!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Howard dropped me off a few blocks south of MacArthur Park on Westlake. The imposing two-story white house featured an expansive front yard gone to seed, yet sporting a flourishing avocado tree. Incongruous amongst the teeming apartment complexes surrounding it, it seemed air-lifted from another time and place.
“Are you sure about this, Sarah?” he asked for the fifth time.
I nodded. “Come back here at 3, OK? I’ll be fine.” The late May LA sun had already seared through the morning fog, and I blinked rapidly trying to adjust as I climbed the porch steps.
Mike waited at the door, that Elvis-half smile flickering through his face. Impossibly tan, his sun-bleached hair now meandered in waves and curls half-way down his neck, almost covering his ears.
“Your hair…” we both said together, chuckling nervously.
“I didn’t think I’d like it short, but, it looks OK. Really,” he said, while opening the door, and ushering me through a foyer, walls splotched with grease marks on the fading white paint, the floor covered by a threadbare carpet needing a good vacuuming.
“How many of you here?” I asked. He gave me quick tour: two bedrooms on the first floor, four upstairs. The dining room housed two nursing students, sisters. Across from them, another med student and his live-in girl-friend. Upstairs, Mike sported the largest room – “I found the house, so I took first choice” – with three other med students, one woman, two men, up there with him.
“Wow, eight people,” I noted. “It doesn’t look that crowded.”
“Maybe because we don’t have much furniture?”
“Just like my place now – four men, four women. How’s that working out here?”
“The girls all hold their own,” was his response. He pointed out the main feature of his room, a “bed” consisting of four planks, stained light brown, nailed together, holding a waterbed mattress in check. He pushed on it lightly, setting off concentric rippling waves. “Come on, let’s go out, walk up to the park, we can talk along the way. How long did you say you’d be here?”
“He’s picking me up at 3.”
“Good. There’s a deli up on Alvarado, we can eat lunch there. Langer’s.”
Three or four blocks later, we’d arrived.
“Look at all the people!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t think anyone walked here.”
“Yup, LA’s a real city, not an endless suburb, like some people think. Bustling.” Entering the park, we immediately encountered a large lake, home to honking geese and some of those human-powered pedal boats. Mike steered us to a bench along the shore, shaded by several palms.
I hadn’t felt awkward at all, and Mike seemed equally at ease. I wondered what might be broiling beneath the surface, in both of us.
“How’s your mother?” I ventured.
He smiled. “She’s amazing. Back at work.”
“You mean she’s seeing patients? Didn’t she have to learn how to talk again?”
He nodded. “They cut off half her tongue in surgery. Then she had that stroke last fall…”
“Lizzie told me about that. She was with you?”
“Yeah we were all in the car, my parents, and came around a corner on the way up to the house – remember that road?” I nodded. “All of a sudden she sounded garbled, and by the time we got up the hill, she had trouble walking, and told us she thought she’d had a stroke. So calm, almost in charge.”
“A lady with an iron will,” I added. I wanted to ask him about Elizabeth, but was afraid to open that up.
He made it easy. “You know, Elizabeth decided last month, ‘We’re not right together,’ or something like that.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Remember Vanessa, the girl in our house back there? She had a friend, called him her boyfriend, in grad school at Oregon. Arranged for Lizzie to take a room in his house. She never told me directly, but I think they took up together, and that’s why she called it off, with me.”
“How’d that make you feel, Mike?”
“Boy, you really are going to be a psychologist, aren’t you, asking how I feel.”
“You know, I started seeing a therapist when I got back to school , after we…broke up? Whatever it was we did?”
He looked down at his sandals, frowned, then said, “I thought I was the one who got messed up by that, not you. You seemed to self-assured, like you knew exactly what, who you needed, what we each should do.”
“And you?” I stopped, not sure if I was ready to go there yet. “I asked you about Lizzie, and how you felt about her.”
“It’s funny. I like – liked? – her as a friend, first of all, of course. Then we moved in together, and that was so easy, just like a roommate, but a girl. Just a good companion, I thought.”
“But you only had one bedroom?”
“Yeah, maybe that’s what started it? I don’t know, one night I found her there in bed with me, and you probably know where that led.”
Now my turn to frown, I gritted my teeth and simply nodded.
“Funny, though we were friends, companions, then sharing a bed all summer. But I never really felt I loved her, ever.” He paused, sucked his teeth, then said, “I mean, I was hurt when she said we were done, but I think it was just my pride, not my heart being hurt, you know? Still, I was a little angry at her.”
“How could you get mad at Lizzie? She’s so sweet, or at least she was.”
“Oh, she still is. Apparently, she thought I wasn’t worth her time.”
“Come on, Mike, she’s up there in Eugene, you’re down here, about to start six years of the grind. What’s she supposed to do, wait for you forever? Give up her life to come live with you?” As I spoke, I realised what I was really trying to say, who I was really talking about. I decided, two years of therapy, I can go there. I thought of taking his hands; instead, I tried to capture his gaze. “Mike, you do know, don’t you, that I didn’t want to, I tried very hard not to, hurt you.”
Grinding his teeth, staring hard right back at me, he said, “Janie, you did. You…I was…I am…so angry, mad at you.” He didn’t shout, he didn’t even sound all that perturbed. Resignation was what I felt from him. Relaxing his shoulders, his eyes filled up with tears.
While he sniffed, trying to hold it in, I said, “Mike, I was angry, too. Not about us, I mean, we can talk more about that,. I was angry at you. And Lizzie. For getting together, for…I don’t know for what. I know you two weren’t trying to hurt me, you were just being yourselves.” I took a deep breath, hoping I could help him. “My therapist, she finally got me to see, it was not you, or Lizzie. I was the one choosing to be mad, to be angry at you. That helped me so much, once I understood that. It’s the main reason why I’m able to be here with you now. I don’t want to tell you what to do, what to feel. Lord knows I’m not a shrink, and certainly don’t ever want to be yours. But think about that, please?” I pleaded.
He nodded, still with a sad, almost sullen aura in his face. I waited.
Finally, slowly, he came out with, “I can’t just call you up, the way I do, say, my sister. I can’t keep in contact, fraternally, like that, because…because we’ve been in love. Caring about what happens, in an abstract way, to you – I can’t, I don’t want to, I don’t know how to do that. I’m not willing – able, maybe – to begin doing that, to expose myself again to the same dependency, that intimate affection we previously had.” He fell silent again. Geese honked and flapped out on the lake, the sun reflected mercilessly off the asphalt by our feet.
At last, he concluded “I guess you’d say, if I can’t have everything, I’d rather have nothing at all.”
I couldn’t leave him, leave us like that. “Mike, we can’t resurrect the past. You know that.” He nodded. “But we can learn – I can learn – not only about what I did with you, but about what I’ll do, where I’ll go. We both can have good lives, will have good lives.”
“But not with each other,” he said, almost inaudibly.
“Not, not with each other, not any more.”
“But not with each other,” he said, almost inaudibly.
“Not, not with each other, not any more.” I tried, light-heartedly, “So how is you love life now? Anyone new?”
“Sure. I mean, no. A few dates, but…I think you spoiled me.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning, I guess, I’m learning that not everyone likes me the way you did. You made it all so easy.”
I steered us back to future plans. “You said this is your last free summer for six years…”
After a cleansing sigh, he said, “Now we have clinical, the last two years of school. It’s like being an intern, rotations on all the services for sixteen months. First the required ones, then, the fourth year, some electives, finally get a start on real doctor training.”
“What’s first?”
“Pediatrics, then Ob-Gyn. Internal Medicine, and Surgery.”
“Psych?”
“I don’t know, Janie. The times I’ve done the clinic here, it’s been…underwhelming. Not what I expected. All drugs and confusion. The patients never seem to get better, the doctors don’t really have a real solid understanding of why they do what they, what works, what doesn’t. All guesswork.”
“Are you going to work anywhere this summer, then?”
“No. I’m planning on driving up the coast, see my aunt and cousins in Fremont, near Oakland. Keep on going to Seattle, my mother’s sister lives there. Sun Valley, with Shelly, Snowmass, on to Chicago.”
“Chicago?”
“The Olympic Trials for swimming are there, I want to see Molly swim, see if she makes the team.”
“By yourself? Where are you going to stay?”
“My dad gave me another Dodge, a Charger. It’s got a huge engine, goes real fast. The back seats fold down, there’s room enough for me to sleep. I’ll just pull over anywhere, I guess.”
We had our lunch at Langer’s. walked and talked around the park, then drifted back to his house just before 3, where Howard waited in the driveway.
“How’d it go?” he asked as I got in.
“OK, I answered. “Not bad. Kind of weird, but good, you know?”
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