Golden Orange
Page 7
There are fifteen to twenty fishermen in the dory fleet, a unique and eccentric band who, for a century, have launched their little flat-bottomed boats directly off the beach, smashing through the breakers into wind and spray and deep dark ocean. All alone usually, at two o’clock in the morning, they motor out sometimes twenty-five miles to set their mile-long lines, held down in a thousand feet of ocean by Coke bottles and bricks, each line set with over five hundred hooks from which a good day’s catch of half a ton will be plucked by hands turned bone-white from exposure. All of this in an era when commercial fishermen use airplanes and sonar.
Of course, the brightly painted old wooden dory boats, littering the beach where they sell the day’s catch, are there for atmosphere. Nowadays, the new boats of Japanese design have Yamaha engines, and Toyota trucks haul them out of the water at day’s end. Still, the dory fleet retains a kind of Gypsy romance to tourists, and even to locals. They’re part of the rind in The Golden Orange.
“Know something?” Winnie said, looking down to the bar level where beautiful young women were having drinks with middle-aged men they hardly knew or just met. “This is a pickup joint.”
Tess said, “Not the way you mean it. In the age of herpes and AIDS these women come here to get fed. These gentlemen are looking for dinner companions and the ladies just oblige. It seldom goes beyond that, or so I’ve been told. It’s a tradition here.”
“So there really is hunger in America!” Winnie observed. “And these Gold Coasters’re doing their share to take care of it, at a hundred bucks a head. Maybe this is part of the thousand points of light George Bush was talking about at the Republican convention.”
Tess looked at a pair of young women, both with hair like tennis star André Agassi, and said, “More like young animals being captured, fed and released by toothless predators. This is a nature show, Winnie. They do everything but tag ears around here.”
Winnie had two more Polish vodkas, and was starting to vibrate by the time dessert came.
“Got any cheesecake?” he asked the waitress. “I’ll have cheesecake if you got it.”
“And give him a scoop of white chocolate ice cream on the side,” Tess said. “My old son hasn’t had a meal lately.”
When the waitress was gone, Winnie said, “Any son of yours would still be squeezing zits. You can’t be a day over thirty-five.”
She looked very pleased at that, but said, “You don’t really expect me to tell you my age.”
“Me, I just turned forty. I’m feeling it. Only time I felt young was tonight at your club. Watching the grab-a-granny action.”
“Who told you about the grab-a-granny business?”
“The tall guy with the funny red toup on his head. The one that yelled at me when we left.”
“The one who called me a hooker.”
“Yeah, well, he was one a those drunks likes to shock little girls and people from Nebraska. I didn’t pay no attention to what he was saying half the time.”
“If my father were alive I’d take you to his yacht club,” she said. “Different crowd entirely.”
“I know a few people belong there,” Winnie said. “Met ’em when I was still sailing a lot. Your dad was commodore, huh?”
“My grandfather. When I was a little girl Daddy made me sail Sabots and Snowbirds. Humphrey Bogart was racing his Albatross here in those days.”
“So you are a sailor!”
“Not if I can help it. Whenever I’d place below the top three in a race I’d get lectured for an hour. It’s probably why I hate boats. Especially sailboats.”
“Bet you were an only child, with an old man riding that hard.”
“You win the bet.”
“Daddy’s girl, huh?”
All the time she was talking about her father, Tess Binder looked away from Winnie, toward the night, toward the crashing surf beyond the long white sand beach. She didn’t answer him at first, then she smiled sardonically and said, “Daddy wasn’t much for girls, as it turns out. Shall we go?”
“Sure,” he said, finishing the last bite of cheesecake.
“Let’s go to your club.”
“My club?”
“Spoon’s Landing.”
“Well … tonight’s likely to be a little rough. The gang from the boatyards get paid.”
“Super! Let’s go!”
“Hey, I do belong to a club,” he said. “Sort of. Let’s stop at my club for one and then to Spoon’s.”
Ten minutes later, Tess, who looked as though she might be feeling the drinks, parked the Mercedes in the parking lot beside the American Legion Post on Fifteenth Street. The building happened to rest on some of the most valuable land on the Balboa peninsula, city-owned property on Lido Channel. Winnie had joined the Legion for three reasons: cheap drinks, pretty good steaks you get to cook, and a restful channel view. Those members who’d seen combat were mostly vets of W.W. II or Korea. There were only a few from Winnie’s war, but everyone seemed friendly and real. He never could get used to older folks calling him “comrade” all the time. Still, when you get an honest shot of good booze for a buck and a quarter, you had no bitch coming. And unlike Spoon’s Landing, the worst argument he ever heard here was about whether or not you can talk during a salute.
The old babe who played the piano was in full swing when they arrived. All in all, the Legion was like any mid-America lodge. Tess seemed to enjoy the down-home hospitality, so they killed an hour listening to the piano, during which Winnie downed four vodkas because at that price you couldn’t afford not to. Just before they left, the old lady played “Where or When,” and a widow of a W.W. II naval aviator stood up and sang in a thin quavery soprano.
It seems we stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other in the same way then
But I don’t remember where or when.
“That’s how I feel about you!” Winnie said suddenly. “Like the song!”
“What do you mean?”
“Since I first met you I’ve felt like I’ve seen you before. Maybe talked to you. Something.”
He shook his head slowly, groping for it. Déjà vu. A snatch of a melody. The smell of her perfume: jasmine. What?
“Haven’t we met someplace before, babe?” she said. “That what you mean?”
“No, I’m serious,” he said.
The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore
We smiled at each other in the same way then
But I can’t remember where or when.
“I’d remember you, old son,” she said. “Shall we go?”
Winnie stopped when they reached the sidewalk outside.
“Anything wrong?” she asked.
“You ever drink at that jazz club in Laguna?”
“Winnie!” she said, shaking her head. “I’m offended. Are you saying you could forget me?”
“No, I guess I couldn’t,” he said.
The voice drifted outside, the tin soprano, so full of sadness.
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before and loved before
But who knows where or wheeeennnn.
Tess chuckled and said, “Maybe we were chums in some other life?”
“Maybe,” Winnie said. “But I’d be happy to be your pal in this one.”
Spoon’s Landing was, as Winnie feared, full of fishermen and boatyard gypsies and off-duty cops and other waterfront vagabonds. Four boozy cops in jeans and T-shirts were playing snooker and punching large holes in their paychecks. The L.A. Kings were playing hockey on big screen, and there were some petty but boisterous bets being made in the corner of the saloon. A dory fisherman in huaraches and cutoffs—a wiry guy with alligator hands—accidentally lurched into Tess before they got to the bar. He offered a leering apology, disappointed to see Winnie right behind her.
“I was afraid a this,” Winnie said. “Looks like a panel for the Geraldo Rivera show. Sure you wanna have a drink?”
“
Wouldn’t miss it,” Tess said cheerily, and Winnie wasn’t too bombed to see that she didn’t seem all that sober either.
“Let’s sit at the far side,” he said.
Spoon moved Guppy’s empty glass twelve inches down the bar to make room for the new arrivals and told her, “Wake up and go home!”
The old woman opened her eyes, banged her hand on the bartop and said, “Somebody stole my drink when I went to the ladies room! I demand another one!”
“Cut it out!” Spoon said.
“Cut what out?” Guppy’s velvet hair ribbon was undone and dangling in front of her nose, unleashing an explosion of gray hair. “I’m the one got ripped off by one of your low-life customers! Look at ’em!” She waved her hand in the general direction of the dory crews. “I’ve seen more gentility at a cockfight and better wardrobes. Their idea of style is tying the thongs on their deck shoes and they don’t need socks ’cause their ankles’re green.”
Then she located her glass and smacked it down on the bar, yelling, “Publican! Bring me a screwdriver!”
“I’ll put one through your heart!” said the saloonkeeper. “This bar’s inlaid with shell from Galápagos turtles! You can’t get giant turtle shells no more!”
“Well, you shouldn’t have a goddamn endangered bartop!” Guppy countered. “You environmental pirate!”
“I’ll buy Guppy a drink, for chrissake!” said Winnie. Anything to quiet things down.
“She ain’t gettin no drink!” Spoon said. “She’s been drinkin rum since noon. This always happens when she takes that noon balloon to Jamaica.”
Guppy smiled demurely at Tess, extended her gloved hand and said, “Howja do, my dear. I’m Guppy Stover. What’s Winnie doing with a lady like you?”
Tess Binder smiled and shook hands with Guppy, who then said, “Don’t get too close to those guys playing snooker. They’re cops. And stay away from the bunch of thugs watching the hockey game. They think class is when most of the words on their tattoos’re spelled right.” Then she pointed to Bilge O’Toole and said, “Don’t even look in his direction or you’ll be wearing him like a fox stole. We’re talking here about a guy that drinks from the faucet without a glass. He smiles at you, you’ll feel like you just been flashed.”
The old woman, forgetting she was eighty-sixed, yelled to the saloonkeeper: “Spoon, bring me a brain tumor! I feel like mixing.”
“I ain’t serving drinks to a drunk!” Spoon said. “If I wanted to get thrown in jail I’d attend a Grateful Dead concert. Go home!”
Bilge O’Toole, who probably had a higher blood-alcohol reading than Guppy, said, “Stop whining about a drink! What is this, the days of whine and roses?”
Then Carlos Tuna moved in close, carrying his turtle, Regis, around his neck in a leather pouch designed for comfy riding. He stuck up for Guppy. Soon everybody was fuming and fussing about who should or should not be served an alcoholic beverage.
“What this is really about,” Winnie explained to Tess over all the yelling, “is a debate over what Regis, who’s Carlos’s turtle, did to Irma, who’s Bilge’s turtle. They’re looking for an excuse to fight. Jesus, where’s the ghostbusters when we need ’em?”
“I’m enjoying myself immensely!” Tess said. And for once her gray eyes looked a bit less opaque.
Finally Carlos said to Bilge, “Listen, I was you I’d go back down the bar with the rest a that barge garbage!”
“Careful, Bilge!” Guppy sneered. “Don’t mess with Carlos. He’s one of those hard guys, blows his nose on the sidewalk.”
“He’ll be wipin’ it there along with his ass, he messes with me or my turtle!” Bilge countered, his face red and sweaty, his white hair standing in stalks.
“This’ll be a one-punch fight,” Spoon said disgustedly to Winnie. “Whichever one throws it, he’ll have a coronary on the spot. They’ll be hemorrhaging cholesterol if they so much as break skin.” Then he turned to both big-bellied turtle wranglers and said, “Break it up, or you’re all eighty-sixed!”
“I came here and paid good money for a laugh or two!” Guppy cried in utter despair. “They had more laughs in Wuthering Heights!”
Tess had trouble hitting the ashtray when she snuffed out her cigarette. “I think there’s only one place to go,” she said boozily.
“Yeah?”
“My place. Wanna see my house?”
“I’ll need a microsecond to think it over,” Winnie said.
Guppy Stover was being removed from Spoon’s Landing by the proprietor himself when Winnie and Tess arrived at the Mercedes parked on the street in front.
The old woman’s hair ribbon was long gone and her mass of hair had fallen forward, hiding all but her strawberry nose.
“Unhand me, you lout!” she cried, as Spoon gently propelled her down the sidewalk in the general direction of her apartment.
“You’re not wanted here tonight,” Spoon said. “Go home.”
“What am I, a pariah?” she cried. “A leper? Why don’t you brand me? Why not make me wear a scarlet letter? I bet Hester Prynne got kindlier pub service, you big tub a pelican puke!”
“That’s what you get when boozers have an education,” Spoon explained to Tess just before she opened the door to the Mercedes. “Always bringin up people I ain’t met.”
Tess was quiet during the ten-minute ride from Spoon’s to her home on Linda Isle. So was Winnie, but only because he was being lulled to sleep by the metallic chug of the diesel car.
His head bobbed when she said, “What else did he say? That man?”
“What man?”
“The tall one at the club.”
“The guy wearing the rug? I don’t know. Bought me a couple drinks and was filling me in on some a your members.”
“And what about my group? I mean, the women I was drinking with?”
“I don’t know,” Winnie said, realizing that tonight of all nights he should’ve shut it off after the eighth or tenth vodka. “Just more or less that they got the social consciousness of Marie Antoinette.”
“Well, he wasn’t exaggerating all that much.”
“No?”
“About a few of them. Corky Peebles, for example.”
“I liked her haircut,” Winnie said, as Tess stopped at the guarded kiosk of Linda Isle. “Reminded me a the Beatles when they started out. Very nostalgic.”
The uniformed guard waved and pressed the button to raise the wooden car barrier. Tess drove onto the island and made an immediate right. Into the ghetto.
A few homes on her side of the island were listed for $2.5 million, but there were a few you could pick up for as little as $1.2 million on leased land. Tess Binder’s house was one of those. She detested it. She’d gotten by with the furniture that Ralph Cunningham gave her when he’d bolted. She could’ve bought different furniture on credit, but had refused to put a penny into a house she hated. She didn’t even have the emotional energy to try to sell the horrible marble sculpture her husband had bought during their honeymoon in Florence. The “art dealer” in Florence had told Ralph that the sculptor was a young Michelangelo. Tess said, sure, if Michelangelo had freebased for about ten years and had the taste of Imelda Marcos.
Winnie Farlowe was one of the few human beings she’d invited into the house since Ralph deserted her for his tennis partner and what would surely be a costly doubles match.
She was about to apologize and concede that the place was ghastly, when Winnie said, “This is the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen! I love marble floors and a sweeping staircase and a crystal chandelier! Where does Scarlett O’Hara sleep?”
“So glad you like it, old son,” Tess said, leading him down into the sunken living room, tossing her purse on one of two sofas that Ralph had done in florid raw silk. She unsteadily turned on two lamps and pulled her shoes off, dropping them on the biggest glass and gilt coffee table Winnie had ever seen. “I need a drink,” she said, walking to the mirrored wet bar. She hated smoked mirrors. So gauche!
Winnie sat down on the sofa next to Tess only after she put a glass of Russian vodka on the table next to her double Scotch.
“Sorry I don’t have Polish vodka.”
“I was thinking I had enough,” Winnie said, eyeing the drink.
“I know I’ve had enough,” Tess said, taking a good hard hit on the Scotch, closing her eyes as it slid down her throat. Winnie had never seen someone drink Scotch the way she did—erotically.
He caressed his glass while she lit a cigarette and tucked her legs underneath herself, revealing all of one thigh. Tess clapped her hands and a sensual saxophone riff surrounded them: Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”
“John Coltrane was the best ever on tenor,” Winnie said. “Wish I coulda seen him in person.”
“I’m not a real jazz buff,” Tess said, “but I like certain pieces. My husband owed his life to Japanese technology. Me, I’d rather have a radio you can see and turn on with a knob.”
“Okay if I take my coat off?”
“I certainly assumed you’d take your coat off,” Tess Binder said, looking him right in the eye. She did it the same way she shook hands. Confidently.
The implication stopped him for a second. Those gray eyes behind the oversized glasses were impossible to read, especially since she kept going out of focus. He knew he shouldn’t have another swallow of booze.
Then she did that trick again. She sipped the Scotch and leaned her head back like a bird. He could almost see it slide down. He couldn’t decide. Was it the booze in his belly or the Scotch slipping down that long graceful throat? Anyway, Winnie Farlowe was getting mightily aroused.