* * *
“You want to send them eight-by-ten color glossies?”
“Of the two of us or of me, the darky lover, alone? Do you think Rosalie and Jake would like that?”
“Seriously, what do you want to do?”
“Emma, I’ve told you before, I don’t see that we have to do anything. It’s not as if you’ve ever made them privy to the details of your life.”
For Jesse knew that since that long-ago first-time-home-from-Atlanta Christmas, Emma had written a letter to her parents every two weeks that was less revealing than her shopping list. And even though she visited dutifully once a year, for all they shared she might as well not have bothered. It was all one-way travel. After the JFK assassination weekend, they had never visited her.
“I’m willing to tell them all about us, Jess, though you know they’ll never begin to understand. Jake won’t mind so much deep down, but he’s been corroded by all that cracker shit.”
“Emma, let’s just skip it. It means nothing to me. I don’t need another set of relatives, God knows. Look at my own.”
Emma tried to, but they were as much fictional characters to her as Rosalie and Jake were to Jesse. For though Jesse had mentioned Emma to his mother and his sisters, they had never met.
“Don’t worry about it, Em. I don’t.”
“We’ll just be orphans together, then,” she said.
At that, Jesse pulled her into his lap.
“I’ll be your momma and your daddy and your sisters and your brothers. Your grandma and your grandpa and all the family you never had.”
And for a while he was, that first year. He made Emma feel at home. She had found a safe harbor that would give her passage to the adventures of the sea while at the same time protecting her from its raging terrors. That first year, Emma felt she was his beloved. Why, there was no way she could drown.
10
California
1971
California is a roller coaster. Pay your money, step right up, and it takes you for a ride. A thrill a minute, this state of the United States that is also a state of mind.
It was in a roller coaster mood that Jesse and Emma set out one morning in their second spring together to a serendipitous Sierra destination, perhaps Lake Tahoe.
They started from a giddy peak, perched on their little mountaintop. Then down they rolled, pointing Jesse’s Morgan into the Santa Clara Valley, Valley of the Heart’s Delight, where the springtime orchards bloomed. Up again, up, up eastward over a transmission-eating incline before dropping over the other side into the Sacramento Valley that stretched brown and flat as the Holy Land. They followed the Sacramento River as they turned north toward the capital city of the same name. The delta land was damp and swampy like Louisiana bayou land. Rice grew in diked bogs along with crawfish, called crayfish here. But, when boiled, served with a pungent sauce in the beached paddleboat of a restaurant where Emma and Jesse had stopped for lunch, no matter what the pronunciation, the small crustaceans tasted the same.
“God, I’m stuffed.” Emma patted her stomach and pushed back from the Formica tabletop.
Through plate glass windows the sun shimmied like a Bourbon Street fan dancer on the levee-hemmed water. Emma felt lazy with food, sunshine and beer, floating in a delicious afternoon dizziness called “the fantards” back home.
“Why don’t we find someplace cozy and take a long nap?” She reached under the table and squeezed Jesse’s blue-jeaned knee.
In answer he grinned, then fingered a corner of his mustache, twirled it like the villain in a melodrama who was certain that, if not now, surely in a minute he’d have the upper hand.
“We’ve got a long way to go before nightfall if we’re going to make the Sierra,” he said.
But he motioned to the waiter all the same, the waiter who had eyed them throughout lunch, this Southern-voiced long drink of water and her lunch partner, dark as himself, whose bigger-than-life voice betrayed no origins at all.
“Check, please,” Jesse said.
Emma stretched and yawned. “I don’t know if we ought to try to drive it all in one day. Maybe we ought to take it slow.”
Jesse reached for his wallet then, dropped money on the table, headed toward the door. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Emma followed, but with a bit of hesitation.
“Are we driving on, or what?”
“Aren’t you the one who likes surprises? Or do I have you mixed up with someone else?”
This particular surprise had been nibbling for months at the edges of Jesse’s mind. He still wasn’t sure—but then he hadn’t yet given it words. Until the words, well, an unborn surprise could be anything. A surprise was a surprise, right?
The waiter watched as the blonde hesitated. Then her face jumped the fence of indecision and beamed into that of the big black man who held her hand.,
“Sure I do, Jesse, but nothing you do surprises me now.”
“Oh, yeah? Already you got me figured out?” He shook his head. “Come on, then. In that case, I’m gonna show you something you’ve never seen.”
“Ha! I’ve heard that before!”
“Ha yourself.” And then with one arm he reeled her in, held her close.
The waiter watched as this uppity woman who had more than one trick up her sleeve snaked a long silent hand over to a table that hadn’t been cleared, dipped her slender fingers into a water pitcher, then dropped a handful of ice down the jeans of her escort, who yowled and smacked her upside the head with a softly pulled punch. Then they laughed their way out the door, this electric couple.
The waiter listened for their car door’s slam and clucked to himself like a chicken under his breath. Who were they? he wondered. Must be some story behind what they were all about.
They spent the night in a motel near Roseville in the Gold Country, snuggled together like spoons in a family silver chest. They slept late, the curtains drawn against the light.
Emma awoke to Jesse’s kisses on her forehead. He’d been awake for a while, thinking.
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead. Let’s hit the road. Got miles to go before you get your surprise.”
She rolled to him then, sleep-warm, pressing her full length against his. He ran a hand along the curve of her behind. His behind. Emma was his. And in that moment he made up his mind—even before she whispered, “I love you, Jesse.”
He answered, “I love you too, baby. And you’re going to love this surprise.”
* * *
She did love the little town of Lodestar, perched up on the side of a hill out of which had once poured gold by the ton, making this one of the richest boom towns in the West.
All that was left now were a couple of gilded mansions, a single street lined with saloons for the tourists, three motels, one hotel and a million-dollar sky-blue view out every window.
The wide-open rip-roaring good times that the nuggets bought—traveling magic shows, dancing girls, Chinese cooks and hot and cold running whores—had petered out into a clot of mobile homes with a sign flashing “Playland” at their gate. Pull the glad wagons into a circle. For this was Miles County, Nevada, whose major source of income, now that the ore had played out, was legalized prostitution.
Emma and Jesse were sitting at the bar of a saloon called the Silver Dollar. Old coins, embedded in the wood like stars, probably would have twinkled had any light ever penetrated the bar’s permanent gloom.
“Think we ought to do one like this at Skytop?” Jesse asked.
Emma ran a hand down the smooth surface. “Might not be a bad idea.” Might not be a bad idea to get a move on with the big stuff, like the staircase, before we start on the details. But she didn’t say that. Give your tongue a holiday, too, she thought.
“Why don’t you finish up that drink and let’s go on a little tour. See what else we can find.” Jesse threw a proprietary arm around her, led her toward the rear of the saloon.
They passed the ubiquitous slot machines that had appea
red in every gas station, fast-food shop and grocery store since they’d crossed the Nevada line. Emma fished in her pocket for nickels. You could get an awful lot of excitement for a dollar’s worth of nickels. But Jesse was moving too fast for cheap thrills.
In the far corner was a small, dusty latticework grotto trimmed with plastic flowers, lace curtains tacked over old wallpaper, photographs of couples smiling down from all angles.
“It’s the chapel,” Jesse ventured.
“You mean people get married right here in this saloon?”
He laughed at her indignation. “That’s the same tone you use when you say ‘canned beans.’”
“And why not?” slurred a voice from behind them, heavy with bourbon.
A short balding man in a black suit almost as shiny as his pate smiled before them. He held out a hand. “Silas Marner Jones.” Then, “What’s so funny, little lady?”
“Nothing.” She wiped the grin off her face.
“My name? Well,” he said, “better that my mother had moved on from books of the Bible to the library shelf. I have a sister named First and Second Thessalonians. There were fourteen of us altogether, and I could have done a hell of a lot worse. But,” he raised a hand as if he had just reached out and grabbed hold of the slippery but holy part of himself, “though my name isn’t from the Good Book, I am a man of the cloth.”
Emma and Jesse traded a look.
“Ordained not only by the state of Nevada, but by the Holy Empirical and Evangelical Church of the Moving Spirit, to join those who have been living in love but yet in sin in the name of all that’s holy, as one.”
“I beg your pardon,” Emma said.
“I’m a justice of the peace,” Silas said then straightforwardly, realizing through the fog of that morning’s booze that if he didn’t just spit it out he might lose a possible twenty-five dollars. “You two here to get hitched?”
“I don’t think so,” Emma said. “Thanks anyway.” And turned to go.
“Wait a minute,” said Jesse. “Why not?”
“Why not?” Emma’s voice rose and rose again as the room seemed to grow brighter before her, all its edges shining. “Why not?”
Jesse grinned at her. Was he joking?
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Is this a proposal?”
Silas Marner Jones shifted his weight from his right foot to his left. Each was shod in a black-and-white high-topped tennis shoe that had seen better days. If the blonde said yes, he could drive into Carson City to the Army-Navy surplus and see about getting a new pair. Recently, the marriage business had been dragging.
Jesse’s grin grew wider, Hell, yes, it was a proposal. This was the surprise. Initially when he’d dangled a secret delight, he’d meant their destination, the town Lodestar which he’d visited once when he was young. But then there was the idea that for months he’d been noodling around.
He hadn’t been able to focus on it wholly, to set aside each part of it and look at it with a cold and logical mind. But last night, just before he tipped over into unconsciousness, in that dreamy land of phantasmagoria, that vestibule to the territory of deep sleep, he had seen an image of Emma as if she were on the other end of some magical teeter-totter, rising like a fairy princess. Behind her was a blurred parade of all the other women he’d ever known, including his quick-grab-her-while-you-can firefly of a mother—with whom he’d never been at home. Then that parade had receded and there was Emma, golden, his, just his, alone.
“Sounds like a proposal to me,” Silas said. And then, as the big black man frowned at him, he realized that he’d overstepped the line. Don’t sell so hard, Jones, he said to himself. Let the suckers do the work. He listened to his own advice and took three steps back.
“It is a proposal,” Jesse said. “What do you think?” Emma heard how light his voice was, so that if she said no she wouldn’t think it mattered, wouldn’t think him hurt.
What did she think? She thought this wasn’t the proposal of the movies, a man kneeling, staring adoringly into her eyes, his very heartbeat dependent on her answer.
“I married him because he asked me to do it in a saloon,” she’d later say glibly to others—or when she needed an answer to the question for herself. But she might have said other things.
Because he was one of the handsomest men I’d ever seen.
Because after a year he still made me laugh.
Because we’d shared a dream called Skytop.
Because I liked to hear him sing.
Because he hadn’t bored me yet, and nothing about him reminded me of West Cypress.
“Are you serious?”
“Serious as death.”
Emma smiled.
“Is that a yes?” Jesse asked and traced the curve of her mouth with a finger.
“Yes!” She was jumping up and down now, her feet dancing.
“Yes!” Jesse shouted. They joined hands and swung each other around and around like children in a schoolyard. Silas Marner Jones moved farther aside, not wanting to do anything to queer the deal.
But he needn’t have worried. They were swept away with themselves. All he had to do was lead them. And, this being Nevada, the state officials in their infinite wisdom had made the process so simple that a drunken dull-normal teenager could follow it, and many did.
Within fifteen minutes, having handed over the requisite amount of cash and signed in the proper spaces, Emma, in purple corduroy jeans and her buckskin jacket, and Jesse, as always in his carefully pressed Levis, white shirt and Emma’s Christmas gift, a black leather jacket, joined hands and themselves in holy matrimony.
Miss Cat Miles, a round-faced matron who just happened to have the same surname as the county, and Jimmy Lavell, a tall loquacious drunk with a crew cut and a permanent twinkle, were two regulars who earned much of their bar change by signing their John Henrys at the appropriate moment. They did that very thing for Jesse and Emma and then settled back at the bar with fresh boilermakers.
The ceremony took ten minutes, stretched out because Silas Marner Jones did a bit of quoting from both William Shakespeare and e e cummings, running the two together in a most peculiar combination.
But it would do. And Emma had a cigar band from behind the bar on her finger—Jesse having rejected Silas’s offer of a bargain-priced gold ring—to prove it.
They stepped out onto the wooden sidewalk and exchanged a movie clinch so steamy that, had there been horses in the street, it would have scared them.
Then Emma looked Jesse square in the face. “What’s next?” she asked.
“Next!” her brand-new husband roared. “Getting married wasn’t the cherry on the top?”
“I don’t know.” Emma winked at him. “Was it?”
Jesse took four more steps backward from his bride of five minutes and gave her a long hard look.
Then he reached a decision. “Wait right there,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He disappeared back through the swinging doors of the Silver Dollar.
Emma waited five minutes, then sat down, dangling her feet off the edge of the high wooden sidewalk. She held her left hand out and inspected the cigar band, excited, and wondering at what she’d done.
“You got it,” Jesse said then, sneaking up behind her.
“Got what?”
“Your cherry on the top. Come.”
He shoved a bottle of champagne and two glasses into her hands as he jumped into the Morgan without opening his door.
Showy, Jess. Very flashy. What are you doing for an encore?
What he did: the little plane was waiting for them on the edge of town, and the grinning pilot flew them in blue spirals, rolls and somersaults above the craggy tippytops of the Sierras before, a hundred miles farther south, he finally put them down.
“Jesse, Jesse,” she laughed, breathless, “I’m going to throw up.”
“Oh no you’re not,” he said. “Not for this kind of money.”
A jeep straggling tin cans and pink and silver
streamers was waiting to drive them through the Yosemite Valley, where the sun was glinting off the face of Half Dome. A smiling porter was at their service at the Awahnee’s door.
“No luggage,” Jesse said as he tipped the porter anyway. “And I can carry the bride.”
At that he swooped Emma out of the jeep and, shades of their first meeting, carried her up the wide steps of the old stone-and-redwood lodge, Skytop on a grand scale, through the endless lobby where sedate blue-haired couples gaped at them from tapestried high-backed chairs, past the desk where he called, “Tree,” and the clerks answered, “Congratulations sir, ma’am,” and up, up, up the wooden stairs to a set of double doors.
“Jesse, how did you pull this off? It takes months just to get an ordinary room.”
He plopped her down across the wide bed, having kicked shut the door of the bridal suite behind him. “Don’t ask,” he said.
“But—”
Then his mouth lowered to hers, and that was the last question Emma asked for a long while.
11
West Cypress August
1972
The summer-evening streets were still and empty. The frame houses in this older part of town were beginning to show their age, but then, Jake thought, what wasn’t?
New houses were going up out past the Northside, out in what used to be the country, columned mini-Taras with wide yards full of St. Augustine sod. But here, close to the river, close to town, such as it was, steps sagged, chimneys tilted. The freeway was coming right through the middle of it for those who were in a rush to get from where they’d been to where they were going. The folks who lived in its path had to be in a hurry, too, to relocate. Their houses stood empty now, abandoned. Once people were gone, Jake thought, how quickly their houses gave up, dropping shutters and screens and sashes as easily as a fresh widow strewing hairpins, girdles, all pretense of caring.
Jake wiped his brow. The night was hot and close, nothing stirring except air conditioners, window fans. He thought of Emma. She had always hated this August heat.
“Rich people go away in August,” she’d announced once at the table when she was quite young. She’d read that in a book. And then she’d gone away for far longer than a month to Atlanta, New York, California. There were two whole summers full of postcards from Europe once. For a long time, the bad time, she hadn’t written much. But then those postcards. He had them all in a scrapbook. His Emma, flying to all the places he had only dreamed of, had never been to, writing back about museums and wines and foods he’d never heard of as if she had been traveling forever.
Keeping Secrets Page 20
