San Francisco Noir (12 page)

“That was me,” Zoë corrects. “It was Marvin, not Jerry. And he used the ‘n’ word.”

“We had the same father, metamorphically. A barbarian with bad grammar who thought a
yarmulke
was a ticket to prison. A guy who could plaster and drywall. They were house painters. When they were employed. House painters.” Clarissa stares at the bay.

“Like Hitler,” Zoë points out. Then, “Had your mother run away yet?”

“Rachel? She was on the verge. She was becoming River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”

Zoë remembers Clarissa’s mother. A woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, rarely spoke. Jerry had pushed her out of a moving car. He kicked in her ribs and put her in a cast. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the hibiscus and night-blooming jasmine beside the alleys, sheathed in long skirts, shawls, and kimonos. She was younger than they are now.

Then Clarissa had a family of subtraction. Zoë envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families. The brothers in juvenile detention. The sisters who disappeared. Soon, if Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. Perhaps she could escape the anomalous caste consigned to stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind wires and no white picket fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even secondhand cars were an aberration. If she got placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight As and then won the poetry and science competition. Maybe she could be given a new name with syllables that formed church steeples on your lips, like the women in books. A stay-at-home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies could call her Elizabeth or Margaret or Christine.

“Did you realize we were Jewish?” Zoë wonders.

“I was instructed to never to reveal this. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa answers. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”

“I wanted a bat mitzvah,” Zoë suddenly remembers. “I don’t know how I even knew the word. Marvin said,
You mean a Jew thing? It costs a fortune to get into that club. They inspect you first. You have to shave your head and show them your penis.”

“Speaking of Marvin’s penis, remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a thirteen-year-old?” Clarissa asks.

It happened in California. It was front-page news in an era when newspapers were read and discussed. The details were graphic and comprehensive, indelible like a personal mutilation.

“Jerry said,
I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5'2”. He’s got a three-inch dick
. He mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers.” Clarissa repeats the demonstration for her. “Then he said,
Why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a dick that small?”
Clarissa turns back to the bay.

“Is that when it happened? When you moved away? You disappeared. The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” Zoë tries to form a chronology.

“Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. Jerry thought a ditch with a turnip in it was a party. I was chattel. Rachel left and he just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were hanging in their closet. My pajamas were folded on their bed. Then he found us an apartment in Oakland. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”

“But she came back for you,” Zoë says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”

“You don’t get out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”

Zoë examines the bay. There is less agitation, swells softer; a haze grazes what was amethyst. The diagnosis has come. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.

“Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa suddenly asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”

“Mommy did it, actually. She was between mental hospitals that month. Maybe a weekend pass. Her contemptuous glare. It cut right through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out. She said,
Marvin, look, that kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands?
I remember precisely. She said,
You think you’re a neurosurgeon? You think you’re a symphony conductor? You’re not even human.
Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers and they took her in the ambulance.”

They are quiet. The bay, too, is still. Through haze, the sun is lemon-yellow on the heavy waters. There are floating orchards rooted in sand. Wave break and dog bark are a language. Accuracy is a necessary requirement of civilization. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s an elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. The way you are no longer blind, cold, bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.

Zoë and Clarissa’s fingers entwine. Clarissa wears a platinum set Tiffany diamond of at least four carats. And a gold Rolex with the oyster diamond setting. She withdraws her hand.

“You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets and red silk jackets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”

“So you transcend the genre?” Zoë is enraged.

“What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adoles-cences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa stares at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars that are like tiny metallic studs or hooks—they help you shred flesh.

Zoë considers their shared childhood in the already faltering city without seasons. Their parents were Jews who had been disenfranchised for generations; pre-urban and unprepared in a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Plumbing and appliances amazed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately closed. What if it burned out? Then their offspring, who became mute with shock, there in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow hibiscus and magenta bougainvillea, behind banks of startled red geraniums and brittle canna.

“We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus, and coyotes. We are the indigenous spawn of this saint. His bastards,” Zoë realizes.

“We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”

They stand and everything is suspended. The bay is barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just been wheeled back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung over. Or in a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.

“But we have instincts.” Zoë is exhausted. Her arm with the gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, an outcropping that is Marin and Sonoma, and a suggestion of something beyond.

“We understand ambushes and unconventional warfare. We’re expert with camouflage,” Clarissa agrees, offering encouragement.

“They’ll never take us by surprise,” Zoë laughs. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.

Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Sudden vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. They are beyond known choreography. One must relentlessly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.

“I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces. “But you look stunning. I’m impressed. Have you considered a wardrobe update? Do schmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that don’t fit right. They were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”

“That’s okay,” Zoë manages. This is emotional aerobics for the crippled, she thinks. Then, “I appreciate the gesture.”

“I don’t have a generous impulse in my repertoire.” Clarissa seems tired. “This is a search-and-destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. And we must end our reunion with a celebratory benediction.”

This is their ritual of conclusion. They exchange tokens of mutual acceptance. It’s how they prove their capacity to transcend themselves. It’s the equivalent of boot camp five-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.

“I brought you a postcard you sent me from Fiji sixteen years ago.” Zoë produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “
On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s nude breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.
” Zoë offers the postcard to Clarissa.

“I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t sound surprised. “That was Anna. We don’t speak anymore. I don’t know where she lives. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona.”

Zoë takes the postcard back. She is convinced their reunions are conceptually well-intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were considered purifying and curative. Also barbequing women at the stake. And garlic for vampire protection.

There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madame Curie, and the extent of her fatigue. Then Zoë says, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”

“When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then détente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And as an afterthought, asks, “What about you?”

“I’m getting married,” Zoë says. “I’m moving to Pennsylvania.”

“Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your half-way-house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.

“Fuck you.” Zoë is incensed.

“I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have extreme difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances. It’s unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”

“You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” Zoë stares at her, so startled she’s almost sober.

“He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.

The stylish phone opens, the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists and in our pockets. Clarissa’s phone is voice-activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”

“Does your arm hurt?” Zoë wonders. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire.

“No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles, “keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. The cause is just.”

Zoë realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.

Suddenly Zoë feels she is on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi five hours from Goa. Then the six-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for seven hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally the fourteen-hour flight to New York. Seventy hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies of vertigo in free fall where no time zones apply.

Clarissa and Zoë no longer hold hands. A distance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.

“Another bittersweet reunion barely survived,” Clarissa says. “My beloved cousin.”

“And you, my first and greatest love,” Zoë says. “Another high-risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”

“We’ll get red hearts around our names next time. Our next tattoo,” Clarissa smiles.

They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They have slid into an interminable foreign film neither of them has interest or affection for. She knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.

There is a certain pause just before sunset, when the bay is veiled in azure.

It’s the moment of redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone-fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.

“My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.

Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, sunglasses with an ear attachment she imagines CIA field operatives employ. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. Zoë refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, Zoë can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk now, in the alleys and sides of residential streets with ridiculous, insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Point View. Who do they think they’re kidding?