That’s when another man approaches her, and like trying a different style of yogurt, or a different pair of shoes, she dances with this man. But she feels with him the same inability to dance. He wants to dance in a certain way, and get close to her in a certain way, and the only way she can get comfortable is to numb herself, to close her eyes, ignore his presence, and dance, not with him, but with herself. She can still dance, she thinks, but only with herself. And when the song ends she opens her eyes, and that man, like the other man, walks away. When she finds Christine, although Jane doesn’t say anything, Christine can tell that the plan to jettison numbness didn’t work. She can sense her friend’s agitation, and although she’s been happily flirting with a blond-haired man, she leaves that man, and they gather their things and they drive back home.
That night Jane sleeps on Christine’s sofa. Because it’s a strange place to sleep, she wakes up early. It’s barely light. Everyone else is still sleeping, so she walks out onto the deck. She notices a bougainvillea, and although she knows the flowers have no scent, she bends a purple flower to her nose. Flowers are one of the things that used to give her pleasure, and she still has hope. Because the deck is perched above a canyon, when she looks out over the edge of the deck she holds the railing. From the promontory of the deck she can see, as the sky begins to lighten, the lingering lights of the city below her, fading away. She feels the air in her lungs, and she’s listening to the air, and the birds in the air, and the sound of traffic in the distance.
When the family wakes up, they all sit around a big table and eat pancakes together. Later, while Christine is going over some math homework with Lucca, Jane walks out to the deck and stands on the deck, looking at the view. It was raining before but now it isn’t, and Isabel, who is seven years old, is also standing on the deck, in front of a redwood picnic table, wanting to cry and trying not to. Yesterday she had a birthday party, and one of the gifts she was given by her father, Christine’s ex-husband, was a socket set, a perfectly good set of tools for doing specific work. And you might think that tools are wasted on a young girl, that they’re only valuable for the work they perform. But Isabel loved the tools, not for their intended purpose, but as beautiful objects. The problem is, she’s left the tool set out in the rain and now the tools are wet. She’s staring into the plastic container filled with the different-sized sockets, looking at the ruined tools but not touching them. Jane walks to her. She sees the tears that Isabel is trying to contain and she recognizes those tears. She tells Isabel that water isn’t necessarily a problem, that the tools can probably be salvaged, but to the young girl they’re already ruined. What used to be pristine and beautiful has now been destroyed, and no amount of wishing is going to save them. And that’s probably true, Jane thinks, but she also thinks it might not be true. She brings the tool set into the house, sets the red container on the kitchen table, finds some rags, and first alone, and then with Isabel, begins working. Together they take out each individual socket, dry each one, and then they dry the plastic container. It doesn’t seem extraordinary to Jane, not at first. They’re just working together. But as Jane stands with the girl, not speaking, cleaning and drying and polishing the stainless pieces of metal, she can feel a sense of possibility rise up in her and come to the surface. And once it’s there, she doesn’t want it to go away.
Los Angeles has been called the City of Dreams; also the City of Angels; Jim Morrison called it the City of Lights, but to me it was just a city. I said in the beginning of this book that I’m originally from New York, but that’s not true. Although I did live in New York for a number of years, I was born in California, near San Diego, and for that reason Los Angeles has never been a dream for me, just a city, a city to live in. Nathanael West called it the City of Death, and maybe it was for him, but for me, at the moment, it was something else. At the moment I was walking along Vermont Avenue, alive in a way I’d never been before, alive to my senses and the world streaming in through my senses. I’d detached who I was from the web that had organized my world, and although a sense of self is a wonderful thing, as I walked along the sidewalk that morning, listening to the sounds of the cars, and the birds, and the occasional voices, I didn’t need any mediation between me and the world.
I’d parked my car in the post office parking lot, so it must have been a weekend day. Not that weekends meant anything to me. Not that anything meant what it normally meant. I was walking along the street, the sun in the sky, and I passed a bank where people were getting money. I didn’t get money. A white butterfly, or possibly a moth, flitted in front of me. The bookstore I liked was across the street, but the idea of reading symbols on pieces of paper seemed ridiculous. I was walking past a tree, and if I wanted to read something I could read the tree. Not read, but see, in the tree, whatever I wanted to know about the world. The tree was alive and the plants planted in front of the bank, they were alive, and under the sidewalk a root of the tree was pressing up, lifting the sidewalk, and I placed my foot on the section of cement, balancing first on that foot, and then the other, walking along like that until I came to a corner.
Across the street to my left was another corner, and I aimed my mind in the direction of that corner. I stepped off the curb, placing one foot on the black asphalt of the street. I heard the sharp wail of a car horn and then, a half second later, a car passed in front of me, inches from my chest. The car and the horn drove away and a woman with a baby stroller said something to me. She looked worried. “I’m fine,” I remember telling her. She probably thought I was crazy, stepping in front of a moving car. “Dónde vas?” she said, and why did she want to know who I was? “Dónde vas?” she said again, and then she pointed to the stoplight. “Esta seguro,” she said, smiling now, indicating that now I could walk. And I saw no cars coming, so I stepped off the sidewalk, telling myself I was fine. I crossed the street, and I could see people sitting outside, in the sunshine, in front of a Starbucks store. It was a coffee store, with tables, and that’s what I wanted, I thought to myself, not a coffee, but a place to sit. Not in the sun, so I walked inside the glass doors. It was cool, and warm, and there were people. I was amazed by the people, so intent on their work or their conversations. There weren’t any vacant chairs so I sat on the floor, legs crossed, my back against the wall. I assumed people were watching me, but that’s what I like about a city. Nothing is strange in a city. A man and a woman were sitting at a nearby table. The man was eating a cookie, and although there was music in the room, it was background music. Noise. And it mingled with the music of the noise of everything else. A man to my left was looking at his computer. A potted plant with long green leaves was to my right. Then the woman at the table stood up, the man ate the last of his cookie, and the woman positioned a bag on her shoulder. When they left I went to their table. No one seemed to notice that I wasn’t eating or drinking or using the products being sold. From the table I could see the whole room and the light of the room, coming from the street and the overhead bulbs and the people. I noticed the light given off by people, by their bodies. It wasn’t a blinding light, but I could see it, see them, and it was something I usually didn’t see. I’d never noticed so much light before, and music. The air conditioner seemed to be playing music, but no one was moving to the music, and I suspected that only I was hearing it. And seeing the light. And the raisin. A folded, slightly scrunched-up piece of tissue paper was still on the tabletop, and on the paper there were crumbs from the cookie, the oatmeal cookie, and along with the crumbs was a raisin. The raisin had been baked, so it was doubly shriveled, and I thought maybe I’d feel sorry for the raisin, shriveled up, left behind, unwanted, but the raisin wasn’t sad. It wanted nothing. Or maybe it wanted to be eaten. I hadn’t eaten for a while, and not having eaten, I could feel my empty stomach. And although I liked it empty, I picked up the raisin. And when I say light was emanating from the raisin, I don’t mean actual light. It was more like glowing. The raisin was glowing with its raisinness. And when I say the raisin was talking to me, I don’t mean actual speech. But by virtue of its raisinness and its luminosity, I got the idea that I should eat the raisin. I was holding it between my fingers, and there was the music of the world swirling around me, and the light bouncing off the objects around me, and also bouncing off me, back onto the objects of the world. I looked at the raisin, large and dark, with a sugar crystal clinging to its skin. The raisin contained an entire world, and I put that world to my lips, opened my lips, and let the raisin fall onto my tongue. I held the raisin in my mouth, feeling my saliva surrounding the little black seed, and then, with my front teeth, I bit the raisin in two. I could taste some sweetness when I did, and I let that sweetness slide over my tongue, and the idea of my tongue reminded me of Jane. I imagined her cheeks when she smiled, and then I bit the two halves of the raisin so that now there were four halves, or four parts, and I let my saliva and the raisin — it wasn’t a raisin anymore — mix in my mouth, and then I positioned the raisin back on my teeth and I began chewing. And the thing that had once been a raisin sent sweetness into my mouth, and when I swallowed I could feel the sweetness of what was no longer a raisin, but was now something else, something transformed, and I could feel it seeping its way down my body and into my body, and I could feel it, in my arms and legs and brain even, the nourishment of it, the sweetness and life, and Man ist was man isst, I thought, and like an elixir coursing through my arteries, it was flowing through me, altering my blood and the cells that were fed by that blood, and I don’t know how long I sat at the table, but at some point I looked up and I realized that yes, the world was still there.