INTO THE WATER

When I was little and we went as a family to the beach my father would leave us to go on what felt to me an endless swim. I watched him walk down to the water, hitching up the navy blue swimming trunks that my mother, never a craftsperson, had knitted before I was born. The swimming trunks had no elastic and always needed help. I watched my father’s black head of hair advance into the waves, through the crowd of people squealing, jumping and doing normal things, and now he is swimming, purposefully, past everyone, out, in a straight line further and further and further than anyone else even thinks of going, my father, now just a black dot, disappears from us into an expanse of time so long I lose track. He is gone. Until, later in the afternoon, long after I have not forgotten but become absorbed in 100 other things closer at hand, he returns, water streaming, a laugh of pleasure on his face.

SUMMER SAX

Last week some time one evening when the windows were open I heard the sound of a saxaphone. Someone was playing a sax – I was pretty sure it was a sax -- somewhere nearby. I felt like I was in a movie: soft evening summer light, the sound of a lonely saxophone. It played no real melody, but you could tell it could if it wanted to. It went on for about 30 minutes, someone making something up as they went along, plaintive and sweet as I washed the dishes as quietly as possible.

Maybe it’s that guy who lives next door, I thought. For the last year or two or three I’d caught sight of him in his yard; and then one day during the winter he came to the door, introduced himself as Norm, said he lived next door, and asked us to clean the snow and ice from the end of our driveway because his wife was having trouble negotiating it with her wheelchair.

Maybe it’s Norm, I thought.

This Saturday morning I was pulling out of the driveway and I saw Norm with a small white dog at the end of a retractable leash making his way through his yard. He walked with a cane, awkward and bent over though he is not elderly. I stopped the car, got out and approached him.

I began with a wave. He waved back. I asked him if he’d been playing the sax the other night. “Yes,” he answered, “who are you?”

“I’m Marta,” I answered, “I live next door,” and I pointed.

“Oh, yes, yes!” he said, brightening, remembering.

“Your music was beautiful,” I said. “I felt like I was in a movie, hearing it.”

“Thank you,” said Norm. “That really feels good. Thanks for letting me know. I used to be a pro, you know, played all the time. But now, well, life is full of chores.” Here he paused and untangled his dog’s leash.

“Yes, it is,” I assented. I had to agree with him. Life can sometimes feel very full of chores.

“Listen,” he said,” “I’ll tell you a story. I used to have a tenor sax, but I lost it about 10 years ago.”

“You lost it?” I asked.

“Well, I sold it. I needed the money. “  And immediately I saw his ill-health, his wife’s. I saw the need for money, had a sense of what he had been through. Here was a person who had been up against it.

“So I played a lot of wooden flutes, Indian flutes, things like that. Then last year my daughters got together and bought me an alto sax, and it’s like I got my soul back.” His voice and his face were elated now as he spoke. “Thank you so much,” he said again, “for saying you liked my playing.”

LONG AFTERNOONS AND NO EVENINGS

I answered an ad in the paper and got the job, secretary to Larry who sold advertising in the yellow pages. Larry looked exactly like you’d expect him to: mouse-colored hair, wire-frame glasses, a tie clip. He had his own office. I had a desk outside and so did Roxanne who was the receptionist answering the phone and polishing her nails. I typed Larry’s letters. He didn’t have too many of them. In between I wrote a story on a yellow legal pad about a man who lived alone and pasted pictures of girls on his walls and how the pictures whispered to him.

When I was 14 in school I had written a long story about a man in solitary confinement. The man with the girl pictures was similar, both people who were completely alone and going a little crazy. 

Working for Larry was my first full-time job. We had just gotten to LA and moved into the cottage in West Hollywood that Kerry, Geoffrey’s glamorous older friend, had found for us in advance.

The cottage had lime-green-and-white shag carpeting in every room including the bathroom, yellow linoleum in the kitchen and mirrors pasted on one of the bedroom walls.

I didn’t have a car. I was the only person in LA who didn’t have a car, and I would never have one because how does anyone buy a car? Geoffrey has his Uncle Elliott’s castoff Mercedes, a big box 4-door that we drove cross-country in. Geoffrey doesn’t have to work because he’s on the payroll of his fathers mail-order jewelry company and gets a check for $80 every week.

So he stays home. He is sleeping when I get up and put on my black pantyhose and skirt, when I walk the two blocks up to Sunset Boulevard in this Los Angeles city to catch the bus.

I am always glum. I look out the window on the way to Larry’s office and every single thing is wrong – this job, me a secretary while my talented boyfriend stays home to write screenplays on his self-correcting IBM Selectric, an instrument I never would have thought a person could buy and have in their own home. Geoffrey’s sits on the heavy wooden desk we bought at the Salvation Army and placed two feet from the end of the bed against the wall.

At the other end of the bed, behind our heads as we sleep, is the full stereo with turntable, top-of-the-line dual cassette recorder and Geoffrey’s big puffy black headphones. 

We came to LA because Geoffrey wants to be a film director. He likes to write screenplays about good-looking witty people who have affairs with each other. I read his screenplays and always feel like I could never be friends with his characters, or that they would never want to be friends with me. I don’t really know why Geoffrey says he loves me. I am not likes the people he likes though I try.

I hate not liking myself and I hate hating my life. I hate Larry’s office. One day he calls me into his office and gently, without a reason, fires me and I have to fight hard not to cry in front of him. 

I continue to live in the white cottage that stands in a shady line of identical white cottages, across from a line of identical white cottages, a cement walkway in between.

I go on to the next job, this one a little better because at least we are creating books. I answer the phones at Fotonovel. Fotonovel takes stills from movies and pastes in bubble of dialog. The guy in charge is very handsome, remote, wealthy and stylish and I recognize his girlfriend form my college back east, but she and I don’t speak. I sit across from the artists, people just a little older than me who have their own windowless offices and do the paste-up. I admire them their title.

One night I sit in the living room at home. There is the brown Salvation Army couch and the color TV and coffee table and the blue ceramic ipe in the shape of a wizard. There is the TV Guide that Geoffrey has gone through, making everything he wants to watch and tape, and in a blur of tears I am cutting my hair without a mirror, just cutting it off.

Fotonovel fires me too, and I hold my tears this time until I get to the stairwell where I run into Steve, one of the artists I have not dared to speak to. I blurt out that I’ve been fired and my tears show and he only looks at me. He doesn’t know what to say so I keep moving down the stairs and into the bright summer light of Sunset Boulevard.

New Dog

The weekend is just about over. Sunday afternoon, a chill entering the air. It was so sweet and warm today. I took Bird up to the Comeau for the first time. On the leash, which is something Tamar did not need and I will have to get used to it. But I liked it, the leash. Suddenly leash-walking is in. Just this afternoon I read something from a woman I respect who lives near the Comeau, asking that everyone obey the leash law – she doesn’t like being bounded upon by unleashed dogs, and she says people are always calling  and calling for their lost dogs. 

That’s what I was doing a couple of nights ago and there aren’t many things worse than not knowing where your dog is. 

Bird has now been identified as “a runner” and she will be on a leash for a long time, maybe until she is an old lady years from now. But for the time being she is our new dog and it is such new territory. 

Getting Tamar did not feel so traumatic, so seismic a shift. I notice how committed both Fred and I are though. We really love her and want this to work. It made me so happy last night to wake up in the dark realizing she had clambered up beside me. She spent the night at my side, sharing the bed. She was a thoughtful sharer of space, willing to shift when needed. 

I love the colors of her fur when I look closely, the browns of her head, like wood, soft subtle hues. And this afternoon I noticed that the tip of her tail is almost red. She is a beautiful palette of browns. 

YOUNG NIGHTS

This morning, driving to work, the radio on, a song begins. I hear the opening chords and immediately relax. I don’t recognize the song, but I recognize the tone. Perhaps, I think, it will be a boring song, a mundane song, one that is embedded in my past, but too familiar to be interesting. Still, something in me settled down deeply, with pleasure, as if into an old familiar armchair. This was not going to be a brand new song I needed to pay attention to to see if I liked it. Nor would I have to endure a song I didn’t like much, or turn off the radio to silence one I hated. No, something was coming that my body knew I loved. 

And then the voice came in. Of course, Van. Into the Mystic. 

And I am transported to the cocoon of bed and night and Geoffrey then. 

We do not go to bed without music. In his apartment there must always be a soundtrack. For sleeping, he makes special tapes. The wrapper he makes for them is of lavender construction paper with the songs of Side A typed in a column on the left, the songs of Side B typed in a column on the right. He types the title on the spine, then cuts the paper with scissors to fit perfectly into the hard clear plastic case. There are many lavender tapes, and many other collections, all typed, titled and color-coded -- red for loud rock, blue for softer.

The lavender sleep tapes weave a soft web.

I listen as we fuck every night in the sheets we rarely wash. They have a comfortable familiar scent, the smell of New York City apartments that have been lived in a long time. The same with the nubby electric blanket. 

Into the Mystic, Van’s voice, Madame George – these endless strings of soft, warm sound carry me beyond where I am. I yield to those songs so easily in the dark. These nights with Geoffrey’s body so natural to mine, so easy to fall asleep with, his arms with no ambivalence around me, his body under me, still inside, my head fits his shoulder perfectly. And Van sings so long, so far out into the night without boundary, far enough away that we all stay lost till morning. 

AT HOME

My father sits at the restaurant table. It has a creaseless white linen cloth. The white linen napkins are large and starched. The cutlery is heavy, polished silver. The glasses shine. The waiter stands like a soldier at my father’s elbow, gently pours a small amount of the red wine into the globe. My father sniffs the wine, swirls it and sips it, then nods his assent. Not once does he argue with the wine. It is always just as it should be.

When guests come on a Sunday afternoon, they are people we do not know, a man and his wife from my father’s office. My father directs me to pull out all the tiny green weeds growing up through the white gravel path that leads to the front door. He drives to the Eidelweiss bakery in the Bedford shopping plaza and buys pastries. Sometimes he buys a few new glasses, a bottle of Johnny Walker, and my mother receives these things in the kitchen as an affront, as unnecessary, a waste of the money we don’t have.

After the lunch my father insists though that I play the piano for our guests. I pull back, I say no as politely as possible, sure that the guests do not want to hear my clumsy playing, but my father does not give up.

I do not enjoy my weekly lessons with Miss Spottiswood who does not enjoy them either. I might enjoy them if I practiced in between lessons, and I leave each session with Miss Spottiswood intending to do just that so as not to repeat the awful hour of plonking through what I have not looked at since the week before. But after each class I let the next day go by, and then the next, and another week disappears on me.

I do not play anything well.

If there are no guests, my father likes to have each daughter one by one stand on his knees while he holds their hands, bouncing his knees in time to a Hungarian song about a circus pony. The song gets faster and faster, you shriek, you lose your balance, my father catches you. Everybody laughs.
Usually the house is very quiet, each person by themselves.

On the back slope that leads down to the road are a few scattered evergreens, Christmas trees from years past that my mother has planted. Also there is a small azalea bush that my father gave me for a birthday. It was covered in flowers that night when he crept up the attic stairs after I had gone to bed and left it on the top step. My mother planted it on the back slope, which remains an ignored place. Not like the front of the house that my father tries to make look like something.

Often on weekends he dives into the woods opposite the front door with a lawnmower, telling me to pull out patches of brambles. I do as I am told though I want to stay up in my attic room listening to the radio. I can complain, but not completely cross my father. I must do what he says. And in the evening he and I will dress up and he will drive us into the city to Lincoln Center and we will glide into the crowd, the only time we are in synch, gliding up the red velvet stairs.

I want to like opera, but most of it is unintelligible and not meant for me. Still, I am happy to be somewhere, to be in New York. My father has a small smile on his face, pleased with the surroundings and with the pastries we order at intermission.

“A park!” he says to me once about the woods back home. He wants the woods to look like a park.

My mother despairs when she sees him with the lawnmower. “He runs over half my plants,” she laments. “He doesn’t know the difference.”

There is my mother in the kitchen, in the house, in the garden, housecleaning, making bag lunches for my sisters and me, making three meals a day, easy simple meals but never missing one, reading the New York Review of Books, a novel – Dickens or something from the library. This is what I see of my mother’s world. 

My father’s world is his new Ford sedan, is his subscription to the Metropolitan for Saturday nights, is his whiskey and soda on the rocks at night (or cheap wine) with classical music on the Fisher stereo and Somerset Maugham or Iris Murdoch as he sits in the living room in an armchair in lamplight, the narrow French doors closed at the bottom of the stairs, the rest of us upstairs, each in a bed.

“You ruined my life!” I hear my mother cry out one night in the living room. I had heard her get out of bed and go downstairs and knew a fight was coming. My father’s tones never match hers in the late-night fights. It is always her voice that makes the fight, his that tries to tame it all back down.

And in the morning my mother is still distraught, her face creased with pain. I have never seen her carrying the fight over into the next morning. I suggest perhaps she just leave. It seems that this would solve alot of things. We are standing in the living room. “But you kids are all I have,” she says, and I am disappointed. Nothing is going to change. 

BLACK CLUES

Now and then, at really aimless moments, I still look for a trace of Geoffrey on the internet. There is nothing except some comment he made on a Bob Dylan fan site almost 20 years ago. Otherwise nothing.

I am not so stirred as I was 10 or 15 years ago to look him up. No, I won’t do that, but I do think of him from time to time and wonder what his life is, who did he become.

I imagine him alone in the large family apartment overlooking Washington Square, the same place I occupied as a 20-year-old in the 70s. The computer world no doubt suits him, its anonymity, its lack of need for any real contact.

I have even wondered if he was a threat to his two young nieces, born after my time. I have seen Geoffrey’s sister’s profile on Facebook – a lifeless profile, so constrained – and seen the profiles of the two adult daughters. Even from this great distance I can tell that one is more troubled than the other.

I remember Geoffrey liking white cotton underpants and small breasts and I have made the leap to wondering if what he really wanted was a little girl. 

In those harsh summer months back in 1977 when he had started his out-in-the-open affair with HB, a writer much older than either of us whom he’d met in a writing class, I took to reading his black and white copy book journal that he kept in the bottom drawer of the tall black bureau brought from – and still smelling of -- his childhood apartment. 

I read Geoffrey’s awkward stick-figure handwriting, pages of it, looking for clues to who he was, always with the approach of admiration. Geoffrey was an enticing mystery to me then. I wanted so much to enter and be at home in his world. I’d been trying for years. Though sometimes I gave up, preferring my own world more and more.

In the journal I read of a memory of his of being a child and being in bed with an older boy who showed him how to jerk off. Something like that. Sexual. With an older boy. He had never told me this story.

In the margins of his journal he wrote here and there: Hi Marta.

I used to dress in white tee shirts, no bra, and Levi’s, no make-up, long hair parted in the middle – it was how he liked me best and how I felt the best too. 

His sister, who is now a shrink in LA, was a provisional friend. First of all, the two of them were so tight I had to find a way to fit in.

During the first few weeks of meeting this new boyfriend he took me to his childhood apartment where he’d lived all his life. The apartment was in disarray, its three occupants all moving on – Geoffrey, his sister, their mother. His sister was on her way to college. She sat on her bed amidst half-packed suitcases as the three of us hung out, Geoffrey and her making jokes, me trying my best to be part of this circle I was so new to. Part of the challenge was that his sister did not have a shirt or a bra on. She sat on her bed, folding laundry and chatting with her large breasts fully exposed. 

I could sense that Geoffrey liked her toplessness for the coolness it implied and I did my best to take it in stride. 

There was a lot of laughter between Geoffrey and his sister, as if they could not be together unless they were laughing and I learned quickly how to crack the right jokes when I was with them to earn my keep. Much of their banter came from Geoffrey teasing her. Much of it came from her picking up the thread and teasing herself before he could get to her. Geoffrey was the prince of his family: the smart Ivy League boy. She was the girl, more plain of face, assumed mediocre though hard-working, who would have to fend for herself. Even her eventual PhD would never be able to compete with what we all took to be Geoffrey’s natural talents. 

Once Geoffrey’s mother, long and far removed from his life, a chain-smoking alcoholic from and living in Mississippi played a tape for me of Geoffrey as a little boy. He was saying, “Toy, toy,” and the grown-ups were laughing and saying, “No, Geoffrey, that’s your little sister.” “Toy, toy,” he kept insisting.

When I first met him – me 18, he 19 – he was so much more in command of his life than I was, a life with so much more contained within it – divorced parents, a stepmother, a stepbrother, a half-sister plus New York City apartments, a house in the Hamptons, possessions, friends. I had none of these things, my life so contained by my small family and its poverty. 

All I really had was reading and the dream of writing. Geoffrey already had a typed manuscript, a full novel. It didn’t matter that I didn’t like his book, that I didn’t like that he chose the title by lining up a few phrases that he liked the sound of and asking me to pick one. I chose “Pure Effect,” slyly giving my comment on the content. But he had written it. And he liked it. And I couldn’t write anything without tearing it up.

Then he was young with a quick tongue and it was all going to happen for him in the future. And now we are in that future and I am pretty sure it has not happened for him. I imagine him in shadow and alone with no more youth to protect him. Everyone else really did grow up and get a life. Geoffrey never thought he would have to. I imagine he still laughs at the expense of others and keeps the steel chains across his character and history firmly in place, making him dangerous, vicious and someone I now know better than to go near.