12 Bliss Street

by Martha Conway

  “Huh,” Robert said. “She looked darker than that. Anyway, I thought about calling out, hey, but then I thought, I don’t know, don’t break the moment. You two seemed pretty intense.”

  “Mmm.”

  “So was she from here?”

  “Oh. No. No, she wasn’t from here.”

  He began thinking fast. Robert clearly hadn’t seen the posters yet, but he might. He hadn’t put two and two together, but he might. He might not. But he might. Chorizo was silent for a moment. Then he said, “It’s time for the sauna.”

  The heat hit their faces as they opened the door and all the steam made it difficult to see. They made their way to the long wooden benches and arranged their towels to sit on them.

  “Here,” Chorizo said. He had filled two paper Dixie cups halfway with salt and he gave one to Robert.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Watch.”

  He took a pinch of salt and began rubbing his feet and legs. Now he could feel his warm skin in a way that he didn’t usually. The salt was a tactile reminder, small rough grains on his skin saying pay attention to this.

  “Polishing the body,” he said.

  Robert said, “What?”

  White steam floated like fog curling out from the center of the room and they sat back letting the soft wet heat enter their bodies. Robert held the paper cup of salt in his hand and closed his eyes. They were the only ones there.

  “Would you like some ice water?” Chorizo asked.

  “Thank you,” Robert said.

  Chorizo used the standing shower in the corner to rinse the salt off his legs. Then he went to the counter and poured water into two cups and added a lemon slice for each.

  “I’ve been thinking about sadness,” Chorizo said as he sat down. He took a sip of cold water. “I recently read that scientists believe this feeling may have Darwinian roots.”

  “Hunh,” Robert said with his eyes closed.

  “Imagine our ancestor is lost in the wood and needs to get back before nightfall. He is a hunter-gatherer with only simple weapons; it is dangerous to be out after night. He takes the wrong turn and a feeling comes over him—a sense that something is wrong. Sadness. Depression. This is a signal from the body.”

  “He should turn around,” Robert said.

  “Bravery is a kind of sadness,” Chorizo continued. “The ideal warrior should be sad and tender. He doesn’t act out of anger, out of fear. He acts out of necessity. But that doesn’t mean he is cold, that he is a stone.”

  “What warrior?”

  “Each of us is a warrior. We do battle every day.”

  “In traffic, yeah.” Robert laughed.

  “Warriors assess what is. We act according to what is. That’s why we need to let the world in. But to let the world in is to be sad. To act on that is to be brave.”

  “You have completely lost me,” Robert said.

  Chorizo sipped his water. Sadness, duty, bravery, he thought. These were important concepts. Lost concepts. Here they were in a Japanese sauna, participating in the great tradition of the Japanese public bath. The Japanese with their honor, their sense of duty. A great warrior race.

  “I’ve grown fond of you, Robert, you know that?” Chorizo said.

  They were sweating. The towels they were sitting on were wet.

  Robert smiled, pleased. “Oh, right,” he said.

  * * *

  Afterwards, in the locker room, Chorizo watched Robert examine his face in the mirror.

  “Look at me, I look so relaxed. I can’t believe it.”

  “I told you, this is very good for you.”

  “I feel so great,” Robert said. “I might even sleep tonight.”

  Chorizo bent to tie his shoe.

  “I didn’t know you had trouble sleeping,” he lied. He straightened up. Robert was still looking at his own face, which looked pink and healthy in the mirror. Pink and healthy and alive.

  “I can fall asleep but then I’m up an hour later. It’s like that all night: asleep, awake, asleep, awake.”

  “Do you take anything for it?”

  “Brandy,” Robert said.

  “Just one?”

  “Or two or three.”

  Chorizo thought: I could make it look like a suicide.

  “I have something that might help with that,” he told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a natural cure for sleeplessness. Like homeopathy. A pill. Two actually. You should take them with brandy.” He thought: a suicide or an overdose, either way. “I have some on me; you can try two tonight. If you try them tonight and they work, I can get more tomorrow.”

  “Homeopathy?”

  “But you have to take two,” Chorizo said.

  Fifteen

  Wednesday evening Lou knocked on Nicola’s door with a large Tupperware container under his arm.

  “I’ve brought some beans,” he said when she answered.

  “What’s this?”

  “I’m making you dinner.”

  “I thought you didn’t cook.”

  “Barlotti beans,” Lou said. “Soaked overnight.”

  “They let you soak beans overnight in your hotel?”

  “I’m not staying at a hotel,” he said. “Do you have an eight-quart soup pot?”

  He carried in a shopping bag and took out square plastic cartons with fresh rosemary and fresh sage leaves, bags of carrots and celery, a small onion, and about twelve red potatoes the size of crab apples.

  Nicola watched him line ingredients along the counter. “Are you wooing me?” she asked.

  Lou smiled and two patches of red appeared under his cheekbones. Unreal, a loan shark who blushes.

  “You’re wooing me with soup,” she said.

  “Not just soup. These are Lamon Barlotti beans, from Australia. They say Italian migrants brought them over. They’re best if they’re grown on a wire fence.”

  “You grew these, too?”

  “I did not grow them,” Lou said. He rolled up his white shirtsleeves and began washing his hands at her sink. “I very carefully bought them,” he said.

  Who was this guy? Four days ago she had paid him six thousand dollars of her own money, she had written him a personal check for six thousand dollars, and in return he was making her soup. She wanted just to stand and look at him. Nice hands, nice arms, a good face. Makes money in the time-honored tradition of helping others when no legitimate institution will touch them.

  “Beans are one of the richest sources of vegetable protein,” he was saying. “Did you know that bean soup is on the menu of the United States Senate Restaurant every day?”

  “Is that so?”

  “Every single day,” he said.

  He held a stalk of rosemary under the faucet then began cutting it into tiny herbal points.

  “It’s like a law,” he said.

  He had everything: peppercorns, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, chicken stock, salt. He crushed a sage leaf between his fingers then held out his hand. “Smell,” he said.

  He was wearing black jeans and the inevitable white shirt, and although the hair on his head was dark, the hair on his arms looked like fine strands of deep gold.

  “So where are you staying?” Nicola asked.

  “What?”

  “If you’re not in a hotel?”

  Lou began washing potatoes with a scrub brush.

  “My uncle.”

  “Your uncle the loan shark?”

  “My uncle the doctor.”

  “I thought you came from a crime family?”

  “That’s my mother’s side,” he told her.

  A warm smell of garlic frying in olive oil wafted over from the range. Lou added the diced herbs and vegetables, then covered the sauté pan.

  Nicola said, “So Uncle Doctor lives in San Francisco?”

  “He’s trying to get me to move here, too.”

  “I didn’t know you were thinking of moving.”

  “Of course it dep
ends.”

  “On what?”

  Lou looked at her steadily. “On the food,” he said.

  Nicola smiled and looked at her reflection in the window and realized she was still wearing her work clothes. She told Lou she’d just be a minute. In her bedroom she pulled on jeans and a black China silk camisole and a small pink T-shirt. Her lipstick was the creasy kind and she rubbed it all off, then applied another color that wasn’t as good but stayed on longer. Pressed her lips together. Blotted. Is this really necessary, Nicola wondered? She applied more lipstick and blotted. I look okay, she thought. She smiled. I look great. For the first time in she didn’t know how many months her eyes looked alive. She held out her palm and looked in the mirror and thought: I can feel him right here.

  But before she went back to the kitchen she turned away from the door and dialed Scooter’s cell phone number. When he answered she asked him not to come back to her house before ten. She said, “I’m kind of, I need to do some work.”

  “What’s going on?” Scooter asked. She could hear bar noises in the background.

  “I’m working on something,” she explained, and she thought well that’s pretty much the truth.

  When she came out Lou was in the living room looking through her compact disks. A woman’s voice filled the room. Mama Cass.

  “Is the soup done?”

  “The first stage,” he said, and sat down on the couch. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Though I liked the suit, too.”

  She sat down on the couch halfway facing him. Again she noticed how dark his eyes were. Their legs were almost touching.

  “So do you do this at everyone’s home?” she asked.

  “What, make them dinner?”

  “I meant take charge.”

  Lou looked her over.

  “I can’t imagine anyone taking charge of you,” he said.

  She thought of Guy. “Really?”

  “You’re so I’m-in-control.”

  She laughed. “You think so, huh?”

  “It’s kind of a turn-on,” Lou said.

  He took her hand. Her heart gave a sudden hard beat. She tried to think of what to say. “You smell nice,” she told him.

  Lou smiled. “I always smell nice.”

  Again her heart seemed to tighten. What is this, she asked herself? She was excited and nervous and she didn’t want to be, she wanted to be in control, comfortable, setting the pace. Lou’s legs were stretched out in front of the couch and he looked up at her with a serious expression. His sleeves were still rolled up from cooking. Nicola tried to picture him in an apron. He had fine dark eyebrows and a perfect complexion. Again she noticed his arms, how strong they were. She thought of her father, who when he first met Scooter said you can do better. But a bookie?

  “So who was that on the phone?” Lou asked.

  “You heard that? It was nothing, just a … a thing I had to check.”

  “Is someone staying here?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  He motioned to the duffel bag underneath the window.

  “Oh yeah. Yeah,” Nicola said slowly. “Well, actually, Scooter.”

  “And you called him,” Lou said.

  “Well. Yes.”

  “You told him not to come by.”

  “Yes.”

  “Until a certain time.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “Ten.”

  “Ten tomorrow morning?”

  Nicola smiled. “Ten o’clock,” she said. “Tonight.”

  Lou said, “Then I have to move fast.”

  But instead of moving fast he leaned his head back on the couch cushion and closed his eyes. A shark, a law-school dropout, a man who makes soup. Who was he really? For a while they sat there saying nothing, holding hands, listening to the music.

  It was nice, actually. The warm room, the smell of garlic, a woman’s voice on the stereo. Nicola began to feel more comfortable, more like this wasn’t so strange to be sitting here on her couch with a slightly disreputable man, and anyway it’s not like the last man wasn’t slightly disreputable, and the one before that. She moved her foot toward his and when her shoe made contact he turned and looked at her, he looked at her face and at her T-shirt and her jeans, and Nicola wondered if the camisole she was wearing was visible and she hoped that it was. Lou smiled and she smiled and she felt kind of dopey smiling together like that but she liked it too.

  After a moment he touched her cheekbone with his thumb. “You know what I really like?” he asked.

  “What,” she said.

  “Your arms.”

  She laughed.

  “I really like your arms,” he said.

  She said, “I like yours, too. I was noticing them while you chopped.”

  “Really?”

  “I like a man who can chop with inferior cutlery.”

  At that he grinned and moved closer and took her other hand and what else could she do? She closed her eyes and kissed him. His lips were very warm. She was thinking, It’s always such a surprise, the first time you kiss someone. It feels so oh, so this is who you are. All these people I don’t know, I will never know, because I will never kiss them. Mama Cass sang, “Every time I see that girl you know I want to lay down and die.” Nicola opened her eyes and saw that Lou had his eyes open too. He was watching her. “But you know I’m living a lie,” sang Mama Cass.

  “All right?” Lou asked.

  She felt extraordinary. She didn’t know what to say.

  Lou pulled back a little. “Is this good?”

  “It’s good,” she finally said.

  “Good. Listen. Tell me when thirty minutes are up.”

  “Thirty minutes?”

  “I have to add the herbs to the soup.”

  She laughed. She felt that something large and wonderful was happening, a feeling that pressed upwards on her heart. Lou took her face in his hands. They moved backwards on the couch and the couch cushion bent under their weight and Nicola heard the CD click into the next song. They began to kiss in earnest. She didn’t open her eyes. All she wanted was to lie there in the warm room kissing him and smelling the aroma of soup cooking on the other side of the wall and feeling his hands on her face and feeling the corduroy couch fabric against her neck when suddenly there was a terrific banging on the front door, a banging and banging, like two fists going at it at once.

  “Quick, quick,” someone, a woman, was shouting. She banged again. “Open the door!”

  “Jesus,” Nicola said sitting up quickly.

  “Is anyone in there? I can see lights,” the woman shouted.

  Lou and Nicola jumped up at the same time and Nicola ran to the door and didn’t even think but opened it without looking to see who it was—a woman in trouble, that’s all she knew. As the door opened the woman seemed to fall inside.

  It was Robert’s sister. She was holding a suitcase and a laptop computer and her face was swollen from crying.

  “Oh my God, he’s dead,” Carmen said. She was sobbing. “He’s dead, Robert’s dead.”

  Sixteen

  She had lovely wide hips and small breasts and a small waist and she told him that she tried and tried to take some inches off her thighs but her body didn’t work that way—“it all goes from my breasts,” she told him at dinner, “that’s the first place that shrinks.”

  Three hours later he was watching her through the viewfinder. It was true about her breasts. Her face now was calm and trancelike, in the stage he liked the best. Her fingernails were blue.

  She lay on her back on the bed, barely conscious, and Chorizo moved the camera in for a close-up of her face, her brown eyes hidden under half-closed lids, her lips pale, her face pale, her naked shoulders pale, pale. Panning in and out: the close-up, the long body shot, the longer shot of two bodies, a man and a woman’s, on the bed.

  They were not naked. They were not even touching. Chorizo pulled back for anothe
r shot of the two of them. He could see how filmmakers got off on this: making other people see things the way they were seeing them; the way they experimented with seeing them. Moving his fingers over the camera buttons, opening and shutting the audience’s eyes, moving them into position: you’re looking in from the doorway, now you’re on the ceiling peering down.

  It’s a physical thing, Chorizo was thinking, what you do to the ones who watch what you do.

  He pulled the small slick gray knob forward and back with his thumb and said to the boy, “Now touch the fabric.”

  The boy moved toward the girl but it was clear he was not very interested. Later he would shoot up next to his girlfriend Marlina on her Navajo bedspread, and much later they would fall asleep chastely, side by side. These days what they had was more intimate than sex, based as it was on mutually assured survival. The boy was wearing a white T-shirt and briefs and he lazily pulled on the spaghetti strap of the girl’s embroidered silk top. Chorizo could see old needle marks that peppered the backs of his thighs. He kept the camera off that. The bedspread was deep blue and red, the pillowcases yellow. Chorizo liked lots of colors for these shots. The room was well-lit but with thick black curtains; still, he could hear noises from the outside, a steady stream of talking and laughing and shouting and sometimes the breaking of bottles. There was a popular club across the street and an all-night diner on the corner. It was just about eight o’clock.

  “Ricky,” Chorizo ordered.

  The boy was lazy, and the girl was already asleep. Technically, comatose. He wished he could remember her name. Lake, was that it? River? Rive? When he had told her the story of the crocodile and the monkey she had fixed her brown eyes on his mouth as if watching the words themselves, living creatures that sprang from his lips. He had said, “The story is a wonderful example of what you need to succeed: courage and faith and luck.

  “What you are missing,” he said to the girl, “is luck.”

  She had smiled then, a crooked kind of acceptance. Did she actually understand him? Most of them didn’t understand by then. But he would swear there was something in—Rive, was it?—there was something in her that grasped his meaning. Grasped it, accepted it, let it go.

  “Ricky,” he said again.

  The boy stirred, then pulled on the straps of her chemise again. The girl showed no response. There would be a moment when the body stiffened; it actually seemed to grow hard in an instant. The death instant. Maybe it wasn’t so much hard as still; very very still. Riva? Was her name Riva?