Turquoise Sky

Home , Black Hole (solitaire), Cocktail umbrella

TURQUOISE SKY

______

A Project

Presented

to the Faculty of

California State University, Chico

______

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

English

______

by © Sheila Michelle Stagner 2014

Spring 2014 TURQUOISE SKY

A Project

Sheila Michelle Stagner

Spring 2014

APPROVED BY THE DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND VICE PROVOST FOR RESEARCH:

______Eun K. Park, Ph.D.

APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Robert G. Davidson, Ph.D., Chair

______Paul S. Eggers, Ph.D. PUBLICATION RIGHTS

No portion of this project may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author.

iii DEDICATION

This writing project is dedicated to the men and women of the world who have given and sacrificed, and suffered, and who have gone on to be overcomers, living full and meaningful lives. This work is also dedicated to the Muses who inspired

Turquoise Sky, and to the Muse who showed up at the last possible moment, infusing the work with new life. He remains a part of the magic and the mystery.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This writing project would not have been possible without the generous support of many people.

I would like to express my deep appreciation to my graduate advisor and writing project committee chair, Dr. Robert Davidson, for his abundant help, support, and masterly guidance throughout the duration of my studies. His insightful comments, suggestions, and careful readings of my drafts, as well as the vast literary and writing knowledge he imparted to me at the various stages of my academic journey, has been highly beneficial. His discussions on the works of Henry James (and other major writers), in addition to his belief in my ability to create compelling and emotionally rich characters worked to inspire me to want to reach greater heights in my artistry. On that note, I am indebted to Dr. Davidson for his investment in the major characters from Turquoise Sky; his hearty interest in these characters is what prompted me to resurrect their stories and to begin anew at the last moment; ergo this writing project.

Likewise, Dr. Davidson would not accept anything less than my best efforts, and for that, I thank him profusely. His urgings that I go deeper with these characters paid off in more ways than one: with this writing project, I found my literary voice. I cannot thank Dr. Davidson enough for his assistance and direction throughout the whole process of completing my project and for his steadfast commitment in helping my progress stay on schedule. It goes without saying that without Dr. Davidson’s patience, unceasing confidence in me, and persistent help this project would not have been successful.

v I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to my writing mentor, as well as teaching mentor, Dr. Paul Eggers, who so kindly served on my writing project committee. He made available his support in a number of ways during my academic studies and has always been an enormous source of encouragement and support. I am especially indebted to him for the invaluable teaching experience I gained under his tutelage. Additionally, I am beholden to Dr. Eggers for his help and patient guidance during my overzealous experimentation with different writing styles. His instruction, direction, and the additional resources he pointed me to greatly aided me in discovering and honing my literary angle of vision, for which I am most grateful. Had I not gone through those experimentation stages in those earlier years, I fear I would still be trying to find my way artistically, and my creative vision stifled. His Form and Practice graduate seminar solidified my findings.

All in all, I have greatly benefited from Dr. Eggers’ writing expertise, keen observations, and constructive suggestions throughout my writing journey. Further, his advice and comments helped me to keep my writing focused, particularly with this project. I would especially like to show him my gratitude for his useful feedback on the numerous revisions of this manuscript. Without Dr. Eggers’ assistance this writing project would not have been written to its fullest.

Furthermore, I would also like to offer special thanks to both Dr. Davidson and Dr. Eggers for their endless patience and tolerance during several unexpected crises that occurred at the last leg of my academic journey. Truthfully, without their extraordinary support and understanding this project would not have materialized.

vi I would also like to extend my sincere appreciation to Dr. Jeanne Clark, poet extraordinaire, who, though I never had the privilege of studying under, was always a source of great inspiration and warm encouragement. I enjoyed the times spent with her at English Department events and the time she took away from her busy schedule to greet me with her warm smile and to answer any of my questions. Dr. Clark has been a vibrant part of my creative writing journey, and I am thankful for her moral support throughout my academic career.

I would also like to convey my gratitude to the professors and instructors, as well as the staff, of the Department of English, for their various forms of support during my academic studies. I have been amazingly fortunate to have been able to study under so many wonderful and talented professors. I am grateful also to my creative writing students—they taught me well.

This acknowledgement would not be complete without special thanks to my classmates and colleagues, and community of fellow creative writers for their feedback, comments, and suggestions in regards to my working drafts. I would like to especially thank Emily, Joshua, Lucas, Noel J., and Mike G. for their interest in my family of San

Francisco characters (in those very early drafts) and for encouraging me to continue telling their stories. I am particularly grateful to Noel J. and Mike G. for the time they spent reading and discussing with me those earlier working drafts and for their keen observations and invaluable comments. Many thanks also to Krystal, Tim, Charles, Tony, and Sandra for their feedback and suggestions on later drafts.

vii I owe a very important debt to my friend and fellow artist, Linda Sherrill, for her endless help and unselfish support, and belief in my artistic aspirations. Moreover, I owe her much gratitude for cheerleading me on and for her heartfelt interest in my storyline and my characters’ plights, and my writing project as a whole. Equally important, words cannot express my sincere appreciation for her willingness to be my

“second pair of eyes.” I especially want to give special thanks to Linda for her priceless assistance in the final proofreading and copyediting (and her kind patience with my last minute changes!) of the numerous revisions I generated. I could not have kept my wits about me without her, and her companionship and unyielding support during those long, laborious hours livened up what would have been a lonely office.

I am also indebted to my friend and teacher, Judith L. Thompson, Executive

Director & Clinical Supervisor of The Growing Place of Chico. I would like to express my gratitude to her for her support, encouragement, and belief in me throughout my academic career, and for her gently nudging me on to continue on the scholarly path set out before me. Her passionate belief in my writing and storytelling abilities, and her unflagging support helped me to overcome setbacks and to continue on with the completion of my writing project.

I would also like to acknowledge my friend, Karin Martin, who I also am obliged to in the writing of this project, not only for her support and encouragement throughout my graduate studies, but also for her willingness to listen to me brainstorm some of my story ideas and my main characters’ complicated mindsets. My discussions with her have been illuminating, and I very much appreciate her insightful comments as

viii to the finer points of my protagonists’ intra-psychic struggles. I would also like to show my appreciation to Karin for her eagerness to read through and comment on the lengthy drafts of Turquoise Sky despite her busy schedule.

Deepest gratitude is also extended to my friend, Heather Dorris, Certified Life

Coach and Administrative Assistant of The Growing Place of Chico, for assisting me with the final formatting of my writing project. I am deeply appreciative of Heather’s time and her computer expertise; her help and support helped to take the edge off completing the nuts and bolts of this project as the submission deadline grew nearer. I can’t thank her enough. Additionally, sincerest thanks are in order for Dave Brown, of

Dave Brown Consulting, for his technical expertise.

I would also like to show my appreciation to the staff of The Growing Place for being so kind as to allow me to utilize their facility for additional research while generously providing me with a quiet room for further writing.

I would like to offer sincerest thanks to my friend and mentor, Diane Wabs, for her solid support throughout my studies and the writing of this project. Her friendship, laughter, and patience helped me to stay sane through the more trying times.

Special thanks also to Allen “Paco” Ramirez; his abiding friendship and good humor and understanding have been a great source of joy, peace, and inspiration.

Moreover, I appreciate his support in helping me to better define my goals and vision, especially pertaining to the field of counseling; he’s been a good listener and teacher.

I am deeply grateful to my friends and fellow Chico State Alumni, Jhoana

DelaCruz Ball and Leslie Ball; they have been with me from the beginning of my studies

ix and continue to lovingly champion me on. I’m also grateful for the much-needed laughter and good times we shared between study times (not forgetting the fun times in service we spent with our Chico State FASO family of friends!) and for their steadfast friendship and continued belief in me.

I would especially like to acknowledge my longtime friend, Yasmin Lluveras, for her ongoing support, encouragement, and joyful presence in my life. Her perseverance, academic endeavors, and accomplishments have always been an inspiration to me. In addition, I appreciate her unwavering belief in me and her post-MA guidance for my Psychology Studies; and most of all, her friendship.

None of this would have been possible without the love, support, and caring patience of my family and extended families. Words cannot express my gratitude and heartfelt thanks. Additionally, I would like to show my deep appreciation to my loved ones for being so understanding when I, at times, was so distant during the writing of this project. I look forward to fulfilling those promised visits.

Last, but not least, I want to thank Almighty God for being in my life, and for giving me the courage and strength to complete this immense writing project, and for His perfect timing.

For those whose name is not mentioned herewith, I want you to know how much I appreciate you walking this journey with me.

x TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Publication Rights ...... iii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Abstract ...... xii

PART

I. A Critical Introduction ...... 2

II. Turquoise Sky ...... 39

III. Works Cited ...... 123

xi ABSTRACT

TURQUOISE SKY

Master of Arts in English

California State University, Chico

Spring 2014

Turquoise Sky is a character-driven piece, with emphasis on the psychological and psychosexual, written in the received Realist tradition of literary mode. It is a plot of decline—and hope—set in the milieu of San Francisco during the early 1970s, and is essentially about how the main protagonist, Angela Herrera, searches for a sense of self and empowerment in the midst of a power struggle with her high school sweetheart and ex-fiancé, Tony Sanchez, a returning Vietnam veteran. The heightened physical and emotional power struggle between Angela and Tony acts as a shield and a distraction from what is real between them and the real challenges they face, what they are currently both too wounded to admit to, or deal with from where they both are in their lives.

Because of the intricacies of the intra-psychic issues at work, the storyline contains a host of intersecting themes including ones such as trauma, questions and issues of identity and sexuality, gender differences and power struggles, alienation and detachment, guilt and shame, and the search for love and acceptance, redemption and truth.

xii PART I A Critical Introduction

Literary Landscape and Influences

Creative writers are privileged inheritors of rich literary traditions passed down from generations of great writers spanning the globe, in what Robert Paul Lamb, in

Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, neatly describes as “influence[s] felt” upon and within one generation of major authors from another (14). Another way to look at artistic legacy is through the lens of Flaubert’s free indirect style, a point-of-view technique which is in effect a deep rendering of third- person limited omniscience embedded at the sentence level that can be used in several different ways depending on the effect the artist desires to achieve (cf. Wood). According to James Wood, in How Fiction Works, free indirect style allows the reader to “see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language” (11).

James Wood cites free indirect style examples from many great authors, with emphasis on Henry James. We don’t have to look much further than the opening sentence of Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove to see this profundity in action:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her

unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in

the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had

brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. (1)

2 3 The adverb “unconscionably” in the narrative strand captures the careful reader’s attention: is this Kate Croy’s word or Henry James’ word—or both? (Wood 16).

The lively flow of oscillating energy between narrator and character invites and challenges the reader to go deeper into the world of the character by considering co- existing dimensions of reality, even if one dimension holds the reader in a state of productive ambiguity. In other words, the audience is suspended between two worlds: in that of the mediating narrator and that of the character (Wood 11-18). Depending on the amount of psychic distance I want occurring between narrator and character in my storylines, I will employ one or all of the varying aspects of the free indirect style. For instance, in “Night at the Drive-in,” a story I wrote involving the character of Julien

Farrell (a minor character in my writing project herewith) and his Vietnam War experiences, the narration closely follows the language he would typically resort to when with his wartime buddies and/or with his homeboys back home:

Half-Mexican, half-Filipino, his Chicana Filipinita was an exotic. And

exotic was what he now desired more than anything else. He was no

longer satisfied by what other women had to offer him. He liked what

Josephina had to offer. One moment she was slapping together tortillas for

him just like the ones moms made; the next, massaging his scalp and feet

with all the sweetness of a Saigon bar girl. She’d make a good wife. If

only she would say yes. But her ideas about college always got in the way.

Why does homegirl need a fucking degree for anyways? (65)

Conversely, while writing Turquoise Sky, my creative project story, I wanted to maintain more psychic distance in order to shadow the emotionally disconnected and

4 overactive and self-analytical mindset of the main protagonist, Angela Herrera. So for that reason the narration for the most part typifies a more clinical language throughout the story, emphasizing her sense of alienation and uptightness. In the passage below, Angela is trying to reconcile her self-destructive tendencies with Tony, the man she truly loves, and her desire to be respected and loved by him. She thinks about how Tony’s sadistic treatment of her may not be enough to feed her insatiable need to be punished for all the wrong she’s committed in her life—that he may have to hurt her in ways she hasn’t even thought about yet, which frightens and confuses her:

Nevertheless, it was a part of her that felt strangely alive with its own

wants and needs that longed to satisfy what most normal people would

find abhorrent. It was a hidden part of herself, she’d as much figured, that

strongly desired to be punished by Tony in whatever humiliating way he

dished out to her, and she hated herself for desiring what she should

despise, thinking she might be mentally defective in some way for wanting

those kinds of things to happen to her. (67)

The adjective “abhorrent” in the first sentence might be a word Angela, who happens to be a character who views her world through a shame-grid, uses at times, and it may not be. Granted, Angela studies vocabulary books in her off hours; however, at the same time, given her religious background and the social mores she inhabits, and given the coda position of “abhorrent,” there’s a sense of a strong collective voice “unidentified free indirect style” (Wood 24) of criticism she’s internalized (Wood 17). Or the word could simply be the narrator’s word, or all of the above. In this way, a psychological fluidity between psychical entities is taking place, enhancing and enlarging and

5 intensifying the world of the character. Perhaps there is more to Angela’s psyche than she sees, things the audience can see.

In the words of James Wood, “This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see” (11). Arguably, if not for Henry James’ mastery of the free indirect style first posited by Flaubert, it would not be the refined and distinguished craft-of- writing technique it is today, one that allows for a deeper experience of a character’s “felt life” (Henry James).

Creative writing for me is a meditative and spiritual act, and when it comes to entering into a conversation with a community of writers, particularly those with whom I share a similar “angle of vision”—that is, “your habitual artistic approaches, and your idiosyncratic psychological, emotional, and spiritual engagement with those topics and approaches” (Eggers, “Growing as a Writer” 13)—it’s like entering in communion with those writers who’ve gone before me and those writers who are with me now. It’s comforting and pleasurable to feel that I am a part of something larger than myself in an area I hold so much passion for. We are blessed beyond words to have generations of literature at our fingertips to peruse, contemplate, emulate, instruct, and inspire us.

Subjects of history, spirituality, and psychology have always intrigued me. I consider myself a lifelong student of all three (and am currently an enrolled student in a psychology counseling and a life coaching program in which I am specializing in trauma and post-traumatic growth, and addiction and recovery issues), so it probably should come to no surprise to me that the literary works that first spoke to me (pre-college) were the writings of Dostoevsky.

6 The historical setting of nineteenth-century Russia, Dostoevsky’s gift for bringing his characters to life, and his passionate and unrelenting intellectual, psychological, and spiritual investigations of the psyche and heart of his characters, captured and catapulted my imagination. Crime and Punishment was my baptism into the world of Dostoevsky. I was immediately taken in by Dostoevsky’s psychological portrayal of a conflicted murderer, Raskolnikov, stricken with convergences of humility and prideful hubris in the aftermath of his crime. Now that I am able to view great literature through a literary lens, I see the depth of beauty in Dostoevsky’s dramatic rendering of Raskolnikov’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual reactions to the incident.

In this way, Dostoevsky not only deepens Raskolnikov’s psyche and shows his humanity in a sympathetic light, but he also reveals the power of human choice, and how we are beholden to the consequences of exercising our free will.

I credit Dostoevsky’s writings as the impetus for my initial interest in obtaining a Bachelor’s in English when I returned to college; Dostoevsky’s writings, in turn, prepared me for the writings of Henry James, whom I consider one of my greatest literary predecessors. I feel fortunate that I’ve been introduced to as many great literary authors as I have, in my many memorable times spent within the walls of Taylor Hall at

Chico State University, studying and discussing literature and writing, in addition to the wonderful memories of interning in and the teaching of Creative Writing. The writers I've been influenced by are numerous and diverse in style, subject, and approach.

Authors whose writings inspire me and for which I feel a deep sense of connection with are works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hardy, Henry James, Kafka, Camus,

Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, and David Foster

7 Wallace—they are a special group of writers whose writings have moved me intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and are whom I consider a large part of my literary genealogy. The writings of Junot Diaz, Denis Johnson, and Mary Gaitskill have also impacted my writerly sensibilities.

To add to that list, critics’ works on craft-of-writing and aesthetic theories have also greatly influenced my writing. My reading library and writer’s toolbox would not be complete without the inclusion of such books. I was introduced to many great critics in my Form and Practice course with Dr. Paul Eggers and in my Independent

Study courses with Dr. Robert Davidson, and from each book covered and studied, I gained a tremendous amount of literary writing knowledge, for which I am most appreciative. Although there are a great many works by critics, the works I have found most helpful are books written by critics and authors such as James Wood, Charles

Baxter, John Gardner, Wayne C. Booth, Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Flannery O’Connor.

As a fellow Catholic and fellow writer, I am especially thankful and indebted to Flannery O’Connor for her material in Mystery and Manners. Overall, O’Connor’s book is exceptional, particularly her discussion on her “anagogical vision”—which she speaks of with great authority and describes as “the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation” (72). She’s not interested in solely presenting surface level meaning, but rather she’s interested in delivering multi- textured material that “suggest[s] both the world and eternity” (111)—an approach I deeply aspire to reach in my writing. I kept this idea in mind as I drew out the character of Angela in Turquoise Sky. I wanted this character to resonate with readers on multiple

8 levels: the literal, the metaphorical, the metaphysical, the spiritual—and for the strands of her psychological schema to echo one another in a well-orchestrated, harmonious pattern.

What I found especially helpful, at a time when I was agonizing over whether or not to include violence in my workshop stories, and particularly this story now, was

Flannery O’Connor’s powerful discussion on the use of violence in her fiction in Mystery and Manners. My characters are often emotionally raw and edgy, their language sometimes gritty, inhabiting worlds where violence is sometimes a part of the landscape.

Violence is often the only thing my characters understand—similar to O’Connor’s idea, though my characters are of a different sort from that of O’Connor’s “grotesque” characters. And, as odd as it sounds, the only thing that will often work to spur my characters towards positive growth and change (cf. O’Connor 112), because patterns of violence are what is familiar to my characters; it is a part of their habitual responses and approaches in dealing with conflict and strife. And because, as is very similar to

O’Connor’s Catholic sentiments, violence is sometimes what it takes to wake my characters up on a spiritual level.

The following assertion of Flannery O’Connor’s falls in nicely with the character movement in my writing project, Turquoise Sky, where she states:

I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction

will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found

that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and

preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard

that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is

something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which

9 is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in

the Christian view of the world. (Mystery and Manners 112)

One of the main fixtures of Christendom is the ongoing spiritual battle between the dark forces of evil and the heavenly realms. The characters of the

Grandmother and the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” quickly come to mind. The two willful characters battle out their issues of spiritual bondage in what I would call the devil’s playground of violence, being that extreme violence is what it takes to shake loose their rigid belief systems so that they may be able to see themselves how they really are, instead of what they think they are.

When I consider the spiritual implications for my main character, Angela, in

Turquoise Sky—and where I locate the Catholic/Christian idea of “suffering for the sake of renewing the mind, body, and spirit”—her faint transformation could not be made possible without the sexual and emotional violence she incurs—it is what she knows. I’m not quite sure Flannery O’Connor had sexual violence in mind when she spoke of bringing violence into play as a means to open her character’s eyes. I think she would, however, give me a favorable nod in this regard, being that evil in the form of violence comes in many disguises.

Flannery O’Connor also uses violence as a literary device to jolt the modern reader into better being able to articulate “where the real heart of the story lies” (111), since her literary bent is primarily located on the “anagogical level”—that is, “the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it” (111)—of her

“anagogical vision” writing theory. O’Connor is gracious with her readership, never forceful in trying to draw the reader into her anagogical vision. I appreciate that

10 O’Connor’s work is rooted in the theme of Christian suffering and redemption—and grace. Because what I want more than anything for my characters is grace.

What’s more, I admire that Flannery O’Connor does not come across as being didactic or preachy—a thought which raises an important question: What exactly does the moral or morality constitute in fiction?

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines the word “moral” (in its adjective counterpart) as being “concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character”; and in its noun form, Oxford

American describes it as “a lesson, esp. one concerning what is right or prudent, that can be derived from a story, a piece of information, or an experience” (1101).

In On Moral Fiction, John Gardner argues against didacticism in art, yet at the same time, he claims that artistic creation is essentially “good (as opposed to pernicious or vacuous) only when it has a clear positive moral effect, presenting valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward virtue, toward life affirmation” (18).

To be fair, Gardner in Moral Fiction is to a large extent writing in response to what he construed as the emotional and spiritual vacuity of postmodernist works at that time; arguably, he also writes for effect via hyperbole.

In spite of his battle of wits with postmodernists, John Gardner’s contention that only works containing a moral vision of what he (and the critics/artists on this side of the moral versus morality argument) deems to be “the moral” in art is not only based on contradiction—namely, placing the artist in a position of moral authority—but also it is based on setting up a criteria that art contain “models of virtue” (82) for the reader, which

11 not only qualifies art, but also the writer. Granted, presenting positive renditions of life is a noble aim; conversely, real life does not always behave that way, and to predicate storytelling on such, because it is the good and decent thing to do, is to present a false reality filled with romantic notions of what life should be like, not what it truly is.

Moreover, it violates the natural laws of cause and effect, of choice and consequences. Poor choices often can lead to unfavorable consequences, and I think it is important for the storyline to be able to show, to quote the title of a Clint Eastwood movie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Wouldn’t the good and decent thing be to allow the characters to be who they are, even if it means they have to suffer their consequences in order to find the truth of their hidden selves, whatever that truth may be? Furthermore, it goes without saying, let the author and reader be who they are. Let the artist explore his or her medium, and let the reader respond.

As much as I appreciate John Gardner’s writings, and see some validity in a fraction of his claims, I beg to differ. Neither does an artist hold the truths of the universe, nor does he or she have the right or responsibility to instruct readers on how to live their lives—that is the responsibility of the reader. A creative writer is merely an “observer”

(Baxter 14) of life who just happens to have a keen eye and an artistic enthusiasm for the subtle (or not so subtle) nuances of life, one who, according to Flannery O’Connor “sees his obligation as being to the truth of what can happen in life, and not to the reader—not to the reader’s taste, not to the reader’s happiness, not even to the reader’s morals” (172).

As an artist, I’m interested in writing fiction that “poses questions, not answers” (Davidson 25). The questions I pose aren’t whether my characters are right or wrong, or whether or not they’re making healthy or unhealthy choices. My job as an artist

12 is not to instruct, but to present the most vivid, penetrating, and compelling psychological portrayal that I possibly can, and to let the reader judge and to draw meaning from the story. I take this cue from Henry James. “Henry James said,” Flannery O’Connor writes,

“that the morality of a piece of fiction depended on the amount of ‘felt life’ that was in it”

(146).

In discussing Henry James’ views of what comprised “the moral” in storytelling, Rob Davidson, in The Master and the Dean, puts it this way:

[ . . . ] morality was, for James, most often related to questions of form and

execution in art. From his earliest work as a critic, he viewed writing as a

moral practice—not so much in terms of what a given work of art depicted

[ . . . ], but in the manner of the depiction itself: the language, the sense of

verisimilitude, the overall accuracy of the portrait, and the greater purpose

of the portrayal. (12)

This Jamesian view of morality in art is radically different from the narrow idea of art containing a moral vision comprised of, for example, sentimentalism and didacticism, and for good reason. For an artist to hold his or her characters up as models of virtue places him- or herself in a position of supreme authority, an all-knowing god- like figure, who knows what’s best for the lives of the characters and the thought-life of the readers.

At best, it’s counter-intuitive and dehumanizing, all meaning and hope for revealed truths negated by the author’s legalism and the author’s commandeering of the character’s free will. Meaning in the story comes alive for the audience through what I like to think of as the characters’ “discover[ies] and decision[s]” (Burroway and

13 Stuckey-French 84-86), for it is the characters that reveal their humanness, not the artist, as it is the audience that determines the meaning the characters make through their actions and choices. The artist is the conduit that makes it possible for the dream to come alive. It’s the depth of life portrayed, or as Henry James says, it’s the “felt life” of the characters, as revealed through the artist’s careful rendering of the character’s interior life, and commitment to the form and practice of his or her artistry.

Discussion and Overview of Writing Project

While as an undergraduate and graduate student in the English and Creative

Writing program at Chico State, I've been drawn to psychological realism, dirty realism, and gritty realism in my workshop drafts and in my choice of reading materials, be they situated in Realist-leaning and/or Postmodernist-leaning frames. Moreover, I've felt driven to create works that investigate the effects of trauma and crisis on the human psyche, and the underlying motives for the choices one makes when one is under duress—from a psychological stand point, by creating the most vivid and compelling characters I possibly can, characters who are able to negotiate even the mildest transformation under the harshest circumstances in order to show the resolve of the human spirit.

14 physical and emotional power struggle between Angela and Tony acts as a shield and a distraction from what is real between them and the real challenges they face, what they are currently both too wounded to admit to, or deal with from where they both are in their lives. And even though each of them have moved on with other people (Angela now engaged to Victor Maldonado, and Tony’s dating relationship with a girl named

Margarita), they have not been able to move on from each other because of the interplay of and interrelated psychodynamics—and emotional ties—that exist between them.

Turquoise Sky began as a short story and grew into a larger piece, which is now but only one part of a larger project I am working on. Originally, I had planned on presenting a compilation of linking stories involving some of the same characters, then after careful consideration, narrowed the interrelated stories to two companion stories,

Turquoise Sky, featuring the main protagonist, Angela, and “The Real Deal,” a story which takes place in Saigon during the Vietnam War, featuring Angela’s then fiancé,

Tony, as the focal character.

The lack of the companion piece makes Turquoise Sky incomplete in some ways when it comes to the representation of Tony’s character, for neither is the totality of his psyche—particularly his sensitive nature—nor his history with Angela fully explored in Turquoise Sky as they are in his story, “Real Deal.” In other words, the character of

15 Tony comes across as one-dimensional, instead of three-dimensional, in Turquoise Sky.

Furthermore, a different shade of Angela not seen in this story is seen through Tony’s eyes in his story. It’s not only his perception of who she is and/or who he wants her to be, but also it’s an aspect of her that Angela hasn’t fully recognized in herself which makes his perception of her even that more electrifyingly beautiful.

As far as writing a Realist story set in San Francisco during the Vietnam Era, there were many more considerations and challenges. Firstly, historical accuracy, or any accuracy for that matter, in my stories is of great importance to me. I spend a lot of time researching all aspects of the time period I’m writing in, even if it means confirming details I remember from the era I grew up in, and I do whatever is humanly possible to make sure the details of the time, place, and culture are accurate. This exercise and discipline in research also helps me to get a better overall sense of my characters.

Secondly, a lot of frenzied activity was taking place in San Francisco during the Vietnam Era concerning the Women’s Movement, the Vietnam War, the Counter-

Culture Movement, and so on. Yet, the story is not about the time period as a whole, but rather about the inner conflicts of a young woman that happens to be living during that particular era; though the cultural mindset (and that of the subculture she is a part of) and her Catholic sentiments of course affects the ways she views and interacts with her environment and relationships.

The ensuing character minutiae of the main protagonist, Angela, were pieced together the more I imagined the psychology of her mind through different groupings of psychological schema, though she lacked the boldness of my initial impression of her. A couple of years ago, the essence of Angela’s sensitive, yet hardened nature, as well as the

16 way I imagined her to look, first came to me through the impression of a racially mixed woman with coal-black eyes and hair, of spectacular female bravado, one who could fight and dance and love and laugh all at once, and who could maneuver in and out of different cultures like a vibrant-colored chameleon. The more the character of Angela took shape, the larger her psychological map grew in complexity and size, and as a result deeper issues emerged to the surface, which in effect chiseled away at the more gregarious and easygoing disposition I first imagined of her.

In character-driven Realist stories we want proactive characters, that is to say, characters “capable of causing an action and capable of being changed by it” (Burroway and Stuckey-French 83), since Realist stories essentially are about the power of choice and the results and consequences of the choices the characters make. The character of

Angela, in part, lacks a certain amount of character agency necessary to highlight human choice, particularly in a Realist story of this scope; however, at the same time, she is someone who is aware of her own flaws—think: tragic heroine. Although not making a decision often constitutes a decision, the reasons for Angela’s passivity and helplessness, as well as her resistance to taking action needs to be shown in order to make the story work.

On that note, despite the protracted movement of Angela’s character, I provide textual evidence through dramatic rendering as to why Angela inhabits a mental framework of “learned helplessness” (Bradshaw 51, Herman 91), and why her eventual realization is gradual and delayed. Due to the complexity of her psychological issues, her emotional breakthrough, or realization, if you prefer, is dependent on graduated levels of understanding. Moreover, with each revision, the storyline evolved into a narrative of

17 decline, which proved to be more frustrating with each pass, until finally I allowed the story to say what it seemed to want to say, and with good result. Circumstances like the one I described remind me of a well-noted critic’s advice: “Let each work do what it

‘wants’ to do; let its author discover its inherent powers and gauge his techniques to the realization of those powers” (Booth 378).

I don’t pretend to be a licensed psychologist, but I am currently a student of psychology, and in addition have studied independently—via short and long seminars and courses, and reading materials—for a number of years, and served as an intern in a multitude of areas connected with the psychological. Psychological complexities of the mind cannot be easily encapsulated; it’s a broad area of study and involves so many variables. So: for that reason, and because of the limited scope of this critical introduction, I, therefore, speak only to the salient psychological points of the storyline.

I view the psychology of the soulful mind as a prism. A person’s impressions and perceptions of certain things they’ve experienced are varied, and essentially linked to other impressions and perceptions of things they’ve experienced. One could call this associative thinking, for instance, when one thinks of a character’s mental ruminations

(since we are on the subject of writing), but what I have in mind goes even deeper—to the core level of a person’s being, where his or her core beliefs about themselves reside, and where these subjective beliefs can often be tangled up with a person’s sense of identity, to the extent that a person’s identity may even be “split at the core,” as is sometimes the case in someone who suffers trauma during the developing stages of the self.

18 In my story, this “split” is more along the lines of the self being fragmented more than anything else, which is the case with the main protagonist, Angela.

Disassociation is a coping mechanism, a way she has learned to survive the past traumas inflicted on her and the ensuing mixed messages. Consequently, when under stress, the brokenness and opposing sides in her subconscious surfaces, becoming more apparent, which is the psychological space the character of Angela is at in this phase of her life.

The slow unraveling of Angela’s conflicted mindset works in conjunction with the type of conflict operating in the story. It’s not your typical Aristotelian notion of conflict-in-story in which the character wants/desires X, but Y is getting in the way.

Instead, the conflict runs along a more “permutational structure” (Eggers 1), an intriguing structure I find highly compatible to the psychological dynamics at work in many of my stories. Dr. Paul Eggers, in “Realist Subversions in Jesus’ Son,” describes it this way:

[T]he chains of events are largely nonhierarchical, there’s a lack of

resolution, and conflict and sources of tension are diffused. Instead, the

main issues are non-developmentally echoed or mirrored in various guises

(like image clusters in a poem) that may or may not be coherently related

in space and time. This structure allows for a static exploration, one that

deepens our sense of the scope and complexities of the initial issues—but

the deepening comes at the cost of forward motion or progress in the

character. (1)

This type of “non-developmental structure” works well with the investigation of Angela’s psychological wiring, as well as with the emotional and psychical push-pulls between the characters, and has afforded me the opportunity to go deep inside Angela’s complicated

19 mindset—while maintaining narrative distance—without the fear of not meeting the

“conflict-standard-in-stories” commonly associated with Realist stories. Of course, I did not want to sacrifice the “deepening” of Angela’s character, thus I worked along a continuum in this regard. On that note, the permutational structure at work in my story is complimented and solidified by Charles Baxter’s “counterpoint” conflict strategy that began to naturally take hold as I wrote Turquoise Sky.

Theirs is a dynamic relationship, Angela Herrera and Tony Sanchez. They each carry their own emotional and psychic wounds, and grapple with their own demons, in their search for a return to a sense of psychical and emotional normalcy. They both are dealing with trauma—I say trauma because post-traumatic stress disorder did not become officially recognized by the psychiatric community until 1980 (Herman 28)—issues of their own and issues of unhealthy shame (or what could better be referred to as toxic shame).

Here is where I would like to take an opportunity to differentiate between healthy shame and toxic shame. Guilt is differentiated from shame, and as the saying goes: guilt is I did something wrong, whereas, shame is I am wrong. These distinctions are important in considering my characters’ head trips. In Healing the Shame That Binds

You, Bradshaw provides this noteworthy explanation:

There are two forms of shame: nourishing shame and toxic/life-destroying

shame. As toxic shame, it is an excruciatingly internal experience of

unexpected exposure. It is a deep cut felt primarily from the inside. It

divides us from ourselves and from others. In toxic shame, we disown

ourselves. And this disowning demands a cover-up. Toxic shame parades

20 in many garbs and get-ups. It loves darkness and secretiveness. It is the

dark secret aspect of shame which has evaded our study. (3)

The “many faces of shame” (Bradshaw) play a large role in the storyline, more so for the character of Angela—she cloaks herself in its “secretiveness.”

When Angela and Tony come together they deny what they desire most from each other: unconditional love, one that transcends the destructive and sexualized relationship that they’ve grown accustomed to operating in, since Tony arrived back home from being a combat soldier overseas in Vietnam. The shame and guilt residing within each fuel their ongoing dysfunction with one another in the “dance of death” they’ve come to embrace. The focus on power and sex keep them from truly knowing each other the way they deeply desire to be known.

Tony suffers from war trauma, for things that had happened over there, and

Angela in turn, reacts to his trauma with her own—early trauma which is awakened by his abusive behaviors towards her after he returns home from the war. Toxic shame underscores both of their traumatic experiences. Furthermore, “Traumatic symptoms,”

Judith Herman writes, “have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and to take on a life of their own” (34). Hence, both Tony’s and Angela’s destructive acting out behaviors with one another act as an emotional avoidance system, which only works to create other modes of destruction and isolation between them. Ironically, it is Angela who spirals out of control and Tony who—seemingly through Angela’s emotional and psychological tailspin—gains a healthy perspective.

The character of Angela is an emotionally complicated and complex character, made up of many contradictions. A child of a neglectful and alcoholic

21 mother—a situation in itself which carries its own brand of toxic shame as a result of the unstable and chaotic systems alcoholism/addiction frequently induce in the life of the alcoholic/addict and those closest to him or her—Angela inhabits her own system of self- negating traits. Ones, for instance, such as compliance; people pleasing; and looking to others for approval, meaning, and purpose, etcetera. Often when these particular traits are combined with other issues involving the “loss of selfhood” (Bradshaw 14), they typically register under the category of what we now commonly identify as “co- dependency/co-dependent behaviors,” of which I do not elaborate on further for reasons of brevity. Angela also has grown up without a father figure to help guide her and validate her femaleness, a matter that has left her vulnerable to seeking out male attention and approval in misguided efforts to fill the void left by an absent father figure.

To compound matters, there was the “incident” on her twelfth birthday she experienced at the hands of a teenage boy—the son of her mother’s boyfriend at the time—an older boy she trusted and felt romantically attracted to. Feelings of attraction; love; terror; betrayal; and power happened at once, becoming enmeshed, thereby, creating a web of pain and confusion as to what really happened, because her mind was too mentally immature to process what had happened to her sexually and emotionally. A violation of that sort goes straight to the core of the victim’s being which can give rise to a sense of false shame and guilt—because the victim is blamed, or he or she blames him- or herself for what happened, and so forth—and the evolution of hatred of self quickly takes up residence in the person’s soul since the self is so closely bound to one’s sexuality. A splintering of the developing self in the character of Angela occurred as a

22 result. Hence, Angela’s sense of being torn between two parts: a “bad Angela” and a

“good Angela.”

Even more devastating for Angela is that she carries deep shame about having pleasurable sensations while being held by the older boy “during a strange jerking moment that ended in an unusually tight embrace” (99), in which her young mind could not comprehend the meaning of in the midst of being sexually exploited. She not only feels betrayed by someone she thought she could trust, but she also feels betrayed by her own body. Sex and danger have been erotized, and feelings of sexual ambivalence—the repulsion and attraction—are already set in motion before the romantic coupling of

Angela and Tony that occurs in their high school years.

Tony’s shame and guilt is wrapped up in a war that still surges through his mind, body, and soul. He’s angry and edgy, and doesn’t feel good about a lot of things that happened in Vietnam, things he’s never shared with Angela or anyone else, except his buddy, Julien, who also fought in Vietnam. One thing he doesn’t feel good about is the fact that he took full advantage of what the women of Vietnam had to offer him sexually, as a way to escape the horror of the war—the combination of sex, danger, and violence formed a neurological pathway of pleasure in his brain—and he feels ashamed.

Tony’s also ashamed he’s having strange reactions to being in combat; he thinks he shouldn’t be experiencing what he’s experiencing: the nightmares, the violent outbursts, the jumpiness, the regrets. It makes him feel weak and unmanly, especially in light of the reality that Julien seems to have survived the wartime experience like a man, parading around like a peacock, whenever anyone asks or confronts him about being an Army

Ranger in Vietnam. But that is another story.

23 Furthermore, the toxic shame Angela and Tony each carry exacts punishment

(Bradshaw 129) as a result of the self-hatred and self-loathing undealt-with shame and unforgiveness of self produces. They both feel bad about themselves for different reasons, and the feelings of badness and wrongdoing that permeate their beings creates in both of them a subconscious desire to be punished, as in the “I am a bad person, therefore

I deserve X” equation.

Angela, more so than Tony, inhabits a self-defeating mindset, which she exhibits through self-sabotaging behaviors and self-fulfilling prophecies. As hideous as

Tony’s behaviors have been toward Angela, there’s a limit as to just how far he’ll go to humiliate and hurt her—his guilt over past actions stops himself from ever really hurting her. Angela, on the other hand, lacks healthy boundaries, and while not standing up for herself, seemingly wants to push Tony past his. It’s the two opposing parts of herself, the

“good girl” and the “bad girl,” that come into play. Angela’s compulsion in this area reminds me of a commentary James Wood, in How Fiction Works, makes in conjunction with the infamous character of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Similar to Flannery O’Connor’s “anagogical vision,” Wood speaks of three layers of imagery fastened to Dostoevsky’s characters. The layer I bring to the discussion here is one Wood considers operating on a “religious” level, one that interestingly corresponds to O’Connor’s anagogical level—though posited from a different angle, a perspective I hadn’t fully considered:

These characters act like this because they want to be known; even if they

are unaware of it, they want to reveal their baseness; they want to confess.

They want to reveal the dark shamefulness of their souls, and so, without

24 knowing quite why, they act “scandalously” and appallingly in front of

others, so that people “better” than they can judge them for the wretches

they are. (160)

I do see this quality in Angela—she wants to be “found out” for many different reasons. In one respect, she desires to confess her secret life of sexual promiscuity, her desires for dangerous sexual liaisons, and her inability to be faithful to one man. And in another respect, her sense of toxic shame wants people to see her for the

“wretch” she thinks she is, which is closely tied to the idea of being punished for bad and inexcusable social behavior, in conjunction with both internal and outer expectations of self. People who are unable to verbalize or give voice to their pain and/or inner turmoil will most often act out their pain and conflicts either to, besides seeking relief, bring attention to a problem so that someone can step in an intervene on their behalf, be it a system of support, or as a disciplinary measure to get them to stop the destruction they’re engaged in. Angela doesn’t like giving herself away, and would very much like for someone to call a halt to it, since she, herself, feels powerless to stop the symptoms of trauma that gear her towards self-destructive behaviors, and the resulting embedded secrecy and duplicity the destructive forms take. Yet, she has to be the one to take control of her life; no one can do it for her.

Before Tony went away to war, Angela’s relationship with him was naively idyllic and secure on a surface level—she looked to Tony for all her needs. And now their relationship is a different animal, not to mention the new challenges amidst the changing Western culture of the 1960s/1970s. The fact that both characters are each suffering from trauma separate from the trauma they inflict on each other wasn’t meant to

25 convolute the storyline with one trauma after another, but rather because these two characters share a common history and in many ways mirror—and counterpoint one another.

Viewed this way, the pairing of Tony and Angela logically sets them up to both be co-protagonists in the storyline (with Angela filling the slot of the main protagonist), as in Charles Baxter’s concept of “counterpointed characterization,” in which Baxter discusses at length in a chapter of the same name in his book Burning

Down the House. “With counterpointed characterization,” Baxter writes, “certain kinds of people are pushed together, people who bring out a crucial response to each other. A latent energy rises to the surface, the desire or secret previously forced down into psychic obscurity” (88). As I alluded to previously, Angela and Tony echo each other throughout the whole story; there is mounting tension between them—a longing for the love they deny each other—even though we are never in Tony’s head. Their “dance” brings out the worst, and in this case, “the crucial,” in each other for the benefit of the story arc.

Moreover, their mutual corruption of one another demands redemption in order for there to be some form of meaning in the story; otherwise, their acting out is all in vain, and all humanity in Tony and Angela negated.

Charles Baxter then goes on to say that “Actual conflict can be a fairly minor element in most stories, written or told,” and that “A more appropriate question might be,

‘What’s emerging here?’ or: ‘What’s showing up?’” (89); as is the case with Angela and

Tony, more so in the psychological probing of Angela. There is a line of escalating tension in Angela surrounding her relationship, or lack of relationship, with Tony.

Thoughts of him are constantly at the back of her mind, and as the overfunctioning co-

26 dependent and shame-based character that she is, the majority of her decisions and actions are based on what happened in the past between them, her ambivalent and conflicted feelings toward him in the present, and how Tony might think about or react to what she says or does, present and future.

That being said, the characters of Angela and Tony are under parallel scrutiny, even if the focal character is Angela. Further, there is the underlying question of will they or won’t they get back together? What’s more, Tony’s actions have as much bearing as

Angela’s because what affects him, psychically affects her. It is through Angela’s idée fixe of Tony that he always remains at our side, physically absent as he is throughout most of the story.

The character of Mrs. Newsome, the fiancée of the main character, Lambert

Strether, in Henry James’ novel, The Ambassadors, came to mind when I was trying to ascertain how to integrate the character of Tony into Angela’s story without his boldly ambitious and vibrant personality taking over the storyline. Mrs. Newsome, who is a dominating force in Strether’s life, not once appears physically in the story, yet her presence is deeply felt in the character of Strether all through the story as his mid-life crisis unfolds in Europe. Strether never fails to consider Mrs. Newsome or to think about her, even while he explores potential love relationships with other women. Mrs.

Newsome is always at his heels, dictating his every move, in spite of his desire to embolden himself. Similarly, Angela’s line of tension begins with Tony.

Angela’s triggered emotions lead her on a journey of self-discovery, which interestingly and ironically wouldn’t have otherwise taken place had Tony not begun acting out his pain with her. Actually, traces of Angela’s past trauma began to surface

27 when Tony broke it off with her while in Nam—his break-up letter (he broke up with her because he’d heard a rumor she’d slept with his rival Ricardo) was the catalyst, or rather the pre-trigger for her cycling downwards and inward.

Angela is trying to figure out just who she is as a person, and who is trying to give voice to who she thinks she might be. Though she attempts to look inward for answers with the help and guidance of counselors and mentors, at this stage of her quest for truth, she mainly searches for answers through experimenting with relationships with other men, not only to assuage her emotional pain and ego, but because she believes

Tony is the cause of all her problems. And because it’s where she’s at in her limited understanding of self—we only know what we know, when we know it, and beyond that, we can’t know. She’s a rabbit, a runner, and she’s been running from past trauma most of her life, and is now only becoming aware of it vis-à-vis Tony’s war trauma. She also runs away from what she loves, in this case Tony; instead of facing him head on, of the truths about herself she will see reflected in him. Enter the love interests of Victor Maldonado, and later Jesse “whatever your last name is” (112).

As Angela and Tony battle it out, Angela’s character defects become very apparent, one of them her duplicity, and another her fear of true intimacy and her inability to truly commit to one man via her attention seeking and sexual acting out behaviors—aspects of her which Tony is very well aware of that he tries to expose through attempting to pull off the metaphorical mask she hides behind

(Charles Baxter 96).

Charles Baxter nicely puts it into this context: “One character tries to help (or get at) another character in order to make the mask fall for therapeutic or semidemonic

28 reasons, to let the angels or the furies loose” (96). Tony does it for both reasons, I think, but with the intent of wanting Angela to own her self-defeating behaviors, and at the same time wanting to expose the hypocritical behaviors she often projects onto him and accuses him of—because of his own pride issues, and because he loves her.

Because Tony is a lot healthier than Angela, he tries—in his own way, albeit crudely chauvinistic—to take ownership of his bad behavior towards her. “Angela,” he yells at her (shortly after they’ve been intimate together), “I’m doing this for your own good. You don’t want the dude to marry you, only to have him find out you’re not the little angel he's imagined you to be. It’s wrong and he’ll hate you for it” (77). The “dude”

Tony is referring to is Angela’s current fiancé, Victor, a man of deep religious conviction—who is likewise in the same Catholic tradition as Angela and Tony—who she talks herself into believing has the power to save her from herself on all levels—the physical, the emotional, the psychological, and the spiritual.

Victor is a man Angela supposedly loves, but just cheated on with Tony. In this way, she views Victor as an object instead of a real person, a mere reflection of how she views herself. For that very reason, Victor never physically materializes in the story.

He is but a cardboard cutout she attaches her hopes and dreams to, a mere romantic illusion of mythical proportions, who she believes can save her from herself.

Angela refuses to own up to her duplicitous behaviors and the part she has played with Tony—and does play with him—in their twisted game of love. She is defiant in her own right. Layers of buried shame-based thinking and conflicted feelings—some her own stuff, some she projects onto Tony—unfold like the wings of a cocooned

29 butterfly throughout the storyline until a pattern of delusion and faulty thinking is presented, particularly at the end, when she takes up with Jesse.

The character of Jesse provides Angela the false intimacy she seeks in order to escape the frozen feelings of buried pain and resentments that are beginning to emerge, and thaw. But the relief she seeks only increases her shame spiral, causing her to want to act out more, each time hoping for a different result, but instead ending up with a whole new set of problems.

Despite Angela’s acting out with Jesse in the latter part of the story, it is Tony she ultimately has to end up with—not because it’s fate, but rather because he is a part of who she is; and because, Angela has to turn towards the mirror he symbolizes and face the monster that resides within herself, generated by a sense of shame and self-contempt that permeates every part of her being, if she is to come to terms of who she is or experience any form of realization. Moreover, the structure of Baxter’s “counterpointed characterization” and “emerging conflict” idea has been set in motion, and in order to remain true to the character arc of the Realist tradition, Angela and Tony must come together at the end, regardless of how tenuous their reconciliation. We see this same effect in The Ambassadors—the characters of Lambert Strether and Mrs. Newsome are brought full circle at the end.

Angela, in spite of her emotional and psychological turmoil, is a self-aware character in search of knowledge and truth to help unravel the tangled web of emotions and confusion that gets in the way of her having a sense of an internal locus of control and state of self-actualization. Overall, though fragile, she is a sensitive, yet determined

30 character. And a character who feels great concern for others—she just so happens to be her own worst enemy.

As stated earlier, different environmental factors contributed to Angela’s confusion, turmoil, and fragmented sense of self. And in the depth of her being exists an emotional void, a black hole; and the only way Angela thinks she can fill up the relenting pain and emptiness created by the “hole in her heart” is mainly through her sexuality because deep down she mistakenly believes her sexuality is all she really has to offer a man. This faulty thought pattern as well as her “learned helplessness” crystallized with the older teenage boy’s sexual exploitation of her, and the subsequent “incidents” thereafter, ones she felt powerless to stop.

The self was not designed for contempt; therefore, it is a space that becomes uninhabitable. In an attempt to normalize her reality, and what we would now also suggest as the attempt to normalize “brain chemistry,” Angela swings back and forth between compliance and aggression in trying to find her psychical balance; but finding her balance is very difficult because she doesn’t know what it looks like, since she’s long habituated to operating out of extremes and chaos. The chaos and shifts in extremes, and the black and white thinking, have become the familiar. Angela’s simultaneous attraction to and involvement with both Victor and Jesse, both men essentially polar opposites in most respects, reflects her dichotomous thinking.

On the other hand, a person can sometimes take on the wounding and/or monstrosities of the perpetrator as a survival mechanism; the victim then becoming victimizer in some bizarre acquired form that bears no resemblance to the original violation of the soul, wherein, the polar opposites reside inside one psyche—to the point

31 where victim and victimizer in story become indistinguishable. This happens later in the storyline when Angela decides to throw her possible future away with Victor, treating him like an object of scorn—and any possible reconciliation with Tony, the man she, in her heart of hearts, loves—by taking up with the character of Jesse, and then settling into a tumultuous relationship with him that subsists on a daily diet of mutual torment and punishment.

In the extreme portrayals of the character of Angela—one moment one way with Victor, and another moment another way with Jesse—there is the Angela who is both emotionally and physically ambivalent with Tony; she’s repulsed by and attracted to him at the same time. However, what remains consistent is her ambivalence—she knows

Tony, unlike Victor or Jesse, has the power to break her heart over and over again.

Besides her deep love for him, she and Tony are bonded in their unique brand of dysfunction and attachment styles.

This ambivalence is heightened and acted out in the scene they share together in her flat, earlier in the story, where Tony and Angela fall into their familiar “push-pull” pattern of coming together and pulling apart. On the one hand, she desires the closeness they once shared: the attachment; the love; the belonging; the pleasurable sensations; the security she knows in that he will be there for her when she needs him; and the connection at the deepest core level a woman feels with a man she loves.

And on the other hand, she recalls how cheap he’s made her feel each time afterwards because of his patterns of abuse and withdrawal, since he’s arrived home from

Nam. Nonetheless, she still feels drawn to him—her need to feel cherished and loved by

32 him overwhelms her own instincts of self-respect, even though she is eagerly caught up in their “dance of death.”

In addition to the environmental factors mentioned earlier, and in addition to her inherent biological and psychological propensities, how Angela views herself as a woman, particularly in relation to Tony, is comprised of the climate and culture of the era she is living in—not to mention the Catholic beliefs she and Tony share. Even though

American culture is changing in the world of Angela, not every community—or every individual, for that matter—was impacted at the same time or in the same way. Some subcultures within the existing culture had the added element of machismo (and rigid gender roles), and this mindset wasn’t limited to Latino and/or Hispanic communities.

The Italian community as well, for instance, had its own entrenched ideas of the ultimate dominant male. As someone of mixed heritage from a variety of cultures, including Asian and Hispanic, and as someone who’s been exposed to a variety of cultures, I speak from experience.

As a woman, Angela has the expectations of the subculture she is living in, as well as the expectations of the larger Western culture, to consider in her every day decisions. Even though the Women’s Movement and the sexual revolution were well under way, Angela is expected to remain a virgin and behave chastely before marriage in the subculture she is a part of—and if not a virgin, to act like one. This was also true of the larger Western culture to a great extent, despite the fluidity of shifting ideologies and beliefs occurring in society at that time. If a woman did express her sexuality outside the traditional norms, men arguably viewed her with covert or overt hostility.

33 Abuse is only a part of the picture of this portrait of a broken soul; it is only a piece of the puzzle in her life Angela can’t figure out. She doesn’t want to live out a lifestyle of guilt and shame, but doesn’t have the strength at this point in her emotional and spiritual journey to have power over her own world. There’s a lot she’s struggling with in trying to find her voice, and a lot converging on her all at once. And when it comes to matters of sexuality—two worlds, “the flesh and the spirit”—likewise, collide in this character.

That is to say, Angela is caught between the sexual revolution and her internal

Catholic structures of right and wrong. Her faith-based belief in God calls her to a standard of living which stands in direct opposition to what the world deems right.

Even though Angela has her own fleshly desires and her desire to be loved by a man, she at the same time, on a deep spiritual level, strongly desires to live her life according to God’s standards and to be the woman He designed her to be, that she might fulfill her God-given destiny. And for this character, remaining sexually pure before marriage is one spiritual discipline, being faithful to God and His commandments, that is, which helps her to feel more in line with God’s will for her life, thus giving her great inner peace.

Angela struggles to find this balance in the midst of her patterns of extreme thinking/behaviors, though the character of Victor offers her the opportunity for purity within a context of a relationship. However, she and Victor are in different places in their lives and in their spiritual journeys; whereas, the character of Tony meets her right where she’s at—they speak the same love language.

34 Not only are guilt and shame difficult topics, but sexual topics can be and are just as difficult, if not more difficult, to read and write about.

Because of the psychosexual subject matter, Turquoise Sky contains disturbing sexual imagery which can provoke a wide range of responses being that sexuality in itself often makes for a difficult and uncomfortable topic for many. “Sexuality,” John

Bradshaw writes in Healing the Shame, “is the core of human selfhood. Our sex is not something we have or do, it is who we are” (54). And, because of that reason alone, it is a highly personal and private aspect of ourselves. And rightly so. We all have our internal gauges which measure just how much is too much or too little when it comes to sensitive and controversial subjects.

The sexual imagery was difficult for me to write, particularly the violent sexual imagery, and throughout all stages of drafting this story, I struggled with whether or not it was appropriate to even include it in the text, at times agonizing over a simple line of provocative prose, as to whether or not it was too revealing or too suggestive, cutting the line only to put it back in. Yet, I felt called to write about certain characters with certain psychological make ups, and not to include the violent sexual imagery would be not to allow the characters to be who they are or to meet them where they’re at.

Just how do I present the story the way it needs to be written to make meaning in a way that does not offend my readers’ sensibilities? And how does one present issues having to do with sexuality without it coming across as gratuitous? Those were questions

I routinely turned over in my mind. Although, a couple of years before, I’d read David

Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and had some ideas about how to

35 present issues of sexuality and the psychosexual in writing, I still wasn’t quite convinced, being Wallace was a male writer, coming from a male perspective.

Fortunately, for me, both of my writing mentors suggested I read a selection of stories in one of Mary Gaitskill’s short-story collections, Bad Behavior or Because

They Wanted To. Reading her stories not only helped me to see how a contemporary female writer wrote about and approached issues of sexuality, but also I felt validated to see that other female writers in the genre of literary fiction were writing about similar themes and issues I’d been writing about in my workshop drafts. In fact, at first I was shocked to see the striking similarities between some of Gaitskill’s themes and my own.

Themes, for example, such as emotional disconnection and alienation, romantic and sexual angst, and power struggles between the different genders.

Equally unsettling was that some of Mary Gaitskill’s storylines take place in nearly the same eras, and nearly the same San Francisco locations as my own stories.

And I thought, this is just too coincidental and strange, and she’s already published subjects I’ve been writing about. I then had to be reminded that there’s more than one way to look at a subject. “There may never be anything new to say,” Flannery O’Connor says about writing fiction, “but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention” (76).

Nonetheless, I was thankful to have learned of Mary Gaitskill’s writings.

Besides being encouraged by her approach to writing about the psychosexual in modern society (read: I didn’t feel like my writing was totally out there!), I was taken in by her emotionally complex characters, all the genders presented as equally subversive and

36 behaving badly, and her remarkable writing style. And, as it turns out, all things considered, I could say the same for both Wallace and Gaitskill, each writer equally skilled in their bold and daring, darkly humorous presentation of the sexual and the psychosexual. I won’t quote any lines here from, say, Wallace’s “Adult World (1)” or

Gaitskill’s “Romantic Weekend,” there are just too many great ones and a topic within itself.

Conclusion

The literary greats are always at an artist’s back, hovering over the writer’s literary spaces. Be it intuitively or by concentrated effort, writers serious about their craft adopt a literary lineage, or literary landscape, if you will, as they continue to develop and grow as writers; for creativity is about embracing and enhancing modes of artistic creation already put in motion. Even during the process of revision, writers are engaging and responding to their own writing.

I consider myself fortunate that I’ve been able to take as many creative- writing classes as I have, in my time at Chico State, as both an undergraduate and graduate student. Not only have I received invaluable instruction from my professors, but

I’ve also had a great number of opportunities to be able to hone my creative-writing skills through workshopping and through the process of revision. Just as reading and engaging with other authors’ works is an act of joining the ongoing literary conversation, writing is an ongoing process.

My literary landscape may differ—that is, my tastes in subjects, imagery impressions, and topics I feel called to write about may change; then again I can’t imagine a writing life that doesn’t include writing about both the lovable and the

37 unlovable. I am drawn to examining the more disturbing aspects of human behaviors, the darker side of humanity, sides that make us, as a society, uncomfortable. Not because I want to distress or offend my readers, but because I feel compelled to investigate questions of human behavior society would most often prefer to turn a blind eye to.

Feelings of shame that permeate as well as hover over my characters, I conjecture, is what makes this story so disturbing, as does the psychosexual element. The good news is that what’s disturbing has the potential to be transformed into something radically different—something vibrant and new—just as stories can be revised and revised until thankfully the original draft is no longer recognizable.

I invite my reader to join me in my quest to grasp and understand what is at the root of my characters’ behaviors, the hidden motivations that drive them, that inspire them to move beyond what is already known. Knowing, seeing, understanding is power—what is brought into the light can no longer remain in darkness.

Instinctively I know that my vision of Turquoise Sky has not yet been fully realized, storyline and characters alike. As my committee chair, Rob Davidson, says, the work I present now is but a snapshot of where I am artistically at this moment. And here it stands at this juncture in my life at which I can say I proudly present my creative writing project, Turquoise Sky, because I’ve worked to the best of my ability to paint a moralistic portrayal in all artistic senses of the word, of a “felt life” (Henry James).

PART II

Turquoise Sky

They dined in the Los Angeles Playboy Club, she and her boss, Jax Dupart—a lawyer, on loan from the L.A. office, who she worked for as a Kelly Girl temp in the San

Francisco office—and his Hollywood client.

Normally Angela’s eyes would light up in the company of men, but right now they were as dim as the lighting in the darkest corner of the room. Her female parrot,

Peaches, had recently flown off with a flock of wild parrots that made their home in the palm trees of Dolores Street, not far from where she lived in the Mission District.

But that wasn’t what was bringing her down.

She’d settled for catching a glance here and there of her multi-colored parrot flitting around the area with her green-winged companions the way she’d accepted being in a place that catered to the private sexual fantasies of men; though she was initially excited when she and her boss, Jax, had first arrived, at the idea of doing something new and different, of being in a place she’d never been, one she could brag about to her friends, and so they could all get a good laugh. Men ogling women stuffed in Bunny suits was minor, she’d seen men do stranger things, and figured her funky mood probably had more to do with her ex-fiancé, Tony.

Since meeting her new love, Victor, Angela noticed Tony had been easing his way back into her life as if he were a welcomed guest gliding through the back door of her flat.

39 40 And she couldn’t say no to him, even though he treated her like a revolving door. He’d enter into her life with all kinds of wonderful promises, and then just when she began to trust him again, he’d revert back to the bad behaviors he’d brought back home with him from Vietnam, treating her like his whore instead of his reina, his whipping post instead of his heart.

She remembered what Nilda—who sometimes sat in for the head counselor,

Eve, at the women’s drop-in rap center—had said to her when she’d mentioned Tony’s latest intrusions into her life. “Unless you get off on being hurt by him, Angela,” she’d said flippantly, “it’s time to give the hombre the boot—and I mean, for good.”

Later that day, she asked her landlord and friend, Rudy, what he’d thought about what the intern had said. He’d been in the garden deadheading roses when she’d run into him. She cradled a bag of groceries in one arm, and draped across her other arm was her dry-cleaning.

“She sounds like a sadomasochist,” Rudy had laughed. “But then again,” he said, “turning your back on Tony may be what’s needed—for both of you.” He’d gone on to tell her that there’s nothing wrong with separations, that he and his lover had learned, though slowly and painfully, many things about themselves while doing their own thing.

Meanwhile, a band played Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass favorites, and her boss, Jax, explained a legal document—one she’d typed up earlier that day at the hotel— to his client with all the finesse of a classical music conductor. She leaned her face against her hand and thought more about what Rudy had said.

There was a loud crashing sound and a lot of sympathetic gasping, and the music stopped. A brunette Bunny, balancing a tray of drinks, slipped on her three-inch

41 heels and landed on her backside, the front of her suit stained with dark liquid in the outline of a misshapen heart. A crowd of eager males rushed to help her, like a horde of black ants swarming a piece of white frosted cake, and a scream, like that between a howl and a shriek, erupted from some deep, dark place within the Bunny when someone lifted an ankle. And when the stretcher came for her, she screamed again.

Angela’s insides cringed at the sounds the fallen Bunny made, because she knew she wasn’t immune from being unhinged that way emotionally, and as she watched the rescue scene being played out in front of her, her mind spun like the wheels of a sports car on a race track. I can’t turn my back on Tony, she anxiously thought. Not now, not ever. He might start drinking heavily again and getting into fistfights with wild-eyed strangers in rowdy bars, and who knows whatever else. She wanted to remind Rudy of these things next time she saw him.

After a short while of stopping to people-watch and after taking a gulp of her drink, she hummed along to the James Taylor tunes now playing, smiling softly at Jax’s client between sips of her beverage, whenever he looked her way. She liked the gentleness in his round eyes and the closeness of his thick, hairy eyebrows, the one long eyebrow reminding her of a caterpillar which gave him a warm and fuzzy, almost comedic look, one she found appealing and safe. He’d spoken fondly of his wife earlier, about what a good homemaker and mother she was; and Angela wanted to hear more about her, how she came to be that way, hoping she could pick up some pointers.

But what Jax wanted most was for her to look beautiful and to appear amused and to smile a lot in the way a cheerleader would smile to a crowd. So: while Jax enthralled his client with his zany tales of yachting around the French Riviera with Jackie

42 O. and her husband, Aristotle, and other famous people, and with ocean tales comparable to Moby-Dick, she pretended to enjoy hearing the same stories she’d heard before, spinning each new cocktail umbrella between her fingers as though she were twirling her high school baton.

She’d be turning twenty-two in a few weeks, and tried to forget about the strange hold Tony had over her, instead focusing on the life she and Victor were planning for themselves. She didn’t want to be doing the same things she’d been doing, ten years down the road—going through changes with Tony. Though when she tried to picture giving birth to the four children Victor desperately wanted, she couldn’t—it didn’t seem real. She didn’t seem real. The only real thing she could picture was tantalizing Victor with all the sexual techniques she’d read about in Cosmo and Rudy’s Playgirl magazines, and other provocative things she imagined would keep Victor preoccupied until she could find the courage in her to be a loving mother—her own mother hadn’t been so loving with her, only distant and cold, except when the loving role suited her or when a suitor with children that she’d met at one of those divorced clubs, was involved.

Angela felt a sense of painful loneliness and shame, and an indescribable hollowness at the thought that her need to be Victor’s ultimate sexual fantasy might be the only thing she had to offer him as a wife. She wished she didn’t need to feel and act sexy in order to feel loved and accepted, and could behave like other normal women. She looked around the room, at the sexually charged women in the club, glad she at least had the decency to keep herself in check.

She sneezed a quiet sneeze and blinked back the tears in her eyes when a cigarette girl drenched in drugstore fragrance stopped by their table to ask why Jax hadn’t

43 returned her phone calls. After hearing his vague reply, the distraught blonde scurried away. Blurry eyed, Angela fumbled for the compact mirror inside her purse and clicked it open, wiping the smeared eyeliner from beneath her eyes. She was relieved to hear Jax’s client excusing himself to meet with a film producer who’d summoned him from a table across the room; she didn’t want her new friend to see her this way, for him to think she was crying, when she wasn’t.

Jax slipped a silk handkerchief into her palm. “You’re not crying over lover boy again?” he asked with a chuckle, his smile widening into a boyish grin.

He looked like a different man to her when he smiled that way, like a younger version of her grandfather on her mother’s side, who also was French-German with angular features and tawny colored hair and skin, and eyes like a young lion’s. Most other times, Jax came across like a big cat on the prowl with eyes the shade of the darkest part of the deepest jungle the longer you stared into them, giving him an eerie, sometimes other-worldly quality. She wondered if she, too, appeared like a different person at different times, or if she stayed looking the same, like that of a shadowy figure with the ability to slip in and out of the backgrounds of people’s lives undetected.

It had disturbed her that Jax had brought up Tony; she wanted to keep her troubles with Tony separate from Jax and from her job; she preferred keeping the people in her life—men for the most part—compartmentalized into separate categories; it made them easier to manage, and less likely for there to be unnecessary head trips and emotional conflicts and other unforeseeable problems, should they become more acquainted with one another than she was comfortable with.

44 She watched as Jax struck a match and lit up a menthol cigarette. “Tony’s the furthest thing from my mind,” she said to him, in reply to his earlier question.

He took a long drag of his cigarette, and then exhaled. “What makes you think

I was talking about Tony?” The glimmer was gone from his eyes. Her heart thumped around inside her chest as if a foreign body was trying to punch its way out. She reached for the glass of ice water in front of her and took a long drink.

She then calmly set the glass down in front of her. “I know you weren’t referring to Victor,” she said with a raised eyebrow. Her response felt as unreal as his question, and she felt like a fraud, a fake, a phony, a woman pretending to have it all together, and one she knew Jax could see right through with those soul-penetrating eyes of his. But still she continued to play the part she felt Jax expected of her—one of confidence when it came to countering the opposition. He’d given her books on the subject to read.

“Ah, yes, Victor,” Jax said, after brushing a crumb from his smooth pant leg, before then crossing one leg over the other. He leaned back in his seat and rested an elbow against the table and took another hit of his smoke, narrowing his eyes as he stared intently across the huge room, as if the sexist club had magically transformed itself into a genteel nineteenth-century ballroom.

“How could I forget about Victor?” he asked. “Or should I say, ‘How could you forget about Victor?’” He turned to her and then glanced at her ring finger. “You’re still wearing his engagement ring.”

She placed her hands in her lap. She suddenly felt small in comparison to the large diamond, almost ashamed.

45 He leaned in closer. “Angela,” he said with an amused smile, “you’re not really planning on marrying him, are you?”

She studied his amused look and thought she saw a genuine look of concern behind the curious grin he held and was touched. She always tried to look for the best in people. She’d really never known Jax to be concerned for anyone else but himself in the eight months she’d known him. She figured him being an only child is what had made him so self-centered and egotistical. She found herself oddly attracted to him for a moment and wondered what it would be like to be his wife, then dismissed the thought as quickly as it came. He was too much of a playboy for her taste, a man, she’d come to learn, who didn’t think anything of having sex with someone he just met, something which lately had bothered her about him more than anything because it confirmed her deep suspicion that most men lacked self-control when it came to sex.

And if that was the case, just who could she trust with her heart? Even Victor, who was anything but a player, might not be able to be trusted to control his restrained sexuality, even in his quest for purity. He could be secretly screwing one of his beautiful secretaries in an empty office overlooking the San Francisco Bay at this very moment, she mused, but then changed her mind, erasing the unlikely image; it felt too unreal.

Victor was the perfect man.

She pictured him and the stern look on his face the time she’d begged him with her body to make love to her while they sat parked at the drive-in theatre watching a

Charles Bronson movie. A strict Catholic, he wanted to wait to have sex with her until after they were married, and she knew that. But a part of her had to test him, to make sure he was the real deal. And sure enough, he proved to be the man he’d said he was. He

46 hadn’t strayed from that line of thinking in the short time they’d known each other, and she respected him for scolding her each time she suggested they go all the way after one of their short-lived make-out sessions.

She’d grown to like the idea of waiting to have sex, again; it was a chance for her to recapture the sense of purity she once possessed, when she was a good Catholic girl, before the craziness of the Vietnam War had touched Tony, and he in turn had taken it out on her, defiling her from the inside out. She only wished she could truly be the woman Victor thought she was, and hoped that in time she would become that woman without Victor ever realizing a change needed to take place.

Angela darted her eyes across the room, then glanced back at Jax. He seemed to still be waiting for an answer, even though he’d been distracted by a band member who’d stopped by the table to talk to him briefly, slipping into his palm a small envelope; and by their Bunny waitress, who’d set another round of drinks down on the table.

“Angela, you still haven’t answered my question,” said Jax, after taking a swig of his drink. He motioned for her to do the same.

She took a sip of her drink, and then nervously toyed with Victor’s engagement ring. “Jax, if you’re worried my marrying Victor will distract me from my job responsibilities, don’t,” she said. “Victor’s a good and decent man—he has nothing but respect for me and my career aspirations.”

She pictured Victor at Sunday morning Mass standing firm behind the lectern, the reddish stain glass light pressed about his face as though being perpetually kissed by saints, and the glow of candles at his back. The aroma of church incense filled in the blanks, the longer Victor’s image stayed with her, and she looked forward to being with

47 him at Mass again, sitting at his side, her hair veiled in soft black lace, like a good

Catholic wife-to-be.

Jax straightened the edge of a manila folder on the table in front of him until it was perfectly aligned with the others beneath it. “Victor isn’t my objection.”

Her eyes widened at the thought he’d seen something dangerously flawed in her that she was not yet aware of.

She swallowed hard.

“Then what is your objection?” she asked.

“You,” he said, flicking an ash from his cigarette.

She stared back at Jax like an elegant statue carved from precious stone for a moment that seemed to stretch across time and space.

And then, as if suffering a crushing blow in this one instance of imagined invincibility, she lowered her eyes.

“Oh, I see,” she said.

She suddenly felt the urge to call Victor, to tell him he was wasting his time, that she was tainted in some indiscernible way and spiritually unredeemable, and to go find somebody else to love.

She drank what was left of her frothy drink, and glanced up at the portrait of the nude on the wall. She felt uneasy, as if the woman’s sultry eyes were just waiting for her to succumb to their bewitching spell. She would try not to look at the naked seductress anymore; her shamelessness was beginning to disgust her.

She could feel Jax’s stare on her, and started craving a cigarette.

48 “Angela,” he said. “I only say this because I care about what happens to you.”

She watched Jax’s hands as he spoke. A tightness in her shoulders had spread to her neck, and all she could think of was having Jax massage her.

“Thank you for caring, Jax,” she said. “But really—”

“Angela,” he said, after lighting up another cigarette. “Let me put it to you this way. You’re a restless one. I noticed it the first time I’d laid eyes on you. And frankly,” he said with a tone of incredulity, “it’s a characteristic I’ve rarely seen in other women—except for my lovely estranged wife.” Pausing to take another hit of his smoke, he glanced up at an athletic redhead walking past. “And,” he went on, “I would hate for you to put something in motion that wouldn’t be good for either you or Victor.”

She was relieved to hear her problem had to do with not being able to stay in one place too long and nothing more. She grimaced while rubbing at the back of her neck, and then, as if on auto pilot, quickly reached into her purse for the pack of Virginia

Slims she kept stashed there for those times she couldn’t stop the urge to smoke. She hated the stinking, filthy habit and would usually quit the next morning following a smoking and drinking binge.

She smiled with her eyes, as Jax brought a lit match to her cigarette. She drew on the stale cigarette with the force of someone sucking on a straw in a half-frozen milkshake, relaxing as soon as she felt the first hit of nicotine rushing through her.

“Then I should be with Tony?” she asked eagerly.

She wanted answers and wanted them fast, and Jax seemed to have all the answers.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Jax said.

49 Before she could say more, he turned his attention to the group of Bunnies gathering around him, pulling him from his seat as part of a Bunny Hop dance skit, which annoyed her, but there was nothing she felt she could do to make them go away. The spotlight was on them, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do without making a complete fool of herself.

As Jax allowed himself to be blindfolded by the dumb bunnies, she reflected on what Jax had said, and she began to feel like a lab rat trapped in a maze. She drummed her fingers on the table. If she couldn’t even love her tormentor, Tony, then she didn’t know who she could love, or who would ever love her.

She swept her eyes past the Bunnies as they glided with precision-like movements among the candle-lit tables filled with finely dressed men and women in varying poses, before scanning the illuminated life-size portraits of provocatively posed women fanned out in front of her, and suddenly felt a deep sense of hopelessness she couldn’t yet define. The fear of living her life out as the woman on the outside always looking in, started, more than ever, to feel like a reality for her. No matter what position she took, be it sexual or virginal, she felt she couldn’t win.

She plucked her purse from beneath her chair and headed for the “powder room,” as her Grandmother Mitzi would say, thinking she could find some peace there, if only for a moment. She’d settle down in a fancy cushioned chair in a shadowy corner of the lounge, where she could be alone to powder her face and touch up her hair, and then close her eyes and think positive, happy thoughts, of how no matter what, things are as they should be. But when she felt the icy stare of an older woman in a fox head fur scarf

50 glaring at her from within the lounge mirror, she got up in a huff. You might as well have said, “Get out of here, spic,” Angela thought to herself as she pushed through the exit.

She stepped outside, into the balmy darkness, and searched for a payphone away from the sounds of the club, to call Victor. Hearing his voice, she reassured herself, would comfort her.

When Tony’s roommate, Julien, answered the phone, she’d realized the mistake after she’d experienced a moment of clarity from her alcohol-induced haze. And after talking with Julien for a few moments, reassuring him she was okay and not as wasted as she sounded, she told him she was away on a business trip dining in a fancy establishment with fancy people. She begged him not to tell Tony that she’d mistakenly dialed his number, that it would only cause unnecessary trouble. “Your secret’s safe with me, homegirl,” he’d said to her in a low voice.

Julien’s words lingered in her mind long after she hung up the receiver. She leaned her forehead against the phone receiver. Just what I need. More secrets.

She really wanted to get her head straight and debated whether or not to place a collect call to Esmeralda, who’d been a friend, since they first met at her high school graduation—she was one of the volunteer caterers at the graduation party. Ironically,

Esmeralda had once dated her father, she’d recently learned, before he’d met her mother

“in the good old days—when style ruled the day,” as Esmeralda was fond of referring to the ‘40s and ‘50s of her youth.

After a long agonizing moment, she decided to step away from the phone. It was late and she didn’t want to wake Esmeralda. A recovering heroin addict who had cleaned up her act years ago, she now owned a candle shop and she and her husband both

51 went to bed early during the week. Besides, she already knew what Esmeralda would say to her in order to calm her down until they could talk at length again: “You just got to keep on, keeping on, girl,” or when in one of her more serious moods: “Keep your eye on the vertical, ” she’d say to her in a hard voice, “and not the horizontal, Angela.”

She and Jax caught a late evening flight back to San Francisco the following day. Since Jax had scheduled his pro bono hours for a battered women’s clinic at an office a couple of blocks from her place, he asked if he could crash at her pad. She wanted to say no, only because she wasn’t sure how Victor might react if he were to find out. But other than that she didn’t mind; she liked being tight with her boss and all the esteem that came with it at the office. Before she even had a chance to answer, he told her in exchange for all her hard work and her flexible attitude, he was giving her the day off.

While he unpacked his shaving gear in the bathroom, she moved the bottles of liquor she had stashed away in the kitchen to the back of her bedroom closet, for his own good. She was starting to think that maybe he had a drinking problem. Her roommate,

Lisa, a stewardess, who rarely ever stayed at home, would be arriving home any day now.

Foxy and highly flirtatious, she didn’t want Jax to mistakenly misread Lisa’s intentions and to do something he might later regret because he couldn’t control himself while liquored up.

Plus she didn’t want Jax firing her over Lisa’s antics—Lisa got a kick out of luring men into a game of emotional and sexual acrobatics and would punish them in oddball ways, if they cut out before she finished toying with them. Early on, Angela had

52 decided that Lisa was a little too on the freaky side for her, but since she spent most of her time on the road or shacked up with one of her many boyfriends, and was hardly ever home, giving her the space she needed, Angela learned to live with Lisa’s “whorish ways,” as Tony called them.

She padded down the hall, comforted by the familiar feel of the smooth, polished wooden floor beneath her feet, towards Lisa’s room, checking to see if her sleeping figure was tucked beneath her bedspread. The waterbed was as calm as a mountain lake, and the cover flat; and her room, in the same condition she’d left it—bare and lonesome.

The phone rang and she quickly picked up the phone receiver in the hall. It was her mother. She wanted her to walk to the corner store and get her a pack of cigarettes. “You know how late it is?” Angela yelled into the receiver. “I could get raped.” She could hear her mother’s boyfriend of the moment coughing in the background. “How about soldier boy?” her mother asked. “He around?” Her mother sounded high, so she didn't bother reminding her that she and Tony were no longer together. Seemed she was continuously reminding her.

She waited for her to bring up Victor’s name, just for the hell of it, to see if she’d been paying attention to what she’d been saying to her lately, but she never did.

She slammed the phone down on her when she brought up the cigarettes again, and began pacing the long hallway that led to a back door, angry at her mother for a multitude of reasons that seemed to defy reason, which made her feel bad for yelling at her mother in the first place.

53 After splashing her face with cool water, she took a sip from the Tang fruit drink she’d poured herself, and then stared back at the reflection in the mirror, surprised by the unreadable, yet determined look in her dark brown, almost black-colored eyes, which if anyone had seen them would think she had the eyes of an owl soaring over a desert. Just who are you? she asked the reflection in the mirror. She felt the skin on her face, patting it, to make sure she was real. Her face sometimes felt numb, like her insides, making her sometimes doubt her own actualized existence, as though she were a ghost of a dead person who hadn’t realized she were already dead. She shook her head in dismay.

She looked for Jax to say goodnight. She found him kicked back in one of the cushioned lawn chairs on the balcony. He wore a Harvard sweat shirt and a shadowy beard, and was gazing up at the night skies, and perhaps the stars, the moon. And she wondered if he, too, ever imagined the true color of the dark side of the moon. She imagined it to be a radiant glow of blue-green.

She wrapped herself in a crocheted shawl, and stepped out onto the balcony into the cool, crisp air, shutting the large glass sliding door behind her. She could hear the muffled voices of Rudy and his lover, John, arguing, and see the flickering lights of the television screen through the sheer curtains of Rudy’s bedroom window. She hoped John wouldn’t get all coked-up again and start beating up on Rudy—he refused to hit back, and refused help, and that frustrated her. The bedroom lights of the college student Rudy rented to flicked off, then on, then off again. Angela figured Candy was peeking through her blinds down at her and Jax, in a state of ecstasy at the sight of her visiting with another male besides Tony.

54 She figured early on that the white girl had a thing for Tony. She could tell by the timing of her sunbathing sessions in the courtyard below her balcony, where she’d parade around in one of her skimpy bikinis, like she were a contestant in a beauty pageant hoping to score points, before lying down on a beach towel on the soft pavement, helplessly looking around for someone to help her slather baby oil on her back.

Jax smiled and asked if she wanted to sit down with him and smoke a joint.

He removed a plastic baggie from his pocket. “Acapulco gold,” he grinned.

She hesitated, and then cautiously sat down on a lawn chair next to him. She told herself she’d only take one hit.

Now that she and Victor were serious, she didn’t know if she should continue doing the things she’d been doing in secret, the excessive drinking, the smoking out, because she knew he wouldn’t approve, nor would Tony. Tony had already convinced himself that she had a drinking problem; it was an issue they’d fought over since he’d come back from Vietnam. “Just because I can put a six-pack down doesn’t mean you can,” was his usual line of reasoning when it came to her enjoying a few drinks. But that wasn’t the only reason she didn't want to share a quiet moment with her boss.

Not only did she not want to end up feeling closer to Jax, but she also didn’t want the walls of formality she’d managed to carefully erect between them to collapse in a moment of unforeseen weakness. She also didn’t want to end up sleeping with him.

She’d been feeling an unexplainable attachment growing inside of her towards him since last night. After arriving back at the hotel from the Playboy Club, he’d given her a back massage while lying on his bed, and afterwards, they’d talked together in a way she’d never talked with Tony or Victor—like good friends, instead of lovers.

55 This frightened her because she felt both attracted and, at the same time, repulsed by his playboy persona. She was still trying to figure Tony out so that they could end on a good note, and didn’t want another unpredictable male complicating her life with Victor more than it already was, particularly a man she worked for. As it was, she felt she couldn’t even trust her own judgment. She reminded herself she was engaged to

Victor, and hated herself for even thinking of a one-night stand with Jax.

They spoke in hushed tones after he lit up.

“Jax, why are we here?” she asked.

He turned to her and gave her a bewildered look, and smiling, said, “You’re deeper than I thought, Angela. Please continue.”

“No, Jax,” she said, shaking her head. “Thank you, but that’s not what I meant.”

She tried to gather her thoughts, to find the right words.

“Jax, are you trying to get me in the sack?” she asked, after taking a hit off the joint he’d passed to her. It was more a statement than a question, and she didn’t know how else to phrase it without sounding vulgar and unrefined. She’d blurted it out and started to feel a little weird for saying what she’d said. A part of her feared he was trying to get over on her, sexually, even though she wasn’t quite sure of her own motives.

There was an awkward pause as long as a lengthening shadow. And she began to feel more self-conscious than she already felt.

He yawned, and then smiled. “I know you too well, Angela.” He stretched his arms over his head, before cradling his neck in the palms of his hands, and smiling, added, “It wouldn’t be any fun.”

56 A guard dog let out a lone bark, ending with a whimper.

She took a moment to consider what he’d just said. Something about what he said bothered her, but she didn’t know exactly what.

“Besides,” he added, “I don’t stick my pen in company ink. Can get messy.”

The leaves in the trees shook in the sudden breeze; the night air against her face soothed her.

“That’s good to know,” she said, tucking a loose strand of yarn into an opening in her shawl. “Makes me feel I can be myself with you without worrying about you wanting to get it on with me.”

“Of course, Angela,” Jax said, as he passed the joint to her. “As much as I find your exotic look highly desirable, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

They’d been discussing the increase in violence against women since the free love movement, when Jax asked her, straightforwardly, if she’d ever been a victim of violence.

She thought it a strange question, but surmised he was preparing for his work at the women’s clinic tomorrow.

“Me a victim? Hell no,” she said loudly. The tone in her voice surprised her, and she peered around self-consciously, fearing the whole neighborhood might have heard her.

“Interesting answer,” said Jax.

She envied his confident, relaxed style of relating, and after taking a deep breath, tried to do the same.

57 She hesitated, and tugged at her ear lobe. “So, Jax,” she finally asked, “is that the kind of answer a battered woman might give?”

“Actually, yes,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

“That’s good to know,” she said with a sigh of relief. “It’ll make me more believable, like I have first-hand knowledge, if and when I should get the chance to help those types of women.”

She turned to Jax and waited for him to respond, as well as searching for any non-verbal cue in his body language. But there was none. He sat quietly, as if thinking some deep, profound thought that he wasn’t yet ready to formulate into words. She imagined he was envisioning her next to him at the women’s clinic, assisting him with all those needy, hurting women by showing them just how much she could identify with their pain, even if only a show of emotions. She craved work experience in any field of law Jax worked in, and she’d been hoping for some time now that he would soon ask her to assist him with his pro bono projects. He continued to sit quietly, saying nothing, just staring out into the darkness. Following his cue, she leaned her head back against the soft cushion of her chair and stared out into the same darkness, at a couple of bats zigzagging through the trees. She then began to gather her things when she noticed Jax stirring, sweetly telling him yes, when he asked if she wanted to go back inside to help him finish eating what was left of the take-out Chinese food.

Angela was awakened by a dull ache in the pit of her stomach and to the morning sunlight that shone through the window like a flashlight searching for the dead.

58 She and Jax had stayed up a little longer than she had wanted to, talking and drinking after playing a game of Parcheesi. After he delivered a short lecture on women’s liberation, the pros and cons, he mostly talked about his estranged wife, the model, and how much he still cried himself to sleep at the thought of her leaving him for a young

Hollywood stuntman. He went on to tell her about the time he’d gotten himself so worked up about her betrayal, that he’d gone over to the bearded dude’s pad early one morning, and while the dude and his wife were rolling around in the sack, he cut his telephone line.

She thought about what Jax had said about married life. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to get married anymore.

She wrapped a crumpled sheet around her body and after removing the heavy make-up from her face from the night before and after splashing her face with water, quietly tiptoed around the front room, careful not to wake Jax, in case he’d decided to sleep in. She noticed the folded sheets and blankets he’d neatly placed on Lisa’s velvety red armchair, ignoring the polluted ashtray on the patio table. Instead, she followed the aroma of French Roast into the kitchen and saw a small folded card in her coffee mug.

Victor’s matching coffee mug sat next to hers and had his name written across it in big bold letters. She could smell Victor’s aftershave cologne when she opened it.

Morning, my sweet angel, thought you might want to wake up to me.

She took another whiff and closed her eyes. She loved the smell of Brut. She tossed her bed sheet on a chair, and then gulped down a large glass of water after inhaling a handful of Ritz crackers.

She was just about to pour herself a cup of coffee when she heard a hard knock at the door. Quickly grabbing the sheet, she wrapped it around her and opened the

59 door without peeking through the peep hole, like Victor had repeatedly warned her to do.

He constantly worried about her getting raped by some San Francisco sex maniac going door-to-door in search of an innocent victim.

She envisioned Victor kissing her body on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, like he’d done a couple of times while on his way to work. “Just a moment of weakness,” he would tell her each time before jumping into the shower. She assumed since they were being so good about not being bad that God probably didn’t mind their little bathroom trips.

When Angela saw it was Tony, she slammed the door, and put her back up against the door and slid down slowly, wrapping the sheet tightly around her like it were a coat of armor. She brought her knees to her chest and let her forehead fall into her hands. Her eyelids felt heavy. Oh, God, not him. Not now.

Yet, a part of her heart reluctantly welcomed him; his poor treatment of her had become, in some ways, predictable and familiar, though his moods could be very unpredictable. As long as I don’t let him touch me, I’ll be fine, she told herself. But then again, why would she want to play a game of emotional Russian roulette with a man she knew had the power to hurt her, unless Nilda, the intern, was right—she enjoyed it.

The thought sickened her.

Nilda sickened her.

She heard the knock again, but it was softer this time. “Angela, I know you’re there. Open the door.”

“This has to stop,” she said to Tony. “It’s not good for either one of us.”

“C’mon, Angela. I just want to talk to you.”

60 The pleading in his voice tugged at her heart, and she couldn’t bear the thought of turning him away.

“What if I have a man in here?” she asked. “A white guy.”

She quietly exhaled, then listened for an answer.

“Jax left a couple of hours ago,” he shot back. “At exactly 0700 hours.”

“How do you know these things?” she asked. “What are you some kind of peeping tom?”

“No, I’m not a peeping tom, and yes, I know these things. Angela,” he said.

“Open the door. You know how I hate it when you play these games.”

“Well, then hate me.”

“You know I can never hate you, mija.”

After a long minute, she cracked open the door. The sunlight hurt her eyes but the air carried the aroma of baked bread from a nearby factory. She breathed in the familiar smell, and was glad to be home. “I have to get dressed first,” she said, closing the door. “Come back later . . . much later.”

He put his foot in the door. “It’s not like I haven’t seen you naked before.”

The cocky sound in his voice alarmed her; she worried he was up to his old tricks. “Promise, Tony, you won’t try to touch me.”

“Damn girl, you act like I haven’t seen pussy before,” he said. “Of course, I’m not going to try to touch you. You’re taken.”

“Say the magic words, Tony. Or I’m not letting you in.”

“Okay, have it your way. Cross my heart and hope to die, blah, blah, blah.”

She opened the door and let him in, then stuck her head outside, checking the stairs for

61 any sign of Victor. Abalone shells Tony had brought her back from his diving trips sat atop the wooden porch railing facing her. She recalled the dive he’d brought her on, where he taught her to reach inside the cracks and crevices of craggy rocks. She could never keep her hand there for long without getting freaked out by the creepy creatures she imagined existed below the surface of the water. She’d jerk a gloved hand back as quickly as she’d shoved it in.

She folded her arms tightly against her chest. “Okay, speak fast, Tony. Why did you come here and what do you want?”

“I’ll be able to talk when you put some clothes on,” he said, giving her the once-over. “I forgot how incredibly beautiful you look in a bed sheet.”

“Tony, don’t start,” she said.

“Okay, okay," he said, while setting a bag of pastries, a bottle of orange juice, and a piece of fruit on the kitchen counter. She stared at the large pomegranate he brought, and wondered what he was trying to prove by always bringing her the things she knew he remembered she liked the most. Last time he stopped by to lure her back into his

“dance of death,” an expression she’d read in a self-help book, he’d brought her a container of her favorite Oolong tea from Chinatown. The time before that, he’d left a basket of avocados and lemons at her back door from his mother’s garden.

She hurried to the bedroom, losing the sheet half way there. “There’s some coffee on, if you want it,” she called out from the back room in a sing-song voice. “Victor made it.” She emphasized Victor’s name.

She heard him swearing in Spanish slang at the mention of Victor’s name, followed by one of his amused chuckles. He lingered over the patio table and polluted

62 ashtray. “Since when did choir boy start smoking out . . . or was it your boss getting you high? That’s grounds for sexual harassment for you liberated women,” he added with a mocking laugh.

She ignored his comments and reached for the Jovan Musk on her vanity and dabbed a small amount beneath each ear, stopping for a moment to admire the matching lotus flower candle holders Tony had given her—the vibrant blue color of the petals never failed to catch her eye and warm her heart. She then reached for and slipped into the bright pink kimono he’d bought for her while on R&R in Hong Kong. Smiling, she twirled around in front of the dresser mirror, her eyes following the lines of the tangerine- colored tiger, until she came face-to-face with its menacing face. A soft noise startled her.

“Tony, what are you doing in here?”

He stood within French doors that separated her bedroom from another room, and stretched his arms out against the doors, as though his tall, muscular figure was the only thing that could keep the walls of the room from crumbling in an earthquake.

“It’s not like I haven’t been inside these walls before, Angela,” he said, flashing her one of his trademark smiles, one that eased into his face, crinkling the soft lines around his eyes, making it seem like the glint in his eyes would never leave you the longer he grinned.

“I’m glad to see the room hasn’t changed. Still warm and inviting. Had Victor in here yet?”

She threw a bunny slipper at him.

She hated the arrogant prick.

63 “Whoa, good one,” he said. “You almost hit me. And I can’t say I didn’t deserve it.”

“Why the hell did you come here, anyways?” Angela yelled at him, waving her arms in the air. “I'm finally starting to get my life together after you bailing on me for the second time, and then you show up. What’s up with that, cabron? What do you think

I am? One of your Vietnamese whores you can fuck whenever you want?” She threw another shoe at him; this time, a wooden platform sandal.

He ducked.

“Chale,” he said. “It’s not like that, and you know that. I loved you, Angela.

Really loved you.”

“Yeah, well, then why did you break my heart?”

“Because I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Oh, that makes a lot of sense.” She stumbled over to the bed and sat down. “I don’t feel good.” Her insides felt like a splintered piece of wood.

Tony moved from where he was standing and slowly sat down beside her.

“Tell me how I can make you feel better.” He rubbed her shoulders and back.

She looked up at him, while removing his hands from her. “You’d make me feel better if you’d stop messing with my mind.”

“You’re right,” he said.

Her eyes locked with his. There was a calm seriousness in his eyes, like that of a perched eagle she’d seen pictured in National Geographic. She felt they’d made progress. He could behave like a rational adult.

“This Victor dude,” he said, “does he make you happy?”

64 He knew nothing of Victor, only that he had relocated to San Francisco after graduating from Stanford University a year ago, and that his last name was Maldonado, and that he liked to play a lot of tennis. Angela, herself, still wondered what Victor saw in her. She’d only attended a semester of junior college and had grown up in a broken family. He, on the other hand, had been raised in one of the more affluent parts of San

Fernando Valley with an intact family. The fear of not being good enough for Victor surfaced again, and she quickly pushed the fear to the back of her mind.

“Never been happier,” she said, while striking a match and lighting a candle.

“Then, I’m happy for you, Angela,” he said. “Really happy.”

“He’s a dream come true,” she said, striking a match to light another candle.

“He’ll take good care of me, and love—”

“Okay, Angie,” he said. “I get the picture. No need to explain further.”

She blew at an unruly candle flame in the same manner she’d blow liquid bubbles in her bath, soft and steady. “What about you, found that someone special?” She was afraid to hear the answer.

“That’s why I came here,” he said. “I really needed to talk to someone who cared. And I know you never stopped caring, am I right?”

“Yes, you are right,” she said with an upward tilt of her chin. She pictured them going to counseling together and working things out, putting an end to the madness, and moving on with their lives, in some way or another.

Tony began to tell her of his troubles, but as soon as she heard it had to do with some chick named Margarita she started to tune him out, wondering why the hell he was talking to her about another woman. Didn’t he know she would scratch out any

65 woman’s eyes that came near him? She felt a wave of shame rise to her face, her cheeks suddenly warm. The longer he talked about this woman called Margarita, the more teary- eyed he got, and all she could think about was hurting him the way he had hurt her, because right now he was breaking her heart all over again. She didn’t want to hear about how some stupid-ass bitch was breaking his heart; she wanted to hear him begging for her to take him back.

“I don’t know why I did what I did,” he said about Margarita. “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

“Well, she was probably asking for it,” she said. “Some chicks get off on that kind of shit, you know, getting slapped around and stuff like that.”

He glared at her. “I didn’t hit her,” he said with flared nostrils. “You should know me by now, Angela. I don’t hit women.”

“Alright, alright,” she said, trying to smooth things over. “No need to get all worked up over nothing.”

Soft pearls of perspiration formed on the sides of his face. “I’m warm,” he said. “Mind if I take my shirt off?” His humility surprised her. He usually never asked, just did whatever he wanted to do when he was with her. With others, it was a different story—he’d act the perfect gentleman.

“Go right ahead.” After tossing aside a brown teddy bear and a stuffed white bunny rabbit, she reached for a glass of water by her bedside to take a sip, while from the corner of her eye, watched him pull the black T-shirt over his head. She wanted to kiss the black-inked tattoos on his muscular arms with her tongue.

66 She popped open the lid on a miniature tin can with an English countryside design and offered him a raspberry candy.

He lay back on the bed and rested a forearm across his forehead. “Oh,

Angela,” he said, between sucks of his candy. “What am I going to do?”

She folded her legs beneath her and leaned towards him, gripping her teddy bear by the neck. She wanted to make Tony hurt, the way he hurt her, but punching and kicking him would only end up hurting her. He got off on kinky shit. She tossed the stuffed animal to the floor, and then rolled her tangy candy around in her mouth as if it was a piece of ice, and bit down, crunching louder than she expected.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” he said softly, “to tell Margarita how sorry I am.”

Her eyes roamed over his body as he continued to talk. She felt a tug of war going on inside of her. Part of her wanted to get naked with him and lick him up and down and all around, while another part of her couldn’t wait to kick him out of her bed.

Tingling warmth continued to rise within her until it was sharp as a razor and now at the tip of her tongue, and she feared that at any moment Tony would be able to smell the scent of her hunger—nothing ever got past him. Satisfaction or no satisfaction, he could be a real bastard; she had to remember. She thought back to the times they used to have a lot of sex, right after he got back from Nam, and just how cheap she felt each time afterwards.

She had to remember.

A web of images widened in her mind, of him holding her down by her neck, practically strangling her, calling her his bitch and his whore, while he pumped away at

67 her furiously—as though her body was the whole of Vietnam and would turn on him at any moment. And when she complained of his rough treatment of her, he’d threaten to tie her up and leave her tied up until she cried. But she wasn’t the crying type. And after awhile, and after they drank and fought some more, he’d screw her again, but with all the gentleness of a man in love. The memory in her body of him degrading her had disturbed, yet excited her at the same time. And the more times he took want he wanted, the more she wanted him to take it. And she never understood why. And still didn’t; and even now she wanted to feel cheap all over again, even after all the time she’d spent going to counseling and working on herself.

Yet, being treated like a sexual receptacle by Tony may not be enough, she thought. She might need to experience more hurt by him in ways she hadn’t even come to desire or even understand. The idea made her feel more afraid of herself than she did of

Tony and scared the shit out of her just considering it as a possibility.

Nevertheless, it was a part of her that felt strangely alive with its own wants and needs that longed to satisfy what most normal people would find abhorrent. It was a hidden part of herself, she’d as much figured, that strongly desired to be punished by

Tony in whatever humiliating way he dished out to her, and she hated herself for desiring what she should despise, thinking she might be mentally defective in some way for wanting those kinds of things to happen to her.

If her older male cousins on her father’s side had known Tony’s darker side, they would’ve driven all the way from Tucson and beaten him with a baseball bat. But they would have to beat her too, because now she was just as freaky as Tony. She never remembered being like this before he’d taken her virginity away. And even now, with

68 him lying on her bed, his thick, sexy voice speaking of love for another woman, made her want him even more.

He rested on his elbows. “So, what do you think I should do, Angela?”

She stared without blinking. “About what?”

“About Margarita, what else?” he said, his eyes narrowing until they became like dark slits. “Have you even heard a word I said?”

She blinked her eyes. “Yeah, right, Margarita.”

There was a pause.

“You know I wouldn’t miss your warm smell,” he said with a sardonic chuckle. “You should know me by now, Angela.” He began to sound more and more like the old Tony she knew—calculating and dangerous. “And don’t think I haven’t smelled the smoke in your hair. You’re reeking of that shit. I should pound you for that alone.”

She bit her lip and turned away. She could taste the blood. The bad moon in him was rising, still his arrogant behavior somehow excited her, and her heart thumped wildly in her chest. Things were as they should be.

“I want to know what’s been going on over here,” he went on, in a firm voice with a jab of his fingers against the hard mattress. “Victor’s too much of a square to involve you in these things. Tell me you haven’t had Ricardo over here again. Because then I’m really going to have to hurt you.”

She hadn’t thought about Ricardo in a long time and his open-ended invitation to teach her how to play chess. Besides his boyish charm and his ability to say what was really on his mind, she liked that about him, his mastery over strategic moves on board games, though sometimes she had the urge to hurt him by talking about what a great

69 lover Tony was in bed, and how he made her scream at just the right moment. She knew that would make him mad with jealousy. Ricardo and Tony were once buddies; they played ball together in high school and had always been highly competitive with each other on and off the court. After Tony had broken up with her, Ricardo would come by now and then to check on her, to make sure she was all right. He believed all single girls should remain living at home until married. “Important to keep yourself safe from guys like me,” he’d said to her with a laugh, and then a slow smile. She’d been tempted to go on a date with Ricardo, the guy all the girls wanted to date, when he’d asked her, but instinctively knew going out with him would only stir up more trouble between him and

Tony, and she would come out looking like the bad guy. Tony still believed the rumor that she had let Ricardo spend the night with her during his first week in-country. Men seemed to operate that way, she’d discovered. Always blaming the woman. Still she felt tempted to tell Tony about the time she let Ricardo French-kiss her at her back porch, after a night of playing Monopoly together and after he’d given her a stuffed animal to add to the collection on her bed. She suddenly felt bad, at the thought that she may have betrayed Tony after all with that simple kiss.

Tony tugged at her hair. “Hey, look at me, when I’m talking to you.”

She turned towards him.

His stare grew fierce and she wanted him more than ever. Just a moment of weakness.

She feared the worst now. That she would go into another nervous depression, if she were to give into any of his demands. He had a way of twisting things around and making them her fault. She pictured herself being hooked on Valium again and making

70 those weekly trips over to Haight-Ashbury to face the head counselor, Eve, and having to admit with a straight face that she’d let Tony back into her life, and then she’d have to go back to talking about Tony all the time, how Tony did this to her, and that to her. The craziness felt like a never-ending cycle. The thoughts rolled over in her mind as though driven by a madman behind a steam roller, and she fought hard to block the madness by mentally reciting affirmations she’d gleaned from the many self-help books she’d read.

She couldn’t think of any.

“Since you won’t talk to me,” Tony said, tossing the stuffed bunny to the floor, “let’s see what your body has to say. It’s always been kind to me. Come here, you,” he said, pulling her beneath him. She felt like a rag doll in his grip, and hated herself for going blank whenever Tony started behaving this way.

He tore open her robe and gazed at her nakedness, and then sniffed at her like an animal sniffing one of its own. His dark eyes were deep and penetratingly smooth, yet sharp and piecing like that of a wolf’s, holding her in a trance. She watched the animal in him watching her, from somewhere outside herself, as though she were an angel perched above them recording their every move; the silence was slow, deadening, surreal, otherworldly like, and she wished he’d stop staring at her like she were a small animal whose flesh he was readying to rip apart. She fought to get back to her senses, and pictured herself calmly telling him this was all a mistake; he had her figured wrong. She was a good girl.

Tony finally spoke. “What have you been thinking about, eh, Chica?” he asked, stroking her forehead and then kissing her hair. “Have you been thinking about all those good times we had?”

71 She blinked her eyes and stared defiantly back at him, relieved to feel a rush of color to her cheekbones and a fullness in her lips—she was not dead to herself after all.

Her eyes widened the longer she held his gaze. Their eyes communicated things in a language only they could understand for a long moment, and she felt as though a lifetime of memories had passed between them, and she wondered if what they shared was truly a love beyond human understanding, or a sickness of the soul that needed to be wiped out.

She didn’t know what to do. She relaxed into her body and felt it weaken beneath his, the longer he caressed her with his fingers. She hated that she could so easily melt beneath his touch, but she didn’t feel she had the strength or the will to turn things back around.

She would take all of him in, his troubles, his heartaches, his hatred, and then lose herself in him, an act that had become as familiar as finding her way home in the dark.

She glanced up at the large statue of the Virgin staring down at her from her bookcase and the heart-breaking disappointment in her glazed eyes, and mentally said a

Hail Mary; and then arched her neck back, as Tony busied himself with her body, to look up at the bronze crucifix hanging on the wall above her bed. She suddenly felt afraid, for both Tony and herself. She bucked and slapped at him, as if she’d suddenly awakened from a dream she hadn’t been able to wake herself from.

“No, Tony, don’t,” she cried. “I can’t do this.”

“But, your body’s saying yes.”

“The Blessed Mother’s watching.”

“That never stopped you before.”

She bit and slapped at him, and when she’d seized the opportunity, she snapped her legs shut like a clamshell. And after they struggled with one another for

72 awhile, their entangled bodies, like two mating dragonflies clinging to each other in mid- flight, they rolled down off the bed and onto the throw rug below like one giant insect.

And because she felt she’d led him on, and because she felt going down on him wasn’t as sinful and intimate as going all the way, she took all of him in her mouth as soon as he’d grabbed her by the sides of her hair with both his fists.

The morning sunlight had gradually shifted, and shadows of tree leaves sputtered on the wall like the wings of hummingbirds. She and Tony lay naked between the sheets in each other’s arms.

“I'm sorry, baby,” Tony whispered in her ear. “I didn’t mean for things to happen this way.” He kissed her hair and held her close.

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s all my fault.”

“Ssh, baby, it’s not your fault.” He held her closer and kissed her hair again.

“No, Tony,” she said frantically. “Everything’s my fault, really. You don’t understand.”

“Now, now. Settle down,” he said in an even calmer voice. “I don’t blame you for being upset. I know I can be a real dick to you sometimes.”

He began to talk about their past, about the happy times they shared while they were in high school, about how he couldn’t stop thinking about her for days at a time while humping through the jungles of the Nam, and about the dreams and plans he’d mapped out for their life together as husband and wife—things he’d never shared with her before.

73 Angela wanted to speak, but she couldn’t think straight. He was behaving differently, kind and gentle, and she suddenly felt uncomfortable; and she began to wonder if he carried two souls in his body—one moment a monster, the next a gentleman. What if he wanted to really share his heart with her, did she really want to know his latest secrets? The closeness might be unbearably painful and gut wrenching.

He might share the intimate details of the women he’d been with and, perhaps, loved while he was away at war. Worse yet, what if he drew her close only to walk away from her again? Or told her he was in love with her and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her? She’d have to change the way she’d grown to think about the post-war

Tony. Her insides twisted like a pretzel at the thought of having to go back and start all over again, and she stared up at the ceiling for a long time mentally trying to put words into sentences. But each time she tried, the words would float away in different directions, causing more confusion.

“Tony, I think I’m going crazy.”

“Ssh, you’re not going crazy, baby,” he said. “If you were, you wouldn’t be saying that.”

Cuddling with him satisfied a deep longing she’d been feeling, and she began to wonder if her unquenchable desire to be held by a man she still had strong feelings for was really about wanting to feel loved in a way she wasn’t sure Victor would be able to appreciate. He was too normal when it came to matters of the heart, and she feared he would never understand her occasional freak outs. The emptiness that swelled within her came with the changing of the moon, it seemed, and was as wide and as deep as the ocean, and as far out as an undertow would take her. Then again, she thought, how could

74 she expect Victor, or any man, for that matter, to fill the strange emptiness she often felt deep down in her soul that seemed at times, untamable and wild as a beast, if she ignored it long enough.

She stopped trying to analyze herself. She was tired of trying to figure things out, of feeling like a pinball was being slammed from one side of her brain to the other.

She heard Tony lightly snoring.

She shook him. “Tony, wake up.”

“Baby, you’re not going crazy,” he said in a sleepy, groggy voice. “Go back to sleep.”

She’d forgotten he’d been working long hours at the manufacturing plant, and felt bad for waking him. She gazed at his sleeping eyes and wanted to kiss them softly and lie back beside him in his arms, thinking if they remained this way long enough, things would be as they once were between them, before he’d gone to war and come back a changed man. She then imagined him dreaming of Margarita, of holding her and caressing her, and calling her mija, and telling her she’s the only girl he’d ever truly loved; and suddenly she wanted to get away from Tony, and him away from her. She rolled over on her back and pulled the covers over her head, and began to think about how much easier it would be to be involved with someone, without really having to be involved. She wouldn’t have to worry about the hassles of really knowing someone and being known, and getting her heart broken all over again.

She recalled the black leather-vested construction worker who played pool at the bar up the street on Friday evenings, and how his dark, moody eyes would follow her around whenever she stepped in to play the pinball machines. They could just come and

75 go as they pleased without feelings or attachments or feelings of familiarity, she figured, remaining like strangers in a crowd, coming together only when fate threw them together.

And there’d be no more pain, and no more regrets, just the memory of his black pointy boots seated at the side of her bed. The idea of thinking of another man as she lay next to

Tony made her feel like a whore, and she wondered if maybe deep down, at the center of her being, she was a whore, not only now, but in a past life. She wondered how God could ever love a sinner like her, one possibly beyond repair and beyond redemption; she then recalled the Woman at the Well.

The phone rang.

She grabbed the silky kimono beside her and slipped from the bed, running to the kitchen phone with all the swiftness of a gazelle trying to make it to the other side of the mountain. It was Victor, telling her he was sorry he’d missed her, but he’d had to leave quickly this morning, he’d had a high profile client coming in. “One of those megalomaniac types who thinks the firm has nothing better to do than serve him,” he said to her.

Angela listened for any sign of Tony from the other room. “Oh, yes,” she said to Victor. “I know the type.”

He asked if she’d made plans for later, and she told him she felt she needed to rest, to have some time alone to recuperate from the trip.

“I’ll call you later, Love Bug,” she said before hanging up the phone.

She began to feel bad about what she’d done with Tony behind Victor’s back as soon as she heard the sound of his voice, and wanted to smear the ashes from the patio ashtray in her face.

76 Then again, what’s the big deal? she asked herself. I didn’t have sex with

Tony.

She opened the bag of pastries Tony had brought and looked inside, and tore at one of the sweet breads, stuffing it in her mouth. The texture was light and airy and melted like a Communion wafer in her mouth. She said a prayer for Victor, while pouring herself a cup of coffee, and prayed this thing with Tony would all blow over.

“Love Bug, eh?” Tony said. “Sounds serious.”

Angela spun around. “Ay, Tony, you scared the shit out of me, standing there like that, like some ghost at my back.”

“Angela, are you sure you love this Victor dude?” he asked, while twisting the cap off the orange juice. “Because if I’m not mistaken, you sure act different around him, catch my drift?” He drank from the bottle and winked at her from the corner of his eye.

“No,” she said. “I don’t catch your drift.”

He rubbed his chin as if thinking some great thought. “Well, let me phrase it in a way your pretty little head can understand . . . your little love bug doesn’t know about your temper problem, does he?”

Angela looked away.

“Or, let’s see, how about your little drug habit . . . okay, that didn’t count, I know, it was only a phase. And your excessive drinking, not so good. Oh, here’s one you’ll enjoy: your insatiable appetite for kinky sex—or the fact that you just gave your ex-fiancé a blow job.”

She threw a glass pitcher of water at their high school prom picture on the wall, smashing it to the floor. “Stop! I’ve heard enough,” she yelled in Spanish. “God,

77 you make me sick. Both you and my mother. Always wanting to take from me what’s mine to freely give.” She banged a fist on the counter and swept the bag of pastries to the floor, and cursed him some more.

“Angela, I’m doing this for your own good,” he yelled back in a mixture of

Spanish and English. “You don’t want the dude to marry you, only to have him find out you’re not the little angel he’s imagined you to be. It’s wrong and he’ll hate you for it.”

“So, what are you suggesting?” she asked. “That I marry someone like you?”

“Yeah, well, that’s kind of what I had in mind.”

“Ay, cabron, you’re confusing me.” She pulled at her hair.

“I’m just giving you my opinion,” he said in a calm voice. “Seemed like the right thing to say.”

Angela shook her head. “You know, Tony, you came over here looking for someone to talk to and I still don’t know what it is you wanted to talk about. All I know is that my mind feels like it’s going around in circles.”

“You have a point,” he said. “Look, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep talking. I’m going to leave you alone for now, but I’ll be coming around again and again, until we figure this thing out.”

“Tony, what is there to figure out? Besides, I have a boyfriend, remember?”

“A fiancé,” he corrected her.

She rolled her eyes. “Boyfriend, fiancé, whatever.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t all be friends,” Tony said, while picking up the broken pieces of glass from the floor. “Angela, we go too far back,” he went on, placing the frame and picture on the kitchen table. “Shit, I’ll even hang out with your old man,

78 get to know him. Choir boy needs someone who’s been there to show him what life is really all about.”

“Okay, fine,” she said, absently. “We’ll do that. Right now I got to get my head together before I go off on someone.”

“See what I mean?” he said, grinning.

She shoved and pushed at him. “Ay, pendejo! Leave me before I go off on your pinche dumbass.”

“Now, you’re talking,” said Tony. “If I wasn’t with Margarita and you weren’t with Victor—who knows?”

She pushed him towards the door. “You’re not making sense anymore, enough already. Go on.” An urgent need to have him out of her flat and away from her, had welled up inside of her.

She watched, from her dining room window, from behind a pulled drape, the back end of his ride as he pulled away. The paint job on his Impala was as blue as the ocean is deep and liquid smooth, and similar in color to the old Chevy sedan her father had restored and once drove her around town in one Sunday after Mass while dressed in their finest clothes. She also remembered the day her parents had their blow-out fight and could still see it in her mind, as though it’d been written with a camera.

She was sitting on the front steps of her Grandma Mitzi’s home where her mother and father had lived for awhile soon after he’d been furloughed from the auto plant where he had worked since his high school graduation. After a lot of arguing between her mother and father in the bedroom and later the sound of her mother smashing porcelain knickknacks on the living room floor, her father finally appeared

79 from the basement pad below. Ambling towards her gently, he then quietly opened the wooden gate on the white picket fence, and began to slowly walk towards her where she was sitting on the higher step. She recalled the clicking sound her father’s shiny black shoes made on the concrete sidewalk, and how his bronze-colored figure blocked the sun from her eyes as he stood in front of her, before bending down on one knee to clasp her hands within his. The last thing she remembered was watching the brake lights of his

Chevy bombita flashing like the beating of a heart.

After wiping up the mess on the floor she’d made, she peered through an open slit in the drapes to take a second look. She thought she’d heard Tony’s laughter. And when she saw Candy leaning over the driver’s side window of his car, laughing and talking with him, looking all cute and pretty in her Hawaiian print bikini and matching straw hat, a surge of blind rage shot through her mind and body, like the shooting off of an island volcano.

She swung back the drapes and unrolled the window.

“Hey, Tony,” she yelled loudly.

Tony turned to look up at her with a surprised look on his face. His arm lay across the driver’s side door in a relaxed casual manner, as though he’d just finished strumming a beautiful folk song on his guitar.

Angela flew down the stairs like a demon ghost, and then stomped across the gravel driveway in her bunny slippers to where Tony sat parked.

He gave her a puzzled look and lifted his hand, as if reaching for hers.

“Angela, what’s going on?”

80 She jabbed at his shoulder with the momentum of a boxer getting ready to throw a punch. “Fucking asshole, you know damn well what’s going on.”

A toothpick fell from his mouth.

“Angela, watch your mouth,” he said. “You know how much I hate that foul language rolling off your tongue.”

She slapped at his hand. “Screw your foul language bullshit and screw you,” she snapped at him in a mixture of Spanish and English. “You’ve never apologized to me, Tony, for what you did to me.” She glanced at the mailbox across the street, recalling the coffee-stained letter she’d received from him while he was in Nam, and how much her heart broke when she’d read it. He’d broken it off with her because he’d heard a rumor she was sleeping with Ricardo. She then narrowed her eyes at Tony and made herself remember every painful detail. “You didn’t even give me the chance to fight back,” she said. “And I hate you for that. Hate you! Hear me?” She’d never lashed out at

Tony like this before, and it frightened her, yet made her feel strong in a way she’d never felt before.

“Angela,” he said, “this isn’t the time or place.”

“It’s never the time or place with you.”

Movement to her left caught her eye.

She turned to Candy and glared. “What the fuck you looking at bitch?”

Candy sauntered towards Tony, and said in a whisper. “Hey, I’ll talk to you later.”

81 “Oh, no you won’t,” said Angela loudly, grabbing a fistful of her dirty blonde hair, and pulling her down on the ground, until she heard the bang of the twit’s bony knees against the rough pavement.

Tony jumped out of the car and pulled Angela from Candy’s cowering figure just as Angela was about to whack the gringa upside her head. Rudy ran over to where they were in the driveway as soon as he finished parking his car on the street. Tony held

Angela back by the waist as she tried to lunge at Candy, and asked Rudy to take Candy inside, back to her flat where she could remain safe.

Neighbors poured out onto their patios and stairways. Angela’s body shook uncontrollably and she couldn’t see straight. She knew she was losing control, but she couldn’t stop herself. She wanted to lash out at everything and everyone, and at the same time wanted to scream and cry, but couldn’t. The belt on her kimono had loosened and the silky fabric had slipped open, and she didn’t give a damn. She felt Tony grabbing her by the arm and yanking her upstairs to her flat and heard him telling Rudy not to worry, he had everything under control. From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Peaches flit past her balcony window, then grew sad when she realized she’d only seen the shadow of a raven.

Tony slammed the front door of her flat behind them, and placed her on the sofa, and then began to pace the living room. He stopped in front of her once and opened his mouth to speak, then walked away, returning a few minutes later with two opened

Heinekens.

“I didn’t know you drank these, but here,” he said, handing her one. “This will help calm you.”

82 She felt his stare on her as she guzzled hers down. After finishing his, he stood up and paced the room for a few minutes, then sat back down and put his head in his hands.

She looked over at him and knew to stay away from him. He hated it when she would lose her temper, and knew he would pull away from her for a while. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

He stood up and gruffly told her to go to her room and put some clothes on.

His eyes were swollen and red. When she returned, he and his car were gone, but he’d left her a scribbled note tucked inside Victor’s coffee mug, telling her he’d be in touch.

She cleaned house most of the day and watered her houseplants, searching for any signs of Peaches with her binoculars from the balcony, between loads of laundry, after she and Rudy had gone for a late lunch at a quiet restaurant around the corner. She didn’t say much at lunch to Rudy about what had happened earlier that day between her and Tony, and with a quizzical, yet concerned look, Rudy said he hoped everything was okay between the two of them, especially her. She apologized to Rudy for making a scene in front of his home, and asked how Candy was doing. “A little shook up,” said

Rudy. He told her not to worry, that she wouldn’t be pressing charges, which made

Angela stiffen with more anger towards Candy for her arrogance at thinking she was the one calling the shots around her neighborhood.

“Though, I think she’s thinking of leaving,” Rudy said.

83 “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” asked Angela, after biting into her cucumber and pickle sandwich. She felt bad her actions had possibly cost him a renter.

“It’s a good thing,” Rudy said, lifting his fork. “She’s been flirting with my new tenant’s husband, at the house down the street. Chick has a death wish,” he added with a laugh. “Actually,” he said, after dipping his fork into his potato salad, “Candy’s leaving will make it much easier to handle the situation. It’s been tense. Now, I won’t have to do anything.”

“I know what you mean,” Angela said. “Sometimes it’s easier if people just go away.”

Rudy began to talk about his better half, John, and how he’d been worried that

John might have gone over to the bathhouse on Valencia the night before last, after one of their long drawn-out fights. She was glad that the topic of conversation had turned to

Rudy venting about relationship woes, because she didn’t feel ready to talk about her feelings about what had happened between her and Tony, though she knew everyone wanted to know—their relationship had become like an ongoing soap opera episode for everyone in the neighborhood who was aware of their history together, or in some way connected to the both of them. “Will they get back together, or won’t they?” had become a part of small talk at small gatherings—and, she was actually embarrassed to bring up his name anymore, in fear her friends, and people in the neighborhood, might be beginning to secretly wonder if she was a little crazy, for continuing to allow herself to be

Tony’s doormat. When Rudy said to her he thought John might be a double dipper—an alcoholic and a codependent—she wanted to ask Rudy if he thought she might be sick in the head. But she didn’t. She usually limited that diagnosis for Tony.

It was after eight in the evening when she’d gone out onto the balcony to search the skies for Peaches again, though, she figured, her parrot sat with half-closed eyes, huddled close to one of her wild companions inside one of the palm trees of

Dolores street. She leaned on the balcony railing and breathed in the fresh air. The air felt moist and carried the scent of the ocean and marinated meats smoking on an outdoor grill. Faded rose petals scattered when the wind picked up, and the fronds of a nearby palm swished like a thick grass skirt on a slow-dancing hula dancer.

The sky turned the shade of an over-ripened apricot, the longer she stayed outdoors, and Angela imagined the big red sun on the other side of the mountain was about to slip into the edge of the ocean. She tried to figure out and to make sense of what had happened between her and Tony earlier in the day, but she couldn’t—her mind would draw a blank, as if nothing had ever happened. Though she’d heard there might be some rain and thunder—a freak storm—she longed to go for a walk along the seashore and to commune with the lonely and playful water spirits she heard dwelled along the shoreline.

When night fell, she slipped into a cushioned armchair beside the bay window, and poured over a stack of magazines and self-help books she’d recently bought but had been too busy working to read, and sipped from her glass of water. Then when she grew bored with that she opened up her vocabulary book and began to jot down the words she wasn’t familiar with into her vocabulary notebook. Then, when weary of memorizing words, she played a game of Solitaire on the coffee table in the front room; a repeat of Love, American Style played on the boob tube. She even called her mother to

85 make sure she was okay and that she had enough booze and cigarettes to last her the weekend.

Even though it was late, she felt tempted to call her best friend, Marta, a shy, petite girl from El Salvador with a pretty heart-shaped face, big wavy hair, and a loud laugh, who she’d met a couple of years ago at a University sponsored women’s clinic offering free counseling sessions. Marta was the only other girl from the Mission District there besides her, and immediately after they’d met, they’d hit it off. Marta made her promise she would never mention it to anyone that she’d met her there. She was worried what others in the barrio would think, if they’d found out she suffered from sad and nervous feelings, and was getting outside help from strangers. Angela understood all too well the need to keep certain things secret from the watchful eyes of others.

She wanted to see if Marta felt like going to the ceramic studio on Geary.

They would sometimes do that on a Friday night. Carve and shape clay vases and other knick knacks year round for Christmas presents, and talk about how they sometimes couldn’t feel their feelings or figure out what was bothering them, and how anxious and crazy it made them to feel that way, so numb inside as if their hearts had been shot up with Novocain, and like they were weird or something or some crazy shit like that, and how they’d end up laughing all the way home, freaking people out on the bus with their deep belly laughter, about the strangeness they felt about themselves and how they imagined others perceived their weirdness.

Just as she finished dialing Marta’s number she hung up the phone. She’d been staring at a colorful plaque Marta had given her that she had strung over a bookcase; it read: “Laugh at Yourself First, Before Anyone Else Can.” Marta, she figured, would

86 want to know all about what had happened between her and Tony, and she wasn’t ready to make fun of herself and release the craziness of the day. Marta also believed that Tony and she were soul mates, and was always encouraging her, like Esmeralda, to call him on his shit instead of always running away from him. The thoughts in her mind shifted, and she recalled the new vocabulary word she’d learned tonight. Sublime, she said to herself out loud.

She was glad when Jax had called to say hello and to thank her for letting him crash at her place; he was a nice distraction. He then began telling her how things went at the battered women’s clinic, and as he described every minute detail of his day, she absent-mindedly scribbled lotus flowers in bloom on a pad of white paper with black ink.

After Jax outlined a list of things he needed done at the office on Monday, and for her to take note, he added that she was in for a surprise Monday, but only hinted at the firm’s hiring manager’s decision to offer her a permanent position as his assistant. The pen dropped from her fingers to the floor. As happy and ecstatic as she was at the news, something still continued to eat at her insides like a hornworm nibbling its way across the tender shoots of a tomato plant.

She wanted to call Tony and apologize for her behavior earlier that day, hoping he could help her make sense of what had happened between them, but felt too afraid and too ashamed—fearful she might lash out at him unexpectedly again.

Something about him had a way of setting her off.

After she’d hung up the phone with Jax, Lisa called, telling her she’d be home for sure on Sunday and that she had something important to tell her. New Orleans’s jazz music played in the background. “Oh, let me just tell you now,” she’d said in an excited

87 voice. “Julien and me, we’re moving in together.” She didn’t know Lisa and Julien had been seeing each other and felt a little pissed that she’d been kept in the dark. She also didn’t see what Julien and Lisa had in common—except sex. They had wanted to keep it a secret from her, Lisa told her, because she and Julien knew things were complicated between Tony and her, and didn’t want to upset her even more. Great, Angela thought.

Everyone thinks I’m weak. Lisa told her she’d tell her everything when she saw her

Sunday and not to worry about finding another roommate, that Rudy had a one-bedroom flat for her to rent in the big house.

Rudy, too? What is with these people not telling me what’s going on? Next thing I’m going to hear, she mused, is that Tony’s moving in with Margarita. She opened a new pack of cigarettes and after pulling a cigarette out, struck a match and lit it up. She wondered if she’d do something as crazy as cutting Margarita’s phone line. She stopped herself from entertaining such horrible thoughts. She had no right; she wasn’t even married to Tony.

She tapped her fingers on the kitchen table to the Rolling Stones tunes she had playing on Lisa’s stereo system, between puffs on her smoke. She liked the smooth, slippery feel of the Formica tabletop beneath her fingers. She felt extremely hyped up and wanted to talk to Eve, but she was still out of town, and she didn’t feel like talking with her fill-in, the mannish Nilda. Plus, something disturbed her whenever she was in Nilda’s presence; her smile was soft and gentle, yet handsome and strong, which made her mind and body often feel like a busy switchboard, the signals confused and lighting up all over the place. A part of her wanted to be held by her, for her to tell her everything was going

88 to be all right, and another part of her never wanted to see her again. She pushed back the thoughts of walking over to the girl bar she knew Nilda frequented on Friday nights.

She felt numb inside, and still didn’t know what to make of everything that had happened between her and Tony. She felt good and bad. Good, because she’d shown

Tony she wasn’t going to take his shit anymore, but bad, because she lost control in front of the whole freaking neighborhood. But her body also betrayed her with Tony, once again. And now she felt cheap all over again, and oddly desperately alone; she knew

Victor would never be able to reach her in this place. There were so many problems in the world right now and solutions she desired to be a part of, but frustratingly she couldn’t get past the weirdo things about herself and her head trips when it came to men.

She hated that men were always getting in the way of her dreams.

Her foot tapping wasn’t helping to relieve her nervousness; it just made her feel more restless. She needed something to help her relax. Yet, she was determined not to drink any more liquor; in fear she might be turning into the alcoholic Tony accused her of being.

What have I done? she wondered, as she wrestled to pull the bulk of her hair into a high ponytail. She mentally tried to trace her steps, and the longer she sat, the more the walls of the room seemed to be moving in on her. She opened the refrigerator and after staring at the last of Jax’s Heinekens for a long agonizing moment, grabbed it and lit up a fresh cigarette.

She sat back down in front of the kitchen table, next to the wall phone, periodically glancing at it, picking at the wall paper peeling back from the wall, between

89 sips of her drink and hits of her smoke. She debated what to do about calling Victor and bit at a thumbnail. She had promised she’d call him, and she liked keeping her promises.

She picked up the prom picture of her and Tony, after taking a long drag of her smoke, recalling how sweet he’d been to her during that time, carrying her books and walking her home from school every day. Remembering how proud and handsome he looked in his Varsity football jersey, and how he’d parade her down the halls the day of his games; and when he’d walk her home, how he’d gently drape his Letterman jacket around her shoulders. She remembered a lot of things.

Then one day he came back from Vietnam, after extending a couple of times.

He’d come back a different man, one who drank heavily and who was obsessed with kinky sex and fucking her brains out whenever he could get his hands on her. She thought about the Polaroid pictures he’d sent to her, while he was in Saigon. Pictures of him with

Vietnamese bar girls. She thought about mailing them back to him.

Oh, Tony, what am I to do with you? She said aloud, in a mocking tone.

She took a long gulp of her beer and after tasting the last drop, tore the prom picture of her and Tony in half, sliding the two pieces beneath the very red pomegranate.

She now lay on her bed in her bedroom, staring up at the popcorn ceiling as she held the receiver of her pink princess phone against her heart, listening to the obnoxious busy signal the phone made whenever it was off the hook, before finally dialing Victor’s number. After they exchanged pleasant niceties, he mentioned to her that a group of his co-workers, along with their girlfriends, were talking about going bowling tomorrow night and he asked if she felt like going, or if she thought she needed more time to rest from her trip. She told him she’d let him know tomorrow, that sometimes she

90 never knew how she would feel one day to the next. He asked if she was okay, she seemed a little distant.

She wanted to tell him everything she’d done wrong that day. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep her betrayal from him; the urge to confess to him was strong. She recalled how Rudy had suggested to her over lunch that she not say anything to Victor until she had some time to think things over, gently reminding her that her compulsion to act quickly only created more drama. However, she felt that if she didn’t act quickly, her pent-up guilt would destroy whatever she and Victor had left. That she’d learned about herself.

There was a long pause in her conversation with Victor, and she felt her heart would explode into tears at any moment. He asked if she was still there. “Yes, I’m here,” she replied. She felt more disconnected than ever from him and didn't know what to say, fearful to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. When he told her he loved her, before hanging up, she told him “sweet dreams,” and then gently placed the receiver on its cradle. She wished he’d stop telling her that he loved her every time they talked—it made her heart pull away from him. Tony was the only guy she’d ever felt okay hearing it from. He only told her that he loved her once—right before he took her virginity away.

She blinked her eyes and looked over at the clock on her nightstand. It was only eleven o’clock at night. She thought it was morning. After she’d hung up with

Victor, she’d fallen asleep at the foot of her bed. She’d been dreaming strange dreams, vivid dreams, and had suddenly awakened after coming face-to-face with a ghost of a

91 dead woman in her nightmarish dream, who looked just like her, and who wore her same black evening dress and hat and heels, except that the dead woman wore her long, dark hair in a bun on top of her head, and her skin was the color of polished ivory. The black veiled figure stood in the middle of a small room constructed of wooden doors that was icy cold, which in the dream made Angela feel she were standing inside a meat freezer. A swollen river of icy water flowed between them, and Angela shivered all over. Yet she was not awake, she was still inside the nightmare dream. She tried to leave the dream, thinking she’d finally awaken to her normal surroundings as soon as she felt the cold tile floor of the bathroom beneath her feet, but as soon she glanced at herself in the bathroom mirror, she saw herself once again back in the dream, this time wandering the banks of a snow-covered river in search of a lost child wearing a red snow jacket and yellow boots—whose child she didn’t know. She just knew she had to find the child before it was too late. And just when she’d spotted a blur of red and yellow in the white of snow, she felt a cold dead hand against her face.

Angela gasped for air and felt her forehead with her palm. It was warm but her cheeks were cold. She couldn’t get the creepy black-veiled figure out of her mind and the memory of her cold, dead hand touching her. She felt marked for death and worried someone had put a curse on her. She quickly thought of Esmeralda and her cures for curses.

She jumped from her bed, pouncing onto the floor like she had the watchfulness and suppleness of a jungle cat.

She scanned the room, sensing for any presence of evil. She felt wired and restless, agitated and jumpy, and her brain hummed like the electrical wires on a

92 barbwired fence. She checked all the doors and all the windows and started reciting sections of Psalm 91—the only Psalm she knew by heart.

She thought of Esmeralda again. Esmeralda and her old man, Carlos, owned a huge, purple- and pink-colored Victorian they’d recently finished renovating in the

Haight-Ashbury district. She needed to get away from the Mission District for awhile; the trappings were all too familiar which made her desperate situation feel all that more dangerous. She began to have a really bad feeling the more she considered the possibility of a spell being cast on her. She thought about Ricardo’s ex-girlfriend, a beautiful bohemian chick with striking green eyes and naturally long lashes, and how she had threatened to put a curse on her if the rumor about her and Ricardo sleeping together turned out to be true—“You’ll be barren and childless,” the Brazilian had snarled at her a year ago between isles of fruits and vegetables at a Saturday market on Mission. Her heart now beating erratically in what felt like the hollow of her chest, Angela lit a candle known for its protective properties and began speaking out loud made-up incantations of protection while waving the candle smoke towards her face as if to inhale.

Afterwards, she dialed Esmeralda’s number and asked if anyone could come give her a ride, that she wasn’t tired after all and could make it to Elena’s birthday party, but that she’d kind of been in a funk lately and hoped they’d get a chance to talk, she and

Esmeralda alone. She decided not to mention the feeling of being cursed, because

Esmeralda sounded tired and beat, and she didn’t want her to get all stirred up. She’d be at it for days. Esmeralda told her Carlos would be coming by to pick her up and to be ready to go.

93 She blew out all the candles in the flat and unplugged her phone, then slipped into a lavender dress and a pair of sling-back heels, and went outside and sat down on a bottom stair, and listened carefully to the sounds of the night while searching the darkened skies for stars, as she waited for Carlos’s powder blue Caddy to pull up.

Angela curled up on the bed next to Esmeralda and rested her head against her bosom. They lay in the large master bedroom of her home. Books and plants and record albums sat on makeshift shelves made of long pieces of plywood stacked on large cement bricks. Big, poufy ferns hung in macramé plant holders from a ceiling within an extraordinary large bay window. Alongside the extra-wide windowsills clusters of blood red and brilliant white candles in tall glass containers held steady flames, except when disturbed by sudden drafts of air.

“Why’s my baby girl so upset?” Esmeralda asked, while raking her long fingernails through Angela’s long dark hair. “Did Victor do something to upset you?”

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Angela said, sitting up. “I just started to feel all crazy again. And I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately. I’ve just been feeling so confused about everything.”

She turned to Esmeralda and watched as she moved to pull a bottle of liquor and two shot glasses from an ornate Chinese mahogany cabinet that sat against the wall on the far side of the room. “You and the rest of the world,” Esmeralda said with a chuckle, as she moved about the room, her silver bangles and anklets jingling with each slight movement. After considering the turquoise-inlaid necklace she’d been wanting to

94 buy for Esmeralda for her upcoming birthday that she’d spotted at a pawn shop on

Valencia, Angela scooted herself against the headboard, leaned back and stretched her legs on the bed, imagining Esmeralda as the sassy, young Latina that had once dated her musician father, as the beautiful and gracious older woman played bartender. Some day she would get up the nerve to ask Esmeralda more about those days.

“If only I could get past this craziness,” Angela said out loud. “Then I could focus on the things that really matter. Damn.”

“Everything in its time, esa,” said Esmeralda. “Everything in its time.”

A couple of owls called back and forth to each other outside the window. She and Esmeralda both stopped to listen to the soft hooting sounds the owls made, and smiled.

“You see, Angelita,” Esmeralda said, motioning with her eyes towards the window, “you are who you are supposed to be at this moment. Even our friends, the owls, know who they are at this exact moment in time.”

Esmeralda sat beside her and placed a glass in her hand. “Here, mija, this will make you feel better. Always works for my arthritis.” She fluffed some of the pillows on the bed, before placing one behind Angela’s back, and then hers.

Angela glanced at one of Esmeralda’s religious plaques. “I have seen his ways, but I will heal him,” she read aloud.

“I’ve never seen that plaque,” Angela said. “Is it new?”

“No, Angela,” Esmeralda said. “It’s not new. You’ve just never been still long enough to notice it.”

“He sees everything, doesn’t He?”

95 “That is true,” Esmeralda said. “Nothing is hidden from God’s sight. Even things done in the dark.”

Angela stared down at her engagement ring, and then she looked away. She thought about the pair of owls perched in the darkness, about how comforting their sounds were.

After they finished their drinks, she leaned into Esmeralda’s warm hug and closed her eyes.

Angela talked about Tony for awhile and some of the things that had happened between them earlier that day. “I should’ve never ambushed him,” she said.

“But sometimes his arrogance gets under my skin, like you wouldn’t believe, the way he struts around like his shit don’t stink, like he’s God’s gift to women. Ay! I could just strangle the vato.” She didn’t bother telling Esmeralda she’d been intimate with him; she didn’t feel ready to talk about it.

Esmeralda raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it’s yourself you’re fighting with and not him?”

Angela’s body stiffened at the idea, but knew she had it coming. She and

Esmeralda had talked about something similar the last time she’d come over after getting into it with Tony. When Esmeralda asked about how her rap sessions over at the women’s clinic were going, and if she felt they were helping, she changed the subject to

Victor, a subject she rarely talked to Esmeralda about. Why she didn’t, she didn’t know, but figured it was because Victor never did anything to upset her, even more reason for her to marry him.

“Victor doesn’t know you’re here,” Esmeralda asked, “does he?”

96 Angela slowly shook her head no.

“It’s good you’re here,” she said, turning towards her nightstand to light a stick of incense. “A change of scenery can give you a different perspective. Already you’ve seen things you haven’t noticed before.”

Esmeralda’s old man banged on the door, demanding she unlock it and let him in.

“You better leave now,” Esmeralda said, planting a kiss on her cheek. “Carlos needs his loving. Now go unlock the door for him. The party will help you forget your worries. Just behave yourself—and remember to watch and to listen.”

Carlos yelled for Esmeralda to unlock the door.

“Sweetie, please go unlock that door for me,” Esmeralda said, striking a match to light her cigarette. “Before the pinche has a cow.” As soon as Angela opened the door, Carlos pushed past her, slamming the door behind him. She resented Carlos for intruding on her private time with Esmeralda, and cursed him and all men in her mind.

She walked down a long hallway and into the main room. Sweaty bodies gyrated under flashing colored lights, to the Isley Brothers LP spinning on the turntable, the throngs of bodies pushing and bumping up against her as she tried to make her way towards the kitchen to look for something to eat, and to find Elena so that she could wish her a happy birthday. Elena a.k.a. La Morena was ten years sober.

A dude dressed in dark jeans and a high neck shirt reached out and grabbed her by the hand as she tried to pass. “Want to dance?” he asked, in a smooth sounding voice.

97 Angela liked the strength of his grip and paused to examine him more closely.

He had jet-black hair, dark eyes with long curly lashes, and arched eyebrows. His stare commanded presence and she wanted to be its audience.

Angela smiled with her eyes. “Sure, why not.”

Just as they were about to start fast dancing, a slow song came on, and she let him hold her close as they slow danced. At first, she was hesitant to let him hold her so close but then gave in. It's not hurting anyone, she thought. He smelled of designer cologne and Doublemint gum, and was a good dancer. It’d been a long time since she had slow danced with someone. He held her gently and spoke to her softly in her ear, calling her by her name.

She pulled away to look at him. “How did you know my name?” she asked.

Dudes always seemed to know who she was, and that bothered her.

“I asked Carlos,” he said. “As soon as I saw you come in with him, I said to myself, ‘Now, that’s a real woman.’” He winked, and then nodded while smiling, as though he were impressed with what he had said.

She gave him an intrigued but puzzled look.

“I call it like I see it,” he said, winking again. “By the way, name’s Jesse.”

She repeated his name out loud. “Nice name. I like it.”

“Hey, at least I have that going for me,” he said with a chuckle. He drew her closer.

She danced all three slow jams with him and was deeply impressed by his gentlemanly behavior. He kept his hands in one place.

98 When the fast jams started again, Jesse led her over to the dining room table where Esmeralda had laid out a spread of home-made tamales, dishes of rice with beans, grilled meats, bowls of cut-up melons, and a platter of fried bananas and other desserts.

They carried their plates of food to a screened balcony out back and nibbled at their food while trying to talk. A small group of guys had gathered together to tell jokes and smoke their cigarettes.

Jesse placed his hand in hers. “Come with me,” he said. “I know a place where we can have some privacy.”

She felt as though she’d known him for years and couldn’t believe they’d just met. She wondered if it was meant to be for them to meet, if he was the one who could truly make her happy and make all her problems with Tony and Victor go away. She continued to entertain the idea in her head, until she believed they had been destined to meet. She wouldn’t bother to play hard to get with him because that would only disrupt and delay what fate had already put in motion. She swallowed the last bite of her banana fritter.

Jesse led her to an entry way at the end of the hall, and she willingly followed.

She knew the layout of Esmeralda’s home, but had never ventured past the rooms on the main level. Her heart thumped hard in her chest with excitement at the anticipation of him showing her things she’d never seen before. But when she looked out the back entry, she grew wary. It was pitch black outside and she could hear the wind howl. Leaves from the trees rustled in the wind and a cat screeched an ear-piercing sound. It was a penetrating darkness, one she’d experienced before, the night of her twelfth birthday.

99 She sometimes dreamt about the dark event in color, even though she remembered it in black and white. Her mother had taken her with her to a party at her boyfriend’s home in the foggy hills of South San Francisco, on a cold, damp night, leaving her to sit in a basement-turned-fun-room to play board games and watch television with her boyfriend’s son, while they drank and laughed and danced in the living room upstairs to rock and roll records. But the older boy, who she had a crush on and who would often greet her by grabbing her by her tummy and tickling her, which made her giggle and roll around in his warm embrace, was nowhere to be found. The only remnant of him was a freshly lit cigarette smoldering in a ceramic hand-shaped ashtray on a wooden picnic table next to an empty beer bottle, a pack of Camel cigarettes, and a pink-frosted birthday cake. She’d felt tempted to try taking a puff of the cigarette, after dipping a finger into the cake frosting, but when she’d heard a young cat’s frightened cries outside the window she hurried to the back door and walked out into the damp darkness, searching for any sign of the kitten. Fingers of fog flew through her, like a flurry of vengeful spirits, and the dark wind howled with the ghostly screams of strangers. But she wasn’t afraid. Not until she swore she felt the presence of evil coming up from behind her, ending with a blind-fold pulled across her eyes, and a familiar sounding voice against her ear saying, “Big girls don’t cry,” while another hand rubbed every part of her during a strange jerking moment that ended in an unusually tight embrace. Afterwards, the stranger in the night pressed the tip of a lit cigarette into the nape of her neck, and then disappeared with the young cat into a hallway of darkness stretching out into a hillside she always remembered as being covered in fluffy clumps of blue-green grass and purple-tinged flowers in springtime.

100 Jesse tugged at her hand with his. “Well, are you coming or not?”

Angela touched the raised burn mark on the back of her neck, wondering if she’d accidently burned herself with a hot roller while high, and then let go of Jesse’s hand. “I better not.”

“C’mon,” he said, with a nod of his head and wave of his hand. “I won’t hurt you. I’m Carlos’s cousin. He’d kill me if I ever did anything to hurt you, Angela.”

She rubbed her neck for a slow moment, and then dropped her hand to her side, smoothing her dress. “So, where are you taking me?” She asked with a flutter of her eyelashes. She didn’t know why she was behaving so child-like with Jesse and couldn’t seem to get a hold of herself.

“There’s a basement pad out back beneath the mother-in-law apartment,” he said. “Esmeralda and Carlos are letting me crash there for awhile.”

She placed her hand in his, following closely behind. She thought she should be afraid, but she wasn’t. She liked the feel of his fingers nestled inside her palm. Jesse opened a door to a small hallway and ushered her in, then quietly shut the door behind him.

He looked to her, motioned to the door. “See, no locks,” he said. “You can leave whenever you want, Angela.”

She said nothing. She couldn’t think straight. She was mesmerized by Jesse, by the sexy sound of his voice. She liked the sound of her name on his lips and wanted him to say it again. She let him lead her down a long hall and into a small living room separated by a curtain of wooden beads.

101 The smoke-filled room smelled musky. Soft music played in the background.

Couples quietly made out on sofas and chairs, and others passed bongs between them. No one bothered to look up to see who had entered when they arrived. They just went about their business, except for the ponytailed blonde in the pale green hot pants and white go- go boots, who was seated beneath a cluster of hanging spider plants in the far corner of the room. She sat in a sunken loveseat all by herself.

She glanced up at Angela, gave her a knowing smile, and then looked away as soon as she spotted the thick muscled Japanese dude entering in from the kitchen with a beer in one hand, and a frayed army jacket in the other. His face was clever and he wore a sure smile. All eyes were now on him, and Angela followed his every move; he appeared to be searching for someone or something between postured handshakes and laughs.

When he finally spotted what he’d seemed to be looking for, Angela watched as the blonde excitedly pulled her blouse high above her chest, letting the handsome male greet each exaggerated nipple with multiple flicks of his tongue; and with a sultry lick of her lips and a wink of her eye, the crude woman gestured for her to come join them.

Angela stood there and blinked a few times, while Jesse smoothed a stray piece of hair from her face. She knew better than to stare; staring could get you killed, but she continued to stare anyways. She couldn’t believe this woman, and just how sleazy she was acting in front of everyone. Her legs were high above her head now, the tips of her boots hidden inside the Spider plants overhanging, her hair undone and her face concealed by her lover’s backside. Angela caught the man’s glare when he turned around, and quickly she fixed her eyes on Jesse’s gaze.

102 “Don’t mind Regina,” Jesse said in a reassuring voice. “Stuff like that usually doesn’t happen here. But Lieutenant Ray has a thing for go-go dancers with big tits who turn tricks on the side,” he went on. “Just don’t let Esmeralda know there was a whore back here—she’ll freak.”

Angela recalled the tales and stories she’d heard from Lisa about Tony having a thing for a French-Vietnamese go-go dancer who lived near a river of flowing green water that carried the scent of perfumed flowers, and she began to feel a little unsure of herself, like she somehow didn’t measure up and should be somebody else other than who she was: a prim and proper girl.

She looked up at Jesse, at the adoring look in his eyes, as he rested his eyes on her, and she felt a sense of relief wash over her. He didn’t seem interested in girls that were easy.

He laced his fingers in hers, grabbed a six-pack from the fridge, and led her out the kitchen door to a stairway that led to a large basement room down below, and after switching on a shaded red light, sat her on a bed pushed up against the wall, cushioned with large throw pillows. She slipped off her heels, leaned back against the pillows, and folded her knees to her chest.

Various oil paintings hung from the walls in all sizes and shapes, some strikingly amateur, some professional. Her eyes lingered on a print of Frida Kahlo’s Self-

Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. A monkey from behind toyed with the thorn necklace on her neck. Hmm, what a cute little monkey.

She would ask Jesse about his self-portrait later, something about it seemed a little off, though quite well done. On a black lacquered dresser a lava lamp oozed deep

103 shades of purple, green, and dark blue colors, the blobs of colors folding into one another until no longer recognizable, and then floating to the surface only to start all over again.

She closed her eyes and thought of the ocean, picturing moonlit waves crashing against the darkened beach, and the feel of foamy water streaming through her toes and feet. She wondered if Jesse liked walking along the beach at night. She felt like going for a walk.

“You don’t have to be here,” Jesse said, after putting a record album on the turntable. “You can leave any time you want.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “I know that,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

She started to feel a little pissed off at Jesse for bringing her down here in front of everyone. She imagined they were all thinking he was going to nail her tonight, and snickering about it upstairs. Maybe even spying through a hole in the wall or a crack in the ceiling, hoping to get a glimpse of him seducing her into his bed. She was a Kelly

Girl hire, she wanted to tell Jesse and the rest of them, a girl with a promising career ahead of her, one who cared about her reputation. She sobered up at the thought of the revelation, which in turn made her feel invincible. Contrary to Tony’s claims, she now realized she was right all along—she could hold her liquor.

Jesse sat down next to her and handed her a beer. “I’m not what you probably think I am.”

“And what do I think you are?” she asked, before bringing the bottle to her lips.

“Some lowlife dude who’s only out for a piece of ass.”

104 “And are you?” she asked. She could feel her head clearing with each gulp, and she wanted more. She asked for his drink, and he gladly gave it to her, before popping open another.

“If I was,” he said with an amused smile, “I would’ve already had you.”

Her drink spilled from her lips. “I think I'm a little buzzed.”

He reached for a tissue, patting her chin and chest where the liquid had spilled. “Yes, I can see that,” he said.

She appreciated that his hand didn’t linger on her chest too long, or just happen to cop a feel of one of her breasts.

While he went upstairs for more liquor, she looked down at the stain on her dress and walked to the bathroom sink to blot it out. There was no bathroom mirror to look into, and she was frustrated she couldn’t see herself. While running her hands through her hair, she felt a jeweled earring pull from her ear, and then heard a ping when it hit the linoleum. She got down on her knees and searched behind a fabric curtain tacked to the sink, feeling for the earring and thought she felt it in a crack. She pulled the fabric aside and looked inside the crack and a worn piece of the flooring lifted up. She peered inside and saw a box filled with bags of dope. Her earring lay on top. She grasped her earring, and then quickly slid the flooring back, letting the fabric drop. She didn’t like seeing those kinds of things. She stood up and put her hands on her hips, and wondered if maybe she should go back upstairs to the birthday party and hang out with the girls.

People might start talking.

Muffled sounds of male banter echoed through the ceiling vent from the apartment above. A dude challenged another dude, one who went by the name of Razor.

105 There was a loud thump and then a shouting match. She thought she’d better stay below for now, where she felt safer. And out of everyone’s radar.

Jesse brought back another six-pack and a bottle of tequila, along with some chips, and set them on top of a small refrigerator next to two shot glasses.

“I usually don’t drink this much,” she said to him, watching as he placed the six-pack inside the refrigerator.

As her eyes lingered on his backside, an image of Lieutenant Ray and his hooker girlfriend came to mind.

“Neither do I,” Jesse said, turning toward her.

She quickly shifted her eyes upwards towards his.

“Actually, I prefer a good glass of wine,” he said, dismissing his surroundings with a wave of his hand, “and a different setting.”

“No offense, but you don’t look the part,” she said, still thinking of Lieutenant

Ray, wondering if Tony knew of him and vice versa.

“Looks can be deceiving,” he said, pausing to look her in the eye.

He filled each of their glasses with tequila, and they each sucked on a slice of lime and drank. The warmth overtook her, and she dismissed the concern of Tony and

Lieutenant Ray knowing of one another.

The room continued to glow a muted crimson beneath a red and gold colored

Tiffany lamp, and they moved back to the bed that doubled as a couch.

Jesse talked about the different poets and philosophers he enjoyed reading, and her eyes darted around the section of the room they sat in. The things in his room were distracting her, and she wondered who exactly he was and what she was doing

106 sitting on a bed in a semi-darkened room, drinking alcohol with a guy she’d just met, but yet couldn’t stop from happening. It was as if she were watching a movie and she had to watch the ending to see how things would turn out.

He held a worn copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions in his hands, clinging to it the way her mother would greedily cling to her stash, and he talked about how he had once been an “A” student in school with dreams of being an artist/philosopher, but then everything changed when he fell in with the wrong crowd. “I was living a life of

‘being seduced and seducing,’” he quoted Saint Augustine, and “of ‘being deceived and deceiving’ and that’s what got me into some shady dealings.” He paused to open the book and leafed through the many dog-eared pages, continuing to quote Saint Augustine, as if he were his personal savior.

He turned away to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye.

And that’s when Angela began to wonder if Jesse’s confession was all an act.

She narrowed her eyes at him, examining every gesture he made, searching for any sign of deception in his mannerisms. She’d never seen a dude show such emotion after reading from an ordinary book, and it touched her.

He closed the book and set it aside, and then he looked directly into her eyes, and with a solemn look, told her that after that realization he decided to turn over a new leaf—while he’d been in jail.

Angela stared at him without blinking, her pupils as big as an owl’s eyes.

“Wow, man, that’s heavy,” she said. “I wish I could be that deep.” She repeated the quoted lines in her head so that she could remember to write them down as soon as she

107 got home. Living a life of being seduced and seducing. Esmeralda was right, she thought.

I’m seeing life in a whole new way.

“Read more and it’ll help you get there,” Jesse said. “I read a lot while I was locked up. Reading the Bible from front to back is a good place to start. ”

“I tried reading the Bible, for real,” she said, while studying a row of mismatched designs on the bed cover. “Right after I graduated from high school. But then, after a few hours of reading it, I began to feel strange all over. The idea of allowing a higher being’s words to enter into my mind freaked me out, and for like two days I felt like my mind was separated from my body. Crazy, eh?” She tucked her bangs behind her ears when they fell forward, and then looked up at him. “I refuse to ever open another

Bible ever again.”

He rubbed his chin. “I’m sorry you had that experience, Angela,” he said.

“Higher learning isn’t meant to hurt you, but to enlighten you. Don’t close your mind to what is good and beautiful because it’s different from what you’re used to.” An idea seemed to have come to him, and he excused himself, and disappeared behind a curtain of plastic beads. He then began frantically searching for something in a small hall closet across from the bathroom, before heading upstairs, telling her on the way up he’d be right back. She imagined he had something he wanted to give to her.

The music stopped playing.

She listened to the faint hum of the refrigerator and the soft gurgling sounds that came from a fish aquarium beneath the staircase. She walked over to the aquarium and stood in the soft glow of light and gazed at the tropical fishes staring back at her from

108 behind the glass. She mused over the idea that the fish could be so happily unaware they were living in a world of someone else’s making.

When Jesse came back down, he pulled a couple of beers from the fridge and popped them open and smiled, then handed her one and drank from the other.

He stroked her cheek. “My having been in prison doesn’t scare you, does it?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “You’re Carlos’s cousin, remember?”

He motioned for her to sit down on a small armchair, and then he kicked back in a green cushioned chair beneath a large poster of Jimi Hendrix playing his electric guitar with a mountain of blue sky at his back. A small coffee table sat between them.

Jesse briefly mentioned his ex-wife, about how pissed off he still was at her, and at any woman who reminded him of her, for aborting his baby, when he was first locked up.

“The bitch used a knitting needle,” he told Angela. “Then bragged about it to all her friends.”

“God, that’s horrible,” Angela said, shaking her head.

She wished he’d stop talking about his past, because it made her think of her past. She didn’t want to think of her past anymore. She wanted to have fun, and lots of it.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what got me talking about that.”

“It’s okay,” Angela said. “It’s important to talk about the things that bother us.”

“Nothing seems to bother you,” he said. “Wish I would’ve met someone like you before I’d met my ex-wife.”

“I try,” she said, before taking another gulp of her beer.

109 They sat just gazing at the colorful fish swimming around in the aquarium for what seemed like a long time.

He then turned to her and after asking her about herself, and before she could answer, he began telling her about the other horrible things his ex had done to him, about her cheating on him with one of his buddies. She let him talk, figuring he needed someone like her to vent to. It gave her more time to admire the colorful peacock tattoo on his arm. She wanted to taste the shades of peacock colors that seemed to jump out at her. She drained her drink, and then asked him for another beer; and afterwards, he slipped an album on the turntable, and she got up and started to dance to the music.

He kicked back on the bed, drank his beer, and smiled as he watched her dance. She pretended she was a pretty go-go dancer in a high-priced club.

She told Jesse about her night at the Playboy Club in L.A., and mimicked a

Playboy Bunny performing a Bunny dip, and then laughingly fell into his lap. He playfully bounced her on his knee, and she laughed some more.

He brought his arms around her and fired up a joint. “You smoke?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“You will like this,” he said.

He brought it to her lips and she inhaled deeply. Smiling, she closed her eyes and tilted her head back. A vision of Victor advancing toward her, with an outstretched hand, burst in the back of her eyelids. Her heart beat fast sporadically in her chest as she tried to replace the image of him in her mind with Jesse’s image. She didn’t want to think about Victor anymore. Or Tony. She was having too much fun with Jesse. Besides, she thought, Jesse has the power to help me forget Tony, which would only help my and

110 Victor’s relationship in the long run. Victor will understand the things I needed to do with

Jesse, she reassured herself, to make things right for us. I am where I need to be, learning new things.

Another record dropped from the spindle and began spinning. More soulful sounds filled the room.

Jesse brushed his lips against her neck. “I like you, Angela.”

“How can you like me?” she asked. “You just met me.”

“I believe in love at first sight, Sweetie, that’s how.” He took another hit off the joint, and after exhaling, motioned for her to take another hit.

She didn’t refuse and took another hit, and after a few moments answered him. “Then you’re talking to the wrong girl,” she said. “Because I don’t believe in love.”

“Yeah, then why are you wearing an engagement ring on your finger?”

She glanced at her ring, covered it with her hand before looking up at him.

“Then why are you hitting on a female who’s engaged?”

“Because I’m lonely and don’t give a shit,” he said. “And because I’m attracted to you.”

“Good answer, but that doesn’t make it right.”

“I’m not the one engaged,” he said.

“What would you say if I told you I wanted to make out with that go-go dancer upstairs?”

“Shit, I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “What can I say? How you choose to live your life is your business, esa. But to be honest, I’m a little surprised. Surprised that you would tell me that.”

111 “How so?” she asked.

“You don’t seem like the type,” he said. “But if you want me to pay for her, I will. Believe me, I would be more than happy to do that for you," he added with an amused smile. “It’s not the first time I paid for some action.”

She dropped her eyes to her hands resting on her lap. She pictured the little white gloves she wore to church as a child, the ones she’d rest in her lap and fiddle with after Sister Mary would slap her hand for playing footsie with the boys. She felt her mouth form into a pout, as if someone were squeezing the sides of her face the way her mother would squeeze the juice from her halved orange. Her childlike expressions often seemed to come out of nowhere, and when they did, she wanted more than anything to hide behind a dark pair of shades.

“It is kind of sick,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t know why I said it.”

“Must be the weed,” he said.

“Must be,” she said.

Tony would’ve gotten on her case for her even thinking of getting it on with another chick—she’d hinted at it with him before and she was only kidding around, and he went off on her, calling her all kinds of names—and it had disappointed her that Jesse hadn’t done the same, as she hoped he would have.

And it came to her, with the finality of someone uttering their last words that she felt a strong desire to be punished for all the wrong she’d committed in her life. Even though she wasn’t exactly sure of what it all was that she’d done wrong. It was just a feeling, a bad one.

112 She slid from Jesse’s lap and stood up to face him. “Or maybe it’s not the dope making me think these things,” she hissed, como igual una cobra. “But you, Jesse, whatever your last name is.”

He looked at her quizzically, and reached his hand out to hers.

She slapped at it.

He grabbed her wrist and held it tight. “If you’re trying to get me to hit you,

Angela, it’s not going to work,” he said, with clenched teeth. “I don’t hit chicks.”

He let go of her wrist and guzzled the rest of his beer, and then got up and after pushing through the back door, sat down in front of a large water fountain made of

Spanish tiles, beneath a statue of a harp-playing cherub. He waited a moment, and then lit up a cigarette.

Angela stepped out of the warm room; the moistened cement felt cool beneath her bare feet. Crickets chirped into the night air, their songs starting and stopping, and then starting again, before ending altogether.

She shut the door behind her, and keeping her back against it, looked over at

Jesse’s darkened figure in the dim light, and watched the glow of his cigarette. A blanket of puffy black clouds were moving in and the sky looked cut in half. She moved towards

Jesse and asked him for a cigarette, and after sizing her up, as though trying to get an accurate read on her, lit one up and handed it to her. She thought she saw a look of contempt for her pass over his face.

There was a comfortable silence as they smoked together.

An owl flew overhead and into a fruit tree.

She wondered where its mate was.

113 “I lied to you, Angela,” Jesse finally said, snubbing his cigarette on the ground. “I’ve knocked around a few women in my time—and I’m not proud of it.”

He brushed up alongside of her. “So: don’t fuck with me. I want to be nice to you. Understand?” he added in Spanish.

He took the half-smoked cigarette from her hand and extinguished it. Faint drops of water blew against their faces. “Now, come inside,” he said, leading her by the wrist. “Before you catch cold.”

They both went into the bathroom and washed their hands together in the sink with warm, sudsy water, to wipe away the stench of tobacco smoke, and then swished

Scope around in their mouths. He told her he hated the taste and smell of cigarette smoke on a woman.

He pulled her down beside him on the bed, and then gently patted her face with a soft towel, removing any remaining drops of water.

“Tell me you didn’t mean for me to hit you, Angela,” he said with a hint of desperation in his voice. “I don’t want there to be any bad feelings between us.” He tossed the gold-colored towel behind him.

She didn’t have any bad feelings and didn’t know why he was making such a big deal out of it. Was just a friendly little spat, she wanted to reassure him.

She brushed a finger across his eyebrow, and told him she was sorry, she didn’t mean to provoke him. He looked so boyishly sad and she suddenly felt sorry for him.

She then slowly slid down beside him, placed her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. “I’m flying high—too high.”

114 “Don’t fight it, Chica,” he said. “Move with it.”

He switched off the light, and then slowly undressed her, turning her away from him, towards the wall, where she came face-to-face with a framed water color of

The Virgin. She clumsily slid a pillow in front of the painting, listening as Jesse pulled his shirt over his head and undid his belt buckle. She imagined him wrapping the belt around her neck and pulling it tight, after beating her with it. She buried her head in the pillow and drank in Jesse’s male scent, wiping the frightening images from her mind, wondering how she could have such insanely hideous ideas.

She imagined a future conversation she and Marta would have about her thoughts of wanting to be whipped and strangled by Jesse and them laughing until they cried and their stomachs hurt with pleasure, as she re-enacted the imagined scenario with silly, animated gestures.

She sensed her aloneness in the room.

She wondered if it was too late to get up and leave, or if it would piss Jesse off. As she waited for Jesse to come back from wherever he’d gone, she watched the shadows on the wall.

Sharp, jagged shadows shot up against the wall from a flickering candle flame. When flames jumped around like that she believed what Esmeralda had once said about leaping flames. “Restless spirits with something to say,” she’d said in a sober voice to her after they’d downed a couple of drinks one Friday evening after hours inside the office of her candle shop. Angela listened carefully to the quiet noises in the room.

Esmeralda came to mind again, and she wondered how she would react if she were to find out she was down in the basement getting loaded with Carlos’s younger cousin—she

115 pictured her shaking her head with disgust at her for messing around with yet another dude, instead of facing her demons head on.

She began to wonder if Jesse was even Carlos’s cousin. Tony, Victor, Carlos,

Esmeralda—this is all getting complicated, she thought. And just who the hell is Jesse?

What if he’s a pimp trying to get me all strung out on him or worse yet an ax-murderer?

God, what am I doing? I’m about to wreck my life. For the love of God, I have got to pull myself together. She felt around with her toes between the sheets for her panties.

Just as she was about to turn to find her things, she felt Jesse’s warm nakedness next to hers in the bed, and his arm around her, holding her tight. She leaned into his embrace, enjoying the secret moments with this new man, unaware of the loud creaking sounds a nearby gate made with each gust of wind.

After awhile, he pulled away from her and rested on an elbow. “You know, you really shouldn’t be here,” he said, brushing his lips against her shoulder. “Now, I can play the nice guy and take you home, or you can sleep next to me. It’s your call,

Sweetness.”

She turned to face him. A halo of light surrounded him; his face was hard and dark and fierce, yet soft like the moist petals of a wild orchid after a tropical rain. She traced his full lips with her fingers, feeling for a smile, for any warm gesture. There was none—and she felt a rush of excitement and the fear of danger speeding through her all at once, her eyes widening at the idea of lying in secret with him; and out of shame closed her eyes. She tried to find the strength in her to not give in to what she most desired right now, but she figured it was too late to turn back now—she’d already let things go too far and had led him on.

116 What does it really matter if I let Jesse have his way with me? He must know to use a rubber. She was too embarrassed to ask him if he had a Trojan on him, and just trusted that everything would work out the way it was supposed to.

She thought of Tony, and how their shared history could be altered in an instant. Yet, knowing this one act had the power to sever all ties with Tony gave her a sense of relief. No longer would she grapple with should she or shouldn’t she open the door to let him in. Once he found out about her night of debauchery with Jesse, she knew he wouldn’t be knocking on any of her doors. Damn, I’m being such a slut, but I can’t— don’t want to make it stop.

Her eyes met Jesse’s, and when she saw the tenderness in them, she felt a stony coldness towards him she didn’t understand. “Hurt them before they hurt you,” came to mind, a saying her mother used to tell her. She found most of her mother’s ideas about men ridiculous and misguided, and downright cruel, and never bought into any of them.

He continued to stare at her, his eyes drilling down into hers. “God, you’re beautiful.” he said.

She hated the sound of worship and the tone of vulnerability in his voice when he said it, and before he could say anything more, she slapped him across the face, then sunk her teeth into the darkest part of his flesh.

“Ouch. You stupid bitch,” he cried out, yanking her head back against the pillow. “You bit me.”

A harsh north wind blew. The large basement window rattled, and a neighbor’s gate continued to swing and creak in the wind, slamming shut with a loud

117 bang. Another gust of wind blew against the blue-tinted window and a flash made the room go blue from a bolt of lightning.

“Let go of me,” Angela snapped at Jesse, slapping and hitting at him. Her fingernails scratched his face, and he struck her with his palm.

A loud crack ripped across the sky, and then another, ending with a thud of rain against the window.

The candle flame died and the room sunk into darkness—and she let him consume her.

She felt him deep inside of her, and her heart cried out as though it’d been pierced with a thousand swords because moving in rhythm with him began to feel so good and so real and so familiar, yet so wrong and so dangerous, the feelings all tangled together into one hideous, monstrous ball that rose and fell as her body floated along waves of fear and excitement and moments of shameful ecstasy; and she wanted to scream. She hated herself for hurting Victor, and possibly Tony, but she couldn’t help herself, the pull of Jesse’s intense hatred and desire for her was too strong; and when the moment was right, she stripped Victor’s engagement ring from her finger with her lips and tongue, spitting the ring from her mouth to the floor. Just a moment of weakness.

Angela stood out on the balcony of her pad beneath a late autumn sun, shaking the ice in her drink like a pair of dice, as she studied the puffs of clouds stretched across the blue skies in the shape of snow angels. She took another hit of her smoke with

118 a squint of her eye, and continued humming along to the Jazz Samba album playing on the stereo Jesse had bought her for their three-month anniversary.

That was almost two months ago.

They’d been insanely inseparable (after she’d nicely broken it off with Victor, who was now seeing a nice Nicaraguan woman he’d met at his church), and she and

Jesses would love and beat on each other nightly after getting bombed out of their minds, and when they found they couldn’t love each other without wanting to hurt each other, be it in the streets or the privacy of their bedroom, they’d realized they had better end things before they ended up killing each other, going their separate ways. That was, before he’d been sent back to prison for dealing drugs. And as much as Angela sometimes missed

Jesse, she tried not to think about those times—she didn’t like what she had become and who she had been.

The last time she and Jesse had gotten high together on Angel dust, she’d taken a lit match to his Harley while they were in an Arizona desert surrounded by blue mountain; she laughed as she watched the bike explode, the flames shooting upwards, like a fireworks display, up into the bands of purple and crimson pink colors stretched across an azure sky. And when they’d gotten back to San Francisco in one piece, and after they’d both gotten high together on more dust and alcohol, he’d held her over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge as punishment for destroying his new motorcycle, until the wheels of their lives almost came off. Her gut ached at the memory of trying to pull him down with her until they almost went tumbling down together, to the rough waters below.

119 Everything seemed to have happened in slow motion. “Move with it, hombre.

Don’t fight it,” is what she’d said to him, as she dared him to go down with her. With an unforgettable look of agonizing fear and at the same time an unimaginable force of strength, he’d pulled them both back before they’d completely gone over into the shadowy darkness. She could still see the tall towers of the bridge and the dark blur of the sky staring back at her, when she allowed herself to linger on the memory.

She shook her head, then took a final drag of her cigarette and while crushing it in the ashtray, recalled the closing act of the piece . . . afterwards, stunned and dazed, she and Jesse wandered towards and through Golden Gate Park, and after kicking and pulling at one another, because she wanted to go one direction; and Jesse, another, they stumbled into a grove of thick foliage where several homeless Vietnam vets had set up camp. And after partying and carrying on with the vets for awhile, she and Jesse crawled over to a thicket of big glossy leaved plants and made mad love, not caring who was around or who could hear them, before falling asleep in each other’s arms. She wondered how she and Jesse had gotten to the place they had, and at what point she stopped caring about how far their insatiable hunger for each other would take them.

With that thought, Angela finished off her soda and waved back at Marta,

Julien, Rudy, and John; the four of them were harvesting fruit from Rudy’s persimmon tree to give to Esmeralda. There’d be persimmon pie and persimmon bread and persimmon cookies, and she knew Jesse would be glad to receive another care package from the gang. She looked forward to helping Esmeralda with the mixing, the rolling, and the baking of the desserts, and to smelling the sweet aroma of persimmon pastries flowing through the old Victorian from the kitchen ovens.

120 Angela rolled the ball of her berry lip gloss along her lips and then went back indoors, and after she’d turned off the stereo and slipped the vinyl record back into its cover, she glanced down at the coffee table, at the copy of Confessions Jesse had given to her before he’d been sent away, and then at the stacks of cardboard boxes lined up against the living room and dining room walls. She would soon have her things moved into one of the upper rooms of Esmeralda and Carlos’s Victorian—the managing partners at the firm had decided to let her go for coming to work high and for fighting with Jesse in front of everyone in the office, despite Jax’s pleas to keep her on. She didn’t blame them.

She let out a sigh containing an odd mixture of apprehension, sadness, and relief, and a weird form of acceptance; though through it all she felt a calm inner peace she’d never known before.

When she heard the tap at the front door, she slowly pulled it open for Tony.

He stood beneath the overhang, brushing autumn leaves from his hair and dust from his jeans and shirt. A row of thick pumpkins sat atop the wooden porch railing behind him. He looked good to her, standing there with the sun at his back.

Tony breathed in deeply and then smiled a relaxed, happy smile. “Ready to go?” he asked, while pocketing a pair of work gloves.

She blew out the flame of a candle resting on an antique stand beneath a painting of The Last Supper she’d recently spotted at a thrift shop, and after taking a moment to admire her find, turned towards Tony, and smiling, said, “Yes, I’m ready.”

They would go to their twelve-step meetings and rap groups together, and afterwards have dinner together alone or with friends, and then ride out to beach and take

121 a long walk along the sandy shore, or walk along one of the many scenic routes in and around the City, and talk and laugh, and get to know each other all over again, remember the sides of themselves they’d forgotten, all beneath what she imagined deepening shades of turquoise sky.

She knew it wouldn’t be easy starting all over, that she and Tony both had a lot of their own hang-ups to deal with, and a lot of things to iron out between them.

Feelings were raw on both sides.

But, she was determined to make things right. At least they were both single—that was a good start.

She walked towards where Tony stood, at the top of the stairwell, and smiling a toothy smile, pulled a stem of leaves from his hair.

After he helped her with her sweater, she turned to him, and softly said,

“Thank you, Tony, for being there for me, in all my craziness. And for finding Peaches.”

He brushed an ash from her face, and then brought his arms around her. “Just don’t let her get away again, then I’ll have to go and track her down like a mad man,” he added with a light-hearted laugh. “And you know how crazy I can get.”

She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or to cry, and when he pulled her closer, she let go of the crinkled leaves she held in her hand, watching with one eye, as they fluttered along the soft autumn wind, and into the light.

WORKS CITED

Works Cited

Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. 2nd ed. Saint Paul:

Graywolf Press, 2008. Print.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 1983. Print.

Bradshaw, John. Healing the Shame That Binds You. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health

Communications, Inc., 1988. Print.

Burroway, Janet and Elizabeth Stuckey-French. Writing Fiction: A Guide to the

Narrative Craft. 7th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Print.

Davidson, Rob. The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and

William Dean Howells. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Print.

Dostoevsky, Feodor. Crime and Punishment. Ed. George Gibian. 3rd ed. New York:

W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. Print.

Eggers, Paul. “Growing as a Writer.” Engl 520/620: Writer’s Workshop. Ed. Paul Eggers.

Chico: Mr. Kopy Downtown School & Office Supply, 2011. 13-14. Print.

---. “Realist Subversions in Jesus’ Son.” Handout. English, 520/620: Writer’s Workshop.

Chico State University, Chico, CA. Fall 2011. 1. Print.

Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behavior. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Print.

---. Because They Wanted To. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Print.

Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Print.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Print.

123 124 James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Ed. S.P. Rosenbaum. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton

& Company, 1994. Print.

---. The Wings of the Dove. New York: Signet Classic, 1999. Print.

Lamb, Robert Paul. Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern

Short Story. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Print.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Eds. Sally and Robert

Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. Print.

---. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” O’Connor Collected Works. New York: The Library

of America, 1988. Print.

Stagner, Sheila Michelle. “Night at the Drive-in.” 2013. TS.

Wallace, David Foster. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. New York: Back Bay Books,

2007. Print.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Print.