The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Then we may be on to something. There’s an antiabortion ring we’ve been watching who have a dark red Chevrolet with Arkansas plates. It’s a stolen car. We’ve been letting them keep it because it makes it easy to track them. Stolen from a used car lot in Fort Smith, Arkansas. One of their favorite targets lately is bookstores. They stole all the feminist books out of a big discount store in L.A. We’ve been waiting for them to do something we can jail them for. We found the jacket, by the way. It was thrown away several blocks from here. A cheap leather jacket made in Taiwan like ones that are sold in jeans stores everywhere.”

  “Then it has nothing to do with Adrien’s murder, does it?” Nora Jane shook her head from side to side as she spoke. She was becoming terrified at last. “What does any of this mean? If these people scared Tammili and bombed our store, why did they do it? I don’t get it. None of it makes sense. Is there anything else you need Tammili to tell you?”

  “Not unless she can remember something she didn’t tell us yesterday.” The detective folded his hands. They were good hands, wide and strong and freckled. Another altar boy, Nora Jane decided, I cannot escape them anywhere. The Church. Its shadows are everywhere. Light and shadow, that’s all we know. The past, the past, the past. She saw herself going with her mother into the darkened sanctuary, her mother smelling of whiskey and cigarettes. She would have been better if she’d gone to AA meetings, Nora Jane decided, but then, they have AA meetings at churches, don’t they? Good and bad, in constant battle for the world. The goddamn antiabortionists, the fools. And yet, they call it into play. They force the issue, don’t they? I didn’t abort the girls and God knows, there was no reason to have them. I didn’t even know who they belonged to. Still am not sure. Of course we know. We know. Tammili is Freddy’s and Lydia belongs to Sandy and I fucked two men in two days and got pregnant like an alley cat. And that’s the past and I’ve been shriven for that a million times for sure.

  “What are you thinking?” the detective asked.

  “Are you a Roman Catholic?”

  “I was.”

  “Me too. Those groups make you think about it. They may be crazy but it works. It gets our attention.”

  “If they bombed our store they should be put in prison for the rest of their lives,” Tammili said. “They are trampling on our First Amendment rights.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Uncle Nieman.”

  “Are you finished?” Nora Jane stood up. The detective met her eye. Realms of discourse passed between them. Nora Jane was especially beautiful this day, with her high cheekbones and wide green eyes and her passion and her fear. She was lovelier now than she had been when she was younger. Lovelier than the night she met Freddy Harwood, when she tried to rob him with a wooden gun and ended up talking to him all night and crying in his arms. Freddy could never remember what they said that night. I am a creature of language, he had told Nieman later. But all I can remember is her face and the way she moved her hands when she spoke. There are Graces, I decided. And they have chosen this woman as their proof.

  Now the poor twenty-nine-year-old detective from the San Francisco Police Department was suffering that face and that voice and those graces. He stood up beside her and tried not to let it show.

  “That’s all,” he said. “The D.A. just wanted us to see if there was a chance we’d got it right about the car.”

  Nora Jane turned to her children. “You all go find something to do for a while. Your grandmother wants to take you shopping later. Did I tell you that? Do you want to go with her?”

  “Yes.” They looked at each other and giggled. They loved going shopping with their grandmother. Nora Jane and Freddy were contemptuous of malls but their grandmother Ann approached a mall as if it were a carnival. She had even let them ride a centrifugal-force machine.

  “Then go on and call and tell her you’re ready.” Nora Jane watched them leave the room, then moved closer to the detective. “Tell me more about this group of people from Arkansas.”

  “Actually, they’re from Utah. They have a stolen car with Arkansas plates. They’re dangerous people. If we could pin this bombing on them, it would be a help.”

  “I think it’s about Salman Rushdie. I don’t think it’s about Mormon sects. They wouldn’t bother to come to where our store is. They wouldn’t even know about that part of Berkeley.”

  “Nuts are everywhere.”

  “Then where is it safe to live?”

  “Not in this city,” he answered. “If you knew what I know you couldn’t sleep at night.”

  In the Los Angeles office of the Muslim fundamentalist group to which Doctor Hava Zouabi was attached as a spy and a terrified tool, they had called a meeting to discuss the telephone conversations he had been making in the last few days. “He’s beginning to think he’s a free agent,” Amir was saying. “The university people have spoiled him. He has forgotten the thirty million dollars our country gave them for their school. He has begun to believe they are interested in what he has to say. I think it’s time he went home before he loses his usefulness altogether. He made three phone calls from his office to special numbers. We had all the numbers changed, of course, but it was unthinking. We need a more attractive man in the job. He’s not presentable with that pockmarked face. It confirms their prejudices. I was thinking Mostapha might be better in the position.”

  “How could we explain his leaving?”

  “An illness. That’s easy enough to arrange.”

  “What of the bookstore people? Has there been any decision on Salman lately?”

  “Let Salman stew in his juice. Public opinion in Britain is turning against him. If anyone gets to him, of course, so much the better.”

  “Will we claim credit for the bookstore?”

  “Childish idea. It was bungled, amateur and messy. Abdel says it was a Christian group from Utah. Of no interest to us.”

  “What of the emir in New York City? It was his disciple who took the woman in the hotel.”

  “We will rescue them when the time comes. He’s an old man. It’s good for people to see they have no pity for him. We have made our point. They know we can reach them. The times of jihad will come. Two shipments from Cologne got through the airport. It all goes as planned. There is much we know. Much we cannot know. Allah be praised.”

  “Allah be praised.”

  Jason Hebert was in his office staring at a poster that read CONVICTION IS THE ENEMY OF TRUTH. It was covered with a fine layer of dust and he was thinking of getting up and wiping it off with his handkerchief when Freddy and Nieman were ushered in.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said. “We think we know who your intruder was. He’s part of a Mormon sect that broke off from the Church in Utah. Just another bunch of crazies who went to the hills to have four wives. Only this bunch has a leader who’s a real nut. Kid from Salt Lake City whose father left them early. His mother ran a halfway house for unwed mothers. All the babies given up for adoption. A couple of the girls committed suicide later. About the time he was nineteen he left home and started collecting followers. He’s a good-looking devil, a natural leader. We’re pretty sure it was one of them outside your house. Maybe him. But we don’t know why. What could you have done to get the attention of that bunch?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Freddy began. “We had a feminist enclave the day before Adrien spoke. They may have thought she was part of that. Her books were in the same window with all the feminist books. Could they have planted the device and it went off the wrong day? Or did they get Adrien mixed up with someone else? She was a feminist too, but that wasn’t the main thrust of her books.”

  “This crowd isn’t smart enough to know the difference, but killing women in hotel rooms isn’t part of their m.o. I’d have a hard time fitting that in. I think they’re doing peyote. I was around in the seventies. I can spot drug behavior. Each drug leaves a trail for me. I can smell it.”

  “What would I have done?” Nieman asked.
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  “Nothing. Bottled water.”

  “That’s right. He had the first filter system in Berkeley. So Adrien could have died for a mistake?” Freddy sat down in the chair facing Jason’s desk. “All of it could be a mistake. Just being in the public eye. Even being there can endanger someone’s life. That’s what we’ve come to?”

  “Technology allowed madness to spread,” Nieman said. “And yet, most of us would be dead without it. Bill Clinton is the last president who will ever give a damn about the poor, and his days are limited.”

  “Where is Sebranek?” Freddy asked. “We can’t find him.”

  “He’s with his son. We released the body. They are taking it to New York in the morning.’’

  “We haven’t heard from him all day. Then Nieman remembered what was in the window and we decided to come down here. Adrien’s books were in the window with everyone a Mormon sect would hate.”

  “We released a statement apologizing for picking up Johnnie Conrad. It’s not sufficient, but it will help.”

  “Was Johnnie at the hotel?”

  “No, the girl changed her story. She went out with him a year ago, once. She went crazy because she saw the body. No one’s blaming her for anything. She’s in bad shape.”

  “Many harbor madness waiting for an outlet,” Nieman said. He put his hand on Freddy’s sleeve. “Let’s go home, old friend. I’ve had enough of this day. We’ll go by the museum and look at the jade Buddha and try to stop the madness in our own hearts.”

  “Is my family safe?” Freddy stood up and faced Jason. Jason shook his head. It took him a moment to answer.

  “I feel they are. We’ll keep a police watch on you for a while. Until we can round up some of the Holy Rollers and question them. I don’t think you were the targets. I think it’s broader than that, unspecific.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I know.”

  “Thank you for the work you do.” Freddy shook his hand and then he and Nieman walked silently back to Nieman’s car and got into it and drove away.

  “Do you want to stop and see the Buddha?”

  “Not today.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “So am I, old buddy.”

  Sebranek was talking to Nora Jane on the phone. “I’m with Johnnie,” he said. “They’re baking cookies. Where do you buy a stove? Do you know somewhere that would have a stove delivered in a hurry?”

  “Sure. Call Sears. They’re the only ones who service them. Not that I’m prejudiced.”

  “I forgot. Freddy’s grandmother owned it, didn’t she? You wouldn’t have a number, would you?”

  “When are you leaving? What’s going on?”

  “We’ll have the service tomorrow in New York. I’m leaving tonight. Johnnie’s going with me. You wouldn’t know someone I could hire to come down here and work until he gets back, someone who might be good at fixing things and playing basketball?”

  “I don’t know where you are, Sebranek. Start at the beginning.”

  “I’m watching Johnnie work. I didn’t know he worked. I’ve never seen him work. It’s a light in the cave. I don’t want him to leave it to go with me but he’s insisting.”

  Which is how it happened that Freddy Harwood and Nieman Gluuk ended up spending the weekend overseeing the installation of a stove, a refrigerator, a washer and dryer, and two portable basketball goals in a warehouse in the heart of the most dangerous ghetto in San Francisco. Nieman brought along a young black reporter from the Arts Live section of the Chronicle. “He’ll get a story out of it,” he excused himself to Freddy. “You know I don’t use people.”

  Freddy brought Tammili because she insisted on going along.

  In New York City, in a church on Fifth Avenue, Sebranek and Johnnie and half the literary community of the East Coast were burying Adrien Searle.

  The Episcopal priest raised the cup, the organ played “Amazing Grace,” there was not a dry eye in the packed church. The body of Adrien Searle was now either completely irrelevant to the universe of particles and waves, or else, alive in Sebranek’s brain, or else, what had been Adrien was coiled deep within the eggs of her five-year-old granddaughter, waiting for some sperm worth devouring.

  In San Francisco Nieman was paying the pizza delivery man for twenty cheese and pepperoni pizzas and Tammili was setting the picnic tables with blue and white paper tablecloths.

  The redheaded girl was worrying that Johnnie might never come back and the Sears deliverymen were trying to remember they were being paid time and a half for Saturday work and forget they were in Soweto risking their lives.

  The youngest deliveryman finished his work on the refrigerator, then decided, what the hell, he’d do the plumbing for free. “If someone will take me home later,” he said to Freddy.

  “We’ll get you home,” Freddy promised. He smiled at the young man and approved of him to the tenth power, something the young man had never gotten at home.

  Which is how Milton House came to leave his job at Sears and grow his hair out to his shoulders and spend his mornings getting an M.A. in social work and his afternoons being in love with Johnnie Conrad’s girl and having his mind bent by Johnnie’s superior mind. But that is another story.

  Back at their house Nora Jane and Lydia were having lunch by the pool. They had made pita bread sandwiches filled with sprouts and chopped celery and tomatoes and green peppers. They were drinking iced Sports Tea and talking about perfume and ballet.

  “My grandmother would put a drop of perfume on her letters if she wrote to anyone she used to know when she was a diva,” Nora Jane was saying. “She didn’t have much money by then but she always had that perfume.”

  “But singing doesn’t ruin your feet like ballet does. Maybe Tammili was right to quit. I’m going to quit too. Aurora Morris’s big sister had to have her feet operated on because she got these bone spurs and Madame Gautier can barely dance anymore. If I was seventy years old and all I’d been doing was riding my bike I bet I wouldn’t be crippled like she is.”

  “No one cares if you take it or not. You can quit anytime you like.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Lydia put down her sandwich and went around the table and put her arms around her mother’s neck. “You say.”

  “I want you to be smart and use your brain and pass math and wear yellow once a week so I can look at you in it.” Nora Jane giggled. It was enough. Her child’s arms around her neck was sufficient reason to love the earth. The earth was not an evil place. Murder and pain and evil did not rule the earth. Children do, and loving them and watching them and listening to them grow. Amen.

  You Must Change Your Life

  In January of nineteen hundred and ninety-five the esteemed movie critic of the San Francisco Chronicle took an unapproved leave of absence from his job and went back to Berkeley full time to study biochemistry. He gave his editor ten days’ notice, turned in five hastily written, unusually kind reviews of American movies, and walked out.

  Why did the feared and admired Nieman Gluuk walk out on a career he had spent twenty years creating? Was it a midlife crisis? Was he ill? Had he fallen in love? The Bay Area arts community forgot about the Simpson trial in its surprise and incredulity.

  Let them ponder and search their hearts. The only person who knows the truth is Nieman Gluuk and he can’t tell because he can’t remember.

  The first thing Nieman did after he turned in his notice was call his mother. “I throw up my hands,” she said. “This is it, Nieman. The last straw. Of course you will not quit your job.”

  “I’m going back to school, Mother. I’m twenty years behind in knowledge. I have led the life you planned for me as long as I can lead it. I told you. That’s it. I’ll call you again on Sunday.”

  “Don’t think I’m going to support you when you’re broke,” she answered. “I watched your father ruin his life following his whims. I swore I’d protect you from that.”

  “Don’t protect me,” he begged. “Ge
t down on your knees and pray you won’t protect me. I’m forty-four years old. It’s time for me to stop pacing in my cage. I keep thinking of the poem by Rilke.

  “His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

  has grown so weary that it cannot hold

  anything else. It seems to him there are

  a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

  As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

  the movement of his powerful soft strides

  is like a ritual dance around a center

  in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

  Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

  lifts, quietly—An image enters in,

  rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

  plunges into the heart and is gone.”

  “You are not Rilke,” his mother said. “Don’t dramatize yourself Nieman. You have a lovely life. The last thing you need is to go back to Berkeley and get some crazy ideas put in your head. This is Freddy Harwood’s doing. This has Freddy written all over it.”

  “Freddy’s in it. I’ll admit that. He and Nora Jane and I have gone back to school together. I wish I hadn’t even called you. I’m hanging up.”

  “Freddy has a trust fund and you don’t. You never remember that, Nieman. Don’t expect me to pick up the pieces when this is over. . . .” Nieman had hung up the phone. It was a radical move but one to which he often resorted in his lifelong attempt to escape the woman who had borne him.

  Nieman’s return to academia had started as a gesture of friendship. Nieman and Freddy had attended Berkeley in the sixties but Nora Jane was fifteen years younger and had never attended college, not even for a day.

  “Think how it eats at her,” Freddy told him. “We own a bookstore and she never even had freshman English. If anyone asks her where she went to school, she still gets embarrassed. I tell her it’s only reading books but she won’t believe it. She wants a degree and I want it for her.”