by LEE OLDS
Although he didn’t exactly follow her around anymore, he managed to miraculously show up at some of the places she visited to address her and that was true whether she was with someone else or not. It was sort of like pass by commentary, a veritable monologue for she never answered him. She not only didn’t know how to but she was afraid to. For instance if she were sitting in the café he’d approach her table, doff his horrendous baseball cap and begin jabbering.
“I hear you’re going to law school. You’ll certainly do well at it. You’ve a brilliant mind, I wouldn’t be surprised if you ended up as a judge somewhere.”
She, of course’d, look askance. If at a friend, she’d blush. But in an instant he’d be gone. He’d said his piece and been satisfied by it. Nothing appeared to embarrass him or tell him this behavior might just be a little bit abnormal. He’d lost it. We declared him a nut case but definitely a pleasant one for whenever he saw us it was the same thing.
“How’re you guys anyhow, the real high rollers in town.” He said it with a subservient countenance but he was too serious to be kidding. We ignored him as soon as we saw him come in the door. He’d turned into an embarrassment for us. We turned away hoping he hadn’t noticed us but he had. We were like the very items he’d come there to find. He’d hold his hat, peer into the glass case of goodies as though they were the most delectable pastries in the world; then just as abruptly approach our table pretending they hadn’t held his attention one bit.
You can see how uncomfortable these antics could make a person. While Gloria and her girlfriend, Tricia, who worked in the café, were waiting in line at the movie theater on New Caledonia Street he approached them.
“Going to the show?” He’d asked them; then to Gloria. “That’s odd. Going in to see yourself?” And he’d scratch his head before he wandered off. Indicating, of course, she was the star of the movie she’d be going to see or something very nearly like it. She, naturally, felt sorry for him and though he was legally violating his restraining order for he wasn’t to come within twenty yards of her, she didn’t feel his presence serious enough to report him. And that did make her uneasy for when you’re exposed to an unbalanced individual, who’s formerly threatened you, there’s always the possibility they might suddenly snap and turn on you. It lurks in your mind. Then she had another problem.
“You’re kidding,” said Hammond. “That poor beautiful girl seems to have them all.”
“No I’m not.” Barth, the ex-newspaperman she’d taken up with to ‘tell things to’ and arouse Hartwig’s envy had finally become so bad with his violent coughing fits that Gloria, who’d been staying there, had called an ambulance and seen him off to the veteran’s hospital in the city where he could receive further treatment for his cancer. He was simply losing too much blood and she was tired of its disposal, which she’d undertaken herself since he wouldn’t touch it but would’ve had the entire flat decorated with Styrofoam cups full of the stuff. A sacred monument perhaps to himself no matter how stoically resolved he was to his condition. A personal sort of icon or cross. You just didn’t dare tell him that.
The radiologists had refused further dosage for he’d already received the standard and the chemotherapists would only treat him as long as he remained at the hospital. You know it makes you so sick anyhow you want to die and your hair falls out. Most of his had recently.
“And why would they only treat him in the hospital?” Said Hammond.
“Because there they could keep an eye on him and prevent his drinking. Like antibiotics, chemotherapy and booze don’t mix. And, quite frankly, that was the last sort of treatment available for him. The hormones hadn’t worked. They’d only exacerbated the cancer.”
“Really then,” said Hammond. “If the man felt so bad why didn’t he just end it himself? The doctors knew he was terminal didn’t they. Didn’t they tell him?”
“I imagine they did but doctors don’t want their patients to stop treatment for then they’ll be out of work,” I said. “And even so most people want to cling to that last breath of life though the man’d obviously threatened the act in front of the girl several times already. This old soldier, evidently, wasn’t one of the timid sorts when it came to eschatological issues.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, in several drunken rages he’d pulled out his old nine millimeter Walther he’d had in the service, stepped before the bay window and pointed the thing at his head.”
“Do I want this?” He’d shake the barrel at his temple melodramatically, “or do I want this?” He’d lower the pistol and wave at the view.
“You know you want that,” Gloria’d say, pointing her shaking fingers at the tantalizing horizon, and then gently relieve him of the ice-cold pistol and restore it to the cabinet. Then he’d say,
“Let’s go down to Sam’s for one.” And the two of them’d walk along the lagoon through the foggy night to the cozy neighborhood bar on the bay, which always had a fire going. She’d spew her grief about Hartwig and he’d encourage her to.
“Just forget the prick. You can easily find someone else. Why if I were younger.”
Now all that’d ended. They were keeping him in the hospital. She had no more real reason to stay in the neighborhood. Her scene with Hartwig (if by then it was anything whatsoever) was in limbo though hopes of meeting someone else perhaps were still in the offing, for Sausalito was a romantic little city in case you’ve forgotten. But then her exasperation with Johansson who confronted her almost daily compounded and she obviously got to the point she felt uncomfortable living in the general area. She decided to move. She took advantage of Sylvia’s offer and relocated to the city. Perhaps she felt that would solidify her hold on Hartwig and bring him back to her. If she couldn’t have him she’d be next to his kin, the next best thing. Who knows what goes on in the mind of an obsessed young woman? They’re difficult to read when they’re normal.
She quit her job, the mover came for her things and guess who was there to see her off?”
“The maniac?” Said Hammond.
“No, in fact, someone else, someone she dearly loved. Perhaps more than Hartwig,” I added in a moment of exultation. “At least at times it might’ve appeared that way. This was Stanley, his dog.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No.”
He’d just been roaming the area as usual, had become curious at the moving of the furniture … after all how many nights had he spent at the foot of her bed when … But why go into that. The dog sat on his haunches like a loyal Samaritan until the van was full, checking and sniffing each of her things as they were loaded and when Gloria hopped in and it began to roll down the road the dog followed alongside barking. As if to say ‘stop, unpack those things and come back. You’re making a big mistake. It, it seemed didn’t want to let her go. Fearing it might get run over, Gloria had the mover stop and holding its collar she walked it stooped over back to the factory where she had one of the workers hold it until they were out of sight. Of course, she nearly broke down right there as she walked back to the van, for just hearing the dog howl and whine like that, but she hopped back into the truck and she and the driver were off presumably to bigger and better things, a new life and a new world. Most of us’ve had those moments in our lives. For some of us they’ve worked.
When Hartwig heard of this move he was upset. I don’t know why but he was although he seemed nonetheless determined to carry out his scheme with the heiress if anything even more so. Like a man possessed I might say. There he was before us in the café announcing his trip.
“Tomorrow we go to the city to get my passport and new clothes (that she was going to buy him) and in several weeks we’ll be on a plane to Lisbon. I’ll send you our itinerary from there.” He elicited a jovial laugh, which was answered typically by our gadfly photographer.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” but a tint of frustration had begun to creep into his face for I believe by that time he felt it inevitable he was go
ing to lose the wager.
“I’m glad you won’t be there to see it,” was all Hartwig said. And we drank to that.
The rest of the time he spent getting ready. His keeper took him to Brooks Brothers in the city where she invested in no end of expensive clothes for him so that, of course, he might fit the role of the trophy she’d finally caught. At least by then I’m certain she felt she had. A new look, a motherly look had come upon her face when she was in Hartwig’s presence. We all noticed it and believed she had something definite in mind for her (their) future. The two of them had gone back to her mother (they certainly couldn’t go to Hartwig’s) and received a sincere sympathy from her regarding their future although Sandy hadn’t informed her of the trip and Hartwig certainly hadn’t volunteered to. She, I imagine, was waiting until they got back when she’d have something more significant to announce.
“And just what might that be?” Said Hammond.
“What else but marriage?” I said. “She you know by this time was madly in love with our hero but there was more to it than that…”
“And?”
She’d begun to feel the man’s weakness, which, of course, was money … I might say the weakness of us all … and didn’t mind it. She was willing to offer that, she felt if she could just have him. She wanted him to love her (had he really ever loved anyone except perhaps his dog?) and felt in his own way he did. If not in the romantic sense like Romeo or ‘Gone with the Wind’, so what. Who got that in real life? He was good enough for her and, a mistake of all women I might add with men like that, was she felt she could manipulate him. And you know I bet she could. If she just played her cards right he would marry her at this point and she could rule him by pulling the purse strings. As to how long such a merger might last is anyone’s guess. But how long does any marriage last nowadays where divorces are commoner than children. They’re like the meal one gets at a fast food chain. For people’ve finally found out, like most of our experiences, love doesn’t last forever and despite the family our culture says it’s all right to split up.
Hartwig’d lived and been with her awhile. Why couldn’t their association become a habit of longer duration? He could join the ‘boys’ club’ (Bohemian), spend her money in a demonstrative fashion. In every other way except perhaps her dinginess she was good enough. And if the thing came to an end in five or ten years he’d file for a settlement. Sandy knew she couldn’t have him on a prenupt. If they agreed on anything that was the tacit understanding between them. She’d even stopped seeing her other lover for the nonce, Brochowitz, or at least stopped reiterating to Hartwig her visits to the psycho, so he was out of the picture. The slate was clean or at least appeared to be. Their last big event was to be ‘poetry night’ here; then they were off.
“Poetry night?” Said Hammond. “What the hell’s that now?”
“Here, I’ll tell you.”
The third Thursday of every month was devoted to poetry at the café. Neighbors or even people from as far away as the peninsula or the east bay, who’d jotted down their thoughts or expressed their opinions of our society at large, would come there to read them on what was called an open mike. Some wrote poems; some prose, others mere musings but all were welcome. Singers and instrumentalists could also put in their ten minutes. Such events, certainly more genuine than our talent shows, were a godsend for Hartwig who because of his proficiency and the appeal of his instrument had become the cause celebre at them. The organizer always put him last and extended his time to twenty minutes instead of the usual ten. This was so the audience, many of whom were participants themselves, would stay through the entire event, even though to do so they’d have to sit through those who they didn’t want to hear. The crowds were large, the donation bowl passed about, and if you did manage to acquire a seat or standing space you didn’t want to leave it or it’d surely be taken. Due to that quirk Hartwig had a captive audience. The night lasted three or four hours so you had anywhere from fifteen or twenty persons performing at a session.
Sandy was keen on attending. Hartwig hadn’t taken her before and it was special to her for she’d now be seen on his arm before the Bohemian crowd, not merely the opera goers and that would cast a signal to those doubters that he was simply with her and no one else. One might compare it to being seen on the arm of a celebrity in one of the famous Hollywood haunts but, whether they were good or bad, poetry nights weren’t that superficial. Women’d cry, men’d shout imprecations at some wrong they’d recently suffered (and there were many even in a society supposedly as well off as ours) and the little ones, for many people brought their children, would look and listen in wonderment as before a puppet show.
“So,” said Hammond. “It was a family affair.”
“Sort of,” I acknowledged, “that is if you had one. None of our group had yet but who were we except a bunch of local characters. The one who organized the event was perhaps the biggest character of all. He was an expatriated poet from North Beach, who’d frequented it in its heyday but had graduated to our town when it’d become fallow. And this was peculiar.”
“Why was that?”
“He was a black man in his early fifties, who’d once run for Mayor in the city, a pure showman if there ever was one. He certainly pretended to write though one didn’t know whether he actually did or not. Now and then he’d get up and utter his musings, which somehow weren’t quite all there. He certainly worked at it hard enough for every single day (and night) one saw him in the coffee house, his laptop open, his head topped by a Panama hat, bent over it and his dexterous fingers working the keys. He lived there, literally, though he (all six feet of him) slept in his old Jaguar sedan cramped up like bones in a bag. We didn’t know how he did it. He had a welfare stipend to sustain himself, but arthritis was catching up to him. He’d begun to walk with a stoop. His name was Mercer.”
“Mercer,” we’d say on the appointed night, “think there’ll be a good show?”
“Never can tell,” he’d smile with his perfect (false) teeth, tip his hat and answer coyly.
The job of MC had fallen to him because of his availability and good nature. He was often ribbed about being the only man of color on the scene but he sloughed it off like he belonged there and he did. He’d been accepted. Most white communities have a ‘token black’, he was ours. There was a black community at the north side of town but the residents there kept mostly to themselves. You rarely encountered them in Sausalito.
The bay was unusually warm that year; people were actually swimming in it. At six o’clock in the evening it had begun to expel its invisible waves of heat. The masts of the yachts across from the café were still like tapered spikes set in the bottom of a trap as the first visitors arrived. The five of us grabbed the tall oak table near the window, which nonetheless held a perfect view of the speaker’s platform. We didn’t expect to hear much really. To see a lot, however, was a different matter. The characters who attend those sorts of affairs are worth any ten shows you might see in a nightclub. And during the course of the evening they all seemed to surface though not all of them stayed for Hartwig’s finale.
Sylvia, the mother, arrived with her new adoptee, Gloria and another dapper young man who turned out to be an assistant district attorney in the city. True to her word the mother had brought this eligible friend of hers aboard by introducing him to Gloria though I don’t believe she was exactly his date. Not yet anyhow.
“Why not? Said Hammond. “At this point? If he was attractive, intelligent, had a job. At least he was going somewhere. Whereas Hartwig…?”
“The two’d just met,” I advised him. “They were getting to know one another. The deeper relation takes time if it comes at all. In many cases it doesn’t.”
“But,” said Hammond. “Why’d they come in the first place? How’d the mother hear of a miniscule poetry reading in Sausalito? Certainly her son didn’t tell her.”
“Gloria, of course,” I said. “She and the mother talked it over. Gloria induc
ed her to go. Maybe she wanted to offer one last display of herself to the man she loved before cutting herself off from him forever and she wanted to witness the pride a mother takes in her naturally talented son. The one thing Sylvia always loved about her son was his playing. She came to hear that. Guess who else was there, June, though I don’t know how she found out about it. She came with Marcus.”
“And her other daughter?”
“Jennifer,” I said. “No, she didn’t come either, just like she hadn’t attended the christening. She was still feuding with her mother.”
“Over what now for God’s sakes,” said Hammond? “She attended the play didn’t she? Shakespeare at the beach.”
“Her mysterious disappearances.”
“Mysterious disappearances?”
Yes, you see that’d been the one secret of her persecuted life she’d been able to withhold from her domineering mother, though the poor thing had confided it to Marcus with the proviso,
“You must never tell, promise.”
“Don’t even think of it,” said the ever honest Marcus. Jennifer’d evidently taken to browsing around the little town of Tiburon, which was a short bus ride away from her mother’s house. Anything to get out and about on her own. June refused to let the girl have a car and she didn’t want her straying. At an antique store there the pretty young girl’d walked in one day to find it not busy and had engaged in conversation what turned out to be the owner, a single man in his early forties who’d been educated in Europe and had moved there to set up his business. He was a little Jewish fellow who’d already been here for twenty years, single, shrewd, very bright and of a sensitive if not handsome appearance. His name was Hans Kriebel. He was a German Jew.
Jennifer’s arrival had evolved into a long talk, which in turn begot more appearances and long talks. One thing led to another. The man kept an apartment above the store, which was at street level. She played the piano, which he also had upstairs, he the violin. And while neither of them was particularly good they made a complimentary duo together. The two began an affair, fell in love and he wanted to marry her. Though he was substantially older than she, after being raised by her hounding adopted mother he was a figure she could well respond to, almost like fitting one’s shadow to oneself. The way she talked about her mother, however, he was afraid to ask. They’d be in bed. He’d close the store in the afternoon so she could get home then open it again after dark.