Adverbs (15 page)

“Let’s go,” Steven said. “Maybe I should drive because I know where I’m going.”

“We’re just going to a gas station,” Allison said.

“Where else?” Steven said. “Where else would we be going?”

He stepped out of his dead car and stood up. Allison shivered in the rustling wind, and there was a noise from the fence like one of the birds thought this was a bad idea, or maybe it was just one of the trees, groomed and shivering in the nighttime. “You’re really out of gas?” she said.

“How many times do I have to
tell
you?” Steven said. “Listen, I’ve already had a bad day, because you saw me quit, okay? I didn’t have to lead you back home. I wanted to go somewhere else. I don’t know. I didn’t know where I was going to go. But I was doing you a favor.”

“I thought you were going home anyway,” Allison said.

“Not until I fill my car up,” Steven said. “Not until I fix this. I think I should drive. Just give me the keys.”

“I don’t know,” Allison said. “Maybe I should drive.”

But Steven was already walking toward the driver side of her friend’s car, and she noticed for the first time a limp. “You’re lost already,” he said, and held out his hand to her. Allison had the key, of course. She had the key in her hand. Not a car went by as she walked to him and gave it up. She put the key in his hand and for a moment their hands touched, and there’s a moment like this in a fantastic movie. Ingrid Bergman slips a key into the hand of
Cary Grant, who must go downstairs into the wine cellar in order to defeat what must be the Nazis. Allison and Steven were not in this movie. They were in the outskirts of South San Francisco The Industrial City, which was already the outskirts, and at the end of the movie the love works, despite the Nazis and the poisoned milk and a husband played by which actor Allison can never remember. She slid into the passenger seat, her feet brushing up against her friend’s favorite driving music on the floor. When Steven turned the key she saw the same song was still playing, even though the two of them had somehow moved into the future.

“I hate this song,” Steven said, peering into the side mirror and turning the car all the way around. Now the apartments were on the right and the golf course was on the left but still the road looked the same.

“It was just on,” Allison said. “I didn’t choose it.”

“Well, choose something from the floor,” Steven said. “Christ, this car is a mess.”

Allison wondered whether the word
Christ
could be considered the second incident of anti-Semitism she’d seen from this guy, or whether she was still stuck on the first one, the one she’d heard on the phone. She reached down and grabbed a tape and threw it into the machine. The hit from a more recent era stopped and a song began playing that will never be a hit, although it is beautiful. It’s a romantic song, but the rhythms skitter all over the place, clicking and whirring like a calculator somebody threw down the steps. “This is worse,” Steven said. “What is this? This is some faggot singing with a bunch of drum machines.”

“It’s my friend’s tape,” Allison said. “It’s my friend’s car. And it’s a mess because I got this guy to drive it down from Seattle with a bunch of my stuff in the trunk so I could fly. He turned out to be crazy, that guy. I can’t remember now why I just didn’t drive it myself.”

“I bet I know,” Steven said with a chuckle.

“And don’t say faggot,” Allison said. “In San Francisco of all places. What is that, the reason for saying faggot? How can you be in a Graduate Studies program and still say faggot?”

“I quit,” the guy said. “It wasn’t for me.”

“That’s another thing,” Allison said. “You quit during library orientation. You won’t even get your money back.”

“I wasn’t enrolled in that school,” Steven said. “What, do you think I’m crazy?”

“Yes,” Allison said. “You, also. Now I do.” Outside the road looked the same: the fence was still ugly and the lights on the apartments shone on nothing on the walls. Where was she? Why didn’t she just stay in the horseshoe of chairs, or attach herself to the leg of the library woman and refuse to budge until she was taken home and fixed a hot meal?

“Let me tell you what I think about
you
,” Steven said, and took a cigarette out of his pocket. “I think you’re smart enough to find the highway by yourself but you’re too lonely to go home alone, so I think you asked me for a ride. I think you haven’t had a boyfriend in months or maybe ever.”

“That’s not true,” Allison said, “none of it, and particularly the boyfriend. What is your problem?”

“I’m angry about things,” he said. “I’m going to smoke in here, okay? Does that cigarette lighter work?”

“No,” Allison said. “I have matches.” She opened her purse and pushed past the library papers to find that she did, in fact, have matches. The fence whirred by. She struck one and lit a cigarette which was hanging out of Steven’s mouth.

“Where is this friend of yours?” he said, instead of “Thank you.” “Some boy who dumped you but you took his car and all his gay music?”

“Again with the gay,” Allison said. “What is it? And no. She’s gone.”

“Lesbian?” Steven said. “That’s okay with me.”

“I bet it is,” Allison said. “She was a friend of mine. She still is.”

“I guess it’s none of my business,” Steven said, and Allison looked up from her lap. His eyes were sweeping across the windshield, back and forth, even though there was nothing in front of them but where they’d already been. It was the nicest thing he’d said to her. Actually, it was maybe the nicest thing anyone had said to Allison since her landlord said she was easy on the eyes.

“Where’s a gas station?” she asked. “I really need to learn my way around this town if I’m going to stay.”

“We’ll find a gas station in a minute,” Steven said. “If they still do that. Maybe since the catastrophe they’re not going to give me a can of gasoline. Since the catastrophe I could do who knows with it. You know? Like a gang? Beat up Jews for their money and light the bodies on fire.”

“Are you on drugs?” Allison said.

“I wouldn’t say I’m
on
them,” Steven said, and widened his mouth around the cigarette to give her a little laugh. This was the laugh, Allison could see, that would indicate both a half-assed
apology and a cue to change the subject. There had been plenty of Stevens, but the first Steven she’d ever met had a laugh like that, back in junior high. He said he was going to invite Allison to a make-out party but then invited Lila instead, or maybe it was the other way around. Allison only remembers the look on his face when she and Lila waited by the back entrance, near the hideous mural they’d had to paint for Ms. Wylie. It must have been a Wednesday, because the blood on Lila’s sleeve made quite a stir when they arrived at Hebrew School. It was very, very easy to beat that Steven up. “Look,” he said, and for a moment Allison thought they’d arrived at a gas station, but out the window was nothing. “Not
look
,” he said, and reached out to Allison’s chin. With not very much effort he moved her head so that she was facing him. “I mean the expression, look. Don’t look at me that way. Tell me a story or something. A dream you had. I’m not having a good night.”

“Neither am I,” Allison said, inching her chin away.

“That’s what I’m
saying
,” Steven insisted. “We should be keeping each other better company than we are.”

“Okay,” Allison said, and said it again. “Okay, so where did you get that limp?”

“I hurt myself,” Steven lied, “but that’s not what I mean. We’re flirting, right? I think you’re very good-looking. Now you say something.”

The song whirred into the second verse. Already they were at the second verse, or maybe it was the chorus, in which the singer insists he won’t let go, even if you say so, oh no. Allison has never liked this song, not like Lila, who’d cue it up over and
over, her weakening fingers drumming against the steering wheel until she wasn’t allowed to drive anymore. Allison wished this is where they were driving, wherever she and Lila were going that night. Maybe it was a party, or maybe they were just going to drive around and cry. “I wish I were someplace else,” Allison said. “That’s something.”

“Come on,” Steven said and yanked the tape out of the stereo and—Allison couldn’t believe it, but boy oh boy was it happening—threw it out the window while a man on the radio started talking about being an expert.

“I’m an expert,” the expert said. “I have a number of degrees on the subject.”

“It’s obvious we’re going to sleep together,” Steven said. “You don’t need a graduate degree for that. Can’t we be honest about such a thing?”

“Did you,” Allison asked, “really throw my tape out the window?”

“Not your tape,” Steven said with a chuckle of freaky delight. There was either something black in one of his teeth or he didn’t have one of his teeth, and Allison realized, with sudden expertise, that she would never know which it was. Quietly, she slipped her feet out of Lila’s shoes, which clattered onto the music on the floor of the car. She was ready. She would have to leave all those songs, and the car, but the car wasn’t hers, and Jews have it in their blood to leave a place quickly. You never know when it’s going to get bad for the Jews, but boy oh boy oh boy do you know when it’s happening. Allison saw, spooky as an apparition, the red spotlight waiting for her after the curve in the
road, and she knew that was the moment in her future when soft-spoken was a thing of the past.

“I’m going to quit,” she said.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Steven insisted. “Let’s just fuck. We can go to either of our apartments. In the morning we’ll deal with my car but right now let’s quit while we’re ahead.”

“
Behind
!” Allison said, very very loudly, and Steven twitched his eyes to the rearview mirror. “Quit while we’re
behind
!” And the car, Lila’s car, rolled to a sloppy stop. The door opened and the night air came in. Barefoot Allison stepped onto gravel, maybe broken glass, and took two quick steps onto someone’s lawn.

“Of course there’s going to be another catastrophe,” said the radio expert. “Do you think this is the first volcano we’re going to hear about? And let’s not get started on the number of people who, for reasons I have stated, absolutely hate freedom.”

“
What
?” Steven said. “We’re not there yet! This isn’t even my car!”

Somewhere behind them that tape was broken on the ground, but as I said, Allison never really liked it. It was Lila’s tape. She—Allison—could survive without that stuff. She could not see far into the future, of course—nobody can. This book only has young people in it because I am not that old. I don’t know what love’s like with the bulk of so much time, or if the most acute heartbreaks really do slip elsewhere or, as I suspect, stay heartbroken, stay terrible, no matter how many catastrophes go by. “This isn’t even my car!” Steven said again. “This isn’t even my car, and I have a question! How are you going to go home if you don’t go home with me?”

Allison had a question too. “How should I know?” she cried, spreading her hands out wide, but then, when the expert was heard to cry “Oh my god!” and the program skittered to a commercial, she knew of course how. Just because there are more catastrophes on the way is no reason to avoid the ones that are here now, idling in the middle of the road. “I’ll take a goddamn cab!” she said. “I should have done that in the first place.”

“Ha!”
Steven said. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” Then he coughed, around his cigarette, but for a moment it sounded like he’d said “forsooth.” “You don’t know what you’re doing, forsooth,” like he was Shakespeare, glittering ugly in the distant past. The lighting helped, of course. The red of the stoplight, and the grainy white from the lights clipped to the apartment drains, and some strange orange light in the sky, all gaped down on her as she took another, another, another step on the wet grass. It was long past sunset, this strange orange light in the sky, and Allison was pretty sure that wasn’t west anyway. It was wrong to be barefoot, but these wrongs would be righted. She would find a better curb to stand on, where she could hail a cab or—let’s face it—any other savior that might come along. If she waved long enough someone would pull over and take her where she wanted to go. Allison squinted at the strange, catastrophic sky, and took another step, another step, another step, because in the future—she could see it—this would not be happening.

T
his part’s true. A group of men are trying to get an enormous number of potatoes into a café. I know this because I’m sitting at the café where the story is taking place. The potatoes are in boxes, and the boxes are piled in a pyramid and fused together, under a shroud of plastic wrap like they do, a web of ice a Snow Queen might hurl down upon us, if we were potatoes and if the potatoes were in boxes and, um, if there were a Snow Queen. The fused potato pyramid is on wheels, but still the potatoes cannot enter the café. It is impossible. Many men are working on this impossible project. They are pressing their fists against the boxes. They are asking people sitting at tables to move, and a few women are working on this too. Not everybody who is working on this impossible project works at the café, but all of them are certain they can get this pyramid of potatoes to arrive through the small, small door. They are all wrong. It’s not an impossible task like climbing a mountain, or falling in love in a nightclub. It’s an impossible task like raising the dead. If these potatoes get into the café it will be an actual real live miracle.

But a miracle has happened before, with an object much much smaller than a potato. When I was seventeen and hopelessly in love, I found myself on a vacation, chained to my family
in Arizona. In case you’re wondering it’s a long story. We were visiting Taliesin, a school of architecture founded and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, about which and about whom at the time I did not give a flying fuck. I was in love and could think of nothing but the love in question, although she—Missi Rubenzik—does not appear in this story. Spread magnificently in front of the school was a path I was sulking through, a swipe of gravel, doubtlessly culled from local quarries, leading up to the building I didn’t want to visit. Maybe halfway up, my mother, who appears once in “Particularly,” being forced by grown-ups to do a pointless chore, and then again in “Wrongly,” in much more dire circumstances, clutched one hand with another, and then looked at me, with an expression of terror, as if I were a phantom. She appeared panicked—she frantically examined the engagement ring on her left hand, so that I wondered, illogically, whether her horror at my uncoupled state had possessed her completely.

“My diamond is gone!” she said. “I’ve lost the diamond to my wedding ring! I must have dropped it on the path!”

Everyone gathered around her. We looked at the gold setting on my mother’s finger, the pointy teeth biting a pocket of air.

“It’s gone for good,” my father said. “A needle in a haystack.”

It was true, as this story is. The path was made of nothing but tiny shiny stones, and even a cursory search was impossible. Now my parents were heartbroken too. The diamonds in my mother’s engagement ring had come from the heel of my grandmother’s shoe, a place the Nazis didn’t think of looking as she led my father and his brother into America, but that isn’t the miracle
either, although it is miraculous. The miracle isn’t the path the diamonds took to get into the shoe, which I would have to invent, beginning with what’s-it-called—carbon? a prehistoric creature, tarpitted to death in Africa maybe?—and ending with a German diamond dealer who must have done so much desperate business, or a household tool, let’s say a pair of sewing scissors, that my grandmother held in one hand, traveling shoe in the other, as she grimly dug her way out of the catastrophe that surrounded her. But those things aren’t the miracle, not in this story.

The miracle is that I found the missing diamond, ten years later in a book:

“Unreasoningly” or not, the search party did keep the diamond right where we could always gaze on it. Every time I reread this part of the book—Paula Sharp’s novel
Crows over a Wheatfield
—the diamond is still there. Add to this miracle that the scene
in Sharp’s novel takes place in the
other
Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, as far away from Arizona as the lyrics of a love song are from being in love. How did something so small travel an impossible distance? How did a diamond fall from my mother’s engagement ring onto a gravel path at Taliesin in Arizona and end up on the lawn at Taliesin in Paula Sharp’s novel?

Some say that it’s God who performs such miracles, but not in this book. (God appears only once, as the older sister in “Briefly,” drinking snitched rum in the good glasses and flirting with the boy someone else wants.) Instead I tracked down Paula Sharp to ask her about the miracle, and it is fair to say, based on an actual real live interview, that she has no idea:

It would, in fact, require a magpie’s eye to notice a diamond on the gravel on the path in Arizona, the setting of one story, and fly it all the way to the lawn on the hill in Wisconsin, the setting of another, and so I read T. R. Birkhead’s
The Magpies: The Ecology and Behaviour of Black-billed and Yellow-billed Magpies:

Accordingly, the magpies in this book are so furtive, so eager to avoid human persecution, that you might not have noticed them. But they’re there, right from the start:

They’re everywhere, these birds, looking for shiny things and carrying them around in their beaks. How else could one explain the pendant Joe gets in “Obviously,” or the envelope of money Helena finds in “Not Particularly,” flown in through the rip in her purse? You can follow them throughout the book, flying across lawns, eavesdropping in diners, listening to the radio and tucked into bed, in the forest or in the hinterlands or out the window of a cab, trying to get in the last word:

But following the birds is like following the taxi instead of the passenger. You might as well emphasize that Chinese woman, whom I first spotted on the subway in New York, where this book begins. My wife and I were coming home one night and arguing like we do. I told my wife I was going to leave her for the Chinese woman at the end of the subway car, and I stalked off and stood next to this oblivious woman until my wife and I were laughing hysterically at either end of the car. We went home happy together, and the woman never appeared in our lives again until I wrote this book.

In an earlier draft, instead of this essay, all of the characters in
Adverbs
—even the Chinese woman—gathered together for a party and decided to play a game. The game is Adverbs, because without a game the party’s just refreshments and people talking and there’s enough of that in the book already. Someone is It and leaves the room and everyone else decides on an adverb. It returns and forces people to act out things in the manner of the word, which is another name for the game. People argue
violently
, or make coffee
quickly
, and there’s always a time when the alcohol takes over and people suggest
hornily
and we all must watch as It makes two people writhe on the floor, supposedly dancing or eating or driving a car, until finally It guesses the adverb everyone’s thinking of. It’s a charade, although it’s not much like Charades. You play until you get bored. Nobody keeps score, because there’s no sense in keeping track of what everyone is doing. You might as well trace birds through a book, or follow a total stranger you spot outside the window of your cab, or follow the cocktails spilling themselves from the pages of
vintage cocktail encyclopedias to leave stains through this book, or follow the pop songs that stick in people’s heads or follow the people themselves, although you’re likely to confuse them, as so many people in this book have the same names. You can’t follow all the Joes, or all the Davids or Andreas. You can’t follow Adam or Allison or Keith, up to Seattle or down to San Francisco or across—three thousand miles, as the bird flies—to New York City, and anyway they don’t matter. If you follow the diamond in my mother’s ring from Africa to Germany to California to Arizona to Wisconsin, in the heel of a grandmother, in the beak of a magpie, in the gravel of the path, in someone else’s novel, in the center of the earth where the volcanoes are from, you would forget the miracle, the reason diamonds end up on people’s fingers in the first place. It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe, and look—actually
look
!—the potatoes have arrived! They had to slice through the plastic—attractively, artfully, aggressively, to name three adverbs that didn’t make it into this book—but the potatoes are being carried inside, an actual miracle! It can’t happen to everyone—as in life, some people will be killed off before they get something shiny, and some of them will screw it up and others will just end up with the wrong kind of bird—but some of them will arrive at love. Surely somebody will arrive, in a taxi perhaps, attractively, artfully, aggressively, or any other way it is done.