“Do you lust for her, son?”
It seemed like such an old-fashioned word, lust. He had to translate it: Do you want to fuck her? “I’m not sure. I want to make her feel safe.”
The priest was silent. The walls of the confessional seemed to dissolve, and Reggie imagined the two of them beside a cold stream in a vast subterranean cave. He heard Father John scratch his scalp. “By its nature,” the priest began, “desire grows, feeds on itself, and becomes what it wants. The desire for God reaches for goodness, truth, and beauty. Desire in the wrong direction takes over our lives and the lives of others. It can destroy that which it desires.”
The fabric of Reggie’s slacks bound his thighs, and his head felt as if it were submerged under water. What was Father John saying? That he might destroy Laura? No, that wasn’t it, was it?
Father John interrupted Reggie’s backfiring synapses. “Have you told your wife about her?”
“No.”
“How is your relationship with her?”
“Who, the girl?”
“No, your wife.”
The word that came to mind was cool. Audrey Carol-Brooks was a driven, capable supermom, a paralegal going to law school at night, always after her sons to do their homework; she was a dynamo, one of those beautiful, powerful black women so sure of herself that in the early mornings, when she wanted tenderness, Reggie felt pressured, resentful that she made herself soft and available for twenty minutes a day and he was supposed to respond. But that, too, made him feel guilty because he knew she tried so hard and had sacrificed so much to be his wife, a sacrifice he neither understood, nor thought he deserved. “We’re okay,” Reggie said finally. “We love our sons. We are . . . good partners.”
“Do you have relations?”
“You mean sex?”
“Yes.”
“We make love . . . when we have time,” which, he realized, was not frequently. “I love my wife,” he added lamely.
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.” Father John paused to blow his nose—a real honker—then said, “The two of you need to set aside time to be together, to remind yourselves of why you married, to feel grateful for what you have together. The vulnerability that draws you to this girl is there in your wife as well. She needs you, especially when she is busy with so many responsibilities.”
The priest told Reggie to pray to the Virgin Mary, to avoid seeing the girl, and to come to mass every Sunday and bring his sons. He gave him ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys as penance.
Later, after he knelt in a pew in back and recited the prayers, Reggie felt better. Yet he realized he hadn’t been completely honest with the priest. Did he want Laura? He wasn’t sure. He thought about her a lot, especially since she’d skipped his last two classes. He wanted to watch her. He wanted to see her dance. He wanted to hold her in his arms and to stroke her long, dark hair.
He recalled how, after he telephoned her ex-boyfriend and helped her get a restraining order, she made this gesture that was almost like sign language: She rubbed her palms together four times, then placed her hands on opposite shoulders and slid them down her arms in a self-embrace until her fingers stretched toward her feet. It was so eloquent. It said, Thank you for helping me do what needed to be done.
As he remembered this, Reggie realized he was in love.
* * *
I have a cousin on the police force in East LA, so I know that the day shift starts at seven a.m. When I’m coming back with my fish, I often see one or two cruisers at the end of Marina Point. The cops inside drink their coffee and look out over the channel, watching the sun rise over the purple water. I can understand how it’s a nice way to start the day, filling their hearts with peace before they face a city that hates them. They never get out of their cars, so one morning, when I saw a black plainclothes detective climb out of a slickback and wander down the jetty by himself, looking around the sand like he’d lost his keys, I figured he was searching for clues.
Back when I first realized who the arm belonged to, I considered calling the police and leaving an anonymous message. But it wasn’t my business, and with my luck, they’d track me down, and the sculptor would tell them about the time he caught me watching her, and they’d think I was the one who chopped her body into pieces. Every day I scanned the papers to see if they’d identified the arm or found a suspect, but after they reported finding the second arm, there was nothing.
So I was surprised when I saw the same officer a few days later, talking to the crazy-haired sculptor. I knew from one of the early-morning dog walkers that the sculptor spent his summers in France. It looked like he was fixing to go. His tools were all locked up in the shed, and his half-finished sculptures sat around the sandy lot, looking like pilings from the old piers that burned down in the fifties.
The officer walked around the house slowly, pacing out measurements. He stirred the gravel in the driveway with the toe of his shoe and picked up something. Then he walked over to the Japanese boxwood hedge, right where I used to stand and look up at her kitchen window.
My first thought was that the sculptor told him about the Mexican fisherman he’d caught watching her, so I made back to my truck fast, cutting around houses, checking over my shoulder to see if the cop was following, but he wasn’t.
When I got to my truck, I circled back through Speedway, the alley by the beach. It was a dumb thing to do. If he looked, he could’ve taken down my license number. But at that time of day there’s lots of Mexicans in trucks going up and down the alley—gardeners, construction workers, plumbers—so I figured he wouldn’t notice me. Nah, that’s not true. I didn’t figure nothing. I just wanted to see what he was up to.
Now he was inside in the kitchen. He slid open the window and looked out over the bougainvillea toward the ocean. He had a face that looked like a scarred-up rottweiler, but you could tell there was something gentle about him. His expression moved me, sad and troubled, and I was surprised ’cause when you know someone’s a cop, or he wears a uniform, you don’t expect him to show emotion, just like you expect him to be honest and to know what he’s doing.
He stood there a long time. I could tell he was thinking about the girl. He picked a feather out of the bougainvillea, held it for a moment, then blew it into the air.
Someone called him from inside. As he turned, he glanced over at me in my truck. I don’t know if he saw me or not, or if his head was filled with images of the girl, but I decided to get out of there.
* * *
“Well, I’m glad you’re finally over her,” Scott’s mother said from the kitchen. She rocked a cleaver back and forth, mincing a mound of onions, cilantro, and serrano peppers, then shoveled them into a Japanese rice bowl.
Scott poured himself a gin and tonic from the wet bar and ambled into the kitchen. He leaned against the black granite countertop and drew a spider out of a spill of tomato sauce. “I thought you liked her,” Scott said.
“She was much too skinny. Weren’t you afraid of snapping her in two when you had sex?” The cleaver thunked into the butcher block, halving a hot Italian sausage.
“Mother, I wish you wouldn’t talk about her like that.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot. My thirty-year-old son is still a virgin,” she quipped, waving the cleaver in his direction.
Despite the fact his mother had married and divorced three times, she was not normally sarcastic and bitter. It was a state she wound herself into when she spent time with her ladies’ support group, women in their fifties, invariably wealthy, who, now divorced, felt cheated of youth and romance. They were in turns polite, amusing, and ruthless. They were the kind of women who might, on occasion, hire a gigolo and then boast about it. Scott’s mother called these women her girlfriends, although they were a long way from being girls and were as friendly to one another as rival bidders at Sotheby’s. Scott always noticed a change in his mother after one of her luncheons with the gals: She turned into a bitch. “What are you so mad about?” he asked.
/> “I’m not mad,” she said. Scott saw something stretch and snap in her like and elastic band. She put down her cleaver, and he caught a glimpse of the mother who once greeted him after school each day with milk and cookies. “I’m just tired.”
He expected her to say more and sensed dark secrets shimmering beneath her skin. Then she looked at him coldly, blaming him for being male, he supposed. She turned to dig out the veins from a pile of tiger shrimp.
His sister, Samantha, a short, athletic blonde, barreled through the kitchen to the refrigerator and grabbed a Diet Coke. She was one year younger than Scott and resented it. Or maybe she resented his status as the only son. Whatever her grudge, it seemed to Scott that she spent her entire childhood trying to get him into trouble. He wasn’t sure she’d outgrown it.
Samantha popped open the tab on the Diet Coke, took a swig, then arched her back, swishing her hair back and forth like a schoolgirl showing off her tresses, a habit Scott found irritating. “Have you asked him, Mom?”
His mother glanced at her as if suddenly becoming conscious of a distant barking dog, then resumed chopping tomatoes. Using that stagy clear-as-a-bell voice that she affected to ask about a broken vase or a scratch on her Mercedes, she said, “Scott, since you’re not using Grandma’s engagement ring, would you mind if Sammy wore it?”
Scott jumped, startled, wondering what she knew. Perhaps that was why she was acting so strangely. But she couldn’t know anything, could she? Would she care? “Oma wanted me to have it,” said Scott plaintively.
His mother dumped the shrimp in with the chunks of raw tuna and salmon. “She wanted you to have it for your wife. A lot of good it does anyone in your sock drawer. Why don’t you let your sister wear it?”
Scott looked out the French doors to the pool shimmering in the yard. His mother had been the first in the neighborhood to design her garden according to the principals of feng shui, with clumps of trees, rock groupings, and winding paths. The pool had a yin-yang mosaic in the bottom, which her Chinese consultant assured her was worth the twenty-thousand-dollar cost in the good fortune and harmony it would bring. Scott thought it was gaudy. Yet, he had to admit there was something soothing about the view. It tended to make him reflective.
That damn ring. What a nuisance. Laura hadn’t protested when he slipped it on her finger that night. She had no choice. He knew at the time it wasn’t the wisest thing to do and was bound to cause trouble, but he was so full of love for her, he wanted something of his to be with her. For a moment, it made her his.
He jumped at the sound of the cleaver, the blade bisecting another sausage. He turned and saw his sister staring at him. The fish smell seemed to be mixing with the smell of the women, and it was nauseating him. “The ring is the only thing I have to remember Grandma by,” he said. “Besides, I’m thinking of getting married soon and I want my fiancée to wear it.”
“Really?” His mother twisted her neck to look at Samantha, her expression sarcastic, her tone mocking, superior. “Sammy, have you ever heard Scott use the word fiancée before?”
Samantha leaned against the countertop, propping herself up on her elbows, breasts thrust forward, chin angled up. “Nope. I’m shocked it didn’t choke him.”
His mother peered at him curiously, then over at Sammy. “I’m glad my son bounces back so quickly from heartbreak. I wonder when he’ll let us meet this new girlfriend?”
Speaking about him as if he weren’t there—it pissed him off—a trick his sisters used to tease him, and his mother borrowed it whenever she was feeling nasty. At that moment Scott hated his mother, her face unnaturally wrinkle-free, her thighs surgically thin, her clinging blouse and capri pants, casual yet expensive, the costume of a woman thirty years younger. With effort, he kept his voice relaxed and pleasant. “She’s on vacation right now. I’ll bring her over for dinner one of these days, after she gets back.”
“Does this young lady have a name?” asked his mother.
Scott flashed over the names of ex-girlfriends he could ask for a favor. His mind went blank, and he couldn’t put a single name to any of their faces. “Really, Mother. I hate being interrogated like this. I’ll bring her over, and you can ask her as many questions as you like.”
“I hope she’s not a snob like Laura,” said Sammy, stuffing a slice of raw red pepper into her mouth.
Scott felt his neck telescope into his shoulders. He forced the air out of his lungs in a long hiss until there was no air left in him. He breathed deeply, struggling for control, like a man without arms treading water. “Laura wasn’t a snob,” he said softly. “She was quiet, that’s all. Do you have to make a comment about everyone?”
He caught a malevolent glint in his sister’s eye. “Ha! She dumped you but you’re still in love her. You guys love abuse. You eat it up, don’t you?”
“Shut up, Sammy.” He stood clenching his fists, specks of spit bubbling at the corners of his mouth. Both sister and mother recoiled, chins tilting up, eyes wide, frozen like coyotes feasting on a carcass, alerted to hungry predators.
The motor for the Jacuzzi rumbled on. A blue jay squawked in the eucalyptus. A block away, a leaf blower whined and sputtered.
After several moments, his mother, cool and steady, went back to chopping tomatoes. “Well, Scott, until we meet this mysterious new love in your life, I want you give the ring to Samantha.”
His anger melted into a dull, throbbing boredom. Why did women become such bitches when they got together, ganging up to get their way, taunting and nagging until they broke him? All for a stupid ring worth what, a few thousand? He couldn’t wait to get out of there. He didn’t even care that his mother was making his favorite dish. “I don’t want Sammy wearing it. She ruins everything.”
“I bet he lost it.” Sammy was doing calf stretches on the step to the living room, which annoyed Scott. As if that would help her lose the ten pounds she complained about.
His mother arched her left eyebrow and stared him in the eyes. “Did you lose it, Scott?”
He seethed inside but kept his voice even. “No. Of course not. I can bring it over and show you if you want.”
She paused in her chopping, then smiled as if recalling something cute one of her children did when small. “Yes. Why don’t you do that.”
Sammy grinned smugly.
Seafood paella or not, he couldn’t take any more. He wanted desperately to leave, but knew if he did, he’d be starting a family drama, a battle of wills. A war he could never win.
He grabbed two Heinekens from the refrigerator and went into the garden to wait for dinner.
* * *
As Reggie Brooks walked around Laura’s empty apartment, he saw no evidence that a crime had been committed there.
The place hadn’t been cleaned yet, and there were dusty outlines where furniture had been moved. The sculptor who rented to Laura said that she had flown back east to care for her mother.
“You talked to her?” asked Reggie.
“No. I noticed she was gone a few days. Then her boyfriend came by to move her stuff into storage. He said that Laura wasn’t sure when she’d be able to return and wanted to give up her apartment. She had asked him to take care of things.”
“You mean Scott Goodsell?” asked Reggie. He recalled printing the name on the paperwork for the restraining order, how incensed it had made him.
“Yes. He’s the only guy I ever saw her with.”
“You kept track?”
The sculptor gave Reggie a withering look, then harrumphed, his thick mustache vibrating as he exhaled. He said he’d be up front if Reggie needed him.
The floor of the foyer was white marble. The air smelled of new paint, which seemed odd. But then Laura hadn’t counted on her mother getting sick, so it wasn’t unreasonable to think she had recently redecorated. Near the baseboard, Reggie noticed tiny dark splatters showing through the new paint. Probably mud she’d missed, then painted over.
In the living room, he discovered several sliv
ers of glass between the floorboards near the balcony. He pulled on a plastic glove and brushed the minute pieces into a small offering envelope from church. They made good evidence bags in a pinch.
He found a broom in the closet off the kitchen and swept the bedroom. In the pile of dust and sand, he recognized Laura’s long dark hairs. There were short coarse hairs as well. It gave him an odd sensation to imagine where those came from. He picked up a small yellowed strip of paper from a Chinese fortune cookie. A wise man turns adversity into his fortune. He imagined her long fingers breaking open the cookie, reading the fortune, then, in a vague desire to hold on to the thought, slipping it into her pocket, and later, the paper, forgotten, floating out of her jeans as she undressed, hiding in the dust beneath her bed, lying there as she slept.
He brushed the hairs and the fortune into another offering envelope.
The bathroom was the cleanest room; sparkling even. The tub looked like it had never been used. She must be a shower person, he decided. He imagined her graceful silhouette behind the white shower curtain, arching back, massaging her scalp, steam billowing over the top. He turned and looked at the floor. He noticed green garbage-bag fasteners under the sink, the heavy-duty kind, six stuck together as if they had fallen out of the box when she pulled out a bag. He slipped them into an envelope.
On the balcony off the living room, Reggie noticed the lattice that held up the bougainvillea was broken in spots and loose, as if someone had climbed it. He recognized it as the cheap stuff Audrey bought at Home Depot, not made for scaling or even for heavy vines.
He walked into the kitchen and stood over the double sink. The view of the channel was incredible. Catalina Island, faint blue and misty, sat on the horizon. Reggie imagined her standing there eating strawberries, dipping them in whipped cream, first licking the cool, slippery foam, then wrapping her tongue around the tart sweetness of the berries, dreaming about love on an exotic island, Jamaica or Madagascar, folded into the arms of her young black lover, his dreadlocks tickling her neck . . .
Good Morning, Darkness Page 5
