It was a country road he knew well, glare or no glare. Rain was falling now, and he kept his head down, not because he felt the wet or the cold, but because he didn’t like the hazy glare around every raindrop. He didn’t need to see where he was going; he knew the road like the back of his hand. Bao Dai looked at the backs of his hands.
They were strange hands.
He didn’t know them at all.
He kept walking, glancing down at his hands from time to time to see if they were beginning to look familiar. They never did, but at least he knew the road.
Bao Dai came to a mailbox: a normal rural mailbox, except it had been painted. He knew that; he remembered the smell of the wet paint, remembered how hard it had been to get the blue flowers just right and how he had copied the black symbol—a circle with an airplane shape inside—from somebody’s button. It might have been yesterday. But it wasn’t, because the paint had faded away, almost completely. He had to look very closely to make out the forms of one or two flowers, the outline of the symbol.
Bao Dai turned onto a dirt road. He saw the farm. He heard voices, laughter, guitars. His heart raced. He began to run, a clumsy, sliding run along the muddy road, in the tropical suit and the brogues, two sizes too big. He ran, but no one was there—no talkers, no laughers, no players.
There was only a middle-aged woman, scattering birdseed in the yard. She looked up. The glare was very bad. It took him a long time to recognize her, a very long time.
She didn’t recognize him at all.
He had to tell her who he was.
And then what should have happened? What had he expected? What had he dreamed? He didn’t know. All he knew was that his arms were lifting from his sides, all on their own. But she didn’t step forward; she was still staring at his face. He didn’t like the way she stared, didn’t like the wrinkles on her skin.
He lowered his arms, stepped back.
At that moment, she opened her arms to him in a hesitant sort of way. He took another step back. She lowered her arms, bit her lip.
Their timing was off.
They went inside. She made him a meal. Fried chicken. Yellow wax beans. Banana bread.
It was sickening.
Night fell but the glare didn’t go away. She made a fire in the fireplace, rolled a cigarette, lit it, sucked in smoke, held it out.
“No,” he said.
“No?” She was surprised. “It’s Colombian.”
“No.” The smoke scared him.
She turned on the radio. Music played. Rock music, he supposed, but he hated it. It was boring. Boring rock music was hateful. She was tapping her foot. He noticed that his hands were fists. He straightened them out.
A man rolled up in a wheelchair. “Company?” he said. The man in the wheelchair couldn’t see.
“Business,” said the woman. “No one you know.”
The man rolled away. There was something familiar about him. Bao Dai was about to ask her when another question occurred to him, a far more important question.
She wouldn’t answer. At first. He had to ask a few more times, and get up, and cross the room, and stand in front of her. It was then that they finally touched—when he took her hand and pulled her up and twisted her arm behind her back and twisted some more.
Then she told him.
Bao Dai left the next morning. He wore the tropical suit, the button-down shirt, the brogues, but he kept the tie in his pocket, together with the traveling money she’d given him—at least, she hadn’t tried to stop him when he took it from her bag.
In the airport and on the plane, Bao Dai began to notice that people had things. All kinds of things. He didn’t even know the names of some of them. He had a tropical suit, a tie with sailboats on it, a button-down shirt, boxer shorts, long socks that needed washing, and shoes—with little holes in the toe—two sizes too big. They gave him blisters. He’d seen the blisters when he’d gone to bed the night before, but he couldn’t feel them.
“Cocktail, sir, before your meal?”
Bao Dai looked up, into the slanted eyes of a yellow woman. “Cocktail?” she repeated.
He shrank in his seat.
“Or would you prefer a nonalcoholic beverage?”
Bao Dai grunted. She went away. He kept an eye on her for the rest of the trip.
He got off the plane in a city where the air made his eyes water. He found the house he wanted, near the beach. It was a white Spanish house with a red tile roof. It made him think of Zorro. He remembered how Zorro spun the 7-Up bottle with the tip of his sword. Zip zip zip—the mark of Zorro. Every Saturday afternoon. Four-thirty.
Bao Dai walked past the house three or four times before he went up and knocked. No one answered. He went to the garage and tried the door. It opened. He stepped inside, pulled the door closed and stood by the window so he could watch the street.
A car turned into the driveway and stopped. A nice blue car. The windows were down so Bao Dai could hear music playing inside, just before the ignition was switched off. Music, full and clear, as if the band had all its equipment right there in the back seat.
A young-looking fair-haired man got out of the car, opened the front door with a key and entered the house.
So fucking young-looking.
Bao Dai’s hands were fists again. He straightened them, reached for the handle of the garage door. At that moment, another car drove up. A woman got out.
A beautiful woman.
She had healthy, glowing skin and a strong body—he could see it was strong from the way it moved under her skirt. He liked the way it moved. It gave him feelings he barely remembered feeling before, almost as though it were the first time. Almost. Three female faces flipped through his mind—black from the clothing store, yellow from the plane, and now white a few yards away. And suddenly he wanted sex, not just sex, but rough sex. That must have been the yellow part. He hadn’t thought of sex for a long time, hadn’t had an erection for years. He didn’t know if he could have one.
Bao Dai slipped his hand into the waistband of the suit pants and touched himself. Nothing happened. He kept his hand there anyway, while he watched the woman walking toward the house. There was a little girl with her. They had the same kind of hair. He wondered how hair like that would feel against his penis and felt a faint stirring. He glanced down. The feeling vanished. Maybe he had imagined it. He heard a low, angry growl. A few moments passed before he realized it was coming from his own throat. When he looked up again, the woman and the girl were disappearing into the house.
Bao Dai stayed in the garage. After a while, the woman came out alone. Now she had a frown line between her dark eyes. She drove away in her car.
The sky grew darker. The glare remained. When it was fully night, not black night, but a pink and orange, starless night, Bao Dai silently opened the garage door and silently moved toward the house.
4
Jessie Shapiro was in a bad mood. At a glance, anyone would have seen that from the way she was standing in her doorway, arms crossed. But no one saw. The street was deserted.
Jessie Shapiro’s watch said 3:30. The colon dividing hours from minutes flashed every second to remind her that time marched on. Flash, flash, flash. She didn’t need reminding.
3:31. Jessie looked down Idaho, anticipating the sight of a blue BMW going too fast, a fair-haired man behind the wheel and little girl beside him. But there was no BMW. No fair-haired man. No little girl.
No cars at all. Too cold for the beach, too early for going out. The massed boredom of fifteen million people was almost palpable. Soon they’d have to shop, but for now the traffic hum was no louder than beehives at a safe distance. The sky was the color of tin, and the sun hung at a strange low angle, small as a softball and drab white. Mid-November in L.A. Sunday afternoon.
3:33. That made Pat thirty-three minutes late. Kate was due at the birthday party at 4:00. Pat knew this. Jessie had told him when she dropped Kate off Friday afternoon. Twice. Coming and going. The secon
d time he’d gotten that look in his eye, the bugged teenager look, and said: “How many times are you going to tell me?”
“Till I get some acknowledgment,” she’d wanted to say. But there was no point fighting with him now. Fighting was for the married. Divorce was peace.
3:40. A mother went by, pushing a stroller. The mother was cracking her gum; her Walkman was turned up so loud Jessie could identify the song: “Sometimes When We Touch.” The baby had a runny nose; he looked like Buddy Hackett. They were the only signs of life.
“Damn,” Jessie said, going into the house and closing the door harder than she had to. The house shook. She was strong. It was weak: small, pretty and frail, like an aging belle with osteoporosis. Jessie had drawn up plans to rebuild it from the bottom up. All she was waiting for were money and time.
She went inside, under the only object of value she owned, a little Calder mobile that she’d taken as payment from a client, past a pile of tennis equipment, hers and Kate’s, and into the kitchen. There was no point in calling Pat: he’d told her that they were going sailing for the weekend and that he’d bring Kate back directly from the marina. Jessie picked up the phone and dialed his number anyway. “Hi,” said a woman’s voice she didn’t recognize and didn’t like. “No one’s here right now, but just leave a message and we’ll buzz you back. Promise.”
“Jesus,” Jessie said, putting down the phone, too, a little harder than she had to. Doubts about letting Kate spend every second weekend with her father popped up in her brain. She forced them down with the usual arguments—Kate liked spending time with Pat, a girl needs a father, what possible harm could come of it? Besides, she’d agreed in writing to the visits when she’d signed the divorce agreement, a document as important to their lives as the Constitution, and just as difficult to amend.
She went back to the doorway, looked down Idaho. “Damn.” The party was in Beverly Hills. It would take at least half an hour to get there. She’d hoped to squeeze in a few hours of work. Instead she was standing in the doorway. In a bad mood.
3:50.
The phone rang. Jessie ran in and answered it.
“Hi, Jessie. It’s Philip.”
“Hi.”
“Don’t sound so excited.”
“Sorry, Philip. I just thought it was someone else.”
“Oh?”
“Pat, I mean,” she said with impatience she hadn’t meant for Philip. “He’s late bringing Kate back.” Now she was complaining to him; stop it, she told herself. “What’s up?”
“It’s finished.”
“What?”
“‘Valley Nocturne.’”
Jessie heard a car parking in front of the house. “That’s good. Listen, Philip, I—”
“When can you come and see it? We’ll crack open a little something and—”
“Well, I’m not—”
“How about tonight? I’d really like—”
“I don’t think tonight. Listen, I’ll call you back, okay? I think there’s someone at the door.”
“But—”
Jessie hung up and went to the door. No one was there. The car belonged to the woman who lived across the street. Jessie caught a glimpse of her going into the house with her son, who carried a stuffed panda bigger than he was. Every week he returned with another trophy from the land of fathers. Jessie had a vision of children all over Southern California being shuttled back to their mothers: boosting gasoline sales, driving toy company stocks higher. There were probably studies that proved divorce was good for the economy.
“Shit.” She thought of calling the marina, but she had no idea whose boat they’d gone out on. Pat knew a lot of people who’d grown nautical in the past few years. She dialed his number again. She had no need to look it up—the phone had once been in her name; the house in Venice had belonged to the two of them. “Hi,” said the voice of the woman she didn’t know and didn’t like. “No one’s here right now, but just leave a message and we’ll buzz you back. Promise.” A word she disliked drifted into her mind. Bimbo. She banished it.
Was it possible Pat was at home, just not answering the phone for some reason? Jessie tried to think of a reason and couldn’t, but went outside anyway. Passing the hall table, she saw the birthday present, a pen that wrote in twelve colors, chosen and wrapped by Kate before she left. Jessie took it with her.
She got into her car, a five-year-old American model that had been recalled three times, and drove south to Venice. The house was a white Spanish L with a red tile roof; the street, a dead end half a block from the beach. Every time she visited, the neighborhood seemed a little seedier. Today two men smoking joints were roller-skating toward the boardwalk. They eyed her without breaking stride and wheeled around the corner. A man with a bottle in a paper bag was coming the other way. Jessie stopped in front of the house. The BMW wasn’t in the driveway. She got out of the car and looked in the garage. Empty. Jessie had a house key, but she didn’t bother going in: two rolled-up newspapers lay on the stoop.
Jessie returned to her car. The knuckles of her hands, gripping the wheel as she sat there, turned white. She folded her hands in her lap. Perhaps, she thought, Pat had realized he was late and tried to make up for it by taking Kate right to the party. That didn’t sound like Pat, but Jessie turned the car around and drove east. All her other ideas began with an accident at sea.
There were no joint-smoking roller skaters in the birthday girl’s neighborhood. She lived on an estate behind a ten-foot wall. The only person in sight was the guard at the gate. He wore a well-tailored black uniform and looked like a movie SS man, minus insignia. Jessie rolled down her window. “I’m looking for my daughter—she was invited to Cameo’s party, but there’s been a mix-up and her father might have brought her.”
The SS man didn’t open the gate. Instead he consulted a clipboard. “What’s your daughter’s name?”
Jessie told him.
“She’s on the list, all right, but she hasn’t come yet. And the party’s almost over.”
“Maybe he’s called. I’d like to go in and ask Cameo’s parents.”
“That won’t be possible. They’re cruising in the Solomons.” He ran his eyes over Jessie’s car. Maybe he was worried that Solomon Island references would be lost on the owner of a car like hers.
“Then—”
“I’ll let you speak to Miss Simms. She’s in charge of the party.” He opened the gate.
Jessie followed a smooth, winding drive, lined on both sides with pink hibiscus. Ahead glittered a high-tech pleasure dome, built on a hill. The birthday party was taking place at the bottom of the hill, where a little state fair had been put up for the children. There was a midway with games and a fortune teller, clowns, jugglers and a ferris wheel. But none of the children were playing in the midway; the hired help had it to themselves.
Two girls sat in the bottom chair of the unmoving ferris wheel. They both had lank blond hair and high cheekbones. Jessie approached them.
“Cannes sucks,” said one.
“Paris is worse,” replied the other.
“Excuse me,” Jessie said. “I’m looking for my daughter.”
They looked up. Jessie could feel socioeconomic sensors scanning her surface. “What’s her name?” asked one.
“Kate Shapiro.”
The girls shook their heads.
“Or you might know her as Kate Rodney. Or Rodney-Shapiro,” Jessie added with a smile.
The humor passed them by. “Is she the one with the frizzy hair? Like yours?”
“That’s right. Just like mine.”
Something in her tone made the girl’s eyes shift down for a moment. “Haven’t seen her.”
Most of the children were gathered around a pool in the distance. When Jessie got there, two Mexican waiters were setting a pink cake on a long table. They could have used some help: the cake was eleven tiers high; eleven silver candles burned on the top. One of the clowns played “Happy Birthday” on an accordion, but no one s
ang except the waiters and a tall, thin woman with an English accent.
“Come now, Cameo,” said the Englishwoman. “Make a wish and blow out the candles.”
The birthday girl reclined in a chaise longue, a fruit punch at her elbow. She wore Vuarnet sunglasses and a cap that read Bora Bora Golf and Country Club. “I’m tired, Miss Simms,” she said. “You do it.”
The Englishwoman climbed on a chair, made a wish and blew out the candles in one breath. The clowns clapped with delight and stamped their floppy feet. Their eyes were very tired. Jessie thought she recognized one of them from a doughnut commercial on TV.
The Englishwoman began to cut the cake. A boy skimmed paper plates into the pool. “I’ve got the Mr. Mister video that’s coming out next month,” said Cameo. “Anyone want to see it?”
The children rose and straggled up the long hill toward the house. The Englishwoman stopped cutting the cake. “Hector,” she said, “put the cake in the cold storage room.”
The waiters picked up the cake and carried it away.
“Miss Simms?” Jessie said.
“Yes?” The Englishwoman, still standing on the chair, looked down. Her thoughts were far away.
“I’m Jessie Shapiro. I’m looking for my daughter Kate. Has she been here?”
“Kate?” said Miss Simms, brightening. She climbed down. “What a lovely child. So—” She began to say something, then censored whatever it was. “No,” she said. “Kate hasn’t been here.” Miss Simms raised an eyebrow.
“Did her father call, by any chance? I think there’s been a mix-up.”
“Not to my knowledge.” Miss Simms sat at the table, elbowed aside a stack of presents, all neatly wrapped in the paper of famous Rodeo Drive shops, and dialed a portable phone. “Mrs. Sanchez,” she said. “Would you read me the log, please?”
While Miss Simms listened to Mrs. Sanchez, she opened a leather folder, took out some thick deckle-edged stationery and began to write. Jessie read the words upside down.
“Dear Missy, Thank you for the lovely gift. I hope you had a good time at my party. Thanks very much for coming. Your friend—” She left a space at the bottom for Cameo to sign.
Hard Rain Page 2
