John Haskell - Out of My Skin

Jane was standing on the deck — taking in the view of the San Fernando Valley — when her phone rang.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said. She didn’t recognize me at first because I was using Scott’s phone.

“Where are you?”

I was sitting in my car on some street. “Where are you ?”

“Watching a movie,” she said.

She explained that she was at Christine’s house, watching Isabel following her brother around the house, filming him with a camera. When I asked if I could drive up and visit her there, she told me later, that later would be better, and we agreed to meet at the café we’d been to on Sunset.

I found a place to park in the same neighborhood I parked the last time I was there, and when I walked into the restaurant Jane was already sitting at a table. She had her back to the window, and I sat across from her, facing the window.

She was wearing a sleeveless dress, and I felt like raising my water glass and making a toast, to the dress or to her, and I was thinking about what exactly I wanted to toast when she said, “Not with water.” Apparently you weren’t supposed to make a toast with water, but since my glass was raised, she raised hers. It had a piece of lemon floating in with the ice, as did mine, and we touched the rims of our glasses. I’d heard somewhere that when you raise a glass it’s considered polite to look at the person, so I looked at her, and for a moment she looked at me, and then we drank.

I ordered a chai with milk, Jane ordered an omelet with fries, and I noticed that, when she ordered, the table rocked slightly. When I jiggled it, I could see which leg was causing the wobble, so I grabbed a paper napkin from under my knife, folded the napkin, and bent down. I was kneeling under the table, my head under the table, lifting the uneven table leg and placing the folded napkin under the leg, when I saw her face poke down. She was looking at me.

“Better?” I said.

“Better,” she said.

And that’s when our food came. We sat there, eating and talking, like something we’d done a thousand times, but now it seemed. .

“How was your day?” I said.

“What I did?”

“Or later.”

“Do I have plans, you mean?”

She moved a small vase of flowers to the side of the table and then slid the plate of french fries to a point equidistant between us. We ate french fries together, and when they were gone, all I could think to say was “You look different,” because she did.

“Than what?”

“What I imagined.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I guess.”

Then we paid the bill. She drank the last of the water from her glass, placed it on the round water mark, exactly where it had been before, and when she looked up, I saw her eyes and the life that seemed to spill out of them onto her face.

“Shall we go?” she said.

She stood up and then I stood up, and she announced that her car was around the corner.

In the Hitchcock movie North by Northwest , Cary Grant plays a man who’s mistaken for a spy. At first unwittingly, then grudgingly, and then, when he meets Eva Marie Saint, with a kind of relish, he actually becomes a spy. Near the end of the movie Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are chased to the cliff above Mount Rushmore. Below them are the faces of the presidents, staring out over the visitor center, and beyond that, to the Great Plains. Martin Landau, part of a gang of actual spies, is trying to kill them. He’s chased them to the edge of this cliff where they slip somehow and fall off the cliff, and they’re hanging on to the stone face of whatever president it is. We can see Cary Grant’s fingers holding on, and we can see Martin Landau step up to the edge of the cliff and place his foot on Cary Grant’s fingers. We can almost hear the bones in his hand crack, and he might easily fall to his death, but Cary Grant keeps holding on, and there’s a struggle and at the end of the struggle Martin Landau is the one we see falling downward into space, getting smaller and smaller, until eventually he disappears.

I followed Jane, past the café tables and out into the sunlight, into the dry air and the evaporating clouds. We walked together around the corner and up the residential sidewalk, walking between the lawns, underneath the palm trees. When she saw her car she stepped into the street and was walking in the street and I was on the sidewalk. She walked to her car with her keys in her hand, and then, electronically, she unlocked the car doors. With a gesture of invitation she said, “Are you coming?”

In her gesture there was ease and grace, and although the gesture itself could have meant any number of things, the beauty of the gesture was its tone. Her tone. They talk about dreams having a tone, and although I wasn’t dreaming, I thought I understood what her tone was.

Theoretically I would have stepped off the sidewalk, onto the soft grass, and walked to the passenger door of her car. Theoretically I would have learned, from what I didn’t do before, how I would now move toward happiness. I would walk to her passenger door and I would open it. It would have been very easy. But instead of doing that, I stepped over the grass and off the curb, and I walked to the street to where she was standing.

“You’re not coming?”

I was standing on the asphalt, looking at Jane and the palm trees lining the street behind her. I was inside my body, in with all the millions of habits I’d spent my life creating. Her invitation was an invitation to be in the world and to see the world in a new way, to see her in a new, and therefore unknown, way. Going to my car and driving off alone, that was already known, and I felt the lure of the already known. She opened her door and stood by her door, holding the door with her hand. I was about to tell her about my car, that I was parked in a different residential neighborhood, in a one-hour-only zone, and I could feel myself about to speak, but as I was about to speak, instead of speaking, I remembered something. I remembered Cary Grant in North by Northwest reaching across the brow of one of the presidents, taking the hand of Eva Marie Saint, pulling her off the face of the president and into his arms.

I’m standing in the street, the image of Cary Grant in my mind turning into an image of Steve Martin, then turning into a single thought: If I’m going to become something, why not become something with Jane. She’s looking at me and I’m looking at her, and the distance between us is like an ocean. And I’m thinking about the ocean, and about how water, when it flows down a stream and enters the ocean, is doing the necessary thing. I know I’m breathing because I can feel the breath coming into my lungs and then leaving my lungs and oddly, it’s happening on its own. I see Jane, wedged between the door and the car, and it’s as if I can see myself. I see myself turn to my right and take a step. I take one step, then another, watching myself as I walk away from the place where I’m standing and the skin I’m standing in. I watch myself walk away from myself, around the back of the car, onto the grass and across the grass to the passenger door. Part of me is standing on the asphalt, watching, and part of me walks to the door. It’s unlocked, so I open it. We both get into the car at the same time, and then she closes her door. I look over at her, fitting into the cushion of the seat, her hands in her lap, the steering wheel in front of her. The keys are in the ignition. She’s looking through the car window, and the light is diffuse but sharp. We’re both aware that I’m looking at her, and then she turns to me and looks at me. I see, as if through my eyes, and I see her entire face. I see the contours of her cheek and the shine on her nose and the freckles below her eyes. I can see her eyes looking into my eyes. She’s looking into my eyes but she’s seeing the person behind those eyes.