I Will Be Complete Read online

  I took him to the kitchen. He rummaged through the pantry as if it had been waiting for him. By now I had a comeback and was waiting to drop it into the conversation, but he was already on to something else. On his way to the crackers, he’d found a can of something. He held it behind his back.

  “Kid, would you eat shit?”

  I forgot what I was going to say. “What? No.”

  “Even if they perfumed it and said it was nutritious? I think you would.”

  I was suspicious. “What’s in your hand?”

  “How do we get outside?” I took Peter to the screen door by the kitchen and he led me, hand on the back of my neck, to the deck that overlooked the street far below. It was after dark. He was looking at the view.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He adjusted his trousers, smoothed down his shirt, and raised his arms. “Look at this. Kid, I bet you don’t even see it, do you? Corona del Mar, the Pacific Ocean, that Ferris wheel down there, all the lights. It’s fucking gorgeous. Every day of your life you should be grateful for this view. Your father, who is a genius by the way, invented cassette tapes and his hard work got you this. You are part of the charmed elite.” He showed off what he’d pilfered, a can of Spam. “You are too intelligent for this. This? This is shit.”

  “Mom only got that because—”

  “You’re going to blame your mom for this? That’s bullshit. What do you like to eat?”

  “Macaroni and cheese.”

  “Macaroni and cheese? You ever been to North Beach? The Washington Square Bar & Grill has the best macaroni and cheese in North America.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. I really liked Morton’s frozen macaroni and cheese. But I knew what he probably meant, the restaurant food was more sophisticated. I wasn’t ready for that. Also, why were we outside?

  “Kid, I want you to throw this Spam away, now.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t move.

  With a sigh, Peter took it back from me. Then, arcing his arm in a clean overhand pitch, he threw the Spam as far as he could. A few seconds later, in the darkness, there was the sound of metal tumbling over pavement far below. I couldn’t believe he’d done that.

  “Do you have other cans of that?”

  We did! We had a couple. I fetched them. This was fantastic.

  “Now—throw them the fuck away, kid.”

  There was no one around to tell me not to, and so with my throwing arm, I tossed the two cans down the hillside. They calved the ice plant.

  “Are you ever going to have Spam in your house again?”

  “I don’t know—Mom buys—”

  “That is bullshit. Don’t let your mom take the heat. You love her, right? You want the best for her and for you. Fuck Spam. No more Spam. Now let’s go inside and eat cheese and crackers until we can’t see straight.”

  When I remember Peter’s voice, I can hear his monologues as if they play on a loop somewhere independent of time or space, like there’s a station eternally broadcasting him and it’s just a matter of what’s playing when you happen to tune in.

  “Do you know about lateral thinking?” he asked. “You aren’t the kind of kid who gets trapped by boundaries.” It was later, and my mother was watching, in what had been my father’s office, something unprecedented. We’d been building toward it not just that night but for the weeks since my mother had mentioned Peter was a chess master. Three chairs around a small white porcelain table, that second bottle of Chablis to the side. My father’s stereo playing something I didn’t even know we had, Joni Mitchell. She was a friend of Peter’s. Mom had bought her albums, apparently.

  Peter couldn’t figure out how to adjust the volume, so he directed me to the pre-amp. He made us wait, his finger tapping empty air, until he could talk-sing along to my mother. “You know they love you when they’re there. Am I right, baby?”

  Peter saw my expression. I knew immediately that he’d said something about my father. “Your mother is an amazing woman. And you’re a good kid. Tell me if this makes sense.”

  I said sharply, “If what makes sense?”

  “Easy there. Don’t get mad at me for talking. See, there’s rational thinking, which is about going from step A to step B, and that’s where the guys in suits, the squares so straight they step out of the shower to pee, that’s where those guys stop, endgame.” He was talking over the music, but the beat and the bass line made it seem like he was providing lyrics. “Those guys, they never get further than figuring out the easiest path that everyone sees. Then there’s where you’re at, a better place, the imagination. You, you’re reading funny books and your mom says you draw and write, and you’re in that fancy school for smart kids, right? What you need to study is lateral thinking. What looks like a boundary to some poor schmuck who follows the rules turns out to be exactly the stepping-stone you need to move ahead. Abstract thinking goes from A to Q to Z and gives B and C and D the finger. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

  So many Charming-isms. My mother must have contributed to the conversation but Peter was like a lightbulb throwing her part into shadows. No man, be he Texan or Eskimo, can stand a kick in the balls. Don’t shit where you eat. Don’t get distracted and keep your eye on what you want, kid, and don’t let someone else dictate your life.

  Why all this attention from him? That’s easy—my mother was a beautiful woman. Even better, she was soon to get a divorce settlement. With a plate of cheese and crackers next to us, Peter and I were setting up our mutual future, through a game of chess.

  I can’t count the number of rules that were being broken. Playing chess in my father’s study, with Peter, who that night—even I knew it, and somehow I didn’t care—was going to sleep with my mother. And he had put Joni Mitchell, an artist my father never could sign to Certron, on my father’s stereo equipment.

  We were going to use the Fabergé chess set. It was like breaking into a temple to drink the wine. Peter kept turning the pieces around in his hand, asking me which was the knight, which was the bishop, claiming they were too ornate—too “bullshit”—to tell the difference between them.

  “You can’t tell how exquisite this set is?” I asked.

  “It’s exquisite. And it’s bullshit.”

  It was a long game. My mother started remembering that there was a James Bond film on, and maybe I wanted to watch it. But Peter said he wanted to finish our match. I kept thinking about his rap on lateral thinking. If I tried too hard to beat him at chess it might mean something other than what I’d thought, like I was missing a larger point.

  I checkmated him. Or he let me checkmate him.

  “I’d have won,” Peter laughed, “if I wasn’t so stoned.”

  He must mean drunk, I thought, even though I knew he didn’t. He was treating me like a grown-up. Not just a grown-up, but a compatriot. This was him exercising lateral thinking. Making me question whether something was or wasn’t what it sounded like was a subtle invitation to take just a tiny step further. Further where? There was only one way to find out. Come here, let me show you.

  1974 BROADWAY

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  94109

  MY MOTHER was blessed with the ability to launch new adventures with little fear. She had been the child born out of wedlock, then the resourceful girl who ran the household, then the wife of an American soldier, a divorced secretary in Los Angeles, a middle-class mother, and a rich divorcée. I don’t think she would have pointed to any of those roles to say, “That’s it, that’s when I was most like myself.”

  Except now. She was fond of saying to friends that when she turned thirty-nine in 1974, she realized what she wanted to be when she grew up. “It’s so ironic,” she said, about everything in general and each circumstance specifically. She used the word “ironic” so often I started to make a little sigh every time. “Ironic” might a
s well have been the Latin on our family crest.

  Mom explained: there was an exam in Britain, the 11+, dreaded by all eleven-year-old working-class kids because it separated the wheat from the chaff. If you passed—no one in her family did—you were elevated from the crushing life of your ancestors. You were allowed into schools that prepared you to handle the levers that made the world turn. Otherwise, upon your failure you were condemned to an education of a grayscale life, the assembly line, no better future than the occasional rueful laugh on a Saturday night at the pub. It was a cruel test, promising a rare bit of class penetration, and then dashing hopes as soon as they were raised.

  And yet my mother passed. Brilliantly.

  She got a scholarship to Bishopshalt, the type of school with badges and uniforms and students who would later know the catacombs of Parliament. Her sisters were jealous. She was accused of having a big head, of thinking herself above her station. And then, a family crisis prevented her from following through. For one moment she’d had a vision through a door cut into a brick garden wall, of gaiety, power, and improvement. Now she was stuck again.

  What was worse, in a way, was that her crushed, guilt-inducing, poverty-stricken father had been a child of German military aristocracy, complete with summers in Calais and motorcycle trips across the continent. What that must have been like, father and daughter together, almost living up to their potential, then fate striking them both down. But they had a role model for how the family could turn out: Aunt Ingrid.

  Aunt Ingrid was a journalist. She flew around the world writing articles for important magazines. She befriended movie stars and politicians. She was a member of the jet set, a passport and toothbrush and a pack of Gitanes in her overcoat and drinking dictators and publicists under the table in search of a groundbreaking interview. When she visited Uxbridge, she brought with her breezes of sophistication and kindness, but not promise. Once that scholarship was gone, there was no longer promise in my mother’s life.

  And then at the age of thirty-nine, promise magically reappeared. My mother could join the smart set. She was not ignorant of how that class lived. She was never flashy or indiscreet—those were adjectives she deployed when describing how an otherwise intelligent person could be déclassé. But when she looked at herself in the mirror at I. Magnin, trying on a crème-colored Burberry trench coat, she did say it looked smashing on her. Her dream was to wake up and drive to the airport and on impulse jump aboard a flight. Unlike so many other things, she would get a chance to do that, soon enough.

  My mother was in the habit then of explaining what she knew of the world, and I would say something, and she wouldn’t hear it. I would say it again, and she would fall silent, blue eyes still for one extra moment, then she would say, “Mmm?” for me to repeat myself. Sometimes she couldn’t hear me but other times she could.

  * * *

  —

  Terms of the settlement were kept from me but she did have assets, as one might say discreetly. My mother claimed she got very little and my father claimed she got an enormous amount—hundreds of thousands of dollars—meant to keep her stable for the rest of her life. I’ve seen the numbers since and I think these views were clouded by their anger at each other. There weren’t hundreds of thousands of dollars. There was some cash, some corporate paper, and some property—like the art—that could be sold to get more cash, or managed as an investment. In a stern letter, my father drew a chart for her, with much more brittle penmanship than the chart he’d once done of her family tree. It showed how bonds earmarked for my college education would, though their face value was small, be bountiful when I needed them. All she had to do was leave them alone.

  My mother rolled her eyes at this. How well had he done with money, exactly? He had never yet understood her needs or her desires. I think this is when I learned the word “élan,” as my mother used it with a quiet smile and a way of spreading her hands, like she was smoothing out problems by sheer force of style. Peter Charming, she said, had a kind of élan, for instance, but she said she saw through it—he had it the way someone who practiced piano long enough could almost sound born to the keyboard. Peter liked having us around because she had the real thing.

  Her mother and father, and her ancestors before them, didn’t have a chance like this, but that was in the old countries, England, Germany. Here, you could make your own luck if you tried. She and I were going to show Dad what she could do. She had a story in mind, with a young Cockney girl who’d been pushed too far by a man who wanted to mold her without taking in who she really was. “Just you wait, ’enry ’iggins, just you wait,” she was fond of saying. She meant my father, or all men, or an invisible enemy force that was more amorphous than just one person.

  * * *

  —

  One Friday in November, around six o’clock, our phone on Setting Sun Drive rang. My mother came into my room, eyes awake with mischief. “We’re going to San Francisco.” As in: right away. Turn off the TV. Peter Charming had bought us two tickets on the last flight PSA had that night. He was throwing a party that wouldn’t be complete without us there. We didn’t need to pack. We would stay at Peter’s Pacific Heights mansion.

  I had some new comic books I wanted to read and old ones to reread, so I didn’t want to go. My mom started packing anyway. Peter called again, and my mother, deep in her walk-in closet, put me on the phone. He wanted to know what she was doing.

  “She’s packing.”

  “Make her stop. Go in there and get her the fuck out of her closet. Tell her to just get her purse and you and get on the plane. We’ll buy clothes tomorrow. Tell her to fucking quit the closet shit. We’ll buy her a whole new wardrobe.”

  I did that, exactly, letting Peter listen in. I was laughing as I tugged my mother away from her suitcases, and she was laughing, too. I’d forgotten I didn’t want to go.

  Three hours later, we were getting out of the cab in front of Peter’s house on Broadway and Laguna. It was two stories, flat-fronted and plain blue outside, nothing ornate. There were a lot of stairs involved. We could see through the front windows that the living room was packed with people. Peter was there with a glass of wine in his hand, which he handed to my mother. “You made it! You made it! You’re incredible. I can’t believe you and the midget just got on the plane. Suzie Blue will show you the place. Sue Blue! Sue Blue!”

  He had more to say but it was hard for me to listen, for many reasons. For instance there were two men kissing in the hallway. They had perfect hair, Ryan O’Neal hair, tousled without being shaggy. Oh, I thought, those men must be gay.

  Sue embraced my mother and kissed me on the cheek.

  I had never seen anyone like Sue in person. She was a figure out of a Truffaut film. She was tall, willowy, platinum blond, with blue eyes and red lipstick that made her skin look white as plaster. I’d previously thought “skin white as plaster” was a silly exaggeration. Her voice was tranquil, as if she had been born in the middle of this party and had taken in stride everything that had happened since. She wore jeans and a silk blouse and tiny button pearl earrings, and she breezed over to hand Peter a new glass of wine, then floated back to us. She floated. I realized during the long time I stared that this was an effect—effortlessness. I’d never seen effortlessness.

  As she took us upstairs, I noticed people smoking pot. The bad kids in my neighborhood smoked pot on the beach or the public stairways by the high school. Weren’t the adults here worried about the cops? No one here seemed worried about anything. In fact, that seemed to be a feature of the party. So I decided, without this being effective, that I wasn’t worried.

  Upstairs was the master bedroom, with bookshelves from floor to ceiling and piles of books by Peter’s bed. The hallway was narrow, with a kind of floor I didn’t recognize (it was hardwood) and the doors had dinged-up complicated moldings that didn’t match from one room to the next. Here was Peter’s office
, where someone was stretched out on the leather couch with electrodes on his head.

  “Biofeedback,” Sue explained, pitching the unfamiliar words as my mom and I trailed behind. It was like acupuncture, or massage. My mother was fascinated. She wondered if it could help her migraines. I wanted her to try it. I wanted her to try everything. I was also afraid of everything, but I’d picked up on the atmosphere. If something was strange, it was new, and embracing it meant you were breaking free from something old.

  Sue led me to my room, where there was a brass bed and some old white shelves overstuffed with books. The guests’ coats were piled on the bed, which Sue patted. The bed rippled. It was a water bed. Even the most spoiled of my classmates didn’t sleep on water beds. “And these are for you if you get bored,” she said, handing me some underground comic books I’d never heard of. I would never admit to being bored here. I wanted to move in and live here until I was no longer terrified by everything I saw.

  A little while later, I stood in the living room, halfway behind the fronds of a potted fern, sipping a Coke, nodding to the music, and pretending I’d been to parties before. The hors d’oeuvres smelled of roasted garlic and the burgers were dressed with aioli and capers. I realized I didn’t even know what a hamburger meant on this planet.

  Peter swept by with a girl on his arm, stopping at the stereo. He ignored me. The Rolling Stones’ Aftermath was playing, and Peter was explaining to her that while they were in the studio, groupies were actually blowing them. Then he took off the record and put on Joni Mitchell. “You should hear her do it in person. She’s in town later, you should come by, her voice is best around five a.m.,” and then he was gone again. I took more sips of my Coke. I pretended I wasn’t waiting for the police to arrest us all.

  Sue found me. “I was looking for you. You’re the only person here who will appreciate this. Do you play pinball?”