The Room of White Fire

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Let’s walk,” she said.

  The April night was damp this close to the Pacific, and the electric “gas lamps” glowed in the mist. The Padres were on the road and Petco Park was dark. Spring Sundays draw out the locals, so the sidewalks were bustling. We got Jägermeisters at Bar Vie. Then a pedicab to take us past the aircraft carrier Midway, and the monstrous Unconditional Surrender statue pulsing in camera flashes.

  We walked arm in arm downtown, past the library and stadium, no stated destination, no conversation. Paige stumbled slightly on a sidewalk crack and righted herself with my arm.

  Then took my hand. Led me through an alley I wasn’t familiar with, then back onto the avenue, where we came to a stop in front of the swank Glorietta Lofts. I looked up at the stainless deco building rising into the mist-pricked light of the streetlamps, then at Paige, close beside me.

  “Oh,” she said. “I must live here.”

  “‘Neutral ground’?”

  “Are you up for a nightcap?”

  A ripple of thrill. “I am.”

  She entered something on the keypad outside the lobby, held her thumb over a sensor, then swung the glass door open for me. I stepped past her. The lobby had a black marble floor, oak panels, gold light fixtures, and a large bronze pedestal-mounted catamaran tacking into the wind. A touch of class with a pinch of pretense.

  “I could apologize for tricking you,” she said. “But my heart wouldn’t be in it.”

  We stepped into the elevator. She touched her thumb to another sensor on the control panel, then pushed the brass button for floor twenty-seven. The door shut and the car lifted off and Paige turned in close to me, hands on the shawl covering her shoulders. She looked at my face but not into my eyes. I could smell her light perfume, and a trace of liquor on her breath. When the elevator braked she tilted into me.

  We entered her home and lights came on. In the foyer she draped her shawl and clutch on a coat rack, added my jacket. She led me into the living room. The shutters were open and I looked out over the Embarcadero, Coronado, and across the infinite black Pacific beyond. We were above it all.

  The room was large and rectangular. An industrial feel. Pendulum lights hung from the ceiling and gas flames wavered silently in a glass-faced fireplace to my right. The floor looked to be maple. The furnishings were right-angled, sober, minimally padded. One entire wall was a bookshelf with a sliding stepladder to get up high. The large floor rug on which I stood had a crazed abstract pattern not unlike my necktie. The open kitchen looked sleek and neat. Paige went in and started on drinks. I could see the back of her reflected in the big window, her shoulders bare and calves flexed as she reached into a cabinet.

  “Cold vodka with a twist okay?”

  “More than.”

  A freezer rolled open and shut. I heard knife taps on a cutting board as she carved the twists, then the soft gurgle of liquid hitting glass. She came out with two frosted cocktail glasses topped with artful coils of lemon rind, spilling not a drop. We touched rims and drank. She turned and looked out the window so I did, too, and for a moment we stood separate but together, watching the city and the ships and the water. She took a sip, then set her glass on a coffee table and produced a remote control from between two neat stacks of magazines. Music poured into the room. She put down the remote and turned to me.

  “You saved me a waltz,” I said, setting down my drink.

  Bracing herself on my shoulder with one hand, she unstrapped a shoe and let it drop. Then the other. Toed them under the table.

  The waltz was from The Princess Bride. Just as in our nonmusical security-office dance, the first movements were clumsy, but soon we had that waltz all to ourselves. She followed well. The night’s alcohol made me feel light. My dress shoes had good leather soles and they slid easily on the lunatic rug. I thought Paige said something and looked at her, but apparently she had not. Her gaze was level. Justine came to me in parts. Eyes but not face, voice but not words. Then drifted. To coalesce again. “Dancing with you makes me remember,” I said.

  “I remember, also.”

  She nodded against me.

  One two three.

  We glided around the funny-looking rug, took a side trip into the kitchen, around it and out, then along the face of the big window overlooking the world. A waltz is a heady dance, the play of weight and momentum. Formal and graceful. I learned by standing on Mom’s feet when I was five.

  “Dan’s here right now,” she said. “And just a second ago, before we started dancing, I sensed Justine, waiting just inside you. After years have gone by, here they are. Do they talk on the other side? Don’t worry. I’m a scientist. I will not go supernatural on you. But I know they are somewhere. And that is good and okay with me.” She touched her nose to my neck and inhaled.

  Beat of heart, tingle of skin. “I thought I heard you say something,” I said.

  “Listen to what you don’t quite hear, Roland. It’s almost always something you don’t hear yet.”

  “You pry right in.”

  “I’ll shut up.”

  The room spun around us: window and city and lights on the water, bookshelf and ladder, foyer and fire, the kitchen, then window and city again.

  “Can I take the comb out of my hair?”

  I felt her arms release and her upper body lean away, but we kept our three-quarter time. Her arms reached to their task, and her fingers worked. A dark wave fell to her shoulders. She lobbed the comb into the kitchen, where it clattered on the floor, and took my hand again.

  All the songs were waltzes. Some were up-tempo and made me feel Austrian. Some were as slow as summer in Ventura, where I’d lived as a boy. Some had words and some not a one. My heart was beating strong after the first two, and my breathing was deep and good. So was hers. Five waltzes? Six?

  She led me off the dance floor to the black sofa and collected our empty glasses. In the kitchen she rattled and banged, then came back with fresh glasses and twists, and the vodka bottle peeking out of a frosty stainless steel container—all balanced on a small tray. “I slung cocktails in college,” she said.

  She set it all on the table in front of us. Then sat down close to me and drew up her knees, letting her dress rise up her legs. I put my arm around her. She moved closer and rested her hand on the knot of my tie. She told me she saw something she liked in me that first day at Arcadia. Didn’t say what it was. Less than a week ago. She laughed. I looked at her hair falling forward and her face and the shine of the light in her eyes. Small beads of perspiration had formed above her mouth and one drop made it down her neck and into the hollow of her collarbone.

  “I’m nervous,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “Did you dance with Justine often?”

  “Often.”

  “Have you always been so angry?”

  I shrugged. How to say, It’s for everything that happened to her and shouldn’t have happened, without ruining the evening?

  “Do you blame yourself?”

  A twinge of defensiveness. “I could have kept her on the ground.”

  “Do you blame her?”

  I spoke before considering, and fumbled an unhappy truth. “I’m angry at her for trying to take a few hours of pleasure without me and not coming back. Logical? No. Anger does what it will.”

  “Fight it, Roland.”

  “With what?”

  “Forgiveness.”

  She stood and picked up the remote, dropped it clatteringly to the hardwood floor, swayed unsteadily, then picked it up. Her hair fell forward around her face as she found the right buttons. The house lights dimmed while papery blinds hummed down the windows. She drained her glass and set it down and shivered. “Sorry. I need just a little more courage.”

  “Am I that scary?”

  “Take me to my bed. It’s thataway.”

 
I walked Paige to the bedroom with one of her arms over my neck like a wounded warrior. She felt heavy and drunk. I helped her off with the dress and she hit the bed, dug under the covers and curled up, knees to chest. I lay on top of the covers, close beside her, and ran my fingers through her hair. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t drink that. Much.”

  “It’s okay, Paige.”

  “Say no to anger.”

  “I will.”

  “But you still have to . . .”

  “Have to what?”

  “Call. Me first. When you find Clay. And testify. And make all the bad stuff. Go away.”

  Before I could tell her I hadn’t agreed to either, her breathing had gone deep and fast. I touched her face, pale in the moonlight. Ran a finger along her jawline. I wanted her so bad it hurt. I listened to her breathing. Took my hand off her and sat up against the headboard. I heard the San Diego traffic far below, watched a tug pulling a Navy tender across the silver water of the bay, felt weirdly crowded by the past, even here, just two people, twenty-seven stories up in a box of brick and glass with the lights off and the nightshades down.

  26

  I found some bottled water in the refrigerator, took it back into the bedroom, and stood in the doorway for a moment. Her back was to me and she was breathing steadily. The bed-stand clock said 1:47. The bathroom night-light was on but I didn’t want to wake her. Didn’t seem like a thunderstorm could do that at this point, but . . .

  So I crossed the living room to the other side of the penthouse and found the second bath at the end of the hall. It was good-sized, apparently set up to service two bedrooms, one on either side, with doors to each at either end of a long bathroom counter. There were twin sinks and dark blue tile. I hit the lights, splashed hot water on my face, then cold. The mirror displayed all my thirty-eight years in detailed relief—laughs and fights, highs and lows, truly a map deserved.

  High on the left side of my forehead is the scar with the story behind it. Nickel-sized and Y-shaped. Faint, but in the right light it’s clear. Got it in my first professional fight—just out of the corps and invincible. Roland “Rolling Thunder” Ford versus Darien “Demolition” Dixon. Part of the undercard at Trump 29 Casino, Coachella, California, 2005. Darien was twice the fighter I was and I knew it after the first thirty seconds of the fight. He had some fun with me. Finally put me down in the ninth with a jab, a cross, and a hook. I was a sack of gravel on the canvas, but still conscious. Watching the ref looming over me, counting. Lights bright, crowd loud. I knew I could get up, beat the count, and continue. Or I could stay right where I was and call it all quits. More important, I was astonished that this could happen to invincible me. Tough guy in school. Never knocked down in a Marine Corps bout. Door-to-doors in Fallujah and never caught a bullet or stepped on an IED. People around me shot dead from hundreds of yards away, others blown to shreds with one step. Twenty-six years of victory. But laying there as the referee counted, it all came crashing down on me at once and for the first time—the fact that I was utterly, spectacularly mortal. So this is how it feels. I was suddenly thankful just to be alive.

  Of course, in accord with Ford spirit and Marine training, I got up at “nine,” bounced on my toes, and glared at the ref, nodding. He took my wrists, stared into my eyes, and stepped away. “Demolition” hit me with a big right I just didn’t have the legs to get away from. Saw it coming. The next thing I remember, a ceiling of faces was staring down at me in bright, bright light. Some I knew. I remembered where I was and what had happened. They helped me to my feet, then to my stool in the corner. I sat there, watching the world around me, feeling pleasantly outside myself, childlike. State of wonder.

  Hospital, seven stitches and an MRI, out in a couple of hours.

  Rolling Thunder’s first defeat.

  Mortality check.

  Stopped fighting.

  Began dancing.

  I look at the scar sometimes to remind myself of that mortality. To know that sometimes it’s good not to get up before the bell. Not to let your pride carry you into the big punch that puts you down. When I’m worried or afraid, the scar heats up. When there’s something wrong that I’m not aware of, some trouble that has yet to register, the scar itches. And every once in a while—used to be once a year or so, but lately more often—I feel that same state of post-KO wonder come over me, and I’ll want to sit on a stool in my corner and just watch the world go by. I asked a neurologist about it years ago and he told me not to worry—I probably hadn’t taken enough punishment to cause chronic dementia pugilistica. That made the scar itch. Which worried me. Had another scan, but he saw nothing unusual.

  —

  Still standing in Paige Hulet’s guest bath, I checked my phone and found nothing, looked into the mirror again and shook my head.

  I opened one of the bathroom’s two interior doors because that’s what I do. There was a light switch just inside. Paige’s home office greeted me: a neat desk, a computer and peripherals, stacks of magazines. I stepped in. One wall hung with framed pictures, diplomas, certificates. On the desk a row of coffee cups bristling with pens and pencils and a large desk blotter dense with scribbles and drawings. There was a smaller version of the wall-sized bookcase, no ladder needed. A brown leather task chair sat before a desktop monitor. In the far opposite corner was a red leather recliner with a reading lamp behind it. A complex-looking treadmill faced the southern window. Through that window, the Grand Hyatt reminded me of the night I’d met Justine. I looked at it for a long while.

  Then went to the bookcase to read titles and authors. Most of the volumes were hardbound books on biology, medical science, psychiatry, and philosophy. French literature, poetry, and drama. No PI novels.

  I sat in the task chair in front of the desk, butt low and knees high, found the chair’s vertical control, and raised the seat bottom. For some reason I thought of me moving Paige Hulet out of the strong sunlight outside Arcadia, then her moving us back into it. I wondered if the sunlight was truth, or an irresistible illusion, or simply sunlight. Wondered if she was awake in her bed and maybe missing me. Smelled her body and perfume on me and silently apologized to Justine. It wasn’t the horny foreplay that made me feel guilty, it was the reckless affection that Paige Hulet brought to me.

  On the desk lay a short stack of the Journal of Psychiatry, all the same issue from three months ago, with “Soul Wounds” by Paige Hulet called out on the cover. I took one and flipped to the article and read a paragraph at random. I looked at her picture at the end. She looked better in real life. Especially with her dress off.

  I rolled back from the desk for a wider view of Paige’s work space. Stopped just short of the treadmill. Studied her diplomas on the wall, arranged at eye level above her computer monitor. Tustin High School valedictorian. UCLA, with a major in biology and a minor in French, summa cum laude. The Keck School of Medicine of USC. Columbia University Medical Center psychiatry resident. Proud of her achievements, I thought.

  Around this core of lauds and laurels hung framed photographs of Paige with various patients at Arcadia. Recognized some of them. It looked like the pictures had been shot spontaneously—some taken outside in the woods or around the pool, others in the art studio and the recreation rooms and the Lyceum. Most of the patients looked relaxed. Some looked wide-eyed with excitement, or maybe they were just aping the clichés about the mentally disturbed that they all surely knew too well. I saw trust on the faces of those men and women, and the satisfaction this trust was bringing their lovely doctor. Paige looked happy. Several were of Clay Hickman, who looked very much as he did in the pictures Paige had supplied to me: a young slender-faced man with a mop of blond hair and different-colored eyes. In one shot, she faced the camera while he looked at her, and the contentment in him was obvious. The healer, he’s thinking. My lovely healer. She seemed as happy as he did. Something in her expression. Achievement. See what I’v
e done. I looked at that picture for a long beat, wondering how a mind fails. Not like a heart, or a plan, or the fuel pump of an airplane. No. More complicated, maybe, or at least less understood. Sitting there, I felt humbled that, even through the sludge of psychotropic drugs and hallucinogens they were shoveling down him, Clay Hickman could still find moments of genuine joy.

  Then, farther out from the doctor/partner shots, was Paige’s personal history: as a girl with her mom and dad, beach trips, camping. Paige in a barnyard holding an orange cat, and tennis, tennis, tennis. Crestview League singles champion of 1992 and 1993. I was surprised that she was three years my senior. Didn’t look it. She looked then like she did now: serious and smart. Paige looking up from a book. Paige with girlfriends. Later, Paige being graduated from UCLA, summa cum laude. Deans’ lists. Not quite smiling. No boyfriends on that wall. And no Daniel that I could see. Only a few pictures of Paige as an adult, other than those with her partners at Arcadia. A few with Mom and Dad again, aging well apparently.

  —

  Back in the guest bath, I opened the door on the opposite wall of the two-sink counter, stepped in, and found a light. It was smaller than the home office and furnished very simply: a twin bed along one wall, a chest of drawers, a small desk with a wooden chair and a lamp. I turned on more lights. A French Open poster hung above the desk. I was pleased to see that its setting, Roland-Garros, was in big type. Beside it was a poster of Rafa Nadal sliding on clay. A window faced west and I could see the lights of the naval installations out on Coronado.

  The room smelled fresh and clean, but felt unused. I opened the closet: a few blouses and light jackets hanging at one end, jeans and trousers at the other. Shoes on the floor, sweaters on the shelf. I heard a siren wailing far down and away.