Gold - I will be complete a memoir

I THINK YOURE AN ADULT when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first date. I might have gotten this idea from my parents, because they reinvented themselves so often. Their stories have odd turns which speak not of one life, but of many that dont seem to match up, and of choices youd think no one would actually make.

When I was twelve years old, I lived by myself for a while. This was the mid-1970s in San Francisco, so the rules were a little different thenand yet not so different that me living alone made much sense. When I describe what happened, people tend to ask, But how did you end up so They dance around the word normal, then realize it doesnt apply, and instead they say, So nice? Im not nice. Im polite. Nice is a quality and polite is a strategy. But I have ended up happy. Also, Ive ended up something more unusual than that: autonomous.

I have a good memory but lately Ive been looking for people who might know more, and I come up empty. Life in the 1970s led to a lot of bad luck and unexpected consequences. Perversely, Im relieved when I learn some people I wanted to talk to are dead. But then I find one man I dont actually want to: Peter Charming. Hes almost invisible, but Im good at research.

He has no business licenses. He doesnt own property in his name. The house he lived in when I knew him turns out to have belonged to somebody else, and even his 1970s phone number is assigned to a different person in old directories. I cant find any criminal records, though those are difficult to get to the bottom of. The San Francisco Superior Court, however, provides some sheet music in a way and its up to me to imagine the score. There are civil lawsuits. In some, hes the defendant and in others the plaintiff. One of them went on for seven years and struggled all the way to trial twice.

There are ways the mind pushes back against knowing too much. You research too long. You obsess over irrelevant details. Your memories tend to come in snapshots without context. You amaze the world by how unfazed, how nice you seem. You discount cruelties as if theyre anecdotes best brought out in a barroom competition. You also tend to say you when you mean I.

When I was a kid, Peter was bad to my mom. She managed to escape eventually, but at a cost. I dont know if the damage he inflicted upon her was worse financially or emotionally. In our family, money is a convenient cipher for the wounds that are harder to qualify. Accounting for his charisma and promises, you could reduce him to an elemental force that moved my mother and me forward, then backward, then apart. My mother is much more important, but when I think of looking directly at her I reflexively retreat into research. I would rather look into Peters life again.

People leave San Francisco but something always gets left behind. Usually its gossip. Ive mentioned his name to people who were in that social circle and its like he never existed. Im sure they met him and I dont think theyre lying when they say they dont remember. He was of a time and a place that are gone. Its like asking about a statue in a park now the site of a high rise. What happened to that old bronze bust? Didnt you see it?

His picture is in the society column of the San Francisco Chronicle in the late 1960s, and he looks young. He hasnt learned arrogance yet. Instead, he looks just shy of self-confident, asking the camera to confirm it sees him as handsome. Hes an escort for women who are older. They have their own money, and my hunch is that when they stopped seeing Peter, they still had all of it, minus what theyd given him knowingly. That was before the 1970s, the time that was made for him.

One person reacted to his name, once. At a party sometime in the 1980s, I met a novelist whom I knew by reputationa happy bullshit artist in the way of those Beats who made careers and academic posts by riding out the ambiguity of whether theyd actually had Kerouac sleep on their couch.

I was twenty-two and the novelist was in his sixties. He was talking to a beautiful woman who held her drink with both hands and who regarded him with suspicion, like he was about to offer her candy. As I was walking by, he brought me into the conversation, which I recognized as a gambit to make her reduce her grip on her glass to one hand, to let the other settle to her hip.

Excuse me, he said to me. You look part English.

Thats true.

Is the other partJewish? I ask that as a full Jew myself.

It is.

Ive often thought the combination of English and Ashkenazi makes the most handsome man in the room. Dont you think so? he asked the girl, who was noncommittal. This fine woman, he said a moment later, still hasnt decided to leave her husband for me, but I cant blame her.