Don't Cry: Stories (13 page)

“She means we look like hell,” said my father when I told him what my “friend” had said.

"She meant you don’t look like you’ve had a face-lift,” I replied.

“I would if I could afford it.”

I repeated that to Dani, with laughter and love in my voice. We love our parents, our stories said to each other. We are people who can love. At thirty-three, I used my parents to explain me—to make me something more real than the outline of a woman drawn in the polluted air of a bar by the most casual of fingers. The thought makes me sad and a little ashamed, and yet our confidences were not entirely false. Standing on the street fifteen years later, we still felt the silken warmth of our stories breathing between us, a live tissue of affectionate trust that appears to give us shelter each time we meet.

The light changed, but instead of crossing the street toward my destination, I went the other way with Dani, as if she had led me, even though she hadn’t. I asked about her latest girlfriend, a poet as fashionable as Dani’s orange hip-hugging jeans. “Yasmin is in L.A. for the month,” she said, and paused while we recognized an actress striding toward us on starved, stick legs, a little black poodle with a beautiful red tongue peering haplessly from the tensile cave of her bosom. “She’s teaching a poetry workshop,” added Dani. “And how is David?”

A grainy smell of gas rose off a torpid snake of traffic and snakily wound through the scent of damp bark and leaves. A taxi driver with his arm out the window beat out a song on his section of snake. Already it had formed, our invisible shelter, its walls hung with living pictures.

“So,” said Dani lightly, “are we going somewhere?”

And of course we are: down the hall and to the right, past the picture of Dani in her office, talking on the telephone to her father; he is in San Francisco and wants to see Tosca with her. Dani is wearing black-and-white-checked stretch pants and bright red lipstick, and her glossy hair is flush against her wide cheekbones. “Okay, Daddy,” she says, and her voice is softer and more seductive than it ever was with me.

We walk down the street in San Francisco, holding hands; a creamy-skinned young girl with a rosy smile rides up on a lavender bike and says, “Dani!” She and Dani talk, the girl’s long bare leg bracing tense and beautiful against the curb. Dani promises to call

soon; the girl rides away in a wake of lavender and rosy eagerness. I ask, “Whos that? and Dani smiles. "Oh,” she replies, drawing it out, "just some girl.”

In my bedroom, we lounge on a summer afternoon. The air is thick with heat and earthen smells: cat piss, armpit, rug mold, fruit, cunt; in the world around us, fibrous green and fungal life unfurls to offer its inmost odor to the sun. We are naked, and my blue comforter is rolled back like a parted wave; the cat walks in and out with her tail up. I am showing Dani a picture of my father holding me in one arm and bending his head to kiss my infant foot. My mother is a blur of breast in the background, and my breast, just scored by Dani’s teeth and tongue, echoes hers. Dani had called and asked me to meet her and I’d said no because I had a cold. An hour later, she showed up with a plastic bag of oranges and echinacea tea, and I was surprised and touched to realize she thought I might be lying.

I should not have been surprised: Dani’s confidence lay almost entirely in her social identity, a smart, well-secured area, beyond which lay hidden a verdant private world longing for and afraid of form—hidden even from her. When she broke up with her girlfriend (a pretty blonde with pink, allergic eyes whom I was fated to run into at parties for the next dozen years), Dam said this woman, with whom she’d lived for two years, had never known her. I feel like people accept the first thing I show them,” she said, and that s all I ever am to them.” A month later, she broke up with me.

I said, “Do you have time to get a drink?”

“With your bag?”

"Why not?” I said. "It’s easily checked.”

“Umm.”

A freckled girl walked by in a red raincoat, smiling to herself, and there was that same papered-over circus poster on another wall, this time showing a ghostly tiger leaping from a shouting model’s open mouth.

"I dreamed about you last week,” I said.

“Yes?” Her sidelong glance was piercing in the eye, but watchful in the heart; her dark hair was rough-textured, and layered in a ragged way, which gave a casual carnality to her lips and jaw.

“I dreamed we were in Las Vegas again, and you were wearing high heels and a dress.”

“Really!” She laughed, a hot, dry little sound, and—how ridiculous—on yet another wall a circus elephant dourly paraded across an advertisement for a rock concert against cancer, appar-ently holding another elephant by the tail. “So,” she said', “where do you want to go?”

Back to that first dive with its passing girls, its flavor of fog and forest of music; or the sweet sad cave next to a vacant lot strung with darkish-colored bulbs; or that odorous cavern glittering with earrings and rhinestone studs and sweat on the tossing hair of some dancer under a dirt-swarming light; that velvety cubbyhole like an emerald jewelry box with a false back, a secret compartment that, when we found it, revealed a place where we belonged together.

“Cafe Loup?” I said. “It’s quiet.”

Six months or so after the first time we broke up, we met again at .the book fair in Las Vegas. I was there because my new book was

coming soon; Dani was there as an editor. During the day, the book fair was a bland caravan parked inside a pallid amphitheater tented with beige, a series of stalls and tables draped with colorless cloth and laden methodically with books. At night, it was a giant Ferris wheel whirring ecstatically and predictably, each club, restaurant, and gaming room its own tossing car, blurred with lights and screaming faces while the sober carnie worked the machine. In this tossing blur, I kept glimpsing Dani; walking down a hallway to an obligatory event, I glanced into a passing room and saw her crossing it with the feral stride particular to her—her hips never swaying, but projecting intendy, rather coldly forward. I thought I saw her slender back and butt impatiently squeeze between a pair of outsized hams and heads in order to get to the bar, but more hams and heads crowded in and buried her before I could be sure. I was at a party for an author, who has since become an actress, when I saw Dani politely listening to someone I couldn’t see, eyes flashing through the politeness as if in response to the flattered speaker—a fool who would not recognize the instinctive flashing of an eel in deep water. It was a few minutes later that she came up behind me while I was scooping a fingerful of icing off the author’s cake. Later that night, in front of a display of white tigers trapped behind the glass wall of a hotel lobby, I leaned against her and whispered, “Let’s pretend we don’t know each other.” She embraced me from behind and roughly rubbed her head on mine. A brilliandy colored bird flew behind the glass; one tiger snarled at another, which had come too close to it.

In my room, we ordered a bottle of scotch. An hour or so later, in a torrent of furious drunkenness, we used each other on the floor. I remember pungendy but only dimly the terse movement of her lean arm and its maniacal shadow, my splayed leg, the gentle

edifice of her chin, her underlip, the soft visual snarl as she turned her face sharply to the side. Amazement briefly lit my drunkenness as she gathered me in her arms and carried me to the bed. “I love you,” I said, and sleep came batlike down upon us.

The next day, we ordered breakfast from a huge menu in a fake leather book and I apologized for that intimacy—we were not, after all, supposed to know each other. “Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “People who don’t know you are always saying that.” For the rest of the book fair, we were together every night, holding hands and kissing at strip shows, casinos, and a women’s boxing match. Then we went back to San Francisco, and broke up again.

During that breakup conversation, I reminded her of what she’d said about no one really knowing her. “Don’t you see why that is?” I said. “You’ve gone out of your way to create a perfect, seductive surface, and people want to believe in perfection. If they think they see it, they don’t want to look further.”

“Do you want to?”

If I said yes, I meant it, in a way But in another way, I didn’t. If social identity was her great strength, it was my great weakness. And so of course I loved to see myself reflected in her shiny sur-face. I loved to appear in public as that reflection—even if the reflection was that of a stupidly smiling woman in a sequined costume, waiting to be sawed in half.

Cafe Loup is an elegant establishment with a low ceiling, dim lighting, and a melancholy feeling of aquarium depth that subtly blurs the diners seated at the white-draped tables in the back—-the elderly gentleman with his gallant fallen face and his pressed shirt, his companions lowered white head and dark linen dress, her pale

arm quivering slightly as she saws the leg off a small bird. I checked my bag at the door and we chose a table, even though the polished bar was almost empty. Dani ordered a martini with no olive; I had red wine. The waiter, a middle-aged man with a heavy face, silently approved of the elegant manner with which Dani placed her order. Silently, with upturned eyes, she accepted his approval. Then she turned to me and said, “So, how long has it been?”

Months passed; I moved from Marin County to San Francisco. I saw Dani for dinner every now and then, or went with her to the movies. We were only friends, but still her face froze when, over pomegranate cocktails with lime, I told her I couldn’t meet her later because I had to meet my boyfriend. Seeing her expression, I became so flustered that I nearly began to stammer. She turned her head and became absorbed in the view—chartreuse shrubbery below, blue and hazy sky above, a watercolor with a purple blur spreading luridly across its middle.

After that, our invisible shelter became less substantial, more like a pavilion or a series of tents gently billowing and hollowing in the night air. When I saw her at a poetry reading/performance that I attended with my boyfriend, it was almost not there at all. While he wandered through the room with an affable air, I sought out Dani, half-afraid to find her. When I did, she saw my fear, and rushing to press her advantage, she tried and failed to curl her lip contemptuously. Perhaps to steady her quavering mouth, she took my extended hand. "Hello,” she said softly Hello, said the heat of her hand. It was around then that she took up with another writer, a preposterous person who once took offense at something I said or didn’t say, and, to my relief, refused to speak to me ever after.

And suddenly there were long distances between one tent and the next, and I found myself walking under the stars, alone on dark wet grass.

Dani sipped her martini and nibbled at a dish of nuts. She talked about Yasmin, with whom she had lived for the last three years— longer than anyone else. Her posture was erect and alert, her small shoulders perfectly squared. But her hair was rough by then, not glossy. She was swollen under the eyes, and there were deep creases on either side of her mouth and between her brows; her lips were bare and dry. Her once-insouciant slenderness had become gaunt and somehow stripped, like a car or motorcycle might be stripped to reveal the crude elegance of its engine.

“I don’t want to be unfaithful anymore,” she said. “I want to stay with Yasmin. I want to take care of her.”

I smiled and said, “You’re like a man. You’ve always been that way.” Her smile in return was like a blush of pleasure. “Yeah, I guess it’s true,” she said.

In San Francisco, I wandered into a maze that was sometimes peopled and sometimes empty, sometimes brightly lit and sometimes so dark that I had to grope my way along it with my hands, heart pounding with fear that I would never find my way out. I quickly became lost, and it seemed like almost everyone I met was lost, too. Sometimes it seemed to me an empty life, but that wasn’t really true. It wasn’t empty; it was more that the people and events in it were difficult to put together in any way that felt whole.

Before she met Yasmin, Dani said, she did not court or date or screw any girls for over a year. She was thirty-six and she felt very old. She did not want to be the “older lesbian” going after young girls. She did not have the heart for it. But she was very lonely, more lonely than she had ever been. She felt'she didn’t belong anywhere. She thought she would die. I didn’t ask her why she hadn’t called me, because I already knew. Instead, I glanced down at my watch, saw that I needed to go, and ordered another drink.

At the end of the show, the magician goes home. And so does the girl who was sawed in half She changes out of her costume into her jeans and sneakers and leaves by the back door, crushing a cigarette under her foot as she goes.

It is a low form of performance, and a tawdry metaphor for any kind of affair. And yet shows are wonderful. Even for jaded performers, they have a sheen of glamour, no matter if the sheen is threadbare and collecting dust. And in that sheen, there may be hidden, in the sparkle of some stray rhinestone or store-bought glitter, the true magic that will, as the synthetic curtain opens, reveal a glimpse of something more real than one’s strange and unreal life.

The curtain opened again at a boring book event in L.A.; I walked in, and there was Dani, lying eel-like on a leather love seat, nodding at someone I couldn’t see. She must’ve felt my gaze, because she turned, saw me, and said, “Of all people—her voice loud enough for me to hear her across the room. I knocked down a lamp as we stumbled into her room, a funky litde box that my fun-house memory has given three walls instead of four. To steady me, she took my hair in her fist. “We really don’t know each other now,” she said. The next day, I woke alone in my room, where a lustily roaring hotel shower brightly stippled my bruised flesh. The curtain opened again that evening; silently she offered me her smartly clad arm, and silently I accepted.

Halfway through her second martini, Dani asked, “Does David take care of you?”

“Yes,” I said. “We take care of each other.”