Crossroads (24 page)

In the car, she squeezed my hand. “You seem to be all right, honey. He probably did the right thing. You know, I think he cares about you a lot. Maybe more than he's cared about anyone in a long time. Sometimes it's just a matter of timing.”

“We weren't getting along very well. Oh, it's a long story.”

Roxanne nodded compassionately. “It always is.”

Seal Point was fogged in, the way that guy I met at Jennie's the night I met Sean said it always was, so we decided to have a drink in the bar. The bar was crowded and completely engulfed in fog. “What kind of a place is this?” I was incredulous.

“Fog, smog, muggers. Every place has its problems,” Art said philosophically. Then he sang a few bars of “California, Here I Come.”

“It's all timing,” Roxanne said, unaware of her non sequitur.

We ordered Irish coffees, and after finishing one, Art began to sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” He completed
about one measure before Roxanne told him to shut up.

I wanted at least to try to catch a glimpse of the seals, and Roxanne said she'd come with me. Art said, “You're crazy. You aren't going to see any seals out there today.” But he joined us reluctantly. We snapped up our down vests and headed out.

There were only a few other tourists there, climbing around in the fog across mud and stones, disappointed that they could not see the famous, gentle creatures. The truth was we could see nothing, but we heard their distant barking and the ocean as it lapped the shore. At first I climbed, with Roxanne right behind me, Art pulling up the rear, but after a while I climbed down. The incline was muddy and slippery and my feet were unsure as I moved across the boulders, away from them in the fog.

Suddenly I was aware that I stood alone on the rocks with all of America at my back and nothing I could see ahead of me. The seals barked, obscured by the fog, from their place somewhere at sea, not very far away really, but as inaccessible as some promise unspoken, some hope unfulfilled. I felt like the first person to come to the edge of the continent, the first person to comprehend how infinite possibility is shattered by human limitations.

I was lost, utterly lost. Some bad things had happened to me, the way some bad things happen in most people's lives, but at that very moment I had no one but myself to blame. Somewhere behind me I heard Roxanne calling my name, and I did not miss the ring of desperation in her voice. She knew how easy it would be right then for me to slip, to go off the edge, down the embankment. No one would hear me. No one would see me. And life just seemed so incredibly stupid to me as I stood on that precarious point.

Roxanne caught up with me and grabbed my arm, afraid to let go, it seemed. “Hey,” she said, “where've you been?”

“Well, where do you think? I've been right here. Why?”

“Oh, you know, we were just looking for you, that's all. It's kind of creepy out here right now.”

For some reason, I hadn't noticed it was creepy. I was almost beginning to enjoy the fog, to enjoy not being able to see above me or beyond. It was like being in one of those sensory deprivation tanks, where you see dream images shoot through your mind and then a wonderful calm comes over you. It was a womb to me, this fog with the ocean below, and then Roxanne intruded with her hand on my arm. “Come on,” she said, coaxing me. I tried to convince her that I wanted to stand out there by myself for a while, but the girl who'd gotten sick on the winding curves was suddenly very firm with me. “No,” she said, “Art's waiting; let's go.”

When I got back to the hotel, I asked the desk clerk if my husband had phoned. I'm not sure why I felt the need to say husband, but it didn't matter because you couldn't fool this desk clerk. He'd seen this happen a dozen times before. He shook his head without looking up from his copy of
Lui
. But as soon as I walked into the room, the phone rang. “Thank God,” I said.

But it was Roxanne. “You going to be all right?”

“Oh, sure, I'm going to be fine.”

“Honest Injun? You left in a bit of a hurry.”

“I promise I'm going to be fine.”

When I hung up, I knew I wasn't going to be fine. I put on my coat and walked outside. The desk clerk looked up, bored with my comings and goings, sighed, and went back to his magazine as I strolled out into the cold San Francisco night. I walked through Union Square, up the hill, until I stood at the base of the crookedest street in the world. It was a confused, impossible street and I thought how it wasn't good to make people take such tortuous routes. If it wasn't a landmark, it wouldn't be a street at all.

All my life I've wanted order. Straight roads, honest love,
even keel. And yet it's never been that simple when my emotions are involved. I walked on, down to the marina, to the bay, to the spot where Sean and I had watched the graceful seals almost touch but not quite, then disappear into the dark sea. I found a spot on the pier and stared into the black water, or at least what I could see of it through the fog.

Life's banal repetitions were not lost on me. It was to San Francisco that my mother had come in a Greyhound bus over fifteen years ago, when domesticity proved to be less than what she'd thought it would be and she still had thoughts of a world out there, bigger than marriage, bigger than family or sex and its holding powers. But the truth is, if you're moving east to west, which is the way America got discovered by the people who recorded its history, San Francisco is at the end of the line. You can't go any farther, so if you're a pioneer, this is where you stop. As far as landscapes went, for my mother and myself, there was no place left to go.

My mother had once stood more or less on this same spot and we'd both gazed into the waters at the same moment in our lives, and here we'd made our choices. She had returned home, to domesticity, and I was still in the process of deciding. Out of the fog, I glimpsed the Golden Gate Bridge, its cables and towers only partly revealed. At an early age I'd learned that you need tension to connect two points and my father's dream of bridging the Bering Strait was an impossibility. Some bridges, my father taught me long ago, would never be built.

I had to talk to someone. Someone who understood what I wanted. Someone who knew me perhaps better than anyone else. I looked into the bay one more time and knew I didn't want to drown. I wanted to place a phone call.

I went back to the hotel and got the Illinois operator. It took a while, but Zap had a listed phone number in Champaign. This time, well aware of the time difference, I placed a call and to my surprise he answered. “Hi,” I said.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong. I just wanted to say hello.”

“Bullshit.” He didn't sound annoyed.

“How do you know something is wrong?”

” Deborah, is the sky blue? Are you my sister? It's three a.m. I know you're in California. I know something is wrong because we haven't spoken in weeks and because your voice is about to crack.”

So I explained to him that Sean had gone back to L.A., that we'd agreed it was for the best, that I thought it was because he'd found me with Mark that night, among a million other reasons. I told him there was a thick fog all around me and I couldn't see a thing. I told him I thought I'd fallen in love with Sean after all and that life at best was the most fragile of enterprises. “I don't think I'm going to make it.” I was crying now, sobbing into the phone at my brother.

“You're going to make it.”

“How do you know?” I cried.

“Because you called me.”

“I'm lost, I'm alone here, and I don't know how to get out of the fog.”

Zap said there were lots of ways out of the fog and he gave me explicit instructions. He said I should take a cab to the airport first thing in the morning and wait for a plane to New York. Eventually, he assured me, a plane would have to leave. He said I should go home and go back to work.

During the night I vacillated. I wanted to go west, across the fifty-six miles of Bering Strait, back to Russia, the nation of my embittered and persecuted ancestors, back into the land where Anna Karenina, rejected by love and society, had hurled herself onto the tracks of the oncoming train. But I picked another means of transport and took TWA to the East, at my brother's suggestion.

T
HE FIRST MONTH
was terrible. After Mark left me, I'd wake up in the middle of the night, trembling with anger and rage. Shaking as if something had terrified me as I slept. But with Sean it was different. This time I couldn't find the name for what it was I felt. This time I didn't wake, shaking and trembling. This time I slept. I slept long, deep, endless hours of untroubled sleep and woke more exhausted than before. The fatigue perplexed me. I lay in bed for hours like a beached whale and thought how this time I really had only myself to blame. Sometimes I blamed Lila for making me mistrust so deeply, but mostly I blamed myself.

It was Sally who figured out what it was that was making me so tired, that barely let me get through the day, then buried me in bed hours before anyone in Manhattan would ever dream of going to bed. She invited me to dinner one night. “You look like you have permanent jet lag,” she said when she opened the door. Sally made us green tortellini with funghi sauce, salad, and an Italian marinated chicken that was delicious. I could barely lift the fork.

“It's not like the last time,” I mumbled as I tried to eat. “The last time I was furious. Now I'm just sleepy.” It had been more than a month since I got back from California, and I still dragged around. Sally listened to me patiently through dinner and into dessert. She didn't protest when I hardly sampled her gourmet meal.

After dinner she lit one of the two dozen or so Carltons she'd smoke in the course of the evening. She ran her fingers through her frizzy black mop. “You know,” she said after a while, “I felt like that once. After my dad died. It wasn't like anything I'd ever felt before. I was just exhausted. Maybe what you're feeling is grief.”

It was having a word to label what I felt that enabled me to start feeling better. I was feeling a sense of loss as awful and festering as a child feels when it finds its puppy squashed flat as a manhole cover right before its eyes. How do you behave when you've lost something? A pen, your keys, a ring whose value is only sentimental? The first thing you are is disoriented. You look in all directions. Then there's a rush to figure out where you may have left what you've lost. But retracing your steps doesn't help. It's gone, and you have to learn to live without it. Having the word for the emotion that ails you is like having the diagnosis for the disease. Only then can you begin to treat it. Once I understood I was grieving for something I'd lost, I began, slowly, to return to the world.

One Saturday I fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and when I woke, I decided the apartment looked dark, even though it was still daylight. It looked very dark to me. It occurred to me that the apartment had always been dark and that what I needed, what had suddenly become essential to me, was to purchase a new lamp. For five years I had lived in that living room with the same light, but on that dreary afternoon I had to go and buy a lamp.

I put on a rain slicker and headed toward Seventy-second Street. I wasn't thinking about Sean; I was thinking about my
new lamp. The store on Seventy-second Street had lamps that hung from the ceiling like sparklers and fireworks. It had lamps that looked as if they should live at the bottom of the sea. Twisted green tentacles, pink globs floating inside glass. It had regular old lamps, some with little Cupids at the base, some with elephants; a camel wore a lampshade as a hat; a rickshaw driver had a bulb for a head and a lampshade hat. It had regular old desk lamps, Tensors, night lights, Lightoliers, lamps for serious people, lamps for drawing tables, lamps for seduction, Donald Duck lamps, goose lamps, lots of lamps. Over the Muzak, Debbie Boone sang, “You light up my life,” and you could tell from the brainwashed pallor of the salesmen that this was the only song they heard all day.

But I wasn't brainwashed yet. I'd simply entered this world of light, waterfalls of light, animals of light, giant squids of light. “Well, sweetheart, what can I do for you?” a bright-eyed salesman with a round belly asked.

“I want to buy a lamp.”

He chuckled. “You've come to the right place.” He began showing me lamps, but I knew what I wanted and spotted it right away. A five-foot-high Oriental bamboo lamp with a straight, plain shade stood out among all the tentacles and the geese with marked serenity. “I want that one,” I said.

When I handed the salesman my check and driver's license, he looked at me, stunned. “Come on, you can't be over twenty-two. I thought you were handing me your college I.D.”

“I'll never see thirty again.”

“I don't believe it.” He scrutinized me under all that light. “How do you do it? Special diet? Exercise?”

“It's all mental,” I said, pointing to my head.

I walked along Columbus Avenue carrying my lamp. People paused to admire it. I passed the flower man on the corner of Seventieth. “Hey,” he called to me, “can I see that lamp? That's a real beauty. Where'd you get it?” I told him. “In that junky store? You got the best thing in the place.” We talked
for a minute and he told me it was a good time to buy birds of paradise. “They're just coming into season.” I walked a little farther and an old woman, walking her three Yorkies, stopped and said, “What a lovely lamp!”

Everybody likes my lamp, I thought as I brought it into the house. As I dragged out the lamp it was replacing, one of those modern, space-age silver things Mark had picked out, I thought to myself that you don't buy a lamp if the world looks grim. You don't buy a new lamp if you aren't planning on looking around.