Clearly Now, the Rain (2 page)

Thanks, I can really use that,
she says against my shoulder, and her voice warbles from shaky to firm, the timbre of both the hurt girl I want to soothe and the tough screw I already admire. Maybe this is also the first time I really notice the sculpture of her jaw, the curve of her long neck, the near-perfection of her chest (or, as she would say,
how great her tits are
). The first time I inhale deeply of her perfume, the expensive musk that lurks in shirtsleeves and linens, and sometimes, it seems, rides in on a sudden breeze.

I am flying down to school the next day for some reason, so I watch them all pull away, Louis and Jay in our van, Serala in her Honda Accord, which she'd named
Desert
Storm
. A caravan of youth, vanishing.

At the time, the giddiness I felt about Serala was conflated with the giddiness I felt about college, departure, a blank page, an unblemished space in the world and I wasn't given to analyzing it too much. The truth is I didn't like myself too much. I was hungry for childhood to be decisively done because the events of my life didn't fit under the thin skin of a kid anymore. In truth they had not for a long time, beginning with the ugliness of my parents' divorce, which was knotted up in my father's abuse of drugs, alcohol and other affairs, the revelations of which turned my childhood into a kind of false floor in my memory. But in recent years the casual way that violence and betrayals and sorrow cropped up had increased in velocity: the mental illness of my best friend, the suicide of Hugh's popular brother, the betrayal by a girl that I'd loved wildly. From beneath a baseball cap with a keg cup in my hand, devoid of wisdom or perspective, I flailed. The best I could achieve was catharsis by risking my ass writing graffiti on rain-soaked billboards or dropping acid and playing chicken with freight trains. I wanted to deal with life's pain better and I thought that college and all its attendant lessons would instruct me in how to face storms like a man instead of a boy.

Likewise I can say now that Serala was the human manifestation of that. I knew that she had endured rougher trials than me. I saw in her a stoic and mature model, a contrast to my adolescent hunt for catharsis and circular ranting in Louis's ear. I wanted to grow up intentionally as opposed to being costumed in adulthood by events and feeling absurd in the cut of those clothes. I wanted to be perceived like Serala and, like Serala, respected.

I had no idea what the toll was for that kind of a journey.

Two

Minutes after our arrival at Sage Hill College, this time as students, Louis and I sit on “the mounds”—little hills with fake grass—and listen to the president's welcome speech. She is a large woman who smiles too much to be believed. She is wearing a sweat suit. It is one hundred and fourteen degrees.

I'm dressed comfortably because this is a free-flowing community,
she explains, making grandiose gestures with flabby arms.

Louis and I scoot into the shade of a transplanted tree and talk genuinely about fleeing—back to any of the places we found ourselves the season before. But when I glance at my friend—my road partner—his big, sunburned face tilted to the side, trying to make sense of the nonsense they're feeding us from the podium, and I see everything I feel reflected in him, I am equally ready to continue forward. So when the poisoned sunset spreads, when we start to smell weed and hear music, we haul boxes from the van and build high school shrines with tape and curling photos on the cinderblock walls of our dorm rooms.

Although Louis and I are not roommates, he's just down the hall. A gangly, pale kid who will be my roommate wears a look as if he's been blindsided by this relative adulthood. When I drop my jeans and cut the quarter pound of Seattle green off my thigh, I think he might faint. But he recovers.

As the party gears up on our hallway that night, the same hallway on which I met Serala months ago, I hear snippets of chatter:
Hey, dude, do you skate? / No, bro, I don't know what it means, I just thought it would be a cool tattoo / I'm totally gonna take the easiest classes, man
. My anxiety about higher learning begins to drain away but disappointment laces through me, too—it sounds like high school out there. And I have a hard time imagining Serala in this bastion of image and ease, even as I witness her here.

Trying to balance love and concern, Jay betrayed her for the second time that fall by reading her journal. I might have done the same. The ferocity with which she said it to him:
It's my fucking business, don't—just don't.
A mark that might sneak from beneath a sleeve or a bra strap, the acid that would run through his veins as he tried not to ask, tried to believe the half-truths and denials.

So the second time Jay reads her journal, she puts an end to their relationship.

He calls me in desperation one afternoon and I go to him. I find him in his room, the drapes drawn tight, Miles Davis's
Kind of Blue
rocking the stereo. Jay's collapsed on the floor, tears and butts and straying splashes of Jack Daniel's mixing in the ashtray in his lap. The wreckage that I'd anticipated is in the foreground. All of Jay's bright presentation has inverted into a disaster of mucus and tears, all of his plumage knotted in disarray. He uses his fists on raw eyes that won't stop.

And I would see Serala then, too, on one of her midnight campus rambles, the slow way she'd look up when I ran into her, the sleepy smile in the sleepless night. I'd see her vanish from a smoky crowd and return far calmer. I sit down on the ratty carpet and can see her at that very moment, even as Jay cries softly and the clock tower does its five o'clock song: strolling angrily off to her car, or placidly into her dorm, depending on which side of the score she is on.

There is nothing to say to Jay in those moments—I had already learned that much, ironically, from Serala, about wasted words and the moments when language would fail.

I can't do it,
he says, between slugs off the bottle,
I can't fucking pull myself up by my bootstraps this time.
His broad brow and thick lips are contorted. I join him for a drink and start assembling ad hoc wisdom in my head. But he continues.
She's with that motherfucker right now, I know. That motherfucker came in here the other day calling himself my friend and told me he that he wouldn't do this to me—came of his own free fucking will.

Jay hits the bottle, harder than he has yet. The moderate light of an autumn evening comes in muted by curtains and the stir of shadows grows in the corners. I hate Serala then. And it isn't only because she is hurting my friend. It is mostly because I think that she can, and so eventually will, turn her back, that she might not be the person I've been casting her as—and that I don't want to consider.

Samar: I first saw her high in a tree, dancing wildly above a party of a thousand undergraduates. Her legs secured her on a bough, muscular suggestions under a red skirt, dreadlocks whipping against the polluted sky. A security guard pulled her down from her perch and I followed her into the night. She stayed late in my room, chaste but taunting with her eyes, and borrowed a knife with which to walk back to her dorm. She came from a childhood in the meat grinder of Beirut, escaping through Mediterranean islands with her mother, eventually to an upper-middle-class existence in Massachusetts. I was ridiculously smitten; she rose like a phoenix as all the girls of my adolescence turned to ash in my head. Samar was a survivor but not a victim, roughened but not incapacitated by the wrongs of her world. She gave me a place to put all the bitterness that crowded in me. The militancy with which she spoke against imperialism, the indignation that she wielded after seeing powerless people cut down as a child—it tapped directly into my anger, which I still couldn't explain to myself. Even when she tried to image herself as a fasco-feminist, tried to be masculine, gruff, drinking heavy beer, belching and refusing to shave her legs, her sex appeal made me stupid with desire. I lied to myself, I resisted, and I talked my drunken way into other girls' beds. But when Samar put it to me, smoking cigarettes one October day under the brutal sun,
Should we just say we're seeing each other until we say something else?
I rushed in with my heart bared.

Maybe two days after that, Samar and I are finishing a frustrating, passionate tussle in my bed (she is postponing sex for some cryptic reason). The dark is finally complete outside the glass and the sounds of life and party slip under the door: popcorn popping, TVs blaring, the Beastie Boys thumping along. I light a cigarette and see her profile in the brief orange glow.

She kisses me again and says,
I'll be back later—I'm going on the hunt for weed.

Later didn't come before sleep, and later didn't come before dawn. Later came at the end of the next day, when she called me down to the quad and took a deep breath and told me she'd been with Jay. I slammed two doors. And then I went to Serala.

Our first meal alone in California: Denny's on an offshoot of Route 66. A hot Sunday afternoon in late October 1996. She has Coke and coffee and fries; I'm forking some kind of nasty omelet. We discuss poetry, especially the Beats. We discuss Jay, Samar, Serala's new man, Monty, and the emotional incest of our little college. She adds a big breath of carcinogen to the restaurant's stratosphere and cuts her gaze at me. I swallow omelet quickly.

What?

She narrows her eyes and leans closer to me. I didn't know at the time why I saw the flicker of fear along with the hesitation. But her voice shakes when she says,
Eli, I want to let you in
. Then she takes a drag because her throat has caught and surprised her.
I carry so much around.

I have the sense to nod attentively and steal a French fry.

It's not that I need help, you know,
and she looks over my shoulder and takes another drag.
It's just that I think I want you to know me.

I nod again, but that isn't cutting it.

I want to know you,
I add stupidly, but it's true. After a moment of staring, just a hint of vulnerability in her face, she changes the subject.

We climb into her Honda, the absurdly named Desert Storm, and crank the windows down, open the sun roof, light Pall Malls, turn on the radio, and drive like mad, like we are tackling the American road, like we won't stop till Mexico, like this is all we need—even though there are really only three miles between us and campus.

As we pass through the last stoplight she starts fiddling with the radio. She tusks Pall Mall smoke through her nose in frustration at the lack of good choices, her jeweled wrist and fingers close enough to my leg to make me nervous. She finds the opening bars of “I Can See Clearly Now,” and she twists the volume and turns her opaque shades on me and shows her perfect teeth and we say, both at once,
I love this song!

One night in late November, when California has finally given up the ghost of summer, Serala comes to visit my room. Late at night, more often than not, my room was candle-lit, Pearl Jam songs floating out of the speakers, windows open for the Santa Ana gusts. It is her birthday—and Louis's too, incidentally. She has been celebrating by eating very strong ecstasy. She's like mercury, or quicksilver, like the loops of jewelry she will, in later years, take from her neck and wrists each night and pour from one hand to the next like water. I can barely get her properly seated on the bed. She tips sideways and forwards, drops her lit cigarette, giggling and
oopsying
! It's as if only love and innocence remain in her. It's like the first times I got stoned: the hilarity overpowering, the uproarious, childish jokes. Her face is contorted and illuminated with laughter, eyes running, mouth wide, a loss of control that burns through her awareness every few seconds and causes her to clamp a jeweled hand over her face. But then something else gets us going and she is gorgeously wrecked all over again, so far from her cage.

She staggers to the stereo and starts pressing buttons.
Dylan
,
I want to hear Dylan, I want to hear Dylan!
She's like a toddler, demanding her way. I try to explain we'll have to load a Dylan disc, but she isn't hearing it, just trying to work magic with her clumsy fingers, her face lit neon blue from the digital readout, pieces of ash floating free from her cigarette.

Hours later I lay sleepless in my sheets, smiling at the image of her smiling, eyes heavy lidded, half-toppled over, giggling. For her birthday I gave her a stainless steel ashtray, wrapped in purple paper. It gained me a slurry exclamation of joy:
Yay! I love presents!
And that childlike grin breaking again and again around her white teeth.

That was one of two times that she admitted to being happy.

Spring break, 1997, I traveled to the San Joaquin Valley to volunteer for the United Farm Workers' Union. After a week of labor, the call came that my father had fallen eighty feet from a cliff in Costa Rica.

He had been struggling out from underneath the darkness of two failed marriages, a soon-to-be empty nest, and the evil Seattle weather. But really it was severe depression that had sent him off to a foreign land to search. He had been a strong and fair father, an excellent friend to many, a sly but just businessman, and a deeply flawed husband and chooser of mates. He'd struggled with cocaine, alcohol, women, and his weight, but what it all boiled down to was the noose of biochemistry that lay just barely slack around his neck. Those of us who were closest to him—me, my brother Luke, and a couple of friends—had seen his departure for Central America as the first decisive and courageous step he had taken away from the quicksand of his life.

In the Seattle hospital he was Life-Flighted to, the hospital that killed him twice with negligence before resuscitating him, where I had to sweep desks clean of their contents to get the attention of a nurse, my brother and I hardened. Luke had been an imaginary-friend-collecting type of kid, in no small part because such disconnection kept him insulated from the ugliness of two divorces. But over the course of his first adolescent years, he'd morphed into a confident, popular, charming young man. He was, in fact, at the time of dad's fall, living in Barcelona becoming bilingual, experienced in sex and drugs, and absurdly cosmopolitan for fifteen years of age. But he still deferred to me as his big brother, was still my tentative admirer—yet ready for my rote verbal abuse. And he still bore the burden of jester for our family, even in this darkest chapter. His narrow face and chaotic dirty blond hair, his light blue eyes attentively darting—it's all still framed vividly against a background of nurses and tubes and bladders of saline solution. Luke was ready, like a hair trigger, to try to make Dad laugh or, just the same, to join me in the hospital's stairwells to pound steel doors until bruises appeared on our fists.

With angry tenacity on his part, and against all prognoses, my dad survived—shattered and agonized and addicted to narcotics, but walking.

I returned to Sage Hill for the last few weeks of that semester and Serala was the only one who didn't make me feel like a Martian. She did better: she made me feel like everyone else was a Martian. Coming from the savage battle for my father back to a place where people's concerns were as superficial as which beer to buy, or as academic as an armed conflict thousands of miles away, closed me into a very lonely space. I was bitter on behalf of my father, and no one could grasp that—in fact it wasn't permitted. I was supposed to be happy.

While sitting with Serala on the mounds under an orange tree one night, slugging a bottle of wine, the sky richened by a bad day of pollution, I report my dad's precarious climb back into his life.

It's, like, people keep saying to him, whenever he mentions the pain he's in or the struggle to get by, “Oh, you should be so happy you're alive—it's a miracle, you know!”

I'm about to explain further, to say that my dad is sick to death of hearing that shit. That he is grateful to be alive but that's not enough to get him up into his suit of agony each day. But Serala doesn't need me to say more. She makes a face as if the wine were suddenly bad.

God, that's awful. He must be fucking sick of hearing that claptrap—what a selfish thing to say to somebody who's suffering. It's shocking, Eli, sometimes even to me, how people always make things easier on themselves, even when they see someone they love hurting.