The Orange Curtain (11 page)

She was touching his hand now, soft as a flower petal.

“Watching him, I always imagined that the mind had some kind of somatic recall of verbs. You could shuffle your feet and the word
walk
would come back to you, but nouns were stored in all these arbitrary little cubby holes facing you, like at the post office, without much sense of order. It was the key to the order of the boxes that he’d lost and he had to scan them in some kind of imposed order.”

He shrugged, remembering the terrible struggles his father had gone through, and also the way his looks had changed toward the end, with the chemotherapy taking his hair, and the bloat of inactivity, and his second wife, not Jack Liffey’s mother, overfeeding him. Cooking was the only thing she could do for him, and his face came to look far too small, a tiny set of features painted into the center of a big white hard-boiled egg.

“And then I noticed that there was a pattern to the words he had the worst trouble with.
Wife
and
son
and
sister
. And then
hour
,
day
,
week
,
year
—all the words for time. They were the things that hurt. The family that he was leaving, and time—knowing he didn’t have time. Language betrayed him little by little. The cancer was a real bastard, hitting him when he was down.”

He ran down. He was scaring himself with thoughts of death, and he could feel a line of sweat across his forehead.

“That too much grief. It just break your heart there so much hurt in the world.” She gave his hand a platonic little squeeze. “I don’t want make it worse. You don’t have to do nothing you don’t want. You come back if you want or you stay away. We friend.”

He nodded and felt the cool wind probing up the skirts of his sheet, stiffening his penis against his will. It just kept happening. At this rate, he’d have to walk back into the house bent double. It had been difficult to relate to the slippery, fast-talking, intense nugget of ego-energy she had put forward, but her sudden generosity and a peek at her vulnerability did a lot for his sense of affection.

“I do you favor today. If you feel okay, I take you to Industrial League. I know them. You ask them about Phuong Minh. Then I take you back to your car.”

“Thanks, Tien. I need to make a phone call now.”

She detached the cellular from the computer and handed it to him. It turned out she hadn’t discarded his clothes after all. Auntie Pham had washed and ironed them and mended the tear at the pocket, and they were so tidy now he would have trouble convincing anybody he’d been mugged in them. Tien Joubert went into the house to let him call in privacy.

First, putting off the hard one, he called MediaPros and delayed his visit a day, which didn’t upset them at all, then Marlena, who was nearly hysterical.

“I know, Mar, I’m sorry. I was beaten unconscious last night by a half dozen thugs. I’m okay now except for a big black eye and a lot of bruises. A Vietnamese family here took me in and patched me up. I’ll be home in a while.”

Vietnamese
family
, he thought. Another sidestep on the long downward ethical course of his life.

It was a black Mercedes 560SL, pretty much what he would have guessed, and she didn’t drive it very well. She was erratic, slow for a block, then speeding up for a while as some tune in her head changed, decelerating abruptly, and every now and then drifting a foot into the next lane as her mind went to something else. He thought of asking if she’d ever considered hiring a chauffeur, but it wasn’t a chauffeur sort of car.

Suddenly she pulled over in a red zone, a tow-away zone, and pushed the shifter all the way up into park and looked at him as if she was worried one of them was about to die. “I don’t want you to get wrong idea. You look at me and maybe think all Viet Nam people crazy and pushy like me. I not same as them mostly. I told you I want to be big and strong and loud because it’s the squeaky door that gets grease. You got to say what you want in the world. Most Viet Nam people not like that. Americans always want you to represent your people, like everybody got to be a little chip off the big blockade.”

Indeed, he thought. A police car doodled past them. He was a little uneasy about the tow-away zone but he let her run.

“The really most important thing my people love is delicacy and a very quiet, very strong respect. Buddhism say—the second big Truth of Buddhism say this thing—the big cause of problem in life is passion, you got to push passion away. You got to repudiate it.” She smiled in satisfaction at getting the word right this time.

“But me, I get a taste for passion. Maybe in France I get this thing, and I say, No, the big problem in life is stay quiet and delicate and let yourself be floor mat. Passion is okay, make a squeak, make lots of squeak. You see what I say, I’m different?”

“Yes, I see. You’re a remarkable woman.”

She touched his knee lightly. “I want you come back to me, Jack Liff. Will you come back?”

His ears burned and his forehead buzzed. “I don’t know, Tien. Do you just want a big hairy American? That shouldn’t be so hard.”

“You something special. I been with American guy and they got a bad attitude. They don’t respect you. You different.”

“I don’t know if I can come back the way you mean, Tien. Can we just let it sit for now?”

She smiled. “Okay, man. I see you one torment guy.”

“You’re going to get a ticket stopped here.”

“Who cares? It just money.”

She stopped on a red curb again in front of the nondescript high rise and jumped out. The building was not far from the Fashion Island Mall on the cliffs overlooking Newport, just another upended Kleenex box, but it would have super views of the town below and the sparkling blue-green ocean, with a wind stirring little whitecaps.

He pointed at the curb and she shrugged and said, “I not stay. I just introduce you and go shop. Fashion Island got good Neiman-Marcus.”

In the elevator, she pushed the button for the next to top floor.

“Are you a member of the Industrial League?” he asked.

“You kidding, huh? You in Fortune 500, they ask you be member. You run Joe’s Laundry and Dry Cleaning, you get polite note to go down street to Chamber of Commerce. I on advisory board from Little Saigon—that about like advisory board from kindergarten. It mean nothing, but I never say no, member of anything. It good to make friends.”

The office was on the side of the building that would have the view. She rapped once on a wood and frosted glass door that must have been rescued from some Victorian building. Gold-bordered black letters on the glass said only ILOC, like a discreet private club, which in a way it was, he supposed.

Inside there was an unattended lobby with antique furniture and big then-and-now aerial photos of the county. Off to the right he could see into an empty conference room with a rosewood table and high-back padded chairs. All the other doors but one were closed. The open office had a young man with long blond hair, who craned his neck back to see the visitors and then stood.

“Hi, Ms. Joubert. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

A young woman in slacks came out of the same office. She wore round wire-rims like John Lennon, which made her look studious and mannish. “Mrs. Joubert.”

Tien Joubert took their hands and introduced Jack Liffey without naming either of them. “I want you take good care of this guy a while, he big special guy. He got important questions.”

He felt himself blushing a little as she left. The blushing made his eye ache and immediately he told them he’d been mugged to get it over with. They didn’t seem very surprised.

“I’m Dick Bormann, but no relation,” the young man told him jauntily. “My dad did not hide out in the Argentine jungles after World War Two.”

The young man had a way of standing slightly sideways and watching you at an angle, as if preparing to bolt.

“Neither did Martin,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m sure he had a nice suite in a hotel. Perón helped relocate thousands of Nazis.”

“You’re a historian, too.”

“Just an amateur.”

“I’m Debbie Miller. We’re grad students, working here part time. The director is out this week. He spends most of his time in Washington and Sacramento.” She plucked at short dark hair, and tapped a foot nervously.

“You two work with Phuong Minh?”

“Sure,” Dick Bormann said. “Come see.”

The blond young man sidled away to lead Jack Liffey into the conference room, which was even bigger than he’d guessed, while the young woman hung back and then banged around in the office outside as if hiding the drinks from her parents. The outside wall of the conference room was a good thirty feet long, all glass, and had a staggering view of the ocean. Several container ships were crossing the horizon stacked with their colored shipping boxes, and he could just make out the southern end of Catalina in the mists.

“You can see Catalina over the nearby mall called Fascist Island where Mrs. Joubert always goes, and that’s a great shot of the Pacific, isn’t it?”

Jack Liffey almost said, I thought it was Lake Michigan, but let it go. He was beckoned to the side of the room, where there was a posed photo in a redwood forest, a half dozen young people kneeling in front and another half dozen older people in back. “This was our staff at a retreat last year. Phuong’s there.”

She was right in the middle, with a wan decorous smile, holding a large ceremonial gavel in both arms.

“This isn’t Bohemian Grove, is it?” he asked as Debbie Miller came in to join them.

“The very place. The private playground of the ruling class, where the Rockefellers play ping-pong with the Kissingers and then tell them which country to invade.” He chuckled and spread his arms wide. “You’ve stumbled into it, Mr. Liffey. Isn’t it amazing? This is the private meeting room of the inner sanctum of the ruling class, at least the local fraction of it that deigns to visit go-go Orange County, and right this minute it’s all run by
us
, two grad students.”

A 737 came over, still fairly low and rising steeply, from John Wayne Airport behind the building.

“Not
run
exactly,” the young woman corrected primly. “The board meets here four times a year and the director carries out their wishes. All we do is their research and odd jobs.”

“Did Phuong work with you?”

“The past tense? Has something happened to her?”

“Her father’s worried. She hasn’t been home for a while. When did you last see her?”

“Oh, gosh…maybe ten days. I was beginning to wonder. Would you like some coffee?”

“Sure.”

They got him a mug of mediocre coffee and took him back to their own office where they sat at desks that had been positioned in the four corners of the room. They swiveled their chairs around to face the middle, like a bunch of sophomores in the library discussing Kierkegaard, he thought, if kids still did that. There was a strange smell in the room that he couldn’t identify. Barnyard came to mind.

“What did Phuong do here?”

“The same thing we do really,” Debbie Miller said. “We’ve been working on nothing but the airport issue for months. The Industrial League feels very strongly,” she added in a pompous singsong voice, as she held up a slick tri-fold with a faraway airport on the cover, “that it is imperative for the future of international trade and the expansion of the job base to develop El Toro as a regional airport.”

“And you don’t?”

“There’s arguments on both sides,” Dick Bormann said. “In fact, Phuong was informally our ‘deep-six’ editor. She was in charge of the inconvenient facts that we were supposed to find some way to answer or hide.”

The young man stood and reached across, past Jack Liffey, to what must have been Phuong’s desk and picked off the top a little metal file box with flowers on it and opened it up. His eyebrows went up as he read the first card. “‘A house loses approximately 1.33 percent of its value for every decibel of additional airplane noise.’ Try
that
on your homeowner out there, or this: ‘The value of a house increases approximately 3.4 percent for every quarter mile it is farther from the flight path.’”

He plucked out another card. “‘Seventy-nine percent of the businesses in south county oppose the airport.’ Needless to say,” he added, “these aren’t companies traded on the big board. This is Tammy’s Needlepoint Supplies and George’s Surfboard Wax.”

He became aware of a very faint scrabbling sound, like rats in the wainscoting that the two researchers were doing their best to ignore.

“Do you think Phuong could have made any enemies doing this research?”

“Only if the people affected actually mind losing their life savings. Seriously—people are pretty pissed off, but not at us. Heavens, we’re just lackeys.”

“We did get threats, Dick.” Debbie Miller volunteered. “You just don’t take them seriously. I took the very first one on the phone. Some gruff guy said he was in the Mission Viejo Homeowners association and he’d blow us to kingdom come, one by one, if we didn’t drop the stupid airport idea. Obviously he wasn’t an official representative.”

Dick Bormann chuckled. “I just can’t believe a goofball is that dangerous.”

“We got more from the same guy, we’ve all had them. Phuong had one, too, and it shook her up. He guessed she was Asian, maybe she gave her name, and he used some racial epithet.”

“Have you ever had picketers? Slashed tires?”

“Naw,” the young man said. “Not many people even know we exist. If there’s a real focus for all the hatred, it’s Ron Kitsos. He’s the guy who owns Air Forty-Niner, you know, the Happy Gold Bird. He’s fanatical about wanting the airport. He’d love to make El Toro a regional hub.”

“Who’s publicly opposed?”

“A lot of people. Debbie?”

She made a few faces. It seemed to help her think. “Probably the best known is Sam C. Treat. He used to be a pilot for Forty-Niner and before that he used to fly for the Marines out of El Toro. He loves to go to public meetings and tick off the big three no-nos against the airport.”