Then she was patting him on the arm, murmuring that she was sorry, and they both bent down to the floor together in search of teacup and glasses while the bodies went round and round around them, and they bumped heads and recoiled amid apologies, and Mark's fevered fingers found his glasses, miraculously intact, and fit them back in front of his eyes, and he blinked and found himself staring from a distance of five inches into the face of Kimberly Ann Cordayne.
Kimberly Ann Cordayne: the girl, yes, of his dreams. Childhood sweetheart, unrequited, from the moment he'd first beheld her, pinafored and five, riding her trike down the modest suburban SoCal street where they both lived. He'd been so entranced by her Hallmark Card perfection that the raspberry scoop fell off his ice cream cone to hot doom on the sidewalk and he never noticed. She pedaled over his bare toes and cruised on with her pert nose in the air, never acknowledging his existence. From that day his heart had been lost.
Hope and despair surged up like surf within him. He straightened, his tongue too tied to produce words. And she yelled, "Mark! Mark Meadows! Fuck, but it's good to see you." And hugged him.
He stood there blinking like an idiot. No female who wasn't a relative had ever hugged him before. He swallowed spastically. What if I get an erection? Belatedly, he made feeble patting gestures at the small of her back.
She pushed away, held him at arm's length. "Let me look at you, brother. Why, you haven't changed a bit."
He winced. The taunting would begin now, for his skinniness, his clumsiness, his crew cut, the pimples still sprinkled across scrawny, allegedly postadolescent features and his most recent, most aggravating deficit, his utter and complete inability to be anywhere near With It. In high school, Kimberly Ann had evolved from indifference into his foremost tormentor-or, rather, a succession of jocks on whose overelaborated biceps she hung, cooing encouragements, had assumed the role.
But here she was tugging him toward that corner table. "Come on, man. Let's talk about the bad old days."
It was an opportunity for which he'd hopelessly hoped three quarters of his life. Face-to-face with his paragon of love and beauty while the band on stage assaulted the Beatles'
"Blackbird"-and he couldn't think of one damned thing to say. But Kimberly Ann was more than happy to do the talking. About the changes she'd been through since good old Rexford Tugwell High. About the far-out people she'd met at Whittier College, how they turned her on and opened her eyes. How she'd dropped out midway through her senior year and come here, the Bay Area, the bright mecca of Movement. How she'd been finding herself ever since.
Perhaps he hadn't changed, but she most definitely had. Gone was the straight black ponytail, pleated skirts, pastel lipstick and nail polish, the prim stewardess perfection of an up-and-coming Bank of America executive's one daughter. Kimberly's hair had grown long, hanging down well past her shoulders in a great kinky cloudy Yoko Ono mane. She wore a frilly peasant blouse embroidered with mushrooms and planets, a voluminous skirt tie-dyed into what reminded Mark of nothing so much as fireworks displays in Disneyland. He knew her feet were bare, from having stepped on one. She looked more beautiful than he ever could have imagined.
And those pale eyes, winter-sky eyes, that had so often frozen him in the past, were glowing at him with such warmth he could barely stand to look at them. It was heaven, but somehow he couldn't buy it. Being Mark, he had to question. "Kimberly-" he began.
She held up two fingers. "Hold it right there, dude. I left that name behind me with my bourgeois ways. I'm Sunflower now."
He bobbed his head and his Adam's apple. "OkaySunflower."
"So what brings you here, man?"
"It's an experiment."
She eyed him across the rim of her jelly jar wineglass, suddenly wary.
"I just finished my undergrad work at MIT," he explained in a rush. "Now I'm here to get my doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley."
"So what's that got to do with this scene?"
"Well, what I've been working on is figuring out just how DNA encodes genetic information. I published some papers, stuff like that." At MIT they'd compared him to Einstein, as a matter of fact, but you'd never catch him saying that. "But this summer I found something that interests me a lot more. The chemistry of mind."
Blue blankness, her eyes.
"Psychedelics. Psychoactive drugs. I read all the material-Leary, Alpert, the Solomon collection. It really-what's the expression? Really turned me on." He leaned forward, fingers plucking unconsciously at the felt-tip pens nestled in their plastic protector in his breast pocket. In his excitement he sprinkled the spool tabletop with unconscious spittle. "It's a really vital area of research. I think it might lead to answering the really important questions-who we are, and how, and why."
She looked at him with half a frown and half a smile. "I still don't get it."
"I'm doing fieldwork to establish a context for my research. On the drug culture-the, uh, the counterculture. Trying to get an angle on how hallucinogen use affects people's outlook. "
He moistened his lips. "It's really exciting. There's a whole world I never knew existed-here." A nervous tic encompassed the Onion's smoky confines. "But somehow I can't really, well, make contact. I've bought all the Grateful Dead records, but I still feel like an outsider. I-I almost feel I'd like to be part of this whole hippie thing."
"Hippie?" she said with a patrician snort. "Mark, where've you been? It's 1969. The hippie movement's been dead for two years." She shook her head. "Have you actually done any of these drugs you're trying to study?"
He flushed. "No…. uh-I'm not ready to get to that stage. "
"Poor Mark. You're so uptight. Looks as if I'm going to have my work cut out for me, trying to show you what it is that's happening, Mr. Jones."
The reference skimmed his flattop, but suddenly his face brightened and his nose and cheekbones and whatnot went in happy directions, and he showed his horsy teeth. "You mean you'll help me?" He grabbed her hand, snatched his fingers away as if afraid they'd leave marks. "You'll show me around?" She nodded.
"Great!" He picked up the teacup, clinked it against an upper tooth, realized it was empty and clacked it down again. "I've been wondering why-that is, I-well, you've never, ah, talked to me like this before."
She took one of his hands in both of hers and he thought his heart would stop. "Oh, Mark," she said, tenderly, even. "Always the analytical one. It's just that since my eyes have been opened, I've realized that everyone's beautiful in his own way, except the pigs who oppress the people. And I see youstill straight. But you haven't sold out, man. I can tell; I can read it in your aura. You're still the same old Mark."
His head whirled like a carousel out of control. Cynical, his left brain tossed up the hypothesis that she was homesick, that he was part of a childhood and past she had cut herself off from, perhaps, too completely. He brushed it aside. She was Kimberly Ann, invulnerable, unapproachable. Any minute now she'd recognize him for the impostor he was.
She didn't. They talked on into the night-or rather, she talked and he listened, wanting to believe but still unable to. When the band took a long-overdue break, somebody cued up side one of Destiny's new album on the sound system. The gestalt burned itself irrevocably in: darkness and colored lights playing in the hair and face of the most beautiful woman in his world, and behind it the husky baritone of Tom Marion Douglas singing of love and death and dislocation, of elder gods and destinies best not hinted at. It changed him, that night. But he didn't know yet.