The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “One of the things they don’t teach ’em in the slam is social graces. He’s very resourceful—he’s had to be to survive this long. When he’s ready to talk to you, he’ll figure a way. I can’t believe there’s any harm in him where you’re concerned. Talk to him, child, you might just learn something that would change your opinion of him.”

  “I knew you were working a lesson into that conversation.”

  “Occupational hazard.”

  We heard a clatter of feet and overlapping conversations coming down the stairs: The church ladies had arrived.

  “My cue to leave,” I said.

  “Bye, McGuff.” He folded me into an embrace. “See you at Bartolinis’ party tomorrow?”

  I remembered to ask him to say a rosary for Mark while the hungry ghosts were being consigned back to hell. He promised that he would, but he would do so in the church.

  On the drive back to Berkeley, I tried to calculate how many times over the last few days I had been called honey, dear, or in Father John’s case, child. Just two weeks earlier, the senior network producer who was my boss had suggested that it might be time for me to have a little tuck taken under my chin and maybe a little nip in my eyelids. In the TV world where I worked, I was an old lady, over forty. Among my mom’s friends I was still a kid. The reality was both and neither, I thought.

  There was a good shoe store in Berkeley on Shattuck, catty-corner from Beto’s deli. I found a big enough space to park Mike’s pickup truck in a public lot off College, suffered through a few comments about the environmental irresponsibility of driving such a big vehicle—people in Berkeley feel quite comfortable about sharing their opinions—and walked over to Shattuck.

  I was in luck. The perfect pair of shoes—high-heeled silver sandals—was displayed in the front window of the store. At least, they were perfect until I tried them on. I could hardly walk in them, much less dance. I settled instead for practical, medium-heeled black sling-backs. The dress was long. Who’d see the shoes? Besides, I might actually be able to wear the black shoes again.

  The next errand on the list was getting in some basic supplies for house guests: eggs, milk, juice, bread. As I left the shoe store, I noticed that the ragged man—face shrouded by the hood of his stretched-out sweatshirt—who had been curled up on the bench in front of Beto’s deli when I arrived was now upright, pacing back and forth.

  Since the Summer of Love in the 1960s, Berkeley has been a magnet for street people. Old hippies, hippie wannabes, tokers and tweakers, musicians and purveyors of tie-dye garb and handmade bongs, professional panhandlers and various other folks who have slipped away from the bonds of the nine-to-five world, hang out in the city’s parks and set up stalls along the streets. Generally, they are a harmless and colorful element of local daily life; a street festival every day.

  The man pacing around Beto’s store, however, did not seem harmless to me. He seemed agitated, as if on the verge of something. I dialed Beto’s mobile phone to give him a heads-up.

  “It’s okay, Maggie,” Beto said. “Why don’t you cross the street and talk to him?”

  “Who is he?”

  “It’s Larry Nordquist. He’s been out there since yesterday afternoon. Someone told him you’ve been coming by, so he’s out there waiting for you to show up.”

  I’d only had a quick glimpse of him the day before, a face peeking around the garden gate. With his head covered, I did not recognize him. I was still staring at the pacer—Larry—when he caught my reflection in the deli window. I took a breath, steeled myself, and began to cross the street. He stopped dead, watched me for a beat or two. And then he took off running.

  Beto stood in the open deli door, watching.

  “What was that about?” I asked as I walked inside with him.

  “Larry is making amends to people he thinks he’s harmed,” he said, taking his place behind the refrigerated cases. “At any rate, he’s trying to.”

  It was just past eleven o’clock and the store was still fairly quiet, the lull between the breakfast and lunch-time storms.

  “Which one of the Twelve Steps is making amends?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Beto picked up two plates, piled salad greens on them and topped both with hefty scoops of curried chicken salad. “At least he’s working on his problems. When he came in yesterday to make amends with me, he told me he needed to make amends with you, too.”

  “Guess he changed his mind.”

  “He said with you it would be harder.”

  Beto handed the plates across to me. While he gathered forks, napkins and hard rolls, I carried the plates to a table.

  “I’m not sure he was sober when I talked to him,” he said, taking the seat opposite mine. “I don’t know if it was alcohol or something else, but he was on the verge of freaking out the whole time.”

  “Was he apologizing about that fight when we were kids?”

  His mouth was full so he answered by toggling his head back and forth, meaning yes and no. He reached around and pulled two bottles of bubbly water out of a drinks cooler.

  “What did he say?”

  Beto winced. “It wasn’t so much the fight, as the day it went down. Do you remember?”

  “Who could forget, Beto?”

  “Well apparently that’s what’s been on Larry’s mind. No statute of limitations on guilt, huh?”

  “What does he think connects the two?”

  “He told me that after the fight he was still plotting what he was going to do to us next when he heard about Mom. He was afraid we’d think he was the one, you know, who did that to her. So he took off for a while.”

  “I never thought Larry had anything to do with it,” I said. “Did you?”

  He flushed bright red. “When Dad told me Mom died, I thought I was being punished for fighting. Major bad karma.”

  “Ah, Beto.” I covered his hand with mine.

  He patted my hand and smiled gamely. “What? Don’t you like your lunch?”

  “Almost as special as your pastrami.”

  He laughed. “Then eat it.”

  After a few quiet bites, he said, “I got lots of counseling, Maggie. Your mom referred us to a child psychologist who wanted me to reason my way through my feelings. How do you reason your way through something like that? Father John told me that I needed to believe that Mom was happy in heaven, sitting next to God. That just pissed me off, because if she was sitting around anywhere being happy, I thought she should be with me and Dad in our house.”

  “Perfect kid logic.”

  “You know who really helped the most?”

  “Who?”

  “The Buddhist priest Mom got to know in the refugee camp,” he said. “He told me that Mom’s spirit was really angry because of the way she died. That made total sense to me, because, like I said, I was pretty pissed off, too. Then he told me I could comfort her by making fresh offerings to her every day. He told me she was always close by. That was the answer I liked the best, and that’s the one I picked.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “I asked Father John to say a rosary for my brother, Mark. But this year I think I’ll burn some offerings for him, too.”

  “Cover all the bases, Maggie.” He laid his fork across his empty plate and leaned back in his chair, content, smiling. One of his staffers came and took the plates away.

  “You know,” he said, “Mom started that Hungry Ghosts celebration in our backyard because when the refugees first got here after the war, none of the local Buddhist temples followed the Vietnamese lunar calendar. Think of all those ancestors left behind in Vietnam, all those people who died in the war and never had a proper burial. All those unhappy hungry ghosts who could come through and cause mischief if they weren’t taken care of. The problem was, the Gates of Hell open and close a whole month earlier in Vietnam than they do in China and Japan. Way too late to deal with pissed-off ancestors.”

  “There are Vietnamese temples around now,” I said. “But you still have t
he celebration in your backyard.”

  “Of course we do. That’s where Mom is.”

  The store was getting busy.

  “I’ll be sure to say hello to her tomorrow,” I said, rising. “Thank you for lunch.”

  He put his arm through mine and walked me to the door. “Talk to him, Maggie.”

  “That’s up to him.”

  As I walked back toward the lot where I parked Mike’s truck I glanced at a shop window and spotted Larry following me from across the street, staying several yards behind me. It was creepy. He had to know where I was going, so why dog my steps if he wanted to talk to me? I stopped and turned to face him. But he ducked into an open doorway and I wasn’t about to chase him down. Instead, I got back into the truck and headed for the closest supermarket for some staples.

  No one was behind me when I pulled into Mom’s garage and closed the door. I thought immediately about the person who had aggressively pushed on the locked back gate when Evie Sanchez was with me, and then the break-in. Both times, whoever it was had run away. Larry both times? Possibly. Father John said he was resourceful. Stymied by the locked gate and possibly the thorny bougainvillea on the trellis beside it, maybe he had found another entry point. But why? If he, or anyone, wanted to talk to me, he could knock on the front door.

  Before going upstairs to make beds for weekend guests, I made a circuit of the downstairs, taking care that every door and window was securely locked. When I left the house to meet Jean-Paul, I double-bolted the front door. Striding to the downtown BART station, my bag of evening clothes slung over my shoulder, I saw no one lurking, but I was still wary. I regretted turning down Jean-Paul’s offer to pick me up in a car.

  Funny, I thought, during all those years that Isabelle stalked me I remained completely oblivious to her and any peril she might have presented. So why, when no one was there, was I feeling as spooked as I was? It wasn’t Larry; I didn’t think he intended harm, even if it was he who broke into the house. Maybe it was all the talk about hungry ghosts. Or was it that I had been sleeping in my old bedroom for the last several days knowing that I had yet to pack away the monsters that lived under the bed? In any case, for the weekend, Jean-Paul and I would be using the room across the hall.

  When I came around the curve in the street and caught the first glimpse of Beto’s driveway, I knew what at least one source of my discomfort was. I had seen that damn picture of Mrs. Bartolini’s battered corpse.

  On an ordinary Monday morning, in a peaceful neighborhood, a monster had slipped through our veneer of safety and created mayhem. Was he still among us? Had he been inside my house the night before?

  Chapter 7

  Jean-Paul was on the sidewalk in front of the French consulate, watching for me. He came to meet me, smiling his shy, upside-down smile, holding his arms wide for me to walk into. I put my arms around him and offered my face for les bises, the kiss on either cheek, plus the third for close friends and lovers that is the standard French greeting.

  He was dressed for the evening in a beautifully tailored silk tux, minus the jacket.

  “You’re gorgeous,” I said. And he was.

  “I’ve missed you.” He kept his arm around my waist as he led me inside to the guest apartment where I was to change; I clung to him. Looking down into my face he asked, “All is well?”

  “All is well. You’re here.”

  While I dressed, he lounged across the guest bed, looking as gracefully elegant as a panther, talking to me as I transformed myself from bedraggled commuter to evening butterfly. Or dragonfly, as it were.

  Mom had sewn a piece of felt into the shoulder seam of the black dress as an anchor for the dragonfly brooch so that it wouldn’t pull the delicate fabric. Jean-Paul watched me engineer the placement of the brooch, as I had watched Mom do the same.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  “The brooch?” I said.

  “No, chérie, the woman who wears it.”

  I stretched out beside him, curling myself into the contours of his body. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I am afraid,” he said, kissing the side of my neck, “that if we don’t get up from here right now, we will not get up at all. And, sorry to say, we will be greatly missed.”

  We weren’t in a hurry about it, but we did get up, and we left. A driver named Rafael, who doubled as a security guard for the San Francisco consul general, ferried us to the de Young Museum of Fine Arts in Golden Gate Park. At the door we were greeted by the museum people, the staff from the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris that had accompanied several of the Matisse works, and the chocolatier who was underwriting the event as a way to announce the opening of his first American shop, a confectionary in the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero; commerce and culture wed.

  Before the invited guests arrived, we were given a brief tour of the reception preparations and the exhibit. The museum’s main concourse had been transformed to represent a street in Montparnasse, with faux sidewalk cafés and shops, and a street musician playing an accordion. The terrace at the far end of the concourse, where dinner would be served, had become a Parisian garden bistro, lit by candle light. As we walked through the special exhibits gallery on the lower level, I turned to Jean-Paul and asked, “Where is your San Francisco counterpart?”

  “Monsieur le consul general of San Francisco?”

  “Oui.”

  He lifted one shoulder, pretending to be studying a painting. “We did le swap. He is in Los Angeles tonight at the opening of a French film.”

  “Le swap, huh?” I said, putting my palm against his cheek and turning his face toward me. “When did this come about?”

  He made a moue, trying to hide a smile. “It took two days to negotiate with my colleague, but the deal was sealed day before yesterday, just before I called you. I thought an evening out would be a nice break for you. All I had to do was persuade my colleague that he would enjoy spending an evening with some film stars more than he would an evening with Monsieur Matisse.”

  “Et voilà,” I said.

  “Yep.” He kissed me quickly.

  M. Matisse’s opening drew an interesting collection of local luminaries, both political and social. I ran into an old friend from my days working at KQED, the PBS outlet in San Francisco. We had a good catch-up conversation while Jean-Paul took care of some official duties. He made a charming short speech in two languages, thanking various dignitaries for their support, and hanging medals around the necks of some of the people responsible for mounting the exhibit in furtherance of Franco-American friendship. Or something.

  As he escorted me in to dinner, he put his head close to mine and said, “There is a bit of a stir among the Centre Pompidou staff about your dress.”

  “What? This old rag?”

  “Exactly.” There was a mischievous glint in his eyes. “I was asked—accused might be a better word—of having the dress lent to you for the evening out of the couturier’s archival collection.”

  “And you told them?”

  “That I know nothing about such things, which is the truth.” We found our seats and he held my chair for me. “But, if you don’t mind, what is the provenance of la belle robe?”

  “I found it in Mom’s closet yesterday after I spoke with you. I hadn’t brought evening attire with me.”

  “Of course,” he said, taking his seat beside me. “She perhaps acquired it at the couturier’s shop during a trip abroad?”

  “Hardly,” I said. I looked over and saw the staffers with their heads together, watching us. I smiled. “She bought it at a rummage sale.”

  “What is that?”

  “Like a brocante.” A French flea market.

  He laughed, his gaze following mine to the little clutch of curious women. “Let’s tell them nothing.”

  Afterward, as we rode together in the backseat of the Town Car, headed across the Bay Bridge toward Berkeley and the work that awaited me there, I felt a bit like Cinderella after the ball. Except that Prince Charmi
ng was riding in the coach with me.

  Jean-Paul was quiet, looking out his window at the play of lights on the water below us. The Bay Lights installation was still up, twenty-five thousand LED lights illuminating the length and height of the west span of the Bay Bridge. It was dazzling, but I’d had a very bad night before and a very long day, and the car was very plush, so I was struggling to keep from nodding off. When Jean-Paul took a deep breath and cleared his throat, I came to a bit, wondering if perhaps I was about to find out why he had gone to all the trouble to arrange le swap. He broke the silence with a question.

  “Has your network come across with funding for your film in ­Normandy?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “My producer wants it, but the network hasn’t, or won’t, approve a budget.”

  “What is the hold-up?”

  “I think it’s me,” I said, patting the flesh under my chin. “Jean-Paul, I am old for television.”

  He folded my hand into his. “In Europe, a woman your age would just be coming into her own.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “if her own wasn’t a career in front of a camera.”

  He tipped his head slightly to one side, acknowledging that what I said could be correct. He asked, “Perhaps the issue is the cost of making a film abroad?”

  “Not if I can shoot the film I want,” I said. “The heart of the project will be conversations with my grandmother at the farm in Normandy during harvest, and then at her Paris home late in the fall. To keep the point of view at an intimate level the only crew I need is a camera­man.”

  “Guido?” he said.

  “Yes. Guido and I can do this one alone, the way we did field reports when we were still covering news stories together. Because we will stay with Grand-mère and we don’t need a big crew, the production costs will be minimal. But if we don’t get funding soon, we’ll miss the harvest this year. Grand-mère is ninety-three. Next year may be too late.”

  “If the network does not come through, would you go ahead with the film if an alternate source of funding could be found?”

  “If I could come up with both funding and a distributor I would certainly give it some serious thought,” I said.