The three occupants of the blanket — Teddy (a little guy in racing leathers whom I took to be Sarah’s beau), Alice (a health-food nut, thin as a refugee), and a big, box-headed character with a wire-thin Little Richard mustache — smiled benevolently at us as we eased down amidst a clutter of paper plates and plastic cups, denuded ribs, puddled grease and pinto beans. I sat between Petra and Sarah, and sucked the foam from my beer. Flies hovered, the big P.A. speakers crackled, smoke spun off into the sky.
Petra introduced me — everyone seemed to be familiar with our connection, and this pleased me — and then Little Richard said that he’d just got back from three weeks in Hawaii, tuning pianos. This led to two distinct but rapidly converging threads of conversation: the Islands and the trade of piano tuning. Sarah said she was tone deaf. Teddy said that he once swam with humpback whales off Maui. Alice looked up from a plate of shredded carrots and said that she preferred Debussy’s Etudes to anything Chopin ever did — especially when she was in Hawaii. Did the tropical air make tuning more difficult? Petra wondered. Richard tied up the loose ends neatly with an anecdote about sun bathing in Kaanapali with his tuning forks, and then turned to me and said, “So what do you do, fella?”
These were dangerous conversational waters, and I could see the shoals and reefs prickling about me. Earlier, in the car, Petra had asked the same question and I’d begged off by saying, “You know — a little of this and a little of that.” “Sounds like a pretty evasive answer,” she’d retorted, and I’d dropped the corners of my mouth and said, “You’re right. Actually I run guns to Libya.” Now I opted for the straightforward approach. I looked Richard in the eye and told him I inspected airplane fuselages for stress fractures.
“Oh,” he said, and then the conversation rushed on past me, expanding to touch on methods of tofu preparation, the heat, the shameless behavior of a number of people I didn’t know, and the political situation in Central America. I leaned back on the blanket, scanning the crowd for trouble, smiling amenably at Petra’s friends and whispering nonstop witticisms in her ear. And oh, yes: drinking beer. It seemed that every time I took a swallow or two someone would hand me a fresh cup. This had a two-fold effect — of relaxing my guard (so what if I ran across Sapers or one of the other yokels — they had nothing on me) and suppressing my appetite. When Petra got us a plate of potato salad and chili beans, I did a couple of finger exercises with my plastic fork and then drained another beer.
After a while the conversation went dead, the C&W band lurched into some rural funk, and Sarah and Teddy got up to dance. Little Richard was passed out at the edge of the blanket, the sun filtering through the leaves to illuminate each separate astonishing whisker of his mustache, and Alice excused herself to go tend Sarah’s health-food stand. I thought of asking Petra to dance, but since I hate dancing, I decided against it. Instead I told her that I hadn’t meant to be flippant or to hide anything when she’d asked me what I did for a living, and sketched in what I’d been doing for the past year or so — that is, refurbishing Victorians in a slow market and reading banal, subliterate freshman papers as a part-timer at Cabrillo Community College. I didn’t mention the summer camp.
She looked disappointed. Or skeptical. “So you live in San Francisco?”
I nodded. “But I’m up here for the summer with a couple of friends — just to get away, you know?” “I know. Fishing, right?”
We smiled at each other. “Yeah, well, we do actually go fishing sometimes. But mainly the idea is just to rough it, you know, get out of the city, listen to the crickets, hike in the mountains.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her, and then she dropped her head to trace a pattern in the blanket. I felt then that she saw right through me, knew as well as Vogelsang what I was doing in Willits. Lies beget other lies, I thought — now’s the time to come clean, to start the relationship off right. But I didn’t come clean. I couldn’t. I was about to say more, to get myself in deeper, when she lifted her glass and said “Cheers.”
For the next hour or so, while the sun made a molten puddle of the parking lot and the band hammered away at their guitars as if the instruments had somehow offended them, we talked, getting to know each other, comparing notes. I learned about Petra’s childhood in Evanston, summers spent sailing on the Great Lakes, her talent for design and the first misshapen piece she’d ever fired (a noseless bust of Janis Joplin). Her father was an architect, her mother was dead. Auto accident. She had a sister named Helen. She liked green chartreuse, Husky dogs and old-time Chicago Blues. She was twenty-nine. When she was in the tenth grade, attending a private school, she’d met a guy two years her senior, an athlete, high achiever and verbal whiz. They dated. He was class president, she was secretary of the Art Club. He went to the University of Iowa, she went to the University of Iowa. They dated strenuously, lived together, got married. He went to law school, she worked (in a Kentucky-style-chicken franchise where they went through thirty gallons of lard a day). When he graduated and got a job with a firm in San Francisco, they moved to a skylit apartment on Dolores Street and she began doing ceramics in earnest. One night he told her he was bored. Bored? she said. I don’t want to talk about it, he said. Two days later he was gone. She called the law firm. He hadn’t been in for over a week. Later she heard that he was in Amsterdam, living on a barge, then someone saw him at a jazz club in Oslo. With a Danish girl. After that, she stopped asking.
I made sympathetic noises. How could anyone — be he deaf, dumb, blind, castrated — walk out on her? I was thinking, and then realized that someone, somewhere, could be thinking the same thing about Ronnie. Square pegs, round holes.
We drank beer. Petra stretched her legs, applied tanning oil to thighs and forearms, offered me potato salad as if it were caviar. It was hot, it was dry, there was too much dust, too much noise and there were too many people, but I hardly noticed — I gave my full attention to Petra, mooning over her like some ridiculous lovelorn swain out of Shakespeare or Lyly, ready to jump up and swoon at the drop of a hat. We drank more beer. Teddy and Sarah fumbled back to the blanket, panting and running sweat, stolidly drained their warm beers and staggered back to the dance floor. Then Petra handed me her empty cup and rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go to the ladies’. Would you get me another beer?”
“Sure,” I said, reckless, foolish, drink-besotted, hurtling mindlessly toward some fateful collision. I sprang up from the blanket. We were standing inches apart. I put my arm around her shoulder and we kissed for the first time, dogs yapping and chords thumping at the periphery of my consciousness, my whole being consumed with pure urgent animal lust. “Be back in a minute,” she said, her voice soft as a touch, and I stood there, empty cup in hand, watching helplessly as she receded into the crowd.
I looked around me. The heifer bacchanal was in full swing, heads, shoulders, torsos and hips flailing in time to the music, feet shuffling and legs kicking, incisors tearing, molars champing, throats gulping — beef, beef, beef — as the smoke rose to the sky and abandoned shrieks cut through the steady pounding din of the drums. To the left of the dancers was the barbecue pit, which I would have to negotiate on my way to the beer booth, and beyond that the appalling dark entrance of the bar.
I began to maneuver my way through the crowd, thinking of Petra’s blue shorts and the couch at the summer camp, when someone set off a string of firecrackers and fifty hats sailed into the air accompanied by a chorus of yips and yahoos. Ducking hats and elbows, clutching the plastic cups in one hand and extending the other to forestall interference, I snaked through the mass of carnivorous bodies at the barbecue pit and was just closing in on my destination when a two-hundred-pound blonde in pigtails and a fringed Dale Evans outfit stepped in front of me and asked if I wanted to dance.