Roadmap Part 9

CHAPTER 22 - RETRO ACTIVE

Red fire ants are crawling through my brain.  I've changed my position in bed fifty times, tried meditating, Zen breathing, masturbation, but still the fire ants keep marching.  I haven't slept in days.  I'm scared and happy and anxious.  Overnight, everything's changing.  But what's it changing into?  All I know is I can't sleep.  And Shane hasn't called in two days.

To top it off, Tony’s doing his Withdrawal Act.  I found the book I'd given him, that I hoped he'd love, in front of my door.  When I asked, he replied curtly that he never read it.

"You think everything has to do with you," He once told me.  And in this case, he's right.  Last night, I wrote him a letter.

Dear Tony, I just want you to know how glad I am that we've become friends.  You've put up with a lot from me and helped me heal.  Best of all, when I was in pain, you showed me how to have fun.  For me, you answered the question: Can men and women be friends?

Slid it under his door.

When I opened my door this morning, I found it.  On the back, he'd written:

In the deepest sense of the word -- Thanks.

P.S. - I want this back for ego gratification.

xx

It's past midnight when I hear him trying to open the kitchen door (which has been getting stuck a lot lately).  I run out in my nightie and greet him with, "Do you have any vodka?"

He laughs, "Sure."  In his room, he takes the bottle out of a picnic basket, "Leave me a couple fingers."  I run to the kitchen and make popcorn.

Popcorn and vodka assembled, I sit on Tony's floor with the bowl between my legs, chomping and gulping.  Edward appears in the doorway.

"I heard you were dating an Asian female."

"Vietnamese.  I like her," Tony answers, lying back on his pillow.  "She's intelligent, fun to be with."  Edward leaves, missing the spectacle of me spilling vodka on the carpet.

"I'm sorry!  I'll clean it!"

"S'okay.  Really...So how are you and Shane?"

I tell him I think Shane has a good sense of borders, "It's kind of like, 'You take care of your side of the fence and I'll take care of mine and we'll meet in the middle.'"

"That's good," he muses.  "That's the way it should be."

Sucking the vodka out of the ice, "Can you answer a boy-girl question?"

"I can try."

"Well, Shane called and left a message and then I called back and left a message and finally we talked about doing something tonight, but I haven't heard.  So the question is:  Whose turn is it to call?"

Tony thinks a second.  "Either one can call either one."

I call the next morning.  Shane is sick.  "I've got this awful stomach pain.  It started yesterday." Thinking it might help, I arrive at his place with a platter of sushi.  The house is dark except for the blue light of the TV which glows all the way out to the patio. Seeing me, Shane gets up with effort, shuffling to the kitchen where he turns on the light.

He's so immediately grateful, "You got this at Ten Sushi?  I love that place!  This looks wonderful, but I have no appetite.  Here, let me give you some money."

"It's your going-away present. Party food." He once told me that real Japanese only eat sushi at parties. He sinks heavily into one of the Thrift Shop chairs at the table, "I feel so old." His big black cat meows against him. "Leave me alone, Black Cat! I'm sick."

Setting up the sushi in the comfortable silence, I'm enjoying how easy we are together; how nice it is not to feel obligated to talk or fill the air with anxious words.  I also like Shane's natural decision to eat in the kitchen, not in front of the TV

He picks at the sushi with his chopsticks while the cats go crazy, begging at our feet. 

"The person I thought would housesit can't do it," he says.  "Would you be interested?  I could find somebody to just feed the cats, water the garden.  I've done it before, I just thought maybe...You might like to stay here."

Leave Topanga?  Leave Tony before he leaves for Poland? Drive an hour to work on the Westside?  I'll have to think about it.

xx

We sit chastely on his French Whorehouse red velvet loveseat, watching the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  He props his feet up on an ottoman, while I sit at a demure distance.

During the commercial, he leans back, "You should have seen me last night.  I was twisting and turning.  Actually moaning.  At work today, I was sitting on my break...and it hurt so much it was like..."  He puts his fist under his T-shirt and mimes the scene in Alien where John Hurt twists in agony until the alien embryo bursts out of his stomach; letting his hand play the "embryo", squealing/scampering off.  I take a chance.

"Do you know what Reiki is?" I ask.

"I've heard of it.  A Japanese laying on of hands?"

He lets me move closer and place my hands gently over his stomach, while keeping my eyes on Redford and Newman.  After all these years, the movie is still amazingly good.  Whenever I notice an editing or writing or directing trick, I start to comment.  But before I can, he tells me what I saw.  So eerie and satisfying.

When I take my hands away, he says, "Thanks.  I needed that."  But how would I have known what he needed if I hadn't guessed?  Will I always be right?

Movie over, I go home.  Being with somebody when they're sick and not having sex feels so...married.

A day later I wake up with a killer sore throat. 

"I was feeling feverish yesterday, Tony."

"You've got the fever all right."

My throat thing flares into an upper respiratory thing and I spend my days nursing a hacking cough at work. I go to lunch with Georgia whose looking reckless today in black leather.  Leaning her fist upon her cheek, she gazes at me as I pick at my Ceasar salad and says, "It's okay when you're twenty, making love all night, but..." Then.  "Nah, I'm like you.  I give it everything I've got."

Her words surprise me.  Is that what I do?  Throw myself into the fire?  Go for broke.

xx

He's left me a message in his cello-voice: "I'm feeling...better, but still rocky.  I think I got food poisoning. That's what I think. Anyway...why don't you come over tomorrow, we can catch an afternoon movie, get a bite to eat and you can come to the reading I'm doing at East/West, if you want.  Then you can stay over and take me to the airport in the morning. Preferably in a limo with a hospital bed in the back."

  xx

In Topanga, Edward and Suki have just put their late-night takeout into the fridge and left. Eva has paused our conversation until they leave.  Then: "Would you like to live in Edward's cabin?" she asks casually. "I can't take him anymore.  I want him out."

Of course I'd like it.  Who wouldn't want two huge rooms (one with a killer view, the other with wall-to-wall shelves), a wood burning stove and Shane's tree growing up through the deck? "I can't take him either," I admit.  "He's really been on my case lately."

"You know why Edward gets to you?" she eyes me.  "Because he knows he can." He comes in again and we clam up stupidly. Without looking at him, she goes.  The moment the kitchen door is closed, Edward yelps:

"What the hell's wrong with her?  She's like ice. Is she mad at me?"

I try something new.  "I don't know, Edward."  And walk away.

"Yes, you do!"

"Ask Eva."

"Damn it!  Don't run away!"

 

I go to my room, get into bed and turn off the light. I hear them arguing:

Edward:  What's wrong?

Eva:  You get major PMS and I can't stand it anymore.

Edward:  When? What? Give me specifics.

Eva:  I just try to avoid you.

Edward:  I am the way I am.  It's got nothing to do with you!

Eva:  I don't want to talk about it anymore.

Silence.

My phone rings.

"Carrie, it's Edward.  She won't tell me."

"It's not my problem."  Is that me talking?

"You know what I think?  I think you and she have been commiserating."

"No, we haven't."

"Well, I -"

"I have to go to sleep now." I hang up. I actually hang up. Where did this "boundary" come from? Can you grow a boundary in a split second? What kind of soil does it grow in? What fertilizes it? Or am I really being cowardly, already fantasizing about making love to Shane between those cozy log walls?

Tony is gone for the night. Otherwise, I'd run in and ask what he thinks.

One more thing.  Eva also dropped the news that one of her ex-husbands could be staying with us. He’s coming from Alaska. Why and for how long were questions she ignored.

So there will be six people here and trouble is in the air.

 xx

In the morning, I call Shane and accept his housesitting offer.  He says great, he'll call me at one so we can get together for a matinee, dinner and his reading at East/West.

My flu is full blown now. I gasp and cough my way to and from the car, loading it up with Stay-At-Shane's stuff. Looking up from packing a difficult box, I find Edward at my door. I hug him right away, "I'm so sorry.  I've been thinking about you all morning."

"So what's up?  Why am I getting all this shit?"

"Well, you've been depressed."

"But what does that have to do with her?  I hardly ever see her."  I have no answer.  He leans against the mirrored closet, "But I haven't done anything.  Now you, I was rude to.  I was mean and I'm sorry.  But I never see her!"

"Maybe it's not you.  Maybe it's just she's taking on more than she can deal with:  Carmelita, this ex-husband..."

"Renato is coming?  Renato the User?" He slaps the mirror with a guffaw.  Then nodding as he digests it. "Guess she's feeling crowded."

I pick up the last item for the car:  my computer.

"Can I help you with something?"

"The keyboard."

He follows me to the car where I struggle to open the hatchback.

"Speaking of biting off more than you can chew," he says, "Are you sure you're up for this housesitting thing?"

"No. I'm not," I reply honestly. "I know this sounds weird but it feels like...graduation.”

Seeing Eva come out of the house and head toward us, Edward walks briskly in the other direction. When she gets a few feet from me, she states: "Mercury is retrograde. Obstacles in communication and transportation. Started last week really."

"For how long?"

"Three weeks. "

"Great." I get in the car and start the engine. Eva doesn’t move.

“Carrie?”

"Yes?”

"You know the planets can’t really go backwards. It’s just an illusion."

I smile. She smiles back. I thank her. And go.

xx

I arrive at Shane's to find him watering the garden, "The horsetail ferns require lots and lots of water...the clay rocks I put in to hold the water actually absorb it, so everything dries out faster."

"How are you feeling?"

"Better.  It was probably food poisoning."

"Or the flu.  I've got the worst flu."

"Yeah, my brother was saying there's something going around that either hits you in the stomach or the throat.  I probably got it from that Indian guy at the Seven/Eleven."

"When he gave you your change."

"Must've been that quarter he licked."

Inside his home, I put my Chinese herbs on to boil and unload the car.  He helps me carry the computer to his room, clearing a space on his fly fishing table, then standing back to observe:

"Computer looks good in the middle of the fly fishing."

Fifteen minutes pass while I unsuccessfully try to hook up the computer.  He returns, playfully gruff:

"What the hell's goin' on in here?"  Then he helps.  There.  That's better.

We sit at the kitchen table, me with my foul-smelling cup of herbs and he with a brand new hiking boot in his hand.  He reads aloud the warning on the label of the waterproofer in his hands (Will discolor...) and winces. 

"I love this color!  I can't do it." After going through a repertoire of funny, anxious faces, he strokes the beige suede, turning it a deep grey. While he repaints his boots, I tell him about Eva's fight with Edward, and her offer of the cabin to me.

"What do you think?" I ask. "Should I worry about Edward?"

He grins at the memory of the cabin and he sings "HAPPY TRAILS TO YOU..."

Boots done, he shows me the list he made: 

Take in mail, feed cats twice a day, water garden every five days, run car every week, feed the birds, secure windows when leaving...

Feed the birds?

I have to admit that I'm too sick to go to a movie.

"Can I take a nap instead?"

Sure, he says, just a minute, let me make the bed for you.  There.

"Just relax," he says, shutting the door as I snuggle into the orange sheets.  He hasn't tucked me in or kissed me. But it feels like he has.

xx

At six, we go to dinner in my car. His reading is in an hour. He takes me to Hop Li Restaurant, five minutes away in Chinatown. On the way, he points to a schoolyard and says, "This is where they do Tai Chi. You might want to check it out."

Hop Li turns out to be a wonderful restaurant where the waiters are elegant and handsome, the food exquisite.

"You don't need a fork, do you?" he asks with rhetorical pride as he hands it back to the waiter who just set it down. I let him order: sizzling house chow mein, scallops in Hoisin sauce, Chinese broccoli.

Tonight he's more handsome than ever, his eyes so vivid they remind me of those forties films where the only eyes were highlighted with light, the rest of the face left in shadow. I tell him that I watched The Joy Luck Club with Eva and Carmelita the other night.

"I know all those actresses," he says, pouring me tea.  So he knows those beauties. And he's sitting here with me.  I tell him what Carmelita said.

"Watching the scene between the Chinese American woman and her WASP husband and Carmelita said something in Spanish. When she left the room, Eva screamed, 'I can't stand her fucking prejudice! She said, 'What a shame.  A good looking guy with such an ugly woman.'"

He leans back with a bitter laugh, looking heavenward in a comic plea, "And what does she think she is?  Lily White?"

True to its name, a sizzling dish of chow mein is placed before us.  Picking up the small bowl next to his plate, Shane says, "I'm going to eat the way we do at home.  I'm not going to use this plate at all." He scoops rice into his small bowl, ladling the stir fry over it.

"This is the way I always do it," I agree, putting my bowl in his waiting hand so he can give me some rice, admiring his precise movements, the caring way he hands me the bowl.

"It's great to have an appetite again," he says.  Minutes later, the waiter pushes the sizzling platter to the edge, replacing it with the broccoli.  I smoothly slide both dishes so they're side by side.

"What's the matter with that guy, taking our food away?" Shane teases.  "Most Caucasians don't eat from all the plates at once.  The ones I know do, but he'd just tell me that they're probably Asiaphiles."  True.

The Chinese broccoli is meltingly soft in my mouth, "Mmmm...does your mother cook like this?"

"My mom made meat loaf, hot dogs."  When I laugh, he looks serious.  "She was American.  We ate American food."

"Have you ever eaten chicken feet?"

“I used to keep chickens so I know what they step in."

"You had chickens?"

"When I lived on the East Side.  I had a place with a peacock, chickens, a couple of roosters." 

And no woman?  Or was there one?

After the leftovers have been tucked into their little takeout containers and we drink the last of the tea, I take something out of my purse and hold it in my closed hand.

"I have a present for you."

He does exactly what I prayed I wouldn't.  He frowns, pulls back, as if I'd said, "I've got a rattlesnake for you."

"You didn't have to do that," he looks worried. "I don't need anything."

I put the present back in my purse.

"Never mind then.  Forget it."

He looks startled.  Or is he disappointed? 

"Oh all right," I retrieve it and hand it to him.  "It's a Bull's Eye."

I launch into the story of how I found the Bull’s Eye in a metaphysical shop next to the dance school a few months ago. The proprietor is a South American man who’s become my friend. "He told me they wash up on the beaches of Rio. You keep it until it explodes open. That means there was danger but it protected you. "

I’d had it in my purse, through hell and back.

He rubs it between his fingers, "It looks like polished wood.  I like it."

Bull's Eye.

The bill comes and we split it. He takes my cash and pays with his credit card ("I'm not taking much cash.").

We get into my car, I turn the key, and there's a heart grabbing "CLICK."  I can't believe it. "Must be your alternator," he says, before going to call a cab to get him to the theater on time. I call AAA. It's weird to be going through this crisis with someone I hardly know. Making me all too aware that we lack connection, history, loyalty—the main ingredients of partnership. 

His cab comes and he goes.

The tow truck guy jumps me ("Must be your alternator") and tells me to "Drive her thirty minutes before stopping." Nothing is going to stop me from going to that reading. In an agony of impatience, I drive around the block of the theater for twenty-four minutes. Mercury is still retrograde. But my Natal Moon is in Leo, which means Willpower. My moon is going to kick Mercury's butt tonight.

I enter the dark, empty lobby of the theater and make my way to the heavy, groaning house doors.  One step inside and I get the whole picture.

Shane sits on stage with four other actors, all holding scripts while a scene takes place in front of them. The audience is all Asian. Embarrassingly conspicuous with my blonde hair and audacious tardiness, I slide into a seat near the door. 

On stage, an impoverished teen-aged girl is offering to violate herself with a jagged glass for a Thai porno film. Her monologue has the audience in a dead silence. If the proverbial pin were to drop, it would sound like thunder.

Icy air is blowing on my throat from the overhead air conditioner, filling my dripping sinuses. "I will not cough," I think stoically.  I will not...I will not.  I try to subtly clear my throat, but there's a growing tickle in my chest, like a beehive let loose against my lungs. Any second I'm about to cough with such hacking gusto that everyone--even the actors--will have to turn towards me.

Pushing against the creaking doors to the lobby, I run to the restroom where I'm consumed by a gagging, teary coughing fit. This is ridiculous. The things I do for love. What do I hope to gain by this masochistic exercise? To see him act again.

And he does act again.  By the time I've returned with my mucous cleared, I get to see him in three different roles. One, in particular, is unforgettable.  He seduces a woman, not with his body, but with words.  Affable, boyish, sexy. 

The man who has charmed me now charms someone else...and an audience of fifty others.

Play over, the actors file offstage, except for Shane who wearily sits at the end of the stage, his back to the audience, rubbing his eyes.  Instead of going to him, I go in search of jumper cables.  No one has any.

By the time, I go backstage, he's back there with his friends. His eyes pop at the sight of me, "You're here!" But news of my continued car problem causes him to grit his teeth. He shows me to the phone. Call AAA, he says. I do, aware that I'm doing exactly what I'd wanted to avoid:  making a spectacle of myself.

Still, he's kind enough to wait outside with me for the tow truck and graciously introduces me to various friends who pass us.

No sooner has my car been jumped, then I turn around to find...no Shane.  Behind the wheel, motor running, I honk the horn. He comes out, leans in the window, "Go on ahead. I'm going to stay awhile and talk to the dramaturge."  Seeing me hesitate, "Take Sunset to Echo Park, Echo Park to Scott..."

I should drive through Echo Park (aka "Gangland") late at night in a vehicle that's been stalling?  Alone?

"I'd really rather you came with me..."

"I'll meet you there later."

As I take a more circuitous route through the safer Silver Lake, my anger overtakes my anxiety.  This is his last night before Europe and he'll be with his theater friends while I make my lonely way home through dangerous neighborhoods praying that my car makes it.  By the time I park on his narrow winding street, I've figured out several versions of how I will explain his insensitivity to him.

But he's already there.  Doing something with wire near the cat feeder on the patio, back turned slightly away from me as I come to the bottom of the rattling wooden steps. "What took you so long?"

 

I'm sitting on the loveseat, blowing my nose and watching him heft a chocolate-colored dust buster.

"Japanese are very clean," he says. 

"Why are you doing this?  It's after midnight and you're leaving."

"I don't want to leave you with a dirty apartment."

I follow him from room to room, content to let illness excuse my inactivity.  He sweeps, vacuums, scrubs ("If you buy a mop, I'll reimburse you...").  It's been an hour since I drove here in a snit about his thoughtless behavior and we've been pleasantly chatting.

Taking a break, he holds out a jar of paper wrapped Asian candies.

"Oh, I love salted plums!"

"Most people don't know what these are," he pops one in his mouth, leans against the sink, chewing up the flesh and tossing the seed out the open door, into the garden.

Time. 

"You know," I plunge in, "when you stayed at the theater, I was really scared my car might break down again and these neighborhoods are dangerous at night.  I wish you’d have come with me."  He tosses the pit out the door, "I'm sorry, I guess I wasn't thinking."  Then he turns to the sink where he squirts dish detergent.

And that's the end of it.  My feathers are back where they belong, neat and smooth.

"Oh, my brother might drop by to spend the night from time to time," he says over his shoulder.  "He's having trouble with his wife, she's sick in the head and sometimes he might need to get away."

Brother?  This is news.

"Is there anything I need to know about him?"

"He's a serial killer.  No, he's okay.  A real live wire.  He married this Korean girl."

"Is everybody in your family married to Asians?"

"My brother's the only one who didn't marry Japanese.

I tell him about a girlfriend of mine whose father is Japanese and mother, Chinese.

"The first time she brought her Caucasian boyfriend home, her father was talking to him downstairs while her mother was upstairs yelling at her, 'Tell me you're not sleeping with him!'"

He wipes the moisture from the walls around the sink over and over, suddenly serious.  "White guy with an Asian woman?"

"She married him.  They're both screenwriters."

Scrub.  Scrub.  "All these Caucasian guys, they want Asian women right now.  Asian women are hip."

"Why?"

"They think they're 'exotic'.  And once they've developed a taste for Asian women..." 

Is that how he feels? Was that why he wanted Grace?  Why is he telling me?  How does he think it makes me feel?

Now he's scrubbing the tiny crevices around the stove knobs. "Y'know what really pisses me off? You always see white guys with Asian women and you almost never see Asian men with Asian women."

"Oh, come on, I've seen lots of Asian couples."

"Where?"

"Chinatown."

He snorts, "Fresh off the boat, sure.  I'm talkin' Asian American women who grew up in this country with all its media hype of what a sexy guy should look like.  The WASPS have made the "WASP look" a turn-on. Men with Asian features are out."

"What?" I've never even thought about it before. "Listen, Shane, every Caucasian woman that I've told that I'm seeing an Asian American man has says, 'Wow!  How'd you do that? I'm getting horny just thinking about it.'"

"Really? Well, those are your friends.  Believe me, they're the exceptions.  Trust me. I live with this. Don't get me wrong," squeezing the suds out of the sponge, "I'm not the KKK or anything..."

"It sure sounds like it." I'm trying to be cool, but memory nags at me. Shane lying against me, kissing the back of my neck, "Do you want it from behind tonight?"  The ultimate sexual power trip? It can carry undercurrents of rage, pain, humiliation, dominance. It's late, I'm sick, and trying to ignore the implications, but I want to leave.

Now he's ranting: "It's not enough they take our jobs, our dignity, our stories. They take our women and when they marry, have kids...all this crap about how beautiful Eurasian kids are..."

Maybe if I get outside, it will give me the courage to do what I know I must to save myself.  I walk out the door and land in a patio chair where I sit just outside his kitchen, nursing my cup of Chinese medicine, which has grown ice cold. He talks to me through the door, as if I haven't budged:

"In Hawaii, a white guy can get killed for being with a Hawaiian woman.  That makes white guys think twice."

Anxious to leave the topic, but unable to, I offer, "Now that I think about it, there is a lot of anti-Asian male media hype. About a month ago, before we got together, a woman at work told me that she'd heard on a radio show that Japanese men don't do any foreplay.  But after being with you..."

He laughs, "Were you saying, 'Oh, it's not twoo, it's not twoo!'" (a twist on Madeline Kahn's famous line in Blazing Saddles when she realizes that black men are well hung).

Our laughter has eased the tension. I go back inside and sit at the kitchen table, thinking of our connection. "People are just people. They get attracted for lots of reasons—not just because one's white and one's Asian."

He throws back his head with a derisive laugh, "Yeah, right!" Finally putting the sponge aside, he wipes his hands on a dishtowel, which he carefully hangs to dry on the edge of the sink. Then he sits next to me, opening a map.

I draw in breath to draw in courage.

"Shane. I have to ask you. Do you see me as some white chick that...?"

Without missing a beat, he answers simply, "I don't think of you as white.  You do Tai Chi, drink Chinese herbs, do Japanese healing, know how to use chopsticks...and anyway, you're Jewish so you're ethnic, not white."

What?

 Is this B.S.?  If it is, what great B.S.!  Well, I can't leave now.  Was it Eva who stated that Shane and I “must have been non-white in a past life?”

Something dawns on me and the words just come:

"The media—our TV and movies—they give us our legends.  That's how we pass on who we are, where we come from, where we're going.  So if you remove an entire people and their culture from those stories, you remove their chances to have a history, to have their own legends, until there's nothing left to pass on, no positive cultural images.  And eventually, it will wipe them out because they've been made invisible."

He looks at me steadily.  I'm on a roll: "So if they don't exist in the media, then they don't exist.  Even their own women won't want them."

"That's it!" he cries. "I want whatever you're on."

Two A.M.  Shane finally lies next to me where I've already been lying for half an hour. The entire apartment is immaculate.  Before he falls asleep, he mentions that he always likes to start a trip with a breakfast at the Pantry Restaurant downtown.

"The day I was supposed to go to Catalina, I got up early, had breakfast at The Pantry and got there half an hour early."

xx

At four A.M., his digital clock goes off. We get up like two old married people to shower and dress. While I'm shampooing, he knocks on the door, "putting another towel out" for my hair.

A clothes rack stretches across the room before the bathroom and he's cleared a large space for my clothes. I pull a dress off it, while he sits on the floor, sniffing his socks.

"This is how it is when you're not married," he comments.  "You just sniff and go, 'Well, one more day!'"  And when you are married, I want to ask, does your wife make sure you always have a clean pair?

We enter the shivery black night of early morning, Shane extolling the virtues of his soft luggage on the way to my car. But my Mercury's still in retrograde and we have to drive his tired Honda instead. "I don't fucking believe this!" he can't get the driver's door open. Frantically, he comes around to the passenger side, opens it, then leans across to open the driver's door. Ronald Reagan's astrologer probably told him not to travel today.

He stomps his foot on the accelerator, instructing, "You've got to keep pumping gas to get the motor to turn over." The motor turns over. "Then once it's on, keep giving it gas until you're sure it won't stall.  You can drive a stick, right?"

Yes, Captain.

"It will stall when you stop at a light and lose power when you go around a curve."

Assured that the engine is up and running, we head out.  But first, he needs to stop at his landlady's to drop off his rent check.  Half a block from his home, we careen up a hill, the wrong way on a one-way street and he parks the car (engine running) in front of some large garages and says, "Come with me.  I want you to see this."

We climb up steps, past the garages and are met by an island of grass that seems infinite. In one corner, is her apartment building--two story with an angular design--probably very modern in the late forties.  Like a Frank Lloyd Wright.  We pass through willy-nilly gardens until we reach the rounded edge of this huge property where I am rewarded and startled by a dazzling a hundred eighty degree view.  Before us, the city rises up and spreads out, twinkling and brilliant.  

The downtown skyscrapers with their blue and violet neon trim are as sharply lighted as D.C. monuments, making them appear powerful and reassuring.  And all the while, the dew is dripping, the birds are silent and only the hum of the sleeping city greets us as we stand poised above the City of Angels and contemplate its mystifying beauty.

"Right about now I'd need a cigarette," he comments. "Ever since I got sick, I stopped smoking. Feels so good to breathe and taste food. I'm done for good."

xx

We park the car on Figueroa, half a block from The Pantry in the deserted downtown, we half-skip toward the dark, peopleless restaurant while I joke, "The way things are going, those famous doors that have never closed in fifty years..."

"Will be closed for asbestos removal!" he laughs.

But to our relief, the steel doors swing open easily and within minutes, we're seated at the counter digging into plates of breakfast that would make a ranch hand swoon.

"Is it as good as Millie's?" he asks.  I nod yes, amazed that he remembers that night.

Even though we haven't had sex in five days and even though I hack like a wino, I feel feminine and sexy sitting next to him, dressed for work in another dress that "goes down, down, down..."). When I go to the restroom, I can feel men's eyes on me and I'm proud to be with Shane, glad people can see us together.

Breakfast over, he hands me a doggie bag of our leftovers, as he turns away to pay the bill, "Give this to the man outside." As soon as I exit, I see a ragged, but alert man a few feet from the door.

"Can you use this?" I ask.

"I sure can," he says, taking the bag.  "Thank you."

Feed the birds...feed the man outside...give me the shirt off his back...an extra towel...a glass of pear juice...Once, he told me, "All I can do is take care of myself and do whatever I can to help the Earth."

On the way to the airport, he reaches down and takes a flyer from the floor, tossing it to me, "You might be interested in this." Its a warning that a film will be shot in the ark next to his place with "special effect explosions and helicopters" from ten and four every night for the next week.

Pumping the gas, after we stall at the red light, he adds, "The people upstairs make a lot of noise. They have two dogs who run back and forth on hardwood floors with their nails. It can drive you crazy."

In the airport parking lot, he gets out of the car and hands me the keys.  And that's that. Every time I had to drive Boris' car, I heard: "Remember I don't have insurance, I don't have money for new car, be careful, this is the only car I have."

Shane just handed me the keys.  Is it trust or resignation? Last night, he said, "If anything happens, don't call me. I don't want to know. I won't be able to do anything anyway." I tried to explain that once when I was housesitting, someone's cat ran away.  He put his fingers in his ears.  "I don't want to know."

A line of Asians has already formed in front of the ticket counter.  We stand next to a short, stocky man with shaggy gray hair and a benign, grinning face. He's wearing an orange baseball cap and a safari jacket.  Holds out a friendly hand to me:

"My name is Honda," he says.  "Harry Honda." While Shane goes to the rest room, Harry tells me that he's a journalist and a World War II vet who was actually in the Go For Broke infantry.

"I could tell you stories," he says. "I've been writing about it for years."

An airline employee asks for two lines. Everyone for France, please stay where you are; everyone else form another line. All the Caucasians fall out.

Shane returns, ducks back under the rope, saying to me in a loud voice, "You're in the wrong line."

xx

His ticket processed, we go to the waiting area, Shane muses, "I'm never this early for anything." Sitting next to him in this chilly room, I feel woozy, as if I'm about to slip into a coma. 

"Lie down," he suggests, getting up and leaving the seat next to me open.  I curl across both seats and can feel him put his jacket over me, right over the one I'm wearing.  The gesture warms me more thoroughly than the jacket itself.

Pretty soon I have to sit up to meet his teen-age niece, Alison and her boyfriend du jour. She's very sharp and alive, with a cynical edge. I like that in a girl. 

As she and her beau go off to search for other relatives, Shane turns to me and says out of the corner of his mouth, "Caucasian guy."  Her father, Shane's brother, Steve, shows up.

"All the boys' names in your family start with 'S'," I note.  "Are you named after somebody?"

"Japanese don't name their kids after anybody."

"They don't?"

"The surname is what's important.  That's where the family name is carried.  Harry Honda says, 'My name is Honda" when he introduces himself.”

Steve Fukunaga is an introverted, graying man who gives me a superficial handshake before loping off in another direction.  I can hear him thinking, "Caucasian woman."

"Can't you get some cough drops?" Shane asks.  Am I embarrassing him with my noisy flu in the midst of his inherently reserved community?  But even as he says it, he stnds.  "I'm getting coffee anyway..." 

Whether he's motivated by caring or annoyance is moot in light of his swift solution. While he's gone, I fantasize about how I'll kiss him good-bye. Something to make up for the last five days. I'll take him to a faraway corner just before he boards...I've been missing his expert kisses. And it will be three whole weeks before another one.

The plane starts boarding. Shane returns and reaches for me, but I move away towards the corner I've picked out.  He merely looks puzzled.  Two feet away, people are filing onto the plane.  Alison is watching us.  What the heck?  I go to him and let him lightly kiss me (even his light kisses seem full) and we hug.

"Send me a postcard," I tell him.

"Take good care of your Little Joshua Tree."

As he gets in line and I stand aside, several passengers (including Honda) ask, "Aren't you going, too?"  It's very flattering and gratifying to see how easily they'd accept me if I was.

Then he's gone.

xx

I make my way to his ancient car trembling and praying that I'll be able to drive this stalling vehicle to work in Century City and back across town to Echo Park, without putting another scratch on it.

And I do.