by Ron Carlson
I order another bitter from the girl, and I notice she’s a pretty girl about twenty-six, and I tell myself again: I’ve got to begin noticing women, but by the time she returns with the pint, I’ve begun my catalogue again, going way to the top of the High Street, at the corner of the heath, and I’m starting with Jack Straw’s Castle. I’m trying to decide whether or not to include The Spaniards, where Judith and I walked only one day, but we were too late for lunch and the staff was all cranky. I feel a hand on my shoulder. Judith lifts my glass and drains the whole pint until I can see her eyes closed through the bottom of the glass.
“Hello, Douglas,” she says. “Let’s eat later.” She leads me outside.
If we were strangers, or acquaintances, or anything less than what we are, whatever that is, I would now ask What’s up?, but we don’t talk that way. There is going to be some theater first, I see, as Judith walks two steps ahead of me across the boulevard, through the park, and down the winding steps to the beach. She’s wearing a blue oxford shirt under the brown baggy cardigan I bought her in Hampstead. She always wears clothes from the old days when she meets me.
There aren’t many people out, since it’s a gray day in February, but there is a brighter band of light on the horizon and a warm breeze comes off the sea. I walk behind Judith and kind of enjoy it; the air feels good and I’m full of beer. The light over the ocean makes it seem as if there is a lot of the day left. It’s sunny for brunch in Hawaii. I swing my legs, stepping in every other of her footprints. It feels wonderful to move this way; she can take her time. I don’t really want to hear about Reichert or the studio.
Judith walks in a forced jaunt, bunched a little against the weather, her fingers in her sweater pockets.
“You kind of walk like David Niven,” I say to her back. I’m suddenly thinking this doesn’t have to be a terrible interview; the beer has made me careless. She walks on. I let her go a little farther ahead, and then I follow doing crazy steps: five-foot leaps and then micro-steps, inches apart. Backward steps, duck steps, and then a few real long side steps. She’ll see this stuff on the way back.
We approach a couple who have committed themselves to a full-scale beach picnic. They are both sitting on a real checked tablecloth and we hear the man say “Viola!” to the young woman as he pulls a bottle of red wine from a large basket. He is wearing a dark sweater which I see has a large crimson “H” on the front. I’ve seen him in the story department at Paramount.
Judith stops. “Where are we going?”
As she faces me, I see the new necklace, a silver doodah of some kind. When she first came out, she wore a half pence and a New York subway token. When she finally moved in with Reichert, she made a string with six of my cigarette filters, painted turquoise, to make it look like it was my fault. She wants to show me this new one and holds it out. Taking it in my hand, I am as close to her as I’ve been in ten months.
“Pretty, right?” I see it is a smashed .38 cartridge. “I found it last week at the bottom of the swimming pool.”
We start back, but I steer her higher along the beach. I don’t want to see those tracks in the sand after all. “You want to go up to the pier?” I say. “You always like the pier.”
“The guy back there, the Harvard guy,” Judith says, now walking beside me, “he’s at Paramount in the story department.”
On the pier I finally ask her why she has the day off. She says that a rat has died in the office and they can’t find it even though there are two carpenters taking all the video cabinets apart, and the smell is so bad that Reichert sent everybody home. “He’s taking meetings at the house, telling everybody that they’re so special he’s meeting them in private. Today, it’s Jamie Curtis. The smell is bad, but you get used to it. I just couldn’t take those two stoned carpenters taking the doors off everything and chuckling their heads off.”
We buy ten tokens and go into the arcade. She leads me down all three aisles of video games and then back to the booth where she says to the kid: “Don’t you have any of the old games? Where’s Space Invaders?”
All the games we’ve seen have “Mega” in the titles. The kid points out a Donkey Kong game in the corner which has seen a lot of use. Judith makes me go first and then she asks questions: “What do you think the point of this game is?” “Do you think the girl is even worth saving?” I’m trying to concentrate, but the little guy acts drunk. He can’t decide which ladder to take, and Judith is beside me doing her show: “Do you think the guy really wants the girl?” I never get him above the second tier. The flaming barrel drops right on our heads.
Then, while she plays, she makes statements. She moves him expertly up the levels and says, “The guy could care less about the girl. He wants to get near the ape. He’s just curious.” She jumps two barrels at once and says, “See this, the guy only likes the outing; he loves to jump the barrels.” He seems to run faster when she plays. Judith takes him all the way to the top three times, but when he reaches the girl, Judith steps back, hands off the controls, and lets the monkey grab them both and close the game. “It’s fate,” she says. “I’m not getting in the way.”
As she starts another session, I slip away, out onto the pier and around to the restrooms. The bumper cars are empty. The kid in his booth sits hunched on the high chair, reading a hunting magazine. Reichert brought us out here when we had first moved. He had pointed at the kid in there and told me not to worry, there was plenty of work in California. Judith had laughed.
Later, after he’d hired Judith at the studio, she and I sometimes came out alone and stood at the end of the pier. It was like being on a great ferry headed west; she’d said that. She had liked California then. A lot of things were happening for her. We’d stand and let the waves break under us.
On the one trip we made to France from London, we’d gone out on the ferry deck in a gray drizzle, and she had said that the first thing she was going to do in St. Tropez was take her shirt off and sunburn her key onto her left breast. And, after a quick check that we were alone, she had opened her shirt, her nipples tight in the cold channel air, and placed the necklace in the spot. Two days later, she did just that, creating a little white shape that looked like that key for a long time. On the ferry that day, she had looked for a minute like a short blond figurehead; she’d said that too.
When I return, Judith is out on the pier rail. She holds up the last token and tells me that I’m not getting my last turn. I know that it will soon be another necklace. She has one like it with a Chucky Cheese token on it which reads, “In Pizza We Trust.”
She puts the token in her pocket and turns to the sea. The day here is shot, the sun gone, the cloud cover a bald dusk, but in the far west that fuzzy line of light persists on the sea’s edge.
“They’re having brunch on the veranda in Waikiki.”
“I’m as far West as I go.” Judith says into the wind. “This is it for me.”
I don’t want to argue with her. It is a relief not wanting to argue. It is not my fault she came to California. I don’t want to say that again. I don’t want to attack Reichert or defend him or any of the dozen other people we both still see, all of them bright, well-educated, charming people, mostly young, and every one of them integrally involved in film projects that are hideous or silly. I won’t argue. It is a relief. All I want is a beer. I want to push off this rail and walk back, swinging my legs, feeling my knees as we climb the steps, and go back across the street and have another beer.
“You think it’s possible to write a good movie?” Judith says, turning to me.
“I think it’s less possible than a year ago.”
“Oh good, I can’t wait until tomorrow.”
I nearly say Neither can I, but that is exactly how we used to talk. I say: “Judith, let me buy you a pint of bitter and a sandwich.”
“You think this is a good country? You think this is a livable country?”
I am not going to do this. “Judith, I can’t go on without a pint,”
I say, stepping away from the rail. It is an old joke from London. I walk back to the first silver owl, as Judith calls the coin-operated binoculars on the pier.
Way out there I can see the guy from Paramount leaning back on one elbow drinking wine in the gray wind. Where do they learn that stuff? I close my eyes. I try to remember the name of the pub in Highgate across from Coleridge’s grave. I can’t get it. We walked there once on Easter, up through the cemetery where we stood before Marx’s tomb, and now I’m trying to remember Marx’s tomb: “Workers of the World Unite, ours is not to something something, but to change something.” There was a green-headed mallard on every stone crucifer. Judith and I sat on a green bench in the park and argued about something. The ducks were all mating, walking in circles around us, and then we walked up to the pub which had been a real coach stop in the old days, and it’s name was. I can’t remember.
I can remember Judith, after she started writing for Reichert, coming home late in the car. She wouldn’t come in the house. I would go out after a while and find her sitting in the Rabbit, listening to the end of a Jackson Browne tape. I should have known. It was Reichert’s tape: “Hold Out.” It was the Era of Maximum Smiling; she called it that. She’d look up from the car and smile. “This is the Era of Maximum Smiling,” she’d say.
I wanted then to remind her that the Era of Quality Smiling was when we could watch the kites on Parliament Hill on the heath, when we could see all of London grumbling beneath us, when we would smile at the idea of writing in California. But it was too late. When a woman sits in the car listening to tapes, it’s too late.
I walk almost to the second silver owl when Judith catches up. We step back onto the continent, cross the beach, and by the time we’re at the top of the stairs, she’s taken my arm. She doesn’t speak except to say, “David Niven’s dead,” as we cross the street and go into the King’s Head.
At the table, it starts. Her face, and I see again that it is a good face, the only face, falls. When she leans forward to take her face in her hands, I can see the silver cartridge again and all the little red marks above her breasts where her jewelry had nicked her over the years. I remember that after she’d shower it looked like a light coral necklace there. “God, Doug,” she says. “I don’t know whether to go forward or backward anymore.” She’s about to cry.
I feel the old numbness rise in my neck, the old bad confusion. I’m glad the girl has brought the wonderful brown beer, and I lift my glass in my hand. The beer is cool and sweet.
“Judith,” I say.
“Doug, remember that bitch at the Spaniards who wouldn’t serve us because we were five minutes late for pub hours?”
“No,” I say. There is no sense in starting. I could ask her now the name of that pub at Highgate, the coach stop, Judith would remember. But: no.
The King’s Head is empty now: four o’clock. By seven, every English starlet on the coast will be in here. “Judith. Hey. Don’t cry.” I push her glass across so it just touches her elbow. “Judith. Here. Drink this. How about the turkey sandwich?”
She nods, her head in her hands.
“Don’t cry,” I say. “It’s possible to write a good movie. It’s a livable country. Judith, you are the most clever woman I ever met. But, you were right about that little guy. He doesn’t want the girl. He wants to run back and forth. He wants to jump the barrels and not get burned.”
OLYMPUS HILLS
I LEFT the party early, finding my coat on the bed, surprising Karen and Darrel, who stood when I entered. “It’s funny,” I said, trying to ease their embarrassment, “but I know every coat in this pile.” I lifted Cindy’s rabbit fur jacket. “For five points. Careful: she does not wear this thing to work.”
“Cindy,” Karen said, her voice husky.
I had just left Cindy in the kitchen. She and Tom were sitting on the counter drinking tequila and having a heart to heart. Whenever people drink tequila, they always talk about it, the worm, a war story or two, and then maybe mushroom experience and it’s a heart to heart. Cindy was wearing a white silk dress, sprayed with little red dots which turned out to be strawberries. I have been in these kitchens before and when Cindy hoists her bottom onto the kitchen counter and, nursing a tequila and lemon between her knees, starts telling drug experiences, it’s just enough. Even Tom sitting up there by her looked a little spent. He’s too big a guy to sit on a kitchen counter and look natural anyway.
Karen and Darrel had forgotten to let go of each other’s hands and their faces were smashed red from all the kissing. They looked like the two healthiest people at the party. I was surprised, because I’d seen Karen with another guy from the firm, a programmer named Chuck who does our board overlays, at a dozen lunches in the last month. And I admired Darrel’s ability to struggle in there with Karen, while we could all hear his wife, Ellen, singing along with Tommy James and the Shondells in the other room. It was a small house for Olympus Hills.
“Victor, Ted, Sharon, Tom, Ellen,” I said, laying the coats aside, until I found the tan raincoat. “Lisa,” I said, looking at it. The bed was a little archaeology of the party: all those layers of beautiful coats. Victor and his new leather flight jacket. Tom and his bright swollen parka. And Lisa’s classy raincoat second from the bottom. She must have arrived early.
“My coat,” I looked up and said to Darrel, and when I saw how embarrassed he still was, leaning there against the wall as if I was going to scold them, I added, “I’m leaving early. No problem.” I patted my coat. “I’d say you’ve got an hour before another coat is touched. I’ll close the door. Happy Valentines.”
I didn’t put my coat on in the hall, because I didn’t want Ted or Sharon to make a fuss, to cry out, “Hal, you’re leaving! Before charades! You can’t leave before charades!”
I wanted to leave before charades. I’d played charades with this group before and it was worse than college. Victor, Ted, and about five others played solely to humiliate everyone. They would select unproduced plays from Gilbert and Sullivan, and then explode when people would claim to have not heard of them. “You ignorami!” I’d heard Victor scream. “You aborigines! Swinesnouts! This is incredible.”
My wife, Lisa, could be wicked too. She would always write the sexiest titles she could, knowing that some woman on the other team, in the drunken spirit of camaraderie that sometimes waved over the group, would embarrass herself fully doing How to Make Love to a Man and be the talk of the office for a week. I remember in detail the vision of Cindy writhing before the group one night, clutching both her breasts with her hands, thrusting her pelvis at her team as if to drive them back on the couch. I don’t remember the name of the literary work she was describing.
I wanted to slip through the living room as if I were getting some fresh air and then be gone. Lisa had come from work tonight and she had her own car; I’d see her at home later. There was a time when we had one car, and we used to go places together. It was a used silver Tempest, the car I had in graduate school. The original owner had applied zodiac stickers in circles on all the doors.
Lisa always claims to hate these parties. We’ll be dressing at home and she’ll wave the hairdrier at me, making predictions. “Karen will wear that blue mini and go after Lou. They’ll have a clam dip diluted with sour cream. Generic sour cream. Did I say generic sour cream? Wayne will move in on me when I sit on the couch and tell me about his kids for two hours. He thinks that’s the way you flirt. Ted will bring his oldies tape. Ellen will be the first one to sing. Tom will be the first one drunk. You’ll get drunk too and come on to Cindy, and we’ll have our little quarrel on the way home. Are you ready? Let’s go.”
And she used to be right. I would get drunk. I’d end up singing with Ellen and, later, making my three point five crass comments to some of the women. Wayne would do his sincerity routine for Lisa on the couch. He was no dummy; she was always the loveliest woman in the whole house. I’d end up in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with Cindy, sometimes leani
ng against Cindy and then the counter. It was a party, wasn’t it?
That was then. Lisa wouldn’t be right tonight, about me. February. It had been a long winter already: five, six parties since New Year’s. No wonder Karen had been able to spot Cindy’s coat. Too much snow, too much fog; by Friday night, no one wanted to go home. Everybody was kind of surprised suddenly to have money, but no one knew what to do about it. Most of us had Ted’s oldies tape memorized the way you come to know an album; when a song ends, you know what’s coming next. We knew what brand everyone smoked and who would lend you a cigarette gladly. We knew that Ted smoked Kools because he’d learned in college that no one would borrow them. We knew what everyone drank and how much. We knew where people would be sitting by eleven o’clock. I knew it all and I just wanted to go home. I was trying.
I eased by a group standing by the kitchen door, and edged around the two couples dancing to the Supremes. Ellen waved at me from across the buffet table with the breadstick she was using as a microphone. Baby Love. I could see Lisa sitting on the couch. She was smiling at Wayne who sat on the carpet by her knees. I know all her smiles and this was a real one. I had to thread between Victor and his new girlfriend to reach the door and then I was out in the snow.
Pulling on my coat, I walked down the trail in the falling snow, right into the deer. I didn’t actually hit him, but by the time we both looked up we were at most three feet apart. It was a young male. He had a fine pair of forked antlers and a broad black nose, wet and shiny in the light from the yard lamp. I immediately backed up four or five steps to give him room, but he stood there, casually, looking at me. There were deer all over the city because of the snowfall, but I had never, ever, seen one this close.
I backed to the door, slowly, thinking to show someone. I forgot myself. I wanted Lisa to come out and see this guy. I wanted Lisa to come out and see this deer and come home with me. She could say, “We’ll pick up my car tomorrow or the day after that,” and steam up the dark with her laugh. I hadn’t realized how lonely I was until I saw his face, his moist eyes, the bone grain of his antlers.