The Ninth Wave

by Eugene Burdick

  Maybe the important question is whether or not I love him, Georgia thought. Maybe you can never know if he loves you, so the important thing is to know if you love him.

  It would be a hard thing to know, she thought. Mike was like a stone; an attractive, magnetic, powerful stone. A stone that was vaguely translucent; that you could see into for a few inches and then it went milky and inscrutable. And around the stone, all the little iron filings gathered, people like herself who did not see anything in the stone, but could not resist it. When the stone moved they rearranged themselves, shifted positions, made an intricate complex maneuver to get closer to the stone.

  Once she had said this to Mike. They were walking through Yosemite Park and they saw a tall white tree with spiky branches beside a huge hulking rock. It was the first windy day of autumn and they saw the tree rub against the rock and the stubby branches splintered off their summer's growth against the flint-hard surface. On the side of the tree that was toward the rock, the limbs were stunted, raw, splintered.

  "That's us," she said and pointed at the rock and the tree. "I keep splintering against you and I never even scratch your surface. And wherever I touch you I'm all splintered. Look at the rock. There isn't even a scratch on it."

  Mike looked at the rock and then at the tree. He nodded and they continued the walk. He did not understand.

  Part of the process, part of the inevitable thing that kept her awake, was comparing Mike to the other men she knew. He was not like Morrie. Morrie was like a sponge, a big soft sponge with a diamond-hard core. Mike was not like Harry Amsterdam, her second cousin who had come out from New York one Christmas and taken her to five night clubs, gotten her drunk on champagne, seduced her and then put his head on her lap and cried desperately. And Mike was not like Father. At first she had thought they were alike. They were both calm and decisive and that had deceived her. But as she came to know Mike, she realized that her father was a balance of tensions, that his surface calm was due to a careful calculation of pressures, a determination to appear a certain way. With Mike the appearance was the reality: he was not under tension.

  No, that was not completely right, she thought. Mike was under tensions. But he did not calculate or worry or scheme. The pressures were from the inside, not from she outside. They were Mike's pressures, his own.

  A covey of MG's came down the boulevard. There was a boy and girl in each roadster and a little flag was fastened to the rear of each car. They whirred past, jockeying for position. From a few of the cars came wind-shattered laughs.

  Mike woke up and rolled over on his back.

  "I was dreaming," he said.

  "I didn't know you dreamed."

  "I do. For years, ever since the war, it's been the same dream. Exactly and precisely the same dream. I know it like I know the palm of my hand."

  "Tell me about it, Mike."

  "Why would you want to know about a dream?" he asked sleepily. "That's funny about women. A woman is curious about a man. She wants to pull out everything private, see everything inside of him. And when she does she loves him; when his privacy is gone she loves him. Doesn't matter. I'll tell you about the dream."

  He pulled the pillow under his head.

  "The dream has no color," he said. "Everything is gray. There is a landscape. Somehow I know it's round and limited, has boundaries. At the edge of the landscape are hills, sharp, angular hills, studded with rocks. On the tops of the hills are trees. The trees are huge and tough like no trees I've ever seen. They're the boundary. In between the hills is a valley and I always walk through that.

  "The whole thing, the whole landscape, is held together somehow. It trembles as if it might come apart. The whole thing is like one of those airplane wings that engineers test under stress. When the strain gets great enough the wing starts to vibrate, and finally a single little rivet goes or a pucker appears in the foil and the whole thing twists itself to pieces. The landscape is like that: under stress and barely holding itself together.

  "I walk through the valley and come onto a street. It's a regular city street. There are dried palm trees hanging over the street and they make a gray thin shade. In front of some of the lots there are 'For Sale' signs. In the scorched grass two cats are fighting. I can hear them hiss, but can't see them. Then one cat backs out of the grass, arched and walking on its nails, spitting into the grass. The other cat comes after it in long oily leaps. They circle around for a few minutes and then one turns and runs.

  "The nails of one of them scratch the surface of the landscape. I can see it very clearly . . . a long, very thin rent. Through the rent I can see something whirling and turning, like the circle of burning gas you see around a planet.

  "The landscape starts to tremble, wrinkles run out from the tiny rent. Somewhere, far away, up in one of the hills, a tree crashes down and I know that if I don't stop it the whole thing will crumple up, twist, tear itself to pieces. So I run to the rent and patch it together. The material is tough and hard, like a ripped open tin can. My fingers bleed as I try to get it back together. The cats come back, terrified at what they have done. They crouch down and watch me, pleading with their eyes for me to fix the rent. And finally I get it back together. The trembling stops, everything steadies down. And I wake up."

  "That's all?" Georgia asked.

  "That's all," Mike said. "Not very exciting, is it?"

  He looked at her for a moment. He turned over and at once he was asleep. In a few moments his teeth began to grind softly together.

  Georgia thought of Hank. Hank never became angry with Mike, but the things that Mike said upset him.

  Why did it upset Hank so much? she thought. Mike never forced his ideas on anyone. He just believed some unpleasant things and acted on his beliefs. It was one of the attractive things about Mike. He didn't try to be fashionable or popular or easy. He said just what he thought. Hank exaggerates things, she thought. He worries too much. He's like me.

  The next day Georgia asked Morrie the name of a good psychoanalyst. She made an appointment. The psychoanalyst was a German and he was very gentle. He spoke with a very thick accent. She told him Mike's dream. Once or twice he asked her to repeat episodea in the dream, very slowly.

  "Are those the same words, the identical words, that your friend used?" he asked her.

  Exactly," she said.

  He nodded and she went on. He asked her some questions about Mike's age and his occupation and his family.

  "No. It's hopeless," he said. "Oh, I could tell you a few things. A lot of technical things about the dream and what the trees and the hills and the cats mean. But without knowing the man, without having him here, it would not mean anything. I'm sorry."

  Georgia thanked him. She handed him an envelope that contained a hundred-dollar bill,

  "It is not necessary to pay for such advice," he said. She knew he meant it. She took the envelope back.

  "Thank you for your time," she said.

  "It's all right," he said.

  He led her to the door. As he opened the door to let her pass, he put up his hand.

  "Just one thing, Miss' Blenner," he said. "Just one remark that is really an intuition, a guess, a hunch. Do not attach much weight to it; Do not figure it as important. But I feel that this man is a very powerful person and that he is not disturbed. He sounds like a man who is balanced. Almost, although it is very vague, I feel that he is a good person."

  "Good?"

  "Don't ask what I mean by good. I do not know. Only that I feel it. This person does not have evil intentions. He is independent. Maybe he hurts people, but not deliberately. But do not take this seriously. It is just a guess."

  Georgia thanked him and walked out into the street.

  CHAPTER 30

  "A Power Absolute, Minute, Regular, Provident, and Mild"

  "What happens today?" Hank said to Georgia.

  She was driving and they had hardly spoken since she picked him up at the hospital. They were driving through Seal Beach
and along the highway the old oil derricks were black and ancient. Underneath the derricks, almost invisible, were small, well-kept engines that turned the pumping arms and took a steady trickle of oil out of the ground.

  "Mike's meeting with Notesteln's friends," Georgia said. "These are men from the companies that pay Notestein for his political advice. Mike says they won't be the real powerful men . . . they don't like to mess with politics. They'll be bright young executives; men who've handled some rough labor negotiation cases. That sort of person."

  "They're crazy," Hank said. 'They ought to send out their heavyweights. They send out their lightweights and the champ will just clean up on them." His voice was bitter.

  Georgia picked up speed. They drove along the wide strip of beach that rum from Seal Beach to Balboa. The beach was broad, dirty and untended. Thousands of beer bottles and beer cans stuck up out of the sand and there were blackened holes where wiener-bake fires had been built. They passed the first shack. It was built around an old Buick. Stakes had been driven into the ground and then paper boxes, plywood, newspapers and blankets had been hammered to the stakes. The rear of the Buick stuck out of the shack, like a beast that had been caught in some unsubstantial and improbable trap. A spiral of smoke came out of the shack, was caught by the breeze and blown flat across the highway. Three Mexican children crawled on the hood of the car. At a water hydrant beside the highway an old Mexican woman was filling quart beer cans with water. A little girl staggered back and forth from the hydrant to the shack, a beer bottle in each hand. At the edge of the beach, the waves came in fresh and blue and were corroded instantly by tar, seaweed, discarded papers and bits of firewood.

  "Morrie says that these people will be tough," Georgia said. "He says they'll probably lick Mike. They're used to dealing with hard people."

  Hank snorted. He sat with his head bent forward, held up by his hands. His face was thinner; almost bony.

  The road curved away from the beach and suddenly they left the dirty beach and the greasy smoke and the beer cans behind. They came into Balboa and it was bright with high masts, flags, sleek shops, the polished glass of expensive shops.

  They picked Mike up at a restaurant and then drove on to Balboa Island. They parked behind a long fence. A sign over the gate said "Sea and Sand."

  "It's one of those houses that big corporations buy for their executives for recreation," Mike said. "It's deductible as a business expense. Nice way to give your executives a free vacation."

  They walked through the gate. The house was set well back from the white beach that ran down to the bay. It was a long, low modern house with blue-tinted windows in front and a wide porch covered with a bright blue canvas awning. A short pier ran out from the beach and a forty-five-foot sloop was moored there. A barefoot man was polishing brass around the binnacle.

  In the middle of the beach a group of women were stretched out around a big umbrella. One of the women saw Mike and she said something. The women rolled over and watched them.

  The women were all between thirty-five and forty years old. Most of them had loose pebbled skin around their thighs as if they had dieted recently. The sand around them was dotted with bottles of sun lotion. Their flesh was pink and glistened with oil.

  Mike walked toward the porch of the house, and Hank and Georgia followed him. A group of men were sitting on the porch. They stood up as Mike approached. He stepped onto the porch.

  "I'm Mike Freesmith," he said.

  He stood stolidly, his legs apart, somber and citified in his suit. Sand poured in little streams from his shoes and cuffs and fell on the hemp flooring. The men watched him uncertainly and then a man with a mustache stepped forward.

  "Yes, yes, yes," he said. "We've been expecting you. This is a great pleasure. We didn't know you were bringing friends."

  He raised his hand, anticipating an apology from Mike and ready to wave it away. Mike did not apologize. He did not say anything.

  The man with the mustache flushed and then stepped up to Mike.

  "My name's Matthieson," he said. "Why don't we go inside and talk? The glare is bad out here."

  Mike did not introduce him to Georgia and Hank. They walked in and sat down in a room full of rattan chairs and couches. In one corner was a bar and a Filipino boy in a white jacket. Matthieson put Mike in front of a low table that held a box of Bering cigars, a large ashtray, and a box of matches.

  The other men walked in from the porch and sat down. There were eight of them. Matthieson did not introduce them to Mike. Most of them wore hula shirts decorated with flowers, sharks, leis and surfboards. Some of them had on denim pants and some wore shorts. All of them had rounded, but not prominent bellies. Their fat was well controlled.

  "How about a drink?" Matthieson asked. Mike took a gin and tonic. Matthieson picked up the box of cigars. "And a cigar."

  The box was completely full. Mike looked down at it for a moment. Then he grinned up at Matthieson.

  "Can't talk politics without a smoke-filled room, eh?" he said. Matthieson flushed again. He jabbed at the cigars to loosen them. "O.K., I'll take one." Mike took a cigar and lit it.

  Matthieson raised his eybrows in the direction of the other men. Obediently three of them stepped forward and took cigars. They sat down and inexpertly began to light them. In a few minutes the room was blue with smoke.

  "It was very good of you to come down here to talk to us about California politics, Mr. Freesmith," Matthieson said. Hank had a feeling that Matthieson was the most prominent man in the room, the most promising. He was so promising that he could afford the eccentricity of a mustache. He was that sure of a vice-presidency. "After all, our companies have to live and grow and make a profit ]n California. So we're interested in everything about California. And especially politics, became this is an election year."

  "I didn't come to give you a lecture on California politics," Mike said without taking the cigar from his mouth. "I came to talk to you about John Cromwell's campaign for governor."

  His voice was rude and sharp. He looked straight ahead.

  Here it comes, Hank thought. You well-nourished, successful, ambitious young executives have got your fingers in the wringer now. You'll come out flattened; squashed out flat.

  Hank took a gin and tonic from the Filipino and sat back in his chair. His stomach was tight. He looked around at the young executives. With a quick shock of excitement Hank realized that most of them were smiling. The three who had been dutifully smoking cigars reached forward and ground them out, as if Mike's rudeness had released them from a courtesy. The tentative look was gone from their faces.

  They're tough, Hank thought. These boys are really tough. Under those silly hula shirts and Bermuda shorts are some very tough characters. These boys are on the make. Maybe they can handle Mike.

  "O.K., tell us about Cromwell's campaign," Matthieson said. "Can he win?"

  "I thought Notestein told you that already," Mike said. "I told him how we were going to win."

  "Who's Notestein?" a man with sunburned knees said. His face was blank. He looked at Matthieson.

  "Oh, he was a sort of consultant to some of the vice-presidents interested in this political situation," Matthieson said in a low, quick voice.

  "What do you mean 'was'?" Mike asked.

  "They let him go a few days ago," Matthieson said. "The senior vice-presidents felt that his judgment wasn't all that it should be in this sort of thing. You know, he's a foreigner. A Geman Jew, something like that. He really doesn't understand California politics too well."

  That's two, Hank thought. First Moon and now Notestein. He remembered Notestein's hurried, frenzied, panicked scurry across Santa Monica Boulevard; his shoulders hunched, his body shrunken in the sport coat. Notestein knew it would happen then; knew he was caught.

  Matthieson's face was not apologetic or defensive. And Hank pushed away the memory of Notestein's bunched and fearful body and hoped that Matthieson's face would not change.

  "That
was a mistake," Mike said. "Notestein was a good person. He understood California politics."

  "That was a decision that our people felt competent to make," Matthieson said. He changed the subject. "Maybe you could tell us what you told Mr. Notestein."

  "No. I won't tell you that," Mike said. "I told Notestein and he told your bosses. They decided to fire him because they didn't believe what he said." Mike paused and grinned at them. "So if you go back and tell them the same thing maybe they'll fire you."