She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (6 page)

The wet-ashes smell of my contented middle age was gone. I told myself in wonderment, in disbelieving, incredulous total conviction: Forever! This is forever! After a long history of floating on the sweet surfaces of San Francisco, working enough to get by, killing time, occasionally killing some brews with Alfonso—now I thought, Forever with this lady, just because little songs come out of her eyes when she smiles? I answered the question: Yes.

We kept talking to each other as if we had found endless marvels to tell. I brought her the stones I had collected in a longer life than hers. She wrapped in ribbons the delights and pains of her growing up. We sat laughing and breathing into each other. We ate all the time and grew thin. We were in a state. We were too happy. Our friends hated us. I noticed her secret pre-pregnancy sleepy smile. Probably I walked with a strut. I knew we would have children. Envy is as legitimate and human as any other enjoyment. Alfonso was right to dislike so much happiness. He also forgave us. That's the job assignment for friends who have to deal with lovers.

*   *   *

About that time, probably due to the confidence shed down upon my life, the swagger of a happy lover, I finally had the chance to get rich. An offer came my way. Karim Abdullah was a friendly person of enterprise, hefty across the chest and in the thighs, wearing semitropical clothes that emphasized his heft. He kind of liked heft; he also kind of appreciated a skinny, different sort of person like me. Despite his body's tendency to weight, his spirit was delicate and precise. He kept his eyebrows carefully sculpted into widely separated bunches of dense hair, clean outlines, with antlike dots of plucked growth between the clumps. He liked a lot of things about doing business in San Francisco, including his own eyes, and reminded himself and others of his pleasure by wearing a touch of eyeliner.

The sex shows he ran in a former movie theater in the Tenderloin were the legal, tax-paying part of his enterprise.

I used to notice Karim looking at me, nodding, nodding, smiling, building up our acquaintance on the sidewalk terrace of Enrico's, where we both took lunch. When he saw me there with Priscilla, he made the beer-ad approval sign with his hand, circle of thumb and forefinger, three thick fingers upraised, meaning, Hey! She's okay!

“That man likes me,” Priscilla said. “Funny eyes.”

“I think he likes
me.
” I said. “He's a local business guy who thinks … Here he comes.”

There came Karim, smiling, snug, warm, advancing his ample vibes, carrying a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket; explaining that he could have sent it over with a waiter, which would be the normal way to do it, he fully understood the etiquette of such gestures, but this was far more than a mere gesture; rather, it was a tribute to a remarkable couple whom he admired from afar but with whom he now sought to build a personal association; explaining that he desired to save the time that is lost in the practice of ordinary courtesy; explaining that he admired the lady and also deeply, deeply respected my reputation in my chosen field of endeavor and why hadn't I returned his calls?

“Pretty busy these days,” I said. “No sort of office staff. I'm a solo practitioner.”

“Like that, like that. Solo practitioner,” he repeated, rolling the words juicily. “You sing alone, Mr. Kasdan.”

Perhaps I smiled. Priscilla kicked me in the universal language of stand up and be polite. I stood. “Look, I promise to return your call,” I said. “Just now I'm having a day off with … This is Priscilla.”

“I know, I know, I know.” He beamed. “Today is not the first time I have seen you two together, deserving so many good things in your life. And so now I leave you, please drink in your own honor, celebrate your good fortune.”

He bowed—he wore his wide, inappropriate, white linen suit with pride—he backed away, he knew I would call. I had made an oral contract. From his table he smiled and bowed again, and then turned away, meaning that I could talk freely. He knew I would be talking about him. His own companion was a young woman wearing a black-and-white cowl and nun's habit although Halloween was still a few weeks away.

Priscilla smiled at him across the crowded lunchtime terrace, raised her glass and held it there. The nun told him to look and he looked. He raised his glass and both Priscilla and Karim drank, and the nun also drank. I didn't.

I held Priscilla's wrist while I explained that we were getting to know each other these days, she and I, and now she knew there was some work I didn't do, some folks I didn't want to know, and Karim fitted the category. In fact, he just about filled it for me.

“But he wants to know you.”

“It's nice to be loved, isn't it?”

“I kind of like him. He seems confident.”

“Wants professional services,” I said. “Collections, or traveling with cash, or maybe better or worse. There seems to be a fair amount of money circulating around him.”

She liked the sound of this. “Is it illegal? Am I so innocent you can't explain it in detail?”

I didn't know in detail. In North Beach and the Tenderloin it wasn't always helpful to know in detail. That was Alfonso's business, not mine. I didn't have to build a case to know as much as I needed. I explained about how a lack of knowledge can be a helpful thing in my trade. She wanted to learn. Also at times she didn't mind teaching as it came to her. “He'll be back,” she said.

“You don't get prophecy points for that.”

“He really wants to persuade you.”

I didn't enjoy this. She was longing for adventures and I was longing for limits on them. “Not persuadable,” I said.

“He'll be back, lover.”

*   *   *

People can join a parade and dance along with the band, giddy with the joy of sunlight on their bodies—a class action of merriment and mystic oneness in community—while the band, which is the source of all this terrific rhythm, is paying strict attention to its own music.

Sometimes Priscilla and Dan stayed joined, kept their bodies locked into folds and membranes, not moving, breathing, hardly moving at all—a mutuality of decision, both of us deciding, nobody's idea—lying there and desperately still at first, then calmly still, whispering, telling all the things we loved, admitting freely that the first among these things was each other (I think it was more Dan, my tongue set free by the blessedness of bodies breaking the boundaries of bodies, who spoke these things) until the light started to seep under the shade, in the edges around the shade, and there were morning noises outside. The paperboy's footsteps. A whistler.

“Is it okay if I come now?”

“Whatever. Yes. Yes.”

I could feel a bone at her middle rising and falling with her breath as she said yes.

“Now?”

“Yes!”

That cry we all make, smart or dumb, sex-drunk or just human, agreeing, assenting, convening, calling up the spirits of past and future and now, just the two of us here on earth together. Sometimes adding, as a kind of afterthought, “God, God, God,” though God isn't really what we are believing in. The prayer just pours from some history of love and belief in the joining of souls, the prayer cannot be shut out, as the dawn light and the day cannot be shut out. Priscilla and Dan Kasdan.

*   *   *

Like many who marry, we married to learn who and what else we could be. “Let's,” I said.

She asked: “I was wondering. Do we need to see the other side of the mountain?” That was what she called transforming this courtship into marriage and permanence.

“How do you feel about it?”

“I'm curious. We could drive to Big Sur and find a Universal Life minister.”

But we passed a courthouse in Monterey first and decided to stop for lunch, a flower, and a wedding. The judge took time out from a drunk-driving trial and kept the culprit waiting while he asked if we thought the poor jerk—one prior alcohol-related accident—should go to jail and wished us a long happy life together and please drive carefully on Route 1, the winding narrow road to Ditjen's Big Sur Inn. Congratulations, you are man and wife, don't drink your wine till you get there.

The cabins were nestled into the hollow of a steep, sun-dappled slope of alluvial granite which poured down through the pine and poppies, bush monkey flowers and wild mustard, ending abruptly in a jigsaw of rocky beaches, eddying tide pools, the Pacific Ocean. A Norwegian settler had built these rooms with Hansel and Gretel as his architects. There were hawks overhead, hummingbirds nearer by. Priscilla claimed to see a whale just this side of the fog bank and I didn't argue the point.

She was still holding the rose I had bought when we entered the courthouse. I asked why.

“Because I like it. Don't cross me,” she said.

When it was dark, we didn't mind bringing our first day as man and wife to an early close. We built a fire. The bed smelled of mustiness and wood smoke. “Well, it's been a long drive, no one'll judge us if we don't look for trouble in downtown Big Sur.”

“Not that long a drive,” I said.

“Let me be the judge of that. Long enough.”

Her hands were on my shirt. Mine were on hers. The bed smelled of wood smoke and Priscilla and Dan.

“Wait. Wait,” she said. And then: “Stop waiting.”

She came undone; it was a way she had, fainting with terrible sighs, seeming to scatter under me like a puzzle or break over me like a cloud, Priscilla fragments raining down. And then, after a moment when time stopped, the pieces came back together and she was ready to make jokes, sit up and hold her knees, look for something to eat. It took me longer to come together again and remember who I was. Her eager smile and fading freckled flush were already there to welcome me. “Hey! Let's change the music, okay?”

This was the other side of the mountain. It wasn't the only other side.

I dozed through furniture-buying expeditions. In my sleep I mumbled, “If you like it, sure.” The coffee table. The new plug-in appliances. A toaster that also baked—did it whistle “Abbey Road”? All I really cared about was the bed and a kitchen table for late-night snacking. Nevertheless, a house occurred, with closets, nothing not inside the closets that belonged inside the closets. In progress was an extreme late-sixties, early-seventies effort to be normal human beings despite San Francisco and an abnormally spirited woman.

On the other side of the mountain lurked a creature no one truly anticipates until it suddenly makes its claim and the universe is filled.

*   *   *

After we moved into the proper Marina flat, pregnant Priscilla, a garage for the pregnant Priscilla's automobile, a new life for the beatnik private eye on the other side of the mountain, it seemed important to share my blessings, each other, with my two best people, Alfonso and my wife. I said to Alfonso, “Just you for dinner, not a party.”

“I'm bringing my dog.”

“You don't have a dog, Alfonso.”

“My new puppy. I need a social life just like you.”

“Alfonso, I don't want a new puppy shitting on my new Marina hardwood floors.”

He shook his head with wonderment at what Dan Kasdan, the married man, had become. “First place, Mingus wouldn't do that. Second place, this is true love, too. I'm committed to this equal-opportunity puppy. Where I go, he goes.”

“Mingus?” I asked. “A cute name?”

“Loves that modern jazz, man. And he wouldn't do what you said on your hardwood floors.”

Priscilla agreed that my law-enforcement backup would never bring a non-housebroken animal into our flat. She said, “A Boy and His Dog, what a cute story.”

“Don't call him ‘boy' to his face,” I said.

Probably she was continually aware that he was black, as white folks usually are about black folks. He was heavy, smart, smiley, the officer who helped me in my chosen career, and my all-time buddy; we would try to love his dog, too. It so behooved us in our state of grace.

I think both Alfonso and I liked showing off for Priscilla as we sat over drinks and continued our tales of semilegal behavior in defense of the public against illegal behavior. She laughed at the right places and had the proper response to analysis of the one-joint rule for minors. The profit motive also came under discussion as I described staying out of money laundering and narcotics transport, although someone once paid me in airline tickets that turned out to be stolen; tainted, as the prosecutor delicately pointed out when he decided not to prosecute; Alfonso had vouched for me there. That's what friends are for. When Priscilla asked what he knew about Karim Abdullah, Alfonso said he was a smart hustler, medium big-time so far, who might even manage to keep free of the criminal justice system, and then Priscilla inquired if that would be true for those who worked for him too. Alfonso said maybe, depends, and raised his eyebrows at me. “Smart woman,” he said. “But don't think too far ahead, it's dangerous.”

“I'm not averse,” Priscilla said, although the eyebrows had been lifted at me.

I could feel Alfonso relaxing and happy as he tickled the nose of Mingus and told him not to bother the nice folks or eat their furniture. Mingus chewed a little at his socks, but that seemed to be permitted in this sudden romance. Alfonso mentioned his son living with the mother in Newark or Trenton, one of those places, she didn't even like to tell him her address. It was hard on him but he was patient and would wait it out because he really didn't have a choice. He didn't. Someday the kid would make up his own mind about his father. Priscilla listened and said nothing and that was the right thing to do. There was a space of silence and then we filled our plates.

“Kids need a dad,” Alfonso said. “I'll be there.”

Just before dessert—I was sure she was making some sort of flan, bronzed crust and burnt cream, something domestic and sweet like that—I was discussing how Mingus tended to yip and yap a lot around our legs. “Tole you he love the jazz,” said Alfonso.