Double Take (13 page)

1975

You can tell it's going to be Christmas soon. Nicky has stopped playing Mikis Theodorakis and has put on a tape loop of carols. The carols must have been taped off a record, and right in the middle of “Joy to the World,” the record starts to skip, so every forty-five minutes you hear it go, “Joy, joy, joy, joy, joy.”

Someone has draped fake holly and ivy all over the walls of Diana's Grotto. Cardboard Santas dangle from every light fixture. A white artificial Christmas tree sits in the window covered with flashing lights. Everyone is full of Christmas cheer.

I haven't seen Joey in weeks, not since that last night in Bert's. I've told my mother she can wallpaper my room. She is overjoyed. She likes wallpaper better than paint because it changes the wall more completely, and she is only too ready to paper over my mural. It is a representation of how she had nothing to do with my life, how she could never do anything for me but cook me food I liked. Recently I confessed to her that I throw up all the time, and she made me go to a specialist at the university hospital. After a series of very unpleasant X-rays, he told her it was all in my head (he never addressed any remarks directly to me) and was called bulimia. Now I know what my mother is thinking: the one thing I can do is feed her, and she rejects it. How like her, she thinks, not knowing I hear her thoughts.

It's been weeks since I was in a bar. I come straight home from work every night and watch TV with the dog, who puts his head on my lap and drools. I watch a show about police cadets called
The Rookies
, and I think maybe that's what I should do, join
the police force, like Joey, but then I think no, blue is not my color. That's as close as I get to a career plan. I can't think about the future at all. I am being here now.

Emily is moving. She has decided to go to law school. She will begin taking classes in January and will enroll officially in the fall. She will combine her law degree with an M.B.A. and something to do with systems analysis. This is clearly a very practical course of action.

That's what I need, I think, a system. I decide to try to regulate my life. I leave for work at the exact same time every day, I eat the same thing for breakfast (a strawberry Pop Tart), and I am even more consistent about throwing up. I pretend I am a new planet and that this is my orbit, circumscribed, no choices to make, whirling around the sun the same old way forever, or at least until the universe explodes.

For several weeks now, I have been working on a letter to Michael. It's been months since I heard from him, or rather, since I threw out all his letters, unopened. So far I've got the words “Dear Michael” at the top of the page, and then, under that, “Dear Michael, dear Michael, dear Michael.”

Work has been boring lately. The only excitement was last week when Saida, the waitress from Tunisia, my only real friend at Diana's, had a big fight with Nicky and quit. The fight was because she had dropped an entire cheesecake on the floor, face down, and Nicky wanted her to pick it up, scrape it off, and put it back on the shelf as if nothing had happened. She refused. He insisted. She refused again. He started screaming at her and she screamed back, he in Greek, she in French. The one thing I understood was that she was going back to Tunisia where men weren't pigs. I recognized that word,
cochon
. I imagined Saida as Odysseus, me as Circe, and everyone else in Diana's as swine. It was easier with some people than with others.

The most regular aspect of my life is when Oscar comes into Diana's. He arrives every day at exactly 4 o'clock and spends fifteen minutes looking at a menu, even though he knows by heart every single thing that's on it, and he knows what he's going to order. But he reads that menu thoroughly, as if somewhere between the shish kabob and the B.L.T. is some special message for him that will unravel the secrets of the universe. His cat has died, and his face is even more mournful than before. He looks like Droopy, that cartoon dog; his cheeks hang down like they are trying to pull him into the ground. But when he sees me, he smiles and says, “What flavor is it today?” and I say, “Strawberry-banana,” and he gets a look on his face of inner peace and harmony, of someone who has reached nirvana, and says, “Baby, get me some Jell-O, will you, please?” And I say, “Jell-O?” like I'm surprised, like I didn't know that all along there was only one thing on this menu for him, like I thought he had actually made a decision, utilizing all the forces at his disposal, as if his free will swirled around both of us like a sandstorm and then died down, leaving everything utterly clear.

Nicky has been giving me the counter every day when Tee leaves early to go to her night job because he knows I hate it. When I take over, all of Tee's regular customers, mostly cops, are still sitting there drinking coffee. Then they leave and a bunch of new cops come in, changing shifts or something. Neither group leaves me more than a dime here and there, though they drink gallons of coffee. I am startled one day when one of them says, “Hey there, Cookie.” At first I think he is someone I know from
Casa, but then I remember that night I almost got a ticket for running a red light. It seems like a million years ago.

I wipe the counter with a rag that smells like mildew and sour milk. The counter looks cleaner, but the smell just spreads across it.

It's Christmas Eve. For the second time since I moved back here, I am cleaning my room. Not just pushing dust aside, but clearing everything out so my mother can wallpaper. I've put all my records in boxes and carried them into the attic. I've dismantled my stereo and stuck it in the closet. I've ripped down all my old posters—Bob Dylan on a motorcycle, Hendrix at Woodstock, a big peace sign. I've taken my books from college to Powell's on 57th Street and sold them. The guy there gave me eleven dollars and fifty-three cents. Honey, I am smokin'.

I am sorting through a big black box that belonged to my mother when she was a child. At least she claims she was once a child, but I've never believed her. She seems too sure of herself, and too old. (My parents were old when they had me. They were both married before to people they won't discuss.) She claims it was her toy box, and that every time she opened it the lid came down and hit her in the head. She says she's lucky she wasn't decapitated, as people often have been by toy boxes, and I am lucky too, because if she had been decapitated I would never have been born. She seems to expect me to say something thankful, so I do. This dangerous box has always appealed to me and I've kept special things in it—letters, drawings, tarot cards, hash pipes. Now I want to empty it and throw everything away.

In the box I find a pile of sketchbooks. In high school I was one of those kids who walked around drawing. I leaf through one. The first page has a charcoal sketch of 57th Street, an ordinary-looking row of storefronts with plate glass windows. The old drugstore, the kind with a soda fountain that served Green River sodas, and next to it, of
course, Casa. I have drawn the face of an old woman in the window of the Christian Science Reading Room. In front of the stores are shadowy figures. I rip this page out of the sketchbook, roll it into a ball, and toss it into the corner of my bedroom, where a huge pile of trash is already strewn.

On the next page is a sketch of Bando. I find a whole series of them, though
they're not good likenesses. There's Bando looking serious, as usual. There's Bando looking annoyed. There's Bando saying, will you put that goddamn sketchbook away? For a moment I consider keeping them all; I have a sudden primitive belief that I have captured his soul in them. But I don't believe in souls, because if they existed there would be an afterlife, and if there were an afterlife Bando would have come back and told me—what? That someone murdered him? What did I want him to say? That it wasn't my fault he had died, not my fault, not my fault. I throw out the sketchbooks.

Further down I find a shoebox of newspaper clippings of people I used to know: someone after his long hair was shaved off by the police when they pulled him over for speeding downstate; someone inserting a daisy in the muzzle of a gun at a demonstration; a row of picketers outside the Museum of Science and Industry protesting an exhibit that allowed people to strafe miniature Vietnamese villages. I toss the shoebox in the trash heap and move on to another full of old letters: from Emily when she went to France; from Bando while I was at college; from Michael during our summers apart. I throw the letters out without looking at them. Eliminate the middleman.

I've discarded everything in the box and my room is nearly empty. I have bagged all the trash and carried it out to the side of the house. I sit in my bedroom window looking out at the street. It's dark, and my parents should be home soon. Right now
they're gearing up for their annual fight about what to do for Christmas Eve. Because my mother is Jewish and my father Catholic, this is always a problem, though both of them ostensibly gave up their religions to have me. Not a smart trade, I think, but then my parents are devoid of business sense. Every year on Christmas Eve my father sinks onto the couch, picks up his martini, and sighs. What's wrong, my mother demands. She is a member of the Emotion Police. Nothing, my father says. I know what it is, my mother says, you wish we had a Christmas tree. You wish I'd make you a little piece of ham for dinner. Christmas Day, he snarls, Christmas Day is when we'd have the ham. So go, my mother says in her very reasonable voice, a voice I fear, go to the Co-op and buy a tree and a nice piece of ham. They're still open, I don't mind. No, no, my father says in a voice strangling with martyrdom, the voice of someone who is secretly desperate for a hunk of pink pig, some overcooked vegetables, and two kinds of pie.

This is my cue to sail in and insist we go eat Chinese, and every year, we do. Resolving this argument is probably the only generous thing I have ever done for my parents, besides staying out of their way.

I am watching out the window for their cars. I notice the Volvo parked in front—my mother must have ridden to work with my father. I am working up a craving for egg foo yung when the phone rings.

“Nothing's wrong,” my mother says for some reason, maybe in response to my tone. “Your father and I are going to a cocktail party and we'll be home about nine. Can you fix yourself something to eat, sweetheart? There are plenty of leftovers in the fridge. Okay?”

“Of course it's okay,” I say. “It's okay, it's all right, go, have a good time, I'll be fine.” I sound like my grandmother, complete with Yiddish inflection.

“Merry Christmas,” my mother says, hanging up.

I go back to cleaning.

The vacuum cleaner exudes that comforting smell of dusty childhood. I inhale it. I push the flat head of its hose across the floor and it sucks up all the pieces of me I have dropped. When I extend it under the bed I hear something stick. The vacuum cleaner makes the sound of someone unable to breath. I prepare to perform a rescue but I don't need to. It's another letter from Michael, one I have somehow missed. I throw it on the floor and stare at the return address: Davis, California. If I look a little closer, I can see the postmark: mid-October. The last letter he sent me before giving up.

I examine it carefully, turning it over, running my hands along the smooth paper, and find myself wondering how I have managed to discard so much. I conclude that a person's desire not to know something can be so powerful that it overwhelms the desire to seek information in order to process reality. The parts of my brain where Michael had been were now hazy white spaces, translucent like the glass in bathroom windows, and throwing out his letters had been like dropping them into this blankness and losing them forever. I stare at his handwriting on the envelope. He obviously wrote with a calligraphy pen, and his letters loop slightly to the left, hopeful and sweet. I throw the letter back under the bed without opening it and head downstairs. In the front room, I notice my mother's car keys lying on the table in a pile of old mail. I go to the hall closet and get out my new winter coat—not exactly new, my mother bought it for me in a thrift shop in
the suburbs, where the best thrift shops are. It's a presentable garment, the kind someone would wear if they had a good job and were planning to stay here forever. When I put it on I feel like I'm suffocating, but my mother says it looks nice. As I open the door to her car, I glance up at the house and notice I have left the light on in my bedroom. Through the window I see the top part of my mural. I drive away.

There were nine things I loved about Michael:

1. In our art classes, while I made big messes on canvases and it was clear I would never be anything but a bad muralist, his paintings were full of penetrating color that seeped into me and stayed there.

2. In his face, a face so familiar I could hardly see it, I saw those colors. His paintings were filled with heat and light; everything about him was.

3. He would ensnare total strangers into conversations about helium or plate tectonics, then disappear while they were still talking.

4. He brought me coffee in bed.

5. He liked to drive around L.A. finding offbeat places—the Shakespeare Bridge, the Bradbury Building, the Neutra houses, the bumper cars on Hollywood Boulevard.

6. He cooked by combining random ingredients that tasted delicious.

7. He dressed like a tropical bird.

8. Every moment with him was a surprise.

9. Although he knew everything about me, had seen me pick my nose and even pee, he loved me.

I am not thinking about these nine things.

Bert's hasn't changed much in the weeks I've been away. The same bartender hands me an Old Style without asking what I want. The usual Christmas decorations are draped across the bottles behind him—some tinsel, a row of lights, a strand of that green stuff that looks like pine. I carry my beer into the middle room and sit at the bar, where Christmas lights wink on and off. No one is in this room, and come to think of it, the front room was awfully quiet too. Then I realize that of course, the students are gone, they're all back in Iowa trying to talk to their farmer parents about Keynesian economics. Only people who really live here are in Bert's, and we have absolutely nothing better to do.

I'm already on my fifth Old Style when someone I know comes in. Chad. Oh goodie, I think, it would be Chad, wouldn't it.

“Hey,” he says, sliding onto the stool next to me in a way that is probably meant to look suave. “Hey, Harry,” he says to the bartender, whose name I have never known. “The usual.” Then he turns to me and says, “What are you up to?”

“I'm trying to pick up some sailors,” I say.

“Good luck with that.” He takes a big sip of some toxic-looking beverage. “Hey, you'll never guess who I ran into the other day. Well, speak of the devil.” He looks past me toward the doorway.

I turn and see a tall blond guy in a heavy winter coat. It's Sebastian. I shriek his name, rush over, and throw my arms around him. The room spins as I hug him. Then I realize he's not hugging back. I gaze into his face.

“Hello, Cookie.” He sounds tired.

“Is it really you?” I can't stop staring at him.

“Yeah, it's me.”

“When did you get here?”

“You saw me, I just walked in the door.”

“I mean when did you get back in town?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“And you didn't call me?”

He doesn't answer. He sits down at the bar next to Chad and orders a bourbon and water. The bartender brings it. “I didn't really want to see you,” Sebastian says, not looking at me.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Excuse me, folks,” Chad says, standing up. “I have to go to the can.” He winks at me.

I'm pushing down something welling up in me, like vomit but more sickening. In a civil tone that reminds me scarily of my mother's, I say, “So where have you been all these years?”

“Wyoming.”

“I see. A man of few words. Let's see, where in Wyoming do I think you've been? Cheyenne? Cody? Laramie?”

“Jackson Hole.”

“How interesting. Let me guess—are you a spy? An accountant? A doctor? No, you haven't been gone long enough to become a doctor.”

“I've been doing some plumbing. When I first got there,” he says, warming to the conversation a tad, “I didn't know what to do with myself so I took a course.”

“Didn't want to be a drug dealer like your best friend?”

“No hard feelings,” he says in a slightly kinder voice, “but I don't want to talk to you.”

“I was here first, but I'll leave if you'll just tell me why.”

“Come on, you know why.”

“I have no idea.”

“Cookie, you strung him along for years, then you left him here, he starts doing heroin, then he starts dealing, then he fucking commits suicide and I have to tell you why? Grow up, for God's sake.”

“Fuck you, Sebastian,” I say in the quiet, reasonable tone. “I was his friend. Like you were. I loved him like you did. And he didn't commit suicide. Someone murdered him.”

“Riiiight,” he says in his old drawl as I walk away.

As I run down the street toward my mother's car, fat blobs of snow spin in the air. I'm putting the car key in the lock when I hear the crunch of footsteps behind me. I ball my fist with the key sticking out, like a brass knuckle, and whip around, and am about to gouge out the eyes of whoever is approaching me, but it's Joey.

“Long time no see,” he says, smiling.

I throw myself into his arms. We stand in the whirling snow, hugging. I seem to be doing a lot of hugging tonight, but this is going better than the last one. I lift my face from his shoulder and say, “Merry Christmas,” and then I kiss him. His lips are soft and tasty like he's been chewing Juicyfruit gum. He starts to run his tongue across my teeth but I break away from him. I notice I have messed up his hair.

“Merry Christmas,” he says. I jump in the car and drive away.