Among the Living

FOUR
The morning broke eternal, bright, and fair.
Or so it looked to Jimmy. He was on the open top deck of the red-and-white ferry that crossed the Bay from Pier 41 to Sausalito. He’d gone back to the hotel to change, to shower, to go from the black linen suit he’d worn yesterday to another linen suit, this one the color of the little spoon of cream on the Irish coffee at the Buena Vista. A cream-colored suit over a black shirt, like today was going to be the opposite of last night. As if, as the kids say.
But it was a beautiful day; a few clouds pushed all the way back over to Oakland. Tiburon was in front of them, Alcatraz sliding by to the left. On the Rock, another red-and-white boat off-loaded the 10:10 crowd as the first-run-of-the-day people queued up for the trip back across to San Francisco. (Did they still call it that, “the Rock,” after the movie, after the wrestler who’d named himself after the movie and then become a movie star?) Jimmy could hear the voices of the kids on the Alcatraz dock, loud, vacation loud.
Down below him a deck, Lucy almost looked caught up in the new morning thing herself. She sat out in the open in the middle of the first row of fib erglass benches, ten feet back from the splash zone, the V of the bow. She’d made a friend, a white-haired lady in a spiffy blue-and-white Nautica windbreaker, a happy lady, a talker. Lucy said a few words in reply now and then and nodded every few seconds. Women liked her, Lucy. Jimmy wondered why, what it was that was in her eyes or the shape of her mouth or the way she held herself that made women like her. And want to help her. He hadn’t really looked her in the eye. Up close. Maybe it’d move him, too.
The boy Jimmy was calling Les Paul for the shape of his guitar case came out onto the deck with two hot chocolates in his hands and a frosted, sprinkled donut stuck in his mouth. It was a little cool out here on the water, but he was wearing just a T-shirt. He handed off one of the cocoas to his sister and sat a few places away on the end of the bench, so as not to intrude in the back-and-forth between the women. He sat there and went to work on his donut, eating the way kids do, taking a bite and then looking at the thing, studying it while he chewed. He looked over at Lucy and the Nautica lady. Jimmy got the sense that the boy knew his sister was hurting, off balance, and that he didn’t much relish the role of helpmate, was glad for some help.
Training for the women ahead for you, Jimmy thought.
Les only stayed on the bench a minute. Too much energy. Too much juice running through the lines. He took his breakfast snack up to the bow, lay forward into the angle of the hull on the port side. A gull found him immediately, with that bright donut, took up a position in the air two feet above the boy’s head, locked on, even when the boat rose or splashed to one side, powering through a swell. This is his job, Jimmy thought about the bird, as much as popping and locking for the tourists is Machine Shop’s job nights down on the waterfront.
Les broke off a piece of the donut and ate it very deliberately and then another and then another until it was gone, and then the bird moved on to the next mark.
Jimmy lifted his gaze to Tiburon, getting bigger in the frame. It was like another Alcatraz in size and the lift of its hump, but an island of a whole other order in its hospitality, its richness. And its freedom? It was green, for one thing, and dotted with houses. Old Money. San Francisco doctors and lawyers. Second and third generation. Maybe fourth.
He saw that Lucy was looking at it, too, even as the white-haired lady prattled on.
“Is that Tiburon?” Lucy interrupted her to ask.
“Yes, it is,” Jimmy saw the white-haired lady reply.
There was a change in pitch, and the boat slowed. It was a commuter ferry, with a stop in Tiburon before the turnaround in Sausalito. They were a good half mile out from Tiburon but, even over the sounds of the water, the engines, the wind across the decks, they could hear hammering. And old-school hammering, too, with a hammer, not an air gun. Jimmy scanned the houses up and down the hill and down to the rocks, the water’s edge, until he found it, the grand old moss-green Craftsman “cottage” with a scar of new wood on one side of its face and a carpenter, now a third of a mile away, in khakis and a white sleeveless tee, raising and dropping that hammer, a half beat off from the sound that crossed the water.
053
Sausalito was Sausalito. You had to look hard to see how it could be a real place to real people, a place to live and not a happy hologram that zapped back into the projector once the last tourist turned his back to go up the ramp to the boat.
Lucy and Les had fish and chips at an H Salt Esquire that faced the waterfront and the marina. It was early yet, right at twelve, and there wasn’t much of a line. They brought the food outside, very accommodating for the investigator tailing them. Lucy seemed to fall back into herself over lunch. She stopped eating and pushed away her little newspaper-lined basket of greasy fish.
Jimmy hated to say it, but he was already tired of her here-we-go-again soul-sink act. Les reacted to it immediately. Maybe that was what irritated Jimmy, how the boy scrambled each time to find in himself some sense of what to do to help.
“It’s just a piece of fish,” Jimmy said aloud.
The panhandler on a break on the bench beside him stirred. “You sure you can’t help me out with gas money, man?” he said. “I’m stranded.”
Jimmy got up, never even really looked at him.
“God bless you,” the panhandler said.
Next, there was some jewelry for Lucy to look through, a rack out under the perfect sun alongside the very clean sidewalk in the bank of stores and bars along Bridgeway, the main drag. Jimmy strolled along across the street, stopping when she stopped, catching the mundane details to pass on to Angel. Lucy fingered a necklace while the bosomy young hippie woman who’d made it told her how good it looked on her. Les stood by, patient, putting on a good show of having no place he’d rather be than with his depressed sister in Disneyland. The boy pointed to another necklace, and the hippie girl took it down and handed it to Lucy. Lucy undid the clasp and held it up around her neck, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in it anymore.
A passerby offered an opinion. “It looks good on you,” Jimmy saw her say.
She was a real beauty, the passerby. Alone, too. With an expensive, trendy, flat leather bag over her shoulder, matching her expensive, trendy, pointy shoes, Jimmy guessed. The bag and shoes were bold yellow, golden-rod. She took off her sunglasses, shook out her hair. It was women like this with hair like this who made them come up with a new name for brown. She wore a white dress, full in the skirt, belted, V-necked, summery, so white it splashed light onto the storefront. She was Lucy’s age, maybe a little older. The dress was long and had something of a Town & Country classy modesty about it. But it didn’t stop Jimmy from imagining her legs pretty much all the way up to the top.
Lucy smiled and thanked the passerby but didn’t want to talk. The woman smiled in return and walked on.
Lucy and Les took the bus.
Jimmy took a cab.
Right across the Golden Gate.
There was the city, off to the left. The day was still wonderfully, deceptively beautiful, clear and blue. And that moon. A daylight moon, almost full, sitting atop the point of the TransAmerica Pyramid like a balloon. The window was down, and the air smelled good. Jimmy realized he was happy. Go figure.
It was even a nice taxicab, patchouli and all. The driver was a Mr. Natural with dishwater blond dreads. The picture on his license had him with the same look, five or six years earlier. In the movie playing in Jimmy’s head, here was the long-term live-in “husband” of the busty jewelry maker on the street back in Sausalito. He had the Pacifica station on the radio. They were against the war.
Lucy and Les’s bus was four car lengths ahead. It was a commuter. With a rainbow running down the side. It changed lanes. The cab driver changed lanes with it.
“You’re from L.A.,” Mr. Natural said. He had his window down, too, enjoying the sea stink, too, the cool air. The cab was an excellent old Checker, with wing vents, as God intended, so there wasn’t a roar that had to be shouted over.
“Yeah,” Jimmy admitted.
“I can read people.”
“So what was it? What said L.A.?”
“The suit, I guess. The extra button undone on your shirt. Your shoes. A little showbizzy but not executive suite. But not actor, either.”
“You’ve been reading my mail,” Jimmy said.
“I used to be a haberdasher. Eleven years.”
“Do they really call them haberdashers?”
“They did when I was doing it.”
“Here? San Francisco?”
“Right on Union Square,” the cabby said.
Jimmy tried to do the math. The driver looked late thirties at the most.
“You ever see that movie The Conversation?” the cabby-haberdasher said, taking one hand off the wheel, turning, looking back, getting eye to eye.
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Gene Hackman.” He waited.
“I love that movie,” the other said.
The Sausalito bus blew by the toll booths in the far right lane and pulled over. There was a plaza at the head of the bridge and a small commuter parking lot.
There wasn’t any chance of the bus pulling out anytime soon, so the cabby just slowed and picked a lane and waited through the minute that it took to come up to the toll booth.
“Be here now!” he said to the toll taker, a gruff-looking 1950s-looking man, probably Italian, as he handed over five bucks.
“Baba Ram Dass,” the toll man said. “He’s sick, you know. And broke.” Mr. Natural just shook his head sadly.
He held up his right hand so you could see it in the rear window and started across three lanes to the outside. Remarkably, people yielded. He left a car’s length between him and the bus, so they had a clear view.
When the bus’s door opened, the first one off was a leathery little man in his sixties in a serious bike rider’s frog suit. He went around to the front of the bus and started unhitching his lean red-and-green Euro bike off the rack.
“Some don’t like to ride across the bridge,” the cabby said, narrating. “Guy that size, he might be right.”
“When I was here before, they didn’t used to let you ride across,” Jimmy said.
Mr. Natural shook his head. “You got it wrong,” he said. He turned around to look at Jimmy. “Unless you haven’t been here in twenty years and you’re a whole lot older than you look. They put the bike lane in, in 1992.”
Lean Man mounted up, headed on south into the city.
“They used to be worried about jumpers,” the cabby said. “Stupid. No bike rider is going to jump. Think about it.”
“I was always surprised they let you walk across,” Jimmy said.
“They couldn’t stop people from walking,” the cabby said. “It would be admitting something they’re unable to admit.”
Lucy and Les Paul got off the bus. Jimmy dug into his pocket for his sheaf of bills.
“I heard something on the radio this morning,” the cabby said. “They said new figures show that the cost of living now outweighs the benefits.”
Lucy and Les just stood in the sunlight a moment next to the bus. They looked like they were coming this way, coming back across the bridge. They’d walk right by him if Jimmy stayed in the cab. He got out.
He leaned in through the open passenger window, handed Mr. Natural two twenties. “Thanks,” he said.
“It’s a joke. Think about it.”
“I’m laughing on the inside,” Jimmy said.
054
But Lucy and Les didn’t come back across the bridge. Not yet anyway. Instead, they found the stairs that led down to the Golden Gate Bridge observation area and gift shop, a round building with glass sides and an iron skeleton, probably the same iron from the bridge. Below the shop, down through the tops of the dark green trees, was brick Fort Point, built around the massive foot of the southern base of the bridge.
The shop was crowded. The “gifts” were grouped by languages. You couldn’t call them trinkets. The “lap throws,” whatever they were, were 129 U.S. dollars, which apparently was a sensational bargain if you were Japanese. Lucy and Les Paul stayed by themselves, as much as it was possible in the packed room.
She dug in her purse and came out with coins for Les for one odd hand-cranked vending machine. A penny and three quarters. The low-tech machine smashed an elongated image of the Golden Gate onto the raw stock of the penny—and kept the six bits for the trouble. Les turned the big handle and made one and got so happy he looked about ten. Lucy laughed off a handful of years, too, and then went back to her purse for more quarters and another penny for another go-around. A matching pair. Maybe they’d get the hippie girl back in Sausalito to turn the pennies into earrings.
And then Lucy was sad again.
What happens to happiness? Where does it go when it goes? And how? Out of the throat where the throaty laughter was born, across the tongue, across the teeth? Are there people who can see it leaving, drifting out? Is happiness exhaled like breath? Does it float into the clouds? Does it hover over our heads like a departing soul, hanging around to haunt us once we’re low again, dead to joy again? That’s my happiness up there . . . It used to be mine. Because Lucy was happy, Jimmy had seen it with his own eyes, as clearly as he could see anything else in the gift shop. And now it was gone, as gone as anything could be gone, sucked out of her, breathed out of her. She’d stepped out into the sunlight in her new jeans and white top. (Out of the wind, off the boat, and away from the water, she’d pulled off the jacket and tied it around her waist by the sleeves.) She’d stepped, still laughing, out of the gift shop, holding the bright flattened pennies up to her ears until Les snatched his away from her. The sun should have lifted her spirits, made her even happier, but the opposite happened.
Or something happened. As they came out onto the observation area, she just stopped (it was next to one of the coin-operated telescopes) and went from happy to sad. Jimmy had come out ahead of them, was across the way against the low wall that hemmed in the observation area. It was almost as if she’d seem him standing there and thrown on her depression again, like a wool overcoat, just for him.
But she had a savior. Or at least a friend. The woman in the white dress with the yellow purse and yellow shoes and the highlights in her chestnut hair. She was back, apparently hitting the same tourist spots as Lucy and Les, though she didn’t exactly look the tourist. She stood, alone again, just this side of the snack bar on the observation deck. Was she in line? She never turned away once she’d seen Lucy, sad ol’ Lucy, once she’d seen what was on her face, coming out of the gift shop.
She started toward her.
“Are you all right?” Jimmy watched the woman in white say, right into Lucy’s ear. She touched her arm, just above the wrist, with just her fingertips.
Lucy nodded, but in a way that made it obvious she wasn’t. Maybe too obvious.
Les was still standing there beside his sister. The woman in white said something to the boy that Jimmy couldn’t read. Maybe it was, Leave us alone a minute. Les started away for the concession stand. He only made it a few feet before Lucy called him back and handed him a bill.
Les went to wait in line at the snack bar. For what? A water? Coffee?
Jimmy’s impatience with Lucy was back again, too.
Get her a hankie. Get her a beer to cry in.
Get her a blue key light to stand in, to add to the effect. Get her the world’s smallest violin.
The woman with the white dress and yellow purse led Lucy to a bench across the grassy observation area, held her by the arm as if she was eighty and in her vapors. A Japanese woman on the bench rose when she saw the distressed women approaching. She bowed and backed away.
The women sat. The woman in white had those long legs of hers crossed, showing through the inverted V in the skirt, unbuttoned two buttons.
“Sexy Sadie,” Jimmy said.
Were they holding hands now? They were hip to hip. They were fifty feet away, as far away as you could get without going over the berm. Had they moved there because of him, out of earshot of any men, even the anonymous L.A. man in the off-white linen suit? Sexy Sadie would ask a quiet question, and Lucy would nod. And then, after the warm bond between them had bonded still warmer, Lucy would offer a question, and the woman would nod.
Where were the steaming cups of chamomile?
But then, when Lucy put her eyes on the ground and said nothing for a long time, the woman leaned close and whispered in her ear.
It made Jimmy remember something. From last night. Another whisper.
Les Paul was still waiting. He wasn’t monitoring his sister, didn’t even look over that way, seemingly glad to have been assigned a task that involved action and not emotion. At the head of the snack line was a barrel-shaped man, European, with a dictionary in his hand, squinting at the white plastic movable type on the black menu board. This could take awhile.
When Jimmy looked away from Les and back at the pity party on the bench, the two women had been joined by a third. Another woman.
When it came to this supporting cast, each woman was better-looking than the one before, though it was wrong to try to rank them. Each one was better-looking than she had a right to be. Professional-strength beauty. Sexy Sadie was on the tall side, model tall, brunette. This new one was almost short, black-haired, blue-black hair cut close to the head, with ragged bangs, that shake-it-out shaggy boy look. And vibrant blue-green eyes, bright enough to be read a mile away. (Or across the observation area, at any rate.) Maybe they were contacts. She had a killer body, stretch-wrapped in what was probably pleather, a sixties minidress and matching high sixties boots, so far on the other side of self-conscious she couldn’t even see us from there, back here in Dullsville.
Polythene Pam. So good-looking she looked like a man.
The woman in the white dress had been alone walking down the street in Sausalito when she’d stopped to offer Lucy advice about the sidewalk jewelry. And she was still alone, or alone again, when she’d spotted Lucy this second time, in front of the gift shop. And now Sexy Sadie had just happened to run into her very best friend in the whole world, and just when another poor sister needed bucking up, too, because these two, Sadie and Pam, were definitely close. Hooked up. Not sisters certainly. Lovers? Welcome to San Francisco. Maybe they were just two very on women. Or maybe Jimmy was just lonely. They flanked Lucy, sitting so close the three of them still left room on either end of the bench.
They worked her, poor Lucy. There was no other way to look at it. They were going to console her or die trying. Sadie would say something in one ear, and Lucy would nod or just keep staring at the grass in front of her and then, before Lucy could nod again, Pam would lean in to say something in the other ear, both of them close enough to kiss the downhearted girl.
It was something to behold, and Jimmy beheld it.
He looked over at the snack bar. Les was coming back with a Coke and a bottle of water. He was accompanied now by the stout European man. Jimmy decided on second look he was probably Italian. Homme Italia carried a hot dog and another Coke. He said a few last words to the boy and then waved with the hot dog. He looked a little lonely, too.
Les headed toward the spot where his sister and the stranger had been when he’d left them, out in front of the gift shop, before they moved to the bench across the grass. Les didn’t seem to realize they weren’t there until he was right on top of the same spot. He looked confused.
“They’re on the bench,” Jimmy said to himself.
But they weren’t.
When Jimmy panned right again, the bench was empty.
He had a hunch, a bad feeling. He tried to talk himself out of it, even as he ran up the metal stairs, back up to the level of the bridge.
Three steps at a time, and there she was.
Lucy was on the bridge, walking away, walking toward the center. She was already a hundred yards gone. Alone. Walking away. She wasn’t in any hurry, but there was a kind of scary purposefulness to her gait, almost as if she was counting the steps.
Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine . . .
She was still fifty yards ahead of Jimmy when Les blew past him with a concussive blast that almost pushed Jimmy into the rail. The boy still had the two drinks in his hands, but he dropped them now, first the Coke and then the bottle of water. The water bottle skittered across the walk and bounced into the air and then under the railing that separated the walk and bike run from the fast traffic.
The water bottle bounced into the air and was struck by a northbound Saab, dead in the windshield, bursting. The driver spooked at the splash, the flood, locked the brakes, and crunched the nose of the car into the rail and took the hit from a tailgating Ford Festiva, all in the time it took Jimmy to realize who’d blown past him.
Les never looked back, even as the line of cars in both hot lanes skidded and smoked and banged into each other.
Lucy kept walking. The inverted arc of the main immense suspension cable was beside her to her right, descending as she crossed the lateral plane toward some inevitable point of intersection, the descending curve and the baseline, as if the whole of the Golden Gate were a graph to illustrate the diminution of something. Hope? Promise? A fall from a great height.
But Les caught up to her.
When Jimmy saw that the boy was going to overtake her, or rather when he saw her reaction, when he saw Lucy let go of the dark thing she was holding on to, he stopped, let them have their moment. He had to remind himself that they didn’t know who he was.
Lucy tried to cover with a line or two, and her brother offered her the grace of something close to a laugh, though he certainly didn’t mean it. His face was flu shed from the run. Now he bent over to catch his breath. It occasioned another line from her. The sidewalk was empty around them, had been empty for almost all of the boy’s run after her. It was odd.
The two consoling beauties were nowhere to be seen. They’d just disappeared, like a magic trick, like a magician’s two lovely assistants.
Now the traffic recovered, rolled past Lucy and Les, except for the cars that had crashed. The drivers were out of them now. From the passing cars, no one looked over.