Always (43 page)

We waited for a light.

“If you have a question, or something on your mind, say it. Just open your mouth and let the words roll out. It’s not so very hard.”

Where is Kick? How come you always know where she is and I don’t? Why isn’t she here so I can hold her and bury my face in her hair and know it’s real?
I tried to imagine the words rolling out as bright and sturdy as toy trucks, immune to all misunderstanding.

The lights changed and we started to cross.

“It is hard,” I said.

“Do it anyway.”

I put one foot in front of the other. Trucks roared by, rain hissed. It would be easier to talk to someone I could hold.

“Usually, if people want you to know where they are, they tell you,” I said.

After a moment he said, “Is that a question?”

“Yes. I don’t . . . I want to talk to Kick and I don’t know where she is. She didn’t tell me. I just, I wonder why she didn’t volunteer the information.”

“She’s not a mind-reader, Torvingen. Besides, sometimes people like to be asked. It shows you’re interested.”

“Not that you’re being nosy?”

“She’s a grown woman. If she wants you to back off, she can say so.” He shook his head. “Christ, you’re as bad as each other.”

“So . . . I should just ask?”

“Yes! Yes. A thousand times, yes. Look.” He stopped and turned to face me, but a truck thundered past close to the curb and threw up a curtain of muddy puddle water, drowning whatever he had been about to say. He sighed and wiped the lid of his go-cup with his T-shirt, and changed his mind about saying whatever it was. “This is a sorry excuse for a summer.” We walked for a while in silence under a scudding sky. “Now,” he said, “what’s this about a chair?”

I told him about the chair, and the trees, and by the time we got to the warehouse, I still hadn’t told him about Nordstrom, or teaching my mother to punch, about Corning or Ed Tom Hardy, about my plan to buy more land, about much of anything, because all of a sudden I had no faith in my ability to integrate any of it, to plan and execute. I couldn’t be sure I was making the right decisions. I couldn’t even trust what I saw.

When we were halfway across the parking lot, his phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and waved me on before answering.
Jonie,
I told myself,
some problem with the coffeehouses,
as a maroon Subaru Forester pulled into the parking lot and Deverell Turtledove and a woman who looked a bit like Green Jacket got out: his wife, Philippa. Dornan had turned his back to me, so I said hello to the Turtledoves and led them to Finkel and Rusen’s trailer.

When I stepped back down into the parking lot two hours later holding legal paperwork, I found the sky bright blue, the air washed clean and now fat with warmth. Several cars were gone from the lot. Dornan was gone, too. I lifted my face to the sun. I considered calling him, but decided against it. Perhaps I would go to the dojo. Perhaps I should call Kick’s house.

My phone rang, but it was Gary, with an appointment for tomorrow morning at a downtown bank. I thanked him and folded the phone. Walked to my car, threw the paperwork on the backseat. My phone rang again as I got in the car, and this time it was Kick.

“Want to come over?” she said. “I’ll grill us something. We can watch the sun set over Troy.”

SHE SAT
cross-legged on the back patio next to a tiny Hibachi grill, tending tuna, and vegetables in foil, and sipping a bottle of Stella Artois.

I lay with my head on her lap. She had showered just before I arrived, and in the early-evening sun her damp hair smelled sharply of fennel shampoo. Her bare legs were warm, and her tank top had been sheared off just below the breasts. If I looked straight up, I could see the shadowed swell. Her stomach touched my hair every time she breathed.

When I had arrived, she had smiled, and kissed me, and busied herself with starting the coals and preparing the food, but although she chopped and marinated and tasted with every appearance of engagement, it was clear that most of her attention was focused on some interior plane.

I didn’t mind. We could talk later. For now it was enough to feel her skin on mine, to sit inside her smell. I enjoyed the scrape of aluminum foil as she turned the vegetables, the warmth of the sun on my face. Every now and again, the early-evening breeze shook a few of the afternoon’s raindrops from the ancient cherry tree and they hissed on the coals.

Two cats appeared, one black, the other a tawny puffball, and sat silently by the fence.

“Meet El Jefe Don Gato and Der Floofenmeister,” she said, the first time she’d spoken in ten minutes.

The cats turned their gaze, laserlike, in my direction, then returned their focus to the sizzling fish. The black one was wearing a blue-and-red collar with a blue tag. I read it upside down. “According to his tag, his name is Sylvester.”

“Well, that’s what the neighbors call him, and seeing as he’s theirs, I can’t stop them.”

He did look like a don riding about his hacienda, thin and aristocratic, greying but formidable. I squinted. “The other one’s tag says Blondie.”

She made a sound of disgust and adjusted the vent at the base of the grill.

The cats looked at me again, and back at the fish. “Are they expecting a handout?”

“They won’t like the lemon marinade.” She lifted the boning knife from the Pyrex dish she’d brought the fish out in, and pushed the dish over the concrete to the cats. The black one leaned forward a millimeter and blinked as though someone had flicked him on the nose, just like Dornan when descriptions of gore got too graphic. He sneezed, turned, and walked away to the fence, leapt up and disappeared over the other side. The fluffy one gave Kick a disappointed look, and ambled off towards the bottom of the garden. It looked as though she were wearing puffy pantaloons.

More rain dropped from the cherry overhead. I raised myself up on one elbow and reached for one of the many twigs littering the patio directly beneath the tree. No buds. It had been dead awhile before it fell. I pondered phyllotactic ratios.

“I went to the Asian Art Museum today.” She nodded that she was listening. “I saw a chair. It was simple, made five hundred years ago of hardwood, but it was beautiful. Perfect. Perfect the way a circle is, or a flower, or a river. Flawless. I found myself thinking about proportion, and grace, and beauty, and then I saw it all around me.” I held up the twig. “The ratio of how these stems grow is perfectly uniform, twig after twig.”

She was silent for a while. “Perfection is important to you, isn’t it?”

“It’s pleasing. And orderly. It works. I like things that work.” Except, of course, I wasn’t working one hundred percent. But if I told her about the flashback it would only serve to remind her that the drugs had been delivered through her coffee, and then we’d talk about Corning. I didn’t want to do that, and, judging from her behavior, she had enough on her mind.

“So if something isn’t perfect, you throw it away?”

I sat up. She was studying me, but, again, I got the impression a vast part of her was about some interior business. “It depends. Yes, if it’s meant to be a functional object. I’ve never seen the point of keeping something that doesn’t work. May as well get rid of it.”

She said nothing, and her face was still, and then she shrugged abruptly. “Well, now it’s time to get rid of that twig, and eat.”

We sat on the step that led down to the lawn, warm plates balanced on bare legs. The fish was succulent, the roasted pepper and mushrooms luscious. A Steller’s jay swooped into the bay hedge at the bottom of the lawn and sang something rude. Its feathers were radioactive blue. Nordstrom was a million miles away.

The sun hung low at our backs, a hairbreadth from sinking behind the house and leaving the garden in shade. A dragonfly like a three-inch titanium helicopter zoomed in and out of the light, skimming the sky of mosquitoes. I put my arm around her waist, and she leaned against me briefly, then went back to eating. I finished my food one-handed.

“That twig,” I said. “It was dead.”

“They usually are when they fall off.”

“Yes. But there are a lot of them. And not just twigs. A few fair-sized branches. And that whole limb, the one that hangs over the dining room extension, is dying.”

“So?”

“The tree is diseased.”

She slugged back the rest of her beer. “She’s beautiful.”

She? “Well, yes. But that’s not the point.”

“Who says? She’s old, yes, and bits of her aren’t doing as well as they used to, but so what? She’s been a beautiful cherry tree for nearly a hundred years. She’s still a beautiful cherry tree.”

“No cherries for a year or more, though, I imagine.”

“When women get old and stop producing babies, do you think they should be hacked off at the knees and thrown in a pit?” I stared. Her eyes were inimical, hard, as they had been that first time, when she had thought I was attacking Rusen. Then they glimmered with tears and she turned away and wiped at them with her fist. “Shit.”

"Kick ...” I reviewed the conversation in my head. “I’m sorry. About the cherries.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s not about the fucking cherries!”

“What—” But she stood up and cut me off.

“I’m getting more beer. Want some?”

She was gone for more than five minutes. I stood and stretched and wandered about the garden. A bush juddered to itself and a cat yowled. I sat on one of the brick steps that divided the upper lawn from the lower. The sun was going down. The side of Queen Anne began to twinkle.

She came out with her beer and sat next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her.

I cleared my throat. “Kick.”

“Give me a few minutes, okay?”

“All right.”

I kissed her bare shoulder—very slightly salty. I should have bought her those pearls.

“What did you do today?” she said eventually. “Just tell me about your day. Distract me.”

She didn’t mean,
Tell me about the bad things that happened.
“I talked to Floo—to Rusen and Finkel. They want me to invest in the production.”

“And will you?”

“You’ve done a lot of film. What do you think of it as an investment?”

“Realistically, it’s hopeless.”

“But?”

“But now the asshole director is gone, Rusen is doing an incredible job. I’ve seen some of the rough edit, and some of his ideas for the new finale. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”

“But?”

“But, okay, here’s the thing. As a movie, it won’t ever be a success, but it could go to DVD or maybe even to get a contract from a network. It will get people’s attention. And then they’ll hire the people who helped them make this one. And I’ll have a success to put on my résumé. You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?”

“No.”

“Hollywood people, and TV is as much Hollywood as the movies are, are incredibly superstitious. They have no idea what makes a hit, so they hire on the magic-bullet basis. They look at your résumé—whether you’re the best boy or grip or second AD or caterer or set dresser, it doesn’t matter; if they see a flop sitting there, it’s a like a big cow patty stinking up the dining room. They want to get rid of you. You’ll taint their project. But if they see you’ve been part of a box office hit, they’ll take you. You have the golden aura: you’ve been associated with success. So,
Feral,
the
Feral
we’re shooting now, won’t ever be released, but it could get turned into a real project, which will go on my résumé, and Steve Jursen’s—he’s out of the hospital by the way, did you know?—and Joel Pedersen’s, and five years from now we’ll all have more work than we know what to do with, and Hippoworks will move to swanky new digs in Century City, and hire a receptionist with a boob job.” She blew a mournful tune on her beer bottle. “If they get the cash for post, and if the big finale works.”

“It might not?”

“They don’t have a stunt coordinator.”

“You could do it.”

“I’m a cook,” she said.

Years ago, I’d met a girl called Cutter, a fourteen-year-old living on the street, jamming her veins with heroin to stop the nightmares about what Daddy used to do to her. Once she got used to me, she would talk about all her plans for One Day, and beam at me, a blindingly sweet smile from such a thin, scabbed face, but if I ever asked how she was really doing, whether there was anything I could to do help, she’d slam the shutters and get ready to run. Then there had been Sandra. I had learnt that, whatever Dornan said, there were times to talk in gradually diminishing circles.

“Troy,” I said, and nodded at the twinkling hill. “Have you ever been to that part of the world?”

“Yep. Thrown myself off cliffs into the Aegean, into the Black Sea, dived in the reefs off Belize and Australia, driven a car that plunged into the Bosporus. Did I tell you my first few real gigs were as a stunt diver?”

I nodded. She hadn’t, but the clerk at Hollywood Video had. I stroked her hair. “Ever been to Mycenae?”

“Nope.”

“The Lion Gate is still there. It’s massive, but brutal. No grace, no subtlety, just massive. And in the center is a huge beehive. Not a beehive, exactly, but a tomb that looked like a hut made of stones, empty inside. Part of the mighty Mycenaean civilization. And it’s nothing but crude lumps of stone stacked up like a beehive. I know it was the Bronze Age but I was expecting . . . more.”

“Orators in white chitons, people declaiming in iambic trimeter?”

“Something like that.”

“What do you expect from a yahoo like Agamemnon?” But she stroked my arm, leaned down and kissed it, kissing away my old disappointment, reassuring me that there was more that was good in life than bad.

After a moment the quality of her stroking changed, and I could tell she was no longer really aware of me, that she was back in whatever place she’d been half the evening.