Alison was the other friend I had living in Los Angeles. She’d left New York about four years earlier and now, as a way to introduce me to Angelino culture, she’d invited me to a bookstore, for the launching of a new magazine. Its aim, according to the press release, was the “fusion of fashion and literature,” and along with the wine, there were various people reading from texts. By the middle of the second reader, a poetess, Alison informed me, not quite sotto voce, that she was leaving. She probably wanted me to leave with her, but because the event was part of my new life in Los Angeles, I decided to stay.
And I did.
And while I was standing there, listening to a man reading an essay about the Woodstock music festival, I noticed the neck of a woman in front of me. The bookstore hadn’t bothered with chairs so most of us were standing, and while the man was reading his excerpt about the use of drugs — not only at Woodstock, but in what he called the general culture of rebellion — saying that drugs were a protest against the old, a tool to get closer to reality, I was focused on this neck, and the downy hairs on the back of the neck. This was a neck I knew, and when the man finished, and after we clapped, the woman turned around.
I was about to say something to her but she spoke first.
“I know you.”
“Sure,” I said. “How’s Rex?”
“He’s great.”
I was good with the names of animals.
“How’s your ankle?”
“Fine,” I said, and I didn’t know what to say and she didn’t seem to mind.
She was wearing glasses now, and a beret on her head, and a yellow dress with straps. She started telling me about some award she was a finalist for, and that she enjoyed our “quote interview,” and that’s when a woman walked up, kissed her on both cheeks, and then a man walked up and said, “Tell Jane about Mammoth,” and for a while they talked about their vacation.
And when the couple left we stood there, and it was like meeting her for the first time. I wanted to tell her she looked like Joni Mitchell.
“With that beret. .” I said.
“It’s French.”
“Of course,” I said, and there was a pause.
I knew that Joni Mitchell, during the time of the Woodstock music festival, had a chance to go there and play her music. She was invited to take a plane with some musicians she knew, with Crosby and Stills and Nash, but she’d also been scheduled to appear on a television talk show in New York City. And either she decided, or someone decided for her, to stay and do the talk show. So she missed Woodstock. She wrote a song about it, but she missed the experience. She did the careful thing and the compliant thing, but she didn’t do the necessary thing.
And I didn’t want to make the same mistake.
I was standing in front of a person, with the possibility of getting to know that person better, and I said, “What were we talking about?”
“My beret.”
“Right. And Rex.”
“And your ankle.”
I stood on one foot to indicate that my ankle was back to normal, and it was almost a conversation. The words were going back and forth like a conversation, but in the back of my mind was a memory of who I used to be, or the almost magnetic pull of who I used to be, and because who I used to be never seemed suave enough or attractive enough, I tried to be someone who would be those things. I rose up off my hips to stand a little taller, and when I did, although I felt physically better, there was still the matter of talking. We were supposedly having a conversation, and I didn’t know what the person I was trying to be would say, but she was encouraging me, nodding and talking. And I was staring at her, at her cheekbones and her slightly crooked teeth, staring at her face like staring at an object, a sculptural object. And I guess I was paying so much attention to the visual aspect of her face that, at some point, some neurons stopped firing. The soundtrack of the world got turned off and the event I was witnessing, an event I was part of — the two of us talking — became, in my mind, a silent movie. I could see her mouth talking and smiling, but with the audio part of the program cut out, because I wasn’t distracted by the content of what she was saying, I could look at her and feel what I actually felt about her.
This is what I call the realization-that-something-is-necessary-but-not-knowing-what-that-is stage. A necessary thing is any action that makes sense of a given circumstance, that follows naturally what came before, like water flowing down a stream. If you can imagine water, cascading over rocks, actually thinking about something, then what that water is thinking about is the necessary thing, and the beauty of the necessary thing is that it’s true to itself, and by being true to itself, it knows exactly what to do.
Which is why I began acting like Scott — like Scott acting like Steve Martin. I was trying to be like water. When I said, “I wish I had a bone for Rex,” I said it in a way Scott would have said it, as if I was hearing Scott in my ear and he was telling me what to say.
“He likes toys,” she said. “You know. .” and she made a squeezing gesture.
“Squeezable.”
“Right.”
And we continued like this, and I guess it wasn’t so much what we said, but the way I was feeling when we said it. We moved over to the corner of the store, by the window, and I kept hoping I’d remember something about Steve Martin, or the way Scott had acted like Steve Martin. Being Steve would be a way to woo her, and I was hoping, by thinking about Scott, and at the same time focusing on the present moment, that Scott’s carefree persona would appear in me.
“So,” I said. “I never asked you. About your past.”
She just looked at me, and by way of explanation, told me the story of King Minos of Crete. The story is about how the wife of King Minos used to watch the prized bull prancing in the field. She liked that particular bull and she wanted to have that bull, so she built, or had built, a huge wooden cow, a hollow wooden cow, and one night she slipped inside the cow so that when the bull mated with the cow, and came inside the cow, she was inside the cow. And the offspring of that union was the Minotaur, half human and half beast.
“That’s interesting,” I said.
Whatever had happened in the past, I thought, that was in the past, and the two of us, standing by the floor-to-ceiling window, we were in the present. And sometimes two people can talk and that’s all it is, and sometimes they can talk in a way that moves through the metaphorical skin of the conversation, into the muscle and nerve and the actual joint, and that’s where we were going. The more we talked, the more successful the talking seemed to be, and the more I let Scott have his leash, that’s the expression. I gave myself over to Scott’s imitation of Steve, and it was fun, like play, as in “child’s play,” and I was carried away with its pleasure.
In New York you can be standing on the street, and without much effort, somebody says something and suddenly you’re in some conversation. I’d been in Los Angeles almost a week, and I’d tried to have conversations with people, but aside from salespeople and waiters, nothing was very substantive. But this was. Steve seemed to be working like a charm, and when I say charm I mean, for instance, that when I noticed her hands were a little weatherworn, I didn’t mind because I didn’t think Steve would mind. And maybe I momentarily worried that I wasn’t being completely authentic, that in imitating Scott I was being false or dishonest, but how could I argue with pleasure?