She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (19 page)

I could have checked my answering machine from any push-button phone, even from Potrero Hill, but I wanted to consider things in a strictly business environment. Pure stubborn stupidity wasn't sufficient to account for my life; I was looking for other explanations, age, malignant nostalgia, liver disease—something it would be fun to blame. Dumb pigheadedness wasn't really enriching to my self-esteem.

I never saw evidence of cleaning people in the building above Enrico's, not very much evidence of cleaning, either, but tonight a chemical cleaning smell welcomed me and a bucket of green powder stood in a corner of my office, near the filing case. The stench didn't taste clean in my mouth, but maybe it was busy smothering invisible toxic infections. I sat at my desk, switched on the gooseneck lamp, and picked up my memo sheet. I wrote: Priscilla. I wrote: Dan. I wrote: Jeff. That was about as far as I could go. Werner, where are you when I need you?

The smells from the cleaning bucket were worse than dirt. I stared at the green powder in the pail that was like Jeff's sand pail when we used to drive out to Ocean Beach, except that beach sand isn't green and doesn't have that chemical smell. Jeff liked to pick up sand dollars, those airy tracings … When I heard the closet door open, I was ready with a question: “You left your cleaning bucket, didn't you?”

“No shit,” said the man in the closet, stepping out, a schoolteacherish person with glinty metal-rimmed glasses and no broom in his hand. My closet-dweller was a dark cidery brown fellow with a weathered sinewy body. He had not been napping in the closet. What he had in his hand was a stubby weapon, cut down from a larger one. It would make a big noise if it went off.

“I didn't hear you cleaning in there,” I said.

“No shit.”

“You find anything interesting?”

I figured it might be a good idea to keep the skinny Filipino schoolteacher or night janitor or illicit-entry enterprise-zone person talking, if possible. A man with a gun is best kept talking, from the point of view of the man without a gun.

He didn't answer the question about what he was looking for in the closet. He must have transferred himself there when he heard my footsteps outside. I looked him in the eyes—couldn't see the eyes—looked at the glint off the bottle lenses of his glasses and kept on talking. “So if you're not a sanitary engineer in the building, what can I do for you?”

“I am.”

“Sir?”

“Sanitary engineer stuff. I save phone calls, that type action.”

“Save phone calls?”

“Make a point—”

“You're making it, waving that thing at me.”

“—hey, and you talk too much while I'm making my point. Mr. Karim ask me to ask you—”

In that schoolteacherish gun-toting way, he said “ask,” with an effort, not “ax.” His nervousness and his gun were for purposes of signifying. He was a little man with severe eye problems. Probably growing up half black, half Filipino kept him on his toes and he needed to do a lot of signifying with the neighborhood kids, flashing his roll or his piece or whatever he carried to impress the folks.

“Mr. Karim, he like to talk to you,
converse.
” He peered around the room disapprovingly. “Why don't you get a better lamp, beam onto things?”

“I'm not usually here much at night.”

“So meet Mr. Karim at the farmer's market—he like that fresh stuff, no preserve in it—down at Civic Center? How about eight o'clock tomorrow morning?”

“I don't like to get out that early. I get up, but I'm just having my coffee.”

“Tomorrow morning's an exception. Maybe you be up most of the night anyway, am I right?”

The weapon was just for show. The skinny fellow stuck it in his pocket. It probably didn't even have cartridges. The skinny fellow was just Karim's way of saving on telephones, not putting things on tape, plus making an impression.

“If you never done your shopping there, you gonna love that farmer's market, man. All those fresh fruits and vegetables and dried nuts in bulk.”

He started out the door.

“Hey!” I said. “Don't you want your cleaning bucket?”

He turned, his goggles catching the light from my gooseneck lamp. “You say hey to me, smart-ass, I got to give you credit. But man, I think you stupid, too. How about your responsibilities? Don't you get a divorce from your wife but you still got a boy you didn't divorce yet?”

*   *   *

I called Priscilla and said to watch Jeff, not let him wander unobserved, and were there any strangers hanging around the neighborhood?

“Dan, is there anything I should be afraid of? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No, no, you know me. Just fuss and fidget.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Nothing to tell, just thinking night thoughts…”

As always, when I spoke with Priscilla by telephone, my hand was shaking when I hung up. But nothing in my voice betrayed anxiety, I was sure of that, because otherwise she would have mentioned it.

I thought it best, perhaps even interesting, to meet with Karim as requested. Although the message was delivered by a man with a cleaning bucket who had found his way into my office in the slope above Enrico's in North Beach, and this wasn't the way messages usually came to me, I saw good reason for doing a bit of shopping at the Civic Center's farmer's market the next morning. It would have been wrong not to enjoy the nuts in bulk and hear the man out.

*   *   *

The little brown guy was right about my sleeping that night. Karim had found a way to keep the blood moving in my head, the lymph system flooded and alert, if that's what causes a person to mobilize himself. It was almost a pleasure to be forced into doing something again.

I parked illegally in a bus zone near the outdoor market end of the Civic Center. As long as I wasn't towed, I wouldn't worry; always intended to rotate into the set of Florida license plates a colleague in West Palm Beach sent me every year as a Christmas present, but never quite put the screwdriver to work. Onion smells off the morning produce stalls. Admired the Honda clunk shut of a well-fitting door. The clunk now had a bit of rattle, like a cigarette cough; someone once tried to pry it open at another bus zone, figuring he might as well make off with the radio since the car was illegally parked anyway. Must have been a fastidious junkie who didn't like smashing windows, all those pulverized bits of safety glass.

Not just onion smells;
nice
onion smells. Down here in the Tenderloin, amid the homeless, the Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants, the old alkies, the geriatric giveups, the Wednesday and Saturday farmer's market provided earthy, healthy, vitamin-filled fumes. Not even the hot air inflating the dome of San Francisco City Hall nearby could kill the smell of fresh onions. Folks picking up their bulk raisins, sun-ripened tomatoes, strands of plump white garlic, and artichokes from Castro Valley temporarily outnumbered the folks in the nearby outdoor offices of the transvestite and transsexual, twenty-four-hours-a-day, we-never-close retail exchange of drugs and favors.

I looked back to find a woman cop with her foot on the rear bumper of my Honda, taking out her citation book, and then waving, “Yo, Dan!”

“Yo, Wanda!”

She tucked the citation book back into her belt. Maybe this was another lucky day. I even remembered her name. If she'd still been a meter person, where she'd started out, it would not necessarily have been my lucky day. San Francisco was sometimes a friendly small town where people knew each other, such as Wanda and Dan, and didn't give citations.

I didn't know the farmers at their stands. Some of them wore mittens, plaid shirts, work boots; and then, beneath a sign that said
ORGANIC SQUASH
, there was the young woman wearing a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt, denim cutoffs so short I could see part of the triangle of hair between her legs. She had a cute face with bright kitten eyes under dark bangs. “What's organic squash?” I asked her, and from behind her cart—now, settled on its wheels, it was more like a country stand—she said, “Bugs, weevils, worms, all good protein when you cook it—no cancer-giving insecticides, sir?”

“That's terrific.”

“We sell a lot of them at Halloween time. We call those over there ‘pumpkins.'”

“Good name for them,” I said. “I'll take a weevil zucchini if you got one.”

“Eat it here or to go?” the kitten-faced, button-eyed farmerette asked. “That individual standing behind you wants a word with you, Mr. Kasdan.”

I turned slowly. It was Karim, no surprise there, wearing a long knitted coat, a kind of overgrown sweater with folds and drapes that made him look like a thickened, foppish manager of dancers. Several colors in dark shades, purple, orange, were woven together. He was nodding and nodding, smiling, dense trimmed clumps of eyebrows working, darkly stained lids blinking, the voice oiling out: “You sure do mess up.”

“Explain that to me.”

Karim worked his lips in the fresh vegetable chill. “Prefer not, my friend, worry you unnecessarily.” He shrugged under the heavy knit. “If it turns out to be necessary.”

The important thing in a complex negotiation is just to be there, not rushing to have a say, just waiting for the opening. I have learned this, but I don't always know it. This time I partway managed. Karim put his fingers around a tomato at the farmerette's stand. He didn't squeeze hard; he was only enjoying the fresh yielding flesh. He was smiling, nodding, urging me to understand him,
care
for him. I needed to make things explicit. This need of mine had been part of what caused the trouble with Priscilla, my asking if she loved me at a time when the answer was not going to be favorable. Sometimes it's better just to let things slide along. I wasn't like that. I was an old-time nag and worrier.

“You ever go about things the normal way?” I asked.

Karim sighed. He put his hand on the knitted wool over his chest and then back on a tomato. “Like everybody, I have human feelings, my friend. I think it was eight years ago, summer. I was younger. My best girl was pregnant—was I pissed—but then she had a miss, you know, a late period, and she couldn't stop crying and suddenly, right here”—his chest again—“I felt something for her. Sad? Didn't want to fuck her or anything, just sad. For her. Isn't that the normal way?” He cast his eyes downward, long lashes fluttering, dejected. “And then I went to the mirror, my friend, see what it look like.”

“I accept what you're saying, Karim.”

“No you don't.”

“I believe you.”

“But you don't understand. Nobody does. You're so smart you think you do, but you're so dumb you don't.”

“Stipulated. What does this have to do with me?”

Karim was still exploring the tomato, pressing into it, taking risks with his nails. It could squirt all over me. It could even squirt on him. “My friend,” he said, “but I really was sad. Would have changed my life. Have that son, nearly eight years old by now.”

I wasn't going to ask how he knew it would have been a boy. Karim didn't need the procedures of questioning. I didn't need the involvement.

The farmerette with the bright button eyes and the fringe of bangs was watching us both with a happy Future Farmers of America smile on her pointy little face. During the moment which gave her a chance, she remarked politely, “Normally when people squeeze the tomatoes, we prefer they buy. These are carried ripe, farm to town, and we're proud of their mint condition. We even drive in low gear so's not to bounce them around too much.”

I reached into my pocket.

“Oh no, not you, Mr. Kasdan. I was just explaining our tomatoes in general. You're not responsible for what Karim does around here.”

Now the nice fresh vegetable smells weren't much better than the green chemical cleaning smell in my office. Sniffing around should be more fun for a man with a healthy nose in middle life. For that matter, as a coffee lover, I had been stuck with rotten coffee since Priscilla and I split up—either bitter restaurant coffee after cheap Greek salads and souvlaki or, worse, instant brown paste when I was waking myself at home, climbing out of a bad dream with relief when the alarm went off. Sniffing around with a healthy nose in middle life was leading me to Filipino office cleaners and Junior Miss farmer persons without a lot of sincerity in their hearts.

This was a
complaining
man. Sometimes I drank good coffee at the Puccini on Columbus, and Alfonso made good coffee, and I recall a few times, visiting Jeff, picking up the kid, when Priscilla told me to sit down while she offered me a cup of the brew I remembered.

Karim called me back to business. He preferred that I pay attention. “Hey Dan, two things people like to have said about them, and since people say those things about me, I'm a happy individual.”

“What's that?”

“You mean what's those. Okay, now we're conversing. First, I have a great sense of humor. Everybody wants to hear that, but in my case, I'm confident it's true.”

“Stipulated. And?”

“And he moves with a certain grace.”

“Pardon?”

“People say, Dan”—Karim bent closer to explain, patient—“people tend to say I'm stocky, not fat, built slow and easy, not a kid anymore, but, Dan … I move with a certain grace.”

I would agree to that, too, a certain grace, plus lovely eyes, if it was required. I had no strong convictions in the matter.

“And Dan? Furthermore?”

I kept my eyes on him.

“You kind of tickle me. That's as good as have a way with jokes—better. And you definitely move with an average degree of style. I'd almost say, in your case, grace, if you will kindly permit.”

“As you say, everybody does.”

Karim shook his head. “Didn't say that, my dear. Said people like to
think
that. About themselves they like to think it, and sometimes like to say it to others, whether it's true or not. It doesn't have to be true.”