Gerald read Freud. He cut out a picture from a book. The photograph showed five men in stiff black suits staring straight ahead at the camera, unsmiling. They seemed to have a secret sneer on their lips as if they were silently thinking, there, assholes, see how right we were? Gerald tacked the picture to the wall near the brown sofa. I didn’t know who the men were. I waited for Gerald to tell me. He didn’t.
Whenever I remember Berkeley it is, in my mind, always autumn, always punched open, stinging and alive. It is the last apartment Gerald and I lived in, with the small asymmetrical bedroom opening into a dark hallway and the miniature living room with the three oversized pillows I’d insisted on even though we really didn’t need them. Gerald was right. No one came to visit. We had no friends. It would be sunset. Below, the traffic was still and hushed. It might have been the rushing of small animals, gray scurrying rodents, perhaps.
Gerald was memorizing theories of primate social behavior. He talked about langurs, gibbons and howler monkeys. He was struck by the implications of sexual dimorphism and dominance hierarchies in hamadryas baboons. He said he was getting back to the essentials. The pieces were beginning to fit.
Jung appeared in our life. Now Gerald talked about dreams, trances, tarot cards, flying saucers, astrology and visionary states.
“What are you dreaming?” he demanded. He had flicked on the light.
I stared at him, rubbing my eyes, trying to wake up. Gerald and I no longer slept in the same room.
“You’ve got to remember. Tell me,” Gerald screamed.
I couldn’t remember. There was a red cast to everything. Red and black, like a fire at night when the black smoke burns into the black air and night itself smells singed. I clutched the blankets against my chest.
“Don’t pretend,” Gerald said darkly. I had never seen him so angry. “I’m warning you. Blue magic has the greatest spatial complexity. But green magic has the eternal power.”
“Yes.” I tried not to stare at him. “Of course.”
“You’re good, real good,” he said. “You’re not like the others. Sea traps over their holes. Weeds that smell.” He made a kind of sucking sound. “You’re not like the others. You keep yourself covered. Thank you. God will bless you.”
“Of course he’s crazy,” Francine said over the telephone. “I told you that two years ago.”
“I can feel them,” Gerald exclaimed. He stretched his arms wide. He flexed his fingers. “My cells, my cells,” he cried, rapturously.
His cells were ancient, he explained. Within him the first amoeba stirred. A fish struggled to grow lungs. An amphibian was washed upon a primeval shore and squatted in the sun, blinded and gasping for air. The climate changed. Mammals scurried out into a new world. A beast gambled, climbed down from the trees and left the dwindling forests. The beast was neither fast nor well-armed.
It scavenged. It ate what other animals left behind. It was, from the beginning, an unspeakable creature. In time it realized its full potential and became man.
Gerald said he could sense the truth of it in his blood. He, Gerald Campbell, was a microcosm of the entire evolutionary life process on the planet earth.
I never doubted him. I simply never cared. Gerald was the scientist. He wanted me to understand. It was vital for my development as a human being that I become aware of the great events that shaped my destiny.
“You’re not applying yourself,” Gerald told me. He sounded disappointed.
Give him the black holes of space, I would think, slowly pulling on my short black skirt and pinning up my long hair for work, sticking the bobby pins in and jamming them hard against my scalp. Give him quasars and pulsars, African folk tales, the books with diagrams on how to build wigwams and canoes. Anything to keep him talking, anything to feel that we were still connected to some outside reality beyond the three rooms of our apartment. I put on the white cotton blouse of my waitress uniform, the blouse that denied the existence of my breasts. Then I leaned over the toilet bowl and vomited.
We had lived in the apartment two years. Previous tenants had painted the half-sized bathroom an enamel red. I would sit in the small tub after work, water hot, trying to empty my mind of everything while my legs and thighs turned lobster red. Above the tub, the walls felt sticky like blood, like some hidden and unforgivable wound in the building itself.
The bedroom walls had been painted a pale lavender. I slept in that room alone. Gerald slept on a straw mat on the living room floor. I would lie in bed after my bath and watch the car lights on the boulevard below. I would watch the sunset. The sun was a thick ruby. It looked close enough to pluck and swallow. Then one could grow red eels inside. One could fill the bloodstream with red moths trying to push out.
Gerald was talking about the hard evidence. I turned away. Hard evidence had nothing to do with my life. Everything in my life was soft. Gerald was soft, as if his baby fat had returned. He held his blue jeans together with a safety pin, refusing to accept or deny his new white belly. And Gerald was soft, soft in the sharp darkness, the darkness that fell down on me like a huge clawed bird.
Heat clamped a lid over the city. Berkeley was sealed shut, air thick and hopeless. Not even the bay breeze stirred.
Slowly, stretched out on my bed, on the cool sheets, I pinched my nipple. I felt my breasts rise hard and red like the enamel walls. My breasts had stony eyes in the center, eyes straining to see something.
“You want it, don’t you?” Gerald said.
He had appeared in the doorway. From habit, I immediately pulled my legs up and shielded my breasts with my arms. I was never naked in front of Gerald.
“I can tell you want it,” Gerald said.
He sat down on the far edge of the bed. The it, I supposed, was sex. The it was Gerald on top of me, a paler layer of night, doing something to me, pushing some small splinter of night into me and collapsing near my shoulder, asleep. It was becoming difficult to remember exactly what the it was or why it had ever mattered.
“Why don’t you admit it? I know you want it.” Gerald’s voice was hard. He seemed to be talking to a third party.
“Yeah, I want it,” I said. I looked at Gerald. A stiff smile was positioned on his lips.
“If you want it so bad, go pick it up on the streets,” he said.
I stared at him, startled. It sounded like the line from a movie. A nasty line, right before someone gets slapped. I didn’t remember seeing that film with him.
“Go on,” Gerald said from the hallway. “Whore. I’ve seen the devil. Big deal. He opened an import shop on Telegraph Avenue. He’s got a backpack and smokes hash. Go on, whore.”
Then night exploded, a tunnel collapsing in. And I was running into the night barefoot with the car keys.
I had rarely driven the car. Gerald said my manual dexterity and peripheral vision were inadequate. Now I pushed the car into darkness and let the night swallow me. I crossed the bridge into San Francisco feeling heady, letting myself glide down to the coves of flickering light. I parked the car in North Beach and began walking down Broadway.
The streets were crowded with summer night life. I walked quickly, as if I were meeting someone. I walked so fast I did not see the posters of naked women on the walls and doors of burlesque clubs. I felt the jostle of shirt-sleeved men and women, felt the imprint of their arms and legs as they passed. I felt the obsidian I had swallowed. I felt it turn inside, cutting new blood grooves. Something was moving through the empty corridors I imagined myself to be. Something was growing legs and a spine. Something was breathing. Soon it would start kicking down all the fine identical rows of pale gray locked doors.