AS HE DROVE TOWARD the Getty, palm fronds passing above like the fans that cooled the pharaohs, he tried not to think of the woman in the yellow dress, who had appeared like a blinding sunburst with the promise that it could put an end to longing and lay the past to rest. She was just a symbol, but he was sure that her splendor was not merely superficial. In her expression he had seen modesty, love, intelligence, and kindness.
He wished he had a billion dollars, or just a hundred million, perhaps even just fifty million. Then at least he would suffer for a time the delusion that he could outwit mortality. He would fly Luc in an air ambulance to the Cleveland Clinic or the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, or Harvard or Johns Hopkins, whichever was the best. He would settle Cathérine and David in a nearby Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton. He would visit them frequently. And he would buy a house on a mountainside so as to look out over the whole expanse of Los Angeles, comforted by the flat blue of the Pacific disappearing calmly toward the joint between water and sky, the fine-line gate to infinity. In this city, disconnected from everything but the present, he would live with the woman in the yellow dress, the woman who had such full-bodied, wavy, astoundingly gold hair, if she would have him, until he was eighty, when he would die and return to Jacqueline forever, if she would forgive him.
Had Jacqueline lived, life would have been even more peaceful than the natural narcotic of Los Angeles could make it. She had a talent for happiness, and the patience, gentleness, and feminine power that allowed her to hold through without fighting. He, on the other hand, knew how to hold through only by fighting, and when he could no longer fight he would be done.
Since her death, his many infatuations, which had radiated like burning infrared into the hearts of younger and inappropriate women, were nothing more than a confused and pathetic attempt to reach beyond the veil, and by touching, embracing, and loving the beauty of another, to touch, embrace, and love life once more. Although he hadn’t misled the subjects of these infatuations for more than an instant, and although what passed between them was as pure as it was powerful, he was ashamed nonetheless. As honest as were his impulses, he could not act on them. He had full license to do so, for widowers can remarry. But not Jules. He could kill two men, evade the police, and perhaps rob a bank or two, but he dared not seek out the woman he had seen leaving the hotel, speak to her, embrace her, kiss her, and chance to stay with her for as long as he could.
AS THE DAYS HAD passed in beautiful weather and he had heard nothing, he had presumed that Acorn was making arrangements for an orchestra. He was so much absented from his own world and so put at ease by Beverly Hills – its drunken blue and green night lighting that made jeweled caves of almost every pocket of vegetation; its highly waxed cars gliding over streets as clean as new cloth; its population, desperately, but slowly, on the make – that he spent money as if he actually had it. After all, he was going to get a million Euros, and his living expenses would be covered by Acorn. He felt free to buy a thing or two: sunglasses for $750; a deep blue silk tie for $300; a cashmere blazer for $2,000. Then, after he hadn’t heard anything for five days, and thinking that he might have been hung out to dry, he stopped spending promiscuously.
After parking his car in the Getty’s spotless underground garage, he took the train up the mountainside. Perched above the sea, the museum’s many levels, terraces, fountains, courtyards, gardens, and galleries hung dreamlike in the sky.
As he sat on a bench overlooking the Pacific – its sparkling, its Technicolor blues, its beckoning and hypnotic disappearance at the horizon – his phone rang.
He fumbled it out of his pocket. “Hey, Jewels.”
“Yes?”
“Jack. Come to New York.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“What about here? What about the orchestration?”
“They did that already in New York.”
“Why am I here?”
“You mean why were you born?”
“Why am I in Los Angeles?”
“I don’t know. It was supposed to have been done there, but they must have found a quicker way to get it done here.”
“Who are they?”
“The people who manage this kind of thing, whoever they are. No big deal. Hop on a plane and come here for the board meeting.”
“Okay,” Jules said. He wondered how he would fare with these people, who exhibited the carelessness of great wealth.
Amina Belkacem
JULES CHOSE A WINDOW seat on the port side of the aircraft so that on his way east he would be able to look across the expansive landscape in north light. At 40,000 feet, two miles higher than Everest, the world below would seem at peace. In clear weather, the silent action – as if to confirm an intractable state of beneficence outside the realm of human affairs – would be of clouds and their shadows moving slowly across deserts, mountain ranges, prairies, and endless farmlands punctuated by thin exclamation points of almost immobile white smoke.
When the plane was airborne with wheels retracted, but still in tight maneuvers before setting its course, a disembodied voice filled the cabin. Half the passengers looked into the air. As Moses could testify, rich, authoritative, disembodied voices are both comforting and disturbing.
“This is your captain speaking,” it said with the ease and authority of practice and command. “We have some weather in the Southwest, so we’re going to take a more northerly route to New York today. We think we can make up for the time that would normally be lost, by getting a boost from the jet stream, which is farther north than usual, and why on the southerly route there’s the heat and humidity making those storms. We’ll be in the jet stream twice as long as we would have been, and hope to get you to New York on time.