The Practical Navigator (28 page)

“This.” Rose looks as if a small, furry animal with rabies has suddenly appeared on her desk and plunked itself down for a nap.

“Yeah,” says Leo. Casual.

“
This
book?”

“It's a good read,” says Leo.

It's
Gravity's Rainbow
.

“What's a book really, really smart people read?” Leo asks the librarian, and after determining that Leo is thinking fiction and not theoretical physics or analytical philosophy, the librarian, a wizened woman with a thick, waist-length braid of gray hair, has recommended Thomas Pynchon. Taking it home, Leo prepares English breakfast tea, puts on comfortable pajamas, props himself up with pillows on the couch, and begins to read. After three minutes, he gets up to go to the bathroom. He never returns to the couch. The book is undecipherable. It's as if it's written in code from the very first paragraph. It's not Thomas Pynchon's fault. Leo knows he's no genius. He knows he is lacking in big thoughts and meaningful insight. He is opinionated and occasionally belligerent for no other reason than annoyance at human imperfection, especially his own. One does not have to be smart to want things to somehow be better.

“You actually read this,” says Rose, sounding skeptical.

“Yeah,” says Leo. “I don't think it's his best but…”

“His best.” Rose now looks as if she doesn't know whether to spit or swallow. Leo hopes it's the latter. “Okay, tell me what it's about, Leo, this book, his best.”

“What?” says Leo as if offended. “It's about determinism, the reverse flow of time, and the inherent sexuality of mechanical devices.” Whew. Good. He's got it out without stumbling. Copying it off Wikipedia took two minutes, memorizing it took hours.

“Fine, Leo,” Rose says coldly. “I will give this to Michael. I'm sure he'll enjoy it very much.” And with that, Rose turns her golden eyes back to her computer screen.

Failure. Always failure. The whole charade suddenly feels ridiculous. If women only knew what guys do for them. Cook. Read. Shave. Leo turns for the door. And suddenly annoyed, not just annoyed,
pissed
—at himself, at Rose, at Thomas Pynchon whoever that is—he turns back.

“You know what, Rose? You want to know the truth? The only books I enjoy reading are cookbooks.” And just like that, he has her complete and total attention.

“Cookbooks.”

“Recipes? Food?”

“I know what a cookbook is, Leo.”

“Oh, really,” says Leo, thinking Rose is not the only one who can cross arms across an ample chest. “'Cause I was under the impression you didn't even like to eat.”

“Would I look like this if I didn't eat, Leo?”

By God, he has her on the defensive. “Yeah? What's your favorite dish? What kind of food you like?” He's on familiar ground now. Unless it's Martian cuisine, Leo has cooked it.

Rose hesitates, as if searching the data banks. “New Orleans,” she finally says. “I like New Orleans–style food.”

Score, thinks Leo, whose copy of
The Picayune's Creole Cook Book
is worn and tattered with use. “Yeah? Cajun or Creole?”

“There's a difference?” For the first time in Leo's experience, Rose looks nervous.

“Creole uses tomatoes, Rose, Cajun doesn't.”

“If you say so.” Make that very nervous.

“I know so. What about jambalaya? You like jambalaya?”

“I don't know. What is it?”

“It's like a paella. Beans and rice. Shrimp. Andouille sausage and ham. Sound good?”

“I guess.”

“Good,” says Leo. “'Cause I'm gonna make you some.”

“Get out of here, Leo.”

“I am. A whole big pot of it. And we'll talk about books while we eat it.”

“I'm not going out with you, Leo.”

“Not out. My place. Rose, c'mon. What's a little food, wine, and fine literature among friends?”

“Leave me alone!” screams Rose, frightening Leo out of his shorts. “For the last time. I'm not your friend. This is sexual harassment, and if it happens again, I will tell Michael and he will have no choice but to boot your ass out of a job. Now take your recipes and your books and your cookies and your stupid
bigote
and get out of here.” And then Rose is on her feet and moving across the room to the office's single restroom, graceful for a big woman. Open, close, click of lock. Done. Over.

“I'm sorry,” whispers Leo, staring into some vast, empty space. “I'm sorry and I promise I won't bother you again.”

From the solitude of the tiny bathroom, Rose listens to Leo leave. It pains her to act like this. Rose has heard that Leo is a devoted father with a faithless ex-wife who puts her own selfish needs ahead of her children, the thought of which makes Rose think,
esa perra mejor no cruzan mi camino
—that bitch better not ever cross my path. But really, enough is enough. Time to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all. Leo is getting too close for comfort.

Rose pulls up her dress, hops up on the throne, and sits. She regrets she doesn't have a book because her mind immediately goes to New Orleans, a place she's read about but never visited. What was it Leo called that dish again? Made with beans, rice, shrimp, and andouille sausage. Or was it ambrosia sausage? Aphrodisiac sausage? Rose's stomach gurgles mournfully and involuntarily she farts.

Oh, just damn you, Leo. Damn you to hell.

 

46

Michael drives north on Interstate 5. It's mid-morning and any residual commuter traffic should be going in the opposite direction, but still, both sides of the highway are packed and it takes him a good forty minutes to get to Carlsbad. Getting off the highway, he drives east toward San Marco, past industrial parks and shopping centers featuring Costco, Home Depot, and Target, the land flattening out and opening up, turning drier and more desolate, the flats giving way to foothills, the foothills to mountain canyons. Ten miles on, he comes up and across a ridge and in the distance sees housing developments spread out in large clusters, the mortar of canyon, chaparral, sage scrub, and conifer separating them. Planned suburban living pushing against nature. Nature resisting, if not pushing back.

Resting Palms is a relatively new development where each modest house with its attached garage and small postage stamp of lawn is a complete clone of the one next to it, a place, Michael muses, where you could come home drunk at night and find yourself searching for your front door as if it were a lost car in an immense parking lot. There is a community center. There is a clubhouse with a pool. He sees no one, not man, woman, or child, on the sidewalks.

At the northeastern edge of the development, a new row of houses are under construction. The land has been plowed flat and shaved clean of any kind of vegetation. Trenches have been dug for what will be plumbing and sewage lines. Where will the water come from? Michael wonders. To drink, to flush, to wash. Do the developers include the cost of it in the sale price? Or do the happy new home owners discover the cost of living in a drought area when the first bill arrives?

At the end of the already paved road, foundation footings and slabs have been poured and framing has begun. Michael notes that the workers are using lightweight steel, strong, easy, and fast to assemble, but hard to insulate. A steel stud conducts ten times as much heat as dimensional lumber. Questionable when the temperature gauge on his dash tells Michael that it's now fifteen degrees hotter than it was on the coast. He doesn't want to think what it'll be like working outside here in the summer. Not yet anyway.

And then nothing. The road ends and he stops.

Dry ground. Piles of rubble. Surveyor stakes topped with red plastic ribbons denoting where the next phase of construction will begin. Beyond it, charred hills and wasted chaparral, evidence of the last wildfire that took out almost seven thousand acres in east county. Nature pushing back hard. You buy your ticket, you take your chances.

Michael has never thought of himself as having any kind of an aesthetic. Architects draw up the plans. He executes. He makes suggestions, sometimes they're picked up on, sometimes not. But there has always been something unique about each project. Something about the finished result he liked and was proud of. This job will be like working on an assembly line. Like Model Ts, the houses will be identical to the ones behind him. They will be code compliant and have fire-safe landscaping. Unlike his own haphazard bungalow, they will have high-end kitchens and marble baths. They will be prewired for cable and Internet. They will have all the latest conveniences. They will be commuter friendly and have easy access to the interstate. But to Michael's mind, they will say nothing about the people who live in them. Nothing about the people who built them.

Ah, progress.

Neal Beacham was right. Michael couldn't handle a job like this in a million years. But he'll learn. He has to. People are counting on him.

The problem is he's been spoiled by the sea.

 

47

“I'm getting that feeling again.”

Anita is pacing the small room, unable to sit and unsteady on her feet, so much so that Fari wonders if she's on something.

“What feeling is that?” Fari asks.

“I don't know, I don't know, like—
ahhhhh
.” Anita feigns biting her arm. “Like I'm gonna go crazy if I don't get moving.”

There is a hardness to Anita's eyes Fari hasn't seen before, as if the brain behind them weighs too much.

“Moving.”

“You know. Get away from here. Away.”

“Will that make you happy?”

“I don't know.”

“Has it in the past?”

“I don't
know,
” Anita says, agitated. Drinking is making her thoughts both fierce and clumsy. It never used to be this way. A drink made things clearer. Or at least calmer.

It's too much. It's all just too much.

“What would make you happy, Anita? Do you really even know?”

“Oh, for—don't you ever listen to me? Do you ever really hear what I'm saying? I don't know what being happy even is. I never have.”

“I'm sure that's a very difficult feeling.”

“Yeah, sure. Like you'd know.”

Drinking never used to make her angry either. Her father, not her.

“More than you might think.”

“Okay, let's go down the list then. How about worried all the time. How about guilty. I fucked up as a wife, okay? I fucked it up as a mother and I have a hard time living with that. Do you know what kids called Jamie at school the other day? You want to know? They called him a retard. And I didn't know what to do about it. His mother, and I didn't know how to make it better for him. How would that make
you
feel?”

“Not very good.”

“Now
there's
an understatement. But who cares. He didn't want me anyway, he wanted Michael. And he should.” Anita knows now she's going to cry. She's going to cry any second. In front of this sphinx-faced woman who is so like her mother, both of them women who never feel anything.

“I—I think I should leave. This isn't working. It's all just so stupid.”

“I wish you wouldn't.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Because you're in distress. And it's my job to help.”

“Your job. God forbid we should make it personal.”

“It is personal.”

It is very personal.

“Anita, I've been doing some reading. Do you know there are autistic people who can tell you what pi to the twenty-thousandth place is off the top of their heads?”

“Really? Great. Now tell me how that makes for a meaningful life.”

“A woman taught herself to speak Latin in a week. I find that meaningful. An autistic child in Japan wrote a best-selling novel. I find that very meaningful. People on the autism spectrum are brilliant scientists, they're tech geniuses, they're experts in finance.”

“I'd settle for normal.”

“What is normal, Anita? Is it being like everybody else? Is anybody like anybody else? Are you? The only thing that's normal is that we all share the same imperfect human condition.”

Words, thinks Anita. People think words are a cure for everything.

I'm done.

“Look, the problem is this. I'm not sure this mom thing is gonna work out, okay? I'm not cut out for it. I never was. I should just accept it. I mean, I'm not even sure parents make that much of a difference. I had the classic American upbringing, alcoholic father, emotionally distant mother, and look at me. I turned out just fine.”

It's a good line. She's used it before and has always gotten an amused reaction. She wants Dr. Akrepede to laugh or at least smile before she leaves for the last time, but instead the woman is looking at her with disapproval.

Not you too.

“You abandoned your husband and child once, Anita. It's caused you nothing but pain. If you're looking for excuses to do it again, I'm not the one who can give them to you.”

The stricken look on Anita's face makes Fari sad. She has wanted so much to help this woman. And in doing so, help Michael. She hasn't. She's failed both of them. “You know, I think perhaps you're right. This isn't working. It really might be best if you do look for another therapist,” says Fari. Her voice sounds hollow. “I'll be happy to recommend some.”

“That hopeless, huh?” says Anita, suddenly not wanting to go anywhere.

“No. It's my fault. Boundaries are a crucial element in patient-therapist interaction and I've crossed them.”

“I don't understand.”

“I should have told you from the very beginning. I know your husband.”

“Michael?”

Fari nods. “And because I do, I'm finding it harder and harder to be objective with you.”