by Chip Jacobs
Two years ago, when the former president appeared before a packed house at Pasadena’s Hotel Maryland, Nick said he was in the back, yearning to say his peace man to man. Roosevelt talked ebulliently for two hours about his travels through Africa, his disdain for Congress, and his fondness for the Throop Institute as the kind of technical school that made the “Germans the great race they are.”
“During the middle of his speech, we locked eyes, and he recognized me all these years later. He never glanced my way again. And he’s ahead of Thaddeus Lowe on my list of all-time heroes.”
“Yes,” Jules said. “But even great men aren’t always good, and the hypocrisy you accentuated in your question was worthwhile.”
“Especially if you’re trying to spur a president to shoot you like a bear cub.”
They got off the mostly empty trolley at the station under the Hotel’s Green breezeway. The baking winds were dying down, though Pasadena Fire Chief Dewey Morgantheau must’ve been nipping from his flask, praying no embers drifted onto any fancy wood structures.
Outside, Jules wasn’t finished with her game. “You know what else I abhor?” she asked. “Regrets.”
“I get the message,” Nick said. “I need to let my complex go.”
“But do you get the message? Because I regret bidding goodnight—particularly to someone with whom I’m hopelessly in-love.”
As in with me? Nick briefly vacated his body, witnessing the scene on a helium cloud. How could he have been so petty before? “You’re not trying to jolt me out of my funk?”
She stepped back. “Nick: am I someone who throws around words loosely? I meant it. Every letter.” Tears rolled down her smile lines. “You’re why I’m not supposed to be in Seattle.”
“I hear that place stinks of salmon. Jules, I love you back. Have from Mr. Mercereau’s funeral service and will to, uh, my own.”
“Teddy Stumper: why are we still here?”
—
They didn’t so much as enter Nick’s bungalow as execute a controlled stumble, kissing and groping like gravitationally intersecting planets. He somehow kicked the door closed as she tugged him toward his fast-idiously made bed.
Eager fingers peeled at clothes, flinging them with glee. Nick’s trousers landed in the sink, her bodice under his desk. Unbuckled boots clunked onto hardwood.
Nick, who’d only had relations with one other woman, a pageant beauty who’d visited Cawston, kissed, tongued, and stroked every wet cleft available. Jules reciprocated with fearless hands and a fiery hunger.
He could barely unwrap his German-made condom before the mattress turned into a steam bed. He hoped all that wine he consumed helped him last with this wondrous girl peeling back more than her past. They were four thighs, one friction machine.
“Keep doing that,” she said, purring. “Right there.”
More quick-slow gyrations, a torrent of “oohs,” and one “oh God” unfit for the pulpit.
Minutes later, Jules retracted from a kiss as they thundered toward climax. “You’re making the Earth move,” she said. “Just stop cramping my shin. Scoot inward.”
“Huh? ’Kay,” Nick said distractedly.
Thrust, parry, grind.
“Oww,” she said not long after. “My leg. Get off of it.”
“If I was any more inward,” Nick said panting, “I’d be one of your organs. Your leg must be seeing things.”
Jules drew him back in, until the pain in her calf surpassed the elation in her loins. She pushed him off toward where the bed met the wall. “I’m not kidding. Your toenails are sharp as claws.”
“I propose we investigate later. It’s not me.”
“But, if it’s not you, then who is it?”
Jules whipped the sheet off them. Now, this was a mood-killer. From his horny smirk to his still-grinding torso, paws clenched around her right shin, Royo was having himself a party to remember.
“You four-legged cad!” she hollered. “Release me. I’m not some lascivious poodle.”
Jules shook her leg, trying to knock him off her; Royo kept pumping. “Do something, Nick. I’m not that type of girl. You didn’t concoct this, right?”
“Of course not! You think I’d risk being murdered—on a night I didn’t expect?”
He drove the heel of his foot into the top of Royo’s white-patched chest, causing the mutt to flip backward off the bed with an Arf. Naked Nick flew after him, hooking Royo by collar to drag him and his resistant nails toward the opposite wall. There, he snatched him by the mane and hurled him into his closet, slamming the door. “Consider yourself lucky,” he said, “I didn’t castrate you with my old ostrich shears.”
Covering his blue orbs in self-defense, he trudged toward Jules, assum-ing their coupling was over, and maybe more than that. “I cannot begin,” he said, “to apologize profusely enough for that. I was so preoccupied when we burst in I forgot he existed. The lech crept in, I guess, while we were, um, busy.”
Jules, moonbeams splashing her face through Nick’s window, said nothing. She was now leaned up, examining her leg. That’s when her eyes bugged out.
“For both of your sakes, that better only be slobber on my shin. I mean it.”
Wasn’t this romantic: an unscheduled, cross-species ménage à trois? What’s a guy to do but pick up one of his discarded socks to mop away any offending fluid?
“You can relax. It’s only drool,” Nick said, bowling the sock under his bedsprings. “Let me reiterate by everything I hold holy, it’s slobber. Pasa-denans don’t endorse this brand of carnality. Or much of any, to be honest.”
Jules snagged him by the wrist. “I believe you,” she said, her shock tapering. “Next time, if there is a next time, you’re bunking him at Fleet. And giving him a saltpeter tablet.”
“I’ll make it two. Delayed justice.” He bent over to kiss her.
Jules guided him back atop her. “Now, where were we?”
“You were mentioning a higher power.”
“And you’ll be calling for one if I so much as discover a single flea.”
Back at it they went, with Royo sighing and periodically launching himself against the closet door.
—
Before Jules awoke the next morning, Nick freed Royo from his penitentiary and tapped on Fleet’s window. Soon, his sleepy-headed chum agreed to house him for the morning, provided that Nick agree to a double date with him and Hattie, who didn’t appreciate that Fleet was still conducting transactional coitus with the dowager.
Jules was up when he returned, smoothing out the wrinkles of her creased party dress. Both were mildly hungover, if not self-conscious after last night’s gymnastics. Nick pecked her and said, “Good morning. How about some coffee and eggs?”
“Please,” she said.
Nick, as a morning person, could talk the clay ears off a Busch Gardens gnome. So he prepared breakfast in his boxers, aflutter that Jules was stroking her hair with his comb, while rambling impressions of Lummis’s Bohemian guests.
“Once we eat,” Jules said when she could, “I must return home. I have tasks to complete. Do not read anything into it.”
“Me? Never.”
She didn’t laugh, and after Nick set out scrambled eggs, blood oranges, and coffee, they chewed in silence. To hurry things along afterward, Jules rinsed the dishes as Nick searched for fresh clothes in his closet; Royo yanked down almost everything in there in rebellion.
“Jules,” he said, after he dressed for another hot July day. “We need to talk.”
“Must we?” she asked from the sink, hands sudsy. “I’m in a pensive state.”
“This isn’t about me trying to plumb the dark sides of your moons. It’s about me.”
“It is?”
“Yes. On our second date, you inquired why I punched my adversary at Cawston. This relates to tha
t. Following last night, I’ll explode if I don’t explain.”
Jules switched off the faucet to face him. Nick’s chest got heavy.
“My father, Nathaniel, was a mechanical whiz—a whiz always in demand. Present him a busted machine, and he’d repair it. Any kind. He made good money doing that and took good care of us. When I was a sophomore at USC, he opened a shop on Fair Oaks to be his own boss—and everything fell apart. He began hearing voices.”
“Oh, no.”
“Unhappily, oh, yes. The doctors ran tests, but they were unable to formulate any conclusive diagnosis. My father hadn’t struck his head; he was rarely sick. Even after my mother gave birth to a stillborn daughter before me, he recovered in his own reserved manner. I take after my extroverted mother. Obviously.”
Jules wiped her hands on the dishtowel.
“The doctors suggested he spend a month ‘relaxing his mind’ in a Sierra Madre sanitarium. My mother disagreed. She believed, in the absence of any identifiable trigger, that Pasadena’s atmosphere might be causing his distress because he toiled outside so frequently. She suspected the brown air that intermittently films over the valley. Needless to say, I thought that was poppycock and we quarreled. I wanted another medical opinion. She insisted my father be removed from lurking dangers.”
Jules inched toward him. Nick held up a palm to keep her away.
“Let me continue or I’ll crumble. They decided to return to Indiana, where they both had family, and purchased a home in Bloomington. My father got hired with a company assembling mechanical harvesters. But the voices resumed. It wasn’t Pasadena’s fault.”
“How soon?”
“Two months. He told my mother that the voices promised to disappear if he listened for their message on, this is hard to say—the railroad tracks outside town.”
“Lord, Nick.”
“In desperation, he complied. After that locomotive clobbered him,” Nick said, flicking water from his eyes, “it was like that train struck us, too. Mother and I grew estranged after the first wave of grief passed. I needed to leave USC for a semester to earn tuition money. Believe you me, I couldn’t have survived that black tunnel without Fleet. Mother and I have reconciled since, and I send her back whatever I don’t spend. When we correspond, I avoid being a Pasadena Pollyanna and she omits her trepidation about the atmosphere. You might say we blot over our despair.”
Jules mouth was now an O. “That’s heartbreaking,” she said. “Through and through. What I cannot fathom is why you’re putting yourself through this anguish now?”
“Because, after our relations, you needed to appreciate I’m not always as blithe as I outwardly appear. My father’s death taught me that I possess the capacity to seal hurt away in my psyche’s lockbox, if you catch me. It was how I survived college and rose at Cawston. Then surprise. Otis’s repulsive comments proved there was some TNT in there.”
He bent over, hands on knees, and came back up red-eyed.
“Father’s Day was only a few weeks ago,” Jules said. “That ginned up the sorrow, didn’t it?”
Nick sniffled. “You think the Busches have an in with Sigmund Freud so I can lie on his couch?”
“Probably not. He’s Austrian, not German.”
“Same continent.”
Gloomy laughs ended Nick’s confessional.
“Now can I embrace you?” Jules said.
“Definitely.”
—
This being early on a church-mouse Sunday, nobody besides milkmen and gray hairs were out when they left Bungalow Heaven West. Jules lived four blocks away in a Busch rental property, a quaint, Scottish-style cottage with a rounded front door. Overhead, Pasadena’s morning sky was another work of art. With that load off his chest, and Jules at his side, you could’ve tricked Nick that Michelangelo painted it.
A block from her place on Delacey, Jules stopped on her heels. “This is where I need to take my leave,” she said, surprising him. “Those tasks.”
Nick stuttered. This, to him, wasn’t a walk of shame. Last night they’d exchanged I-love-yous. “I wanted to escort you all the way,” he said. “Royo’s no gentleman, but I want to be one.”
That elicited a smile line. “Don’t fret,” she said. “You are.”
“Brontë-sisters approved?” he asked kiddingly.
“Yes. Brontë’s-approved.” A shadow then crossed her face. “Furthermore, I owe you a quick revelation. I beg you to listen without follow-ups.”
Nick’s flywheels spun. Was she secretly engaged, sick, a cat person? “I will.”
“The primary reason I departed Chicago was a man, Nick, and, no, it wasn’t a romantic entanglement. Boys come and go, no offense. It was the odious realization that I could not spend another second around a father who’d rather control me than love me in all my idiosyncrasies. His cruelty was a form of barbarism. That’s all I’ll vocalize.”
“Understood,” Nick said without understanding much.
“Think of it as one of the dark sides of my moon best to explore in time. I’ll see you at Ivy Wall Monday when you drop off your cad.”
“Okeydoke,” he replied.
“Perfect answer.” They kissed and she walked away.
Nick went to grab a doughnut and more coffee from Smilin’ Dan’s to process everything. Outside the joint, a dozen parrots, a few as chunky as squirrels, monitored him from the branches of an aspen tree. Their population, some speculated, was double what it was since their mysterious arrival.
Two flatfoots were talking shop at the counter over pancakes while he waited for a fresh pot to brew. The officers had sleepy eyes, dense mustaches, and voices louder than they realized.
“In all my years, we’ve never had a spate like this,” one said. “Fourteen burglaries in six months, all at fancy estates. He snatches valuables some days, and pinches nothing the next. He busts in late at night, and in the afternoon. If it’s the same crook that targeted Cawston last year, he’s trying to throw us off his scent. We’ll get him. We always do.”
Cawston? That’s my yesterday. Nick exited ten minutes later with crumbs from a sugar doughnut on lips that couldn’t stop smirking.
Phosphorous Days
There are things you write your mother to assure her you’re thriving—solar lamps glowing like magic; a girl who might be “the one”—and things you hold back. One of these days, Amelia “Amy” Chance would be receiving a bubbly letter from California. It just wouldn’t be in July from a son living life with blazing wheels on his feet.
This year’s Fourth was Nick’s best ever, one that commenced with a morning Red Car to Santa Monica beach with Jules, Fleet, and Hattie, and climaxed ogling fireworks at a Pasadena park while eating strawberry ice cream. Two Busch Garden football games followed, as well as his best-attended ostrich rodeo yet. “Bravo, flying dog!” the sick children yelled out after Royo leapt onto Nick’s shoulders as he rode Mrs. C. “Bravo, ostrich man!”
His stumbling into a job on the Colorado Street Bridge was responsible for these trappings. Soon, the roadway would be christened, and he’d springboard into his future.
The project only had two more arches to complete, both on the west side of the canyon, before the finishing work started. Bridge rats nicknamed the largest of them the “Big Whopper,” for it’d be taller than any local building, vaulting twelve to fifteen stories above the valley floor.
Nick’s contributions were already in place: thirty-six installed solar lamps salted around the eastern bank. A dozen new ones on the western slopes, not far from where he’d seen Los Angeles City Hall’s scouts licking their chops about a potential annexation, were now trenched, too. Marcus’s pro-forma inspection this upcoming Monday was all that stood between him and his next meaningful step: pitching the city of Pasadena to buy his wireless, bargain-priced devices for its street-lighting program. With that legitimizer, he coul
d sell anywhere.
On the Sunday before he was to meet Marcus, Nick introduced Jules to the grilled-meat wizardry prepared by his Cajun friend. Walking off their leaden sandwiches afterward, they passed the yellow-brick walls of Pacific Electric’s fully rebuilt railcar-maintenance shop. Unlike other times, Nick didn’t shiver with goose bumps or vague sensations of being airborne in proximity to it, just a flush of appreciation about being alive in an era where everything seemed possible.
Under eighty-degree skies, they promenaded south on Fair Oaks, and continued on until they were in South Pasadena at the bottom of the lush hill at Walter Raymond’s resort. Jules admitted never being inside before, and Nick told her it was worth blowing thirty minutes. She agreed, vowing not to fall asleep this time to his narration.
They took the pedestrian tunnel to the hotel’s ground floor where a chalkboard listed the amenities you’d need a week to sample. Shetland pony rides and bowling, golf and other outdoor sports, a house orchestra and private tours: the Raymond boasted it all. “Tally-Ho” coaches to ferry guests to the adjacent train depot, which first delivered sun-seeking Bostonians here in the late 1880s, remained in service.
“What do you think Mr. Lummis’s left-wing friends would say about this, besides it manifesting the excesses of capitalism?” Jules asked, watching a sweating bellboy push a heavy luggage cart.
“Whether somebody had a match?”
Done in Second Empire architecture, the ornate, two-hundred-room building glamorized the Pasadena region before Adolphus and other tycoons discovered it. While, that is, the glamor lasted. On an Easter day nine years after it opened, a chimney ember fluttered onto the Raymond’s wood roof and the entire hotel burned to a crisp while most of its guests attended Sunday church services. Seven years later, a less flammable Raymond Hotel was up and running.