Golden States

by Michael Cunningham

  He went out into the hallway. Mom was still in the living room with the television on, and Janet said, “Hi,” and went in too. David positioned himself three steps down on the staircase, just above the point at which he could have been seen from the living room. Lizzie lay behind her closed door, sleeping her drugged, frowning sleep. He had to listen hard to separate Mom’s and Janet’s voices from the voices on the television, Johnny Carson talking to a woman with a foreign accent and a sharp, painful-sounding laugh.

  “How did it go?” Mom was saying.

  “Oh God, I don’t know,” Janet said. “You should see him, he looks like a wreck. He hasn’t shaved, his eyes are bloodshot. I didn’t think people really got like that, I thought it was just the movies.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “A lot of things. Basically he just doesn’t understand what he did wrong. I mean, one minute we were getting married and the next minute I’d picked a fight and moved back home to start a career in medicine. I’m not sure if I understand it anymore, either.”

  “Well, the way I understand—”

  The rest of Mom’s sentence was overridden by the foreign woman, who said in a great braying voice, “But darhlink, I’m still here and where is she?” followed by an avalanche of laughter and applause.

  “—oldest trick in the book,” Mom was saying.

  “It’s no trick,” Janet said. “You didn’t see him.”

  “I don’t have to. I saw Frank Stark with three days’ growth on his face, begging me for a seventh chance.”

  “Well, Rob isn’t Frank Stark, is he?”

  “Of course he’s not. But they all—”

  A new guest entered to applause and whistles, which ate into Janet’s next sentence.

  “—you stop about that?” she said. “My father wasn’t the last good man on earth.”

  “I never said he was.”

  “It’s what you think.”

  “No I don’t. I know your father had his faults.”

  “Name me one.”

  “Well, he was probably the worst dancer in the United States.”

  Janet laughed. “Shocking,” she said. “I’d just like to know one thing, actually. Why do you hate Rob so much? What has he ever done that’s made me anything but happy?”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t hate Rob.”

  “Yes you do, you’ve hated every boy I’ve gone out with since I was fifteen.”

  “Calm down. Just calm down, now.”

  Neither of them spoke for a minute. A man on Johnny Carson was talking about stunt driving. “—and at a hundred forty-five miles an hour, Johnny, with your clothes on fire, a jammed harness can be a very nasty thing.” David automatically pictured Johnny’s look of lockjawed amazement, then the small earnest bobbing of his head when he found a person both impressive and foolish.

  Janet said, “I get so tired of you pushing men away from me. They’re never good enough. Are you really that anxious for me to end up alone?”

  “You’re only twenty-three years old, honey.”

  “Don’t call me ‘honey.’ ”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “And don’t try to make some spinster doctor out of me. This is my life, not yours.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Another silence stretched between them, full of television noise. Janet said, in a voice so quiet David could hardly hear her, “Of course it is. I’m losing my mind, aren’t I?”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Yes I am. I can feel it slipping.” Her voice quivered. She didn’t cry. “I’m just so confused,” she said. “I mean, ever since my father died and you married that, well that man, I’ve just, I haven’t really known how to relax with anybody, I mean, I can’t seem to really be with men, like sexually, and I keep thinking well maybe if I met someone else and oh, God, it just isn’t fair—”

  David couldn’t sit apart any longer. He got up and strode downstairs, thinking that if questioned he’d tell them he just woke up or something. Something. He found the two of them sitting together on the sofa, holding hands. They ignored him, or didn’t notice him. They kept their faces turned to each other. The knuckles of their clasped hands were white, from holding so hard. David lingered a moment in the doorway and then went timidly back upstairs, as abashed as if he’d interrupted two lovers. He went back to bed and lay curled into a tight ball in the middle of the mattress.

  Rob was not back in San Francisco. Rob was right here, with whiskers and bloodshot eyes. Janet might think he’d gone back to his motel in Hollywood but David knew he hadn’t; he was creeping around the backyard or sitting in his car at the curb, watching. The house felt twice as endangered now, being watched by somebody who knew it on the inside, who’d eaten and slept in it. David bit down on his own knuckle. He gave it a good long bite, the way Lizzie used to bite the plump pink rubber arms of her dolls.

  His dreams that night were a swamp he fought to slogout of. He must have awakened a dozen times, into a dull dazed awareness of his true surroundings, then he would sink back into the sucking mud of sleep. The dreams resided an inch below the surface of his conscious mind, so that when he woke he could determine the shape and size of his dream just as he could have made out a large dark body in murky water, a rough form without details. Always there was a monster or rather the suggestion of a monster, something that searched and snuffled just beyond the range of vision. He would hide from it but never in a safe place. Doors had no locks, trees were never high enough. Once when he woke up he thought a sound from outside had roused him. Though he wanted to go to the window he couldn’t; he was paralyzed in bed. He imagined a giant waiting just to one side, knowing which window was his, so that when he appeared there a huge face would loom before him, grinning, eyes alight, lolling an enormous brown speckled tongue. He rolled himself into a tighter ball and squeezed his way back into sleep.

  That morning at breakfast Lizzie was crazy to know what had happened between Janet and Rob. Janet was still sleeping, and Mom told Lizzie, “They had a good long talk, honey, and I think Janet’s decided it would be better for her to stay here.”

  Lizzie’s face drooped with disappointment—lightened, David suspected, by the small hope that now she might someday marry Rob herself.

  “Now will he go back to San Francisco?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Mom said. “He has to get back to his job.”

  “Is he going to make it so we don’t have to go to Spokane?” she asked.

  “I don’t think he can, honey. Remember what I told you about Spokane?”

  Lizzie nodded sullenly, staring at her plate.

  “What did I tell you?” Mom said.

  “To be quiet when we’re there, and if Dad starts bothering me, call you.”

  “That’s right. And I’ll jump on the next plane and pick you up. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Lizzie glanced at David. They both knew the hole in the plan. If they called Mom, Dad would hear them doing it. Then they’d be alone with him for hours, him and quiet, stoned Marie.

  It was Saturday, which meant that Lizzie would spend the day in her room with Pia Rogovsky, playing Michael Jackson and talking about herself. Pia was what Lizzie had always wanted, an interested, unquestioning audience. This was a friendship that could last for years.

  David would ordinarily have gone to meet Billy and hang around the Plaza. Now he would have to think of something else to do. He spent the next hour sitting in the living room with the television on, checking the window every couple of minutes to find nothing there.

  Janet came downstairs in her nightgown and got a cup of coffee from the kitchen. She brought it into the living room, holding it up at chest level with both hands. In the long white nightgown, with the cup steaming before her, she looked churchly, or what David remembered as churchly, since the Starks hadn’t gone in years.

  “Morning,” she said. “What’s on TV?”

  “I don’t know,” he t
old her. It was a Bugs Bunny cartoon, which he was embarrassed to have been caught watching.

  She sat beside him on the sofa and pulled her legs up so that her chin rested on her knees. It made her seem smaller than she was, small as Lizzie. She sipped tentatively at her coffee.

  “Did you have a good time last night?” David asked, because it was the only way he could think of to phrase the question.

  “No, I don’t think you could say I had a really good time. But it was definitely the right thing, going to talk to him.”

  “Is he still at the motel?” David asked.

  She nodded. “I’m supposed to be thinking. He’s going to call here tonight.”

  “Oh.”

  “What are you doing today?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “Do you want to go to the movies or something?”

  “Thanks. But I guess I’d better stay home and, well, and think.”

  David drew in a good breath. “You shouldn’t go back to San Francisco with Rob,” he said.

  “You don’t think so either, huh?”

  “Well, not really.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know.” She sipped her coffee and looked at the screen. Bugs tied a knot in Elmer’s gun so it blew up pow in his face. David saw the colors reflected in Janet’s eyes.

  “You could meet somebody you love more,” he said. “I mean, you’re really pretty.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, still watching the television. “Thank you.”

  “You are,” he said, as if she had contradicted him. “Everybody wants me to be a doctor, huh?”

  “Yes,” he said, though the moment he’d said it he had a feeling it was not what she wanted to hear. Something about the way her eyes narrowed. On television Bugs was dancing a little ballet while Elmer’s shotgun blasts puffed up all around him like popcorn.

  “What if I couldn’t become a doctor, though?” she said. “What if I never got into school? You’d be disappointed, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” he lied. It occurred to him that he would be disappointed; he wanted Janet to be smart. He said “No,” again, for emphasis.

  “Would you support me in my old age? Me and Mom and Lizzie too, this whole houseful of women you’ve got here?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re a good man, David. Maybe if I don’t go back with Rob I’ll get lucky and meet somebody like you.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  The day would not pass. Every time David looked at a clock it was impossibly early. Lizzie and Pia Rogovsky thumped and bumped on the ceiling in time to Michael Jackson; Mom vacuumed and drank coffee and cleaned the windows with short, squeaking strokes. Janet took a fresh cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes and disappeared into her room.

  After two hours of watching television, David went up and tapped on Janet’s door. “Who is it?” she called in a slightly annoyed voice, as if he should have known better than to interrupt her.

  “David.”

  “What is it, honey?”

  “I don’t know. Can I come in?”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  He opened the door and went inside. Janet sat on her bed with an ashtray bracketed between her feet. She was still in her nightgown, smoking.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.” David waited at the door, uncertain of his next move. “Um, please don’t call me ‘honey,’ ” he said.

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “No. It’s all right. I mean, well, it’s all right.” Actually, he wanted her to call him “honey.” He didn’t know why he said about two-thirds of what came out of his mouth. It was like having the tongue of another person.

  Janet laughed, and he smiled in a way he hoped wasn’t too stupid-looking. Mom had started making over Janet’s room as a guest room a year ago, but never got around to finishing it. It had for now the feeling of a motel room, sparsely furnished in anticipation of thieving guests. The walls were bare, as was the bureau top under its framed mirror. Janet’s narrow bed had been covered with a flowered spread, yellow daisies on an orange field, meant to be cheerful but actually sinister in a room that had no other decoration. As if in keeping with the spirit of the room Janet kept her empty suitcase propped by the door.

  “What’s up?” she asked David.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He ran his fingertips over the crackled gray flank of her suitcase, an old American Tourister. “What have you been doing?” he asked.

  “Thinking. Just like I promised I would.”

  “Oh.” He went and sat on the edge of her bed. His weight on the mattress tipped two cigarette butts out of the brimming ashtray. He picked them up and saw that fine gray ashes had sifted out to make a dark circle on the flowery field.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the movies?” he said.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know what I’ve been thinking about, David? I’ve been thinking about how lucky we are. I mean, look at all this. A big solid house, and we all love one another, at least more often than not. Really, this is heaven.”

  “It is?”

  “So I’ve decided we should all worry less,” she said. “I mean, we may not find the perfect lover, and we may not grow up to be doctors like we thought we would, but we’ll still be the same people. We’ll still be ourselves. Isn’t that a comforting thought?”

  “Uh-huh.” The idea struck him with a chill. To always stayyourself, no matter what you did? To be always small and uncertain about everything?

  “Good. That is my entire accumulated wisdom and I pass it along to you gladly.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the movies?” he said.

  “Mmm.” She stretched her arms straight up over her head. David could hear the stitches in her elbow joints. “I’ve been toying with the idea of getting dressed.”

  “Do you want to go for a swim?”

  “Nope. What I’m going to do is take a bath for about an hour, and mess with my hair, and I don’t know, pluck things and trim things. I’m going to fix myself up.”

  “Well, I’m going to go downstairs,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want anything? he asked. “Do you want a cookie?”

  She laughed. He was becoming ridiculous. “No thank you,” she said.

  “Okay. See you.”

  “See you.”

  He got up and walked to the door, where he stood for a moment, working for one more thing to say. There was plenty he wanted to tell her but nothing would form itself into a sentence. He said, “See you later,” closed the door, and went downstairs.

  In the kitchen he took a few Oreos from the breadbox. He ate one and went back upstairs with the others. Janet had already gone into the bathroom. He could hear water running in the tub, and heard the creak and click of the medicine cabinet. He nearly knocked on the door before he realized, with a familiar swoop of vertigo, that he was behaving like a fool. Taking cookies to someone in a bathroom. Wait, before you step into that tub, have a cookie. He ran back downstairs. “We’re always still the same people,” Janet had said. In a way part of him would always be standing outside the bathroomdoor, bringing cookies to somebody who needed anything but cookies. He took up his position on the floor in front of the television, and ate the cookies himself.

  The hours crept by. Janet spent two hours in the bathroom making herself beautiful (“Making myself bee-yootiful” is what she said, posing a moment with both hands linked behind her head and her hips wriggling like a belly dancer’s); she smoked cigarettes with Mom in the kitchen and helped make dinner. David could hear the two of them laughing over the sound of the television. He wondered when Rob would call.

  Pia Rogovsky was allowed to stay for dinner, after a long pleading call to her parents, two shadowy figures who rarely let her out after four-thirty and whose house, David imagined, smelled like Pia herse
lf. She was not someone you could hate but she was a darkness inside the Starks’ house, a small invasion. When her parents gave in she clapped her pink-nailed hands together and said “Oooooh.” Mom went over the menu with her, asking if she liked this and liked that, and though Pia agreed to everything David noticed her, at the dinner table, mournfully picking the green pepper out of her spaghetti sauce.

  Janet was cheerful at dinner and took care of asking Pia the polite questions. When Janet asked, “Where did you live before you moved here?” Pia hesitated, smiled and said, “Pittsburgh?” as if she wasn’t certain whether it was the right answer.

  “I was born in London,” Lizzie said, and no one bothered to contradict her.

  The telephone rang while they were eating dessert. Janet jumped up, saying, “Excuse me,” and ran upstairs to answer it. David thought that if Pia wasn’t there, she’d have picked it up in the kitchen, where she could be overheard. Pia sat spooning ice cream with moronic joy.

  “Are you getting along all right in school here, Pia?” Mom asked. David could tell from the tilt of her chin that her main attention was slanted upstairs.

  “Oh, yes,” Pia said, as agreeable to that as she was to everything else.

  “Pia hates this school,” Lizzie said. “She thinks everybody in it is an asshole.”

  Pia’s face darkened and she smiled, caught between two agreements. You couldn’t really hate her, David thought. He wondered what Janet was saying.

  “Let Pia answer for herself, please, Lizzie,” Mom said.

  “Well she told me she hates it,” Lizzie said. “Didn’t you, Pia?”

  Pia smiled so hard David thought her face would split. “Sometimes I do,” she said.

  “A big fat girl named Roxanne Sexauer pushed Pia into a pile of dog shit yesterday,” Lizzie said. “She stunk all day.”

  Pia smiled and smiled. David thought he could see beads of sweat pop out along her upper lip.