There was this one, who all the guys knew. The story was this creep had come off a bus from Ohio after doing time for assault. He was younger, he reeked of alcohol and poor hygiene, he had a smirk on his face and an attitude to go with it, and Sam knew from other acquaintances that this one stole. All the guys knew who stole. People who have nothing material to speak of are sensitive to this type of behavior; the lawless don’t take criminal behavior lightly.
A missing pair of Adidas, someone’s headphones—the men who “lived” in Malibu, around the Colony, were very specific about their belongings. You didn’t need to see Hog’s name scratched into an iPod (taken from a surfer’s backpack, of course) to know it was his, and so it was with Sam’s blue blanket and army-issue sleeping bag. And so it was with Sam’s books.
Eight-thirty in the morning, Sam had come back from a swim. Even before he saw, walking down the trail and brushing back the branches with his outstretched hand, he knew. Everything was gone. No blanket. No sleeping bag. Not one damn book.
He went looking for the guy with the smirk. It didn’t take long to find him, huddled under the surf shack, empty bottle of cheap amber liquid by his feet, passed out under the familiar sleeping bag, snoring like an old dog.
Sam knew better, but he picked the young man up by his hair and threw him onto the sand. The guy was airborne before he was awake. He got to his feet, and Sam squared off before him, waiting for the first punch. Sam never unleashed the first punch. He was a last-punch kind of guy.
He didn’t have to wait long. The man aimed at Sam’s stomach and landed surprisingly hard. Sam bent over and noticed a glint of something, a knife in the man’s hand, winking, approaching …
Sam flicked the knife out of his hand and broke his wrist, the snap scaring off a flock of pelicans that had been watching, a curious, winged band of spectators.
The man screamed and went to his knees, cradling his hand. Sam calmly collected his belongings; the books were out of their bag, moist and sandy, and his sleeping bag would never smell the same. But Sam knew he wouldn’t have to deal with this one again.
Except when he turned up dead a couple weeks later, and Sam, along with the myriad of other homeless, was questioned and released.
Sam combed his hair back and took a swig of water and headed to the beach access next to #184. He had overslept; he had been dreaming in memory. He wondered what that meant as he opened the gate to the beach.
13
SAVED
THE NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR, an elegant older woman with an old California name, arms wrapped in gold bangles and a full glass of amber liquid in her hand every evening, had regaled Gracie with stories about the Malibu before the railroad, before Pacific Coast Highway, before movie stars. Before all of this, there had been May Rindge, a feisty widow whose family had owned all twenty-six miles of Malibu. She’d kept out government officials and trespassers by hiring armed guards and dynamiting highway construction attempts. Finally May had exhausted her fortune and was forced to rent out plots of coastal land to entertainers. And thus the Colony was born. In 1926, the woman told her, her bangles serenading her as they slid down her arm, the first white surfer had ridden his first wave at what was then Malibu Ranch.
Gracie looked out from her deck and saw every day what was worth protecting.
Her neighbor had often invited Gracie to use her kayak anytime she wanted, as long as she put it back under the house when she was done with it. Gracie was heartened by the neighborly gesture but had never taken the woman up on her offer. Frankly, kayaks scared Gracie. Was it natural, she wondered, for a human being to kayak? And why were they called kayaks? Did the word mean “compact drowning tool”? Gracie had never actually been in a kayak, and had no idea how to maneuver the thing into the water, much less how to actually bring it back to shore.
But after studying the display of kayakers streaming down the Pacific from Point Dume every morning, wrapped in their life vests and sporting bright baseball caps, Gracie had the unfortunate idea that kayaking looked easy. She reminded herself that tennis looked easy, too, when Agassi played; Christ, gymnastics looked easy when she went to Cirque du Soleil. She had pulled her back out trying to touch her toes after a particularly inspiring performance by a Chinese tumbler.
Jaden had taken up residence with Kenny (i.e., Ana and her sisters) for the weekend and so was not around to act as her mother’s natural deterrent. And Gracie had come up with a plan to try one new thing in her life every day (a plan devised twenty minutes ago over coffee). So Gracie decided that she would learn to kayak.
Wearing a baseball cap with the title of one of Kenny’s movies across the bill, she dragged the green plastic ten-foot flotation device out from under her neighbor’s house and pulled it down to the beach to an area she thought looked most inviting to someone who was completely unskilled and ignorant of this fact.
She pulled the kayak to the shore break and got in, holding the oar in both hands. She was wearing a T-shirt over her bathing suit, recalling the days when, as a chubby preadolescent, she lived in the T-shirt-over-bathing-suit look over the long hot inner-city summers at the public swimming pool.
It wasn’t her best look, as she remembered. Her father’s long white T-shirts would stick to her protruding belly, accentuating what she hoped would be eliminated. Why, she thought, had no one warned her?
But no matter. Here she was, sitting in a kayak on the beach feeling the spray in her face, the wind in her hair—why, Gracie was practically the female Kelly Slater!
Except that she was marooned. The water was moving away from the kayak. She had not even set foot in the ocean and already she was stranded. She got out and pushed the kayak forward toward the surf. And got in again. The water merely teased the bottom of the kayak. There was not enough pressure to pull her in.
She got out again, pushed the kayak farther in, and, in a feat of human physicality she’d not experienced since sex with a javelin thrower in her freshman year of college, she jumped in the kayak at the same time the water rose, buoying the contraption. Then she grabbed her oar and did some sort of waving thing with it in the water, hoping she looked like the professional she knew she could be, and actually moved forward. She was kayaking! She was an athlete! She was One with Nature!
After twenty exhilarating seconds, a wave suddenly rose in front of the kayak. Gracie, in a panic, turned sideways instead of moving straight into the oncoming charge of water. In that moment, she deeply regretted the fact that she had neglected to ask her neighbor about a life jacket because she’d been too ashamed to admit she needed one.
She was no longer an athlete! She was drowning! This was two new things in life that she had accomplished in one day!
A second wave followed the first rush of water, knocking her from the kayak and unscrewing the oar from her clenched hands. She thought this was totally unnecessary on the part of Mother Nature, to leave her without any hope of surviving, a mere thirty feet from a lineup of the most expensive beach houses on the planet. She would only be a footnote to her death. She could just see the news headline: “Forty-ish Woman Drowns in Front of Celebrity Homes.”
She thought about Jaden. She thought about what dead bodies look like after they drown. Closed casket, she hoped. No sense in scaring the child.
And as she was sinking down in the water, gulping salty liquid rather than the preferred oxygen, she thought about Kenny. She wondered how he would feel, knowing he’d left Gracie and then she’d drowned in front of the Malibu Colony. Would he feel shame? Remorse? Anguish at how he broke up with her, and for whom?
The answer came fast. Kenny would dine out on Gracie’s death for months. Even if Britney left him after a few weeks, women would be flocking to him forever. Everyone in town loved a widower!
Gracie couldn’t leave on those terms. She made a decision to live. She was not going to be the one to bring Kenny that level of happiness.
Her feet touched the sandy bottom and she pushed up, propelling herself throug
h the water, spinning upwards. Feeling her lungs exploding, she reached up with her arms. Then her head was above the water for a moment, and she made the most of it. She screamed!
Another wave went over her head and she was forced under again. She feared the worst was going to happen, no matter how strong her motivation to live in order to make Kenny unhappy. And then she felt something tug at her T-shirt sleeve.
That something grabbed her around the waist, pulling her to the surface. Gracie had a split second to look down, registering the tanned, bulky forearm circling her waist. It made her think of baseball, those professional players with forearms like Popeye, great for hitting balls out of the park. And encircling waists.
Gracie finally broke the surface. She coughed and spat water, trying to get out some semblance of a thank-you (having not let her manners go along with her pride), and then leaned back into what felt like a wall of human sinew as she was pulled closer to shore. Once this human wall found his bearings in the sand, he picked her up as though she weighed as little as Helen the dachshund and held her tight against his chest as he walked onto the dry sand. Gracie’s arms were curved around his neck; they couldn’t be pried from him with a crowbar.
Gracie had met men when she was younger in several ways: in a college class, a popular bar, standing in line at a restaurant. She had never met a man while drowning. As this particular man set her down on the dry sand and hovered over her, she wondered why she’d never tried it before.
She wiped the salt water from her face and peered up at him, her eyes half closed, keeping her knees together and her legs bent to the side to appear sexy yet demure, like a newspaper hosiery ad.
He stood with his legs apart, his arms crossed over his chest,watching her with the kind of attention, Gracie thought, a doctor gives to a patient who’s trying to kill herself.
Gracie noticed several things about him at once. He was tall; he was built; he was tan; he had a strong jawline and wideset dark eyes, my God, he had great hair; and he was in her demographic.
And there was no wedding ring.
Gracie felt like one of them should speak, since obviously they were going to be married. After all, they had practically had sex. Being saved was the closest she’d been to a man since she chased the masturbator off the beach a couple weeks ago.
“Thuidnk yduo,” she said. She realized she hadn’t spat all of the water out of her mouth. She coughed again.
He looked at her, cocking his head slightly to one side. He seemed to be taking his time, assessing her with a sort of detached amusement. His eyes weren’t exactly warm, but they weren’t cold, either. He reminded Gracie of a younger Clint Eastwood. Standing before her was the classic reluctant hero. Maybe he wasn’t used to seeing soaking wet divorcées starting a new life by baptizing themselves from the inside out.
A moment passed. Clint (her pet name for him) turned back to look at the ocean. Gracie wondered if he was planning his escape. Was she so scary that she could frighten off a man with abnormally strong forearms and a torso like a brick wall? She pictured Kenny in his bathing suit, Kenny who worked out every morning but was never quite able to leave the sheen of the upper-middle-class boyhood behind. There would always be a fine, soft layer above the muscles nurtured by the latest protein drink and a personal trainer named Gunnar. Kenny had a nice body, there was no doubt, but the man Gracie was staring at could eat him for breakfast, stationary bike and all.
Gracie shuddered. Maybe her new boyfriend even ate bread!
“Thank you, I mean,” Gracie said, trying to amend her earlier communication breach. And then, “Oh, no, no—the kayak!” She had lost the kayak and the oar. So much for making friends with the neighbors.
Clint hadn’t moved; he was standing, still as a rock, now looking out at the ocean. Then he turned and started walking toward the water, slowly, then picking up speed. Suddenly he dove in, leaving Gracie in her lingerie-model position, wondering who the hell had just saved her life.And confident that she had just met the most attractive man she’d ever seen without the help of artificial light.
“Would it have killed you to get a name?” she said to herself as she got up, brushing sand from her bottom and watching him as he swam with long, strong strokes away from the potential disaster scene. Her life.
Gracie turned and ran to the house; she’d have to get dried and dressed and talk to Lavender.
Gracie knew she had found 152.
GRACIE WASTED an entire hour before she finally biked down to the guard station to see Lavender. First of all, she felt as nervous as she would for a first date—what could she change into that would be casual enough for a drop-in visit and yet pretty enough to be attractive to the age/geography-appropriate man who had saved her life?
She thought about the proverb “Once you save a life, it is yours to keep.” She wondered if her mystery man, 152, knew the proverb. She wondered if he was thinking about it when he stood there,watching her with what she realized now was a sort of practiced wariness.
She wondered if he would have looked at her with those eyes if she were Pam Anderson.
You can see why she changed her clothes about twenty times.
Then to the gift. What kind of gift should she bring him? Wine? Great idea. Unless he was an alcoholic—and might he think the same of her for bringing a bottle of red to his house on a hot afternoon. How about food? When was the last time she baked? And what if he didn’t eat sugar or flour or—like those people who were sprouting up in Northern California—what if he didn’t eat anything cooked, period?
Oh my God, Gracie suddenly thought, what if he doesn’t speak English? After all, Gracie couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that he’d understood her when she thanked him. What if he was embarrassed that he couldn’t speak English?
Gracie was at a loss. And was no closer to being dressed and ready to bike down to see Lavender than when she started.
Finally she decided to throw caution (and her future dating life) to the wind; she would bring him a book. A simple book. Her favorite one, the one she never tired of reading, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Even if he didn’t speak English, he would have surely heard of Fitzgerald. And he would think her worldly and intelligent.
Or a freak, Gracie thought, as she pulled on her never-worn pareo and a tank top, blocking out her fear of flabby upper arms with the vain hope that her ten-thousand-dollar breasts would be a viable distraction.
LAVENDER WAS not there. At the moment that Gracie needed her most, Lavender had taken a sick day. Gracie bit her lip and wondered if she should consult the current security guard. He was a younger white man with a heavy accent and the kind of look on his face that said he was an engineer in his mother country and here he was working for peanuts as a security guard of all things.
Gracie decided not to ask him about 152.
But she did spend the next forty-five minutes biking up and down the half-mile stretch of Malibu Colony, back and forth and back and forth, F. Scott’s beauty of a novel safely strapped into the basket between her handlebars. Forty minutes into her endless loop, she saw a new Jaguar drive up to #152 and park in front. Her heart started beating faster immediately. Sweat droplets formed under her arms. She wished she’d worn a white top. She wished she was ten pounds skinnier. She wished she were ten years younger. She wished she’d find that lotion that would finally, finally, get rid of the wrinkles on her hands (why were her hands so much bonier than the rest of her body?).
She wished she could change many things except one: her newfound valor. Perhaps coming so close to death (okay, maybe not so, so close to death)—anyway, coming so close to almost drowning had changed her. Gracie had never been that most brave of souls when it came to the outside, physical world; she had no desire to climb a mountain using ropes and pulleys, none at all to scuba-dive in a shark tank, nothing at all registered in her as excitement in regard to jumping out of an airplane over the desert.
But she had never been afraid
of confrontation.
And this factor of her personality, combined with the adrenaline rush of her morning activities, spurred her along as she rode up to the Jaguar, spinning her wheels soundlessly, with her feet stuck out at the sides, then raising one leg over the bike to settle both feet on the ground, stopping the bike directly in front of #152. And just as Clint stopped the car and got out, Gracie grabbed the book and turned to greet him and heard,“Well, goddamn, look who’s here.”
Gracie’s eyes had to refocus, for whom she was standing in front of was not Clint, the man who saved her life and as a result owed her his, but Lou, the man for whom Kenny worked. Lou Manahan was #152.
Gracie stood for a moment, frozen smile on her lips, hands frozen around a paperback edition of F. Scott’s masterpiece, voice box seized up, knees locked.
Lou came toward her and gave her a bear hug, which, frankly, went a long way to helping her thaw. The hug felt like a strange hybrid of fatherly touch and “old friend” touch mixed with a subtle patina of “you’re divorced, let’s have sex” touch.
True, an alarm went off somewhere south of her belly button (did she even have sex organs anymore? And were they called organs?), but Gracie didn’t trust her own instincts. Weren’t they the instincts that had her marry Kenny in the first place? The instincts that let her down when she first spied that (MOTHERF-CKING) earring in his left ear? The instincts that told her that the rapturous Clint was #152, not the old-enough-to-be-your-father-if-your-father-were-a-teenager-when-you-were-conceived Lou?
Lou was standing, smiling at her, the deep wrinkles around his green-gray eyes at once inviting and off-putting. “You staying in the Colony, Gracie?” he asked.
It seemed like a simple enough question—unless you were Gracie and felt the need to nervously overexplain in charged situations.
The Starter Wife Page 16