Among the Living (48 page)

She is happily married now and has a little boy and never thinks of you and is out of your reach forever
. . .

Suddenly there were little dancers everywhere. The doors must have opened somewhere, sending them out to their parents and nannies.

But they weren’t dancers. Mary was parked directly in front of a dance academy, but it was next door to a martial arts dojo, blocked by her car. Another kind of dance. The boys and girls, six and seven and eight and nine, spilled out in their gis, still all jacked up from the class, half of them kicking the air as they crab-walked across the asphalt, white belts or no belts, calling out things to each other, a happy little assault force.

The boy who was Mary’s boy was one of the last to leave. He came out and stood in the angled sunlight just outside the glass door. The dojo had been a retail store of some kind in its previous life. The instructor came out behind the boy, a serious hand resting on his low shoulder. He was a black man with a Navy SEAL’s body. Whatever he was saying to the boy, the boy kept nodding. By this age, living where he lived, living like he lived, the kid probably had five coaches in his life. He knew the coach drill.

The teacher dismissed the little warrior with a gentle hand on the back of his head. The black man’s palms were so white they almost flashed in the bright, angled light. The boy ran the rest of the way to the SUV, opened the back door, and climbed up and in, buckling himself in and pulling the door closed. The front passenger-side window came down. The sensei leaned in with some words for the mom.

It made Jimmy’s chest ache.

He followed them halfway home, halfway back to the hump of Tiburon, but he kept going straight when Mary turned left into the parking lot of a market. He’d had enough
obvious
.

He looked up in the rearview mirror. Had he caught her looking over at the departing Porsche? Following it with her eyes? Maybe he’d been tailgating or maybe she thought he had. He was wearing the blocky Ray-Ban Wayfarers from the glove compartment. That’s what he had always worn then.
Then.
Maybe she’d seen him in her rearview mirror.

Maybe she . . .

No, it was something simpler than that. It had to be.

He watched the day die in a place that was almost painfully beautiful, Mount Tam, Tamalpais, one of the world’s most scenic overlooks. At least if you loved California, if it spoke to you, the general drama of the coastline, the specific drama of San Francisco. The knob of the mountain was bare but for grass and outcroppings of smooth rock, hundreds of feet above the water, right at the Gate. The bridge was to the right. Though the sky was still full of light, the cars’ headlights were all on, on the bridge, three lanes north and three lanes south, as if the curbs were channeling opposing flows of bright lava. Or surging white blood cells.

Two ways to go,
he thought.

Southbound. He should be southbound. He should get the hell out of there. He turned and looked at the Porsche. With the riotous colors in the sky melting on the classic curves of the fenders, it looked like a model sitting there. The whole picture, and him in it, looked managed, staged, touched up.
A pensive, handsome young man and his automobile, the symbol of his success.
He should finish this cigarette and grind it dead on the ground and get behind the wood-rimmed wheel and turn the key and see the white light leap into the corners of the gauges, see the red-edged needle jump to three-quarters—plenty of gas to get well on down the road—turn the key further, hear the engine go, see the tach leap with the first punch of the gas. Hear and see everything that said
Go!
Everything that said leave the land of the dead before they all started coming to life.

He let the Lucky Strike burn all the way down, pinching it like a jay, staring at the car sitting there. He thought about the day he bought it. The car. He thought about who was with him. He thought about the ninety-year-old lady. He thought about the German tourist, about the wine-country wine she didn’t drink that day. He thought about the young man dying of AIDS, until he died stepping off the wrong side of the Golden Gate. Everything he thought was complicated. None of it was self-evident. The voice in his head—the voice of himself,
Jimmy Miles
—was a dozen voices. He was like Machine Shop. But with Shop, at least what was in his head was a debate. With Jimmy, it was ten points of view. Twenty. It was like being in a bus station at midnight listening to crazy people, all of whom think they know you. It was like being in a room with every version of yourself you’ve ever been, hearing every lying man and boy you’ve ever been turning on you.

Maybe
that
was the gathering he’d dreamed of that morning.

He came down off the mountain and went north. To Tiburon.

A few minutes before seven, the babysitter drove up to the big Craftsman house in a yellow Volkswagen convertible. She looked college age. She parked on a curve just below the house. She got out, locked the car, started toward the gate in the hedge, then remembered something and went back to the bug. A book. In case her boyfriend wasn’t home when she called. Mary’s husband answered the door, stood there in the frame. White shirt, dark pants, tie around his neck waiting to be tied. He was a good-looking man. Jimmy still didn’t know what his name was. He hadn’t seen him again since the first time out in the park until now. He had a glass of red wine in his hand. Even from across the street, Jimmy could guess the lines in the joke he made with the young girl about it.

Mary was upstairs in the boy’s room. Jimmy didn’t know his name yet, either. She was getting him into PJs. Or trying to. He was jumping on the bed, taking advantage of the special circumstances, a weeknight left with a sitter. She caught him in midair on one jump and hugged him with such devotion it might have scared him a little. There must have been a voice they both heard from downstairs, mother and son, because they suddenly looked at each other and made the same funny face and turned for the door. A second later, the light went out.

There were two ways off the tip of Tiburon, two ends of the same road, but one way was more direct than the other. Jimmy couldn’t keep himself from making assumptions about Mary’s husband, filling the blanks. He didn’t seem like the take-the-long-way kind of guy.

Jimmy guessed right; here came the X-5. Somebody had gotten it washed since the late afternoon. With the dark trees of Tiburon behind it on the dark street with its tasteful lighting, it was all black on black, glistening. Everything today looked like an upscale car ad.

Jimmy waited, let them get a ways up the road. He was parked in the lot of a closed gas station. The lights were out except for three moons of backlit white plastic, the signs over the pumps on the three bays.

Self Self Full, they said. Take your pick.

Jimmy was a little underdressed, a suit, no tie, but didn’t have any trouble crashing the do in the St. Francis ballroom. It was a fund-raiser for some charity, something with
Heart
in the name. He wasn’t on the list. He wrote a thousand-dollar check. Suddenly they knew him. A smiling woman who reminded him of Patricia Hatch from Graceful Exits pinned a red ceramic heart on his lapel.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Thank you,” Jimmy said. He was looking down at his new lapel jewelry.

“I mean in the auction,” she said.

It wasn’t hard to blend in, stay concealed. He had put on a black suit that morning and looked like every other man in the room, even the ones who’d thrown on a tux. You had to get close to see that Jimmy’s shirt was taupe and that he wasn’t wearing socks with the loafers. He hit the hosted bar for a champagne and crème de cassis, which is what everyone else seemed to be drinking, and found a shaggy arica palm to screen him.

Mary and her husband were at one of the front tables. With two other couples. Jimmy was across the broad room, with twenty tables between them, but he thought she looked his way once, fixed her eyes in his direction. But then someone in the foreground waved, and Mary waved back. So much for
I somehow sensed you were there
. She went back to her conversation with the man next to her. They were seated boy/girl.

Jimmy looked at her husband again. He was caught up in a conversation with the woman seated to his right. Or was pretending to be. Who was he? So far, Jimmy had held himself back from thinking too much on it. That was too high school, too. What difference did it make? He hadn’t seen Mary in almost ten years. So what if she still looked the same to him? Ten years had passed. She had found someone. What did he think, that she had joined some I-can-never-love-another order? What was that phrase that everyone used now? She had
moved on
.

She flashed a smile to the others at the table and pushed back and stood. She took her clutch bag off the table. She moved toward opened double doors, the exit.

It was risky business, but Jimmy moved out from his blind and started on a line that, if he kept on it, would intersect her path. She stopped to talk to someone. She was only thirty feet away from him. He stopped. If she looked any direction except straight ahead when she finished talking, they’d be face-to-face. It would make for a dramatic scene, if drama was what he wanted.

But she didn’t look his way, walked straight out the exit.

He went through another open door into the hallway. He looked for the doorway where she would have come out. There were restrooms there.

Jimmy ducked back into the ballroom, found another potted plant to meld with. And snagged another kir royale from the tray of a passing waiter.

Mary’s husband was impatient, maybe even suspicious of where his wife had gone. He kept up his end of the conversation with the woman next to him but still managed to look over at the exit every ten seconds. He did everything but check his watch.

Then he checked his watch. He got up, tossed the napkin in his lap onto the table. Jimmy realized he was older than he’d thought. Older than Mary. She’d be in her early thirties. Her husband was in his mid-forties.

He touched the shoulder of the woman he’d been talking with and said something and started off where he’d been looking all along, toward the exit.

And then she appeared in the doorway. She looked altogether innocent, refreshed, touched-up, relaxed. Until she saw the look on her husband’s face, coming toward her.

He smiled but meant something nasty by it.

When he got close enough, she said something to him.

It didn’t change the look on his face.

They were stopped beside one of the buffet tables, the dessert table. She said something else to him. Her tone had changed. She walked past him, or tried to. He took her by the wrist to stop her.

She said one word, glaring at him. Jimmy guessed it was probably his name.

He let go of her wrist.

Now it was his turn to say
her
name, as she walked away from him. She kept going.

Maybe it was the light, or that there was a tall ice sculpture behind him, but there was
blue
behind his head and shoulders, a blue edge.
Blue.

But when Jimmy looked away, at Mary, and then looked back at her husband, the blue was gone.

Was it too late to get
simple
back?

On his way, he looked them up on the seating chart out in the foyer, where he’d laid down his check.

Dr. Marc Hesse and Mary Hesse.

When he drove onto the plaza in front of the Mark Hopkins, to leave the Porsche with the valet instead of driving down into the garage himself, Machine Shop was there. Pacing. Scrubbed out of his silver paint.

He had a wild look in his eyes.

It was late. Jimmy was tired. When he got out, left the motor running, Shop was right there.

“Your girl killed herself,” he said. “Your Lucy.”

It was too nice a night for it, hot as hell, but clear. Jimmy roared up Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills in the huffing old Cadillac, fouling the air behind him. It was a cruising car, not a ride-to-the-rescue car. Or whatever it was that he was riding to. In his head he could still hear Mary screaming on the phone. It was uphill all the way, twisting and turning. He stuffed the gas to the floor, and the land yacht shuddered, downshifted itself into fir st. It was like an old surfer digging hard to get a fat classic long board up and over a wave. Strange, the things you think of when you’re thinking everything at once. Jimmy remembered a toast Ronald Reagan used to give, “May the road rise up to meet you . . .” He must not have meant this.