What Lies Between Us (16 page)

But one has survived. One shrimp has outgrown his kin by inches and outlived all his kind. In his red carapace like a king's mantle, his antennae bristling, he moves about the aquarium, climbs rocks to survey his kingdom, brings pincers to his face to feed himself. I call him Godzilla for his ability to survive devastation. He reminds me of those days when the river was my life. The days before water became dangerous, but here water is small and contained. Here I can watch Godzilla in his busy life and wonder if he too watches me as I come and go. He is my closest companion in these solitary days.

*   *   *

Days off I spend among flowers. When I first saw the dahlia grove at Golden Gate Park there was a moment of breathless recognition. How I had missed the flowers I grew up amongst! Those luscious crab claws and jacaranda of childhood. But here too are monster blossoms with wild faces. Not the same, because this soil, this air, yields different beauties, but likewise seductive. I gaped at them, worshiped their tumbled madness or precisely placed geometry. From the lightest champagne pink to the bloodiest midnight dark they turned their bold faces to the sun, and I wanted to kiss each one. So I cajoled and worked my way through the ranks of volunteers until I am here once a week. My fingers in the dirt, stripping away dead leaves, loving these flowers.

*   *   *

This is my life. A private undertaking. A place of refuge and solitary pleasures. And then, as always, everything changes.

Most evenings I am home curled up with a textbook. The human body doles out its secrets bit by bit, so there is always more to learn. But this night I am restless. A warm spell has fallen over the city. It is a rare enough thing to make people spill out into the open, everyone giddy at the thought of walking the streets without jackets, sweaters, scarves. There is the feel of a holiday. I feel a pounding restlessness in my blood, and soon the textbook is abandoned and I am pacing the apartment, not sure what to do with myself. My phone pings. It is Nadine, a nurse on my floor who has been after me to come out for ages. She has said, “You need to get out more. You're alone too much.” Now she texts,
My new dude is spinning. At the Elbow Room. Come?

I thumb back,
Yes
☺

What? Really?!?
☺ ☺ ☺ ☺

I am already pulling on my shoes.

I walk down the long stretch of Twenty-fourth Street to the bar, where shimmering curls of silver ribbon hang from the ceiling and throw swirls of light around the dim interior. It's packed and loud; it feels like we are all swimming underwater, moving through some green, lightning-streaked liquid. Nadine grabs my hand as I walk by, pulls me into a booth, pushes an icy bottle of beer into my hand. A man she knows crowds in next to me and suddenly I am at sea.

He doesn't look at me. I don't look at him. We don't talk to each other. But I can feel his long thigh resting against mine, the heat of it almost too much to bear. He talks to the others squashed into the booth with us. I can't tell who they are. Everything is loud and overwhelming. I sit mute. Nadine is already drunk. She points at me with her beer bottle and says, “This is…” But my name is swallowed up by the music and the voices.

I feel my face flare up. He turns to look at me, says, “What
is
your name?” And I lean into him and whisper it like a secret, and he looks at me and nods; some recognition sparks in both of us.

He says, “Let's dance.” And I am shaking my head. “No, no, no. I don't dance.” But he is laughing and saying, “I bet you do,” and he reaches out and our fingers interlock and we stand up and then he is pushing through the crowd, pulling me along.

On the floor, a crush of bodies, sweat spilling from skin to skin. I am shy, but then the music enters my bloodstream. It takes over my pulse and my feet. My fingers are undulating and I am unwinding and uncurling and expanding and laughing riotously with this man who has appeared like something mythical, something magnificent. We dance for hours, his body connected to mine by the music. We stomp and twirl and make faces. We are camp to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, melancholy to “True Colors,” singing at the tops of our voices along with the crowd, sweeping our arms in poetic gesture, then frenzied when the DJ reverts to drum and bass and the whole place is only bodies moving to rhythm.

Then the lights turn on and we are all blinking in the glare like beached fish and he turns to me. His eyes are startlingly blue in the sudden light, blue as deep water. He says, “Do you want to come and see my view from the roof?”

I've never done anything like this before. Later I will feel surprise and even shock that I agreed so quickly. I, who am so used to dodging love. But at this moment I know, with a sureness I've never felt about anything else in my life, that this man is magic.

*   *   *

We walk up the hill to Noe Valley, suddenly awkward. He lives in a house perched on a side street off Twenty-fourth. He has three roommates, he says, but they are all probably out on this beautiful night. We enter the house. His room in the back is large, cavelike, and high-ceilinged, and on every wall are paintings that looked like they have been ripped out of art books, bought at thrift stores, some framed, some taped from the back. Along these walls turned away from sight are stacks and stacks of canvases.

He goes to get us wine, and in the dim light I study the painting on the wall closest to me. A Japanese print showing a few figures hurrying across a bridge, bare pale legs, the shards of a storm coming down, a riot of waves rising underneath. I move to another and see a woman writhing on the ocean's edge. She is caught in the coils of a giant octopus, tentacles snaking all over her body. I look more closely, feel my face flare up. She's rearing back in pleasure, her fingers at her crotch, her snorkel mask forgotten at her throat, and the water gathered at her back. The octopus, enormous and frightening but also erotic, holds her captive. Its tentacles stretch around her ankles, drape around her arms; one encircles an aroused nipple as she pleasures herself. I imagine these tentacles moving around me. How heavy they would be, how easy it would be to succumb to that embrace. Daniel next to me, hands me a glass of red, says, “Teraoka. Do you know him?” I shake my head, embarrassed that he has seen me looking.

He must sense this because he says, “Come on.” He grabs a throw from its place on an old chair and disappears through a window. I push through behind him and am borne into the night. He spreads the throw on the roof and we sit. It is astoundingly warm. There is a downward slant on the slate under us, making our toes curl in vertigo. Below us, late-night stragglers, arms around each other's waists, stumble home to bed. We perch above them, unseen, but seeing everything in the dim light of the sharp sickle moon. We talk shyly and carefully through the wine. I don't remember what was said, just that it was said breathlessly. When he reaches over to kiss me I surprise myself by not pulling away as I have done so often. Then there is a dizzy roll, a loss of gravity, a sort of slipping and sliding. His mouth and his scent and a thousand giddy kisses, a hungry taking of tongue and breath and taste, and somehow we have rolled to the very edge of the roof; just below us is a drop into the now-silent street. We look down and laugh because we are invincible, and nothing, not even that empty space just below our heads, is frightening.

And then he says, “Bed?” and stands up and I follow him as he scrambles up the roof and stumbles through the window and toward the bed. He pulls my hand, kisses me more softly, seeing that the atmosphere has changed, but I shake my head and pull away. I cannot do this. There are terrible memories in my skin. I walk out of his door as he calls out, “Can I call you?” I shake my head hard, say, “No, absolutely not. I'm
not
available.” It is a warning and a threat. I close the door quietly behind me and pray never to see him again.

*   *   *

His name is Daniel. He is an artist, a painter in oils and gauche. In the daytime he handles art for museums and collections; at night he paints. He's twenty-nine, a year older than me. Nadine tells me all this. She tells me he's been asking about me, asking for my number. She asks if she can give it to him and I say, “No!” and then I go home and look up meanings of the name Daniel. It means “judgment of God.” I shudder. That's the last thing I need. I read this about men of this name: “Daniels tend to be passionate, compassionate, intuitive, romantic, and to have magnetic personalities. They are usually humanitarian, broad-minded and generous, and tend to follow professions where they can serve humanity. Because they are so affectionate and giving, they may be imposed on. They are romantic and easily fall in love, but may be easily hurt and are sometimes quick-tempered.”

I look up that artist—Teraoka, he had said. I find a cross-eyed geisha, her long tongue intent on her ice-cream cone, characters caught in a shipwreck, and many, many women writhing in the giant octopus's embrace.

I slam my laptop shut and shower as I always do under burning hot water. I eat my solitary dinner, my eyes on the textbook in front of me. And later I look down to see that I have drawn his name in looping octopus curlicues in the margins of my perfect and ordered notes.

*   *   *

I wait for Nadine to ask again. I have to wait days, but then she asks and I say yes, give him my number, and I ignore the Cheshire cat grin that stretches across her face.

He calls. We talk. I tell him I prefer texts because I am busy. So then he texts and asks me out. I say yes. He will pick me up on a Saturday morning. I am beside myself that morning. What will I wear? I throw clothes on the bed, huge discarded piles of everything I own. I strew shoes across my perfect apartment. Godzilla watches me from his tank; he has never seen me so nervous. I settle on the most innocuous clothes—a sweatshirt, jeans. I cannot bear the thought that this man might see he has unsettled me.

He picks me up. The sun is shining. We drive toward the water. I had thought we would have lunch, see a movie. Instead he says he wants to walk the Golden Gate Bridge with me. I've never done this. It's always seemed the dominion of tourists. We park and walk along the bridge. Water crashes blue-green under our feet. We hang our heads over the edge and watch the ocean dashing itself against the rocks, breaking itself into a million silver bits. We turn to look up into the sparkling sky, the arches of the bridge stretching high into the air above our heads. I point to the other side and say, “That way is Asia!” Excited as a school kid, he laughs and grabs my hand. We walk along in the most perfect silence, our heartbeats in synch, our bodies reaching out to each other, our nostrils flared to catch each other's scent.

*   *   *

Later he kisses me slowly and carefully. I feel the tightly wound cocoon of myself loosen and begin to unravel, but it is months before I am convinced into his bed. When he enters me, I hold on to his shoulders and weep. Here are memories under the skin that are being released. But for him I can bear them. He asks with his eyes if he should stop and I shake my head and hold on harder and his tongue shoots out and licks away my tears and I sob until he comes. Just before we fall asleep, I whisper, “If you leave, I will die.” He's mostly asleep, but he kisses my eyelids, whispers, “Never.” Sated, still and calm, I fall asleep with him still softening inside me.

*   *   *

It is astounding, the way we fit together. And there must be some alchemy that happens in sleep on that first night, because this is how we sleep from that day on. My back cleaved to his front, his lips against my shoulder, his long body curved around mine. He holds my wrist between his fingers, his thumb on my pulse. Our moving and shifting in darkness is always choreographed—an elbow accommodated, a neck nuzzled, knees folded into each other. There is never an expanse of sheet between us. Always just the sacred resting of these two bodies entwined.

*   *   *

We learn each other's lives. He grew up in West Virginia, a place that feels as exotic to me as Sri Lanka must feel to him. I say, “Coal? Isn't that what you have there?”

He laughs. “Yes, but my dad is a doctor. We lived in Charleston. It was as big as a city gets out there, but I wanted out as soon as possible. So I did what all the kids do. I packed up and went to art school in New York.” He says he went to a place called Cooper Union. I don't know what this means until I look it up later and realize it's the best art school in the country, that they accept only a handful of the most talented young applicants every year. “Why didn't you tell me?” I ask. He makes a wry face, says, “New York … all of that. It didn't end well for me.” He won't tell me more. I let it be. We all have our secrets.

For money he works as an art handler. There are five of them in the company. All young artists, driven and talented but forced to handle other people's work to survive. They drive to rich people's houses in Marin, in Pacific Heights, to install the private collections. The most expensive collections are in the houses where Broadway meets the Presidio, he says. He tells me about a house perched over the city that feels exactly like stepping into an eighteenth-century Italian villa. Another house is so modern that walking in, one is greeted by a cement wall and a huge photograph of a woman pissing into a man's upturned mouth. He has put up displays at MOMA, at the De Young, at the Asian Art Museum. “What's the most incredible thing you've touched?” I ask.

“The Monets,” he says. “To be that close. To see the brushstrokes…” He shakes his head and has no words for what it felt like to be that close to genius.

All around his bedroom are large and small canvases of his; others are stacked under his bed. He pulls them out to show me and I see the progression of his thoughts and talent. The early paintings are crowded and full of color. Later his style is simpler and cleaner, more graphic and beautiful, intensely emotional. One painting I love shows a young girl standing in an open doorway holding out a letter, a stork taking it from her hand. Overhead a whole gaggle of birds is flying past. It's called
Special Delivery
, he says. It's a metaphor for a young girl's losing her virginity, becoming pregnant. I hadn't seen it. They are messages, I realize. Each canvas a short story. He shows me piece after piece after piece. He asks, “What do you think? Do you like them?” Yes, of course, I like everything about him. Already I am a mirror. He is the image.