This was the routine: glasses on the floor, serapes on the wall, our host in a rubber Nixon mask, blue overhead bulbs, and a two-headed ax on the coffee table. Yosenabe came over to explain that the woman who’d brought him kept staring at me because she thought I might be one of the men involved in the theft of her Samoyed. He had a gray crew cut and wore steel-rim Tojo glasses right out of a WWII cartoon. I admired his nerve. When I said I came from New York, he revealed his shoulder holster, the plastic gun that shot green and red candy BB’s.
Yosenabe was an art restorer, an expert on Japanese swords. Once he had made wildlife dioramas for the Museum of Natural History, but New York was not so good. He made too much money and the cold weather made him think too hard.
“This city nice and boring,” he said. “Full of Japs.”
It was several days later that I found an empty cigarette pack in my jacket, and Yosenabe’s business card tucked in behind the cellophane. Through the blunting residue of the recent drunk, I could call back the apprehension that Yosenabe might let me in on a few jokes.
His studio was on the second floor of a wooden firetrap downwind from a mayonnaise factory. I went up the outside stairs and found Yosenabe chipping cotton practice balls with a nine iron. The place was crammed, a treasury, and I mentioned how very close to a porcelain vase he was coming on his backswing.
“No worries. This a repair shop.”
We had green tea and pretzel sticks. But Yosenabe was in a hurry, packing for a trip to Yosemite. Proudly, he displayed the shoes he was taking, brand-new sneakers with diamond-shaped holes cut in the canvas. It was late autumn, the midst of the rainy season.
“You’ll get soaked if you wear those,” I said.
Yosenabe smiled indulgently. “Holes are for water to run out.”
The logic hit me like an injection. Here, finally, was someone who understood the modus operandi of the world. I bowed.
Was this a turning point?
Well, here are the facts: Two months later I was in Los Angeles eating fresh fruit all day long and teaching myself to dive. Before the year was out I married an anthropologist who was the greatest fuck of my life. We weren’t very happy together and came apart in the end like burrs from a blanket. Holes are for water to run out. Absolutely.
11
MY EX-WIFE CALLS from L.A. She’s a great one for staying in touch. Also, she has trouble getting to sleep sometimes, and it scares her.
“Just lying here in bed thinking about you.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah. Me and the night and the music. I don’t have a thing on.”
Violet gives good phone.
I remember the way she’d talk to herself with an English accent in the mornings. I remember her smell of cosmetics and fear.
I was new to Southern California and I fell in love with Violet’s driving. We’d go zipping through the canyons in her green sports job with the top down and the radio wailing, eucalyptus always in the air. Violet would tromp and slide and dig through that gearbox like a mole in a tunnel. She didn’t struggle with modesty, could do without conversation. She shot a bullet through my heart.
It happened after a daylight banzai move along Mulholland Drive. Violet dodged a bottled-water truck by no more than a foot, Curtis Mayfield pouring from the speakers. My eyes watered and I knew I was right there at zero, had found what I was looking for: cathexis. She parked on some baked plateau below a water tank, beer empties and diapers strewn around, all the indicants of a True Detective scene-of-the-crime. She stared out over the hazy San Fernando tracts, her breathing steady as breakers. And she glistened.
“Let’s drive to Vegas and get married,” I said.
“Right now?”
“By tomorrow I won’t want to.”
Violet was embarrassed to be there in corduroy pants, but the minister told her not to worry. We had pink champagne at the chapel and a woman from Samoa took Polaroids.
That night at the motel I woke up feeling chilled. I said to myself: You’re married to an anthropology professor and she’s allergic to shellfish. Violet reached over to me and her palms were hot and smooth. She whispered in my ear.
“Right now?” I said.
The honeymoon didn’t come until six months later, by which time I had my own car and Violet had renewed her prescription for antidepressants. She wanted to go to New Mexico to study Hopi sheep culturists, so we decided to call it a honeymoon and close the file on that. It was late July and we drank a lot of beer, got headaches. While Violet toured the pueblos with a Hopi activist in a rollbar Jeep, I watched Wheel of Fortune and Break the Bank. Actually, knowing how much she wanted to, I was touched she didn’t fuck him. I watched Password and General Hospital and Championship Bowling. She went all over the valley gathering oral histories with a tape recorder. Some of the old people wanted money, some were too drunk or crazy to remember even last year, last month. At night I would go all over Violet’s body looking for sheep ticks. After about ten days, we went back to L.A.
The money on both sides of Violet’s family comes from long citrus holdings. But when I think about being married to Violet, I think of tangerines. I think of her slender toes, pink as grapefruit.
“I’m on something new,” Violet is saying. “Not a tricyclic.”
My mouth is dry and I’m drinking cold instant coffee. “Does it help?”
“Who knows? It’s the ritual of the thing, mostly.”
“Sure. Along with the artificial flavorings.”
“Another thing is I have this paper with a publication review committee and I probably should have heard from them last week. So it’s tense. And I know one of the women on the committee, a cunt. She likes to scuttle careers.”
“What’s the article?”
“Don’t be polite…Textiles, it’s about textiles.”
Stacked by the phone are some of the books Violet has sent. The one on top is called Poetry by Aphasics (Chain Mail Press, Rochester, Minn.). Her munificent intellect, her pitiable turns of phrase. “I’m afraid I’ll destroy you,” she’d often said.
“Tense,” I say.
“Exactly so. I cook these fancy dishes and then pour them down the disposal. I lie in the empty bathtub with my clothes on.”
“You call up your ex-husband and get cute.”
“But today I took off and went to the beach,” she says, changing the subject without changing the subject. “I got there early, around ten, so I caught all the high sun. The heat and the glare made me dopey. I passed out on the towel and when I woke up my shoes were gone. There’s the purse with my money and credit cards, there’s the watch I took off so it shouldn’t leave a white line around my wrist, and some lunatic steals my shoes.”
“No getting away from it.” This is a sad fact about her.
“Thought there’d be blisters from walking across the parking lot barefoot. But I feel just lovely since I got home. There was a little brandy left in the bottle and I had that, wrote some letters.”
“Any of them to me?”
“I send you books. I don’t send you letters.”
“Yeah, why is that?” Do you begin to see how violently Violet she is?
“Well, you know, we all have our avoidances. I’ve started letters to you; it’s not that it doesn’t occur to me.”
I know it’s wrong, but I go: “You don’t like writing because it leaves evidence.”