I Will Be Complete Read online

  “I’m taking the year off.” I lied so quickly I didn’t even have a chance to blush.

  I was still sure he was going to change his mind when he introduced me to Barbara, the woman in half-glasses, who politely conceded my existence with a silent “this will make no difference when we’re dead” expression and a more friendly “welcome to a sinking ship” handshake.

  Mike started to indicate where all the books were, but didn’t finish. He figured I’d learn that later. As co-workers passed, he flagged them down with a kind of feisty pride, like he was getting one over on his bosses by hiring me.

  He waved toward the blond boy I’d seen before. “This is Jeffrey. Jeffrey’s been here a year and a half now.”

  “Nicolas.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m Nicolas.” He was already reaching into his pocket and taking out a checkbook. He unbuttoned the snaps on it and smoothed out the checks. Mike looked as if he’d parachuted into the wrong cocktail party while he took in the checkbook that Jeffrey—Nicolas—was showing off. He’d just legally changed his name to Nicolas et in Arcadia Ego, which was printed on his checks. “It means even in paradise, there is death,” said Nicolas with quiet pride.

  “Okay, then,” said Mike.

  Nicolas shimmered away. Mike looked after him and shrugged, as if admitting, ninety seconds after hiring me, that he didn’t understand anything that was going on. But still: welcome to working at this independent bookstore.

  * * *

  —

  I’m not sure who else I met that day. Later, Melanie told me she’d seen me but decided to hide in the back until I left. “I already had enough on my plate,” she said, which was true.

  More than one person asked if Mike had me meet Rick yet, and Mike laughed, and said, No, not yet, and I got the impression that everyone wanted to see Rick, whoever he was, meet the new guy.

  I left soon after, full of cheer, and walking to the bus stop I rehearsed telling my dad the good news. Full-time employment at a bookstore. I thought briefly of my mom.

  Mom, yeah, I’ll be in L.A. all summer, but it’s a forty-hour-a-week job so no I can’t visit, yeah, I know, I’m sorry, too.

  I replayed for myself the conversation with the Japanese tourists, who had been kawaii. No, cuter than that: taihen kawaii. I was going to work at a job that brought me into contact with very cute women.

  When I got on the bus on Wilshire, the driver did a double take. “Weren’t you just here on my bus?”

  “No.”

  “You know who you look like?”

  “Timothy Hutton,” I said.

  The bus driver laughed at me. “Who? You? No. What, does Timothy Hutton look like he rides my bus? No, you look like a guy who got off on the last stop.” Laughing to a guy sitting in the handicapped seat. “He thinks he looks like Timothy Hutton.”

  When I got off at my stop, the bus driver waved at me, and when the doors closed I could see further laughter breaking out.

  I wasn’t going to tell my father that part of the story.

  It wasn’t until I was on the front steps of my house, key in the lock, that it occurred to me the word for “always” was itsumo, not nidoto. I had told the girls the books were on sale never.

  CURRENT EVENTS

  I WAS SOMETIMES THERE AT 9:45, when Mike came in to open up, or at the other 9:45, when we closed. The rituals weren’t complicated—turning lights on or off, setting or disarming the alarm. Counting out the register drawer. At the end of the day, sometimes I was the second man in the office upstairs, standing and watching, as was protocol, while Mike or Harold or Fred counted the day’s cash into piles for deposit. We were allowed to buy books at 40 percent off, and we could borrow them for a week at a time as long as we checked them out.

  I loved it at Hunter’s. I loved being surrounded by books. I loved it when someone asked if we had a book—if I knew where it was already, I loved uniting them with it, and if I didn’t know where it was I loved looking it up on our microfiche and, if necessary, ordering it. I’d read almost nothing that people asked for. It was a store for some popular fiction, but more people came in looking for something classic or smart, and being able to hand over classic, smart books made me happy. I even loved grousing about customers who paid by check, the transactions which took the longest, especially the ones who only made the move to get their checkbook after I’d rung up the books and presented them with the receipt. Inevitably the checkbook was at the bottom of a purse that needed to be unlocked with the complexity of a Kansas missile silo.

  My first day, still being coached to use the register, I saw a man waiting in line wearing a cardigan and half-glasses. People were staring. Finally, the woman behind him said, “Aren’t you Bob Newhart?”

  He gave a soft chuckle and said, “No, I get that all the time, though.”

  “You even sound like him,” she said. His reply was a sad shrug that implied a burden: he got that all the time, too.

  He handed me his credit card. BOB NEWHART. His eyes flicked toward mine for less than a second, and I knew I was supposed to stay quiet, so I did. He bought his books and left.

  When he’d hired me, Mike, in his beautiful radio announcer’s voice, suggested certain skills were involved when dealing with the famous. It wasn’t something that could be taught, really, but he could see I grasped the whole Tao of the thing, he said. He kept using Eastern philosophical words even when they didn’t line up with what he meant, but I nodded anyway, because I could see that it pleased him to say things like “Zen” when he meant “tact,” maybe.

  Mike didn’t bring this up, but it was widely known among the staff that the true test would be if Timothy Hutton or, worse, Sean Penn came into the store. All of Mike’s tact would go like chicken feathers out of an open blender.

  Linda Evans came in. I beamed across the store at her, because my mother had been told she looked like Linda Evans. I told Mike my mom looked a lot like Linda Evans. He said, “Our bookkeeper looks like Betty White,” and I said, “Yeah, I know.”

  It was a regal bookstore but it was also terrible. It was in no way ready for the modern world. We had some complicated reporting relationship with the Beverly Hills flagship store, revised many times over the decades, that no one quite understood. We didn’t know how to organize our computer books. We had no language tapes. If we didn’t have a book a customer wanted, we ordered it from Baker & Taylor or Ingram and it took weeks to show up, at full price, whereas Crown could get it faster and cheaper. There was a box of yellowing slips of paper showing which customers were in arrears (Peter Bogdanovich, for instance).

  What we had on our side was eccentricity and its cousin, deep knowledge of books. There was an index card file box under the counter where employees wrote down what books they’d borrowed and when. This is where I felt shallow again—I didn’t know what to read. Almost everyone else did. Everyone had read multiple books in every conceivable subject, mostly for their own interests, but also so they knew what to recommend to customers. Melanie’s card was spotless: one neatly written high-end literary title after the other, check-out and return dates as regular as the movements of the sun and the moon. Rick’s was that of a lunatic. In lush and yet careful cursive, the first title was Gidget Has an Orgasm, and they only got weirder from there.

  My fellow employees were mostly grumpy, attending to customers as if disturbed from a good nap. Bernie looked like he’d slept in his dress shirt and tie. He listened to Bill Evans, only. He had seventy-three albums by Bill Evans. Rob made the same puns to customers every day, and had to shave his throat and the back and sides of his neck to get his shirt well enough buttoned to support the bow ties he favored. Barbara, who was listless and bored, usually stood behind Rob and made fun of him in ways he didn’t understand.

  Harold, the assistant manager, was ambitious, only doing the job until he could launch
another career he was too savvy to tell us about. Chris was a writer and Anna a performance artist and Mitch was another writer. Melanie was a dancer, with straight black hair that fell down her back. I thought she was about my age. She had a tidy way of dressing in white pressed shirts and jeans, and she never seemed to make eye contact with me. Fred had once run an underground newspaper in Boston. Kim wore khakis every day and Naomi was a feminist and Dana drove a VW Squareback she named Chloe, and was nice enough to drive me home a couple times.

  Mostly I was interested in whatever Melanie was doing. I was assigned sections to inventory—music and history—which were on the opposite side of the store from the children’s books that she stocked. If I was assigned to the register, she seemed to be in the stockroom. If I was shelving, she was helping customers. Her lunch breaks were scheduled around her classes, and she tended not to eat anyway.

  I tried to ask her something that would get a response. “What’s Rick like?”

  She considered this. “I think I’ll let you see for yourself.” She helped another customer and I understood she hated me.

  * * *

  —

  Then Rick came back.

  I’m unclear where he had been. It’s not like he’d worked there long enough to earn vacation time. I only remember his return metaphorically—as if I were shelving books and the hairs on my arms started to stand up.

  More mundanely, at some awkward time that was definitely not when a shift began, a compact guy breezed into the store. He was wearing sunglasses and he was holding a knit tie, then hugging Melanie, and then Nicolas, and Dana, then studiously not hugging Rob. Rick Savilla.

  At first glance, Rick was as vivid to me as if I’d made him up. Muscular and little, with a Caesar haircut and a complexion just bronzed enough and teeth just white enough to seem healthy but not vulgar. Preppy, in a low-key Lacoste kind of way. No straight nineteen-year-old like myself could have guessed his age. He once said he was approaching thirty, and had I been smarter, or old enough myself, I would have asked, “From what direction?”

  That summer, a health book called Life Extension was a big seller among the ladies who shopped. One of them was asking if we had it, and Rick was listening to her carefully. “We do have that,” he said. “It’s in the health section right there.”

  She didn’t look where he was pointing. “Bring it to me.” I’d already noticed how some customers asked for things like they were dictators. She was genuinely looking down her nose when she said it, as if she’d never seen a dowager in a movie before.

  Rick walked to the health section and brought the copy of Life Extension to the counter. When the woman reached for it, he took it away from her.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “you don’t deserve to have your life extended.” He put the book beneath the counter. He then ignored her and kept talking to Melanie.

  Melanie was blushing on his behalf. “Rick?” Like: how could you do that?

  “I feel like Atticus Finch putting down that dog. It’s for her own good. It’s for your own good, madame.” He said this while making eye contact with the woman, whom I could tell had, you know, shopped for most of her life, but hadn’t run into this before. She had something to say about that, but this was the moment Rick saw me.

  “Oh my lord, is this him?” Rick looked at Melanie, who grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to tear him away from the front desk. He released himself, regarding me like he was trying to take in the features of a horse at a stable. He deflated. “Straight. Oh well. Melanie, you go out with him,” he said, sounding almost helpful. “What?” Then looking at me, “Where did you come from?”

  “The I Ching,” I said.

  “I bet you did. Where else?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “Mecca! But not for you. You don’t even know about the bathhouses.”

  “I know about the bathhouses.”

  “What do you know?”

  I knew nothing, but I said, “Never wear a green handkerchief,” which was a guess close enough to something profound that Rick nodded in agreement.

  “My favorite is fisting,” he said, making a fist for me. He said it required massive amounts of amyl nitrate, not to mention a fresh manicure.

  So, within about thirty seconds of meeting me, he was talking about fisting. I knew why, and I wasn’t going to do what he wanted: be shocked. “Do the bathhouses still have glory holes?” I asked.

  “Do they ever!” he exclaimed. “And you hear all these screams around you—part of the trip is figuring out whether they’re pleasure or pain. How do you know about glory holes?”

  “Guys talk, you hear things.”

  He then announced that in the last year he’d slept with a thousand men, which made Mel laugh—she thought he was exaggerating—but Rick did a little tally and nodded. Three a day, roughly.

  “Am I shocking you?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “I’m a clear-running stream. Zen.”

  “Zen?”

  “I like the interior calm it—”

  “How did you learn about it?”

  “Japanese Studies major.”

  “Where?”

  “Wesleyan.”

  “Connecticut Wesleyan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bucks-a-go-go. Are you rich? Did you like Wesleyan?”

  “I liked my fraternity.”

  “Fraternity? You were in a fraternity? I’m talking to a boy who was in a fraternity?”

  “Coed.”

  “Oh my God, what does that mean?”

  “Group showers.”

  “I like this fraternity.” Then, cooing, “But Glen, how do I get you to join my fraternity?”

  “I don’t know, Rick, what can your fraternity do for me?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Melanie said, closing her eyes.

  I was just getting started. I felt energized. Straight men like myself are always flirtatious with gay men. We might not go on safaris or to bullfights, but we push on different limits to show how tremendously secure we are. Plus, the more calm I was, the more impressed Mel seemed to be.

  “The initiation ritual alone is worth the price of admission, young man.” Rick looked at me as if I should be afraid. “We have to have a dinner party,” he said. “Melanie, will you come to my dinner party? You can bring Glen.”

  Mel looked startled to have the spotlight on her now, and said, “Sure?,” and then there were customers or other distractions, and the banter was over for now, which disappointed me. I’d never been to a dinner party as an adult. If flirting like this got me the invitation, I wanted to know what the event itself would be like.

  * * *

  —

  Earlier, there had been an exchange I didn’t understand.

  Shortly after Rick came in, and they’d hugged, Melanie asked, “How’s Lolly?”

  Rick gasped. “Lolly? Lolly is a slut. Oh. My. God. That girl!” He winced. “She’s only fourteen years old and she’s behaving like a divorcée.”

  Mel said, “Maybe it’s just a phase.”

  “I keep telling myself that. Children go through a phase where they just have to piss off their parents.”

  “There’s always Fausta.”

  Rick softened, and blew out a sigh. “Fausta is a dear.” Lolly had already gotten into so much trouble with drugs and boys that Rick had put her into a special school in Switzerland, where she was just one demerit away from being sent home. Sometimes she sent him disquieting photographs of herself with boys, and now he dreaded getting mail from her. He had a well-behaved son who was thirteen, and Fausta, age nine, who was the gem of the bunch.

  Rick mentioned something about Fausta’s dance lessons, and he asked Melanie about a performance she’d seen. I don’t remember what troupe she was
describing, or even if she was describing something positive or negative, but the way she used her whole body in delivering her review—imitating moves she’d seen, showing off graceful, expressive motions—made her come alive. Her straight black hair was like a living, liquid fabric she could shake out for emphasis. I wanted to ask her something she would have to answer by moving like that.

  When we were alone at the counter later, I couldn’t think of anything to say that was as interesting as I’d thought I was when Rick was around. After some silence, Mel said, “So Rick doesn’t freak you out?”

  I tried to explain. I’d been brought up in San Francisco. Wesleyan was like a laboratory for ideas, and this bookstore, among people who’d thought more about how to live than I had, was the marketplace. Whatever I was saying was cribbed from lectures I hadn’t paid enough attention to. I used the word “evolved” a lot, as in, “As someone who’s, y’know, more evolved than other people—”

  Mel had a fantasy about living on a solitary mesa in the desert, making dances, sometimes drinking wine with friends. When she drove around town, her mind went toward making dances. She reacted to the world by choreographing it.

  She couldn’t believe some people just wondered all day what they’d have for dinner. I’d been thinking the same thing—how was it possible not to ask questions about how the world worked? How could people not want to make art out of it, she wondered, too.

  I said, “That’s because they’re dough heads.”

  “Dough heads?” she asked.

  “People who don’t think.” It was a paraphrase from one of my classes in Buddhist parables. “People who don’t even know they don’t think.”

  Mel was still evaluating me. “Yeah, I think you’re pretty evolved.” She chuckled. “Young Buddha of Westwood,” she said, and then she helped out some customers.

  The rest of the day, I walked around feeling like the young Buddha of Westwood. I tried to engineer running into Melanie and alternatively avoiding her if I saw her too much. For a girl my age, she seemed like she’d managed to live a few extra years of life. Every once in a while, at the counter, in the otherwise silent atmosphere, I would hear her chuckle, “Dough heads,” under her breath. I wondered if I was going to dinner at Rick’s house with her. Would that be a date?