THIRTY-ONE
“I have to be back before dark,” Mary said.
She drove a car Jimmy hadn’t seen before, a two-seater Mercedes convertible. Early seventies and perfect. Light silver, the color of a knife. The road was in the country, with a nice gentle back and forth to it, through a valley where they grew flowers, mile after mile, color by color, in strict, clean rows. It was like being led by the hand across a color chart. It was like driving through a rainbow, only the colors were harder. Even to the two of them, even in the moment, it felt like a dream. With that same sense that it had to end, and probably abruptly.
Mary had called the Mark and told him where to meet her, a corner away from Nob Hill. She told him to take the cable car and where to get off. She had called at eight that morning. Something made him think she’d just dropped her boy off at school. They took the 280 out of town, the same way Jimmy and Machine Shop had headed south the day before, and then along the reservoir lakes, lakes to the right, the moneyed communities to the left. He watched to see if she looked over at Hillsborough, in the direction of Butternut Drive. She didn’t. Another ten miles, and she veered off right onto San Mateo Road, the road up and over the ridge of mountains between the Bay and the peninsula towns and the coast.
“I have to be back before dark.”
She didn’t give a reason. He could come up with three or four on his own, and he didn’t want to think about any of them. He certainly wasn’t going to ask her why. He just looked at her, what the wind was doing to her hair, the shifting light to her eyes.
“I never rode in a car with you, you driving,” he said.
She didn’t say anything.
The fields of flowers ended, and the road came out at Half Moon Bay. It was a Thursday. There wasn’t much traffic, local or otherwise, through the main strip of town. Half Moon had been there awhile, had some character, some Western to it. It also had that nobody-will-know-us-here feel.
They went to the beach, parked, and walked down onto the sand. The waves were gentle. And empty. Pillar Point was to the right, a confusion of sailboat masts and The Breakwater. Even that had an unpeopled look to it.
The two of them had a way of not talking in settings like this, a history of unpregnant silence. Back when they were first together they would go out to the beach at Malibu or Paradise Cove or up into the mountains or out to some alluvial plain in Joshua Tree and just be there, side by side, no pressure to talk, no impulse to frame things with words. It was one of the first pop-up signs that told Jimmy he loved her, when he realized that she didn’t need to say anything, especially in those situations when anything either one of them might have said would probably be weak. Or just wrong.
But he spoke now.
“This is where Mavericks is, right? The big waves.”
She pointed straight out. “In the winter months, December. A half mile out past the point. It’s tow-in surfing. I don’t even know what you can see from here. They go out in boats, on Jet Skis. The waves are forty, fifty feet.”
The calm in front of them suddenly seemed like something else that could end abruptly. She took his hand. She looked up the beach in one direction. Someone with a dog was coming, too far away to even tell if it was a man or woman, throwing something to send the dog out ahead.
“Are you afraid of him?” Jimmy said. He meant her husband, Hesse.
She didn’t have a quick answer. Or a defiant one, which surprised him.
She pulled him to her. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. Was that the answer?
“What did he say? When you were arguing?”
“This isn’t about him,” she said. “In the end.”
“Of all the city parks in all the towns in the world, I walk onto yours,” Jimmy said, holding her.
She wasn’t going to let him throw movie lines at her. “L.A. is only a few hundred miles away,” she said. “We would have run into each other again eventually.”
“You knew where I was; I didn’t know where you were.”
“You’re the one who used to talk about Fate all the time,” she said. They still held each other. It didn’t sound as harsh coming out of her mouth as the words would look on a page. Or would seem, remembered. “You were the one who always said that we were meant to be together.”
“We were young.”
“What are we now?” she said.
“Together,” Jimmy said.
He wanted to say one more line. He wanted to ask her why she went into the arms of a Sailor, why she married a Sailor. Was it possible she didn’t know about Hesse? Even he didn’t believe in a Fate that blind. Or blinding.
She seemed to sense how close he was to asking the real question about her husband.
“Come on,” she said. “There’s a motel up the way. I called ahead.”
The man with the dog had reached them. Mary didn’t look his way, but Jimmy did. The man didn’t want their eyes to meet, put all his attention on the dog.
“Rex!” the man yelled and threw the stick again.
Mary was looking up at the sun. Or maybe she was gauging the time left by the position of the faint curl of daylight moon.
089
They made it back before dark, time to spare. In time.
In time for Jimmy to be waiting at dusk for Hesse to exit the medical center. To tail him. Maybe in time for Mary to pick up the kid and make it home and shower and change into evening clothes for a reconciliatory dinner with her husband someplace nice in the City, because Hesse never went home. He drove from the UCSF med center to the Sequoia Club to get cleaned up, emerged a half hour later in a slick suit for a dinner date.
Only the doctor met someone else for dinner. A woman not his wife is the phrase.
Great gears turn. And not-so-great ones, too.
Jimmy had seen all the detective movies, so he knew, Jake Gittes and Chinatown aside, no self-respecting investigator did divorce work. The money wasn’t any good, the hours blew, and the customers were never satisfied at the end of the thing, were more likely to hate you more for telling the truth than the guilty party for living the lie. When he started “looking into things” for people, formally and informally, for money or, more often, for his own private reasons, he knew what he wasn’t going to do. He wasn’t going to follow husbands to dinner dates. But here he was.
Why was it always husbands? Because husbands tried to pull it off in town. Women at least had the sense to go out of town. Out to some sleepy little beach town for instance. On a Thursday afternoon.
Jimmy didn’t have any reason to think Hesse had identifie d the Porsche, so he’d only stayed two car lengths behind the corpuscular red Mercedes as it left the Sequoia Club. He had the top up, but that was because it felt like rain, the air thickening, clouds descending onto the hills of San Francisco like a stage curtain dropping. He was working. He had half a pack of the American Spirits left. Angel’s pint of Courvoisier was in the glove box if he needed it. There was good music on the radio. He’d made love hours ago in a motel at the beach with the only woman he cared about, still had her scent on him. Life was confusing, but it was good. A wave bigger than Mavericks might be building a thousand miles offshore, but it wasn’t here yet.
Hesse and the woman met at the restaurant. Separate cars, meet out front. They’d picked a restaurant on top of a high-rise with glass elevators on the outside of the building, right downtown. Maybe they thought it would look like some kind of business meeting, on the up-and-up. Sophisticates in a sophisticated city. The woman wore a stylish hat, a two-hundred-dollar version of a skateboarder’s sock hat. Nothing sexier than that.
They left their cars, rode up together.
Somebody else was there. The man who’d been on the Half Moon Bay beach with the dog was there, too. Minus Rex.
Jimmy waited a beat, dodged the dog man, rode on up after them.
Their first courses arrived.
She had her head bare now. It was the short-haired woman Jimmy had identifie d as The Lady, the Sailor the New Leonidas girl had talked about, the one from the mess hall with the candelabra who’d reminded him a little, but not all the way, of a young Teresa Miles.
There didn’t seem to be much passion to the thing. But, just as Jimmy thought that, Hesse reached across the table to touch her hand, to make some point. They almost looked like lovers. She drank. He didn’t. The view of the city was lovely behind them. It was a very businesslike date. Jimmy remembered Groner’s line about cardiologists and their cold, cold hearts. And Hesse a Mormon on top.
Jimmy was almost enjoying it, watching them, a great position at the bar, a gin to make it look right.
Then The Lady said something, and he said something back. And the lovebirds flashed red. Mauve, actually. And he remembered the twisted-together threads of story that had brought him here, that had twisted tighter with this.
A half hour later, Hesse and the woman were coming down in one elevator, and Jimmy was in the other. They were a bit ahead in the race for the street level.
While they waited for their cars, they stood close and talked. She even touched his hand.
Jimmy watched from the Porsche.
Hesse kissed her lightly. She pulled him back for another, this one with a little more intent behind it. She walked to her car, and he walked to his. He didn’t look back at her. She didn’t look back at him. The two cars pulled away, the red Mercedes and a silver Prius. The Mercedes with a refined roar, the Prius with an electric hum.
So what did it mean? Jimmy had seen the San Francisco movie called The Conversation, too, knew lovers’ talk was code, that there was always something else being said, that it could look like one thing but be something else.
But it sure looked like unfaithfulness, betrayal. Or maybe Jimmy was just hoping to dirty up his rival.
He saw movement across the street. It was the man with the dog from the beach, coming out of the shadows, on the phone, with a little hurry in his step. Out at Half Moon Bay, Jimmy had decided that he worked for Hesse, was tailing Mary, Mary and the new man in her life. Now, he didn’t know what to think.
He started the Porsche and pulled forward.
Dog Man walked four blocks, fast, with Jimmy lagging behind in the Porsche. The man stayed on the phone.
He went down a side street.
Jimmy drove by and looped back. Mary’s black SUV was parked down the alley, and the man was at the driver’s-side window.
He finished reporting in. He nodded. He walked away from her.
She sat there a minute, then left her car, walked away toward the waterfront.