As I walked around to my car door, the purple Malibu was backing away from the curb. One of the Chicano boys leaned his face out the window, looked at my crotch, and slowly licked his upper lip. I acted like I didn’t see him, but when I got inside the Bonneville I locked the door, started the engine, and waited for them to drive on to San Pablo. Then I lit a cigarette and drove south. The day had gotten brighter, but cooler, and I could smell rusted freighter. On the Eastshore Freeway I passed the huge parking lot of the Golden Gate Fields Race Track, and there was the long span of Oakland Bay Bridge a few miles ahead, the hazy green of Yerba Buena Island at its halfway point, a gray ship there, a place Nick and I had pointed out to each other on maps when we first got here. I thought about driving south to Millbrae, just cruise around the housing complex near the mall till I found Lester’s car parked in front of his family’s house. But then what? Sit there and wait for his kids to come home from school? Watch Les and his wife step outside to greet them? I remembered what the colonel had said about Les, that his superior officers know everything. I wondered if I should try and contact him, warn him, but I didn’t know how I could do that without somehow making things worse, having his wife answer the phone or the door if I ever found his house in the first place.
I had the slow-blood sick feeling you get with a hangover that plans to last all day, that, and hunger pains, my stomach all tight with everything. I drove to the Mission District, parked on a street lined with palm trees, and walked two blocks in the sunshine past adobe apartment buildings to the Café Amaro and Connie Walsh’s office above. Gary stood behind his desk on the phone. He was wearing a black-and-white Les MisérablesT-shirt tucked into his jeans, his belly hanging slightly over his braided belt. The conference-room door was open, and there was no one else in the waiting area. I had a feeling Connie Walsh wasn’t in either. Her receptionist hung up and put his hands on his hips. “Well look who the kitty dragged in.”
I didn’t know if I wanted to kick a hole in the wall or curl up in a ball in my chair. I asked if Connie was here and he said no, she wasn’t, she’s at court. “But she’s tried to get ahold of you at your motel. She needs to know if she should begin proceedings against the county for you. My God, what happened to your arms?”
I lifted my elbow and looked at my right upper arm, then my left. They were already darkening to a light shade of purple. I looked back up at Gary, at his warm green eyes, the real caring in his face. “Look, I’m not at a motel, I can’t afforda motel, and I don’t want to sue the county, all right? I just want my fucking house back.” I moved to his desk, took a pencil from a coffee mug, and started writing my PO box number on one of the pink memo pads next to his phone. “If Connie can come up with something new she can write to me. Otherwise, there’s nothing else to talk about.”
I walked back down the dark stairwell to the café, and I should’ve felt guilty about talking like that to my lawyer’s secretary, but it had felt good to let go at someone, anyone.I stood in the café, not knowing if I wanted to eat something or not, but on the sound system was that meditative New Age music, this very steady rising and falling of computerized notes that had all the rhythm of the respirator beside my father’s hospital bed just before he died.
In Millbrae, I took the exit off the Camino Real and bypassed the mall’s parking lot, all those cars baking in the sun, and I cruised through the housing developments with names like Hunter’s Arch, Palomino Meadows, and Eureka Fields as slowly as a cop or a child molester, hating California houses, so flat and one-story, stucco and wood, so many pink or peach. Most of them had a short driveway leading to a carport, a basketball hoop nailed just under its green fiberglass roof. Inside on the smooth-looking concrete were beach balls, and plastic bats, and dog-chewed Frisbees. As I continued driving slowly by, I tried to remember the ages of Lester’s kids, but I couldn’t. Some of the houses were shaded by eucalyptus trees, their thin gray bark peeling like a molting insect’s. Other homes were completely exposed with small flower gardens on each side of their front doors. I passed one stucco house the color of a banana and saw a tanned blond woman in shorts and a tank top lying out in the sun in a lawn chair. Her legs glistened with baby oil and her nails were painted bright pink. There was a Toyota in the driveway, heat flashing through my stomach, but I could see it wasn’t Lester’s, and I kept driving, wondering more than ever now what his wife looked like, what they were saying to each other right now. Were they making love one last time, the way people sometimes did at the end? And wasit the end? I wasn’t so sure, and I was surprised at how resentful I felt. I wondered again if I should try and warn him he might be in trouble at work, but that’s not why I’d be calling him, and I knew it.
I lit a cigarette and continued driving slowly down one quiet winding street to the next, looking out at all this family life from behind Nicky Lazaro’s aviator sunglasses, my stomach as tight and hot as stretched rubber about to break.
I GUESS I’D planned to get through the rest of the afternoon with a double feature at the Cineplex, but once I got inside the terra-cotta-tiled mall, standing in line with other people who could afford to see a movie in the middle of a weekday—kids out of school for the summer, retired old ladies straining to read the marquee—I stepped away, shaking my head like a crazy woman, the kind you see in the city talking to the air, feeding invisible birds.
My stomach hurt. In front of the theater was a granite wishing fountain and a pool full of pocket change. On the other side was a Mexican restaurant from a chain you only see on the West Coast, and I went in and sat at a blue-tiled table at the window, heard myself order a guacamole salad and a drink, a strawberry margarita. I could’ve asked for a virgin, but I didn’t.
My order came right away, but the sight of the avocado cream spooned over lettuce made me feel queasy and I pushed it away and drank from the margarita, which was cold and sweet. Over the restaurant’s stereo speakers came a fast salsa beat behind six or seven guitars. I could already feel the tequila in the blood of my face. I ordered another, my sluggishness from last night’s beer replaced by a liquid lightness, and I smoked a cigarette and sipped my cool strawberry heat. I watched people go by in the main corridor of the mall, but I wasn’t really seeing them, just their movement, their endless stroll to buy things. A man caught my eye, thin and blond, holding his little girl’s hand while a baby slept in a sling across his chest. They walked right by the window, the girl trailing her fingers across the glass, her young father smiling at something she was saying. But they didn’t look in and I drew deep on my cigarette and put it out before all the smoke had even filled me with what I knew, that Lester would not leave his family, he would stay with his wife, stay in his own desperation to spare his kids any. This was suddenly so clear to me I wondered if I’d really known it all along; Les wasn’t the kind to turn his back on what was expected of him just because he was unhappy. Every two or three years he might have a week-long fling with someone like me, a street woman he’d meet through his job, but that was as close as he’d get to chucking the whole thing. I knew this. He might not yet. But I did. He might come back tonight, but if he did, he’d be full of family pain and resolve. He’d take me out for a memorable dinner date, or maybe cook me something, then make love to me like a man taking in oxygen before he goes on a long underwater trip. He’d pack his car and in the morning be gone, only to find out at work that his time with me would cost him even more than he thought.