All Stories Are Love Stories (8 page)

Max left his house day after lonely day and hopped on those buses as other kids might hitch rides to something—anything—better, eventually staying on them until they made their way up and through the maze of busy scrubs-clad doctor-ants scurrying around UCSF; through the kaleidoscopic colors of Haight Street, where the nouveau runaways smoked weed on the sidewalks and the sixties had left hippies out in the sun to mummify, limping along in their musty hazes of patchouli and dreadlocks. And still the bus went on, past the Church Street couples too in love with each other to notice a heartsick adolescent staring out at them, past the dog parks with their flirting pups and overcaffeinated owners, past every variety of person using the street as a stage, into the urine-soaked, subterranean tunnels, peaceful and warm beneath Market Street, and then bursting right out of it and into the financial district's throbbing towers of economic preoccupation, stopping on their way to the glittering piers of the Embarcadero to pick up handfuls of freshly minted MBAs on their way to work, most of them too hip to smile.

During the rougher weeks when his mother was working so hard he rarely saw her, he let himself fall apart as he rode, turning his face to the window so no one would see him, though on any given bus in San Francisco, there was usually someone doing something much more alarming than crying. It was comforting to know that, when compared to the average human experience, his misery was unremarkable.

Then, one day, right after junior year began and a new wave of lonesomeness descended on him in the midst of kids who'd been in school together for years, Vashti got on the bus.

The moment he saw the top of her smooth crown of black hair on its way up the stairs, something kicked alive in his heart. Then the rest of her emerged, and it was even better: the mass of liquid black hair framing that huge, slow smile and even huger black-lashed eyes, her too big backpack and coat and the mess she was making dropping things from one or the other as she chatted openheartedly with the bus driver. Clumsy but graceful, enchanting and quirky, these were things he saw in her almost instantly, qualities he would grow to love in her. He reflected now and then on how remarkable it was to know someone who wore her true self on display at all times. Vashti would laugh and say it was just because she'd never had a mother around to teach her how to play by women's rules, and it was true that it made her less popular—she wasn't smartly guarded like the other, more self-conscious girls. Yet that unfiltered openness was what made her so undeniably alluring, in the same way a candid photo captures energy and truth that a posed one cannot.

But, like most boys his age, what Max first noticed was how beautiful she was. And miracle of miracles—she sat beside him. Sat beside him and smiled and looked him in the eye and asked if he was going to Lincoln, too. Which, by some divine providence, he was. She hadn't seen him before, she ventured, had she? Of course she hadn't—or rather, he hadn't seen her. That was probably because he had only gone
there for a few months last spring, he said, and she nodded and said her dad was still driving her to school then. Who knows why, he thought, as an invisible line flew from this girl's heart to his and sank deep and true. She was prattling along, seemingly oblivious of the effect her warm-blooded, sweet-smelling, softly curved presence had on him.

Her dad had insisted on driving her the first week, she was saying, but now she'd be taking the bus. They'd be taking the bus together, she said and smiled, introducing him to the first of a million simple pleasures that could delight her. Was he a junior, too? She'd just turned sixteen that summer, she confessed shyly, and was a little on the young side for their class; but she was sure they could still be friends! She smiled again, leaving him tongue-tied. Was that his trumpet? How long had he been playing? Where did he live? Her laugh was silvery and soft; when he closed his eyes, he imagined ice melting after a relentlessly cold winter. She only ever took her eyes off his to laugh.

Thinking of her, he'd forgotten again that he promised himself he wouldn't.

It was a bad habit, recently rekindled. It would die down again soon enough. It was only those e-mails she'd sent last September—could it have been six months already?—the ones that said she was back in town and hoped he was well. Static and chaste, as miserable as fake food after a lengthy starvation. “Hi, how are you, I hope you're well” e-mails should have secured the seal on the grave that was their relationship, but instead they had him thinking of her anew. Struggling, if he was going to be honest with himself. For the
life of him, he still couldn't figure out why he'd never found a way to neatly write her off, as any normal man would do when a woman left him abruptly right in the middle of love. And with so much at stake. But then, to be left in the middle of something means it's perpetually unfinished.

Max snapped out of it, powering off his computer and racing down the hall to catch the elevator. As he crossed the quiet corridor, the sun shining once again through the windows to the west, he reveled in the satisfaction of knowing the best part of the day was finally here. A few hours of music and children on one of those thrilling winter afternoons that hinted at spring, the kids' voices enchanting in their unfocused way of stretching toward something beautiful, the sound of it soothing something deep inside him that he sometimes forgot was there. He caught the elevator just in time and opened the door at one minute past four, the music drifting in from below.

Rafael at the security desk rolled his eyes in solidarity, sure to have withstood more than his share of bellyaching in the fifteen minutes since he'd buzzed Max with the announcement of the accompanist's (some very distant relation by marriage of Mrs. Levi-Ward's who managed to be both disinterested and judgmental) early arrival and the passing along of the message that Max was running late. “Sorry,” Max said as the harmonies kicked in. Rafael shrugged. “It's nothing.” He rifled through his notes. “You got a few more interesting visitors in the meantime. They're waiting inside, too, get this.” He lifted a piece of paper, squinting at it beneath a narrow desk light. “Friar Schmuck and Sister
Cock-a-Doo-del-Doo,” he said, raising a conspiratorial eyebrow toward Max. “Said you were expecting them? Tried to buzz you, but you didn't pick up.”

“Sister who?

Rafael narrowed his eyes. “They said you were expecting them. Nun? About six feet tall, bright pink hair, a wig? Ring any bells?”

“The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence? But they were supposed to be here tomorrow.” How had he messed that up?

“Here,” Rafael said, turning the paper toward Max, “they signed.” Max peered at the names: Friar Schmuck and Sister Coco. One in tight print, the other in flaring cursive, the acronym SPI and the date beside their names.

“Shit,” he muttered, “I had them down for tomorrow,” he told the waiting Rafael, whose last name he could never remember but who reminded him vividly of a tiny, squawk-prone bird, voluminous in his fierceness. “I must have double-booked.” He grimaced his regret. Rafael took a beat before nodding skeptically in return, still waiting for an explanation for what had seemed like an unacceptable entry into his world, one he didn't quite feel like waiving for Max.

Max couldn't resist. “Never heard of the order?” Rafael returned his gaze blankly. “They're a San Francisco original, Rafael!” he scolded mockingly. He was fond of this pair, an old gay priest and a transgender nun, and was more than ready to go up against the conservatives on his board to make the Masonic their permanent home for Play Fair. Raised as he was with a father whose religion separated him from those he loved, he found an order devoted to safe sex and universal
inclusion nothing short of miraculous. “You must have heard of them!”

“I'm a Catholic.” Rafael frowned, sitting down and turning back to his notes.

Inside the auditorium, Max checked his watch again. Six minutes past four. Shit. She already had the kids in formation and warming up. And now he was going to have to manage two clients as well as her. Oh well. The kids sounded great, and no one had seen him yet.

Max took a seat in the back, using the low light to remain anonymous for a few more minutes and take a breather. The only person near him a small girl slumped into her jacket, as if she were hiding in the dark.
Good idea
, he thought, leaning back and closing his eyes to listen.

When his seat leapt beneath him, he had just begun to drift off.

“He must really be something. Or is it a she?”

Vashti looked up at the waitress squinting down at her. She had small, dark eyes. Her skin was leathery from too much sun and smoke, but her mouth was kind.

“Excuse me?”

She poured more coffee into Vashti's mug. “You've been sitting here all afternoon, hon, nursing that coffee like whiskey. Where I come from, we'd say you're wound up tighter than an eight-day clock.”

“I'm finishing up.”

“Of course you are.” The waitress looked over her shoulder before leaning in. “You want to know something?”

Vashti wasn't sure she did.

“I loved someone like that once.” They regarded each other. “He's dead now.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Doesn't matter.” Her earlobes were empty circles lined with silver.
Did it hurt?
Vashti wondered. Maybe once, but certainly not as much now.

“I loved him the whole time he was alive, when all our friends were having one fling after another and getting married and then getting unmarried.
Why bother
, we used to say to each other”—she shook out a damp cloth and ran it across
the empty table near the window—“
falling in love if you don't like what comes after?
Crazy, huh?” She looked up at Vashti, wanting a response.

“I guess.”

“You
know
, I'd say”—she went back to rubbing the dirt and crumbs off the table and onto the floor—“a romantic streak ain't nothing to be ashamed of, hon. I'd say it's a bigger shame to just go with the flow, you know—go for the upgrade the minute the older model starts to break down.”

Vashti felt her cheeks grow warm, then hot. She scrounged around in her bag for a cash tip and scurried out with a botched thanks. She had been there most of the afternoon, hadn't she, but she was still not ready to leave. She ducked into the Grace gift shop across the hallway, idly drawn to the beautiful crystalline figures in the cases filled with hushed light. She reached out to touch one of them, a sheep or a lamb. Yes, a lamb. She picked it up off the shelf and held it gently in her hand.

If only she hadn't
seen
him before she'd seen him. If only he hadn't looked so familiar. If only seeing him hadn't immediately resurrected the sharp, thrilling kick of anticipation in her gut, brought the feel of him to her hands so that she clenched them now, brought the very smell of him back so that she felt almost stifled by a sense of rightness and desire. She had never been very successful at hiding love, though it seemed so simple to hide an invisible thing.

Before February fourteenth was Max's birthday, it was just another day on which she and Max had a friendship she refused to recognize as love. It had been going on like that for
the better part of the six months they'd known each other, but she had stockpiled reasons like swords to fend off love: she was not ready to date; Max was confusing friendship for a different kind of affection; her father would never allow her to date anyway, much less a boy with no roots. Maybe if Max had been a wealthy Iranian traditionalist who could take her off her father's hands as soon as possible, he might have conceded to Max's attentions. But to date simply because she wanted to? He'd never allow it. What she wanted was rarely a factor in what her father wanted for her.

She was thinking about these things while standing in her kitchen and cracking eggs over a bowl as Max sat across from her on a stool, reading. His hair had grown longer, and he kept pushing it back off his forehead with his long fingers absentmindedly, making it stand on end. The eggs were warm in her hands, as was the butter—she'd left them out overnight, and by the time she and Max got home from school, they were perfect for the soft melding of fat and liquid and sweetness that could be baked into the miracle of cake. No matter how many times she did it, pulling confections from the oven always felt at least a little like drawing rabbits from the empty hole of a hat.

“Are you sure your mom won't miss you?” she asked again.

Max shrugged, not looking up, the sharp bone of his shoulder showing through his T-shirt. “She has to work this afternoon. She's glad I'm not alone, at least.”

She'd been planning the cake for weeks but only worked up the courage to actually ask him over that day. Even though her father left to open Edible Apothecary at 8:15
every morning, he liked to show up unannounced to check on his younger daughter. Yousef Shirah was proprietary about both his daughters, and Vashti suspected that although necessity took Javi into the store at an early age, her father found it to be the only remotely positive result of his wife's death—having his older daughter under his watchful eye whenever she wasn't at school or sleeping. As for Vashti, she was monitored until she was in high school by a hostile great-aunt when her sister or father wasn't around. Then she was trusted to be alone, but only as far as they understood “alone” to mean that her father would drive her to school, have Javi pick her up, and drop by regularly and without warning in the afternoon. Other kid's parents texted; their father appeared.

It was true that even if her mother hadn't died, Vashti might have always made her careful father nervous. But it was so much worse once Nasrin was gone. Yousef found his wife's death to be a punishment, his flourishing daughters a thin salve against the intolerable insult of raising them without a mother. No matter how well they were doing, he firmly believed they would be doing better had she lived. There was more than a little anger in his grief. In their father's worldview, their mother had been penalized for a life in which regular mammograms were forgone for afternoons too beautiful to sacrifice to the doctor, mornings with her daughters in the kitchen, or any of the many other spontaneous joys that called to her, despite the fact that both Vashti's grandmother and great-grandmother had died of breast cancer. Yousef believed that the way his daughters' mother had chosen to lead
her life had resulted directly in her premature death. Vashti supposed he must have tolerated or even loved that spontaneity about her once, but after he lost her to it, his grief was such that he had to shift some of it into blame. Sometimes, when she caught him frowning at something when others were laughing, Vashti thought her father might have blamed her mother simply because she had allowed herself to be so loved. Of course, Javi had been a great comfort—she was dutiful and responsible, like her father—but the daughter most like his dead wife disturbed him so profoundly that Vashti sometimes wondered if he thought she had conjured up the resemblance herself.

For weeks, she had warned herself repeatedly against having Max over, citing the potential of her father's anger if he found out; she tried to talk herself out of it, but she knew that Yousef would use Valentine's Day to have a sale on exotic spices and herbs, and he would stay at the store until the last possible customer had come through. Anyway, she told herself, nothing would happen between her and Max; they were close friends, and nothing more; did everything between a boy and a girl have to be about love?

A breeze came through the window she'd cracked open, carrying the fragrance of any number of newly growing things, February in California after the rains. It was warm, and her nostrils were suddenly full of nothing but flowers and food. And Max. Sitting right there, in the close, quiet space of her kitchen. Every time she neared him, she was sure she smelled the faint, dark sweetness of his flannel shirt; the brassy trumpet smells always on his hands, bitter but
not unpleasant. Earlier she'd smelled it in his hair, too, when he'd leaned over to look at the recipe she'd chosen. She found herself fumbling, suddenly nervous. As he usually did, Max sensed her discomfort and looked up, smiling to make her feel a little less self-conscious, a little more at home. All at once she felt sick and dizzy, unsure of what was coming or if she could stop it.

“What?” Max asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, “nothing.” She began cleaning up the shells of the eggs she'd already cracked, crushing the small, fragile nettles in her hands. Suddenly, she remembered a story her mother had told her once, or maybe Javi, about a girl who had to crush nettles into flax to make woven wings for the ones she loved.

“Do you need help?”

“No,” she said, avoiding his eye. And then he told her about something that happened in school that opened his heart to her and made her laugh and forget she shouldn't walk in. On any given day, for over a year, Max had been there with a million tiny ways of making her want to forget that she was supposed to put up boundaries between herself and him, to keep her own heart's doors locked, even though they threatened to swing on their hinges whenever he came around. His tenderness seemed reckless to her, frequently terrifying in its ease and generosity; he asked Javi questions about her day when she was around, befriending her because he somehow understood that the two sisters came as a pair. He told Vashti that she was beautiful whenever she let her guard down enough to allow him to, and that he loved her in
bright colors and hated the oversize brown puffer jacket that was two sizes two big, the one she wore even when it wasn't all that cold. The only other time she'd had him over, when she was sure he would be just a friend, she'd come in from the bathroom to find him holding up a small, framed picture of her mother that had been hidden behind the huge ones of her father's relatives in Iran, squinting at it as if he could see her even better if he just looked hard enough. He tried her terrible attempts at grapefruit and ginger and salted agave muffins and told her they were terrible; he told her about New York and the forests and about his dad without actually telling her about his dad.
Why?
she often wondered. She needed reasons, it seemed. Because how else could she accept that a lonely, independent boy who'd only ever been loved by his mother was falling for a motherless girl reluctantly chained to her father?

He turned a page, pushing his hair back again, this time leaving a faint ink smudge on his forehead. His skin was pale in winter, with only a few freckles remaining on his cheekbones, and his lips were pale, too. She turned back to her recipe, but she couldn't understand what she read, because amid all the aromatics coming from the magical elixirs of spring and sugar, the scent memory of Max was the one she'd latched on to unwittingly, wanting to inhale it as deeply as she possibly could, sneak even closer to him so it would be stronger, so it would be the only thing she smelled. She reached clumsily for a measuring cup, knocking an egg to the floor. “Oh no,” she cried softly, looking down on it as Max came around to see. “I needed that,” she said, looking into his face.

There was a long silence between them.

Just as it became almost unbearable, he stepped closer to her than he had ever been, and there was that scent. Max.

“It's OK,” he said softly. “I don't need a cake.”

She watched herself reach for his fingers as if from a distance, but the moment she pressed her palm to his she was instantly, acutely aware that something she hadn't known she'd wanted was finally there. His lips on hers made short work of sealing the thing between them that had been awkward lately, smoothing it over, bringing her home, closer to him. Love, Vashti found herself realizing, wasn't some kind of mysterious merging of forbidden, adult desires amid the negotiation of locked cages. It was innocent, breakable, and essential.

The lamb in her palm fell onto its side. She righted it. It was a nice little thing. She could buy it for him. Buy it for him and give it to him for his birthday. It was, she figured, as good a place to start as any.

The clerk was eyeing her. She nodded, assuring him she was ready to buy. But as she took a step forward, she stumbled.

The second it happened, she knew what was coming. The clerk did, too, jerking his head up, instantly on full alert. They locked eyes with an urgency that had nothing to do with anything that had come before, but there was nothing to be done, nothing to do or say or think or feel but pure, undiluted fear. Then, with another sickening lurch, the ground beneath them began to convulse violently, and the rows upon rows of Marys and Jesuses and saints in their glass cases came crashing down over their heads.