TWENTY-THREE
Two girls were holding hands. It was a start.
Jimmy found them down by the piers, walking apart from the others. One of them kept looking over her shoulder at him. She smiled, in fact. The girls wore matching clothes, long blue dresses out of some cheap goods. It looked rough to the skin and the color uneven, as if hand-dyed. It made Jimmy think of cult clothes, pretty hippie girls on a commune, flowers in their hair but a dreary, frightened servitude in their hearts, following the master. (The trick was to not want to be the master.)
“Wait,” Jimmy said when the one turned to look at him again.
She waited, held back her sister.
When he got closer, he saw how young they were. With Sailors the new form matched the old, at least in age and usually in size. From a distance, or in a photograph, one might pass for his or her former self, except to the eyes of a close loved one, to whom the new person always looked like a stranger.
It wasn’t a logical thing. The Sailor way was a ball of mystery, surrounded by a hundred miles of fog. There was a famous fog in the Central Valley, starting south of Bakersfield on Old 99 when you came up from L.A., Thule fog, so thick it looked like dishwater. Whenever Jimmy drove through it, or up to it (you couldn’t drive through it at its worst), he thought, This is what it’s like to be a Sailor. A sailor at the wheel of his boat.
“Hi,” the girls said together. They weren’t twins in this domain, but they looked alike.
“Hi,” Jimmy said.
They seemed so trusting, so open. Unafraid, now that they had each other. They also seemed to know who he was. He wondered why, what they’d been told about him.
They were New. It was all over them. Jimmy had already decided they probably weren’t the Greek girls, the reborn Leonidas twins. He just had a feeling about them. The fog. He was about to ask them, gently, about themselves, when they just smiled again, or at least the one of them did, and they walked away.
Down the rabbit hole again . . .
Jimmy followed them into a room in an old military building, World War II-era, wooden, with brown linoleum floors. One of those buildings built fast, when the world was coming apart on two fronts. It had a ten-foot ceiling, exposed rafters, all very intentional. There were windows along both sides, but they were covered with blackout cloths, just like in the war. It was an officers’ mess, with a long table.
An odd one, because the table was set with candelabra and a tablecloth. And a meal on silver serving plates.
The chairs were filled with women. The two sisters were seated on either side of a woman who looked a little French, with short-cropped hair. They stopped talking and eating when he stepped in, then went back to it. They were different ages, but there was something in their faces, all of the women, something about their pale skin, that made Jimmy think of the Procol Harum line about the sixteen vestal virgins leaving for the coast. (And, although his eyes were open, they might just as well have been closed.) It was a little like a scene from a dream, like a memory of an event that never took place.
A couple of the women looked familiar. It took him a second to realize that some voice in his head was telling him that two or three of them resembled women out of his past. That dream. At his right, closest to him, was a dark-haired beauty who reminded him of a woman from a year or so ago in his life, a “client” who’d become much more before it was over. And next to her was a girl who instantly made him think of a girl he’d fallen hard for when he was just a kid, maybe the last real love before he’d become a Sailor. (Maybe they’d slipped him something on the boat.) Right in front of him was a punky-looking girl with silver hair. Eighties Girl. She stuck out her tongue at him. Jimmy almost laughed. He’d accepted the trippiness of the scene, was going with it.
Then he realized the short-haired woman at the other end of the table looked a little like his mother. He didn’t exactly want to dwell on that.
There was an open place at the table. Was it meant for him? There was a glass of wine there. He decided now would be a good time to drink half of it.
It wasn’t all women. Machine Shop was there. Shop had dressed for the occasion, whatever the occasion was, a maroon suit that could have been sewn from the remnants of the velvet hanging on Whitehead’s vessel. Put him in a plush red Al Green suit and the seventies really came out. Shop hadn’t even noticed Jimmy. He was totally into the women around him, full shuck and jive, a bit of the old “And how are you fine ladies this evening?” When his eyes met Jimmy’s, he looked embarrassed, guilty, caught. He was supposed to meet Jimmy at the Wharf.
“Sorry, man,” Shop said.
“Yeah, I was looking for you up there.”
“And now you’re here.”
“How’d you get here?” Jimmy said.
“They brought me in a limousine,” Shop said.
Jimmy guessed that all this was part of Whitehead’s master plan, whatever it was.
Then he saw Mary. Or rather “Mary.”
At the far end of the table. If the lights were up, she probably wouldn’t have looked a thing like Mary. Not the twenty-two-year-old Mary Jimmy had met on Sunset Strip in 1995, not the woman now, out in Tiburon. But the hair was close, the face the same shape. She was wearing a dress that made Jimmy remember the one Lucy had been wearing there at the start. But that was all right, too; all of them were getting tangled up in each other’s stories in his head.
He took his wine over to her. Nobody paid him much mind. He stood over her.
She looked up at him, stopped whatever conversation she was having. This close, she didn’t look like Mary at all.
“Come sit by me,” Jimmy said to her. “There’s a seat down there by me.” He sounded drunker than he was.
“You’re always trying to relocate me,” the Mary almost lookalike said. Or Jimmy thought she did.