“Are the entrees acceptable?” I asked Hammond. “Perhaps we’d like them flambe?”
“We don’t do flambe,” the headwaiter said, losing control of his upper lip entirely. It flapped upward like a beached flounder. Flambe was yesterday’s culinary news.
“No flambe,” I said. “Gosh, too bad. You two still hungry?” I asked Hammond and Eleanor. They both shook their heads. “Check, please,” I said. The headwaiter, nearing the part of the Dining Experience during which the Tip usually appeared, mastered his upper lip long enough to smile and headed upwind, away from us.
“You two leave,” I said. “The drill begins now.”
“He’s not following you yet,” Hammond insisted, putting down his wineglass.
“The odds against getting AIDS in the course of normal heterosexual contact are about four thousand to one,” I said, looking not at Hammond but at Eleanor. “Fooling around much?” I asked him.
Eleanor got up. “Good night,” she said. She headed for the door.
“That’s one down,” I said.
“You don’t know shit about women,” Hammond said, watching her go. “You know that? Piss her off and send her home into the arms of that clown with the bad toupee.”
“Better him than the Incinerator,” I said. “When are you leaving, Al?”
“Give this fish a good tip,” Hammond said, rising. “You put him into a new life-insurance category. Well, ‘night.”
“Night yourself,” I said. “Half, huh?”
“And the house,” he said. “Women don’t fight fair. She’ll get the kids. Kids aren’t community property. They’re all that matters, but they’re not community property.” People were looking at us again. Hammond glared around the room, and people suddenly found something very interesting on their plates.
“Kids need houses,” I said.
“They need fathers, too,” Hammond said defiantly. “What do they need more, fathers or houses?”
“Al,” I said to the room at large, “don’t ask me. My former girlfriend is sleeping with a publisher.” The few brave ones who had looked up dived back into their plates.
“Yeah,” Hammond said. “So we’ll all sleep on it.” He picked up a knife and made fencing motions in my direction, to the genteel embarrassment of all in sight.“ ‘Bye,” he said, dropping the knife onto the table.
“ ‘Bye,” I said. He wove his way to the door, heading for the car that would take him to his empty house. People watched him go, an extravagantly overmuscled man in a tight suit.
“Thank you so much,” the headwaiter said, dropping the check onto the table as though it were a leper’s shirt. “And please come back.”
“If I do,” I said, handing him a hundred and ninety bucks, “you could get a terrific chance to learn about flambe.”
9
The rearview mirror was more or less empty.
It had been more or less empty for four days.
It was an old rearview mirror. Alice, my car, was almost thirty, and I had no reason to believe that the mirror wasn’t original. That made it almost as old as Eleanor. Some of the silvering had given way to a kind of powdery blackness, and there was a little continent of black, shaped vaguely like Australia, in the upper left-hand corner. The rearview mirror was falling apart. Eleanor, on the other hand, was in great shape.
I’d spent most of the last four days either watching the rearview mirror or thinking about Eleanor. The two activities had been equally productive. I had decided to replace the mirror, and Eleanor, at long last, had decided to replace me.
I pulled into a hot, flat little cul-de-sac in the Valley and waited for nothing.
Eleanor and I had met more than ten years ago, at UCLA. I’d been finishing a master’s degree in English lit, and she’d been a visitor from the Department for Asian Studies, looking into early British translators of classic Chinese novels. At the time, The Dream of the Red Chamber, probably the best of the bunch, was my favorite book in the world, and I’d had the pleasure of introducing her to David Hawkes’s wonderful modern English version, which he calls The Story of the Stone. Six months later, we were living together.
Within a year, she had threatened and cajoled me out of smoking a pack and a half a day, and she’d managed somehow to get me out of my armchair and onto the jogging track. In doing it, she taught me a great secret: I had never known it could be pleasant to perspire. I’d never understood that it could feel good to have aching muscles. I hiked. I ran. I surfed. I dropped thirty pounds. I swam happily in the love of a good woman. I also found a vocation, after almost nine years of meandering in the Halls of Academe, seeking initials to string, like magic talismans, after my name.
It began when a cokehead, his dipswitches permanently fused in the manic configuration, dropped a sweet Taiwanese girl named Jennie Chu off the roof of one of the residence halls. Jennie had been a pianist and a gymnast with a shy smile and a wicked sense of humor, and she’d been Eleanor’s closest friend. She died by mistake. The cokehead couldn’t tell Asians apart. As my contribution to Eleanor’s recovery process, I worked out who did it and delivered him to the police with his elbows broken. I later regretted the elbows.
Eleanor discovered the dreadful little shack in Topanga Canyon and fixed it up. We lived happily for a few years, me practicing my new job part-time while I earned a few more useless degrees, and even teaching for a couple of semesters, and she working on her writing and turning out her first book, Two Fit, about how couples could help each other to become healthy. It sold like radishes. Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, I started fooling around, stupid, pleasureless, meaningless betrayals with people whose names I barely knew. Eleanor put up with it for a while, and then she didn’t. She moved to Venice on her royalties, and we entered into a new stage of the relationship. It didn’t make either of us particularly happy, but it was better than nor seeing each other at all. She remained the most important person in my life.
And now there was Burt.
Time, as everybody says nowadays, is relative. Sitting there in that stifling cul-de-sac, sending mental letter bombs to Burt and watching two Chicano kids squabble over a garden hose, the three minutes I’d promised myself that I would wait for nothing to happen seemed to take a decade. At two minutes and forty seconds, I decided to cheat. I started Alice and pulled out of the little circle of faded houses, making a right onto Sherman Way and cruising in Alice’s stately fashion past the hospital in which Abraham Winston had died.
I’d been cheating on the surveillance times quite a lot lately. The four days had passed like sludge. The waiting, as infuriating as it would have been under any circumstances, was made all the more unendurable by the fact that I couldn’t pull myself away from watching the bloody pot. As a result, all the nothing that I experienced took a lot longer to happen. I felt like a particle physicist put on permanent standby until the elusive graviton-the Snark of subatomic particles-popped out of the void to explain why his feet remained anchored to the ground. And it didn’t.
Even during the brief interludes in which I pursued my own business, it took five times as long to do anything because I had to drag myself through all the double-backs, loop routes, feints, detours, and parking stalls that make up the vocabulary of checking for a tail. With my Thomas Brothers map book open in my lap, I turned into every dead end and cul-de-sac I passed, waited for three minutes-or, lately, two and a half-and then came back out again with my eye on that blemished and blistering rearview mirror. So I drove and fretted and fretted and drove again and consoled myself with the knowledge that at least no one else had been burned to death.
Wallowing through the slog of time, I knocked on more doors to apartments overlooking the various death scenes and got nothing. I’d talked to the homeless, to the extent that anyone can talk to the homeless. I’d distributed fifteen or sixteen of Annabelle Winston’s twenties, hoping for information, and purchased nothing more than fifteen or sixteen vicarious drinking binges. I’d talked to Eleanor and Hammond on the phone. More consolation: No one seemed to be following them, either.