My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  We walked around the lake a few days after I’d returned, and after about a mile I realized Sarah was not, in fact, engaged in the conversation.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her. “You seem distracted.”

  “Oh,” she said, after a bit, and we maneuvered around a group of pregnant women walking basset hounds.

  “Yeah. My husband just asked for a divorce,” she said.

  There was a long, profound pause before I responded.

  “You have a husband?” I asked.

  It occurred to me that after a year of friendship, she’d never once mentioned she was married, and I’d never bothered to ask. I was surprised.

  Anyhow, Sarah was in her own doldrums, and she was my friend, and I cared for her deeply.

  So one afternoon, about a week after I’d been back, it was an unusually rainy day in Seattle, because it was really raining, like it meant it, which it doesn’t do often here, contrary to the popular mythology. You know how Eskimos have like ten different phrases for snow? People in Seattle have three for rain: There’s “Aw, crap; it’s raining,” and “Fuck! It’s raining,” and lastly, “Shit! It’s really fucking raining!” These are usually the transplants, though; proper born-in-Seattle Seattleites wouldn’t allow themselves the Anglo-Saxon.

  This particular day, it was the last sort of weather: It was really fucking raining. I had just settled back into my own routines, living downtown in my apartment away from Steph and languishing in the idea of sidewalks, neighborhood pubs, and twenty-four-hour grocery stores, and I was feeling that I might, once again, be able to resuscitate the idea of the urban male single guy. Build up the wardrobe, get back to dating women who would be comfortable at a bistro, didn’t wear flannel, and had a predilection for most things lit’ry. Just not Rebecca Brown.

  But today, I decided I wanted to see Sarah, and as she had a schedule as irregular as mine, I called her around noon and asked, since it was raining, if I could just swing by for coffee and a catch-up.

  She seemed happy to hear from me, delighted even, and said, “Please: Come on by and tell me about your adventures off with Steph and her family on the Right Coast.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “Be there in about half an hour.”

  I stopped at a liquor store en route to pick up some bourbon, something dark for the wint’ry afternoon and unusual for us, Sarah and me, since we were mostly exercise/walking friends. I saw that the prohibition on absinthe had been lifted (I’d been monitoring this, as I was fascinated with the idea of absinthe, since I had it at my friend Andy’s house once and it had provided me with the most crystalline dreams I’ve ever experienced, and was never able to experience again), and as I was checking out with my flask of Kentucky something, I bought a couple small display absinthe promotions, thinking it would be a nice treat.

  I had all the accoutrements at home—again, remember, I had that fascination earlier—and I went home and collected the absinthe glass, the spoon, and the raw natural sugar preferred, then drove to Sarah’s house.

  She was preparing dinner, for her and her child, and she had been working out in the basement before I arrived.

  I sat down at her counter and then with a carnival, vaudeville clown–type flourish, I began to produce from every part of my huge leather coat . . . a small bottle of absinthe . . . then from this sleeve, an absinthe glass . . . from this pocket, an absinthe spoon . . . I’m totally Marcel Marceau here . . . then from that pocket, another small bottle . . . and from the other sleeve, another glass, and so on.

  When I was done, Sarah had her hand on her hip and was looking at me with a combination of sympathy for my bad vaudeville and enjoyment at the idea I’d take such time to try to cheer her up.

  After I set the ceremony together on her countertop, she continued with her baking and I suddenly realized she was wearing spandex, and a form-fitting aerobic top under one of those jogging Lycra jacket thingies.

  I said, “Wow, Sarah; you’re incredibly attractive.” A naturally slender woman, six years of karate had not hurt her allure. (I’ve never been good at poker, obviously. I’m the guy who yells, “Whoohoo!” with a good hand, and says, “Aw, shit,” when it’s bad, before looking up and realizing what I’ve done.)

  Sarah, in her kitchen, stopped for just a second and pursed a smile without looking at me, and I knew something had changed between us, as did she.

  I poured the absinthe and some cold water over the sugar cubes and the spoons and explained to her the process of the drip, the slow mingling of the sugar and the opacity of the louche, the smell and taste of licorice. I loved the ceremonial aspect of it, I told her, like taking communion, or getting beheaded by a fellow dishonored Japanese man with a long sword, after you stab yourself in the liver: It’s the ritual that’s important.

  I had most of my absinthe, but she did not like hers, and then my phone started wringing.

  And I spelled that correctly.

  It started worrying, and it was Steph calling, twice, three times.

  I begged pardon and stood outside in the pissing rain, on the back porch of Sarah’s house, and I answered the phone to have a hysterical Steph telling me I needed to come get her, that her mother had been in an accident now, and that she needed to get on a flight back home, again. Please.

  Wait, what?

  “She was in an accident,” Steph said.

  “That was your dad,” I said. Maybe I was absenthed.

  “No, my mother this time! She’s in the hospital! She had an accident!”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes at the front lobby, depending on traffic.”

  “Have to run,” I said to Sarah.

  “Oh, is everything all right?”

  “I think . . . you know, I’m not sure. I’ll tell you more when I know it.”

  I was pretty high and a bit tipsy from the absinthe as I drove downtown to Steph’s work, and it made the traffic snarl that much more bearable, but I picked her up, and she was damp and soaked and my car was enveloped in cascading waves of some really ferocious rain when she slid in and slammed the door shut finally and managed to explain that her mother, who was doing the upkeep on the house while Harold was recovering, was moving some things around in his garden shed when she knocked something over and a heavy shovel fell off the wall and slammed her in her eye.

  “She might lose the eye,” Steph said. “I have to be there.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said. “You just got back from being gone for two weeks. This is crazy; what will you do with work? It’s not life threatening.”

  “You don’t know, all right? You don’t know what this is like. Maybe in your family it’s acceptable to not show up for an emergency, but it’s not in mine.”

  This really hurt. She meant the incident with my younger brother in Austin, and how I had talked myself out of going there, overnight, and how awful I’d always felt about being 3,500 miles away, alone and isolated, when he was in a coma and my family was ripped to shreds.

  “That’s not fair, Stephanie.”

  “I’m sorry. I am. That just came out. But I have to go.”

  “Fine; I’ll drive you home and then take you to the airport.”

  Five hours later, I returned to Sarah’s house, and there was an impromptu party, mostly with people from the karate school. I could tell by the way she was moving that Sarah was a bit in her cups, and I had not yet had enough.

  Brenda was there, among others, and it was not a party-party, just people gathered and drinking, and Sarah was feeling a bit brazen.

  I walked in with more booze, and people were happy, and Sarah saw me from across the room and sauntered quite sexily over to me, pointed at me, and then pointed at the guest bedroom, and said, “Get in there.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. Aw, shit. I did this.

  “In there?” I asked, coyly, delayingly. My initial response was that if we had sex, that would end the friendship. It always did. And I really, really loved our friendship
.

  “Follow me,” she said, and she walked in.

  The party continued on behind us, but it was closing down, and I was trying to figure out how to get out of this in such a way that saved Sarah’s blushings. I dearly, dearly liked her but wasn’t sure I wanted to move into—

  “Holy shit, Sarah!” I said as the door closed behind me and she peeled off her jeans, let them drop, and then took off her top and revealed the most perfect body I think I’ve ever seen in person.

  “Jesus Christ, where did that come from?”

  “Lay down,” she commanded, pointing to the bed, and in a matter of seconds, our relationship went from the platonic to the sophist.

  PART III LOOKING DOWN

  CHAPTER 22 Sarah’s Place

  Her house was built in the northern shadow of Queen Anne Hill, right into the angled slope just above a private Christian university and the intersection of two quiet, little-used urban streets that made an isosceles triangle. The house rested at the base, and a small, beaten-down lawn emerged valiantly in the limited sunlight, tucked neatly into the tip like the bow of a Euclidean ship, plowing through a frozen rock and asphalt sea.

  It was a good house—the kind of clean, healthy house you’d find in one of the better John Irving books that played more of a central character than a location or vehicle of rehabilitation. It stood gray and tall and angular, had steep sides and unused balconies, and could make itself invisible if it wanted to, could hide from you behind its evergreens if you weren’t looking for it. It shared the neighborhood easily, rubbed its boundaries comfortably with the block, except for the gay couple down the street with the pocket Chihuahua, two ridiculously large firefighting-type men with an unnatural fear of larger dogs, or the series of dogs that at one point or another lived at Sarah’s house, which, for many years, was a living system of shelter and rescue for many upturned lives, both human and canine.

  It was the sort of house with a screen door that was never locked and opened right into the kitchen, the hearth of the home, and invited you to sit down, make yourself comfortable—sit, sit, sit!—while someone cooked you something to eat. Sarah would, later, make me, as a lumbering dead person, something to eat, and often.

  That was Sarah’s house, back then, when I began visiting her, started making excuses to come by, excuses suggesting the innocuous and platonic and transparently friendly because, well, they were. Or we were, rather, every one of those things—platonic and friendly and transparent. So much so that the purpose of my first visit was to bring Brenda Brown some lesbian porn magazines I’d found under Steph’s bed.

  Brenda Brown, our karate instructor, lived in Sarah’s basement and brought a real sense of color to the house, which would otherwise have passed for a stuffy, upper-middle-class house with doilies and a pervading smell of some grandmother’s bad German candies. Instead, Sarah’s house was lined with books, philosophy texts and women’s literature, a triptych of iconic images of the nourishing cycle of femininity. There was power here, and I was drawn to it.

  So when I found all the porno magazines, instead of being concerned or curious about Steph’s choices in buying them, I thought I knew just the person who would like them, if Steph had indeed lost interest in their draw, as she was claiming. I’d been fascinated with them at first, from the position of a printer (saddle-stitched, gloss cover, 12 × 18 with a bleed and face trim, with a sixty-page newsprint black-and-white interior, printed in California—who was producing this? Was it self-sustaining? Certainly a niche audience. How were they keeping themselves afloat? Not by advertising, by the looks of it. Definitely not a Larry Flynt product, too homemade, too ... unheteronormative. Much less gynecology in this magazine, for instance, and ironically. And these models—this is what Steph was into? Did I really look like a butch lesbian now? I mean, I know I gained some weight, but REALLY, I don’t own anything flannel....).

  Steph had more than a year’s subscription under her bed, and not a single penis to be found in all twelve or fourteen issues. Call me phallocentric, but I was much more intrigued by the cultural significance and production dilemma of a printed lesbian periodical than the idea of it being pornography. After all, I was most certainly not the target audience; it made sense that the eroticism was lost on me, and not because most of the models looked like a plurality of modern-day Venus de Willendorfs, in mullets.

  Steph never felt compelled to explain why she had the collection, and I never pressed her for an answer. Interestingly, she often felt contentious about and diminished by the pornographic trails left on my web browser, and curiously, I thought she and I had been above such a discussion anyway—especially since she had had a much more, let’s say, adventurous sex life than I would ever consider.

  So when I came up with the idea to give the magazine collection to my new friend, Brenda, who I thought would appreciate it, Steph had agreed, and a bit too sheepishly and coy, I had felt at the time.

  Brenda lived in the basement with her three dogs, in probably the only place in the city that living arrangement could have been possible. Sarah had her own dog, an aging and elegant English Lab named Genevieve who kept order as the alpha bitch. Brenda had a gorgeous pit bull puppy named Betty Brown that she had rescued from a future of being a bait dog, plucked right from the trunk of a drug dealer’s car, and they were inseparable. And she had a lanky Irish wolfhound named Jack County, also a rescue, also relieved of ownership from a drug manufacturer, some guy with the last name of “County” who cooked meth in a trailer park and had left Jack chained to a tree with no care or water. Brenda saved the dog, brought him back from the brink of death to a life of health and sanitation, gave him the best years of his life. Jack County looked like the canine version of Tom Selleck and would follow me around, find me in the house when he heard my voice, then curl up at my feet or near me with a paw placed reassuringly on me to convince me to stay still and keep him company while he napped. He had this wonderfully demure manner of curling up his long tail and tucking it under his nether bits while he slept, which looked like a merkin. “Remember this is all gravy, Jack,” Sarah would say when Jack would enter a room.

  Finally, Brenda had Bill Brown, a dog that had moved far past his dog years and into archival history, had dementia and doggie Alzheimer’s, would sometimes find himself trapped in a corner of the house and incapable of remembering that to get out of the corner, all he had to do was either turn to a side or back up. Instead, he’d stare at the corner and become confused, begin barking and growling until someone came by and pointed him in another direction. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sad.

  Brenda accepted the paper bag full of lesbian pornography in the manner intended: It was a fun gift—enjoy it. But the more I learned about Brenda, the more I realized that she didn’t need pornography; Brenda was a magnetic draw of vitality. She didn’t date other lesbians; she dated straight girls who suddenly realized how fantastic and sexy Brenda was. We called these women “brendasexuals,” because after a brief fling, they’d eventually end up dating men again, and Brenda would be the only same-sex experience they likely would have in their lives. But that was Brenda: She was mesmerizing.

  She was even more mesmerizing on the karate mat, so much so that I hadn’t seen that Steph had developed her own fascination with Brenda, oddly enough. Which, at this point, just makes me sort of laugh, thinking back to when I tried to introduce them one afternoon at the karate school, and I said, “Oh, hold on just a second; I’ll get Brenda and you can meet her,” and when I turned around again, I saw Steph actually running out of the school. If this had been a cartoon, and sometimes later it felt like one, I would have turned around to a floating, spinning hat, suspended in midair with a word bubble that read “Whoosh!” floating beneath it.

  Instead of feeling any sort of jealousy, from this distance, I think my only real envy is that I wished I could have met someone back then who would frighten me with similar feelings felt at that level. The only comparable intensity woul
d eventually come with my feelings for Sarah, but that’s not for a few chapters at least. Right now, we were still frightened of the torrid affair we’d had, and rather publicly, in front of most of the karate school people who had been at her house that night.

  And as much as I really missed my friendship with Sarah as we adjusted to the new reality, I have to say that I really missed her house, really missed the sanctuary and safety of being in a clean, sunlit place full of dog energy and Brenda Brown in the basement, the house itself as a destination, a place to go and sit with coffee and talk about everything and nothing, feeling a sense of safety that you couldn’t say anything wrong, and neither would she, because we were both very clever, and very raunchy in private, and then very polite in public, for the most part. I could get away with saying almost anything that popped into my mind, and Sarah would look at me like, “Did you just really say that?” and then giggle, and I’d respond the same, when she would lob a particularly astute or sordid bon mot, and we’d have a wonderful time because there was nothing in the balance, nothing either of us demanded of one another. We had nothing to lose in the exchange.

  But that had shifted immediately the morning she woke up and I had disappeared, and she had to face her household alone, with a headache, and I had crawled back into my apartment on the other side of the hill, in the rental area, and sulked, and quietly waited for the rest of the storm to settle in for good.

  CHAPTER 23 Buying Goblin Fruit