Chance (84 page)

“Yes, well . . . there is always that. And I’m sure she would know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course not. Who ever does? But it’s not a bad out.”

Chance just looked at him.

“She
is
borderline, there’s nothing you can do, you or anybody else. She is what she is, the product of whatever tragic beginnings and fucked-up set of circumstances she had the great misfortune to be born into. What’s Beckett’s line? It’s a hell of a planet? My advice, make love to her while you still can. Make wild, passionate love and move on, onward and upward as they say, but tell me all about it, will you? Details, please.” When Chance said nothing, Jean-Baptiste continued with this latest train of thought. “You know how they say getting older means settling for less. It’s a good deal more dire than that, my friend, it’s staring the gray rat in the eye and refusing to blink.”

Chance looked once more to the man in the diaper, Captain America, aware of a fresh insight into his old friend’s work. “Is that what he’s doing?” he asked.

“Oh, there’s no doubt about it.”

“It’s what you look for . . . in all of them . . .” His eye swept to Lucy’s favorite, the old lady in her Indian headdress.

“That certain spark, yes . . . the immediacy of it. Unflinching, I suppose would be another way of saying it.”

“And how do you differentiate unflinching from purely mad?”

“Ah . . .” Jean-Baptiste said, warming to the subject. “Therein resides the tale, my friend. But I let the viewer decide about all of that. Frankly that part doesn’t interest me all that much. It’s the light that I’m after, a moth to the fucking flame, that and a few vicarious forays into the land of the living. It’s what remains and I’m counting on you to deliver.”

Chance smiled at him, in spite of everything. He couldn’t quite help it. If details were what he was after . . . Chance had details.

“ ‘Go under young man . . .’ ” Jean-Baptiste said. He was quoting now, from the man whose likeness perched upon Chance’s desk, Big D’s main man. Christ, Chance thought, there’s no escaping the fucker. But Jean-Baptiste’s eyes were cast to the heavens, his voice possessed of a theatrical tone in the lower register. “ ‘I love him whose soul is deep,
even in being wounded. . . . I love all those who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning and as heralds they perish.’ ”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Chance said.

“My point exactly,” Jean-Baptiste told him.

Tho the dark be cold and blind,

Yet her sea-fog’s touch is kind . . .

—George Sterling, “The Cool, Grey City of Love”

S
HE WAS
waiting for him in the little café and she was the woman she had pretty much always been in his presence, the one from the bookstore in Berkeley who had so nearly charmed him into asking her out. The effect was such that the subject of Raymond Blackstone did not come up again. He would never have imagined it that way but that’s the way it was; a moment out of time and that was, as Doc Billy would have said, the long and the short of it. Blackstone was still in a hospital room in the East Bay and the night was theirs. Later they walked, an empty bottle of some Napa Valley cabernet at the table to mark their passing, through city streets for what must have been half the length of San Francisco and the entire place made magical by the simple fact of her being in it, the sky void of stars but shot through with a grand, seemingly omnipresent luminosity that was no more than clouds giving back the city’s own light.

In places they would stop to window-shop for things they would never buy and half their sentences began with the phrase
“If I ever had a ton
of dough . . .”
and then they would laugh and go on. They found a tiny store off an alley not far from Allan’s Antiques that specialized in extremely high-end European pianos and Chance managed a somewhat halting version of a Chopin nocturne on a prewar Bechstein finished in rosewood and could not believe such a jewel of a place had escaped his attention until just now but felt too that perhaps a good many things had escaped his attention until just now.

Not from weariness but in an ever increasing hurry, they caught finally a city bus that Chance rode without diagnosing a single person save the one he was with, who sat close beside him on the plastic seat, covering his hand with her own, moving it for him to the inside of her thigh, warm through her jeans that seemed to fit her just there as might a second skin, the outside edge of his hand brushing up against the seam where it cut against her sex, as along their descent toward the Great Highway the moon split the clouds with such light as would take your breath and exiting they could hear the surf and smell the air thick with salt and he was dizzy with wanting her.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his going under . . .
Fucking Jean-Baptiste.

He was not sure how it would be, in the heat of the moment when the moment finally came . . . Jackie Black perhaps with whips and sex toys, some sadomasochistic limit experience worthy of Michel Foucault. It was after all
his
city of love . . . the place where the great man and fellow Nietzschean had come to conduct his own interrogation of limits by way of transgression and finally to orchestrate his end by way of its bathhouses and leather bars and let’s face it . . . it wasn’t exactly like Chance had never gone there with Jackie Black, in the emptiness of his apartment, in the still of the night, in the depths of his obsession, or fantasized that in fucking her he might even play out his own variation of the bad cop, having her because he could, because that was the stuff of fantasy, all power and pain, humiliation and control. But it wasn’t
like that either, not finally when all was said and done. It wasn’t like anything except what it was like. There was really no room for anything else, no vacant spaces and no more quips about him as her knight or how it was when he talked like a doctor. It was just her without words and she was right there with him, more present than anyone before her, meeting him at every turn, finding him one way and then another until it was very hard to say where one of them ended and the other began, and how many times can one say that about any one fucking thing? He was spent beyond caring in the wake of it, the taste of her still in his mouth, naked across the bed, in violation of the most basic tenet of his profession, as alive as he’d ever felt.

They might have dozed a little. It was hard to know. The point came when she rose to leave. “You could stay,” he told her.

She smiled a little. She was standing at the side of his bed, naked, the muted light caressing her body. My God, he thought, there was no getting enough of her. “I’m getting up early,” she told him. “I have a ticket. I’m going up north for a bit to visit my daughter.”

“She’s all right then? You know where she is?”

“Yes.”

“He told you then?”

“When I saw him in the hospital.”

The reference brought back all they had failed to discuss, the absoluteness of their little escape. “This business about him handling things . . .”

“I think,” she said, and she took a long time doing it, “it would probably be good for us not to see each other for a while.”

He just looked at her.

“I don’t know what happened or what this will do to him. All I can say is, I know him well enough to know that he will be out for blood. You don’t want to be in his way.”

He’d come to one elbow and lay there watching her dress. She did so without recourse to underwear, bra and panties being stuffed in her purse. Watching the jeans go up over her bare ass filled him with
longing. He saw her glance in the direction of the cabinet that held his perfumes then look away, her eyes down. “You know,” he said. “We could try that again . . .”

She lifted her face. Her smile was from the bookstore in Berkeley, sweet and smart, a little wicked. “Try what?” she asked. “Everything?”

“Yes. But what I meant was . . . we could try it again with the perfumes.”

She nodded.

“Would that be a yes or a no?”

“I don’t know.”

“I didn’t mean now, of course.”

“I didn’t think I could be your patient.”

“You can’t. But we can find someone else. We’ll find the best there is.”

“He
is
getting out.”

What sounded like the music from a passing car found its way from the street, a shrill voice in Spanish backed by accordions.

“I don’t know what he’s going to do. I may never see you again.”

“Is that why you came?”

A moment passed. “I wanted to,” she said. “I’ve wanted to ever since that day we met in the café below your office.”

“I’ve wanted to ever since that day in Berkeley,” he told her. “The day we met at the bookstore.”

She gave him a look. “
That
would have been forward.”

“I almost asked you out, to coffee or something.”

“What stopped you? Me being crazy?”

“My experience . . . the really crazy are rarely the ones who think of themselves as crazy, but in answer to your question, yes, that and the constraints of my profession.”

She smiled. “Well . . . neither seemed to have stopped you tonight.”

“Placing me at your mercy.”

She continued with her dressing. “I’m not sure we can stop,” she said.

“I’m not either but you’re right . . . it
would
be best if we did, but only for a while, and it’s not about him . . .”

“Who then?”

“You’ve been through an extended period of trauma. There may have been other traumas before, things still hidden. There’s lots of work to do. You have to be free to do it.”

She seemed about to respond then stopped, dropping to sit beside him, leaning forward, her fingers on his wrist and he saw that she had found him out because he had cut himself there once a long time ago and the scars were yet visible, old and faint but it must have been that the light was hitting them just so and suddenly she was tracing them with the tips of her fingers and when she had done that she turned her arm so that he might see other scars a good deal fresher than his own but he’d noticed those already, when she was beneath him, reaching out above her head, hands pressing into the wall, arms flexed and outstretched.