Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher (12 page)

My mother was sitting in the chair in which she’s spent much of her adult life, a high-backed, regal affair that is continually being reupholstered in a shade of blue indistinguishable to me from any of the previous blues. My mother, though, is capable of distinguishing among blues in much the same way Eskimos are said to be able to do with snow, and the current shade, she assures all who ask, is the most pleasing yet. Since it was early in the day by her standards—only three-fifteen—she had the
Los Angeles Times
spread out at her feet and about twenty of her daily sixty cigarettes pronged down and lipsticked in the cut-glass ashtray at her side.

“You’re late,” she said, leaning forward and scanning the obituaries. “Cripes, but people are dying young these days.”

“I made a few stops,” I said, “trying to squeeze in as much life as I can before the ax falls.”

“You lack focus.” She peered down at a particularly large obituary, ornamented by a photograph of a woman who had probably planted a great many fringed geraniums in her all-too-brief day. “You run around like a chicken with its head cut off. It’s the family curse.”

“I thought the family curse was drink.” She obviously wasn’t going to slip into maternal mode anytime soon, so I took the initiative and kissed her cheek. Bending over brought both the bullshot and the sore back into play. “Coffee on?”

“I made an upside-down cake.” She flicked the newspaper noisily with her index finger and made a clucking noise. “Only sixty-three.”

I crossed the small living room to the kitchen. “What the hell is this, hot water?”

“Caffeine’s bad for you,” she said complacently. “Especially if you lack focus. The Chinese drink lots of hot water. Ask Eleanor.”

“I’m going to close my eyes and name the presidents, and when I get to Madison there’ll be real coffee in this pot.”

She heaved a sigh, preparatory to getting up. “I spoiled you,” she said.

“It was the piano lessons,” I said, sticking my finger into the upside-down cake.

“I never gave you piano lessons. Take your finger out of there this minute.”

“That’s what I mean.” My finger was sticky, brown, and sweet with caramelized sugar, a taste that took me back to a time when I had barely been able to reach the counter. “If you’d forced me to take piano lessons, I might have developed some character.”

“Actually, I
wanted
you to take lessons. Your father said no. Said the scales would drive him stark staring mad.”

“And then there was the piano.” I put my finger back into the cake as she ladled a tablespoon of instant espresso into a cup and then added some more, direct from the jar. My mother’s coffee was a cardiologist’s nightmare.

“What piano?” She sloshed water into the cup, getting most of it on the counter. “Hell’s bells,” she said.

“The one we didn’t have.”

“That was your father, too,” my mother said. She leaned against the sink and took an absentminded sip of my coffee. “ ‘If the boy wants to play something,’ he said, ‘get him a harmonica. At least we’ll have someplace to put it.’”

I took the cup from her hand. “You could have talked him into it.”

“He’s a stubborn man. I tried. Got him up to a ukelele before he dug his heels in. Is that strong enough?”

“It’d raise the dead.”

“Sweet words from my sweet son.” She patted me on the cheek in a brisk, businesslike fashion and scanned the counter. “Did I have a cigarette?”

“Since I came in, you mean?”

“I’ve taken to putting them down and walking away. It worries your father.”

“And so it might. Where is he?”

“At the golf course.”

“Dad doesn’t play golf.”

“He likes to laugh at their trousers. Why is it that old men become such fools?”

“Ask me in a few years.”

She started to roll her eyes, thought better of it, and blinked. “You have to mature before you get old.”

“Ah. We’re getting to it, are we?”

She sat in her chair and pushed the newspaper aside with her foot. “Of course,” she said, putting a cigarette to her lips and lighting it, “you may have matured since I saw you last.”

“I was here last week.”

“I sometimes ask myself what I did wrong. Other women don’t need to make an appointment to see their sons.” She reached out and folded the paper, signaling that I had her full attention. “Do you still see that nice Peggy whatshername?”

I sat on the couch and blew on my coffee. “The last time I saw Peggy, I was sixteen.”

“Such a pretty girl.”

“As I recall, you said she reminded you of Secretariat.”

She didn’t even blink. “Horsy women,” she said, “breed well.”

There was absolutely no point in trying to hurry her, so I took a sip of coffee and felt my throat close involuntarily against the strength of it.

“And Eleanor. Is she still putting up with you?”

The coffee was as bitter as aloes, whatever they are. “Not very well.”

My mother shook her head. “We’re not a very communicative family, are we? And most Irish talk so.”

“So what about Eleanor?”

She blew smoke at me. “Such a pretty girl.”

“I thought that was Peggy.”

“Peggy looked like a horse,” she said. “And not a very attractive horse, at that.”

“I’ll just bet,” I said, “that you sent Dad to the golf course.”

She tapped ash into the crystal. “Why don’t you marry Eleanor?”

I lifted the lethal cup from the saucer, but it didn’t get to my lips. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “It’s you.”

My mother examined her cigarette as though she suspected it might have a tear in it. “Don’t swear. What’s me?”

“My mail. All that junk aimed at people who are tying the knot, as you usually say. All those phone calls.”

“You’re confusing me. Are we talking about mail, or—”

“You know perfectly well what we’re talking about. How did you do it?” I didn’t have much hope of getting a straight answer; my mother regards the truth as something you tell when you can’t think of anything more entertaining, but she surprised me.

“I went to Bullock’s,” she said. “I registered you for china and silver. They sell their mailing lists, you know.”

“What in the world motivated—”

She squinted at me through the smoke. “You’re not as young as you used to be, you know.”

I made the cup clatter against the saucer. “My God. That had never occurred to me.”

“Good Lord, if anyone had told me twenty years ago that I’d be asking my son to marry a Chinese girl, I’d have slit my throat and danced in my own blood.”

“Not on the carpet,” I said.

“I’m serious, young man.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you have a highly sanguinary turn of phrase?”

She tilted her head back and looked down her nose at me. “I’m
serious
.”

“I know you are.” I was touched. Like most Wasps born in the thirties, my parents were garden-variety racists, and their desire for a daughter-in-law of “good family” had been a frequent theme when I was growing up. The equine Peggy, I recalled, had come from my parents’ idea of a good family. “Still, I don’t think the bells are going to ring real soon.”

“Well, I tried,” she said. “But you’re going to die a disappointed man if you don’t marry that girl.”

“It’s not a unilateral decision, you know.”

“Bah. She’d marry you in a minute, if you stopped acting like such a simpleton.”

“I wish it were that easy.”

“Your generation,” she said impatiently, “complicates everything. Sometimes I think it has to do with physics. In the old days, in my days, I mean, things moved in a straight line unless something bent them. Now you’ve got all kinds of particles and whatnot, and something called the law of uncertainty. Well, I ask you. How can a law be a law if it’s uncertain? How can you be certain you’re obeying it? It’s like the speed limit, if the sign said ‘fifty-five or thereabouts.’ What’s ‘thereabouts’? It’s no wonder you’ve got, oh, punks and homosexuals everywhere.”

“What do you think about homosexuals these days?”

She put a hand over her heart. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Give me a break. Just because I haven’t married—”

“Well, it would be a relief if you did. Whenever I tell people my son is single, I always wonder what they’re thinking. There’s that little pause.”

“Gay people,” I prompted.

“I liked it better when they were all decorators and actors. They were so good with flowers. Now you just never know. They’re even in the army.”

“I guess they’ve finally been given the right to die for their country.”

“I’m sure they’re as brave as the next man.”

“Or woman.”

“Please.” She pursed her lips and closed her eyes briefly. “If you’re suggesting that women… That’s something I
can’t
get used to. I mean, men, we all know they’ll sleep with anything, your father excepted, but women are supposed to have some sense.”

I had memories of very loud late-night discussions between my parents when I was small, and the name
Betty
had figured prominently in many of them, but there had never been an appropriate time to bring it up. As my mother said, we weren’t a very communicative family. Still…

“I guess old Dad always behaved himself.”

She gave me a severe look. “He didn’t sleep with infants,” she said briskly.

It took me a moment to realize we’d taken up the next item on my mother’s agenda. “You called Eleanor.”

“Perhaps,” she said airily.

“Or Eleanor called you.”

“If you had an ounce of tact, you’d know I don’t intend to—”

“It’s flattering to be discussed by two attractive women, but that’s hooey and you should know it. Infants indeed.”

“At first I thought she was a boy. That peculiar name.”

“This seems to be the theme of the day. Your Deviant Son.”

“It gave me a turn, I can tell you.”

“She’s not an infant, and what’s more important, we’re not sleeping together.”

“I think you should tell that to Eleanor.”

“I did. She didn’t believe me.”

“I don’t blame her,” she said promptly. “Your life is entirely too irregular. You spread yourself all over the landscape. That was all right when you were a boy, but the time has come to steady yourself. Focus. Settle down. Have some cake.”

“In that order?”

She got up to cut the cake. “You’re a trying child. And you’re going to miss the best bet of your life. Eleanor, I mean.”

“She’s too good for me.” I was only half kidding.

“You’re my son,” my mother said, plopping a slice of cake onto a paper plate. “She loves you,” she told the plate.

“Hell is almost getting what you want.”

“That’s fatuous. You behave as though your life had nothing to do with you.”

“I don’t feel as though I’ve got very much control over it,” I said, and Max flashed into my mind:
Control is an illusion
.

“I’m an old woman,” my mother said with surprising bitterness. “Things are ceasing to work.
That’s
something that can’t be controlled. There’s nothing wrong with your life that couldn’t be fixed with a little common sense. Eleanor is a good, steady girl. Your children would be perfectly beautiful. Sometimes I wish I could just choke a little sense into you.”

“Yeah, well, I love you, too.”

She put the cake firmly on the sink, went to her chair, and leaned down and opened the paper. The audience was over. “I’ll say hello to your father for you.”

The moon had risen earlier and brighter than I would have liked. It hung fat and full and pasty in the sky, skipping over a thin wisp of low-hanging clouds like a stone on ocean foam.

Eight o’clock, and not a parking space in sight. The night was still hot. Alice’s windows admitted a stream of dry air as I circled the block, passing Max’s house, making a right onto Santa Monica and then another right—north again—on the next street. While Max’s street, Flores, was still slumbering peacefully in the 1920s, with rows of craftsmen’s bungalows lighted up on either side, apartment houses had taken root on the parallel street. Many of them had broken out in almost dermatological eruptions of architectural whimsy: portholes and ship’s railings, abstract neon compositions wired to the stucco, free-standing sculptures planted on the grass. Others rose blank and austere, Art Deco reincarnated.

Max’s house, of course, was dark. I could make out the yellow crime-scene tape across the porch and the seals pasted to the door. A driveway, lined with bougainvillea, ran alongside the bungalow, and a row of Max’s roses gleamed healthily in the moonlight on the far side. He had dozens more, Christy had told me, in back.

I didn’t want to park near the house anyway. Alice was far too distinctive. I might be ignoring Spurrier’s command, but that didn’t mean I didn’t take it seriously.

Four blocks away, on the other side of the Boulevard, I eased Alice into a space and climbed out, my joints stiff and cranky from sitting still for so long. I loosened up as I hit the sidewalk, and by the time I’d reached the lights of the main street I was walking like a more or less upright primate. A pair of latex gloves, pulled from a box of fifty I’d bought on the way, bulged uncomfortably in my pocket.

The restaurants and bars were full, men in jeans or shorts and T-shirts standing in line in front of the more popular places. I flowed with the current on the sidewalk, feeling anonymous and even confident. This was Sheriffs’ territory, though, and it took an effort not to glance at the occasional black-and-white, idling slowly by in the traffic. Some of the deputies, I noticed, wore their shades even at night. Never a good sign.

Flores Street was dark and relatively deserted. Walking quickly, like someone who knew exactly where he was going, I turned up Max’s driveway and past the house, my heartbeat accelerating and the taste of my mother’s coffee sharp and sour in the back of my throat. I found the gate in the center of the shoulder-high chain-link fence, wincing as it squealed open. This was not something I would be able to explain if a patrol car spotted me.

Roses lifted pale faces to the moon, and the breeze, a real fire breeze blown down from the desert, stirred the tendrils of the pepper tree that arched high above the yard. The tree soaked up the moon’s light, and I had to grapple in my pockets for the little medical flashlight, the size of a ballpoint pen, I’d taken from Alice’s dash compartment. Then I slipped into the latex gloves.