent after she had pulled most of the hair from her head. She took lithium and wore a head scarf to hide her scalp. She had an air of ridiculous tragedy that reeked of affectation, but Margot admired it anyway. At breakfast she ate an orange, coffee, and toast soaked with expensive European butter, which she would sprinkle with salt. As she leisurely ate, she would glue false fingernails to her fingers and then paint them with red polish. Her gestures were very elaborate and fine.

Donald, the math major, watched her with bemusement and, Margot thought, perverse, furtive attraction enlivened by a little hot streak of disgust. Patrick did not watch her, but Margot felt his attention sometimes touch his sister, quickly, like a traveling drop of light, as if he were checking to be sure she was still there. He sat at the table in a torpid slouch, but his hazel eyes were live and expectant. He held his limbs, especially his hands, in peculiar twists that made Margot imagine his inner muscles in secret shapes of furious discord, but his posture was light, lax, and happy. She knew that his
mother sometimes sent him bottles of Valium or Xanax, because she had once been present when one of his would-be girlfriends intercepted a care package and dumped the contents in the toilet. But she didn’t think his languor was drug induced. It seemed more the product of an unusual distribution of self, as if, by some crafty manipulation of internal circuitry, he’d concentrated himself in certain key psychic posts and abandoned the vast regions he didn’t want to be in. These empty spaces had an almost electrical allure, more highly charged than his distinct presence in the areas he occupied. Men didn’t like him very much, but whenever the phone rang, it was almost always a girl for Patrick.

Margot’s apartment was cold when she arrived. She turned on the heat and then went through all the rooms, turning on the lights. She put her pink flannel robe over her clothes and made herself a dinner of sliced carrots, a ham sandwich, and a Styrofoam cup of take-out vegetable soup. She put the sandwich and the carrots on a turquoise plate and the soup in a burgundy bowl. She put out a folded napkin and a spoon and vitamin capsules. She poured herself half a glass of red wine. She sat down, and suppressed pain oscillated through her in a slow, hard wave. When she had told Patrick that Roberta had left her, she had seen a faint look of satisfaction move in his eyes—satisfaction not at her loss but at seeing the Margot who was familiar to him, stalwart in a state of loss. His look almost made her bitter. But at the same time, she felt that something in her voice had invited it.

She poured lots of salt on her ham sandwich and allowed her little dinner to comfort her. It was one of the things she and Roberta were good at: small, comforting dinners. Roberta had been gone for six months, and it was still difficult for Margot to sit down to eat by herself. Still, she was determined to do it, and her determination felt good to her. It made her feel like a tenacious animal, burrowing a home in hard, dry soil. And that, of course, had been what Patrick had heard in her voice.

She remembered very well the moment when she and Patrick had become friends. She had been sitting in her room on a rainy afternoon,
and he had knocked on the door to ask if she wanted to go to the Brown Jug to have coffee with him. She remembered thinking that coffee with Patrick might be an event and then being irritated at herself for the thought.

They had to walk some blocks to get to the Brown Jug. The rain had just stopped, and the air was cold, silken, and insinuating. Patrick hadn’t worn a scarf, and to protect his throat he held his coat close around his neck with one hand in a gesture of artificial privation that seemed a calculated counterpoint to the abundance of his lips and eyes. He drew her into conversation with a gentle solicitousness that was both seductive and condescending. The condescension made her unsettled and gruff, but then a little tendril of seduction would creep out and wrap itself about her wrist, and to her embarrassment, she would find herself talking brightly, her words done up in fancy shapes to impress him. He listened to her with a tense receptivity that made her embarrassment strangely thrilling. The conversation was static and vibrant at once, like a suspension bridge humming with hidden electrical energy.

The rain had surfeited the grass, and each bright blade was alert and full of tender resolve. She commented on the beauty of it. Patrick said that when he was in the third grade, he would walk to school in the winter and imagine that the grass was crying out to him for help from under the snow. Sometimes he would reach down and dig out a blade or two and put them in his warm pocket with an odd, almost erotic burst of feeling at the random, humanitarian rescue. He would imagine what the rescued grass must feel like, huddling in his pocket, gratified, yet bewildered and fearful in the stifling lint-ridden warmth. Once he actually brought one home and laid it to convalesce in a tiny matchbox stuffed with cotton.

“You must’ve been very disappointed when it died,” said Margot.

“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t really think it was alive.”

His tone was light and delighted; it seemed as if it could turn in an infinite number of directions at once, all of them easy. Margot was quite taken with him; he was not what she had expected.

When they got to the diner, they ordered coffee and sweet, gelatinous pies. The tone of their conversation changed. Seated and eating, Margot no longer felt the solicitousness or the light changeability she
had sensed during the walk. Patrick just looked at her and talked about nothing. Her mind wandered, taking in the shabby, genial diner with pleasure. On the walls there were cheap paintings of landscapes and animals that nevertheless looked as if the artists had cared about them. There were plastic flowers on each table. The sugar containers had big lumps of stale sugar in them. Their waitress was a small woman in her thirties with beautiful, fierce eyes. One of her legs was withered, but her carriage was determined and erect. Patrick said, “It’s just that I feel so invisible. I just feel so invisible.”