by Nell Zink
“Maybe hang it out to dry. I’m sorry.”
“I wanted a new phone anyway. I want a burner clamshell phone like you and the other celebrities have.”
“You’re crazy,” he says. He touches her face tenderly. “I really think you should have a baby, just so you get a chance to love somebody who deserves it. You’re such a loving person, and the guys you love are such fucking jokes.”
“Rob the romantic,” she says. “One night with Penny, and you’re a breeder.”
“I love her. She’s as tormented as you or anybody, but when she’s in trouble, it’s through no fault of her own. I spent so much of my life around self-defeating fuckups, I forgot that was even possible!”
She looks down, unhappy. Her phone’s display is black and blank. I’m not going to chase you, Matt writes to her. I know what campground you’re in. I also know you can’t want me as much as you do and not come back to me. You’re not that strong. That’s what you always say, and I’m starting to believe it. But she can’t see it, not right now.
BACK AT THE CAMPSITE, ROB proposes they all spend the day doing some sightseeing together.
He drives into San Francisco, intending to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. But the toll situation is vague and intimidating, requiring or not requiring an RFID sticker that might or might not require a credit card, and in the end he parks near Fort Point and they walk the entire way up to cross the bridge on foot.
In the middle of the bridge, Jazz makes a joke about suicide hotlines. Rob offers her his phone. Sorry says she’s so light, she’d waft down like a leaf and not get hurt. Penny grabs her arm and doesn’t let go again until they’re in Marin County.
They leave the road and hike down to the first beach on the left. Past the scarred pines and ruined amenities, below the empty campground, Sorry sits down on the tar-blackened sand. The others wade into tiny waves that make the smooth stones go clack-clack. A dark wall approaches over the ocean, low and sinister, and eats the bridge. “Fog,” Rob says knowingly, but there is reverence in his voice.
They return to the minivan exhausted, after a long march through blank, boring whiteness.
After a few wrong turns, they find Golden Gate Park, nowhere near the Golden Gate, and park. They can’t find uninhabited benches, so they sit on the grass.
Penny’s euphoria is fading. She hasn’t had sex with Rob in nearly seven hours.
She feels irritable and needy, seeking his attention and ashamed of herself for doing so. She doesn’t so much mind the idea of flying to California every weekend—she’s small enough to curl up in economy, and she’ll have the money to pay for it if she keeps living at Tranquility—but she will miss him so much. She knows it already. All week, every week, she’ll be his lonely girlfriend, his lover in name only, pouring her erotic creativity into dumb texts, kissing his distorted face on frustrating video calls, staring stupidly at her phone. She will bridge the weeks between their encounters by implementing the new life skills she learned in his absence—skepticism, apathy, how to run on empty—while the pleasure she would take in seeing him every morning and every night will lie there like a five-hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk, with no one to pick it up, until it blows away.
She doesn’t feel she has a choice. She’s not going to find anything better than what she has. For jobs and men, it’s a seller’s market. There are no other fish in the sea. If she throws these ones back, she’ll be empty-handed.
She sniffles and interweaves her fingers with his fingers. She tries hard to entertain the notion that she might be jumping the gun. You can’t sleep with a guy for one day—no matter how hard you’ve worked to get him—and go straight to long-term future plans, right? After his career as CHA’s leading tease, he might be raring to try out Californication. He’s a man, after all. That’s why she loves him. She leans on him and says, “I love you.” He puts his arm around her and nods hello to a stranger who’s staring at him as she walks by looking like a younger version of Kestrel in wrestling booties and a black silk romper. Penny adds, “I’m getting a headache. I need coffee.”
“I second the motion,” Sorry says, and Jazz agrees.
Penny and Rob walk into a nearby business district to look for takeout. She pays thirteen dollars for four paper cups of drip coffee. They take small, hot sips as they walk back to the park, still not seeing a bench anywhere. They deliver the coffee to Jazz and Sorry and sit down near them on the grass, and Penny says, “Rob.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you really plan to stay here?”
“I don’t know.”
She is silent. Then she says, “That doesn’t give me much to work with.”
“I truly don’t know. I have absolute freedom.”
“I don’t. I have a job that starts in two and a half weeks, and I want to start it. I need to make money, and I need to learn more. It’s an interesting job, and I know I’ll learn a lot. But I’m in love with you, so it makes me feel like shit.”
“Isn’t love supposed to make you happy?”
“I can’t go back there.” She leans on him and clutches his arm. “I want to be with you. I need to be with you. If I have to go home—I can’t imagine it. I’ll die.”
“That’s an easy one,” he says. “Since it doesn’t matter to me, and you want to be in New York, we’ll go back to Tranquility. If we start tomorrow, we can take it slow, like two hundred miles a day, which is nothing. But do you have gas money? That’s the main thing holding me in Oakland. I spent everything I had on a tent and sleeping bags. It was still cheaper than the motels in this place.”
Penny sobs.
“Don’t cry!” he says, embracing her. “I love you!”
“I’m not crying,” she says. Immediately she stops. She shakes her head, aware that it is chock full of fluff.
“Oh good,” he says.
They walk a few feet and sketch their plans to Sorry and Jazz.
“Me, I’m going to Hawaii,” Sorry says. “California squared!”
“Hawaii!” Jazz says. She hits Sorry on the arm. “Shit, what a great idea! Why didn’t you say that before? It’s a tropical island in America. You don’t even need a passport!”
“And you know it has a major tourist trade. Maybe I never told you guys this, but I can make these baskets—really professional-looking baskets. I learned it in the hospital. I could sell them on consignment at gift shops. I mean, nobody in New York is going to buy native crafts, because there are no natives, but in Hawaii—”
“You look kind of Hawaiian. Doesn’t she?” Jazz says.
Penny and Rob regard Sorry in this new light.
“Yes,” Penny says. “Definitely. She totally has the hair, and in Hawaii being heavy is a sign of belonging to the hereditary ruling class.”
“We can squat on public land,” Sorry says. “Can I have your tent? If there’s just the two of you, you can sleep in the van.”
“It’s so basic, I don’t know if it’s really waterproof. Hawaii probably has monsoon rains.”
“I think it’s one of those places where it rains on one side of the island and not on the other. We’ll go to the dry side.”
“Okay, you can have my tent.”
Several minutes later, as Sorry and Jazz are booking last-minute one-way tickets to Honolulu on Sorry’s tablet, Penny says to Rob, “I can’t believe it. I was all tortured deciding whether to throw my life away for love and move to Oakland. Now it’s like, Oakland who? Where am I? What am I even doing?”
“You’re on vacation.” He kisses her.
“Seriously! Every time I think I know what’s happening, the cards get reshuffled.”
“You could get a job in Hawaii,” Rob says.
Penny laughs, frowns, and says, “I’m going to miss them.”
“They’ll be back. Jazz is like a comet. Try to slow her down, and you’ll get your hands ripped off. But wait it out, and she always comes back.”
“That’s like this seventies saying my dad used to quot
e—‘If you love something, set it free’—except it’s like, ‘Set it free or it will rip your hands off.’”
“I think you might be missing something about that saying.” He croons in a hippie voice, “‘I promise you, baby, I’ll never set you free.’”
“Oh right,” Penny says.
“My dad is like that. He tells women he loves them but they’re free to go, and he lives in a thirty-foot trailer with no electric. Now, when I’m in love, there are nicer things I can think of to say, like”—he affects a girlish falsetto—“‘I’d die if I had to be separated from you for even one day.’”
“Stop it!”
He lets his hands drop from her body.
She picks them up and puts them back. “I didn’t mean that. I meant stop gloating.”
TWO DAYS LATER, ROB DRIVES his friends to San Francisco International, on the other side of the bay. Traffic is bad, and they arrive rushed. Sorry leans forward to stub out her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. Simultaneously, she presses five hundred dollars in cash into Rob’s hand.
“I can’t accept this,” he says. “I’ve never known where you get your money, but I know you need it more than I do.”
“I got a divorce settlement. If I’m ever so down and out I need five hundred dollars, I’ll know who to call.”
They all disembark and set their luggage on the sidewalk. Sorry wears a long, stretchy black gown and a bone amulet on a leather thong (gift from Penny). Jazz looks smashing, in red sandals and a new white dress patterned with big red flowers.
“Well, no need for good-byes,” Rob says, “since you’ll be back in two months.”
Standing at attention, Jazz says, “Or maybe this is good-bye. Because there’s something I should tell you.”
At that he looks worried, because the possibilities are virtually endless.
“It’s about when I shot the monster. You probably think I was acting in self-defense and missed. But I made a conscious decision to trash the house. I was going to execute the landlord for what he did to you, and I choked. But something had to happen. Something extreme. I couldn’t do it, because he saved my life once. But I’m a killer. You should know that.”
“Merciful Jesus,” Rob says. “Please tell me you know how to make sense.”
“You’re not a killer,” Penny objects. “It’s like the personal injury lawyers say. ‘Give me damages, I’ll find liability.’ Something stopped you. There’s no body.”
“She’s right,” Rob says. “You stopped him torturing me to death. I’ll never forget it. But you don’t want to be a good person. That’s too boring for you. And don’t even think about telling me how he saved your life. Your death wish is proof positive that our culture is totally fucked and needs to be reinvented from the ground up.”
“I’m leaving the gun behind,” Jazz says. “It’s under the spare tire.”
Rob cries out in frustration and anger.
Frowning at Rob, Sorry says to Jazz, “You’re a wonderful person. Just stressed out. You need to get off this dog-eat-dog continent and breathe some South Sea air.”
Jazz whispers, “Rob. Really. I’ll be okay.”
“You’d better be.” He says to Sorry, “Do not let her out of your sight. No new phones. Monitor her communications. Make her go cold turkey on that son of a bitch.”
Jazz says, “You’re too sane to understand me. My life doesn’t fit in your head.”
“What’s there to understand? You’re not honest with me.”
“Every time I try to be, you get upset. It’s only since you started caring about me. It makes it impossible to be friends.”
Now Rob looks sad.
“Not impossible! I didn’t mean that. But stop caring about me. I’ll break your heart.”
“You’ve got it backward,” he says. “I always loved you enough to be your fucking doormat, and you started needing me the day you met him. In all the time I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you outside your comfort zone. Until now.”
“Yeah, I guess you could say I’ve met my match.”
In the conversational impasse, Penny hugs Jazz, saying she is pleased that Matt lives on, because they would all be in such deep shit otherwise. Jazz hugs Rob until he says he will always love her no matter what and that she’d better fucking take care of herself and come back from Hawaii in one piece. Sorry kisses Rob on the cheek and says that all animals have a right to live and be free. Embracing Penny, she thanks her for bringing some anarchy into their humdrum lives.
“Bye!” they all call out at last.
The travelers hike their duffel bags onto their shoulders and depart. Rob and Penny stand by the side door of the minivan, waving. They watch the duffels weave through the terminal—one high, green, and majestic, the other blue and bobbing like a cork. “Divorce settlement,” Rob remarks. He closes and locks the doors, checking for forgotten personal items. “Divorce settlement,” he says again.
“You sound like a Furby,” Penny says.
“I thought Sorry was a lesbian.”
“Lesbians can get divorced! Now they can even divorce women they used to be in love with, instead of chumps they married for the settlement.”
“The world is going to hell in a handbasket,” he agrees. He starts the engine. “Next stop Surf City.”
“Where’s that?”
“Somewhere west of here. The place where we’re going to rent a paddleboat and drop that gun way out in the ocean.” He pulls out past the double-parked cars into traffic.
“What do you think will happen to Jazz?”
“Definitely something. Sorry might find a comfortable holding pattern, but Jazz—no way. Like she says, something has to happen.”
“I bet she meets somebody new on the plane. Like some Japanese businessman, and the next time we hear from her she’s in Nagasaki.”
“I don’t think so. I think Matt’s her Mount Everest, and she’s not going to come down until she’s been on top.”
AMALIA LIKES™ THE NORMAN BAKER Center (aka Sunshine—the Center can’t really interact socially) on Facebook and declares it her friend™. She encourages all her friends™ to attend its grand opening on the second Sunday in September.
Patrick direct messages her and Penny and Matt: Nice work. Didn’t know you had anything planned for the house! I’ll be on Mindanao but thoughts with you. Great job. Looks terrific. Dad would be proud. Baker Books! YES! Hugs P
Penny texts her: In Big Sur. So gr8. Be back in time. Love you.
SUNDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 11, 2016.
In Fort Lee, Matt kicks off his duvet. He picks up his phone, checks his mail and social media, and selects an old Funkadelic MP3 to pipe to the speakers in the kitchen. He picks his way downstairs. There are wineglasses on the open wooden staircase, and dust bunnies, some resting on the remains of wine. He is thinner, with dark circles under his eyes.
He dresses carefully, in indigo Levi’s, a long-sleeved T-shirt, light fleece jacket, Timberlands, and a solar-powered Timex. It reads nine-thirty-three.
AT TEN-THIRTY, ROB AND PENNY awaken in Tranquility. “Let me make coffee,” Penny says, crawling out of bed.
In the kitchen her mood is placid and sunny. As much as she abhors Matt, she is pleased his vengeance takes the form of a memorial to her father. Of course his motives are the worst and he’s a domineering lunatic, but the benefit to her is clear: the Norman Baker Center makes her feel that Norm will soon cease haunting her. Instead he will enter into a denatured existence as an icon in a niche—the patron saint of JC anarchism—with Matt, of all people, as his priest. She reflects that she could move all his nasty furniture over to the Center and buy some decent Scandinavian stuff from her salary at the bank.
She muses and hums as she arranges two cappuccinos, toast, and mango preserves on a tray. Unbeknownst to her, her thoughts represent a state of unconditional love. She asks nothing of Matt but Mattness, and grants his right to exist. She even grants Norm the right to be dead and forgotten, his legacy er
ased.
“Today’s the day,” she says, handing Rob a red Zoloft cup of milky coffee. “The Norman Baker drug cult meets the Norman Baker shopping center. It’s like matter and antimatter.”
“I can’t believe you want to go there at all.”
“It’s going to be great. Dad’s friends love me. You will be so weirded out when you see how they treat me.”
She dresses carefully, selecting particular amulets she feels will be appropriate for no particular reason. Over them she arranges her white cotton shift and a red crocheted shoulder bag with her phone. Rob remarks on her lack of underwear and shoes. “They’re not part of this outfit,” she explains.
“Well, I won’t worry about you, if you don’t worry about me.”
“Deal,” she says. “We’re all grown-ups here.”
BEFORE NOON, MATT IS DOWN at the Baker Center. His staff—manager Kestrel, baristas Feather and Huma, booksellers Sunshine and Cassidy—stand erect at their stations as he enters. “Looking great! I’m psyched! I love this book display. Did you do this, Sunshine? This is great work. You guys are set to do some serious business today.”
Feather says, “Would you like a latte? I’m still practicing.”
“Well, then, make me a latte!”
Cassidy says, “Matt, I wanted to say, because we were talking about it, and we wanted you to know how much it means to us that you did this. I worked in so many stores, and this is the first time I got paid. And the inventory is, like, amazing. We have so many books!”
“Thank you, Cassidy! Now I have to do some last-minute stuff in my office”—he is already ascending the stairs—“so if you need me, come get me.”
Matt reaches roof level, holds the banister, and sighs heavily. He steps out into the angled light of early fall, which is creating colorful geometric patterns on the fawn-colored carpet via prismatic glass in the Glasgow-style transoms of the French doors facing west. He plunks down in an arts-and-crafts armchair with camel hair cushions and puts his feet up on the white-tiled hearth.