K. Dick, for Breaking Bad, for sea otters and mountain lions, for mathematics applied to daily life, and especially for his geometrical method of statistics pedagogy, which he explained so well she almost understood it. The third time she saw him, at a noodle joint where she was forced to pretend not to be hungry because her latest Renewable Solutions paycheck hadn’t cleared yet, she found herself at a crossroads: either risk friendship or retreat to the safety of casual sex.
Outside the restaurant, in light fog, in the Sunday-evening quiet of Telegraph Avenue, she put the moves on Jason and he responded avidly. She could feel her stomach growling as she pressed it into his; she hoped he couldn’t hear it.
“Do you want to go to your house?” she murmured in his ear.
Jason said no, regrettably, he had a sister visiting.
At the word sister, Pip’s heart constricted with hostility. Having no siblings of her own, she couldn’t help resenting the demands and potential supportiveness of other people’s; their nuclear-family normalcy, their inherited wealth of closeness.
“We can go to my house,” she said, somewhat crossly. And she was so absorbed in resenting Jason’s sister for displacing her from his bedroom (and, by extension, from his heart, although she didn’t particularly want a place in it), so vexed by her circumstances as she and Jason walked hand in hand down Telegraph Avenue, that they’d reached the door of her house before she remembered that they couldn’t go there.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Could you wait outside for a second while I deal with something?”
“Um, sure,” Jason said.
She gave him a grateful kiss, and they proceeded to neck and grind for ten minutes on her doorstep, Pip burying herself in the pleasure of being touched by a clean and highly competent boy, until a distinctly audible growl from her stomach brought her out of it.
“One second, OK?” she said.
“Are you hungry?”
“No! Or actually suddenly maybe yes, slightly. I wasn’t at the restaurant, though.”
She eased her key into the lock and went inside. In the living room, her schizophrenic housemate, Dreyfuss, was watching a basketball game with her disabled housemate, Ramón, on a scavenged TV set whose digital converter a third housemate, Stephen, the one she was more or less in love with, had obtained by sidewalk barter. Dreyfuss’s body, bloated by the medications that he’d to date been good about taking, filled a low, scavenged armchair.
“Pip, Pip,” Ramón cried out, “Pip, what are you doing now, you said you might help me with my vocabbleree, you wanna help me with it now?”
Pip put a finger to her lips, and Ramón clapped his hands over his mouth.
“That’s right,” said Dreyfuss quietly. “She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s here. And why might that be? Could it be because the German spies are in the kitchen? I use the word spies loosely, of course, though perhaps not entirely inappropriately, given the fact that there are some thirty-five members of the Oakland Nuclear Disarmament Study Group, of which Pip and Stephen are by no means the least dispensable, and yet the house that the Germans have chosen to favor with their all too typically German earnestness and nosiness, for nearly a week now, is ours. A curious fact, worth considering.”
“Dreyfuss,” Pip hissed, moving closer to him to avoid raising her voice.
Dreyfuss placidly knit his fat fingers on his belly and continued speaking to Ramón, who never tired of listening to him. “Could it be that Pip wants to avoid talking to the German spies? Perhaps especially tonight? When she’s brought home a young gentleman with whom she’s been osculating on the front porch for some fifteen minutes now?”
“You’re the spy,” Pip whispered furiously. “I hate your spying.”
“She hates it when I observe things that no intelligent person could fail to notice,” Dreyfuss explained to Ramón. “To observe what’s in plain sight is not to spy, Ramón. And perhaps the Germans, too, are doing no more than that. What constitutes a spy, however, is motive, and there, Pip—” He turned to her. “There I would advise you to ask yourself what these nosy, earnest Germans are doing in our house.”
“You didn’t stop taking your meds, did you?” Pip whispered.
“Osculate, Ramón. There’s a fine vocabulary word for you.”
“Whassit mean?”
“Why, it means to neck. To lock lips. To pluck up kisses by their roots.”
“Pip, you gonna help me with my vocabbleree?”
“I believe she has other plans tonight, my friend.”
“Sweetie, no, not now,” Pip whispered to Ramón, and then, to Dreyfuss, “The Germans are here because we invited them, because we had room. But you’re right, I need you not to tell them I’m here.”
“What do you think, Ramón?” Dreyfuss said. “Should we help her? She’s not helping you with your vocabulary.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Help him yourself. You’re the one with the huge vocabulary.”
Dreyfuss turned again to Pip and looked at her steadily, his eyes all intellect, no affect. It was as if his meds suppressed his condition well enough to keep him from butchering people in the street with a broadsword but not quite enough to banish it from his eyes. Stephen had assured Pip that Dreyfuss looked at everyone the same way, but she persisted in thinking that, if he ever stopped taking his meds, she would be the person he went after with a broadsword or whatever, the person in whom he would pinpoint the trouble in the world, the conspiracy against him; and, what’s more, she believed that he was seeing something true about her falseness.
“These Germans and their spying are distasteful to me,” Dreyfuss said to her. “Their first thought when they walk into a house is how to take it over.”
“They’re peace activists, Dreyfuss. They stopped trying to be world conquerors, like, seventy years ago.”
“I want you and Stephen to make them go away.”
“OK! We will! Later. Tomorrow.”
“We don’t like the Germans, do we, Ramón?”
“We like it when it’s jus’ the five of us, like famlee,” Ramón said.
“Well … not a family. Not exactly. No. We each have our own families, don’t we, Pip?”
Dreyfuss looked into her eyes again, significantly, knowingly, with no human warmth—or was it maybe simply no trace of desire? Maybe every man would look at her this heartlessly if sex were entirely subtracted? She went over to Ramón and put her hands on his fat, sloping shoulders. “Ramón, sweetie, I’m busy tonight,” she said. “But I’ll be home all night tomorrow. OK?”
“OK,” he said, completely trusting her.
She hurried back to the front door and let in Jason, who was blowing on his cupped fingers. As they passed by the living room, Ramón again clapped his hands to his mouth, miming his commitment to secrecy, while Dreyfuss imperturbably watched basketball. There were so many things for Jason to see in the house and so few that Pip cared for him to see, and Dreyfuss and Ramón each had a smell, Dreyfuss’s yeasty, Ramón’s uriney, that she was used to but visitors weren’t. She climbed the stairs rapidly on tiptoe, hoping that Jason would get the idea to hurry and be quiet. From behind a closed door on the second floor came the familiar cadences of Stephen and his wife finding fault with each other.
In her little bedroom, on the third floor, she led Jason to her mattress without turning any lights on, because she didn’t want him to see how poor she was. She was horribly poor but her sheets were clean; she was rich in cleanliness. When she’d moved into the room, a year earlier, she’d