by Noreen Ayres
I laughed and threw the wet wad of paper towels into the sink and glanced at the clock. “Sure.”
“You’re a great girl, you really are. Only remember, I’m drunk and I don’t really mean that.”
“Get off the phone so I can get some things done.”
“See you around noon.”
“Make it one.”
“So long, Smokey.” He used my other name. And took advantage of my pause.
“See,” he said, “I know more about you than you thought. And your old, your very old, brother never rubbed it in, now did he?”
6
He said he needed to walk. “Let’s go down to the bay,” I said, since the fog had lifted by the time Nate got to my place. The sweet fragrance of white sage, encouraged by the sun, drifted through my open slider as he paced and I sat.
“I think I want to eat,” he said.
“Fine. There are great places on the island.”
“Maybe we should just stay here.”
“Out,” I said, pointing to the front door while I unfolded from the couch.
We drove down Jamboree, a boulevard wide enough to be a freeway. It was named for a vast Boy Scout gathering that took place decades ago, when there was nothing around for miles and bulldozers could scrape out a campsite without people yelling about endangered gnatcatchers. At its end a mile down, we crept across the tiny bridge that leads to Balboa Island, which lies between the inland mass and the nearly four-mile-long Balboa peninsula, leaving a channel of water on both sides. A small strip of what’s called town runs down the middle of the island, and the rest is a packed architectural mix of houses that range from funky to grand. We could stroll the sidewalk that runs right next to the sand, and watch the ducks waddle up from the beach to nip at flower salads in people’s plate-sized yards.
I parked next to a bakery that offered sandwiches for lunch, and sprang for drinks and bean sprout–walnut-avocado–cream cheese fodder on wheat bread for us both. Halfway down the walk, he told me to hold his sandwich so he could peel off his green cable-stitch sweater, revealing a burgundy knit shirt underneath. His skin seemed flushed, and his eyes watered from the sun-bright droplets in the air.
“Well?” I said, waiting.
“Just a minute.”
“Okay.” We walked some more.
Ahead, a young woman in shorts and a carpenter’s apron rose up from looping a length of orange power cord in her hand as she worked on a house whose owners were adding a second story. Her hair was blonde and wavy to the waist, and I was happy for her, that she got to work outside. Her gaze lingered on Nathan.
I talked about ducks. I told him I’d joined Audubon. I knew a little something about birds now. He looked at me without comment other than “good.” “I mean, I don’t know how much I can ever know. There are over eight hundred species in North America, after all. I don’t want to be a nut about it, you know?”
He nodded and finished his food. We talked about the unusual houses we were passing, some like Cape Cod cottages, others a Spanish motif. When we were nearing the curve of the island, he said quietly, “It’s Miranda.” We stopped. He looked at me briefly, and said, “You remember her.”
“Yes, I remember her.” A picture of Nathan’s Miranda flashed into my mind, this woman the third of his four wives. She was a beauty, I remembered that. Her best feature was the hair that fell in one long hefty auburn braid all the way to her hips. She would tie off the rope with an orange or aqua ribbon, or whatever color heightened her golden skin and accented her penny-brown eyes. Fifteen years his junior, she’d been both his pride and his slight embarrassment, for Nathan was not the type to call attention to himself. I never knew her well: met her once, talked to her a few times on the phone. His multiple marriages were always a puzzle to me, not fitting a man who wouldn’t jaywalk on an empty street after a nuclear holocaust. Early on, I figured this wife for a quick bite of sandwich between his real estate lady and the heiress who talked like Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator and no doubt counted the ringy-dingys.
Off my right shoulder, in someone’s garden, a tin sea captain stuck on a pole was running in place with the wind, over the heads of lavender hollyhocks.
Nathan said, “Something might have happened to her.” In my heart I didn’t want him to go on.
“I was supposed to see her. She didn’t show up.”
“That doesn’t sound too serious to me.”
“Don’t be flip, okay?”
Flip? I thought. We walked on.
“We were to meet Tuesday. We meet every Tuesday.” He stepped over a low concrete wall and sat on it, his shoes in the sand.
“You’ve been out here awhile, then,” I said.
Glancing at me, then looking away at three mallards walking flatfooted under a boat tie-up, he said, “I was busy. I tried calling once—”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Since February.”
“Three months.”
“Convicted,” he said, and held out his wrists for cuffs.
I smiled. “Forgiven. And you’ve been seeing her all this time.”
He nodded. “Now you know about your big brother.”
This was a new thing, not a Nathan thing, I was hearing. Then I thought, What do I know about how he conducts his life? Maybe that’s how he developed and lost his other wives.
“How does wife number four feel about this?”
“She has a name,” he said.
“Okay, how does Bridget feel about this?”
“Of course she doesn’t know. I don’t know how it happened. I didn’t plan it.”
“Is that why you’re out here, to be near her?”
“It didn’t feel like cheating, since Miranda had been my wife. We were like old friends. It’s not that uncommon after a divorce. Really.”
“Mm-hm.”
Nathan stood up and stepped over the wall to the sidewalk and began walking, his hands in his pockets.
He said, “Don’t judge me.”
“Of course I won’t judge you.”
But I did. In my heart I did. But more, I feared for him. Don’t let it be the corpse in the canyon, I thought.
Nathan gestured and said, “The old spark was there, what can I say? You’ll learn someday things are not all so simple.”
“I never thought they were.”
“You should see her. She’s positively glowing.”
“Glowing. So, let me see: She’s either pregnant, or she just swung a movie deal.”
I moved ahead of him and jumped up on the wall and tried to see how far I could walk there, little kid style, since I had on my rubber-soled shoes. I didn’t want to be talking to Nathan about his personal life. I didn’t want to be paying attention to two Mirandas in one week. Yet in my gut I knew. There’s a lot more coincidence in police work than people want to hear. Still, I hoped for two Mirandas: the one in the canyon and his. As the campy comedian Judy Tenuta would say, it could happen.
“She didn’t sign a movie deal.”
Stepping off the wall, I asked, “The baby then. It’s yours?” What had Dr. Margolis, the pathologist, said about the Jane? He said she had not borne children. Were we safe then? We were safe.
Nathan’s voice sounded like number 2-grain sandpaper on tin. “It’s not mine,” he said. “They’re working things out . . . she and mat, that, Bob.”
“I can tell you like him fine.”
“He’s a doctor. He’s a jerk.”
“When did Miranda tell you this, she’s preggers?”
“In the motel, the last time. They had a knockdown drag-out.” He waved his hand. “I don’t know about what. Something. He filled the bedspread with all her stuffed animals, took it out on the lawn, and burned it. She started beating on him and he threw her in the pool.”
“What a cute couple.”
“After they made up, they decided to have a baby.”
“That’s sick, Nathan.”
“No, it’s not sick
. It’s human. You never got to know her. She’s a great girl. You never saw that.”
“I guess I didn’t.”
Trying to picture what it would be like to be so happy about such an event you’d celebrate with an ex-husband while whispering on pillows, I couldn’t, but maybe that was a shortcoming of my own.
“Before this, was she having fun?”
“She was unhappy. I told you that.”
“Was she fooling around?”
Maybe he didn’t like the baldness of the question; or maybe he didn’t want to contemplate it himself. There was a long pause. “She might have a friend.”
I looked away, hiding my expression.
“Her husband’s into Harleys. Her too. This guy paints their tanks or something.”
“Nathan . . .”
“If she and Dr. Jerkoff had a fight, she wouldn’t come to me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Pride. She wouldn’t come to me. She might go to this guy.”
“Oh, Nathan.”
The old impatience showed in his face. “You have to realize people are people,” he said.
“I know what people do,” I said.
“If I could just be sure she was all right . . .”
“I’m not a cop anymore, Nathan. I haven’t been for a lot of years.”
“But you know things.”
“And you can get me on the cheap.”
“That’s not it,” he said tautly. “But I’ll pay you, if that’s what you want.”
“I’m just being snotty. That’s my job as a kid sister.”
We were approaching the ferry dock that would cross to the peninsula where there were shops and restaurants and an amusement center complete with a ferris wheel. Twin red VW Jettas were on the ferry’s deck, the drivers out and leaning over the rails.
I said, “Maybe Miranda decided to call it off.”
“Not possible,” he said, shaking his head.
“What happened between you and her—to your marriage?” Out in the channel a sailboat drifted by. Behind the sailboat came a slow-moving yacht trailed by a canoe with eight paddlers in white jerseys, pulling flashing yellow oars.
“She came home one day and told me she was in love with somebody else. I thought it would be someone younger, closer to her age. Shit, I didn’t know who it would be. But not a doctor. He’s almost as old as me. I said, ‘Is this guy your gynecologist?’”
“That made her cooperative, I’ll bet.”
“She threw a pineapple at me.”
“Fond memories.”
“Maybe that was part of the attraction. The unpredictability. Me, well . . .” He shrugged. “They met on the golf course, Ladies’ Day. A neurologist. A doctor who rides Harleys. Feature that.”
“I have friends who say bikes are no worse than cars if you know what you’re doing. It depends on the person, the training, and the charity of luck.”
“Bridget volunteers at a convalescent hospital—yes, Bridget.”
“I liked Mary Lee.”
“You were too young. You liked her because she made you brownies.”
“Yeah man, why didn’t you keep her?”
“Convalescent hospitals, they’re not what people think. They have a lot of young people in there, too. Accident victims. Bikers. Pardon me, let me revise that. Squashes. That’s what they call them, squashes. Nobody home. They’re all kinked up”—Nathan made claws of his hands, opened his eyes wide, and lolled his tongue—“and people have to come in and put casts on their limbs so their bones don’t break from spasms. This prick doctor must know that.” He arced his soda can into a trash barrel ahead of us. A woman’s laughter pierced the air above the periodic explosions of nail guns, gull calls, and the talk of people passing by. We stepped off the walk and onto the sand.
In Nathan’s brow and eyes was my father, and in the cheekbones and full lips, our mother. Creases at the eyes said he smiled more than I knew. He took a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lit it, saying, “You’re thinking I should leave well enough alone. But that’s not going to happen. I can’t do anything about Bridget right now. I’ll handle that when the time comes.”
By the side of a beached boat two male mallards were butting chests. Mating season should be over and territories already established, but these two, I guessed, bore old grudges. We crossed the sand again to the sidewalk and mounted steps made of cut-down telephone poles to reach the sidewalk. As we did, a teenager with headphones handed us a flier advertising Rollerblades and surfboards and a free drawing for tickets to see Dire Straits at Irvine Meadows.
Nathan said, “She wouldn’t say so, but I think she’s staying in her marriage because she’s afraid. Afraid of the world. See, I never gave her anything when we divorced. We weren’t married that long. I should have. God, she’s only a kid, really.”
“She’s just a few years younger than I.”
“But you’re different.”
“Yeah. I have a job.”
“She never trained for anything.”
“You just have to be out there. You get a measly job, you quit it, go on to the next one until you find something that will work.”
“See? You’re so judgmental.”
“She could go to school. I did.”
Nathan blinked his eyes and shook his head as if telling himself, yeah, but it’s different for her.
“Now there’s the baby to think about,” he said. “I should have given her something at the divorce, but I was mad. Out screwing around while I’m busting my ass. I sound mad now, but I’m not. I’m not a saint either. I just hold with the double standard.”
It was the second time he showed a sense of humor about himself, and in that one moment I gained an insight into him I hadn’t had, and forgave him half a dozen things in our past.
“I hate to say this, but maybe she had a sudden attack of conscience. After all, this is the second time she’s fooled around in a marriage.”
“I’m telling you she wouldn’t. Not the way it’s been with us. I had someone call her house, one of the girls in my office. That shows you how loose my screws are. A maid answered the phone. She said, ‘Mrs. Robertson’s on vacation in Europe.’”
“What?”
“What?” he echoed.
“Her last name.”
“Robertson.”
The name rang through. Miranda Robertson: the name on the canyon car registration.
Nathan was still talking. “Miranda isn’t out of the country. She just returned from Italy last month. Why would she go back right away? I know she would’ve told me if she was going back.”
“That was her new name? Robertson?”
He nodded, and crossed the sidewalk to a snack stand to get another Coke.
The birth date on the registration, what was it? Something, something fifty-three? Ray Vega had made a joke of it. Or was it sixty-three? Didn’t the doctor say the body was in her forties? Thirty-five or forty. That’s what he said. Miranda was, as I remembered, not yet thirty. The corpse had breast implants. Miranda wouldn’t have had breast implants. She already had a good figure. Miranda was pregnant. The woman from the canyon burn wasn’t pregnant. I saw the uterus put in the scale. Would I know a mildly pregnant uterus if I saw it? No. But the doctor didn’t say. . . .
I realized I hadn’t asked my brother where Miranda lived. Maybe because I knew what he’d say. Maybe because in my heart I knew the pretty girl with the auburn braid and the golden skin was gone.
When he came back, I said, “Nathan, I’ve got to ask you a question you may not like or may not know the answer to, but try to keep it in perspective, okay?”
We stared out over the gently rippled water to the pitch of Balboa Pavilion, the grand 1905 building that when lit with stringers of lights at night takes on an aura of nostalgic innocence.
“Let’s have it,” he said.
“Do you know if Miranda ever had breast surgery?”
“Why would you ask such a thing?”
“Nathan, d
id Miranda . . . does Miranda live in Beverly Hills?”
His eyes searched my face, fear and anger at war with each other.
“Does she?”
“Yes.” His breath was corning hard. The embroidered alligator on his shirt rose and fell.
“What is it?” he asked. “What do you know?”
“There was a car found Thursday. A woman was in it. The name on the registration . . . but I didn’t connect—”
“You knew! You knew all along something happened and you didn’t tell me.” He let go of the can, which rolled against the wall, and a moan came out from somewhere in the deep bend of his body. I went to him and tried to hold him, but he wouldn’t let me.
“Nathan, no positive ID has been made. How would I put it together? I didn’t know Miranda’s last name. The address on the registration said L.A. We’re down here. It’s almost like two different worlds. Who would put it together?”
He walked between an opening in the seawall onto the sand, his face fiery, his body a board.
I looked around for help, but what kind of help I didn’t know.
7
I put Nathan back on the road an hour after the walk around the island. He had clammed up. No matter how I talked to him, or about what, he was a million miles away. In my apartment, he washed his face and called a friend he was going to play tennis with, to cancel. When I asked him if he was all right, he said he was just going home to sleep. I told him I was sure there was some mistake about Miranda, that I’d phone her husband myself if that’s what he wanted. He said, “No, wait, I’ll think of something,” and left me feeling irrelevant, superfluous, as he often did.
My mind needed a rest. I went to see a movie with John Goodman in it, because John Goodman was in it, and spoke to no one except the woman in the ticket booth. Afterward I wandered in a department store in Triangle Square without knowing what I was looking for. I ignored the sales associates, as they like to call themselves, and hoped they thought I was a mean and shifty shoplifter.
Later, I walked a couple blocks down the street, headed for a coffeehouse with pretensions of hippiebeatdom. Alongside me, slick-looking cars swept along the boulevard, their cloth tops down, the music up, the drivers busy with gum and lush with new spring tans and expensive sunglasses.