34
HAVE I MENTIONED TO you the stretch I pulled in San Francisco? Of course, yes, the story of the shoes with the holes cut in them. So. There I was in the city that has always wanted to be somewhere else. The place and the people in it were arch and overindulged and wanted their sophistication to be appreciated. The locale, in short, was all too fitting.
I had a cheap apartment with a view of the Oakland shipyards. Above an Italian restaurant, it was furnished like something out of a thirties detective novel and redolent of singed garlic. My landlady left small packets of anisette cookies in front of my door.
I had a job that brought me into contact with the sort of underworld I needed as an antidote to Lake Success. If I was going to shake loose of that depleting heritage, Le Sex Shoppe was ideal territory. It was undemanding work besides and afforded me nearly limitless reading time — B. Traven and Vargas Llosa were my fascinations at the time. I had barely to glance up from The Green House in order to make change for the peep booths.
I had an Olds 88 that enabled me to learn the city like an anatomy chart. I knew a spot in the Mission where tamarind or hibiscus popsicles could be had, and out the avenues toward the sea, a Korean grocery with the cheapest carton of cigarettes that side of the Bay and homemade kimchi that made your eyes water. In a light industrial zone south of Market, I found a record store called Tommy’s Soul Shack where I could get a bet down on anything from the sixth race exacta at Longacres to the bottom of a fight card in Stockton. In the apartment directly overhead lived a conceptual artist named Irv who made masks out of hair scrounged from beauty salon Dumpsters. Irv was a lapsed Jew from Baltimore, a fellow fugitive. He supplied me with high-grade black hashish at very reasonable rates.
The fabled city at my fingertips? The life of Riley? Well, not altogether. Ambivalence comes with every territory.
I was having an affair with an Armenian art student who wept while she fucked. “What is it? What is it?” I’d say, but Andrea would only pull her dark hair over her dark face and shudder. The tendons in her neck would stand out wire-tight. I’d stroke them, matching her silence for silence. Her mysteries filled me with loathing as often as with tenderness, but I couldn’t say goodbye. Andrea was short, round, not particularly beautiful. Still, I was enormously aroused by her almost complete lack of humor, by the warm morning smell that stayed all day with her and which no perfume could fully mask. Also, I suppose, I was unduly fascinated by my own reactions to the first woman I had known for whom there seemed to be so much at stake.
Evidently, Andrea was very much in love with me, although I had given her no good reason to be so. It unnerved me. Anyway, she was so bloody earnest about it, blew the notes so hard. Combined with some mutant species of Old World submissiveness, this studious approach of Andrea’s sometimes tempted me to strangle her.
We had known each other but a few days when she came to see where I worked. The presence of a living woman made the customers fractious and a few regulars grumbled across the street to the bar to sit in the dark. With the same sharp attention she would bring to a gallery full of Mirós or Rosenquists, Andrea looked over the merchandise. After a few minutes she carried an open magazine to the counter.
“Would you like for me to do this?” she asked quietly.
The photograph showed a woman cleaving herself with a black rubber dildo. I began to wish I were in the bar.
“You only have to ask.” Her eyes were shiny brown lakes.
The woman in the photograph grimaced; Andrea was expressionless. Her somber zeal bored into my skull like a steel screw.
“I’d ask you out for shots at the Forest Club,” I said, barely able to control myself.
But we had our harmonic periods as well. One of Andrea’s uncles was a grocery broker with a warehouse at China Basin. We’d head over there on a Saturday and load up with garbanzo beans, macaroni, olives, pomegranates, and marinated artichoke hearts. Then we’d go back to her one-room flat and eat like starved nomads while listening to the Giants game on the radio. Then we would ascend.
A previous tenant had cut a hatchway to the roof and installed a ladder. He wasn’t much as a carpenter and when it rained — which in San Francisco could be any minute now — the hatch was a difficulty. But Andrea had a tarpaulin she’d fasten over the top and a spaghetti pot to catch whatever leaked through to the bottom.
“I’ve got to have open space,” she said.
Golden Gate Park was at least three miles away.
Andrea had extra-long wiring on her record machine so that along with cushions and army blankets, we could haul it on up and listen to the atonal composers she liked so much. In each other’s arms, in the soot and waning sunlight, we would whisper like children.
Andrea told me stories about her family: the very devout grandfather with no left arm who several years ago had brought in the largest raisin harvest in the history of Inyo County; the cousin who, at least peripherally, had been involved in the assassination of a Turkish diplomat; and her eldest sister, who’d moved south, changed her name, and could now be seen as a corrupt D.A. on a semipopular daytime serial.
But the point of it all was simply this: We were so young we had no stories about ourselves. Probably that is a large part of what kept us after one another despite the negative signposts — the eagerness, even desperation, for heightened moments we could hoard away.
Must I always present things in such crass relief? Where is the balance? I should say that holding tight on that asphalt roof, I didn’t care that her paintings were derivative and cold, her dark mysteries so unnecessary. I felt enveloped and pleasantly stupid and I loved her.
Then in October Andrea was raped. Not by drunken seamen or nonwhite sociopaths, but by two fellow art students who cornered her late one night in the sculpture studio. They threw her over stacked bags of plaster of parts and pummeled her. As the second one burst in her, one flailing arm reached the purse that had fallen behind her. She plunged the nail file into the film major’s neck and ran, ran for blocks thinking of water to clean herself. On the apron of an all-night gas station bright as an operating theater, she remembered not to.
“You want a case, we need the semen,” said the bland resident.
I saw a 4-H sponsor petting a prize Charolais bull.
We sat on turquoise plastic chairs in the ER. The bruises on Andrea’s face were turning four or five different colors, but she was dreadfully calm.
I said: “You should have gone for his eye.”
“Blind him, shit, I was trying to kill him,” Andrea said. “Missed the jugular, that’s all.”
And that was the end of her weeping in bed. By instinctive understanding, no words passed between us; we simply resumed. Her silent encouragements were new, and the hardened ridges of her muscle. Even her surface textures seemed different: glassier, more like an altar statue. In her face, which I could watch without pangs now, was something I was certain had not been there before. She seemed distanced in a dream. I realized that I was to her now no more than a bright but finally weightless preoccupation, like a silver boar’s-head toothpick holder shipped to a lonely colonial outpost along with the rum and ropes of tobacco. I felt a kind of sick relief.