by David Gordon
On an impulse, I called Lonsky, but grew shy once he got on the phone, explaining in a roundabout way that I had suddenly remembered an image from Ms. Doon’s computer screen and that I thought she might have gone there.
“A rock?” he repeated. “With a hole in it?”
“Well a very big rock, a boulder. Picture a lit window in a dark building,” I said uncomfortably. I was describing Jerry again.
“Very well, Kornberg, I am picturing it. But how did you recognize this rock in the first place?”
“I’ve been there, more than once. It’s up north.” I paused again. “My wife and I go or used to go.”
“I see,” he said, interested now, but no more convinced. “I concede that you know the place. But there are any number of reasons why it might have appeared on her screen.”
“You’re right. It’s probably nothing. Just what I guess you detectives call a hunch.”
“A hunch? Kornberg, please. I’m trying to instill a sense of professionalism in you, if nothing else.”
“Sorry.”
“Now, let’s proceed rationally. You say you recovered this memory. Fine. But how and why? After all, we did a very thorough regression exercise when you were here. It’s curious that this new fact should simply arise unbidden. There must have been a trigger and this is the significant factor, not your so-called gut. What exactly were you doing when the memory returned?”
Now I was sorry I’d ever mentioned anything. “I was just falling asleep,” I admitted.
“I see. The hypnagogic state. Proceed.”
So I proceeded, as best I could, to tell him about the figure in the window, and who Jerry was, and MJ and Margie, and how my wife and I used to go to Big Sur every New Year’s Eve to escape the manic-depressing party scene and cuddle instead among the redwoods and walk on that very beach before that hollowed rock in the rain. Finally, I ran out of words and trailed off, lapsing into an awkward silence.
“Hello?” I said. “Are you still there?”
Lonsky cleared his throat. “Leave immediately,” he said in his flat tone. “Do not tarry. I will reimburse your expenses. I suggest checking the better hotels first. Report in as soon as you can.”
25
IF YOU DRIVE LIKE a maniac, you can get to San Francisco in five hours and change. Big Sur, which is about a hundred and twenty miles closer, is six hours no matter what. The reason is that, while you can take the 101 freeway or even the I-5 to San Francisco, to reach Big Sur, sooner or later you have to get on Highway 1, the long, thin road that threads up the very edge of the California coast. Highway 1 is stunning and treacherous, full of switchbacks, shared lanes, the occasional rock- or mudslide, and, deadliest of all, dumb, clumsy Winnebagos lumbering along roads built for leaner cars, like the huge person jammed into the plane seat beside you, hogging half your space. The beauty beyond your side windows—plunging cliffs, pounding sea, towering redwoods looming in the mist—is matched only by the fury before your windshield as you honk and yell, straining to pass one of these lard buckets as it drags itself uphill or tries to bumble its way around a turn.
At least that’s how it felt to me as I raced very slowly up the coast, in hot pursuit of my quarry, whom, I realized as I lost the radio and phone signal in the rocks, I still had no idea why I was following.
26
I TRIED THE NICER HOTELS first, as instructed. Big Sur is a small town, with most places strung along the highway, and I was familiar with the main spots. First Detjan’s Big Sur Inn, where Lala and I always stayed, then Ventana, the fancy place where some old friends had their wedding. Working my way north, I tried Post Ranch without luck, and then went by the Cliffside Inn, a luxuriously rustic hotel perched drastically on the rim of the world. The style was haute hippy modern: exposed beams, flagstone, ferns and glass. I asked a sunny young lady at the counter if my friend had checked in. Yes, Ms. Doon was there, but not in her room at the moment. I thanked her and then, at a loss for what else to do with myself, I went to the beach.
I parked by the roadside and ambled down a pitted road to Pfeiffer Beach, past the display of a local artist whose “art” consisted of finding things that, seen from certain, stoned angles, sort of looked like other things. A stone resembled a sleeping cat. A lump of wood was an old beggar, a branch a bird. Another, pointy rock was, he suggested hopefully, a sculpture of a mountain. A clutch of dreadlocked backpackers burbled admiringly, their minds blown, while their scrawny dog gave me a woebegone stare. I crossed a dry creek bed and walked out onto the sand to look at the hole in the rock.
I don’t know how else to describe it. By rock I mean a house-size boulder, fallen from the mountain that stood here once, back before the wind winnowed out this beach, before the ocean ate the land and left these jagged teeth. Now, like a home that has burned away, leaving only a doorframe or a single wall, this huge chunk of stone stands alone on the beach, and through its center runs a tunnel, a passage bored by the endless fist of the endless surf pounding on its door forever. Again and again the ocean comes exploding through the hole, spraying salt and throwing itself on the sand, then sucking itself back the way it came, lacey foam rustling like a dragging dress, down the long hall to the sea. It was to this spot we came, my wife and I, each new year of our life together, off-season, a cheap time to visit, but also an escape from New Year’s dreary fun, to a cabin with no clock, or TV or phone signal, and walked down to stand on this spot. With each wave, a door cracks open to reveal a hidden corridor to the sky. It is like a magic trick: everything that was always there appears, again, and is miraculous each time.
27
I REFOUND RAMONA BY ACCIDENT in the hotel bar, watching the sunset through a martini. She wore a white slip dress. Her black hair gleamed like a raven’s wing. For a split second she looked like my wife, but not really: the sun was in my eyes. As I entered the room I was helpless in the sudden glare, dazzled and blinking blindly at an outline. It was just a trick of light and memory, the hovering image of my own life that floated behind my eyes and turned every small, curvy, cocoa-colored girl into Lala.
By the time my eyes adjusted, and I realized who she was, it was too late to hide. As is customary in half-empty bars on early orange evenings, where still lives pose over deep drinks, everyone looked up, mildly, to see what I would do, including Her. So I did the usual. I walked to the bar very casually and ordered a club soda with lime. I paid—too much—took up a post at the railing, and hoped (from my peripheral vision) that she didn’t recognize me as the unshaven transvestite trying on eye shadow at Trashy or the lurking panty-thief from the movies or the fallen derelict face-planted in the seaweed. My glass sweated in my hand, my back sweated in my shirt, and I tried to look relaxed as I sucked on top-price ice cubes, watching another day die, irredeemably, off the American coast.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
It was she, speaking out loud, to me.
“Excuse me?” I tried to say, swallowing an ice cube. It jumped down my throat and stuck there a moment, more or less cutting off my air until it melted enough to drop into my belly. I smiled suavely as I fought for breath, freezing and dying slightly from within.
“Are you OK?” she asked with a smile. I coughed, gulping as the cube finally slid down my gullet.
“Sorry,” I wheezed. “Wrong pipe.”
She laughed. “That’s all right.”
I cleared my throat. “Sure, go ahead and laugh while I choke to death. Don’t offer me a Heimlich or anything.”
She laughed more. I was charming her! In a pathetic way, but still. “I don’t know how,” she said.
“Remind me never to trust you with my life.”
She shrugged. “You definitely shouldn’t. Didn’t your mother warn you about strangers?”
“Ah,” I said. “Yes, but my father warned me not to listen to my mother. And anyway, I thought you knew me from somewhere. Or was that just a pickup line?”
She blushed and laughed loudly, and play pu
nched my gut, with the delight of the gorgeous, adored woman being teased. For a guy who hadn’t been on a date in years, I wasn’t doing badly, not that I had managed much witty badinage even when single.
“Yes, I admit it,” she said sarcastically, but with a spark in her eyes. “I was just trying to talk to you.”
“I knew it. The oldest trick in the book. And this is your lair I’ve stumbled into.”
“Yes.” She glanced at the silent drinkers watching a silent game on TV. “This is where I come to pick up men.”
Across the room a red-haired, red-faced man in red golf pants laughed loudly and slapped his pal’s back. An old lady of the sinewy, sun-shrunken type, decked in a visor and strung with gold, rattled the ice in her empty glass, squealing like a witch casting a spell till the ponytailed bartender brought her a fresh one. She sighed, settling back into her chair.
“I can see why,” I said. “It’s quite a scene.”
She shrugged. Her hair kissed her shoulders. Her flesh was perfect, like coffee ice cream, smooth and rich, racially ambiguous, and without flaws or variations in tone, so unlike my own splotchy, hairy pink hide. “So what are you doing here all alone?” she asked.
“Me?” I looked around dramatically and then leaned in. “I’m a private eye on a case. Looking for a mysterious missing woman.”
“I see.” With a nail she drew a jagged line, like a crack, in the fog on her glass. “And who is this woman?”
“I don’t know. That’s why it’s a mystery.”
“Is she good or bad?”
“Both, probably.”
“What does she look like? Maybe I’ve seen her?”
“She looks a bit like you.”
“Ah, then she’s probably bad.” She finished her drink. “I have to admit, you’re cleverer than most strange men in bars, although less well dressed. What do you do when you’re not on a case?”
“Read. Watch too many movies. Wander around.”
“That’s it?”
“I try to write a little.”
“Ah, a writer. That makes sense. I bet you’re good at telling stories, with the private eye stuff and all.”
“Actually, I write experimental fiction. I’m not really into plot-driven stuff.”
“You mean more just about the characters, their psychology?”
“No, not that either. I’m not really so interested in psychology.”
“So more like a poem or something, abstract ideas?”
“No, it’s a novel. Definitely not abstract. I can’t stand all that intellectual abstraction.”
“A novel with no story or characters or ideas? It’s hard to imagine.”
“Yeah for me too.” We both laughed. “Actually, I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”
“I noticed.”
“What about you? What do you do?”
“I don’t know. Wander about, like you said. Be a woman of mystery.” She tapped my glass with her empty glass. It rang lightly. “Another gin and tonic?”
“Sure,” I said. “But this time hold the gin.” She frowned curiously. “I’m a master of drunken kung fu,” I explained. “I might lose control and kill someone.”
“Okay, if you say so… one virgin gin and tonic coming up.” She sallied off with our glasses. I settled my eyes on the ocean and considered how nicely this was working out. The perfect way to keep a private eye on someone, without them knowing you’re following, is to have them hang around with you. True, Lonsky had specified a discreet distance, but an operative working a case has to improvise. I was also amazed at how well I was doing with such a knockout. But, of course, I told myself, as I had at so many smoky neighborhood barbeques and winey gallery openings: don’t worry, this is just a bit of harmless flirting, you’re a married man. But was I still? Standing there, where no one knew my name, where no one even knew I was, I realized how far I had drifted, in just a day, away from my own life. I felt seasick, and I clutched the railing for support.
Then she returned, without the drinks, looking pale and unsteady herself, as if the whole deck had tilted on a rising wave. She leaned into me, muttering swiftly under her breath, “I have to go. Right now.”
“Sorry?”
She gripped my wrist and whispered in my ear. I smelled perfume and shampoo and behind that something sharper, sweet and sour—late afternoon cocktails and sweat. But her voice was sober and serious. “I have to leave right now. Walk out with me. Please.”
I remembered suddenly that I really was a detective (sort of), following a mystery woman, not just a writer pretending to be one to make a mystery woman smile. Was this the danger I was here to fight? Whom was she hiding from? A husband? A stalker? A spy? I looked around, but it was just the same lame crew as before. Unless they were in disguise.
“Don’t look,” she hissed. “Let’s just go, this way.” She guided me toward the back of the deck and down a stairway that led to the parking lot. “Where is your car?”
“There,” I said. “But what’s wrong? Who was it?”
“Please. Not now. Let’s just get out of here. Please.”
She hurried ahead to my car, so I unlocked it and we got in. As I rolled toward the highway, she slid low in the seat, shielding her face.
“Where to?”
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Someplace quiet where I can breathe.”
“OK.” I made a right onto the One, headed south.
“No,” she said. “Turn around. Let’s go to the forest. You know, the redwoods.”
“OK.” Glancing quickly, I U-turned in a driveway and headed north. She relaxed after I passed the hotel, taking a lipstick from her purse and touching up her mouth in the mirror.
“So,” I asked, “what was all that about?”
“Please don’t,” she interrupted. “Don’t ask. Don’t ask me anything ever. That way I won’t have to lie to you. I haven’t yet, well not really, not much, and it feels good for once. I’m such a dirty liar. Maybe that’s why I feel close to you, even though we’re strangers. I feel like you’re the one person who I’m honest with. Just myself. Without any lies or masks.” She gripped my knee and looked at me intently. “Don’t even ask my name. Please?”
“Sure. No problem.” I chuckled assuredly, like a man of the world. She was making me a little nervous. “We’ll be anonymous. And don’t go asking me anything either,” I warned, poking her leg. “I’m very deep and troubled and I don’t want to talk about it.”
She giggled happily. “Go ahead. Make fun of me. I deserve it.” She finished her lipstick, and sat back, gazing at the scenery. “I’m happy here, with you,” she sighed. “I feel safe.”
That was good enough for me. I turned into the entrance for the national forest, paid the attendant, and parked. We got out and walked up the path. We spoke not, but she touched my arm once or twice to steady herself as her red heels sank into the earth and we hiked into the broken shadows under the giant trees. They soared above us, hundreds of feet high, like cathedral pillars reaching for some vanished vault. These were the oldest living things on earth. In their history, we barely registered, our whole lives brief as a bug’s. And as for our thoughts and feelings, our little victories and dramas, these were less than nothing. Yet, that odd growth, the human mind, still clung to a vain idea, that our self-consciousness, the source of so much trouble for ourselves and our fellow life-forms, had to serve some purpose, some need of nature’s own. Perhaps we were flowers, brains on fragile stems, seeded here as the one creature aware of all this pointless beauty and its loss: our minds, nature’s weirdest blossoms, petals that open only to see the sun, and then go dark.
“What are you thinking?” she asked me as we stood together among the waist-high roots. Our bodies were closer than I’d noticed. We nearly touched.
“I don’t know,” I said, afraid to say. “What were you thinking?”
“This,” she said, and kissed me.
28
LATER, WHEN I THOUGHT back to
that moment, it felt unreal, but at the time it seemed, if by no means normal, then natural, as if for once everything were working out just like it should. I took her face in my hands and kissed her back. Now that I held her, she seemed so much smaller. Her mouth tasted like sugared strawberries and vermouth. She pushed her body against mine, arms clutching at my neck, and I felt her heart beating in her chest. Breathing hard, we grasped and shoved, as though we were struggling. It was like a slow-motion fight. Her tooth cut my lip and I tasted blood. I pulled back and saw her eyes glitter wildly like a cat’s. Then she shut them and reached her mouth for mine again. We leaned against the tree, blind and unspeaking, and my hands found her body, touched her waist and hips and thighs, her breasts and shoulders and the small of her back, feverish and alive. Then a parade of Asian tourists came around the path. I suppose I hadn’t heard them approaching over the pounding of my own blood in my head. Blushing and panting, hand in hand, we stumbled back down to the car and began grappling again inside. Whispering hoarsely in my ear she told me to look at her and I looked in her eyes, but she pushed me back and pulled up her dress. She wore the things that I saw her buy in the shop, the black stockings, the garter belt, the flimsy triangle of lace split to show her shining wet and pink as her mouth was after my kisses, then red inside like her mouth was, swollen and raw. Touch me, she ordered. Hypnotized, I reached out and touched her pussy just slightly and she flinched and groaned, yelping as if I’d hurt her, and pushed my hand away. She squirmed away and said not here, no please, take me back to the hotel and I started the car and I drove, though once we were moving she grabbed my hand and thrust it between her legs again. I drove like that with one hand, fighting the curves. We went back to the Cliffside Inn and parked around back in the guests’ lot, where the rooms were perched over the cliff, and I could see the sweat gluing her dress to the small of her back as I followed her upstairs to her room. The smell of her hair and perfume was in my nose, the taste of her mouth and my own blood was in my mouth, and the image of how she’d looked with her legs spread in my car was blazing in my brain so brightly I could barely see and I walked right into her as she reached her door. She dropped the key and cursed softly and I picked it up. Shaking, I opened the door and we entered the room, with its tightly made white bed and the white curtain blowing in the open balcony door and beyond that the ocean crashing far below, and I brushed the straps from her shoulders and she slid out of the dress and pulled me toward her, unhooking my belt and yanking at the buttons on my shirt till I took it off over my head, then pushed her back onto the bed while she drew me to her, guiding my hands, and I reached for that little flag of lace, that little veil, and tore it away, and she pulled my pants off and licked my cock and then pulled me toward her, pulled me down saying please and I pushed my cock, wet with her spit, against her wet pussy, and she was saying yes, saying please, saying fuck me and then I was inside her, and she was still saying yes, fuck me, fuck me please, and I pushed harder, forcing myself as deep as I could, and feeling her breath on my face and her nails in my arms and then her teeth in my shoulder, the whole time saying, more, please, fuck me, please. After we finished we laid there for a while in silence and I might have fallen asleep, for an hour or perhaps just for a second. Maybe I just blinked my eyes. But when I opened them it was dark out, the sun was finally gone, and when I turned to kiss her, she was gone too. I sat up, still confused and dim-eyed in the dark, and saw her standing on the balcony, framed in the door, a silver silhouette, still as a statue in the moonlight, looking down at the sea. And I called to her, I just said hey there you are—since I wasn’t supposed to know her name—and she might have heard me, or perhaps not, since she did not look back, she just stepped over the side and I heard her scream.