CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE RAINS ended and the sky cleared over Los Angeles, bringing the mountains closer. The family atomized as families will when a bad secret is hidden among them, a solid something they must all edge around.

Eamon worked on his senior thesis about Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician of the seventeenth century who invented the adding machine.

At first Eamon just liked the name “Blaise Pascal” but research turned up worthwhile facts, such as Pascal’s terrible health and his argument for belief in God based on gambling theory.

Micah had started a school club called the New Luddites which opposed all things electronic. Made up of restless hackers and people who knew little about computers, it was never going to be a large club, having disavowed the means of communication by which it might have become known. “Live in the world” was the club slogan.

Joan and Rob went about the house like random people put together for some reason they could no longer remember. They argued over the making of the bed, the volume of the music, the foolishness of horror movies, Micah’s continued shaving with a blade.

Every bitter word seemed to erode Joan’s honor, because she could not be party to jealousy or unhappiness. It reminded her of the last days with Charles. She refused to discuss her unfaithfulness in the house because the children might hear. And when the children were not home she refused to discuss it because she didn’t want to.

Rob had proposed to her at a ski lodge in Big Bear and that’s where they went to decide whether they would go on or not. Probably they wouldn’t, Joan thought. Once asked, the question had only one true answer.

At the lodge, large windows looked out at the mountains and trees and people riding T-bars in colorful and rising procession.

Joan had a massage and an herbal wrap in the spa, and they rolled her up in a blanket. She felt warm and relaxed on the table and thought she might lie just like this for a couple days.

Rob skied all day and came in burned from the sun. They dressed and ate supper in a restaurant with chairs made of tree branches.

Rob drank a glass of red wine and ordered another.

“Ski instructor walks into a bar and orders a round for him and his friends,” he said. “‘You don’t have any friends,’ says the bartender. ‘That’s okay,’ says the ski instructor, ‘I don’t have any money.’”

“Rob.”

“What.”

“I don’t feel like jokes.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Maybe we should ask everyone to be quiet forever.”

“Be calm. Look at me. I am.”

“Was it for the part?”

“I had the part.”

“It’s not a good part.”

“I think I can make something of it.”

“You fuck a ghost. This is drama. You fuck a ghost, you fuck the Screen Writers Guild, life is but a dream.”

“It’s not him.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“There is a process we go through, now, that is called divorce.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve been divorced.”

“You know that I have,” said Joan.

“You signed the papers.”

“Yes.”

“And where did they go? These papers that you signed.”

“What office? How would I know?”

“Because there’s no record of it.”

“We’re in a ski lodge. We’re not in a court of law. Drop the show that you’re making. No one is watching. You know I’m not good with paperwork. It’s just you and me.”

“This is over, Joanie.”

“Yes. I think it is.”

Later that night they sat on the veranda drinking wine under the warming bonnet of a heat lamp. Skiers went down the mountain under the lights, arms folded like wings. There was a yellow moon and Joan thought of all the things it had witnessed and would in time to come, and her own troubles seemed small considered in that light.

Micah and Charlotte went to the magic show at a theater on Beverly. You wouldn’t have known it was a theater—blank sandstone wall, steel door, small placard on a tripod stand.

Doc and Dalton crouched on the sidewalk spinning quarters. The object was to stop the quarter on edge with your finger.

“Victory is mine, Little Man,” said Dalton.

“That’s on an angle.”

“So what?”

“Doesn’t count.”

“I taught you this game.”

“Get up off the ground,” said Charlotte.

They went inside the theater and presented their tickets. It was a long space painted black with rows of chairs and a small bar selling wine and beer.

Doc and Dalton didn’t want to be chosen from the audience, so Micah found an usher and told her his friends had pleurisy and could not participate in any magic.

She gave him red paper flowers of the kind distributed on Memorial Day and said if they wore the flowers the magician would know to skip them.

Doc and Dalton declined to wear the flowers as they would look like sissies, so Micah twisted the green paper stems together and, bowing, presented the two flowers to Charlotte.

“How thoughtful,” she said.

The magician ate broken glass, made clothespins dance across the stage, and changed a traffic cone into a naked woman. He said that all the traffic cones in Los Angeles were people with a curse upon them and he was setting them free one by one.

Doc and Dalton were not called out of the audience and they seemed both relieved and disappointed. The magician asked Micah to stand during the mind-reading segment.

“I’m seeing a young woman,” he said. “Her name is Lisa or perhaps Linda. She is far away from you.”

“Lyris,” said Micah. “My sister.”

“Ah. Yes. And you’re hiding from her. Why are you doing that?”

“Where are we?”

“You’re outside. It must be a game of hide-and-seek.”

“We did play that.”

“And she’s nervous. Why would that be? Even though she knows she’ll find you.”

“There were these cats that would come down from the old junkyard,” said Micah.

“Wild cats. In the shadows. Yes.”

“Big nasty calicos with burrs in their coats.”

“What would you say?”

“To Lyris?”

“If she were here.”

“That I miss her.”

After the magic show they walked down to a private club past Rampart and beneath the freeway. They skirted a line of people dressed like mourners because Charlotte knew the bouncer, who waved them in, stamping the backs of their hands with red skulls.

They entered a sweaty tunnel of music that seemed to come from inside them. The walls whirled with lights, and dancers twisted and ground in a collective tremor. Micah thought of junior high dances where known couples and pairs of girls did most of the dancing, and to cross the gym from the boys’ to the girls’ side was to risk humiliation all around.

Micah and Dalton went to get drinks, then waded back through the room carrying plastic cups high in the humid air. Doc and Charlotte waited among walls of bodies. The four of them shielded the small space they faced, gulping the tops of their drinks before they could get jostled and spilled.

DJs stared like prison wardens from the mezzanine, shouting mouth to microphone, making sounds like someone beating a rug. They finished their drinks, and Doc and Dalton went for more as Charlotte and Micah danced. Micah was not that good of a dancer. Charlotte came to his aid with an unselfish ease learned over many nights in clubs. With their hands and bodies together Micah could not help but dance with some of her grace.

He became drunk in a little while and went outside and leaned against the wall of the club. He bummed a cigarette and smoked with his head hanging, until the ember burnt his hair, and then he put the cigarette out and went in again, raising the back of his hand like a symbol of solidarity with the bouncers.

There was trouble in the club. A man had felt Charlotte up and she had thrown her drink on him. He was in his twenties, which made it worse. The man tried to get to Charlotte, saying drunkenly that he only wanted to talk to her. Micah blocked him and they wrestled momentarily before the man hit Micah in the face and Micah shoved him back and lowered his head and rammed him in the chest, dropping him to the floor. On the black tiles the man struggled to breathe, and his eyes fluttered, and he passed out.

It was over in seconds and had gone just as Tiny had said it would. Then the sleeping man was roused by his friends, who picked him up and dragged him away.

Micah went to the bar and rested his elbows on shining bronze with faint cloudy arcs of the cleaning rag. His hands were shaking. No one knows what all we pretend.

He ordered water and ice and the barmaid took a plastic glass and thrust it in the ice bin and picked up a nozzle head and ran water over the ice and tucked in a slice of lime.

“On the house, Big Time,” she said.

Micah went back to his friends but couldn’t find them. He worked his way around the club. More people streamed in, faces assuming a religious aspect as they entered the music. Looking about, Micah saw only the sweat and sway of strangers.

He could not see all of the room at once. Maybe Charlotte was looking for him, and they were following each other around the perimeter at an unchanging distance, never to meet. He stood in one place for twenty minutes and then went out to find a taxi.

Micah thought that true cities would be full of taxis, but this was not the case with Los Angeles. He walked north on Glendale, looking over his shoulder, and soon gave up finding a ride. He had only a little bit of money anyway.

He passed a combination restaurant and meat market, a mesh fence topped with razor wire, a dark apartment complex with red slab roofs.

An orange cat lay on the steps of a canary store and Micah knelt and held out his hand. The cat’s eyes gleamed gold from the shadows as it got up and wandered down to the sidewalk.

It arched its back in a big stretch and fell over and Micah scratched the fur behind its neck and under its chin. Cats loved this, in his experience, and this big tomcat was no different.

Micah sang a song that Tiny used to sing when he saw a cat.

“My name is Cat.

I’ll pee in your hat.”

Later on he met a man carrying a basket of laundry with a yellow jug of detergent high atop folded towels.

“Good evening,” said the man.

“Good evening,” said Micah. “Can you tell me if I’m close to Sunset Boulevard?”

“Just keep on, it’s not very far. Go on up past Echo Park and bear left.”

The 101 underpass was a dark tunnel with sloped banks of dirt and creeping ivy and the sound of cars passing overhead.

There were portraits painted on the columns holding up the freeway—a man making a fist to set off his biceps, a woman with hands pressed in prayer.

Micah came out of the tunnel into the electric light and walked along the western shore of the lake at Echo Park.

Palm trees bordered the water, lank and thorny against the sky, and three white jets of water rose, peaked, and fell from a fountain in the center of the lake.

Micah wondered if they performed a function or just made it look nice. Two helicopters drifted lazily in the charcoal sky.

He found a taxi at last in the parking lot of a Walgreens on Sunset. Two men, one large, one small, leaned against the glass-green fender with their arms folded and chins resting on their chests.

Micah got his billfold out and counted the bills remaining.

“I’ve got eleven dollars,” he said. “Will that get me to Hellman Hills?”

They turned to each other with their arms still folded and talked it over.

“Not by the meter,” said the smaller one. “Offhand I’m going to estimate that’s a fifteen-, sixteen-dollar fare.”

“Might be as much as twenty the way I’d go,” said the other man.

He reached down and with both hands yanked a palm blade from the wheel well of the taxi. He ran his thumb along the leaf and tossed it aside.

“Well, that’s all I have,” said Micah.

“We run the meter, the meter doesn’t run us.”

They took him home, the small man driving and the large man riding along the high and moonlit curves of the freeway with the mountains rising in the north.

Micah sat in the middle of the backseat with his legs stretched comfortably, recounting the adventures of his night. The cab smelled of tobacco and oranges.

“You decked him out.”

“It didn’t seem like me doing it,” said Micah. “It was more like I was watching it happen.”

“Moments of action,” said the large man, his arm flung amiably over the back of the seat. “Certainly. They pass by and later we . . . we . . .”

“Think about them,” said the driver.

He laid his head to the side, relaxed, steering with one hand. “He got what he had coming. You don’t put your hands on a woman you don’t know.”

“And even if you do,” said the large man.

They laughed as if thinking of some woman they knew that they couldn’t put their hands on.

“He got what he had coming,” said the driver.

Micah had never been so happy to be in his narrow bed with the cool pillows and striped blanket. He fell asleep with the peace of the finally sheltered and did not wake until six in the morning when he heard tapping at the window.

He came out of a dream in which some of his friends from back home had moved into a house across the street. They ignored him at first, but then they opened up and discussed the crops they were planting.

Could it be raining? he wondered.

Micah got out of bed and wrapped the blanket around him and went to the window. Charlotte looked up from the grass, the white lines of the volleyball court rising behind her.

He went downstairs and opened the back door.

“Where did you go?” he said.

She reached out unsteadily, her fingers batting his lips.

“Shhh,” she said. “It’s very early in the sky.”

“All right. You’re hammered.”

She looked to the side as if someone were standing behind her.

“No. I mean, maybe I am, that’s beside the point,” she said. “Hammered. I am hammered. You have the funniest way of talking, Micah Darling my darling. Come with me.”

They went into the yard and stood in the grass looking at the sky, the midnight blue fading to yellow, the trees in black silhouette.

“Isn’t it the most beautiful sky you’ve ever seen?” she said. “Why would they do this?”

Micah rearranged the blanket on his shoulders. “Who?”

“If you knew that, you would know everything,” said Charlotte. She pressed her hands to her forehead and closed her eyes. “I’m sweaty right now. And dizzy. I believe I’m going to throw up if I’m not mistaken.”

Micah took her hand and led her inside the house.

“Is Joan here?”

“They’re at Big Bear.”

“Take me to your bathroom.”

Micah gathered Charlotte’s hair and held it fast behind her head as she knelt throwing up what she’d drunk.

When the convulsions of her rib cage had turned to shivers, she reached up with her left hand and pulled the silver handle down.

She got to her feet and looked into the mirror on the medicine cabinet.

“I’m the baddest thing that ever came down the road,” she said.

“You’re the best bad thing I ever seen.”

Micah ran water till it was hot and soaked a washcloth in the sink and washed her face slowly and tenderly as Lyris had done for him when he was young. She cried for a little while and then laughed.

Charlotte brushed her teeth and took a slug of Listerine and swished it around and spat it out.

“I feel like a fire has gone out in me,” she said. “Can we go to bed now?”

They went to his bedroom, where he gave her a shirt to wear and she undressed, folded her clothes over the back of the chair, and pulled the shirt on over her head.

Her lean brown arms emerged from the white sleeves of the shirt one at a time and with her hands she smoothed the cloth down.

They got into bed. Micah sat and rolled the blanket out in the air and let it drift down over them. Charlotte turned on her side and patted her hip meaning snuggle up.

“Micah.”

“Yeah.”

“How did that magician know about your sister?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that myself.”

“I love you.”

Micah went back to sleep. Charlotte went to sleep for the first time all night.