Somehow Bone managed to get them back to the hotel, probably by driving twenty miles an hour all the way though he could not have sworn to it, since he remembered almost nothing of the journey except a vague feeling of personal heroism, as if he were a half-dead Saint Bernard dog dragging his poor lost charges to safety. In the hotel parking lot Cutter showed his gratitude by throwing a punch at him, but he missed and hit a parked Cadillac instead. Yelling in pain, Alex then dented the car’s hood with his cane and finished it off by urinating on two of its whitewalls. In time, however, the three of them managed to reach the right floor of the hotel and even their very own room. Once inside, Bone submitted meekly to the booze and with two exceptions did not stir from his oblivion until almost eleven the next morning. The first exception was when he rolled over once at a hammering sound counterpointed by heavy panting and he had the distinct impression he saw Cutter performing calisthenics out on the balcony. Another time he seemed to recall seeing Cutter, naked and shower-drenched, opening the door for room service, a stooped old man who pushed a breakfast cart into the room as if he had no real expectation of ever getting out alive. But Bone could not have cared less. Sleep was what he needed, sore hangover’s bath, and he drifted contentedly in it until a chambermaid came clattering into the room at eleven and, not seeing him zonked out on the floor between the beds, began to tidy up the bathroom, all the while singing a soft Spanish dirge. Bone thought of rolling under a bed and letting her complete her work in peace, but there was not enough room, so he did the next best thing—he slipped up onto one of the beds and began to yawn loudly. The maid came out of the bathroom in a crouch, her eyes round with terror.
“I no see!” she cried.
Bone shrugged. “De nada. You come back, si?”
“I no see!”
“Right. I understand. You come back, okay?”
“Hokay!” She backed out of the room carefully, knowing a brujo when she saw one.
Alone, Bone wondered what time Cutter and Valerie had left. Remembering the calisthenics and room service during the night, the coffee and the showers, he assumed Cutter had tried to work his hangover off instead of sleeping it off, that he had been that anxious to pick up where Bone had left off yesterday. And Bone did not have to look far for confirmation. On the dresser mirror across the room was a lipstick-scrawled message:
YANKEE GO HOME!
Below it, an arrow pointed to the top of the dresser, where Cutter had continued his message on a sheet of hotel stationery:
Dear Chickenshit,
During the night it comes to me like a hot flash—I need you like I need more glass eyes. Who’s to say I wasn’t on Alvarez Street that night? Who’s to say I didn’t see old J.J. dump the bod same as you did? Not J.J. hisself—that I guarantee.
So what it comes down to, dear heart, is this—me and V. hereby include you out. In a word, you are fired—free to return to the sands of S.B. and contemplate the utter perfection of your ding-dong.
Meanwhile, J.J. is ours. Mine. Today we don’t send a boy out on a man’s job. Today I go. And tomorrow—well, someday y’all come visit us on Ibiza, hear?
But for the nonce—get lost.
Yrs. in Jesus,
Alexander IV
All in all, Bone considered it pretty good advice, if not actually to get lost at least to put as much distance as he could between himself and them, and the sooner the better. Even handled expertly—that is, the way Bone himself would have tried to handle it—the operation would have been a long shot at best. It required a negotiator who knew something of the corporate labyrinth, because unless one reached Wolfe with the product intact—not picked over by underlings, ripped open, light-exposed—then one really had nothing to sell. Wolfe would have no alternative except to call in the gendarmes and bluff it out, play his power game to the full, which would probably mean jail—and not for Wolfe. Considering all that. Bone simply could not imagine Cutter bringing the thing off. Somewhere along the line, probably within minutes after he entered Wolfe’s domain, he would run up against one variety or other of bureaucratic lunacy and his response would naturally be both swift and outrageous, the kind of act that would bring everything crashing down upon him. A mad lame bull in a plastic shop, that would about describe him. And it was a description Bone could not see leading to anything but failure. So he was glad to be out of it, anxious to be on his way.
There was still his hangover to deal with, however, his need for oxygen and food and movement. Getting out of bed, he decided that if room service was good enough for Cutter and Valerie it was also good enough for him, and he phoned down an order for French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee, and a pint of freshly squeezed orange juice, this last a specification that threw the order-taker into such a panic Bone wondered if he had been connected with the Sheraton-Iceland kitchen by mistake. He then smoked a cigarette, defecated splendidly, and spent the next fifteen minutes in the shower, grateful that the world’s reputedly impending water crisis was still a few years distant.
The breakfast proved to be almost as cold as it was expensive, though this last he solved à la Cutter, scrawling his version of Valerie’s signature across the room service check. By twelve-thirty he was ready to go, fed and dressed, with the few things he had brought with him, extra shirt, socks, toilet articles, all stuffed into his venerable attaché case. Downstairs he strode across the hotel lobby and out through the bustling entrance like any other successful young executive. Only where they all seemed to be hailing taxis, he walked casually across the parking lot, shortcutted through some bushes, and headed down the hill to Lankersham. Another block and he was on the freeway entrance ramp, thumbing with his usual touch of calculated restraint and even embarrassment, hoping to make clear to that Great American Majority thundering past that his customary place was right there with them on the road, not next to it as now, for it was his experience that people were more likely to pick up their own kind. And normally it was the women who came through for him, usually young ones, two or three of them riding together and thus able to combine a sense of adventure with some measure of security. But this day it was a man who did the honors, a heavy middle-aged sales type with a bright red face and a whiskey voice. He drove one-handed and very fast, chainsmoking Camels as he cruised along the freeway, tailgating, changing lanes, slipping through openings that would have given a Hell’s Angel pause. But as Bone quickly learned, the man was not really being cavalier with anyone’s life except his own, for the simple reason that he did not seem to realize that there were any others out there. Bone in fact believed that if he had been an armed Black Panther or a Hari Krishna monk or a bull dyke fondling a bicycle chain, it would have been the same—the man would not have noticed. All he wanted, all he had stopped for, was a pair of ears, a hitchhiker confessor, a surrogate shrink.
In the less than ninety minutes it took to reach Santa Barbara, Bone learned in crushing detail the history of the man’s three rottenfuckin’ marriages. He learned all about the ingratitude and stupidity of the man’s rottenfuckin’ daughters and pansy-ass sons and in the bargain got a straight-from-the-shoulder analysis of the housewares business, starting with the manufacturers and moving down through the jobbers and salesmen (the best of the goddamn lot, the backbone of the whole economy) to the rottenfuckin’ retailers themselves, who never discounted anything unless it was simple old-fashioned honesty, an honest product for an honest buck. Like most businesses, housewares was simply no place for an honest man, a good man, and especially not an honest good man who was also a crackerjack salesman. Him they just didn’t know what to do with. They cheated him and lied to him and stabbed him in the back. They shaved his commissions and pirated his accounts and failed to recognize his considerable achievements. All of which convinced Bone that he had more than earned his way back to Santa Barbara, and in fact had a little something extra due him. So as they reached the downtown area and the man started to pull off the freeway to let him out, Bone told him to go on to the next corner and hang a right.
“There’s something you’ve got to see,” he explained. “It’s just a couple of blocks.”
Murdock’s Bar actually was six blocks from the freeway, but the housewares tycoon did not complain. As Bone got out, though, the man asked for an explanation.
“Well, what is it I got to see?”
Bone frowned, smiled. It should have been obvious. “My destination,” he said.
Unfortunately Murdock’s turned out not to be much in the way of a destination, for Murdock himself was gone, which meant Bone would not be able to drink on his tab or borrow the man’s car for a run uptown to see Mo and the baby. Nevertheless Bone did settle in long enough to have one vodka tonic, to sit there in the pleasant darkness working on the drink and picking at his decision to come here, all the way downtown, instead of getting out on 101 as it passed through Montecito, not even a half mile from Mrs. Little’s, which after all was his new home, his place of bed and board for now. But as he thought about it, he had to admit no decision was involved, that he simply had come straight here like a homing pigeon following the radar beam of its nature. The fact that Cutter would not be there did not really enter in. Bone had been alone with her before, dozens of times, and nothing had happened. So why should he expect anything to happen this time? Oh, he could hope, all right. And he could even try, make the old half-hearted try. There couldn’t be any harm in that, he told himself. There was never any harm in that.
On the way out he ran into Sergeant Verdugo, one of the detectives who had rousted him the night of the murder. Verdugo said he was still assigned to the case, but was getting nowhere fast. He asked Bone if his memory had improved any and Bone said he was on his way uptown, that maybe the sergeant would give him a lift and they could talk about it. Verdugo had the look of a man who knew he was being suckered, but he went along anyway, driving Bone the few miles to Cutter’s place. And all he did was nod wearily when Bone said he had nothing to add to his original statement. For his part, the sergeant did not have much more to offer. Every lead so far in the case had reached a dead end. The department was nowhere. Lieutenant Ross was back on warm milk and baby food. And to top it all, the victim’s sister seemed to have disappeared. Her mother didn’t know where she was, and neither did her employer.
“Ross thinks we’ll find her dead too,” Verdugo finished.
Bone said nothing.
They were at Cutter’s now. “Still staying here, huh?” the sergeant observed. “On the floor?”
Getting out, Bone smiled. “Home is where the heart is.”
There was no answer to his knock, so he went on into the house, expecting that he would find her asleep in bed with the baby. Instead he found her out on the deck dozing topless in the sun on one of the webbed folding chairs Swanson had given Cutter. Alex Five was at her feet, asleep in a pile of blankets on the deck floor. For a short time Bone just stood there in the doorway saying nothing, not moving, as if he feared the slightest sound would bring it all crashing down, this tableau that looked almost contrived by a French impressionist—the half-nude madonna and child asleep in the gold pool of the sun, with the mountains and the sea and the red-roofed city beyond. He thought of bending down and touching his lips to her breasts, but he knew that would probably gain him nothing except a punched nose, so he lightly rapped on the doorjamb instead. And Mo reacted about as he had expected she would, with her eyes mostly, a look of bland surprise. Not bothering to cover her breasts, she raised her finger to her mouth to silence him—she did not want him waking the baby. Getting up, she followed him back into the house and closed the French deck doors behind her.
“What the hell are you now, a cat burglar?” she asked, slipping into a sweatshirt.
“I knocked.”
“Not very loud.”
Bone smiled. “Just loud enough. For my purposes.”
Flopping back on the davenport, she lit a cigarette. “Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself.”
“Immensely.”
“Yeah, they’re pretty great,” she admitted. “All thirty-four inches.”
“I’m not a tits man.”
“What then? Elbows? Ankles?”
“Eyes, Mo. I have this thing about certain kinds of eyes.”
“Bloodshot, no doubt.”
“Usually, yes.”
She said nothing for a few moments, evidently having temporarily run out of sarcasm. “You’re alone?” she asked finally.
“I came back alone, yes.”
“He’s still there, then?”
“Still there. Still on the job.”
She sat looking at him, smiling slightly. “Are you going to tell me why?”
“Sure. I chickened out. Once I hit Wolfe’s place, I found I couldn’t go through with the thing. But I pretended to anyway. Went through the motions. You know.”
“Why?”
“Why couldn’t I go through with it?”
“Yes. Why the sudden bout of sanity?”
“That about says it.”
“Why pretend you went through with it though?”
“I figured when nothing happened—when Wolfe never got in touch—the whole thing would just peter out. Alex would lose interest, give it up.”
“I take it he didn’t.”
“No. Today he’s carrying the ball.”
“And will he drop it too?”
“Not if he can help it.”
“Is there any chance he could bring it off?”
“Let’s hope so. For your sake anyway.”
“You figure I might benefit somehow?”
Bone shrugged.
“Sort of share-the-wealth thing?”
“I can’t see why not.”
“Can’t you now?”
“No, I can’t.”
Mo’s smile seemed to appreciate the effort he made, but she still was not buying. “And the girl? I take it she didn’t chicken out either.”
“No. She’s still hanging in there.”
“Plucky little thing.”
“Yeah, she’s a plucky little thing.”
“And with you gone, that sort of throws them together, doesn’t it?”
“In a business sort of way.”
“Kind of colleagues, you might say.”
Bone did not pick it up.
“Or partners,” she went on.
“Whatever.”
“Bedmates?”
“Not while I was there.”
“Of course not. Not with old blue-eyes on the Scene. I mean one couldn’t very well expect Alex to beat that kind of competition, could one?”
Bone went along. “Now that you mention it.”
“Except with me, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But now if he were screwing her—you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“Would it matter?”
“Which. Their screwing, or your telling me?”
“Take your pick.”
The smile came again. “You’re right, Rich. I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it.”
“No.”
The baby was awake now. Through the French doors Bone could hear him jabbering, see him on his hands and knees at the deck railing, trying to squeeze his head through.
“It’s all right—you can go get him,” Mo said. “You can do your little domestic thing.”
Bone gave her a despairing look. But he went out onto the deck and got the baby anyway.
“You want to change him?” she asked.
“No.”
“Feed him?”
“I’ll watch.”
While Mo took the baby into the bedroom, Bone went back onto the deck and stretched out in the sun, whose brilliance and warmth did nothing to diminish his feeling of rising spirits. Just yesterday he had had one foot in the abyss, yet here he was today back on solid ground, safe and sane if not solvent. And as for any uneasiness he might have felt about coming here alone, Mo herself had quickly dispelled that, Mo in the flesh, the ever astringent flesh. He stood about as good a chance of abusing her as he did a bulldozer. More likely, she would end up rolling right over him. But even that prospect held no terror for him. He was content in the knowledge that he just might find out something this day, maybe get her out of his system for good—or help her set the hook even deeper. Either way, it would be a kind of release, one less point for anxiety.
While he was on the deck the phone rang in the living room, in fact rang seven or eight times before Mo finally answered it. And even then she did not say much except for an occasional “Yes, I heard you,” or “Yes, I’m still here.” Finally she said, “Why don’t you tell him yourself? He’s here.”
At that, Bone got up and went back inside, where he found Mo holding the phone out to him as if it were a wet diaper.
“It’s the great blackmailer,” she said. “With wondrous tales to tell.”
Bone said hello, and Cutter’s voice boomed out of the receiver:
“Keeping the old home fires burning, uh, Rich?”
“Trying, anyway.”
“That’s the ticket. You hang in there, kiddo.”
“Sure thing.”
Cutter came on even stronger now, the juices of his ego fairly oozing from his voice. Was Bone at all interested in how the day’s activities had gone? Yes, of course he was. Well, Cutter was sure happy to hear that, because he hated to think his old buddy might be pissed off at him, and for no good reason either, like that half-assed note Cutter had left in the hotel room for him, which had just been a put-on of course, certainly old Rich was able to see that. Anyway, the wheels of time had done their thing and so had he. Yes, this fool had rushed in where Bone had rightly feared to tread, and would Bone believe that the thing was done, the fait already accompli? Would he believe old Alex had made high-echelon contact and was now waiting to hear from them?
“A young executive type named Pruitt,” Cutter went on. “How about that? Not Whozit but Pruitt—now is that a favorable sign or is that a favorable sign? And in the young man’s own words—he’ll be in touch with us today. He’ll send us a message.”
For some reason Bone could only repeat the phrase: “He’ll send you a message?”
“That’s right.”
“Which means he knows where you are? Where you’re staying?”
“Yeah, I had to improvise a little. With you gone, certain little changes had to be made in the game plan.”
“Suppose he sends you a message via the L.A.P.D.? Or a cannon?”
Cutter laughed. “No chance—believe me. I scared them shitless.”
Bone believed it. “Well, congratulations,” he said. “And good luck. I think you’re going to need it.”
“You too. Tell Mo I said she should be extra nice, because your ego has been so badly bruised of late. Tell her I said you can use the Packard if you need it. You can even sit in my chair.”
“Gee thanks.”
“It’s nothing. Goomba for now.”
Bone hung up. Mo was standing in the deck doorway, staring out at the sea.
“He tell you what happened?” Bone asked.
“More than I care to know. I don’t give a damn. Let him get his ass killed or jailed, I don’t care.”
For a time neither of them said anything more. Bone stood there looking at her sun-limned in the doorway, her face and hair a furze of honeyed fire.
“It’s only three o’clock,” he said finally. “Anything you want to do?”
She gave him a thoughtful look and then nodded, very positively. “Yes. First, I’ll feed the baby. And then I have a gallon of pretty good Chianti and some ridiculously expensive Romano cheese compliments of George. Also some Triscuits and half a loaf of dago bread. So we’ll drink and we’ll eat and we’ll drink some more and maybe play a few records and possibly even dance. How does that sound? Does it sound like something a pair of quasi human beings could manage?”
Bone was not sure. “We could try,” he said.
And try, they did. Through the late afternoon, they sat around drinking the wine and listening to records by Carole King and Elton John and Seals and Crofts, albums by Streisand and the Beatles and Sarah Vaughan and Stevie Wonder. They watched the baby and played with him and they danced together, Bone occasionally kissing her forehead or cheek, chaste kisses she did not seem to mind or even notice. Then during Wonder’s Golden Lady Bone slid his right hand inside her chinos and onto her buttocks at the same time he kissed her on the mouth. And when she did not resist he brought his left hand into the act too, reaching up under her sweatshirt and lightly taking hold of her breast. But at that she pulled away, very casually, however, more as if she had simply tired of dancing. Dropping onto the sofa, she told him not to bother.
“You’d only be disappointed,” she explained. “You wouldn’t be gaining a lover, you’d be losing a friend.”
Bone said he was willing to risk it, but she shook her head.
“No, I don’t think I’m in your league, Rich. I remember the night you had the black girl here, the night of the killing. I thought you two would never quit—God, was I jealous! I hated her.”
Bone tried not to look too pleased. “That was athletics, Mo. Right now I have something else in mind.”
“Like what?”
“Why don’t we find out?”
She smiled with wry affection, almost as if he were another Alexander Five, who at the moment was sitting on the floor happily ripping up a copy of the Village Voice.
“You poor sap,” she said. “You really are a slave to it, aren’t you?”
“I don’t want any it,” he told her.
“What then?”
“You. Us.”
“Love?” She said it without total mockery, almost as if she were testing the word, testing him.
“Why not?”
And she laughed. “A thousand reasons.”
Bone was sitting next to her now, leaning back, about ready to give up, for he had learned a long time ago that one rarely talked a woman into the act. One made his move and either succeeded then or not at all. But suddenly he realized she had changed her position on the davenport. Tucking one leg up under her and turning toward him, she began to search his eyes with her own, a long cool unreadable look that he had to force himself to meet. And then suddenly she kissed him, on the mouth, barely touching his lips. At the same time her hand came to rest on his lap, on the mound of his erection.
“I guess it’s be worth a try,” she said. “What could we lose?”
Bone tried to take her there on the davenport, but she put him off, saying she first had to take care of the baby and then herself.
“You wouldn’t want to make love to a slob, now would you?” she asked.
She changed the baby’s diapers and then gave him to Bone while she took a bath. So Bone found himself lying in bed bouncing the baby up and down on his stomach, lifting him above his face, shaking him and rubbing noses, making the little fellow gurgle with laughter. And it made the whole thing seem very routine, very orderly and domestic. That was how she came back into the room too, like a wife, very matter-of-fact, casually pulling shades, turning on the one dim dresser light, picking up the baby and placing him in the makeshift playpen next to the bed formed by two walls and the back of a chest of drawers and the bed itself, so that he had the option of standing next to them and observing their lovemaking if he wished. But he was more interested in an old coffeepot and an alphabet block, which he carried to the center of the pen and, sitting down, began to bang together.
It was in this simple domestic setting then that Bone and Mo came together in the bed. But from the moment he touched her, took hold of her shoulders and gently pulled her down onto him, there was no single routine second between them. It was Bone’s experience that lovemaking was almost never that so much as a mutual act of masturbation in which the partners used each other’s bodies in place of their own hands or other devices. And he found nothing wrong in this, in fact believed that it led to sex at its fullest and best, as with the black girl last week, those hour-long sessions in which the participants practically fed on each other, carefully searched out those special little morsels of sensation and then picked them clean, blood and sinew and bone, tearing and crunching and sucking, devouring all in a long sweet feast of the flesh, a kind of gluttony perhaps, but still very satisfying and very human, hurting no one. At the same time, neither did it reach Bone’s spirit or touch his heart. That kind of lovemaking he had known only rarely in his life, first as an eighteen-year-old boy with a church summer camp director’s wife and then in the first months of his marriage to Ruth and in only two affairs since then, just four times in all his life when he had made love to a person, someone who had lived in his mind as surely and vividly as he himself. And ironically the sex then rarely had been the best, had almost always been complicated and weakened by the human feelings sweeping back and forth between him and the loved one. Yet even then, during these less than perfect performances, what he had felt as he held his woman and entered her had no counterpart in the other “lovemaking,” the masturbatory variety. For what he had felt was a kind of death of self, an immolation, as if he had briefly penetrated to the cool still fire at the heart of things.
And he felt something like this now as he made love to Mo, his lips brushing her hair and eyes and cheeks before twining with her mouth finally in a kiss that lasted until he could feel her begin to come and then he burrowed his face in her neck as he rushed to follow, crushing her body to his, killing it, killing his own. And immediately she was weeping in his arms, her face a lovely saltlick to his mouth. It was then he heard himself uttering the heavy, forbidden words:
“I love you, Mo. I love you. I love you.”
In response she held his body tightly, locking him in the bracelet of her legs, and began to return his kisses, ardently, her mouth suddenly the sweetest spring in all the desert of his life. So it was only natural that within a short time they were making love again, but more slowly now, more deliciously, like a pair of moths playing at the very edge of fire. And possibly they played too near, for when they reached climax this second time it was as if they had consummated a kind of death instead. Suddenly the whole thing was gone, murdered. In her touch alone Bone could feel the thing’s death, feel it draining out of her as surely as the blood from his penis. Wordlessly he got off her and lay back on the pillow beside her, but apparently even that was not separation enough, for she abruptly rolled away from him and reached out to the baby, who was still sitting on the floor, engrossed in trying to get the alphabet blocks out of the coffeepot. But he gave it up for his mother’s finger, squeezing it, lifting it to his mouth.
And for a while that was how things remained—Mo lying at the edge of the bed, broodingly playing with the baby, while Bone lay alone, waiting. Finally she spoke:
“So you love me, do you?”
He was slow to answer. “If not you, then no one.”
“Maybe no one, then?”
“No—you, Mo.”
“How much?”
Bone could almost feel the ground opening under him, the abyss forming again. “I’m no good at math,” he said.
“You love me enough to be my man? Enough to go to some lousy job every day and make the bread so I can take care of this one, feed him, clothe him?” The baby was standing at the side of the bed now, playing with his mother’s hair. She waited a few moments before making the hole wider. “And in the middle of the night, Rich, when I wake up and can almost hear my terror scratching along the walls—will you be here then? Will you be here to hold me, Rich? Will you love me then?”
He thought of asking her whatever had happened to that hard-nosed women’s-libber who expected nothing of men, who would not even accord them the role of fatherhood let alone economic dominance. Apparently that Mo had only been a front, a pose. But he did not bother to ask. Silence was so much safer. And of course it answered all her questions anyway, better than any words could have. Sitting up, she gave him a slight enigmatic smile, a look carrying something beyond its usual burden of irony, something new and subtly alien, as if the light gray-green of her eyes had turned a muddy brown.
“Well, I guess you can relax now, Rich. No more holdouts. The Richard Bone fan club is complete.” She started to get out of bed.
“Mo—” Bone took hold of her arm, staying her for the moment.
She was smiling brightly now, falsely. “Yes? Was there something more?”
He waited, but her smile did not change. He let go of her.
“Good. I must be about my son’s business.” After slipping into her kimono she picked up the baby and took him into the kitchen.
Bone got up and dressed slowly, feeling almost ill with disappointment, the way it all had ended. But it was not his fault, he told himself. Nor hers either. It was just life, that was all it was, always just life, the inability of people to do what they wanted, have what they wanted. Always something else would enter the picture, some need or condition or commitment, some complicating factor that democratically robbed the rich and poor alike, robbed them of fulfillment. Mo understood his position, there could be no question of that. In fact, more than anyone else she and Cutter were always giving him the needle about it, what he was and how he lived, old Golden Boy, the Duke of Unemployment, the Prince of Welfare. So even as she was saying all that a few minutes ago, putting him on the spot that way, she already knew what his answer would be, what it had to be. This winner among winners who could barely feed and clothe himself—how in God’s name was he suddenly to become the All-American Provider again? There was no way. And Mo knew it, had known it all along. So it was not his fault, not his worry. There was no need for him to sweat the thing. She would be all right. It had been the wine talking, that was all. The wine and the sex. She had probably already forgotten the whole thing. Why shouldn’t he do the same?
In the next hour Mo dragged back and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom, taking care of the baby, changing and feeding him and getting him ready for bed. Every so often she would take a drink of the wine, which was over half gone now. And once Bone saw her in the bathroom shaking a few pills into her hand and popping them into her mouth like peanuts. He tried to stay out of her way. He sat in the living room perusing the ravaged Village Voice and he drank a little more of the wine and finished off the last of the bread and cheese.
After she had put the baby to bed, Bone suggested they put on something warm and go out on the deck and watch California doing her thing, the lights of her cars moving along the coast. Shrugging, Mo brought along the bottle of wine but rejected the idea of putting on a coat—keeping her warm would be his responsibility, she said. And after he had sat down in the one sturdy deck chair, she settled snugly onto his lap, pulling his coat—Cutter’s actually—around her and tucking her head in under his chin. The night was beautifully clear, with a late Santa Ana coming down out of the canyons and pushing the normally heavy night air out to the islands, so Bone was able to see up the coast to Goleta and beyond, a kind of miniature electric Milky Way through which the traffic on 101 moved steadily, like a river of meteors. Mo did not bother to look. The air was cold and she lay against Bone shivering, her eyes closed. He kissed her on the forehead and in her hair a few times but she did not react at all, and when he tried to tell her about the events of last night, Cutter doing Sunset Strip, she said she was not interested. In fact about all she did seem interested in was the wine she had brought out with her and which she sipped at every now and then.
After a while Bone suggested they go back inside, and she went along as indifferently as he had gone out in the first place. She was still shivering, however, so he got a blanket out of the bedroom and spread it over her on the davenport. And then he lay down next to her, behind her, holding one arm around her, over her breasts. And the position must have made her feel better and more secure, for she laughed suddenly, a soft wry laugh muffled against the stuffing of the old davenport.
“I kind of had you going back there, didn’t I,” she said.
“Where?”
“The bedroom.”
“You still have.”
“Not the sex part, dummy. What I said, I mean—all that gunk about love and security, getting me a shield and protector.”
“I knew you didn’t mean it,” Bone said, and wondered whether he would have tried it looking her in the eye. “I know you better than that,” he added.
“Of course you do. And in the biblical sense now too, isn’t that sweet? I am known by Richard Bone—why it’s a regular lyric.” She laughed and then repeated the phrase, almost sang it. “I am known by Richard Bone.”
Bone squeezed her breasts. “And it’s been nice knowing you.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
Bone told her to shut up and go to sleep and for a while she did not say anything more, just lay there against his body breathing shallowly. And then, as the rhythm of her breathing changed, he realized she was weeping.
“You’d better leave now, Rich,” she said finally.
“Soon.”
“No, now. I don’t want to fall asleep…this way. And then wake…alone.”
“I’ll stay.”
“No, you won’t. When I’m asleep, you’ll get up and leave. You’ll sneak off carrying your shoes. I know you.”
“I told you to go to sleep,” he said. “Now do it. Relax. Give up the fight a few minutes, okay?”
And in time she seemed to drop off occasionally, going down into sleep like a tiring swimmer into the sea. But then she would come up out of it again and laboriously push on.
“I didn’t expect anything from you, Rich,” she said finally.
“There was no reason to.”
“Of course not. I mean it’s not as if you were the first in line.” She had begun slurring her words now, and she spoke so softly Bone could barely hear her. “Course the line, it goes way back—back to Daddy, I guess. Old numero uno. And then a teacher was next, a woman, so brilliant and pretty, my idol, my secret love. And then a whole marching band of boys, one at a time, and one just like another. And then the drugs, and Jesus. And now Alex—Alex and you and the baby.”
Bone snored softly, pretending sleep. But it made no difference.
“When you’re gone,” she went on, “I’ll wake up alone. In the middle of the night I’ll wake up and I’ll probably run in there to see if he’s still there. I’ll look at him sleeping, my little monster, my jailer. I’ll look at him and I’ll tell myself, oh you love him now, now when you’re the Big Enchilada and he needs you every hour of the day. But later? Later, when he won’t need me either? ’Cause, really, who needs old ladies, huh, Rich? Who wants them?”
“Right,” Bone said. “He’ll reject you too, just like everyone else. No one likes you, Mo. No one ever has. No one ever will.”
If she heard him, she gave no sign of it. “Oh, I could go home, I guess. I could sit around the pool with my mother and drink margaritas. I could swim and get a good tan again and we could talk about face lifts and clothes and new places to eat. But I won’t do it.”
“You won’t do it.”
She turned in his arm, unthinkingly thrusting her buttocks tighter against his erection. “You know how I always see myself?” she said. “How I always picture myself? And I can’t stop. I mean, I try. I really do. But I even dream it. It’s like a kind of precognition. I’m, oh I don’t know, forty or fifty, and even skinnier than now and pale as death and my face is just a kind of blank, you know? I’m sitting alone on this bench outside somewhere, on the grounds of some kind of institution or hospital, it seems. And I never smile. I never cry. I just sit there. And I wait.”
Again Bone told her to sleep, told her that he would stay.
She tried to laugh then, at least made a kind of derisive sound, an expulsion of air. But she ended up crying again, with her body if nothing else. Holding her tightly, Bone waited, and after a while she stopped trembling and seemed to slip under the surface of her consciousness again, but only to rise out of it moments later.
“Will you stay, Rich?” she asked. “When I wake, will you be here?”
He said nothing for a time, hoping she would fall asleep again. But she persisted.
“Will you be here, Rich?”
He squeezed her body reassuringly. “Sure,” he said. “So go to sleep now, Mo. Rest.”
And he could almost feel her descending into it for good now, filling her lungs with air and arching her body and letting go, plunging steeply into the stillness.
Bone did not get up until he was sure she was sound asleep, then he moved quickly, getting the keys to the Packard off the mantel, where Cutter invariably threw them, though occasionally missing and depositing them in the fireplace instead, and a few times even in the fire. Bone quietly went out the front door then and locked it behind him. He slipped into the Packard, choked it lavishly, and got it started on the first try.
Ten minutes later he parked the car a half block from the Littles’. He took off his shoes and walked gingerly around the sprawling structure toward his room, all the way fearing that the lady of the house would somehow sense his arrival and come running at him with her hair up in rollers and her eyes taped back and her face mudpacked and chin-strapped for the night. He made it in safely, however, locking the door behind him and quickly undressing and slipping into bed.
He almost felt guilty admitting it to himself, but he was feeling pretty good about how things had turned out. He was not very proud of having to run out on Mo like that, but then she had not left him much choice, coming on the way she had, like some poor knocked-up teenager, all tears and need and self-pity. That simply was not the Mo he knew. It was an impostor, some weird mime doing a one-night stand. Tomorrow she would be herself again, he was sure of that, and she would understand. Certainly she knew that in this world you saved yourself. Either you did it, or no one did.
But beyond that, his disappointment in her, he felt a kind of relief too, because he no longer felt vulnerable where she was concerned. It was as if he had got all his markers back. He was his own man again, all his emotions once more in fairly good shape, a trifle hard maybe, overtrained, but durable, good for the longer distances. So there was really nothing much to think about, nothing to keep him awake.
And nothing did. He slept until a banging sound woke him at dawn. Getting up, he saw George Swanson standing outside his door in the soft mauve light. George was wearing a raincoat over denim pants and what appeared to be a pajama top, and for once his hair was not combed, his face was not shaved.
Bone opened the door.
“You know where Alex is?” Swanson asked.
“In L.A.—why?”
Swanson’s eyes filmed over. “Mo and the baby—I guess you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what?” Bone felt oddly foolish saying it, like a man already struck by lightning but waiting around for the report, the thunder that would announce his own demise. “Heard what?” he repeated.
“There was a fire,” Swanson said. “They’re both dead.”