Among the Living (12 page)

“Some of them,” he said.

She didn’t want to talk about ghosts.

“Have you ever been here before?” he said.

“There are pictures of me with my parents here.”

“But you haven’t been here since?”

She shook her head. “Why would I?”

“You must have always wondered the things you wonder now, whether he did it, who she really was.”

“No.”

“So what makes you want to know now?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but it wasn’t true.

Someone dimmed the lights. It was nine o’clock.

The linen of the tablecloth was so white, the marigolds in the clear vase so bright and perfect. He breathed in her scent. It filled his head. Starting from when they were at Ike’s he was saying more than he usually said, letting her see more.
I’m falling for her,
he thought, and thought again how good a word for it it was,
falling,
wherever it led, whatever happened now.

“What are you wearing?”

“It doesn’t have a name,” she said.

“Your own concoction?”

“Do you like it?” she said.

“I don’t know if that’s the word,” Jimmy said.

She smiled again and looked away. Maybe she was falling, too.

“What is perfume made out of?”

“Oils, mostly. And alcohol.”

“How did you get into this?” he said.

“A woman taught me the business.”

“How does it work?”

“The business or the perfume?”

“Perfume.”

“The molecules of the scent activate receptors in the nose and the mouth, which excite certain areas of the brain.”

She drew her drink across the table closer to her, turning it in her fingers. “That’s the simple explanation,” she said, as a way of teasing him.

“A minute ago,” Jimmy said, “I remembered a day with my mother. On Point Lobos. Carmel and Monterey. Out of nowhere. I thought maybe it was your perfume.”

“Were there flowers?” Jean said.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I remember the cypress trees.” He knew he was telling her more than he should.

“It’s not supposed to work that way,” she said. “That’s called ‘a headache. ’ It’s when a scent—” She broke off. “How much of this do you really want to know?”

“More,” he said.

“A basic, low-quality scent acts directly on the limbic system in the temporal lobe of the brain. It calls up what are called ‘moment memories. ’ It’s better for a scent to be more general. The smell of cotton candy reminds you of a trip to the carnival when you were six. A good perfume reminds you . . .” And here she paused, because she knew how it would sound. “Of being in love.”

The ghosts in the room leaned closer.

“Mixing memory and desire . . .” Jimmy said.

She knew the line, but didn’t remember what it was from. “What is that?”

“Freshman English. T. S. Eliot,” Jimmy said. “ ‘April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain . . .’
The Wasteland.
I read it—and quit school.”

She laughed. “You just stood up and walked out?”

“I waited until the end of the day,” he said.

Even when he lied he was telling her too much.

They walked along the canal, past the houses. Jean had taken off her shoes. It usually cooled down at night in L.A., particularly on the water, but this night was as warm as the afternoon had been and the canal stank a little. Every once in a while there would be a flash of white over their heads, a gull reeling. Maybe they fed at night. Most of the living rooms were open to the walkway, drapes drawn back, shutters open. People read in chairs or watched TV. They would look up at the movement outside, unconcerned when they saw that it was a young man and a young woman. Some of the houses flew their own bright flags on angled poles, picto graphic statements about the people within, crests and flowers and boats and too many rainbows. One banner brushed across their heads as they walked under it, like a magician’s scarf.

“When I was a little girl,” Jean said, “I used to wonder what it would be like if your footprints could be seen everywhere you’d ever gone. A path of them. My little footprints would be up and down this walk, I guess. It’s almost too much to bear.”

They passed three more houses. The wind changed direction suddenly and the temperature dropped ten degrees, a gift.

Somewhere along the way, she took his hand.

A rat watched them from under a painted cement mushroom.

“This is odd,” she said, “letting someone into your life so quickly. You already know things about me no one else knows. And you’re strange.”

“I think you said that already.”

“What did you think when you first saw me?”

“That you were beautiful.”

He thought better than to tell her his idea about a beautiful woman and a beautiful car, how its time was gone already even as you looked at it.

At this moment, she seemed very
present.

“That’s what men always say,” she said. “I guess it gets the desired response.”

“I also thought you looked sad,” Jimmy said. “In the eyes. Maybe from thinking the same sad thing over and over.”

He thought she would let go of his hand but she didn’t and they walked on without either of them saying anything. Steps climbed up and over the haunches of a bridge and there was just another short block.

And then they were in front of 110 Rivo Alto Canal.

Now Jean let go of his hand and held herself, like the girl on Sunset after she’d kissed Jimmy and felt a chill run through her. The watchful neighbor across the canal was away or asleep and the house of the Abba neighbor was dark, too. They were alone, or at least as alone as Jimmy’s worldview allowed.

She was about to say something, to fill the silence.

“There’s a woman living in the back bedroom,” Jimmy said.

Jean didn’t look away from the house. Even in the dim light he could tell she was trying not to react, or at least not to show it.

Jimmy said, “I don’t know if she lives there all the time or just comes and goes.”

Jean turned away from the house.

“Have any idea who she is?” Jimmy said.

“No.” Then she said, to try to put a period on it, “It doesn’t matter.”

Jimmy wasn’t going to let it go. “Gee, it seems like it would,” he said. “Maybe she bought it after—”

Jean looked at him.

“I own the house.”

He really hadn’t thought of that.

“It sat empty while my father was in prison during the years of appeals. Then it went to my brother Carey and he didn’t want to have anything to do with it and needed the money, so I bought it from him.”

“Why?”

“He needed money.”

“Why did you want it?”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought the answers were there.
Here.
”

“When was this?”

“When I was at Stanford.”

She made herself turn and look at it again, or to let him know she wasn’t afraid to.

“What’s it like inside?”

“You’ve never been back?” Jimmy said.

She shook her head. “My business manager pays the gardeners, the electricity.”

“It’s like a museum, like a World’s Fair exhibit from 1977.”

Another chill ran through her.

“A little creepy,” Jimmy said. “So who is the woman?”

“I said I don’t know. I guess a transient. I should sell it, tear it down.”

Jean stared at the dark face of the house for a long moment.

“Are your parents alive?” she said.

The question knocked him off balance.

“No,” he said.

Her eyes were fixed on the house, as if waiting for the front door to open, as if she’d knocked.

“If I could see my mother’s face, at the moment it happened,” she said, “I’d know everything.”

“Or your
father’s
face,” Jimmy said.

Jean turned her back on the house again. This time he took
her
hand. He drew her to him, held her like a dancer. The wind came up again and it made the tackle on the mast of the sailboat across the canal clang, like a signal that something should be starting or ending.

She touched his forehead, where he’d been cut, knew somehow that it was part of this, that he had already given up something for her.

After a moment, she said, “I have trouble getting close to people.”

“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t anymore,” Jimmy said. “Maybe my friend Angel.”

“Why is that?” she said. “Do you know?”

“No.”

“We should go,” Jean said.

They were next to the seawall.

“Stand up on the wall,” Jimmy said.

She took his hand and stepped up onto the low wall, like the little girl who had lived in that house and been afraid. She walked along, balancing dramatically, happy again for a second, and when she stepped down she went into his arms and kissed him, both of them out of the reach of the past for another second, even though they were this close to it.

They pulled up to her apartment. The radio was on low.

“Can we just keep on going?” Jean said.

He looked at her.

“I like this song,” she said.

So that was how they came to drive up through Benedict Canyon to Mulholland and then along the crest of the mountains, the lights spread out first on the right, the Valley, then on the left, Hollywood and West Hollywood. They came all the way out to Bel Air, over the 405, dove right down onto Sepulveda, on through the tunnel. Now the hills were dark, the road winding, and the grid of Valley lights only occasionally flashed through gaps in the trees, or the half-moon.

Jimmy steered right into a wide curve where the two lanes became four, just past the first cluster of houses, moving from one pool of orange streetlight onto another.

The radius of the curve opened and then eased into a left. They had the road to themselves and, it seemed for at least a few more seconds, the night.

The windows were down. “I love that smell,” Jean said.

“Manzanita,” Jimmy said.

They were just another man and a woman, falling. Out on a date on a weeknight, all the time in the world.

And then there was a kid covered in blood right in the road in front of them. Jean called out a wordless sound like a frightened sleeper. Jimmy saw the boy and braked hard and skidded off the road.

He was sixteen or seventeen, in a bright blue snowboarder’s knit cap. He seemed oddly calm, flat, somewhere else already, gone. The blood was from a cut at his hairline and it was still coming, covering his face and now the neck of his Notre Dame High School T-shirt. He just stood in the middle of the street, oblivious to the threat of traffic, slack, careless, as if the worst thing had already happened.

The white Honda Accord was on its roof on the shoulder in a sparkling bed of broken glass, the wheels still turning. Jimmy and Jean got out and Jimmy walked purposefully toward it, left Jean behind beside the Dodge.

She stepped toward the kid still standing in the road.

“Don’t touch him,” Jimmy turned and said to her, calm. “He’s all right.”

She didn’t understand but she did as she was told. There was something about the way he said it that froze her in place.

“Call,” Jimmy said.

The driver was crushed in the frame of the window, hanging half out of the overturned car. Jimmy knelt, put fingers to the boy’s neck, felt for the carotid. He stood. On the passenger side in the front seat another teenager hung upside down in his shoulder belt, covered in blood, too, but moving, alive.

The bloodied kid still standing in the road came out of his daze. He looked at Jean as she got her phone out of the Dodge. He started to say something, but then shook his head and turned away from her.

He walked stiff-legged toward Jimmy and the Accord.

He saw the boy crushed in the window, the dead driver.

“Whoa. Sean? Shit, man, I hit my head . . .”

He saw the front seat passenger, moving, alive.

“Oh, shit, man, Sean and Calley . . .”

Before Jimmy got to him, the boy knelt in the broken glass to look into the backseat where there was a third body, another face covered in blood.

Jimmy yanked him to his feet.

“What’s your name?”

“I was—”

“What’s your name?” Jimmy said again.

“Drew.”

Jimmy started walking him away from the wreck.

“We were just—” the kid began.

“The driver is dead,” Jimmy said. “The other guy is hurt. An ambulance is coming.”

He wrapped his arms around the teenager as if he was nine years old.