7.
The Opera
Two and a half days later, Rachel and my mother had left Los Angeles, and a cold peace prevailed in the house. But Julie and I weren’t touching each other.
As dust particles swam in brutal morning sunbeams, I sat at the desk in the study and sent two e-mails to my manager: one checking on a Portuguese hedge fund that wanted to license an instrumental remix of “This Is Just Wrong” for its website, another checking on a Ukrainian cell phone commercial, which was going to play “This Is Just Wrong” as gendered cell phones freak-danced each other. Sending them made me feel that the way I supported myself shared a common ancestor with employment. I so enjoyed this sensation, the warmth of purpose, that I wrote a third business e-mail to Gordon, whom I was going to see that night; he and Cora and Julie and I had a long-standing date to see Joanna Newsom at Disney Concert Hall.
“This is a wild proposition,” I wrote. “But would you ever be interested in having me build you a home studio? In that big-ass garage of yours?” This was entrepreneurial initiative. “I’d give you the bro rate.”
The response was swift, festooned at beginning and end with garlands of exclamation points. “Yes,” wrote Gordon. “How can we make this happen quickly? I have SO MANY SONGS IN MY HEAD AND SOON CORA IS (Cora and I are) GOING TO GENERATE A BABY.”
We resolved to explore specifics at the concert. I hid my laptop and my cell phone from myself, under the covers of the bed, and took out my acoustic guitar. I was still waiting for notes on the Spirits of New Orleans score. It was the time of day Julie had encouraged me to set aside for songwriting. Since our evening with Khadijah a week ago, I had known—how I loathed this knowledge—whom the song must be about. TV could show us wish fulfillment, but pop songs were for longing. Replacing the woman with a song about the woman—surely, this was adulthood.
I slung the guitar strap over my shoulders and whipped around a corner and aimed the guitar like an M16 at the block of machinery in the hall closet, the brain of the smart house, with its red veins flowing to the DVR, the AC, the alarm system, the sprinklers. I charged out of the closet and down the hall in bare feet. A white swath of kitchen spread open before me.
I swung the guitar onto my back, hoisted myself up onto the kitchen island, and sat cross-legged beneath the hanging pans.
“Good evening,” I said, addressing the track lighting. I strummed an open chord and waited for a song to come. I stared at the ceiling and hoped to hear a melody reverberate around the kitchen like a bird.
Instead I saw, reflected in the side of a hanging pot, the distorted bust of a twenty-eight-year-old man: the expanding forehead, the thickening neck. The person on the side of the pot could not with credibility write any song I would want to write, so I stood on the island and gingerly removed the pots, the insidious, face-fattening wok. I dismounted the island, found a photo in a bedroom drawer, the one our Australian label had taken of me three years earlier, and placed it in the island’s sink. Looking at it as I played, I searched for a loop of four high minor chords, the song the boy in the picture would write about a sad-eyed girl he loved.
I shut my eyes and was in a department store covered with dust. It was a picture that came to me from the photo spreads of downtown Manhattan after the towers fell, but that didn’t matter. Dust coated the shoulders of shirts on their spinal racks. Khadijah sat on a desk beside a cash register, in a wool sweater and a wool skirt, dustless, kicking her feet to a muffled floor tom counting four—that rhythm was the first component, perhaps.
In the department store, I saw everyone I knew in high school break in, through the emergency exit, and run laughing through the room. They were still teenagers, and they ran like Vikings in a church, unopposed, rustling the rows of sleeves. Dust carpeted their faces, so that you couldn’t see their eyes, and so that their hair stuck limp to their necks. They converged upon us at great speed. They were memories who wanted to be made corporeal, from my song, but Khadijah slid off the cashier’s desk and said, “It’s me you’ll bring back.” Sounds started to form discrete chords as she touched her fingers to my hand.
This was when the front door of the house opened, and there entered not a high school’s worth of spectral adolescents but Julie’s father, Samson.
“I was just reading about your father’s country house in the paper,” he called to me from the foyer, a Crate & Barrel bag full of wineglasses supported by one forearm as he locked the door behind him. Julie had warned me this morning he might be coming over to bring what he felt were necessary additions to our kitchen. “The one he converted, from a little cabin in the Berkshires.”
The Times’ Sunday Real Estate section had a piece in which my father was featured: “The Death Grip of the Summer Home.” Of course Sam had read it.
My father’s recent additions to the cabin had been a dramatic, autodidactic experiment in residential architecture. The Monopoly house of my childhood, the dacha, had grown three stories tall, retaining its original small, square footprint. Each floor was an undivided room strewn with beds and desks. It was an outpost where troops might be marshaled, where conquests and retributions might be planned. The roof was trimmed with a green stripe, and the stripe was full of white Celtic knots.
“Oh, that, yeah,” I said.
“No, no, it’s a courageous thing to design your own house,” said Sam. “A brave risk.” He stopped to glance at my head shot, lying in the island’s sink, in which I was twenty-five, long-haired, smoking a cigarette and wearing a tincture of eyeliner. This gave me enough time to seize the Crate & Barrel bag and march with it toward the guest bedroom, leading him away, I hoped, from the head shot.
“It’s good of you to carry something,” he said. “In the Times, he says the contractors have been stringing him on, making him spend money left and right,” Sam followed me through the kitchen. “It’s terrible what these people do.”
“His biggest mistake was granting this woman at the Times an interview,” I said. “She’s the new girlfriend of this guy he knows from college, Beanie Camden, and my father will do virtually anything for any person named Beanie Camden.” I shrugged to convey insignificance. I realized that, out of great insecurity, I was bragging about my family—implying a picturesque insanity, a glorious downward mobility, fin de race.
Sam looked at me sadly. “Ah,” he said, “old guys have their dreams, you know.”
Somewhere in Massachusetts, my father, buffered by Mueller-affiliated income, was lavishing cash on improvements to the cabin, instead of writing the essays he’d moved to New York to write. I began to reinterpret his story. Perhaps the problem wasn’t that he’d cheated on my mother; perhaps the problem was that he’d never gotten what he’d pursued. I could write songs about the ghost of a teenage girl and age into such a man. Or I could stop dreaming about Khadijah and get her. She’d be back in L.A. to visit Todd. Giving her the stone might not have been such an infantile performance after all. And Khadijah, whoever she might be now, would not mock a member of my family on television for liberalism.
I was able to bludgeon these thoughts into submission by the time Julie came home from work to spin into a concert-going outfit. I gave her a breezy kiss, as if affection were flowing freely between us. Samson’s voice rose and expanded with joy through the guest room as he greeted his only child. I knew from the creak of bedsprings that Julie had sat on the bed to embrace him, and for a moment they became quiet and affectionate. I could just barely overhear them.
“Sleep here tonight, Dad,” Julie said, “if you don’t feel like dealing with the traffic on the way back to Glendale. It doesn’t bother us.”
“What is this music you are going to see, Jules, instead of staying here to hang out with your decrepit father?”
“It’s indie-rock music, Dad; it’s this horrible thing. Her name is Joanna Newsom. She’s this singer with a tiny voice who plays the harp. Everybody loves her, for reasons no one can explain.”
? ? ?
Gordon met us in the lobby of Disney Concert Hall, in a tweed suit and tie. He wore a vest, a watch chain, and a longer beard than the one he’d had three weeks ago. Cora hadn’t followed him into the Edwardian; she wore a wool skirt and a pigeon gray cowl-neck that made her pregnancy more visible than usual. I’d known she was due in three months, but it wasn’t until I saw the mound that I recognized the threat it posed to my career. It might give Gordon a deadline by which to record his songs, but with a house full of puling, Cora might not permit the garage to become a second source of bedlam on the property.
“What do you think of the new album?” Cora asked me. “As a musician?”
“I mean, she’s f*cking amazing,” I said, “but I kind of miss the home-studio sound of the first record.” I realized at this point that my need to make money had taken whole possession of my tongue, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. “On that album, you could feel that it was just her, in a space where she felt at home, and it was so warm for that reason. I actually think that’s how a huge proportion of great albums are made. People put their studios in their guesthouses, or whatever structure is at hand.”
Julie squeezed my hand and flashed me a look: Calm down. She toed Cora’s leather sandals with her black flats.
“You know how to dress for the occasion,” said Julie. “You look like a beautiful elf. Not Santa’s workshop, Middle Earth. You’re like the best version of all these other girls here. This is Elf Night.”
She had a point. Last week, Joanna Newsom had publicly renounced her medieval outfits, but this audience gave off an unmistakable vapor of Tolkien. A slender young woman quested among Gehry’s escarpments in pointed boots, her hair parted down the middle, her collar up and ready for the alpine frost. Two teenage girls stood apart from their dates as one adjusted the other’s tunic.
“This album has finished music for me,” one of their dates explained to them, loudly. “It’s complete. I’m done.”
“Julie, you are so right,” said Cora. She pointed her chin to something behind me. “That girl over there is a perfect little Sephardic elf-princess.”
Before I turned around, I knew who it was. Of course she and Todd were here. Why hadn’t I seen it? Going to Joanna Newsom Accompanied by the L.A. Philharmonic at Disney Concert Hall was like going to the opera in Dangerous Liaisons. It was where you looked at everybody you knew, and they looked at you.
Todd and Khadijah stared at me goggle-eyed for a moment, and we might have kept the conversation brief by unspoken consensus had not the third of their party, whom I recognized from an early mumblecore film, approached Gordon and Julie. He reminded them, in triumphant tones, that they’d hung out with him in Williamstown, three summers ago.
“Gordon, Cora,” I said. “This is Khadijah. We went to high school together.”
“I love that,” said Cora. “I was just talking about how pretty you are.”
Khadijah’s thrift-store dress was hideous, and would have been merely hideous placed on any other woman in the hall. But on Khadijah it was wickedly hideous. Two strips of a thick, bright red plaid material began at a point on the small of her back and crossed in the middle of her stomach. These components were so crudely stitched together as to seem to have been sewn, as a healing activity, by the inmates of a group home. It was only because of the absurd size of Khadijah’s eyes and nose in proportion to her body that the dress took on its evil prettiness. You are so liberal, I thought, full of longing. You believe so strongly in the contingency of your own success on factors beyond your control, you’re game to dress yourself like a crafts project gone wrong. No libertarian would wear such a dress. I could feel, as an almost tactile presence, the warmth of the northeastern hearth.
This was not an easy circumstance for Julie. Because I knew her face, I could see the weight it carried. But she kept her composure. I was smashed by a wave of guilt.
“Did you guys see Andy Samberg?” asked Todd. “He was on the escalator like five minutes ago. He was wearing purple high-tops.” His voice grew louder. “He and the Newsom came to an opening at our friend’s gallery last night and they canoodled by the donations tube for like twenty minutes. He made so much money—everyone was going over there to look at them. They had to donate to justify being in that part of the room.”
There was a strange silence. We all experienced, I think, a brief shiver of further degradation. The chill of caste. We didn’t like that Todd, Todd who stood straight, possessed a noble chin, made music nobody wanted to buy, would speak of Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg as if they were higher beings.
“It doesn’t shock me at all that Andy would do that,” said Julie. “I’ve met him a couple times. I can completely see him going apeshit for the Queen of the Elves.”
“And I have no idea who he’s talking about,” Khadijah said to us. Everyone stared at her for a moment. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t, like, been in front of a television in, like, fifteen years.”
“You can’t say that in Los Angeles,” said Todd, looking at everyone and smiling to show it was a joke.
“He makes funny videos,” said Cora. “For Saturday Night Live.” She crossed her arms, stuck out her hip, and changed the subject. “I guess it must be over with Joanna and that musician dude named Smog. I feel like there were new pictures of them together on a blog last month.”
“That all went down like eight months ago,” said Williamstown Guy. “Maybe that’s what she’ll sing about.”
The lights blinked. Our parties separated, and we rode the silver escalators to our seats.
“Well,” said Julie, “that was the worst conversation of our lives.”
“There was no vibe between me and Khadijah whatsoever. Couldn’t you tell?” A stone—what did it matter? It was an in-joke between high school friends.
“Please try to help me believe it,” she said. “I know I’m being difficult. But maybe a little harder than you’re trying, please.”
During the first half of the concert, Joanna Newsom played with the orchestra. For five minutes, this was dazzling. The sheer gall of her was an act in itself. Her hair was up in deep red ribbons, and her gown and heels were the same color. In front of all the professional musicians in tuxedos, she plucked her giant harp with her gawky arms. She growled out the low notes and howled out the high ones, like a horny, lonely Appalachian.
“She’s sitting on some great big balls,” whispered Julie in my ear. “You have to give her that. To sing like a country-ass little girl, next to pogrom survivors with violins? She’s like this alien being.”
But the songs she played with the orchestra were the songs from her most recent album, which were long and impersonal and complicated and very smart. They were not the songs of hers I loved. Soon I felt she was dragging the orchestra behind her, and I wanted her to shed them.
We were all growing restless. Cora tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a pair of opera glasses. They were made of brass, small and gleaming.
“Gordon found these at some vintage store in Vermont,” she said. “Aren’t they awesome?”
They were. I found I could sweep over the faces across the chasmic hall, and catch people I knew with their guards down. Directly across from us, a little ways down, I found a multigenerational encampment of Lampoon people. In the center there was a senior Simpsons writer, based in the reputedly less funny, older, more powerful Simpsons writers’ room. He sat with his arm around his girlfriend, an arborist suffering cancer or alopecia, who wore a pink kerchief. I’d once seen her at a party, watching her three-year-old daughter from a defunct marriage admire the hair of the woman playing Legos with her, and the look on her face as she watched was one I could not decode: maybe horror, maybe delight. To their left, a row of twentysomethings, legs crossed, from the Simpsons’ reputedly funnier younger room, one of them with a brunette who had a late-night eclectic hour at the public radio station in Santa Monica, drinking from a large, surely smuggled-in bottle of beer, shaking a pill from a red case into her hand, chasing it down, scribbling a note in pen on her white, hard palm, brow furrowed. Someone had told me once that she was so revered as a hookup that undergrads who had never met her compared reports of her behavior in the Lampoon Castle. To their right, a muscular, young graphic designer, with a scrawny, bearded animator who lived in the desert. They appeared to watch the stage with diminishing interest. This would have been my father’s world, I thought, if he’d been born fifteen years later, twenty; the great error of his life was to show up at the Lampoon before it became a portal to comedy. He might have turned his will to rant into a marketable skill.
Khadijah and Todd were a few rows to their right, a little higher. I averted my gaze.
I handed Julie the glasses. “Sorry this is boring,” I said, and took her hand. I felt at home, in an egg I didn’t want to break.
“Look at the nosebleeds,” she said, adjusting the focus. “See the guy with the shaggy gray hair and the glasses? With the Asian girlfriend? He was Cora’s English professor at USC. He took her virginity when she was twenty, a month after her dad died.”
I took back the opera glasses and found the couple she’d described. They were dignified, contemplative, frowning at Newsom from their inexpensive seats. His glasses were blocky and green. Hers were diamond-shaped, purple.
“He cheated on Cora with that woman,” Julie whispered. “She’s something called a Language poet. How humiliating, having a pretentious a*shole cheat on you with a pretentious loser.”
“You’re being very subtle,” I said. We kissed, fast but hard.
With the glasses, I gave the English professor another look. He was leaning forward now, one elbow on his knee, his hand on his mouth, as if he was deeply moved.
“There is something all of the people here have in common,” said Julie. “But I can’t put my finger on what it is.” She rested her head on my shoulder. It was a joke between us, the size of her head; it was truly large, almost doll-like on her body. “It’s on the tip of my tongue, what it is, this thing connecting everyone here,” she whispered. “The name of the category.”
Intermission came, and I wanted the weight to remain on my shoulder. The offense against my sister still smarted. But I wanted the place we occupied in this egg with other people we’d met at parties to remain recognizable, to our friends and to ourselves. Something of this bond was in my blood. Something in me loved this kingdom. Just as forty-five minutes earlier I had felt the warmth issuing from the hearth of the motherland, so did I now feel that the home I had found in Los Angeles with Julie was twice as warm, twice as real.
“Come with me,” I said.
There were lines out the bathrooms, but I found an unmarked door a few feet left of the bar that opened on a supply closet. A bartender in a vest looked at us for a moment as if to stop us, but I thought she’d leave us alone when she saw who Julie was, and she did. There was a cinematic quality to Julie’s life, in which the boring obstacles remained out of frame, because people deferred to her. It infuriated me, and made me hate the world for its submissiveness, even as I felt like I was riding in a car through the Great Plains, very fast.
I closed the door, after I’d put back the three mops I’d knocked over, and the three cardboard boxes of sponges I’d knocked over putting back the mops. I leaned against a wall and pulled her toward me. The knowledge that my behavior had endangered what we had, had hurt her, made me want to give her something.
Julie checked her watch. “If this concert wasn’t so boring, I might not be this kind of girl. But oh well.”
At first it was awkward. We fell back on our usual talk as we kissed and put our hands down each other’s pants. The words were so familiar they were more comforting than erotic: the schools we would get our children into, Crossroads and/or Saint Ann’s; the things we were going to say to each other on our wedding night in Topanga Canyon; the fact that we owned each other.
“Do I really own you?” she asked. A warmth circuited between us.
“You own my back, my labor,” I said. “You and your babies own my hands.” The plain fact that neither my back nor my hands had any market value was banished by our kissing, by her hands and mine. It was one of those moments in making out when dry old promises bloom unexpectedly into strange new ones. We were safe.
The mops and the boxes fell over again as we fled into the light. I thought of the bartender in the vest. She or one of the custodians would have to clean up the mess. In the orange-carpeted hallway, I felt I was rushing upward, to take my place on Olympus among the gods, and toppling downward, to some plush vermilion level of Hell reserved for jail punks and homeless people who blew teenagers in Grand Central. Both seemed tolerable. Perhaps I was a traitor to my family. But this engagement, I thought, this soon to be marriage, is my home.
We reached our row before the ushers shut the doors. Cora and Gordon looked at us with poker faces as we fell beside them. Julie sat next to Cora this time, and put her hands on Cora’s belly.
“You are going to be the most cultured little baby,” Julie cooed. We were both in good spirits, contented, slightly sleepy. “When I was your age, all I heard was people talking about money.”
Then everybody stopped talking and clapped, because Joanna Newsom had swished back onstage, in a new dress, with new hair. There were whoops, and libidinous grunts. She had the knack for shapeshifting so prized in musicians. Her legs were exposed, and her hair fell across her shoulders. The orchestra was gone. She sat alone on a hard stool, by her towering harp, and the dress she wore was a silver that toyed with the light.
“BAREFOOT?” wrote Julie in the little red Il Bisonte notebook she kept in her bag. “ARE YOU F*ckING KIDDING ME?” And barefoot she was, her feet gleaming in the lights. Julie laid her head back on my shoulder, and we were safe in our egg.
The stage was almost bare now. There was only the twenty-five-year-old before us, and her otherworldly harp.
“This is a new song,” she said. “I don’t even know what it’s called yet.” She reached out and hit the first strings as she sang a high, pigeonish note. The words were indecipherable. The note spilled down into a staccato flourish; it sounded like Smokey Robinson and like The Marriage of Figaro. Now that there was a solitary voice with one instrument, the orchestra retired to the wings, I couldn’t help but remember Khadijah’s voice imitating Nancy’s, the high, sharp tones that rose up and filled the classroom.
“Do you think she’s singing for Andy Samberg?” Julie asked me. “Or for the guy she left named Smog?” It was the question that must have been on any number of minds in this room: To whom did this music belong? The new man or the old?
“Both,” I said. Her head reestablished itself on my shoulder.
The Smokey Robinson/Marriage of Figaro theme was only prologue to the body of the song. It was a folk song, in its essence, a lament. Technical training gave out. Newsom drew her face close to the microphone and confided.
“You’ve got the run of the place,” she sang, “now that you’re running around.” And on the last syllable she drew back and rasped, her throat half closed. The pleasure of running, and the dizziness and illness of it—that was her subject. I turned to see the faces of my friends and found Cora looking up at the professor in the nosebleeds, though she had her hands on her swollen belly. I took the glasses off the arm of my seat and looked at the spot where I had not allowed myself to look before. Khadijah was a head in a honeycomb of heads, and I didn’t dare linger on her. All I could read on her face was a tension, an absence of happiness.
This music was for fallen men and women, I decided, gazing into the sectioned hollows of the ceiling, though the notion was jejune. The betrayals that bound Cora to the professor and bound me to Khadijah and bound the professor to his girlfriend and the singer of the song to the men we couldn’t see, they would all be forgiven. We would all be spared, because our type of behavior had its place in the world. This music could not have been written without shame.
“The phantom of love,” sang Joanna Newsom, “moves among us at will.” It wasn’t until the song was over and applause filled the room that I missed Julie’s head on my shoulder. She was sitting erect, looking at me. The opera glasses were in her hand. She’d deduced, I knew, whose face I’d been searching for and staring at. The warmth we’d earned in the closet dissolved in the air, victim to a colder, prettier truth.
After the encore, we filed down the escalator, and outside to the podiums where valets took our tickets and ran for our cars. Khadijah and Todd must have street-parked; they were nowhere to be seen.
Gordon and I embraced. It was what we had to do, after a concert like that. As two musicians, or at least an aspiring-musician-cum-animator-cum-aspiring-musician and a middling-to-failed-musician-cum-aspiring-studio-engineer, we had to acknowledge we’d witnessed a moment of brilliance. We didn’t say the word, but that’s what it had been. Whether Joanna Newsom would be able to sustain it on an album, she’d struck that golden bell.
“We have to get you in the garage.” He whispered in my ear, so that his pregnant wife couldn’t hear. “I’m going to have the talk with Cora in the morning.”
We shook hands and belabored each other about the head and shoulders the way I’d seen the popular seventh-grade boys do when I was a despised pacifist in the school yard. Segueing into self-parody, we bumped chests.
“Look, Cora,” said Julie. “The men are so hot from the elf queen show they have to blow off some steam.”
“Didn’t you guys like the concert?” I asked.
“Her persona can be a little annoying,” said Cora. “But the music—”
“What’s wrong with her persona?” asked Gordon, too quickly. He was smiling, but there was gravel in his voice. “Can you not be jealous of every female artist your age who gets to be the center of attention, even when she’s kind of yodeling with a harp?”
“Can you not interrupt when your wife occasionally tries to say something?” Julie asked him. She placed a hand on Cora’s shoulder. “I mean, if we’re on the topic of wanting to be the center of attention.”
This did not augur well. When Julie criticized Gordon to his face, it was often a prelude to darker observations about men in general. It was time to speed our exit. I put on my jacket, which had been draped over my arm, and detected a strange weight in the left pocket.
I shoved my hand in the pocket and closed it on a stone wrapped in a napkin. It was the same size as the one I’d plucked from the urinal trough. Khadijah must have dropped it in during intermission, when I’d left my jacket on my seat. I was aghast—it could have slipped out and tumbled onto Julie’s shoe. Could Khadijah have kept it in her bag all this time, and carried it to Massachusetts and back to Los Angeles? What was the function of the napkin? Was something written on it? Could my sweat have soaked through my body into the pocket and destroyed a freshly written note, or poem? My face, probably, was not normal.
“I’m sorry, Gordon,” said Julie. “That was an unfriendly thing for me to say.” She put a hand to her chest. “Sometimes my mother just sort of explodes out of me. It’s why I work with wild animals.”
Julie’s VW came and we said good-bye, each couple leaving the other to fight.
I steered through the net of traffic between the concert hall and the 110. Usually I liked to drive, and Julie liked to enjoin me to drive faster with jokes at my expense, and usually I liked these jokes. But now we were both silent.
When we were on the 110, she cleared her throat. “I’d like to advance a theory.”
I waited. I took the ramp to the 10 for the short jump to Olympic.
“The theory,” she said, “is called the theory of elves.”
“I gave you something reasonably similar to a hand job,” I said. “Why do you sound like you’re going to say something divisive?”
“It almost redeemed the concert. Thank you. But what I was about to say was just that it was like being an anthropologist, watching this intriguing tribe of people who enjoy this music. And this tribe I will call the Tribe of Elves. The theory of elves states that many pretentious, young, white and whitish people want to be like the elves from The Lord of the Rings. The deal with the elves in The Lord of the Rings is that they’re on their way out. They’re this vanishing race of willowy, pale, scruffily elegant superpeople, and they like to be out in the woods, and they speak this soft, pretty language, and they’re kind of constantly unfazed. They wear doilies on their heads, and they play the harp. They have this better land they’re eventually going to go to. But they can’t just get in their magic boats and disappear. No. They have to persevere, and save Middle Earth. They have to stick it out just a little longer, so they can help the humans and the dwarves and hobbits and all the shorter, stupider people fight the evil wizard and the orcs. And the elves are like, ‘Take hope, Stubbier Ones, little dwarves and hobbits and shit. For we just barely remain, with our sense of noblesse oblige, to save you. And by the way, our numbers are dwindling, because we’re about to sail away to our just reward. Look upon us while you can. You should be grateful for this Language poetry we’re writing, and this beautiful folk music you should like, because they’re our vanishing art forms, and they’re how we will keep you away from television, which is the Eye of Sauron. Well, my friend, I am Gimli the Dwarf, and I am proud. I have a big head, and am thus well-suited for television. My arms couldn’t reach halfway across a harp without my arm flesh swinging into the strings. I am not an ethereal girl. I appear on TV for money. And my parents actually want me to make money, because they just arrived in Middle Earth, which was what the Jews were like fifteen minutes ago. So you can jizz all over your Sephardic elf, in her raggedy clothes, and Andy Samberg can have his elf queen, and you can all go dwindle together. I’ll go find a rich dwarf, and everybody’s happy. It’s like that book they talk about in The Great Gatsby, the book Tom likes about the passing of the great race. You’re just passing from this Earth, you and your elf sisters, and I’m going to stay here, and I’ll be okay. I mean, I hate Persians and Armenians too, and I forget that I am them, but at least Persians aren’t like, ‘Look at me, you guys, because I’m the last unicorn.’”
“I think I missed Olympic.”
“That response didn’t have enough words in it.”
I put my hand in the pocket of my jacket.
“Why are we talking about race?” I demanded. I rubbed the napkin-wrapped stone with my thumb. “We talk about race in this country when we don’t want to talk about something else, like economic equality, or global warming.”
“Yeah, those are the topics on my mind. I was trying to tell you how I feel without being accusatory. I take back what I said about finding a rich dwarf. I am angry!”
I yanked the VW off the 10 so we could make our way west on side streets and cut over to Olympic past Koreatown.
“Baby, don’t drive one-handed. This is silly.”
“You’re absolutely right.” I extracted my hand from my jacket and put it on the wheel.
“Do you have something in your pocket?”
“Sorry, my cell phone was vibrating.”
“Do I scare you? Does it scare you when your baby talks about race? You look like a tiny, frightened deer.”
“Tiny, frightened deer” was a relatively recent variation on the traditional “shy deer,” which we’d coined on our second date. It was what she called me when she’d asked me to try on a membranous Prada bathing suit at the outlets near Joshua Tree and we found it could hide either my butt crack or my genitals but not both, and we’d made out on the bench in the dressing room even though we knew the clerks could see our legs.
“It’s all good,” I said. “It’s just like what do you say to assure someone you love that you’re not racist?”
She took my hand in hers, which prevented two-handed driving and thereby signified that our love was more important than safety. Warmth filled the cockpit of the VW and made it a pair of battle stations.
Back in the vestibule of the house, we assumed a shoe-removal posture in which we placed our backs side by side against the wall. Once we were barefoot she threw her silver cardigan on the living room couch and I stayed in my jacket. We were quiet; Samson’s Mercedes was still in the driveway, so he must have decided to stay the night in the guest bedroom.
“Are you cold?” She squinted at me. “Why do you still have your jacket on?” She whispered, although Samson might have already been wakened by the engine in the driveway, or by the three inquisitive beeps emitted by the alarm system as we opened the front door and entered the code.
“Yeah, I’ve got the chills for some reason.” I buttoned my jacket, and crossed my arms in front of it, in order to ensure that it would not be taken from me. My hand itched to sink into the pocket and hold the stone. But I knew it was there from the way it brushed against my waist.
“Oh no,” she said. “Sick boy. Lie down.” She took me to the couch, made me lie on it, and crawled on top of me. “I’ll keep you warm,” she said. “I’m like a seal shielding its pup from the wind. In medieval Greenland.” And then: “Ow. What do you have in your jacket?”
“Listen,” I said. “I need to tell you something.”
She could move gracefully, Julie. Maybe it had to do with having logged so many hours with lab mice in grad school. Unhurried, her hand slipped into my pocket. She drew out the stone and its napkin sheath, flipped the stone, unfolded the napkin, studied both, separated her body from mine, and rose from the couch without looking at me. She walked with the stone and the napkin through the living room.
Her chest rose and fell. I floated to her side, feeling like I was hovering over my body, a ghost in the house. I read over her shoulder.
The message was written in blue ballpoint pen on the kind of cocktail napkin that comes with the cups of seltzer you buy at intermission. I could not help but note that it broke none of the rules Khadijah and I had set for ourselves.
K HAS WRT. ON YR WALL:
GO AWAY
It was the same stone I had given Khadijah, with the crude circled A. I backed away from Julie to address her. I needed some physical distance from the stone to convince myself I was a real person in the midst of real events, to shake the feeling of unreality.
“Baby,” I said, trying to conjure heat in the air.
Julie looked at me with no expression. The stone still in her hand, she cranked back her arm like a radical of ’68. I wondered if she was going to throw it at my head.
I flinched, and the stone went wide. It struck the window, near the corner where the living room met the foyer, and cracked the pane. Julie had not, I realized from the crack’s location, had the intention of throwing it anywhere near me.
But because the window had been struck, the banshee wail of the alarm system saturated the house. It was everywhere all at once, with no point of origin. Beneath it, the male robot began to speak. Security breach, team mobilized, patroller now in route.
Julie ran to the alarm box and jabbed the keys. The voice would not stop. Nor would the wail. Indeed, subtracting elements from the picture proved impossible; elements added themselves. First, Sam ran into the living room in his pajamas, his mouth moving, inaudible. Second, the security firm arrived in the form of a helicopter. The blades filled a midrange between the Talking Heads baritone of the robot administrator and the banshee wail. Then the helicopter switched on its spotlight, and the scene assumed the quality of war.
Julie didn’t look angry now. I could tell she had the same vegetable taste in her mouth that I had in mine: humiliation. This only child, who had surpassed the wildest expectations of her father, had thrown a stone into a pane of glass, and it was inconceivable that the damage could ever be undone.