Nicola shrugged. “It’s a zen thing,” she explained.
She showered and changed, then walked with Lou to his car, a dark blue rental with a spoiler over the trunk. Lou unlocked her door before unlocking his own. Well, well, Nicola thought. Inside it smelled like damp newspapers and Lou fastened his seat belt, then sat for a moment with his hands on the steering wheel.
The night was dry and windy, the kind of wind that seemed to swoop up from underneath you. Drivers were just beginning to turn on their headlights. Nicola glanced at Lou’s hands, which were thick, kind of muscular. Can fingers be muscular?
“What’s up?” she asked after a few moments.
“I’m doing my traffic prayer,” Lou said, looking out the windshield.
“Your traffic prayer?” Nicola almost laughed. “You have a traffic prayer?”
“It’s very effective.”
“Can I hear it?”
“Really?”
“Definitely.”
Lou cleared his throat. His two top buttons were unbuttoned and beneath the V-shaped opening she could see the small rise of his collarbone. Lou from New Jersey. He had the dark good looks of an Italian—or was he Irish, dark Irish? He had dark eyes, straight dark hair, a small nose. Irish, she thought. She could see him growing up in the suburbs: going to mass on Good Friday, then playing pool at a bar with a bunch of his buddies.
“Let my car pass undamaged through the streets,” he began. “And let the vehicles part before me. Let the red lights turn green and let the green lights linger. Let my tires remain unpunctured. And let me neither be stopped nor cited now until I reach my destination, amen.” He looked over at Nicola and started the engine. “Sometimes I add a few lines about animals, too.”
Nicola laughed.
“Or storms, if the weather looks bad.”
“You’re an odd one, aren’t you?” Nicola asked.
“I don’t know what I am,” Lou said.
She wasn’t sure if that was all just for her amusement or what, but she liked it. Lou reached over to adjust the rearview mirror and as his hand came near her Nicola remembered the sudden strange intimacy of sitting in a car with a stranger. Was this a date, she wondered? The phrase “business associate” conjured up something disreputable, possibly unlawful, but probably that was closer to the truth.
“I think you could use something more at the end,” she said.
Lou flicked on his blinker. “At the end of the prayer?”
“Something about a place to park.”
“Curbside parking,” Lou said. “That’s good.”
* * *
The restaurant was in the financial district with long windows facing the cable car tracks. The hostess seated them in the back. Sea nets hung on the walls and there were rows of sconces shaped like clamshells. A good restaurant: expensive, well-lit, comfortable. As they sat down Nicola found herself checking her fingernails.
“Last night I went to an Italian restaurant,” Lou was saying. He fluffed out the thick white napkin and spread it on his lap, then he opened a small notepad. “Dinner took almost four hours.”
“What did you have?”
“Panzerotti salsi di noci.” He was reading from his notes. “That’s white sauce with walnuts. Now a few days ago I went to a vegan restaurant. Ever try that? I had a drink called Doctor Telma’s Chinese Potion. Actually I liked the food, but as soon as I was outside I started to crave pastrami. Like when you leave an aquarium and head for the sushi bar.”
“Are you going to write any of this up anywhere?” Nicola asked him.
“That’s the plan.”
He had been in San Francisco for only a week but already had checked off Russian, Mediterranean, and Vietnamese food from his list. Tomorrow he was planning to go to a Turkish restaurant and try something called kota voskou.
They opened their menus. The restaurant was full but not noisy, and Nicola felt easy with herself. Comfortable. They faced each other across the table, which was much less intimate than sitting side by side in a dark car. In his neat white shirt Lou looked young and polite. But anyone can be an opponent, as Alicia would say. Nicola looked at his hand for a wedding ring.
“I was engaged once,” Lou said.
“What?”
“I see you’re looking at my left hand.”
“I wasn’t,” Nicola began. Then she shrugged. “All right,” she said.
“Do you want to hear about it?”
“Oh, that’s a story I’ve heard many times. Second date stuff. How the woman you never understood broke your heart.”
“Actually I broke hers.”
“Well, that I might listen to,” she said.
The waiter came to tell them the specials. Lou listened carefully, then ordered appetizers for both of them to share: black mussel soufflé (the restaurant’s specialty), salad, and a consommé of wild mushrooms and sweet bay scallops. Nicola noticed his dark eyes again, the careful way he spoke, his casual confidence. He watched the busboy fill their water glasses, then he took up his notebook again.
“So this is a second date,” he said. It was a question.
Nicola sipped her water. “That depends on the food.”
She found herself comparing him to Chorizo. They were both attractive in the style she liked: dark, not too thin, not too hairy. Chorizo was the fatherly version. Lou was polite in a way that Nicola had learned to distrust; it sometimes masked chauvinism. Still, there was something about a man in a white button-down shirt, Nicola thought, his pale skin underneath like something protected by Brooks Brothers.
Their appetizers came and Lou divided them neatly in half. He gave Nicola a plate. “She wanted to have puzzle rings as wedding bands,” he told her.
“Your fiancée?”
“And there were other differences. The wedding meal was supposed to be color coordinated with the bridesmaids’ dresses. What food can you serve that’s blue?”
“Delicious,” Nicola said. She was eating a Greek salad with red wine vinaigrette and smelt fries.
“Really?” Lou picked up his pencil. “Tell me more.”
“I could just eat and eat,” she said.
She concentrated on the arrangement of flavors: sweet, salty, smoky. As they ate Lou wrote down each dish and timed the servings and asked Nicola for her opinion. She liked that. The restaurant was a real restaurant with white tablecloths and white candles and a branch of unusual flower buds in every vase. She liked that too. They were sitting in a row of two-person tables and the large room spread out before Nicola in soft gold and orange. Her hunger seemed to increase as she ate and she leaned the tines of her fork inward to retrieve every last small leafy tidbit.
“Now tell me something about Scott,” Lou said.
Nicola took a small sip of wine. “When I was married to him everyone still called him Scooter.”
“Well that tells me something,” he said. “What else?”
She thought for a moment. “Once he bought a used cocktail piano even though neither one of us could play. We were supposed to make money on it. But although we listed it in the classifieds week after week, no one ever came by to see it. For years it just sat in a corner and once in a while Scooter would pay someone to come in and tune it.” She took another sip of wine. “I wonder whatever happened to that,” she said.
It had been a relief, when she left him, to also leave all their possessions—the piano, the leaky water bed, the Star Trek commemorative plates, the boxes of carefully preserved third-rate comics. Nicola pictured Scooter in a room that grew increasingly crowded and narrow. He was always coming home with surprises.
“How long were you married?” Lou asked.
“Four years. He always had a new idea about how to make money. Once he invested an entire paycheck in an animal rest home,” she said.
“What, for senile retrievers?”
“Actually, that one didn’t do too badly.”
Two waiters served their entrees on small gold-rimmed plates. Beh
ind them the curved restaurant bar with its shiny top and silver mirror and well-dressed drinkers seemed like a scene on an ocean liner.
“What is a cocktail piano anyway?” Nicola asked.
She had ordered caramelized Chilean sea bass in sweetened onion sauce with fried okra, and Lou chose the medallions of rare ahi tuna. Midway through the meal they switched plates.
“Excellent,” said Lou about the sea bass. “This has really brought me into the zone.”
“The zone?”
Lou looked at his watch. “So far I’ve been in for just under ten minutes.”
“What’s the record?”
“Oh, the record is a long story.”
Nicola put down her fork. “Okay,” she said.
“Really?”
“I’d like to know.”
“Really? All right,” he said. “Well, one day I was walking in the park. This was in New York. Although it was only about five o’clock, I was hungry because I’d just played racquetball with this woman who turned out to be not so interesting, and when she went home I decided to go to this restaurant she had told me about, but I wasn’t optimistic because, you know, she wasn’t interesting.”
“Okay,” Nicola said.
“So I get there and even though it was early there were only about three free tables, but still they could seat me right away.”
“Because there were three free tables.”
“Right.” Lou smiled. “Okay, anyway. It starts out they have this huge cavernous dining room, like some medieval cave with a fire going in a huge fireplace that was really like a hole in the wall with sticks on the bottom—it was so big the logs looked like sticks—and almost everything is cooked right there on that big open fire. I started out with mussels in the shell, which tasted like they had been caught about ten minutes before, and then I had smoke-licked pork loin. If the mussels hadn’t kick-started me into the zone, then the pork definitely did. Then there was grilled asparagus with parmesan cheese, and roasted yukon potatoes with arugula, and Italian wine, and, oh yeah, a basket of tiny fresh-baked rolls, like minimuffins, that a waiter kept replenishing. That was his whole job, replenishing minimuffins.”
“I want that job,” Nicola said.
Lou took another bite of fish. “Then there was warm caramelized tart with house-made vanilla ice cream, and coffee. I was worried I might overdo it, but that night I could do no wrong. I had been planning to go see a movie but I didn’t want to get out of myself; I didn’t want to break the spell.”
“So what did you do?”
“I walked around the city. I went into a bookshop. I felt I could do anything as long as I didn’t engage in someone else’s life. I know it sounds hokey.”
“It doesn’t sound hokey.”
“It sounds completely hokey but I think that was the best night I ever spent in my life. I walked along Columbus Avenue and looked at all the stores, which of course were all closed and gated. But, see, that was the best part. I wanted nothing. For the first time I wanted nothing. I was content just to look.”
He stopped and kind of smiled a little. The surfer grin.
Nicola couldn’t help smiling back. “That’s the story?” she asked.
“That’s the story. That’s the record for the zone. And that’s when I decided I wanted to do this for a living, to get out of my uncle’s business and go after the zone in a legitimate way.”
“And you’re in the zone now?”
Lou smiled again. “Here I am,” he said.
* * *
It wasn’t until they were at the coffee and dessert phase that Nicola brought up the topic of Robert.
Lou told her what he had found. Apparently Robert was from Vacaville, California, a place that literally meant cow town. Fifteen years ago Robert started buying real estate in Berkeley, then eventually moved to San Francisco and bought a few lots near the ocean. He lived alone and although he owned a lot of property he was seriously in debt.
“But that’s not unusual,” Lou told her.
“I’m sure you see it a lot.”
“It’s pretty much all I see,” he said.
There was no sign of a sister so far, but Lou had put in a few calls about that. Still, it was a lot of work for, what was it, one day? Two days if you count Sunday. Nicola was impressed.
“How did you do this so fast?”
Lou handed her a folder. “I have excellent phone skills,” he said. “And here’s something else you might find interesting.”
It was a Xerox of some legal document—a title deed. In capital letters was the name GOLDEN GATE ROOMS.
“Golden Gate Rooms?” Nicola looked at Lou. “That motel?”
“I took a look around his place the other night. How much do you know about him? Like for instance, is he a geek?”
Nicola laughed. “Robert?”
“I found lots of computer equipment in his garage.”
“You broke into his house?”
“I looked in the window. Do you want to taste this?”
He sliced off a bite of his dessert—Meyer lemon tart with sherbet—and placed it on her saucer.
“Mmm,” Nicola said. It was delicious. She took another bite. “I thought it would be cold and flaky.”
He grinned, agreeing. “No, it’s warm and melty.”
“But not at all mushy.” Nicola took another bite, then leaned back in her seat with her coffee. And looked at Lou.
She was enjoying herself. She was liking him more and more.
“I wouldn’t guess that Robert had anything to do with computers,” she said. “He’s kind of an idiot.”
“This is good for us.”
“But in truth nothing would surprise me. He’s shifty and greedy. You won’t believe the rent he charges the poor Russians who live in the main house. I’m always surprised that in all these years he’s never raised my rent. It makes me more suspicious, in fact. Like he’s lying in wait for something. He has his little plans.”
“Has he spoken to you about any of them?”
“Robert would never talk to me about anything. But there’s a way he looks at everything—you can see the little wheels turning. It’s easy to see them since they turn so slowly.”
The waiter came over with the bill.
“One computer was left on,” Lou told her, “though I didn’t see any applications running. It could be he just forgot to turn it off.”
“Or it could be an open connection,” Nicola said.
“An open connection?”
“To the Internet. Maybe he’s hosting a Web site or something. Though I can’t believe that’s true. I know a couple of kids who could find out.”
“College students?”
“High-school kids. Last weekend they kidnapped me and tied me up. Turns out they worked for Scooter.”
Lou laughed.
“You think I’m kidding,” Nicola said. She put on her coat. Outside the wind had died down but it was still chilly. A street light flickered as they passed underneath it.
“I gave them my landlord’s name and address. They’re going to search the Internet, see if they can find anything there. They work for me now.”
She felt for the top button of her coat. They walked side by side on the sidewalk, almost touching, and Nicola felt full and warm, satisfied, a little spacy. When they got to the street Lou unlocked her car door for her.
“So how did you like the meal?” he asked.
Nicola smiled. “I enjoyed it.”
“Enjoyed it as in, for instance, a second date?”
He stood with his hand on the door handle, watching her. They were on a busy downtown street, noisy but dark, and although Nicola couldn’t see Lou’s face very well still she could feel something happening, she could feel how he looked at her and she knew that all it would take from her was one step forward. Her heart seemed to squeeze in on itself. I like him, she thought. His shirt collar was bent under his coat and she felt a strong desire to put her arm up to his neck and strai
ghten out his collar, but at the same time she knew she should wait, go slowly, figure him out, find out his secrets, assess, direct, plan this thing, whatever it is, or is it just part of the loan sharking business, the part where they kiss you then pat you and say now now now little missy? One step forward, that’s all it would take. A car slowed, then stopped, just behind them and its right blinker lit up. They had been discovered. Their parking spot had been claimed. Just a step, Nicola was thinking, one step. But instead she held her ground.
“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said.
Twelve
After Lou dropped her off, Nicola walked down the path next to the main house toward her cottage, a small one-bedroom hidden from the street.
The path was short, constructed of crumbling octagonal stones, and unlit. Lights were on in the main house where the Russians lived, and the white December roses that grew in their yard seemed tinged with blue in the moonlight. As she passed, someone in the house drew back a curtain. A woman with a baby. Nicola held up her hand. The curtain fell back.
Inside her own house she locked the door and put on the tea kettle. It was easier not to think of Lou as a bookie, or whatever he was. She saw him as an easygoing type, a surfer, a gourmand, though he also mentioned law school. Nothing quite fit together. Her camisole strap had gotten tangled with her bra, and she was looking forward to her terrycloth robe, a silk nightshirt, or maybe nothing underneath. But first she would have tea the way she liked it, steeped for three and a half minutes, then sugared. Nicola watched the clock on the microwave, then turned back for the sugar bowl. And gasped.
There was a face at the window.
“Christ,” she said, stepping back.
His eyes were dark holes and his face seemed outlined in silver, and when he saw that she saw him, he knocked sharply on the glass. Nicola took another step away, thinking about phone cords and other household weapons, then she realized it was her landlord, Robert.
Her hand was on her throat. She went to the door but didn’t open it. Instead she opened the small brass peep window next to the chain and spoke through that. “What,” she said.
“Nicola, can I come in?”
“What are you doing here?”
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