Among the Living (45 page)

The Haight. Lucy wasn’t there. And the Skylark was gone. Maybe she’d figured it out on her own. Maybe she’d packed up and was headed south.

But he knew that wasn’t true.

He drove across the Golden Gate, blew past the spot where the dropped drinks had splashed into the oncoming traffic, where Lucy had stopped almost in the middle of the bridge, where Les had caught up to her. A couple was handing off their camera to another tourist for a shot of the two of them with the backdrop of the city, their backs against the low rail.

He took the first exit, dropped down into Sausalito. The baby-blue Skylark would be easy to spot, wherever they were, if he got lucky.

He didn’t get lucky.

He kept on, stayed on the road that swung around the pinched curve of top of the Bay. It gave him time to practice his speech.

Tiburon. He found them. The Skylark was right there in the parking lot of the picnic place next to the playing fields, in the row of spaces closest to the highway. He couldn’t have missed it if he wanted. It was sitting there all alone, like a big sign that said: Here!

So he
had
gotten lucky.

He pulled in and parked, found a place.

He watched them through the windshield of the Porsche. This time Lucy had brought Les with her. There was no sign of the others, the women, the helpmates. It was a sweet little scene. The sky was blue. The water was beautiful.

A little soccer player came running his way, right toward Jimmy. A boy six or seven with his shin guards over his socks, out of uniform, silky baggy pants and mismatched top. He had a set of keys jangling in his hand. Jimmy looked across the field. There weren’t any games on. (It was Sunday. They probably didn’t have games on Sunday.) But there were two or three boys at some distance and a few parents. (Lucy and Les were close by, but not right next to the parents and kids.) There was a chirp as the Tahoe two spaces away from the Porsche unlocked its doors.

The boy was impatient to get back to the field, to his friends. He yanked opened the passenger-side door and climbed in. Jimmy looked over, saw him rummaging between the Tahoe’s front seats.

He came out with a white squeeze bottle of sunblock, slammed the door, was already running back across the fie ld when he aimed the remote behind him and locked the Tahoe. California kids. Or maybe they were like this everywhere now.

As the boy closed in, a woman, who’d had her back turned away, standing, turned. Maybe she’d heard his voice. Maybe the boy had said something, maybe protested about the errand she’d sent him on, interrupting his play. “Here . . .” maybe he’d said, with an impatient edge to his voice. The boy was holding up the sunblock.

She took a few steps toward him, to meet him. She kneeled down.

It was all it took. She was far away, a hundred yards at least. She was across any number of gulfs, of chasms, of distances. Of time and space and reason. On the other side of possibility, across a wide field of coincidence and improbability. But it was all it took, the shape of her. The outline of her.

Her hair in the light.

The flash of white in the luster of her face, the teeth in her smile, the smile in her eyes . . .

As she knelt and finger-painted sunblock under the boy’s eyes, across his forehead, and down the line of his nose.

Mary.

The same song was playing on a dozen radios, all tuned to KHJ. It was an AM kind of night. The sidewalks were more crowded than the four lanes of the street, and the street was plenty crowded, weekenders in from the suburbs to see how the other half lived, to pretend to be something wilder than what they were. It was the middle of summer. It was an even warmer night than usual, riot weather, but there wasn’t any chance of a flare-up among this throng. The word was
mellow
. Moving along on the sidewalk, cruising out of the sound of one radio and then into the zone of the next, was like moving along
inside
the song, like walking with the singer, best friends.

It could have been Polk Street or MacDougal Street or South Beach, or even Fisherman’s Wharf, but it was Sunset Boulevard, the Sunset Strip. It was L.A.

It could have been now, but it was 1995.

It could have been a lot of songs, probably should have been “London Calling” or “My Sharona” or even the Carpenters and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” but it was Tom Jones and “It’s Not Unusual (To Be Loved by Anyone).” Another big pop lie.

She was with another guy the first time he saw her.
She
was Mary, her name was Mary, though it would take most of the night for him to find that out, to work his way through the jungle of playful protective coloration she threw up,
to break her down
was the way she always put it later when they were telling others about how they met, about that first night.

Jimmy and Mary.

He was with someone else, too. Most nights he was alone, particularly on the Strip. He lived nearby, a little house down below Sunset, below a restaurant everybody was going to at the time, Roy’s. (Now it’s the site of the House of Blues.) It was dead center in the Strip. It was close enough to the Chateau Marmont to walk over, which Jimmy did all the time.

The girl he was with that night worked as a secretary at a record label. She liked him more than he liked her. She brought him records, what they called “product.” The LPs (they were still making them, along with cassettes and CDs) always had a hole drilled through some corner of the cover, a sign that they were meant for promotion. She’d bring him boxes of them. When she realized she liked him more than he liked her, trying to change that, she started bringing him boxes of “cleans,” albums that weren’t punched, that could be sold or traded for whatever you wanted. She hadn’t figured out that Jimmy was different, different from everyone, and that he didn’t care about money. (And, because he didn’t care, he had a lot of it or could always get it.) She didn’t know he was a Sailor. It was the secret he kept from almost everyone.

The guy Mary was with was a director.

She was twenty-two; the director was thirty-eight. She was five ten; he was five eight. She was blond. He was blonder. Jimmy and the secretary, who had her arm threaded through his as they walked, were on the north side of Sunset, next to Tower Records. Mary and the director were across the street, going into a sushi place with a bamboo facade and glossy bright red paint around the door, making the entryway look like a garish mouth.

“Do you know her?” the secretary had said to Jimmy, when she saw him looking across the street.

The joke they said later, Jimmy and Mary, each taking a line in the telling of it, was that the director had looked back through the red mouth of that door and said to her, “Do you know him?”

Mary and the director had fought over dinner, and she had ended up walking away from him. From his white Jaguar sedan specifically, with the director standing next to it, sake-drunk, the valet standing there, too. She’d walked away on up Sunset, headed west, pretending to be drunk, too, which she wasn’t at all. Jimmy had found her in Gil Turner’s, a bright, glass-fronted, classic corner liquor store near the end of the Strip. She was inside, at the counter.

He was alone by then, too, behind the wheel of the only car he had, an oxidized white ’68 Cadillac convertible, the punch line to some joke he’d forgotten. The top had long ago been knifed by vandals, so he left it down, at least once summer came. At the time, he thought he was just cruising, but he could admit later he was looking for her.

He parked. She came out. He set off after her. He caught up to her, walked alongside her. She was headed back toward the center of things. He didn’t say anything for a half a block. That section of the strip was dead, the block before the Rainbow and The Roxy.

“Let’s hear it,” she said, when she realized that he was just weird enough to walk along beside her silently, maybe forever. “Your clever first line.”

“I don’t have one,” Jimmy said. “I don’t have a clever
last
line, either.”

“Thinking ahead, are we?”

She was as tall as he was. And she had on flat shoes, dancer’s shoes. Capezios. She was skinny but not a model. She probably wasn’t a dancer, either. He thought of asking, but it sounded too much like a pickup line.

“You want these?” she said and offered him an unopened pack of cigarettes, after they’d walked another half block. She was setting the pace, not fast, not slow. Not an escape, not a stroll.

“Luckies,” he said.

“I don’t smoke,” she said. “I felt sorry for the man in the store.”

“That’s Gil. Himself.”

“I felt sorry for Gil.”

“He’s probably a millionaire,” Jimmy said.

“So millionaires aren’t worthy of our concern?” she said. Jimmy wondered if she
was
drunk, the way she chose her words. He’d learn soon enough that it was just
her
. Then, at least. The way she was then. She said, “I felt sorry for him because of the look in his eye, because he looked forsaken.”

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Lucky,” she said.

Jimmy pulled the ribbon on the white-and-red pack of smokes and tapped it against the palm of his hand.

“Why do people do that?” she said.

“I don’t know, I think it packs the tobacco tighter or something,” Jimmy said.

“Or everyone saw someone do it in a movie.”

“Are you an actress?” Jimmy said.

“No, you are,” she said. “
You
are.”

They walked almost as far as Tower Records and the sushi place. Jimmy was prepared to run into the boyfriend again, the director, but that would be overestimating him.

“Let’s go somewhere. Where do you want to go?” Jimmy said, standing there on the sidewalk. In 1995.

“San Francisco,” she said. “L.A. is bothering me. You’re not the Cut Killer, are you?” Lately, since the beginning of summer, there’d been a series of killings, girls’ bodies left spread-eagle on road cuts, the sloping gouges into the rock where the highway sliced through. Nine of them.

“Where do you want to go?” Jimmy asked her again, as serious about anything as he’d been in a long, long time.

Mary wasn’t a single mom. She wasn’t alone.

He
came late to the soccer practice or play date or picnic or whatever it was. Sunday afternoon in the park on Tiburon. Her husband. Jimmy saw him drive up in a black BMW X-5. On the phone. He parked and sat there another two minutes, finishing his call. There were two other mothers and a father next to Mary on the sidelines of the playing fie ld. She had her back to the parking lot and didn’t see him. She had her eyes on the boy, who was dribbling a ball down the fie ld, or at least making an earnest six-year-old’s attempt at dribbling.

Her
son. It was hard for Jimmy to even think it. He didn’t know much about kids but got close guessing the boy’s age. He did the math. Everything in him wanted to get closer, to see more, but he knew that Mary would spot him, his shape, his coloration, as easily as he had hers. Or at least that was what he told himself, to keep himself inside the car. To stop himself. He turned the key and started the engine. The sound of the rev made Mary turn to look. It was then that she saw her husband walking toward her across the apron of the field. He wore a dark gray suit, but as he came closer he pulled off the necktie and unbuttoned the collar of the blue shirt. He folded the tie in half and slipped it into his coat pocket. (Who goes into the office on a Sunday? Even for a half day?) He was dark-haired. With a hundred-dollar haircut. He smiled at his wife from ten yards out and then looked away quickly to find the boy on the field, to wave, though the kid wasn’t looking.

He came up and kissed Mary, put his hand on her back. Her hair was longer. And darker.

Jimmy drove away out the exit of the lot but turned left on the main road in and stopped on the shoulder. There was a little elevation, to look down on the fie ld, the water behind it, Sausalito behind that. The boy had come over. The father had kneeled down to ruffle his hair. The mother was saying something. A family was laughing.

Jimmy let out the clutch and drove on. Fast and loud.

Very high school.

And what do you call sitting in the dark in a car on a hilly lane on Tiburon, on Belvedere, across from a black Craftsman house with a light in the second-flo or window and a woman framed there, lifting a boy’s T-shirt over his head, his arms raised as if surrendering?