Parts Unknown

Part II





Los Angeles

2008





Chapter 5





“I won’t do it! I won’t! I won’t!” Lucy was in a rage, her face beet-red, her dark-brown eyes so dilated they appeared black. “I’m not going to, and you can’t make me!” She jumped up and down, ablaze with fury. Then she began flinging stuffed animals at me. I caught them, laughing, because if I didn’t laugh, I might cry, or worse, scream, hit her, run out of the apartment and not come back.

“Honey.” I forced my voice to be as quiet and gentle as possible, the way one would speak to a rabid bunny. “It’s cleanup time. We do it every day. The toys on the floor go in the basket. The books go in the bookshelf. That’s all. Then you can watch Curious George.”

She was lying on the floor now, pounding it with her fists. I thought despairingly of Mrs. Schusterman downstairs. Unfortunately, Lucy’s room was directly above her living room.

“I’ll help you. It’ll be so fast, you won’t believe it. We’ll do it together, okay?”

It was too late, though. Lucy was past listening, lost in a tangle of fear and anxiety, her tantrum shrieking to its inevitable climax. I pragmatically checked the ceramic clock on her wall, a concoction involving a cow, a moon, and a tick-tocking spoon underneath. Four forty-five. Tantrums usually lasted about fifteen minutes. I walked out her door, locked it from the outside—the reverse lock a hard-won battle with George—and wobbled to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of wine, my hands shaking. Down the hall, Lucy was flinging herself against the door, hollering “Nooooo! Noooooo! Mommy, let me out! Let me out please, Mommy, please, I’ll be good, I promise!” I peeked around the kitchen opening. Lucy was kicking her door with such force it was shaking in the jamb. I sipped some wine, staggered to the kitchen table, put my head in my arms, and closed my eyes. I was just so tired.

Eventually the kicking subsided, then the shouting, and all I could hear were muffled, heartbroken sobs. She must be lying on her bed then, her face in the pillow. The tantrum was over. I gulped a last swallow of wine, then walked the gauntlet of that dark hall, unlocked the door, and stroked her light blonde hair. “Better now, honey?”

She peered forlornly up from her damp pillow, clutching her favorite stuffed monkey in one hand and a pulled-off Barbie leg in the other. Other pieces of Barbie were splayed in a disjointed huddle across the room. “I love you, Mommy.”

“I love you too, Lucy.” I hugged her tight. This was the best part, the moments after, when she was exhausted and almost baby-like. She lay boneless in my arms, a rag doll.

“So we’ll clean up now, okay?” I gauged her face. It was limp and acquiescent. I sang softly, “Bunny goes here, and Where’s Baby’s Belly Button goes here.”

She sang along with me, “Fairy girl goes here,” throwing a nude Barbie fairy-themed toy in the basket, “and The Little Fur Family goes here,” carefully sliding the book into the pink bookcase with flowers painted down the side. When we were done, I picked her up and kissed each cheek. “See, that wasn’t so bad. Now you can watch TV, and I’ll make dinner.”

She wiped her nose on the back of her hand, then swiped her hands on her red corduroy overalls. “Yeah, Mommy.”

Back in the yellow-tiled kitchen, I checked the clock. Five fifteen. A whole hour and forty-five minutes till George would be back. Maybe he’d come home early.

For someone who seemed to subsist solely on crustless slices of bread and pieces of cheese, Lucy was an impossibly energetic three-year-old. Most days, she was like some miniature teenager, bent on defiance just for the sake of saying no. Television kept her quiet, though. After a blessed hour of PBS, and a quick dinner—we both had toasted cheese; there was no point being fancy, with just the two of us—she refused to take a bath.

I had no reserves left. I contemplated throwing her bodily in the tub and forcing her to wash, but I didn’t have the energy. “Fine, you can have a bath tomorrow,” I countered, “But you have to go to bed now, then.” It was 6:30. I could not wait for the day to end.

“But Daddy, I need to see Daddy!” Her voice was rising to an ominous wail.

“He’ll peek in when he gets home, and he’ll say goodnight to you.”

“No, I need my Daddy. I need my Daddy now.” I furtively swiped exhausted tears from my eyes. Half an hour till George got home—I didn’t think I could make it.

We compromised—she put on her pajamas, long johns patterned with pastel bunnies, and I brushed her teeth. And then we read story after story—treacly Disney Princess books, and a tale about a talking dump truck, and a few about Barbie mermaids and fairies, until at last, all the way down the hall, I heard the lock click back, and George was home. I was saved.

~ ~ ~

It had been such a beautiful day on that April Sunday in 2002. I’d lived in Los Angeles for two years, and was visiting the Getty Museum for the first time. It felt so luxurious, sitting back in the museum tram as it toiled up the steep hill to the top, having a whole afternoon to myself to explore. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t found the time, before. But I’d been so busy, just getting by, flinging myself exhausted into bed every night, my calendar bristling with blacked-in and crossed out dates.

It was so complicated, keeping track of where I had to be, when. Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons assisting at Kids Can Paint in Glendale. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays all day as receptionist in Dr. Bronson’s dental office on Wilshire. That had been a lucky break. When he was cleaning my teeth, on the last visit I could make while still covered by my family’s dental insurance plan, I’d noticed that his usual receptionist wasn’t there. One thing had led to another, and there I was, still, two years later, filling in part-time. Sometimes I would get confused, and get in my car and drive down Wilshire, realizing halfway there that I was supposed to be in Glendale, in the opposite direction completely, working for someone else.

But that Sunday, I was free. The warm sun penetrated me so completely that I even walked loosely, feeling easy and happy in a way I hadn’t for some time. I poked in and out of the gallery buildings, the layout confusing—I kept running into blank walls when I wanted to exit, and I couldn’t read the map well enough to figure out how to get from modern art to Renaissance art. But the setting was so beautiful, and the buildings so appealing, I didn’t even care, and headed to the gardens for a break.

Perched on the edge of the mountain, the Getty’s views were breathtaking, and I walked up the highest path I saw so I could get the best view of the Los Angeles basin spread before me. Far in the distance an ultramarine ocean gleamed, pinpoints of sunlight dancing across it. Everything below me looked perfect, like a fairy tale, the crowded streets and lonely days transformed into a glowing fantasy, viewed from above. I tossed my head back and let the sun warm my face; I was toasty and happy all the way through. I felt like I could open up again; really paint again. I still kept at it, determined, but it often felt like more work than pleasure. I was haphazardly trying to amass a portfolio so that I could start submitting to galleries, but I never managed to get something cohesive together. I kept trying new ideas—upside down horses, dystopian cityscapes, Day of the Dead marzipan skeletons shopping at the mall—hoping something would stick and I could see it through a series. But I’d lose interest after the second painting, and try something different in a different style. I’d get there, eventually—I had to believe that. In the meantime, canvas after canvas stacked up in my living room, facing the wall so I wouldn’t have to look at my many failures.

I was embarrassed to admit it even to myself, but somehow, I was still painting for Josh. Don’t get me wrong—I knew he wasn’t coming back. He was lost for good, and I was sure I’d never see him again. But what kept me painting was the remote possibility that my work would be noticed. That galleries would display my art; that my name would become known. And that art critics would write about me, and one day Josh would see my name in the newspaper and say, Wait a minute. I knew that girl once. And for a little while, he’d think of me, and remember those three weeks. And if he remembered, even for a moment, then I wouldn’t be the only one still crushed by the burden of those memories that after four years I’d yet to figure out. Nothing had come together since then in quite that way, with quite that quality of light, emotion, atmosphere. Feeling.

It was tiny and pitiful, but that was why I painted.

The stupid thing was, I was still stuck back in that August, and although years had passed, I’d never managed to extricate myself. Loving Josh—being an artist—making some mark on the world—all those were linked inextricably, so that without Josh, I was as lost as ever, tentatively feeling my way down the path that had been so blazingly clear for just those few weeks, four years ago.

But things could be different now. I would stop by Blick Art Materials on Beverly after the museum, I decided, and pick up some supplies—fresh canvas, maybe a new brush, for a treat.

Everything in the Getty garden was arranged so elegantly. Bougainvillea twined on metal supports around a pool with an entrancing floating, planted maze. Strange globe-like succulents were arranged in neat rows, and a stream became a fountain, which ended in a hidden pool several stories below . Kids ran and laughed in the bright sun near the fountain, around the paths leading to the labyrinth. Sunshine glanced off their hair, haloing their heads with bright energy. I stopped in the middle of the path and closed my eyes, mentally photographing this moment.

I was suddenly jostled, someone bumping straight into me. My eyes sprang open. A well-dressed gentleman stood beside me—suit coat, neatly pressed khakis, close-cropped white-blond hair. “I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to walk right into you—are you okay?”

“I’m fine, and it’s my fault anyhow, for stopping like that,” I reassured him. “It’s just such a beautiful day—I was letting the sun soak in. For a minute I felt like I was at the beach.”

“That’s why I’m here too,” he confessed. “It’s so pleasant outside that even the Geometry of Seeing exhibit couldn’t hold my attention. And I came here just to see it—only to find out that I’d rather be here in the sunshine.” He spoke with an almost British cadence and I eagerly broke in, “You have a lovely accent. Are you from . . . another country?” Remembering too late that it was rude to ask after people’s origins.

He laughed. “Oh no, I was born and raised in Los Angeles.”

“My mistake—I lived in London for a year . . . I’m still a huge Anglophile.”

“I am fond of trifle—does that count?”

We had started walking as we talked, winding our way through the gardens and down to the pond at the bottom, with that miniature floating maze in the center.

We sat down on a bench for a moment.

“What would you find if you could get to the middle of that maze?” I wondered aloud.

He furrowed his brow, perplexed. “Is that a trick question? It’s too small—you wouldn’t fit!”

That answer pretty much sucked, but I stuck out my hand anyhow. “Hi. I’m Vivian.”

“George. George Anglin. Pleased to meet you.”

“And you.” Our handshake seemed the first step in some nineteenth century dance, the dancers circling each other warily, only their hands touching.

“What are you doing next?” I asked, pulling out my gallery guide.

“Lunch, I suppose,” he said. “Although I do have a list I brought with me, of pieces I really wanted to see today.” He retrieved a meticulously hand-printed inventory from his inside jacket pocket: Lansdowne Herakles, Oak Tree in Winter—Talbot, Irises—Van Gogh. “But it’s noon . . .” He checked his watch. “I always have lunch at this time. Would you like to join me?”

I wondered how old he was. Late thirties, maybe? Forty? I was twenty-four. Well, it’s not like he was asking me on a date. And I had nothing better to do, anyhow. “Sure, lunch sounds good.” We walked together toward the sandwich cart, his cream-colored button-down shirt and jeans blurring his angular frame at the edges as we passed the creamy limestone buildings. He was so pale, his eyebrows and eyelashes almost white in the bright sun against his freckled skin, and he walked with gravitas, one hand grasping the jutting wrist of the other.

I bought a roast-beef sandwich; he went for a green salad with dressing on the side. We sat at one of the outside cafe tables, near one of those cream-colored limestone walls. An in-ground fountain shot up, then disappeared, then flung itself from the pavement again.

“So are you a native?” he asked me, pausing while chewing delicately. He would be such a well-mannered dinner party companion, were I ever invited to any dinner parties.

“Of Los Angeles? Oh no, I’m from San Jose, with detours to Connecticut, and London.”

“It must have been hard to leave the Bay area—it’s so beautiful there. So many green and open places; they’re hard to find here.”

I glanced up at the blue, blue sky. The sun was so warm and bright, far closer to the earth than it had been in San Jose.

“No, it wasn’t hard to leave, at all. I prefer it here, actually.” One place was the same as another, really.

“And what brought you here?” I would have thought he was prying, but he seemed so genuinely interested, I relaxed. It had been so long since someone had asked me questions, had wanted to hear my answers.

“Well . . . someone I remembered from college lived here. And I sort of ended up here, wondering if I’d find him.”

“Did you?”

“Oh. No. It was silly of me in the first place. And that was a few years ago.” I blinked and smiled at George. “It’s just me. I live in this cool restored Art Deco building on Kingsley, and I’m an art assistant, and a receptionist. Till I can get together my portfolio, and start submitting slides to galleries. It’s taking longer than I thought it would. To get myself together. I mean, get my stuff together.”

“You have plenty of time,” he assured me. “You’re young. You’re so fortunate, to be able to create art. I always wished I had an artistic side, but so far I haven’t found it. I can appreciate art, at least, even if I can’t create it.”

“Thanks,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable focusing attention on myself. “It feels more like a curse than a blessing sometimes. What about you?”

“I live near LACMA, actually. In this rent-controlled apartment—it’s in a wonderful old building that looks like a castle. I teach statistics at Cal Tech.”

“I guessed it!” I exclaimed. “I had a feeling you were really smart.”

He laughed. “I’ll take it as a compliment.”

“No—it’s the way you walk. So . . . purposefully. And with such good posture.”

“My mother made me take ballet classes when I was young. I was the only boy there, and when my school friends found out I was teased mercilessly. For years! But I did learn how to stand properly.” He swished his fingers across the table, a graceful movement. “And to move with intention. I try to make every motion economical, the right one.”

“Isn’t it easier just to slouch?” I asked. “You don’t have to think about slouching—you just do it.”

“But that’s the point—living with intention. Even in the most mundane moments, like taking a walk—you make it meaningful.”

I wanted to grasp his hand, suddenly, take some of his self-assurance for myself. My fingers twitched involuntarily.

“So, Cal Tech—that’s exciting. Isn’t it an awful commute, though?”

His eyes lit up as we fell into the perennial Los Angeles conversion topic—back roads to Pasadena, hours to leave home in which the traffic was light, and horror stories—“Once I was driving to work on the 110,” he recounted, “and traffic was backed up for miles—literally miles! This was crazy traffic, even for LA. Everyone was confused, they had no idea what was going on. People were getting out of their cars and walking around the freeway. It turned out someone was about to jump from one of the overpasses. They’d closed down the whole freeway, there were policemen and fire trucks everywhere. Eventually the guy gave up. But we just sat there, for an hour and a half.”

I half-smiled, jiggling my bottle of water. It was hard to tell if the story was funny or sad. “So, you must have liked the Geometry of Seeing exhibit. Being into math and formulas and all.”

“Yes, I did. Nice and orderly, the way I like it.” Was he being self-deprecating or did he mean it? I eyed him and he smiled bashfully. “I prefer a bit of the unpredictable myself,” I grinned back. “Shall we take a look at those irises, then?”

He offered his arm and I linked mine through his, and we walked toward the gallery. There the irises were, their downturned blue petals like little frowny faces. The bright sunflowers in the background were out of reach. I wanted to reach out and touch the aggressive, thick brushstrokes, but of course I couldn’t. And divorced from the passion and heartache that Van Gogh must have felt through his life, it was reduced to a pretty painting, in a sterile room. I didn’t want to stay any longer, looking at this extraordinarily costly painting that had done Van Gogh no good in his life, painted a year before he died in an asylum.

“I need to go, George,” I said, already moving toward the exit. “But it was nice meeting you.” It had been a good diversion talking to him, but he seemed so put together. Talking to him showed the mess my life was in stark relief.

“Can I have your number? Maybe we can meet again,” he suggested. I felt a surprised, bright flare warm me inside. “Oh sure, here . . . wait, I don’t have a pen.” I rummaged through my overstuffed shoulder bag in frustration. He reached into his capacious inside jacket pocket and produced a small pad and a pen. I scribbled my number, and in return he handed me his business card. I put it in my purse, where it disappeared from view, and from my mind, until a few days later.

~ ~ ~

“Hi, sweetie.” I hugged George gratefully—my savior. Every night, just as I was at the brink of insanity, he came home and rescued me, over and over. He kissed me back, then mock-staggered—Lucy had run up behind him and was holding on to his legs for dear life. “Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy” she sang, like a mantra. “You’re home, you’re home, you’re home!”

He kissed Lucy soundly on both cheeks. “How’s my pumpkin?” Then he lifted her up on his shoulders and carried her to her room, taking over the bedtime routine from there. I limped into the living room and collapsed onto the sofa. From Lucy’s room, I heard the musical cadence of George reading her favorite story, Guess How Much I Love You. I knew Lucy was tucked in bed, sucking her thumb, content at last.

George eventually emerged, loosening his tie with one finger. “There’s not much for dinner,” I nodded toward the kitchen. “We just had toast and cheese tonight.”

“Healthy,” he teased, then, carefully, “You should try to get her to eat vegetables. Or fruits. Just try, that’s all I’m asking.”

“You don’t know what my day is like, okay?” I near-whispered, with a barely repressed fury that threatened to erupt into tears. “So don’t even . . .”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” his arms around me then. “I know it’s hard. I wish I didn’t have to work so late.”

“I’m counting the days till summer vacation,” I whispered into his neck. Summertime—when he was home, all summer, and it was the three of us. Instead of just me and Lucy, battling wills all afternoon long in that claustrophobic little apartment.

He pulled back, and I felt alone for a moment, outside the safety of his arms. “Any news?” he asked hopefully. I shook my head dully. “Negative, again. I’m spending a fortune on those pee-sticks. I just can’t understand it—it was so easy, with Lucy.”

“When it happens, it happens,” he murmured. “Everything in its time.”

I had a sudden, panicked vision of me, not pregnant, still, two years from now. Lucy would be five, and in kindergarten. And moms would be trickling back to work—the stay-at-home moms from preschool transforming themselves back into working women, or tireless PTA volunteers. And what would I be doing? I had to have another, just to keep the future at bay. Another baby would buy me five more years, at least, to figure things out.

What would happen, I wondered more often than I should, if a person couldn’t figure out what to do in life? Did that mean that you would just . . . die? Disappear? If you had no idea what path to follow—maybe there was no path, for you. You couldn’t just lounge around like some 1950s housewife these days, vacuuming the floor occasionally while watching television. Everyone needed a plan.

My plan turned out to be this: Marry George. Have a baby. Repeat. But the repeat part wasn’t working out so good. I needed a new plan.

I was just so tired, I couldn’t come up with one.

If you could map out my life in Los Angeles, it would look like one big square. The top right corner was the apartment, where I spent most of my time. The bottom right corner was the Fairfax library, where Lucy and I lost ourselves in make-believe stories every week. The lower left corner was any of a handful of stores—Ralphs, Target, Trader Joe’s—where I spent many mornings. The top left corner was the park, where I whiled away weekday afternoons, watching the nannies, sipping coffee, and dreaming about a different life.

~ ~ ~

I was honestly surprised when George called, four days later: “It’s George Anglin—we met at the Getty last weekend?”

“Hi!” I exclaimed. “It’s nice to hear from you.” That encounter had receded to the back of my mind, although I was still meaning to stop by Blick Art Materials and pick up those supplies.

“I enjoyed meeting you, and I was wondering—would you like to have dinner with me on Saturday?”

Me? Being asked on a date? It so rarely happened. In fact, I almost never got phone calls; they were usually for Kip, my roommate. He was a drummer for Luscious Sorrow, whose paltry gigs at filthy Silverlake bars necessitated a full-time job serving coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. We’d found each other through a Dawson College alumni housing web site, and we were the perfect roommates: both over-educated, slumming it in jobs whose annual pay was far less than a year’s tuition at our former school. Kip and I stayed out of each other’s way, except for companionable trysts on Sunday afternoons to watch “Blind Date” and howl at the goofy jokes. I wondered every so often what it would be like to kiss him, to run my fingers through that Gandalf-length goatee and caress those stretched earlobes with thick black knobs in them. As we guffawed at the hilarious word balloons on our favorite show, I imagined reaching out and touching his sinewy arm blazing shoulder-to-wrist with colorful body art. But I was too shy to make a move.

Our two-bedroom apartment was tiny and lacked heat (unless you wanted to stick your head in the oven), but living there was worth it just to fling open the living room windows and gaze into the building’s courtyard, lush with bird-of-paradise plants and overgrown bright-pink hibiscus—a reminder of some more hopeful pre-Depression era, when perhaps young starlets lived in this building, or people with grand ideas, just starting out but destined for future greatness. Meanwhile, the hibiscus were beautiful, but every time I accidentally brushed a body part against them, I broke out in a rash.

These days the building was just a slumping relic, on a street otherwise packed with hastily built cinderblock-style apartments. Off to the right, Franklin Avenue beckoned like an impossible dream, huge houses tucked atop steep drives. And further off still was Griffith Park, Los Angeles’ one big swath of wild open space. In my rotting apartment building, close to the seedy side of Hollywood Boulevard, shuttling between two poorly paying jobs, I felt on the very verge of civilization itself.

But George introduced me to a Los Angeles I barely knew. He offered to pick me up, but I hastily declined, horrified at his possibly seeing my living situation. “I’ll meet you there,” I countered. “Tell me the name again?”

Cafe Du Village, Larchmont Boulevard. How could it be that I’d lived here for two years and never encountered this lovely, civilized street, like Lincoln Avenue back in the sedate neighborhood I grew up in. I parked Angelina—my car—and looked around. Graceful trees lined Larchmont, strung with tiny twinkling white lights, and the street was lined with fashionable shops and restaurants. I was used to hanging out at the Bourgeois Pig coffee house on Franklin, or the dirty, arty area around Los Feliz. Nothing so pleasant as this street. The women I passed as I speed-walked toward the restaurant (late, double-checking the address) were uniformly well-groomed—deeply tanned, wearing Ugg boots with mini-skirts, all perfectly highlighted hair and beautifully arched eyebrows. These were the people who got LA.

I burst into the small, red-awninged restaurant ten minutes late, and of course he was there already, looking as classy as anything. His blond hair was cut even shorter than it had been the other week, perhaps to disguise the fact that it was thinning away from the temples, and he wore a perfectly pressed, French blue button-down shirt. His fair, freckled cheeks were flushed already, perhaps from the glass of wine he grasped lightly. Perhaps from the fact that I was late. “I’m so sorry!” I cried, hastily throwing myself into a chair. “I didn’t know the neighborhood, and . . .”

“I’m glad you’re here,” he smiled. He poured some wine into my waiting glass—this appeared to be a bring-your-own-wine kind of place. “Cheers.” We clinked glasses, then there was a deadly silence—oh no, and the date had just begun! “So . . .” I blurted out, “I was surprised when you called. Pleasantly, I mean.”

“Well, I’m turning forty next week,” George began. (A-ha—now I knew how old he was!) “And I thought it’s about time I did something spontaneous. I’m usually so busy—teaching, and doing research. I have family obligations, also.” (I raised my eyebrows.) He clarified, “My mother. She’s getting older, and she’s on her own now. I spend as much time with her as I can.”

“How nice!” I said warmly. “You’re so kind to look after your mother like that. I hope someone does the same for my parents, when they get older.” I fiddled with my napkin. “That’s not to say that I wouldn’t, of course . . . they’re just, far away. And we’ve never been that close.”

“San Jose, you said?” he asked, nonjudgmentally.

I nodded. “I just couldn’t see going back there, after college. And now that I’m here—there’s just not much there, for me. Some old high-school friends. And if I want to get somewhere with my art, LA has more opportunities.”

He leaned forward, interested. “Tell me more about the kind of art you do.”

“Well, not much at the moment,” I confessed. “I’m always just about to start some big project . . . oh.” The waiter was hovering. “I’ll have the, er, magret de canard, please.” My French accent was execrable.

“L’entrecote, s’il vous plaît.” Unsurprisingly, his French was perfect. “My mother was a French teacher,” he explained. “So, you were saying—about your art?”

“I paint,” I explained, as enthusiastically as I could. “I’ve been trying a lot of different themes and media, actually, but nothing seems to stick. I was painting animal skeletons for a while, and I went through this sports phase—soccer balls, and four-square balls, and golf balls, all balanced on each other. But they were kind of hard to paint, and I’m not much good at perspective, and the balls kept rolling away so I could never get the correspondences right. So anyhow, I’m doing portraits, mostly, these days . . . of made-up people doing ridiculous things, like riding bicycles upside down. But it’s hard to paint imaginary people. They always go sort of funny . . .” I trailed off.

“You sound very talented,” George assured me.

“Well, thanks,” I demurred. “I don’t know about that. But what about you—what excites you about statistics?”

“That’s a great question,” he said, as if responding to an enthusiastic student. I felt the absurd happiness that comes from saying the right thing. “You might be surprised to hear that there’s plenty of room for creativity in my field, too.”

“Really.” I leaned forward. “Tell me.”

“Just imagine taking your life and quantifying it. Thinking about how many times, say, you crossed a particular street this week. And say I counted all the times I crossed that same street this week. What if I crossed that street, every time, just minutes before you came by? We could graph our respective trajectories. And we would see how our lives, all this week, almost intersected. We took something that seemed random, and gave it meaning. Then, you could go further. It’s like the odds of dice coming up a certain number. It’s possible to roll six sixes in a row. And it’s possible for the paths of two people who almost met a number of times to finally intersect. It’s all based on probability.”

I nodded. “That’s cool. My brain doesn’t work like that. I wish it did. Thinking in that way must be like reading maps—just looking at something and all of a sudden the correspondences appear. I’m terrible at reading maps too. They’re all squiggly lines going in impossible directions. I keep looking at the shapes the lines form, like cloud pictures, and not making the least sense out of the map’s purpose, you know?”

“That’s because you’re an artist. You think differently than I do. I’d love to find out how your mind works, how you come up with your ideas. Reading maps—don’t worry about it. I’ll read them for you.” I blushed, feeling overly praised. I didn’t feel I’d done much lately to be commended about.

“It’s neat also,” I said shyly, “to think that maybe what you said is true—maybe you and I have been just missing each other for years, and then we just met up, just like that. Our trajectories crossed, that one time.”

“Some call it fate,” said George. “I call it science.”

I thought about that for a bit. “You’re right,” I said slowly. “Fate—that’s just a bunch of crap. I just can’t stand those couples who are all ‘We’re meant to be together. When we met it was fate.’ Whatever! Deluded!” I caught myself. “Well. What’s Pasadena like?” I asked sweetly. “I haven’t been there yet.”

“Pasadena is the city all cities should aspire to,” George said loftily. “It’s clean. It’s pretty. It’s safe.” He enumerated the virtues on his fingers. “Wide streets. Well-preserved Craftsman bungalows everywhere you look. It is civilized. I would have loved to live there and be closer to the university, but it’s important to my mother that I live near her, in case of emergency. She’s getting older and I’m the only family member she has left. And that’s the same for me—we’re all each other has, really.” He looked perplexed. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this. You’re so easy to talk to.”

“Go on,” I encouraged him.

“So, a wonderful perk of my job is that Cal Tech is near the Huntington library and gardens, the most civilized spot you could imagine. I go there sometimes at lunchtime, sit in the gardens, and work on lesson plans.”

“I’ve heard of it. All those Gainsborough paintings—it would be awesome, to see them in person.”

“I must take you there. You’ll love it.”

So, already, there was to be a second date. And we’d barely even started the first date. But he was so old. It was embarrassing, almost, dining with him. At least he wasn’t old enough to be my dad. Not quite. Then again: how many people were asking me out on dates these days? Or had ever?

I pushed my fingers nervously through the spikes of my still-short hair. “I’d like that.”

After a couple glasses of the wine George had brought, the interview-style air between us shifted, relaxed. I skated my wineglass around the glass-covered tabletop, colorful Provencal-style linens beneath. It occurred to me that the reason I had initially taken him for British was the careful way he spoke. He gave equal weight to each word, and enunciated each fully, as if eliding the syllables would bring him one fateful step closer to anarchy. It reminded me, fondly, of the way Trevor spoke.

George finished only half of his entree; in fact, he had cut the duck exactly in half the moment it had arrived. He raised two fingers imperiously and jerked his chin, beckoning the waiter over, and asked him, in French, apparently for a doggy bag in which to take home the rest. “Not hungry?” I asked.

“No, that’s not it at all,” he said. “I told you before that how I walk with purpose. I also eat with purpose. That duck was twice as big as the government’s guidelines for a recommended serving of protein. I eat exactly as much as I need to. No more.”

“You have an enormous amount of self control,” I commented.

He raised an eyebrow. “I research everything. And if there’s an answer I don’t know, I make it my business to find out.”

When I was a kid, poring over books in the library in preparation for school reports, I was always struck by the footnotes, constant “Ibid.s,” one after another. What was this Ibid book that all the footnotes kept referring to? It must be some massive compendium of all the knowledge of civilization, some über-encyclopedia. I was crushed when I discovered the true meaning of the term. But maybe—George could be my Ibid.

“I wish I had a plan for every day, like you do,” I said. “It seems things would be so much easier that way.”

He smiled. “Now, keep in mind that caution against excess doesn’t apply to wine purchases. Or beautiful girls.” He reached out and touched my hair. “Did I tell you how much I love beautiful things?”

“No,” I gulped, my head tingling where his fingers still lingered.

“When I see something beautiful, I have to have it.”

Our spoons clicked as we shared a crême brulée.

~ ~ ~

George was making his own dinner again. A good wife would know how to cook something besides cheese toast, I thought, scrunched up in one corner of the sofa, hugging my knees. She’d pour her husband a glass of wine, and ask him about his day.

With effort, I detached myself from the sofa cushions and walked into the kitchen. “Tell me about your day, hon,” I said, pouring generous slugs of a 2002 Barolo into wineglasses for each of us. George didn’t splurge on much except for wine and orchids—his two passions. After four years of marriage, I could now recite varietals with ease, and had the money to be choosy about what wines I drank. No more cheap-ass purchases of Charles Shaw or Barefoot wines. Lucky me.

“I’ve got big news,” George said. “Archie Martindale is retiring. Can you believe it, that old windbag is finally giving it up.”

“It’s about time! So do you think . . .”

“That’s right. I might have a chance.” Archie had been department chair, a post George desperately coveted.

He smiled and rubbed my hair, as if I were a pet cat. I’d grown it long since I got married—it was no longer the elfin mop it used to be, but fell straight down to my shoulders again. I dressed differently now, too. A person had to grow up sometime. I favored navy-blue pullovers and khakis from Banana Republic—an easy, thoughtless uniform that befitted a professor’s wife. The hole from an ill-advised eyebrow ring I’d installed my senior year had long since closed up. That was from my old, artsy days. It had been years now since I’d picked up a paintbrush. Since I’d gotten married, in fact.

“When do you find out?” I asked eagerly.

“Ahhh, they’ll take as long as possible to decide. Not till summer, probably. But I was on fire after I heard that news. Gave one of my better lectures. I was covering the Central Limit Theorem in my Statistical Methods course today. It’s really interesting, actually. It deals with the distribution of probability . . .”

He was warming to his topic; it was safe to tune him out. I listened selectively as he stirred the pasta into the boiling water. “. . . now if you consider the Lindeberg condition, on the other hand . . .”

I sat with him while he ate his meal, nodding as enthusiastically as I could while he finished explaining the Gnedenko and Kolmogorov states. Or was it Gnedorov and Koledenko? My brain glitched, stuck on those words like a silly mnemonic. If I kept repeating them, I might well fall asleep. I slurped wine, louder than I should have, and poured another glass.

“Wife of the Future Chair of the Statistics Department . . . maybe I should print business cards for myself,” I joked. “Really, congratulations, honey. I’m so glad Archie’s retiring.”

He smoothed his shirt, preening, and opened his mail, his sharp letter opener ripping through the envelopes with finite stabbing sounds.

Meanwhile, I flipped with interest through the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. I liked imagining Lucy in the photos, just around the corner from the gently distressed furnishings artfully arrayed on the pages. Those gorgeous, curvy dressers. The whimsical rugs, bright with color and promise. The pretty, pretty curtains with appliquéd flowers. Nothing could ever go wrong in rooms furnished that way. I wanted that for Lucy—a room that would keep her safe, forever, where she could be grounded and free of fear in ways I never had been. She would never float away, unmoored by poor furniture choices.

George had a stack of reading fanned out tidily on the side table. He would read all three magazines there, cover to cover, before bed—Business Week, Time, and Newsweek. It was Tuesday, so it was magazine night. Wednesdays were reading night; George was heavily into biographies. Thursdays . . . what were Thursdays? Oh yeah, the History Channel. Friday—that was sex night. Three nights away. I had time to muster my reserves, then.

~ ~ ~

I spent so much time in that living room, its decor didn’t register anymore. But I had fallen in love with George in that living room. More accurately, I’d fallen in love with him thanks to the map on the living room wall, above the faux fireplace.

It had been weeks before George brought me to his apartment. He courted me in the way a proper gentleman would, which involved dinners at increasingly expensive restaurants, a few foreign-language films, and lengthy smooching sessions in the car, which was truly “necking,” as he never ventured below my collarbone. I was becoming increasingly torn. I loved the fancy meals, and I liked having plans for a change on Saturday nights. But he was so old and proper. And I felt like such a half-assed mess next to his precision and planning. He planned each date. He paid for each date.

I came along, like a well-trained artist poodle, and did my tricks. He liked for me to look pretty, so I carefully attired myself in my most attractive flea-market finds and even attempted mascara. He liked it when I talked about my art, and especially about creativity, which despite his assertions to the contrary, he hadn’t mastered in the way I had. In fact, that was the one thing I had that he didn’t, and he wanted to figure out how I worked. To take me apart like an expensive clock mechanism to see how the gears fit together. I’d tell him about my ideas, my all-night painting sessions when there was something I absolutely had to paint, and how I couldn’t stop, I needed to paint as fast as I could, before the vision before me faded away in the mist, a ghost. He stared intently, his fingers twitching, and I could tell he was dying to write this down, to take notes.

Finally, there was the night of the most expensive meal yet—a several-hundred-dollar extravaganza at Campanile Restaurant on La Brea, suspiciously celebrating no occasion at all. I knew that no meal comes free, and I felt the heavy weight of his expectations settle not unpleasantly over me, like a warm blanket. He drove me to his place for a “nightcap.” We were both tipsy from sharing a bottle of wine, and giddy in the way that spending hundreds of dollars on food that would soon be digested and forgotten makes you.

His living room’s utter neatness struck me like a blow. Rooming with Kip, my status quo was filth. Dirty dishes cluttering any available surface, frayed Jockey underwear in unexpected locations, free weights in the middle of the floor that I’d always trip over. But in George’s apartment, the books were sorted by color, and the sofa was at an exact right angle from the recliner, and directly proportional to the coffee table. Truly, a grown-up lived here.

Not only that, but the room was full of exotic, brightly colored flowers on long stems, strappy leaves beneath. Orchids. “They’re beautiful,” I murmured, almost but not quite touching one. They were so thick, glossy, and waxy, they didn’t quite seem real.

“I’ve spent years building up this collection,” he explained. “No run-of-the-mill phaleanopsis for me. This one’s a pleurothallis plectinata. And this variety,” he gave me a sly look, “Is called Sweetheart. I’ve got cattleyas, epidendrums. Some paphiopedilums. It can get to be an expensive habit.”

“They must be hard to take care of,” I ventured.

“I know just what they need. I keep a close eye on them; I’m quite invested in their upkeep. I go to orchid shows, several times a year—here.” He selected a brown leather scrapbook from a nearby bookcase, and proudly showed me a variety of award ribbons, stuck carefully to the pages with double-sided tape. “Very nice,” I murmured. Really, I needed to leave. This was getting kind of creepy. What was I thinking, taking up with a practically middle-aged man who not only saved meeting minutes of the Orchid Society of Southern California but mounted them in an album? He had won an honorable mention at the Southland Orchid Show and was keeping the silly little ribbon for eternity, for crying out loud.

My eyes darted around as I tried to think up an excuse for a quick escape. The furniture all matched, and even more impressive, it was in colors that easily stained—taupe, cream, beige. I saw no stains. I scanned his walls. No artwork, either. This was a disaster. Maybe I could fake some gastric emergency. But then I saw an intriguing-looking old map above that fake fireplace.

“It’s one of the most expensive items I’ve ever bought,” George commented as I stepped up close to the glass-encased marvel. “But I had to have it. I like owning beautiful things.”

His voice, mist-like, barely prickled my consciousness—I couldn’t stop looking at that map. I guess, if I was going to stick around, I should have been making some sultry, sexual moves by that point, but I kept staring. An inset in the frame dated the map from 1719. It was a map of North America as envisioned by the intrepid explorers and cartographers of the day, with painstaking renderings of indigenous peoples along the side. The continent’s shape was about right, but some key details were completely bollixed up. There were only three Great Lakes, and what was now Florida broke off abruptly at the Gulf of Mexico, with some invented North Sea underneath. The Western Ocean to the east became the Sea of the British Empire along the East coast. North America was divided into long-disbanded territories—Louisiana, New France, New Mexico. But the best part was California—it was an island! There it was, cut off from the rest of the country by a mythical Red Sea, off in a little alternate universe of its own.

Most of the western half of North America was labeled Parts Unknown. Just a big blank space on the map, a few mountain ranges and Indian tribes sketched in, with no borders at all on that side. Anything north of the Californian island was completely unexplored. What wonders a person could find there, sandwiched between those imaginary seas. A lost city of gold, perhaps. The sunken Atlantis.

Oh, to be on that island of California, wandering northward toward Parts Unknown, nothing but a knapsack on my back and all the possibilities in the world before me. George must know. He must understand—his precise diction masking his raw, wild heart. He and I were kindred spirits, after all, the map revealing our true selves in the way words couldn’t.

I turned, at last, and grasped him in my arms.

~ ~ ~

“G’night, George.” I kissed him lightly when I was done with the catalog.

“Love you, dear.”

“I love you, too.”

Undressing in the bedroom, I could hear him moving around in the hall, the shushing sound as he lifted the cordless phone from its cradle. The fuzz of his voice from the far end of the den—his nightly call home. “Hello, Mother. How was your day?” By the time I was tucked in bed, teeth brushed, pillows arranged around me, he was still talking. Soft murmurs, solicitous acknowledgements.

I sat down on George’s bed and brushed my hair. I always thought of it as George’s bed, because it was the sort of furniture I’d never choose to buy. It was made of big, heavy, dark pieces of wood, hand-carved with intricate patterns—tree trunks, leaves, small elvin things that looked like satyrs here and there, peeking out from behind baroquely curling flower stems. It was an antique and had been imported from Bavaria. I didn’t like to look too closely at the designs. I was never sure what I might find.

Nevertheless, I loved that bed. I could float in its crisp sheets endlessly, free of worry. In fact, I spent more time there than I should, but I had time to spare—all the time I used to fill with painting. I didn’t paint anymore, and I hadn’t for a long time. I missed it sometimes, like a lost but insignificant body part: tonsils; appendix. You don’t really need them, and it’s surprising how well you could live without them. It just seemed like too much effort, to exhume all the supplies from the boxes in the garage where they were stored. And what would I paint? I hadn’t a clue.

The truth was: I didn’t feel like I deserved to paint. I hadn’t done anything for years that would let me reward myself in that way. Better to stop. Better not to think about it.

I had continued painting for a while, after I’d met George. He liked to show me off at faculty get-togethers. “This is my girlfriend, the artist,” he’d say proudly, his arm possessively around my waist. And mustached colleagues would eye him with a new respect. I could almost hear them thinking, I didn’t know he had it in him. Sure, he’d pursued me when he’d found I was an artist, but once I became pregnant with Lucy, I turned into someone else—the vessel carrying his future heir, the one remnant of the Anglin line. And honestly, that fuzzy, sexual, intangible “artistic mystique” that so drew him to me—well, I didn’t have it anymore. When Lucy was born, everything had stopped. Several years of exhaustion, night wakings, tantrum after tantrum. I loved Lucy more than I’d ever imagined I could love someone, but she left me drained, empty.

I was capable of nothing but letting the days go by, one after the other in an endless stream. Lately, when she was in preschool in the morning, I’d often go to our bedroom and lie down, feeling the sun slant through the window just so, warming my whole body. I’d lie there like a cat, soaking in the rays, feeling boneless and without thought. I could just be there. Just exist. Without thinking, without feeling, without having to do anything.

And George didn’t mind, soon enough, that I’d stopped painting. He never did get it figured out, no matter how much I tried to explain where I got my ideas, how I knew which paints to use; why the #4 bristle brush was my favorite, why I never used the sable one, even though I had bought it specially. “The bristle brush just feels right,” I’d tell him, and I’d see him make a mental note, then erase it, because you couldn’t quantify that. You couldn’t quantify a feeling.

I glopped some peppermint foot lotion into my hand and rubbed it on my tired feet. They were long, pale, veiny—not my best feature. With surprise, I noticed deeper blue veins coming up from the soles—they looked just like my mother’s. How could that have happened, when I wasn’t looking? My body betraying me like that. Turning me into someone else.

The days went on. They weren’t boring, because Lucy’s frequent tantrums provided variety. Trying to get through the preschool drop-off and pickup while avoiding all those other put-together parents was exhausting in itself. Thank god for my friend Astrid, my one beacon of messiness in the tidy world of playdates and volunteer opportunities.

But in the end, my days were unchangeable: as impossible to affect as the weather, but without nearly as much variety. And I could see them all stretching ahead of me, years and years of those same days. You could try to halt the rain by going outside without an umbrella, but that wouldn’t do a thing. You’d just get wet. I mean, forget that “change comes from within” crap. Where? From where? The universe was inviolate. Perhaps each day of my life had been preordained since my birth. Somehow that August in 1998 had slipped through the cracks, but you couldn’t expect such a cosmic error to happen again.

Lucy would grow older, and there would be different schools, and different challenges to deal with. But that didn’t really change anything. Because I could go on like this, indefinitely. Just like Madame, her week revolving around Sunday dinner. Just like Mom, spraying Endust on the hall table every day. Vacuuming the rug, over and over.

That could be me.