Out the window, the glow of the Hollywood sign was slightly blurred with June fog, a soft wetness on the hills raising the smell of sage and chamise, moisture wiping the glass with dreams.
SHE CAME HOME at two when the bars closed, alone, her restlessness satisfied for the moment. I sat on her bed, watched her change clothes, adoring each gesture. Someday I would do this, the way she crossed her arms and pulled her dress over her head, kicked off her high heels. I put them on, admiring them on my feet. They were almost the right size. In another year or so, they would fit. She sat down next to me, handed me her brush, and I brushed her pale hair smooth, painting the air with her violets. “I saw the goat man again,” she said.
“What goat man?”
“From the wine garden, remember? The grinning Pan, cloven hooves peeping out from under his pants?”
I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields.
“He stared at me the entire time,” she said. “Barry Kolker. Marlene says he’s a writer of personal essays.” Her fine lips turned into long commas of disapproval. “He was with that actress from The Cactus Garden, Jill Lewis.”
Her white hair, like unbleached silk, flowed through the boar bristle brush.
“With that fat goat of a man. Can you imagine?” I knew she couldn’t. Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren’t, you just didn’t exist. She had drummed it into my head since I was small. Although I had noticed by now that reality didn’t always conform to my mother’s ideas.
“Maybe she likes him,” I said.
“She must be insane,” my mother said, taking the brush away from me and brushing my hair now, bearing down on the scalp hard. “She could have any man she wanted. What could she possibly be thinking?”
SHE SAW HIM again at her favorite artists’ bar downtown with no sign by the tracks. She saw him at a party in Silverlake. Wherever she went, she complained, there he was, the goat man.
I thought it was only coincidence, but one night at a performance space in Santa Monica where we went to watch one of her friends beating on Sparkletts bottles and ranting about the drought, I saw him too, four rows back. He spent the whole time trying to catch her eye. He waved at me and I waved back, low, so she wouldn’t see.
After it was over, I wanted to talk to him, but she dragged me out fast. “Don’t encourage him,” she hissed.
When he turned up at the annual publication party for Cinema Scene, I had to agree that he was following her. It was outside in the courtyard of an old hotel on the Strip. The heat of the day was beginning to dissipate. The women wore bare dresses, my mother like a moth in white silk. I threaded my way through the crowd to the hors d’oeuvres table, quickly loaded my purse with things I thought could stand a few hours unrefrigerated—crab claws and asparagus spears, liver in bacon—and there was Barry, piling a plate with shrimp. He saw me, and his eyes immediately swept the crowd for my mother. She was behind me, drinking white wine, gossiping with Miles, the photo editor, a gaunt, stubble-chinned Englishman whose ringers were stained with nicotine. She hadn’t seen Barry yet. He started through the crowd toward her. I was close behind him.
“Ingrid,” Barry said, penetrating her circle of two. “I’ve been looking for you.” He smiled. Her eyes flicked cruelly over his mustard-colored tie hanging to one side, his brown shirt pulling at the buttons over his stomach, his uneven teeth, the shrimp in his chubby fist. I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn’t seem to feel the chill.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said, coming even closer.
“I’d rather you wouldn’t,” she said.
“You’ll change your mind about me,” he said. He put his finger alongside his nose, winked at me, and walked on to another group of people, put his arm around a pretty girl, kissed her neck. My mother turned away. That kiss went against everything she believed. In her universe, it simply would never happen.
“You know Barry?” Miles asked.
“Who?” my mother said.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. We went down to the apartment pool and swam slow quiet laps under the local stars, the Crab Claw, the Giant Shrimp.
MY MOTHER bent over her drafting table, cutting type without a ruler in long elegant strokes. “This is Zen,” she said. “No flaw, no moment’s hesitation. A window onto grace.” She looked genuinely happy. It sometimes happened when she was pasting up just right, she forgot where she was, why she was there, where she’d been and would rather be, forgot about everything but the gift of cutting a perfectly straight freehand line, a pleasure as pure as when she’d just written a beautiful phrase.
But then I saw what she didn’t see, the goat man enter the production room. I didn’t want to be the one to ruin her moment of grace, so I kept making my Chinese tree out of benday dots and wrong-sized photo stills from Salaam Bombay! When I glanced up, he caught my eye and put his finger to his lips, crept up behind her and tapped her shoulder. Her knife went slicing through the type. She whirled around and I thought she was going to cut him, but he showed her something that stopped her, a small envelope he put on her table.
“For you and your daughter,” he said.
She opened it, removed two tickets, blue-and-white. Her silence as she examined them astonished me. She stared at them, then him, jabbing the sharp end of her X-acto into the rubbery surface of the desk, a dart that stuck there for a moment before she pulled it out.
“Just the concert,” she said. “No dinner, no dancing.”
“Agreed,” he said, but I could see he really didn’t believe her. He didn’t know her yet.
It was a gamelan concert at the art museum. Now I knew why she accepted. I only wondered how he knew exactly the right thing to propose, the one thing she would never turn down. Had he hidden in the oleanders outside our apartment? Interviewed her friends? Bribed somebody?
THE NIGHT crackled as my mother and I waited for him in the forecourt of the museum. Everything had turned to static electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly from the ends.
Forced to wait, my mother made small, jerky movements with her arms, her hands. “Late. How despicable. I should have known. He’s probably off rutting in some field with the other goats. Remind me never to make plans with quadrupeds.”
She still had on her work clothes, though she’d had time to change. It was a sign, to indicate to him that it wasn’t a real date, that it meant nothing. All around us, women in bright summer silks and a shifting bouquet of expensive perfumes eyed her critically. Men admired her, smiled, stared. She stared back, blue eyes burning, until they grew awkward and turned away.
“Men,” she said. “No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.”
I saw Barry across the plaza, his bulk jolting on his short legs. He grinned, flashing the gap between his teeth. “Sorry, but traffic was murder.”
My mother turned away from the apology. Only peons made excuses for themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.
THE GAMELAN orchestra was twenty small slim men kneeling before elaborately carved sets of chimes and gongs and drums. The drum began, joined by one of the lower sets of chimes. Then more entered the growing mass of sound. Rhythms began to emerge, expand, complex as lianas. My mother said the gamelan created in the listener a brain wave beyond all alphas and betas and thetas, a brain wave that paralyzed the normal channels of thought and forced new ones to grow outside them, in the untouched regions of the mind, like parallel blood vessels that form to accommodate a damaged heart.