Don't Cry: Stories (12 page)

But the intrepid soul attached to the brain of the girl who had knelt under the mirror ball that night did not hang around. As soon as he released it, it made a beeline toward its proper owner, who was mercifully still asleep, and so was spared the strange sensation of reentry. The window of her heart was just open enough for it to slip in.

Almost a year later, they passed each other on the street. They might have tried to avoid meeting, except that neither recognized the other until it was too late. This was because the appearance of both had been subtly altered. Each of them was vaguely aware that the other had changed, but neither suspected that the other had a thing to do with it. Each merely recognized the other as an enemy with whom they were no longer at war, and they both had tentative, tolerant eyes that said, I like you fine as long as you don’t start anything. They said, Hi, how are you?” on the approach and “Good!” on the way past. Both of them turned to look at each other, got caught, and quickly turned back. Neither of them saw their souls, unfurled in the sun and glimmering at each other with recognition and regard.

I dreamed of Dani only once that I can remember, but it was a deep, delicious dream, like a maze made of diaphanous silk, or a room of hidden chambers, each chamber nested inside the previous one—except that according to the inverse law of the dream, each inner chamber was bigger, not smaller, than the last.

In the dream, I was alone on the streets of Las Vegas, surrounded by speeding traffic and huge streaming lights advertising monstrous casinos. There were thousands of people pouring in and out of the monstrous advertised mouths, but I didn’t know any of them. I went to my hotel. The walls of its lobby were made of artificial forest, with animals and birds moving inside them. I went to my room; its walls seemed to shift and flux. Dani came out of the bathroom wearing a leopard-print minidress and black high-heeled shoes. The room stirred as if surprised; though she sometimes wore lipstick, Dani never wore a dress or high heels. She wore pants and clunky boys’ shoes; she liked her lovers to wear dresses. But in the fluxing chamber of my dream, she walked toward me with a leopard-print dress purring on her haunches. Her slender little body was like a cold-blooded eel with electricity inside it; her movements, too, had the blithe, whipping ease of an eel traveling in deep water. But her flashing eyes were human. She came toward me as though she were going to kiss me, but instead she walked past me, opened a door in the wall, and disappeared. I looked out the window and saw cities and countries; I even saw private rooms in other countries; I saw things that had happened hundreds of years ago. But I couldn’t see Dani, even though she was inside my room.

A week later, I was walking down the street in Manhattan, and there she was. It was during the first autumn of the Iraq war. It was a time of decay and disillusion. On the newsstand, a magazine cover read why we haven’t been hit again: ten reasons TO FEEL safe—a^jd SCARED. In the middle of town, a building fell down and crushed people to death, and before sad-ness, there was relief that it was merely more decay, and not terrorism. A bus stop advertisement for bras read WHO needs inner beauty? and someone had written across it in black marker YOU DO ASSHOLE.

I was carrying wine and fuchsia flowers, and the flowers nervously waved their wobbling fingers over the top of my bag. It was a humid afternoon and the air was heavy with the burnt tang of fresh-laid asphalt and hot salted nuts. I walked past a wall layered with many seasons of damp movie posters; the suggestion of a circus seeped up under the face of an actress, until a torn half tiger leapt, roaring, through the hoop of her eye. Loud, clashing music poured out car windows and ran together in a muddy pool of sound, with a single bell-like instrument sparkling in and around the murk. I looked up, my mind suddenly tingling with a halfremembered song, and there she was, looking at me. An eerily smiling beggar wandered between us, jiggling the coins in his cup.

and I remembered that when we first met, she had put her finger on my sternum, lightly run it down to my navel, and turned away. “Hello, Ella,” she said.

She was on her way home from her job as an editor of a small press distinguished mainly by its embroilment in several lawsuits. I was preparing for a dinner party my husband was giving for some pleasant people who had once been well regarded in bohemian literary circles. She knew I was married, but still, when I said the word husband, she let contempt touch her eyes and lips. We clasped hands and I kissed her cool, porous cheek. Dani used contempt like a clever accessory, worn lightly enough to beguile and unsetde the eye before blending into otherwise-ordinary clothing. I’ve never seen her without it, though sometimes it fails to catch the light and flash.

During the last ten years, we’ve met several times like this. When we first met, nothing was like this. That was fifteen years ago. I had just published a book that was like a little box with monsters inside it. I had spent five dreary years writing it in a tiny apartment with a sink and a stove against one wall and a mattress against the other, building the box and its inhabitants out of words that ran, stumbled, posed, and pirouetted across cheap notepaper like a swarm of hornets were after them. I neglected my family. I forgot how to talk to people. I paced the room while feverish tinny songs poured from a transistor radio with a broken antenna and fantasized about the social identity that might be mine if the book were to succeed.

I did not realize I had made monsters, nor how strong they were, until the book was published and they lifted the roof off my apartment, scaled the wall, and roamed the streets in clothes I never would’ve worn myself. Everywhere I went, it seemed, my monsters had preceded me, and by the tune I appeared, people saw me through their aura. This could’ve worked for me socially; monsters were and always will be fashionable. But in my mind, my monsters and I were separate. Painful and complicated situations arose, and I lacked the skill to handle them with finesse. I left the monsters behind and moved to California, where I rented a cottage in a canyon heavily grown with trees. I purchased a rug with large, bright polka dots on it and a red couch, on which I sat for hours, hypnotized by the prize of my new social identity. It was an appealing thing and I longed to put it on—but when I did, I couldn’t quite make it fit. Hesitant to go out in something so ill' fitting, and uncertain how to alter it, I stayed home with the cat, who accepted my private identity as she always had.

Back in New York, several new acquaintances became concerned. They gave me the names of people I might introduce myself to in San Francisco, and one day I took the bus across the Golden Gate Bridge to meet one of them. The warm, dim, creaking old coach traveled low on its haunches, half-full of adults heavily wrapped in their bodies and minds, plus light-limbed, yawping teens, bounding and darting even as they sat in their seats. On the highway, the bus accelerated, and with a high whinging sound, we sprouted crude wings and flew across luminous bay on humming bridge, between radiant, declaiming sky and enrapt, answering sea, flecked with flying brightness and lightly spangled with little tossing boats. We barreled along a winding avenue thickly built with motels (the stick-legged ball of a smiling sheep leaping over the words comfort inn still leaps somewhere in my brain) and squat chunks of fast-food stores. The distant ocean flashed and brimmed at intersections. We turned right, climbed a hill; at the top, fog boiled through the air on wings of mystery and delight. Down the hill, lit slabs of business rose up into the coming night. Floods of quick, smart people surged along with the hobbled and

toiling; the felled sat beached and stunned against buildings in heaps of rags. Turn and turn again. Glancing out the window, I saw a strip club with a poster on its wall featuring one half-naked girl walking another on a leash. The leashed girl looked up and raised a' paw in a patently ironic expression of submission and desire. I was meeting Dani in a neighborhood of bars and old burlesque clubs, a place of cockeyed streets like crooked mouths lined with doors ■ like jack-o’-lantern teeth. The fog lolled in the sky, sluggish as a fat white woman on rumpled sheets. I was in a place where people dressed up as monsters, and after going to so much trouble to make them, I’d left mine behind. Feeling small and naked, I walked under big neon signs: a naked woman, an apple, a snake. It was not frightening. It was a relief to feel small and naked again.

I entered the appointed spot, a dive with a slanted, vertiginous floor. It took a moment to figure out who she was, but I believe she saw my nakedness at once. So did the man sitting with her, a middle-aged academic with a red shelflike brow. “Your stories are interesting for their subject matter,” he peevishly remarked to me. “But they aren’t formally aggressive enough for me.” He went on to describe his formal needs while Dani listened with droll courtesy, then turned to me with an amused grin. She put her cold finger on my sternum and ran it lightly down to my navel, then turned back with mock solemnity as her companion put down his drained glass and held forth again. He left minutes later, banging a table cockeyed as his curled arm and flipper hand worried the torn sleeve of his jacket.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I just ran into him. He’s lonely and he talks too much when he’s drunk.”

She was twenty-five. I was thirty-three. She was already editor in chief of a venerable avant-garde press, a veritable circus of caged monsters and their stylish keepers. She spoke with a combination

of real confidence and its flimsy counterfeit. Monsteriess, I barely knew how to speak at all, and what I could say was timid and unctuous. It didn’t matter. She wore a heavy silver necklace over her white T-shirt, under which her small breasts gave off dark, glandular warmth. Behind the bar, a mountain of green, blue, and gold bottles glimmered before a murky mirror lake. On the television above the bar, a rock star in an elaborate video drew a door in the air with a piece of chalk, smiled, and stepped through it. Jukebox music rose up, making a forest of sound, through which young girls traveled on their way to the bathroom. Above us, the fog traveled, too, laughing and quick. The bathroom door creaked loud and long; slim thighs went past, along with a swinging litde wrist loaded with shining jewelry. We were hungry for this, all of this, and for each of us, “this” took form in the other. We ate each other with our eyes and, completely apart from our inconsequential words, our voices said, How delicious. We impulsively kissed, and separated quickly, laughing like people who had accidentally brushed against each other on the sidewalk. Then with a nervous toss of her head, she glided in close again. Soft heat came off her face, and then there was the dark, sucking heat of her mouth. She said, “I’d take you to dinner, but my girlfriend is expecting me.”

She drove me to the bus stop in front of a doughnut place and stood waiting with me. She lived with her girlfriend, she said, but they had an understanding. Gum wrappers and plastic bags stirred in the cold, light-echoing wake of night traffic. Behind the glass of the doughnut place, a dark woman with rhythmic arms labored over golden dough. On the street, a hunched man with a sour face strutted back and forth, displaying the masking-tape words on the back of his jacket—COPS are TOPS—i’m a BOTTOM—plus an arrow pointing at his butt. Really, I said, an understanding? Yes, said Dam, though it had been difficult to maintain. How had they

arrived at it> I asked. How had they talked about it> They had not talked about it, she said. She thought it was more powerful for not being talked about. Bottom scowled as we kissed again. Golden doughnuts continued to fry. The bus arrived; I crossed its black rubber threshold, sat in the back, and almost immediately went to sleep.

Asleep on the bus, I dreamed that while watching a magic show I was plucked, blank and tingling, from the audience and led by a white-gloved assistant up onto the stage, where I was suddenly drenched with color and identity I was the girl to be sawed in half. My heart pounded. I woke on the winding avenue thickly built with hotels, their signs now rapt and glowing in the velvet dark.

Naturally, it was nonsense about the understanding. That was just a door Dani had drawn in the air with her finger. But when we tried it, it opened, and so in we went.

We met almost every week for five months. Our time alone was as light and pleasantly shocking as her casual touch to my sternum, but with its meaning now thoroughly unfolded. We attended film screenings, dinner parties, the dull receptions that follow literary panels—and somehow we would always find an unused room, an inviting stair, a hallway that would magically rearrange its molecules to become a sweet litde seraglio and modestly revert as soon as we left it, smoothing our clothes and hair. We would have dinner somewhere, and then she would drive me back home to Marin. We drove without talking, the tape deck playing and the landscape making dark curved shapes all about us, shapes that would part to reveal the stars, then the ocean, then clusters of fleeing light. I remember a tape she played a lot, a song that went “Let your love come through j Love come through to you.” It was a lush and longing song, and after it, the silence between songs seemed dense and deep. It was during this silence that Dani asked, “What are you thinking?” And so we began to talk.

We talked much like we made love—false and sincere, bold and fearful, vulnerable and shielded. I knew that her mother had had several face-lifts, a tummy tuck, and liposuction. I knew that after an especially grueling set of operations, she had declared triumphantly to her daughter, “You have inherited an excellent set of healing genes!” She knew that my father had screamed to my mother, “I’m done with you, you phony! I’m going to find me a black lady with big flat feet and a hole up her butt!” I knew that one Thanksgiving her mother had burst into tears, run into the kitchen, and stuffed the turkey into the garbage, shouting, “And I wish I could do this to every one of you!” When Dani tried to comfort her, she turned away shouting, “No! No!” Dani told this story not with self-pity but with laughter and love in her voice. WTien I showed her a picture of my parents taken at an ancient local studio known for its funereal tinting and suffocating airbrush technique, she said, entirely without irony, “They look great! They look so real!”