by Deb Caletti
“Really beautiful,” he said.
But he didn’t mean me. He knelt down and looked Max right in the eyes and scruffed his big, thick neck.
It was the first thing I learned about Nicco Ricci.
He was not the kind of guy who’d turn his head at every attractive female. Who’d leer and remark and gawk. But, man, he couldn’t keep his eyes off dogs.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Exhibit 29: Sworn statement of Mrs. Doris Brawley
Exhibit 30: Sworn statement of Joshua K. Brawley
“What’s his name?” the guy asked. His white sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His dark, curly hair seemed to have a mind of its own.
“Max.”
“Hey, Big Max. Look at you, huh? You’re a real head-turner, aren’t you? Purebred?”
“No idea.”
“A mystery dog. I like that.”
“This is going to sound weird, but I think I’ve seen you before,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“At Baker? I’m pretty sure it was you.”
“Oh, probably. I live right by there. And I work here.” He hooked his thumb up, toward the Cliff House. “On break, in case you couldn’t tell by the socks and father shoes. I’m here pretty much every day. Or sometimes Baker.”
So much for fate. And then… well, I lost all words. My brain slammed shut. Centuries of silence passed. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I wasn’t the confident girl at the baseball game, flirting. I wasn’t even the girl who’d stretched out on the towel, trying to get him to look. I blushed. I blushed so hard, I felt the flames in my cheeks.
“Well, hey, gotta get back,” he said. “Good to meet you, Big Max. Maybe I’ll see you around.”
He didn’t give me his name. He didn’t ask for mine. He just wanted to pet my dog. I’d taken a long drink of water at Baker that first time I saw him, and he’d barely noticed me. Max took a long drink of water, and boom.
* * *
That day when I got home, there was a truck in the driveway. Two guys were taking big crates out of the back, bringing them into the house.
It was the first time anything like that had happened. At least, the first time I’d seen it. I know the date is important, but I’m not sure. I don’t know exactly. I could look back at a calendar and try to guess.
But I paid my driver, and Max and I went inside. I had to haul him by the collar because he wanted to jump all over those guys. The doors to the patio were open.
I led Max through the White Room. I couldn’t believe it, but Lila was out there, smoking a cigarette.
“What are you doing?” I asked. I was so mad. No one with half a brain smoked anymore. I felt like she was standing there waving a pistol in the air. “Why are you smoking?”
She exhaled with her lips pursed toward the sky. She wore an emerald-colored sleeveless jumpsuit and sandals lined with blue stones. “Nervous habit.”
“Well, put it out. I don’t want that cancerous stuff in my lungs.”
“Don’t be such a prude,” she said, but she took a last puff, and tamped it out on the stucco edge of the staircase.
“What’s going on with that truck?” I asked.
“Jake’s storing some stuff here.”
“I saw. Paintings, right? Artwork.”
“Yeah.”
“More? I mean, it seems like he has a lot of them already. A real lot.”
“Well, he’s a dealer,” she said, as if this were obvious. “An art dealer.”
“I thought you said he was in real estate.”
“He’s in both. He’s in a lot of things.”
“Ma’am?” one of the men called.
“Yes!” She became the flowing, bright, and brilliant Lila as she headed inside. I stood on the patio and pretended I wasn’t listening.
“Mrs. Brawley said you’d have a check?” the driver said.
“Oh, I know nothing about that,” she said. “You’d have to ask Jake.”
“We were supposed to get payment today.”
“I’m just the girlfriend.”
“We can’t leave the stuff, then.”
“Take it back. It doesn’t matter to me.”
The guy’s voice was tense. Pissed. Max stood at the end of his leash, watching. His ears were pointed up, alert. He heard the tension too. I stopped pretending that I wasn’t listening and watched them. The men—they were, like, immovable. Arms folded. Big refrigerators of men. One of them stepped outside to make a phone call. I sat down on the end of the chaise longue and held the leash. “It’s okay,” I said softly to Max. I was trying to be reassuring, even though the whole thing was making me nervous.
When the guy came back, he said, “Fine. We’re outta here.”
Lila shut the door behind them. I heard her exhale. When she came back outside, she seemed almost giddy.
“Well, that’s done! Oh, baby, did I mention? Jake’s coming over tonight to take us out to dinner. Fun, right? God, I thought he’d never forgive me!”
They’d been fighting. That’s why she’d been moping around for days. “Forgive you for what?”
“Not inviting him to your birthday! Jesus, he can be so possessive.”
“Oh, good quality in a boyfriend,” I said. But what I thought was, Honestly? She hadn’t invited him? He came to get me at the airport, she made a big deal about us bonding, he sent me flowers, and he didn’t get to come? I felt bad for the guy.
She ignored my sarcasm. “You should have heard the awful things he said to me.”
I kept my mouth shut. I was kind of on his side at that point, actually. I knew how she could get too. We stared at each other. She must have read my face.
“Well, we were both heated,” she admitted. “I’m just glad it’s over. Honey, that dog. He’s a mess. Can’t you rinse him out or something before he treks through the house?”
“He’s not a dishrag. He’s a living being.”
“Sand everywhere. And God knows what else.”
I gave Max love and acceptance with my eyes, since I knew he was listening. “What was up with those men? I mean, it didn’t exactly seem like your regular UPS delivery.”
“Some of Jake’s associates…” She waved her hand as if to say, You don’t want to know.
I probably didn’t. Not really. Still. “ ‘Associates’?”
“Oh, people he works with. I’ve got to say, he’s kept some interesting company over the years. Back when he was doing real estate deals in Las Vegas, especially. He wouldn’t even tell me until we’d known each other awhile. ‘You’d have never given me a chance,’ he said. People like that scare me, baby.”
“People like those guys?”
“No, no. Not those guys. They’re harmless. They’re deliverymen. And all that Vegas stuff is behind him anyway. I just mean, sometimes he uses back channels to get things done.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what “back channels” meant. I understood it to mean slightly illegal but not really. I know, I know—I shrugged it off. It was hard to see this clearly. Lila was always dramatic.
“What can I say? I’m in love.” Lila shrugged, as if being in love were something she’d accidentally caught, like a food-borne illness.
She was in something, all right, but I didn’t know it yet.
In trouble.
In danger.
In over her head.
Yeah. That was more like it.
* * *
He came over that night. Jake. He drove Lila’s Land Rover so we could all fit, and we went out to North Beach. He cut through the Presidio, which he called “the scenic route.”
He had music on in the car and the mood was light and it was actually kind of fun. I shoved away anything Lila had said about their fight and back channels and associates, and even my discomfort on the ride from the airport, because I was trying to get to know him. That night, he became a real person to me. We went to this place called Original Joe’s that looked like those old Italian restaurants in the movi
es, all dim, with red padded leather banquette seats and black-and-white checkered floors and old Italian waiters in tuxedos writing orders on their little pads, bringing big trays of food that they held up high in the air. They seemed to know Jake. They called him Big Jake and Handsome Harry. There was a little… I don’t know. Fawning, fussing over him, like he was important.
“Big Jake, huh? Sounds like a clichéd Mafia name,” I joked. I doubted Mafia guys even really existed anymore. Lila had already ordered a martini and was sitting right up next to him on that banquette seat.
“Aww, you know.” He waved his hand, like maybe he was embarrassed.
“I like that name! And I really like this place.” I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and hurt him again. I was trying to be extra nice to him to make up for our first meeting. I wanted him to see the person I actually was.
“Yeah, it’s great, huh?” Jake smiled wide, and then he went on to give this complicated history of how the restaurant was owned by Louis and then Tony and then so-and-so and so-and-so, how no one ever even had the name Joe.
We were all in a good mood. I got this meatball the size of a baseball, so that might have helped. Jake was telling all these funny stories, usually about how he was meeting someone for something and how it all went really wrong, like getting stuck in an elevator, or driving somewhere and getting carjacked. He told us about being a bodyguard in “the old days” too, which was hilarious, but also kind of awesome.
The thing was, I started to like him. I could see why Lila did. When he laughed, you wanted to laugh. I mean, in the candlelight, he was even sort of handsome, with the kind of hooded eyes that made you think of all the intriguing secrets behind them. He seemed like he’d do anything for her too. It was all the helping-with-the-coat and being-super-nice-to-the-daughter stuff that meant he probably wanted to marry her. He paid the check without even looking at the number, and then, when we got up to leave, Lila asked the waiter to take a photo of the three of us. The night was important to her.
On the way home, Jake was driving fast, and Lila was saying, “Slow down, Jake,” but I was joking around, saying, “Faster. Faster!”
“You like speed, huh?” he said, and he met my eyes in the rearview mirror. It was dark, and I saw them flash in the passing streetlights.
Actually, I was kind of nervous when he took those curves along the dark 101, but I wanted to please him. I wanted him to like me back. “Yeah, I do,” I said.
“We’ll go out in my car someday. I’ll show you speed. Better yet, I’ll let you drive. Practice a little before we get your permit.”
“Forget it,” Lila said.
“Hey, we can’t be like that. She’s not a kid. She needs her freedom.”
He was looking at me in that rearview mirror, and I kind of wished he’d keep his eyes on the road, but man, it was nice. Him on my side against her. Him noticing and understanding something important about me. And the word “we”: It gave me such a good feeling. A family feeling. Like a weight might be lifted. In spite of all the things Lila would say, like Never rely on a man and Always have your own money and such, the word “we” solved our money problems, those unopened envelopes that said Final Notice, the worrisome feeling that we were spending, spending, spending, but not bringing anything in. And we meant that he could be her person, instead of me. He was driving a car at night like fathers do, and Lila was in the passenger seat, and I got to be in back, and suddenly I wanted all of us together, maybe as bad as she did.
“Ah, that sounds like a terrible idea,” Lila said.
“Supreme,” Jake said.
* * *
When we got back home, Lila made both herself and Jake another drink. “Hey!” Jake said to me. “You said you like art, right? Wanna see some art?”
“Sure. Yeah.” The weirdness that afternoon with the deliverymen didn’t matter. It was over. I did want to see some art. I wanted to see what was in those crates.
We all went upstairs. The new arrivals had been moved to the guest room with the others. Lila stirred her drink with the tip of her finger. She stood in the doorway, half in, half out. She was still wearing the yellow dress she’d worn to dinner, and those heels with the butterfly buckles. I’d kicked off my shoes the second we got home. Max was probably making a meal out of them downstairs.
Man, those paintings were really packed carefully. Jake had to use the claw of a hammer to wrench open the outer wood frame. Once that was off, there were layers of plastic wrap, insulating materials, foam, and then, finally, a board and a stretcher. Layers and more layers.
“I don’t normally take these out of here, so this is a special treat,” he said, shaking his finger my way, indicating he was doing it for me. I could see why he didn’t take them out—packing those paintings up again would take forever. “Get that end,” he said. To me, not to Lila. She had those nails she wouldn’t want to wreck.
We unwrapped and unrolled and edged, edged, edged it out. Finally it was free.
It was a large drawing in a white glass frame. A crazy, frantic image.
“You like?”
It took me a minute to work out what it was. And then I knew, because the clearest things in the piece were the big, round breasts.
“Well, pretty obvious it’s a woman.”
I knelt to look at the signature. It was hard to read for sure, but I thought it said de Kooning. Of course I knew that name. Cora and I had taken every art elective we could. Art History, Masters of Art, Art and Society. “Wait. Really? Is this really by him?”
“Heh. What do you think?”
I tilted my head. The woman’s expression was flat except for large, dark eyes. “I think it’s real. Is it real?”
Jake squatted on his haunches next to me. He stared into my eyes. He maybe stared a little too long. He lowered his voice, like it was just us in there. “You gotta trust your gut,” he said.
My stomach flipped with those words and with that long look. I had this flashing thought—I hope I hadn’t been, I don’t know, too nice. Actually, it wasn’t even a thought, just a flash. Stupid. “My gut says real.”
“Sketches for his Woman series,” Jake said. “Graphite on paper.”
“Wow,” I breathed.
“All right,” Lila said. “Are we done here?”
“Let’s open the others,” I said. It was incredible, all the important art that might be there.
But when Lila was done, everyone was done. “Let’s get outta here,” Jake said, and stood.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
“Someone selling her collection,” he said, and that was it. He shut the door.
The woman in the drawing, though—she looked haunted.
* * *
Lila and Jake took their drinks downstairs, but I went to my room. I opened the laptop I had at Lila’s, and I looked up those drawings. They were the sketches de Kooning had done for the paintings in his celebrated Woman series, all right. I wanted to take a picture of it to send to Cora, because she’d love this.
But I didn’t. There was no clear reason why I shouldn’t show Cora. Trust your gut, Jake had told me, and so I kept my mouth shut.
That night, I read. I learned how, at first, de Kooning painted really feminine and ladylike images of women. Later, he made them more angry and almost violent looking, garish, with fang teeth and globelike eyes. I mean, pretty clearly he was conflicted about them. I studied the images on the screen. Man, the breasts were front and center, but the actual person-woman seemed absent. Gone, or never there in the first place. Sometimes, he drew them with his eyes closed, portraying only what was in his imagination. Often, he’d start with the mouth. He’d cut a woman’s lips from a cigarette ad in a magazine and then paste them on a canvas and paint around them. He didn’t know why he did this, he said.
I kept thinking about that. How the mouth was such a problem for him.
* * *
That night, I could hear Jake and Lila talking and laughing, and then I he
ard them come upstairs. I heard Lila’s door shut with a playful bang.
Shit. It made me uncomfortable, knowing what they were doing in there.
It was late. It was dark. I didn’t even know where to go, but I had to get out of that house.
I put on my shorts and my tank top and grabbed a pair of flip-flops. I stepped quietly down the stairs, plugging my ears when I went past Lila’s room. I turned off the alarm. I shushed Max, slipped out the front door.
The night smelled like salt water and eucalyptus. I walked next door like my mind had a secret plan that I didn’t even know about. I climbed over construction stuff—piles of lumber, big fat rolls of insulation. I stepped carefully because there were nails and other junk on the ground, shards of the old structure brought down. I wondered what that particular spot of earth had experienced over all the centuries, even before the former mansion was built. I read once that California had ten thousand earthquakes a year, even if they weren’t big ones. Ten thousand.
I stepped up into the timber-bones of the house. A neighbor’s dog began to bark. I hoped he wasn’t telling on me. I tried to imagine what each room might be, but there was stuff to step over and around—stacks of wood and tubs of who-knows-what.
I walked on beams, balancing carefully. Under the crescent moon, I wove around the two-by-fours of the skeleton.
I spotted evidence of the workers—a crumpled burger wrapper, a pair of leather work gloves. I picked up the gloves and slipped my hands inside. I wondered if they belonged to him, the guy who watched me. I raised them to my nose. I inhaled the smell of leather and sawdust and sweat. It was a man smell. And then I yanked them off and tossed them to the floor.
There was the outline of a staircase. No rails, just steps. I went up. They led to the open platform floor of the second story. I stepped to the edge and sat down. My legs dangled. From there you could see the sea, the lights, the bridge. It was high up. High enough where you have crazy thoughts about falling or leaping.
I looked out, and when I saw all of it stretched in front of me—the lights, a city, things happening—I felt this huge ache of want. I was filled with it, want for everything that might be coming. It was hunger and a yearning, to desire and be desired, to be large and seen and known, things I hadn’t yet been, even though I’d been walking around in the world all this time.