You Can Say You Knew Me When (32 page)

“What exactly are you apologizing for?” Woody had asked in the car. After hearing Brady’s message, I guessed what Woody was fishing for: an admission of
messing around
, some version of which had reached him through the telephone-game of our friends.

I returned only one call: “Brady, this is Jamie. Yeah, it does sound like you fucked up. And it sounds like Colleen went behind my back, and Annie passed on third-hand information to Woody. So, yeah, everyone’s talking about me, no one’s talking to me. Thanks. I appreciate it.” Click.

If I’d just gone to that fucking dinner party at Brady’s, I would have spent that night with Woody and not set off to the park the next day, to Walt. If I hadn’t upset Colleen after the gallery opening, she might not have dished my secrets to Brady. And maybe if I’d just returned Woody’s call before I’d left town—if I’d just been able to have the conversation he wanted—maybe Roger’s condom would not have wound up in Woody’s garbage pail. Each move I’d made for weeks had been a tactical error, the cause of an unwanted effect.

And now I had Jed to add to the list. Jed.

The gray sky had finally opened up. A steady, snapping rain came down on me as I dashed a couple blocks to a café on Guerrero called the Roast. I waited in line at the counter behind a small-boned white woman dressed in black, with a crown of magenta dreadlocks, and her male companion, apparently a bike messenger—raggedy pants cut off mid-calf, a double-wide shoulder bag, a U-lock in his back pocket. “It’s because of the government coming down on Microsoft,” she was saying to him. “That judge ordering them to split up. So the market is, like, the party’s over. Hit the brakes, the feds are getting involved.”

“Fuck Microsoft,” he snarled. “They eat up every original idea.”

“I know, but they’ve brought the Internet to a lot of people. Which is ultimately a subversive thing, because the government can’t control it.”

“Good, so now we’ve got the Internet, and we don’t need Microsoft.” The counter guy handed the messenger a to-go cup of coffee, which he lifted high, proposing a toast to the entire café. “I hope the whole fucking system comes crashing down and all you yuppies will leave San Francisco. Rats from a sinking ship.”

She smiled at his theatrics, but smugly. “Get a real ideology. When the ship sinks, the rats drown, too.”

Were conversations like this going on all over the country on this day? In San Francisco, the news had hit like the death of a public figure. The topic on every tongue.

The caffeine had an inverse effect on me, calling up two days of exhaustion. Ready for sleep, I curled up on my mattress, but sleep didn’t come. I was disoriented, nearly dizzy, a sensation that felt thrust upon me—a pounding by a heavy wave—and also internal, a sonic force vibrating through my bones involving all the voices of the day: the people leaving me messages and the pundits in the paper and Woody saying, quite distinctly,
I don’t know if I can save our relationship.
Underneath this ran a constant hum, the ghost of Teddy Garner whispering from the wings, grabbing attention.
Leave me alone, Teddy. I’ve been to your mountaintop, I’ve planted my fucking flag. Now get out of my head.

Zombie-eyed, I wrote in my journal, trying to work out, Ian-style, the a, b, and c of my near future:
(A) Figure out how to turn this “quest” into a paying gig. (B) Let Woody call the shots so you don’t lose him.
I pulled out
Desolation Angels,
one of the Kerouac titles I hadn’t yet opened, and I read for a couple hours about Kerouac and Ginsberg slumming in Mexico City. Instantly my future filled up, not with practical dictates of job and boyfriend but with cinematic visions of trekking south of the border with Jed. Maybe that was the point of
JIMMY
on my father’s map; maybe I was supposed to complete the journey for him.
(C) Forget Jed. You want your life back. What happened with Jed is not your life.
I tossed Kerouac aside with a groan, made my way to the kitchen, opened a cookbook. Something for Woody: a peace offering. A Red Velvet Cake. I wrote a list of ingredients, stuck it to the fridge. Having expended this great effort, I slumped on the couch, channel surfing.

I remembered spending days like this, whole weeks in fact, when I was twenty-three and working my first job in San Francisco, a couple days a week at a bed-and-breakfast. The winter of 1991. I had come West, leaving my boyfriend, Nathan, behind, based on a vague promise from a friend that there was a radio job waiting for me here (so vague it disappeared once I arrived). Nathan showed up at my door just a few weeks later. We rekindled in the Mission the lifestyle we’d created in Jersey City: lazing around in our underwear, reading novels to each other in bed, eating oatmeal for breakfast and stir-fry for dinner and skipping lunch. That was the good part. The rest was arguing and hurt feelings, and when it finally got to be too much—when Nathan rode his motorcycle south to Los Angeles and told me in no uncertain terms not to follow—I turned back to the idea of a career. I put myself on a schedule. I found myself a production position, figured out how to
network
. Still, the allure of inactivity had taken hold, and I never stopped seeing aimlessness as a higher state of being. In this way I’d always considered myself emblematic of my so-called generation, marked with an X as though we lacked identifiable traits.

I understood that bike messenger’s battle cry: curtail the money-hungry frenzy, notch back the arrogance of the virtual millionaires, correct the madness! Maybe we’d get a moratorium on the overpriced condos glutting my block; maybe artists and musicians would stop losing their leases; maybe I’d find fewer SUV’s on Valencia nipping at my back tire. Vindication for those of us who hadn’t profited from the boom and never wanted it in the first place. This notable news day might be a bookend to any of those ten years ago, when the economic recession of the early nineties had been a welcome reminder that the greed-is-good eighties were finally over.

But try as I might to paint the stock market’s fortunes as us versus them, the dividing line was blurry. My boyfriend could lose his job, my brother-in-law might have squandered my inheritance, new chances for freelance work would diminish. I was a rat on this ship.

I found a Vicodin in the bathroom and downed it with a mug of Sleepytime tea. And then I grabbed my backpack, still smelling of cow butt, and dug out a bud. Back in bed, wrapped in the sheets, seeking a cocoon—to be transformed by sleep into a more majestic creature!—I was struck with the certainty that I simply couldn’t cope. Every adult life was a one-person show: written, directed and acted solo in front of a fickle audience. To keep from getting the hook, you had to perform. To perform, you had to have drive. There were large forces at work out there. You needed a plan, not just the ABCs of intention.

Tomorrow, I told myself, I’d have the energy to make a plan to take action. Tomorrow.

I slept for fourteen hours: through the ringing of the phone and the clamor of the garbage trucks on their weekly tank roll down Manfred Alley and the daybreak yapping of the mutt across the hall. Out the window the ground was still wet, but the sun ruled the sky and the only clouds were fluffy and harmless. After a hot shower, my head felt relatively clear. Even the welts on my forehead had subsided. I understood now what yesterday’s disorientation had been: the chemical coda of the ecstasy, the dreaded
suicide Tuesday
that follows every weekend binge. What a difference a day makes.

I listened once more to that dismal record of disappointment and confrontations-in-the-making that was my voice mail, and I returned the necessary phone calls—the ones that had to do with money. This turned out to be less painful than imagined, as is often the case when you finally tackle the thing you’ve put off. Bob at New World Transcripts had an assignment for me after all, and he even agreed to pay me at a slightly higher rate so that I didn’t get screwed for their previous overpayment. The student loan people talked me through a long-term deferment. The dentist’s office agreed to another month’s delay. Even Deirdre was agreeable, saying she would
force
Andy to forward the remaining nine thousand dollars. Andy was being extra-secretive about the specifics of his investments, telling Deirdre he was going to
normalize
their portfolio without worrying her about the details. “To hell with Andy and his cockamamie schemes,” she said. “I’m taking some of the money, and I’m going on vacation. Don’t be surprised if I show up on your doorstep.” She made it sound like a joke, but I heard the tremor in her throat.

Woody, when I got hold of him at work, reported that he still had a job. The first round of cutbacks had been announced; severe, but less mercenary than expected.

He came over after work—after nine-thirty that night—and I presented him, with a hopeful flourish, the pink-frosted cake I’d baked that day. He took a bite, complimented me, took another. Put down his fork. Chewed. Swallowed. I was stuffing a forkful between my lips when he said, “I know that you’ve been sneaking around behind my back.”

The wad in my mouth turned to cement. I could only mix it around; it would not dissolve. Woody sat waiting for a reply. Spitting cake into my napkin, I said, “I know that you had sex with someone in the last few days.”

He nodded very slowly, revealing almost nothing.

I looked away. Breathed. Tried again. “Okay, yes, there were a couple of times.”

“A couple?”

“Why, what did you hear?”

“Just, in general. That you’d said something to Colleen.”

“I would have told you eventually,” I said. “You gotta believe me.”

“Why?” he asked. “You’ve broken my trust. You’ve been a poor communicator. You haven’t been fully present for some time. And you’re still holding secrets.”

What about you?
I wanted to shout but didn’t, because the pull to tell all was strong: to purge myself of every lie and omission, to clear a path to redemption. But even stronger was the knowledge—knowledge that had guided me most of my life (since my mother’s death, since my father first shunned me)—that mistakes cannot be undone. Why hurt Woody’s feelings further by providing the gory details?

So instead I said, “Let me tell you about my trip,” and a river of words rushed forth. I told him about
In the Woods,
about the map my father had sketched, about
the kid
who helped me find the land trust. I told Woody that as I laid awake in that fog-drenched railcar, all I could think about was getting home to him. He listened, but when my river stopped flowing, I could see he was waiting for more. My confession was without a therapeutic payoff. Instead of a thunderous epiphany there was an empty echo, no doubt because I’d all but removed Jed (and the motel and the ecstasy and using my father’s name) from the story. “Look, I’m no good at this,” I pleaded. “But I’m willing to try.”

Woody’s cell phone rang. “Fuck, I have to take this.” It was someone from work. He stepped to the living room. The conversation went on for many minutes as they strategized for their next big meeting in this make-or-break week.

At the kitchen table, I lit up a cigarette. My reflection stared back from a night-black windowpane. Light from above highlighted the gray ribbon of rising smoke, sculpting my torso in shadows. A picture of cool, muted isolation—I might have been trapped in a film-noir interrogation. Gone was klutzy Jamie, nervous Jamie, needy Jamie. In his place was a solitary, brooding outlaw, the kind of image that I’d flirted with for years, a pose so comfortable that I hardly recognized it as a pose. On some level, this was the me that Woody fell for. “I like that you go your own way,” he said on one of our first dates. A few weeks after we’d started having sex, he confessed that he was surprised we hadn’t burned out yet. “It’s that moody redhead thing you give off. I knew you’d come on strong, but I didn’t think you had staying power.”

When he returned, I pulled him close, determined to draw him into a kiss, one that would demonstrate my
staying power
. I pressed my hips into his. I held his face in my hands.

“You’re humping my leg,” he said.

“You should take that as a sign that I want to jump your bones.”

A range of near-responses passed across his face.

“Please tell me you’re still interested in having sex with me,” I said.

“God, yeah.” His cheeks flared with color. His voice was hushed, almost reverent, making a shrine to the nearly two years of intimacy we’d created together. “I always want to have sex with you, Jamie.”

“But?”

“But there are still so many questions.”

I tightened my hold on him. “We both have questions,” I said. “Let’s just do this.”

Here’s a question that’s all mine: When at last I was naked with Woody, our bodies clamped together as if magnetized, my thoughts marked by astonishment at how good we could make each other feel; when at last we had consummated the slow, tense build and were lying leg folded over leg, arms tucked under necks, bodies wet with a number of substances; and I turned my face to his and saw the multicolored stubble and the blonde eyebrows and the flush of his neck still pumped full of heat (and it almost made me weep, the way his beauty coalesced for me—impulsive, manipulative, doesn’t-deserve-it me); why in this moment did I allow another impression, a howl of doubt, to push its way to the surface like nausea after a feast?
This is not love, it’s sex! You are attracted to the surface and nothing deeper! Stop fooling each other!
A masculine bellow, so sure of its authority it seemed to have controlled me forever. Why didn’t I just grab this demon by the throat and throttle it? Why, instead, did I think,
You might have a point,
and let it grow stronger?