by
Miranda July
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I sat in the car while he filled the tank and a young man cleaned my windshield, which was unnecessary but I guessed part of the service. The guy with the squeegee had a Huckleberry Finn/Gilbert Blythe look that I used to flip out over as a teenager but with more closely cropped hair and a downy little mustache that kind of ruined the effect. He was sliding the rubber edge across the glass with long, sure, steady strokes. It was hypnotic, like being bathed. I fell into a sort of lazy trance and for this reason I was slow to realize we had made eye contact. How embarrassing. But to look away would make it seem as if I cared what this person thought—he should look away. He didn’t, so we remained locked together like this as he made his way down the window. In moments he seemed to be smiling faintly at our predicament and at other times he grew deeply serious, as if this thing between us was no joke. And I could feel my own face mirroring his, sunny and then somber, grave. I felt a little disoriented. What had I gotten myself into? Would this never end? And at the same time I had a growing anxiety about the end. I feared it would be too abrupt or that I would somehow be unprepared. It took a long time for me to notice the earbuds in his ears. He was listening to something, that’s why the serious then smiling face. Probably a podcast. Could he even really see me through the glass? No, the way the light hit it made that impossible; I was just a dark shape. No matter. I’d already forgotten him by the time I pulled back onto the freeway.
I drove to Fontana’s listening to Portishead at a very loud volume. This had been my main album in the midnineties when my ex-girlfriend and ex–best friend were living together in the apartment next door to me and loudly consummating their new love. The lovemaking involved some kind of hitting followed by a hoarse uh. It was a kind of arousal that I hadn’t experienced—I’d never been hit, I’d never gone uh. When they had sex like this I’d put on my Walkman and listen to Portishead and try to imagine a time when this would all just be a funny story. Now was that time. My young agony was the funny part; it made me smile as I drove. Twenty years ago I’d been in my twenties; twenty years from now I’d be in my sixties. I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot. I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to. I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season.
Fontana’s wasn’t exactly what I would call healthy. I ordered the Shrimp Diablo. The young waitress was barely civil, but I treated her warmly nonetheless; I always go out of my way to not be like my mom in these situations. She often felt she was being mocked—so she mocked back. She’d get nervous and mock a waitress, a cab driver, a neighbor. Sometimes they didn’t notice, but often they did and a fight would break out, ending with her in tears. Now I’m more detached, but when she mocked me as a teenager I had to restrain myself from scratching her face or biting her. All in all, though, my mom was the cozier parent, no contest. I loved it when we cuddled; the warmth and smell of her body in a baby blue nylon nightie. Her big, soft breasts falling this way and that. Once, at around fifteen, I did briefly try to strangle her during one of those mocking episodes. That’s when I discovered there’s no satisfaction in violence; it actually works in reverse, making you the bad one.
He wasn’t as young as he looked, but he was younger than he thought he was. Thirty-one is young, I said. He winced like I was just being polite. He felt like a fuckup, like he should have done more by now. He’d wasted time on stupid shit. He was working overtime these days; he needed to save up twenty thousand dollars, a “nest egg,” and that would take years and years. I nodded, getting it. There was nothing on my person that revealed I’d just been paid twenty thousand dollars for one sentence about hand jobs.
[...] I lived there for six years. It’s where I became myself—or at least a self that would last me a very long time. I never permitted any lovers to move in. I needed to eat messily while reading, to sometimes not get dressed all day. To work in bed. To wake up in the middle of the night with the edge of something brand-new and reel it in until dawn, then take a mentholated bath like a champ after a big fight. Then sleep and sleep and sleep, unmolested [...]
Harris never really wants to hear more than the minimum. Which is okay. There would be a time, after this time of formality, when we would gush to each other. And obviously right now I would only be adding more “lies.” Lies in quotes because people always use the word so righteously, as if the truth is a naturally occurring diamond. But fine, call it lying. Each person does the amount of lying that is right for them. You have to know yourself and fulfill the amount of untruth that your constitution requires. I knew many women (like my own dear Jordi) who simply couldn’t handle the feeling lying gave them—it wasn’t their bag.
I had never really decorated, not with actual money. Harris already owned our house before I met him so I just moved in, which took all of twenty minutes. His dishes and furniture and bedding were of a higher caliber than mine so I gave my few things to Goodwill, installed my books and clothes, and hung my purple toiletries bag from a hook in the bathroom. When friends came over I would immediately take them aside and explain that almost nothing in this house was mine, this wasn’t even my style. It was actually more sophisticated than my style; there was an enormous square, black wooden table with eight matching chairs around it. Where would you even buy such a thing? In time I just let people believe it was all mine (“ours,” whatever). And some of it is: our spoons, for example. We kept losing spoons until finally there were only three in rotation. I can solve this, I thought. I can single-handedly make this problem go away. And I did. Top-of-the-line spoons, too—ten of them. Sometimes when we are in the middle of an especially bad argument I think: I’ll just take my spoons and leave.
But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues—their many and sharp tongues—and give this new girl a chance.
“Sorry.” We walked in silence, watching overly large crows land on a fence. “I guess any calling, no matter what it is, is a kind of unresolvable ache,” I said, giving in to knowing more than him. “It’s a problem that you can’t fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will commit your whole life to trying. Every second that you have is somehow for it.” You could also apparently lose your calling and wind up wandering around with a guy who worked at Hertz.
But to be clear, I had not, at any age, desired a specific male body in the way I did now. While all my boyfriends and crushes had been reasonably good-looking, my attraction hovered up near their face, where they kept their talent and power. Lusting for the whole length of a person, head to toe, was what body-rooted fuckers did, Jordi, and men. Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. I suddenly understood all of classical art. The endless carved nudes, Venus in her shell, David. And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding why, thinking of sexy as one of many styles, not realizing it was the only style. You should always be emerging from a shell if possible. Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth. I lay in the center of the bed, unblinking.