Strength

Lindsay Werner was one of a rare breed of man, the type who dressed impeccably but modestly and showed courtesy to everyone, even those who lacked this quality themselves. He wore crisp white collared shirts and pressed slacks of black or charcoal gray supported by gray suspenders. His ties were shiny, he liked the shiny ones, but of classic hues such as maroon or royal blue embellished with little patterns in gold or gray or black. His glasses had plastic frames to reduce the chance of breakage, and were of a tortoise shell pattern in earthen hues. He wore soft leather wing tipped shoes that were all black so that you would only notice the wing tip quality if you examined them closely, and black nylon socks pulled up over his calves. He had dressed this way in his youth and he dressed this way even now as his years progressed and his neatly trimmed fine hair turned gray at the back of his head but remained black at the crown and his pencil line mustache was all salt and pepper.
He worked for the city arts commission issuing permits to crafters who desired to pedal their wares on the streets of San Francisco. He loved art and music, but lacking the courage, talent, and skill to produce anything himself, he was satisfied with working close to creative people. Although he might only encounter a particular artist once or twice, he enjoyed the momentary proximity. They would come into his office after demonstrating to a panel that they were indeed the artist or crafter who produced the goods they intended to sell, and there, behind the walls of his cubicle, he would accept their check or credit card and write out their permit and laminate their photograph into an official street vender identification badge. It was in this way that he met Alice.
She was a painter with long honey colored hair and blue eyes and skin like milk. She wore long flowing scarves of bright colors and knitted hats and billowing goucho pants. Every gesture, every glance of hers was filled with vitality, and spark. She was too young to sport even crows eye wrinkles or fine lines on the forehead. She showed him an abnormal amount of attention there in his office, standing terribly close to him as he filled out the paperwork on a counter beside the desk. It made him tremble. She touched his suspenders and gazed into his eyes and made him completely dizzy.
“Do you like Dashiell Hammett? The Maltese Falcon?” she asked him and he had been scarcely able to nod and cough out a yes.
“Well you remind me of a character from a book like that, the way you look. But are you the villain or the good guy?” she asked him pulling on the suspender a little and turning her face up to his.
“The good guy I hope.” He said honestly.
“Hmm.” She smiled, “I’m sure you are. But we should find out.” She took a step back from him and began to collect her things.
“I’m not, uh… quite finished with your permit yet.” He told her.
“That’s all right.” She said, “You can bring it to me when you pick me up for dinner.”
“D-Dinner?” he stammered.
She nodded,
“Dinner. Tonight. 7pm. You can pick me up on the corner of Geary and Folsom.”
Then she left him standing there alone, sweating and shaking.
He had picked her up that night, exactly at seven, and soon she was living with him, sharing meals with him, sleeping with him, and making love to him. There had never been a woman like Alice before. He gave her money for clothes and art supplies, he bought her jewelry and flowers. She transformed his living room into a makeshift studio, setting up her easel over a sheet, and soon the room was full of pieces of art. Now he was closer than he had ever been to the creative process. He watched her in awe and even sat for her once.
She had a way of asking him for money that he could not refuse. He gave it to her until his account was overdrawn and he was pulling it from his savings.
Then one evening he came home from the office and found that she was gone, every sign of her had vanished. He sat down in the empty living room, full of shock. The trembling and sweating began as it had on the day that he met her and soon it transformed into tears. In the following weeks he searched for her on the streets, looking for her in the places were she used to sell her art. He asked the other vendors but none of them had seen her, no one knew where she had gone. Then one day a little Italian photographer, a young man with long dark hair stared at him for a long moment after he asked about Alice.
“You’re the one that lives on Lombard right? 326? She had me up there sometimes when you were at work. Forget about her. She’s no good. You seem nice, if I had known you I wouldn’t have gone into your bed with her like that.”
He stared back at the man in shock, in terror in disbelief. For the first time in his life he felt an incredible rage. He wanted to grab the young man by the throat. His skin turned red.
“Do you know where she is?” he asked “Is she with you?”
“With me?” the man laughed bitterly, “No. She took up with some business man living in Nob Hill. She won’t see me anymore either. Forget about her. She is no good. She looks like a lamb, but my friend, we are the lambs. She’s the lion.”
Then he had turned away and busied himself shuffling black and white prints, perhaps to hide his own emotion, and Lindsay wondered away down the windy street huddled under his jacket. Now he felt like a character from a Dashiel Hammet novel, most definitely, the good guy, the one who gets duped, and this new awareness of himself stung him fiercely and unrelentingly in the heart.

Strength In Michigan

The first thing she remembers is the heat. With the thunderstorms came the tangible thickness of moist air. It was unlike the dry desert heat she was used to, and the slippery grips of humidity held her limbs and pulled on her strength, dragging her to the floor. For the first days of her stay in Michigan, she sought refuge in the one room of the small Victorian that had an air conditioner. She let her boyfriend drink with his old friends while she remained in the dark coolness of the room, letting the pleasant hum of the machine keep her company.

She was at Marty’s house, an old friend she had heard about so often from Jay, her boyfriend. The house was on a well maintained residential block, lined with tall, sprawling bowed trees that were just starting to turn yellow. It was a street of single-family detached homes, all nearly identical in form and lot size. Each one had a small front yard, a squat rectangular house, and a wooden fence that wrapped around the side and outlined a long rectangular yard. It was a racially mixed neighborhood of working class families and an ice cream truck drove through each day a little after noon. From the sidewalk, there were six steps up to the screened-in porch. Above the roof of the porch was a pointed rooftop with a window facing the street. It was the window for the one second-story room where Marty slept. The screened in porch was the only space in the house where smoking was permitted, thus, it was the place to lounge and drink through the long humid days. The space was accommodating for many people, providing plenty of places to sit. Along the walls were two long mismatched couches, one on each side of the front door. There were a cluster of chairs, some wooden, some padded, some metal. At the far end of the porch was a circular wooden table with some chairs pushed into it, as though waiting for the players of a soon-to-be poker game. The porch floor revealed the age of the house and its abuse in the extreme natural elements of Michigan. It was worn and brown. The grains of the wood had faded and splintered long ago. The furniture was badly beaten, the fabric stained and thin. It was the party room and was treated as such. There were cigarette butts scattered on the floor, smelly ashtrays were filled with the delicate gray remnants of tobacco and paper. There were empty beer cans and bottles that sat on tables and the floor, waiting for the maid that would never come.

Nightly, a group of three to fifteen would congregate on the porch, each laden with some form of alcohol. She knew this was their habit, their form of celebration, so she tried to relax into it. She knew Jay had missed his friends, that he had felt isolated with her in California, but she thought she could sense his cognitive dissonance, his feeling of distance from the people he once thought of as family. The memories were brighter than the people that stood before him now. She sat on the couch, sipping her beer and trying not to wince as clouds of smoke ambled past her in their search for the night outside the screens. Jay was talkative and looking stylish with his grandfather’s fedora tilted on his head. She would watch Dara, Marty’s Latvian girlfriend who always looked bored as she sat at the round table. She was the only completely sober person on that narrow porch, she was going through a court-ordered DUI program and couldn’t drink.

Marty was about 42. He was tall and had a stout stomach and meaty arms and legs. His complexion was pinkish and extended to his strawberry blond hair and eyebrows. He had an extra ten years on the majority of the group. As far as she could tell, he was the one most able to function in society. He had bought the house in the early nineties and filled it with some roommates, and because the mortgage was so cheap, he only worked a few months in the winter delivering pizzas. Marty drank socially, but he never got into the hard drugs or severe alcohol abuse that almost everyone else had. He was the stability of the group, not as cool as the others, not as interesting, but the one solid rock with a house that the rest of them revolved around. If someone left town and came back years later, they always came to Marty’s house.

Jay had always described his friends as artists and musicians. But from what she saw, it seemed to be a thing of the past. Something they talked about and remembered, but not something they did. The majority of them seemed to be in their late twenties, but they seemed so old to her, like their long decline had begun long ago.

After the first couple of days on their visit, Fran, Jay’s old girlfriend, came over with her new boyfriend, Mike, (a guy who had been Jay’s friend). She knew all about Fran and Jay’s complicated relationship. Among her many problems related to substance abuse, Fran had been prosecuted by the district attorney for domestic abuse (she had broken Jay’s arm) and had had several abortions she only told Jay about afterwards. When she came over, the air was noticeably more tense. There were the old problems, the lingering questions and hurt and the new lover’s presence, packed into a small space. Fran walked with a small stagger and her eyelids remained slightly closed, like she was always one step away from intoxicated sleep. Jay carried a picture of Fran in his wallet and mentioned many times how pretty she had been with her big doe-like eyes. The girl on the couch had given herself over to alcohol. She wore long men’s style shorts and a stained wife-beater that accentuated her bulging stomach. Her legs were hairy and her hair was a mess of faded pink and blond dreadlocks. But it was the way Fran sat and talked that revealed her the most, she just seemed to be so tired of everything…Michigan, the old friends, the faded memories, the alcohol, her body…

One day, she and Jay planned to prepare a small barbecue. They left Fran and Mike and Dara and Marty and the rest of them back at the house and they walked to the store together, hand in hand. They bought some red meat and potatoes and vegetables for the shish-kabobs. When they walked into Marty’s house an hour later, their hands hurting from the weight of the heavy plastic bags, they knew something had shifted. Fran had gotten very drunk and was making a mess and talking about the ways Jay had hurt her. Dara and Marty had gotten into a fight. There was another couple downstairs in the midst of an argument. The entire house was tense. Jay went to try to talk to Fran in the living room.

Seeing no other plan, she continued on to the small kitchen with the groceries. It was shaped like a very small “L” and was just barely big enough for three people to stand in. There was one long window that faced the green backyard and two long windows perpendicular to it that faced the fence and the house on the opposite side. The fridge in the corner was covered with magnets and cartoons and a newspaper article about a potential police officer who had been denied entry into the academy because his IQ was too high. She took a deep breath and inhaled the soft light of the late afternoon. The cabinets were dingy white and the floor was covered in a checkered Formica pattern. The kitchen seemed so cool and calm to her, a welcome oasis from the drama that was all around her. She got out the cutting board and opened the bags of vegetables. She stood there, slicing and chopping, trying to move forward with the plan for a barbecue. The afternoon light streamed in through the windows. She felt anxious energy all around, but focused on her labor and remaining as calm as she could. Jay came up behind her and put his arms around her shoulders. “You are so strong,” he said. She smiled, happy that he saw her as a pillar that wouldn’t crumble. Then her attention moved back to preparing the meat.

Vigilance

It was too hot. That was the one thing that was clear. Too hot to be out here. Too hot to be wearing three layers of clothing: the undershirt, the sweater and the regulation light blue button up shirt. Too hot to be standing and trying in any way that he could think of to look like he was actually busy, like he was concentrating on something, like there were urgent things for him to do, and not look like he was just standing, out here in the sidewalk, away from the cool tranquility of the museum’s halls, and just standing here alone, bored, tired, with nothing to do but look at the people walking by him, maybe wondering who had decided to put this poor guy out here, what was he there for really?
He stretched lightly and looked around, up at the slight rustle of the branches, at the tall thick trees that lined the sidewalk across from where he stood. He tried to remind himself that there was a reason that they wanted someone out here, as invisible as it might be, he was indeed serving a purpose. It was a strange dangerous world and right when you least expected it, something terrible could happen, and maybe then, they would say: “Thank god he was there to stop it! Imagine if he had been inside?” and then he would smile full of pride and they would look at him with great admiration, because he had saved them all, and that had been his role all along, if they had only paid attention, if they had only known, if they had only followed the chain of logic all the way to its conclusion.
He was in fact ready to be a hero. If the opportunity didn’t come along, well, that wasn’t really his fault. If he was truly ready, then he was a hero already, and as he thought of that, he puffed his chest out and ran his hand over his shaved head and breathed a little easier.
Just then, three girls in bicycles were about to cross the street, just a few feet away from him. He looked over at them. One had long curly brown hair and another had short blonde hair and a third was a little full figured but still pretty cute and he smiled at them and nodded but they looked right through him, as if he was a pillar on a building, just another fixture of the landscape. He looked right at them, letting them know that he was an avatar for authority, for the one authority that ruled over this little land of trees, and buildings, and displays, and air conditioning, and he was not smiling anymore, but still they didn’t look at him, even when they rolled by, so very close to him and even when they stopped their bikes only a few feet away.
They were discussing where to go next, and how much longer to keep on riding, and he could hear it all from where he was standing, and he was right there, so close, and he wondered if maybe they were looking at him off the corner of their eyes, maybe they were having wild thoughts about this handsome man in uniform that was standing right there, so close to them, so available, maybe their thoughts were not unlike the thoughts he had, but they wouldn’t dare to look straight at him, because he was so strong, because he was so powerful. If that was the case, then that was ok, he could understand that, he could see that he could be pretty intimidating, what with his blue uniform, and his radio, which crackled every once in a while, and his shaved head, and his strong muscular body. It was not in vain that he went to they gym four times per week, and he knew that any girl that was truly a girl would notice, even through the three layers of clothing that were making him sweat too much.
Just then he worried that maybe they had noticed the sweat on his forehead, even though they seemed to be looking up the street and talking amongst themselves. He didn’t want to disgust them, not at all. He reached up and wiped some of the sweat with his long sleeve and he was surprised to realize how much he was truly sweating. It was coming down his forehead in big long drops, and, if the girls were looking at all, they would have surely noticed. Maybe that was why they were now going away. He could see their asses pressed against the bicycle seats as they rolled up the sidewalk away from him, and he wondered if it was the sweat that finally had made them go away, if it was the sweat that had disenchanted them with the handsome guard that stood before them, keeping them safe.
If it had been the sweat, at least he could rest easy in the thought that it wasn’t his fault. He did not choose the uniform, he did not choose to stand out here, he did not choose the shift or the hours. He was just a man ready to be a hero and he would go wherever they told him to go. He couldn’t expect these girls to understand that. And it was just too hot, too hot to be out here.