Widow's Dozen. Marek Waldorf
That wasn’t unusual either. At this stage, failing to make a pass would have counted as a silent but definitive no. I’d been toying with the idea, I said to her half an hour later, walking toward Market while she decided whether to invite me home for the night, or “hanging it out to dry.”
Back at her place, we spoke piecemeal for a few hours before we began (tentatively) to unfold.
3
Six months earlier she had shown up at the crisis counseling office where I worked to begin her temporary assignment. I’d answered the door when she rang and informed her (nobody else around) she was a day ahead of schedule. She appeared nervous, as who wouldn’t be on her first day of work. She did a rabbit-twitch with her nose and mouth, then left—or, to suit my fancy, vanished back into the hat. I noted four things about her then: that she was got up all in black, including the greased and dyed hair; she was breaking out; the lip-stick, a damson shade thickly applied, seemed too much for her small, pursed mouth. Fourth, I noted her eyes, a chastening blue. Several days earlier, I’d spent the morning of my thirty-first birthday with my mom (visiting from back east) and grandmother at Pilgrim’s Haven, in Palo Alto, where my grandmother, blind and bedridden by a stroke, spent the time conjuring what sense she could from the voices on the large television set in a metal bracket in the upper left-hand corner of her room, jumbling up the soaps, the sitcoms, the cop dramas, the cartoons, the game and talk shows, the movies of the week, and the commercials, and waiting for her daughters to call so that she could yell or plead for them to come take her home, as she hadn’t been told the family house, designed by my grandfather in the 1920s, had been sold, torn down and replaced with a near-windowless monstrosity that, in accordance with the fashion around Stanford at the time, resembled nothing so much as a mausoleum. Pilgrim’s Haven was comprised of flat-roofed, elongated bungalows, prefab-looking with a light metal coat of robin-blue over the siding, connected by open walkways along meager plantings of flowers. There were no trees anywhere. There were, however, several broad, boring lawns.
My birthday fell on the thirteenth. Given the reversal, thirty-one seemed to promise new beginnings or the auspicious overturning of old habits. Later at work I was given a chocolate cupcake with a single candle shoved into the top, and a hibiscus. I didn’t really understand why they’d included the flower. I stayed home that night and watched TV or read, one or the other.
Brigid and I hit it off quickly, a rapport built on shared work assignments, common interests (music mainly), and of course the fact we both smoked. Before finding a post at the crisis center, I’d been transcribing worker’s comp psych-evaluations at a mom-&-pop shop playing both sides of the fence. It hadn’t lasted long. For one thing, I’d been optimistic about my typing speed, hoping it wouldn’t matter. The near tapless slur of the two other receptionists’ keyboards quickly disabused me of that fantasy. I also got the sense that something about my bathing habits bothered my employers, or the state of my laundry, the thrift-store jacket and birthday ties. Neither psychiatrist liked confrontation much, but they had their receptionists well trained.
4
“Why?” Brigid asked. “What is it you want out of this?” Her tiny hands fists in the pockets of a blue-and-green tweed jacket. I could have said I didn’t have much to lose, and she had the most beautiful neck, a dancer’s neck, but why? “I’ve examined the situation closely,” I noted, “and found certain aspects to my liking.” “Such as?” Girls! Ultimately she bought my act, or tolerated it. As sold on me as I was on her, but in her own way and with whatever scruples she supposedly possessed. Also she had a cat.
A semblance of carelessness coupled with the sense that, however silly what she said seemed, she’d laid down the law. On the phone she sounded younger, scarcely thirteen. “You don’t even try not to be difficult,” in a voice that was high, equable, reedy. She’d meant it (she hastened to add) as a compliment. The best people were all impossible, supposedly. Or “supposively”: that’s just how she said it.
Nob Hill Sunday: our first together, in a cupboard park at the top of the stairs of one of the city’s premier hills, stretched out on a crowded lawn. I turned myself from back to stomach with the regularity of rotisseried meat. The park was tithed into uneven quads by radial paths bricked neatly through the grass. We’d stationed ourselves at a fairly isolated spot away from Grace Cathedral. She would tell stories, assuming I cared, no, I cared, not opening up exactly but telling me enough about her childhood to give me an idea of the role she wished to inhabit. A survivor . . . we strayed into the topic of suicide, which she’d attempted (age thirteen) by swallowing a bottle of aspirin then going next door to play. She’d landed in therapy, which became an ongoing thing.
Obtained from eight years of treatment, as far as I could tell, was the ability to talk about her upbringing without embarrassment, self-pity or for that matter much emotion at all showing through. Abuse . . . she skirted the word, and so would I.
5
As I said, chiefly as I saw it then. There was no edge to the conversation to drift back from, but we did move on to other matters, wherein she laid claim to telepathy, a guardian angel, the gift of second sight. My head rested on a black bag loaded with books. I shifted them a bit, bag and head, beneath leafage affording patchy relief from the surplus of light granted between fog and bay. It seemed a lull entered. We were learning how to become comfortable with one another, and silence (an easy one) was part of the process. I noticed something I had failed to after seven months of working together: she was extremely judgmental. People-watching with a view to picking apart fashion blunders was a favorite pastime. I joined her games with the savagery I often mistake for wit—she found me funny enough, in any case, if somewhat slow-witted . . . “Can’t you keep up?” she might say, but not in a mean way.
Later, I showed her the beginning of a story I was working on, written in the first person: a young man named Fellows goes into a pawn shop, where he discovers a large fossilized beetle, a scarab, and buys it without a second thought. Taking the subway home, he notices that all seven people in the car are wearing wigs, while only three of them are old. I told Brigid this had happened to me once. “On the BART?” she said in disbelief. “No, not here, in New York—it was the last car but in the afternoon.” “Did you have a wig on?” she asked. “No—of course not.” “Then not everybody in the car was wearing a wig,” she said, pleased with herself.
I was to meet her at her apartment, after work, and she was late returning from ballet class. I waited at her building gate for half an hour, walked down to Market, came back to her foyer, waited some more. A pool hall on the second floor of the building opposite. Paddles of ceiling fans visible through the open windows, and a RACK ’EM sign flashing orange to green. I decided to wait another ten minutes, then leave. The time passed and as I walked down the street—approaching Market—I saw her at the far corner, and even though she saw me turn around and knew I had seen her, she began to run, not clumsily but endearingly off-kilter. She told me dancers were often clumsy. Sure, I watched her practice: she wasn’t shy like that.
Features that (once they operated on me) were difficult to forget. She tapered sharply at her extremities. Taking her hand in mine, the fingers extended no further than the first joint of mine. Her feet were just as small, her head as well. The neck, her favorite item, long and set at a forward angle. Twice while we were together, she’d hacked her hair short in back. Just taken a wedge between her fingers and ridden the scissors through . . . the dreaded “bowl” haircut. It was becoming too glamorous, she’d inform me after the fact. Once she did it because she hated the haircut I got, clipped a half-inch from my scalp. She had a round face. Her aquiline nose started high and sloped steeply on each side to close-set eyes and her blondish lashes bolstered with mascara, a night’s sleep making horror-film bruises out of the sockets. She bruised easily. Knees, shins, thighs. In photographs taken years earlier, in unhealthy pours of sunlight producing a squint, with beach-length hair, she looked older, wearing a self-critical expression that seemed to confirm the worst. Part of her attraction was the innocence chiding any effort to honor or appease it. To which she owed so much incredible experience I felt like the ingénue—no, I was the ingénue, we both agreed.
When she told me her breasts were “torpedo-shaped,” I agreed.