How Town

by Michael Nava

  “Paul know?” I asked, approaching him.

  He shook his head. “I’ll go see him tomorrow.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “Thanks, but I think I should go by myself.” He yawned. “Listen, I could use a drink. What about you?”

  “Some coffee, maybe.”

  “Let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”

  He was right. A thin vapor drifted off the surface of the water and I felt the autumn damp through my shirt. We made our way back to the house and into the kitchen. He set about fixing coffee while I sat at the table watching him, piling up the day’s events in my head; Ruth’s disappearance, Ben’s visit to me, Sara’s death. Two of the three I was pretty sure were related. Although I couldn’t fit Sara into the equation, I couldn’t add it up without her.

  Pouring two cups of coffee, Mark said, over his shoulder, “You take anything in it?”

  “Black.”

  He excused himself and left the room, returning a moment later with a bottle of Jameson. He poured some into his cup and brought both cups to the table, setting them down delicately. He pulled out a chair and sat down. Closing tired eyes, he took a drink.

  He shuddered, drank some more and reached back to the counter for the bottle. Pouring another slug into his cup, he glanced at me and said, “I’ve got a taste for the stuff, too. Not as bad as Sara though.”

  “No one starts out a drunk,” I replied.

  “That why you stopped?” he asked.

  “Yeah. It got out of control.”

  He smiled, wanly. “I can’t imagine you ever out of control, Hank.”

  Remembering the last time I’d detoxed, I said, “Trust me. This is good, Mark.”

  “Coffee and fried egg sandwiches,” Mark said. “The Mark Windsor cookbook. You cook?”

  “Sometimes.” We settled into an awkward silence.

  “Sara could be a real bitch,” Mark said abruptly, his eyes darkening, “but I couldn’t blame her, not after what she went through with Paul. It’s to her credit that she stayed with him.”

  Cynically, I said, “For the money?”

  He smiled sourly. “You wouldn’t ask if you’d ever been through a divorce.”

  “Well, from what I saw of her and Paul, money sounds more probable than love.”

  He brooded over his cup. “You never seem to love the people you’re supposed to.” He ran a fingertip around the rim of his cup. “Like with Paul. He’s my brother, but I’ve never loved him. Or my dad.” He pushed his cup back and forth. “That’s not true. I did love my dad, even if he was an asshole, even if he couldn’t care less for me.”

  “What is it about Paul that you despise so much?” I asked. “That he didn’t stand up to your father? It’s not his fault he wasn’t as strong as you. He was just a kid, Mark.”

  He worked the muscles in his face. “I need another drink for this,” he said, finally, and filled his cup. “There was just the four of us.” He sipped the whiskey. “There wasn’t anyone else to talk to except Paul about what used to happen. Like the time Mom got so drunk at dinner she threw up and Dad made us sit there and keep on eating, like nothing had happened. I had to count on Paul.” He took another drink, and when he spoke again, his voice had thickened. “But Paul was worse than them. They were just pretending nothing was wrong. Paul really believed it. Really.” He looked at me, his eyes like flares. “I think he made himself kind of crazy so that he didn’t have to deal with it. And that left me alone.”

  My first thought was that self-pity seemed to run deep in the Windsor sons, but then I thought of Elena and me. The only difference between the children of the Rioses and the Windsors was the dimension of our isolation from each other.

  “Except you,” Mark muttered. “There was you, too. You don’t have to believe this,” he said, “but when I heard you were back in town, I was really happy. It had been too long.”

  “I wrote you once,” I said. I would have sounded less like the offended lover had I not been as tired as I was. But then again, it was an exhausting conversation, after all these years. For Mark, too. He was white with fatigue.

  “Yeah, I still have that letter somewhere,” he said. “Telling me you were queer.” He clenched his fingers around the handle of the cup. Angrily, he asked, “What did you want me to do? Send you flowers? Tell you it didn’t make any difference? It sure as hell did, Hank. I trusted you, man, and you … I’m not that way, not like you.”

  “You think all I wanted was to fuck you?”

  For a second, he recoiled from me. Then, in a low, furious voice, he said, “You said in that letter that you loved me. What else was I supposed to think?”

  “I did love you,” I said just as angrily. “I counted on you the same way you counted on Paul, to understand me.” I watched him trying to work it out in his head, and plunged on, having waited twenty years for this moment. “It wasn’t about sex. Well,” I relented. It was urgent that I be honest. “Not mainly about sex. I could have lived with you saying no to sex. But when you didn’t answer, you said no to everything, to being friends, to the only happiness I had ever had.”

  “That’s how I felt when I got that letter,” Mark said, not yielding an inch to my anger. “I already knew I was a freak, Henry, growing up in that house. Being your friend was the most normal thing I ever did, but that letter changed it.”

  “Well, what the hell did you feel for me?”

  The question caught him off guard and I watched the anger evaporate from his expression. Finally, he said, “You were my brother.”

  “Don’t brothers love each other?”

  “Jesus,” he muttered, but I couldn’t tell whether the tone was revelation or resignation.

  “Don’t they?” I asked again, quietly.

  Setting his hand on the table, he nodded. “I loved you,” he said.

  The sourness in my mouth wasn’t the coffee or lack of sleep. And it sure as hell wasn’t victory. It was the twenty years’ worth of regret. “Do you have any more cigarettes?”

  “Sure,” he said, surprised. He fumbled in his coat pocket for his pack of Winstons, took two out, handed me one and lit them. “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

  “Not since law school,” I replied, tasting the acrid smoke.

  We smoked in silence for a few minutes. I thought about Sara, whom I’d completely forgotten about for the past half-hour. Yet it was only the proximity of death, her death, that let Mark and me say these things to each other.

  “I think I understand now,” he said, finally.

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  He put out his cigarette in his coffee cup. “I’m broke, Hank, and I’m probably going to go to jail.”

  “I know,” I said. “Stein told me. He read some memo in Clayton’s office.”

  He yawned. “Well, at least I won’t have to worry about how I stand with you.”

  “I’ll represent you, if you want.”

  He got up from the table. “Thanks, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to afford you.”

  “I didn’t say I’d charge you.”

  He patted my shoulder. “I’m proud of you, Hank, have I told you that?” He yawned. “I guess we should clear out.”

  “I’d better drive you home.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll walk. It’s not far and it’ll sober me up. What time is it, anyway?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Almost five.”

  “Geez, if I was twenty years younger or just a little drunker, I’d go out for a run.”

  We locked up the house and he walked me to my car. The sky was turning smoke gray as the first light of day edged slowly along the horizon and the air was fresh and damp. Good running weather.

  “See you,” he said.

  “Mark, what did you want to talk to me about the other night at the Hyatt?”

  “Nothing that I didn’t tell you tonight,” he replied. “ ’Bye.”

  “See you.”

  He walked up the
street with a drunkard’s fragile gait, whistling tunelessly, and I didn’t think I’d be getting that call from him when the time came. He’d made his way through life alone and he’d see it through alone, not taking handouts, not trading on an old friendship. Maybe he was just a garden-variety neurotic and no doubt he’d hurt a lot of people to build the business that was now collapsing around him. Still, I had loved so infrequently I felt a debt to those whom I had, for the reprieve from solitude. It was the weight of what I owed that I felt as I watched him round the corner.

  The phone woke me at noon. Reaching blindly, I knocked the receiver to the floor and fumbled with it. I pressed the cool plastic to my ear and shut my eyes against the glare from the windows.

  “Yeah,” I managed.

  “Catch you at a bad time, sport?”

  “Was asleep, Kev.”

  “Is that cow town in a different time zone or did you have a rough night?”

  “My client’s wife drowned last night,” I said.

  “Ah.” He paused. “Have you figured out how you’re going to get it into evidence?”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” I replied, awakening. “You’re calling about the file, I assume. Did you have a chance to look at it?”

  “Couldn’t do it, old man. The record was ordered sealed.”

  I sat up. “Why?”

  “My guess is that it was to protect the identity of the victim.”

  Yes, that would make sense since the victim was a minor. “How quickly could we get a court order to unseal it?”

  “Well,” he said, slowly, “if I went in ex parte today we might get a hearing in a week.”

  “Too long. You have any chips you can cash in with a judge down there? How about the one that married you?”

  “Frances Flynn?” he asked on a note of rising incredulousness. “You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”

  “It’s really important. There are some very heavy things going on in this case, including this woman’s death last night. I need to see that file.”

  “Well, you know your business,” he said. “I might be able to get us on calendar tomorrow afternoon, but I’d just as soon that you came down and handled it.”

  “Sure, I have to go to Oakland anyway.”

  “No one has to go to Oakland,” he replied. “Let me see what I can do and I’ll call you back.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I threw back the covers and got out of bed, wandering through the room, waking myself. When my head cleared I ordered up a pot of coffee and prepared myself for the task of going to see Paul.

  Mark had already been by, but even before then Paul had known about Sara’s death. One of the cops at the scene had called the jail. Paul had been awakened at three and told that his old lady had killed herself. It was evident from the way he looked that he hadn’t slept after that. He sat across the table from me, unshaven and disheveled. His eyes were manic but he spoke without affect. In his exhaustion I saw, for the first time, the family resemblance to Mark.

  “You don’t know it was suicide,” I said, for the third or fourth time, but he remained unpersuaded. “It could have been an accident.” I wasn’t really convinced of this myself, but it was dangerous to fuel either his guilt or his paranoia.

  “How do you know, you weren’t there when it happened.”

  “Paul, I talked to her last week. She seemed fine.”

  “You don’t understand what I put her through, what I took away from her. She didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have any life. Just the booze.”

  I shook my head. “Will you stop feeling sorry for yourself?”

  He bristled, but said nothing.

  “You’re not God, Paul,” I continued. “You don’t control other people. You don’t give them reasons to live or reasons to die. Sara was tough, she’d survived a lot, you know that better than I do. Don’t take that away from her.”

  Raggedly, he began to cry. His hand strained across the table for mine and clutched my wrist. “You don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “She hated me,” he said, looking up red-eyed. “She wanted to hurt me.”

  I pulled my hand away. “Don’t you ever think about anyone else, Paul?”

  He wiped his face on his sleeve. “You don’t understand me.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “Your wife’s dead and you’re crying for yourself. I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve suffered,” he said, bitterly. “You don’t know what it was like when I was a kid.”

  “I’ve heard it from Mark,” I replied. “It was rough. I sympathize but you’re thirty-two years old, Paul. You’re too old to be blaming Mom and Dad.”

  “Fuck you. What do you know about my parents?”

  “Mark said—”

  “I fucked her, Henry,” he yelled. “She made me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She was a drunken slut. I was so happy when she died. I thought she took the feelings with her, but then I met Ruth.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “My mother,” he whispered. “My mother.”

  21

  PAUL SAID, “I’D JUST COME in from the pool and I heard her banging around the house, drunk as usual. No one else was home, maybe the maid was there, I don’t know. I heard her talking to herself outside my room and then she came in, carrying a can of my dad’s talc.” For a moment he talked about his father, but circled back and continued. “I was standing there in my bathing suit and she started shaking the powder all over me. In my eyes. I couldn’t see. Saying crazy stuff. ‘My baby,’ that’s what she said. My baby.”

  He interrupted himself again. “I never told anyone this. Well, Sara. I told Sara.” He started crying again. “I pushed her away but she kept on coming. Then I was on the bed and she was rubbing me. She was laying on top of me. She stank. Her hair, her skin. She didn’t clean herself when she was drinking. Jesus, Henry, say something.”

  “I’m sorry, Paul. I’m sorry that it happened.”

  “She got her hand down into my bathing suit. Squeezing my balls until I wanted to scream.” He rubbed the side of his neck, inflaming the skin. “She started jerking me off. She stuck her tongue in my mouth, it tasted like gin. That was her drink.” He paused in his rubbing. “Sara liked gin, too. Just like Mom. ‘Get me G and T while you’re up, Herb.’ That was Mom’s motto.”

  “You don’t have to tell me any more,” I said.

  “I want to! She was kissing me, she was jerking me off. Look, I was thirteen, you know. I walked around with a hard-on.” His breathing was quick and nervous. “It began to feel pretty good. I pulled down my bathing suit.” He glanced at me and then looked away. “Make it easier for her.”

  “You must have been terrified.”

  He nodded. “I flashed between that and, well, the physical sensation. How the hell else was I supposed to react with someone jerking me off?”

  “I understand, Paul.”

  “Do you?” he asked bitterly. “She lifted her dress up and she … I couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like being swallowed. And then I came. She didn’t come. Not that time.”

  “It happened again?”

  He calmed himself. “Off and on, until I went to college. She was always drunk. In blackouts.”

  “Always?”

  He shrugged. “Well, we never talked about it.”

  “Have you ever thought of getting help?”

  “When it was over, it was over,” he said.

  “What about Ruth?”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve read the goddamned literature, Henry. I know all about pedophiles. I know all about how it works. Well, believe me, it’s not that simple. I wasn’t passing on what my mother taught me. My feelings for Ruth were real.”

  “But you must know there’s a connection.”

  “What am I supposed to do, just say no?” He got up. “Hate myself? Kill myself? Fuck that.”

&nbs
p; “Get help,” I replied.

  “Thanks,” he said, moving toward the door. “Thanks a lot.”

  Back at the hotel there was a message from Kevin.

  “What’s going on?” I asked when I’d been put through to him.

  There was a moment’s pause. “You sound worse than you did this morning, pal.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “We’re on the one-thirty calendar at Judge Flynn’s court tomorrow,” he said. “On your motion to unseal the records. I put one together pretty fast. What I said was that it might reveal evidence material to the case you’re on now. Does that sound about right?”

  “Yeah.” Outside, dusk gathered in the sky. The thought of another night in Los Robles was unbearable. “Listen, if I drive down to the city tonight can you and Terry put me up?”

  “Sure. What time will you be in?”

  “If I leave right away I should be there by eight.”

  “Sounds good. You sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

  I hung up, stared at the phone for a minute, and then dialed my number in LA. It rang twice and then Josh picked it up.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi, I was thinking about calling you.”

  It felt awkward to be talking to him, having so much going on without any coherent way of saying it. “Sara Windsor was killed last night.”

  “What happened?”

  “Cops think she got drunk and fell into the pool.”

  “You don’t.”

  Wearily I said, “I don’t know what I think. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Henry.” His voice was low with worry. “Are you okay?”

  “I miss you.”

  “I think I should come up there.”

  “In a couple of days, maybe. I have to go to San Francisco tonight. And to Oakland. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

  “Do you always have to carry everything by yourself?”

  “I’m trying not to. That’s why I called.”

  “Call me tomorrow, okay?”

  “I promise.”