You wear an expression of mild disappointment. I don’t blame you. The view should be breathtaking but it isn’t. There’s nothing much to see from a passing car until it comes flying around the suspended curve approaching over the western shoulder of Queen Anne. By then the show is almost over. Like so many structures, the George Washington Bridge on Aurora was intended to be more impressive than all that had gone before, and ended up another source of irritation and misadventure. What to do about all the lonely-hearts and forgotten friends and neglected artists who flock there to die?
In my opinion the engineers who designed the bridge would have been brilliant with roller coasters. Every passing vehicle goes humming through the air like a giant insect on speed. Even sober a pedestrian could easily fall on the footpath on hands and knees, giddy and sick from the height and the speed of the cars whipping past.
If you fell, would you gain a minute to think? Would the postponement and further reflection change your mind?
Every day at 1 a.m., after wiping down your workstation in the kitchen, stacking the dish racks, and turning off the lights, you walk to the bus stop in a trance, exhausted. Luxuriating in fantasies of flying, soaring, sailing to the moon on gossamer wings. Turning your face toward the black voluminous clouds while the rest of the world goes silent.
No one notices when you board the bus for your work shift every afternoon. Even if you forget to pay for a ticket, no one questions it. No one notices you. The driver stares into the asphalt void. The other passengers sit hunched over and tired, making their way home at the hour when your night is only beginning.
In the bathroom in the cement block motel where you rent a room by the month, you are compulsive about leaving no traces. You wipe your fingerprints and stray hairs off the sink and shower as efficiently as you scrub grease off pots and pans all night long.
When you started at the restaurant you were told to wear elbow-length rubber gloves. You took them off one night and no one cared. Even with the gloves you feel blisters rising on your fingers. You don’t care anymore.
You wonder how badly the fall will hurt and for how long but you’ve heard of people dying of shock during the fall itself. You wonder what shock feels like, what impact and catastrophe striking your body simultaneously will feel like. Will your numbness spare you, or will the hard slap of mortality bring you to life for an instant? If so, will you want to live? Your eyes continue to search the sky, although you say you’ve given up.
I tiptoe a little closer. Hanging from the metal rail, both hands overhead, lightly gripping the rail by my fingertips, I stare at you and lean forward. Menacing? Perhaps. Trying not to smile.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Your face turns quickly away from the moon, away from the clouds, toward me. Your eyes open, flashing white in the light! You see me for less than a second before you let go and scream, less than a second before you plummet to the ground far below.
Chapter Three
My mother had a favorite saying I hated. I knew it was paraphrased from a Rolling Stones song of her youth. She pretended she’d made it up.
“We get the things we crave,” she used to say with a smarmy grin, often in the direction of my dad and usually over TV trays bearing Microwave dinners, “not the things we think we want.” This raggedy hippie wisdom was certainly apt in relation to Lee Todd Butcher.
“See, it doesn’t matter where a writer comes from,” he said one day in class. “What matters is being able to imagine the worst thing that can possibly happen, and then build a plausible story around it. The best gift a crime fiction writer can have is a diabolical mind, and that’s not a product of experience. It just happens.”
He was sitting on the corner of his desk with one leg hiked. This was a default position that reminded me of a broken-down dog leaning against a fence to pee. He seldom left his desk during class. He never paced; given his hacking cough, a stroll across the room might have worn him out. He never tried to democratize the seating arrangement by having us pull our chairs into a circle.
“Sitting in a circle is for cowboys and children,” he said to the student who suggested it. “Do you want to study westerns, read Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey? Should we build a campfire? No? Then I’ll sit up here and you sit out there where you can receive all of this fucking wisdom I’m offering.”
He lectured on research, structure, devices and clichés, characters and motivation, story versus plot, pacing, complications, climax, resolution, and denouement. He also gave reading assignments. To his credit not all of them were his own books. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Charles Willeford, Chester Himes, John D. MacDonald, and Elmore Leonard were included. Absent from the list were most of Lee Todd’s successful friends and rivals. And he never included women.
“They’re, uh, sort of a different breed,” he said. Then he moved to kill the subject. “Hey, if you want to read and write cozy mysteries set in a fanciful English village in the 1930s, have at it, kids! But that’s not my thing. If the story doesn’t have any grit to it, I lose interest after the first page. Know what I mean?”
One of the two other girls in class raised her hand.
“Yeah, uh, Pauline?” Lee Todd said.
“How about Mary Higgins Clark?” she asked.
The two girls were sitting next to one another. They exchanged glances. I noted this collusion peripherally.
“Like I said,” Lee Todd explained. “Feel free to read what you enjoy, suburban domestic drama, women’s lib novels from the 1960s, whatever turns your crank. Not in my class.”
The last thing I wanted was to become a member of the Cozy Girl Club. From that day on, I paid no attention to the other girls.
Up to this point I hadn’t given any thought to being a crime fiction writer. For me the class had been a way to buy and kill time. Staying busy at school kept my parents believing I was learning a trade during a period when I had no prospects and no way to support myself. At the same time I found it more entertaining than drinking beer all day, to study the myriad ways an author might contrive to slaughter human beings.
When I realized Lee Todd believed females weren’t supposed to care about these things, I decided I cared about them. I plowed through the recommended reading list, and steered clear of female authors. It wasn’t that I wanted the guy to like me. I wanted him to envy me. I wanted to break his code and then steal it.
I began to daydream about making a name for myself, earning a living doing what my teacher and negative inspiration could no longer do. I had a vague notion of rising in his estimation only to leave a few skid marks across his ego. Maybe my animosity sprang from latent attraction but I doubt it. Butcher was a guy whose best years were over. I was young enough and experienced enough to see him as fair game, a pelt to be tanned and worn as a souvenir.
Moving on from Lee Todd’s list I read Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, finding the latter preoccupied with domestic drama, opera, and American aspirations. Thompson was a different matter. Gritty, amoral, and messed up in ways I’d never imagined. After every trip down one of those dusty, grim, nasty roads I felt like I needed a shower and a night alone.
“You reading that, Gloria, or just trying to look tough?” Lee Todd asked when he spotted my tattered copy of Wild Town.
We were the last people exiting the classroom on a Wednesday afternoon. For only the second time all semester I’d caught his full attention and I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“Greta,” I said.
“Huh?”
He squinted at me like he thought I was speaking a language he didn’t recognize. I was going to explain when his face split into a wide grin and he tapped me on the arm.
“Just playin’ with ya, kiddo,” he said. He turned quickly and was gone, sauntering away from me down the waxed floor of the fluorescent hall toward the parking lot.
Pike Place Market bustles and crackles in winter. Shoppers dressed in three
layers of clothing sidestep one another and offer thin smiles of apology for taking up too much space.
You like the market best at night. Oily fragrance of Alaskan halibut and cod fading on the breeze, boardwalks creaking under your footfalls, you can’t get enough of the slop-slop-slop of the tide against the pier. When you were a child you dreamed of growing up to be a fish, swimming deep, tempting the fisherman’s net with your flashy scales. You woke up sad to be a child again.
Your mouth grew fishlike with the years, pulled down at the corners. When anyone asked why you were sad you answered, “I was born sad.” Prompting ahs and ohs and sighs and cheer-up gifts. Your mother lavished presents upon your dear tiny self and held your hand and went on spoon-feeding you until you were seven. Your friends worried for your health. Your girlfriends worried for your state of mind. They were right to do so.
I track your descent from one ragged wooden ramp to another, and follow you outdoors. I know you must hear the echo of your journey, the shadow catching up to you on the icy boardwalk. Beside you the silhouettes of steamships climb, as gigantic as the whales of your slumbering mind.
You take one faltering step. You regard the endless cold of the deep, and the endless sorrows of the shore, and you consider your mother. Her eyes fringed with tears, her wishes ignored by everyone. On the pier you stand alone in a mist-shrouded stasis, almost unaware of a hand extending, taking your shoulder in a calm, decisive grip, turning you ever so firmly toward the gray blackness of the freezing, poisonous void, the dark-watered bay, the empty sky, and me.
Chapter Four
Lee Todd Butcher wasn’t my first whatever-you-call-it. ‘Boyfriend’ sounds like one of those sitcoms set in the 1950s. ‘Lover’ is a word from a romance novel, and there wasn’t much romance between us. ‘A dude I screwed’ speaks for itself, a crass tribute to something that doesn’t deserve credit.
There had been Gordon, the drummer, whose cover band, Corrosion, I followed for two months in high school. Gordon was five years older than I was and he succeeded in ‘cracking the seal’ of my apparently super-resilient hymen on the floor of his van between gigs one Saturday night. I can never smell wet dog without remembering the moment, or the blood, or the grimace Gordon made while wiping the floor with a filthy beach towel.
Once the technicalities were out of the way, I was ready to practice my new skill. Unfortunately Gordon was one of those guys for whom sex means a tiny portion of what it actually means. I lost interest the second time he insisted on a rim job without taking a shower. Nose six inches from the crinkled flesh of his anus, noting how the raw pink alternated with brown flecks in the folds, I just said no. Later I commemorated the day with the word ‘fuck-brain’ scratched with a silver dollar on the back door of his van, a sort of warning sign for his future dates.
I got over Gordon by having sex with Jimbo, a computer science major with shoulder-length Jesus hair and a Five-Year Plan to marry a rich girl, ‘even if she’s fat and ugly,’ so he could start his own business. I wasn’t fat, I wasn’t really ugly, and I definitely wasn’t rich. But I knew what Jimbo liked and I was pretty sure the coddled princess he hoped to marry wasn’t going to hit his ass with a wooden paddle and make him lick her toenails until he came in his Pac-Man boxer shorts. But who knows? I’ve been wrong plenty of times.
I got over Jimbo by having sex with Stephen, who was born in south London, a fact he shouted to every person who ever remarked on his accent. He was okay in bed, never asked me to play dress-up or anything, and didn’t mind taking turns with the orgasms. But Stephen never stopped talking. Mostly about how superior everything British was, compared to everything American—education, housing, childcare, films, theater, conversation, history, geography. One time he got into an argument with a bank teller over the mandatory charges on a checking account.
“You don’t understand what I’m asking,” he explained at least five times to the harried teller. “Can you tell me what I’m paying for, in terms of added service? Because it seems to me you’re making a profit from my money simply residing in your bank. Do you follow? I am, in effect, lending you my money and you make a profit from it in the marketplace and give me nothing in return except the use of my money. Then you want to charge me for it. Do you see what I’m saying? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The teller sputtered between sentences. “Sir… Sir… Excuse me, sir…”
“You’ve charged me to print my cheques and in England the printing is included. Yours is an inferior process, in the States, do you see? Do you understand?”
Stephen’s contempt for all things American made it surprising when he proposed marriage. But I figured he was angling for a green card. At nineteen this was a lot more than I could handle.
I knew a girl named Kiki who married a Dutch guy who kept her locked in the bedroom all day. She told me this over lunch at McDonald’s. Her story of being dragged by the hair and slapped around was so detailed and intense, it was only later I wondered how she escaped long enough to eat a cheeseburger, and why she didn’t have a mark on her.
“Why did you marry this guy?” I asked Kiki.
“Pieter,” she said, contorting the vowels into sounds I couldn’t reproduce.
She studied the view from the grimy window at McDonald’s. Across the street a jeweler advertised wedding rings as a specialty ‘for over sixty years.’ Flanking the jeweler’s were a pawnshop and a rundown furniture store. Both were consumed by mold and ivy.
“He’s crazy about me, absolutely insane with passion,” Kiki said. “I was afraid he might hurt himself if I didn’t marry him.”
I thought about this while Kiki finished her vanilla shake. She licked a drop of white cream from the corner of her lips and watched me with owlish eyes. Her thin, placid smile and pixie haircut were her best features. I wondered how much of what she called passion was nothing but a craving for drama.
“Don’t be bloody stupid,” said Stephen when I turned down his proposal. “You could have a British passport, you fucking cow. You could travel and see the world and learn something instead of dying of ignorance in the same town where you were born. What’s wrong with you?”
Stephen wasn’t the only guy who thought something was wrong with me. Most of the men I met had a list of things I ought to do, from taking better care of my hair and skin and nails, to learning how to cook what they liked, to giving them blowjobs while they watched their favorite movie for the twelfth time.
None of these so-called relationships worked. Not because the men were wrong and not because I was independent but because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the vast number of unclaimed years that stretched before me. I didn’t know what or who I was, or how I wanted to wear my hair, or whether I wanted to cook or have children or travel. All I knew was that these questions were exhausting and I was tired of thinking about them.
This is when I met Lee Todd Butcher, a man who wanted nothing. He would be easy to land and easy to forget. Or so I thought.
His house was slightly cleaner than the back of Gordon the Rim Job’s van. A squat, bulky trailer home, it stood on a patch of dry grass at the end of a quarter-mile-long dirt road. The wooden fence surrounding the property was useless, designed to contain cows back when the area was mostly farms and ranches. Only indigenous plants grew nearby and they were parched. Lee Todd didn’t believe in wasting water if he had to pay for it. Whatever could thrive on rainfall could stay; the owner was content to let the rest expire and decorate the ground with shriveled amber stalks and tattered leaves. The land on all sides could have served as an atomic test site in a bygone era, a wasteland of dead grass, dying boxwood, and dust.
Inside, the trailer had a surprisingly high ceiling with a couple of crossbeams for decorative effect. An eclectic set of firearms lined the walls. An elk head stared from its place of honor above the living room sofa.
“Gilda, take your time, and figure out what you want,” Lee Todd told me over a Budweis
er. “You’re, what, almost twenty? When I was your age I was trying to lose a finger to get out of the fucking Army. Seems like a century ago.”
“God. How old are you?” I asked, feeling a spaghetti strap of my silk camisole as it fell from my shoulder. I pretended not to notice, knowing he noticed, seeing it register in the pale blue and gray flicker of his eyes. I wanted to lean back and gaze at the elk head from underneath but I didn’t move.
“Never ask an old man how old he is,” he said with a wink so immeasurably swift and light I wondered if I’d imagined it.
“Fifty?”
“Jesus.”
“Sixty?”
“Fucking Christ!”
“Tell me and I’ll stop guessing,” I said.
The afternoon sun transported a cloud of dust motes to the center of the living room. The couch and lampshades were lemon yellow and spattered with something that might have been beer. I couldn’t tell if this was their original color or if the sun had robbed them of a bolder hue.
“What do you want out of life, Greta?”
“So you do know my name,” I said. I tried to lift one eyebrow in the cocky manner of a woman from one of the novels assigned in class.
Lee Todd barely suppressed a laugh. He took hold of my wrists and held them with such mild warmth I would have swooned if I’d known how. I slid closer, slipped one leg over his lap, and straddled him. We sat like this for a minute, the bright flint of his eyes meeting my stare with no hint of coyness.
When he kissed me, this too was different from the fumbling, pecking, and grunted negotiations I’d known with other guys. When he lifted me up and walked to the bedroom carrying me, still straddling his hips and holding him by the shoulders, he was almost the guy in the photo on his books.
Lee Todd never rushed anything. He let every lazy gesture arrive in its own time. Making love was unhurried and as natural as the sensual draws of a cigarette afterward. He lay naked, stretched out across the sheets, one hand behind his head, smoking, watching me.
I Wish I Was Like You Page 3
