Golden States

by Michael Cunningham

  She was sitting at the table in her usual place, smoking a cigarette. The tabletop glowed in the filtered moonlight like old ice. The bowl of fruit, black globes, sat in the middle.

  “Hi,” David said.

  “You should be sleeping,” she told him. Her voice was soft and a little too low.

  David sat down at his own place. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Just smoking a cigarette. Watching the wallpaper.”

  “Oh. Is it okay if I sit with you?”

  “Sure”

  “Can I have a drag of your cigarette?”

  “You don’t smoke cigarettes.”

  “Well, I do, sometimes.”

  “Sorry. I refuse to contribute.”

  “What did Rob tell you when he called?”

  She blew out a stream of smoke, which hung palely and stretched itself toward the door before vanishing. “Oh, a lot of things,” she said. “He still wants to get married.”

  “Oh.”

  “And it’s all so crazy,” she said. “People don’t get married anymore anyway, I’ll bet nobody else in Los Angeles County is sitting in a dark room right now worrying about marriage.” “They’re not?” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “No. If they’re thinking about anything at all they’re thinkingabout—I don’t know. Issues. Or drugs. I don’t have any idea what other people think about, to tell you the truth.”

  “You don’t love Rob, do you?” David asked.

  “That’s a tricky question. I guess I always thought love would be more ... definiteShe shook her head. “You like Rob, don’t you?”

  “Well, I guess so,” David said. It was true; Rob was a nice enough man.

  “You know,” Janet said, “I used to look at him and think, My God, this is it. This is what twenty million American women would give their right arms for. A friendly lawyer with nice hands and scads of money, who loves me and wants to take care of me. This is the Great North American Thing.” She dragged deeply on her cigarette. “I got to thinking, if I don’t want this, what in the world do I want? Maybe I don’t want anything at all.”

  “Oh,” David said.

  “Blithering again, huh?” Janet said. “I keep forgetting you’re not thirty-five. What I decided to do, David, is live on my own and try getting into medical school again. Even if I’m not exactly brilliant.”

  “You are brilliant,” he told her.

  “I’m not. You may as well know the awful truth. I’m a solid B student, and B students don’t ordinarily get to be doctors. But I’m going to study hard, and keep trying. Anyway, it’s better than spending my life trying to talk myself into loving somebody.”

  “You’ll meet somebody you love more than Rob,” David said. “There are a lot of other people besides him.”

  “I guess I will. I know I will. Rob’s just such a... Well, the second awful truth is, I’m not quite what the world calls pretty. I’m not what they’re buying this year.”

  David looked at her and tried to imagine that she wasn’t pretty. Although her face was obscured by darkness, he knewit so well he could project every detail from his head. Her nose was longer than most, but it concluded logically over her wide, thin lips. Every feature of hers made sense in terms of every other—her neck was thin, with three deep creases and a pair of cords at the base that moved when she spoke; her forehead rose high above her dark brows, as white and placid as her throat was nervous. Her eyes watched with amusement from pockets of brown-lavender skin that turned, like the colors of a shell, to the pale cream of her cheekbones. She and David looked something alike. There was no way she could not be pretty.

  “You are,” he told her. He’d meant to say, You are pretty, but the word embarrassed him.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’m pretty to you. That’s nice.”

  A silence caught, and held. A minute passed.

  “Do you want to go to the movies with me after school tomorrow?” David asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. Thanks. I think I’ll just stay around the house.”

  “Okay. Can’t I have just one drag of your cigarette?”

  ‘Wo,” she laughed, and ground the cigarette out in the ashtray. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”

  “It’s late.”

  “I know. That’s the best time.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  “No. It’s a school night. You’d better go back to bed.”

  “Well. Okay. See you in the morning.”

  “Right. Sleep tight.”

  “Good night.”

  David left the room and went to the top of the stairs, where he sat down and waited for Janet to leave. This time he would follow her. He rested his forehead against the wrought-iron post, which was twisted like a birthday candle. The stairs dropped away beneath him; the house was built over an abandoned mine shaft. He saved himself by clinging to the banister,holding tight while the carpeted treads, still linked, dropped soundlessly into the pit.

  This was where Dad had stood, enormous in a bathrobe, one side of which hung open to reveal the whole hairy length of his leg. The ends of the drawstring had hung down below his knees. Janet, who would have been much younger but who had always looked the same to David, had been going out and Dad had hollered to her that she wasn’t going anywhere, she was going to stay home and stop slutting around. She’d said, Oh, fine, I’ll stay here and slut around with you, and in David’s memory Dad had jumped down the whole staircase, one big leap, robe flapping. Janet got the door half open and she and Dad were fighting or hugging in the doorway, there was no telling which. He could picture Janet biting Dad on the lip. A trickle of blood ran down Dad’s chin and spotted his bathrobe. Dad had screamed like a woman. This was either just before or just after David was knocked down the stairs. He could not remember which. He could remember that Janet’s purse had had fringe that flew in rhythm with her hair as she ran across the lawn, and that a silver car had been waiting for her out in the street.

  It was some time around then that she had decided to be a doctor. During the divorce it was all she and Mom had talked about. They’d sent away for college catalogues, Mom insisting on Janet’s applying to Berkeley because it was farther away than UCLA. Dad had started pulling up in front of the house at night and sitting there, silent, in his car. Everybody had pictured Janet in a white coat with a syringe, living up north, searching for cures.

  David heard her get up with a tired sigh. He lifted his head eagerly to listen. A short silence. Then he heard her walk through the kitchen and go out the back door instead of the front.

  He went to his room and looked out the window. Janet had gone to the edge of the pool and was standing with her backto the house, her head bent, looking into the water. The reflection of a streetlight, a false moon, rode skittishly on the surface. She unbuttoned her shirt and shrugged it off. As it fell it disappeared into the dark concrete. Her skin was so white it glowed. She pulled down her jeans and stepped out of them, balancing on one foot and then the other. Her panties were a brilliant white triangle that turned her skin suddenly to ivory. She swung her arms up over her head and dove, and seemed to take an unusually long time hitting the water. For a protracted moment she hung with her body arched, legs pressed together, the dark line between her thighs widening at her underpants. Then the water took her. Her head surfaced and she swam a steady determined crawl, from end to end and back again. David watched over her. Even through the glass he could hear the rhythm of her breathing, a ragged, fragile sound. She was so exposed there, in the water. It seemed as though the noise she made was dangerous, inviting attention the way a wounded animal’s lopsided movements attract predators. The bushes that lined the fence cupped their own shadows, spots of darkness so black they seemed to protrude. David listened for the howls of coyotes. He stood at the window until Janet got out of the pool. When she did he saw her breasts straight on. He was so surprised his attention glazed over and he saw them the way he saw photog
raphs, as products of his own imagination rather than inevitable facts of nature. The only naked women he had ever seen were in pictures. Janet stepped out of the water, picked up her clothes, and ran back into the house, her breasts bobbing heavily, implying their own weight and resilience, throwing shadows on her rib cage. He watched with mingled amazement and satisfaction, vaguely taking credit for the invention of her body. He heard her enter the house, and thought of her dripping on the kitchen linoleum, shivering, holding her wadded clothes to her chest. She sprinted up the stairs and down the hall, past his door. He touched his own chest, gently, with the fingertips of bothhands. The fact that the Janet who slept one room down was the same person he’d just seen running naked was strange enough to keep him awake until after midnight. If he raised himself up in bed he could see the water of the pool, dark and shimmering.

  In the morning he woke and went straight to the window. Mom was in the yard with her net, skimming leaves off the water. Each leaf trailed three fingers in the brightening water. Mom picked them up one by one, with a steady patience. David was sure she was shrinking; her cheeks seemed to have no bones under them at all. He thought, though, that if anything was really wrong, someone would be sure to tell him.

  Billy shot David all day at school. He shot him from behind during homeroom class, and again at lunch. When David was crossing the yard on his way to the cafeteria he glanced up at the library and saw Billy standing in a window, shooting him from behind the dusty glass. David smiled and waved, but Billy just kept on shooting. Then David raised his own rifle and pretended to shoot back, but Billy didn’t flinch. David felt the weakness of his own bullets. He let the gun drop and walked away, with his shoulders squared and his head held high and his toes turned out, cowboy style. As he walked he could imagine the bullets thudding into his back, dancing him all over the yard.

  Without Billy there was nothing to do after school. Other kids were not interested in him, and a few held mysterious grudges. A boy named Benny Richter once tore to pieces the intricate cover David had made for a report on the lost city of Troy, with broken columns cut out of National Geographic and the face of a fashion model he imagined to look like Helen. The scraps of the cover fell at his feet, and before the wind took it he saw the woman’s lips, offering a kiss from a ragged-edgetriangle of skin. With Billy mad at him he had no real friends at all, and after school he just went home.

  When he got there he found Janet back in the pool, swimming laps. She had on a two-piece bathing suit. Mom was still at work and Lizzie was up in her room, dancing so hard to her Michael Jackson album she set the hall chandelier abuzz. David went out and sat beside the pool, with his knees tucked under his chin. Janet swam strong determined laps, head down, sucking air every second stroke, her face an agony of exertion. At either end of the pool she did a flip turn, pushing off underwater and streaking back the way she’d come. Her bathing suit was two turquoise bands in the paler turquoise of the water. David counted fifty laps.

  When she was done she clung for a while to the edge of the coping, gasping for breath. She smiled at David, unable to speak. He asked if she was all right, and she nodded. She stroked her way over to the ladder, hoisted herself out, and bent to one side to squeeze the water from her hair. David could see the herringbone stream of water that washed down her spine and disappeared into the bottom of her suit, emerging in twin slick movements on her thighs.

  Still panting, she came and sat beside him. “Hello,” she whispered.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She drew her knees up to her chest and sat the same way he did. She smelled scoured and bleached.

  “You’re a good swimmer,” he told her.

  “I just hate to have to stop,” she said.

  “What did you do today?”

  “Besides swimming? Nothing. What about you?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  She nodded, and they both stared straight ahead at the peaked roof of the neighbor’s house, which sliced up over the fence, a reversed duplicate of the Starks’. Behind it, the sky was a limpid, even blue.

  “You shouldn’t swim alone,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not alone anymore. You want to come for a swim?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ll just watch you.” He worried about the way his right nipple had sprouted a single dark corkscrew hair. It didn’t look right. He thought he would keep his body private until it looked more symmetrical.

  “All right.” She stood and walked to the deep end, her wet hair clinging to her back. Her back was thin, the buttons of her spine prominent enough to throw small rounded shadows. She paused at the pool’s edge, swung her arms, and dove in, cutting the water straight, barely raising a splash. David watched her swim back and forth, ticking off the laps with grim efficiency.

  The telephone rang inside the house. David ran into the kitchen. He could hear Lizzie jumping around upstairs, to the rhythm of “Beat It.” He picked up the phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, David? It’s Rob.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “Is Janet there?”

  “Urn, no.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Well, she went out.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “I think she went out with a friend,” David said.

  “What friend?”

  “Well, I think she went out with a friend from here.”

  “Who’s that, David?”

  “I don’t know. His name is Billy.”

  “I see. Who is Billy, David?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he an old friend of Janet’s?” Rob asked.

  “I think so.”

  “I don’t think I ever heard about him.”

  “Well, everybody around here knows him. He was in the marines. Now he’s studying to be a doctor.”

  “What do you know? And Janet went out with him?” “Uh-huh. I think so.”

  “I see. Well, just mention to her that I called, all right?” “Okay.”

  “Been a pleasure talking to you, David.”

  “You’re welcome,” David said, and hung up. His face was flushed and his nose ran a little, the mixture of shame and giddiness he always felt when he told a story. This one was a mistake—he’d surely be found out. But he’d worry about that later.

  He checked the kitchen window. Janet was still swimming. As he watched her he slipped his hand up under his shirt and pulled at the single hair that sprouted from his nipple. He thought about werewolves. Wolfman movies had always scared him more than any other kind; something about a man, normal and nice as anybody, turning suddenly into a monster. Monsters that stayed monsters were one thing. They were themselves and you were you. He tugged at the hair his body had grown, and considered plucking it out, but decided it would hurt too much.

  Janet was still swimming when Mom got home. Mom worked in the school superintendent’s office, making reports. David had no idea what the reports were about.

  “Another day, another thousand dollars,” Mom said as she came into the kitchen. She carried with her a gust of her work-smell: perfume and mimeograph ink. She set her purse down on the kitchen counter. The purse drooped into its own loose weight, like a sack of jelly.

  “Janet’s out there swimming,” David said.

  “1 see.” Mom washed her hands at the sink, with dish soap. “And you’re the lifeguard?”

  Embarrassed, David went to the refrigerator and took a deep swallow from the milk carton.

  “I told you not to do that,” Mom said. “You leave crumbs on the spout.”

  “I didn’t leave any crumbs,” he told her. “Mom, do we have to go see Dad this summer?”

  She took the dish towel from the handle of the refrigerator and dried her hands slowly. David noticed that she had thick blue veins in her hands. The veins settled and unsettled themselves under her skin.

  “I thought you liked going to Washington,” she said.

&
nbsp; “Well, I don’t, really.”

  “I think you’d better go anyway. Your father will be hurt if you don’t.”

  “Uh-huh.” David rearranged the magnets on the refrigerator. There were five of them: a pineapple, a peach, a plum, a bunch of grapes, and a wooden ladybug. “When did Dad push me down the stairs?” he asked.

  “He didn’t push you down the stairs, honey. It was an accident. He was mad at me, and he accidentally bumped into you because he wasn’t looking where he was going. He would never have pushed you down the stairs on purpose.”

  “Uh-huh,” David said. He felt with his fingertips along the top of his forehead, where the scar was, a thin straight line like a length of fine wire buried beneath the skin.

  “He really would rather have died than hurt you. Remember how he carried you out to the car? I thought he was going to kill us all, getting you to the hospital.”

  “I guess so,” David said. He remembered the trip to the hospital, with his cherry-red blood all over Mom’s blue dress and Dad sitting clenched at the wheel, blasting the horn at anybody who got in the way. Dad had driven up on the sidewalk for a block, with the horn pressed down. It had seemed like the end of the world.

  “He loves you,” Mom said. “He’d go crazy if you didn’t come up to see him.”

  “Uh-huh.” He worked the magnets into a straight line. Upstairs, Lizzie executed a dance step that rattled the plaster. “She’s going to break the ceiling someday,” he said.

  “Well, if she does, you catch her for me,” Mom told him.

  David could imagine doing it, catching people as they fell through the ceiling like laundry through a chute. “Was Ray a good dancer?” he asked.

  “Ray’s feet weighed about ten pounds each, rest his soul,” Mom said. “It was like dancing with a bear in combat boots.” “Oh.”

  “Not that that stopped us,” Mom said. “We used to go dancing all the time. I just kept a good supply of bandages in my purse. Ray thought he was a good dancer.”

  “Uh-huh.” David liked hearing about Ray. The main thing he knew was that Ray had been funny. Once when he asked Mom if Ray was a better husband than Dad, she had glanced up over David’s head as if Ray himself stood there and said, “Well, he knew better jokes, I’ll tell you that much.”