Curled in the Bed of Love (4 page)

“I'm putting on the heat,” I say. “We'll warm you right up, Mrs. Lesser. You just tell me when the temperature's comfortable. And how did you like walking down the crookedest street in the world?”

I'd dropped them off so they could walk down the half-blockor so where Lombard Street is cobbled and coiled like a snake. The line of cars waiting to drive down the few yards of the crookedest street in the world stretched for several blocks, and I figured, why should they have to wait?

“It wasn't what I thought it would be,” Mrs. L. says.

“But now you can say you've done it,” I say. With the tourists, you don't leave out any of the highlights, because they want to go home and say they did everything. So far this afternoon we've crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and come back, circled up to Twin Peaks, driven through the park, and toured downtown. Renting a limousine for a couple of hours is a good way to familiarize yourself with the city when you first arrive.

“That wind bites into you,” Mrs. L. says. “You don't expect it this time of year.”

I nod. “Summer in San Francisco is a rotten surprise.”

I'm not your talkative type of driver. That kind of thing, where you're pressing your personal opinions on them and telling them your life story, is just oppressive to the customer, an intrusion. Of course I'll oblige if the customer initiates the conversation.
Some of the people I get, they talk my ear off. Maybe because the passengers don't have to look at my face—with my eyes on the road, I'm as anonymous as a priest behind the screen in the confessional—they pour out their hearts to me, or they want me to pour out mine. That's how I got together with Linnie. Right away, I liked her. She actually looked at me when she got in the limo. She asked me about the stack of books on the dashboard. I had James Joyce's
Dubliners
with me that day, and she'd read it too, and we laughed about how right he was about the Irish, all the mealymouthed
pleases
and
thank yous
and
I'm sorrys
slapped on over the grudges like a thin coat of paint. We talked about what part of Ireland our parents came from and the obvious things you have in common if you're Irish—a mother who's forever lighting a candle for you, wanting what you want but also always disappointed you haven't got it yet, and a father who hoards words like money but is plenty free with his fists. That's real Irish, all right. We sat parked in front of her apartment with the engine running, talked so long I ran out of gas.

As we head for Fisherman's Wharf, I give the Lessers a quick rundown of what they should do when they get there. Eat Dungeness crab from that stand on the sidewalk, watch for the seals on the west side of the wharf, stroll up to Ghirardelli Square to shop. I'm full of advice on where to find the best bargains.

I guess you get big ideas about yourself when you wear a uniform. I feel like a representative of something when I'm dressed for work: crisp white shirt pressed perfectly by the cleaners, the navy blue jacket and pants, shoes shined so you can see your reflection in them, and the cap, like a cop's cap, with gold braid above the rim. And I pay attention to personal hygiene, get a haircut every six weeks, trim my nails and buff them, keep an electric razor in the glove compartment so that when I work a long day I can still look fresh. A chauffeur's day starts at 6
A.M.
when all the executives need a ride to the airport, and then you often get
a slack time in the middle of the day. Business picks up again in the evening, and if you're driving a wedding party or even just a bunch of people who want to drink without worrying, you never know what time you'll make it home. Most nights I take the car home so I can clean it and be on time for the first charter the next morning.

My schedule has helped me out some with Linnie. I can tell her I just have a few hours free between customers or break off necking with her and claim I have to be up at five, and she understands. The problem is, those excuses can carry you only for so long. And I can't face trying again. I was twenty-one before I got close enough with a woman to have sex. Everything seemed to be working fine, but then when I entered her, I went soft. That poor girl—she worked on me, using her mouth, closing her hand over my penis and pumping it like a piston, till she was slick with sweat. The second time we were together, I managed to pull it off, but the third and fourth time she had to work so hard, and the more she had to work, the less aroused I got. So then you figure it's the woman. Till you've tried with five or six women, and it goes the same way with every one of them.

Worrying about why—if it was because I grew up Catholic, with Dad acting the tyrant and Mom playing the devout little handmaid, or if maybe I really preferred men—didn't matter much next to the fact that I couldn't deliver in bed. Failure piled up in the shape of a big brick wall. You have to wait for something bigger than you to come along and smash a thing like that. A miracle. So I'm killing time. For a couple of years now, during the midday slack period, I've been taking classes at the community college, and I do real well in my courses, but it's hard to finish them because I can never count on making it to class.

Mrs. L. asks me where she can buy some of the famous San Francisco sourdough to take home. “I'm sure you would know the best place.”

She has real manners. When I recommend the Boudin Bakery, she thanks me with strict graciousness. I bet she has a spanking clean kitchen at home and makes Mr. L. mow the lawn weekly. I bet they go to a church with cushioned pews and no kneelers.

A crackling noise comes from Mr. L.'s corner, and I know he's studying the map. “There's a cable car turnaround right there by Ghirardelli Square,” he says. “It looks like we could take the cable car back to the hotel afterward. Then we could let you go when you drop us off.”

“Well, you could,” I say. “But the lines are terrible. Too many tourists right there. I tell you what, though. I could pick you up when you're done and drop you off over on Bay Street. There's another cable car line there that not everyone knows about.”

Mr. L. says, “We don't know that we'd find you when we wanted you, do we?”

Some people really want you to work for their forgiveness. And he probably assumes I'm trying to get another hour's fare out of them. I don't have another fare scheduled till six, and I really do want to make it up to him, erase the disappointment from his memory. “After that mix-up at Lombard Street, I'd like to treat you to an extra hour,” I say.

“That's not necessary,” he says.

He's embarrassed. The men usually are. When I get these businessmen in the car some mornings, offer them fresh orange juice or the newspaper, crisply folded, I have to insist on these little luxuries, and they'll take what I offer, if they take it, without a word. But the women, even the executives, are more open about wanting to be pampered. I'll glance in the rearview mirror and see them trying out the footrest or investigating the refrigerator just to see what they could have if they wanted it.

I try to come up with a way to get Mr. L. to see I really want to be generous, that I'm not just thinking of the tip. The other drivers think I'm a dope. Any little extras—drinks, food—the driver pays
for out of his own pocket, and with the liquor especially, the hope is the customer will pay a dividend on your generosity when he leaves a tip. I stock the bar with Johnnie Walker Red; a lot of the other drivers just pour cheap scotch into a Johnnie Walker bottle. But I feel sorry for these guys, having to live all the time in falseness. That's the real misery to me. Then you're really a lackey.

“Mrs. Lesser's not gonna want to wait in that long line in this cold,” I say. “And why should she when I'm right here?”

Once we can agree that we're doing this for Mrs. L., not him, Mr. L. goes along with the idea. I pull into a red zone so I can drop them off right smackat the foot of the wharf, because you're not restrained by the rules when you're riding in a limo, and then I make a big fuss of coming around to open the door, prolonging the moment when they can enjoy the envy of the pedestrians passing by us.

I pull away to find a place where I can park on the street for an hour. Parking is a nightmare in San Francisco, and you get so you know every little side street where there's a chance of finding a spot, just like you know the location of all the public restrooms. I look for parking near the housing projects, because the tourists take one look at the cinder-block buildings with rusted metal grilles over the windows and decide to fork over ten bucks for a parking garage. I pull into a spot and crack the window for some fresh air before turning off the engine. I might get a kid or two coming up to touch the car or peer in the windows, but as long as I stay with the car, I don't generally have to worry about any damage to the vehicle. The quiet on these empty streets is eerie, like the few stunted trees here, shaped like some scrawny struggle that's gone still, been frozen to silence.

I sort through the books on the dashboard, trying to see what I feel like. I usually keep half a dozen books with me, because if you're waiting for a customer who might return any minute, you can't concentrate on a heavyweight like George Eliot, and you
need a mystery or a biography that you can pickup and put down constantly. When I know I have time, like I do now, I can dig into something solid, unless I'm just too tired to make the effort. I pick out a book of stories by Flannery O'Connor, which I am not having too much fun with, but which I feel I ought to finish, for the sake of my education.

This Flannery O'Connor is some kind of Catholic all right, and I suspect the brutal way she goes about her business stems from that Irish last name of hers—she and my dad would get along just fine. She makes fun of her characters the whole way through the story, and then she pounds them with something terrible, a mass murderer on the loose, a little boy who hangs himself. The father of this little boy is kind of an ass, a right-thinking liberal who wants to adopt a poor black kid but won't let his own child believe his dead mommy is in heaven. The guy just doesn't deserve what happens to him. I'd love a chance to ask old Flannery why she took it so to heart, the mean idea that salvation should cost too much, the eye of the needle and all that.

I get celebrity authors in the limo sometimes, and if they're chatty, I'll ask them that kind of stuff. They would shine me on if I mouthed pablum about how nice their books were, but they're surprised when I ask specific questions that show I've read the book. Like everyone else, they prefer to assume you're invisible. I'm not the only driver who's had customers get hot and heavy in the back, even though I might be the only driver who's doubly tormented by having to pretend I can't see it or hear it.

Sometimes the authors get over the initial shock. This one guy who wrote a book on the psychology of shopping gave me a whole song and dance about how Americans are finally working free of their Puritan roots and getting up the courage to be hedonistic. Shopping's a reward, an intimate pleasure, and the customer can't feel intimate if the store is too crowded or the merchandise is placed too close to where there's a lot of traffic. Women in particular,
he told me, won't buy if they're worried about people bumping into them from behind. I understand that, I guess. The most luxurious thing about a limo is the stillness, the way you can seal yourself off from the rest of the world with the push of a button, settle into a cozy cave with carpeting that runs up the door so that you won't hear the soles of your own shoes scrape against anything.

When I told Linnie about this guy, who gets paid to videotape customers in a department store and analyze their behavior, she laughed. She claims all marketing research is hogwash, even though she herself fits this guy's profile to a T, buys in boutiques because she's embarrassed to pick through racks of clothes in department stores. Then she'll correct herself, say no, it isn't hogwash—“they” work on us every minute to transform all our wants into whims that only their products can satisfy. When she works for a marketing firm herself.

I'm never too sure about Linnie's job description—whether she's a glorified secretary or has really worked her way up into management. One minute she's showing off about her expense account—we'd never have met if her company wasn't a client of the limo service—and the next she's plotting ways to punish the executives for expecting their administrative assistants to work the same long hours they do for a fraction of the pay. I love her for that, for how she keeps bumping into herself coming and going, for how her own vehemence bangs smack into her confusion about what she really wants. She's going to get so tangled up in deciding whether I'm a jerk for breaking up with her or whether it's her fault for being too plump or too apologetic about her ample self, too assertive or too hesitant, too much woman or not enough. I'd tell her I had some neurological disease and it wouldn't be fair to expect her to sign on for that, except then Linnie would probably rise to the challenge.

I lookup from my book when I hear the yelling. Surfacing from the book to reality is like stepping out of a dark room into the light,
and I'm blinded, can't see them at first, though I can hear them. They're standing on the sidewalk just a couple dozen yards from me, a woman and a man circling each other, shoulders squared, screaming the usual fuckingbitchbastard at each other. They're from the projects: in the same way the scraggly trees here shout poverty, their clothes shout the tiredness and wear and tear and ill fit of a hard life.

For a few moments the man and woman are bound to each other, connected by a taut cord of tension, she moving to the left when he moves to the right, keeping exactly the same distance between them. Then he lunges for her, his fist slamming into her shoulder. She trips over the curb and tumbles into the street, rolling like a cat as soon as she hits the ground, preternaturally aware of just where his foot will come out to kick her, foiling him. Then she's up, shoulders hunched, circling him again, both of them panting, chests heaving with pent-up rage.