To the Bone (7 page)

T
hey're like deer on two legs, graceful creatures that prance not through the woods but along the sidewalks. They stream in and out of the Haight's little bar-cafés in tight jeans and short skirts, tossing their hair and smiling. Their earrings shimmer and you can see the ridges of cartilage in their throats, delicate as eggshell. Perspiration glistens on their skin. You walk among them, brush against them. They don't pay any attention. You look like one of their kind.

The street you're on is a blue-black tunnel of sky, slashed by car headlights. Music spills through the hot air, red electric and easy violet and the misty rose of an alto sax. It all blends together like voices, lifting the crowd's feet on an invisible cushion and moving them along. The shop windows are filled with bright tinsel. But the open doorways are like caves, with the glow of fires inside and figures eating and drinking and mating.

She's here somewhere, in one of those caves.

Her voice sings in your head, calling you. Sometimes it gets lost in the other noise, but if you close your eyes you can hear it clearly. It leads you into a doorway. There's a live band at the far end of the room, with a crowd dancing. Lots of tattoos and colored hair. Not really your kind of place.

But that could be her at the bar, sitting alone.

You take the empty seat next to her. She moves her purse over a little, to give you more room. The top of the wine list is a Mondavi Reserve cabernet at twenty-four dollars a glass. You order it, and listen hard to the voice inside.

“What kind of music do you call that?” you ask her.

She shrugs. “Mostly hip-hop, I guess,” she says uncomfortably, and she turns to watch the dance floor. She's young, twenty-two or-three, and to her, you seem old.

You know by now that she's not the one.

The band quits. Another girl her age, who's been dancing, comes and sits on her other side. They start talking immediately, chattering like birds.

You pocket your change and slip away.

Outside, you find a quiet spot and lean against a wall, close your eyes, and shut everything else out. The voice in your head is a blur of echoes hammering around.

But her song will start again sweet and clear, and lead you to her. It always has.

W
hen Monks came out of the shower, Martine was waiting on the deck with an old-fashioned glass of cold clean Finlandia vodka, touched with fresh lemon. It hurt his teeth and brought a sharp pleasant ache to his throat.

“You're an angel of mercy,” he said, and sank into a chair.

She sat beside him. “Tell me what happened.”

He went through the story tersely—the ugly death of a pretty young woman, and the waves that had risen in its wake.

“Baird suggested, with his usual tact, that I'm getting old,” he finished. He took another long drink. “Maybe he's right.”

“That's ridiculous. You know it and so does he. He's just upset.”

“He sure doesn't want any dust settling on Welles D'Anton's halo.”

“I used to hear that name a lot,” she said. “When I was working for those big-shot executives. Their wives were crazy about D'Anton. It was a status thing, like driving a Rolls. They'd pay a fortune for a Botox injection.”

Monks recalled Larrabee's question about how a struggling actress like Eden Hale had been able to afford the surgeon to the rich and famous.

“He's got his own style, that's for sure,” Monks said. “That clinic had the feel of a French whorehouse.”

“Really?” she said archly. “You know that from experience?”

Only once, Monks thought, and it was true, the place hadn't been anything like D'Anton's clinic. He decided not to elaborate.

“Just a figure of speech,” he said.

“He's supposed to have a magic touch,” Martine said. “Fountain of youth, you know? But from what I could tell, his results were pretty much the same as any other decent plastic surgeon's. I think he's just managed to develop that mystique.”

Monks drank again. “Why'd she have to get her breasts done anyway?” he growled, suddenly, unreasonably, angry about it. “They looked fine.”

Martine shot a glance at him, swift and cool. “You must have watched those movies very closely.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I mean—you know what I mean.”

“Women are all wrapped up about beauty, Carroll. All the time and money we spend on hair, skin care, clothes. Look through a Victoria's Secret catalog some time. That's a zillion-dollar market, and those aren't even things that most other people
see.
It has everything to do with how we think of ourselves. Like me. After my accident, I knew I'd never be beautiful.”

He slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her close. “You're a vision,” he said.

“Not like what you think is beautiful when you're ten.
Baywatch
babes in bikinis, bouncing down the beach. It was something about myself I never trusted. I never believed any man would really want me.” She shrugged. “Of course, women who
are
beautiful probably figure that's the
only
reason men want them.”

Monks had never thought of it quite like that. Women were damned either way.

“There's an endless supply of pretty girls,” he said. “They're being born every minute. Delectable fruit on the great tree of life. But youth and beauty fade away and pass on, even as the morning dew evaporateth in the sunlight.”

She smiled wryly. “Sounds like you didn't get any sleep.”

“What I'm trying to tell you is, you're not just a knockout. There's a lot more
to
you.”

“I know a line when I hear one. You must be wiped out.”

“Pretty much,” he admitted.

“Did you eat, at least?”

“Coffee.”

“Idiot. I bought steaks. Start the grill when you're ready.”

He nodded, but went into the kitchen first and refilled his glass with vodka. He knew he had to be careful. Tomorrow was going to be bad enough in many ways, without the crippling burden of a hangover. One or two drinks would not hurt.

The problem was that one or two had never done him any good.

He got the grill going and the thick steaks cooking. He fed choice bits to the three cats who prowled like thugs demanding tribute—Felicity, the neurotic calico; Cesare Borgia, black, scarred, and streetwise; and Omar, the eighteen-pound blue Persian.

Cats were like creatures in dreams, operating with a logic that seemed to make perfect sense to them, although it was mostly impenetrable to humans. Monks was convinced that the real reason cats had become domesticated—or more probably, deigned to start hanging out with people—had nothing to do with anything so mundane as food or safety. It was because they had discovered the pleasures of hand and lap. The two males would stalk him, trying to trip him into sitting, then leap on him and pin him down by assuming a gravity of several times their actual weight. The calico would shamelessly offer her belly to be petted, then clasp his hand with her forepaws, licking it and drooling. He speculated that instinct told her it was the butting heads of the kittens she had never had.

He had brought several women to the house over the years since his divorce. The cats had treated them with a mixture of jealousy and contempt—with Felicity going so far as to burrow between the two humans in bed, trying to literally kick the intruding female out—and had outlasted them all. But they had loved Martine immediately. Now Monks was the one who felt their cold stares, particularly after he had been gone working for a night. He remembered that the first emotion he had felt about her was an urge to protect. Maybe it was the same with the cats.

Three or four drinks would be okay, he decided. But not five or six.

By the time the steaks were done, the knots in his brain were dissolving. He went into the kitchen to fill his glass one last time. Martine was putting together linguine with Parmesan and garlic.

“Tell me the truth,” Monks said. “Are you getting bored with me?”

She looked surprised. “Don't be silly.” Then she glanced at his glass. “How many of those have you had?”

This irritated Monks. “I'm doing fine,” he said, careful to enunciate the words precisely.

“On an empty stomach, with no sleep?”

“If you want to play nurse, why don't you put on a uniform?”

She turned away stiffly. He had meant it as a joke, or at least he thought he had. He had been told that sometimes there was an edge to his voice that he himself did not hear. The edge tended to sharpen, and his hearing to dim, with alcohol.

“What makes you think I'm getting bored?” she said.

“The way you've been talking about getting back into practice.”

“What's the matter with that? I spend half my life becoming a doctor, and I'm not supposed to practice?”

“Of course you are,” he said. “I'm just wondering, you know, where. When. All that.”

She turned to face him full on, holding a long wooden spoon like a fencing sword. “Why's this coming up now?”

“Well, it has to sooner or later. Don't you think I deserve to know?”

“Know
what
? I haven't decided anything yet.”

“Know what you haven't decided, then.”

“You're a little drunk, Carroll. This isn't funny.”

“‘Drunk' is a relative term, Martine. Strictly speaking, you have never seen me drunk.
Drunk
is a fifth or two of liquor in a day, and that's really only the beginning of drunk, because it can be sustained indefinitely.”

“Do you turn into a different person?”

In his brain flared a dizzy, fragmented memory of a night when he had looped a black silk scarf around the slender neck of Alison Chapley—a sexual game, one that she had initiated—and barely caught himself before she had stopped breathing for good.

“In vino, veritas,”
he said.

“My lowbrow education didn't include Latin.”

“‘There is truth in wine.' Are you moving out?”

There was a longish hesitation before she answered. “I never really moved in.”

Monks nodded. “It's been seeming more and more like that.”

He walked back outside and leaned his forearms on the deck railing. The creek at the bottom of his sloping property was silent now, the last sluggish rivulets from the winter rains dried into a few scattered pools. They would be gone, too, soon. Evening came early up here in the woods, and jays flitted through the thick madrone foliage on their last errands, big birds that crashed around like vandals, flashes of iridescent blue that appeared with jarring swiftness at the corners of your vision and left again by the time you turned your head. They usually woke him at first light, seeming to take malicious pleasure in perching outside his window and screeching until he hauled himself to his feet.

Martine Rostanov had been with him for more than a year—since the two of them had nearly been killed together. She had uncovered the fact that a giant software corporation, getting into the business of genetic manipulation, was using fetuses that were deliberately aborted for the purpose. Monks had gotten caught up with her in exposing this. When it was over, on a foggy March dawn, they had stumbled back to this house, singed, shocked, and exhausted, and made love right here on the deck.

They had moved into a tacit arrangement of living together, here, most of the time. But she had kept her house in Burlingame, south of San Francisco, and although Monks wasn't keeping count, he knew that he was alone more now. He stayed with her there sometimes, but he was rooted here, in his place, and he got restless when he was away for long. He loved solitude. The advantages of suburbia—shopping, movies, people—did not interest him. For her, the isolation of the country wore just as thin.

There were other practicalities that came into play. She was an internist and had spent several years as the in-house physician for that same computer corporation. She had come out of last year's emotional wrenching not ready to get back into the mainstream of medicine. But inactivity was wearing thin, too.

He heard the door open, felt her come to stand beside him.

“This isn't fair,” she said. “You're making me the bad guy. Kicking you when you're down.” He noted that she had refilled her own glass, with a fine Carmenet sauvignon blanc, and she seemed a little unsteady.

“That's not what I'm doing,” he said. “And it's not what you're doing. What's happening at the hospital and what's happening here, they're two different things.”

“But that's
why
you're doing it. Isn't it.”

The term that came into Monks's mind was one that Emil Zukich used—the legendary mechanic who lived up the road, and who had built and rebuilt the Bronco.
Metal on metal:
the point where bushings and bearings and all the other buffers had ground down to dust, and the machine crashed along tearing up its own bones. It was true that external circumstances might precipitate such a thing.

But between Martine and him, it had built on its own, unseen and unnoticed except in tiny increments—the unhappy expression in a passing glance, the slight reluctance to touch. The sense that there was something going on in the background that was never brought forth.

“You're changing the subject,” he said.

“I don't want to be away from
you,
Carroll. I just don't think I can keep on making it here.”

“I understand that, Martine. I really do.”

But he knew in his guts, even if she did not, that that was not the entire truth.

“We can do it half and half,” she said. “Your place and mine.”

“You bet.”

“I've talked to some people about work. That's all, just talking, feeling around. I think I could move into a practice without too much trouble.”

“I'm sure you could,” he said.

“I didn't tell you about it because—goddammit, quit giving me that stoic act.”

“It's not an act.”

“I know it's not,” she said. “Fuck you.”

They both drank.

“Let's take a walk,” Monks said.

“The food will get cold.”

“Just around the place.”

“Okay,” she said doubtfully.

He offered his hand. She took it. They walked down the deck's steps onto a hard red dirt path that skirted the perimeter of the property's three acres.

Thirty yards or so farther on, Monks paused, pointing at a tire-sized flat rock. “I killed a rattlesnake right there once.”

Martine pulled her hand away and turned quickly in a circle, her gaze darting around the nearby earth, littered with twisted snakelike madrone twigs.

“Quit it,” she said. “You're scaring me.”

“I didn't want to. But the kids were still little. I couldn't take the chance.”

“Did you face it hand-to-fang? Like those guys on TV?”

“Are you kidding? I snuck up behind it and whacked it with a garden hoe.”

She shivered. “Are there a lot of them around? Rattlesnakes?”

“I only ever killed one other. I was getting firewood and it came out of the woodpile, between me and the door. Things got pretty tight for a minute there.” Monks pointed at the woodshed, an old board-and-batten structure with only a narrow aisle between the stacks of split rounds. “The cats have taken out a few. They leave them on the doorstep.”

“I didn't know cats would hunt snakes.”

Another harsh image from his past seared Monks's brain—the cats on the hood of the Bronco, leaping and howling in the moonlight, while on the front seat a cobra weaved from side to side, trying to strike at them through the venom-smeared windshield.

“These cats will,” he said.

They walked on, past the workout shed. It was almost dark, cool and still now, with the jays quiet. Higher up, a breeze rustled the redwood fronds and madrone leaves. A few tree frogs were tuning up for the night's concert. He walked slowly and she kept pace with him, swinging her leg without complaint. But on this rough and hilly terrain, she would get tired quickly. Monks stopped again, on the edge of the gully that led down to the creekbed.