Twenty Grand (8 page)

My lover looked up. He had nothing in his hands. He must have memorized it. I was impressed because he's not good at memorization. He held his head high and said:

Benny. You are married today. Congratulations. But you should also congratulate me. I had a near-son today.

A few people clapped.

He weighed a pound, my lover said. He was blond, like all the Mintch men. His age was fourteen weeks.

Six weeks, I said quietly. Half an ounce. Looked like cheese. But no one heard.

Eighteen weeks, my lover said, making it up as he went. The surgeons said that, remarkably, he sang a song as he died. If he lived, he would have been a jazz musician. You like jazz music yourself, Benny.

Benny nodded.

What do you say to the death of a musician? my lover said.

I love jazz, Benny said.

Yes, I know, my lover said. But what do you say to a death?

There was silence. Someone said, Boo hiss. Then a lot of other people said it, Boo hiss. The guests at my table pushed their chairs back. I wanted to say, “Why are you standing up?” but I didn't. A minute later the guests at the tables near mine got up and walked off too. The ones who couldn't find seats leaned against the limestone walls.

What do we do, Benny? my lover said. What do we do about this?

At that point I knew that the kiss he'd given me when I'd eaten the second partridge was a real trick kiss. I'd heard about other times like this and none of them were good. But I knew the thing to do was not to seem afraid. I'd heard from the other waitresses at the restaurant that you had a chance of getting forgiven if you pretended to be sorry. I stood up and faced the crowd.

I cleared my throat. What can I do? I said. How can I make it up?

You can't, my lover said. It's too late.

Maybe it's not, I said. I'll go check!

But the exit was far away. And it was a door that led to another room, not to the outside, and some people were standing in front of it.

I felt desperate and said the first thing that came into my head. I guess that I made a mistake, I said. However, I think you should know that in this case, the near-son was very small. It only weighed half an ounce. And even though it was precious to me, it didn't know the alphabet.

No one laughed.

It was smaller than a tonsil, I said.

Boo hiss, someone said. Boo hiss.

And furthermore, I said, a bit mad now, this bit about the tingle is bullstuff. Nothing happened at eleven oh five. That is just way off.

I thought you'd say that, my lover said. In fact, I knew you would. Because I made that part up, about eleven oh five, as a test. So let me guess. Was it one-fifteen?

No, I said.

I didn't think so, he said. Because I didn't feel a tingle then. Was it noon?

No, I said.

He paused. Ow! he said. Ow! He grabbed his own neck and squeezed it, then punched himself in the gut. He was acting out what he thought his near-son must have felt. Ow, ow! he said. Does it look like it hurts?

No one spoke. Then several people said, Yes.

Because you know what I really felt, my lover said, addressing the crowd, was a slow steady tingle all day. And do you know why?

Why? everyone said.

Because, my lover said, today was the day that my near-son was dead!

Everyone cheered then, and I knew that my speech had not been good enough.

You assassinate an assassin, my lover said. And you punch a bully. But what do you do when a near-son is dead?

Quickly I prepared a better speech in my head. I knew that whatever I said had to be full of pathos and had to convince everyone in the room that as a person I had many facets. I thought of my good qualities. There weren't many. Several times in the last month, I had helped an old lady cross the street. But it was the same old lady, she lived nearby. As for my interests, I liked walking through the woods, reading books in the bathtub, and having sex. But everybody liked those things. I knew there must be something momentous about me. But I couldn't think of what it was. So I decided to make something up.

I see auras, I said.

No one paid any attention. Everyone stood up. All the people who had been seated in the red room and the green room of the church were now in our room, the blue one, and they'd gathered along the walls.

I looked at my lover. I love you, I said.

My lover glanced at me. I love you too, he said. Then he looked back at Benny.

I ask you as a friend, my lover said. As my best friend and a handsome guy. What do we do about this?

The crowd moved forward.

I stretched to my full height, five three.

I'm not sorry, I said.

They were almost to me so I got up on my chair. I'm a waitress, I said. I serve mostly dinners. Sometimes I do breakfast buffet. For the last three years I've paid my lover's rent. I pay the gas bill and sometimes I take him to movies. I do it because he's an analyst, and if I'm not around then who will support him?

Hands yanked my dress.

There's no such thing as a near-son, I said. It's just a story. Please don't touch me. But that was all I got to say.

I
WAS MISERABLE
that summer. I had chosen to remain at my beautiful school in California because I did not want to return to my parents' beautiful house in Maine. Summer housing was located at the college adjacent to mine, so I moved my few things to a building topped by jutting metal bars as if made from an Erector set. There were only a few, mostly foreign, students on the campus that summer and they had strange courtyard activities of which I was not a part. Six days a week I woke at seven and took a series of buses through Pomona, a city of low, rusted-out cars, pawn shops, and slow-moving faces, all looking somewhere, and arrived at a white mini-mall in Diamond Bar, where I taught three three-hour-long classes, standardized-test preparation, and a thin version of English literature, to a series of Taiwanese tenth graders. They drove to class in their parents' Mercedeses and called me Piggy and Honey and told quick jokes in Taiwanese. I was not fat but they called me Piggy out of affection. They were my friends. At night I took three buses back and arrived at the campus as the foreigners were setting up barbecues in the courtyard and went up to my room, a tiny square on the third floor with a view of what would have been the expanding southern valley if I could have seen so far, if the smog had not covered the valley, and slept. When I was hungry I ate snacks from the snack machine, mostly cakes, chips, and chocolate-nut bars. There was a tiny kitchenette downstairs, but someone had stolen the blender that I had, upon moving in, placed on a counter for communal use, and I no longer liked to go there. On weekends I slept until the weekends were over. In short, I had a very regular life with no one to talk to beyond the children to whom I taught English literature.

When my sister, who had once been with me at the college but was now a lawyer in northern California, called me to say that a friend of hers, Jacob, was living at home for the summer, forty minutes west of Pomona, and would I like to have dinner with him, I said yes.

I am not sure why I said yes. There was a beautiful desert garden, a maze on a hill of rocks and cacti and strange desert flowers, behind a coffee shop, jutting and awkward, like an unfinished log cabin, which was not now open; and I sometimes sat on the benches of this garden, hidden by immense green leaves, while the sun went down, and looked up at Mt. Baldy and its sisters above the colleges. My sister and I, before she had left, had driven up—you could drive up, past the flat foothills and their spreading low houses, into curving roads that twisted around trees and above great fall-aways, past the village of Baldy, where in the winters skiers lodged; daring skiers, because the slopes were only steep crags, really, and each winter many skiers died—you could drive up these roads, slowly was the best our car could do, and reach a high circle, the near top, where you could park and walk around a giant and precarious U that fell deeply down, thousands of feet, into tumblegrass, and had once been an arctic lake. We had driven up there and walked around, saying not much, in the summer, seeing the light gauze of smog setting over the valley below us, and then driven back down together.

Was it like dying?

It was kind of like dying.

 

J
ACOB CALLED ME
on the telephone, a prelude, and talked to me. I talked to him in my room, on my bed, with the lights mostly out. Or, I did not really talk, I listened, because Jacob talked, about anything: his brothers, his childhood, his talents, which were related to biology laboratories and the viewing of plays; he did not talk of the law, his profession (or profession-to-be; he was, unlike my sister, still in law school). He was a facile talker, moving without warning from one subject to another, and I let him because I wanted him to talk until I was tired.

He asked me, did I like to hike? I did. Had I ever been to Big Bear? I had not. Would I like to go? Certainly. Why not?

It came out later that Big Bear was seventy-five miles away, far east into the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains; but at that point I had said I would like to go hiking, and Jacob knew of nothing near as pleasing closer. He arrived in a truck on a Wednesday morning (the school was closed on Wednesdays) at eight thirty. He had said eight o'clock; I had said, ten; he had explained that the drive was long and that to get the best of the day we should leave early; we had settled on nine. He was early; but what had I to prepare? I brought a backpack. It had apples. I had bought them at a convenience store close to one of my bus stops. On the drive Jacob talked and I talked. It was pleasant to drive, or to be driven. The land beyond the highway, little mountains, barren of trees, brush grass, rolling, was beautiful, the skin of an animal laid down. The hills grew larger, water ran through the fields, and we arrived at the town of Big Bear. The town was a small beseeching town much like the one in which my parents lived, in Maine—some humble mountains; winding, poorly tarred roads with busted guard rails; a central village of careful sidewalks and gridded boutiques, white-painted frames holding up glass walls.

There was no Big Bear. Big Bear, the mountain, we discovered, was a good ways south. The trails that did exist were subtle, mere widened stretches of shoulder beyond a bridge where a slash of red paint marked a pine. We stopped a local, or what looked like a local, to ask, and he listed several trails. I selected a short one. Jacob had a camera. He asked the local to take our picture. Jacob put his arm around me; I smiled.

 

T
HE HIKE WAS
not arduous. A winding, cone-lined path, twisting slightly up. Noon hit; we grew hot. We stripped to T-shirt and tank top. The trees were scattered and the light came through as families, couples with dogs, came rushing down, excited by gravity. We talked of dogs. We talked of couples. Jacob talked of an ex-lover. It hadn't worked; afterward, the woman had said untrue things of Jacob. We'd reached a tumble of boulders, one on top of the other, the size of small houses, and, at his suggestion, climbed up. On top of these we sat and ate the apples and drank a bottle of water he'd brought. The lake, Big Bear, stretched, behind trees, far beneath: a small blue cloth.

Jacob took my picture: me, my arms crossed, on the edge of the rock. I took his; the same. He asked if he could kiss me. I said no. I might have said that I was sorry or did not know him well enough. I should explain that I had known when he'd arrived and stepped out of his truck and put his arms around me that I would never want to make love to him or for him to make love to me or for us to have any sort of physical intimacy at all. Perhaps this was unfair, since I had for so long listened to him tell me about himself on the phone. It may seem my objection was physical, and perhaps it was, in so far as the physical reveals the emotional; what I had not heard in Jacob's voice, a certain angry despair, I had seen in his face. Jacob forgave me, so to speak. He said something along the lines of he understood. We climbed down from the rocks and from the mountain. I thought we might go home. At the bottom we found the car. Jacob drove us around the village and we circled around the lake.

Because we came upon it, and Jacob was taken with it, we rented a rowboat with an outboard. How could I say no? Jacob rowed. I lay back. I wanted the sun. I wanted to look like a person who spent time in the sun. The lake, after all, was nothing, merely a curve of water around an outcropping of hill; but we could not see the other side, and so we rowed dutifully around to it, remarking on rock formations, a stray parasailer slooping past. Jacob talked, of college and nothing at all, of people he'd met or people he'd known, who might have been said to mistreat him but hadn't known any better than to do what they did; he seemed to be both asking for and receiving advice, and my only obligation in this was to open my eyes, from time to time, and agree.

 

W
E RETURNED
the boat. Jacob suggested dinner. I said okay. I wanted to go home, but more than that I wanted dinner. I had not eaten dinner in months. I wanted to choose my food from a list of food.

All of the restaurants were closed. They bore signs in their darkened glass fronts that said dinner at six and back at five thirty for dinner.

It's okay, Jacob said. We can shop. He extended his hand behind him and I took it. Mostly the streets were deserted. A few families wandered in and out of the doors of the shops. The shops were littered with crystal things, bright plastic objects, colorful kites of silk. We touched things, held them up to each other, turning them to read their inscriptions:
HAND-CRAFTED
,
ARTISAN
,
BIG BEAR
. The salespersons remained behind large wooden counters, dark like drinking bars, adjusting small placards and key chains, pretending not to watch. I had the feeling we'd entered a world that did not want us in it. But on the street we had walked together as if we were happy. We had hiked up and down a mountain, a small mountain, a good hill, really, but we had hiked up and down it.

Do you want anything? Jacob said. He was turning a small crystal music box over in his hands.

I did. I wanted everything. Let's go in there, I said. I pointed to a shop across the street with colored flags across its door. We entered and the shop was a cave of rock formations, with delicate items, glass feeders and wrought-iron totems, dangling from the ceiling. The halls extended around colored items in trays into a back room with earthenware pots, Grecian urns, and red garden columns. In the center was a waterfall of miniature proportions, a replica of Big Bear, I supposed, with water spouting from a high rock formation, and on its ledge, two golemesque figurines, their tiny arms raised as if to touch each other.

I glanced at the price tag. It was $500.

Maybe the restaurants are open, Jacob said.

We found one on a high cliff at the edge of the lake. Its back was a wooden deck with round wooden tables. We sat underneath a red sun umbrella and were given checkered place mats by a girl in a gingham apron.

Have wine, Jacob said. Would you like wine?

As we ate, first the deck and then the whole of the restaurant filled with families and other couples. Young girls in cotton sun gowns ran around the deck, elbowing over the wooden rail and staring into the lake below, while their mothers crossed their legs and stirred their drinks with flag-topped glass straws.

I remarked that the sudden crowd seemed strange. Jacob drank his wine. It's the Fourth of July, he said.

How I hadn't known that the day was the Fourth of July I cannot explain except that all I had done was work and sleep that summer and days meant nothing to me beyond being either for work or for sleep.

Our waitress, her yellow hair in a high chignon, appeared with a tray of tortes.

I shook my head.

There'll be fireworks, Jacob said. He placed money by the bill that I had meant to share and then the waitress picked it up and smiled at me.

 

I
HAVE A SURPRISE
, Jacob said. I want to show you now.

We exited the restaurant to a sidewalk filled with people and had to zigzag back and forth to follow each other. I asked where the people had come from and Jacob answered that they were like us. They had covered the fields that lined the roads with blankets and lawn chairs, portable radios, cases of beer, white Formica tables, and beach balls, although there was no beach.

I had no good reason to refuse.

The air was thick with the greenness of the lake. It's too hot, I said. We'll be eaten alive by insects. We had reached the truck. Turn around, he said. Spread out your arms. He held up a can of insect repellent. I held out my arms and he sprayed along my arms and chest and down each leg and then he sprayed my back.

Now me, he said.

When I was done he removed a pink wool blanket from the bed of the truck. Underneath were two bottles of wine. We'll have to drink from the bottles, he said. I forgot glasses.

I would have been happy there, by the side of the road, but Jacob wanted to find a better spot, one with grass and where we could lie down, and we followed other trucks, caravan style, along the people-lined roads. One young couple in jeans and gold skin was setting up a portable grill; they waved us over. Children in the van in front of us pushed their noses and cheeks against the glass. Come sit with us! the man called. I wanted to. I wanted whatever awkward conversation would come from the four of us sitting down on a blanket together waiting for the sky to fill with light. The woman smiled and waved. It's too crowded, Jacob said. He drove on until he found a grassy hill. It was not uncrowded. We were not alone. He carried our things from the trunk. In the now near-dark were the outlines of other pairs, restless, getting up and sitting up and lying back down again. It won't be much longer, Jacob said.

I thought of my room, where, I now knew, I had been happy; my ten-by-eight room of ninety-five degrees in the dormitory of gridded iron with only foreigners in the courtyard, entering and exiting in strange-tongued coteries. Lay down with me, Jacob said. It's better like this. I lay back. I could feel the grass and the small hills of ants beneath me.

Do you see the stars? Jacob said. He was drinking from the bottle of wine. There were no stars. The sky was heavy with low invisible clouds, the kind that can't be seen but descend and surround the body.

I'm sorry I'm not much company, I said.

Look. He pointed.

Where?

Above that cloud.

There was a tiny faint star.

Oh, I said.

He lay back. Close your eyes, he said.

I did. His hand closed around my hand. You can see them better this way, he said.

I did not see stars. I planned my own return—my shower, my night, my night clothes, my bed, a book by which I would grow tired.

Those people are kissing. He pointed to an amorphous mass in the dark, moving slowly over itself.