Golden State: A Novel (22 page)

“I don’t deserve it, Jules, but I need you to forgive me.”

The hem of her skirt was frayed. Under the beautiful Vera Wang coat, she’d been wearing the same skirt the last few times I’d seen her—she said it was the only thing that didn’t make her uncomfortable. Why had I never thought to buy her another skirt?

“I’m trying,” I said. “I’m really trying.” She wanted to know that I forgave her. Why couldn’t I give her this? I realized that maybe that was what she’d been waiting for all along, maybe that was why she came back.

Later that afternoon, we found ourselves on the cliffs at Lands End at low tide, the time of day when that frigid stretch of coast is prone to giving up its secrets.

“What’s that?” Heather asked, pointing to a bit of steel poking up from the shallows about a hundred yards offshore.

“There are dozens of old shipwrecks around here,” I said. “That’s
most likely the
Lyman Stewart
, or maybe the
Ohioan
. The one that’s always fascinated me is one you can’t see, the
Rio de Janeiro
.”

“Yeah?”

“It was a foggy morning in February 1901. The ship originated in Hong Kong with two hundred and ten passengers and crew. It hit a submerged rock at Fort Point at about five o’clock in the morning and disappeared within a few minutes. Two hours after the wreck, an employee for the Merchants’ Exchange who was waiting for the
Rio de Janeiro
at the port of San Francisco saw a life raft emerging from the fog.”

“There were survivors?”

“Eighty-two.”

Heather absentmindedly laid a hand on her stomach. “Any kids?”

“It was mostly the men who survived. Years ago, Tom gave me a book,
Great Shipwrecks of the Pacific Coast
. I sort of got hooked. One of the passengers who died was a mail-order bride—Mary Catherine Carraher—on her way to marry Tom’s great-grandfather.”

“I guess it’s lucky for Tom she didn’t make it.”

“Long story short, the
Rio de Janeiro
vanished. A few bodies washed up onshore after it happened, and over the years, bits and pieces of it floated to the surface, but the hull was never found. All sorts of stories circulated about treasure buried at the bottom of the sea, but to this day no one knows where the wreckage is located. Now whenever I’m out here, I find myself subconsciously searching for the
Rio de Janeiro
. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have this fantasy that one day, I’m going to make a great discovery.”

10:01 a.m
.

A couple of blocks downhill from St. Francis Memorial Hospital, I stop in front of a motorcycle shop. A single light shines inside, casting its glow on a dozen bikes, chrome gleaming. The door to the motorcycle shop swings open, and a man pulls out on a Harley. He looks to be in his late forties, with blue eyes and close-cropped brown hair.

I hobble over, and he cuts the engine. “Please tell me you’re not an apparition,” I say.

“Unfortunately, I’m really here. Picking up my money pit.”

“I thought Harleys were indestructible?”

“Not quite. My wife says that’s what I get for having the poor taste to indulge a midlife crisis. I’m a marine biologist in my real life.” He gives me a once-over, his eyes settling on my bandaged foot. “Looks like you’ve got your hands full.”

“I don’t suppose I could ask you a favor?”

“Let me guess: you need a ride.”

“It’s kind of an emergency. I have to get to the hospital at Forty-third and Clement to deliver my sister’s baby.”

He adjusts the rearview mirror. “Sure. We’re going to have to jog around the roadblocks and see how we do. I can’t make any promises,
but I should at least be able to get you a few blocks west of here.”

“Great. Thanks so much.”

“No problem. We’ll just strap your crutches down.” He winds a bungee cord around the crutches. “I’m Ted, by the way.”

“Julie Walker.”

He tightens the cord. “That should do it. But you’re going to need a helmet.” He runs inside the shop and comes out with a hot pink helmet. “Sorry,” he says, smiling. “I take it you’re not a hot pink kind of lady.”

“I love it.” It feels like some brilliant disguise, like trying on a new life, if only for a minute. I pull the strap tight and climb on behind him, bracing my hands on the back of the seat.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Ted says, “but you might want to hold on to me.”

I wrap my arms around his waist, feeling timid at first, but once we get going I lean into him, surprised by how much I like the unfamiliar sense of dependence, my own safety entirely out of my control. I think of Paul, a pediatric oncologist I’ve known for years. A few days after Tom revealed that he had slept with the “Hallelujah” woman, I ran into Paul in the hallway after my weekly lecture at UCSF. He asked if I wanted to go out for coffee. Over cappuccinos at Reverie, he told me he’d just gotten divorced. He and his wife had two children in middle school, a house in Millbrae, a vacation home in Tahoe, season tickets to the Giants, sixteen years of marriage under their belts. Tom and I had attended their Christmas party a few months earlier. The wife was the principal of a public high school; the children were polite and smiling. Even the dog, a golden retriever named Zito, seemed made-for-TV perfect. From the outside, everything looked fine.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Paul said.

“I know what you mean.”

He looked at me as though a light had switched on in his brain. “Hey, you want to have dinner with me this weekend?”

“Why not?”

As I was dressing for the date, putting on my best lingerie, I realized I was more nervous than I’d been in years. The last time a man had seen my naked body for the first time, it was Tom, and I had been twenty-five years old.

As it turned out, we didn’t go to bed together on that date. But a couple of weeks later, we met for drinks at the Claremont in Berkeley. Well into our third glass of wine, Paul looked at his watch and said, “If we don’t leave now, we’re going to miss our reservations. Chez Panisse Café doesn’t tolerate tardiness.”

“I don’t really feel like dinner,” I said.

We skipped the dinner reservations and checked into a room at the Claremont. It started off steamy and sexy, but once we got past the kissing and unzipping, it quickly turned awkward. Even though Paul was in great shape and knew all the right buttons to push, I didn’t have much fun. I felt too self-conscious, as if we were following a script in which we had both decided to cheat on our cheating spouses but we’d been miscast.

The next morning, when I rolled over and got my bearings—registering the small shock of finding myself in bed with another man—I realized that I was going to ask Tom for a divorce. This decision had little if anything to do with Paul, who, I realized, was merely a diversion, a mildly pleasurable means to an inevitable end. Paul and I showered separately, dressed, and went down to breakfast, where we agreed that, while it had been a good night, a therapeutic night, we didn’t want to turn it into a relationship.

“Just promise me one thing,” I said, raising my mimosa in a toast.

“Hmm?”

“It won’t be weird when we see each other at work.”

“Other than the fact that I’m going to imagine you naked every time I see you, it won’t be weird at all.” And, oddly enough, it wasn’t.

We hit roadblock after roadblock, slowly winding our way west. Even with my poor sense of direction, I can tell we’re getting closer to Forty-third Avenue, but farther from Clement. By the time Ted
pulls over to the curb across the street from Golden Gate Park, it feels as though something with very sharp jaws has taken hold of my ankle and won’t let go. Ted cuts the engine, climbs off, and helps me with my crutches. “I’m really sorry. I wish I could have gotten you closer. Good luck with that baby.”

I thank him and turn to face the crowd. As Ted and his bike rumble away, I have the sinking feeling that my best chance for getting to Heather on time has just vanished. A brick wall sections off the park at Stanyan and Fulton. In order to enter, I’ll have to navigate the two crowded blocks to the Arguello Gate. I think of Rilke again, his pregnant woman making her way along the wall in the middle of the bombed-out city. The world doesn’t stop for a baby, but surely, it does at least make some concessions.

In early November, after daylight savings kicks the clock back an hour, it is already dark when I leave work just after five. From the parking lot of the VA I can see across the quiet avenues of the Richmond, over the long green swath of Golden Gate Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city glittering on the layered hills. Some nights it is warm, and the children at the school on the edge of the campus are getting in their last few minutes of play before their parents arrive to pick them up.

In the first few days of early darkness, the playground vibrates with excitement. The children chase and squeal and whoop it up, as if they think they’re getting away with something, being outside with their friends after dark, when, by the looks of things, they ought to be in bed.

One of my most vivid memories is of the playground at that particular time in that particular season, five years ago. It had been a difficult day at work. I had lost a patient—Mr. Drager, a Korean War vet, very frail. His wife and daughter were by his side when he died, and I was there, too, along with his favorite nurse, a middle-aged woman named Paula who used to cut Tootsie rolls into tiny pieces so that he could suck on them—his favorite sweet, something remembered from childhood. A few days before he died, his daughter
watched him smile as the candy was placed on his tongue. She had flown in from Sweden two months before, expecting to stay for a weekend, but had found she couldn’t leave her father; she needed to be with him until the end.

His death was a good death, as deaths go, and yet, that afternoon, I was feeling the grief of losing him. With some patients, I’ll admit, I feel no such thing. But I had liked Mr. Drager very much, had enjoyed hearing his stories of his childhood in the thirties in Chicago, where his father was a union man and his mother was a seamstress. He had been injured by a grenade, which left him with a metal plate in his left hip, a nail in his left knee, one blinded eye, and a permanent, pronounced limp. But he didn’t regret it. “I did my bit for my country,” he told me once, “and ever since, my country has been taking care of me in one way or another.”

Mr. Drager had been coming in for years, since long before I began working there—sometimes for a couple of days at a time, sometimes weeks. His final stint had been his longest. In the end, we simply unhooked everything. It was what he had approved in his paperwork back when he was able, and something I had discussed with him at length when he was still lucid. When it came time to turn off the machine, my hand shook. I had done it many times; I knew it was the right thing, what he wanted, what his family wanted; and yet it was with deep sadness that I carried out his orders and watched the EKG go flat. He died at two forty-six in the afternoon. After that I still had rounds to make, patients to talk to, a brand-new intern to supervise.

After work, I left the hospital and walked over to the school to collect Ethan. There were plenty of fancier child-care centers in the city, but Ethan was happy here, and I liked having him nearby. It made me feel complete, to have my working life in such close proximity to my home life. Picking him up was always my favorite part of the day, but that evening, as much as I wanted to see him, I would have given anything for half an hour to sit alone in a quiet room with a glass of wine and process the day’s events.

As I walked across the parking lot, I could see the children on the
playground, could hear their happy squeals. I stopped just outside the tall chain-link fence and spotted Ethan, pushing a plastic tractor through the sandbox. “Garbage guy is coming,” he said to no one in particular. “Out of the way, garbage guy coming through.” My heart flooded with joy. I lingered outside the fence, watching him, until another child spotted me and called, “Ethan, your mommy’s here!”

Ethan dropped the tractor and ran to the fence. I opened the gate and stepped inside, and he rushed into my arms, pressing his face against my shirt. Then he stepped back and asked me very seriously, “Am I on vacation?”

“You’re not on vacation,” I said. “You’re at school. Does it feel like vacation?”

“Look!” he exclaimed, pointing up at the sky. “It’s dark. There’s the moon! I never go to school at nighttime before!”

“The time changed,” I explained. “Now that winter is coming, it gets dark earlier.”

“I know!” he said. “Let’s have cake for dinner!”

I scooped him up into my arms. “Good idea. We’ll make one when we get home.”

Suddenly, I no longer felt that I needed half an hour alone. I only wanted to be with Ethan, this sweet boy who had been delivered under such terrible circumstances into my life. I loved the way he saw the world. I loved the fact that the smallest change in routine could become an event, worthy of celebration. From an early age, ambition for me had been a slow burn, the thing that kept me going and gave me pleasure, the thing that marked my place in the world. As I carried Ethan to the car, I understood how it happened that well-educated women suddenly abandoned hard-won careers, devoting themselves to domesticity; something about mothering a small child softens the edges of ambition, mutes the desire to race ahead. When I was with Ethan, I wanted to stop time.

Later that night, watching Ethan devour the chocolate cake we’d made from a box when we got home, I thought of Mr. Drager’s daughter, who had traveled thousands of miles to be with her father
when he died. Ultimately, wasn’t this what it meant to have a child? You raise them up, you suffer every time they suffer, you’re happy when they’re happy, you make cake together, you marvel at the moon, and the reward is this: when you are old, you don’t have to die alone.

“I like the pretzels,” Dennis says, “but the M&M’s were better. Why’d you switch?”

On the other end of the line, I can hear him chewing.

“Health kick,” I reply.