"San Francisco Noir" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maravelis Peter, Stansberry Domenic, Corbet David, Soracco Sin, Gifford Barry,...)
PART II. In Memoriam to Identity
THE NEUTRAL ZONE BY KATE BRAVERMAN
Fisherman’s Wharf
Zoë and Clarissa meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone. The landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood. The carousel spins in predictable orbits and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. These hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel does not require calculus, rehab, or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.
“I’m here,” Zoë says from her cell phone.
“At the wharf?” Clarissa must clarify the conditions.
“Little anemic waves at my feet. Corn dogs that give you cancer. Old men catching perch with so much mercury they explode as they reel them in,” Zoë reports.
“What color is the water?” Clarissa asks.
“Last-ditch leukemia IV drip blue,” Zoë decides.
“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”
Zoë has no interest in who Clarissa will abandon or strand at a conference table, restaurant, or health club. No callbacks, a medical emergency, cancel everything, Clarissa will inform her staff. It’s a day for experimental time travel.
They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments and behaviors, has proved too intimate and demanding. Between them are houses never seen, husbands dead or divorced, known only by anecdote or photograph. Entire strata of their lives are less than footnotes. Years passed when they did not know one another’s addresses or current last names. Decades when they could have been driftwood to one another, vessels lost at sea. A drowned stranger, perhaps, why bother?
“This litany of blame is becoming tedious,” Zoë once recognized.
“Human perimeters are collective background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit,” Clarissa responded. “It’s residual static from a Baptist radio broadcast in Mississippi. It’s irrelevant and obsolete.”
“We’ll bite it off with our teeth,” Zoë offered. “Napalm it. Grenade launchers and M-16s. Tec-9s. We’ll have our own Cultural Revolution. We’ll go post-modern, but fully armed.”
“We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances. We’ll whisper endearments while strolling the killing fields,” Clarissa was enthusiastic. “We’ll crawl our Ho Chi Minh trail, hand-in-hand, trusting each other with our lives.”
“But we’ll abide by the Geneva Convention,” Zoë prompted. “Despite our emotional residue.”
“Directed psychological evolution. It’ll be more brutal than weight training,” Clarissa agreed. “But we’ll become better human beings.”
“We’ll redefine and transcend ourselves,” Zoë said.
It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, bay studded with cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. Zoë had lived two years without electricity in a shack on a nameless river of red orchids in the jungle near Hana. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably didn’t know there were sea-sons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening, and the mosquitoes went in temporary remission.
“I like it conceptually. But let’s go further,” Clarissa suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just strands of light from one radiance to another.”
“Should we reject linearity entirely?” Zoë asked. “Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks?”
“Discreet and unpredictable meetings with spectacular voltage. We’ll communicate by blowtorch,” Clarissa replied. “We’ll wear asbestos jackets.”
A process of accommodation and evolution was plausible, they agreed. True, they had failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving. But the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret do not apply to them. They would have a pact, an armistice, like aggressive radical improvisational surgery. Their psychiatrists were cautiously optimistic. The possibility of malignant complications was an acceptable risk. Then they had shaken hands.
Now Zoë sees Clarissa. She is exiting a black Lincoln town car, wearing her standard business outfit-aerobics pants and jacket, Gucci sunglasses and Giants baseball cap. It’s the camouflaged movie star look designed to create the impression that you’re attempting to be incognito. Clarissa is carrying not a gym bag, which would be appropriate and predictable, but a Chanel purse with leather quilting and gold braid handles. It’s the uniform the narcissistic personality disorder dictates.
They kiss on each cheek. “You forgot my birthday,” Clarissa begins. She dismisses the car and driver with a hand gesture.
“I didn’t sign on as a soccer mom. I don’t decorate for holidays. I don’t bake or send thank-you cards. I don’t answer the phone. I throw away personal mail. You know this,” Zoë reminds her.
“Don’t you go to bed before Thanksgiving and not get up until after Valentine’s Day?” Clarissa’s voice is light.
“That was my mother,” Zoë says. “I simply leave the country at appropriate junctures.”
Actually, Zoë is fond of Christmas in Southeast Asia. Ornately decorated pine trees in the air-conditioned hotel lobbies like vestiges from another planet. Bamboo balconies draped in green velvets, antique brocades, and holly wreaths. More fetishes. And Christmas carols rendered in versions so mangled by distance and erroneous translation they’re almost tolerable. Rivers smell of rotting vegetables, petrol, wood cooking fires, and hunger. Air is layers of decaying prayers that remind her of a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as metal but as streams of origami. In Bangkok, in December, it is 103 degrees.
“Let’s just be here now,” Clarissa says. “We know the rules. It’s play time.” Her mouth glistens with a red lipstick that seems to have small stars encrusted within it. There are implications in the sheen Zoë doesn’t want to consider.
The wharf is almost deserted. It’s mid-day, mid-week, in an undifferentiated season. It’s another windswept early November. They walk hand-in-hand down the pier past occasional immigrant men fishing and stray teenagers who appear eager for corruption. Zoë and Clarissa know where they live. They, too, grew up in tenements designed for transience, already shabby decades ago, festering like sun sores. They were an integral part of the blueprint for the millennial slums in the sun. They were the penciled-in stick figures on the diagrams.
“Don’t look,” Clarissa cautions. “They’re contagious. We’ll get a contact psychotic flashback.”
The Last Edge Saloon perches on the furthest border of the pier. Their reunions begin here. They choose a booth facing the bay on three sides. They might drink coffee, perhaps with Dexedrine. Or get drunk on something festive, like White Russians or champagne. Since Zoë is technically in AA, she decides to let Clarissa set the tenor. Clarissa orders Bloody Marys. From a caloric standpoint, it’s the obvious choice.
“You still look like a hippy,” Clarissa observes. She regards her with a smile that is speciously conciliatory, perhaps even condescending. Zoë interprets this as disturbing. Anxiety is inseparable from the air. It’s in the oxygen molecules and how their biochemistry fails to correctly process them. It’s a perpetual uneasy truce.
“It’s my signature classic bohemian style,” Zoë replies. “And I want to formalize our alliance.”
“Do you want to get married?” Clarissa asks.
“I want a document with terms, precise specifications,” Zoë realizes. “And I want a weapons check.”
“Contracts are worthless,” Clarissa points out. “They’re a wish list for Santa.” She’s a lawyer, after all. She knows.
“We could become cousins,” Zoë suggests. This appeals to her.
Survivors of cataclysmic childhoods defined by poverty and isolation compulsively seek validation. They know they lack proper emotional documentation. Cousins evokes a blood connection that would both substantiate and obviate certain complexities, the ebbs and flows, droughts and monsoons of their relationship. Such a device would highlight and justify their erratic and pathologically intense con-junction. In regions of bamboo and sun-rotted petals, wind propels sand like tiny bullets, and there are always too few artifacts. Cousins is an inspiration.
“I could draw up the papers,” Clarissa is expansive. “But adoption is superior.”
Zoë came to San Francisco when she was seven. Her father, Marvin, had terminal cancer. Her mother was mentally ill. They were bankrupt. She used to think heaven was a foster home. If Marvin would just finally die, perhaps she could even get adopted.
“I’ve missed you like a first love,” Zoë says.
“I was your first love,” Clarissa reminds her. “And you mine.”
They lean across the faux-wood table etched with knife-gouged gang insignias and logos of metal bands and kiss again. They are both manic this autumn day. Zoë and Clarissa share numerous personality disorders. They are both bipolar 2 with borderline features. Substance abuse is a persistent irritant. Recently, they have both been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Today, sun turns San Francisco Bay the purple of noon irises in country gardens in July. To articulate such facets, to know and chart them, is a spasm of thunder inside, a tiny birth the size of a violet’s mouth. If she extracted this entity from her body, she could give it to Clarissa like an infant.
Zoë examines her almost cousin’s eyes. Even through dark sunglasses, they are inordinately bright. Zoë senses that she, too, is also glowing. Yes, her eyes are brass corridors reflecting fluorescent light. They are both candles today, unusually in sync, radiant with clarity and energy. Clarissa wears a silk scarf, a vivid purple implying motion. It might contain vertical waves.
“Do you like it?” Clarissa asks. “Hérmes. Take it. I just stole it on Maiden Lane.”
“You still shoplift?” Zoë holds the scarf. It feels moist and sanctified, an embrace around her neck.
“It’s an attitude like guerrilla warfare,” Clarissa explains. They’ve finished their second round of drinks. “A thrill kill requires mental discipline. Put it on and keep walking. I know, I’ve had it for years. I bought it on the Champs-Élysées. It was raining. I was at the George V. I remember the details absolutely. No one could dare question me. And no one does. Let’s ride the carousel.”
They carry their drinks across the stained wooden planks of the pier. The carousel is closed. Clarissa makes a cell phone call and a man appears. She produces three hundred-dollar bills. They wait for the right seats, choosing recently painted twin horses, white and intricately decorated like certain porcelain, and ride for half an hour. Clarissa vomits twice.
Zoë searches her theoretical arsenal. Is it time for a hand grenade? Should she call for a chopper with medics? Then she remembers her mission. “Are you okay?” she manages.
“I understand how children discover bulimia,” Clarissa reports, excited. “It’s an accidental miracle.”
“Maybe you’ll get retroactive psychiatric insight points,” Zoë says.
Despite the gym-suit camouflage, it’s obvious Clarissa has gained weight. But even they have taboos. Eating disorders are a forbidden topic. They meet on neutral ground, but there are still no-fly zones, areas of fragmentation bombs and landmines. Shrapnel is a constant.
Clarissa borrows the purple scarf to wipe her mouth. She has contaminated the silk, but Zoë still wants it back. She thinks, suddenly, of flower bouquets and their inadequacy. The floral arrangements of her life have been too much and not enough. The petals stained. They were debris.
“If a contract is insufficient, what can we do?” Zoë wonders.
They are standing on the pier where the carousel is no longer operating. Gone are the circles they inscribed in the loitering too-thin aqua air. Her body carved the afternoon as they whirled and spun, engraving trails of midnight-blue ink like marks made by fins. Somewhere these etchings floated into a river winding down to a bay, more invisible origami.
“We could get a tattoo,” Clarissa proposes. “Our names together in a heart.”
“A tattoo?” Zoë repeats, delighted. “Won’t it be painful and dangerous? The possibility of AIDS and infection?”
“But you love needles.” Clarissa is annoyed. “You’re a professional junky.”
“I’m in remission,” Zoë replies quickly, unexpectedly defensive.
In truth, during one particularly virulent carousel rotation, she began to think about a drug dealer she knew in North Beach. It’s walking distance, over a steep sequence of stone steps and hills, through a sudden unexpected gate. There is a combination lock. Within, a creek is dammed and trapped, the water a stalled green with slime and duck excrement. She knows this Victorian house, the grain in every wooden floorboard and the way sunset displays itself through each glass pane in every room. There is geometry to how sun impales and dissects the Golden Gate Bridge. If you comprehend this mathematics, you can construct spaceships and time machines with common household appliances. You listen to the radio and talk to any god. This is encrypted information she will be buried with.
“You always relapse,” Clarissa observes, as if stating an historical date or chemical formula. “And don’t you already have AIDS?”
Zoë is shocked. She stares at Clarissa. Even with Gucci sunglasses, there’s a distinct softening around the chin, a loss of definition in her cheeks. “No, dear potential cousin. I have hepatitis C. And you need to get your face done.”
“What part?” Clarissa is concerned.
They are walking from the pier toward a tattoo parlor on Columbus Avenue. Shops offer stacks of cheap plaster statues, saints and children, dwarves and frogs. Someone will purchase and paint these objects, display them, give them as gifts. And plastic replicas of Alcatraz and T-shirts that say Prisoner and Psycho Ward.
“What part?” Zoë repeats. “It isn’t a fucking contract. It’s a composition. Just give the guy a blank check. And don’t use a Pacific Heights or Marin surgeon. You’ll end up looking like everybody else. I found an Italian in Pittsburgh.”
“I noticed you finally got your father off your face,” Clarissa slowly admits.
“Well, the police wouldn’t do it,” Zoë says. “And Mommy was so busy.”
Slow swells are below the wharf now. The bay is a liquid representation of fall. It’s in continual transition. It’s a form of treachery. All fluid bodies are autumnal and promise betrayal. That’s what leaves changing mean, the reds and ochre, the yellows like lanterns. It’s about packing and disappearing. It’s a season for divestiture. That’s the fundamental imperative winds hint at. Time of the severing. That’s the obvious subtext. And it occurs to Zoë that her elation could dissipate. Emotions have their own seasons, inexplicable currents and random lightning storms.
Zoë follows Clarissa into the tattoo parlor. “Let’s rock,” Clarissa says. “Lock and load.”
The Eagles are playing. It’s “Hotel California,” of course. A tanned man with a blond ponytail who looks like a yoga instructor opens a book of designs. Dragons. Butterflies. Demons. Flowers. Guitars. Spiders. Zoë vaguely remembers negotiations including the procurement of a fifth of vodka, tomato juice, and a complicated argument about the aesthetic implications of script choices. Eventually they selected a gothic font. Then she may have passed out.
Zoë realizes they are in an arcade on Pier 39. It’s three hours and six Bloody Marys later. They have gauze and adhesive tape on their shoulders where their names are carved into their left upper arms in identical navy-blue. They decided to leave the encircling heart in red ink for their next reunion. Banks of garish video games surround them; hip-hop music blasts from speakers in the ceilings and floors. Boys who all look part Asian or Mexican are armed with laser levers and plastic machine guns. They keep the real Glocks in their pockets.
“This is not the global village I envisioned,” Zoë says.
“That’s politically incorrect enough to get me disbarred,” Clarissa whispers. She places two fingers against her red lacquered lips in a gesture of mock fright.
The automatic photographic booth is on the far side of the arcade. Four shots. They have been taking pictures here since they rode buses and walked from Daly City in seventh grade. Zoë remembers when it cost a quarter. Now it takes dollars. This photographic session is a ritual element in each of their meetings. It’s their sacrament. When they leave the booth, they cut the strip in half. Zoë saves her photographs in a shoebox where she keeps her passport and birth certifi-cate. She assumes Clarissa saves hers in her jewelry vault. Or perhaps she just throws them away.
The photographs are a necessary component of their liturgy. Zoë knows they can only see one another by laminated representations. It would be too disturbing and intrusive if they could actually perceive one another without artificial mediation. They communicate by email, fax, and newspaper clippings. The telephone is unbearable. They only use it to arrange an imminent unplanned meeting.
“Marvin’s jowls are definitely gone.” Clarissa studies the thin strip of four facial shots. “You have cheekbones. Are those implants? Jesus. You’re gorgeous. You never looked this good, not at sixteen, even. Cosmetic surgery already.”
“We’re breathing on forty,” Zoë says, bewildered. Certainly Clarissa comprehends the necessity of proactive facial procedures. This is San Francisco and Clarissa is an entertainment business attorney with a penthouse office above a Chinese bank. Is Clarissa in denial? Are her medications interfering with her functioning on so obvious and rudimentary a level?
“I thought you had to wait as long as possible.” Clarissa’s words are slurred.
“After you psychologically remove the slap across the face, and its more damaging verbal resonances-” Zoë begins.
“And that takes decades and costs what? A quarter of a million?” Clarissa is still staring at the strip of photographs.
“Then the next step is actual surgical removal. It’s a natural progression. It’s how to treat emotional cancer. Keep them,” Zoë says. “Get some reference points.”
They sit on a bench on the south side of the pier, sun tamed and restrained. The water is becoming agitated. White caps like mouths opening, baring teeth. The bay reminds Zoe of women in autumn in a medical imaging office. First the locker, the paper bathrobe, the chatty blonde with the clipboard who walks you into the room containing the mammogram machines. Then the stasis before the X-rays are read. Yes, the bay is waiting for its results. Poppies encrusted with resins or blood float like prayer offerings in the dangerous toxic waters.
“We used to walk here. What were we? Eleven, twelve?” Clarissa asks. Her mood is also shifting. They’re both still drunk.
Zoë and Clarissa, gauze and bandages on their shoulders, hold hands. Zoë’s childhood is sequences of yellows composed of trailer park kitchen cabinets and the invisible poisons leaking from the pores of fathers undergoing chemotherapy. Take a breath of rancid lemon. You’ve seen the Pacific, reached the end of the trail and don’t linger at the edges of death too long. They had a final punctuation for that. It was called the iron lung.
“They hadn’t invented a vocabulary for us yet,” Clarissa says to the waves. “Dysfunctional families. Latchkey children. Remember when I lost my key? What my father did? Jerry tied me up in the carport in pajamas for a week.”
“I brought you a canteen with orange juice. A bottle of vitamins,” Zoë recalls. “And a few joints. I cut up a cantaloupe in tiny pieces. You were handcuffed. I fed you like a sick bird.”
“How did you get a canteen?” Clarissa asks.
“I took it from the hospital outpatient closet,” Zoë says. Her head is throbbing.
She stares at sea swells that are the process by which autumn becomes water. If you understand the bay, it smells of slow-burning cedar. Midnight currents are actually leaves brushing the ocean with russet and amber. Only adepts recognize this. Waves answer to the moon and immutable laws of spin and fall. They don’t get dinner on the table at the appointed hour. They don’t carpool or pick up the suits on time, have the cuff links and invitations ready.
“Only you know,” Clarissa says. She looks like she may vomit again.
Zoë nods. Yes, only I was at ground zero when it happened. This is why we tattooed ourselves. Who else could comprehend adolescence in the margins of a hardscrabble town in the conceptual latitudes? The late ’50s and their village was subdivided wood frame houses and stucco bungalows nailed in rows like the fruit trees above gashes of alley, oranges and lemons so bitter they burned your mouth.
“We sat next to each other in homeroom,” Zoë says.
It was seventh grade and they were learning about cities. Their names were Sherry and Judy then but they do not ever mention this.
“We rode buses, trying to find the city,” Clarissa remembers. “We had library cards.”
True, Zoë thinks, but they could not find their geography or circumstances in literature. Nature was oaks and maples, not a riot of magenta bougainvillea, not a blaze of red and yellow canna bursting through bamboo fences sticky with pink oleander. Families had two parents and pastel houses behind lawns with white picket fences where characters experienced angst rather than hunger and rage. Such children did not sift through trashcans in dusk alleys searching for glass soda bottles redeemable for two cents apiece. Gather enough glass and you had bus fare. On a fortunate hunt, you could trap enough coins for lunch.
“Remember digging for bottles for food money?” Zoë asks.
“I remember what you said,” Clarissa smiles. “You said Holden Caulfield would have taken a taxi.”
Zoë laughs. “Remember our black berets? We were trying to meet Ginsberg and Kerouac. We wore those berets every day. We got lice.”
Clarissa shrugs. “We looked for beatniks right here, on this pier. Boys with sketchbooks and guitars. We said we were French. We practiced our accents at recess.”
Recess in the region of broken families, of divorcées and single mothers, of stigma and words that could not be spoken out loud. Alcoholism. Cancer. Child abuse. Illegitimacy. Domestic violence. The special yellow smell of Sunday evenings when the mothers who worked as secretaries poured peroxide on their hair. The tiny implications of illumination from the one lamp you were allowed to turn on. Electricity was an extravagance. Their San Francisco was a medieval oasis, ocean at your face, desert at your back. There were warlords at the utility companies with incomprehensible capabilities and powers. Phones were instruments of terror. It cost money every time you touched them. Long distance calls were rationed, like chocolate during a war. The world as it was, before hotlines that could put your father in prison.
“I still have nightmares about the apartment in Daly City,” Clarissa reveals. “At every St. Regis and Ritz, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, I wake up shaking. At the Bora Bora Lagoon Resort Hotel. At the Palazzo Sasso in Ravello, for Christ’s sake. The plot complications vary but somehow I’m back there.”
“Remember the neighbors?” Zoë asks. They lived next door, with a cement hall between them. She is dizzy. Her arm burns.
“The wetbacks and hillbillies? The identical blondes with drawls?” Clarissa is unusually bright. “It was still the Depression. I had a friend once. Another friend, not like you, Zoë. A hillbilly. Jerry found us listening to the radio. It was Elvis. Jerry started yelling, You’re playing colored music? You’re putting colored music in my house? He threw the radio at my face. Took out my front tooth. That’s how I discovered caps.”
“That was me,” Zoë corrects. “It was Marvin, not Jerry. And he used the ‘n’ word.”
“We had the same father, metamorphically. A barbarian with bad grammar who thought a yarmulke was a ticket to prison. A guy who could plaster and drywall. They were house painters. When they were employed. House painters.” Clarissa stares at the bay.
“Like Hitler,” Zoë points out. Then, “Had your mother run away yet?”
“Rachel? She was on the verge. She was becoming River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”
Zoë remembers Clarissa’s mother. A woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, rarely spoke. Jerry had pushed her out of a moving car. He kicked in her ribs and put her in a cast. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the hibiscus and night-blooming jasmine beside the alleys, sheathed in long skirts, shawls, and kimonos. She was younger than they are now.
Then Clarissa had a family of subtraction. Zoë envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families. The brothers in juvenile detention. The sisters who disappeared. Soon, if Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. Perhaps she could escape the anomalous caste consigned to stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind wires and no white picket fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even secondhand cars were an aberration. If she got placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight As and then won the poetry and science competition. Maybe she could be given a new name with syllables that formed church steeples on your lips, like the women in books. A stay-at-home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies could call her Elizabeth or Margaret or Christine.
“Did you realize we were Jewish?” Zoë wonders.
“I was instructed to never to reveal this. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa answers. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”
“I wanted a bat mitzvah,” Zoë suddenly remembers. “I don’t know how I even knew the word. Marvin said, You mean a Jew thing? It costs a fortune to get into that club. They inspect you first. You have to shave your head and show them your penis.”
“Speaking of Marvin’s penis, remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a thirteen-year-old?” Clarissa asks.
It happened in California. It was front-page news in an era when newspapers were read and discussed. The details were graphic and comprehensive, indelible like a personal mutilation.
“Jerry said, I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5'2”. He’s got a three-inch dick. He mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers.” Clarissa repeats the demonstration for her. “Then he said, Why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a dick that small?” Clarissa turns back to the bay.
“Is that when it happened? When you moved away? You disappeared. The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” Zoë tries to form a chronology.
“Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. Jerry thought a ditch with a turnip in it was a party. I was chattel. Rachel left and he just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were hanging in their closet. My pajamas were folded on their bed. Then he found us an apartment in Oakland. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”
“But she came back for you,” Zoë says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”
“You don’t get out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”
Zoë examines the bay. There is less agitation, swells softer; a haze grazes what was amethyst. The diagnosis has come. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.
“Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa suddenly asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”
“Mommy did it, actually. She was between mental hospitals that month. Maybe a weekend pass. Her contemptuous glare. It cut right through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out. She said, Marvin, look, that kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands? I remember precisely. She said, You think you’re a neurosurgeon? You think you’re a symphony conductor? You’re not even human. Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers and they took her in the ambulance.”
They are quiet. The bay, too, is still. Through haze, the sun is lemon-yellow on the heavy waters. There are floating orchards rooted in sand. Wave break and dog bark are a language. Accuracy is a necessary requirement of civilization. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s an elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. The way you are no longer blind, cold, bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.
Zoë and Clarissa’s fingers entwine. Clarissa wears a platinum set Tiffany diamond of at least four carats. And a gold Rolex with the oyster diamond setting. She withdraws her hand.
“You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets and red silk jackets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”
“So you transcend the genre?” Zoë is enraged.
“What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adoles-cences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa stares at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars that are like tiny metallic studs or hooks-they help you shred flesh.
Zoë considers their shared childhood in the already faltering city without seasons. Their parents were Jews who had been disenfranchised for generations; pre-urban and unprepared in a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Plumbing and appliances amazed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately closed. What if it burned out? Then their offspring, who became mute with shock, there in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow hibiscus and magenta bougainvillea, behind banks of startled red geraniums and brittle canna.
“We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus, and coyotes. We are the indigenous spawn of this saint. His bastards,” Zoë realizes.
“We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”
They stand and everything is suspended. The bay is barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just been wheeled back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung over. Or in a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.
“But we have instincts.” Zoë is exhausted. Her arm with the gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, an outcropping that is Marin and Sonoma, and a suggestion of something beyond.
“We understand ambushes and unconventional warfare. We’re expert with camouflage,” Clarissa agrees, offering encouragement.
“They’ll never take us by surprise,” Zoë laughs. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.
Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Sudden vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. They are beyond known choreography. One must relentlessly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.
“I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces. “But you look stunning. I’m impressed. Have you considered a wardrobe update? Do schmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that don’t fit right. They were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”
“That’s okay,” Zoë manages. This is emotional aerobics for the crippled, she thinks. Then, “I appreciate the gesture.”
“I don’t have a generous impulse in my repertoire.” Clarissa seems tired. “This is a search-and-destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. And we must end our reunion with a celebratory benediction.”
This is their ritual of conclusion. They exchange tokens of mutual acceptance. It’s how they prove their capacity to transcend themselves. It’s the equivalent of boot camp five-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.
“I brought you a postcard you sent me from Fiji sixteen years ago.” Zoë produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s nude breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.” Zoë offers the postcard to Clarissa.
“I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t sound surprised. “That was Anna. We don’t speak anymore. I don’t know where she lives. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona.”
Zoë takes the postcard back. She is convinced their reunions are conceptually well-intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were considered purifying and curative. Also barbequing women at the stake. And garlic for vampire protection.
There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madame Curie, and the extent of her fatigue. Then Zoë says, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”
“When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then détente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And as an afterthought, asks, “What about you?”
“I’m getting married,” Zoë says. “I’m moving to Pennsylvania.”
“Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your half-way-house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.
“Fuck you.” Zoë is incensed.
“I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have extreme difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances. It’s unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”
“You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” Zoë stares at her, so startled she’s almost sober.
“He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.
The stylish phone opens, the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists and in our pockets. Clarissa’s phone is voice-activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”
“Does your arm hurt?” Zoë wonders. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire.
“No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles, “keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. The cause is just.”
Zoë realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.
Suddenly Zoë feels she is on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi five hours from Goa. Then the six-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for seven hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally the fourteen-hour flight to New York. Seventy hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies of vertigo in free fall where no time zones apply.
Clarissa and Zoë no longer hold hands. A distance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.
“And you, my first and greatest love,” Zoë says. “Another high-risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”
“We’ll get red hearts around our names next time. Our next tattoo,” Clarissa smiles.
They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They have slid into an interminable foreign film neither of them has interest or affection for. She knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.
There is a certain pause just before sunset, when the bay is veiled in azure.
It’s the moment of redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone-fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.
“My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.
Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, sunglasses with an ear attachment she imagines CIA field operatives employ. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. Zoë refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, Zoë can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk now, in the alleys and sides of residential streets with ridiculous, insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Point View. Who do they think they’re kidding?
Keep walking and shadows find you. They are the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. Such shadows taste like a wounded sherry you can drink or pour on your cuts. Use them for bath oil and become immune to infection. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you are more dangerous than they imagine. They cannot fill in your blanks. Simply surrender and they do everything.
There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delu-sionary construct, like movie and real-estate contracts. Satellites map each zip code and tap every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat arenas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re in our genes, passed down the generations, like poisonous heirlooms. It’s ground zero now and forever. Zoë senses the car moving behind and away from her, and she is grateful. She never wants to see Clarissa again.