“But I can’t think of anything you could want that you can’t get here,” she said, “except for CDs, and you can walk to Flashman’s from here. Is it the signs?”
All I could do was shake my head and then go back to work replacing the machine head on a beautiful old Guild I was in the middle of repairing while Nia went off on a new tangent.
The store signs seem to me to be one of the more obvious examples of the area’s Old World ambience. Most are in English, in various kinds of old-fashioned script, but some of the shops still have signage in Dutch, dating back a hundred years, and the buildings are mostly tenanted by generations of the same families. My business fits right in with the old bakeries, cafes, wool shops, antique stores, bookshops, art galleries, cabinetmaker’s shops, grocery stores, butcher shops and other enterprises where services and goods alike are all offered in an old-fashioned manner—with courtesy and an unfailing attention to the customer’s needs. The goods are handmade, the produce, meats and poultry all come from local farms. In the cafes, the coffee is roasted and ground on the premises. In the bakeries, the dough is rolled on flour-strewn wooden tables and everything is baked in large, old-fashioned ovens, filling the air with the irresistible aroma of fresh-baked bread and pastries.
Nia’s complaints to the contrary, within two weeks of moving into the area I was doing all my shopping locally. There was no more occasion to stand in long lines at the mall grocery store or fight the traffic in the parking lots. I still drive out-of-town for my wood, but everything else I want I can find within a few blocks of home. My only other needs—machine heads, fret wire, inlays, strings and the like that I need for my business—I have delivered by FedEx or UPS, and if I have to walk a few blocks to meet the trucks because the drivers won’t carry my deliveries to my door, I don’t mind at all, enjoying the chance to explore some unfamiliar lane or shop on the return trip.
The neighborhood is so self-contained, and I’ve spent so much time in it over the past few months, that the walk from Johnny Devlin’s apartment in the Combat Zone leaves me feeling somewhat culture-shocked—a sensation that’s amplified by the incredible circumstance I’ve found myself in since I woke in Devlin’s body this morning. Normally the walk would have taken an hour or so, but it’s closer to two hours before I’m finally standing in front of the three-story brick and stone town house where I’ve been living for the past few months.
It’s almost nine, but the lights are still off in the workshop. Normally, I would have been in there by eight. But I’m not in there, am I? Or even in the apartment upstairs. I turn to regard Devlin’s reflection in the window of the wool shop across the street from my building. I’m out here. Only my body is inside. Upstairs, in the apartment.
I cross the street with a sense of mounting dread. I feel as though I’ve stumbled into a dangerous no-man’s-land, a place ruled by neither sense nor logic, where every step I take will be the wrong one. Approaching is the moment that will tell me the real truth: either I am who I think I am, or my mind’s taken a side trip into some alternate reality that mimics the city I know but where nothing is familiar anymore—not even myself.
What if it is true? What if I’m not who I think I am?
The concept overwhelms me. When I reach the front stoop of my building, I have to turn away. I sit down on my haunches, the cobblestones underfoot, my back against the short wall that encloses my neighbor’s garden.
Who am I? I have only myself; I have only what my memory tells me and no real way of knowing if it’s true—not when every physical sense tells me I’m someone else. And there’s no one I can turn to and ask, “Who am I?” No one who knows me well enough. Both my father and Janossy are dead. Nia tends to talk more than listen. My last long-term relationship was with a woman named Donna Corey whose two enthusiasms in life were playing bass and riding her motorcycle. It’s been three years now since she joined a band on the West Coast, hopped on her Harley and rode out of my life.
Everyone else is an acquaintance. They only know my surface, what I look like, not the details of who I am. There’s no one I can turn to and reveal some secret that only the two of us know, some revelation that will cut through the impossibility of my present appearance to reveal its lie.
If it even is a lie.
No, I tell myself. Don’t start on that again.
But it’s hard to be logical. I can feel the panic welling up inside me once more, a swelling wave of hysteria and dark despair. If there was only one person I could turn to, one person to confirm that I haven’t gone crazy, that the world has...But there’s not. I have nothing, no one to hold on to, not one anchor to reality except for what lies inside my head.
What lies inside my head. All these memories. So many of them, with such detail. How can they all be lies?
I can remember the inlay I was working on last night for Frankie Beale’s mandolin. She plays in a bluegrass band and wanted her name to run the length of the neck in mother-of-pearl—a little bit of old-timey flash and spunk that suits Frankie to a T, tall and lanky, with fingers so long she can span seven frets on her mandolin without a strain. I can still hear the grin in her voice when I called her the other day to tell her I was almost finished with her new instrument.
I can remember the first time my father showed me how to use a saw set to bend the teeth of a handsaw to the angle needed to get a specific cut. Or the way he taught me to use a chisel with such delicacy that there’s no need to go over the surface of the wood again with sandpaper, the cuts are so smooth. I still use that technique when I’m building my instruments.
I can remember Donna showing up for our first date, dark hair hanging loose, pale blue eyes laughing at the look on my face when she told me there was no way she’d show up at a club riding in my van, it was the bike or nothing. And then she just sat there on the Harley in her black leather pants and cowboy boots, tight white T-shirt and jean jacket, waiting for me to get on behind her. The engine throbbed between our legs as she cranked up the throttle and the machine seemed to bolt from the curb as though it had been cut from a leash, and there I was, hanging on tight to her, arms wrapped around her waist, her hair blowing back into my face. In the two years we were together she seemed to take it as a personal challenge to shake me up whenever she could. Leaving had been her greatest success.
I can remember any number of afternoons in the new shop when I’d be working at my bench with Nia kicking her heels against the rungs of the old oak chair by the desk. She loved to hear about Janossy, how he’d emigrated from Hungary to San Francisco, how he’d fallen in with Ginsberg’s crowd and almost given up building instruments for playing them, jazzy Gitan rhythms backing up the beat of declaimed free verse, the women and the wine and all, until he turned on, tuned in and dropped out well before Leary made it a religion, eating peyote buttons and smoking the Mary J., had his moment of satori and ended up missing the Summer of Love because he moved to the farm outside of Newford to follow his true calling.
And I can remember Janossy himself, the Beat perfectly balanced with the Zen monk, his irreverence for propriety and his belief in the basic decency of all women and men, the odd mystic bent with which he approached his woodworking that never seemed odd when it came from him, when he spoke of it. And always that gentle reminder, to keep things simple. Balanced and simple.
“Everything in balance,” he’d liked to say. “Embrace whatever you approach with as much enthusiasm as you can muster, but never forget that the world still goes on, whether you pay attention to it or not. There is no event so momentous that it hasn’t been seen before, no trouble so grand that it won’t look small from another perspective.”
Try this one on for size, I think, and then realize that given the chance, Janossy probably would. And he’d thrive on the experience.
I sigh and get slowly to my feet. Walking up to the door, I automatically reach for my keys before I remember that all I have are the ones to Devlin’s apartment, not my own.
It’s an odd
sensation, going inside the building as though I’m a stranger, walking up to the door of my apartment on the second floor, ringing my own bell. I think I’ve steeled myself for what’s coming next, but nothing could have prepared me for the shock of finally coming face-to-face with myself when the door opens.
To be honest, I’d been half-expecting a complete stranger. No matter how real my memories are to me, the situation I’m in is so improbable that it seems far more likely the flaw’s with me. That I’ve misremembered. That I’m suffering from a multiple personality disorder, something that allows different personalities to inhabit the same body, some of whom were unaware of the presence of the others. Such as the entity that thinks of himself as Max Trader.
But I know the face of the man who answers the door, know it from how many thousand mornings, shaving, combing my hair in front of the mirror, brushing my teeth. Light brown hair drawn back in a ponytail with the slightly receding hairline that expands the height of the forehead. The ears maybe a little too big, nose definitely too big, face long and thin, but not really gaunt. They aren’t the features to launch a film career, but it’s still my face, as familiar as a friend.
The shock of recognition leaves me speechless. I can see a similar expression in the other man’s eyes, but he recovers before me.
“I was wondering when you’d be showing up,” the man wearing my face says.
10 LISA FISHER
Just once, Lisa thought, she’d like to get up on time and not have to suffer through this mad scramble to catch the subway with only seconds to spare every morning. She was running only a few minutes late today, but that didn’t mean much. Something always came up. A run in her stocking. Nothing to wear—or rather, nothing that felt right, even though she might have worn the exact same outfit last week and not only felt perfectly comfortable in it, but attractive as well. She couldn’t find her purse. She could find her purse, but not her keys. She could find both purse and keys, but not the wedding band she wore to forestall unwanted attention both at work and traveling back and forth between the office and home.
One of these days Cleaver was going to fire her, and then where would they be?
This morning she was happy with the simple dark skirt and white blouse she’d laid out last night, the black hose with their subtle pattern of rosebuds and the low heels. Her hair was behaving, but that was only because she now had it cut so short it was difficult for it to do anything but behave. The small rash of pimples on her chin had finally decided that she wasn’t going to make friends with them and had found someone else to visit overnight.
At thirty-eight you shouldn’t have to worry about zits anymore, but she’d never had that kind of luck. Sometimes she wanted to throttle all those unblemished models in the fashion magazines. Not only did they have flawless skin, but they also had someone else to worry about their makeup.
Her own simply wouldn’t go on right this morning. She’d done her face twice now and was so heavy-handed that she kept seeing a tramp looking back at her from the bathroom mirror instead of her own face. Finally she gave up. She scrubbed her face clean for a third time—forgoing foundation, blush and the rest—and settled on some eye shadow and a dab of lipstick. She’d just have to do her face properly after work, before she met Julie for dinner.
Julie. The thought of seeing her tonight made Lisa smile, until she realized that she still hadn’t dealt with the ramifications that having a date with another woman would have on the rest of her life.
Not now, she told herself.
She swept her makeup off the back of the sink and into her purse, gave herself a last critical once-over in the mirror, then left the bathroom.
“Nia, will you please get up,” she called through the open door of her daughter’s bedroom as she passed by.
“Why?”
Lisa stifled the irrational flash of anger that filled her at the sound of that one word. She’d always promised herself that, if she ever had kids, she wasn’t going to treat them the way her own parents had treated her, but more and more lately she found herself turning into her mother. She paused by the doorway and took a deep breath.
“Because otherwise you’ll be late for school,” she said, keeping her voice reasonable.
Nia was sitting up in her bed, her long black hair messy, features still puffy from sleep. Another late night, Lisa realized, seeing the dark circles under Nia’s eyes. Her daughter had embraced the current resurgence of interest in the Beats, staying up until all hours, drinking coffee, writing poetry, listening to bebop jazz that no more appealed to Lisa now than it had the first time around when her older sister had been so enamored of it.
Lisa didn’t have any real argument with what Nia did—at least not in principle. But she knew it wasn’t going to stop here. For now Nia played at being a beatnik in her room, but all too soon she’d be out all night, hanging around with who knew what kind of people, and there would be nothing that Lisa could do about it.
“I’m finished for the year,” Nia said. “It’s summer holidays—remember?”
“Well, I still don’t want you lying in bed until noon every day,” Lisa said.
She winced inwardly. Now that was her own mother, verbatim.
“I won’t,” Nia told her. “I was getting up. I just wasn’t making a big production out of it, okay?”
“If you sleep in every day, you’re never going to get a job.”
“I don’t want a job.”
“Yes, we know that. But we’ve already been through this all before. You’re sixteen now. It’s time you started pulling your weight.”
“Well, I’ve been looking,” Nia said with a shrug, “but no one’s hiring.”
“Well, it would help—” Lisa began, then firmly cut herself off. It would help if you didn’t look like one of the walking dead, was what she’d been about to say. Nia’s pale skin, the black hair, the black clothes—none of it helped.
“It would just be a help,” she said.
“Okay, already.”
Lisa could remember when the two of them had been able to talk to each other without arguing, when they shared everything in their lives, but in the last year or so, all that had changed. Her daughter was a stranger to her now.
She knew she should be able to understand what Nia was going through with this beatnik phase—hadn’t she put her parents through her own hippie days?—but her reason seemed to shut down every time she and Nia talked and it was all she could do to not be constantly on the poor kid’s case, lecturing and haranguing and generally being her own parents.
It didn’t help that she was going through so many changes herself, changes she was no more able to articulate to Nia than her daughter could explain her own.
“I’m sorry,” Lisa said, trying to be conciliatory. “I just have a lot on my mind these days.”
“Like how do I come out to my daughter?”
“I said it was okay.”
Lisa nodded. She started to turn away, then paused again.
“I won’t be home for dinner,” she said, “so you’ll have to get your own.” Nia raised her eyebrows. “Anybody I know?”
“It’s somebody new.”
“Well, I hope he’s nice.”
“He...”
He’s not a he, Lisa wanted to say, but she couldn’t get the words out. It was one thing to finally surrender to her own feelings the way she had, but a whole different story explaining it.
“I’ll just have to see,” she said.
She realized it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words left her mouth and Nia’s face closed down on her. But she couldn't get into it now. “Yeah, well have a good time.”
“I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.”
“Whatever.”
Nia had every reason to be acting this sullen, Lisa knew, but that flash of irritation returned all the same. I have a life, too, she wanted to say. I have a right to some privacy. But instead she did the same thing to Nia that her mother had alway
s done to her and rather than explain herself, she went on the offensive.
“One more thing,” she said. “I don’t want you spending the whole day downstairs bothering Mr. Trader in his shop.”
“I don't bother Max,” Nia told her. “He likes it when I visit. He told me so himself.”
“But that’s just it. This whole friendship makes me feel very uncomfortable. He’s old enough to be your father.”
Nia sneered. “So what’re you saying? You think he’s putting it to me?”
“Nia! I won’t have you—”
“You’re going to be late again,” Nia said, giving her alarm clock a pointed look.
Oh Christ, Lisa thought. Look at the time.
“We are not finished with this discussion,” she said.
“We never are, are we? If it’s not this, you’re ragging me about something else. It never stops, does it?”
All Lisa could do was give her an anguished look. How had it come to this?
“Please don’t do this to me,” she said. She could feel the tears welling in her eyes. “Not when I have to be at work in twenty minutes.”
Nia laid back down on her bed and turned her face to the wall, leaving Lisa only a view of one stiff shoulder.
“So go,” Nia said. “And we’ll talk tonight.”
“Nia, I love you.”
Lisa heard her daughter mumble something.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“I said, have a nice time tonight.”
But that wasn’t what she’d said at all. What Lisa had heard was, “Yeah, well you’ve got a funny way of showing it.”
She wanted to pretend that she’d misheard, that their relationship hadn’t come to the point where her own daughter didn’t think she loved her anymore, but it was no use. Nia and she were becoming as estranged from one another as Lisa had been from her own mother.
Lisa couldn’t fact it. Trying to hide her tears, she fled the apartment.
11 MAX
It takes me a few moments to assimilate what the man wearing my face has just said.