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THE FLYER HUNG IN the window of Vintage on the Haight. Emily Thomas had seen the same one a few blocks down at Amoeba Records and another one at The Red Vic. It was difficult to ignore with its blaring neon-yellow paper and jarring font. It had been equally difficult to ignore when her roommate, Zoey, had smacked it down on their kitchen counter that morning with a cry that she knew the bass guitarist and they had, had, had to go.
“Heartrending?” Emily repeated aloud. Frost was heartrending, Dickinson, Browning even. But a band? Somewhere a publicist needed to be shot.
With a shudder, she pushed open the shop’s door. The romantic strains of Frank Sinatra greeted her as they did every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening, as did the musty scent of memories. She knew every item on each of the endless clothes racks and dilapidated mannequins long before her eyes adjusted to the glow of the shop’s lights. The display and bookcases that she had helped stock full to the bursting point with everything from chipped Wedgewood tea sets to mismatched champagne flutes heaved a sigh of welcome. It was too much for such a small space, but there was nothing Emily would change; she would only add more and make it worse, yet better at the same time. Her sights settled on the old, Bantam rooster of a woman behind the counter who was busy sorting a tray of jewelry.
“Heartrending, Myra?” Emily announced while navigating around two hat racks and a Victorian fainting couch to make it to the white-haired woman’s side. “Did you know the flyer in the window actually says ‘heartrending’?”
“You’re late.”
“I’ll tell you what heartrending is. Having your landlord announce you have one month to vacate the premises. That’s heartrending. Facing life on a sewer grate and picking through the trash for breakfast. That’s heartrending. Graduating with no hope of a job, that’s—”
“I heard you.” Myra paused in the examination of a brooch and tilted her cheek to receive Emily’s kiss. “But you should have seen the young gentleman that handed that flyer to me. He looked like he should be in some old black and white movie, you know what I’m saying to you?” Her birdlike hands fluttered along a row of rings, and she plucked a few out for further inspection.
Emily waited. Who would it be today? Tyrone Power? Laurence Olivier? Last week, Emily had unwrapped a complete twelve-piece place setting of Havilland china listening to how Myra’s unmarried podiatrist was the spitting image of a young Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Evidently, Emily’s imminent homelessness did not matter when eligible men were afoot.
“So, how are you today?”
“Biding my time until death claims me, what do you think? Now that boy who came in, he had the most gorgeous caramel brown skin, he did. And his hair—like coffee with these honey streaks running through it, and you know what? He blushed when he asked me if I would hang the flyer in the window. My right hand to God. Blushed! How many young men blush any more, a deep cherry red even. Like a borscht.”
“Sounds edible,” Emily remarked dryly.
“Yes! Exactly. And he spoke like on Masterpiece Theatre, which slayed me. Stayed here quite a while, fascinated with the old records especially. And the books. The poetry, too.” She paused for a moment, looking down at the tray of rings. “Did I mention the poetry?”
Emily continued to sort the remaining jewelry. For months she had listened to Myra go on about the same thing, feverishly trying to set her up with everyone from the delivery man to her accountant, as if Emily was reaching her expiration date and would suddenly begin to emit a foul odor or sprout a tail. For Myra, any young woman of procreative age needed to start acting responsibly—or at least cinematically, like Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man—and begin kissing the first available bachelor, even if it was during a deluge in a graveyard.
“It’d do you good to get out for a change instead of hiding out here on a Friday night.”
“I do not hide out.”
“Yes, you do.”
“You pay me to come here, Myra—it’s my job.”
“Emily…” Myra took Emily’s chin in a firm grip and twisted it down so that her shrewd little eyes could inventory the young woman’s face. “A lovely thing, like Gene Tierney in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, except for those curls and that wide mouth which God must have given you to smile more ’cause otherwise it’s just a waste of lips and teeth.” She released her, but not before she pinched Emily’s cheek for good measure, leaving behind the comforting scent of cinnamon and liniment.
“And you know how to put yourself together, even if you tend to camouflage it with those men’s jackets and boots. In my day we showed off our curves. It wouldn’t kill you to do the same, you know what I’m telling you? You take off that Friday night, wear a dress, and go to hear that band—have fun with your friends instead of pawing through old things with an old thing.”
“You’re not old.”
“I’m old enough to know that you’re hiding out. Hiding out at that college and hiding out here with more books and hundred-year-old hats. Not that I don’t love having you about, honey pie, but you need to live. Get your roommates, go out with those nice girls.”
“I can’t. I have work I need to finish for Dr. Vandin.”
“Doctor? He ain’t no doctor. Not the kind that counts.”
“He’s got his PhD from Harvard, Myra, and that’s all that counts.”
Myra did not look convinced. “Well, typing up some papers for some skirt-chasing Ruskie professor who ought to know better isn’t the kind of Friday night any self-respecting young woman should be having. Going at you the way he does, and you a student. It’s not right.”
Emily wanted to explain to her that she needed his class to graduate. Between the income she scraped together from Vandin’s job, this shop, and her scholarship, she had barely enough left to make it to the end of the semester. The last thing she needed to be doing was paying an outrageous cover charge to sit in some seedy bar and drink ten dollar beers and listen to a bunch of—she pointed to the flyer in a fit of disgust and read, “Nervy, explosive men that can power a small country. Really.”
Completely ignoring her, Myra held out a ring from the box she had been sorting, placed it in Emily’s palm, and gave her one long, calculating look.
The ring was beautiful. A platinum band encircled by a vine of tiny diamonds, Emily took it in her fingers, overcome with the urge to hold it, to feel its history in her hand as she did with so many things in this shop. “This is lovely. Where did you get it?”
Undeterred, the old woman strode over to the front of the shop, ripped the flyer off the window, and smacked it down on the counter, much as Emily’s roommate had done that morning. “See that? When is the last time you’ve been stunned, had the hair on your neck electrified? When?”
Emily continued to stare at the ring. She knew Myra was being discreet but no less brutal in her analysis of her sex life. In truth, Emily had remained “unelectrified” by most men during her years at college; as a writer, she preferred to couch it in more poetic terms, such as detachment. She preferred detachment. Detachment kept her from partaking in the endless hook-ups and one night stands of college life. And it also kept her from becoming special to someone else. The most special. The kind of special that would involve a ring like this. Yet, if she was being honest with herself, which she wasn’t, she would have liked to have been someone’s only—not be shared, but be the one, the reason, the most coveted above all, even if it hurt. She wanted to feel the moment of knowing it was she who could cause a face to turn, eyes to widen in happiness with a look that couldn’t be faked. It would happen too suddenly to be anything other than sincere, the joy passing from face to heart and hammered there with the words: It’s you.
But that was one tall order in twenty-first-century San Francisco where relationships lasted about as long as a latte. And the Skellar, where those Lost Boys were playing? She hated the punk-jazz-grunge-goth bar. It was dirty and loud and filled with the he
roin-chic students that were so popular at college. No, she would come here and burrow into her favorite overstuffed club chair in the back with a copy of Browning and the glass of wine Myra always gave her every Friday night. Every Friday night.
Nervy. Heartrending. Explosive. The words taunted her. In the end she rationalized it was because they were so poorly written. So dramatic. So challenging.
“You go to that show, and I’ll put that ring on layaway for you. Wholesale.”
Emily glanced down at the vine of tiny diamonds. Her closet at home was filled with so-called layaway clothes Myra had claimed she couldn’t sell, when in actuality she had seen Emily caress a sleeve or hold up a dress to see if it fit. But that ring was much more costly than a beaded purse or a pillbox hat; she would be lucky if she could ever pay it off. Still, it called to her and made her heart ache with the fear that someone might snatch it up, some tourist who couldn’t understand the workmanship that went into such a striking band. She had to have it. It made no sense, especially with the probability of a staggering rent increase looming on the horizon, but she simply had to have it. It was old and odd, like everything in the store. Old and odd, like everything she loved. She would work it off slowly.
“I’ll go,” she decided and pushed the flyer away for the last time. “If nothing else, I’ll tell them to change their copy. Heartrending? God.”
Myra smiled and put aside the ring. “Moonlight Serenade” began to play.
After closing up the shop with Myra, Emily gathered her thick wool jacket about her and headed down Haight Street. Most of the lining and all of the pockets had worn out, leaving her no place to keep her hands warm, so she opted to grab a cup of tea before catching the bus. She had the extra bonus of having a decent book in her messenger bag.
With her Earl Grey in hand she found a bench near the park, opened her book, and started to read. Across the lawn, the Friday night gathering of T-shirt and shorts-clad pothead bongo drummers had started up, oblivious to the cooling fog making its way from the ocean. Their tie-dyed, peasant-skirted groupies twirled barefoot to the music, arms raised in some sort of farewell rite to the disappearing sun. Emily tried to ignore them, but the sound of nearby chuckling made her glance up from her book.
On a low stone wall several yards away sat a homeless man who was only slightly less shabby than the hippies. He stared at them, laughed, and strummed his guitar idly, his case open for donations at his feet. Clearly he wasn’t bothered by too much competition for one corner, as this end of the park was notorious for its stoner population who liked to camp under the trees, defecate in the bushes, and frequent the McDonald’s across the street. Emily turned the page and took a sip of her tea, hoping to God that she and her roommates would not be reduced to this if worst came to worst. The guitarist began to play in a more complicated way than befitted the average drug addict. Emily had read the same paragraph three times before she gave up and peered over the top of her book at him.
He wore a thick fisherman’s sweater, a shabby red scarf, and equally disreputable jeans, although his shoes looked new, but those could have been part of some shelter’s outreach program for all she knew. Though the black cabbie cap pulled down over his forehead was intriguing, it also shielded his eyes. Why she wanted to see them, she couldn’t say.
The damp wind made her huddle into her coat and wrap her fingers around her tea. As always, she felt the cold clear through to her bones and shivered. She had been raised in New York City, a place with four vocal seasons, not this interminable wet fall. The chill moved through the trees, and the bongos became a distant heartbeat. Even the guitar was muffled, for he had turned to the side, his leg hitched on the low wall. He began to sing.
There was a guitar and there were hands—beautiful hands strummed those chords. Emily understood this; she could see this. She could smell pot and the grease from McDonald’s and the dregs of her tea. Other people had gathered to listen now; she did not know what they could see or smell or feel, but a hush fell over them, and they stopped and waited. It reminded Emily of the feeling she had when she was very young, sitting in the dark in her living room, waiting for her parents to turn on the Christmas tree lights for the first time…the very air around her changed. Everything changed. She was bewitched.
She watched him until it grew late. She did not move a muscle, only held her tea between her frozen fingers. He finally packed up and left, oblivious to her still huddled on the bench. When she was sure he had gone, when she was sure everyone had gone, when she was sure she was alone, she whispered to the night, to the empty space on the wall.
“It’s you.”
For the next several nights Emily went to listen to the homeless man with the red scarf play his guitar. He had shown up like clockwork, each evening from five till seven, and Emily sat close enough to hear him but far enough away to allow the crowd of people that invariably formed around him to block her from view. Sometimes he played nothing but classical music, other times nothing but jazz, and one night he spent an hour jamming out with a shopping cart guy who wailed away on the harmonica to their mutual delight.
On the eighth night Emily made the decision that she would leave a dollar in his case, or a sandwich, something, anything, to allow her to speak to him, to thank him. She had been too daunted to approach him before and hadn’t wanted him to know she came every day. She feared he might think she was crazy, stalking him as she was. That, or desperate. Either way, she didn’t want the surreal situation to change, but she knew she had to say something to him, and she fretted the whole afternoon, even wearing her favorite Chanel jacket and scarf. Lipstick, too.
He did not show.
He did not show the next night, or the one after that. Emily tried to act as if it didn’t bother her, and gathered her famous air of detachment about her, but it didn’t work. She found herself walking through the park between classes, hoping to spot the red scarf. Her roommates thought her distracted behavior was due either to the fact that they hadn’t found a new rental yet, or that Dr. Vandin was continuing to give her an exceptionally difficult time in class or at work. In response, they’d arranged for more and more apartment viewings.
By the following Friday night, Emily stood in front of the Skellar as she had promised Myra. She didn’t want to be there; she wanted to be back at the park searching for the guitarist, though at this late hour he would certainly be long gone. With one last look toward the park, she shoved her way through the scrum of students into the club.
“Emmmiiiiieeee!” she heard her one roommate, Zoey, shout like Stanley Kowalski. “Emmmiiieee!” A pair of sturdy arms parted the crowd and grabbed Emily in a fierce hug. She surrendered to its warmth and heft. Clearly straight from her latest tiling job in Pacific Heights, Zoey had coupled her grout covered overalls with gargantuan chandelier earrings and so many silver African fertility bracelets Emily feared her muscular wrists might just snap off under the strain. Despite her recent degree, she wore the moniker of “itinerant laborer and starving artist” proudly like one of the many tattoos blazing up from the collar of her T-shirt. “You came, you actually came. Good for you!” she said and dragged her to their table in the murky back corner that stunk from its proximity to the bathrooms.
Margot, her other roommate, uncurled herself from her seat and gave Emily a peck on the cheek. A waiter materialized from out of nowhere, and Margot placed a firm hand on his arm. Her blunt black hair guillotined the collar of her blouse as she turned to look up into his eyes, her leather skirt inching its way along the unending length of her legs. “Another margarita, please. With a sigh, and I mean a sigh of salt. Don’t slather it on this time—dip it lightly. A sigh, you understand, just coat the rim like you were kissing it. And please, for all that is holy, keep them coming. It’s been an abysmal day.”
“Midterms?” Emily ventured. This was Margot’s first year working as an assistant professor at the same college Emily attended, and by the looks of her two drained glasses, things hadn’t gone w
ell.
“I hate all undergraduates,” Margot replied. “Both classes retained nothing. Mouth breathers all.”
“So where the hell were you today?”
Emily’s mind raced, trying to decipher the look of consternation on Zoey’s face. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I totally forgot you had the appointments to look at those listings. I was in Vandin’s office till the afternoon, and then I went to look—well…you know how it is.” Unable to tell them she had wandered the pathways around the Academy of Science most of the afternoon searching for a homeless musician she had never spoken to, Emily felt her roommates’ stress radiating off their bodies like sweat.
“No, I don’t know how it is,” Zoey said. “Do you know how many cultures enslave their women with that kind of bullshit? That man’s a troglodyte.”
“Did you find an apartment?”
“We saw five places, and the best one had a drunk asleep in his own vomit in the lobby.”
“Evidently, that is what was meant by ‘doorman,’” Margot qualified.
“What about the other four?”
“One had been recently vacated by an old man with ferrets, and the other one was over a medical marijuana shop, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but there was a LaRouche headquarters next to it, and even I have standards. The last two didn’t have nearly enough natural light, and I can’t paint without good light. Ain’t gonna happen,” Zoey declared.
Emily looked to Margot since she provided the only reliable income of the three.
“Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass,” Margot offered while she scanned the bar for their errant waiter. “Although I do have a fundamental problem with residual ferret shit. But resistance is futile, Emily, you have to know that. Once Zoey sets what she wants in her mind…” She held up her hands as though offering them up to God.
Before Emily could respond, the lights dimmed and an excessively pierced girl came onto the stage to announce the evening’s act. Zoey shoved her fingers in her mouth to whistle, and then started spitting on the table, which earned her a questionable glance from Margot.
Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story Page 3
