The Burg and Other Seattle Scenes (3 page)

Anyway, when I was at the sink in the Burgermaster—a regular porcelain sink with a single tap–I happened to look down and I saw a penny on the floor behind where I had
my way back to the sink—I hadn't washed my hands yet; I may not have been clear about that, but I went for the penny before I washed my hands—I spotted another penny near where I had stood by the sink before I spotted the first penny and I picked it up. It was sticky and I washed it and dried it with a paper towel and put it in my pocket and then I washed my hands with soap from the liquid soap dispenser and dried them and left the bathroom and went back to my booth to read more of my newspaper and drink more coffee.

After a while I had to pee again and I went back to the bathroom and did it in the urinal again. Then I went to the sink. As I turned on the tap, I glanced to my left and saw a quarter almost where I had seen the first penny, but farther back toward the opposite wall. I turned off the tap and went and picked it up and put it in my pocket, wondering if someone was salting the floor with these coins, wondering if someone was watching me as I picked them up. Moving back to the sink, I saw a nickel on the floor by the wall on the other side of the sink. It was not where it would be if it had fallen out of somebody's pocket, had he been standing at the sink and had he had a hole in his pocket—someone would have had to toss it there. I picked it up and put it in my pocket and washed my hands with soap again. As I lathered my hands, I looked around, at the ceiling, at the walls, at the partition separating the toilet from the urinal and sink, to see if I could locate a camera. I could not and I rinsed the soap off my hands and dried them and went back out to my booth and gathered my jacket and the part of the newspaper I had not read yet and left the restaurant. I walked slowly and with deliberation to my car. I wanted to convey to
anybody who might be observing me that I was not someone to be trifled with, and if fact my senses were alert to anything that might happen, especially laughter or sudden movement.

I was finishing a manicure when I learned that Martin had died. It was on TV. Taping a commercial, he went into Lake Elsinore; his parachute hadn't opened and he had not pulled his reserve. That was what most of the witnesses said, though one said he had seen Martin's reserve inflate. Martin went into the water and then he climbed out of the water onto a sand bar and then he fell back into the water. That was what most of the witnesses said. He drowned. The autopsy proved that.

Sheryl, who owned the shop I worked at, looked at me and said, “Oh God, Bunny. I didn't know,” because she hadn't known it was Martin I was involved with. I was shaking. I thought I was going to throw up. The woman in the chair began to cry. I told Sheryl I had to go home and she said, “Wait, I'll drive you.” But I didn't wait and I didn't go home, at least not yet, because there it would be true, and on the road there was always the possibility of…possibility. So I drove until I stopped, and then I was home and I went inside and waited for Martin to show up.

The phone rang, I remember that. But I was cooking steaks on the grill and didn't want to be bothered. I threw up twice but made it to the bathroom each time. Finally there was no light left in the sky that wasn't reflected off the street, and I knew more than I refused to know that Martin was dead. I cannot tell you the immensity of what was taken from me when I accepted that so-called gift of knowledge.

A few years later my husband died. We had not been married long but had settled into a routine that lent predictability to my life. When Barry died, I thought, “I've been through this. I can do it again.” Barry's sister thought I was not grieving enough and became my mortal enemy. Barry died a hero. Also a jumper, he sacrificed himself to save the others in the plane. Never mind the technical details of what happened and what he did. He did it, that's all, and he was a true hero. I appreciate that, and in my memories of him I can usually overlook his love for cocaine and what it might have meant if he had lived to use more of it.

What have I learned about men? I have made my current one promise not to jump out of airplanes unless they are on fire and going down. But that doesn't mean much. I have learned this: the boring ones aren't worth my time and the others die fast.

We had lunch at The Continental on the Av. I had not been in there since graduate school, since I had lived with Willy and Bruce. Bruce had gotten married, though not to Willy. Willy had gone into archeology and disappeared. But that was another life, only half remembered.

Constance said she'd been in New England. She'd spent three years in a Buddhist monastery, which explained why I hadn't seen her for so long. Then she came back and a month later had just come out of University Book Store here on the Av—right there where we had run into each other again, by the post office—when she collapsed in the midst of a grand mal. She had never had one before, though she had suffered for years from headaches. When she woke up, she was in a hospital and her hair had been shaved off. A tumor, not malignant, had been removed from her brain. It had grown for twenty years, her doctors estimated, without her knowledge, pressing against her brain until her brain was only one third its previous size. Its removal was, she said, quite a load off her mind.

Dark humor had always been part of her. What was new, what resulted from her surgery, was some loss of memory and the inability to experience some emotions. She could not feel love, though apparently she could experience other emotions. She said she was going to stop confiding in certain people because it upset her to see them cry when she confessed that while she knew they had been close, she just did not love them now. She found it “curious”—that was her
word—that people reacted as they did when she told them she no longer loved them, or perhaps did not even remember them. She was comfortable, she said, with the distance she resided at now from old friends and former lovers.

She looked up from her souvlaki. I could feel the question though I avoided looking at her.

“Barely acquainted,” I said.

She laughed, delighted. “Thank you.”

for Roy McCready

From the ground I might have seemed

an angel falling out of orbit

or a tiny meteor aflame,

spinning on it lopsided axis,

arc-ing downward to a terrible rendezvous.

Inside, beginning to burn, I sat,

unable to reach an ejection handle,

anticipating the melt and crackle of my eyeballs.

My brain, working at light's speed,

fastened finally on the solution to my problem:

I would ride the plane into the sea,

the sea would douse the fire,

I would climb out and be saved.

I held to this desperate idiocy for an

electric moment's fraction before my plane exploded,

loosing me into hot sunlight

where my parachute snapped, rippled,

opened and set me down in brine

that doused my burns. The helicopter

arrived before the enemy and I was saved,

though somewhere in the tangle of shouting and harness,

drumming rotor blades and lathering water,

and the fearful hammering of cannon

I lost my Navy-issue .38-caliber

revolver

which,

as I healed in hospital in San Diego,

the FBI, in a confrontation classic in irony,

dispassion, and the agency's determination

to extinguish evil in all its guises,

accused me of stealing with the motive of profit,

or nostalgia,

or providing aid to the enemy.

Everything was pink that day; even God's own sky looked pink to me, except for the red of that girl's hood. When I saw her I thought immediately how sad she looked, even though I couldn't see her face. Now, of course, I understand that it was my own sadness I saw on her.

She was sitting against the wire fence that surrounds the school where I was taking my granddaughter to enroll her. Her arms opened out away from her body and her palms were up so that I almost expected to see stigmata. Both girls, my granddaughter and the dead girl, were dressed in pink. The dead girl was wearing a pink sweat suit, pants and shirt, a designer suit really, not made for running or gymnastics. Her feet were naked. If she had been wearing shoes, one of the neighborhood children wore them now. A paper bag was over her head. It was not pink but a deep reddish-brown. When I got closer I saw that it was not paper but a cloth handbag, one you could buy in a store that imports from Mexico or South America. Before it became reddish-brown it had been a cottony white. Maybe it was this girl's. Maybe she had been shot by another girl who had put her own bag over this girl's head. But probably not. Not that another girl might not have shot her, but she wouldn't have ruined her own handbag. As I was reaching to pull it off, I suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired, but I wanted to close her eyes. I knew they would be open.

When I touched the bag it was hard and stiff, so I knew she had been dead for a while. When my granddaughter
saw the girl's face, she screamed and brought her little hands to her own face. I had forgotten she was with me. I told her to go back to the car and I watched her as she ran across the street, her pink skirt bouncing up off her little bottom. I felt so tired I could hardly bear it. And so I drew down the eyelids on that poor, destroyed face, as you would close the blinds in your living room against the bright sun, and they stayed closed, though I was afraid they wouldn't.

Once when my son was in the war he and his friends—the other soldiers he was with—were ambushed. His best friend—another boy from the neighborhood, but who Junior knew only casually back home—got killed in the ambush. They had been through so much bad together and now he had got killed. And after he died, immediately after, and maybe some others had died too, Junior and the other soldiers who remained sat down to eat while they waited for the helicopter to come. And as Junior ate his lunch, his best friend watched him with his dead eyes. And my son said to me a year later, or maybe two, that he hadn't felt a thing but tired as he ate his lunch. Not then, anyway. I do believe, I am absolutely certain, that my son took his own life because he couldn't forgive himself for not closing his friend's eyes, for not allowing him his earned peace.

Maybe that is why it was so important to me to close this poor girl's eyes, so that no other child would have to see them, although it was not clear to me then why I needed to do this. But I wish I had been alone. I wish my granddaughter had not been with me. I wish this poor girl who could not have been fifteen years old had not died, nor my son, nor any other mother's son or daughter.

I found a part-time job selling Time-Life Books over the telephone. Four hours a day in the morning, Tuesday through Saturday, I went to the office on the north side of Lake Union, just west of Gasworks Park, got my assignment from my supervisor, sat down on a plastic chair in a cubicle, and made my calls. We called the towns and cities of the Pacific Northwest, from Seattle east to Montana, from Vancouver, British Columbia down to northern California. I did well at it, probably because they were books I was selling. I doubt I would have done as well trying to sell vacuum cleaners or paring knives.

There were fifteen or twenty of us at the phones and almost everybody was gregarious, as you would expect from phone sales people. A few kept to themselves. One of the latter was a former university professor—I never learned which discipline—whose department had been abolished during the Reagan recession. Another was a Metro driver who came directly to the office after his graveyard shift on a bus. Time-Life was his second job and he was always tired. One of the more gregarious was a man who didn't speak in complete sentences, at least when he was on the phone, but uttered key words and phrases and sentence fragments. He sold more books than anyone else. Still another man had been an executive in a sales organization. He had taken early retirement so he could watch the baby while his wife established her career as a corporate attorney. It was his second marriage and he was quite a bit older than
his wife. He took the job with Time-Life for extra income, but primarily because he missed the social aspects of the workplace.

I made two friends there and we would take our breaks together, always finding something to laugh about over our coffee. One was named Jerry. He had served five years in a federal prison for selling LSD, the first person convicted under the then new law prohibiting its sale. He said he hadn't been selling it; he was giving it away at a Grateful Dead concert, as he had done at many of their concerts. One of the people he gave it to was an FBI agent who later lied about Jerry's asking for money.

My other friend was named Bob. He had recently graduated from Gonzaga Law School and was in Seattle studying for the bar exam. He was a nice-looking man, tall and boyish and a little soft, though not overweight. This in contrast to Jerry who was shorter and darker and older than Bob and whose face had the marks of hard experience.

Of the three of us, Bob was the most entertaining, consistently coming up with funny, often ironic stories. One day he asked if either Jerry or I had met anyone on the phone during our calls who had come on to us. Both of us had. A woman in Portland had invited me out for a drink, but I had declined, mainly because I had not wanted to drive down to Portland to go out with someone I had not already met in person.

Bob said he'd made a date in Vancouver for this weekend with a woman he'd met on one of his calls. Jerry and I were surprised at Bob's audacity. It would be like going on a blind date without anyone having vouched for
the character of the person you were going out with—and to drive a hundred and forty miles for a first date? Bob said he would let us know how it went.