The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 20

  THINGS I REGRET WHISPERING WHILE KISSING BILLIE ANNE

  I can’t stop kissing you

  God (eleven times)

  Am I a bad kisser?

  I love you

  PLACES I WOULD KISS BILLIE ANNE HAD I THE CHANCE TO KISS HER AGAIN

  Vaccination scar on right forearm

  Kneecaps

  Right eyelid, now unwrapped and free from bandages, unlike one year ago, when doctors thought she might lose her sight

  Mouth

  PET NAMES FOR BILLIE ANNE, CONCEIVED THREE HOURS FOLLOWING OUR KISS, AT DAWN, AND SCRIBBLED EXCITEDLY, HURRIEDLY ONTO A PIECE OE SCRAP PAPER, READY FOR USE HAD THINGS WORKED OUT DIEFFRENTLY

  Silly Anne

  Sleepy Anne

  Chilly Anne

  Baby

  THINGS THAT HAVE REMINDED ME INSTANTLY, ALMOST REFLEXIVELY OF BILLIE ANNE

  A bottle of Mercurochrome

  My mother’s black-and-white wedding photo, her hair parted on the left, taken three days before her twenty-first birthday

  A pyramid of old cardboard boxes haphazardly stacked in the alley behind a neighborhood grocery store

  Cell G-8 of a spreadsheet document

  A tangled hazard-orange extension cord

  A little girl, no more than four years old, spinning around in a faded yellow sundress, her knees muddy

  The Republic of Ireland

  A documentary about salmon

  A packet of Dentyne Ice sugarless gum, the same brand that I, completely oblivious, purchased on my way to meet Billie Anne and discover that our kiss had been a mistake

  An elderly man, jogging at dawn, with liver spots like freckles

  My reflection

  TOTAL SIT-UPS PERFORMED THE DAY AFTER THE NIGHT I KISSED BILLIE ANNE

  Thirteen

  VEGETABLES I HAVE IMAGINED US SOWING TOGETHER IN THE BACKYARD GARDEN OF OUR FUTURE HOME

  Eggplant

  Carrots

  Radishes

  Those tall green stalks with the white tips

  Artichokes

  Potatoes (both of the sweet and nonsweet variety)

  CITIES I HAVE DREAMED OF VISITING WITH BILLIE ANNE

  London

  Belfast

  Madison, Wisconsin

  Rio de Janeiro

  Reykjavik

  Ottowa

  Barcelona

  Rome

  NUMBER OF MONTHS, DAYS SINCE I FIRST REALIZED I WAS IN LOVE WITH BILLIE ANNE

  Thirteen months, twenty-three days

  THINGS THAT HAVE PROVEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FORGET ABOUT BILLIE ANNE

  Her bottom row of teeth, nowhere near as straight as the top row and almost always hidden behind her bottom lip

  How she used to crochet, swaying erratically in the rocking chair she found abandoned behind a nursing home; the loops of yards appearing, disappearing, reappearing, her fingers working frantically, seemingly independent from the rest of her

  The photo of me she had secretly taken, unflattering and out of focus, that I found (had no idea she had) sitting on the dresser in her bedroom the night we kissed

  How, back when we were still nothing more than friends, our legs would meet below the table, thighs abutting swiftly, seamlessly, while we argued politics above it

  The way she would laugh, shoulders convulsing, head thrown perilously back, tear ducts moistening then pooling beyond

  capacity—all of it in complete silence, absolute soundlessness, as if the entire scene were occurring in the vacuum of space

  How, even when the bar was quiet and our voices perfectly

  distinct, we would find it necessary to lean close, talk directly

  into each other’s ears, noses lightly brushing cheeks, our speech slowed significantly, pauses abused, in order to prolong the intimacy, if only for a few lingering seconds

  NUMBER OF MONTHS, DAYS SINCE I FIRST MET BILLIE ANNE AT A MUTUAL FRIEND’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

  Twenty-six months, eighteen days

  PRESENT I PLANNED TO GIVE BILLIE ANNE ON OUR ONE-YEAR WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

  Her own darkroom

  MISTAKES, ERRORS IN JUDGEMENT, COMMITTED AFTER KISSING BILLIE ANNE FOR THE FIRST AND LAST TIME

  Agreeing to be friends

  Reaching for her left hand beneath a diner table two days after having agreed to be friends

  Reaching for her right hand after she pulled her left hand away

  Wrongly assuming that writing this piece would be cathartic, that it would help me articulate my anguish and longing, that it would provide me with perspective, help clear up the sequence of events, steady the blur

  COLLEGE COURSES I DROPPED FOLLOWING OUR KISS

  The History of Ireland

  British Literature to 1660

  Introduction to Ethics

  The Romantic Period

  REASONS WHY I ASKED OUT DIANE, A LOCAL COFFEE SHOP WAITRESS AND UTTER STRANGER, FOUR MONTHS AFTER KISSING BILLIE ANNE

  Closely resembled Billie Anne physically

  “Diane” sounds like “Billie Anne”

  Thought she would make me forget about Billie Anne

  RECURRING DREAMS STARRING BILLIE ANNE

  I am somewhere on the West Coast, standing in a strange low-ceilinged room. I am punching Billie Anne’s father, hard, across the left temple. He’s drunk; he’s always drunk. I continue to punch, my right hand exploding against his skull. I am trying to sober him up, forever if possible. He doesn’t know who I am, has never seen me before, but immediately understands why I’m there, hurting him, can see it in my face, in the way my fists tremble. Suddenly my limbs slacken, I feel ill. I realize I do not hate her father, do not know enough about him, what he’s done or not done, to hate him. This is not retribution; this is not the pure, selfless act I have made it out to be. It is only a shallow ploy to win her over.

  We’ve been dating for almost three months, Billie Anne and I. We are happy. We spend most days in bed, despite it being humid, watching the oscillating fan push hot air around the room. We hold hands wherever we go, even when it’s not convenient, even when it creates complications, forces us to zigzag our way down the busy downtown streets. She rewards me with kisses each time I make her laugh. Sometimes she is not done laughing and reaches over to kiss me too soon. I love it when this happens. I am good at making her laugh, maybe better at it than at anything else in life. She returns home from the grocery store, purchased avocado in hand. I tell her it is not yet ripe. What do you know about avocados? she challenges back, a smile crawling out over her lips. We’re about to start again. I am in ecstasy.

  We are leaving a bar late at night. Someone approaches us from the side. I am unable to defend her.

  We are married. We are having a fight. I am arguing that our three-year-old daughter, Jane, is far too young to attend preschool; that we must keep Jane with us at home as long as we can manage it, that once we send her off to school there’s no turning back. Billie Anne argues that Jane needs to be around other children her age, that it’s healthy for her development, and plus, she adds, I went to preschool when I was three years old. That’s exactly what I’m worried about, I mutter under my breath. This is a mistake.

  It is four months from now. Billie Anne is reading this piece. She realizes she made a mistake. My phone rings.

  RADIO

  Sebastian Matthews

  (rā’dē-ō) n 1: a: an apparatus used to transmit radio signals; a transmitter b: an apparatus used to receive radio signals; a receiver c: a complex of equipment capable of transmitting and receiving radio signals 2: indispensable accessory for a car

  I was wrong to think that one last week together would change anything. All it did was postpone the inevitable. If anything, it improved our sex life, which had been so sporadic and so unrewarding for so long that I found the ease and sweetness of our last days together close to shocking and nearly a good enough reason to stay. A bit of divine grace, then, a grand temptation.

  We’d get up late in Eva’s tiny beach apartment
, dawdle in bed, make love in the bright morning sun. Around noon we’d throw on clothes and walk the several sun-bleached blocks to Zinc Cafe for huge lattes in big French-style bowls. I’d cadge a sports section from a nearby table, and we’d sit outside, torpid in the sun, hunger eventually propelling us home. The days invariably filled up with long beach walks, naps, window shopping, quick swims in the Pacific. Nights we caught a flick or grabbed dinner at one of the few inexpensive restaurants in town. Eva’s favorite was the Hare Krishna place that offered all-you-can-eat dhal, where we took off our shoes and sat cross-legged at the low tables while the young staff, barefoot and freshly shaven, slipped behind the yard-sale screens like stagehands.

  You’d think we were on our honeymoon, and in a way we were—only our moon was waning. A fact that became painfully clear to us both as the days added up, the surface layer of conviviality peeling back to expose the wounds of two years of frustrated effort and miscommunication. My infidelities were sufficiently recent that Eva could easily fall into a sulk about them, me, anything. For my part, if things weren’t working just right in bed, I’d slip back into my old pattern of despondency and muted anger, the mood ruined for hours.

  But these moments came and went that week like fluke thunderstorms: driving in, pouring down wrath, and leaving. For the most part, we were left those last few days with open skies and smooth sailing. It was all a mirage, of course. I had already made up my mind, quit my job, left my apartment, packed my car. The whole shebang. And even though she said she wanted me to stay, and may have even believed we could work things out, it was clear: we were simply waiting for time to run out. It was a foregone conclusion. At least it was for me.

  Eva was working as a graduate student intern at the college art museum. She was older, beautiful in a red-haired Nordic way, awesomely unapproachable. I was a senior in college, that breed of lonely student who had a knack for falling in love with beauty, who responded to the challenge of Eva like a mountain climber facing Mount Everest.

  My method of courtship was unruly and direct. I’d stop by the museum, make sure we ran into each other “accidentally,” then return with flowers stolen from the president’s office to invite her out for coffee. Once I blanketed Eva’s car in oranges from a nearby tree, leaving an O’Hara poem as a parking ticket under her Volvo’s wipers. She agreed to have lunch with me, mostly I think out of curiosity. We ended up at the botanical gardens, walking side by side on the dirt paths, bending under the drooping rubber plants, hands almost (but not quite) touching.

  I didn’t say much those first strolls. I let Eva relate her turbulent history with men. Let her tell stories of growing up in a big family outside Sacramento and about her troubled brother, who wouldn’t let her turn from his pain. I knew with certainty—don’t ask me how I knew this, I just did—that the way to Eva’s heart was through a dogged companionship. That I had to move cautiously and pay close attention so as not to lose her burgeoning trust. If and when she opened up to my presence, I would bring forth the purest part of my romantic heart, laying simple words out before her in a simply tied bouquet easy for her to see and smell and, if so desired, take up in her arms.

  We met for dinners in town, usually in a corner booth at Walter’s, the campus hangout. I liked watching Eva’s mouth as she talked, the way she’d hold her tongue lightly on her teeth as she thought through an idea, tapping it sometimes to make a point. I liked watching her hands absentmindedly fold and refold a napkin. How she leaned over to kiss my cheek suddenly, as if moved by some spirit to do so. And how, outside in the warm air, under a waxy-leafed tree, or up against the car, she’d release herself into my arms when I held her close, her whole small body pressing into mine. Finally, after months of long walks and soul-searching conversations, after furtive kisses and a series of passionate embraces in the alcoves of the museum, Eva invited me back to her place in Pasadena.

  I moved into the city the day after graduation, desperate to prove my love. I wanted Eva to know I was in it for the long haul. Eva wasn’t so sure. She had me on a kind of relationship probation. She loved me, too, in a you-amuse-me-I-feel-sorry-for-you kind of way, but she was waiting for me to grow up into a man. She was older, more experienced, and so required I have a career and a palpable sense of the future before she would even think of committing to me. It was a well-intentioned, ill-advised gamble on her part that only made me yearn more for a quality of being, a presence, I had not yet discovered. I was playacting—at being a man, a writer, a boyfriend.

  When Eva took the assistant curator job in Laguna, I moved into her monk’s-quarters apartment at the tippy-top of Laurel Canyon, the intersection of Appian Way and Wonderland Avenue, overlooking the computer-board sprawl of Los Angeles. My new landlord, also my sitting meditation teacher, kept showing up to give me spiritual practices disguised as yard work. At first, I was lonely without Eva around. I missed our late night take-out dinners and the impromptu road trips to the desert. But soon enough I took a liking to my young-bachelor-in-the-city status—flirting with the pretty women passing through the store, joining the staff on all-night club haunts.

  Without a car—or, let’s face it, Eva around to give me a ride—I had to walk down the mountain to work. I headed out in the early afternoon after a morning trying, and usually failing to, write. It took over an hour to get down, but I didn’t mind. I saw it as my walking meditation. As free time to rustle up an adventure, something a wandering samurai might come upon. That’s how I saw myself then: a wandering ronin coming into the city. But the closer I got to Sunset, the more noise came up to meet me, the more billboards and high-rise condos cluttered up my hard-fought “empty mind.” It was like being on a river that suddenly starts to pick up pace: you turn a corner and all of a sudden you are in the rapids. It was already too late to back-paddle my way out.

  I worked the late shift at a relentlessly hip bookstore on the Strip. My new buddy Miles would get me stoned, we’d put on old Beatles tapes and watch from our stools as the grimy circus of West Hollywood wheeled by. The made-up, model wannabe women, long-legged and vacuous. The slick-haired types with their cellular phones stapled to their ear. The busloads of tour-ists. The gay boys in their tight shorts and baseball caps. The bums, the prostitutes, the glammed-out punks, the heavy-metal youths slinking around like dirty, blow-dried cats. I’d make up sad-sack stories for all of them, and Miles laughed along, placing his curly red head on the counter in dramatic response. He had this wild, hyena cackle laugh that made everybody turn and look. I couldn’t help but laugh with him—him cackling at me, me cracking up at his laugh, both of us laughing at the whole scene.

  At closing time, I’d haul in the magazine racks. I had to take them one at a time, carry them inside without any papers flopping out, and set them down in a nice row alongside all the other magazine racks. By the time I got done—there were six of them and they each weighed about seventy pounds—I’d be sweaty and covered with ink and had pissed off some asshole for stepping on his feet or taking away the Il Figaro he was pretending to read but was never going to buy. Around one, if Miles didn’t give me a ride, I’d walk back up the mountain. (Once, a bored rich lady, some unremembered screen goddess, picked me up in her Mercedes and drove me to the top, Chopin blasting through the open sunroof.) At the top of the ridge, there was a huge gravel turnout overlooking the city and the ocean. Looming over the switchback, high atop a rocky abutment, stood a run-down Gothic-looking mansion surrounded by rows of plane trees. The only way up was through a huge Batmanesque gate engineered into the rocky hillside. Whoever lived there—I never saw a soul coming or going—commanded a bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles, as well as a long strip of the Pacific coastline.

  Stopping at that turnout, I was sure that I was standing at the highest point of the city. There was always a steady flow of wind coming off the ocean, the overpowering aroma of smog and the low buzz of insects. And if I stood there long enough, if I truly listened, I could make out the hollowed-out hum of tires on asp
halt in the valley below. The whole world at my feet, I would empty out and become quiet, at one with the wild incongruity of nature and metropolis. For those fleeting moments, I told myself, I was as impenetrable as the castle at my back.

  Everyone said it: I needed a car. I’d heard Hondas were reliable and so grabbed the want ads Eva had left out for me and focused on them. The only thing I could find in my price range was a ’78 Honda Civic two-door. The ad stressed engine reliability, a fully documented history of repairs, good gas mileage. I jotted down the number. A young man’s friendly voice invited me to come and give it a look. He lived out in the Valley. Eva was up for the weekend, researching an exhibit of Californian “regionalist” painters, using the UCLA art library. But she had some free time and agreed to drive me out.

  The guy lived so far out in the Valley, the San Gabriel Mountains had long since disappeared behind a curtain of smog. We headed north on Ventura, passing backward down the history of American suburban sprawl as we went. Close to the mountains there were nice houses, sure—ranch-style jobs, faux Mediterranean mansions—but pod malls dotted every corner, and block by block things begin to shrink and dirty. Soon we were on the edge of any western city, desert creeping in, lawns not so green, buildings unkempt and dilapidated. A few miles out and we could just as easily have been in Texas or Arizona. The lawns morphed into parking lots lined with chain-link fences, into squat apartment complexes aligned in tracts.

  The guy was out working on the car when we pulled up, which should have told me something right off the bat. But I was in one of those quick-fix, blinders-on, get-it-done-now moods. Eva tried warning me.

  “You should just look at it, drive it maybe,” she said. “You need to check out other cars, see what’s out there.”

  But I knew what was out there for $700, and this was it. I wanted to get the car and go. My life was blessed with magic; this was the perfect car.

  The guy was young, clean, polite. He showed me the automobile with a nice flair. He even had the repair bills handy (there was quite a sheaf—another clue I didn’t pick up on) and revved the engine for me. It sounded good, except for that one deep stutter gasp at the beginning that sent out a little black puff of warning smoke. But I ignored that with a wave of the hand. We talked some more. Eva pulled me aside and told me I could do better. I didn’t want to hear it. What was she thinking? I could handle it.