The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 21

  I drove the thing around. It almost stalled a couple of times, but I attributed it to my rusty clutch skills. I liked the interior, the way the dash cracked in little rivulets. The feel of the asphalt under my body. I could drive this thing away today. I had the cash. Why not?

  When I told Eva I was going to buy it right then and drive it home, she just shook her head slowly. She didn’t tell me I would be sorry, didn’t chastise me. She didn’t even try to stop me. She just got in her car and drove off.

  I walked back to the car to find the guy buried under the hood. I was in the mood to make small talk.

  “So whatcha do for a living?” I asked.

  “I’m a magician,” he said, reaching for a wrench.

  Cool, I thought. So am I. I swear nothing sounded off in my head, no warning bell. A magician, that’s a great job.

  “Yeah,” he said, cleaning his hands on a dirty rag. “Mostly kids’ parties, weddings, you know, gigs here and there. I make things disappear, pull things out of my hat.”

  I told him I was a writer. That I worked at a bookstore. He asked me about Eva and praised me for my fine taste in women.

  “She’s quite a find,” he said. “You must be some lover.”

  I laughed and, at the same time, gave him his money in a mock handoff. He took the envelope and started running with it, arm out to block rushing defenders. We both laughed. After we signed the transfer papers and shook hands, I felt for sure I had met a fellow seeker on the path. A good man. Maybe I’d drive by sometime and pick him up, and we’d ride out ’til we hit cattle ranches.

  “Call me if you have any questions,” he said. I pulled into traffic, waving.

  The car was a dud, of course. I didn’t even make it out of the Valley before the thing started bucking and smoking. A block from Laurel Canyon Boulevard the car came to a stop with smoke pouring out of the hood. I was in state of shock. I might have even cried a little. What had I done?

  Eventually, I came back to my senses and called the guy. Got his machine. I shouted at it, telling the guy he was a liar and a thief. The thing turned off before I was done. I was going to call back but only had enough change for one more call. There was a long silence when I told Eva what had happened.

  Finally, the tow truck came. (She had used her Triple A card.) The guy at the station just shook his head and told me he’d buy the car for parts. Fifty bucks.

  “Take it off your hands” is how he put it. “Otherwise, what’s the use?”

  It needed a new engine, to start. The engine block was cracked. Beyond that, the thing needed new plugs, a tune-up, new brakes, new rings and cables, a fan belt, new shocks, and, the clincher, a smog inspection sticker. I’d forgotten about that entirely. Total bill: $4,000. I was crestfallen.

  Eventually, Eva came and got me. She was actually quite nice about it. I kept insisting that she hated me, but she bit her tongue and shook her head. Still, the whole ride up the mountain I couldn’t look at her. I knew I had failed her in some essential way. Her protracted silence only confirmed it.

  Eva ended up finding me a car, against my stubborn wishes—an ’84 Mercury Zephyr with red vinyl interior. Hawaii Five-O all the way. She fronted me the money and a friend of her father’s drove it down from his used lot. The radiator had a leak, so every time I wanted to go down to Laguna I had to top it off with water. I had to fill up the leaky tires, too, not having the money for new ones. I could only put a few dollars of gas in at a time. It was the best I could do. It was how I treated myself. From my teeth to my emotional life, I’d leave things alone until they groaned loud enough for me to notice. Perform a quick patch job and hope for the best.

  Eva and I had been together for nearly two years, the longest I’d been in a serious relationship. But we were seeing each other less and less. I was getting down to Laguna now every other weekend; and Eva was hanging out more with the art crowd, asking me to meet her at parties I always seemed underdressed for. One guy even asked me, out on a flimsy balcony overlooking the Pacific, if I were her younger brother. “Spring break?” he wondered aloud, sipping his mixed drink.

  She had started hanging out with this hot young director, who was showing her around at premieres like a trophy girlfriend. Eva swore they were just friends—and I wanted to believe her—but it got under my skin. Though I had been faithful up to that point, I began eyeing the stock girl at the store, the one with the pouty lower lip and the Krazy Kat tattoo on her forearm.

  Eva headed out of town for a week to accompany her director friend on a press junket, leaving me to watch her cat. (Frannie was a supremely strange animal, a stray Siamese she’d found on the streets of São Paulo, a beast so sensitive and tuned into Eva that whenever we fought, when I even raised my voice a notch, the cat would throw up in protest, depositing a little puddle of bile on the floor, then look up at me accusingly.) “Behave,” Eva told me as she kissed me good-bye, stroking the cat’s head. “Frannie is watching.” I went out with the stock girl the next night. We kissed a couple of times, that’s all. But when I got back to the apartment, the cat had thrown up on the carpet. The next night I found myself in Krazy Kat’s bed, listening to Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi Is Dead” superloud and drinking premixed tropical drinks.

  It wasn’t long after that Eva and I decided to split. I told her about Krazy Kat as soon as she got back. Eva hadn’t wanted to instigate anything, but she seemed relieved. I think she finally realized how little I was actually offering her. None of the writing I was doing was going anywhere, or getting me anywhere, and I seemed stuck in a rut at the bookstore. Of course, I was too wrapped up in myself to know this back then. I never could see Eva for who she was: a serious woman approaching her late thirties, hoping to start a family. All I could ever see was my red-haired Nordic goddess. She was a romantic projection I kept throwing out onto the screen of my mind.

  The car ended up dying one night on the way back from Laguna. It had to be past two, maybe three. I hadn’t been able to pull myself away from Eva’s bed any earlier. (Sex then between us was touch-and-go, and since that night had been most definitely go, I took it as far as it went.) The drive through Laguna Canyon was its cathartic best, all wind through the windows and dark expanse and quiet hills looming at the periphery. The smell of sage wafted off the high desert floor. But somewhere outside of east LA, the car shut down. The lighted panels blacked out, the music trailed off into silence. I let the car drift over to the breakdown lane, waited a few minutes. But the beast wouldn’t turn back on. Nothing. Not even that awful clicking. Just dead engine. The highway walls loomed; the few cars out that late just whipped by in a tunnel of light.

  After a few hours, two Chicano guys took pity on me. They tied a rope to my car and towed me into the city. After what seemed like an endless slalom ride, we cut across two lanes and went down the off-ramp more than a little too fast and then, as if coming up out of a dream, emerged in a somewhat busy part of town lit up by all-night gas stations. My knuckles were white; I was holding onto the wheel so hard, my back had clenched in a hunched-over posture. The two men left me at a Texaco station, getting out long enough to take back their rope. I shook their hands and thanked them both profusely, but they only smiled politely. Their whole demeanor had changed, switching from friendly and open to guarded and cautious.

  Miles was home when I called, still up in a stoned cloud, bless his soul. He picked me up twenty minutes later and took me to an all-night diner, first getting me high in the front seat of his Toyota. We ate a late-night breakfast—big stacks of blueberry pancakes, sides of bacon—talking and smoking until sunrise. I told him the story and he laughed with me at my bad luck.

  “I’m thinking of getting out of town,” I told him, taking myself by surprise saying it. “Just throw my things in my car and head north.”

  Miles nodded his head sagely. “You’re doin’ the right thing, my friend. Eva’s a good woman, but you’re not ready to settle down.”

  We headed west up La Brea, blasting Dyla
n Live in Dublin (Take your pick: “Just Like a Woman,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”). When Miles lit another bowl, steering the car with his knees, I started telling him about the change in the Chicano men’s behavior. It had been bothering me. I wondered if maybe they weren’t comfortable in that part of town. He thought about it for a while. Then he shook his head.

  “No,” he said, handing me the pipe. “They were probably waiting for you to pay them something for their trouble. They cursed you the whole ride home, amigo.”

  A few nights later, Eva stayed over with me in that little apartment in the hills. I’d already started packing. We stayed up late, exhausting ourselves with a heartfelt, marathon talk about our life together, our separate futures, the whole sad affair. We went to sleep reluctantly, brought down by the weight of all the unanswered questions.

  Something woke me from a hard sleep. A loud voice? I thought maybe I’d been dreaming.

  “King! Please! Don’t!”

  No dreaming this. I sat up, leaned into the noisy silence of the canyon and listened hard. The only sounds: the solitary whine of a sports car working its way through the gears, the thrum of the refrigerator. But then out of darkness came a fast succession of echoing footsteps, heavy slaps on wet pavement slipping a little at each step—steps strangely amplified, sharp and hollow. Then the voice again, a man’s, its urgency entering into his body like a jolt of electricity.

  “King! Don’t!”

  Two sets of footsteps now: what had to be dress shoes slapping and slipping, but also sneakers, sure-footed, even. And then Eva was awake, jerked from her sleep by my cry.

  She called out, “Who’s there?”

  I reached back for her extended hand. “I don’t know,” I said. Then came the distinct, horrifying sound of a fist making contact with a body, a deadened whoomp.

  I watched a current of fear flow through her as sweat broke out on the back of my neck.

  One man fell down; I could hear what must have been his head knocking back onto pavement. He began to wail.

  “Please! No! Please! Please! No!”

  Like a sleepwalker, I moved up to the window, shivering in the sick excitement of the moment. Fog was pulled like a white curtain across the open windows, wisps of it drifting into the room.

  Another punch. Then another. Then a louder, creepier whoomp that had to be a kick, and then the air let out of the man, his breath rattling out of battered ribs.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Stop it! Just stop it! Enough!”

  For a moment there was silence. Then out of the fog came the electric smack of a face slap, followed by an animal yowl of pain.

  “I didn’t do it, King, I swear it!”

  Another kick.

  I turned to Eva and, as if reciting lines, said, “Call the police.”

  She was already crouched over the phone, dialing. In that instant she looked like the famous photograph of a nude curled in on herself, transformed into a shell. She was crying.

  “You motherfucking asshole! Don’t you lie to me!”

  I turned back to the slap of King’s voice. Deep, flat, and rage-bloated, it rose up through the night in a stench. I realized I’d been holding my breath against its force.

  She got the police on the phone, but what could she say? There was no telling what street King stood spraddle-legged on, in what alley the man lay cringing beneath him. The canyon was a maze of labyrinthine streets, stilted mansions looming up on either side.

  “They’re on their way,” she said, joining me at the window, but we both knew no help would come.

  And so, in this way, standing beside each other in the warm breeze, we listened in on the brutal intimacy of one man methodically beating another. I felt like a child eavesdropping on his parents’ fighting. At one point, I went outside onto the porch and yelled, “We called the cops!” Eva returned to bed and curled up again into a tight ball.

  “Why don’t you do something,” she said, her face buried into the pillow. “For once, just do something.”

  I didn’t have an answer, nor did I have the energy to console her. I’d understood what she meant by “just do something,” but all I could manage was to stand there, wondering what the man in the dress shoes had done, how bad he had crossed King. It seemed crazy to cross anyone named King. Maybe he didn’t do anything and King had gotten his signals crossed.

  Finally, the man in the dress shoes got on his feet and started stumbling down the hill. King came after him, a new wave of rage rising up in his voice.

  “Come back here, you little fuck!”

  I thought for sure if King caught him he’d kill him, and I’d have to stand up in my cloud perch and hear it all, guilty by association. But the man kept running and King’s steps slowed. Eventually I heard him curse and turn back, the soles of his sneakers making muffled drumbeats fading out like a song.

  I stayed up for a long time, my body thrumming with adrenaline. Eventually a cop came to the door, and I went out on the deck to answer his questions. Then I went back outside and looked out over the canyon, watching as the house lights slowly blinked on. I listened to the first morning sounds as they wafted up through the thinning fog and thought about all that Eva and I had gone through. I felt bad that it was all unraveling. And then I thought about King: of crossing him, of going down under a rain of punches.

  Our last night in Laguna was excruciatingly polite. Eva was determined to end everything with civility and grace, but I could see the anger tightening her face. I could tell she was doing everything in her power to hold it in. As for me, well, I was too ashamed to do anything but tiptoe around. My pack was leaning against the back door, the newly repaired car was gassed up and ready to go on the street. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I slept in my clothes, outside the covers, stroking Eva’s hair until she finally passed through her anger into sleep. Left the house at daybreak like a thief under the reproachful gaze of Frannie the cat.

  The radio fizzled out one last time as I passed out of town and entered into the high-desert funnel of Laguna Valley, leaving me for a brief, exalted time with open sky and the first of the day’s light. Some ancient Indian spirit deep in the hills filtered out the radio waves to remind me to pay better attention, to be present to the sacredness the valley held. I rolled down the windows one last time to say good-bye: to Eva, to the two years in LA, to everything. I looked up at the last of the night’s stars that I never saw in the city. In the little gravel switchback I always turned into, I shut off the engine, got out, and stood there awhile, half-listening for coyote. The hills were completely quiet and still; I could make out a line of trees in the distance. The only movement was the wind blowing down off the hills, filled with the odor of distant ocean. My head jammed with thoughts and second thoughts.

  Slowly, I calmed down and started tuning into the night around me. I could hear the car engine ticking under the hood, a desert animal rustling in the shrub, an eighteen-wheeler moving through its gears out on the highway more than two miles away, and underneath it all, low and rumbling, the ocean surf as it came down on the beach—the saddest, purest sound in the world. The longer I stood there, the more sense I had that my life outside that moment was out of whack. That if I could just plant myself there long enough, root myself somehow, maybe the feeling of calm that spooked me like a spirit would grow within me. But that wasn’t happening. The full weight and force of my actions seeped in and started taking its numbing effect. I’d just left the woman I loved, had gone and walked out, leaving a life behind like a sloughed-off skin.

  Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now: that you can’t outrun the things you want to leave behind, because they are embedded in your body and move where you move, go where you go, are you. That life moves in a circle. I was young and thought a straight line up the coast meant up and out to freedom. That I would soon forget Eva’s soft voice, the way she lilted her words so everything sounded like a half-question, or an invitation. I th
ought that I was still in love with her, despite everything, and wanted more than anything to do right by her.

  Out on the highway, the radio woke up out of its trance—some old-school jazz number emerged out of thin air, reconstructing itself first as fuzz then static then notes and tones. I rode its rhythms all the way down Highway 5 into the sleeping city of angels, then on through it, the sacred valley energy still pulsing through my body, mixing with the pulse of gas station coffee. Another good tune. Gigantic monoliths drifted by, pale sunlight licking at their tops. The flattened-out back of the Pacific dozed on my left, rolling hills on the right. My battered old Zephyr steered itself through the morning. I was moving on, heading out. Before I knew it, I was north on the Coast Highway bound for San Francisco. The wind on my face, everything.

  SEALED-OFF

  Jonathan Ames

  (sld ôf) adj 1: closed or secured tightly so as to prevent ingress or egress; a sealed-off heart; the sealed off airport was surrounded by a cordon of police

  When Ethan and I were fifteen we started drinking beer together. I remember the first time that we two snuck out and we went to the other side of the lake and drank them really slow while hidden in the woods. I remember we kept asking each other, “Are you drunk yet? Do you feel anything?”

  We didn’t like to fish or swim as much anymore, all we started caring about was how we’d get our hands on more beer. One weekend Ethan’s parents went away and we managed to get a whole case. I told my parents I was going to stay over Ethan’s house, which is something I had done for years. We drank beer on the back porch and as we got drunk we kept on saying how beautiful the lake was. We drank as much as we could out of his father’s tall beer glasses until we both thought we were going to be sick and Ethan pulled out the sofa bed in the living room and we both lay down and passed out.