Cage's Bend (38 page)

“Mental health consumers,” I correct him.

“Whatever. They looked nice enough. Not too fucked up or stupid.”

“Did I see you talking to those two Harbor Patrol cops in the back of the court?”

“Yeah. I asked them if they believed that you did it. They said yeah. One of them said you were lucky to have a brother like me.”

I felt a twinge of envy. The good brother, the successful one, the semialcoholic womanizer. “You’re a good brother, Harper. You didn’t have to come out here. Thanks for putting the money in my commissary. You have no idea how good a Snickers bar can make you feel. They don’t give us enough to eat. That’s my main complaint about this jail. I’m hungry all the time. ”

“You’ll be out soon.” Harper smiles. “At Frontier they said a bed would open in a few days.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“That’s true.” He looks somber.

“And you’ll be gone. Hong Kong. New York. What a life.” The envy wells up in me. My résumé for the last decade is a long list of little jails and nuthouses. Now it’s time to start over again. The Frontier House. “The Frontier, that’s where I’m stuck. The Frontier of mental illness.”

“Don’t look so pessimistic.” Harper puts his hand on the glass. “You can build a nice life out here. You got the ocean. Redwoods. Surfing. Mountain biking. A first-class county mental health program from what I can see.”

“Everyone here dropped so much acid in the sixties they have to have a good program.” I make Harper laugh. Suddenly I want to cry. I clench my fists, trying to summon up the energy and drive to pull myself up, persevere, prevail. “God I’ll be glad to be out of these fucking coveralls.”

“I bought some khakis and sweaters and T-shirts at the Gap today,” Harper says. “I left them for you at Frontier.”

A cop walks along the booths, passes behind Harper, calling out something. Harper glances over his shoulder, then says, “Time’s up. Hang in there, brother. I’ll swing through town next week on the way back to New York. Love you.”

“Love you.”

I watch him pick up his blue blazer, see that he’s wearing faded jeans. There’s a spring to his step. He sweeps out of the room, borne on a tide of money. I put my head in my hands and watch the other visitors file out behind him. The last are a whole family of women so fat they can barely squeeze through the door frame.

The End of the World as We Know It

1987

O
ne Friday July morning in the hours before dawn, the streets of San Francisco were wet and empty. Fog was creeping in from the Bay, curling up the steep hillsides. The windows of the ’74 Cadillac Fleetwood were open to the mist. The long, heavy four-door had been his grandfather Rutledge’s last, so rarely used that it had logged only twenty thousand miles when his second wife gave it to Nick upon the old man’s death and Nick christened it Pilar, after Hemingway’s fishing boat and his indomitable guerrilla heroine. Six years later, Pilar was still in mint condition. Nick kept meaning to trade it in for a more eco-friendly car, but it was his sole possession that reminded him of his grandfather.

“It’s the end of my world as I knew it,” Nick sang loudly, personalizing the words to the song thundering from the tape deck, a game he’d played with Cage since they were boys. “
And I feel fried!
” Nick had been driving for hours, since his friend Chris, a rock-climbing partner and fellow Berkeley environmental studies grad student, had dropped him at home after dragging him out to a bar full of undergrads. The thought of lying in the bed whose sheets still smelled of Monica, in the room where the empty closet and drawers were glaring symbols of the hole in his heart, kept him roaming the dark streets, though he knew that he should turn around and go back home, if for no other reason than he shouldn’t poison the atmosphere with fossil fuel that he couldn’t afford to burn anyway at ten miles to the gallon. Nick’s passion for ecology was his father’s religious conviction translated into the secular. He could not believe in God, but he could believe in nature, and to him the last great cause was the fight to salvage what was left of the biosphere before the grand planetary ecosystem went terminal, if it wasn’t already too late. “Idealism. Nihilism. Pollution. Evolution,” he shouted over the song. “Dissertation. Masturbation. Fuck that!”

After drinking himself to sleep the previous Wednesday night, Nick had woken early and spent Thursday in the library working furiously. In the evening he returned to the bungalow he had shared with Monica for a little over a year and sat on the front stoop while twilight faded into night over the rooftops, trying not to think about her while every object in his field of vision pulled him back to her as if by a gravitational force—the moon to the moon they saw together climbing in Joshua Tree, the Heineken in his hand to the one he’d been drinking when they met at a party two years ago, the empty spot in the driveway to her red BMW. Look inside my head, he told her, can’t you see that it’s just you? But he couldn’t talk to her because she was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

In retrospect he should have seen it coming. Perhaps he was blind because the idea was too sad to consider. Like nuclear war. There had been signs over the last couple of months. One, she no longer laughed so much at his jokes and antics. Two, she was quick to anger when he left the toilet seat up or was slow to make the bed. Three, she stopped having sex about two weeks back. But Nick was sprinting down the homestretch of his thesis, revising an article that had tentatively been accepted by
Conservation Biology
, getting his résumé out to the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and a half dozen United Nations agencies, teaching an undergraduate class. He had been working fourteen hours every day for two months, trying to finish his degree so they could spend August climbing in the Sierra before Monica had to be back at school. In the rush to the finish line Nick had been blindsided.

Four years younger than Nick, Monica Eleanor Carson was the daughter of the vice chairman of Bank of America and a Marin County housewife. When they met at a party, she was a first-year law student and was charmed by the handsome southerner passionate in a quiet way about scaling mountain walls and defending the planet. Nick was always sweet and sometimes funny and a gentle marathoner in bed. But in the last months the charm wore off and she fell out of love. She had never been sure that she wanted to follow him to Washington or Nairobi, wherever he landed a job. Certain traits of his began to irritate her—the snippets of Yeats, Eliot, and Shakespeare that popped out of his mouth at apt moments; his disapproval of her parents, the number of TVs in their house, their Republican politics, the size of their swimming pool. And Monica, with her blonde cheerleader looks and deep cleavage, had no shortage of old boyfriends and interested suitors. Nick was an experiment and the results came back negative.

The Monday before at breakfast, just after Nick had set a tall glass of blended fruit and seeds in front of her and sat down across the table, Monica had taken a sip of the smoothie, then said softly, “I’ve fallen out of love with you.”

Reviewing the outline of the class he had to teach in an hour in his head, Nick was uncertain of what he’d heard and said, “I love you, too, baby.”

“See!” Monica seized the proof of his neglect, the anger to camouflage guilt. “You hardly listen to me anymore!”

“Baby, I’m sorry I’ve been distracted. We’ll take off for the mountains soon.”

“Forget the mountains,” Monica yelled.

“We’ll go wherever you want.”

“It’s not that, Nick.” She lowered her voice. “I don’t want to go on.”

Suddenly Nick saw the unthinkable. Somehow he managed to keep his face composed, his voice steady. “You don’t love me anymore?”

“Of course I
love
you.” She pronounced the word dismissively. “We had some great times. You’re a sweetheart. I’ve just fallen out of love with you. You’re not the one.”

If you decide to take the heart in which I have my roots, then think that on that very day, at that very minute
—a Spanish love poem began to run through Nick’s head but he shut it down and willed his eyes to stay dry. Tears would be like a red flag to a bull. Monica’s father had fought nightmarish battles across the frozen wasteland of Korea, his unit cut off and starving for weeks after the Chinese swept into the war to drive the Americans out of the North, and Monica’s mother had been an army nurse he met while learning to walk a second time. Monica had grown up in a household that laughed at common sickness and pain. She was tough. It was one of the things that Nick loved about her. She was fearless on the end of a rope. Nick saw that she would act swiftly, decisively, take no prisoners.

She reached over the table and put her hand on his.

Nick thought she might be daring him to cry so she could walk away with less regret. “I love you, Monica. I thought I was good for you, kind of a counterbalance. This is so fast it’s crazy. Why don’t you give us a little time?”

“It’s all I’ve been thinking about all summer. I’m not happy anymore.”

“The flames of passion are now just ashes?”

Monica’s mouth pursed in irritation.

“That was my own drivel.” Nick circled the table.

“Well, that pretty much sums it up,” Monica said as Nick pulled her up by the hands. “The excitement’s over and I can’t see us making a future together. We’re just too different.”

“It was fun while it lasted.” Nick tried to be ironic.

“Yeah.” Monica held him hard and laid her head on his shoulder. “It was a good run.”

Nick pushed her back by the shoulders to look at her blonde hair and blue eyes, her clean, all-American face.

“Girls flirt with you all the time, Nick. You’ll be all right,” Monica said. She had lost the brooding expression she’d had for the last few days.

Nick hugged her again so she wouldn’t see the rain clouds gathering in his eyes. He realized with a pang that this might be the last time he would feel her breasts pressed against his chest. Over her shoulder he said, “Let’s make love right now.”

“It would be like going to a funeral.”

Nick’s laugh was hollow. He looked in her eyes. “One last time. Like a wake.”

For a second Monica had the expression of a woman staring at a dress marked down in a shop, then she said, “No, Nick. It would just spoil the good memories. It would be
so
awkward.”

“In my experience sex at a dramatic juncture is out of this world.” Nick watched her for a sign she might change her mind. He wanted to throw himself at her feet, weep and beg, to rip off her clothes, carry her to the bed, and ravish her for hours. His voice was thick. “What are you going to do?”

Monica angled her eyes to the smoothie melting in her glass. “I’m flying to Hawaii to get on my parents’ boat.”

“When?”

“Today.”

“What?” Nick shouted, pulling away. “You drop this on me like a bomb and disappear?”

“I booked the ticket last week and I was sort of hoping that I’d change my mind.”

“This is so cold.” Nick stood still with a dazed expression.

“You’ve got to be cruel to be kind,” Monica quipped.

Nick felt as if he were falling through space, waving his arms with nothing to catch onto. Outside on the street a car honked. Nick staggered a few feet back and collapsed onto a sofa.

“There’s Chris.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Nick said.

“Please go.” Monica crossed the room and grabbed Nick’s satchel by his desk. It was green Italian leather, a birthday present she’d given him to replace his threadbare rucksack. Nick always packed it before he went to bed. Monica carried it to the sofa and sat down beside him. “Chris is out there.”

“I just had open-heart surgery. How can I teach?”

The car honked three short bursts, then a long wail.

“Nick, dammit, pull yourself together. You know how I hate scenes,” Monica said. “We’ll talk when you get back, okay?”

Nick returned immediately after class but she was already gone. He read a note on the kitchen table:

Dear Honey Bear,

I decided it’s better for us to talk about this when I get back in a couple of weeks. I’ll call you from the sat phone on the boat. I do love you, you know. We’re just not made for each other. We could still go climbing sometime.

Love,
Monica

“Fuck you,” Nick said, and the tears he’d been holding back gushed out in a great swell that left him bent over, grasping the table as if he could be washed away.

Through that week when the sun set, memories arrived like uninvited guests invading the living room of his mind to reminisce of the glory days over cocktails, impersonating her cheerful California accent.
Nick
, what if we had a girl and she had your dark skin and dark eyes and my blonde hair? Your full lips but the shape of my mouth? Your long legs and my long torso? Wouldn’t she be
so
gorgeous? Nick wanted to escape but he was trapped. Some of the visitors prodded him toward honesty: Come on, boy, admit that much of her appeal was the family money. You could pursue your do-gooder career knowing that you would always drive BMWs and spend Easter in Venice. “I love her!” Nick yelled to himself on Thursday night, spilling his gin and tonic in his lap. “She’s the only girlfriend I ever had that I didn’t cheat on!” At nine o’clock, when it was eleven in Nashville and Cage would be back from the library, he turned down the Talking Heads on the stereo and picked up the phone, dialed with unsteady fingers.