#last tango in arty flashbacks

[the-revisionist]

The Tristan Chord, chapter 20

xx. Calder Valley sunset view

Trigger warning: mentions of abortion, underage sex

1. the escape artist

It’s the Year of the Abortion. Gillian only calls it this in her head and in her diary: Written in a looped, thickly traced imprimatur of deep, cheap ballpoint blue—wishes she had an oh-so-symbolic red pen but doesn’t—underlined, defiant, and knowing full well that her nosy mother would read it. Despite this bit of all-caps bravado she does not quite possess the courage to write down all the things she wants to put to paper. Like how the morning after the D&E that began and ended with a doctor’s lecture and scowl, she stared into a toilet bowl of blood—oily clots and thickened skeins, specimens poised on the water’s surface as if on slide under a microscope, like in science class, she should be in science class—and her knees buckled and it was an act of sheer will to keep upright because she has already caused enough trouble, is the source of her mother’s tears and rages, her father’s silences, Robbie’s wounded befuddlement as she froze him out, all of it worse than the blood in the bowl, than the abortion itself.

Thus a resolution to be good: Extra chores around the house, studying more, assiduously avoiding any kind of interaction with and/or mention of boys. No matter how hard she tried, though, the perpetual undercurrent of parental resentment lit up her nerves and sent sparks of rebellion flying through the house. She swore at her mother’s passive-aggressive comments, matched her father in sulking, and got horrid, lurid purple streaks in her hair that unleashed a torrent of abusive verbiage from her mother more extensive and obscene than announcement of a pregnancy did. Her father had just sighed and said Oh, Gillian in that way he had, half a haiku of disappointment that cut her a thousand times more than the elaborate brow-beatings from her mum.

Then summer. The streaks in her hair grew out and when she bobbed it she appeared alarmingly wholesome—particularly in a school uniform, so it is a relief to chuck it in the bottom of the closet for a few months and avoid the leering sarcasm of certain headmasters: playing the nice girl next door now, are we? Being good, she realizes, is a tiresome affair, garnering no tangible reward, nor even a baseline of respect. She starts staying out late again, staggering in at any time between midnight and five in the morning, and usually digesting a late-night snack of leftovers and opprobrium from whichever parent had stayed up late for the honor of shaming her.

These nocturnal preoccupations come courtesy of another big event in the Year of the Abortion: Antje, Gillian’s best mate, buys a used Fiat. She lives in a council flat with her mother, who is Dutch; her father, a drunken native of Sowerby Bridge, occasionally shows up at the flat for attempts at reconciliation with his wife and daughter until his fists and his drinking override the tenuous established peace, and he ends up leaving again for the deleterious combination of rehab and flophouse.

Gillian has no idea why Antje—possessive of blonde supermodel good looks, who was also smart, cool, and widely admired by all—has ever given her the time of day. She possesses no illusions about her own appearance, and suspects they are friends largely because she makes Antje look good in comparison—pretty, but not too much so, the Belinda to her Dido—this comparison leaping to mind thanks to Maurice playing Dido and Aeneas the other week whilst she and her parents were having tea at his; after too much sherry he tipsily enacted the plot with salt and pepper shakers and various other condiments. (Dido was a bottle of Ballymaloe Relish.) Conveniently she could blame her parents for mixed messages. Her father, always kindly biased toward one and all, said that she was beautiful, while her mother would only say, with grudging suspiciousness, there’s something about you.

In comparison to what Antje has splendidly in spades, something is really nothing, and that elusive something did not serve her well in the plan she had hatched last year to be noticed by the great and mysterious Eddie Greenwood. Antje knows him, had introduced them at an outdoor party near the reservoir one time, where Eddie said ta by way of introducing himself and then later don’t lean on that, love when she dared to press her ass against the precious shiny flank of his newly renovated Corvair. Via the social misfit’s favorite kind of osmosis—artful eavesdropping—Gillian absorbed several facts: he was the older brother of her classmate Robbie, worked in a garage as a mechanic, which she liked because she liked working with autos and fixing things too, and Christ in heaven he was the gorgeous eighth fucking wonder of the world when he dove flawlessly into the reservoir. Awkwardly, and with Antje’s eh, why not? approval she set to the task of befriending Robbie in hopes of getting closer to Eddie. Similar to John Elliot’s impervious ignorance to the subtext of Gillian’s frequent interrogations concerning his estranged wife, Robbie seemed oblivious to her persistent questioning about his brother, and before she knew it she was in too deep with him. Which was easy enough to do because he was kind, laughed at her dumb jokes, and appeared interested in her to a degree that no one else was. Exempting the strange force of Robbie’s desire for her, nothing remains of the fantasy she craved nor the relationship she never meant to have.

So she finds herself at the reservoir once again on a summer night, but this time alone with Antje—their hair damp from a swim, trading a joint, and staring up into the encroaching night as just-visible stars knit infinite, unseen pathways into blackening blue.

So that’s that, eh? Antje says.

That’s that, Gillian echoes.

Antje hums sympathetically. Brilliant plan didn’t work.

Nope. Gillian releases a cloud of smoke, an offering to the starry sky. Didn’t fucking work at all.

They collapse into giggling that leaves them breathless, because there is nothing else to be said about it all.

A fortnight before the school year begins anew they go to a punk club in Manchester, all cavernous chill, blood red anarchy symbols and slogans on the grotty walls, bloated with smoke, and with a bad band doing covers of Joy Division until they’re booed off stage and someone starts cranking the real thing through the speakers. While Antje flirts with some bloke from the shit band because she thinks he looks like Adam Ant, Gillian tries finagling a pint from the bartender, who rolls his eyes at her alarming baby face and tells her to piss off—and finds herself pressed up against a woman at the bar also vying for alcohol.

The woman smirks and buys her a pint. Gillian is relieved the club is dim enough to camouflage her burning blush. Over the past year certain feelings have, on occasion, simmered within her, forcing periodic, half-hearted self-denials of the realization that she fancied some girls a bit, and watched them much the way she did certain boys and thus in a manner distinct from that of her friends—not the casual critiques of how Claire wears her lustrous hair and how Rita does her flawless makeup and doesn’t Sandra look amazing in that skirt, but something different. She is ensnared by ineluctable details: softness and grace, perfume and clean sweat, the long legs of the headmaster’s wife, just to name a few.

In the dark of the club the color of the woman’s eyes are unfathomable. Her hair, long and wavy, looks dark brown, auburn—or maybe that was a trick of the magenta light that hovered sadly around the empty, beer-sodden dance floor. She wears the seemingly incongruous combination of a leather motorcycle jacket over some sort of flowery print dress, and Doc Martens. So incongruous it seems genius, at least to a fifteen-year-old. She lives in Hebden Bridge, she tells Gillian, and studies art at Bradford. She smokes. Curlicues from her cigarette unravel slowly in contrast to the pounding, transformative flurry of music relentless as hummingbird wings.

Day in day out. Day in day out. Day in day out.

Gillian’s heartbeat matches time with Joy Division until Antje roughly grabs the scruff of her collar and slurs into her ear, we’re leaving, Mike is taking us to a party.

Irritably she wrinkles her nose. Who’s Mike?

Our new best friend, Antje hisses, so stop flirting with this dyke and let’s go.

This dyke. The phrase vibrates, her neck prickles. But as Gillian shrugs apologetically and turns to go, the woman grabs her rucksack by the strap, fishes out Gillian’s notebook of French that she was studying in preparation for the fall, and scrawls a name and an address on a blank page in the back. Only the name swims into cohesion: Julia.

Stop by sometime, yeah? Julia says. I have interesting friends. She smiles. And better drinks than here.

Outside the dark air is purer and sweeter, even as a lorry roars by, and the guy named Mike points at a white van while Gillian stops dead on the curb and thinks ax murderer.

Then Antje presses the keys of the Fiat into her palm, the sweaty warmth of her hand a shock. Follow us, she says.

Don’t have my license yet, you know that.

Don’t get caught, then. Before crossing the street to the van, she squints playfully at Gillian. That woman gave you her number?

Well, address. Yeah. So?

Oh nothing, Butterbean, Antje coos.

The nickname, used ever since they were in grammar school together, soothes Gillian’s ire just a touch. Don’t mean anything, she grumbles.

Jesus Gillian, you were looking at her like a bloke, Antje cackles—and nudges her gentle-like, nipping at her with a quick, blurry kiss on the cheek, and says, S’all right, silly, I don’t care. You only live once.

Following Mike to the van she sways through the street and the trench coat she wears flutters and flares; a streetlamp coronation drops a wreath of light on her blonde head. She pops into the van and she’s gone. Even though they remained friends for years after this, Gillian has always framed this image as a closing shot, the final scene in the movie of their youth because twelve years later Antje will be dead of an overdose in some bloke’s apartment in Manchester and Gillian will be married to Eddie and the first thing she will think of when hearing about it will be, you were always looking for the perfect way out, you always wanted to escape the shit life here, well you did, you finally did. In death, she envied Antje more than she ever did in life.  

2. A different shadow on the wall, a stranglehold of a certain feeling

A few weeks pass before Gillian makes the move one day after school. Getting into Julia’s building is no problem; the lock on the main door is broken, and every floor is connected by a thread of dingy hallways reeking of cabbage or unidentifiable root vegetables—a hundred years of cheap food sweltering and stewing in misery. Standing in front of the correct door on the fourth floor, she knocks. And waits. Knocks again. Nothing. While anxiously biting her lips, she hears an ominously slow thumping on the stairs that grows closer and closer. Then singing, a basso profundo of all force and no tone: Reap the wild wind.

Then, exaggerated and trilled ridiculously: Reeeeeaaaap the wwwwwwild wwwwwind.

Appearing at the end of the hallway is a large man with wild, curly black hair and a herringbone overcoat. He grins at her, which does absolutely nothing to soothe the panicked pounding of her heart; at a glance she can tell that she barely reaches his shoulders, her waist is probably as big as one of his thighs. Slowly he sways toward her, hulking and humming Ultravox, drunk or stoned or both and, like a battered old ship guided to shore by an invisible tugboat, lumbers right past her to the corner flat next door.

Fumbling with a set of keys, he nods at the door of Julia’s flat. She’s not in, love. Be around in about an hour or so.

Oh.

You’re welcome to wait, he says, and the door to his flat slowly opens. Want to come in?

N-no, I’m okay. I’ll just wait out here.

He smiles again. Smart girl. Prolly watch all those slasher movies, don’t ya? They’re like a public service announcement these days, aren’t they? He pushes the door open wider. Tell you what. I’ll leave the door open so we can chat.

Gillian remembers she has a Swiss army knife in her rucksack. My luck, she thinks, I’d probably end up stabbing myself if he comes at me. Okay, she agrees warily.

I’m James.

Right.

All right Miss Mysterious, you don’t have to tell me your name. Where’d you meet Jules?

Jules?

Julia, ya numpty.

Oh. Club over on Carlton.

You mean that shite place that always plays Depeche Mode?

Gillian hesitates. She likes Depeche Mode. No, the one with the anarchy symbols.

Jesus Christ you’ll get the clap from just sitting on the shitter in that dump. Fancy a cuppa?

Sure.

She hears a clatter of dishes, the sound of a kettle popped, running water.

You’re just a wee bairn, he says. What’re ya doing in a shithole like that, eh?

Listening to music, she replies, and trots out the lie she has prepared for nearly every stranger she meets: I’m eighteen.

If you’re eighteen, he snorts, then I’m bloody Methuselah.

Tired on being on the backfoot, she decides it’s time to grill him by seizing on his weird accent: You Irish?

He gasps. You wound me, child! Glaswegian, born and raised.

Sorry.

Trust me, I’ve been called worse. He carries an old wooden desk chair into the hallway and presents it to Gillian with a florid curtsy and she thinks of an old cartoon she saw with a bear pretending to be a butler. Thought ya should be comfortable, he says. Five minutes later he brings out a cup of tea, goes back into the apartment, and Gillian feels like she’s being set up for some Monty Python skit and a giant blancmange will come barreling down the hallway and smother her to death.

I’m assuming she wants to paint you, James calls out into the hallway.

Gillian squeaks. Me?

You’re pretty enough.

She paints? Then Gillian remembers: She’s in art school, numpty.

He sighs. There’s nothing more painful than a wasted compliment. O the fairer sex, thank heavens I don’t have to bother with you lot.

That was a compliment, then?

James laughs. Come inside, take a look. I have some of her paintings here. Her flat’s too bloody small for most of ’em.

Gillian hesitates.

I swear I’m not a rapist.

That is s-something a rapist would say.

Fair point, ya cheeky little bint.

He ignores her. She finishes the tea, frowns nervously into the empty cup until the curious embrace of fate wins out and she surrenders, wandering cautiously through the open door into his flat.

It is larger than expected. One half of it is sparse—mattress on floor, electric plate, small refrigerator—but a migration and density of objects creeps along the southern exposure: paints in containers and on brushes clustered in empty rusted coffee cans, the effect of it all pulls the eye to the canvases in various states of process that crowd and dominate the wall that they lean against.

The biggest canvas is the most colorful one, a painting unlike anything she has seen hung in dusty museums or anyone’s home. A landscape of the world on fire—swaths of red-orange-gold meltingly thick on a blue and lavender background, the brightness chasing a darkening violet blue to the very edge of the canvas, to where you imagine the night begins. Her eyes flicker among the alternating lines of drenched color and she marvels at how these individual, distinct lines come together into a thrilling whole, as the frames of a film coalesce into a single second of motion. Something else magically takes shape: A hauntingly familiar hatched stack of lines near the bottom of the painting, its identity confirmed with a 90-degree head tilt.

That’s the mill! she exclaims.

Yup, he says. As the title evinces.

There is a ribbon of rough white canvas at the painting’s bottom right. She kneels, and there it is, in a thin pencil scrawl almost too illegible to read: view of calder valley sunset no 27, the milll.

Oh.

He laughs not unkindly, his heavy, bearlike tread creaking the floorboards as he walks over to the painting.

It’s something, isn’t it? he murmurs, as if seeing the landscape for the first time. Folding his arms, he sighs with undisguised affection. Bitch has the nerve to paint better than me.

Another cup of tea and several biscuits later she’s so caught up in his conversation, his world—he talks of his hometown of Glasgow and its art history, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and symbolism and Art Nouveau, all while doodling on a large sketchpad and continually topping off his tea with scotch—that she almost doesn’t notice Julia walking in through the flat’s still-open door. Late afternoon sunlight cuts across the room and the artist herself rivals the startling beauty of her work—same Doc Martens, same leather jacket over a frayed linen blouse, and an old corduroy skirt, and Gillian receives confirmation that her hair is a rich russet brown and her eyes, filled with sunlight, are light hazel, sort of green-gold. The sum effect is that she is unlike any woman Gillian has ever encountered before, different than her classmates, her teachers, her mum’s friends.

She rests a hand feather-light on Gillian’s shoulder as if they’ve known each other forever and Gillian hears the delicate racketing of silver bracelets near her own ear, a click-click as if something is locking into place—oh happy prison, keep me here forever—and Julia says, in a voice flecked with a toff accent that Gillian hadn’t noticed the first time around, James, you’ve stolen my stray.

3. drink and dope and Derrida and Depeche Mode

Gillian starts coming round regularly. First it’s weekends, then a sprinkling of days during the week after school, casually dispersed just so that she doesn’t appear a desperate clinger-on. Sometimes there are up to a dozen or so people crammed in Julia’s tiny, tidy flat—apparently she uses James’s significantly larger space as a default studio—sitting around smoking, drinking, eating, getting high, and talking about books, music, art. Even though she is terrified of saying anything amongst this gaggle of university students and penniless artists—she still hasn’t recovered from the shame of enthusiastically admitting she liked Wordsworth—nonetheless she feels remarkably grown up and sophisticated and is mostly content to sit around and take it all in. Well, to take in the restless hostess at the very least: At these times Julia is always on the move, fetching drinks, talking, pacing, trying to get people to eat homemade protein bars or granola or disgustingly verdant smoothies.

She’s a bloody hippie, James always says. Talk a good game, pretends she’s a Wire fan or whatever, but you see, whenever she’s alone she’s making fucking granola and listening to Joni Mitchell.

That James knows what she’s like whenever she’s alone has, on more than one occasion, guiltily tied Gillian into knots of jealousy; it’s not until she drops in on him late one afternoon to find him hung-over all the way into bleary-eyed incoherence and with a scruffy, peroxide-blond punk boy in his bed that his particular intimacy with Julia all makes sense. Insofar as anything she feels, thinks, or sees nowadays makes sense.

It certainly doesn’t make sense, Gillian thinks, that after a night of drink and dope and Derrida and Depeche Mode—some in Julia’s circle had grudgingly copped to liking the band, which made her feel cool again—to make granola at four in the morning but by Christ they are doing it. Everyone is gone, including James, who has staggered back to his flat, and she watches as Julia scoops the cooled granola off a baking sheet, dump it into a bowl, and shove it under Gillian’s nose.

Try it, says Julia. Not the burnt parts, though.

Gillian grabs a nutty, sticky clump of the granola and pops it in her mouth. It’s sweet and warm, and she could easily down the whole bowl. It’s good, she says.

Bet you can’t taste the spirulina!

No, because I don’t know what the fuck that is.

Julia laughs and sits across from Gillian at the space-green Formica kitchen table, which, as she had proudly told Gillian, had been fished out of a dumpster—by James, of course. She stretches out long legs, flexes her bare feet. Gillian notices that the bottoms of her feet are grayish-pink from running around barefoot all night.

So, she drawls, my little foul-mouthed friend, my sweet and tender hooligan—

Am I really a hooligan?

Don’t sound so pleased, Gillian. You certainly like to talk that way, don’t you? But that’s not you, you’re smart. Can’t help but wonder, though, if you’re thinking ahead. Do you want to go to university?

My father wants me to work in insurance, Gillian replies with a shrug. Civil service, maybe.

Julia bursts into laughter.

No, really.

Why?

Because I—like helping people? Gillian speculates helplessly. Which is bollocks because the thought of actually dealing with people all day sets her teeth on edge. It’s because the old man wants her to work in some boring desk job that will keep her out of trouble.

But what do you want to do?

Julia asks her this question all the time. Because she’s so unaccustomed to anyone actually asking what she would like to do with her future, usually she just shrugs or changes the subject. But the late night, the cheap chianti, the joint has worn down her stroppy protective layer.

I don’t—don’t know, she says. Travel. Go to France. Maybe Netherlands, Rotterdam—Antje’s got family there, we talked about going someday.

You’re learning French. I saw it in your notebook.

Yeah. Thought maybe if I got good enough, I c-could be a translator. I could live and work anywhere, then.

You could, Julia says softly. She has a habit of gazing so intensely at Gillian, and for such seemingly long, uninterrupted intervals—half a minute seems eternity—that Gillian wants to tell her everything but then she stops and wonders if Julia is really seeing her and not an object in light and shadow, something to be committed to paper or canvas in paints and oils and pens, rendered useless and casually discarded in the process.

Gillian stares at the floor. Are you really going to paint me? she mumbles.

You don’t want me to, do you?

With a don’t-give-a-fuck shrug, Gillian redirects her look at the kitchen wall, where there is a worn and torn film poster of Cocteau’s Orphée, and gnaws futilely at a hangnail.

I don’t usually paint figures. People. She pauses. Well, not anymore. Thought I was never good at it. But James said I should try again, and figurative work, that’s his thing—he’s so good he caught the eye of Lucian Freud, you know. So when I saw you, I thought you might—inspire me.

Me?

You’ve got a good face. An interesting face. Mark my words, there’s more beauty in character than anything you’ll see in a bloody magazine or on telly.

Gillian feels a blush coursing up her body, from chest to neck and further, and as the tips of her ears tingle, she blurts out, You should paint Antje. She’s way prettier than me. She’s beautiful. I mean, she’s, she’s like a painting come to life anyway. Like a, a Botticelli or whatever.

Why would I want to paint a painting? Julia grins teasingly. You sound like you’re in love with her.

No. I mean, I love her—she’s my best friend.

I like her. Bring her round again.

Nah. She’s too busy shagging this guy she met, he’s in a band.

Not that horrible Joy Division cover band? Julia is aghast.

Gillian’s silence confirms it.

They laugh.

Then, sighing, Julia looks out the window. Jesus Christ, it’s nearly dawn.

My parents will be freaking out.

You can call them. James has a phone—you could dash over and use it. Nothing will wake him now.

Gillian shakes her head. Fuck them.

Julia doesn’t push. She rises, relights the joint she’s been working on most of the night, and starts puttering about clearing up the party mess while Joni Mitchell plays jazzy and low in the background.

But you know I’m so glad to be on my own—

Calder Valley sunrise seems less spectacular compared to the painting of its sunset. Gillian stands near the kitchen window and she’s just tired and high enough—and crashing ever so slightly—to imagine that the pastel cresting of dawn over the tops of the buildings is a painting, something created in the vapid studio of her unimaginative mind. Absently she nibbles at her fingernails again and tastes the smoky bitterness from a joint on her fingers and amidst the layered bass that rolls through her like blood and the jangling guitar, Julia lifts the hair away from the nape of Gillian’s neck and kisses her there.

Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger Can set up trembling in my bones

Is this okay? she whispers.

I know no one’s going to show me everything We all come and go unknown Each so deep and superficial Between the forceps and the stone

Gillian is afraid to say yes, even more afraid to say no. She touches Julia’s hand, which rests on her hip—a tentative signal, a flashing warning light to go slow. Hejira means journey, this much she has learned from puzzling endlessly over Joni Mitchell. But there’s no telling what the point of the journey is or where it will end up. But this morning it takes her to this woman’s bed, where she’s stripped down blank and naked as a new canvas. Her partially clad, fumbling fucks with Robbie—and a couple others—did not prepare her for the wholesale vulnerability of being like this in someone’s bed. For appraisal with sight and words and where the hot greed of her response is tempered with a thousand kinds of touches and kisses, a sweet hell of foreplay where the ache created by the slightest contemplation of forever dwells—she knows it now and will never, ever forget it because it is here that she learns how to beg without regret.

Slow and gentle, Julia parts her legs and studies her cunt as closely as her face or any other part of her body; it is impossible to know within the fine, feathered interleaves of aesthetics and desire where the artist’s detachment ends and the lover’s appreciation begins.

L’origine du monde—the origin of the world, she says. It’s a painting. By Courbet. Beautiful. Almost as beautiful as you. She sighs. Christ. You are really lovely and I can’t help myself.

Gillian manages one last final, whispered please before it begins. The immersive shock of someone going down on her for the first time sends her shivering into a sublime state of frightening pleasure. She can’t relax, can’t enjoy it. Like diving, an innate instinct for self-preservation mingles with the exhilaration. But with slow persistence, and a couple soothing breaks—take a breath, love—she comes.  

Later, an impasto of fickle November sun and shadows marks the prints on the bedroom wall—a Georgia O’Keefe, and the pink flag of the Wire poster flutters a good-morning kiss—dapples their tangled limbs, and underneath her head her new lover’s heart marks time in a steady swishing beat, like an oar hitting water, while she breathes in the happiness of a moment that she never wants to end.

Maybe I’ll take you to France, girl, Julia murmurs before falling asleep.

4. the forceps and the stone

On the day of her 44th birthday Gillian takes her usual solitary, celebratory ramble and finds herself in Leeds, in the city’s beautiful main library and on the brink of an unavoidable chasm into the past. Prominently on display, as thick and large as a cutting board or even the bloody registry for Westminster Abbey, is a mammoth coffee table-type book called Contemporary Scottish Artists and she thinks of James for the first time in God knows how many years. The spine makes a tiny creak of protest when she opens it and she shoots a panicked look at the librarian, who is pretending not to watch her. She finds him listed in the index, and there is his work on page 457: a soft-lined impressionist pastel sketch of a handsome, fair-haired man sitting on a park bench beside the name JAMES HEATH ADAIR, the sprawl of his life contained within parentheses: (1958–2007). Nearly thirty years ago she had cried in his lap, face pressed into dirty, paint-stippled chinos, while he soothed her with hair-stroking and platitudes over the impossibilities of first love and helplessly, stupidly quoted Nick Lowe at her—you’ve got to be cruel to be kind—in order to justify his best friend’s sudden and permanent decampment to her native London.

Now she struggles, and fails, not to cry in front of the librarian who frowns openly at her, ready to give her the boot should salty tears mar the glossy pages of their fancy new book.

It takes another year to summon forth courage to look up Julia; the convenience of finally having a computer at home, after she scrounges up enough money to buy Raff a decent one for school use, affords her all the stealth and privacy required for this niggling, fortuitous task. Late one night, the shit internet connection somehow tremendously improved by three glasses of wine, she googles Julia and finds photos of a professor living in northern California with closely cropped gray-white hair and wearing glasses—here is the book she co-edited called Methods and Modalities in Art Education, and here is a photo of her in a studio wearing worn denim with a bandana at her throat, the same throat Gillian kissed fewer times than she wanted, here are hands that fucked and caressed in a black and white photo, caught in broad gesticulations as Julia stands in front of a class wearing a plain white blouse and a spangled necklace, here is her wry half-smile and Gillian wonders how many students have fallen for that smile and that seductive line about Courbet, and here is the reacquaintance of loss nestling soft and wild against her, here is its gentle unpredictability, here is loss begetting loss, and here she falls asleep on the couch after another few glasses of wine and thinking, I always knew you would end up in California.

Even though she drifts off to a vision of California cliffs and coasts, her unconscious mind teems with recollections of Eddie: Nearly two years after Julia left Hebden Bridge she ran into him on the main drag in Ripponden, where she’d gone looking for a summer job.

He’s alone, leaning against the old Corvair that Robbie claimed they’d rebuilt together, but later Eddie tells her he did it all himself because Robbie is a fuckwit. He’s just as beautiful as she remembers, tall and golden-haired, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, wearing a dark blue Fred Perry polo and a pair of Ray Bans. As she approaches, he grins. This close she notices his teeth, two crazy paths of crowded, crooked enamel. It releases him from the burden of perfection, from the fantasy that existed in her mind. It places him within her reach. He hoots with self-conscious laughter and shyly ducks his head, like James Dean in Giant confronted with and confounded by the mere presence of Elizabeth Taylor. When he removes the Ray-Bans and finally looks at her, she is lost to him.

chapter soundtrack:

“Digital,” Joy Division 

“Reap the Wild Wind,” Ultravox 

“Hejira,” Joni Mitchell

“California,” Joni Mitchell