11. November 1995, Part II“Would you like a box for that?”“So, what are your life plans?”“What’s your poison?”“Redeem that rain check, maybe?”
NOVEMBER 1995, PART II
“WOULD YOU LIKE A BOX FOR THAT?”
T he Saturday after Dia de los Muertos, after kissing Haze goodbye, he set out on his motorcycle from the bright morning sunshine of the Mission, back into the gloom of the Sunset. His route took him by Grand View Park, where he had given Julia the mermaid necklace. And it took him by the jewelry store on Taraval – the one with the signage in Chinese only.
He had yet another Act the Maggot rehearsal later that afternoon, where he would practice her song, and then that evening he would go to work at her father’s restaurant.
Abruptly, he swerved into a parking spot in front of the jewelry store on Taraval and glanced at his watch. Ten til ten.
He would just have to make new memories.
He waited on his bike until Michelle’s mother unlocked the front door. She gave a start of recognition, and beamed up at him.
“Ahhhhhh!” she said.
For a moment he was surprised that she even recognized him, until he remembered that he was probably the only white guy who ever came into this place. She opened the door wide to admit him, and then shouted back into the interior of the store. Michelle emerged from the rear of the store and stopped dead in her tracks when she spotted William.
“Oh my God! William! Long time no see! What are you doing here?”
In the past two years, she had traded in the Coke bottle glasses with the square black frames that swamped her face for a more stylish pair with thin oval frames. Not only that, she had shed her braces, and had apparently learned to comb her hair.
Without waiting for him to answer her first question, she chirped, “How’s Julia?”
His guts wrenched themselves inside-out. “We broke up.”
Michelle’s face fell. “Oh my God; no way! I can’t even imagine that. What happened?” At the look on his face, she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry; that was a stupid thing to say.”
He waved his hand dismissively. Then, she looked like a deer in the headlights.
“You’ve come to return the ring, haven’t you? It’s way past the return window, you know.” She pointed to a sign beside the register in Chinese characters. “It says you have thirty days to return any purchases. You’ll just have to take my word for it.”
“I’m not here to return the ring. I’m here to buy a necklace for my…” Michelle wasn’t a bad-looking girl, in her businesslike emerald-green sheath dress and blazer. “For my sister.”
“You mean Kelly?” The look on her face was skeptical. “She never seemed like the jewelry-wearing type to me. Unless that’s changed?”
He thought fast. “It’s for a special occasion. Our mom is making her get all dressed up.”
She smiled now and, holding his gaze, peeled off her blazer. The sheath dress underneath was sleeveless, and fitted. She tossed it onto the glass display case, then leaned across the glass toward him, her elbows and forearms planted on the countertop.
“So, what do you have in mind?” Her voice was suddenly different, more sultry, and he realized with a jolt that Michelle – he and Julia’s former lab partner in AP Biology – was flirting with him.
He took a step backward. Smiled sheepishly. “Ah – I’m not too sure, to be honest.”
“Well,” she said, reaching into the glass display case and pulling out a necklace display stand, “we just got these in.”
She set the stand on the glass countertop. Each necklace was a silver chain with an occult-like symbol at the end of it. At his look of confusion, she explained, “Zodiac symbols.”
Intrigued, William peered at each pendant. They did look like something Haze would like.
“What’s Kelly’s sign?” asked Michelle.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted.
She grinned and leaned across the countertop again. Her neckline puckered at the front, and he quickly averted his eyes from the shadowy glimpse of her bra and cleavage. “When’s her birthday?”
When was Haze’s birthday? Oh yeah – March. She had once told him she was born on the spring equinox.
“Huh,” Michelle remarked, pulling one particular necklace from the display stand. “I wouldn’t have pegged Kelly for a Pisces.”
She held it up to him, the pendant draped across the palm of her hand, and he stepped forward for a closer look. The silver pendant looked a bit like a letter H, as in Haze, with the vertical strokes curved inward, and the horizontal one streaking all the way through the vertical ones.
It was perfect.
Then, to his dismay, Michelle seized his hand and pressed the necklace into his palm. She still flashed that coy grin.
He met her gaze now, the heat rising to his face as it always did when a girl flirted with him. But he didn’t step away this time. And he smiled back.
“How much?”
“Ten bucks.” When his eyebrows raised at the cheap price, she leaned across the countertop again and added, “And a cup of coffee.”
Still smiling, he reached into his back pocket for his wallet and pulled out a twenty. “Keep the change. I’ll take a rain check on the coffee.”
She stood up slowly, accepted the twenty. Held it by the edges, stretched it out. Peered coyly at him over the top of the bill. His face still aflame, he forced himself to hold her gaze.
“Receipt?” he prompted.
Wordlessly she reached into a drawer hidden behind the glass display case and pulled out a receipt pad. Scribbled on it, tore it out, and handed it to him. Just before his fingertips grasped it, she snatched it back.
“Would you like a box for that?”
“Um – okay.”
Still, even as she turned away, her eyes lingered on his. She sauntered back into the storeroom and emerged a moment later with a black necklace box. Took the necklace from him, allowing her fingers to brush his as she did so, and placed it into the box. Smirking the whole way.
At last he accepted the box and the receipt from her. Held them up and nodded by way of acknowledgement. Smiled and turned to go, holding her gaze as long as possible, as she had done before.
It wasn’t until he got home and looked at the receipt that he realized she had written her phone number on it.
“SO, WHAT ARE YOUR LIFE PLANS?”
The next morning, he drove to the Mission to retrieve Haze. His loud pipes announced his approach, and her front door swung open before he could even kill the ignition.
She wore a pair of fitted black jeans tucked into the tops of Doc Martens, and a black quilted motorcycle jacket with sharply squared-off shoulders. And with her hair pinned up the way it was, she looked like she had stepped right off the set of Blade Runner.
It was a promising beginning.
“So. Where are you taking me?” she shouted over the roar of his engine.
“It’s a surprise,” he replied. Just as he had with Julia.
With a grin, she slid on a pair of mirrored sunglasses and lowered her helmet over her head. Tossed her things into the saddlebag and swung herself gamely onto the back of his motorcycle. Squeezed him tight around the waist.
Without another word, he blasted away from the curb.
As they tore across the city toward the Inner Sunset, William was aware that they turned heads wherever they went. He convinced himself that it was not just because of his loud pipes, but also because of how great Haze looked on the back of his bike.
Just as Julia had turned heads, with those sensational long legs, and her messy copper braid flying out from beneath her helmet.
At the foot of Turtle Hill, he found a parking spot as close as possible to the one where he had parked with Julia on that cold day nearly two years ago.
“It’s not far from here, if you want to walk,” he told Haze, pointing up a long set of stairs that climbed the hillside. Just as he had told Julia.
Haze smiled and nodded, so he took her hand and led her up the stairs. Across the treacherous, uneven ground strewn with rocks and tree roots. Pointed, and said, “Look.” Haze caught her breath at the sweeping view.
But nothing else after that was right. It wasn’t as bright and clear of a day today as it had been then. Fog and clouds obscured too much of the view. It wasn’t quite as cold and windy, so when he brought Haze to the bench, there was no need for him to put his arms around her, to keep her warm.
He had brought his camera with him, just as he had back then. So he rose from the bench to snap some photos of the city spread out before them, and of Haze, standing before the vista. But her smile was reserved and close-mouthed, not bright and joyful, as Julia’s had been.
He could feel the necklace box, inside the inner pocket of his coat, pressing against his chest. But it was wrong – all wrong.
So he put Haze back on his bike and drove her out of the city, down Highway 1. To A?o Nuevo, where he held the camera out in front of them and snapped photos of them, with the elephant seals in the background. Past Monterey, past Carmel, past the cliffs slicing into the blue ocean. All the way to the park that shared its name with her . To the eighty-foot waterfall, plunging onto the sandy beach.
He snapped the photos of Haze in front of the view. But she didn’t ask to take any of him, as Julia had.
The necklace box stayed in his inner jacket pocket.
“Are you okay?” Haze asked as they ate their picnic lunch.
Only then did he realize how long he had been frowning out at the falls, brooding. With a pang of guilt, he smiled halfheartedly at her. Finished chewing his bite of sandwich, and swallowed hard. “I guess I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged, took a gulp of his soda. Thought quickly. “School.”
“Oh,” she said, peering closely at him. “I almost forgot you were going to school.”
Huffing a rueful laugh, he screwed the lid back on the soda bottle. “Me too.”
“Remind me again, what are you majoring in?”
“Hospitality Management,” he said dully, stuffing another bite of sandwich into his mouth.
Her eyebrows raised. “Hospitality Management?”
He shrugged. Gulped down his morsel of sandwich, which had suddenly turned dry and crumbly in his mouth. “I figure I can use it in the restaurant industry somehow.”
“If you want to be a cook, you could just go to culinary school.”
He felt irritable, having to explain this to her. “I got a full-ride scholarship to USF. The priest at our church connected me with it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to school, anywhere.”
She nodded slowly, her eyes still trained on his. “I get that. It just doesn’t seem like you’re very interested in what you’re studying.”
His stomach suddenly churned with nausea. “The truth is, it was my grandmother who connected me with the scholarship, through the priest. And… you know. She died a couple of months after that, so…”
He watched her connecting the dots. “Oh. And you feel like you kind of owe it to her?”
Wincing a bit at her frank characterization, he turned to look out over the vista, at McWay Falls. The same waterfall he and Julia had admired when he proposed to her.
He slipped the ring onto her left hand. “I’m coming with you to Santa Barbara. I’m not going to USF. And I’d like you to marry me.”
He held her hand in both of his, and she spent a whole looking at the diamond sparkling on her finger, still in shock. The diamond was modest, but it was clearly a new ring. She looked up at him and brushed back the bit of hair falling over his forehead.
“I’ll wear your ring, and I’ll marry you someday. But I won’t let you give up your scholarship.”
“I won’t change my mind. I’m going with you.”
“No,” she said gently. “I told you, I won’t forget about you.”
“I know you won’t, because I’ll be there with you.”
She touched his face, made him look her in the eye. “I love you. We’ll have a good life together. But you need to get your degree.”
“I can be a cook.”
“I know that’s not what you really want.”
With a note of desperation, he said, “Why won’t you believe me when I tell you I don’t know what I want to do with my life, except to love you until the day I die? I’m not going to give up a sure thing for an unsure thing.”
She watched her melting under his words as she took his hand in hers. But she said, “You’re right, this is a sure thing. We’ll see each other once a month, at least. At holidays, during breaks. I’ll call you every single week, maybe every day. Write you letters. And, you’ll figure out what you want to do and get your degree.”
She watched his face, watched him look out on the vista. Touched his forehead to smooth the worried furrows in his brow. Held up her hand for him to see.
“I’m wearing your ring. I’m never taking it off. You’ll never get rid of me now.”
He smiled halfheartedly.
“Listen to me.” She made him wrap his arms around her waist. “I’ll never forget this day as long as I live.”
“Me neither.”
“What?” Haze’s voice jerked him back to the unwelcome present.
“What what ?” he hedged.
“You said, ‘Me neither.’ You neither, what?”
He would never forget how quickly all their promises to each other had fallen by the wayside – that’s what.
And now, look at him. How pathetic was he? What the fuck was he doing here , of all places, with Haze?
He set aside his sandwich now, half-eaten. “Besides, if I was going to go somewhere of my choosing, it would be to UCSB.”
Again, Haze’s eyebrows lifted. “You mean Santa Barbara?”
He shrugged, avoided her gaze.
She gave a short, incredulous laugh. “Why there?”
He frowned. “I’ve been down there once or twice. It’s nice.”
She said nothing, so he glanced up at her, and he knew – she knew. Quickly, he changed the subject by saying, “So, what are your life plans?”
From the look on her face, he knew she had not missed the note of sarcasm. She shifted in her seat on the picnic blanket and set aside her half-eaten sandwich, as he had a moment earlier. “I… I’m not going to lie to you, Will.” Her eyes flitted up to meet his. “All of this – my tattoo business, trying to stay clean – is just so I can get my son back. So I can bring him home with me, to San Francisco.”
With another pang of guilt, he reached for her hand. “Can’t your dad help you?”
She frowned down at their hands clasped together. “I won’t take any money from my father.” He waited for her to elaborate. Her eyes flitted back up to his face again. “My dad… He’s not the nicest person.”
“Okay… what about your brothers? Can they help?”
Again, her eyes drifted away from his. “Kirill is a poor priest of a poor Russian Orthodox church in Alaska. And Vasya…” Her face wa rped with apprehension. “If I had to prove where I get money from – in order to get my son back – it wouldn’t look good if I took money from my dad or Vasya.”
A sudden thought occurred to him. One that had tiptoed at the back of his consciousness for many years; but now it came fully to the forefront. Carefully, he ventured, “What does your dad do for a living, again?”
She withdrew her hand from his. Plucked a grape off of the cluster of grapes she had brought with her for lunch, and popped it in her mouth. Chewed a moment. “He’s a botanist.”
He peered sharply at her. Watched her chew. She avoided his gaze studiously.
He didn’t contradict her. Didn’t bother reminding her that she had once told him that her father was a geneticist.
The bitterness that poisoned his soul on the drive back to the city made it difficult even to be civil to Haze when he dropped her off in front of her house.
“Are you coming in?” she shouted over the roar of his engine when he didn’t kill it.
He flipped up his helmet’s visor so she could hear him. “I have to catch up on my studies tonight,” he replied.
“Oh. Okay.” She looked disappointed, but she moved toward him, as if expecting a kiss. Begrudgingly, he lifted the helmet off of his head, and gave her a quick peck on the lips.
“I’ll call you later,” he said.
She nodded with a sober look, but said nothing. As she backed away from his bike, he fastened his helmet back on and peeled away from the curb. He told himself that he hadn’t lied to her. He really did need to catch up on his studies.
But that wasn’t really what he planned to do with his evening.
Instead, once he got back to the Sunset, he swerved to park in front of the jewelry store on Taraval. He told himself he was just going to return the necklace.
But it was closed on Sunday.
So he went home and smoked a bowl of Haze’s excellent weed. Found the key to his father’s liquor cabinet, and swiped another bottle of Jameson. Took a couple of pulls.
He reached into his back pocket and retrieved his wallet. Opened it, and pulled out the receipt Michelle had given him. Unfolded it, and looked at her number.
“WHAT’S YOUR POISON?”
Even if he had been prepared for his Macroeconomics test the next morning, he was too hung over. So he slept until well past noon, until he had to get up and go to his Act the Maggot rehearsal.
When he returned home, a message waited for him on the answering machine. From Haze. With a pang of guilt, he remembered how he had treated her yesterday.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night, like I said I would,” he offered when he returned her call.
“Will…” she began. “The reason I called is because I wanted to let you know that I have no expectations of what this is.”
“Huh?”
“I mean…” She seemed to be grasping for the right words. “I have no delusions about what our relationship is, or isn’t.”
“Haze –”
“I’m four years older than you. I’m divorced, with a nine-month-old son who will probably come live with me soon. But the point is, I get what this is. I just wanted you to know that.”
“Haze, can I just –”
“And I know you’re not really free to offer more, either.”
He had no response for this. After a long pause, she continued, “I really like you, a lot. I like spending time with you. Let’s just let it be that, and don’t feel like you have to pretend it’s anything more.”
Another long pause. “Okay.”
“So... with that out of the way – do you want to come over?”
He spent that night, and every night that week, at her house. And he went to every class that week, for a change, though he couldn’t quite put his mind to any of them. The impending debut of Act the Maggot that coming Friday weighed too heavily on him.
He had never performed in any way in front of a crowd. Certainly he had never sung in front of anyone before, besides Mike, and Julia, and now his bandmates.
And on top of all of that, Haze had threatened to come to the show. How was he supposed to bare his soul about Julia in front of her? In front of an entire pub full of drunken assholes?
It didn’t matter that none of them knew what the song was about – he knew. And Haze was perceptive; surely she would figure it out.
Around midnight Friday morning, he sat up in Haze’s bed. She lay facing away from him, breathing softly in her sleep. The only light illuminating her filtered through the gauzy curtains of her window.
Her mini-bottles of liquor downstairs called to him.
He slowly swung his legs out of bed, trying not to wake her with his movement. But the creaks in the hardwood floor as he stood up betrayed him. She stretched and turned to look.
“You okay?”
“I’m just going to the bathroom,” he lied.
She propped herself up on her elbow. Peered at him. “You’ve been tossing and turning a lot.”
“I’m sorry. I can go sleep on the couch, if you want.”
She sat up. “No, I don’t want. But I’ve got something that might help you sleep, if you’re willing to give it a try.”
He hesitated. “I don’t want to be too loopy for class tomorrow.”
“You won’t be. Can I turn the light on?”
He relented, and with her bedside lamp illuminated, she swung herself out of bed. Still completely naked, she squatted in front of the bedside table, opened a drawer, and pulled out a box that he hadn’t seen before. Packed the bowl of her bong with its contents.
“Still nervous about your first show?” she speculated.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“You’ve been practicing all week. You’re ready.”
“I know.”
She brought the bong over to his side of the bed. Sat on the edge of the bed beside him. “I’ll give you some of this to take with you tomorrow.”
“Where do you get this stuff from?” he ventured, as casually as possible.
She took a rip. After exhaling, she said, “You know I can’t talk about that.”
He took a rip of his own, and tried again. “Secret family recipe?”
She cast him a sharp look. “What do you really want to know, Will?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly.
A ridge appeared between her brows. “You want to know if my dad is a Russian mob boss?”
Suddenly ashamed, he looked away and tugged at his knuckles. “I...”
“That’s what everyone says, right?” she persisted. Her tone carried a faint edge he had never detected there before. “How else would I have access to goods like these? Why else would everyone in this neighborhood give me such a wide berth?”
He forced his eyes back to hers, fixing her with an earnest gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For dignifying the idle gossip of a couple of mouth-breathers with my attention.”
“Mouth-breathers...” One corner of her mouth lifted. “Jimmy and Mike.”
He gave a shaky laugh. “Especially Mike. He's worse than a fucking church lady.”
She laughed freely, but volunteered nothing further; and besides, her product was working its magic now. She turned off the light, pulled him down under the covers. Made out with him a while, and attempted a hand job. But clearly this particular strain was no aphrodisiac – he remained limp, and dropped right off to sleep.
She was right; he was not too loopy the next morning to go to class. Even so, he was too anxious to focus on the first lecture of the day. So he skipped his remaining classes and drove straight home. Packed the bowl with Haze’s chill-out weed and smoked it all.
Then he started in on the Jameson.
As afternoon waned into evening, he judged it best to walk to MacGowan’s, rather than trying to drive. He ambled into the pub and headed straight for the bar, and Cindy.
She spotted him and aimed her megawatt smile at him. Leaned across the bar so he could hear her over the din of the jukebox and the chatter. “Hey, Maximus!” She had been calling him some variation on Mad Max since the first time she saw him. “Ready to rock?”
“Not yet,” he admitted, his eyes lingering a bit too long on the abundance of exposed cleavage above her neckline. She had to be at least a double-D. “Can I get a shot of something?”
“Sure,” she said, but she cast him a quizzical look. “Have you been drinking already?”
He took a step back. “Nah.”
Still, she gazed at him suspiciously, but she said, “What’s your poison?”
“Surprise me.”
She poured him a shot of gin. She knew he didn’t like gin. He knocked it back anyway, and asked for another.
“Give it a minute to kick in, Maximilian,” Cindy suggested. “The night is still young.”
So he stumbled to the stage, where Mike and the other bandmates were setting up. Clambered up onto the stage with his guitar case, and fumbled around as he tried to help them set up the equipment.
At one point, Mike clapped a hand on his back. “Dude, are you sloshed already?” He was grinning, but his eyes were uneasy.
William waved him aside. “No, man. I’m just comfortably numb.”
At one point, as they were doing their sound check, he glanced out at the crowd and spotted Haze, sitting by herself at one of the pub tables, watching him. She waved and offered that circumspect smile of hers. He smiled back, lifted his hand, and went back to work.
Despite the substances coursing through his system, his nerves broke through. Even so, he felt far easier than he would have otherwise.
Someone silenced the jukebox, and the eyes of everyone in the pub veered toward the stage. With a cue from Mike, the band exploded into its first song. During the intro, Mike stepped up to the microphone, gave a rousing salute to the audience, pumped his fist and shouted, “ We. Are. Act the Maggot! ”
It could easily have been cheesy as hell, but Mike’s enthusiasm was infectious, as always. The crowd roared its approval, and he roared right back at them, truly in his element.
It was Irish pub rock, all right – raucous and rollicking, with Mike’s lyrics celebrating drinking, women, the working class, and Irish nationalism. During one quick break in the set, Mike introduced all of the band members, and then they plunged right into the next song. At one point, William looked up long enough to watch the crowd clap along with the rhythm, and for a moment at least, his inhibitions melted away.
But then Mike stepped up to the microphone and, in a lower voice, said, “I’d like to take things down a notch and let my brother Will sing the next song, since he wrote it.”
The liquor churned in William’s stomach now, but he stepped up to the microphone, avoiding eye contact at all costs. He knew the song inside and out, like he knew his own soul. He would have known it that intimately even if he hadn’t practiced it for weeks.
“This song is called Copper Thread ,” he mumbled into the microphone.
The shouts of the audience reached his ears: “What?!” “We can’t hear you!”
Ignoring them, he strummed the intro. Tittering drifted up from the audience, but it subsided the moment the melody unfurled from his fingertips.
His voice cracked at the beginning – just as it had when he sang Wish You Were Here to Julia. But now, as then, it quickly gained strength, and midway through the song, he felt confident enough to glance up .
He locked eyes with Haze.
She was smiling, in her usual restrained way. He quickly turned his eyes back down to the stage floor, or up to the ceiling.
The bar had grown remarkably quiet, so he glanced up again. Just long enough to see every eye in the room riveted to him. Especially, he couldn’t help but notice, the eyes of the women.
When he strummed the final chord and stepped back from the microphone, a heart-stopping second of brief silence ensued, followed by an eruption of applause and cheers. He allowed himself one final glance up, and locked eyes again with Haze. Her face flushed red as she clapped vigorously, and the corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled wider than ever.
It was all wrong.
Here he stood before his current “friend with benefits,” serenading the incandescent torch he still carried for Julia – for her smile, and her hair, and her nipples , for fuck’s sake. It didn’t matter that neither Haze, nor anyone else in the audience, understood the metaphorical lyrics. The glow in her eyes as she looked at him drove it all home – she was all wrong; the whole thing was all wrong. And he was a consummate dickhead.
“REDEEM THAT RAIN CHECK, MAYBE?”
The next morning, after leaving Haze’s house, William drove straight to the jewelry store on Taraval.
“Ahhhh!” Michelle’s mother said like always, beaming at him when he swung open the front door. Then, immediately, she shouted back into the interior of the store: “Michelle!”
Michelle emerged and, as before, stopped short when she saw him. But then her mouth curled into an involuntary smile, and she sauntered casually to the counter.
“William!” She had tucked a flowy, gold-colored silk blouse into a black pencil skirt. His eyes traced the line of her legs past the skirt’s hem, to the sheer back-seam hose and red pumps. She was petite – at least a foot shorter than him, maybe even shorter. “What brings you back here? Another sister?”
“Actually,” he said, reaching into the interior pocket of his jacket and pulling out the black necklace box, “I’m here to return the one I bought the other day.”
“Oh,” she said, her smile widening even further. “It didn’t work out?”
He said nothing; he only smiled back as flirtatiously as he knew how, and hoped it didn’t look as awkward as it felt. After handing her the necklace box, he retrieved the receipt from his wallet, and her smile faded somewhat.
“I saved your phone number,” he said.
Her coy grin returned, and she held his gaze a moment before turning to process his refund. The cash register popped open, and she counted out the bills into his hand.
He doubted the wisdom of what he was about to do, and did it anyway.
“Can I make it up to you?” he ventured, holding up the cash. “Redeem that rain check, maybe?”