“Monica?” asked Norton, without looking at her.
“He’s just confident enough to get into trouble,” she said. “He needs to believe more in us. He needs to depend on us.”
“He’ll come to do that,” said Weinstein. “We’re trying to build a relationship with him, not offer a one-night stand.”
“I don’t trust pretty men,” said Norton. “They lack character, period.”
“He’s passed every phase of his training perfectly. It’s not his fault he’s got a pretty face. That’s what got us all here, isn’t it?”
Norton nodded, acknowledging this reference to Rebecca. “How does he react to pressure?”
“The most pressure we’ve put him through was today, your questions about Rebecca.”
“Based on that, I’d say he’s liable to become pissed off.”
“I think he can keep his head.”
“Does he sprint at the end of his runs?”
“Always. Why?”
“He looks like a quick-comer to me. He might need endurance, Joshua. If he saves enough mustard for a sprint after seven miles, all the better. Has he shown any interest in Sharon?”
“A little. Not much. I could be wrong, though.”
“Hmm. I’d sure like to have more pull with him than just you.”
“Rebecca’s the pull, Norton. Not me, or Sharon, or anyone else. He’s single-minded.”
“No use trying to change that, I suppose.”
“Let’s use it while it’s there.”
Norton and Weinstein stood and shook hands. Monica took a chair at the table.
“Things in Washington are okay,” said Norton “Frazee is still too interested in Wayfarer, but I don’t know how to correct that. And the more I try to shade him away, the more control he wants. He’s like a kid with toys. I hate bureaucrats. Of course he’s worried sick about the Hate Crimes money we got from the White House—worried about it going away. He’s always whining about no money. So he’s determined to keep this operation small and deniable. No show of force from us. No Ruby Ridge. No Waco.”
“We’ve all got our crosses to bear,” said Monica. “You’re Joshua’s, and Frazee is yours.”
“Whose are you?”
“My husband’s, I hope.”
Weinstein remained standing when Norton sat back down. Joshua’s stomach was trembling a little, and he felt uncertain in his knees. “Well?” he asked.
“Nice work,” said Norton. “Move ahead.”
CHAPTER
NINE
They dropped John in front of a little house on Sun Valley Drive, a small street off of Laguna Canyon Road, then headed for town to pick up some groceries for their celebration.
He stood there for a while, noting the fresh asphalt under his feet, the ivy choking the Chinese elm in his front yard, the wooden fence he’d built to contain the dogs, the old brick chimney and the forlorn face of the house he had once happily called home. Mrs. Gorman from across the street waved at him uncertainly, focusing on him with her weak eyes as if he were someone returned from the dead. He nodded, walked down the driveway and let himself in through the squeaking gate for the first time in almost five months.
The yard was overgrown, in shambles. Luckily, it was hidden from the neighbors by the ivy-covered fence. The lawn furniture seemed to have sunk into an abyss of weeds. The vegetable garden was profuse with zucchini, and pocked by gopher mounds. A ground squirrel, squash in mouth, hurried away toward the woodpile by the side of the house. The needles of a bristlecone pine lay deep beneath the tree, lashed loosely together by a silk skein of spiderwebs and funnels that shone dustily in the afternoon sun.
John sees Rebecca there, under that tree, sitting in a beach chair with a book open on her lap and her long pale legs stretched into a patch of late December sun.
“Wine?” he asks.
“You,” she answers.
John worked the key in a lock gone stubborn with disuse. Finally it turned. Then the familiar clunk of the heavy door sucking inward, and the ambience—aged by absence but intact—reaching out to greet him as he stepped inside. Dust. Heavy air. The smell of loss. Shapes of things still firm in their places, matching perfectly the shapes and places in his memory. Sunlight diffused through the dirt of windowpanes. A potent silence. Home.
“Oh,” he muttered.
He gathered up the sheets he’d placed over the couch and chairs, the television and stereo, the coffee table and hearth. The covers were heavy with dust, and so were the things beneath them. John had not known until now that motes were smaller than the weave of cotton. He took the sheets outside and tossed them into the weeds.
He walked back inside, leaving the door open, then went into the kitchen. He opened the blinds and windows. The refrigerator still hummed quietly and John was pleased that he had kept the utilities on. Five months, he thought. In the dining alcove off the kitchen he removed the sheets from the table and chairs, then slid open the glass door that faced the canyon drainage creek and dropped them to the patio. The bricks were buried by the bright orange bracts of an enormous bougainvillea growing beside the house. When the sheets hit, some of the bracts lifted up, then floated down in alternating sideways dips, like tiny magic carpets. And he sees her again on that patio, wrapped in a heavy blue robe he has bought for her visits here, with the rain pouring off the roof shingles on three sides of her, and she smiles at him over a cup of coffee as the steam issues up past her eyes and John thinks, yes, those are the eyes I’ve waited a lifetime to know.
He straightened the downstairs bathroom a little. The toilet bowl was stained, so he brushed it out with some liquid bleach, flushing twice. For Sharon, he thought.
Then he approached the bedroom. He didn’t walk right in, but rather hesitated at the threshold and, leaning over it like an inquiring butler, scanned the room for its familiarities, its memories and heartaches. They were dense in there, too packed and coiled and alive for John Menden to confront just now. He kept seeing Rebecca by the planter in the rain.
“Oh,” he muttered again. “Oh.”
He sat alone on the upstairs deck and looked over the canyon.
Vultures and redtail hawks cruised in the updrafts. From isolated stands of scrub oak, heat waves shimmered up against the dry hills.
He thought about when he had hiked and camped in these arroyos as a boy, when he had found shards of Gabrieleno pottery, arrowheads and a revolver made in 1844. He still clearly remembered the mountain lion he had seen in 1960. He recalled with minor pride the tiny night snake he had captured, which local biologists assured him was not found in the region. He wondered if his boxes of 35mm slides down in the garage were still good.
John stared off toward the hills, but in his mind’s eye he saw only Rebecca. It was important to be here now, he thought, to touch the same places she had touched, to breathe the air she had once shared.
Just before sunset John uncovered the barbecue, arranged it out by the railing overlooking the street, and lit the charcoal.
Joshua came up with his second gin and tonic, watching closely as John started up the fire. “Want that bottle of tequila now?” he asked.
“Later,” said John.
“You almost sunk us with that crack to Evan about hating Wayfarer’s guts.”
“It worked out okay, Joshua. At least they were my words, not something you put in my mouth.”
“True. My words would have been about the same.”
Joshua pulled deeply on his drink.
Downstairs, Sharon boiled water for rice and made a salad. John could hear her knife strokes on the cutting board. He had always liked the sounds of a woman in his house, and he remembered the ones he had been with in his thirty-four years. It was odd, he thought, that you could love someone but not be able to imagine yourself with her for very long. The harder you look ahead, the more your vision blurs.
But when he had met Rebecca Harris, engaged though she was, he easily foresaw her presence in his life. She had
simply arrived. Up to that point, John had not believed that destiny was anything more than what you decided to do, but the connection he felt to Rebecca made him reconsider. Rebecca wasn’t so much a discovery as a recognition.
He had puzzled over this for many nights, wondering if the circumstances of a man’s life could conspire to lead him to the one woman destined to join him. It was a corny idea, or was it? Either way, it had happened.
But how could he possibly explain to this woman what he had found, what he knew? It was like having an album of the world’s most beautiful music, and nothing to play it on.
Weinstein shuttled between the kitchen and the deck. As John put the chicken on the grill, Weinstein arrived holding his third cocktail, already half gone, John’s bottle of Herradura and a handful of limes. He set the bottle and the limes on the railing, then took a seat toward the sunset and drank from his glass.
“I don’t usually drink this much,” he said.
“You seem to be enjoying it.”
“We’ve got so much to do,” Weinstein said thoughtfully. “But no, I don’t want to talk about that right now. I want to talk about Rebecca.”
John looked at him, then returned his attention to the sizzling hens. Through the smoke, he was aware of Weinstein’s eyes upon him.
Joshua drank deeply. “Did her letter surprise you? Had you intuited that she was about to leave me for you?”
John opened the bottle and took a sip of the Herradura. It was warm and sweet in his mouth, and tasted like the desert and the maguey it was made out of. “I knew she had to decide. The time for that had come. I thought she’d stay with you.”
Weinstein grunted. “I knew she was leaving. I watched her do it, minute by minute, day by day, month by month. I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t ask. My father died of cancer when I was twenty-two. It was similar. A slow march, but you understand where it will end. Don’t say you’re sorry. You can say anything you want about Rebecca, but don’t say you’re sorry.”
John said nothing, but repositioned the chicken on the grill. He took another sip of tequila.
“How come you don’t drink that stuff with limes and salt?” Weinstein asked.
“It ruins the taste.”
“Is it really hallucinogenic, like they say?”
“No, not for me.”
“Does it make you mean?”
“No. It’s a green, feminine spirit. It’s calming compared to, say, Scotch or gin. Not so angular.”
“A feminine spirit,” repeated Weinstein. “You fucked Rebecca for the first time on January the ninth, didn’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“I could tell from the look on her face when I saw her that night. Here, was it?”
“Downstairs.”
“Bedroom?”
“You really want to know these things, Josh?”
“Yes, John. I want to know them. I have my ways of tending her memory, just like you have yours. What did she do when you finished?”
“She cried.”
“Did you cry, too?”
“No.”
“How did you feel?”
John sipped again from the bottle as a fresh billow of smoke emerged from the coals. “I felt like I’d finally come home, after a long time away.”
Weinstein smiled unhappily. “Did you tell her that?”
John nodded.
“You’re a real smoothie,” said Weinstein. “I never really had that gift myself.”
“What gift is that?”
“Telling women the right thing. The thing they want to hear, even if they don’t believe it.”
“Well, I don’t know, Josh.”
“That’s what you are, John—a smooth-talking Romeo.”
John took another sip of the Herradura. It was apparent to him that Joshua Weinstein was spoiling for a fight, or at least for a way to define John lowly, and believe the definition. Part of tending the memory, he thought. It didn’t seem right to resist, really, but you couldn’t just stand there in your own house, let some fellow serve you a plate of shit and pretend to enjoy it.
“An hour ago, it was my stupid honesty with Evan you were complaining about,” he said. “Now I talk smoothly. Whatever I had that Rebecca liked, you must have had some of, too.”
Weinstein took another big gulp of his drink. A visible shudder traveled down his neck. “That’s wrong. I’ve concluded that we are opposites. That, in fact, the reasons she went to you were to acquire what I couldn’t supply. Smooth talk was one thing. And cool another. I’m not cool, John. I’m a hot little New York Jew, and nothing can change that. She loved that about me. But what you are, she loved more. You’ve got the tongue, Menden. You’ve got the look and the cool. You’ve got the qualities promoted on cold-filtered beer commercials and ads for sports cars. You’ve got a touch of something few women can really resist. It’s part Hollywood, part myth.”
“Don’t undermine her,” said John.
“Accuracy before sentiment. The truth may not get us far, but lies get us nothing but lost.”
“The truth is she loved us both, and for the time it took her to write that letter at least, she thought she loved me more.”
“She wasn’t fickle. That letter was her heart.”
“Well, Joshua, you can decide she left you for a better ape, or that she left you for an ass. The truth is probably somewhere in between. If you want me to take a convenient role and play it out, forget it. I’d just mess up my lines and the whole thing would be a waste of breath.”
Dumars entered then, bearing a pitcher of what Weinstein was drinking. She moved through the silence and filled his out-reached glass. She glanced at John with a look of concerned inquisition.
“God, you’d need a blowtorch to cut the vibes up here,” she noted. “Remember, boys, we’re supposed to be celebrating, sort of?” Then she retreated from the deck without another look at either of them.
“Sharon is aware that she needs a man, and the awareness embarrasses her,” said Weinstein. “She’s of our generation, the first in this republic to be raised with the notion that love can be found with a housecat, and that men are just enemies waiting to screw women over. Even women younger than Sharon have realized how unworkable that is. But there she remains, on the cutting edge of the ridiculous. Do you find her attractive?”
“Yes. She’s got a better sense of humor than you give her credit for.”
“There you go again, saying what they want to hear, even when they’re not around to hear it. You’re a smoothie, Menden.”
“Yeah, yeah—you’ve covered that already, Josh.”
“There was a time, and I’m not sure if it’s passed, when I wanted to challenge you. On any and every thing a man is supposed to be. I knew I couldn’t beat you at being tall. But at everything else, I believed I’d kick your ass. I still believe I would. I’m a better man than you, by almost any standard of measure. If ever you want to contest that, just name your game and I’ll be there. I’ve speculated on the most satisfying way of trouncing you. Really smashing the living shit out of you.”
“And?”
“It changes.”
“Well, I hope dangling me in front of Wayfarer then dropping me in hasn’t entered your mind.”
Weinstein stared at John for a long moment, then shook his head. “That’s business. You couldn’t find a more conscientious master than me. What I’m talking now is strictly pleasure. And don’t forget—I hate Wayfarer more than I hate you.”
“That’s comforting, Joshua.”
Weinstein finished half his drink in one gulp, set down the glass and pulled the automatic from his shoulder holster. He looked at it for a long moment, as if searching for some new feature he’d overlooked. It was a 9mm Smith with a blued finish and dark walnut grips. He flipped the safety off, then on again.
“Could be an old-fashioned gunfight,” he said.
“Could,” said John.
Joshua set the gun on the deck, then picked up his
drink again. “That scare you—a drunk man with a gun?”
“It sure does. Aren’t you breaking some FBI rule?”
“You sound like a faggot, whining about rules. Rebecca liked it on the top with me. You, too?”
“How do you like your chicken?”
“That’s a dumb question. When’s the last time somebody told you they like their chicken rare?”
Weinstein picked up the gun again, aimed it at John, flipped the safety off, then on.
John studied him through the smoke. The idea crossed his mind to kick the barbecue over at Joshua’s feet and watch him scramble to keep his wingtips from blistering. John knew that Weinstein wouldn’t shoot him on purpose, but he was worried that his “master” was revealing himself to be a genuine hazard.
Booze and guns were an even worse combination than booze and cars.
Joshua holstered the pistol, sighed, and drank again. “I’m just blowing off a little steam,” he said.
“Good to know,” said John. “Just that light little trigger between three highballs and a bullet in my heart.”
And that was all it took—one mention of a bullet and a heart—to send them both plummeting back down to earth, back down to the tree-shaded deck on which their dinner was cooking, back down to the house which had heard the laughter of the woman they had both loved.
“I’m a lot more sober than I look. And there’s one thing I want to get straight, John. It doesn’t have to do with competition. It’s just a simple fact that you’re going to have to accept. It’s a fact that I need to remember. This is the fact—I loved Rebecca more than you did. I loved her more than you ever could.”
John watched Weinstein as he said this, noting the blood rushing into Josh’s ears, the bob of his big Adam’s apple, the insatiable glow of his eyes behind the lenses. This whole thing, he thought, is a crying shame. Every second of every day since Rebecca died in the cold March rain, just a crying fucking shame.
“Yes, you did,” he said, looking down through the smoke, his eyes burning with more than the smoke.
“Thank you.”
After dinner they turned off the houselights, sat on the patio chairs and watched the stars come out. The night was clear and the moon rose full and white over the hilltop. It was so bright John could read his watch face without pushing on the light. He looked out into the canyon and thought of the nights he’d slept back there, nights just like this with the moon radiant and the ground warm enough for a lightweight sleeping bag. He remembered the puma he’d seen out here, in the first light of a summer morning, lying on a rock outcropping only a hundred feet away, calmly eyeing him. Puma, he thought. Wayfarer.
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