Given World (22 page)

I think of a Rickie Lee Jones song, part of a tape I once played over and over in my car. It is about a gas station, and about love, about running out of possibilities. I haven’t heard it in forever. Haven’t listened to Rickie Lee Jones since Lu went off the grid.

We ring the bell, and a vision appears. He is wearing cutoff jeans, a pale-yellow sweater vest that sets off beautifully the ornate “Mamma Mia” tattoo covering his left shoulder, fluffy white bunny slippers, and at least a dozen silver rings on each hand. His thick, platinum-blond hair is swept up into a configuration that falls somewhere between pompadour and bouffant. Combined with his shockingly high cheekbones and eyelashes long enough to brush them when he blinks, he looks like the cover girl on some outrageous Norwegian girlie magazine.

A voice from the top of the stairs—the voice from the phone—calls down, “You forgot your boa, baby. I thought you were trying to make an impression.”

The door answerer lifts his chin and rolls his eyes. He holds his hand out to each of us in turn, palm down and wrist bent, as if expecting a curtsy and a kiss.

“Max,” he says. “At your service.”

Eddie simply shakes Max’s hand, but I take hold of it with both of mine, because this is apparently one more thing I have forgotten how to do. Max cocks his head and eyes me appraisingly, seeming to decide only now to let us in. He stands back from the door and motions us up the stairs.

“You may ignore the skinny brunette if you’d like. She hasn’t had her pill yet this morning.”

The “skinny brunette” is indeed both of those things, but with his fine, longish hair and horn-rimmed glasses, he looks, in comparison and just in general, totally unastonishing. Eddie, I’m sure, doesn’t differentiate one way or the other. Boys. The more the merrier.

Christopher says, “He made that up, about the pill. In case you were wondering.”

“Oh no,” I say. “I wasn’t wondering.”

Eddie says, “Yes she was. I was too. I was wondering if you’d share.”

Everyone laughs, except Max, who is only halfway up the stairs. “Don’t start the party without me, wenches.” He sounds serious.

In the living room are a leather sofa, a huge TV, two brocaded armchairs by the window, a coffee table made of a four-inch-thick slab of what looks to be polished concrete, and the biggest cat I have ever seen. Big and fat. Black and white and enormous.

I say, “That must weigh a ton.”

“That is Annabelle,” Max says. “Don’t hurt her feelings. She has a thyroid problem.”

“No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean her. I meant the table.”

I bend down and knock on it. It’s embedded with hundreds of tiny multicolored pebbles, and is indeed made of cement somehow buffed to glossy smoothness.

“Wow. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“No one has,” Christopher says. “It’s Max’s only family heirloom. His father made it. Allegedly.”

“Nothing alleged about it.” Max sits down on the couch, runs his fingers admiringly along one polished edge of the table, and crosses one bunny-slippered foot over his knee. “My father had a very unique sense of style.”

Christopher squeezes Max’s knee and smiles at Eddie and me. “Runs in the family,” he says. “You may have gathered.”

We talk about Montana, as the boys seem fascinated by what little they’ve heard of it, and have it in their heads that all the sidewalks are still wooden there, and people get from place to place on horseback. I feel strangely at ease, drugged almost, but still able to hold up my side of a conversation. I write it off to jet lag and go with it.

“Some do,” I tell them, “But in the cities, they’ve graduated to buggies. They still need horses to pull them though.”

Max slits his eyes at me and cocks his head. “They have
cities
?”

“Oh, yeah. Huge. Four-story buildings and everything.”

Max presses a manicured index finger to the hollow below one sharp cheekbone. “You are completely full of shit, aren’t you?”

“Sort of,” I say. “Sometimes.”

Eddie leans in. “Always.”

“Not always.”

Max says, “I vote for always.”

No one is the least bit interested in Vietnam, or why I went there, and that is fine with me.

The boys converse for a while about new bars in the Castro and the Fillmore district, and when that topic is played out, Max offers a proclamation.

“I like this one,” he says, motioning toward me but speaking to the cat, who by now is draped upside down over his lap, belly flapping out to either side, love-child composite of cat and manta ray. She peers up at Max and does not protest. Christopher’s smile is sweet and guileless, and I am blown away. Honored. Dizzy as we head for the car.

“Welcome home,” Eddie says.

“Home,” I repeat after him, as if it is some kind of incantation that will eventually take.

•  •  •

The house is a typical, semi-run-down Victorian, ivory white with barely visible traces of rose and turquoise trim. Our flat is on the second level, above the downstairs apartment and the garage. The hardwood floors still shine in places, and the ceilings are twelve feet high. In the living room, along with the leather sofa and the huge TV, is a fireplace with two mantels, one below a large mirror and one above it. My bedroom is already fitted out with lace curtains over an entire wall of windows, and through them I can just see a few blocks up the street to the iron picket fence bordering SF General.

The eighties, blessedly, took with them the carnage of boys dying by the thousands on Ward 5B. Some nights, though, I can’t help picturing the white coroner’s vans making their way from the hospital to the morgue downtown, past this very block. I imagine processions, van after van, each containing one body only, though back then they could probably have—and maybe sometimes needed to—fit three to a gurney. I see tiny gold hoop earrings, meticulously placed and unostentatious in right ears. Hair perfect, streaked, coiffed, still. Things my unruly hair has never been. Of course Christopher and Max are okay, and Eddie, by some miracle. This generation of boys has surely learned how to play it safe, not kill themselves and each other in the name of love, or its likeness.

They have taken me back at the bar, again, so there is that familiarity; something of a comfort. I go in four days a week, on the bus, which lets me off on Bayshore at the bottom of Cortland. From there I can walk, or wait for a different bus, but it hardly ever seems to come. The hill is steep and long, and after I climb it, most days, I am light-headed but clear. A fancy coffee shop has just opened where Ellsworth comes down off the heights, and if I am not running late, I’ll stop in for a cup and a bagel or a scone, pretend I am one of those self-possessed San Franciscans not paralyzed by a simple question like “Room for cream?” The first time someone asked me that, I had no idea what she was talking about.

The bar feels both cozy and cavernous before I open, before I turn up all the lights and open the front door, and I like it quite a lot that way. Many days I catch myself wishing there was some way to actually avoid opening, because if I could do that, people wouldn’t come in and want things, even though wanting things is fine, but they also want to talk, and that part really isn’t. The problem is, I have forgotten how to chat up the clientele. My mouth simply doesn’t work that way anymore.

Before I left, I was good at it. Now it is a shock every time my mouth opens to let out something resembling coherent English. I have to believe that eventually I will stop hearing everything I say echo back, strange and brittle, but, for now, it is almost as if someone else is talking, using my voice without permission.

“What can I get you? Anchor Steam? Sure. That’ll be three dollars, please.”

“I’m sorry, you can’t play your guitar in here, but there’s a garden out back where you can, if no one objects.”

“Nope, no babies allowed. Twenty-one and over. Twenty-one
years
.”

One day a customer drops to the floor after she’s had a couple of beers, starts doing push-ups and accompanying herself loudly: “You had a good home, but you left. You’re right! Jody was there when you left. You’re right! Your baby was there when you left. You’re right!”

For a minute I am so stunned I don’t know what to do, until a beer glass I’m holding breaks from being held too tightly. I lean over the bar.

“Hey. Hey! Get off the floor. Stop that. Now!” A handful of customers have been standing around staring; they all step back when I raise my voice. The girl pauses, resting on her forearms, and looks up.

“What’s your problem?”

“I,” I tell her, “do not have a problem. You, on the other hand, have five seconds to sit your ass on a bar stool, quietly, or you’re out of here. Got it?” I see her think about arguing. “Now. Time’s up.”

She removes herself from the floor, drains her beer, scowls briefly at me, and slams out into the cold. I wash the blood off my hand and bandage it. I have to wear gloves, now, to wash glasses. I hate those gloves—that rubbery, confined feeling.

The rest of the day, I replay over and over the tape of me saying “Now” and “Stop” and “Ass on bar stool.” It sounds okay, like I actually was the one in control. I suppose there will be more of these moments, and even when I still feel the need to test them for legitimacy, that will be a safer bet for sure than just coming completely unhinged and throwing heavy things at breakable other things. I do not replay the glass shattering in my hand or the stone panic I felt listening to the cadence of that marching song.

At first, at home, I can only rarely bring myself to leave my room. In the evenings when I’m not working, I can hear Max, in his chattering splendor, talking about his clients at Saks and their idiosyncrasies and demands and how utterly gorgeous they look when he is done dressing them.

Christopher’s voice is too soft to make out individual words, and sometimes Max will lower his voice as well, so that I imagine they are talking about me, but hope I am not so self-absorbed as to think they don’t have other things to discuss. For one thing, they are so obviously in love, and when I do brave a trip to the living room and perch on the edge of the leather sofa, I find them sitting close together, hand in hand, watching
Absolutely Fabulous
or
I Love Lucy
or
The Avengers
and laughing, the cat spread-eagled and still—a great, furry, overstuffed bit of taxidermy, being stroked and petted by one or both of them, her tail wrapped like Cleopatra’s snake around a compliant arm.

Mornings, I generally don’t come out until both boys have left: Christopher early for his office job downtown and Max, later, for the store. Before Max gets in a taxi at ten or so, he watches game shows on the TV and primps for his customers. With those cheekbones and pale eyes and incredible eyelashes, he is really more beautiful than handsome, in a totally Greta Garbo sort of way.

I don’t mean to avoid him. I want to go out and watch
The Price Is Right
with him and listen to him gossip about the women he waits on, or talk about the silly things people keep in their pockets and their handbags—hoping Bob Barker will ask for, say, a hard-boiled egg or dog tags or a thermometer—but for a long time I just can’t do it. I try to identify the cause and think maybe it is because he is just a little too vivid for me right now, a little too alive. My head is still full of Vietnam, in black and white, and I can’t change it. Max, on the other hand, is Technicolor in a big way.

Christopher is much less present, much less daunting. On Saturdays, when he doesn’t have to work and Max does, I hear him whistling in the kitchen, always something classical and unthreatening. After a few weeks of sneaking around the house when the two of them are sleeping or out, putting my hand on the doorknob when they are here and awake, but not having the nerve to turn it, and wishing I was more like Eddie—who would have been sitting on the couch petting Annabelle and eating popcorn with them the first night—Christopher’s whistling lures me out. He is in the kitchen making tea, Annabelle on the counter watching him as he stirs it, and they both manage to not look surprised to see me. I wonder how the cat has gotten up there—surely she has not jumped—and imagine Christopher giving her a gentle boost, and the image makes me smile.

“Like some?” Christopher says, motioning to a tin of Earl Grey. Something barely identifiable but utterly perfect happens: a sudden transfer, another new and unimagined country heard from. I’m not really a tea drinker, but the whole idea seems so civilized, so much like what normal people do somewhere in the real world.

“That would be wonderful.”

I sit at the kitchen table while he makes it and brings it to me, along with the little white cow-shaped milk pitcher, sugar and a spoon. The cat watches, metronomically switching her tail across the counter. I pour the milk; watch it spiral cloudy in the cup as I stir it. Christopher leans against the counter and looks out the window. It was raining earlier, but the sky is clearing and the sun is high and bright. Me and the cat watch it streak across the floor.

“Pretty day,” Christopher says. “Do you have to work?”

“Not until tonight.” I stretch my arms up over my head. “I’m so happy. Seems like forever since we’ve seen any real blue sky.”

The words come out in the right order, in the right language, and I am sure they make sense. Christopher does not seem aware that this is a rather huge accomplishment, and I consider that an achievement in itself. When he asks if I want to go for a walk with him and Annabelle, I do not make up some lame excuse. I go put my sneakers on. Christopher attaches a red-rhinestoned leash to the cat’s collar, and we set off up the hill.

“Nice leash,” I say.

Christopher smiles. “Max. If I had picked it out, it would have been far less glamorous. Khaki or something. A bit of twine.”

“But with a bell.”

Christopher says, “Maybe a small one.”

•  •  •

I realize that any lingering sense of dislocation may be because of a change in the city itself; it is not all me. It started before I left but is now kicking in with a vengeance. People carry pagers around and talk loudly on the pay phone about very important things like stock options and public offerings. I do not understand the concepts, and something about “public offerings” makes me thing of human sacrifices. From there the tangential connections can prove quite remarkable. I am reminded by those tangents of the mescaline and acid I took in high school, the pot I smoked, and all the other substances that in combination probably rewired my synapses pretty thoroughly. But San Francisco was the perfect place for someone like me to land, and I often feel as if I am watching the city I still love grow distant in the rearview mirror.