Gary looked like a scared squirrel in a suit as he went back to dry-washing his hands.

  “I know a guy you’d dig big time, Gary,” Jamey said. “Name’s Plinio, from San Salvador. Makes dirt wages as a welder up on 33rd. Adores the wife he left behind. Candelaria. To ‘keep her in my heart,’ as Plinio puts it, he memorizes love poems, and practices them inside his welder’s helmet where nobody else can hear. Maybe you could do that for Lynette back there in the clothes, Gair! The other day Plinio sprang some Lorca on me. ‘Romance de la luna, luna.’ I only remember part of it, but check it out.”

  Jamey’s body took on the look of an overworked, cop-haunted, lovelorn migrant sending sheer adoration four thousand miles south as in accent he whispered:

  The moon comes to the forge

  in her creamy pink petticoat.

  The child stares, stares,

  the child is staring at her.

  In the breeze, stirred,

  the moon stirs her arms,

  shows, pure, voluptuous,

  her breasts of shining metal.

  As Gary listened he rolled his chair a little forward so he could lean round the clothes and peer, expressionless but open-mouthed, at moonlike Lynette. Noticing, she glanced down at her voluptuous mounds and turned pink as Gary’s socks. And Jamey left Damsels in This Dress in a euphoria, feeling strangely certain that his life’s work would be bound to the miseducated, hardworking, half-broken, extraordinary creatures known as “ordinary people.” He had no inkling what that work might be. He only knew that Lorca-quoting welders, sweet spherical seamstresses, and lovestruck homunculi with perfect recall were as far from human baitballs as you could get. What better reason did he need to draw such people out, archiving their skewed talents, quirks, and poetry in his lively mind, long body, and wounded tongue.

  VIII. Radiance vs. Reef

  (Seattle, 1988)

  Maybe the sacred, today, is someone misspelling “scared,” then loving the skewed meaning caused by their misspelling. Maybe that reasonless loving is a sacred act.

  —Thomas Soames

  RISA HAD BEEN a gangly adolescent. But when her smile blazed forth, even during her gawky years, she caused dogtails to wag, birds to sing, and boys to attempt unperformable circus tricks. Young womanhood intensified the effect, and after she fell for Sanskrit an increased connectivity between her inner and outer worlds worked still greater magic: when she would fall into Vedic reveries, or work to carry a sadness into the vast dark of ṣadness, the little blue veins in her temples took on a bioluminescent quality and her entire face glowed like campfire embers modulating in heavy night air, resulting in a dignity reminiscent of a medieval madonna painting—until the smile intensified to a grin. Then her lips parted, an utterly surprising eighth-of-an-inch gap between her incisors exposed an unruly mirthfulness, and the sanctity blew sky-high. From early childhood Dave made her promise never to let an orthodontist touch what that cliché-shattering gap did for her beauty.

  At age twenty Risa’s face was inspiring passersby to walk with some frequency into phone poles, closed glass doors, parked cars, and one another. But other reactions set in at the same time. Now and then strangers would take one look at her and their faces would harden as if her very existence was a personal affront. Others would take her in, then assail her with forced wit, bad poetry, dumb-shit hustle moves. Still others, some of them so charming they were indistinguishable from potential friends, would succeed in getting to know her before showing themselves to be sexual conquistadors tracking her in hopes of bagging her the way hunters hope to bag trophy elk. Insulting encroachments, brushes with sleaze, and a few modest harms befell her. Then Risa got lucky, or grace got gracious and sent a friend who helped her come to terms with her strange problem.

  An ex–Jesuit novice a decade older than Risa, TJ McGraff, was attending Seattle Culinary Institute in preparation for opening a restaurant in Portland, Oregon. For R&R he enrolled in an evening oil painting class at U Dub. Risa’s own painting had flowered, winning her a work-study position co-teaching the class.

  The first time she spoke with TJ, he introduced himself as “a failed Jesuit, a food fanatic, and an obsessed but awful painter, as we can see.” The painting he nodded toward—a vaguely geometrical mass of orange, brown, and yellow chunks cluttering a canvas in a random strew—looked to Risa like the aftermath of a furniture-repair project attempted by a psychopath with no tools but a chainsaw and wood glue. “I see some potential there,” she lied.

  She began to like TJ the instant he snorted, “Piffle! Don’t insult my astounding lack of talent with bogus encouragement. Come on, assistant instructor. Take another look and tell me what you really see.”

  Risa gave the painting another look. The thing remained such awful company that to speak of it honestly would violate her resolve to Restrain the mind as the charioteer restrains his vicious horses. But she had an idea. She’d been taking extracurricular Bharata natyam classes—one of the classical dance forms of southern India. Rather than comment on TJ’s painting, she decided to concoct a faux Bharata natyam performance that would allow her to respond with no words at all.

  Striking a sudden, full-bodied, wide-stanced, giant-eyed pose that caused TJ’s jaw to drop, Risa arranged both hands in the “Live Long and Prosper” mudra of Mr. Spock of early Star Trek. Cocking her head with a look of “Bright Curiosity,” she danced up to the painting. Contemplating the canvas, her brightness then dimmed, the Spock mudras spasmed into limpness, her mouth went slack and forehead and face seized up. Holding these gestures, she turned to TJ and maintained the pose for a good five seconds so he could see how totally his painting had fucked her up. TJ went hysterical with delight. The other students, hearing the ruckus, stopped working and watched.

  As if to save herself, Risa danced ten steps away from TJ’s painting, turned back, folded her hands over her breast, and gazed at the painting yearningly. This second study caused her to look as if she were being doused in radioactive waste. Mouth collapsed, forehead shriveled, hands quivering in some sort of “Bloodied Tuna Thrashing on the Deck of the Boat” mudra—and when she turned to TJ and again held the pose to reveal how he’d ruined her, he howled. The other students were laughing now too.

  Dancing to her backpack, Risa reached inside, pulled out her trusty giant magnifying glass, pirouetted back to the painting, and used the glass to give TJ and the students a giant-eyeballed look that silently proclaimed: “A New Hope Dawns!” But when she held the glass close to the canvas, as if to study TJ’s brushwork, she began puffing her cheeks and convulsing in the manner of an Afghan hound about to chunder on the carpet.

  As TJ wiped his eyes, helpless with glee, the class broke out in applause.

  Risa gave a smile to all, and a parting namaste to the godforsaken painting.

  TJ APPEARED TO have money. He lived, during his chef school stint, in a pricey Queen Anne district bungalow with a heated garage he’d converted into a studio. On the day they’d met, he’d invited Risa to come see his studio and, if she liked, work in it free of charge. For fear of amorous intent, she resisted for a time, but the more she saw of TJ in class, the more he struck her as asexual. One rainy night, sinking into the ubiquitous annual Seattle Fall Melancholy, Risa drove over to Queen Anne, located TJ’s place, saw lights on in the garage, and knocked on the door.

  TJ answered, wearing a spattered green artist’s apron, a tiny silk pouch on a cord hanging round his neck—and nothing else. Guessing that he was working with a live model, that she was completely wrong about his asexuality, and that activity was in the offing, Risa apologized for dropping in unannounced and turned to go. “No, no!” TJ cried. “I’m so glad you’re here. Come in, come in!”

  “You’re…working alone?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Of course I’m...” He glanced down at himself. “Dear God. Sorry about…the obvious!” Since his apron didn’t close in back, TJ began backing toward the rear door of the studio, telling Risa, “William Blake contends the muses commune readily with the naked. My painting was so awful tonight I was trolling the heavens for help, using my body as a, uh…what do salmon fishermen call those lures? Hoochies?”

  Risa had started laughing soon as TJ had gone into reverse. By the time he called himself a hoochie she was in pain.

  “Art’s hell! Don’t you love it?” he declared. “When I get back we’ll commiserate and drink way too much tea!” With which he turned and ran, leaving Risa gaping at his surprisingly furry, compact little butt.

  She’d hardly finished grinning when he reappeared, wrapped in a dark blue silk dressing gown as distracting as the no-outfit outfit. Though elegant in its tailoring and sheen, the gown was covered with pale-faced geisha girls, every one of whom was wearing a smaller version of the same gown, each gown-within-a-gown covered with smaller geishas. Risa’s head began to swim from the M. C. Escher effect. “What kind of tea?” TJ asked brightly.

  “Lapsang if you’ve got it. I hardly ever smoke, but when I’m bumming I do. So smoky tea helps. A suicide substitute should taste believable.”

  Nodding Risa toward a rocker, TJ and the geishas went into high gear, putting a kettle on a hot plate, fetching a plastic honey bear from a cupboard, climbing onto a chair to fetch, from a high shelf, two diminutive Yixing teapots and a matching pair of teabowls no bigger than shot glasses. He placed a bamboo end table by Risa’s rocker and a big wicker chair close by. But after he smiled at her, the geisha ensemble froze, his brow furrowed, and he began staring much more closely. “Okay, Risa,” he said. “What’s this talk of bumming and suicide substitutes? Who blew out the hurricane lamp I always see burning inside you?”

  “I’m fine, TJ,” she sighed.

  “So long as you don’t play poker,” he replied. “You’re the worst liar in Seattle.”

  “I came to admire your studio, not dump in it,” she said.

  The kettle whistled. TJ filled the little Yixing pots and delivered Risa’s to the side table. With an athleticism that dazzled her for its strangeness he then balanced his tiny teabowl upside down atop his tiny pot, climbed up and stood on his wicker chair’s seat, stayed perfectly balanced as he dropped to the seat by collapsing then folding his legs Buddha style with no help from his hands, smoothed his lapful of geishas, removed teabowl from pot, filled the tiny bowl with a dead-accurate high pour to cool the tea, squeezed in a drop of honey, stirred the tea with a tiny reed whisk, took a demure sip, and turned to face her.

  “As my Jesuit novice master, Father Tom Schmidt, used to tell us,” he began, “Schmidt happens. You’ve been schmadt upon, Risa. It’s plain as day. So there’s nothing for it but to find a friend, tell what happened, let him help scrape off the schmidt, and go figure. I’m your friend. If I’d been schmadt upon I’d want you to listen. So let me listen. Then we’ll go figure.”

  She nodded indecisively, said nothing for several seconds, then drew a deep breath and nearly shouted, “It’s my damned face!”

  TJ blinked in surprise. “Your damned face,” he said blankly.

  “This thing!” she said, stabbing a finger at it.

  “But it’s…so…outstanding,” he said, looking puzzled.

  “Whatever it is,” Risa said, “I have no choice but to live behind it. And something about it keeps causing certain…strangelings…to, well, get in my face. I never see them coming. I try to ignore them. But I need to get way better at ignoring and seeing them coming. And that’s the whole story. So please, let’s change the damned subject!”

  TJ shook his head. “You think Father Schmidt would let you walk after a confession like that? He’d get down to it, Risa. He’d say, ‘Describe a few of these strangelings.’”

  She heaved a trauma-tinged sigh. “Well, there’s the type who hate me point-blank—which is their right, I guess, but it always kind of shocks me. And there’s the type who, despite lack of eye contact, lack of encouragement, lack of everything I can think to lack, attach to me like barnacles to a piling, then start venting all this hyper-personal…stuff. Then there’s the Lotharios. Which is biological. You can’t blame a guy, or now and then gal, for trying. But I draw the line at the man who, not an hour ago, on a sidewalk loaded with people, called across the street to me that he had ten inches and wouldn’t I like to verify that by hand. The thing is, TJ, talking about this crap just smears around its sleazy residue. Life is good. Great, even. Mostly. Not one person in a thousand pulls this stuff.”

  “But there are two million people in Seattle, Risa. If these creeps are one in a thousand, that leaves you two thousand potential strangelings to have to deal with. This sounds like a pattern. Patterns need fixing. You can smoke in here, by the way.”

  “God, thanks!” Risa dug her battered Kools out of her backpack, fired one up, and filled her lungs. “I’d love to end these encounters, TJ. But I’m starting to fear I’m unconsciously doing something to cause them. Some days you’d think my face was a billboard that read: ‘COME ON OVER AND TELL ME HOW FUCKED UP, UNFAIR, DULL, OR SEXUALLY WEIRD YOUR LIFE IS, FREE OF CHARGE, NO TIME LIMIT, NO THOUGHT TOO TEDIOUS OR KINKY. AND IF YOU’D RATHER JUST SCREW ME WITHOUT INTRODUCING YOURSELF, WHY, HOW FUN! THANKS FOR SHARING!’ But see the problem? What a bitch I am to talk this way!”

  “That was not bitchy,” TJ said. “You’re holding on to your humor despite your revulsion. And revulsion, under the circumstances you describe, is what à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ would call ‘a necessary sorrow of the soul.’”

  Risa started giggling.

  “What’s funny?” TJ asked.

  “A guy in a geisha robe quoting Thomas à Kempis,” she said.

  Ignoring the giggles, TJ leaned in toward her and stared at her with unapologetic directness. “That marvelous tooth gap in your grin,” he said as if muttering over one of his own paintings, “really struck me when we met. It makes you look as if you know things it would delight others to know. Which you in fact do. But the come-ons, I suspect, have more to do with your iconographic features. In images of the saints, some faces draw us in with their serenity, some with their suffering, some with their eerily present eyes. With your face I’d say it’s the smile. Sad or happy, good news or bad, a remarkably glowing smile is your default expression. Add the aura of dark, messy hair, the beauty, and those little blue veins at your temples and wow. You really light up the space around you.”

  “Just so you know,” Risa said, “every time I hear words like ‘aura’ or ‘glow’ aimed my way I fight an urge to run away screaming.”

  “But just so you know,” a dead serious TJ replied, “Seattle’s Rembrandt-like reduction of light renders even a hint of radiance stunning. This isn’t random harassment, Risa. Your face, to be nothing but an art historian about it, is iconic. And priests and religious artists for millennia have encouraged people not only to trust such a glow, but to light candles before it, pray to it, worship it. That history puts a face like yours in a very loaded position.”

  Risa groaned, and took a suicidal drag that finished off her cigarette.

  “I sympathize,” he said. “But I also think I’ve grasped the problem. Shall we cut to the advisory chase?”

  “Please!”

  “Jesus said, famously, that the poor are always with us. But he was apparently too loving to add that so are the haters, wheedlers, leeches, Lotharios, and self-proclaimed ten-inchers. Lost or fogbound souls are drawn to faces like yours as surely as lost and fogbound ships are drawn to guidance by lighthouses. If it’s any consolation, I recently suffered a comparable fate. During my failed priest stint down in Chiapas, white clerical collars and black Jesuit shirts made a name-brand lighthouse out of me.”

  Risa was a parochial school veteran. She sensed TJ’s priestly authority as he spoke. But boy did the gang of geishas modify the authority’s frequency!

  “What fogbound souls forget,” he said, “is that every lighthouse on Earth stands on a stone cape or reef or sea stack signaling the very opposite of a safe harbor. This is where you have the power to change things.”

  “How, TJ? I don’t see how.”

  “From the moment we met,” TJ began, “I sensed your open, undefended heart. But I also sensed—when I asked you about my godawful painting, for instance—a strong determination to harm no one via word or thought or deed. My advice is, lessen that determination. Giving occasional offense is not the same as doing harm. An offense that shatters an illusion is a kindness in disguise. When you see a wheedler, whiner, or creeper sailing your way, be a lighthouse. Use the same beacon that draws people to warn people away. Don’t let the fogbound even think about anchoring close to you. Allowing that is unfair to you and them.”

  Risa nodded her head slowly, but faintly. Distractedly. And a quiet came over her. She sat very still for several seconds. She then bent at the waist, crossed her arms over her knees, lay her head down on her forearms and grew even more still. “I’m fine,” she murmured toward the floor. “Back in a bit. This just happens.”

  A half minute passed. Her breath came slowly. TJ couldn’t see her lowered face. Only the jumble of her hair. But he sensed she’d gone somewhere deep inside and far away.

  When she returned to herself and sat up, Risa, being Risa, smiled and, alas, glowed. But her face was pale, her pupils enlarged, and she looked more than a little lost. “Your advice,” she said weakly, “felt perfect. And then…something happened. Lately I sometimes…get sent, you could say, on these little…‘journeys’ is a word. Gone in a flash, back in a flash. But the flash holds all this content that really whacks me. The content is…not like the thunder after a lightning flash. It’s more like the cloudburst and downpour.”