“Ira,” she said in the heaviest of voices, bringing her bridal mouth toward his. Just before he kissed her he closed his eyes, brought his own hand to his mouth, and swallowed, hard.
“My darling,” he said.
Ocean Avenue
IF YOU CAN STILL see how you could once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible. One day not too long ago, in Laguna Beach, California, an architect named Bobby Lazar went downtown to have a cup of coffee at the Café Zinc with his friend Albert Wong and Albert’s new wife, Dawn (who had, very sensibly, retained her maiden name). Albert and Dawn were still in that period of total astonishment that follows a wedding, grinning at each other like two people who have survived an air crash without a scratch, touching one another frequently, lucky to be alive. Lazar was not a cynical man and he wished them well, but he had also been lonely for a long time, and their happiness was making him a little sick. Albert had brought along a copy of Science, in which he had recently published some work on the String Theory, and it was as Lazar looked up from Al’s name and abbreviations in the journal’s table of contents that he saw Suzette, in her exercise clothes, coming toward the cafe from across the street, looking like she weighed about seventy-five pounds.
She was always too thin, though at the time of their closest acquaintance he had thought he liked a woman with bony shoulders. She had a bony back, too, he suddenly remembered, like a marimba, as well as a pointed, bony nose and chin, and she was always — but always—on a diet, even though she had a naturally small appetite and danced aerobically or ran five miles every day. Her face looked hollowed and somehow mutated, as do the faces of most women who get too much exercise, but there was a sheen on her brow and a mad, aerobic glimmer in her eye. She’d permed her hair since he last saw her, and it flew out around her head in two square feet of golden Pre-Raphaelite rotini — the lily maid of Astolat on an endorphin high. A friend had once said she was the kind of woman who causes automobile accidents when she walks down the street, and, as a matter of fact, as she stepped up onto the patio of the café, a man passing on his bicycle made the mistake of following her with his eyes for a moment and nearly rode into the open door of a parked car.
“Isn’t that Suzette?” Al said. Albert was, as it happened, the only one of his friends after the judgment who refused to behave as though Suzette had never existed, and he was always asking after her in his pointed, physicistic manner, one skeptical eyebrow raised. Needless to say, Lazar did not like to be reminded. In the course of their affair, he knew, he had been terribly erratic, by turns tightfisted and profligate, glum and overeager, unsociable and socially aflutter, full of both flattery and glib invective — a shithead, in short — and, to his credit, he was afraid that he had treated Suzette very badly. It may have been this repressed consciousness, more than anything else, that led him to tell himself, when he first saw her again, that he did not love her anymore.
“Uh-oh,” said Dawn, after she remembered who Suzette was.
“I have nothing to be afraid of,” Lazar said. As she passed, he called out, “Suzette?” He felt curiously invulnerable to her still evident charms, and uttered her name with the lightness and faint derision of someone on a crowded airplane signaling to an attractive but slightly elderly stewardess. “Hey, Suze!”
She was wearing a Walkman, however, with the earphones turned up very loud, and she floated past on a swell of Chaka Khan and Rufus.
“Didn’t she hear you?” said Albert, looking surprised.
“No, Dr. Five Useful Non-Implications of the String Theory, she did not,” Lazar said. “She was wearing earphones.”
“I think she was ignoring you.” Albert turned to his bride and duly consulted her. “Didn’t she look like she heard him? Didn’t her face kind of blink?”
“There she is, Bobby,” said Dawn, pointing toward the entrance of the café. As it was a beautiful December morning, they were sitting out on the patio, and Lazar had his back to the Zinc. “Waiting on line.”
He felt that he did not actually desire to speak to her but that Albert and Dawn’s presence forced him into it somehow. A certain tyranny of in-touchness holds sway in that part of the world — a compulsion to behave always as though one is still in therapy but making real progress, and the rules of enlightened behavior seemed to dictate that he not sneak away from the table with his head under a newspaper — as he might have done if alone — and go home to watch the Weather Channel or Home Shopping Network for three hours with a twelve-pack of Mexican beer and the phone off the hook. He turned around in his chair and looked at Suzette more closely. She had on one of those glittering, opalescent Intergalactic Amazon leotard-and-tights combinations that seem to be made of cavorite or adamantium and do not so much cling to a woman’s body as seal her off from gamma rays and lethal Stardust. Lazar pronounced her name again, more loudly, calling out across the sunny patio. She looked even thinner from behind.
“Oh, Bobby,” she said, removing the headphones but keeping her place in the coffee line.
“Hello, Suze,” he said. They nodded pleasantly to one another, and that might have been it right there. After a second or two she dipped her head semiapologetically, smiled an irritated smile, and put the earphones—“ear-buds,” he recalled, was the nauseous term — back into her ears.
“She looks great,” Lazar said magnanimously to Albert and Dawn, keeping his eyes on Suzette.
“She looks so thin, so drawn,” said Dawn, who frankly could have stood to drop about fifteen pounds.
“She looks fine to me,” said Al. “I’d say she looks better than ever.”
“I know you would,” Lazar snapped. “You’d say it just to bug me.”
He was a little irritated himself now. The memory of their last few days together had returned to him, despite all his heroic efforts over the past months to repress it utterly. He thought of the weekend following that bad review of their restaurant in the Times (they’d had a Balearic restaurant called Ibiza in San Clemente) — a review in which the critic had singled out his distressed-stucco interior and Suzette’s Majorcan paella, in particular, for censure. Since these were precisely the two points around which, in the course of opening the restaurant, they had constructed their most idiotic and horrible arguments, the unfavorable notice hit their already shaky relationship like a dumdum bullet, and Suzette went a little nuts. She didn’t show up at home or at Ibiza all the next day — so that poor hypersensitive little José had to do all the cooking — but instead disappeared into the haunts of physical culture. She worked out at the gym, went to Zahava’s class, had her body waxed, and then, to top it all off, rode her bicycle all the way to El Toro and back. When she finally came home she was in a mighty hormonal rage and suffered under the delusion that she could lift a thousand pounds and chew her way through vanadium steel. She claimed that Lazar had bankrupted her, among other outrageous and untrue assertions, and he went out for a beer to escape from her. By the time he returned, several hours later, she had moved out, taking with her only his belongings, as though she had come to see some fundamental inequity in their relationship — such as their having been switched at birth — and were attempting in this way to rectify it.
This loss, though painful, he would have been willing to suffer if it hadn’t included his collection of William Powelliana, which was then at its peak and contained everything from the checkered wingtips Powell wore in The Kennel Club Murder Case to Powell’s personal copy of the shooting script for Life with Father to a 1934 letter from Dashiell Hammett congratulating Powell on his interpretation of Nick Charles, which Lazar had managed to obtain from a Powell grand-nephew only minutes before the epistolary buzzards from the University of Texas tried to snap it up. Suzette sold the entire collection, at far less than its value, to that awful Kelso McNair up in Lawndale, who only annexed it to his vast empire of Myrna Loy memorabilia and locked it away in his vault. In retaliation Lazar went down the next morning to their safe-deposit box at Dana Point, removed all six of Suzette’s 1958 and ’59 Barbie Dolls, and sold them to a collectibles store up in Orange for not quite four thousand dollars, at which point she brought the first suit against him.