10.
Meanwhile, the friendship between
George and Beth was an embarrassment to them both, at times, because of its
intensity and breadth. People assumed,
even though the two would have made an odd couple, that they had been secretly
physically intimate, or if not, that it was inevitable. That may have been a natural assumption to
make (though inarguably prurient), because it wan an obvious fact that George
was in love with Beth. George and Beth
both knew it, but unrequited love was the most natural kind for the asexual
George to give, as well as the most natural kind for Beth, arrested
developmentally at the emotional age of 12, to receive. But the truths is that they were
friends. When in his last days she would
be comfortable enough with him dozing off and on throughout the day on her
couch to walk around the apartment naked when she found it necessary, like when
she'd been putting on her underwear in her bedroom for instance but then
remembered she'd left the only bra she owned on the floor of the living room
and she had to go get it -- George didn't feel a sexual charge seeing her bare
breasts but instead, or at least mostly, gratefulness towards her for finally
allowing him so completely into her private world.
The day after he met her, he went
back to the library to see her again, and brought her a copy of a book of poems
about cats. She already owned the book,
but was pleased by the gift anyway, because she liked owning things. "Where did you get this book from?"
she'd asked him, "It's a first edition, isn't it?"
"Mmm hmm, I bought it as part
of an estate. An old English fellow
passed away last week in Pasadena, and his wife is a customer in my store; I
own a used bookstore. She let me have
first pick at his book collection, which turned out to be amazing. Really wonderful stuff. If you're interested,
I could show you what I got from that estate.
Maybe there's something you want."
They would soon share routines, habits and traditions, especially once
she divorced Richard. Every Boxing Day,
for instance, which is a holiday celebrated in England on the day after
Christmas, they exchanged one wild-card gift each, a present that hadn't
appeared on the meticulous wish list of gifts they traded each December
1st. Every year for his birthday one of
her gifts to him was a bag of assorted candy, but she put the bag together from
several bags of candy, and he had to figure out the theme, like one year, an
easy year, all the candy in the bag was red (red Jolly Ranchers, red Wax Lips,
Red Hots), but one year it was more challenging, all the candies had the names
of locations in them: Boston Baked Beans
and Charleston Chews. They had annual
two-person Oscars parties that always included a spread of Pub Cheese and frois
grois: the person with the least correct
Oscar predictions had to do the dishes left over from all the snacks they ate
that night. Every Easter they went to
the Griffith Park Observatory, which was one of the main locations in “Rebel
Without a Cause,” simply because Christ reminded Beth of James Dean. When Molly was still a child, and came to
visit Beth on the weekends, there was the excuse of laying a groundwork of
beautiful images in Molly's memory to add a flourish to everything the two
grownups planned, and they developed traditions they would abandon later when
Molly grew up, like going to the temporary carnival in downtown that was set up
every year for Chinese New Year, or burying the small rodents one of Beth's
cats always dragged back to the apartment with funerary rites and solemn
ceremony.
Beth had been so proud of herself
for catching the interest of a classy and handsome man like Richard, and
through that pinhole of pride, some love escaped, made its way to Richard. But only some. She didn't fully accept the fact that he was
a person, that he continued to walk and breathe when out of her sight. And there was her endless amazement that
she'd made Molly. But these two people,
huge as their impact was on her, made her uncomfortable to be around; she
dropped more things than usual when Molly was in the kitchen, and her best hair
days all occurred on days in which Richard didn't see her. It was only George with whom she didn't
stutter or say unduly obnoxious things she didn't mean. And when she moved to Arizona, it was because,
in the first blush of forty, Beth realized anew that she was young, pretty and
doomed, and wanted a fresh start.
On a hot summer day in 2007, Beth,
who'd learned to drive in exchange for becoming less adept at all the other
adult skills she'd once taken pains to learn, like a baby attempting language,
was driving on the freeway. At this
point in her life, her nineteen-year-old daughter was mostly
incommunicado. She spoke on the phone to
her best friend George almost everyday.
She hadn't been working a regular job for two years, because she'd
suffered debilitating panic attacks at her last job, and now she was crazy
enough to qualify for Social Security Insurance. She craved sex, pills and popcorn, all the
time. Keeping pace alongside her fragile
Datsun on the freeway, a young man was riding what looked like little more than
a motorized bicycle. That the boy should
not have gotten on the freeway on this contraption was obvious, because it
could hardly take his weight, it wobbled and sputtered noxious clouds of
gas. The rider was wearing those canvas
high-top sneakers Molly used to love to wear when she called herself a
punk-rocker, a pair of cut-off shorts and a t-shirt that had “Satan’s Little
Angels” printed on it in red Old English lettering. This shirt would become a heartbreaking
detail to her because of the way it so flippantly alluded to the afterlife. He wore his hair in a pompadour. She could see the sweat on his face and even
though it would sound later like an unbelievable exaggeration, she could see
the areas of skin that stretch across his knuckles made pale from how tightly
he grasped the handlebars. It was rare,
to have an opportunity like this to watch a handsome, weary, nearby man careen
through various levels of fear. She
imagined this must have been his first time in a situation which necessitated
taking this contraption, a Honda Rebel, on the freeway, and she wondered where
he was headed, and if he wished he had worn tougher clothes in case the bike
tipped over – there was nothing covering his legs or arms and it would hurt
awfully if he took a spill. Then without
even looking behind or beside him, he sped in front of Beth’s car, and she
killed him. Poetic irony being the
common fate of poets, which Beth was, the father of the young man had been
killed in a freeway accident as well.
The young man, whose rock band had
been called “Satan’s Little Angels,” had been living with his girlfriend,
Lorena, when Beth ran him over, and the young woman briefly entertained the
notion of suing Beth for vehicular manslaughter, but a therapist convinced her
to try to move on from the accident, and Lorena tried her hardest. Beth disappeared, first sending this letter
to Richard:
“Richard, please just let me explain
myself someday. In the meantime, please
take over.”
And
that was all it said.
