The Girls From Corona Del Mar (14 page)

“He was just a child,” he sobbed to Lorrie Ann one night. “He was just a little boy.”

After that, Arman stayed perpetually drunk. He went on all his missions drunk. He spent all his pay on alcohol, which was difficult and costly to procure. A bottle of Crown Royal could cost upward of two
hundred dollars. He was often so drunk in combat that he would fail to keep coherent grasp of the mission and would wind up stopping somewhere and just vomiting into a corner. When they fought in cities, he mostly hid behind buildings, hoping not to have to kill anyone, hoping also that a muj would stumble across him and end his farcical existence. Once, he lay down in an alley for the duration of a firefight. “I was just napping,” he explained, “but everyone thought I was dead. Even my guys were surprised when later I got up.” But Arman was not reprimanded or punished for this behavior, extreme as it was. “The leadership had unraveled” was his enigmatic explanation.

It was during one of these drunken missions that Arman was accidentally left behind in a building destined to be blown up. In the explosion, one of the support beams fell on him, severing his legs at the shins. “I was so happy to finally be dying,” he told Lorrie Ann, “that when one of my buddies came and tried to get me, I actually threatened to shoot him. ‘I’ll have no legs,’ I begged him. ‘Please don’t save me. If you have any mercy, just shoot me in the face, please. Shoot me in the face, brother.’ ” But his battle buddy did not, could not, in the end, bring himself to do it. Once they were back stateside, the young man had come to him in the hospital, crying and apologizing. He knew that Arman had meant it, and that it was because of him that Arman would now have to live out the rest of his days as a crippled child-killer.

“I could have been a happy dead person,” Arman summed up. “But instead, I’m this.”

“He wasn’t a loser,” Lorrie Ann said, that day at my kitchen table. Her eyes seemed glassy. Was she high? Or was she just tired? I didn’t know. I didn’t know a lot about drugs, really. “He was just lost.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’m not saying he was consciously malevolent or something.”

“No, but, I just kept thinking, what if Jim had come back and I wasn’t there? What if he’d been alone with all of that, with everything he’d
done? Wouldn’t I want some girl to try to love him, even though he was so broken? Wouldn’t I barter my soul itself for a girl to do that for him?” She brought her thumb to her mouth and began to nibble on the nail. She still chewed them, after all these years.

I didn’t know how to answer her. I wanted to say that Jim was different, that Arman had never been half the man Jim was, but I couldn’t, because the truth was, I didn’t think Jim had been much of a man anyway. Granted, in comparison to Arman he was like Prince Charming, but still. What I really wanted to say was that no man was worth Lorrie Ann’s soul. That she shouldn’t give herself up for anyone ever.

“In the thing I’m translating,” I said finally, “there’s this part where this goddess, Inanna, goes to the underworld. She just develops this craving for death, to know death. And as she goes, deeper and deeper, she has to give up everything. All the gifts she’s been given, all the wisdom of her father, all her armor, everything. And each time, she asks why, she says, ‘What is this?’ And she’s told, ‘Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.’ And finally she’s naked, and she stands before the goddess of the underworld. And the judges of the underworld surround her and pass judgment over her. They kill her. It says, ‘Inanna was turned into a corpse, a piece of rotting meat, and was hung from a hook on the wall.’ ”

“Does she really die there? That can’t be the end of the story. Stories just don’t end like that,” Lorrie Ann said.

“She escapes,” I admitted, impressed by Lor’s canniness. “Her servant begs the gods for help, to go and get her, but each god says no. Her father says no because he says she chose this. He says, ‘My daughter craved the Great Above, Inanna craved the Great Below … She who goes to the Dark City stays there.’ Finally her uncle decides to help.”

“So does he go and get her?” Lorrie Ann had made her thumb bleed and was now sucking on the wound.

“Weirdly, he doesn’t go himself. He fashions little genderless creatures out of dirt and then gives them instructions on how to save her. They act all friendly to the queen of the underworld, sympathizing with
her pain. And when she decides she likes them, she offers them a gift, and they ask for Inanna’s corpse. Then they bring her back to life. They resurrect her. After that it gets complicated—the demons follow her out. The
galla
, they follow her back out into the world.”

“How weird.”

“I know.”

We were silent then. The tea had turned bitter in the pot, and I flinched when I took a sip.

“Mia, do you think I’m a corpse hanging on the wall?” Lorrie Ann asked. “Is that it?”

“A little bit,” I said. “Maybe.”

I looked into my cup of tea. There was a pattern of sediment on the bottom, and I thought about the practice of divining things from tea leaves. Were women so desperate to know what would happen to them that they would tell themselves such lies, such fairy tales? Certainly, for most of history, women had not had control over what would happen to them at all, and so perhaps it was as effective as anything else to try to read the future in tea leaves. The next time I looked up, Lorrie Ann was crying.

“Where’s Zach?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “but can I please, please, please go shoot up in your bathroom?”

CHAPTER NINE

Of course I said yes. There was a deep instinct in me, left over from the years with my mother and Paddy, I guess, to avoid conflict with any person who was not sober. A drunk could insist that the moon was green, and I would do nothing but nod affably. Certainly, I knew enough not to try to take away the bottle from someone trying to see the bottom of it. So there was no way I would tell Lorrie Ann she could not shoot up in my bathroom, even though I am sure that would have been the sane thing to do.

The thing that most disturbed me, and what I hadn’t wanted to get into with Lorrie Ann, about the underworld section of Inanna was that when the demons follow her out of the underworld, they want to take someone in her place. A life for a life. The most ancient form of mathematics.

At first they want to take her best friend, but Inanna says no. “She is my constant support,” she says. “She is my
sukkal
who gives me wise advice. She is my warrior who fights by my side.” They ask for her two sons, but again, Inanna says no. She faces those terrifying
galla
, who I could not help but imagine as wooden gnomes like those Lor’s mother collected, and staring deep into their wooden, inhuman eyes, she refuses to give them her sons.

But who will Inanna give up? She has to give up someone. Who will it be?

It is her lover, her husband, her mortal man, Dumuzi.

“Inanna fastened on Dumuzi the eye of death. She spoke against him
the word of wrath. She uttered against him the cry of guilt: Take him! Take Dumuzi away!” And the demons fell on Dumuzi. The Sumerian descriptions of violence disturbed me—they were obscene in some way that was new to me precisely because it felt so old. The passages described the demons seizing him by the thighs, pouring out his milk, gashing him with axes.

Was that the choice—your friend, your son, or your husband? I think I had become fascinated with Inanna because I saw so much of Lor in her, or so much of her in Lor, but now, as I opened the drawer where I had secreted away the pregnancy test, a blue box with curly pink script reading “Yes or No,”
I feared the Inanna in myself. I feared my ability to betray—to betray Lor, to betray Franklin, to betray the bean of life that might be inside me.

How to excuse the way that Lor had betrayed Zach? If, indeed, that was what she had done. That night four years ago, when I had visited Lorrie Ann and Zach and the loser Arman in the sad, subsidized Costa Mesa apartment, there had been a moment when she was putting Zach to bed that stuck with me.

She had been lifting Zach out of his wheelchair and up onto the bed with its spread-out blanket, where she prepared to feed him through his feeding tube, holding the little bag of formula aloft so that it would flow down the tube, led by gravity, into her son, where it would give him sustenance. “At some point, I’m not going to be able to lift him anymore, and I have no idea what I’ll do. Literally, I can’t imagine what I’ll do.”

Was that what had happened? In some literal or metaphysical way, had Lorrie Ann been unable to shoulder the load?

I could hear her running water in the bathroom. Lorrie Ann was here, was in my magical sublet apartment where nothing matched and where all the knives were dull, and what should have been happy was terrible. She was shooting up in my bathroom and I was so paralyzed I didn’t know what to do but pretend everything was normal.

Even with that test in my hand, I was having trouble holding the thought of a baby still enough to look at. Did I want a baby? The one
time Franklin and I had talked about it he had been vehement: he had no desire for children, he didn’t see himself as a papa type. It had been part of a discussion about his ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth. Her desire for children had been what made them break up. And I knew that, and so even considering keeping the child felt like a betrayal.

My own feelings were more like a swarm than a coherent position. On the one hand, there was the feeling of the miraculous, the tender and tangled, the impossible and yet ordinary division of cells that must be protected, safeguarded. On the other hand, there was Zach’s infant body, gray-blue and still, all that could be taken from you when you risked wanting something. There was my crushed toe to contend with and the microsuede of my brothers’ skin, my mother’s puffy eyes, the possibility that I would be like her, or worse, the hanger, the horrible hanger that I had used. It was complicated, it was unspeakably complicated.

But I was afraid that no matter what happened, I would wind up betraying somebody: Franklin, or the bean of life, or myself.

I picture them in her kitchen, sometime after the Goldschläger night, Arman at the table and Lor doing dishes.

“There were complications.”

“Yeah, but what complications?” he would have asked. “I mean, something specific must have happened. It’s not like some percentage of children are randomly born with brain damage.”

“There were problems with my uterus.”

“What was the problem with your uterus?” Arman insisted, even as Lorrie Ann’s shoulders became rigid.

“You’re really not going to stop asking, are you?” she said, slamming the dish she was washing back into the sink.

“I told you how I lost my legs,” he said, still sitting easily at her kitchen table, playing with a fork, rubbing the tines with his thumb.

“And I’m telling you: there was a problem with my uterus.” She shook suds off her hands and into the sink, dried her hands on a dish towel. For a moment they just stared at each other in the small kitchen.

“Please,” he said. “Please trust me.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what was wrong with my uterus. There just was. There was just something wrong, okay?” Lorrie Ann clutched the dish towel so that the veins and tendons in the backs of her hands danced just under the skin.

“Do you want me to do the dishes?” Arman asked. Lorrie Ann knew it was a peace offering, but it also took Arman hours to do dishes because he had to do them one handed so he could use his other hand to keep himself upright on a crutch.

“No.” She sighed, turning back to the sink.

But then later in bed:

“Please just tell me the story.”

“Why do you want to hear the story?”

They were in the dark, though the door was open to the lighted hall so they could hear Zach if he started to cry. He needed the hall light left on or he would get night terrors.

“Fine, don’t tell me.”

“Arman.”

“No, if you want to stay closed up inside yourself forever, that’s your choice. Not my business.”

“Arman.”

But he didn’t speak to her. He didn’t turn away; he let her keep lying there, nestled in his armpit, her head upon his chest, his long hair spread out under her like a blanket, but through some sort of voodoo he made his body unnaturally still, until it seemed he might be made of clay like a golem.

“I needed to be induced,” Lorrie Ann said. Her voice sounded so tiny, so high in the darkness, even to herself, like a child’s or a puppet’s.

Immediately, she could feel Arman’s body come back to life. She could almost hear the blood gush through his tissues. He squeezed her arm.

“I was late. I was three or four days past my due date and they kept saying Zach was going to be a big baby, that we needed to get him out of there. They said he would be nine pounds at least. He turned out to
be only seven, but I guess the ultrasounds really only give you a rough estimate.” She stopped for a moment, reining herself in. It was so difficult to talk about pregnancy and birth and babies because the details mattered only to people who had done it themselves. Arman wouldn’t care about birth weights; he wouldn’t know about how they told you the baby would be wrinkly and weird if it stayed in there too long.