MY WEDNESDAY HOUSE was the CPA’s on the Colma River. There was a small deck overlooking the trees down to the water and I stood out there now, leaning on the railing to give my right foot a break. I’d been hopping around on the toes of it all morning while I vacuummed, dusted, and straightened up, and every few minutes my calf muscle started to bunch up in a cramp and I had to stop and knead it until it relaxed again.
The deck was cool and shaded, but the sunlight was all over the river, bringing out the green in it, a layer of pollen floating along the surface. The air smelled like sewage and bark, and I could hear the crows up in the trees. It felt good to be working, even though I probably should have listened to Les and rested another day. Last night he drove me back to my car in San Bruno. We kissed goodbye in the light of the storage shed lot, then I came back here, lugged in my suitcase, and bagged the leftover Szechuan food and stuffed it into the mini-fridge bar on the floor. Inside were small green bottles of Inglenook white wine, nips of Smirnoff vodka and Bailey’s Irish Cream, two Heinekens and the can of Michelob. I flicked on the TV, lay on the bed, and watched most of a movie about a man who kills his wife and three kids and gets away with it for almost twenty years before they catch him living a new life with a new family only a state and a half away. When the phone rang I didn’t know I was almost asleep. It was Lester, saying he was at a phone booth down the street from his house, he already missed me. Then he paused, I think to give me a chance to say I missed him too, but I couldn’t say that; I was used to being alone and right then I needed something I was used to. He asked if he could take me to breakfast. I told him yeah, though when I hung up it was as if I wasn’t anchored all the way to the ground, like when you’ve had too much to drink but you don’t know it until you lie down and it’s that instant right before the room begins to turn when you feel the chains break away. I was glad he’d called, but I also felt like a kept woman and I guess I told him that this morning over coffee at Carl Jr.’s.
It was only six-thirty, but almost all the counter stools were taken up with men in trucker caps, some in suits and ties, drinking their coffees and reading newspapers between bites of eggs, toast, and home fries. Half the tables were full too. Lester was in his uniform, already thirty minutes into his six-to-six shift, he told me. His shirt had neat creases in the sleeves and I pictured his wife ironing it for him the night before. It was hard to look right into his face. I was glad when the waitress came to take our order and left us with two cups of coffee.
“This is on me, Lester.”
“I said I’d take youto breakfast.”
“You did. You drove me here, now I’m buying.”
“Keep your money, Kathy, you’ll need it.” He sipped his coffee, his eyes still on me.
“You’re paying for my room, what do I fucking need money for?” I was a little surprised at how mad I was.
Lester put down his cup. He started to reach over for my hand but then stopped himself. He leaned forward and said quiet and low: “I’m not sure what’s happening here either, Kathy, but I do know I’m not trying to make you some toy of mine. I just had to see you before it was another day.”
“And what?”
“That’s all.”
“No, what?” I touched his hand. I didn’t feel mad anymore. “Before it was another day and what?
“You’d forget.” He looked into my face and scrunched his lips up sideways, his cheeks and throat darkening. He had to be the sweetest-looking man I’d ever seen.
“Ha,you’re lucky I even remembered how.” I leaned forward. “You’ll have to wear something next time though, cowboy.”
“I’m embarrassed.”
“Yeah, well—” I lightly slapped his hand. “Don’t do it again.”
Our waitress showed up with the food right then, and we both started to laugh.
When he dropped me off at the motor lodge, we kissed a long time in the front seat of his cruiser. He asked if he could stop by after his shift and I said yeah, he could. But as I left I felt that off-the-ground sensation again, things turning too fast, and I knew I had to get back into my normal routine, hurt foot or not.
I watched a leafy branch float down the river in the sunshine, then I limped back inside to finish up, but first I had to check on Connie Walsh’s progress because I knew nothing was going to make me feel more rooted than getting back into my house. I sat on the arm of the black Naugahyde couch so many middle-aged men seemed to buy, and I punched in the number that by now I knew as well as my own mother’s.
T HE MOTHER WHORES ARE LOCATED ABOVE A COFFEEHOUSE NOT FARfrom the Highway Department Depot and the Concourse Hotel. I walk from the cool darkness of the underground garage that smells of car exhaust and dried oil upon concrete, carrying my leather valise under my arm, and for this meeting I have dressed in my finest suit, a summer-weight cashmere-and-mohair black double-breasted I purchased from a Pakistani in North Tehran. The shirt is white, the tie is blue and brown, the color of steel. As I left the bungalow, Nadi asked me why I was dressed so, and I told to her the truth: I am taking care of important business today, Nadi. Investment business. She asked no more questions. This morning Nadereh wore a cotton pantsuit the color of red sharob. She had brushed her hair until it was full and well-shaped upon her head, and she had applied cosmetics to her eyes, cheeks, and lips. She smiled and handed to me the shopping list for this Saturday’s party for our daughter, and Nadi looked so zeebah then, so beautiful in her new expectations, that I drove from the bungalow and down the hill with a furnace in my stomach for what I must accomplish.
And of course I feel it even more so as I walk from the Concourse Hotel for I am thinking of long days under the sun with Tran, Torez, and the Panamanian pig Mendez. I am recalling the highway dust upon my clothes that stick to my skin with sweat, the burn on my bare head, the kunee behind the desk in the hotel’s lobby who would see all these things and give me not enough respect for even the common cargar I had become. But as I walk beneath a sky that is full of sun I advise myself to practice discipline and forget these things for they leave me also with a feeling of having been beaten before I have even fought. I am a genob sarhang, a retired colonel of the Imperial Air Force. I have honored all the legalities in the buying of this bungalow, and I am certain there is nothing they can do to change this fact.
The waiting area at the top of the stairs is small and shabby and this gives to me more hope. I tell the smiling kunee at the desk my business, and he offers me to sit but I stand and wait. On the walls are advertisements for parades of women who love women and kunees who love kunees. This sort of freedom I will never understand. What manner of society is it when one can do whatever one feels like doing? I have been told other cities in America are not as free as this one. A young pooldar doctor in the high-rise apartments of Berkeley told me this, that the heart of this country, a place called the Middle West, is more proper than the cities of both coasts: Ohio, he said. Iowa. Perhaps, after selling the bungalow, I will move my wife and son there. But Nadereh would not wish to live so far from Soraya, not now with the possibility of grandchildren. And I would miss the sea, for even though it is the Pacific and not the Caspian, its vast presence is a reminder to me.
“Mr. Barmeeny?”
The lawyer’s secretary is dressed nicely in a gray skirt and blouse, but she wears no shoes upon her feet.
“Behrani.My name is Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani. I wish to speak with Mr. Walsh, please.”