Parts Unknown (10 page)

These days the building was just a slumping relic, on a street otherwise packed with hastily built cinderblock-style apartments. Off to the right, Franklin Avenue beckoned like an impossible dream, huge houses tucked atop steep drives. And further off still was Griffith Park, Los Angeles’ one big swath of wild open space. In my rotting apartment building, close to the seedy side of Hollywood Boulevard, shuttling between two poorly paying jobs, I felt on the very verge of civilization itself.

But George introduced me to a Los Angeles I barely knew. He offered to pick me up, but I hastily declined, horrified at his possibly seeing my living situation. “I’ll meet you there,” I countered. “Tell me the name again?”

Cafe Du Village, Larchmont Boulevard. How could it be that I’d lived here for two years and never encountered this lovely, civilized street, like Lincoln Avenue back in the sedate neighborhood I grew up in. I parked Angelina—my car—and looked around. Graceful trees lined Larchmont, strung with tiny twinkling white lights, and the street was lined with fashionable shops and restaurants. I was used to hanging out at the Bourgeois Pig coffee house on Franklin, or the dirty, arty area around Los Feliz. Nothing so pleasant as this street. The women I passed as I speed-walked toward the restaurant (late, double-checking the address) were uniformly well-groomed—deeply tanned, wearing Ugg boots with mini-skirts, all perfectly highlighted hair and beautifully arched eyebrows. These were the people who
got
LA.

I burst into the small, red-awninged restaurant ten minutes late, and of course he was there already, looking as classy as anything. His blond hair was cut even shorter than it had been the other week, perhaps to disguise the fact that it was thinning away from the temples, and he wore a perfectly pressed, French blue button-down shirt. His fair, freckled cheeks were flushed already, perhaps from the glass of wine he grasped lightly. Perhaps from the fact that I was late. “I’m so sorry!” I cried, hastily throwing myself into a chair. “I didn’t know the neighborhood, and . . .”

“I’m glad you’re here,” he smiled. He poured some wine into my waiting glass—this appeared to be a bring-your-own-wine kind of place. “Cheers.” We clinked glasses, then there was a deadly silence—oh no, and the date had just begun! “So . . .” I blurted out, “I was surprised when you called. Pleasantly, I mean.”

“Well, I’m turning forty next week,” George began. (A-ha—now I knew how old he was!) “And I thought it’s about time I did something spontaneous. I’m usually so busy—teaching, and doing research. I have family obligations, also.” (I raised my eyebrows.) He clarified, “My mother. She’s getting older, and she’s on her own now. I spend as much time with her as I can.”

“How nice!” I said warmly. “You’re so kind to look after your mother like that. I hope someone does the same for my parents, when they get older.” I fiddled with my napkin. “That’s not to say that I wouldn’t, of course . . . they’re just, far away. And we’ve never been that close.”

“San Jose, you said?” he asked, nonjudgmentally.

I nodded. “I just couldn’t see going back there, after college. And now that I’m here—there’s just not much there, for me. Some old high-school friends. And if I want to get somewhere with my art, LA has more opportunities.”

He leaned forward, interested. “Tell me more about the kind of art you do.”

“Well, not much at the moment,” I confessed. “I’m always just about to start some big project . . . oh.” The waiter was hovering. “I’ll have the, er,
magret de canard
, please.” My French accent was execrable.

“
L’entrecote, s’il vous plaît
.” Unsurprisingly, his French was perfect. “My mother was a French teacher,” he explained. “So, you were saying—about your art?”

“I paint,” I explained, as enthusiastically as I could. “I’ve been trying a lot of different themes and media, actually, but nothing seems to stick. I was painting animal skeletons for a while, and I went through this sports phase—soccer balls, and four-square balls, and golf balls, all balanced on each other. But they were kind of hard to paint, and I’m not much good at perspective, and the balls kept rolling away so I could never get the correspondences right. So anyhow, I’m doing portraits, mostly, these days . . . of made-up people doing ridiculous things, like riding bicycles upside down. But it’s hard to paint imaginary people. They always go sort of funny . . .” I trailed off.

“You sound very talented,” George assured me.

“Well, thanks,” I demurred. “I don’t know about that. But what about you—what excites you about statistics?”

 “That’s a great question,” he said, as if responding to an enthusiastic student. I felt the absurd happiness that comes from saying the right thing. “You might be surprised to hear that there’s plenty of room for creativity in my field, too.”

“Really.” I leaned forward. “Tell me.”

“Just imagine taking your life and quantifying it. Thinking about how many times, say, you crossed a particular street this week. And say I counted all the times I crossed that same street this week. What if I crossed that street, every time, just minutes before you came by? We could graph our respective trajectories. And we would see how our lives, all this week, almost intersected. We took something that seemed random, and gave it meaning. Then, you could go further. It’s like the odds of dice coming up a certain number. It’s possible to roll six sixes in a row. And it’s possible for the paths of two people who
almost
met a number of times to finally intersect. It’s all based on probability.”

I nodded. “That’s cool. My brain doesn’t work like that. I wish it did. Thinking in that way must be like reading maps—just looking at something and all of a sudden the correspondences appear. I’m terrible at reading maps too. They’re all squiggly lines going in impossible directions. I keep looking at the shapes the lines form, like cloud pictures, and not making the least sense out of the map’s purpose, you know?”

 “That’s because you’re an artist. You think differently than I do. I’d love to find out how your mind works, how you come up with your ideas. Reading maps—don’t worry about it. I’ll read them for you.” I blushed, feeling overly praised. I didn’t feel I’d done much lately to be commended about.

“It’s neat also,” I said shyly, “to think that maybe what you said is true—maybe you and I have been just missing each other for years, and then we just met up, just like that. Our trajectories crossed, that one time.”

“Some call it fate,” said George. “I call it science.”

I thought about that for a bit. “You’re right,” I said slowly. “Fate—that’s just a bunch of crap. I just can’t stand those couples who are all ‘We’re meant to be together. When we met it was
fate
.’ Whatever! Deluded!” I caught myself. “Well. What’s Pasadena like?” I asked sweetly. “I haven’t been there yet.”

“Pasadena is the city all cities should aspire to,” George said loftily. “It’s clean. It’s pretty. It’s safe.” He enumerated the virtues on his fingers. “Wide streets. Well-preserved Craftsman bungalows everywhere you look. It is civilized. I would have loved to live there and be closer to the university, but it’s important to my mother that I live near her, in case of emergency. She’s getting older and I’m the only family member she has left. And that’s the same for me—we’re all each other has, really.” He looked perplexed. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this. You’re so easy to talk to.”

“Go on,” I encouraged him.

“So, a wonderful perk of my job is that Cal Tech is near the Huntington library and gardens, the most civilized spot you could imagine. I go there sometimes at lunchtime, sit in the gardens, and work on lesson plans.”

“I’ve heard of it. All those Gainsborough paintings—it would be awesome, to see them in person.”

“I must take you there. You’ll love it.”

So, already, there was to be a second date. And we’d barely even started the first date. But he was so
old
. It was embarrassing, almost, dining with him. At least he wasn’t old enough to be my dad. Not quite. Then again: how many people were asking me out on dates these days? Or had ever?

I pushed my fingers nervously through the spikes of my still-short hair. “I’d like that.”

After a couple glasses of the wine George had brought, the interview-style air between us shifted, relaxed. I skated my wineglass around the glass-covered tabletop, colorful Provencal-style linens beneath. It occurred to me that the reason I had initially taken him for British was the careful way he spoke. He gave equal weight to each word, and enunciated each fully, as if eliding the syllables would bring him one fateful step closer to anarchy. It reminded me, fondly, of the way Trevor spoke.

George finished only half of his entree; in fact, he had cut the duck exactly in half the moment it had arrived. He raised two fingers imperiously and jerked his chin, beckoning the waiter over, and asked him, in French, apparently for a doggy bag in which to take home the rest. “Not hungry?” I asked.

“No, that’s not it at all,” he said. “I told you before that how I walk with purpose. I also eat with purpose. That duck was twice as big as the government’s guidelines for a recommended serving of protein. I eat exactly as much as I need to. No more.”

“You have an enormous amount of self control,” I commented.

He raised an eyebrow. “I research
everything
. And if there’s an answer I don’t know, I make it my business to find out.”

When I was a kid, poring over books in the library in preparation for school reports, I was always struck by the footnotes, constant “Ibid.s,” one after another. What was this
Ibid
book that all the footnotes kept referring to? It must be some massive compendium of all the knowledge of civilization, some über-encyclopedia. I was crushed when I discovered the true meaning of the term. But maybe—George could be my
Ibid
.

“I wish I had a plan for every day, like you do,” I said. “It seems things would be so much easier that way.”

He smiled. “Now, keep in mind that caution against excess doesn’t apply to wine purchases. Or beautiful girls.” He reached out and touched my hair. “Did I tell you how much I love beautiful things?”

“No,” I gulped, my head tingling where his fingers still lingered.

“When I see something beautiful, I have to have it.”

Our spoons clicked as we shared a crême brulée.

~ ~ ~

George was making his own dinner again. A good wife would know how to cook something besides cheese toast, I thought, scrunched up in one corner of the sofa, hugging my knees. She’d pour her husband a glass of wine, and ask him about his day.

With effort, I detached myself from the sofa cushions and walked into the kitchen. “Tell me about your day, hon,” I said, pouring generous slugs of a 2002 Barolo into wineglasses for each of us. George didn’t splurge on much except for wine and orchids—his two passions. After four years of marriage, I could now recite varietals with ease, and had the money to be choosy about what wines I drank. No more cheap-ass purchases of Charles Shaw or Barefoot wines. Lucky me.

“I’ve got big news,” George said. “Archie Martindale is retiring. Can you believe it, that old windbag is finally giving it up.”

“It’s about time! So do you think . . .”

“That’s right. I might have a chance.” Archie had been department chair, a post George desperately coveted.

He smiled and rubbed my hair, as if I were a pet cat. I’d grown it long since I got married—it was no longer the elfin mop it used to be, but fell straight down to my shoulders again. I dressed differently now, too. A person had to grow up sometime. I favored navy-blue pullovers and khakis from Banana Republic—an easy, thoughtless uniform that befitted a professor’s wife. The hole from an ill-advised eyebrow ring I’d installed my senior year had long since closed up. That was from my old, artsy days. It had been years now since I’d picked up a paintbrush. Since I’d gotten married, in fact.

 “When do you find out?” I asked eagerly.

“Ahhh, they’ll take as long as possible to decide. Not till summer, probably. But I was on fire after I heard that news. Gave one of my better lectures. I was covering the Central Limit Theorem in my Statistical Methods course today. It’s really interesting, actually. It deals with the distribution of probability . . .”

He was warming to his topic; it was safe to tune him out. I listened selectively as he stirred the pasta into the boiling water. “. . . now if you consider the Lindeberg condition, on the other hand . . .”

I sat with him while he ate his meal, nodding as enthusiastically as I could while he finished explaining the Gnedenko and Kolmogorov states. Or was it Gnedorov and Koledenko? My brain glitched, stuck on those words like a silly mnemonic. If I kept repeating them, I might well fall asleep. I slurped wine, louder than I should have, and poured another glass.

“Wife of the Future Chair of the Statistics Department . . . maybe I should print business cards for myself,” I joked. “Really, congratulations, honey. I’m so glad Archie’s retiring.”

He smoothed his shirt, preening, and opened his mail, his sharp letter opener ripping through the envelopes with finite stabbing sounds.

Meanwhile, I flipped with interest through the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. I liked imagining Lucy in the photos, just around the corner from the gently distressed furnishings artfully arrayed on the pages. Those gorgeous, curvy dressers. The whimsical rugs, bright with color and promise. The pretty, pretty curtains with appliquéd flowers. Nothing could ever go wrong in rooms furnished that way. I wanted that for Lucy—a room that would keep her safe, forever, where she could be grounded and free of fear in ways I never had been. She would never float away, unmoored by poor furniture choices.

George had a stack of reading fanned out tidily on the side table. He would read all three magazines there, cover to cover, before bed—
Business Week
,
Time
, and
Newsweek
. It was Tuesday, so it was magazine night. Wednesdays were reading night; George was heavily into biographies. Thursdays . . . what were Thursdays? Oh yeah, the History Channel. Friday—that was sex night. Three nights away. I had time to muster my reserves, then.