I lived from apartment to apartment, sometimes with friends, sometimes strangers. I got a ride to San Francisco and stayed in a European-style hostel, where you could stay a limited number of nights for a fixed fee. It was a large dilapidated building with high ceilings and sweet, moldy drains. The kitchen cabinets were full of stale cereal, the kind with frosting or colored sweet bits made to look like animals or stars. You had to chip in for food staples. You weren’t supposed to bring in drugs; people did, but they were moderate and they shared. The man who ran it, a college student with a soft stomach and a big ball of hair on his head, even kept a record player in one of the common rooms, and we gathered there at night to share pot and listen to playful elfin songs about freedom and love. These songs had the light beauty of a summer night full of wonderful smells and fireflies. They also had a feeling of sickness hidden in them, but we didn’t hear that then.

down between open knees. Guys would talk loudly to one another about whatever they were thinking about or things that they did. I remember a guy talking about a girl he’d gotten pregnant. He’d told her to get on the ground and eat dirt first, and she did. “And then I fertilized it!” he said. The guys laughed, and the girls watched with intent, quiet eyes. I went out on the fire escape with Lilet and we sat with our legs dangling down, somebody’s lilac bushes between our feet.

I saw music, too, in the people I got stoned with in the park or saw dancing at parties or bars. I remember this boy and girl I saw dancing at a crash pad once. They didn’t touch or act sexy, but they looked at each other the whole time, like they were connected through their eyes. They didn’t pay any attention to the rhythm of the music. They danced to its secret personality—clownish and gross, like something big and dumb stuck in a tar pit and trying to walk its way out with brute force. Like being stuck and gross was something great.

A long time ago, John loved me. I never loved him, but I used his friendship, and the using became so comfortable for both of us that we started really being friends. When I lost my looks and had to go on disability, John pitied me and then looked down on me, but that just got fit into the friendship, too. What can’t get fit in is that sometimes even now John looks at me and sees a beautiful girl in a ruined face. It’s broken, with age and pain coming through the cracks, but it’s there, and it pisses him off. It pisses me off, too. When we have these fights and he hears crying and hurt in my voice, it’s a different version of that ruined beauty, except it’s not something he can see, so he can’t think ruined or beauty. He just feels it, like sex when it’s disgusting but you want it anyway. Like his baby plays with the flabby arms, not knowing they’re ugly. I can’t have a baby and we’re not going to fuck, but it’s still in my voice—sex and warm arms mixed with hurt and ugliness, so he can’t separate them. When that happens, it doesn’t matter that I’m not beautiful or even pretty, and he is confused and unhappy.

I always had that, but I didn’t know it until now. It’s the reason somebody once thought I could be a model, the thing they kept trying to photograph and never did. When I was young, my beauty held it in a case that wouldn’t open. Then it broke open. Now that I’m almost fifty, it’s there, so much so that even John feels it without knowing what it is. It’s disgusting to whore it out in a fight over cigarettes, but that’s life.

The air smells of gasoline, dirt, and trees; cars farting out of hot iron stomachs; and the fresh BO of nature. Down the street, there’s still a picket line out in front of the Nissan dealership, people standing in mud-colored rain slickers, their faces looking like crude sketches under their dripping hoods: brows, nose, lips, jowls. Clear plastic bags are tied over their signs, which read don’t buy from nissan. don’t buy from scabs. Most of them trudge in a circle, like they are trudging through a ritual they no longer remember the meaning of but which they dimly believe is their only hope. Two others stand outside the circle, their plastic hoods thrown back, talking and laughing furious, face-crushing laughter as the rain pours down on their heads. They’ve been there a month. I try to catch somebody’s eye to wish them luck, like I usually do. But nobody looks up in the rain.

I didn’t want it. But I ate it, and when my father asked, “Do you like it?” I said, “It’s good.” Sara picked out the sausage, glaring at it like she was really pissed. She ate the beans and went upstairs. “She’s a vegetarian now,” said Daphne. “Probably stuffing herself with candy,” said my dad. Van Cliburn played Tchaikovsky in the next room; in the dining room, the TV was on mute. The months in San Francisco were folded up into a bright tiny box and put down somewhere amid the notices and piles of coupons. I was blended into the electrical comfort of home, where our emotions ran together and were carried by music and TV images. Except for Sara’s—she couldn’t join the current. I don’t know why, but she couldn’t.

His car was sleek and white and had doors that opened upward, like wings on a flying horse. We got inside it. He opened the bag (which was silk) and scooped the cocaine out of it with his car key. He placed the key under one winged nostril and briskly inhaled. I thought of the time my father was insulted by a car salesman who said, “All you want is something to get around in!” For a week after, my father walked around saying, “What do you do with it, you son of a bitch? Screw with it?” We passed the key back and forth for some moments. Finally, he licked it and put it in the ignition. He said, “Alison, you are a beautiful girl. And now you are in a country that understands beauty. Enjoy it.” He started the car. The drug hit my heart. Its hard pounding spread through my body in long dark ripples and for a second I was afraid. Then I stepped inside the electrical current and let it knock me out. We pulled out of the lot and into the Parisian traffic.

Most of the guys he asks to work for him are okay. They’re ex-junkies and fuckups, but they want to do better. Even so, their presence sometimes pisses the neighbors off. They come over to complain, and there’s Drew: a wall with a furnace stomach and benevolent eyes looking out of a fleshy face. They’ll talk to him about these unsafe people, these sad, ragged people appearing to bang around with hammers and wander the sidewalks. Drew will look into space and go, “Uhhh.” There’ll be a silence. Then Drew will explain why these men are okay. He’ll point to a piece of work and say, “This man did that; that man did this. I need help; they can help.” He’ll make more “uhhh” noises. I believe it’s the noises that get people. Takes them out of the world of words into practical thoughts: Things need to get built. Men need to earn. Neighbors have to be decent. The neighbors walk away confused, like they don’t know what has happened.

I went to community college two more semesters. Instead of I poetry, I concentrated on word-processing classes. When I M felt I was skilled enough to get a job, I quit. I moved to Manhattan when a friend of a friend told me about a friend (named Gandy) who needed a roommate for a six-month sublet. My father said, “Why? You were doing so well.” I told him, “Because I’m too bored to live here,” and he just shook his head. “You always expected so much,” said my mother. “You expect even more after what happened. You have to enjoy what you have.” And I replied, “But I don’t have anything here. I need to go where I can have something.” My father looked down and left the room. I had hurt him, but he couldn’t do anything about it—I still had what was left of the French money and I could do what I wanted.

I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook. The city was so big and bright that for a moment my terrible heaven paled, then went invisible. I thought it was gone, but what I couldn’t see, I felt walking next to me in streets full of vying people. I felt it in their fixed outthrust faces, their busy rigid backs, their jiggling jewelry, their creeping and swagger. I felt it in the office workers who perched in flocks on the concrete flower boxes of giant corporate banks, eating their lunches over crossed legs and rumpled laps, the wind blowing their hair in their chewing mouths and waves of scabby pigeons surging at their feet, eating the bits that fell on the pavement. I felt it in the rough sensate hands of subway musicians playing on drums and guitars while the singer collected money with his cup, still singing like he was talking to himself in a carelessly beautiful voice while riders streamed down concrete stairs like drab birds made fantastic in flight. I felt monstrous wants and gorgeous terrors that found form in radio songs, movie screens, billboards, layers of posters on decayed walls, public dreams bleeding into one another on cheap paper like they might bleed from person to person. I took it in and fed on it, and for a while, that was enough.