Split (31 page)

"These characters represent all the possible states of human existence," Laurie said, running her pink nail down one column.

"Really?" I couldn't quite stomach her solemn tone, and it must have shown in my face.

Laurie gave me a level stare. "Things are going to get better for you," she said.

Despite my flippancy, I took the shrine home and mounted it on the back of the bookcase that walled off my bed. I didn't believe it was the strongbox of my soul, but I had a tiny superstitious fear of throwing it out.

When I told Laurie that I'd hung the shrine in my room, she asked if she could meet my father: "I'd like explain to him a little about this stuff, so he won't think you're associating with a nut."

"I don't think he cares one way or another," I told her, but Laurie insisted it was for the best. She came by on a Sunday evening and settled herself on the couch while I went to get my father from his study. He was at his desk, a welter of books and papers around him.

I rapped on the door frame. "Dad? There's someone here who'd like to meet you. The woman I work with."

He paused in his train of thought. "Sure, honey. I'll be right out."

Laurie stood up when he came into the room.

"Dad, this is Laurie. We work together at Easy Rents."

She offered her hand.

"Nice to meet you," my father said, looking vaguely confused by the formal mood.

Laurie sat down. She had both hands in her lap, and she was fidgeting. I'd never seen her like this. "I wanted to talk to you because Lisa has been getting interested in this group I'm involved with—I'm sure you probably saw the shrine she brought home—and I just wanted to let you know a little about it."

My father smiled. "Well, you're welcome to tell me about it," he said, "but whatever Lisa wants to do is okay with me." He looked amused by Laurie's earnest appeal to his authority.

"I don't know if you're familiar with Buddhism," Laurie ventured. She had rehearsed her spiel and wouldn't be stopped. When she was finished, she smiled expectantly, ready to answer questions.

"Well, like I said, I have complete faith in Lisa's judgment," my father said.

"Because a lot of families feel nervous—you know, with the chanting."

"It's not a problem with this family." He and I exchanged a small smile. "We've seen it all."

 

All that week the sun was scorching. The lawns looked like cut paper, heat shimmered up from the avenues, and I had to put a towel over the black vinyl seat of my car. I felt slightly sick—from the weather or the flu, I couldn't tell. One night, when the midday heat didn't lift, I slept on the couch in the living room, where a faint breeze came in through the western windows. After lying awake for hours, chanting softly under my breath, I slipped into a dream with an odd awareness of the change, as you might slip sideways though the curtain of a waterfall, surprised to find you can breathe on the other side. I was asleep, but I knew I was dreaming, and the knowledge filled me with a sudden exultancy: if this was a dream, I could do anything. Quickly, eager to do something impossible, I vaulted up toward the living-room ceiling. Once there, I felt a little sheepish, but it was pleasant to be weightless, and so I dipped out of an open window, out over the chain of headlights pulling down Olympic Boulevard, and floated west toward the sea. From my vantage point in the air, I could make out each street corner, exactly as it looked when I drove past it in daylight: there was that scrap of pink chiffon snagged in the fence at La Cienega and Wilshire; over there the store on Pico where checks could be cashed with a purchase of meat. I was floating above the Los Angeles basin, a great bowl of steel and light, and yet at that same moment I knew I was asleep in sweat-dampened pajamas, on the second floor of our tile-roofed apartment, under the boat-shaped leaves of a rubber tree. That doubleness was like another dimension; the world widened out on all sides. I skimmed out toward Pacific Palisades, executing rolls and barrel turns, and all the while I could hear the faucet drip in the kitchen at home, the refrigerator click on and whir. Up ahead was the ocean, and I moved out over it, unafraid. When I reached Catalina Island, I circled the lighted dome of the casino, flew over bison sleeping upright on the hills. Coming back, skimming low over the waves, I saw that the water wasn't dark, as it looked from the shore. It was illuminated by the city lights, miles of extra wattage spilling over the sea, a broad gold band that broke to pieces on the chop.

 

I woke the next morning to an unmistakable cramping. In an odd way, I was grateful for the pain, for the corrective it seemed to apply. I had been granted a reprieve—I wouldn't have to go back to the clinic, wouldn't have to pay the consequences of my bad judgment—but I felt that I should suffer for my carelessness. I went into the kitchen to make tea, and my father came in.

"Are you all right?" he asked. "You look pale."

"I'm fine," I told him, lightheaded to say the words and believe them. "Everything's fine."

I drove to the showroom and sat down across from Laurie in the cushioned customers' chair. I didn't have to say anything. The relief was all over my face. Laurie beamed. "I knew it would work," she said.

I could see she was happy, but the certainty in her face made me stiffen. "That what would work?"

She faltered for a moment. "The chanting."

My friend was convinced those syllables did the trick, the magic syllables and the box and the scroll. I wanted to believe it was my own doing. But even that wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. Nothing could be proved by a sample of one. It might well have been luck. It might have been chance.

"We don't know that for sure, do we?"

"No, of course not," Laurie said, glancing down at her nails. She deferred out of politeness, out of gentleness, but I could see in her tipped-down face that she still believed.

I
WENT BACK
to school in the fall with three thousand dollars in the bank, a feeling of pleasant self-containment, and the vow not to fritter any more of my time away with men. Then, midway through the school year, I fell in love. I didn't know then it would be more than a passing fling.

I got to know Mauricio through an American-history section. I sat up front, monopolizing the classroom discussion and mooning over the T.A., a sharp-featured young graduate student with an infectious passion for his subject. On our first day in class, Mark asked us to write our names, majors, and any other salient facts on a three-by-five card. Then he went around the classroom asking what we'd like to be called, and marking down any unusual nicknames or pronunciations. Somehow, despite his dedication, he got the idea that Mauricio wanted to be called Bruce, and Mau (pronounced like my old familiar, Chairman Mao) never disabused him of the error.

I never took note of Bruce's presence—he sat in the back and rarely spoke—but he took note of mine. He claims he found me insufferable, my endless comments, my transparent crush on the teacher, but that couldn't have been the whole story; he can still remember certain outfits I wore to class.

We were in his dorm room when this slipped out. I had been led there by Wendy, who knew Mau from the campus coffee shop. It was late on a Friday night, and I was bored. Mau didn't make much of an impression. He was listening to Jethro Tull, and some high school friend of his was there, sniffing amyl nitrate from a tiny amber jar, then flopping backward on the bed. He kept offering it to Mau, who kept declining, which seemed prudent.

Then Mau told me that we shared a class.

"Really? I don't remember seeing you." This was odd. There were only thirty students in the section.

As proof, he slipped into an imitation of our T.A. at the blackboard. "So, what are the basic tenets of federalism? Class? Anyone do the reading? Lisa?"

"It's my fault I do the reading?"

"No, of course not," Mau said. "Just as long as you admit you're motivated by lust."

I fessed up. "All right, so I have a crush on him, a Jewish guy with a mustache and nice muscles. And he gives those inspired lectures on the Bill of Rights."

Mau, I soon learned, was Jewish, too. A Jew from Mexico, no less, with freckles and blue eyes. He had left Mexico City at twelve and spent his adolescence in Orange County, trying to transform himself into a surf rat.

I sensed a fellow misfit. "That must have been a bizarre transition."

"Yeah. I never wanted to invite anyone over for dinner. I thought our house was too ethnic. My mom served chilies with everything."

Later, I would discover that we shared other connections—divorced parents, step- and half siblings to spare—and nearly shared a birthday. It seems Mau and I were born one day apart, in 1966, our mothers—one in Newark, one in Mexico City—overlapping in labor for a brief time.

 

Mau owned a truck, and for our first date we drove east, under a lid of singed air, to a library and botanical preserve in Pasadena. We had known each other two weeks, and this was our first official date: to go look at exotic plants.

We paid our entrance fee and walked a little through the landscape of succulents and cacti. Mau was absorbed in the plants, in studying them. He had a lack of self-regard and a wonderment at outward things that reminded me of my mother.

"I can never remember the difference between euphorbs and cacti," he said, squatting down in front of one of the beds. He often began his sentences with a qualification, a doubt. "In one, the spines are considered leaves—hardened leaves coming off the trunk—and in the other, the spines are really modified stems and the leaves are so tiny you can't see them."

We moved from the desert to the flowers and manicured herbs of an English garden and sat on a bench. It was scorching there against the Pasadena hills. My mouth felt mothy and dry, and I asked Mau if he minded waiting for a few minutes in the shade. We had been walking very slowly, almost drifting along the path, but even this began to feel like too much progress. He put his hand on my knee—a steadying gesture—and for a moment I couldn't remember who he was. Friend? Brother? It was akin to that moment of waking in a strange room when you turn and turn, trying to latch on to some clue to your whereabouts, so that you can couple up to the world again and go on. Whoever he was, he had good manners. His eyebrows came down a little, and he cocked his head to the side: "I think I see a water fountain up ahead. Why don't we walk a little?"

What I liked about Mau, early on, was his rationality and calm. And that he was humble and doubted himself. Much of this would cause us trouble later. One day I would throw a shoe at him to try to raise his ire, and at times his shyness became a trial. At parties, he'd often go missing without a word, and one night I found him in a closet, sipping a beer on a pile of dirty clothes, happier there than in company. But just then he seemed to be my perfect complement. Gentle, with an oddball humor, attentive and self-contained.

We strolled on into Japan: through groves of bamboo and over orderly rivers. Inside a high wall we found a rock garden, a bed of blue-gray stones combed into undulating waves, which a plaque told us was meant to inspire tranquillity. A handful of visitors milled about, staring at the rocks with expectant expressions, then grew restless and passed out through a door on the far wall. Mau squatted down beside the rock waves and, after studying them for a moment, reached his hand over the barrier.

"Can't you read? The sign says no touching!" The voice was high-pitched, but the body that delivered it, which was advancing upon us, was enormous—a pear-shaped man in a security uniform.

Mau stood up, apologetic but calm. The rocks seemed to have worked their effect on him. "There was a break in the pattern," he said. "I was going to smooth it out."

I went directly into my unctuous mode, my ass-kissing authority mode, which I hated in myself and was helpless to resist. "Sorry about that," I said, trying to arrange my face like that of a reasonable person. "He didn't mean to disturb."

I walked with the guard toward the exit to show him we meant no further harm, and Mau trailed behind, looking backward at the rocks as if at some unfinished business.

"This must be a tough job," I said to the guard, going into overkill. Then it struck me: it probably was tough. The boredom, the low pay, the daily enforcement of rules that you didn't devise and that people chafed at and blamed you for. This kind of thought came to me from my father. He often asked people about their jobs: supermarket checkers, car-wash boys. And the stories they told him were always slightly unexpected, a glimpse of work from the inside. At the end of the day, if the register didn't balance, you were docked for the difference, or, look at this, the wheel glaze made your hands break out in a rash.

"Well, it's the best work I can get," the security guard said. "I've got some abnormalities." He made a sweeping motion over his gut, and I thought I caught a glimpse of webbing between his fingers. In my heat-struck state, the guard was beginning to look like a cartoon—that enormous waist and tiny head—with a cartoon's putty-colored flesh. Mau pulled alongside us at the mention of abnormalities and began examining the man with interest.

"My mother, she had three arms," the guard told us, glancing back toward the rock garden to see if anyone was within earshot. "I was a rough sort, and she'd wash the dishes with two hands and slap me with the extra."

We stood before him, rapt.

"She didn't even have to turn around," the guard went on, warming to his subject. "It came off her back, sort of." He gestured toward his shoulder blades.

I tried to think of something to say. "Well, we're sorry if we caused any trouble."

At the reference to the rocks, the guard seemed to remember his duties. His chest swelled and his head reared back: "The sign was right there, plain as day: don't touch the rocks. But he had to stick his paw in." He kept a wary eye on Mau as we walked away.

Later, we left the gardens, and Mau bought a pineapple at the supermarket—it seemed just the thing—and sliced it on his tailgate with a bowie knife. I felt as if I had known him for ages. Years later, it was the guard we would remember when we recalled that day, his webby hands, his haunches tapering to tiny feet. A vast man, deerlike and sad, stationed at the doorway to the Garden of Tranquillity.