Stein,stoned s-1

by Hal Ackerman

  Nicholette’s visit had left Stein unsettled. He thought of himself as the retired gunslinger in the Western movies who goes out to the barn late at nights while his wife and kids are asleep and unwraps the old Colt. 45 from the creche where he has carefully swathed it in bunting and fur, feeling its heft and weight in his hand, remembering its dangerous, seductive power, but also the promises he made to people who depended on his being alive, and then returning it to its hiding place, along with another tiny little piece of himself.

  When Stein mentally replayed the stream of condescending replies he had made to Nicholette he did not feel like a western hero. He felt like an idiot. He wished that someone from the Ministry of Pompous Assholes had come and shoved a pie in his face- a service he had performed during his youth to many others who deserved it.

  “You ought to clean up after your pet.”

  The morally superior voice of a neighbor, a deputy sheriff in the Environment posse, brought Stein back into now. Watson had squirted out a squalid little dump onto a patch of new grass. “What are you feeding him?” she added.

  “He’s old. Cut him some slack.”

  “I wasn’t blaming him.”

  Naturally, Stein had neglected to bring the little baggies, the latest industry to thrive on America’s obsession with early toilet training. “I have them inside,” he muttered. He scooted Watson back into the house and came back out with a baggie, fully intending to perform his civic duty. But when he saw the woman still standing there, marking the spot, he could not give her the satisfaction of having puppeteered him. Before getting to the sidewalk he diverted from his path and knocked on Penelope Kim’s door. She lived on the other side of the horseshoe from Stein. Their front doors faced each other across a center courtyard dominated by a tall banyan tree.

  “Go away,” she pouted from inside. “I’m writing.”

  “I thought today was a thinking day.”

  She came to the door wearing slim running shorts and a tank top that clung to her like tracing paper. “I hate when you do this to me, Stein.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make me beg.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Nicholette Bradley has been gone for eleven minutes and you haven’t told me a word.”

  “How do you know her name?”

  “God. Stein. Do you not exist in the modern world? Have you not seen the last fifty covers of Cosmo and Vogue?”

  Vogue. Stein pulled Nicholette’s card out of his shirt pocket. Now the picture made sense.

  “Oh my God. Is that what she smells like?” Penelope plucked the card out of Stein’s hand and filled her chest with a long Zen breath, one nostril at a time. Stein realized that he had been breathing in that perfume too and was still partially intoxicated.

  “She wants to sleep with you, doesn’t she?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “You underestimate your power.”

  Music emanated from Angie’s bedroom across the courtyard. Stein felt drawn to obligation. “I should get back.”

  “Are you still menstruating about her weed? You should send her to Paris, Stein. Let her live on her own for a while. Tend bar. Be an artist’s model. It would be good for her. Good for both of you.”

  “That’s so interesting! Her mother keeps suggesting precisely that.”

  “Her mother has your balls in a bolo.”

  “Why don’t you give Klein a teenage daughter? So I can read it as an instructional manual.”

  “You say that as a joke.”

  “Tell me what he does when his daughter forgets her father’s fiftieth birthday.”

  “Stein, is it your birthday? Is that why you’re depressed?”

  “I’m not depressed.”

  “Oh my God! Of course you’re a Sag. How could I not have known that?”

  Penelope wrangled him inside and sat him down on one of her silky, cushiony arrangements. Her entire apartment was white. White walls, white curtains, white lampshades, white silk room dividers, white lilies in a white porcelain vase on a white obelisk. She knelt behind him and told him to close his eyes.

  “I have to clean up Watson’s-”

  “Shh.”

  Her fingertips on his temples felt like butterfly wings that sent sparks of electricity through him. He wondered if being attracted to a bisexual meant that he was partially gay. “Being old is cool,” Penelope murmured. Her fingertips manipulated his scalp through the short grey hair. “My high-school teacher told me that it takes a man until he’s fifty to realize that his penis is not a weapon but a baton.”

  “Your high-school teacher told you that?”

  She was past that and already on to the next thing. “Stein, you just gave me the perfect idea for Klein. The killers use his daughter as bait knowing that he can’t help trying to rescue her. She’s his kryptonite. That’s how they get him.”

  “What do you mean, get him?”

  “You know, kill him.”

  “The character you’re modeling on me dies?”

  “It’s the perfect existential ending, Stein. He’s so sixties. Which are so over.”

  There was a thump and a loud crash from across the courtyard.

  “Angie!”

  Stein catapulted off Penelope’s cushions and out her door. Across the courtyard, Stein’s door was wide open. He bounded across the bed of ivy that grew around the circumference of the banyan tree and vaulted up the steps of his landing. “ANGIE!” He bellowed up to the open second story window directly overhead. He grabbed the kryptonite bar lock from his bicycle that rested against the stairs and entered his living room on full alert.

  The wooden rack of cassette tapes had been knocked over, and plastic boxes littered the floor. His breath came heavily. There was a noise on the staircase. A leg materialized. Followed by a body in a business suit and a beautiful face. Stein looked up at his ex-wife with a combination of rapidly depleting relief and growing anger. “Hillary?” He allowed his right arm brandishing the iron bar to drop to his side and tried to make his voice sound welcoming, coming not even close. “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you. I was taking Angie Christmas shopping tonight and to see The Nutcracker.”

  “You never told me that.”

  She was uninterested in his protest.

  “You never even asked.”

  “I told Angie to tell you.”

  Nitrogen bubbles popped in Stein’s brain. He spoke so civilly he thought his teeth would pulverize. “We agreed not use Angie as a go-between, Hillary. Does this conversation ring a bell? We agreed we would make all parental arrangement directly with each other.”

  “Are you going to hold me hostage to every word I say?”

  “Do you mean are you accountable for what you say? YES! We call that being an adult. Setting an example to our child about integrity.”

  “Don’t spar with me Harry, I’m too tired to pull my punches.”

  “Anyway, you can’t take her to The Nutcracker tonight. We have plans.”

  Angie clomped down the steps at that moment. “What plans? We don’t have any plans,”

  “Well we should,” he grouched. “It’s my damn birthday.” He turned on Hillary. “You should have told her. I remind her when it’s yours.”

  Angie shot Stein a look of pity and mortification a parent never wants to see from his child. “Is that why you’ve been acting so weird today? You thought I forgot your birthday?”

  “Don’t make it worse by pretending.”

  Angie strode with purpose to the linen closet, tossed aside the blankets and pillowcases where Stein had momentarily contemplated hiding Goodpasture’s birthday bud, then marched back to him brandishing a festively wrapped parcel. “Do you and Watson not have the same birthday?” she demanded. “Does this not prove I remembered?” She tore apart the folds of red and blue tissue paper and thrust the inner contents at Stein. It was a package of twelve rawhide chewies. She knelt and nuzzled Watso
n. “You see Watsie, I know it’s your special day.”

  “I am humbled in ways I cannot describe,” Stein said.

  “Why are you still here, anyway? I thought you had gone to the airport to pick up Lila.”

  Stein blanched. “Is that tonight?”

  “Duh..”

  He rummaged through a pile of yellow Post-Its stuck to his desk calendar and found the note he was looking for. “Oh God.” He looked pleadingly at the clock, whose face was as unforgiving as Hillary’s. “She’s going to think I forgot.”

  “You did forget.”

  “But you know her. She’s going to think it’s because she’s not important enough to remember.” He grabbed his wallet and keys, leapt down the four steps, turned his ankle and very nearly went sprawling, recovered and waved back over his shoulder that he was ok as he stumbled toward his car.

  “That’s your father,” Hillary said, “always chasing the six o’clock plane at six forty-five.”

  At the curb, Stein’s neighbor was still eyeing the offending brown blotch.

  Traffic on the southbound 405 was tighter than a spastic colon. Stein juked and jived between lanes making up a car length then losing it back. He visualized Lila sitting alone at Baggage Claim, watching the last unclaimed duffel make its five hundredth orbit around carousel. If wishing made it true, he would wish that he loved Lila. Angie was right. She was the perfect woman for him. Goofy and dependable, smart and practical, she had an appreciation of life’s fragility and a batty sense of humor. She had been her second husband’s second wife. They had had seven good years, then cancer. When the bad end came, it was Lila and not his first wife who changed her husband’s bandages and washed him. It was Lila holding his hand as his life ebbed from it, even when his own teenage son and daughter could not. The one deficit that negated all her strong qualities was her obvious poor judgment. She was in love with Stein.

  Ninety minutes late, Stein ran raggedly into the United Airlines baggage claim area. Lila was sitting on her suitcase, wearing her red Versace business suit, reading Cosmopolitan.

  “Good! You’re still here,” he gasped.

  “Good I’m still here? No, it’s not good that I’m here. It’s pathetic. If I had any self-respect I would be home in a hot bath drinking a glass of Merlot.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the traffic.”

  “You forgot. You can admit it.”

  “I absolutely did not forget! In fact, I’ve been making trial runs all week to see which was the best route.”

  “I called your house. They told me you just left.”

  “I’m a shit,” Stein conceded.

  “But you’re an old shit and you need some pity.” She handed him a neatly wrapped little package. “Happy birthday. And thanks for coming up with a really nice lie. I still want to believe it.”

  She watched hopefully as Stein opened the box. It was the soundtrack to Woodstock II. “Angie told me you’d like it.”

  He nodded yes. “My girls.”

  D RIVING NORTHBOUNDED on the 405, Stein was concentrating on eleven different things other than driving, so he didn’t see the sixteen-wheeler lumbering into the same lane from the left that he was entering from the right. The blast of its air horn practically lifted his car off the road. Its huge form filled his field of view like an iceberg. He lurched blindly to the right, hit the gas hard, found himself going straight at the median. Lila screamed. Stein hit the brake, skidded and jounced across the steel nubs implanted into the road. The wind draft made the Camry fishtail. The bottom corner of the MERGE LEFT sign sheared off his outside mirror. The truck never slowed. A second blast of its horn dopplered out behind it like a lingering fuck you. Heart pounding, Stein pulled to the shoulder and asked Lila if she was ok.

  “Am I ok? No, I’m not ok. Look at me.” Her voice was tweeting in its upper register. She had been thrown sideways in her seat and her wide brimmed hat knocked askew along with her equilibrium. “If you have a death wish, it’s proper etiquette to let your passenger know ahead of time.”

  “Sorry.”

  He started up again and drove slowly on surface streets away from the freeway. He was more lightheaded than he realized from the adrenaline rush. He made a few exploratory turns that took them into dark and unfamiliar territory. Lila noticed his uncertainty. “I presume you know where you’re going,” she said.

  “By presume, you mean you hope and wish?”

  “Can you drive without your mirror?”

  “Who needs hindsight?”

  A water tower rose silently out of the darkness; it looked vaguely familiar to Stein and he realized exactly where he was. He had never approached the Espe warehouse from this direction, from the far side of the Ballona Wetlands. He remembered that he had forgotten to follow up with Mattingly about the whole Morty Greene arrest warrant thing and a bad sound emanated from his throat.

  “Are we lost?”

  He had nearly passed the driveway when he jerked the wheel and careened into a skidding turn.

  “Jesus, Stein! Where did you learn to drive?”

  “There’s a thing I have to do here. It’ll only take a second.”

  “Here? Where is here?”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Like I have a vote.”

  He punched his security code into the electronic box at the side of the gate and the wooden barrier arm rose in salute. He came to a hard stop at the glass-doored entrance.

  “Do you want to wait here or come in?” He decided for her. “I’ll just be a second.”

  He jumped out of the car and entered the warehouse unchallenged. The outer door was open. The security guard’s desk was unoccupied. A game show played on the portable TV alongside the four-inch monitor. It would take a real criminal mastermind to steal anything out of here, Stein thought. Down the hallway leading to the executive offices there were framed posters of the previous years’ magazine and billboard ads. The girl was clean cut and heartbreakingly beautiful. Her hair looked too perfect to be human. Except now that Stein had met Nicholette Bradley, he recognized that she was the girl in the photographs. She was the Espe New Radiance Girl.

  A light was on in Mattingly’s office, and Stein had a foreboding that he was going to walk in on something horrible, like Mattingly romping naked with Mrs. Higgit. He made sure he made a lot of noise and gave ample warning for them to separate and dress. “Hello, I’m here,” he called out. “Stop doing anything disgusting.” Mattingly was sitting dolefully at his desk. Even the sight of Stein did not cheer him. He extended to Stein the handful of papers he had been clutching.

  The sheaf of extortion notes was typed on old-fashioned bond paper. They were short, none more than a line or two. Each alluded to a dire consequence: One threatened to blow the lid off the Espe campaign. Another predicted the Fall of the House of Espe.

  “It’s Paul Vane,” Mattingly moaned, before Stein had formulated enough interest to ask the question. “The hair dresser. Michael Esposito’s ex-whatever. You need to stop him.”

  “Stop him from what?” Stein was in the dark as to how this related to Morty Greene, if any of it did.

  “It’s a desperate cry for help.” The thin disembodied voice once again emerged from the recesses of the room as Michael Esposito glided out of the shadows. “He sees that he’s nothing without me. He wants me back.”

  “Yes, well I’m definitely the one to settle a battle between ex-lovers. I’ve done it so well in my own life.” Stein bowed and about-faced.

  Michael undulated toward him, sniffing the atmosphere around him as if trolling for pheromones, then boldly blocking his path to the door. “I believe someone has already been out to see my ex-lover,” Michael declared. “I think we will find that this is the business card of Paul Vane.” With a theatrical flourish his two long fingers swooped down and plucked the card out of Stein’s front pocket. But his yelp of triumph caught in his throat when he saw that the card was not Paul Vane’s at all. He turned red as a full-body niacin flush.
“Faltez-moi,” he gasped. “Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.” He replaced Nicholette’s card into Stein’s breast pocket and smoothed his shirt.

  Stein cut the embarrassment by exaggerating it. “I hope that was as much fun for you as it was for me.” And then to Mattingly. “So we have a lover’s quarrel… which the interested or disinterested parties will settle on their own. Bottles will be returned. No arrest warrants for Morty Greene. Everybody lives happily ever after and goes to the beach.” With a bow and a smile he turned to go, adding a courteous and firm, “Case closed.”

  The hallway back toward the exit seemed endless. He wanted to be out of here and have this lathering chapter behind him. The security guard was still not at his desk. The TV still played to an empty room. Something caught Stein’s attention. A news crew was reporting live from Topanga Canyon where an explosion had demolished part of a home. No injuries or fatalities had been discovered. Luckily no one had been at home. The preliminary investigation put the cause as an outdoor gas line feeding a barbecue pit that had been clogged, leading to a gas buildup. The woman delivering the report had been instructed by her news chief to find some snide humor in this and she did her witless best.

  Stein ran back to the car. Lila quickly ended a furtive phone call saying, “He’s coming. Tell everyone to stay,” and stuffed her phone back into her purse. The next moment Stein pulled the passenger side door open and shoved the keys into Lila’s hand. “Take the car. I’ve got to go.”

  “WHAT?”

  “You’re right.” He took the keys back. “I need the car. I’ll get you a cab.”

  “Stein!”

  He grabbed her cell phone and gave Yellow Cab specific directions and made sure there’d be a taxi here in less than five minutes. “Don’t say anything to Angie. I know you guys sometimes talk about me.”