Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  After he’d packed up the necessaries he did the dishes anyway. Then he delivered the luggage down the steps to the Datsun. Somebody had scrawled NATURE BATS LAST with a finger in the grime on the back window. After four more round trips, all the way to the bottom of the steps and back, each trip with two boxes of books, four and more rest stops, and weight loss through perspiration, he washed down a fistful of pills with an entire liter of water, and called a cab. With a final box of books on one shoulder, and a valise in the balancing hand, he walked out.

  Click of lock, end of chapter. Forty years passed through him like a breeze down a canyon, the last two of these years a mere dust devil at the far end of it. From a wire across the street, a mockingbird loudly proclaimed its freedom. It sounded a lot like a car alarm.

  The staircase ended at the sidewalk on the west side of De Haro Street. He sat on the third step, waiting for the taxi. Far beyond the roof of the old Pioneer Soap Factory, two blocks away, now converted to live/work lofts—all meanings of those three nouns long since up for grabs, and are we hysterical yet?—tendrils of fog flirted with the south end of Yerba Buena Island. The lower deck of the Bay Bridge thronged with the evening’s traffic, a slow-motion existential bullet that he had managed to dodge all his working life. Engrave it on the toothless old rake’s drawer in the columbarium: NEVER COMMUTED. There’s an accomplishment.

  As for the present view, encroaching development would soon demolish it. Quentin permitted himself a rueful smile. He had enjoyed his use of that view, the memory and the reality of which might well die with the rest of him. Somewhere along the waterfront, probably at Pier 35, a cruise ship gave a long blast of its horn, a warning to its passengers that but half an hour of shopping remained before departure. Three chuckling ravens barreled over the hill above the cottage.

  The driver sized him up at once. He insisted on loading the trunk and back seat of the cab while Quentin waited in the front passenger seat. When the cabbie had joined him, Quentin gave their destination as Green Apple Books.

  “Sixth and Clement,” the cabbie said.

  The books were quality titles in poetry, fiction, history. Much of the contemporary work was signed by the author. The Thom Gunn titles, for example. Jack Straw’s Castle. Boss Cupid. Long gone Thom Gunn. The signed books might be worth something. The poetry was. It developed that the cabbie read history. Quentin made him a gift of Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy, boxed.

  Signed or not, the remaining books were all in good shape, they would find good homes. The transaction would precede a delicious supper in an excellent Burmese restaurant on California Street, not far from the bookstore, followed by a good night’s sleep in a room rentable by the night, by the week, by the month. And maybe, Quentin thought with a twinkle in his eye, some paid companionship. Gourmet room service or bathroom up the hall, what difference did it make?

  The succeeding units of time he would take as, and if, they were served.

  THIRTEEN

  TIPSY LEFT THE BAR, ABOUT AN HOUR AFTER QUENTIN, IN HER CLAPPED-OUT Beamer. Green exterior, black interior, no back seat, a bag of golf clubs in the trunk forgotten since the last time she’d had a flat tire, it started and got her home. DUI be damned. She was legally drunk, too. DUI be double damned.

  She had offered to give the clubs to the cute guy from AAA who came to fix that flat maybe five years ago. Six? Seven? He declined to accept them. You don’t play golf? Tipsy had asked him, not even half seriously. By way of a serious answer, however, the lad had recited a few verses from Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey.

  Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

  of that man skilled in all ways of contending …

  Goddamn it, Tipsy had thought at the time, doesn’t anybody in this town read trash anymore?

  As the air wrench spun five nuts off the Beamer’s left rear wheel, the strophes kept flowing.

  … the wanderer, harried for years on end,

  after he plundered the stronghold

  on the proud height of Troy …

  He set the flat to one side, saying, “There’re twenty-four books in Homer’s Odyssey. I’ve got ten of them puppies memorized.” He rolled the spare in front of the wheel well and lined up the holes in the rim with the lugs on the hub. “I don’t have time to play golf.” He lifted the wheel and seated it. “Book Eleven is called A Gathering of Shades.” As he hand-started each of the five nuts, he recited.

  And Heraklês, down the vistas of the dead,

  faded from sight; but I stood fast,

  awaiting other great souls who perished in times past.

  I should have met, then, god-begotten Theseus

  and Peirithoös, whom both I longed to see,

  but first came—came …

  he forestalled an interruption by raising one hand. Darren, as was stitched on his shirt, getting cuter by the minute, rested his forehead against the sidewall of the newly mounted tire, and closed his eyes. With a curious sense of anticipation, Tipsy watched as his lips moved in silence. At length the kid nodded.

  … but first came shades in thousands, rustling

  in a pandemonium of whispers, blown together,

  and the horror took me that Perséphonê

  had brought from darker hell some saurian death’s head.

  I whirled then, made for the ship, shouted to crewmen

  to get aboard and cast off the stern hawsers,

  an order soon obeyed. They took their thwarts,

  and the ship went leaping toward the stream of Ocean

  first under oars, then with a following wind.

  He cross-torqued the lug nuts with an airwrench. “That’s the last stanza of Book Eleven,” he said between nuts one and four. “Thirteen books to go.” He looked up at her and smiled. His smile dazzling, his skin unmarked by care or time, he squinted against the sun and told her, “I don’t have no fuckin’ time for no fuckin’ golf,” and they both laughed.

  He spared a little time for Tipsy, though. Darren’s wrecker spent a weekend or three parked in front of her house, a spavined copy of the old Doubleday Anchor edition of Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey, a rubberband holding it together, on the dashboard. It turned out it was one of several knackered copies, from one or another of which Darren was seldom to be separated. One thing led to another, accompanied by deepening mutual awareness and, after a few weeks, Darren didn’t come around any more.

  She liked to tell herself she had inspired him.

  It was also possible that he went away because she drank too much and had lousy taste in literature.

  Of course the thought occurred to her that she’d taken Darren home—the other end of the driveway—at least in part because his love for a good book reminded her of her brother. The thought occurred to Quentin, too.

  “Yeah, well,” she said to Quentin, “that’s nice and neat and psychofuckingtheoretical.”

  She hadn’t had a flat tire since, but she had momentarily tuned up her taste in reading. She took a hiatus from cozies, thrillers, crime novels, mysteries, political memoirs, and White House tell-alls to embark upon Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey. Even though tonier literature interfered with her drinking, on account of its demand on her attention span, she continued to drink. And eventually the quantum in literary quality succumbed.

  Darren’s business card surfaced occasionally in the glove compartment, whence, most recently, she’d had to produce the registration and proof of insurance prior to being handcuffed and hauled off to the four hours of jail time mandated by current drunk-driving statutes. That’s why she was thinking of Darren, at the moment …

  Sure, baby. That’s right.

  The driveway and her home were in that block of Quintara that fronts a big playground, way out in the Sunset District, between 40th and 41st Avenues, not a mile from Ocean Beach. A ground-floor beauty parlor had been converted to a modest studio apartment, whose signal virtue was a south-facing pair of warped and pain
t-peeled French doors that opened onto a neglected garden behind the building. This luxury possessed a single fig tree whose fruit Tipsy had never tasted, despite living hard by it for the twelve years since Dhow Jones settled to the bottom for good. A weathered and unpainted Adirondack chair, pushed into the corner between the house and the fence in the northwestern quadrant of the yard, faced the tree. In front of the chair stood a milk crate with a sofa cushion on top of it, her antimacassar, as Tipsy had called the footstool until she looked it up.

  A protective covering for the backs of chairs and sofas. [Etymology: anti- + Macassar, a brand of hair oil.]

  After that, she called it a footstool.

  She often read in the chair, wrapped in a blanket, with a hot toddy to ward off the chill of a summer’s fog. She kept her 2,000-page Webster’s New World Dictionary out there, too, where it lived underneath the chair in a four-bottle wine crate with a hinged lid. She’d paid two dollars for the dictionary at a yard sale. Every time she purchased a bag of potato chips she saved its desiccant pouch for the dictionary crate. Thus the tome mildewed but slowly, and remained equally capable of coughing up etymologies for words like antimacassar, as well as hibernating patiently in its wooden box while its mistress breezed through hundreds of pages of undemanding prose.

  By the way, here is Tipsy’s toddy recipe.

  INTO an 8 oz. mug

  POUR 5 oz. boiling water

  STIR IN 1 teaspoon wild mountain honey

  ADD the juice of 1/4 lemon

  (DISCARD the rind—or SAVE for ZEST)

  FINISH with 1-1/2 oz. rum, brandy, or bourbon

  Guaranteed to keep you warm on the inside while you pursue low-calorie reading in the lee of an unpainted board fence creaking in 25 knots of a fifty-five-degree westerly.

  Which was what was happening by the time the Beamer got Tipsy home. The fig tree was positively hustling in the wind, the ground beneath it littered with fresh and rotting fruit. Since neither Tipsy nor the landlady—who, living in her other house in Napa, was rarely seen, but she kept the upstairs apartment and the parking garage for herself—harvested the fruit, their decay had nurtured a green and orange froth of furiously blooming nasturtiums that had pretty much taken over the garden and most of the fence with the exception of a seldom-trod path of redwood cross-sections that meandered from the active left-hand door of the French casement to the foot of the fig tree, with a well-trod bifurcation to the chair.

  She had a chair at the foot of her bed, too, for the numerous days when it was too wet or cold to read out back. Flush with both arms stood a stack of paperbacks, whose spines retailed the zeitgeist of Tipsy’s reading list. The thrillers of Ross MacDonald, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, many, many Simenons, even the detective novels of Faulkner and Gore Vidal, along with Eric Ambler, Wilkie Collins, Ruth Rendell, Dick Francis, Robert Parker … and the entire early to middle career of Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse through The Unmade Bed, and, once Tipsy discovered that Sagan had taken her pen name from a character in Proust, the C. Scott Moncrief translation, arrived in the form of a gift from Quentin, soon comprised a footstool of its own. Quentin, who had read Remembrance of Things Past twice, nevertheless predicted that Tipsy would never read it. In fact, stacks of books encased the little overstuffed chair not like concrete surrounds a gun emplacement on a Liberty ship. Books spilled into the bathroom, the kitchenette (The Nero Wolfe Cookbook), and the entryway (Dorothy Sayers, Amanda Cross, Judge Dee, Josephine Tey), and she had improvised a unique method of storing these works, which was simply to stand them side by side and let them march along a wall, through doors, into and out of whatever room came next. Good thing she had two rooms—three counting the bath. Periodically, she and Quentin would journey to Green Apple with several boxes of each other’s books and sell them. Buyers at the store always harvested Derek Raymond, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Iris Murdoch, or Wilkie Collins from her boxes, but Quentin always got more money for fewer books.

  The only domestic event which even came close to embarrassing Tipsy was the weekly Dumping of the Bottles. No matter when or how she did it, it made for a lot of noise. And one bottle at a time, carefully placed atop its predecessor in the recycling bin, seemed to take forever.

  “An alcoholic just can’t catch a break,” Tipsy mused to herself, as she carried out the week’s empties and dumped them. And who cares what the neighbors think anyway? And, really, what could they think? That I’m a faded beauty who lives on booze and trash literature? Score one for neighborly percipience. “You would think,” she said to herself, mimicking Quentin, “that after weeping to Edith Piaf while dancing naked in front of the full length mirror on the back of the bathroom door at two o’clock in the morning, you’d be forgiven for making a little noise with the recycling.”

  Ouch, and nevermind. A girl has her secrets. She thinks.

  When the job at Gentilia dried up, as it were, Tipsy had tried to care. But she’d been there for over four years, long past the time to move on. Back in her mind—sometimes not so far—lurked the specter of suicide or, perhaps more precisely, the lure of suicide. In any case, it was an act she considered inevitable rather than rash. By way of a sort of security deposit, she had purchased a .32 caliber automatic pistol in a Reno pawnshop (“That’s a nice example of a purse gun you’ve bought yourself there, little lady.”), along with a couple of boxes of rounds, and passed an afternoon in the desert on the east side of Mono Lake teaching herself how to shoot it. Pistol and the remaining cartridges now patiently awaited the Big Day in the bedside drawer. Health insurance, she called them. She had no other.

  Not that she was ready to consummate that particular inevitability, not just yet. Not even close. Beginning with its simplicity and its solitude, there was much about her routine of drinking and reading that she genuinely enjoyed. An afternoon passed comfortably sipping a drink with Quentin sufficed as a social life. She was under no delusions about what it meant. She knew he sat with her only to humor her. If he canceled a date, it wasn’t because he didn’t enjoy her company, but because he couldn’t gin up, as it were, the stamina sufficient to while away yet another afternoon watching her drink. “The quality of life,” he would apprise into the phone, “is diminishing.”

  Tipsy, on the other hand, had no interest in doing anything else. She’d found that she could read one dynamite thriller after another with no ill effects. Drinking herself to sleep every night had proved equally reliable.

  The real problem was money.

  Once she’d been laid off she qualified for six months of unemployment benefits, with the potential of extending the coverage for another nine months. Sasparilla had helped her con a small disability check from the state due to carpal tunnel syndrome brought on by typing invoices for nipple clamps and the like. You’d think they’d cut her a separate check against her wonder over guys from Iowa who would order penis bracelets big enough to wear on her wrist—but no.

  That had been fourteen months ago.

  Two months left.

  Though the job was waiting for her, Tipsy had put off thinking about the inevitability of going back to Gentilia. She was a woman of a certain age, after all. She’d worked a lot already and had damn little to show for it. Why keep trying? She’d learned any number of little economies. She didn’t have a pet so she didn’t have to buy pet food. She’d learned to live without heat. Her landlady deducted $250 a month from the rent for sweeping the sidewalk in front of the building, for putting the recycling and trash bins out on garbage day and taking them in again, for washing the windows in both apartments. For another $100 a month she allowed two elderly parties who didn’t care to qualify for medical marijuana to come by and pick up the monthly package left for them by that same landlady, who did qualify and resold the benefit. These chores didn’t add up to two full days out of the month. Three hundred fifty bucks left a mere one hundred owing on the rent. The unemployment and disability checks covered that and left her $950 monthl
y for whatever. Booze. Vitamin C. Used thrillers. A slim margin, but not bad. And when Quentin was around, he never let her pay for anything. She’d often wondered what people saw in the novels of Stendhal, or of Elizabeth Taylor, or Dostoyevsky, or Marguerite Duras, or Tolstoy, or Mary Renault, or Faulkner or, god forbid, Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook, in Tipsy’s opinion, was a fine example of a modern novel that put people off reading for keeps and drove them wholesale into the insatiable gorge of television. Nothing Quentin could say had convinced her to reattempt it.

  By Tipsy’s lights, the unexpected twists and surprise turns, the ghastly crime and the fitting comeuppance, the Moral Imperative, that old here-we-go-again feeling, explained things in ways literature did not. Not any literature she’d ever taken the trouble to read, anyway. I mean, a memoir written in 1917? In Russian? Charley, please. Be serious.

  Charley. There sails a guy who took life by the horns, went ten rounds with it, got flattened, picked himself up off the deck and threw himself back into the storm.

  They were born and raised on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Charley attempted to run away two or three times before he actually made it, and still he was only sixteen years old when he got out for real. A year later his first two postcards appeared in the mailbox, one week apart. They came from Egypt and the second one, which appeared first, depicted burning sand, a camel, a squinting man in a djellaba holding the camel’s bridle, a wind-blasted pyramid in the background, it bore a triangular stamp with serrated edges, and it was addressed to Tipsy care of their parents. Likewise the first one, which arrived second, which depicted a nineteenth century drawing of the entrance to a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Put together they read,