Generation X (11 page)

But then Dag's already
had
his big mid-twenties crisis, and thank God these things only happen once. So I guess he's just been alone for too many days—not having conversation with people makes you go nuts. It really does. Especially in Nevada.

"Hi, funsters! Treats for all," Dag yells to us, reeling through the door, carrying a paper loot sack across Claire's threshold, pausing briefly to snoop Claire's mail on the hall table, and allowing
a
fraction of a second for Claire and me to exchange a meaningful, raised-eyebrow

glance as we sit on her couches playing Scrabble, and time enough also for her to whisper to me,
" D o
something."

"Hi, Cupcake," Claire then says, click-clicking across the wood floor on platform cork wedgies and hamming it up in a flare-legged

lavender toreador jumpsuit. "1 dressed as a Reno housewife in your honor. 1 even attempted a beehive do, but I ran out of hairspray. So it kind of turned into a
d o n ' t .
W a n t a d r i n k ? "

" A v o d k a a n d o r a n g e w o u l d b e n i c e . H i , A n d y . " "Hi, Dag," I say, g e t t i n g u p a n d w a l k i n g p a s t h i m , o u t t h e f r o n t d o o r . " G o t t a p e e .

Claire's loo is making funny sounds. See y o u i n a second. Long drive today?" "Twelve hours." "Love ya."

Back across the courtyard in my clean but disorganized little bun-galow, I dig through my bottom bathroom drawer and locate a prescription bottle left over from my fun-with-downers phase of a year or two ago.

From the bottle I extract five orange 0.50 mg. Xanax brand tranquilizer tablets, wait for a pee-ish length of time, then return to Claire's, where J grind them up with her spice pestle, slipping the resultant powder into Dag's vodka and ora nge. "Well, Dag. You look like a rat's nest at the
POOROCHONDRIA

Hypochondria derived from not

moment, but
h e y ,
here's to you, anyway." We toast (me with a soda), having medical insurance.

and after watching him down his drink, I realize in an electric guilt jolt in the back of my neck, that I've misdosed him—r a t h e r t h a n h a v ing
PERSONAL TABU: A

him simply relax a bit (as was intended), I now gave him about fifteen small rule for living, bordering on

a superstition, that allows one

minutes before he turns into a piece of furniture. Best never to mention to cope with everyday life in the

this to Claire.

absence of cultural or religious

dictums.

"Dagmar, my gift please," Claire says, her voice contrived and synthetically perky, overcomp ensating for her concern about Dag's

distress-sale condition.

"In good time, you lucky lucky children," Dag says, tottering on his seat, "in good time. I want to relax a second." We sip and take in Claire's pad. "Claire, your place is spotless and charming as usual."

"Gee, thanks Dag." Claire assumes Dag is being supercilious, but actually, Dag and I have always admired Claire's taste—her bungalow

is quantum leaps in taste ahead of both of ours, furnished with heaps of familial loot snagged in between her mother's and father's plentiful Brentwood divorces.

Claire will go to incredible lengths to get the desired effects. ("My apartment must
be perfect.")
She pulled up the carpet, for instance, and revealed hardwood flooring, which she hand-refinished, stained, and then sprinkled with Persian and Mexican throw rugs. Antique plate silver jugs and vases (Orange Country Flea Market) rest in front of walls covered with fabric. Outdoorsy Adirondack chairs made of cascara willow bear cushions of Provençal material printed by wood block.

SEMI-DISPOSABLE

Claire's is a lovely space, but it has one truly
disturbing
artifact in
SWEDISH FURNITURE

it—racks of antlers, dozens of them, lying tangled in a brittle calciferous cluster in the room adjoining the kitchen, the room that technically really
ought
to have been the dining room instead of an ossuary that scares the daylights out of repairpersons come to fix the appliances.

ARCHITECTURAL

The antler-collecting obsession started months ago, when Claire

INDIGESTION:
The almost

obsessive need to live in a 'cool'

"liberated" a rack of elk antlers from a nearby garage sale. A few days architectural environment.

later she informed Dag and me that she had performed a small ceremony Frequently related objects of

to allow the soul of the tortured, hunted animal to go to heaven. She fetish include framed black-and-white art photography [Diane

wouldn't tell us what the ceremony was.

Arbus a favorite); simplistic pine

Soon, the liberation process became a small obsession. Claire now

furniture; matte black high-tech

rescues antlers by placing ads in the
Desert Sun
saying, "Local artist items such as TVs, stereos, and

telephones; low-wattage ambient

requires antlers for project. Please call 323. . . .' Nine times out often lighting; a lamp, chair, or ta ble

the respondent is a woman named Verna, hair in curlers, chewing nic -that alludes to the 1950s; cut flowers with complex names.

otine gum who says to Claire, "You don't look the the scrimshaw type to me, honey, but the bastard's gone, so just take the damn things.

JAPANESE

Never could stand them, anyway."

MINIMALISM:
The most

frequently offered interior

design aesthetic used by

rootless career-hopping young

people.

"Well, Dag," I ask, reaching for his paper bags, "What did you get me?"

"Hands off the merchandise, please!" Dag snaps, adding quickly,

"Patience. Please." He then reaches into the bag and then hands me something quickly before I can see what it is.
"Un cadeau pour toi."

It's a coiled-up antique bead belt with GRAND CANYON written on

it in bead-ese.

"Dag! This is perfect! Total 1940s."

"Thought you'd like it. And now for
mademoiselle
—" Dag pivots and hands Claire something: a de-labeled Miracle Whip mayonnaise jar filled with something green. "Possibly the most charmed object in my collection."

"Mille tendresses,
Dag," Claire says, looking into what looks like olive-colored instant coffee crystals, "But what is it? Green sand?" She s h o w s t h e j a r t o m e , t h e n s h a k e s i t a b i t . " I
am
perplexed. Is it jade?"

"Not jade at all."

A sick shiver marimbas down my spine. "Dag, you didn't get it in New Mexico, did you?"

" G o o d g u e s s , A n d y . T h e n y o u k n o w w h a t i t i s ? "

" I h a v e a h u n c h . "

"You kittenish thing, you."

"Will you two stop being so
male,
and just tell me what this stuff i s ? " d e m a n d s Claire. "My cheeks are hurting from smiling."

I a s k C l a i r e i f I c a n s e e h e r p r e s e n t f o r a s e c o n d , a n d s h e h a n d s me the jar, but Dag tries to grab it from me. I guess his cocktail is starting to kick in. "It's not really radioactive, is it Dag?" I ask.

"Ra dioactive!" Claire shrieks. This scares Dag. He drops the jar and it shatters. Within moments, countless green glass beads explode like a cluster of angry hornets, shooting everywhere, rattling down the floor, rolling into cracks, into the couch fabric, into the ficus soil—

everywhere.

"Dag, what is this shit? Clean it up! Get it out of my house!"

"It's Trinitite," mumbles Dag, more crestfallen than upset, "It's from Alamogordo, where they had the first N-test. The heat was so intense it melted the sand into a new substance altogether. I bought a bottle at a ladies auxiliary clothing store."

"Oh my god. It's plutonium! You brought plutonium into my house.

You are
such
an asshole. This place is a waste dump now." She gathers breath. "I can't live here anymore ! I have to move! My perfect little house—I live in a toxic waste dump —" Claire starts dancing the chicken in her wedgies, her pale face red with hysteria, yet making no guilt inroads on a rapidly fading Dag.

Stupidly I try to be the voice of reason: "Claire, come on. The explosion was almost fifty years ago. The stuff is harmless now—"

"Then you can harmless it all right into the trash for me,
Mr. Know Everything. You don't actually believe all of that
harmless
talk, do you?

You are
such
a victim, you pea-brained dimwit—no ones believes the government. This stuffs
death
for the next four and a half billion years."

Dag mumbles a phrase from the couch, where he's almost asleep.

"You're overreacting, Claire. The beads are half-lived out. They're clean."

"Don't even
speak
to me, you hell-bound P.R. Frankenstein mon-ster, until you've decontaminated this entire house. Until then, I'll be s t a y i n g a t A n d y ' s . G o o d
n i g h t . "

She roars out the door like a runaway train car, leaving Dag near

comatose on the couch, condemned to a sleep of febrile pale green

nightmares. Claire may or may not have nightmares, but should she ever come back to this bungalow, she'll never be able to sleep there quite perfectly ever again.

Tobias arrives to visit Claire tomorrow. And Christmas with the family i n P o r t l a n d s o o n . W h y i s i t s o i m p o s s i b l e t o d e -complicate my life?

DON'T

EAT

YOURSELF

An action-packed day. Dag is still asleep on Claire's sofa, unaware of how deeply he has plunged on her shit list. Claire, meanwhile, is in my bathroom, dolling herself up and philosophizing out loud through a steamy Givenchy scented murk and amid a counterload of cosmetics and accessories I was made to fetch from her bungalow that resembles the emptied-out contents of a child's Halloween sack: 'Everybody has a

'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you.

Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn

or the woman wearing

White Shoulders who

stamps your book at the

library—a stranger who,

if you were to come home

and find a message from

them on your answering

machine saying
'Drop

everything. I love you.

Come away with me now

to Florida,'
you'd follow

them. 'Yours is the blond checkout clerk at Jensen's, isn't it? You've told me about as much. Dag's is probably Elvissa" (Elvissa is Claire's good friend.) "—and
mine,
unfortunately," she comes out of the bath-room head cocked to one side inserting an earring, "is Tobias. Life is
so
unfair, Andy. It really is." UTobias is Claire's unfortunate obsession from New York, and he's driving in from LAX airport this morning. He's our age, and Biff-and-Muffy private schoolish like Claire's brother Allan, and from some eastern white bread ghetto: New Rochelle? Shaker

Heights? Darien? Westmount? Lake Forest? Does it matter? He has one of those bankish money jobs of the sort that when, at parties, he tells you what he does, you start to forget as soon as he tells you. He affects a tedious corp orate killspeak. He sees nothing silly or offensive in frequenting franchised theme-restaurants with artificial, possessive-case names like McTuckey's or O'Dooligan's. He knows all variations and

nuances of tassel loafers. ("I could
never
wear
your
shoes, Andy. They've got
moccasin
stitching. Far too casual.")

Not surprisingly, he's a control freak and considers himself in-formed. He likes to make jokes about paving Alaska and nuking Iran.

To borrow a phrase from a popular song, he's loyal to the Bank of

A merica. He's thrown something away and he's
m e a n .