“It’s me, isn’t it?” I screamed, terrified, sick.
“You have no concept of patience, of the right time and place, the natural cosmic rhythms. All you do is nag.”
“Is that so?” I screamed. I walked over to the bookcase. With both hands, I emptied an entire shelf onto the floor. The books bounced and ricocheted off each other. They lay at pointed angles like a stack of plucked feathers.
It is our marriage picture. At the Las Vegas Palace of Marriage a photograph was included in the price. We stand near one another, posed in front of a fireplace where synthetic logs burn. We stand close but do not touch. We are not smiling. I am wearing orchids. I remember Gerald bought me two. It was very hot and they died almost immediately. It was odd having two orchids. I wore them pinned to my dress. They looked like grotesque twin breasts.
The longer I studied the photographs, the more interested I became in the periphery. Gerald Campbell no longer mattered. Always his shoulders slump into shadow. His face drifts off to the palest corner of the remembered room. It is not necessary to edit him. His presence is tentative and easily ignored. Gerald erases himself.
I find myself drawn to the objects. Whose fireplace did we stand in front of? Who snapped us, arms almost touching, in front of what mantel? What round wooden table is it? Whose green china teapot? Where is that black iron railing? On what terrace, in what city?
It is important to be precise. One must carefully assemble the details. I pour tea from a green china teapot. I draw the curtains apart and admit sunlight into my house. I bend down in noon sunlight to water a patch of new blood-red canna pushing up near my front-yard fence. The self has already been defined.
Suddenly I felt a terrible stinging uselessness. I assembled the few gifts Gerald had given me. There was a string of too big, too bright imitation coral beads I could never bring myself to wear, not even once. They looked like the sort of thing one sees wrapped around a mannequin’s neck in airport gift shops, next to plastic leis and ashtrays saying Hawaii in gaudy goldish letters.
I found the blouse Gerald had bought me, one birthday or Christmas. It was a big billowing affair in yellow and magenta and red stripes. It was much too large for me, as if in Gerald’s eyes I was enormous. I held the blouse against me. I looked like a soiled cloud.
There were more bits and pieces of Gerald. Pots and pans we had bought when we first moved to Berkeley. They were old, stained by a dozen different sinks. I had scrubbed them a thousand times and they still stank of him.
The telephone rang. My hands were shaking. This is it, I thought. My father is dead.
“I’m cleaning it up,” Jason breathed at me. He meant he was cleaning the globs of pink and peach and yellow from his square glass palette. He meant the model had gone home.
“You coming over?” His voice was water falling through dark green ferns. His voice was a slow wind brushing the crepe petals of poppies. “Give me half an hour?”
Half an hour? What did he have to do? Erase the traces of the evening he had, the two wineglasses, the rumpled sheets, the hard evidence of his life which he knows, after all this time, locks me in a terrible silence.
Jason is careful. He folds their blouses and jackets neatly in his bedroom closet. Still, I see the gifts they bring him, the handmade ceramic vases with pressed flowers pushed through narrow channels in the clay, the batik wall hangings with sea shells and stones glassy from waves and age tangled in the threads.
It is odd, but I have always felt myself superior to these women with their portable pasts, their interchangeable presents, their lives of endless transition. Of course, it is just a feeling, something locked within me for which I have no hard evidence.
I held the receiver very tight in my hand. All I said was yes.
I remembered the pile of clothing and knickknacks, household goods and photographs on my living room floor. I scooped them up into bags and threw the bags into the trash cans in the alley behind my house.
After what seemed a suitable passage of time, I wound my way across bridges and eroded pavement to Jason’s house. In places, the sidewalk dipped down to mud or narrowed to a dirt trail. I pushed palm fronds back with my hands. I crossed an alley littered with parts of bicycles, pieces of stained rugs and piles of rusty nails glistening like red worms in the moonlight. The sky and water were an identical shade of deep purple, perfect mirrors. A thin haze was low in the sky and drifted across the cool water, a soft gauze.
I opened Jason’s gate. I walked carefully past the rows of planted vegetables in his front yard, the artichokes, tomatoes, broccoli and strawberries all nodding their slow green heads.
Jason’s door was opened. I walked in. I knew precisely where to go.
8
Everything requires an explanation. Name. Age. Sex. Today I named myself Rose.
I am twenty-seven and a pine tree my age knows more. A pine has stood without complaints or vision, accepting the burden of sunlight and the torture of night rain. A pine tree squares its spiked green shoulders and becomes a model for saplings and a guardian of hillsides, content with the cycles, flush of spring, stripping winter, and all the predictable repetition.
The sex is obvious. I am female, as you can plainly see, under the dress, across the flesh. I can meet you in the parking lot. A country setting could be arranged.
Weight. Height. Current addictions. Who’s dying? How many did you say? Just arrests or convictions? You’re joking.
Marital status.
Marital status.
Jason was sitting in the kitchen alcove at a table that had once been mine. My father found it in a junk store and spent an entire month digging through the layers of old paint and sanding it, bringing back the fine oak grain. Jason said he liked the table. And impulsively, I had given it to him. Now it is the only place in his studio where I feel comfortable.
Jason was grinding up cocaine. He looked at me and smiled. After all this time, when Jason smiles at me I feel caught, captured, held circling frantic like a moth at a light bulb in summer.
“You said you have a problem?”
I thought of my father battling for his life. Jason was staring at me. And I knew there could be no connection between my parallel worlds. All was ordered and mutually exclusive. The pathways were clearly etched, straight and smooth as asphalt highways, deliberate as a surgeon’s incision. The roads would never intersect, no matter the gravity, no matter the pull to the dark center, the cruel underbelly where I lived and watched worlds churn while stars clawed my face, floors dissolved and nothing was solid.
“It’s O.K. now,” I said, pulling my blouse over my head.
Jason nodded. “You always panic. See, nothing’s that bad, right?”
“Right,” I said.
Of course, it wasn’t me speaking. The me I had once been had disappeared. Someone else remained, some pale relative. Now all I wanted Jason to do was tie my arm up. All I wanted Jason to do was tap, tap, tap the sides of the syringe and find a vein to fuck. We were always close when we shot dope. We were kin then, sanctified by blood.
Picasso was sitting near Jason’s leg, a fine white and orange tabby cat with long thick fur. I hadn’t killed him yet, hadn’t come and taken him warm and trusting across the boulevard and down to the shoreline and strangled him.
“You get any rents?” Jason asked.
He was grinding up cocaine. My problem had been dismissed, inconsequential. Jason spilled a small white heap from a glass vial onto a mirror. Then he ground the particles into a powder with a razor blade. Jason was concentrating, looking down at the table, absorbed.