Sleeping Tigers (3 page)

I studied my map in order not to stare, and was suddenly reminded of the Treasure Map game that Cam and I had played as children. We drew our treasure maps on white construction paper, elaborate scrawled illustrations in smudged pencil, then deliberately chewed the paper’s edges to dampen it before we rolled the maps into scrolls and left them to yellow in the sun for that authentic treasure map look. I always felt slightly bored during this game, but my brother leaped into full character every time I agreed to play. He’d pretend to hobble along on a wooden leg as a pirate, or sneak like a stowaway behind the kegs of gunpowder disguised as living room furniture.

Whatever his role, Cam’s mission was to steal the treasure map. And I was always the captain of the pirate ship, except for the one time we convinced our father to play this game with us. Our father had roared and swung an egg beater inside his sleeve like a fake metal arm. Cam and I fled, shrieking, into the garage.

Just as my father came flying out the back door, the screen slamming behind him like a musket firing, Cam yanked me to safety into the dark space behind the furnace. We hid there in the oily smelling dark, hearts pounding, until our father tired of looking for us and retreated.

“We fooled the Captain,” Cam had giggled. Where my brother was concerned, it was always us against the scary outside world.

“Well, brother,” I whispered, pocketing my map and turning back towards Karin’s apartment. “Where are you hiding now, in this scary, scary world?”

Chapter
two

I
’d worked myself up into such a state of anxiety by the time I arrived at Karin’s that I nearly ran back down the stairs when she opened her door. I had to remind myself that a party is just a sandbox for grownups.

This particular sandbox was already crowded. It pulsed with people and music and flashing lights that made the guests look like jerky marionettes. I certainly would have retreated if Karin hadn’t caught me by one arm.

She wore a thigh-length black satin dress that revealed the pale tops of her breasts. Around her neck, Karin had wrapped a white scarf studded with gold stars, and her earrings were enormous gold moons. She embraced me in a musky hug.

“No hiding,” Karin whispered in my ear. “You look too fabulous. Now listen: there are at least a dozen single straight guys here. They’ve all got good jobs, and I’ve tried two of them out personally, so I know they’re hot.”

“Jesus, Karin.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or call Animal Control.

She giggled and led me into the living room, announcing my arrival with the subtlety of a talk show host. “Hey, everybody! This is my best friend from back home, Jordan O’Malley!” Karin elicited a cheer from the crowd, then left me while she greeted more guests at the door.

I had a strategy for surviving any party: graze. There was plenty to nibble. I’d seen to that myself; I even knew where to find the extra bags of tortilla chips if we ran out. I gravitated towards the dining room table, but Karin reappeared before I could fill my plate. A man followed in her wake.

“This,” Karin said, docking in front of me, “is a friend of mine from the hospital, David Goldstein. He’s a pediatrician and you’re a teacher, so you both must like kids, right? That should be a good ice breaker.”

Certainly, nobody could ever accuse Karin of procrastinating. I shook hands with David, the first contestant in Karin’s private Dating Game, wondering whether she’d had the chance to, as she put it, “try him out.” The only thing I knew for sure was that he was employed.

Karin embraced us both, pulling us together like salt and pepper shakers, then zoomed off. David shifted his feet. He wasn’t much taller than I, which made him short in a man’s world, and he had the slightly stooped shoulders and slender frame of an academic. I could have looked him in the eye if his gaze hadn’t been focused on the floor. Instead, I studied his hair. The curls were as silver and metallic as my mother’s favorite brand of kitchen scrub pads. He was probably about my age, but his hair made him look older.

And what was he looking at? My boots? Or, rather, Karin’s boots. I had the urge to squat down and peer into his face, which is what I did with students whenever they felt too overcome to look me in the eye. But no. Let him rise to the occasion. I waited him out.

Judging from David’s wire frame glasses, baggy jeans and pocket t-shirt, he was the sort of boy who had coached the high school math team. He had been laughed at in gym class. And he had probably gone straight from college to medical school, then completed a residency in a clinic for the poor.

I deduced this last bit from David’s shoes, which were the thick leather sandals worn by teachers I knew who had done Peace Corps stints in countries with more dust than rain. They were the shoes Moses must have worn to lead the way through the Red Sea, and David Goldstein wore them with frayed socks. All in all, David looked like someone I could talk to. I was sorry he couldn’t possibly think the same thing of me, since I was dressed in Karin’s Whore of Babylon ensemble.

It was too loud to talk in the living room. I led him out onto Karin’s porch, where at least there was a decent breeze. We leaned against the railing and David told me that he did work in a clinic for the poor, as I had suspected. He also served as a pediatric emergency physician in the same city hospital where Karin worked. He’d recently spent a year working abroad, he added, and was having trouble readjusting to life here.

“Where were you?”

“Nepal,” he said, sounding wistful. “Right up until last month, I lived in a mud hut and practiced medicine in a converted cow shed.”

I conjured up dirt floors, dung heaps buzzing with flies, and bloody sheets. “Why there?” I spun my mental globe and found Nepal: Land of Sherpas, yaks, Mt. Everest, and yetis, according to one of my fourth grader’s oral reports for social studies.

“Not for the noblest reason,” David said. “I went for the mountains. Ever since I was a kid, I’d dreamed about climbing Everest.”

“And now you’ve done it? That’s wonderful!”

David shook his head and made a face. “Not quite. Weak knees,” he explained, pointing down at the betrayers. “The curse of being in my thirties and spending my whole life lifting books instead of weights.”

“I bet you saved a few lives, though, even if you didn’t climb mountains.”

“Not as many as I would have liked.” David set his beer bottle on the railing and turned to look out over the rooftops. I did the same, our shoulders comfortably touching. A jet flew overhead, silent and twinkling.

“Once, a villager brought me into his house,” David said, “and begged me to look at his daughter. I went upstairs, where the whole family was gathered around a heap of wool blankets. The only light was from this smoky little fire, so it took me a minute to realize that my patient was actually under those blankets. She was a little thing and skinny as a stick. Her temperature was soaring, up to 105 degrees. She had a severe pelvic infection. A pelvic infection!” He shook his head. “In our country, sulfa drugs could snuff that out in a week, but that kid was on death’s door.”

I could imagine it all: the shadowy figures, the smoky room, the moaning child, David huddled over her. “So what did you do?”

I never found out. Our conversation was interrupted by a loud beeping from David’s pager. He grabbed it off his belt and grimaced at the number. “Sorry. I need to make a call.”

“Karin’s room is quiet,” I suggested. “Down the hall, last room on the left.” As I watched David make his way through the dancers, I wondered whether he already knew where Karin’s bedroom was.

I lingered on the porch, listening to the night sounds of the city. For the last party I’d gone to with Peter, I’d bought a tight little black dress, the sort that would give a dead man an erection. Peter had looked me over and only asked if I could please blow-dry my hair straight, just this once.

Karin materialized at my side. “Why are you moping out here?” She took me firmly by the elbow, leading me back into the apartment.

“I was waiting for David. We were having a nice talk.”

She rolled her eyes. “That figures. Takes a nerd to know one. Listen, David’s as dull as dirt and piss poor besides.”

“But you’re the one who introduced him to me!”

“Just as a warm-up exercise. You said yourself that you’re through with nice guys. Peter was nice, remember?”

“That’s mean.”

“Look, David’s got a billion stories, every one of them sad to the bone. That’s the last thing you need right now. Besides, he had to leave for an emergency room consult. If you really want to pursue things, I’ll give you his number later. Now mingle!” she ordered.

Karin drew me into the brightly lit, crowded kitchen and pointed. Next to the table, which was barely visible beneath six-packs and wine bottles, stood a man whose freckled face was haloed by a cloud of blonde hair. We watched for several minutes while he performed tricks with a tiny Frisbee for several female groupies. He was tall, with a lanky runner’s build and a face that might have been handsome if it were plumped out a little. As it was, his small dark eyes, flat nose, and pert mouth looked stamped onto his skin. He was dressed in a blue Hawaiian shirt, baggy green shorts, and running shoes.

“What do you think?” Karin breathed into my hair. “Wouldn’t you rather frolic with a feral Frisbee player than ponder the world’s woes with a pensive pediatrician?” Karin waved and the man grinned, flexing one arm like Popeye. “Isn’t he amazing?”

“He’s coordinated,” I said, as Surfer Boy shot a miniature Frisbee into the air and caught it on his forehead, where it balanced on edge.

Karin elbowed me in the ribs. “You don’t know the half of it,” she moaned, fanning her face theatrically. “Come on, what do you really think?”

I studied the guy more closely. “Sorry. There’s not enough beer in the world.”

“Oh, give him a chance. Break loose for once,” Karin said, and abandoned me again to join the dancers in the living room.

I wandered over to the dining room table, loaded down a plate with food, then hovered in the kitchen doorway, watching the object of Karin’s admiration spin a palm-sized red Frisbee across his shoulders. The man saw me watching and advanced. When we were scarcely a foot apart, he pulled an even smaller Frisbee out from behind my ear, rolled it down his arm, then balanced it on one finger. He lifted my hand to pass it to me; the Frisbee continued spinning on the tip of my forefinger.

I had to laugh. “Now what?”

The man shrugged. “Keep it. Consider it your Welcome to California gift.” He flashed a grin and made his way back into the kitchen.

I eyed the Frisbee uncertainly. It seemed a shame to stop the spin, but how long could I stand here like the Statue of Liberty, especially with a plate of food in my other hand?

“Neat trick,” said a woman beside me.

I turned to look at her and dropped the Frisbee, but caught it in midair. I hastily slid it into one of the many pockets of my leather pants. “Too bad I couldn’t keep it up.”

“Bet he could, though.” The woman gestured with her sharp chin in the Frisbee player’s direction. She was attractive with the anemic, alien good looks of a super model. In her rayon pink dress, pink leggings, and black Chinese slippers with embroidered roses, however, she looked like a little girl playing Cinderella. Her hips were slight, but her breasts held their own against an enormous metal necklace that might once have been part of a chain link fence.

“He certainly has energy to spare,” I said.

The woman examined me with huge, kohl-rimmed dark eyes and introduced herself as “Anna, Anna Mendez,” exhaling each time on the final “a” of her name as if she were doing abdominal crunches: “An-ah, An-ah!”

“I work with Karin and wanted to meet you, Jordan. Karin thinks the world of you,” Anna said in a voice so ragged and small that it wafted in my direction like a scrap of paper caught on a breeze.

“Are you a nurse with Karin at the hospital?”

“A nutritionist.”

Ah. Hence the death-by-starvation appearance. I’d seen more fat on a ribbon snake. “That must be interesting work,” I said.

Anna shrugged. “Not really. People are bent on killing themselves through excess in this country.”

I glanced down at the paper plate in my hand, which sagged in its greasy middle under the weight of artery-choking cheese, pastries, and chips. My leather pants squeaked and wheezed as I shifted my weight and slid the plate onto the tiny folding table beside me, where the fats could congeal in peace. I struggled to think of something to say. “So, how do you encourage people to change their habits?”

“She terrorizes them.” A man joined our conversation. “Our little Anna is a real Discipline Diva with a crop in her boot.”

The speaker was dressed like someone on the cover of a romance novel, in a billowy white cotton shirt, black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a black scarf wound in a complicated way around his neck: testosterone on the hoof. He had a sturdy handlebar mustache and shoulders so broad that Karin must have turned him sideways to fit him through her bedroom door. I had no doubt that he’d been there. She would not have let this one go untouched.

Anna introduced us. “This is Ed,” she breathed.

Ed: a name meant to be stitched on a mechanic’s overalls. He had kind dark eyes, but looked too much like a cartoon villain to be truly appealing. Anna, however, devoured his beefcake proportions the way I’d go after a brownie.

“I do not ever terrorize anybody!” Anna was protesting, speaking in the lilting cadences of uncertain women. “You can’t scare anyone into anything? Not really, when it comes to changing their eating habits? Because people have to motivate themselves?”

I was glad that Anna wasn’t my nutritionist. I was also happy that nobody was standing behind us. My butt would look like a beach ball next to hers, which was as small and tight as two clenched fists.

Our conversation meandered. Anna, it turned out, was from Minnesota. “Horrible, horrible place,” she said. “Bleak skies, lots of snow, and nothing but white bread in the bakeries.”

“What about you?” I asked Ed. “How did you end up in San Francisco?”

Ed smiled handsomely. How else could he smile? “I’m an anomaly, a native San Franciscan. Third generation!” He pulled a wallet out of his pocket and displayed a photograph to prove it. A collection of at least two dozen people, all ages and sizes, smiled into the camera. Like Ed, they had strong chins, hairy forearms, and broad shoulders. Even the girls.

“That’s really something,” I said.

Anna looked stricken. “I always wanted to come from a large family. But I was an only child, the spackle on my parents’ marriage.”

Uh oh. Here it was: The California Confession. One thing I’d learned in my two days here was that Californians could bring out the big guns of personal pain on a moment’s notice. Just today, I’d been in the corner market buying party supplies when I overheard one woman emphatically tell another that she was learning to honor her clitoris after her divorce.