All This Heavenly Glory (14 page)

Jenna, an especially accommodating friend, a friend who has known Charlotte since junior high, a friend who is as familiar
with Charlotte’s stubborn nature as with her own powers of persuasion, comes by to pick Charlotte up to find that Charlotte
is wearing a large gray sweatshirt seeming to indicate that Charlotte is not yet ready to go.
No, not going,
says Charlotte. Jenna spends some time modifying her description of the occasion to convey its casual, unimportant nature,
to convey its utter one-hour-of-your-life essence, to remind her how much she loves the cinnamon-laced decaf at Cafe Lalo,
that from her apartment Cafe Lalo is equidistant to the Korean deli, that she will spring for both the cinnamon-laced decaf
and a slice of Umanoff & Parsons’ chocolate mud cake, which she knows is Charlotte’s favorite, at which time Charlotte agrees
to go partly for the mud cake and partly because Jenna is not leaving her apartment.

Initially, it appears that Charlotte will return to her apartment entirely unaffected by the casual decaf meeting. Todd is
not presenting any of the characteristics that usually appeal to her, namely that he has never been, holds no interest in
being, nor does he in any way look like an actor. It’s not that Charlotte is looking for actors. She just finds them. They
are abundant in her business, they are abundant in Alcoholics Anonymous, and they are abundant in the food-service industry.
Todd describes himself as a filmmaker. This is probably the only clue to any potential problem, as Charlotte has always had
a hard time not hearing that word in italics, that that word often presupposes some kind of art/ statement-making, which presupposes
pretension, not to mention the internal conflict that arises given that she has filmmaking aspirations of her own but would
like to avoid pretension, e.g., she could go the opposite route and say she makes movies, to make the point of being down
to earth, but which she worries could portray her as trying to be down to earth but really being just as pretentious as the
next guy, which at this point is neither here nor there considering that all Charlotte is really doing about the filmmaking
at this point is secretly writing, but to get back to the dating issue, since we know that Charlotte is looking for no one,
not actors nor waiters nor filmmakers, the combination of her looking for no one and Todd’s not making any kind of initial
overwhelming impression on her allows Charlotte to relax and engage in conversation with Todd without concern for the entirety
of their future. At some point Charlotte becomes aware that what is happening is not so much conversation as interview, an
interview with questions that are not so much questions as they are an interview for a position for which all other applicants
are no longer being considered, an interview in which the questions are not so much unusual as they are numerous and exclusive
of Jenna, who is sitting right there and is not at all displeased to be excluded, as this may be the first match she has ever
made of any success, inasmuch as even one party has interest in the other, which Todd obviously does, although it is hard
for anyone to miss the change in the angle of Charlotte’s head from interest in Todd as a friend of Jenna’s who she will never
see again after this mud cake to interest in having another piece of mud cake at which time Jenna will not simply be excluded
but will not be present at all. Charlotte herself is not sure how this transformation of Todd has taken place in the course
of the eating of the mud cake. She can plainly see that he looks exactly as he did when she walked into Cafe Lalo, that his
hair is still uncombed, that his purple plaid short-sleeve Land’s End shirt is still tucked into his slightly too highly hitched
jeans (which border perilously on acid-washed), and that his jean jacket is still hanging on the back of his chair, which,
when they leave, will turn the aforementioned outfit into what Charlotte considers to be the contemporary version of the leisure
suit. Charlotte is sure, faced with denim-on-denim, that she must really be interested in this guy. She is only grateful that
it is a little too chilly for sandals.

Charlotte and Todd say goodnight and nice meeting you and they smile that way and before he says goodnight in his denim leisure
suit, Todd hands Charlotte his e-mail address on a slightly chocolatey napkin.
I’d love to read some of your stuff.
Charlotte, who has sort of lied in the interview and said that she has no stuff, reiterates that she has no stuff, since
it’s not stuff she’s ready to show anyone at this point, to which Todd says,
Well send me an e-mail anyway.
Todd walks away, Charlotte looks at the chocolatey napkin and then at Jenna and says,
Fuck. This is going to make it very hard to leave town.

7.

In the end, the opposite will be true, and there will be other things that make it hard to leave town, but in the meantime,
right about here there could very well be another lengthy insane boyfriend story. There was a lengthy insane boyfriend story
here in which Charlotte, under the duress of wanting to leave town but not knowing how, started by accepting Todd’s invitation,
on the first date, to get into a very small, very old stick-shift car that she was barely able to drive, for a cross-country
road trip in which he more or less psychoanalyzed her, and her mother, and his mother, and anyone who’s ever had a mother,
been a mother, knows how to spell
mother,
or has anything to do with motherhood in any remote way, from coast to coast. To say much more seems needless except insofar
as it leads to the part about her getting out of town. They did have a few good minutes early on at Joshua Tree, in spite
of Todd’s idea that they should ingest mushrooms for a spiritual experience. Charlotte tried to explain to him the many ways
she thought
spiritual
and
mushrooms
did not belong in the same sentence, and also that in the program you don’t get to do drugs of any kind. His mother had been
sober for some time, you’d think he’d have known this, plus he’s not stupid, nevertheless he tried to debate Charlotte on
account of her not having done massive amounts of drugs and because her primary substance of choice to abuse had been alcohol.
Somehow they got past this and had a decent time at Joshua Tree. You’re not supposed to camp there without a permit but they
did anyway, setting up a little camp underneath some kind of rock formation, and they hiked a little and Charlotte barely
slept because there are no lights and she could see the stars in a way she’d never seen them before, like if there had been
time she could have counted every one, and also had as close to a spiritual experience as she’s ever had, minus mushrooms,
wherein it suddenly seemed a revelation to her that the earth rotated, because she’d look at the moon and it was there, and
then it was there, and then it was there, like in those stop-motion movies where it’s speeded up and it goes
shoop
across the sky in about five seconds. Her mistake was getting back into the car after the sun came up, knowing she should
have said,
You know, this is as good as it’s going to get, I’ll just catch the bus.
Anyway, you could just as well insert your own insane boyfriend story here, everyone has at least one or twenty, although
you might want to ramp it up about fifteen times, and title it
How to Leave Town the Hard Way,
and you could have him be the typical arty/angsty guy who “isn’t about” any or all of the following:

things

success

money

bringing babies into a precarious world

time

electricity

the phone

insert your own basic human twentieth-century desire or need

(maybe your guy isn’t about food, or breathing)

(and who will, not very long at all after this lengthy I.B.S., appear to be very much about all of the things on this list
and more insofar as he marries rich and brings babies into the precarious world) but who is about, who seems currently to
exist only for and be solely about metaphors as his own unique means of psychoanalyzing you.

Todd is, granted, one of the more extreme examples of mental unrest that Charlotte has come across, and there are some really
good examples of things he says that are so unbelievable that you might like to know about them anyway. Like the thing about
metaphors. Like everything is a metaphor for something else, like nothing really is what it is in and of itself, e.g., on
the second day of their road trip, their rearview mirror breaks and Charlotte has the idea of getting it fixed while Todd
has the idea that it’s a metaphor because Charlotte, metaphorically, doesn’t need to see behind her, but rather to look ahead.
Or she’s blue because she wears so much blue. Also he thinks people who have too much actual stuff have too much emotional
stuff, which sort of pushes Charlotte’s buttons because she does have way too much stuff and would like to get rid of some
of it, but not all of it, like Todd, who goes out of his way to rid himself of his own actual stuff so that some minor illusion
is created that his emotional stuff is also worked out, to the point where he doesn’t have like, a chair, which is pretty
obviously something most people need, one chair, and then he’ll try to say he’s not about that, and Charlotte will say,
Chairs? You’re not about chairs?
and it becomes a crazy exercise in craziness, but by the time this is discovered, Charlotte has already been sucked into
the vacuum because you have to admit it’s fascinating even if it’s ultimately exhausting, and it will cause her to reexamine
some of her own worldview, which he will take credit for, except it won’t be in the way that he thinks.

8.

A recap of the real reasons Charlotte is blue at this time:

1) Charlotte is broke

2) Charlotte is unemployed

3) Charlotte is on a road trip with someone inclined to use words like
bardo

4) Charlotte’s mother has just been diagnosed with cancer.

9.

There could be another lengthy cancer story here. You could likely insert your own lengthy cancer story here and call it
How to Do All the Wrong Things When Your Mother / Father /Sister / Best Friend Gets
Sick
and you could include any or all of the following.

Feelings of:

extreme and overt hostility toward the ailing relative/friend
(in Charlotte’s case it starts with being pissed off at her mother going and getting cancer when she’s trying to leave town)

flashbacks/reliving entire confusing childhood
(ranging from average daily weirdnesses like why Charlotte had to eat store-brand cornflakes with powdered milk for breakfast
when her mother got to eat leftover Entenmann’s banana cake to why her mother didn’t encourage her more to be a singer, or
a filmmaker, or whatever she wanted to be, considering)

Details about:

paleness/helplessness/hair loss
(like the time Charlotte’s mother tried to break away from a lifetime of hot rollers by using a round brush and a blow-dryer
and got the brush stuck in her hair and Charlotte had to work it out and her mother put her head in her hands, which by the
way, with only marginal aging and advanced-stage nail-biting, looked identical to Charlotte’s, and her mother said,
I’m going to lose my hair
and tried to make it look like she wasn’t about to cry.

Mom, you’re not going to have chemo. It’s not the cancer that makes it fall out. I know but I don’t want to lose my hair.

You’re not going to lose your hair.

I don’t want to lose my hair,
she said again, smoothing it down.

Mom, you’re not making any sense. You can’t lose your hair.

Gillian from next door’s daughter lost her hair. It never came back.

Mom, she had alopecia.

That’s a stress thing, you know, I have stress.

You’re not going to get alopecia.

Well, I have to be careful about that.)

and/or

surgical scars/depression of ailing relative/friend
(like the long crooked one down Charlotte’s mother’s back;
Look, Charlotte, I’m bionic,
she said, or the way she kept the curtains closed most of the day even though no one could see in and there was lots of sunshine
over her garden otherwise, except it was almost like she didn’t want to know about it if she couldn’t fully participate in
it, she was never a halfway-participatory kind of gal)

Duration and quality of:

crying/attempts to avoid this in presence of ailing relative/ friend
(assume that in this case all of the above were numerous, phlegmy, sometimes loud, often leading to breathing problems and
the need to excuse oneself from the room)

Reconciliation and/or profound gratitude for ailing relative/ friend:

        (e.g., the broken hammer Charlotte’s mom got at a garage sale for fifty cents after Charlotte’s flew out the window, or handmade
doll clothes, or handmade Charlotte clothes, or the birthday cake for her ninth birthday with roses all the way around so
everyone got one even though it cost a lot extra that she didn’t really have, or for the best stocking stuffers, or the Spanish
Steps, the Coliseum, and the Catacombs, for letting Charlotte sit at the cappuccino bar by herself at age eleven in Milan,
for taking her at age ten to see
West Side Story
and
Wuthering Heights
in Tokyo [w/Japanese subtitles], for taking her on the bullet train to sec Mount Fuji, going shopping in the Zona Rosa in
Mexico City, for not letting Charlotte drink the water in Mexico City, for taking Charlotte up the ski lift in Aspen, in spite
of her fear of heights, for taking Charlotte horseback riding in the mountains in Aspen, in spite of her fear of heights,
for skiing in Vermont [see: aforementioned fear of heights], for going up Pikes Peak [see: skiing in Vt., ski lifts in Aspen],
and crossing the world’s highest suspension bridge at Royal Gorge [see: Pikes Peak], for getting Charlotte a Shih Tzu, for
a complete and total lack of grief about the kinds of things kids generally get grief about, e.g., staying out late, [not]
getting straight As, messy rooms, going to see the musical
Hair
for Rachel Richmond’s tenth birthday party, buying Charlotte the record and subsequently not flinching when it finally occurred
to Charlotte to ask what
cunnilingus
was, for reupholstering Charlotte’s queen-size sleeper sofa with white fabric even though
it’s so impractical,
for knitting an afghan for the reupholstered sleeper sofa, for never throwing anything away that Charlotte might possibly
have wanted or needed, for teaching Charlotte to sew, for teaching her how to make a quilt [and telling Charlotte it didn’t
have to be perfect because none of hers were, even though careful examination of the evidence proved otherwise], for ripping
apart everything Charlotte sewed that came out bad and putting it back together [which might seem like a mixed message except
for when you put two sleeves on the right side of a dress and someone fixes it, it’s just better], for making Charlotte a
Cowardly Lion costume for
The Wizard of Oz, for The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, When We Were Very Young
[her copy], and
Harold and the Purple Crayon
[her copy, tragically lost], for approximately fifty blank books [no longer blank], for reading
Little Women
to Charlotte out loud every night for a week in fourth grade after Charlotte forgot she had a book report due, for taking
her to Bil Baird puppet shows, movies at Radio City Music Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art,
for taking her ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, roller-skating in Vermont, out for lobster in Maine, to see Old Faithful
and
The Nutcracker,
and for never even suggesting that they see Cats, for Davis Academy, for always telling Charlotte she’s beautiful, for undue
forgiveness Charlotte had not always extended to her)