Among the Living (38 page)

Lean Man mounted up, headed on south into the city.

“They used to be worried about jumpers,” the cabby said. “Stupid. No bike rider is going to jump. Think about it.”

“I was always surprised they let you
walk
across,” Jimmy said.

“They couldn’t stop people from walking,” the cabby said. “It would be admitting something they’re unable to admit.”

Lucy and Les Paul got off the bus. Jimmy dug into his pocket for his sheaf of bills.

“I heard something on the radio this morning,” the cabby said. “They said new figures show that the cost of living now outweighs the benefits.”

Lucy and Les just stood in the sunlight a moment next to the bus. They looked like they were coming this way, coming back across the bridge. They’d walk right by him if Jimmy stayed in the cab. He got out.

He leaned in through the open passenger window, handed Mr. Natural two twenties. “Thanks,” he said.

“It’s a joke. Think about it.”

“I’m laughing on the inside,” Jimmy said.

But Lucy and Les didn’t come back across the bridge. Not yet anyway. Instead, they found the stairs that led down to the Golden Gate Bridge observation area and gift shop, a round building with glass sides and an iron skeleton, probably the same iron from the bridge. Below the shop, down through the tops of the dark green trees, was brick Fort Point, built around the massive foot of the southern base of the bridge.

The shop was crowded. The “gifts” were grouped by languages. You couldn’t call them trinkets. The “lap throws,” whatever they were, were 129 U.S. dollars, which apparently was a sensational bargain if you were Japanese. Lucy and Les Paul stayed by themselves, as much as it was possible in the packed room.

She dug in her purse and came out with coins for Les for one odd hand-cranked vending machine. A penny and three quarters. The low-tech machine smashed an elongated image of the Golden Gate onto the raw stock of the penny—and kept the six bits for the trouble. Les turned the big handle and made one and got so happy he looked about ten. Lucy laughed off a handful of years, too, and then went back to her purse for more quarters and another penny for another go-around. A matching pair. Maybe they’d get the hippie girl back in Sausalito to turn the pennies into earrings.

And then Lucy was sad again.

What happens to happiness? Where does it go when it goes? And how? Out of the throat where the throaty laughter was born, across the tongue, across the teeth? Are there people who can
see
it leaving, drifting out? Is happiness exhaled like breath? Does it float into the clouds? Does it hover over our heads like a departing soul, hanging around to haunt us once we’re low again, dead to joy again?
That’s my happiness up there
. . .
It used to be mine.
Because Lucy
was
happy, Jimmy had seen it with his own eyes, as clearly as he could see anything else in the gift shop. And now it was gone, as gone as anything could be gone, sucked out of her, breathed out of her. She’d stepped out into the sunlight in her new jeans and white top. (Out of the wind, off the boat, and away from the water, she’d pulled off the jacket and tied it around her waist by the sleeves.) She’d stepped, still laughing, out of the gift shop, holding the bright flattened pennies up to her ears until Les snatched his away from her. The sun should have lifted her spirits, made her even happier, but the opposite happened.

Or
something
happened. As they came out onto the observation area, she just stopped (it was next to one of the coin-operated telescopes) and went from happy to sad. Jimmy had come out ahead of them, was across the way against the low wall that hemmed in the observation area. It was almost as if she’d seem him standing there and thrown on her depression again, like a wool overcoat, just for him.

But she had a savior. Or at least a friend. The woman in the white dress with the yellow purse and yellow shoes and the highlights in her chestnut hair. She was back, apparently hitting the same tourist spots as Lucy and Les, though she didn’t exactly look the tourist. She stood, alone again, just this side of the snack bar on the observation deck. Was she in line? She never turned away once she’d seen Lucy, sad ol’ Lucy, once she’d seen what was on her face, coming out of the gift shop.

She started toward her.

“Are you all right?” Jimmy watched the woman in white say, right into Lucy’s ear. She touched her arm, just above the wrist, with just her fingertips.

Lucy nodded, but in a way that made it obvious she wasn’t. Maybe too obvious.

Les was still standing there beside his sister. The woman in white said something to the boy that Jimmy couldn’t read. Maybe it was,
Leave us alone a minute
. Les started away for the concession stand. He only made it a few feet before Lucy called him back and handed him a bill.

Les went to wait in line at the snack bar. For what? A water? Coffee?

Jimmy’s impatience with Lucy was back again, too.

The woman with the white dress and yellow purse led Lucy to a bench across the grassy observation area, held her by the arm as if she was eighty and in her vapors. A Japanese woman on the bench rose when she saw the distressed women approaching. She bowed and backed away.

The women sat. The woman in white had those long legs of hers crossed, showing through the inverted V in the skirt, unbuttoned two buttons.

“Sexy Sadie,” Jimmy said.

Were they holding hands now? They were hip to hip. They were fifty feet away, as far away as you could get without going over the berm. Had they moved there because of him, out of earshot of any men, even the anonymous L.A. man in the off-white linen suit? Sexy Sadie would ask a quiet question, and Lucy would nod. And then, after the warm bond between them had bonded still warmer, Lucy would offer a question, and the woman would nod.

Where were the steaming cups of chamomile?

But then, when Lucy put her eyes on the ground and said nothing for a long time, the woman leaned close and whispered in her ear.

It made Jimmy remember something. From last night. Another whisper.

Les Paul was still waiting. He wasn’t monitoring his sister, didn’t even look over that way, seemingly glad to have been assigned a task that involved action and not emotion. At the head of the snack line was a barrel-shaped man, European, with a dictionary in his hand, squinting at the white plastic movable type on the black menu board. This could take awhile.

When Jimmy looked away from Les and back at the pity party on the bench, the two women had been joined by a third. Another woman.

When it came to this supporting cast, each woman was better-looking than the one before, though it was wrong to try to rank them. Each one was better-looking than she had a right to be. Professional-strength beauty. Sexy Sadie was on the tall side, model tall, brunette. This new one was almost short, black-haired, blue-black hair cut close to the head, with ragged bangs, that shake-it-out shaggy boy look. And vibrant blue-green eyes, bright enough to be read a mile away. (Or across the observation area, at any rate.) Maybe they were contacts. She had a killer body, stretch-wrapped in what was probably pleather, a sixties minidress and matching high sixties boots, so far on the other side of self-conscious she couldn’t even see us from there, back here in Dullsville.

Polythene Pam. So good-looking she looked like a man.

The woman in the white dress had been alone walking down the street in Sausalito when she’d stopped to offer Lucy advice about the sidewalk jewelry. And she was still alone, or alone again, when she’d spotted Lucy this second time, in front of the gift shop. And now Sexy Sadie had just happened to run into her very best friend in the whole world, and just when another poor sister needed bucking up, too, because these two, Sadie and Pam, were definitely close. Hooked up. Not sisters certainly. Lovers? Welcome to San Francisco. Maybe they were just two very
on
women. Or maybe Jimmy was just lonely. They flanked Lucy, sitting so close the three of them still left room on either end of the bench.

They worked her, poor Lucy. There was no other way to look at it. They were going to console her or die trying. Sadie would say something in one ear, and Lucy would nod or just keep staring at the grass in front of her and then, before Lucy could nod again, Pam would lean in to say something in the other ear, both of them close enough to kiss the downhearted girl.

It was something to behold, and Jimmy beheld it.

He looked over at the snack bar. Les was coming back with a Coke and a bottle of water. He was accompanied now by the stout European man. Jimmy decided on second look he was probably Italian. Homme Italia carried a hot dog and another Coke. He said a few last words to the boy and then waved with the hot dog. He looked a little lonely, too.

Les headed toward the spot where his sister and the stranger had been when he’d left them, out in front of the gift shop, before they moved to the bench across the grass. Les didn’t seem to realize they weren’t there until he was right on top of the same spot. He looked confused.

“They’re on the bench,” Jimmy said to himself.

But they weren’t.

When Jimmy panned right again, the bench was empty.

He had a hunch, a bad feeling. He tried to talk himself out of it, even as he ran up the metal stairs, back up to the level of the bridge.

Three steps at a time, and there she was.

Lucy was on the bridge, walking away, walking toward the center. She was already a hundred yards gone. Alone. Walking away. She wasn’t in any hurry, but there was a kind of scary purposefulness to her gait, almost as if she was counting the steps.

Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine
. . .

She was still fifty yards ahead of Jimmy when Les blew past him with a concussive blast that almost pushed Jimmy into the rail. The boy still had the two drinks in his hands, but he dropped them now, first the Coke and then the bottle of water. The water bottle skittered across the walk and bounced into the air and then under the railing that separated the walk and bike run from the fast traffic.

The water bottle bounced into the air and was struck by a northbound Saab, dead in the windshield, bursting. The driver spooked at the splash, the flood, locked the brakes, and crunched the nose of the car into the rail and took the hit from a tailgating Ford Festiva, all in the time it took Jimmy to realize who’d blown past him.

Les never looked back, even as the line of cars in both hot lanes skidded and smoked and banged into each other.

Lucy kept walking. The inverted arc of the main immense suspension cable was beside her to her right, descending as she crossed the lateral plane toward some inevitable point of intersection, the descending curve and the baseline, as if the whole of the Golden Gate were a graph to illustrate the diminution of something. Hope? Promise? A fall from a great height.

But Les caught up to her.

When Jimmy saw that the boy was going to overtake her, or rather when he saw her reaction, when he saw Lucy let go of the dark thing she was holding on to, he stopped, let them have their moment. He had to remind himself that they didn’t know who he was.

Lucy tried to cover with a line or two, and her brother offered her the grace of something close to a laugh, though he certainly didn’t mean it. His face was flu shed from the run. Now he bent over to catch his breath. It occasioned another line from her. The sidewalk was empty around them, had been empty for almost all of the boy’s run after her. It was odd.

The two consoling beauties were nowhere to be seen. They’d just disappeared, like a magic trick, like a magician’s two lovely assistants.

Now the traffic recovered, rolled past Lucy and Les, except for the cars that had crashed. The drivers were out of them now. From the passing cars, no one looked over.

Jimmy sat with his eyes closed in a club chair by the window in his tenth-floor suite at the Mark.

For three hours.

There was a bedroom and a sitting room. He was in the bedroom, with the drapes open. When he’d first come back from the Golden Gate, from following Lucy and Les, from looking her right in the eye as she’d walked right back past him on the bridge, he had sat there for a long time and watched the light change, the clouds moving in across the Bay, their quick shadows crossing Alcatraz. Then he’d closed his eyes. Now it was five thirty. The day, which had begun so beautifully, was ending that way. At least for those looking at the sky.

Jimmy opened his eyes. He stood and took off the coat of his suit and laid it across the bed. He looked at the clock. He put on some music, the jazz the black cabby had been listening to, old jazz from a station that broadcast from down on the wharf and used Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront” under its station IDs. He walked back to the window. The low air conditioner under the tall picture window blew right at his groin. It would have been funny, worth a joke, a line, if he’d had anybody in the room with him. He found the little door to look in on the AC controls, fiddled with the knobs and buttons, but couldn’t shut it off. You didn’t need AC in San Francisco, and the hotel
didn’t
have it for years, didn’t have it the last time he was here. The windows used to open, even the tall ones. He felt his anger rise, felt it burn out to the surface from whatever tight, dark spot he usually kept it stuffed into.