Tacoma Stories

by Richard Wiley

  “Are you a painter?” he asked. He let his eyes move down to her hands, looking for flecks of paint.

  “In Tacoma, I was in sales. For a long time Jaguars, and for another long time real estate,” she said. “But yes, I’ll admit to painting now. At least behind closed doors. Painter, I can live with; artist, I cannot.”

  “It seems to me that when doors are closed, we don’t have to clothe ourselves like we do when they are open,” he said. “What are your paintings like? Can you describe them for me?”

  He moved the saltshaker and pepper mill apart, then danced them back together, no longer Russians, but in the kind of do-si-do of a square-dance couple. He didn’t think of what he’d said as showing her the power of his personality, since he’d just come right out and said it, but he could tell the comment impressed her. And, indeed, she thought “when doors are closed, we don’t have to clothe ourselves like we do when they are open,” was exactly like something she might say. She had even written something like it in her profile. Was he reciting it back to her? Surely not. Oh, she had to stop this! Why was she suspicious of this man? Maybe she’d have a thirteenth date, end on a higher note, call it a baker’s dozen.

  When their first course came—his garden salad and her yogurt-and-cucumber soup—she finally gave some serious thought to his question. What were her paintings like? Could she paint one of them for him now using words? In sales, one obviously sold something. Would talking about her paintings therefore be selling herself, or would it be letting him see the clothes she wore when she was behind closed doors?

  He took a bite of his salad and watched her. She reminded him of some of the graduate students he had had over the years, women who saw only chemical equations when they looked at him. She was far too beautiful for him, no question about that, but where did her beauty reside? Could he isolate it? In chemistry, in order to understand a reaction when many reactants were involved, the order of reaction was determined by isolation. In female beauty, then, in her particular beauty, what was the order of his reaction? Did it commence with the wonderful width of her mouth, the perfect smallness of her nose, or the dark and inquisitive eyes that darted about above them both?

  When he said, “Mmm, fresh vegetables” out of absolutely nowhere, Farmer McGregor came into her mind, sneaking up on Peter Rabbit, and she looked at the tablecloth to see if her wine Rorschach rabbit was gone. It was not, but it had faded out of its rabbitness, was now actually something like the painting she’d been working on that morning: lines and squiggles, dark white on light white and falling dimly away from any representative reality. She decided that if it stayed there beyond their first course, she would not only tell him about her paintings but tell him everything she could think to tell him about herself, no holds barred. It was her final Internet date after all, unless she decided on a baker’s dozen.

  She picked up her spoon, slid it beneath the surface of her yogurt-and-cucumber soup, and lifted it to her mouth. When the soup’s flavor hit her, she closed her eyes. “Lord, this is good!” she managed to say, while for him the closing of her eyes isolated them, proving that her beauty did not reside there, or not only there, at least. That the rest of her face, undone by the startling flavor, looked deranged, made him think of what she might look like during sex. But her beauty was not diminished in the slightest.

  “In milk, there are two types of proteins,” he said. “Casein and whey. When the milk goes sour, it curdles. The coagulating part is casein, and the watery substance is whey. It’s a bit like the Indian dish raita, wouldn’t you say?”

  He was talking about her soup and she knew it.

  “What I would say is it’s fab-u-lous,” she said. “Muy fabuloso.”

  She was ready to spoon some of the soup into his mouth, and had it not been for the sudden intrusion of Spanish, she would have done it. But muy fabuloso? Where had that come from? She’d never studied Spanish, not even in high school.

  “Très fantastique!” he said. “Très magnifique!”

  He looked at the saltshaker and pepper mill, thinking to turn them into French balladeers, but he kept his hands to himself.

  “When I was a child, I used to love to paint clouds,” she told him, “and I paint clouds these days, too. Not big puffy ones and not rain clouds, either. These days, they are unrepresentative; they’re the clouds within my head.”

  That wasn’t as good as his “when doors are closed” thing, but it wasn’t half bad. And it was true. She thought to say she painted clouds from both sides now, but decided it would be trite.

  “Unrepresentative clouds,” he said. “Sort of like petri dish formations.”

  She took another spoonful of soup. Très magnifique! Muy fabuloso! “Yeah,” she said. “I guess so.”

  “I have a painting by Agnes Martin at home,” he told her. “There is this little scrap of paper on its back, on which someone wrote, ‘I can see humility, delicate and white…. It is satisfying just by itself.’ I like to think that the writer of that note was also Agnes Martin. It has come to mean as much to me as the painting.”

  She looked from his eyebrows to the mottled fields of his cheeks, his nose like a dangerous ski jump. I can see humility, delicate and white…. He was not only not attractive; he was actively unattractive. His face seemed made from the leftover parts of a child’s discarded Mr. Potato Head.

  “I know Agnes Martin,” she said. And then she said, “Tell me something. Where did you hang that painting? I mean, where exactly is it in your house?”

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t hang it,” he said. “It’s sitting on my couch, staring out at me like some kind of abstract, uninvited guest.”

  Damn. Everything he said was better than what she could come up with. “You don’t mean to say over your couch, but on it? Correct?”

  He’d made that perfectly clear, but she wanted it perfectly clear again.

  “On the couch,” he said. “Yes.”

  “What’s the painting’s name?” she asked. “And what does it look like?”

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to look like anything, but to me it looks like a piece of blank sheet music. Its name is Acrylic on canvas. From 1997. It’s not a very good name.”

  She wanted to say that she would like to see the painting, not as code that the date was going well but because she really wanted to see it. An Agnes Martin. On his couch. Not over it. She imagined his ears as the sheet music’s treble clefs when he stood in front of his couch looking at it. Treble clefs with two sharps after it, like the tufts of hair coming out of his ears. So what key was that? Two treble clefs as seen from the back. That is, if sheet music could have two treble clefs.

  “I think I know that painting,” she said. “It’s gray on gray, like even though the sheet music hasn’t been written on, it’s been waiting to be written on for quite a long time?”

  “Why, yes,” he said. “It’s exactly like that.”

  He flatlined his eyebrows again.

  Waiting to be written on for quite some time …

  He wanted to ask if she’d like to come write on it right that second, but of course they had only finished their soup and salad.

  WHEN HE DELIVERED THEIR MAIN COURSE, the waiter said, “Sea bass and squid are nothing alike, but they live together in the same stretch of ocean,” causing them both to believe he was making reference to their unlikeliness as a couple. The waiter’s flourish when placing the dishes down convinced her that she was wrong, that it was just something he said, but Bert felt insulted. Très insulted. Like d’Artagnan. The waiter needed a lesson in manners.

  “I think what they really do is swim at the same depth,” she said. “And I also think that one eats the other, since I often used plastic squid as bait when I went fishing at home.”

  To her surprise, Bert laughed, his facial parts collapsing into congress. “Fishing?” he said. “I used to go fishing with my dad.”

  She took a bite of her sea bass, which was nearly as good as the yogurt-a
nd-cucumber soup, but she was on guard against another Spanish outburst. “And I with mine, but we never fished for bass,” she said. “Salmon was our goal, cod our consolation prize.”

  He looked at his squid, a consolation prize against the size of her bass. When he took a tentative bite, what got to him first was its texture, which was firm but not tough, the little squid bodies and the little squid tentacles cooked to perfection. When the taste came to him half a second later, it was like a second chance to make a first impression. Squid weren’t handsome, either. With their weirdly elongated bodies and capped heads, they looked, in fact, like uncircumcised penises, three of which graced his plate. His propensity to eat fast, Angela told him, was her first indication that she would choose Angelo, who ate as slowly as a cow chewing its cud. But before he remembered that and stopped himself, he’d already eaten two of the squid, the last one cowering on his plate.

  She, however, was in a sea bass heaven…. “Splendid, splendid, splendid,” she said. “What a place to bring me! I’ll tell you one thing, of all my dates so far, this is …”

  She was going to say “the best restaurant,” but stopped, worried that “What a place to bring me!” assumed that he would pay. Had she actually accented the bring? On each of her previous dates, they’d split the bill, and they would this time, too. Also, to say that of all her dates so far this was the best restaurant could be taken to mean that the date itself was nowhere near the best she’d had, and that wasn’t quite true, not because she saw a future with him but because, well, because she was having fun. She said, “My paintings aren’t like clouds on a normal day. They aren’t like clouds during rain, nor are they like clouds during thunderstorms. They’re not …”

  “They are not cumulus, cirrus, stratus, or nimbus,” he said. “It’s cloud’s illusions you recall, you really don’t know clouds at all.”

  At first, she stared at him blankly, then somewhat coldly, as if he were making fun. But she hadn’t spoken a line from that song aloud earlier; she was sure she’d only thought it.

  “They’re cloud primal screams,” she said, “like some of those early Coltrane solos. But they’re still clouds, my friend, and I do know them.”

  She played with her carrots, lining them up above what remained of the sea bass like eighth notes for the Agnes Martin painting. She nearly said more about early Coltrane, but she had learned about Coltrane from Steve, and she didn’t want Steve to have a spot at the table.

  “No,” she said. “I got that wrong. They aren’t like primal screams but more like primal shouts, calming into primal conversations, I hope.”

  He thought that was absolutely brilliant.

  “I know I’m not supposed to ask this,” he said. “But ‘calming into primal conversations …’ Is that what we are doing now?”

  Goddamn he’s good, she thought, but she said, “You’re certainly not supposed to say it.” She tapped her wineglass. “Two more sauvignon blancs?”

  Should she have said sauvignons blanc? Did it work like attorneys general? “I’m an easy drunk,” she said. “Oops, I mean a cheap one.”

  But that was wrong, too, since the wine was fourteen bucks a glass.

  “Angela reminded me not to eat too fast,” he said. “She said that the last thing a woman wants to see is me gobbling down my food.”

  “That Angela,” she said. “I hope you thanked your brother properly.”

  For a while they ate and drank slowly, both adhering to Angela’s rule. When he took a bite of his last squid, she took a sip of her wine, and when she returned to her sea bass, he put his wineglass to his mouth. Their arms and hands moved in awkward unison, like the pincers of a crab after a stroke. For ten minutes this went on, their eyes and thoughts lively but every other part of them like wary drivers going through a school zone.

  When the noises of the room came back to them, they heard a woman at a nearby table actually say, “Eat slowly, Peter,” and that made them smile, as if eating fast had once been an issue with them, which they had long ago solved.

  “AN APRICOT TART WITH CHANTILLY CREAM,” he told the waiter. “Two spoons, and … what do you think? Two coffees?”

  “I’d love a cup of coffee,” she said, “but unless you’re ambidextrous, we won’t be needing two spoons. I’m not much for sweets.”

  “You think you’re not,” he said. “But this is a special occasion.”

  They had been there for ninety-seven minutes and most of the other diners were gone. When she asked the waiter if he recommended the apricot tart, he swooned like Cupid had just shot him through the heart. When he was gone, she said, “I’ll eat some if you can tell me what Chantilly cream is. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”

  “It’s a light whipped cream with vanilla or brandy added,” he said. “A sort of liquid version of Chantilly lace, I guess you could say.”

  He briefly thought to tell her its chemical formula, but he did not. Angelo always brought up history, always told people historical facts whenever anyone mentioned anything at all.

  When the dessert arrived, almost instantly, it looked deflated, as if some dessert bully had pushed it down in its tart pan. It also looked old, its texture as mottled as the skin on his cheeks. The cream was not filigreed across the tart’s top, either, like his Chantilly lace comment made her believe, but formed a small white pond beside it, like a long-unused swimming hole beside an ancient dock, forgotten since the kids grew up.

  “Never judge a book by its cover,” he said. “It might be a cliché, but that’s what Angela did, and for a while I figured that’s what you were doing, too, but you’re not.”

  His look was so intense, the blue of his eyes so bore into her, that at first she didn’t know what to do, except to quell the sudden urge to get up and leave the table. But when she found herself calling them “cobalt” blue, his eyes, she understood as clearly as if she had been one of them that this was the look he gave his organic chemistry students while they stared through their microscopes at life’s most elemental parts. No, she was not going to judge a book by its cover. She was going to judge it by reading it, and that would take more than just this one dumb date.

  They didn’t eat the apricot tart until their coffee came. A couple of weeks earlier, she had dined alone at the recommendation of a friend, at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place on San Francisco’s Kearny Street. The food had been a disappointment, but when her fortune cookie came, it said, “Don’t dine alone! Hell is not other people,” and she’d kept it. She decided to tell him that now, so he could let her know that it was a play on the famous Jean-Paul Sartre line, thus providing a bit more evidence that scientists knew art. But when she opened her mouth, he put a spoonful of apricot tart with Chantilly cream in it.

  “Just one bite,” he said. “Think of it as chumming for salmon.”

  Like the yogurt-and-cucumber soup before it, the apricot tart demolished not only her face but all of the sinewy mess that her life had been until just about that moment.

  He took his own bite of tart, letting its fabulous flavor unglue his rough features, until he looked to her like one of those early Cubist Picasso things that she had seen at SFMOMA on the same day she had gone to the Chinese place. Hell is not other people.

  “Do you want to go to a movie?” she asked. “Or maybe sit in the park and listen to jazz?”

  “Early Coltrane?” he asked.

  “Actually, I like the straighter stuff,” she said. “I am partial to early Nat King Cole. I even read his biography once.”

  When they left Chez Panisse, the weather had turned, not cooling down but warming up. He shrugged and said, “Sometimes you need a jacket, sometimes you don’t.”

  When they got to her car, there was a ticket on its windshield. Two hours and five minutes she’d been gone.

  Plus, of course, the twenty years in sales.

  The Strange Detective

  [2002]

  ON HIS WAY BACK FROM SEEING his grandfather at Tobey Jones nursing home, Lars L
arson Junior took a detour into Point Defiance Park, his elbow out the window of the new VW Beetle he sometimes drove so rain would mat the hair on his forearm. It was dead winter, but since childhood he’d liked the cold, could run in it in a T-shirt and shorts back then, or go to Owen Beach and trudge along among the driftwood. Winter and driftwood and crashing waves, rain and low cloud cover—this was what Lars loved.

  Once inside the park, he intended to loop around the Five Mile Drive, then head back to work at Lars Larson Motors, but he changed his mind when he saw a sign for the very Owen Beach he’d just thought of. He got on his cell, called Ruth at his office to tell her he’d be late, then turned on the radio. “Beechwood 4-5789” came out of the speakers, which were as good as he told his customers they were—surround-sound in a Beetle really was great. The car was a Lars Larson Motors loaner, the oldies station set by whomever they’d lent it to last, but Lars left it alone. Beach wood was what he would soon be walking amid—the detritus of his life in Tacoma.

  At Owen Beach, Lars was disappointed to see two other cars in the parking lot. That meant he might run into other walkers, which was fine, he guessed, since the beach was public, but also not fine, because even solitary people sometimes liked to strike up conversations. He did note that the two other cars were American, a new Jeep Cherokee and an old red T-bird from too late a year to be cool, sometime in the early 1960s was his guess. The T-bird’s tires were oversize, giving it the sense of a muscle car and making it look ridiculous.

  Lars parked and took off his tie and reached into the backseat for a parka. He still had his suit pants on but found his old Nikes on the floor and removed his business shoes and put them on. His suit jacket lay across the passenger seat so he could look nice later, when trying to sell cars. He got out, locked the VW, and headed down the beach toward the Point. The tide was coming in but would not be up to the driftwood line for at least another hour. “Beechwood 4-5789” was in his head. Can you really call someone up and get a date any old time? Such a jaunty view of relationships was nowhere near the truth of them in Lars’s experience, but on a whim he took his phone out and called the number anyway. B equaled 2 and E equaled 3, so 234-5789. Only the lack of a 6 kept it out of sequence. It was very much like him to do such a thing—one of his ex-wives used to tell him so constantly—but no one picked up, and he didn’t leave a message when the machine clicked in. No dates this time.