The Other Joseph (12 page)

In a half hour I was downtown, and I quit that bus to wait for another. Glass and concrete. Tall buildings and bike messengers. A different terrarium here than the Outer Richmond. Warmer. The sky not overcast but cornflower and streaked with the cotton contrails of planes. Classy, on-the-go women and men with all ten of their fingers marched by. In their smooth dresses and suits they were like some different species.

When I reached the shipyards I saw longshoremen and dockworkers gathered by the bay. They were throwing crusts to seagulls as they finished their lunches. I went into a corner store and bought a Mountain Dew, some Funyuns, and a ham sandwich secured inside a triangle of plastic, then found a bench and ate. To my left the I-80 bridge looked like a spiderweb dropping into the water, and I could see across the bay to Oakland and Alameda. Tommy had cooled his heels for a few weeks at an Alameda naval base after completing boot camp in Illinois. His only stop before, on his road to becoming a SEAL, he went to Coronado for BUD/S training. A tanker was heading north, a container ship was coming south, and I imagined my brother tracking them from his side of the bay. Maybe it wasn't such a bad way to go, drowning. Maybe Tommy held his breath until a peaceful euphoria slid over him and he couldn't resist that last, fatal swallow. Then, no more struggling, no more suffering, no more fear. Just blackness without pain except, at the very end, when there was a starburst of light and his thoughts went to us, his family.

Or, better still, maybe he never even woke up from his fall.

BY THREE O'CLOCK
I'd walked from a bus stop to Lincoln Park, and I found a spot on the bushy hill above Marvel Court where I could sit. After an hour a green Subaru Forester pulled into the garage, and then a woman came jogging out to grab the newspaper from the driveway before retreating into the house. And though she was too quick for me to make out much of her face, she had the same close-cropped platinum hair as in the photo of Nancy Hammons I'd brought up in the Cybermobile. But she also appeared to be older. Tommy would have been thirty-seven. This woman looked at least forty-five.

There was a rainbow sticker on the bumper of the Subaru, but on Thursday I'd managed to locate a collection of Nancy's poetry in the “local authors” section of a bookstore, and several of the poems in
Salted Waters
had more or less outed her already. I'll admit to feeling a twinge of disappointment Nancy wasn't closer to my age and straight. Ever since I'd learned of Joni I think part of me had been hoping all she was missing in her life was a father, and that the woman who'd given birth to my brother's daughter was thirty-six or thirty-seven and as unattached and available as I was. That Nancy had never stopped loving Tommy and couldn't look at me without thinking of him. That the daughter
and
the mother might gradually grow to love
me,
maybe even take the Joseph name. That a man with no one but a dog might stumble upon a family.

If I had to stay on that Lincoln Park hillside from morning to sundown tomorrow, so be it. I'd come to see Joni, but all I could do was try again later.

SIX O'CLOCK
. Balboa Street. On a short strip of blocks that was like a colorized photograph in the cold, dead center of the mostly muted Outer Richmond. A hodgepodge of commerce amid the
neighborhood's suffocation of homes. I was sitting at the back of Simple Pleasures Café with finger-combed hair, waiting for Marina Katanova—and asking with each passing no-show minute how I'd let my true mission get derailed by this honey trap.

Simple Pleasures was a coffee shop, but they also had food and beer and wine. All I'd bought so far was a water. At the table to the right of mine a man was giving chess lessons to a schoolboy. The man was different looking but in a rock singer way, and the boy's manicured, wedding-ringed mom was across from him with her arm around her son. I watched them and noticed that whenever the boy pondered a move the chess instructor and the woman would smile at each other. Eye-fucking, really.

And I was musing about how it was the mom who was actually playing a game when a girl in a blue nursing uniform said, “Excuse me,” then squeezed through the foot or so separating my table from the vacant one to my left. She was Indian, the overseas kind. She sat down next to me with a glass of red wine, and I put my hand under the table so she wouldn't see my bird claw. All of these people—the innocent boy and the handsome chess instructor, the good-to-go mother and the nurse with the speck-of-ruby nose stud—were close enough for me to reach out and touch.

“Checkmate,” said the boy.

“Word,” said the chess instructor, fist-bumping the boy.

“That is awesome,” said the mom. “You're a
fantastic
teacher.”

I just stared ahead and listened, but the nurse was looking across my table now, watching the chess lessons. After a while I noticed a guy in medical scrubs and plastic clogs angling our way. He was cradling a pint glass of beer like it was filled with nitroglycerin, and he kept shuffling toward me in his orange shoes but then sat opposite the nurse.

“Hi, Radha,” he said. “Oops for ordering without you. Didn't see you when I came in.”

“That's okay,” she said. “Hi.”

“Thanks so much for coming. And sorry. Dr. Weiss made all the residents stay a little late today.” He pointed at her wineglass. “Vino. Cool. Cheers. You already paid for that?”

“Uh-huh.”

Obviously. Great question, guy. He barely looked old enough to drink. “A lot of people in here,” he said to Nurse Radha.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess because it's Friday.”

“Totes. How was your shift?”

And so on and so on. The flouncy-haired resident would be a bona fide doctor eventually, but he still talked and acted like a frat boy. “So,” he said, “have you thought about it?”

He started to say more, but the nurse sighed and cut him off. “I
have
thought about it,” she said, “and here's the deal—you seem like a really nice person, but I don't think it's such a good idea. Me being a nurse, us at the hospital every day.” A speech spilled out of her, one I could tell she had prepared well beforehand. A speech she'd maybe practiced on her hospital sisters between rounds. It was like there was someone standing behind the resident and holding up cue cards for her to read. He tried to stop her but she rolled on, rushing her words as if now those cue cards were on fire and disappearing. “It's not smart,” she said, “with us having to work together, and so, yeah—”

Her voice trailed off, and she looked at her lap. This was a pre-date, a negotiation to perhaps have a date in the future. A powwow not so different from the one Viktor claimed to have organized for me and Marina (forty-five minutes late and counting). There you go, Radha. Piss on all doctors. May they spend their nights alone in their castles, raping their sterile and perfect hands. I was being shot down, or at least stood up, as well—but we weren't in the same fraternity, me and him.

The resident was trying to save face now. “I understand,” he was saying. “I understand totally.” Nobody had lifted a chess piece
in a long time; we were all listening to this death rattle. “It's just that I dig you,” he added.

Suddenly I needed to get out from between those twin soap operas. The scene had snapped into perspective, and I saw how pathetic it was to be waiting to present myself to some Russian woman I'd never even spoken to. I called Viktor's cell, but no one answered. I didn't bother leaving a voice mail. Despite having given him a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check in Golden Gate Park, I'm not sure I ever
really
believed he could find a woman willing to have anything to do with me. No Marina. No Joni. One working day in, this trip was already shaping up to be another wrong turn for me.

I jostled the chess instructor's table as I went by, apologizing when a captured knight fell to the floor. It was a downhill mile to my place. Nail salons and dentist offices and markets. A liquor store and a laundromat and an old movie theater. Chinese restaurant after Chinese restaurant. The air was even colder than before, and I pulled up the hood of my sweatshirt as I headed toward the horizon. Through a mesh of phone lines and cable and wire, the western sky was bleeding in pinks and reds.

THE DOOR TO KAREN YANG'S
three hundred square feet of San Francisco was cut into the back of a two-car garage I wasn't allowed to park in, and when I got inside Sam started whirling around in a circle, black claws clicking against the apartment's lemon tile. The floor was all that same ugly tile, and I had one room of living space that doubled as a kitchen, plus a bathroom with a shower but no tub. I pushed Sam away, too cross about Simple Pleasures to pet him, then opened the back door. “Go on,” I said, and he skulked out into the plot of sandy dirt and brown weeds I shared via a corkscrew of metal stairs with whoever lived in the second- and third-floor flats above me.

The apartment had a small bed with a synthetic comforter that still had tags. Creased white sheets and one pillow. A table and two chairs. A dresser, a desk, and a couch. There was a computer Karen had said I could use, but if she owned a phone or a TV they were both gone now. Her closet was locked and her dresser had been emptied. There was no food at all in the icebox or the cabinets. The microwave was immaculate; the pots and plates and pans and utensils like they'd just come from the store. No pictures, no books, no calendar. It seemed impossible Karen Yang lived there. That anyone had ever lived there. I suspected the computer might contain clues, but I could only log in as a guest. My password was
Visitor0.

I called Sam in. It was early, but I killed the lights. My sleeping bag was spread across that uncomfortable comforter, and I yanked off my Red Wings and lay down. I had a towel for Sam by the door, but he crept closer, then dropped to the floor beside the bed. I could hear him breathing.

I HADN'T NAPPED
for more than an hour when I woke to Sam barking at my phone. I had on jeans, but no shirt, no socks. The room was dark, the tile cold, and I was bumbling around on the balls of my feet. The phone cut off before I could get to it, then someone rang the apartment bell. Again Sam barked, and I stubbed my toe on the doorsill going into the garage. Fuck fuck fuck. Viktor had my address. This must be him.

I switched a light on. It was freezing with the sun gone. A Volvo was parked too far forward, and I slid myself through the narrow gap between the drywall and the front bumper. The bell sounded again; Sam barked again. “I'm coming,” I hollered. It was Viktor all right. I could smell his cigar.

To the side of the garage was a concrete room that served as the building's entrance, and an iron gate kept the world at bay.
I stepped out from the garage and saw Viktor on the sidewalk. He was pacing back and forth behind the bars, and though I was the one who was locked away, in his black pants and black jacket he looked like a silver-browed zoo ape.

“Marina didn't show,” I said.

“I know this.” Viktor pitched his cigar into the street, then grabbed one of the bars with his wide hand. “I have a message from her.”

“I need to put a shirt on. I'll be right back.”

He latched onto another of the bars. He was twice my age, but even so, it seemed as if he could tear that gate off the hinges. “You are already all the way out here! Let me in.”

His stopping-by-unannounced, probation-officer act had me ticked, but I made my way across the concrete to let him inside. He saw me shivering and laughed. I'm sure San Francisco cold has nothing on Russia cold, and when I opened the gate he slapped my bare shoulder, muttered a word I think might have meant pussy.

VIKTOR AND I SAT
on the couch while he tried to salvage our partnership. I was fastening the snaps of my work shirt, and he was brushing at the scab on Sam's ear. Marina had told him her phone had died. That she hadn't been able to call him sooner to relay she wouldn't be making Simple Pleasures. That she'd had to run a few unexpected errands for her employers. Right. Even Viktor didn't sound like he believed her. “But come to my home for dinner tomorrow,” he said. “You can meet her then.”

“What about
your
cell? You couldn't return my call?”

“I forgot my phone in the Mercedes. Sorry. A bad day for phones. I am just hearing all of this. So now I am here.”

“That check I gave you? I'd like it back.”

“You do not want this anymore?”

“I don't.”

“I would not cheat you.” He reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and produced my check. “It is two-fifty for each woman you meet. Give this to me after our dinner. Is that better? You have spent much more than that to be here this week. You are upset. And maybe too you are nervous. But you cannot let that ruin everything.”

He was calling me a pussy again, basically. His light eyes seemed sleepy but earnest as he pressed the check into my hand. Perhaps it
was
all a lie, a con, but he had a point. There was little to lose.

“You're positive she will be there?”

“I am positive! We will have a very nice evening.” He pulled a Ziploc from another pocket and showed it to me. “Some chicken pieces for the patient,” he said.

I nodded, and he tossed them to Sam one by one. Sam's tail started whacking against the side of my leg, and when the chicken was all gone Viktor went into the kitchen area and washed his hands. He seemed somewhat disgusted by how small the place was, and even more so by the lack of a TV. Earlier, walking in, that had been the first thing he'd commented on.

“Do you want to hear a joke?” He was opening and closing Karen Yang's cabinets for some reason. “A Vovochka joke. He is a Russian boy. A student.”

I sighed. “Go ahead.” Malcolm had ruined me on jokes, but at least his were short. I doubted Viktor's would be. It had happened in imperceptible degrees, this transition of his from dour marriage pimp to jovial comrade.