The Girls From Corona Del Mar (5 page)

He took the bottle from her and set it on a rack, then turned to the salad guy: “I’m going to go outside and have a cigarette. I’ll be back in five.”

Outside, even the summer heat was a relief from the temperature of the kitchen, and Jim dusted off a cobwebby milk crate for Lorrie Ann to sit on while he smoked.

“You really are glowing, you know. They always say pregnant women glow, but some of them don’t. Some of them get all pimply and nasty.”

These compliments made Lorrie Ann shy, and she dipped her head as she laughed. Once, Jim had told her she had such pretty eyes and that they reminded him of Dentyne gum, “like if I chewed on them, they’d be minty.” She found his lack of guile charming. “It makes the compliments mean more,” she told me, “because he must really mean them.”

“But,” I had objected, “he’s imagining eating your eyeballs.”

“So?” she asked.

There was a silence between them then, both awkward and intimate. Lorrie Ann half wanted it to go on forever. She liked not having to talk. Sometimes her favorite thing was just to meet Jim after he got off work at eleven and lie on his futon with him, watching TV. Food Network, mostly, and sometimes Animal Planet. There they could just rest next to each other, two tiny worlds, separate but at peace.

“I don’t mean to be trying to sweet-talk you,” Jim said finally. “I really want you to go to Berkeley. I’ll move, you know. If you want to just defer a year. Or you could apply to UCI. We’ll make it work.”

Lorrie Ann searched his face for any sign that he did not mean what he said. “My mom says that having kids is like getting a double helping of gravity,” she said. “Twice as hard to move, twice as hard to get things done.”

“I like your mom,” Jim said. He did. Dana and he got along famously. It almost pained Lorrie Ann that Jim had done everything so right. Didn’t he deserve to get what he wanted? Didn’t he deserve to be happy? And he said his happiness would be in marrying her. This made the equation in her mind awfully unbalanced. On the one side of it was the life of an unborn child, Jim’s happiness, and doing the right thing, and then on the other side of it was drinking coffee in San Francisco and driving up those scary streets so steep it seemed like your car was on a roller-coaster track. She had pictures of herself in the city: all the things she would do there, the person she would grow up to be. A life of bookstores
and cut flowers and tiny glass bottles arranged on window frames and trolley cars and everything she wanted.

“I love you,” Lorrie Ann lied. (Was it a lie? I never knew, exactly. I couldn’t understand her love for Jim and so I made my peace with Lor’s decisions by assuming her feelings for him were either feigned or a delusion, but perhaps they were not. Perhaps she loved him with the same animal part of herself that couldn’t let that baby go.)

“I love you too,” Jim said, “but you know that. Lorrie Ann, let’s be honest. You could probably find a guy ten times better than me. But you won’t ever find one who loves you as much as I love you.”

And that was what clinched it. It was like a branch snapping inside of her, or so I must imagine. It must have been unavoidable, an almost physical fact, her decision. It must have been nonrational, or else I can never forgive her. How could it be that I wanted those scary narrow streets and books and coffee shops for her so much more than she wanted them for herself? But she stood up, and she grabbed him, squeezed him in his sweaty chef’s coat in a tight hug. “Yes,” she said into his apron.

“Yes? Like yes-yes?” Jim said.

“Yes,” Lorrie Ann said. And then Jim reached his arms around her and squeezed her so that she was lifted off the ground, and he began jumping up and down with her pinioned to the front of him, screaming and whooping and hollering. He let her go and opened the kitchen door and yelled at the salad boy: “The most beautiful girl in the world has agreed to marry me!”

The salad boy came toward them, stuck his head out of the doorway. “You really did?” he asked Lorrie Ann.

She nodded, blushing.

“Well, shit,” he said.

“Can you believe this?” Jim asked him, gripping the salad boy by the shoulders.

“You’re one lucky fucker,” the salad boy said.

“I am,” Jim said, crushing the salad boy to his chest. “I’m the luckiest fucker in the world.”

——

It was a bit rushed, since Lorrie Ann wanted to get married before she was really showing, but they managed to put together a pretty good party at the community center, where the surviving members of Sons of Eden played one last reunion show, and everyone brought potluck, and Lorrie Ann looked so beautiful that for a while there it seemed like maybe she had been right, and maybe there was something in Jim that no one else could see, and maybe everything was going to be wonderful. It was impossible to imagine bad things happening to Lorrie Ann. There was just something about her. I remember at the reception, egged on by Jim and the bassist of Sons of Eden, she sang an old Kitty Wells number, “If Teardrops Were Pennies.” I shivered to hear her voice, a slender silver thread of sound in the heavy dusk of that California August, but as time kept unspooling and the years passed, I wondered if somehow Lorrie Ann had sung her own curse, had prophesied all that was to come.

In Istanbul with Franklin, when I was translating the Sumerian myth of Inanna, I would think of my old friend.

Inanna sings:

Inanna sings on and on about the different
me
, a Sumerian concept that has no direct English correlative, but can best be described as a mode of being. While her father was drunk, she tricked him into giving her everything, all the
me:
the art of the woodworker, the art of the metalsmith.
He gives her the art of travel and the art of the secure dwelling place. The art of kindness and of deceit. It was this that reminded me of Lorrie Ann. The girl had all the
me
, had been given herself as a gift, so that everything she did was absolutely hers and hers alone.

But I also wondered what happens to the songs we sing, even after we are done singing them.

Which is not to say that I approved of her marriage to Jim. I never did, and in all of her wedding pictures my eyes are like black, smoldering coals. I was so angry that at the reception I got horribly drunk and brutally fucked a boy named Garrett in his car, riding him in the backseat, my hand clamped over his nose and mouth, pushing his face to the side and smashing it into the upholstery so that he couldn’t look at me.

The thing was: I was supposed to go to Berkeley too. That had been the plan, for both of us to get into Berkeley and move to San Francisco together. But I hadn’t gotten in.

I had procrastinated. It is impossible as an adult to even reconstruct the kind of magical thinking that seventeen-year-olds are capable of, but somehow I left my essays for both Berkeley and Yale for the last night before the deadline. I had sent in nothing applications to UCI, Santa Cruz, and UCSD earlier in the week. Maybe their deadlines were earlier; I don’t know. But I remember very specifically that I had one night to write the Yale and Berkeley essays, the two that were most important to me. (I had told no one I was applying to Yale, no one except the school guidance counselor, who told me I was wasting my time.)

I waited until everyone was asleep, and then I snuck out to the patio with my mother’s pack of Camels and a glass of red wine, and I spent the next nine hours writing my Yale essay. I told them about the horrors of French Club, and the letters in sports, and the As, and the AP classes, and I told them that I had done all of this not because I wanted to make money or have a good career, but because I was sure that there must be, somewhere in the world, a place that I belonged, somewhere where I
wouldn’t feel like I was hiding behind the mask of my face, somewhere where my mind could stretch out instead of being shunted back inside me by the trick sliding doors of multiple-choice tests, somewhere where I could find peers, where our ideas could come out of us and form a kind of glowing golden mesh between us of shared mental energy, just like in Plato’s dialogues, somewhere where what I was would not be a problem for anyone, where I wouldn’t be a “smart-ass,” or a “smart mouth,” or a “smart aleck,” but just fucking smart.

In the morning, I cobbled together something to send in to Berkeley, something that, evidently, wasn’t good enough.

Maybe if I had been going to Berkeley with her, Lorrie Ann would have chosen differently: Berkeley would have seemed more real, had a stronger gravitational pull. Or maybe it was the shock of hearing I was going to Yale, the betrayal, that kept her from going. I still remember the afternoon I told her, breathless, having run all the way to her house and then straight up those wooden steps and into the circle of gnomes, the admissions letter clenched in my hand. I had profoundly misunderstood how hurt Lorrie Ann would be that I had kept a secret from her, and such an important one. The look on her face when I told her gave me the sudden jolt of stepping off a curb without meaning to. But applying to Yale had been as private for me as masturbating. In a weird way, it had never occurred to me to tell Lorrie Ann at all. But I was leaving her. Was it insane to think that my betrayal was at least part of what made her think it was such a good idea to partner up with Jim?

CHAPTER FOUR

At Yale, I began to drift away from her. Part of it was my inevitable involvement in the life of the college: I made friends; I started dating; I fell in love with translating Latin and Greek. (The elegantly playful way that Horace used the ablative case, the garish ugliness of Greek contrasted with the gorgeous things it said, as though butterflies were hidden in monstrous stone gargoyles!) Everything at Yale was so wonderful that I felt a perpetual impostor. It seemed sometimes that I was the only one who had routinely shoplifted from Victoria’s Secret in youth and who knew all of the words to every song by Sublime.

But part of why we drifted apart was that talking to Lorrie Ann about her pregnancy and her life depressed me. Perhaps it was my own abortion that annexed any feelings of excitement that I might have had on her behalf. Perhaps it was that I felt, but could not say to her, that she had made a mistake, that she should have gone to San Francisco, just as I had gone to New Haven. Perhaps it was just that every phone call confirmed for me that Lorrie Ann was good and I was bad. I spent my days lazing in a boy’s dorm room, eating microwave waffles and a can of frosting, trying to invent new sexual positions and discussing Catullus, while Lorrie Ann spent her days researching strollers and agonizing over which car seat to ask her mother to buy. I was growing tired of being bad and bored with her for being good. So this was what it was like to grow apart, I thought.

But when she called to tell me the baby had been born, I understood that we had not been growing apart but had only been becoming more
equal and opposite, and through our symmetry had been becoming even more deeply connected. The baby, a boy they named Zachary, had been born blue. The birth had been bad. An emergency C-section. There would be a brain scan, but not until tomorrow or the next day, when the baby was more stable. She told me these things and then neither of us could speak and the phone was filled with the staticky hiss of Lorrie Ann’s jagged breathing and my own high-pitched hyperventilation. Something in the universe was flawed and great masses were careening through space unchecked. I wanted so badly to keep this from happening to her, but it had already happened. It had already happened and nothing could undo it. “I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said, though I had no idea how, how I would afford a plane ticket, what I would say to my professors. I had not even come home for Christmas, that’s how broke I was.

“Okay,” she said.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I repeated.

“I believe you,” she said. “You’ll be here tomorrow.”

As it turned out, I was able to buy a standby ticket on Delta with a combination of cash and a newly activated credit card, and I was indeed by Lorrie Ann’s hospital bed the following afternoon. I had written all my professors a strange, overly intimate account of why I would be absent from their classes for the next two weeks and asked for mercy. What I had not done was do laundry, and so my suitcase was filled with dirty clothes, and somehow I could smell them even through the duffel bag in the antiseptic clean of her hospital room.

When I got there, she was asleep. There was no baby, no Jim, no Dana: just Lor, alone in her hospital bed. I had come with a pathetic bouquet of daisies I bought at the airport, forgetting entirely that I would be able to buy flowers at the hospital. Lor looked weirdly swollen. Her cheeks were chubby, her chin softly doubled, her lips so swollen the bottom one had a split in it. There were yellow circles under
her eyes. Her hair was lank and greasy. Why hadn’t anyone washed her hair? She was wearing a hospital gown that was, I was astounded to see, flecked with blood. Why had no one brought her a nightgown of her own? Or at least insisted on a clean hospital gown? I found a spare water pitcher in the nightstand by her bed, filled it with water, and did my best to fluff the ragged daisies. There were no other flowers in the room. When I saw Jim, I would deck him.