* * *
Downstairs the small circle of chairs was full, the group in mid-conversation. There were murmurs of greeting as I sat and poured myself a cup of coffee from a pot. Besides Jess there were six other women, ranging from early twenties to late sixties. Some I knew better than others. I’d helped each of them at some point. I noticed Zoe, from the coffee shop where I had met Brenda Johnson. So she had come after all. She sat quietly in long sleeves, her chair slightly pushed back from the rest of the circle. The bruise on her face looked better.
“So does Flannery O’Connor always make her characters suffer this much?”
We were reading The Violent Bear It Away. The question was from Samantha. She was gorgeous, a tall black woman with an orange silk Hermès scarf wrapped high around her neck. She had a beautiful husky voice and sang jazz at the local East Bay clubs. She always wore the scarf. I was probably the only one in the room who had seen the lurid scar that the scarf concealed. Or met the person who put it there. A drunk heckler at a nightclub in Oakland. He’d gotten angry when she made some mild joke after an hour of him shouting for her to take off her top. Supposedly the heckler was a local tough guy. The house bouncer had conveniently gone deaf.
“Suffer, sure. But not only suffer,” I said. O’Connor was a favorite. “Her characters struggle. With themselves, with the world, with their faith and identity. With who they are. With what they believe.”
Samantha nodded. “I get the struggle part.” A few of the women smiled. Knowing nods. There had been some struggle in that group. I saw Zoe smile for the first time. Her eyes were excited. I saw Jess had given her a spare copy of the book.
That night, in response to Samantha’s joke, the heckler had thrown a highball glass that shattered on the brick wall behind her, spraying a burst of glass splinters. I’d held a dish towel against her neck until the ambulance arrived. The heckler had left quickly after he heard the screams. Self-preservation in the very lowest form. The security cameras had been down and Oakland kept the cops busy. Maybe they’d tried hard to track him down. Maybe they hadn’t. I’d always privately felt that if there wasn’t a body laid out neatly next to a smoking gun, some cops seemed to suddenly care a lot less about getting to the bottom of things. I’d seen plenty of cops seem more excited about giving a traffic ticket than solving a cold case. It didn’t surprise me that eventually they had given up the search.
I hadn’t.
It had taken me three weeks. Asking around up and down the city. Bars, gyms, backdoor card games, barber shops, liquor stores, the works. Finally, I got a name. With a name, everything became much easier. Pretty soon I had an address to go with the name.
Afterward I was pretty sure the heckler wouldn’t throw glasses anymore. He probably wouldn’t be much good at throwing anything. Maybe a few years down the line he’d be able to lob a bocce ball, although he hadn’t seemed like the bocce ball type.
“Have a cookie, Nikki. Fresh-baked this morning,” said Marlene, offering me a plate piled with oatmeal cookies. She was a wide-hipped, cheerful woman who was the head chef at one of Berkeley’s most beloved restaurants, The Redwood Tavern, just down the block. Marlene never failed to show up to the book club meetings with something delicious.
“I can’t,” I said apologetically.
“Don’t tell me you’re watching your weight,” she exclaimed. “Where’s that leave me?”
I’d met Marlene a few years earlier. She’d been having a hard time, working at a San Francisco restaurant owned by one of the celebrity chefs, the handsome, enfant terrible type who not only got their own cookbooks but then went and posed shirtless on calendars with a cigarette and scowl. A genius in the kitchen, but not really a nice guy at all. Not to his female employees, anyway.
I’d helped her move on.
“I have a dinner right after this,” I explained. “No cookies. I need my appetite.”
“A date,” clarified Jess. “A double date. And our poor Nikki is terrified.” There was laughter and I theatrically threw an arm over my eyes and slid down in my chair. I liked the book club sessions. Half talking books, half just talking. I’d been in the habit of informally inviting some of the women I helped to drop by the store and stay in touch. But the actual idea, the book club idea, had been Jess’s.
The door opened and a voice called out. “Anyone work here?” The speaker was a Hispanic guy of about thirty, brooding eyes and black hair frozen solid with styling gel. Stubble shadowed his face and I smelled his cologne from halfway across the store. He held a plastic-wrapped bunch of red roses in one hand.
Jess stood and hurried over. “Sorry, right here! Can I help you find a book?”
The man shot her a broad smile and gestured with the roses. “Actually, you can help me find my girlfriend.”
Her tone changed. “This is a bookstore. That’s what we have. Books.”
Zoe was already standing. “What are you doing here, Luis?”
“Can I talk to you, baby?”
“I’m busy now, I can’t talk.”
His voice lowered, pleading. “I came by to say sorry, baby. That’s all.”
Our group had fallen quiet; one of those awkward moments when talking and trying not to listen seemed equally impossible. “Just come here for a second,” he said again. “You know I love you.”
Her voice was determined. “No, Luis. Leave me alone. I’m busy. I mean it.”
He gestured again with the flowers. “Fine, baby. I just wanted to give these to you.” His voice changed, some of the affection fading to disinterest. “I don’t want to bother you. I’ll get out of here.”
She hesitated for a moment, her eyes showing a blatant indecision. Like a smoker, trying to quit, staring at a pack of cigarettes. As he turned away she hurried over. “Give them to me, then.” She took the flowers and his hand grazed her wrist. She pulled her hand away, slowly, and his fingertips stretched to brush her skin. I watched his fingers against her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I really am. You know that, baby. You know I didn’t mean it. You know how much I love you.”
“I’m busy,” Zoe said quietly. “Leave me alone.”
“You look so damn beautiful right now, baby. Can I talk to you? Just for a minute? Then you can go back and do your thing.”
She said something I didn’t hear and he tugged her toward him, whispered something. She shook her head and looked down, flowers in one hand. “Come on,” he said, his voice coaxing. “I made us a reservation already. You know it’s your favorite place.”
“I’m with people,” she said softly. “My friends. You shouldn’t be here.”
Luis whispered something else and bent his head to kiss her. She turned her head and took the first kiss on the side of her face. The next one, following fast like a boxer’s combination, caught her lips.
“Looks like Nikki’s not the only one going on a date,” Marlene whispered.
Zoe looked over at us. “I gotta go,” she murmured. “Thanks for everything.”
I didn’t say anything. Just nodded good-bye. Luis shot the group of us that high-wattage smile again. It was a good smile, one that showed his white teeth and dimpled his cheeks. I would have bet that plenty of women had fallen for that smile. “Sorry, ladies, didn’t mean to drag her away,” he apologized, still smiling. “Guess I just can’t stay away from her.”
No one answered him. I watched the two of them leave, his arm around her waist. Zoe held the flowers. Luis held Zoe. Someone walking past them on the street might have thought cute couple and not given them a second look.
I turned back to the group. “Anyway, the title—from the biblical passage, Matthew eleven, verse twelve. ‘The kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.’ Let’s talk about that. Who are the violent here? What are they trying to bear away?”
“Seems like he’s bearing away that poor girl,” muttered Jess.
Along with the rest of the women, I looked involuntarily toward th
e door. Wondering if I should have done anything more. Knowing that however much I might want to, I couldn’t charge through the world trying to fix every broken thing I came across. Yet here, sitting all around me, were women who had all needed something. Different things, but the same thing. Where was the line? Broken things didn’t always fix themselves.
Especially when there was someone trying hard to keep them broken.
“Nikki?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Was thinking about something. One more time?” I turned my attention back to the book group, trying to focus on the discussion while in the back of my mind trying to place a foreign scent. After a moment, I realized what was distracting me.
I could still smell a trace of Luis’s cologne, heavy and dangerous in the air.
17
“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “Got caught in traffic.”
“No trouble at all, Nikki. You missed the first round, but plenty more.”
Ethan came over. He was wearing a blazer and chinos. The sleeves on the blazer spilled almost to his knuckles. He kissed me on the mouth, surprising me. To my greater surprise, I didn’t mind. “Meet Lawrence and Katherine Walker,” he said. “Good friends. Lawrence has taught me everything I know about tennis.”
“Which isn’t much, Ethan, I’m afraid. But we persevere.”
Lawrence Walker was a tall, solidly built man in his late thirties, with carefully kept jet-black hair, a close-cropped beard, and wire-frame glasses that together would have left him looking perfectly at home in the October Revolution. He wore a green cashmere sweater, gray flannel pants, and brown oxfords. His accent seemed East Coast. His wife, Katherine, was a tall blonde about the same age. Maybe five years older than me. She wore a flowing tangerine skirt, with a necklace of heavy pieces of turquoise looped around her neck. Each wore a rose gold wedding ring.
I greeted them and handed Lawrence a bottle.
“A Barolo,” he said, impressed. “I can see you’re going to teach Ethan a thing or two.”
“She already has,” said Ethan with a smile. He was happy. Happy, and a little buzzed.
They had a spacious apartment in the trendy Lake Merritt neighborhood of Oakland. My brother’s apartment was probably less than a fifteen-minute drive away, but it could have been in another world. I looked around. The place screamed intellect and whispered money. Tasteful, but able to indulge that taste, too. High oak bookcases in the living room. My eyes picked up a hodgepodge of names as I walked past—Foucault, Marcus Aurelius, Guy de Maupassant, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Jean Genet, Anthony Trollope, Harold Bloom, Thomas Mann, Goethe, of course the mandatory Sophocles and Euripides and Shakespeare and Chaucer and Joyce. They had everything covered. Literature, history, drama, philosophy, cultural studies.
One of the reasons I hated e-readers was because bookshelves showed so much about the people who owned them. Here, clearly, was an academic couple, probably able to discuss Greek tragedy, Russian literature, and French political science with equal fluency. Also, here was an apartment whose occupants were broadcasting a message a mile high: they wanted anyone who knew anything about books to know that they did, as well. I took another look at the titles. The proportions were too perfect. A little of everything, not too much of any one thing. A careful display. In the living room was a sculpture, a crouched warrior with spear raised in one hand. Paintings, a series of nude prints, Saville, a Tracey Emin, a Modigliani. The living room was comfortably appointed, a heather-gray upholstered couch, deep armchairs, a striking dining table legged with marble pillars.
“What can I offer you to drink, Nikki?” Lawrence asked. “We’ll have a few cocktails here and then we can drive over to the Fox Theater.”
I sat. Conscious of my motorcycle boots on the hardwood floor. I hadn’t known what to wear and had settled on jeans and a conservative turtleneck sweater for the chilly October evening. I ran a hand through my hair, hoping the helmet hadn’t mussed it too badly. “As long as it doesn’t come out of a blender, I’m hard to disappoint.”
“No blenders allowed in this house, I assure you,” said Lawrence. “We’ve had a round of Negronis to start and were debating the prospect of a second.”
“A Negroni works fine, thank you.”
“Excellent. And please, help yourself.” There was a large wooden board covered with cheeses and meats and expensive-looking crackers. Even a small silver bowl of black caviar with a small porcelain spoon. The Walkers knew how to entertain, and they had the means to do so. Lawrence moved off to a wet bar in the corner of the living room. He poured Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth into a glass beaker and stirred vigorously with a long bartender’s spoon. A picture on the opposite wall caught my eye. Lawrence, wearing blue headgear and a pair of blue boxing gloves that looked about sixteen or eighteen ounces. Too large a size for him to have been pro, at least based on that photograph. “Where did you box?” I asked.
“You are observant. Just some amateur stuff back East. When I was too young to know any better.”
“Lawrence is being modest,” Katherine said. “At Princeton he was in the New Jersey Golden Gloves three years running.”
“You must take me for a terrible barbarian, Nikki. We didn’t use cestuses, I assure you.”
“Cestuses?” Ethan asked. He sat next to me. Close, his leg touching mine.
“Spiked leather straps,” I explained. “The Greeks and Romans wrapped them around their hands. Turned what passed for boxing back then into blood sport.”
“How do you know all that?” Ethan wanted to know. “At first I thought Golden Gloves was an a cappella group.”
“Someone taught me how to box. Ages ago. I guess a little stuck.”
“He had something against soccer?” Ethan teased.
I smiled back. “He just didn’t want me beating up the boys anymore.”
Lawrence came over with two Negronis, on the rocks, the color of the drinks a deep ruby. He handed a glass to me, a twist of orange bent carefully around the rim. He gave the second drink absently to Ethan, eyes still on me. “Boxing and bookstores? Nikki, you continue to impress.”
“I think I lucked out,” Ethan agreed.
I squeezed his knee affectionately but didn’t answer. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done something like that. Like squeezing someone’s knee. Some casual affectionate touch. It felt good. Natural. “What do you both do?” I asked.
“I teach in the Cal history department. Katherine is in French. Still scratching our heads wondering how we ended up three thousand miles west of where we began.”
“I blame the Cambridge winters,” Katherine said.
Lawrence smiled. “Indeed. The chill winds of New England practically sailed us across the country.”
“Harvard? Grad school? You met there?” They had just told me that, loud and clear. Humanities plus Cambridge equaled Harvard. They just hadn’t told me. An East Coast tendency, I’d noticed.
They exchanged a glance. Nodded. “Exactly. And how about you, Nikki?”
“Nikki runs a bookstore,” Ethan said proudly. “Owns a bookstore. The Brimstone Magpie, over on Telegraph.”
“Did you ever consider the academic life?” Katherine wanted to know.
I finished my Negroni. “I think at some point I’ve considered everything.”
“Is your family from California originally?”
I shook the ice around in my glass and nodded vaguely, wondering how to change the subject. Lawrence saw my empty glass. “Another one, coming up.”
I nodded in relief. As if sensing my reluctance, Katherine sipped her drink and shifted the conversation. “So where did you two meet, anyway?”
“Over breakfast,” I answered.
“How charming! Such a pleasure to hear a story other than ‘online.’ Lawrence and I were together before the whole eHarmony craze, or whatever those things are called. Thank goodness. The thought of swiping frantically through all those random faces strikes me as such a dismal way to spend one’s time.”
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One of them had to come from money, I was thinking. Maybe both. The apartment was too expensively furnished. And they were too young to be tenured. I wondered if they owned the apartment or rented. I would have bet owned. Lawrence was speaking. “We’ve been trying our best to civilize Ethan here from the wilds of Montana.”
“Hence the tennis,” I said.
I didn’t love the comment. A little patronizing. I glanced at Ethan. He seemed fine with it. Maybe—I had to smile at the thought—I was feeling protective.
“Indeed,” Lawrence agreed. “Hence the tennis.”
There was another round of drinks. A bottle of wine was opened, then another. At some point Lawrence, with a mischievous grin, opened a carved wooden box and took out a small joint. “Does anyone indulge? After all, it’s in the spirit of musical appreciation.”
A slightly blurry hour later Lawrence started herding us to the door for the concert. “We’ll get a cab. We’re going to miss the opening act as it is,” he said. “But I’m afraid,” he added, “that driving would be less than responsible.”
“Let’s walk, honey,” Katherine said, tugging his arm. “It’s barely two miles and it’s nice out. I could use the fresh air.”
They looked back at us. I shrugged. “Fine by me.”
We made our way along the curve of Lake Merritt, heading toward downtown Oakland. The night air was cool and the street quiet. Only the occasional car. A sliver of moon. Ethan and Lawrence walked ahead, talking excitedly about the upcoming Cal-Cardinal game. As we left their neighborhood, the streets became grittier, the streetlights scarcer. Katherine was talking. “Lawrence and I think it’s wonderful that Ethan met you. We really do.”
“Thanks,” I said. This was the heart-to-heart part of the double date, I supposed. Girl talk. The part where the two men chatted sports and the two women confided over whatever. But I was in a good mood. The drinks and pot buzzing in my head.
“We can see that you have a sense of culture. It’s so good for him. We’ve been doing our best to move him along in that respect. To build things up.”
Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel Page 9