Flamenco

Flamenco

East, West, Home Is Best

She stands with slightly more weight on the right foot, and the right hip pushed out, giving her body an agreeable “s” shape.  She wears faded jeans, and a wide tooled leather belt, a white t-shirt that is snug, and a bit small, so that a smiling patch of glowing perfect skin shows between the jeans and shirt.  Her skin is golden brown, and if you looked closely you could see fine golden hairs shining in whorls against the skin of her back, and the skin of her arms.  Some of these hairs catch the light and gleam like precious metal.  She has prominent cheekbones, and wide intelligent eyes, that are green in this light, but that leave the impression they could be blue in some other light, in some other place, at some other time.  There is a slight golden ring around the iris, but very slight.  Her mouth is full, but has none of the fake explosiveness of the girls who blow their lips up with collagen, like over inflated playground equipment.  It is simply a generous mouth; the bottom lip has a freckle in it, or possibly the freckle is just below the edge of the lip (it is hard to tell these things, without staring impolitely).

She stands, in her agreeable pose, with her generous mouth, shrugging her youth around her like an expensive fur, hugging it tightly, as she listens to the street musician with the dreadlocks, who sits by the open guitar case in which change and a few bills lie, fallen from the hands of almsgivers, or lovers of music, as he attempts to channel the ghost of some long departed Flamenco guitar player.  He may be the only male in the station that does not notice her.  He has eyes only for an interior apparition of some Andalusian aficionado of his art.  He caresses the strings as other men long to caress this woman with the golden hair, and glowing skin.  He is strong, yet tender, with his light cypress wood guitar.  He holds it near his heart.  His guitar is smaller than a classical guitar, and it can be held higher on the lap; it is also more percussive, so it is louder, and you can feel in your chest the way his fingers fly over the strings, if you were paying attention to the music, and not looking at her ass, in those jeans.  He has studied Flamenco, and has bought an instrument that is a facsimile of those cradled by real masters of the art.   His roommate plays a classical guitar, of rosewood, but Jeffrey has been to Spain, and bought The Real Thing, with his parents’ money.  What do they think about their Jeffrey sitting on the bare concrete of the cold BART station playing for change, and the occasional dollar?  His parents really do not enter our story, but his mother is a member of the San Jose Rose society, and his father is a VP for a high tech firm, so you can guess what they think, can’t you?

Jeffrey cannot stand the name “Jeffrey”.  He has rechristened himself “Antonio,” after Antonio de Torres, who developed and stabilized the Flamenco guitar.  But “Wait,” you say, “Didn’t Antonio de Torres do the same for the classical guitar?”  Of course, but Jeffrey doesn’t care.  He likes the name Antonio, and he’s not very logical.

At this moment he is deep into a Seguiriyas.  The notes crawl up and down your skin, as they crawl up and down the inside of Jeffrey/Antonio’s brain, coiling through his synapses and down his spinal column, until they reach his fingers, where they become seductively sinuous.  There is no denying he is an artist, for he can make his passion audible.  Tonight this song will undulate through your dreams like a lithe and slightly dangerous snake, and Jeffrey/Antonio will smile at the thought of this, of you, and all the other people infected by the virus of his guitar and his imagination.  Artists are such vectors for contagions of the mind.

But enough of Jeffrey.  He’ll burn out on Flamenco in a few years. He’ll get an MBA from Stanford, to please his father.  Do not worry about him.  He is unimportant, at least to this story.  Of course he is the hero of his own life’s story, but this is not his story, so for our purposes he is unimportant.  This is it for Jeffrey/Antonio.  We will not meet him again.

A young man stands near the guitar player.  He has been infected, not by the music, not by Jeffery, but by lust.  He looks at her, in her blue jeans that accentuate her body’s spare, supple, minimalism, and he is almost crippled by his desire for her.  He wants to ravish her, and then he wants to start all over again, but more gently the second time.  Even though he does not really believe in love, the thought occurs to him that this might be the one girl he could fall in love with.  Of course he isn’t as attractive as she is.  Why would she pay any attention to him, or go out with him if he asked her?

He knows he is not a stud.  His stomach muscles refuse to arrange themselves in anything resembling a six-pack, although he is probably not willing to do as many sit ups, or as much weight work, as the physically perfect guy who lives down the hall from him in his dorm.

His hair is brown and slightly curly, neither long nor short, just middling.  He is not tall, just 6’, and his shoulders are not wide, but he might become distinguished in middle age, depending upon what he does with himself.  He is very bright, but totally lacking in self-awareness.  He is a complete idiot when it comes to understanding himself; if he has an Achilles heel, we must acknowledge that this is it.

He is wearing jeans, not very faded, but not new, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt.  He is not a deadhead, that would be his mother, who bought him the T-shirt.  His mother who locked herself in her room for two days when Jerry Garcia died, and did nothing but cry, eat ice cream (Cherry Garcia), and listen to CDs of the Dead.  He wears the T-shirt because he finds it socially useful. People often initiate conversations with him about the Dead; they assume he is a fan, and he doesn’t correct them; he isn’t that honest, and because of his mom he knows enough about the music to fake almost any conversation, if that’s what it is, faking.  He thinks it might be faking, but his only concern is of being exposed faking something; he has no qualms about accomplishing the actual fakery successfully.

He stands with the left foot out, in a slightly awkward position.  He looks as if he was in the midst of moving away, and then froze, which is, essentially, what happened.  If you have seen the ancient Greek Kouros figures, that is the position the poor young man is in.  He was on his way out of the station; thinking of nothing but himself, and all the things he has to do, because the world imposes many tasks upon him, most of them unpleasant, like working, and studying, when suddenly he saw her, like an apparition, like the visitation of a Goddess.

He watches her.  She pushes back a strand of her blond hair, behind one perfect ear.  Her ears are not pierced, but he can see she has a tattoo on her groin.  He sees the lacy edge of it peek out from the gap between her jeans and her shirt.  It looks like some sort of tribal/ethnic tattoo.  It’s very erotic, like everything else about her.  Should he speak to her?  He ponders this, without moving, barely breathing.  She is too beautiful for him; he knows this.  She also might be wealthy, since her leather goods are rich and luxurious; they have obviously been used, but have the look of something fine.  Her bag, her shoes, her belt, all are exquisite.  He doesn’t know what they are, but he doesn’t think he could afford them, and if he can’t afford them, can he afford her?  Can he afford even speaking to her?

As he debates himself about her, she moves.  She comes over to him, hesitantly.

“I like the dead too, are you a big fan?”  She has just the trace of an accent, maybe, or maybe not.  He isn’t sure.

“My mother gave me the shirt, “ he says sheepishly.

Where did that come from?  Why did he tell her the truth?  He can’t quite figure that one out, and he doesn’t have time to even process it since the conversation is moving on.

“That’s so sweet.” She says.  “I wish my parents would give me something like that.”

“Well… my mom is a huge Dead fan.  She went into mourning when Jerry died.  I think she took it harder than when my grandfather died- her father, not my dad’s father.”

“Really?  Wow, I don’t think my parents know who Jerry is.”  She shakes her head over her parents, who do not seem to her to have ever been young enough to appreciate anything like Jerry.

“Do you want to go get some coffee or something?” she asks.

She has asked him out.  She has picked him up.  Suddenly his appraisal of her is diminished.  There must be something wrong with her; she must have some hidden defect that he is not aware of yet.  Why else would she talk to him?  Why ask him out for coffee?  She cannot be a goddess, because a goddess would never condescend to notice him, a mortal, and a pretty poor mortal at that.  She would have lost value in his eyes even if she had accepted his overtures, if he had worked up the courage to make them, because any woman who is willing to go out with him, is a woman willing to go out with him, and as such, is not as valuable as one who would not.  By this logic no one who ever goes out with him will actually be worthy, and he will never be happy with anyone who consents to be in his company.  It’s exactly like Groucho’s club membership problem, but he doesn’t understand himself well enough to know that he has an insoluble problem on his hands, as far as women are concerned.  You know more about him, after reading only a few short paragraphs, than he will ever know about himself.

“Sure,” he says.

Why did she ask him out for coffee?  Why did she talk to him, when she has not talked to so many other American boys/men?  She can’t be sure.  She saw him looking at her, and she thought he looked sweet, and thoughtful.  She is sad today.  She is lonely, or anticipating loneliness.  Her parents are going back to Denmark.  If she does not go with them, she will be alone here in this huge, impersonal country. 'Ost vest hjemme bedst" (East, west, home is best).  But where is home?  She can’t be sure.

Washington DC is a long way away, but at least, with her parents in Washington, they are all in the same country together, and she can imagine everything about the embassy on its tree lined leafy street, since she grew up there, although she is not sure if that makes it home.  When her parents are back in Denmark they will be half a world away, across an interminable expanse of ocean.  She can’t imagine that kind of distance, and she won’t be able to imagine them in familiar terrain anymore.  Home used to be with her parents, but now she almost feels too old for parents, and this feeling brings with it the inevitable sadness of growing up, and losing what was certain, and losing her sense of what was home.  Perhaps it is her desire for a new home, and a new connection to this place, so far from the people she used to love so absolutely, that makes her ask him out for coffee. 

She is touched by the story about his mother.  She thinks it is a good sign that he is close to his mother, as she imagines he is, just by the little he has said.  And since her parents are on her mind, perhaps it is his love for his mother that pushes her to do something she has never done before.  She has never, in all her life, made the first move.  And now she has.  She is pleased that he said he would go for coffee, but she never contemplated being refused.

They walk; they saunter, out into strong blinking sunlight.  The first thing Malene sees is the brown street person, sitting with a cardboard sign that says “Will work for food,”  even though no one in their right mind would hire this man for anything, nor does he appear capable of standing, much less working. She smells him almost in the same instant she sees him; the sour, slightly sweet smell of sweat and urine cured in open air, and under multiple layers of clothing.  She digs into her pocket and puts her change in the cup.  The man says thank you and smiles at her with rotten teeth.  Malene shudders.

“Why did you do that?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says.  “I always do.  I just feel so sorry for them.”

“But you’re only given them the money they need for drugs and alcohol.  They don’t want real help,” he says in a certain voice, with a touch of smugness.  “Once, when I was new here, I saw one of them with a sign that said ‘Will Work for Food.’  I believed him, and went and bought him a hamburger.  You know what he did?”

Malene shakes her head, although she thinks she has heard this story before.

“He threw it out.  He didn’t want food.”

The story he has just told her is not true.  It is someone else’s story, and he can’t remember whose.  He wonders briefly if it was ever true.

Malene nods, and hangs her head, and likes him a bit less than she did.  Perhaps you, reader, like him less also. I know that I like him less than I did, before I wrote that, but that’s who he is.  It can’t be helped.  People are what they are.

They find a small coffee shop and have plain black coffees.  This shop is old fashioned, and doesn’t serve lattes and espressos and mocha javas.  Here you simply get coffee, in a heavy white cup smooth and heavy as a stone.  The coffee doesn’t have any surname- it is just coffee.

After the waitress takes their order there is silence.  They each look at the table.  He shifts in his seat; she crosses her legs, and moves her dark leather purse from the table, to the place on the bench seat beside her.  The vinyl is red, and cool, and there is a little tear patched with some sort of gray tape.  They sit across from each other in the booth, and they both wonder if they made a mistake.

“I don’t know your name yet,” he says.

“It’s Malene.”

Silence.

Then she realizes she should have asked his.

“What’s you name?”

“John,” he answers, “it’s a boring name, but it’s not too bad.  Your name is really different thought.  Why’d your parents name you that?”

“I’m Danish,” she says.  “My parents liked it because it’s short for Magdalene, and that was my grandmother’s name.”

“It’s pretty”

“Thanks”

She looks at her hands, they are the same as always, and she wonders what her parents are doing now.  Her mother is probably packing, and her father will be at the office.

“What are you thinking about?” He asks.

Surprised by the question she tells him.

“I was thinking about my mom and dad.  They’re going back to Denmark.  I’m not sure what I want to do.  I don’t know if I want to stay in this country without them.”

“Stay,” he says.  And he reaches out and touches one of her hands.  This is one of the most tender things he has ever done.  Instantly he regrets it.  He has put too much out there.   He resents her for making him say this.  He pulls back his hand.

She thinks it is shyness that made him pull his hand away.  She is touched.  She can forgive his attitude toward street people, if he is going to be so open and honest and loving with her.

“Maybe I will, “ she says.  She smiles at John.

He smiles back, reflexively.

The waitress puts down their coffees heavily, so that a bit of the brown liquid sloshes over the rim and runs down the side of her cup, and makes a ring around the bottom.

“What’s her problem?” he says.

“Tell me about your mom,” she says, not caring about the waitress, or the coffee, taking up a napkin to wipe away the coffee on her side of the table.

“Well, “ says John, stalling for time, trying to figure out which angle of his mother represents the best side for this purpose, “you know she likes the Dead.  She’s also a painter, and she teaches painting for our local PBS station.  She’s pretty good.  She lives in San Leandro; do you know where that is?”

Malene nods “Yes.”

“I think you’d like her.”

“How do you know?  You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you give money to street people.  My mom would do that.  I know you like to listen to musicians in BART.  My mom would do that too.  I know you like your coffee black- that’s the way my mom drinks hers.  See, I know a lot about you.”

Of course it is a lie that his mom drinks her coffee black.  His mom doesn’t drink coffee; she drinks tea, frequently herbal tea.  Her favorite tea right now is some sort of blackberry tea that makes John sick.  She keeps offering it to him when he visits, as if she can’t remember what her own son likes to drink.  He can’t be sure that his mom would give money to bums either, but she might.  She does many things that annoy him, and she might do that.  She does like street performers, so she probably would listen to a guitarist sitting in the Bart station, but that’s just a guess.

They have spent 45 minutes together now.  To be exact, they’ve spent 44 minutes and 37 seconds.

Bad Is Never Good Until Worse Happens

Malene and John have been together 3 months now, or 129,600 minutes, never mind about the seconds.  Malene has let John move into her apartment (3 rooms and a hall) over the store where she sells T-shirts, Indian clothing, and jewelry for Lavay Washington, who also runs a successful Henna salon, and a soul food restaurant, called Mama’s Hot.   The windows of the bedroom are hung with tie-die curtains; the bed (a mattress on the floor) is covered in an Indian cotton bedspread; the walls are painted with roses- a gift from John’s mother, when she visited.  The floors are hardwood, and Malene refinished them when she moved in, so they glow in the mornings when the curtains are open and the sun pours in like a warm liquid.  You would feel comfortable in Malene’s apartment, because it has a casual beauty to it.  It has the same sort of beauty that Malene has, an unselfconscious beauty, unmarred by pretentiousness or presumption.

The bathroom is small, and old, but clean; black and white tile, a tub, a toilet.  The kitchen is old too, but at least the refrigerator and stove are new.  They don’t use the kitchen much anyway, since neither John nor Malene likes to cook, and this is Berkeley, where 40 % of the city is under 25, active, and hungry, so meals are easy to find, and not too expensive.

John doesn’t miss the dorm at all.  Malene, on the other hand, often misses living alone, or dislikes living with John, she isn’t sure which.  John has been distant with her when they are alone.  When they are out with his friends he has his hands all over her.  It’s embarrassing.  But once they are alone he goes off to study, or goes out to do “errands,” and she is left alone, but not really alone.  She loves John’s mother, but she isn’t living with Joan, so what does that matter?

In the beginning he couldn’t get enough of her.  They spent whole weekends in bed, when she didn’t have to work in the shop.  When she did have to work he’d be waiting for her, and practically jump her when she walked in the door.  She wasn’t always as eager as he was, but she wanted to please him, so she never said no.

They made love on the floors, in the tub, on the windowsill (Malene wonders who saw them, and she is still embarrassed to meet her neighbors’ eyes), on the kitchen table, in the grass or bushes at the parks (notably at Strawberry Canyon Recreation Area and the Botanical garden), in the store downstairs behind the counter, in the dressing room, and in the store bathroom.  There may have been other places, but Malene can’t remember all of them.

Bad is never good until worse happens.  This is something Malene’s mother used to say to her.  She thinks of it often now.  It seems to sum up her relationship with John.  Not that the beginning was bad, but after the first month, the proverb certainly applied.

She is taking new T-shirts and jewelry out of boxes and stocking the shelves and display racks when a red haired girl with a leather-beaded halter-top comes in the store.  She’s typical of the kind of customer that frequents the Kashmir Connection.  Her hair is long and straight.  She is very white, and freckled, except for the pointy parts of her, which are red- like the bony points of her shoulders, and her nose, and her knees.  She isn’t very pretty, but she has a good body.  Somebody should tell her to wear a little less blue eye shadow, thinks Malene.

“Can I help you?”  She asks politely, as she always does.

“Is John around?”  The girl doesn’t look her in the eye.  Instead Malene looks into oval patches of shimmering blue eye shadow, which stare at her like the blind eyes on some painted statue.

“No, he’s in class this morning.  I live with him.  Can I help you?”  She’s trying to be nice.  Could this be one of John’s friends from school?  Someone he has a class with? 

“No, I don’t think so,” she says, and she walks out.  The bell over the door jangles too loudly as she leaves

Malene wonders if she should mention this to John.  If she does, he may accuse her of being jealous.  If she doesn’t, and this girl, whoever she is, mentions to John that she dropped by, he might accuse her of being jealous for not mentioning it.  She can’t trust John to put any faith in the innocence of her actions anymore.  She knows she is innocent, of what she isn’t sure, but she knows for a fact that she is innocent.  But she doesn’t know what to do about it.

Alana, meanwhile, stalks down Telegraph.  She knew John wouldn’t be there.  She just wanted to get a look at his toad of a girlfriend.  Malene is much better looking than she thought she would be, from what John said, which makes her hate Malene that little bit extra. 

The bells in Sather Tower, also known as Campanile, are ringing because it is noon, but Alana is oblivious.  She is too accustomed to them, and too angry, to care about 61 stupid bells in a stupid bell tower, playing at the same old stupid time.  If she looked up from the dirty sidewalk Alana could see the Campanile.  It is 307 feet tall and visible from almost anywhere in Berkeley, but she is too busy frowning at the sidewalk, and thinking about ways to get rid of Malene.

John is a wimp; she knows this.  That’s why he can’t get rid of Malene himself, but she knows he wants to.  If he didn’t want to, why would he be going out with her?  It’s totally obvious.

Alana makes for Annapurna.  John had some friends over to her place on the weekend and one of them broke her water bong.  John said he would buy her a new one.   She also goes to Annapurna because her friend Crystal works there, and Crystal always gives her a discount, sometimes a 100% discount.  The size of the discount depends on whether the manager is there or not.  Don’t look so shocked.  If you had a friend like Crystal you’d be discount shopping as well.

Looking at a display of bongs Alana decides she wants a deep blue glass bong with dolphins on the sides.  It is 65.00, but with one of Crystal’s discounts it should be affordable enough.  The store is dim, and smells like incense, and there is a group of blond girls in tie-dye t-shirts blocking her path to Crystal, who is busy at the register.  The girls are picking up various pieces of ethnic art and giggling over the penises.  One of them has a tie-dye t-shirt with a smiley face on it.  Alana sticks an elbow out as she moves past the girls.

“Ow,” yelps the girl in the smiley face.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Alana purrs sweetly, moving past them, blinking her blue lids at them.  I got her in the boob, she thinks.

Crystal is free now, and Alana leans on the counter and says softly “How much could I get the blue dolphin bong for?”  Alana never worries about ending a sentence with a preposition, and to be honest, neither do I.

“Can’t,” hisses Crystal, closing the register with a sharp crack.

“Manager?” hisses back Alana.

“No,” Crystal replies, “the manager’s son is here.  Besides, those are special bongs- imported from the UK.  He would definitely notice if I sold those too cheap.”

“Couldn’t you say it got broken or something?”

“Look Alana, I would if I could, but I don’t want to lose my job, ok?”

No, it is definitely not ok with Alana.

One of the blond girls in the tie-dye t-shirts comes over to buy a candle, and Alana moves away.  It’s a sandalwood candle, and it reeks.  Alana can smell it from 3 feet away.  She wrinkles her nose in disgust, nods at Crystal, and leaves.

Back in the sun, Alana is dispirited.  Nothing has gone right today.  The visit to Kashmir Connection was supposed to make her feel better, not worse.  Crystal was supposed to help her get a new bong, and she didn’t.  It’s been a crappy day.

Alana ignores the dirty, stinking man, with the palsied hand out, begging for change.  She has trained herself not to notice them.  She wishes she could train herself not to smell them, because they are SO gross.  She sighs.  She crosses to the campus and goes to a kiosk to get two bagels with cream cheese. She will go wait for John outside his class and surprise him with the bagel.  Then she’ll tell him about her little visit to Malene.

John has been enduring a particularly brutal class called “A History of Race and Ethnicity in Western North America, 1598-Present”.  This is Ethnic studies 10A, and John thought it would be an easy 4 units.  He has come to realize just how hard it is to sit in a class he totally disagrees with, and listen to an instructor he thinks is an over paid fraud.  Of course the instructor is really just a poorly paid grad student, but John may not know that.  And James J. Little Jr. (J.J. to his mother), the poorly paid grad student in charge of this class, has no inducement to share his privations with his students.  James enjoys being called “Professor Little”, and if he is not yet a PhD, and if he lives in one small room in International House, still, he has a great view, and he likes being in control of the petty little lives of the undergraduates whom he teaches, or rather, the students in whose general direction he lectures.

He rarely grades papers.  James has made little marks next to his students names, denoting what grades he thinks they should have, based on how James assesses their attitude and participation at the weekly discussion classes.  What this really means is that if James likes you he will give you an A, if he doesn’t like you he will give you a D or an F, and if he fails to notice you, you could get a C or a B; there is simply no way to predict how the middle group will shake out. (John, as you might expect, has a “D” in the class.)  Because he does not waste his time on papers James has a lot of free time on his hands, none of which he spends on his PhD. 

He spends quite a bit of time at the little corner desk in his room trying to pick up women in chat groups.  If you go to this link you will see a room quite a bit like James’ room, it even has a computer desk in the same corner. http://ias.berkeley.edu/ihouse/l/residents/rescomp/3d/bayviewsingle.html.

However, unlike the bed in that link, James’ bed is covered in real African Kente cloth (or what he was told was real African Kente Cloth at the Berkeley flea market).  If you asked James about Kente cloth, which would be unwise, he might give you a long lecture on its origins in Ghana in the 12th century.  He would probably tell you it was an Asante ceremonial cloth worn by kings and queens in Ghana, and that the word itself comes from “kenten,” which means basket, because the cloth looks like the weave of a basket.  Kente cloth came in many designs and each design had great symbolic significance, which James would happily explain to you at great length.  He would probably add that the original Asante name was nsaduaso or nwontoma, meaning "a cloth hand-woven on a loom" and that name is still used today by Asante weavers and elders, who are traditional people, and like traditional names.   James likes to think of elders.  He doesn’t like his own parents very much, since they keep asking him when he will finish his PhD, and when he will marry, and produce the next generation of Littles, but he likes the idea of elders somewhere else- Ghana, for example, is a good place for elders to live. James might add, at the end of the discussion of Kente cloth, with a little scoff at modern society, that the term kente is the most popularly used name for the cloth today, in and outside Ghana, by people who are not as in touch with tradition as the elders are, and as James is.  If a visitor could tear himself or herself away from James’ bedspread they would see that on the wall, next to the window, there is a poster of Martin Luther King, which proclaims “Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice.”  If one applied this statement to James’ class, and it’s grading policy, it is clear that his class is not blessed with the presence of peace.  The irony of this has never occurred to him, and it never will.  Not in this story, and not after it.

The best thing about the room is the window.  James has an arched window and a bay view.  People pay millions of dollars to have views like this in the Bay Area and James only has to pay $5,000 per semester.  Of course that seems like a tremendous amount of money to James, but he does like his view.

James is a handsome light skinned black man.  He is tall, 6’3”, and he is sick of having people ask him if he plays basketball.  He hates basketball, and the identification of black men with sports.  Of course he was never very good at any sports, so he might feel differently about the whole thing if he had been an athlete, but we’ll just never know.

John is trudging out of class, wondering is he should complain to the Dean about Professor Little.  John feels he is getting a really raw deal, as he often does, but this is one of the few times in his life when he is correct about the deal and the rawness thereof.

He can’t decide if he is pleased to see Alana or not, but he is pleased to see the bagel.  He greets the bagel warmly, and shambles off with Alana to sit on a bench, and become more familiar with his bagel.

“So how was class?” she asks.

He knows she doesn’t want to know.  She knows he knows she doesn’t want to know.

“Fine,” he says, as he takes a large creamy bite.

“I met Malene,” she says, crumpling up the bagel bag.

“WHAT,” sputters John, through a mouthful of bagel and cream cheese.  He turns to face her.  He has inhaled some bagel.  He feels like he is choking.  Alana has her full concentration on the bag. She smiles slightly.

“I wanted to see her, you know?  I didn’t say who I was.  She doesn’t know my name.  I just asked if you were around.”

“Great, just great Alana.  I live there.  If she gets pissed at me I’ll be homeless.”

“Oh calm down John, you can always move in with me.  I sort of thought that’s where we were heading anyway.”

Was that where he was heading?  He didn’t know that.  Granted, he was tired of Malene never calling him on anything.  She was too passive, maybe because she was Danish.  But on the other hand she was a lot like his mother, and his mother was Scots Irish.  Malene never got mad; she never swore; she just cleaned the house when she was angry.  A few weeks ago, when he’d been out with Alana, he’d forgotten to call home and tell Malene he was going to be late getting home (study group, he would have said, if he’d remembered).  So she had cooked dinner and waited for him, and waited, and waited.  When he turned up around 2am, she said nothing.  But she took a big bucket of soapy water and a mop and went out and washed the landing and the stairs.  That was just the way she was.

“Ok, I’m calm” he says, swallowing down the crumbs of bagel lodged in his throat.

“Are you sure sweetie?”  God he is such a baby, she thinks.  She is already getting tired of this.  Now she is sorry she went to see Malene.  Maybe John isn’t worth getting.  She pets the back of his neck, as her eyes follow a particularly well built guy wearing just a backpack, a pair of shorts, and some hiking boots.  She could definitely do better, she thinks.

Chapter 3- Give to a pig when it grunts and a child when it cries, and you will have a fine pig and a bad child.

Malene is cleaning the front windows of the store.  She cleans them once a week, to the amazement and delight of Lavay, who hopes the tall blond Danish girl will work for her forever, because she really works.  She can’t get any of the college students at the Henna store to even clean the inside of the store, much less the outside. Malene sings one of the Danish national anthems to herself while she cleans.  It is called “Der er et Yndigt Land”, which means, “There is a lovely country.”  There is another national anthem called “Kong Christian Stod Ved Højen Mast”, which translated means “King Christian Stood by the Tall Mast,” but Malene doesn’t know this anthem.  Not many people do.  This caused a very funny mix up at the 1986 World Soccer Cup in Mexico, but that’s not really part of this story.  If you really must know that story you can Google it.

Malene sings:

Since many people have not had the foresight to learn Danish, as preparation for reading this story (a terrible oversight on their part), what Malene is singing translates as follows:

People who walk by have no idea what she is singing, but they like the sound of it.  Malene has a nice strong soprano voice, and what she lacks in vocal training, she makes up for with sincerity.  Malene is missing her parents.  She is wishing she went back to Denmark, and she has been wishing this for a while, but she is embarrassed to tell her parents she made a mistake.  She thinks she is too big to be making mistakes like this.  Her grandmother was always scolding Helga Swenson, nee Madsen, that she would spoil Malene by not being firmer with her.  “Give to a pig when it grunts and a child when it cries, and you will have a fine pig and a bad child.” Her grandmother would say this on the phone, from Denmark, every Saturday evening, and Malene would know she had said it because her mother would say “ja moder, ja moder” while tears would trace the edges of Malene’s mother’s fine white cheekbones.  And Helga would take off her glasses, and rest her forehead on her hand, and discretely wipe the tears away with her thumb.  A few tears slip down Malene’s cheeks, and fall on the cement already wet with soapy water, running off the sparkling windows.

At least John isn’t home to see this, she thinks to herself.  Now her thoughts wander to the red headed girl, with the sly face, and the strange blue eye shadow.  What could she have wanted?

Malene pours the last of the soapy water in the gutter, and locks up the store.  There have been very few customers today.  She drags the bucket and squeegee up the stairs to the utility closet on the landing.  It is cool and dark in the hall.  The bottom door to the street, at the foot of the stairs, has a fanlight of colored glass, and patches of colored light creep the walls in the morning.  It’s an Eastern exposure, so in the afternoons, like this, there is very little light.

Malene goes to wash off, and put on some comfortable sweats and a t-shirt.  She has the new Berkeley catalog, and she is thinking about going back to school in the spring.  She has already been on a leave of absence for 2 quarters.  She only has one more quarter to go, and then she will be out, because a student can only be on leave for 3 quarters. She has already written a letter explaining that she has saved enough money to continue her education (since she claimed her leave was for financial reasons, even though her parents would have given her money).

She had been floundering around in liberal studies, before she left.  Now she thinks what she really wants to study is history.  Living in Berkeley has made her aware of just how many cultures there are in the world.  She has not seen them all, nowhere near, but she has the sense now of a huge other world out there, a world which never intersected with her in any way before now.  It’s like an iceberg, which she has simply seen the tip of, far out at sea.  She keeps her catalog and enrolment form under the bed, because she isn’t sure what John’s response will be to this.  He likes to think of himself as the Berkeley Student, and she is just “my girlfriend who works in a shop.”  It doesn’t matter that she went to an elite prep school, that she speaks 4 languages proficiently (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and English) and one badly (French).  John never mentions that she can translate Latin, or that she had 1-¾ years at Berkeley with a 4.0, which is a much better GPA than he has.

Oh yes, she is ready to go back to school.  Every time she gets angry with John and cleans something into the early morning hours, she gets more and more ready.  Tomorrow she will drop her application off and see her advisor.

John walks in at 6:45.  His last class was hours ago.

“Hello,” Malene calls out from the kitchen, when she hears the door open.

No answer.

When she comes out of the kitchen she sees John and the red haired girl are standing in the room, waiting for her, watching her.  She doesn’t want to stare at them, but this white-faced girl with blue eye shadow is holding John’s hand, as if she were his girlfriend.

“Well,” says Malene.  “I’ve made dinner, are you hungry?”  She realizes this is not what was expected of her.  She was supposed to ask about the girl, about the hand holding, about the relationship, but she hasn’t the heart somehow.  Now that the whole thing is falling apart, and her relationship with John is obviously over (she hopes) she realizes she is relieved!  She almost smiles.  Everything will be better again.  She will be the person she knows she is when John is not around.  She will be herself again.  She feels like she has come back to her body after a long absence, and she says, to the startled couple “Do you want to eat before you go?  I’ve made a big pot of spaghetti.”

The red haired girl narrows her eyes.  Her back is very straight, and she looks wary, like an animal at the edge of a trap.

“We just came for John’s things,” she says.

John is quiet, eyes down on the floor, as if he is searching for something crucially important that might be rolling around down there.

“I’ve got some boxes,” offers Malene cheerfully.  “Would you like them?”

They say neither yes or no, so Malene pushes past them to the hall, and the utility closet, and gets out some of the boxes she has piled in there.  She doesn’t like to throw things away, and she is so glad she has these to offer them.   There can be no excuses, now. They cannot say they have to come back for things, that they didn’t have enough boxes.

“Do you want some help?” Malene asks solicitously.

John is beginning to wonder if he made a terrible mistake.  But then he realizes it is too late for anything else.  He has committed to this action.

Joan is doing “T’ai Chi with Mike”, when Malene calls. Joan has quite a crush on Mike, who is 32, tall, dark, and almost attractive, and works at the same PBS station where Joan works.  She tends to fantasize a bit while doing Tai Chi with Mike.  Sometimes she talks back to the TV, saying “Yes Mike, Yes. Oh that feels so good Mike.”  She feels a little silly doing this, but no one is watching, and it doesn’t hurt anyone.  She finds it hard to meet Mike’s gaze at the station, but aside from that, it’s totally harmless.  Joan is 48, 5’6”, pear shaped, and very unhappy about the age spots on her arms, since it is hard to find flowing clothes that hide both her hips AND her arms.  She envies Arab women in burkas.  She thinks she would look much more attractive in a burka.

She knows it is not PC to envy the Arab women their burkas.  She should be about liberating them FROM their burkas; she knows this, and she certainly is 100% behind Arab women wearing the kinds of unattractive polyester outfits she finds in her size at Wal-Mart, as long as there was some sort of reciprocity, and she could have a Burka.

When Joan answers the phone she smiles when she realizes it is Malene.  She likes Malene more than any of John’s other girlfriends, who tended to be sulky and surly, if she ever met them at all.  She doesn’t think John is good enough for Malene, and she also thinks this must be a terrible thing to think about your own son, but she certainly wouldn’t want to date him, so she doesn’t think Malene ought to either. 

“Hello Malene, it’s so good to hear from you.”

And she really means it.  And with Joan if she really means it, you know right away.  So Malene immediately feels better about calling, because in between visits with Joan, she forgets how comforting she is to talk to, and now she remembers.

“John was just here, Joan, and he’s left.”

“Is he coming home?” asks Joan, wondering briefly if John has asked Malene to marry him, and hoping so much that he hasn’t, no matter how wonderful it would be to have Malene as a daughter in law.

“Oh, no, sorry Joan; Oh No! I just wanted you to know that he has left for good; he moved out.  I didn’t want you to have to wait until he told you, since I know how slow he is about communicating that sort of thing.”

Joan hadn’t known John was living with Malene until she came up to visit one weekend and found he’d let another boy crash in the dorm, for a quid pro quo, of course.  John was never going to be mistaken for a charity.

“Oh,” said Joan.

“I’m sorry,” said Malene.  “I didn’t ask him to leave or anything.”  She leaves out the part about pointy, nasty white-faced Alana with the blue eye shadow.  She doesn’t want to make Joan sad.

“We can keep in touch though, right?” Says Joan, warmly, “Because I would hate to lose track of you Malene, and I know you know that about me.  I hope you’ll still call me once and a while, and when I’m in Berkeley, I hope we can still get together.”

“Absolutely,” Malene answers, as she nods to Joan from her apartment in Berkeley.

“Wonderful!” replies Joan, as she nods back from her small duplex in San Leandro.

“Well, take care then,” Malene says, as she uncrosses her feet and gets up from the bed, where she was sitting to make the call.

“You too dear,” says Joan.

And it is over.  Malene has finished it.  That was the last bit of John, the part that couldn’t be put in a cardboard box, and sent away with him.  It has been neatly packed away now, but because it is precious she has packed it away with great care.  She would not trust John with this job, since she saw how he threw his stuff into the boxes, and indeed, almost threw her stuff in as well.  It was a good thing she kept an eye out, or her clock radio would be gone, as well as three pairs of her underwear, 5 CD’s of African music that Lavay had given her, and her geode bookends.

Who takes the child by the hand, takes the mother by the heart.

John is wearing his suit.  He hates wearing suits, but she insisted.  She even went out and bought him a tie and matching pocket square. “So you won’t embarrass me,” she said.  Rachel is John’s 6th or 7th live in girlfriend since Malene; he wouldn’t be totally sure even if he spent some time trying to figure it out.  There have been even more girlfriends if we count transitory alliances that never resulted in multiple night stays.  And he always forgets the girl who only lived with him for the week he thought he was a poet, when he drank a bottle of whiskey every day.  Luckily he was on break, so it didn’t affect his grades, which cannot tolerate any further slippage toward the abyss of Academic Probation.

He has seen Malene around campus.  She is back attending classes.  Her golden hair shines in the sun as she walks easily along the paths.  She is almost never alone.  He often sees her with a tall blond man who carries a leather briefcase.  For a while he consoled himself with the idea that this might be some relative from Denmark visiting the school, but when he saw them kissing passionately by Sather Gate he decided it was probably not a relative.  “Though who KNOWS with the Danish!” he thought petulantly.

He has tried criticizing Malene to his mom, especially after seeing Malene engaging in wanton kissing by Sather Gate (“Really, they might as well have been having SEX!” he said a bit too loudly), but his mom just leaves the room.  She has been very unsupportive of his break up with Malene, in his opinion.  You, of course, know more about Joan than John does.  Poor John will never understand his mother. 

Now he has this wedding reception to go to with Rachel.  The wedding is at some small chapel somewhere, but the reception is at the Claremont, which everyone in Berkeley has seen, but few have the money to visit.  He is only going because of the food.  He has heard the resort has fabulous food.  It better be really good food, since Rachel expects him to dance with her for it.  He won’t know any of the guests.  The groom is some old friend of Rachel’s family.  If Rachel’s father were in town he would be going too, with Rachel’s new stepmother, who is about 5 years older than Rachel (maybe less), and is much more attractive.  Needless to say there are some issues about that situation.  But Dr. and Mrs. Cohen are in Europe right now, so they cannot attend, and Rachel will represent the Cohen family, sans issues (maybe), for this weekend.

John doesn’t look too bad in his suit.  The lapels are the wrong width, because it is an old suit, and the waist is a little tight; he must have put on a few pounds.  But the new tie and pocket square look great.  Rachel was right about those.  They are maroon raw silk, and they are the best things about his ensemble.  Rachel has her own credit cards, since her daddy is a doctor, and she is his little princess.  She also has a new red mustang, in which she gets several tickets a year, and daddy happily pays them.  Being the only child of an indulgent doctor has its advantages.

Rachel has on an absolutely lovely little vintage blue dress and jacket of shantung silk from the 1950’s.  It’s a French blue, and the dress has lace and ribbon at the neck.  The jacket has 5 braided silk buttons, a peter pan collar, and faux pockets, with flaps.  Rachel has had shoes dyed to match, and she wears her hair in a chignon.  If Rachel were at all attractive she would look beautiful today.  But no amount of money can make her attractive, or give her a good personality.

She and John go down to the Mustang.

“I forgot the present John.  Go get it.”  She gets behind the wheel and pulls the mirror down to fine tune her make-up.  She has to be careful not to poke herself in the eye, because she got extra long nails for the wedding, and had them painted the same color as her dress.  John thinks they look like claws.  John goes back up the steps to the apartment.  He picks up the present and walks back down to the car.  He has been trying to figure out what kind of animal Rachel reminds him of, and now he knows, some sort of carnivorous bird.

“Did you lock the door?”

“Of course I did,” he says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he snaps, “I’m sure.”

“You were sure that other time, but the door was unlocked.”

“Right,” he says, “do you want me to go check the door?”

“Not if you’re really sure.”

“I’m really sure.”

She purses her lips. 

“Fine.  I’m going to go check, even though I’m really sure.”

He stomps up to the door.  It is locked.  He stomps back.

“I hope we aren’t going to be late,” she says.

John sulks, while Rachel drives, not that Rachel will notice.  She still has the mirror down to look at her eyelashes. She is barely looking at the road.  He is invisible.

At the Claremont Rachel takes John’s arm. They walk into the lobby, and find their way to the Richardson –Swenson wedding.  John had not looked at the invitation, or he might have realized that Rachel’s family friend was marrying his Malene.  Of course she isn’t really his Malene, except that she is, to him.  For John, his girlfriends’ lives effectively stop when they cease to be his girlfriends, so it is discomfiting to have proof of Malene’s apparent ability to continue on without him, thrust so demonstrably upon him, and so suddenly, without warning.  He feels slightly sick when he sees the banquet hall.  Rachel chases down a waiter, and grabs two glasses of champagne. 

Rachel wants to find Craig Richardson so she can congratulate him.  John insists he will be happier in the corner, in back of a large floral display of pink and white roses and lilies, where he can look at the amazing view.  Rachel has never known him to look at a view before.  John gazes intently out the window, grasping the sill of the window like the railing of a sinking ship, drinking his champagne, wondering how soon he can escape.  Out of the corner of his eye he sees a large woman dressed in the same color of lavender his mother likes.  This woman is wearing the SAME dress his mother has.  Then, with a mounting sense of horror, he realizes the woman is his mother, and worse, she is walking arm and arm with Malene.  What kind of treachery is this?

They have not seen him, so he cringes back behind the flowers; they walk past his position, and then into another part of the room.  He can no longer see them, and they can no longer see him.  John can breathe again.

Malene looked like a goddess- of course all women look good on their wedding day, so that isn’t extraordinary.  But Malene looks especially good.  She is wearing a silk wedding dress that her mother had custom made, and which is based on the dress designed by Miss Sonja Haraldsen when she married Crown Prince Harald of Norway.  Helga, Malene’s mother, would have loved to have worn a dress like Sonja’s dress, but Sonja was married in ’68, and Helga married 7 years before in 1961.  Helga’s dress had been an old fashioned satin dress with a train, which she had immediately dyed and altered after the wedding to make a serviceable cocktail dress.

Malene doesn’t care what she gets married in, or where she gets married, so the parents of the young couple have been able to suit themselves with the arrangements.  Luckily both sets of parents have taste and money, and Malene looks lovely in her wedding dress that has long sleeves, and opens at the bottom like a bell.  It looks plain at first, accentuating Malene’s wonderful figure, glowing skin and blond hair, but on closer inspection you would notice that the dress is discretely embroidered with pearls.  Unlike Sonja’s dress, Malene’s does not have a train that falls from the shoulders.  But her mother did get a veil with a train that falls from a headpiece, which is also embroidered with pearls.  The only jewelry Malene wears is her grandmother Magdalene’s large diamond brooch, and her 2-carat emerald cut diamond engagement ring, set in platinum, with the matching wedding band.

Rachel finds John still hiding behind the foliage, and tries to drag him out to the tables.  John won’t budge.

Gradually everyone starts sitting down, and John is pried away from his corner.  There are no place cards, so John sits at a table as close as possible to the safety of his flower arrangement and corner.  Rachel wanted to sit closer to the bride and groom, to have a front row seat, but she can tell by looking at John that he isn’t going to move, and she doesn’t want to sit alone.  John thinks he can see a blob of purple in the front of the room that might be his mother.  Suddenly a salad of baby greens, pears, mandarin oranges, and caramelized walnuts appears before John.  John immediately begins to eat, with little regard for his new silk tie and pocket scarf.  Soon there are little spots of citrus dressing on John’s tie, and matching spots on his suit and pocket square.  He has a piece of lettuce stuck in his teeth, so when he talks the green flashes like a rotten tooth.  If Rachel could see his face she would tell him to clean his teeth, but she is next to him, and on the wrong side, and she is trying not to get anything on her silk dress, so she can’t spare any attention for John.

The salad plates are collected, and some of the people at the table are trying to introduce themselves.  A single young man offers his compliments to the table, and informs everyone that he is a software engineer from India.  He is a friend of the groom.  Rachel informs the table that she too is a friend of the groom.  “We’ve been friends since we were babies,” She adds.  Two other couples are friends of the groom’s parents.  There is an empty chair, which does not need to be introduced to anyone.  It’s a very nice chair though.

The next course is roasted breast of chicken with grilled prawns.  The chicken is served with whipped Yukon potatoes, baby carrots and organic broccoli.  John decides the food was almost worth the stress of attending the affair.  Rachel is seriously upset about the spot a runaway carrot has made on her dress.  She excuses herself to go to the ladies room.

While she is gone John exchanges plates with her, as he has eaten his own food; he eats her dinner too, since he has a theory that the plates will be cleared before Rachel returns.  When the dinner plates are cleared before Rachel returns John feels fatuously proud of himself.

Dessert is a sampler, and guests can choose milk chocolate pots du crème, bittersweet chocolate and caramel layer cake, or white chocolate truffle cream with macerated berries.  John orders the white chocolate truffle cream for himself, and the pots du crème for Rachel, with the hope that she will stay in the bathroom long enough for him to be able to eat her dessert.

The dessert arrives and John digs in.  He drops a few blobs of white truffle cream on his tie, which blend interestingly with the citrus dressing from the salad.  What John has failed to notice, while he was engrossed in his dessert, is that Malene and her new husband are now walking from table to table greeting the guests.  When John looks up the happy couple are bearing down on his table.

At this moment Rachel appears with a huge spot on her dress.  The spot is made up of the original small oil spot, from the wayward buttered carrot, expanded with water and white fuzz from the towels in the bathroom, which pilled into a cottony lint when rubbed on her dress.

John smiles at Malene and the lettuce on his tooth makes him look a bit like a pirate.  Malene takes in his food spotted tie, the little soul patch he has tried to grow on his chin, his out of date suit, and his current date Rachel, and she gives him a lovely greeting, nods to the rest of the table, and then she is gone.  As she glides away on the arm of her husband, Craig Richardson, patent attorney, she is SO glad she stopped seeing John.  She can’t imagine why she ever went out with him in the first place.

“Are you going to eat your dessert?” asks John.

“No,” replies Rachel, “but you can’t have it.”

“Why not?”

“Because”

“Because why?” John whines.  “If you’re not going to eat it I don’t see why it should go to waste.”

”Because we’re leaving right now,” hisses Rachel, digging her claws into his shoulder.

Rachel has always had a bit of a crush on Craig, and she had hoped to make an impression at the wedding- a good impression- not an impression that she was a loser with a loser boyfriend.

Fin