by Susan Braudy
“I’d give anything for an Alka-Seltzer.”
She dug in her bag again and came up with silver foil packets of codeine and aspirin powder. “Maybe he’ll listen to you.”
I smiled weakly at her in gratitude.
Behind the wheel of the red car I dissolved two packets in a Perrier and drank the foaming brew. In Paul’s glove compartment I found a crushed box of Kleenex, a striped necktie, and a broken flashlight. I careened into the wheat field before I got the lights on. My favorite yellow cat was huddled on my pocketbook in the back seat. She was fat and sultry, a Mae West. “You get around, Mae.” Suddenly I giggled thinking of Mae West’s line “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”
Then the road twisted and my headlights faded. What in the world would I say if I managed to find him? I was driving into solid black. “Courage,” I said to Mae. It wasn’t exactly my style to go chasing him like a cop in a Mack Sennett movie.
I swerved off the road and half the car rolled up over a rock. I bravely shifted into reverse, and my favorite Clark Gable line popped into my head. “With enough courage,” he said to Scarlett O’Hara, with his special smile creasing his cheeks and twinkling into his eyes, “you can even do without a reputation.”
A crescent moon hung in the navy sky. I switched on my high beams and began to whistle. When I saw a moving vehicle ahead I speeded up to eighty miles an hour. But it was a small pickup truck full of singing Arab teenagers. I passed it, undaunted, high off the codeine.
Small headlights came down the road: he might be heading back. But when the car flew by me, I saw it was an old Volkswagen.
Then I pictured him on a beach waving goodbye from the deck of a seaplane. Maybe he was headed to New York. I would beg him to take me along. I giggled—I guess I like chasing him, I thought, remembering the way I had run up Madison Avenue.
“Well, at least I know how crazy I am,” I said aloud.
After another hour, I found the turn for the small port town. The pulse in my temple hurt worse. A light rain tickled my face and arms. I didn’t dare take time to tinker with the folded convertible roof. I pulled onto a sandy flat and swallowed more foamy aspirin.
I left the lights on when I loped barefoot into a field of low grapevines to pee. Lucky I had the Kleenex. My mother’s Philadelphia bathroom rules ran deep. I plucked several tart berries and sucked their seeds while I drove through the first streaks of sunrise flaring all around me like somebody had turned a gigantic luminous pink bowl over my head.
I kissed the map hours later when I hit the outskirts of the town on the black-beach side of the island. “Not conclusive, Mae, but cheering,” I said. Her marble eyes stared at me. “I’m going to find him and it’s going to be a hit movie.”
I giggled, wondering what Michael would say if he could see me now. He’d have to be impressed with my determination. Of course, he would fire me. I was disobeying his orders. On the other hand, if I got Jack to go back and finish shooting and the picture made money, I’d get a raise. I’d probably get Michael’s job.
“It’s the codeine talking,” I told Mae. I was passing a curving row of stone houses in the town. A boy was pedaling an old heavy bicycle like kids when I was young. “Seaplane?” I asked him. He just stared. I made flying motions. He stuck his thumb over his shoulder down the empty cobblestone street. I shifted gears and went a block downhill. The port was filled with bobbing sailboats, painted motorboats, tugs, and fishermen folding nets and climbing masts to tie back sails. In the gray sky a group of white seabirds circled a black rock jetty like a mobile blown by a friendly wind.
I blinked my eyes with pleasure. Then I drove along the wharf filled with people. A street vendor was pushing a tall glass cart uphill away from the sea. I pointed at his pile of small fish in dark gold skins, and held out a palm of coins. He picked a few up. I tore one fish open and wolfed it down, handing Mae a large chunk. It tasted sweet. Then I coasted down to the water’s edge, smelling the pungent odor of gasoline and Gauloise cigarettes.
I parked in front of an old man sitting on a hand-carved stool. He was sewing a fishnet onto a metal bar.
“Seaplane?”
He shrugged. “Hydrofoil?” I knew he understood me. He looked slowly out to sea. I followed his gaze, staring horrified into the bright blue. “Too late,” he said.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I probably missed him by one hour.”
Tears smarted my tired eyes. Confused, I walked down the coastline past hundreds of boats. I passed my car and heard something that sounded like a schmaltzy Viennese string orchestra start up on an old radio.
I stopped short in front of a spinning propeller. A huge silver hydrofoil sat between two bobbing sailboats. The old man had to be wrong. I teetered up the gangplank to the hydrofoil across a dark piece of deep water. The propeller blades looked bigger than my living room. I strode across the white deck to press my face against a window. Two men sat playing dominoes in a dim saloon. I rapped on the window.
The man coming out had dark eyes and a familiar wiry frame like a New York Jewish intellectual. He wore a turban and his huge black mustache seemed to be hiding the upturned corners of his mouth.
“I’m looking for a friend who’s dropping me in Tel Aviv.”
His accent was Israeli. “Nobody mentioned a girl. Everybody’s chiseling fares.”
“It’s my husband,” I improvised wildly. “We had a plan to meet here and I got a flat tire on the road. I’m very late.”
“Hold it,” he said, walking down the gangplank, “this doesn’t add up.”
“He has a terrible cold. We’re on our honeymoon, you know.” I trailed him down the coastline to another large gray hydrofoil. He grinned and beckoned to me. I was still in business.
I made my way along the varnished deck of the hydrofoil. A sea gull cawed above me. I suspected he thought I was a fish. I peered inside the small round window. There was somebody lying in the dark under a mountain of coats. I wiped at the splashed window.
My heart pounded like the sound track of Zulu. I’d know him anywhere. I fumbled around, feeling the smooth wood of the saloon for the door, focusing my eyes in the dim light. He was dozing on a couch, his lips parted. The paneled space was the size of a bathroom. I tiptoed to his side and gasped. He’d hacked his hair off into a sloppy crew cut. His beard was gone, with fresh razor cuts showing on his pale cheeks. “Oh, no,” I groaned. What a mess. His ears were red, probably infected. I leaned against a round life preserver on the wall. The wood-paneled room smelled like a beach house closed for the winter. I didn’t know what was worse: he didn’t look dashing, he didn’t look like Jesus.
I knelt down to look at his full slack mouth. He sighed in his sleep and I felt the same shock on my body as when he first brushed his mouth on my forehead six years ago in that hotel room. He was seductive and grandiose. With his fingers he combed my hair off my forehead wide around the pillow. I tensed against the sensation that he was too much a stranger to be biting my earlobe. I remember him whispering, “I’ll stop anytime you want, but nothing that feels this good could be all bad, now could it?”
For the next half hour I watched my body respond like a performing acrobat. My knees lifted under his chest, we thrust at each other’s wet smooth flesh, panting, accelerating, his head bobbing, his hair tumbling forward. But I was in shock. “How is it?” I gasped. “Is there anything I can do?”
He stopped high above me, his lower half invisible, and I realized why sea horses and mermaids were beautiful. “The day a lady has to worry about me.” I shut my eyes. We didn’t know each other well enough to exchange sentences about what we were doing.
Now the hydrofoil was vibrating with ragged noises. He shifted, opened one eye, and scowled up at me. “Still following me around?” His nose was running. He looked miserable, and I understood it. Anita had destroyed him. The shoot was a mess. His Welsh girlfriend didn’t want him. But dammit, nobody mopped my brow when my marriage w
ent to pieces. I just sat at my desk in the city room, pounding the typewriter and popping Valium. This man needed more help. I tucked a sleeve of a red-checkered coat under his chin. He was trembling like he was chilled.
“You look awful,” I blurted.
“Don’t be shy,” he said harshly. But I heard relief in his voice. His eyes were fastened on me like he was scared I’d disappear.
“The cross looks empty without you.”
“I am never setting foot near that woman again.”
I took another tack. “Where’s this boat headed?”
“Tel Aviv.”
“Where are you going?”
“Never mind, Ms. Mogul.”
I pulled his billfold, car keys, and glasses out of my pocketbook and dangled them in front of his face. “Nobody runs away without their stuff.”
“You take the cake,” he said, coughing. “How the hell’d you find me?”
I waved the map.
His eyes closed. “You still chasing screen images?”
I got angry. “At least I’m not an aging satyr who’s too burned out to work.”
He didn’t answer. I buried my face in my hands and started crying soundlessly. It was exhaustion and relief.
“You win, my life sucks, my work sucks. I don’t know why I do it.” He tried to sit up, grabbing coats that were slipping to the floor.
I watched him between my fingers, listening to the creaking boat until I calmed down. I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry, I know you’re really upset about your girlfriend. How bad is it?”
“Why tell you?”
“Come on.”
“I don’t know how to tell it like a story,” he said, immobile under the huge pile of coats. “I saw her, I flipped, I pursued her, she was married, she resisted, we got together. She ran back to her husband twice before she said she loved me. I ran away and then she got unhappy. Then I kept chasing her until she got tired of me chasing her.”
“It feels terrible?”
“I wake up at three a.m. and watch the sun rise and I feel like I failed at living my life.”
I didn’t know what to say. He sneezed. “She sits on that cliff in Wales comforting me and running up hundreds of dollars of phone bills until it’s morning.”
“She cares for you.”
“Not enough to marry me, and I don’t blame her. She’s doing Juliet with the Royal Shakespeare, and the only thing she likes about Los Angeles is sleeping on the beach, and she really hates the way I am with women.” He chuckled weakly.
“How’s that?”
“Too curious.”
I let that go. “Is she the first person you wanted to marry?”
“I proposed to four ladies,” he grunted, “and my timing is fucked; every time I wanted to, they didn’t.”
“The pursuit of loneliness,” I pronounced, sitting gingerly in the damp leather chair. “You’re a smart guy and everything. You don’t really want to marry anybody or you’d be able to arrange it.”
“You’re probably right, you’re right about everything.” He sounded only a little sarcastic.
“Not in my own life.”
“How long were you married?” Our voices were low. I thought back all those years over the sound of the soft slapping waves. The memories hurt.
“Ten years. We grew up together. I met him when he was sixteen. He told me he was so smart he had total free will. I decided then and there to marry him. We argued for hours. I took my glasses off to show him I wasn’t a bookworm.”
“God, I wish I was that sure of something.”
“Me too.” I walked unsteadily to the little round window. I didn’t like talking about it. The sun had gone in, and the sea was gray and endless. “He told somebody I looked like a fish. I ignored it. I dated a friend of his for months to get his attention.”
“Why didn’t it work?”
“It worked for ten years, and then it fell apart because my career took off and we couldn’t admit things weren’t great.”
“What about sex?”
I felt sad. “We didn’t know anything.” I watched a sailboat disappear on the horizon.
“What about kids?”
I turned back to him in the small room. “I had things to do first. Now I’ll never have kids.”
“That’s hard; it’s like saying you know you’re going to die.”
My eyes smarted. Something relaxed in my chest. Words tumbled out. “Now it hurts because I lost the option.”
He waited for me to go on, while I listened to water gurgling and lapping. “I used to tell myself people had kids for the wrong reasons—like wanting mirror images of themselves and a successful-looking life. Now I don’t know anymore. Sometimes I think maybe I’ll marry a man with kids.”
“That’s still possible.”
I didn’t answer.
“Are you that unhappy too?” he said, his teeth chattering.
I sank into the clammy leather chair. “What’s this, twenty California questions?”
“When do you let your guard down anyway?” he asked quickly. “Please,” he added, “I need to talk to somebody smart.”
“Okay, I keep diaries,” I began slowly, “and when I was young I wrote when I was miserable about boys. But now I’m forty and I want to be happy. I don’t want to feel profound and sad.”
“Open the window,” he said. “Smell the sea.”
I unlatched the small porthole. We both inhaled the pungent wind.
“You still dreaming you died?” he asked abruptly.
My hair blew in my eyes. I swallowed against tears in my throat. “Well, aren’t you afraid of dying?”
“Only when I’m upset about my life.”
I nodded.
“Look at it this way, if you’re dead, you’re not here and you got no problems.” He widened his eyes and set his lips to give me his inward Jesus look. We both laughed too merrily.
“Hey,” he asked lightly, “how did we connect up anyway?”
I leaned my head out the window, embarrassed. The wind clapped high yellow sails on the next boat. Watch out, I told myself. No point in getting all involved with him again. Anita was right. He was dangerous and unavailable. “I’m surprised you remember me at all,” I said, wishing I wasn’t so curious to hear his version of our encounter.
“Who could forget?” There was a crackle in his voice.
“But you’ve been with lots of women.” I leaned my head out the window again.
“But you were dying to escape and you wanted to stay.” He laughed and kicked off the wool coats. He was wearing dungarees and a tee shirt, no shoes or socks. “Your conflict was so sexual,” he drawled.
I knew this kind of seduction. I picked up the coats and threw them over him.
“What was that Italian restaurant?” he asked, coughing.
“Nanni’s on Sixty-first Street.”
“What exactly happened?” He frowned up at the ceiling.
“I trailed you up Madison Avenue. I seduced you.”
“Hardly.”
“It was the last frivolous thing I did,” I said.
“Flattering.” He yawned.
I sat down and looked him in the eyes. “Why do people chase stars?”
“They want something too big,” he said wearily. “They think we got whatever they need.” He sat up on his elbows, his face close to mine. I felt his warm breath. “What did you want from me?”
I smiled at him helplessly. His eyes were red-rimmed. He had fever. We couldn’t sit here and reminisce forever. “Well, I remember it was the night after my marriage broke up,” I said hastily.
“Oh, right, you were in pain.”
“That’s what you said at the time.”
“When did you start feeling it?”
“Six months later. I almost died.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” he muttered. “That’s the breaks. Go on.” He sneezed three times. “Tell it like a story.”
“Well, I was eating p
asta and my date was doing all the talking. And then you sat down at the next table. What a view I had, and it was a complete accident. Like finding a hundred thousand dollars.” I paused again. “You looked like the movies to me.”
A smile twitched Jack Hanscomb’s mouth.
Encouraged, I continued. “So anyway, my date stopped describing his farm kitchen and asked how I was. I kept staring at you. I had goose bumps like I was a kid again near somebody who was the best fun.”
“Why not just go to my next movie?”
I smiled back uncertainly. I had to keep my ground. “Well, I wanted to connect to the famous king of charm.”
He raised one eyebrow sarcastically. “What was I up to?”
“Well, you were trying to get the actress you were with to say ‘fuck’ before a sex scene in your next movie. You said she’d be famous.”
He snorted. “What a bullshit artist. Who was she? She go for it?”
“Hook and line,” I said. “I watched for her name on your next movie credits. I think it was Angie.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“She was wearing a white miniskirt and her hair was black and falling out of combs.”
His voice crackled. “Oh, right, Angie. Keep going. What a memory you have.”
“Well, while my date is describing the water pump in his farmhouse basement I see you’re going to be eating pasta for twenty more minutes. I clutch my stomach and tell him about my toxic appendix, I pay my half of the bill and get in a cab. I say I am going right to bed.”
Jack snorted. It was great to hear him happy. “Was that the first time you pulled something like that?”
“No, no,” I lied. “Then I got the cabdriver to circle back and I ran into the restaurant before they gave my seat away. I wolfed down three rolls. I hadn’t been eating. You know women lose weight when they lose a mate.”
“Men too. Did I notice you?”
“No, you were still snowing the actress. I think she agreed to say ‘blow job.’ ”
“God, I’m great at business.” He laughed. “This is beginning to feel like an old-fashioned date.”
“Why?”
“Each person tells a few stories from their autobiography and then they fuck.” He laughed until he coughed.
