White Leather and Flawed Pearls

by Susan Altstatt

  “’Cause I’ve tried saying all that to myself, and more. Just too many fucking coincidences in one place, girl, if you ask me. There’s got to be a purpose in it somewhere.”

  I remember every moment of it.

  A very strange two weeks spent in his company, him getting cold-turkey detoxified, me staying cold-feet virgin. It was how I lost an Icon of Desire and gained a pen pal. Say rather, traded a false idol for the real old thing.

  “—So, you have your free week that I promised you, three years back. Thomas Peter Rhymer, at your service. What do y’want me for?”

  A really vast percentage of young girls survive their early years in love with horses. Then they discover boys, and the horses languish. Boys of a similar stripe pack their juvenile libidos into cars and motorcycles. Most withdraw enough in time to marry the erstwhile horsey girls. But some stick with the cars.

  Boys of a certain other kind love heavy metal rock stars and read Soldier of Fortune. Most grow up, but a few go off to die in Africa. And girls of certain kinds love rock stars too. (Usually different rock stars.) When they get out of school they marry someone else.

  Then one or two—much like their counterparts who really do make mercenary soldiers—one or two marry rock stars. A statistical necessity after all, since rock stars marry.

  He snickered. “Bet that’s y’mother’s wool suit, too.”

  “Right. Let’s drive up to Reno and get married.” He was my enchanted prince, after all. If you rescue the prince, I’ve never read of more than one traditional reward.

  The red brows arched. I’d agonized for three whole years, thought of every last contingency, and a telling comeback to each last thing he might say: each thing in fact but what he did say: “Y’asked me that three years ago.”

  “I did not! Well, not in those words!”

  “I got it.”

  “I noticed you didn’t say yes.”

  “Something else y’might have noticed.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t say no.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Hey! I don’t get serious proposals often as y’might think! Well, proposals, sure—but I mean, the kind that I might—well, y’know.”

  The coffee came. It was a guy who brought it, that was all I noticed, a white starched sleeve and male hand moving past my ear. But when the hand and cup came past Tom’s ear I saw his pale eyes track it; once the cup was safely on the tablecloth Tom caught the hand before it got away. It belonged to a thin young guy, black hair, black eyes. Tom leaned back against his front, and smiled up at him.

  “Lead or rhythm?”

  The kid was practically gagging on his load of terror and shy desire. He managed to whisper, “Lead.”

  “Are y’any good?” A painful shrug. Tom still kept his hand, fingering it appreciatively. “Won’t do, love, you mustn’t give that answer. Are you any good?”

  “Sure I’m good.”

  “Better. Bet that hard spot in your pocket is a tape, huh? Say ‘Hendrix was a spastic’ and we’ll have a listen.” He’d made him laugh, but given him the hiccups.

  “Hendrix was a (hic) spas(hic).”

  “Send it to the room.”

  He let him get away, turning back to his coffee, and me. “Fingers hard as a bone pick, and the tendons bowed right out across the knuckles. Only way you get hands like that’s playing guitar ten hours a day. Y’look at Harlan’s sometime.”

  I didn’t want to look at Harlan’s hands, or any other part of him. I didn’t want to think about Harlan. His name vanished into my thoughts like a stone in deep water.

  “Sure y’know what you’re saying?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A hot week at your cabin wouldn’t do?”

  “A hot month makes the barest start on what I want.”

  Tom inspected the bowl of packaged sugars and creamers with great care. He looked up. Think about the white tiger at the S.F. Zoo: young male, one of only fifty-two on earth. He looks up from his meat with the same sterling silver eyes, and gravely lethal innocence.

  “Is there nothing else y’want to ask me?”

  “Unh-unh.”

  “Such as, did I go to the doctor and have my balls reconnected? That seemed of some importance to you at one time.” He waved a long finger at me. “What would y’say, if I told you I’d not gone? Would y’still be offering to marry me?”

  “I wouldn’t be too happy, but I’d still want you. What if I’d told you I wasn’t still virgin?”

  He chuckled ruefully, licked the finger, and made a score mark for me on the air.

  The fact that I was virgin didn’t make virginity “my trip.” Nobody ever explained to my satisfaction the supernatural virtues of the state: It was just a new womb, like that other place the Gospel mentions: “A new tomb, in which no one had yet been laid.” I don’t see dedicating my reproductive system to God by not using it, any more than dedicating my brain to God by not using it. But I saw a lot of sense in saving it, like the new tomb, for a proper occupant.

  Every functioning instinct said this one was proper, proper, proper, from his head down to his feet. Beside the rank desirability of him, any drawbacks he might have were very small stuff. Papa always said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

  Now Tom was looking across the coffee shop in a deliberate sort of way. I followed his gaze, and saw a waitress being reeled in at the end of it, like a marlin on a 100-pound line. This woman was middle-aged, stylish, and fixy, but she wore the identical sleepwalking wounded look as any kid lurking in the potted palms.

  Taking her hand when it came in range, Tom leaned back into her, the same small intimacy he’d used to waste the young guitar player. “Say, could I have milk for this instead of the non-dairy slop? It doesn’t sit too well with me.”

  “Of course, dear,” whispered the waitress. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  He watched her go.

  “What if I said, ‘We tried, and it couldn’t be done’?”

  “Same.”

  Yet another waitress brought his glass of milk. With her, a young woman in expensive meet-the-public clothes (the stainless warrior maiden off the front desk, in fact) brought a full candle glass, replacement for the nearly full one burning on our table.

  I began to get the picture: a shock of ripples running through the hotel staff every time Tom left his room. Quick sprints down backstairs, whisperings, in-house phone calls: “Tommi’s in the coffee shop. Run run run. Quick, grab the girls, find the guys, say, “Love walks visible among us—”

  Build me a tower, forty feet high,

  So I can see you, as you ride by.

  As you ride by, dear, as you ride by,

  So I can see you, as you ride by—

  What an awful burden for any mortal shoulders, and his not the widest. He was a naughty little kid playing fantasy hero in one of the most beguiling suits of flesh-and-blood dress-up ever issued by a witty God. He waited patiently each time until they finished ministering to him.

  “Well, I did go,” he said when they were out of earshot. “Swiss clinic. The whole guided trip through the marvels of modern medicine.” He looked down at the table.

  “They wanted a biopsy to see if I was still good, but I didn’t like the thought of that. I said, ‘Hook it up, and I’ll pay for it, no matter.’ Then they wanted to do one side and the other later, but I saw no sense in being sore twice. And I had to heal up for six weeks.

  “When I came back, they went through the whole story about the only mark of success being a sperm count. Which all came down to me having to do it in my hand, so he could look under a microscope.

  “He left me kicking my heels in an examination room for an inordinately fucking long time. Couldn’t tell a thing from his face when he came back, either: some bedside manner that was. Then he said, ‘What I have to tell you Herr Rhymer is, not only have you the sperm count, it is already in the normal range—’”

  “More coffee?”

&nbs
p; A dippy little girl in a bellhop’s monkey suit was bending over him. Her hair was half as red as his own.

  “Thank you love, but that’s all, now. My time’s gone.” We waited while she poured, and poured, and backed off smiling.

  “So how many paternity suits have you settled so far?”

  “God! What d’y’think I am? It’s only been three months! If I’d gone out and banged half of Geneva the first night, it still takes nine!”

  “Did you?”

  He giggled. “Hardly. Old Harlan’s been almost happy with me.”

  “Are you—still—” “Lovers” can be a hard—next to impossible—word to say.

  The pastry cart, also, was hard to ignore in its approach as a siege engine trundling toward the walls. The girl behind it was so tall. Lean, athletic. Long honey hair around a gentle stately face. Her bellhop outfit said more “Queen’s Own Guard” than “monkey suit.”

  She eyed Tom soberly. He didn’t crave sweets; she knew he didn’t. He looked at her and saw that she knew. Put myself in her place, that cart of sugar crud my only link to Tommi Rhymer, one he didn’t want. I had to look away, down at the tall girl’s shoes. I don’t get fooled about a person’s sex very often, but the feet are the real giveaway. Those were a guy’s feet, in a guy’s big generous black shoes.

  “Almond tart.” A young guy’s soft, unassuming voice.

  “You make it?” asked Tom in a voice that matched.

  That put him on the spot. He thought long. Downcast eyes. “Wish I had.”

  “I wish you had too.” The answer was yes. Yes, yes, yes, I knew it was. And not just to the almond tarts. “You recommend?”

  Now the boy had to raise his eyes. Sweet blue eyes. Thick, honey lashes. “Fine stuff,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “All right!”

  Tom, pointing to me: “She wants one too.”

  “All right!”

  Simple as that. A man wooed by forwardness, and won by innocence. Wooed and wooed and won and won. Picture this sudden vivid vista of a life spent in his orbit, beating back a nonstop stream of earnest forward innocents. With a bat.

  Lord God Holy Spirit

  Who teaches me to pray

  Have mercy on me.

  The boy with the cart had left; Tom was looking at me gravely. I couldn’t remember where our own talk stopped.

  He said, “Harlan.”

  That was it, all right.

  “If I could walk away from him, I would be nothing you might want. I could walk away from you, ten times as easy. I’m not that changeable. May be good for you I’m not. Very old-fashioned, in my way. My grandparents’ marriage was arranged, I’m told. It lasted fifty years, and they died within the month of one another.

  “So I don’t see why, if I should put my mind to it, I couldn’t call you my own dear love, and not be lying. Now, y’gave me to understand that you’ve got some religion. I’ve imagined y’were Roman, but I may be just imagining.”

  “You’re not.”

  He had taken a bite of almond tart. He chewed and swallowed it in slow silence. Then he said, “Fortunate.”

  “Like not smoking.”

  “Right.

  “I was raised that way too. And my head is Roman in funny places, though you might not think it. Can’t be too sure what they teach these days, ’specially in America. But the Church taught me; the only right reason for marrying, is what they used to call the ‘procreation of children.’ Now I find that very sensible.”

  Another pretty person brought the check, black, this one, with Michael Jackson California Curls, and almost certainly a guy; he had a little moustache.

  “Wait, love.” He didn’t look at the check; he put two twenty-dollar bills on top of it. “Never mind the change, we haven’t time.

  “—My idea would be, that if I should marry you, anyone who sees us should feel satisfied that we just got it on. And I don’t intend appearances to deceive. I mean to be quite shameless in my marital bliss. If, say, that embarrasses you, better back off now.”

  “Foot of the Nelson Monument.”

  “You bet. I’ll do it on the BBC if they give me an hour show. I’ve got my public to consider, after all. Wouldn’t want them to think that Rhymer’s faded. Just that he’s all grown up and taken out a public license. Also. I have had my lifetime’s fill up to here,” he gestured, “with birth control. When you said years ago that what you’d wanted out of me was a house full of redheaded kids—remember that?—you don’t know what you touched.”

  “I sort of hoped it was your heart.”

  He choked on his coffee. His face went scarlet with laughter, and he hid it, though he stole a glance at me.

  A water glass appeared at his hand, fast enough for a magic act. I didn’t look to see what brought it: I didn’t care, so long as it got away and let him finish.

  “Why Reno?”

  “It’s in Nevada. No waiting to get married. Every place else, it takes two weeks.”

  “You mean, married before a judge?”

  “I guess I do.”

  His silence lasted. Finally he said, “I suppose what I’m wondering is, if you come from religious people, why you’re not after getting married in a church.”

  “I am very much after being married in the Church. I just want to sew you up first, so I get the chance.”

  He was laughing and shaking his head. “You’re too damn smart.”

  “I hope that’s why you’re marrying me.”

  “I hope so too,” he said. “What d’y’think I’ll need?”

  “ID. Passport, I guess. Clothes for a week. The cabin’s halfway between Reno and here. We can be back there married by this evening.”

  “You got your own car?”

  “My mother’s.” No use lying to him. Just brazen it out. “You know. Like the suit.”

  “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “No way.”

  “Do I take it that y’don’t get on?”

  “I love my mother; she loves me.”

  He looked away. Bit his lip. Looked back. Looked away again. “—Have to think about that one.” His change came anyway, on a stainless art-deco salver.

  “—Hey,” I said, “years ago, the last thing you asked of me, the very last, was to give you proof that I could keep your secrets. I’ve done it all the way.”

  He started to snicker. “Wouldn’t be too fair, I suppose, to start wondering, if you’re that close keeping secrets for me, just how you’d be at keeping ’em from me, once we were—”

  “No. It wouldn’t be very fair at all.”

  “Didn’t think it would.”

  A wallet came out of his inside pocket, and a roll of bills came out of that. He started to peel off tens. He made a little circle of them on the table, ten in all, like the spokes of a wheel with the candleholder for a hub. “Good service,” he said, “appeals to me.”

  Chapter 2

  So keep it to a walk across the lobby, and a demure jog (jogging with a purse) around the block. Down the alley with its loading dock and service doors, its kitchen noises and kitchen smells, I set the land speed record.

  Inside those kitchens, even now, are people giving wired, inspired accounts of what they did for Love Incarnate in the coffee shop. How they danced attendance on him.

  Love Incarnate isn’t waiting on the dock.

  So, what’d I expect? Give him time to reach his room; give him time to get his stuff. Time to say goodbye.

  I reach the car, unlock and sit in it. The dock is quite invisible from where I am. My heart rate sags toward normal.

  Lemme guess, he won’t be there.

  He’ll have gone back to his room, thought it over, talked it over, and recognized the money and the misery and the bad PR it’d cost him to get out of this. Eventually somebody (that Garfein probably) will stroll down here and offer me apologies. Thank you, but no thank you. Fun talking to you, but. Maybe it wouldn’t even be that kind. I’d wait and wait, and nob
ody would come.

  I said I was going to Mass this morning.

  So I wouldn’t be lying, I found a 7:30 a.m. (Our Lady of the Suburbs), and went to it. A genuine California Catholic Church, designed to be a school gym after the real church got built. Which it never did, of course.

  A hospital chaplain was the celebrant. Right at the climax of the Mass, the Consecration as a cosmic cue, his pager beeped. It sounded like the end of the world. For some unknown in Stanford Hospital, it probably was.

  Father Chaplain clicked the ceremony into fast forward: ten minutes saw him off to bless the dying and comfort the survivors. Everybody else went home. Except me.

  8:30 a.m.

  Junipero Serra: dubbed by little rustic signs “The World’s Most Beautiful Freeway.” Forty-five minutes to an hour north (depending on your attitude), the Serra dumps you out in San Francisco: 19th Avenue. North of Golden Gate Park, 19th crosses Geary. Now you’re pointed at the beach.

  Out in the avenues, old Geary’s lined with Greek laundries, Russian bakeries, and Filipino movie theaters. It goes residential at the very end, and splits into a Y. One half is called Seal Rock. That’s where I parked, by a dry yard filled with succulents: aloes and agaves, pink and gray and green and striped and spiky. From Seal Rock downtown, Breakers to Bay, is a measured fifteen-minute drive exactly. Punctual’s fine. An hour-and-a-fucking-half too punctual’s got nothing to be said for it whatever.

  Behind me was the last stop on the bus line: people who get off there are at their leisure, mostly, headed out to jog the sea cliff. Couples jogging by me, never any singles. Trim young couples with kids in pack frames, trim old couples in unisex warm ups. Trim gay couples, shirtless to show off their Nautilus muscles. I watched them bounce over the curvature of the street and disappear, down to where the sea lions bark, and the bright mist rises off the breakers.

  Saint Francis, when he felt in need of input, used to play this game: shut his eyes, pray, open up the scripture or some other book, plant his finger on the page. And if what he read there bore no obvious application to his problem, he’d do the whole bit over: shut his eyes, ask for a clue to the first passage, random access the book.