It was the week everybody got really into the Clientele album that Andrea and Sam had to leave the apartment one morning so the landlord could finally repair the glass shower door the other Andrea walked into the night of the Zumpano show, so the two of them decided to sit out front on the sidewalk with a pitcher of margaritas and sell stuff they didn’t want anymore on a blanket. Sam sold the skirt her mother sent every birthday, three of them, and the limited-pressing seven-inch single by the Unsuspecting Motorists, “I Am Here.” The single is rare but Sam didn’t really like them anymore since they dropped their guitarist for a boy with curly red hair and a tiny little beard. It was eleven A. M., too early for the naked lady across the street, so of course Andrea and Sam ended up talking about Egg. “I like him,” Andrea said. “I’d give him a ride to the airport if he asked me, but I’d be very surprised that he asked.”
“What’s-his-name was a boy like that,” Sam said, forgetting for a moment and sipping from the pitcher. From her bedroom window she could hear the faint sounds of the first Katydids album. No one remembers that album but Sam. It wasn’t on loud enough to hear really but Sam didn’t think she could call to the landlord to turn it up. Andrea and Sam had lived in another apartment, over by the zoo with the other Andrea—as if two Andreas weren’t enough trouble, it was also when the radio just wouldn’t stop with that Waltzing Pneumonia song “Andrea Says”—and they became friends with the landlord because he called them both “Chicky chicky,” mostly Sam. But then Andrea and Sam got a letter from him which started “Dear chicky chicky sexy,” and it contained some snapshots, and so they moved. In the new place they had not as much room. It was harder to move around, or to move in, even: there were still boxes. They were marked FRAGILE from the last move but now they held different things. They weren’t fragile anymore, hadn’t been fragile for years, and you could shut up about it because they knew how that sounded.
“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” Andrea said, as if they hadn’t been quiet all this time.
“What’s-his-name?” Sam said.
“Yes,” Andrea said, “because he has a name. Steven is his name, by the way.”
“Can I keep calling him Egg?” Sam asked. “You’ll grant me that, right?”
Andrea sighed so loudly that the two boys looked up from the crate of comic books they were looking through. Andrea and Sam had found the crate as is, in the apartment when they moved in, and every sidewalk sale they lugged them out to attract boys. “Yes, Sam,” she said, and gave Sam a look that approximated enormous patience. “Egg.”
Sam reached across the card table and flicked her thumb at her black badge sitting there, decorated with a wavy, hand-painted yellow line. She’d found it outside the Black Elephant one wealthy evening, and now it skittered toward her roommate but stopped halfway like it had lost interest. “Those comics aren’t for sale,” she told the boys, and held up the pitcher. “Margarita?”
“Tony,” replied one of the boys, moving on. It had been like this for years. Andrea and Sam had known each other forever, or at least since the first Morphine album which was almost as long. Somebody someplace had introduced them by having a birthday party they both crashed. It was at an art gallery with paintings on the wall. At the time Sam lived in South San Francisco The Industrial City but still she knew enough that when a guy named Tomas stood up and said that there were a few things everyone needed to know before he read from his unfinished novel and the first thing was that it was a work-in-progress, they left together like they had plans. Zodiac was closed but Andrea and Sam convinced the boy to reopen and they bought an album each, at ten percent off, while he put stacks of dollar bills into waiting rub-berbands. Almost immediately they had a tiff—Andrea wanted to buy the Fallen Airlines album Give Up the Ghost, and Sam thought they were terrible except the debut—but it ended quickly and they both thought themselves slightly victorious. There was going to be a lot of that. Late-night San Francisco doesn’t offer much food but Sam taught Andrea this tiny sushi place across from Seven Gables that she later tried to teach Sam about. Andrea and Sam pushed a platter back and forth between them, offering larger and larger sums of money for the other to eat the worst kind, when they slap a piece of cold omelette on top of some rice and hope it will pass for sushi in the land of the blind. They invented a game of making a list of songs with hilarious unintentional parentheses. Their favorites were Tammy Wynette’s “I Wasn’t Meant to Live My Life Alone (with Vince Gill)” and Johnny Cash’s “Where Were You When They Crucified Our Lord (with the Carter Family).”
Boys, like Frank Sinatra they’d had a few. Andrea had a drunk guy named Ben who was an activist after a few beers. He’d call department stores and pretend he was going to stop by for a mink stole that same afternoon, and then suddenly shout “Fur is murder!” and hang up while Andrea and Sam laughed and played the Salad Forks album. The whiskey he took to bringing over didn’t last, either. “I always thought alcoholics would be fun,” Andrea said wistfully the night she dumped him and went with Sam to the Tish Brothers show to celebrate. Ben had turned out to be the opposite of fun, and smashed a speaker in his rage on his way out. For a while Andrea and Sam listened only to the Phil Spector box set, which was in mono, but finally they relented and spent the money.
Sam had the houseguest. He’d arrived about the time the Spinanes broke up. He was somebody’s ex-something and ended up staying weeks, and all day long. They’d all play Andrea’s old board games she’d rescued from the divorce and say less and less to one another. For a while, under the spell of a compilation from Don’t You Love Me Records, the houseguest slept in either bedroom while deciding who to sleep with. Andrea and Sam agreed it didn’t matter who he chose. He chose Sam, and so for a while it was like that. Then one night he got tired when Whistledown took forever to start their show because the banjo couldn’t be amplified to their satisfaction. The houseguest was tired. Sam said she’d go on to the Smoke Room where Brad Wooly was rumored to be playing Burt Bacharach covers. She never understood why he was gone when she got home. She never quite got why he wasn’t waiting on the couch with a nature program on television.
The houseguest got married out in the wine country, the week before Ruins in the Country arrived at Zodiac Records, and Andrea and Sam were stunningly invited. It was the fanciest envelope that had ever arrived in their apartment, and it was inside another one. Sam wore one of the skirts her mother sent her, but they ditched the wedding early and went back upstairs to the hotel rooms. They took off their shoes halfway down the corridor and carried them along with the bottles of wine the caterers had given them, and walked to their room turning all the DO NOT
DISTURB signs over so they read MAID, PLEASE MAKE UP ROOM. Inside they left bare footprints on the TV screen as they stretched out on the floor and listened to the Asking Prices and the Stone Roses and Perfect Teeth and Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty. The hotel room had a tiny, unsatisfying stereo, and Andrea and Sam talked about their vanishing list of friends.
“Well, the other Andrea moved to New York with that guy obsessed with Bob Dylan,” Andrea counted, “and Kate’s never gotten over high school, and Carla Louise drives a cab now I think and so is never free at night or during the daytime. Ed and Dawn are now Dead and Yawn, but what’s-her-name from England we still see at Barrelhopper shows.”
“She’s no friend,” Sam said.
“I wish you’d work that out,” Andrea said. “Clark still works at Zodiac, and Porky’s still over at what’s-it.”
“None of those people are friends,” Sam said. “We don’t even know Porky’s name.”
“It’s Porky,” Andrea said, and took both bottles. “A mouthful of champagne and an extra sip of chianti is my recipe for a rosé cocktail you make right in your mouth. What’s your point?”
It struck Sam, boy not for the first time, that she and Andrea were more like a lesbian couple that had broken up than whatever it was they actually were. Over the years they had developed a layer of sin
cerity over the irony over the sincerity. It was an irony sandwich, then, which tasted mostly like sincerity, like a cheap, bad sandwich. They grew their hair until it was time to get it cut, and they lived together in yet another apartment with a bathroom floor nothing could get clean. Up went the Elvis Costello poster, the one everybody had. While listening to the Hummingbirds they had seen a hummingbird which they interpreted as a sign, and so together they purchased a hummingbird feeder and together they never put it up, planning to lure hummingbirds with abundant charm rather than sugar water. Together they named the hummingbird Hummers but Hummers never appeared again, at least not when they were looking, and together they had managed to get Sam fired from her job for using the office scanner and printer. They had scanned and printed, over and over, a title in parentheses from a Beatles album, in the prim and beautiful original 1960s font: (This Bird Has Flown). They’d printed them out on stickers and ran around their neighborhood, adding them to signs which kept appearing stapled and taped to telephone poles. The signs advertised a lost parakeet. Probably they would not have been caught had they not left Sam’s keys and the bottle of gin and the two bottles of tonic and the lime and the bag of ice and the knife they had used to slice the lime on the receptionist’s desk where they’d been fortifying themselves waiting for the scanner to work. They’d done this together and told no one.
“I thought of someone else,” Andrea said.
“Mike, I thought of him too, and give me the wine,” Sam said. The Dusty Springfield album had reached the particularly sad song, when Dusty says she’s been wrong before. The song called for more wine always.
“Okay, Mike too,” Andrea said, “but I was thinking of the naked woman across the way.”
This woman was not a friend either, but she had friends. What she did not have was curtains, and Andrea and Sam would watch her from across their cheap street. Sometimes the views were disturbingly intimate: the woman’s boyfriend would cook, while the woman would pick lint off her jeans or read the side of a box of tea, not speaking, or friends would arrive and leave after only an hour, helping her hang framed prints on the wall. But more often the woman was alone and would walk around naked for some reason, neither beautiful enough nor ugly enough to make sense. Andrea and Sam would watch all day and not understand it.
“We’ve never met her,” Sam said, although actually the woman had come to a sidewalk sale and bought a skein of yarn neither Andrea nor Sam could remember owning. “I think we don’t have friends really anymore. It’s like we’re the left-behind canaries from that book our moms used to read us.”
“It wasn’t canaries,” Andrea said. “Something else was left behind.” Andrea’s mom was actually not much for reading to kids. She was more the type of mom who would teach you how to shimmy. “Do you wish you were downstairs in the rented hall, with a husband or whatever they call those boys nowadays? Did you see his uncle stuffing money into a birdcage they set up so people could stuff money into? Wedding after wedding after wedding and then yours—your wedding? Would that make you what they’re now calling happy?”
“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Sam said. She tried to grab for a pillow but it was all the way up on the bed so she stuffed nothing over her mouth and nose.
“Then cheer up,” Andrea said, “if you have nothing better to do.” In the months since the release of the Magpies’ first single, “How Good Are You,” San Francisco was rumored to be anticipating a catastrophe, natural or man-made no one knew, debated in the papers in an increasingly spooky tone. Andrea pictured the two of them living through whatever it would be, or maybe in some desperate race against time, stuck in traffic or on an island with no way to get across, with either Andrea or Sam driving and either Andrea or Sam sick and dying in the passenger seat. Andrea shared these stories before the first sip of anything at all, but it was tougher, in Sam’s opinion, for Andrea and Sam to keep projecting the sense that they were sharp-tongued survivors of a million dangers when in fact nothing much had happened. They’d discovered they’d been at the same show many years ago, when Prince had joined the Bangles onstage for the song “Manic Monday” and a sloppy, ill-rehearsed cover of “Gotta Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” but more and more this seemed like it wasn’t enough. More and more it seemed like less and less. “At least we don’t have Hank Hayride’s problems,” Sam said out loud. This was a joke about someone from Andrea’s high school that Sam hadn’t even met, but someday, San Francisco being small, that would happen and hilarity would likely ensue.
But not today. Today was the morning after the Sinways show, and Andrea and Sam were drinking Belgian beers in the Pour House and playing the entire Cottontails album How Can You Believe on the jukebox. In front of them was a loose pile of cash they’d come by through selling the books they didn’t want anymore to Page Through Books. They’d sold Ivanhoe and The Color Purple. They’d sold The Magpies: The Ecology and Behaviour of Black-billed and Yellow-billed Magpies, which was actually a library book, and Crows over a Wheatfield and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. They’d sold The Harvard Dictionary of Music and The Red Badge of Courage and Beloved and another copy of Beloved. Sam had wanted to sell Glee Club and Andrea hadn’t let her, but they’d sold poetry by John Donne and Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop and Stephen Spender and at least four books of advice, and The English Patient and Heaven Is a Place on Earth, which was quite popular at the time. It seemed maybe only Lipstick Traces and The Forthright Girl and Hangover Square were sitting lonely together on the shelves. “I just drank Treasure Island,” Andrea said. “Long John Silver down the hatch.”
“I guess we should have kept that one,” Sam said meanly. “For Egg, I mean. That’s a boy book, what with the treasure hunt and all the blowjobs.”
“There aren’t any blowjobs in Treasure Island,” Andrea said. “That’s The Sea Wolf, and will you do one thing for me?”
Sam narrowed her eyes, which is a good trick. “You said that five things ago,” she said, and then—“What?”
The song “Girl Hurricane” started, and a few others at the bar looked up in recognition. This was the hit. “It was dark all day and getting darker all the time,” the hit says. “I was sitting in a rocking chair, drinking gin and lime.” Andrea finished her beer. “Be nice to him,” she said.
Sam made a noise like she’d had a baby and the baby had fallen into a volcano, years and years ago but still sad.
“Why don’t you like him?” Andrea said. “Why aren’t you nice to him? He doesn’t have any of the things.”
Late one night over a Nick Drake album they’d made a pact not to touch the things wrong with boys: Money, Mommy, Slutty, Druggy, and Gay. It was an informal pact, but it had turned out not to be enough. You might think, as the song goes, that it’d fallen apart when Egg arrived, but it actually started when a very popular band who refused to have their name here released a new single, with lyrics Sam didn’t like. “You want me?” the song asked, or maybe it was the singer. “Well, come and knock the fucking door down. I’ll be waiting, with a gun and a pack of sandwiches.” Sam couldn’t believe it was sandwiches and not cigarettes. Who on Earth would think to bring a pack of sandwiches someplace where you had to knock the fucking door down to get in? To cheer herself up she got a movie she liked and watched it—The Snow Queen—on TV. That was the day Egg arrived.
“I met this guy Steven,” Andrea said. “He was at the Laundromat if you can believe it. We’re going to see the Friendly Skies.”
“But they suck,” Sam said.
“So do all my clothes,” Andrea said, walking in front of the TV, “but I’m going to wear something. Listen for the doorbell.”
“Our neighbor isn’t wearing anything,” Sam pointed out, flapping her wrist at the bare boobs across the way, but Andrea was already splashing in the shower and leaving a mess. Sam watched a scene or two and then suddenly it was the scene in which Egg walked into their apartment for the first time without knocking.
“It was open,” he sa
id and then looked at the movie. The first thing that bugged Sam was that he would say “I’m really into” whatever the topic was. “I’m really into movies,” he said.
“Andrea will be just a minute,” Sam said. “Margarita?”
“Steven,” Egg said, walking around the apartment.
“Sam,” Sam said.
“Okay, Sam,” Egg said. “Sam like a guy?”
“That’s right,” Sam said. “Sam like a guy. I’m Sam, a guy.”
“Hummingbird feeder!” he said. The unopened box was on top of a stack of fragiles. “Maybe I’ll call my band that. Hummingbird Feeder.”
“You have a band?” Sam said.
“Not for real,” Egg said. “Just, you know, to think about. Hey, Andrea’s great, huh?”
“I’ve known her for years,” Sam said, “but you never know.”
“We all have our faults,” Egg said.
“Look,” Sam said, but Egg looked at The Snow Queen so Sam turned it off. “I mean look,” she said. “The expression. I know you. You hang around the Laundromat and eavesdrop until you can just parachute into the conversation the one time someone does their laundry without their roommate.”
“That’s not me,” he said mildly. “I was at the Orbit Room. Andrea bought me a drink.”
“The Orbit Room,” Sam said, “is right next to the Laundromat.”
“Chinese women do my laundry for me,” Egg said. “I’m an electrical contractor. We have a minute so I’ll tell you. You know how a building goes up, at first quickly and then stops while they putter inside? That’s me. I’m why.”
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