New California Fiction : ANYTHING BUT A GENTLEMAN

ACCOMPLICE

Another woman entered his life. Like a long night at the theater, and you think you’ve seen all of the characters in the play, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, a woman walks onto the stage. A woman from a world you hadn’t known about, hadn’t even suspected. She’s a Frieda or a Julie or an Elizabeth who’s really a Liz or a Beth. Another face, another mind, another worry, another dupe, another potential instigator of pain. You welcome her into your heart, allow your mutual needs to collide, the intimacy building as secret lives unravel, and soon there’s this ball of string at your feet, and you’re standing above the mess, looking down, until finally you look up and see her--her eyes--and then there’s nothing else to do but embrace, explore protrusions, cavities, or just keep staring into each other’s eyes as if eyes could speak, and sometimes it seems they can. He felt obliged to answer her when she looked at him, as though a stare were a pressing question; and he responded not by staring back but by making a shocking proposition or, more often than not, a series of admissions. He had plenty of those, a whole stockpile of admissions, some of them old enough to no longer qualify. And so he’d pick one up like an old book, blow off the dust, crack open the spine and invite her to look over his shoulder as he jabbed with his finger to indicate the most revealing, potentially damaging parts. Get it over and done with, like opening your mouth and pointing to the tooth you want the dentist to extract. She was to be an accomplice in his downfall, giving evidence against him in a mad, circuitous attempt to gain the sympathy of the jury--a larger collection of women who would later add up his deficits and, if he were lucky, give the miracle of a decision in his favor. To redeem himself, he needed the attention of women, one after another, to listen and finally touch him with a grace he didn’t deserve, a forgiveness he hadn’t ever gotten close to earning.

ANSWER

The cafe was on the bus route, and he would always meet her there after crossing the city to spend the night at her place. Years later, on a trip to that city where he’d once lived, he found the same cafe. He’d been searching for it and gotten lost, and he was annoyed with himself for not being able to retrace his steps. But then he turned a corner and the neighborhood was suddenly familiar. A minute later he found the cafe, ordered coffee, sat down and slowly looked around. The cafe held memories just beyond his reach; he spent more time trying to remember than actually remembering. The cafe looked the same as before but the people had changed. Or, on second thought, he realized that the people hadn’t changed, nor had the cafe, nor had the music that was coming out of the loudspeakers hanging from the ceiling. In any case, he felt out of place, the same way the past is perpetually out of place. He wanted to think of her again, to bring her back, to think it possible for her to walk through the door and stop and smile at him, her head cocked to one side as though to say, Well, well. Sunglasses on top of her head, her black hair cut short, a long skirt that went swish-swish as she came toward him. But he wasn’t any good at imagining it, or he couldn’t keep hold of the image, because he knew that she would be different now, and he didn’t know if she even lived here anymore. He was sure she wouldn’t like this place, that she had moved on, changed her tastes in cafes as well as in men. She had a habit of doing that. She’d always been quick to judge, which was one of the things he had liked about her. She saw everything in the world--people, books, cities, movies, even cafes--as attempts to please her, as court jesters come to entertain and earn their keep. She nodded her head yes, or she shook her head no--rarely any hesitation. He’d asked her, back then, why she was with him, why she wanted to be with him, and she never gave him an answer that convinced him. She’d said yes to the person he was, but that wasn’t enough. No one had ever convinced him, but she’d been the least convincing. She’d scared him, and that was almost worth it--the thrill of not knowing, or of being unworthy and somehow getting away with it--but that was also what led him to distrust her, to suspect that eventually she would come to dislike him and make him feel stupid. She’d make him feel like a book you wouldn’t want to read twice. He’d finally left her to avoid that feeling--he’d seen it coming--and now, sitting in this cafe, wishing to get just a glimpse of her, it came to him, in spite of all his precautions, that exact feeling of swimming in his own stupidity. There was no stopping it.

BOY

A woman said to him, Some men are men, and some men are boys and they’ll always be boys. She wasn’t referring to levels of maturity, or degrees of masculinity, but to a man’s appearance, and also to his attitude, the way he took hold of the world or watched as the world took hold of him. He listened to her, at once imagining himself as a boy, his blond hair in his eyes as he lay on his back, on someone’s front lawn, where someone stood above him, bending over and tickling him and making him feel the pleasure of getting, at the same moment, what he wanted and what he didn’t want. A boy’s highest delight was always in that exhilarating ambiguity. He was still ticklish, even to this day, but no one knew it, or no one took advantage of it; and even if you can sometimes make yourself laugh, or give yourself intricate forms of sexual pleasure, it’s impossible to tickle yourself. Maybe she knew what he wanted. Maybe she’d seen it as soon as she’d seen that he was a boy, that he’d always been that way. How had she known, or how could she be so sure? And the question remained as to whether she wished to take advantage of the boyishness she’d guessed at, whether she liked to tickle. She kept her cards close to her chest, and he couldn’t help admiring her for that. Still, it gave him hope that her observation about his boyishness had clearly been intended as neither compliment nor insult, which made him think that life for her was more complicated than that, more roundabout in its logic, and that she was more accepting of the inevitability of the way people turned out, despite their best-laid plans.

ECLAIR

What he liked about her was her impulsiveness, especially when it came to food. She’d go to a bakery and buy indiscriminately, bringing home a huge assortment of baked goods. Cakes, pies, fruit tarts, sour-cream brownies, hazelnut croissants, bear claws, exquisite little chocolate things, every kind of muffin. Never anything as practical as bread. She’d come home and say, I went to the bakery, tossing the heavy white bags on the kitchen table. Or if it wasn’t a bakery, then it was a deli, and she’d bring home tall pastrami sandwiches with gushing mustard, plump shrimps in garlic sauce, every variety of potato salad, three or four small bags of potato chips, just in case, and a dessert treat to finish things off. She had no conception of money, nor any idea of what a human being could reasonably be expected to eat. Her dog, a miniature schnauzer, feasted on leftovers. She told him that she had never set foot in a supermarket since the end of her marriage--a marriage that never seemed quite real to him, as though she might’ve made up the whole thing, invented a change in her life by imagining herself as someone she’d never been. He himself couldn’t imagine her in a supermarket--now or back then, years ago--buying food that had to be cooked or otherwise prepared. She left that to others. In bakeries and delis, she flattered the people behind the counters, explaining in apt, convincing terminology why their eclair, say, was better than anyone else’s. Even later, when their sexual life was nearly null, they ate like fiends. And so it went, shamelessly, without the guilt or ambivalence typical among those who eat without reason. In restaurants, they sometimes finished their meal and had the feeling that only half of what was supposed to have happened had happened, and so they ordered the same thing again and ate it. Waitresses kept their thoughts to themselves. He couldn’t help worrying a little about those waitresses, about what other people might think, but she never cared a lick what anyone thought, least of all waitresses. He took on that carefree attitude, as best he could, because he wanted to call it his own; he hadn’t ever eaten this way, but he was interested in trying it out, imagining himself as someone he’d never been. When eventually they split up, he went back to wheeling his cart through supermarkets and eating like a normal person. He felt an inordinate fear of waitresses and the people who served in bakeries and delis, as though the verbal exchange between two strangers over a counter was too much for him now. She’d done all the talking in the past, he realized. He was convinced that these people knew far too much about him, held opinions about his acts of indulgence, and any indifference they displayed was only a ploy to know even more.

HEART

She returned and she wanted to know what had happened in his life. He couldn’t say. A lot had happened, only he wasn’t in the mood to run down a list of items when he knew, or thought he knew, that they wouldn’t add up to anything palpable. He’d been unhappy--that was easy to say--but he knew from experience that he wouldn’t be able to explain why, let alone conjure what he’d been feeling at the time. So he didn’t try, because he felt hopeless and because he’d gotten into the habit of not trying, of stopping before he’d even begun. For him, his reluctance wasn’t that different from a simple lapse of memory: He tried to return to where he’d been a week ago, or even a couple of days ago, and he couldn’t. He felt the way you feel when someone asks you about a friend of yours, how’s he doing, and you don’t really know what to say because you can’t remember, and so you just make up something or you try to answer the question in your friend’s voice, maybe using the words this friend would use if he were answering for himself. In your own case, you aren’t supposed to answer the question that way, speaking for yourself as though you were someone else. A person should be able to go further in explaining what had led to unhappiness--he knew that--but what he ended up talking about was the unhappiness of not being able to explain the other, original unhappiness. She said, One out of two isn’t so bad, and that was nice of her. She saw the world as one of limited opportunity, but seeing it that way hadn’t undone her. You can only do so much, he told himself, using a line she might’ve used. He remembered when he was a boy and how his father would come home and tell his mother stories about everything that had happened that day at the office. In retrospect, he could see that his father had needed to tell the stories, couldn’t have gone on without telling them. The stories were mostly point-by-point re-enactments of conversations: I said this . . . he said that . . . I said this. Now, no longer a boy, he wanted to tell stories that same way, to bring the present into the past, if only to repeat the past, to listen to the stories of his own life, to have her listen, to master things the second time around. But he’d grown paralyzed, unable to believe in his own versions of the past, even when the original conversations took place nowhere but in his own mind, in his imagination, which was where much of his life took place these days. He felt tempted to lie, to leave parts out, to elaborate, to make the story more compelling, to flatter himself. Wasn’t that the biggest reason why people told stories? He felt tempted, and that froze him, stopped him in his tracks. It wasn’t that he resisted these temptations--was that even possible?--but that he’d given up the idea of trying, given up the idea of saying to someone else, or sometimes just himself, that something had happened and it had happened like this . He’d given up on staking his heart to the this , which was like having no heart at all.

MEMORY

He talked on the phone with an ex-girlfriend’s mother. They shared the disadvantage of thinking too much, taking the long way around, and yet they spoke always from a distance, as though he were still her daughter’s boyfriend. The relationship with the woman had ended, and yet he kept up with the woman’s mother--it didn’t make a lot of sense. They spoke every other month or so, and at points they talked about her daughter, his ex-girlfriend, but only briefly, because there was danger in that. He didn’t want to live through that again. She told him that she disappointed her daughter, because her daughter wanted her to be strong, to find strength from inside of herself. Her daughter couldn’t easily imagine the predicament of being alone because there’d always been a long string of boys, and then a long string of men, to offer her an ear, to give notice that her presence in the world mattered. Her mother didn’t have that any longer, and she ached for a man. It only got harder as you got older, as people got more set in their ways, and as time took its toll on your looks. Or it was a sadness over the memory of what it felt like to look the way you looked. Some men and women never forget, and their pasts tag along, earlier good fortune following at their heels like an obedient dog. But this woman had lost her past, watched it float away with the image of her ex-husband, and now she was unmoored, lonely, desperate to recover it. Even if she never gave herself a chance to really think about it, he knew she had the fantasy of returning to that same husband, and she wasn’t of a mind to let it go. She wanted to find something that would retroactively redeem the whole of everything. That was the gist of what she had to say when she was at her weakest. And sometimes she felt a little sorry for herself--it was true--but never so much that he felt obliged to intercede to make her feel better, nor did she ask for that. Their phone discussions couldn’t bring redemption, and maybe that was why it became a favorite topic. Her daughter had given him a taste of it, and now her mother bore witness to the pain of its sustained absence.

PATIO

He moved to a new apartment that included a patio. In fact, the patio was the prime selling point of the apartment; he would never have moved in if the apartment hadn’t had the patio, which looked out on a batch of eucalyptus trees that were slowly being strangled by omnipresent ivy. Birds, owls, a colony of squirrels and the occasional bewildered-looking dog, an escapee from a neighboring yard. He sat on his patio, on a redwood chaise lounge, and as the sun shone down on his bare toes he felt the closest thing to happiness. It made him think of his grandparents’ patio, when he was a child, with trees and patches of Kentucky bluegrass and wind chimes, and they’d sit--his parents and his mother’s parents--out on the patio, with iced tea or drinks or wine, and they’d chat. Chat about what? He didn’t have any idea, but he could remember feeling bored with the circumstances--the patio, the serenity, the wet dirt in the immaculate flower beds--and so he’d investigate the alley out in the back, beyond the garage. There was none where he lived. Or he’d play with the two dogs, one of which was half-coyote. But he certainly wouldn’t sit on the patio, like an adult, and while away an afternoon in frivolous talk. In short, he’d never liked that patio but saw now that his pleasure in his new patio was inextricably linked to the old patio, as though he’d been waiting all this time to take pleasure in what he couldn’t take pleasure in as a child, as though he knew then--somewhere in the back of his little mind--that he was meant for patios, and that was why he hated his grandparents’ patio. There’s some relish in turning away or resisting your destiny and its pleasures while you still have the chance. Or maybe it was that he’d finally grown up, taken his spot on the chaise lounge, filled the indentation left by his forebears, moved his life, or been moved by his life, into a period of simpler pleasures--the pleasure of doing nothing, of absence, of sitting and thinking and listening to the birds and resenting the dogs that barked, some days incessantly, for no reason he could fathom. He sat on his patio alone, chatting with himself, sunk in the warm arms of self-absorption. There was even a day when one of those dogs wandered among the ivy, sniffing maybe for squirrels, and then looked up and stood still--as though in shock at the sight of this man on his chaise lounge--and something passed between the two of them, 10 or so yards apart, something about fear and not-knowing and a yearning to get closer. He waved at the dog, as a child might, knowing that the dog wouldn’t understand the significance of his gesture but not really caring.

SILLINESS

She had a boy who was 11 years old. It wouldn’t be true to say that that’s what interested him about her--the boy--but there were times when he felt as though he had a lot in common with him, maybe more than with his mother. He liked him. The boy was reserved, unusually quiet, almost serene. When she was gone, he’d stay with the boy and sometimes they sat in the same room for an hour or two, saying nothing to each other but flipping through magazines and passing a box of crackers. No apparent nervousness or shyness at the heart of that silence. They both liked to read and shared this silly appetite for magazines. They leafed through one, tossed it back on the coffee table, grabbed another--until eventually they exhausted the whole pile of magazines. The crackers, too. The boy wore glasses when he read, and sometimes he’d bite his nails. It wasn’t clear whether he knew he was biting his nails, or whether he’d be ashamed to have it pointed out. The boy’s mother bit her nails as well, which was probably where the boy had picked it up, though she wasn’t in the least ashamed. She was tall and wore her hair in a loose braid. It seemed stupid but he’d always wanted to be with a woman with hair like that--thick, dark, worked back into a single braid. He’d done some thinking about women’s hair, the idea of a braid, the way he liked it. How is it that these strange desires come into being? Magazines, braids, people who don’t say a word to each other. What of all those men who want to be with a blonde or a woman with enormous breasts? Somewhere along the line he’d succumbed to his own desires, recognizing their silliness, feeling embarrassed at first but then facing up to the limits of his imagination, giving in to his predilections the way a parent gives in to a child, the way some people give in to biting their nails. In fact, it was the same way he would’ve given in to the woman’s boy if he’d ever asked for anything, ever told of a wound that wouldn’t heal. He wanted the boy to suffer, if only for a moment, and then to reach out for help. Instead, the boy appeared calm, oblivious to the messiness of the lives around him--his mother’s, for instance. He wondered whether the boy would always be that way, or whether he’d explode into adolescence, making up for lost time, wearing his masculinity like a badge, demanding that others pay up for having made a mess of things. His own adolescence had been less an explosion than a muffled cry. And a single gesture: a hand, his own, placed across his mouth, as though something had just escaped that shouldn’t have, that never would again.

SKIRT

He looked at the picture, in a fashion magazine, and saw a woman in a short, sequined skirt unlike any skirt you’d see a woman wear on the street. He liked it that way--nothing real, as though the image itself were imagined. Because of the way the woman in the picture was sitting--her weight on one hip, legs crossed at the highest point--the skirt was hiked up farther than it might’ve been. That was the way he phrased it in his mind-- hiked up --and those words were almost more exciting than the sight of the skirt itself, which rode up her thighs as she stared blankly into the camera, at us, as though to say that she knew that we knew but that it wasn’t important. It was important to him, though: He was mesmerized. He wanted to touch this woman, wanted to slide his hand along the woman’s leg, up under her skirt. He also wanted her to close her eyes, if only for a moment, so that she could see in her mind, and he could see in her mind, an image of what the hand was doing. He wanted her to want that, to feel compelled to imagine what it must look like. But what he really wanted, whether he knew it or not, was to have what it was that allowed him to slide his hand up under her skirt. He’d first imagined it as a chance encounter--he didn’t know this woman, hadn’t ever seen a sequined skirt like hers, and she was allowing him to do with her what he wanted. But that scenario went stale, and soon he wanted, at the least, for her to want him to want her. He wanted the intimacy that made that possible. He wanted a connection, a look between them like some speeded-up conversation, an emotional current that allowed him or even moved him, against all calculation of what he should do, or shouldn’t do, to slip his hand under her skirt. He wanted what allowed that to happen more than he wanted it to happen. He wanted that moment again when everything is right in the world, when neediness is relegated to childhood, where it belongs, and sexual desire is pure, blunt, inexplicable. He wanted the end of all of that emotion that was itself the impetus of the sexual desire, a good part of the reason for the thrill of looking at the picture in the first place.

STRANGER

He met a woman who wanted to touch only parts of his body, and never more than one at a time, and his penis was of no special significance. At first, before he fully understood the nature of her desire, she seemed only shy and hesitant. He wanted to reassure her, take care of her; and eventually his desire got mixed up with pity, as typically happened, whether or not he wanted it to. Her fear drew him closer, and he imagined himself leading her out of that fear, going as slow as she needed to go. Anyway, what was the hurry? But he’d misunderstood her intentions: She wanted to go slow with a peculiar vengeance. He first realized this when she said she wanted only to touch his eyes, for him to lie down on the bed so that she could sit behind him and put a single finger on each of his eyelids. To make the dark darker, she said. A strange request, he thought, but it also seemed sweet of her. He couldn’t have predicted it, but after closing his eyes and feeling her fingers press down, ever so slightly, it immediately came to him that she might hurt him, and he couldn’t work that possibility out of his mind. What if, without warning, she pressed down with all her might? After all, how well did he know her? Would his eyeballs explode, like tiny, taut balloons? Life’s frightening enough, and sex is a scary venture, especially in the beginning, but all of that pales when compared to the possibility of a virtual stranger pushing down relentlessly on your eyeballs. He knew that, and knowing it made him uncomfortable. As it turned out, she didn’t choose to crush his eyeballs, and she never asked to touch them again. Instead, she moved on to his arms, his legs, the toes of each foot taken as a unit. She did everything as though she was responding to a secret idea or plan of action, as though she possessed an elaborate stratagem for pleasure. Like a worn map she pulled out in private. He had no idea where she was taking him, but he was getting to the point of liking the fear, getting used to it.

TUXEDO

If only for one night, he wanted to act gruffly, to be sure of himself, to feel excessively masculine. He’d throw all doubts out the window. He wanted to bark at people, and give the impression to bystanders that he used his power because he had it, whether or not he’d ever earned it. He wanted to feel as though he was at the end of what was necessarily a very long leash. He wanted to say the word women as though it amounted to a confession. He wanted to wear a tuxedo and drink too much and stay up all night and say all those things he’d never gotten around to saying, even if he’d never before felt the impulse to say them. He wanted to feel the impulse. He wasn’t sure to whom he’d say these things, but maybe it was to other men--gruff, soggy on liquor, done up in tuxedos, very much like himself. Men who loved each other almost as much as they loved themselves.

WOMAN

The road, which wound along the edge of the city for miles, twisting and turning, made driving a challenge, especially in the dark. From the opposite direction, cars appeared out of nowhere. He drove madly, eyes glued to the road, talking to the woman in the passenger seat about their past together, her recent marriage, the direction of their lives. They didn’t look at each other for the 40 or so minutes they drove along, because the road didn’t allow it and because he didn’t want it, and maybe she didn’t either. It was like talking on the telephone except the person was sitting right next to you. The conversation advanced, retreated, got dead serious and then came back to a place of humor. It wasn’t a matter of getting things off your chest, or even communicating something personal or ethereal, as much as it was a game of discussing, prodding, arguing, taking on opinions, propelling the conversation to places where you hadn’t gone before, where you hadn’t counted on going. Not having seen each other in almost two years, they returned to this way of gaining intimacy by giving it, through talk, an occasion or excuse. She talked of the limitations of her marriage, of any marriage, and of her desire to keep going, maybe even to embrace those limitations, though no one asks to be limited. She was a strange mixture of enthusiasm and sobriety, and he felt caught in between, not so much swayed by her opinions as amused, mesmerized, challenged. The limitations she spoke of were mostly the limitations of conversation with her husband, so that what they were having, in his car, was a conversation about the possibility, or difficulty, of conversation. Her husband was always interested in talking, she said, and even in arguing, but he wasn’t always interested in the places where she wanted to go, the rules by which she wanted to conduct the conversation. Listening to her and negotiating the curves in the road, he could sympathize with her husband. Not because he himself got tired of talking to this woman, but because he imagined it was possible, if the stakes were consistently raised, to tire of anyone, to feel your limitations and wish to play a different kind of game where you’d be more comfortable. But driving along, engaged in this conversation, he was happy. Maybe because the stakes weren’t high enough to scare him out of his happiness. She said at one point, I continue to be attracted to you, more so I think than you are to me. It wasn’t delivered as a come-on. He let that statement sit tight, though he wanted to tell her otherwise, to prove her wrong. As they got nearer to her hotel, he drove slower and then felt a desperate urge to zoom right past it, to keep on driving, to keep on talking, to go just about anywhere, even if it were only in an elaborate set of circles, so that they could push the conversation until it wore itself out or worked its way to a more natural end. But he didn’t do that; he let her off at the hotel, the conversation dropped off along with her. Some goodbys can’t help but be abrupt, no matter how long they take. He wanted to say, before she left the car, that the conversation had made him happy--happier than he’d been in quite a while--but he didn’t, and he didn’t know why he didn’t.