“Maybe. But more likely something metal. Some long skinny piece of metal with a sharp end.”
“And they searched the grounds for a weapon that looked like that.”
“Of course not. In the first place, Slimeball didn’t have the brains to search for anything; I guess he was absent from crime class the day they did that page. And, secondly, nobody knew until now they should look for that kind of a weapon. So, no.”
“It’s late now, to look.”
“A’course it is, but we’ll still try. I got my two Klingons down there right now poking around.”
I survey her; she’s perky, very handsome, and fast. “God, are you going to be a new order around here.”
And Cherie, who is unfolding her legs, nods complacently. “New order, I guess you got it. Totally different order, different species, right?”
I let this slide into an uncomfortable minute. My father does a lot of forgetting.
“Thank God he’s out of there,” Rob says. “You, too.”
I say, “Yeah, yeah,” because Rob has put some possessive emotion into that you, too. Unspoken message: I, Rob, continue to help; I am Old Reliable; I got you to leave that place. In a minute he’s going to tell me that my father is his oldest friend.
I tell him that I had a nice session this afternoon with Cherie.
He says, “Oh. Fine,” in a suppressed voice.
“She didn’t say anything about you.”
Rob says, “Uh-huh.”
“How’s that relationship doing?” I persist. There’s a pause.
What answer do I want? Do I wait for him to say, Terrible, or Wonderful, or We’re made for each other, or We’re breaking up?
“Fine,” Rob says.
You can’t accuse him of being verbose.
“Maybe I could come over to see Ed this evening,” he says.
I advise, “Don’t.”
I don’t want Rob this evening because Scott is coming this evening.
Also because I don’t want him.
He says, “Well, I have to come tomorrow anyway to take him for his calcium shot,” and hangs up, quick, before I can beat him to it.
Chapter 19
Scott shows up at eight o’clock in his rented convertible.
“I think we should head south,” he says.
“Okay. What’s south?”
He pulls out a map and we cluster over it. A BMW, even a rented one, has a good dashboard light.
South is Santa Cruz, Monterey, Carmel. I tell him that I went to school in Santa Cruz and I don’t want Santa Cruz and he says, Well, then, maybe Monterey? and I say, Okay.
“There are a hundred and fifty restaurants in Monterey,” he announces. “Some have a fish theme and some have a Mexican theme and some have a rob-the-tourist theme. There is one farther along, in Carmel in somebody’s garden that I went to last month and kind of liked. I went there with Rita, but I guess I’m okay to do it again.”
We decide, yes, we’ll go south and to Carmel.
We start off down the coast road, which is too dark to see the scenery, but you can kind of feel it: bushes and hill on one side, cliff-edge and ocean on the other.
“This road will be real quiet until Santa Cruz, when it turns into a mob scene,” he says. “Maybe I can circumvent that.” He drives with one hand, capably.
“Reet and I,” he ventures. I haven’t asked, but maybe he wants to fill in the silences. Maybe he wants to talk. “We were sort of lovers, maybe I told you, and then we were sort of friends. I miss her. I miss her a lot.”
I say, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, right.
“Hey,” he adds quickly, as if he thinks I found Yeah, right off-putting, “I know you’re sorry.”
Well, I did get off-put, but he pushes along with, “You really helped, did I say that? I’m not good with saying how I feel. Even with knowing how I feel.”
Quit it, chum, you’re getting at my unarmored places. Any guy that admits to vulnerability and then admits that . . . Oh, phooey.
“Sorry,” he says. “Difficult stuff. Too personal.”
We have a half-mile of darkness with ocean noises off to the right. “When I first met you,” I finally essay, “I thought you were a horse’s ass.”
“I probably was.”
“You were snotty. Mean to Rita.”
“Damn right. She could get to me. To see somebody go under like that. And kind of on purpose, know what I mean?”
“Yeah. I saw.”
“I identified. I do those things, too.”
“You!” I fling the word out across the darkness. I’m amazed. “You’re the least . . .” I can’t think of the right word-cluster. “You’re in control.”
“It’s a pose . . . I used to think I was. I talked myself into that.”
We’re approaching some lights. A big red sign announces SARTORI’S ITALIAN. Laughter and a few bars of music make the road feel even emptier.
“Jesus,” he says. “It got me down about her. But lately everything gets me down. Like, I’ve been thinking back and brooding about death. I don’t get it.”
“Oh, come on.”
“First somebody is. And they’re here and they’re part of it. And then bang, all of a sudden, out. And what’s left?” He gestures off to the side, where the bank and the bushes are. “Nothing? Memories? We’re supposed to console ourselves with that? ‘The person lives on in our memories’? Phooey.”
I start out on the speech about how as long as you are alive and remembering the person and grieving for them and recalling the good things they did and all that. It does sound kind of thin. And underneath I’m thinking that Scott has really taken off about Rita’s death. It’s the kind of response you get from somebody who’s had other experiences with death and feels these previous experiences reviving each time a new one happens.
“Did you lose somebody else earlier?” I ask. “Somebody important who died on you?”
He jerks the car slightly. We are passing the intersections leading into Half Moon Bay. “No.” He sounds cross.
We have quite a bit of silence as he negotiates some lighted crossings.
“Tell me about your dad,” he says abruptly after we start again onto the dark part of the highway. “Doing better? Settling in okay?”
I get the idea: this recent subject is dropped. We spend the whole twenty-five miles between Half Moon Bay and the Santa Cruz approaches talking about Daddy. I give the latest on him and accept Scott’s sympathy. I decide Scott keeps starting subjects and then dropping them. I’ll return to some of this stuff later. I want more about Rita, death, the Hartdale. And Danielle. I really want to hear from him on Danielle. She keeps sounding important to me.
I don’t understand you, Scott, I think. It’s always intriguing not to understand someone when you think there’s a complicated second person below the top one. If you follow me.
He manages to drive skillfully and not say anything much all the way into Carmel.
I’m debating whether or not to share the news about how Marcus Broussard died. And about how Cherie will be our new sheriff. I decide on silence. Scott is withholding stuff from me. He’ll learn all these info bites pretty soon.
Meanwhile I can feel superior.
Scott says, “Huh?”
I like Carmel, in spite of its phoniness. My great-grandmother should have bought a cutie-pie house here instead of the one she bought in Venice.
I tell Scott that when Rob and I lived in Santa Cruz, we hardly ever came down to Carmel. We were too poor. The town is quaint and charming, and quaint costs money.
Scott’s restaurant in the garden has heat lamps and colored lights and a quaint, charming main building to retire to when the fog is in. Tonight there is no fog. The waitresses wear Laura Ashley prints, which Rob once described as the local equivalent of peasant dress. The menu is extensive. Both Scott and I opt for crab salad and chardonnay. I think (a) that I know some important things Scott doesn’t yet know, and (b) that I really don’t m
iss Rob at all.
“Do you miss him—what’s his name, Rob?” Scott asks.
Oh, cut it out.
We sip industriously at the chardonnay. And he finally lets me broach the subject of the Hartdale, which I’ve been poking at for several minutes.
“Hartdale?” he inquires. “What’s that?”
I give him a hooded look.
“Hart-dale.” He fools with his napkin, twisting and untwisting it, doing a pretty good Gollum handwringing imitation. “Hates the horrid Hartdale.”
“Cut it out.”
“What? My liver? Cut out my liver?”
“Scott, stop it. Why do you think you hate the Hartdale?”
“Sweetheart, I don’t just think I hate it, you try yearning and scheming and leching for something and waking up at night in a cold sweat because you’re never going to get that or anything else and you’ll go off to the next world and no one will have the faintest idea you were ever here. And then ...”
“Yes?”
“And then you learn all you have to do is kiss Egon’s ass.”
“Bullshit. Egon’s not that important.”
“He’s an example. Maybe he is important. How the hell do I know. One day I’m working away the best I know how, a little brainwork here, a little cheating there, just like everybody, no particular results. And all of a sudden there’s an explosion and a shift in the time-space continuum and . . .”
“And you’re famous?”
“No. Prospectively famous. It’s guaranteed. Certified . . . platinum card.”
He doesn’t spill his glass, although he looks as if he’s going to. He tilts it and then sets it down fairly carefully and puts his head in his hands.
“What you want,” he says, not very clearly, “is supposed to be the best and you think you’re the best and you’ve got to have it. And then something happens—a couple of things happen . . . The sort of events that . . . Oh, shit.
“Nothing specific. Just life,” he mutters into his cupped hands.
Bro, I think, you aren’t getting away with that, Just life. It was something big and specific. Nobody is ready to shop the Hartdale because of free-floating world-weariness.
I reach out and touch his wrist. After a minute he grabs on to me with the other hand. He says, “I’m ordering another bottle.”
After a while and a spot of bottle-opening, he himself reverts to the topic. “So suddenly it seems completely phony and you think you’re chasing the—what is it?”
“The bluebird of happiness?”
He shakes his head. “Something that turns into something else.”
“A pot of gold.”
He’s gloomy. “That just disappeared?”
“Well, it was at the foot of the rainbow and you know about rainbows.”
“N’yaa.” He refills our glasses. “What I want is the metaphor where it doesn’t exactly disappear; it’s still there but you suddenly think, What is this anyway, what the hell is it worth, look at it, how crumby and grubby it is, why was I chasing it?”
I don’t tell Scott, “But the Hartdale? How can you, even after a bad night, think that about the Hartdale?” I know that I, as the noncompetitor listening to Scott’s story, am supposed be above it all. But let’s face it: I’m a child of our society. I grew up right here, in our crumby, grubby culture. There’s not a chance in the world of it happening, but I’d give my eye teeth to be on the short list for the Hartdale.
By the time we depart Carmel, both of us are pretty far into the chardonnay. Perhaps Scott should not be driving, but then, neither should I. I let him go ahead and rev up and we strap ourselves in, both of us wobbly. The moon is out in its crescent guise, some stars are arrayed. And I have my agenda planned. I am going to wait until we are moderately well along the way, say eight or ten miles, and then I am going to broach the subject of Danielle.
“ ‘I went down to Saint James Infirmary,’ ” I begin, filling in time, but also touching on my topic, yesterday’s love.
Scott says I have a nice voice but it would be terrific if I could keep a tune. I try another lament. “ ‘Give me one for my baby and one more for . . .’ ”
“For God’s sake, cool it,” Scott instructs.
So okay, maybe I touched a nerve. I let five minutes go by until we’re beyond most of the lights and distractions. We’re on the four-lane highway that will eventually hit State One. The wind whips, but the night is friendly; it’s not cold. “Tell me about Danielle,” I say.
“Good God. Why?”
“I’m curious. How old was she? How did you meet her?”
“Cut it out. What’s Danielle to you or you to Danielle?”
“Don’t quote.”
“Danielle was a pretty girl I was in college with. Why do you care?”
“You talked about her; Rita did, too; so does my dad; so does Egon. Everybody mentions her, but nobody actually says anything.”
“So, forget it. She was just somebody.”
“Somebody important.”
“Just somebody.”
“And I saw a picture of her.”
“A picture? What picture?”
“A shot of all the gang on a dig. She was in it.”
“Oh. That picture.”
“She was nice-looking.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Long blond hair. Good shape.”
“Listen, what the hell are you doing?”
“And,” I pursue my advantage, “Rita’s boyfriend had a picture of her.”
“Rita’s boyfriend? Who the fuck is Rita’s boyfriend?”
“Rita’s boyfriend is this fairly neutral jerk named George Marziano and he had a studio picture of Danielle.”
Scott tries to drive the car into the divider. He corrects and pulls it back, not doing too well. We wobble for a while. He says, “What in hell are you into? All of a sudden you talk about Rita’s boyfriend. And I knew Rita really well and never heard anything about a boyfriend and now you say it’s a boyfriend who has a picture of Danielle?”
“He does. Or he used to. A studio picture. A big, glossy, nine-by-twelve shot.”
“Of Danielle? What’s she doing?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see the picture. Rita got rid of it. Danielle was nude, though; that’s what George says.”
Scott tries now to drive the car into the right-hand lane of traffic. He says, “Christ crucified. Cut this out right now. Quit talking about Danielle.”
“You’d better pull over,” I instruct.
“I won’t pull over. I have no intention of doing so.”
The car is wobbling irritatedly. The highway has almost reached the side road that leads to State Highway 101, which we don’t want, but where there is a traffic island with a gas station and a sign that reads, COFFEE—SNAX.
“Pull over,” I say, “we’ll get coffee. I could sure use some.”
“No.”
“Yes,” I say. “Please.”
To my total amazement this works. Maybe I sound sufficiently humble and nice. Maybe he really does want to talk about Danielle. Or to find out what I know about her. He negotiates the lane traversal with only a couple of close calls and we skid, tires protesting, into Mack’s Crossing—Gas.
Nobody’s around who looks like Mack. Gas is dispensed by machine and so is the coffee, which I can see inside in a shiny blue-and-red machine. A Latina lady in a red muumuu sits beside a large sign that says, CLERK HAS ONLY TEN DOLLARS IN CASH.
Scott parks on the side and trails on into the snack cubicle, where I can see him negotiating with the coffee machine. Eventually he comes out with two plastic cups. He gives me one and slumps against the steering wheel, holding his cup carefully upright, sipping slowly.
Finally he says, “Danielle was my girlfriend in college. She went to med school and I followed. So why do you care?”
“And she got to be an archaeologist?”
“Sure. So did I. She was really smart.”
“What kind of smart?”
“Any kind you like. Fast. Intuitive. Intellectual. Photographic memory. Restless. Why in hell do you care?”
“And she was pretty.”
“She was beautiful.”
“She had a lot of boyfriends.”
“Lovers. She had a ton of lovers. She had me, she had Marcus, she had somebody named Nizham, she had a couple of curators. They weren’t exactly lovers; they were in love with her; she didn’t care spit for them.”
“Did she love you?”
“She kept coming back to me.”
“Rita liked her.”
“Rita hated her. Reet was jealous of her—lots of people were.”
“You always talk about her in the past tense.”
“Yeah, I do. I talk about a lot of stuff in the past tense. I talk about being here and finding or not finding something on that dig and maybe getting the Hartdale and all that other stupid crap in the past tense. Danielle is past to me. She and I are over. Will you for God’s sake get the hell off my case?” He grabs my coffee, which I have only half finished, and, managing to hold two cups in one hand, lurches out of the car and toward the trash can.
And we depart Mack’s with screeching tires. We have a couple of near misses getting back into the intersection.
Scott is driving so tensely that I decide I’d better be quiet. So I am quiet and he is quiet and this keeps up for miles and miles. He’s driving as if he is still really angry. Furious, you could say. Snapping the steering wheel back and forth. There’s almost no other traffic, but after we leave the towns behind us, the road gets very narrow and there is always that invisible drop down to where the ocean must be.
“Cool it already,” I say once and get no reaction.
He grunts when a fox darts in front of us.
That’s the only sound all the way back to the Manor. He skids up to the entry and leaves me to open the car door for myself.
Which of course I always try to do. But Scott usually has those antediluvean good manners that go with what I suspect is his landed-gentleman background.
“Listen,” he says when I’m out of the car and on my feet, “this is somebody I was real close to once and not anymore. I had strong feelings about it once and not anymore. I don’t like to talk about it. And it’s my business. Are we clear?”
Erased From Memory Page 17