“What about that lady you’re with?”
“You mean Abby?”
“If Abby’s your beautiful black girlfriend, yeah. I see her on Telegraph Avenue, you know.”
“You do?”
“Just going into bookstores, whatever. She doesn’t know me.”
“She’s in a hurry,” I said, picturing Abby moving on that crowded street, past the teen beggars in their hundred-dollar leathers-if I ran it like a video clip in my mind’s eye, the soundtrack might be Central Line’s “Walking into Sunshine” or some other not remotely depressing disco cut. Meanwhile in Emeryville it was darkest before dawn, and Van Morrison and the sacred fumes of sex and marijuana beckoned me into the slipstream.
“She looks kind of angry to me,” said Katha, startling and delighting me. “But it’s none of my business.”
“It’s okay,” I said, marveling that she’d said it. “Maybe she is. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what a person is like, when you’re up close.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Like your song.” I was shameless. “Sometimes you understand all at once, in a flash.” I was so grateful to Katha for calling Abby angry. I wanted to reward her, stroke her, call blessings of orgasms down upon her for pardoning my bungled life with that passing observation.
Years ago, I’d read a novel, a thriller in which glamorous people destroyed themselves by sexual intrigue. One character was another’s shoals, that was what I’d remembered about the book-and the character who’d wrecked the other had explained how she was infinitely dangerous because she was damaged. This character’s damage made her an involuntary criminal, the book seemed to say. Her damage-orphanhood, abuse, I couldn’t remember what it was-made her unfit to mix with those who’d been luckier, who’d squeaked through life innocent of such knowledge. The story was enthralling bunk, impossible not to finish even as I’d loathed it for its implicit assertion that the undamaged ought to bolt their doors against the damaged ones, who would hurt them if they could, who couldn’t help wishing to. When I read the book, I’d never met anyone undamaged. I still think I never have.
Suddenly Katha Purly seemed to me a refutation of that book, refutation I hadn’t known I’d needed until this instant. I’d raged against the silly, trashy novel because of the nerve it twinged-my shame at my own hurt, my fear that it made me an untouchable, poisonous to others. Katha made nonsense of that. I’d thought I was following a dangerous angel to her lair, that I’d been drawn by some offer of destruction. But Katha was only an ordinary angel. Her sister’s room was evidence, and so was M-Dog, and so was Peter. But the best evidence was my own presence here. She’d taken me in when I’d needed her to.
Katha was only as good as her damage. It formed the substance of what she knew. What made me dangerous, or at least awful, wasn’t my damage, but the way I’d denied it. What I’d left undone. Katha sheltered her sister and M-Dog, Mingus surrendered a kidney, and Abraham and Francesca brought Barrett Rude Junior soup and chicken. In my visionary state I could see the Tupperware containers, could see a skeletal Barry as he smeared hot mustard on a fridge-gummed thigh or drumstick. Meanwhile, Abby and I conducted a witty war to prove which of us was truly depressed. Shunning my damage I’d starved my life, it seemed now. I was lost in feints and skirmishes three thousand miles from the homefront. Katha had a bed made, waiting for her sister in Walla Walla -I had The Falsetto Box and Your So-Called Friends.
When, ten months before, I’d delivered my Subtle Distinctions box-set liner note to Rhodes Blemner of Remnant, he’d let two weeks pass without calling to confirm he’d received it. Finally I cracked, and called him myself.
“You got it?”
“Sure, I got it.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. We’ll run the note in the box, I sent it to the art department. It’s scheduled.”
“How’d you like it?”
“It’s not your best work, Dylan.” Rhodes had perfected a lethal hippie frankness, after the manner of his heroes, from Bill Graham to R. Crumb. “I was disappointed, given how you pushed so hard for the reissue. It wasn’t what I expected.”
“I think it’s exactly my best work.”
“Well, it conveys the impression you think that. It’s full of big thoughts, if that’s what you mean. But I personally think it’s also full of shit. Beginning with the quotes up front, all that Brian Eno stuff, which I cut.”
“Fuck you, Rhodes. Send it back to me.”
“We’ll run it. What do I know? You’ll win a Grammy, that’s my prediction. For best hot air.”
I defended. “I had to create a context-”
“It’s a false context. The piece reads as if you sat in a small room listening to nothing but Distinctions records for a year and then postulated the history of black music. It reads like you were avoiding something. Maybe you were avoiding your research. You quote Cashbox, for crying out loud. That’s like something one of these British writers would do-write a note on living musicians and quote an interview somebody gave to Cashbox in 1974.”
Now, here on Katha’s futon, layering pot over coke at the outer reaches of a binge which felt stolen from time, my hand beginning to explore the waitress’s knee in automatic lust, Rhodes Blemner’s cavil to my liner note seemed completely of a piece with every other revelation. My failure to provide Jared Orthman an end to the Prisonaires’ story held the same message for me as M-Dog’s rhymes, as Katha’s sister’s empty room, as my father’s green triangle-I was halted in a motion half-completed. My facts were no good. I’d been scooped by Zelmo Swift’s interns, out-researched by Francesca’s soup. The man himself is still alive, I’d written, but I hadn’t believed it, had to be told again and again by the Jareds and Rhodeses and Zelmos. The man himself, and his son too, even if they only had one pair of kidneys between them.
Katha and I talked and kissed while my thoughts raced, and until they didn’t. My waitress and I had months of teasing in the bank, and we drew on them now. On the sticky tapestry-covered futon, in the streetlamp light which streaked the wall above our heads, with Van Morrison moaning Celtic inspiration, our addled bodies pushed and gnawed at one another. Hot blunt hands got stuck under blue-jean waistbands until we sighed and tugged apart the snaps. Katha’s flesh was smooth and sheeny, so rubbery I wondered if it was somehow an effect of drug-dust between my fingers and her skin. She was plush and uncreased, like a marzipan animal. An elegant margin of hairs rode the curve from her navel into her pubic tangle.
I paused where I always do, melancholy at the threshold, a make-out man. Thinking, We could stop here. This could be fine, this could be enough. I’m often more certain I want to be held than engulfed.
“I’ve got something,” whispered Katha. “I’ll be right back.”
“Okay,” I said.
My blondes had always been those Leslie Cunninghams, striding the world undamaged, or seeming so, impassive goddesses who regarded me dubiously. Or Heather Windle, or the Solver girls, forever circling away on bikes and skates, forever packing and moving from the neighborhood of me. Now I had my blonde in Katha Purly. At last one had given herself to me, completely and without bargaining, but she was different, realer, rich with damage. This was an ordinary, rapid-fading epiphany, the last of my dozens: my young waitress wasn’t a fantasy because nobody was. People were actual, every last one of them. Likely even the Solver girls, wherever they were.
I had my blonde now, yes, but I couldn’t stay hard inside her. It was the drugs-I couldn’t feel myself inside her from within the condom she’d unrolled. But Katha Purly was unbearably generous with me. In the pale daylight now infecting the room, long-shadowing the crumbs in the stale corners and the silent boom box, the streets below noising to dawn life, the house around us still and full of sleeping bodies like an interstellar ship, Katha touched herself, gorgeously gave herself the orgasm I’d wanted to provide, made her own face and throat flush red, temples pink beneath pale eyebrows, while exhorting me to give tribute onto her superb pooled chest, championing me with her voice, cooing me forward. I managed to do it, just.