Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (22 page)

Finally Jim had landed a
second-floor railroad flat in San Francisco’s North Beach by sheer
luck, by taking over another Stanford’s faculty member’s lease when
he and his wife split up and fled for their lives. It was a fantasy
flat, with working fireplaces, high beamed ceilings, old hardwood
wainscoting, a stained-glass window at the end of the long central
hallway, sliding wood doors, an ancient marble mantel in a huge
front room that had a corner half-turret with windows of curved
glass through which he gazed at the frozen flight of lights in fog.
In that one sweeping view he could see Coit Tower on a nearby
hilltop, and above the trees of Washington Square down the hill the
illuminated spires of Saint Peter-Paul’s Cathedral rising like huge
sleek, elegant bones, and down descending avenues of fog toward the
Bay, where far below at Fisherman’s Wharf he could see a great red
neon fish flashing before some restaurant. Beyond that was Alcatraz
Island glowing through the fog like an enormous ship anchored in
the dark bay.

Jim had moved his few boxes
of belongings up from the low- rent residential hotel in Palo Alto
into the flat, and he had spent all his spare time cleaning and
polishing, polishing the broad windows until they cast the
prismatic colors of light across the shining parquet floors; and at
night, pooped from polishing, Jim would make a fire in the front
room’s fireplace and stretch out on his sleeping bag before it,
listening to plaintive, trumpety Mexican music on his portable
radio and sipping jug red wine while he imagined that firelight
flickering on Lindsay’s perfect, pretty titties.

2

Finally Jim got around to
calling old Ralph. Let’s get together for a drink and shoot the
shit, Jim suggested. They both arrived at the appointed bar late
and half loaded. They took one look at each other and began to
laugh and punch each other in the shoulders. You are the real
Running Dog, Ralph said. You always call me the Running Dog, but
you’re the real Running Dog around here. Well, Jim had to agree.
Jim felt so magnanimous he was nearly wiggling with it. Jim fed
Ralph a bag of what he knew in his heart was baloney about the
nature of Lindsay’s old love for Ralph, that Ralph was a great, no,
maybe the great love of Lindsay’s life, but that Ralph had let
that love slip through his fingers. Jim told Ralph that if Ralph
had been the one to go up to Missoula the previous May, Ralph
would be the lucky dog strolling down that aisle in the chapel of
love next spring and not Jim. What Jim really thought was that he
and Lindsay were a celestial pair, a match made in heaven, destined
legendary lovers, and that Ralph and Lindsay’s puny little affair,
if that’s what you even wanted to call that little fling, was only
a minor instrument of fate to get Lindsay and Jim together. Jim was
only bemused instead of bored stiff and pissed as Ralph bragged on
and on about new stories written and soon to be accepted by major
magazines. Jim did truly love that old Running Dog, his old buddy
who was doing his damnedest to hide his broken heart and who Jim
did not really mean to do dirt, this old Ralphie boy.

Ralph asked Jim to read at
his Thursday-afternoon class at Berkeley, and said they’d use the
fifty-bucks honorarium Ralph could probably scare up for a nice
dinner and drinks. By the time Ralph’s class met on the selected
afternoon, he and Jim had already drunk up the fifty bucks, and
Ralph introduced Jim first as a distinguished panel and then, after
several students pointed out the obvious, Ralph reintroduced Jim as
Norman Mailer.

That night Ralph and Jim had
found themselves somehow deep up in the Sacramento Delta, lost
among the levees, in a beer joint with a bunch of pretty college
coeds Ralph kept claiming he had never given A grades. Those honeys
never got A grades from me, Ralph kept claiming. Except for the
tall, black-haired beauty with the tattoo of a rose on her right
shoulder, whose first-person stories always concerned the funny
albeit sometimes fatalistic exploits of the female biker gang she
apparently led. They were in some godforsaken, crossroads roadhouse
named Dutch’s, which had a low ceiling of polished anders and walls
covered with wild fur and the stuffed faces of animals, and after
they had both fallen in and out of love with the tall, beautiful,
tattooed biker chick several times, but had finally decided to
give her up before she came between them, Jim put his arm around
old Ralph’s shoulder and he said, I’m sorry, old dog. You’re like a
brother to me, old Ralphie, and I did you dirt. But goddamn it,
Ralph, I love the girl. No, not the beautiful, fucken tattooed
chick, you can have her, I already told you. Lindsay. I love her.
Lindsay. I love you, too, old dog. But I love the girl, Ralph. I
do. We didn’t mean for it to happen. It just did. Ralph, I feel
terrible. I never wanted to cause you of all people in the world
pain and suffering and any feelings of humiliation and inadequacy.
I’d cut off my right arm, old Ralph, before I’d deliberately cause
you, my best old pal, the pain and suffering that come with feeling
like a loser, especially in the love department. But I love her,
old Ralph. No, goddamn it, not the tattooed chick. Lindsay!
Lindsay! Ralph, do you forgive me?

Sure, old Jim, Ralph said,
and hugged Jim’s shoulder back. —I forgive you. It’s water over the
dam.

Do you really forgive me?
Jim asked. —Do you mean it?

I do. I swear I do, old Jim,
Ralph said, shaking his woolly head in vigorous
affirmation.

Ralph and Jim embraced at
the bar. When Jim began to weep, so did Ralph. Men looked away from
them, and the college girls, including the tall, beautiful,
tattooed biker chick, began to dance with the incredulous
locals.

I have a new girlfriend,
anyway, Ralph said after a time.

Say what? Jim
said.

I'm a fool for love, Ralph
said. —I never learn my lesson.

You have a new
girlfriend?

She’s a babe.

Her? Jim asked, and nodded
toward the tall, beautiful, tattooed biker chick, who was boogying
wildly at that point with a bearded, one-legged, relentlessly
hopping local man.

No, Ralph said. —No way. I
told you you could have her.

Who, then? Do I know her?
What’s her name?

You’ve got to be kidding,
Ralph said, and laughed, his big shoulders shaking, covering his
mouth with his paw, the way he used to do.

Ralph and Jim had 4:00 a.m.
scrambled eggs at a Nut Tree restaurant God-knows-where on Route
80, where they walked the check and Ralph stole a cherry-wood
pepper grinder as an upcoming anniversary present for Alice Ann, to
commemorate their eighteen years of marital bliss.

3

Lindsay and Jim were married
on a beautiful spring afternoon, and she wore a long-sleeved,
floor-length, light green dress, its material covered with small
blue and yellow flowers, which she had made with her own hands. She
wore a wide-brimmed white sail of a sunhat and carried a single
white rose. Jim wore a new plaid sport coat he had bought the day
before. It looked like something he could fashionably wear to sell
used cars.

The party that night after
the ceremony was a great success, and the police were called only
twice. When Jim came to the next afternoon himself, he found his
breathtakingly beautiful bride in bed beside him still wearing her
lovely, albeit somewhat wrinkled, wedding dress, not to speak of
her somewhat crushed white sail of a hat, whereas Jim was buck
naked except for his brand-new snakeskin cowboy boots, Lindsay’s
wedding gift.

Only for Crumley’s grumbling
and threats two days later did the rented moving van get loaded
with all of Lindsay’s worldly goods for the move south to San
Francisco to begin a new life with this new husband. The various
Trail’s End bar drunks.

Buffalo had dragged along to
help had moved like moonwalkers, and often their memories clearly
failed them as they returned to the house with items from the
truck. Lindsay visibly trembled as her beloved, inherited treasures
were lucked into place on the truck and bound. When the Buffalo
almost stumbled off the truck’s loading plank with a box of her
grandmother’s priceless china, Lindsay gasped and then flung
herself to the second-floor bathroom, where she locked herself in,
lit up, and paced in rage and despair. The day had been packed with
the portent of bad omens. As soon as she spotted her kitty-carrying
case the morning of this moving day, little Sappho had hidden out
wild-eyed and shivering in a closet. Finally Lindsay quit pacing
the bathroom and simply flopped down on the commode lid, where she
sat grinding her teeth and chain-smoking. Presently Jim began
tapping on the door and begging Lindsay to trust in their future
together.

Later on that day of their
departure, when Jim pulled Lindsay’s Oldsmobile Cutlass into a
drive-through car wash in Lolo to remove the crude comments Buffalo
and the boys had soaped onto the car, the crazy caravan of Trail’s
End drunks and grown men with the nicknames of boys had circled
them honking and hooting and hanging mooning asses out side
windows. Now and again some drunk fool would discharge his gun in
the air. Lindsay had looked over at Jim with her smoky,
country-song gray eyes, and shook her head slowly, and said quietly
and simply, Good God, and I am just on my so-called honeymoon.
Lindsay reached over and put her hand on Jim’s big arm. Honey,
Lindsay said, and Jim looked at her, honey, all I want is a normal
life. A simple, normal life is all I ask of you.

Yessum, Jim had said, and
grinned. —The normal life is in the mail.

4

A huge full moon hung above
the Bay, and nearby the planet Venus shone that night far more
brilliantly than any star, as Jim and Lindsay sped into Berkeley
out of the east, Jim singing Shine on, shine on harvest moon, for
me and my gal, above the radio blasting honky-tonk, the highway
lights lushly coral, taillights bobbing in the tinted windshield
like the blossoms of tiny electric red roses.

Lindsay rolled down her
window, stuck out her head, let her long hair blow. She closed her
eyes, opened her mouth, and ate air fresh from the Orient. Lindsay
clapped her hands. I’ve never been so flipping excited, she
exclaimed to Jim. I’ve never been so happy. God, Stark, I think I
could eat you alive, Lindsay said, and then kissed and nibbled at
Jim’s neck.

Just remember, Jim said, you
are what you eat.

When suddenly in the smooth
flowing darkness beyond the road in the mudflats by the bay, the
horrible shapes of creatures rose in Lindsay’s vision from the
black waters. Holy moly, Stark, Lindsay said, and pointed
excitedly. —What in the world?

Them, baby, Jim said, are
driftwood sculptures. People come out and build them at low tide.
Driftwood dinosaurs, a sphinx of driftwood, tigers, trolls, demons,
driftwood creatures in the form of spheres, an animal imagined by
Poe, a minotaur, Swedenborg’s devils, the elephant that foretold
the birth of Buddha, driftwood metaphysical beings, nymphs, you
name it.

Whatever you say, Stark,
Lindsay said, rolling up her window and lighting a cigarette. She
looked into the rearview mirror. She wanted to keep the past behind
her but still visible, the way she liked to watch horror movies on
television, from the next room while she was ironing.

Following a wide sweep of
highway onto a massive bright boat of a bridge that seemed to float
over a flood of low fog, Jim delivered Lindsay into the startling
lights of a brand-new life.

Killer Is Cool

1

The fresh start that Ralph
and Alice Ann made that same March when Jim and Lindsay were
married was perhaps their best ever. They had been through the
flames, Alice Ann declared, and now they were rising from the ashes
of the past. They had gotten that bad bankruptcy business behind
them, and Ralph’s first book, that collection of stories which
would eventually make him famous, was just coming out, and the
early reviews—Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly—were
wonderful. All those years of dashed hopes, final straws, that life
of low points, leaving towns under the cover of darkness,
abandoning breakdowns on the highway and sneaking away burdened by
defeat, bankruptcies like clockwork, were all somehow vindicated
and made almost heroic by the stories in Ralph’s book.

Ralph and Alice Ann had
decided to use every dime of Ralph’s remaining advance money to
make their old homestead as glossy as a magazine layout. Alice Ann
searched Sears for new bedroom rugs and drapes and kitchen
curtains; they had to have new kitchen curtains, curtains like
Alice Ann’s mother once had, pale green with tiny pink apples on
them, a few posters maybe, or prints, both, whatever, as long as
they were bright, splashed with color, maybe in a Mexican motif
(Alice Ann loved Mexico, and someday she and Ralph just had to get
south of the border), as long as everything new in this fresh start
was an aria of color and brightness and light, and plants, loads of
new plants, exploding ferns, green jades, flowering plants,
everywhere green, growing plants, galore with life, and lamps, two
big new lamps for their showcase of a living room.