“We’ll see you in a couple of days. I’m sure Sarah will phone very soon.”
“Sounds good,” I sang out into the dark of the car. Sounds good, that same midwestern girl’s slightly frightened reply. It appeared to clinch a deal, and was meant to sound the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except it was promiseless — mere affirmative description. It got you away, out the door. Once again.
IV
Classes did not start until the following week. But nonetheless I could feel the semester winding itself up as if with the hand crank of a Gatling gun, readying itself for unleashing. The spring semester! It was both aptly and inaptly named. Since it had not yet officially begun, I slept until noon, then woke and made a sad little breakfast of poor man’s baklava: a large biscuit of shredded wheat with honey poured over and chopped peanuts sprinkled on top. The kitchen was still in its state of neglect. More strawberries in the refrigerator, which it seemed I had only just bought, had once again withered, turned this time the turquoise-gray of a copper roof. The bread, too, had a powdery blue mold that would have made a lovely eyeshadow for a showgirl — perhaps one who also needed the penicillin. The heel end of another loaf, weeks old, was sitting on the counter in a plastic bag with what looked like a snake inside: a coil of mold with orange and black markings. It was the Frugal Girls’ Museum of Modern Art.
The landlord had returned to not stinting too badly on the heat. Happiness. In the mail a check came from Sarah for three hundred dollars — it seemed both too much and too little, but I did not actually bother to calculate the hours and what the pay should have come to. I went to the bank and deposited the check and took back a hundred of it in twenties to spend on new books and food. I sat in my apartment with the most inane sorts of magazines, all left there by Murph, which I read with an avidity and dementia typically brought on by hair salons and winter. “Four Things Men Find Hot.” I could never find all four — they were seldom listed numerically or in a conspicuous place. Once you had the magazine open, you had to dig around among the ads (which was their ploy), trying to find them scattered there, and even when you did they were always in slight disguise. Clearly no one at any of these magazines knew for sure what men found hot, though they were hoping you would believe they did. Or maybe everyone at these New York City magazines knew only gay men, and so the things they knew that men found hot they were afraid to actually tell their readers.
Surprise seemed a theme.
As did things with food.
As for the clothing depicted in these pages, I was at a bored loss. It seemed uncool to spend that much money to look like an experimental cake. What would be cool was something different: more murderous, and not depictable. From what I could see, the best look would involve not just something new, but something with insouciant jewelry and ominous leather goods denouncing something old that lay deep within yourself and others. Probably I would never accomplish this. Without explicit instruction I had no feel or instinct, at least not for the new part. I felt, however, that if called upon, I could do the other part — denunciation — but privately. Privately part cool, since I partook of denouncing (silently, violently) all the time.
For several days I let drift take over me. I turned on my computer and aimlessly roamed the Internet. I would click this and then that and pretty soon I was looking at stock car racing or Demi Moore’s bare pre-op breasts. A billion ads for herbal remedies and computer security systems flew onto the screen. I took on-screen Oscar quizzes. I googled old friends from elementary school. Nothing. I googled Lynette McKowen. Nothing. I googled Bonnie Jankling Crowe, whose full name I now knew — illegally. Nothing again. I went back to Demi Moore’s bare pre-op breasts and wondered about the half-life of regret.
When I went to bed at night I suffered my first bout of insomnia. This is what death would be like, I feared: not sleep but insomnia. To sleep no more, as I had learned in Pre-1700 British Drama. I had never feared insomnia before — like prison, wouldn’t it just give you more time to read? I’d always been able to sleep. But now I lay there, fretful as a Bartók quartet. My mind wandered through the night hours uneasily, and it was indeed like prison: when the sky began to lighten, I was in disbelief and filled with terrible, buzzing tiredness.
Once I woke with the feeling that I had actually died in the night. I awoke with a sense that during ostensible sleep I had encountered not just life’s brevity but its speed! and its noise and its irrelevance and its close. How we glamorized our lives! our bodies! which were nothing more than — potatoes! with a potato’s flat eyes and pale pink snappable roots. I lay there in bed in a peaceful form of depression. In another town, one less antagonistic toward religion, this mood — pre-prayer, pre-God, pre-conversion — might have been assigned some spiritual significance. But for people in Troy, God was mind-clutter: a cross between a billboard, a charlatan, a hamburger, and a fairy king. I had always thought God was part of a sensible if credulous denial of death, one that made life doable. How could that be wicked? Why bother criticizing that? Why disparage the crutches of the lame? Why vainly imagine one’s own gait unhobbled? Besides, religion gave us swearing. Before Christianity, what was there? “By Jove”? But life in Troy was to be taken without any lucky charms of any sort. It was neo-reformation. The walls of my winter room seemed a silvery, quilted satin, like the interior of a coffin. I began to feel there was no such thing as wisdom. Only lack of wisdom.
Finally, Sarah phoned. “Tassie, how are you — it’s been days!”
“Days and nights,” I said stupidly.
“I’ll say,” she said. “Poor Emmie sobbed for two nights. She’d wake up at three in the morning and just cry and cry, poor thing. She would look out into the dark of her new room and just not know where she was. I would just take her and rock her back to sleep. But now I think she does understand and she seems to have settled right in. I am wondering whether you are free this afternoon? It’s time for me to check back in on my maniac restaurant and see how it’s doing.”
“Is Emmie her name now?” This seemed strange.
Sarah paused. “Well, we found ourselves using her initials right away — M.E. — and before we knew it, well, there we were with Emmie. It suits her, I think.”
“Does she still respond to Mary?” I asked, having no common sense.
“Well, I don’t really know,” said Sarah.
I did not mind the walk to their house. I walked briskly for the first time in days. The stadium in its arc was like a frozen tidal wave outside my apartment. The cold knocked the sleepiness from my head as well as my days-long, tortured hallucination of deep existential vision. The sky was partly clear, with ballooning clouds floating absurdly above, as if for a party that had yet to begin. Low on the horizon there were different clouds, like old plowed snow at the end of a street. I was like every kid who had grown up in the country, allowing the weather — good or bad — to describe life for me: its mocking, its magic, its contradictions, its moody grip. Why not? One was helpless before everything.
In the front of the house the gate at the stairs was still broken. I slipped through and on up to the porch. When I rang the doorbell no one came, and so I knocked with my knuckles on the glass pane of the thick wood door. Sarah opened it dressed in the Madame Curie look I soon learned she favored: a white lab-style coat and black tights. Her matte red lipstick lent a kind of movie version air of Madame: hard crimson elegance in the riverbed cracks of her lips. She didn’t want to look like the other chefs in town, with their country-hippie garb, scarves, and flowery print shirts. A restaurant was a science, she would tell me, not a square dance. Perhaps that was where she got it wrong.