by Susan Dunlap
‘I just told you that!’
He hadn’t, of course.
‘Ferente’s her name. But she was married to a guy named Rousseau.’
‘Does she go by Rousseau?’
‘She could.’
How had this man lived this long without someone strangling him? ‘R-o-u two s’s e-a-u?’
‘Like it sounds.’
‘Wally, do you expect me to find her under this name?’
‘You could.’
‘Then why not cut to the chase and give me her phone number. Which … you … have?’ Dammit!
The silence from his end went on so long I was on the verge of hanging up and calling again, when he said, ‘Five one oh …’
East Bay.
I copied the rest of the number, repeated it – laboriously – thanked him and just about hung up.
‘Don’t tell her I gave it to you.’
‘I won’t.’ I’ll add your secret to Gracie’s and Gary’s.
‘Tell me what she says.’ There was such an earnestness to his request that I censored my first choice of response and just agreed.
I called her. Left a message and my numbers, changed into running clothes to whip by Gary’s office and pick up the Aston Martin and make my way back here from wherever I could find a piece of curb in Gary’s parking district to leave the car. If I veered back across Broadway here, I’d have to move that sedan every two hours. One scratch would cost more than I’d earned this calendar year.
The landline was blinking. A message.
‘Hey, Darce’ – it was Mike – ‘here’s the number … Two something … Wait.’ The swish of fumbling mixed with a metallic buzz. ‘Here. 287-4398. Wait … Sun’s hitting the screen. Yeah, here, 237-4898. OK?’ More phone rumbling. ‘Be careful. You know that, right? Seriously. I should never have let you shove me on to the ferry. I almost jumped into the bay and swam back. I would have. You were watching me, right? Hey, sorry I missed you. And, well, thanks. I’ll call later.’
I was so relieved I slid down to sitting and leaned against the wall, still holding the receiver.
Then I was annoyed.
I listened to the message again. What jumped out were his pauses. Mike was not a pauser. When I was a kid I assumed he possessed all knowledge. Later, I had the sense that his poise came from having chosen his role before a scene began. It gave me a queasy feeling and I’d always assured myself that while my favorite brother might cop a pose for others, he was natural with me.
Whatever the backdrop, Mike never hesitated, doubled back, allowed himself to sound exhausted … unsure – and, oh God, wary – like this.
Wary … and he didn’t even know about the figure in the shadows or the cracking of his windshield. Or Gracie’s steps. Or Gary’s garage.
Damn it, if I had him on the line I could ask.
And Mike would say …?
I replayed the message, hoping I’d missed some positive allusion, or at least some better rationale for his uneasiness than the sun shining on the cell-phone screen. But, in fact, what I heard this time was worse. He’d misread the phone number he’d left me, one time or the other. Or maybe both.
I dialed first one, then the other. Neither did he answer. On neither had he remembered – or maybe bothered – to set up the message option. I’d missed him by half an hour! And unless I stationed myself here by the zendo phone, I’d probably miss him the rest of the day. Dammit. He had the answers. Adrienne Ferente, formerly Rousseau, who was she? Where was she? How did he end up house-sitting for her? Free gig? Free love? I dialed his number again. It rang and rang. Didn’t even go to message. Just kept ringing.
If it even was the right number.
When all things are dead ends, do the next thing.
I called John.
As the phone rang I remembered his call two days ago. ‘Call me,’ he’d insisted. I had not.
That wasn’t going to make this conversation better.
The call went to message.
The message said, ‘I will be unavailable for the rest of the week. Leave a message if you want, but I won’t be checking till the weekend.’
When all things are dead ends, and the next thing is a dead end, then what?
TWELVE
Upstairs I found Leo moving his robes from the closet rack to a hook on the door, hand-brushing them, inspecting the edges for fraying. The bell rings into silence, he’d said, more than once, meaning that at zazen, the timekeeper does not ring the bell at the moment the period is scheduled to begin, but waits until latecomers have entered, settled on their cushions, and the room is silent. So that the bell is not just one more noise in the room, but a note once struck that pulls everyone into the communion of silence.
For Leo, the ritual of moving robes, getting dressed, walking downstairs and into the zendo was his preparation for the bell.
It meant I had time to change, too. But not to do anything else. Not that I had a plan, other than to go back to Mike’s apartment and hope.
Leo glanced over as I reached the hallway. ‘Take-out after zazen?’
‘Sure.’
‘Tacos?’
‘Sure.’
He must have seen something in my face. He said, ‘I’ll make the call.’
‘Thanks.’
When the bell rang into the early evening silence twenty minutes later, I let myself be pulled in by the widening ripples of the ever-softer reverberations. The candles that had been almost invisible when we entered flickered against dusk by the end. Sometimes zazen is a long flow of calm, sometimes it’s thoughts yanking on the hem of your mind. You let one go, only to have it replaced by another. Some of both happened, but one thought kept pulling at me: burritos.
‘There was this great burrito shop Mike took me to when I was a kid,’ I said to Leo upstairs after zazen. ‘Fish burritos before anyplace else had them. They actually put abalone in them. No one does that! God, it was good. I’d forgotten about it. Place with a funny name. Jansen’s Burritos. I wonder if it’s still in business. It’d be pretty far for take-out.’
He pulled out his phone, checked. ‘Maybe they’re there but no listing. Jalisco OK? I’ll call and go get it.’
I did the phone check dance. Nothing from Adrienne – if, in fact, she’d ever gotten a message from Wally to call me. Nothing from Mike, not on the landline or my cell. ‘I’m here till at least eight. Call me on the landline,’ I said to each of their messages. ‘Don’t put it off. I’ll just keep bugging you,’ I added to Mike.
‘Dinner!’ Leo sang out twenty minutes later, as his rubber- soled shoes splatted on the stairs.
We Lotts have an erratic relationship with food. To a one, we’re irresponsible about mealtimes. But when food materializes it’s like a visit from an old and dear friend. We settle in for the duration. Or just about make pests of ourselves coming back again and again. Like with Jansen’s chorizo and petrale burritos with the bits of abalone.
‘Jansen’s burritos?’ Leo asked after we’d finished Jalisco’s trout and guacamole. He was sitting cross-legged on his futon in his room, leaning back against the wall like a man making room for his stomach. The containers formed a centerpiece between us on the floor that passed for a table.
‘Jansen married well. Mike said all the guy contributed to the restaurant was his name.’
Leo looked like he might have commented but didn’t.
I was picturing Jansen’s back then. ‘The place was tiny – half a storefront wide; more like a food cart without wheels. The family’d had a restaurant in Mexico, I think. No one’s English was more than passable. The youngest girl translated. But it didn’t matter. The whole family knew Mike and made a big deal over me, his sister. They let me pretend I was employed in the burrito-making line. They were always refining my technique.’
He raised an eyebrow and reached for a bit of tortilla to scoop up the remains of the rice and salsa.
‘Burrito building – not too much rice on the tortilla or it dulls down the
taste of the fish. But too little and the juice squirts out as soon as the customer takes a bite. Know your Anglos who think they can handle chili and can’t. Senora Perez had a watered-down bottle of hot sauce for them.
‘Their burrito was huge. By the time they added the extra fish, extra beans, sour cream, it looked like a ham hock in a tortilla. Mike and I had to take two buses to stop there.’ I was twelve, Mike sixteen. In three years he would disappear. ‘Back then we’d go to a Giants game every month or so. Fans, but not big fans. We’d make a day of it: Jansen’s for lunch, and then Candlestick, where you can freeze on any summer day. Mike’s rule was keep eating to ward off the cold.’ I grinned.
‘I told Gary about all this after Mike disappeared. His assumption was Mike didn’t care about the food, that he was meeting a girl there.’
‘Was he?’
‘John said, What?’
‘Was he meeting a girl?’ Leo had stopped eating and sat, just waiting.
He was asking not about the girl, but – I realized – about me. Had I noticed what Mike was doing?
‘I don’t think so. Girls flocked to him. He didn’t have to go all that way. I’m sure …’
Leo caught my eye.
‘OK, I assume there’s no reason he would have. The whole food and ballgame was a ritual between us.’
‘To carry yourself forward and experience the myriad of thing …’
It was a moment before I finished Dogen-zenji’s teaching, ‘… is delusion.’
Eihei Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism was talking about enlightenment and delusion. But Leo wasn’t.
‘You mean me and Mike?’
He continued eating, leaving me to contemplate just what he did mean.
I returned to my dinner too. Nothing puts a Lott off her food. I could have pondered Leo’s comment. Instead I tried to picture Jansen’s, tried to see not the men cooking, not the mother folding napkins, the three daughters working the food line and the register, too busy to have time for Mike, not even the line outside blocking the driveway, the house next door and into its driveway, but to draw back the memory of the people nearby. While I was scooping white fish and chorizo with the slotted spoon, was Mike outside chatting up a girl? Dark hair? Blonde? A redhead like the two of us?
Could that have been the point of these trips?
Could the girl have been Adrienne Ferente? Was that the connection? Or was this a wild, desperate grab for illusion?
Adrienne Ferente whom, in any case, I couldn’t track down.
Adrienne Ferente to whose apartment I had the key.
At 10.30 p.m. I scored a parking spot a block from Adrienne/Mike’s apartment, on the street that borders the park panhandle, a wide grassy island between fast streets to and from the freeway. Haight Street might still have been popping, but Oak Street was as quiet as its rustic name indicated. Cars swished by on their way to downtown, or 101 north to the Bay Bridge or south to San Jose, but they were merely a river flowing beyond the shore. The Victorian houses that danced in blues and purples in daylight were shadowy frames for dim glows of computers or TVs. Occasionally traces of marijuana glided lazily across the sidewalk, as if it knew its days of being an illegal and thrilling danger were over and it was all but legal already. As if those fetors carried off bits of the Haight-Ashbury as they drifted over the rest of the city.
As the stampede of gentrification raced back over it.
I spotted Mike’s house by Wally’s open second-story window and the bright ceiling light. And the grumble and jolts of men’s voices. The shades were up and Subhuti, the big guy from Jersey with the oddly Buddhist name, kept bouncing out of his chair.
The front door was locked, but I still had Mike’s key. His apartment, on the ground floor, was dark. Good. I needed undisturbed time to uncover an address, a phone number, something to lead me to Adrienne’s temporary place in the East Bay. And then there was the Glock in the bedroom drawer. Still there?
Before I could reach for the knob, a thump from above shook the hallway floor.
I headed upstairs. ‘Hi,’ I said, opening the unlocked door. The place looked like grad students had been in residence for a semester. Like a hurricane, a tornado and a flood had converged. Like surfaces other than the floor did not exist. Like dishes of what must once have been food were dissolving into the jumble of blankets and clothes and books on the floor. ‘Wow.’
Heather laughed. Tom looked sheepish. Subhuti – Boots, I recalled – glanced over at the source of the sound – me – and turned back to the computer screen.
‘Good point, Tom, if nothing gets in your way,’ he said, gliding over the slight disturbance of my arrival. ‘Like Maroski said this morning, you got, what, maybe a year to make it.’
‘But if your app’s got legs—’
Boots brushed her off. ‘Got legs? It walks. Away from you. You’re lucky you get bought out. Not so hot, you fail.’
‘But local—’
‘Heather, my dear, they’re all local. Look, like Jeffers said, you start a local service, you know, like valet for a day. Client places the order at midnight, for six a.m. Order goes to your hub here or maybe you’ve outsourced to Mumbai for overnight. Either way, it shoots back to humans. Either you got a guy in Ess Eff who texts local providers, or you’ve got that automated. But, bottom line, honey, the guy who presses the suit lives here.’
Heather rolled her eyes. Tom, his arm still around her shoulder, gave it a quick squeeze.
‘Let’s say you succeed, despite dealing with independent providers who are independent because they like working their own schedule. Despite customers making repeat deals directly with them and cutting out the middle man—’
‘You?’
‘Right.’
‘Stuff happens,’ Tom muttered in a way that suggested it had happened to him.
‘Right. Provider gets a flat tire.’
‘Or a better offer.’
‘Can’t find the address. Can’t stand the client. Can’t—’
‘Got it,’ Tom cut in.
‘So you’re big stuff. With luck you get a big buy-out.’
‘Like you told me.’ How many times?
‘More likely you get shafted.’
‘Like you told—’
‘My point, Tom, is that you gotta work your ass off in that year, ’cause that’s all you’re going to get. You gotta see it as a stepping stone. You gotta position yourself for the leap.’
Tom sighed, stood and said, ‘Like you said.’ And headed to the bathroom.
‘Like yours.’ Boots shifted to face Heather. ‘You got your cold case, you got your crowd-sourcing. It’s all local. Maybe you’re in, say, Orono, Maine, but every bit of information you collected comes from someone local to the case, right?’
‘Yes, but I sift it, post it to anyone, anywhere. I’ve been doing it for years and I know—’
He lifted a hand, effectively brushing off her observation on her own project. ‘You don’t got local, you don’t got nothin’.’
Now I realized why the window was open. The slight aroma of marijuana didn’t begin to cover the smell of going-bad food.
‘Yeah, wow!’ Wally, the curmudgeon in residence, peered out of the kitchen. He glared at our living-room trio, down at the wet bowl in his hands, and over at me, his expression of weary disgust never altering. It was like he clothed himself in long-suffering and the garb suited him. His face drooped into culverts, from his sunken cheeks to the troughs from the corners of his tight and downturned mouth. Does there come a time, I wondered, when a smile is no longer physiologically possible?
‘You gave me the wrong number for Adrienne.’
‘How—’
‘She hasn’t called back.’
From his expression, I might have said ‘the sun’s not rising at midnight,’ or ‘the impound lot isn’t providing valet service,’ or ‘the threesome in the living room aren’t planning a trip to the art museum.’ But his gaze flickered to a drawer and b
ack. ‘I can check her number.’
‘Just call her. Now.’
‘It’s the middle of the night! If it weren’t for these clowns I’d be tucked in bed.’
‘With her?’
‘She wishes!’
It’s said that men do not see their bodies as critically as do women. Even so, it was hard to imagine Wally standing in front of the mirror muttering, ‘Come and get it, ladies.’
‘Just call her. Tell her I’m driving you crazy and it’s her fault.’
For once Wally stood silent. Apparently I had taken the words out of his mouth.
I started through the living room and said over my shoulder, ‘I’m going downstairs to check something for Mike.’
Heather perked up. I had the feeling that she figured whatever I might do down there had to be more interesting than the argument up here. But before she could move, Tom, staring at the screen, wrapped his arm tighter around her shoulder. Boots reached into a big plastic bowl and pawed up a mound of orange cracker-y stuff. But not fast enough to cover a spark of jealousy.
Recalling the gun in Adrienne’s bedroom downstairs, I glanced out the window. ‘Hey, you guys, have you had any problems, danger-wise?’
Tom and Boot shrugged, but it was Heather I watched. She hesitated.
‘Heather?’
She shook her head.
I held my gaze.
‘Well, you know, I’m not from here, so maybe I’m just not ready for the city, you know?’
‘But …?’
‘Well, a couple times I had the feeling someone was following me. But then I looked around and there were just other people behind. No one—’
‘Big, bad and scary,’ Boots put in.
‘Yeah,’ Heather said, seeming relieved.
‘I’ll take you downstairs.’ This from Wally.
‘I’m fine.’
‘S’OK. I’m going. Not hanging around here,’ he said, eyeing the three, who were ignoring him.
I’d counted on being alone. But ‘things as it is,’ Suzuki-roshi said, intentionally ungrammatically. We suffer because we want things to be different than they are. So, I’d suffer Wally.
‘What did the apartment look like before it was tossed? When Mike was just living there?’ I asked as we headed downstairs.