Ride Around Shining (4 page)

I sometimes had the sense that she was familiar with me, and flirted with me even, because she thought we had some particular, indefinable thing in common. It wasn't the blue-blooded stuff—I was always worried she was going to see right through that. It was a white thing, somehow. I lived in the city, I knew about records, and I was taciturn enough to appear fashionable. I felt the whole of her faint interest in me came out of these things. What drew me to her world was one of the very things that discontented her about it: the dearth of people like me. She turned to me like a confidant from the distant world of whiteness and leafed through me like a hipster primer, not knowing how poorly I would prepare her for that world.

As we turned up Thirty-Third, she began to roll herself another cigarette, and for a moment the sweetish smell of the tony old stuff filled the car. “That smells like my uncle's
Wall Street Week
tobacco,” I said.

She eyed me with a brow up. “His what?”

“He had a pipe. But he'd only smoke it on Friday nights, during
Wall Street Week
.”

“My dad watched that show,” she said. “Great-Uncle Bobby taught Louie Rukeyser at Princeton.”

I felt enamored of these names, yet irritated by them, too. I couldn't believe she couldn't hear how she sounded. “Louie and Great-Uncle Bobby,” I repeated witheringly. “Louie and Great-Uncle Bobby played Diplomacy in the study at Fort Nancy,” I said, clipping each of the words.

She eyed me like I was acting crazy, and the talk died once more. We snaked through the streets of old, elegant neighborhoods I only knew as whorls on maps, and she tucked her cigarette into a flowered metal case.

“I used to wish I'd gone to Princeton is all,” I said at last, just to get it behind us.

“No you didn't,” she said decisively. It was like this was common knowledge among all the informed people of the Eastern Seaboard.

“A couple of my uncles went there,” I said. “The last of our money.”

She snickered. “Do we have to start on that today? The ongoing saga!”

Her voice broke out scathing, softened by laughter but not much. It did that sometimes, became exuberant or savage from out of a perfect composure—it had pounce. She laughed to herself, delighted at her own rudeness, her little jokes. When she saw I wasn't amused her little hand flashed out at me for a moment, and I thought she was going to cup my face and cry “Poor baby,” or maybe flick my ear or something. Her little wrists flashed at me between the seats, wanting to be grabbed.

“If the missus finds my history tedious . . .” I began, thinking how easy it would be. I'd been provoked; it was Sunday; it wouldn't be out of line.

“The missus?” she laughed. “Last time it was madame. Can't keep your shit straight at all.”

Taking the wheel firmly with one hand, I watched my other shoot out and snatch one of her wrists, then seek on for the other. Still laughing, incredulous now, she twisted away from me instinctively, but when she brought her free hand up to pull my fingers off her wrist, I grabbed that, too. Having hold, I said nothing, but only sat up straight and drove calmly on, my face stern, showing her how adults behaved.

She too said nothing, only squirmed against me in silence. Massing her strength to pull away, she grunted in exertion, a fabulous noise. Failing, she pulled her wrists in, against the bare skin of her chest, into the light-boned valley of her. I'm sure she thought I'd let her off then, but I didn't feel compromised. With another low noise, she bucked and dipped her head, and I felt the brush of her hair against my hand. Seeing a light go yellow in front of us, I told her to look out, and for a moment before she wrenched free I felt against the delicate skin of my wrist the teeth of this feral girl.

We sat at the light in a swollen silence, breathing. The back of my wrist was damp. I tried to force my face to go blank again, to become that droop-lidded, expressionless face of servitude I'd practiced before the mirror, pleased at its classical look. She massaged her wrists and returned a strand of hair to its right place.

I'd made up my mind about her face by then all right. At first I'd thought it was just her stature, the star's wife with her exclusive girlhood, that it was all secondhand desire and conquest and snobbery, although God knows she seemed normal enough. And some star—that flare-gunner didn't even start. She was sweating then, just a little gleam around the temple, but it brought out her curious, unbeautiful face from beneath that haircut that looked like half a week's salary. Her nose was a little thin, a little prominent; her lips were thin. It was something her neighbors might get worked on, but she wasn't the type. Hers was a face that time would scarcely age, and I thought for how many years she'd look almost as girlish as that. If she had work she'd have to watch it fall apart. She didn't need it, after all: her eyes were like the ocean on a bad day, her thin mouth was wet and full of dry laughter, anyone would want to throw one into her narrow body, through her inscrutable judgments and her little bones.

She was looking at me strangely. “I'm sorry I taunt you,” she said. Her voice was flat, almost perfectly detached, yet I felt I could hear a husk of emotion beneath.

“I don't mind it.”

“But you do,” she said. She needn't have said that. I knew she knew, that I was hurt somehow to mix up these words.

“I'm sorry if I don't act like you're used to,” I said, surprised by the wounded hauteur in my own voice.

“I'm sorry you think I want you to.”

We passed another park and I glanced over, very businesslike, like maybe children were lining the road there, waiting to leap into traffic. Some rockabillies were playing kickball.

“Why'd you really send for me today?” I asked.

Her eyes roved slow over my face. “That's not your business, boy,” she said lightly. “Make a left at the next light.”

We came up on Alberta, a street the suburban myths of my first driving days held to be in the ghetto, and now a center of white return. All over North Portland, no corner market could breathe easy, no barbershop was safe from the visionary gentry. At first these places were just built up around, so they could stand as symbols of authenticity, but when the disharmony became deafening they'd give way, to become impractical boutiques. Going west toward the new development blocks, I watched the old, worn-down taco stands fade in anticipation of the gleaming new taquerias.

“You live in a place like this?”

She asked like she was sure, and I didn't contradict her. But in seeing these blocks through her eyes, the parodic figure of the concerned gentry, marching around with its dogs, supporting local businesses, looking at black people being poor and feeling responsible and putting on troubled faces as if to say, get off that stoop and do something noble so I can rejoice in your humanity—these figures faded, and then I couldn't deny that the place was beautiful, flush with the transitory luster of young money and relatively new ideas. She smiled wistfully at a sidewalk crowd waiting for brunch seats at that incongruous hour and I realized that here was her real city, that she'd found it already without me. Perhaps it could even stay this young forever, and we could all get together and march against the police or something, and eat barbecue, vegan barbecue, forever free from our histories.

I felt my failure of comportment recede a little under the pleasure of arbitrary judgments against whole neighborhoods, and watched Antonia's face gleam in the summer light.

“See?” she said. “This is the place. Why would you want to act like you live anywhere else? You're never going to have to meet my father.”

“Maybe I will,” I said. I could see myself shaking his hand, decorous and restrained, a self-made man.

We found the block she wanted and turned off into the side streets. She pointed me to a stop. I executed a fairly gorgeous Y-turn-into-parallel, and we parked on the other side of the street.

“You can shut it off,” she said.

We sat in front of a narrow, brightly colored house. The porch rails were striped vivid as candy, and leaning forward to look past her I could see there were new, bright flowers in the beds. The house looked too clean. The walk was freshly swept, the porch was bare, and the blinds on the windows were all drawn up exactly halfway.

She didn't say anything. She just sat there, her hands cupped quietly in her lap, looking at this house. I was surprised: I'd been driving Calyph to condos and lofts. This looked like the bright, attractive home a young couple might buy after getting minor promotions at their respective nonprofits and deciding they were ready to settle down and invest in a reason to start attending community meetings. And then, once again, my derision faded, and it was just a little house in the city, a bit cute for my style, but a place two people could live well in the shadow of its quaint impoverished history and fragrant old trees. I could see us there, renting the place, moving around inside behind the blinds on some afternoon like this, on the kitchen table or just only talking, as the summer air poured through the windows and the city went on around us, happy and unnoticing.

“Didn't even take the flyers out yet.”

“What?” I asked.

She opened her door. Stepping onto the sidewalk, she bent over a Realtor's sign I hadn't seen. She lifted the door of the plastic box on the signpost and took out all the flyers. The hooks on the bottom of the sign were empty, the house's status unknown. She held the flyers out for me to see as she came back to the car.

“It was supposed to be a secret,” I said.

“What was?” she asked, and I felt a sort of chill of understanding go over me.

“This house.”

“It is,” she said.

Antonia was determined
to be as remote from her husband's festivities as possible, and had me leave her behind on Alberta—to have dinner with a friend, she said. She wanted a pickup at nine, and I ended up back at my own place for a few hours.

All the latter half of that year I was subletting from an old bachelor who lived in the sprawling attic of a semidilapidated Victorian up near Forest Park. He was not, properly speaking, that old—a retired teacher of some soft subject, in his late fifties, gone to Alaska for the rest of the year—but in absentia he became each day a purer amalgam of his checkered ties, folded white socks, and all-too-vivid décor. His apartment was home to a number of curiosities. The narrow walls of the stair leading up to the apartment were papered with old concert posters and ads for Mexican wine. Mardi Gras beads hung everywhere in the kitchen, over things that seemed to want no adornment—the knob on the stove's exhaust hood, and the smoke detector.

I made a dinner of canned gumbo in his rusting galley kitchen and took it into the front room to eat. The room was like a plaintive advertisement for literacy. The high table was stacked with books almost exclusively on the subject of love, and the coffee table was lined inches deep with old newspapers from everywhere—I put my bowl on a yellowing copy of
Le Monde
. Maybe the look and smell of old newsprint just fired the bachelor's tepid, remembering blood, but the whole place seemed to be awkwardly waiting for something. Like the unused candles in Calyph's living room, the room appeared partially a pose, a display of moldering erudition he'd set as carefully as a trap and then had to live amid, season after season. It was as though he was just waiting for some woman to come up his groaning stair and turn the corner and say, “Why, look at all these beautiful
books
.” Her face would become suffused with kindred light, and he would be a bachelor no longer.

But, God, he put himself all out there. It was his home, and it was his right, and I was just a stranger paying to be there, but I felt like every day I lived there I was leafing through his loneliness. Every time I put down a glass of water, it seemed like I might watermark his soul. A woman would have to displace six solemn artifacts of his heart just to sit down in that place. Sometimes I'd look up, at the photographs of his parents and the pencil-sketched self-portraits and the watercolor nude he'd painted himself, and it seemed his too-open heart itself hung on the wall among them, its ventricles sloughing in the exposure.

When I liked being a servant, it was because it gave me a code that demanded I not be like the bachelor. Your heart is your own, it said, now never show it. Plant it in a dark room, in rich soil, where it will age well and grow so wine-dark and full no nail will ever hold it to a wall. When I made improvements to my past, and even when I took liberties within my work, I felt what I said and did were not wrongs, because they were all done in fidelity to my new buried heart. The thing was growing in bulges. Strange new shoots were flying out of the earth, and I had to accept them and tend to them even when they came in strange guises and surprised me. When I felt I ought to grab Antonia, or tip that sculpture over, I knew I must go through with these things, in spite of their danger, lest in denying this new energy mine should shrivel back again into a lackey's heart, as dry and small as a walnut carried around in an old paper sack. I didn't mean to cause them any real trouble.

When I brought her home
the status cars were all departed, leaving great ruts at the edge of the drive. We went over the blacktop and onto the gravel and I saw the house was dark but for the debris: there was an inexplicable mound of popcorn on the apron of the garage, and on the front steps a few discarded beer bottles lay gleaming greenly in the moon.

Antonia had gotten a flower from somewhere and twined it in her hair, and coming from her dinner she looked beautiful, and the flower looked somehow flagrant. She seemed full of health, as though she'd drunk a lot of special juice and washed her face in a bowl of rainwater. The flower was a blue, open, fleshy-looking thing, and I remember feeling that she ought to take it out from there, that it was immodest. The stem rested above her ear, and, turning back to her now in the moonlight, I saw the faintest line of residue running down her neck where a drop of water had trickled out and dried.