Dorothy moved her chair against the bed and rested her arm down by his legs. Her hair was the color of wheat just before it was harvested. The white blouse had a scoop neck, a scalloped row of blue cornflowers that perfectly matched her eyes. Freckles on a tan bosom. He found he couldn’t stop taking her in, like the air he breathed. ‘I’m staring.’
She laughed, more sunlight. ‘I’d stare too if I’d been blind yesterday.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He always felt apologetic about this damn disease. ‘I didn’t mean to get anybody involved in all this. Don’t feel like you have to come visit. I’m okay.’
‘It is a terrible inconvenience.’ Was she teasing him? ‘I was just saying to Maury today, ’I guess I’ve got to go visit that awful Jeff Elliot again. He is really making my life difficult, going blind in our office like that.‘
‘I was just saying -’
‘I know what you were saying. And it’s silly.’ She patted his leg. ‘Are they feeding you all right here?’
He tried to remember. ‘I guess so. I must have had something. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be out tomorrow anyway. They just wanted to observe me for the day.’
‘Kaiser,’ she said. ‘Keep those beds empty. You never know when someone might need one.’
‘It’s okay,’ he repeated. ‘All I need is steroids. I don’t need to be in the hospital.’
‘You need food.’
‘I guess so. I never really thought about it.’
‘You never think about food? I think about food all the time.’
His eyes traveled down over her slim body. ‘Where do you put it?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I put it. Now who’s picking you up when you leave here? How are you getting home?’
He hadn’t thought about that, either. He supposed he’d take a cab. He hoped his car was still parked in one of the handicapped stalls behind the Hall of Justice.
‘Okay, it’s settled then. I’m coming by tomorrow, taking you home, and cooking you a meal. After that, you’ve just got to stop bothering me.’ She stood up, leaned over and kissed him. ‘Don’t get fresh,’ she said, then was gone.
Hardy reflected, not for the first time, that he was too much in touch with himself. Wouldn’t it be nice to sometimes be able to truly fool yourself? Not know every motive you had down to about six levels.
He wanted to see Celine, and not in his office. That was the problem.
He had simply decided – last week, as soon as it had come up – that he was not going to do anything about it. It was too risky – for him, for Frannie, for the new life that was making him more content than he’d ever thought possible. It seemed to him that sometimes you met people who were immediately recognizable as having an almost chemical power to insinuate themselves into your life. Those people – men or women – could power your engines if you weren’t yet settled down. But if you had a career and a family and a rhythm to your life, a blast like that could only destroy things. If you wanted to keep your orbit you avoided that extra juice. Simple as that.
Hardy could control himself – that wasn’t it – but Celine was fire. And the best way to avoid getting burned, even if you were careful, was to avoid the fire.
‘Dumb,’ he said, pausing a moment before pushing open the semi-opaque glass doors of Hardbodies! He was greeted by twenty reflections of himself. Mirrors, mirrors, on the wall.
‘Can I help you?’
The name tag said ‘Chris,’ and Chris, Hardy thought, was the Bionic Man. Muscles on his muscles, green Hardbodies! headband, yellow Hardbodies! t-shirt, black Spandex shorts. Wristbands on both wrists. Perfect shiny black Beatle-length hair. Behind the long counter he could see three girls and four guys, all from the same mold as Chris.
‘I’m meeting somebody,’ he said.
‘Sure, no problem,’ Chris said. ‘We got a pager at the desk here.’
He heard her name called while he waited on a padded stool. There weren’t any chairs, only stools. And little mushroom tables with magazines on them: City Sports, Triathloner, Maximum Steel, The Competitive Edge. There was music playing, heavy-beat stuff. He heard what sounded like a lot of basketballs getting dribbled on a wooden floor.
The place already seemed packed, and people were filing by him as though they were giving away money in the back room.
Suddenly, though he jogged four or five days a week, he felt old and flabby. Everybody in here was under thirty, except for the ones who were fifty and looked better than Hardy figured he had at twenty.
And Celine, who wasn’t anywhere near fifty and looked better than any of the twenties, even with a good sweat up. Especially, perhaps, with a good sweat up. A blue sweatband held her hair back, a towel was draped around her neck. She wore a fluorescent blue Spandex halter top soaked dark between her breasts. The bare skin of her stomach gleamed wet and hard. The leotard bottoms rose over her hips at the sides and dipped well below her navel in the front. A Spandex bikini bottom matched her top. White Reeboks.
He was standing almost before he was aware of it. They were shaking hands, hers wet and powdery. She brushed his cheek with her lips, then wiped the slight moisture from the side of his mouth. ‘Sorry. Thank you for coming down.’
Hardy stood, wanting to rub the spot on his cheek. Fire burns.
‘I feel a little funny here,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t my natural environment, especially dressed like this.’
She took him in. ‘You look fine.’
‘Is there someplace to talk?’
Celine told him there was a juice bar on the second floor. Would that be all right? Hardy followed her up a wide banistered granite staircase to the upstairs lobby, the entire space bordered by hi-tech metallic instruments of torture – exercycles, Climb-Masters, rowing machines, treadmills. Each was in use. You couldn’t avoid the panting, the noise of thirty sets of whirring gears, occasionally a moan or a grunt. Beyond the machines, the glass wall to the outside showed off another of the city’s famous views – Alcatraz, Angel Island, Marin County. You could see where the fog abruptly ended a mile or so inside the Golden Gate.
The juice bar was about as intimate as a railroad station, but at least the noise level was lower. The aerobic music wasn’t pumped in here, although it did leak from the lobby. Celine ordered some type of a shake that the perfect specimen behind the bar poured a bunch of powders into. Hardy thought he’d stick with some bottled water; he paid $4.75 for the two drinks.
They sat at a low table in the corner of the room where the glass wall met brick. ‘Do you come here a lot?’ Hardy asked.
‘Sometimes it’s like I live here. Then since Daddy…’ She sipped her shake. ‘It works it off. I don’t know what else to do to fill up the time.’
‘What did you do before?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Before your father died. Sometimes the best thing you can do is go back to your routines, what you were used to.’
A tanker that appeared through the fog bank on the Bay seemed to take her attention for a minute. ‘But I didn’t really do anything routinely,’ she said. ‘I mean, I don’t work or anything. I just lived. Now…’ She let it trail off, went back to staring.
‘Did you see your father every day?’
‘Well, not every. When he wanted to see me, I had to be there. I mean, I know that sounds weird, but he’d get hurt.’
‘He’d get hurt if you didn’t drop everything to see him?’
‘Well, not everything. I had my own life too.’
‘That’s what I was talking about. Getting back to your own life.’
She was shaking her head. ‘But it’s like there’s no point to it now. Don’t you see? It’s like the center’s fallen out.’