Rag and Bone (14 page)

“Putting in guest bathrooms?”

He bit my ear. “They’re good guest bathrooms.”

“Ow, is it going to be that kind of night?”

He let go of me. “Hope so. You want something to drink? Iced tea? A Coke?”

“Tea,” I said. “Can I help with anything?”

“Everything’s done, except grilling the fish. It’s tuna, that okay?”

“Sounds great.”

He got the drinks and we went outside, where he sat me at the table, put the fish on the grill, and brought the rice and salad from the kitchen. He put the roses in a blue vase and set them on the table.

“So,” he said, watching the fish. “You had a rough day.”

I looked around at the sun-dappled trees, the weathered deck, the bright kitchen. “I’m happy now.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No, I’d like to forget about my family for a few hours. Is that all right?”

“Man, that’s why I built this place. You can shrug everything off and just kick back.” He turned the fish.

“You really don’t seem like the kind of guy who needs to get away from it all.”

“No? Why?”

“You’re pretty outgoing. I wouldn’t have figured you for someone who likes a lot of time alone.”

“I never used to be,” he said, smearing the fish with marinade. “Fact, I hated being by myself. I was always looking for the party or at least someone to distract me. Hand me the plates one at a time, okay?”

He slid the fish onto the plates. I took one then the other, while he went back into the house and came out with small bowls of salsa and guacamole, a bottle of dressing and a stack of corn tortillas wrapped in an embroidered dishcloth that I knew had to have been sewn by his mother.

He refilled our glasses and we served ourselves. He lifted his glass and touched mine.
“Buen provecho,
Henry.”

“Buen provecho,
John.” I cut a piece of fish with the edge of my fork.

“When I was alone, I started thinking,” he said, picking up the conversation. “I didn’t like to think.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because then I’d have to start thinking about the future, or why I had these little feelings about other guys or maybe that I was drinking too much or about my marriage. Grown-up shit. I tell you, Henry, I did not want to grow up. I figured if I grew up, I would stop having fun.”

“Something change your mind?”

“No. I was right! You do stop having fun, or maybe the things that were fun when you were a kid stop being fun. For a while I just did ’em more, faster, harder, trying to get the fun back, but it didn’t work. I bet you’ve always been the kind of guy people can count on.”

“I try to be.”

“Me, I was the kind of guy you could count on not to count on.” He ate a forkful of rice, a piece of fish. “That shit catches up with you.” He stopped eating and looked at me. “It caught up with me the night I ran into that telephone pole and almost crippled that girl. Since then I’ve been trying to walk the straight and narrow.”

“I’m not sure about the straight,” I said, “but you do okay on the narrow.”

He laughed, but then in a serious voice said, “I have my slips. You gotta know that about me.”

“Anyone who has standards has slips, John. Only good people worry about being good.”

He smiled. “Is that why your hair is gray?”

“My hair started going gray when I was twenty-five. That was a long time ago, by the way.”

“Lucky for you I like older men,” he said.

When we finished eating, I helped John clear the table and together we washed up. I went to put the leftover salsa in the refrigerator. On the door, in a magnetic plastic picture frame, was a snapshot of John in a silvery-gray suit with a white carnation in his lapel, standing with his arm around a very pretty woman, a blonde about his age who was wearing a bottle green silk sheath dress. They were standing against a railing. Behind them was the ocean and sunset. I put the salsa away. When I turned, John was standing at the sink, drying a bowl and watching me.

“That’s Deanna,” he said. “The girl I told you I was dating.”

I took the picture off the fridge. Deanna had the look of a woman who believed she’d earned the laugh lines that bracketed her mouth and wasn’t ashamed of them.

“She’s not a girl, John, she’s a woman,” I said. “You told me you thought I was real? She looks pretty real, too.”

He came up behind me and took the picture. “She’s good people.” He stuck it back on the fridge, in a slightly less prominent spot. “You upset?”

“No. Does she know about me?”

He shook his head. “She knows I’ve been with guys, but she thinks it’s in the past. I did too, before I met you. I was gonna tell her when things were more solid between you and me.”

“That’s cool,” I said. “You know, John, I don’t have any expectations.”

“That’s funny,” he said, putting his arms around my waist. “Because I do.”

We went into the living room and stretched out on the couch. Twilight deepened into night, the music ended. He sat up and switched on a lamp. His hair was rumpled and his shirt was lost in the cushions. I pulled him back down and he lay with his head on my chest.

“I can hear your heart,” he said.

I smoothed his bristly hair. “You’ll tell me if it stops.”

“Don’t joke like that.” He lifted his head and looked at me. “The first time I saw you, I thought you were dying.”

I kissed him. “I’m not dying, John.”

“Are you sure it’s all right for you to have sex?”

“Yeah, as long as it’s not very exciting sex.”

I could see he thought I was serious, but then he figured it out.
“Payaso,
” he said. “Clown.”

I embraced him. “It feels good to hold you.”

“You, too,” he said, stroking my chest. “You have nice skin.”

“You have a great chest.”

“You don’t mind my potbelly?”

“A little meat on a man looks good. I’ve always been a scarecrow.”

“You got the right build for a distance runner,” he said.

I squeezed a massive biceps. “And you’ve still got a pitcher’s arm.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said. “I don’t think you would have liked me when I was playing.”

“Then I guess I should be happy that part of your life is over,” I said. He stirred unhappily in my arms. “I’m sorry, John. That was a stupid thing to say.”

He raised his face above mine and caught my eyes with his. The lamplight darkened their green flicker and made them even graver. When I looked into John’s eyes, I saw the depth of feeling that lay beneath the easygoing demeanor with which he faced life. Sometimes it floated closer to the surface than at other times, and I could see clearly how much it had cost him to leave behind the golden boy in the baseball uniform to assume the rigors and ambiguities of a man’s life. There was sadness but also strength, gravity and grace, uncertainty but courage. As if he had meant for me to see this, he smiled slowly and pressed his cheek against mine, scorching me with his heat. I closed my arms around him. Our chests filled and emptied at the same time. When at last we untangled ourselves, my pendant had pressed a heart shape into his skin.

“G
OOD MORNING, HENRY,”
Dr. Hayward said. “Nice hat. DeLeon and Son. What is that?”

“A friend’s contracting company,” I said. I removed the hat and put it on my lap. Hayward’s office was on the fourth floor of West-side Hospital, with a window that framed the Hollywood hills when they were visible. The gray June pall that hung in the air made the row of palm trees lining Olympic Boulevard look like leftover props from a Maria Montez movie.

“Leon, that’s the Spanish word for lion, isn’t it?” Hayward said. I didn’t know whether his chattiness was a good sign or a bad one. He had bustled in twenty minutes late with the results of my last series of tests, leaving me in his waiting room for another ten minutes before peremptorily summoning me. Now he wanted a Spanish lesson.

“Leon was one of the ancient kingdoms of Spain,” I said. “DeLeon means ‘from Leon.’”

He tipped back in a thronelike leather chair—no economically correct furniture for the head of Westside’s cardiology department. His feet, I observed, barely touched the ground. Other than the chair, the rest of his office was modest enough. White walls, framed degrees, a couple of art prints that appeared to have been selected by committee for maximum inoffensiveness. The only personal items I could see were pictures of his family—wife, teenage son, pre-teen daughter—all, like Dr. Hayward, small, cute and visibly of superior intellect.

“But it means ‘lion,’ too, doesn’t it?”

On his bookcase was a spiffy miniature stereo system—all chrome and sleek blond wood—on which he was playing, at very low volume, a somber piece of classical music that the CD propped against the stereo identified as Mahler’s Second Symphony.

“Yes,” I conceded. “It also means ‘lion.’”

He grinned triumphantly and flipped open my file folder. “Your results are fine. Treadmill was negative—ECG normal, no substernal chest pain reported. Your resting pulse is okay. You’re taking your beta-blocker faithfully?”

“Like clockwork.”

“And an aspirin every day.”

“To keep the doctor away.”

He smirked, flipped a page. “Lipids—well, you’ve got some hereditary problems there, but it seems to be under control with the Lipitor. Any chest pains, shortness of breath?”

“I did have a pain in my chest a couple of days ago that felt like a muscle spasm.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, then rattled off a series of rapid-fire questions as if he hoped to catch me in a lie. Fortunately, I had done at least as many cross-examinations as he, so I kept up. Then he fell silent, went back through my chart. “Well, Henry, I just don’t see any cause for immediate alarm here, but if it happens again, I want you to call me then and not wait three days to report it.” He cast a stern look at me. “Got it?”

“I understand,” I said. As I tried to frame my next question, a chorus burst out on the CD. “I have to ask you kind of an awkward—”

“Yes, you can have sex,” he said.

“How did you know I was going to ask you about sex?”

“It’s a standard question,” he replied. He glanced at the cap in my lap and said, “Hmpf. Did you have specific questions or should I give you my post-heart attack birds-and-bees talk?”

“All I want to know is whether I could drop dead in flagrante delicto.”

“Ah, the standard lecture, then,” he said. “Sexual intercourse carries a zero to negligible risk of cardiac arrest. In much older men, the beta-blocker may cause some dysfunction. Are you having trouble getting erections?”

“Uh—no,” I said. “Well, yes. A bit.”

“That’s probably psychological, Henry. Sex is not going to kill you—well, let me amend that. Safe sex is not going to kill you. Your problems will pass. If they persist, then we’ll see if there’s a medical cause.” When he finished, he smiled and said, “Tell Mr. DeLeon if he has concerns, he can call me directly.”

“How did you know?”

“Usually it’s one of the first things men in relationships are worried about after a heart attack. You didn’t ask, so I drew the logical conclusion. Now you’re asking, so obviously your situation has changed and”—he raised an eyebrow—“you came in wearing that very red hat.”

“I’ll tell John he can call you if he has questions,” I said. “By the way, you scare me.”

Hayward flashed his smug grin. “I want you to accelerate the pace of your exercise.” He glanced at me. “Let’s avoid the obvious double-entendre.”

“I wasn’t going there.”

“Brisk walks would be good,” he said. “The idea is a progressive increase. Push yourself a bit, and unless I hear from you before, I’ll see you in a month.”

I got up to leave. At the door, I said, “Thanks for everything, Doc.”

“Enjoy yourself,” he said, and as he reached for the phone, added, “safely.”

On my way home, I had a thought and drove to the Beverly Center. Late that afternoon, when the-sludge had finally cleared from the sky, I put on my brand-new running shoes, an old pair of running shorts and an even older T-shirt from law school, the red Stanford lettering all but faded into the gray, and drove to a nearby high school. I made my way through the red brick buildings that had served as a backdrop for more than one teen exploitation film, and found the football field. It was ringed by a quarter-mile track. I went out to field, lay my cell phone in the grass and began to stretch. Over a decade had passed since I’d stopped running, so I was surprised at how quickly I remembered the sequences of stretches but not so surprised at how much more difficult they were. I was reaching for the big toe on my left foot when my phone rang. I picked it up. It was my investigator, Freeman Vidor.

“Hey, Henry, I got the info you wanted on that lady. Jesusita Trujillo.”

“A phone number?”

He chuckled. “Phone number, address, Social Security, place of employment, number of kids. Credit rating.”

“Another fly caught in the worldwide web, huh? She have a son named Peter?”

“Yeah, and two daughters besides.”

“I’m not at the office right now. Can you e-mail me this information?”

“Sure,” he said. “Where are you?”

“At the track.”

“When did you start playing the ponies?”

“A running track, Freeman,” I said. “I’m going to attempt to run a mile in under a month.”

“You sure you want to do that?”

“Doctor’s orders.”

He snorted. “Hope his med-mal insurance is paid up.”

“Talk to you later, Freeman. Thanks.”

I finished my stretches, stuck the phone in the waistband of my shorts and walked to the start of the track. The air smelled hazily of eucalyptus from the surrounding trees and of sun-warmed grass. As I looked down the dusty length of the track, my body seemed in some subtle way to remember all those years of starting lines at track meets. My pulse accelerated a bit, my knees bent a little, my shoulders loosened, my neck straightened, the balls of my feet seemed to touch more lightly the ground beneath them. I got into position, counted three and slowly set off.

Soaking in the tub that evening, I studied the printout of Freeman’s e-mail glimpse into the life of Mrs. Jesusita Trujillo, a sixty-five-year-old widow who lived in Garden Grove and worked as a teacher’s aide to supplement her Social Security. Peter, thirty-five, was the youngest of her three children. She also had two married daughters, one living in San Diego, the other in Hawthorne. She had recently taken out a loan for ten thousand dollars, using her house for collateral. Since she had no large debts, I wondered why she needed that much money. Home improvements? I would see for myself when I dropped in on her tomorrow evening. I had decided to visit rather than call, because if she was in touch with Vicky and Pete, she might refuse to see me, depending on what my niece had told her. The cell phone rang. I put the paper aside and answered it. It was John. I made him laugh with an account of my elephantine pace around the track and then I told him about my talk with Dr. Hayward.