Trust Exercise(46)

One more thing, before Karen and Sarah’s reunion. In her story, Sarah takes the actual friendship between Sarah and Karen, and turns it into a friendship between Sarah and Joelle. She also takes the actual end of that friendship, and turns it into a show that was watched by their classmates, a Trust Exercise. But it wasn’t. The death of our friendship was private. The dying took place at a distance, but at the instant of death we were face-to-face without anyone else. It was my first day back at school after a break. I’d spent the fall and winter of my junior year at a Bible school and I hadn’t seen Sarah since early that summer. Sarah had spent the summer in England with her much older lover. She had gotten to do this by driving her mother’s car, without her mother’s permission, away from a fight with her mother over her mother’s refusal to give her permission to travel to England, through a red light and into an oncoming truck, totaling the car and receiving nonfatal but impressive-enough injuries. As soon as she was discharged from the hospital and her passport was ready, she left for England and didn’t come back until the day before school started. I knew these details because my mother had given rides to Sarah’s mother all summer, to the grocery store and the doctor, because Sarah had totaled the car and Sarah’s mother couldn’t afford to replace it. Sarah’s mother was disabled, which for some reason Sarah’s story doesn’t mention.

I had gotten to school early my first day back so I could park in the front lot, where there weren’t many spaces, because I wanted to avoid everyone I knew and they parked in the back. It was January and the air was actually cold, its dampness was cold, and the cold damp made a haze that in my memory softened the light so that I felt hidden and somehow alone, as if I was actually going to succeed, and get through the first day of school without having to see anybody I knew although it was a small school and all the same people every year and there was no way I’d even get through an hour without seeing them all. But even a few minutes without seeing them all would have made a difference. There were teachers’ cars in the front lot but it wasn’t half full. My plan was to sit in the smokers’ courtyard, which opened off the cafeteria through a set of glass doors, so it wasn’t a good place to hide but at least you could see people coming. I knew there was nowhere to hide and the best I could do was to see people coming, but then I pulled open the heavy front door of our school and there was Sarah. She seemed to be coming out. It was seven forty-five in the morning, forty-five minutes before the first bell. There was no one else, no other sound; all the adults were in the main office or locked in their classrooms.

Sarah was wearing some kind of punk outfit that was supposed to look uncaring—punk—but instead shouted effort. The effort of all those months working her bakery job to earn money, the effort of totaling her mother’s car to make her mother too frightened to try and control what she did, the effort of crossing the ocean to spend the summer with a much older man, the effort of navigating Carnaby Street and choosing just the right clothes without knowing what any choice meant. The outfit was Doc Martens boots and shredded black fishnets and bleached cutoff jeans and a white, black, and red T-shirt with a spiky-haired guy sneering “Oi!” Her hair was short and she’d drawn thick lines around her eyes. Inside the lines her eyes didn’t look larger, as she probably hoped, but sunk in from the rest of her face, like she’d put on a mask. From under her eyeliner mask she saw me, the person she’d most hoped to avoid, just as she was the person I’d most hoped to avoid, so that, thinking and acting the same way, our efforts canceled each other. And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.

I don’t know what she saw in my gaze. Her story doesn’t show my gaze, or depict it through somebody else, or maybe it does and I’m so self-deluded I don’t recognize it. That’s possible. What she should have seen was pure accusation, which doesn’t take long to transmit. We looked at each other for just long enough. I don’t think we stopped walking, me in, and her out, the same door. Everything we’d felt for each other, which had been dying down throughout the summer almost naturally, how a candle’s flame slowly dies out when you cut off its air, flared and changed all at once into something else, instead of expiring. But our friendship was over.



* * *



KAREN STOOD OUTSIDE the Skylight bookstore in Los Angeles, waiting for her old friend, the author. Her old friend the author had arrived at the bookstore by car about fifteen minutes before, and had stood outside the store in the same spot where Karen was now standing. Her old friend the author had glanced into the store and then glanced at her watch, as if waiting for someone or something, or as if concealing a hesitation by pretending to be waiting for someone or something. Then, as if the someone or something had arrived or the hesitation ended, she went into the store. During this time, Karen watched from a café across the street. At the café, Karen had also been waiting for someone and something, and also hesitating. She had been waiting for her old friend the author, and for whatever sensation it would give her to see her old friend the author again. The sensation had been precise and satisfying. It had been a sudden pressure on the sternum, a pressure that meant excitement, and dread, and anticipation, and reluctance, all rolled together, but with an emphasis on excitement and anticipation. Karen was very good at parsing and naming her feelings. She’d been practicing this skill for many years. The sternum-pressure sensation had also been like hunger, a demand for action, unlike other similar sensations which despite being similar were completely different, not demands for action but warnings against it. Karen’s hesitation had been waiting for this signal and once she had it her hesitation was over and she got up and paid for her coffee and crossed the street to go into the bookstore but before she had done this a new hesitation came up, the hesitation about sitting in the audience. As already discussed, Karen had intended to sit in the audience if she went to the reading at all, but standing in front of the bookstore, looking through the big windows at the other early arrivals milling around browsing the shelves, Karen had all those thoughts mentioned above about audiences and power trips and moral high grounds and decided not to sit in the audience but to stay outside on the sidewalk where she wouldn’t seem out of place because it was lively for an LA sidewalk as this was one of those rare “walkable” neighborhoods LA is so proud of. Karen had lived in Los Angeles for a period of several years which had ended several years ago, but her brother still lived here, she still wound up here a couple times a year, she still felt at home here. She was still on her own turf, you might say. Karen had browsed in this bookstore before but she hadn’t bought anything. She leaned casually against the plate-glass window, cupping her palms around her eyes to make the inside of the store visible. The sun was setting, its fiery light pouring from the café side of the street, painting the solid parts of Skylight Books’s storefront gold while turning the window into a blinding mirror and throwing huge golden rectangles into the store, across the concrete floor and up the bookshelves standing all over the place at artsy angles to each other to form a sort of maze. Karen knew that because of the light behind her she could press her face to the window and be just a dark shape to a person inside. That was an advantage she hadn’t expected. She could see, through the maze of bookshelves, to the part of the store where the readings were held. A lectern faced several rows of folding chairs. Some people were starting to sit in the chairs, while others continued to wander. Some of the wanderers pensively held stacks of books they’d already discovered, while others pensively gazed at the slender signs hung on the walls, describing the books that were shelved underneath. Art. Humor. Essays. Reference. Fiction. The words on the signs formed a system implying that people who shopped in the store all agreed what the different words meant. The day before, the day she’d arrived in LA, Karen had gone to a drugstore and among the signs on the aisles describing what each aisle contained—“Hair Care”; “Cough and Cold”; “Cosmetics”—was a sign that read “Personal Intimacy.” “Personal Intimacy” was the way certain items were categorized in that drugstore. “Art,” “Humor,” “Essays,” “Reference,” and “Fiction” were the ways certain books had been categorized in the bookstore. “An author of fiction” is the way Karen’s old friend the author categorizes herself. A category is a way to define, while a definition, according to the dictionary, is a statement of the exact meaning of a word. The dictionary tells us that fiction is literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people, is invention or fabrication, as opposed to fact. The dictionary tells us that the imaginary exists only in the imagination. Logic tells us that what exists only in the imagination does not exist in reality, or actuality, which the thesaurus tells us are the same thing.