He just went that way.
What!
Down Effie Street.
Why didn’t you stop him?
He was going so fast, it took me a moment to realize it was him.
It was Potato?
Yeah.
Was he injured?
No, he looked happy.
Happy? He was terrified.
As soon as she said this, I thought of how fast he was running and understood she was right. He was running in blind panic, in terror. A teenage Filipino boy walked up to the car and just stood there, the way people do when disaster strikes. We ignored him.
He went that way?
Yeah, but that was at least ten minutes ago.
Shit!
She roared off, down Effie Street. The boy stayed with me, as if we were together in this.
She lost her dog.
He nodded and glanced around, like the dog might be right nearby.
What’s the reward?
I don’t think there is one yet.
She has to have a reward.
This seemed crass to me, but before I could say so, the red car returned. She was driving slowly now. She rolled down her window, and I walked over with a spilled feeling inside. She was in a nightie. The yellow bathrobe had been formed into a little nest on the passenger seat, and in the nest was Potato, dead. I said I was terribly sorry. The woman responded with a look that told me I alone was responsible and she would share no words with a professional dog killer. I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.
She drove off, and the boy and I were alone again. I was only a few blocks from my house, but it was hard to walk away. I didn’t know what I would think about when I began moving again. William. Who was William. It felt perverse, almost illegal to think about him now. And exhausting. Suddenly it seemed as if our relationship took mountains of strength to maintain. She was probably burying the dog in her yard right now. I looked at the boy; he was the opposite of a prince. He had nothing. When my sister was in college, she used to sometimes take these boys home. She would call me the next morning.
I could see it in his pants, it was like half hard, so I could already tell it was big.
Please stop now.
But when he took off his pants, I almost shit on myself, I was like, Please honey, get that thing up in me, and quick!
I see.
And then he took out this tiny piece of black rope or something and tied it around his cock, and I’m like, What’s that for? And he just laughed in this nasty little-boy way. And I put on these tacky panties that I just got, they have a zipper in front that goes all the way around to the back? But he didn’t really like those, I guess, because he just pulled them off and told me to do myself. Have you ever heard a guy say it like that? Do yourself?
No.
Of course you haven’t. Anyways, I was rubbing and rubbing and I was super wet and he’s all pushing it in my face and I’m going crazy for it and then, you’re not going to believe this, he jizzes all over my face. Before I even get it in. Can you believe that?
Yes.
Well, yeah, I guess so. I guess he was really young and he probably’d never seen such white pussy before.
And then my sister paused to listen to the sound of my breath over the phone. She could hear that I was done, I had come. So she said goodbye and I said goodbye and we hung up. It is this way between us; it has always been this way. She has always taken care of me like this. If I could quietly kill her without anyone knowing, I would.
I looked at the boy; he was looking at me as if we had already agreed on something. Just by standing beside him for a minute too long, I had somehow propositioned him. I couldn’t leave him without some kind of negotiation.
You could wash my car.
For how much?
Ten dollars?
For ten dollars I won’t do anything.
Okay.
I opened my purse and gave him ten dollars and he walked down Effie Street toward certain death and I walked home. In the reoccurring dream, everything has already fallen down, and I’m underneath. I’m crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble. And as I crawl, I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn’t the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling, and then suddenly, I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.
The Man on the Stairs
It was a quiet sound, but it woke me up because it was a human sound. I held my breath and it happened again, then again: it was footsteps on the stairs. I tried to whisper, There’s someone coming up the stairs, but my breath was cowering, I couldn’t shape it. I squeezed Kevin’s wrist in units, three pulses, then two, then three. I was trying to invent a language that could enter his sleep. But after a while I realized I wasn’t even squeezing his wrist, I was just pulsing the air. That’s how scared I was; I was squeezing air. And still the sound continued, the man coming up the stairs. He was walking in the slowest possible way. He seemed to have all the time in the world for this, my God, did he have time. I have never taken such care with anything. That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I’m being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea, I suck it down as if I’m in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest. Or if I’m in a hot tub with some other people and we’re all looking up at the stars, I’ll be the first to say, It’s so beautiful here. The sooner you say, It’s so beautiful here, the quicker you can say, Wow, I’m getting overheated.
The man on the stairs was taking so long, I forgot the danger for whole moments at a time and almost fell back asleep, only to be awakened by him shifting his weight. I was going to die and it was taking forever. I stopped trying to alert Kevin because I was worried he would make a sound upon waking, like he might say, What? Or, What, honey? The man on the stairs would hear this and know how vulnerable we were. He would know my boyfriend called me honey. He might even hear my boyfriend’s slight annoyance, his exhaustion after last night’s fight. We both fantasize about other people when we’re having sex, but he likes to tell me who the other people are, and I don’t. Why should I? It’s my own private business. It’s not my fault he gets off on having me know. He likes to report it the second he comes, like a cat presenting the gift of a dead bird. I never asked for it.
I didn’t want the man on the stairs knowing these things about us. But he would know. The second he threw on the lights and pulled out his gun, or his knife, or his heavy rock, the second he held the gun to my head, or the knife at my heart, or the heavy rock over my chest, he would know. He would see it in my boyfriend’s eyes: You can have her, just let me live. And in my eyes, he would see the words: I never really knew true love. Would he empathize with us? Does he know what it’s like? Most people do. You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it’s not true. Generally, people don’t like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too. Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends. They are people with jobs in their fields of interest. My oldest friend, Marilyn, loves to sing and is head of enrollment at a prestigious music school. It’s a good job, but not as good as just opening your mouth and singing. La. I always thought I would be friends with a professional singer. A jazz singer. A best friend who is a jazz singer and a reckless but safe driver. That is more what I pictured for myself. I also imagined friends who adored me. These friends thi
nk I’m a drag. I fantasize about starting over and eliminating the film of dragginess that hangs over me. I think I have a handle on it now; there are three main things that make me a drag:
I never return phone calls.
I am falsely modest.
I have a disproportionate amount of guilt about these two things, which makes me unpleasant to be around.
It wouldn’t be so hard to return calls and be more genuinely modest, but it’s too late for these friends. They wouldn’t be able to see that I’m not a drag anymore. I need clean new people who associate me with fun. This is my number two problem: I am never satisfied with what I have. It goes hand in hand with my number one problem: rushing. Maybe they aren’t so much hand in hand as two hands of the same beast. Maybe they are my hands; I am the beast.
I had a crush on Kevin for thirteen years before he finally started liking me back. He wasn’t interested at first because I was a child. I was twelve and he was twenty-five. After I turned eighteen, it took him seven more years to think of me as a real adult, not his student anymore. On our first date, I wore a dress that I had bought when I was seventeen, especially for this occasion. It was out of style. On the way to the restaurant, we stopped at a gas station. I sat in the car and watched a teenage boy clean the windshield while Kevin paid for the gas. The boy used the squeegee with a kind precision that made you know this job was not simply within his field of interest, this was exactly it, this was all he had ever wanted. La. As we pulled out of the gas station, I stared through my perfect, clean window at the teenager and thought: I should be with him instead.
The man on the stairs pauses for such incredibly long periods of time, I almost wonder if he is having a problem. Like maybe he’s disabled or very old. Or maybe just really tired. Maybe he’s already killed everyone else on the block and now he’s all worn out. In moments I can almost see him leaning against the banister, his eyes sifting through the darkness. My eyes are open, too. Kevin sleeps, he is so far away and he always will be. The silence becomes longer and longer until I start to wonder if the man is there at all. The only sound is Kevin breathing. What if I spend the rest of my life in this bed, listening to Kevin breathe. But lo. A strong and certain creak issues from the stairwell, and what I feel is thrilling relief. He is really there, he is on the stairs, and he is coming closer in his own breathtakingly slow way. If I lived to see daylight, I would never forget this lesson in care.
I opened the covers and stepped out of bed. I was only wearing a T-shirt, and I didn’t put on pants because who cares. Maybe he would be half naked, too; maybe he would be headless and covered in blood. I stood in the doorway of the stairwell, on the top step. It was darker there than in the bedroom, and I felt blind. I stood and waited to die or for my eyes to adjust, whichever came first. Before I could see anything, I could hear him breathing, he was right in front of me. I leaned forward, I could feel his breath. I could smell his sourness. It wasn’t good, he wasn’t good, he did not have good intentions. I stood there, and he stood there. He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs. My eyes were adjusting and I saw a man, an ordinary man, a stranger. We were staring into each other’s eyes, and suddenly I felt furious. Go away, I whispered. Get out. Get out of my house.
After we pulled out of the gas station, we drove to a restaurant that Kevin thought I might like. But I was still thinking about the boy with the squeegee, and I systematically did the opposite of everything that Kevin wanted. I didn’t order dessert or wine, just a little salad, which I complained about. But he did not give up; he made jokes, ridiculous jokes, in the car on the way back to my apartment. I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.
The Sister
Many times people have asked if I would like to meet their sister. Some women never marry and don’t fuss much with their appearance, and the years don’t tiptoe around them. These women, they have brothers, and the brothers of such women often know a man like me, an old man who is alone. Men alone often have one or two large things wrong with them, but these are things that the brothers think their sisters should be able to live with. An example of such a problem is: still being in love with one’s deceased wife. This wasn’t my problem; I had never been in love with anyone, dead or alive. But this is an example of the type of problem that men like me have, sizable. We are often introduced to people’s sisters. Sisters come in all ages; this took me a while to realize. I have no siblings, but I remember boys in school talking about their sisters, and so I always imagined sisters being of a certain age, school age. Did I want to meet their sister? At first I was taken aback to see such a tall, elderly sister. But of course everyone is old now, even the beautiful sisters of the boys I knew in school. It has been so long since I met a little girl. Men like me, men alone, we are the least likely people to be introduced to little girls. And I can tell you in one word why this is. Rape.
Almost all the purses in the world are made at the one place, Deagan Leather. Even if they have different tags on them, even if one of them says MADE IN SRI LANKA and the other one says MADE WITH PRIDE IN THE USA, they were both assembled in Richmond, California, at Deagan. When you finish your twentieth consecutive year at Deagan, they throw you a party with hula punch, and you automatically get free purses for the rest of your life. Victor Caesar-Sanchez and I are the only two people who’ve gotten the party so far. We play a game called What Good Thing Can You Make Out of Unlimited Purses. An example of a good thing is a leather house, or a leather airplane that actually flies. I didn’t know the name of Victor’s wife until she died last year: it was Caroline. I guess she wasn’t Mexican like him; I had pictured her Mexican this whole time. And I did not know he had a sister until he asked, Do you want to meet my sister? Her name was Blanca Caesar-Sanchez. Again I made that mistake of imagining her a teenager. A teenager in a white dress. New little breasts. I did want to meet her.
He arranged for Blanca and me to meet at an AIDS benefit party. Many of the people there were in their twenties and thirties, and I wondered if they were Blanca or the friends of Blanca. I went out of my way to be tolerant of them. There were also people in their forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, and these people had a chance of being Blanca, too, or the parents of Blanca, or grandparents or even great-grandparents of Blanca, if Blanca was a child. There were a few children running around, sisters of brothers, who could be Blanca or Blanca’s grandchild. The evening wore on. Many times I saw Victor and he told me that he had just seen his sister but lost her again. Then he said that he had in fact sent her over to my table not fifteen minutes ago to introduce herself, and had I not met her? I had not.
Well, what did you think of her?
I didn’t meet her!
Oh, I thought you said you had.
No, I said I had not, I had not.
Well, that is a shame. I think she left. She told me she liked you.
What?
She said she wants to see you again.
But I never met her!
Watch it, that’s my sister you’re talking about.
I am six foot three. I weigh 180 pounds. I have gray hair that is receded. I am not fit, but I have a naturally fast metabolism, so I am skinny. Except for my stomach.
Blanca came in and out of my life over the next few weeks, but she never came in far enough for me to see her. I failed to meet her in so many different ways that I began to know her anyway. I knew the qualities of her particular absence. I dressed up for it. I wore a suit that I had never gotten the hang of in the seventies, but now it felt all right. It’s an unusual suit because it’s light beige, almost off-white. You don’t see that color much in big amounts, suit and jacket both. It became my uniform for not meeting Blanca.
Was she at the Tiny Bubble Lounge last night?
She was! Di
d she introduce herself?
No.
I told her you sometimes go there. She’s been stopping by regularly.
I’d like to meet her.
And she’d like to meet you.
Victor, she’s gotta introduce herself. I see her in my dreams.
And what does she look like?
She’s an angel.
That’s Blanca, that’s the one.
Is she blond?
No, she’s dark-haired, like me.
A brunette.
Well, I don’t know about that.
You just said she was.
Yeah, I just don’t like to hear my sister talked about that way.
Brunette? That’s nothing bad.
Yeah. But it’s how you said it.
“Brunette” said by a man who has to use two hands to jerk off each night, that’s what she did to me. I knew when she was near because I started breathing harder. The whole feeling in the room changed: her smell wrapped itself around my face, and I just knew she was there and I couldn’t stop thinking she was a teenager. Even though it made no sense. The bar was full of smoke and men, but I could see her, behind someone, just out of view, in tight jeans and tennis shoes, chewing gum, with pierced ears and some kind of band holding her hair back. A ribbon or some kind of plastic band. And pierced ears. I said that already. Okay. That’s what I saw. Some may say that such a girl is not ready for a relationship with a man, especially a man in his late sixties. But to that I say: We don’t know anything. We don’t know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love. I wouldn’t force her. I wouldn’t have to. She would want me. We would be in love. What do you know. You don’t know anything. Call me when you’ve cured AIDS, give me a ring then and I’ll listen.