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“When he was a boy he was caught in a boiler explosion that scarred his face and blinded his eye.”
When he retired he became reclusive and removed.
He had a disagreement with Nina about the man she married.
Rega didn’t like him and so he disowned his daughter. As far as Philomena knew, Nina was still out of the will.
Nina Tourneau eventually separated from her husband and tried to become an artist down in Southern California somewhere. When that failed she became an art dealer.
Then we made love again.
Philomena would have married Axel if he’d asked her to. She would have had his children and hosted his acid parties with catered meals and champagne chasers.
“But you never said you loved him,” I said.
“Love is an old-fashioned concept,” she replied in university-ese. “The human race developed love to make families cohe-sive. It’s just a tool you put back in the closet when you’re done with it.”
“And then you take it out again when someone else strikes your fancy?”
Then we made love again.
“Love is like a man’s thing,” she told me. “It gets all hot and bothered for a while there, but then after it’s over it goes to sleep.”
“Not me,” I said. “Not tonight.”
She smiled and the sun came up.
I forced myself to get dressed and ready to go.
“Do you have to leave?” she asked me.
“Do you love me?” I asked.
It is a question I had never asked a woman before that day. I had no idea that the words were in my chest, my heart. But that 2 7 6
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was the reply to her question. If she had said yes I would have taken a different path, I’m sure. Maybe I would have taken her with me or maybe I would have cut my losses and run. Maybe we would have flown together on the bearer bonds to Switzerland, where I would have taken a flat above Bonnie and Joguye.
“Sure I do,” she said with a one-shoulder shrug. She might as well have winked.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief and went out the door.
i p a r k e d m y l o w - r i d e r car across the street from an
innocuous-looking place on Ozone, less than a block away from Santa Monica beach. It was a little after seven and there was some activity on the street. There were men in suits and old women with dogs on leashes, bicyclers showing off their calves in shorts, and bums shaking the sand from their clothes. Almost everyone was white but they didn’t mind me sitting there. They didn’t call for the police.
I drank my coffee, ate my jelly doughnut. I tried to remember the last good meal I’d had. The chili at Primo’s, I thought. I felt clean. Cinnamon and I had taken four showers between our fevered bouts of not-love. My sex ached in my pants. I thought about her repudiation of love and my surprising deep need for it.
I wondered if my life would ever settle back into the bliss I’d known with Bonnie and the hope for happiness I had discovered in Cinnamon’s arms.
These thoughts pained me. I looked up and there was Jackson Blue walking out his front door, his useless spectacles on his face and a black briefcase dangling from his left hand.
I rolled down the window and called his last name.
He went down behind a parked car next to him. At one time seeing him jump like that would have made me grin. Many a 2 7 7
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time I had startled Jackson just because he would react like that.
He dove out windows, skipped around corners — but that day I wasn’t trying to scare my friend, I got no pleasure witnessing his frantic leap.
“Jackson, it’s me . . . Easy.”
Jackson’s head popped up. He grimaced but before he could complain I got out of the car with my hands held up in apology.
“Sorry, man,” I said. “I just saw you and shouted without thinkin’.”
The little coward pulled himself up and walked toward me, looking around to make sure there was no trap.
“Hey, Ease. What’s wrong?”
“I need help, Jackson.”
“Look like you need three days in bed.”
“That too.”
“What can I do for ya?”
“I just need you to ride with me, Blue. Ride with me for the day if you can.”
“Where you ridin’?”
“I got to find a white woman and then her daddy.”
“What you need me for?” Jackson asked.
“Company. That’s all. That and somebody to bounce ideas off of. I mean if you can get outta work.”
“Oh yeah,” Jackson said in that false bravado he always used to camouflage his coward’s heart. “You know I’m at that place sometimes as late as the president. He come in my office and tell me to go home. All I gotta do is call an’ tell ’em I need a rest day an’ they say, See ya.”
He clapped my shoulder, letting me know that he’d take the ride.
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“But first we gotta go tell Jewelle,” he said. “You know babygirl gotta know where daddy gonna be.”
We walked back to his door and Jackson used three keys on the locks. The crow’s nest entrance of his apartment looked down into a giant room. It was like staring down into a well made up to be some fairy-tale creature’s home.
“Easy here, baby,” Jackson announced.
She was standing at the window, looking out into a flower garden that they worked on in their spare time. She wore a pink housecoat with hair curlers in her hair like tiny, precariously perched oil drums.
Jackson and I were in our mid-forties, old men compared to Jewelle, who was still shy of thirty. Her brown skin and long face were attractive enough, but what made her a beauty was the power in her eyes. Jewelle was a real estate genius. She’d taken my old manager’s property and turned it into nearly an empire. The riots had slowed her growth some but soon she’d be a millionaire and she and Jackson would live with the rich people up in Bel Air.
Jewelle smiled as we descended the ladderlike stairs to their home. The walls were twenty-five feet high and every inch was covered in bookcases crammed with Jackson’s lifelong collection of books.
He had eight encyclopedias and dictionaries in everything from Greek to Mandarin. He was better read than any professor but even with all that knowledge at his disposal he’d rather lie than tell the truth.
“Hi, Easy,” Jewelle said. She loved older men. And she loved me particularly because I always helped when I could. I might have been the only man (or woman for that matter) in her life who gave her more than he took.
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“Hey, J.J. What’s up?”
“Thinkin’ about buying up property in a neighborhood in L.A.
proper,” she said. “Lotta Koreans movin’ in there. The value’s bound to rise.”
“Me an’ Easy gonna take a personal day,” Jackson said.
“What kinda personal day?” Jewelle asked suspiciously.
“Nobody dangerous, nothing illegal,” I said.
Jewelle loved Jackson because he was the only man she’d ever met who could outthink her. Anything she’d ask — he had the answer. It’s said that some women are attracted to men’s minds.
She was the only one I ever knew personally.
“What about your job, baby?” she asked.
“Easy want some company, J.J.,” Jackson told her. “When the last time you hear him say sumpin’ like that to me?”
I could see that they’d talked about me quite a bit. I could almost make out the echoes of those conversations in that cavernous room.
Jewelle nodded and Jackson took off his tie. When he went to the phone to make a call Jewelle sidled up next to me.
“You in trouble, Easy?” she asked.
“So bad that you can’t even imagine it, J.J.”
“I don’t want Jackson in there with you.”
“It’s not like that, honey,” I told her. “Really . . . he just gonna ride with me. Maybe give me an idea or two.”