I got within a couple feet of her when she turned my way. And it was too late to be normal. I had no basket and no cart. I was backed up against the gondola shelves; a bracket spiked my neck. My palms were flat against the Special K. I looked like a jumper. I felt like a jumper. The tumult of my feelings had struck me dumb. Esme with her box of Kashi was leaving my aisle — Esme, whom I barely knew but who continued to rouse from me the urge to know her more.
She went to an East Coast university and then overseas, while I tooled around Anaheim. I still thought about her, of course, but figured she was lost to me and that in lieu of this fabled thing called happiness, I’d try something else. I started up a few meetings here and there. The idea? Show up. Talk. Share something of yourself. Get to know your neighbors. What I did not know then is that there are politics in numbers, and that when you bring the isolates together, sometimes they want to discuss the state of our union, to say that our lawmakers are charlatans who should be deposed and that only a sundering of this menace can return us to values touted in the Bill of Rights. And that sometimes, for saying this and joining up, they want sex. It’s the strandeds’ approach to intercourse: Let’s rend ourselves from humanity so we can find ourselves in each other. Still, these people were here and there, hardly a notable constituency among those for whom the Helix — though we didn’t have a name yet — was a way out of isolation.
The meetings got bigger. And more frequent. I began to think there was real purpose in this, which was when Esme reappeared. On my block. She was visiting her parents, driving a new car, and wanting to head into L.A. to a new restaurant she’d heard about, and did I know the way? I was twenty-four and enrolled at a local college but starting to be Helix full-time. I just happened to be home, looking for a Hamburger Helper Halloween costume I’d made with Norman many years before. In ’83, when I was thirteen, the semiotics of the white glove were incandescent in the sequined accessory of one Michael Jackson, though for me, it was all about the four-fingered Helping Hand, with red cuff and smiley face. That Halloween, the last I’d ever celebrate, Norman and I sported the Hand’s likeness through a gauntlet of evidence that said: Already, you are different.
So I’d come back for the glove, but really for providence, which explains itself post hoc, if ever.
I couldn’t tell if Esme remembered me, but I decided our history was so dull, it would compromise our future if I brought it up. She was wearing a baby-blue cardigan buttoned to the neck, and sunglasses she took off when I gave her directions, botched the directions, and then insisted I didn’t know the directions by name, only sight. She would simply have to take me along. I stood with my head braced against my arms, which were folded atop the driver’s side door. She got out of the car. She was a foot shorter than me. I’d seen her kind of hair on a billboard for a revolutionary shampoo product — bright, blond, emulsive. Her fingernails were pastel. Creamy pink for the virgin bride. She wore white leather Keds bound tight. She was a fortress, a turret, and in those embrasure eyes were the guns of Navarone.
“Hop in,” she said, and we were off.
A slop of Vaseline, the occasional sock, hole in the pillow — my victories in the ejaculate of love had been circumscribed by diffidence and, before the infarction and weight loss, the more apparent problem of repelling women in my age bracket because women under thirty do not yet realize they can’t be this picky.
So you can imagine how it was with Esme. I was awkward in bed. Angles of penetration that were obtuse and painful. Slippage. The indiscriminate lapping of skin between her legs until she told me to stop, just stop it. She said good-bye with tenderness and relief. And in the instant that followed her leaving, it was clear: I would be with her again or kill myself.
That night I went to bed a wreck. The resolve of but a few hours ago had given way to anxieties about why I would never see her again. I turned off the light, keen on pursuing my thoughts. I needed to understand which failure had driven her away. I was a young man. I couldn’t know then I’d be asking these questions for the rest of my life.
I mooned away the hours. I floundered at Cypress College. Esme had vanished. Her parents had vanished. I had no way to find her; it made me nuts. I started to lose even more weight. To think about food as the thing denied, the thing indulged, and to see in both a mortification of the body that I deserved. The closeness I had felt with Esme set my other relationships in relief. I would never be comfortable with my peers. I did not have any friends. I worked the Helix all the time.
Three months later, the phone rang. And just like that, she was at my place.
I made her some chocolate milk. We talked.
I said, “It’s okay. We can handle this. I’m just so happy you called. That you’re here.”
“Handle? What’s to handle? There will be no handling. None whatsoever. No way.”
“What do you mean ‘no way’?”
I wanted to crawl under the table, hasp my fingers around her waist, and stay there for the next six months.
“I can’t believe you,” she said. “You’re supposed to flip out when I tell you, split the cost, and disappear.”
I was appalled. “Disappear? What do you mean? We’re a family now. We’re in love.”
“Good God,” she said, and she stood up. Three months in, and it was terrible already. She had mistaken the spotting of early pregnancy for a normal, if light, cycle. She menstruated irregularly; how could she have known? But now that she did, it had to be done. Any longer and the procedure could get dangerous.
I tried to listen, but I was too happy. She had called. She was in distress, so she called. That would have been enough, but now this. A baby together. Surely we had to marry. Only we were not marrying. She was going to a motel.
I stammered. “But you called me. You came all the way to campus.”
She reached over and put a hand on mine. I guess my incapacity to understand what was going on moved her.
“If you can just help me with the money, everything will be fine.”
“Can you stay the night? Maybe if you stay the night, we can talk more about this tomorrow.”
“No,” she said. “You send me a check. You get on with your life. Do something useful. Forget the Helix.”
I shook my head. If I couldn’t have her, I obviously needed the Helix.
“I can’t afford this on my own,” she said. Her voice seemed to point itself at me. “You have to help.”
“Then stay the night.”
“On the couch.”
“No. With me.”
“But your roommates.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t need them.”
That night I crawled into bed with Esme. She wore one of my T-shirts. She did not want me to touch her, but I curled up behind her in spoon formation. She didn’t resist. I put my hand on her stomach and tried to tell the baby I was there. We stayed like that for hours.
“I could babysit,” I said.
She laughed. “You could darn socks.”
“I could! What, you think I can’t learn to knit? I could.” I sat up and showed her my hands. “Look at these. They can do anything.”
“Shhh. Your roommates. Let’s go to sleep — I’m tired. Then I can go home and make an appointment.”