Susan has put Jeremy down to bed. It was breakfast for dinner, which is his favorite. A meal of ketchup and syrup. Sometimes he’ll eat the eggs and pancakes, too. I am sitting out on the back porch. One of those white, plastic lawn chairs. Late summer, very warm, humid. Los Angeles. The wisteria on the terrace is beginning to die. I am drinking a glass of wine, my second, and smoking a cigarette, the one Susan allows me ungrudgingly after dinner. Susan is in her studio writing away on her ancient Dell. The keys stick. The lights from the valley, the source obscured by the hills, illuminate the sky a discomfiting purple, a bruisy gray the color of nausea. I am feeling so tranquil, so safe swaddled in that intimate color, in the intimacy of my routine. Later I will grade papers on helical structures and the difference between genotype and phenotype. It is lovely out. It is eerie.
The phone rings, but there’s no one I need to talk to. Susan picks up. It’s for you, she calls. I stab out my cigarette and pick up the wireless phone that’s just inside the doorway. Take it back outside.
Got it, babe. I turn on the phone. Hello?
Sal?
Oh! That voice! How do I know it so immediately? How do I know it in my intestines and in all of my extremities before I can even think of her name? How wrong I could be after ten years, having seen her face in ice cream parlors and strip clubs, in restaurants and at Jeremy’s soccer games. Sometimes, terrifyingly, flashing across Susan’s face, or other times in Jeremy’s own. Sometimes startling myself in my own unthinking reflection.
Fiona. Fiona of the long lashes. Fiona of the inexplicable laugh. Fiona of the capacious sexual appetite. Of the ukulele strings. Of the little wicker baskets. Of the rosewater. Fiona the Cruel. Fiona the Ambivalent. Fiona the Terrible.
It has been ten years.
Where are you calling from? I ask.
Taos. Taos, New Mexico. Fiona of the bird bones and animal skulls.
What are you doing in Taos?
I’m here for a gig.
Are you at a hotel?
I’m at a payphone.
You’re calling me from a payphone?
You haven’t changed your phone number.
It’s called spontaneous recovery. A dog who has been conditioned to salivate at the ring of a bell, and is then put through a period of deconditioning still retains the memory of the conditioned response. After a week of silence the dog will still salivate at the sound of the bell. Fiona has called. I am drooling.
Why are you calling me?
Fiona the Wreck. The Impetuous. We had, the summer between our freshman and sophomore years, maintained an enthusiastic correspondence, although we spoke to each other nearly everyday, anyway. Sometimes we would read aloud our letters to each other over the telephone; such was our pleasure. I wrote:
June 21st, 2000
(father’s day)
Dear Fiona,
You left a few hours ago for Boston. I didn’t even have to cry this time, but I still feel sad. I can’t even tell you how much I hate goodbyes. Gwendolyn (the girl I babysit) is napping now. I really like her. A lot. She’s become very affectionate with me, and sometimes I’m tempted to snatch her up like a teddy bear and curl her into myself in bed and just sleep and sleep and sleep. We watched Sesame Street, today, and painted. Her mother is subletting a room to this post-grad lacrosse-playing hippie named Nathaniel who shamelessly flirts with me while drinking nettle tea (I had some. It tastes like I’d expect nettles to taste.) He told me that his friends in college used to call him “Plain Yogurt,” which is just about the sorriest excuse for a nickname I can think of. I stole one of his American Spirits last week, which I don’t like as much as I like to say I do.
She wrote:
July 6th, 2000
Sal—
Today was—without a doubt—a two cigarette morning. Perhaps you know what I mean. Two cigarettes, and I’ll probably have a third after I finish my Red Eye, which I only drink over ice. I went to an 8:15 therapy session this morning. Needless to say, it required me to smoke two, maybe three, cigarettes, and order an extra shot of espresso in my coffee this morning, and I will take the jitters that inevitably follow as happy consequence. I always like it when my knees shake.
We were nineteen and twenty in the year 2000.
Yours was the only number I could remember. My cell phone broke. You know… payphone. Nobody has to remember anybody’s number anymore.
What do you want?
A friendly voice, I guess. I’m sorry. I know this is awfully inappropriate of me. If—I just wanted to know how my dear, old friend was. Is.
I do not know what to say. What do you say to a reanimated corpse? To the stuttering coma patient? She continues,
It’s been so long, Sal. I think about you everyday, you know. If there’s anything I think about everyday it’s you.
I did not tell her that for ten years she had inhabited my closets and bed sheets and dishware. The empty O’s of my breakfast cereal. Certain chords played on the guitar, certain city smells.
I’d just like to catch up.
Ketchup?
What?
Wasn’t funny. Nevermind.
Just. Tell me something about yourself.
All at once, I am sick.
August, 2000. She came to visit me in Los Angeles. And I, like a big dope, met her at the airport with a picnic basket. Flowers. She liked sunflowers because they cheered her up. I’d bought her a big bunch of long-stemmed sunflowers, which she subsequently decided not to take home with her on the plane, four days later. They lasted almost until the end of the month in my room. My gift to her.
I’d taken her to Venice Beach because she’d never been to the Pacific Ocean before, and we’d had one of our typical conversations, a little bit drunk off the wine and not having had eaten enough soup and bread at all. We were both trying to be so skinny, back then.
What’s your favorite thing about me? It was the sort of indulgent blather lovers like to get away with.
Considering your shitty personality, she said, I remember, I’d have to go with your eyes.
My eyes?
Your breasts. Your hips. Your canines. I don’t know. You bite when you kiss. Sometimes you’re funny.
I love you, I’d said. She said,
You’re my companion. She was selfish. She was selfish and unfeeling. I didn’t know that then, so I continued.
I think I like your mouth the best. When you smile, it’s like the sides of your mouth pull up by fish hooks.
You’re my best friend. I was flattered, I remember being flattered at the time.
Do you want to swim, I’d asked. She looked into the sea, the girl who’d only been to the Atlantic.
No, she said. The sun is so warm. Later on that day, when we had gone from the beach, she said, I love you tremendously. She meant it, but she was such a whore. She went back to Boston a few days later.
She wrote:
September 3rd, 2009
It’s not simple, Sal. Can I be your friend without losing the intimacy I’ve come to depend on with you? Can I be your lover without being sexually attracted to you? I like kissing you, Sal. And then sometimes I don’t.
What I don’t want, Sal, is for you to act differently towards me, for you to even feel differently towards me. There is not a vocabulary large enough, there is not a culture advanced enough, to categorize the myriad manifestations of love. This, Sal, is why it is not simple to me. I am not trying to be abstract. I just. Am. Abstract.
She was so goddamn cute. She was so good with words. She would ask me questions like, would you rather know a little about a lot, or a lot about a little, or, if you weren’t in school where would you be right now? She had a way of biting her lower lip. When she’d met my mother she had flung herself around her neck and said, thank god, I finally meet you! Every perfect thing she ever did now turns my stomach.
Are you punishing me?
What? Her tone seems genuinely alarmed, but she never claimed to be disingenuous about anything. For godsakes, Sally, no. I decide to light another cigarette.
You still smoke? She asks. She must’ve heard the match strike over the phone, or correctly interpreted the pause. Me, too. Camel Reds. I bet she still smokes Camel Reds. I don’t ask. I exhale.
It’s not like I have a flair for drama or anything, Fiona. I think you know that. But I don’t think I can talk to you. You know the phrase “my blood is boiling?” My blood is boiling.
I wouldn’t just do this to you, Sal.
I am so sick of you. I am being unfair. She doesn’t know I’ve been seeing her face in doorknobs for ten years.
No, Sally, she says. I’m sick.
And she wrote:
July 12th, 2000
Christian wants to drop acid today, because it’s his birthday, and I don’t, but I probably will and by the time you get this letter you’ll have heard all about it or else maybe I’ll write about it here if I do. I told you about my aunt who ate acid when she was 19 and still has flashbacks where everyone is a cartoon? I shouldn’t do it if I’m sad, or if I’m even anything but riotously happy, it seems to me, or at least in a mood for exploration, but I have been putting it off because I’ve either been working or I’ve been with you or I was sad. I don’t think I like the sound of psychadelics. It sounds like Alice being trapped in Wonderland for hours and hours too long. Like you can’t turn your mind off. I like to turn my mind off. Or go away. Maybe it will take me away?
I’m wondering if I should go abroad my junior year. I think I’d like to go to Spain. Maybe even just for a semester
Cancer, she says. Breast cancer. I’m going to have a mastectomy. I’m scared. I am speechless. Somewhere between rage and perplexity, I know she shouldn’t be telling me this. She is in Taos, New Mexico, playing guitar and singing for a bunch of ex-hippies and mine is the only number she could remember when her cell phone broke. And then I understand.
The gig?
Nah. I’m in L.A. I thought maybe I could see you.
Where is it… when—
Cedar’s. On Thursday. I didn’t think I’d care so much. About a boob. Tit. Breast.
Left or right? I can’t help asking. Not that it matters.
Right. My guitar playing side.
Fiona—
I know you still hold a grudge. Sal. For godsakes. Please get over it. I am being cut open on Thursday. I’d like for you to be with me.
She wrote:
July 23rd, 2000
I’m already thinking about next year. Wonder if I’ll get my shit together. Stop smoking. Find a therapist. Do my work. Get employed. Start running again. Go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. It’s all very daunting (I’m not kidding—I’m legitimately nervous), but it’s exciting, too. I’ll be ready to be in New York by the time I get to New York.
And I replied:
August 1st, 2000
I’m already thinking about next summer, too, which seems appropriate because I started thinking about this summer last summer. We will both live in New York and I will swing a free trip to Israel, as is my right. I will surf around Brooklyn and Manhattan on my futon, and, hopefully, be very much employed, or maybe get an internship at some clinic. And I will sleep with you whenever I possibly can.
Your very good friend,
your lover, bunkmate, band manager, companion, partner in crime, etcetera, et al,
Sal
In the last few months I knew her it was obvious that something was wrong. Women, people, perhaps, especially women maybe, are very intuitive. I don’t know if you could call it a sixth sense or what, but there’s something sensory, something meta-sensory, a way in which you see and calibrate her every word, inflection, movement or half-movement, voluntary or involuntary, notice subconsciously where her eyes rest, when they won’t catch yours; the way a kiss becomes perfunctory, the subtlety of distinguishing that perfunctoriness from a comfy familiarity. It’s when talking on the phone becomes easier than talking in person, because there aren’t eyes to meet, no hand to grab. The way you reassure yourself because of the easy telephone chat. The way Doubt’s million little claws will relax their pinching hold and you will tell yourself that that vague anxiety you feel has no foundation, that your friends see you together and tell you how they wish they were you, that at parties you still hold hands and when you’re drunk you sloppily whisper in her ear to come upstairs with you, to take her pants off, and when she says no, dear, you tell yourself to not take it personally, it was neither the time nor the place. Women, people, some women maybe, give very little credit to this… this intuition. Women, people, are so—Fiona is, was… is—very complicated.
Twice, we fought. The first time was because of something I said. I told her she talked a lot but usually didn’t really say anything. I was joking a little, a little too on the nose, I guess. Fiona—Fiona the Broadcaster; Fiona of the syllables and syllables and chatter and debate. Fiona the Raconteur, she got quiet at first and then said, that’s the worst thing anybody’s ever said to me.
And the second time was when I finally grew brave enough to ask her what was going on (I said, even, what the hell is going on).
I wrote to her once:
June 30th, 2000
Fiona, I, too, have been raised with a vocabulary of psychobabble—with as many words for neuroses as Eskimos have for snow. Love is never love, it is obsession. Love is never love, it is codependence. Love is a dangerous, shadowy thing whose traffic creeps along a highway from your heart to your head and confuses the two. Love is not merely emotional—it is intellectual, psychological, controllable and uncontrollable in as far as you can choose what to think and how. Love, as I have grown to understand it, makes you weak rather than strong.
And if I ever loved you in that way, it is certainly not how I love you now. I love the thing that has been created between us, but more importantly I love you. Because you never cease to dazzle me, and to impress me. Because you are smart, and worldly, and savvy. And passionate. And thoughtful. And talented. And I am my very best when I’m around you. My love for you.
is.
pure.
When was it that I became an adult? Where is the threshold? I had a crummy childhood and my journal entry from my thirteenth birthday reads, I will never get any older. I am so old. I was initiated into the customary rituals of sex and drugs and even bills and taxes and college tuition, of red tape and bureaucracy and grocery shopping, of tact and reticence and propriety at all the normal times, if not earlier than most people I know. There was an obvious point where I thought I’d found myself, as if Identity was a purely heterosexual thing and that the emotional zenith of a lesbian’s life is when she concedes that she, yes, is, in fact attracted to women and she can join the masses screaming for her cause, but is suddenly excluded from the rest of the clubs, the other kind of clubs for conditions that novels get written about. At least you know who you are, people have told me. Susan loves you. Jeremy is a blessing. Who I am has never been determined by me. I was once talking to one of my roommates in college about Fiona and she said, stop, stop right now. There’s a line.
How dare you call me, I say into the phone.
For godsakes, Sal. It’s been ten years. We are talking nonsense to each other. I say,
You’re making me feel like a child, as if I didn’t think we weren’t all, ambiguously, children.
I need you right now. I am already a mother of one. I mean, of two. I say,
This is impossible.
Sal, are you okay? Susan is calling me from her studio. I must’ve been yelling into the phone. Her voice is like the rope that pulls you out of the gulch.
I’m gonna go now, Fiona.
You’re just gonna go?
This is impossible, I say again.
Sal don’t be weak. Please, please—
I?
– I’m very confused.
In one world I hang up the phone right here. In another, I keep talking to her, I walk her down off that cliff just like I used to when she’d spiral into depression. In another world I say, very maturely, very melodramatically, goodbye. In another Susan comes out and, knowing instinctively whom I’m talking to, makes my decision for me by taking the phone from my hand. Another one Jeremy wakes up screaming from a dream. In another, the phone beeps; call waiting. In another, the phone simply melts or explodes.
