But no: first we had to go through the waffle ritual. George always had only one waffle, and he poured syrup ever so carefully on that waffle, tilting it so that every hole had a little syrup in it. When the amount of syrup was about equal, he cut up the waffle in eight square-ish pieces, and ate each slowly, all the while helping Lucy with her waffle, which she would rip to shreds, and then dunk each shred in as much syrup as possible before devouring it using her fingers, the waffle simply a syrup-transport vehicle. Lucy maxed out at one waffle as well, which left me to eat the other half-dozen. Tuesdays, I spent the day eating waffles: for snacks, for lunch, and sometimes, for dinner. If I never saw another Belgian waffle again I would be eternally thankful. But throwing away the waffles felt disloyal to George. Tuesday waffles were his expression of love. He made them to make us happy.
Finally, George showered, grabbed his briefcase, and drove off. I pulled out in the Volvo with Lucy. It was only a mile to the preschool from our apartment, straight down Curson, right on Pico, a few blocks west of Fairfax. Instead of walking Lucy to her classroom as I usually did, I dropped her off in the car line, giving her a hasty hug goodbye and barely making eye contact with Ms. Bridget, who shepherded her into the building. I noticed that one end of the Happy Hands Preschool sign had come unmoored; it flapped crazily in the breeze. I drove home so quickly I broke whatever neighborhood speed limits there were, sailing over the speed bumps on Curson so fast I probably wrecked the car’s undercarriage.
And at last, for the morning at least, universes needn’t collide. It was just me and the computer. Sleazy or not, I was ready to do some serious digging. This time, searching on “Joshua Barnes” yielded a cornucopia of hits. His book page on Amazon. Scholastic’s promotional page for his book. And, bonanza, his personal web site. Unhesitating, I clicked straight to it. Clearly professionally done—a pastiche of superhero-ish colors—reds and golds—lots of Flash animation, ka-pows ricocheting off the screen at me. Clicking on About, I saw an attractive photograph, different from his book-flap photo—sweet, now I had two photos to commit to memory. In this one, he was relaxing in an adobe-walled studio, fingers poised over the keyboard of a Mac, gazing with a crooked smile at the camera. His hair was long now, curling almost to his shoulders, and his face looked boyish and satisfied.
I read with a sinking heart what I should have noticed on his book flap copy: “Joshua Barnes lives in Santa Fe with his wife and daughter.”
Well, there you go. It was one thing to spend several days fantasizing about getting back together with an old love; quite another to realize that my half-baked plans involved not only me, but also Josh, cheating on our respective spouses and children. I had no moral fiber, to even imagine such a scenario.
I clicked through links—blog postings. A bulletin board. None of them registered. Of course he’d be married. Of course he would have moved on.
I closed my browser window with a decisive click. That was that. I was so shook up, I badly wanted a drink, but it was 10 am. I still had some standards. So I rooted around my sweater drawer, another choice hiding spot, under thick green and beige sweaters until I came upon the crinkly little rectangle. My emergency stash of cigarettes. I rarely smoked anymore, but there were some times when sanity was more important than health. I went out the front door onto the narrow walkway outside the apartment and leaned forward cross-legged against the balustrade. I looked up at the chateau-like spires of the building’s roof. Castle, my ass. Holding on to the chipped white-painted metal railings with one hand while grasping the cigarette with another, I felt as if I were peering through the bars of some tenuous prison.
Mr. Abramoff came up the walkway, brushing fallen jacaranda petals from his jacket. He was a Hasidic Jew, and was usually attired in a black hat, black suit, and spotless white shirt. He was probably my age, but I persisted in calling him by his last name, because he seemed so much more wise and aware than I was. He appeared to have it all figured out. I envied him his complacency and the slow, deliberate way in which he spoke, with a kind of rocking, singsong cadence. I’d heard he was once a secular Jew, and had become born-again in whatever sense it takes to become a Hasid. Here was someone who had considered all the options, and decided on this one path. From there, all his decisions henceforth were made and prescribed. All he had to do was follow them, like a to-do list.
“Hi, Mr. Abramoff,” I waved, trying not to blow smoke in his direction.
“Hi, Mrs. Anglin,” he waved back amiably, his pudgy fingers backlit by the sun like starfish.
“Nice day, huh,” I offered. I always had a hard time figuring out what to say to him—our lives were so utterly dissimilar it was like chatting with someone who lived on the moon.
“Sure,” he replied, reaching into his shirt pocket, removing a packet of cigarettes, and touching it to his forehead and then toward me in a small salute of solidarity.
I grinned, surprised, and blew a ragged smoke ring his way.
~ ~ ~
I had drawn a series of cartoon-like panels at the end of that long-ago August—a visual history of our month together. I had folded the pages in half and put them in the outside pocket of my duffel; they’d eventually migrated to the bottom of a cardboard box in the garage, beneath strata of old birthday cards, yearbooks, and Hollywood Bowl programs. Looking at the smiling cartoon Vivian and Josh was too painful, like poking a fresh wound. I’d figured I’d take out that history one day, maybe when I was really old, in a retirement home or something, and all by myself. But that morning, after spending an hour staring dumbly into space on the walkway, inhaling my way through half a packet of cigarettes, my body fairly thrummed with nicotine.
Head aching, dizzy, buzzed, I hurried to our garage in back of the apartment building, yanked back the obstinate bolt, and battling rat droppings and spider webs, made it to the bottom of that buckled box. Clutching my prize, along with a battered box of doll heads and a crumpled paper bag containing three hacky sacks, I hurried back up the apartment, peering furtively around as if being spied on by the adultery police. Paging through those silly pictures, he came back to me full force, all those dusty long ago memories suddenly reclaimed. They reminded me that I’d been loved, unequivocally and completely. That I’d been young once, and free.
Maybe I was going a little batty. Just a little, maybe. Living on only a few hours of sleep a night, thinking constantly about Josh—someone I’d known only for less than a month, ten years ago.
Josh didn’t even remember me, probably. But I was giving up on “just friends.” Impossibly, that prehistoric part of the brain—the limbic system—never forgets love. Those passionate memories had been concealed for years, but Josh’s return made all those feelings dance right back, as if they’d never left. Even though I was in love with a ghost from my past.
No matter what, I was going to make Josh love me again. I didn’t know how, but somehow I’d show him that I was better than his wife, that he still needed me. I was already figuring out how Lucy and I would live in Santa Fe with him. How long we’d wait to get married. How to break the news to George. Maybe his wife would live down the street, so he could see his daughter as often as he wanted. Whatever. He would love me, again. He had to. I couldn’t be the only one feeling this desperate yearning; it wasn’t fair. If I hadn’t stopped loving him—he couldn’t stop loving me. That was that.
I wasn’t going nuts, really I wasn’t. This was the truth, as I could imagine it.
I fingered the doll heads in the old box curiously. I faintly recalled doing a series of disembodied doll head paintings in college. I took some toothpicks from the kitchen drawer and stuck them in the soft plastic at the bottom, propping the heads up on little toothpick tripods.
I wandered through the house, casually placing doll heads here and there—among the orchids in the living room, on Lucy’s nightstand, and lined haphazardly on top of our dresser.
There wasn’t much in the house that belonged to me. I’d brought a paper towel holder, my
small collection of vintage cookbooks, and a couple oil paintings with me when I’d moved in with George. He had everything I’d need, anyway.
So it was nice, seeing those doll heads scattered about, pouty pink lips smiling in little pursed bows.
~ ~ ~
Lucy had some internal mechanism that woke her every few nights exactly at 1:30 in the morning—just when I was in my deepest sleep. That night I dimly heard her voice piping down the hall, increasingly frantic—“Mommy! Mommy! Mommeeeee!” But I could barely move—it was a huge struggle to push myself up and out from layers upon layers of heavy dreams, and emerge gasping into the velvety night. Tightening my bathrobe around me, I stumbled down the hall to her room.
“What happened, honey?”
“I had a bad dream, and it woked me up.”
“Everything’s fine, you’ll be fine.” I stroked her soft hair. “Just go back to sleep.”
“I want some milk.”
I was too tired to argue, and lurched to the kitchen to pour milk into a sippy cup, a fair amount spilling on the counter.
She drank the milk, slowly, making it last. “Stay with me, Mommy.”
It was pointless to say no—I’d fought that late-night battle before and lost. Mrs. Schusterman had heard the hysterical result, and had run upstairs to bang at our door in the early morning hours, her gray hair wild around her head, her eyes small frustrated slits.
“Sure, sweetie.”
I curled my body around hers in the narrow, twin-sized bed. She was warm and pliant, and after a while, I felt her relax into sleep, her soft breaths deepening, slowing. It was utterly peaceful, lying there with my arm around her, feeling her slight shoulders rise and fall. When I was certain she was asleep, I raised myself on my elbow to look at her. In sleep she looked so much like she had as a baby—the round, fuzzy curve of her cheek, her small snub nose. Her blonde hair, late to grow in, had never been cut, and curled around her face in a soft nimbus of fine baby curls. I thought I’d never seen anything so amazing in my life. I made that, I thought. How can it be—that I made something so perfect? Everything was all right while I lay next to Lucy.
But back in my own bed, still awake hours later, my mind revolved helplessly between George-Josh-Josh-George. I could picture Josh writing, maybe, in that little studio, with photos of his family on the desk and a view of yesterday’s cloudy, 61-degree sky out his window. His wife was undoubtedly intelligent and accomplished, his child far better behaved than my own. Maybe on weekends, he’d be outdoors at a farmer’s market with his perfect little family, buying chile peppers or whatever a person did in Santa Fe. Tonight he’d be asleep too, with his beautiful wife in his beautiful house. He’d have kissed her goodnight as I kissed George.
During the day, I’d go through the motions of daily life—cooking dinner, greeting George in the evening as he came through the door. If Lucy was awake, George would hug her first. Then I’d step in, put my hands on his shoulders and kiss him—one second, two, our lips moist, pull away. It was entirely un-sexual, like kissing my brother. But that was what happened after you’d been married for a while, as predictable as the moon. Since I'd found out about Josh, it felt like pretending. I was utterly divided, half of me going through the motions of conversing with George, disciplining Lucy, washing the dinner dishes. The other half in fevered Josh-and-Vivian movie mode, all the time. In my fantasies, after wild sex, we’d cuddle in bed with our respective pads of paper. I would draw, he would write. Art porn: that’s what my fantasies boiled down to.
I had thought it would be like this forever. Me, home with Lucy, the years going by, one slipping into another. Nothing changing. Me and George, sitting near each other every night on the sofa, but rarely close enough to touch. Fridays, making love almost like strangers, hurrying to finish so we could go to sleep, only to wake up at six o’clock the next morning and start the routine again. Forever in this apartment, too great a bargain to ever leave, in the perfect Los Angeles location, only a mile from Madame’s.
I had always been loyal to George—it had never occurred to me not to be. Once I made a friend, I kept that friend forever—I still called Kim once a month, for heaven’s sake. The same was true for a marriage: once you committed to something, you stuck it out. It was also true that George and I weren’t joiners. We didn’t go on dinner dates with other couples. We were members of no clubs, except for George’s precious Orchid Society. I spent most of my waking hours in the company of Lucy. So: there was never any opportunity, any need, to search outside that box I lived in, until now. You could talk morals all you wanted—it was what you did when presented with the opportunity to be unfaithful that really defined you as a person.
I had to do the right thing. I wanted to see Josh, true. I would go to his book signing, and say hello. And see if he wanted to be friends. That’s it—just friends. After all these years, of course we could be friends—it had been so long, after all. And we’d known each other for so short a time. I could love George, and I could see Josh. Crazy fantasies were all well and good, but nothing was actually going to happen.
Chapter 9
I closed my eyes, and this time, welcomed the memories. But try as I might to hold on to that first night with Josh, the explosive lovemaking, the feeling of total belonging that I’d never experienced before, my thoughts wound forward. After ten days together, Josh was as familiar as if I’d known him forever, and yet new, too, always surprising. He kept me aloft and floating, on a sea of his words. We spent so much time together—the whole day, every day—doing cheap things so as to save money for our separate futures, which would happen, impossibly, in just a few weeks.
August 12, we were going to see Cats—my first musical. Sure, Josh was planning to buy tickets on standby at half price right before the performance, but still—I was so excited to go to the theater district. I dressed up in a girlish flowered dress from TopShop. Slicked my hair up with gel and even attempted mascara, almost poking my eye out with the wand. It would have been so much easier to have been born a boy, I reflected, raking a hole in my new pantyhose with an errant fingernail on the first try. I carefully slid on another pair, then twirled in front of the mirror above the fireplace. I looked all grown up, going out to the theater with my boyfriend. Me! I smirked at the unreality of it all.
I settled myself on the sagging orange armchair in the corner of the room and waited. Josh had the night off; he’d been out running errands that afternoon. A few minutes before we were supposed to leave, he hurried in, did a double take, and then smiled weakly. My returning smile died as I stopped myself from getting up to show off my dress. “You look different,” he said uncertainly. “Why are you wearing that?”
“I thought I’d try to dress up for a change.” I felt immensely embarrassed—as if I’d been caught in some sort of trap.
“It’s not you,” he observed, tossing his parcel from Boots on the bed.
I thought, panicked, My god, he’s right. It’s not me, at all.
I almost wanted to change, put on my usual uniform—frayed jeans and an ancient crocheted top—but instead, I shrugged on my stained army surplus jacket, concealing my dress. Did he only know me through clothes and hair—my vintage, tattered garb and short spiky hair the one sign that I was really an artist, worth his love?
~ ~ ~
Short hair. I’d spent my whole life with straight brown hair that hung down in tangled strands around my face. Whenever the wind blew just a little bit, bits of hair would get stuck in my mouth; my hair would smell like spit by the end of each day. Post-Butler College acceptance, I went into a frenzy of change. Long earrings purchased at Ace Drugs, the miniscule all-purpose drugstore, cheap earring, and Max Factor makeup emporium on Twyford’s main street. Cheap slinky polyester dresses to wear to Saturday night parties with Kelly, my newfound ally. And the coup de grace: new hair. I surmised that the more I could change myself outside, maybe I’d change inside too. But the thought of saying goodbye to all that hair had proven rath
er terrifying.
It was April, and gray piles of icy snow were still everywhere. The faster I walked downtown, the less likely I was to change my mind. Snow seeped through a hole in the front of my Docs, but I didn’t let that slow me down. I went straight to Barrazzi! For Hair, the cheapest hair salon in Twyford. It was the sort of place where, if you paid them $8, they’d grab some scissors and cut the split ends off your hair, not even bothering to wet it down. This time, though, I had $20 in my pocket. We were going for dramatic transformation, here.
Linda, my stylist, was far more arty-looking than me, with about seventy visible piercings and tattoos. I wanted change of a different kind: “Cut it off! Cut it all off!” I yelled madly, like a line from a bad TV show.
I pulled my hair from its ponytail—it reached halfway down my back. It hadn’t been properly cut since my high-school freshman class picture day. “I know just what to do. You’re gonna love it!” Linda assured me, as she pulled my hair back, held it in one hand, and lopped it all off.
And what do you know. Forty minutes later, a smallish girl with a pixie cut gelled up in disarming little swirls exited Barrazzi! For Hair. The new Vivian Lewis had arrived.
Personal transformation through looks. It had been worth a try. It had given me Josh, after all.
~ ~ ~
We took the tube to the theater, holding hands, my universe shattered. I’d been found out; I had restored the fantasy just in time.
All through dinner, at L’Osteria, an inexpensive but pretty Italian restaurant—our first real, proper date—I chattered aimlessly, about roommates, and London weather, and swirled my fettuccine alfredo on my fork. Feeling the viscous texture of the linguine on my tongue, sliding down my throat, the faint taste of nutmeg like a warning. What if I wasn’t deep enough for Josh? Interesting enough for Josh?
Parts Unknown Page 13
