Erased From Memory (25 page)

“Hartdale?” he inquires. “What’s that?”

I give him a hooded look.

“Hart-dale.” He fools with his napkin, twisting and untwisting it, doing a pretty good Gollum handwringing imitation. “Hates the horrid Hartdale.”

“Cut it out.”

“What? My liver? Cut out my liver?”

“Scott, stop it. Why do you think you hate the Hartdale?”

“Sweetheart, I don’t just think I hate it, you try yearning and scheming and leching for something and waking up at night in a cold sweat because you’re never going to get that or anything else and you’ll go off to the next world and no one will have the faintest idea you were ever here. And then ...”

“Yes?”

“And then you learn all you have to do is kiss Egon’s ass.”

“Bullshit. Egon’s not that important.”

“He’s an example. Maybe he is important. How the hell do I know. One day I’m working away the best I know how, a little brainwork here, a little cheating there, just like everybody, no particular results. And all of a sudden there’s an explosion and a shift in the time-space continuum and . . .”

“And you’re famous?”

“No. Prospectively famous. It’s guaranteed. Certified . . . platinum card.”

He doesn’t spill his glass, although he looks as if he’s going to. He tilts it and then sets it down fairly carefully and puts his head in his hands.

“What you want,” he says, not very clearly, “is supposed to be the best and you think you’re the best and you’ve got to have it. And then something happens—a couple of things happen . . . The sort of events that . . . Oh,
shit
.

“Nothing specific. Just life,” he mutters into his cupped hands.

Bro, I think, you aren’t getting away with that,
Just life
. It was something big and specific. Nobody is ready to shop the Hartdale because of free-floating world-weariness.

I reach out and touch his wrist. After a minute he grabs on to me with the other hand. He says, “I’m ordering another bottle.”

 
 
Chardonnay is okay, I think, if it’s not too sweet. This one is dry.

After a while and a spot of bottle-opening, he himself reverts to the topic. “So suddenly it seems completely phony and you think you’re chasing the—what is it?”

“The bluebird of happiness?”

He shakes his head. “Something that turns into something else.”

“A pot of gold.”

He’s gloomy. “That just disappeared?”

“Well, it was at the foot of the rainbow and you know about rainbows.”

“N’yaa.” He refills our glasses. “What I want is the metaphor where it doesn’t exactly disappear; it’s still there but you suddenly think,
What is this anyway, what the hell is it worth, look at it, how crumby and grubby it is, why was I chasing it?
”

I don’t tell Scott, “But the Hartdale? How can you, even after a bad night, think that about the Hartdale?” I know that I, as the noncompetitor listening to Scott’s story, am supposed be above it all. But let’s face it: I’m a child of our society. I grew up right here, in our crumby, grubby culture. There’s not a chance in the world of it happening, but I’d give my eye teeth to be on the short list for the Hartdale.

By the time we depart Carmel, both of us are pretty far into the chardonnay. Perhaps Scott should not be driving, but then, neither should I. I let him go ahead and rev up and we strap ourselves in, both of us wobbly. The moon is out in its crescent guise, some stars are arrayed. And I have my agenda planned. I am going to wait until we are moderately well along the way, say eight or ten miles, and then I am going to broach the subject of Danielle.

“ ‘I went down to Saint James Infirmary,’ ” I begin, filling in time, but also touching on my topic, yesterday’s love.

Scott says I have a nice voice but it would be terrific if I could keep a tune. I try another lament. “ ‘Give me one for my baby and one more for . . .’ ”

“For God’s sake, cool it,” Scott instructs.

So okay, maybe I touched a nerve. I let five minutes go by until we’re beyond most of the lights and distractions. We’re on the four-lane highway that will eventually hit State One. The wind whips, but the night is friendly; it’s not cold. “Tell me about Danielle,” I say.

“Good God. Why?”

“I’m curious. How old was she? How did you meet her?”

“Cut it out. What’s Danielle to you or you to Danielle?”

“Don’t quote.”

“Danielle was a pretty girl I was in college with. Why do you care?”

“You talked about her; Rita did, too; so does my dad; so does Egon. Everybody mentions her, but nobody actually says anything.”

“So, forget it. She was just somebody.”

“Somebody important.”

“Just somebody.”

“And I saw a picture of her.”

“A picture? What picture?”

“A shot of all the gang on a dig. She was in it.”

“Oh. That picture.”

“She was nice-looking.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Long blond hair. Good shape.”

“Listen, what the hell are you doing?”

“And,” I pursue my advantage, “Rita’s boyfriend had a picture of her.”

“Rita’s boyfriend? Who the fuck is Rita’s boyfriend?”

“Rita’s boyfriend is this fairly neutral jerk named George Marziano and he had a studio picture of Danielle.”

Scott tries to drive the car into the divider. He corrects and pulls it back, not doing too well. We wobble for a while. He says, “What in hell are you into? All of a sudden you talk about Rita’s boyfriend. And I knew Rita really well and never heard anything about a boyfriend and now you say it’s a boyfriend who has a picture of Danielle?”

“He does. Or he used to. A studio picture. A big, glossy, nine-by-twelve shot.”

“Of Danielle? What’s she doing?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see the picture. Rita got rid of it. Danielle was nude, though; that’s what George says.”

Scott tries now to drive the car into the right-hand lane of traffic. He says, “Christ crucified. Cut this out right now. Quit talking about Danielle.”

“You’d better pull over,” I instruct.

“I won’t pull over. I have no intention of doing so.”

The car is wobbling irritatedly. The highway has almost reached the side road that leads to State Highway 101, which we don’t want, but where there is a traffic island with a gas station and a sign that reads, COFFEE—SNAX.

“Pull over,” I say, “we’ll get coffee. I could sure use some.”

“No.”

“Yes,” I say. “Please.”

To my total amazement this works. Maybe I sound sufficiently humble and nice. Maybe he really does want to talk about Danielle. Or to find out what I know about her. He negotiates the lane traversal with only a couple of close calls and we skid, tires protesting, into Mack’s Crossing—Gas.

Nobody’s around who looks like Mack. Gas is dispensed by machine and so is the coffee, which I can see inside in a shiny blue-and-red machine. A Latina lady in a red muumuu sits beside a large sign that says, CLERK HAS ONLY TEN DOLLARS IN CASH.

Scott parks on the side and trails on into the snack cubicle, where I can see him negotiating with the coffee machine. Eventually he comes out with two plastic cups. He gives me one and slumps against the steering wheel, holding his cup carefully upright, sipping slowly.

Finally he says, “Danielle was my girlfriend in college. She went to med school and I followed. So why do you care?”

“And she got to be an archaeologist?”

“Sure. So did I. She was really smart.”

“What kind of smart?”

“Any kind you like. Fast. Intuitive. Intellectual. Photographic memory. Restless. Why in
hell
do you care?”

“And she was pretty.”

“She was beautiful.”

“She had a lot of boyfriends.”

“Lovers. She had a ton of lovers. She had me, she had Marcus, she had somebody named Nizham, she had a couple of curators. They weren’t exactly lovers; they were in love with
her
; she didn’t care spit for them.”

“Did she love you?”

“She kept coming back to me.”

“Rita liked her.”

“Rita hated her. Reet was jealous of her—lots of people were.”

“You always talk about her in the past tense.”

“Yeah, I do. I talk about a lot of stuff in the past tense. I talk about being here and finding or not finding something on that dig and maybe getting the Hartdale and all that other stupid crap in the past tense. Danielle is past to me. She and I are over. Will you for God’s sake get the hell off my case?” He grabs my coffee, which I have only half finished, and, managing to hold two cups in one hand, lurches out of the car and toward the trash can.

And we depart Mack’s with screeching tires. We have a couple of near misses getting back into the intersection.

Scott is driving so tensely that I decide I’d better be quiet. So I am quiet and he is quiet and this keeps up for miles and miles. He’s driving as if he is still really angry. Furious, you could say. Snapping the steering wheel back and forth. There’s almost no other traffic, but after we leave the towns behind us, the road gets very narrow and there is always that invisible drop down to where the ocean must be.

“Cool it already,” I say once and get no reaction.

He grunts when a fox darts in front of us.

That’s the only sound all the way back to the Manor. He skids up to the entry and leaves me to open the car door for myself.

Which of course I always try to do. But Scott usually has those antediluvean good manners that go with what I suspect is his landed-gentleman background.

“Listen,” he says when I’m out of the car and on my feet, “this is somebody I was real close to once and not anymore. I had strong feelings about it once and not anymore. I don’t like to talk about it. And it’s my business. Are we clear?”

“Clear as a bell.” Which is a lie. I don’t believe for a minute that statement about him having strong feelings once and not anymore. I can really recognize strong feelings right here in the present when I sit beside them.

Chapter 20

“Well, I don’t understand,” Susie says.

I agree that it is all kind of peculiar.

“I have tried to understand. I think Cherie is an absolutely wonderful human being. But Cherie and Rob? Carla,
you
belong with Rob.”

Susie is in Berkeley and I am at the Manor. I’m not sure whether that makes her easier to talk to or harder.

“You and Rob are the perfect couple.”

I decide not to deal with that. It’s totally untrue; Rob and I were not very well matched. We were barely a couple at all. We disagreed and had power struggles. We had known each other much too long.

“I don’t know how I would feel about Cherie and Rob if it were not for you and Rob. But Cherie has a friend here in Berkeley.”

“Is that Susie? There on the telephone?” my father asks. “What is she saying?”

I tell him in an aside that she is coming down to the Manor and I tell Susie that I’m not interested in Cherie’s boyfriends. What happens between her and Rob is their business.

“I called you because my dad misses you,” I say.

“Oh, and I miss him. And I miss you. Yes, of course I will come, and I will talk reasonably and understandingly to Rob.”

“Susie, please, don’t do any such thing. Come down and don’t stay with Rob, stay here. I’m inviting you . . . And another thing I wanted to ask, this is special: I want you to try to get something for me. A peculiar, hard-to-get movie. Only about four years old, but limited edition.”

“Oh, I have that friend, Chippy, who has the wonderful video store. I love getting rare movies.”

“This one is dirty.”

“Carla, what do you mean ‘dirty’? If you’re saying that it deals with sex, why, sex is a natural aspect of the life cycle; nothing natural can possibly be dirty; of course I will be happy to ask Chippy for it.”

I am probably imagining that Susie sounds extra-enthusiastic about the dirty aspect of Marcus Broussard’s film. I give her some details while I’m brooding about Cherie’s Berkeley boyfriend.

“Susie will have lots of things for you to do,” I tell my dad after I’ve hung up.

He says that she will take him to the museum because she likes the museum and will be distressed to see that he is not still there.

Here at the Manor my dad’s best friend is Mrs. La Salle, a handsome old lady with close-clipped silver hair. She lives here only half the time; the rest of her life occurs in San Francisco, where she does work that I conjecture to be glamorous. She used to write a San Francisco society column; I suspect her now of doing the anonymous gossip page for the
Nob Hill Gazette
. She won’t talk about it, possibly to save being exclaimed over by the other Manor residents, who are too admiring. As well as uncomfortably jealous.

She says, “Something stupid is what I do. I’ll tell you sometime.”