“I don’t know. Random jumps? Venus envy?”
For a moment she looks timid, swallowed up in tiers of videotape, a refugee in a ship’s dark hold; then her leg shoots out to kick me hard.
“Really, you’re okay. Strength to spare.”
Ellen rolls her eyes, then looks away. “Have you ever wanted eminence? Ever cast yourself as a star?”
“Once. At sixteen, I was going to solve the Kennedy assassination. I made charts. I did a concordance of the Warren Report.”
“And?”
“I got to be seventeen.”
“I think it’s the biggest thing between us. That we share that ambition deficiency.” She stretches, waggles the sole of her shoe against mine. “Come on, why don’t you drive me home.”
If only this were the invitation it sounds like.
We’re zipping right along. No traffic at all. Ellen inspects my car like a detective.
“What’s this?” Fingering a brown potsherd glued to the dash.
“Found it out by the Salt River. It could be a relic with some spirit power or it could be nothing.”
“Spirit power? That costume doesn’t fit on you.”
“Why not?”
She tips back against the seat, rolls her head from side to side. “Too calculated.”
But I have a spot in mind where the power is hard to dismiss. Half a mile along the frontage road, then left. Castellated sandstone bluffs with a stream running slow underneath, colors enriched and outlines sharpened by the late sun. The air is light and perfumed with minerals. We drape over the warm hood, backs against the windshield.
“I’m learning to love the terrain,” Ellen says, teeth clamped on a barrette as she gathers her hair. “It frightened me at first. Merciless. Too raw. But I adjusted.”
“Where were you before?”
“Seattle. Lots of water, lots of green. Relaxing to the eye and ear.”
“Why leave?”
“I got toxoplasmosis. From our cat.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not. Parasitic microbes swimming around in your cells.” The way she folds her arms around herself it’s as though the story has to be squeezed out. “She really was a sweet little girl. I met her in a ticket line for La Bohéme. We had a house right by Lake Union with big bay windows and a plum tree in the yard. She played piano, I did some production for the PBS station. What a soft life. But I got a rash across my breasts, fevers of a hundred three, my throat swollen so I could barely swallow. Mono, they said at the hospital, and by the time someone really figured it out, I was in bad shape. The girl got scared and went back to Alaska. I got a permanent infestation of the kidneys. Little fuckers are in there now, latent, ready to activate anytime.”
Ellen slides’ over the fender and walks away, anomalous in her office clothes amid the scrub and rock. I watch her move down to the stream, squat to rub water on her face over and over. Powerful. And so much grief from a cat.
We stop at a place outside the city where the chili verde is supposed to be good. Ellen smokes irritably and leaves her plate full. I drink Tecate and lime and feel my admiration pass through stages, like an insect taking on protective colors, ending in spite. A distasteful image immobile in sepia, then disappearing into the noise of families all around us. The heart, I think, is just a muscle.
We drive in darkness now. Golden oldies are barely audible on the radio, but with spearing headlights and briefly impaled signs they substitute for conversation. “Don’t forget who’s taking you home and in his arms you’re gonna be…So, darlin’, save the last dance for me.” Abruptly, Ellen puts her hand on the wheel. I let go and she steers intently for several miles, her face a prow. But then it’s all relinquished. She fidgets with my lighter, thumbing silent butane at herself, loitering somewhere in her mind. I’d like to floor it, but we’ve reached the limits of the city. Ellen directs me in a flat voice, and on the radio a tractor pull is being promoted. She stares at adjacent drivers, some of whom speed up, some of whom slow down.
The apartment tower is unpleasantly sheer, an ugly spindle behind its landscaping. Some sort of complex tax deal for the company, Foley has intimated. Free rental to the workers and an open road for the accountants.
“Have coffee with me?”
I cannot allow myself to imagine…But as we cross the plaza and push through big glass doors, I feel like someone entering a seraglio in disguise. The lobby fountain gurgles. I am emboldened, elated by the odor of acrylic carpet and the glare inside the elevator.
“Home on the range,” Ellen says, letting me go in first.
So little in it, but a space that seems cramped. All the colors are pale. There are toast crumbs by the sink, smears of fat. There is a varnished bamboo screen by windows facing north toward the airport, a Max Ernst reproduction, dried berry branches in a blue bottle.
“Not much, is it?” she says, scuffling in the kitchenette. “I think of moving all the time, but that’s as far as I get.”
While the coffee drips, she shows me photographs, large color prints of wall murals over on the East Side. In some the artists stand in the foreground, raising their fists to la raza. She talks of Siqueiros and Diego Rivera with an excitement that lingers on my skin. But when all you do is watch, things pass by.
She has a little Dutch cigar with her coffee and speaks softly. “Part of the Seattle thing was having something under me. A kind of scaffolding. We were much involved up there. Aid for Guatemalan refugees, the Fremont Women’s Health Collective, volunteer time at the food bank. But the biologists say altruism doesn’t exist. I realized all that righteous solidarity was a way of comforting myself. Moral obligations were really emotional ones.”
She winces at herself, looks to me for a reaction. I am desperate in my obligations, seeing her once again as she squats beside the stream. I yearn for the dizziness of abjection, the smell of her secrecy.
“So how do I replace these things? With a practical attitude? Run your laps, cash your checks. Cut down on sugar and red meats.” She surrounds her empty cup for warmth. “Retreat, retreat. Rehearse yourself. There are all sorts of things to give up, but I don’t see anything pious in being solitary. Where are the fucking replacements?”
Clearly, she wants words and not my arms.
I say, in the irrelevance of my desire, “This is not a tender age.”
“Okay. What do we do about that?”
“We’re supposed to ‘play hardball’ and ‘stonewall it.’”
Ellen moves to the window and looks out. “You are a complacent, gutless asshole.”
“Yes, but I’m other things too.”
She ignores my hand on her back, glaring hard into the distance where runways are long and flat, where tower lights spin tirelessly and never retreat.
It begins to rain as I reach the car. A cold wash. Wipers and defroster on, I head through the strip zone for home, past a chain of mansard roofs, floodlights blaring on wet asphalt and chrome, savannas of plate glass, a fiberglass drumstick rotating atop a pole. The city’s population has doubled in the last ten years. In another five it will double again, pouring out hydrocarbons and sucking up the aquifer. I bless the sterility of the desert.
32
WHILE MANY MARCHED SMARTLY, even proudly, through the era of the airline hijacking and the happening, of self-immolations, lettuce boycotts, astrological medallions, and the aluminum can, I straggled. My hands were slack, my eyes un-watchful. I chainsmoked to the monotonous beat of history. Disposable history, as I discovered.
I was a tender of newswire machines, those tireless contraptions which, on white cylinders like massive rolls of toilet paper, recorded and arranged the soot-black dung smears of the day. The richly fertilized sheets which I distributed were inhaled and combed through for special nuggets; they were segmented and scribbled on, spiked on the wall, and soon enough balled up in the Dumpster. Event revealed Trend which grew into Crisis, all of which evaporated as soon as the next movement of tanks, the next celebrity drug arraignment, the next violated child thrown from an apartment rooftop. There really was no keeping up, so I straggled. And sometimes things turned up in the litter at the end of the line.