by Herbert Gold
“Cling?”
I didn’t understand her. I didn’t speak Korean, but she looked as if I were supposed to. “Cling! Cling! Cling!”
“Pardon?” I asked, feeling desperate, wanting my garlicked shrimp, rice, tofu, and kimchee, wanting to be in tune with the world’s doings.
She too was desperate. She tossed her head back and called out, gargling, “Glug-glug-glug,” and then I knew she had been asking me “Drink?”
“Tea,” I said.
And so over my late-afternoon seafood snack, including shrimp and mixed fish, mostly shrimp and oily sprouts, I faced the fact that my hearing was less acute than it used to be; also my brain processed information at a slower pace; and I didn’t finish my plate, either.
The program for today was fuller than usual. This morning I had watched Jeff play indoor field hockey, along with the mothers and a few distracted fathers—he darted like a fish, which should have made me feel good and sort of did. Now I was scheduled for Korean barbecue and a visit with Alfonso; then a serious scrub of teeth with the toothbrush I kept in my pocket (bachelor hygiene); then a visit with Carol.
Alfonso had said not to hold my order for him. He had stupid paperwork down at the station house and you know how the stupid paperwork goes. I was temporarily alone with fermented pickled cabbage and faulty ears, waiting for my friend who was also my police-force resource, personal assault and battery counselor, and fellow bachelor. We didn’t play on a level playing field. I was older, less wise, and more discouraged, but he carried the extra weight around his ass and middle.
“For I am the voice of your conscience,” Alfonso was saying, slopping into his chair and reaching for a shrimp from my plate. I hadn’t seen or heard him coming, though I would no longer say my buddy moved like a cat.
I greeted him with characteristic enthusiasm: “You’re getting fat, Alfons.”
“A healthy conscience knows no limitations to size.”
“Now you’ve got some kind of barbecue sauce on your face.”
He swiped fastidiously across his mouth with his wrist and then transferred the gunk to a paper napkin. “But a good conscience does keep clear, agendawise,” he said. “You sleeping any better?”
“Lots.”
“But better?”
I shrugged. I was a partisan of grief and complaint but hadn’t determined when I crossed the border into maudlin and fanatic. I preferred not to be denounced by my old pal.
I tried a defensive action. “I been seeing this Carol,” I said.
He breathed heavily through his nose. He was struggling and failing to pick up a piece of my leftover tofu with his fingers. It kept mooshing apart, falling to the plate. I handed him a fork; he didn’t say thanks. “Lonely nights, cheap grass, and lots of self-pity—hey, you got it made.”
“I don’t need you to tell me this.”
He was licking his fingers. He was signaling to Susie for a cling of beer. He said to me, “It’s gratuitous. It’s a gift, pal, no extra charge. You’re my early-warning system, so it’s only right I offer you something in return. Someday maybe me, too, I’ll gonna be old, skinny, and sorry for myself. And white.” He was grinning and oozing his caramel good nature at me. “Fat chance.”
“This Carol, you’d like her—”
“Good. Good. Stick up for yourself, my man. But I bet she ain’t got any meat on her, right? Not anorexic, just a workout lady, right? I’ll bet she’s a natural-foods, sushi, ethnic-folk-health-munchies person, am I right there? Purple sweats? Runs every morning? Am I right?”
“Wrong,” I said. “Only part right.”
He gazed with longing eyes at my plate. There was a little rice left, one shrimp, a mound of Alfonso-fingered and abandoned tofu, that great spicy kimchee, which meant I had to do a lot of tooth brushing before I went to meet Carol. On a chlorophyll or Binaca scale my breath would still be at the low end of acceptability in contemporary San Francisco. “Didn’t leave much for me, did you?” Alfonso asked. “And it’s too early to buy dinner, so I’ll just finish what you left. So you can tell me about this Carol.”
I wished I could brag a little. “Nothing much to tell,” I said.
“She know that song? I bet she don’t—‘Stick out you can, here come de garbage man’?”
“Never thought to ask her.”
“Don’t pay no mind to the essentials, brother?” He peered into my face. “I notice you’re still not having such a good time.” He tugged at his tight nap and then looked at his fingers. The hair didn’t come off. “Well, I don’t know. You got a friend. You ought to get your respeck back—”
“That’s not what I’m missing.”
“Whatever.”
The friend I had was Alfonso and he knew that. We both knew a good pal wasn’t enough.
“Uh, what I gotta say. Been seeing Karim?” Alfonso asked.
“Not really.”
“Not really? Sort of? Negotiating?”
“Shit, he calls. He’s got ideas for me. Priscilla thinks I’m slacking off, got to accept my responsibilities.”
“What gives her that idea?” Alfonso inquired. “But Karim ain’t the way to go.”
“Maybe one good score would make people happy.”
“Don’t. I said don’t. The reason you even thinking about a score is not a good reason to be thinking about it. Okay? And been beating up any lovers since last we discussed?”
“No,” I said carefully. “Not Xavier.” Just the thought of him gave me a stomachache, for which the thought of punching him out was a temporary remedy.
“Don’t that either,” said Alfonso. “Don’t Karim, don’t the loverboy. Don’t get yourself arrested for assault, don’t get your license suspended, don’t go to jail.”
So what to do? I sighed, he sighed.
“Hey, not so bad, have a good time,” Alfonso said. “You got kimchee on your breath, but maybe she likes … Carol? … the stink of pepper, cabbage, and garlic on a fella, if that’s what it is. I don’t know about this shit you eat, man.”
He waved goodbye through the window as I glanced at him from the sidewalk. I was on my way. He was calling to Susie and ordering his own plate of something.
* * *
I was on my way to my early-evening workout with an account executive in advertising who had a dinner meeting coming up but could use some exercise first. Carol enjoyed a recreational spasm in the late afternoon, Carol and Kasdan, together or more likely separately. It crossed my mind that she was slightly more plump than I ordinarily liked, but this was not a moral flaw. Not to worry at the present time.
Worry about the opportunity Karim was offering to change my life. Worry about the choice between breaking out or giving up. No, take an hour to worry about nothing.
As Carol was dressing for her meeting, she remarked, “When you go, after your little postcoital nap, please remove my keys from your keychain and leave them on the desk. I know I can trust you to do no damage. Just pull the door shut.”
“You mean it’s all over?”
“For me, too,” she said.
She must have read my mind. I was somewhat skinnier than she liked. But she had confidence I wouldn’t tear the place up or steal anything or even take what might be considered mine, of which there was hardly a trace. She credited me with decency, like a responsible sublet; my toothbrush would go straight into the wastebasket. I would try to live up to that.
She looked clean, sweet, and a little too plump as she swept toward her dinner meeting, on time as usual. I sighed, didn’t doze, departed. How could I sleep in peace when her goodbye words were “And your breath smelled like shit.”
“It’s the kimchee,” I said. “Or maybe the garlic. Whatever.”
But she was gone.
Gradually it was beginning to sink in that I was no longer a promising young man. I was a promised older guy—promised to heaven. That was the optimistic way of looking at it.
Part Two
Chapter 5
Now let
’s go back a few years to when I was a former philosophy instructor who had gone into the groovier trade of private investigator. (Person imagines his future teaching philosophy at Hayward State until retirement and finds a message of nausea waiting in his belly; person during beatnik overture to the Age of Aquarius notices there’s more to life than he ever dreamed of, including under-the-table income; person takes an internship with Hal Lipset, pioneer of the sneaky mike hidden in a martini olive out there in the real world.) It was that time long, long ago when adult males sewed embroidered strips, or astrological symbols, or peace signs on their shirts; young women ironed their hair straight and practiced inner voyages, sticking mandala decals on their hair irons; it was so long ago, in the misty reaches of the sixties, that chalk-faced street mimes were not yet obsolete—back, back we go.
The days when I was the youngest person in the room were already gone and I pretended not to miss them. I was settling into bachelor middle age, except that I called it early middle age, hoping for a merry twinkle in my wise old eyes. And just about the time I began to get used to what is unavoidable, letting the sweet seasons of San Francisco wash over me, the world changed—and not only drugs, rock and roll, the Vietnam War, and Bob Dylan songs full of nasal lists and ambiguous inventories, those external delights that entertained the late sixties in the hundred-year-long operetta of San Francisco. Something abruptly disappeared—my comfortable loneliness, dailiness, beer drinking, grass smoking, hanging out with Alfonso. The years were silting up and then suddenly they were flooded away.
Comfort was taken from my grasp. I consented. It was a case of complete surrender. Alfonso looked at me and said: “The full catastrophe, you’re gone now.”
It had nothing to do with hormones or the solitude I had come to enjoy. Love was crackling in the sky and wings unfolded across my back; it can happen to almost anyone, even to me, even at the blandest, most unlikely occasion. Such as dinner offered by the nervy, twitchy, recently divorced Lillian to whom I found myself appointed companion. Young Priscilla was the friend of a friend, recently arrived in San Francisco, teaching kids at the Museum of Modern Art, and my sociable companion believed a sweet thing, a friend of a friend, should have something to do on a Saturday night. “Let’s be helpful, shall we?” Lillian asked.
“I don’t mind,” I said.
Priscilla was willing to take what came along, at least this once. When she needed a ride home, I offered it, although our hostess was planning for me to spend the night, and I drove Priscilla past my flat, pointing at the dark windows. “That’s where I live. Not that you’ll ever need to know.”
Later, she said she took this as a challenge. She would not only come to know where I lived but also would make me forget that any other woman had left traces in my middle-aged lair. On her first visit she reached into a closet and held a raincoat between her fingers like a dead rat, commanding: “Get this thing out of here.”
It was a blue Pan Am Airways raincoat.
“Out!”
We were both laughing and falling all over each other.
Tall, bony, and reddish, with a careless insulation of extra flesh that would soon melt off, since it was unneeded by a fast-moving athlete; yellowish square teeth which got brightness from their intensity of use in grinning; hugely amused avid—that’s hungry—blue eyes; a look of turbulent health for which youth was only partly to blame.
The style was not cute; I had seen enough cuteness in California. It was beauty. Her stride was long, she threw a ball long; she took a long view of things while accepting the day on its conditions, at least until she decided not to. I didn’t understand her at all.
Before I could proceed to the vital business of not understanding this woman, exploring the lack of understanding, entering the mystery between us, the full catastrophe, I had to settle things with Lillian. It was embarrassing to go crazy for the guest she so kindly, tolerantly, with a sigh, felt obliged to feed one Saturday night, but I could live with embarrassment. Lillian might be the nervous, noisy, angry kind of person in a procedure of parting ways; it was her right. I took earnest thought to the matter. I asked Alfonso, who managed to live with a weight problem, women problems, the problem of being a black cop, plus all the other normal problems.
“In public,” he said. “Won’t want to screw up the place screaming if she knows the waiters. Put her in a little jail where she’ll try to behave if she can.”
“Jail?”
“Take her to Enrico’s, it’s not exactly lockup, but figure it out for yourself, my man.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s your hope. Worst thing can happen, she breaks a bottle over your dumb head.”
There are many wise men in the world, of whom I am not one; I’ve learned to take plausible advice. The trouble is that it’s usually plausible without being comforting, but Alfonso made sense. In a public place, Lillian’s good manners might prevail and she would not create a noisy, destructive, glassware-breaking scene. Such was my prayer.
I invited Lillian to Enrico’s Coffee House for a bit of wine and to tell her I had fallen in love with her last-minute guest at dinner. I ordered the bottle, a chardonnay. I started my tale. She drank the wine in long gulps (the California whites have really taken hold) as I kept refilling her glass.
I talked about the mystery.
She stared at her empty glass.
I poured.
I explained.
She dabbed at her lips and gazed accusingly at the few drops left alone on the rim of the glass. I repoured.
Lillian seemed unable to speak. She was inhibited by the presence of familiar faces in this neighborhood hangout. Her head was thrown slightly back, tendons standing out on her neck, as if she were ready to sing an aria from Manon (I pick that opera at random), but paralysis stopped the music.
She began to cry. She began to squirm in her chair and cry and make little farting noises—farts, she made, not noticing that she was doing so—and at the same time sipped the wine without clear explication of her emotions, only those squeaking sounds as she shifted in her chair and nodded at me to replenish the supply. “Chardonnay from Napa,” she said, “sweeter than the French, but a lovely bouquet.”
It was unnerving. I wanted something more.
“Hey, I never really liked you that much anyway,” Lillian said. “You were an interim solution.”
Alfonso had turned out to be correct in his analysis of the Lillian situation; and if so much care and wine hadn’t been necessary, I’d never have known, would I? Alfonso wasn’t perfect, either. He thought she might break a bottle; she only broke wind.
The air was cleared. I was free to pursue Priscilla, the lady who felt irritated when I said she’d never need to know where I lived. She liked challenges. I called to invite her to dinner; she offered a counterinvitation—a picnic among the flowers on the springtime mountainside just outside town; Mount Tamalpais, where the Tamalpais Indians once hunted game and hid from the Miwoks, who specialized in fishing but sometimes wandered up to kill a Tamalpais.
“Great,” I said, rushing, “there’s the Mountain Home Inn, they have a nice view, it’s a pretty place.”
“No. Stop.”
“Stop? No?”
“I have something else in mind.”
“Pardon?”
“Picnic—listen, will you?” She explained about her straw basket and how she liked a certain kind of eggs, I’d see, and she had some wine in stock, and would I mind too much if she just put together a little lunch for us?
Graciously I did not object. I don’t take offense easily.
She drove a red TR-3, battered but clean, smelling of sun-baked leather. The top was down and her hair flew in the wind. Freckles and need for shampoo result from the sun, she said. I sort of knew what she meant. I felt a silly grin on my face that I couldn’t erase. We shambled up a hillside, holding the straw basket between us. When she opened the basket and everything was nicely lined up, stacked inside, I noticed there were
cloth napkins, pale blue ones, rolled into napkin rings.
“You could have brought paper napkins.”
“We’ll use these again next time,” she said. She had written my name on one of the napkin rings.
The sun pure and dry, dappled shadows from the redwoods overhead shading us, flickering heat and coolness in the air, we allowed ourselves to answer the questions that lovers who plan ahead, or plan to plan ahead, allow themselves to ask. What did I want for the rest of my life? (Her, but I wasn’t ready to say that aloud.) I liked looking for and finding people who needed to be found, I liked collecting money for people who were owed it, I liked the edge of improvisation and even the bit of risk when a reluctant debtor or adolescent speed freak got pissed off. I enjoyed runaways, credit violators, and deadbeat fathers.
“You’re serious about your job?” she asked.
“I have to admit it.”
“That could be good, depending on how serious. I’m serious, too.”
“About what?”
“How do you feel about real ambition? How about real money?”
“Never been a huge priority. Maybe been in California too long.”
She was playing with a twig. “Hey, there are lots of Californias—think LA, think San Jose.”
She poked at my palm with the twig. I closed my hand around hers. “Together,” I said, “my seriousness, your restlessness, we make a good team.”
“Probably we might.” She grinned. She liked keeping things a little out of balance. But then she added in her formal way, very politely: “Dear man.”
She peeled the foil off a dish of caviar from Marcel and Henri; a picnic needs surprises. Our promises should be taken fresh, like caviar, and enjoyed for what they are right now, on a mountain day in the sun and shade, with sharp and salty tastes and no doubts.
* * *
The next times lasted eight years and a son. On that secluded mountain slope in the spring green and brightness, she uplifted her thighs to me hilariously, her pale eyes defying the sunlight flooding down upon us, going dreamy and wide and dissolving into the vision of the two of us alone in the world, on a mountainside, forever.
