Southern Cross

by Stephen Greenleaf

  She will leave him, certainly. That much is decided. But then what? What will she do for money? Who will protect her from the creep who’s been stalking her? And who will make her happy besides Ted?

  Wednesday was a day away.

  I’d promised Peggy an answer by then, but I still didn’t know what that answer should be. It would have been simple if the jeopardy were hers—in that case, I’d have been in Seattle already. It would also have been different if she were unattached—the romantic potential of a reunion would have overridden the risk of a crash if the potential went unrealized. But as things stood, a trip to Seattle would be analogous to an alcoholic going to work for Jack Daniel’s while forbidden a sip of the inventory.

  I’d spent the week reminiscing—part of it pleasant; part still painful. I could remember the day she’d applied for a job as though the ink were still wet on the résumé. She’d worn a brown wool suit with yellow buttons up the front and shoes with heels high enough to make her calves and thighs puff nicely, which I hear is the point of the exercise. Her hair was short and unprepossessing; her fingers and wrists and neck were free of jewelry but not of sun. Her gaze was frank and unabashed and maybe a little hostile; her answers to my questions were so brisk and to the point that I suspected she was late for a more promising interview.

  She’d allowed herself to smile at my opening jokes but at the first opportunity she made it clear that she wouldn’t fetch my laundry or order my groceries or phone for Giants tickets or similar chores that too many secretaries are saddled with. She eventually did all those things and more for me, of course, but never because I asked her to.

  At one point she’d interrupted the narration of her previous experience to turn the tables. “You used to be a lawyer,” she declared out of the blue.

  “I still am a lawyer,” I corrected.

  “But you’re not practicing.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t afford the neckties.”

  Her lips wrinkled. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Have you priced one, lately? Twenty-five bucks, and by the time you get it home it’s already too wide or too skinny or too plain or too something.”

  Her focus wasn’t fashion. “I heard you got disbarred.”

  “Not disbarred; suspended.”

  “Was it for anything illegal or immoral?”

  “Not on my part.”

  She cocked her head. “How can I know whether to believe you?”

  “Do you want to believe me?”

  She indulged my inspection for the first time. “I’m beginning to think so.”

  “Then come to work and find out. You can quit on ten minutes’ notice.”

  So that’s what she did, and the notice didn’t come for nine years.

  Peggy Nettleton is five years younger than I am, which puts her a step away from forty-five. Over time, I learned that she had been raised in the East, been married and divorced, and had a daughter named Allison, who was struggling to make a living as a dancer. But when she left, there were corners of Peggy’s life that remained in deep shadow, lines of autobiography that were firmly forbidden, parts of her past that she refused to discuss for reasons that had left town with her.

  But our affinities more than compensated for her reticence. We had similar tastes in books and movies, found pathos and humor in like phenomena, had more or less the same worldview, and gave our individual contributions to that selfsame planet equal degrees of weight, which was somewhere south of stupendous. What differences we had were minor—she hated football and loved sushi; I loved Raymond Chandler and hated Diane Sawyer; I hated Reagan and she hated Jerry Brown. But where it counted most we were simpatico—on points of professional ethics and personal morality we invariably occupied the same vicinity—and our relationship was soon symbiotic and indispensable.

  Years went by. We shared professional ups and downs and personal vagaries as well. We moved in and out of relationships with other people, compared notes, offered tips and then condolences, and became each other’s psychotherapist when we weren’t each other’s best friend. We’d share a drink at the end of most workdays and call each other at least once on weekends to make sure solitude wasn’t taking its toll. Talking with Peggy about whatever came up and following wherever it led us became my favorite pastime, the part of the day I most looked forward to, the only hobby I had outside baseball and poker and teasing Charley Sleet. Then she got in trouble.

  A guy started calling her on the phone, getting more and more intrusive, his demands increasingly sick and salacious, his probe of her psyche ever deeper and more perverted. For reasons originating in past trauma and present frailty, Peggy had done less than she might have to dissuade him. I reacted less than majestically to the situation, both physically and psychologically: in the course of ferreting out her tormentor, I put Peggy’s life in jeopardy and, even less commendably, took advantage of her vulnerability to advance our relationship to a plateau that included sex. I hadn’t forced her to sleep with me, of course, but neither had I realized that she was in no shape to make that decision at that particular point in time. The harassment had, among other things, deprived her of free will while making her desperate for a champion; wittingly or not, I had taken advantage of her plight.

  Eventually I’d caught the guy, thanks to a lot of help from Peggy and some from Ruthie Spring and Charley Sleet. Peggy hadn’t been harmed, on the surface at least, though her psyche had been scarred by both the problem and the fix, which had ended in the narrative sense when Peggy stabbed a man through the throat with a screwdriver. In the psychological sense, the incident probably wasn’t over yet. Anyhow, when things were back to normal, or so I thought, Peggy decided to leave town, as an aid to putting her problems behind her. I was cut to the quick when I realized that at the top of the list of problems was my name.

  I’d begged her not to go in as many ways as I could think of. Or almost as many—men’s pride seems to keep them from taking that one last step of apology and supplication, which is often the only step that women need them to take. I’ve often wondered what Peggy would have done if, on the day she left town, I’d dropped to one knee and proposed. Usually I decide that it wouldn’t have slowed her down.

  We’d had our last conversation six years ago and I hadn’t seen or heard from her since. It had been like divorce, at least for me—my life seemed cored and incomplete and I seemed incapable of attaching emotionally to anyone else because my heart still reached for a woman who was no longer there.

  Now she was back. Just when I thought the storm had passed, here she came and the allure was as potent as ever. That same throaty voice, that same endemic melancholy, that same store of inner strength, that same suggestion of real yet calibrated affection, all and more combined to place her back at the base of my existence after a ten-minute telephone conversation.

  When I’d acknowledged the inevitable, I called Charley Sleet, Detective Lieutenant, S.F.P.D., to tell him I was leaving town. When he asked where I was going and why, I told him.

  “Good,” he said. “It’s about time you worked that out.”

  “What out?”

  “You and her. You haven’t been the same since she left.”

  I was irritated that I’d been that obvious. “I don’t think there’s much left to work out, Charley—she’s getting married.”

  “Good,” he said again.

  “What’s good about it?”

  “If she’s married, you’ll leave her alone. Even you aren’t low enough to hustle a married woman.”

  “I thought you liked her.”

  “I do like her. But she took a walk. When they walk, you don’t get over it. You think you will, but you don’t, so since it can’t be the way you think it will, it’s good you won’t even try.”

  I laughed at the end of his essay. “Jesus, Charley. Where’d that come from?”

  “I get around. I seen lots of people think they’d be happier apart, t
hen try it and decide they wouldn’t, then try to patch it up and make it like it was. It never works, is the problem—the cracks are still cracks, which means the next time it hits a bump it breaks apart real easy.”

  “I appreciate the lesson in love, Charley. Maybe you should write a book.”

  “And maybe you should call me when you know what her situation is so I can keep you from being a hero.”

  “What’s wrong with being a hero?”

  “She don’t need a hero, she just needs a PI. She tell you anything about it?”

  “Not much.”

  “When she does, call me.”

  A minute later, I was on the phone to Ruthie Spring. “Why?” I asked when she came on the line.

  “Why what, sugar bear?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Peggy was in Seattle?”

  The hesitation suggested the answer was amorphous. “I didn’t think it was something you needed to know,” she offered finally, her usual brass muted to a rasping whisper.

  “That wasn’t your decision to make.”

  “If she wanted you to know where she was, she could have told you herself. I wasn’t brought up to be a goddamned messenger.”

  Ruthie had been brought up to be a combat nurse and a sheriff’s deputy and a good wife and friend and a dozen other things, all of which were exemplary except for the fact that she had never, in the vernacular of her native Texas, taken a liking to Peggy Nettleton.

  “It would have helped to know that she was okay, Ruthie. It would have helped a lot.”

  “How? By driving you crazy over what to do about it?”

  “I was crazy anyway.”

  “So I noticed. But you were coming out of it. Now you’re back in the shit soup. When are you leaving?”

  “For where?”

  “Seattle.”

  “How do you know I’m going to Seattle?”

  “How do I know you’re pissed off?”

  I spent the rest of the evening wondering how I’d become so predictable.

  When I telephoned Peggy the next day I didn’t beat around the bush—I told her I could clear the decks at the office and be in Seattle on Sunday. I said I could stay for a week, if need be, and asked how difficult her problem was likely to get—in other words, I asked if I should bring my gun.

  She suggested that maybe I should.

  CHAPTER 3

  When she is dressed, Gary is waiting at the door. “Next week?” He’s as casual as a hairdresser filling his book.

  “Nope.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means I’m not going to work with you anymore.”

  He scowls and turns scarlet. “If this is about last time, I told you I was sorry. It got a little lurid. So what?”

  “This isn’t about that. This is about us.”

  “What about us?”

  “It’s over, Gary. The relationship hasn’t worked for a long time.”

  “Worked? What do you mean worked? It worked well enough when I got your face plastered all over town in promos for the Salmon. It worked when I got you that lingerie shoot for Intimates.”

  “I’m talking about love, not layouts, Gary. But if you think you’re entitled to a commission, I’ll try to come up with some cash.” She leaves no doubt that she regards the claim as pimpish.

  He grasps her shoulders with icy hands. With another man, she might be scared, but Gary quails at the slightest sign of strength in the opposition. With him, she is only contemptuous.

  “Look, babe,” he says with the phony hipness she abhors. “We sleep together and we work together. Too much face time is the problem. So what we do is back off. Give each other some space. Keep it where it is till we get straight with each other again, then pick up where we left off. I got some other chicks I want to work with, anyway.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  Her derision doesn’t penetrate. “So we’re cool, right? Come by tonight about eight. I’ll do that pesto thing you like.”

  “No, Gary. It’s over. What we had is history. I’m not going to end up like Mandy.”

  “Fuck Mandy. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to her.”

  “The pathetic thing is that I used to believe that.”

  He squeezes her delts and she twists out of his grasp. For a moment she thinks he might strike her. She wonders if she could beat him up if it came to that, and thinks maybe she could. From the cast to his eye, so does Gary.

  “You’ll change your mind,” he says haughtily. “A month from now you’ll be begging me to take you back. But you know what? I won’t take you on, even for a spread in Penthouse.”

  “You’re just another pervert, Gary. The sad part is you’ve got talent. I don’t know why you don’t use it.”

  “Talent? Talent don’t cover the nut, babe. To live on talent, you need a government grant and Jesse Helms flushed the NEA down the toilet.”

  As per the plan I’d discussed with Peggy, I landed at Sea-Tac airport on Sunday afternoon, splurged on a rental car that turned out to be a Camry, drove north on I-5 to the Madison Street exit, then took Sixth Avenue north to the aptly named Sixth Avenue Inn, where I asked for the room reserved in my name. The desk clerk told me I was paid for five days. I told her I thought that would be sufficient. I grabbed a dozen business cards off the rack in case I ran into someone who wanted to know how to reach me, and ambled off to my room. After I unpacked my bag and washed my face and tore the sanitary tape off the john, I went out to inspect Seattle.

  I had two hours until my dinner date with Peggy, so I wandered the neighborhood in search of some scenery that came complete with a saloon. The neighborhood turned out to be on the north edge of downtown and the bar occupied the corner of Virginia and Second Avenue. The clientele was youngish and toughish and boisterous, but they seemed friendly nonetheless so I grabbed a seat at the dark side of the room and ordered a beer. The barmaid asked me what kind. I asked her what she had. She pointed to a chalkboard that contained a list of beers and ales and bocks and pilsners, most of which I’d never heard of—Guido thinks Michelob is uppity. I opted for something called a Ballard Bitter.

  The bitter beer was good, the bar was appropriately impersonal, and when I walked back into the street I was buoyed by my undemonstrative welcome to the city—I hate it when strangers pretend they like you. I stood on the corner and looked around. There was water off to my front and a big white boat racing a big gray cloud my way: I figured the boat for a ferry. A forest of skyscrapers loomed to my left, a hodgepodge of architecture that lay somewhere between offensive and important, which put it a cut above San Francisco’s ungraceful spires. An object I presumed was the famous Space Needle jutted skyward to my right, and to my rear some nondescript buildings flanked something I would have guessed was a aqueduct if I’d been in ancient Rome instead of fin de siècle Seattle. A moment later, the aqueduct turned into a monorail.

  The restaurant where I was to rendezvous with Peggy was in the direction of the skyscrapers, so I walked that way, wondering what I should say to her about, well, about us, knowing deep down that I shouldn’t say anything at all, that words would make it worse. More alert to my interior landscape than to my surroundings, I roamed the city for close to an hour.

  There weren’t many people around, since it was Sunday, but there were several items of interest—a building that looked like a pencil balanced eerily on its point in defiance of gravity and good sense; an underground bus line as sumptuous as the Moscow subway but eerily abandoned nonetheless; several buildings that had once been grand but now were empty; and an artificial waterfall that wasn’t as silly as it sounded. Every other window sported a sign that advertised espresso.

  An assortment of ranters and ravers kept me on my toes, but there weren’t nearly as many as used to occupy Civic Center Plaza or Union Square before the mayor launched his crackdown. I remembered that Seattle had passed a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk. After an hour of meandering, I was te
mpted to become a criminal.

  When I stopped to wonder what I thought about the place, I decided I was disappointed. Not that it wasn’t spiffy, not that it wasn’t clean, not that people weren’t cheerful and even gregarious, just that it was generic. Nothing screamed Seattle. Nothing shouted salmon, or timber, or airplanes, or software, or whatever else made the city burst with pride. Seattle has been so much in the news of late, with so many touting its virtues, I suppose I’d expected too much and resented my gullibility. Maybe I’d see the light after Peggy gave me the grand tour.

  I dawdled in a mallish enclosure called the Westlake Center long enough to be certain Peggy would arrive at the restaurant first, so she would have to wait for me and not vice versa. But just because the mall boasted an assortment of bookstores and gift shops and lingerie boutiques to divert me, it didn’t mean they got the job done. By the time I opened the door to the Dahlia Lounge I was more nervous than I’d been since the last time a psychotic held a gun on me.

  I spotted her right away, partly because she was the only person alone in a booth but mostly because I’d carried her image in my mind for six long years, examining it like an artifact during sleepless fits both late at night and early morning, until its conformation became indelible.

  I looked at her, then looked away. Looked back until I saw that she saw me, then looked away again. Looked back, waved timidly, smiled, waved more vigorously, then headed in her direction, heedless of the hostess saying something at my back. My breath was high in my chest and my field of vision was the size of a dime. If I had fainted dead away or stumbled over a potted plant, I wouldn’t have wondered why.

  As I neared the booth I was buffeted by impressions—she was a little heavier, a lot grayer, a little paler, and a lot happier than when I’d seen her last. Her eyes preened with pleasure, her hair fell lushly in a short soft wave that looked expensively sculpted, her dress was a simple yet elegant suit—gray jacket with white windowpanes and black buttons, white top square at the neck and snug at the bodice, skirt just short enough to show a slice of thigh. Peggy had turned natty, if that was a word that applied to a beautiful woman—when she’d worked for me, natty wasn’t in her budget.