Adverbs (14 page)

Hank shut the drawer and reset things the best he could so that he’d be undetected. He leaned his forehead against the creaky window and watched people walk by without noticing him. A damp policeman. Two girls returning from someplace, rolling suitcases in a hurry. A guy looking for a newspaper that could work as an umbrella if you were desperate enough. No one.

“Cookies,” Eddie said, and opened her eyes. She could still see him and for a minute they were still both happy. “I had a dream,” she said, as if there aren’t enough supernatural elements in here, “that I had another boyfriend who I think filmed things with a camera. We were making love in the woods,” but something happens when you die. You are no longer interested in other people’s dreams. “And so the other guy reached in his backpack and I thought it was a weapon, but then I saw it was the same kind of cookies…” Her voice evaporated into Hank’s
disinterest. He stood in the doorway and wrapped the sheet tighter around him like an angry king.

“How long have you known?” he said.

“You bastard you read the letter.” Eddie sighed, and dabbed a fingerprint swipe underneath her eyes like she might cry later. “It was in a
drawer
,” she said. “It was a secret for a reason.”

“How long,” Hank said again, “have you known?”

“As long as you haven’t told me,” Eddie said. “You think I don’t read the paper, Hank Hayride?”

“There are five newspapers sitting on your stoop still in plastic bags,” he said.

“And,” Eddie said, “you were holding my pen in the park. It was part of the whole handful of pens you were holding, a red pen with gold letters and you put it in that story you made up. How could you do that, when I said
first thing
that I was already sad, and with a broken heart? You took me for a ride, Hank. I thought we were going someplace and all the time I knew we were going someplace else, to answer your question.”

“Don’t look at me, please,” Hank said, “like I’m in your light. I know a place with fancy drinks. Let me buy you one, Eddie, and we can sit together.”

“A drink won’t matter,” she said.

“Then have one,” he said. “We learned things about each other, Eddie, but couldn’t we go out anyway?”

“You weren’t what you said you were,” Eddie said. “Story of my life, it wasn’t what you said.” She ran her hand down the wall sadly, like it was the last of the house. “I suppose it never is,” she said, “and I’m hungry.”

“They have food there, too,” Hank said. “Great music and food and fancy drinks.”

“No, no, no,” she said. “It’s raining. Let’s break up at the diner, Hank. It’s around the same corner. Put your shoes on, baby.”

She looked at his shoes and this is when she cried. Hank floated toward her. He knew this must be what she had said to her husband, about the shoes, but what else could he do but put them on? Her gentle blouse was on the chair with her tossed keys, and they went out under an umbrella Eddie had bought yesterday so her hair would survive the season. Outside people hurried. A newspaper came in handy, but not as handy as the guy would have liked, and a little boy was crying on the corner with the wailing you can never console. It is natural, this heartbreak which arrives first when you are young and never leaves your house no matter where you move, but still everyone wants the kid to stop the fussing and shut up.

Inside at least it was dry, although ugly. Hank and Eddie walked past a thirsty-looking woman they did not know, and a lonely boy at the jukebox and sat down as far as possible from the windows, where old Christmas paintings waited to be scraped away. It was not a good day to eat at the diner, dead or alive. Nothing on the menu was tempting, and a neglected chalkboard in the corner suggested that today’s soups were nothing. No soups. They unfolded their napkins and I’m sad to say they bickered in the back.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier,” Hank said. “We met in the park and talked immediately, and I guess I didn’t want to. I never meant, you know, to hurt you.”

“
That
,” Eddie said, “is the oldest line in this book.”

“Lines get old because people say them over and over,” Hank said. “It’s the same story—we all lose our charms in the end. I knew when we met with the cookies. I want to love you and take you pretty places. Yes, I have things wrong, but also I can walk through walls if you’ll let me show you. Don’t abandon this here. Don’t find some other boyfriend and leave me alone with only the cats for company.” He looked at her and there it was, the panic of screwing up heaven and earth if you say the wrong thing and seal the envelope. Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.

“I don’t think so,” Eddie said, and this wasn’t it either. “I thought you were nice and I wouldn’t be alone but I must have been dreaming. I should have my head examined, wishing you into my life. Someone should peer into my head for letting you into my house.”

“You could have told me you knew,” Hank said. “If you think you can find a man who doesn’t have secrets, then you’re
still
dreaming.”

“You’re a
ghost
!” Eddie cried. “You’re
empty
and you have
nothing
inside you. I’m tired of men I have to shape into something.”

“I’m tired too,” Hank said, and he said no more. He thought she knew what he meant, but the biggest mistake you can make is thinking they know what you mean. If you mean that you are also exhausted and feel dead in the park, and that you ache for a love to pull you to your feet and make you human again, then you must say so. If you have soup to sell you must write it on the
chalkboard or no one will buy your homemade soup. Otherwise they think you mean, “I’m tired of arguing and I give up on you.” Naturally they will think this, and naturally they will give up on you, and you will give each other up in a grimy diner. Hank was tired and Eddie was tired, and if they were both tired they should have gone to bed, but instead Eddie said nothing, too, just sat and watched her boyfriend vanish from her eyes.

So, the same old story, they decided not to see each other anymore. Hank felt himself fall away as the decision was served up on a sticky plate. He could see through his own body barely, the curl of a napkin through his hand on the table, and the sticky floor through his legs like he was a clear shell, something shaped in the shape of Hank, as Eddie looked up at him and slayed him all over again. He felt the last of him slip away. He will not reappear, Hank Hayride. He was dead to the woman in the diner. He was dead to her.

But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back? Hank Hayride haunted her. Naturally he haunted her, and he should haunt her, for what good are the dead if they do not haunt us, what is the point of these lives? Read instead the names of people who died before I dreamed they would, Amanda Davis, Jacques Hymans, Phil Snyder, Samy Leigh Webster-Woog with his odd and agile dancing like a very bad figure skater on the ice, read the names you think of when you are in the bed losing your own sleep, for the names don’t matter. What matters is how they haunt us, when
the love has floated away and we’re alone in the diner. Over by the windows, the lonesome boy and the thirsty woman were all in a commotion in another story, and Eddie would have another one too. Perhaps she would drive a taxi, or pilot a plane, and once again feel the land shaking happy beneath her. But now Eddie just sat in the back, all the fight drained out of her, and she felt the haunting, and she sipped the bad coffee, and at last in the roar of the rain she gave up the ghost.

Y
eah, I have a question,” said the guy with wicked eyes and a pair of shorts which in San Francisco is widely regarded as wrong. The shorts were the kind filled with pockets so you could take maybe a bunch of tools on a hike. The wicked eyes were the kind they always were: sort of green and trouble. “My question is, I quit. I’m going to quit. I thought this program was my future.” He stood up from a horseshoe made of tables where everyone was sitting. The wind blew in from a window and rustled a paper on a bulletin board which was improperly thumb-tacked. The paper showed a face with a crown on its head, and when the wind moved it looked like the face was going to throw up. “Are you even listening? But this isn’t my future. This is the same bullshit and I should quit right now.” He reached down to his place on the horseshoe where three pieces of paper sat in different ugly colors. He brushed them hard so they skittered like leaves do when you kick them. It was unimpressive. Allison was unimpressed, anyway, although she was soft-spoken and said nothing of the sort. “Fuck you all!” the guy said. This wasn’t something you could quit really. For one thing, it was optional, although everybody from Graduate Studies in English was there. The other thing was that it was library orientation. The
school already had the money, the money, the money of everyone in the room. This was like going grocery shopping and quitting the peas.

“I beg your pardon?” said the library woman who had passed out the three sheets of paper. Her name was something or other.

“I said I’m quitting is what my question is,” said the guy. “I’m out of here. I’m renting a crap of an apartment all the way in South San Francisco The Industrial City and now I realize
no way
is this my future!”

The library woman thought this over and decided to move on. “Okay,” she said, “let’s move on.”

“Are you even
listening
?” the guy yelled. His backpack was looped over the back of his chair like the chair, too, was going on a hike. The guy—whose name, for the record, was Steven—yanked off the backpack and tipped the chair over on purpose. “I quit!”

“So quit,” said another guy. Allison was pretty sure this guy’s name was also Steven. The library woman had made everyone go around the horseshoe saying their names and where they were from and their speciality of study, and Allison thought she’d never been more embarrassed in her life than when she’d said: “Poetry.” It was like giving them the money, the money, the money all over again. Linda said it too, or maybe it was Lisa. There were either two Lisas or—Allison couldn’t remember—there weren’t. There were two Stevens and a Todd and Eddie and nobody would ever forget Bernice. Allison would think suddenly of Bernice far in her future, on her deathbed maybe, and
the earrings of Bernice, which would jangle in her future like a neighbor’s phone ringing when they’re not home and you are, faintly, faintly driving her nuts. The library woman wrote down everything on a pad like the whole room was going down on Allison’s permanent record.

“I
am
quitting!” roared the first, crazier Steven. He left the room. The library woman drew a line through something with her pen. Eddie chuckled nervously. Bernice shook her head, and her dangling earrings, very large, also shook their heads. The earrings were in the shape of two heads of William Shakespeare.

Graduate school was a step for Allison, the beginning of a journey but also the end of a journey she’d already taken up north in Washington State. Allison was staring down her future like a hallway, and the light at the end of the hallway turned out to be bouncing off a pair of earrings shaped like the greatest writer in the English language. Allison also had a crap apartment, coincidentally and awkwardly, in South San Francisco The Industrial City, and now she also felt like quitting, but after a certain age you can’t quit. Allison, for instance, was that age. After a certain age you couldn’t even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else. Allison had said, wrongly, that she was from Texas. The library woman had written this down: Allison, a woman from Texas, here to study poetry and poke endlessly at the carpet in her new crap apartment while outside—if, for instance, it was last night—the neighbors argued endlessly over how to get to the airport. “Take a goddamn cab,” Allison muttered to herself,
shaking a bottle of bitters over a glass she was holding in her hand. But she was too soft-spoken to offer this advice to the bickering neighbors. The bitters, the glass, the ice-cube trays had flown down with her from Washington because she couldn’t face a yard sale, and a cab had taken her from the airport, and she’d turned out all right, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she? Hadn’t she? Hadn’t she? Hadn’t she? And besides, she did want to visit Texas someday. Sprawling and arid, full of millionaires and Mexicans, being from Texas was no less implausible than her actual circumstances, which included a catastrophe of epic-poem proportions in the Pacific Northwest and the ugliest carpeting she had ever seen in South San Francisco The Industrial City. No, you couldn’t quit. The whole thing was optional, of course, but everybody, absolutely, showed up to sit down.

For the next forty minutes the library woman explained everything the sheets of paper already said and then, suddenly, she was done. “I’m done,” she said. “I’m all done. You can go now to your evening ahead of you.”

To Allison, this too, the evening ahead of her, was a long glimpse down a hallway, and she hid in the bathroom. She remembered to steal a roll of toilet paper she kept forgetting to buy but she forgot until she stepped outside into the nighttime that she needed a ride home. Well, not a ride—she had her friend’s car with all of her music still all over the floor—but she needed someone who knew how to get her back to the highway that would lead her, wrongly, to her apartment where she lived. I can’t imagine I need to tell you who was the only one outside scowling on the steps and tapping a pack of cigarettes against the thick of his shorts.

“Hey,” Allison said.

“I don’t care about the money,” the guy said. “I’m not, what am I thinking of, one of the Jewish people.”

Outside there was nobody else. Allison and this particular Steven were at the very top of a long thing of steps. Where do you go when you need someone to tell you where the highway is? It’s not like she thought it was a good idea. It was cold outside—San Francisco gets cold, also famously foggy, so you can’t get around unless you already know where you’re going. Allison held her hand over her purse so he couldn’t look through its large rip and see the stolen toilet paper waiting for her ass to get home. “What?” she asked.

Steven turned around and she saw that he had a telephone up to his ear, which was only a small relief. At least he wasn’t talking to Allison about the Jews. “Hold on,” he said to the other end, and then he turned his bright eyes to Allison. “What?” he said.

“I heard you,” Allison said. “I heard you say that you are living in South San Francisco The Industrial City.”

“I wasn’t bragging,” the guy said.

“I live there too,” Allison said, “and I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to the highway. I haven’t been here long. I don’t know where the highway is.”

Steven’s hand was over the mouthpiece of his phone, and filthy. “Does it strike you that this is a good time?”

“No,” Allison said immediately. A good time hadn’t struck Allison since a disastrous day with a friend, just out of Seattle. “I’m sorry about it,” she said. “I just want to get home.”

Steven sighed, and without any further conversation pressed a button on his phone that hung up on the other person who for
the record was his girlfriend. “I guess you can follow me,” he said. “Are you parked in the stupid lot? I am. I parked in the lot. Let’s go.”

“I didn’t know there was a lot,” Allison said.

“We’re not supposed to park in it,” Steven said, “but anyway, I quit, so who cares?”

Allison looked down: her shoes, too, belonged to a friend of hers. “If I bring my car around,” she said, “will you wait for me?”

Steven blinked, and ran his hands down his shorts as if coaxing them longer. Then he looked at Allison, and she saw another glimpse down the hallway. When somebody tells you that a certain boy isn’t good enough for you, that person has usually not just moved all alone into a crap apartment in a city known for being south of a city that people have heard of. “What did I just say?” Steven said.

What he’d just said was “who cares?” and nobody wants to hear that. Allison turned up the radio rather than hear it in her head as she drove behind Steven down a spooky road she never would have found herself. It wasn’t the same road that took her to the school and it struck her that it wasn’t going to take her back to her crap apartment either. It was a trap, maybe; a spooky trap. The road was almost rural, which you can’t find in San Francisco much. On one side was a dark golf course sulking behind a chain-link fence and on the other were square apartment buildings with lights clipped to the drains, shining on flat pieces of large lawns tan with drought. Here and there on the fence were dark, exhausted birds who also looked like they
wanted to go home. This is a road not many people know about, although it will take you to South San Francisco The Industrial City if that’s really where you want to be heading. It’s a road my mother was riding down once, with a man driving the car. She got out because she didn’t want to die. The man was drunk and yelled at her. She had to carry her shoes. She told me this story once when we were on the road but I never heard the end of it. Where did she go, with her shoes? Is it really possible to quit, and step out of a car that’s taking you someplace terrible? It didn’t seem so to Allison. It was just a part of love, which for the record she knew was in her future with the scowling, smoking boy one car ahead, his cigarette tipping out the window and making this road darker still. Cigarettes—who doesn’t know?—will kill you dead but they’re in everyone’s mouths anyway, because of the sexy smoke that runs out of them. South San Francisco The Industrial City is as ugly as sin but somebody lives there: Allison, in fact. Love and its atrocious apartments, its spooky traps and scowling boys, wasn’t something you could quit. Not at this age. Not after a catastrophe. It’s like a hit song a long time ago, in which a man lists terrible things which have happened to him. He’s been misled and he’s been afraid. He’s been hit in the head and left for dead. He’s been abused and he’s been accused and he’s been refused a piece of bread. On and on he goes down this road, getting pushed around and lost and found and given until sundown to get out of town, and yet this is basically a love song he is singing. He’s had the shit kicked out of him, and guess what? It’s love.

It would be a perfect thing to have on the radio as Allison
followed Steven down the road, but in fact she had a different song going on. The song was a hit from a more recent era, although not a song that Allison liked particularly, and the lyrics kept her absent company as she kept her hands on the wheel and looked through the windshield and saw what was down the road, as sure as the money she’d spent. Maybe Steven wouldn’t quit after all, or maybe he’d come to a Graduate Studies party anyway—in either case that would be the next time she would see him. They wouldn’t get along, exactly, but they would stand together in equal scorn for Bernice and the other Steven, and leave early for a bar that still had ashtrays. Or maybe it would be a copy shop, the only one in South San Francisco The Industrial City. She’d be making copies of something—the song loped to the chorus, and Allison realized with embarrassment that of course it was
poetry
she’d be copying—and he’d stroll in with a poster of his band. They’d make out, Steven’s tongue sour from smoke but worthwhile. Bickering—there was plenty of it in her future, and an old plaid couch he probably owned, the cushions flat and veiny like water lilies. An angry ex-girlfriend to run into, and a time when he would be three hours late and not at all sorry. Would she be pregnant? Allison could not see a baby but boy oh boy oh boy oh boy could she see herself throwing up. She could see the future like an icy prophetess in an old movie, muttering truths that were already printed on three sheets of paper. Allison saw everything, and then, right then in the immediate future, something happened that she hadn’t predicted. Steven’s car signaled like he was winking at her, and slowed down and stopped by the side of the dark, dark road. So of course Allison had to
stop too. “When I was crazy,” the radio explained, “I thought you were great.”

The song is called “It’s All I Can Do.”

Steven’s car went quiet, and Allison, ten feet behind, turned the key and waited. One car went by, but no others. They were on the golf course side of the road. When she saw Steven’s cigarette flick back into the car so he could take a drag, she put the key in her pocket and stepped out of the car. In the future she was standing at his window already, listening to his story of why he stopped, and before she knew it the future was here.

“I ran out of gas,” he said before she could ask. “Completely, I ran out of gas. I tried to make it as far as I could.”

“You’re out of gas?” Allison said. “Didn’t you notice?”

“I
did
notice,” Steven said, scowling around his cigarette, “but I didn’t make it. I ran out of gas. We’re going to have to drive together to a gas station and get it how that happens, when they put the gas in a gas can. And then we’ll drive back here and I’ll fill my car with gas and then we’ll drive back to South San Francisco.”

“The Industrial City,” Allison said, and Steven nodded and threw his cigarette out the window. They were calling it South San Francisco The Industrial City for the same reason I am. It’s not because it’s the name of the town or because everyone there is industrious. It’s because the words South San Francisco The Industrial City are slapped up on a hill, like the famous sign about Hollywood but without even a speck of glamour, so if you are arriving from the airport, your life in Seattle looming over you like ashes from a volcano, you can look out the taxicab win
dow and think, “I am going to live here. This is where my apartment is.”