by Paul Monette
In a word, she thought, she was happy. In the Buddhist sense, at least.
Greg leaned forward, peered at the stone, and blocked it with his shadow. He dropped to one knee and squinted close. His pace from word to word, as he read it aloud, was slow. “‘The sun is but a morning star,’” he said. Then he drew back, stood with a sigh, and turned and cocked his head.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I thought I’d lost you all,” she said, like she hadn’t even heard.
“You what?”
“I thought—you might have other things to do.”
Okay, okay. Couldn’t she see how sorry he was? He stood between her and the grave and shrugged it off, as if to say he never had much to do. But he saw that he must have left her out of it on purpose. Wanted to get to the killer first. Show who the real Lew Archer was.
“You’ll be sorry,” he said to reassure her. “You probably hadn’t heard, but once we take somebody up, from that point on they’re family. You’ll see—we’ll buy you stuff for your birthday. We’ll borrow all your records. You won’t be alone on a Saturday night from now till doomsday.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she replied, and lowered her eyes to the stone.
The silence was not tense. She thought about Sid and Edna, and the way he kept them going. It was wholly unacknowledged, which is why it worked at all, but she heard the sharpened focus in his voice whenever he linked their names. She meant to do much the same for Artie. The difference was, she and Artie had enough to live on coke and caviar. Once they were settled in separate quarters, she planned to keep a watchful eye on the state of his affairs. Make sure he ate three times a day.
“It’s from Thoreau,” she said.
“I gathered as much.”
Now she was back on the gravestone—as if she talked mostly in loops and parabolas, rather than straight in a line. Yet he found he had no trouble following her. Perhaps it was purely a matter of acclimation.
“I can’t explain it,” Vivien said, and he had the idea she was being honest, with herself as much as anyone. “At least it’s not about going to heaven. I mean, you have to do what you can, right here.”
“Did anyone ever tell you you make an improbable mystic?”
Pain in the ass, he might have said. He’d put in ten long years as a writer, after all. Failed or otherwise, he had twenty-six hundred pages of dialogue to prove it. So he ought to know, if anyone did, that a book was just a book. It didn’t have to get up in the morning and make the coffee and drive to work, so what could it possibly know about getting along in this world? Still, he’d grown accustomed to Vivien’s sounding off like a smart-ass Ph.D. He supposed it was little enough to take, next to what she put up with in him, with his endless grumps and privacies.
If you wanted a friend, you took the whole package.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve put the book away.”
This wasn’t entirely true, in fact. It was right on the table by her bed, not three feet away from where she’d found it fifteen days before. What she meant was, she was done reading.
“You mean you’re not moving to Concord?”
“Steepside’s near enough,” she said.
They acted as if they had no clue what the normal scene might be beside a dead man’s grave. There was something queer at the level of impulse, which urged them to go against the grain of whatever was going on. Before all else, they hated to be predictable. It made her wonder how they would ever get together, when all of this was done. That is, would the borders be open? She supposed they’d both be wary of assuming too much freedom. She saw that he kept no calendar at all. If he never made any plans, who did he ever get to see?
“What you’ve got to do,” he said, “is call the ambulance when it’s time. Nobody’s going to hassle you—we’re counting on that. Now, this is the story. We’re all watching the movie. When it’s over, the lights come up, and we find Max slumped in the projection booth. We try to revive him, but it does no good. You got five witnesses.”
He snapped his fingers as if to say the rest was all downhill. Yet he seemed to feel some further self-assurance was required. He stepped down onto the path again and gripped her shoulders to buck her up.
“It shouldn’t be hard to bring off,” he said. “He’s over weight. He’s got lousy nerves. Besides, people die in the middle of things all the time.”
“What if somebody gets suspicious? What if they want an autopsy?”
He shrugged, and his hands fell back to his sides again. “Then I guess we go to jail,” he said, with a curious air of whimsy playing about the apology. “We’ll have to pass notes through the guards. We’ll get a good lawyer.” He shrugged again.
At first she said nothing at all. She surveyed the surrounding night for signs of life. Perhaps, he thought, as he watched her look off down the canyon, dreamy-eyed and still, a Rolls was as good a place as any to act out Walden Pond. Or to put the matter in landed terms, twenty-six acres of desert green within the city limits was vast enough that its confines didn’t show. The Concord original, after all, in the far-off specimen days of 1847, was something close to a staged event itself. Thoreau would doubtless spin in his grave to hear him speak of it quite this way—but then, with one thing and another, Thoreau had probably not stopped spinning in over a hundred years.
“Poor Jasper,” Vivien said at last. “I hardly knew him at all.”
He took it to mean she saw no problem in getting rid of Max. She’d probably thought of a doctor already—someone so greedy for status he’d sign the certificate happily. With the merest flip of the corpse’s lids, and without so much as mussing a button on Max’s shirt. As for this last remark, about Jasper, he found the sudden surge of melancholy most disarming. If they had to talk death, if that was the break through these last weeks had brought them to, why couldn’t they keep it roundabout, and curse the whole condition? The individual dead were too upsetting—thieves and cheats, to leave one so alone. Too much a mirror of who one used to be.
“You mean, because he had a secret?”
“I suppose that’s it,” she said.
He noticed the wind had died by the stillness of the lilac dress. She was staring straight at the western sky, but he knew she was looking at something far away in time.
“Is that what it means to survive?” she asked. “You lose everyone twice over?”
Once when they died. Then a second time, when the truth came out.
“But everyone doesn’t have a secret.”
“Really?” she wondered aloud. She wasn’t convinced at all.
“I think it’s time we headed back,” he said. The demands of the schedule were more to his taste than the upper reaches of life-and-death. “They only allowed me half an hour to brief you. They don’t want you to miss the movie.”
He turned downhill, where the lights of Steepside made it hover above the bowl of slopes like a spaceship. All at once, as he made his way in the dark, the narrow track reminded him of coming down the mountain in Vermont. Yet there it had been wide enough for two to walk abreast. This was like a tightrope.
Still, it suited his present mood just fine, to walk down single file. He’d only start getting curmudgeonly if they kept on talking on mountaintops. He didn’t mean to freeze her out. She could be his friend forever if she liked. But in matters of philosophy, they simply had to agree to disagree.
The journey was almost done that demanded all their likenesses. If it meant to stick, this friendship had to go by way of seasons, till it grew like something out in the woods—untended except by the scheme of things, and tough by reason of what it stood. If it needed too much caring for, one or the other was bound to run away.
He must have been twenty steps down the trail when he realized she wasn’t behind him. He glanced around and saw her, brooding still beside the grave. He shouted her down. She looked up sharp.
“Hey, Greg,” she bellowed—gaily, it almost seemed, but she did
not move till she said her piece. “If one of us dies—”
“Us?” he demanded. “You mean you and me?”
“Whoever’s left,” she declared, “has to promise not to go out looking. As far as I’m concerned, you know it all now. There’s nothing else. You promise?”
The smallest pause took hold, while he did a quick fix on her motives. She didn’t seem to mean she was sorry to know the truth about her husband. She wasn’t so blind as to think she kept no secrets of her own. It wasn’t a dare, or an accusation. What she hoped to do was absolve them both of the sort of quest they’d just completed—at least as far as it might pertain to the matter of each other. So neither one would ever be indicted by the past.
“Promise!” he shouted back.
She walked toward him along the ridge, and she knew it would never be quite the same again. Not the way it had been these last two weeks, here at the core of spring. Strangely enough, she could live with that, and with nary a pang of regret or attendant loss of nerve. She reached the spot where he waited, his mild unhidden smile the mirror of her own. He turned and started down again.
No one led, and no one followed. They both went on their own. Not ten minutes since, the uphill climb had afforded her the long view of the world, untrammeled by a single human step. Here, on the down side, things were reversed. Greg had the world to look at. She had him.
They could both lay claim to Walden Pond, or something very like it. But hers, she saw, was a good deal more external—vivid as the opalescent surface of the reservoir, glimmering far below them now in the belly of the canyon. Hers was the dream of summer that brought the blood up in every tree. Greg’s was a few miles farther off, at Cherokee and Franklin. As if the glacier that decreed such things had dug in its heels not once but twice, and made two lakes before it fled these mountains.
His was not even waterbound. The raw terrain, the rock-strewn shore, the wind in the alders—with him, it was not just all in his head, but something he wasn’t terribly keen on owning up to. He lived it after a fashion, of course, but not by the book by any means. So they occupied two poles. Two couldn’t live in either place, at least not two of a kind. Only those who were rare and endangered—Sid and Edna and Artie—had the right to settle on their borders.
They came off the spine of the hill and crossed the tilted desert meadow toward the house. One had to know when a thing was done, she thought, snapping off a sprig of fennel as she passed. The trick was not to mistake for done what was only gone on to another phase. What tended to complicate matters most was learning all the rhythms out of love affairs gone sour. She’d probably been through half a dozen men at two weeks start to finish. They were all of a piece. They lacked the feel of the quick of time and, ten days after she met them, seemed as good as dead. None of them ever taught her how to let a thing go and keep it by. She supposed she bolted before they had the chance.
Greg pulled open the gate’s other half, and the whole full moon of the garden shone dark green beyond it. He stepped through and stopped to catch his breath. When she joined him, they each reached out to one of the gates and swung them shut, like a pair of footmen. Greg secured the dolphin latch. The sudden quiet was twice what it was before. The jasmine scent was overwhelming. After the desert hills, the moss and ferns and fruit trees were the portal of a dream.
They walked on the pebbled garden path, and each step crunched with the gravity of all their going forward.
“Remember what I used to say?” she asked, as if it were years ago. “How it felt like nothing?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that is no longer the case.”
He looked at her sidelong. Please, he thought, no sudden conversions. Let her get all rosy on her own time.
“What is it you feel?” he asked quite briskly. “Hot flashes?”
They skirted the redwood tub—indifferent now to its clouded depths. Then down the alley of plums again, more sure of their footing the second time through. As they pulled the French doors open, he said:
“You ought to get the whole thing down on paper. Inspiration’s very hot these days.”
“Listen, honey,” she shot back, though without a break in stride. “I’m not the only one got cured of being out of it. When I met you, you couldn’t leave the house.”
“Lies!” he bellowed, as they swept across the library like kids who couldn’t read. “You know what your problem is? You keep imagining I’m like you.”
“And you keep thinking you’re not.”
The canyon room. The spiral stair. They raced along, but they didn’t tire. They rollicked down the corridor, trading remarks like a couple of standup comics.
“What’s the best friend you ever had?”
“Are you counting Sid and Edna?”
“No.”
“In that case,” he retorted, “none that I can think of. Why?”
“Not even a dog, or anything?”
He shook his head with a drunken smile, as if this thing were a point of pride. They’d come to the double doors again. Each put a hand forth, gripped a doorknob, paused on the brink of breaking in. The music from the screening room was lonely as a desert trail. They glanced in one another’s eyes without the faintest trace of caution.
“Right,” she said. “Me neither.”
Now they pushed, and the doors opened. They wasted not a moment’s pang about the thousand doors they’d had to go through just to be none other than themselves. Though the dark hit hard against their unaccustomed eyes, they didn’t wait. They groped their way across to the empty row of seats. Sid and Edna shushed and hissed them. They shrank to get under the beam of light, so as not to ruin the picture. They made a great show of getting sat, and when at last they looked—
“Let me tell you something, man,” said Jasper Cokes, as big as life, in a pitiless stare straight at them.
He wore a red bandanna round his neck, gritty and bunched with sweat from so much dusty riding. Needless to say, he had no shirt on. Not an ounce of flab. His tan as deep as the summer sun.
“What if that treasure’s not out there?” Jasper said.
He paused, and the camera lingered on him. Whoever he was talking to had the same view of him they did, here in the hill room. The pause was full of his polished skin and the raw unruly magic in his eyes.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” Jasper scoffed with a thin-lipped laugh. He pointed a finger into the distance. “Three more days—that’s as far as I go. If I don’t find it by then, I’m gonna go someplace else. Back east, maybe.”
“Come on—I’ll show you,” said a young man’s voice, and the camera turned an eye on him.
A kid about twenty. They were out in the yard of a wooden house, on a bluff above the Pacific. The film rolled down the beach as the two men walked. The winter sun was yellow in a deep blue sky.
What scene is this? she wondered idly.
The only thing she knew was the end—where the sheriff’s men come creeping up to the walls of the mission graveyard. This was still early on. They must be on their way to one of the bandits’ hideouts.
“Sst,” said Edna Temple, crouching at Vivien’s ear. “Are you okay? You think we’re crazy?”
Vivien turned to the older woman, whose face was soft in the silver light. Close up, she was old as the hills and her eyes were dancing. Vivien thought: I want to be just like this someday.
“It’s the strangest wake I’ve ever been to,” she whispered behind her hand. She wasn’t sure whose she meant—whether Max or Jasper. “You like the movie?”
“It’s crap,” said Edna. “I love it. Me, I could watch him eat a sandwich.”
She toddled back to her seat.
“There’s nothing here,” said Jasper, casting a practiced eye up the muddy slopes of the wash. “The soil’s too thin. You couldn’t bury something in it.”
What the hell was this? She leaned a little forward and took a bead on the landscape. It seemed to be some sort of runoff. The winter rains
from one of the canyons fed through a wide-mouthed cleft in the bluff, and thus back into the sea.
“If he left his strongbox here,” said the kid, “you’re out of luck. The tides have probably taken it to China.”
“He wouldn’t have made a mistake like that,” Jasper replied emphatically. “Wherever he’s left it, it’s safe. I know it.”
So he did still believe it was out there somewhere. He’s a better actor than people say, thought Vivien, cool as a critic. He gave off an air of endless yearning. It would have been almost tawdry if he hadn’t been so hot. Vivien leaned around in her chair. She was wild with delight to see Jasper alive, and she wanted to share it with Artie. Who sat curled up in the row behind—shy around Jasper as always, even here in the dark.
“What’s all this shit,” she demanded, “about him looking ravaged?”
“Hey, I’m with you,” he whispered back. “He’s gorgeous.”
“You think we ought to release it?”
“Sure.”
That took care of the board of directors meeting.
“How are you?” Vivien asked, still twisted so she faced him. What she was thinking was: How did it feel to have blood on his hands?
“Me?” asked Artie, a bit surprised. “The same. Didn’t you know? I always come out of these blizzards alive.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Sh!” Greg said.
She swung around. He was leaning forward, as if he couldn’t bear to miss a word. At first she thought there must be something crucial going on. But no—it was just the two men shaking hands, on the beach below the bluff. No violence. No sex. Not a major scene at all.
“You like this picture?” she asked him, slightly taken aback. “I thought you stopped at the fifties.”
“We’re expanding,” he said. “Sh!”
Well, all right. She gave it her full attention. Jasper clambered up the bank to the top of the bluff, while the kid ran loose-limbed into the surf. He dived in, swam out past the waves, and turned to the north to free-style home. He waved to Jasper once. And high on the bluff, Jasper nodded and let the moment go. He turned and loped away. The scene dissolved.
