Golden Orange (9 page)

“Who was that delightful man?” Tess asked, as she and Winnie walked through the lobby toward the parking lot.

“Guy I met at the bar. Wore those five-hundred-dollar ostrich shoes with warts on 'em? Went to the Andrei Gromyko charm school. So pessimistic he should wear a shroud.”

“A real sweetheart. I could see that.”

He'd never stood beside her until now, and she was taller than he'd thought. In high heels, she was exactly at eye level with him.

“Where we going to dinner and do they take overdrawn Visa cards and when was the last time you rode in a VW rag-top that runs worse than New York City?”

“Don't worry about a thing, old son,” she said, handing the valet-parking kid her ticket. “You're
my
guest.”

Old son. He
loved
it. They talked like that on
Masterpiece Theater
!

She drove a Mercedes, but not a new one. Winnie correctly guessed it was six years old, a four-door sedan without chrome wheels or pinstripes. Not a Golden Orange kind of car at all. A diesel, for chrissake!

She seemed to read his thoughts.

“One of my ex-husband's cars,” she said. “The one he didn't want. The one that he gave me as a wedding gift, he took back. It was a Porsche nine-thirty Cabriolet. Red. My father did the same thing to me once. It's the way of men like that. The Lords giveth …”

7

The Nymph

T
he restaurant was on the oceanfront. It was one that Winnie had passed a thousand times. Once he'd even stopped for a drink and to watch the sunset on a day he was wearing a
Sail America
sweatshirt that didn't pass dress code: no collar. But the guy on the door, a mustachioed Parisian, who'd long since learned not to act like one, told Winnie not to leave. The Frenchman disappeared for a few minutes and returned with a
Members Only
windbreaker whose stand-up collar passed muster in The Golden Orange except at weddings. But the drinks were $3.75, so Winnie only had a couple.

Now he was back there at twilight with Tess Binder. The first thing he noticed was that the bar was jammed but nobody paid much attention to the magic hour light show. The sky looked eerily blood streaked, moments before the fireball floated down into the inky sea, always faster than Winnie expected.

“Forty-five seconds,” Winnie said after they found some standing room by the big window facing the ocean.

“What's that?”

“Took her forty-five to drop past the horizon tonight. I can see her from my kitchen if I stand on a chair and peek over the roof next door. Took her forty-five seconds tonight.”

“The sun's feminine?”

“Oh yeah, without a doubt,” Winnie said. “Can't live without her, but she's dangerous.”

The Frenchman aimed his prominent Gallic nose at a pair of yuppies sitting at one of the tall cocktail tables and they jumped up and followed him. Winnie grabbed the two vacated stools and a leggy blonde in a tuxedo jacket, black tie, shorts and high-heeled pumps took their drink order.

Outside the window, on the beach, an Asian lad flew his electric-blue and amber batwing kite. The kite looped and climbed, soared and dove. The boy made the kite dance along the sand and pirouette over the bodies of a pair of lovers lying on a beach blanket. Then the kite fluttered and hung in midair above the window of the restaurant, a brilliant jewel hovering in the twilight.

Perched on a high stool with her legs crossed, Tess didn't seem to notice as her full-split white skirt fell open. Winnie loved white stockings! The shawl-collar blouse was white linen, and Tess reflected red dusk back at Winnie. It was a bewitching moment: this vision in white glowing a creamy pink from reflected blood-red twilight.

When the drinks arrived, she touched his glass with hers. He figured she'd say “Cheers,” but she fooled him.

“Chin chin,” she said.

He caught himself gulping, forced himself to put the glass down and tried conversation. “Too bad you don't sail,” he said. “I really dream of a racing boat but I got my eye on a more practical thirty-six-footer. Way she's designed, one guy could sail her round the world. Self-steering vane on her stern controls the rudder. Built in the early sixties and modified with all kinds a stuff. She's a heavy boat. Won't go fast, but very stable. Doesn't oil-can when you go to weather.”

“What's that? Oil-can?”

“You know that hollow sound the boat makes in a chop? Baloom, baloom, baloom. Got lots a headroom down below. No engine. That blew up, but who cares?”

“Going to buy it?”

“Fifteen grand. The best sailboat bargain I'll ever see.”

“So buy it.”

“Gotta pay my lawyer four grand for walking me into court and introducing me to my worst nightmare. My lawyer, Chip, said he woulda
liked
to cut his fee to two.”

“So why didn't he?”

“Claims the senior law partners don't permit fee cutting, sympathy, compassion, pity, or mercy of any kind.”

She shrugged and said, “You got off with probation. He was competent, wasn't he?”

“As Noriega's dermatologist or the department of motor vehicles. All
he
did is stay outta the judge's way so he could torture me for fifteen minutes. Oh yeah, Chip made a two-minute leniency plea with about a thousand adverbs in it. He's the adverb king of the Western world. Only guy in the universe who still says, ‘Jeepers!' As in ‘Jeepers, Win! I really
wish
I could shave the fee! Truly I do! Truly! Sincerely!
But
…'”

“So you won't be buying your bargain boat?”

“Only sailboat I'll have is in my bathtub. Come to think of it, I don't
have
a bathtub. Shower stall. Works half the time.”

“Why do I have a feeling you're trying to tell me how dreadfully poor you are.”

“And needy. Needier than public television. I figured we were eating at your club and it wouldn't cost me. Now I'm nervous as the Borgias's food taster. I might as well come clean. I can't pay for a meal in a place like this. My credit card's more overextended than Mexico.”

Tess Binder looked into Winnie's soft blue eyes and saw not a trace of duplicity. “You
are
ingenuous, Mister Farlowe.”

“Is that like ingenious? I used to be ingenious sometimes. Working on a homicide gave me ingenious moments.”

“And solid. A straight-ahead guy. You even have a forelock to tug.” She seemed amused, checking out the ill-fitting yuppie suit, the graying cowlick, but mostly, the soft vulnerable eyes. “Well, you can stop poor-mouthing even if it's true. I invited you to dinner so it's
my
treat.” She signaled to another waitress in tuxedo shorts, this one a redhead even taller than the blonde.

After that drink, part of him wondered what the hell she wanted with him, this woman who could read his mind. This woman whose eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses were opaque, eyes he couldn't read at all. If eyes were windows, her panes were frosted.

Ten minutes later, the Frenchman showed them to their booth, which faced all the action down in the sunken barroom. The place was decorated like a don't-give-a-shit, make-believe brothel, complete with paintings of voluptuous nudes, all of which said: “No fag designer ever laid a glove on
this
joint. We're earthy, but we ain't cheap.”

The food, as in most really successful Golden Orange restaurants, where the seven-one-four and the F.F.H. wealthy dine, was not faddish. By the end of the 1980's, cholesterol was making a comeback. If you felt like California cuisine you traveled to Beverly Hills or West Hollywood, where a glimpse of movie stars went with the price of dinner. Cajun never did have a foothold in The Golden Orange. Even Southwestern seemed destined to go.

Hearty American fare was back with a vengeance, at least for men. And this was
very
much a man's world, this citadel of white Republicans. They'd dumped all that nouvelle nutrition the moment they learned that zinc doesn't guarantee an erection.

When the menus came, Tess told Winnie to shoot the works, so he ordered the mussels to start, then the abalone at thirty-nine bucks a pop. She ordered the local sea bass, supposedly caught by the dory fleet, that small bastion of oceangoing self-reliance working about five hundred yards from the restaurant, by the Newport pier.

There are fifteen to twenty fishermen in the dory fleet, a unique and eccentric band who, for a century, have launched their little flat-bottomed boats directly off the beach, smashing through the breakers into wind and spray and deep dark ocean. All alone usually, at two o'clock in the morning, they motor out sometimes twenty-five miles to set their mile-long lines, held down in a thousand feet of ocean by Coke bottles and bricks, each line set with over five hundred hooks from which a good day's catch of half a ton will be plucked by hands turned bone-white from exposure. All of this in an era when commercial fishermen use airplanes and sonar.

Of course, the brightly painted old wooden dory boats, littering the beach where they sell the day's catch, are there for atmosphere. Nowadays, the new boats of Japanese design have Yamaha engines, and Toyota trucks haul them out of the water at day's end. Still, the dory fleet retains a kind of Gypsy romance to tourists, and even to locals. They're part of the rind in The Golden Orange.

“Know something?” Winnie said, looking down to the bar level where beautiful young women were having drinks with middle-aged men they hardly knew or just met. “This is a pickup joint.”

Tess said, “Not the way
you
mean it. In the age of herpes and AIDS these women come here to get fed. These gentlemen are looking for dinner companions and the ladies just oblige. It seldom goes beyond that, or so I've been told. It's a tradition here.”

“So there really
is
hunger in America!” Winnie observed. “And these Gold Coasters're doing their share to take care of it, at a hundred bucks a head. Maybe this is part of the thousand points of light George Bush was talking about at the Republican convention.”

Tess looked at a pair of young women, both with hair like tennis star André Agassi, and said, “More like young animals being captured, fed and released by toothless predators. This is a nature show, Winnie. They do everything but tag ears around here.”

Winnie had two more Polish vodkas, and was starting to vibrate by the time dessert came.

“Got any cheesecake?” he asked the waitress. “I'll have cheesecake if you got it.”

“And give him a scoop of white chocolate ice cream on the side,” Tess said. “My old son hasn't had a meal lately.”

When the waitress was gone, Winnie said, “Any son of yours would still be squeezing zits. You can't be a day over thirty-five.”

She looked very pleased at that, but said, “You don't really expect me to tell you my age.”

“Me, I just turned forty. I'm feeling it. Only time I felt young was tonight at your club. Watching the grab-a-granny action.”

“Who told you about the grab-a-granny business?”

“The tall guy with the funny red toup on his head. The one that yelled at me when we left.”

“The one who called
me
a hooker.”

“Yeah, well, he was one a those drunks likes to shock little girls and people from Nebraska. I didn't pay no attention to what he was saying half the time.”

“If my father were alive I'd take you to his yacht club,” she said. “Different crowd entirely.”

“I know a few people belong there,” Winnie said. “Met 'em when I was still sailing a lot. Your dad was commodore, huh?”

“My grandfather. When I was a little girl Daddy made me sail Sabots and Snowbirds. Humphrey Bogart was racing his Albatross here in those days.”

“So you
are
a sailor!”

“Not if I can help it. Whenever I'd place below the top three in a race I'd get lectured for an hour. It's probably why I hate boats. Especially sailboats.”

“Bet you were an only child, with an old man riding that hard.”

“You win the bet.”

“Daddy's girl, huh?”

All the time she was talking about her father, Tess Binder looked away from Winnie, toward the night, toward the crashing surf beyond the long white sand beach. She didn't answer him at first, then she smiled sardonically and said, “Daddy wasn't much for girls, as it turns out. Shall we go?”

“Sure,” he said, finishing the last bite of cheesecake.

“Let's go to
your
club.”

“
My
club?”

“Spoon's Landing.”

“Well … tonight's likely to be a little rough. The gang from the boatyards get paid.”

“Super! Let's go!”

“Hey, I
do
belong to a club,” he said. “Sort of. Let's stop at my club for one and then to Spoon's.”

Ten minutes later, Tess, who looked as though she might be feeling the drinks, parked the Mercedes in the parking lot beside the American Legion Post on Fifteenth Street. The building happened to rest on some of the most valuable land on the Balboa peninsula, city-owned property on Lido Channel. Winnie had joined the Legion for three reasons: cheap drinks, pretty good steaks you get to cook, and a restful channel view. Those members who'd seen combat were mostly vets of W.W. II or Korea. There were only a few from Winnie's war, but everyone seemed friendly and real. He never could get used to older folks calling him “comrade” all the time. Still, when you get an honest shot of good booze for a buck and a quarter, you had no bitch coming. And unlike Spoon's Landing, the worst argument he ever heard here was about whether or not you can talk during a salute.