Among the Living

TWENTY-SEVEN
There is an angry, ugly rhythm to an argument. You don’t have to hear the actual words; the sounds are enough. They’re like blows in a fight. Three or four jabbing syllables and then the louder thud of the knockout punch. But the other isn’t knocked out. Not yet. It’s never over that quickly, no early-round knockdowns. There’s always more. You rephrase. You repeat. Redundancy is a given. You aren’t judged on grammar, maybe on the number of fricatives and glottal stops. The percussion. Or the footwork, the angry, ugly dance of it. There’s a reason arguments end in violence, in hurled glassware, in slammed doors, in slaps, in gunshots. Punctuation is everything.
Dr. Marc Hesse slammed the bedroom door on his way out, and Mrs. Mary Hesse came to the window and looked out at the night, tears running down her cheeks like commas.
Jimmy was across the street but fifty yards away, close enough to hear the angry, ugly sounds but not to see those tears. So maybe he just filled in the blanks, seeing what he wanted, what he needed to see. Just enough to hate Hesse.
The other night in front of the Victorian apartment house, with the Greek father and Machine Shop packed into the Porsche, Jimmy had remembered the ride with his own father when he was ten or eleven, when his father told him he and Jimmy’s mother were divorcing, that speech that begins, “Sometimes a mother and a father grow apart . . .” Jimmy remembered something else. When he was sixteen, he told his mother what his father had said that night, and what she had said back to Jimmy was, “Les cha?nes de mariage sont si lourdes qu’il faut deux pour les porter. Et parfois trois.” They were in a car, too, the huge white Chrysler 400 that was her last car, top down, somewhere in Hollywood. “The chains of matrimony are so heavy it takes two to carry them. And sometimes three.”
The garage door came up. The Mercedes’s red taillights and white backup lights flared, and the SUV charged out, the automatic radio antenna extending so fast it dragged across the last of the garage door hurrying to get out of the way. Mary stood witness in the upstairs window, in the master suite, over the garage. It was a big window, with true divides, beveled leaded glass, black frames dividing her into eight-by-tens.
Jimmy hated him for making her cry, for bringing her to the window to watch him go. He hated him.
Given what he was about to do, it was a useful emotion.
A sound made Mary turn toward the door. A woman stepped into the bedroom, a young woman wearing a dark suit, a uniform of some kind. A nanny? They spoke. Something was determined. Mary came out of the house a few minutes later, a sweater over her shoulders. Jimmy stepped back into the deeper shadows. The street they lived on, Alcatraz Lane, went two ways down the hill. She started off to the right, toward San Francisco, toward the view rustling through the gaps in the evergreens. Jimmy went the other way. All the streets out on the point of Tiburon emptied down onto the drive that circled the tip of the peninsula and led to the village.
Mary walked along the fronts of the shops and restaurants. It was eight or nine. The shops were closed, the restaurants busy. With the indoor smoking ban, every place now had tall stools and tables out front, where the happiest people seemed to gather. Or at least the loudest. Jimmy was a hundred yards behind her, coming up the same side of the street. He saw her look over at them, the happy, loud people. She kept on walking.
There was a compact marina just past the traffic roundabout and the heart of the village. She walked out to the end of a dock. It should have gotten cooler out on the dock, with the wind off the water, but somehow it felt warmer. Maybe it was just Jimmy. The air smelled fresher here than on the other side of the Bay.
Mary stood there with her back to him. There was the sound of the wind, the sound of the boat tackle banging against itself, but still, she had to have heard his footsteps on the planks, coming toward her. Didn’t she? But she didn’t turn. She must have known it was him. At last. Again.
When he was five feet away, she turned.
He stopped.
There was a moment. The sliver of a moon over her shoulder clicked into a new phase.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
He didn’t say anything, let her make up her own answer.
“This isn’t a good night,” she began, as vague as that.
He crossed the last few feet between them. Could be she moved at least a step closer to him. He put his arms around her and drew her in. There was some exotic perfume behind her ear, somewhere on her, that he almost knew, though not from their time together. Not from the past, at least not their past.
He waited. And then he kissed her.
He hadn’t kissed anyone in months. When it’s that way, you could forget how smooth lips were, how warm. How unlike any other skin.
“Besides that,” she said. Her voice had changed into something more comfortable. “What are you doing here? San Francisco.”
Jimmy wished she’d asked something else, almost anything else. He wished he had it in him to lie. “Angel had a friend,” he said. He noticed the tense. “A girl, a girlfriend maybe. She had just broken up with somebody else, came up here. She was kind of messed up. I was keeping an eye on her.”
Mary waited.
“She killed herself,” Jimmy said. “Down on Fisherman’s Wharf.”
“That’s sad,” Mary said. “That’s sad.” It was something else he had remembered about her, the way she repeated lines sometimes. She pulled away from him, turned back toward the water, the lights across. It was as if the word about Lucy had broken her will about something. “There have been so many of them lately. It’s all people are talking about.”
After a moment, she said, “That’s something I never thought of. As bad as it ever got.”
Jimmy knew that wasn’t true. “Let’s get a drink,” he said.
She turned to him. “We can’t do that,” she said.
“We’ll go somewhere. I have the car.”
She looked at him a long time, judging him, he thought, and wondered on what count. How. Was she judging him for then, or for now?
“Come on,” she said, and started past him up the dock.
They walked over to the last pier. There were three fingers of docks and slips. Jimmy just followed her lead. Halfway there, he took her hand, but she let go after only a few seconds, a few steps. He sensed she was angry, but also sensed that it wasn’t entirely focused. It was a rising anger looking for something to form around, something to be about. Something to beat her fist against.
She walked out to the end of the last dock. It was where the big sailboats were, thirty-footers and up.
One of them had her name on it.
Queen Mary.
The cockpit was open, uncovered. It was a Swan, a beautiful Swan, a forty-five footer. She climbed over the lifeline and into the cockpit. There didn’t look to be any live-aboards in the boats in the neighborhood, but there were voices from somewhere close. Voices over the water, that sound. Jimmy looked until he found them, two or three guys in the cockpit of a Hunter 38 out near the head of the next pier, the glow of a cigar or two and the good smell of it winging over. Here behind the curve of the little bay there was barely any wind. Jimmy stepped over the lifeline onto the boat.
Mary was unlocking the cabin. She slid the panel door up and out of the way and stepped down. After a minute, she reappeared with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Plastic glasses, but stemware, a nice shape. Boat drinks.
“I drink a lot of wine now,” she said and handed him the bottle and a corkscrew to open it with. She plopped down in the seat beside the wheel and pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. All the years that had passed since they’d been together in L.A. blew away.
Jimmy opened the wine. When it popped, there was a response from the guys on the boat across the way. Maybe, “Cheers!”
“I don’t know them,” Mary said. “They came in a few days ago, sailing down the coast, I think.”
Jimmy got that she was also saying, I wouldn’t be here if I knew them.
But at least she seemed to have lost the anger. “You know what you said yesterday?” she said. “About how it was still so strong?”
He gave her a glass, found a place to stow the bottle, and sat beside her. He didn’t know if it was a question she meant for him to answer or not.
She seemed to finish her own thought by drinking half of the glass of wine. Punctuation.
She took his hand now. He brought their hands up and kissed the back of hers, something he never would have done if anyone could have seen. He was different when they were together. Always.
He tasted the wine. It was a rich Chianti.
“Are you cold?” she said.
“No.”
“People from L.A. are always cold up here, always talking about it.”
“I hate L.A.,” Jimmy said. He didn’t mean it.
“That’s not true.”
“I’m never going back.”
She surprised him by taking him seriously, like the girl she used to be. It was something else she used to do, something else that made her different from all the rest.
“You know, it never stopped for me,” he said.
The sailing-down-the-coast guys laughed loud and rough at something.
Mary moved away from him just enough for him to notice. He followed her eyes. She was looking at the dots of house lights out on the point, above the village, or maybe she was reacting to the intrusion of the guys on the other dock.
“Is the boat yours or his?”
“Mine. He never comes down. He bought it, but he forgets it’s even here.”
There was another laugh from the men across the way, as if her last line was the punch line to the one about the cardiologist and his restless young wife.
Jimmy stood. He put his wineglass in the teak holder next to the wheel and went forward.
Mary thought he was going to say something to the other sailors. “Jimmy,” she said.
But then she saw him kick off his slip-on shoes.
The Queen Mary, this Queen Mary, was stern-out, its back to the Bay. Jimmy stepped off the boat onto the dock with the balance of a dancer, already getting into the rhythm. He unhitched the bowline with a twirling figure eight, like a cowboy with a lariat. He stepped back onto the boat and curled the line in a circle on the deck, one-handed, another trick. He lifted the white fenders up and over the rail as he came aft and undid the second sheet and the stopper line. He put his foot against the dock and gave it a gentle push. The planks, the cap of the piling backed away.
Mary just watched him through all this. There seemed to be pleasure in it for her, whether it was because of a memory or just the pleasure for women that comes when men finally act. And become themselves, or at least what they think of as themselves. She took the key out of her sweater pocket, a single key on a chain with a fat marshmallow float. She held it out to him. He put it in the ignition and turned it over a click, but not enough to start the engine. He snapped on the nav lights.
He hoisted the main while the stern was still coming around, the boat sliding away from the dock, all from his one push. When she was around, with the sail still just coming up, it caught wind, and the boat started forward across the flat marina water splattered with reflected lights.
It was all pretty slick as moves go, slick and quiet, no engine, and when Jimmy sailed by the men aboard the Hunter on the other dock, they tapped their beer bottles against the rub rail in approval.
Mary went below. She was gone a minute. When she came back to the cockpit, she had on full weather gear, jacket and pants. Everything but a nor’wester hat.
Jimmy had gotten them out past the tip of Belevedere Island already, headed toward the Golden Gate, Sausalito off to the right.
“So, we’re making a passage,” he said, about her change of clothes. “Hawaii.”
“Catalina,” she said. That’s where they used to sail.
She settled back in beside him. He was standing behind the wheel, one hand down to steer. The sail began to luff a little. Without thinking about it, Mary leaned forward and pulled in the sheet looped around the winch and cleated it.
“Who’s sailing this boat?” Jimmy said.
“You are, sir,” she said.
And then they didn’t say anything for thirty minutes.
Not a word.
Not a memory, not a question.
Not a promise, not a hope, not a regret, though their heads must have been filled with all of those things.
Night sailing. Jimmy didn’t know anything like it, anything that combined the serenity, the mysticism, the calm, with that underlying sense of danger, that sense of things that could go bump in the night. There was the bright fire of the City to his left, the rust red arc of the bridge ahead, and, beyond it, a kind of darkness not duplicated anywhere else, only over water. There it was, all of it, wide-screen. The wind was light, but there was enough of it to raise some chop, to occasionally throw up a burst of spray, like a handful of confetti. Everything was warmer than Jimmy would have expected it to be. Maybe it was the tide, the famous tide that caught the Alcatraz escapees all those years ago. So the cops said, anyway. The Bay seemed empty. Maybe it was just a trick of the mind. Jimmy wondered when it was most crowded.
He also wondered what would happen if he just kept going.
He stayed on the same track until just shy of the Golden Gate when he came about. It was then that Mary came up beside him at the wheel. She reached across him, put her hands over his. He thought first that it was a tender gesture, but then he realized she wanted the helm. He pulled his hands out from under hers.
She changed his course. She changed his trim on the sail. The boat immediately picked up speed, moved more cleanly through the water. He found his Chianti and sat with his back to the cabin, sailing backward so he could look at her, with the lights behind her, almost like a corona. It was something else he remembered about her, the way she didn’t just sit there, even when she was just sitting there. She was always moving. It was like each moment made him replace some soft-focus sense of her from memory with the reality of her. Of Mary. Now what was before him was vivid and strong and undeniable. Here.
He wanted to give her whatever she wanted.
He had that feeling.
Jimmy followed her eyes, looked over his shoulder. Ahead there was a large fishing trawler, halfway across the Bay, heading out from Oakland probably, ablaze with deck lights, covered with fast-moving shapes, crew, draped with nets on cranes. It was still a half mile away but bearing down, an intersecting course, insistent enough, big enough, to stir something in the blood.
Mary kept her hand on the wheel as she dug in the cabinet under the seat and came out with a yellow-and-black battery lantern. She pointed it up at the sail, not turning it on until it was aimed away from their eyes, to preserve their night vision.
The sail sprang into whiteness, tall as a billboard.
“Let them see us,” she said.
Even from a third of a mile out, they heard the change in the pitch of the other’s engines. A big thing had yielded.
On the lee of Alcatraz, the wind slacked. Mary eased the boat up into it, to catch what she could. Jimmy tried to suss which cluster of lights ahead was Tiburon, the marina, the restaurants. He thought she was turning for home.
But he was wrong.
She reached forward and started the engine, waited to see that it caught, then started forward to drop the main. Jimmy reached over to steady the wheel, though it was steady enough on its own. He could tell that she was used to sailing alone, even a boat this big. She stood by the boom on the foredeck, atop the cabin, pleating the sail, left right left, as it collapsed onto itself, then looping and tying the stays when it was down. She came back to the helm, pushed the throttle forward a little.
She powered out from under the sweep of the light on Alcatraz, out of its reach, then across a sudden section of chop.
To Angel Island.
It was black, had a mountain in the center of it, was fifty times the size of Alcatraz. Mary steered to the windward side but cruised on past the cove where the overnighters were moored and the campers gone ashore.
She found their own blank section of water. She steered into the wind and cut the engine back to idle. The last of the momentum spent itself. The boat drifted its last foot. They stopped. She listened. They were alone.
“You want to drop an anchor?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
He went forward and let down the anchor, hand over hand, because it was quieter than the electric winch.
She backed up the boat until the hook set. She shut off the engine.
When he came back to the cockpit, she was drinking the last of her glass of wine.
“You were smoking when I saw you in the park,” she said, so quiet he could hardly hear her, right next to her.
He sat beside her. She put her head back.
“I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes, on the road, on the way up here,” he said. “Something made me think of you. And Luckies. That first night on the Strip.”
He didn’t tell her about all the other times something made him think of her these last few days.
“I wondered what you would remember.”
“The house up above Altadena, in Angeles Forest,” he said.
“I would hope you’d remember better times,” she said.
Not the end of it, Jimmy thought. Everything before.
“That isn’t what I remembered about you and me on the way up here, but . . .” He stopped himself. “What do you remember?” he said.
“The way we were together,” Mary said. “What we were like. The way people always said we were exactly the same, just alike, and we weren’t at all, but there was something when we were together that made it seem that way. That made me better.”
“Do you want the rest of the wine?” he said.
She shook her head. Chianti. It was what they always drank. Then. His first night in San Francisco, his unnamed, unseen admirer had bought him a glass in the bar on Columbus. Another thing that sent him down this road, aimed him toward this. Could it have been her? Could she have seen him then? Why wouldn’t she say so now?
He leaned over her. He could feel the heat coming off of her. He remembered pulling the blanket up across her shoulders as she slept in the cabin above Altadena. The last seconds . . . The last seconds before it all changed, before she saw just enough of who he was, who he really was, to rend things. Forever, he thought, until now. He put his hand on the side of her neck. He could feel her carotid, her pulse. His wrist was against the cold knife of the tab of the zipper.
He pulled it down, the zipper. It made a sound like a murmur.
She lifted her back for him.
His hand moved across her breastbone, found another pulse. She wasn’t wearing anything under the weather gear.
They moved from the cockpit to the forward cabin. Inside. The physical part was as good as it had always been. Unthinking, natural, confident, unequivocal. The expected and the surprising at the same time. It had always been that way with them, even when they were on the run in L.A. and scared, up in the Angeles Forest, maybe especially then.
The intervening years, gone. At least in this.
When it was over, they talked, or Mary talked and Jimmy listened. He listened to her and studied her face in the indefinite light, while the boat rocked, like a car alone on a good night road. (Was it only the light of the City, coming across the water?) Her face. She’d changed more than he’d thought. How could it be otherwise? Years had passed. And she wasn’t like him. He had to keep reminding himself of that. Of course time would change her. The shape of her face was the same, but her eyes seemed stiffened, the line of her nose drawn straighter. He thought again she’d probably had some preemptive cutting and sewing, the kind doctors’ wives get. He wanted to reach out to touch her cheek but held back.
She was talkative. She seemed caught up in purpose. That was something new. Before, after sex, in the L.A. days, she’d been soft, conforming, quiet but not sullen, a perfect definition of easy. Making love then seemed to take her out of the world. Tonight it seemed to have set her up to want something more from it.
That, he didn’t understand.
“I want us to be together,” she said to him.
Mary left the cabin, went aft, naked.
She looked back at him. And then just stepped off the stern. It made the smallest of sounds, the water receiving her.
He couldn’t help but think about the suicides.
He stood looking down at her, standing on the aft deck.
“Come on,” she said. He was naked, too.
He knew why she’d gone into the water, that she had to wash the sex off of her before she went home, exchange its scent for some other, for something innocent. Salt for salt.
He had understood that much.
082
Mary’s nanny, or whatever she was, stood at the head of the dock, waiting for them as they walked away from Queen Mary. Her suit, in this setting, seemed almost nautical, a first mate’s uniform. She was almost at attention.
She pulled Mary close and said something. Mary turned and cast Jimmy a complicated look and then started away, with the young woman falling in behind her, leaving him there.