18mm Blues

by Gerald A. Browne

  Harold’s house was one of those. A ten-thousand-square-foot contemporary whose backyard included frontage on Richardson Bay. Previously Harold had owned a house of traditional style in nearby Tiburon. It had eventually cramped Harold, not provided adequate blank wall for his collection of art nor free space enough for his sculptings and precious objets. In that regard this present house was most conducive, stark symmetry, all white and glass. Like a personal museum.

  Grady pulled the Taurus into the fine graveled drive. The car was extremely dirty from having been parked in the airport lot for two weeks. It looked out of place in front of the clean, sleek structure. He got out and went up to the oversize entrance door. There wasn’t a doorbell or knocker. Merely Grady’s weight on an inset portion of the entranceway would activate a chime inside.

  He stood in place three minutes that seemed longer before deciding the fact that he was early was the reason Harold wasn’t home. Harold was always precisely on time or very late. Earliness exposed eagerness, he contended.

  Grady went around to the side of the house, past impeccably lidded garbage bins to a gate. He reached over, slid the bolt aside and proceeded to the rear terrace. There was a square-shaped swimming pool like an island of ideal colored water surrounded by a sea of ideal green grass. White tubular loungers, chairs and tables arranged just so. A bright blue Italian marketplace umbrella and a painted white steel flagpole, a real tall one. Harold had a collection of flags, even some that hardly anyone could identify, such as those of Madagascar, Suriname and Tibet. Most frequently for the implied impression he flew the tricolor or the Union Jack. At the moment nothing had been hoisted, Grady noticed, although right then there was a breeze that could have caused a lot of nice furling and fluttering.

  Grady’s hope half expected he’d find lunch all laid out on one of the terrace tables. He’d looked forward to a leisurely couple of hours of sterling, crystal, linen and a bottle of one of Harold’s show-off wines. But only a half a plastic bowl of cashews, probably stale.

  Grady looked to the house. No discernable movement inside. Where was the Balinese houseboy? Normally he’d be hurrying out to ask was there anything Grady wanted.

  Grady took off his suit jacket and moved a lounger around so he could sit facing the bay. The water was choppy and the sun striking upon it exaggerated its pointilistic impression. White bloated triangles of boats were running and tacking. The high-rises of San Francisco a more definite backdrop than usual and, nearer, the protruding, dun-colored lump of Alcatraz, which caused Grady to consider there were all kinds of detention.

  Harold got there forty minutes late. By then Grady was dozy. Harold told him not to bother getting up, pulled a lounger around for himself. Grady would have welcomed going inside, had had enough of sunning in his business clothes.

  “Want a drink?” Harold asked as he sat.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tall or short?”

  “Tall, thank you.”

  Harold didn’t look in the direction of the house, merely held two fingers high. In less than thirty seconds the houseboy arrived with the drinks. Harold must have told him to have both tall and short ready. The drinks were a Mezcal and pineapple juice concoction topped with a half-inch kicker of 180-proof rum. To not have to gulp his way through the rum Grady requested straws.

  “How did the trip go?” Harold asked.

  “Not bad.” Grady had brought along the sales report, believing it would please his employer and father-in-law. He got it from his jacket pocket, handed it across.

  Harold pushed his Gianfranco Ferré sunglasses up onto his forehead so he’d have a clear, untinted view of the report. He just squinted at the bottom line.

  Grady was awaiting a smile or some praising reaction.

  Only a faint uninterpretable grunt from Harold. He allowed the sales report to drop to the grass. At once the breeze stole it away through a bed of birds of paradise to get caught up in an oleander hedge.

  Grady told himself he wouldn’t retrieve it, not even had it accidentally slipped from Harold’s fingers.

  Harold repositioned his sunglasses, took a sip and crossed his feet. He was wearing a pair of elevator high-top sneakers. Had those and all his shoes custom made in Italy so they’d give him two inches more height. Not because he was so short. He just wanted to be taller than five eight in stocking feet, believed that at five ten to eleven he could get away with claiming and feeling he was close to six feet, which, as he saw it, was the masculine summit.

  Harold admitted to fifty, would be sixty-two come October. He’d had his eyes done, lids and all, eight years ago and needed to have them done again. His hair had gone gray and white and its front line was well in retreat, but he hadn’t done battle with that. The exposed skull skin was thoroughly freckled. For some reason his eyebrows had remained dark, and the contrast of them bushy and unkempt as they were along with his surprisingly deep voice gave him a paradoxical attractiveness. He smiled a lot. Not because he was well humored but because his number five tooth, the right upper bicuspid, was crowned with gold and a certain degree of smile would flash it. Harold had practiced before mirrors and was able to gauge by the tension he asked of his cheek muscles precisely the measure of smile required.

  As for style, Harold had little of his own and was ambivalent about from where he should borrow. At times he dressed the WASP, at other times the Bijan. He had the most professional-looking golfing outfits and the best set of sticks a lot of money could buy. Belonged to the Belvedere Country Club, where his claim of severely torn ligaments in his right shoulder that would never properly heal was believed with sympathy. How unbearable, his not being able to play!

  Then there was trout fishing. He owned the proper, impressive tackle. He’d talk streams and flies with anyone anytime, had elaborate opinions of the Beaverkill, the Frying Pan, the San Juan, the Middle Fork of the Salmon, said the Upper Yellowstone around Livingston was his favorite water. As though he’d fished them all. As though.

  Harold held his arm up, fist clenched.

  The houseboy came within seconds with a silver dish of macadamia nuts.

  Grady wondered when they were really going to eat.

  “Did a shipment arrive from Sri Lanka this morning?” Harold asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Probably still in customs. Juja is sending some yellow sapphires they say are the finest they’ve found in years.”

  “Cooked goods?”

  “They say not but I hear Juja is hurting, so they could be cutting back on reliability. Look into it.”

  “Sure.”

  “The whole fucking market is hurting,” Harold grumbled, as though the thought was more lenient let out. He munched and asked, “Heard from Gayle?”

  “No.”

  “I spoke to her last night early.”

  “Where is she?”

  “With her Aunt Miriam in Rancho Santa Fe, but she doesn’t want you running down there.”

  Grady tried to recall anyone ever mentioning an Aunt Miriam. “When’s she coming back?”

  “As soon as everything’s settled. It would only be confusing and painful for her if she came back now.”

  “What’s not settled?”

  “Gayle wants a divorce.”

  Grady allowed the words to sink in. They didn’t have the impact they should have. “Shouldn’t she be telling me?”

  Harold sat up so his words would be right at Grady. “Look, Bowman”—What happened to Grady? Grady thought—“I didn’t have you over here today to get tangled up in your emotional attitudes. It just happens that Gayle says she wants a divorce and I’m not the one to talk her out of it. Hell, divorce is no big deal, just an evolutionary paragraph, so to speak, a kind of healthful hitch that breaks up the tedium. Know what I mean?”

  Grady knew. He’d heard it from Harold a number of times before, nearly syllable for syllable, Harold’s condensed rationale for his four failed marriages. Once at a dinner gathering someone had pressed Har
old to explain those words, and all Harold could do was repeat them.

  “No,” Harold continued, “I very definitely don’t want my life sullied by your resentments and despondency.”

  Why presume I’m despondent? Grady thought.

  “Naturally my favor falls on Gayle’s side,” Harold said, “and I’ll be looking out for her interests.”

  “Very definitely and naturally.”

  “Are you ridiculing me?”

  Grady looked away.

  “Anyway, Bowman, what you and I have to straighten out has to do with business.”

  “Like what?”

  “To get right to the bone of it, considering the deterioration of your and Gayle’s relationship, I don’t see how you’ll be able to function comfortably in the firm.”

  He’s right, Grady thought.

  “Neither of us wants to suffer that kind of aggravation, do we?”

  Grady thought he sure didn’t, said so.

  Harold flashed his gold crown. “Good. I’ve always had faith in your business sense.”

  Always isn’t forever, Grady thought. Always is as long as there isn’t a hitch, no need for an evolutionary paragraph. He didn’t know whether he should laugh or be bitter.

  “Of course, I’ll help you get resituated any way I can.” Another gold flash. “Actually it’s been a pretty good ride, ten years, hasn’t it?”

  What shit, Grady thought.

  Harold’s face tightened again. “The other matter we have to set right is the house,” he said.

  Grady gathered Harold meant the house in Mill Valley. When he and Gayle were first married they’d lived in a leased apartment on Russian Hill. Gayle seemed to be satisfied with it for a while, less than a year, really, but then insisted on the house. Harold insisted on financing it, as though his holding the mortgage was a gift. “In case there’s ever a sudden need to have it free and clear,” he’d said. It was all drawn up tightly, the 30 percent down, the monthly payments including interest. A fifteen-year mortgage with balloons. Not a payment had been missed.

  “Gayle wants the house,” Harold said. “You know how much it means to her, the time she’s spent on it. That’s all she wants. No alimony or any of that, just the house. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  Grady stood, took up his suit jacket by the crook of a forefinger, didn’t give Havermeyer even another glance. Went over to where the sales report was caught in the oleander hedge. Wounded a few birds of paradise getting to it. He decided against going out by way of the garbage side of the house, went up the steps and into and through it, on the way taking what he was certain would be a last look at the large painting he especially liked in the entrance hall. An Elizabeth Bouguereau. So long painting, he thought, you’re too good for him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A half hour later Grady was sitting on Muir Beach. Up on the shoulder ridge of sand the tide had built. His shoes and socks off, trouser legs rolled to his knees, shirt unbuttoned and its tails pulled out.

  Thinking of other places he’d rather be.

  Cozumel, Mexico, came to mind. In a world out of the ordinary, seventy feet down in the Tormentos Reefs, among the huge coral pinnacles and heads, being merely one of the swimming creatures along with eagle rays and schools of angelfish. His favorite dive, Tormentos. Did the black, big-eyed, at least two-hundred-pound grouper he’d had such lengthy communion with there eleven years ago still claim that sandy valley? Groupers probably didn’t have such a life span. But he hoped so.

  Even more where he’d rather be was Litchfield, Connecticut. Home. The three-story Federal-style house. Not purely, severely Federal because of its Victorian revisions, but in its heart and bones recalling the year 1785. Painted white, of course, with black wooden shutters, and like most of the other houses there along North Street set back the distance of a large lawn. Wrapped in front and along nearly all of one side by a wide, railed porch. A glider on the porch, an old standing one of metal with springs that refused to be silenced and striped canvas-colored cushions, kept up for the sake of memories. Wicker chairs and tables that were brought from the garret of the barn every year about the time when the dogwood petals fell. Returned to the barn soon after yellowed maple leaves began accumulating in their seats.

  He could go back. Would. Not phone and have younger brother Jeff meet him at Kennedy or Bradley. Hurry the surprise of himself up the uneven brick walk and up the five steps of the porch and on in to his father, Fred, and his mother, Ruth, and perhaps even his older sister Janet and perhaps even his grandmother Wilma. They would be at the supper table passing portions or eating from trays while watching television. They’d maul him with hugs, pepper him with kisses, and after things had settled he would sit and exchange updates with them and he would notice that his mother and father, as ever, couldn’t be within reach of each other without in some way touching.

  His mother would love readying his room on the top floor, the one where the apple tree tips scratched eerily across the window screen when there was wind. Just below where the wasps squeezed in and built combs. He’d lie in that bed and reacquaint himself with that certain darkness. He’d delight in regression.

  He would be eighteen again, no, fifteen. It would be the June when he’d begun at the White Flower Farm. There’d be the early morning two-mile bike ride to work along the black-topped road, passing the piled and nearly continuous rock walls and the jostling patches of wild lilies with that particular day’s blossoms enjoying their turn. He’d do whatever tasks the people at White Flower wanted, proud of being able to work, whether it was helping customers load purchased plants into their cars or dividing seedlings into separate containers or edging the display beds or merely deadheading petunias. It seemed the harder the work, the more he liked it, shoveling, hauling topsoil, stacking fifty-pound bags of mulch. He’d pedal home with his jeans caked and his fingernails jammed with soil, some days almost too exhausted to smile.

  He loved plants, the astounding intricacy of ferns. The acquired strength of trees, all that. Irises. During their season he’d seldom pass their bed without giving way to appreciation for their tongues and beards and the perfect arrangement in their fragrant throats.

  He had learned land, learned growing. His interest surpassed his White Flower Farm chores, was intensified by books dealing with famous gardens. Versailles, of course, Hampton Court, Blenheim Palace and other grand ones, and many just as grand to him in their own way such as Barnsley House, Old Westbury, Villandry, Cranborne Manor, Sissinghurst. There were texts to help affiliate him with André Lenôtre, William Kent, Inigo Jones, Henry Wise, and Capability Brown. And in some instances there would be examples of their plans, showing in scale and detail intersecting paths and allées, positions of trees and gates, statuary and fountains, walls and arbors, parterres and hedges.

  On quite a few Saturdays he would take the bus down the length of Connecticut for the purpose of the main reading room of the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue. He pored over articles published by the Royal Horticultural Society and such otherwise unattainable volumes as The Formal Garden in England and Scotland, 1906. And then he would take the long bus ride home with his head full of the future.

  The University of Connecticut at Storrs. A landscape architect was what he’d be.

  But at midterm of his fourth year at the university he’d been invited to spend the vacation at the home of his classmate Wendell Larkin, in Manhattan on East Seventy-fifth Street. Wendell’s father, Matthew, was a gem merchant specializing in colored stones and pearls with offices in the trade district on West Forty-seventh.

  Matthew Larkin asked Grady about landscape architecture. Grady explained some things and, in polite turn, asked Larkin about gems. Larkin had shown him, taken Grady to the office one morning and instructed him on how to use a loupe and let him look into a twenty-carat sapphire, a top-grade bright Ceylon. Grady wasn’t merely interested, he was captivated by that intense blue inner atmosphere.
<
br />   It was as though the vibrations from the crystal structure of the blue had shot into Grady’s eye and instantaneously appropriated his brain. He held the stone away but returned it to his eye, again and again.

  Larkin realized Grady’s fascination at once and was stimulated by it. He took other gemstones from his safe and introduced Grady to the interior realms of emeralds and rubies and the lustrous complexion of pearls. Larkin was the shower, Grady, the looker. What was supposed to have been a half hour of satisfying curiosity turned out to be three hours of engrossment. Grady was so dazzled, so taken, that he’d hardly tasted the pastrami sandwich lunch that Larkin had had sent up from the deli.

  Grady and gemstones.

  Coup de foudre! Love at first sight.

  He’d told himself perhaps he’d had such a reaction because of the kindredness of flowers and gems—their color, their mutual requirement of earth. Just as the beauty of flowers had to be grown, so did that of gems, crystal by crystal.

  Grady gave a great deal of thought to that affinity and decided to use it. After he graduated and had his degree, he put off pursuing his landscaping profession, went to New York City and took the courses offered by the Gemological Institute of America. He wanted to be a certified gemologist. Larkin hired him full-time. Salary and commission, office and access to the safe.

  He’d remained with Larkin four years.

  Until Larkin took ill and had to close down.

  Larkin had helped him get the job as a stone buyer for that most prestigious retail jeweler, Shreve and Company in San Francisco. Grady had gotten along well right from the start with the people at Shreve. He’d impressed them with his knowledge of gems and his business sense.

  It was through Shreve that he’d become acquainted with Harold Havermeyer. The worst he’d heard of the man was that he was a shrewd deal-maker, in the gem trade a high compliment.

  Harold cultivated Grady, gradually. Over a two-year period there’d been lunches and dinners and outings on his boat. Harold had allowed Grady to see only a degree more than his public face, enough to make Grady feel the privileged confidant. Grady hadn’t been naive, not taken in. There just wasn’t any reason to suspect Harold of self-serving motives. Their relationship was well within the normal business-social overlay, and it hadn’t come as a surprise to Grady when Harold began dropping into the cracks of certain moments the hints of the possibility of Grady becoming affiliated with the Harold Havermeyer Company. Harold accelerated Grady’s ambition, dilated it and shaped it to suit his own uses.