“Yes,” Ashton said. “Like me.”
“We all want to help him,” Zakiyyah said. “That’s why we came, that’s why we’re here.”
“Not me,” Nigel said. “I’m just here to drink.”
“Why don’t you help,” Ashton said, “by not talking to him loud and slow like he’s backward? Help him by acting normal. Act like everything’s okay.”
“How do we do that?” said Riley.
“How? You act. Hey, Julian, there you are! We wondered if you were redecorating in there.” Ashton threw Riley a withering look before sliding a freshly poured pint to Julian.
“Jules, Ashton has something to tell you,” Riley blurted before Julian even had a chance to sit down. “Oh, yes, he’s got some great news. Don’t give me your evil eye, Ashton. No sense in beating around the bush. Party’s almost over. Tell him already.”
“Tell me what?” Julian sat down, looking across the table at his brothers. “Tell Mom I’m doing fine,” he said to Tristan and Dalton. “Don’t worry her. She’s got enough on her plate. I’m an adult. I’ll figure it out.” He turned to Ashton. “Tell me what?”
Ashton drank half his pint before he spoke. “I’m moving.”
“Moving where?”
“To London.”
“To London?” That came out two octaves higher than Julian’s normal baritone.
“Preferably to Notting Hill. With you.”
“But I don’t live in Notting Hill,” Julian said dumbly.
“Not yet.” Ashton put on his best smile. “Look, you know I don’t feel right about you being here on your own. I’ve never felt right about it. Plus, like I told you, my old man needs help. Think of it as a father and son reunion.”
“Ashton, aww, are you coming to watch over Jules?” Nigel slurred his words, his narrow shoulders quaking. “Good luck with that. You’ll sack him yourself before the week’s out.”
“I’ll be sacking somebody,” Ashton said to Nigel, “but are you sure it’ll be Jules?” He faced Julian. “Dude, why do you look panicked like a nun in a penguin shooting gallery? I’m not moving here tomorrow. I have a few things to sort out first. And you and I need a place to live. The girls said they’d help us look this weekend, right, girls?”
The girls mumbled in reply.
“What about the Treasure Box?”
“It’s been taken care of. We’re not staying in London forever, are we? Just long enough to . . .” Ashton trailed off. As if he himself didn’t know how that sentence should end. Even Julian didn’t know how that sentence should end. Long enough to what?
“Bryce will run it, you remember him.” Ashton grinned. “Tristan and Dalton will help.” Julian’s brothers drunkenly nodded. “Your mom said she’ll do the inventory, your dad the books. Riley will work on Saturdays, Gwen and Zakiyyah on Sundays. Everyone will pitch in. It’ll be fine.”
But it wasn’t fine. No one could run that store for any length of time except Ashton, not even Julian, and everyone knew it. “Why would you leave L.A., Ash?” Julian said. “It’s your life.”
“It was your life, too,” Ashton said, the shine in his eyes dimming. “It was our life. And look what happened. Plus,” he added, “I want to move to London. Really. I’m sick of the sunshine and warm weather. I need a little rain in my life. Right, Riley? Right, Gwennie? Right, Z?”
The women tutted. “You’re moving to the wrong town for a little rain,” said Zakiyyah.
Julian wanted to back away, but there was nowhere to back away to. His chair was against the wall. “What about Riley?”
“Exactly, Julian!” Riley exclaimed in hearty agreement as to her own inconsequence. “That’s what I keep saying. What about me?”
“You’ll visit on the weekends,” Ashton said.
“It’ll cost me a week’s salary to fly out every weekend,” Riley said. “I’ll be broke and homeless.”
“Not every weekend,” Ashton said. “Maybe once a month. We talked about this. And I’ll come back once a month.”
“Ashton,” Julian said in a faltering voice, “Riley should move here, too.”
“What a great idea, Jules!” Riley said, with fake cheer. “What do you say, Ash?”
“Stop it.” He turned to Julian. “I’m not moving here for fun, Jules. I’m moving here for you.”
Awkwardly Julian excused himself again and back in the men’s room wondered if there was another way out of the pub. Could he climb out through the small window? Flee, leave the apartment, quit work, vanish. That was the only thing he wanted. To vanish off the face of the earth.
After splashing water on his gray face, Julian stood at the far end of the semi-circular bar, trying to block out the noise, holding on to the counter, contemplating his next move. He stared at the gold lights, the round tables, the happy drinking laughing people. Inside him was a churning void.
A gruff voice sounded next to him. “You’re looking for a miracle,” the voice said. “You won’t find it here.”
24
The Question
JULIAN TURNED HIS HEAD TO STARE INTO THE BEAKY PROFILE of an old woman in a black cloak. Her face was the color of desert dirt, dry and cracked with a million crevices. In her lizard-skin hands she palmed a dram of Scotch. Perhaps it wasn’t Julian she had addressed. She wasn’t looking in his direction so Julian couldn’t tell her to mind her own business. He waited. She said nothing else. He thought he’d gotten off easy.
“What are you looking for?” she asked in a heavy Southeast Asian accent. “Your faith?”
Ah.
Now Julian had to turn to her. He wished he also had a Scotch he could palm. Instead, his empty right hand twitched on the counter. “Are you talking to me?”
“Do you see anyone else here?”
“Well, in that case,” Julian said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Those your friends?” She gestured over to the tables. “Came a long way to celebrate with you? For your birthday? Born on the Ides of March, eh, the ancient day for ritual sacrifice and settling all debts. Well, well. That man, the ringmaster, he’s been holding the fire hoops for your amusement the entire night. But instead you look like you’re at your own funeral.”
“Can I help you?”
“I don’t need help,” the woman said. “You need help.”
“Perhaps I can call you a taxi?”
“You’re the one who must hurry.” Her voice was a rake scraping on gravel. “Because you’re almost out of time.”
What? he said inaudibly.
She leveled him with a stare from the half-hooded slits of her ancient eyes. In that crinkle of a face, the eyes burned like black fire, aware, lucid, damning, judging, and unpersuadable. As if she knew everything. Julian’s hands began to shake. He squeezed them together. The fists still shook.
“I heard him say you been to priests and soothsayers, asking questions.”
“I don’t have any questions,” Julian said. “Out of time for what?”
“That was a question.”
“It was rhetorical.”
She smirked. “You must be new to the English language. No, it wasn’t. You know the answers to rhetorical questions.”
A stumped Julian said nothing.
“Everybody’s got a question, the fools and the wise.”
“Not me.” Who was she?
“Ask me,” she said. “I’ve lived longer than you. The way you’re going, I may outlive you. I’ve seen a few things. I know a few things. What do you want to know?”
“Nothing.”
“You know everything, do you?” The old woman nodded. “Mr. Know-it-All. Got all the answers.”
Julian gripped the side of the bar. Mr. Know-it-All? It must be a coincidence! It’s not as if he’d trademarked his name. It was an idiom. Common usage. Many people said Mr. Know-it-All.
“How did you know my name?” he mumbled.
“Is that your question?”
Baffled, he mined her face. Had
he met her somewhere and forgot? She stared back unwaveringly. She was tiny, with a tight gray body in loose black fabric. “Do I know you?” Julian whispered.
“Is that your question?”
“No. God, I told you—no. Look, I don’t want to be rude, but I have to go. I’ve got to get back to my friends.”
“A minute ago you stood by my side wondering how to skip out on them, and now you’re rushing back?” She smirked. “How time flies.”
“Were you listening to us? Did you hear what the gypsy told me?”
“No. Though some gypsies do have partial sight. What did she tell you?”
“She said the time had not yet come for the Lord to act.”
“Shame,” the woman said. “That one did not have the sight. Because the time has definitely come for the Lord to act. And not just the Lord, but you.”
Julian swayed. He’d had too much to drink, that’s all there was to it. Cha-ching, cha-ching. The slot machine in the corner was obnoxiously loud. He noticed this evening that everything in the White Crow had been unusually loud, almost agonizingly so. The slot machines, the laughter, the clinking of glasses, all of it like metal pans, jarring noises of high-strung cymbals clanging next to his ears. It had been unsettling him all night—the pub charged with electrical impulses astride the galloping sound waves—but now the decibel level had become unbearable. He pressed his fingers to his temples. “Do you really want a question?” Julian said to the old woman. Cha-ching! Bangle!
“It’s nothing to me,” the woman replied. “But you clearly need an answer.”
Julian glanced around the pub, sought out Ashton, standing as if on a stage, telling a story. Loud. The barman at the other end, serving a family of foreigners yelling their orders at him in Greek. Loud. There was no one in their section of the pub. Since Josephine’s death he had been pleading to the mute universe, hearing no reply to his shouting rage, to his red anguish.
“Here’s my question,” Julian said. “What is the sign by which you recognize God?”
When he was twelve and out with his parents, he passed a blind beggar on Hollywood Boulevard by Grauman’s Theatre, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk with his beastly cur, near the celebrity hands in cement, by the costumed Spider-Men. The board hanging from the beggar’s neck said, “Please O Lord, give me a sign by which I will know you.” Julian gave the man the only quarter in his pocket, and thought about the man’s plea a long time, until he got up enough nerve to ask his parish priest.
It had taken him six years. He was afraid the priest would laugh at him. But he really needed to know the answer. He was in his freshman summer at UCLA. He and Ashton were planning to hike across the Pacific Crest Trail, through Yosemite and Death Valley, to the Black Hills of South Dakota, and then to Missoula, Montana, and Julian didn’t want to be on the road and not know what he was searching for.
“If you don’t know by now, young man,” the priest said, “I’m afraid you will never know.”
He turned away, leaving Julian embarrassed and chastised. Julian figured the answer must have been right in front of him and he missed it. In the years since, he did consider the possibility that maybe the priest himself didn’t know. But if the man of God didn’t know, how was Julian supposed to know? He was barely even a child of God. Sometimes he went for months without invoking God’s name as anything but a swear word.
Yosemite went off without a hitch and so did the Badlands a year later and Yellowstone a year after that. But then his luck ran out in Topanga. Even after being gifted with his life, Julian continued to carry with him the sense that he was missing something, that there was something important he had forgotten, but it was a smudged sense, like an old faded print. He and Ashton graduated, opened the Treasure Box, Julian walked away from an English masters, from teaching, from a lot of things. He toiled at the store, created a website, became Mr. Know-it-All. They partied, traveled, worked hard, played hard, they had a blast, a great full life. After a parade of women, Julian found Gwen. He got his own place. He leased a Volvo. He was golden. Everything was coming up Southern California roses.
And then—The Invention of Love.
And now—this.
The unflinching woman did not turn away, nor did she speak, as she sat, sipping her Scotch, either thinking or bearing the whisky burn. Julian took a step back, ready to go, and then he heard her dry, grainy voice.
“The infant in his swaddling blanket.”
That was it. That was all she said. Julian thought he had misheard. He leaned in. “The infant in his swaddling blanket? What does that mean?”
Turning her head, she stared straight at him.
Julian staggered back. Her eyes terrified him with their black bottomless knowledge. As if she was the real Miss Know-it-All, about Julian, about everything. “Two thousand years ago, no other sign was given to the wise men when they asked your question,” she said with a hacking cough. “The wisest men who lived back then. Just a newborn wrapped in a blanket. If they didn’t get another sign, why should you? You’re not even that wise a man.”
A strangled noise left Julian’s throat. He needed help so badly, and what the old woman was offering him was impenetrable and therefore useless. In response to his visible desperation, she turned away and shrunk into her robes, vanishing inside them.
Julian stumbled back to the table, gulped down what remained of his warm beer, but couldn’t focus on anything except the old woman’s words. He couldn’t hear anyone. He jumped up, knocked over his chair—more noise—whirled around.
The woman was gone.
“What, Jules? Too much lager? Sit down.” Intoxicated himself, Ashton made futile attempts to right the chair.
Julian sought out the barman. “What woman?” the barman said, pouring an ale on tap, not looking up.
Not only was she gone, but the Scotch in front of her had been cleaned up. Not even a napkin remained.
“You cleaned up her drink, but you don’t remember her?”
“Don’t know what you’re on about, mate. Order or piss off. I’m slammed.”
“Small old woman in a large black coat.”
“Do you think I remember everyone who comes into my pub? Look around.”
“She was a hundred years old! Drinking whisky by herself. How often do you get that?”
The fed-up barman waved his hand around the room, where multitudes clustered, young and old.
Julian examined the high stool where the old woman had sat. It was pushed in, all neat. The pub was deafening. Someone had pulled the slot machine lever and hit the jackpot, and the machine was going nuts, ringing bells and dropping round pound coins into a metal catcher, seven! seven! seven! seven! seven! seven! seven! Julian pressed his palms into his pounding head. He wasn’t used to being this drunk. He must have made the whole thing up. Sometimes he did that. Dreamed things. Like Weaver said. Klonopin. Dangerous hallucinations. He had imagined a dodgy old woman, invented her unfathomable words. Baby! Swaddling blanket! Wise men!
On the bar, a white business card was tucked into the counter lip where she’d been sitting. Julian pulled it out. It was from a place called Time Over Matter. 153 Great Eastern Road. Acupuncture and other Great Eastern rites. That’s all it said. Time over Matter? Eastern rites on Great Eastern Road? Was this a joke? Dropping the card on the floor he walked away. A minute later, he rushed back for it, but it was gone. Someone must have picked it up, though he hadn’t seen anyone walk past. Julian grabbed on to the counter, light-headed, his chest tight.
What was happening?
25
The Widow’s Daughter
THAT NIGHT AS JULIAN CABBED IT TO HERMIT STREET, HIS undimmed prayer wasn’t help me or forgive me. It was, please don’t let Ashton move here. Tomorrow, when he was sober, he would talk Ashton out of it. He couldn’t let his friend ruin his life, too. He tried not to think about the old woman. His fingers kept going numb as he tried not to think of her.
When he staggered into the foyer, Mrs.
Pallaver was waiting for him. Not just her. Her daughter, too. The door to their parlor room was invitingly ajar. “We wondered when you were gonna come home, love,” Mrs. Pallaver said. “Come in, come in. Frieda’s been waiting.”
“Hello there,” he said, holding on to the wall.
“How are you?” Frieda said, remaining sitting. She always sat when she was around him. He knew why. She was such a tall, broad-shouldered gal, towering over him. She was so equine in her energetic fortitude that it painfully raised the question of what she could possibly want with a slim, barely-simmering-with-life jockey like him. His old surging jauntiness had long ebbed, was washed away into the L.A. storm drains when they hosed down Normandie.
“We have a cake for you. Like last year.” Mrs. Pallaver smiled. “Frieda, quick, get the candles.”
“They’re right here, Mum.”
“It’s your favorite, love.” Mrs. Pallaver smiled. “Chocolate cherry. Frieda, help me light these. It’s a tradition now. Frieda, I can’t work this damn ignition thing, do you think it’s out? Have you got plain matches?”
As Julian watched them fuss over the lighter at the poorly lit dining table—mother and daughter, a gray-haired widowed lady trying to spin off her Amazonian child on a would-be-widower who almost had a mother-in-law just like this one, and a bride, not quite like this one—the heater on low, the women having waited for him well past their bedtime, he wanted to rip open his chest to yank out the pity he felt for them, pity like piety, a pathological B-side of a love that could never be, yet which still had something undeniably human in it. Usually he would sit and have tea with them. Last year he even had cake. But tonight, he couldn’t. Nothing stirred in his groin for this woman. It wasn’t that it was too soon. It was that it would never be.
“I’m very sorry,” Julian said, “you’re too kind, but I don’t feel well. Too much celebrating, I’m afraid, thank you, the cake looks very good, perhaps I can take a raincheck? But also, ahem, I wanted to let you know, give as much notice as possible, so you don’t get stuck, so sorry about this also, I’m just sorry all around tonight, aren’t I, but I’ll be moving out. I know—it’s a shock to me as well. I really like it here and didn’t intend on leaving, but Ashton, I’ve told you about him”—oh, stop talking, you idiot! —“he’s moving to London to help me sort out some things, and he and I are getting a flat together, we need just a bit more space than I have here, you see, we need a bedroom—I mean, two bedrooms”—oh God! Will this never stop—“Ashton wants to move to Sloane Square or Mayfair or perhaps Belgravia, he heard it was nice there, or Notting Hill, forgive me for dropping in, but I must go lie down, thanks again . . . I beg your pardon . . .”
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