Acts of God (12 page)

“Francis Cantwell Eagger,” I told him as our drinks arrived.

“Well, I'll have to look for his work if you live in his house. I would like to see where you live,” he said, “but not this trip.”

“Oh, I didn't mean on this trip.”

“Another time.” He gazed out across the bay. “I think I'll be coming out here from time to time.”

“Well, when you are, you should drive down. We can walk on the beach.”

He picked up the oversize menu, which was so large I could no longer see his face. “I'd like that. If this deal goes through, I might be here quite a bit more.” His voice came from the other side of his menu. When he couldn't see me, he put it down. He explained that he was trying to create a broader base for Schoenfield Enterprises and was talking with some local people about real estate speculation. He wanted to develop some resort property in Hawaii or the South Pacific.

I reminded him that I knew a little about the real estate business. “I rent time-shares.”

“Well, maybe you'll help us. If we ever get this off the ground, it will be very big. I'm trying to interest some money people.” He paused as if he'd forgotten something. “I never quite imagined you in real estate, Tessie. I always thought of you as going into nursing or some medical field.”

He didn't seem to want to talk further about his business venture and looked away from me as he changed the subject. “Oh, really? Why is that? I can't see myself as a nurse,” I said.

“I've always thought of you in the helping professions.”

“I'm surprised you've thought of me at all.”

“Well, I have.” He stared at me with those steely-blue eyes, then glanced down at his menu. “What do you recommend?”

“Seafood. The mahimahi should be good.”

As we waited for our drinks, we gazed across at the Golden Gate Bridge. I've loved that bridge since the first time I saw it. It gives me a fleeting sense of endless possibility. “You couldn't ask for a nicer view,” Nick said. Our drinks arrived and we sat, looking out at the bridge, and Nick kept saying how it was the gateway to America and what a great bridge it was.

“There was this story in the paper the other day about a guy who left a note in his car that said ‘I drove all the way from Iowa to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.' But they found his car parked on the Oakland Bridge. The guy didn't even know which bridge to jump off of. Can you imagine?” I told Nick, laughing. “He couldn't even get it right when he killed himself.”

Nick started laughing too, but then he stopped. He shook his head as if this had happened to someone he knew. “Poor guy,” Nick said. “That's a sad story.”

I had the mahimahi with a baked potato and Nick ate a pasta with mixed seafood. He was quiet as he ate, asking me questions about my children. He showed me a picture of Danielle, a somber child with dark circles under her eyes. “She's a pistol,” he said, though I didn't see it.

I told him I thought my kids had suffered from the divorce. “They're rather aimless. I worry about them.”

“It's probably a phase. Didn't we all grow out of it?”

It was still early after dinner and Nick suggested we walk around. He had never been to San Francisco before and asked if I would give him the grand tour. We wandered up the hill toward Coit Tower, then down into North Beach. From there up through Chinatown and into Union Square where his hotel was. It was a nice leisurely walk to take on an October evening when it wasn't too chilly. I enjoyed pointing out the sights.

When we stopped back in his hotel, he invited me in for a drink. He didn't want to sit at the bar and suggested I join him in his room. It was a standard plaid hotel room with a king-size bed. In the bathroom he had a shaving kit, but nothing was hung up in the closet. It didn't seem as if he'd be staying very long. On the bedstand were a pile of magazines, newspapers, a paperback thriller.

“I like mysteries,” Nick said, seeing me glance at the bedstand. “What'll it be?” He opened the minibar. I requested a brandy, which he poured, and we sat down at a small table with two chairs. “So, Tess,” he said, “what's it like, living right by the sea? Do you get up feeling great every day?”

“You have the lake.”

“It's not the same thing. Salt water, the wild seas.”

I told him that in the morning I liked to run up in the hills, then down to the coast. That from my kitchen window I looked out on to the ocean. That sometimes I rescued wildlife stranded on the shore. He leaned forward with his hands folded across his knees as if he really wanted to hear what I had to say. I was beginning to talk more about my children and my divorce, about my stone house and how I wanted to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast, when the phone rang. Nick made a face and for a moment I thought he wasn't going to answer. He let it ring a few times, but then he got up and went to it. He walked stiffly, as if he'd suddenly become an old man or someone expecting bad news.

When he picked it up, I had a sense of what was going on at the other end. He had a deep, husky voice on the phone, different from when he talked to me. I heard him saying things like yes, of course I'm here, no, I'm alone. Don't be silly. Yes, I saw her, but now she's gone home. The kinds of things you say when you are trying to calm somebody down and are lying to her at the same time. His hand tightened around the receiver and his shoulders and back, which faced me, seemed firmly set, as if he were carved out of stone.

I knew it was Margaret and that she was in a flap. It didn't surprise me that they were having a difficult time. I was never quite sure how it was that Margaret Blair had come to marry Nick Schoenfield. They had dated briefly in high school, but it had never amounted to much. After high school, they had married other people, then divorced. Both moved back to Winonah from wherever they had gone. Vicky said they met again over a beer at Paradise.

The Schoenfields were more “our kind” of people—that's what my mother would have said. Prominent Jews with money and maybe some links to organized crime, though no one mentioned those. If I'd stayed in Winonah the way the rest of my friends had, I probably would have married someone like Nick. It was no secret in Winonah that Mr. S. was disappointed over Nick's marriage to Margaret Blair and that he had never quite forgiven his son for marrying her.

The conversation took a long time and I sipped my brandy slowly. It is always strange to be on one end of a conversation, but I could imagine what was being said on the other side. Nick kept saying, “No, that's not true. No, I didn't do that. You know I wouldn't.” I had to drive home so I put the brandy aside, not wanting it to go to my head. Finally Nick put the receiver down and with a big sigh looked up at me. “I guess you know who that was.”

“I guess I do,” I said.

“Well, it just hasn't been easy. She's pretty impossible, you know.”

“Actually, I don't know. I mean, I remember how she was when we were girls, but I don't know how she is now.”

“You can't imagine. Sometimes she goes into the city and doesn't tell us where she's going. Oh, she's always home by bedtime, but it still drives Danielle crazy. She's nice, then she blows up for no reason. It's as if she doesn't care about me at all, then suddenly she has to have me.” Nick shrugged. “I'm going to leave her. I haven't told her yet, but I'm not staying. It's like living with a time bomb.”

I was surprised to hear that. It sent a chill through me because I remembered when Margaret told me she had a time bomb in her chest. I was also surprised that Nick would confide so much in me since we didn't know each other well and hadn't seen each other for many years. “But you've been together a long time.”

“She's never really loved me,” he said. “I loved her, but she never loved me. She just wanted things. That's what's been the worst of it for me, loving someone who doesn't love me.”

“I'm sure she loved you.”

“No, she didn't. She can't. She loves our daughter. That's the only person she loves. Even then, I wonder. There's a part of her that's just not here.”

I nodded, wondering why he had married her in the first place. “There was always something strange about her, Nick.”

“Yes, maybe that's what I liked about her.” He said thoughtfully, “She was unpredictable, but she made things interesting. That counts for something, doesn't it?”

“It does,” I agreed. I said I needed to head back and he walked me down to the lobby. “It was good to see you, Tess.” He kissed me on the cheek. “You haven't changed.” As I turned to leave, he pulled me to him. I wanted to burrow into his chest and stay there, but just as quickly as he held me, he let me go. “Drive safely,” he said, helping me into my car.

As I drove, the highway twisted and turned before my eyes and I had trouble following the road. I'd driven this road a million times and now it was as if I'd never driven it before. But that happens to me sometimes. I'm somewhere I know very well and all of a sudden it's as if I'd never been there before.

When I got home, I went straight to bed. In the morning I went for a long run up in the hills. When I started out I was fine, but once I got up into the wilderness area I started to feel as if I wasn't alone. I felt as if there was something trailing me. Many times my children have begged me not to run up here without a buddy, but then, what's the point of going with a buddy if you want to be by yourself?

As I ran, I kept turning around, expecting to see something barreling down on me, but I never did. Still, I couldn't help but feel that there was something out there and it was watching me.

14

In the dog days of
summer, when we could think of little else to do, Vicky and I formed the Firefighters of America. I'm not sure what it was about fires—the heat, the possibility of being trapped with no way out—but it seemed we wanted to stop them. Not that we had ever really seen a fire, except once when Lindsey's Delicatessen burned down, or had ever been in danger of a fire, but we spent hours thinking about how to prevent them and put them out.

We did some research at the fire department and learned that a “dead man's room” is a room with only one exit. We liked the way the firefighters smelled like burning leaves. We made a list of all the kinds of fires we wanted to put a stop to—fires made by foolish children playing with matches, by careless mothers who left hot oil on the stove, by too many plugs in one outlet. Brushfires started when a cigarette was tossed from a moving car or when lightning struck the ground in the woods. Wildfires. We wanted to put a stop to all of these.

We made little badges out of cardboard with
FOA
carefully inscribed. Small, contained flames leapt into the air on our badges. We colored them orange with a blue glow at the base. We wanted them to be just so, just right. I had no idea how we would protect anyone, but still we made up these little badges.

Then we went from door to door, canvassing the neighborhood. We rang doorbells, and the neighbors who knew us were very nice. I thought that this was what it must be like for my father as he traveled from town to town, talking to people about the disasters they could avert just by signing their names. The neighbors who opened their doors to us listened politely to what we had to say, accepted what we had to offer. We asked for small donations for being members of Firefighters of America. The most we ever got from anyone was a quarter and we bought candy with it.

After a few days we had done my neighborhood and hers and weeks of the summer still stretched before us. We thought about expanding, casting a wider net. We followed the road along the railroad tracks, stopping here and there. We cut over to the other side. In some of these houses people didn't come to the door.

People spoke with accents. Dark men, unshaven in T-shirts, answered the door. These men smelled of cigarettes and hair oil and something sour we couldn't quite place. In the background we could see broken furniture, sofas with their stuffing coming out. Often these doors were slammed in our faces.

We knew the houses along the railroad tracks weren't where we should be. It was different here, and we felt as if we had wandered into a foreign country, past the safe boundaries of our own. Old women sat not far from the doors as if they were expecting someone, but not us, to arrive. Strong cooking smells came from behind these doors—greasy meats, sauces, dead animals. Once or twice we passed Prairie Vista Automotive and, looking up, saw where Margaret lived.

“What do you think it's like up there?” Vicky asked.

I thought of Mrs. Blair in her short skirts, her heels clicking on the asphalt, and my father watching her laugh. “I know what it's like,” I told her. “The woman who irons my father's shirts has been up there.” It was a lie, but I thought of those Saturdays when my father and I stood peering up at the apartment above Santini's Liquor. I concocted dingy rooms that stank of onions and smoke, gray sheets, linoleum floors. I invented walls that were gray, red-striped wallpaper pulling away from them. In her spare time Margaret would peel it back some more. She had found trains in her room, boats in her mother's. The rest of the house was trees.

I found myself making up entire scenarios, full of misery and intrigue. Her mother tells her to stop peeling back the wallpaper. She says there's lead in it or something, and she says she's ruining the walls, but Margaret can't seem to stop wanting to see what's on the other side.

Clarice Blair cleans the place all the time. She gets on her knees and scrubs the floor. She scrubs the cabinets and the counters as if company is going to walk in at any moment, but they never do. Nobody ever goes there. Still, her mother never stops her scrubbing, then she yells at Margaret because she doesn't do anything to help. Margaret is a bastard, but Clarice has never told her. Clarice isn't even sure who the real father is.