Don't Cry Stories Part 4

At three in the morning, Angelique had gone home, leaving the girl alone and very drunk. She was sitting on the pavement in the doorway of the vintage-record store at Sanchez and Eighteenth, the one with the silver mirror ball spinning in its window. The mirror ball was full of light from the dimly illuminated store, and out of it flew a horde of ghost lights, skimming dark walls and sleeping windows in a slow, s.h.i.+mmering curve. Secret and tucked away, the girl knelt beneath the curve of light, her hand on the pavement for balance. Her tapered nails and sparkling rings were fascinating against the concrete, which appeared wonderfully porous and soft, as if it had magically absorbed all the softness of the night. She was waiting for the boy to walk by Even if she couldn't talk to him, she wanted to see him.

It was a sad situation and might've been a disastrous one, except for one thing: It had caused the girl's heart to come open. This had never happened before. Because of the way her soul was hooked into her brain, whenever it had been touched by love, her brain had taken control and overruled her heart. But because of the missing place in her soul, her brain was in too much chaos to control her heart. And so it had come open for the first time. It was as if she had just discovered a hidden door leading to a place inside herself she'd never known to exist. This was a marvelous thing. Of course, she did not experience it that way; because her openness had come for someone who did not want her, she felt it as painful. And yet she made no attempt to close it. Her mind was still strong enough that she could've tried, but she didn't. The stolen piece of her soul silently compelled her to let it stay open. Her soul did this so that if it got loose, it would have a way back in. And so, without knowing what she was doing or why, the girl obeyed. She was steadfast and loyal, and she did not know it. She thought she was just a lovesick b.i.t.c.h. Because of what she thought, it shamed her to keep her heart open. But she did.

The ragged man approaching her on the street could see all of this from almost a block away. Significant pieces of his soul had been missing for years, and his endless search for them had caused his normal sense of sight to grow an invisible, voracious eye, which tirelessly scanned places most people would not wish to see. He saw her emptiness sucking at everything around it. He saw her open heart, full of feeling and pouring it all out. Emptiness and fullness, pulling in and pouring out with equal and opposite force, gave her an extraordinary psychic discharge more visible to him than the ghost lights. It made him curious. When he got close enough to see her, he was even more curious; she did not look like that kind of person.

Meanwhile, the boy was heading home in a taxi, bat girl in tow. He was in a philosophical mood. She was talking nonsense about art. That was okay with him. Her talk was like a glimmering curtain pulled back to reveal a stage with costumed people on it-and he was one of them. The curtain was moth-eaten and torn at the bottom, but that only made it better. The taxi turned down the mirror-ball street. He interrupted the girl. "Do you know why this is my favorite block in the city?"

She looked out the window, then looked back at him. He could tell she was thinking hard about it. He looked past her out the window; the dancing lights flirted with him and ran away. There were homeless people huddled in the dark storefront. He felt pity, plus curiosity. What was it like for them?

"Oh!" said the girl. "The record store?"

In fact, the ragged man was not homeless. He had a room in a tiny, rotting hotel with a hot plate, a buzzing box refrigerator, and stacks of magazines piled up against a wall. People a.s.sumed he was home-less because he stank and was ragged, because he asked for change, and because he was empty like the girl. His soul hadn't been stolen; he had lost it, gradually, over a period of years. He had lost much more than she had. Unlike hers, his soul had been connected to his heart. Because his heart had been deranged by the loss, he'd tried to call back his soul by opening his mind. It didn't work, and he had been without so much of his soul for so long that his open mind was like a gaping wound. His openness had made him wise, but it was not a wisdom he could do anything useful with. His mind hurt him all the time, and the constant hurt made him full of pity for everything that hurt. But because his pity came through his mind, it translated as a thought disturbance rather than feeling, and so was hard to express. He stood before the kneeling girl full of sympathy he couldn't feel and didn't know how to express.

"Do you want money?" she asked.

"Could you help me out?" He hadn't known what else to say. Reflexively, he extended his hand.

"Um, hold on." She opened her purse and pawed through it. Absently, she wondered if the man might rob her. She found her wallet, pulled a dollar from it, and handed it up to him. He took it and paused, as if trying to decide what to do. The circle of whirling lights enclosed them like a spell cast long ago and forgotten, all the force gone out of it but still haunting its spot. He was trying to remember how to talk to girls.

. "That's all I can give," she said. "I'm not rich."

He saw she had no idea what was happening to her. Even if he could talk to her, she would not be able to answer. Sorrow and loneliness roared through him-so much force that came to nothing. He decided to try anyway. "You aren't what you think," he said. "I don't know what I am," she answered.

You are a sack of things without a sack, he thought, but the thought sped by too fast. "Six farts going off in a bag," he said. "Broke the bag and fell out."

She gave a short, nervous laugh. Making a girl laugh-that was good. Grateful for her laughter and wanting very much to help, he decided to show her what was inside him. If you had been looking at him, you would've seen him open his coat and stand as if he were s.e.xually exposing himself. But that gesture was symbolic. Hoping that the girl would have eyes to see, he made his coat the cover for his daily self and, in opening it, revealed the disfigurement of his soul. He did it like a leper might stand in mute greeting before another leper. He did it to show understanding and also to warn.

Her personality didn't see, let alone recognize, what she had been shown; her personality just saw a homeless guy holding his coat open. But beneath her personality, her soul saw what he was showing and shrieked in fear. A block away, the missing piece came awake so suddenly that the other souls trapped in the room with it started and stirred, like restive animals. Do not let that happen, it signaled her. Do something-now! NOW!

At that moment, the boy and his guest walked into his room. Even though the boy was drunk, he was sensitive enough to feel the agitation present there. Not guessing what it was, he mistook it for his own excitement, and he thought he was more attracted to this girl than he was. The girl felt it, too, but, likewise, mistook it for the intensity of the boy himself Within moments, they were stretched out on his bed, kissing. This girl had no intention of revealing her soul. But in the charged atmosphere of the room, she couldn't hold it back altogether, and it floated to her surface, where he could feel it, just under her skin, delicious and tantalizing. She closed her eyes and arched her neck, and he saw the subtle beauty of her eyebrows, the elegant bone of her nose, the down that covered her face. He felt like he loved her, even though he knew he didn't.

The ragged man sighed and closed his coat. He thought he saw a flicker of recognition, but she just sat there, staring at him. He tried another approach.

"Why don't you go home?" he asked. "You shouldn't be out here."

"I'm waiting for someone."

"Oh," he said. "A... boyfriend?"

"Yeah."

His memory became a tunnel of girls, and he fell down it. Some of them were shouting angrily, others were indifferent, and some were laughing with happiness and kissing him with warm, live mouths. One was crying because she was pregnant and too young to have a baby. He sighed again. Now here was this one before him, pert and pretty and torn down the middle. Of course this boyfriend had something to do with her predicament, but what could he do about it? He gave up. "Well," he said, "don't wait too long, sweetheart."

"I won't," she said. She watched him walk down the street, hunched as if subtly crippled. There was a drunk scream from the next block over, and she heard it as a refrain: Do something-now! Now! She took her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed the boy's number.

When he picked up the phone, a dark little silence followed his h.e.l.lo and he knew who it was. "h.e.l.lo?" he said again. The girl on the bed propped her head up with her hand and looked at him. Wonderful: her deep eyes and her blunt-tipped nose and the sharp angle of her elbow.

"We have to talk," said the voice from the phone.

At the sound of it, her captive soul unfurled itself again, and a wave of urgency pa.s.sed through the room.

"It's four in the morning" he said.

"I know. We need to straighten some things out."

"Well, we can't do it now. I have company." Her soul rolled through the room, cras.h.i.+ng like Rip van Winkle's ninepins. He couldn't hear it, but his soul, which was getting nervous, roughly and quickly translated it to his mind as Give me back my Golden Arm! ""You treated me like s.h.i.+t!" cried the girl.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I treated you like you treated me."

She didn't say anything. She gazed at the new place inside her, longing to enter it with him. She thought, I love you, I love you, I love you.

He sensed the new place, but he didn't see what it had to do with him. He sighed. "Call me tomorrow and we can talk," he said. "But right now, I'm busy." He hung up and the ninepins crashed again as her soul flung its full weight against the prison door inside him. The girl on the bed sat like an alert cat, sensing an invisible war.

"An old girlfriend?" she asked.

"No, just somebody I went out with once."

Give me back my Golden Arm!

"I hope she's not a stalker," he added. He sat on the bed; his guest sat up and watched him intently Deep inside him, deeper than dreams, a drum was beating. It had taken several hours for the girl's call for help to filter down to the bottom of the boy's soul; it had just now gone through the prison wall and reached the prisoner inside. He recognized her voice instantly. He rose and gripped the handle of the prison door. With all his strength, he pulled from the inside while the female pushed from the outside. The boy's inmost foundation began slowly to rock. Debris was loosed. The pit was disturbed.

"Do you want me to go?" asked the tattooed girl.

"No," he said. He meant it; he didn't want to be alone.

The girl lay against the storefront door, her open lips pressed against the tiny, hateful phone, her eyes closed, her face knit tight with pain. Day was coming. In the shallow dark, the mirror-ball lights swarmed biliously. Her heart felt swollen and grotesque, as if it were taking over her whole body, including her head. Her mind felt nearly gone. But the ragged man had helped her after all. Because a tiny bit of her had seen what he showed and had the sense to fear it, she made herself stand up. "Don't wait too long, sweetheart," she muttered through her teeth. "Don't wait too long, sweetheart." She imitated the ragged man's voice as she Walked home, hunched in the cold and nearly growling.

The girl from the bar was naked before the boy, as he was before her. She had the turgor of a healthy plant, dense with moisture, so aroused that she was already lost in it. Her soul moved beneath him, luxuriandy turning in her fecundity. The cras.h.i.+ng inside him was matched by the hard, socketed joining of their bodies; he pushed from the outside, she from the inside. Deep things were roused and driven toward the surface: Bits of primary matter joined with feeling, memories, and dreams swarmed upward like bats from a dark shaft. The girl beneath him released her own darkness like a wave of perfume. Overwhelmed without knowing why, the boy pressed into her body as if for refuge. She gave it to him, hot and jumping. Her little demon consorts punched their fists in the air and cheered. He let go of everything but the feeling of her body and the sight of her face, her lips parted just enough to show a sliver of teeth. The prison broke. The boy had a sensation of flying as his freed soul shot up and up and up. The boy rolled off the girl, so moved that he nearly pa.s.sed out. He touched her face with astonished fingers. "Who are you?" he whispered. She smiled. His awe was misplaced, but that scarcely mattered.

Between sleep and wakefulness, he remembered the soul of the girl he'd taken and thrown away; it was like you might suddenly remember something strange that you'd done during a blackout drunk. He got up to look for it, and, to his amazement, b.u.mped into several others before he found it. It was clear what was called for-and yet, as he looked at them, he realized he had grown attached. He had to sit for some moments, just looking at them- Gentleness, Forbearance, Instinct, and Ardor-before he could herd them into the hall and out the door. Perhaps some of them were attached to him, too, for, once outside, instead of dispersing right away, Forbearance and Gentleness cl.u.s.tered at the door, giving off an air of doelike confusion.

But the intrepid soul attached to the brain of the girl who had knelt under the mirror ball that night did not hang around. As soon as he released it, it made a beeline toward its proper owner, who was mercifully still asleep, and so was spared the strange sensation of reentry. The window of her heart was just open enough for it to slip in.

Almost a year later, they pa.s.sed each other on the street. They might have tried to avoid meeting, except that neither recognized the other until it was too late. This was because the appearance of both had been subtly altered. Each of them was vaguely aware that the other had changed, but neither suspected that the other had a thing to do with it. Each merely recognized the other as an enemy with whom they were no longer at war, and they both had tentative, tolerant eyes that said, I like you fine as long as you don't start anything. They said, Hi, how are you?" on the approach and "Good!" on the way past. Both of them turned to look at each other, got caught, and quickly turned back. Neither of them saw their souls, unfurled in the sun and glimmering at each other with recognition and regard.

Today I'm Yours.

I dreamed of Dani only once that I can remember, but it was a deep, delicious dream, like a maze made of diaphanous silk, or a room of hidden chambers, each chamber nested inside the previous one-except that according to the inverse law of the dream, each inner chamber was bigger, not smaller, than the last.

In the dream, I was alone on the streets of Las Vegas, surrounded by speeding traffic and huge streaming lights advertising monstrous casinos. There were thousands of people pouring in and out of the monstrous advertised mouths, but I didn't know any of them. I went to my hotel. The walls of its lobby were made of artificial forest, with animals and birds moving inside them. I went to my room; its walls seemed to s.h.i.+ft and flux. Dani came out of the bathroom wearing a leopard-print minidress and black high-heeled shoes. The room stirred as if surprised; though she sometimes wore lipstick, Dani never wore a dress or high heels. She wore pants and clunky boys' shoes; she liked her lovers to wear dresses. But in the fluxing chamber of my dream, she walked toward me with a leopard-print dress purring on her haunches. Her slender little body was like a cold-blooded eel with electricity inside it; her movements, too, had the blithe, whipping ease of an eel traveling in deep water. But her flas.h.i.+ng eyes were human. She came toward me as though she were going to kiss me, but instead she walked past me, opened a door in the wall, and disappeared. I looked out the window and saw cities and countries; I even saw private rooms in other countries; I saw things that had happened hundreds of years ago. But I couldn't see Dani, even though she was inside my room.

A week later, I was walking down the street in Manhattan, and there she was. It was during the first autumn of the Iraq war. It was a time of decay and disillusion. On the newsstand, a magazine cover read why we haven't been hit again: ten reasons TO FEEL safe-a^jd SCARED. In the middle of town, a building fell down and crushed people to death, and before sad-ness, there was relief that it was merely more decay, and not terrorism. A bus stop advertis.e.m.e.nt for bras read WHO needs inner beauty? and someone had written across it in black marker YOU DO a.s.sHOLE.

I was carrying wine and fuchsia flowers, and the flowers nervously waved their wobbling fingers over the top of my bag. It was a humid afternoon and the air was heavy with the burnt tang of fresh-laid asphalt and hot salted nuts. I walked past a wall layered with many seasons of damp movie posters; the suggestion of a circus seeped up under the face of an actress, until a torn half tiger leapt, roaring, through the hoop of her eye. Loud, clas.h.i.+ng music poured out car windows and ran together in a muddy pool of sound, with a single bell-like instrument sparkling in and around the murk. I looked up, my mind suddenly tingling with a halfremembered song, and there she was, looking at me. An eerily smiling beggar wandered between us, jiggling the coins in his cup.

and I remembered that when we first met, she had put her finger on my sternum, lightly run it down to my navel, and turned away. "h.e.l.lo, Ella," she said.

She was on her way home from her job as an editor of a small press distinguished mainly by its embroilment in several lawsuits. I was preparing for a dinner party my husband was giving for some pleasant people who had once been well regarded in bohemian literary circles. She knew I was married, but still, when I said the word husband, she let contempt touch her eyes and lips. We clasped hands and I kissed her cool, porous cheek. Dani used contempt like a clever accessory, worn lightly enough to beguile and unsetde the eye before blending into otherwise-ordinary clothing. I've never seen her without it, though sometimes it fails to catch the light and flash.

During the last ten years, we've met several times like this. When we first met, nothing was like this. That was fifteen years ago. I had just published a book that was like a little box with monsters inside it. I had spent five dreary years writing it in a tiny apartment with a sink and a stove against one wall and a mattress against the other, building the box and its inhabitants out of words that ran, stumbled, posed, and pirouetted across cheap notepaper like a swarm of hornets were after them. I neglected my family. I forgot how to talk to people. I paced the room while feverish tinny songs poured from a transistor radio with a broken antenna and fantasized about the social ident.i.ty that might be mine if the book were to succeed.

I did not realize I had made monsters, nor how strong they were, until the book was published and they lifted the roof off my apartment, scaled the wall, and roamed the streets in clothes I never would've worn myself. Everywhere I went, it seemed, my monsters had preceded me, and by the tune I appeared, people saw me through their aura. This could've worked for me socially; monsters were and always will be fas.h.i.+onable. But in my mind, my monsters and I were separate. Painful and complicated situations arose, and I lacked the skill to handle them with finesse. I left the monsters behind and moved to California, where I rented a cottage in a canyon heavily grown with trees. I purchased a rug with large, bright polka dots on it and a red couch, on which I sat for hours, hypnotized by the prize of my new social ident.i.ty. It was an appealing thing and I longed to put it on-but when I did, I couldn't quite make it fit. Hesitant to go out in something so ill' fitting, and uncertain how to alter it, I stayed home with the cat, who accepted my private ident.i.ty as she always had.

Back in New York, several new acquaintances became concerned. They gave me the names of people I might introduce myself to in San Francisco, and one day I took the bus across the Golden Gate Bridge to meet one of them. The warm, dim, creaking old coach traveled low on its haunches, half-full of adults heavily wrapped in their bodies and minds, plus light-limbed, yawping teens, bounding and darting even as they sat in their seats. On the highway, the bus accelerated, and with a high whinging sound, we sprouted crude wings and flew across luminous bay on humming bridge, between radiant, declaiming sky and enrapt, answering sea, flecked with flying brightness and lightly spangled with little tossing boats. We barreled along a winding avenue thickly built with motels (the stick-legged ball of a smiling sheep leaping over the words comfort inn still leaps somewhere in my brain) and squat chunks of fast-food stores. The distant ocean flashed and brimmed at intersections. We turned right, climbed a hill; at the top, fog boiled through the air on wings of mystery and delight. Down the hill, lit slabs of business rose up into the coming night. Floods of quick, smart people surged along with the hobbled and toiling; the felled sat beached and stunned against buildings in heaps of rags. Turn and turn again. Glancing out the window, I saw a strip club with a poster on its wall featuring one half-naked girl walking another on a leash. The leashed girl looked up and raised a' paw in a patently ironic expression of submission and desire. I was meeting Dani in a neighborhood of bars and old burlesque clubs, a place of c.o.c.keyed streets like crooked mouths lined with doors like jack-o'-lantern teeth. The fog lolled in the sky, sluggish as a fat white woman on rumpled sheets. I was in a place where people dressed up as monsters, and after going to so much trouble to make them, I'd left mine behind. Feeling small and naked, I walked under big neon signs: a naked woman, an apple, a snake. It was not frightening. It was a relief to feel small and naked again.

I entered the appointed spot, a dive with a slanted, vertiginous floor. It took a moment to figure out who she was, but I believe she saw my nakedness at once. So did the man sitting with her, a middle-aged academic with a red shelflike brow. "Your stories are interesting for their subject matter," he peevishly remarked to me. "But they aren't formally aggressive enough for me." He went on to describe his formal needs while Dani listened with droll courtesy, then turned to me with an amused grin. She put her cold finger on my sternum and ran it lightly down to my navel, then turned back with mock solemnity as her companion put down his drained gla.s.s and held forth again. He left minutes later, banging a table c.o.c.keyed as his curled arm and flipper hand worried the torn sleeve of his jacket.

"I'm sorry about that," she said. "I just ran into him. He's lonely and he talks too much when he's drunk."

She was twenty-five. I was thirty-three. She was already editor in chief of a venerable avant-garde press, a veritable circus of caged monsters and their stylish keepers. She spoke with a combination of real confidence and its flimsy counterfeit. Monsteriess, I barely knew how to speak at all, and what I could say was timid and unctuous. It didn't matter. She wore a heavy silver necklace over her white T-s.h.i.+rt, under which her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s gave off dark, glandular warmth. Behind the bar, a mountain of green, blue, and gold bottles glimmered before a murky mirror lake. On the television above the bar, a rock star in an elaborate video drew a door in the air with a piece of chalk, smiled, and stepped through it. Jukebox music rose up, making a forest of sound, through which young girls traveled on their way to the bathroom. Above us, the fog traveled, too, laughing and quick. The bathroom door creaked loud and long; slim thighs went past, along with a swinging litde wrist loaded with s.h.i.+ning jewelry. We were hungry for this, all of this, and for each of us, "this" took form in the other. We ate each other with our eyes and, completely apart from our inconsequential words, our voices said, How delicious. We impulsively kissed, and separated quickly, laughing like people who had accidentally brushed against each other on the sidewalk. Then with a nervous toss of her head, she glided in close again. Soft heat came off her face, and then there was the dark, sucking heat of her mouth. She said, "I'd take you to dinner, but my girlfriend is expecting me."

She drove me to the bus stop in front of a doughnut place and stood waiting with me. She lived with her girlfriend, she said, but they had an understanding. Gum wrappers and plastic bags stirred in the cold, light-echoing wake of night traffic. Behind the gla.s.s of the doughnut place, a dark woman with rhythmic arms labored over golden dough. On the street, a hunched man with a sour face strutted back and forth, displaying the masking-tape words on the back of his jacket-COPS are TOPS-i'm a BOTTOM-plus an arrow pointing at his b.u.t.t. Really, I said, an understanding? Yes, said Dam, though it had been difficult to maintain. How had they arrived at it> I asked. How had they talked about it> They had not talked about it, she said. She thought it was more powerful for not being talked about. Bottom scowled as we kissed again. Golden doughnuts continued to fry. The bus arrived; I crossed its black rubber threshold, sat in the back, and almost immediately went to sleep.

Asleep on the bus, I dreamed that while watching a magic show I was plucked, blank and tingling, from the audience and led by a white-gloved a.s.sistant up onto the stage, where I was suddenly drenched with color and ident.i.ty I was the girl to be sawed in half. My heart pounded. I woke on the winding avenue thickly built with hotels, their signs now rapt and glowing in the velvet dark.

Naturally, it was nonsense about the understanding. That was just a door Dani had drawn in the air with her finger. But when we tried it, it opened, and so in we went.

We met almost every week for five months. Our time alone was as light and pleasantly shocking as her casual touch to my sternum, but with its meaning now thoroughly unfolded. We attended film screenings, dinner parties, the dull receptions that follow literary panels-and somehow we would always find an unused room, an inviting stair, a hallway that would magically rearrange its molecules to become a sweet litde seraglio and modestly revert as soon as we left it, smoothing our clothes and hair. We would have dinner somewhere, and then she would drive me back home to Marin. We drove without talking, the tape deck playing and the landscape making dark curved shapes all about us, shapes that would part to reveal the stars, then the ocean, then cl.u.s.ters of fleeing light. I remember a tape she played a lot, a song that went "Let your love come through j Love come through to you." It was a lush and longing song, and after it, the silence between songs seemed dense and deep. It was during this silence that Dani asked, "What are you thinking?" And so we began to talk.

We talked much like we made love-false and sincere, bold and fearful, vulnerable and s.h.i.+elded. I knew that her mother had had several face-lifts, a tummy tuck, and liposuction. I knew that after an especially grueling set of operations, she had declared triumphantly to her daughter, "You have inherited an excellent set of healing genes!" She knew that my father had screamed to my mother, "I'm done with you, you phony! I'm going to find me a black lady with big flat feet and a hole up her b.u.t.t!" I knew that one Thanksgiving her mother had burst into tears, run into the kitchen, and stuffed the turkey into the garbage, shouting, "And I wish I could do this to every one of you!" When Dani tried to comfort her, she turned away shouting, "No! No!" Dani told this story not with self-pity but with laughter and love in her voice. WTien I showed her a picture of my parents taken at an ancient local studio known for its funereal tinting and suffocating airbrush technique, she said, entirely without irony, "They look great! They look so real!"

"She means we look like h.e.l.l," said my father when I told him what my "friend" had said.

"She meant you don't look like you've had a face-lift," I replied.

"I would if I could afford it."

I repeated that to Dani, with laughter and love in my voice. We love our parents, our stories said to each other. We are people who can love. At thirty-three, I used my parents to explain me-to make me something more real than the outline of a woman drawn in the polluted air of a bar by the most casual of fingers. The thought makes me sad and a little ashamed, and yet our confidences were not entirely false. Standing on the street fifteen years later, we still felt the silken warmth of our stories breathing between us, a live tissue of affectionate trust that appears to give us shelter each time we meet.

The light changed, but instead of crossing the street toward my destination, I went the other way with Dani, as if she had led me, even though she hadn't. I asked about her latest girlfriend, a poet as fas.h.i.+onable as Dani's orange hip-hugging jeans. "Yasmin is in L.A. for the month," she said, and paused while we recognized an actress striding toward us on starved, stick legs, a little black poodle with a beautiful red tongue peering haplessly from the tensile cave of her bosom. "She's teaching a poetry workshop," added Dani. "And how is David?"

A grainy smell of gas rose off a torpid snake of traffic and snakily wound through the scent of damp bark and leaves. A taxi driver with his arm out the window beat out a song on his section of snake. Already it had formed, our invisible shelter, its walls hung with living pictures.

"So," said Dani lightly, "are we going somewhere?"

And of course we are: down the hall and to the right, past the picture of Dani in her office, talking on the telephone to her father; he is in San Francisco and wants to see Tosca with her. Dani is wearing black-and-white-checked stretch pants and bright red lipstick, and her glossy hair is flush against her wide cheekbones. "Okay, Daddy," she says, and her voice is softer and more seductive than it ever was with me.

We walk down the street in San Francisco, holding hands; a creamy-skinned young girl with a rosy smile rides up on a lavender bike and says, "Dani!" She and Dani talk, the girl's long bare leg bracing tense and beautiful against the curb. Dani promises to call soon; the girl rides away in a wake of lavender and rosy eagerness. I ask, "Whos that? and Dani smiles. "Oh," she replies, drawing it out, "just some girl."

In my bedroom, we lounge on a summer afternoon. The air is thick with heat and earthen smells: cat p.i.s.s, armpit, rug mold, fruit, c.u.n.t; in the world around us, fibrous green and fungal life unfurls to offer its inmost odor to the sun. We are naked, and my blue comforter is rolled back like a parted wave; the cat walks in and out with her tail up. I am showing Dani a picture of my father holding me in one arm and bending his head to kiss my infant foot. My mother is a blur of breast in the background, and my breast, just scored by Dani's teeth and tongue, echoes hers. Dani had called and asked me to meet her and I'd said no because I had a cold. An hour later, she showed up with a plastic bag of oranges and echinacea tea, and I was surprised and touched to realize she thought I might be lying.

I should not have been surprised: Dani's confidence lay almost entirely in her social ident.i.ty, a smart, well-secured area, beyond which lay hidden a verdant private world longing for and afraid of form-hidden even from her. When she broke up with her girlfriend (a pretty blonde with pink, allergic eyes whom I was fated to run into at parties for the next dozen years), Dam said this woman, with whom she'd lived for two years, had never known her. I feel like people accept the first thing I show them," she said, and that s all I ever am to them." A month later, she broke up with me.

I said, "Do you have time to get a drink?"

"With your bag?"

"Why not?" I said. "It's easily checked."

"Umm."

A freckled girl walked by in a red raincoat, smiling to herself, and there was that same papered-over circus poster on another wall, this time showing a ghostly tiger leaping from a shouting model's open mouth.

"I dreamed about you last week," I said.

"Yes?" Her sidelong glance was piercing in the eye, but watchful in the heart; her dark hair was rough-textured, and layered in a ragged way, which gave a casual carnality to her lips and jaw.

"I dreamed we were in Las Vegas again, and you were wearing high heels and a dress."

"Really!" She laughed, a hot, dry little sound, and-how ridiculous-on yet another wall a circus elephant dourly paraded across an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a rock concert against cancer, appar-ently holding another elephant by the tail. "So," she said', "where do you want to go?"

Back to that first dive with its pa.s.sing girls, its flavor of fog and forest of music; or the sweet sad cave next to a vacant lot strung with darkish-colored bulbs; or that odorous cavern glittering with earrings and rhinestone studs and sweat on the tossing hair of some dancer under a dirt-swarming light; that velvety cubbyhole like an emerald jewelry box with a false back, a secret compartment that, when we found it, revealed a place where we belonged together.

"Cafe Loup?" I said. "It's quiet."

Six months or so after the first time we broke up, we met again at .the book fair in Las Vegas. I was there because my new book was coming soon; Dani was there as an editor. During the day, the book fair was a bland caravan parked inside a pallid amphitheater tented with beige, a series of stalls and tables draped with colorless cloth and laden methodically with books. At night, it was a giant Ferris wheel whirring ecstatically and predictably, each club, restaurant, and gaming room its own tossing car, blurred with lights and screaming faces while the sober carnie worked the machine. In this tossing blur, I kept glimpsing Dani; walking down a hallway to an obligatory event, I glanced into a pa.s.sing room and saw her crossing it with the feral stride particular to her-her hips never swaying, but projecting intendy, rather coldly forward. I thought I saw her slender back and b.u.t.t impatiently squeeze between a pair of outsized hams and heads in order to get to the bar, but more hams and heads crowded in and buried her before I could be sure. I was at a party for an author, who has since become an actress, when I saw Dani politely listening to someone I couldn't see, eyes flas.h.i.+ng through the politeness as if in response to the flattered speaker-a fool who would not recognize the instinctive flas.h.i.+ng of an eel in deep water. It was a few minutes later that she came up behind me while I was scooping a fingerful of icing off the author's cake. Later that night, in front of a display of white tigers trapped behind the gla.s.s wall of a hotel lobby, I leaned against her and whispered, "Let's pretend we don't know each other." She embraced me from behind and roughly rubbed her head on mine. A brilliandy colored bird flew behind the gla.s.s; one tiger snarled at another, which had come too close to it.

In my room, we ordered a bottle of scotch. An hour or so later, in a torrent of furious drunkenness, we used each other on the floor. I remember pungendy but only dimly the terse movement of her lean arm and its maniacal shadow, my splayed leg, the gentle edifice of her chin, her underlip, the soft visual snarl as she turned her face sharply to the side. Amazement briefly lit my drunkenness as she gathered me in her arms and carried me to the bed. "I love you," I said, and sleep came batlike down upon us.

The next day, we ordered breakfast from a huge menu in a fake leather book and I apologized for that intimacy-we were not, after all, supposed to know each other. "Oh, that's all right," she said. "People who don't know you are always saying that." For the rest of the book fair, we were together every night, holding hands and kissing at strip shows, casinos, and a women's boxing match. Then we went back to San Francisco, and broke up again.

During that breakup conversation, I reminded her of what she'd said about no one really knowing her. "Don't you see why that is?" I said. "You've gone out of your way to create a perfect, seductive surface, and people want to believe in perfection. If they think they see it, they don't want to look further."

"Do you want to?"

If I said yes, I meant it, in a way But in another way, I didn't. If social ident.i.ty was her great strength, it was my great weakness. And so of course I loved to see myself reflected in her s.h.i.+ny sur-face. I loved to appear in public as that reflection-even if the reflection was that of a stupidly smiling woman in a sequined costume, waiting to be sawed in half.

Cafe Loup is an elegant establishment with a low ceiling, dim lighting, and a melancholy feeling of aquarium depth that subtly blurs the diners seated at the white-draped tables in the back--the elderly gentleman with his gallant fallen face and his pressed s.h.i.+rt, his companions lowered white head and dark linen dress, her pale arm quivering slightly as she saws the leg off a small bird. I checked my bag at the door and we chose a table, even though the polished bar was almost empty. Dani ordered a martini with no olive; I had red wine. The waiter, a middle-aged man with a heavy face, silently approved of the elegant manner with which Dani placed her order. Silently, with upturned eyes, she accepted his approval. Then she turned to me and said, "So, how long has it been?"

Months pa.s.sed; I moved from Marin County to San Francisco. I saw Dani for dinner every now and then, or went with her to the movies. We were only friends, but still her face froze when, over pomegranate c.o.c.ktails with lime, I told her I couldn't meet her later because I had to meet my boyfriend. Seeing her expression, I became so fl.u.s.tered that I nearly began to stammer. She turned her head and became absorbed in the view-chartreuse shrubbery below, blue and hazy sky above, a watercolor with a purple blur spreading luridly across its middle.

After that, our invisible shelter became less substantial, more like a pavilion or a series of tents gently billowing and hollowing in the night air. When I saw her at a poetry reading/performance that I attended with my boyfriend, it was almost not there at all. While he wandered through the room with an affable air, I sought out Dani, half-afraid to find her. When I did, she saw my fear, and rus.h.i.+ng to press her advantage, she tried and failed to curl her lip contemptuously. Perhaps to steady her quavering mouth, she took my extended hand. "h.e.l.lo," she said softly h.e.l.lo, said the heat of her hand. It was around then that she took up with another writer, a preposterous person who once took offense at something I said or didn't say, and, to my relief, refused to speak to me ever after.

And suddenly there were long distances between one tent and the next, and I found myself walking under the stars, alone on dark wet gra.s.s.

Dani sipped her martini and nibbled at a dish of nuts. She talked about Yasmin, with whom she had lived for the last three years- longer than anyone else. Her posture was erect and alert, her small shoulders perfectly squared. But her hair was rough by then, not glossy. She was swollen under the eyes, and there were deep creases on either side of her mouth and between her brows; her lips were bare and dry. Her once-insouciant slenderness had become gaunt and somehow stripped, like a car or motorcycle might be stripped to reveal the crude elegance of its engine.

"I don't want to be unfaithful anymore," she said. "I want to stay with Yasmin. I want to take care of her."

I smiled and said, "You're like a man. You've always been that way." Her smile in return was like a blush of pleasure. "Yeah, I guess it's true," she said.

In San Francisco, I wandered into a maze that was sometimes peopled and sometimes empty, sometimes brightly lit and sometimes so dark that I had to grope my way along it with my hands, heart pounding with fear that I would never find my way out. I quickly became lost, and it seemed like almost everyone I met was lost, too. Sometimes it seemed to me an empty life, but that wasn't really true. It wasn't empty; it was more that the people and events in it were difficult to put together in any way that felt whole.