The Golden Gate Is Red

by Jim Kohlberg

I opened the door on her sitting in a pink bathrobe, a waxen face and dark smudged eyes above it. She was propped up against a satin-covered headrest. She pointed an open hand around the room, to the marred view over the bay, out to the deep beyond the bridge, blocked by the trees and hedges of the grounds.

  “Like my view now?” she said. I smiled and nodded as if I meant it, and she smiled and nodded as if she thought I did.

  “It looked better than the one upstairs,” she explained. And slow as always, I got it. There had been the stain on the bedroom rug upstairs, still amoeba-like and present.

  “I tried new rugs,” she confirmed. I could only nod and paint a lopsided smile on my face. She had only one place to live now, the house Joe had been killed in, and not long to live there, either.

  I nodded at the carpets underneath her bed. “They look new,” I said. I thought of the room upstairs and Joe crying for life as someone crushed his head with a Louisville Slugger. My stomach twisted into a knot. Acidic sadness crept up and burned my throat, and I felt its force and pressure behind my eyes.

  “I meant upstairs, moron.” She smiled, her lopsided face breaking into something more natural, close to real.

  “Sorry. Really sorry,” I said.

  She waved at me and looked out the windowpane. I could see her Adam’s apple bob up and down in a swallow where her neck was silhouetted against the brightness of the window and the green of the trees outside. Her neck was thin and swan white. I sat down on a green-brocaded club chair, the only color in that room with the white hospital bed and the IV pole and the drab and silent monitoring equipment. The color was the Kelly green she had loved.

  “You talk to my doctors?” she asked, turning her head, with its short, stubby hair, back toward me.

  “They wouldn’t tell me anything if I asked, unless you authorized them. But I talked to H & H.”

  “H & H?”

  “Sorry. That’s what I call Napoleon and Arty. Hopkins and Hannaford. H & H.”

  “Like the Green Stamps.” She smiled.

  “Like that,” I said. “They told me.”

  “I guess drama like this doesn’t stay quiet for long.”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “My doctor said he could go in . . .” She looked out the window again, and I saw her Adam’s apple bob once, twice, outlined against the windowpane. It was bony and stuck out, the skin of the neck sagging around her throat. I could hear her breath rasp and see hesitation at swallowing.

  “Tumor’s in the prefrontal lobe this time. To cut it . . . it would be like a lobotomy. Small odds of success, since there are other small ones all over.” She turned back. “But the good news is they can’t be small for long. Those little suckers are runners. Run, run, run all day long. ’Fore long they’re all grown up.”

  “I know. I mean, I didn’t know. The details, I didn’t. But I know,” I said, swallowing. “I know you don’t have long.”

  “Guthrie told you,” she said, this time fixing me with eyes, those still-beautiful, silent, soul-breaking eyes, squeezing my heart and throat until I became a strange mixture of blood and tears. She fixed those eyes on me.

  She said, “Guthrie told me they weren’t going to press charges.”

  “He said that?”

  “He did.”

  “Just now?”

  “Before you came. Before you walked in. He was nice, at least he was trying to be. But he made it clear he thought they had enough to prosecute. He said . . . he said . . .” and she stopped again and smiled, her small little smile, the broken eyes.

  “He said he wouldn’t waste taxpayers’ money ’cause I had a longer sentence to be served.” She blew out a big breath at the end and took in a full chest of air. I could see a piece of tape on her neck stretch and then wrinkle again against the skin. “Pretty self-righteous, our man Guthrie,” she said, exhaling.

  It was my turn to breathe, but I could barely get it in. “What did you say?”

  “What could I say? ‘Thanks. See you later. It was a gas, Guthrie. A blast. Let’s do it again sometime.’”

  I was about to ask “Really?” when she added, “Don’t worry, Max. It was just ‘thanks.’ The rest was my embroidery.”

  I could not look at her then, and if I could have looked at her, I would not have seen her through the sudden haze of tears. I heard a river roar next to my ear, moving fast and dark, white water ahead. How could she die? We had lost it before we ever had it. I lost her once, and now she’s going again. In front of me this time.

  And then I came to the placid end of the rapids where the water lay flat with white suds after the rocks. The question I could neither speak nor avoid, could not flee nor face, swelled in me as a river high with runoff. My face pointed down, as water, a tear maybe, dropped off my face and dripped onto the carpet. I could see it splash and plop on the rug. Plop. Plop. Slowly, slowly, my head came up of its own accord.

  She watched me.

  “You want to know, don’t you?” she asked.

  I nodded. I felt the skin on the back of my neck bunch and cord, the muscle cramping tight.

  “Everybody wants to know,” she said. “Everybody.”

  “For God’s sake, tell me what happened.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “It can’t possibly matter now,” I said.

  “You think just ’cause I’m dying I don’t care what people think about me? You try dying and see what you want to confess. You’re not a priest anyhow,” she said, her tired chest rising and falling from the effort as she grabbed at the metal arm on the bed. My head was heavy, and I hung it down again, defeated by the bitterness that was in her and would camp with her to the death. Beyond it, too. I saw the rounded, small wet spot where I had dripped before. The spot seemed smaller to me, as if I had returned as a man to my childhood bedroom, all things shrunken and cramped.

  “Do you really want to know, Max?” she asked while my head was down.

  I looked up then with urgency, hardness, a need that came from nowhere and everywhere and seized me like a lust. “Yes. I want to know. But most of all, I want to know that you do,” I said, using the desire that had arrived unwanted.

  “So you are a confessor after all.” She smiled. She grabbed with two bony hands, two elderly spotted hands, at her white sheets and pulled herself more upright.

  “I didn’t tell him to do it,” she said. “I swear to you, I didn’t.”

  I leaned back in the big chair, and breath vacated my body in relief. I looked up at the ceiling. I could have flown to it.

  “Thank God,” I said.

  “But I did it,” she said. “I never asked him to, but I might as well have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I gave him money. I told him Joe’s schedule. I made plans with him for after the divorce. I—”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because. Because Joe was leaving me. Because I hit menopause. Because I deserve better. Because. Because. Because. What do the reasons matter? I did it. I goaded that poor, stupid, vicious, simple barnyard rooster of a concrete mason into doing my bidding. I knew what I was doing every step of the way. Like I was born to it.”

  “Jesus Christ, why?” I said.

  “Because I was fucking angry,” she said. “That enough of an answer? Is that what you wanted? To know all this? Do you feel better knowing, Max? Are you a better man for it?”

  My chest burned with sadness so sharp I wanted a knife to cleave it out, take a razor down my windpipe, hydrochloric down my throat, anything—anything to burn away this knowledge.

  Then I dragged my face to look at her and her round bulbous eyes and the moist lips and the neck straining, the head forward and off the pillow. I said to that ravaged, devoured face, “No, I don’t feel better. And no, I’m not a better man for it. But I am more of a man for knowing. Though I don’t suppose you would understand.”

  She moved a waxy hand at me. “At this point who gives a fuck about understanding?”
/>   I watched her fingers pluck at the hem of the sheet, then smooth the fabric on the small logs of her legs under the sheet. And still I wanted to hide, so I said, “I don’t understand. This was the tumor, right? You weren’t diagnosed, but it must have been growing in there. I mean there are all these cases of people losing brain function and doing crazy stuff. Other stuff. That could be you. Right?”

  “Who the fuck knows, Max? Who cares?” she asked, now pounding her legs. “Who the fuck cares? I’ll be dead in six weeks. Why does it matter?”

  “It matters to me!” The words came out of my throat like a defect, a great, black, roaring hell of sorrow, dark and twisted and numb.

  “That’s only because you loved me,” she said.

  And then anger arrived; a savior, a saintly protection, a separation, a distance. I watched the miles fly away between us, and I was suddenly standing upright and empty. I felt I was looking down at her from great Olympian mountains, and I was in the cool summer breeze of high mountain air. She was down there below, small and exhausted and wan. Her hand still plucked the hem of the sheet, the last green light of bitterness remaining like a twitch all the way down to her fingertips. I looked down at her with the peaceful emptiness that truth and freedom bring. I said to her, “Once. Once I loved you dearly.”

  She looked up at me as I turned to leave, a sheen of fear over her eyes, but accepting my retreat as she faced me, her chin still strong and jutting.

  “And it was a long time ago,” she said.

  I went to the door. Grasped the brass knob. Before I could go, she had one last question: “Will I see you again?”

  I held the brass, its coolness welcome in my hand, but I did not turn to her.

  “I’ll be back a few times,” I said. “Before you go.”

  “That’s nice, Max. You were always a very nice man.”

  “All the good it does me,” I said.

  She didn’t stop me anymore. I went out. I don’t recall the plush carpet down the long hall and out through the marble foyer. Where my shoes must have clicked loudly in the empty hall.

  From out of nowhere, the man in white appeared, his shoes squishing and squeaking on the marble as I opened the front door, the brass knocker glinting into my eyes from the high, harsh morning sun. He nodded at me and closed the door on my heels. I went down the steps and into my car, into the clear and gleaming slow motion of moments we remember forever.

  After that I saw her three more times. She had fallen into a coma soon after that visit. She lasted only a week.

  When I spoke to the doctor and the coroner—who Guthrie had insisted examine the body for any drugs or assisted suicide—the doctor expressed some surprise at the size of the remaining tumors.

  The last visit I had waited there, nodding when she spoke, watching her look out the window, and proffering bromides or platitudes when she asked me questions I could not answer. Which was almost any question. Every question.

  I could barely speak, but I returned and waited out of some instinct, some wish to see death and watch how it took Christina and to see what it would have to say or do for me. But of course Death is silent and speaks only to those he has come for. And I simply stood witness as the cancer ate what little remained of Christina.

  I have asked myself many times since how those events could have come to pass and what I have learned from them. And, in fact, this tale was a misguided effort to explain them to myself. As always, the mystery of ourselves eludes us, a bank of fog always out of reach or that when entered, obscures our vision even more.

  But I lived beyond Christina and Joe and buried them both and came away with something. I had always wanted to know the truth, or believed I had, and had constructed a life I thought was dedicated to learning and recording and transmitting truth in numbers. And all I learned was how much I flee from truth in people, from the dark in intimate souls and places, from the dark in myself. Our shadows mingle and flow into deltas of the mind, meld with the clean and deep blue oceans of our souls. And we cannot tell one from the other, because they are the same substance, the same element, the same ocean. That is us, that is who we are. And trying to parse it into truth or numbers or Letters of Administration is a fool’s job.

  So now I walk the hills of my San Francisco, up the steep, wide streets and down the narrow, grounded blocks of North Beach or past the palaces of Pacific Heights, a fool no longer.

  Acknowledgments

  It was a surprise to no one but me: No book is an island, complete unto itself.

  There are always far too many people who play a part in bringing a book to market than can be thanked, if only because the mythic solitary author does not really exist except in the pages or scenes of bad books and movies. Thanks to Kyle Jennings, the first editor/publisher to believe in my work, who agreed to sign a three-book contract with me and pointed out that GGR should lead the way. To Jane Friedman at Open Road, who believed in this book before I did, and to Nicole Passage and Jennifer Pooley for their herculean editing. And to the solitary hours given me by the four wonderful women in my life: my wife, Suzanne, and our daughters, Casey, Maddy, and Charlotte.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Jim Kohlberg

  Cover design by Andrea C. Uva

  ISBN 978-1-4532-5464-6

  Published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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