Adverbs (20 page)

“Shall we dance?” he says.

“No,” she says.

“Yes we did,” Keith insists. “We were dancing. I saw you.”

Allison nods a very little bit. “I heard the song,” she said.

“Yes yes yes,” Keith says, “oh baby yes,” and the hand moves to her belly.

“Another song,” Allison says. “The one by that band, from when I was in high school, that saved my life the way songs do. ‘Whatever I do, I’m just passing the time, to get to you to pass the time with you.’ That’s what I mean, Keith Whatever. Go away and I love him. Often I do. And the other times—”

“The other times are a vacation,” Keith says. “You’re on one now.”

“The other times are hell on Earth,” Allison says. “When he’s not here there’s arson and gunfire, and sharks and the bartender is an enormous fan.” She looks up and the closet spins, like it, too, is an enormous fan. “I can’t go by myself. I need his help.”

“That’s quite a story,” Keith says, but he takes his hands off her. “Can I use that?”

“You can use everything,” she says, and dumps her purse all over Scandinavia. “I don’t need anything here, like my wallet stuffed with cash they won’t take, and these linty mints, and if you want to put your glasses around your neck there’s a cord just for that. Here’s some tissues if you’re sad, and a pregnancy test.”

“Oh my god!” Hillary is standing in the doorway of the bathroom which on one hand is surprising but there’s the other hand, too. “Oh my god you guys. Turn on the TV! Turn on the TV!”

“Don’t you knock?” Keith says and puts on his growly shirt.

“There’s been a catastrophe,” Hillary says, but Allison can’t see her stupid expression from her sad location. Allison washes
the last of everything out of her mouth and pushes the contents of her purse together in a heap. “I hate you,” she says very quietly to Hillary. “Your comic strip is incredibly stupid and badly drawn, and you announce all of the jokes twice. Like the title of the comic will be, ‘The Masked Ball,’ but it will give away the punch line before you can even read it. And you, Keith, the heads of all your characters are stupid big, and don’t dance so close with your denim erection.” But Allison is soft-spoken and nobody hears this kind of prayer, where you pray to the specifics of a person. Please, Adrian, with your shoulders and your lovely drawings of the end of the world, pick me up by my beltloops and rescue me off this boat, in the name of the can where you keep your pencils, and your haircut, Amen.

Not today. Allison pulls herself into the bedroom where Hillary and Keith are staring in horror at a blank screen. “We don’t have TV,” Allison says anyway. “We’re in the middle of the ocean.”

“Of course we have TV,” Keith says. “Haven’t you ever been on Comics Cruise before?”

Slowly, slowly, the screen shows them a city on fire. “It’s San Francisco,” Hillary says. “That’s where your husband lives, Allison. It’s just like his work.”

“I live there too,” Allison says, but she is on a ship right now.

“The pharmacy girl told me the news told her that it was a volcano,” Hillary says. “This is really spooky, Spouse. First a volcano like his old comics and then you’re pregnant like his new comics. And it’s happening on Comics Cruise!”

“Flip the channel or turn it off,” Allison says. She lies on the
bed, which was her plan anyway, like a pillow. “I want to skip this.”

“You can’t skip it,” Keith says. “Something like this is on all the channels although I don’t for a minute think it’s a fucking volcano.”

“It is a fucking volcano,” says the guy on TV. “It’s hell on Earth. Look at this footage we got of it and you will say holy motherfucking shit!”

“Holy motherfucking shit,” Keith says. “Whoever got that footage must have made a bundle.”

“Oh my god,” Hillary says. “We will stay on Comics Cruise forever and ever and ever until this is over, and I’m so terrible to be around, aren’t I?”

Allison is on the bed and trying to listen. Adrian should be here, on the ship in the middle of the ocean, or she should be there, throwing up in her own bathroom. It’s bigger, San Francisco, and more of her things are in it. Allison looks off to the purse pile in the room she’ll pay for later, if what the registration guy said is true. They don’t want her by herself. They don’t want Allison to show up without her husband, everyone knows this, and Allison doesn’t either. This can’t be happening, and look at that stuff: the wallet, the mints, the tissues. There’s no gun to shoot her way out, or even a baby to keep her company. She has nothing to get her off this boat, and please, please, look at those ashes of his on the floor. It has been often. It has not been often enough.

“Allison, you’ve got to see this.” Hillary is jumping up and down like a monkey, and Allison looks wistfully back at the purse
for something to kill her with. Please, not the ashes. “Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!”

“There are no survivors,” says the television, “or maybe there are. Obviously we’re not going to be one thousand percent correct about every little thing at a time like this.”

Allison puts a hand on her stomach. She feels fat, but maybe it’s just her. Maybe she’s by herself. “Help me,” Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away.

Y
ou have to be careful when you say what you like two weeks before your birthday. You say birds you’ll get birds. You say the new album by the Prowlers and you better not buy it yourself because it will be waiting for you in the bag from Zodiac Records, at a ten-percent discount on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday afternoon, when the boy from the Winsomes works there, with his curly red hair and that tiny little beard all bass players grow, giving ten percent off to anybody who smiles at him cute. Two weeks before don’t say anything you don’t want because boy will you get it. Boy you better be careful.

It was the week everybody got really into the Clientele album that Andrea and Sam had to leave the apartment one morning so the landlord could finally repair the glass shower door the other Andrea walked into the night of the Zumpano show, so the two of them decided to sit out front on the sidewalk with a pitcher of margaritas and sell stuff they didn’t want anymore on a blanket. Sam sold the skirt her mother sent every birthday, three of them, and the limited-pressing seven-inch single by the Unsuspecting Motorists, “I Am Here.” The single is rare but Sam didn’t really like them anymore since they dropped their guitarist for a boy with curly red hair and a tiny little beard. It was eleven
A
.
M
., too
early for the naked lady across the street, so of course Andrea and Sam ended up talking about Egg. “I like him,” Andrea said. “I’d give him a ride to the airport if he asked me, but I’d be very surprised that he asked.”

“What’s-his-name was a boy like that,” Sam said, forgetting for a moment and sipping from the pitcher. From her bedroom window she could hear the faint sounds of the first Katydids album. No one remembers that album but Sam. It wasn’t on loud enough to hear really but Sam didn’t think she could call to the landlord to turn it up. Andrea and Sam had lived in another apartment, over by the zoo with the other Andrea—as if two Andreas weren’t enough trouble, it was also when the radio just wouldn’t stop with that Waltzing Pneumonia song “Andrea Says”—and they became friends with the landlord because he called them both “Chicky chicky,” mostly Sam. But then Andrea and Sam got a letter from him which started “Dear chicky chicky sexy,” and it contained some snapshots, and so they moved. In the new place they had not as much room. It was harder to move around, or to move in, even: there were still boxes. They were marked
FRAGILE
from the last move but now they held different things. They weren’t fragile anymore, hadn’t been fragile for years, and you could shut up about it because they knew how that sounded.

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” Andrea said, as if they hadn’t been quiet all this time.

“What’s-his-name?” Sam said.

“Yes,” Andrea said, “because he has a name. Steven is his name, by the way.”

“Can I keep calling him Egg?” Sam asked. “You’ll grant me that, right?”

Andrea sighed so loudly that the two boys looked up from the crate of comic books they were looking through. Andrea and Sam had found the crate as is, in the apartment when they moved in, and every sidewalk sale they lugged them out to attract boys. “Yes, Sam,” she said, and gave Sam a look that approximated enormous patience. “Egg.”

Sam reached across the card table and flicked her thumb at her black badge sitting there, decorated with a wavy, hand-painted yellow line. She’d found it outside the Black Elephant one wealthy evening, and now it skittered toward her roommate but stopped halfway like it had lost interest. “Those comics aren’t for sale,” she told the boys, and held up the pitcher. “Margarita?”

“Tony,” replied one of the boys, moving on. It had been like this for years. Andrea and Sam had known each other forever, or at least since the first Morphine album which was almost as long. Somebody someplace had introduced them by having a birthday party they both crashed. It was at an art gallery with paintings on the wall. At the time Sam lived in South San Francisco The Industrial City but still she knew enough that when a guy named Tomas stood up and said that there were a few things everyone needed to know before he read from his unfinished novel and the first thing was that it was a work-in-progress, they left together like they had plans. Zodiac was closed but Andrea and Sam convinced the boy to reopen and they bought an album each, at ten percent off, while he put stacks of dollar bills into waiting rub-
berbands. Almost immediately they had a tiff—Andrea wanted to buy the Fallen Airlines album
Give Up the Ghost
, and Sam thought they were terrible except the debut—but it ended quickly and they both thought themselves slightly victorious. There was going to be a lot of that. Late-night San Francisco doesn’t offer much food but Sam taught Andrea this tiny sushi place across from Seven Gables that she later tried to teach Sam about. Andrea and Sam pushed a platter back and forth between them, offering larger and larger sums of money for the other to eat the worst kind, when they slap a piece of cold omelette on top of some rice and hope it will pass for sushi in the land of the blind. They invented a game of making a list of songs with hilarious unintentional parentheses. Their favorites were Tammy Wynette’s “I Wasn’t Meant to Live My Life Alone (with Vince Gill)” and Johnny Cash’s “Where Were You When They Crucified Our Lord (with the Carter Family).”

Boys, like Frank Sinatra they’d had a few. Andrea had a drunk guy named Ben who was an activist after a few beers. He’d call department stores and pretend he was going to stop by for a mink stole that same afternoon, and then suddenly shout “Fur is murder!” and hang up while Andrea and Sam laughed and played the Salad Forks album. The whiskey he took to bringing over didn’t last, either. “I always thought alcoholics would be
fun
,” Andrea said wistfully the night she dumped him and went with Sam to the Tish Brothers show to celebrate. Ben had turned out to be the opposite of fun, and smashed a speaker in his rage on his way out. For a while Andrea and Sam listened only to the Phil Spector box set, which was in mono, but finally they relented and spent the money.

Sam had the houseguest. He’d arrived about the time the Spinanes broke up. He was somebody’s ex-something and ended up staying weeks, and all day long. They’d all play Andrea’s old board games she’d rescued from the divorce and say less and less to one another. For a while, under the spell of a compilation from Don’t You Love Me Records, the houseguest slept in either bedroom while deciding who to sleep with. Andrea and Sam agreed it didn’t matter who he chose. He chose Sam, and so for a while it was like that. Then one night he got tired when Whistledown took forever to start their show because the banjo couldn’t be amplified to their satisfaction. The houseguest was tired. Sam said she’d go on to the Smoke Room where Brad Wooly was rumored to be playing Burt Bacharach covers. She never understood why he was gone when she got home. She never quite got why he wasn’t waiting on the couch with a nature program on television.

The houseguest got married out in the wine country, the week before
Ruins in the Country
arrived at Zodiac Records, and Andrea and Sam were stunningly invited. It was the fanciest envelope that had ever arrived in their apartment, and it was inside another one. Sam wore one of the skirts her mother sent her, but they ditched the wedding early and went back upstairs to the hotel rooms. They took off their shoes halfway down the corridor and carried them along with the bottles of wine the caterers had given them, and walked to their room turning all the
DO NOT

DISTURB
signs over so they read
MAID
,
PLEASE MAKE UP ROOM
. Inside they left bare footprints on the TV screen as they stretched out on the floor and listened to the Asking Prices and the Stone Roses and
Perfect Teeth
and
Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty
. The
hotel room had a tiny, unsatisfying stereo, and Andrea and Sam talked about their vanishing list of friends.

“Well, the other Andrea moved to New York with that guy obsessed with Bob Dylan,” Andrea counted, “and Kate’s never gotten over high school, and Carla Louise drives a cab now I think and so is never free at night or during the daytime. Ed and Dawn are now Dead and Yawn, but what’s-her-name from England we still see at Barrelhopper shows.”

“She’s no friend,” Sam said.

“I wish you’d work that out,” Andrea said. “Clark still works at Zodiac, and Porky’s still over at what’s-it.”

“None of those people are friends,” Sam said. “We don’t even know Porky’s name.”

“It’s Porky,” Andrea said, and took both bottles. “A mouthful of champagne and an extra sip of chianti is my recipe for a rosé cocktail you make right in your mouth. What’s your point?”

It struck Sam, boy not for the first time, that she and Andrea were more like a lesbian couple that had broken up than whatever it was they actually were. Over the years they had developed a layer of sincerity over the irony over the sincerity. It was an irony sandwich, then, which tasted mostly like sincerity, like a cheap, bad sandwich. They grew their hair until it was time to get it cut, and they lived together in yet another apartment with a bathroom floor nothing could get clean. Up went the Elvis Costello poster, the one everybody had. While listening to the Hummingbirds they had seen a hummingbird which they interpreted as a sign, and so together they purchased a hummingbird feeder and together they never put it up, planning to lure hum
mingbirds with abundant charm rather than sugar water. Together they named the hummingbird Hummers but Hummers never appeared again, at least not when they were looking, and together they had managed to get Sam fired from her job for using the office scanner and printer. They had scanned and printed, over and over, a title in parentheses from a Beatles album, in the prim and beautiful original 1960s font: (This Bird Has Flown). They’d printed them out on stickers and ran around their neighborhood, adding them to signs which kept appearing stapled and taped to telephone poles. The signs advertised a lost parakeet. Probably they would not have been caught had they not left Sam’s keys and the bottle of gin and the two bottles of tonic and the lime and the bag of ice and the knife they had used to slice the lime on the receptionist’s desk where they’d been fortifying themselves waiting for the scanner to work. They’d done this together and told no one.

“I thought of someone else,” Andrea said.

“Mike, I thought of him too, and give me the wine,” Sam said. The Dusty Springfield album had reached the particularly sad song, when Dusty says she’s been wrong before. The song called for more wine always.

“Okay, Mike too,” Andrea said, “but I was thinking of the naked woman across the way.”

This woman was not a friend either, but she had friends. What she did not have was curtains, and Andrea and Sam would watch her from across their cheap street. Sometimes the views were disturbingly intimate: the woman’s boyfriend would cook, while the woman would pick lint off her jeans or read the side of
a box of tea, not speaking, or friends would arrive and leave after only an hour, helping her hang framed prints on the wall. But more often the woman was alone and would walk around naked for some reason, neither beautiful enough nor ugly enough to make sense. Andrea and Sam would watch all day and not understand it.

“We’ve never met her,” Sam said, although actually the woman had come to a sidewalk sale and bought a skein of yarn neither Andrea nor Sam could remember owning. “I think we don’t have friends really anymore. It’s like we’re the left-behind canaries from that book our moms used to read us.”

“It wasn’t canaries,” Andrea said. “Something else was left behind.” Andrea’s mom was actually not much for reading to kids. She was more the type of mom who would teach you how to shimmy. “Do you wish you were downstairs in the rented hall, with a husband or whatever they call those boys nowadays? Did you see his uncle stuffing money into a birdcage they set up so people could stuff money into? Wedding after wedding after wedding and then yours—your wedding? Would that make you what they’re now calling happy?”

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Sam said. She tried to grab for a pillow but it was all the way up on the bed so she stuffed nothing over her mouth and nose.

“Then cheer up,” Andrea said, “if you have nothing better to do.” In the months since the release of the Magpies’ first single, “How Good Are You,” San Francisco was rumored to be anticipating a catastrophe, natural or man-made no one knew, debated in the papers in an increasingly spooky tone. Andrea pictured the
two of them living through whatever it would be, or maybe in some desperate race against time, stuck in traffic or on an island with no way to get across, with either Andrea or Sam driving and either Andrea or Sam sick and dying in the passenger seat. Andrea shared these stories before the first sip of anything at all, but it was tougher, in Sam’s opinion, for Andrea and Sam to keep projecting the sense that they were sharp-tongued survivors of a million dangers when in fact nothing much had happened. They’d discovered they’d been at the same show many years ago, when Prince had joined the Bangles onstage for the song “Manic Monday” and a sloppy, ill-rehearsed cover of “Gotta Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” but more and more this seemed like it wasn’t enough. More and more it seemed like less and less. “At least we don’t have Hank Hayride’s problems,” Sam said out loud. This was a joke about someone from Andrea’s high school that Sam hadn’t even met, but someday, San Francisco being small, that would happen and hilarity would likely ensue.

But not today. Today was the morning after the Sinways show, and Andrea and Sam were drinking Belgian beers in the Pour House and playing the entire Cottontails album
How Can You Believe
on the jukebox. In front of them was a loose pile of cash they’d come by through selling the books they didn’t want anymore to Page Through Books. They’d sold
Ivanhoe
and
The Color Purple
. They’d sold
The Magpies: The Ecology and Behaviour of Black-billed and Yellow-billed Magpies
, which was actually a library book, and
Crows over a Wheatfield
and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. They’d sold
The Harvard Dictionary of Music
and
The Red Badge of Courage
and
Beloved
and another copy of
Beloved
. Sam had wanted to sell
Glee Club
and Andrea hadn’t let her, but they’d sold poetry by John Donne and Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop and Stephen Spender and at least four books of advice, and
The English Patient
and
Heaven Is a Place on Earth
, which was quite popular at the time. It seemed maybe only
Lipstick Traces
and
The Forthright Girl
and
Hangover Square
were sitting lonely together on the shelves. “I just drank
Treasure Island
,” Andrea said. “Long John Silver down the hatch.”