Chapter 2

So keep it to a walk across the lobby, and a demure jog (jogging with a purse) around the block. Down the alley with its loading dock and service doors, its kitchen noises and kitchen smells, I set the land speed record.

Inside those kitchens, even now, are people giving wired, inspired accounts of what they did for Love Incarnate in the coffee shop. How they danced attendance on him.

Love Incarnate isn’t waiting on the dock.

So, what’d I expect? Give him time to reach his room; give him time to get his stuff. Time to say goodbye.

I reach the car, unlock and sit in it. The dock is quite invisible from where I am. My heart rate sags toward normal.

Lemme guess, he won’t be there.

He’ll have gone back to his room, thought it over, talked it over, and recognized the money and the misery and the bad PR it’d cost him to get out of this. Eventually somebody (that Garfein probably) will stroll down here and offer me apologies. Thank you, but no thank you. Fun talking to you, but. Maybe it wouldn’t even be that kind. I’d wait and wait, and nobody would come.

I said I was going to Mass this morning.

So I wouldn’t be lying, I found a 7:30 a.m. (Our Lady of the Suburbs), and went to it. A genuine California Catholic Church, designed to be a school gym after the real church got built. Which it never did, of course.

A hospital chaplain was the celebrant. Right at the climax of the Mass, the Consecration as a cosmic cue, his pager beeped. It sounded like the end of the world. For some unknown in Stanford Hospital, it probably was.

Father Chaplain clicked the ceremony into fast forward: ten minutes saw him off to bless the dying and comfort the survivors. Everybody else went home. Except me.

8:30 a.m.

Junipero Serra: dubbed by little rustic signs “The World’s Most Beautiful Freeway.” Forty-five minutes to an hour north (depending on your attitude), the Serra dumps you out in San Francisco: 19th Avenue. North of Golden Gate Park, 19th crosses Geary. Now you’re pointed at the beach.

Out in the avenues, old Geary’s lined with Greek laundries, Russian bakeries, and Filipino movie theaters. It goes residential at the very end, and splits into a Y. One half is called Seal Rock. That’s where I parked, by a dry yard filled with succulents: aloes and agaves, pink and gray and green and striped and spiky. From Seal Rock downtown, Breakers to Bay, is a measured fifteen-minute drive exactly. Punctual’s fine. An hour-and-a-fucking-half too punctual’s got nothing to be said for it whatever.

Behind me was the last stop on the bus line: people who get off there are at their leisure, mostly, headed out to jog the sea cliff. Couples jogging by me, never any singles. Trim young couples with kids in pack frames, trim old couples in unisex warm ups. Trim gay couples, shirtless to show off their Nautilus muscles. I watched them bounce over the curvature of the street and disappear, down to where the sea lions bark, and the bright mist rises off the breakers.

Saint Francis, when he felt in need of input, used to play this game: shut his eyes, pray, open up the scripture or some other book, plant his finger on the page. And if what he read there bore no obvious application to his problem, he’d do the whole bit over: shut his eyes, ask for a clue to the first passage, random access the book.

I’d like to go through life that way: random access and refuse to edit. (People at school used to ask what I was smoking. Answer: nothing. I am entertaining myself.) Pray, “Lord, that I may see—” Then open the eyes, bang. And see what comes by, the most amazing stuff, not the dumb theories people make and like to call the really-real.

Theories are only suitcases; you cram in all the “real” you can, and cut off what hangs out. But it’s the funny incorrigible things I always loved the most, the stuff that won’t be suitcased, the things I don’t know what they are. Antique whatsits with rusty moving parts. Holy medals to saints I can’t find in the book. Little books about strange days, in languages I don’t read. Matters that take penetrating.

Take the Gospel of this Sunday’s Mass:

—You think I have come to establish peace on earth? I assure you, the contrary is true; I have come for division. From now on, a household of five will be divided three against two and two against three; father will be split against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law—

Which wouldn’t be so wild, you see, except they tell you, “God is Love.” Think about the five in my house: who would side with me if I managed to come home with Tommi Rhymer? Mother, father, sister, brother? Maybe it wouldn’t be three against two, but four against one.

Another bus grinds to the end of the line. More pairs of pastel couples trot past laughing, seaward, over the brow of the hill. Well, for better or for worse, here comes the Lord of Love. Groovin’ up slowly.

12:15 p.m.

So I’ve asked the man to marry me: my fantasy since I was twelve. I’m back in the car alone (nothing changed except the scenery), down in the musty deep between two city buildings. Thinking: what about a household of four? Is it two against two? Three against one? And a household of three?

Two against one, no choice.

And a household of two?

I fired up the bus, drove around the kink in the alley, and Oh God, there he was already. Same clothes. He’d added a white cloth English cap and shades. His left hand held a leather carry-on; a luggage-stickered fiddle case was in his right. Just delicious, thirty-two going on seventeen, fidgeting on the dock next to the garbage Dumpster.

He saw me, too.

A little run took him off into the air, heels tucked against his rear, arms flung wide with a bag in each hand, picture perfect, circa 1940s Hollywood musical.

When he’d made it through the door I hadn’t unlocked, he said, “They must have rings and such in—where we’re going, won’t they?”

I ground along in low to the end of the alley.

“We could take whatever comes today,” he said, “and do it right next week in London—”

“Next week’s stuff may be terrific, but it can’t ever be the same—” (God, why am I so stubborn? Why say that?)

“Or, we could do it here,” he said.

Side by side, we peered from the end of our alley into downtown crowds, crawling noontime traffic, jackhammers, open manholes, torn-up streets. The real world.

“So what are y’doing now?”

“Thinking.”

“Tell me.”

Can’t. Why not? Don’t know. I have lived a short life steeped in secrecy, so accustomed to censoring my mind for public consumption. I’m marrying my fantasy confessor, the inhabitant of my dreams who always understood. I have to get used to his reality. He is not a dream. He is not a pet. He inhabits the front seat of my mother’s VW bus. If he asks what’s on my mind, it better be safe to tell him. Or I better find out now. “I like old junk stores.”

He said, “So do I. Wanta know a secret?”

“Yeah.”

“Never bought diamonds in my life. Not even for me.”

“I like to walk in some old cluttered place and close my eyes and say: My thing is in here somewhere. God put it here for me. And wave my face around like a shut-eyed dish antenna, seeing if I can home in on it. Don’t laugh! I can, too!”

“Hey, Green Eyes,” he said.

“—And my favorite thing, you know what my favorite is? I’ve got like, this whole little collection of things I don’t know what they are—”

“Now, now,” he said, “I want to see you do it: I know some chaps’ve got grouse dogs that work like you.”

A block or two from Union Square garage is this tiny little shop that does estate jewelry. It has one glass door and one glass window, and inside is so narrow, the counter sits edge-on to the street. I’d always been enamored of the jewels in there, slightly tarnished by reality. They had their histories and mysteries; they’d all belonged to Mafia Dons, or Edwardian Divas who blazed scarlet careers across the princes of three continents and ended penitent days in a convent.

It was just ahead; I could see the small glass door. Also the closed sign through the glass.

Can’t imagine a more embarrassing bleak impacted situation: shooting off my mouth and blundering around in search of special gifts from God, with my glorious white-and-ruddy Dulcinea like a dog at heel, watching me not find ’em. In present light, the weird old baubles in the window looked straight off the geegaw shelf at Goodwill anyway.

“Not fine enough, is it?”

“C’mon,” he said. “They got the better stuff inside.”

“Closed on Sunday.”

“Somebody’s in there.”

Two somebodies, a man and a girl, bustling between the counter and a back room with lockboxes and ledgers.

“C’mon,” I said, “let’s go. Please let’s go.”

Tom already had a hand up, tapping on the glass.

I saw the man jump (he saw us), his lips form, “Sorry, but we’re closed Sundays.”

Tom fished inside his pocket for the wallet, extracted a hundred-dollar bill and flattened it against the window.

Watch the guy begin to waffle. He approached the door, unlocked it. He had a gray suit, gray hair, and gray eyes, and a sleek gray-lavender tint to his skin, as if his grandmother was a Rajah’s daughter out of Ranchipur.

He said, “We’re closed on Sunday.”

“I’m gone on Monday. Would y’take a hundred dollars just to let us look? Who’ll ever know?”

So he got his laugh, and got inside.

“All right,” Tom had taken off the cap, put it in his belt; taken off the shades, put them in his pocket. Now he put a good preliminary grip on me: “I’m marrying her; she needs a diamond doesn’t she? I want it to be like no one else’s. Let’s start with the most costly ring you have.”

“For a woman?”

Tom looked suddenly very shy, about the most devastating trick he has. “Don’t know. Whatever she fancies.”

Store Man thought. His focus shifted; more people stood outside the window, a group of girls. And they weren’t ogling the goodies in his case. Tom motioned at the door: “Y’might lock that up again.”

“—the finest woman’s ring I have just now, is, in fact two rings, and can’t be disposed of separately. But should they be for you, the extra might be remade as a brooch—”

Two girls scooted off along the sidewalk, and reappeared with half a dozen.

“—The Dewitt sisters: Carlotta and Constanza Dewitt. Their parents were the pinnacle of Peninsula society in the ’20s, and the girls were twins, identical. They dressed alike, did everything together: they made their joint debut, a legendary blowout; they both chose extremely decorative and totally worthless young gentlemen (Tom laughed quietly) to marry, and were married together, double ceremony. After a few stormy years on the Grand Tour—”

“Matching divorces, right?”

“Right.” He opened the fragile leather box. Two objects of pure fantasy glowed in a green velvet heaven.

Tom made a noise of appreciation, a kind of cockney fishwife squawk. “That’s diamonds, is it?”

“That’s diamonds.”

“What color would you call that, now?”

“I believe, officially, they’re canary.”

They were Day-Glo orange if anything. They were little alien spacecraft with rows and rays of glowing lights, two genuine close encounters of the third kind.

“—The twins never remarried,” he was saying. “They were fixtures of the San Francisco scene for, oh, years out of mind—I can remember them from the ’70s, tottering out of their limousine in Union Square, still wearing the most stunning identical couturier outfits. The matching engagement rings remained in the estate. The nephew, or grand-nephew, placed them here.”

I made so bold as to take one from its velvet. Antique things are dainty and tiny: I couldn’t wear one away, even if Tom bought them; it’d need a piece spliced in—

“—They’re an old-fashioned cut of course, what’s termed ‘Mine Cut’: less valuable, sorry to say, than if—”

It fitted like a custom job.

“The Dewitt sisters weren’t as tall as you, but certainly more—what? Zaftig.”

Tom picked the extra little apricot spacecraft from the velvet tray. He slipped it on his own ring finger with a kind of shy finality.

Tom’s are magic hands, immensely long and fine, like the outsize hands that bless and gesture across old mosaics. My hands are square, capable, I always thought embarrassing: hands of a twelve-year-old boy programmed to be a very big man. Who could have guessed at all? I was crying, and I hoped nobody noticed. Then Tom was poking something soft into my other hand below the counter’s edge. A Kleenex.

I have been playing 21 with God. Not just asking, but begging, weeping, bullying a silent heaven to deal me one particular card out of the deck. And now it’s dealt, it’s face down on the table, I’m easing up one corner just to look—Jack of Hearts! All at once, a second card, uncalled for—not by me, at least. Ace of Diamonds.

“How much?”

Swift figures written on a pad, and held up where I couldn’t see. Store Man seemed almost apologetic.

“Right,” said Tom.

“Well, they’re not the most expensive item in the safe by any means.”

“What is?” said Tom.

“You mean, in the way of rings?”

“In the way of anything.”

“Ah.” Store Man cogitated; tapped the counter glass. “Oh! Of course. Marilee? Madame Hoang’s bracelet, please. Marilee’s head hung through the curtain from the back room: a piece of taxidermy, glass eyes fixed on Tom. “Yes, just get it out. As you’ll see, much more than starving fishermen came out of Vietnam. Ah—I think I’ll do as you suggested—” He locked the door. Kids scattered back, closed in again. Bolder ones began to tap the glass.

Marilee’s head disappeared from the curtain. Her father pursued it to the back room, and, after much whispering, brought out a safety deposit box. A metal case inside that opened with a combination. A leather one inside that took a key. A shower of white spangles made good its escape, and rioted across the walls and ceiling.

“About to ask a dumb question: that’s not diamant?”

“Oh no! Oh no no no, God no. They’re perfectly matched blue-white diamonds, modern cut, over two hundred of them.”

“Sorry, but I’ve been used to wearing things like this on stage, and they were diamant, and some of those could cost three hundred pounds—”

“Oh doubtless.”

“May I?”

“My daughter, who is better acquainted with such matters, tells me you’re an entertainer.”

Tom grinned, and the white fire in his hand cast fairy lights across his face. “I do get paid for it.”

“By ‘Bill Graham Presents’?”

“For one. But this came out of Vietnam?”

“Madame Hoang spray-painted it flat white, and wore it out on her own arm. A real estate consortium has it from Madame and the General now, down payment on acreage, roughly the size of San Francisco, near the Mendocino coast.”

Tom, bemused, amused, and thoughtful, was turning it in the air. He draped its flaming length across his wrist.

I tried to image Madame Hoang. The original Dragon Lady? Or an antique fragile matriarch, and the General was her son. Or she could be a leggy Swede with platinum hair, kept by her oriental warlord in secluded kinkiness.

“—It would make a proper piece for the stage,” Store Man was saying, “if expense meant nothing, and you didn’t mind the risk. Most women are intimidated. This is what you call a serious piece—No one would ever expect to find this here—I don’t have an international clientele—”

“She’d expect it.” Tom gathered me in tightly, “She’s got a gift.”

Wait a minute! I didn’t pray this out of thin air—I didn’t know it was here, I knew the store was here, I like to window shop—I’m accepting a hero’s medal for a rescue I never pulled, for great deeds only contemplated—

“—if I hadn’t gone to Stanford with their mother,” the man is saying, “provincial loyalty, or what have you. Sotheby’s appraiser’s coming, possibly tomorrow. It’s my hunch this will end up broken and reset—”

Tom dropped back to the real world. “No it shan’t, I want it whole. I believe I have the perfect use. How much for the three? The two rings and the bracelet?”

Hardly the time to tell him I’m not a holy hero. Store Man wrote again. All delicacy aside, I craned. A definite six figures; was it seven? They were too fast for me.

“Right,” said Tom. “Believe I can still manage. I’ll need to call my road manager, get him down here. We’re on our way to—where is it now?”

I said, “Reno.”

“Right. Reno, and—”

Beaming, Store Man pumped my hand. “Congratulations!” He did the same to Tom, adding, “God loves a cheerful giver.”

A telephone was served up on the counter’s warm glass top. Tom fought his patient way past information, the hotel desk, and a clutch of unwanted Belshangles personnel.

“No, you won’t do. I need Garfein. I love you, but y’won’t do.” Listen. “God, Margot, I don’t care where he is, have him open a crack, and pop the fucking phone in with him. He can manage the two at once.” Pause. “Sim. Bless you.”

Longer pause. “I’ve just spent a lot of money. Yeah. Right, love. Like a lot of money. Right. Like London, Switzerland. So get off it, and get down here.”

He turned back to us helplessly. “Where am I?”

———

Finally Sim arrived.

“My road manager.”

“Beautiful.”

“Sim. We’re taking the rings; the bracelet I’m leaving with you. He’ll explain. One thing, you’re not to show that piece to Harlan. I don’t want him to see that toy, or know that it exists. Okay?”

The answer to my question I supposed, a chill and sobering answer, about Love’s entry to the household of two.

“Got it,” said Garfein.

“Ta,” said Tom.

Halfway to Union Square, he stopped, dismay all over his face. “We still’ve got no wedding rings!” Most of the store crowd had gone, but a few stayed watching. Their patience was repaid when we plowed in. “Wedding rings!” said Tom.

“To complement your apricot extravaganzas?” Store Man didn’t look surprised. Sim looked frazzled: if he’d had more hair, he might be tearing it.

“A plain gold band like old country people wear: that’s what I want. And I mean to leave it on, until at last it won’t come off at all.”

So I said “Same for me.”

Tom put his arm around my hip, not the waist, the hip, as I’d seen guys do in the Castro (each with a hand down the friend’s back pocket), and yanked me hard against him. I nearly fell over. I didn’t have any back pockets, but he did. My hand went in as far as the ring.

———

Tom slid down, till the back of his head engaged the car seat and his knees were wedged against the dash. His white cap met the top of his dark glasses; not much of him was visible. His sweet cream cheek. The brash little tough-kid thrust to his jaw and lower lip. He said, “I’ve known for two years I’d get married.” Most Americans say married “marr-ied,” almost “mare-id.” Whether it was the Londoner in him, or just the him in him: he said “ma-rried,” dainty and precise, a small boy making his cautious curtsy to an adult explosive word.

I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything.

I knew why I was marrying him: a Grand Passion, conceived in childhood, nursed in solitude, pursued with total lack of self-preservation through adolescence.

Yesterday, this is what I did.

7:00 a.m.

I turn up in the kitchen dressed for action, and wait for Mama to say, “Where to?”

So I can answer, “Mountains.”

“Alone?”

“Kaye Lyttle would like to go with me.” Which is true; she’s said so many times. Didn’t say she was going with me.

“May I have my old key to the cabin back, please?”

“Baby, I still don’t think that’s safe. Besides,” she adds tellingly, “I don’t know where it is.”

“I am eighteen, and it’s in Papa’s dresser drawer, like everything else he ever took away from me.”

“Three years,” she says. “You’ve known where it was—”

“Hey, I’m honest.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if we all went? That way you’d have people to cook and wash up for you—” Very long-suffering.

“I have my own food.”

“You’ve only been eighteen for a week and a day.”

One year’s all that anybody’s got to be eighteen in: not exactly a discipline you can give a lifetime’s practice.

———

One week earlier, caviar and champagne for me at Saint Ann’s after Mass. I mean Beluga and the French stuff, too. My parents and their crew don’t mess around. There is always a spread of food in the Newman House after Mass. For birthdays, weddings, baptisms, and major feasts there is an unconscionably ginormous spread of food. The Saint Ann’s High-Mass crowd take those scriptures about the “Heavenly Banquet” and the “Supper of the Lamb” quite literally.

So I can observe from where I stand, two Benedictine monks smearing Brie on baguettes and laughing, three tenured professors, one doling out Russian caviar, sweet butter, and minced onion in minute, sacramental amounts (mine being the only authorized seconds: my birthday)—and any number of emeritus professors, visiting professors, foreign students, graduate students (not all Catholic, but getting there), parents, wives, husbands, lions and lambs together, everyone drinking wine and eating cold roast beef with horseradish sauce.

Also lots of kids. Saint Ann’s High Mass must have the highest infant baptism rate of any Sunday service going.

And here I am, dandling my solitary glass of French champagne (I asked about seconds there, but none are forthcoming). “You know what I really wanted for my eighteenth birthday?” Great line to put the dampers on a celebration.

Papa (one of the tenured) lifts champagne bottle-mouth from glass in sparkling mid-pour.

“For you guys to truck down to the Savings and Loan and redo my bank account so I can draw money out of it.”

“You need money?”

“I’d like that little passbook in my purse to say ‘Miranda Dolores Falconer,’ not ‘R. Falconer or M.F. Falconer as custodians for M.D. Falconer.’ It’s the principle, that’s all.”

“What’s it doing in your purse?”

“Getting dirty, mostly.” I earned half that money myself. Minors are the world’s original second-class citizens.

But my setup is complete.

All that’s required now is to mouth “Cu-s-t-o-o-d-i-ans,” two or three more times in as loathsome a manner as possible. And pray: “Lord, ‘subtle as serpents’ is okay, so long as ‘innocent as doves’ goes with it. I’ve known I was devious since before I could talk. Just don’t let me be dishonest.”

The contents of my prayer life get a little odd. My contents are a little odd. I figure God knows that.

Papa waves the champagne bottle at my chest. “You realize, if you manage to blow your college money, it’s you that’s going to miss it at Berkeley in the fall?”

“Uh-huh.”

Sad, because I aced the SATs with scores impressive enough to show what a lazy clot I’d been at school. I got accepted into Berkeley, no sweat in the least, when lots of poor hardworking hot-to-study types are headed for the Junior Colleges. Sad that I’m a rank impostor. I never intend to go. And so far, nobody knows but me.

That was a week ago last Sunday; when the punch line of the morning’s Gospel was “Wherever your treasure lies, there your heart will be.”

———

Friday afternoon, here I go, off to the Savings and Loan. All by myself. A first. Food for a week for two is what I need, opulent (this time) but non-labor-intensive food for a week. I think about a hundred dollars. Gas money also, cash to reach the mountains maybe four times, up and back and up and back, untraceable. Thirty dollars a crack. To be safe, I took three hundred dollars. Put it in my little white purse, right in the envelope with the tickets and the invitation.

Saturday morning. I got in the old VW bus, and before Papa could stroll down the drive and request my flight plan, I roared away.

———

Oregon expressway to 101; 101 south to 237. Crossing below the marshy lower end of San Francisco Bay, I pick up northbound 680 on the other side, through the first range of summer-yellow hills. High above the freeway canyon a red tailed hawk wheels toward her nest, bearing a very long, very limp snake in her claws. I take it for some kind of omen.

Livermore valley. It was eighty-five degrees on our front porch in Stanford. Hot. Here a roadside time-and-temperature display stands proudly at 102.

The second range of hills.

The San Joaquin. Wide hazy valley, fertile and sweltering: orchards, alfalfa, corn. The food of a nation wells from here, as far as the eye can see. Dim black pillars around the rim of the world, the occasional inevitable grass fires, pour their summer donation of smog into the sky.

A place named for Joachim, husband of Saint Ann, father of Mary. The barren man who prayed so hard, and so hard and so hard—he got more than he asked for. San Joaquin, Grandfather of God.

Off the last freeway now, onto Highway 88 east of Stockton. Here begins my provisioning (farmers are opening their road stands for the day) with melons so fragrant they perfume the car, fresh sweet corn, some white, some yellow—and better yet—some bicolored. Viny tomatoes, still hot from the sun.

Into Jackson on the far side of the valley: time for a lightning pass through the local Safeway: bacon, eggs, bagels, cream cheese. Salad stuff. A twelve-pound slab of New York steak, still in one piece.

One more stop in Jackson. Main Street: where the curbs are two feet tall, and a sidewalk plaque commemorates the last public hanging. The last whorehouse got shut down in the ’50s, Papa says.

Old saloons have metamorphosed into slick boutiques, but in among the ticky-tacky is a cavernous dry goods store that still sells gold pans. Also the Jackson Bakery, home to glorious fat flaky turnovers. I buy all the blueberries they have plus raspberries to make a baker’s dozen, just as my mother and grandfather always did before me.

Still on the early side of noon, I begin my leadfoot run up the mountain. Five thousand feet. Six thousand feet. Where the granite bones of the world begin to show, and the sky gets darker blue, and the trees all smell like bitter incense. Meditating, as I go, about the food I’ve bought. All very homely and American. But so am I. The food is like me.

What if he doesn’t like it?

God, what if he doesn’t like me?

Why would he have sent me mail for three whole years now, if he didn’t like me?

———

My sister and I ran age group track for years: national level competition. Papa maintained a certain distance from the whole affair; it was Mama who drove us to practice and drove us to meets, and drove us up the wall. And as long as she kept after me, I excelled. The 1984 Olympics didn’t seem so far away. When I got too big to intimidate, I went down like a rock.

Hormones. I quit; fell in love with a Rock and Roll Star. Not supposed to work out that way, is it? Growing up means getting serious, taking charge of your life. The 1984 Olympics came and went. I never turned the TV on.

But Mama had a sort of system, a ladder of degrees to rate performance, from lousy to sensational. The bottom rung was “Don’t run last.”

And man, was I happy to be through with that forever.

Now here I go, rating my own chances from the bottom up: if Belshangles had played Oakland and Tommi didn’t contact me at all, that would be running dead last. Doing better than that already. I got tickets and an engraved invitation.

But to what event? Though Mama might not equate my bedding Tommi Rhymer with “Finishing in the Medals,” I had been prepared to grab for any level of intimacy I could get, depending on a whole galaxy of unknowns. That was yesterday.

And now, twenty-four hours later, I teetered on the last, the ultimate plateau, corresponding to Mama’s “Win.” I had my fantasy lover headed for Nevada; I was wearing his Day-Glo diamond ring, and he had on the matching one. So far it was working like a charm. The real question: why? What made him so unrealistically tractable—a matching Grand Passion?

He knew what the Grand Passion trip was about okay, and had embarked, I guessed, on one such journey in his life, but certainly not for me. More poetry surfaced (learned at school, would you believe—)

He hangs in shades the oranges bright,

Like golden lamps in a green night—

Andrew Marvell’s Bermudas is what it was:

—He makes the figs our mouths to meet,

And scatters melons at our feet,

But apples plants, of such a price,

No tree could ever bear them twice.

Passion fruit. Somehow, I wouldn’t even want to make Tom bear those apples twice.

But he was talking again. “Up till now,” he said, “well, up till now I’ve not been old enough. Few years from now I’d be too old, and it wouldn’t be seemly.”

I couldn’t think of any answer, plain, ordinary, conversational. I ached to stop the car, rush around to his side and crush him to me. Cover him, hide him, so he couldn’t ever be too old. I found the mental address where I’d left Bermudas, and vanished into it. Excellent way of keeping sane. See how much I can remember.

Where the remote Bermudas ride

In the ocean’s bosom, unespied,

From a small boat that rowed along

The listening waves received this song—

What should we do but sing His praise,

Who brought us through the watery maze

Unto a land so far from home,

And yet far gentler than our own?

Where He the great sea monsters racks

That lift the deep upon their backs,

He lands us on this grassy stage

Far from priests’ and prelates’ rage—

I’d made it past the fruit, right down to the end in fact—

—Thus sang they in the English boat,

An holy and a cheerful note,

And all the while, to aid their chime,

With falling oars they kept the time.

—before he spoke again. “I don’t have AIDS.”

The car hummed along.

“Well I could have, you know that.”

We’d been on the road exactly one hour, tooling along through Vacaville now: dry gold hills and dusty oak trees all around, the little airstrip on our right humming with towplanes as they lofted one sport glider after another. An affluent swarm of multicolored dragonflies circled on the thermals overhead.

Lines of an old T. Rex song ousted Bermudas from my mind, something definitely not learned for school: Marc Bolan calling himself a sexual glider, imploring a current lover to be his plane in the rain.

Except there wasn’t any rain. Smoggy, brassy-hot California valley August. We drove along.

“I went and had that blood test done. They say I haven’t even seen the bug.”

“I’m not questioning you.”

He swung around on me with a shrug that almost looked like desperation. “Shouldn’t you? Shouldn’t you be?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you told me you were well.”

Silence closed in again. The last of the coast hills dropped behind. I started the long straight run across the San Joaquin. This far north it’s properly the Sacramento Valley, but I still think about it as the San Joaquin, Spanish for Saint Joachim. Hazy fertile summer place.

“Maybe I was lying.”

I didn’t take him up on it.

———

Israel waited for a Messiah in Saint Joachim’s day, with the pious all set to go in their assemblies of tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands, all shined up and ready for the great Assembly of Heaven, the coming of the Kingdom of God.

The Dead Sea Scrolls tell all about it.

Women weren’t allowed in that assembly. Neither were men with problems. Not just the reprobates, but the deaf, the blind, the retarded, the sterile, men who stooped from age, men missing a limb or lame in one—even men who were scarred in their hands or feet. “Because,” they said, “the Angels of God will be there, and it wouldn’t be seemly.”

So the irony was, when the Messiah came, they nailed Him through the hands and feet, and banned Him with the other undesirables. And kept on waiting, waiting—

I see Him like the kid in Alice’s Restaurant: sittin’ there with the mother stabbers and the father rapers, laughin’ and havin’ a wonderful time and playin’ with the pencils on the GROUP W bench. Joachim was His grandfather.

Joachim and Ann had no children, and the dumb priests wouldn’t let him worship. A man was bound under the Law to worship God and get children; if he couldn’t do one, he wasn’t counted fit to do the other. So Joachim ran away. He sat out in the hills and prayed. I guess he must have known the moment his grief was lifted; he went off leaping, back down the mountainside to town. Ann must have too; she left home and headed for the gate.

It’s just a legend, an old story. I never met anyone who believed such stuff but me. Most of the things I love are apocryphal. So they met and kissed in the public road under the city gate, kissed in front of everybody. Mary was conceived from that kiss.

What a kiss that must have been.

Thinking about that and driving along across the summer valley, it all drifted with the heat into the end of Alice’s Restaurant, where the crazy Sergeant reads off his paper to the litterbugs, mother stabbers, father rapers, etc., on the GROUP W bench, declaring them unfit for the draft: Then, on the other side—right in the middle of the other side—away from everything else on the other side, it said:

“Kid: have you rehabilitated yourself?”

———

The old VW hummed along. We passed the flood plain west of Sacramento, arched above the slow brown river. Capitol and State buildings paraded by at a leafy distance.

Unruly suburb infiltrates the miles of gold-dredge tailings north of Sacramento, baking scrubland stripped and jumbled in the last century, disguised with tract houses in this. But at Auburn, oh, at Auburn the road swings east again. Triumphant mountains which you never saw approaching are suddenly under your wheels.

We had been two hours on the road.

———

“Well what if I did?” He burst out finally, “What would you do?” Remembering the question wasn’t my problem. Knowing my answer wasn’t; I just couldn’t say it. Silence didn’t stop him this time. “Get the hell away from me, that’s what you’d do?”

I said, “No, I wouldn’t.”

Silence. Up and up.

Oaks give way to fir trees. Grass gives way to rock. Valley smog becomes Sierra blue sky. And the blue gets darker, and darker—

“So what would y’do? Hold my hand with rubber gloves and watch me die?”

“If that was my only option left, I guess I would.”

“Well, I’ll just say in advance, I want no part of it. Besides, I already got somebody with a pretty firm commitment to that job.”

“If you went first.”

“What?”

“I said, if you went first. What if it was him? Hey, what are we talking about this for? Is he sick? Is he exposed to AIDS?”

The white cap shook emphatically. “He’s got no chance of not having what I’ve got. Or of getting what I haven’t, for that matter. Which, right now, thanks to no virtues of mine, is nothing.”

“So?”

There’s a fine, fine art to getting up a long grade in an old VW bus. You have to stay above sixty-two miles per hour. So plan ahead, stand on it well before the grade, get the old momentum up.

Then hope like crazy nothing makes you brake, for if you do, and backslide off that cusp of speed, then it’s slower, slower, helplessly slower—gear down, move right, until you’re laying down a trail of oil, sweat, and tears: twenty miles an hour in the far right lane all the way to the top.

“—So it seems I’ve gone looking, and put myself in the goddamn middle of every ‘high-risk identity group’ I can think of, ’cept for being Haitian. Little late for that.”

“You’re no hemophiliac either.”

“No, thank God I’m English!”

“You could buy property in Port au Prince.”

“I’m not laughing! Couldn’t you just imagine me as AIDS Poster Boy of the Year?”

“Don’t do that to me!”

“Say, don’t do it to you? I don’t wanta do it to me! I don’t want to die of that stupid, goddamn ignominious disease! I don’t want to die at all!”

He was going to freak. I didn’t know what to do.

“If I lived in L.A., I’d be dead now!”

Headed up the grade to Donner summit at sixty-two miles an hour in the next-to-the-fastest of four lanes of traffic. I didn’t know what to do. Think about Saint Francis and his random-input enlightenment method. I bet old Francis never did it on a freeway. I shut my eyes anyhow, and prayed to see.

Instantaneous response: a screech of alarm from my passenger, “God! Look out! Bloody fucking car!”

I have entered the Realm of Seeing. Some big American tank with lots of chrome, stuck behind a yet slower vehicle in the right-hand lane, pulls ponderously in front of me at thirty miles per hour. Prominent on the born-again rear end I’m about to impact is a bumper sticker: “Jesus Gave Me This Car.”

Input, if I ever saw it!

So Jesus Gave Me This Man!

(Breaking as hard as I can: sixty miles an hour!)

He can’t go bad on me: I prayed for him!

(Fifty-five mph!) He’s mine!

(Forty-five!) No backsies!

(Thirty-five!) Gear down, oh help, oh God, I’m so close on the guy, even his bumper sticker disappears from view!

Like it says: You love your kids; would you give ’em scorpions if they ask for fish, or stones instead of bread?

(Thirty.) The bumper sticker reappears, and placidly, unmindfully, begins to pull away.

You gave him to me; God doesn’t give no trash!

He looks as good and edible to me as loaves and fishes!

Be damned if I’ll believe he’s scorpions and stones!

No scorpions! No stones!

Good San Francisco French bread, a nice long baguette, fresh and warm, sweet as anything. And rich mahogany smoked salmon, straight off the North Coast!

No switches and ashes in my Christmas stocking!

Etc., etc.

———

“I’ve been thinking and thinking now, all the way here, how it was I ever planned to cut the coat I covet out of the cloth I’ve been given. You know—” he said, beginning to sound horribly tearful, “—in San Francisco, when Sim came down to fetch you from the lobby there? He got me out of Harlan’s bed before he went. Anybody looking for me who knew me at all’d try there second, and if he really knew me, might just look there first. I’ve almost no conscious cruelty in my nature, and I would call it more than cruel, not to make positive you understood that.”

“I think—” I said, “I think I understand that.”

“Well I don’t think you do!”

“What I’m trying to say: sooner or later I’m afraid you’ll end up by despising me, and maybe sooner is better than later. You think I’m joking, but I’m not. You’ll get inside, and see it’s all for real. You’ll say ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ and I won’t have any answer. Then you’ll want to get the hell out, and you will.”

He made it all sound so final.

Competition left me a very dull kid in some ways. Isolated, too. Capable of being single-minded. I have the personality of a snapping turtle: grab on, and not let go till it thunders. The only coat I’d ever coveted, I was wearing. I had no apprehensions about getting it out of the cloth I was given. God wouldn’t almost give him to me, would he? An earthly treasure too far gone to wear? Just to prove I’d got my values on all backwards, a prize past mending?

Prayer fails; it fibrillates: then it tumbles in upon itself, a black hole of the spirit contracting so fast under its own gravity, no sensible word escapes.

My sister raised rabbits for a while, and my brother, age four, was forever grabbing and messing with the baby bunnies, in spite of threats and paddlings, until he managed to pull the tail off one.

Here he came, holding the tiny lifeless tag of fur and bone in one hand and the ruined baby in the other, his face a mask of dirt and tears, crying, “Glue! Glue!” That was going to be me in a moment, weeping like a child at the insupportable ruin of things: broken things I didn’t know how to reassemble.

Glue, glue. Cosmic glue.

I had crawled—like the sinners up Dante’s mount of Purgatory, each heaving along a heavy boulder on his back—to the very summit ridge of the Sierras to the place John Muir called the Range of Light. Shows all he knew.

I saw a sign for the old scenic route down to Donner Lake and Truckee, and took it. He really was beginning to sob. And so was I. Then it was “Vista Turn Off—¼ Mile.”

“You can keep the rings—” he said, “—something decent to remember me by.”

I slammed the van into the turnoff, into a parking slot against the vista rail, yanked his faery-canary diamond thing off my hand, and shoved it at him. It came off easy.

“Don’t want your silly rings.”

“Ah please, don’t make it worse and worse—”

“Not without you, I don’t!”

“I bought them for you—” He snuffled stubbornly.

“You’ll find somebody else to give ’em to.”

“No I won’t—” He started to work the gaudy cluster off his own ring finger. It stuck fast at the knuckle. His hands were bigger after all. “—I shan’t try this again—”

“You must know hundreds who’d be likelier than I was.”

“I wouldn’t say that: ones I do, I can think at least a hundred reasons each for my not marrying. Don’t know hundreds, anyway.”

“You mean the magazines are wrong.”

“What?”

“Talking about your AIDS-risk people.”

“What?”

“Twelve hundred lifetime partners.”

He looked absolutely aghast. He even stopped tugging at the ring. “What d’y’think? I haven’t spent my entire life on tour, y’know! See? You’ve begun on me already! I—I just don’t think this is going to work, that’s all. I’m afraid, plain terrified it isn’t going to work!”

“I don’t give a shit if it works or not!”

“I wouldn’t say that, either!”

There was the view, rocky heights horizon to horizon, and Donner Lake dimpling and flashing in the trees below. Stout people in bright cotton clothes were using it for backdrop, taking snapshots of each other.

A small breeze wandered whistling past the windows.

“C’mon girl, what I’m trying to tell you: you can still get out. You don’t want to live with my problems?”

I felt ready to explode.

“What kind of shitty question you call that? Of course I don’t want to live with your problems!” He looked tearful and taken aback. “Do you?” I went on talking much too fast. “Listen, you know what all this reminds me of? A dumb story in a book back home, made a real dent in me when I was about fourteen: there’s a little coastal steamship going up the Irish Sea or someplace, and it’s coming a god-awful storm.

“Well, this young sailor starts to freak, screaming, ‘Captain, Captain! We are going down!’

“And the captain—you know what he says? He says, ‘Didn’t ye know that ships go down when ye first hired on?’

“‘Yessir!’

“‘Didn’t ye know some go down every year?’

“‘Yessir!’

“‘Weren’t ye hired to go down?’

“‘Yessir!’

“‘So go down like a man, and to hell wi’ye!’

“That’s much the way I’ve felt about a lot of things. I always figured I was hired to go down.”

Silence.

We sat in the car and looked out over the windy sliver of Donner Lake a mile below—the meadow at the far end, where the Donner Party sat, and starved, and cannibalized each other one whole winter long, because they hadn’t had the smarts to mark the snow drifts where their oxen froze. All around the lake are summer homes and boat docks now. A miniature ski boat with a pair of tiny skiers sliced its silver surface, soundless, effortless. On the far side, a train was hauling up the sheer eastern face of the Sierra, four big diesel engines pushing and four pulling, through the endless snow sheds. Chinese coolies died to build those sheds a hundred years ago.

Tom got out his shades and put them on. “So who did y’say composed that little moral tale?”

“I didn’t. It was Yeats, I think.”

“William Butler Yeats?”

“That’s the one.”

“Goddamn Irishman. You know, I don’t like that. In fact, I don’t like it at all. I never hired you on to go down. I hired you to float high. And if you don’t, what use are you to me? What the fuck: I never hired you anyway!

“Turn the car back on. C’mon.”

I drove the long, slow way round the vista parking lot, avoiding children and the overflow from litter cans, arriving at last, unavoidably, back at the highway entrance.

“Which way?” I said, “San Francisco?”

“Hell with that. I said you’re going to float. How far is ah—”

“Reno?”

“Right.”

“’Bout half an hour that way. Are you floating too?”

He shook his head. “I suppose I must, if I’m to keep an eye on you.”

———

I scribbled a phone book list of wedding chapels at the gas station in Truckee. Really freaky for a California kid: the whole of Nevada fits inside one phone book.

After Truckee, California goes away. Nevada comes on hot and heavy, fast enough to give your eyes rope burns.

97.4% Guaranteed Payback!

Nobody Turns It On Like Onslow!

98.5% Payback!

Winners Play Harrah’s!

Reno’s Best Odds! 99% Video Poker!

Next Exit For Fun!

2000 Car Garage!

Ham ’N’ Eggs 99¢ !

Hospitality And All The Rest!

The roadside hype goes up ten decibels with every elevation line you drop. Then California is a mile-high wall of shadow, gray stone, green forest, little fastnesses of August snow, all behind you. Simmering ahead, a tacky mirage in a shallow desert bowl, is Reno.

The Reno chapels cluster on Virginia Street, from

Sweetheart Chapel Of Love

Corner Of N. Virginia St. And I-80 Exit 13!

Open! Come In!

complete weddings, Certified Legal!

Flowers, Rings, Garters, Gowns!

Visa And Mastercard!

se habla español

to

Gold Rush Wedding Chapel

in our Hotel–Casino

Convenient location—Uniquely romantic

2 Blocks from the courthouse

Religious or civil ceremonies

Indoor or Outdoor

Free Video and Viewing

Free Champagne! Free Transportation

Tom was riding with his eyes shut. He opened them at the corner of Virginia Street and I-80 exit 13. On the right side stand a motel, a wedding chapel, an RV storage lot, and another wedding chapel. On the left, a hair salon, a wedding chapel and a fast food joint.

The two on the right are former storefronts painted sugar-frosting colors, strawberry, grape, vanilla, lemon-lime. In California they’d be card parlors, and the signs would say PAN-POKER-LO BALL. The windows of the first are masked in pointy plywood arches, cupcake pink: pure ghetto-fantasy Arabian Nights. The second’s windowless but wears the same kitsch arches all around: shadow boxes framing red plush hearts. The left-hand chapel’s in a bungalow. Between its windows and their lacy tiebacks interpose the arches, screaming yellow.

It took a minute, but I figured it. They weren’t supposed to look Moslem: Moslem reads heavy sex in the harem. Gothic reads church. Church reads wedding. Ghetto gothic. Drive by slowly, people already honking at my rear. Quick, glance at Tom’s face and wish I hadn’t: it wore a look. Really betrayed disbelief.

Drive on. Next block began the high-rises. Casinos. Lighted signs. Flashing lights. Harrah’s. Circus Circus. Signs hyping casino entertainment: that elephant graveyard where old ’50s TV luminaries in sequined caftans go to die.

Discount Souvenirs, World’s Largest

Slots and Soda Works!

99¢ T-Shirts!

Novelty Slot Machines!

Leather And Lace!

Cash for Diamonds And Guns!

Buy —Sell—Trade

Beyond the crush of cars was a steady two-way flow along the sidewalk. Obese, permed women jostling by, and raddled, faded men, so many purposeful ants on their way to the garbage. Onto this swarming walk the casinos spilled directly, no formality of doors or walls, huge many-layered galleries a-whir with coins in machines, chicka chicka chicka chicka chicka. The buzz inside the hive.

Ahead, a steel and neon message spanned the street with flashing stars: Dante’s inscription over Hell Gate wouldn’t have surprised me, the one that ends, “Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.” Just about everybody’s heard that end; but you know how it begins? It starts “Love made me—”

All that this one really said was

Reno! The Biggest Little City In The World!

Casino Canyon isn’t long; it empties into hot sun, open space, wide stone walks, stone parapets. The Truckee River hustles through the middle of town, still singing to its stones about the California peaks they washed from.

Here squats a big stone building, abashed and patient, very closed on Sunday. The Courthouse. Must be: the next alley is Court Street. I took a right into its dark mouth. The Courthouse bulk made up one side of it, the other was like big motels, lobbies on the street level, rooms on the next level, parking on top, and signs that said

Queen Beds

U set Temp

Direct Dial Phone

Color TV

Marriage Service

Licenses available 7 days a week/ 8am till midnight

Small fee—very personal—simple fast service

Civil Marriage Commitment

No waiting.

They didn’t actually advertise “Best odds in town” and 99-cent ham ’n’ eggs available with each and every wedding, but I bet you anything they had slot machines.

Into the sun again, no waiting, and there, a block behind the Courthouse, sat a brick colonial building; in California it would have been a funeral home.

Here it was a duplex; one half said Mortgage Insurance, the other Marriage Chapel. Parking lots at either side said Mortgage Parking / Marriage Parking. There was a wet green lawn out front, a sidewalk, and, gracing the curb, a ten-wheeled limousine forty feet long.

“Wait!” said Tom.

I put us on the Marriage Parking side.

The back of the limo had a removable roof. Removed. And obvious why: closed up, it would have rained in there. The whole rear end was an eight-foot hot tub, bubbling away in gold-flecked fiberglass. Then came a pulpit (complete with reading light and fringy frontal), plush pews, a bar, refrigerators, and finally, a place for the band.

Music stood open on the stands: if I went around the street side and shaded my eyes, I could just make out:

“One Hand, One Heart”

Tom had loped on down the sidewalk. Now he circled back along the gutter and met me next to the music.

“What’s it for?”

“I believe people get married in it.”

“Drivin’ around?”

Somebody guffawed.

Chattering, Español habla-ing people cascaded from the marriage side of the building, down the steps, and onto the lawn. Big plushy people, two big families, lots of brown friends, and brothers in rented tuxedos, sisters in pink satin, an abundant fluffy bride in a veil.

Tom hit the asphalt with the professional aplomb of a commando under fire. He let his back slide down the limo; I descended in his lap. He laughed until he cried.

Thomas Peter Rhymer in the desolate Nevada street where I’d transported him: thin, frightened, desperately fragile. Working-class English. Thirty-two and aging. Wearing the plain scars of every kind of hard knock and tough scrape I could imagine. I wanted to put my arms around it all, bury my face in him until I couldn’t see anything else. So I did, down behind the limo. The side of his collar smelled like fresh bread.

Very hot and private on the concrete. The people on the lawn couldn’t see us, and there weren’t too many driving by. Who cares what they thought anyway? Just one more weirded out couple embracing in the gutter. The limo’s shiny oyster flank collects the sun, flat black tire rubber gives off heat. I peep at grit and glitter, pebbles and glass bits on the pavement. Somebody’s marked-up Keno card.

“So, girl,” he whispered, “I didn’t come up here to be your ninety-nine-cent souvenir. I know too much about that trade.”

“How about my ninety-nine-cent ham’n’eggs?” I asked his collar.

“Now, I might just go for that. But isn’t there some other kind of place here, a town hall or the like, where men and women marry in a bit of dignity?”

Every last desire, fantasy, hormone that I owned nuzzled up close to him and lay content. T.P. Rhymer, clinging smartly to the tag end of his dignity.

I liked him, too.

Well, I did know where there was a town hall, but it wasn’t Reno. Forty clean miles of desert south. And we’d have to pass that way to get back to the mountains. Describing Carson City to his collar I found far easier than looking him in the eye. Such a funky little place, state capital or no, that, as my grandmother would have said, “If there was a boxcar on the siding, you missed it.”

Her father had run a mining company railroad, which left a certain railroad color to her vocabulary, like the gem she insisted was the company motto of the Southern Pacific: “Uphill slow, downhill fast; tonnage first, safety last.”

That set him off again, laughing till he couldn’t breathe: “Oh God,” he gasped, “Oh God. The same as us. So—” (he got a first good breath) “—is it going to work out like the rings?”

“What?”

“This morning, you were having me believe God leaves treats around for you to find—”

My faith lay damp and macerated as a tired pound of hamburger leaking through its paper. Nevertheless, if Grace (or similar entity) had led me safe this far, it did seem inconceivably senseless that Grace might not intend to lead us home. “Okay,” I said. “Okay, it’s like the rings.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.” But I wasn’t sure of anything.

We got up, leaning on each other.

As I cranked the van, his left hand slid across the hot vinyl till the back of it lay comforted under my thigh. I looked at him to find out how to take it; he wouldn’t raise his eyes. There were still tears in the lashes. But the hand stayed where it was for the rest of the ride.