Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  “Let’s have a look,” Holden told her.

  Patsy produced a milk crate and stood on it to reach the bottle, and displayed the courtesy of blowing off the dust before she placed the flask on the bar.

  Holden produced his own, very elegant, pair of folding reading glasses with thin gold temple bars and a golden chain with tiny links, and studied the bottle through them. “My goodness,” he said at length. “It’s a calvados.” He looked up. “It’s never been touched.”

  “At fifty bucks a pop,” Patsy said, still atop the crate, “I’m surprised it ever got purchased, let alone touched.”

  For once, China volunteered the truth. “I’ve never heard of it,” he said, referring to the genus.

  “Nor have I,” Holden declared frankly, referring to the species. “My curiosity is piqued. Patsy?”

  “Yes?”

  Holden tapped the bottle with a corner of his glasses. “How utterly charming.”

  Patsy shrugged. “It was here when I bought the place in 1991.”

  Peering through the lenses of his folded spectacles, Holden’s eyes ranged over the label in question. “So it’s at least eighteen years old,” he marveled. “Right here in San Francisco.”

  China touched his chest and blushed convincingly. “What a coincidence. It’s the same age I am!”

  Holden looked at China. “You don’t say.”

  “I’m half deceased,” China glumly posited.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Patsy admonished him. “You’re half alive.”

  “You … You’re …” China gulped histrionically.

  “Yes,” Patsy lied, “I’m almost forty.”

  “You don’t look a day over thirty,” Holden countered suavely.

  “Yeah,” Patsy laughed, “and the Iraq War was a boon to the economy.”

  “That clenches it.” Holden replaced the bottle on the bar and tucked his spectacles back into the inside breast pocket of his jacket—where, as China had already noted, also resided a wallet of tanned ostrich, iguana, or alligator skin. Holden hailed from neither Texas nor Australia, by his accent, so China’s money was on the alligator.

  Holden’s hand lingered at the pocket. Patsy stepped off the milk crate. China’s breath quickened—might it be rhino? Elephant? Holden inclined his impeccable hair toward the bottle. “We’ll have a glass apiece.”

  Patsy tapped the bar three times with a middle finger.

  Patsy, China thought to himself, how disappointingly boorish. Such a lack of faith. Can’t you see what we have here?

  “Ah,” said Holden, getting the drift. He retrieved the wallet, and from it, at arm’s length, he far-sightedly fetched a C-note, laid it on the bar, and crossed it with a twenty. “For you,” he sweetly declared to Patsy, replacing the wallet. Still and all, China thought begrudgingly, business is business.

  “Excellent,” said Patsy, not touching the notes. “Now my grandson can finish college.”

  Holden bethought himself and half-retrieved the billfold. “Unless you would care to join us?”

  Patsy shook her head. “Too early for me,” she declined. “But that’s very kind of you.”

  “Another time, then.” The wallet settled back into its burrow.

  Without turning to look at it, Patsy gave the milk crate a kick that sent it back under the sink. “Do you mind if I take the trouble to serve it correctly?” She took away China’s brandy glass, swabbed the bar in front of her two customers, and dealt a clean napkin to each of them. “I get so little practice.”

  Holden raised an eyebrow. “Patsy,” he declared, “that’s a congeniality most unexpected.” He turned to China. “Don’t you just love it, when somebody fetishizes the secular?” China rewarded this query with a completely blank look. Holden said to Patsy, “I’ll wager the warmth will coax this liquor into divulging the most divine secrets.” He turned aside again. “China?”

  At this, China barely hesitated. On the one hand, while he always wanted to appear more sophisticated than the people around him, on the other hand he’d learned that it was rarely true. This was especially the case with older men, more experienced than himself, and especially with the kind of men in whom China tended to be most interested, older men in funds, the majority of whom, moreover, took singular pleasure in schooling younger men in various of the pleasures of life. “I’m sure I don’t know what that means,” he admitted simply.

  Holden placed a reassuring hand on China’s forearm. China readily colored, a trick he had learned in acting class. This guy’s faster than I am, he observed to himself, he’s making it easy.

  “We’ll certainly follow your advice,” Holden said to Patsy. He let the hand linger.

  Upon each of the two fresh napkins before her two customers Patsy had soon erected a modest brandy globe half-full of water heated to piping hot by the steam spigot on the espresso machine, each surmounted by a second glass, its globe gimbaled by the mouth of the first, and tilted so that its charge of calvados did not quite spill.

  China, for one, was especially appreciative of this novel etiquette, for, in the meantime, his epiglottis had been encapsulated by a bolus of meth-raddled mucus of prodigious dimension, so that he feared he must soon loudly clear his throat and hawk the result out the street door or choke. But, and just in the nick of time, Holden adroitly plucked erect his snifter, its warmed elixir the brindle of a million-dollar foal, with a bouquet quite the equal to that of old money, and toasted Patsy, then China. Making haste to follow suit, China downed his entire drink.

  It felt like someone had opened an emergency exit on an intercontinental flight at the polar zenith—in first class, of course! The bolus disappeared without a trace.

  Patsy was staring at him, but if China’s gaucherie had nonplussed Holden, it also amused him, and only the latter showed. “To a fruitful evening,” he smiled, before he allowed a mere dram of calvados to flow over his lower lip. For a long moment afterward, the beam of a connoisseur suffused his features. Then he closed his eyes. “Un …” he opened his eyes, “believable.” He touched the base of his glass to the rim of China’s empty one. “Patsy?” he said, but he was looking at China. “Another, if you please.”

  Patsy didn’t wait for him to produce the fifty bucks.

  “To the delights of the unknown,” Holden toasted, “and to unknown delights.” He paused to study the light that appeared to slowly pierce the nostrum of his raised glass. “This is most auspicious,” he pronounced, with the confidence peculiar to a man who can back up his most recently dispensed hundred dollar bill with another. Again, he took a very small sip. And this time even China siphoned off but a quarter of his calvados, as if to savor it, demonstrating, in fact, remarkable restraint.

  Holden smiled broadly. “Most auspicious indeed.”

  China could not have agreed more. “Thank you, Holden.”

  “Miou Miou,” Holden sweetly smiled. “Call me Miou Miou.”

  SEVENTEEN

  QUENTIN REPLACED THE RECEIVER ON THE HOOK. AT THE FAR END OF THE hallway a man and a woman haggled in stage whispers. “I’m tellin’ you nigga—” said the woman. “Fuck you, bitch,” the man retorted. “Who you calling bitch, nigga?”

  “Is this what I get for reading two newspapers a day, year in and year out?” Quentin asked himself.

  The two people at the end of the hall exchanged money and drugs. “That’s my last two dollars,” said the one.

  “Then I’m outta here,” replied the other. “I don’ wanna be hangin’ ’round no broke people.”

  Quentin continued his train of thought as he returned to his room. “I suppose the first year or two of fascination with the human trainwreck comprises the fault of the seducer; but surely, do not the next fifty-odd years imply the complicity of the seduced?” Opening the door to his little room he caught sight of the hot plate on which smoldered the remains of two cups of instant coffee. A cockroach stood on the counter beside it, its feelers raised inquisitively toward the steam. “Such are the chambers
allotted to what folk as remain in the world with the leisure to consider life’s weightier propositions. A blanket as coarse as possible, a window covered with aluminum foil, a constant welter by which the most basic of human functions as well as every television channel are conducted to the sphere of contemplation by virtue of three thin walls and one each of floor and ceiling, all of it ameliorated by the odor of cigarettes combusted decades ago, mildewed carpet, dead mice, and the reek of disinfectant borne upon the updraft in the light well, if the one window isn’t nailed shut. And what about the brown corona of tobacco residue on the ceiling above the bed? Even cockroaches have a peculiar odor, if there are enough of them, and not to exclude the tenacity of the odor of the rough trade lately paid off and sent away. …”

  Anyhow, he sighed, as of today, at long last, sex is over.

  And other than that resolution, or realization, or resignation, enough with the asceticism already.

  Beyond the front door of Hotel Verlaine the air was rank, but this distinction was not specific to Eddy Street. No rain had fallen in northern California for three months. With luck, only another three months would elapse before the rains returned. Six months between downpours and even the cleanest block in Pacific Heights would accumulate a stench. But the reprieve in the Tenderloin didn’t last two weeks.

  But Quentin’s new-found freedom from the passive-aggressive oppression of the China regime gave him all the sweet tastes he could have wanted. Sure he was lonely. The liaison with China had cost him most of his friends, who could not abide the boy. Only Tipsy had hung in with him. But clearly, she now had more important salmon to poach.

  Or could it be that he had leaned on her once too often? Quentin racked his brain to discover some equation of emotional interdependence between himself and his remaining friend. He put up with her drinking, for one example. Discussing books with her, for another example, was even less interesting. And yet, sit through it he did. Was this not friendship?

  A perfunctory cafe on the corner of Jones and Bush served him a cappuccino and a “chocolate croissant” for $6.50. The price point, Quentin thought, as the clerk laid three dollars and fifty cents in change on the counter, allows me to tip this young fellow a magnanimous buck, thinking the while that I, too, was once a barista, though in those days the term was “backbar talent.” One of my regulars, who drank white wine on ice morning noon and night, was smitten with me. He was also a professor of Middle Italian. He would sit in the corner, where the glass rack met the bullfight poster, and watch me work. When I’d come near he’d stage whisper,

  Ogne pense vole …

  and bat his eyelashes.

  Had Quentin been rude to that old man? He hoped not. Such indiscretions can come back to haunt one’s geriatric reverie.

  “You know,” Quentin observed, as the young man placed the pastry next to a bowl of coffee and steamed milk, “that’s actually a pain au chocolat and not a chocolate croissant, as you call it. Croissant is French for crescent. Like that almond croissant in the display case. See? It’s crescent-shaped. There’s nothing crescent-shaped about this pain au chocolat. It looks like a wallet. Better you should call it a portefeuille au chocolat.”

  The clerk slid his eyes from the pain au chocolat to the almond croissant and back. Neither crescent- nor wallet-shaped, his eyes were slits. They looked like they’d been up all night, smoking kif and playing the nose flute. They regarded Quentin, then languidly blinked.

  “For me,” the clerk said, “French pastry is a potent symbol of the yoke of colonialism.” He looked past Quentin. “Next in line, please.”

  At the door a rack displayed the Chronicle and The New York Times. PRESIDENT DEFENDS FOREIGN POLICY headlined one, PRESIDENT COUNTERS CRITICISM headlined the other.

  Not today, Quentin said to himself, resolutely stepping past the rack; today, I take off.

  On the sidewalk a pair of tables flanked the door into the cafe. One of them had a large planter upwind of it. Now who’s the Philistine, he grumbled, as he dropped his valise beside a spindly wire chair, whose back he turned against the planter and the fog wind making a good ten knots down Bush Street. Chocolate crescent, indeed. He retrieved his morning pills from the valise. This goddamn so-called culture takes what it wants from the rest of the world, renames it by way of laying claim to it, and jettisons the rest. If I weren’t getting on in years and had the money, I’d start another planet. What am I supposed to do, he fumed, just sit here eating this crap without reading a newspaper? I’ll go mad. And just as he thought this thought, a folded copy of The Wall Street Journal dropped on the table in front of him. “May I join you, Mr. Asche?”

  The man familiarly yet politely addressing him wore a costume to go along with his Russian accent. From the sidewalk up, Quentin considered well-polished black shoes, sharply creased black trousers, a lint-free Chesterfield coat over a jacket that matched the pants, and a silk shirt, all of them black. A white silk cravat, a homburg hat, and a furled black brolly completed the ensemble.

  “The Russian consulate,” Quentin said, squinting against the diffuse sunlight that backlit the man’s face, “is on the corner of Scott and Pacific, about forty blocks that way.” He pointed into the wind. “It features twin surveillance cameras over every door and a two-story, cruciform radio antenna on the roof. You can’t miss it.”

  “That’s true,” the man smiled pleasantly. “Although I haven’t been there since the celebration of the Pepsi-for-Stolichnaya deal.”

  Quentin frowned. “That was in the seventies of the last century.”

  “I was young but, insofar as I remember it,” the man pushed back the brim of his hat with a single forefinger, “that was one hell of a party.” He smiled thinly. “Not to mention, it was the very eyetooth of perestroika.”

  Quentin shook his head. “If you’d told me then that one day I’d miss Richard Nixon. …” He sighed. “How do you know my name? Have we met?”

  “Good question, the first, and no to the second. But, if you don’t mind, your cappuccino and pain au chocolat look very appetizing.” He hooked the umbrella on the back of the empty chair. “Why don’t you have a look at the paper while I retrieve a modest repast for myself? Then we’ll talk.” He tipped his hat and slightly inclined his head. “But only if you care to talk.”

  Quentin gestured at the newspaper. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE BACKS TROOP BUILDUP, the headline read. NO HONOR WITHOUT SACRIFICE, ran the subhead. “I’m not one to judge a person by his reading material but—really—The Wall Street Journal?”

  The Russian shook his head. “But of course you judge people by what they read, Mr. Asche. As for me?” The man smiled and shrugged. “I’m just trying to keep up with the Joneses.”

  “Maybe you should move into my hotel,” Quentin suggested, as a somewhat sour reaction to his own presumption that the man was referring to the Dow Jones Company, which used to own the paper. Quentin added, “I swore I’d take today off from this nonsense,” even as his eyes had begun to scan the various texts legible above the fold.

  “Quite so,” said the stranger. “Better you should get the news from poetry.”

  “See here,” Quentin unreasonably expostulated, “that really is a most tedious admonition.”

  The man smiled as he passed through the front door of the cafe. “You’re easy this morning.”

  Recollecting why he was ostensibly sitting there in the first place, Quentin took a bite of his chocolate crescent and chased down his pills with subdainty sips of cappuccino, which had already cooled by half. Flakes of pastry fell to the newspaper. He was quite hungry, and he had choked down his morning pills with what remained of the pastry and coffee before the stranger returned.

  The Russian was followed by the opinionated clerk, who took away Quentin’s empty cup and saucer and replaced them with full ones.

  “Menu redux,” the stranger pointed out. “My treat. You look a little lean.” He removed his hat and set it on the table, alongside a coffee and chocolate wallet of hi
s own.

  “It’s my gay aesthetic,” Quentin said suspiciously. “But thank you.” He fell upon the second pastry. “Indeed I am hungry,” he allowed, catching a crumb fallen from his mouth and replacing it. “Although I’m not certain of the nutrition to be gained by consuming multiple chocolate wallets.”

  “Yes,” the man said, taking a seat. “Maybe if you consumed real ones.” He tore two sugar packets in half and let their contents cascade into his black coffee. Taking up a spoon he stirred the coffee and watched Quentin eat. The man’s eyes were intelligent, measured, steely.

  “So,” Quentin said, when nearly finished with his second breakfast. “You were going to tell me how you know my name.”

  “No, I wasn’t.” The man replied pleasantly enough. “But I will if you’d like.”

  “I’d like.”

  “Charley Powell,” the man said.

  Quentin frowned. “What about him?”

  The man shrugged. “Charley said you’d provide the answer to that.”

  Tipsy’s admonition to mumness, phoned in not two hours ago, and which had seemed merely superstitious then, now appeared prescient. “That’s interesting,” Quentin said offhandedly, “if only because I’ve never actually met Charley Powell.”

  “But his sister is a close friend of yours,” the man reminded him.

  Quentin deflected this. “You know what, pal? If you told me you were Charley Powell himself, I wouldn’t have much reason to believe you one way or the other. That’s how much I know about Charley Powell.”

  “Oh,” the man said mildly, “you know a bit more than that, Mr. Asche.”

  “Asche,” Quentin said. “That’s right.” He extended his hand. “And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

  The man looked at the proffered hand. “Vassily,” he said easily. He took the hand, not with palm across palm, as in a handshake, but thumb interlaced with thumb, and he smiled thinly. “Novgorodovich.”

  “Like the city,” Quentin said.

  “Yes.”