We Are Pirates: A Novel (12 page)

“Who’s the cake for?” Gwen tried.

Nathan blinked very slowly, and she had to stop herself from licking her lips.

Cody stood back up and looked at her sympathetically, and his big brother gave him a shove. “Get going, Yankee,” Nathan said, and made a motion with his circled hand—just like her father had about Allan, up and down, along an imaginary penis—that ruined the word “Yankee” for Gwen forever. “Hey,” he said to her, with bright eyes. His hand was still circled. “I think you’re like a pirate treasure.”

“What?” she asked. How did he know?

His hand uncurled and pointed right at her. “Sunken chest,” he said, and ruffled Cody’s hat on his way out. “See ya, Spot.” Gwen could not watch them, only the cake in the box, each time it bounced in Cory’s hands, like a boat in a storm. Naomi’s birthday, she thought with some relief, was not now.

“Who were those guys? I’ve seen them.”

“Nathan Glasserman and Cody Glasserman.”

“Jerk.”

“Yes.”

“But gorge.”

“What?”

“Gorgeous.”

Gwen felt a jealous shiver. She hunched over so nobody would see her sunken chest and decided to do so every day until she died. This would be our Nathan’s legacy.

“What was it you said, though?” Amber said, slipping a pen out of her pocket. “I fail to see the contraband? I prefer older guys, like Tortuga.”

“Controversy.”

“Piece of paper?”

“What? Yeah.” Gwen unzipped her bag. “Tortuga’s cool.”

“But you like that Glasser guy?”

“Well,” Gwen said, and then didn’t say anything.

“It’s okay to like jerks. I mean, it’d be better to like a nice guy, but there aren’t any. Look at them.”

Gwen tore out a piece of paper and Amber held it to the wall and started writing on it immediately.

“Don’t you wish,” Amber started, and then paused to scribble more, “that with guys like that you could just kidnap them? You know, and shut them up somehow?”

“Like, stuff them into a car,” Gwen said. She could not tell if she had thought of this before or was just thinking of it now.

“Have our wicked way with them,” Amber said. “What do you want?”

“What?”

“Don’t get a muffin; they taste like potpourri. You like the almond cookies?”

“I’ve never been here.”

“But you know what cookies are, right? With almonds?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Six almond cookies,” she said, and then finished with the paper. “With my ex, it was like that. I hated when he talked most of the time.”

Her
ex.
Gwen followed her to the counter. “Amber, my princess,” the man said. “What does your father want today?”

Amber frowned at the paper like she couldn’t read it. “Two black coffees, two chocolate chip, six almond cookies,” she read, and drummed those nails, those nails, on the wall.

“Charge it to his account?” the guy said.

“That’s what it says.” Amber slid the paper over to him. He turned to get the coffee, and she leaned into Gwen. “I can do anyone’s handwriting. Anyone’s.”

“Wow.”

“We don’t need a tray,” she told the guy, and handed Gwen one of the coffees.

“All right,” he said. “Tell your dad to send us more vinegar.”

“I will,” Amber said with a smile that stayed on until they were back outside.

“Your dad makes vinegar?”

“I know.” Amber took out a cookie and broke it in half against her chest, handing one piece to Gwen and opening the lid on her coffee. The steam rose into the air, disappearing before it reached the streetcar lines. “It’s stupid. He and another dad bought some land up in Napa and they grow grapes, to make a fortune off wine.
And
the wine was awful. So now they make vinegar, and they named it after me and the other guy’s daughter.
Amber Dawn Vinegar.
Can you stand it? Thanks, name me after bad salad dressing,
Dad
.”

“He makes vinegar in Napa and gets his cookies here?”

Amber was looking at her. “Vinegar is just on weekends,” she said.

“Oh. What’s the rest of the time?”

“He’s a
dentist
,” Amber said, and pointed back toward his office.

“Dr.
Donner
?”

“Yeah, I know, right? Hey, I didn’t ask, but you wanted coffee, right? Otherwise pour it out.”

“It burned me when I was little.”

“What?”

“I was four and I reached up for a doughnut and spilled a carafe of coffee. It was boiling hot. It was a second- and third-degree burn. I ruined my grandmother’s birthday, because we all had to leave the hotel and wait in the emergency room. I still have it, the scar of it on my leg. That’s what he meant, Nathan,
Spot.
”

But Amber was already outraged. “What? Ruined your grandmother’s birthday? Who told you that?”

“Everybody.”

“They told you it ruined her birthday?
And
what about your leg? You were
four
?”

“I don’t know,” Gwen said. “My parents said when I was four I was trouble. They still think it. I’m still trouble.”

Amber took a sip of coffee and spat it right back in the cup, shaking her head. “They are wrong,” she said. “Gwen, they are wrong, your parents. Let’s go to my house.”

“I have to be at the Jean Bonnet Living Center later. That’s the place I was saying.”

“The old people?”

“He’s depending on me.”

Amber grabbed Gwen’s coffee and dropped it into the street in one deft move. “Okay, but my house after, right? We can do, I don’t know. TV, but I hate TV. We can listen to music.”

“Where do you live?”

It just kept getting bigger, bigger, bigger. Just when Gwen was heart-beaten and all her fortifications down, to have this offered her, this maiden voyage to a new place previously uncharted in the plotted day, made her eyes wet. All of it was thrilling, but the thrill’s first swell was there on the corner when Gwen asked this forger and flirt, this fierce battler against fathers, this rogue adventurer with gypsy earrings and embattled nails, where she lived. Where do you hail from, marvelous Amber, who shall expound thee? Whither your three-bedroom, two-bath?

“Octavia,” Amber said, just the name of the street, but smiling like she knew all along.

Chapter 5

“Radio?” Levine asked.

“Yes, yes.” Phil Needle was still furious about the rental car, and the rental car growled on the asphalt like it was mad back. The stupid girl at the stupid airport had given him a car no man should be seen driving, be he even of most humble birth, and she had done her job as if at gunpoint. It made him want to shoot her, but there wasn’t much time, still so far from L.A., a drink at the bar, enough sleep for the big pitch in the morning. The way out of the rental lot was long, curving past the strange parts of the airport, the warehouses and private planes, man in a suit—me—looking up hopefully from his cell phone as he waited for his ride. Phil Needle was not it. He turned the knob, and there was the thumping song that his daughter liked so much. “Tortuga,” he said.

“Hey,” Levine said, “did you go to a club?”

“A club?”        

“Yeah, the handstamp.”

Phil Needle rubbed his hand. “Yes,” he said primly. “I know I probably seem old to you, but I still go hear music. It’s how I keep in touch with what’s going on.”

“Who did you hear?”

“What?”

“Last night.”

“Nobody good.”

“Nobody good,” Levine repeated, and rolled her window down further to stick her hand out into the air, cupping the wind like a breast.

“Can you keep a secret?” Phil Needle asked.

“No,” Levine said immediately.

Phil Needle kept his hands on the wheel.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, I think what I’m going to do down here is going to be very big,” Phil Needle said. “This is a big show.”

“The Belly Jefferson thing?”

“Yes,” Phil Needle said, “and just as Belly Jefferson, with just a few short songs, electrified the world of music, I think this show will change everyone who listens to it. And I will be producing it, so I will be listening to it most. It will change me, and all of us, profoundly.” He had a lot of interesting things to say, every day, if only somebody would write them down.

“You sound excited,” Levine said, and tapped one finger on her window.

“I guess I am,” Phil Needle said.

“Ray always said that,” she said. “You should have that desire, the desire to do things. He told the whole company, it gets everybody excited. It’s like a turn-on. You have the same thing.”

They had come to a place where some men were working on the road. No, one of them was a woman. “I mean it. I know I don’t sound like I mean anything, but I do.”

“Well,” Phil Needle said, and then thought he should say “thank you.” He did not say it. He thought again, again, again, of the document he had found on Levine’s computer, and felt a small flutter between his legs, underneath the seat belt.

“What are you going to call the show?”

“I was going to have you write it down. I have that notebook. I can’t think of it. I can’t think of what to call it.”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for,” Levine said, briefly hoisting one leg onto the dashboard before sliding it off. “Do you want to do it now?”

“We could stop for lunch,” Phil Needle said. “We should stop, at some point.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” she said, meditatively.

“Really?” Phil Needle said. “Because of the animals, or—”

“The animals, right.”

Phil Needle thought about it. It was a shame about the animals, but the other thing was, who cares? “It might be hard to be a vegetarian on this road,” he said. “San Francisco’s full of vegetables, but they just kill things here in the middle. There’s a steak house, I know, a ranch that’s still a ranch, I think.”

“Well, I just lost my appetite,” Levine said. “Actually, I’m starving.” She stretched her leg again, her heel rubbing against the plastic or whatever it was that the glove compartment was made of. Her legs could not help but be open, just a bit, while she did this. It had to be plastic. “Now, can
you
keep a secret?”

Phil Needle smiled right away. “No.”

“Then I’m not going to tell you,” Levine said with a smile for the road.

“I was kidding.”

“So was I.” She continued to smile out the window rather than at Phil Needle. “Ray Droke?”

“Who?”

“We were just talking about him. Ray Droke. My old boss.”

This wasn’t going to be exciting. “Yeah. Advertising, you told me.”

“You didn’t call him?”

“What?”

“Ray Droke.”

“No.” Phil Needle shook his head, swinging the view in front of him.

“I listed him as a reference. You didn’t call him?”

“No,” Phil Needle said again, and then added, “Not yet,” although he wasn’t going to call him, and it was too late now. Alma Levine, with her leg up, her eyes inscrutable behind her sunglasses, reflecting the bright sun and the stupid road, worked for him. She was his, or he was hers: anyhow, they were together already, in the car.

“Remember how I said I had a problem with him?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you want to know the absolute truth,” she said, and then nothing for a minute. The radio stuttered over itself, briefly flirting with some other signal.

“What?”

She sighed, and took off her sunglasses as if she was looking at Phil Needle for the first time. “I fucked him.”

The car went faster.

They were on top of a wild place, unbuilt and scraggled, with lean-to trees giving way to unexpected slices of vista. From a bench they could see the city tossed out like dice and string, the streetcars ambling out to the Embarcadero, the domino dots of changing traffic lights, the gray grove of downtown skyscrapers—a city where anything might happen, even Gwen.

“Sick, right?”

“Yeah.”

“This is our place, you know?”

“I’ve never been here, though,” Gwen said, embarrassed. It was just blocks from the Jean Bonnet Living Center, but it was Amber who showed the new way to go.

“I knew you’d like it, though.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Right? I told you it was sick.”

Sick
meant cool. Having Amber around was like finding a big maze in your backyard. “
Verily
,” Gwen said.

“
And
,” Amber said, but then she just sighed and found a broken branch to play with, waving it in circles around the view of the city like she was designating favorite buildings, or important targets. Gwen sat. In her pocket crinkled another letter to the
San Francisco Chronicle
regarding the unfair treatment an ex–naval officer was receiving. “So good of you,” Amber murmured. They both knew what they were talking about. Gwen felt her body warm like a blush and felt so happy for a moment that she did not ask the question.