Double Blind, Chapter Twelve: The Punkalollabrigida

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Twelve

I leave the testing center, knowing that I will fail. My memories of Tuesday are like figures viewed through marbled glass, but a few odd tracks are clear. Nefertiti found an excuse for buying me a drink – then, arriving at a busy café, instructed me to save a table while she got the cappuccinos. She sprinkled hers with chocolate, mine with Ecstasy. God knows why. Considering my state of mind – and her lustworthy attributes – why would she need chemical assistance?

            It’s a crisp autumn day, clouds jogging across the sky like portly triathletes. I’m driving Bryant Street, where the town squires have blocked off the avenue at regular intervals, and inserted narrow bridges so only bikes and pedestrians can get through. I take great pleasure in living in a place where they actually think of such things. Or perhaps I am desperate for positives. A quintet of cyclists passes me the other way in their European silks, like grimly determined tropical birds. I turn left into Mrs. Brendel’s driveway.

            My lovely daughter meets me at the door. Her T-shirt features a baroque composer in Schwarzenegger sunglasses and the words I’ll Be Bach.

            “Heya, dishalish.”

            “Hi, Dadsalish.” She turns back toward the living room. “Bye, Mrs. Brendel!”

            “Bye, honey! Remember – posture!”

            “Posture!” she says, giggling.

            I can hold back no longer. I grab her under the arms and swing her into the air. Songsheets go flying.

            “Dadsalish!” she scolds. We scurry across the yard, picking pages from the boxwood. “You must be more careful!”

            This makes me laugh for a good long time. Realizing how witty she has been, Laura drops her show of disapproval for a self-satisfied smile. When she ducks under a rose bush after Für Elise, I slip a couple of fallen leaves into her music folder. We’re halfway home, sitting at a backed-up intersection, when she discovers my sabotage.

            “Dadsalish!” She takes the leaves in either hand – a red and a yellow – and makes them dance like puppets.

            “Are you leafing through your music, Lauralish?”

            “Oh!” She takes an invisible arrow to the shoulder. (I have told her that puns are dangerous things, and she has taken it to a logical, nine-year-old extreme.) “Dadsalish! That’s bad.”

            “Would you like me to leaf the subject alone?”

            “Aigh!” The other shoulder.

            “You autumn not fall for such tricks.”

            “Gah!” The stomach.

            “I used to be uncertain about such matters, but now I’m deciduous.”

            She opens one eye to peer at me quizzically.

            “Yes, it’s a pun,” I explain.

            “Eeh!” Straight through the heart, and she slumps backward, holding the leaves over her chest like lilies.

            “Howl! Howl! Howl!” I lament, drawing on my scant Shakespeare. “I have slain sweet Cordelia with my savage punnery.”

            The corpse returns to life and whacks me on the shoulder.

            “Get thee to a punnery!”

            “Gack!” I take an arrow in the neck. But the light turns green, so I heal quickly. Laura gives her leaves a closer study.

            “What are these from, Dadsalish?”

            “Gimme.” She puts them in my hand, and I peek while dodging cars.

            “The yellow’s a birch, and the red’s… an Oregon maple.”

            She takes them back and holds them next to each other as if they’re having a conversation.

            “Mrs. Schmidt says that leaves are sun-harvesters, and to do their work they put on green jackets. Chlor… chloro…”

            “Phyll,” I say. “Chlorophyll.”

            “Yeah! But in the fall, when it gets cold, the leaves take off their work clothes, and yellow is their real color. And the tree can’t support them anymore, so it lets them fall to the ground. And that’s why they call it ‘fall.’”

            “You are a brilliant child,” I say. “Where did you get all these brains?”

            “From Dadsalish.”

            “And Machiavellian, as well.”

            “Huh?”

            “And observant, as well. But… what about the red leaves?”

            “Umm…” She runs the maple across her lips, willing it to give up its secrets. “Oh! She says they’re not sure, but the red might be a way for the leaf to send as much sun as it can to the tree before it falls off. It’s kind of a… panic attack.”

            “Or a red alert,” I say. Laura giggles.

            We cruise the last two miles in silence. Laura, my daughter who makes Hamlet jokes, is scouring the yards and strip malls for red and yellow trees.

            It occurs to me that I’m a big fat liar. I’ve told that story about failing my medical exam for so long that I believed it myself. It wasn’t to spite my mother; it wasn’t to avoid dealing with people. I failed that exam because I wanted to be a scientist, I wanted to poke and prod the giant quizbox of nature and make her give up her secrets. But not all of them, because I wanted the game to go on forever.

            Now, nature has tricked me. I am a big red maple leaf, about to be dropped from the tree.

The morning that follows, I see the kids off, kiss the wife on the cheek, and make a show of driving off to work. Once free of the neighborhood, I loop around to a copy shop to check my email, and I receive the expected news: the MDMA is a confirmed resident of my bloodstream, and I am not welcome at the lab.

            I give serious consideration to a day at the beach, but figure I’d better stay within a ten-mile radius of Stanford, where a chance sighting would raise no alarms. Be it horny housewife, statutory rape or unintentional drug abuse, I am back in my customary position, guilty of crimes I dare not speak. I miss Pisarro.

            I’m cruising The El Camino, fiddling with the radio, when I land on some techno thing, a chocolate pudding of beeps and bloops over a rhythm track that sounds like a thousand chopsticks whapping a granite slab. It’s oddly refreshing (or perhaps I am desperate for positives). I am sinking into the trance when a woman cuts in with a deep, placid voice – the kind you might expect of a psychologist, or dominatrix.

            “That thing was ‘Na Na Neurons’ by the Contra Tempos, a little splash from ought-one. Preceded by ‘Bugarilla’ from Hans Offal. You’re on the Morning Buzz Saw with Ann Apolis, a half-hour away from Paulie Unsaturated and his Punkalollabrigida. I’ll be back with a few more doses of pulsation after these messages from the dark overlords of KFJC Radio, Foothill College.”

            She switches to a pre-recorded plug for the holiday theater show. I take a left onto Castro, looking for a pool hall. At the corner of Mercy Street, Ann Apolis returns.

            “Don’t forget the Foothill Ski Club’s annual venture to Heavenly Valley, December six. Take it from a wily veteran – the skiing is much better if you’ve got a big audience for your crash-and-burn stories.”

            I take a U-turn and head for the college.

            Two years before, Jessie and I were herding the kids to that same holiday show when Laura spotted a woman in the window. When the woman spoke, her words came out of a speaker in front of the building.

            “Wow!” she said. “How cool is that?”

            I park at a far lot and try to recall the route, up through a Japanese garden, past a natural-wood classroom complex, a trio of squat brick buildings on the left. The entrance is unmistakable, a cluttered lobby of old furniture and underground concert posters. A nerdish kid in a green sweater-vest sits in a fuzzy armchair, drilling in on a calculus textbook.

            “Hi,” I say. “Is Ann Apolis almost off?”

            He finishes a line and checks his watch. “Yes. She’s off in… Cripes!”

            He scrambles for the back hall, leaving me mouthing the word “Cripes?”

            Seconds later, I hear an angry person with a British accent, snarling an intro for the Dead Kennedys. A woman appears in the doorway, pleasantly rotund, with leonine blonde hair, blue-gray eyes and a beauty-queen smile.

            “Hopkins?”

            “Nancy,” I say. “Nancy Bloomsburg.”

We sit in the quad beneath a squadron of sprawling non-Oregon maples, sprinkling us with leather-brown leaves (Laura would love it). I’m down to the final pocket on a plastic photo-holder.

            “That’s our youngest, Kyle. Little opera star, that one. When he wants my attention, he sings, ‘Mom-mee!’ I swear, someday he’s gonna break glass.”

            “Four boys! You must feel like you’re living in a locker room.”

            “Suits me fine. I’m a total tomboy, anyway.”

            “Definitely.”

            We share an awkward pause – after 15 years, it’s expected. A leaf strikes my knee, its sides crinkled up like a tiny coracle.

            “So where’d you get ‘Ann Apolis’?”

            She laughs with that lovely whiskey edge. “Well, I’m from Maryland. And the wacky pseudonym is unofficial station policy. Wouldn’t do if people found out their techno chick was a bovine mother of four.”

            “Or that Paulie Unsaturated is… whatever he is.”

            She slaps the bench. “I know! I can’t even watch him work, or I absolutely lose it. I just want to spank him and send him home to his mother.”

            We laugh until we’re both looking away, at the maple-leaf ceiling.

            “I got laid off by National Semi a couple years ago – and Frank’s job was doing well – so I thought, by damn, it’s time to live out the old DJ fantasy. Foothill’s absolutely the best.”

            “So I’ve heard.”

            “What about you? What the hell are you up to?”

            She is just the confidante I’ve been looking for, but there are minefields everywhere.

            “It’s been tough, Nancy – especially lately. But we’re working on it.”

            She touches my knee. “Don’t think Frank and I haven’t had our stretches.”

            “That’s marriage.” I’m sinking into cliché. And there’s something I want out of this. Nancy is gathering up her purse, and about to say something like, Well, I’ve really got to…

            “Nancy? Do you remember when we broke up?”

            She stops cold, and studies my face. “It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

            Now I’m taken aback.

            “Really?”

            She looks at the grass, then squints her eyes like she’s getting a headache. This is an old expression. It means she’s trying to get something just right.

            “Schroeder was an old flame from high school. He went back east for college, and was paying his last visit to California before taking a job in Sweden. One last weekend, a little skiing at Squaw – Schroeder’s gone and I’m back to you. I wanted to marry you, Hopkins. But old flames… heat up. And college girls make incredibly stupid mistakes. And not even Nancy Bloomsburg had the gall – or the courage – to ask forgiveness for a crime that large.”

            Fifteen years later, the old story is bringing water to Nancy’s eyes. I take her shoulders and kiss her on the cheek.

            “Life’s pretty astounding.”

            She laughs. “Damned astounding.”

            “I’m glad I found you again. You’ve got my email?”

            “And you’ve got mine.”

            “But no ski weekends.”

            “Hah! Certainly not.”

            “Bye, Nanc.”

            “Bye, Hopkins.”

I circle the big hill of campus and come back out to the freeway, dazed by the vicious reconstructions of chance. If Gunnar doesn’t spy Nancy and Schroeder at Squaw Valley, my unhappy marriage is gone. Nancy’s four boys. Laura and Marcus, replaced by genetic shadows in the chemical soufflé of lovemaking.

            Acknowledging that I am living in a parallel universe seems to lessen my troubles. Perhaps I’ll be all right. Perhaps I think too much. Paulie’s playing the Ramones, I’m hitting the gas – the Punkalollabrigida is open for business.

Photo by MJV