Eye to Eye Page 2

  I laugh at the thought of a toolshed in Ian’s palatial garden. “Oh, you know…” I don’t want to complain to Earl, not right now. He’s had to listen to me complain too much; me, the woman who says she’s never one to complain. “Let’s just say that I needed to come down the hill to see you, and that I can only drink Diet Coke tonight, in the interest of avoiding alcohol abuse.”

  Earl holds his hand up. “‘Enough said, baby. Diet Coke, coming right up.”

  Seeing Earl makes me feel better, but while he gets my drink, I get sad again all of a sudden. Earl calling me trouble gets me thinking about Doris, my best friend, and my former partner in misery at grad school in Langsdale, Indiana. If she were here, I’d definitely be having more than Diet Coke. I’m so proud of her that she’s Dr. Weatherall. Professor Weatherall. She didn’t let the academic crazies chase her away like I did. I was considering a Ph.D., too. But like one of those challenges on Survivor, I ran out of stamina, and gave up after trying to balance myself on a narrow pole. But Georgia—Professor Doris Weatherall in Georgia—tickles me, as they say in the South.

  “Doris,” I’d said, tossing her shoes into a big box when we packed up her apartment a few weeks ago, “you’re going to have to learn how to get the vapors.”

  “Don’t,” she’d said. “I’m going to kill myself.”

  “C’mon. You’ve got a great gig. Atlanta’s a cool town. And didn’t you say there’s all this hiking and pretty nature and stuff?”

  “Listen to you. Nature. You break out in a cold sweat at the thought of grass. Now I know you’re really trying to make me feel better.”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s true, though. Atlanta’s supposed to be a cool town.” Doris sighed. She suddenly flopped down on her couch. “I just wish you were coming with me. It’ll suck not knowing anybody.”

  “La-uh-dies don’t say suck, Miss Weatherall. A true Southern lady does not, and I repeat, does not, use such coarse language.”

  “But they give their friends the middle finger,” Doris said, demonstrating.

  I covered my mouth daintily and fanned myself. “I do declare, I believe I might faint. Somebody give me a mint julep.”

  “What is a julep, anyway?” Doris stood again, absently surveying her Langsdale apartment.

  “Fuck if I know,” I said. “I barely know what mint looks like. It looks like green, right?”

  “Oh, I see. La-uh-dies don’t say suck, but they say fuck.” Doris shook her head. “Wow. You and Earl are a pair. The country boy and the city chick who’s not even sure if mint is green. This just proves that there’s someone for everyone.”

  I held up a pair of black platform heels. “You should totally give me these. Southern Belles don’t wear these kinds of shoes. They wear, like, white pumps or something, don’t they? These are L.A. shoes.”

  Doris clasped her hands together and pointed her index fingers at me like a gun. “Put the shoes in the box and step away from the collection,” she said.

  “Jeez.” I held my hands up in surrender. “I’m a get Earl after you if you don’t act right.”

  Doris slapped her hands together, trying to get the dust off them. “Earl? He’s a teddy bear. He’ll be on my side.”

  I smiled at that. Earl was crazy about Doris. He liked her mouth, that it was big, equally big as mine. Earl didn’t get shrinking violets. One more reason to love him.

  Earl and I were going to help Doris drive to Georgia the next day, but not before we tied one last one on that night. We all went to the Saloon, and for the first time Earl wasn’t the bartender. He’d given notice two weeks before, and was a customer like everyone else.

  “Until we meet again,” we all repeated.

  “To Boozy and Floozy,” Earl said, raising his glass to me and Doris. Zach, Doris’s guy, clinked Earl’s glass enthusiastically. Doris and I glared at them both until they lowered their glasses. But then Earl clinked his glass with ours and flashed those dimples.

  Driving on the interstate the next day, Doris seemed worried about Zach, didn’t think it was going to last, especially since they were “taking a break” from each other.

  “I don’t know,” she said, tuning the radio. “I don’t know if he has enough ambition.”

  “But Earl’s a bartender. You like him,” I tried to reason. Personally, I thought Doris and Zach had come too far to let ambition, or a lack thereof, get between them.

  “A damn good bartender,” Earl said from the back of Doris’s Toyota. He was laid out lengthwise, but curled up because he was too much man for a Toyota.

  “Yes, but Earl wants to go to law school—”

  “But not to make money,” I say.

  Earl sang along to the Hank Williams tune coming from the radio. He sounded good. Real good. I hadn’t ever heard him sing.

  “It’s not the money,” Doris said, but couldn’t elaborate as to what it was exactly.

  So it was only the four of us that night before we hit the road. All the way to Atlanta, we split the driving, and got Doris to Georgia faster than you could say Rhett Butler.

  It’s dusky outside and every so often the door to the Baseline swings open, and a warm breeze comes in, along with somebody covered in tattoos or still wearing sunglasses—indoors, at night. And what about the women walking through the door? Maybe it was because I was in graduate school in the Midwest far too long, where style and any attempt at fashion was frowned upon, got you labeled as a dum-dum, but looking around at the women, looking at Katie in her perfect, taut body, I feel dowdy. I thought I was looking effortlessly chic. Instead, my sundress feels too thrift store, a little too tight. My flip-flops are a little worn, I have to admit. Or maybe it’s seeing how Ian lives, how a lot of people live or try to look like they’re living in L.A. I knew all of this, saw all of this before I left, but because it wasn’t my life, I didn’t think about it so much, either way. Now I feel like a visitor, a tourist, being wowed and amazed by so many ordinary things. Coming back to a place that has changed so much, or being the person who went away, who has changed so much, has made me nutty, made Earl look at me with worry more than once since being here in L.A. I can get past this.

  I’ve been through worse: the two most scarring experiences of my life were working at McDonald’s in high school, and living five years in Langsdale, Indiana. I only lasted for one year at McDonald’s and finally quit when I realized I couldn’t take one more day of asking folks if they wanted an apple pie with that, only to hear them yell through the drive-through speaker exactly what I could do with that apple pie.

  Sure, my hard time at Langsdale lasted much longer—you have no idea how much longer. Five years in small-town Midwest as a black woman in graduate school should be calculated more like dog years. I was only there five real-time years, yet my psyche aged ten years. I have souvenirs from both McDonald’s and Langsdale. The not-faded-enough imprint of a kamikaze fry that somehow jumped out of boiling lard and landed on my forearm. I once nearly got into fisticuffs with some Shakespearean at a party, who blah, blah, blahed about an article he’d read about our “litigious” society, and how that one woman who sued McDonald’s over spilled coffee on her thighs was “frivolous” and “greedy.” I saw the photos of that woman’s thighs, which didn’t look none too pretty after a cup full of hot-ass coffee settled on them, and they didn’t look frivolous—they looked fucked up. And I showed the Shakespearean my fry tattoo. That shut him up.

  It was the beginning of a long epiphany, really. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life: continue on with a Ph.D., or leave and do something that was a better fit for me? I took the MFA and ran with my second souvenir: Earl.

  When I first met Earl, he looked like the lost member of ZZ Top—or Grizzly Adams—and I saw myself as a kind of Clair Huxtable—if she were more broke, showed a lot more skin, kept her hair in braids, never went to the gym and cussed like a sailor. If you try to think of these two kinds of people dating, and you feel your mind refusing to wrap itse
lf around that image, think about how I must have felt about it. But God bless Earl. He only thought about what he wanted and how to go about getting it. He never worried about what anything looked like, this man who would never use the phrase “politicize.” He never even worried about what our life would be like in L.A. Before leaving Langsdale, Earl was already thinking about quitting bartending and studying labor law because he was tired of his family and friends—a long line of factory workers just like mine—getting screwed over. “I cain’t bartend for all the rest of my days, Ronnie,” he’d said. But he decided to do it just a little bit longer in L.A. to save for school and get settled.

  And so, in an anything-for-love gesture, my boyfriend, a man who cares nothing about the looks of things, moved with me to my hometown, a city that is obsessed with the looks of things. All the time packing up my life in Langsdale, Indiana, I thought about how Earl would adjust, fit in. Turns out that I’m the one having to readjust. I’m a native Los Angelino who has had it up to here with loud, self-important cell-phone conversations about “project meetings” while I’m trying to eat my lunch. I’m one flip out away from the next Hummer I see taking up two parking spaces outside Starbucks. And don’t get me started on the hipster uniform for the up-and-coming Hollywood set. For the guys, a hundred-dollar haircut so that one’s hair looks effortlessly “I’m-too-cool-to-comb-my-hair messy,” faux Elvis sunglasses, ironic T-shirts of ’70s and ’80s icons. In general, it’s the look of a fifteen-year-old skateboarder, even if you happen to be closer to thirty. The women have three looks: anything that makes one look like a thirteen-year-old, anything that makes one like a hooker and a thirteen year-old, and anything that looks like what Doris refers to as the mask—that is, at least four layers of makeup. I wanted to live in Echo Park because it used to have none of the things, none of the people, that made me nutty. Turns out they’ve migrated, crawling away from the west side, leaving a trail of dumb, money-making Hollywood scripts behind them. So, Earl and I are living in a neighborhood we can hardly afford to stay in and given first, last and deposit on any new place, we can’t afford to leave.

  Who in the world would have thought that I’d find myself sometimes longing for the relatively simpler life of Indiana? Sitting out on Earl’s porch, listening to him tell stories about growing up in a small town, or watching a free movie in the park at night while fireflies drifted past, or—and this is really scary—longing for the days when I sat in a graduate seminar of self-important academics in training, throwing around Foucault and bell hooks with shaky authority. But I’m confronting my longing. I admit my longing: I’ve complained to Earl since moving back. Okay. I’ve ranted, monologued, delivered hour-long dissertations. In typical Earl fashion, he’s not phased one bit. He’s on easy street, relaxed and loving his adventure in L.A., the traffic, the smog, all of it. Earl responds to it with a shrug, a shake of his head and a grin. Meanwhile, this Ian kid has nearly sent me to my first visit to a therapist in all my thirty years of living.

  Hearing that Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is “lame” and school is “retarded” and he is “going to be a music producer, so who needed this shit anyway?” makes me panic about the purpose of trying to teach anyone anything. He hadn’t even tried to read the book. After that first meeting with Ian, I went home to Earl, and I was still stunned. He pulled me up from the couch and gave me one of his bear hugs. “It is what it is, darlin’. You’re home. You’re an L.A. woman.”

  “It’s not the same,” I said mournfully into Earl’s T-shirt. “And if it’s not rich Hollywood kids driving me to drink, it’s all these other fools running around who are not even from here. People pose so hard, it’s a wonder they don’t break a goddamn bone.”

  Earl grinned at me. “I ain’t from here. You like me all right. And anyhow, it ain’t who’s from where, it’s who sees eye to eye,” he said. “You can’t blame folks for trying to get somewhere. They’re just trying too hard, is all. Getting above their raising is what Daddy used to say.”

  “Being a pain in the ass is what my daddy calls it.”

  “Actually,” Earl said, giving me another squeeze, “my daddy calls it that, too.” Then he winked, let me go and ran his hands through his newly short hair with the neat, sandy waves that looked slightly retro, and I made up my mind to stop whining, to count my blessings. I was living in the place I was born, raised, and wanted to be with a good person, a smart person, a handsome man. Someone who understood me. Cain’t beat that with a stick, Earl would say.

  I kissed his freshly shaved right cheek, right on his dimple, and said, “Thanks, Erardo, baby. Thanks for being so sane.”

  Earl tugged on one of my braids. “Erardo. I still ain’t used to you calling me that.”

  “Viva Italia!” I shouted.

  He shook his head. “I wish you never knew I was Italian. Hell, I don’t even think of myself thataway.”

  The only reason I knew that Earl’s real name was Erardo Lo Vecchio was because it showed up on my caller ID the first time he called me. I’ve continued to get a kick out of his name since then, and for a long time I was obsessed with Italy and Italians, anything that was a combination thereof. I’ve calmed my Italian lust, although Doris would say that’s arguable. She would also say that my lust for Earl had nothing to do with his Italian pheromones wafting toward me. She would say that in spite of my hard head, I was seeing him for the true man he was, the true man he is—a reluctant Italian who’s much more Billy Ray than Bruno, who’s crazy about me and gets what I’m saying, even though we were raised on two different planets. Planet Indiana and Planet California.

  Earl keeps giving me Diet Cokes and now that it’s later in the evening, nine o’clock, things are picking up. I watch him banter and carry on with Katie, who I try to like, but she’s way too flirty with Earl for me to give her a break. I didn’t think I was the jealous kind. But now, I watch her closely. If you looked up the antonyms for willowy and blond, in both cases the thesaurus would say my name. Veronica Williams. Curvy and dark. All night, Katie’s been chatting it up with Earl, laughing and lightly touching him to guide him out of her way as she moves fast around the tight space, taking orders and pouring drinks. She and her cleavage are working hard to charm the customers. But maybe I should see that she’s working hard. She makes her job seem easy and breezy, but she’s a bit too hyper about it.

  Earl told me she wants to be (surprise!) an actor. “An actor,” I said. “Figures.”

  “I thought ladies was called ‘actresses’?” Earl questioned at the time.

  “Do you go to doctresses?” I asked him. “Or get tickets by police officeresses?” That whole diminutive tag for jobs that happened to be done by women always killed me.

  “Got it,” Earl said.

  The busier it gets, the more I think it’s time for me to walk back up the hill because I never want to be out on the street too late at night. I’ve not been gone from L.A. so long that I forget the dark streets can be full of creepy motherfuckers who think it’s cute to chop up women. Besides, Earl’s getting too busy to keep me company while Katie’s working overtime to keep him company. For a moment, the images of them together get to me and I have a fleeting thought that the two of them look like they should be together, but I shake it off. I try to get his attention while The Beastie Boys fade out on the jukebox. When Ray Charles kicks in, Earl perks up. He’s nodding his head to the music and I can see him whistling, even if I can’t hear him over the orchestration.

  “Earl!” Katie hollers. “Sing it. You know you can sing. Don’t be shy!”

  Earl puts a drink on the counter and looks around the bar, searching for me. I’m down at one end, so cup my hands around my mouth and shout, “Sing, baby!” I love to hear him sing. It’s just busy enough, but not too busy that folks can’t hear Earl sing if he really belts it out. He shrugs, holds his towel out, as if to say, should I? I nod, blow him a kiss, point to my wrist watch, and thumb toward the bar exit.

  Earl grins, mouths I
love you, and waits for the next verse before he joins Ray.

  His voice is strong and deep over the din of the bar. He waves goodbye, but sings at me, so I can’t leave. All the folks whistle at Earl and egg him on. I’m mesmerized, and I’m thinking if Katie sees what I see, if everybody sees what I see, Earl’s going to fit right in, in the land of looking good.

  When I turn to leave, I catch something out the corner of my eye. It’s Katie. This time, when she touches Earl to move around him at the bar, she stands behind him, gives him a squeeze from behind and rests her face against his back. I get a feeling, a sick feeling. It surprises me, this feeling, and it takes me a little while to recognize that it’s fear. But I don’t even know what I’m afraid of, exactly.

  doris

  Question:

  What do Ezra Pound (brilliant imagist poet, granddaddy of literary modernism, borderline fascist) and Doris Weatherall (struggling feminist poet, practicing postmodernist, and dater of borderline fascists*) have in common?

  Answer:

  a) Unrequited love for T. S. Eliot. (including much hotter movie version of Eliot, craggy-faced Willem Dafoe in his early days.)

  b) Belief in the power of language to convey image, and image to convey experience.

  c) Mantralike devotion to the phrase “Make it New.” (Not to be confused with the now-Dr. Weatherall’s other favorite reality show catchphrase, “Make it Work.”)

  d) All of the above.

  (* For those unfamiliar with academic lingo, “practicing postmodernist and dater of borderline fascists” means that although I have a liberal job in a liberal profession, I subscribe to Us Weekly and date the occasional republican, à la Maria Shriver.)