by Barbara Hall
She says, “Look, I’ve got another year here. I can stand it. Then I’ll get a job. Or I’ll go to Europe. Something like that.”
“Hallie,” I say quietly.
“Look,” she says again, her voice shifting up this time. She is angry or frustrated or scared. It all looks the same in the dark, and I have never been able to read voices the way I can read notes. People confuse me. Their sounds are complex and conflicting. They always seem out of tune. I hear people’s sounds, but I can’t interpret them.
She says, “You just have to get over me, Pearl. Leave it alone.”
It’s funny how she says it. As if I am the abandoned one and she is asking me to move on. I feel humiliated and rejected. But encouraged, too, in a strange way. Hallie is telling me to move on. Hallie is saying my work is done here. This is probably what I came for.
So I tell her, “I want to know you’re okay. I handled it badly. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I should have been more understanding. I shouldn’t have pushed.”
These words are coming out of me in a torrent. They sound rushed and confused and younger than my years, younger than Hallie’s years.
She smiles, and her smile seems calm and comforting. It reassures me. I have come here to be reassured by my student. How sad is that? I feel my tongue backing down my throat and tears are shoving at the corners of my eyes.
She says, “It’s okay. You just wanted me to be great. But I don’t want to be great. My mother was that way and it drove her nuts. She died.”
“You’re looking at it all wrong,” I say.
“I have to go inside,” she says.
“Hallie, just don’t give up.”
“Why would I do that?” she asks.
“Please. Talk to me.”
She shakes the hair out of her face, and suddenly she appears mature. Way more mature than I am. She has a knowing look in her eyes.
She says, “Things mostly work out. People have their stories, you know? All the calamity and drama, it’s a way of putting things off. It’s an excuse not to live.”
I don’t say anything to that.
She says, “Look, how it happens is, people survive stuff. Everybody’s story is sad because people like sad stories. But the truth is, we just work our way through the mess. I probably told you stuff I shouldn’t have. I was probably trying to get you to care. And you proved you cared.”
She starts backing away. I want to leap out of the car and grab her. I want to kidnap her and take her home. I want to shape her life. I want her to amount to something. I think it is my job. I watch her retreating into the shadows, and I realize there is nothing I can do.
I think, She is going to be okay. Then I think, No, she is not.
Then I realize she is going to be okay some days, and some days she is not, and that is how it goes.
Out the window, I say, “Hey, was that you I saw on the street in Venice?”
She laughs. “Face it, you’re just going to keep seeing me.”
“Until what?” I ask.
“Until you don’t need to anymore.”
I get out of my car but stay next to it. “Did you get anything from me?” I ask. I hear the scared, pathetic tone in my voice. Like when you hit the wrong note on a violin. It’s sorry for you. It wants to make it up to you. It translates your pain.
Hallie turns. She says, “Too soon to tell. But it’s over now, you know? Everything ends. You move on to the next thing.”
“Tell me what to do.”
She’s in the shadows now. I can barely see her. But as always, I can hear her.
She says, “Don’t be pathetic. I couldn’t live with that.”
I stand there for a long time after she’s gone. I hear the whir of the power lines.
Finally I get in the car and close the door.
I start the engine and I hear the pistons churning, and I turn the headlights on and see the rays illuminating the road ahead of me, and I’m in the presence of all these laws of physics, which have always governed our lives, even when we didn’t understand them, and I know that awareness improves and diminishes our lives in equal parts.
I put the car into gear and I move away from her and toward something else.
18
WHEN I GET HOME, I am greeted by the angry, pacing version of Clive. We have not made a plan to get together tonight. We said we would call each other. So I am surprised, agitated, pleased, and annoyed to see him, all at once.
“It’s cold out here,” he says as I get out of the car. It is late February, and the rainy season has set in. It hasn’t actually rained today, but the clouds have been hovering and the threat of rain feels just like the actual event in L.A.
“Yes, it’s a little chilly. What are you doing here?” I ask.
“It’s Wednesday. We usually see each other on Wednesdays.”
“I had Lance today. You know I stay late when I have Lance.”
“So it’s all about Lance now,” he accuses. I actually laugh; it’s such a ridiculous charge.
“No, it’s only about Lance on Wednesdays.”
“And sometimes on Mondays.”
“What’s your point, Clive?”
He obviously doesn’t have a point. He stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jeans. One reason he is cold is that he is not wearing a coat. People can’t get a handle on the weather in Los Angeles, even if they were born and raised here. It claims to be a warm climate, but it is not consistent. And its attitude changes as drastically as hormones.
He thrashes around for a point, then comes up with this: “You have to decide if we are a couple or not.”
“All right. I’m going with yes, we are a couple.”
This surprises him. He hesitates a moment, then says, “Well, couples make time to see each other.”
“I have some time now,” I say, kissing him on the neck. I had targeted his mouth, but he turned his head away at the last second.
“You are wearing me out,” he says.
“How am I doing that?”
“You act like you want to be with me, but you won’t really be with me.”
“How can I be more with you, Clive?”
“You could meet my parents, for one thing.”
“Give me a time and a place.”
“That’s just an example.”
I am starting to feel angry now. I am starting to think he’s not worth it. I am tired from my lesson with Lance and my encounter with Hallie, and I really just want to have a beer, eat some peanuts, and crawl into bed with the TV remote. I would like to have sex, but I am resenting all the layers I have to work through to get there.
I remember, now, why love is so difficult. You have to process another person’s feelings. I find it challenging enough to process my own. You have to see into the future a little bit to love someone. You have to anticipate their concerns, feel their feelings, and formulate an appropriate, and often forced, response.
At the same time, I know that if I reject this thing in front of me, I will end up like Josie or Ernest or Franklin or Patrick. I will become smug and self-righteous. I will have all the answers without even considering the questions. I will observe life and construct elaborate theories. I will put forth these theories and ridicule anyone who refuses to validate them. I will start to stoop or gain weight, and I will start to rant. I do not want this for me.
I take Clive by the hand. It is stone cold, but it starts to warm up as my fingers wrap around his. I say, “Come inside. You’re just cold and hungry.”
“Don’t try to confuse me,” he says.
“I won’t. Just come inside.”
He follows me without arguing. Once we are in the trailer, he collapses in a chair and I open a can of chili. I’m not really hungry, but I know once the smell permeates the small trailer, Clive will start to calm down.
As I’m fixing him a tray, he says to me, “Pearl, I can’t decide if you are my future, or if you’re interfering with it.”
This might be the smart
est thing I’ve ever heard from him. It’s so smart that I can’t formulate a response. So I put the tray down in front of him—a steaming bowl of chili, with some shredded cheese and corn chips on the side, along with a bottle of beer. He looks at it longingly, but he seems to understand that if he takes it, he will have lost another battle.
“Well, let’s look at the options,” I say. “I could be both. I could be neither. Or I could just be the person who is going to keep you from being alone tonight. All of those things are pretty good.”
He takes a few bites of chili, then puts his spoon down and looks at me again.
“I’m afraid I’m in love with you, Pearl,” he says.
“That’s okay.”
“Do you ever feel that way?”
“Yes,” I admit without hesitation.
“Doesn’t it scare you?” he asks in an exasperated tone, as if this were the worst imaginable predicament.
“Of course it does.”
“Then why don’t you look scared?”
I smile. “I am older than you. Fear doesn’t bother me as much.”
He stares at me for a long moment, then goes back to eating the chili. He eats slowly, but without pausing, without looking up, without speaking. Finally he puts his spoon down in his empty bowl, wipes his mouth with the paper napkin, and looks up at me.
He says, “Why don’t you introduce me to any of your friends?”
I laugh. I light a cigarette and wave the smoke away so it won’t annoy him. Which is foolish, because there is nowhere else for the smoke to go in this confined space. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“You know all my friends,” I tell him. “Franklin, Ernest, Patrick, Declan.”
“You don’t have any other friends?”
“Well, there’s Ralph, the drunk next door. I could invite him over sometime.”
“You don’t have any girlfriends?”
The realization dawns on me that I have not thought about Leah in some time. I saw her long enough to get permission to sleep with Clive. And to invade Hallie’s life. I have divorced her. He’s right, I have kept this part of my life away from him. And from myself.
“I have one girlfriend,” I say. “Her name is Leah. You can meet her anytime you want.”
He nods, and his body seems to relax, as if he is slowly but surely getting to the bottom of this particular mystery.
“What about your parents?” he asks. “Why don’t you want me to meet them?”
“Because they’re dead,” I say.
His eyes widen and he leans forward in his chair.
“Oh, my God,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I shrug and smoke my cigarette.
“Both of them? When did they die?”
“Years ago,” I say.
“When you were a kid?”
“No, when I was an adult. I’m forty, Clive. A lot of people my age have dead parents.”
He stares hard at me, as if this is something he is unwilling to accept. I’m not sure whether he’s trying to fathom the reality of my age or the reality that everyone dies. Or maybe it’s a simultaneous awareness dawning on him, and being with me is going to remind him, every moment of his life, of the relentless passage of time. The advantage to being with someone your own age is that you confront the specter of mortality at the same pace.
“So you’re an orphan,” he says.
And my immediate response is to laugh, though my laughter soon dies and I stare back at him, letting my cigarette smolder away as I contemplate his words.
It’s true, I am an orphan. Hallie was an orphan. Was this part of our connection? Is this, in fact, the lingering connection? If so, it has taken me a long time to see it.
“Everyone is eventually an orphan,” I say. “Unless they don’t outlive their parents. But everyone expects to do that.”
Clive hears this, and he thinks about it, but I can’t help him. He is young and he is hearing a terrible truth. That life is about painful realization. It’s about parties for a long time, and then someone has to pick up the tab. He sees the tab but he can’t reach for it yet. Seeing the future is so much more difficult than not seeing it. That’s what Isaac Newton would say. Maybe it’s even what Hallie would say. Maybe it’s what I would say if I weren’t glimpsing something more real.
“I’m sorry about that,” Clive tells me. “I’m sorry for you.”
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t do that to me.”
“Don’t what? Feel badly for you?”
“Bad,” I snap. “You feel bad, not badly. If you feel badly, it means you have no nerve endings in your fingers.”
He just stares at me. I realize two things: that I have veered off into parts unknown, and that I have rejected an honest emotion. It makes me feel bad. Bad, not badly.
I stub out my cigarette and kneel down in front of him. I take his hands into mine. He avoids looking at me. I have shamed him. I don’t know why I do that to people.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But you can’t go around making people into victims. You can’t pity people. Especially if you love them.”
He lifts his eyes to mine. “Why?”
“Because the goal is to elevate the people you love. You know, make them better. Make them strong. Expect things from them.”
While he is thinking about this, I feel my mind racing back, again, to Hallie. I expected things from her. And I drove her away. I turned her into something monstrous. I devalued her with my expectations. I negated her. I did that.
But I couldn’t have done that. I wanted everything for her. I wanted to help.
The thing I didn’t see back then is that people can be destroyed by goodness. Damage can be done by hope. If people aren’t ready for hope, it’s a cruel trick to put it on their doorstep. Like a bag of shit on fire. They stomp it out because they don’t know what else to do.
I don’t know how to say this to Clive, and I am glad. Glad that I can’t say it, glad that he wouldn’t understand it. Glad that our relationship is so off balance that I cannot disrupt it any further. All I can do is be in it.
He sighs and rubs his eyes, the way a kid does when he is past the point of exhaustion. He blows the breath out of his lips, and they drum together as if he’s trying to make bubbles or create a new sound.
He says, “I don’t know, Pearl. I feel kind of lost sometimes.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Like, I can close my eyes and see my whole future coming together. I can see me in a band or writing songs and recording them in a studio. At the same time, I see me being this totally conventional guy, with a wife and kids and dogs and stuff. They’re both me, but in a way, neither one of them is me. It’s just a guy I’m imagining.”
He stops talking and stares. I know better than to speak.
Then he says, “Sometimes I can’t see my future at all. Like it’s a complete blank. I try to picture it, but nothing comes.”
I nod. He waits. There is nothing to say.
“Do you ever think about the future?” he finally asks.
“Not much,” I answer honestly.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe in the future.”
“Oh, right,” he says, with a slight eye roll. “There is only now. Don’t get Zen on me.”
“But there is only now. It’s not a Zen thing. It’s something I believe. It’s more like physics.”
“Tell me,” he says.
“Well, some scientists believe that everything is happening at the same time. The past, the present, and the future. It’s all the same thing. It’s one big cosmic soup. It’s a kind of perpetual motion. Do you understand?”
He shakes his head, but I keep talking.
“It’s the idea that there is no linear time at all. It’s all just a perpetual state of now. Like billions of TV screens with the same program on, but at different times. Past and present both affecting each other, but the moment itself never changes. It just is. And there is nothing else.”
“There’s nothing else,” he says slowly, “because we could get hit by a truck tomorrow.”
“Well, yes, but we could also never have been born. According to this theory.”
“So, like, nothing is real?”
“Nothing is real, and nothing is not real. Things just are. That’s why you try to be in the moment. Because you might as well be somewhere. And all evidence seems to point to the fact that being here, now, is where all the good stuff happens.”
He nods and stares at my hands, which are still holding his.
He says, “Like when you’re playing a riff, and you’re not worried about finishing it. You’re just in it.”
“Right.”
He takes one of my hands to his lips and kisses it. Something like an electric current shoots through me. There is a feeling in it, and the feeling makes me want to forgive everyone and forget everything. I am reminded that I am alive, and that might be enough of a thing to be.
He says, “Also, this could all be a dream.”
I smile. “Well, like Bob Dylan said.”
His face draws a blank. He doesn’t know much about Bob Dylan. That’s okay, too.
“What did he say?” he asks.
“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”
LATER WHEN WE are in bed, huddled together against the cold (as if it were possible to do anything in that bed except huddle), I let my eyes roam across the ceiling and I think of Lance and his voices. The whole exchange seems like something I imagined and willed into existence. He is the first student who has ever talked to me about the voices. Hallie hinted at a similar kind of intuition, but I drew my own conclusions about her. I knew she could hear the music in her head. I knew she didn’t have to read it. But that was another thing altogether.
It is true that I have heard similar voices in my life. As Lance said, it isn’t exactly a human voice, and it isn’t even what we think of as language. It is more like energy, or some kind of intelligence, offering suggestions. Then I translate that intelligence into language that I can understand. The best way to describe it is that it is like a song, but that is misleading, too, because we think of songs as things that already exist, created by people. But where do songs come from in the first place? A tune is not a thing you can construct; it is a thing you deconstruct by putting it into notation, or by rendering it on an instrument. It loses something in the translation. It starts out divine, and as soon as a person touches it, interprets it, it becomes something else. It is not so much despoiled as transfigured into something both human and divine. Like Jesus. Perfectly human and perfectly divine.
