Trust Me (19 page)

CHAPTER 40

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It was a hot and crowded day at Venice beach.
Jeff cut through the river of people milling on the boardwalk and passed the park where the rollerbladers skated to music blasting from a portable PA system and skateboarders performed tricks on a wooden ramp. Out onto the blazing sand, where he had to jog toward the shore to keep his feet from burning.

Out in the water, a wave reared up and broke, easily six feet high, followed by another. By the time he got to the shoreline, five more had lined up and peeled perfectly to the left, directly in front of the lifeguard tower.

Children waded in the shallow water. A fat man in flowered trunks stood knee-deep in the water; when the white foam hit him, he remained motionless as it came up to his waist. Jeff moved out past the fat man and put the fins on. A few boogie boarders hovered outside the impact zone—the size of the surf seemed to be keeping the swimmers inside.

The ocean was cool and refreshing. It felt good to be in the water, healthy and clear headed. It felt good to be sober. He pushed through the light chop, kicking his fins and moving briskly toward the outside. When he got to the spot where the larger waves had begun breaking, he turned and looked back at the beach, using the fins to stay afloat in the deep water.

The black and yellow flag flew over the lifeguard tower—no board surfing allowed. The entire beach was strewn with towels and umbrellas and people, mostly concentrated on the gentle rise from the tide line to the tower. Behind that, a stretch of flat beach extended about fifty yards wide before you got to the boardwalk. A red jeep with a long yellow paddleboard on its roof was parked next to the tower. A lifeguard stood at the jeep’s open door, pointing out toward the horizon.

He turned around. A green wall loomed ahead of him, advancing and steepening rapidly. He swam up to meet it, getting lifted by the swell as it passed, turning at the crest to look down the face. It was a long drop to the bottom. He had to swim farther out to meet the larger wave that followed. When it passed, he turned to watch from behind as it crashed with a roar.

It was the third wave that set up just right, peaking in front of him with a promise of an unbroken shoulder to the left. He kicked hard with his fins and felt the wave pick him up, thrusting him toward the beach as it threatened to break. He extended his left arm and leaned toward it, moving down and across the face of the wave as it came down behind him. Drawing a straight line along the vertical green surface, Jeff sped, weightless, the churning curl right at his heels.

The wave finally closed out, breaking in front of him and pitching him out into the flat water ahead, then catching up with him and pushing him under, spinning and bouncing off the sandy bottom, before finally releasing him and passing him by.

Standing in waist high water, he saw the fat man forty yards down the beach. It had been years since he had ridden a wave so well. The thought came to him that it was crazy to have lived by the beach for so long and never gone in the water. Too involved in the nightmare of getting loaded.

Half an hour and six memorable rides later, he walked up the rise of the beach, fins in his hand. The lifeguard, standing on the platform outside the tower enclosure, said, “Nice riding.”

Jeff looked up and grinned. “Yeah. It’s
fun out there. Where’s this swell coming from, anyway?”

The lifeguard shaded his eyes and looked out at the ocean, scanning up and down the surf line. “There’s
a big hurricane about five hundred miles off the tip of Baja, moving this way. Plus a new swell coming in from somewhere near Australia.”

“So it’s going to get bigger?”

“Huge.” The lifeguard pointed toward the horizon. “Look at this.”

Distant lines approached, evenly spaced. The nearest formed a distinct swell, becoming steeper as it advanced toward the shore. It was bigger than the ones he had seen so far, and when it broke it crashed all at once, too big to contour itself to the shifting sandbars below.

He sat on his towel next to the tower and watched. Overhead, a news helicopter passed by. A small plane pulled a banner advertising beer. The west wind came up, offsetting the heat from the sun. He turned as he heard the lifeguard step off
the ramp and watched him go to the shoreline, using a loudspeaker to clear people out of the ocean. There was a large triangular patch of brown water—an undertow—forming where his last ride had ended. The fat man turned and lumbered back into ankle-deep water.

CHAPTER 41

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Unbelievable.
Art had called, saying he had a video of their session in his office, things Holly had said while in “a highly lucid moment of connection” to her “wounded inner child.” He told her it was important—critical even—for her psychological well-being and spiritual health that she watch it. He was texting her a link as they were speaking. She hung up without responding.

Too agitated to sit, Holly paced around her kitchen, feeling a tremor in her hands and the old familiar lightheadedness that preceded a seizure. She reached in her purse and fished out a Xanax and chewed it into a foul-tasting, crumbly paste. The act itself, with its promise of relief, calmed her enough to make a decision.

She watched, first with dread, then in horror as the events at the session in Art’s office unfolded on the small screen of her phone. At first, the camera had just been pointed at the wall and there was only audio. She gasped when the angle abruptly changed. No detail was spared in the close-up: Art in her mouth, his hand behind her head, his naked hips moving.

Her cell phone trilled in her hand. She stabbed at the screen and said, “You creepy little prick. What do you want?” She put him on speakerphone and held it at arm’s length, as if to distance herself as much as possible.

His voice blared from the device. “Actually, I’m a bit short on funds, Holly my dear. Round up what you can and meet me at the Malibu Beach Inn. You should be able to get there in an hour.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” She was shouting at the phone. “What if I don’t?”

“Holly, one tap on my phone and the video goes online. Who knows? It might go viral and you’ll finally be a star.”

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And now here he was, saying, “Let’s go have tea and dessert at the restaurant on the pier,” as if nothing had changed. They were in the lot just north of the hotel, her BMW parked next to Art’s Jag. A wave smashed down in the shore break as Art got out of his car.

“Come now, Holly, last time. No tricks, I promise. It’s just that—” he paused as he locked the Jag “—there are a few things you should know before we part. And you’ll never have to worry about what I sent you.”

Christ. Okay, she thought, decaf and a piece of pie, she would listen to what the asshole had to say, and that would be the end of it.

But then they got to the entrance to the pier and Art said, “The ocean tonight is truly magnificent. You really must see this,” and he led her by the elbow, past the restaurant to where they could look north toward the point. A wave exploded against the pilings underneath them, and the entire pier shuddered.

A long dark wall approached Malibu Point three hundred yards to the north and, far out from the shore, broke with a sharp crack, the whitewater churning toward the beach as the wave peeled southward in obedience to the contour of the rocky bottom. The entire wall of water finally collapsed thunderously beneath their feet. Another one was already forming on the moonless horizon.

Art guided her forcefully now toward the end of the pier, where the bait house and coffee shop loomed in the darkness. There was so much power in this place—there, another crash, bigger than before—she would ignore this man, let him say his bullshit, give him whatever he wanted, and the hell with him.

“You’re angry with me.” How very astute. So the man had earned his PhD.

“At least it’s nice to know what’s what, have all our cards on the table.”

Art said, “What’s what . . . isn’t that a lovely idea?”

“At least we’ve finally arrived at the truth.”

“Ha! The truth. Is that with a capital T? What if I told you nobody knows what’s what?” He walked behind her now. “Did you ever see a movie called
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
?” She had, in fact—it was required material in the Film School at UCLA. A Confederate soldier on a bridge gets hung, the rope breaks and he swims down the river in the night, away from the rifle shots and the baying hounds—he runs down a road toward safety, toward a house he knows. A beautiful woman floats down the steps from the veranda, her hand stretched forth to greet him. When their fingers touch the rope snaps taut and the soldier is hanging from the bridge.

“What about it?”

“Kazantzakis, Borges, the storytellers of India with their endless nested dreams; they all have the same theme.” He caught up with her now; they were more than halfway to the bait shop. The ocean had been calm for a moment.

“So?” His bullshit seemed so dreary now; how could she ever have found him interesting?

“The point, my dear, is that there is no ‘what’s what.’ We have no way of proving ‘what is.’ You see, I can’t even prove that I am really here.”

There was a light fog, not the thick kind that begins in wisps and then rolls in billows over the surface of the ocean, but the kind that hangs evenly in the air, adding a chill to the night.

Art droned on. “At the very best I can only assume I’m here, talking to you, and not lying in a dentist’s chair somewhere, under the influence of too much nitrous oxide, having a fabulous hallucination.” He took her elbow again; she pulled away and walked ahead. “Or pinned under a wrecked auto, bleeding to death and in shock, in total denial of what is happening to me, inventing this here instead. But ‘here’ is only in my head.”

The sea was black, the horizon invisible. They had come to the end of the pier; the lights from the restaurant were blocked by the bait shop and the darkness was nearly complete. Holly turned to the right and walked to the north side of the pier. She stepped past a bench and looked out over the railing toward the point. What was the man carrying on about?

“Jesus, Art, what’s your point? I have the money you wanted.” She reached into her purse. She looked back and saw that Art stood on the other side of the bench, his hands in his pockets, peering up into the night sky. “Do you even have a point?”

“So what do you do?” he asked, as though she hadn’t said anything. “How do you feel when everything you think you know loses its solidity? When all your nice, taken-for-granted beliefs become wispy, smoky, phantom ideas that you can no longer connect to? Where the simple facts of God and good, of moral principal and right living are not only called into question but suddenly seem naive, ridiculous, unacceptable to the intelligence? When a termite colony seems the only apt metaphor for human behavior, what do you do? To what or whom do you turn for comfort? What is left to guide your actions?”

Crazy, she thought, how his voice was hypnotic even now, relentless, as though he could engulf her in his bullshit just by the force of its delivery. A wave formed, farther out than the previous set, and rushed forward, suspended vertically for an endless moment before collapsing in a sustained roar. An even larger one reared behind it.

A point of light flicked on in the path of the outer wave, then seemed to submerge, casting a greenish glow that rose as the swell lifted it. Near the top, the glow emerged from the water and became a narrow beam pointing down into the trough of the wave. In the dim glow from the pier, she could see that a surfer was hurtling down the face of the beast, a flashlight attached to his forearm and a white trail flaring off the board behind him. He hit the flat water of the trough at the same time as the lip of the wave hit—he was just ahead of it, banking hard and accelerating into the steep rushing wall, his left arm extended forward, the radiant beam shooting out in front of him.

She exclaimed, “Incredible!” and stepped up to the railing, absorbed in the spectacle. The first wave was just now looming at the end of the pier, its crest reaching to touch the underside of the wooden slats of the deck. There was a sucking sound as the water pulled away from the pilings; she looked down and saw their gray shapes like bones in a bone yard.

The surfer had climbed to the top of the wave and then turned back to race downward, banking hard to avoid the lip smashing behind him, flying up into the middle of the wave as the curl caught up and buried him. For seconds only the shaft of light was visible.

The first wave finally shattered right under where she and Art stood. Spray flew up over their heads and the deck trembled. Halfway to the point, the flashlight emerged from the hollow of the second wave. An entire section of the wall broke in front of the surfer—he turned his board toward shore and lay down as the whitewater exploded around him.

She felt a hand on the seat of her jeans.

“Holly, my dear—”

“Art, why don’t you shut up and go home. I don’t even care what you do.”

The wave rose up at the end of the pier now, larger than the last, another monster already behind it, the sucking sound below even louder.

He said, “Holly . . .” in that same calm, persistent voice. “There is no home. No truth, no God, and nowhere left to go.” She felt his hands lift and push, felt herself pitch forward, felt the pain as her ankles slammed against the railing, saw the gray bones of the pilings as she fell.

CHAPTER 42

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It was interesting, sitting at a bar and not having a drink.
Jeff looked around; the place was packed. There were bottles of beer, snifters of brandy, shots of tequila, mixed drinks, drinks on ice, and coffee drinks all around him. The smell of cognac wafted over from his left—across the bar a couple drank with two straws from a concoction served in a coconut shell. The amazing thing about it, he thought, was that he didn’t care, didn’t need a drink, didn’t even want one.

He and Ron, along with half a dozen others from the meeting that had just ended, were waiting for a table to be cleared so they could all sit together. It seemed like a long way to drive just for an AA meeting—“Is this what they mean by any lengths?” he had asked Ron, who just chuckled—but it was a good, friendly group and he had enjoyed himself.

Every five or six minutes since they had arrived, the floor shook and dishes rattled as huge waves pounded the pier. He was about to excuse himself so he could go out and watch the surf—there was a view through the restaurant windows, but it was difficult to really see—when he saw a familiar figure outside on the pier.

Jeff was sitting on a barstool, facing Ron, with the bar to his left. To his right were a window and a side exit that let out onto the pier. A couple walked by, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the man, dressed in dark slacks and a windbreaker, take his companion by the elbow as if guiding her toward the end of the pier. In fact, he thought, he had seen her before too. But he couldn’t connect the two of them. There was no way that the man, whom he hadn’t seen in years, could be with the blond from that SOL meeting. No way.

“Excuse me?” he asked. Ron had been talking about something that had been said earlier, at the meeting, calling it psychobabble. Said it sound like some of that SOL bullshit.

“What’s up? You look like the liberty bell just went off behind your eyes.” Ron glanced out the window at the couple, now receding into the darkness. Then he looked back at Jeff with that patient look, like Jeff had a slow processor upstairs but would eventually come up with a response.

“Hey, I’m fine. I’m just gonna hit the men’s room for a minute and then maybe step outside and watch the surf.” Ron looked at him with interest and gave a small smile. Jeff left the bar and walked through the main restaurant, past the restrooms, and out the main entrance, and then looped around through the huge doors at the pier’s entrance. The two were barely visible now. He waited for a moment while the pier trembled like an aftershock from an earthquake.

He followed, keeping to the right side of the pier, walking between the benches and the railing, moving fast enough that he could gain some ground on the couple. He saw the girl disengage herself from the man. Now, as he followed, she walked ahead of the man by several feet. What was going on?

As they approached the bait shop, the man caught up with the girl. In a moment of silence, between the sets of crashing waves, he heard the man talking. Pieces of sentences floated on the mist. Silence from the girl.

He looked back. The restaurant was far behind him, cheerfully lit, seeming almost unreal against the backdrop of low hills across the Pacific Coast Highway. He wondered what Ron would think of what he was doing, following some couple in the dark. Stalking. He brushed the doubt aside; something odd was going on here.

When he turned again, he saw that the two were in the even darker shadow by the south side of the bait shop. He took the opportunity to catch up and obscure himself against the shoreward side of the structure and then peered out to find that they had disappeared. He followed and then came to a stop at the next corner of the bait shop.

They had turned to the right and walked a short distance to the corner of the pier. The girl stood at the railing, facing north, on the other side of a bench from the man. Jeff was sure of who he was now—sure about both of them.

From his place by the building, he could hear the blond, only about fifteen feet away, ask the guy, “What’s your point?” Half a beat later: “Do you even have a point?” The guy droned on about Christian beliefs and God, about principals and human behavior and metaphors—
What the hell was happening?

An enormous wave reared up on the point and began peeling off with impeccable form, thunderously, but with an eerie precision. A second, even larger, wave towered behind it and suddenly—he couldn’t believe it—some maniac with a flashlight attached to his arm took three strokes on a longboard and powered down the face, then made a radical bottom turn, using all its torque for the speed he needed to move forward.

The girl leaned on the railing and made an exclamation that was drowned by the roar of the surf. The guy on the wave pointed his light down the line, poised in maximum trim, and proceeded to get eaten alive as the curl caught up with, enveloped, and then passed him. He thought the surfer had bought it—what a spooky tumble he was headed for—when he noticed the light moving in a line through the glass top of the tunnel. Suddenly the flashlight reappeared and the guy was in the clear.

A larger wave was already building behind this one. Perhaps the guy on the board knew it, because he chose to straighten out and ride the churning white soup toward shore, whereas kicking out over the top of the wave would have put him in the path of the monster outside.

He saw the man walk around the bench and place his hand on the seat of the blond’s pants. He heard her say, “Shut up,” and then the guy said something he couldn’t hear. There was a sucking sound as the water rushed toward the wave that the surfer had ridden—he was bouncing toward shore fifty yards to the north, but now the swell was approaching the pier and about to thump down on the pilings.

There was a quick motion of the man’s arm and shoulder, and the blond went over the railing.