"So where're we going for the beer?"
"Pacific Beach," Fin said. "I know a place on the sand where we can get a free sunset with an overpriced beer."
"I live in P. B.," she said.
"Yeah? Then you've probably been everywhere in town."
Nell decided that a sunset drink was about all this guy was good for. Three divorces? No way! To make conversation, she said, "Got any kids?"
"Never had kids," Fin said. "Would it be too forward of me to explain that I have a very low sperm count? Negligible in fact."
"I didn't ask," she said.
"Sorry if that was too intimate a revelation. It's been several months since I talked to a date, not that this is a date. But let's talk about me. Did you happen to catch my gig at Blackfriars' Theatre? Or maybe at North Coast Rep? Or at Lamb's Players Theatre last season?"
"I've never seen you perform," she said. "But I think I read a small story in the paper a couple years ago about local actors. You were mentioned, right?"
"It wasn't that small," he said. "My picture was used in the story, though not one of my best. I'm, uh, being considered for a part in Harbor Nights."
"What's that, a play?"
"No, a TV series they're shooting down here."
"That should be interesting."
"A contract killer. Can you see me as a killer?"
She turned and looked at him then, and he turned away from the traffic to face her. He was definitely one of them, Nell Salter thought. He had Peter Pan Policeman written all over him. Only he was worse than most: an actor to boot!
She said, "If you're a real actor, you can be a killer or anything else."
"That's exactly right!" Fin said. "You're smarter than all the yuppie casting agents I've read for in the past five years. 'Not the type we're looking for,' they usually say. I say, 'Was John Malkovich the type to play a world-class seducer in Dangerous Liaisons?' "
"I don't know," she said. "I didn't see it."
"Okay, let's talk about me" Fin said. "Do you like Irish types? My full name is Finbar Brendan Finnegan."
Was it an omen? "As a matter of fact, I just had a passing thought about last St. Patrick's Day," she admitted.
"Really? What?"
"Not important. Yeah, I like the Irish except for the Kennedys and all their cousins including pets and livestock. I don't like people that treat women like ..."
"Like Marilyn Monroe?"
"You got it."
"I'm the opposite," Fin said. "I've been victimized by women all my life. My sisters were so protective they thought Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil's stepchild. And they were so unbelievably cruel they made me learn the words to every song Patti Page ever recorded. Would you like me to sing 'How Much Is That Doggie in the Window'?"
"I don't think so," Nell said, catching herself wondering if his little body held any interesting surprises, like a nice ass. His chatter was a bit disarming.
"Anyway, that's my life story until I joined the marines and went to Vietnam and came home and joined the San Diego P. D. and got my own place just so I didn't have to hear the Von Trapps yodeling in the Alps about the sound of mucous. My sisters think that's the greatest musical ever made. They're very Catholic. Then I met and married that sergeant you used to know who was the reincarnation of the Bitch of Buchenwald. Never marry somebody who thinks her handcuffs are a fashion statement."
"Me, I learned about marriage the first time I tried it," Nell said. "If I ever get real lonely I'll buy a parrot. Better conversation than I get from most guys."
"That's 'cause you people're more verbal than we are," Fin said. And more mature. Little boys stay little boys till they're forty-something; little girls're just sawed-off women."
"And you?" Nell turned and looked at him. "Are you finally mature?"
"I haven't got married since I was forty-two," Fin said. "That might mean I'm growing up."
Nell found herself wondering about his buns again. Then he wheeled the Vette into a parking lot across from the oceanfront.
The restaurant was by the Crystal Pier, one of the last structural relics of Southern California's Golden Age of The Beach. It was a charming, seedy period piece. The main street of Pacific Beach, or "P. B.," as the locals called it, fed right onto the pier, under a two-story arch that joined two whitewashed, teal-shingled buildings belonging to the Crystal Pier Hotel. Farther out on the wooden pier were twenty-one cottages lining both sides of the pier, where cars could park in front of their rooms, over a sandy beach and white water.
Beyond the cottages, the pier narrowed into a wide pedestrian boardwalk that opened up again onto a spacious fishing platform guarded by a white railing, one hundred yards out over blue water. From above, the pier looked like a sand shovel that had drifted away from a giant child and floated on the ocean.
The restaurant was a typical California chain. The emphasis was not on food but on drinks, expensive enough to justify the rent, but affordable enough not to completely discourage the locals who'd be needed when winter came and tourists went.
Fin and Nell were lucky to get a window table, where they ordered tropical drinks served in ceramic coconut shells by a waitress in a sarong. They looked out on a "boardwalk" made of concrete that stretched four miles south to Mission Beach. And because autumn was late in arriving, the boardwalk was loaded with joggers, walkers, rollerbladers and skateboarders draped in bag-rags out for their evening exposure. Most of the hardbodies wore combinations of Day-Glo shorts, tank tops, T-shirts, swimsuits and cutoffs. There was a bit of hip-hop and grunge, but not like at L. A.'s Venice Beach.
Continuing with his obsessive chatter, Fin said, "I've been around women all my life. You'll find I'm easy to be with. In fact, women are very comfortable with me. I'm the sensitive artistic type. I wouldn't hurt a Medfly."
The weird thing was, whatever the guy was doing, it was starting to work on her. He was starting to look a little cuter, even after only one drink. Cute little guys could be dangerous though. She asked, "Did you bring your ex-wives here?"
"No, they preferred those trendy places in La Jolla where you can watch the sunset, but you're surrounded by a lotta wealthy gentlemen from countries where camels're still beasts of burden and occasional lovers. But enough about my ex-wives. Let's talk about me."
Then they didn't talk much about anything for a few minutes, because of the impending sunset. Sitting there at the fake monkeypod cocktail table, drinking from a fake coconut shell, being brushed lightly by a fake potted-palm branch, they were getting caught up in the nostalgia. A hint of the way it was, the way it must have been, in bygone days when summer never ended along California's coast. Because life was different then, or so they said, all who'd lived it.
Fin was delighted to see that it was going to be a great sunset, guaranteeing that people in the bar beside the windows would "Oh!" and "Ah!" the instant the fireball disappeared into the eternal sea. No matter how many times he'd seen it, Fin never stopped feeling exhilaration, followed by a sense of loss when the sky momentarily blazed crimson from the afterglow of the heavenly light.
By the time it happened, Fin and Nell had already finished their second drink. He turned to her and she looked as sad as he felt after all the fire had vanished.
She gazed into his eyes for a moment, and she astonished him by reading his mind. By saying what he felt.
"I know ," Nell said, nodding. "For a little while, before it disappears, you can really pretend, can't you? That life's a beach, after all."
Fin was awfully glad he'd matured. In the old days he'd have married her for that.
Chapter 15
After work that day, Jules Temple sipped Chablis and soaked in the hot tub until sunset, the hot tub belonging to the apartment building in Sunset Cliffs, an old residential area by Point Loma where he rented a two-bedroom unit. He had the hot tub all to himself, and from the hillside vantage point, he watched as the sky blazed and fired the sandstone cliffs below, burnishing them to the color of old gold.
Those golden cliffs at sunset reminded him of his mother's antique-jewelry collection: another small treasure his father had given to charity rather than to his only child.
Jules was not a worrier and never had been, but the phone call from Nell Salter was troubling. There was so much riding on the sale of his company that the most remote threat to the negotiations was of concern. He'd been mulling a few scenarios involving the theft of his truck and the toxic exposure to the Mexican driver, but no scenario made sense.
Jules had never been one to project, nor to fret unduly as to the consequence of actions, even impulsive ones -- as his father had often pointed out -- so he decided to stop fretting for now. Tomorrow he'd go to the yacht club and get some free legal advice about some vexing scenarios he'd conjured. For now he was just going to enjoy the view, the wine, and the tub.
One day soon, he'd have his own house with a view of the Pacific, and his own hot tub where he could soak naked, either with or without female companionship. And he'd also have a decent car, like a red Mercedes 560SL, instead of a yellow Mazda Miata that he was almost ashamed to drive. Then he could start to live the way he'd been meant to live, if his father hadn't taken his only child's birthright to the grave.
Jules wasn't sure if he'd truly hated his father, but he loathed the old man's memory. The only time he wished the old man was alive was when he'd accomplished something, such as selling a business that had increased his cash investment tenfold in only a few years, and in the teeth of a global recession. It reminded Jules that he'd have to hide the capital gain or his ex-wife would be after him for more child support.
It pleased him to compare himself to his father, a man who'd never been able to accomplish much, content to be a salaried lawyer at a law firm. Jules believed that he'd got the entrepreneurial spirit from his grandfather, but what had happened to his grandfather's legacy? Gone to charities, because the grandfather had trusted his son to do right by his descendants.
What could he have accomplished, Jules wondered, if only he had inherited his father's house? It had fetched more than two million dollars because of the glorious bay view, and the executor, an old friend and colleague of Harold Temple, had seen to it that Jules did not so much as get his mother's silver coffee service. He got his five-year monthly stipend and nothing more.
So Jules wished that Harold Temple could be alive if only to see what his son had accomplished, all alone, from his own hard work and quick mind. The old man never would have believed it: a blue-collar industry of the worst kind. But the right industry for someone as imaginative as Jules Temple.
It'd been easy to beat out his competition, childishly easy. Just as it would be when he put the profits -- not all, but a good portion -- into a topless dancing establishment that would be the talk of San Diego. He'd show the doubters an amazingly profitable operation.
His reveries were interrupted when one of his neighbors, an elderly woman in a puckered pink swimsuit, dropped her towel on a lounge beside the hot tub, and said, "Mind if I join you?"
Her flesh was dead white and veined, like his father's during those last years. Jules had never introduced himself to any of his neighbors and wasn't about to start. Now he couldn't enjoy the view or the wine or even the jasmine-scented evening air. She disgusted him.
"It's all yours," he said.
After having been awed into silence by the sunset, Fin and Nell got back to chatting, and gave their table to a pair of diners, a twenty-something pair of lovebirds who did more kissing than dining. Fin and Nell moved closer to the bar and perched on high stools at a little cocktail table. By then, they'd switched to vodka martinis, and after he'd completely lost count of his drinks Fin decided they were more bombed than Bosnia.
His chin kept slipping off his hand as he listened to her whine boozily about the sexual harassment she'd endured throughout her tenure in law enforcement. That was after she'd listened to him whine boozily about the injustices he'd suffered at the hands of ex-wives and talent agents.
When his dimpled chin fell out of his hand for the third time, she said, "How many martinis've you had, anyway?"
"As many as you."
"We shoulda stuck to pina coladas."
"Too sugary."
"You gotta drive soon," she said, slurring slightly. "Maybe we oughtta get something to eat."
"Certainly," he said, slurring worse.
"I don't usually drink like this," Nell said. "I don't usually talk like this. So much, I mean."
"I know," Fin said, his eyelids drooping. "It's because I'm so easy to talk to. Women tend to talk to me like I'm one of the girls."
Nell blew a puff of breath upward because her hair kept falling across her eyes. "Why?" she asked. "Are you gay or something?"
"I probably am," Fin said somberly, "except for the sex part."
"Nobody cares what anybody is," Nell said, spilling some booze on the table. "You get to a certain age, all you care about is, does the guy have AIDS. And does he cuddle good."
"I know how that is," Fin said, sympathetically. And this time his elbow slipped clear off the cocktail table. "When I used to go to singles bars, I'd wear my San Diego Blood Bank T-shirt just to show all the lonely nurses and schoolteachers that I'm a clean donor."
"I knew you'd go for nurses and schoolteachers," Nell said, accusingly. "The care givers, right?"
"I'm the cuddly care giver," Fin said, defensively. "Remember my first ex-wife, the good sergeant? She wore those confrontational stockings with seams in them even before Madonna did. And call me a silly goose if you want to, but I don't think it's romantic when a female wears scary eye makeup and does one-arm pushups in her teddy just before she jumps in bed at night. The most tender thing she ever said to me was 'Let's get it on.' "
"Was she like that?" Nell was genuinely shocked.
"When we got divorced she got all the dishes she hadn't thrown at me. Living with her was more risky than clerking in a Seven-Eleven store."
"I really didn't know her very well," Nell assured him.
Fin said, "I think I married my second ex-wife because she was the opposite of the sergeant. She loved the great indoors and prescription drugs, but hated people and avoided them. The Witness Protection Program has better mixers. It was because of her that I had a test done and found out that I have a very low sperm count. I was glad 'cause any baby she gave birth to would end up being Howard Hughes. Compared to her Salman Rushdie is a party animal. Did I mention my practically nonexistent sperm count? That nobody has to worry about?"
"Yeah, yeah, you said." Nell licked some spilled martini off the back of her hand.
The sight of her tongue gave Fin a semi-woody! He adored her broken nose! "I give blood every month, so I'm always getting tested."
"Yeah yeah yeah," she mumbled, signaling to the waitress for another round.
"You know what I hate about young actors?" Fin said. "Most of them don't even drink."
"Know what I hate about all male cops?" Nell said. "They do."
"It doesn't pay to tomcat around in singles bars, not in these times," Fin said. "I mean, some of the cops I work with? When they sober up they have to sit in a tub full of chlorine bleach for two days. I mean, if you caught a rear view of them in the shower you'd run and call the orangutan wrangler at the San Diego Zoo."
"Yeah yeah yeah," she said, sitting up tall and crossing her legs, causing her skirt-slit to reveal her entire thigh.
"You sure are in good shape for your . . . you sure are in good shape," he said. "Do you jog or something?" Of course he well remembered her back in her youthful jogging days: Foglights Salter!
"I'm in good shape for any age, bucko!" she said, truculently.
"You sure are," he said, slumping a bit, figuring that submissive gestures are best when boozy babes get pugnacious.
When the waitress put the drinks down she looked doubtfully at the two dipsos.
Nell said to Fin, "You're not very tall, are you?"
"None of us actors are as tall a
s you imagined," he said, with a hiccup. "Excuse me," he said, and did it again.
"I guess you're right," Nell said. "Bogart stood on a milk crate when he did love scenes with Ingrid Bergman."
"James Cagney was even shorter," Fin said earnestly. "None of us are tall."
"If I was wearing tall heels, would you be embarrassed to dance with me?"
He thought it'd be tricky to walk, let alone dance, but he said gallantly, "Just tell me if you wanna dance. We could go somewhere. I do all the Latin steps."
"No, I don't wanna dance!" she said, exasperated, and this time her elbow slipped. "I just wanna know how secure you really are. I never met a secure male cop in my whole entire life!"
"My third ex-wife was six foot one," Fin explained. "Barefoot. She taught me to tango and I was never embarrassed with my face pressed to her bosom. But being married to her was like Fatal Attraction Two. Before we split up she accused me of dating other babes, and she started putting cockroaches in the toaster. I don't know where she got the cockroaches because she was a clean person, I have to give her that much. Life with her was a game of Dungeons and Dragons. If we'd had a kid that turned out like her, I'd've had it put to sleep."
"I don't believe all this!" Nell said, much louder than she realized.
The bartender shook his head at the cocktail waitress: No more booze!
"That's paranoid," she said. "Cockroaches! You're just proving you're a typical insecure male cop!"
"I'm not paranoid," he said, gravely. "She turned the toaster into a cockroach condo. I checked every inch of the apartment and there were no cockroaches anywhere else. It had to be her. I think maybe she was trying to justify sleeping with half the San Francisco Giants one afternoon before a doubleheader with the Padres. There were a lotta tired puppies on the field that night, I can tell you."
"Was she good-looking?"
"Actually, my conscious mind no longer remembers anything about her physical appearance. She went the way of my seventh-grade French."
"Fin!" she cried suddenly. "I got a flash for you. We're hammered. Smashed. Fried. Tanked. Both of us. I haven't been like this in years!"
Finnegan's Week (1993) Page 13
