Leave It to Me

by Bharati Mukherjee

  “I think my mother was different from the women of your youth.”

  Ham gave my knee a pat, then a squeeze. His message came through: the times had been unique, not the women. Your mother was the product of her times. I’m old enough to understand, to be your guide through it, not that old.

  “Does my story bore you, Ham?” I said. “I can pitch it different. I should’ve known, you’re a producer, not a friend.”

  “The war screwed us up.” He wasn’t speaking to me.

  “I can think bankable script if that’s all you want. Backpacking blonde and swarthy, mysterious guru meet cute.”

  I’d barely got started when Ham stopped me. “It’s not that, hon, I’m not bored. No one’s bored by the ocean. No one’s bored by a tornado.”

  The Gray Nuns had named me Faustine after a typhoon, I remembered. Was my fury that obvious? “You find me scary, Ham?” I pulled my charmer pout. Frankie’d been putty when I pouted. “I scare you?” I waited for Ham to laugh. “Ham, what’s wrong?”

  “No force in nature stronger than a child trying to find her mother.” He plucked a wad of bills from his inner pocket, peeled off a twenty without looking and called the waiter over.

  “Everything satisfactory, Mr. Ham?” The waiter offered two fortune cookies; I grabbed one, Ham crushed the other and dropped the crumbs back on the tray.

  “You’re scary all right. You’re trying to enlist me in a war, aren’t you?”

  It was true; I needed Ham, needed the nets he cast, the people he knew, the visions and delusions he’d survived. Without him I’d be drifting downstream in the trivia of my mother’s times. I knew that their seventies had been more than cheap beads and headbands, but I was never easy about their music, never quite sure who’d died when of what self-indulgence. Forget their death-by-Nirvana and death-by-bombmaking; the truth was I had no experience of counterculture. In Wyatt’s Circle in Schenectady, the most we could boast of was shoplifting or spray-painting. “Expressions of ad hoc spite against the Establishment” is how Wyatt dismissed our misdemeanors. I had to understand Ham and Bio-Mom and their Berkeley times. The girls of Ham’s youth. That’s when I made up my mind to let Ham seduce me. I could be the youth of Ham’s middle age. Late middle age. Deep-fried squid is not the aphrodisiac.

  He scraped his chair back across the red linoleum floor. “Poor fucking Jimi,” he sighed. “Now you have me all depressed.” He pulled the table forward so it’d be easier for me to slide out.

  The cashier had the receipt and two more fortune cookies on a tiny plastic tray. “Everything fine?”

  “Thanks, Lee.” Ham picked one cookie off the tray and tossed it to me. “I never look.”

  I read my fortune. Confucius says, Come back for marvelous meal to same restaurant. Frankie would have been mortified; first we were sinister, now we’re getting cute.

  Ham took out a ballpoint and scribbled on the receipt. “Who do you want to be, hon? Staff? Talent? Consultant? In case the IRS wants to know.”

  “Force of nature,” I said. Deal with that, Mr. Accountant. “In case the Flash ever asks.”

  The cashier said, “My grandson Byron, he has the acting bug, Mr. Ham.”

  We’d almost made it out the door.

  “Why not send him over sometime? Who knows, maybe we’ll cure him.”

  We walked out into lemony-gray afternoon brightness, holding hands.

  In North Beach the afternoon was still warm, but the stretchy shadows thrown by commercial buildings got me down. I slipped my arm around Ham’s waist as we strolled down a sloping block. “What now? What comes after squid?”

  We were passing a café. A cozy café. Ham could have gone into it, ordered two espressos, we could have hunkered down at the wood counter and listened to Verdi.

  Ham stopped. I caught his look. Sex, like grace, comes at you when you least expect it. “Your place?”

  A mean question. “Not today,” I said.

  “My office then.” We kept walking towards ShoeString.

  “You’ll give me a VIP tour?”

  “Maybe.”

  I was in the studio’s guest suite on the floor directly above Ham’s office. You needed a special key to a special elevator to get to it. That’s where we found ourselves après-squid.

  The whole floor was one big room, divided into purple and crimson alcoves for sleeping and partying. On the ceiling were murals of scenes from The Father of His Country, Part I. Fishing junks burning in a Hong Kong harbor. A half-naked white karate champ chopping bloody evil Japanese soldiers à la the young Frankie Fong. Grateful peasants stringing up fat tyrants. Asian belles with boob implants waving peacetime palm fronds.

  “Like it?” Ham slid his hands under my T-shirt.

  “A monument to yourself,” I murmured, “must be the most satisfying kind.” I let myself savor the probes and touches of those expert hands.

  “Get you a drink?” The tip of Ham’s tongue traced my hairline.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Later,” he whispered. The hands dragged themselves down my midriff. “Let’s be indiscreet first.”

  I unbuckled Ham’s belt, and tugged his shirttail out and over his pants, felt him harden. He let go of me to unbutton his shirt. From just below the left collarbone to halfway down his chest, a scar cut diagonally through gray-brown chest hair. I kissed the scar. “I might tell you how I got it,” he said, “when we have that drink.” He stepped out of his slacks and shorts, but kept his socks and loafers on.

  “Tell me how you like it,” he coaxed, pulling me down on a sofa, and pushing me back against cushions. “It’s all fair game.” He knelt in front of me. “You taste sweet. Sweet and corrupt and tender and very young.”

  “Poor Ham,” I whispered, “poor Jimi.”

  Afterwards we lay on the rug, and didn’t talk about Ham’s scar. We talked about safe things, like the perfect pet for a filmmaker (tropical fish), straight-to-video love affairs, dangerous women, what’s left that’s still sexy, still exciting.

  “Got to go back to work sometime.” He raised himself on an elbow. “Want that drink now?”

  I reached under the sofa with my feet for my T-shirt. “I want a job now.”

  “That’s easy.” Ham pulled on his shorts. Gray-brown hair whorled above the wide waistband.

  “Here’s a harder one, then,” I said to his back as he made his way to the refrigerator in the kitchen alcove.

  “Want a Diet Coke?”

  “I want a detective, Ham.”

  I called Ham’s office from a pay phone near the Clayton Street post office the next morning. Between dreams the night before that I was sleeping in a bed and not a backseat, I developed an itch to drop Angie a postcard and tell her I was … well, I figured I’d come up with something if I bought a stamp and a postcard, but ended up dialing ShoeString.

  “I’d have sent flowers,” Ham said, “if I’d known where to send them.”

  “I don’t have a vase for flowers, Ham.”

  “When can I see you again?” I heard him call out to his assistant, “Got that list, Sam?” Then he was back on the mouthpiece. “Got something to write with?”

  I didn’t, so I couldn’t write down the four or five names of private investigators and agencies that he read off Samantha’s list. The only agency names that sounded familiar were Vulture and Vulcan.

  “So when?” Ham asked. “Don’t I deserve a phone number at least?”

  “I think we both like games,” I said.

  I got the Vulcan number from information—god! I hate paying for information just because all the phone books are chewed up or missing—and dialed it next. A woman’s voice drowsy with decongestants instructed me to leave my name, number and the purpose of my call. I called the Vulture number. When the tape came on I introduced myself as “a very close friend of Ham Cohan.” I didn’t hang up right away, and sure enough, the same man who hadn’t wanted to give me the time of day before said, “Okay, it’s Fred Pointer.” />
  “Ham Cohan thought you could help me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “It’s a missing-persons case—”

  Fred cut me off. “What exactly did Ham say about me?”

  I lied. “He said maybe you don’t do missing persons anymore, but that you were the best. Let me just describe the case to you, Fred.”

  “Ham said that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Ham doesn’t like me. Why would he say that about me?”

  “Because he admires you?”

  “Ham knows I’m a persistent prick, I get things done.”

  “When’s the soonest opening?”

  “Middle of November. Of next year.”

  “How about today, Fred?”

  “You’re pretty persistent yourself.” Fred laughed.

  He gave me an early-evening slot for later that week, and suggested a coffee in my neighborhood.

  “I’ll come to your office. Easier that way.”

  “Name a coffee shop,” he insisted. “What’s your native habitat? I need to know the client.”

  “How about the Boss Bean?” I’d been inside only once; it looked like the kind of place that had survived many owners and many names.

  “Start making notes,” Fred counseled. “Whatever you have on the missing person, get it down.”

  “You mean, like tattoos and harelips?”

  “Whatever the fuck you have. Anything. I figure if it’s a harelip you don’t need an expensive investigator like me.”

  Hint, hint, Mr. Pointer. Expensive is good. I can be First Class, too. I couldn’t admit I didn’t have a thing, not even a real name. “How’ll you recognize me?”

  “Relax, I’ll find you.” He hung up.

  I called Ham again. “That drink you promised yesterday? What if I were to collect tonight?”

  “How about right now?”

  Tung and Phuk caters “Love Bird Specials” on houseboats of cash-paying special friends. We drove to Sausalito, listening to jazz tapes, stuff on his generation that I had to fake an interest in. Life is a learning curve for upstate orphans.

  “Jazz at its best,” he explained, “is all about white men acting black and black men acting white, for the sake of music.”

  Maybe because I wasn’t one or the other, I never quite caught the difference between jazz and the blues or jazz and swing or, for that matter, jazz and anything that played on radio stations that advertised cruises, health care for seniors and IRAs. Ham’s music just sounded old.

  I wasn’t tone deaf, like Pappy and Angie; I hadn’t been born a DiMartino, thank god! I did know about twenty kinds of rock from my summer stint at the Record Barn in Latham Mall. Well, actually, I only knew all the songs and groups that’d made the charts in June and July 1992. But that expertise didn’t count with Ham. Ham really hated rock—Whiteboy Noise, he called it—even more than he hated rap. Rock and rap, he instructed, were musically racist. I went along with his attitudes, because I liked Ham. And because I might need more favors. And anyway, what was not to like about Congo Master Poncho Sanchez when I wasn’t having to pay nor wait in line?

  Between tapes Ham disclosed surprise number two: I had a job cocktail waitressing two weeknights and weekends at Steep Steps, the jazz club to die for on Folsom.

  I felt very special that afternoon. I thought at the time it was because I hadn’t picknicked on Hot Peking Prawns before, hadn’t been held and shaken on a boat, floating on floating, so insulated from the city and from time, hadn’t ever made love through a quake big enough to knock cereal boxes off a galley shelf. Now I wonder if my feeling so special wasn’t because Ham was scared of me, or maybe not of me but of what he’d started. He needed to believe I was some kind of fallen princess, not a no-name street person living out of a car and soup kitchens. He should’ve known I never belonged in that pool. But that afternoon on the Last Chance all those questions could be put aside. Squint your eyes just a little, and I looked like a boat-worthy, Sausalito-worthy, jazz-worthy Californian. A good life had been given us, and it would go on and on, and it would get better.

  Ham told me the next morning—I’d scrounged together a breakfast of cranberry juice and Wheat Thins—that he’d called in his chips and found me a job in record time because he couldn’t bear my sleeping in a car.

  The Steep Steps job made it possible for me to move into a second-floor no-lease rental in a rooming house on Beulah Street off Cole. The house was a dilapidated Victorian with graffiti-tagged walls. CEE-DOUBLE-YOU, the kid got around. The stairs creaked; the hallways smelled of pot and the spices of the home of the brave. I was inching closer to the times, maybe even the block, of my flower-child Bio-Mom. I could only picture her as a teenager in batik and bell-bottoms. She existed outside time. I was already a lot older than she must have been.

  My floor had an astrologer who read futures off a software called Disaster, a retired Belgian chocolatier and a Somali medical student who supported his wife and two kids, a bunch of sisters and an elderly woman by doing body piercing, body spackling, tattoo erasures and clitoridectomies. The ground floor had larger rooms and longer-term tenants, including a political refugee from a place he called Vanuatu (which I hadn’t heard of before I met this huge, bitter man), a preschool teacher and her harpsichordist lover, a Serbian photographer with a name that was all consonants and behind a door hung with an I MY ARSENAL sign a Vietnam vet who painted made-to-order signs for a living. BLOWJOB BETTER’S B&B, COLE VALLEY MILITIA: you couldn’t miss his work on Haight.

  All my neighbors had come home to the Beulah rooming house from somewhere else. Vanuatu Man wasn’t the only refugee, and Loco Larry wasn’t the only war-maimed. Everything was flow, a spontaneous web without compartments. Somalia, Vanuatu, Vietnam, Belgium, India-Schenectady. Forty years ago it was a big one-family house, probably Italian. We shared toilets and kitchens. What counted was attitude. Faithandhope. I made that my daily mantra. Trust coincidence, aim for revenge. Faithandhope.

  In this mood, I passed the collection bowl for Divine Intergalactica, xeroxed horoscopes and happiness charts for my astrologer neighbor, taught “Puff the Magic Dragon” to the small Somali boys and even let myself be waylaid on the stoop by Loco Larry, who picked up transmissions from morals squads and undercover agents. He could read their minds. He could smell entrapment, see purple glows around their fed heads. What was not to believe? Beulah belonged in a special-effects studio lot.

  Three weeks into October, and I already could give guided tours of San Francisco’s homeless and high rollers. Cocktail waitressing never felt like my vocation, but because the club was stuck between a pawn shop and a transsexuals’ lingerie boutique, I acquired a wardrobe no DiMartino would recognize me in. On any given night Kiki, a recovering anorexic who shared my shifts, filled me in on which celebrity patron was nurturing what addiction, and Beth Hendon, the bartender as well as boss, when she was around, on who was fucking whom. The full dope on Beth I got from Ham. She had been a runway model in Paris, Milan, Buenos Aires, crashed in Miami, done the Betty Ford Center turnaround more than once and was currently trying out life as a small-business woman.

  The Bay Area was good to me.

  I intended to be good for it.

  For meetings with strangers in public places like coffee shops, I like to wear a rose between my teeth. I talked Loco Larry the sign painter into providing me the rose for my preliminary checking out of the PI from Vulture. Larry was in a cooperative mood. My right cheek got a quality flower in fifteen different colors, the lips its calyx, the left cheek its thorny stem.

  The Boss Bean is the kind of benign place where a salesman in shirt and tie doesn’t stick out any more than a Schenectady runaway with a psychedelic rose on her face or a bag lady in sweats. You don’t have to have shrapnel-studded brows or Mohawk hair. Nobody shoves around nobody else’s aura. Everybody’s made welcome to the Bay area. If you just hiked in from an aw-shucks county, the blackboard menu’ll clue you in on cool, foreign pr
onunciations. Example: AU LAIT (o-lay) $1. 50. The only other time I’d been inside this café had been with Archangel Gabe, and he’d walked out after I’d pointed to the menu and ordered the o-lay, muttering (much as Wyatt might have done, come to think of it), “And why not ole! Fuck the Haight, it’s strictly for whitebreads!”

  I pushed poor Wyatt out of guilt range, and ordered an ole and a bagel at the counter.

  “Cool, “the kid behind the counter said above the whoosh of steamed milk.”I like the way you say it. Makes for a fiesta in the head.”

  I carried my coffee and bagel to the row of tables by the wall-to-wall glass sliding door and took possession of the only table for two left overlooking Waller Street. Then I shifted my chair around and scanned faces for one that had “gumshoe” glowing in invisible ink on its forehead. None of the coffee-drinking males looked the right age. They still wore their baseball caps backwards, had too many rings in their lips and lobes. An HIV test came back positive on my right, and on my left a techie argument about too many Asians making the Internet boring. Two men in hard hats strode in for take-out lattes. Another seedy row house being gentrified, more Haight natives being expelled. An old man in winter coat, fur cap and galoshes loped in. He carried his own mug. It had a Yale logo. “How’s it going, Lionel?” the kid behind the counter chatted as he filled the mug. “The Martians treating you any better today?”

  A car honked on Waller, kept honking. A woman in a shapeless dress of expensive linen looked up, frowning, from her paperback. She was frowning at a yellow VW bug honking at a double-parked panel truck. The truck was Loco Larry’s. The woman went back to reading The Portable Chekhov. She caught me staring, got up and grabbed a postcard advertising Tanqueray gin from a rack of freebie postcards and scribbled something on it. Then she popped the book into a canvas tote, gathered up her dirty glass, plate and fork and stacked them in a plastic bin that had a PLEASE! Magic-Markered on its side, stalked past my table, dropping the postcard on the floor near my feet, pushed the sliding glass aside and left the café. I didn’t have to crane my neck to read her message: Read “The Kiss” and Die.