Golden State: A Novel

by Richmond, Michelle

  “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.” The words were inadequate. I’d known it all along of course, in the abstract. But being with her, hearing her stories, seeing the scars, made it real.

  “They were just kids,” Heather said, shuddering. “Anyway, you were asking me about something?”

  “Buddy,” I said, feeling foolish. I’d confronted this feeling many times with my patients. The conversation would turn to serious matters, something terrible that had happened to them in the war; there would be a window of vulnerability, of honesty—and then it was as if a switch would flip, and we were supposed to go back to discussing mundane things. As a physician, I should have been able to make the transition, but in all my years of practicing medicine, I’d never gotten used to it.

  “From Laurel,” I added. “The kid who used to cut our grass for free because he had a crush on you.”

  She nodded, seemingly happy to change the subject. “I heard Buddy moved to Birmingham. He married a girl from New Jersey, and they own a Krystal franchise.”

  She gathered the sections of her paper into a neat pile and placed it carefully in the center of the table. Then she wiped the table with a napkin, which she folded and tucked into her coffee cup. “Do you have time to go for a walk?”

  I glanced at my watch; it was still forty-five minutes before morning rounds. I’d been coming in early for months, avoiding the moment when Tom walked in the door from his night shift at the radio station. I didn’t quite know how to face him anymore in the early hours, those hours that had once been so intimate. I used to stay in bed longer than I should, just to feel him curl up beside me, his skin layered with the smells of the station, his hair out of whack, his breath smelling of chocolate milk.

  As I followed Heather out of the cafeteria, I wondered if she could sense how wary I was. Waiting to hear her latest angle, her newest troubles. Waiting to suss out the truth from the fiction. Ever since I’d left Mississippi, eighteen years before, Heather had never shown up on my doorstep without needing something. Each time she arrived, there were always lies, and something bad happened. I’d always managed to put it behind me, until the last time, with Ethan, her one mistake that was too big to forgive.

  8

  6:52 a.m.

  I hobble up to the intersection of Front and California, my ankle throbbing. The brisk, briny smell of the bay mingles with the scent of chestnuts from a stall. A small crowd has already gathered at the cable car turnaround, in the shadow of the towering office building at 101 California. The building, with its distinctive pleated façade, has a tragic history: in 1993, a businessman named Gian Luigi Ferri entered the offices of the law firm Pettit & Martin and began firing with two handguns and a pistol. He roamed several floors, killing eight people, before shooting himself. In the aftermath, the California legislature passed some of the most stringent gun laws in the country. Later, Stephen Sposato, whose wife, Jody, died in the attack, would carry their infant daughter in a backpack while testifying before Congress. The man with the motherless baby in the backpack helped Barbara Boxer push the Federal Assault Weapons Ban through Congress. The expiration of the ban in 2004 is in the news every time there’s a mass shooting, one more piece of emotionally charged evidence the secessionists use to point out the fundamental differences between California and the rest of the country.

  Now another young man with a backpack stands at the end of the line, intently reading a worn copy of Home-Grown Medicine: A Marijuana Primer. There’s a reason San Francisco has a reputation; half of what people say about this city happens to be true.

  The backpack moves, a tiny hand pops out, and a baby appears.

  My stomach does that weird looping thing it always does at the sight of a baby. I settle on the sidewalk to wait. My ankle is on fire. I turn on the Bakelite, hoping to distract myself from the pain. Tom’s on the air, all control and good humor. You’d never know that he’s been up all night, that his personal life is falling apart.

  “Thanks for tuning in to KMOO on this highly unusual Tuesday morning,” he says. I always thought the call letters were bizarre, a strangely rural reference for an urban station in a city teeming with vegans, until Tom explained to me that the guy who started the station in the fifties was from Montana, where he’d made his money on cattle.

  “I’m looking out my window, and I can see a big ugly cloud of smoke out near the Marina. Call in if you know the scoop. Let’s be calm, people. Let’s be civilized. There’s no need for this thing to be rancorous. Just ask lawyer Linda.”

  That last part’s for me. I’ll miss them, all those coded messages coming through the airwaves. I wish I’d written them down over the years, a secret history. After the divorce, how long will it take for him to replace me with someone else, to direct his mercurial comments to someone with whom he’s building a new, perhaps better, history? And how long will it take for me to truly start over, to find my way in unfamiliar terrain? The problem with marriage is that it provides a false sense of security. When you have walked down the aisle, when you have spent years building a life together, when your finances and emotional interests are so intricately intertwined, it can seem as if an essential part of your existence on this planet has been mastered. With the matter of love taken care of, you think you can concentrate on other things. It’s not that love is forgotten, only that it seems set in stone. Until you realize it isn’t.

  My old mentor, Dr. Bariloche, comes to mind.

  It was June, and I had just graduated from medical school. I should have been with the rest of my classmates, who were having a party to celebrate before everyone scattered to do residencies at hospitals around the country. There was a general feeling among us that one weight had been lifted, while another, more serious weight would soon be on our shoulders. The party promised to be a raucous affair, a fitting end to four hard years. Instead, I was at a funeral.

  At sixty-five, Dr. Bariloche was still a substantial woman, tall and sturdy. She and her husband, a graphic designer nine years her junior, had planned to travel the world together as soon as she retired. That afternoon, as Dr. Bariloche and I stood on the damp lawn outside the church, she said to me, with tears in her eyes, “I picked him young so he wouldn’t die on me. Honestly, if I’d known he would have a heart attack at fifty-six, I’m not so sure I would have married him. Is that wrong?”

  “Not at all,” I reassured her, though I was thinking that maybe it was.

  I held her arm as we navigated to the limousine and joined the procession of cars headed back to her house, where her niece had organized the mourners. At some point, several hours later, I noticed that Dr. Bariloche had disappeared. I found her sitting alone in the bedroom, drinking a glass of wine, examining the books on the shelf.

  “Come in,” she said, motioning for me to sit on the bed beside her. She reached out and ran her fingers over the books on the shelf, stopping on a worn blue spine. “I remember when this book came out,” she said. “I’d just started my residency, my first day on the job. I was walking back to my apartment from the hospital, and there was a large display in the window of the bookstore, stacks and stacks of this book. I went in and bought it. A man had bled to death in front of me that day. He’d been stabbed, and the orderlies wheeled him in, and as the blood was pouring out of a wound in his side I froze for several crucial seconds. Afterward, I walked around in a daze. I bought the book because I needed something to distract me.”

  I sat there in silence, feeling the warmth of her body next to me on the bed. The room was cold and smelled of vanilla candles. Though she had never been easy on me, had at times, in fact, made my life miserable, it is fair to say that I loved her.

  “The day I bought this book was the end of one life, the beginning of another,” Dr. Bariloche said. “The day I met my husband was another beginning. The day he died, another ending. And here I am unfortunately, beginning again. The problem is, I have no idea where to start.” A lock of dyed black hair escaped her bun and fell into
her eyes. She tucked it behind her ear, with a gesture I had seen her make hundreds—no, thousands—of times. “We tend to see life as a continuum, Julie, but really, it’s a series of phases, generating a series of different selves. You leave one life behind and start another. And each time, a different version of yourself emerges.”

  It was unlike Dr. Bariloche to speak in such symbolic terms. She had a scientific mind; there was a hardness about her that put some of the other students off but that I had come to respect.

  “When you arrived here four years ago, you were a very nervous young woman with great grades, a scholarship, and no confidence. To be honest with you, Julie, the first time I heard you speak in class, I doubted you were cut out to be a doctor.”

  I squirmed uneasily. She’d never said as much, but I’d always suspected it.

  “Now look at you.” She allowed one finger to settle lightly, fleetingly, on my knee. “Top of your class, flying colors and all that, and off to your next phase, your new beginning. I have to admit, I’m a little jealous.”

  “I’m waiting for UCSF to tell me they made a mistake,” I said. “It was startling enough when they accepted me for medical school. To do my residency here too—it’s more than I hoped for.”

  “You earned your spot,” she said.

  I noticed then that her hands were trembling. I’d seen those hands intubate an infant, remove a bullet lodged centimeters from a man’s spine, hold down a screaming woman on dialysis, comfort a thousand different patients. I’d never once seen them tremble. She looked up at me, and on her face was an expression I’d never seen there before. It took me a moment to identify it: fear.

  “What will I do now?”

  Of course, I didn’t have an answer. Nor did I, at that moment, imagine I would one day be in her shoes: starting over, out of context, with no clear path ahead.

  9

  “I heard a rumor,” Dennis says. His voice over the cellphone is oppressive, but I keep the volume up high, hoping to hear Betty or Rajiv, or Eleanor. I want to hear their voices, just to know they’re okay.

  “What’s that, Dennis?”

  “People say you’re getting divorced. Is it true?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “That should make me happy,” Dennis says. “But actually, it’s really fucking depressing. You and Tom looked like you had it all figured out, Doc. If you can’t make it work, where does that leave the rest of us?”

  Last night, I arrived at KMOO just past midnight, as I had done so many times in the past. Entering the building I felt a rush of warm nostalgia, along with a sense of regret—the feeling you get when you leave a city you’ve grown tired of, only to realize there were so many things you wanted to do but never got around to. I brought Marnee Thai in take-out boxes, Mitchell’s ice cream for dessert. I tried to make the night last as long as possible. I ate slowly and talked slowly. Neither of us looked at the divorce papers on the table, which Tom only needed to sign. Odd, how easy it is to end a thing that took so long to create.

  It was just past two in the morning when I told Tom I was going home. “You can barely keep your eyes open,” he scolded. “Spend the night here.”

  He led me to the old leather couch in the staff lounge and put a blanket over me. The couch smells permanently of cigarettes and Kool-Aid. It is a historic couch. The list of musicians who have crashed there, overdosed there, and fucked there is legendary. There’s the story about Grace Slick and a young male intern that is retold every time they hire a new employee. There’s the story about Skip Spence of Moby Grape. And of course there’s the one about Norman Greenbaum and the night he wrote “Spirit in the Sky.” To all those legendary drug binges and sex romps might be added my own history with Tom. Last night, as I was driving to the station, I promised myself that I wouldn’t confuse matters by going down that old familiar road.

  I don’t know how long I’d been dozing when the song came on. I almost felt it more than heard it, that quiet crescendo, and when I opened my eyes Tom was standing in front of me, a sad smile on his face, a questioning look.

  “Come here,” I said. He lay down beside me, the old cushions sinking under his weight.

  By the time the words broke quietly through the fog, we were halfway out of our clothes. The song—Dire Straits, “Telegraph Road”—had been a secret code between us ever since the first time he played it for me at the station, more than a decade before. “It’s fourteen minutes long,” he had said then, locking the door behind him. He’d played the song for me a dozen or more times since then, always when we were alone at the station in the middle of the night, and, every time, I had read it as a signal, an invitation.

  But this time was different, because I knew it would be the last.

  I touched his hair where it grazed his temple, traced a finger along his eyebrow. I love his eyebrows; they’re wild, out of control, and seem to grow more unruly by the year. You could send him to a spa and a tailor and a personal shopper, and he’d still manage to look as if he’d just rolled out of bed. The clothes designers make these days, with some mythical metrosexual male in mind, never look right on Tom. He’s too tall, for one thing, and too broad in the shoulders to fit into those skinny shirts. In high school he eschewed the obvious sport, basketball, and instead played baseball and ran cross-country. He still has a runner’s shape from behind.

  In photographs, side by side, we look comically mismatched. Even in my highest heels, I’m dwarfed by him. While he doesn’t have the kind of looks that translate well in photos—there’s something slightly off in the symmetry of his face, a vague and misleading suggestion of a history of fistfights—I can still glance at him from across a room and feel all those familiar stirrings. Even at our worst, during those times when we seemed to be fighting all the time, I wanted to go to bed with him. Sex was easily the best and least complicated thing about our marriage; I can’t imagine life without it.

  Last night, it was just as good as always, maybe better. All that sadness, all that history, distilled into one final act. Maybe I could live without his companionship at movies. Maybe I could live without his familiar presence at the breakfast table, the constant, comforting refrain of us. But how can I live without this?

  Tom’s hands smelled like the soap they keep in the bathroom at the station, a concoction of lemongrass and sage that always makes me sneeze. At some point we knocked over a Coke someone had left on the table in front of the couch. It sank into the carpet, making soft fizzing sounds.

  As the Dire Straits song was coming to an end, Tom got up, pulled on his pants, and hurried out of the room. He was too late. On the intercom I could hear the final notes of “Telegraph Road” as Tom was running down the hallway, and then I counted the seconds of silence—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four—before his voice came on the air.

  “That was four seconds of silence,” he said. “Which is about how long you’d have to defend yourself from a bear who’s charging at you from a hundred feet. So if you’re headed to Yosemite this weekend, keep that in mind.”

  A minute later, Tom came back. “You’re dressed,” he told me.

  “You’re not.” I tossed him his shirt.

  He stood looking at me, the shirt in his hand. Our bodies were aging. When did that happen? For so long, we’d been young, and then, quite suddenly, we weren’t. A few of the hairs on his chest had turned gray; I’d never noticed it before. It made me feel a deep tenderness toward him.

  “That was nice,” he said.

  “Better than nice.”

  He put his shirt on, buttoned it. I followed him into the studio and took my place in the chair against the wall. I had sat here so many times, watching him work. I wouldn’t be doing this again, either. It’s the reverse of falling in love, when everything is sweet and exciting, when everything is a first that raises the question, Will this happen again?

  “Jules,” he said, turning his chair to face me, “I love you.”


  “It’s the oxytocin,” I said, attempting a joke.

  He didn’t laugh.

  “The biological love drug. When a woman has an orgasm, her body releases oxytocin, which creates a sense of bonding. She’s lying there with the man inside her, and all of a sudden her body is flooded with this hormone that makes her feel close to him. Biologically speaking, it’s probably there to ensure the woman’s fidelity, or at least her ongoing affection, increasing the chances that the man will provide for her young. Funny thing is, when the male orgasms, his body releases only a fraction of what hers does.”

  “In that case,” he retorted, “you should be the one saying you love me, because I’m pretty sure that was an orgasm you had at the end there.” He was fiddling with the controls, and Admiral Radley came on, “I Heart California.”

  “There’s a trick,” I said.

  “A trick?”

  “When we were on the couch, in the middle of it, I was rubbing circles in the small of your back, remember?”

  “Of course I remember. It’s one of my favorite things that you do.”

  “Funny thing is, for men, being rubbed in the small of the back has the same hormonal effect an orgasm does for women. It releases a superdose of oxytocin.”

  He rolled his chair over to me, put his hands on my knees. “Did they teach you that in medical school?”