THE BALLAD OF MARI-ADA AND JUNIPERO

by Oliver Broudy

      He reached behind him and punched out the Marvin Gaye tape and put in what he thought was Jules Shear but turned out to be a violent Bartok composition. They slouched next to each other and shared the cigarette, their feet propped on the backs of the front seats, which they had cocked forward. The boy still had his jeans around his knees, and the girl still had her skirt reversed. The girl leaned over and snapped off the condom and crumpled it up in a Kleenex she had taken from a box on the shelf behind them.
      She was thinking that sex is a story that always ends the same way. And people will say yeah well maybe, but it's always interesting. She was beginning to disagree. Nevertheless, she was enjoying the cigarette, the filtered tip of which was getting a little slippery because of their wanton mouths. He popped the latch on the back window. The complicated Bartok continued to aggravate the small plastic speakers and trouble the girl's mind. She said, Is this your tape? She was a recently graduated English major working as a nanny for a rich family with two children, one pleasant, one less so. She wanted to be a journalist and she spent her time writing stories about real and unreal events in order to accumulate a portfolio. She wanted an immediate job as a journalist and couldn't stand the idea of interning.
      The boy, too, was enjoying the cigarette, but he was wondering why they were in this car. It was his, an old Toyota Corolla, and the engine had to be on for the tape deck to run.
      Hey, truck-driving man, she said.
      Yes, baby, he said.
      Get up there and turn that thing off before we all die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

      Perhaps they were lured outdoors by a subtle desire to be with other people and not each other. Perhaps they were driven to escape the flat air of her studio in the Mission, which only had one small square window and no TV. They both thought TV was a bad thing, but privately she wondered whether if they had a TV they would be less bored, and whether it was boredom that led them out to fuck in the city streets. Sometimes they fucked slowly, taking deep dreamlike breaths, and to her friends she characterized this as incredibly sexy, but maybe this too was just boredom, she did not know.
      They had been together for about eight months and after two of them she began to give him hand jobs on public buses. After a while he began holding her tit while waiting in line for movies. She encouraged this. Returning to her place late at night she sometimes yanked him to the floor before he could remove his jacket, before he could unpack his change, and nickels would go spinning through the dark room as she shimmied free of her jeans. When he said this was tawdry, she replied that she knew it was, but she thought it was funny because it reminded her of high school. You screw a lot of guys in high school? he asked. Hundreds, she said. It wasn't sex. It was something less. It was mischief.
      He worked for a garage driving a tow truck and when he was driving around at night she would sometimes come with him, sitting next to him on the big wide seat, smoking and listening to AM radio. She was sometimes distracted when the nights began, and would talk irritably of stories she might write and who might publish them. A human interest story about the lady on Haight who was always conversing with a cracked ice cube tray. An expose on the racist way a chain record store organized its music, automatically placing any album with a black singer on the cover in the soul section. A snappy, haughty review of an Abel Ferrara film.
      The boy listened. He was content to listen. The nights were very lovely. On hills he would turn the engine off and they would coast mysteriously through the silent city and the soft winds would lift transparent supermarket bags imprinted with red lettering prettily into the air. On these nights there was flight over rooftops, the air made swimmable by the mixed ether of jasmine and moonlight.
      They would stop for a chilled bottle of Riesling which she liked and they would drink it as they drove, and sometimes the girl would strip and sit nude on the seat with a sweatshirt folded under her. They would stop the truck and sit on the ticking hood. They would climb the metal steps hammered into the chimney of an old Victorian house on Russian Hill and watch the distant water straighten and compose a moon pathway to Marin. They would drive to Twin Peaks and wish that they too could tumble down into the city like the fog. Because he had roommates, most nights were spent at her studio, or on the roof, where there was no view but where they could smoke a joint and watch the cats creep along the fences and pry among the shadows of the green paradise in the middle of the block, a ramshackle rectangle of gardens and unstable decks and compost piles and broken birdhouses. A Harley Davidson would rumble by and the car alarms would start up like dogs.
      They wandered forgetfully through the city and passing sudden alleyways he would say Look! and she would see the pallid, yellow streetlight on the side of an old house, its blue wall like a flaking fresco. In the alley there would also be two or three hoary pieces of plywood leaning against each other at increasing angles, a length of black industrial hose, an enormous paisley-patterned armchair lacking a cushion. The yellow light compressed these objects into a kind of exhibit, stealing a dimension from them and leaving them tautly still. Yeah, gross, she'd reply, referring to the scattered garbage that was also there.
      No, the way the light--
      Yes I know, she would interrupt, I was just kidding.
      Silently they would go on, aware of themselves and then less so, watched by cats on windowsills, tracked by streetlights through the gauzy mezzanines of tarata trees and acacia.
      In the quiet night their footsteps were like the drops from a loose faucet. They walked through the city and perched in the eaves of it and smelled its scents, the almond scent of burnt coffee from the corner cafe, woodsmoke drifting from unknown rooftops, surprising like the smell of seagrass brought in from the shore by the fog, the rank stink of incense, garlic, falafel, the perfumes of passing women subsumed in the ever-present honey scent of the Victorian Box tree with its miniscule blossoms, a whiff of exhaust or its surprising absence when the electric buses staggered by.
      The fog came into the city and occupied it anew each morning, hiding the city from itself so that its parts existed unaware of each other, like hamlets hidden on a Scottish moor. Each neighborhood echoed with its own sounds--the sides of beer trucks ratcheting open, buses lumbering up hills, bottles rattling in a shopping cart.
      The boy was content. He saw pigeons circling in the buttery afternoon light, throwing shadows against the plywood wall of a new apartment house next to an empty lot, shadows that raced down the building's long bare flank and around the corner among the complicated array of fire escapes and windows that still had tape on them. He told the girl that he had always thought the birds circled that way out of some dumb instinct, and that for some reason it had never occurred to him that they did it because they liked the way the sun felt on their wings, and the way their shadows flowed along the custard-colored walls, that they liked being part of a larger graceful motion, like a sax in a jazz band, to be in the midst of something like that. The boy felt like this himself, and this was why he was happy just to drive a truck.
      He felt his love for the girl was a kind of tribute to the city and its beauty, and that their nocturnal drives and morning walks were part of an ongoing pilgrimage to the city. He often wondered if he could bear the city without her.
      In the back of a Cadillac he chanted her name, Mari-Ada. Mari-Ada Mari-Ada Mari-Ada, the a's short and blending into sighs. It was three a.m. and the Cadillac was parked in front of a driveway on Fillmore, right across from the Junipero Serra Building, a low-income housing facility for the elderly. Seeing the sign, Mari-Ada absorbed the name and chanted dazedly to the boy in reply, Junipero Junipero Junipero. This was a name the girl continued to use after that night, and the boy was glad because his real name wasn't nearly as lyrical--nor did it demand in its pronunciation such a sweet pursing of Mari-Ada's lips.
      It was her idea, to use the cars he towed as venues for quick trysts. He resisted at first, briefly angry that she would so blithely risk his job. He gave in one night against the side of a broad black Buick, her breasts rising up against his collarbone. She leaned back and studied him, his gray eyes. With great attention she placed in his nostrils the white knots at either end of the cotton string that hung from her windbreaker and whispered, Let's go! He held the door for her, snorting the strings free.
      It added a new anticipation to their nightly prowls. When a call came over the two-way radio, they both listened carefully to the model and the location, weighing the prospect in their minds, considering the risk. Risk for Junipero was much less theoretical than for the girl. When he had first started driving the truck, he had rushed through towing jobs, terrified of being caught by the car's owner. He invariably felt criminal, and it had taken months for him to train himself to proceed with his work slowly, to keep his eyes in front of him, instead of constantly checking for marauding car owners with raised fists. Or worse.
      It had taken months for him to stop feeling guilty. Eventually he developed standard responses for those times when he was interrupted. Most times he'd just say, Sorry, ma'am or mister, I have no choice. You should get yourself a bike. This is a bike city anyhow. Then he would give them the information about who to call and how to go about getting their car back. He never took bribes. If he didn't like the person, if they were rude or warlike he'd say, Hey, you took a chance. And if they came at him, he'd grab the baseball bat that he kept in the back. You take a swing and I take a swing, he'd say. Aloud he'd said this twice; to himself, many times.
      After the Buick, Junipero began to perceive this risk as something of his own that he could share with the girl, and he began to perceive the Toyotas, the Porsches, the Fords, all the cars he touched and hoisted and towed as gifts as well, things that both belonged to him and did not, like the city itself.
      Mari-Ada and Junipero fornicated in the backs of cars that were not their own for two months without incident. Until one sweet July night. A call came in about a big old Country Squire parked on a sidewalk in North Beach. It was up on the hill near Coit Tower. The boy never had much reason to go into this neighborhood, because people were generally civilized around there, except of course down on Columbus, where things tended to get a little unruly on the weekends. It was a funny thing, because the girl only decided to go along with him that night at the last minute.
      It was around midnight and she was lying in bed with her cat, Mahfouz, on her chest, and she was reading through the collected Mencken. She said no when he asked, but as he was preparing to go her arms got tired from holding the book, which was big, up above the cat's head. She put the book down and the cat got off her chest and leaped onto the bookshelf and from there onto the small window ledge. With nothing keeping her there anymore, she drowsily decided to accompany the boy, just as he was walking out the door.
      Don't even have to jimmy it, he said, because the front door of the station wagon was unlocked. It was parked at an angle across the sidewalk with its left front fender nudged up against a bottlebrush tree. Wads of nasturtium crowded the wheel. It appeared as if the car had been driven recklessly onto the sidewalk and simply abandoned. When they got inside they could smell the liquor. Vodka. The girl was worried about the car slipping out of gear and rolling back down the hill. She made the boy check to see that the emergency brake was on, and, oddly, it was. The car was wide enough for them to recline crosswise, and this they did, the girl on the bottom. The boy's face rubbed against the vinyl bench seat.
      As they fucked, Junipero became sad. He tried not to, he tried to concentrate on her, and on the sensation, but he just ended up feeling sad and that what they were doing wasn't fun anymore but just ridiculous, maybe desperate. He listened to her breathing to try to gauge if she felt the same way, but he could not tell. He placed his forehead on the armrest attached to the side door. And then there was the metallic tap at the window.
      Amazingly, the police were not at all amused, as the girl had hoped. There were two of them. Their patrol car was parked in front of the tow truck. The boy and the girl quickly dressed themselves, which in this case only meant hoisting up their pants. Mari-Ada said, Let's just say it's my car, but Junipero could not reply, because there was a swelling in his throat. One after the other they scooted out the passenger door and presented themselves before the cops, who were politely waiting away from the car.
      That your truck? one of them asked. He gestured to the tow truck with his flashlight.
      Neither cop spoke on the way to the police station, nor did the boy or the girl. The boy remained glum, but she was thinking that for once their sex had had a different ending, and she was enjoying the variety. Mari-Ada loved the boy, but there was some-thing monotonous about him. How could he be so monotonous? Somehow the fact that they were in a police car allowed her to regard him more directly: Was he, deep down, a simp? She looked at him, studied his nose, which bulged at the bridge.

      In the morning the cops called the owner of the station wagon. He was a scrawny kid with matted hair and a black T-shirt bearing the words EYE BOX. Black tattoo ribbons curled around his right forearm. From the other side of the holding-cell bars, he looked at them with bruised eyes, not saying anything. The girl said, You're not angry, are you?
      The boy and the girl sat next to each other on a bench that was covered with a stained piece of canvas. When they'd entered the cell five hours earlier, the girl had looked around the place and said, Perfect. Now she watched the tattooed boy. He wasn't looking at them anymore. He looked at his boots and scratched his goatee with a forefinger. No, he said. His voice was pleasingly deep and mellow. I was just thinking about my ex-girlfriend. This is the first time the back seat's gotten any use since we split up. They all considered this. Then the boy, overcoming the swelling in his throat, said, Why'd you split up?

      The waves slid up the beach, scalloping out to either side as the sandpipers, whose one gift seemed to be the ability to maintain an unerring inch of distance between themselves and the sheets of foam that chased them, pittered quickly away, and then back again to needle the wet sand. The sand was suppurating in places, but was otherwise a perfect surface, flat and firm, streaked here and there with darker ribbons of silt or murrhined with sand dollars and worn stone. It was two days later. The tattooed boy had not pressed charges, and Mari-Ada and Junipero had decided to take a walk on the beach.
      The waves advanced with a great commotion, frolicking, leaping over each other like the dogs, wet-shanked, that played among them. Beyond them were the generations to come, the solemn accrual of power, the intimidating toil and curl that ended almost humorously in a faint fizz as the waves thinned up the smooth slope. Farther down were lonely men weaving kites to and fro, parleying the sky; and farther still, the mountains, which were separated by so much sky as to seem to have become a part of it, taking on the watercolor outlines of a cloud. She pointed at this as they walked, her sneakers looped over his shoulders.
      Mari-Ada was thinking about sex again, and monotony. She was reminded of a game that she used to play with her kids, the ones she baby-sat. The tea game. The game was very simple. The kids would prepare a tea party and invite her. She would arrive at the tea party and ask for a cup of tea. Snickering and covering their mouths, the kids would pour her a cup of imaginary tea and she would trustingly bring it to her lips, but upon discovering the tea to be scalding hot she would cry out and clasp her throat and fall over backwards. The kids would squeal with delight. Again! Again! they'd shout. And so they'd start over, her pretending not to know about the scalding imaginary tea and the kids doing their best to contain their mischievous hilarity. They could play the game for hours and the kids would never seem to tire of it, even though the ending was always the same. What did it mean? Once she accidentally took a sip from the glass before the tea had been poured. She went through her usual production of yelping and falling over and was surprised when she did not hear the expected joyful outcry. Sitting up again, she saw them both staring at her, pouting. But we didn't pour it yet, they said.
      As Junipero walked beside her he could sense her distance. He assumed a position behind her, placing his hands on her hips, and looking down to place his feet in her tracks. She kept walking. She was going to leave him, and he wondered why this had to be. She was ambitious. She was restless. Why couldn't she be happy with what they had? He moved around to face her and walked backwards.
      What's wrong. You seem a little blue, he said.
      She told him that she had gotten a job. At a local paper.
      Staff writer, she said.
      Great, the boy said. Now you can support me.(Because of the Country Squire incident the boy had been fired.)

      Junipero spent two nights without the girl, and she let him do this. She let him prepare himself for her departure. The boy sat in his room and studied his green wallpaper, the green tulips succeeding each other vertically, the separating stripe of darker green. He purchased cheap beer and drank it and sat and watched as his thoughts turned back toward her. Finally, when all the beer had been drunk, he hoisted himself upright and stumbled into the hallway, down the battered steps and out into the city. It seemed only proper that he walk its lovely streets alone and grieve. When he woke up the next morning, he would crumble bread on the roof outside his window, so the pigeons would come. He would sit in his chair and watch the shadows of the pigeons in the orange light against his lowered blind, and he would think of her.
      On the third night, the boy brought the girl a TV, a 12-inch Sony. In her musty studio she was sitting on the floor amidst hundreds of photographs, trying, it seemed, to organize them into albums that were stacked at her side. The photographs were in wide disarray, overlapping each other and blocking out the entire floor; some seemed to have been organized into rows, perhaps by date, roll, or place. The boy spotted one row that was mostly blue--sky pictures--and the sight somehow gave him hope. But when she turned to look at him he saw that he was too late.
      He nodded at her. She gestured toward the photos with her elbow and said, I'm finally doing it.

      He carefully traversed her work area and placed the TV down on the chair. He turned to face her, but she was concentrating on the photo pile, as if it were a puzzle. He removed the TV from the chair and put it on the floor, and sat down in the chair himself.
      I got you a TV, he said.
      The girl did not reply. They sat in the small, high-ceilinged, stuffy room in silence.
      The boy sat listening to the sound of their relationship ending, to the sound of glossy photos sliding beneath her small hand. He felt her words though she hadn't yet spoken them, and he measured them in his heart against what he knew. He sat quietly in the chair feeling the rare sensation of being both with her and without her, in two worlds, knowing he would only feel this once, and knowing that forever after there would only be the sensation of being without her. He had almost summoned the strength to leave, when she said, It just doesn't seem to be going anywhere, you know? It's not doing anything. It's just sort of there. And so I ask myself, Why? Why is it there. Junipero began to cry. He lowered his head.
      I'm sorry, baby, the girl said. She took a conciliatory tone. I just need to clear some room in my life. I've got this job now--
      She stopped. With some amount of cruelty she picked a photo from those before her and placed it with some others at her side. I mean it's lovely and everything and very nice but it's not leading anywhere. We're just standing still. Don't you feel that?
      She looked at him. She got up and tiptoed through the clutter and knelt in front of him, putting her hand on his shoulder. June, she said. Junipero. Hey.

      Junipero took the bus home. He felt empty and exhausted and was wondering whether he should have kept the TV for himself. He climbed the front steps of his rickety Victorian and rummaged in his pocket for his key. His flat was on the second floor. There was no one else around. Was it a Friday?
      He got a beer from the fridge, disconsolately checked the machine for messages, and walked down the hall to his room. He sat down in his chair with the beer and then got quickly up again upon spotting what looked like a note tacked to his door. As he got closer, though, he realized it was just a square of moonlight, and there was nothing written on it.

Oliver Broudy lives in San Francisco. This is his first time in print.