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“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.