The Dead Do Not Improve (16 page)

In the last video, shot from behind, James and Frank Chu, both dressed in somewhat tasteful bondage leather, disappear over the crest of the hill on Octavia. The Safeway sign hovers on the horizon, but you can still read the words printed on the back of Frank Chu’s sign, the side he has always rented out to advertisers:

I heard Ellen shift around in the bed. A pillow thudded against the TV. In a voice quivering with joy, she said, “That motherfucker was wearing my shoes.”

4
. At four in the morning, seated amid a litter of room service plates, wine bottles, and coffee platters, we finally came up with our plausible scenario. James had tossed our room at the Hotel St. Francis because he needed a pair of women’s shoes for his fashion show. The reason he did this, we deduced, was that he was insane. The attack outside the Uptown had been the spillover from the Baby Molester’s murder. Because the party responsible was a terrorist group, which, we assumed, was primarily concerned with promoting its agenda, there was no reason why they would take the time and energy to track me down again. Someone probably had to pay, sure, but we couldn’t find any reason it had to be us. As for Bill, we chalked it up to coincidence, and I marveled again,
with my new girl, at the smallness of San Francisco and said some nice, smart things about how this Internet media social networking fuckanalia had done some crap and made some things that seemed impossible more possible, simulacra, planets spinning in their own orbits, and so on. We poured out a drink for the Baby Molester and Bill and said some nasty things about the vermin who would kill a destitute old lady and a decent dude, after which we screwed quickly and quietly, so as to not disturb our bull dyke patrol. Then, blessedly, entombed in Egyptian cotton, scallop juice, finer plates, and wine, we fell asleep.

We were wrong, of course, but a most-plausible scenario is still a most-plausible scenario, and when you’re in love and fearing for your life, you accept any scaffolding upon which you can hang your fragile, contingent future.

5
. Writers are always complaining about how Tolstoy ruined love. What they mean isn’t that he gutted our expectations for romance, or cast an unrelenting eye on our vanities. It’s more that after reading
Anna Karenina
, you realize the futility and clumsiness of any attempt you might make at projecting love, or even the concept of love, onto the printed page. He’s just too good at it, and anything you try is doomed to sound silly, glib, or, even worse,
baroque
. In fact, the space Tolstoy takes up in the literature of love is so monstrous that if one were to draft up a list of the five best-written love stories, it would read something like this:

I’m sure there are those who will protest the fact that three of the four authors are dead white men (I won’t get into jokes or debates over the fourth), but dead white men invented romantic love, and so it seems reasonable that they would be best equipped to write about it. If someone were to draft a list of the greatest relationships between a man and, say, the reflection of the moon in a cup of wine, or anything involving mountains or farewells, the top fifty would all be Chinese. This doesn’t mean that we can’t find value in Thoreau, or even Pound, with his ornate imitations, but if you’re looking for a pure distillation of something, especially something poetic, I say go straight to the source.

I’m stalling and deflecting, sure, but I am also trying, despite this weighty, ornate hesitation, to commit, at least to the written page, exactly what happened when I woke up in the morning and saw Ellen sleeping next to me—her arm flung dramatically across her forehead, her fingertips dipped in a puddle of mustard. I, who had always prided myself on my ability to accept the fallacy of love, with all my commas, parentheses, and qualified statements, felt love grab me violently by the back of the neck and fling me straight into her arms. This blooming helplessness, which flooded me to my teeth, made me feel a lot of different things, but mostly, it made me feel like a girl.

She was the eighteenth or nineteenth girl who had shared a bed with me. At least, in some way that counts. Early riser, always, I have watched each of these girls sleeping, and although I could usually muster up a flare of sentiment over the beauty of vulnerability, or whatever, I could
also feel the slight but utterly evident discomfort of a forced appreciation, something similar to the tyranny that made me put Romeo and Juliet up on that list, when my real choice at number three would have been the off-page romance between Holden Caulfield and Old Jane.

But with Ellen, I only felt the need to gently lift those fingers out of the mustard puddle and wipe them off with a napkin dipped in water. She screwed one eye open. With a giant shit-eating grin on my face, I held up the yellowed napkin and chuckled.

How else could I explain love? I am compromised, in so many ways.

6
. Kim came by the room shortly after Ellen woke up. The hard edge from the Starbucks had been dulled down to something close to mere rudeness. More than anything, he seemed worried. I wondered if this show of vulnerability was some cop trick, or if, as I suspected, it was the sort of sign one immigrant flashes to another when he admits that the country cannot be conquered alone. Before his debriefing, which consisted of no new information and could have been easily done over the phone, he handed me a folder of e-mails printed from Bill’s account. There were about fifteen in all, each one authored by someone calling himself Richard McBeef or Mr. Brownstone. He wanted me to see if I could detect some unfamiliarity with the language, some syntax that might provide us with a clue about the author.

As Kim fiddled with his keys and explained something to Ellen, I read over the letters, but they were all senseless, synthetic. Whatever awkwardness Kim had read in the sentences probably came from the
pressure of having to cram so much of
Mr. Brownstone
and
Richard McBeef
into such a small epistolary space.

It was nice to feel useful, to say the least.

We explained our plausible scenario. Using Ellen’s phone, we showed him the videos of James strutting down Market Street. Kim shook his head, glowering at the floor, but said we might as well stay at the hotel for a couple more days. The danger, he agreed, had passed. He would get in touch with us once he figured anything out and urged me to keep thinking about the letters, Cho Seung-Hui, the Baby Molester, and any possible connections between them all. If I came up with anything or remembered anything, I should give him a call.

Then, hangdogged, he left.

As Kim left, our guard cop entered the room and introduced herself as Officer Bar Davis. She apologized for being brusque the night before—Kim had explained the new scenario, and now that the threat seemed less imminent, she could ease up a bit. She said to ask if we needed anything.

We ordered breakfast up to the room: Eggs Benedict, something called morning steak, pancakes, and mimosas. Staring at the bubbles in the champagne flute, it dawned on me that I had been drunk for two or three straight days now. The thought made me giggle. Ellen, sawing through morning steak, looked up and smiled. She said, “The bubbles tickle my throat, too.”

After breakfast, we had lazy, careless sex and watched
The View
. I checked my e-mail on my phone, but it was just the same silliness from Adam about who had published what where and how we were both fucked for life. The noon news started up. The anchor said something
about a rash of murders with a possible link to an activist group within the city, but my plausible scenario was working its magic and I had no concern anymore. But then someone said something about funeral arrangements, and I looked up and saw a blue screen with these words.

It seemed like a good way to put a close on all of this. Ellen must have been thinking something similar because she raised her questioning eyebrow.

But what to wear?

7
. Officer Davis dropped us off at Fight Against the Dying of the Light, a vintage shop on 16th and Mission, just up the street from the Hotel St. Francis. I’ve always loved shopping with girls, probably because the girls who end up with me are never the type to drag their
men anywhere, especially somewhere with forgiving lighting and clean floors. Sitting on some couch, waiting for a girl to emerge from behind a curtain, is the edifying sort of torture that helps us understand generic stand-up comedy and the norms of American domesticity. For someone like me, who has lived so far outside of the narrative of paying taxes or the annoying guy who sits by the water cooler at work, these pauses of normalcy are my glimpse at what it might be like to be a bro. And so, slouching in a velvet love seat, I tried to look disinterested, and, more important, oppressed, every time Ellen came flouncing out from behind the curtain, but in my heart, I was happier than I’ve been in years.

Under the watchful eye of Doreen, the terminally thin, limping owner, Ellen tried on five different black dresses. Doreen kept fussing over the breadth of Ellen’s shoulders, noting that in her day, girls didn’t have four separate muscles in their arms, but after a good half hour, the three of us settled on an airy, lacy thing, a pair of black satin gloves, and a squared-off, almost Quakerish hat. For me, Doreen picked out a heavy wool suit with wide lapels, which she matched with a broad yellow power tie.

I won’t mention how much it all cost, because that would ruin it, but as we were paying, Doreen told Ellen that a bright shade of lipstick was the key to looking good at a wedding, and, before the New England in Ellen could register a protest, Doreen grabbed her by the cheeks and smeared on a shade of red that would have made even Dolores Haze blush.

8
. The burial plot was atop a steeply banked hill. From the car, we could only see the outlines of three men, each one standing with his hands clasped behind his back. Before starting the vertical ascent, I looked over at Ellen and saw she was frowning, though not sadly. If I were to guess at it, I’d say that she was probably hating California and its modern, spacious cemeteries and the good weather that always accompanies a funeral. At least, that’s what I was thinking.

Anyway. I grabbed Ellen’s hand, and we trundled up the hill.

Up top, we saw a party on the verge of breakout. The three respectful men were, in fact, security guards. On the far edge of the plot, four scraggly dudes were fiddling around with a PA. A guitar and a drum set lay in the grass behind them. A stand-up bass had been propped up against a gravestone. Surrounding a folding table stocked with handles of Costco booze were six or seven men with fuck-you-Dad piercings—septa, cheeks, foreheads—and tribal facial tattoos. I counted seven, maybe fifteen dogs running around, yapping at one another, and at least twenty or so old hippies, each one dressed in his or her referential,
Harold and Maude
best, smiling and drinking out of red plastic cups. Around the hole and the chains and the crane, a circle of women took turns staple gunning daisies to the coffin. All the young women had been surgically enhanced. Just beyond the coffin stood a line of grim-faced Latino kids, each one of them around high school age. Other than me and Ellen and the security guards, they were the only people dressed in anything resembling funeral attire, and, like us, they seemed to not really have any idea of how to react to this particular morass.

We hid behind the security guards. I couldn’t tell if Ellen’s hand
was trembling in mine, or if mine was trembling in hers. But then she whispered, “Oh, my God,” and I followed her eyes and saw, at the end of the line of Latino youth, the glowering face of the Advanced Creative Writer.

9
. Our plausible scenario was fucked, but I couldn’t quite parse out whether it was fucked in a bad way. Before I could decide, a chubby bald man walked up to us with an offering of two red Dixie cups. I accepted mine and drank down half of whatever was inside. He smiled and said, “It’s just vodka and cranberry juice. Don’t worry.”

Ellen smiled, tightly, and took the cup from the bald man’s hand.

“So,” he said, “how do you know ol’ Dolores here?”

One of us said, “We were her neighbors.”

“Ah, you can’t beat a real neighbor. Especially these days.”

“Yes. I guess that’s true.”

“How long have you two been living together?”

She winced. I tried not to think about why.

I said, “Not that long.”

“Well, good luck to you. I apologize for the freak show. I’m sure you knew Dolores wasn’t your average old lady, and her friends, as you can see, certainly don’t fit that bill.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Well, I would hope not.” Turning to Ellen, he asked, “So, what’s your getup here? Jackie O at the funeral? Little Asian John-John?”

“Uh, yes. I am from Boston. The Boston area.”

“You rarely see it go this way, Asian boy and corn-fed girl. It’s always the other way around. Makes no sense to me. I say let the high achiever be the breadwinner. Why let all that work ethic go to waste?”

Despite myself, I laughed. The bald man smiled warmly and said, “This one knows what I’m talking about. I suppose it’s the media’s fault, especially media like me. I don’t think we’ve filmed one single Asian male interracial scene, except when we gave Hisanori a little gift for his fifth-year anniversary with the company.”