The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

“Pleased to meet you, Kitty,” he said. He stuck his hand through the gap. His gray, unblinking eyes met hers directly, and she stared back until her pee stream stopped.

  “I’ll be right out,” she said.

  She found him in the hallway, bouncing lightly in his black service oxfords. “I apologize,” he said. “About before, I mean. I don’t like that guy. I didn’t want to talk to him.”

  “Conrad said you were a wild man.”

  He nodded vigorously. “That’s it, right there. That’s why I don’t like him.”

  They went outside and fell naturally to walking. Jim clasped his hands behind his back. Kitty sensed that he was concentrating on matching her pace; that he would be walking faster if he were by himself. He was from the Bay Area. He’d dropped out a year earlier and he wasn’t sure if he was going to stay in Portland. He told Kitty he was writing a novel, and that he found inspiration in California: the tiki torches at night, the smell of barbecue.

  “Listen, Kitty,” he said, “can you do me a favor? I need something from the library. The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet. I don’t have an ID anymore. I was going to ask my friend who works at the radio station, but he wasn’t around.”

  “I mean, I’d like to help, but—”

  “I’ll give you my driver’s license as collateral. I only need it for a day.”

  She brought the book out to him and he handed her his driver’s license. He had a beard in the picture.

  Kitty took Jim’s license out and looked at it a few times that evening. When he met her on the library steps the next day to give her the book, he didn’t want it back. “It’s expired anyhow,” he said. And that was the last she saw of Jim for several months.

  Kitty saw Conrad all the time. He always seemed to be hanging around the Student Union or the coffee shop next door. She liked his rapid way of speaking and his Converse high tops and his hair—long and kinky and black, like Jimmy Page. They hung out together all night at the first social of the year. Kitty was wearing an old dress of her mother’s—burgundy rayon with a square neckline and short, puffed sleeves that made her look like a cigarette girl. They danced until their clothes clung to them, and then Conrad leaned in to be heard over the band, enclosing her in a curtain of kinky hair. “Let’s go to the rhodo garden,” he said. His lips brushed her ear.

  What? She asked with her eyes.

  “The rhododendron garden. Down the hill. I’ll show you.”

  She followed him down the steep campus driveway, across 28th Street, and into the quiet park. The path wound among bushes and over a little footbridge. Something is about to happen now, she thought as they sat down on the bank of the pond. She felt a pulsing in her throat and between her legs. Without hesitating, Conrad kissed her, forcing her down onto the grass. Thinking of duck shit, she pushed him away and pulled off her mother’s rayon dress. He stood up and straddled her while he undressed, then knelt down and wriggled her underwear off. His face loomed close again, and then he was lying on her. She wrapped her legs around him and memorized the patch of sky over his shoulder, and the rhododendron branches framing it.

  And then he was inside her and she was moving with him, her arms pinned on the spongy ground. All of him felt smooth and hard. She smelled his hair. Prell, she thought. He jerked forward suddenly and gasped, and then they were lying side by side. He slid his hand over her shoulder, down into the dip of her waist, and up over her hip. She still throbbed everywhere, but it was over.

  Later he told her he’d been tripping on acid.

  The next day, Kitty went with a group of people to the coast in Conrad’s car. They took LSD and sat on a beach of little black stones, smoothed by the ocean and hot in the sun. Kitty rolled around and dug her hands in the pebbles. She threw them in the air and felt them fall on her legs and stomach like fat, warm raindrops on the surface of a pond. She wandered down the shoreline and sat for a long time, watching the surf churn, until she noticed the tide coming in. She was unsure for a moment how fast it was moving. It suddenly came to her that she would be trapped in her isolated cove if she didn’t get back to the others. The cliff behind her, she saw, was steep and greasy—too slick to climb. She began running and didn’t stop until she reached Conrad and lay next to him on the pebbles. I have a lover, she told herself.

  Conrad lived in a big group house up the hill from the campus. It was boxy and white, and they called it “The Westinghouse” because it looked like a dryer. The common rooms were decorated with trash-picked couches and shopping carts. A smell of ether drifted up from the basement, where Conrad made drugs that Kitty had never heard of: MDA, DMT, bromo-mescaline. She felt brave and tried everything. They went to the movies tripping, or to video arcades, or just wandered around the mall. Conrad smuggled sodium out of the lab at school, and they threw chunks into the Willamette. It exploded on the surface in yellows and oranges, like waterborne fireworks.

  They went out late at night in search of food. Their favorite place was a diner downtown where the waitresses had gingham uniforms. One waitress wore a stiff yellow wig and only had teeth on one side of her mouth. She recited the litany of pies on request:

  “PeachappleDutchapplecherryblueberrypecanstrawberryrhubarbpumpkinbananacreamBostoncreamlemonmeringue.”

  “What was that third one?” Conrad would ask, winking at Kitty across a table of half-eaten food.

  It was Conrad who suggested she move into the Westinghouse when the room next to his opened up. The first night he stayed with her, and the next night he didn’t. The night after that, he still wasn’t home when she finally fell asleep. It bothered her, but she kept it to herself. After all, he had never said they were a couple. “It’ll be convenient” was all he’d said. A few times she crept abjectly into his room without being invited. She craved him, but she always left him still craving.

  Kitty turned her recriminations inward when she came home and found Conrad on the living room couch with someone on his lap—a girl named Holly, who’d hitchhiked up from Eugene in her bare feet. Later that night, after Kitty sneaked downstairs and confirmed that Holly was not sleeping on the couch, she lay awake in her room and imagined them on the other side of the wall: Conrad’s hand moving over Holly’s shoulder and into the dip of her waist, across her belly, between her legs.

  Holly did not leave the next day, as had been her plan. She stayed for weeks. Kitty’s pride dictated that she be nonchalant. She, Holly, and Conrad went together to Sodium Beach, and to the diner with the gingham-wearing waitresses. She let Holly pull her hair into a French braid and walked around campus with her and was bitterly relieved when she moved on.

  One day, Kitty woke feeling sick and decided to skip her morning lecture. It was afternoon when she got up again, and she was hungry and lightheaded, so she took some Spaghetti-Os off Conrad’s shelf and ate them out of the can. A sudden thirst for orange juice came over her. She put a coat on over her flannel nightgown and walked to the Thriftway, where the bright lights and the muzak hit her like a wave. Before she felt it coming, she’d vomited Spaghetti-Os all over the waxed linoleum tiles.

  When Conrad found her in bed later that afternoon, she told him about the Spaghetti-Os, and throwing up at Thriftway. “Feel my forehead,” she said. “Am I hot?”

  “No,” he said, climbing in next to her. He reached under her quilt for a breast.

  “Ow.”

  “That hurts?”

  “Yeah. Ow, don’t touch them.”

  “Hmm. You didn’t miss your period, did you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t really keep track.” She considered for a moment. “I don’t remember having one last month.”

  “Well, there you go,” he said. “C’mon. You can’t get any more pregnant.” He pulled her nightgown up. “Don’t worry—I won’t touch your tits.”

  It was the last time she had sex with Conrad. She woke the next day and found she couldn’t stand him anymore. She didn’t tell him when she confirmed her condition. She didn’t want to gi
ve him the satisfaction of knowing something so consequential had come of their adventures.

  Kitty skipped the last lecture of the semester and took a bus to the clinic. A small group of protesters lined the sidewalk outside, but they didn’t look at her or even pick up their signs as she walked past them. Inside, she changed into a gown and accepted a Valium from the nurse. She worried that it wouldn’t work, that somehow all the DMT and LSD and MDA she’d taken in the last few months would neutralize it, but after a few minutes a drowsy feeling came over her. The rest she met calmly: the donut of fluorescent light, the stirrups, the doctor with the port wine birthmark on his cheek, the sucking sound of his machine and the cramping pain. She tried to think about what was happening but she couldn’t hold it in her mind.

  She told her roommates they would have to get someone else, that she wasn’t coming back after winter break, and packed up her trunk and her suitcase and a cardboard box of books. She didn’t even own the mattress she’d been sleeping on. After paying for the abortion and losing her security deposit, she was lucky to find something she could afford: the basement room in the house on the cul-de-sac, with its Astroturf and bad lighting and its damp chill that reminded her every day of hard-won self-sufficiency.

  After the break and the three weeks of torpor and Jack Benny reruns, Kitty came back to Portland ready to start again. She stayed away from the Student Union and anywhere else she was likely to run into Conrad, and went to work on her incompletes. She was downtown, browsing the table of Reed course books at Powell’s, when she saw Jim Frank for the second time. He seemed genuinely pleased to see her.

  “You didn’t end up going to California?” she asked.

  “No, not yet,” he said. “I think I will, though, sometime soon, but I just got a job at the 7-Eleven on 28th Street. I’m living on Hawthorne, in my own, my very own apartment. Listen, I’m going to Singles Going Steady now.”

  Singles Going Steady turned out to be a record store across the street. Inside, they paused for a moment. “You know, you look like a Shangri-La,” Jim said. “That is, you look like one of girls in the Shangri-Las. I’ll show you.”

  She followed him to the Oldies section and stood by while he flipped through a bin, frowning. He pulled a record. On the cover, three girls posed in matching outfits.

  “Mary Weiss—the lead singer.” He pointed to the one in the middle. “It’s your hair, the way you have it parted. That and those kind of pants.”

  “Pedal pushers.”

  He looked up at her with surprise. “That is such a good word! Pedal pushers! And your name, too: Kitty. ‘It’s Kitty’s turn to cry.’ No, wait—Judy. It’s Judy’s Turn to Cry.”

  “Is that one of their songs?”

  “No, that’s Leslie Gore,” he said. “But, um, it’s a good name. Yeah, you remind me of Mary Weiss: sad and tough like that. A tough, sad teenager.”

  He led her to the listening station, where he put the record on and fitted the headphones over her ears. She recognized the first song—“Leader of the Pack”—as soon as it started, but Jim quickly picked the needle up and moved it to another track.

  This one began with a somber piano figure in a slow waltz time. Three girls, in hushed unison, spoke a single word: Past. Then a lone voice took up the recitation in an amplified whisper: tender, but burred with experience and studio reverb and a trace of a New York accent. Well now, let me tell you about the past. Past is filled with silent joys and broken toys. Jim watched while Kitty listened to that song and the next, then carefully lifted the headphones.

  “Let me buy this for you,” he said.

  “I don’t have a record player.”

  “I’m going to buy it anyhow, and we can play it at my place.”

  Jim’s building was not like the complexes on 28th Street. It was brick and old, with a wide, dusty hallway that reminded her of her grammar school. Following him into his apartment she peeked at the bedroom, to the left of the entryway. There was nothing inside but a typewriter, sitting on the floor in a sea of scattered pages.

  “Is that where you’re writing your novel?”

  “That’s good, that you remembered that,” he said. “Yes, the novel.”

  Kitty wanted to go in and pick up a page and read it, but she stopped herself.

  “What’s it like, writing a book?”

  “I don’t really know how to answer that. It’s great, I guess.”

  There was no furniture in the living room either, except for a rug with a sleeping bag on it and a boombox and a lift-and-play record player. Next to the sleeping bag a picture, torn out of a magazine, was taped to the wall. Kitty bent forward to look: a girl with short hair and thick false eyelashes in black tights and a T-shirt, posing atop an expensive-looking leather footstool shaped like a rhinoceros. Her arms were gracefully outstretched with one leg extended behind her.

  “That’s Edie Sedgwick,” Jim said.

  “Who?”

  “From the Factory.”

  “What factory?”

  “Andy Warhol’s Factory.”

  “Oh.” Kitty had heard of Andy Warhol but she didn’t understand the part about a factory.

  Still wearing their coats, they sat down on the floor across from each other, each leaning against a wall, and Jim put on the Shangri-Las. The record had an echoey sound to it, as if it had been made specifically to be listened to in a room like this: a cold room with no furniture. The tough, sad girls were Out in the Street, they were Walking in the Sand, they could Never Go Home Anymore. It was dark when the record ended, but Jim didn’t turn on the light. Kitty had a strong desire to tell him about Conrad and Holly and the abortion, and about how she was worried that she still felt some pain from it. But she could sense that he would not want her to, so instead she talked about Western Mystical Philosophy and how, now that she’d finally started to do the reading, she felt like everything related to it—even the record they’d just listened to.

  “Relates how?” he asked.

  “Well, like, Plotinus. I read this thing last night that keeps going through my head: ‘The soul, different from the divinity but sprung from it, must needs love.’”

  Jim exhaled. “Yeah, that’s great, just all by itself. I don’t even want to know what it means or where it comes from, you know? Sometimes I’ll just open up a book in the middle and get some great phrase, or a good, technical-sounding word that I can drop into my novel somewhere. That’s where my head’s at.”

  Later, in the hallway, it occurred to her why the picture of the girl in the black tights had been taped to the wall, at that height, by the sleeping bag.

  The next time she was at the library, she remembered what Jim had said, and she looked up The Thief’s Journal—the book she’d checked out for him in September. She opened it up at random and read.

  Picturing the world outside, its shapelessness and confusion even more perfect at night, I turned it into a godhead of which I was not only the cherished pretext, object of so much care and caution, chosen and superlatively led despite ordeals that were painful and exhausting to the point of despair, but also the sole purpose of so many labors.

  Kitty started dropping in on Jim at the 7-Eleven when she stayed late at the library. Sometimes, if she was at home in the evening, he would come by her house and they would wander around for a while until he had to go to work. They walked along the median strip of Powell Boulevard, past vast, sparsely stocked thrift stores. They watched some firemen put out a practice blaze in a hollow cement structure in the middle of an asphalt lot. The factories by the river were dark and quiet, except for a few that glowed with swing-shift lights, their exhaust fans humming in the night. Mostly, Jim and Kitty walked through wet, foggy emptiness. Portland was a lonely city, a place where drifters reached the edge of the continent. Jim showed her a hobo camp under the Burnside Bridge near the downtown soup kitchens.

  Once, they went to the diner with the pies and saw the waitress who only had teeth on one side of her mouth. Afterward,
walking home, Kitty started to tell Jim about Conrad. He looked straight ahead while she spoke, nodding, but he stopped her before she got to the Spaghetti-Os and what came next.

  “I want to tell you something, Kitty,” he said. “This is important. Any guy will fuck you if you ask. Don’t ever worry about that.”

  The milder weather came. Kitty saw Conrad around, and her other old roommates from the Westinghouse. It would have been impossible to avoid them entirely. She made a point of being friendly but she still kept away from the Student Union. She got a B on her paper for Western Mystical Philosophy, reduced to a C for lateness. That was okay—she’d cleared up the incomplete. It was a struggle, but she was keeping up with all her current classes. Thucydides and Herodotus were still giving her problems, though.

  And something else: she still had pain. It had moved upward, spread out, gotten duller. When Tylenol didn’t help, she stayed in bed with Windex and a hot water bottle. She knew she should make another appointment at the Women’s Health Center, but she remembered the morning at the clinic and the doctor with the port wine birthmark, and she kept putting it off.

  She was at home under her electric blanket when Jim knocked on the basement entrance. The bright April sun blinded her for a minute when she opened the door.

  “It’s really dark in here,” he said. “You should change those bulbs.” The other fluorescent light tube had started to burn out, and now they were both strobing.

  “What are you doing up so early?” she asked.

  “I wanted to bring you some things on my way out of town.”

  Kitty’s stomach dropped.

  “Where are you going?”

  “California. My sister said I could stay in her garage. In Mountain View.”

  “But—when are you leaving?” She hoped she didn’t sound whiny.

  “Now,” he said. “Well, tonight. I wanted you to have this.” He gave her a thick manila envelope on which he had written, in large block letters, “Real Life in California, by Jim Frank.”