“Afraid she didn’t.”
“Thanks, Ben.”
“Sure. Hope everything’s okay. You look kind of sick.”
“Something I ate, that’s all.”
Double lie. Something I was trying to swallow and couldn’t choke down.
In the days before HIV began killing people, Henry the Eighth’s had been a flagship in the sexual revolution — a singles hangout, a meat market. Kerry had told me that once and I’d kidded her about having firsthand knowledge. She’d been mildly offended. Casual sex wasn’t for her; never had been, never would be. She had to care about a man before she went to bed with him. “Contrary to what you may think,” she’d said, “I am not an easy lay.”
Count your blessings.
These days, with AIDS a full-scale epidemic thanks to head-in-the-sand politicians, Henry the Eighth’s had a new, more sedate image. Live jazz had replaced canned rock, and sex was no longer the primary topic of conversation. Men took their wives there now. Men took their lady friends and mistresses there too. Men like Barney Rivera. Men like Paul Blessing.
Not tonight, though. Big Friday night crowd, dancing, drinking, couples holding hands and intimate discussions; it took me a while to canvass the place, hating what I was doing the whole time. Hating myself, too, because now I wasn’t just the sad loner, the invisible man, but a different and even more piteous cliché: man on the hunt for a woman who might be cheating. The kind of job I despised when it was offered to me professionally. The kind of job, in reverse, that Joe DeFalco had talked me into doing for Kay Runyon.
Kerry wasn’t there. I saw a couple of tall, fortyish, silver-templed types, but the women they were with were strangers. Been here and gone? Where? His place? Hers? Would she take him home with her? Bad enough if she went with him, but if she took him to her apartment, if she took him into the bed she’d shared with me...
She hadn’t. Not tonight anyway.
I drove from the Financial District to Diamond Heights, hating myself even more, and made two passes in front of her building on Gold Mine Drive. No sign of her car. Then I dropped down to the street below, parked and got out at a point where you could look up and see her balcony and windows. The drapes were drawn and the lights were off.
Paul blessing.
All right, who was Paul Blessing?
Back downtown, driving in a kind of fog now. O’Farrell again, and into my building, and upstairs to my office. Telephone directory. Blessing, Paul or P. No listing. But there was a listing for Blessing Furniture Showrooms on Mission and Sixteenth. The Yellow Pages carried a half-page ad for Blessing Furniture Showrooms; they specialized in solid oak and walnut furnishings and sofa beds, and had three branches — Cupertino, Lafayette, and Millbrae. Large enough operation to benefit from a professionally orchestrated advertising campaign. And Bates and Carpenter actively solicited the business of small chain outfits in a variety of enterprises.
I hauled out my accumulation of White Pages for the nine Bay Area counties and began to hunt through them. He lived in Marin County; at least, there was a listing for Blessing, Paul M., in Tiburon, and Tiburon was the kind of upscale community that attracted successful business types. I copied down the address and telephone number. Then I combed the remaining directories to find out if there were any other Paul or P. Blessings in the area. There weren’t.
I wondered if he had a wife over there in Tiburon.
I wondered if he and Kerry were in a motel room somewhere.
I wondered if he loved her or was just using her.
I wondered if she loved him.
After a while, when I was sick with wondering, I closed up the office again and went home to wonder some more.
I kept thinking, sitting in the dark of my living room, that it was my fault.
That in a way I had set it up — not the specific circumstances of the affair, but the climate that had allowed it to happen. Unconsciously, but with the same precision and results as if it had been a calculated plan. Loner, workaholic, lapsed idealist... that was me, all right. But no matter what I had led myself to believe, Kerry was none of those things. She needed people; she needed a well-rounded life; she needed dreams and ideals to sustain her. And from me she needed more than a few hours or a few days, catch-as-catch-can — uninspired, predictable hours and days at that, with no excitement and no real passion except in bed. All my careful rationalizations about how much alike we were were so much crap. Soulmates? No way. Her soul was bright and mine was dark — and it was possible, even probable, that she’d understood that longer and better than I did, that it was the one true reason she refused to marry me.
My fault. Sad-eyed loner with his heart on his sleeve... not such a bad way to look at yourself, because it was an acceptable self-image. The troubled knight, good and noble, jousting for justice. But in others’ eyes, the image might not be half so appealing. What was my kind of loner, when you broke him down to basics, but a weak and selfish person? Pretending other people matter a great deal to him, paying lip service to how much empathy he has — but maybe the truth is, no one matters much except as they pertain directly to him, and his only real empathy is for himself.
The few individuals he lets get close to him are there to feed his vanity, to help him maintain his positive self-image. Ah, but those few have minds of their own, different needs and agendas, different ways of looking at things, and sooner or later they begin to chafe under the yoke of his selfishness, to stop collaborating in it. And instead of understanding, adapting, he shifts the blame to them and maneuvers them out of his life.
Eberhardt... was that the way it was with him? He’d wanted his freedom, he said — from me, from my way of doing things. From years of being folded and stuffed into neat little slots that conformed with my view of what he was and ought to be? From an egotistical tyrant who was so well insulated he didn’t even know he was either one? No wonder he’d quit me.
No wonder Kerry might be quitting me.
And when they were both gone, the seal would be complete. I’d become a self-fulfilled prophecy: the true dark-souled loner, forever lost inside himself, shrieking his pain in a wilderness where no one was left to hear or care.
I went to bed expecting to sleep little, and to have bad dreams when I did drop off. Instead I went out as soon as I went down, and stayed out until gray dawn, and didn’t dream at all. But it was not a good rest. I awoke feeling logy, with grit in my eyes and a tightness behind them, like the residue of a severe migraine. Not even a long, hot shower and three cups of coffee took away much of the grinding tiredness.
At least I didn’t feel as bad about myself this morning. You never hate anyone as much in the daylight as you do in the dark, including the party that stares back at you from the bathroom mirror. Weak, selfish, egotistical tyrant? Dark-souled loner? All of those things in a way, yes, but none to any radical degree. Nor was what had happened with Eberhardt, what was happening with Kerry, all my fault. It takes two to screw up a personal relationship, no matter what the circumstances. I’d be a hell of a lot better able to cope with what lay ahead if I kept that in mind.
Another thing, too: Nobody can screw up a man’s relationship with himself worse than he can, working alone.
Chapter 14
“Hello?” woman’s voice, not young, not old, with a faint trace of an accent.
“Is this the Blessing residence?”
“Yes, it is.”
“The Paul Blessing who owns Blessing’s Furniture Showrooms?”