the Golden Orange (1990)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  There was live music in the bar, a three-piece band with a female vocalist. And the place wasn't as dark as Spoon's Landing, which meant it wasn't as dark as Dracula's bunk, but it was dark enough to camouflage nips and tucks and bad sutures and lumpy implants and curdled silicone.

  Winnie walked all the way around the rectangular midroom bar but couldn't find her in the teeming crowd. He started looking at the people the way a cop does, noticing that a lot of the women had skin so taut they were frog eyed, with that look of perpetual astonishment. The older guys had their share of cosmetic surgery too, the kind that softens and smoothes the eyes. But instead of looking like young men they end up looking like old women. Old guys with old women's eyes were a common sight even in Spoon's Landing. What wasn't common was the sight of a black face anywhere in The Golden Orange. The census always claimed there were a few, but nobody ever saw one. It was said that former baseball slugger Reggie Jackson lived around here but it was widely believed that by now he'd turned white.

  Winnie elbowed a space for himself at the bar next to a guy who was doing well just to hang on. The guy was very tall, wore an auburn toupee, and was swaying like a palm tree in big wind. He looked pretty old up close, and you could weave a dock line from his gray wiry nose hair.

  "Better adjust the horizontal hold, partner," Winnie said when the guy lurched into him.

  "I know you?"

  Winnie thought it was the worst rug he'd ever seen, especially on a rich guy. "I'm new around here," he said.

  Winnie was delighted when the guy waved to one of the harried bartenders and yelled, "Give my friend a . .."

  "Polish vodka. On the rocks."

  "Double?"

  "Why not?"

  When Winnie's drink arrived, the drunk in the funny red rug said, "You won't like it here. Superficial. Everybody's superficial."

  "Well, superficiality's only skin deep," Winnie said, standing on tiptoes, unable to spot her among the murky mob of drinkers.

  "Look at the lizards slithering in," the guy said disgustedly. "Here to ferret out some lonely old broad before she gets Alzheimer's so bad her lawyer has to slam a lid on the money box. This is the night of the lizard. Drinks're cheap. Grab-a-granny night, we call it." Then the tall drunk took a closer look at Winnie, swayed to starboard, and said, "Wait a minute. You a lizard? Naw, you don't look like one."

  Winnie caught him in midstagger and said, "You filed a flight plan?"

  "Another drink for my friend!" the guy said to the bartender, who nodded and took an order for thirteen drinks from a perspiring waitress as the roar of the crowd increased in direct relation to the decibel level of the band playing in the other room.

  "Anyway," Winnie's sponsor continued, "you're new, so you can hook your wagon to a star. Or your bumper hitch to a hearse. Some old broad with lips like wet clay and a house done in graveyard marble."

  "I'm sorta always hooking my wagon to a wagon, is my problem," Winnie said.

  Then the drunk pointed to a booth full of hot mommas on the upper level. They were sleek and slim and expensive, like Tess Binder. Women her age. Even across the room Winnie could see they were all looking for something.

  "Stay away from them" the guy said.

  "Who they waiting for?"

  "Not guys like you. F. F. H. rich, not just seven-one-four rich."

  "Excuse me?"

  "I tell you, stay away from those broads! None of them ever had an orgasm unless it happened on shop-till-you-drop day at South Coast Plaza. If local paramedics have to learn lifesaving liposuction it's because of them. Conversation? They could trivialize trivia."

  While Winnie Farlowe was watching them, Tess Binder strolled into the jammed barroom, walked directly toward them, kissed one of them on the cheek and sat down at their table.

  "Do you know that one?" Winnie asked the tall drunk.

  The guy swayed again, looked over the heads of the crowd at Tess Binder and said, "No, but they're interchangeable. Choosing between any two of them's like choosing between Iran and Iraq."

  Two minutes later Winnie was standing at the booth full of hot mommas. Corky Peebles, in a torso-hugging cotton turtleneck, took a sniff but passed. She knew poverty when she smelled it.

  "Win!" Tess said, beaming up at him. "Sit. Have a drink." Then she turned to the other hot mommas and said, "Everyone, this is Win Farlowe."

  Winnie caught a few names, and sat down to hear the end of Rita Fisher's tale of tragic divorce, which everyone knew to mean she'd not been able to get Graham Fisher to abrogate the prenuptial agreement.

  "... so there I was wandering around Crystal Court," Rita explained. "Alone. I mean, really alone in a crowd. My house on Lido? Gone. Even my birthday present? My five-sixty SL? Gone! Stolen by that barrel of guts! That heartless, three-hundred-pound monster. Him, he's still decimating herds of beef. Me, I'm living on tarragon sprigs!"

  Tess said, "You should've put mad money aside every chance you got. Next time, get a secret safety deposit box."

  Rita sighed. "That doesn't work for me. Mad money's harder to keep boxed up than Elvis Presley."

  A few of the women clucked and murmured sympathetically, but Winnie noticed that none of them stopped eyeing the new prospects who passed through the packed lounge in an endless flow.

  "I told you, you should never've married that greedy swine!" said the ever-sensitive Corky Peebles. "People like him, and Castro and Qaddafi, and Ted Kennedy, and ..." She'd just run out of famous people she hated. "They should all be put in a country where they only have a Sears store to shop in! They should have to live with mall withdrawal forever!"

  It was clearly the worst fate that Corky Peebles could wish on another human being.

  "After a while the need to shop sort of goes in remission," Tess consoled. Then she turned to Winnie and said, "Shall we go to dinner?"

  As Winnie and Tess pushed through the crowd and got to the door, the drunk in the red rug was boozier yet. He was sharing the door table with a dog-eyed hot momma so thin you could pick her up like a beer mug, by her collar bones. He was saying to her: "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be! That's Robert Browning."

  The skinny momma, her silicone bursting out of a creamy pink silk blouse, had just eyeballed better pickings in the form of a rollicking up-and-coming mortgage banker. She jumped up and said, "Mister Browning was correct only if you have a personal trainer, a good cosmetic surgeon and a great portfolio. Bye-bye, darling."

  The disgusted drunk spotted Winnie leaving with Tess Binder and cried out, "Don't think yours is any different! They're so predictable! An organ grinder shows you more variety! Their natural inclination is toward spike heels with ankle straps and fishnet stockings! Don't be fooled, my friend! Hookers! All of them!"

  "Who was that delightful man?" Tess asked, as she and Winnie walked through the lobby toward the parking lot.

  "Guy I met at the bar. Wore those five-hundred-dollar ostrich shoes with warts on 'em? Went to the Andrei Gromyko charm school. So pessimistic he should wear a shroud."

  "A real sweetheart. I could see that."

  He'd never stood beside her until now, and she was taller than he'd thought. In high heels, she was exactly at eye level with him.

  "Where we going to dinner and do they take overdrawn Visa cards and when was the last time you rode in a VW ragtop that runs worse than New York City?"

  "Don't worry about a thing, old son," she said, handing the valet-parking kid her ticket. "You're my guest."

  Old son. He loved it. They talked like that on Masterpiece Theater!

  She drove a Mercedes, but not a new one. Winnie correctly guessed it was six years old, a four-door sedan without chrome wheels or pinstripes. Not a Golden Orange kind of car at all. A diesel, for chrissake!

  She seemed to read his thoughts.

  "One of my ex-husband's cars," she said. "The one he didn't want. The one that he gave me as a wedding gift, he took back. It was a Porsche nine-thirty Cabriolet. Red. My father did the same t
hing to me once. It's the way of men like that. The Lords giveth . .."

  Chapter 7 _ The Nymph

  The restaurant was on the ocean-front. It was one that Winnie had passed a thousand times. Once he'd even stopped for a drink and to watch the sunset on a day he was wearing a Sail America sweatshirt that didn't pass dress code: no collar. But the guy on the door, a mustachioed Parisian, who'd long since learned not to act like one, told Winnie not to leave. The Frenchman disappeared for a few minutes and returned with a Members Only windbreaker whose stand-up collar passed muster in The Golden Orange except at weddings. But the drinks were $3.75, so Winnie only had a couple.

  Now he was back there at twilight with Tess Binder. The first thing he noticed was that the bar was jammed but nobody paid much attention to the magic hour light show. The sky looked eerily blood streaked, moments before the fireball floated down into the inky sea, always faster than Winnie expected.

  "Forty-five seconds," Winnie said after they found some standing room by the big window facing the ocean.

  "What's that?"

  "Took her forty-five to drop past the horizon tonight. I can see her from my kitchen if I stand on a chair and peek over the roof next door. Took her forty-five seconds tonight."

  "The sun's feminine?"

  "Oh yeah, without a doubt," Winnie said. "Can't live without her, but she's dangerous."

  The Frenchman aimed his prominent Gallic nose at a pair of yuppies sitting at one of the tall cocktail tables and they jumped up and followed him. Winnie grabbed the two vacated stools and a leggy blonde in a tuxedo jacket, black tie, shorts and high-heeled pumps took their drink order.

  Outside the window, on the beach, an Asian lad flew his electric-blue and amber batwing kite. The kite looped and climbed, soared and dove. The boy made the kite dance along the sand and pirouette over the bodies of a pair of lovers lying on a beach blanket. Then the kite fluttered and hung in midair above the window of the restaurant, a brilliant jewel hovering in the twilight.

  Perched on a high stool with her legs crossed, Tess didn't seem to notice as her full-split white skirt fell open. Winnie loved white stockings! The shawl-collar blouse was white linen, and Tess reflected red dusk back at Winnie. It was a bewitching moment: this vision in white glowing a creamy pink from reflected blood-red twilight.

  When the drinks arrived, she touched his glass with hers. He figured she'd say "Cheers," but she fooled him.

  "Chin chin," she said.

  He caught himself gulping, forced himself to put the glass down and tried conversation. "Too bad you don't sail," he said. "I really dream of a racing boat but I got my eye on a more practical thirty-six-footer. Way she's designed, one guy could sail her round the world. Self-steering vane on her stern controls the rudder. Built in the early sixties and modified with all kinds a stuff. She's a heavy boat. Won't go fast, but very stable. Doesn't oil-can when you go to weather."

  "What's that? Oil-can?"

  "You know that hollow sound the boat makes in a chop? Baloom, baloom, baloom. Got lots a headroom down below. No engine. That blew up, but who cares?"

  "Going to buy it?"

  "Fifteen grand. The best sailboat bargain I'll ever t *

  see.

  "So buy it."

  "Gotta pay my lawyer four grand for walking me into court and introducing me to my worst nightmare. My lawyer, Chip, said he woulda liked to cut his fee to two."

  "So why didn't he?"

  "Claims the senior law partners don't permit fee cutting, sympathy, compassion, pity, or mercy of any kind."

  She shrugged and said, "You got off with probation. He was competent, wasn't he?"

  "As Noriega's dermatologist or the department of motor vehicles. All he did is stay outta the judge's way so he could torture me for fifteen minutes. Oh yeah, Chip made a two-minute leniency plea with about a thousand adverbs in it. He's the adverb king of the Western world. Only guy in the universe who still says, 'Jeepers!' As in 'Jeepers, Win! I really wish I could shave the fee! Truly I do! Truly! Sincerely! But...

  "So you won't be buying your bargain boat?"

  "Only sailboat I'll have is in my bathtub. Come to think of it, I don't have a bathtub. Shower stall. Works half the time."

  "Why do I have a feeling you're trying to tell me how dreadfully poor you are."

  "And needy. Needier than public television. I figured we were eating at your club and it wouldn't cost me. Now I'm nervous as the Borgia's food taster. I might as well come clean. I can't pay for a meal in a place like this. My credit card's more overextended than Mexico."

  Tess Binder looked into Winnie's soft blue eyes and saw not a trace of duplicity. "You are ingenuous, Mister Farlowe."

  "Is that like ingenious? I used to be ingenious sometimes. Working on a homicide gave me ingenious moments."

  "And solid. A straight-ahead guy. You even have a forelock to tug." She seemed amused, checking out the ill-fitting yuppie suit, the graying cowlick, but mostly, the soft vulnerable eyes. "Well, you can stop poor-mouthing even if it's true. I invited you to dinner so it's my treat." She signaled to another waitress in tuxedo shorts, this one a redhead even taller than the blonde.

  After that drink, part of him wondered what the hell she wanted with him, this woman who could read his mind. This woman whose eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses were opaque, eyes he couldn't read at all. If eyes were windows, her panes were frosted.

  Ten minutes later, the Frenchman showed them to their booth, which faced all the action down in the sunken barroom. The place was decorated like a don't-give-a-shit, make-believe brothel, complete with paintings of voluptuous nudes, all of which said: "No fag designer ever laid a glove on this joint. We re earthy, but we ain't cheap."

  The food, as in most really successful Golden Orange restaurants, where the seven-one-four and the F. F. H. wealthy dine, was not faddish. By the end of the 1980's, cholesterol was making a comeback. If you felt like California cuisine you traveled to Beverly Hills or West Hollywood, where a glimpse of movie stars went with the price of dinner. Cajun never did have a foothold in The Golden Orange. Even Southwestern seemed destined to go.

  Hearty American fare was back with a vengeance, at least for men. And this was very much a man's world, this citadel of white Republicans. They'd dumped all that nouvelle nutrition the moment they learned that zinc doesn't guarantee an erection.

  When the menus came, Tess told Winnie to shoot the works, so he ordered the mussels to start, then the abalone at thirty-nine bucks a pop. She ordered the local sea bass, supposedly caught by the dory fleet, that small bastion of oceangoing self-reliance working about five hundred yards from the restaurant, by the Newport pier.

  There are fifteen to twenty fishermen in the dory fleet, a unique and eccentric band who, for a century, have launched their little flat-bottomed boats directly off the beach, smashing through the breakers into wind and spray and deep dark ocean. All alone usually, at two o'clock in the morning, they motor out sometimes twenty-five miles to set their mile-long lines, held down in a thousand feet of ocean by Coke bottles and bricks, each line set with over five hundred hooks from which a good day's catch of half a ton will be plucked by hands turned bone-white from exposure. All of this in an era when commercial fishermen use airplanes and sonar.

  Of course, the brightly painted old wooden dory boats, littering the beach where they sell the day's catch, are there for atmosphere. Nowadays, the new boats of Japanese design have Yamaha engines, and Toyota trucks haul them out of the water at day's end. Still, the dory fleet retains a kind of Gypsy romance to tourists, and even to locals. They're part of the rind in The Golden Orange.

  "Know something?" Winnie said, looking down to the bar level where beautiful young women were having drinks with middle-aged men they hardly knew or just met. "This is a pickup joint."

  Tess said, "Not the way you mean it. In the age of herpes and AIDS these women come here to get fed. These gentlemen are looking for dinner companions and the ladies just oblige
. It seldom goes beyond that, or so I've been told. It's a tradition here."

  "So there really is hunger in America!" Winnie observed. "And these Gold Coasters're doing their share to take care of it, at a hundred bucks a head. Maybe this is part of the thousand points of light George Bush was talking about at the Republican convention."

  Tess looked at a pair of young women, both with hair like tennis star Andr6 Agassi, and said, "More like young animals being captured, fed and released by toothless predators. This is a nature show, Winnie. They do everything but tag ears around here."

  Winnie had two more Polish vodkas, and was starting to vibrate by the time dessert came.

  "Got any cheesecake?" he asked the waitress. "I'll have cheesecake if you got it."

  "And give him a scoop of white chocolate ice cream on the side," Tess said. "My old son hasn't had a meal lately."

  When the waitress was gone, Winnie said, "Any son of yours would still be squeezing zits. You can't be a day over thirty-five."

  She looked very pleased at that, but said, "You don't really expect me to tell you my age."

  "Me, I just turned forty. I'm feeling it. Only time I felt young was tonight at your club. Watching the grab-a-granny action."

  "Who told you about the grab-a-granny business?

  "The tall guy with the funny red toup on his head. The one that yelled at me when we left."

  "The one who called me a hooker."

  "Yeah, well, he was one a those drunks likes to shock little girls and people from Nebraska. I didn't pay no attention to what he was saying half the ,. ff time.

  "If my father were alive I'd take you to his yacht club," she said. "Different crowd entirely."

  "I know a few people belong there," Winnie said. "Met 'em when I was still sailing a lot. Your dad was commodore, huh?"

  "My grandfather. When I was a little girl Daddy made me sail Sabots and Snowbirds. Humphrey Bogart was racing his Albatross here in those days."

  "So you are a sailor!"

  "Not if I can help it. Whenever I'd place below the top three in a race I'd get lectured for an hour. It's probably why I hate boats. Especially sailboats."