THIRTY-FIVE
She stood facing him when he came in. The woman in the suit had deposited him on the other side of the door and then clicked away in her heels.
The room was lit up bright, the way a child puts on all the lights when a night turns scary, when questions threaten to overtake everything. There were deep green drapes, a heavy weave, closed across whatever windows there were. Two of the four walls were covered with dark books, floor to ceiling. There wasn’t much furniture, and the wooden floors were bare, polished to a shine that made it look like the two of them, Jimmy and Mary, were standing on water, looking at each other across a gulf.
She stayed where she was.
Jimmy stepped in through the doorway but nothing more. For now.
“I don’t know if you knew or not, but The Man is gone,” Mary said.
“Yeah, I don’t get that,” Jimmy said. “Explain it to me.”
She smoothed out the front of her dress, or dried the palms of her hands on it, if they were damp. She had changed clothes, too, from what she was wearing at The ’Choke, when she was being “consoled,” or he thought she was. Now she was in a gray suit, with a long coat over a long skirt. It was a little odd, high-collared, a little Eva Perón-theatrical.
“There must be other things you want me to explain first,” she said.
“You started with that.” He heard the edge in his voice.
“Help me,” she said.
And suddenly she was Mary again. He almost crossed to her. But he didn’t. He remembered that one of the things that had landed him here, wherever this was, was his predilection for riding to the rescue. Or thinking he could.
“You know, that’s what The Man said to me,” Jimmy said. “Help me. He wanted me to get him on his feet, give him a last look at his dimming empire.”
Mary turned her back on Jimmy and reached into the drapes and found the cord and yanked them open. She had her own anger. It was closer to the surface than either one of them thought.
It was the picture window.
It was the drawing room.
It was the house on Russian Hill.
Jimmy felt stupid for not figuring it out before now.
Still with her back to him, Mary said, “I’ll explain it to you. He’s gone. Crossed over. Released. The special exception for Sailors with years of service. The grace of God. A time and a place. That’s all I know about it. That’s all he knew, all he understood about it. That leaders sometimes are given a gift.”
“Turn around, let me see you,” Jimmy said.
She turned. She let him stare at her. She knew that right now she was two women to him. She was giving him a chance to try to fit one woman onto the other.
“I understand how you feel,” she said.
“Do you?” he said.
She walked to him. Her hand rose to touch his face, but she stopped it on its way.
She said, “I remember standing in some trees in the middle of the night, in the clothes I had been sleeping in. I remember a man telling me, when he finally got around to it, that he was not what he seemed. That he was something that nobody was, that couldn’t be as far as I knew.”
“All right,” Jimmy said.
“I remember six men in a semicircle on a deck, one of them with his face covered with a gray wool scarf, and it a warm night, too.”
“All right, I get it.”
“No, you don’t. You only get part of it, Jimmy.”
She didn’t sound angry anymore.
“We’re even,” he said.
Her face fell. “Is that what you think this is? Something as small and as far away as that?”
The flywheel in his head was spinning so fast it felt like it could come apart. He was trying to see it, how this had happened, how he had come to be in this room. He was making lists in his head, drawing diagrams, schematics. He was trying to piece it together. He was trying to re-create the wiring, get it together to where, when he threw the switch, the circuit completed and the light came on.
The call to Lucy.
The stop in Saugus.
The trip north.
The Beatles in the glove box, the CD he never remembered buying.
The way the fake Lucy looked, dressed, cried. Died.
Mary walked past a table, brushed her fingers across what must have been a switch. All the lights in the room went out at once.
He couldn’t see anything. He heard her walk away from him, toward the window.
His eyes adjusted. What he saw first was a dull red glow, her shoulders and the reflection of their line in the glass of the window.
Until that moment, he wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure she was a Sailor. It pressed down on him, the knowledge. The fact of it.
He said, “Is that your house, in the Haight? The black house?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you here, in The Man’s house?” he said. “You seem right at home.”
“For the last six years, I worked with Martin. One of the ones who worked for him, but one of his favorites. He never left this house. Everything came to him.”
“Why did you marry a Sailor?”
“I want you to be with me,” she said, there in the dark.
“Why did you marry a Sailor?” he said again.
“I want us to be together.”
“Why did you marry a Sailor?”
This time, she let the clock in the other room play a little fill. “I didn’t,” she said. “Hesse is just someone I work with. I’m not married.”
Jimmy’s heart dropped another hundred floors.
“I knew me being married would draw you closer,” she said, “not push you away. Would make you want me more. Especially with the kind of man Hesse is.”
“What about your boy? Where’d you get him?”
“He’s mine. Jamie. He’s mine. He’s mine. I’m his mommy, and that’s where we live, Tiburon.”
She found her softest voice. “Come here,” she said.
He stayed where he was. He felt like the pile of sticks The Man was.
“Come here, Jimmy.”
He crossed to her. There, behind her, was the City, the Bay. A ship was leaving, out under the Gate.
“How did you die?” Jimmy said, that question they alone can ask. And usually never do.
“I took pills.”
“You always hated drugs.”
“I know.”
“Why did you do it? What made you? Why did you want to die?”
She took his hand. “To reach you,” she said.
He pulled away his hand. “A girl died, Mary.”
“I know,” she said. “But that wasn’t because of me.”
“It wasn’t?”
“That was part of someone else’s plan,” she said. “I didn’t order it. I wouldn’t have. I had what I wanted. You were here.”
“She was a human being.”
Mary could have stopped then. But she didn’t stop. “Heartbroken girls die every day,” she said.
The low clouds and high fog had cleared altogether. The City, the world, was all spread out before them, like a board game.
“Look at us,” she said. She meant their refle ction in the window, red by blue. Red. Blue. It was like there were four of them.
He was looking past them, at a judging sky.
“I want us to be together,” she said again. “We’ll do everything together.” A sentence for each of the two Marys.