The Royal Family (113 page)

I want to be in love so bad, Celia whispered to herself. I want to be loved so bad.

You sit there and get snookered. I’m going to read the paper.

John? John!

What is it now, Ceel?

John, I want a baby.

Listen to you. With your mood swings, what kind of mother would you be?

Didn’t you ever feel excited when you . . .

When I what?

Didn’t you put your hand on Irene’s tummy, just to feel . . . ?

The baby never moved inside her, John said. Irene never reached that stage.

John’s erection reminded Celia of the cigarette upslanted between Domino’s fingers. She wanted to shout at him, but instead she started crying as he sat there, and at length she said through her tears: I know I have a pattern. I’m aware of it, thank you very much.

Well? said John.

Celia wanted to say: You’re just making me feel worse. Will you please shut up? —Instead, she cried harder.

John softened. He could be very kind with weak and broken creatures.

I feel bad that I feel this way, she whispered. I feel defeated and insecure as a result of all this. I’m back at the beginning again. At least when I’m at the office I’m something. They actually look up to me, John—

Exactly, John said. I totally understand you there.

Well, here I am. I’m in your hotel room that you paid for and so I’m not anything. I’m just Celia.

You are that, he said.

I wonder where all these fears come from. I remember when I was in high school, I was such a good swimmer, but I was afraid to be a lifeguard. I don’t know why.

She dreamed that she went out of the hotel, and from the window where a man in a suit who had just made love with her remained there protruded a big green gun. She began to run. She was getting away with it. She ran and ran. Then she began to wonder how she would get home, and how she would know when she was home, because she was very lost now. She remembered something about the North Star and hoped that she would be able to figure it all out. She came to the top of the hill, and saw an army of the
enemy, all men, playing a ball game involving half-remembered toys from her childhood. She ran on, hoping they wouldn’t see her. She was going downhill now. She was at the edge of a cliff.

But her dream was (by conventional logic, at least) in error, because John never slept with Domino again.

•

By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and he was not found, because God translated him . . .

 

H
EBREWS
11.5

•

Is it fair to accept on faith the dogma that each and every soul who dwells in San Francisco is perfectly represented by one of that city’s streets? Celia’s street would be Union Street because that was where all the expensive merchandise incubated by night in the wombs of exclusive shops, growing in beauty as in price until the moment when Celia happened to walk by the window display so that each new thing could be seen by her, then loved, then ceremonially packaged. Tyler’s street would not be Turk Street—oh, no, he was not yet pure enough to abase himself as successfully as that; he couldn’t lick up the spittle of others (excepting only his Queen). Perhaps he could become Eddy or Ellis Street—or, better yet, some brief grey alley lost somewhere south of Market. —And John? Here there’s but one answer, and in keeping with John it’s truly a magnificent one: Geary Street.

Of all the multitudinous arteries of San Francisco, Geary Street is perhaps the most important of the overlooked. —Yes, the overlooked—what a fine category! Failing private detectives with their envious ears, self-pitying child molesters who want to “explain” themselves to every stranger at every bar, customerless prostitutes, lawyers who haven’t yet made full partner, and I myself, described in the introduction to the Japanese translation of one of my novels as “a minor writer”—oh, sting! —and you yourself, reader, who suffer from this world’s deficient appreciation of your qualities—and for that matter all of us living creatures, for up to now we’ve been rudely overlooked by death—which reminds me of the dead, for they get overlooked not only by us but also by each other . . . In short,
overlooked
signifies everyone except lucky Cain, who flees from one wilderness to the next, pursued by recognition of his immortal Mark.

I admit that Geary Street cannot boast Cain’s flair. And yet in its length and in the proliferation of its speeding corpuscles it ranks almost as mighty as Market Street, which bisects the city into a pair of angled grids, as if San Francisco were a sheet of graph paper diagonally folded, then torn, with the lower triangle, the scrap South of Market, getting magically rotated a hundred and thirty-five degrees before being rejoined. Geary Street likewise is kin to Van Ness Avenue, which offers love-seekers a convenient route of travel from the Tenderloin to Capp Street. Nor should we omit to mention the fraternal relations between Geary and Gough, Franklin and Fell, all three of which the devotees of Freeway 101 employ with scarcely a thought, but what will do they when the inevitable earthquake reduces those serviceways to twisted segments of disconnection?

But enough name-dropping. Market Street can go promote itself for all I care.

The tale of Geary Street is the tale of life itself, which begins, as did the first
prehistoric unicellular organisms, at the ocean. In that very first block somewhere in the mists of Forty-Eighth Avenue, which almost touches the low sea-horizon and the wet silver-tan sand of Ocean Beach, Geary Street, here known to meter maids as Geary Boulevard, as indeed it will remain all the way to Van Ness, already foreshadows the business character of its adulthood, for it promises wideness, smoothness and above all
accessibility,
in sober defiance of the maniacal laughter of that convulsing female automaton at the Musée Mechanique on the lower terrace of the Cliff House, where tourists come to gaze upon white-dunged Seal Rock, enter the camera obscura, and afterward buy overpriced hot dogs. Resolutely rejecting these follies, and above all refusing to acknowledge the insanely laughing robot as its mother, Geary Street faces east and grows workmanlike into existence. At this stage, the infant pavement carries with it only dimunitive pastel-painted cube-houses for its toys. Hedges and flowers adorn these properties, some of which actually stand alone, lawn to lawn, unlike the promiscuous blocks of wall-kissing flats which make up so much of San Francisco. Every now and then one can glimpse the tea-smoke forest ribbon of Golden Gate park below and to the right, with the outer Sunset district gently rising into the fog beyond, like some pearlescently obsolete circuit-board studded with pale cubical transistors and resistors. Were we in the Sunset, Geary Street itself and the Richmond district it passes through would look the same way, the Richmond and the Sunset being almost mirror images of one another. (What would the Sunset’s Geary Street be? Judah, maybe, or Taraval.) But already, striving to outdistance the repose of these seaside beginnings, where planktonic destinies allow for nothing but flotation and cool grey submission, Geary Street strains to carry and to convey, to facilitate, to make business happen, to
go between.
At Fortieth Avenue, in the spirit of corporate mergers, it swallows up Point Lobos Avenue; and as early as Thirty-Eighth Avenue I’ve seen the first panhandler, wrapped in silver fog, listlessly overlooking grey pavement, hoping for nickels, dimes and quarters to congeal out of grey and silver air. He is the
genius loci
or tutelary deity of Geary Street. He is Business.

By Thirty-Sixth Avenue the houses have begun to crowd and to swell, like muscular apprentice construction workers old enough to bleed in wars but too young to vote, old enough to lift the heaviest buckets of paint and bags of sheet rock but too young to sit guarding the coffeepot; and so they hustle, trying to get what they can as time advances down Geary Street’s blue-grey ribbon, and the number 38 Geary bus, the most frequent in the city, I believe, except perhaps the 30 Stockton, roars beeping in and out of fog. A few homes, the so-called multiplexes constructed in the 1950s and 1960s, still resemble squarish concretions of mist, but as they move farther from the greenish hazy sea they begin to dry off and get down to brass tacks. Each one wants to be voted Most Likely To Succeed. Each one wants to receive a loyalty certificate. Each one wants to get rich. What to do, then, but
work?
And at Twenty-Sixth Avenue, demarcated by the teardrop domes, more yellow than gold, of the Orthodox church, whose saints gaze out across the thoroughfare, blessing transport, commerce and journeying, the business world properly begins, and Geary Street comes into full strength. In this Russian zone, the restaurants and video parlors like as not proclaim themselves in Cyrillic—more so now at the end of the twentieth century than in the days of the USSR, when Little Russia was mainly comprised of ageing aristocrats and counterrevolutionaries. Now post-Soviets can come and sell pizzas, which is why the character of this thoroughfare is precisely characterlessness. Long before we’ve reached the Moscow and Tbilsi Bakery, banks and Irish pubs have rushed in, and one never knows whether to expect the Wirth Brothers pastry shop or an
income tax service, because Geary Street, nomadically epitomized by Geary Shoe Repair, owns such a plainly utiliarian personality—Jack-of-all-Trades Street, we ought to call it. We can bully ourselves into pretending that Geary is something special, but it eschews preciousness; if only lava were to seal it off for five centuries, anthropologists would love it. Shunning Haight Street’s narcissism, Clement Street’s dreaminess, Geary Street expresses pure functionality, like a well-made Indian arrowhead. And Little Russia? As long gone as the ocean! At Sixteenth Avenue, that outpost of expensive grandeur, the Russian Renaissance Restaurant, where I used to transform money into lemon-flavored vodka in the cause of unrequited love, fails to hold the line laid down by the Orthodox saints: it’s all motleyness now, pied and commercially nondescript in the convenient manner of freeways, although at Fifteenth the two wide ribbons of opposing traffic get purified by the fragrance of fresh bagels, and somewhere around there I remember Shenson’s Kosher style deli, whose proudly pregnant Russian-looking countergirl makes Reuben sandwiches, stuffed cabbages, and other treats. May she and her baby remain always overlooked by death.

After Little Russia comes Little Korea with its Hangul newspapers, its excitable, clannish grocerywomen, and above all its temples of grilled meat where for a price one can offer up to heaven the greasy incense of barbeque-smoke, faithfully attended by many small round dishes of pickles. Do I write too much about food? Geary Street knows that everybody needs to eat, just as everybody sooner or later needs an undertaker’s services, and, as I recall, there’s a funeral parlor right here. Geary Street, practical and grey, solves all your necessities! And what’s Geary Street’s necessity? Why, to strain continually eastward, toward the greenery of Union Square and the jewelry shops beyond, none of which it can yet imagine. Ask an entrepeneur what his maximum profit will be, and he can’t tell you, because he’s refrained from limiting himself; on his own forehead he’s inscribed the mark of infinity. Geary Street knows only that there’s no returning to the ocean. So it must vibrate straight ahead, toward the steadily increasing murmur and din of downtown, which is at least partially of its own making. And Little Korea, was it ever anything but the brainchild of Geary Street’s brother-in-law, who worked for the Chamber of Commerce? Don’t ask me. Which of its Korean restaurants is the best? Don’t ask Geary Street. Geary Street has other worries. And now Little Korea lies behind us.

In the Richmond district on a spring Sunday afternoon after many rainy nights, the pale houses shine, with every shadow seemingly painted on. A garage door slowly, magically rolls upward. Sunlight extends its tongue inside. Nothing moves. A sparrow chirps. Clouds hang upended in the sky; the nearly tamed forests of Golden Gate Park peer over the stores and apartments of Geary Street; the morning brightens. A young Asian couple slowly walk down the sidewalk, reading newspapers as they go. But Geary Street hurries past them; Geary Street does not have time for spring.