Winnie #2
Oh god, and yes, those were his teeth. I’d know that smile, those lips and teeth, anywhere. They’d been fused to mine for years, had explored so many hidden parts of my body.
It was as if I was a cowboy meeting an old nemesis in a dusty ghost town, like the one where we had, in fact, started talking on the eighth grade field trip to the Sonoma Mission and Toscano Hotel.
He’d been the new kid for about a month, keeping to himself with books of poetry under shady trees at lunch.
He rarely talked in class. But as we ambled along with the twenty other zitty thirteen-year-olds at the old west saloon of the Toscano, he had leaned over and whispered so close I could feel his breath tickle my ear all the way down behind my knees, “Can’t you just see John Wayne walking in here and holding the place up? ”
“Gary Cooper,” I’d whispered back, because High Noon was the only western I’d ever seen, and only because it had Grace Kelly in it.
“Fair enough,” he’d whispered back. Then he straightened back up with his arms folded across his chest, nodding and scrutinizing the place anew, as if he was seeing Cooper and Kelly entering stage right.
I’d impressed him! I’d said something about a film that had impressed the gorgeous son of the famous and famously private actress who’d mysteriously moved to Napa, 400 miles away from Hollywood.
I never wanted him to stop whispering in my ear after that.
He did a lot of whispering in my ear, among other things I felt behind my knees that were not meant for my knees, for three years until his mother moved him back to Southern California, to Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon, Griffith Park and Venice Beach—places he wrote to me about for months, helping me see them through his eyes like I’d helped him see two movie stars from a 1952 western at the Toscano Hotel.
Until, abruptly, his letters had stopped—even in response to the ten I overwrote to him, asking, then begging, to know why he’d gone silent.
I convulsed with memory where I stood.
He wasn’t looking at me.
He was smiling down on some skinny blond in a bikini top and cutoff jeans, no hat, her face turned up to the sun.
Someone—a guy—handed Lincoln a guitar, which he took before sitting on their party’s patchwork quilt, then kissing the blond long and hard like he meant it.
She put her hand on his thigh as he started to strum the guitar.
Which was when I realized I was dripping daal on my own damn feet.
Of course he’s here, I thought as I used a tissue from my pocket to wipe the food off my toes and sandals. Maybe he was even in one of the bands who’d be taking the stage later.
Suddenly the crowd looked shiny with sweat and already sunburned, and the scent of burning coconut oil mingled grossly with body odor, the tang of sex and other unwashed labors. The din of people’s voices and amateur melodies hurt my ears.
When I stood up after getting about half the daal off my feet, I found myself eye-to-chin with Lincoln.
I was so startled, I jumped like someone had come into a silent room and said “Boo!”
Lincoln laughed. “Am I so scary?” Oh god, his voice had only gotten deeper, more delicious.
“Only when you dress up like the Tin Man,” I managed to quip, referring to a costume he’d worn to a Halloween party we attended years ago. I’d gone as Dorothy.
“I always thought you liked that one,” he said.
“I preferred Rhett Butler.” To my Scarlett, of course.
“I know you did,” he said, with a twinkling flash of memory in his eye. He was clearly calling to mind the heavy making out we’d done in a dark corner of that party, which was bold with the bikini blond two yards away. I assumed she was staring daggers at us. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Yeah, you too,” I replied. Then, reaching for a way to keep him with me a moment longer, I said, “I saw you with a guitar. Are you performing today?”
“I wish,” he said. “I play pretty regularly in the city, but no big breaks yet.”
“I’m in the city, too. Where do you live?”
“Cole, about four blocks from Haight.”
“I’m like two blocks away from there.”
“And yet we run into each other here.”
“And yet.”
It was still there. The magnetic pull of our bodies, the irresistible urge to keep sparring, to make the other one laugh. It was stronger than ever.
“Maybe I’ll see you there,” he said.
“Maybe.” Ask me my address.
“Good to see you again, Winnie.”
Play it cool, I told myself. “You too,” I replied.
Incredibly, I was still holding the plate of daal, which was probably a good thing as having something to occupy my hands made an awkward hug or any other anemic physical contact impossible.
“See ya,” I said, then I turned and walked away before he could.
My heart beat wildly as I made my way back to Miranda and Rachel.
By the time I got to our blanket, my hands were shaking.
“I just saw Lincoln,” I said as I set the plate down at last.
“Oh Jesus,” said Miranda. “Did you talk to him?”
I nodded. “It was weird.”
“I bet,” Rachel said. No doubt she remembered him—there were a few years when my boyfriend and my sister’s best friend were over at our house all the time.
And I’m sure Miranda told her all about how destroyed I’d been when Lincoln left.
He was the only person who ever read my writing and encouraged me without hesitation; not even Miranda had done that, not after she decided to set her painting aside to focus on the vineyard.
When he stopped answering my letters, which always contained a new poem written specially for him, it felt like someone had died.
I violently hated whatever girl I assumed had taken him from me.
It couldn’t have been the skinny blond, could it? Regardless, I hated her, too.
I also felt sorry for her, because I could tell. I could tell he still wanted me.
And I wanted him. How was that possible, six years later? My heart hadn’t stopped thudding from our conversation. I felt bloated yet hungry, already clammy and gross everywhere, with the whole day stretching out in front of us.
Rachel handed me a bottle of cheap pink Lodi zinfandel—no precious Hartley Chardonnay, here!—from the stash we’d toted from her apartment. “Might as well drink it now,” she said. “Otherwise it’ll boil and be undrinkable.”
“As if it’s drinkable now,” Miranda said.
Snob.
I took the bottle, which was still cool at the neck and sweating with glorious condensation on the body, and took three long swigs.
I handed it to Miranda, who—incredibly, despite the comment she’d just made and her respect for wine, and her constant fussing over what glass to use and when to pour it after it had been uncorked—took a long drink straight from the bottle herself.
“When in Rome,” she said to my surprised expression.
“I feel better already,” I said, because it made me feel better, stronger, that my big sister and her friend were here, drinking in solidarity with me.
“And fuck Lincoln,” she added, obviously wanting to remind me of the way he’d broken my heart.
Rachel took the bottle and agreed, “Fuck Lincoln,” before taking her own long glug.
With the wine racing nicely through my veins, I reached for my embroidered bag, took out my supplies, and rolled a real joint with nothing to cut the strength, lit it, took a drag, and handed it to Miranda, who didn’t partake and passed it along to Rachel.
So. There would be some limits to my sister’s bacchanal in Rome.
I wasn’t going to let that stop me, though. Besides, I needed her to stay sober enough to keep me back from the edge. I loved her for that, too.
By the time The Charlatans walked onstage in their bowler hats and waistcoats and round glasses, looking for all the world like Sherlock Holmes and Watson, not a psychedelic rock band, I was perfectly buzzed.
The mix of wine and weed had been exactly the cocktail I needed to blunt the knowledge that Lincoln was here with someone else.
To “tune out,” as Leary had said to us all back at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in January.
God, I loved to tune out.
Wait, though, I realized. He’d actually said, “tune in,” like to the music—and to peace but also to oppression and what we could do about it. Turn on, tune in, and drop out.
Well, I was tuned in, too. As long as I was also tuned out to the shit that hurt me.
Miranda never tuned out. I was always jealous of that, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Back then, I saw her focus and overdeveloped sense of responsibility as boring. Now I wonder…What would it be like to be inside that clear and orderly mind of hers?
That’s what I’m here to find out.