“Patience’s not here.”
“She’s sleeping right now.”
“Sorry but she’s not in.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.” Finally.
The list hadn’t changed since I’d lived there and heard these responses to her other suitors. This time it was me who got the cold receiver’s message. One Monday she granted me a visit. It had been a month since we’d seen each other. I waited on the front porch for her and followed her into the familiar kitchen where the cupboards were made from packing crates, and she poured me out half a water glass of vodka and ordered me to drink it to catch up with her. I told her I wasn’t in the mood for drinking but would have a regular drink. She served me insolently.
“I supposed you’d like mix and ice too?”
“Yes, if you have it; at least, ice.”
I followed her into the living room where we lay down on floor cushions and tried to catch up on our lives.
“I am in great pain. You must know that because you have the same pain in your confusion over Tove,” she told me. I couldn’t relate to what she was saying, for when I wasn’t with Tove I wasn’t thinking about her and wasn’t having any pain. My pain lately had been from not having a good and honest and satisfying relationship with any of my womanfriends. But she didn’t believe me.
Later I followed her into her bedroom and we lay down on her foam mattress. She covered her eyes with her forearm as if the world were too much. I wanted to comfort her. She told me to go, that she had no room for me tonight. That she could think of nothing else but her problems, and that it wouldn’t help to talk about them with me. She led me to the front door nearly two hours after I’d arrived. Her eyes were blurred and she had achieved the blank distance she’d sought with alcohol. I was thankful I hadn’t drunk enough to affect my demeanor and I felt capable and competent in leaving this one to her private solace, may she find it. Still before I left she made me promise to phone her.
About a week later I did. We made plans to go to Mount Tamalpais on a motorcycle ride. I felt like consoling her or at least doing something for her that would show I was a friend. Taking her on an outing into nature was my way. I arrived a little late. She had been waiting and was ready to go. Her face looked blank and distant again as if she’d prepared herself for me. We bundled up and drove off over the Golden Gate. She was happy with the cold wind biting her barbituated cheeks. She said she was so comfortable she could fall asleep. I hoped she would hold on. Turn after turn we were curving up the mountain, and I was taking too many chances at passing cars. Patience brought out the risk-taking part of me.
Walking through the park she became perky and alive. She felt she knew where the trail lay, but she led us in the wrong direction. She was solaced by the vista of mountain meadows, the trees. We walked past the amphitheater where I promised to perform later and found a private manzanita glen where we could look out over the suburban hill residences of Marin County, the bridges, the strange white square homes of the city dwellers. Looking back on where we came, she achieved perspective, laid back, and began to talk.
“I would like to live in a house with two other mature, intelligent women. One of them could be you.”
“As a friend or a lover?”
“We would see.”
She told me she had taken barbituates and that it was her habit in order to escape the turmoil of the world she met daily in the mental clinic and nightly in her scattered but intense affairs. I saw an ember burning out before me.
“I would like to comfort you. I think I can.”
“No! I don’t want you to, for that would form our relationship into a dependency trip. It’s hard to break a pattern that you start.”
I didn’t think she was right, for I thought of how I would need comfort in the future and she could repay me, then we’d be equal, but I didn’t say anything. I guess that was my problem. I didn’t say enough of what I thought. We drove back to the city. I was freezing from the cold Bay afternoon air that cut through my sweater. I suffered the cold that caught me two weeks later from that ride: Patience never called like she said she would.
I LEFT FOR MEXICO FEELING A BURST OF EXHILARATION with each succeeding motorcycle mile I put between myself and San Francisco. Although I had spoken about relaxing and a slow leisurely drive down the coast, I was moving as fast as my BMW could smooth me down the road. With the border crossing, I took a deep breath and began to inhale more and cruise with my eyes open to the new land. I didn’t think I was running from anything, but I was. I was running from my old butch self of sexual compulsion and chauvinism, of tough shirts and Levis. I was running from the woman who would compete with any man and come out on top; I was putting distance between myself as seducer and the real self I would find again in a quiet house in Guadalajara with the woman I first came out with four years ago, Tove. But first I was to meet two mirror selves, one in the form of a man and one a woman. After these encounters I would be able to see the shell of seduction I was leaving behind.
“Hey there gal, roll out of that bag.”
“Hey man, the world’s going already; open those eyes now.”
I pulled my tired lids apart a crack to see some hulk a few feet away bent in a supplicating manner toward my stretchedout form. I was in a trailer park in La Paz. I reached for my glasses.
“Do I know you?”
“No, but you should! You’re Barbara and you’re driving the BMW here. Isn’t that right?”
“Yeah, but how did you know?” What was this big black mirage? I wasn’t awake and the man was dancing a number on me.
“I was with that couple with the trailer from Pasadena, the doctor and that beaut of a wife with the cutest crotch you ever did see. You saw it now; don’t tell me you didn’t. They told me your trip and I thought, hey, here’s a chick I got to meet. I’m Bill.” My eyes were wide enough now to take in his towering muscular structure, his wide grin and engaging eyes. My nose began to smell the gin coming out through his pores from a session the night before. My ears began to hear the sexual exploits he was already laying on me; before I was out of one bag he was putting me in another.
“God, lady, I got to tell you about my friend Kathy who tripped with me. She was as gay as a catfish but we got it on one time like nothing else and had a ball catting around together. We’d make the cutest tricks together and both get our jollies off. Come on gall, roll out of that sack, we got some traveling to do.” This guy was something else. My little solitary trip was being invaded; like a cockroach coming into a sparkling tiled kitchen at night, this dude was trying to creep into my world.
We went for breakfast and we walked around town, and the conversation didn’t leave sex for one minute. I think I heard about every woman and man he’d ever made; I heard about every man his daughter had ever made, and I heard how he hospitalized his wife by throwing her down the stairs, and how he knocked up the dude he caught her with; I heard what a great lover he was, about every woman he’d had since the border crossing, how he could twirl his tongue, kiss every inch of a woman’s body dry from a bath, send her screaming up the wall shaking with lust for more of him. All this through huevos rancheros and a postcard home to ma saying “Great fun here, Love, Bill.” By the time he began to include me in his plans to form a seduction team appearing to others as a couple and was ready for a new round of evocative description of what we could do together, I was waving he and his marijuana headband a fast goodbye, encouraging him on his way to the Cape, where he was going to make a great masculine statement by turning back toward the States to pee.
I found a small hotel room for a few dollars, took a shower, made an uninspiring dinner on my camp stove, and decided to walk in town a bit before retiring. I was standing at