Summer in the Land of Skin

The car in front of us flashes two bright-red brake lights, and I hold my breath again as she concentrates on lighting her cigarette. At the last minute, she slams on the brakes. She laughs and takes a drag, looking at me sideways.

“You’ve got an interesting driving style,” I say.

“This is nothing,” she tells me, adjusting the rearview mirror so she can examine her eyebrows. “You should see me when I’m drunk.”

Lucy and Arlan are out tonight, and for the first time since I came here, I’m home alone. Buddhist Monkeys has a regular gig on Friday nights at Fanny’s Barbecue Palace. Of course, I’m always invited, but tonight I’m not in the mood to watch Arlan’s talent being eclipsed by Danny’s absurd theatrics. It’s painful watching the handful of alcoholics who constitute Buddhist Monkeys’ fan base being replaced with a full-on crowd when the lame headliners, Honkey Dory, show up. Still, I don’t blame the kids around here for preferring Honkey Dory’s saccharine, top-forty tunes to Danny’s clumsy attempts at social commentary set to the assault-on-the-senses he calls music.

Since I met him a couple of weeks ago, my distaste for Danny has increased exponentially. His concept of the cosmos revolves around three reference points: Mad Max, Black Flag, and shooting up. If you try to steer the conversation away from these three topics, he inevitably stares with glassy-eyed vacancy at a point in space just above and beyond your left shoulder.

As for the other band members, Bill is more likable than Sparky, though by a thin margin. Sparky is enamored with Danny, and because he has no discernable personality of his own, his willingness to laugh at everything Danny says makes him guilty by association, in my eyes. Bill is more a devotee of Arlan, which gives us something in common, at least. He’s also more civilized than the others, but his rodentlike eagerness is a turnoff. Once, I saw him make the moves on a disgustingly drunk college girl who’d just been publicly dumped. Her mascara was still wet and the front of her shirt was slightly vomit-stained; Bill went right up and handed her another drink.

Tonight, I’m determined to take advantage of the only privacy I’ve had in weeks. Soon after I watch Lucy and Arlan drive off in his station wagon, I fix myself a cup of tea and snuggle into the window seat. I breathe into the cup and feel the steam rise against my face in a thin vapor. Outside, the evening sky is deepening its melancholy blue by several shades, and the college kids are beginning their Friday night by clomping downtown in their heavy-soled hipster shoes. The stillness of the house is startling. I can’t remember the last time I was alone.

In my old life, I’d grown used to days on end of virtual solitude. Even when I worked at After Hours, I was isolated inside my cubicle, with nothing but the low, compulsive hum of office life between me and silence. On weekends, I sometimes went out with Derek; we’d dine on lentil soup and organic juice at his favorite restaurant in Mill Valley, where the faint smell of ginger and dirt always clung to the air. Or my mother and I would spend the obligatory meal in one another’s company. As soon as we’d finished eating, though, we’d flee, both of us taxed by the accumulated weight of things we were too tired or frightened to say.

This summer my loner facade has been under siege. Since I’ve started living with Lucy and Arlan, every day begins and ends with the sounds of other people—the toilet flushes, coffee beans are ground, a tray of ice cubes is being twisted until it cracks, someone is yelling at someone else to bring them cigarettes. Sometimes I sleep by myself in the living room, listening to Lucy and Arlan have sex; more often, Bill or Danny or Sparky or all three are snoring somewhere nearby, collapsed on the floor in various shapes. I live in a hive of human sounds, filled with the buzz of other peoples’ needs and impulses.

The Land of Skin is active tonight. As it gets dark, I unwrap my binoculars from the wool sweater stashed deep in my backpack. I feel a little dirty as I crouch closer to the window and begin to focus. The hairy fixture of Purgatory Corner appears in life-size detail, his baseball cap perched backwards on his head, his stringy brown hair parting to reveal large, fleshy ears. He’s yelling something at the Goat Kid Hovel, and I open the window to hear better. “Get a life!” he bellows. “Goddamn disturbance of the peace!”

Across the street, the Goat Kids are attempting a barbecue of sorts. A cacophony of distorted guitars is pulsing from their windows. Out on the lawn, there’s a group of seven or eight of them clustered around a trash can half filled with debris. One of them douses it with lighter fluid and tosses a match in. A cluster of flames emerges suddenly, like a devil they’ve conjured. The flames increase in intensity, turning the Goat Kids’ faces gold. I hear the guy on the porch scream a half scolding, half admiring obscenity from across the street, but they’re too enraptured to notice. Someone carrying a package of hot dogs emerges from the house, and several of them dangle the dogs close to the flames. By the time they’ve managed to impale one or two on sticks, the flames have died down to embers.

I watch for a long time, lost in the familiar pleasure of it. I fold my legs under me and press my binoculars to the glass. I look for Raggedy Ann, but she’s not there. I feel half guilty, as if her absence is a direct result of my failure to look for her lately. I think of Magdalena and all those I watched with such vigilance back in San Francisco. Something in me longs for the beige of my apartment, the uninterrupted hours spent in anonymous bliss, soaking up the details of other peoples’ lives.

Some time later, I hear the scratch of a lighter behind me, and I turn so quickly that I feel a pain shoot down my neck. Lucy’s lighting her cigarette, standing there in her little red T-shirt and a barely-there skirt, with one boot tapping against the carpet. “So,” she says, and little puffs of smoke emerge from her lips as she speaks. “You’re one of those.”

I stand up and try to force my binoculars into my backpack.

“Don’t,” she says simply, but I’ve spilled the contents of my bag now, and am busying myself stuffing shirts and underwear and packages of gum back where they came from. “Anna,” she says. I meet her gaze, and she smiles. “You’re blushing,” she tells me. “You’re so lovely when you blush.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” I say.

“I’m not.” She comes closer, and I can smell the smoke on her, the sweet, fruity smell of her shampoo, and her breath laced with gin. “I would never do that.” For a moment, we just stand there, very close. Her face is tilted upward slightly toward mine. I can see the dark red lipstick, and the place where she went just slightly outside the lip line, to make her lips look even fuller. There are tiny marks where she plucked her eyebrows. Her eyes are so dark, and she’s watching me so intently, that the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand erect. I look down.

She takes a step back and falls onto the couch, her limbs spreading in a way that tells me she’s drunk. “I don’t humiliate people I like,” she says. “But I don’t mind telling you—watching is a form of rape.”

I sit, and concentrate on cinching my backpack closed.

“By the way,” she says, and she takes an extralong drag off her cigarette. “How can you go through life without smoking? Don’t you feel impovish—” She pauses and wraps her mouth around the syllables more carefully. “Impoverished?”

“How so?” I ask, glad that she’s changed the subject.

“You’ve been robbed of your prime smoking years!” She takes a cigarette from the pack and hands it to me. “Go on. Try one.”

“No thanks,” I say.