Complementary Colors

Chapter One
Beautiful



I was craving something, but I wasn’t exactly sure what. I wanted something new. I wanted something beautiful. My life was at a strange stand-still, stagnant as the smoggy San Jose air. So I’d signed up for a poetry class. I’d been looking forward to it all week, but now as I sat in a university classroom, waiting for class to begin, I thought maybe I’d made a mistake. The students leaned on their desktops, talking to each other in the circle of desks, casual and comfortable in their jeans, while I sat stiffly in my work clothes: black blazer, pink blouse, dark nylons and black heels, my long brown hair pulled back in a clip.
Sitting in the circle with us was Professor Alameida. I knew her name because it was printed on my class schedule. She had long gray hair and a craggy face, and the sleeves of her denim jacket were rolled up to reveal silver and turquoise bracelets. When she opened a folder, silence descended on the group.
Just then, the classroom door creaked open. In walked two people, two women. They were unlike any two women I’d ever seen. They both had short dark hair, gelled into spikes, and they wore black leather jackets, baggy jeans, and black boots. It’s hard to explain now why I didn’t think “lesbians” right away. Or “dykes.” But I didn’t. It was 1992; why would I have known any gay people? Or I should say lesbians. I did have an old college friend, Manny, who was gay, or so I assumed. He now lived in Massachusetts; he’d moved there with a guy I thought was his lover. But my life, not unlike many people’s lives, was mostly filled with people like me. In my case that meant straight people, in their twenties and thirties, who were dating, or engaged, or divorced. The lesbian world might as well have been taking place in Massachusetts, while I lived my straight life in California. Until that moment, of course.
I wasn’t the only one staring at them. It seemed everyone did. The two women had made a rather dramatic entrance, coming in late on the first day, walking in like they were one person split in two. For women, they took up a lot of space, with their spiky hair and bulky leather jackets and big boots shining with silver buckles. They sat in the two empty seats right next to the professor. The desks seemed too small for their bodies, their energy. They leaned back, knees apart, feet planted like men.
“Sorry,” said the taller one, three silver earrings glimmering in one ear, and a smear of a tattoo on the back of her hand.
Professor Alameida looked over at them, half-smiled, and placed her hand on the desk of the woman closest to her. She handed them each a syllabus with a certain ease, a sense of familiarity.
“It’s okay, we just started,” she said, leaning forward in her desk and crossing her feet at the ankles. “I’m Vanessa Alameida. Please call me Vanessa. Not professor. I don’t like that stuff.” Her voice was so low and gravelly I had to strain to hear her. “This class is about poetry, poetry, poetry. You will write a poem most weeks, beginning next week, as it says here.” She tapped her finger on the syllabus. “You will bring copies for everyone. I don’t want you to write a poem at the last minute. You should be writing it and thinking about it all week. A poem is a living thing. If you dash it off and bring it in dead, we’ll know.” She put her fist over her mouth and coughed a deep cough, her silver bracelets jangling.
Anxiety grew in me. I’d have to write poems and bring them in fresh and vulnerable as kittens with their eyes sealed shut. I looked at the blank piece of paper in my notebook in front of me. If I put my pen to it, thinking “poem,” would a bunch of words emerge, words put together in such a way as to create something new, something that at this moment didn’t exist? I used to think about that sometimes when I’d begin to write a journal entry—that in a few minutes, I’d be to the bottom of the page even though I didn’t know what would propel me, what would get me there, and what it would be like to finish. My living time wouldn’t have passed unnoticed. I’d have created something. Could I do this with poetry?
The most I had ever written was when I’d recently lived in Japan for a year. But aside from some journal-writing, most of the writing had been letters. Writing helped alleviate my dizzying culture shock. Could I now write something artful, something that would surprise me and take me to new places? This seemed like a hopeful act. Could I be hopeful like that? The idea of hope seemed to feed something elusive in me that was hungry.
“Now here, let’s read this,” the professor said, handing the person to her left a stack of papers. The stack continued person to person around the circle. The leather-jacketed woman with the tattoo on her hand leaned over to the other one and whispered something in her ear. They quietly laughed. I found myself curious about what she said, and oddly a little embarrassed, as though maybe they were making fun of me. I knew that was crazy—they hadn’t even looked at me. They were probably oblivious of my presence. Yet something about having them in the room, dressed alike and sharing secrets, made me feel a little inept and eager, like I used to around the popular girls in middle school.
When the paper came to me, I saw that on it was a poem by Louise Glück. I’d heard the name before, but I didn’t know her work. Maybe I’d read something of hers ten years before when I’d been working on my undergraduate degree in English. That was the thing that always surprised me about having a degree in English: how much literature there was in the world, and how little of it I really knew.
Vanessa read the poem aloud, slowly, as though chewing each word. Its title was “Messengers.” Vanessa’s voice crackled like electricity through line after line of the long, haunting poem. In the poem, geese and deer waited “as though their bodies do not impede them.” Images of animals and nature, imbued with life and death, inhabited the poem’s rich language.
When she finished reading, we sat, quiet. A chill snaked through my body. I didn’t really understand the poem. But I felt it. I felt it inside me, like it was a fish swimming around in my veins. The poem, it seemed to me, used words to get at something beyond words. The deer, the geese. Beauty. Mortality. I may not have understood the poem, but I thought I knew exactly what the poet felt.
Vanessa uncrossed then re-crossed her legs. A guy with dreadlocks and ripped overalls sniffed. A young woman with short blond hair shifted in her seat. She wore baggy shorts with sandals, and one of those olive green sweaters that looks like the most comfortable sweater in the world, the kind that pretty actresses with tousled hair wear in beach movies. She looked like she’d stepped out of the “casual wear” pages of a high-end catalogue.
The sun was getting low out the window. I could see the dark edges of a tree and the corner of a dirty white concrete building across the way.
“Well,” said Vanessa. “What do you think?”
I felt myself flush, as I often did when students don’t answer a teacher’s question. It seemed to be my fault, that I should have an answer for her. I wanted to say something, but I worried I’d sound like a fool. I wanted to say, “I feel this poem in my veins.” But that would sound completely idiotic. As a student with a degree in English, I thought I should instead say something about the images, the metaphor, the use of rhythmic repetition.
Out the window, the tree was completely still. It was a warm, summer–becoming–fall evening. The florescent lights overhead asserted themselves as the light outside dimmed.
“I think it’s beautiful,” said the tall, leather jacketed woman with the tattoo on her hand. She had dark eyes and thick eyelashes, almost as thick as my boyfriend Daniel’s. And a delicate chin that curved up, just slightly, and a small scar on her forehead. She had taken off her leather jacket to reveal a black tee-shirt and a necklace on a long silver chain.
Her words had given me permission to speak. “Me too,” I said. “I think it’s beautiful, too.” I could feel the eyes of the class on me. I swallowed and looked down at the poem, seeing if I could find a line I especially liked, but then a guy who I thought might be Vietnamese was talking, saying, “What does she mean, wounded and dominant?”
“What do you think she means?” asked Vanessa.
I lost his answer because as soon as I looked up from the poem, I glanced over at the tattooed woman and saw that she was looking at me. When my eye caught hers, she didn’t look away, just smiled. The girlishness of her smile surprised me. She had a mouth full of movie star teeth: large, straight and bright white. I smiled back, trying to say with my smile that I liked her comment on the poem, that I appreciated the way she had spoken up and given me room to do the same.
Then she said something to me, silently exaggerating her mouth movements so that I might be able to read her lips. I couldn’t figure out what she was saying. I tilted my head and looked at her quizzically, shrugging my shoulders so she’d try again. She held up the poem and pointed to it.
Then, slowly, she mouthed two words, pausing between. She mouthed the words one more time, very slowly. A surprising tingle scuttled up my spine.
I saw that she was saying, “Yes, beautiful.”

On my drive home, I felt hyper-awake as I do sometimes after leaving the movies. The contrast between the dark theater and the bright aliveness of the action on the screen makes me perceive life outside anew. I might newly regard the sound of my shoes on the sidewalk, the exaggerated purple of a blouse in a store window, the blooming white of an airplane trail in the sky. I inhabit a new reality, as though the movie has changed me.
As I drove home that night, the dashboard shone a bright chemical green. The brake lights in front of me vibrated red. The dark asphalt shimmered wet and shiny, although it had been months since we’d had rain. I pushed my foot down on the accelerator and sped up to eighty, eighty-five, ninety, passing five or six cars before I slowed to sixty-five. I imagined if a cop were to pull me over I’d respond in verse, in Walt Whitman exaltations. Maybe the officer would say, “Did you know you were speeding, Miss?” And I’d say, “The night is singing to me! The brake lights and stars are alive!”
When I pulled through the gate of our apartment building and parked, I sat still to the whir of the engine fan. I took out my notebook and, by the overhead light, wrote lines of a poem, a poem about a woman driving down the freeway, exalting in the night. My pen moved quickly over the page, and when I finished I looked at the words. There was that wonder again—the amazement that I had the ability to make something. Those words on the page hadn’t been there moments before. I knew the next day they might not be so thrilling, but for now, it was all good.
I ran up the steps to our apartment, hoping that Daniel would be there (often he worked very late) and hoping that if he were, he would let me share my excitement of the night. The excitement had been building all day, in fact. At work it had been hard to focus. I didn’t hate my job, but I didn’t love it either. Before I’d left for Japan I had been piecing together different jobs: teaching ESL to new immigrants at night at a community college, working in an after-school reading program for kids who hated to read, and babysitting the peevish young daughter of two doctors. I’d felt fragmented driving here and there, not having a single work site, a real career. While I was in Japan, my best friend Lucy got hired as the director of the tutoring center, and when I returned to the Bay Area she immediately offered me a full-time job. I was grateful to her, grateful to have a paycheck. Grateful to have one location to go to work. Although now I could feel the gratitude running thin. I wasn’t sure this job was for me. But it was all I had at the moment.
I guess it was the corporate feel of the place. At the learning center, each child had a binder. A hundred fat green binders lined the walls on sturdy shelves. Each binder was embossed with the corporate logo: a blond-haired boy holding a pencil over a piece of paper and smiling broadly. It was my job to write down what each child was to do at the center each day—a script for the tutors. Sometimes I also tutored, sitting at a table in the bend of the U shape, while three children came to me with their binders. I’d open the binders and give each child directions: “Get the yellow reading book and read pages 5 to 10 and answer the questions,” or “get the purple math kit so we can do the subtraction blocks.”
There were a few kids I looked forward to seeing, the ones who weren’t put out by having to do more school after school. The ones who were thrilled to collect fake coins that they could use to “buy” cheap plastic toys and candy in our little awards store. But there was something sterile about the place. The way we had a script we had to follow when a parent called or dropped in to find out about the cost of the program. The way we couldn’t wear pants, except on Fridays, and then it was only slacks, not jeans. The corporate logo that was both inane and eerie, clones of that smiling blond kid staring at me from the binders and on the stationary and on every single memo.
It was a small center, just Lucy and me, and a few part-time teachers who taught in the afternoons. During the days, Lucy and I organized binders, tested kids, crunched numbers. Lucy seemed to do it all so easily, as though being part of the business was like cleaning her house or going shopping. She was fast and efficient, and I sensed no resistance in the way she moved cleanly from teaching a kid long division, to filling in a budgeting spreadsheet, to answering the phone with a cheery, “Wellstone Learning, where your child comes first. This is Lucy, how may I help you?” Lucy was freckled, thin and small-boned. As short as she was, she had disproportionately long legs that looked great in suntan nylons.
At lunch time the place was usually quiet—no kids yet, no teachers, no phone calls. Lucy and I sat in the main teaching room at one of the six tutoring tables, eating our sandwiches.
“Quit jiggling your foot against the table, Gwen,” Lucy had said. “You seem agitated today.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“That poetry class I’m taking. Tonight is the first night.”
“Poetry?” She took a sip of her Diet Coke and eyed me over the can. “Are you reading it or writing it?”
“Both, I think.”
“Sounds like my worst nightmare.” She smiled. I liked the way one of her front teeth overlapped a little with the other one. Combined with her small size, freckles, and frizzy hair, she had the charm of a sprite.
“Really, why a nightmare?” I bit into a carrot and looked longingly at her potato chips.
“Thou and thee and roses and thorns—it’s just, I don’t know, weird. All those agonizing moments in high school when the teacher is trying to get us to see the deeper meaning of some obscure poem.”
“Have you ever read any contemporary poetry? I mean, some people even use the word fuck in their poetry these days.”
“Now there’s a poem I’d like to read.” She put a potato chip in her mouth and held the bag over to me. I took one, just one, and savored the greasy, salty flavor. “Speaking of fucking,” she said, “Will is driving me crazy.”
“Why?” I asked, taking one more potato chip and relishing the energy in the air, a kind of intimacy that developed whenever we shifted from small talk to a deeper gossip about our lives. I looked forward to hearing what she was going to tell me. There was something about the unhappiness of her marriage that fostered a connection between us.
“Sometimes I feel like he’s going to rub my skin off, he touches me so much. He won’t leave me alone. We’re sitting in bed reading and he absently touches my leg or my arm, up and down, up and down. Driving in the car he has his arm around me and rubs my arm up and down, up and down. It’s like a bad habit he needs to break. I wonder if I can get him The Patch or some medication that will dissolve in his coffee.”
I’d heard this complaint before, but I never tired of it. Maybe listening to Lucy was my version of watching a soap opera.
“That man,” she continued, “would have sex with me twenty-four-seven if I let him. So when he’s not on me like a rabbit, he’s touching me. It just doesn’t seem right that the man I love makes my skin crawl. I wish he was more like Daniel is with you.”
“No you don’t,” I insisted. “I mean, it’s like we’re with two extremes. You get too much, I don’t get enough. We’re like Goldilocks searching for the just-right bowl of porridge, the just-right bed.”
“Maybe we should swap men,” she laughed, stretching out her pretty legs then crossing them again. “Let’s just go to each other’s houses tonight and see what happens.”
“Now there’s an idea,” I said. “I’m sure Daniel would dig you. Only problem is, I’m too queen-sized for Will.”
“You’re not queen-sized!”
“Compared to you I am. He likes how little you are. He desires your body. He craves you. He actually has sex with you with the lights on, while you’re both fully awake. If I only had your problem.”
“Don’t say that, Gwen.” I could tell by her tone of voice and the lowering of her eyes that she was serious.
“I’m sorry,” I said, dusting sandwich crumbs off the table and onto my hand then dropping them into the garbage can under the table. “I didn’t mean to make light of it.”
“I think I need to face the fact,” she said, her eyes still lowered, “that Will and I just aren’t compatible. All these months of marriage counseling have not changed a thing.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, my heart slightly picking up its pace. Something about the idea of people on the edge of a cliff, ready to make a major change in their lives, gave me a little thrill.
“You know what I’m saying. I’m seriously thinking of divorce.”
“Oh, Lucy, I’m sorry.”
She finally looked up at me, and I expected her eyes to be shining with tears, but they weren’t.
“Yeah, well,” she said. “It’s not the end of the world. Look at you. You survived a divorce just fine. Divorcing Andy was the best thing you could have done. And now you’re with a fascinating man.”
“Who drops into silence for days at a time—”
“But at least Daniel’s interesting! Maybe it’s because you’re not married. Maybe living together is better. I mean, all Will wants to do is watch sports on that fucking TV, and he wants me there right next to him so he can pet me like a dog. I want to pull the plug and throw the TV out the damn window. I’m always, Let’s go to the park. Let’s go away for the weekend. Let’s—I don’t know, let’s do something that people do.” She laughed awkwardly.
“Yes, what do people do?” I said in my best upper-class imitation accent.
“I know that—what’s that from?” she asked.
“The Great Gatsby.”
“Oh, yeah, I kind of liked that book until my senior English teacher went on and on and about the symbolism of eyes on some billboard—”
“The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg—”
“Yeah, that—until she went on and on about how they represented some god-like judgment or something like that. Drove me crazy. I just thought it was a good story.” She fell silent for a minute. I wished I could say something about how much I loved digging deeply into literature and finding surprises, unearthing hidden meanings. But she was so adamant and practical. I might sound like a flake or a know-it-all.
I drank the rest of my soda and stopped myself from reaching over for another potato chip. I wished I were more like her when it came to food—someone who could forget she had a bunch of chips sitting in front of her.
“Your divorce wasn’t that bad, was it?” she asked. “Will and I are like you were. We have no kids, just a house. Not much else of anything, really. Are you glad you got divorced? Are you happier?”
“Yes, I’m definitely happier,” I said, not sure that I was. I knew I wasn’t sadder. But was I happier? Not quite. I was a little—what? The word confused came to mind. Befuddled. I had been married to Andy for four short years, having married him when I was only twenty-two. It seemed like a long time ago. I’d heard he was now remarried with a couple of kids. We had been young, hadn’t really known what we were doing. At least that’s how I felt. I had no idea how he felt. After I’d asked him for a separation, he packed up and went to live with his grandmother. Only his attorney showed up to court. He had friends come get his stuff out of the apartment. He was pissed at me. He left a message on my answering machine calling me a bitch, a whore. I never saw him again.
Soon after, I met Daniel. I’d thought I’d figured things out after the divorce, but my relationship with Daniel was far from mature, thoughtful, open, and honest—everything it seemed a good relationship should be. Which was why I’d gone to Japan. I thought I could learn independence, could learn to love to be alone, could figure things out (like I had thought after the divorce). If going to another country to live for a year hadn’t helped me figure everything out, what would? Even though Daniel and I were living together now, our relationship felt exactly the same as it had before I left:
I was contentious and wanted too much.
He was quiet and withholding.
And my work? I was making okay money, but I had a vague itch of dissatisfaction. There was something I was doing wrong, in both my work life and personal life. I had to remind myself constantly of the little new-age nugget, that life was a journey, not a destination. Sometimes that helped, sometimes it irritated me. I had the sense that something was off-kilter. I was thirty-one years old. When would I figure it out? And, more to the point, what was the “it” to figure out?
Lucy sucked down the rest of her soda, dropped the can to the floor with a clang, and crushed it with her foot. She tossed it to the recycle bin and it plopped in, a direct hit.
“I’m not sure I believe in happiness,” she said. I’d heard her say that before. It rankled me, made me want to defend the possibility that happiness exists.
“Of course you do,” I said.
“Oh, you’re right,” she said, pinching me on the arm. “I forgot. I do. Thanks.”
She’d kissed me facetiously and sloppily on the cheek, picked up an armful of binders, and tromped to her office on her tiny high-heeled shoes.


When I walked in the door that night after the first poetry class, Daniel had on the stereo ear phones (probably listening to Led Zeppelin) and a newspaper in his lap (the sports page of the New York Times, the only paper he would subscribe to, even though we lived in California). The TV was on, too, featuring a news story about Ross Perot’s fight to be included in the upcoming Bush/Clinton presidential debate. Reading, listening to music and watching TV simultaneously was Daniel’s version of a sensory depravation tank—or, sensory overload tank. It was his way to block out everything. He must have had a bad day in the lab. Or maybe he was plunging into one of his dark moods.
Dark moods.
That’s what he called the occasional week or two every few months that he lost his sense of humor, his ability to make eye contact, his sense that life was worth living. During dark moods he retreated to his cocoon. There was no touching him there. I had learned over the course of our three years together to leave him alone, to wait for him to emerge. I hated his black moods, hated being left alone in the world to fend for myself while he licked his wounds in his private cave. That’s why my stomach tightened when I walked into the apartment. Was a dark mood on the horizon? Or had another one of his papers been rejected? Or had he gotten bad results on a recent experiment? Or had his lab boss screamed at him again, the boss who was an egomaniac and who, I was sure, was threatened by Daniel’s brilliance?
I needed to test it out, to see what was going on with him. I pulled the door shut hard so he’d hear it in spite of the headphones (all the neighbors probably heard it too). He looked up. His dark eyes, a little bulging and framed by thick lashes, met mine. I smiled. He smiled back, lifted his hand in a little wave, the hand holding a pen.
So, no dark mood. Just a bad lab day.
I went to him, bent over the couch and kissed his forehead. He put his hand on the back of my head and moved his fingers through my hair. I kissed as close to his ear as I could get, at the edge of the headphone. He pulled my hand to his lips and kissed my palm. I wanted to look into his eyes, but they were closed. He knew that kissing my palm melted me at the center. He knew it had that effect on me, a warm watery feeling that infused my arms and legs. He knew a lot about how he made me feel—good and bad—because I told him.
And Daniel never forgot a thing.
That’s why I wanted to see his eyes as he kissed my palm, because I wanted to see him calculating his way into my heart, calculating a way to infuse my veins with desire. I wanted to see that he had planned to make me feel good, even though he apparently felt like shit. I needed to remind myself that he was giving me something at that moment, even though he wasn’t in a giving mood.
Because Daniel never forgot a thing, most of what he did seemed a bit calculated—or, rather, planned. Sometimes he seemed like an actor whose off-stage director whispered instructions to him. When he spoke I got the odd feeling that he was reading from a script. Maybe he was an old soul living the exact same life for the second time. Maybe he was so self-conscious that he couldn’t act without predigesting the action in his mind. Or maybe he was slow at the regular actions of the world but fast at the extraordinary ones. Whatever he was, one thing people agreed on: he was a genius.
When he let go of my hand, I knew I would be pushing the envelope by standing there much longer. It would be easy to overstay my welcome. It would be easy to ask for more than his palm-kissing generosity in a moment he obviously wanted to be alone. I was like a vampire, he said, always craving more. Perhaps this was something I loved about him: he always left me wanting more. It stoked my desire. What I wanted tonight was to talk, to tell him all about the poetry class. He knew tonight had been the first night. But it was obvious he wasn’t going to talk to me.
I turned and left him to his music/TV/newspaper. The apartment was small, only a few steps from the living room to the kitchen. In the refrigerator I found some white wine that didn’t smell too bad when I poured it, and didn’t taste too bad once I fished out the crumbled cork that floated in the glass. I also found leftover spaghetti, which didn’t look too bad after discarding the crunchy pieces that hadn’t been protected by loose-fitting saran wrap.
As I walked through the living room with my dinner, Daniel remained engrossed in his music/TV/newspaper. I was sure he was aware of my presence, but it was obvious he didn’t want to be. He had let me know with the palm-kiss not to take his need to escape personally. I tried not to, but of course it was impossible.
I sat on the bed to eat. The bed was actually a futon on a low frame, shoved in the corner of the bedroom beneath a window that looked out onto the balconies of other apartments, balconies like ours, cluttered with barbecues and dying plants and plastic lawn chairs and bicycles hanging from hooks. Next to the futon was a large desk with a bulky computer screen on top. On the floor were scattered papers and clothes, all Daniel’s. In fact, almost everything in the apartment was Daniel’s.
I had moved in just six months before, when I came back from Japan. I’d lived in Tokyo a year, teaching English, and when I came back, I owned not much more than what two suitcases held. Before I had gone to Japan, I had a huge yard sale and sold everything I owned—my furniture, books, heaps of clothes, even my car. I was stripping myself of belongings, trying to make myself clean and free. I even left Daniel behind, a speck on the ground, waving good-bye.
I’d hoped being alone in another country, another culture, would change me. I left as Gwen Sullivan—Californian, teacher, girlfriend to Daniel-the-genius. In Japan, it seemed a little like I was becoming someone else. After a few months, I could sense a new identity building inside, the seeds of something. I could feel myself evolving, as I drank long nights away with Japanese and European friends who said let’s go to Malaysia, let’s go to Thailand, let’s go to Korea. It’s cheap. It’ll be fun. I spent days alone in my tiny studio apartment, reading and writing in my diary, and thinking.
For the first time in my life, I rode subways, willing away my claustrophobia as the train shot through dark tunnels, a stranger’s thigh pressed against mine. I wrote long letters to Daniel, telling him the truth about how I was changing. I wrote long letters to my friend Lucy, telling her other truths about how I was changing.
Then one day in Japan, it was as though a light switch flicked in me. Maybe my evolutionary gene was defunct. Or maybe culture shock had rearranged my DNA. I walked down the spiral steps of my apartment, passed my landlord and returned his konnichi wa greeting, put my hands over my ears as a screaming motorcycle wove maniacally through cars on the busy street, and then I crossed at the light to the train station, put my phone card into the phone and called Daniel.
I said I wanted to come home.
It felt strange saying that because I didn’t really have a home. But he knew what I meant and immediately, silently, he made his home my home. He sent me the money for the ticket, I got on the plane, and he picked me up at the San Francisco airport, drove me to his place, and six months later, there I still was.
Yes, here I was, in the Bay Area, living in a cheap apartment in a sketchy neighborhood in East Palo Alto, bordering elegant Palo Alto, which poured over into Ivy League campus affluence—a constant reminder of Daniel’s prestigious yet lowly and low-paid post-doc position that may, or may not, be a stone’s throw from an Ivy League professorship. Yes, here I was in Daniel’s world, and now those Japan memories were a little like a dream. Coming back to the Bay Area was kind of like that Ray Bradbury story that my seventh grade science teacher read to the class. (Every Friday she read science fiction to us, which fostered in me a brief illusion that I could like science.) In the story, a tour group takes a safari trip into the past. They are told they must stay on the path, but one man deviates from the path and steps on a butterfly. When they return to the future, everything has changed a little: a different person has won the presidential election, the air feels strange, even language is altered just enough so that the usual is recognizably unusual. That’s how I felt—that my year in Japan had transported me to another time. And now that I was back, everything was the same but just a little bit changed.
And tonight, the poetry class had heightened that feeling.
I was excited about being a student again. I’d written a little poetry and a few stories, and had kept a diary off and on since I was a kid. There were a few poems I loved, especially Walt Whitman’s expansive Leaves of Grass. I was looking forward to learning how to write a poem, how to make the magic work officially.
Still in my work clothes, I sat back on the futon and closed my eyes, drifting through thoughts of poetry, of class, and of those two women in leather jackets.
I was only half awake when I felt Daniel unzipping my skirt.
He helped me with my blouse and my nylons. He lay on top of me, kissing my neck, then my breasts, and as he moved inside of me, I felt like I wasn’t quite having sex but was dreaming about sex, about tattoos and silver bracelets, and about deer, how they move so gracefully, how beautiful they are.