Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  He had found a lock that was identical to the one that hung on the connecting door in the lawyer’s closet. Anne’s landlord had probably bought his at the same store. The need to replace the existing lock was urgent in him. It had become a part of what he had finally begun to see as the whole picture—finished and framed and hanging on the wall. That kind of thinking was dangerous, of course. Because of his appreciation of inspiration and of sudden artistic passion, he was hesitant to imagine it too clearly. An artist had to be open to change. And as each element in the work became clear, they suggested other elements that had to be accepted and clarified, or else rejected. A piece wasn’t finished until it was finished. And you couldn’t rush it.

  Knowing all that didn’t make him any less anxious to switch the locks, and his mind skipped on ahead as it had a dozen times already, imagining himself slipping into her closet, perhaps as she lay sleeping. He pictured the darkness, the line of light past the edge of the closet door, the smell of her clothing, the musty wooden smell of the closet. He listened to the sounds of her apartment, beyond the closet wall, peering through the door at her bed, the sheets and blankets pushed around. There was the sound of water running, and when it didn’t stop, he knew it was the shower. She was in the bathroom, not ten feet from where he stood in the darkness. He opened the closet door, peered out into the room, and located the door of the bathroom, which, in the privacy of her solitary existence, she had left open. Steam clouded the lit bathroom. There was the sound of the water shutting off, of a shower door clicking open, movement in the foggy mirror….

  He came to himself, standing on the sidewalk outside the hardware store, realizing with a shudder that he had drifted off. His mouth had been open, and he wiped his chin and looked around. No one was staring at him. Recalling his daydream, he licked his lips and then slipped the lock into his waist pack. It wouldn’t hurt to check the street door of Anne’s apartment, just to see if any of the tenants had come in yet.

  He crossed the street, looking down toward the pier. People crowded the sidewalk tables a block down in front of Starbucks, swilling coffee. He stopped dead on the sidewalk. Unbelievably, Dave and Anne sat at one of the tables, talking like old friends. Here was a surprise. This wasn’t in the picture two minutes ago. It was more like a hole in the picture, or a splash of bad color that had to be painted out.

  He started up the sidewalk toward them, suddenly over-come with a furious anger. Anne clearly wasn’t the problem here. Dave was the problem—the meddling, ignorant … His thoughts were suddenly scattered and staticky, and his head pounded violently. He grasped his forehead and leaned against the wall of a building. His vision was black along the edges, and he forced himself to breathe regularly, in through his mouth, out through his nose. Control, he told himself. Anger is your enemy.

  After a minute he regained his composure, and when he did, he abruptly understood that Dave, too, had a part in the piece. Perhaps a brief part. But to forget that now, to fly off the handle and make a scene on the street, might ruin what was beginning to look like a masterpiece.

  Without looking back, he turned around and headed north on Main again. Obviously it would be far better if Anne didn’t see him. If ever there was a time when it was best to be subtle, now was that time. Sunlight shone on the windows of Anne’s apartment. He tried the downstairs door, but it was still locked, and immediately he stepped down onto the sidewalk again and walked toward the alley. In the time it took him to get to the back of the building, he had made up his mind. His clearheadedness and insight had returned to him, along with a faith in himself. Quickly he looked around. Seeing no one in the alley, he vaulted the gate again and ascended the stairs.

  1

  “IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE HE’S SERIOUS,” ANNE SAID. SHE and Dave sat in the sunlight at a streetside table in front of Starbucks. The morning was clear, and it was almost hot in the sun, even though it was early. There was no fog, and the wind had turned around offshore and was blowing light and warm, like a trade wind. “Not that I’ve got anything against copper baby faces, but they’re not what I expected, exactly.”

  “I’m a little surprised myself,” Dave said. “Collier’s come up with some stretchers, but this takes the cake. Maybe it’ll work, though.”

  “How successful is the theatre? it can’t make much money, can it?”

  “Money? It’s a flat-out loser as far as money’s concerned. It’s the Earl’s hobby, like owning a bunch of classic cars that you can’t really drive anywhere. The thing is, it’s a safe bet that any staging of King Lear will lose money, so they might as well lose it colorfully. That’s what the Earl meant with his comment about the alligators. They won’t save anything by being timid.”

  “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “That’s the first principle with Collier and the Earl.”

  “Can they afford to lose money all the time?”

  “The Earl can. He can afford to do anything he wants. That’s what he’s been doing ever since his wife died nearly forty years ago. Collier doesn’t have a dime, so he’s got nothing to lose. They make a great team.”

  “So why do I have a hard time fitting Edmund into this picture?” She looked at his face, as if gauging his reaction to her mention of Edmund.

  “He’s kind of a square peg, I guess,” Dave said carefully. “Square peg” wasn’t the first phrase that came into his mind, and other more colorful phrases followed, but this was no time to look like he held a grudge.

  “Will he put up with it? With Mr. Collier’s play?”

  “Who? Edmund?”

  She nodded.

  “What can Edmund do? It’s the Earl’s business.”

  “I got the impression …”

  “That Edmund was the man.” Dave shrugged. “Edmund’s just Edmund. He wears a suit, he shoots golf, he signs the paychecks….”

  “I’ve played a little golf in my time.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve worn a suit.” Dave smiled at her. “Edmund’s not my favorite subject, to tell you the truth, and I don’t want to sit around and bad-mouth the man. It’s bad for the digestion.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I just don’t quite know what to think of him.”

  “Neither do a lot of people. Personally, I try not to think of him.”

  “I don’t think he’s trustworthy,” she said. “But maybe you already know that.”

  The statement filled him with a sudden joy. She already didn’t like Edmund. She saw straight through him. “I’ve known Edmund for twenty years,” he said, “and if there was ever a moment in those twenty years when he was what you’d call trustworthy, I must have been out of town.” it was a careful thing to say, given the possibilities. He wouldn’t have had any trouble listing Edmund’s crimes, and never mind the shady deal with the notary, the threats against Collier, or the thing with the tiki earlier in the week. He could have gone on for an hour about dozens of petty, treacherous little incidents over the years. But he was sick of Edmund, and he was determined to take Casey’s advice and turn the other cheek, if only to look the other way. The problem was, you could turn the other cheek if an insult was directed against you, but you couldn’t if it was directed against your neighbor—Collier in this instance, or Casey.

  “Well, watch out for him. I don’t think he has your best interests at heart.”

  For a moment he considered asking her what she meant, but to hell with it. He nodded instead, and said, “Thanks. I’ll watch out for him.”

  “He told me earlier that someone had been looking through the boxes that the Earl had let me store in one of the back rooms.”

  “Maybe somebody has.”

  “I think he was implying that it was you, although he didn’t come right out and say so.”

  “Edmund hardly ever comes right out and says anything. One way or another, I didn’t look through the boxes.”

  “I didn’t think you had.”

  “Thanks.”

  She looked radiant in the sunlight,
with her dark hair and her flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, although he wasn’t any kind of expert, and it was possible that she was just good with it. She caught his eye, and he glanced away, down Main Street toward the pier. Twice already he had caught himself staring at her, and her noticing it embarrassed the hell out of him. The sidewalks were jumping with people in the nice weather, eating breakfast in the cafes and walking down toward the pier. A shaggy-haired surfer hauled a sign out of the Windansea shop advertising a wet suit sale, and the sign reminded Dave that he had lied to Casey. He hadn’t sold his wet suit. It was lying around in the garage somewhere. But it was hopelessly out of date now, and he seemed to remember that there was a hole in one of the knees….

  The breeze ruffled the back of his hair, reminding him of the smell of the ocean when you were out in the water on an offshore day, the way the spindrift blew back over the crest, the way the wave held up, glowing with green sunlight. It had been a long time since he had been a part of that; a lot of water had rolled past under the pier. Ten years ago he had been married for all of fourteen months. The marriage had worked for about half that time, and then had gone off the rails. Kelly was a teacher—solid, cheerful, smart. She danced. He didn’t dance. She sat and drank coffee in the morning and read magazines. On weekends she could kill hours that way, when she had hours to kill. She wanted company when she was killing time, but he hadn’t been good company. He hadn’t ever been able to sit around without being edgy, especially early in the day, and it was only recently, looking back, that he realized that somewhere along the line he had become a slave to production, to work, whatever you wanted to call it. Two minutes out of bed in the morning and he was moving, as if he were running to keep up with something, or to outdistance something. When Kelly had wanted children and he hadn’t, she had said to him, “Who did you think you were marrying?” After the breakup she had married another teacher, had three kids, and the last time he’d seen her, she had seemed perfectly happy.

  He stole another glance at Anne now, and saw that she was staring into her coffee cup. She looked troubled, some-how, and she looked up at him briefly, almost curiously, and quickly looked away again.

  “Reading the coffee grounds?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “I’m bilingual that way—English and coffee grounds.”

  “What do they say?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she said. “Not yet. And anyway, everything changes if you tell. That’s why the stuff that psychics come up with never works. They always tell you what they see, and then everything changes, and they’re wrong.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Entirely. I’m completely convinced. So what you have to do is ask me in about five years, and I’ll tell you if I was right or not.”

  “I don’t know if I can wait five years.”

  She looked at him for a moment, as if she were trying to read something into the statement. “You’re in a hurry?” she asked. Clearly she was serious.

  He shrugged. “I was just thinking about time passing—the things I might have done, but I didn’t. The way things might have worked out.” He tapped the tabletop with his spoon and tried to look as if he were only half serious.

  “That kind of thinking seems like a trap to me.”

  “Maybe because what you’ve done amounts to something you’re happy with. What you’ve accomplished is hanging on a wall for everyone to see, including yourself. There must be some satisfaction in that.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever I’ve got hanging on the wall isn’t as good as it should be. I’m never satisfied, except maybe for a couple of months. And it certainly doesn’t make you any happier day to day because you paint pictures. You can’t seriously believe that a painter is happier on any given day than a plumber is.”

  “No, but a plumber might wish he was a painter. A painter doesn’t wish he was anything but a painter. Admit it. When’s the last time you sat around wishing you were a plumber or a bookkeeper or a real estate agent?”

  “You’re right as far as it goes, except none of that has anything to do with happiness. Believe me. I’ve known a lot of miserable painters. Good ones, too. And that sort of wishing is a disease, I think—wishing for what you might have had if things had been different. Things are never different. They can’t ever be. They’re just what they are. Anyway, we’ve drifted way off the subject. You were talking about the way things might have been, which is a type of regret that’s simply a condition of life. It’s better to laugh at it. You’re alive, aren’t you? You’re working this weird job, the sun’s shining, the coffee’s good. What do you want, egg in your beer?”

  “I want a double espresso for the road,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “A quarter for the telescope out on the pier. Would the Earl put up with that?”

  “The Earl would recommend it,” Dave said.

  THE OCEAN WAS WINTER GREEN, GLASSY AND CLEAR, AND Catalina Island floated on the horizon as if it lay a couple of miles offshore instead of twenty-six. Up the coast the Palos Verdes Peninsula stood out sharply against the blue sky, marking the southern edge of the South Bay beaches, and in the east the Balboa and Newport piers were so clearly defined that Dave could nearly count their pilings. The swell had calmed down, and the waves were slanting through in long, clean lines, sets of six or eight, lacy sheets of spray blowing back over the crests and into the faces of surfers climbing and dropping on the long green walls. Sunlight sparkled on the water, and the ocean was full of sail-boats, twenty or thirty of them working their way down from the direction of Belmont Shores or Alamitos Bay, coming around to catch the offshores, their spinnakers billowing out in the wind.

  When the telescopes clicked off, they walked out toward the end of the pier, where a half-dozen fishermen hunched at the railing, watching their lines lift and fail with the passing swell. Finally they stood looking into the deep water at the end of the pier, and Dave took two pennies out of his pocket and handed one to Anne. Making a wish, he dropped his in, watching for its tiny splash and then following its course for another moment as it sank. Anne turned around, flipped hers over her shoulder, and together they walked back to the Earl’s shortly after ten. Edmund wasn’t in, but neither of them mentioned it, and the late start they’d gotten made it hard to start at all. The warm weather made the morning slow and drowsy, with shafts of sunlight through the windows and skylights. Dave started cutting out the baby heads, and Anne sketched big-cheeked faces onto a pad of heavy paper. At noon the truck left for Westminster with the Oklahoma! props, and wouldn’t be back until near closing, and as the clatter of the departing truck faded in the distance, the warehouse grew hushed, the afternoon stillness broken only by the clicking of paint rollers in roller pans and the remote sound of the Earl’s juke-box upstairs, Doris Day singing “Sentimental Journey.”

  They ate lunch back in among the palm trees and fishing nets under the balcony while the paint dried, and Dave told her about how he had rebuilt the prow of the Spanish galleon, and how Casey had engineered the gear mechanism that worked the painted ocean waves along her side. Dust motes drifted in the sunshine that shone through the dusty windows, and the afternoon stretched on, drowsy and slow, while they worked at the baby faces, Dave with cans of copper spray paint, and Anne with a chunky-tipped Marks-a-lot pen. The light in the Earl’s grew dim finally, and Dave was surprised to find that it was nearly six, nearly time to close up, and just as he thought it, he heard the sound of the old Ford truck hammering around the corner from the Highway, laboring through second gear.

  That was it. The day was over. So now what? Dave wondered. Go home? Sit around and read a book? Cadge another dinner from Casey and Nancy? He watched Anne put her pens back into her tackle box, and just then the Earl walked out of his office door, looking frazzled from a long nap. He surveyed the darkening warehouse, caught sight of Dave sweeping up, and jerked his head toward the catwalk stairs, then stepped back into his
office and shut the door.

  “Let’s go upstairs and watch the sunset,” Dave said to Anne abruptly.

  “Upstairs?”

  “Follow me.” He headed up onto the balcony, past the Earl’s office, and around onto the stairs that angled up toward the roof. Anne followed him out onto the catwalk, where they stood looking west through the high window, over the rooftop of Collier’s bungalow and across the highway where the sun hung impossibly large and orange above the ocean, cloud drift stained a smoky red stretching away on either side of it. The sun seemed to pick up speed as it fell into the sea, its edge rippling against the evening horizon.

  Dave realized that she had her hand on his shoulder, probably in order to steady herself, and so he stood there watching until the sun disappeared and the ocean changed from green to gray in the twilight.

  29

  EDMUND WORE THE KEY AROUND HIS NECK ON A CHAIN, as if it were an identification tag. The lawyer’s car was gone from the lot at five, and the downstairs door was locked. It hadn’t taken sixty seconds to get in through the rear door, slip the lock on the law office, and gain access to Anne’s apartment through the connecting door, which banged to a stop against the clothes rod in her closet, but left plenty of space to squeeze through. He had brought the stolen male doll with him. He didn’t quite know why, but he had the notion that he would use it somehow, perhaps as a reminder that Anne’s private world wasn’t entirely private; that someone knew—and admired—her secrets.

  He stood well away from the window and pulled on a pair of throwaway surgical gloves. He had to take advantage of the last of the afternoon sunlight. He didn’t dare light a lamp, and he would have to be careful with the Mini Maglite he’d brought, so that nobody saw it from the street. At any moment, of course, Anne herself might show up, so he had fastened the chain lock inside the door, which would prevent her from getting in. The ensuing confusion would give him enough time to get back out into the law office in order to hide. Probably she would go back downstairs again to call the landlord, and then he could slip out the back and be gone. Her finding the locked door might lead to unfortunate discoveries, but it was better than his being surprised, especially this early in the game.