She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me

by Herbert Gold

  “Let’s get moving,” he said. “You ready now?”

  “I guess.”

  The lengthened skin of a road-killed rat lay stretched in the gutter, just ahead of the plumper corpse of a cat with bits of fur looking like trampled slush. “Must have been a truck took them both out at once,” Alfonso said. “Died doing what they suppose to do—rat running, cat after him.”

  “What makes you think it’s a him?” I asked.

  “Don’t plan to look any closer, my man. Hey, you notice Janey’s horse—”

  “Pony.”

  “—was a boy or a girl?”

  Chapter 2

  I protect. People may say I go around losing my temper, but in general I do not, and I’ll break the knees of anyone I catch saying it. I watch out for wives, kids, offshore accounts; folks bring me in to save their goods. I don’t do hubcaps.

  Heart and clients bedeviled by loss and regret is where I intervene.

  At present I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or anyone. Dan Kasdan doesn’t tell fortunes. Dan Kasdan preserves them.

  And how I love my wife and kid.

  Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, pink cheekbones, tired pink-and-yellow eyes—these things make me look like a healthy, aging philosophy professor from a pretty good university; or maybe, if only I knew how to dress, like the vice president of a socially aware insurance company based in San Francisco. The look is not too far off. I’m a private investigator in the Bay Area, which includes Berkeley, Oakland, parts of Marin, even as far south as San Jose if you’re willing to pay travel time. I use Murine, but it doesn’t help the pink, and I forget to take my doc’s advice to wash the eyelids with baby shampoo, scrubbing with Q-tips, because, oh, conjunctivitis isn’t all that bad. And I hate to stare at my face in the mirror, which you have to do in that Q-tip deal or else you’re going to jab a place that shouldn’t be jabbed. It’s tender in there.

  With women, their business with mascara and Q-tips, they know how. I don’t. I have sad eyes because I still love, am in love with, my former wife. This is an appetite that does not nourish.

  Divorce carried all sorts of unexpected problems into my life. For example, I knew all about the famous San Francisco house fleas, but the mosquitoes surprised me. I left a couple of beer cans outside. The drought ended, it rained and rained, it dripped some more, which gave meteorology an idea—the clouds opened up, rainwater slopping into the beer cans left outside Poorman’s Cottage on Potrero Hill. I doubt if there was much remaining flavor to the beer, but then the sun came back and—what do you know?—in those beer cans, unbeknownst to their proprietor, swam squiggles of anxious life, invisible mosquito larvae. And then what do you further know? The anxious squiggles ripened into humming, buzzing nocturnal biters. And just when I had finally accepted the high-pitched, nearly inaudible fleas, which after all can be controlled by regular vacuuming (Hispanic old lady, silent but mechanically adept except for changing the dust bag).

  No fun to be bereft and hurt in the soul, plus itching lumps on the knuckles that clutch the sheet over the head in desperation insomnia.

  To manage the mosquitoes I had to empty the yard of beer cans so that future mosquito generations would have no place to brood and breed, swim and prosper, before taking off on their whining nighttime missions around my ears and knuckles. Otherwise my cottage on Potrero Hill might turn into New Jersey, the Garden State, where I had recently pursued a father to remind him of his responsibilities concerning child support. (I told him I had friends whose names ended in vowels and we would always know where he slept. He told me to buzz off, like a mosquito. But then he thought seriously about the trouble I was taking with him, noticed the broken capillaries in my eyes, and wrote a check that cleared.)

  “I come better with my chocolate bunny when I don’t have to pay for the kids I left behind,” said the depressed deadbeat.

  “Whyncha learn to come without you need foreplay involving the cash flow or afterthoughts?” suggested Dan Kasdan.

  “Say what?”

  “You said chocolate bunny,” I said. I wanted to put him at his ease by letting him know I listened. “That’s cute.”

  He seemed to recognize me not only as a person with close personal ties with the driver’s license bureau and Social Security Administration, so I could always track him down, but also as a fellow sufferer, a kindred spirit, a human being. “I need money,” he said. “My chocolate bunny craves security. You and me, if we’re not good-looking, we got to offer the ladies something.”

  “Try getting rich and famous,” I suggested. “How about tall and handsome?”

  He considered those possibilities, decided it was too much trouble and he wasn’t cut out to be a star, all that public exposure, People magazine, the adulation of the multitudes—not for him. “My chocolate bunny likes presents,” he said.

  “Your chocolate bunny?” When people keep repeating something, I’ve learned they want to be taken up on it. “So she’s a black girl.”

  The deadbeat beamed triumphantly, as if I weren’t cut out to understand anything important, never would, only getting my way in business with reddened eyes and threats of violence. “It’s a cute saying between us,” he explained. “I met her on Easter at the parade, she was wearing like a bonnet, have you heard of romance, Mr. Kasdan?”

  “I’m more into tangible when I’m on the job.”

  “Nothing more tangible than Linda, let me tell you.”

  I just stared. I don’t mind sarcasm or correction from the mark, so long as the check clears for the client and myself, and the future checks keep coming. “I’m a frequent flier,” I said. “You and your chocolate bunny don’t work out an arrangement brings pleasure into your lives without taking essentials out of the mouths of your kiddies, I’ll definitely be back. I like Jersey, the parkways. Trenton’s a beautiful town. I enjoy my trade.”

  The deadbeat father thought I’d be a little Jew with felt pens staining the pocket and a plan to graduate from private eye to CPA. Instead he saw a skinny fellow with grayish hair, pink eyelids, and a sad way of saying, “Pay up or you’re a fugitive gets his hand caught in a car door. His knees. His neck. The worst kind, mister. And as a divorced dad myself, I have no sympathy.”

  The deadbeat sighed. Obviously I didn’t understand anything about the importance of Easter. “She should’ve married one of your kind. They love their kids. I guess it’s because of all the persecution they brought on their own heads due to nagging, nagging, nagging.”

  “Sorry if I repeat myself, asshole. But you’re a little slow. Pretend you’re a loving dad.”

  Out of his stingy emotions he broke his deadbeat wind, yesterday’s farts saved for my arrival. The deadbeat gave up.

  This was the Resurrection and the Life. “From now on I’m Mosaic,” he said.

  I looked at him and he looked at me. His expression was one I knew from other deadbeat husband/fathers. You a pimp for my ex and I can’t even say it? Yup, that’s what I was, pimping food, schoolbooks, and doctor bills out of this nice person who just wanted to live in peace with the world and his chocolate bunny, plus not pay his dues. That’s how it was.

  While he was staring at me, trying to kill me as best he could while unable to do so, I passed the time by not humming or cleaning my fingernails or consulting my travel itinerary. It was time to go, but I wanted to make sure he would remember me. It was part of the deal, making sure the client wouldn’t need to send me back to Jersey. So I looked at him as if he were an invisible clot of bugs in the air. I could sit on him in a chair and not even notice, just scratching my butt a little.

  The deadbeat seemed a little slow. I could either rev myself up by admiring his general insufficiency as a human dad being or pretend I was revved up, which would save time and spare me from tapping into my reserve stock of adrenaline. I wiggled my fingers into and out of a fist. Needed to be limber in case he surprised me. I didn’t want to get totally dreamy and out of focus, and I didn’t want to mis
s my flight, and I guess I was losing patience in general, another fault that comes with the irritations of age.

  “Hey?” I inquired.

  He raised his left eyebrow. I don’t put up with that kind of elegance in a stupid deadbeat dad, so then both his eyebrows suddenly shot up in a much more satisfying kind of surprised inquiry as I grabbed him by the collar, taking fistfuls of cloth and neck, and lifted him forward so I could conveniently yell into his nose: “Far-staysh, Mr. Asshole? Far-staysh?” Suddenly I was transformed into a crazy individual shouting something that made no sense to him.

  “Hey, watch it, watch it, don’t, I’m sorry.” He was mumbling and white faced.

  “Far-staysh means do you fucking understand?”

  “I do.” It was like a wedding. “Hey, let go.” He wriggled, he struggled. For some reason I seemed to have lifted him slightly off the floor, a trick of deadbeat levitation. “Hey, come on, please.”

  “Do you plan to write a check for your wife and kid—” I released his collar and wiped my hands on my pants. I hate getting deadbeat slobber on my hands. “Okay, calm down. Write the check right now, while we’re both thinking about it, okay?”

  “Okay, okay, watch it, Mr. Kasdan.”

  “I know you’re a man of honor, so I won’t ask for certified paper, but somehow I just know you’re gonna have the check covered by the time I hand it over to your wife. Am I right in that? I trust you, asshole. ’Cause you just know in your heart of hearts it’s the decent thing to do and if the check bounces I’ll be back.” I grabbed him again. “So you say you far-staysh.” Grabbed him tightly.

  “Far…” (Strangled.) “… staysh.”

  “Now write. I’ll just run a little clean water on my hands while I’m waiting.”

  I wash my hands before peeing, because it’s a precious object I’m about to handle, a sacramental gift of God, and also after grabbing a deadbeat’s neck, because it’s a dirty, dirty thing at best. Also helps to cool down.

  “Thanks for your consideration, asshole.”

  He was fingering the red blotches on his neck, which looked a little like monkeybites from his chocolate bunny. I wondered how he would explain them to her. He caught me looking at him. What else should I do? He pulled a check and started writing.

  “Hey, asshole?”

  “What?”

  “I said thanks, so say you’re welcome. You hardly know me and already I’m helping you take care of your kid back in San Francisco.”

  He wrote. I pocketed.

  “Mr. Kasdan, you didn’t need to do that.”

  I shrugged and turned out my palms in my Jewishest way. “Maybe not, but in my business a person has to make judgment calls. Time is money and none of us is getting rich off this. You were a case of judgment call, so what can we do?”

  “You could have…” It trailed off.

  “But I’m sorry if I called you a deadbeat, and for that I apologize, asshole.” I sincerely wanted him to remember me.

  * * *

  I flew home to San Francisco and said to the client: “You married him, but I’m also wed to him now. He accepted my offer not to have him hurt.”

  “How much do I owe you, Mr. Kasdan?”

  There’s the airfare, the Budget rent-a-car, the Motel 6. There’s the per diem.

  “Mr. Kasdan?”

  I was thinking of Priscilla and Jeff; my wife, ex-wife, former wife, love; my son. I answered something.

  Chapter 3

  When a man breaks up with a ladyfriend or grows older, which seems to happen all the time—and to other folks besides me, and even, I understand, to women—it’s probably best to fill the idle hours with a complete physical checkup. One of those things you do when you’ve got nothing to do. I definitely needed tangible in my life.

  My pal Doctor Weinberg, Fred, asked me to blow hard. I blew into some kind of puffer-fish ballooning device. I did this proudly because I don’t smoke. I imagined carefree scuba diving off some lovely tropical reef.

  Fred frowned. “Do it again.”

  I concentrated and this time imagined thrashing against flinty coral, bleeding, gasping, and drowning. Fred performed snapping, putting-away motions. “Okay.” He looked gloomy and depressed.

  “Okay? Just okay?”

  “Better’n I do.”

  I had to be content with doing better than my gray, overweight doctor who was born the same year as I was. It wasn’t a whole lot of praise; he wasn’t offering gratuitous comfort. I wasn’t going to tell him about my hearing (the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells) because I didn’t want any useless sympathy or useful suggestions about audiologists.

  He took blood. They would run the complete set on me; insurance pays for most of it. “I don’t have AIDS,” I told him. He grunted. He and the lab would be the judge of that.

  Now he sighed and tried to pretend it was just ordinary breathing he was undergoing. “Bend over, please.”

  Hey, pal. But I knew this part all too well. My pants were down at my ankles. (What if there was an earthquake and I had to run?) The snapping sound was not that patriotic one of Old Glory in the breeze; Fred was slipping on his mayonnaise-colored disposable rubber gloves.

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” he said.

  “It makes me seasick,” I said.

  I clutched the edge of the table while my innards objected to the whole interlude. His finger was reaching through my butt toward my prostate. I was wondering what he did when folks were constipated. Oh, I didn’t like this; a world that allows such procedures on a totally healthy person is all askew. I lurched in sympathy with myself.

  He mumbled explanations. “Smooth is okay. Rough is not so okay. The PSA test is conclusive, plus margin of error.”

  “I don’t, uh, uh, uh, understand.”

  He withdrew. I felt better. Some sort of lubricant was tickling my butt. Next hour, the same finger up a different patient.

  “Feels just fine,” he said. “Slightly enlarged is normal. How many times you pee at night?”

  “I drink lots of water.”

  “How many times?”

  “I drink coffee, too.”

  “How many times?”

  This guy, my pal, my doc, was uncivilized. He demanded the truth. “Well, one time. But then maybe a couple hours later, another time, And if I sleep seven–eight hours, just before my last dawn nap, oh—”

  “Yes?”

  “Not usually.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “One more time.”

  He was writing. I was repeating myself about drinking one hell of a lot of water and coffee, or soda, beer, other liquids, or diuretic substances, maybe spices in my Mexican food, terrific digestion, eat out almost every night, always thirsty … tried the lite beers but don’t really prefer them …

  “Any diabetes in your family?” he asked.

  “None! Never! Not!”

  So I seemed to be getting away without telling him about my hearing loss, probably from an old war wound, too much rock and roll during my ten-year-long summer of love, and my occasional narcolepsy, falling asleep almost without warning when I was depressed, sometimes taking two naps a day—that isn’t narcolepsy, it’s escapism—and my lack of joy in my love arrangements; and then my wife, my former wife. Some things are none of a person’s doctor-and-friend’s goddamn business.

  He was looking me straight in the eyes. “Have any problems with anhedonia?”

  The question exasperated me. “Some people say ‘prostrate.’ I get it right. I leave out the r. But what the fuck is anhedonia?”

  “Inability,” he began gloomily, sighing, “or difficulty … in feeling pleasure.”

  “I come okay.”

  “I mean pleasure in general. The deliciousness of the morning chill, the smile of a baby next door, the smell of the dew on the flower…”

  “So why didn’t you say? Yeah, sometimes I wonder if it’s all worthwhile. Actually, there are other things I like better, Fred.
The smile of a baby next door? Where I live it’s more like raccoon doo-doo on the flowers.”

  We sat looking at each other in silence, two men of a certain age, divorced, our children escaping into their own lives, the years inexorable. I doubted the entire world-historical import of the smell of morning dew. It was a good thing Fred stuck with medicine because his career as a lyric poet would have been a nonstarter. But I felt certain he too knew what it was like to have history buzzing in his ears, keeping him awake, giving him a bat’s nighttime alertness, along with sudden hibernations during the day. Our distant cousins, the bears and bats; my immediate neighbors, the raccoons, fleas, and feral kids from the Projects.

  “Old days, when I started out, we used to try thyroid or speed with vitamins, that turned out to be not so good an idea, or advice, the talking cure…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now I say: Enjoy your naps. That’s not narcolepsy.”

  “And enjoy my anhedonia?”

  He walked me to the door and made one of those growling Japanesey sighs. “How about a movie and the Early Bird dinner?” he asked. “You name the night, I got nothing on, either.”

  We’d have to sit halfway down the aisle at the movies. He was farsighted, liked the rear, but I needed all the help I could get to pick up the sound track. A lot of healthy young folks prefer to sit forward, folks who can sort it all out in their heads, process the music when a Korean cutie is saying “Cling?” but means to ask “Drink?”

  Getting old was a full-time occupation. I wasn’t sure I still had the time for it.

  Chapter 4

  “Cling?”

  High-energy Susie in her black tights and micro-mini, dictator of Korean pots and barbecue, supreme regulator of fermented cabbage for the masses, bounced impatiently on her toes and shouted her question over the counter of Hann’s Hibachi, cling! cling! cling! tolling at me on Polk Street in San Francisco like a happy, high-pitched bell while I realized I was still growing older.