All That Was Happy

by M. M. Wilshire

  “Surf’s up,” she said.

  Chapter 40

  The picture was on the front page of the Times’ Business Section. Just seeing herself caught up in Huntington’s arms brought her close to hyperventilation. That had been, she realized, The Moment--the one her entire life had brought her to--the one which made people swear in no uncertain terms that there was a God, and that God knew what He was doing.

  The caption and the text of the article mentioned them both by name. The Japanese venture capitalists had--no doubt as a result of their routine and exhaustive background checks of all supplicants seeking from them a pipeline of free-flowing yen--easily made the connection between her name and Bernie’s--them not being the sort of persons anyone could call stupid by any stretch. Thus, the sight of Bernie’s wife on the front page of the Business Section of the L.A. Times, in the arms of another wealthy man, accompanied by a caption announcing their engagement, reduced irreparably by their own estimation the required measure of confidence they’d need in Bernie to loan him money enough to head up a consortium. They’d then undoubtedly dumped Bernie out on his flaming red ears. To wit, Bernie wasn’t going to get the bread he needed to launch his lifetime dream of being the King of the Tools.

  In one fell swoop into Huntington’s arms, she’d trashed Bernie’s dreams of becoming wealthy beyond measure at the head of a tool consortium. At the thought of Huntington, she wanted to simply run out into the night screaming his name in all directions, letting the world know how one woman felt about him.

  She wouldn’t go to Huntington straightaway--nor would she call him tonight. If she did, she was certain, it would result in the two of them dropping whatever they were doing and coming together in an embrace out of which would most certainly arise the very sin Huntington was trying to avoid, and had avoided thus far, for a lifetime, preferring instead to save himself for the consummation of the sacrament of marriage, should that be God’s will, or for the priesthood, should he be led, finally, in that direction.

  It was clear to her, ever since she’d received the initial love letter from him and later, the Robert August surfboard, that Huntington’s feelings for her were real--real enough to be a sign from God that his true vocation would be found in marriage. However, having received the note and the surfboard too late--after she’d vowed to Bernie to attempt the necessary repairs on their ruptured union, she’d been forced to deny her passion for Huntington, to forego the kind of happiness she’d heretofore never thought possible, in order to serve the twin masters of marital duty and obligation, with their attendant driving forces of guilt, lovelessness, compromise and humiliation--forces masquerading under the guise of a noble self-sacrifice for ideals which, when tested, evaporated like the morning dew.

  “Dr. Black’s exchange,” the voice said.

  “It’s me, Beckie,” she said. “Bernie was only using me to look good to the Japanese Investors--when I got the surfboard, I didn’t run to Huntington because I’d already renewed my vows, but now that it’s all over the papers, and Bernie has been discredited with the Venture Capitalists, Bernie’s showing his true colors again--the marriage is over and Huntington is free to choose me over the priesthood.”

  “Hold please,” the exchange said.

  “Beckie?” Dr. Black’s voice. A little annoyed, the bizarre background noise suggesting Black was right in the middle of a round of watching Regis sweat a male contestant who believed that a million dollars would square his position in the universe just a tad truer than it was before.

  “Bernie’s through with me,” Beckie said. “He was only using me. When he was trying to put his consortium together, he divorced me so he could pledge all our assets, but when his main bank dropped him he had to turn to some high-rolling Japanese investors--apparently, they have a thing about Principle’s in the deal living honorable lives or something, and when they saw me in the papers with Huntington, they told Bernie to go out and do hara-kiri. I’m free. I’m trying not to call Huntington because I think our relief and passion might lead to something we both want to wait for.”

  “Wait a minute,” Black said. There was a significant pause, during which Beckie could hear the wah-wah-wah of the show’s surreal, anxiety inspiring refrain.

  “I can’t believe it,” Black said. “The guy just blew the $200 dollar question--everybody knows it’s Little Boy Blue who blows his horn, not Little Jack Horner! What an idiot! Is there no hope for this world?”

  “Dr. Black, did you hear anything I just said?” Beckie said.

  “Yeah,” Black said. “You’ve got a toxic husband--what’re you going to do about it?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me,” Beckie said.

  “Remember that shark?” Black said. “The one we saw biting the head off that seal at the pier?”

  “How could I forget?” Beckie said.

  “Do that,” Black said, and hung up.

  Beckie considered this advice while she relit her cigar. Black had seemed annoyed, obviously more interested in returning to her game show than working with a patient. To console herself for the way Black had rudely hung up on her, she removed a few cubes from the bin in the fridge and crushed them in a steel pot with a heavy marble rolling pin reserved for the purpose before half-filling the first jelly glass she could grab with the crushed ice and couple of ounces of a nice clean single malt scotch. It was really the only beverage that went with a good cigar.

  Back in the living room, she emptied out the contents of the package Lauren had messengered to her and idly leafed through the investigative agency’s information on Bernie, Ira and Leah. The information quickly shocked her--although it did not specifically make the connections the data presented, much of the information, by its very existence, was absolutely damaging to all three parties--she was no financial wizard, but she needed no accountant to confirm something she had but mildly suspicioned a day before--as regarded the complete stripping of all assets from her--Bernie, Ira and Leah were all in it together. And for the oldest possible reason: pure and simple greed--they’d pooled their assets to pledge their way into the consortium and thus share in the spoils together--all without so much as a “howdy-do” to her.

  She reached into the straw purse and took out her gun. Leah and Ira would be home by now--it would only take a bullet apiece in their case--neither one of them were in what anyone would call great physical shape. That would leave three for Bernie, which she’d deliver personally when he arrived back at his silver Jag which even now sat waiting for him in the long term parking at LAX. By the time it all got sorted out, she’d be calling Huntington from a nice safe little non-extradition treaty country, the kind of place that still put the little parasols in the drink.

  The statue of Our Lady caught her eye once again. Our Lady had watched the brutal butchering of her precious Son without retaliating. Beckie put the gun back in the bag. Perhaps the enlightened people were right. Violence was bad karma.

  “Okay,” she said to the Virgin, this time deciding to kneel before starting in, for the third time on her as-yet incomplete saying of the rosary.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace,” she said.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Chapter 41

  In L.A. nobody opens the front door at night. Beckie peeked first through the curtain which allowed her a view of the wide front porch and front yard area. Parked in the driveway directly behind the Roadster was a black Ford Expedition. The man on the porch, likewise dressed in black, was nobody she knew, but he looked like Central Castings idea of a hit man. Taking the gun from her handbag, she approached the front door warily and spoke to her visitor through the intercom.

  “Yes,” she squawked.

  “Beckie?” he said. He knew her by her first name--which could be either good or bad.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “I’m a friend of Huntington’s--I’ve got a message for you.”

  Her mind flashed back to the note she’d received from Huntington. What with
the tri-party conspiracy so recently launched by her husband, and what with the venting of his considerable rage all the way from Japan, Beckie was not in a mood to trust.

  “What’s the message?” she said.

  “He told me to drop by and ask you for your “final answer”.

  She recalled Huntington’s love letter. After you receive the present, you will hear from me a final time, to ask you, as Regis likes to say, “Is that your final answer?”

  Beckie opened the door to find a middle-aged man in a backwards collar--a priest.

  “I’m Father Larry,” he said. “I drove all the way out here from Tarzana--may I come in?”

  Later, after Father had enjoyed a cup of fresh-brewed coffee--during which time he’d had a chance to hear Beckie’s story--the two spent a few minutes throwing a white plastic ball back and forth, a game which delighted Mr. Boopers to the point where he ran himself into a ragged, wheezing frenzy.

  “That’s a real feel-good pooch you have there,” Father said.

  “Mr. Boopers saved my life,” Beckie said. “I at least owe him a meal and a place to sleep for the remainder of his life. But I admit I’m starting to like him just a little.”

  “He’s got a big heart for one so tiny,” Father said. “I’m surprised the little fellow didn’t bark when I knocked.”

  “He’s a weird dog,” Beckie said. “He’s a lousy watchdog, but he’s got a fair measure of courage--the other night, he barked at a Great White over in Paradise Cove.”

  “Maybe he was born near the gulf where there’s a lot of sharks,” Father said.

  “So you’re Huntington’s priest,” she said, tired of the chit-chat and desiring to move the subject area a little closer to the affairs of her heart.

  “I’m just a priest who happens to be a friend,” he said. “Huntington and I go back aways. We became acquainted during my tenure with Saint Pat’s in New York.”

  “You know, Father,” Beckie said. “When I saw you standing on the porch, I didn’t know but what you might have been a hit man sent here by my husband. I was very afraid.”

  “I’ll admit I was a little nervous myself,” he said, “what with you standing there with the gun in your hand. And the way you had every light in the house on, as though you were some sort of lunatic--I’d begun to wonder if this wasn’t one of those moments which, when you add up all the little details, spells out the last scene at the end of your life. I thought for sure God was getting to roll the final credits. I almost expected to hear the music start to play.”

  “You want to know if I still want to marry Huntington,” Beckie said. “The answer is Yes, but I’ve waited to tell him out of fear that if we’re alone together, we’ll be unable to control ourselves--we’ve got a certain chemistry together. And I may as well say, it concerned me to think I’d be stealing someone away from their true vocation as a Catholic priest.”

  “You’re a Catholic?” Father said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I was afraid you’d ask me that--I was raised a Catholic, but I married outside the church. I haven’t been up for Communion for twenty-nine years. That’s another thing that bothers me--Huntington and I want each other--but is that enough? We’re completely different people--he’s an active Catholic and I’m not, and he’s young enough to have children, and I’m forty-nine--for me, it would be a real stretch to bear him a child--and I mean a real stretch. Plus, he’s never been married before, and I come with a lot of baggage. I’m not even free to be married! You know, Father, this is an unholy tangle--I think, deep down, that’s why I’m afraid it won’t work. I fear that on some level, I’ll just be using Huntington to escape my problems with my present husband. What do you think, Father? Should I reach out to Huntington, or should I stay away? It would probably be better for him if I stayed away. Father, before I can give you my final answer, I need your advice. I need to make sure that, in spite of my best intentions, I’m not guilty of simply acting out the role of the scarlet woman who is diverting a holy man from his destiny.”

  “My advice to you is to give no final answer,” Father said.

  “But Father, I thought you came here to get my final answer,” she said.

  “You’re not ready to give it,” he said. “For you to make a commitment of this magnitude at such a time in your life would hurt you more than help you. You’ve asked me my advice, that’s it.”

  “But what will I do? Huntington is waiting.”

  “Let him wait,” Father said. “You’ll have to risk it--if you truly love him, you’ll stay away from him until you’ve searched your heart, reconciled your present marriage one way or the other, and reunited yourself with the Church once again.”

  “But what if Huntington interprets my refusal to give him an answer as a rejection and enters the priesthood? I’ll lose him forever.”

  “Then you’ll lose him,” Father said. “But nothing is forever, except our life with God.”

  “Father, I’m lost,” Beckie said. “I don’t know what to do. What if Huntington can’t wait for me?”

  “There’s only one thing to do in a case like this,” Father said. “Trust God.”

  “But Father--I can’t!”

  “Why not?” he said. “Everything else you’ve trusted in up to now has been a bust. What choice do you have? Now if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time for me to go.” He handed her a card. “Call me if you need me,” he said.

  Beckie found herself confronting that awful place inside herself everybody superficially referred to as being alone--a place surprisingly easy to find in spite of the ten million souls surrounding her, a place where seeing life clearly was difficult due to an absence of inner light, a place where feeling anything at all was a matter, not of emotional discharge and release, but of finding her way in the dark, guided only by the rough edges of past regrets. Shouldering her disappointments, she wandered one last time through the trackless wasteland of the place she used to call home, turning off the lights one-by-one before at last collapsing on the couch under the weight of the darkness which pressed her inexorably downward into a troubled, but dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 42

  “Exactly how fast can you knock it all down and haul it all away,” Beckie said to the man with the big belly holding the clipboard.

  “Once we get the necessary permits,” he said. “The whole thing’ll take maybe four or five hours.”

  “How soon can you get started, assuming you’ll earn a sizable bonus for completing the job today?”

  “We have a man in the City Planning Office that’ll have the permit to us in maybe half an hour,” he said. “We do the permit process over the Internet. We could start after that--of course, you still have to move all the furniture out--how soon will the moving people be finished?”

  “There won’t be any moving people,” she said. “The job I’m requesting includes the removal of all the contents of the house, as well as the house itself.”

  The man rubbed the top of his head. “That sounds a little crazy, lady,” he said. “You just want us to scoop all your furniture along with the house and dump it someplace?”

  “You’re missing the whole point,” she said. “Which is how much money you’re going to make if you get on the stick and get it done before 5 o’clock tonight.”

  “Okay, lady,” he said. “By 5 o’clock tonight, this lot will be scraped clean as a whistle.”

  “Leave the trees,” she said.

  Beckie, after a troubled sleep, awoke angry and went straight to the Yellow Pages, locating quickly a company specializing in urban demolition and who, for a fair price, would remove forever from the face of the earth the house she and Bernie had shared together for twenty-nine years, along with its furniture and other appointments, said price including the complete removal of the large swimming pool and the filling in of the hole.

  That bit of business concluded, she returned Mr. Boopers to his place in the straw carryall, emptied the contents of the bedroom wall safe into the same,
grabbed, as an afterthought, the small statuette of the Virgin which sat upon her fireplace mantle, and proceeded to her Mercedes SL-600 Desert Silver Black Diamond Edition Convertible V-12 Roadster, which now had the top down and from the rear deck of which protruded absurdly the black surfboard, its tail fin waving proudly, said board which was previously manufactured from a block of polyurethane foam by Jacobs sometime during the 60’s surfing craze and which had once belonged to the legendary Robert August--the very same board he’d taken on his travels around the world in search of the perfect wave, the very same board of which she’d been introduced to on the day Mickey Dora, her first big crush, had enjoyed an exceptional day hanging ten at Malibu, the same board upon which, during a recent encounter with a very imperfect wave, was responsibly wholly for the swollen bridge of Beckie’s nose and the blackening of her right eye, said injury occurring to her nose after her attempt to ride its nose and hang five on the unwaxed, and therefore impossibly slippery surface of that nose, the nose which Huntington had waxed that she might never slip again.

  On the hands-free, she managed to raise Lauren.

  “Lauren,” she said. “Do you recall what Bernie did to me the other day? The seizure of my assets, the freezing of my bank accounts, and the stealing of my car, all in the name of Divorce?”

  “Yes,” Lauren said.

  “Bernie’s on his way back from Japan,” Beckie said. “But before he sets foot on U.S. soil, I want you to do the same back to him. That gives you maybe most of today, but not much more than that. How soon can you get started?”

  “I’ve started,” Lauren said. “Call me later and I’ll give you a progress report.”

  “There’s one more thing,” Beckie said. “I want you to deliver a message to Huntington for me--it’s very important that you tell him it’s my final answer. For personal reasons, I won’t be contacting him for awhile.”