“I suppose there’s not much call for Kick to be on set at the moment if no one is eating her food.”
“You know, Torvingen, when I first met you, I never knew what you were thinking, but there have been times lately when I can practically see the thoughts form on your face. It doesn’t seem natural and I’m not entirely sure I like it. I am sure, however, that I find your unwillingness to simply ask the question wholly tedious.”
We waited for a light.
“If you have a question, or something on your mind, say it. Just open your mouth and let the words roll out. It’s not so very hard.”
Where is Kick? How come you always know where she is and I don’t? Why isn’t she here so I can hold her and bury my face in her hair and know it’s real? I tried to imagine the words rolling out as bright and sturdy as toy trucks, immune to all misunderstanding.
The lights changed and we started to cross.
“It is hard,” I said.
“Do it anyway.”
I put one foot in front of the other. Trucks roared by, rain hissed. It would be easier to talk to someone I could hold.
“Usually, if people want you to know where they are, they tell you,” I said.
After a moment he said, “Is that a question?”
“Yes. I don’t… I want to talk to Kick and I don’t know where she is. She didn’t tell me. I just, I wonder why she didn’t volunteer the information.”
“She’s not a mind-reader, Torvingen. Besides, sometimes people like to be asked. It shows you’re interested.”
“Not that you’re being nosy?”
“She’s a grown woman. If she wants you to back off, she can say so.” He shook his head. “Christ, you’re as bad as each other.”
“So… I should just ask?”
“Yes! Yes. A thousand times, yes. Look.” He stopped and turned to face me, but a truck thundered past close to the curb and threw up a curtain of muddy puddle water, drowning whatever he had been about to say. He sighed and wiped the lid of his go-cup with his T-shirt, and changed his mind about saying whatever it was. “This is a sorry excuse for a summer.” We walked for a while in silence under a scudding sky. “Now,” he said, “what’s this about a chair?”
I told him about the chair, and the trees, and by the time we got to the warehouse, I still hadn’t told him about Nordstrom, or teaching my mother to punch, about Corning or Ed Tom Hardy, about my plan to buy more land, about much of anything, because all of a sudden I had no faith in my ability to integrate any of it, to plan and execute. I couldn’t be sure I was making the right decisions. I couldn’t even trust what I saw.
When we were halfway across the parking lot, his phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and waved me on before answering. Jonie, I told myself, some problem with the coffeehouses, as a maroon Subaru Forester pulled into the parking lot and Deverell Turtledove and a woman who looked a bit like Green Jacket got out: his wife, Philippa. Dornan had turned his back to me, so I said hello to the Turtledoves and led them to Finkel and Rusen’s trailer.
When I stepped back down into the parking lot two hours later holding legal paperwork, I found the sky bright blue, the air washed clean and now fat with warmth. Several cars were gone from the lot. Dornan was gone, too. I lifted my face to the sun. I considered calling him, but decided against it. Perhaps I would go to the dojo. Perhaps I should call Kick’s house.
My phone rang, but it was Gary, with an appointment for tomorrow morning at a downtown bank. I thanked him and folded the phone. Walked to my car, threw the paperwork on the backseat. My phone rang again as I got in the car, and this time it was Kick.
“Want to come over?” she said. “I’ll grill us something. We can watch the sun set over Troy.”
SHE SAT cross-legged on the back patio next to a tiny Hibachi grill, tending tuna, and vegetables in foil, and sipping a bottle of Stella Artois.
I lay with my head on her lap. She had showered just before I arrived, and in the early-evening sun her damp hair smelled sharply of fennel shampoo. Her bare legs were warm, and her tank top had been sheared off just below the breasts. If I looked straight up, I could see the shadowed swell. Her stomach touched my hair every time she breathed.
When I had arrived, she had smiled, and kissed me, and busied herself with starting the coals and preparing the food, but although she chopped and marinated and tasted with every appearance of engagement, it was clear that most of her attention was focused on some interior plane.
I didn’t mind. We could talk later. For now it was enough to feel her skin on mine, to sit inside her smell. I enjoyed the scrape of aluminum foil as she turned the vegetables, the warmth of the sun on my face. Every now and again, the early-evening breeze shook a few of the afternoon’s raindrops from the ancient cherry tree and they hissed on the coals.
Two cats appeared, one black, the other a tawny puffball, and sat silently by the fence.
“Meet El Jefe Don Gato and Der Floofenmeister,” she said, the first time she’d spoken in ten minutes.
The cats turned their gaze, laserlike, in my direction, then returned their focus to the sizzling fish. The black one was wearing a blue-and-red collar with a blue tag. I read it upside down. “According to his tag, his name is Sylvester.”
“Well, that’s what the neighbors call him, and seeing as he’s theirs, I can’t stop them.”
He did look like a don riding about his hacienda, thin and aristocratic, greying but formidable. I squinted. “The other one’s tag says Blondie.”
She made a sound of disgust and adjusted the vent at the base of the grill.
The cats looked at me again, and back at the fish. “Are they expecting a handout?”
“They won’t like the lemon marinade.” She lifted the boning knife from the Pyrex dish she’d brought the fish out in, and pushed the dish over the concrete to the cats. The black one leaned forward a millimeter and blinked as though someone had flicked him on the nose, just like Dornan when descriptions of gore got too graphic. He sneezed, turned, and walked away to the fence, leapt up and disappeared over the other side. The fluffy one gave Kick a disappointed look, and ambled off towards the bottom of the garden. It looked as though she were wearing puffy pantaloons.
More rain dropped from the cherry overhead. I raised myself up on one elbow and reached for one of the many twigs littering the patio directly beneath the tree. No buds. It had been dead awhile before it fell. I pondered phyllotactic ratios.
“I went to the Asian Art Museum today.” She nodded that she was listening. “I saw a chair. It was simple, made five hundred years ago of hardwood, but it was beautiful. Perfect. Perfect the way a circle is, or a flower, or a river. Flawless. I found myself thinking about proportion, and grace, and beauty, and then I saw it all around me.” I held up the twig. “The ratio of how these stems grow is perfectly uniform, twig after twig.”
She was silent for a while. “Perfection is important to you, isn’t it?”
“It’s pleasing. And orderly. It works. I like things that work.” Except, of course, I wasn’t working one hundred percent. But if I told her about the flashback it would only serve to remind her that the drugs had been delivered through her coffee, and then we’d talk about Corning. I didn’t want to do that, and, judging from her behavior, she had enough on her mind.
“So if something isn’t perfect, you throw it away?”
I sat up. She was studying me, but, again, I got the impression a vast part of her was about some interior business. “It depends. Yes, if it’s meant to be a functional object. I’ve never seen the point of keeping something that doesn’t work. May as well get rid of it.”