It Chooses You

  VISTA

  —

  Movies are the only thing I make that puts me at the mercy of financiers, which is partly why I make other things too. Writing is free, and I can rehearse a performance in my living room; it may turn out that no one wants to publish the book or present the performance, but at least I’m not waiting for permission to make the thing. Having a screenplay and no money to make it would almost be worse than not having a screenplay and maintaining the dream of being wanted. At times it seemed that I was only pretending the script wasn’t finished, to save face, to give myself some sense of control. And on a more superstitious level, I secretly believed I would get financing when I had completed my vision quest, learned the thing I needed to know. The gods were at the edges of their seats, hoping I would do everything right so they could reward me.

  I had been avoiding Beverly because Vista, on the map, seemed dangerously far away. But I was becoming more intrepid, or else my time was seeming less valuable. If, worst-case scenario, I couldn’t find my way home from Vista, I could just live there. So I called Brigitte and Alfred and we set out in the morning. In between the towns and cities in California are straw-covered hills that sometimes burst into flames. Beverly lived on one of these brown hills, which made sense; you could keep a suitcase or a jacket in the city, but Bengal leopard babies would need more room.

  The road was dirt, the house was surrounded by abandoned furniture and equipment, and Beverly, who met us in the lawn, was painfully lacerated. She had told me on the phone that she didn’t want her face photographed because she’d just had an accident involving a shovel. The wounds were still spinning their scabs.

  Beverly: Come on, I’ll take you in the house and show you the cats first, and then we’ll go from there. You know what this is?

  She pointed to something on the wall. It had eyes.

  Miranda: Yes.

  Beverly: What? What is it?

  Miranda: That’s the butt of something.

  Beverly: Yes — very good! Excellent!

  Miranda: Of what, though?

  Beverly: A deer. And this bone came from Vietnam. Some man there carves it. Isn’t that incredible?

  Miranda: Amazing, yeah.

  Beverly: It’s all hand-carved. Come on. These are fish. This was from a volcano.

  It was like a very questionable natural-history museum; each thing might be a million years old or it might have been made in the late ’70s. But I was learning to assess people quickly, and Beverly wasn’t crazy, just very glad to see us and in a hurry to get the party started. There was so much to see and do.

  Beverly: Oh, and this one is dinosaur poop. And you know what this is? That’s a dinosaur tooth — no, a mammoth tooth, but it’s pre-mammoth. This is a picture of my second marriage. My first husband died. We were married forty years — forty and a half — and he died of cancer. It was horrible.

  Miranda: I’m sorry. How long have you been with your current husband?

  Beverly: Eight years.

  Miranda: That’s like two lives.

  Beverly: Yeah, it is — two entirely different ones. This is our love.

  By “love” she meant the leopards; we had just entered a fenced-off kitchen crawling with baby leopards.

  Beverly: These are the girls, and I don’t allow them on the table and they know better. She’s a real lover, that one. This is Bonnie Blue, and she’s in heat, so that’s why she does a lot of yelling. Different, aren’t they?

  I nodded, but at first they did not seem very different or very much like leopards. Weren’t leopards massive and deadly? These looked more like cute kittens. Then one of them suddenly jumped in the air to the height of my face. Two more began wrestling, slamming each other against the wall with violent cracks. They were small, but they no longer seemed cute; there was a strong man inside of each one. I tried to contemplate breeds and cross-breeds, but my knowledge was thin and I had to supplement it with what I knew about Spiderman and Frankenstein. And the Incredible Hulk.

  Beverly: I started this twenty years ago — 1988. Twenty-one years, I guess. These cats are bred with a British Shorthair, because the leopard itself is only eight to ten pounds — a tiny little leopard. So they’re bred with a British Shorthair to give them some macho, some heavy.

  Beverly took us outside to show us the bigger cats in their cages, who shared a wall with an aviary full of screaming birds.

  Miranda: Does it drive the cats crazy that there are all these birds next door?

  Beverly: Oh, they love it! It’s their entertainment center.

  I was fine with admiring the coop from the outside, but Beverly told me to hurry in before one flew out. Dozens of birds swarmed around our heads. The squawking and chirping were deafening.

  I thought about my dad’s bird phobia and how unenjoyable he would find this. Then I breathed in and out slowly and pretended I was a rebellious teenager trying to differentiate myself from my parents, and in this way I was able to stay in the aviary and continue the interview.

  Miranda: What kind of bird is this?

  Beverly: Isn’t that beautiful? And they’re rare. That’s a green-winged dove. There’s also a bird in here called a bobo. It’s black and white and it has a red beak — look for that. It sings like a canary in the morning, and it’s from Africa. And the finch is so doggoned cute.

  Miranda: Yeah. Really loud, isn’t it?

  Beverly: You get used to it after a while. Look at the colors. Our creator just has an unbelievable imagination.

  The sound and smell and the wings beating around my face began to make me feel slightly hysterical, like I might cry. I also couldn’t stop smiling. I should go to Mexico, I thought. Not that Beverly was Mexican, just that I’d always meant to go there. She took a baby bird out of its nest and held it in her palm. It looked like an embryo.

  Beverly: See the way the tongue goes side to side? They have little polka dots in the mouth, and that’s what attracts the mother to feed them. This has just been born.

  Miranda: Maybe it should go back in the nest.

  Beverly: Let me give you guys some eggs. You guys can take these with you.

  Miranda: Really? Will they hatch?

  Beverly: Only if you sit on them for thirty days! And now we have a surprise — come on.

  She hurried us out of the aviary and over to a field, where we were quickly surrounded by massive sheep. I am not that familiar with sheep, so it took me a moment to notice that these ones had many, many horns, horns growing out of horns, all of them curly.

  Beverly: These are the oldest breed known to man. They’re from Israel and they’re actually in the Bible. They’re in Genesis 28 to 30 — they’re Jacob’s. Very, very special. They have anywhere from two to six horns.

  Miranda: Yeah, they really do have a lot of horns.

  Three dogs came rushing up to the fence.

  Beverly: Her name is Raspberry, and then the black one’s Squooshy, and the big one is Puppy-Puppy. If you hand-feed them they’re wonderful, but they’re wild if you don’t.

  Miranda: Were these ones hand-fed?

  Beverly laughed, so I laughed. I suggested we go inside, so I could interview her away from the sound of the birds. We went in the kitchen and she prepared the kittens’ lunch while we talked.

  Miranda: Give me a sense of your history.

  Beverly: I started off with one female.

  Miranda: Okay. And you’re from?

  Beverly: I’m from Huntington Beach.

  Miranda: How long have you lived here?

  Beverly: Let’s see — thirty-seven years? Since ’72.

  Miranda: How do you make an income?

  Beverly: The cats. The birds are not cutting it right now — they’re just not.

  Miranda: Do you notice the economy? Does that affect it at all?

  Beverly: Oh, yeah. They’re not buying like they used to.

  Miranda: Do you have a computer?

  Beverly: I do, but I don’t use it.

  Miranda:
So no online selling — none of that.

  Beverly: Uh-uh. And that’s a down thing too, because everybody does it by computer now. I’m hurting my own self, but I don’t have the time or the energy. I just don’t. I’m not interested in computers.

  Miranda: You’ve got a lot else to keep you busy. Do you feel like you have a community here or are you pretty isolated? What’s it like in this area?

  Beverly: People-wise? Yeah, I’m isolated.

  Miranda: What’s been the strangest part of your life so far?

  Beverly: Losing my husband was the worst.

  Miranda: Would you say he was the love of your life?

  Beverly: Yeah.

  Miranda: How old were you when you met him?

  Beverly: Sixteen.

  Miranda: So how did you meet him?

  Beverly: At church. A very handsome man. Blue eyes, six foot two, six foot three — really sharp.

  Miranda: And do you have pictures?

  Beverly: I do, but I’m embarrassed. My husband, Fernando — I would feel bad for him.

  Miranda: I understand.

  I felt a little ashamed to have asked. And yet it would have been more romantic if she had pulled a picture of the blue-eyed husband, the one I had just suggested was the love of her life, out of her blouse. Two lives, one after the other, but the second life can never compare…

  Beverly: I planned a surprise for you. His name is Sebastian, and he won’t be here till four thirty.

  Miranda: Oh, well, you know what — we have another interview at four thirty.

  Beverly: Oh no.

  Miranda: Sorry, I didn’t realize that.

  Beverly: I’m really sorry you can’t see Sebastian. He’s thirty-five pounds. He’s double what we’ve got here. And she walks him on a leash like a dog, and it’s just the darnedest thing you ever saw in your whole life. And the thing of it is she does drum rolls on him — hard. She gets in there and just pounds and he just takes it all — I don’t know how, but he does. Look what I made you guys.

  Beverly pulled a giant bowl of fruit salad out of the fridge. It was the kind with marshmallows; they’d melted into the juice, turning it milky. I started to make a polite noise of regret, but seeing her face fall, I realized refusing was the opposite of polite. I squeezed my iPhone in my pocket. Would it be weird to check my email right now? Or maybe read the news? I had an overwhelming desire to take a little time-out. One option was a bathroom break.

  Miranda: Wow, that’s a lot of chopping. Could you point me toward the —

  Beverly: Yeah — took me all morning. I can send a cup with you home on the road.

  She had bought an enormous amount of fruit and spent all morning chopping it. She’d asked her husband to herd the biblical sheep toward us at the exact moment we exited the aviary; she’d invited Sebastian, the thirty-five-pound leopard. The least I could do was eat the salad.

  Miranda: Okay, give us a cup, that would be great.

  Beverly: I can also do a bowl. Or cups — which would you prefer?

  Miranda: A bowl’s good. Just one bowl and we’ll —

  Beverly: Oh no! You each get one! Would you like some crackers to go with it? We like soda crackers with ours, crumbled on top, but it’s up to you.

  We held the dripping bowls in the car and drove to the gas station. I made us each eat one piece of pineapple before we threw them in the trash. It tasted fine. I moved some newspaper over the bowls, because what if Beverly went to get some gas and threw something away and saw? Nothing could be worse than that. We had gone to the place where all living things come from; it was fetid and smelly and cloyingly sweet, filled with raw meat and curling horns, her face was smashed, everything was breeding and cross-breeding, newborn or biblical. And I couldn’t take it. The fullness of her life was menacing to me — there was no room for invention, no place for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes me feel useful, or feel anything at all. She wanted me to just actually be there and eat fruit with her.

  I went home and immediately fell asleep, as if fleeing from consciousness. I woke up three hours later and, instead of going online, I tried to pretend I was Beverly, that I was so caught up in living things I that didn’t have “the time or the energy” for a computer. The PennySaver didn’t have quite the allure it once did, but I sat down with the latest issue and a pen to circle new listings. Andrew’s ad was still in there; the tadpoles had probably transitioned this week. It seemed Michael had sold the leather jacket; he was ten dollars closer to womanhood. Everything was changing, except me. I was sitting in my little cave, trying to squeeze something out of nothing. I couldn’t just conjure a fiction — the answers to my questions about Jason had to be true, wrought from life, like all the other parts of the story.

  Each character in the movie had been wrestled into existence, quickly or slowly, usually slowly and then all at once. A year earlier I had been suffering through a fruitless week when I told myself, Okay, loser, if you really are incapable of writing, then let’s hear it. Let’s hear what incapable sounds like. I made broken, inhuman sounds and then tried to type them, with sodden, clumsy hands. I wrote the pathetic tale of Incapable. It was long and irrelevant to my story about Sophie and Jason. Who would talk like this? Not a man or woman, no one fit for a movie.

  I shut my computer gratefully at the sound of my husband’s car outside. I waved from the porch as he parked, and then, with growing horror, I watched our dog jump out of the car, chasing a cat into the street as a speeding car approached. The car swerved to avoid hitting the dog, and hit the cat instead. It had happened so quickly — one moment I was writing about Incapable, and in the next moment I was putting a dead cat in a bag. He was an old, bedraggled stray, one I had seen around. I felt as though we were all complicit — me, my husband, and the driver. All of us had been careless, if not today then on another day, and all this carelessness had culminated in the death of a stranger.

  When the cat was buried I finally sat back down to work and re-read the broken monologue. I felt more tenderly toward the inhuman voice now; it wasn’t really incapable, just very alone, and tired, and unwanted — a stray. I named him Paw Paw and swore I would avenge his death. He was part of the script now.

  It took me a long time to figure out this cat’s place in the story. Again and again it was respectfully suggested to me that I cut Paw Paw’s monologue. But I couldn’t kill him twice, and I thought his voice might be the distressing, ridiculous, problematic soul of what I was trying to make. Not that my conviction protected me; it’s always embarrassing to pin a tail onto thin air, nowhere near the donkey. It might be wrong, it sure looks like it is — but then again, maybe the donkey’s in the wrong place, or there are two donkeys, and the tail just got there first.

  PAM

  —

  PHOTO ALBUMS

  $10 EACH

  —

  LAKEWOOD

  —

  Pam could not believe we were seeing her house when it was such a mess. We assured her that it looked very clean, which it did — clean and chaotically filled with art. Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, The Hunt of the Unicorn, and various other familiaresque images had been meticulously re-created in needlepoint, by Pam, over the years. We settled ourselves around a large stack of albums and I lifted one onto my lap.

  Miranda: Where did these come from?

  Pam: One of my friends, he has a friend, and that friend have a big sale. I keep looking at the first album and the second one, and I said, “Oh my god, that’s interesting. I wish I could go on vacation like this lady here.”

  As she talked I flipped though the album, and then another one. They were all filled with pictures of the same wealthy white couple — beginning with their wedding in the ’50s and ending with the last of their cruises.

  Pam: These people, they are going all over the world. To Greece and Italy and Japan, and it is gorgeous wherever. It really is nice, and someday maybe I wish I can go, but no money this time. My life, I get married so young and
I have no time for vacation. And I say, Well, I can look at this pictures — is better than no vacation.

  Miranda: So you don’t know these people?

  Pam: No, I don’t know the people, but I don’t want the albums to be thrown away. I keep almost like ten years actually, in my house.

  I glanced at her, wondering if she was a bit of a hoarder. She wore a pink sleeveless top, not unlike Michael’s, and her baroque decorating style made her seem older than she was. I guessed she was forty-eight. An exhausted forty-eight.

  Miranda: What do you imagine their life was like?

  Pam: I think they have very, very good life. Nice, happy life, actually, if you living that long.

  Miranda: Yeah, they’re pretty old in some of these.

  Pam: Yeah, is very, very old, and is nice not only that they go, but it is nice to see them be happy with each other. Look at him, and he is just smiling, and it’s nice. I always feel so good to see somebody really happy.

  Miranda: Do you think they died pretty old?

  Pam: Yeah, I think the lady is like ninety-five and the guy ninety, yeah.

  Miranda: I’m surprised their kids wouldn’t have taken these. Wouldn’t you think —

  Pam: They don’t have kids, yeah. They don’t have kids.

  Miranda: So when did you move from Greece? How old were you?

  Pam: I was seventeen. I got married and I come here, and then after I had three kids.

  Miranda: Right away?

  Pam: Yeah, after a year.

  Miranda: So you were eighteen. And what did you do?

  Pam: We work in restaurants, fixing food.

  Miranda: So you had a restaurant?

  Pam: Yeah. Twenty years one, and thirteen years another one.

  Miranda: Wow — so twenty-three years.

  Pam: Yeah, thirty-three years.

  Pam: Right, thirty-three. What would you do in the restaurant? What was your job?