Gerald had changed his college major for the fourth time. He had already lost his scholarship and his teaching assistant position. He said he needed entire days to ponder and reflect. A job, any job at all, would be degrading to the intellectual climate he lived in. When he spoke about his intellectual climate, I imagined he had a large fluffy white cloud inside his head.
We didn’t have money for luxuries like soap and shampoo. We bathed at neighbors’ houses. We ate Ritz crackers dipped in ketchup and salad dressing from the student cafeteria. I had completed one year of college. I was in the honors program, permitted to take special classes taught by visiting professors from Europe and the Orient, men and women who spent the semester dazed, in culture shock. When Gerald developed an inability to hold a job, any job, I dropped out of school.
I became a waitress in Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant on Shattuck Avenue. The pasta sat steaming in big black pots and the smoke was hot against the thickening spring air. I had to wear my long reddish hair pinned up for work. I stuck the bobby pins in tight against my head each night. They felt like thorns. My feet ached continually. It didn’t matter, I told myself. Wives often supported their husbands. Gerald would find himself, commit himself to some program of study, sooner or later. There would be grants and scholarships, a sense of progression. I wouldn’t be working in Giovanni’s forever.
Gerald and I hadn’t made love in a year and a half. I was filled with an indescribable sense of futility. Gerald had gained weight. His flesh seemed oddly leaden, a heavy, awkward thing that had to be willed, jolted and forced into motion.
When Gerald wasn’t reading, he was sitting in the lotus position on his straw mat in front of the television. Each night, at six o’clock, as if a gong, had been struck summoning the faithful back to prayer, Gerald assumed the lotus position on his straw mat and turned on Star Trek. He sat there, barely breathing, rapt, as if in a religious communion.
The program was about a star ship, a gigantic machine holding a crew of four hundred human beings who seemed to be wearing flannel pajamas. The star ship Enterprise was one of only twelve such ships in the fleet. Its five-year mission was to roam through the galaxy seeking new worlds and new civilizations and boldly going where no man had gone before. After a while, I realized Gerald planned to watch the entire five-year mission.
Sometimes the Enterprise found parallel universes remarkably similar to earth, like planets patterned on mob-ruled Chicago of the thirties, or the Nazis, or ancient Rome with the added attraction of modern technology.
There were planets where the rulers lived in a cloud of magnificent splendor while the majority of the population suffered cruel exploitation below, in the mines, where a poisonous gas retarded their intellectual development. There were planets of aliens with antennae on their paper-thin white faces and the power to alter matter at will. There were green men, horned men, giants, dwarfs, blobs, monsters, Amazons and wayward telepathic children. There were decadent civilizations run by computers. There were witches, soldiers, merchants, kings, scholars, warriors, peasants and killers.
The Enterprise was run by Captain James T. Kirk. Gerald dismissed him as meaningless. Gerald was only concerned with Spock, the first officer, a scientist who was half human, half Vulcan. Vulcans had conquered their aggressive tendencies by severe mental discipline. Vulcans were freed of the scourge of unpredictability and emotion and love.
Gerald had a special appreciation for the forces and events that occasionally allowed Spock to have emotion. Once Spock was hit in the face by a kind of psychedelic plant that made him climb trees and laugh. And once Spock went back in time to an ice age generations before his people had conquered emotion. Spock reverted to barbarism, ate meat and had sex with a woman. Normally Spock had sex only once each seven years. And then the sex consisted of something like an intense handshake. The rest of the time Spock amused himself with a special neck grip that made people instantly collapse, a more than genius IQ and a form of telepathy called the Vulcan Mind Meld. Spock also had gracefully arched pointed ears and greenish skin. Gerald seemed to love him.
“It’s a metaphor,” Gerald would say.
“But we’ve seen this one before. At least three times.”
“Five times,” Gerald corrected, sitting in the lotus position, transfixed.
Gerald claimed each new viewing revealed another aspect of the ship’s functioning or Star Fleet Command. Gerald wasn’t concerned with the plots. He was interested in the details at the edges.
“This is a poem about humanity,” Gerald said, staring at the screen.
“But we’ve seen this show five times.”
“The man of knowledge is a patient man,” Gerald said, dismissing me.
I came back to Los Angeles to talk to Francine. I was nineteen and vomited all the time. I was seeking guidance. There were other problems. There was the revolution. Gerald had been in the library. He stopped to watch the demonstration in Spraul Plaza, the puffs of angry white smoke rising from the tear gas canisters. He had been listening to the explosions and the screaming. An Alameda police officer, tape covering his badge number and riot gear covering his face, hit Gerald from behind, across the back of his legs, with a billy club. Gerald collapsed on the cement.
“You look terrible,” Francine told me.
I was sitting inside my parents’ house, the house where I grew up, a modest pastel stucco in West Los Angeles with small square rooms and a sense of sturdiness and purpose. It is the house where my father still lives.
My mother and I were whispering. Francine and I whispered together, as if my father were a foreign agent. He politely ignored us. He was standing outside in the small square strip of fenced backyard watering the avocado and peach trees, watering the perpetually balding ivy, the rubber trees and patch of wild black grapes growing up along the bamboo garden gate.
“You wanted him,” Francine cried, trying to keep her voice down. We were sharing a marijuana cigarette, discreetly, a secret from my father. My father was watering the apricot tree. I could see him outside the window, his back turned, his hand directing the hose.
“I told you, no, hold out, you’ll get something better. But you didn’t listen. Oh, no, not you. You never listen.” Francine inhaled marijuana deep into her lungs. “He’s nothing. What was it? The Greek and Latin bit? Boy, oh, boy, did you sell yourself cheap. Cheap even for you,” my mother added.
I began crying. There was a long period of my life when I cried and vomited almost continually.
“You’ve got to be tough,” Francine explained. “Move out. Divorce him. Just go. He’s nothing. Forget him. He’s slime. Take a suitcase and don’t look back. Maggots will do the rest.”
Francine was getting dressed for a film premiere. She pulled a silk blouse over her head. Her arms looked like wings. She kept spraying herself with perfume. She was elated. Recently, she had crossed an invisible boundary whereby her name was now automatically included on special-invitations lists. She had joined a new, smaller, more elite inner circle. There were cocktail parties now before film premieres and dinner parties afterward. Francine showed me her new evening purse. It was made of round white beads that glistened like so many hard gougedout eyes, or the backs of hard white insects. She sprayed more perfume on her neck. I couldn’t bear her desperate optimism, her certainty of perfect ascension.