She said nothing, and her face was still, and then she shrugged abruptly. “Well, now it’s time to get rid of that twig, and eat.”
We sat on the step that led down to the lawn, warm plates balanced on bare legs. The fish was succulent, the roasted pepper and mushrooms luscious. A Steller’s jay swooped into the bay hedge at the bottom of the lawn and sang something rude. Its feathers were radioactive blue. Nordstrom was a million miles away.
The sun hung low at our backs, a hairbreadth from sinking behind the house and leaving the garden in shade. A dragonfly like a three-inch titanium helicopter zoomed in and out of the light, skimming the sky of mosquitoes. I put my arm around her waist, and she leaned against me briefly, then went back to eating. I finished my food one-handed.
“That twig,” I said. “It was dead.”
“They usually are when they fall off.”
“Yes. But there are a lot of them. And not just twigs. A few fair-sized branches. And that whole limb, the one that hangs over the dining room extension, is dying.”
“So?”
“The tree is diseased.”
She slugged back the rest of her beer. “She’s beautiful.”
She? “Well, yes. But that’s not the point.”
“Who says? She’s old, yes, and bits of her aren’t doing as well as they used to, but so what? She’s been a beautiful cherry tree for nearly a hundred years. She’s still a beautiful cherry tree.”
“No cherries for a year or more, though, I imagine.”
“When women get old and stop producing babies, do you think they should be hacked off at the knees and thrown in a pit?” I stared. Her eyes were inimical, hard, as they had been that first time, when she had thought I was attacking Rusen. Then they glimmered with tears and she turned away and wiped at them with her fist. “Shit.”
"Kick ...” I reviewed the conversation in my head. “I’m sorry. About the cherries.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s not about the fucking cherries!”
“What—” But she stood up and cut me off.
“I’m getting more beer. Want some?”
She was gone for more than five minutes. I stood and stretched and wandered about the garden. A bush juddered to itself and a cat yowled. I sat on one of the brick steps that divided the upper lawn from the lower. The sun was going down. The side of Queen Anne began to twinkle.
She came out with her beer and sat next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her.
I cleared my throat. “Kick.”
“Give me a few minutes, okay?”
“All right.”
I kissed her bare shoulder—very slightly salty. I should have bought her those pearls.
“What did you do today?” she said eventually. “Just tell me about your day. Distract me.”
She didn’t mean, Tell me about the bad things that happened. “I talked to Floo—to Rusen and Finkel. They want me to invest in the production.”
“And will you?”
“You’ve done a lot of film. What do you think of it as an investment?”
“Realistically, it’s hopeless.”
“But?”
“But now the asshole director is gone, Rusen is doing an incredible job. I’ve seen some of the rough edit, and some of his ideas for the new finale. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”
“But?”
“But, okay, here’s the thing. As a movie, it won’t ever be a success, but it could go to DVD or maybe even to get a contract from a network. It will get people’s attention. And then they’ll hire the people who helped them make this one. And I’ll have a success to put on my résumé. You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No.”
“Hollywood people, and TV is as much Hollywood as the movies are, are incredibly superstitious. They have no idea what makes a hit, so they hire on the magic-bullet basis. They look at your résumé—whether you’re the best boy or grip or second AD or caterer or set dresser, it doesn’t matter; if they see a flop sitting there, it’s a like a big cow patty stinking up the dining room. They want to get rid of you. You’ll taint their project. But if they see you’ve been part of a box office hit, they’ll take you. You have the golden aura: you’ve been associated with success. So, Feral, the Feral we’re shooting now, won’t ever be released, but it could get turned into a real project, which will go on my résumé, and Steve Jursen’s—he’s out of the hospital by the way, did you know?—and Joel Pedersen’s, and five years from now we’ll all have more work than we know what to do with, and Hippoworks will move to swanky new digs in Century City, and hire a receptionist with a boob job.” She blew a mournful tune on her beer bottle. “If they get the cash for post, and if the big finale works.”
“It might not?”
“They don’t have a stunt coordinator.”
“You could do it.”
“I’m a cook,” she said.
Years ago, I’d met a girl called Cutter, a fourteen-year-old living on the street, jamming her veins with heroin to stop the nightmares about what Daddy used to do to her. Once she got used to me, she would talk about all her plans for One Day, and beam at me, a blindingly sweet smile from such a thin, scabbed face, but if I ever asked how she was really doing, whether there was anything I could to do help, she’d slam the shutters and get ready to run. Then there had been Sandra. I had learnt that, whatever Dornan said, there were times to talk in gradually diminishing circles.
“Troy,” I said, and nodded at the twinkling hill. “Have you ever been to that part of the world?”
“Yep. Thrown myself off cliffs into the Aegean, into the Black Sea, dived in the reefs off Belize and Australia, driven a car that plunged into the Bosporus. Did I tell you my first few real gigs were as a stunt diver?”
I nodded. She hadn’t, but the clerk at Hollywood Video had. I stroked her hair. “Ever been to Mycenae?”
“Nope.”
“The Lion Gate is still there. It’s massive, but brutal. No grace, no subtlety, just massive. And in the center is a huge beehive. Not a beehive, exactly, but a tomb that looked like a hut made of stones, empty inside. Part of the mighty Mycenaean civilization. And it’s nothing but crude lumps of stone stacked up like a beehive. I know it was the Bronze Age but I was expecting… more.”
“Orators in white chitons, people declaiming in iambic trimeter?”
“Something like that.”
“What do you expect from a yahoo like Agamemnon?” But she stroked my arm, leaned down and kissed it, kissing away my old disappointment, reassuring me that there was more that was good in life than bad.
After a moment the quality of her stroking changed, and I could tell she was no longer really aware of me, that she was back in whatever place she’d been half the evening.
The stroking, paused, resumed. Her muscles firmed. She lifted her head.
“Yesterday,” she said. “After the Duwamish park, when I had to leave, it was because I had an—Shit.” Something thumped into the concrete behind me. She jumped up. “Jefe! Drop it. Drop it right now!”
It was the black cat, weighed down by a huge rat in its mouth. He dropped the rat at Kick’s feet and looked pleased. The rat lay on its side, panting.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God. Is it hurt?”
The rat jumped to its feet and made a dash for the gap under the fence. Jefe pounced, seized it, threw it in the air, caught it, shook it, brought it back. Dropped it again in front of Kick. How much simpler life would be if we could act like cats: just drop our trophy at the beloved’s feet.
“Oh, God. Aud, get him away. The cat. Get the cat away. Get him away.”
I picked Jefe up, carried him to the fence, and dropped him over.
"Don’t,” I said, when Kick bent to the rat. “It will bite.” It could have rabies.