The Wave (2 page)

3

I kissed Nella on the lips. We were sitting in my car in front of her apartment building on Adams. She moved her head but didn’t open her mouth. We had been to a Caribbean restaurant in Venice and a movie called
The Night Man
at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. We had talked and held hands, and now I was kissing her neck. She made a noise, not exactly a moan, and when I moved my head back, she pressed her hand against my neck, saying wordlessly that she wanted another kiss. I touched her neck lightly with my tongue, and she did moan. I kissed her lips again, but that door was still closed.

I kissed her cheeks and forehead, her eyes and behind her left ear. I came back to her lips, but they wouldn’t part. I touched her breast for maybe three seconds before she moved my hand away.

I took the forbidding hand and kissed it. She pushed two fingers into my mouth and pressed down on my tongue lightly. That brought a muffled moan from me.

“What did you say?” Nella asked.

I ran my tongue between her fingers.

“Oooo, baby,” she said. “I should bring you upstairs.”

I kissed her lips again, and they parted for a long moment. Then she moved back.

“Not so fast, married man.”

“She’s in New York. We’re getting a divorce,” I begged.

“No,” Nella said. She caressed my cheek with a caring hand. “I just don’t want to start out so fast. I only wanted to give you one little kiss, but I didn’t know your kisses were so sweet.”

She could have pulled my heart right out of my chest. I hadn’t been with a woman since Shelly and Thomas hooked up. Shelly and I had been a couple since high school, and she had never once called my kisses sweet.

“Can we wait a little while before we go further?” Nella asked, as if it were really up to me.

When I couldn’t come up with the right words, she kissed me lightly, with just a little tongue.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. But you know I sure don’t want to.”

“Wait here,” Nella said.

She jumped out of the car and ran through the door of the large aqua-colored, plaster-faced apartment building. There was a strip of lawn on either side of the front doors and a squat relative of the palm tree to the right. Through the windshield, I could see white clouds passing over, illuminated by a million city lights. The glare of nighttime L.A. was so strong that only a few potent stars were visible. My heart was pounding. The electric air shocked me with each breath.

Where is she? Am I being tested? Should I just leave, or does she want me to sit out here all night waiting for her fancy and her love? Maybe she wants me to go up to her door. Maybe she’s waiting for me in a nightgown and here I am sitting in the car like a fool.

These thoughts went through my head again and again. Then Nella came bounding out with a white box the size of a loaf of bread under her arm.

“I’m sorry it took me so long,” she said at my window. “But I had it in the closet somewhere.”

She shoved the box at me.

“What is it?”

“A phone left over from my last place. I didn’t like the way it looked after I painted, so I bought another one.”

“Why you giving it to me?”

“Because you said you broke yours, and I want you to call me the minute you get in.”

The kiss she gave me through that window was the most passionate I’d ever known. It stayed with me all the way back to my garage-home.

“Errol?” she asked, answering the phone.

“Uh-huh. Who did you expect?”

“Take off your clothes,” she replied.

We made love over the phone line, something I had never done before. She was upset when I didn’t have coconut oil, but she finally settled for virgin olive. In the beginning, I hardly knew what to say to her. She made me explain every move and sensation, what things felt like and how they appeared. After a while I got the hang of it. She got very excited when I told her to get down on her knees.

It was three o’clock before we said our good-byes. After that, we’d call back every five minutes or so just to make sure that love was still there.

So when the phone rang at ten to four, I answered, “Hey,” with certainty that she’d be there kissing my ear.

“Airy, your line’s been busy all night.”

I knew everything in that moment. Maybe I wasn’t sure of how or why or even who, but I knew that my life as I had known it was somehow over. The man on the line was close to me; very much so. My father had used those same words many times after I’d moved out and he’d tried to call. He was never angry, just frustrated and maybe a little frightened.

“Who is this?”

“It’s me, Airy—Papa.”

“My father’s dead.”

“It’s so cold here, Airy. So cold,” he said, as if my reminding him about death brought back the chill.

“Where are you?”

“There’s a hut behind the trees. In the woods beyond the graveyard. You can see my stone from here. They leave in the nighttime. I sleep on the ground with the sun between the leaves so they don’t find me and put me back.”

“Who are you?”

“Papa. Papa.”

“My father is dead.”

“It’s so cold, so cold. I sleep in the trees. No clothes.”

“Listen, man,” I said, my temper running hot with the hormones in my veins. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Cold,” he said. “Papa . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Hello?”

Maybe ten seconds passed, and then there was a single rapping note, and I knew that he’d put the receiver down on a table.

4

I was at the Fox Hills Memorial Park at seven the next morning. Papa was out there somewhere, just a flat cement disk among thousands. The cemetery director’s office was open, but no one was there, so I studied the maps out in front of the building, trying to remember where my father was buried. NY-UEP-CT-1598 was his number. That meant the New Yard in Upper Elysian Park, Circle Terrace, at lot number 1598.

I hadn’t been to see Papa in six years. And the graveyard was immense. I had never been there alone. I followed the procession from the chapel the first time, behind the minister we hired to provide the service. My only other visits were with my mother and my sister, Angelique. I never paid attention to which way we were going.

I studied the map for a long time, taking notes and trying to get my bearings by scanning the grounds now and then. Finally I set out to find his stone by myself for the first time since his death.

It took over an hour to locate him.

The New Yard was at the far end of a long curving path that went up a hill and through a section of the graveyard that, as far as I could tell, had no name. I came upon a place called Celestial Gardens, which led me to the New Yard. This was the largest and least expensive area of the cemetery. There were more than a dozen different sections whose names had nothing to do with their placement. There was no Elysian Park or Lower Elysian Park. I wandered through Green Pastures, Holy Rest, and Heavenly Pines before coming upon Upper Elysian Park.

There were five thousand cement disks and more spread out before me. I think it was the immensity of death that brought me to tears again. I hadn’t slept at all the night before. In my mind’s eye, I’d picture my father, emaciated and dying, one moment and then Nella’s smile the next. It’s a wonder I found the stone at all.

Arthur Bontemps Porter III

Born

September 19, 1935

Died

January 1, 1996

There was no quote or endearing memorial, just the dates and a name. He never believed in God. He didn’t think about death at all. There was no will or life insurance policy, not even a provision for his plot.

“We never liked to think about that kind of thing,” my mother said in his defense. “I mean . . . life is so short anyway, why think about dying?”

At forty-nine she had to go to work at the neighborhood newspaper, the
Olympic Gazette,
answering phones, editing articles, interviewing local residents, and even mopping floors for a subsistence salary.

Angelique and I helped her out as much as we could, but now I made very little, and Angie had to watch her money because she was having a baby with her husband, Lon.

The grass around his stone was dirty. I could see the dark soil between the long green blades. I knelt before the grave and pinched the loose soil between my fingers. It was moist and icy cold.

“What you got there?”

I yelped and jumped three paces, spinning around in midair.

I saw the man standing on the concrete path a few feet from my father’s grave, but his features didn’t register at first. I didn’t know if he was white or black, thin or fat.

“What do you want?” I cried.

“Nothing, son,” the man said.

He was wearing gray coveralls, not naked.

“Did he die recently?”

“What?” I asked. “What did you say?”

“Sometimes people come up here years after they lost somebody. Maybe for the first time. It makes the loss feel real.”

He was an older man, white. His hair was all gray, and his eyes, I think, were blue. He carried a stick with a nail at the end. Speared on that nail was a Cracker Jack box that someone had carelessly thrown away.

“I’m Errol Porter,” I said. “This is my father’s grave.”

“Fathers,” the man said. “It’s hard on a son to lose the man who made him. Fathers were once God in a child’s eye.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“I’ll leave you, then. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Wait.”

“Yes?”

“What—what’s this dirt here in the grass? Is that normal?”

The groundskeeper took a step off the pathway and approached the cut-rate grave. He knelt, as I had done, and touched the soil.

“Rain,” he said with certainty.

“It hasn’t rained in two weeks,” I said.

“But when it does, sometimes the soil comes up. Sometimes it washes down from the parks.”

He gestured toward a wooded area not twenty-five feet from the grave. Looking into the thicket of sapling pines, I thought about the woods my late-night caller had claimed to live in.

“Is there a building back there?” I asked.

“Why?” The groundskeeper was suddenly alert, suspicious, even.

“When I came here with my mother, after Dad died, I went off in the woods somewhere to have a cigarette. I remember a small building that had a telephone and a desk.”

“Somebody broke in there over the last week. Some bum livin’ it up and using the night watchman’s phone.”

“Wouldn’t the night watchman see a man using his phone?” I asked.

“Eric gets spooked out here at night. He spends most of his time down at the main office. He only comes up to make his rounds. We used to have three men at night, but the board of directors got tired of payin’ for it. All they got’s Eric now, and Eric’s a chicken.”

“How come there’s no soil on the other graves?”

“It pools up in one place or another,” the elder man said. “I’m Jacob, Errol. Been workin’ at Fox for forty-two years. You want me to clean off your father’s plot?”

“I can’t afford it,” I said. “Lost my job a while back and, well, thanks anyway.”

“You’re a good boy, Errol,” Jacob said, clapping me on the shoulder. “I only hope my own children feel as much love for me when I’m dead and gone.”

“I’m sure they will,” I said. “I’m sure they will.”

5

The borders of the cemetery had high stone and concrete fences protecting the parks. The sides of the walls were embedded with glass and crowned with coiled razor wire. I wore a heavy-duty canvas apron, heavy kiln gloves, and work boots to scale the twelve-foot walls. With these garments, the master builder’s canvas tarp, and an aluminum ladder from the pottery studio, I made my way, at two
A.M.
, to the southern edge of the graveyard. That was just off the freeway exit, behind a dense landscape of California pines.

“Are you totally insane?” Nella had asked me.

We were on our four o’clock lunch break. Just before I told her about my plan, we had been kissing in the clay closet.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Why?”

“I can’t explain it, honey.” It was the first endearment I had used with her.

“There must be some reason you got for doing something so crazy.”

“It was the way he said that he’d been calling. The way he said the words. The—the inflection,” I said, reaching for the right term. “It was exactly,
exactly
, the way my father always complained after I had been on the phone a long time. I mean . . . He could have heard my nickname. He could have looked me up in the phone book and just said Airy because it sounded right. Or—or maybe he once knew an Errol and called him that. But he said exactly the same words, just like my father did. There’s no way he could have faked that. Somehow he has to know me or my father. I have to go.”

I expected Nella to argue with me, to tell me that I was too crazy to date. But instead she took me home, brought me to her bed, and made love to me as if I were more than twice the man I felt.

At one
A.M.
I reluctantly left her side.

“Aren’t you afraid to go?” she asked me.

“He was my father, Nella,” I said. “I know this guy must just be crazy, but I owe him something. His memory, I mean.”

An elemental light shone in Nella’s bayou-colored eyes. She let her fingers run down my naked thigh, and then kissed my knee.

“At least we’ll have this,” she said, “before the ghosts out there take you to the Necropolis.”

Her words came back to me as I tossed the thick canvas over the razor wire. Nella wasn’t afraid that I’d be arrested, but that I’d be captured by the spirits of the dead.

The ladder was eight feet high, and the ground was uneven. I stood on the top rung struggling to maintain balance in my clumsy clothes. When I leaped onto the tarp, the ladder fell over. I had to catch onto the wire through the tarp. And even though I wore thick gloves, one of the razors cut into the ring finger of my right hand. I felt blood in my glove. I kicked and pulled, making it to the top of the wall, buoyed by the fierce coiled wire.

I stopped to catch my breath, feeling safe for the moment. But then the wire shifted and I fell down the inner wall, through a thick network of branches, and to the ground below.

I hit the earth so hard that for a moment all I knew was pain. I pulled off the gloves and held the bleeding finger to stanch the wound and ride out the throbbing ache in my pelvis. As soon as I was able, I got to my feet hoping that nothing was broken. By then I didn’t care about the man who said he was my father. All I wanted was to get out of there, to get home to my own bed and to Shelly . . .

I hadn’t thought
home to Shelly
in a long time. The air was cold on my neck. My hip hurt, but I could walk. Moonlight winked between the branches and pine needles. I took a deep breath and then stifled a laugh. I had made it over that fearsome wall. Nella’s lovemaking came back to me, and I whispered, “Yeah.”

I didn’t know exactly where I was, but NY-UEP-CT-1598 was somewhere in that part of the cemetery. I clambered up a steep incline through the stand of shrub pine until I came to a plateau of monuments. This was the rich neighborhood, where the wealthy could spread out for their long rest.

There were great statues of angels in alabaster and obsidian that glowed under the three-quarter moon. The caskets were housed in small buildings barred by golden gates. Fresh flowers decorated many of the crypts. Long speeches were etched into stone tablets on almost every burial place.

I limped through the small town of death on a path made from huge, hewn granite plates.

I heard the voice first, before I realized that he was singing. An electric torch shone a little way off to my left.

When a ma-aan loves a woe-man . . .

It must be Eric, I thought, the cowardly night watchman, singing to protect himself from the dead.

He can do her no wrong . . .

I crouched down beside a gated tomb, under the shadow of a great rectangular monolith of black marble. Eric made his way quickly between the vaults, his torch swinging and his voice quavering with fear and love. The last verse I heard him sing—
turn his back on his best friend/If he puts her down—
faded behind a small hill.

I made my way back into the stand of pines to keep from being seen and maybe to find the way to the little hut the crazed hobo had been calling me from.

He attacked me as soon as I was in the landscaped forest, grabbing me from behind and pinning my arms to my sides. I fell to the ground under his weight, thinking that maybe I was going to be murdered. And then I worried that maybe this really was some spirit who intended to drag me down into hell.