There once was a time long ago we were sleepwalking, our knucklebones barely brushing by accident, and we were sleepwalking midday along a canal in Venice Beach, which is very close to something you said was called Muscle Beach, or on top of it. When I touched you I said sorry.
I remember the canal was almost as beautiful as Real Venice, which is a place with real gondoliers and architectures that someday will be pulled completely underwater, like California.
And under the water there are chimeras, you know? But they are machine-simple and aggregated from gears and pulleys and ropey seaweed, which is why I am always so scared of dark water.
I remember reading about a person whose legs became tangled in the tendrils of a huge man-of-war in the Gulf of Mexico, and in a way he did not die of drowning at all; instead he died of paralysis. If you laughed and pretended you might push me into the canal, I would not find it very funny.
And even though I did not find it very funny, maybe you grabbed me by the forearm to reassure me I was not falling into anything. Maybe that was what happened.
What was the sky? All I can remember is I cannot remember the sky at all. But it’s probably a light blue along the horizon and a much deeper blue higher up — like a fingernail — because that is how skies usually go. But this sky is burning lunchtime-hot, that is what I remember. It is burning your face into a dark shadow, and now I wonder what you looked like then.
Anyway.
You stopped as if you had always known where we were going. I turned all the way around to look at everything but I couldn’t see anything, or you. I tried to make my eyes pinholes, and I could only just see your shadow pointing at a sign.
It was a realtor’s sign, a toothpick in the sandy part of a lawn, and I craned my neck up and up to see the beach mansion with its great bay windows and patios and sliding glass doors. And I turned all the way around again, looking to see what the mansion could see, and everything everything was tremendous.
And I looked again, very hard, to look at what you were seeing, and the sign said open house in capital letters.
You had an idea. It was the second time you’d touched me, when you pressed your fingertips just above the last bone of my spine. This was how you steered me into the mansion, swearing this would be very very funny.
And you talked seriously with the woman downstairs about the asking price and our budget, which really was very funny, because it was the largest house I had ever stood in, except your dad’s.
The woman downstairs was so kind even though, I guessed, she was onto us.
We went upstairs to the bedroom with its blanched beach-white sheets on the big beach bed.
The bedroom made me nervous. I rambled into the bathroom, but there was no toilet paper anywhere. Instead of sitting down in the bathroom I stared at the two marble sinks. I had seen sinks side-by-side before, but never in a house. The toilet was in a separate room from the shower.
You were standing in the bedroom near the sliding glass doors looking out from the inside. From here on the inside the sky was magnified: now more than ever you were a perfect reified silhouette. I sat down on the bed’s edge, where I thought about your shape, about how funny this was.
The woman arrived in the doorway, her hands clasped. She wondered what we thought and we loved it we loved it and now we were not lying.
Just then, while we were talking to the realtor, we discovered we were suddenly and immediately rich. Instead of going downstairs to eat all the tea sandwiches and cookies, we brought out our silver Cross pens and signed every contract without having to think.
And I promised you I would sell my car and my bicycle and all my books, because I would never need them again.
We bought that mansion and we whooped and hollered and threw our arms around each other and we hugged the woman too and we sang gospel hymns and telephoned our Californian friends and we were so happy because neither of us ever had something all our own before. I was so excited because I kept thinking how your dad hated me really hated me because when I was 20 years old I did not know how to say the word paella.
And the floorboards were blank burnished rosewood glinting from pink-green sky outside, here in this glass mansion that belonged to you and me.
We were two people who were going to make it.
Oh.
We said we liked the house very much but where were the tea sandwiches.
We wound back down the open curl of steps, from upstairs to downstairs totally overexposed, and I was shaking and holding onto the rail and not you.
Everyone in linen suits and cotton dresses watched as we maneuvered toward the tea sandwiches hungrily.
Certainly it was very very funny.
One time I read about a person whose legs were tangled in the tendrils of a man-of-war, which is a type of enormous jellyfish in the Gulf of Mexico. He could not escape and he became very still. Eventually he died underwater.
The real happy ending is there is nothing to be sorry for ever ever, so far.
originally published in They n.4, “The Los Angeles Catalog”