FREDDY HARWOOD sat in his office at his bookstore in Berkeley, California, with his feet up on the desk and chewed the edge of his coffee cup. Frances came to the door three times to see if he would talk but he wouldn’t even look at her. “You’ve got to send back those calligraphy books,” she said. “We haven’t sold a single one. I told you not to get that many.”
“I don’t want to send them back,” he said. “I want them right where they are. Don’t talk to me now, Frances. I’m thinking.”
“Are you okay?”
“No. Now go on. Close the door.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nora Jane’s pregnant.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Leave me alone, Frances. Please shut the door.”
“You need someone to talk to. You need—”
“Go run the bookstore, Frances. Please don’t stand there.”
She left the door open. Freddy got up and closed it. He laid his feet on a stack of invoices and stuck the edge of his thumb into his mouth. Manic-depressive, he decided. I was perfectly all right five minutes ago, a normal average neurotic walking down the street on my way to do my share of the world’s work, on my way to add my light to the store of light, on my way to run the single most financially depressed bookstore in northern California and maybe the world. Perfectly, absolutely all right. Normal. And the minute I came in this room I started thinking about her and all she ever did in this room in my life was try to rob me. My God, I love her.
He raised his hands to his face. He made a catcher’s mitt out of his hands and laid his face into that container. This is it, he decided, what all the science and art and philosophy and poetry and literature and movies were supposed to deliver me from and they have failed. A baby inside of her and it might not even be mine. A curved universe, low and inside, coming at me below the knees.
The first shock passed up the desk and through his hands and into his jaw. Books fell from their shelves, a chair slid into a window, there were crashes downstairs. She’s in the car, he thought. She’s in that goddamn convertible. He got up and pulled the door open and moved out into the hall. The stairway was still there. He ran down the stairs and found Frances in the History section holding on to a man in a raincoat. Several customers were huddled around the cash register. Willis and Eileen were on the floor with their arms over their heads. “Get out in the street,” Freddy yelled. “For Christ’s sake, get out of here. There’s too much to fall. Let’s go. Let’s get outside.” He pushed a group of customers through the turnstyle. The second shock came. A section of art books fell across Children’s Fantasy.
“Out the door,” he was screaming. “For Christ’s sake get out the door. Frances, get over here. Get out that door before it shatters.” He dragged the customers along with him. They were barely out the door when the third shock came. The front window collapsed around the sign Clara Books, Clara For Light. His baby. The whole front window caved in upon a display of photography books. It moved in great triangular plates right down on top of Irving Penn and Ansel Adams and Disfarmer and David Hockney and Eugene Smith. A five-thousand-dollar print of “Country Doctor” fell across the books. “Is anyone else in there?” Freddy yelled. “Willis, where is Allison? Was she in the storeroom?”
“She’s here,” Willis said. “Right here by me.” Telegraph Avenue was full of people. They were streaming out of the stores. A woman in a sari was running toward them. She grabbed Freddy’s arm and pulled him toward a door. “In there,” she was screaming. “My babies in there. You save them. In there.” She pulled him toward the door of a restaurant. “In there,” she kept saying, pointing to the door, pulling on his arm. “My babies in there. In the kitchen. In there.” He pushed her behind him and walked into the restaurant. He moved between the tables, past the barstools and the bar, and turned into a narrow hall. He went down a hallway and into a kitchen and pushed a fallen counter out of his way and there they were, huddled beneath a sink, two little boys. He covered them with wet tablecloths and picked them up, one under each arm, and walked back out the way he had come. He handed them to a policeman and sank down onto the pavement on top of a tablecloth and began to cry. He rolled up in a ball on the wet tablecloth and cried his heart out. Then he went to sleep. And into a terrible dream. In the dream Nora Jane’s retreating back moved farther and farther away from him through the length of Golden Gate Park. Come back, he yelled after her, come back, I’m sorry I said it. I’m sorry. You goddamn unforgiving, Roman Catholic bitch, come back. Don’t you dare break my heart, you heartless uneducated child. Come back to me.
He woke up in a hospital room with his best friend, Nieman Gluuk, standing beside his bed. Nieman was a film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. On the other side of the bed was his mother. His hands were bandaged and there were newspapers piled up on a tray. “You’re a hero,” Nieman said. “Coast to coast. Every paper in the U.S.A.”
“My hands hurt,” he said. “My hands are killing me.”
“It’s only skin,” his mother said. “Stuart’s been here all night. He said they’re going to heal. You’re going to be all right.”
“Where is Nora Jane? Nieman, WHERE IS NORA JANE?”
“She’s on her way. She was on a bridge. She’s in Sausalito with some plastic surgeon’s wife.”
“What day is it?”
“It’s Friday. The city’s a mess. It’s the worst quake in fifty years. Do you want some water?”
“She’s pregnant. Nora Jane’s going to have a baby. Where is she, Nieman? I want to see her.”
“She’s coming. It’s hard to get around right now, Freddy. She’s on her way.”
“Get me something for my hands, will you? Goddammit, where is Stuart? Tell him to get me some butter. You have to put butter on it, for Christ’s sake. Mother, get Stuart in here. That bastard. Where is he? If he was all burned up I wouldn’t be wandering around somewhere. Tell him to get me some butter for my goddamn hands.” Stuart was a heart surgeon. He was Freddy’s older brother. “I want some butter, for God’s sake. Go tell him to get in here.” A nurse appeared and slipped a needle out of a cone and put it into Freddy’s arm and he drifted back down into his dreams. These dreams were better. It was the beach at Malibu on a windy day, the undertow signs were up and the sun was shining and everyone was sitting around under umbrellas drinking beer. Nieman was filming it. It was a movie about Malibu. They were going to make a million dollars by just being themselves on a beach telling stories and letting Nieman film it.
“She’s pregnant?” Mrs. Harwood said, looking at Nieman. “His little girlfriend’s pregnant?”
“It’s been quite a day,” Nieman said. “Well, your son’s a hero,” he added.
“Do you think his hands will be all right?”
“Medical science can do anything now.”
Nora Jane Whittington was on the Richmond–San Rafael bridge when the earthquake moved across the beautiful city of San Francisco, California. She got out of her car and made her way around the front and climbed into a station wagon full of babies being driven by one Madge Johnson of Sausalito, California. After Nora Jane and Madge were rescued by the Coast Guard they went to Madge’s house in Sausalito and Madge’s husband, who was a plastic surgeon, took everyone’s pulse and the maid fed them supper and Nora Jane told the Johnsons the story of her life, up to and including the fact that she was pregnant and wasn’t sure if the father was Freddy Harwood or her old boyfriend, Sandy. “You can have an amnio,” Doctor Johnson suggested. “That way you’ll at least know if it’s a girl or a boy.” He laughed at his joke.
“My God, Arnold, that’s incredible you would joke at a thing like this,” Madge said. “I am really upset with you.”
“That is how men face the facts of conception.” Doctor Johnson straightened his shoulders and went into his lecture mode. “Men always get dizzy and full of fear and hilarity at the idea of children being conceived. It’s a phenomenon that has been documented in many cultures. They have photographed men everywhere, including some very remote tribes in New Guinea, being presented with the fact that a conception has taken place and they uniformly begin to joke about the matter, many going into this sort of uncontrolled smiling laughing state. In much the same way people are often filled with laughter at funerals. It seems to be a clue to the darkness or fear of death hiding in us all….”
“Oh, please,” Madge said. “Not now. About this amnio. I think you should consider it, Nora. It would at least tell the blood type.”
“What exactly do they do?” Nora Jane said. “They stick a needle down where the baby is? I don’t like that idea. How do they know where it is? I don’t see how that could be a good idea, to make a hole in there, a germ might get in.”
“Oh, they’ve got it all on a sonar screen while they’re doing it,” Doctor Johnson said. “There’s no chance a good technician would injure the baby. For your own peace of mind you ought to go on and clear this up. It’s the modern world, Nora Jane. Take advantage of it. Well, it’s up to you.”
“Of course it’s up to her,” Madge said. “Let’s turn on the television again. I want to see what happened in the city.”
The television came on. Scenes of downtown San Francisco, followed by shots of firemen escorting people from buildings. There were broken monuments, stretchers, smashed automobiles. Then Freddy Harwood’s face appeared, a shot Nieman had taken years ago at a Berkeley peace rally. “Bookstore owner walks into burning building,” the announcer was saying. “In an act of unparalleled daring and courage a Telegraph Avenue bookstore owner walked into a Vietnamese restaurant and carried out two small children through what firemen described as an inferno. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital where he is being treated for burns of the hands and legs. The governor has sent greetings and in a press release the President of the United States said…”
“It’s Freddy,” Nora Jane said. “Oh, my God, Madge, that’s him. How can I call him?”
Now Nora Jane stood at the foot of the hospital bed. Madge and Doctor Johnson were with her. Nieman had moved back. Mrs. Harwood was still stationed by her son’s head. “He said you were going to have a baby,” she said. “I think that’s wonderful. I want you to know I will do anything I can to help.” She lifted her hands. She held them out to the girl.
“How is he?” Nora Jane said. “Are his hands going to be okay?”
“They’ll heal,” Nieman said. “He’s a hero, Nora Jane. He’s gone the distance. That’s the important thing. After you do that you can fix the rest.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Nora Jane said. “I never knew a hero.” She moved closer to the bed. She lay her head down on Freddy’s crazy hairy chest. She very softly lay her head down upon his heart. He was breathing. No one spoke. Mrs. Harwood looked down at the floor. Madge rolled her hips into Doctor Johnson’s leg. Nieman closed his mind.
“Nora Jane was a hero too,” Madge said. “She helped me so much on the bridge. I never would have made it without her. I had a whole carpool with me.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Nora Jane said. “I just came over there because I was afraid to be alone.” She stood up, put her hand on Freddy’s head, looked at his mother. She was thinking about something he did when he made love to her. He pretended he was retarded. “Oh, Missy Nora Jane, you so good to come and see us at the home,” he would say. “Miss Dater, she say we should be so good to you. You want me to do what I do for Miss Dater? Miss Dater, she say I’m so good at it. She say I get all the cookies and candy I can eat. She say—”
“Shut up,” Nora Jane would say whenever he started that. “I won’t make love to you if you pretend to be retarded.” Now that he was a hero she wished she had let him do it. She giggled.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about something he does that’s funny. He does a lot of real crazy things.”
“Don’t tell me,” Mrs. Harwood said. “I’m his mother.”
“He’s waking up,” Nieman said. “Don’t talk about him. He can hear.” Freddy opened his eyes, then closed them again, then waved his hands in the air, then moaned. He opened one eye, then the other. He was looking right at her. Nora Jane’s heart melted. “Oh, Freddy,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“You’re going to marry me,” he said. He sat up on his elbow. “You are going to marry me, goddammit. You can’t play with somebody’s affections like that. I’m a serious man and SERIOUS PEOPLE GET MARRIED. Goddammit, my hands are killing me. Mother, would you get Stuart to come in here. That GODDAMN STUART, THEY OUGHT TO TAKE HIS LICENSE AWAY… NORA JANE.”
She put her hands on his chest. It seemed the best place to touch him. “I’ll get a test,” she said. “Doctor Johnson’s going to fix it up.”
“I don’t want a test,” he said. “I want you to marry me.” He sank back down on the pillows. He was starting to cry again. Tears were starting to run down his face. His mother looked away. Nieman was writing it. I admire your passion, he was writing. I always admire passion. Freddy kept on crying. Madge and Doctor Johnson clutched each other. Nora Jane moved her hands up onto his shoulder. “Please don’t cry anymore,” she said. “You have a good time. You have a happy life. You watch movies all the time and read books and go up to Willits and camp out and build your solar house. Freddy, please stop crying. We’re alive, aren’t we? I mean, we’re lucky to be alive. A lot of people got killed.” He stopped at that.
“Wipe off my face, will you, Mother? And tell Stuart to get in here and put something on my hands. Oh, shit. Could I have another shot? I really want another shot.”
“I love you,” Nora Jane said. “I really love you, Freddy. I’m not just saying that. You are the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad you do.” Then the nurse came in the room with Freddy’s brother right behind her and they moved everyone out into the hall and put him back to sleep.
Twelve injections of Demerol, seven days on Valium and Tylenol Number Three, four days on Bayer aspirin, failed attempts at transcendental meditation, self-hypnosis, and positive thinking, three days of walking all over the Mount Sinai Hospital behind the bookmobile, and Freddy was dismissed, with his hands still bandaged, to resume his normal life. Nora Jane picked him up at the emergency entrance. Three nurses helped him into the car, piling the back seat with flowers and plants.
“Stop off somewhere and get rid of these goddamn flowers,” Freddy said, as soon as they pulled out onto the freeway. “I had to take them.”
“I never saw anybody get that many flowers in my life, even when the archbishop died.”
“Let’s go to Peet’s. I want a cup of real coffee so goddamn much.”
“I made an appointment to get an amnio. They said I could come in tomorrow. I, well, never mind that.”
“What? Never mind what? Cut down Redwood.”
“I know. I was going to. Listen, I think you’ll be sorry I did it. Well, anyway, what difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference to me.”
“It might not even tell me anything. I don’t even know what blood type Sandy is. Well, never mind it. I don’t know how we got into this.” She parked the car across from Peet’s and turned around in the seat and put her hands on his bandages. “I like you the most of anyone I’ve ever made love to or run around with. That’s true and you know it. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. But I am not in love with you and that is also true.” Her black curls were violet in the sun. Her shoulders were bare beneath the straps of her sundress. If he could not have her there was no reason for anything. If he could not have her there was no reason in the world, all was madness and random evil and stupid jokes being played by the galaxy and all its real and imagined gods. Gods, yes, if he could not have her there must be gods after all, only something in the image of man could be so dumb, mistaken, ignorant, and cruel. The sun beat down on Nora Jane’s blue convertible, it beat down on her head and shoulders and Freddy Harwood’s bandaged hands. “You don’t have to love me, Nora Jane. As long as that baby belongs to me.”
“I don’t think it does.”
“Well, get out and let’s go see if I can figure out a way to drink a cup of coffee without making a goddamn fool of myself.” He knocked the door open with his elbow and stepped out onto Telegraph Avenue. Seven people were around him by the time Nora Jane could come around the other way. Three people who already knew and loved him and four more who wanted to. He’s a hero, Nora Jane was thinking. Why would anybody like that want to like me anyway?
The next morning Nora Jane went down to the Berkeley Women’s Clinic and had the amniocentesis. Afterwards she was going to meet Nieman and Freddy for lunch. She got up early and dressed up in a jade green silk dress, which was beginning to be too tight around the hips, and she screwed her face together and walked into the clinic determined to go through with it.
The first thing she had to do was take off the dress. Next she had to lie down on a bed surrounded by machinery, and in a moment she was watching the inside of her uterus on a television screen. “Oh, oh,” the technician said. The doctor laughed.
“What happened?” Nora Jane said. “What’s wrong?”
“There’re two of them,” the doctor said. “I thought so by the heartbeats. You’ve got twins.” He squeezed her hand. The technician beamed, as delighted as if he had had something to do with it.
“What do you mean?” Nora Jane sat up on her elbow.
“Two babies in there. Identical by the looks of it. I think it’s one sac. Can’t be sure.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Be still now. Lie back. We’re going to begin the amnio. It won’t take long. It’s all right. Don’t worry. Hold Jamie’s hand. Oh, that’s a good girl.” Then Nora Jane squeezed her eyes and her fists and the needle penetrated her skin and moved down into the sac Lydia and Tammili were swimming in and took one ounce of amniotic fluid and withdrew. The doctor secured the test tube, rubbed a spot on Nora Jane’s stomach with alcohol and patted her on the leg. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “Now we’ll get you out of here so you can celebrate.”
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I just don’t believe it’s true.”
“We’ll give you a picture to take home with you. How about that?” An hour later Nora Jane left the clinic carrying in her purse an envelope containing a photograph of Tammili and Lydia floating around her womb. This is too much knowledge, she decided. This is more than I need to know.
“What’s this all about?” Nieman said. He was at an upstairs table at Chez Panisse holding Freddy’s hand while the test went on. “Stop chewing your bandages, Freddy. Talk to me.”
“She fucked this crazy bastard she used to go with in New Orleans. One afternoon when she was mad at me, so she doesn’t know if the baby’s mine. I should have killed him the minute I saw him. He’s a goddamn criminal, Nieman. I ought to have him put in jail. Well, never mind, he isn’t here anyway. So she’s having this amniocentesis and she won’t get the results for about a month anyway. I’m going crazy. You know that. Everything happens to me. You know it does. I’m probably going to lose my left hand.”
“No you aren’t. Stuart said it was healing. Besides, you’re a hero. It was worth it.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“So when will she find out?”
“I don’t know. Who knows anything anymore. Well, I’m marrying her anyway if I can talk her into it. I can’t live without her. You wouldn’t believe how goddamn much my hands hurt at night. That goddamn Stuart won’t give me a thing.”
“Have you heard from the kids, the ones you saved?”
“Of course I have. They write me every other day. They’ve written me about ten letters. I’m going to get them into Camp Minnesota next year. I was thinking about that this morning. I’ll take them up there as soon as they’re old enough.” Freddy still went to his old camp every summer. He was a senior counselor. Nieman looked away. Freddy’s friends never mentioned his camp to him. They liked to talk about that behind his back. “Well,” Nieman said. “Here she comes. You want me to leave?”
“Of course not, Nieman. This is Berkeley. Not Ohio. What’s happening?” He stood up and held out a chair for Nora Jane and gave her a small quick kiss on the side of the face. Freddy was in extremely high gear this morning. Even for him he was running very tight and hot. He handed Nora Jane her napkin, laid it in her lap. “What did they say?”
“It’s two babies. It’s going to be twins. I have a picture of them if you’d like to see it.” She fished it out of her purse and Freddy held it up to the light and looked at it.
“A month?” Freddy said. “Well, let’s eat lunch. A month, huh? Thirty days.”
“I don’t think they’re yours,” she said. She was looking straight at him. “The right time of month when I was with Sandy. You never listen when I tell you that.” Nieman coughed and drank his wine and signaled to the waiter for some more.
“The role of will is underrated in human affairs,” Freddy said. “To tell the truth, Miss Whittington, you have driven me crazy. Have I told you that today?”
“I didn’t mean to,” she answered. “You’re the one that thought up sleeping with me.” Nieman rose a few inches from his chair and caught the waiter’s eye. Nothing human is foreign to me, he said to himself, as he did about a hundred times a day.
Sandy, the beautiful and mysterious Sandy George Wade of Louisiana and Texas and nowhere. Abandoned when he was six years old, after which he roamed the world playing out that old scenario, doing things to please people and make them love him, then doing the things to make them desert him. It was all he knew. One of the people he talked into caring for him was a poet who taught English at his reform school in Texas. The poet taught him to love poetry and to wield it with his voice and eyes. Nora Jane was a sucker for poetry. When they lived together in New Orleans Sandy had been able to get her to forgive him anything by quoting Dylan Thomas or A. E. Housman or a poem by Auden called “Petition,” which ends with a plea to “Look shining at, new styles of architecture, a change of heart.” Nora Jane always took that to mean she was supposed to think anything Sandy did was all right with advanced thinkers like poets.
Now, on the same day that Nora Jane was having her amniocentesis, Sandy was sitting alone in his room in Mirium Sallisaw’s tacky West Coast mansion thinking of ways to get Nora Jane to forgive him and take him back as her mate and child and live-in boyfriend. Sandy worked for Mirium Sallisaw in her cancer business. She sold trips to Mexico for miracle cures. She had made several million dollars collecting the life savings of terminal cancer patients and she paid Sandy well to be her driver.
In his spare time Sandy had been talking to Mirium’s psychoanalyst and he was beginning to see that some of the things he had done might actually be affecting the lives of other people, especially and specifically Nora Jane, who was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He paced around his room and lay down on his bed and thought up a thousand tricks to get her back. Finally he decided to sit down and write out his frustration in a poem and have Mirium’s Federal Express service deliver it. By the time he had finished it he was so excited he abandoned the Federal Express idea and drove into town and delivered it himself. She was not there, so he left it in the mailbox.
Nora Jane found the poem when she got home from lunch at Chez Panisse. She had spent the afternoon arguing with Freddy about whether they should get married and finally, when she left him at his house, she had agreed to consider a trial marriage for the duration of her pregnancy.
Now she walked up onto the porch of the beige and green house where she had a room and saw the piece of paper sticking out of her mailbox. She knew what it was. No one in her life had left her things sticking out of mailboxes except Sandy. Sandy was one of the few young men left in the Western world who understood the power of written communications. There it was, sticking out and beckoning to her as she walked by the red salvia and the madrone hedge and the poppies. She pulled it out and sat down on the stairs to read.
Jane, Jane, where can you be?
Flown so very far from me.
The golden rain trees are blooming now
Above the house where we once lived.
Could we go there once again?
Could we recapture the love we had?
She folded it up and put it back into its envelope and went into the house and called him up.
“Come on over,” she said. “I have a lot to tell you.”
“What is that?” he answered.
“You won’t believe it, I’m going to have two babies about six months from now.”
“You mean that, don’t you?”
“I think they’re yours, but I’m not sure. Are you coming?”
“As fast as I can get there.”
“Do you think it’s funny?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
He arrived at eight o’clock that night, pulling up to the curb in Mirium Sallisaw’s white Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It was the car he used to drive her clients down to Mexico to the Laetrile clinic and to Las Vegas to get their bootleg Interferon. It was weird and depressing work and Sandy had been saving his money so he could quit. He was up to about four thousand dollars in savings on the night Nora Jane told him she was pregnant. He sped along the freeway thinking what a small sum it was, wondering where in the world he would get some more.
Nora Jane was waiting for him on the steps. He took her into his arms and the old magic was as good as new. The poem he had written to her was true. Back in New Orleans the golden rain trees were covering their old roof with golden dust. “That stuff is made of stars,” Sandy had told her once. “And we are too.”
“I love you,” he told her now. “God, I’ve been missing you.”
“I miss you too,” she answered.
“I’m sorry I’ve been such an asshole. I don’t know what makes me act that way.”
“It’s okay. It was half my fault. Come on in. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
It was some hours later and the moon was shining in on her small white bed with her new lace-trimmed sheets and the lace-trimmed pillowcases and the yellow lilies in a vase she had run out and bought when she knew he was coming. She was wrapped up in his arms. She had told him all she knew. Now she was finishing her speech. “I’m going to have them no matter whose they are. It’s all I know for sure. I don’t care what anyone says. Or who gets mad at me.”
“Don’t sound like that. I want them. I want them to be mine so much I’d reach inside and touch them.” He ran his hands across her stomach. “Listen, baby, we’re going to get out of here and get a place together and start living like white people. I’ve had all I can take of loneliness. You can call the shots. You tell me what you want and I’ll deliver. I’m quitting Mirium. I’ve got four grand saved up in the bank and that will tide us over. I’m going to an employment agency tomorrow and see what they can offer. I’ll take anything they offer me.” He got up from the bed and pulled a package of cigarettes out of his pants and lit one and stood in the window smoking. The moonlight was on his body. He was so graceful it broke Nora Jane’s heart to look at him. He was the most beautiful and graceful person she had ever watched or seen. Everything he did made sense in the beauty of movement department. Watching him now, so beautiful and perfect, she thought about a terrible story he told her about being left somewhere when he was small and standing by the door for days waiting for his mother to come back but she didn’t come. “Oh, Sandy,” Nora Jane got up and stood behind him, holding him in her arms. “I will never leave you again no matter what happens or what you do. I will stick by you if you want me to.” Then she was crying tears all over his beautiful graceful back.
Across the campus of the University of California at Berkeley Freddy Harwood was in his hot tub getting drunk. His bandaged hand was propped up on a shoe rack and a bottle of VVSOP Napoleon brandy was by the soap dish and he was talking on the remote-control phone. “She hasn’t even called and she isn’t there. It means she’s with him. I know it. She’s bound to be. I’ve had it, Nieman. Life’s not doing this to me. I’m getting out. I mean it. I’m getting into dope or moving to New York or paddling up to Canada in a birchbark canoe. None of it is funny anymore. The whole thing sucks and you know it. The whole show. You goddamn well know it. I would take any age over this age. Fuck it all to goddamn bloody fucking hell. That’s all I’ve got to say. I’m through.”
Nieman said he would come over.
“Well, hurry up. I’m in deep, old buddy. I lost my sense of reality a while ago. I mean, I didn’t do anything to deserve this. This is fucking unfair. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Nieman said he was on his way. He called up Freddy’s old girlfriend, Buiji Dalton, and told her to meet him there. Then he called a friend of theirs named Teddy who was a psychotherapist and told him to get in his car. They converged on Freddy’s house. It was a wooden house with great glass wings that swept the horizon for miles across San Francisco and the bridges and the bay.
It had cost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It had paintings by every major painter who had worked in the United States in the last twenty years. It had books in six languages and light and air and was full of food and wine and bottled water from Missouri that tasted like honey. In the middle of the patio, looking out on the bay, was the hot tub where Freddy was contemplating suicide or having a prefrontal lobotomy or taking heroin every day. “The pain,” he was saying into his tape recorder. “This is real pain. This is not some figment of my imagination. This is not just trying to get something that’s hard to get. I don’t want her because she’s hard to get. I want her because I like to look at her and if those aren’t my babies in there it’s all over, she will never marry me. I risked my life to save two small children. I walked into a burning building. It isn’t fair. IT IS NOT FAIR. I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE.” He turned off the recording machine and called Nieman back. “You haven’t left yet?”
“I was going out the door.”
“Have you got a tape of Network, that movie with Peter Finch as the television announcer who gets all the people yelling out the windows?”
“I think so.”
“Bring it over, will you?”
Freddy laid down the phone and turned the recorder back on. “Bitter,” he said into the microphone. “Bitter, bitter, bitter, jaded, tired of life and cynical. No good for anything anymore. Nothing works. The system fucks.”
Clouds of vapor were rolling in from the Pacific Ocean. In a petri dish near the Berkeley campus Tammili and Lydia Whittington’s DNA began to give up its secrets to the Chinese student who was working overtime to make money to bring his sister to the United States from Singapore. “Very interesting,” he thought. He added one drop of a chemical and watched the life below him form and re-form. AB positive, universal donors, he wrote on a pad. He translated it into Chinese with a few brief strokes of his pen. This case interested him very much. He wrote down the name, Nora Jane Whittington. Yes, when he got home he would cast the I Ching and see what else was in store for these baby girls with the lucky blood. Lin Tan, for that was his name, moved the dish to one side and picked up the next one.
Sandy got back into bed with Nora Jane and cuddled her up into his arms. He kissed her hair and then her eyes. He arranged their bodies so they fit against each other very comfortably and perfectly. He heaved a sigh. It was so fragile. It never stayed. It always deserted him. It always went away. It was here now. It would go away. It would leave him alone. “Calm down,” she said. “Don’t get scared. We don’t have to be unhappy if we don’t want to.”
“When will you know?”
“They said a month. They’re busy. So what kind of blood do you have anyway? I’m B positive.”
“It’s some weird shit. I’ve forgotten. I’ll call and find out.”
“Go to sleep. We’ll make it.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I love you too.”
Freddy got out of the hot tub. He was the color of a sunset at Malibu when there were plenty of clouds. Buiji Dalton took a big white towel and began to dry him off. She’d been trying to marry him for his money for five years and she wasn’t giving up now. Not with all she had to offer. Not after she had divorced Dudley and only kept the house. “I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the paper. I cut it out and showed it to everyone. I made a hundred copies and mailed them to people. I’m so proud of you.”
“Hey, stop that, will you?”
“What?”
“Drying me. I’m okay. Come on. Let’s go in the bedroom and watch this movie. It’s the greatest movie made in the United States in four years and Nieman had to go and trash it. He trashed it. Wait till you see it. I want you to tell him what you think when it’s over.”
“Do you want anything to eat?”
“No, just get me that brandy, will you?” Freddy draped the towel over his shoulder and pulled the other part across his stomach to cover his reproductive organs and went into his bedroom and got into bed with his best friend and his old girlfriend on either side of him and pushed a button and the movie started. Freddy had changed his mind about suicide. After all, Nora Jane was practically illiterate. She had never even read Dostoevski. The copyright warning appeared on the screen. His psychiatrist friend, Teddy, came tearing into the room waving a bag from the deli. He took up the other side of Buiji Dalton and the movie began.
“This will go away,” Sandy was saying. “It will disappear.”
“It might not,” Nora Jane answered. “Don’t get scared. We don’t have to be miserable if we don’t want to be.”
Down inside Nora Jane’s womb Tammili signaled to her sister. “Nice night tonight.”
“I wish it could always be the same. She’s always changing. Up and down. Up and down.”
“Get used to it. We’ll be there soon.”
“Let’s don’t think about it.”
“You’re right. Let’s be quiet.”
“Okay.”