12 Bliss Street (12 page)

At the corner the women stopped for a moment, still talking, then entered a building. He took out a pencil and wrote down the address and at that moment the cellular telephone in his pocket began to ring.

“Yes,” Chorizo said.

It was Robert.

“I’m in West Portal,” Robert told him.

Chorizo looked up the street. Robert was nowhere in sight. “Are you,” he said ironically.

“I’m checking up on that woman, Nicola.”

“All right.”

“The woman you wanted me to check up on.”

“All right.”

“And I checked every doctor’s office on the street, but I couldn’t find an employee named Nicola anywhere.”

“Excuse me?”

“What?”

“You went to
doctors
’ offices?” Chorizo asked.

“Yeah and there weren’t any Nicolas, but there was one Nicole. Could that have been her? At a podiatrist’s. Was it Nicole, do you think? Anyway I have the address.”

“I told you dentist, not doctor,” Chorizo said.

“What’s that?”

“She works at a
dentist’s
office, she works for a
dentist.
Oh, never mind. Just meet me back at the office.”

Chorizo turned off the phone and looked at his watch. Robert was such an idiot—really, he’d been hoping for more. Maybe he should spend more time with him, teach him not to be such a fool. Was Robert teachable? Chorizo crossed the street and looked in through the glass door of Nicola’s building. A shaft of sunlight cut through some tempered glass creating a momentary prism, and he was reminded of the second principle of Shambhala—Discover goodness by finding beauty in the everyday world. Chorizo took a moment to watch the prism as it floated lightly against the painted stucco wall.

Beauty in the everyday world.

Then he looked around the foyer. The women weren’t there. He entered the building and studied the office listings pinned by the elevator. A café on the ground floor. A design firm on the top floor. Two dentists in between. Chorizo smiled. She must work for one or the other. The spiritual warrior prevails, he thought, as he copied down the dentists’ names.

Eleven

“Go on, say
it: You’re in my way!”

Nicola shifted her weight and kicked. Her foot reached sternum level. “You’re in my way!”

“Fighting stance!” shouted Alicia. “Left side forward, now bounce! Switch to the other foot! Bounce! Exercise your legs and heart, come on! Five more! Now switch! Two more! Now switch!”

The music turned into heavy bass beats and Nicola turned and began her cross punches. She was standing on the red wrinkled karate mats with twelve other women facing a wall of mirrors. The room was brightly lit and smelled slightly of foot fungus.

“Guard up!” shouted Alicia. “Get a rhythm, come on! Tina, where’s your elbow? Nicola, very good!”

They finished their cross punches, practiced their obliques, then started the whole sequence over in double time. By the time they got to the snap kicks, Nicola felt sweat running down her temple and she could hear someone behind her start to groan.

“All set for handrail drills! Four count front, round, side kick!”

Nicola let her mind go blank as she copied Alicia’s movements. It was important to forget how tired you were. The karate mats felt thin beneath her feet and for a while she tried to imagine an opponent—her landlord? Guy?—but when she let go of specifics, her movements felt cleaner. Clear your mind, Alicia liked to say. Anyone could be an opponent. Nicola kicked the air, then jabbed with a closed fist. Her heart felt like a revved motor.

“Sideways, kick! You’re in my way!”

Nicola turned and kicked. She was mean and serious. During her match she practiced lateral movements, hitting, then stepping aside. Speed was the important factor. Alicia demonstrated a spinning back kick and Nicola thought, I want to do that.

After class she noticed Lou sitting on one of the spectator benches. She smiled at him as she walked over, surprised and glad to see him. He was wearing another white button-down shirt and his face looked recently shaved.

“I thought we were going to meet at the restaurant?” she asked.

He said, “I wanted to see how tough you California women really are.”

Nicola pulled her hair out of its ponytail. She was dripping with sweat.

“And what did you decide?”

“You have a vicious hook,” he told her.

He smiled at her. He had a great, slow smile. The surfer grin, Nicola thought. But his eyes were sharp, like a cat’s.

“Nicola,” Alicia said, coming up to her. Her forehead was clear and dry and her blonde ponytail was still perfectly in place. “Good work tonight. Very good. Have you been practicing?”

“You might say I’ve had a shift in attitude.”

“Well, your focus has really improved. You’re letting yourself empty out, which is great. Soon you can fill up the cup.” She touched Nicola’s shoulder, then moved on to another student.

“Fill up the cup?” Lou asked.

Nicola shrugged. “It’s a zen thing,” she explained.

She showered and changed, then walked with Lou to his car, a dark blue rental with a spoiler over the trunk. Lou unlocked her door before unlocking his own. Well, well, Nicola thought. Inside it smelled like damp newspapers and Lou fastened his seat belt, then sat for a moment with his hands on the steering wheel.

The night was dry and windy, the kind of wind that seemed to swoop up from underneath you. Drivers were just beginning to turn on their headlights. Nicola glanced at Lou’s hands, which were thick, kind of muscular. Can fingers be muscular?

“What’s up?” she asked after a few moments.

“I’m doing my traffic prayer,” Lou said, looking out the windshield.

“Your traffic prayer?” Nicola almost laughed. “You have a traffic prayer?”

“It’s very effective.”

“Can I hear it?”

“Really?”

“Definitely.”

Lou cleared his throat. His two top buttons were unbuttoned and beneath the V-shaped opening she could see the small rise of his collarbone. Lou from New Jersey. He had the dark good looks of an Italian—or was he Irish, dark Irish? He had dark eyes, straight dark hair, a small nose. Irish, she thought. She could see him growing up in the suburbs: going to mass on Good Friday, then playing pool at a bar with a bunch of his buddies.

“Let my car pass undamaged through the streets,” he began. “And let the vehicles part before me. Let the red lights turn green and let the green lights linger. Let my tires remain unpunctured. And let me neither be stopped nor cited now until I reach my destination, amen.” He looked over at Nicola and started the engine. “Sometimes I add a few lines about animals, too.”

Nicola laughed.

“Or storms, if the weather looks bad.”

“You’re an odd one, aren’t you?” Nicola asked.

“I don’t know what I am,” Lou said.

She wasn’t sure if that was all just for her amusement or what, but she liked it. Lou reached over to adjust the rearview mirror and as his hand came near her Nicola remembered the sudden strange intimacy of sitting in a car with a stranger. Was this a date, she wondered? The phrase “business associate” conjured up something disreputable, possibly unlawful, but probably that was closer to the truth.

“I think you could use something more at the end,” she said.

Lou flicked on his blinker. “At the end of the prayer?”

“Something about a place to park.”

“Curbside parking,” Lou said. “That’s good.”

*   *   *

The restaurant was
in the financial district with long windows facing the cable car tracks. The hostess seated them in the back. Sea nets hung on the walls and there were rows of sconces shaped like clamshells. A good restaurant: expensive, well-lit, comfortable. As they sat down Nicola found herself checking her fingernails.

“Last night I went to an Italian restaurant,” Lou was saying. He fluffed out the thick white napkin and spread it on his lap, then he opened a small notepad. “Dinner took almost four hours.”

“What did you have?”

“Panzerotti salsi di noci.” He was reading from his notes. “That’s white sauce with walnuts. Now a few days ago I went to a vegan restaurant. Ever try that? I had a drink called Doctor Telma’s Chinese Potion. Actually I liked the food, but as soon as I was outside I started to crave pastrami. Like when you leave an aquarium and head for the sushi bar.”

“Are you going to write any of this up anywhere?” Nicola asked him.

“That’s the plan.”

He had been in San Francisco for only a week but already had checked off Russian, Mediterranean, and Vietnamese food from his list. Tomorrow he was planning to go to a Turkish restaurant and try something called kota voskou.

They opened their menus. The restaurant was full but not noisy, and Nicola felt easy with herself. Comfortable. They faced each other across the table, which was much less intimate than sitting side by side in a dark car. In his neat white shirt Lou looked young and polite. But anyone can be an opponent, as Alicia would say. Nicola looked at his hand for a wedding ring.

“I was engaged once,” Lou said.

“What?”

“I see you’re looking at my left hand.”

“I wasn’t,” Nicola began. Then she shrugged. “All right,” she said.

“Do you want to hear about it?”

“Oh, that’s a story I’ve heard many times. Second date stuff. How the woman you never understood broke your heart.”

“Actually I broke hers.”

“Well, that I might listen to,” she said.

The waiter came to tell them the specials. Lou listened carefully, then ordered appetizers for both of them to share: black mussel soufflé (the restaurant’s specialty), salad, and a consommé of wild mushrooms and sweet bay scallops. Nicola noticed his dark eyes again, the careful way he spoke, his casual confidence. He watched the busboy fill their water glasses, then he took up his notebook again.

“So this is a second date,” he said. It was a question.

Nicola sipped her water. “That depends on the food.”

She found herself comparing him to Chorizo. They were both attractive in the style she liked: dark, not too thin, not too hairy. Chorizo was the fatherly version. Lou was polite in a way that Nicola had learned to distrust; it sometimes masked chauvinism. Still, there was something about a man in a white button-down shirt, Nicola thought, his pale skin underneath like something protected by Brooks Brothers.

Their appetizers came and Lou divided them neatly in half. He gave Nicola a plate. “She wanted to have puzzle rings as wedding bands,” he told her.

“Your fiancée?”

“And there were other differences. The wedding meal was supposed to be color coordinated with the bridesmaids’ dresses. What food can you serve that’s blue?”

“Delicious,” Nicola said. She was eating a Greek salad with red wine vinaigrette and smelt fries.

“Really?” Lou picked up his pencil. “Tell me more.”

“I could just eat and eat,” she said.

She concentrated on the arrangement of flavors: sweet, salty, smoky. As they ate Lou wrote down each dish and timed the servings and asked Nicola for her opinion. She liked that. The restaurant was a real restaurant with white tablecloths and white candles and a branch of unusual flower buds in every vase. She liked that too. They were sitting in a row of two-person tables and the large room spread out before Nicola in soft gold and orange. Her hunger seemed to increase as she ate and she leaned the tines of her fork inward to retrieve every last small leafy tidbit.

“Now tell me something about Scott,” Lou said.

Nicola took a small sip of wine. “When I was married to him everyone still called him Scooter.”

“Well that tells me something,” he said. “What else?”

She thought for a moment. “Once he bought a used cocktail piano even though neither one of us could play. We were supposed to make money on it. But although we listed it in the classifieds week after week, no one ever came by to see it. For years it just sat in a corner and once in a while Scooter would pay someone to come in and tune it.” She took another sip of wine. “I wonder whatever happened to that,” she said.

It had been a relief, when she left him, to also leave all their possessions—the piano, the leaky water bed, the Star Trek commemorative plates, the boxes of carefully preserved third-rate comics. Nicola pictured Scooter in a room that grew increasingly crowded and narrow. He was always coming home with surprises.

“How long were you married?” Lou asked.

“Four years. He always had a new idea about how to make money. Once he invested an entire paycheck in an animal rest home,” she said.

“What, for senile retrievers?”

“Actually, that one didn’t do too badly.”

Two waiters served their entrees on small gold-rimmed plates. Behind them the curved restaurant bar with its shiny top and silver mirror and well-dressed drinkers seemed like a scene on an ocean liner.

“What is a cocktail piano anyway?” Nicola asked.

She had ordered caramelized Chilean sea bass in sweetened onion sauce with fried okra, and Lou chose the medallions of rare ahi tuna. Midway through the meal they switched plates.

“Excellent,” said Lou about the sea bass. “This has really brought me into the zone.”

“The zone?”

Lou looked at his watch. “So far I’ve been in for just under ten minutes.”

“What’s the record?”

“Oh, the record is a long story.”

Nicola put down her fork. “Okay,” she said.

“Really?”

“I’d like to know.”

“Really? All right,” he said. “Well, one day I was walking in the park. This was in New York. Although it was only about five o’clock, I was hungry because I’d just played racquetball with this woman who turned out to be not so interesting, and when she went home I decided to go to this restaurant she had told me about, but I wasn’t optimistic because, you know, she wasn’t interesting.”

“Okay,” Nicola said.

“So I get there and even though it was early there were only about three free tables, but still they could seat me right away.”

“Because there were three free tables.”

“Right.” Lou smiled. “Okay, anyway. It starts out they have this huge cavernous dining room, like some medieval cave with a fire going in a huge fireplace that was really like a hole in the wall with sticks on the bottom—it was so big the logs looked like sticks—and almost everything is cooked right there on that big open fire. I started out with mussels in the shell, which tasted like they had been caught about ten minutes before, and then I had smoke-licked pork loin. If the mussels hadn’t kick-started me into the zone, then the pork definitely did. Then there was grilled asparagus with parmesan cheese, and roasted yukon potatoes with arugula, and Italian wine, and, oh yeah, a basket of tiny fresh-baked rolls, like minimuffins, that a waiter kept replenishing. That was his whole job, replenishing minimuffins.”