the sub titles

wiley's mother was in town for his first short film screening. he was a bit embarrassed about this, about her obvious pride and her mere presence, which illustrated that it was a big deal, that he didnt write it off to her like he was to all of us. it was shown in the lecture hall on campus that classes such as cinema 101 were held; it had seating for 400 people and about 40 showed up. i wore pearls that night, lots of strands of pearls, because it wasnt every night that your roommate screened a film, and regardless of his dismissal, we all knew what a big deal it was.

as we waited outside for people to arrive, ms. clark moved from group to group with her camera in hand, introducing herself as wiley's mom, and insisting that every interaction be documented. people were clearly amused by this small woman with bright pink lipstick and stirrup pants; her accent and mannerisms revealed the truth of wiley's texan past, one that was easily disguised by his textbook ownership of all things LA.

i had woken up that morning to the sound of a vacuum cleaner on our tile floor, a cleaning manuever that i didnt know was possible. as soon as i opened the door she turned it off, said, "your books are stacked on the table, just cleaning up for the party!" and turned it right back on. i tiptoed over the shiny floor to the stack of coffee table books that i had carefully placed around the living room, and thought for a minute about telling her they were there for conversation starters and for decoration, but walked back into my room and left them there. for the rest of the day the only other exchanges we had were directives about some home ec mistake i had made, something that was broken and needed the landlords attention. our other roommate, gregory, stayed in his room for the rest of the day after being scolded for leaving dry clothes in the machine.

i put on pearls as an apology, since i hadnt spoken to wiley, or gregory for that matter, in weeks. this disentegration of what were once best friendships happened gradually, with tiny fights sprinkled on top of larger betrayals, with hurt feelings turning into silent treatments that lasted until we forgot and began again. i wondered if his mother knew, or could sense, how detached we were from each other and from the house that we had once believed would keep us where we wanted to be- together. i couldnt remember exactly what the last one had been about- money or not doing the dishes or leaving the door unlocked or inviting over an ex-girlfriend, an ex-friend. i thought maybe, if i got gussied up and invited lots of people and made the party wonderful, we could do it properly this time, make up and not let it happen again. be purposefully aware, be willing to do something other than nothing.
wiley and i hugged at the screening and i yelled for him as he took the stage to mock non-chalantly thank everyone for coming; gregory and i sat next to each other and things, as they always did, appeared as normal.

it was the biggest party we had thrown, and ms.clark stayed the entire time. people were covering the balcony, the living room, the kitchen and spilling down the stairs into wiley's room. everyone commented on our house, it was spectacular, the view was unbelievable, everyone wanted to live there. every time i passed by ms.clark she was telling another story about wiley, usually one about a crazy or irresponsible thing he had done that had ended up, haha, just fine afterall! gregory pulled me aside,

"did you hear the last one she was telling?" he was incredulous. "she was telling them, all of them, about the trip we took to vegas after wiley's graduation, and about getting arrested for stealing the fucking handle! theyre all standing there, i think trying not to laugh, as she goes on about this story that originally, you know, probably made her fucking sob! come here..."

i walked over to ms.clark as she was finishing up the infamous vegas story. there were three people, listening wide eyed- two of our good friends from school and a guy i didnt know.

"oh... god i was so mad!" she was laughing so hard she was wiping her eyes. "but as it turned out it was all fine, the cops let em off with the warning of dont be stupid next time! and thats where this picture was taken, right after they had all gotten released." she pointed to the counter top, where a framed picture of wiley, gregory and i on the strip with three other friends sat. but the picture wasnt taken after the cops let us go; it was taken the day before, before we had literally lost all of our money and our hotel keys. before we had to call my brother to come drive in from reno and lend us enough money for gas back to LA the next day. before we made the devastating decision to stay and just not gamble, instead of starting home right then. she had gotten the story wrong because she only knew what wiley had told her, and she desparately wanted it to be true. she desparately wanted to know the truth about him, to be part of it, to be able to retell it at parties and laugh with everyone else. but the parts she had were accurate, all of them except when the picture was taken. and it sounded fine, it sounded funny and like a coming of age tale that everyone can relate to. it didnt sound terrifying. it didnt sound shameful, or disappointing. it didnt sound like my tearful plea to my brother, in the middle of the night, to come bring us enough money so that we didnt have to beg.

gregory and i walked out to the balcony. a friend of ours who hadnt yet seen the house stopped us.

"this place is fucking nice. im jealous man, i live in a one bedroom with a guy who snores like a chainsaw. man, it sucks. howd you guys find this place?"

so we began the story, my arm around gregory's waist, of how we found the listing in LA Weekly, and how its been every bit the dream we'd imagined.

the things they left behind

it was the first night they had ever really hung out together, just the two of them. they had talked alone before, but always with the din of other peoples coversations in the background, always somewhere else to go when the first flush of silence fell upon them. though april didnt have any feelings for dave, and though she earnestly didnt think he had any feelings for her, the thought of being alone with him was as nervewracking has if it had been a first date. she was learning, the more people she met, that there were very few who she would chose being with over being alone. she had never noticed it before, but lately conversation was trying. lately, it left her feeling even more empty than before, or more confused about aspects of herself that she knew perfectly well before saying hello.
so far, dave had been easy to talk to. slight and nearly hairless, dave worked on the school newspaper with her and had worked on the most interesting articles that the college had ever seen, in her opinion. in one, he wrote about people's need to collect things, focusing specifically on garden gnomes and magnets. he had interviewed people, mostly people over 60 living around the university, people who remembered when it was nothing more than a couple of brick buildings. what april liked about dave's articles were that they rarely concluded in a chilling last sentence; he never tried to make a point. she deemed this brave and said so upon their first meeting; he never told her that he thought of it as his most glaring shortcoming- that he never really knew what he was talking about. he would come up with an idea, and then research it or begin writing about it, and would soon realize that what he thought he was writing about was actually something completely different, usually many completely different things, and trying to untangle them was simply too daunting. so he would come up with another idea and hope that people who read the articles took them as interesting glimpes into the lives of strangers. he liked that phrase. april wrote about music.
they met at a thai restaurant that friday night, the first night they were alone. dave asked april questions, and though usually it was the questions that ended up tying her in knots, she could answer his. he asked about her childhood and her family.
"it was a good one," she told him. "me, mom, three brothers. my father died when i was very young, and my mother got remarried when i graduated high school, so, you know, for the most part it was just the five of us." she took a sip of the red wine that dave had ordered, telling them he didnt need to swirl it around or sniff it. it embarassed him he said, and besides it was a pretty unnecessary convention. she took her time before speaking again, because she wanted to make sure that he wasnt going to apologize about her father. it would be an awkward sentence to cut off, and things were going so well. "i dont really remember my dad at all. so its not like thats a particularly painful thing or anything like that. so it was good, really good. my childhood i mean." she blinked two times and he smiled. "what about yours?"
"oh, you know, child of divorce. hated my dad for years. he ran away and married his best friends ex-wife. it was a mess and i was stuck in the middle of it, being the only child my mother had to complain to. to cry to, etc. you know the drill. its really the same story no matter how many times you hear it. right?" he laughed a little bit and she settled into her seat, happy that they had gotten this all out of the way, surprised at how painless it had been. so, things happen.we're adults now and can talk about it. so.
after they split the bill they decided to go get coffee before heading to a friends party. dave stood up and placed his napkin on the table and waited as april got her things together. she slid her credit card into her wallet and began going through her purse.
"oh, sorry. one sec, just want to make sure i've got everything." she pulled out her cell phone and put it on the table. she pulled out various lip sticks and put them in the bowl her dress was making in her lap. she rumaged through until she found her keys, and then a tiny notebook, and then a pen, and then another thing of lipstick. she looked up at him and gave a small laugh. "its just a..." she put her fists full of things up in the air as she said it "a thing i do." dave stood, puzzled but not irritated, and watched as she put everything back and then gave the insides of her wallet one quick glance.
later, though dave had paid for her large cup of jasmine tea with two tea bags, and thus she had not even opened her purse while at the coffee shop, she began to do it again. out came the phone and the lipsticks and the little purse and the pen. this time she didnt laugh, or even acknowledge that she was doing it. and again, dave stood with his hands in his pockets and waited.
they followed each other to the party and dave got them two cups of foamy beer. they stood out on a balcony that overlooked the whole city. dave used one his finest techniques for getting people to speak.
"tell me something," he would say, and the person would say, "what do you want to know?" and he would say, "what do you want to tell me," and then usually they really wanted to tell him something so before long he knew things that he never would have known to even ask about.
"tell me something," he said to her, and propped his elbows on the wooden railing.
"my house burned down when i was little. thats how my dad died."
dave didnt take his elbows off the railing but he turned his head and said, "april, im so sorry. were you in the house?"
"yeah. we all were. it was some fuse or something, some stupid problem with the electricity. it was in the middle of the night, i heard the alarm and my mother came running into my room, i remember the nightgown, and she was screaming, everyone was running. it was huge by then, by the time the alarm went off. its so strange, in my memory of it. i remember her nightgown, and the sound of the alarm, and i remember being outside and our very elderly neighbor coming in her red robe, barefoot, to bring us cookies as we were waiting outside. you know, after it had mostly been put out. it was so kind of her, that small thing. but i dont remember the flames or the smell. isnt that odd? how can that be?"
"maybe you blocked it out. people do that a lot."
"you probably want to know how he died. we were outside, and i guess the firemen hadnt gotten there yet, and by that point there wasnt much left. of the house, i mean. but he was determined, to do something other than wait. he was mad that they took so long. and he had this collection of seashells, of stupid fucking seashells, that he had gotten from around the world, and he arranged them all on this plate i remember. and he went back into that house. the house that was barely half standing, to get a plate of seashells. he couldnt bear it, to stand there and watch them go like that. my mom screamed. my brothers told me all about it, when i was old enough to need to know. she was sobbing and screaming and he ran back in, you know, to get the shells."
"thats an incredibly sad story. that is a devastating story."
april gave a tiny, forced laugh. "we had so little, for so long. so everywhere we went, she would make sure we had everything that was really truly important to us. she would say, got everything? and we would sit down and check- teddy bear, lucky socks, lucky this, lucky that. its a... neurosis, now. i mean, its crippling really. but i dont want to have to feel that, you know? that panicked, i've lost it feeling. ive lost it and its gone forever and it might as well be ashes because ill never ever get it back.even if it is a fucking lipstick. that was his last thought- ive lost it forever."
"maybe his last thought was, im going to make it, im going to rescue them and then ill be whole again."
"i dont know which is sadder," she said, "thinking youve lost it forever, or needing it to feel whole in the first place."
and he nodded, wondering if maybe the truth of things was actually as tangled as he had found it to be.

the antidote for forgetting

she kept crying as she walked into the airport. she cried as she was checking in and as she was going through security. she cried as she waited, she cried on the plane. earlier that day, as he smoked a cigarette through the noisy vertical blinds and she lay on his bed, warm and settled in their sheets, when they talked about her moving and the only rational thing to do, she thought, how easy. how mature, how right. we're doing what we have to do, it would be impossible to do anything other than this- say goodbye today. but as he was taking a shower and as she was still laying there she noticed the way he lined his shoes up, three perfect pairs in a row with the heels against the wall. it took her a beat to realize that they had been this way all along, all ten months of their relationship. his shoes had always been neatly lined up no matter what the rest of the room looked like, and she was only just then noticing it. and she began looking around at the way the towel hung from the nail and the way the corner of the picture curled up. and these parts of the room that she had grown to know so intimately became parts of him, parts of them, parts that she could, feasibly, forget. because maybe she had always known about his shoes, maybe she had always known the way his upperlip quivered a little bit when he drank out of a straw. and maybe the threat of losing those parts, those bones that connected to form him and to form what had been, was what suddenly made her need them. it was all of the goodbyes, to the stench of his elevator, the broken stair. not goodbye to the composite but to all the hundreds of parts- the silly computer game and the way he kissed her forhead. the twitchy dreams he had and how he bit his nails.
and it was then, only after she saw it that way, that the rationality and correctness of their decision disentegrated and it just turned sad. it was the kind of sad that had no limit because no matter how hard you cried about one thing, there was another detail somewhere to dig up and cry about more. it was as if her tears were the antidote for forgetting, the more she cried the more real it all was, the more present it was inside of her. if she could still cry about it, then it still existed.
when she was 11 years old she saw a woman crying at the chinese restaurant she and her mom always went to on friday nights.the place was usually empty but that night there was a woman sitting in a booth with what appeared to be her son.they had just been served when the crying began. the woman looked like she was about to stand, her legs were out from underneath the table and her hands were flat on her lap, like she was going to use them to push herself up. but she was sobbing, heaving deep sobs, and her little boy just stared ahead, confused and scared. the chef and owner of the place came out and put his hand on her back.
her mother told her not to stare, that it was a sad situation and that she hoped they got home ok. but it was the first time that she had ever seen a person cry like that, that rawly, that spontaneously. the woman kept crying, even after more staff came out and they called her a taxi. it was devastation, pure desparation, no matter what the actual origin of the tears. it was stark and beautiful and alive, and watching it made her understand how deeply things live in us, how many layers there really are.
that seeing a plate of sweet and sour chicken could make her cry that way.