Tropical Depression (23 page)

At the end of the dock we stood and stared at the water for a while. The laughter died down and we talked about a lot of things, picking up where the talk on the airplane had ended.

There’s something about a night by the water in Southern California. Somehow it gives amazing potential and promise to whatever it is you’re doing or thinking about. Maybe that explains a lot about the area. Maybe it’s not cocaine and ego at all, but a drug made of pure moonlight and water and a breeze so dry and soft you feel it as an emotion instead of a sensation.

And maybe that explains how I was able to come so far back from the grave, back from the bad memories and nightmares and from all I had done to run and hide, and in just a few hours of Southern California moonlight come all the way back to life, to kissing Nancy Hoffman, in the moonlight, on the dock, by the water.

Nancy Hoffman kissed me back, too. A lot of people who have tried to describe a kiss usually sound like elfin dorks. So I won’t try, beyond saying it did everything a kiss is supposed to do and then some.

Nancy came up for air first. I could have stayed under, lips to lips, all night.

“Whew,” she said. “Slow down, Billy.”

“It’s too late to slow down,” I said. My lips felt tight and heavy. My whole body did, like my blood supply had just doubled.

“Yeah, well, you better try. While I can still stand up.” She ran her fingertips across her lips, then across mine. I almost bit them off. Nancy chuckled. “Billy,” she said. “Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy-boy. What am I going to do with you?”

“You’re doing it,” I told her, and dove back into another kiss. It started a little slower this time. I chewed softly on her lower lip. It tasted like fresh lemons, tart and coppery at the same time.

Sometimes you kiss someone and you’re thinking about what comes next. You use the kiss to lever open the door to other kinds of pawing and snorting.

But kissing Nancy Hoffman, all I was thinking about was the kiss. It was the most complete kiss I’ve ever been a part of. Time stopped, and nothing else mattered.

The next time we came up for air, we paused a little longer. It was pretty clear where we were headed, and I guess both of us needed to think about whether we really wanted to go there.

So we sat on a dock box, snuggled together close, and watched the ripples in the water break up the reflection of the moon. We talked some more.

“Where does all this passion come from?” she wanted to know.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I guess I’ve been alone awhile.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I guess I’ve needed to be.”

She looked out over the water and squeezed my hand. “I just don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

I squeezed back. “Me either. But here it is.”

“I’m not quite sure what I want.”

I reached a hand over and gently turned her chin. Just seeing those golden eyes again stopped my breath for a moment. “I know what I want,” I said.

She gave her low, honey-throated chuckle. “I’ll bet,” she said. “Let me guess.”

She leaned in and rubbed her cheek against mine. “Mm-hmm,” she said. It was part sigh and part laugh. I felt the warm wind of it ricochet into my ear. All the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

Right then, I wanted her more than anything else in the world. And not just blind passion, not just wham-bam and to hell with the consequences. I wanted all of her, for all time. I wanted to drag her away to my cave forever and hide from the dragon together until we got too old and slow and it finally got us.

I settled for another kiss.

This one was every bit as good as the first two. I could feel myself sliding farther and farther away from where I thought I was, where I was supposed to be. For a few minutes I didn’t feel bad or guilty. I didn’t think about Hector McAuley and his sad, slick father.

And for a few minutes there, that was almost as good as the kiss. Almost.

The inside of Nancy Hoffman’s apartment was spare and restrained. It had a kind of old-fashioned feeling to it, even though the furniture was modern. Everything was clean and the surfaces gleamed.

In the living room there was a small and stiff couch, an easy chair, a coffee table, a floor lamp, and an end table. A small hooked throw rug was on the floor by the couch. Off in the corner stood a large stereo cabinet with a glass door. A stack of about thirty records leaned against it, and a larger box of cassettes and CDs sat on top.

There was a doorway at the far end of the room where Nancy had disappeared a few minutes earlier. I guessed it led to the bedroom and bathroom. Either that or she slept on the small couch. A neat row of windows took up about half of one wall. I stepped over and looked out.

The apartment was on the fourth floor of one of those old stone buildings they threw up in the thirties for people who thought they were stars. Out the row of windows I had a grand view of an oak tree that couldn’t quite hide a liquor store. Beyond that was a tremendous glare of bright colored lights.

Nancy had the great good taste to keep heavy curtains across the windows, and I let them drop back in place and turned to look at the room.

I’m a toucher. I admit it. I try not to be a pain in the ass about it, but if I’m left alone in a room, I’ll touch things. I knelt by the stereo and touched the records. She had some good old Motown albums, three by Funkadelic, some Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Josef Zawinul, and a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto featuring David Oistrakh.

Above and behind was a small alcove with a standing bookshelf. There were a couple of standard-issue best-sellers, three travel books on the Caribbean, and a stack of coffee-table books on ballet, tropical sunsets, and so on.

On the top shelf stood a row of photographs in silver frames. There was one of Nancy in a cap and gown. A large, bearded man was handing her a diploma. There was another of Nancy wearing a white nurse’s uniform, smiling against a studio background.

In the center was a picture of a group of people clearly celebrating something or other. At the center of the group were a thin, balding man and a very nice-looking black woman, both middle-aged.

I picked the picture up for some clue. Off on the left edge of the shot I could see a beaming Nancy, her hands held together in midclap. A very handsome black man stood next to her. There was a table on the other side of the picture. I could see a cake, a punch bowl, and some plates on the table. But no clue about the purpose of the celebration, or who the people were—

“My parents,” Nancy said. She had snuck up behind me. I almost dropped the picture.

Nancy took it from me as I turned, smiling fondly down at it. “Their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.”

I didn’t get it. “Your parents?” I said stupidly.

Nancy was still smiling, but it might have been a little forced at this point. “That’s right,” she said.

I leaned over and looked at the picture again. I still didn’t get it. “Which ones?”

Her finger moved right to the center of the picture, to the thin man and the black woman. “Right here,” she said. “Mom and Dad.” And then she gained a little steam, pointing to the handsome black man. “And that is my brother, the reporter.”

“Oh,” I said. Her tawny olive skin, the rich, tight curls of her coppery hair, the luscious lips: oh. “They seem very nice.”

She slammed the picture down, back on the shelf. “You mean, she seems very dark?”

“Nancy—”

“You mean, nice for a white man who married a black woman?”

“Come on, I was surprised, that’s all.”

“Because I don’t
act
black? You jes ain’t seen me dance is all.”

She had turned nasty so fast I wasn’t ready for that, either. It did not matter to me whether Nancy was half-black. It really didn’t.

She glared at me, waiting for some feeble defense. I opened my mouth to make it, but nothing came out. It was just—

Just what? Was she right? I was surprised because she didn’t “act black”? What did that mean? How
did
you act black? Pretend your skin is dark? Why did we think of it as acting?

And here I was, caught in the classical liberal dilemma. Damn it, some of my best friends really
were
black. But maybe friendship was a different level of intimacy—I sure didn’t think of Nancy the same way I thought about Ed Beasley.

So
was
I disturbed? Put off by the revelation of her blackness? I didn’t like to think so. It didn’t fit with my self-image at all. But I
had
been shocked. I had acted differently than the way I would have if she had revealed she was half-Polish.

Self-image—did it come down to that? Was I more worried about how I looked than what I was doing?

There’s a real jerk inside all of us. Like most jerks, he has a simple job on this earth. Whenever you least expect it, whenever it’s most inconvenient, he steps out from behind the couch and puts an arm around your shoulder, so everybody knows he’s with you.

And the thing is, he
is
with you. He’s with all of us. He won’t go away and we are permanently stuck with him. And if we can’t make him funny, it becomes very sad indeed.

So I did the only thing I could. I laughed.

I laughed at pure, unprejudiced Billy Knight, caught in a blind-side trap he had made for himself. I laughed at me, up to my neck in the outhouse and worried about how I was going to get my socks clean. I laughed at my good friend, the jerk inside, who had surprised me into seeing something about myself I didn’t know and wouldn’t have guessed.

And mostly I laughed because, now that I had seen the truth about myself, it really
didn’t
matter. If Nancy had been completely black, or Irish, or anything in between, it wouldn’t matter—now. Because she was the nicest and most interesting person I had met in six or seven years, and that was all that mattered.

Nancy watched me laugh with a polite coldness for about thirty seconds. Finally one corner of her mouth started to twitch, then the other. Then she opened her lovely mouth and let out such a hoot of laughter that it almost scared me.

And in just a minute we were both rolling on the tiny couch, laughing, arms around each other, gasping with laughter.

And after just a few moments of that, my hands suddenly became aware of where they were and what they were doing, and started doing other things.

And after several minutes of that, we quickly became aware of one more thing.

“The couch is too small,” Nancy whispered to me.

“No problem,” I told her. I picked her up in my arms, dizzy with the solid warmth of her weight.

“Down the hall, on the left,” she said, chewing on my ear. She put her tongue inside the ear and hummed softly.

I made it all the way down the hall and into the bedroom, but it was a close call.

By the time I got through the door Nancy was working on my neck, and standing up suddenly took a lot of thought. I stopped thinking about it and tumbled us both onto the bed.

Her skin felt silky and responsive to the touch and alive. The surface of her skin all over felt like it was humming gently. I could almost feel the pores purring.

In spite of my urgency I spent long minutes exploring her, marveling at the feel of that skin, at the rounds and hollows of her, and feeling her hands moving over me, too.

And at some point her breathing broke rhythm for just a moment and I heard her gasp.

Soon after that I stopped hearing and thinking.

In pitch darkness I woke up. My heart was hammering and my mouth was filled with a dry, bitter taste. A line of tears was still wet on the side of my face.

I had been walking with ghosts, listening as they explained their terrible disappointment in me. I knew I had done something unforgivably stupid. The ghosts explained it to me, told me all about it. But when I woke up I couldn’t remember what it was.

Nancy was lying with her back to me. It was a wonderful back, smooth, satiny, lean, and sleek. I couldn’t understand why looking at that back, remembering love with Nancy, could make me feel so bad.

Beyond Nancy was a small bedside table with a digital clock radio. The time flashed as I watched: 3:47.

What the hell was I doing here?

I’ve never been awake at 3:47 A.M. without asking that question. But now there seemed to be a really good reason for asking it.

What
was
I doing here? I was thinking with my gonads, pursuing pleasure when I should have been at work on a couple of nasty murders. Christ Almighty, my wife and child were buried just a few miles from here. What was I thinking about?

Clearly I wasn’t thinking about anything. I wasn’t thinking at all. I had become a cartoon, a caricature of myself, a Billy Knight with a perpetual erection, little horns sprouting from my head and steam coming from my nose.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat with my head in my hands. As the bed shifted under me Nancy made a slow snuggling motion with her shoulders and asked me, “Hmmmdrble?”

Now I had something else to feel bad about. Nancy was a sweet person. She didn’t deserve a monster like me, somebody so far gone he couldn’t even manage anything more complicated than fishing.

And now I couldn’t even manage that. Here I was, three thousand miles away from my ocean, and I was drowning. I was losing time on a cold trail, hurting Nancy, being unfaithful to the memory of family—oh, God, this was so wrong…

What the hell
was
I doing here?

I didn’t know. But I knew I had to get out before I did any more harm.

I slipped quietly into my clothes. Nancy didn’t stir again. I was out the door and down the four flights of stairs in just a few minutes.

When I started my rental car to head back to the hotel, the clock said 4:02.

I got back to the hotel room at 4:42. It was still small and smelled bad. But it was home. My back hurt just looking at the tiny warped bed. The room seemed so oppressive that I started to feel noble and justified. I must be doing something right—I was suffering again.

I knew even Ed wouldn’t be at his desk at this hour, but I called anyway and left a message for him to call me. Then I fell out of my clothes and onto the bed, face down. I was asleep instantly, having just enough time to realize that my feet and my head were six inches higher than my navel.