by Don Lee
“I will,” he said fuzzily, and walked out blinking into the afternoon light.
He was groggy all evening, and the next day he didn’t think the massage had helped that much, his neck still locked and rigid, his body indeed achy. He had difficulty driving, unable to see the periphery, which contributed to something bizarre happening. He was heading home in his truck when an object flew through the window directly past his eyes, almost hitting his face. He swerved and fishtailed and nearly collided head-on with a telephone pole. He was able to steer away at the last moment, but still ended up sideswiping the back panel of his truck, scraping it up good and busting out a taillight, as he saw when he stopped to examine the damage. He got back in the truck and looked at what had sailed through the window. It was a paper airplane, made with lined school paper, and there was a message written on it in a girl’s looping script: “The First Noble Truth is that life is suffering. That must be why I met you.” The curious thing was that he was on a broad swath of Highway 1 with nothing around except artichoke fields. Who had thrown the airplane? Had the message been meant for him? What were the chances it could hover and float across two lanes of highway and then dive through his open window as he was going sixty miles an hour? And what, pray tell, was the Second Noble Truth?
The paper airplane stuffed into his pocket, Lyndon returned to his farm. He grabbed the mail from his roadside box and unlocked his new driveway gate, which was plastered with signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT, DO NOT ENTER, THIS MEANS YOU, ASSHOLE, the last a handwritten amendment, owing to recent events. As he entered his kitchen, the telephone was ringing. He dumped his mail without looking at it into the trash can and opened his refrigerator door. The telephone was still ringing. He lifted the handset two inches from the cradle and dropped it down and resumed staring at the contents of his fridge. He had a hankering for ice cream. He had been craving ice cream since getting the massage the day before from Laura Díaz-McClatchey. Alas, there was none in the freezer, the closest substitute strawberry yogurt. He took the yogurt out to the porch, where long ago he had set up two Adirondack chairs to enjoy the view. The house—a large California Craftsman built in 1912 with wide eaves, gabled dormers, and shingle siding—sat on a rise of coastal bluffs. It was shaded on one side by a stand of red alders and blue gum eucalyptus and flanked on two other sides by his trucks, converted barn, two greenhouses built with plastic sheeting and aluminum frames, and a shed for his old Kubota and Massey Ferguson utility tractors. Around the shed were all the usual farm implements—row planter, cultivator, disc plow, spools of drip tape, compost spreader, everything looking rather rusty and worn. Down the dirt-and-gravel driveway was a muddy irrigation pond, bordered by stacks of aluminum pipes.
But from the porch, Lyndon couldn’t see any of this. There was the Pacific Ocean on his right, his fields before him, and the inland hills. Sometimes, in the spring, he could see gray whales migrating north, seals and sea lions bobbing in the swells, brown pelicans skimming the surface. He could see his cover crops undulating in the breeze, the lush green of bell beans and barley broken by explosions of color from patches of wildflowers—the blue of Douglas irises, the orange of California poppies, the pink of hollyhocks, the gold of buttercups. He could see jackrabbits hopping behind the sagebrush and coyote bush at the edge of the bluff. He could see birds as they flew to the marsh preserve to the south, riding currents of air, the great blue herons and snowy egrets and red-winged blackbirds, the wrens and northern harriers, kites and gulls, and, all around the house—singing—white-crowned sparrows. He could see the terrace of foothills, the gentle slopes of pastureland leading to the canyon preserve of coastal redwoods, grass spotted with yellow mustard and red thistle.
Even today, absent of spring’s colors, the view was magnificent, a screaming-red sunset with cirrus clouds on fire, and Lyndon, spooning yogurt into his mouth, wondered why he had ever stopped sitting on his porch. When had he begun to take all of this for granted? He felt good suddenly, calm and exhilarated and, inexplicably, very, very horny. He finished his yogurt, and instead of starting dinner, as he’d planned, he walked upstairs to his bedroom to masturbate—an uncharacteristic activity for him in his advanced age, at least before bedtime. Maybe once, twice a week, he would masturbate in bed before dropping off to sleep, more out of habit than anything else, but now he felt as randy as a pubescent boy, and he stroked away on his bed with urgent concentration, a vague picture of Laura Díaz-McClatchey—with her pantyhose and chocolate smell—in mind.
He heard a series of soft thumps. It was Bob, standing in the doorway, staring at him openmouthed, a new tennis ball on the floor between his feet.
“Get out of here, Bob!” Lyndon yelled, fumbling to cover himself with a sheet. He was appalled and chagrined, as if caught by his mother. “Git!”
Bob stood his ground until Lyndon threw a book—The Stories of John Cheever—at him, then he trudged down the hallway.
Lyndon thought of continuing with the matter at hand, but the mood had been lost. He went downstairs to the kitchen, fed Bob, and began preparing his own dinner, chopping zucchini and chicken to stir-fry and popping on the rice cooker.
Bob was ten years old. When he was younger, he used to follow Lyndon wherever he went, but now they were like roommates who’d grown disinterested in each other, occupying opposite ends of the house. No more trail-running together, no more sleeping at the foot of Lyndon’s bed. Bob had his own dog door through the mudroom, and he came and went as he pleased. Sometimes Lyndon did not see him for days. In point of fact, Bob seemed depressed—listless. Lyndon couldn’t remember the last time he’d even heard him bark. “You might think of it for yourself, you know,” Lyndon said to Bob. “It might do you some good.”
In the morning, Lyndon awoke feeling remarkably refreshed. His neck was loose, completely unencumbered, as if he’d never had a problem at all. He recalled the way Laura Díaz-McClatchey had tugged on his head and stroked the nape of his neck and cradled it in her hands, and he thought now—despite his resistance to such hokiness—that he had sensed a transference of some sort, that she had been channeling something—dare he say it?—a regenerative energy from her body to his.
Whatever the case, he was happy to be ambulatory again, for he was late in installing a job, a decorative iron doorframe for an art gallery. September was his busiest month, with everyone trying to gussy up their stores before the annual pumpkin festival in mid-October. (Rosarita Bay, along with a hundred other towns across the country, proclaimed itself the pumpkin capital of the world.) This year, though, August had been equally busy. There was going to be a chili and chowder cookoff on Labor Day weekend—another of the new mayor’s ideas to drum up tourists.
Lyndon specialized in ornamental welding, although he was certified to weld anything from sheet metal to structural steel with gas or arc. Truth be told, he preferred down-and-dirty industrial jobs—tire rims, boat anchors, mufflers, and chassis—where he could simply lay down a bead and be in and out. Yet the money was in the fancier decorative work. He wasn’t set up to cast or forge, but if he could order the components and fabricate them in his shop, if he could work cold with mild steels, bending wire or bars into scrolls, similar to the process he’d used for the delicate, ornate sculptures for which he had once been famous, he would take the job. Welding now brought him almost as much income as farming Brussels sprouts.
That afternoon on Main Street, after drilling into the masonry and caulking cracks with sealant, he bolted the iron archway and frame to the art gallery’s entrance. The frame fit precisely, for which he took a moment of pride, and he thought, perhaps, that his streak of bad luck was over. He was finishing with some touch-ups of paint when Laura Díaz-McClatchey appeared, asking, “How’s your neck doing?”
She was standing on the sidewalk behind him, wearing an outfit similar to when he’d last seen her—fitted polyester, pumps, another object lesson in rectitude—with a folded copy of The New York Times tucked underne
ath her arm.
“Better,” he told her. “It’s amazing, how much better it feels, actually.” He swiveled his head from side to side to demonstrate.
“Good. I’m glad.”
“Can I ask you something?” Lyndon said. “What exactly did you do to me? What was the full treatment?”
She was wearing sunglasses with small round lenses, and she slid them off her face and perched them on top of her head. “Why?” she said, scrutinizing him. “Do you feel different?”
“Yes.”
“How so?” For the first time, he detected a glint of playfulness in her manner, a crack in the all-business façade she’d maintained throughout his visit to the institute. “How has it manifested itself,” she persisted, “this feeling?”
“Never mind.”
She smirked at him, as if she knew exactly what was up.
“How long have you been doing shiatsu?” Lyndon asked.
“Oh, I’ve practiced since I was a teenager,” she said. She tossed the Times into a trash bin near the door. “My mother was a therapist in Berkeley. She trained me early. It goes back generations to Japan.”
“You’re part Japanese?”
“Middle name Kobayashi. But I’ve only done it professionally for a couple of months. It’s not my life work, you know. I have a gift for it, but it’s not what I was planning to do as a vocation. It’s a punishment of sorts. I guess you could say I’m serving penance.”
“For what?”
“I had a fall from grace. I’m in exile. I did a bad thing.”
“What did you do?”
“I’m not ready to tell you yet.”
Lyndon nodded. “Okay.”
“I’ll tell you about it when I get to know you better.”
The implication intrigued him—that she intended to get to know him better. Laura Díaz-McClatchey dressed like an insurance agent (what was with the stockings? He remembered the sound of nylon sticking to tatami. Very impractical. They had to run all the time), but she was sexy in her own way, and she was becoming more mysterious, more appealing, with each exchange.
“Do you know anything about art?” she asked, turning toward the gallery.
“No.”
She regarded him skeptically. “Really? Nothing?”
“I’m just a farmer.”
“And welder-cum-bartender,” she said. “Look at this shit. Who buys this crap? Who would want this on their walls?”
This gallery was like all the others on Main Street, filled with kitschy oil paintings of flowers, beaches, landscapes. “This town,” Laura said. “There’s no movie theater. There’s no record store or bike shop. Yet they have a dozen so-called galleries wherein you may procure endless iterations of moonlit waves crashing onto rocks. I worry sometimes about the foundations of our democracy, the future of our cultural heritage, the sanctity of artistic integrity. Of course, then again, I’m an elitist snob and could give a rat’s ass about the hoi polloi.” She smiled—she was being facetious. Wasn’t she? “Do you want to get some ice cream?” she asked.
Ice cream, Lyndon thought. Of course.
He stowed his tools and tarps and moved his truck around the corner to a side street, and they strolled down to Udderly Licious, an ice-cream shop with a faux-rustic décor near the creek bridge. They opened the door and walked in on two teenagers behind the counter in a passionate liplock, making out with hands grabbing and squeezing and clawing—oblivious.
Laura cleared her throat. The teenagers disengaged their mouths with—Lyndon swore—an audible pop. They stared at the adults in a confused haze, faces flushed and wet with saliva. “Hello, Jen,” Laura said.
“Hi,” the girl said slowly. “Hi.” She let go of the boy, and they wiped their mouths and sorted their aprons. “This is André.” The boy winked at them and carried two empty tubs into the back room.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” the girl whispered to Laura.
The boy was beautiful, way out of the girl’s league, really, tall and lanky, with stiff dyed-black hair.
“I don’t know what happened. Last month, he didn’t know I was alive. Can you believe it?”
Lyndon now recognized the girl—blond, a touch overweight, plain—as the client Laura had treated before him at the shiatsu institute.
“I’m happy for you,” Laura said.
“I’m happy for me.” The girl laughed. She pulled on a pair of disposable vinyl gloves. “The usual?”
“Well, what do you recommend today?” Laura asked.
“You’re going to get something different?” the girl said.
“I don’t know. I’m feeling adventurous.”
They all looked at the signboard of flavors, of which there seemed to be as many varieties as there were massages in Rosarita Bay. Chunky Cantaloupe. Adzuki Beano. Almond Tofu Fruity. Chewy Louie. Ginger Molasses. Caramel Prune. Tullamore Dew.
“Go first,” Laura said to Lyndon.
“A scoop of chocolate.”
“Chocolate?” the girl said.
“Please.”
“Double Dark? Rum? Amaretto? Mint? Cheesecake, Fudge, Peanut Butter? Tiramisu? Loco Mocha?”
“Plain chocolate.”
“On a cone or cup?”
“Cone.”
“Vanilla Cinnamon? Honey Wheat, White—”
“Plain sugar.”
“Any sprinkles?”
He was afraid to ask.
“Walnuts, raisins, cookie dough, granola, gummy bears, pecan pralines—” the girl began.
“Nothing,” Lyndon said.
“Okay, that’s cool,” Jen said. “You’re a retro minimalist. Or maybe just a copycat.”
Naturally, plain chocolate on a plain sugar cone, hold the sprinkles, was Laura Díaz-McClatchey’s customary order.
“Who is that girl?” Lyndon asked as they walked out of the shop with their identical cones.
“Jen de Leuw.”
“What’s her story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who is she?”
“I just told you.”
“But what’s she about?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking. She’s in high school. She was born and raised here. She works in an ice-cream store. She’s in love with a boy. She came to me because she tweaked her back in field hockey. I don’t really know anything more about her.”
“Are you a Buddhist?” Lyndon asked.
The Second Noble Truth was that the origin of suffering was attachment. There were four Noble Truths in all, four tenets of Buddhism, which had been easy enough to track down on the Internet with the new computer he had been forced to buy, his old one beyond repair. All along, he had assumed that Laura Díaz-McClatchey had been the root of his erotic insurgency, all the mishaps and bad breaks and odd occurrences, his cosmos seemingly atilt. (The evening before, after his nightly bowl of 420 for dessert, he had masturbated in his bedroom, with the door locked, and once again this morning.) Now he reconsidered. Was Jen de Leuw, this dull, pudgy high school girl, responsible for everything? Had she written the message on the paper airplane? Had she, not Laura, been the source of the ice-cream smell, the font of weird energy that had been channeled into him, or was he imagining things, overanalyzing what was mere coincidence?
“Are you all right?” Laura asked.
“Fine,” he told her.
She gave him a napkin, and they crossed the street.
“How long have you lived here?” she asked.
“Almost seventeen years.”
“Extraordinary. Where were you before this?”
“New York,” he said, licking his cone. “What about you?”
“San Francisco, by way of Chicago and Manhattan and Berlin and London and L.A. and Berkeley. I’ve circled the globe, and I ended up here, a rather sorry circumnavigation, wouldn’t you say? What were you doing in New York?”
“Nothing very interesting.”
“No? Just another anonymous soul in the Big Apple?”
“Really? Just another faceless cog?”
He was irritated by her tone. She seemed to be mocking him, and his sense of privacy felt infringed, much as it had been when she’d asked about his bowel movements. His response, then, surprised him. It came out before he’d even had time to construct it with any intent or meditation. “Do you want to go out to dinner sometime?” he asked.
“Dinner?”
“There’re actually a couple of decent restaurants in town now. You might—”
They rounded the corner, and they happened upon a woman in a squat, hammering a nail—no doubt a shiny new truss nail—into the front right tire of his truck. After a final punctuating whack, the woman rose and turned. It was Sheila Lemke, the benefactor of Lyndon’s most recent sexual activity and also, incidentally, the new mayor of Rosarita Bay. The three of them stood facing one another, Lyndon and Laura with their ice-cream cones, Sheila with her hammer, her expression caught between rage and horror and mad elation.
“Let me give you a piece of advice, sister,” she said to Laura tremulously. “You’re new here. You don’t know this man’s history. You don’t want to get involved with him. You’ll regret it. It’ll be the biggest mistake of your life. He won’t leave you alone. He’ll haunt you. You won’t be able to get rid of him. He seems nice enough on the outside, but he has bad intentions. He’s not honest. He’s a miserable excuse for a human being.” She began to cry. “Oh, fuck me,” she said in frustration, and swung the hammer against Lyndon’s truck, leaving a nice little circular indentation on his door.
They watched Sheila as she broke into a full sprint down the street.
“I should explain,” Lyndon said.
Laura’s ice cream was dripping onto her hand. “I need to go,” she said.
For the third time that month, Lyndon took out his jack and tire iron. He tightened the lug nuts on his spare, then drove to the service station on the corner of Highways 1 and 71, where he had the flat patched. The mechanic tried to convince him to let him, while he was there, fix his broken taillight, but Lyndon refused, which he immediately had occasion to regret, since he was stopped by a sheriff’s patrol car just after he left the station. Lyndon rolled down his window and saw who was approaching in the side mirror: a tall, handsome man with prematurely white hair, splendidly combed in a short pompadour. Lieutenant Steven Lemke. Sheila’s ex-husband.