All Stories Are Love Stories (6 page)

That was what Gene knew of his father up until the last three months of his life, when a terminal diagnosis inspired Hans to make a series of bizarre phone calls to his son. They hadn't spoken in years, but the sound of his father's voice on the phone struck Gene with a familiarity so acute he was immediately transported to a younger version of himself and their gray-shadowed past. He had thought, perhaps stupidly, that redemption was possible, wasn't it?

But per usual, his father had something completely different in mind: a sort of detached deathbed confessional the likes of which still baffled Gene. In several conversations
during which he learned his father was refusing chemo and allowing only a professional nurse access to his home, he also learned that Hans had been the one to find his brother's body in the pond on the land that was supposed to have gone to them both. And that the evening before Georg drowned, he'd come to his older brother begging for money.

Hans never spoke to what most might expect a dying man to tell his only child: that he loved him—or, if that were overly generous, that he at least regretted that he didn't. Instead, just as other fathers might pass along a treasured keepsake, Hans seemed hell-bent on passing along his worst memories. Gene couldn't figure out if he was the recipient of these urgent confessions because his father felt he could be absolved of them by leaving them with his son, or because he wanted his son to know the pain that had shaped him into the hard shell that he was, rotting from the inside out.

Even so, the telling itself was an undeniable act of trust that Gene couldn't help marveling at. And he did hold on to his father's memories as receptacles for the older man's bitterness, as warnings for himself when his own perfectionism reared its ugly head. He attended the funeral only because he feared no one else would, though he flew in that morning and left on the red-eye, as if his childhood in Kansas were a contagion he was still in danger of catching. Early the next morning, Gene crawled into bed with Franklin, who couldn't sleep either.

Franklin—who had been raised by tolerant Jews, who had already sent both parents to the grave and mourned them genuinely, who could not imagine such coldness between
parents and children, who had once wanted children himself before a young lover with no tears for his own father came into his life—lay awake and listened as Gene wondered aloud why the last words he heard from his father, while seemingly inspired by some desire to depart the world unburdened, were dripping with hostility. How could a man think that speaking his sins aloud was enough, if the words weren't tinged with regret? Had he really been so self-righteous that he couldn't even let go of his own defenses when doing so might have been the only way to find the peace he must have craved? Reading Gene's mind, Franklin ran his finger along his lover's jaw in the dark and promised him that the similarities between father and son ended at their looks, and that it shouldn't surprise Gene in the least that his father, a cruel man, would leave the world with cruel stories. But Gene knew his father wasn't cruel, though he'd done cruel things.

No, he hadn't been a cruel man; he'd been a terrified one.

And what would Gene do, now that he was facing his own terror? Dive under the shield of work? Or come up fighting for himself as well as Franklin? Gene sighed. Only time would tell. At least for now, he could still enjoy the morning's great news and the rest of his day, couldn't he? He
would
leave early, get home before the worst of the traffic, surprise Franklin before he could raise any more objections. He didn't really have to spend the afternoon reviewing his notes for the next day's classes. It was a day of celebrations, after all! He checked his watch—if he left after his last meeting, he could be home by three o'clock. He nodded to himself decisively. It was a plan.

Vashti was wrist deep in dough again, desperate to lose herself in blissful devotion to the four gods of pastry: Flour, Butter, Sugar, and Water, elements in whose purest forms she believed as devoutly as some believe in divine perfection. But her prayers were not being answered. As deeply as she wished to find communion with her simple devotions, she could not be distracted from her anxious heart, the beads of anticipatory sweat collecting on her forehead and lip.

What had she gotten herself into? Somehow she'd helped her sister cajole her into doing the thing she most wanted and most feared. And she'd done it all before lunch, well before the blessed darkness of evening could drift in and help her put it off, maybe even renegotiate in the morning. She'd thought it was a blessing in disguise when Jesse asked her to stay a few extra hours to help manage the holiday rush, but all it had done was give her more time to think.

She tried anew to become absorbed in preparing the next day's croissants. Thank God for the rich reward of pastry, its even demands. She pulled a rectangle of cold butter from the refrigerator and placed it on her freshly rolled dough, standing back to adjust and admire the symmetry of her work. Fourteen ounces of butter: an astounding amount, and just enough. It never failed to give her a little thrill. Reverence
for butter was a job requirement, and one of the first things that helped her stand out from the stylishly aproned young women who could frost a pretty cupcake but whose svelte figures quaked at the undeniable lead role that sheer, unadulterated butter played in the making of French pastry. Svelteness had never been Vashti's problem. Her roundness was as much a part of her as her taste for the things that contributed to it. It might be written on her tombstone:
Here lies Vashti
,
who was not afraid of butter.

Over and back, palms across, wrists twisting, the dance of dough. She began to breathe into it, borrowing the rhythms of its transformation.
Every dough must contain life
, she thought to herself.
It takes a little and it gives a little back
.

How long ago had it been, exactly? She pretended it took some effort to recall that it had been fourteen years and three weeks to the day. Just as he had pretended throughout her marriage that she had made the right choice to leave Max; that she was investing in a better, sturdier love by leaving San Francisco for the expansive shelter of Dale's Sonoma estate; that she could forget what true love really felt and tasted and looked like. But instead of living the sort of inspired life she'd once wished for, she found herself trying to live someone else: Dale's, or the life she and Dale tried to fabricate together. The truth was, and it didn't bother her as much now to admit it as it once had, she'd been acquired, just as Dale had acquired his wealth and his stature and his land and success. It was not a callous acquisition—Dale never acquired anything he didn't want unequivocally—but she walked into the terms of someone else's world when she did, and she knew
it would no longer be hers once he was gone. The ranch and the wealth and the great big house with its wide-open spaces were where she had lived, but they did not belong to her the way San Francisco belonged to her, the way a place echoes of who you are no matter how long you've been away from it. She had loved Sonoma, but it was the sort of love one has for a favorite vacation spot, where everything new and wonderful is held up to everything old and loved. Objectively, Sonoma's lush harvests and violet dusks and bee-and-blossom-choked fields were more beautiful than the city, but Vashti lay awake at night thinking of strange eucalyptus groves and narrow hills and distant sirens and houses with windows larger than their doors. When Dale died, she used part of the money he left her to buy an apartment at the top of Liberty between Noe and Castro and buried the rest of the funds in accounts she never intended to touch. Freed from his world, she returned to hers, happy despite its changes. She secured a job at Sucre thanks to a great deal of luck, her not insignificant talents, and the Culinary Institute of America degree she'd earned in record time after her daughter died and she found herself too shattered to do anything but work.

Dale knew when he married her that she had been in love with another man. In fact, if she hadn't been, she might never have taken him up on his proposal. If she hadn't loved Max so much and hadn't been so desperate to leave him, she might not have been so willing to flee the city and take a chance on marriage with a man she did not know very well but who promised her a new life, stability for the baby she was carrying.

Yet even though Dale had offered love, the sort of steady, protective love she'd probably have been better off with, she hadn't been able to receive it. Her sense of love had been indelibly shaped by the impressions she'd made with Max, and as good as Dale's offer of love was, and as much as she wanted to accept it, it was a poor fit. And not only for her. She knew Dale wanted to believe that love could be managed just like money or property, but Vashti knew it couldn't. She knew after Max, and was only more convinced after the brief, bittersweet joy of their daughter's life. She knew rumors abounded that people made practical choices in love, but she'd never met anyone who had. Love was a disease, not a controlled substance. Though maybe it was a rare disease, at least when children weren't involved. Maybe the degree of unqualified adoration she'd had with Max was doomed to consume everything in its path from the start. Sometimes she wondered if it had ever existed, or if it might have been a trick of the mind or the heart.

She could hear the continual ringing of the bell on the door in the other room, so many insistent lovers coming into the bakery, a daylong line of them demanding sugar and sweetness, their right, their fill of the kind of food that matched the kind of love they either hoped they had or yearned for: an immediate, overwhelming, heady connection.

“Vashti.” Her boss at the door startled her.

She looked up. “I know, I know. I'll leave when this dough is done.”

“I can finish that.” Jesse elbowed in close enough that the good, warm smell of him was even stronger than the bread
dough's. He was wearing a “Kiss Me, I'm Irish” T-shirt and a white apron with hearts on it tied around his waist. Somehow the combination of these two things served only to emphasize his biceps. She stepped chastely to the side.

He smiled at her, his deft hands already taking over. “The offer still stands, you know.”

Vashti nodded. “Actually,” she said, “I have plans. But thanks.”

She read the skepticism on his face, but he was too sweet to speak it aloud. God, was she that obvious? If only she were the type of girl who could play games, who could lure and trap and shift and dodge her way suavely through the pitfalls of love. She plunged her arms up to her elbows in a stream of warm water, washing up for good, letting the water grow hot on her skin, suddenly angry and frustrated with herself. She didn't deserve this, this kind, handsome boss looking away while she lied to his face, shutting out the very person responsible for the wonderful job she'd only imagined she might one day have. She was so good at shunning available men, she might as well throw in the towel now. Go home. Go to bed. Die alone.

“But if they fall through, you'll come, right?”

She turned off the water. Her back was to him, so they couldn't see each other's face. She looked up, sighing at the wall. What was wrong with her? Maybe anyone actually available was the problem, proximity as deal breaker.

“Heck, bring him with you! The more, the merrier.”

She nodded, drying off, then tried to smile at him, tried to express her gratitude at his kindness, his interest in her, his
beauty. “I'll see you tomorrow,” she said a few short minutes later, already in her jacket and heading out the door.

She lifted her hood and strode down the street, racing to catch the 24 bus as she rounded the corner, seeing its doors already open.

“Why if it isn't the Queen of Sweets, the Princess of Sugar!” crowed the driver, a squat man of indeterminate grandfatherly age. She had an ongoing debate with herself as to whether his cheer was real or canned. Today it was real, she decided. Was that a good sign? He smiled at her. “Working late, I see.”

She smiled, handing over the box of pastries she'd tucked under her arm on the way out. “We're busy.”

He opened the bag and inhaled deeply. “Hoo-wah,” he said. “I'll bet you are.”

The bus was too warm, the air damp from the morning's stream of soaking passengers, a mobile furnace making its bright way through the rain. She stared out into the streets. Everywhere she looked, signs of love bombarded her. Down Divisadero and well into the Castro, store windows were filled with everything from winking Burmese rubies to paper castles with a million tiny heart-shaped windows filled with light to copies of
Chicken Soup for the Transitioning Soul
and red dildos with heart-shaped scrotums. She loved that on Valentine's Day in particular, she could look almost anywhere and know she was in San Francisco, its whimsical, unapologetic genius on full display. Even the newscast playing on the bus was almost childlike in its cheerfulness, as a few
of her slightly soaked, slightly irritable fellow passengers watched the screen halfheartedly.

Well, it sure has been a bumpy ride this morning here in San Francisco! Ahead on the KSFA midday news, we'll be taking a look at some recent activity on the San Andreas Fault and bring you up to date on the latest in the BART strikes. Also, Dr. Wyatt will share surprising ways that root vegetables might help protect our kids from a devastating childhood illness, and our own Chuck Lorrie will be visiting us live from the parking lot of the Marina Safeway for the Ninth Annual Love the One You're with Fest. Join us at noon.

Vashti's stop was at Twentieth and Castro, and even though she dashed up Liberty to her apartment at the top of the hill, her feet were soaked and her fingertips freezing by the time she fumbled open the door. Six months of living there had helped her master the order of letting herself in: equal parts jiggling of key and knob, one perfectly timed jab with her hip.

She was out of her dripping clothes almost as soon as she closed the door behind her, in the shower not long after that. The cold and rain had given her a short-lived burst of adrenaline. Vashti rested her head on the tile, letting the steam fill the air and soften her breathing. As much as she'd tried to avoid it, she suddenly realized she'd found herself in a place without distraction. Her apartment was quiet as a tomb. She should get a roommate. If it weren't for Dale's money,
she would never have thought of living in the city without one—or six. If wealth bought you anything, it was the ability to isolate yourself comfortably.

The pipes shuddered and moaned, announcing the imminent loss of hot water. She couldn't put it off any longer.

But what would he say? What would he do?
She shook her head, trying to curtail her growing uneasiness. It was better to avoid questions and answers of any kind than it was to come to the very likely conclusion that he might not want to see her at all, or that he might ask her to leave. Or that maybe he'd be indifferent. Or, worse yet, that maybe he'd try to pretend he was indifferent.

Good God. She was exhausting herself. Javi was right. She had to just go and get it over with.

No matter what, there was the consolation prize of her sister coming home. When had they last been together? At Dale's funeral, of course, ten months ago. If that could be thought of as togetherness. It was really only an emergency, with Javi showing up to make sure Vashti's dams didn't dissolve entirely. Then she was gone, whisked away again by the siren calls of professionalism and a compulsive need to earn and achieve that began long before she'd seen the inside of a courtroom. Vashti traced it back to the maelstrom that followed their mother's death, when their father's intensely silent grief inspired his eldest daughter to try desperately to take her mother's place in the store—running the register, answering the phone, dealing with adults burdened with half her maturity and ten times her arrogance—so professionalism became
both her armor and her crutch, a way to leap around the world and keep her carefully protected heart from prolonged exposure to any one place or person.

“Here,” a ten-year-old Javi whispered into her sister's ear, “try this.” She held out a pail filled, to Vashti's aching delight, with crumbled earth. Like a bear cub, Vashti cupped her hand and reached in, shoveling the welcome filler into her mouth. Only Javi could be trusted with Vashti's compulsion to fill her mouth with dirt, joined as they were in the mystifying, terrifying aftermath of life after their mother's death. They were both doing whatever they could to keep from caving to the pressure of crushing grief, whether that meant Javi's staying awake late into the night with her back against the wall and her sister's head on her lap to avoid the despair of further nightmares, or Vashti's eating dirt. That was, until Javi changed the rules of the game.

Javi smiled over the bucket between them, her eyes winking down and her mouth lifting up. A smile as wonderful and frightening as the man in the moon's.

“You've got to eat something, Vishy,” she explained.

But Vashti just held the strange taste in her mouth, shaking her head, stuck between the desire to swallow the sweet, spicy impostor or spit it out.

Her sister sank down and put both her hands on Vashti's knees, looking up into her face. Their mother had been dead for weeks, and they'd been trying to walk around and eat and live with the gravitational pressure of grief pinning their hearts to their chests. Her death had warped everything, even the natural
order that had been their daily lives. They went to bed on time, but Javi woke in the night if she slept at all, speaking through the tongues of her dreams. They sat before the best meals their father could prepare, but Vashti barely ate, then crept outside afterward and filled her mouth with soil from the garden.