6
Like in a cabaret, a fly had glued itself to her face. I was caught short by a sneezing fit, three in succession.
We repaired to the public restrooms in the Fairmont, she to pee and I to get toilet paper for my nose. The Ovaltine-toned lobby: carpeting, drapes, lifeless frippery, lounge seats and sofas in plasmal upholstery. She called it the hotel for rich white trash, where her grandparents, aunts and uncles on her mom’s side stayed whenever they came through town. She seemed to know her way around.
She told me about her father’s belief system, sketched out its laws and his personal enforcement techniques. It was pretty bad, from where I stood—but she said he loved her and had adopted her as his own daughter. He worked part-time out of the house, as a financial advisor. Up until twelve, she received regular whippings with a belt. “Buckle end?” “No, but he used all his strength. I’d have to take down my underpants because he thought that might serve as padding.” “How many times?” Afterward, I cringed at the questions I asked. “I don’t know. I think I blocked it out after three.”
The infractions were trivial, she said, failing to sweep the yard, forgetting to clean her room. On several occasions he’d slapped her using the back of his hand. Off a chair once. And once in the bath so she knocked her head against the faucet. She showed me the small scar deviating out of that. She was thirteen when the marriage ended and her father went into therapy. A period of tremendous remorse for him. For her a frantic reassessment of everything and everything’s implications—her rage and mistrust and the suicide attempt followed. I don’t understand this, but she stayed with him after the marriage to her mom ended. When I asked why, she said she stuck around to keep an eye on her half-brother. “I thought he was with your mom most of the time.” But this was all she wanted to give me, and for once I didn’t press.
I followed her down a white hallway, its walls lined with mezzotint photos of the Fairmont pre and post the 1906 earthquake, past a faux-marble bust backlit inside a glassed-off cubby, down a wide flight of stairs. My face on the wall-length bathroom mirror looked sallow, unimpressive. We found an empty banquet room, and she went into it with no purpose but to flag her own presence in its white-rose glamour, while I remained at the door, waiting to be busted or maybe admiring her as she walked through the empty banquet room.
* * *
Dancing, she moved as she had been trained to move. Sometimes in class, she’d add minor embellishments of her own invention. Outside the studio, silliness came to the fore. I liked her arches, from her eyebrows plucked above the bridge of her nose (where otherwise they would have met) to the soles of her feet, whose toes she let me suck on. The big toe was the most fun. Years of dancing en pointe had caused it to swell to the proportions of a fat cartoon thumb banged with a hammer.
7
New landmarks. Her last name was no good, she said, it had to change, and I felt duty-bound to have a go. Whenever conversation came to a standstill, I’d toss out a couple and wait for her unfailing disapproval. Sometimes I’d show up at her apartment with a single word on my lips, her new name, and she’d look back at me, not comprehending until she caught on. “Better luck next time!” Clemente. Comstock. Leitner. Haab. Radley. Versanova. Quimby. Nodabendon. This last, of course, being the name of heaven or the star system that the heavens of old evolved into, according to her father. He belonged to a local congregation of earth channelers who had distilled the varieties of religious experience into a sort of science of belief. Currier. Fairview. Lessing. Greene. Of course, she had her own ideas on the subject, and the name she at last found (I could only admit) trumped my whole lousy list. It didn’t sit so well next to the first name, but otherwise . . . she decided to become “Ms. Landmark.”
The fiend with two faces. Her silver belt buckle monogrammed with the letter F—I asked what it stood for. “Fiend,” she said, sliding the belt from her pant loops and slipping down to underwear in preparation for bed. I should’ve guessed: “fiend” was her watchword, her favorite noun for herself. In greeting and farewell, or just as punctuation, her friends would flash the “fiend sign,” raising an index and pinkie on one or both hands. Me, I felt awfully remote from such things. Brigid took things a step further by claiming to be a Satanist: she was consistently advocating on behalf of “the universal destruction of mankind.”
Brigid’s naughty secret. Her other hallmark being her double (bipolar, when returning from her therapist) nature: born a Gemini. One side or the other laid claim to “an old soul.” Whose? It didn’t show. This proved something of a paradox: selfish yet generous to a fault—closed-off yet almost impossibly self-revealing—unforgiving yet with a long roster of hard-kept friendships—sexually experienced yet uncomfortable with the whole process, at least around me, and so on. I tried to imagine Brigid’s therapist based on the advice she gave her, but it was hard. And Brigid would have been furious if she’d known what I was up to with my questions. Up the block from her apartment, at the corner, a porn theater whose marquee never changed. One of the posters behind the locked glass in the entry was for a movie called Brigid’s Naughty Secret, which she tried to purchase on several occasions without success.
Between moons. Between one moon and another, there never could be a choice. One an angel disguised as fiend; the other, friend. One disguise as good as another. How could I care? Either way I knew how it would end.
Smog. Not long after we broke up, I discovered that this universal destruction of mankind thing came from the liner notes of a local band whose drummer she had a crush on. A brawny beanpole, he attacked his set with great flair, with his back to the audience. I remember listening to the tape she’d made for me, high, on a shitty portable deck. Since I hadn’t damaged my hearing yet, it sounded pretty good. Reverb was a sort of possession back then. She liked them, The Sea and Cake, Madonna, Elliott Smith, and the Cramps more than me, My Bloody Valentine about the same, and The Bats, Nearly God and the Dirty Three less. I remember listening to Daddy’s Highway a lot, and The Doctor Came at Dawn once we were apart, as well as the novel science fiction of Julius Caesar: “she said I could do it without protection,” the singer-songwriter would keep arguing, “that’s not a woman at all.”
Starcrossed. She wanted to be her own star, solitary but capable of defining (to some infallible degree) the orbits of those around her. “Others are free to feel differently,” she conceded. “Others,” I said, “including me.” Because of this, I would call her “a free spirit” later, yes, meanly. Prime mover would’ve been more accurate: originating but not involved. “I don’t want to have an impact on your life. Maybe I’m not saying that right.” I told her she wasn’t. “But don’t you see yourself at least partially—and I’m not saying fully—responsible for the neuroses you claim to deplore? Can’t you see what a fantasy ‘no impact’ is?” I couldn’t come out and say it, but I felt I had offered her the simplicity she said she wanted to introduce into her life—and that simplicity, perhaps flawed by definition, was me—and here she was, rejecting it. But of course it was more complicated than that. We were returning from a disappointing dance performance. In some pieces, the dancers were suspended from wires against a wall that frondlike patterns of orange, green and blue were projected onto. The music was New Age chant, and there was a twenty-minute slide show. A long walk back down Mission, deserted enough to allow me to piss into a lot through the diamond of a chain-link fence. I was arguing that all dance performances should be done in silence, but at some point lost sight of the fact that she was no longer refuting me. At Van Ness I stopped at a cash machine, where we were pestered by two drunk homeless men. Brigid took the opportunity to explain why she couldn’t give them anything tonight. She had a bad habit of seeing what she could get away with, offering her guileless empathy as substitute for an empty purse. This time it didn’t work. One of the men began to mimic her high voice, and when she took offense, he responded with some nasty insults. The kindest being, “Ooooh, the little princess.” After that the evening was shot. Knowing her fairly well, I would recognize her humiliation in the stiffness of her gait. She was quiet during dinner and increasingly disagreeable. I watched her take down one barrier and put up another, and I waited for her to strike out, not