Mystery Girl: A Novel (10 page)

“Really? Are you sure about this? What about your, um, partnership? What about mine? I mean, I said I knew she cheated but I don’t like
know
know. What if I’m wrong? Then I’ll be the cheater. If I just had proof!” Like all neurotics, tortured by ambivalence, I wanted sin without guilt, pleasure without price. But what if that was the essence of the pleasure itself, the savor of wrongness, its secret sugar, the truth that addicts and spree thieves and black-clad sex outlaws of Jerry’s generation understood, and that morosely married shmoes like me never would? “Though you do look great, very tempting,” I added, seeing her round bottom sway before me, a plum that life was dangling within reach. How many would I get? Do I dare to fuck a peach?

“You talk too much,” she muttered, then pulled up her shorts. Stepping back, I kicked over her bottle, which clattered down the steps and broke.

“Shit, my wine,” she said. The upstairs window opened and Milo’s head poked out.

“What the fuck’s going on out there?” he yelled.

MJ and I escaped through the alley and, her energy expended, she let me drive her home. As we pulled out, I glanced up at the lit window above Videolatry. A silhouette watched us. Jerry, I assume, arisen from his bed to see the fools depart. I dropped MJ off and watched while she shuffled meekly through her front door. Her girlfriend Margie waved to me from the open rectangle of warm light. Then I drove home, glad, I guess, that nothing had happened after all. Besides, Margie, MJ’s senior partner, was also a junior partner in a huge talent agency who rose at dawn to kickbox, all of which made her scarier than most husbands in this town. Instead I ate three Pop-Tarts and watched part of
Serpico.
As my eyes at last surrendered, giving up their watch, my receding thoughts floated back to the images of Jerry silhouetted in his window, of Maggie outlined in her door, and as if those passages were leading me on, I saw another doorway in another time and place: low sun gleaming through a hole in a huge dark rock. A shining beach. The sea. This reminded me of something I couldn’t name, but suddenly I felt happy, and I heard Lala laughing as the tide pulled me under to sleep.

24

WHEN I WOKE UP
I knew where Ramona Doon had gone. That picture I’d recalled, of bright light inside a black tunnel, a dark arch glowing in the sun: it was like the image that had been on Ramona Doon’s
computer screen, on her desk that night when I peeked. I had instantly forgotten it, or rather, I had not even realized that I’d seen it at all, until it returned, called forth from some subbasement of the mind.

On an impulse, I called Lonsky, but grew shy once he got on the phone, explaining in a roundabout way that I had suddenly remembered an image from Ms. Doon’s computer screen and that I thought she might have gone there.

“A rock?” he repeated. “With a hole in it?”

“Well a very big rock, a boulder. Picture a lit window in a dark building,” I said uncomfortably. I was describing Jerry again.

“Very well, Kornberg, I am picturing it. But how did you recognize this rock in the first place?”

“I’ve been there, more than once. It’s up north.” I paused again. “My wife and I go or used to go.”

“I see,” he said, interested now, but no more convinced. “I concede that you know the place. But there are any number of reasons why it might have appeared on her screen.”

“You’re right. It’s probably nothing. Just what I guess you detectives call a hunch.”

“A hunch? Kornberg, please. I’m trying to instill a sense of professionalism in you, if nothing else.”

“Sorry.”

“Now, let’s proceed rationally. You say you recovered this memory. Fine. But how and why? After all, we did a very thorough regression exercise when you were here. It’s curious that this new fact should simply arise unbidden. There must have been a trigger and this is the significant factor, not your so-called gut. What exactly were you doing when the memory returned?”

Now I was sorry I’d ever mentioned anything. “I was just falling asleep,” I admitted.

“I see. The hypnagogic state. Proceed.”

So I proceeded, as best I could, to tell him about the figure in
the window, and who Jerry was, and MJ and Margie, and how my wife and I used to go to Big Sur every New Year’s Eve to escape the manic-depressing party scene and cuddle instead among the redwoods and walk on that very beach before that hollowed rock in the rain. Finally, I ran out of words and trailed off, lapsing into an awkward silence.

“Hello?” I said. “Are you still there?”

Lonsky cleared his throat. “Leave immediately,” he said in his flat tone. “Do not tarry. I will reimburse your expenses. I suggest checking the better hotels first. Report in as soon as you can.”

25

IF YOU DRIVE LIKE
a maniac, you can get to San Francisco in five hours and change. Big Sur, which is about a hundred and twenty miles closer, is six hours no matter what. The reason is that, while you can take the 101 freeway or even the I-5 to San Francisco, to reach Big Sur, sooner or later you have to get on Highway 1, the long, thin road that threads up the very edge of the California coast. Highway 1 is stunning and treacherous, full of switchbacks, shared lanes, the occasional rock- or mudslide, and, deadliest of all, dumb, clumsy Winnebagos lumbering along roads built for leaner cars, like the huge person jammed into the plane seat beside you, hogging half your space. The beauty beyond your side windows—plunging cliffs, pounding sea, towering redwoods looming in the mist—is matched only by the fury before your windshield as you honk and yell, straining to pass one of these lard buckets as it drags itself uphill or tries to bumble its way around a turn.

At least that’s how it felt to me as I raced very slowly up the coast, in hot pursuit of my quarry, whom, I realized as I lost the radio and phone signal in the rocks, I still had no idea why I was following.

26

I TRIED THE NICER HOTELS
first, as instructed. Big Sur is a small town, with most places strung along the highway, and I was familiar with the main spots. First Detjan’s Big Sur Inn, where Lala and I always stayed, then Ventana, the fancy place where some old friends had their wedding. Working my way north, I tried Post Ranch without luck, and then went by the Cliffside Inn, a luxuriously rustic hotel perched drastically on the rim of the world. The style was haute hippy modern: exposed beams, flagstone, ferns and glass. I asked a sunny young lady at the counter if my friend had checked in. Yes, Ms. Doon was there, but not in her room at the moment. I thanked her and then, at a loss for what else to do with myself, I went to the beach.

I parked by the roadside and ambled down a pitted road to Pfeiffer Beach, past the display of a local artist whose “art” consisted of finding things that, seen from certain, stoned angles, sort of looked like other things. A stone resembled a sleeping cat. A lump of wood was an old beggar, a branch a bird. Another, pointy rock was, he suggested hopefully, a sculpture of a mountain. A clutch of dreadlocked backpackers burbled admiringly, their minds blown, while their scrawny dog gave me a woebegone stare. I crossed a dry creek bed and walked out onto the sand to look at the hole in the rock.

I don’t know how else to describe it. By rock I mean a house-size boulder, fallen from the mountain that stood here once, back before the wind winnowed out this beach, before the ocean ate the land and left these jagged teeth. Now, like a home that has burned away, leaving only a doorframe or a single wall, this huge chunk of stone stands alone on the beach, and through its center runs a tunnel, a passage bored by the endless fist of the endless surf pounding on its door forever. Again and again the ocean comes exploding through the hole, spraying salt and throwing itself on the sand, then sucking
itself back the way it came, lacey foam rustling like a dragging dress, down the long hall to the sea. It was to this spot we came, my wife and I, each new year of our life together, off-season, a cheap time to visit, but also an escape from New Year’s dreary fun, to a cabin with no clock, or TV or phone signal, and walked down to stand on this spot. With each wave, a door cracks open to reveal a hidden corridor to the sky. It is like a magic trick: everything that was always there appears, again, and is miraculous each time.

27

I REFOUND RAMONA BY ACCIDENT
in the hotel bar, watching the sunset through a martini. She wore a white slip dress. Her black hair gleamed like a raven’s wing. For a split second she looked like my wife, but not really: the sun was in my eyes. As I entered the room I was helpless in the sudden glare, dazzled and blinking blindly at an outline. It was just a trick of light and memory, the hovering image of my own life that floated behind my eyes and turned every small, curvy, cocoa-colored girl into Lala.

By the time my eyes adjusted, and I realized who she was, it was too late to hide. As is customary in half-empty bars on early orange evenings, where still lives pose over deep drinks, everyone looked up, mildly, to see what I would do, including Her. So I did the usual. I walked to the bar very casually and ordered a club soda with lime. I paid—too much—took up a post at the railing, and hoped (from my peripheral vision) that she didn’t recognize me as the unshaven transvestite trying on eye shadow at Trashy or the lurking panty-thief from the movies or the fallen derelict face-planted in the seaweed. My glass sweated in my hand, my back sweated in my shirt, and I tried to look relaxed as I sucked on top-price ice cubes, watching another day die, irredeemably, off the American coast.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

It was she, speaking out loud, to me.

“Excuse me?” I tried to say, swallowing an ice cube. It jumped down my throat and stuck there a moment, more or less cutting off my air until it melted enough to drop into my belly. I smiled suavely as I fought for breath, freezing and dying slightly from within.

“Are you OK?” she asked with a smile. I coughed, gulping as the cube finally slid down my gullet.

“Sorry,” I wheezed. “Wrong pipe.”

She laughed. “That’s all right.”

I cleared my throat. “Sure, go ahead and laugh while I choke to death. Don’t offer me a Heimlich or anything.”

She laughed more. I was charming her! In a pathetic way, but still. “I don’t know how,” she said.

“Remind me never to trust you with my life.”

She shrugged. “You definitely shouldn’t. Didn’t your mother warn you about strangers?”

“Ah,” I said. “Yes, but my father warned me not to listen to my mother. And anyway, I thought you knew me from somewhere. Or was that just a pickup line?”

She blushed and laughed loudly, and play punched my gut, with the delight of the gorgeous, adored woman being teased. For a guy who hadn’t been on a date in years, I wasn’t doing badly, not that I had managed much witty badinage even when single.

“Yes, I admit it,” she said sarcastically, but with a spark in her eyes. “I was just trying to talk to you.”

“I knew it. The oldest trick in the book. And this is your lair I’ve stumbled into.”

“Yes.” She glanced at the silent drinkers watching a silent game on TV. “This is where I come to pick up men.”

Across the room a red-haired, red-faced man in red golf pants laughed loudly and slapped his pal’s back. An old lady of the sinewy, sun-shrunken type, decked in a visor and strung with gold, rattled the ice in her empty glass, squealing like a witch casting a spell till
the ponytailed bartender brought her a fresh one. She sighed, settling back into her chair.

“I can see why,” I said. “It’s quite a scene.”

She shrugged. Her hair kissed her shoulders. Her flesh was perfect, like coffee ice cream, smooth and rich, racially ambiguous, and without flaws or variations in tone, so unlike my own splotchy, hairy pink hide. “So what are you doing here all alone?” she asked.

“Me?” I looked around dramatically and then leaned in. “I’m a private eye on a case. Looking for a mysterious missing woman.”

“I see.” With a nail she drew a jagged line, like a crack, in the fog on her glass. “And who is this woman?”

“I don’t know. That’s why it’s a mystery.”

“Is she good or bad?”

“Both, probably.”

“What does she look like? Maybe I’ve seen her?”

“She looks a bit like you.”

“Ah, then she’s probably bad.” She finished her drink. “I have to admit, you’re cleverer than most strange men in bars, although less well dressed. What do you do when you’re not on a case?”

“Read. Watch too many movies. Wander around.”

“That’s it?”

“I try to write a little.”

“Ah, a writer. That makes sense. I bet you’re good at telling stories, with the private eye stuff and all.”

“Actually, I write experimental fiction. I’m not really into plot-driven stuff.”

“You mean more just about the characters, their psychology?”

“No, not that either. I’m not really so interested in psychology.”

“So more like a poem or something, abstract ideas?”

“No, it’s a novel. Definitely not abstract. I can’t stand all that intellectual abstraction.”

“A novel with no story or characters or ideas? It’s hard to imagine.”

“Yeah for me too.” We both laughed. “Actually, I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

“I noticed.”

“What about you? What do you do?”

“I don’t know. Wander about, like you said. Be a woman of mystery.” She tapped my glass with her empty glass. It rang lightly. “Another gin and tonic?”

“Sure,” I said. “But this time hold the gin.” She frowned curiously. “I’m a master of drunken kung fu,” I explained. “I might lose control and kill someone.”

“Okay, if you say so… one virgin gin and tonic coming up.” She sallied off with our glasses. I settled my eyes on the ocean and considered how nicely this was working out. The perfect way to keep a private eye on someone, without them knowing you’re following, is to have them hang around with you. True, Lonsky had specified a discreet distance, but an operative working a case has to improvise. I was also amazed at how well I was doing with such a knockout. But, of course, I told myself, as I had at so many smoky neighborhood barbeques and winey gallery openings: don’t worry, this is just a bit of harmless flirting, you’re a married man. But was I still? Standing there, where no one knew my name, where no one even knew I was, I realized how far I had drifted, in just a day, away from my own life. I felt seasick, and I clutched the railing for support.