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We kissed, more and more roughly, until he grabbed ahold of some of my belly fat and pinched it hard. “Oh,” I said, hot and embarrassed. “Sorry.” I was apologizing for the fat. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re beautiful.” I wasn’t. You couldn’t pinch beautiful, at least not in the waist. But I didn’t care. He was beautiful. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I’ve since learned that—if you’re lucky—you get to go to bed with maybe three or four people in your life who are so big and so brilliant and so perfect they blot out the sun. They become the sun. He was one of them, for me. Even though his bed was narrow and he was inexperienced. Even though he thought I was a chubster. Like he said, it didn’t matter. You don’t get to choose when or by whom you are going to be illuminated and maybe even eclipsed—deliciously, filthily eclipsed. It just happens and who knows why. Who even knows what to do about it, except fuck and fuck until the whole thing blows up.
We had a lot of sex that spring, though I was still nominally dating Matthew, whatever that meant. He had always been withholding, so there wasn’t a big change when I began to spend all my time with Cassie, learning what it’s really like Down There. I liked the badness of it, but felt a curious sense of detachment from the sex act itself. What I really wanted to learn was her coolness, her remove, her ability to seem as if she didn’t care. She would fling herself at me, practically tear my clothes off, send me out of my head with her little fingers, and then roll over afterward and look at me with cool Antonioni eyes, like, Who are you again?
The spring grew hotter and more fecund-smelling. We lay in bed one night in late May, saying goodbye. She was getting ready to go back to San Francisco, to spend the summer with a despised stepmother, the latest in a string.
“Are you going to see Matthew this summer?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said. “I hope.”
And she started to cry, and I was so surprised.
When I needed to rest, I made my way not home but to the grand State Library of New South Wales, an imposing cream-colored pile on Macquarie Street. There were books, and a spare, elegant café, and other readers. I began to make my way through Tolstoy; I found his multitudinousness a good antidote to the emptiness of my new life. There was a sweetness and a purpose to my solitude in the library. Late in the afternoon I had to exit the cool gray dim into the hot afternoon and make my way back to Redfern. If I didn’t get home before six o’clock or so, I would have to take a cab that I could ill afford—I couldn’t walk around my neighborhood after dark.
sweet
It was a sweet existence in many ways. I had my loving and beautiful boyfriend Dave, who was sort of a rock star and also the nicest boyfriend I’d ever had. I had work—nude modeling and shifting boxes in a warehouse, not at the same time. There were shows and beaches and long days filled with nothing but reading. When I got restless or Dave was on tour, I hopped trains up and down the coast with a couple of daredevil pals I’d made. But I knew I was supposed to be a student. I wrote in my diary: “Last night I dreamt I was late for school—and how!” Which was funny, but I didn’t feel funny. I felt like I was twenty-two and a college dropout twice over and getting older every day in the wrong hemisphere. I truly believed I would live outside bourgeois society for the rest of my days, nude modeling and warehouse laboring. Maybe I would get promoted to forklift driver. There was nothing in me that believed that the normal things that happened to normal people were things that were going to happen to me. I looked like a free girl—after all, I stuck my thumb out and hitchhiked all the way to Queensland—but at this point I believed I was worthless, pretty much, except maybe my looks, and I don’t think a worthless-feeling person is a free person. I read exhaustively. From Tolstoy I’d moved on to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Thomas Mann and, of all people, Doris Lessing, who made me think in uncomfortably explicit ways about girls and freedom, and the difficulty of the novels was the only thing keeping me from falling into total despair. My brain was a little hammer, looking for somewhere to fall.
“Sometimes life is a thing of determination,” I wrote in my diary that first winter when I returned to school. “And when you are determined, you are free.” Too right, mate. I looked like a bigger fuckup than ever: the heavy blackout drinking, the promiscuity, the mad butter eating. But my life had become a thing of determination, and so it came to pass that I finally escaped the terrible surrender of will that marked my adolescence. I was no longer ruled by boys but by myself.
That night as I fell asleep I thought about Victoria. “Thought” is a strong word. What I did was, I felt. It was rare for a friend to make me feel. And what I felt was that I wanted her friendship. A strong wanting. The kind of wanting I usually reserved for sex and love. Now it was coming, bam, in the middle of the night and with that forcefulness I knew all too well, but it was about a new thing, about this friend. I wanted to change my life, to be worthy of her. Also, I wanted to be a Hegelian because that was the smartest thing I could think of. That would be the new me: Hegelian and friend of Vic. That was all I wanted. But how to go about it? The Hegel part was easy; just read some Hegel. Okay, not that easy. The Vic part I was going to have to work at.
I stopped speaking to Dave altogether. Sometimes I think that moment she said “Why don’t you sit next to your own boyfriend” was the most important moment in my entire life; not just because it led to the most important friendship I will ever have but because she explained so succinctly how to be a friend. How to stop living for boys.
I mounted a charm offensive and eventually wore her down—several months later we went on our first friend date. She picked me up in her Impala and drove me to see Thelma and Louise at the Guild 45th in Wallingford. I thought Brad Pitt was kinda hot; she wasn’t so sure. At the time, we didn’t see our destiny in those two ladies—who seemed old to us—driving off into the sunset together.
<3
We were walking down the bare brown slope of Baldwin Hill, a hill where we walked pretty often but whose name we could never remember, so we insisted upon calling it Bernal Heights (the name of another bare brown hill, this one in San Francisco), which made us laugh at our own dottiness. The hill overlooked the gray gutter of the Los Angeles River. I had been trying to write about being young and finding it painfully difficult. I was tormented by the question of identity in a way I never had been before. It confused me, the way reading coming-of-age memoirs often confused me. A problem of narration. Who was telling the story of young Claire? Asking this question made me feel like I was floating in space. I thought about Geoff Dyer’s writing, and the way he often situates himself in the present day before he engages in nostalgia or memory.
“It’s like he’s in a room, writing, and he tells you about the room, and once that’s established, then you go with him wherever he takes you into the past, and you’re willing to go there with him because you know where he’s writing from. It all makes sense because of that.”
The party was in a dozy subdivision. I went to be nice. The hostess was a woman I liked; we were hovering on the doorstep between acquaintanceship and friendship. The party was typical of my safe island: a lot of voluble, smart, still-beautiful women chatting and cackling away; a few softer-spoken bearded men interspersed. I sat quiet—unusual for me—and listened to someone talk about her divorce; there had been a crop of them that year, like rhubarb. My friend Melinda came in, looking glamorous, the way a fresh divorce takes some women. She looked thinner and somehow more big-boobed. She had that crazed gleam in her eye I had come to recognize. Maybe I had it too. She strode up to me and kissed me on the mouth. “Woman!” she said. “You look HOT.” And she kissed me on the mouth again. Avec tongue. She slipped me the sashimi.
cute
The beignet sat leaden in my stomach. I thought, perhaps not entirely illogically, of dinner parties I would not be invited to as a single woman. The expense of a setting up a second household. Changing the batteries in the smoke alarm. The empty bed. All that old business. At the same time, I felt lighter. When I was in Indonesia many years ago a parrot landed on my head. Everyone oohed and aahed and told me how lucky I was, but all I could feel was its weight, surprisingly heavy. Bruce’s words felt like the moment the parrot took off from my head.
“That guy has been writing you. It sort of hurts my feelings.” He paused, figuring out what to say. “People like you, you know, Claire,” he said. “They love you.”
“I know,” I said. Even though I didn’t really believe him.
“It’s okay to have secrets,” he said. “Just be careful.”
I cried a little, in a pro forma sort of way, wondering as the tears leaked out: Did he have secrets? We had been gone from each other so much, traveling alone. I knew it was dangerous, but I also intuited it was the only way for us to be married right now. We were each giving the other a long lead. I was so mired in my own despair it was hard for me to see that Bruce was undergoing something or other as well. We were sort of trundling along, in our separate orbs, next to each other. I didn’t know what to do about it, except hope we were headed in the same general direction. I often had an obscure feeling that I wanted to figure out a different way to be married; it had never before occurred to me that Bruce and I were in the midst of inventing it.