He was full of ceaseless surprises, but Lu wasn’t. She was my stand-up guy, and all her secrets were already out. She wasn’t going to come up with some new dark episode or previously disguised, dreadful personality trait; that shit was pretty much already on the table. And we wouldn’t be lovers. She just wanted to hold me and look after me, chase the other girls off. After my tour with the bricklaying cokehead, that was good enough. And even though our hearts worked in tandem, I never expected anything resembling consistency, flat knowing I wasn’t going to get it. By the time Lu infiltrated my life, I’d done enough time with the shell-shocked and war-wounded, the alcoholics and the drug addicts to count her showing up clinically alive a bonus.
“Hey, you. Looking good.”
“Don’t lie to me, Cookie.”
“Really?”
“No. Lie to me. Buy me a drink.”
I lent her money and everyone told me I was crazy. Well, of course I was. The years since I’d left Montana had fallen well short of a pure, unadulterated, youthful-type trajectory, and my soul was every iota as snakebit as some of the worst ones. Climbing out of the ditch was a hit-or-miss proposition, and even though I was working on it, down was still a hell of a lot easier way to go than up. Lu was my reflection some of those days, and sometimes it scared me half to death.
• • •
We get through the weeklong autumn heat wave in Sid’s flat, and whatever atmospheric front brought it in disappears back out to sea. Everyone goes a little crazy when it gets steamy like that, and Lu’s even crazier than normal with the early arrival of hot flashes, brought on by the weather — she likes to believe — but more probably by the whiskey and the drugs. The hot flashes prove she’s a girl too, but she adamantly denies it. That’s something she left in the rearview in Indiana, back there with the gropey uncles, the cousins she says stank like sour milk and lighter fluid.
A little fresh fog cat-foots east from the City. Lu hugs herself and shivers when I say the part about the cat’s feet. I tell her about the poem Carl Sandburg wrote and she says, “You’re so smart, Cookie. How’d you get to be so smart?”
“I’m not,” I tell her. “I just read a lot. I have a lot of books.”
“Books,” she says, the tone of her voice signaling something irrefutable, as if she’s just realized a few things are that simple and no one is going to talk her out of it now. I don’t tell her that even in my life nothing is that simple; that when we lost Mick I inherited those books, and only barely had the good sense not to throw them into the ocean when I first got to California, when I realized no god had any intention of answering my questions — here, or in a horizon-to-horizon wheat field under the three-hundred-sixty-degree Montana sky, or anywhere else, from what I’d been able to determine.
The end of the week I have to go back to work, but Lu says she’s okay, and she has been keeping it together pretty well. Her eyes are clear, and the shakes have subsided to barely noticeable. She’s back to dressing like a gentleman. When she’s on, Lu is remarkably fastidious about what she wears, mostly tailored men’s britches and pressed white shirts. Sometimes a French racing cap, sometimes a derby. She’s pretty cute, but that is something I am not allowed to say with my actual voice.
She watches me dress, does a quick pen-and-ink of me standing by the bathtub in my slip, pulling my Friday-night-only stockings on, grimacing at the torture of them, but she doesn’t draw that part. The sketch is all black and white, until she colors the windows in red and orange, with crayons gripped in her fist like she’s wielding an ice pick. She makes it look like the world outside is burning, and then finds a small strip of brown velvet somewhere and ties it into my hair.
Since I close at two and the subway stops running at twelve, Lu has to come get me after work. We’re both driving one car these days, a car I bought but that somehow we both own and she has christened Alice. Alice is a 1969 baby-blue, four-barrel 383 Plymouth Fury that Lu just had to have, and if nothing major goes wrong, I can usually keep her running myself.
After we finish stocking the beer, washing the glasses, and sweeping the floor, we shoot a quiet game of pool and blaze out of town. Looking back from the Bay Bridge, the city behind us is all smoky pink with sodium-vapor light radiating up into the clouds, refracted through the fog. Lu drives, cabbie-fast and maniacally as always, and I lean out the window to shotgun the briny-smelling breeze into my lungs. I look west into the darkness, and see incomprehensible, ceaseless ocean, clear to Asia and back. Miles and miles. Really far and really deep. Lu says, “You ever think about jumping, Cook?”
“Never,” I say, and I’m not really lying. I don’t think about jumping, but I do think about falling — wonder for how long I could make it feel like flying — but I’m never going to get close enough to the edge to do any of those things. Seems silly to have the conversation at all, in that case.
“I don’t believe you,” Lu says, downshifting into second to pass a semi on the right, just before the lane ends. He has to brake to let us in and yanks on the air horn. It’s really loud.
“It’s hardly going to matter if you drive us off a bridge.”
“Oh, be quiet, Cookie. Have I ever killed us?”
Oakland is still awake when we get back. Even though we’re pretty close to the relative sanity of Berkeley, there are still a few young Turks hanging out, waving come-hither dime bags at us, watching just a little longer than maybe they’d watch a couple of guys driving through. Lu doesn’t look anywhere but straight ahead, doesn’t blink, smile, cuss, or nod. When we get to the flat, she throws herself through the door and onto the center of the bed like she’s just escaped a ravenous tiger.
“Jesus Christ. Maybe you need to blindfold me.”
“You’d have to let me drive.” I know what is called for here is not a joke, but it’s been a long night, and maybe I think I can make her laugh.
She throws the keys at me, hard. I duck and they hit the wall. “Not funny,” she says, her voice close to cracking. Hearing it surprises me.
“Sorry. I’m tired.” I sit down next to her, pick her hand up, and feel her pulse. It’s going about a million miles an hour. “Criminy.” I put my head on her chest and listen while her heart slows to a semi-normal speed.
I’m nearly asleep there when she says, “You want to check my teeth too?”
I sit up. “No. I want to go to bed. But you’re going to have to give me some more room.”
“Were you always this much of a pain in the ass?”
“I reckon.”
“It’s a wonder your mother didn’t drown you in the horse trough.”
“My mother loves me.” Last time I checked. Which was a while ago.
“So you say.” She turns over onto her stomach and spreads her arms wide across the bedspread, her face mashed into the pillow. She says something, but it’s impossible to tell what.
“Speak English.”
She turns her head to one side. “Don’t let me go, Cook.”
I take the ribbon out of my hair, tie it twice around her wrist. “There. Now you are in my custody. You can’t escape.”
At five, it is just beginning to get light. Sirens and dogs howl somewhere not far from here. I crawl under one of Lu’s outstretched arms, and when I wake up hours later she’s gone. All her shit and some of mine: the car, the cigarettes, gone. It’s noon, and the steps and the sidewalk are lined with wilting crimson bougainvillea petals. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with these? Goddamn it, Lu.” I am out of words. I pick up a handful of the red petals and hold them until a breeze comes and blows them out of my hand. Inside I press the same hand flat into her side of the bed. I’d swear it’s still warm, sweaty in the indent her body left. I pack my little kit bag, put Sid’s key under the mat, and head for the subway.