by Dan Vining
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Lucky,” she said.
Jimmy pulled the ribbon on the white-and-red pack of smokes and tapped it against the palm of his hand.
“Why do people do that?” she said.
“I don’t know, I think it packs the tobacco tighter or something,” Jimmy said.
“Or everyone saw someone do it in a movie.”
“Are you an actress?” Jimmy said.
“No, you are,” she said. “You are.”
They walked almost as far as Tower Records and the sushi place. Jimmy was prepared to run into the boyfriend again, the director, but that would be overestimating him.
“Let’s go somewhere. Where do you want to go?” Jimmy said, standing there on the sidewalk. In 1995.
“San Francisco,” she said. “L.A. is bothering me. You’re not the Cut Killer, are you?” Lately, since the beginning of summer, there’d been a series of killings, girls’ bodies left spread-eagle on road cuts, the sloping gouges into the rock where the highway sliced through. Nine of them.
“Where do you want to go?” Jimmy asked her again, as serious about anything as he’d been in a long, long time.
Mary wasn’t a single mom. She wasn’t alone.
He came late to the soccer practice or play date or picnic or whatever it was. Sunday afternoon in the park on Tiburon. Her husband. Jimmy saw him drive up in a black BMW X-5. On the phone. He parked and sat there another two minutes, finishing his call. There were two other mothers and a father next to Mary on the sidelines of the playing fie ld. She had her back to the parking lot and didn’t see him. She had her eyes on the boy, who was dribbling a ball down the fie ld, or at least making an earnest six-year-old’s attempt at dribbling.
Her son. It was hard for Jimmy to even think it. He didn’t know much about kids but got close guessing the boy’s age. He did the math. Everything in him wanted to get closer, to see more, but he knew that Mary would spot him, his shape, his coloration, as easily as he had hers. Or at least that was what he told himself, to keep himself inside the car. To stop himself. He turned the key and started the engine. The sound of the rev made Mary turn to look. It was then that she saw her husband walking toward her across the apron of the field. He wore a dark gray suit, but as he came closer he pulled off the necktie and unbuttoned the collar of the blue shirt. He folded the tie in half and slipped it into his coat pocket. (Who goes into the office on a Sunday? Even for a half day?) He was dark-haired. With a hundred-dollar haircut. He smiled at his wife from ten yards out and then looked away quickly to find the boy on the field, to wave, though the kid wasn’t looking.
He came up and kissed Mary, put his hand on her back. Her hair was longer. And darker.
Jimmy drove away out the exit of the lot but turned left on the main road in and stopped on the shoulder. There was a little elevation, to look down on the fie ld, the water behind it, Sausalito behind that. The boy had come over. The father had kneeled down to ruffle his hair. The mother was saying something. A family was laughing.
Jimmy let out the clutch and drove on. Fast and loud.
Very high school.
And what do you call sitting in the dark in a car on a hilly lane on Tiburon, on Belvedere, across from a black Craftsman house with a light in the second-flo or window and a woman framed there, lifting a boy’s T-shirt over his head, his arms raised as if surrendering?
Mary kept living in the director’s house, though she said it wasn’t “living with him . . .” In his rented long and low ranch house up at the top of a cul-de-sac in Benedict Canyon. (“Leased,” she said. “He always makes me say leased.”) Whatever it was now, it had been a family’s house once, stuck up off in a rustic canyon, three bedrooms, two baths, a kidney-shaped pool, an enormous bank of rock behind it like a wave threatening to break. Now it was all white, inside and out, refrigerator white, and had bizarre white rocks the size of apples and grapefruits scattered across the white gravel of the roof.
“It’s like the surface of the moon,” Jimmy said the first time he saw it in the daytime.
“I like it,” Mary said.
There were four girls living there. They didn’t mind being called girls, except for the thirteen-year-old, who was the director’s daughter, there for the summer. The others were Mary’s friends. The girls. One was a friend from before Mary had moved in with the director; the other had become a friend. April and Michelle and Mary. They’d all three slept with the director at one time or another.
“You have to move,” Jimmy said.
“You’re always trying to relocate me,” Mary said.
The director was Canadian, pretended to be French. He’d done one movie, limited release. It starred a rock star, and the movie was notably unprofitable, so a few people at the studios and the agencies got the idea the director was hip. So he had that to ride for a few years. But he didn’t even have a deal anywhere now and was much angrier inside than anyone knew, even his agent. He’d shot another film with a little money from a horndog Pasadena dentist who liked the idea of the girls in the house up there in Benedict, liked the vodka-in-the-freezer thing, liked the old-school drugs they sometimes brought out for his sake. Everyone else thought that part of it was just too eighties. There were a pair of old-fashioned Movi olas in the bedroom where the director had stashed his daughter. Every once in a while he’d go in to work on it, at least run some film through his hands, but most of the time he went to restaurants and out to parties and meetings when he could get them and looked for the next thing.
“Come live with me,” Jimmy said.
It was the morning after they’d made love for the first time, four days after that first night on Sunset. They were at Hugo’s, down on Santa Monica, a breakfast, brunch, and lunch place. Everybody else there was doing business.
“I don’t even know what you do,” she said.
“I don’t do anything,” he said. “I think about you.”
“What did you do before I came along?”
“Think about you.”
If anyone was close enough to hear him, hear them, Mary would have made fun of the line. But he meant it.
“Me, too,” she said.
He could never tell anyone the things they said to each other.
They spent most of that day together, the day after they’d made love for the first time, rode out to the beach with the Cadillac’s ragged ragtop down, out to Paradise Cove to watch the surfers trying to make something happen on a collapsed, glassy day, then ate drippy cheeseburgers at a joint while the red sun flattened out at the horizon. The burger place was on a rise above a south-facing beach, on one of the twists and turns along the line of the coast, and the effect of the right-hand, apparently northern sunset was unsettling, though neither of them noticed it then.
“Everything can change in just a day,” she said.
They were riding back into the City, the back way, up and over Mulholland in from the coast, alone on the two-lane blacktop scrolling through the hills. He was watching the way the Caddy’s high beams swept the manzanita, let himself think that the light going across the brush was what had released the scent that filled their nostrils. It hadn’t rained in two or three months. There was a not-unpleasant dustiness to everything. What did the Eagles sing about in “Hotel California”? The “warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air.” He wondered what it was, colitas. It sounded like a plant, like manzanitas.
“Everything can change in an hour,” Jimmy said. “If it’s the wrong hour.”
“Or the right hour,” Mary said. “You’re so gloomy.”
He left her at the gate of the white house. It wasn’t that big a house, but the owners had put in a rolling iron gate and painted it white, too, so the renters, the leasees, could say they lived in a gated place in Benedict Canyon. Jimmy cranked the wheel, the power steering pump complaining, and turned around in the cul-de-sac. He wouldn’t go in, didn’t want to drop in on that scene again after so good a day, did
n’t want to have to try to make it all lie down in his head one more time. The director always had a crowd over, standing around the black-bottomed pool, looking down at the lights, drinks in their hands, or joints between their fingers like they were cigarettes. Strangers. New people every time.
In the rearview mirror, Jimmy saw her push the button on the squawk box and wait. She pushed it again.
He wasn’t in any hurry to get home. In just a part of a week, she’d gotten him into some new music, new to him. Gloomy Canadian singer songwriters, as it turned out. She’d made him a tape, two-sided, 120 minutes. So, driving around, killing time, he had Leonard Cohen and the last cigarette from the pack of Lucky Strikes she’d given him that first night. He almost hated to smoke it, but he smoked it, cruising east on Sunset into East L.A. Lately he’d been spending more and more time with his friend Angel, had come back around again, reconnected. Everything seemed to go in circles. Angel was a Sailor who worked on vintage cars, who had a shop downtown, who was also a preacher in a way, a street preacher to gangbangers and their knocked-up girlfriends, to the people almost everybody else wrote off. He went by his apartment, went by the storefront church where Angel spent a lot of time, but never found him. He wanted to talk cars, nothing else. He headed for home.
The phone was ringing when he came in. When he answered it, it was just screaming.
TEN
He slept. The phone had detonated a couple of times, but he’d slept through it. He sat up. There was a knife-edge of light under the drapes. He’d drawn them when he came back from Tiburon. He’d slept. He’d even dreamed. It wasn’t that Sailors never slept, but it was rare. They’d sleep an hour or two once a month. But they almost never dreamed. What had he dreamed? Like the rest of us, he couldn’t exactly remember. Angel was in it. There was a gathering of some kind, characters moving in from all quarters, in some kind of empty room. It felt ordinary, obvious, pedestrian. The surprise was that Mary wasn’t in it.
He ordered breakfast, a big breakfast. He was acting like a Norm all of a sudden. It came, and he ate it. He took a shower and put on a clean shirt. Like it was the first day of the rest of his life.
When he stepped out into the hallway in the hotel, he had to step over the Chronicle. If it had been facedown, he wouldn’t have stopped, and his day might have gone a different way, but it was faceup, looking right at him, with a headline across half the page:
THREE GOLDEN GATE SUICIDES
WITHIN SPAN OF ONE HOUR
“Span.” At least someone on the headline desk had a sense of humor about it. Jimmy picked up the paper and tucked it under his arm. He took the elevator straight down to the garage. While he waited for the car, he read the details. The three suicides off the bridge were unrelated. One was a German tourist, a woman. One was a woman in her nineties. (You had to wonder how she got up and over the rail.) The third was an anomaly, a man in his twenties who’d gone off the west side of the bridge, the side facing out to sea, something that almost never happened. Maybe he was a sailor. Small s.
It made Jimmy go back to the bridge. Maybe he was looking for something to bring him back to the present.
He drove along the Marina, the broad sweep of created land, a former marsh filled in a hundred years ago with ’06 earthquake rubble. Now it was as if it had been there all along, another pricey district with its rows of two- and three-story houses, shoulder to shoulder on the left, red-tile roofs and pale ice cream colors, and the expanse of Marina Green and St. Francis Yacht Club to the right. And the Presidio ahead.
And Fort Point, under the southern anchorage of the bridge. Jimmy parked in the lot next to the rocks, the water so close that the cars’ windshields would all be grayed out, misted, when the drivers returned. The massive red/orange ironwork of the bridge, this end of it, was overhead. Sometimes you could hear the traffic noise above all the sounds of the Bay. To stand underneath it felt a little like being inside a hollow sky-scraper. It also made you see how high it was off the water.
Jimmy walked along the shore on the paved path toward the angular brick fort. It had been built at the beginning of the Civil War, to guard the mouth of the Bay, set there long before the bridge. It was a Monday and still early, and tourist traffic was light. As vacationers’ destinations go, Fort Point seemed not to mean much to non-Americans. The crowd, what there was of it, seemed like Kansas people, men in short cargo pants with skinny white legs who looked like they’d been up since four thirty, their portly wives, and kids in Disneyland tees and knit Target shorts the colors of the houses back in the Marina District.
Jimmy knew Fort Point was a gathering place for Sailors. By night anyway. They weren’t out now, or at least they wouldn’t be expected to be, only the ones looking for trouble.
But George Leonidas was there.
“Hello, sir,” Jimmy said, surprising himself with the deference, the formality.
The grieving father, if that’s what he was here for, grieving, was sitting on a bench next to the freshly painted guest services restroom. He was wearing the same clothes, but a fresh version of the brown cuffed trousers and the white short-sleeved shirt. And the brown wing tips. He sat with his legs open, his forearms on his knees, one hand wrapped around the fist of the other, as if holding it back from doing what it wanted to do. His eyes were on the water but unfocused. He hadn’t seen Jimmy until he spoke. But he didn’t seemed surprised to come upon him here. Maybe nothing surprised him anymore. He nodded a greeting, tipped his head up.
When Jimmy got a good look at his eyes, it was hard to think of what to say to him.
“How’s your wife doing?”
Leonidas nodded.
“Better than you, I bet,” Jimmy said. He didn’t mean it harshly, but Leonidas bowed up a little, seemed about ready to come at him, to say something, but didn’t. He knew it was true.
Jimmy looked down at him. I shouldn’t have told you, he thought. He almost said it out loud. This is what you get, when you tell them. It doesn’t make it easier; it makes it harder. The truth doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes it wraps you in a whole new set of chains.
“Why’d you come down here?” Jimmy asked him.
“A kid on the waterfront told me to. Works at one of the crab joints.”
“Told you what?”
“That he thought he saw my Selene here.”
“Selene.”
“Christina,” George Leonidas said. “I called her Selene.”
He suddenly looked at Jimmy, very directly. “I never saw Melina,” he said. “My other girl. Is she the same as . . . as what you said? Like Christina?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. Stop thinking about what I told you. Forget me.”
Jimmy watched as the Greek’s eyes left him, went to the underside of the bridge, out across the bowed line of it toward the center.
“There were three more. Went off the Gate,” he said.
“I know,” Jimmy said.
“It’s not anything I ever thought of. Before,” Leonidas said, still looking where he was looking. “I was in the army. In Vietnam. You see people die, and it changes the way you think. You think different. You just want to come home, work hard, have your house.”
Jimmy thought of the pink rooms Duncan Groner had described, the girls’ rooms.
“One of them was an old lady,” Leonidas said. “Ninety.”
“Go home,” Jimmy said. “Go back over to El Cerrito. Stay away from the City, from places like this.”
Leonidas nodded. He got up, still nodding. Jimmy got the sense that something had scared him, something he’d felt in himself, an idea, an impulse. He was grateful to be yanked back to himself. He offered his hand, and Jimmy shook it.
Jimmy watched him walk away, watched him until the Greek was behind the wheel of the Cadillac, in the first slot in the lot. He’d been up all night, the first one there. Jimmy watched until he saw the Caddy’s wide hood dip at one corner, when the engine started.
He stayed on the bench for
a minute, then made a pass through the fort, walked across the open courtyard, but it was all just sea breezes and sunbeams.
He didn’t know what he was looking for anyway.
Coroners’ offices have less security than you’d think. Jimmy walked in a back door, off the loading dock. He came down one corridor and then another, threaded his way into the interior, following his nose.
He was alone in a roomful of the dead for a good two minutes before anyone came in.
And she didn’t work there.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She was in her late fifties. She was dressed like a businesswoman but in particularly muted colors. Rich, but muted. Dignified.
Jimmy just smiled, the it’s-all-right smile.
The coroner came in, a deputy coroner. He’d probably heard voices in the room. He was in his thirties and fleshy with heavy glasses that could have been military-issue. He looked like he should be working in a comic-book store somewhere.
He looked at Jimmy first. He seemed to know the woman.
“Can I . . . ?” he asked.
“She was first,” Jimmy said. Maybe it would give him time to figure out what he’d come here for.
The man let his eyes linger on Jimmy for another beat, then crossed the room to a steel desk, curved corners, a gray “marble” linoleum top, like an old schoolteacher’s desk, or a cop’s desk. There were clear plastic bags on top. He found the one he was looking for. It had a number on a tag. He lifted his glasses to read it—so he was nearsighted!—and then went to the wall of body drawers. He pulled one out, pulled away the polythene over the face, put it back, and checked the number on the end of the drawer.
He left it open and looked at the woman. She came over. He nodded at her. The woman pulled down the plastic and looked at the body.
Jimmy slipped out, left them alone. There was something that convinced him she wasn’t a family member, but Jimmy couldn’t decide who she was. Clergy? She looked too uncertain, too off balance for that. But she also didn’t look like she was any stranger to morgues. He was at the water fountain, taking a good long drink, when she came out of the body room. She didn’t stop to lean against the wall or anything, didn’t twist a hankie in her hand. She wasn’t distraught, but she had a tear in her eye. And, with this one, you got the idea those eyes hadn’t cried in a while, that her eyes were just a bit too old to tear up easily. Or had seen too much.