The Constant Heart (11 page)

“They're not so bad,” he said. “Want another?”

“In a minute,” I said. “I think I'm going to get out and stand here in the parking lot.”

“You're not going to get sick are you?” he said.

“Maybe not,” I said.

He got out, too, and we both looked at that homemade sign.

“You know what?” he said. “On TV I had the strangest feeling that the woman who was in the store was Sara. You remember her, your pal from high school? Lived in—what did she call it?—the Gulag.”

“I remember,” I said.

“So, was it her?” said my father.

“Yeah,” I said. “She's in trouble.”

“It can't be that bad,” he said.

I turned to those distant hills, which now more than ever looked like green monsters, prehistoric beasts.

“I wouldn't bet on it,” I said.

“I had the strangest feeling over the last three or four years,
since you've been back. The phone would ring and someone breathed there for a while. A woman's breathing. Then she'd hang up.”

“Probably Sara,” I said.

“But why didn't she speak?” said my father.

“She thinks she's damaged goods,” I said.

“Well, that's just silly,” said my father. “Say, you sure you're not going to be sick?”

“That's the funny thing about being scared,” I said. “It's not in the moment. Everything is kind of bright then. But later, you know, the shadows start. That guy could have shot me and Sara, too. Just like that. Bang. And now the greens on that ridge don't seem to be the same color. Darker.”

“Well, you must have done the right thing in the store,” said my father. “Because he didn't do it.”

“Do it” was a stand-in for “getting shot.” But that was my father, who was polite.

“Maybe I just got lucky,” I said.

“You didn't panic,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Not right out where you could see it.”

“So,” he said. “That's enough. It got you through.”

“That's all there is to things like that?” I said. “Just patience and keeping your mouth shut?”

He shrugged.

“I don't know what to say. Here. Have a mint.”

I took another one and put it in my mouth. The sweetness lingered as I looked at that sign.

The door of the Palm opened and a man of about fifty came out, wearing a sports jacket that was double-vented and had a belt. Could have come from Yugoslavia, Budapest, someplace
like that. His hair was brushed back and looked like an inexpensive hairpiece, but it was probably real. He came into the parking lot. A young woman was with him. She had short hair and was wearing blue jeans and a checked shirt. Glitter on her eyes, and dark mascara. High heels with the jeans.

The man looked at me and my father and said, “We're closed. Come back tomorrow. Gonna be amateur night this week.”

I looked at the sign and at the young woman. The sweetness of the chocolate lingered on the tip of my tongue, although I could still hear the sound of that shot. My ears still rang, as though the knowledge of evil had a sound. I wondered if you could hear it in places where people had died for some stupid, ugly reason.

“Come back for amateur night,” the man said. “Going to be something.”

“We just stopped to rest for a moment,” said my father. “We're going fishing.”

The woman with the glitter on her face looked at him and then at us.

“Say, weren't you on TV?” she said to me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Come on,” said my father. “Let's go.”

We pulled back onto the highway, which was just two-lane blacktop.

“Come on,” said my father. “Let's go fishing.”

Soon the stars would be out. That was the moment I lived for, when the sky came alive. What is more reassuring on a winter night than when Orion glows? Cygnus, the clouds of luminous gas in the Crab Nebula. Shock waves from the
supernovas. Delphinus. Canis Major. Ursa Major. You can't see it with the naked eye, but it changes the sky if you know it's there. Like knowing a woman has a tattoo beneath her underwear.

S
ARA DIDN'T GO looking for trouble. After all, who does? Aside from those whackjobs you see from time to time and who, to be honest, I see at the university more than I used to. But that wasn't Sara's style. And the university had nothing to do with it. She took the first step, the real step, after some false starts, in selling cars. Subarus. She said it seemed like a good idea at the time to sell cars, and I guess it was. But she went over the cliff not simply because of greed. What's greed? Just money. She had an idea, she said, to track me down, wherever I was (it might take some doing, but Sara was never afraid of things like that) and she'd be dressed in that stuff you see in
Vogue
and other magazines, Gucci, Versace, Chanel, and she would have, behind her ears and on her wrists, perfume that would make me think paradise had just walked up to my apartment. Wouldn't that just blast all that interstellar medium, all those equations, all my cosmological theories into dust?

“But you were too smart to think that was going to really happen,” I said. “Weren't you?”

“Let me tell you something, Jake, no one is better at outsmarting herself than someone who has brains. So, yeah, I thought we'd settle some old scores, and it would start by me walking up to your door, as though I had stepped out of
Vogue
. And was looking for trouble and the trouble was you.”

“It would have been something . . . ,” I said.

“That's what I thought,” she said. “Would have been fun.”

The bar where we went had the periodic silence when everyone, for some unknown reason, stops talking at the same time.

“But you won't believe the black hole I'm in now. When I think about it, I get the idea I am looking down a well. Darkness that is constricted, you know. It just gets tighter the deeper in you get.”

“You could have just written me a letter,” I said.

“Letter, schmetter,” she said. “I didn't even know where you were. I was in the slammer. Then I got out and found out you were in Berkeley, but you've got to realize what that seems like for someone able, for the first time, to choose what she's going to have for dinner. You might as well have been in the Amazon. But I had this idea. Think about that perfume, coming in like a romantic front. What's a letter compared to that? Physical reality, Jake, how about that? I thought I'd be ready when you were still in school, but things didn't work quite right, and then when you came back here I was still working on it.”

“I thought you didn't believe in romance,” I said.

“I don't know anymore,” she said. “It's like in baseball trades, you know. A player to be named.”

“So you were thinking about it,” I said.

“Listen, Jake, I got things way ahead of that question. So
I had a general idea of making up for all that trouble and I wanted to turn into a woman who would sear you into forgetting every bad thing that ever happened. And for a long time I just lived with this sort of hope, see? Years. Then that general idea turned into a specific action. It started, of course, when I decided to speed things up and began driving cars to Mexico. Not drugs. Nothing like that. All sort of clean. In a way.”

The memory of her voice, of her trouble, lingered, just like perfume, as my boots made that small thump on the first part of the trail to Furnace Creek. The trail starts at the road, and there it's pretty worn, but that doesn't last long. My father and I carried our waders and rods and a sleeping bag, and we went through the undergrowth, ferns like fans, oak and stands of pine, and then we came to the first suspension bridge, just wire and wood, and it swayed back and forth when we went across. There, in the middle, I stopped, and below the water, which was tea-colored in this section, flowed in long tongues, or like those patterns you see on the ground after the water has run during a thunderstorm. Even in the middle of the bridge, Sara's trouble hung around like the stink of something vile, like an open grave.

On the other side of the bridge, the path gained some altitude, and my father, who was in front, started breathing hard. He put his hand on his side and stopped and I came up next to him and waited, although he had never had to rest here, not this early on the ten-mile walk, but then maybe he was just getting old. But he spent a lot of time in the woods and was able to out-walk men in their twenties, and so I said, “Hey, you want to rest?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It's nothing.”

He put his hand on his side, and around his back, toward his kidneys, and then looked uphill, not with anticipation as he usually had but with a new darkness in his eyes, a sort of fear that was the color of the underside of clouds in a thunderstorm. Not gray, but on the way to purple. He breathed deeply and I said, “Maybe you should get that checked out.”

“Naw,” he said. “I just got worried when I saw you on TV.”

“Well, I don't know,” I said.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's go. If we go pretty fast we can get there before dark and fish in the evening for an hour. You know Harlan's Pool? Now that's a place worth fishing when the caddis flies come off and the trout get drunk on them.”

Still, as we went, as he took off in the way he used to, he nevertheless stopped and put his hand on his back and breathed hard and began to sweat a little. If your father is active all his life, who seems to be tougher than you could ever be, you think that he is indestructible. And as we walked, stopping and starting, the green and golden light of the afternoon fell onto the path in lovely patches, which moved on the ground when the wind moved, like green and golden butterflies on the path, wings slowly opening and closing, as though they loved the air. Then my father just kept going and I was left with Sara.

She had done time, as she said, more than she had thought it was going to be, because after she was done with the youth detention they added eighteen months for brawling and attempted mayhem, and then she got into a sort of halfway house run by a family that meant well, but they owned a dry cleaning business and she worked there on the weekends, where she took in the sweaty clothes and put tags on some stains. (“And let me tell you some of them were pretty sketchy
stains, you know? Like, if you get it in the front seat of a car or someplace like that . . . but don't you see, Jake, I was thinking of you. I had to get out of there and make some money. You were slipping away. That's what time does . . . It's not invisible but like a mist that covers things up.”) So, she said, by the time I was almost done as an undergraduate, she got a job in a hardware store, a big box, but even then she didn't think about college, since that was “just waiting in line and letting other people tell you what you know, which is that you need some money and you need to have people get out of your way if you mean business . . . That's the truth of the age, isn't it, Jake?” After all, she said, all she had to do was open
People
magazine, or look at the gossip websites, where women were making so much money and they didn't have to dick around with a bunch of pointy-headed professors (“No offense,” she said to me), and so she started a garage band and sang, dressed in fishnet stockings and a torn T-shirt and a garter belt (“You would have creamed in your pants just to look at me, Jake, and I'm not kidding . . . I really looked the part . . . ”) but, of course, she couldn't sing very well. “Not worth a fucking lick,” she said. “So that was a bust. But we had them guessing there for a while.”

“But you could have called me. Written me. Sent me email,” I said.

“You just don't get it, do you? First, I'd have to say I was wrong. When was the last time you did that, and the admission isn't like ‘I forgot my jacket someplace' but that ‘I was so stupid not to know someone cared about me.' And then I wanted you to be set back on your heels. See? Bam. Like in a cartoon when someone gets hit with a frying pan.”

“A Gucci frying pan?” I said.

“Sometimes, Jake, you have a habit of rubbing me the wrong way. This is one. Just listen. We aren't even near the trouble part.”

So I asked about men she had “been involved with” as the time went by, and she looked down at the table and said, “Well, Jake, there's a problem there,” which was that since she had dismissed romance as just some trap that got in the way of making money (at least she thought this in the beginning) and that men were just useful if you wanted to move from one apartment to another, but mostly they were assholes and since she believed this, the men she took up with proved it, which, as she said, “was sort of a closed loop.” She told me that one guy she took up with wanted a dog and so she bought him a dog, but he took off for three weeks when she was in New York trying to hustle the screenplay she had written and the dog starved to death, and when she came into the house it smelled like, “Well,” she said, “I'll let you imagine.” It lingered, too, and no matter how she scrubbed the walls, the smell was still there and then she tried to paint the place, and that didn't do any good either, since the dog had sort of leaked when it died, down into the floor and into the joists beneath it, but not into the ceiling of the apartment downstairs, although the people there were plenty angry. And they complained to the landlord and he came over, but Sara was too smart for him: She was boiling apple cider and oranges with cloves stuck in them when he showed up, and it smelled like innocence itself, she said.

“You,” she said to me, “were sort of a fetish. A little bit of innocence I was trying to hang on to. Is that so bad? Oh,
Jesus, Jake, when we used to look at those pictures and I tried to pretend there was nothing between us, but you knew there was and I knew it, too, but everything, music, movies, school, everything told me that was just a bunch of shit. What was I supposed to do? You want to call it confused? Well, yeah, I wrote the book on it. But when I came to my senses, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to knock on your door.