Lucy was too programmatic about sex to betray, or possibly even to feel, any hurt. “That’s OK,” she said. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for.”
I could smell the greasepaint on my face; I must have looked like I’d been eating shit. When I went to the bathroom to clean myself up, I discovered a large brown smudge on the collar of my dress shirt, the only good one I owned.
Downstairs the music was King Crimson, a favorite of Bob’s. Anabel was nowhere to be seen. Oswald was near the front door with the Excluded Middle, who was holding a rubber-banded bundle of pamphlets.
“Our friend here has published a chapbook of poetry,” Oswald explained to me.
“Poetry should be free,” the Excluded Middle said, handing me a chapbook. “This is my gift to you.”
“Read the first one for Tom,” Oswald urged him. “I love the joie de vivre.”
“My bare soles squoosh the black spring muck,” the Excluded Middle recited. “The earth is my WHOOPEE CUSHION!”
“There you have it,” Oswald said. “A miracle of poetic compression.”
“Did you see Anabel?” I said. “Anabel Laird?”
“She just walked out.”
“Wearing a jean jacket?”
“The very one.”
I hurried out to the street. When I got to the corner of Market Street, I saw Anabel at the next corner, waiting for the light. I could feel that she’d become, in the space of half an hour, the person in the world it mattered most to me to catch sight of. She must have heard my running footsteps, but she didn’t look at me, even when I reached her side.
“How could you leave?” I said, breathing hard. “We hadn’t talked yet.”
She angled her face away from mine. “What makes you so sure I wanted to talk to you?”
“I was attacked by a rabid squirrel. I’m sorry.”
“You can still go back,” Anabel said. “She seems very determined to take you. I’m guessing you’re the problem she and the Handyman are having? I saw him in those ridiculous antlers and I thought: that is more perfect than he even knows.”
“Can we go somewhere?” I said.
“I’m going home.”
“Right. OK.”
“I can’t stop you from taking the same train, though. If you follow me to my door and ask politely, I might let you sit in my kitchen.”
“Why did you come to the party?” I said. “You knew you’d hate it.”
“Do you want me to say it was because I thought you’d be there?”
“Was that the reason?”
She smiled, still not looking at me. “I’m not going to draw your conclusions for you.”
Her apartment was on the top floor of a well-maintained old house, not a student place, and her kitchen was a vision of cleanliness. She took her shoes off at the door and asked me to do the same. In a rustic white pottery bowl on the table were three perfect apples, on the windowsill two volumes of The Vegetarian Epicure, on the stove a gleaming copper-clad skillet. There was also, on the largest wall, a poster from a butcher shop, a diagram of a cow segmented and labeled as cuts of beef. I studied it, learning where the brisket and the chuck were, while Anabel left the kitchen and came back with an expensive-looking bottle.
“Here we have Château Montrose,” she said. “The same vintage as my birth year. My father sent me a whole case for my birthday, which I’d be doing him a favor if I said was no worse than insensitive and symbolically grotesque, given how my mother died. I suspect his actual motives were more sinister. But I won’t drink alone, for obvious reasons, and Nola is the only person who ever comes here, and she can’t drink red wine with the medication she’s on, so I still have ten bottles. It’s your lucky night.”
“What happened to the other two?”
“I took them to Lucy on Bastille Day. She’s one of my oldest friends, I wanted to bring her something nice. But she was too grateful, if you know what I mean. One or two references to my amazing generosity would have been enough. After that it became a hostile comment on my privilege. Not just my privilege — me personally. I have to say, I know you’re still friends with her, but I’m at the point where she’s literally turning my stomach.”
“Me too, a little bit,” I said.
“Are you aware that you have squirrel on your collar?”
“She took some fending off.”
“You’ll notice I didn’t ask why you were at the party.”
“Look where I am now,” I said. “I’m here, not there.”
“Undeniably.”
We clinked glasses, and I wished her a belated happy birthday. This led to our comparing birth dates. Hers turned out to be April eighth. Mine is August fourth.
The symmetry of 4/8 and 8/4 had a powerful effect on Anabel. “Good Lord,” she said, staring at me as if I were an apparition. “Did you just make that up? Is your birthday really August fourth?”
The signs meant more to her than they did to me. For her they were a way for us to be about more than just chemistry, to be something in the stars, while for me they served mainly to confirm the chemistry of my feelings for her. When the wine had warmed her up and she took off her jean jacket, I saw my fate not in calendrical coincidence but in the thinness of her upper arms, in what they did to my heart.
Under the influence of wine and mystical sign, she set about improving me that night. To be with her, I’d need better ambitions. When she learned that I was applying to journalism school, she said, “And then what? You go to city council meetings in Topeka for five years?”
“It’s an honorable tradition.”
“But is that what you want? What do you want?”
“I want to be famous and powerful. But you have to pay your dues first.”
“What if you could start your own magazine? What would you do with it?”
I said I would try to serve the truth in its full complexity. I told her about the politically polarized house I’d grown up in, my father’s blind progressivism, my mother’s faith in corporations, and how effectively the two of them could poke holes in each other’s politics.
“I could tell your mother a thing or two about corporations,” Anabel said darkly.
“But the alternative doesn’t work, either. You get the Soviet Union, you get the housing projects, you get the Teamsters union. The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that’s where the journalist is supposed to live, in that tension. It’s like I had to be a journalist, growing up in that house.”
“I know what you mean. I had to be an artist for the same reason. But that’s why I can’t see you wasting five years in Topeka or wherever. If you already know you want to serve the truth, you should serve it. Start a magazine like nobody else’s. Not liberal, not conservative. A magazine that pokes holes in both sides at the same time.”
“The Complicater.”
“That’s good! You should remember that. I’m serious.”
In the glow of her approval, it seemed almost possible that I could start a magazine called The Complicater. And would she be talking about my future if she didn’t think she might be a part of it? The thought of this future, the love it would imply, led me to the thought of reaching across the table and touching her hand. I was just about to do it when she stood up.
“I have a project, too.” She went over to the diagram of the beef cuts. “This is my project.”
“I was wondering why a vegetarian had a cow poster in her kitchen.”
“I don’t have it all figured out yet. And it’s going to take me fifteen years to complete. But if I can do it, it’s going to be like your magazine: like nothing the world has ever known.”