OUT THE DOOR, Part One

I stood on the small porch that we had never used as a porch, only as a way to get from the cement walkway to the door. It was a spread of terra cotta, supported by two round white pillars, all of it set down in a small forest of unfamiliar almost-tropical California greenery.

I was leaving. It was morning. I was leaving the little house, Los Angeles, California, my boyfriend of forever. I was slipping out almost without having to say, at least to the boyfriend, I am going, we are breaking up finally forever. Neither of us really believed it though I hoped so much that someone would take his place and thrust him into my past. But we were saying good-bye as if I were going on a trip.

I stood on the porch and he stood in the doorway. We had come to L.A. and California and this house together, three years earlier, the little house with the wall-to-wall shag carpeting, stick-on squares of mirror on the bedroom wall, the Salvation Army furniture, the round piece of stained glass hanging in the bedroom window made by one of his two closest friends. It was one of Jeffrey’s most prized possessions and he’d broken it one morning, throwing a shoe in fury as I left for work.

Kelly and I went to work together each morning. She was blonde, wore a white nurse’s uniform, smoked, lived a few cottages down with Bobby. Boyfriends throwing shoes was normal to her.

Fighting with boyfriends, love and hatred, seemed to be natural companions. You couldn’t have one without the other. Kelly and Bobby confirmed it. Their fights were noisy and crazed too. The fights, then the making up, then a little bit of calm. That was love.

I had left the little cottage almost a year ago, moved across town in the middle of the night on the wave of a slamming-door fight, going to an apartment building I had picked out a few weeks earlier, going there and staying there and even sleeping with one or two others, but still it did not feel that we had fully separated. Though life was very different in my own apartment, a place where on Sundays I went to art galleries by myself, trying to find art that I liked, and never finding it, but always looking, always trying to see what others must be seeing. 

And in the apartment I was able to have a friend over now and then, always new friends, women I was hoping would become friends and they did though the friendship could only go as big as the short time we’d known each other. 

One woman with strawberry blonde hair came and talked on my couch about the baby she had lost from crib death. I listened, I sympathized, though I had never heard of crib death and did not know anyone who had had a baby yet. Still, I felt at home with people who were sad.

Buf came to this apartment and with her I laughed and got high and baked granola though there was always in our friendship something we could not ignore. She was Jeffrey’s sister. She, getting her PhD. In clinical psychology, liked to try and nail me. “You only want to be friends when Jeffrey is not around.” Both she and Jeffrey liked to nail you to the wall in the name of truth-telling. No,” I’d say, but she was never convinced and neither was I. 

I wanted my life in the furnished apartment with the Murphy bed to be perfect, with weekends filled, a new boy in my bed, but these were hard things to accomplish.

I had my camera. I had a black-and-white TV that sat on the floor near a mirror, propped up also on the floor. Wearing my favorite oversize black sweater, my long hair hanging down, I took pictures into the mirror, but didn’t like them much when they came back from the printer. 

And I took a several-week course in masturbation and had my first orgasm alone in the Murphy bed. This counted mostly as something I could report to Jeffrey, something I hoped would raise me in his esteem. So I was making progress, I thought, I must be. Though it did not feel like it. 

I liked Rose downstairs who ran the place. Ancient, in a housecoat, her hair dyed red, always with a cigarette going.

The only other person in the building I met was the boy next door, clearly a Jeffrey-replacement candidate. I sat beside him on his bed one night, probably smoking a joint. “I’d like to make a pass at you,” he said. I deflected him then, feeling like I already had a boyfriend, but returned on a night when I felt like I didn’t. I spent a half hour in his bed before returning to mine. When he asked to store his skis at my place I said sure, but when I left the apartment – leaving L.A., leaving California, leaving Jeffrey – I did not tell him I was going. I wanted him to lose his fucking skis.