My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (15 page)

That night, we sat in front of the fireplace and charted her family tree, her origins and relations, and then we did mine, and she listened to me as I told her about my own histories, my own family, how I'd started writing a book about it, mostly because I wanted to understand it myself. We sat down at a table and did a Venn diagram of my family, then hers, and we asked questions about one another and told stories about each member of our immediate families. While I was comfortable and open and transparent, I felt there was a lot that Steph was not saying, was leaving for the reader to imagine instead of trusting the author, so to speak, in much the same manner of the authors she loved best, who demurred and dithered and shifted with language and never told you outright what the truth of the moment might be, sort of the opposite of poetry.

But that was Steph, I was beginning to understand, and I decided I really liked her. She was a bad fit for the world, in much the same manner that I felt I'd been, and she was this tidy little combination of Sinead O'Connor's commitment to her beliefs cross-pollinated with Wolverine's ferocity. Sort of a modern-day Patricia Highsmith, before the mental illness.

It worked well for us, I thought, because once, before his event, Derek had told me I was a lot like the Hulk. “Except, maybe angrier,” he added, on second thought.

And I admired her, as a person: She would work only for companies that had a cause, nonprofits. Would take a much lower wage than she could draw, if she felt committed to the larger cause. Currently, she said, she was tackling breast cancer.

That impressed me, as someone who couldn't think past my next paycheck.

I found out she also loved camping, was very much into the rural Henry David Thoreau self-independence thing that Yankees actually take seriously, since she hailed from the land of H. P. Lovecraft. I knew she loved reading, I knew she wasn't a fan of movies or television, and I knew she would go on mystic urban walkabouts with Cleo. I knew, eventually, that she'd been involved in a ten-year relationship with another woman and was now swinging back around to boys. I knew she wasn't big on food or drinks or drinking, so that was going to be a mark against her, because I'd become quite the urban hipster, not a foodie exactly, but I'd dated a foodie, just enough to know how to navigate in that world, and I enjoyed it.

I knew she began seeing me as the sort of eroticized “other,” because I was Mexican American, from Texas. And I felt the same, as she was the slim-hipped gentile goal of every immigrant story, as I've mentioned before.

We ended the summer by driving a bit north to one of the many beachside parks that dot some of the water-view neighborhoods overlooking Puget Sound. Since it was a nice Saturday afternoon, it was fairly busy, so we took off our shoes and meandered in the hard, wet sand, walked along the shore and looked at all the beach art left behind by kids and hippies and the artistically inclined, using water-logged detritus as media.

We stopped by an embedded labyrinth of shells, laid out large in a swirling conch pattern, and entered at the open end; we made it halfway around before I stopped and said, “I can't go on; I'm afraid I'll never make it back out,” and Steph laughed and thought I was speaking metaphorically about our relationship, and something flickered for a minute, and then vanished and was gone.

Her phone chimed the Cole Porter song and it was her mother, calling from Steph's hometown, and she decided to answer it. She sat on a log and made a kind of radio theater of her own with that conversation because she knew I was listening, and she helped paint a portrait of Rockwellian rhapsody, flared the phone out so I could hear her mother going on and on about how she and the other doyenne of their small town had banded together to keep a large “box store” out of the town square, and how happy they were in keeping the provincial integrity of the town. It was Arcadian, hearing them engage like that, and lit up every point on my compass; I wanted to be in, wanted to be a part of this bucolic idealization of Americana. It was something I thought I really wanted, back then.

“What do they have against boxes?” I asked.

“Not that kind of store,” Steph said, laughing, and if there had been the thin bat squeak of something big brewing earlier on, it was an all-out foghorn in that goofy grin she gave me, when she wrapped her arm over my neck and kissed me on the cheek, and we wandered back through the beach to her Jeep.

It had taken a month for Stephanie to come clean and tell me what drove her west, what drove her to put so much distance between herself and her family, in the way I had done with mine. We were on another of the long, woodsy walks she loved to take with her dog, and I started telling her about Derek, and the wound that event had left on all of my family.

She was quiet for a while, and then somewhere in there she decided to tell me about her own reasons for moving to Seattle, her reasons for putting a whole country between her future and her past, but not until we were back at her house and in the safety of her basement bedroom, curled up in her huge sleigh bed.

She was twenty-two, she said, and she'd been driving a small car, a compact two-door Mazda, with someone she'd been dating in the front seat and her younger brother in the backseat, when she was home for a weekend from college.

An old man with a brain tumor, confused, in a large car, entered the highway going the opposite direction, came right at them, just on the opposite side of a rise in the road.

“He was just there, out of nowhere,” she told me as we were lying quietly in bed.

“Jesus, Steph; I'm so sorry.”

“My little brother was killed, from the backseat. I wasn't expected to survive. The other person wasn't even bruised. Funny how car wrecks are.”

I remained quiet, unsure what to say.

“My skull was cracked in the impact. That's why I call it ‘my dented head' sometimes. I heard my little brother dying, in the wreck. I kept telling him to hang on, but he was already too far gone. I have epilepsy now, as a result. And a plate in my head. That's why you can see that scar, going around.”

I pulled her hair back a bit and noticed a small, thin line circling her scalp, like she said. I studied her face a little closer and saw that it was structurally unsound, like a Picasso painting.

“You poor thing,” I said, not sure what else to do.

“I take medication to control the epilepsy, but sometimes it makes my thinking too fuzzy.”

I was concerned more for the plate in her head. How do you protect yourself from that?

“And the plate, in your head, what's that like?”

“I can't feel it,” she said. “It's just there.”

“Hunh.”

Run away
, I thought to myself.
I can't help here. This is much bigger than me
.

Still, I was drawn to her, for some reason. Drawn to the anguish, the brokenness, and more than anything else, the intelligence, and the misfit quality.

She's like me
, I thought.
And if there's redemption for her, there's redemption for me
.

We'll do it together.

I began to suspect something was seriously wrong with her on the way back from our drive to eastern Washington, after I'd had an interview with a small company, specializing in bilingual marketing, that intended on growing into a media firm. Currently the owners were responsible for products that were travesties to printed publication, at least in English, as they claimed their Spanish was sublime, but I wasn't a good judge of that; I write in Spanish the way Irvine Welsh writes in English. I'd read about them in a business journal, seen an opportunity and leapt for it, offering to clean up their product and raise their profile so they could compete in larger, more sophisticated urban markets.

Great, they'd said; come out to the eastern part of the state and let's see if we can come to terms.
Fantastic
, I thought: This was the opportunity I'd been looking for, within my skill set and at my leisure. I could work from home, off a laptop. Freedom at last.

So I rented a car and invited Steph, thought we could do with a stretch of the legs for a Saturday afternoon, since we were still getting to know one another.

I had a meeting with the business owners, two families of second-generation Mexican-American heritage, who grew up in the agricultural stratums of eastern Washington, their parents pickers before them, and now, this generation of children graduated from state colleges and set to illuminate the world, or at least their corner of the state, with the power of the Hispanic dollar and the megachurch. But first, they needed a spell checker, an upgrade to their literacy, and corporate identity in their literature, which was currently being produced by two high school seniors on Photoshop. It was shockingly bad.

Off we went, and the four-hour drive was not without its weirdness, as we had both made playlists for the trip. I began to notice that Steph was taking the lyrical insinuations from the songs I'd picked with just a bit too much sincerity, far too literally, and much too personally, to the point where she was becoming visibly upset at particular songs, which, to me, were an enduring liturgy of wordplay and the weary exhaustion of dying relationships—but certainly not a reflection on what was going on in that car, at that time. They were just good songs.

But Steph felt I was telling her something, through the music, and she was getting angry.

“Is that what you're trying to tell me? That this relationship is not realistic?”

“Steph, this is weird. It's just a song. The lyrics are fantastic; I thought you'd like it because you like words so much. This writing is some of the best I've heard in the last ten years.”

“Why does it have to be so cynical?”

It was true, I began to notice: Everything she was playing was bordering on the coy, the optimistically naive and bubbly. Everything I was playing was
musica verité
, the deep complications and sharp-edged intricacies of relationships. I had none of her optimism, which, in all candor, I felt was put on and insincere. There was a sense of the forced, with her optimism, a desperation that I felt undermined any sense of calm or meditative guarantee of a positive outcome.