they put him on German and Russian authors.
'Chekhov short stories.' He leaned forward and handed me the book from the coffee table. It was full of notes and Post-its and underlines.
I leafed through the book. 'My mother hates Chekhov. She says anybody who ever read him knows why there had to be a revolution.'
'Your mother.' Michael smiled. 'Actually, you might really like him. There's a lovely melancholy in Chekhov.' We both turned to the TV to catch the best line in Queen Christina, saying along with Garbo, 'The snow is like a white sea, one could go out and be lost in it. . . and forget the world.'
I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple. My deepest fear was that someday she would find her way back there and never return. It was why I always waited up when she went out on nights like this, no matter how late she came home. I had to hear her key in the lock, smell her violet perfume again.
And I tried not to make it worse by asking for things, pulling her down with my thoughts. I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?
But how I envied the way their mothers sat on their beds and asked what they were thinking. My mother was not in the least bit curious about me. I often wondered what she thought I was, a dog she could tie in front of the store, a parrot on her shoulder?
I never told her that I wished I had a father, that I wanted to go to camp in summertime, that sometimes she scared me. I was afraid she would fly away, and I would end up alone, living in some place where there were too many children, too many smells, where beauty and silence and the intoxication of her words rising in air would be as far away as Saturn.
Out the window, the glow of the Hollywood sign was slightly blurred with June fog, a soft wetness on the hills raising the smell of sage and chamise, moisture wiping the glass with dreams.
SHE CAME HOME at two when the bars closed, alone, her restlessness satisfied for the moment. I sat on her bed, watched her change clothes, adoring each gesture. Someday I would do this, the way she crossed her arms and pulled her dress over her head, kicked off her high heels. I put them on, admiring them on my feet. They were almost the right size. In another year or so, they would fit. She sat down next to me, handed me her brush, and I brushed her pale hair smooth, painting the air with her violets. 'I saw the goat man again,' she said.
'What goat man?'
'From the wine garden, remember? The grinning Pan, cloven hooves peeping out from under his pants?'
I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields.
'He stared at me the entire time,' she said. 'Barry Kolker. Marlene says he's a writer of personal essays.' Her fine lips turned into long commas of disapproval. 'He was with that actress from The Cactus Garden, Jill Lewis.'
Her white hair, like unbleached silk, flowed through the boar bristle brush.
'With that fat goat of a man. Can you imagine?' I knew she couldn't. Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren't, you just didn't exist. She had drummed it into my head since I was small. Although I had noticed by now that reality didn't always conform to my mother's ideas.
'Maybe she likes him,' I said.
'She must be insane,' my mother said, taking the brush away from me and brushing my hair now, bearing down on the scalp hard. 'She could have any man she wanted. What could she possibly be thinking? '
SHE SAW HIM again at her favorite artists' bar downtown with no sign by the tracks. She saw him at a party in Silverlake. Wherever she went, she complained, there he was, the goat man.
I thought it was only coincidence, but one night at a performance space in Santa Monica where we went to watch one of her friends beating on Sparkletts bottles and ranting about the drought, I saw him too, four rows back. He spent the whole time trying to catch her eye. He waved at me and I waved back, low, so she wouldn't see.
After it was over, I wanted to talk to him, but she dragged me out fast. 'Don't encourage him,' she hissed.
When he turned up at the annual publication party for Cinema Scene, I had to agree that he was following her. It was outside in the courtyard of an old hotel on the Strip. The heat of the day was beginning to dissipate. The women wore bare dresses, my mother like a moth in white silk. I threaded my way through the crowd to the hors d'oeuvres table, quickly loaded my purse with things I thought could stand a few hours unrefrigerated — crab claws and asparagus spears, liver in bacon — and there was Barry, piling a plate with shrimp. He saw me, and his eyes immediately swept the crowd for my mother. She was behind me, drinking white wine, gossiping with Miles, the photo editor, a gaunt, stubble-chinned Englishman whose ringers were stained with nicotine. She hadn't seen Barry yet. He started through the crowd toward her. I was close behind him.
'Ingrid,' Barry said, penetrating her circle of two. 'I've been looking for you.' He smiled. Her eyes flicked cruelly over his mustard-colored tie hanging to one side, his brown shirt pulling at the buttons over his stomach, his uneven teeth, the shrimp in his chubby fist. I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.
'I've been thinking about you,' he said, coming even closer.
'I'd rather you wouldn't,' she said.
'You'll change your mind about me,' he said. He put his finger alongside his nose, winked at me, and walked on to another group of people, put his arm around a pretty girl, kissed her neck. My mother turned away. That kiss went against everything she believed. In her universe, it simply would never happen.
'You know Barry?' Miles asked.
