Sarah did a quick rearview check to see if Dylan was still sucking his thumb, and he was. His eyes were glazed with whatever narcotic high this gave him. She couldn't blame him - she still remembered doing it at his age and how much it relaxed her. When her mother caught her sucking it and scolded her, the next time she did it she enjoyed it even more, because it was naughty. She wondered fleetingly if someday Dylan would become a drug addict and she'd be reminded of this stoned expression. Last night Brian had the thankless task of extracting Dylan's blanket from him permanently, and Sarah winced at the memory of his wail. She and Brian had argued about it for weeks, with Sarah voting to let him have it just a little bit longer and Brian wanting to "rip off the band-aid" and get it over with before he started kindergarten. She took the blanket, folded it carefully, and put it on the top shelf of Dylan's bedroom closet, so that even if he couldn't hold it, he could be near it. She didn't tell Brian she did this.
She was on Masonic at Fell, scanning the traffic situation to see if she should stay put or get in the right lane to go up the hill, which was risky because the lane ended abruptly and nobody ever lets you merge without an outraged little honk. On the other hand, doing this saved her an entire light cycle, and she was exhausted and wanted to collapse on the sofa as soon as she could. The late afternoon air was almost sweet with fog, and unlike everyone else, she kept her window cracked to let in that smell because she loved it. The light changed, and in that moment, she decided to stay put and wait out the light if need be. The promise of her sofa wasn't worth the hassle of a near-accident.
She turned on the radio, preset to Energy 92.7, and was pleased to hear the 5:00 mashup just starting. She glanced back up to the rearview to survey her face, which was getting dryer every year, mottled and leathery, and this was patently unfair because she never laid out and sunbathed like all her friends and looking like this, she might as well have. She wondered where all the crepey lines and spots and tiny little domes came from. Mom or Dad? Neither of them, really. And none of them ever showed up in a reasonable area, where you could call it a beauty mark and get away with it. One was in her nasolabial fold - thank you Allure magazine for giving her that nomenclature - and it looked like a pimple with a freckle tossed over it haphazardly. Another was on the side of her nose, colorless and puffy, giving her a witchlike topography. Her dermatologist told her a cosmetic surgeon could remove them for her, but suffering with an HMO, it wouldn't be covered because they weren't cancerous or poisoning her. After a while, she gave up spackling concealer on them, because she knew everyone could see them anyway. They were now a part of her whether she wanted them or not.
The rest of her looked decent, especially after a day spent running errands with Dylan. Her dark brown hair was spilling out of her barretted ponytail in a kind of messy but sexy way, adding interest to her near-uniform of mom jeans, three-quarter sleeve tunic and low-heeled espadrilles. Her dark brown eyeliner had faded, but there was just enough left to frame her dark brown eyes. Before Dylan, they were her calling card, but now when she looked at them, she thought of Dylan, because he had them now. His dark brown eyelashes were adorable, and she couldn't wait to see if they stayed when he grew up. She re-focused her gaze in the mirror from her face to his and was relieved to see him dozing off, thumb still installed. She twisted around to get a better look at him, and at that precise moment, she glanced at the car next to her and saw him.
Her heart began pounding. It was him - no question about it. Behind the wheel of a Land Rover, of all cars, sat her ex-boyfriend, Victor. The one before Brian. All at once, she wanted the light to change so she could get away from him, but also, she wanted to light to stay red so she could regard him some more. She knew that profile so very well. She'd looked at it countless times, in his car, in bed, on the sofa watching TV. Seeing it again was ridiculously familiar, like eight years had not passed by. She might as well have been sitting in his passenger seat, he was so close to her in her mind. He was holding up his cell phone, glancing up and down, at the light, at the phone, ready to proceed when the light changed. All he had to do was glance to the left and he'd see her.
Her stomach knotted up at the memory of how it ended. So horrible, it made her breathless as she struggled to push away the image of their final goodbye, their arms crossed for protection, his words so measured and succinct, like cut crystal, vaulting out of him in that low and heartless way. He had found another girl he liked better, and when she pleaded for an explanation, some sort of reason or justification for why she wasn't good enough anymore, rather than be humane, he opted for the sharp, stabbing method. He ripped the band-aid off, she thought to herself with a rictus smile. She couldn't comprehend how a man who had truly loved her could do that, a man who had once called her his Favorite Girl in the Whole Wide World, and meant it. Yet there he was, yelling at her for failing to make it easy, and she was helpless. And here she was, married with a little boy, in her own car, staring at him in his own car, wanting him to see her, wanting him not to see her. Fleetingly, she wondered if he'd thought of her at all over the years. She decided that he probably had.
Sarah indulged herself with scrutiny. His dark hair was graying at the temples, and he'd clearly gained weight - she could see it in his face. He'd gotten rid of his stupid goatee and was now clean shaven and corporate. Why couldn't he have looked like that when we were together? she wondered. He didn't look very happy, and this comforted her. He seemed perturbed by his phone - it clearly wasn't satisfying him in whatever way he needed. This was appropriate, she realized. He was never satisfied with anything. First women, now technology. At least technology didn't talk back, she thought.
Finally, blessedly, the light changed. She faced forward and let him go. If he looked at her right then, she didn't want to know. The new Chris Lake song came on the radio, and she turned it up, not caring that it might wake up Dylan. She moved forward, and on her right, Victor sped up, intending to cut in front of her as his lane narrowed into nothing. She resisted the urge to be like everyone else and honk angrily at him. She let him in without a fuss, knowing that if he looked in his rearview mirror, he would definitely see her. He would definitely know it was her. She took a deep breath, exhaled, and made the firm decision not to care. And for the rest of the ride home, she focused on her Favorite Boy in the Whole Wide World, still miraculously asleep, thumb now released and by his side
Ben sat at his dining room table (bought on sale 11 years ago for $109 at Oysterbed, chairs included) staring at his open laptop, his screen waiting voraciously for him to fill it up with letters. The people outside who passed by his apartment window on Sanchez, en route to an inauguration party, or maybe fleeing from one in order to get home early for some decent sleep before work the next day, glanced in and saw what looked like a young writer, hunched over, hand crammed up under his chin, searching for just the right word. They were sort of right. Ben was in the middle of filling out his eHarmony profile, which to him felt like essay-based tax forms. He couldn't remember the last time he had less fun. He knew all about eHarmony's promises to find him his true love through some magic formula based on personality types, but for some reason, he was having a lot of trouble getting through the questionnaire pages, unnecessary trouble because this was his second attempt at it: not long ago, he'd signed up with the site, filled out the questionnaire, and, to his horror, was told by the now very unfriendly site that it could not find a match for him.
Ben was genuinely shocked to learn this. Really? he wondered. In all the hundreds of thousands of paid members who visited the site, not a single woman was right for him? At all? Fleetingly, he wondered if there was a male match for him, but then he remembered reading somewhere that eHarmony hates gays and lesbians, so that option was out. Ben wasn't gay, but after getting the horrid news that he was unmatchable, he wouldn't rule it out right now.
After receiving his rejection, Ben spent his next few days in a sort of defect reverie, obsessed with what sort of glitch he'd revealed in his profile that rendered him so repellent. He knew he was a little weird - he'd had girls tell him this before, especially his sisters - but was he that weird? So very weird that he was doomed to live out his days alone? In the Castro? When he first moved to San Francisco, he found a therapist at Davies Medical Center (long before CPMC inhaled it), a man in his seventies who actually berated him for having chosen to live in the Castro. "How do you expect to meet any single women if you deliberately sabotage yourself by living here?" the guy said. The year was 1996, and apparently, this man was completely unaware of the housing situation. Ben explained that while this was certainly true, he was unwilling to be homeless in order to improve his dating life.
He considered his previous girlfriends and wondered how they would fare if they signed up with the site. If he was unmatchable, then one or two of them had to be as well. It couldn't have just been him. Hell, one of his exes even wrote a book about how great it is to be single, and the book did so well it spawned this pro-single social movement with its own website, chat room, support groups, merchandise and, allegedly, an upcoming book tour that included talk shows. (He had it bookmarked.) He really didn't want to think that he was the inspiration for her book, but the way things looked right now, eHarmony might as well have just emailed him, "Look - we know about her book, and dude - take a hint, man. Nobody wants you."
After loosening up with a couple of beers (Pyramid Apricot Ale - he was on a fruity beer kick), Ben looked over his profile and started editing everything to be the opposite of who he actually was. He was no longer introverted, but outgoing; not a homebody, but "up for anything"; "spiritual" instead of "skeptical." Typing these words made him miserable, but the sting of rejection by eHarmony was worse than any rejection by women he'd suffered in the past, and now he was simply on a quest to get eHarmony to like him before anyone else.
He listened as a guy his age with a young daughter passed by outside. His walls were paper thin, and he could hear everyone out there, day and night, so he spent his apartment life wearing foam earplugs. Today, however, he took them out and allowed himself to be distracted from the task at hand. His favorites were the conversation snippets taken out of context. Today, he heard the guy say, "It's something people eat...NO NO NO HONEY don't eat it, don't eat it, here - just - put it in my hand, okay, just spit it out...oh honey, don't cry..." Ben wondered what the kid tried to eat. Right outside, just a few feet away, that young dad was enduring his own kind of misery, one that Ben knew nothing about: parenthood. At the rate things were going, that phase of life was out of his reach, because he couldn't even get fucking eHarmony to like him, much less a girl. Maybe I should stop calling them girls, he wondered. Is that it? Am I offending the online dating gods by not calling them women?
An hour later, Ben finished up his lies, saved his profile, checked his email (nothing), got up, put his empty beer bottles in his recycling, went to his sofa ($602 at Copenhagen), grabbed the remote and settled in for a night with his real true love: TiVo. Tonight's date: The Colbert Report.
Rafferty sat across from his wife Gina at a stupidly large conference room table at Buttfucker & Associates, which is what he liked to call the entertainment law firm he had on retainer. Their real name was Butterworth & Associates, but based on the amount of money they drained out of him, he preferred the alternate name. Gina was facing him on the other side of the table, but it felt like she was clear across the room, like in those Merchant Ivory films where one rich dude sits at one end and his miserable wife sits at the other, silently munching their British food while both of them secretly contemplate divorcing one another. Today, his attorney, Haskell "Hack" Butterworth, sat at the head of the conference room table reading aloud their trust documents, which had taken months to draft and revise due to the complex web of rights and agreements in Rafferty's current deal with Sony, which was less than a year old after his band defected from Geffen. Rafferty had learned over the years that the fresher your deal with a label was, the more legalese it contained, because lawyers were paid to come up with longer, more papery ways of talking about money.
Rafferty was the lead singer of Smackdown, a hard rock band whose heyday in the Eighties was rudely interrupted by those children in Seattle until the mid-Nineties, when, after each band member blew their respective wads on solo projects, they got back together in 1999 and had been churning out music ever since, long enough to be around when the verb for a new release went from "coming out" to "dropping," which always made him crack up when he heard it. "When is your CD gonna drop, dude?" he'd hear from some music journalist, and he'd have to work hard to keep from making a joke about picking it up or misplacing it.
His life had followed the predictable rock star trajectory: fucked-up childhood in Watsonville, met his bandmates after they responded to the bass player's flyer tacked up on a bulletin board at Baytree Bookstore at UC Santa Cruz, gigs in Oakland leading to better gigs in San Francisco, signed with scrappy upstart label Retard Records, developed a rabid lustful following in the Bay Area, got poached by Geffen, went on tour with Quiet Riot, then Skid Row, then Aerosmith, watched Steven Tyler gack out on heroin, tried it, fell into it headfirst, spent the next decade living in Sausalito in a horrified stupor watching grunge bands and then boy bands take over what little video programming was left on MTV, met Gina, a groupie in the middle of her own neverending art school/jewelry business/eBay top seller trajectory, fell in love with her all-natural double-D bookshelf and surprisingly bawdy wit, went to rehab after Gina said she wouldn't marry him unless he did, got clean, endured an incongruously pastel wedding in Hollywood, got his rock star mojo back, wrote and collaborated on songs he was actually proud of for once, and then, four months ago, got diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer.
Fucking hell, man.
And instead of spending time in a state of chemo-tude at UCSF Medical Center like he was supposed to be doing, he was sitting here in a law office listening to his attorney read aloud all the many documents describing where his money was going to go after he dies, which, according to his team of doctors, was imminent. He'd already endured an avalanche of good wishes, some sincere, others from industry people who were actually surprised to learn he was still alive, and his decision to choose a fast death instead of nausea, bone pain and a slow death was something Gina was now being forced to explain to friends, family members, distant relatives, reporters, his management and their employees, bloggers, entertainment news hosts, fans, stalkers and well-meaning strangers who interrupted her during her trips to the pharmacy to get his meds to proclaim how hard they were praying for his recovery. Gina, who had barely begun to live her own life, had worked out a suitable pat answer for just about any occasion: "Well, he's being brave, and that's what counts right now. Thanks for your good wishes - take care."
As Rafferty listened to Hack go over his living trust (so ironic, he thought, to have a living trust as you were dying), he looked at Gina's round face, her normally flat-ironed blonde hair pulled into a messy ponytail with curls spraying defiantly at her temples, her regular rock 'n roll black eyeshadow blended back to a dull roar, and worst of all, her shell-shocked brown eyes as they darted from Hack to him to the table in a kind of pleading triangle as she listened to yet more information about her husband's upcoming death. Rafferty hated seeing her in this pain. A couple of weeks after his diagnosis, when she'd gone through all the Kleenex in their five-bedroom, seven-bathroom house in Ross (bought in anticipation of filling it with little Raffertys), he tried to comfort her by reminding her what she could do with his money after he died, maybe start her own boutique, go back to school, take some friends to Europe, whatever she wanted - she'd be free. No more Rock Star Wife, just Gina. At first he could see her allowing herself to dream about her future, but then she told him she felt guilty spending his money in her head while he "lay dying." They sat in their Jacuzzi and had The Talk, in which Rafferty gave her explicit permission to go on without him, to find a new man to love and have children, to sell their house if she wanted, to make a Smackdown retrospective documentary or put together a Greatest Hits compilation - whatever her little heart desired. That night, he felt like he really got through to her, and he could see her relax a little and start planning, and then the very next day, Hack left a message on their answering machine suggesting the three of them meet "as soon as is practicable" to go over the Death Documents. Whatever hope that he'd managed to inject into Gina that night disappeared.
Rafferty felt his pain medication kick in, and morphine always seemed to bring out the artist in him, so reached over to the stack of pens and legal pads that Helen, Hack's secretary, had had laid out for them, and he grabbed a pen, but a legal pad didn't feel right to him, so he took the cardboard coaster out from under his sweating Coke can and began drawing paisley droplets on it. He wondered why Hack couldn't afford better coasters than cardboard when he was paying him $450 an hour to read aloud his doom. As he drew, he felt Gina's foot nudge him under the table, and when he looked up, Hack was looking at him expectantly. Rafferty guessed that he was being asked to approve something, so he sighed out a vague, "Sounds good..." and this seemed to work, because Hack began stacking and binder-clipping things and said, "I'll have Helen messenger these to you tomorrow. You gonna be around tomorrow?"
Rafferty couldn't resist. "God willing!" he said brightly. Hack smiled and grimaced.
They left the conference room and walked through the law firm to meet up with Damian, Rafferty's manager, in the lobby. He kept his head down, comforted that his sunglasses hid most of his cancerous misery, but as he passed by the offices and cubicles, he could feel the gazes warming his back. He overheard a couple of white-shirted attorneys discussing him as he passed by, and they immediately shut up, muttering, "Wait - there he is...dude, he looks fuckin' awful..." He loved the irony that he'd lived through a decade of heroin, only to be felled by pancreatic cancer, which killed Michael Landon and was currently killing Patrick Swayze. His own oncologist gave it to him straight: "Nobody survives pancreatic cancer."
Damian escorted him and Gina down the elevator at 275 Battery and into their waiting limo. The ride up to Ross was silent, as always. When they got home, Rafferty went straight to bed and Gina said she was going to go online and work on the memorial site she planned to put up.
The next day, Rafferty got a call from Sheila, his publicist, who told him somebody had put up a listing on eBay the night before selling the cardboard coaster.
When Clayton Everett packed up his stuff and moved from Stockton to San Francisco, he knew he was going to reinvent himself, but he had to do it slowly, over time, so he started with changing his name from Clayton to Claybourne. He considered adding a Roman numeral after it, just for patrician spice, but he decided it would be too difficult to remember. Clay had always gone by Clay his whole life, but when he got to the city, he planned to make everyone call him Clayton until they had earned the right to shorten it to Clay. A man has to have his limits, he thought.
Clay already knew how much - or little - power a name could hold. In grade school, his classmates, including his friends, called him Mount Everett, because he was significantly heavier than everyone else. In junior high, he was determined to shed this nickname and deflate himself, so while everyone else was at home ensconced in a bedroom IM-ing, he came home, threw his backpack on the counter, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and walked briskly around his neighborhood, pointedly declining to wave at his neighbors and avoiding petty distractions such as urgent red hands at crosswalks. By high school, he was one of the skinniest kids he knew, and this allowed him to go into any store confident that any piece of clothing in it would fit him. He started reading Men's Vogue and Details, scrutinizing the slouching, glowering models in their faux-hawks and slim-cut suits, and one day he assured himself, this is how I will look in San Francisco. He felt it in his bones, he was so sure. Sometimes, he'd come to school looking like one of the models, but within minutes of entering the building, some jock would pass by him and cough the word fag into his balled-up fist, so Clay would put the clothes in the back of his closet, dreaming of graduation when he could finally get the hell out..
Now, five years later, Clay had made it to the Promised Land, living in a 3-bedroom apartment in the Marina with a couple of trustafarian roommates, Devon and Martin. He met them through a Craigslist roommates ad, and he managed to convince them with many hand flourishes that he too came from money and could pay his rent while trying to figure out what his bliss was, maybe something in the arts, he wasn't sure yet. He remembered how Devon scanned him up and down, and Clay was sure he was fairly sweating fraudulent onto their hardwood floor, but after they went into the kitchen to discuss him, and Clay looked around the apartment envying its rich-kid topography - unspeakably large plasma TV, laptops littered around like soda cans, overstuffed chenille throw pillows donated from their worried mothers - they came back and proclaimed him fit to live with them, although Devon added he was the "best of the candidates they'd seen so far," implying that perhaps there was someone else out there much better than he was, and Clay secretly agreed this was most likely true. They told him his share of the rent was $1,500 per month. The ad said the whole apartment rented for $3,500 per month, which meant Devon and Martin each paid $1,000 each. For a fleeting second, Clay nearly objected to their unwillingness to split the rent evenly, but he caught himself just in time, reminding himself about his ultimate goal and how these two could help him achieve it. Clay clenched his back teeth and told them $1,500 was no problem at all.
Clay was determined to break into San Francisco society. He wasn't sure yet how he was going to do it, especially without money, but he wanted to give it a shot nonetheless. Back in junior high, he was forced to accompany his mother to a cat show at the Moscone Center, and while dying a slow and painful death from embarrassment, he wandered around outside, transfixed by all the taxis disgorging a seemingly endless stream of obese cat owners lugging cages and cosmetic cases and feline-emblazoned merchandise into the building. He watched an older gay couple saunter across the sidewalk, hand-in-hand, and Clay could tell from their tittering expressions that they were mocking the cat folks, just as he was in his head. Clay was quietly stunned to see them hold hands in public, and something in his heart nearly burst over this sight, maybe from joy, he wasn't really sure, but it got his attention, though he quickly bit off an ew gross and averted his gaze. He watched as a folded magazine fell from underneath one of their arms, and neither of them noticed and kept walking. When they had crossed the street and disappeared, Clay went over and picked it up. It was called Nob Hill Gazette, and its cover contained a painfully styled photograph of three older women, Definiciled and ear-tucked, wearing very fancy gowns and glittering jewelry. Clay folded it underneath his own arm, went back into the building, and found his mother sitting in a row of hastily arranged metal folding chairs watching a trio of cats being judged on their apparent award-winning catness. Clay sat down beside her, opened the magazine, and suddenly he was transported from the hell of cat urine and giggling fat people into a world of charity balls at 5-star hotels, men in tuxedos with floppy white hair and their caffeinated trophy wives, articles about family trusts and stock market investments, and pages upon pages of party photos, many with the same people in them over and over again, beaming sveltely and wealthily at the camera.
This is what I want to be, Clay decided right then and there.
For the rest of junior high and high school, no matter how bad things got, Clay kept his eye on the prize: San Francisco. All he had to do was graduate, move there, find a job, and somehow worm his way into these fetes and parties, charm everyone, find a rich man - whoops, woman - to marry, and he'd be set for life. Clay knew he was meant to do this, just like some are meant to be Olympians or politicians or schoolteachers. Clay was meant to go to parties and spend other people's money.
And when Clay wrote out his first incredibly bad check for $1,500 and gave it to Devon, who had appointed himself rent collector, he knew that it was only a matter of time before he was going to be spending Devon's money, and Martin's money, and anyone else he could find to let him do it. He had to be patient. He had to wait for it.
"Do you go by Clay or Clayton?" asked Devon, looking at his check.
Fuck, I forgot, he thought.
"Usually Clayton," he said, "but you can call me Clay." He added what he thought was a smile of indulgence.
