May 5, 1997, le denouement de la grande passion.  I replace the phone receiver in the living room, stay seated on the single bed which serves as a couch.  

   The front door opens and my San Francisco roommates are home. Maria, part Hispanic and a mixture of other things, is small and trim. She releases her son Ichiro, who barely knows me, but is brave enough to crawl towards me. He stops then redirects himself towards his father Barry, a Japanese-American with the same body build as Maria, who is switching on the television. 

   “How are you?” Maria asks. 

   “I'm fine.” 

    “Looks like you've seen a ghost.” 

    I shrug.  “Andre called.” 

    “The guitar player?” 

    I nod. She stands in the living room doorway, waiting. 

   “He's living with another woman and says it's over between us.” 

   “I never liked him.” 

   My eyes blaze. “You only met him once!”   

   “I could tell he was no good,” she says and scoops Ichrio from the plants she grows so well in the cool San Francisco air.  Barry settles into the beanbag, watching the Giants. He glances at Maria, then me. “That's a little harsh,” he says. 

   “No, it isn't,” she says. “He didn't look like he took good care of her. After he helped her move in last week, he was anxious to leave. Looked like a loser to me.” 

   Jim stumbles into our conversation, mumbles something, then leaves for the kitchen to rummage for a snack to feed his thin frame. Nothing will make him fat, just like nothing made Andre gain weight, although he gobbled my love and money until nothing was left of either. 

   Andre has finally told me the truth. But I had dreamed it. Her name is Meredith. She is 32, five years older than both of us, has had four abortions, suffers from her crazy ex-lover flute player she threw out and replaced with him, the guitar player. They are now street musicians – all three of them: the flute player alone, and Meredith the violinist with Andre the guitar player. 

   Andre and Meredith now perform on the San Francisco street corners as she had with the flute player.  I warn Andre that she will get pregnant, to trap him. He says, “No,” that he uses birth control. I know how he loves and know she will be pregnant. She is, within six short weeks. 

   She owns a car. I wonder how long it will take Andre to drag her down to his level as he had done to me.  Perhaps she will be wiser, catching him with her pregnant belly. 

   Summer progresses.  I hear their music on every San Francisco touristy street corner, but especially by Woolworth's where the cable car turns around.  When I chance to see them together, or him alone with the amplifier my secretarial wages bought him, I pale.  My stomach sickens. I turn back. 

   My roommates vacation in August. Alone in the huge house in Glen Park, my fingers touch the walls, the mirrors, Marie's plants, my cluttered room, neglected typewriter, the vial of tranquilizers, and then my first death. 

   My friend and roommate from college Mary Kay, a Vista volunteer near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, was working on a Sioux Indian reservation.  She was killed in a car accident. Broken neck. 

   “I'll cry,” I say in my room, within some young man's arms. 

   “That's all right, Zola,” he says. 

   “It isn't. You don't know how I cry.” 

    “That's all right,” Clint repeats. 

   “It won't be.” 

   “Anything you want to do is all right with me.” 

   “I can't bear being alone anymore,” I whimper. 

   “I know how you feel,” he says. I cry as Clint, a 20 year old man, who has lived through five deaths this year, holds me.  My banshee wails drives me from the bed and I stand in the middle of his room. Stop.Turn towards him as if an actress. 

   “Are you sure this is okay, Clint?” 

   “If that's what you want.” 

   “Does it bother you, for me to cry like this?” 

    “Not really.” 

   I leave the room, wailing as I had done alone. Clint follows, holds me.  I try to tell him of Mary Kay's death and of our life together back in college. Of the guitar player, and how all love ceases to breathe in me, and that I too must die. 

   My cries soak into the walls. Clint invites me back to bed. I go, but my belly shakes and my legs thrash against his lovemaking.  

   He tries to hush my sorrow, but his hands are rough, his body unlearned. His own grief won't open: his mother is dead, other relatives, a close friend too.  His wealthy father doesn't want him with all his problems.  

   “I'm too old for this,” I say, numbering my 27 year history to his greedy youth. I can't bear his touch in the sacred spaces once prized by my Quebecois lover. 

   He tells me, when I visit him at his first apartment in Berkeley, that we are like the Herman comic strip. We fight, insult each other, then find comfort clinging to each other's grief. I don't know if he is a virgin or if I am alive. I am tired as he paws me when I hunger for sleep and, like a virgin, he wants to do it repeatedly. 

   He leaves to travel around the world.  August falls into September, a Stockholm postcard tells me of his travels and return, but we do not meet again. 

   September turns into October. I am not so pale. I haven't seen the French-Canadian guitar player for a while. I know he has stayed, awaiting his unborn child.  Meredith was pregnant in May, the child will be like me, born early February. 

                         November 1977 

   “Someone's here to see you,” Maria calls from the front hallway. I sense curiosity from the lilt in her voice.  I open my bedroom door, in the back, by the kitchen, leave my cave-dwelling where I write about good vampires versus bad vampires to save the planet form the invasion of evil UFOs, The 13th Vampire Mission. 

   I don't recognize the tall, thin, black-haired man with glasses, as he stands in the hallway with a backpack. Then you call my name. My soul reaches towards you, hoping you are someone else. Perhaps you are his brother from Quebec…  

   ”Zola?” you repeat. 

   “Yes?” 

   You shuffle. I suggest you remove your backpack.  You do, and hold out a letter for me.  “From Corrine.” 

   I am speechless, unable to recover from your French accent.  Only Andre made my name sound so full and round with love. 

   “Corrine?” I have not seen her for two years, since we stood on a street corner in Vancouver. She was leaving, on her way to join her helicopter pilot, up north, in Alberta. 

    “I was in Alberta,” you say haltingly.  “She tell me you live here. Give you letter. She say you are good person.” 

   I take the letter. “Are you hungry?” 

   “No,” you say shyly, but Maria overhears, and, motherly, ushers us into the kitchen and brews tea while I read Corrine's letter. 

   “You are Pierre?” I say, raising my eyes from her handwritten scrawl. 

   “Yes, I am. Corrine tell me to give you letter.” 

   “All the way from Alberta! When did you get into town?” 

   “Now,” you say and Maria gives you a cup of tea. 

   “You must be tired,” she and I say together. 

   “Yes,” you say, shaking your head. Your long black hair  hides your eyes. 

   I ask about Corrine, then realize I am selfishly keeping you awake.  “I can put you up for a few days,” I say carefully, checking Marie's face as she prepares dinner. She is not pleased, but the single bed in the living room has slept many of her friends.  “But only for a few days. There's four of us adults here and little Ichiro. It gets crowded with one bathroom.” 

   “No, that is not necessary, Zola,” you say, sensing my discomfort with Maria. 

   “It's okay,” she says and leaves the kitchen. 

   “Roommates,” I sigh. “I never know how they're going to be. If I had my own place like I used to, you'd be welcome longer than just a few days, Pierre. I know how it is traveling. It must be worse in a different country where they don't speak your native tongue. You're from France, eh? Not Quebec?  Did you go through Quebec?”   

   Your tired eyes close.  I escort you to the bathroom, turn on the hot water and let it run into a bucket, to conserve it.   

   “It's the drought. Can't waste water.  I’ll use this water to clean your clothes tomorrow.” 

   “You are too kind, Zola,” you say.

   “I remember hitch-hiking…..” my voice fades, remembering such days and nights with Andre, going to New Orleans, then coming back. 

   “How long is he staying?” Maria asks in the living room. 

   “I don't know. A week or so, nothing more. I sit on the bed and play with Ichiro as she changes his diaper and he gurgles. I look pass the television, into the other living room and through the plant-covered front window, out into the small hill that rises where San Francisco ends and Daly City begins. 

   “That's a long time,” she says. 

   “It isn't,” Barry says from his corner of the room, still watching the Giants. 

   Maria looks at the father of her child. They have not married, although Barry desires that more than she does. 

   “A week is long, with one bathroom.  And you don't even know him,” she says turning towards me as she puts Ichiro onto her shoulder. 

   “My best friend Corrine sent him! He's okay. He's too young to hurt anyone.” 

   “That isn't what I was thinking,” she says but will not explain as she goes upstairs. 

   “He won't stay longer than a week, if that's what you want,” I shout after her, then turn to Barry, “What's got into her?” 

   Barry and I often talk at the kitchen table. He is the only one in the house who I can discuss my novel with. He also talks of his feelings as an unmarried father, a Japanese native Californian, his desire to open his own refinishing shop, as well as the comforting, mundane everyday, “How are you?” and “Any eggs left?” 

   “Don't worry about her,” he says. “Your friend can stay the week.  She'll get over whatever is bothering her.” 

   The group from Sausalito is over, smoking marihuana. You and I join them in the living room, but you are still tired after your shower and nap. When my roommates were vacationing in August, I nearly finished The 13th Vampire Mission.  But I can't write when they are home.  They make me feel like a barbarian from some primitive fires, invading their suburban Garden of Eden of laid-back marihuana, and then cocaine highs, coupled with television and talk of the group's inter-related sexual affairs.   

   When I try to unwind by discussing the ideas in Vampires, their eyes blur and they offer me a jay. 

   You were to sleep on the bed in the living room, but the group settles into a long night. I have no intention of inviting you into my single bed because you are much too young – five years younger – and I am not attracted to you. I clear my typewriter and books to give you room to unroll your sleeping bag.