Moonface (5 page)

“Naughty!” I said. “I love it. And we could have models come out while we sing, dressed up like popsicles.”

“You're funny, Moonface,” he said, lifting his glass to his smiling lips.

The drunk downstairs was saying something about bombs. “
Bombs!
” he yelled.

That week, the heat burned off the fog that normally hovers over the city. You could see Sausalito clearly from Crissy Field; you could walk on the Golden Gate and see clear down to the water. From Twin Peaks, you could take in the entire city, white and clean, a landscape with the houses staggering on top of each other, a pincushion full of pins. But the sky still seemed green. It seemed to even tint the bay.

Charlie and I spent nights in his hotel. We lay close and tight, and in the morning, Charlie put on a suit and tie and walked to the convention center. I went to work and thought about Charlie all day. On the bus, I was having that familiar feeling again—as I stood and hung onto a rail, I couldn't place my feet. They seemed to move without me, jumping off my legs every time the bus skipped or hopped.

We walked all around the city. After Charlie talked on and on about how wonderful the city was, how boring Baltimore could be, I got the nerve to say, “You should just move here. There are tons of jobs,” as nonchalantly as I could, looking into a store window as I said it.

“Hmm,” he said.

We walked to North Beach and had dinner in a romantic restaurant with a purple neon sign in the window. He ate spinach ravioli and I had tiny meatballs covered in sauce. And we talked until the burgundy puddles at the bottom of our wine glasses drained and faded.

The next morning, in his hotel room, he packed up his things, rolling up his neckties and squeezing them into the side pockets of his backpack. I was about to leave for work, going in with the same clothes I had worn the day before, and planning not to be apologetic about it. I sat on the bed pouting. I wasn't going to be apologetic about that, either.

“You shouldn't leave,” I said.

“I don't want to leave. I want to see you again,” he said, sitting on the bed now, close to me. “I want to see you all the time. I would like to kiss you in the morning and in the night,” he said. And I knew something was happening now, something. And I knew that as we stood at the door to his room, and he offered to walk me all the way to the lobby, but I told him, no, no, right here. He gave me a long, slow kiss, his hands on my hips, squeezing tightly, all ten fingers, as we stood in the doorjamb, my feet pigeon-toed and between his. I squeezed him, too, hanging on tight, and I swear I felt the earth moving.

Chapter Five
A Splendid Combination of Physical and Spiritual Renewal Set in the Low And High Lands Of Iowa

C
harlie and I once drove a rented blue and orange moving truck halfway across the country. It was a rattling tin can of a thing that threatened to snap in half at every pothole. The greasy-haired man at the truck rental office in Pittsburgh had handed us an awkwardly oversized atlas and said, “Iowa, eh? I don't even know where that is.”

“Me neither,” I'd said.

As we rode along on the sticky vinyl seats, I opened up the atlas to see the United States sprawled across the centerfold. And there was Iowa, smack dab in the crease of the page. A lavender rectangle underneath a loosely hanging staple. It connected six other states with its dotted border.

“Iowa. The place where things come together and fall apart,” I said as I ripped the staple out.

“See, now that's beautiful. You should be writing this stuff down,” Charlie said with a finger in the air and his eyes steadfast on the road.

But I wasn't trying to be poetic. I was trying to figure out how we got here. Ever since Charlie moved with me to San Francisco, we'd been hopping around from one city to another taking any small jobs we could find. We ended up in Pittsburgh in an attic apartment of a whitewashed brick house. I was doing temp work, shuffling around papers and answering phones at the headquarters of a bank. Charlie worked at an after-school program, helping at-risk kids with their homework and teaching them how to shoot penalty kicks. He wasn't exactly sure what they were at risk of, because for him they were enthusiastic and polite and laughed at every single one of his knock-knock jokes. He didn't mind the work, even though the government technically classified it as “volunteering” and his salary was a few measly paychecks and monthly food stamps. We used my paycheck to stock the house with milk, bread, pasta, and paper towels, and we used the food stamps to buy prosciutto di Parma and imported olive oil from the international markets downtown, because, as Charlie said, even if we were poor, we didn't have to lose our sense of taste. I agreed, but as I stood in line in the market holding a block of pecorino romano cheese behind a mother who was holding her two-year-old and a nine-can pack of tuna, also paying with food stamps, I thought, “We've got to get ourselves some real jobs.”

“We're like vagabonds,” Charlie'd said. “We just need to find our niche.” He started thinking up ideas, and every once in a while he'd spit one out. Like once, when we were watching a PBS documentary on Peru. We spent an hour looking at those chiseled mountains and green landscapes before Charlie said, “We should be alpaca farmers!”

“It can't be that easy,” I said. “PBS is pulling the wool over your eyes!”

Another time in a surf shop in Santa Cruz, he stuffed himself into a full-body wetsuit, came out of the fitting room, and announced: “We're moving to the Bahamas! We'll have a synchronized swimming routine with the dolphins!”

I put a hand on my hip and said, “Are you trying to make me laugh on porpoise?”

Another time, he stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned to me and said, “I know, I know—a dinner theater slash bowling alley.”

“Spare me,” I said.

The ideas kept coming, but the niche never materialized. Then one day, sick of waiting, I stood up from the couch and said to Charlie, “I've got to find myself some meaning!”

“Religion?” he asked, looking a little worried.

“No,” I said. “School.” I bet Charlie was thinking clown school or acrobat school, but I was thinking more like writing school. “Stories, you know, of the bookish nature,” I told him.

“So, you want to be a book writer?” He paused for a second, looked down at the coffee table, and then he said, “Well, at least you're using your imagination.” It wasn't too much of a surprise. We were both writing majors in college. I wrote long, obsessive profiles about the boys I had crushes on; Charlie's stories always baffled readers with the surreal. An odyssey about the boy who thought he was the embodiment of time. “I was smoking a lot of pot back then,” he once confessed.

In Pittsburgh, I had been writing essays about my childhood or about my and Charlie's adventures around the country. I compiled a few of the ones I liked, slid them into brown craft-paper envelopes, kissed the seals, and sent them off to graduate schools. At the end of spring, after all my graduate applications came back, I told Charlie we were moving to Iowa, and the hairs of his curly eyebrows straightened out and stood up in full attention.

It just figured that Charlie would be excited for Iowa. It was like an empty canvas. It was unknown, unexplored territory, and with no obligations tying him to there, maybe he thought he could find his calling. But, as we finalized the moving details and bought new furniture, the more apprehensive I became. It took me hours just to decide on a couch. I was like a pendulum in the showroom, moving back and forth between the hulking upholstered beige beast and a spindly off-white loveseat that was sleek and easy to disassemble and pack.

“This one is crap,” Charlie had said, kicking the loveseat's skinny wooden legs. “Let's just get the sofa.”

“Ugh,” I'd said. “But this one's so ugly. And it's heavy. And it's beige.” I tried with both arms to lift it on one side, but it would not budge.

“This one will last us for a while,” Charlie said.

“But what if we're sick of it in a year? What if we can no longer stand the beige?”

“Moony,” he said, sitting back on the beige cushion and putting his legs up on a glass coffee table. “It's not like this is the last couch we'll ever buy.”

“Yes, Charlie, but it's the first couch we'll ever buy. This isn't a futon we're finding on the street or a hand-me-down from my brother. This is ours; shouldn't we love it?”

“You're reading way too much into this,” he said, as he called the salesperson over. He didn't balk until we went to pay for the sofa, doing a double take at the total before saying, “This is the most expensive thing I've ever bought in my life.”

It wasn't just what we were bringing to Iowa that worried me; it was also the place itself. Even though Charlie and I had seen almost all the states as we traveled back and forth across the country, I only remember seeing Iowa in glimpses. Flat lines of green that halved the windows. Nothing stopped here, not even the wind, which carried everything past these roads and swiftly through the plains and didn't stop until it happened upon a mountain. After six years together, we chose this place to stop and put down our heavy furniture. What if Iowa could not entertain us? What if we got bored with it? With each other? I thought of Iowa as a stop on I-80 to get a quick bite before hopping back on the road, not as a place to plop down and stay a while.

As we drove along in the shaky truck, the east coast far behind in our rearview, I looked out the window and shook my head. But Charlie kept saying, “You're not looking closely enough. There are beautiful things here.” He pointed out places on the side of the road where creeks cut into the grass to shape a valley and where a hill rose out of nowhere. “Like the hips of a woman resting on her side,” he said, a smiled slathered across his face.

“You should be writing this stuff down,” I told him.

We moved into the bottom floor of a split-level duplex. It was a cozy little joint with the windows posed high on the walls inside, but from the front of the house, they sat low and level with the ground. The hedges on the front lawn shaded the living room like natural curtains. Charlie and I hung our silkscreen posters of San Francisco up on the wall and placed plants in the corners of every room. While we felt snug there, the topographical positioning of our home disturbed my mother when she visited that summer.

“In the basement?” she said, her jaw dropping wide as if she were catching flies. She came in through a narrow entrance in the mudroom and walked beneath the low ceiling in the hall. I thought she'd like the compactness of the apartment, seeing as how she took up very little vertical space herself. “Why the basement?”

“It doesn't feel like the basement. Look how much light comes in. The walls are clean. No water damage.” I pointed to the snow-white ceiling, the corner where we had stacked books alphabetically on a low shelf.

“But the basement?” she said, no less disgusted. She pointed with her chin to the hedges. “Close those windows. Aren't you breathing in the dirt? Come"—she reached for my arm and slung her purse over her shoulder—"we'll find you a new apartment.”

But I liked the way the sunlight came in through the bushes outside. The street we lived on was so quiet that we could hear the thin tires of a passing bicycle rolling over the pavement. The town was bright during the summer and fall, and the sidewalks were sprinkled with wispy trees with bicycles leaning on them. Undergrads lived loudly in small farm homes or they crapped up bigger, nicer houses by putting frayed, busted-out Goodwill re-cliners on handcrafted, hundred-year-old wraparound porches. These details were offset by more charming parts of the community: the family-run hardware stores, the food co-op, the bookstore. Charlie and I took long walks along the perimeter of town, where the grass was high and the horizon was a sharp line at the end of a cornfield. And sooner or later, I began to see those little dips and bluffs in the earth, where the land seemed to be moving.

School was not the shocking plunge into cold water that I thought it would be, either. It was intimate midday discussions about writing and literature around wooden conference tables. It was potluck dinners at friends” houses and evening lectures at the local bookstore. The most worrisome part of my first year was the teaching, a requirement of my fellowship. I was assigned to teach rhetoric to freshmen, and the minute I was assigned the course, I found myself secretly cracking open my Webster's dictionary and looking up what the word “rhetoric” actually meant.

“You kind of don't have to know what it means,” a woman named Beth said. She stood under a pavilion at the “Welcome New Grad Students” picnic holding a plastic cup filled with lemonade. I had been talking to her for most of the afternoon. “Trust me; you really don't even have to like teaching.”

Beth was a year ahead of me in the program and didn't seem to mind me asking her question after question. She just sat there in her peach loose-fitting tank top, hiking shorts, and the sensible shoes of a librarian. She had dark brown hair and exotic yet indecipherable features; I'd later learn that she was half white and half Korean. I had the feeling she was quiet and shy, even though she greeted almost everyone at the picnic with an obligatory smile. Every once in a while, I caught her rolling her eyes when someone she didn't care for passed by. I could tell she hated teaching.

“So, what am I supposed to do? Should I just pretend like I am an authority on public discourse and debate? Those kids will see right through me,” I told her.

“Listen,” she said. “Your job is to go in there and jump up and down about rhetoric. Yay, rhetoric!” she said, shaking imaginary pom-poms with her fists.

Charlie concurred when I talked to him about it later. “She's probably right. Teaching is probably a lot like show business. You just have to keep them entertained. If you're excited about it, they'll probably get into it, too.”

On the first day of class, dressed in a skirt to make me look older and in heels to make me look taller, I looked out into an audience of twenty freshmen and told them that rhetoric was going to change their lives. “Look at all it has done for me,” I said, smiling and gesturing grandly with my hands. “A finely worded statement of purpose gained me admission into this school, my persuasive verbal skills and body language nabbed me a boyfriend, and with my captivating oratory, I have twenty new friends who are excited about rhetoric.” It sounded silly coming out of my mouth, but no one thought it was funny enough to laugh.

“Please stop,” I heard someone in the back left whisper.

Fall came and went faster than i imagined it would. i had been so busy with schoolwork and weekend dinner parties that I hadn't noticed the weeks flying by or the air getting cooler and grayer.

Charlie was keeping busy, too, starting new jobs and quitting them after he became bored. He worked in a windowless office that drove him crazy, at a Goodwill donation center where both the workers and donors were surprisingly rude, and at a school for delinquent boys where the rules he was asked to enforce seemed too cruel. “At every door, they have to ask, ”May I please pass through the threshold?” I wanted to tell them that in the real world, no one talks like that,” he said.

He finally found a job in the university's mailroom, driving a van and delivering big boxes of mail to different buildings on campus. I think he liked it because he was in perpetual motion all day, seeing the town and getting outside in the fresh air. He also liked his co-workers, who were mostly macho Romanian guys who told him dirty jokes and taught him how to swear in their language.

By January, I was getting used to teaching and being a student again. I signed up to teach early morning classes in the spring semester just to get that part of my day done, hopefully leaving room to concentrate on my writing. I showed the same energy and enthusiasm during these early classes as I did for the afternoon ones in the fall, but this time my freshmen were even less amused. They sat at their hardwood desks and fell asleep in the crooks of their elbows. I hadn't taken into account how they would fare with the dark winter mornings in Iowa. Though I was getting used to it, I realized that my students had trouble waking up, let alone functioning coherently, in the bleakness of the morning.

I hadn't noticed such desolation myself until one day in late January. I stood at the bus stop in front of our apartment at 8:00 in the morning. It seemed like I was the only person awake, and I took advantage of the quiet to review the lecture I was about to give. I stood on the snowy sidewalk reciting my key points when I felt all the muscles in my body tighten. I rolled my neck and took a long breath of cold air through the thick wool of my scarf. I shivered from the weird sensation and tried to shake it off. At first, I blamed it on the weather.