“Yeah?”
“And he tasted funny too. Like there was something wrong with him.”
“Elise, God, you shouldn’t let ’em come in your mouth.”
“Well, I didn’t want to; it just happened.”
Mark put down the pants and thought. “Well,” he said, “this girl who sells roses in Gas Town has been paying me twenty dollars to clean them for her. Like, take off the thorns and the old petals? If you wanted to help me, I could pay you five dollars. Do you want to do that?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.” She sniffed. “Thank you, Mark.”
“It’s okay.”
She went into the kitchen and raided the refrigerator. She got olives, cheese, tiny green peppers, and cold white rice from an old Chinese take-out box and put it all on a plate and carried it to her room.
The next day she walked by the apartment building, on the opposite side of the street. There was no one sitting on the porch. She looked up at Robin’s window; it was open, as it had been when she left. She pictured Robin coming home and screaming, “Oh, my babies!” She pictured Andy and Eric at the foreign man’s table, eating dishes of ice cream. Then she turned the corner and headed for Granville Street, her rubber dime-store sandals hitting her dirty heels with each fleet step.
Orchid
Margot had not seen Patrick for sixteen years, so it was a mild shock to run into him in Seattle, on the sidewalk outside an esoteric video rental store. She had stopped to halfheartedly examine the items of clothing a street vendor had arranged on a large blanket on the side-walk in front of the store, as well as on some auxiliary coat hangers hung on a parking lot fence. She was considering buying a used print blouse, and thinking how ridiculous it was for someone her age to make such a purchase, when a big man in an expensive suit spoke her name. He was thin-skinned and pale like an old onion, his forehead large and strangely fraught. The muscles of his brows and eyes were tightly bunched together, and their combined expression extended all the way out to the tip of his long nose. She wondered how this oddball knew who she was, but then he extended his hand to her with the debonair fatuity of a very handsome man, and she recognized him. Patrick had been quite a beautiful boy.
“What’re you doing here?” Her voice came out high and flirtatious, and she blushed. “I mean, in Seattle?”
“I moved here three years ago. I moved from San Diego.”
They stood there smiling, their hands still clasped. The wind blew trash about their feet; Patrick shook his ankle to release a piece of pink cellophane, turned his head to watch it run up the street, then turned back to her and grinned. “You’ll never guess what I’m doing now.”
“I’m a social worker,” she blurted. “How about that?”
His smile surged again and she felt a pulse of warmth come through his hand into hers, then fade quickly, as if a cat had leapt onto her lap, changed its mind, and leapt off. “That doesn’t surprise me. I mean, it’s great, but—you know what?—it’s also funny, because I’m a psychopharmacologist.”
“No!”
“Isn’t that a kick?”
Margot and Patrick had met when they were undergraduates at the University of Michigan. He was studying to be an actor and she was studying English lit. Margot was generally more interested in girls than in boys, but she, like everyone, had been arrested by Patrick’s attenuated, almost feminine appearance. He had pale-brown hair, full, blurrily defined lips, and wide hazel eyes with blunt, abundant lashes. His skin was live and sensitive as the surface of a breathing young plant. He had a curious, light-footed poise, which in certain acute moments he would discard with a subtle inward movement, as if startled or disgusted or fascinated by something only he could see.
He said that almost immediately after graduating he’d landed a supporting role in a popular movie Margot had never seen, and that “people” had gotten “excited” about him. But when he moved to Los Angeles, he found Hollywood too horrible to bear. “The vanity,” he said, “the falsity. It’s so base, I can’t even tell you. You lose every-thing, you turn into this creature. I lost the ability to act. I’d go meet these people and do these readings and I’d just choke.” Like a fastidious girl, he tucked a piece of pale hair behind his ear. “Maybe if I’d hung in, I would’ve adjusted and I’d be a star by now. But at a crucial moment my mother died, and I sort of flipped out. She’d always wanted me to go to medical school. So I became a psychopharm.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “It’s boring, but it’s good because I’m really helping people. It’s really good to be helping people. You know?” There was an unctuous inflection in his voice that to Margot seemed a poor cousin to his former grace.
They stood and talked for several moments, each moment a triangular wedge that started small, widened, and reached a set limit. He asked if she was “with someone.” She was not; in fact, a woman named Roberta, whom she had been planning to move in with, had recently dumped her for someone else. Patrick, on the other hand, had just left a relationship with a phlebotomist—a “total masochist” whose life was a vector of disaster and misery—for a chiropractor named Rhoda. Now Rhoda wanted to marry him, and even though he loved her, he knew it would never work out.
“She’s a wonderful kook,” he said, “but she’s a kook. She goes on goddess retreats and Tibetan bell festivals. But I’m actually more open-minded than she is. Her friends are shocked that she’s involved with a psychopharm.” He laughed, Margot thought nervously. “They solemnly come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got a long path ahead of you.’ I mean, please.” He sighed. “She’s at a harmonic convergence retreat now, trying to get ‘centered’ enough to leave me. But I’m afraid I’m just going to pull her back.” He sighed deeply and then blinked as if suddenly aware that they were in public. “Am I telling you more than you need to know?”
“No,” she said. “It’s good to see you, Patrick.”
They exchanged numbers and agreed that maybe they should eat dinner together. Margot walked away in a mild disorientation that lasted some blocks. She looked into the coffee shops she passed every day as if she hadn’t realized what they were before. Listlessly dressed young people sat in them, their expressions hovering between public and private. Their coarsely groomed young faces appeared deliberately inchoate, as if in passive resistance to their own identities. A cosmetic redhead stared back at Margot, her gaze a slim, tingling thread of sensory thought. She self-consciously stroked her dyed hair. The sleeve of her loose pink sweater fell to the elbow of her slim forearm. Margot suddenly remembered the street vendor’s little print blouse and reversed her steps back into the wind.
In Ann Arbor, Margot had answered an ad for a roommate and, as a result, had moved into a house with Patrick, his sister Dolores, and a perpetually consternated math major named Donald. The house was small, but an inept system of hallways gave it a neurotic, spindly sprawl. Margot’s room was a humble cube with three brown cork-board squares affixed to one wall in a slanting shape of dumb symmetrical ascension. One of the house phones sat on a crippled little table outside her door, and since the math major, Donald, shared the first floor with her, it was he that she most often heard, usually having the same dark, fiercely muttered conversation, apparently with the same loathed person whom he invariably hung up on. Whenever Margot remembered the house, she thought of it as dark and a little too cold; she remembered squatting over the heat vent in her room in the morning with big wool house slippers on her feet, working up to getting dressed.