He had no leash for the dog, yet the animal waited pleasantly beside him while we spoke. There’s something admirable about a man who can keep a stray dog at his heels. It made me want to have sex with him.
Every single thing I did was to make that young man want to fuck me. Who are these people who have platonic conversations? They are adults.
I rubbed my chin against my shoulder, exposing half of my neck. I couldn’t tell if that had turned him on, so I did twenty more things. Envying another woman made me ugly with need.
I had to leave first—you must always be the first to go—so I said goodbye and drove away like a person who drives unsafely. I passed the house with the aluminum gate all the way around. Palm trees rose from behind the metal and bougainvillea strangled itself against it. You couldn’t see anything in the distance. Much of the Canyon was that way. Behind a wall of trees and fencing there might be a glorious house with good cars in the driveway, horses in the distance, and crops; or there might be a commune like ours, sandy adobe structures, the occult. That house, Lenny had told me, was the site of a former swinger’s haven called Sandstone. Communal bathrooms and sleeping areas, hot tubs, naked women rinsing their legs in natural springs. You would go for a daytime interview, and if you were deemed suitable, you could come back that night for a trial evening. If you were trim and attractive, you might be invited to become a member. Lenny talked about it like he’d only heard tales and never visited. But he spoke in great detail of tan women with cornrows jumping on cowhide trampolines as the sun fell behind the red mountains.
Just then, as I passed the rusting gate, I had the premonition that I was going to become a killer.
10
ONE OF THE REASONS I worked in the hospital downtown was to desensitize myself. I would still wake screaming in the night, feeling around my bed for their bodies. So I watched as emergency room doctors spoke to one another casually, arms swinging imaginary golf clubs while all around them short and long lives were ending. I went to work in a hospital so that I might learn the drill. That death was common and not so bad.
It didn’t work. One September afternoon a woman came to find her pigtailed child intubated. The child had pursued a butterfly across the street, away from the teachers at the playground. She’d been hit by a bus. The mother could not understand. But a bus is so big, she kept saying. The nurses didn’t get it, but I did. She meant, how could a bus only hit her daughter’s twig body? Merely hit. I begged the nurses to undo the child’s hair and they snarled at me like I was an idiot. But I knew that when the mother saw the pigtails, she wouldn’t be able to make any rational decisions.
What worked better for desensitization was kicking Tim.
Tim worked at AIG and this was during the collapse of Wall Street. So many more terrible things will come to pass after the collapse that I wonder how big a deal it will seem to you. But back then it was a dark time for dark people. The men who’d been pulling in millions a year were suddenly broke or scared. I met him in a restaurant. I was always eating alone those days before Vic.
Tim was with another man like him and they were seated beside me at the bar where, a few months later, I would meet Big Sky.
I’d heard them order a 1966 bottle of French first growth, at fourteen hundred dollars. The other man had seventeen stents in his heart. He ordered the steak and ate the fries off Tim’s plate. Elvis was playing from the sound system. The bartender poured the wine into a goosenecked carafe. It was a little darker than old blood.
They offered me a taste. I said no, no, no and they insisted. The bartender got me a glass and watched Tim to see when he should quit the pour. Think of how terrible that feels, to not even want the wine and then be metered out some amount. To be sized up. Was I worth a $100 taste, or a $250 taste?
—How do you like it? Tim asked me. He was balding and wore a shirt with a contrast collar. He had large teeth and the kinds of eyes that looked like they were in the middle of a sex act no matter what he was doing.
—It’s no Yellow Tail, I said.
They didn’t know to laugh right away. Eventually Tim did because I gave him one of my gazes.
I stayed for another glass. The bartender wiped down the bar, and the smell of rib eye faded out the door.
Back then the blue-collar men who worked at Ford would think of Wall Street and their veins would bulge. They thought of bars like that one, labels of wine that worked out to $350 a goblet. It’s not that I was sympathetic to men like Tim—there was no pitiable plight of the Wall Streeter—but the other end of it was oversimplified. The hatred was misplaced and men like Tim, if anything, wanted you to hate them. If you told them they were not evil, they would say that yes they were. Men don’t necessarily want to be the bad guys, but they don’t want to be the ordinary ones, either.
—Down here, Tim said to me, gesturing around the bar, at the bottles of men and the glasses of
