Among the Living (57 page)

“Let’s get him,” Angel said.

“Wait,” Jimmy said.

There was a drink next to Les’s beer glass. A pretty pink cosmo in a martini glass. Down a sip.

“Did he have somebody with him before?” Jimmy said.

“Not when I saw him,” Shop said. “He was just sitting there by himself, looking out at the water.”

Jimmy saw her, saw
somebody
. Moving away. The restrooms were in the corner.
A flash of white.

They waited a moment, to let her come back, but she never did.

“Come on,” Jimmy said, and they started in.

The boy probably heard Jimmy’s voice. He got some signal, maybe just instinct, and turned.

He didn’t stop to think. He ran like hell, bolted away from the table so fast and rough it knocked over the beer glass. Ran like an underage teen in a bar.

They’d say later they’d forgotten how fast a teenage kid can be, how much go a boy has. He went out the back. For a second, Jimmy thought Les had jumped in the water, right into the Bay, but there were sailboats and houseboats moored all along the back sides of the bars and restaurants, and Les Paul leapt from one rocking deck to the next, broad-jumping, scis soring over rails and deck chairs like a middle school record holder.
Running for his life
is what you’d call it if you saw it.

He got away from the men. It was never even close.

Jimmy went back into the bar, straight into the ladies’ room. It was empty.

Or at least there was nobody in a white dress.

Other people seemed to take comfort in the circularity of things, how things doubled back, repeated, came round again, but Jimmy hated it, had always hated it, that fact of physics or metaphysics or the cosmos or whatever it was. He wanted something new to happen, something unprecedented, instead of the same old thing recycling itself. And the same people.

At least that’s what he told himself, sitting there behind the wheel of the Porsche in the parking lot of the waterfront park out on Tiburon.

What he told himself was that he was there because it was where he’d seen the woman in the white dress. But he knew why he was really there.

He had his own kind of hope. That afternoon, scanning the park, he had too much of it.

The cosmos made him wait two hours.

Mary walked across the grass from the parking lot. Today she and the boy had ridden their bikes over, had come in from the south on a bike path, the boy on a terminally cute scaled-down ten-speed, probably titanium, probably a thousand bucks’ worth. The bikes were just left in a rack. Not even locked. Mary walked with a tall coffee in her hand, a stainless steel Thermos cup. The boy had a net sack with his soccer gear thrown over his shoulder. It was a good life. This is what stay-at-home mom meant for the wife and son of a San Francisco cardiologist.

Mary spread out a blanket, while the boy kicked a ball around. She looked over at the car, the Porsche. The top was up. With the sun sliding down in back of the water behind her, there had to be glare on the windshield. Jimmy knew she couldn’t see in, couldn’t see him. So why did she keep looking over? Did she remember the car? Why did she just stare, stare off at nothing, as if someone was reading an old, familiar story to her?

The soccer ball rolled over to the blanket, to pull her back from wherever she’d gone, from whatever had taken her away. She threw it back to the kid.

Jimmy realized he’d made a point of
not
learning the boy’s name. That night in the newspaper library Groner could have dug it up, on the registry of whatever pricey preschool the boy had gone to, the team list of his little soccer crew, his bike registration. Groner knew it now, had to.

“What’s his name?”
Easy question.

The boy was kicking the ball and going after it, getting in front of it, playing all of the game in his head. Jimmy remembered the way he used to do the same thing with baseball when he was seven or eight, remembered how he’d throw the ball up and hit it and run the bases, even if they were just his mother’s magazines laid out in the backyard, run until he’d switch sides and go after the ball in the outfield, throw it into the air again and catch it and throw it home.

He let his mind slip out of gear, let himself pretend that he’d just pulled up, that she was expecting him, that this was one of those moments where you stop yourself.
Stop and smell the roses.
Where you hold back a second and look at the other out there on the grass, unguarded, waiting for you, and you think,
She loves me
. Before she sees you and puts on whatever face that calls for.

Mary was staring at the car again.

He waited until she looked away again and then started the engine and backed up and drove away.

But not far enough.

Today was the day when he was going to meet Mary face-to-face, and he knew it. He just didn’t know where.

He drove into the village of Tiburon, the little loop of shops and restaurants at the end of the road that went out to the top of the peninsula, by Belvedere, out at the water. He parked in plain sight, lending a hand to Fate. He didn’t put any money in the parking meter, whatever that meant.

He drank a beer, out on the deck behind a place. There were hardly any men anywhere, just pretty women, most of them young. Married. In tennis clothes, in white jeans. Drinking white wine. There was an imposing view, the ferry docks, the expanse of water, Alcatraz and Angel Island, the cityscape behind, all with an impossible depth of field.

He’d ditched Angel and Machine Shop back in Sausalito. He thought of all the things he
should
be doing. He thought of the weight of what he knew was coming next.

But not enough.

“Are you ready for another?” a voice said.

The waitress looked like one of the Tiburon wives, minus the BMW X-5 and the tennis togs and the portfolio. And the cardiologist.

“I don’t know,” Jimmy answered honestly. His glass was still half full. Or was it half empty?

He drained it before the next wave of sarcasm rolled in.

“Let go, let God,”
Angel was always saying.

“Any port in a storm,” Jimmy said aloud as he walked up the street in the village toward the Porsche, with the second beer in him, with the edge off. Everything was a little soft-focus.

“So that’s what I want
,”
Jimmy said to himself, stepped from word to word with a rhythm that matched his footfalls on the sidewalk.
“Another man’s wife. A little boy’s mother. Amen.”

“Jimmy,” Mary said.

She was sitting on the steps in front of a shop right beside the nose of the Porsche, the Porsche with the parking ticket flapping in the breeze. The shop was closed. It was a place that sold pillows, all of them shades of yellow, from what you could see in the window. It had a cute name.

She stood.

He meant to be prepared with an opening line. He knew he’d remember it, whatever he said, whether she did or not. He knew he’d probably regret it, whatever it was.

She was more self-assured. Or maybe it was that it was her town.

“You always wanted us to come to San Francisco,” she said. “I never knew why.”

“And we never did,” he said.

“It’s a kinder place than L.A.,” Jimmy said. “Maybe that was it. I knew you’d like it. But, you know, back then I thought and did a lot of things for no reason at all.”

She sat back down on the steps, straightening the skirt of her dress, pulling it tight across her backside just as she sat. All the women were wearing skirts and dresses. Maybe it was just San Francisco. Or they were dressed the way he liked because it was his fantasy. In her skirt, on the blanket in the park, Mary had looked like Lucy. Or like the girl in foreground in the Wyeth painting,
Christina’s World
, with her legs stretched out to the side. Mary used to like that painting, had a print of it on her wall, the one everyone liked, but that didn’t diminish it for her. Jimmy wondered if she remembered how they used to talk about whether she was crippled or not.

He sat beside her. She’d left him space. They were tucked away, with a low hedge on either side of them.
Out of view,
he thought.

“You still have your car,” she said.

“You saw me, in the park,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah. I mean, I didn’t know it was you.”

“You always did like the car more than me.”

“That’s not true,” she said. It made him remember something about her, something she did, turning back a smart-ass answer with directness. By being straight.

She was still looking at the car in front of them and not at him. There wasn’t much traffic, but she turned her face aside or looked down whenever a car did pass. She didn’t want to be seen. She couldn’t. She wasn’t going to sit there forever, he knew that. He knew she was thinking of something besides him.

“You saw my little boy,” she said.

Don’t say his name,
Jimmy thought.

She didn’t.

He realized that she’d taken the boy home before she came looking for him. She’d changed her shoes, left her bicycle somewhere. Was her car close by? Had she walked back into the village? Did she have a nanny? Had she taken the boy somewhere else?

He was looking at the side of her face. This close, he could see how changed she was. She had aged a little but not much, a little around the eyes. But she had changed in other ways. He wondered if he would have recognized her right away if he’d seen her up close first, instead of across the park. Maybe she’d had some plastic surgery done. She was married to a doctor, after all.

“You look good,” he said.

She let her hand touch his, the edge of it. It was as much as he’d get, but it was
her
touch, unchanged. It was just enough to mess him up good.

A clot of clouds went over the sun. She stood, brushed off the back of her skirt, as if she’d been sitting in a pile of leaves.

She was about to say something when Jimmy said, “It’s still so strong.”

It was the only line he spoke all afternoon that he didn’t rethink later, that was naked and true.

Even if it didn’t stop her from walking away.

Turn the page, things change.

Since the day of the ten suicides, spread all over the city, a dark meanness had rolled into town, a jittery
Now what?
that everyone felt. Ten plus Lucy. They were back down on the waterfront, Jimmy and Angel, coming around the Embarcadero in the Porsche. If he was home in L.A., Jimmy would know how to describe it, that dark sense hanging over everything. And how to duck it. In Los Angeles it would manifest itself in freeway gunplay, “cutoff shootings,” boys on overpasses blowing out windshields with fist-size nuts stolen from job sites. It’d be the dry winds they called Santa Anas, ushering in “homicide summer,” “earthquake weather,” baseball bat attacks at kids’ games in the parks. It’d be fistfig hts at gas stations, gang dustups at Magic Mountain.

Here it had its own style. You felt it in the waves of nervous energy that came off the knots of men standing around the piers. Each cluster of Sailors, out here almost all of them men, would turn and look at the Porsche as it rolled past. Put a fire in a barrel in the middle of them and it’d look like the old newsreels of the Depression. Waiting for something to happen, for whatever was next,
wanting
it, even if everybody knew it would probably be worse.

“Man, look at this,” Jimmy said.

“It’s been getting strange back home, too,” Angel said. “Everybody’s got the jitterbugs.”

Jimmy hadn’t thought about L.A. in a while, not the L.A. of the present. And he’d stopped wanting to run there. He wanted to be here now.