Golden State (26 page)

I showered in my room. The logical thing would have been simply to go to bed, but I was no longer tired. I put on some makeup and stared at myself in the mirror. It was me and it was someone else entirely.

It was after nine when I headed downtown.

* * *

I
’D BEEN
to this Basque restaurant years ago with Eric. A large dark bar in front, a smaller bright dining room in back, and long tables with red-checkered cloths. I was surprised that I found it again so easily, even more surprised that I’d been looking for it.

The bar was as packed as I remembered, but the dining room was nearly empty, the tables still littered, a large group finishing up in the center. No one approached me. The food was served family style on platters. I was without even my own small family. What had I been thinking? It was a quarter to ten.

A waitress came from the kitchen. She was mature, sure of her
self. “Dinner’s over, honey, but you can get a sandwich at the bar until eleven,” she said.

I glanced behind me. The crowd at the bar was three deep. I couldn’t think. I stood there like a huge bird, my arms too long, the left one now sunburned.

“I’ll find you a place,” she said, motioning for me to follow. In a few swift moves, she cleared a path, gave some orders—you up, you over—and I was seated. The man next to me bit into a sandwich. “Tri-tip,” he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “It’s good here.”

I nodded in a friendly way, and ordered a Scotch and soda with the sandwich. There was a television at the far end of the bar, but it wasn’t on.

“The TV’s been broken since the Carter administration,” the man said.

“Longer.” Another patron laughed.

“That’s the way it should be,” I said. All the televisions in the world broken. I was starting to think like Bobby.

“You a trucker?”

My friendliness shut off. I was offended. It wasn’t the picture I had of myself. “A teacher,” I said icily.

He was looking at the band of white between the T-shirt I was wearing now and the sunburn on my arm. Suddenly I understood that he’d been joking, maybe flirting, and I’d taken his comment the wrong way.

“What do you do?” I asked. I didn’t care what he did, but I wanted to make up for my chill.

“I work for the city,” he said.

I nodded knowingly, as if to say
yes, the city
, then turned my attention to the sandwich that had arrived. It was messy but good. I asked for a second drink and another napkin.

A band was setting up noisily on the little stage in the corner of the room, keyboard, amps, guitars. They weren’t kids, but ordinary-looking middle-aged guys. Geezer rockers, as Julia would say. The tall, rangy guy tuning his fiddle looked at least sixty. The man next to me drained his beer, put his napkin on his plate, crossed to the stage, and picked up a guitar.

I stared, surprised, and he smiled at me. The lights came up a bit. The lead guitarist stomped his foot. There was a sudden punch of sound. I knew the chords. “Mobile Line.”

Although his speaking voice was low, he sang high and nasal. Couples crowded the dance floor in front of the band and spilled into the center of the room between the bar and the tables along the wall. This was an old crowd, silver-haired guys in cowboy shirts, pressed jeans, and boots and their big-haired, weathered-about-the-neck dates.

He introduced the band. They were local guys. I got from the jokes that my friend—I’d elevated him to that—was a cop. At the break, they moved through the bar, shaking hands and slapping shoulders. My friend joined a table with five women. The rangy violinist flirted with the waitress who’d taken care of me. The bartender told me that the lead guitarist managed the paint department at Home Depot. Someone fed the jukebox. I ordered another drink. My waitress danced with the violinist. I saw it all from my perch at the bar, but I was invisible, crazy with relief to be outside myself.

The band played a shorter last set—or maybe I just didn’t want it to end. I paid my bill, tipped the bartender, and pulled a twenty from my purse. When I got off the bar stool, I was unsteady on my feet. I sensed I was weaving as I crossed to the waitress. “Wow.” She smiled, holding aloft the twenty I’d given her. Someone turned the jukebox on.

My friend glided into my field of vision. “Dance?” he said.

I wanted to for so many reasons. I loved to dance. The crowd was my age. Fear lay under my happiness and would soon be in control. I was drunk and hadn’t yet figured out how I was going to get back to the hotel. It had been years since I’d danced with a member of the band.

I took my purse off my shoulder and left it on a table. Be careful of your purse, I always said to Julia, especially if you’re going to be dancing.

He was taller than me, straight-postured, and still lean. His salt-and-pepper hair hit his collar. He had a beat-up, acne-scarred face and a strong grip. I guessed he’d been married a few times but wasn’t now. His shirt was damp, unsnapped far enough for me to see that his chest was hairless. More than twenty years, I thought, since I’d felt a smooth
chest next to mine. He pulled me close for a slow dance. “I love the way you look,” he said. “Your hair.”

“Thanks,” I said, flattered in spite of myself. It had been years since I’d danced like this, one song after another with a willing partner. When we finally dropped at a table against the wall, I was ready for the drink he bought me.

“Is this place always like this?” I asked, drumming my fingers on the table to the hum of the room.

“This is a good night. Last week it was dead.”

He placed his hands over mine, stopped their movement, and held them. He rubbed a finger across my wedding ring.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“I was hungry,” I said. “I didn’t want to watch television in my room.” There were so many more reasons, hundreds of them like a bridge behind me, spanning years to a place before I was even born. But I couldn’t bear looking further back than a few hours.

As if I were a teenager, I rose to dance again and pulled him up, the jukebox playing a country song. I didn’t know how to do the dance and he tried to show me. Soon I was laughing and falling against him. He was laughing, too. The bartender announced last call. I put up my hands. No more to drink. “What I need is a cab,” I said.

“I’ll give you a lift,” he said as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

Outside in the cooling air, I clutched him for warmth, for steadiness. He had his guitar in his other hand and asked me to hold it while he cleared the front seat of his pickup, tossing loose papers and a jacket behind the seat. He helped me up, and I felt as if I’d accomplished something simply by managing to get inside. He got in, and rested the key in the ignition. We were parked behind the restaurant, the lot dark, no other cars around. “Where do I take you?” he asked.

“The Sheraton,” I said. “Do you know where that is?”

He laughed. “Yes,” he said. He looked at me, and put his hand in my hair. I reached to take it away, my hand on his too long. Then he was kissing me, the softness surprising me. No, I thought, and then I was kissing him back, not breaking it off, too greedy for the moment,
this moment in which there was only sensation, only self and nothing else. As if I were seventeen, I thought all right this but not that. The cab was warm, the windows fogged. We were drunk. Our shirts were off. I didn’t want to remember the thing I had to remember: who I was. Zippers, hands, fingers. I didn’t care that I was getting marked, a knee banging into the dashboard, my smooth face against his rough one. It was too desperate, my franticness to stay submerged, fighting the pull of consciousness.

“I can’t,” I said, trying to disentangle myself.

“Your place or mine,” he said, misunderstanding.

I wasn’t dreaming. The panic biting my chest was true: I really had betrayed Eric. I groped for my T-shirt.

The act of arranging myself in my clothes made my breath shallow. “Oh God,” I said, throwing my head against the seat, my hand a fist against my mouth, hot tears on my hot face. I couldn’t stop. He grabbed me, and held me against him. He kept saying, “I’ve got you, it’s all right.” But it wasn’t.

I pulled away, no longer the person I’d always thought I was. I asked him to take me back to my hotel.

He didn’t argue. We drove in silence, the night air from our cracked windows stinging my cheeks. I looked at the stars hanging low in the sky and tried not to think.

Outside the Sheraton, he suggested coffee.

“My husband’s camping with our kids,” I said, looking at him. “I didn’t go because I had too much else going on. My brother’s the Cal Bomber.”

There might have been a flicker of surprise in his eyes. It was too dark to tell. I supposed he was used to people confessing all sorts of things. “Jesus,” he said quietly.

He offered to give me his card if I ever wanted just to talk. I thanked him but I refused. I thought of apologizing, but another apology seemed beside the point. I fled his pickup and hurried inside, a hand shielding my eyes from the awful light of the hotel lobby.

* * *

I
DIDN’T KNOW
where I was when I woke up, or why I ached so. When I opened the blackout drapes, the sunlight was like an assault, and the night before seemed impossible. But my face in the bathroom mirror told me it really had happened—my eyes bloodshot from drinking and swollen from hysteria, my cheek reddened from the rub of another man’s face. I stood under the shower and tried to wash it all away.

I checked out of the hotel, the desk clerk looking too long at the name on my credit card. The name of my great-great-grandfather who’d crossed into California in 1848, the name I’d always been so proud of. When I went outside, I couldn’t find my car. In the life I used to know, it would have been in the parking lot. In the life I’d fallen into the night before, my car was outside a Basque restaurant. I had to call a cab.

Since I first fell in love with Eric, I’d never shared so much as a kiss with another man. Except in dreams. Then I’d awake relieved that whatever I’d done hadn’t been real. But last night had been no figment, a stranger’s breath on mine. I’d been willing to exchange so much and we hadn’t even traded names.

I got onto I-5 and headed north, toward home. I was finished with wrong turns. Outside of Stockton, the odometer on my Honda flipped to a hundred thousand miles, but I missed the event.

chapter thirty-six

I
WAS FLUSHED
, alive in anticipation. My children were coming home today. I picked up a magazine, put it down, went to the window and back again too many times to count. I could not be contained. When I heard the sounds of an automobile in the driveway, I ran outside waving and jumping. The right car had pulled up but the wrong family emerged. The man was too tan, too lean, too unshaven, the kids too old. The girls seemed mortified by my loud voice, my waving. Julia had chopped off her hair and put it in spikes, her beautiful long hair. She wore a tattered blue blouse that looked like she’d found it at a Laundromat. I swallowed. They’d been gone two months.

“You look so grown up,” I told her. She endured my embrace the way my third-grade boys did when their mothers tried to kiss them at school.

Lilly stood next to Eric, a hand on the hem of his gray T-shirt. She was at least an inch taller, the first hint of cheekbones pressing through her chubby cheeks. I dropped to my knees, suffocating her against me. When I rose, she stepped back to take Julia’s hand. Eric and I kissed quickly, his unfamiliar stubble stinging my cheek.

Eric wanted to unpack the car, to get that out of the way. Julia headed straight for her room and the telephone. Lilly flopped to the floor in front of the television. I sat next to her and touched her curly hair. I had so many questions, but she uttered no more than one-word replies. I could have been anyone bugging her. I hadn’t let myself imagine how hard this was going to be.

I’d made dinner, spaghetti with homemade meatballs and a sauce of fresh tomatoes, a reliable hit. Even Julia shoveled it in. The girls dominated the dinner-table chatter. Afterward they managed to be in every room we were, as if they were afraid we might forget about them. Eric and I couldn’t have had a real conversation even if we’d wanted to.

It was eleven before the girls were asleep and the two of us were alone. Eric sat on the edge of our bed, tanned and fit in jeans and a T-shirt, his gray hair cut short. He could have been a stranger.

I stood in front of him. “Good to be home?” I asked, too lightly.

He didn’t answer, or even look at me.

I rubbed my arms against my sudden chill. “Have you met someone else? A campground woman?”

“Stop it,” he said.

I took a breath. “Are you leaving me?”

I’d pictured this conversation, played both sides, steeled myself for it, but I wasn’t prepared for how naked the words left me.

“I’ve driven five thousand miles this summer,” he said. “I’ve certainly thought about it.”

I felt helpless waiting for what he had to say.

“I’m not going to be the one who breaks up our family,” he said.

I laughed, bitter-throated. “You’re going to leave that up to me.”

A few days before, I’d reached my arms out to someone else. Eric might have, too. Could he read on my face what I was trying to pretend never happened?

How had we gotten to this broken place? I didn’t know. My brother had mailed bombs, and our marriage had been among the casualties.

I took a step toward him, my heart frantic. He looked at me without speaking. I drew the inside of my wrist down his face, and felt the pleasure of tender skin on hard bristle. He grabbed my wrist, his grip hard.

We stared at each other, our faces close. I didn’t move.

I was shaking, my thoughts pleading.
Forgive me.

He brought my wrist to his sunburned lips and kissed it.

I brushed his face with my fingertips as if his skin might scald me. We kissed, pushing against each other, toppling onto the bed.

“I want to forget,” I said, his hands in my hair.

Our anguish made it easy. We forgot to guard old injuries, fear new ones. There was only this falling, this hanging on.