The Red Car

  For my mother,

  Ann Dermansky

  THE

  RED CAR

  PROLOGUE

  IT WAS A SURPRISE TO OPEN The New York Times in my parents’ kitchen and see a picture of Jonathan Beene. He had won an award for business innovation. They give awards like that. He was the founder of an Internet tech company that allowed individuals to fund other people’s art projects, taking a small percentage of each donation. The company gave a generous share of its profits to women in the third world who wanted to start businesses. It not only supported the arts but did good in the world. Jonathan was beaming in the photo, sitting on a wooden bench in front of a small laundry somewhere in South America. He had not only just won an award. He was worth insane amounts of money.

  I felt happy for him. He had been such a nerd back in college. He had proposed to me once, right before I had dropped out. It had come out offhand, in the middle of a sentence, almost like a joke, and I pretended I hadn’t heard.

  I stared at his picture in the newspaper.

  I had not thought about him in years. Sometimes, I thought he was a figment of my imagination. What happened between us seemed so strange. Jonathan Beene was the reason that I had dropped out of college. I had opted to leave before the school officially asked me to. Haverford was an elite Quaker college, small, proud of its honor code. On two separate occasions, I had had sex with Jonathan Beene for money. It had been an experiment on my part, a successful one I thought, until he had turned us both in to the honor board. I still cannot fathom why he felt the need to do that.

  Jonathan Beene, obviously, was a much better person than I was. He had a much better life than I did, but that was easy. Most people did. I was married, unhappy, living in a small apartment in Queens. I had a job to pay the rent, but we were writers, both of us working on novels, a dream so clichéd that I was loathe to admit to anyone what I did with my days. My husband liked to listen to loud music that I did not like. Sometimes, I would go to my parents’ house in New Jersey just to get away.

  I had gone back to college. I took a year off and then I went back, graduating from a state school where it turned out I earned much better grades. At Haverford, I was a mediocre student, not even. At Rutgers, I did well. It was a better place for me.

  I HAD MADE A POINT OF losing my virginity before college. It had seemed essential, as important as doing well on my SATs. I wanted to be prepared for school.

  At Haverford, however, I realized that I was at a school full of dorks and nerds and liberal do-gooders who had never done a single wrong thing. There were anorexics and overachievers, but almost no one got drunk or stoned or did anything considered vaguely unethical. My SAT scores were low compared to my classmates. I had suspected from the start that it was not the right school for me and had applied to many other colleges, artsier, funkier places, but my mother had said I would not get in to Haverford and so when I did, I went.

  Jonathan Beene was the first person I met. He lived across the hall from me. He had helped me carry my suitcases into my dorm room and I knew before he had told me his name that he had a crush on me.

  I had a boyfriend already. This boyfriend went to another college. He was two years older than me. He was a Republican and drove his dead father’s BMW. He drove me to the beach. We had sex, all the time it felt like. I considered it practice, only sometimes enjoyable. Instructive. I had given him blowjobs. We had gone sixty-nine. We had sex on the couch and in the backseat of his BMW and once in some bushes in the park because the idea turned him on. It was as if there was a checklist I was going down, the way most freshmen buy the things that they need for their dorm rooms. Comforter, textbooks, a new computer.

  It turned out my freshman roommate had never even kissed a boy. I felt stupid, I felt so ridiculously stupid, because when I arrived, I still felt singularly unprepared. My roommate had gone to a prep school. She was fluent in French and Russian. She was bookish and pretty. She had never had a drink. I would not admit to her the things that I had done. Somehow, she liked me anyway.

  I had every intention of breaking up with my boyfriend when I started college but found that when the moment came, it was difficult to do. I mean, I did break up with him, but then he started to cry. He begged me, he begged me to stay with him. He begged me.

  “I love you,” he said.

  He had said it all summer long, my slightly older Republican boyfriend, every time we had sex, but I had just thought that he was grateful.

  “Please don’t break up with me,” he said. “I need you.”

  And I didn’t. Break up with him.

  I took it back.

  IN DECEMBER, THERE WAS A DANCE. It had some sort of goofy name, not quite a formal because Haverford didn’t have formals or fraternities or sororities or even a football team for that matter, but this was an actual dance and almost everyone went. My roommate went. The students at Haverford were busy catching up, all of the kids on my hall, doing all of the things that I had already done. Whereas, I didn’t go the dance, because I was catching up, too. All semester long, I struggled through my classes. My freshman English teacher had told me that I needed remedial help with my writing but that he would not be able to help me because I was not a minority.

  Jonathan Beene had not gone to the dance either.

  He came into my room. He brought chocolate. I was trying to read a philosophy book. I was signed up for Introduction to Philosophy, and it was the hardest class I had ever taken. My eyes glazed over when I tried to do the reading. Descartes. Kant, Nietzsche. I couldn’t read any of it. The texts were abstract and filled me with dread. Jonathan massaged my feet as I read. For the final, I would have to answer an essay question in which I would have to explain the viewpoint of every philosopher we had read so far that semester. Jonathan was also in this philosophy class. He loved this class. He would go on to major in philosophy. He had no problem reading these texts, and he had tried, frequently, to explain them to me without success. My brain did not compute abstract ideas. His pathetic attempt at a foot massage was annoying me.

  “Do you want to have sex?” I asked.

  “Leah?” he said. “What did you say?”

  For my sociology class, I had read an article about teenage prostitution in Japan. They were high school students. Girls from good families who did well in school who wanted to earn extra money to buy expensive clothes. It was such a crazy idea. They would meet men in hotels, have sex and buy clothes. Apparently, this worked out fine for them. Not a big deal. Or so the girls said who were interviewed in the article. They were so beautiful, those teenage Japanese girls. They wore short pleated skirts and knee socks.

  I closed my copy of Critique of Pure Reason.

  Jonathan’s hands cupped my bare feet.

  “Sex,” I said.

  “I love you,” Jonathan said. His face turned red. I felt embarrassed for him.

  It seemed strange how these boys were in love with me. First my boyfriend who I had not yet broken up with, three months later, and now Jonathan Beene, who I had never even kissed.

  “I will have sex with you,” I said, “for one hundred dollars.”

  This was a surprise to me, too. I had not planned any of it. I was in a funny mood. I knew that unless I cheated on my exam, and I could easily do that, it was an open final, I would flunk my philosophy class. But I was not a cheater. I had chosen a college with an honor code. I wanted to be an honorable person. I guess I was feeling a little bleak. My roommate had gone to the dance wearing an almost new black dress my boyfriend had bought for me.

  Jonathan blinked.

  He did not say anything; he just stared at me to see if I was serious. We stared at each other. Suddenly his hands on my feet were not an annoyance. I felt aroused. It turned out
, I was serious.

  “I don’t have any money on me,” Jonathan said.

  “There is a cash machine in the campus center,” I told him.

  Jonathan put on his shoes.

  He was back in less than five minutes, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He handed me five twenty-dollar bills. “This is so weird,” he said.

  It was weird, but I acted like it wasn’t. It worked for Japanese girls. I put the money in the back pocket of my jeans. I took off my jeans. I took off my T-shirt. I was flat chested. I wasn’t wearing a bra. My underwear was pink with a row of flowers on the elastic band.

  “I haven’t done this before,” Jonathan said. His breath was shallow.

  “Somehow, I knew that,” I said.

  It was different, being in charge. I reached my hand into Jonathan’s pants and touched his erection. I watched his eyes roll to the back of his head. Though I had not expected it, I hadn’t planned any of it, I felt excited, too. I pushed Jonathan back on my bed and I took off my flowered underwear. I undid his jeans. I observed his boxer shorts. My boyfriend also wore boxer shorts. I pulled Jonathan’s boxer shorts down. I climbed on top of him. I was able to take him into my hand and slide him inside me. It was all very smooth, practiced. I had had practice. It was turning out to be useful, after all. I knew that after tonight I would be able to break up with my boyfriend and I felt happy about that.

  “What about?” Jonathan gasped. “What about?”

  “What?”

  “Birth control.”

  Jonathan Beene was a kind and responsible boy. I had thought he might want his money back. I could picture it, that clean, crisp wad of twenty-dollar bills, folded inside my pocket.

  “I am on the pill,” I said.

  He held onto my breasts, closed his eyes, and I did everything. It turned out I liked that better, being on top. I came for the first time that night, though I pretended not to.

  SIX YEARS LATER

  ONE OF MY ROOMMATES, PHOEBE, the one who held the lease, had locked herself in her bedroom. I had not seen her in days. I would wake up for work and walk past her door. I would stand in front of it. The light was off, the drapes pulled closed, but after the rest of us left, she would turn on the lights, roam freely. I discovered this once, coming back into the apartment when I had forgotten to pack a book for the commute to work.

  Every day, I would find something missing. One night I made spaghetti; when I went to drain the pasta, I discovered that the colander was missing. Alice, my other roommate, was sitting at the kitchen table eating her broccoli coleslaw without dressing. Alice was anorexic. I suppose just the fact that she was eating could be considered a triumph, but I worried that the act of eating broccoli coleslaw might actually have negative calories: that the energy expended from chewing the food burned more calories than what was consumed. I had read once that that was true for celery.

  I looked at my spaghetti, floating in the pot with no way to drain it. I took a fork and started to fish out the strands of spaghetti, one by one. I didn’t want to eat it anymore, not in front of Alice. I wanted to get the hell out of the apartment, buy a burrito down on Mission Street and drink a Mexican beer with a slice of lime. I wanted to go to the hip bar on Valencia Street and watch my beautiful boyfriend work the bar. He was the bartender. He was definitely a new kind of boyfriend for me. He was tall and blond and good-looking and he wanted sex, but otherwise, he did not love me, did not think it was necessary to return my calls. I was always waiting for him to call.

  Slowly, I extracted my boiled spaghetti from the pot, knowing that I would not eat it. It was funny about my life. It was and it was not what I expected it to be. I worked full-time at an office. I was an executive administrative assistant for the head of Human Resources at the Facilities Management Department at the University of California. I had been stunned to get the job. My boss, Judy, said it was because I had made her laugh during the interview. I don’t remember what I said that was funny. Later, she told me it wasn’t anything in particular, that it was just me.

  I had been an English major. For my job, I wrote descriptions of job openings for custodians and engineers and contract managers. I handled Judy’s busy calendar and I took her calls. I also wrote short stories at my computer. I liked to play a video game where a geometrical worm was stuck in a maze. With every dot it ate, this worm would grow longer and longer until it crashed into one of the maze walls and then I would be dead.

  “Do you want some spaghetti?” I asked Alice.

  “No thanks,” she said. “I already have my dinner.”

  I did not like having roommates. Tonight, for instance, I had the ingredients to make a sauce for my spaghetti. I liked to cook. I had olive oil and fresh tomatoes and garlic, Parmesan cheese, but I never felt comfortable cooking in front of an anorexic. It felt inappropriate. I also was not sure that I would be able to locate a saucepan. I had lost weight since moving into this apartment. That, at least, was something.

  My boss, Judy, was surprised by this fact. My losing weight instead of gaining. Our relationship was not entirely professional. We told each other things. Twenty years older, Judy was always giving me advice, which, for the most part, I appreciated. Judy said that living with an anorexic would make her hungry. Judy did not suffer from feelings of guilt. She did not care what other people thought. We had had long conversations in her office about my roommates, about my love life, and also her love life, while Judy sat at her desk knitting. She had knit me an itchy green scarf that I pretended to love. I loved Judy, though I pretended not to. I had moved cross-country on a whim, far from friends and family, and often I felt unsure of myself, the space I occupied in the world.

  “Why did Phoebe take the colander?” I asked Alice.

  Alice shrugged. “She wants us to move out,” she said.

  “Well.” I sat down next to Alice. My eyes focused on the joints in Alice’s thin fingers. I could swear she was getting thinner. “Why doesn’t she tell us?” I said. “If that’s what she wants.”

  Alice had lived in the apartment for six years. I had been there for six months.

  “She hates confrontation.”

  I had had so few conversations with Phoebe. The truth was I had never liked her, but I had liked the apartment, in an old Victorian house on Castro Street, from the start. My room was tiny but I had a bay window, a view, a futon and a desk. A chair I had found on the street.

  “She took the toaster,” Alice said. “And the coffeepot and most of the plates.”

  I wondered how I had not noticed the toaster. The coffeepot had not been a problem. I mainly went out for coffee in the morning.

  “So she wants us to move?”

  Alice took a bite of broccoli coleslaw. She chewed very, very slowly. Then, she shrugged.

  “Are you going to move?” I asked her.

  “I can’t afford to leave,” Alice said.

  “But it’s her apartment.”

  “I have the key.”

  “She could bolt the door when you go out,” I said.

  “I know that. I am not going to go out anymore,” Alice said. “I don’t have a job. I just have support group and therapy. It’s more important for me that I keep this apartment than go to therapy.”

  “What will you do when you run out of food?” I asked her.

  Alice reached into her back pocket. I don’t know why I felt nervous: what could this ninety-something pound woman do to me but infect me with her sadness? Any more than she already had. She handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

  “You can buy me groceries,” she said. “I don’t need much. I am almost out of chamomile tea,” she said. “And coleslaw.”

  I looked at the money. It would be more uncomfortable, more unpleasant for me not to take it. “I was going to ask you if you wanted to go out with me for a burrito.”

  Alice had done it once before. She watched me eat and sipped an iced tea. She had ordered a side of black beans and ate six beans. We went to a bookstore together whe
re she watched me buy a book. She seemed envious, that I could buy a book. It was a used bookstore and I offered to buy her one, too. The book I bought cost four dollars. Alice had refused.

  “I can’t leave,” Alice said now. “Phoebe might lock me out.”

  It was possible that she might lock me out, too, but I would take that risk.

  “You want me to get you chamomile tea and broccoli coleslaw?” I asked.

  “Would you?” Alice said.

  She had a look on her face.

  “Anything else?”

  “Some soap?”

  “What kind do you want?”

  “Oh anything,” Alice said. “Something organic. And fragrance free.”

  I nodded.

  “You are so sweet,” Alice said.

  People constantly had that idea about me. Maybe Judy was the only person who knew that I wasn’t sweet. I looked at the pot on the stove, the few strands of spaghetti I had extracted from the boiling water on the plate on the kitchen counter. I would not take the time to clean up. I couldn’t get out of the apartment fast enough. Chances were good Alice would clean it up for me so as not to further anger Phoebe.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said.

  “No hurry,” Alice said. “I have been out of soap for days.”

  I HAD FOUR FAVORITE BURRITO PLACES, but I went into La Cumbre, the place I liked the least, because it was my boyfriend’s favorite. On each table, there was a picture of a sexy woman with big black hair and enormous breasts that nearly escaped from her dress. She was a whore. That, at least, was what Daniel had told me. Walking through the Mission, I remembered that tonight was his night off.

  Daniel was sitting at a table by himself, eating a burrito and drinking a Negra Modelo, reading Henry Miller.

  “Leah,” he called out to me.

  He had seen me right away. I did not even have to wonder if I would have to pretend not to see him. He was happy to see me. He was so happy I wondered why he had not just called me and said, “Leah, let’s go out for a burrito.” But that would be too simple. I could not stop thinking of him as my boyfriend, though he wasn’t actually my boyfriend, he was the poet/bartender/college dropout that I was sleeping with. He would be the first to remind me of this. The last time I had slept with him was already two weeks ago.