Windwhistle Bone

by Richard Trainor

  Devlin nodded and smiled unconvincingly. “We’re almost there,” he said. “Let’s duck into the next alley and smoke what’s left of this roach.”

  A few moments later, they walked into Henry Africa’s. It was loud and crowded with couples and singles circling and looking for partners for the evening. Behind the ferns and fronds decorating the dark interior, small clumps of potential mates were chatting each other up. Ram and John moved through the throng looking for Vera and Miranda. They were nowhere to be found. The men found an empty table near the center of the room and sat down to wait. An hour later, the women entered. With them were the bouncer and one of his buddies, as well as a pretty redhead with a knockout body, clad in skintight spandex pants and a Lou Reed Rock-and-Roll Animal T-shirt. The five of them stood off to the side within view of Ram and John but made no effort to join them. Miranda and Vera looked over to nod an acknowledgment, but that was all. Eventually, Vera signaled Ram to step outside and talk. Ram joined her on the grimy sidewalk.

  “Having a good time?” Ram asked, trying to seem casual. Vera caught his undertone but chose to ignore it.

  “Yes, a very good time,” she said, pulling Ram close to her, the Dubonnet scent overpowering. She brought him closer to her and tried to kiss him but Ram resisted and kept his mouth closed.

  “What’s wrong? We’re having fun! It’s a party, don’t be so fucking uptight.”

  “I’m not uptight.”

  “Yes, you are, you and John both, a couple of uptight and possessive old men. Loosen up; we’re going to have some fun.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Vera moved in closer, reaching down and grabbing Ram’s crotch, squeezing it and gazing into his eyes suggestively without meaning or personal intent.

  “Do you like the redhead? I told her all about you and she’s just dying to make your most personal acquaintance.”

  Ram tried to smile dismissively. His anger was rising, his contempt growing.

  “She’s a doll, Vera.”

  Vera shoved Ram backwards and then came forward back to him.

  “All we’re trying to do is have some fun—Miranda and I—and include you and John in it. You’re like a couple of old schoolmarms. Don’t you want to fuck her, Ram? That cute little redhead? What’s wrong with you?”

  Ram stood back, drew a breath, and finally spoke.

  “I can’t speak for John, Vera, only for me. And what’s wrong with me—if indeed it is wrong—is that I’m with you. I’m your boyfriend, you’re my girlfriend, and I’m not interested in sharing myself, or you, with other partners. We’ve been down this road already with Oscar and his girlfriend, remember?”

  “You are really uptight,” said Vera, her voice rising loud enough so that it attracted the attention of others. They turned and looked at Vera and Ram, standing on the sidewalk five feet apart. But the situation didn’t seem dangerous or threatening, just a normal lovers’ spat, and the onlookers ignored it. When Vera saw this, she launched back in on Ram. “I thought you’d like this, a fine fuck with a beautiful young girl who wants to party all night with us on coke, but look at you. You’re all uptight and chiding. I should have listened to Miranda. We should have gone straight to the baths. But I said no; let’s give our men a chance. And look how you’re both responding? You’re all judgment, and John sits there brooding. You’re both dinosaurs, just like Miranda said.”

  Ram considered the charges, shaking with rage that he refused to give in to. When it passed, he gathered himself and said calmly. “Perhaps you’re right. We’re dinosaurs. I don’t know about John, but for me, I can’t change that, not now anyway. Maybe one day I’ll be as evolved as Miranda and you, but that hasn’t come yet, and until it does, if it does, I’ll remain as I am, which you think is lame and stupid. Okay, so be it, but right now, I’ve seen about all I want to see of you for an evening. I’m going to get my keys and see if John wants to come. You and Miranda are on your own. I’m sure you can manage.”

  Vera looked at Ram, a small smile curling her lips, defiant and triumphant at having achieved what she’d intended: a dramatic reaction acted out in public. It always thrilled her, even more than a response to her performances onstage, for this was solely hers, entirely personal and deeply satisfying, and was the intended effect of her performance. She stood watching Ram receding into the club, imagining what he was saying to Devlin, her smile growing wider. She noticed she was no longer alone. The bouncer was standing next to her. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  “None at all,” said Vera, sighing breathlessly. “Everything is fine. Everything is perfect.”

  Ram sped north on Divisadero, parked, stopped at the small package store for more beers and cigarettes, and they were back to the apartment before one. John paid the babysitter, took two beers, and handed one to Ram, who was busy chopping the last lines left. He inhaled three rails and passed the tooter. Devlin inhaled his share and was about to say something, but Ram stopped him.

  “Let’s turn on the television and see if there’s a movie on.”

  Devlin nodded, activated the set, and skimmed the channels. They passed Lord Jim and Double Indemnity landing on La Strada. “Feeling okay?”

  “Sure. How about a joint?”

  “I can do that,” said John, pulling out his stash and twisting one up. “Maybe we should go to The Miyako. It’s not too late.”

  “I’m not in the mood. But I can arrange it if you want to go.”

  “Nah, I just thought that you might.”

  “No, I’m done.”

  The movie had changed now. They sat silently passing the joint, watching images of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. About halfway through the new picture, Devlin sensed that Ram wanted to be left alone and excused himself to read. Ram sat there for most of the night, watching movie after movie until he fell asleep. He heard the door open sometime after dawn and could hear the women whispering as they entered. He paid them no attention. He could feel Vera looking at him inquiringly but ignored her.

  When he awoke, the sky was still gray and overcast. Ram washed his face in the kitchen sink, walked out into the spectral air, breathed in and nearly swooned from its fire-tinged foulness. When he recovered his balance, he walked to the coffee shop on Noe and read the Sunday Chronicle cover to cover. By the time he got back to the apartment, everyone was awake and moving about, and the smell of frying bacon was sweetly intoxicating. Vera and Miranda were nonchalant, and Vera kissed Ram warmly. Ram smiled, ignoring the enmity that started to well up in him and then seated himself at the table where coffee was waiting.

  “So we’re doing the street fair then?” asked Miranda.

  John said sure, and Ram nodded. Vera excused herself to shower, leaving the three of them by themselves. The children and Betty were gone, Ram noticed. Nobody said a word until Vera rejoined them. The air was thick, the atmosphere mildly uncomfortable, but it wasn’t impossible to ignore, and they all managed to do so, for it was second nature for all of them to manage this act by then.

  When they reached Polk Street, the sun was struggling through the particulate air and the fog was lifting. The street was blocked off from California to Broadway with booths lining either side of it, selling T-shirts and candles and incense and sandals, offering massages and psychic readings under a budding sun with a soundtrack dominated by Supertramp. The couples strolled leisurely on one side of Polk Street, then back along the booths on the opposite side. At one booth, Vera offered to buy Ram a tarot reading. He declined: “I’m afraid what the cards might read today,” he said. The response provided Vera an opening and she took Ram’s arm and steered him quickly ahead of John and Miranda, shooting Miranda a look to convey to her that she wanted privacy.

  “Why did you leave us there at the bar? We’d have come with you.”

  “I didn’t think it was worth bothering about.”

  “Come on, Ram. It was nothing, just a little diversion, a little fun.”

  “Not my idea of fun. Did you have a good tim
e?”

  Vera weighed, considered, laughed a couple of staccato “Ha’s” and then pulled closer to him. “It was okay,” she said. “The redhead was disappointed. I got her number though,” Vera said, fishing in her pocket and producing a scrap from the Yellow Pages. She smiled and gripped Ram’s arm more tightly. “We didn’t do anything other than take a hot tub. At least I didn’t. I’m not sure about Miranda. She and the barman were gone for a while.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ram said. “Well, nice to know anyway. We missed a good party.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Miyako. It was Warren Zevon’s party. We were all invited.”

  “And you didn’t tell us?”

  “Like I said, I thought you were occupied.”

  “How rude. Shame on you,” said Vera. When she noticed the icy stare he returned her, she changed the subject to something more agreeable.

  “I thought we could go see a movie later this afternoon. There’s a new Nick Roeg at The Corinth.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession.”

  “How about a comedy?”

  “I think there’s a Louis Malle.”

  “Something in English.”

  “But it is in English.”

  “Well, talk to Miranda and John about it then. If they’re game, I am too.”

  When they finished with the street fair, they stopped at a deli for meatball sandwiches and sodas and walked to Lafayette Park. It was mostly clear now but the blue sky had a sickly quality to it and the sun seemed somehow frozen even as it moved across the heavens.

  “Vera wants to see a movie,” Ram finally offered, breaking the silence.

  “I hope it’s not another eight-hour silent job,” said Devlin, referring to the restored print of Napoleon that they’d seen at a special screening at The Silver hosted by Francis Coppola.

  “No, it’s new and it has sound. It’s a French film, but it’s in English,” said Vera.

  “What’s it called?”

  "Atlantic City."

  “I’ve read some great reviews about that film,” Miranda piped in. “That’s the one with Burt Lancaster and the girl from Rocky Horror, right?”

  “Yes,” said Vera. “Susan Sarandon.”

  “What do you think, John?” said Ram.

  “Well, I like her,” said Devlin, snickering and arching his eyebrows.

  It was enough to break the ice of the frosty morning and they joined John in laughter, Miranda cocking her eyebrow at him and nuzzling him suggestively. Vera did likewise to Ram, opening her mouth and kissing him and slipping her tongue inside him. Ram surrendered to it but he wasn’t lost to it as he usually was when Vera turned up the heat, holding the core of himself in abeyance. When she broke off, Vera looked into his eyes, hoping to see that the reverie would be there. It wasn’t. His eyes were warm but a shield had descended, and how thick or transitory it was, Vera couldn’t discern.

  After the movie, which Ram was surprised to find he liked, despite its being a Malle film, a director whom he found bloodless, they went to a cheap Chinese restaurant on Church Street and talked of plans for their next weekend together. They would meet in Refugio, three weeks hence, for the annual Endymion barbecue that Vera had agreed to attend only on condition of John and Miranda’s being there. Then Ram drove Miranda and John back to Miranda’s apartment and he and Vera collected their things. They parted on the sidewalk with hugs and kisses.

  “I’ll call you next week, Vera,” said Miranda, exchanging a look with her that both Ram and John caught, meaning she’d be checking in to discern whether or not damage control had been effective and how much Vera had told Ram and how concerned Miranda should be about it. Ram and John turned away, both of them smiling ironically.

  “Until then, Dev,” Ram said.

  “Yeah, take it easy. I’ll call you sometime.”

  Ram nodded, said goodbye to Miranda, and he and Vera walked off down Sanchez in the now bright sunlight. “Did you have a good time?” he asked her.

  Vera nodded vigorously, smiled brightly and gripped Ram’s arm lightly. “Yes. It was good. Are you okay though? I mean are we okay?”

  “Sure. I guess so. What do you think?”

  “I think so. I love you.”

  They drove home, mostly in silence. Past Devil’s Slide, Vera fell asleep, her head on Ram’s lap. As they motored down Highway One in the smoke-streaked light, Ram stole occasional glances at Vera in slumber. She looked so sweet and simple in her sleep, and Ram wondered what it was that caused her to bring such chaos and trouble when she awakened. He thought back to what Vera had told him of her childhood and early adult life but there weren’t any telltale signs or blemishes other than the night she was raped when she was nineteen and living in Cleveland. According to Vera, that incident didn’t so much wound her as piss her off. When she told her brothers about it, they went out searching the streets of the neighborhood until they found the guy, working at a bakery. They brought him back to Vera, who positively identified him. Her brothers beat him until she stopped them, finishing the job herself by kicking him in the balls.

  Ram wondered whether it was Vera’s family itself that provided the stimulus for her behavior. Her father’s side was Sicilian, and Papa Joe himself was connected to one of the families, working as a collector for the D’Angelo family. But Papa Joe never brought that home with him, Vera said, and they were a good Catholic family, so that didn’t explain Vera’s wantonness. Vera’s mother, Agnieska, was a devout Czech who exhibited no outward signs of mental or emotional disorder. On their only visit to Cleveland, Ram found her family likable. Her three brothers welcomed him, taking him out drinking with them at the Czech and Sicilian social clubs they belonged to. Her “uncles” found Ram agreeable, even according to him a familial place of honor by allowing him to sit in on their weekly poker game, taking him to the cleaners while doing so, even though they privately pigeon holed him as just another hippie, the latest in a not long but constant stream of Vera’s lovers.

  There was nothing in any of her past and background that Ram could point to as a catalytic event or cause for the chaos she caused, and given that, Ram could only wonder why it was that she courted and provoked such drama.

  He remembered the night he talked with Tor about this, after Tor witnessed a scene at a party where Vera provoked Ram to violence against a man she was vamping, causing Tor to step in and separate the combatants. When he cooled down, Ram tried to explain Vera to Tor. “She’s an actress and sometimes she doesn’t know when to leave the stage.”

  Tor cocked his eyebrow at Ram and laughed softly. “That wasn’t acting, Ram. That was the real deal, buddy. You’ve got a handful on your hands with that woman. Don’t get me wrong, Ram, I like Vera, I truly do. She’s bright, beautiful, sexy, and has lots of style. But she’s trouble, with a capital T, and you might be in over your head.”

  Ram looked down at Vera as they passed Pelican Point. He loved her despite the public scenes, despite the private battles, despite the financial hardships, despite the sexual and emotional infidelity. ‘She’s my woman, no matter what,’ thought Ram, never imagining for a moment just how far that no matter extended or how exhaustively Vera could push it. Near Davenport, she began to stir.

  “Are we home yet?”

  “We’re just outside D’port.”

  “Umm,” she said, getting up and stretching. “What do you say we stop for a drink?”

  “Oak Room?”

  “No, Asti.”

  Ram nodded and stopped the tape player in the middle of Steely Dan’s Everything You Did the synchronicity making him squirm a bit and seeing the tension it brought to Vera’s face, subconsciously, perhaps to her too. “Don’t we have some Coltrane?” she asked. Ram jettisoned the Royal Scam and replaced it with Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Vera smiled hearing the first line of You Are Too Beautiful and snuggled next to her man. “That’s better,” she said.

  They found a parking place o
n Lower Meridian, locked their suitcases in the front seat, and walked a half block north to the Asti. It was dusk now; the inside of the bar was dark and funky smelling, lit by the small table lamp behind the bar and the two overhead fluorescents hanging above the pool table.

  The Sunday regulars were a half-dozen men and women in their sixties and seventies. They occupied their assigned bar stool spaces, looking straight ahead across the bar. Stuffed animal heads looked back over the patrons’ heads protectively, as if the retirees were the stuffed creatures’ harems. Ram ordered a beer and two hard-boiled eggs. Vera ordered a shot of bourbon and a pickled pig’s foot. She looked through the Sunday Sentinel entertainment section. “Nothing,” she proclaimed finally.

  “Then we can go home and make an early night of it.” Ram offered.

  “Let’s call Mad Michael,” she said.

  Ram produced a quarter and Vera went to use the Depression era phone booth along the back wall, returning with a smile. “He’ll be down in half an hour,” she said. “Mad Michael’s always entertaining. You like him, don’t you, Ram?”

  “He’s all right, most of the time.”

  Michael was Vera’s friend and Ram was just getting to know him. He wasn’t quite sure what he thought of him yet, other than that he was brilliant and sometimes over boisterous. He had been an associate professor of American History at San Jose State College until a few years back. He and his then wife ran with a fast crowd of young professionals. Then she left him and his life unraveled. He lost his job at the college then took to the road on a cross-country motorcycle trip. Now he was living in a trailer in the canyons, coming into town occasionally to visit his few friends like Vera, staying for a day or three and sometimes leaving a messy wake in his passing.