“They want to buy it,” Bergen said uncomfortably. He sipped some tea. “I don’t see any point in making coffee,” he told Teresa. “I can never make it the way Dina did; no matter what I do, it’s always too weak.”
“Sell the house,” Teresa said. She got up, and when she walked around the room she noticed things she had ignored at first, bits and pieces of the Santa Rosa house were everywhere: a lace tablecloth, a low oak coffee table, a photograph of Dina in a silver frame, the blue and white dishes displayed in an open glass cabinet.
Teresa turned back to the detective. “You’re lonely,” she said.
“I got this damn canary,” Bergen said. “He happens to be driving me crazy. Want him?” the detective offered. Teresa shook her head no; Silver wasn’t too happy about having Atlas in the house, he would never agree to another pet, especially one that once belonged to Bergen. “Know anybody who might?” Bergen asked.
“Maybe you should go out with another woman,” Teresa said.
Bergen looked at her as if she were crazy. “I’m only lonely sometimes,” he said. “Most of the time I still feel like Dina’s alive. After all, how could she be dead?”
All that day they drank cold tea in the sunlight; when it was close to four, Teresa got ready to leave.
“I’ve missed you,” Bergen said when he walked her to the door. They passed by the bedroom, and Teresa peered inside the dark room where Dina’s possessions were stored.
“I could give you some of this stuff,” Bergen said, nodding to the suitcases full of clothes and linens, the hairpins and brushes and combs. “Actually, you could take it all.”
“I don’t have room for anything,” Teresa said. “You keep it.”
“The dishes?” Bergen said. “She would have wanted you to have the dishes.”
Teresa stood by the front door of the detective’s apartment; she covered her eyes. It was then she understood why she had avoided Bergen: she knew she would cry as soon as she spent any time with him, as soon as she saw all the things that had once belonged to her mother.
“Teresa,” Bergen said. “What can I do? What would make you happy?” The detective studied the crying girl; he reached for his checkbook. “If I lend you two hundred dollars you can get your own place, you won’t have to live with Silver and Lee anymore. How would that be?”
Teresa waved the checkbook away; she shook her head so hard that her hair whirled around and hit the walls of the hallway.
“What?” Bergen said. “What can I do?”
She wouldn’t answer, or she couldn’t, so Bergen was silent too. When she had stopped crying, Bergen put his arm around her and walked her downstairs, then waited with her for the bus. Teresa wanted to tell him to go away, he didn’t have to wait with her on a street corner when the sky, at long last, seemed seconds away from a storm. But when she tried to speak, her voice broke, words refused to form on her tongue. The detective didn’t seem to notice her difficulty, he turned up the collar of his sports coat and kept watch for the bus.
“You know what I keep wondering?” Bergen said, just before the bus appeared. “What was the secret of Dina’s coffee? Why was it so wonderful?”
And although Teresa agreed to meet Bergen on Thursday of the following week just before they parted, she didn’t tell the old detective that Dina’s secret was as simple as cinnamon. She let him go on believing that the ingredient whose name he didn’t know was as intricate as one seed pearl thrown into the pot just before the water boiled, or a blackbird’s feather tossed in with the grounds, when it was just the beautiful difference a brew of dedication can make.
They saw each other every week, and to Bergen it didn’t matter if Teresa even talked, he was with Dina’s daughter, the girl he now thought of as his own child, who might have indeed been his child if he and Dina had only met a few years earlier. They usually met on Thursdays. Lee didn’t notice when Teresa took Atlas with her in the mornings when the weather was good, and then Bergen and Teresa took him on long walks through the city, stopping on street corners to let the old dog rest. When it rained, which was now nearly all the time, they went to the aquarium and spent hours watching the slow motions of the manatee in a tank of still, green water. There were times when Teresa didn’t show up at his apartment, and on those days Bergen knew that she had her sleeping sickness again. Teresa was sleeping more and more, and Bergen brooded over it, he wished he had lived in the house on Divisadero Street from the start, he wondered if that would have made a difference.
Bergen was convinced it was all those stories about the Arias that held Teresa in a web of sleep. The first time he and Dina had ever talked about them was one night when they were waiting for Teresa to go to sleep so that they could pull down the sheet on Dina’s bed and make love until the time when he went back to the Lamplighter Motel. Bergen had sat downstairs in the kitchen for an hour, playing solitaire while Dina went upstairs to check on the girl, and when he was fairly certain that Dina was waiting for him in her own bedroom, he put the deck of cards away and went upstairs.
The hallway was dark, but the door to Teresa’s room was open, and through it he could hear Dina. Her voice was hypnotizing, seductive as sleep. Bergen edged toward Teresa’s room, drawn closer by Dina’s voice, and the glow of light from a candle on Teresa’s night table. It was then he first heard the story that Dina’s father had told so long ago, on nights when the sky was wild and the scent of sage was in the air. Dina was slowly listing the contents of an Aria’s saddlebag; she had added to the stories her father had told her until she was certain that she knew every detail about the men who wandered across the desert.
“He has a map in his saddlebag,” she whispered that night to Teresa. The girl was beneath the covers; her eyes were closed, and each time Dina mentioned another one of the Aria’s belongings, Teresa could see it; she could see the map and the turquoise rings, the canteen filled with icy water, the extra shirt with clean white cuffs, the necklace of rubies, the wildflowers that somehow managed to bloom days after they were plucked from the ground.
At first Bergen thought that Dina was talking about an early romance, that she was recounting the dovelike flirtations of her youth as a bedtime story for Teresa. But soon he realized that the man she called an Aria had never existed, at least he was not truly made up of flesh and blood; no Aria had ever knocked at Dina’s front door, or put his arms around her waist and danced with her till dawn. And as he stood listening by the door, Bergen realized something more: the man Dina was describing looked exactly like Silver.
“He has dark hair,” Dina whispered as her daughter fell asleep; in her dreams Teresa was already traveling across the mesa she had never seen. “His eyes are like ebony, his skin smells like fire, no woman can take her eyes off of him when he walks into a room, the white shirt he wears looks like cotton, but it’s really the finest silk. And sometimes it seems as if you’re waiting a long time for him, sometimes it seems as if it’s forever, longer than a hundred years, but all the time he’s circling closer and closer, it’s just that he’s so silent, that he’s the sort of man who can’t be rushed, who needs hours spent alone, time to look for water, to travel over the highest plains where the sky is always purple and shooting stars fall onto the earth.”
After Teresa had fallen asleep, Dina blew out the candle and went out into the hallway. When she saw Bergen she gasped; she hadn’t expected to find him right outside the door.
“Why are you hiding here?” Dina asked. “My husband used to eavesdrop all the time—it’s a quality I hate.”
When Dina began to walk toward her room, flustered because Bergen had overheard, the detective held her back.
“What kind of story was that?” he asked Dina.
“A bedtime story.” Dina shrugged. She nodded toward her room. “We don’t have all night,” she whispered.
“It’s a made-up story?” Bergen asked, though he had already been convinced by her tone as she whispered to her daughter that Dina believed every word s
he said.
“Sure,” Dina said to Bergen. “It’s made up.”
Later, after they had made love and he held Dina in his arms, Bergen began to cry. Dina politely ignored his tears, but she stroked his forehead with her fingertips.
“You believe that story. You’re still waiting for someone else,” Bergen whispered once he was able to speak. “Some man who rides out of the desert. I’m too old to have a rival, especially one who doesn’t really exist.”
“But Arias do exist,” Dina said with absolute confidence. “If you really want to know the truth, Silver is one of them.”
“You’re going to find out that I’m right,” Bergen said. He kissed her, he heard her sigh. “You’re going to find out that I love you more than a dozen Arias would.”
And much later, when she had begun to write him letters every night, she shyly admitted that she no longer believed in Arias. Bergen wished now that he could show her letters to Teresa. But he doubted that any of those letters could remove the spell of years of bedtime stories, those hours spent listening to the heartbreaking perfection of Dina’s imagined men.
Bergen was still thinking about the Arias when he met Teresa at the aquarium to celebrate her birthday. They were to share sandwiches in the park if it didn’t rain, but first they walked from room to room, studying Pacific fish in huge dark tanks. It was Teresa’s nineteenth birthday, and Silver had given her a small blue sapphire on a platinum chain. She had found it on her bureau when she woke up, and the knowledge that Silver had been in her room while she was sleeping made her dizzier than the gift itself did. Silver was still asleep when Teresa left the house to meet Bergen, so she would have to wait to thank him. She hadn’t even dared put the necklace on in the house for fear Lee would see what an expensive gift Silver had given her. In the double-tiered room where they stood watching the dolphins and the sea lions, Bergen spotted the sapphire right away.
“A boyfriend?” Bergen guessed.
Teresa shook her head and laughed. To Bergen, the gift looked very much like something an Aria might keep in his saddlebag.
“The only gift I have is two cheese sandwiches,” Bergen said. “And this,” he added as he handed her a small box wrapped in tissue paper. Inside was the tortoise-shell comb Dina had been given by her father long ago. Teresa took a handful of her hair and pinned it up, then turned so that Bergen could admire her.
“Very nice,” Bergen said distantly. He was distracted, thinking of the letter of Dina’s he had brought with him to show to Teresa, wondering if it was a terrible breach of faith to show Dina’s letters to anyone, even her daughter.
When they ate their lunch in front of the bandshell, the sun was shining, and Dina’s letter was still in Bergen’s inside pocket. Later, when he drove Teresa home, careful to pull over two blocks away from the apartment so that Silver would not see his car, Bergen still wasn’t certain that he would really show Teresa a letter that was intended only for him.
“I had a terrific birthday,” Teresa said when Bergen stopped the car. “I can’t believe it didn’t rain.”
The letter Bergen carried with him was one of the last Dina had written. Dina no longer believed that Arias existed; somehow the entire notion had disappeared into a layer of filmy ash, and with it her passion for Silver.
“It’s not that I love him any less,” she had written about her son, “maybe I love him even more than before. It’s just that all of a sudden I know him, and when I think about who he is I feel like it’s my fault and I can’t help but cry.”
“I’ve got another present for you,” Bergen told Teresa. He reached into his pocket and then handed Teresa the letter. She examined the envelope closely, recognizing Dina’s handwriting immediately. She turned to the detective, puzzled.
“She wrote to me all the time,” Bergen explained. “She wrote about what she believed in, and what she used to believe in.”
Teresa took the letter out of the envelope and smoothed down the paper.
“She wrote about Arias,” Bergen said softly.
Teresa’s face grew hot. “She told you about the Arias?” she said accusingly. She had always been sure that the stories Dina told her were family secrets, not to be given to any stranger, not even Bergen.
“She told me that she didn’t believe in them any more, that Silver wasn’t one of them, that a woman who waited for an Aria would wind up waiting the rest of her life.”
Teresa ignored the detective and read Dina’s letter; the ink grew blurry before her eyes, the words ran together in a dark desolate line.
“None of this is true,” Teresa told Bergen.
She looked over the letter once more; she couldn’t believe that her mother had written the words she read, that her mother would be so cruel toward Silver, that she would practically disown him with a few scratches of her pen.
Teresa handed the letter back to Bergen. “She had cancer. My mother was delirious. She didn’t know what she was saying.” Teresa turned to look out her window; the air was foggy and gray. She closed her eyes for a moment and when she did she saw an orange moon in the sky and a boy who wore a white shirt, a boy who carried a saddlebag loaded down with maps.
“I’m worried about you,” Bergen admitted. “That’s why I showed you this letter. I’m worried about your sleeping spells and your living with Silver and not having a life of your own.”
“Just because you think you know about the Arias doesn’t mean you understand anything,” Teresa told Bergen. “You don’t understand anything at all.”
Teresa got out of the detective’s car and slammed the door behind her. She stopped when she reached the corner near Silver and Lee’s apartment, and then she turned to make certain that Bergen drove away. Reluctantly he did, the letter hidden once more in his pocket; and Teresa waited until the taillights of his car disappeared as he turned a corner. She wondered what an old man like Bergen could possibly know about dark nights, about passion so sharp it was like daggers, and men who were wilder than the untamed hones they rode. And as she watched Bergen drive away, Teresa thought about the manatee in its green watery cage at the aquarium, and all of the hours she had spent with Bergen, just waiting for that shy creature to turn toward them, and at that moment in her life all of those hours seemed suddenly wasted. As she walked the remaining block back to Silver’s apartment, she decided that she would call Bergen later in the week and cancel her Thursday meeting with him, and, in fact, as she opened the door of the apartment she knew that it would be a very long time before she dared to see that old man again.
FIVE
ONCE A MONTH SILVER met the man called Vallais in an apartment on Russian Hill. Vallais couldn’t be telephoned. The only way to reach him and set up an appointment was through a post-office box, and his address was the most important thing Silver had stolen from Angel Gregory’s apartment in those days before Gregory was sent to Vacaville Prison. At first Vallais had asked why Gregory no longer came to see him, why Silver had taken his place; after a while he no longer asked, it made very little difference to him whether he sold cocaine and marijuana to one man or to that man’s enemy, and he guarded himself against betrayal: his apartment was nothing more than a front, there was no way to trace him, no possessions that belonged to him on Russian Hill other than a small oak table and three wicker chairs. Besides, Silver was a perfect client; he asked no questions, he wore his black linen suit cut so close it seemed a part of him, he never complained, he was always polite. But waiting hours for Vallais when he was late was not in Silver’s nature. Each time he went to Russian Hill, Silver was more convinced than ever that someday soon he would have to find a way to bypass Vallais; he would find a route to small Mexican towns where there was never any wind, he would make his own journeys to Colombia, to villages where the earth was the color of geraniums, he would not have to depend on Vallais, he wouldn’t have to smile at another man unless he chose to.
At first Silver hadn’t even kept a few ounces of marijuana when he resold the
drugs he bought from Vallais. He didn’t care much for drugs, he liked feeling wired; when he walked down the street he had more than a thousand eyes, he was ready to strike, and nothing got by him—not a whisper, not a move. But lately there had been nights when he couldn’t sleep. It was then Silver reached for the carved redwood box in which he had begun to keep some extra marijuana, rolled a joint, and sat in the dark, watching Lee sleep. It would not be until much later, when the sky had just begun to grow light, that Silver would finally put his head on the pillow. And even then he was sometimes unable to sleep; very often he would think about the summer spent in New Mexico, and by morning it always seemed that his grandmother’s rosebushes were growing up the side of the house, covering the windowpanes with thorns, with petals so sweet their scent could hypnotize.
It was in the spring of that year when he first had difficulty sleeping, and Teresa came to live with them, that Silver realized that he was being followed. He heard footsteps behind him every time he walked down the street, he sensed another man’s heartbeat. When he drove through the city, a blue Ford Falcon slipped in and out of traffic; sometimes the Ford was right on his tail, other times it disappeared altogether, leaving Silver to wonder if he had been hallucinating. Soon, there was a shadow on every street corner, a shadow much more threatening than any flesh-and-blood enemy; no place felt safe, no room was quite dark enough, there wasn’t one man Silver could call his friend. Early one evening Silver spotted his enemy for the first time. He had gone to meet Rudy at a bar called El Calderon, less than two blocks from the apartment. It was a place Silver thought of as his own, a place that no longer felt safe when he noticed a stranger at the bar. When the stranger had paid his bill and was about to leave, Silver saw a blood-colored tattoo on the man’s arm, a familiar pair of boots, a certain slope of his shoulders.
“Do you know that guy?” Silver asked Rudy.
“What guy?” Rudy said, because when he turned to look the stranger was already gone.
White Horses Page 19
