ADRIENNE

It’s just three, too early for him to be home from work when I hear the front gate open and his feet on the steps, and then his key turning in our janky door. I’m too lazy and tired to get up off the couch to make sure it’s really Chris and not an armed intruder, or more likely, my mother and father coming to “rescue” me.

I shove a styrofoam container of half-eaten super-nachos beneath the couch and lay still and silent and try to melt between the cushions while he pads barefoot down the long hall that reminds me, for some reason, of the final stretch of prison corridor between one’s cell and a sparking electric chair. Then he’s standing in the room staring at me, and I at him, and we take each other in with long faces, his guilty and confused, mine guilty and shocked—theatrical masks could be molded from these faces.

“What are you doing home?” he asks.

And I was going to ask him the same thing, but instead I say, “What the hell did you do to yourself?” meaning his appearance, which has drastically changed since he climbed from our bed this morning at seven; and then I see his smile fade and his blue eyes turn worried and small, like they’ve been doing for the past few months just before a major breakdown, and I say as enthusiastically as I can, “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” and, rising like the carefree, lighthearted eighteen-year-old I am, I throw my arms around his neck and kiss him with all the love I’ve ever had for anything. “I’m baking you a cake.”

A second cake, actually. The first, with cherry vanilla frosting and multicolored sprinkles, I ate for brunch. That is what pregnant women do, I’ve learned from daytime television, they overeat, they add meals, like brunch. They eat their boyfriends’ birthday cakes and lie about it.

My mother would be disgusted.

At eleven o’clock I watched a woman on television get breast implants. The sounds of suction and squish upset my stomach until I forced myself to get up and turn the sound off, put on an old Fairport Convention record instead. I watched the flesh being cut like raw chicken, the clear balloons going in—my dad would laugh if he could see it, Sandy Denny singing her heart out in praise of plastic surgery. I watched a man bungee jump into a South American river and children reach their arms around furry creatures. I watched D-Day paratroopers inflate in the grainy black and white sky like dozens of blossoms blowing from a tree. I read thirteen pages of a book I bought from the leather-faced man on 24th Street about the 1906 earthquake. There are bodies, the book suggests, that to this day have not been recovered from the devastation caused by the quake, the ensuing fires, the crumbling buildings. Bodies all over the city. In 1906, they estimated 400 deaths, but experts today say there were probably over 3000. The upstairs neighbors once told me that our building was built in 1896. It survived, like most of the buildings in this district, but underwent considerable damage: a power line collapsed, sending a pole straight through the third-story bay window, igniting a fire; the roof and half of our apartment burned; debris piled up. There was death, there had to be.

Death and, I suspect, lost bodies. The building was patched and repaired, the corpses covered up, built over in a sad burial, and this building went on as a building, no one suspecting anything. At noon today I heard a sound, a mumbling, a scratching sort of sound coming from the bedroom.

I won’t tell Chris because he’d laugh, but I know—I know there’s a lady
trapped in those walls, watching our every move.

Eventually I left the couch for morning sickness, to eat, to mix the second cake from the box with an egg. I knocked on the bedroom wall but no one knocked back. I napped. I dreamed. At the kitchen table I wrote in the thick journal Maggie bought me (she is the only one I’ve told, my lab partner in chemistry) that says “You and Me and Baby Makes Three” in pink curling letters on the cover. I write in the journal everyday, log my activities no matter how minor or shameful they seem, because it’s important, I know, to chronicle things like a pregnancy. To show my little boy one day (I know he’s a he) what his young mother went through, as evidence that I did it. I was here with a life in my body trying as hard as I could.

Today the journal upset me because, accidentally, I flipped to the section where the father’s record goes, and it was empty, of course. Four months, since I’d scrawled February 6th under Date Conceived (it happened in the afternoon while gray rain hit the glass and I felt her eyes on my naked back), four months of empty pages, no one’s fault but my own.

And what would Chris write, I wondered, if he knew? His handwriting is difficult to imitate, but I try.

Dear Baby,
Today your father paced around the marble floors of the art museum where he works, staring at the people staring at the paintings and wondering what you will look like in seven months, in seven years, on your twenty- fifth birthday. Today is your father’s twenty-fifth birthday.

I can’t help myself; I write on. I imagine Chris at work; what is he doing right now? Now? Now? Resisting the prodding minds of the old women he works with to explain the present to them? (“Tell us, Curtis, why do the boys wear pants down to their ankles? Do you wear pants like that on your days off?”) The clock on the TV says 12:35. Where are his long beautiful hands? Writing a capital R on a form at his desk, smoking a cigarette on the front lawn, watching the fog cover the Golden Gate. What is he saying, what is he thinking? He’s thinking about his age, every second of his life up to this point. He’s regretting and making vows for the future.

What would he say to his son? Can he fathom a piece of himself, growing like a sprouted seed in my stomach?

It’s also your uncle’s birthday, but he is not here to celebrate. It sounds strange to call him that, strange to think of him as an uncle—he would never have let you call him Uncle Julian. He’d make you call him Jules and he’d teach you how to maneuver a can of spray paint, how to climb a billboard or a freeway overpass by the time you were ten. He’d teach you cop code and hobo code, he’d tell you about jail, lawyers, friends, enemies, fights, girls, Buddha, love, sex, trees before you could talk. He’d use your small body as a tool, lifting you onto his shoulders like an extension handle so you could take the better spot, higher, harder. He’d take you down to Third Street and show you the old spots, but by the time you’re born Third Street might be overrun with new high-end ethnic dinner spots and stainless steel lofts.

My hand is suddenly paralyzed by a feeling that hasn’t left since the day he died, a hollow guilt that exists just beneath my ribs. I think this feeling is because of the sudden urge I had to dance as he lay dying.

What secret method is used in hospitals to suck the color out of everything? The pale yellow water pitcher resting on a tray in the corner, the gown he wore, the soft rose of the walls, the clear tubes that seemed to circle his body like ropes holding him down. The ends of the IVs went into the veins in his hand; the other ends were hooked to bags filled with important fluids, flimsy bags that held his life. There were tubes in his nose and tubes disappearing mysteriously beneath his gown, tubes filling with blood, emptying the blood into neat containers at our feet—his blood was the brightest thing in the room. I had to strain my eyes to see him under that whole synthetic mess, to squint to search the real Jules out from all that camouflaging equipment to identify a toenail, a handful of hair, an eyelid like a sleeping moth.

And that’s when it happened, when I couldn’t help smiling, as though I was in Chris’ museum staring at a rare art piece: the human body failing before my very eyes. I was a viewer waiting for the climactic end of a living thing, enjoying the accompanying soundtrack… their mother sat stroking her son’s hair, her whispers dispersing as they hit the air, the beeps and buzzes of the hospital and the nurses’ rubber shoes squeaking against the linoleum in perfect time to the song that began in my head, as if I had mentally lowered the needle to record just then. A very catchy song Chris and Jules and I had listened to nights before, the last time we’d seen him awake and alive, Icelandic band, 1970s—and the song grew louder and louder until it filled my head like liquor and made me dizzy, ran down my legs, little yips and the strum of guitars, and I felt like dancing, only dancing, like tapping my foot and singing along.

But there was Chris at my elbow, turning in toward me for comfort I couldn’t give—I was busy snapping my fingers and moving my hips—and then his head hit his hands and he let out a moan, an animal noise that brought me back. “I can’t do this,” he said, and left the room through the big swinging doors just as the steady beep-beep above Jules’ head turned into one long drone, a flat green line, just like on a television show.

THE LADY IN THE WALLS

The truth is I’ve lived through very little. Most of my time has been spent in the years after the quake, after the ceiling crumbled and I was wedged in here, built up around, my blackened arms and legs just blending in with the blackened wood and plaster. From this strange tomb you may think I’ve seen, for the past ninety-nine years little more than splintering wood at my nose, smelled the dead rat at my ankle—it is not so.

When I died I became God, saw everything, watched this city metamorphose from a tiny plot of sand dunes, evergreens, cows, into a mess of concrete and poverty, postcard monuments and wealth, watched it maimed and  utilated by bulldozers, by weather, by crossed wires, scaffolds, and automobiles. And I haven’t had to move a muscle. My eyes, it is true, are trapped behind this wall, where only a white sliver of light dares to enter, but the walls melt away like thin sheets of ice.

I look to the east and to the north and everything that is not human disappears— the magnolia trees fall away, the electric lights and aluminum
cars, the taco trucks, the lunchboxes the brown children swing, the dumpsters, the heaps of cardboard boxes and broken ukuleles, plantain peels, corn husks, beer bottles and old toothless pianos—they fade away and all that is left are the people and the most essential objects.

The girl, for instance. I watched her and a pear she ate on the bus the day they met.

She’d brought it for a snack all the way from the orchard she grew up on, plucked it from a tree on the way to the highway with a packed duffel bag and little cardboard sign that read Transamerica Pyramid, even though that was too specific a location, she knew, to ask for when you’re eighty miles away; but just sixteen years old then, she made it as far as Montgomery Station, climbed on a city bus and there, at the stop in front of the Pyramid, watched him board in dirty jeans and a paper-thin T-shirt, watched him haggle with the driver over his fare. It was fate, she thought, and stayed put in the back seat, willing him to sit by her, and he did, sat and watched the pear juice drip down her chin and onto the collar of her virginally white Catholic school uniform; no doubt he fell in love with her at that moment.

I’ve gotten to know them, of course, most intimately, because they came to inhabit this house just a few weeks after that. I cannot escape the sight of them, can’t ignore them when they’re here, in my room, and often my eyes follow them out the door, down the street, across town on foot in inappropriate shoes; they’ll have blisters later and soak their feet in the claw-foot tub.

One might say I know them better than they know themselves. I know, for instance, that for the last three months she’s been lying on that dingy couch with the television on, eating tamales and pastries. I know that she rises only to walk to the panaderia on the corner, to buy a bottle of nail polish for a quarter from the old leather-faced man on the street, his stolen wares arranged on towels along the sidewalk. I know also that her baby’s father doesn’t know he’s a father, and that he doesn’t know she stays home all day, that the books she pretends to read are not for school at all, but for his deception; if he knew she’d dropped out, he would be very angry and give the wall a good kick like the time before, when he received the phone call about his brother.

Is it enough to say that he had a bad fall? This brother of the girl’s baby’s father. It was three months ago, and I, having taken a liking to the boy—Jules they called him—watched him often. He would come to the house to listen to records and drink beer with his brother (and sometimes I would get the two of them confused, they were so identically fair and thin), to sit in the small backyard beneath the avocado tree when it was sunny out and talk to the upstairs neighbors about Chinese medicine and Russian literature, to help the girl with school projects at the kitchen table; an artist, he was. He’d give her artistic advice as to the arrangement of magazine pictures pasted onto poster-board for a report she had to give on aboriginal tribes or the immune system. Jules was kind, smart, caring, and full of life, and I, full of death, couldn’t help but watch him leave this house one night with a heavy bag on his shoulder very late, after engaging with his brother and the girl in many long, profound conversations brought on by too much wine.

I followed him with my eyes down Harrison, up South Van Ness, right on Eddy, past the bums flicking lighters and the men dressed as women trying to sell their bodies, and he was singing to himself along the way, not like a drunk man does to keep himself company, but like a sober man does, because he is happy and on his way somewhere…and in a black alley he climbed a fire escape all the way to the roof of a seven-story brick building, where he was, no doubt, going to paint his name in letters so large they would look over the city and guard it like the eyes of an angel…but he was dizzy from the wine, a wind came up, and just as he was hoisting himself over the ledge his balance faltered and he went…gone…racing toward the ground with his arms and legs kicking in front of him, watching the moon go up like a balloon, higher and higher as he went lower and lower.

He didn’t die on impact but he should have. Instead it drew on for days and nights like my death here, slowly, suffering, moaning silently. The boy and the girl would come home from the hospital and lay down in bed with their shoes still on, and she wouldn’t move a muscle, afraid to touch him it seemed, the tears building and building in her eyes, and he would thrash around in the bed muffling his own screams and sobs with a pillow, beating the mattress. She made tea he wouldn’t drink and cooked food he wouldn’t eat, tried to rub his feet and shoulders, drew him baths he wouldn’t take—he would only sit staring at the wall and beg her not to leave him alone, and then sometimes in the middle of the night he would wake her up and sob that he loved her, he loved her more than anyone, even his dying brother, sobbed that she was all he had in the whole world, and he was only twenty-four.

It used to be different. This time last year they’d lay in this bed with all of their clothes off and wrap themselves up in the white sheets like mummies, like they knew I was here watching, laughing in the sun that comes in through the big bay window and lights up the room. They used to make crepes on Sunday and pretend they were in France, reading his mom’s old Michelin Guide to Paris and listening to an accordion record. Sometimes her father sent small checks in the mail, and they would take them and go out at night and buy drinks and listen to bands with his friends, bands emulating old rock and roll from when before they were born with big hair and lots of leather, guitarists smashing wineglasses on the bar with the heels of their cowboy boots at the Parkside, lead singers wearing mechanics’ jumpsuits unzipped to their pubic hair, humping the mic stand at Cafe du Nord—or they’d try to dress, for a night, like it was 1960 and dance in the red light of a bar by his house to old soul records, or they’d get kicked out because of her fake ID and end up in a big house on Potrero Hill crammed with people, doing free lines of cocaine in the laundry room off the dryer, those anti-drug lectures from Freshman Science repeating in her head as she rolled a dollar bill, and exhausted, worn out, walking home over the freeway hand in hand at 4 a.m.

Then on Monday morning he’d go to work at the Legion of Honor in slacks and polished shoes, and she to school with a backpack and a sandwich. He’d quote Walter Benjamin to his boss when she asked his opinion on so-and-so’s video work, and she’d show up to first period with all her homework done, with a news article idea for the school paper, with a question for her Honors English teacher about Beckett’s involvement with the French Resistance she’d read about by chance over the weekend.

Today she sits watching television until he comes home early in a ridiculous outfit and no shoes on. It’s his birthday, I know, because she’s already baked a birthday cake, eaten it, and now a second is in the oven. I watch her rise and throw her arms around his neck as if she were trying, in that one embrace, to pull him back to her, and it seems impossible that he can’t recognize, with her so close, that bulge beneath her T-shirt. They speak in low voices and she’s staring at the ground, there are tears in her eyes, and I’ll let them, just this once, have a moment alone without me watching, I’ll look down the street here to the south, all the way to the other side of the freeway, to the land of the dead, the acres upon acres of tombstones and plaques where a lonely mother wears a gardening hat and gloves, and prods the soil with a little spade to plant tulips on her son’s grave.

CHRIS

He is the sole island in a sea of wrinkled and hoary old women. Their long white whiskers stick out between rows upon rows of pearls. They dab generic perfume behind their earlobes in the bathroom. They butcher the names of the French painters and roll the “R”s of the Italians. They have trouble operating the telephones. They tell him he must quit smoking.

He must eat more protein. More carbohydrates, less chocolate. When he tries to help them operate the telephones, they slap his hand away like grandmothers even though he is their superior in the workplace. They are millionairesses with dusty mansions in Pacific Heights whose deceased husbands had been adamant patrons of the arts.

Behind the front desk at noon, he takes a program for the exhibit from a stack and writes the same word over and over in elaborate hip-hop letters across the reproduced Courbets on every page. He particularly enjoys defacing The Origin of the World in each brochure, crudely marking up the flesh tones of the painting the more conservative museum-goers hurry past, shuddering. The woman sitting next to him, a new volunteer, is watching so closely at his shoulder that he can smell toothpaste and coffee on her breath. She must be in her seventies, but she has sharp black hair streaked with gray and a militarily avant-garde style that would be more fitting at the MOMA. Her high black boots remind him faintly of Triumph of the Will.

“Curtis,” she says in an accent of indecipherable European origin, “May I ask you please a question?”

Chris looks up at her from his drawing. “My name is Chris. What is your question?” he says flatly. Her dark eyes glow like a child’s or a gypsy’s, and he automatically despises her mischievousness; she wears it like a dumb accessory, like the gigantic amber stone which hangs around her neck on a long chain, the size of a baseball. It looks heavy enough to sink a body.
“What is this you write all the time?” she asks.

Chris can’t stop staring at the amber. “It’s my brother’s name,” he says without looking up. What must it be like, a mosquito, trapped inside a stone for eternity, thumping against the chest of an old woman? Is this what happens to the dead?

He takes his lunch break at 12:30 without intending to eat lunch, flipping off Rodin’s Thinker in the courtyard on his way out (a childhood habit from the times he used to come with his grandmother) and walking down the long drive through the golf course that leads away from the museum he likes to call “the mausoleum.” Halfway down the drive, he kicks his shoes and socks off and walks barefoot through the trimmed grass, his heels sinking now and then in mud. The sun is out in the rest of the city, he knows, but here the sky is always white, the fog drifts thinly through the gnarled pines clustered around the ninth hole.

In an abandoned store front on 36th Avenue, in the large windows lined with faded Chinese newspapers, he is startled by his own reflection. He knows  his body too well, he thinks. There were once two, his own and his brother’s, but now there is one, and that one stands only to recall the other that was lost. His pants are wet and dirty halfway to the knee, the limp hands hang at the side, the narrow torso and the delicately defined neck, the Adam’s apple, the pale hair that falls in biblical waves across his forehead (the first time Adrienne saw him naked she said he was like Michelangelo’s La Pieta; she’d seen it in the Vatican when she was ten, and the image had never left her. Right there in bed, she draped a blanket over her head like the Virgin Mary and held him on her knees in a reenactment of the sculpture. “My mother would call this perverse,” she’d laughed. He believes this is when she fell in love with him.)

This body is haunted, he thinks.

Across the street is a haphazard consignment store with Tiffany lamps, a satin wedding gown, and an autographed baseball in the window. He goes into the store and, in five minutes, leaves carrying his new appearance in a red plastic bag. At the beauty salon on the corner, the woman there speaks little English, but he takes a seat in front of the mirror and takes the shears out of her hands and cuts the first chunk of yellow hair himself, points to the set of razors and she understands.

“All gone,” he says, and she repeats, “All gone.” When she is finished he changes into the clothes he just bought in the salon bathroom, and they fit better than he had hoped, they fit perfectly, as if made for him, and for the first time in a long time he feels free from something he can’t put his finger on.

By one o’clock he starts back up the hill toward work, and the drivers of some of the cars that pass slow down to stare. He passes his shoes and socks in the grass and does not stop for them. He is a different person. The foreign woman is behind the desk with a make-up pencil, reapplying a faux mole above her upper lip when he walks in. “May I help you?” she asks without recognizing him.

“No, it’s me, Chris.”

“Chris… Oh, Curtis! What happened? Your hair…your teeth! What is this you wear? You go shopping? Where are your shoes? It is an art piece, no?”

Before he can answer, the women at Tickets and Sales across the foyer are up for the first time today, all three rising in unison on their arthritic hips like soldiers at attention. At the Audio Tours Desk the gay man who resembles Robert Redford in eye shadow uncrosses his legs and whispers, “Oh my.”

And, spotting him all the way from the second gallery, his boss, Joanne Yokamora, dressed flawlessly in black, clicks her way past the medieval tapestries and Victorian tea sets in a beeline toward him where he waits, unafraid, muddying the floor with footprints.

“Chris, let’s talk outside,” she says, taking his arm gently.

She is concerned, she says. She suggests he go home early and not come back for awhile. Take some time off; it’s only been three months. To rest and to think. To grieve. She talks about acting irrationally when we lose people we love. Time heals all wounds. Time, and therapy, she says.

And he agrees when necessary and says just what is needed to bring the conversation to an end and let Joanne Yokamora feel like she said and did the right thing, but inside his fear is building and building, and all he can think is that if he doesn’t come to work tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, he will sit in the apartment by himself on the couch waiting for Adrienne to get home and throw her backpack down in a huff, hoping to God she skips fourth period, staring at the wall, trying to stare through it—and that seems even worse than the mausoleum.

He takes the long route home, rides the 18 line down along the beach and is followed all the way to the 48 by a murder of crows that roam this part of the highway. By the time the bus is parked between misshapen palms on Dolores and 24th, he sees he was right, the rest of the city has been bathing in sun the whole morning, turning its leaves toward the sky,baring its pasty white faces on Valencia, its brown shoulders on Mission.

The heat has raised the neighborhood’s scent of beans, piss, and laundry detergent to a new degree of pungency the way that new, sharper smells come from meat roasting slowly.

At Harrison he gets off and walks the half block to their apartment, a plain beige building crammed between a three-story Victorian painted lime green and a two-story Queen Anne painted a hot yellow-orange, like candy, like tropical fruit, contrasting sharply with the drab street and sidewalk littered with trash, baby diapers, plastic bags. He is careful not to step on a broken bottle in his bare feet.

He walks in expecting the house to be empty but instead finds Adrienne lying in the living room and shoving, at the sound of his footsteps, a styrofoam container of nachos under the couch and out of sight.

She lays there looking innocent and guilty at the same time, like she did when he first met her, two years ago, eating a pear on a city bus, letting the juice stain her school uniform—until he’s standing over her, and she can’t help but see how he’s changed.

“What the hell happened?” she says. He knows she had meant to say, “Happy birthday, sweetheart!” the moment he walked in the door at six o’clock, and shower him with kisses and pull out neatly wrapped gifts. He smiles wide at her shock, the first smile of the day, revealing a row of gold and platinum capped teeth that sparkle in the afternoon sun. The second-hand caps fit awkwardly and rattle a little when he speaks.

“What, you don’t like it? You don’t like my new look?” he laughs, but the joke dies away almost instantly and the silence is heavy.

“No, I like it, I like it,” Adrienne says, running a hand over his newly shaved head. The hair like straw is all but gone. He reminds her of the military recruiters who come to her school once a week and roam the halls at lunch in fatigues, carrying clipboards. He is like them, but much thinner, with a face drained of life and new gold teeth, a white chest full of bones that shows beneath the brown suede Indian costume he wears, suede with fringe, worn soft and supple, the suede pants too short, even with the fringe they reach only to the tops of his ankles, and below the pants, she sees his feet, cold and covered in mud. She hides her face in his shoulder so he won’t see the tears come into her eyes. “Happy birthday, sweetheart! I’m baking you a cake.”

He pulls her away and looks into her wet, smiling face. She hates being looked at like this, he knows, seriously, in the silence. She’ll break down and say something. “Did you lose your job?” she asks.

“Sort of.”

“Are you staying home for awhile?” she asks, her eyes on the dark wooden floor.

“Yes.”

“Me, too,” she says. And he is about to ask why, but he doesn’t, because he watches her, then, place her hand on her stomach, and he is not overcome with fear, not flooded with images of them, poverty-stricken, evicted from their apartment with a baby bundled in rags, calling her parents on a pay phone in the Tenderloin, riding the Greyhound bus back to the pear orchard with a cardboard box of formula and pacifiers, showing up at his mother’s doorstep in the Excelsior with a big apology on his lips and an even bigger request—no, he sees them here, the three of them, sitting in the backyard on a sunny day in the shade of the avocado tree, counting their fingers and toes.

Leigh Gallagher was born two days after Christmas on the wooden sidewalks of Georgetown, California. Now she is a student in San Francisco. This is her first published work.