My previous post got me thinking. I told you in it that the most important thing a writer can do is never give up, and in this vein I wanted to remind you that in the past six years, since I've become a published novelist, I have written no fewer than four novels that I could not sell. That's right. I have written six that sold (rewriting the sixth at the moment, for publication in the spring), but there were four others that I loved and worked hard on, that I had to let go because my editor and publisher said "no, thanks".
The first was "Autumn Leaves," a quirky "literary" novel about a young Irish American jazz saxophonist and her chance meeting with a famous old African American jazz saxophonist (the last living legend of bebop) and their unlikely friendship. God, I loved that book. And I got lots of "God winks" from the universe about it. (I find that when I'm on the right path, in my art, the universe/God gives me signs, coincidences that are usually hilariously funny and clearly tied to the project at hand.) And yet, at the end of it all, my editor did not want the book. She did not feel it was "an Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez book," aka a book my fans would expect from me. It was literary, with no Latino characters. I was "a brand," commerical "chica lit". (Go ahead, roll your eyes; I did.) She also did not think my "chick lit" readers would want to read about an incontinent old man who saw ghosts and lived in a tenament. That book, "Autumn Leaves," currently lives only in my computer and heart. I suppose my son will sell it upon my death, on Ebay, or donate it to a desperate university library somewhere. I regard it in many ways as the best book I ever wrote. The business of publishing felt otherwise.
The next "failure" was a sequel to The Dirty Girls Social Club. That's right. Before Dirty Girls on Top, there was a totally different sequel. I loved it madly. My editor and publisher felt it was too dark. Usnavys had gestational diabetes. Elizabeth went to Sierra Leone. Sara was kidnapped by Roberto and held hostage in a meat-processing plant. I took the characters down some suspense-ish, depressing paths. Not sure why. I guess a yin yang thing. Plus, I'd been reading a lot of Koontz. At any rate, I had to let it go, after months of work. Ouch.
Next, there was "Girl Crush". Everyone liked that book, except for me. I did not like it. It was fakery and I knew it. A book written in desperation to try to keep making a living at this, as the other two had been dashed. I actually sold that book, but refused to let anyone publish it in the end. Too embarrassing. I know. Insane, right? It was about a professional cheerleader and her mentee relationship with a ballsy female sports agent. In Texas. I tried to love football and Texas enough to pull it off. But in the end, I did not feel like I actually related to the characters enough to be able to release the book without feeling like a complete and total fraud. Weirdness, I know. I know. But that's how I am. I ended up writing the SECOND sequel to Dirty Girls instead, to fulfill that contract. Some of what was in the first sequel squeezed past the "funness" censors. Much did not.
Somewhere in all of that was a book I wrote, that I started to re-read tonight, called "Love at First Lie". As I re-read it, I kept thinking "this ain't half bad." I actually really, really like this book. I think I'll try to sell it again, maybe under another name. My editor's criticism of this particular book was that people would not find the lead character sympathetic, because she was a liar and a recovering drug addict. Fair enough. I, however, really like Dahlia. She has promise. She's been through hell. She is funny. I think she's interesting, and her journey is good. I wrote it around the same time my publisher was about to release "Love the One You're With," by Emily Giffin, who is a much bigger seller than I am. The plots are similar, in a way. I had no idea, at the time I was writing it, that Emily was writing a book about a married woman who wonders about the man she did not marry but once loved - the same thing Dahlia does. I wonder if there was something about this in the decision not to take "Love at First Lie". Dunno.
Most recently there was "The Husband Habit" in first person, with the lead character as a snarky restaurant critic with a hypocritical life coach. I sold it, but decided, as I often do, that it wasn't good enough. Asked to change a few little details, I unraveled the entire thing and began from scratch, rewriting it in the third person this time, with a much different lead character who was now a chef. The first version was funnier, but, I felt, immature. Not where I was at anymore. I had changed a lot in the year since I sold the book, and the more mature me did not want to put the snarky, somewhat juvenile book out there. I also wanted to prove to myself and everyone else that I could, in fact, pull off a convincing third-person, one-character book. So, I did it. Rewrote it all. My editor called this week, and said "It is a completely different book. I can't believe you did that." She likes the new version better. I figured she would. It's a much better book. Did I have to completely write a new book? Nope. I did not. I would have been paid for the minor changes, just the same. But I am constantly striving to improve at my craft. It is not always sane. Quite possibly it is not always healthy. But I always grow from it. I always enjoy the process.
There have been other novels, outlined, half-written, started and disgarded. I came up with a suspenseful, thrilling sequel to my teen novel "Haters," only to be told by Little Brown that, while it looked terrific, "Haters" did not sell well enough to merit a sequel. Ouch. I still pull the outline out now and then and read it for my own pleasure. That's how it is with writers. If we are legitimate, we don't do it for the money or the glory. We do it because it's fun, and we love our characters, and we simply can't NOT do it. We do it, quite simply, because it brings us great pleasure to do it.
I started another book, called "Duke City Diaries," about all these seemingly unconnected lives in Albuquerque, just weird little character sketches, that somehow end up colliding in a strange and twisted plot having to do with a man who finally allows his abusive wife to commit suicide. Again, I was told it was too risky and unconventional, to dark and, well, weird.
There was the teen girl version of Don Quixote, "Dawn and Pancha". There was the teen book "The Bug Girl," which I love and still steal off to rendevous with every so often. There is the middle reader series I outlined, based on Mayan and Aztec mythology, called "The Flower Prince," which I loved and sent to my agent, who crushed my hopes by telling me the talking rabbit was too much like the talking rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, even though my talking rabbit was directly drawn from Mexican mythology. I will eventually go back to it, but sometimes one little comment can send you into a tailspin, or, worse, a nosedive. You peel yourself off the concrete, eventually.
I think all of this is why, when I have a book signing or give a talk, I don't maybe seem as thrilled as some people think I ought to, at being a "published author". Most of my work is still in this laptop, or on my MAC, unseen. To me, much of my best work is invisible.
I mourn the works unknown, and wonder if I am crazy for loving these trails of words ordered in ways my editor and agent don't seem to think have any marketable merit.
That is the writer's lot, I suppose. To write because you cannot do otherwise, and to lovingly tuck your rejected children into bed at night, and hope that they will never stop believing in themselves, no matter what the headmaster thinks.
It's always funny, too, when people say things like "Wow, five books in five years, you're so prolific." You have no idea. No, you really don't. I once read about a disorder that some people have, hypergraphia, something like that, where people write on everything and can't stop. Walls, their skin, whatever is around. I am not quite that bad. But I am damn close. I write constantly, even in silence. As we hiked today, I was writing, in my head. I do not choose to write, and never have; writing is what I am. It is a reflex, like breathing.
That's why, too, it amuses me when certain people who hate me because I symbolize something that bothers them, try to injure me by saying things like "your career won't last." You see, I was a writer long before my first novel was published. I was a writer in fourth grade. In high school, I was the kid who sat to the side and scribbled her thoughts in a notebook. It is not getting published that makes me a writer. I love my unpublished work every bit as much, if not more, than my published work. And nothing that ever happens in my career will cause me to stop writing. Too bad, really. There is a lot of laundry or yardwork I migth be able to get done if that were the case.
That said, I feel it only fair to include here a bit of the rejected writing, so you can see that we are not all perfect. I do not know if it was I who failed here, or my editor. I do know that I continue to adore this character, and this novel, which is complete and unwanted. Curious to know your thoughts on it, but not likely to change my mind because of them. Without further ado, here is the first chapter from "Love at First Lie".
Half of life is fucking up. The other half is dealing with it.
- Henry Rollins
It was ninety-five degrees, a blindingly bright Saturday afternoon in July, when my past came looking for me along Route 66. I hadn’t meant for my past and present selves to intersect on that romanticized stretch of dusty highway fabled by Jack Kerouac to be the mother-road of American-style freedom and reinvention. Pure coincidence, I tell you.
Honestly? I hadn’t meant for them to intersect at all. It just happened that way. Weird thing is, until that day I had believed old Jack – really a handsome man in his youth, you know – knew what he was talking about. Until that day, I’d believed I could become someone else.
Until that day, I thought I’d gotten away with it.
I sat with two glamorous, fit, tanned and wealthy women, my new friends, at a table for three, beneath a large umbrella on the chic patio of Kelly’s Brewery. They were sizes four and six, I was a Banana Republic twelve (which means fourteen but I let them lie to me) and working on losing weight as surely as I worked on becoming a new person altogether.
The restaurant is a renovated deco era gas station, one of Albuquerque’s new “it” places to be seen. When I grew up here, there were no “it” places; that’s why I left. Now I’m back, twenty years after I first fled, and Albuquerque is hailed as the new Austin, it’s listed as the No. 1 city in America for the “creative class,” which I hope to God includes liars. Forbes magazine recently named it the top city in America for business and banking. No, I am not kidding. You see? Things change. Cities change. Gas stations change. People.
Kelly’s Brewery gave me hope. Hope of my own metamorphoses. I took great comfort in knowing that even a stinking dump of an old gas station with rusted pumps and cracks in the walls could remake itself into a trendy, airy pub, with shiny new dark wood floors, soothing ceiling fans, organic veggie burgers and thick dark Guinness on tap. Modern indie rock blasted from the speakers inside the restaurant, and you got the sense that with the right soundtrack, and in the right company, and certainly in the right lighting and with the right menu, anything was possible.
I wore one of my new summer afternoon ensembles, purchased with my new husband’s credit cards: a crisply pressed pair of black crop pants and a medium yellow cotton shirt without sleeves, both ironed by a housekeeper with patience and a proper respect for creases. I had pearls, and a new hairstyle blonder and smoother than ever, flipped at the ends and seemingly casual and carefree. Hair that made me, a woman of 35, appear to be five, maybe ten years younger. It went well with my blue-green eyes.
But my hair, too, was a lie. In its natural state, my hair is wiry, dark and curly, nearly pubic, with stripes of gray, a bushy pyramid of hair that made you think of a circus tent, or that character Alice from the Dilbert comic strip. The old me would not have been caught dead with chemically smoothed hair and a strand of preppie pearls. The old me preferred a look defiantly Betty Boop, a short raspberry bob with too-short bangs, fishnets slashed in just the right places a nose-ring to go with her sneer.
When I was high enough, back when I was addicted to cocaine, I used to lie supine on the filthy flattened grass in Washington Square Park and hope things might crawl in out of the dark to nest in my hair. I thought it might make me more interesting, like I could be talking to someone and a baby mouse would crawl out of my tangled head and I’d say, “Hey, have you met my moose?” Then I might have growled or snapped my teeth at them. The old me got off on frightening others. I now understood this was a false sense of power.
Now, I was still insensitive and selfish by some measures, but in most ways I had improved, though there were undoubtedly still Herculean expressions of work left to be done. I was not a recovered addict; I was recovering, present continuous tense. I no longer did cocaine, but this was not to say I did not remember it fondly as an old friend. There were days when I might have phoned cocaine, if it were a person, just to see how it was doing.
The journey was not going to be short, and it was not going to be easy. But fifteen months had passed since my last snort, and this was something good. The new me was out of the birth canal, and breathing on her own. She looked fabulous, too. And in America, looking the part is half the battle. More than half if you live in Los Angeles, and maybe slightly less than half if you lived in Albuquerque.
To look like the new me took now at least twenty minutes of determined tugging with a round brush and hair dryer, a Sedu Ionic Cermaic Tourmaline flat-iron hissing and steaming secretly behind the closed door of the master bath. That bathroom, for what it’s worth, was housed in my stylishly modern, glass-walled 4000 square-foot home in the North Valley, a home the old me would have envied the crap out of but made fun of anyway.
In Canada, back in my Canada days, I’d learned to call a master bath the ensuite, though I’d never had enough money then to possess one. Assholes had ensuites. That’s what Steven and I told each other because it made us feel better about being broke and sometimes living in a tent in Stanley Park. That was back in my Steven phase, when I liked Steven’s music, talked like Steven, made Steven’s goals my goals – or I should say made Steven’s lack of goals goal my lack of goals goal.
So you know, there have been other phases. My Abraham phase in Los Angeles (Venice, actually) when I got the ass tattoo of the anarchy symbol, the Michael phase in Las Vegas when I did a little dealing (cards, not drugs, thank you), the Kyle phase in New York City when I learned to love jazz fusion, Kerouac and cocaine. You don’t mean for the men in your life to become the focus, for their dreams to supplant your own. But if you let them, they do. They become weeds in the garden of your life. They take over. It is what most of us – men and women alike, I think – are trained for. We do it without thinking. Even now. Even in the twenty-first century. Even closing in on middle age.
Some might say I’m in my Benjamin phase now, with the credit cards and the big, clean house, but it’s not exactly true. My current (and only) husband also happened to have been my first boyfriend, the first boy I ever kissed, back in high school, and as it turned out he never stopped loving me for twenty years. I, however, stopped loving him. There were times when I might have been hard-pressed to remember his name or eye color.
But I came to love him again in this past year. I loved him now. That’s how it is with me. I am flaky, but dedicated. He knew me well, knew me before all the fuckups, knew now about most of the fuckups, and liked me anyway.
Because Benjamin was calm and stable he found my ass tattoo, checkered past and so on somewhat exciting. He thought I could paint, and sing, and he found me funny and pretty. Since marrying him a little more than a year ago I had sold five paintings, each for between five and ten thousand dollars. I had begun to develop a reputation as a grownup and an artist, a mother with normal friends in sizes four and six. A Pilates regular. A Whole Foods shopper. In the light of Benjamin’s love I had become the woman I always wished I could be, an adult version of the idealistic teenager I lost somewhere along the way.
So this whole marriage? It was more of a Benjamin boomerang than a phase, more of a homecoming than a running away. It was more about realizing that sometimes you get it right the first time out of the gate and spend way too much time in the middle fucking it all to hell. Which I did. A lot.
With my legs crossed, one black Max Studio sling-back tapping time in the air, pink painted toenails shining in the sun, I seemed like my new friends, Trish Levy and Carolyn Cohen. I wanted so much to be like them. Them believing that I belonged made me almost believe I belonged. I wished I had my sunglasses, the new Kate Spades. It would have completed the illusion of sober, pampered suburban mom. Stable, normal woman. I’d forgotten them that morning, before Temple, and hadn’t been home since. Did you hear me say “Temple”? Yeah, see? I told you. Things change. Sometimes to a shocking degree.
The old me was Jewish by birthright, but not particularly religious. My mother, whose maiden name was Mendoza, is the daughter of Ashkenazi Jews who were poor and persecuted in Argentina and came to New York in search of something better; their great-grandparents had been poor and persecuted in France, and had gone to Argentina around 1880 with a bunch of other people fleeing the jolly old Inquisition. Somewhere along the way they Hispanicized their last name in hopes of fitting in better. It did not work, apparently, because in 1919 or so, people in Buenos Aires started beating up the Jews and burning down and looting their businesses.
This seems to be a happy tradition all over the world for some reason. Someone’s always trying to kill us. Anyway, so my mom’s eternally optimistic family moved again, this time to New York, not bothering to revert to the old French name because either they could not remember what it was or they had realized that some lies simply don’t mean much. Some lies the bad people can see right through, even if the good ones are fooled for a moment in time. Mom was born in New York, just like her parents were. She speaks little Spanish and I speak next to none.
My dad, meanwhile, is the son of New York Jews whose ancestors came from all over Europe, back when people came to Ellis Island on crowded boats and had dreary black and white photos taken of their children in soggy woolen hats, or shorts with long dark socks. You might say I came from a long line of people who tried to start over and make things better. We’re a grass-is-always greener-somewhere-the-fuck-else sort of group, my family, but then again that happens when, say, people are coming after your children with pitchforks and bayonets. Or gas chambers. That sort of thing.
For the record? Hideous behavior continued against my people in Argentina after my mom’s ancestors left, by the way. When I was about ten, Argentina was under military rule, and several thousand Jews were killed and tortured by the government there, for the “crime” of being Jewish, including some distant relatives. Americans are always surprised to hear about that. They think white Americans and German Nazis have a lock on prejudice. Not so. Americans are always surprised by complex things happening elsewhere – or anywhere, for that matter. Americans tend to think they are the center of the world. The tend to bomb those who disagree.
I hear things are better in Argentina for Jews now, and it’s still got Latin America’s largest Jewish population, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a place I’d like to retire. Fort Lauderdale sounds better, and knowing me I’d pretend like I’d always known how to play canasta convincingly enough for the other retiree ladies to worship me. I’d convince everyone I was an old pro. It’s a talent, like painting, my chameleon skins. I change them like tampons, and save for the moment of introduction, they are every bit as invisibly comfortable. I was perfect for being an addict. Not sure how I was at being normal yet.
Anyway, the point of all this nonsense is that neither of my parents was particularly religious, unless you counted the Grateful Dead as a religion and the back of a VW bus as a temple. If you think really hard about it, a poncho from Peru that you use as a bedspread in the back of the bus is a little like a talus. The rolling papers for your parents’ doobies can look scrollish when left out in a humid place. Nodding off after a peyote trip you decided to take after reading Carlos Castaneda – as my parents did – might pass for davening, right? Except most people don’t drool on themselves while davening, at least not that I’ve seen. I’ve yet to go to Israel. There might very well be drooling daveners there. The geriatric. The orgasmically religious.
My folks were Jewish, no doubt about that, but it was more of an ethnic Judaism that involved feeling outnumbered, defensive, persecuted and guilty. It made for a comfy transformation into hippies who felt outnumbered, defensive, persecuted and guilty. And, of course, being hippies made for a comfy transition to being New Mexicans; as a breed we New Mexicans are outnumbered, defensive, persecuted and guilty of extremely relative tolerance.
Around here, everyone loves everyone and that’s just sort of the way it is. Among my hometown’s many accolades is the one by a civil rights group that found Albuquerque to be the most integrated city in America, along racial, ethnic and economic lines. There really are no rich neighborhoods or poor neighborhoods here. Everyone rubs up against everyone else. And it’s not for lack of space. Albuquerque is roughly the same size, space-wise, as Bombay, India, with 17.5 million fewer people. This means we also have some of the cleanest air in America, which almost makes up for the relative lack of synagogues.
The new me was learning all sorts of new Jewish traditions from Benjamin’s family, who weren’t orthodox but were more observant that your average progressive Jew. I hoped my in-laws might grow to like me one of these days, but it didn’t seem like there was a great rush toward that goal for them.
They were much more pleased with Benjamin’s brother Adam’s choice of a wife in my new friend Trish, a friend gleaned from the fact that she is married to my brother-in-law. She was a good Jewish girl from a stable family, and had never lived in a bus or on a commune. Her parents didn’t have “hot Latin blood” the way they thought my mom did. I tried explaining to them that she was completely a French Jew who happened to end up in Argentina because of a little inconvenient thing called the Inquisition, but they didn’t want to hear it. Some Jews have surprisingly short memories. They imagined my mother teaching me the sultry tango and – poof – it was all over. I was hot. And Latin. I was here to ruin their poor little Benny with the forbidden dance, like those weird ass-shaker kids in the lambada videos. They’d come around though, I though. My in-laws, not the dancing kid freaks.
As soon as they saw how great and devout I was, how good a mom I was, how much I adored their son. The new me pretended she had always lit two candles twenty minutes before sundown on Fridays, one for remembrance and one for observance. You see? The new me remembered and observed. The old me observed, but rarely remembered. Hangovers tend to have that effect on a person. The new me made Friday stews in a crock pot and listened to rock from Israel, which, if you’ve heard rock from Israel, might almost be considered a sacrifice.
With the tilt of my head and the upward angle of my chin, I fit in as I nibbled at the browned edge of the pink grilled salmon – a food said to be good for depression, and so I tried to eat it twice a week now. I wasn’t sure I had depression, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to assume I did. Addiction and depression were as closely related as the Milli is to the Vanilli, and nearly as pitiful.
We sipped chilled white wine. We did not touch the bread, other than to scoot it to the side of the table where no one would be tempted to eat it. We compared soreness from yesterday’s Pilates class, and wondered aloud whether the cumulous clouds popcorning grayly over the flat, purpled top of the Sandia mountain range to the east meant rain or not. We all agreed rain would be welcome, as the summer had been unseasonably dry so far. You see? I was now the sort of woman who cared enough to wish for rain, for rain meant good things for people other than me. That was an improvement. I was now of the class of women who were terribly thoughtful, normal, and safe. The kind who bought greeting cards for each other, just because.
He, the man of my past, by contrast, wore dark jeans with a slender European cut, a form-fitting battered black t-shirt with some sort of red dragon scrolled across the chest, with fashionably shitty Vans. You could see his abdominal muscles through the shirt. He had a choker of shells, a stud in his left nostril and two hoops, one in each ear. His forearms were a mess of tattoos, banded at the wrist with a tangle of rubber bracelets. His short, dark brown hair had been sculpted into a glorious, precise chaos that brought to mind the early snarling days of Billy Idol. The set of the jaw, strong as I remembered. The cheekbones, chiseled to a degree that made you wonder if he were actually made of stone. The lips full, soft, pink. The forehead and brows tilted just so, to communicate, along with the irresistible fuck-you look in his brilliant blue eyes, a supreme boredom, an eternal amusement with life, his life and yours. Especially yours. Six feet two inches tall, graceful as a dancer. Angry as a fighter.
My new friends, women after all, noticed him instantly. We were all married, all in our 30s, but that didn’t stop us from appraising and rating the men who passed along the sidewalks of our lives together. We were merciless, actually, and the men often came up woefully lacking. We laughed at the inherent dishonesty of comb-overs, puzzled over men who wore work boots unlaced with shorts. So, you see. I had not become perfectly nice or anything like that. I had not lost all of my interesting cruelty in the transformation. There was still room for it, in small, elegant doses. Nothing with an X chromosome escaped our murmured, snarking analysis. The highest score of the day so far had sadly been a four.
“Hottie alert, girls,” Trish announced quietly.
I thought of Trish as the quintessential fabulous JAP girl with a sleek red bob, freckles and a tan, two nose-jobs down, and too harsh in the jaw for me to find her as attractive as I believed she found herself. She’s from a wealthy family that lives in the part of the North Valley now called Los Ranchos. Trish has a trust fund and a rich husband, but had opened her own upscale baby clothes boutique in the Nob Hill section of town last year to have something to do, because raising her two kids – both less than five years of age – does not interest her. That, she believes, is what God made nannies for.
The boutique was called Sweet Peas, which seemed too tame and adorable a title for a thing run by the very tough, very hyper, very business-oriented Trish. Think a younger, cuter Barbra Streisand, with Rosie O’Donnell’s personality, minus the humor. Think a spastic Jack Russell Terrier, as a woman with a massive diamond flashing on her left ring finger. A woman who purports to believe in equality but who in reality prefers those with money and her own muted Pottery Barn, Neiman Marcus sensibilities. I have found a version of Trish in nearly every city I’ve ever lived in, and I am drawn to them with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, wanting to hate them and make them like me in equal measure. You might say I’m a social masochist.
Carolyn’s eyes followed Trish’s gaze across the mouth of her wine glass, and she, the soft-spoken, pretty, kind-hearted brunette, released a small, strangled gasp. I remembered having made roughly the same sound when I saw him for the first time, too. And when I left him.
“A ten,” she breathed. “No, make that an eleven.”
He would have been pleased to know Carolyn felt that way about him. I knew that much, for Carolyn was stunning and he, for all his blatant appeal, was essentially insecure, with an insatiable thirst for attention from beautiful women and the occasional man, and this might tell you a bit about why I had to leave, eventaully. He might have attended to the advances of a well-groomed goat for all I knew. Nothing surprised me with him at the end. Carolyn was just the sort of unattainable elegant woman he might have stared at across a room, in front of me, wondering aloud whether something that perfect could actually be wild in bed.
Carolyn looked like those gorgeously lanky Ann Taylor catalog models, the ones who look like human greyhounds who trained at Andover and grew up to ride horses and sip lemonade on the porches of stately gray Cape houses, with fabulously bored-looking preppy boyfriends in brown and blonde who loafed and lounged. The ones who might find the hard cut of wooden Adirondack chairs comfortable against their equally flat backsides. At that moment, Carolyn’s shiny shoulder-length raven hair was pulled back in a loose, pretty ponytail that gleamed like river water in moonlight.
Awestruck by him, my friends turned to me for a friendly, giggling confirmation of this illicit wifely lust, lusting over strangers being our unspoken hobby, the game we played to reassure ourselves it wasn’t too late, that we weren’t dried out yet even though we rarely actually wanted to have sex with our husbands. It was safe to window-shop in a pack, right? After all, the adoring, reliable husbands had the children this afternoon, at the aquarium and bio-park, so we moms could lunch and chat, and it was our chance to remember what it had been like before. Before marriage, before babies. Before husbands. Before.
But Trish and Carolyn had no idea that this delicious ten of a man was my before. I had never told them, or anyone in my new life, the true details of my before, the hope being that what was left unspoken might quietly disappear. And so all I could do was stare, my dark brown eyes, newly softened with a Botox injection or two, open and unblinkingly shocked as Gidget’s with his approach. I hoped that maybe, if I were as lucky as I had come to believe I was, he wouldn’t recognize me. After all, fifteen months had passed since I’d seen him last, as I left New York forever.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered.
“I know.” Trisha sighed, misunderstanding my comment as mere appreciation when in fact it was nothing short of terror. Trish had a gift for misunderstanding that I had come to believe served her well in life. “Guys like that? You don’t see every day.” She pursed her lips, thinking. “Or every week. Or month. Or year. I haven’t seen a guy like that in a year, at least.”
Together we watched as he crossed Wellesley, heading toward Kelley’s. The dark blue Hebrew lettering of the tattoo encircling his bicep flexed as he lifted the cigarette to his lips. Such pretty olive skin, stamped and scarred with his various and ever-changing belief systems. He was a walking bumper sticker for both anarchy and compassion, and all the hypcrisy that implies.
I’d gone with him to get that upper-arm tattoo, to the well-known parlor run by a former Rabbi who catered to rebellious Jews like him, on the lower east side. A tattoo parlor specializing in Hebrew sayings. You could find everything in New York.
Everything except maybe a giant papier mache lumberjack over a Vietnamese restaurant, or a five-storey arrow stabbed into a minimall parking lot. Those kinds of things you could find only here in Albuquerque. It had been an underground thing, the tattoo den, but with the popularity of kabbalist tattoos – they were popping up on people like Britney Spears, for instance – it seemed tamer now. But he didn’t. No, he didn’t. He seemed wired as ever, ready to snap. It turned me on even now. It always had. It probably always would.
The Hebrew saying he’d had carved into the meat of his arm meant: “Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence,” and it was intended as a message to his orthodox parents in Israel on more than one level. One, they did not want him to tattoo his body, as they viewed this to be a form of idol worship.
Then again, they didn’t want him playing jazz fusion in America, particularly not with a band consciously made up of Arabs and Jews, and one repentant drummer who was the grandson of an SS officer, called “Shalom Motherphuquer.” And two, he did not agree with their support of what they called force (he called it “fucking stupid violent bullshit”) against the Palestinians, viewing it as “being no better than those who’ve hated and murdered us.” It’s hard for people to believe, but his edge comes from caring too much rather than not caring at all. That is the part people miss about him, the part I wanted to touch. Kyle is painfully sensitive, when he’s not screwing you over or pretending he wants to throw you from the fire escape.
It had been years since he and his parents spoke to one another the last time I saw him, and nothing in his attitude now made me believe anything might have changed. Same defense posture. Same defiant gaze. This alienation from our families of origin was part of our intense sexual connection, a connection I now understood was unfortunately and powerfully based in pain. To continue together, we had to create and cause one another endless pain, otherwise what was the point?
Now, his intelligent, wide-set eyes with the long lashes narrowed against the smoke as he listened to something the man walking with him said. This brought out the cheekbones even more. He laughed at the shared joke. Laughed, with that sexy buck of his head, and only the left side of his mouth curling up. Carolyn began to fan herself with her napkin, a scrap of her lower lip caught between her teeth, in code for “I want some of that even though I’ll never get it.” It’s kind of like the way she looks at carbs.
This is when he looked up, and saw me. At first he did not register knowing, and I imagined I might escape yet. But a moment later, he recognized me and I knew it was over, the whole fakery of my new life. Our eyes locked, and the grin grew on his face, big enough to reveal those straight, white teeth with the tiniest gap between the two top front. They say those with this sort of gap are more adventurous, and I have met no one to prove the theory wrong, especially not him. He suddenly seemed to lose interest in whatever his friend had been telling him, and aimed his mellow gait toward us. Now, he walked with a purpose. I was overcome with the urge to run, but where would I go? Who would be there to catch me?
Trisha was first to notice the familiar, amused way he looked at me. But his proximity to our table made it impossible for her to speak the words I read in her large green eyes, something along the lines of “Excuse me? You know this guy? And you didn’t tell me? Bad girl. Bad.”
He strolled right up to the low, wrought-iron fence separating the dining patio from the sidewalk, and simply stood, utterly confident in his body and place in the world, sizing me up. A vine with pink flowers curled up and over the fence, enthusiastic, hopeful. And his eyes bored into me. Judging. Assessing. I felt the familiar tingle between my legs and in the center of my lower belly, the old Kegel flinch at the sight of his self-assurance, and realized with a slight shock that my libido was still in tact. I had believed it killed by childbirth six months earlier, severed along with my abdominal wall in the emergency C-section. But there it was, still on call for him like a first-year resident, sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated and at the ready.
I knew him well enough after our tormented five-year relationship to read his thoughts. Lighter, longer hair, thinner body, tame makeup and the kind of clothes we used to make fun of together. Painted fingernails that might be fake. Fancy friends picked from the class of women we used to mock. Little Dahlia Miller, trying to look like a grownup, all dressed up like some idiot suburban soccer mom. What the fuck.
“Hello, Dahlia,” he said, his low, sexy voice breaking the air with the same kind of electricity as the distant thunder. His eyes oozed amusement, and with Kyle, amusement was as good as an accusation.
I could feel Trish and Carolyn staring gape-mouthed at one another, trying to figure out just how it had come to pass that I knew this man. This possibly dangerous, decidedly sexy man.
“Kyle,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Kyle shrugged as if he might come to Albuquerque all the time, which in and of itself is hilarious because nobody comes to Albuquerque all the time; you are either stuck here, or you drive through here, or you come now and then and soon forget the trip altogether.
He took another drag of his cigarette. “My band’s playing in town,” he said. “I was hoping I’d see you. And here you are, my first day in town. Lucky shot. I only took the gig here because you lived here.”
Now, I felt the gazes of my new friends burning across the table at me. A man – no, no, wait, this man – wanted to find me? Dahlia? The pampered and, to their eyes, somewhat passive wife of mild-mannered architect Benjamin Krumholtz?
“Where are you playing?” I hoped my face was not too flushed with blood.
“Museum. Some kind of jazz series.”
“That’s great.” I tried to smile reassuringly at my friends, to think up a lie that would smooth things over. “Guys,” I said to them in as calm a voice as I could, “I’d like to introduce you to Kyle Hartman. He’s a musician I used to know back when I lived in New York.”
Kyle looked sideways at me as he shook their hands and greeted them politely, as if he understood what I was doing. His look told me that he was game for going along with my little charade, but not for long.
I saw Trish notice his Hebrew tattoo, and saw as she subtly pointed it out to Carolyn, mouthing “He’s Jewish!” an exclamation only slightly lower on the food chain for Trish than “he’s rich” and just above “he’s a doctor”. For me, the most sought-after quality in men had for too long been “he’s a psycho” or “he hates you,” but I was trying to make up for that now by choosing Benjamin, about whom might be said “he’s normal,” or “he makes you laugh” or “his mood never darkens, not even when he drinks, which is practically never.”
“Did you guys play together in a band?” Carolyn asked me. Poor Carolyn. Too nice for her own good most of the time.
Kyle sucked down some more smoke, and nodded. “You could say that,” he said. “Right, Dahlia? We made some pretty good music, I thought.”
I nodded, and smiled, even though the truth was this: Kyle was a world-class jazz fusion guitarist who had never much believed in my abilities as a singer. He’d never much liked playing with singers at all, but with me least of all. I tipped toward the indie rock world of angst and weirdness. I liked depressing women singers like Kate Bush. He favored old Weather Report and Jaco Pastorius. Mostly, he had been interested in my eyes, my body, my lips.
Mostly, I think he liked to show me off to his friends, and I don’t say this with any sense of pride about it. I hated it.
I had tried to convince Kyle of my worth as an artist, both as a singer and as a painter, but he’d never seemed all that concerned about helping me. My paintings were too pretty, in his opinion. He was a Salvador Dali man. I preferred Georgia O’Keefe. My songs were too harmonically simplistic. He preferred false resolutions to the standard old five-one. In retrospect, that was probably part of the whole sick, insatiable appeal of Kyle for me, that he found me lacking, that he did not yet believe in me, that I could appreciate and understand him, but it did not work that way in reverse. It was familiar, that feeling of disappointing the very people you wanted to please. In a way, it was all I’d know as a child. It was home.
Physically, however. That had been another story. I had never disappointed Kyle there. He had told me I was his muse, and he’d made me lie naked on the futon on our floor while he looked at me from the chair, a guitar across his lap, composing lopsided songs in five or seven back in the small studio apartment we shared in Soho. Back in my other life. The life that involved marijuana, and, later, as Kyle earned more money, cocaine. My life as a drug addict, failed artist, and jazz groupie concerned desperately with Kyle’s vision for world peace, discussed intermittently during his ongoing criticisms of me and everything I had ever done, was doing, or would someday do. My Kyle phase.
“You look good,” he told me. I could feel Trish grabbing Carolyn’s hand and I could hear their collective inhalation. “You left town without giving me your number,” he said. “I wanted to reach you. Just didn’t know how.”
“Well,” I said, trying hard to downplay the gravity of his words, the earnestness of his desire to find me. “Here I am. You could have called information. Four-one-one isn’t too hard to remember.” Even when you’re high, I added silently. Which he probably was, even now. It should have bothered me, but it did not.
Kyle grinned at me over the hot orange tip of the cigarette, and as he blew out the smoke said, “Yeah, but this way is so much more fun, isn’t it?” He paused to look around at the Nob Hill area, at what I think he saw as its shabby, laughable approximation of coolness. Then he looked at me, cocked his head flirtatiously to one side and said, “Besides, babe, I don’t think I know your new last name, do I?”
“Krumholtz,” I told him. I didn’t intend for my voice to crack, but it happened anyway, a big Erckle crack. Up on the “Krum,” down on the “holtz.” I could tell he wanted to say something about my new name, to laugh, to make fun of me, a skill he’d polished to perfection. He knew which sore places to press, which spots were so tender and bruised the pain froze me unbreathing. But he didn’t harm me now. Funny, as in odd, that.
Maybe he remembered that Benjamin Krumholtz had been my first love, my boyfriend from the eighth grade to senior year, one of my best friends, a man I’d always remembered and wondered about with a sort of respect and secretive wistfulness. He knew this was Benjamin’s territory, and that he’d only just arrived. Maybe he smelled Benjamin on the wind, the way a wolf can scent its competitor from miles away. Even Kyle knew this was not the proper time and place to lift his leg.
Kyle introduced us to his friend, a guy named Brian he knew back at the New School who was now working for the Alibi, an alternative weekly newspaper in town. Kyle said he’d be “crashing” with Brian for a few days, “checking out the city,” and hoped he’d be able to catch up with me.
“I hear you have a beautiful new baby,” he said gravely. “What is it, again? A boy?”
“A girl,” I said, my face exploding in flames now. With your eyes and your smile and Benjamin’s name.
“A girl,” he said, his smile softening for the first time I think I had ever knows. He said it as if this were the most fascinating thing he’d heard, ever. I believe he looked as if he wanted to cry for a moment as small and forceful as the beat of a hummingbird wing. He asked his friend for a pen, and helped himself to my cocktail napkin. “I bet she’s perfect, like her em,” he said, using the Hebrew word for mother.
“She’s great,” I said as I took the napkin with his familiar, wild, left-leaning psychotic scrawl across it. Demon writing that excited my blood. I folded it neatly and tucked it into my handbag, certain I would do my best not call. Pleased he had not asked me for my number because I suspected that if he were to call me I might not resist. Pleased he had at least understood me well enough to know I would have refused.
“Okay, ladies. Have a pleasant afternoon.” And with that, Kyle dipped his head in a cocky farewell to each of us, and walked away.
When he had sauntered out of earshot, my new friends both seemed to sit up straighter, leaning closer to me over the table. Chickens in the hen house, ready to cluck all afternoon.
“What was that?” Trish demanded with one well-waxed brow arched up.
“An ex-boyfriend,” I said. “And not one I particularly ever wanted to see again.”
“Details, please,” said Carolyn, with the grin of the innocent, the kind of smile that comes only from a life lived in cloistered comfort.
Carolyn is from Connecticut. Her father is a banker. Her mother knits. She went to summer camp. She assumed my memories of Kyle would be harmless and pleasurable, possibly titillating in the way of those for whom titillating includes too many margaritas at Senor Frog’s.
These were my new – and only – female friends, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. I didn’t want to let them down by letting them know who I really was. I did not, most of all, want to lose them, because I was unsure about what I might do if I lost anything right now, having nothing else to hold on to. Me, untethered, is not a pretty sight.
So I told them what I could. That Kyle and I met at a jazz club called Sweet Basil. That I’d been in the audience and he had performed. That the lust was overwhelming and enabled us to overlook the simple fact that we had little in common. That we moved in together three weeks after meeting. That we’d been together for five years. That he was a really good musician, a world-famous guitarist in those shrinking yet intellectual and impassioned circles where jazz is still central to a meaningful life. That in the end, we just didn’t get along.
“In the end, I realized I’d never stopped loving Benjamin,” I said. It was only half true. I had grown so numb with self-medication that, until I got pregnant, I scarcely thought about Benjamin at all, or any of my life pre-Kyle for that matter. Thinking of Benjamin reminded me of my failures back then. “So, yeah. We just didn’t get along. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
I did, of course, know how to explain it. That would have been easy: I got pregnant, and decided I couldn’t have another abortion. I’d already had three. The ghosts of them still clung to me with unformed hands in the middle of the night. I decided to stop doing drugs and maybe grow up for the baby’s sake, to clean up, get a life, maybe a real job, but Kyle didn’t want to relinquish the party life, so I left him. The thought of being a mom was finally enough impetus to leave, the baby the catapult that sailed me forever from certain destruction. Benjamin showed up sixteen days after I’d gotten pregnant, came to a green design architecture conference in the city, said he’d always loved me, said he wanted to spend his life with me, and I saw my opportunity, took it.
Easy enough as a story, but shocking, disappointing, horrifying as a life. As a conscious choice. The sort of story that might push nails through the tender young wood of the coffin for my new life, and for my baby’s sake – for Marni’s sake – I could not risk that. Marni was happy, loved, wealthy, stable. Marni had a sober dad, a good dad, a reliable if somewhat boring dad.
Marni had too much to lose now.
Trish watched Kyle’s rear end as he walked away, and eyed me with suspicion. “How could you not get along with that? Any normal woman could get along with that.”
“The smoking,” I said. I did not mention that I, too, used to smoke. Unfiltered, home-rolled, the better to make my voice sultry for belting out old Etta James covers Kyle mocked for their commercialism.
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Trish. “But there’s the patch. Give him the patch. He is patch-worthy.”
“Definitely patch-worthy,” Carolyn agreed.
I smiled through my remembered pain, aware that they were making a Seinfeldian joke, aware that as a group of friends of a certain age we were nearly bound by oath to find all things Seinfeldian hilarious. As women married to a set of brothers, Trish and I were practically sisters now, and I knew she didn’t want me to have ended up with anyone but Benjamin.
I elaborated, with the aim of quelling any sense they might have that I still auto-moistened and pulse-accelerated for this man. “And some other problems. You know. Personality issues.”
“Why do you think he wanted to see you?” asked Carolyn.
I have no idea, but I think he plans to destroy my life for his own amusement and the scary part is I might be stupid enough to let him. Think, I told myself. Think of a good lie.
“He probably wants me to pay him the money he thinks I still owe him.” I shrugged. It was totally untrue. Lying was getting too easy. Kyle was making good money now, both as a sideman and as a group leader, touring Europe twice a year. A headliner at the Montreal Jazz Festival. The Japanese loved him. He was famous in Japan. Most Americans who said they played jazz could become famous in Japan, even if the instrument was, say, the kazoo or the banjo. He did not need my money. He needed something else.
“How much do you owe him?”
“Five hundred dollars,” I said.
“That sucks,” said Trish. “He’d hunt you down for that?” Trish was accustomed to spending that amount on a haircut, which she was known to fly to Scottsdale to get because, in her opinion, no one in Albuquerque knew how to do color properly.
“You don’t know him,” I said. “He’s flat broke. He’s got issues.”
I told them some of the issues. Philandering. Drugs. An ego the dimensions of a hot, red planet, with comparable gravitational pull and hellish core.
What I didn’t tell them was that Kyle Hartman is Marni’s father.
I wanted to tell them. Of course I did. It was like hiding toothpicks under your fingernails living this lie, or a whole set of lies, like carrying a redwood tree on your back and hoping no one noticed. Addicts make terrible decisions, even when they’re sobering up. I got here that way. By the time you understand what you’ve done, where you’ve landed, whom you’ve harmed, it might be too late to go back.
You might like to think you’re not that kind of person, that you are better than me. But maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re just a limping bit of broken lice like everyone else. And maybe Kyle blows down Route 66 on a hot afternoon to remind you that no one can run far enough or fast enough in the end to outrace themselves.
I know it is hard for you to believe, perfect as you surely are and given the nature and magnitude of my sins, but I was overcome with a terrible indigestion of love for Benjamin in that one hot moment. The thought of him caring for Kyle’s child somewhere beneath the piercing blue of a midday New Mexican summer sky made my stomach hurt. It sickened me that this same sky now spread endlessly behind Kyle like a slippery set of dragon wings.
I do not expect to deserve your trust, knowing as you do that I am a fraud. I can only hope that you will believe me when I tell you that the sky that day was so bright that to look at it anywhere, even at the clouded edges of the horizon, felt perilously close to staring at the sun.
Posts
