Our Ecstatic Days (26 page)

This crucible of loss now only makes him realize how lonely he’s always been. It only makes him realize that although he might not have had a name for desolation it was there anyway. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been how he believes no one cares for him, and what it means to be this untouched by another human heart. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been how the deflowered heart has an altogether other kind of music, a music altogether different from the percussion of blood. He’s now aware in a way he’s never been of how seared into the retina of memory are the echoes of all the questions he never got to ask someone, all the great questions of life and love and death that begin to occur to you when you’re a small boy, maybe in the night just as you’re about to fall asleep; he’s now aware in a way he’s never been of how there was never anyone there to answer these questions for him. Feeling forsaken as he hasn’t felt since he was a small boy in

womb of mine already older than I was, the question calling up to me amid the

a silver boat, he’s about to slip off into the sleep of the void when, like a voice speaking out loud to him, like someone right there at his side, there floats up from somewhere deep in his mind something that was left there years ago, planted in his ear one night while he slept and having sunk deep into him, and now opened like a time capsule that was waiting for precisely this moment of
loneliness to unlock it, there in the darkening hush of the trees

your mama loves you

and he sits straight up to it. Like someone right there at his side has whispered it. He sits straight up to it and it’s still there, the thing he just heard, it hasn’t disappeared like a dream. It hasn’t vanished into memory like one of the Lapses of the Lake. It’s still there in the air and, seeing it, his eyes light, like fireflies darting above the grass.

historical rumors and little spasms of collective memory ripping outward, and

at twilight I would look out toward Tokyo Bay from the window of the ryokan

where I stayed when I first got to Japan and I would watch the pixilated black

waves rolling in and with them they brought that memory I had forgotten, of

He gets out late winter. He’s off on the exact day by thirty-some hours, which isn’t bad calculations. He made a decision when he went in to keep track of the days, because he knew it was the intention of his jailers to   jettison his sense of time; they brought him in   
2037
    in a metal truck with no windows. The rumor   is that the penitentiary is somewhere in the plains of the Montana-Saskatchewan annex. When he’s released, a metal truck takes him back to Seattle; they open the doors of the truck and the glitter of the afternoon sea is like glass in his eyes. He sits back in the truck until someone says, Move.

standing with my uncle as a little girl on the banks of the river and seeing the

They put him on a boat going down the coast to Los Angeles. For five days and fifteen hundred miles he doesn’t see anyone except a soldier here and there, like the guards at the Northwest-Mendocino border. The boat sails into L.A. mid-dusk, past the smoky moors of the Hollywood Peninsula, navigating the outlying swamps where the Hancock Park mansions loom in ruin, water rolling in and out of the porticoes. It crosses the rest of the lagoon
into downtown, then up the main canal. Cale can see the smaller canals trickling off between the buildings that are black like the mansions behind him, and there’s a sound of bubbling music from the Chinese storefronts along the water. It comes out of the buildings, a distinct and different melody from each one; addresses on the doors are scratched and defaced, and there are no signs on the street corners anymore. Ask someone how to get to this place or that, and she’ll sing you the directions.

Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of an argument. They’ve been riding the argument all night since they got on the train originally and carelessly bound for … what? dinner? a movie … they   almost can’t remember, they have been riding   
2001
   and changing trains so many hours now. Each   knows something more is at risk in this particular argument on this particular evening than just its resolution, than one woman conceding to the other if only to placate the moment. This particular argument has always been just a little too profound to call merely a lovers’ quarrel.

woman on the other side, and it was only there in Tokyo staring out over the

To others riding the train with them, the two might appear to be mother and daughter. One of them is close to fifty, with a recently cropped mane of increasingly silvery hair and serenity woven in the air around her like a web; the other is barely a woman at all, nineteen years old. The older woman, who doesn’t like to think or speak of the age difference, has to acknowledge to herself that indeed it makes their argument more complicated. They’ve had
some version of this argument many times now in the last several months, and this time each senses that they won’t, as in the past, just move on when it’s over. Or rather: they’ll move on, but without each other. Although the older woman seems the less agitated of the two, the less heated in her words, that’s more a function of maturity; in fact she feels more is at stake for her—but, you know, try telling the younger woman that. Thinking about it in the many silences that fall between each of the argument’s flare-ups, the older woman realizes that to the younger woman, with her entire future still ahead of her, the decision has consequences that much more resounding. So maybe, Sara admits to herself, it’s not so fair to say she has more at stake. I have too little time, the girl has too much. She admits this to herself but not out loud; admitting it out loud, she would lose everything.

They’ve just gotten on the subway line heading south. It’s become a ritual of this argument, in the way all arguments have rituals, that every time a cessation of hostilities coincides with a subway station, the women get off the train and change to another. At this point they’re not paying attention to which train or which station. Somehow as long as they keep moving—as opposed to going to a café somewhere and thrashing things out for good—perhaps some rubicon can avoid being crossed. Lately the younger woman has begun to feel things are out of control, a feeling she hates. She doesn’t want to bring up the age thing with Sara. It’s always been

water that I finally realized it had been my mother on the other side of that

a psychological obstacle for the couple to surmount, particularly for the older woman who’s that much more keenly aware, the younger realizes, of everything such a divide in years represents. By now the girl accepts there’s something maternal in her attraction to the older woman, and doesn’t understand why this is any less a basis for love or a romantic bond than anything else.
Women are drawn to father figures all the time so why can’t I be drawn to a mother figure.

That this probably says something about her relationship with her real mother, the girl understands. Ironically it was this that brought her to Sara as a patient in the first place. Somehow, though, they never got into it in any of their sessions, and she’s trying to remember if she was always the one avoiding the topic or if, now that she thinks about it, it was Sara who avoided it, once the attraction became apparent. Rather quickly it seems, now that the girl thinks about it, they wound up talking more about Sara than her. “You’ll spend your whole life,” Sara said that first session, “making peace with your own true nature,” and every now and then Sara repeats it as though to imply she understands the girl’s nature better than the girl does. The girl still isn’t sure what it actually means, the business about one’s true nature, or whether it’s just something Sara says to sound superior. But at this moment it seems to her perhaps it says a lot more about Sara than about her.

True to the cliche about therapists, Sara’s past seems its own sort of mess when it’s not a blank altogether, and the girl realizes the divide in years is more remarkable for all the experience Sara never had. Whereas the girl’s first sexual encounter—with another girl—took place at eleven, Sara’s had been in her mid-twenties with an emotionally fetal man she wound up dating

river staring back at me, her shoulders sagging in defeat when she couldn’t

thirteen years, never marrying, never living together. After this relationship didn’t so much collapse as trail off into nothingness, with the man simply moving on to another job in another city, Sara’s next was with a woman, also a client like the girl, lasting eight months and then followed by a chasm of nearly ten years in which, as far as the girl can tell, Sara had no intimate human relations of any sort. So talk about spending your life making
peace with your own nature. When you get right down to it, then, who’s really the senior partner here, the girl asks herself on the train now.

So as to establish some control in the relationship, the girl always made it a rule never to make the first move in these things. She broke the rule in Sara’s case, figuring it was the only way anything would ever happen. Now she wonders if this was a mistake. In any other situation she can’t help thinking a nineteen-year-old would never come on to a woman nearly thirty years older but perhaps that’s naïve; after all, nineteen-year-old girls come on to older men all the time. Within six months of their first doctor/patient session, the two moved in together. It’s been a year since, and was a lovely time up till the whole baby obsession that, the girl can pinpoint exactly, began one night four or five months ago. They went across town for dinner at the brownstone of another lesbian couple, who disclosed that without much luck they had been investigating ways of having a child. All the talk that evening of eggs going back and forth from one person to another boggled the girl’s mind so much it gave her a headache.

On the train now the girl feels trapped by how often and fervently she’s insisted to Sara the difference in age means nothing to her. Now, subway track rattling beneath them, that argument restrains her from giving voice to the fact that, in her view,

find the courage to face her small abandoned daughter who not so long

the daughter/mother nature of their relationship renders what Sara wants a bit bizarre. But is this really what troubles her most? the girl wonders. Leaving aside everything else—leaving aside even how it would be her body, after all, serving as laboratory, incubator, assembly line in the processing of some anonymous male sperm just so Sara’s long latent, now suddenly urgent maternal drive might be satisfied—what strange new dynamic
would be loosed not only between them but within the girl herself? If, consciously or not, defined as such or not, on some level the girl plays the role of daughter in her relationship with Sara, then would a baby in some way be a grand-daughter? A sister to her own mother?

Like all those eggs being bandied about over dinner, this makes her head hurt. Perhaps she should get off the train. And naturally, she realizes, we keep talking about this baby as though it goes without saying it would be a girl: what if it’s a boy? Do we know how to raise a boy? Do
I
know how to raise a boy, if it should ever fall to me to do it alone given—muttered under the breath of her mind—how much older Sara is? Somehow the notion it could be a boy, it just makes the whole idea, monumental to begin with, that much more overwhelming, although the younger woman has to confess there’s something irresistible about someday reminding the young teenage barbarian, fumbling with girls in car seats to heavy metal on the radio, that he’s literally the son of a jerkoff; it wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying with a daughter.

You couldn’t have thought of all this ten years ago could you, the girl says to Sara in her mind, with such force of resentment that for a moment she’s sure she said it out loud. But then she realizes the illogic of her own bitterness: of course if Sara had thought of it ten years ago, in all likelihood she would be with someone else

afterward asked What’s missing from the world? and who then never dreamed,

now and they wouldn’t be together at all. “What was that last stop?” the girl finally says in one of the pauses between arguing that now have become longer than the arguing itself. A man sitting across the aisle stares at her; she pulls her coat to her but not too tight, folds her arms across her chest. Actually she really doesn’t hate men. Actually, sometimes they can be easier to deal with than women because everything’s so straightforward in terms of what
they want, and it’s true, no getting ’round it, that women are often confounding labyrinths whereas men, they’re always simple sidestreets just calling themselves boulevards. Plus it’s one of the few advantages of the gender that almost none of the men always checking her out is especially keen for her to have his baby. “Chambers,” Sara answers.

“What?”

“Chambers was the last stop.”

Really? We’re that far downtown? The next station won’t be open this time of night. If she gets off at the stop after that, the girl thinks to herself, should she announce it to Sara, or just do it and see if the other follows? A power play of sorts, the act of just deciding to get off the subway: a way to get Sara to tip her hand, Sara who never tips her hand, who hides everything behind her veil of doctoral calm. A power play—but also an opportunity for the therapist to point out the girl is being unduly, provocatively petulant, even for a nineteen-year-old. So she does the grown-up thing. “I want to get off at the next one,” she says. Sara doesn’t answer; so much for mature behavior, the girl snorts to herself. But at the next stop, when the train doors slide open and the girl grabs her radio and walks off, Sara follows, slipping through the doors just as they close behind her.

never dreamed in all her nights of childhood, in all the nights of childhood

It makes the girl feel a bit more in control and she likes that. She knows they’ve been on the train a long time but she’s momentarily surprised anyway, as the two women walk up the steps from the subway, how dark it is and that it’s not still early twilight as it was when they got on. They’re not saying anything now, Sara just following as they cross the intersection and head for the open plaza. There’s an incongruity between the loveliness of the
balmy moment and the women’s heavy tension. Sara won’t continue to follow silently much longer if I don’t concede something, the girl thinks, even if it’s nothing more than a kind word of regret; but even that would sound contrite and the girl realizes she’s beyond contrition, beyond concession—that in fact she’s angry: is it over then? Entering the plaza square, her head is filled with things it’s never been filled with before: the sense of betrayal, the sense of having been taken advantage of—she was my
therapist,
the girl thinks, but perhaps that’s not fair is it, in as how I made that first move, pursuing the romance with the naked aggression of need. Nothing’s more aggressive than need. But there’s that superiority of Sara’s that makes her so insufferable sometimes, that—