The Other Joseph (14 page)

“Your English is really good—especially for just getting to America and all.”

“No. But thank you.”

“Did you study that in school?”

“Some. Yes.”

Marina appeared to be bored again, and I tried to think of what else to ask her. Nothing was coming to mind. For the moment she seemed through with me as well, and we both went back to eating. When everyone had finished she and Sonya cleared the dishes. It was only me and Viktor in the dining room now, but there was vodka on the table. He lined up two shots and raised his glass, waiting until I did the same.

“Za vas!”
he said.

We touched glasses, then drank the crisp vodka down.

Viktor poured two more and capped the bottle. “Do you like her?” he asked.

“I like her plenty. But if she—”

The TV in the living room exploded to life, and he jumped from his chair. I followed him. Dina was lying in the corner, and Marina was sitting on the living room floor herself. Her white jeans blended perfectly with the carpet, and that made it look like she was melting. Like all that had saved her from disappearing was her shimmering blue top. I'd seen a reverse of this earlier. The sight of Joni's bright blue sweatshirt vanishing into the house on Marvel Court.

Marina had the remote control beside her, and though I could tell that was bothering Viktor a great deal, he motioned for me to join her. Then he left us for the kitchen, and I sat down on the leather couch to watch more of the sea lion hunting. Dina came over to me, and Marina seemed impressed. She dropped the volume. “Dina hates me,” she said.

I scratched the Saluki's slender neck. “I doubt that's true.”

She shrugged, and I was thinking I would ask if she'd like to go for a cigarette when I heard muffled techno music. She pulled out her phone, and I listened as she spoke some quick Russian. She snapped the phone shut and rose. “I have to leave,” she said. “My friend is here to drive me now.”

“Where are you going?”

“This I do not know,” she said, moving to the door. “
Do svidaniya.
It was very nice meeting you.”

She put on her pink coat and came back across the room. I stood, gave her a clumsy hug before she went to find Viktor and Sonya. I was by myself, all alone in the living room except for willowy Dina.

A minute or so passed, then Viktor swooped in and grabbed the remote off the floor. Marina was with him, but she didn't look at me. A horn honked, and she went outside for her boots. I watched the door close.

“She is sexy, yes?” said Viktor.

“Yes.”

“So you would like to have a real date with her? She wants very much to see you again.”

“You sure about that?”

“Of course.” He had the remote pointed at the TV now; the volume was slowly rising.

“Then okay,” I said, almost shouting the words. “But how do you know?”

Viktor laughed. “I know because this is what she tells me!”

I WAS LYING
on my sleeping bag in the black dark of the apartment, a waking dream of Joni and me visiting Lake Claiborne sliding out of my mind like the last scene of a movie. A nice dream, one so pleasant and comforting I didn't want to see it end.

Before I left Viktor's place that Saturday, my two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check in his pocket once more, he had explained that unfortunately, due to Marina's work schedule, he thought our date might not be until Monday or even Tuesday night. He knew I had to be gone from San Francisco on Thursday, understood there was no way I was going to report as a sex offender just to extend my stay—so again he'd asked if I was interested in meeting the other two women, and again I told him I'd like to concentrate on Marina for the time being.

I closed my eyes then, counting Sam's whistled snores until that Lake Claiborne dream ended and a new one began. I saw some concrete tenement building in Moscow. The night shift is over, and Marina has taken the train home from a warehouse in the industrial outskirts. Dawn soon. It is summer, the middle of a Russian heat wave, and somehow I'm there as well, with Marina in her room. She's wearing gray coveralls, and we're standing together, smoking my Winstons. The building is a big hollow square, and her open window overlooks a courtyard crisscrossed with lines of drying laundry. In the twilight, through that galaxy of damp clothes, I can see into other rooms across the way. People are already reclined on their windowsills, burning their own first cigarettes of the morning. Marina and I finish with ours, and she undresses. Once she is naked I step toward her, but she tells me to sit down on the bed. She is even shorter in her bare feet, her body a soft, rolling flow, her nipples dark against her skin. She carries her socks and underthings to a sink and turns the faucet. A stream of water begins pooling in the cracked basin, and she adds a measure of washing powder. She soaks her small bundle, working the fabric, cleaning it, and I'm wondering whether she still wants me in the room with her. Then she wheels her socks out on a clothesline she shares with someone across the courtyard, returns to the sink for the rest. The sun is up now, and she is sweating. Beads of perspiration have formed
between her heavy breasts. Finally she sits in a chair by the window and stares, trying to decide something about me. There's a glass of water on the windowsill, and inside rests the broken half of a plastic comb. She takes the comb from the glass, still watching me as she draws the wet teeth through her hair. I tell her I'm sorry, that it had been wrong of me to believe I could just select her and have her be mine, and at last she comes over as if that apology is what she'd been waiting for all along. She pulls at my boots, then my clothes, until I am naked myself. She's lying with me on the narrow bed now. The plywood under the thin mattress flexes beneath us as we kiss, and the heat makes us slick against one another. My vial of dirt is slapping at her chin, and she takes it into her mouth. I look away. Across the courtyard smokers are peering out from their own windows, but I don't think they can see us in the shadows. When we are done we lie there. I'm thirsty like I'm dying, but I'm not willing to chance the water from that sink. I glance over at Marina, but she says nothing. I'm afraid she wants me gone, and I begin to gather my clothes. After I've dressed I turn back to her. She has fallen asleep, but then she wakes, sees me standing over her, a Cane River swelling between us. “No,” she begs. “Swim to me. Take Marina with you.” And I do.

O
UTSIDE WAS CLOUDLESS AND SUNNY, JEANS-AND-T-SHIRT
weather for my daily hike to Lincoln Park. But it was also a Sunday morning, and Sundays have always depressed me—so even under that Easter egg sky I was feeling beaten down.

My science-teacher mother once told me evolution might account for why many people have a phobia of all snakelike creatures. The smartest cavemen had the good sense to run from everything slithery, and that fear eventually led to the invention of dragons and the serpent that came calling for Eve. Myths that have been around so long we've forgotten our fears, not our stories, came first. Maybe a similar uneasiness is triggered by Sundays. This is a country founded and formed by believers. And maybe generation after generation of our most prosperous and successful ancestors spending the Sabbath feeling guilty became a heritable quirk. Maybe science explains the hitch I get in my chest on the Lord's Day. I've inherited their fears, if not their god.

I stopped for coffee across the street from Lincoln Park. I'd spent an hour in Café Sun on Thursday, trying to read some of
Salted Waters,
but the squat, middle-aged Korean woman who
owned the place had chatted me up. Her name was Sun, like the café, and she looked happy to see me again now. “Good morning, Leroy,” she said.

My north Louisiana drawl had been a challenge for Sun, so I guess to her I was Leroy. I didn't bother correcting her. Café Sun was empty today. Far as I could tell, it was often empty. I pictured Sun in the kitchen of a small apartment. Cash on one side of a table, bills and invoices collected on the other. She'd told me she was born in Seoul and had come to the U.S. just two years back. California was her first and only stop, and I wondered if she appreciated how big America was. Whether, like me, she now fantasized about places where getting by didn't have to be this hard. I'll make a deal with you, Sun. You leave San Francisco when I leave Grand Isle. We'll go searching together for where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs.

I filled a paper cup from one of the push-top thermoses, but before I could pay, a man carrying a clipboard ducked inside and beat me to the register. He was a white guy, but his hair was in long Rastafarian dreadlocks. I got behind him, and he started asking Sun if she sold fair-trade coffee.

“Think I can settle up with the lady?” I asked.

I don't go looking for fights, but I realize I have the worn-and-torn appearance of someone who might. And every once in a while that can be to my advantage. The man didn't say anything; he just left. “Thank you, Leroy,” said Sun, but she didn't sound pleased. The guy was probably off to hassle someone else, but by her logic that was a potential customer lost. She punched at the register, and I handed her three dollars for her kitchen table.

“Keep them,” I told her, when she tried to give me some quarters. She did a slight bow. Sarcasm. I didn't know Sun had that in her.

Then I got dealt a joker. I'd grabbed a seat in the back when I
heard the bells on the front door jangle, and a girl walked in. A teenager. Pin-straight brown hair, blunt bangs, tall, very pretty. She was in jeans and, though the day had been steadily warming, a fringed buckskin jacket. The
Midnight Cowboy
Joe Buck kind. A seventies jacket for her seventies hair. And I was feeling thunderstruck even before Sun sang out, “Joni! Oh! Where have you been, young miss?” Marvel Court was two blocks up the road, so I'm not saying it was a complete miracle for Joni to be standing there in Café Sun—but still, I have to shake my head sometimes at how the world works. At the tricks it will play on you.

I thought of Nancy Hammons and her fucking investigator. There were decent odds that at some point Joni had gotten her hands on a picture of me to study on, and though I'd been hoping for a break such as this, my first reaction was to hide. I shielded my face with my coffee cup, watching as Joni paid for a small carton of something. Coconut water, I think. Her conversation with Sun was a murmur, but I could see her much better than the day before. And here, now, was the mind-blowing, heart-stopping,
you are not the last Joseph
moment I hadn't quite felt on Marvel Court . . . because one thing was clear—she looked enough like Tommy (and a lower-mileage Roy Joseph, I suppose) for me to forever quit questioning whether we really shared blood. More than anything, though, this confident, laughing Joni resembled her grandmother. Not the woman who raised me, so much, but the long-limbed girl I'd seen in old photos. The courthouse bride who'd chosen my father over her own family. She had Mom's same high cheekbones and tiny nose. That same glossy hair. Grief never leaves, it just mutates. Time eases pain only because we forget things or learn how not to think about them—but the grief is always there, adapting, metastasizing, and to stare at Joni was to mourn my dead mother. To remember the woman who went from the girl in those photos to the wailing
stranger my father and navy men had to carry into our home, me watching from the doorway as she floated down the hall.

JONI LED ME NORTH
on Thirty-Second Avenue. I assumed she was aiming for home, and I was hurrying to catch up with her when instead she passed Marvel Court without turning. I lagged back, still caught off guard from Café Sun, thankful for this chance to gather myself, as she walked another block. The street ended, and she went east, entering a neighborhood called Sea Cliff. I began to wonder whether it had been a mistake to leave the
FOR OUR TOMMY
album in the apartment. Whether it was foolish to be saving that for some second meeting when I couldn't be sure how this first one might go.

The stockbroker Viktor drove around was a Sea Cliff resident, and Viktor had also told me Sharon Stone once lived there, that Robin Williams still did. The decamillionaires of Sea Cliff would piss on my two-and-a-quarter-mil portfolio, and you'd expect there to be a goddamn moat around such a place. A fence tinseled with razor wire. A minefield. But the Sea Cliff mansions only smirked and smirked as I passed them, their lawns all glowing the same nuclear green. A road sign warned
TOUR BUSES AND VANS PROHIBITED
, then a man in jogging shorts and a bicycle helmet overtook me on one of those Segway deals. He went whirring down the sidewalk, a sleeveless emperor on his electric chariot, gliding toward Joni. She was sauntering as if she was on a nature hike, but I kept my distance, steeling myself for the introduction, worried the right words would never come.

We walked and walked, and after fifteen minutes Joni finally waltzed her way through Sea Cliff and entered the dark, cool forest of the Presidio. Somewhere nearabout lived the Colemans and nanny Marina. What had once been an army base was now just their playground.

Joni's route had us going downhill, and I could sense we were running out of land even before I saw the sign for a beach. Baker Beach. I followed her through the forest like a fairy-tale wolf, down a blacktop road that led to a parking lot. She tossed her coconut water into a trash can, and in due course I came along and dropped my coffee cup. We were now level with a portion of beach speckled with sunbathers. The Golden Gate itself—a bottleneck of rough water connecting the bay to the ocean. To the west was the flat expanse of the Pacific, and right there to the east: the crayon-red cables, towers, and deck of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I'd read a poem in
Salted Waters
set here. A poem about a shark attack. “Baker Beach, 1959.” Two college students are swimming when a great white slams into the boy. The salted water is pink, and the boy is shouting at the girl to save herself. But she swims to him. The girl is Catholic. The boy has no specific faith. Though she gets him to the beach, he is bleeding out. She baptizes him with Golden Gate splashes, then asks if that is all right. He gives her his permission to continue, and she has him repeat an act of contrition after her. Then, before unconsciousness, he whispers his last words: “I love God, and I love my mother and I love my father. Oh God, help me.”

Joni had taken off her shoes, and I couldn't watch her walk onto the brown beach without feeling that day in 1959. I waited in the parking lot as she stopped not too far from the water's edge. Her buckskin jacket was tied around her waist now; she was wearing an ivory tank top. I was afraid she was going to walk right into the Golden Gate, that a descendant of the shark in her mother's poem would be coming for her, but then she sat down in the sand.

I paused at the bottom of some steps that led from the parking lot to the beach. Jammed my socks into my Red Wings. Cuffed my jeans above my calves. The sand was almost hot on my feet,
and I got about ten yards from Joni, ready to roll the dice—could see a starry spray of freckles escaping from the scoop of her tank top, even—when her phone began to ring. I slowed down, not sure what to do, as she spoke in a long sigh. “I know, Mom,” she said into the cell. “Okay, I know, okay.”

Fuck. This was a haunted, bad-luck place. I couldn't very well jump out of the cake while Nancy was on with her, so I veered to the right, made for the tide line to regroup.

I felt close to certain Joni was watching me walk away from her, a boot in each hand, and I wondered if she was sensing anything familiar in how this drifter carried himself. The Golden Gate Bridge was up ahead, and I squinted against the sun, putting my focus there as I marched on. When I at last looked back at her she was a small blur leaving for the parking lot, and I froze for a moment to decide what next. It was only then that I realized the few sunbathers at this end of the beach were naked, that I'd wandered onto a nude beach. They were all guys—all except for a drunk woman sipping from a brown-bagged bottle and glaring at me. Her whole body was tattoos; her head was shaved. I was staring, and that sent her into a fit. “Eat shit,” she screamed. “No gawkers.”

A harem of muscled, wasp-waisted men were lying on either side of the woman, and one of them sat up and looked at me. “Yeah,” he yapped. “Go away.” His skin was as orange as fresh rust, and soon other orange men were calling out, supporting and defending their mistress overlord, misunderstanding my intentions. Joni was gone now. I had been robbed of her, and I imagined pulling out a pistol. I imagined watching them scatter.

But with no Walther to wave I did the only thing I could think of to appease them. I threw down my Red Wings and unbuckled my belt, stripped off my jeans and my T-shirt and my jockeys until all that remained was the chain around my neck. The water was too cold to believe, but I went wading into the surf anyway. I was the sole swimmer on a half mile of beach, and that circus-freak
woman had gone from cursing me to applauding me. She had her hands up over her hairless head and was clapping. I wouldn't be able to stand that icy Golden Gate long, but despite my misery I must say this also felt nice, proving all of them wrong.

THAT MISSED OPPORTUNITY
with Joni—then, on the way back from Baker Beach, anxious for a distraction, an easing of the sting, I wasn't even able to get Viktor on the phone to check about Marina. I needed to right this ship, so after a shower in the apartment to wash off the salt and sand from my lunatic swim, I went to walk Sam and think.

A light fog had rolled into the Outer Richmond. The warm, sunny day had turned nippy and gray. I knew from Nancy's
San Francisco Chronicle
letter I'd found in the Cybermobile that Joni went to George Washington High School, and I was contemplating how I might make use of that information when I saw a jug-eared old man in a beige windbreaker staple-gunning a flyer to the telephone pole out front of the apartment. I didn't pay him any mind until I realized the flyer wasn't for a garage sale or a lost cat or some such. The top screamed
REWARD
!, and below that was a photo of a guy with sunken cheeks leaned back in an easy chair and grinning at the camera, a wrapped present on his slim lap. I tugged Sam closer and thought of family albums. Of
FOR OUR TOMMY
in the bottom of my duffel bag, waiting on me still, but not forgotten.

Beneath the flyer photo was a phone number, then a tight brick of words:

Up to $5000 for information leading to the location of thirty-one-year-old Mark Sorensen. He was last seen living near the soccer fields in Golden Gate Park. Collect calls will be accepted.

I was more or less looking over the old man's shoulder, but he hadn't noticed me yet. That same phone number was handwritten vertically over and over again along the bottom of the flyer, and the spaces between each scrawled set of digits had been cut with scissors to create fifteen or so tear slips. His hands were trembling, and it took him a while to get the final corner stapled. Next, he ripped off a couple of the tasseled phone numbers and put them in his windbreaker. I almost smiled at that, but it probably wasn't a dumb move. Most people hate to be the first to do anything, and I guess assisting a missing person investigation is no different than calling about a used futon.

The old man got everything situated like he wanted, then turned around and saw me and Sam. He was startled to find us standing there on top of him. A sheaf of flyers was stuffed into his brown pants, and the staple gun was aimed at my crotch. He couldn't have been a day shy of eighty. A warship was anchored across the front of the ball cap he was wearing. The USS
Cecil J. Doyle,
according to the gold stitching. Hooyah. A sailor, then. My brother's brother.

I backed up, and the old man patted at the flyer on the telephone pole with his other hand, the one not holding the staple gun. “My grandson,” he said. “Mark.”

Oh, fuck me. “I'm really sorry,” I told him.

“That's from last Christmas.” He was still sort of caressing the flyer. “On the farm in Minnesota.”

“You came here from Minnesota?”

“Ten of us done flew out.” Sam had been sniffing at the old man's Velcro shoes, and he was petting him now. “Police don't seem to care much. We thought we might could help them along some.”