The Cloud of Unknowing (9 page)

“Pedal pushers.”

He looked up at her with surprise. “That is such a good word! Pedal pushers! And your name, too: Kitty. ‘It's Kitty's turn to cry.' No, wait—Judy. It's Judy's Turn to Cry.”

“Is that one of their songs?”

“No, that's Leslie Gore,” he said. “But, um, it's a good name. Yeah, you remind me of Mary Weiss: sad and tough like that. A tough, sad teenager.”

He led her to the listening station, where he put the record on and fitted the headphones over her ears. She recognized the first song—“Leader of the Pack”—as soon as it started, but Jim quickly picked the needle up and moved it to another track.

This one began with a somber piano figure in a slow waltz time. Three girls, in hushed unison, spoke a single word:
Past
. Then a lone voice took up the recitation in an amplified whisper: tender, but burred with experience and studio reverb and a trace of a New York accent.
Well now, let me tell you about the past. Past is filled with silent joys and broken toys.
Jim watched while Kitty listened to that song and the next, then carefully lifted the headphones.

“Let me buy this for you,” he said.

“I don't have a record player.”

“I'm going to buy it anyhow, and we can play it at my place.”

Jim's building was not like the complexes on 28th Street. It was brick and old, with a wide, dusty hallway that reminded her of her grammar school. Following him into his apartment she peeked at the bedroom, to the left of the entryway. There
was nothing inside but a typewriter, sitting on the floor in a sea of scattered pages.

“Is that where you're writing your novel?”

“That's good, that you remembered that,” he said. “Yes, the novel.”

Kitty wanted to go in and pick up a page and read it, but she stopped herself.

“What's it like, writing a book?”

“I don't really know how to answer that. It's great, I guess.”

There was no furniture in the living room either, except for a rug with a sleeping bag on it and a boombox and a lift-and-play record player. Next to the sleeping bag a picture, torn out of a magazine, was taped to the wall. Kitty bent forward to look: a girl with short hair and thick false eyelashes in black tights and a T-shirt, posing atop an expensive-looking leather footstool shaped like a rhinoceros. Her arms were gracefully outstretched with one leg extended behind her.

“That's Edie Sedgwick,” Jim said.

“Who?”

“From the Factory.”

“What factory?”

“Andy Warhol's Factory.”

“Oh.” Kitty had heard of Andy Warhol but she didn't understand the part about a factory.

Still wearing their coats, they sat down on the floor across from each other, each leaning against a wall, and Jim put on the Shangri-Las. The record had an echoey sound to it, as if it had been made specifically to be listened to in a room like this: a cold room with no furniture. The tough, sad girls were Out in the Street, they were Walking in the Sand, they could Never Go Home Anymore. It was dark when the record ended, but Jim didn't turn on the light. Kitty had a strong desire to tell him about Conrad and Holly and the abortion, and about how she
was worried that she still felt some pain from it. But she could sense that he would not want her to, so instead she talked about Western Mystical Philosophy and how, now that she'd finally started to do the reading, she felt like everything related to it—even the record they'd just listened to.

“Relates how?” he asked.

“Well, like, Plotinus. I read this thing last night that keeps going through my head: ‘The soul, different from the divinity but sprung from it, must needs love.'”

Jim exhaled. “Yeah, that's great, just all by itself. I don't even want to know what it means or where it comes from, you know? Sometimes I'll just open up a book in the middle and get some great phrase, or a good, technical-sounding word that I can drop into my novel somewhere. That's where my head's at.”

Later, in the hallway, it occurred to her why the picture of the girl in the black tights had been taped to the wall, at that height, by the sleeping bag.

The next time she was at the library, she remembered what Jim had said, and she looked up
The Thief's Journal
—the book she'd checked out for him in September. She opened it up at random and read.

Picturing the world outside, its shapelessness and confusion even more perfect at night, I turned it into a godhead of which I was not only the cherished pretext, object of so much care and caution, chosen and superlatively led despite ordeals that were painful and exhausting to the point of despair, but also the sole purpose of so many labors.

Kitty started dropping in on Jim at the 7-Eleven when she stayed late at the library. Sometimes, if she was at home in the
evening, he would come by her house and they would wander around for a while until he had to go to work. They walked along the median strip of Powell Boulevard, past vast, sparsely stocked thrift stores. They watched some firemen put out a practice blaze in a hollow cement structure in the middle of an asphalt lot. The factories by the river were dark and quiet, except for a few that glowed with swing-shift lights, their exhaust fans humming in the night. Mostly, Jim and Kitty walked through wet, foggy emptiness. Portland was a lonely city, a place where drifters reached the edge of the continent. Jim showed her a hobo camp under the Burnside Bridge near the downtown soup kitchens.

Once, they went to the diner with the pies and saw the waitress who only had teeth on one side of her mouth. Afterward, walking home, Kitty started to tell Jim about Conrad. He looked straight ahead while she spoke, nodding, but he stopped her before she got to the Spaghetti-Os and what came next.

“I want to tell you something, Kitty,” he said. “This is important. Any guy will fuck you if you ask. Don't ever worry about that.”

The milder weather came. Kitty saw Conrad around, and her other old roommates from the Westinghouse. It would have been impossible to avoid them entirely. She made a point of being friendly but she still kept away from the Student Union. She got a B on her paper for Western Mystical Philosophy, reduced to a C for lateness. That was okay—she'd cleared up the incomplete. It was a struggle, but she was keeping up with all her current classes. Thucydides and Herodotus were still giving her problems, though.

And something else: she still had pain. It had moved upward, spread out, gotten duller. When Tylenol didn't help, she stayed in bed with Windex and a hot water bottle. She knew she should make another appointment at the Women's Health
Center, but she remembered the morning at the clinic and the doctor with the port wine birthmark, and she kept putting it off.

She was at home under her electric blanket when Jim knocked on the basement entrance. The bright April sun blinded her for a minute when she opened the door.

“It's really dark in here,” he said. “You should change those bulbs.” The other fluorescent light tube had started to burn out, and now they were both strobing.

“What are you doing up so early?” she asked.

“I wanted to bring you some things on my way out of town.”

Kitty's stomach dropped.

“Where are you going?”

“California. My sister said I could stay in her garage. In Mountain View.”

“But—when are you leaving?” She hoped she didn't sound whiny.

“Now,” he said. “Well, tonight. I wanted you to have this.” He gave her a thick manila envelope on which he had written, in large block letters, “Real Life in California, by Jim Frank.”

“Your novel?”

“Almost.” His shoulders went back a little when he said it. “I'll send you the rest when it's finished. And I wanted to give you this, too, since you don't have a radio.”

He had brought her his boombox. She took it from him and set it down on her writing desk. “I didn't know you were going,” she said.

Irritation flickered across his face.

“I mean, I forgot,” she added. “I forgot you said that.”

“Here's my address.” He'd written it down for her. “And my sister's phone number. But don't give that to anyone. And don't show anyone my novel.”

“I don't have a phone,” she said. “Write to me, okay?”

“Isn't there one upstairs?”

“No. Well, yes, but it's not mine. I don't use it.” She had stopped paying her share of the phone bill. “Okay. Bye, I guess,” she said, anxious for him to leave. She felt tears coming and she didn't want him to see them.

She let herself cry for a while after he left. When she was done, she plugged in the boombox and played with the antenna, but the only station she could get through the thick basement walls was a sports talk show. Then she noticed a cassette in the tape player and hit play. For a moment it was just hiss and guitar feedback and thick bass notes dragging a beat. Then the voice came in: male, angry, but as naked and sad as Mary Weiss's.
Turn away, turn away from the wall. Face me now. Face me now.
She took the tape out and looked at it. The label said “FLIPPER,” in Jim's handwriting. She put it back in and hit play again.
Show me, show me all your tears. Your pain, your pain makes me burn.

She opened up the manila envelope and began reading. Someone was driving around in a van looking for someone else. She didn't understand it, but she felt like she was being shown something almost unbearably intimate. She realized she was shivering.

I saw you, I saw you shine
.

When the tape ended, she put Jim's novel down. Now her face was burning. She went upstairs and found a thermometer and took her temperature.

The fever went away, but after a few days it came back stronger than before. She was home from school when Jim's first letter came. He had typed all across the back of the envelope. “I am now the only, sole, exclusive warehouseman at a furniture store,” he said. “I make $5.65 an hour.” He described his sister's
garage, and said he was going to buy a car from her neighbor when he got his first paycheck—a 1968 Plymouth Valiant. Gray. The envelope itself was empty.

Kitty kept the thermometer by her bed, more out of curiosity than anything else. She stayed in her nightgown all week while her fever spiked and abated and spiked again. The pain was intense at times, but listening to Jim's cassette tape helped. The sound traveled over a secret frequency, from a different basement room in a place she'd never seen. The hum of the bass and the cymbal's tinny crash answered the dull and sharp sensations in her abdomen and organized them into a kind of music. On one song—a long one that she played over and over—the synthesizer dropped notes around her like falling stars.

Mail came every day. Jim sent lyrics, dreams, a letter to Dear Abby that he had copied out in his own handwriting. She burned with fever while she read them. Sometimes the words ran together and re-formed into other words. At the beginning of the second week, she got a letter in response to one she had sent, apparently, answering questions she didn't remember asking. “There are several schools of thought as to what the last word of “Real Life in California” will be,” he wrote. “A note exists in which I determined to end with the word “Oh,” which is used throughout the book to denote moments of special grief—just that word on its own. Oh.” He said he had borrowed money against his first check and bought the Valiant, and that he was tuning it up. He said he thought she would like California.

Later she remembered standing in the kitchen, talking to Windex. “Oh Kitty,” the little gray cat said. “You're moribund.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

And then she was being helped into an ambulance. A roommate had found her passed out on the kitchen floor. At the hospital, a nurse said they were going to test her blood pressure
lying down and then sitting up. Kitty watched the cuff inflate and dimly felt it tighten around her arm.

“Good news,” the nurse said. “You don't have to sit up.” She put an IV needle in the back of Kitty's wrist and taped it down.

“Pelvic inflammatory disease,” explained the doctor sitting by Kitty's bed. He clasped his soft, pudgy hands in his lap. A crucifix hung on the wall behind him. Kitty imagined an assembly line: factory workers in hairnets nailing little Christs to their crosses. The bed next to her was empty. Someone—one of her roommates, probably—had brought her some things: pens and a notebook and Jim's boombox.

“You'll need to stay here for at least four or five days,” the pudgy doctor was saying, “so we can give you antibiotics and fluid. You were very dehydrated.” He stood up. “You should be feeling a lot livelier in a day or two.”

“Can you plug that in before you go?” She pointed at the boombox. “And close the door?”

When she was alone, she pressed play and listened for a minute with her eyes closed, waiting to see if the tape worked on her like it had under the heavy blanket of fever, then picked up the notebook and started a letter.

“How is the Valiant running?” she wrote. “Come get me.”