"I believe the cops, for right now. Talk to Marty yet?'
"Sure."
"I did, too, last week. The captain doth protest too much. To me, it looks bad. Blunt-force trauma. Quite a ring to it. Bashers are furious, very bold, and poor personal groomers. They sometimes affect beards. They often see themselves as outdoorsmen, lovers of nature. They also have the problem of what to do with their blunt instruments—leave 'em or keep 'em? You know what intrigues me? His marks are all minorities. I sense the offspring some racist, archconservative, neofascist John Birch Society Orange Countians. So stay on it, Russ—maybe there's another book in it for you. Speaking of which, I saw Under Scorpio Crown for a buck ninety-eight yesterday. Hardcover."
The two-dollar shelf at Crown is a pillory. On the other hand, a book is a book and a lot of hard work goes into one and some are bound to do better than others.
"It wasn't that bad a book. I took some chances."
"So did Custer. I bought six anyway. Gifts, you know.
"Thanks, Erik. Still enjoying your appointment as Amber Mae's financial czar?"
"Yes. Consulting with Mr. Saltz on any of Amber's many financial messes is a balm to me. Not surprisingly, she only trusts me with the small stuff, the liquid diet, she calls it."
This I understood. Amber's parsimony and hypercautiousness regarding money had been clear to me from the beginning, back when she was poor and had good enough reason to act that way. I recalled a caustic remark from Martin Parish, made a few years ago, after Amber had "settled" their divorce with a mere $75,000 for the vastly out earned Marty—something to the effect of her wallet being even tighter than her ass. Could Martin's resentment have festered? I also recalled, oh, quite clearly, how Amber had previously offered me that same amount—$75,000—as enticement to keep me from filing a palimony suit. I had no intention of suing her, nor of accepting the money, and I clearly remember the bitterly comic battles we had over the issue.
What I would have given at that point, some twenty years later, to have $75,000 in the bank!
"I can smell her perfume on the checks," said Erik. "I'd screw them if I could get them to hold still long enough. It's amazing how a person so beautiful and bright can be so stupid. Speaking of beauty, how is Izzy?"
"Isabella is perfect."
"Your insurance doing what it's supposed to?"
"Yes."
"Let me know if there's something I can do for you two. We rejects have to stand together."
"The proud, the many."
"Take care, Russell, and don't try to pass yourself off as me again. You're not nearly smart, handsome, or dangerous enough."
"But I've got the same pain-in-the-ass attitude."
"Mine's better. It comes from the heart."
"When did you get one of those?"
CHAPTER FIVE
That night, distressed and despairing, I made dinner for Isabella Our dinners were always complex productions because Isabel was once a superlative cook and loves to eat. The steroids she was taking to reduce swelling in her head also gave her a robust appetite. She planned the menu; I followed her directions as best I could. The maid prepared breakfast and lunch, then went home. Dinnertime was strictly for us.
Isabella would sit in her wheelchair and direct. She was rested by then, up from a long afternoon nap that sometime started after lunch. I would fuss around in the kitchen, trying to do things right, open a bottle of wine, and start in on it. We would talk.
It was a lot like the old days, if anything can be said to be the way it was before you have a massive seizure, are diagnosed with an inoperable tumor, undergo an experimental radiation-implant procedure, and lose most of the use of your legs because of it. No, it was really not very much like the ole days at all. In fact, Isabella couldn't even look at pictures of herself from earlier times. The smiling, black-haired woman she saw in them seemed a prior blessing that had since been revoked. Isabella is not a vain person—no more than any of us are—but to see that old, strong, vital self was too much for her. She was a big woman. She had gone from 130 shapely, capable pounds to almost 200. Her coal black hair (Isabella is of Mexican descent, her maiden name is Sandoval) had fallen out with the treatments, every last beautiful, wavy shoulder-length strand. Her legs had shrunken from disuse.
It was all that Isabella—a woman who could once skip along on one ski behind a boat doing forty miles an hour— could do to struggle up from her chair and use the cane to move across a room. The stairs leading up to our bedroom were impossible, so we had an elevator installed. The first time Isabella used it, she put on a pair of angels' wings and a halo that she'd worn to a costume party just a few months before. On her lap, she carried the plastic toy-store harp. She started out smiling and ended up crying. I stood there and watched her descend, filled with that strange combination of love for this woman and fury at what had happened to her.
Isabella's world fluctuated between transcendent humor and bitter despair. So did mine.
One thing that Isabella's disease hadn't threatened was her piano playing, the lovely sounds of which would fill our home each afternoon when she got up from her nap. She played Bach and Mozart; she played the show tunes of the thirties, she played Jerry Lee and Elton John; but most of all she played her own compositions, which had come, over the last year, to be the most achingly longing music I had ever heard. When her chords echoed through our stilt house on late afternoons, it was as if Isabella herself were in the air, vibrating through every particle of the place that we called home. It was her breath, her heart, her life. She no longer taught—travel was too difficult and she didn't want her students to see the weight she'd gain and the hair she'd lost. No, Isabella's music was no Ionger profession, but it was one of the two main things that kept her sane. The other—I realized later—was me.
That night, she had chosen an impossible recipe—roast lamb and a chutney sauce I couldn't get right. The vegetables were slaughtered. The rice was dripping but hard. The meat was overdone. Every time I looked down into my wineglass, I saw the puddled ooze on Amber's carpet. I drank the bottle fast.
We were sitting outside on the deck, next to each other, facing south down the canyon toward the sea. Isabella spent hours there during the day, staring off at the parched hills.
"You drink a lot of wine," she said.
"I'm a lot of man."
"Well," she said finally, "be careful, Russ. It's getting be every night. More than a little."
"I know."
"It w-w-worries me."
The truth of the matter is that I was drinking an awful lot then. There were two different worlds for me—the regular one and the one I could enter through alcohol. I preferred the latter. It was a place of only the past and the future, no present, place where action won out over thought, where possibility seemed to wait. There was no cancer in it. I was drunk when I'd called Amber the night before. I was drunk when I'd gone over there. Sober, I'd have done neither. Sober, my world had begun to be a land of pure obligation and utility. I felt like a post in the ground. But from the bottle called the twin worlds of yesterday and tomorrow—thoughtless acceleration, unrestrained speed. I needed motion. I craved it.
So I opened the second bottle. The sun had gone down but there was still an orange glow over the hills. A vulture Ianded on the power pole and looked down at us. I despised it. It was a huge bird, and Izzy had named him Black Death. She named a lot of things in our hillsides. I threw the empty wine bottle at it and it flew away. The bottle vanished into the sagebrush that thrives on our thirsty hillside. Predictably, with all the new development to the south and west behind Laguna, the displaced wildlife has begun to concentrate in our hills. Deer and coyote abound, much to the denigration of local roses and cats. Hawks and vultures fill the air daily, and I have spotted, just recently and for the first time, several bobcats. I killed two five-foot rattlesnakes on my driveway last summer and captured a third that had two heads, which I donated to the Los Angeles Zoo. An older woman on our stree
t was walking her teacup poodle one spring afternoon, only to have the tiny dog swept from the pavement by a vulture (possibly Black Death himself). Since the vulture is, according to ornithologists, strictly a scavenger, the vulture attack was downgraded to a hawk attack by the local press. But I know the old woman—her name is Astrid Kilfoy— and she's lived in this canyon long enough to tell a vulture from a red-tail. As nature is compressed, she metastasizes terrible, aberrant things. Like the tumor in Isabella's skull. Like the Midnight Eye.
I told Isabella about my day—mainly hanging around the cops trying to get the scent for my next book. I came that close to telling her about Amber, but that close was still a million miles away.
"Do you have your subject y-yet?"
"No. I'm still thinking about fiction."
"I think you'd be a fine fiction writer."
"I'm tempted and worried at the same time. Before, I've always had the story there for me. In fiction, I'd have to make it up."
Isabella thought about this for a long minute. "But that way, it can end how you want it to. The hero can get the girl and the good guys can shoot the bad guys. And you wouldn’t have to visit those terrible men in p-prison."
She asked for seconds. I served them up in the kitchen and started back outside. Around the house, Isabella wore baseball caps to hide the nakedness of her head. I liked her head the way it was—its smoothness and humility, its honesty— I liked it a whole lot better when it had Isabella's rich black hair. Coming up on her from behind with the plate, I stopped for just a moment, rocked for the millionth time by how it had changed. She looked like a little man sitting there, a fan perhaps, her cap tilted at a jaunty angle as she looked off into the west hills. I could see the line of her cheek, her fork held midair and not moving. God I love you, I thought. God, help me love more. God, do something good for her or I'll cut your heart with a chain saw and feed it to Black Death. So Jah seh.
I put down the plate, sat, drank. "Things are starting scare me," I said. The wine was beginning to talk. "Nonfiction seems like a terrible thing to try to capture. Who wants to. There's no order. Killers prey on people at random. Good people like you get sick."
"Nature is cruel," said Isabella. "I quit trying to figure out why a year ago. But if you wrote ffiction, you could change that. The killer could get a brain tumor. The hero's wife could be beautiful and slender and have long black hair and help him solve the crime. She could cook for him. At night, she could take him to bed and love him. She wouldn't be a two-hundred pound bald whale."
"You're not a whale—"
"I look like one. I look in the mirror and I can't believe it's me."
"You'll lose the weight when you get off the steroids, not your fault."
"No wonder you drink so much. I would, too, if I had to look at me."
And there sat Isabella in her wheelchair, a once-beautiful woman racked by medicine and cancer, tears running down her face and off her chin. The neurologist had warned us about mood swings caused by drugs. Swing is not the right word.
I knelt down beside her and put my head in her lap. The Fourth of July fireworks show started down on Main Beach and I could see the bright blossoms unfolding in the sky, followed by the distant thud of the launcher. I kept seeing Amber's head in the red explosions.
For a moment, I thought about Amber and Isabella together, about how different they were and how different— opposite, really—were the things that had led me to love each of them. What had drawn me to Amber was her mystery, her odd lack of substance, her absolute aloneness in the world. She rarely spoke of her family, and not once in the years we were together did I ever meet her parents or her sister, who lived, Amber said, in Florida. She told me once, with that natural, unforced arrogance she wore so well, that her sister—Alice, I think it was—was the only woman in the world prettier than she was. There was some feud between them that had ended in estrangement, but Amber's details were not forthcoming. She never called anyone in her family; never wrote; never mentioned missing them even around the holidays. Her family name was actually Fultz, which Amber changed to Wilson as soon as she was old enough. I wanted to protect her. I wanted to give her connection. I always believed that I could fill that huge emptiness surrounding Amber Mae. What I didn't understand until much later was that she never wanted it filled.
Years after that, when I met Isabella's family for the first time, I saw the difference in bold relief. There was a closeness there, a strong sense of interconnectedness, a blurred set of borders where she left off and her parents—-Joe and Corrine---began. And where Amber was alone and vague and fore-molting one skin for another, Isabella was positioned firmly with her people, forthright, and quietly content with them and with herself. As I fell in love with Isabella, I plunged gratefully into that pool of connection, wondering sometimes why I had be so taken with Amber's solitude and secrecy.
And while I sat there on the deck with my head in Isabella's lap, I was proud of her, and of myself for having had the good sense to marry her.
"When you go downtown at night, do you look at other g-girls?"
"No. I think about you."
"Then why do you go?"
"I need to be away sometimes."
"That hurts me more than anything else. That you need to get away from me. Remember how it used to be when we were always together?"
"It can be that way again. We'll have that again."
"But you need to get away from me and I understand. I know you have to dress me in the morning when you wish you were writing, and you do all the shopping and errands, and you clean up after me. And you do the c-cooking at night and the dishes. And you don't have a social life anymore because I don't want people to see what a pig you have for a wife. And I know I don't like our friends to come over. And I know you wanted babies, Russ—because I wanted them even more than you did. And I know now when you Iook into the future, all you can see is me getting w-worse. I can’t stand the look on your face sometimes. It's so full of regret and hate. It scares me."
I drank more. "It's not you I hate, Iz. It's the sickness. It’s not our life I regret. It's all the things we wanted to do."
"I wish I could change it. I've tried so better to get hard. I mean—"
"I know. You're doing everything you can, baby."
Her speech was deteriorating more rapidly. She stroked my hair for a long while. The fireworks burst open in colors, lobbed fading comets down toward the hills. Fresh ones wobbled upward through the darkness, leaving smoke trails. Coyotes yipped from some unspecified distance, their cries bouncing madly around the night. I looked out to the hillsides and followed the outline of Our Lady of the Canyon—one of Isabella's favorite formations. At night, two hills running one behind the other became a pregnant woman lying supine against the sky; the sandstone became her hair, the oak stands became her breasts, and the lights of the city spraying up from between her legs became a soft glow in the place her genitals would be. Isabella had named her. You couldn't even see her during the day. Isabella had even named the sound the wind made—or was it the cry of some misplaced animal?—a keening moan that issued from deep in the canyon on some nights. She called him the Man of the Dark.
"Our Lady of the Canyon looks nice tonight," I said. Her sobbing stopped. She drew a deep breath and I felt it shudder back out of her chest. "She's watching the show, too."
It is hard to describe what I felt then, kneeling beside Isabella's chair. Have you ever known helplessness while someone you love is suffering? Have you ever cursed God for what He has done? Have you ever felt your heart throbbing with so much love and rage that they get mixed up and you can't tell one from the other?
Well, let me tell you this: No matter how deep my own despair was, I knew it was nothing compared to hers; knew that I could only follow her so far out on that gangplank she was being forced to walk over deep black water. Isabella was the one it was happening to. Isabella was having this nightmare. Isabella—no matter how I felt or what I said—was in t
his alone. And she knew it.
"I'm done with my little outburst," she said finally. "What for d-dessert?"
By nine, I had done the dishes, gotten Isabella undressed and into bed, and almost finished the wine. My heart was beginning to beat faster. I could feel the motion coming on. I imagined breeze blowing against my face, objects racing past. I was a unfettered spirit, rushing with the wind down Laguna Canyon. I was a thing without conscience. I was free.
I kissed Isabella good night.
"Don't stay out too late," she said. "Don't smile at an big-titted blondes."
"No. I'll be good."
CHAPTER SIX
I drove back down to South Laguna and parked a hundred feet short of Amber's solitary mansion. It looked just as it had the night before, the one faint light coming from deep within. Reuben Saltz had not gone into the bedroom. No, of course not. He had stood in the entryway, called out to her, heard nothing, maybe climbed halfway up the stairs before the creeping dread of being in someone else's home uninvited turned him back.
I took a drink from the flask. With all my love, Isabella. A voice inside told me to get out of there, go back home to all that love, preserve myself. But the voice was faint, drowned by alcohol. Yes, I wanted that love, but I wanted more. I wanted that other world now, the world of speed, the world with no history and no conscience. I got my gloves from the trunk and put them on.
Down the sidewalk, through the gate, along the stepping-stone walkway, around the corner of the house and onto the patio. The same half moonlight of the night before, a fraction, gradient brighter, maybe.
The glass door was shut and the screen door was pulled tight. I put my finger to the mesh—the flap gave, then closed
But neither was locked. Because you can't lock them from the outside, I thought, because whoever has been here since last night didn't want to be seen going out the front. Reuben?''
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