by Jim Kohlberg
Her hair was wet and stringy, and the damp of it wafted over me.
“I thought you were breakfast,” Christina said, wrapped in a short terrycloth robe that came only to midthigh. There were freckles in the V of her neck that I remembered matched a swatch on one of her shoulders I couldn’t yet see. Her lips opened and spread in a wide lopsided grin, the teeth so white against skin with a tinge of brown. The light came out her eyes and fed on me and warmed me in a way that made me flower and stagger all at the same time.
“Come in,” she said, opening both arms for a wide-open hug.
I melted into her embrace and the compact smallness of her, with both tenderness and fear for her safety. I had always wanted to protect her, even when I realized I needed to be protected from her as well. With her arms around me and the robe slightly parted but still belted closed, she spoke so closely I felt her breath trickle at my neck: “It’s so good to see you today, Max. I’m feeling better, thanks to you. Now that I’m out of that awful . . . place.”
Before I could answer, she let go and slid her hand in mine, her tiny hand, a thin, soft, electric touch, and led me down the short narrow hall into the wide suite.
“You got me a beautiful room,” she said, letting me stand on the threshold and look out the large plate-glass window to the Bay Bridge and the Oakland Hills. Morning traffic streamed across the span and a Sausalito ferry cut a white wake to the Ferry Building docks directly below me. At this height, the three or four blocks across from the bay to the hotel seemed no longer than the length of a domino piece. “I feel like we used to,” she said.
“It would be nice if it were true,” I said.
She was no longer the wandering soul; when I met her, she was a refugee from a double-wide trailer girlhood. A childhood filled with dust belt farms and their bleached nightmares and petty horrors. Her father was a well-known rodeo TV commentator gone first to seed, then drunk, then bankrupt. Her mother, from a Midwest barefoot farm, ran off with a whiplash bronco rider to the Texas panhandle, then scuttled back when he left her at a rodeo. Mom settled into managing a hairdresser’s shop in Little Rock and pushed Christina into majorette competitions. She had shown me a scar where her mom took a baton to her and broke her wrist in two places after she dropped a baton in competition.
She wasn’t that girl anymore all right, as I looked at her in that elegant suite overlooking the bay while she told me she had put the room on her own credit card, not mine. A week ago it would have been Joe’s.
“You know what I mean,” she said, bowing her head.
There was a couch against the wall. She drew me toward it, and we sat down. She kept her hold on my hand and I couldn’t keep standing. The cushions hissed a sigh. She snuggled into my shoulder. I sat as straight as I could muster.
“Christina. We should talk.”
“Talk first? Sure. But you’ve changed,” she said. “The Max I knew would never talk first.”
“Funny, Christina. Very funny. We need to figure out some stuff.”
“Yes, it’s true. Things are an awful mess.”
She wiggled closer to me on the couch and I could feel heat rise between my eyes and on the back of my neck. A hollow emptied out my belly, and I felt the hard flange of lust rise. I took a deliberate breath.
“Christina,” I said, “we have to think.”
“I know,” she said, snuggling into me closer. “What should we think about?”
I couldn’t see her face, but I could see the part in her hair and smell her scent and feel the tips of her fingers moving on the flat of my stomach.
“Christina. Look at me. Joe’s dead. Guthrie thinks you did it. We can’t just sit here and pretend nothing’s happening and fuck.”
She sat up a little straighter. “I know Joe’s dead. He was my husband. Remember?”
“I remember,” I said.
“Let’s not bring up past horrors or old pain. There’s enough for the present, don’t you think?”
“Were you and Joe separated or not? He told me you were.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“The night before he died. He said I had to help him. And then he said you guys had split.”
“He wanted to talk about the investigation?”
“Yes.”
“He was very worried. He was afraid you wouldn’t help.”
“Why?”
“You know why. You may have forgiven us, but you haven’t forgotten a thing.”
“How could I?”
“Even elephants forget . . . with time.”
“Christina, were you separated or not?”
“So, Max the detective is on the case, hard at work.”
“Christina.”
“There’s separated and there’s separated. We were going through a rough time. I don’t deny it. But I don’t believe Joe wanted to divorce me. We wanted to adopt. It’s a shame you never saw that part of him. He would have been a very good father, much more patient than I.”
“Were you living there or not?”
She stood and left me on the couch and walked to the window. Next door, a new building was under construction. The latticework of scaffolding skinned the building while a crane on the roof dropped a cage of workers down the vertical glass. The muffled sounds of hammering intermittently entered the room, which provided a comfortable oasis of leisure and rest, while outside the world toiled through another workday. She looked outside, her back to me, arms crossed in front of her and her shoulders leaning inward. Sometimes I felt she thought she was in a remake of The Maltese Falcon, reprising the role of Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Then she’d slip on another character.
“You won’t believe me,” she said.
“Try, will you?”
“I was living there, but we were separated.”
“How can you be separated and live in the same house?”
“For God’s sake! Don’t be so Victorian. This is San Francisco. This is where the cops go home to use handcuffs. We weren’t sleeping together, okay? You want more details?”
“No. But do you expect anyone to believe that?”
“I don’t care whether anybody believes that or not.”
“You should. You’re under investigation for Joe’s murder.”
“We weren’t fucking! We weren’t sleeping in the same bed. Is that enough?”
“No!” Then I asked, “Why not?”
She whirled around, the hem of her robe twirling open and revealing a flash of her thighs. They were thin and strong. The way I remembered them. And she was tough and light all at the same time.
“Why what? Why weren’t we sleeping together or why weren’t we fucking?”
She threw the last word at me, spreading it out, twisting the knife and watching my face for effect. I stayed calm. I willed blankness onto my face. I wondered how I would ever remove it.
“He kicked me out, okay? Does that make you feel better?” she said, looking down at the rug. She put her arm out for the desk chair and turned it around. She sat down. Her hands gripped the dark wooden back of the chair, and I saw the red lacquered fingernails glint.
“He didn’t want me anymore,” she said.
It was quiet in the room for a moment. Then the sounds of construction drifted through the windows again. Light strayed through the gauzy curtains. Dust motes wavered. A chill rose on my skin.
“I’m sorry,” I said. That could have been a fatal blow to a woman like Christina. I was surprised she had revealed something she had never before experienced. Rejection.
Her hands untangled, and she looked up at me from her hunched-over position. “It had to be someone else. With his libido? Somebody rich without the wrinkles,” she said.
“You don’t have wrinkles.”
“He had another woman. Otherwise he would not have thrown me out. He was always . . . a needy man that way.”
“Do you know anything about his business?”
“Only that it’s grown huge. He hated his old small-p
ie investors calling and complaining or demanding their money back. Wasting his time on pilot fish. He was always dealing with a crisis. Holding hands. Putting out little fires. He was very harried at the end.”
“Really? Joe? Harried?”
“Yes. More than I had ever known.”
“Okay. I’ll check it out. After the funeral tomorrow.”
I stood and went to the desk behind her to gather my jacket. She put a hand on my shoulder.
“May I come?”
“It’s a very bad idea.”
“I was his wife for five years, for Christ’s sake!”
“It will make a scene if you go.”
“It will make a scene if I don’t go.”
“Christina, everyone there will despise you for it.”
“They despise me now. They despised me before. Does it matter?”
“Please.” For some reason I could not explain, I did not have the energy to say goodbye to Joe and take care of Christina at the same time. It would suck me dry, leave me a black hole.
She searched my face for a long time, then said, “Okay, for you, Max, I won’t go.”
“Thank you. Just stay here, relax if you can, and I will call you tomorrow. Okay?”
“Yes, Max.”
I went out the door in a breath of relief, guilty at escaping, my feet whisking down the hall as if the hounds of hell were behind me.
Chapter 10
Joe’s funeral was on a day so clear, so breathtakingly beautiful that it made you wonder what kind of joker lived upstairs. The battered Romanesque church squatted off Highway 1 in Half Moon Bay, where a sargasso sea met fields of ordered green artichokes and a vaulted robin’s egg blue sky. Mourners had gathered early, and there was a large crowd. Most of the people had driven down from the city and looked above them as they filed in, many staring at the rafters and unwashed stone with suspicion, as if the church hadn’t decayed enough to achieve celestial dignity or scarred enough to achieve earthly wisdom.
The priest awaited the arrival of Joe’s father. Paul Meaghan Dempsey, thin and spindly, dressed in a new three-piece black suit that would have made Joe proud, entered finally and sat hunch-shouldered and shrunken in the front pew. Pallbearers processed forward and placed the coffin before the altar. The service under way, the priest spoke eloquently but without passion or knowledge of Joe, the way an accomplished politician can deliver a well-rehearsed speech. He hit the touchstones of Joe’s mother’s early death and the solitude of Joe’s and his father’s life together in Albany, New York, where the tight-lipped senior Dempsey had been a firefighter, first on a truck-and-ladder crew and then as a driver and crew captain. Joe had brought him out to California when he hit it big and bought him a house on Half Moon Bay where the weather blustered and roared enough to remind the old man of upstate New York and its plentiful green fields.
When Paul Dempsey pulled himself to his feet and mounted the steps, the crowd deepened into silence; not even creaks from the pews fought for attention.
His black suit and white hair stood out from the vibrant blue of stained glass glowing behind him. He clutched the sides of the lectern with calloused palms. His voice throttled low, a truck rumbling downhill.
“Joe was smarter than me,” he said. “And I knew this from when he was in third grade. He started his multiplication tables at dinner one night and I realized he was faster. He always won our debates, making a comeback to my simple points. He was faster, smarter, and taller than me, and we both knew it, thank God.”
He looked down at his blunt-fingered hands.
“I’ve seen my share of death. Early death. Ugly death. I have learned enough faith to believe that there is some reason”—he looked at the priest, who nodded—“some good reason for all this, but it is hard. Hard to bear, hard to shoulder, harder to carry.”
A slowly welling shroud of grief rolled forward as women began weeping openly and men reached for handkerchiefs in vain attempts to stomp upon their own tears.
“But we must bear it. And we will bear it. And go on. For that is what the Lord commands.” The sadness of the crowd rose like a wave as Joe’s father was borne upon it.
“He was a good son. He bought me a house here in Half Moon Bay when I retired; or rather, when my knees retired, even though my desire did not.” He stopped again and looked up at the crowd. A smile waxed near his face, a cloud passing over the moon on a windy night, but it was gone as he surveyed the upturned faces and the heaving shoulders shuddering throughout the crowd.
“He was a good son; I don’t need to tell you that. He grew up while I was fighting fires, and then he grew past me, the way all children do.” Paul Dempsey’s voice descended another octave and ran out of register and stopped. Sniffles filled the church, and quiet sobs, held tight, reverberated off the rafters.
“I have seen enough of this, when men fell in the line of duty, to know what to do. And I always thought I was there to help the family through their loss. The young widows with children were the hardest, but we got them their husbands’ pensions, and the first year we made a habit of babysitting for them. And it’s only now I understand what we were doing. We weren’t helping the widowed wives and kids. Oh, I guess we were, but we were helping ourselves much more. So today is a day where we grieve together, for grieving alone is a bitter thing that shrinks us up like fields of drought. But if we do this together, something passes through us, Joe himself passes through us, and we can feel both a little bigger and a little emptier. We can feel him go and know he is where he should be.” Mr. Dempsey’s chest heaved and he stopped.
Irene, beside me, wept, though she hadn’t liked Joe at all. Her black dress spotted with the wetness of tears falling on her lap. She gripped and kneaded her patent leather black purse with white-gloved hands. I pulled a handkerchief out of my breast pocket and gave it to her. She gave me a pat on the thigh and lowered her face into it, wiped her eyes, and surreptitiously blew her nose.
Paul Meaghan Dempsey held on to the lectern, fingers gripping and white, elbows supporting his weight, and looked out at us and spoke again, his voice an old, worn-out chisel rasping over newly rolled and minted steel. “We shall go out to the graveyard, all of us, and commit my son to the earth, and we will do it together, for that is the only way we can. Thank you for coming. For coming from your jobs and families, from far away, to help me see my boy off.”
Mr. Dempsey stepped away from the lectern, not stooped, a light step down to the benches and the seated people who came out of their seats to lay their hands on him, touching the folds of his suit. Slowly, he shriveled and hunched over and began to weep on himself.
The sobbing crescendoed and the priest, standing now and still as an unlit candle, waited. He let the waves of sorrow gather and roll from throat to breast and back again. As it began to ebb from weariness, he took to the altar and straightened himself. I saw him speak Joe’s name to the cross and send a prayer heavenward. The priest spread his hands wide, palms up, and the mourners rose, united, to watch as the coffin was carried out of the church, Joe leading us to his final destination.
The sun poured over the Santa Cruz mountains to the east. It was not late enough for the heat to build and unusual for Half Moon Bay to have no fog bank stretched across its coastline. The graveyard lay on the edge of multiple artichoke fields that at a distance looked like symmetrical rows of four-leaf clovers.
Twenty yards beyond a circular drive lay an open grave covered with the false green of Astroturf. Joe’s glossy wooden coffin lay supported by steel bars, the machinery to lower it obscured.
Not a breath of wind swept in from the sea. Irene threaded her arm through mine as we all approached the grave.
I saw Christina across the street from the cemetery, sitting in her idling Lexus on an access road, one that paralleled the sea and was nearly hidden by the rise of the land. Her car door opened and she joined a late group of mourners coming across the open field, a dark figure against the sea. Dressed head to toe in
black, sheer black nylons, black flats, and an Audrey Hepburn hat with a veil underneath, she could have stepped out of East of Eden.
Christina pushed through a knot of people close to the grave, and when she stood at the edge, Paul Dempsey saw her and stiffened. The crowd stilled. Then Mr. Dempsey broke his gaze from her and I saw no anger in his face. He looked down. He was nodding to himself, as if discovering something he had known but never said out loud.
The priest, still in his purple vestments, opened a well-thumbed book of funeral rites draped with ribbon markers. He turned to a marked page and began, “I am the resurrection and the life.” His voice held a new gust of rising wind, and the mourners quieted and slumped as they looked at the coffin. My mind drifted as I heard his voice and watched the breeze ruffle the hair of down-turned heads.
Christina’s face was blocked by the wide brim of her hat, her head tilted down at the grave. There was none of the torrent of emotion that had built earlier; there was only sadness now, and frailty, as the priest finished his short prayer: “And we commit your son, Joseph, to you, our Lord, for keeping and safety.” With a soft hum, the machinery lowered the coffin into the grave.
The priest knelt, took a handful of earth, and threw clods on the top of the coffin. Paul, knees bent, scooped both hands into the dark soil. He spread his full, cupped hands over the grave and then parted them and the dirt fell down, some dust spraying over the mourners so that a few turned their heads. Others took turns scooping and throwing dirt, and soon the file led away from the grave, through the cemetery to the access road where all the cars were parked.
I approached the open grave and the cherrywood coffin with the thudding of clods loud in my ear. I bent down and scooped two hands of the earth, dry with the spicy smell of peat and fertilizer, and spread my hands, and the earth fell loudly on his coffin.