The Nicholas Linnear Novels (7 page)

“He died of a massive M.I.” Vincent completed the sentence. “Heart attack.”

“Induced, I’m convinced,” Doc Deerforth said, bending forward and stabbing at the printed sheet, “by that substance.”

“Have you fed it through the computer?”

Doc Deerforth shook his head. “Remember that as far as anyone here is concerned, this is an ‘accidental death by drowning,’ at least as of now. Anyway, you must be aware that it would do no good at all.”

“What about the delay in your report to the C.M.E.?” Vincent snapped shut the folder, handed it over to Doc Deerforth.

“Why, didn’t I tell you? I’m having a bit of trouble with the man’s family.” Doc Deerforth placed the folder under his arm and guided Vincent out of the lab, turning out the lights. The twenty-minute drive back to West Bay Bridge seemed awfully long to him all of a sudden.

Justine sat scrunched down in a far corner of the couch, knees drawn up, arms about her legs. Her open sketch pad lay on the low wooden coffee table in front of them. Across the room, the windowpanes were still teary, though most of the rain had dissipated into a low mist.

“Tell me about Japan,” she said abruptly, bringing her face down until it was level with his. Her cool eyes regarded him far from impassively.

“I haven’t been back in a very long time,” he said.

“What’s it like?”

“Different. Very different.”

“You mean the language.”

“Oh, that’s part of it, of course. But it’s more basic than that. You can go to France or Spain, have to deal with other languages. But after all, the thought processes are not that much different. Not in Japan. The Japanese confound most Westerners, frighten them, too, oddly enough.”

“Not really,” she observed. “Everyone’s frightened of what they don’t understand.”

“And then,” he said, “there are some who understand right away. My father was one of those. He loved the East.”

“As do you.”

“Yes,” he said. “As do I.”

“What made you come here?”

He watched her as the darkness came slowly down, as the world outside turned blue, wondering how she could be so insightful in her questions and at the same time so evasive in her answers. Inside the house, where they sat near the bubbling fish tank, the light was like yellow custard.

“I no longer wanted to be in Japan,” he said, recognizing in the simple statement both the truth and the utter insufficiency of the words. But would any words have sufficed? He could not say with any certainty.

“So you came here and went into advertising.”

He nodded. “In effect, yes.”

“And left your family?”

“I have no family.” The words came out cold and hard, as individually devastating as bullets, and she recoiled.

“You make me feel ashamed that I never talk to my sister,” she said, turning her face away from him for a moment as if to actively demonstrate her embarrassment.

“You must hate her a great deal.”

She spun her head back. “That was a cruel thing to say.”

“It was?” He was genuinely surprised. “I don’t think so.” He looked at her. “Are you indifferent about her? That would be far worse, I think.”

“No,” she said. “No, I’m not indifferent to her. She’s my sister. I—I don’t think you could understand,” she finished somewhat lamely and he knew she had meant to say something else, only changing her mind at the last instant.

“Why won’t you talk about your father? You spoke about him before in the past tense. Is he dead?”

There was a look in her eyes, a kind of reflective opacity as if she were staring into a fire, as she said, “Yes. He’s as dead as he could possibly be.” She got off the sofa, went over to the fish tank, peering in with a kind of coiled intensity as if she longed to shrink in size and jump into the salt water, becoming one with the crowd idling there. “What difference could it make to you, anyway? I’m not my father’s daughter; I don’t believe in all that shit.” But her tone said otherwise and Nicholas found himself wondering just what it was her father had done to her that she should despise him so.

“What about your sister?” he said. “I’m curious because I was an only child.”

She turned away from the tank, the water’s reflection in the overhead light dappling one side of her face as if she were submerged, some exotic sea creature attracted by the motion of his descent. He imagined they were at the bottom of the sea, puckered kelp like stately bamboo waving in the deep current’s breeze; he imagined they spoke sonically, bone to bone, vibrations batted back and forth like a tennis ball.

“Gelda.” Her voice had captured an odd quality that he could not place. “My older sister.” She sucked in some air. “You’re lucky to be alone; some things shouldn’t be shared; some things are better left where they are.”

Buried in the sand of the sea floor? he wondered. It seemed irrational to blame her for failing to take him into her confidence yet he found himself annoyed by her obdurate reticence. Abruptly, he felt a tearing need to share her secrets: her humiliations, her childish maunderings, her hate and love and fear; her shame; the core that made this bolt of silk what it was, as different and fascinatingly imperfect as some strange glowing gem. Her mystery pulled him onward and, like a marathon swimmer who has reached his limit and, passing it, finds himself about to go under with the realization that he has attempted to discover and defeat something far too powerful for him, he knew that this same realization was the key to his reaching down to find the unplumbed reserves which would carry him onward to reach the far shore.

But for Nicholas it was somewhat different, for part of him, at least, was well aware of those things which lay hidden there within that interminable beach, and he shuddered to face them again, to gaze upon their hideous countenances. For once before he had come upon them and had almost been destroyed.

They went out of the house in the summer night. The clouds had delivered themselves westward and the sky was at last clear. The stars shone, winking, like ornaments on velvet, making them feel as if the world had wrapped them in a shawl manufactured especially for that occasion.

They strolled along the beach at the waterline, far out, for it was low tide. Their feet picked up the damp sea grapes and their soles felt the brief pain of the fiddler crab shells.

The surf tumbled in low, faintly phosphorescent hillocks that seemed like another world viewed from the wrong end of a telescope. Near to hand, they were alone on the beach; a point of orange, a smokily glowing coal, bespoke a late barbecue in the lee of a dune far down the night.

“Are you afraid of me?” His voice was as light as mist.

“No,” she said. “I’m not.” She stuffed her hands in the front pockets of her jeans. “I’m just afraid. It’s been with me for more than a year and a half, this fear like a diamond shadow-image I can’t manage to shake.”

“We’re all afraid—of something or other.”

“Jesus, Nick, don’t patronize me. You’ve never been afraid like this.”

“Because I’m a man?”

“Because you’re you.” She stared fixedly away from him, his muscularity. She rubbed her palms along her bare arms; he thought she shivered. “Oh, Christ.”

He bent down, scooped up a sand-encrusted stone. He wiped it off, feeling its ineffable smoothness against his skin. Time “had taken away all the edges; time had dictated its shape. Yet the essence of the stone—its mottled color, striations, imperfections of structure, density and hardness—remained. Indomitable.

She took the stone from him and hurled it far out into the water. It struck the surface of the sea without a splash and sank from sight as if it had never existed, but Nicholas could still feel the weight of it where it had rested in the palm of his hand.

“It would be so simple,” he said, “if we could approach people we cared for without any past so we could see them without any coloration.”

She stood silently regarding him and only a slight tremor along her neck told him that she had heard.

“But we can’t,” he continued. “Human memory is long; it’s after all what brings us together, what causes that peculiar tingling, sometimes, when we first meet, like a faint but unmistakable brush of recognition—of what? A kindred spirit, perhaps. An aura. It has many names. It exists, invisible but unallayed for all that.” He paused. “Did you feel it when we met?”

“I felt—something. Yes.” Her thumb stroked the back of his hand, tracing the lines of the bones there. “A spark from a flame.” She looked down at her feet, at the damp black sand, at the rushing water. “I’m afraid to trust you.” Her head came up abruptly as if she had made some decision and was now determined to adhere to it. “My men have been such bastards and—I did the picking, after all….”

“How can I be any different, is that it?”

“But you are different, Nick. I can feel it.” Yet she took her hand away from his. “I can’t go through it again. I just can’t. This isn’t a movie. I don’t know that everything is going to turn out all right.”

“When do you ever know that?”

But she ignored him, continuing, “We’re brought up with a kind of romanticism that’s so false it leads us astray. Falling in love and marriage is forever. The movies, then TV told us that, even—especially—the commercials. We’re all electronic babies now. So then we pass out of ‘us’ and into ‘I’—what do you do when the ‘us’ doesn’t work and the ‘I’ is far too lonely?”

“You keep searching, I suppose. That’s all life is anyway. It’s one great search for whatever it is we want: love, money, fame, recognition, security—all of those things. It’s the degrees of importance which vary in each individual.”

“Except for me.” Justine’s voice was tinged with bitterness now. “I don’t know what I want anymore.”

“What was it,” he said, “that you wanted in San Francisco?” He saw only her outline, an ebon figure in the darkness, blotting out the starlight where she stood.

Her voice, when she answered, was like a wisp out of time, a cold tendril, slightly unearthly, so that he felt a brief shiver run through him.

“I wanted,” she said, “to be dominated.”

“I still can’t believe I said that to you.”

They lay, naked, beneath the sheets in his bed. A beam of moonlight came in through the windows overlooking the sea like an ethereal bridge to another land.

“Why?” Nicholas asked her.

“Because I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed I ever felt that way. I don’t ever want to be like that again. I reject it.”

“Is it so terrible, then, to want to be dominated?”

“The way I wanted it…. Yes, it was—unnatural.”

“How do you mean that?”

She turned around and he felt the soft press of her breasts against his skin. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s just forget I ever said it.”

He took her bare arms in his hands and looked her full in the face. “Let’s get one thing straight. I am who I am. I’m not—what was that guy’s name in San Francisco?”

“Chris.”

“I’m not Chris and I’m not anyone else who’s been in your life.” He paused, studying her eyes. “Do you understand what I’m saying? If you’re fearful of the same things happening, then you’re bound to see me as Chris or someone else. We all do that at times, unconsciously because we all have archetypes. But you can’t do that now. If you fail, if you don’t break through now, you never will. And every man you meet will in some way be Chris and you’ll never be free of whatever it is you fear.”

She broke away from him. “You’ve got no right to lecture me this way. Who the hell do you think you are? I say one thing to you and right away you think you know me.” She got up off the bed. “You don’t know shit about me. You never will. Who the fuck cares what you have to say anyway?”

He saw her moving away and, a moment later, heard the bathroom door slam.

He sat up swinging his legs over the side of the bed. The urge to smoke was strong so he turned his mind to other matters. He ran his fingers through his hair, staring sightlessly out at the sea. Even now, Japan lapped at his consciousness. There was a message there, he knew, but because he himself had forced it to be buried so deep, it was slow in working its way upward to the light.

He stood up. “Justine,” he called.

The door to the bathroom flew open and she emerged, dressed in a dark tank top and jeans. Her eyes were bright hard points, flashing.

“I’m leaving,” she said tightly.

“So soon?” He was amused by her elaborate melodramatics and, too, he did not quite believe her after all.

“You bastard! You’re like all the rest!” She turned toward the hall.

He grabbed her right wrist, whirling her back. “Where are you going?”

“Away!” she cried. “Out of here! Away from you, you sonovabitch!”

“Justine, you’re acting idiotic.”

Her free hand slashed upward, struck him across the face. “Don’t you say that to me.” Her tone was low, a growl; her face was an animalistic mask.

Without thinking, he slapped her. The blow was hard enough so that she reeled backward against the wall. Immediately, his heart broke and he said her name softly and she came into his arms, her open lips against the tendons of his neck, her hot tears scalding his flesh; she stroked the back of his head.

He picked her up and carried her to the rumpled bed and they made violent love for a very long time.

Afterward, with her lithe arms about him, her legs twined with his, he said quite seriously, “That will never happen again. Never.”

“Never,” she breathed, echoing him.

He heard the phone ringing in his sleep and drew himself up through the layers from delta to beta to alpha. Just as he awoke, the muscles in his stomach tightened. He turned over and reached for the receiver; beside him, Justine stirred.

“Hello?” His voice sounded furry.

Justine put her arm across his chest; even her nails were warm.

“Hi! It’s Vincent.” There was a pause. “Say, am I disturbing you?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Sorry, buddy.”

There was only a singing on the line and he woke up. Vincent was too much a Japanese to intrude yet he would not be calling this early unless it was important. It was up to him now, Nicholas knew. If he said later, Vincent would hang up and that would be the end of it. Justine’s head moved into the crook of his shoulder and her face went from light to shadow, the darkness pooling in the dells.