Double Take (16 page)

By the time I get off the train, the snow has really picked up. I lean into it as fat snowflakes whack into my face and find myself wishing I had a warm hat and a scarf.

My parents aren't home from work yet, but the painters are still there. I dash up to my room and find that my uniform is not where I left it (lying on the floor) and that three of the four walls are covered with wallpaper. On the fourth wall, about to be papered over, is my mural. I stand and stare at Bando's face, at the picture of Casa, and I want to say goodbye to it somehow, but instead I find myself shutting down inside like a bank being robbed, alarm bells are going off and big steel doors are clanging shut and locking automatically, and in a moment I feel nothing but the darkness I've gotten so used to ever since Bando died, since I left California, since I left Michael, this cave of shadows. I smile serenely at the painters and stroll out of the room without even turning around to look one last time.

There is no one on the roads as I bulldoze my way to Diana's in my mother's crumbling Volvo, and now the place is almost empty. I'm working the counter again, and I'm bored. Since Saida left, I have no one to talk to when business is slow. Nicky is at the cash register, fidgeting. The plumbers, electricians and telephone repairmen are all at home with their families. One of the electricians always tells me about his son who can do telekinesis like Uri Geller. This guy is home watching his son bend spoons with his mind.

Even the cops are gone, which I am glad about. I have ten thousand dollars in my purse, under the counter, and it suddenly occurs to me to wonder if it is illegal to carry
money to someone. After all, it's only money, I mean it's not like it's a controlled substance. I wonder why I haven't wondered this before.

The sky outside is dark and the windows are covered with condensation. Beyond the endless drone of Greek pop music I can hear the wind. It makes a whooing sound, like the wind in a cartoon. The door opens and Nicky and I look up. I expect to see Jacob Marley's ghost, but it's only Matt. He's not even wearing a coat, just his blue uniform with his name on the pocket.

“Coffee to go,” he says. I stop and stare at him. He looks really strange, and then I realize it's because he's not smiling. I wait for him to say something funny, but he just stands there, and his eyes are weird.

“Double or nothing?” I say, handing him his cup of coffee.

“Oscar's gone,” he says.

“He's gone? Where?”

“He passed.”

“He what?”

“Somebody kill him.”

“Killed him?” I inadvertently correct his grammar. “What are you saying? Somebody killed Oscar? No, Matt. No, that's impossible, no one would kill him.”

“Some truck driver. You know Oscar was learning to drive. He cut this dude off, so the motherfucker got out at an intersection and smashed in his windows with a tire iron, then he start hitting Oscar. Beat him to death.” Matt hands me a quarter for the coffee, then starts to leave. Then he turns back and hands me another quarter. There are tears in his eyes.

“Thank you,” I say automatically as he walks away. Then I call after him, “Matt!” but he's already out the door.

I put the rag I'm holding down on the counter, wander over to a booth, and sit down. I try to look out the window, but all I see are smears of light. I cross my arms on the table and lay my head down on them. Then I start sobbing and can't stop.

When I get home, my parents are already asleep. I hear them stir, and my mother calls out, “Rachel, is that you?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

I am about to walk up the stairs to my room when I remember that it's being wallpapered, so I go into my father's study, curl up on the couch and wrap myself in an old blanket. I lie there crying for a while, thinking about Oscar at first, and then Bando, and then it seems like I am crying because it's all so sad, everything, so sad and futile and dark.

The next morning, I ride with my parents to the university and catch a bus from there to the airport. I carry my backpack with the ten thousand dollars in it onto the plane.

Then we are airborne.

I can tell we are nearing L.A. because when I look out the window, I see small patches of blue on the ground: rectangles, ovals, kidney-shapes. At this point the plane makes a weird sound and seems to stop in mid-flight. I am about to panic when I remember that planes always do this, and it always turns out okay. To be on the safe side, I close my eyes and concentrate on keeping the plane aloft. “Please,” I think, “not yet.”

The flight attendant tells us to stow everything under our seats. I pick up my backpack and check to see if everything is there: my ticket, my wallet, my travelers' checks, my ten thousand dollars. I have also brought a letter from Michael that turned up when the painters moved my bed—his last letter, the one I'd tossed back under there instead of throwing it away. I have still not opened it. I guess I think if I don't open it and read it, it has never existed—the old tree-falling-in-the-forest thing. Not facing reality is still an important part of my ongoing attempt to rescript things with my mind, despite reality's general refusal to play ball.

The arrivals terminal is red and round, like the inside of a heart. I scan the faces lined up to greet the passengers, though I know no one is meeting me. All around me people are falling into each others' arms, squealing with delight. Someone with balloons yells, “Happy New Year!” The clock on the wall says it's two o'clock, not quite the new year yet. At first I think the time is wrong—my plane took off at noon, and it was a four hour flight—but then I remember that I am now in a different time zone. This is exactly what I
want to be in, I think, not just a different time zone but a separate parallel universe in which everything happened some other way.

I go downstairs and rent a car.

I am heading north on the 405 in a 1974 Gremlin with 3,000 miles on it. On either side of the freeway are warehouses, industrial plants, oil tanks, the scrawny tops of palm trees peeking up between them. Behind my new sunglasses the sky is perfect with no clouds, not even any brown around the edges. A tow-truck to my right is hauling the crumpled remains of a Gremlin just like the one I'm in. I can see bloodstains on the seats. Parallel universe, I think, and click on the radio. The radio is playing a disco song called “Right Back Where I Started From.” I click the radio off.

When I get to Santa Monica I check into a small, cheap motel a block or so from the ocean. Michael and I used to stay here sometimes when we wanted to be near the beach. We would drive up the coast to Malibu and spend the day doing beach stuff, then eat seafood at a shack on Pacific Coast Highway. At the time it hadn't seemed like any big deal, but now it seems as miraculous as if we had dined on clouds. The woman at the desk doesn't remember me, but then I don't expect her to. I'm not even sure Michael will remember me.

I stroll past the pool, where old people with zinc ointment all over their noses and skin like the hides of armadillos loll in lounge chairs, holding three-sided mirrors up to their faces to enhance the sun's rays. I walk up the steps to a balcony and find my room. It smells of smoke and Windex. I throw my backpack on a chair and pull the drapes open
so I can look out at the pool. Beyond it are the roofs of squat stucco houses and beyond them, a row of palm trees. Beyond the palm trees, beneath a blankness in the sky, is the ocean. I can't see it, but I know it is there. The sun is starting to lower, and the light is golden. “I've missed you,” I say to the ocean.

“Why did you stay away so long?” the ocean asks me.

“Because I didn't know,” I say.

I take a piece of paper out of my wallet and unfold it: the directions to Fletcher's house. On the back, I have written Michael's parents' phone number. I sit down on one of the two double beds and bounce up and down. I hold the piece of paper in one hand and pick up the telephone receiver with the other. Then I hang it up again. I sit there, my heart pounding. Then I go to my backpack, pull out the letter I've brought with me, and open it.

It's two small sheets of gray stationery. “Rachel,” it says in Michael's familiar calligraphic handwriting. “I want you to know that I can see this from your point of view. After all, what is there for you to do here—sit around and wait three years while I do this fucking stupid thing? I hate law school, I HATE it, I feel like I am going to die from how sterile and lonely it is and how it has nothing to do with what I love. Used to love. Now I don't love anything. I guess you reach a point in life where you forget how to float in the air. It's exactly what I never wanted to have happen to me, and I thought we were exempt from the rules of gravity, but I'm going to resign myself to them, like someone falling. So I wanted you to know you have done the right thing by flying away. It's selfish of me to wish that you hadn't and that you were still here and we could talk all night while it
rains.” I am about to put the letter back in the envelope when I notice that something else is written on the back of the second page. “It was hard for me to understand how you could just forget everything. But now I get it, it's like you can rewrite reality the way you want it to be and then it is that way, and you probably don't even remember how the moon was full and the sand was fluorescent.”

I pick up the phone and dial.

I expect his parents to answer the phone, but it's Michael. When I hear his voice, I feel an electric current run through me as different astral worlds crash into each other. For a moment, I don't say anything. Then I say, “Hey, it's me.”

At first I can't see him very well. The sun is behind him, and his face is shadowed. As my eyes adjust, I take a few steps backwards, but that just makes it worse: he is silhouetted in gold like someone in a Renaissance painting.

“Why would I want to see you?” he had said on the phone.

“No reason,” I said. “Just because it's me. Afterwards you can pretend it was all a dream.”

As his features come into focus, I can see his eyes, dark blue with flecks of yellow, his crooked nose, his small, unsmiling mouth. I feel like I'm waking up from a long nap, like Rip Van Winkle, and this is what the world looks like now. “Are you going to come in?” I ask. He just stands in the doorway. I grab his hand and pull him into the room, closing the door behind him so he can't escape.

It turns out I am wrong—he has not cut his hair very short and bought a three-piece suit. In fact, his hair has grown past his shoulders, and he is wearing a small gold hoop earring. Instead of a suit, he is wearing a white denim jacket over a long white cotton Indian shirt and white jeans. I find that he still looks delicious, like a dessert, and tropical, like one of Carmen Miranda's hats, lush as a rainforest, and I have an urge to lunge at him, throw my arms around him, and knock him onto the bed—but I notice he is giving me a not entirely friendly look, and then I remember that in this universe, in this century, I have not answered or even opened a single one of his letters since last July. My mind casts about for someone to blame—Cookie? Rachel? No one volunteers.

I move closer to him, slowly as if stalking him, and reach my arms inside his jacket. He doesn't respond, but at least he doesn't run away. I clasp my hands behind him and lean back to gaze into his face, something I have done a million times in a million other universes. We are locked inside a kaleidoscope and the gesture repeats eternally. Perhaps out of habit, caught in the mechanism of this stance, he kisses me on the cheek, then pulls his face away so I can't turn the kiss into anything more intense.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” he says. We stand there staring at each other. Then he says, “Let's go get some coffee.” He steps back, breaking my hold on him.

Bob's Big Boy smells exactly like Diana's—burnt coffee, french fries, toast—and they have the same dishes, milky white with a strip of gold applique. At first I think I am going to have to go into the bathroom and throw up, even though I haven't eaten anything since my mother forced a bagel on me on my way out of the house this morning. (On the plane, I cut a piece of mystery meat into tiny pieces and left it there.) The waitress hands us tall heavily-laminated menus that are about forty pages long. I open mine and look for something that will not make me puke.

“Coffee?” asks the waitress, whose nametag says her name is Sandy. Her hair is done in an enormous beehive, though the beehive part is obviously a hairpiece, as it is a different color from the rest of her hair. I remember these hairstyles were popular when I was about six and I used to see the teenagers dancing to rock and roll. It reminds me of those songs I'd heard snatches of from people's transistor radios, “He's So Fine” and “My Boyfriend's Back.”

“Do you need any waitresses here?” I ask Sandy.

“Not right now,” she says. “Maybe next month. Coffee?”

Michael says yes. I say, “I'll have a hot fudge sundae.”

Michael is drinking coffee, and I am eating fake ice cream that tastes like plastic and has come with a little silver dish of hot fudge sauce. I have developed a system of pouring sauce in, taking a bite, pouring more sauce in, taking another bite . . . It tastes incredible, in fact it's the first solid food that has tasted good to me in months, and I could go on and on like this for hours, but unfortunately I eventually run out of sauce and ice cream. I could order another one, but I don't want to press my luck.

He has still not asked me what I'm doing here. Instead, we have been having a conversation about his parents' house, which is on the verge of falling off a cliff and has to be shored up with fresh concrete every month. Their patio is evidently now at the bottom of a canyon. To make matters worse, his parents' dog, a whippet, has not been feeling well ever since it killed a jackrabbit behind the cabanas. The burning question seems to be, is it a physical illness or is the dog simply suffering from remorse? I can ride this out, I tell myself. I imagine myself surfing at Malibu, far offshore, although I have never been on a surfboard in my life.

I sprawl on one of the double beds in my room, and Michael sits in a chair across from me. He is telling me all about law school and making it sound like such a blast that if I hadn't just read his letter about how horrible it is I would be dashing out the door to take the LSATs. I'm fading in and out on what he is saying. Mostly I am watching him and
feeling peace ease into me, the same feeling I had months ago when I found that potholder in the cheeseburger guy's kitchen, this feeling that I haven't been sure until now came from my connection with Michael. Every couple of minutes the feeling is interrupted by a special bulletin from my brain telling me that I have no right to be so comfortable around this person, that he no longer cares for me, that our lives have split into totally separate trajectories, that he has changed and is talking about torts and contracts, not Yeats or Bob Marley, and probably has another girlfriend by now or maybe two or three, girls who answer his letters and buy him fancy kitchen stuff and go to the beach with him when the moon is full and pretend to be werewolves, dance in the sand with him, girls who have never seen snow and wear bright colors, Hawaiian shirts, purple bell-bottoms, girls who—

“You're falling asleep. I should leave.”

“No I'm not.”

“Yes you are. Your eyes were totally closed.”

“I'm just resting them. Sorry. It's been a long day—in fact, my day had two extra hours. I wish they all did. Do you think I should get a job as a flight attendant?”

“I don't know, Rachel. I have no idea what you should do.”

“What time is it?”

“I don't know. I don't have a watch.”

“You still don't have a watch? That's funny, I assumed you'd be a watch-wearer by now.”

“I think it's probably about ten.”

“That would be midnight my time.”

“I'd better let you get some rest.”

“No, it's the new year now. At least for me it is. Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year.” He still has this weird, different face, with a kind of deadness in it. My Michael was always smiling at me, dancing, warm, fluid—this Michael is stiff, with hard, icy edges.

“Have I done this?” I accidentally say out loud.

“What?”

“I didn't mean for this to happen. I didn't know—it was like I was—”

“I need to go,” he says, standing up and shaking his head so his hair is freed from where it has been trapped by his collar. This gesture hurts my insides so much it's like someone has stabbed me.

“Michael,” I say.

“What?”

“Michael.” I hold out my arms to him. “Please. Come here. Please. Stay.”

When I open my eyes, I see his golden hair, his neck, his left shoulder, and in my left ear I hear him breathing. The fingers of my left hand and of his right are locked together. We are making sounds I had forgotten about, sounds I remember from our old bed and how warm and safe and passionate it was, then suddenly I am feeling not sexual passion at all but this awful hollowness, this cave I've been trapped in, and I close my eyes again as tears squeeze past my eyelids and run into my ears. He stops moving and says, “Rachel?” My eyes are still closed, and I feel his hand on my face, smoothing my hair away from my cheek. I open my eyes and look at him, and he looks at me. I see my reflection in
each of his eyes as we start moving together again. I close my eyes, and behind my eyelids, seasons change, turquoise, gold, red.