My apartment was a railroad flat, four rooms off of a corridor of wide-planked floors and chipped moldings. I went into a small middle room that served as my office and pressed the play button on my answering machine. Between Jenny’s messages was one from my new friend Gregory. Apparently he felt he hadn’t come on strong enough the first time.
“Bill-boy, we need to talk. Rita’s not returning my calls. There’s something you need to know. I wanted to tell you in person, but — you’re at serious legal risk if you proceed with the Kumar shoot. Call me back immediately. For your own benefit. You’re on my dashboard and the light is blinking.”
Jenny stood with a beer in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She tugged at my belt loop. “Don’t call him back right now.”
“Don’t worry.”
We went to the living room at the front of the flat. A sofa just fit inside the cove of a bay window. Shelves with too much camera gear and too many books took up two walls.
Jenny and I sat on the sofa. She said Perkins had called to tell her that he expected to reach Sheila’s parents soon. They were travelling in northern Africa. At noon she had met Marion for lunch near the small office Jenny leased in downtown Palo Alto.
“She’d already heard about Sheila,” Jenny said. “She seemed, I don’t know, kind of distracted, until I told her about going into Sheila’s apartment. Suddenly she was all over me. She tried to get me to tell her where the keys were.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t say. I told her about the hard drive, too. That really set her off.”
“I imagine Fay was snooping around because of Simon — but why Marion?”
“I don’t know.” Jenny’s voice was soft and sleepy. Her head rested on my shoulder. Her finger traced a wandering pattern on my shirt. “You have the diary, right?”
“It’s with the film gear. I’ll get it.”
She pulled me back. “Not yet.”
“Did you talk to Fay?” I asked, staying put.
Jenny’s head went back to my shoulder. She answered absently. “She called, asked about Sheila’s parents…” Her hand strayed over my buttons, undid one, then went under the shirt. “Acted like nothing was wrong.”
“I don’t really like the idea, but we ought to read the diary. It might explain some things.”
Her other hand slid under the back of my shirt, then down into my pants. “Let’s forget about it for a minute.”
I didn’t object. Her head rose and she pressed her mouth into mine. Her fingers kept working the buttons. When she got the shirt off, she went for the belt. Pretty soon she was doing things to me that she hadn’t done since we first got together.
She shed her clothes and pulled me on top of her. One long leg draped over the back of the couch and the other rested on the coffee table. With her musky wine breath hot on my face and her slender hips pushing up to meet me, everything else melted away.
As we lay entwined on the sofa, darkness crept over us through the bay window. Jenny stroked the back of my head. Her face glowed gently.
“Bill, I’m so happy to be here.”
“Me, too.” The statement felt true in both big and small ways. I was happy to have my limbs entangled here on the couch with hers. But I was even more happy to be here in my house, here on this planet. To have the fabric of an old sofa scraping my skin. To wiggle my toes. The keenness of the feeling was a little disturbing, given that I’d been gazing at Sheila’s cold corpse just yesterday. It seemed wrong for us to revel so carnally.
“I feel so alive,” she said.
“Alive,” I agreed, “and a little guilty.”
“We have to carry on, Bill. Celebrate life.” Jenny rolled over on top of me and cupped my cheeks. Her eyes were full, a swirl of pearly blue at each center. “Let’s have a baby.”
A thrill fluttered through my stomach, as if the universe was focused on us at this moment with just that in mind: creating a new life. But an imp of rationality still scratched in the corner of my brain. Jenny and I were reacting to the stress of a death. The impulse to procreate right now was the most natural thing in the world. But we should wait and see what other emotions followed this one.
I just smiled at her and said, “Do you want something to eat?”
Disappointment clouded her face. “You don’t have to feel bad about Sheila all the time. We’re still here.”
I stood, and Jenny started to get up with me.
“Stay,” I said. “I’ll whip up something for dinner.” I wanted to be alone for a minute.
I started some water boiling and some oil heating in the kitchen. After taking Jenny a new glass of wine, I went back to the stove. There were three or four dishes in my repertoire. I had some shrimp in the freezer. I sautéed them with some red peppers and chili flakes, and put them on noodles.
We sat on the couch without talking, still naked, in the dark. Passing headlights slid up and away through the blinds. Now and then a car door slammed outside. The freeway hummed faintly in the distance. Before me, on the coffee table, was a bowl of shrimp that I knew would taste good. Jenny certainly seemed to be enjoying hers. I speared a shrimp on my fork, but couldn’t bring it to my lips. Instead I just stared at it. This could have killed Sheila, I kept thinking. One little shrimp. It didn’t, and yet Sheila was still dead, without having eaten a single bite.
9
If Potrero Hill had a center, it was Scoby’s Cafe on 18th Street. After sleeping in the next day, Jenny and I walked up three blocks to the cafe. I brought Sheila’s diary with me.
You could see the strata of history in the clientele. The newest stratum was the laid-off dot-com kids, in fleece and sandals, drinking coffee to no point, itemizing their severance deals and the hardship of living on unemployment. Just below that layer were the ones still plugged in by various gadgets on their belts, gulping coffee to propel them through a day of coding, milestones, delivery of deliverables, and the general job of monetizing the Internet. Then there were the artists, ambitiously scruffy in drab browns and greens. I’d moved in seven years ago during an earlier artist phase, just before the high-tech invasion, when rents were still sane. Actually, artist types had been moving to the neighborhood since the sixties and the days of the hippies. A few of them remained, too, hair turned the color of ash. Some Hell’s Angels still lurked down in Dogpatch, and increasingly the hill was subject to the legions of cutthroat mothers aiming strollers of Jacobs and Madisons at your knees, as they did in the more affluent Noe Valley.
Now and then you’d see the guys with lunch pails stop in for a coffee to go: men who worked in the machine shops, warehouses, and piers at the base of the hill, a reminder of the days when the neighborhood was all about longshoremen and light industry. Before that, it had been a pasture called Goat Hill, with a great view and plenty of salmon in a creek long paved over.
Jenny and I got our coffee and some banana bread and squeezed into a table in the corner. A big storefront window was behind us, and we could see the dogs and smokers who loitered on the benches outside.
The black cover of the diary stared up at us from the little square of faux-marble. I turned the book over. “Let’s start at the end.”
I flipped through unfilled pages to the last page of writing. Sheila’s tiny, neat script had a slight backward slant, as if braving a strong wind. I scanned for something — I didn’t yet know what — that would help us figure out what had happened. Acronyms jumped out — MCl24, Fc, FAb, HAMA — along with a slew of scientific terms. The page was dotted with small drawings as well, many of a Y-shaped figure that looked as though it were reaching to the sky like a Joshua tree.