She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me

by Herbert Gold

  Priscilla smiled at him across the crowded lunchtime terrace, raised her glass and held it there. The nun told him to look and he looked. He raised his glass and both Priscilla and Karim drank, and the nun also drank. I didn’t.

  I held Priscilla’s wrist while I explained that we were getting to know each other these days, she and I, and now she knew there was some work I didn’t do, some folks I didn’t want to know, and Karim fitted the category. In fact, he just about filled it for me.

  “But he wants to know you.”

  “It’s nice to be loved, isn’t it?”

  “I kind of like him. He seems confident.”

  “Wants professional services,” I said. “Collections, or traveling with cash, or maybe better or worse. There seems to be a fair amount of money circulating around him.”

  She liked the sound of this. “Is it illegal? Am I so innocent you can’t explain it in detail?”

  I didn’t know in detail. In North Beach and the Tenderloin it wasn’t always helpful to know in detail. That was Alfonso’s business, not mine. I didn’t have to build a case to know as much as I needed. I explained about how a lack of knowledge can be a helpful thing in my trade. She wanted to learn. Also at times she didn’t mind teaching as it came to her. “He’ll be back,” she said.

  “You don’t get prophecy points for that.”

  “He really wants to persuade you.”

  I didn’t enjoy this. She was longing for adventures and I was longing for limits on them. “Not persuadable,” I said.

  “He’ll be back, lover.”

  * * *

  People can join a parade and dance along with the band, giddy with the joy of sunlight on their bodies—a class action of merriment and mystic oneness in community—while the band, which is the source of all this terrific rhythm, is paying strict attention to its own music.

  Sometimes Priscilla and Dan stayed joined, kept their bodies locked into folds and membranes, not moving, breathing, hardly moving at all—a mutuality of decision, both of us deciding, nobody’s idea—lying there and desperately still at first, then calmly still, whispering, telling all the things we loved, admitting freely that the first among these things was each other (I think it was more Dan, my tongue set free by the blessedness of bodies breaking the boundaries of bodies, who spoke these things) until the light started to seep under the shade, in the edges around the shade, and there were morning noises outside. The paperboy’s footsteps. A whistler.

  “Is it okay if I come now?”

  “Whatever. Yes. Yes.”

  I could feel a bone at her middle rising and falling with her breath as she said yes.

  “Now?”

  “Yes!”

  That cry we all make, smart or dumb, sex-drunk or just human, agreeing, assenting, convening, calling up the spirits of past and future and now, just the two of us here on earth together. Sometimes adding, as a kind of afterthought, “God, God, God,” though God isn’t really what we are believing in. The prayer just pours from some history of love and belief in the joining of souls, the prayer cannot be shut out, as the dawn light and the day cannot be shut out. Priscilla and Dan Kasdan.

  * * *

  Like many who marry, we married to learn who and what else we could be. “Let’s,” I said.

  She asked: “I was wondering. Do we need to see the other side of the mountain?” That was what she called transforming this courtship into marriage and permanence.

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “I’m curious. We could drive to Big Sur and find a Universal Life minister.”

  But we passed a courthouse in Monterey first and decided to stop for lunch, a flower, and a wedding. The judge took time out from a drunk-driving trial and kept the culprit waiting while he asked if we thought the poor jerk—one prior alcohol-related accident—should go to jail and wished us a long happy life together and please drive carefully on Route 1, the winding narrow road to Ditjen’s Big Sur Inn. Congratulations, you are man and wife, don’t drink your wine till you get there.

  The cabins were nestled into the hollow of a steep, sun-dappled slope of alluvial granite which poured down through the pine and poppies, bush monkey flowers and wild mustard, ending abruptly in a jigsaw of rocky beaches, eddying tide pools, the Pacific Ocean. A Norwegian settler had built these rooms with Hansel and Gretel as his architects. There were hawks overhead, hummingbirds nearer by. Priscilla claimed to see a whale just this side of the fog bank and I didn’t argue the point.

  She was still holding the rose I had bought when we entered the courthouse. I asked why.

  “Because I like it. Don’t cross me,” she said.

  When it was dark, we didn’t mind bringing our first day as man and wife to an early close. We built a fire. The bed smelled of mustiness and wood smoke. “Well, it’s been a long drive, no one’ll judge us if we don’t look for trouble in downtown Big Sur.”

  “Not that long a drive,” I said.

  “Let me be the judge of that. Long enough.”

  Her hands were on my shirt. Mine were on hers. The bed smelled of wood smoke and Priscilla and Dan.

  “Wait. Wait,” she said. And then: “Stop waiting.”

  She came undone; it was a way she had, fainting with terrible sighs, seeming to scatter under me like a puzzle or break over me like a cloud, Priscilla fragments raining down. And then, after a moment when time stopped, the pieces came back together and she was ready to make jokes, sit up and hold her knees, look for something to eat. It took me longer to come together again and remember who I was. Her eager smile and fading freckled flush were already there to welcome me. “Hey! Let’s change the music, okay?”

  This was the other side of the mountain. It wasn’t the only other side.

  I dozed through furniture-buying expeditions. In my sleep I mumbled, “If you like it, sure.” The coffee table. The new plug-in appliances. A toaster that also baked—did it whistle “Abbey Road”? All I really cared about was the bed and a kitchen table for late-night snacking. Nevertheless, a house occurred, with closets, nothing not inside the closets that belonged inside the closets. In progress was an extreme late-sixties, early-seventies effort to be normal human beings despite San Francisco and an abnormally spirited woman.

  On the other side of the mountain lurked a creature no one truly anticipates until it suddenly makes its claim and the universe is filled.

  * * *

  After we moved into the proper Marina flat, pregnant Priscilla, a garage for the pregnant Priscilla’s automobile, a new life for the beatnik private eye on the other side of the mountain, it seemed important to share my blessings, each other, with my two best people, Alfonso and my wife. I said to Alfonso, “Just you for dinner, not a party.”

  “I’m bringing my dog.”

  “You don’t have a dog, Alfonso.”

  “My new puppy. I need a social life just like you.”

  “Alfonso, I don’t want a new puppy shitting on my new Marina hardwood floors.”

  He shook his head with wonderment at what Dan Kasdan, the married man, had become. “First place, Mingus wouldn’t do that. Second place, this is true love, too. I’m committed to this equal-opportunity puppy. Where I go, he goes.”

  “Mingus?” I asked. “A cute name?”

  “Loves that modern jazz, man. And he wouldn’t do what you said on your hardwood floors.”

  Priscilla agreed that my law-enforcement backup would never bring a non-housebroken animal into our flat. She said, “A Boy and His Dog, what a cute story.”

  “Don’t call him ‘boy’ to his face,” I said.

  Probably she was continually aware that he was black, as white folks usually are about black folks. He was heavy, smart, smiley, the officer who helped me in my chosen career, and my all-time buddy; we would try to love his dog, too. It so behooved us in our state of grace.

  I think both Alfonso and I liked showing off for Priscilla as we sat over drinks and continued our tales of semilegal behavior in d
efense of the public against illegal behavior. She laughed at the right places and had the proper response to analysis of the one-joint rule for minors. The profit motive also came under discussion as I described staying out of money laundering and narcotics transport, although someone once paid me in airline tickets that turned out to be stolen; tainted, as the prosecutor delicately pointed out when he decided not to prosecute; Alfonso had vouched for me there. That’s what friends are for. When Priscilla asked what he knew about Karim Abdullah, Alfonso said he was a smart hustler, medium big-time so far, who might even manage to keep free of the criminal justice system, and then Priscilla inquired if that would be true for those who worked for him too. Alfonso said maybe, depends, and raised his eyebrows at me. “Smart woman,” he said. “But don’t think too far ahead, it’s dangerous.”

  “I’m not averse,” Priscilla said, although the eyebrows had been lifted at me.

  I could feel Alfonso relaxing and happy as he tickled the nose of Mingus and told him not to bother the nice folks or eat their furniture. Mingus chewed a little at his socks, but that seemed to be permitted in this sudden romance. Alfonso mentioned his son living with the mother in Newark or Trenton, one of those places, she didn’t even like to tell him her address. It was hard on him but he was patient and would wait it out because he really didn’t have a choice. He didn’t. Someday the kid would make up his own mind about his father. Priscilla listened and said nothing and that was the right thing to do. There was a space of silence and then we filled our plates.

  “Kids need a dad,” Alfonso said. “I’ll be there.”

  Just before dessert—I was sure she was making some sort of flan, bronzed crust and burnt cream, something domestic and sweet like that—I was discussing how Mingus tended to yip and yap a lot around our legs. “Tole you he love the jazz,” said Alfonso.

  Priscilla was in the kitchen. “You like her?” I whispered.

  “You already asked me that about every time I see her. Look, you’re the guy’s in love. I’m only the guy who sees what you see in her.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The rest is your own business, pal.” He didn’t believe in keeping his voice down. “Yeah, I like her.”

  She was in the kitchen a long time. Mingus was with her, and quiet. I headed for the kitchen to help with whatever she was doing.

  Priscilla was on her knees, head down, lovely tail up, arms flailing with a dishcloth. Mingus was very quiet, whimpering guiltily. Priscilla was wiping at wettish dog doo on the floor. “Damn!” I said. “Let me get him in here to do that—the goddamn mutt—he said he’d be housebroken.”

  She looked up, her face purple, and said, “No! No! He’ll be so embarrassed.”

  “Ought to be, come in and clean it up—”

  “No! He’s your friend—”

  I stared. I was so amazed I didn’t take the wet dishcloth away from her to scrub the floor myself. Something in me may not have wanted to scrub dogshit after a good meal, dessert on its way but delayed by puppy circumstances. But cleaning up wasn’t what I thought of first; seemed to be an instinct I lacked. I was still thinking Alfonso should do it. “You’re gonna be pissed with me—”

  She looked up again. “Later maybe,” she said, “not now.” And then she thought it through. “Yes. Later.”

  Maybe this was the evening when romance began to turn domestic. Maybe marriage, that’s what it is or comes to be, complications of who cleans up what and why. Priscilla should have said what she wanted. Dan should have known what she wanted. If Alfonso wasn’t doing the cleaning, I should have done the cleaning. The sure thing, surest of all, was that Priscilla should not have been down on her hands and knees wiping away at a yipping puppy’s wet and runny plumbing error.

  In a dream later I grabbed Alfonso’s dear face, rubbed his nose in Mingus shit. A person can rethink history in dreams, but that doesn’t do anything about it. Alfonso never knew how he once stood at the turning point.

  When Mingus and Alfonso left, after he said her flan was sure different from any previous custard in his life, Priscilla started to put things away, I washed the dishes, we shut down the lights and double-locked the door. She was pregnant. Sometimes nowadays we didn’t have sex but just went to bed, went to sleep, snuggled a little and grunted, turned over. But always the lovemaking was at least present in our bed. This time it wasn’t.

  It’ll be there tomorrow, I thought.

  In fact, it was there tomorrow and I could forget about a little domestic nonoccurrence. But something was started, there was a precedent. It could be said our marriage was becoming normalized.

  “Hey, whyncha at least say goodnight?”

  “I said goodnight.”

  “Kiss?”

  Long wait. Slow breath. Stranger sleeping alongside.

  * * *

  When Jeff was born, he wasn’t just our baby, our son, the hyphen between us forever. A new world had been created. We were discovering a world others had explored before us—even the greedy vanity of new parents could admit that—but I was Columbus in that delivery room in Children’s Hospital, and as I watched a knee appear between Priscilla’s legs—it was actually a dear bald head, with a few stringy wet black hairs—the nurse faded to my left in a clever delivery-room maneuver, ready to catch me if I fainted.

  I didn’t. Priscilla, wan, face and hair drenched, defenseless it seemed, said, “We did it.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” I said, sobbing. Even in the turmoil of childbirth she remembered good manners and said “we.” And maybe it wasn’t only good manners; she meant that we had done it together, were doing it, would do it. Oh welcome to the world, sweet son. And to parents who love each other.

  Not even then forgetting that the world is a place crisscrossed with nerves meant to be tickled, Priscilla asked sweetly, eyelashes still wet with tears, “Darling … now say—”

  “What?”

  “Dan. Now say, Thank you, ma’am.”

  Welcome to your family forever, Jeff.

  Chapter 7

  I watched her from our bed. Maybe she thought I was sleeping. She stood before the full-length mirror, briskly drying herself after a morning shower, no nonsense about it, humming under her breath in the new day, bidding pearly droplets of water to be gone. Then she stopped and stared. She liked what she saw in the mirror. She eased off in her scrubbing, she slowed down. It was a pleasantness to continue the work of probing crannies for moisture that came from outside the universe of her body. She noted herself with interest, worthwhile changes after childbirth, worthwhile resilience. She was at peace with the mirror and in life.

  I admired her ass as she bent to dry between her toes. I admired it partly because she also loved it; blessed soul, free of doubt; blessed lady, ass in the air.

  Then she straightened up and saw me watching. She smiled into the mirror. “Jeff’s still asleep,” she said. “Second time he slept through three nights in a row.”

  “What a considerate lad.”

  “Knows the worn-out parents need their rest.” And she wriggled back into bed, careful in so doing to awaken me thoroughly.

  * * *

  I may have seen more clearly before early cataracts began to bathe everyday matters in mist and glow. Calcified shell hasn’t yet blacked out the lens, no clogged duct or glaucoma, but that common disease of age, call it pernicious memory, slides a series of tinted postcards into the collector’s album. Nostalgia sneaks into daydream like a preview of deteriorating eyes. Vitamin E capsules, yellow fish oil, are supposed to eat up the impurities, oozing off with their cargo of calcification. They can’t sweep away the past.

  No ripened cataracts yet, no glaucoma—it’s a case of Retroactive Clairvoyance.

  There’s Dan Kasdan on the bus heading down Columbus to a dental checkup when he sees long-legged Priscilla, hair reddish golden in the sparkly North Beach midday sun, striding along with Jeff bobbing up and down in the baby pack on her back. Jeff is a few months old, still a bald young pe
rson, but already my brilliant son has learned to laugh when he is jiggled. Priscilla’s walk jiggles this fine upstanding little fellow, his paws clinging like a monkey’s, his hair getting ready to sprout through his scalp, the future on its way.

  “Hey!” I cry out, too loud, an emergency appeal to the bus driver. “Let me out! That’s my wife and kid!”

  The driver says, “Man, this ain’t a family unification service.”

  “That’s my wife.”

  “Not doubting your word, man. This ain’t the stop.”

  Everyone on the bus is laughing except the Chinese passengers, but then one man says something in Cantonese. White ghost begs to leave in violation of transit system regulation orders because of wish to share rice plate with his wife—probably not the precise translation from the Cantonese here—and now the Chinese travelers are also shrilly laughing and poking each other. We are in the middle of an all-American new-father city bus melee.

  “Man, this ain’t the rules, but I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do—”

  He has done it already. He stopped the bus. The passengers are enjoying an urban laughter break as the husband and father is running—getting jostled by a blue VW but pushing against the fender as the stoned motorist shouts, “Groovy end run, asshole”—and yelling, “Priscilla! Priscilla!” because she disappears pretty fast when she is striding along like this, even with a baby on her back. And she hears me and we kiss ungainly (the pack, the straps, the baby).

  The bus stops again alongside us. The passengers are applauding. A black guy yells, “Gimme back my wallet!” The driver has violated the rules, but a Muni inspector might determine that he has demonstrated empathy for the potential for the blues in marriage and parenthood. Priscilla asks: “Where did you come from?”

  Just more blessed luck. It was an accident. Wasn’t intruding on her maternal bonding time—no, no, not this paternal dad. I kiss our son and he comments filially, “Urrggh,” a most melodious moist blending of vowels and consonants.