“Did he have right-of-way?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you have lights on?”
“No.”
“That bastard.”
“I think I may have chipped a molar.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Man.” He sits up and glares at me. “You’re always one-upping me.”
The bar is almost empty, but an hour after we’ve sound-checked, there are about twenty people there; at least four of them have come to see us. Lars has graduated to a bottle of Knob Creek I bought at the corner store across the street. He takes a slug as we climb onto the stage, then passes it to me. I take it with my non-tambourine hand and hold it up at the bartender in a gesture of cheers. He sticks up his middle finger.
“Hey, thanks for coming out tonight. We’re Betty Cooper’s Revenge,” says Lars, who has, I now realize, developed a bit of a lisp from the accident. “I fell off my bicycle today and Claire is pregnant. Now you’re all caught up. Let’s play some tunes.”
He starts in with the opening chords of “Mood Ring.”
“If any of you record this and put it online,” I say into my microphone, “I will track you down and—add you to our email list.” Then I put the bottle to my lips and drink.
“Mmm, baby loves bourbon,” Lars says, smirking at me.
“He’s a lousy lay, ladies,” I say. “Believe me, I tried him out. And that was before the concussion. One. Two. A-one two—” I hit the tambourine hard against my palm and shake it.
“Honey baby, you’re a tall drink of water,” Lars sings. “I’m kind of regretting that restraining order.” His falsetto is so pretty. I close my eyes. “Please take it slow, don’t get carried away. Let’s drive through the desert and get married today.”
—
After the set, we stand at the end of the bar, finishing the bottle, until the guy from Coed Dorm comes and screams at us to get our shit off the stage so they can play. I’m sloppy on my feet now and I drop my triangle wand as I’m shoving the percussion gear into my bag. I think about bending down to look for it in the half dark, but I need to use the bathroom, so I decide I’ll just play it with my house key from now on.
When I get to the ladies’ room, there’s a line outside. “Hey,” says the girl in front of me. She’s wearing dangly earrings. “Great show.”
“Hey, thanks,” I say. She smiles at me and I wonder if I should make out with her.
“You’re pregnant, right?” says the girl in front of her. “You can go ahead of me.”
“Oh, cheers.” I move to the front of the line and try the bathroom door. It’s locked. The girl who gave me her spot is wearing little black shorts and tall brown boots. I wonder if I should make out with her.
“Do you date anyone who works here?” I ask her. She looks confused.
“The men’s room is free,” says a guy coming out of the men’s room. “You can use it.”
The bathroom, like every public bathroom in this town, is disgusting. The floors are wet, the door handle is sticky, the graffiti isn’t funny, and there’s no toilet seat. I half sit, half stand, pull my dress up, clutch it in a bunch, and hope for the best.
When I come out, the same guy is still standing there. He has blond floppy hair and wide-set blue eyes and he’s probably attractive but he’s not my type. Tan pants, lace-up Vans, a short-sleeved pale blue button-down shirt, and a big fat silver ring on his thumb.
“I think your friend should go to the emergency room,” he says.
“Who?” I look around until I see Lars sitting at the bar with a girl who waits tables at Suppenküche. She’s holding a handful of ice to his forehead and it’s dribbling down his face as it melts. He’s trying to catch the droplets with his tongue. “Look at those reflexes,” I say. “He’s fine.”
“Are you really pregnant?” the guy asks.
“Yep,” I say, “for a limited time only.”
He holds his hand out and introduces himself as Anton. He asks what I’m doing in the States, and I say I’m doing a PhD in cinema studies, and we get into a conversation about Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson, and the difference between childish cinema and the cinema of childhood. Then my stomach rumbles and it takes me a minute to work out that it’s not alcohol or attraction or my unwanted pregnancy that’s doing it. I just haven’t eaten since breakfast.
“Hey, where do you live?” I ask.
“Just on Seventeenth. Whoa, are you okay?”
I reach out and grab hold of the wall beside me. “Do you have any food there?”
—
His bike is an eight-speed with brakes and a brand name, and tires that wouldn’t look out of place on an army jeep. He rolls it between us as we walk. When we get to his building, he says it’s too heavy to carry up the stairs, and he takes his time locking it up in the downstairs hallway. “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” I say. “You could leave that thing lying out on the pavement all night and no one would take it.”
He looks down at his bike and gives a small, sad shrug. “I’d take it,” he says.
The apartment is standard San Francisco Victorian: a long narrow hallway with bedrooms and a bathroom coming off it, and a living room and a kitchen in the very back. Anton’s probably about twenty-four and I’m expecting ramen noodles or leftover Chinese takeaway, but what he brings out is a plate with five different cheeses on it, a bowl of hummus (“homemade,” he says), and crackers imported from Sweden. He sits opposite me and watches while I eat. “I’ve seen you before,” he says. “At the Common Room. You go out with that tall dirty guy.”
“Not anymore,” I say.
“Huh.” He looks down at the table and smiles. This is when I should probably say something—I’m not looking for anything, or I don’t want to date right now, or We should just be friends. Or maybe it’s some nonverbal cue I’m supposed to give: lean away, seem bored and uninterested, don’t make eye contact while smiling. But those things don’t come naturally to me. So I do what I always do when I meet a new guy: I tell him about all my troubles with the other guys.
“He went away to Honduras to visit a coffee farm, right, and he sent me a text message saying he was spending the last two days on Roatán. We’re writing back and forth, and it’s all really fun, so I say, ‘I’m glad you’re having a break. You need a holiday. Go get laid and be safe.’ And then he sends me this barrage of vitriolic—”
“He’s still in love with you,” Anton says. “He doesn’t want to hear some buddyish suggestion like that. You’re the only one he wants to sleep with.”
“I guess.” I cut off a piece of blue Brie and pull it from the knife with my fingers. “But then there’s my thesis supervisor, who’s so smart and I could talk to him forever, but when we kissed, there was nothing there. I couldn’t believe it. On paper, we’re so right for each other. So I kissed him a few other times just to make sure.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Even his smell. You know how they say if you’re attracted to someone’s scent, it means they have a different immune system from yours? So then your babies would have really strong immune systems. With my supervisor, I’m not attracted to his scent at all. I can barely smell anything, and when I can, I don’t find it sexy. I think it’s because we’re both descendants of Eastern European Jews. We’re from the same tribe.”
“You both have the old Ashkenazi immune system?” he says.
“Exactly. So then there’s this guy back home—” I tell him the story of my sister and my ex-boyfriend, and I expect him to be appalled and horrified, but all he says is, “Do you still have feelings for this guy?”
“No. But what’s that got to do with it?”
“Do you like him at all? Like, as a person?”
“Al? Yeah, he’s lovely. Super sweet guy.”
“Well, then maybe you should get out of their way.”
“What? I can’t do that. It’s too weird. You don’t get how weird it is.”
I’m halfway
through the next story and have eaten most of the hummus when one of Anton’s roommates comes home. A skinny guy with a side part, and a red bandanna tied around his neck. “What’s up?” he says. “We’re having a surprise party for Calorie at the playground in Dolores Park. Wanna join?”
“You have a friend called Calorie?” I ask.
There are voices in the hallway, and the lights go off in the living room. The fairy lights rimming the ceiling come on, and suddenly there are about ten people in there, sitting, standing, talking. One guy has a radio strapped to his back with what looks like a seatbelt. It’s playing a Cut Copy song.
“Who are these people?” I ask, standing up as two girls in leg warmers rush into the kitchen with a foil-covered baking dish that holds, it is soon revealed, a birthday cake for Calorie. Whose name is spelled with an o-r-y.
“They’re moped people,” says Anton. Then, “Wanna go up on the roof? I have wine.”
We go through an alcove full of bicycles and skateboards, out the back door and up some stairs, past the back door of the apartment above, and up another flight till we reach the bottom of a ladder. “Are you scared of heights?” he asks, handing me the bottle. He turns and grabs hold of a rung. I look up the ladder to the awning of the roof and beyond it, to a few city stars.
“I’m not scared of heights,” I tell him, “I’d just rather not fall.”
The roof is big and flat, and we sit right in the middle—Twin Peaks before us, the park to our left, the skyline and bridges behind our backs. The wine is full-bodied and tastes like grapes. Luke, I know, would taste other things in it—stone fruit or Meyer lemon cake or red Jolly Ranchers—things I would never have thought of but, when he identified them, would realize were there.
“So,” Anton says.
“So,” I say.
“So why do you think these guys are into you?” He takes a swig and passes the bottle.
“It’s probably just the accent.”
“It can’t just be that,” he says. “Maybe it’s the Winona Ryder thing. You look a bit like her in the nineties.”
“Wow, I do? Like, which one? Heathers Winona or Little Women Winona?”
“Um, I think Beetlejuice Winona.”
“What? That’s not a good thing. No one’s trying to date Beetlejuice Winona. Except Beetlejuice.”
“Oh,” he says, “then I don’t know what it is. You don’t even have big tits.”
“Small mercies,” I say. “What’s that noise?”
“Mopeds.”
We go to the edge of the roof and look over, and he’s right. A crowd of people on mopeds are revving on the sidewalk. They’re all wearing helmets and jeans and it’s difficult to tell who’s who. I make out a pair of purple leg warmers on one person. A red bandanna on another. Then they all follow one another in a U-turn and ride up the street in a mess of effete urbanism. They turn left onto Dolores Street and head for the park.
“So this abortion thing is a big deal,” Anton says, once they’ve disappeared.
“Nah. This abortion is the most practical and organized thing in my life. It’s the only thing I’m certain I want.”
“Still, it’s like an operation. Operations suck.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess they do.”
We sit back down. The roar of the moped motors turns into a high-pitched buzz as they get farther away. Then it gets quiet. I think about my cigarettes. I left them downstairs in my bag. I lie back, ignoring the gravel digging into me, and picture myself at the clinic on Monday, lying on an operating table, with blood coming out of my—where? With medical instruments lying about that look like—what? I realize I don’t know anything about the procedure I’m going to have, and that seems scarier than knowing every tiny detail about it.
“Let’s stop talking about me,” I say to Anton, feeling suddenly short of breath. “Let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about everything there is to know about you. Like, what do you do?”
“I’m a graphic designer,” he says. “And I paint.”
“Sounds great,” I say. The tightness in my chest gets worse. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No. I just broke up with a woman about four months ago.”
“Cool,” I say. “Can I sleep over?”
“Uh—” He smiles an embarrassed smile and looks up at the radio tower on the hill. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Please,” I say. “We don’t have to do anything. We can just sleep.”
“I just met you,” he says. “I don’t know you.”
“I’m nice,” I say, grabbing his hand and squeezing.
“You’re smashed,” he says. “It wouldn’t feel right. Why don’t I just walk you home?”
—
When I wake early the next morning, it’s still dark outside my window, and I feel like something has gone horribly wrong. I sit up and rack my brain for a minute before I remember: I’m pregnant.
“What’s going on?” someone says.
“Jesus.”
Luke is lying beside me, one hand under his head, the other one lying flat on his bare chest.
“How did you get here?”
“I rode my bike,” he says.
“Who let you in?”
“You did. You drunk-dialed and told me to come over. I asked if we were gonna talk about the baby and you said yes. But when I got here, you kept telling me to shut up. You had other ideas.”
“Shut up,” I say. I find my phone on the floor by the bed and scroll down to the outgoing calls section. And there it is: (Don’t call) Luke 1:38 a.m.
“That’s my name in your phone?” he asks.
“It’s a joke,” I say, lying back down. He props himself up on his elbow and looks at me. His face is just a few centimeters from mine.
“Anyway,” he says, “I was happy you called.”
“How do you do that?” I ask him. “How do you smell like coffee first thing in the morning?”
“I didn’t shower yesterday,” he says. Then I lift my face and kiss him because, for some reason, right now I can’t think of a single sentence that is sexier than that one.
I fall asleep and when I wake again, the sun is rising over Potrero Hill. I slip out of bed, go to my desk, open my laptop, and stare at the last words I wrote, over a week ago: The enduring namelessness of the protagonists of Hiroshima Mon Amour underscores the fragmentation and anonymity that, Resnais holds, are universally characteristic of the postwar experience. I read it over three times. Then I think, God, I’m a wanker.
I look around for my cigarettes. I find an unopened pack in my bag, along with my percussion instruments and a pile of pamphlets that Dr. Hill gave me. The one on top has a picture on it of a Latina girl who looks both solemn and confident. Above her head it reads, ABORTION: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.
By the time Luke wakes up at eight thirty, I’ve read through all of them, and am showered and dressed. “Shit,” he says, climbing out of the bed. “I have a staff cupping at nine.”
I stare at his crotch as he pulls his jeans up his legs, and I say, “This was an isolated incident.”
“Uh-huh,” he says. “Sure.”
Mission Street is almost deserted. There’s a prostitute talking on her phone on the corner of 21st Street, and a couple of dealers standing outside the Beauty Bar. None of them pays any attention to the two of us: Luke on the seat of his fixed-gear, pedaling, and me on the handlebars, giving directions. “Keep going,” I tell him. “Okay, move a little to the left. Now there’s a stop sign coming up in about half a block.” Either it’s too early for this, or I’m still drunk from last night, or maybe it’s the first signs of morning sickness, but I feel every pothole and every piece of rubbish we ride over like it’s a punch to the abdomen. I almost scream when he runs a red light at 19th Street. When he turns left onto 17th, we narrowly avoid a collision with a girl riding a beach cruiser in the other direction.
“You don’t look so hot,” he says when I hop off the bike outside Ant
on’s place.
“Yeah,” I say. “That was rough. You have to change your gear ratio or something.”
“Who lives here?” he asks, looking up at the building.
“Uh, this girl Calory,” I say. “You don’t know her. Thanks for the lift.”
—
When I ring the doorbell, Anton’s roommate opens it, wearing just his boxer shorts. He rubs his eye with the palm of his hand, walks down the hallway, bangs on a closed door, and then goes into the next room. When Anton comes out, he’s wearing just his boxers as well. He’s not as skinny as Luke and he has less chest hair and no tattoos, but what strikes me is how similar all these guys look when they’re half undressed.
“Hi,” I say. “My name’s Claire. I don’t know if you remember me but we met last night at the bar.”
“You do look familiar,” he says. “Betty’s Revenge, right?”
“Yep, founding member.”
He doesn’t ask me in so I cross my arms and lean against the door frame. “So I was reading up about this abortion stuff. And there’s this website run by a really nice woman in Georgia called Loretta who’ll pay for a girl like me to have an ultrasound of my baby. Just to help me make the decision.”
“That’s sweet of her,” he says in a croaky voice. He has sleep goop caught in the corners of both eyes.
“So I was wondering if you’re interested in a road trip?”
He stares at me and yawns at the same time. “Are you serious?”
“No. Actually, I need someone to pick me up from the clinic tomorrow. I’m not allowed to leave by myself. I guess I was wondering—”
He looks like he doesn’t want to do it. But then he says he’ll do it.
“Thank you,” I say. “You’re the only person I know who wouldn’t judge me, or try to sleep with me, or tell me to keep the baby.”
“Jesus,” he says. “I can’t wait to meet your friends.”
And I can’t help it: The future reference makes me happy. “Do you want to go get a coffee or something?” I ask him.
“No,” he says. “I’m going back to bed.”
—
It’s a Sunday morning and Valencia Street is quiet. There are a few couples walking together, with rolled-up newspapers under their arms or with babies in prams, but the road is empty and the sidewalks are mostly vacant. I realize I can walk slower and look around a lot more when I’m not expecting to bump into someone I know. I walk the two blocks to Amnesia, and the next four to the Common Room. Then I cross the street, cut over to Shotwell, and let myself into my apartment.
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