Chapter 4

“Cling?”

High-energy Susie in her black tights and micro-mini, dictator of Korean pots and barbecue, supreme regulator of fermented cabbage for the masses, bounced impatiently on her toes and shouted her question over the counter of Hann’s Hibachi, cling! cling! cling! tolling at me on Polk Street in San Francisco like a happy, high-pitched bell while I realized I was still growing older.

“Cling?”

I didn’t understand her. I didn’t speak Korean, but she looked as if I were supposed to. “Cling! Cling! Cling!”

“Pardon?” I asked, feeling desperate, wanting my garlicked shrimp, rice, tofu, and kimchee, wanting to be in tune with the world’s doings.

She too was desperate. She tossed her head back and called out, gargling, “Glug-glug-glug,” and then I knew she had been asking me “Drink?”

“Tea,” I said.

And so over my late-afternoon seafood snack, including shrimp and mixed fish, mostly shrimp and oily sprouts, I faced the fact that my hearing was less acute than it used to be; also my brain processed information at a slower pace; and I didn’t finish my plate, either.

The program for today was fuller than usual. This morning I had watched Jeff play indoor field hockey, along with the mothers and a few distracted fathers—he darted like a fish, which should have made me feel good and sort of did. Now I was scheduled for Korean barbecue and a visit with Alfonso; then a serious scrub of teeth with the toothbrush I kept in my pocket (bachelor hygiene); then a visit with Carol.

Alfonso had said not to hold my order for him. He had stupid paperwork down at the station house and you know how the stupid paperwork goes. I was temporarily alone with fermented pickled cabbage and faulty ears, waiting for my friend who was also my police-force resource, personal assault and battery counselor, and fellow bachelor. We didn’t play on a level playing field. I was older, less wise, and more discouraged, but he carried the extra weight around his ass and middle.

“For I am the voice of your conscience,” Alfonso was saying, slopping into his chair and reaching for a shrimp from my plate. I hadn’t seen or heard him coming, though I would no longer say my buddy moved like a cat.

I greeted him with characteristic enthusiasm: “You’re getting fat, Alfons.”

“A healthy conscience knows no limitations to size.”

“Now you’ve got some kind of barbecue sauce on your face.”

He swiped fastidiously across his mouth with his wrist and then transferred the gunk to a paper napkin. “But a good conscience does keep clear, agendawise,” he said. “You sleeping any better?”

“Lots.”

“But better?”

I shrugged. I was a partisan of grief and complaint but hadn’t determined when I crossed the border into maudlin and fanatic. I preferred not to be denounced by my old pal.

I tried a defensive action. “I been seeing this Carol,” I said.

He breathed heavily through his nose. He was struggling and failing to pick up a piece of my leftover tofu with his fingers. It kept mooshing apart, falling to the plate. I handed him a fork; he didn’t say thanks. “Lonely nights, cheap grass, and lots of self-pity—hey, you got it made.”

“I don’t need you to tell me this.”

He was licking his fingers. He was signaling to Susie for a cling of beer. He said to me, “It’s gratuitous. It’s a gift, pal, no extra charge. You’re my early-warning system, so it’s only right I offer you something in return. Someday maybe me, too, I’ll gonna be old, skinny, and sorry for myself. And white.” He was grinning and oozing his caramel good nature at me. “Fat chance.”

“This Carol, you’d like her—”

“Good. Good. Stick up for yourself, my man. But I bet she ain’t got any meat on her, right? Not anorexic, just a workout lady, right? I’ll bet she’s a natural-foods, sushi, ethnic-folk-health-munchies person, am I right there? Purple sweats? Runs every morning? Am I right?”

“Wrong,” I said. “Only part right.”

He gazed with longing eyes at my plate. There was a little rice left, one shrimp, a mound of Alfonso-fingered and abandoned tofu, that great spicy kimchee, which meant I had to do a lot of tooth brushing before I went to meet Carol. On a chlorophyll or Binaca scale my breath would still be at the low end of acceptability in contemporary San Francisco. “Didn’t leave much for me, did you?” Alfonso asked. “And it’s too early to buy dinner, so I’ll just finish what you left. So you can tell me about this Carol.”

I wished I could brag a little. “Nothing much to tell,” I said.

“She know that song? I bet she don’t—‘Stick out you can, here come de garbage man’?”

“Never thought to ask her.”

“Don’t pay no mind to the essentials, brother?” He peered into my face. “I notice you’re still not having such a good time.” He tugged at his tight nap and then looked at his fingers. The hair didn’t come off. “Well, I don’t know. You got a friend. You ought to get your respeck back—”

“That’s not what I’m missing.”

“Whatever.”

The friend I had was Alfonso and he knew that. We both knew a good pal wasn’t enough.

“Uh, what I gotta say. Been seeing Karim?” Alfonso asked.

“Not really.”

“Not really? Sort of? Negotiating?”

“Shit, he calls. He’s got ideas for me. Priscilla thinks I’m slacking off, got to accept my responsibilities.”

“What gives her that idea?” Alfonso inquired. “But Karim ain’t the way to go.”

“Maybe one good score would make people happy.”

“Don’t. I said don’t. The reason you even thinking about a score is not a good reason to be thinking about it. Okay? And been beating up any lovers since last we discussed?”

“No,” I said carefully. “Not Xavier.” Just the thought of him gave me a stomachache, for which the thought of punching him out was a temporary remedy.

“Don’t that either,” said Alfonso. “Don’t Karim, don’t the loverboy. Don’t get yourself arrested for assault, don’t get your license suspended, don’t go to jail.”

So what to do? I sighed, he sighed.

“Hey, not so bad, have a good time,” Alfonso said. “You got kimchee on your breath, but maybe she likes … Carol? … the stink of pepper, cabbage, and garlic on a fella, if that’s what it is. I don’t know about this shit you eat, man.”

He waved goodbye through the window as I glanced at him from the sidewalk. I was on my way. He was calling to Susie and ordering his own plate of something.

*   *   *

I was on my way to my early-evening workout with an account executive in advertising who had a dinner meeting coming up but could use some exercise first. Carol enjoyed a recreational spasm in the late afternoon, Carol and Kasdan, together or more likely separately. It crossed my mind that she was slightly more plump than I ordinarily liked, but this was not a moral flaw. Not to worry at the present time.

Worry about the opportunity Karim was offering to change my life. Worry about the choice between breaking out or giving up. No, take an hour to worry about nothing.

As Carol was dressing for her meeting, she remarked, “When you go, after your little postcoital nap, please remove my keys from your keychain and leave them on the desk. I know I can trust you to do no damage. Just pull the door shut.”

“You mean it’s all over?”

“For me, too,” she said.

She must have read my mind. I was somewhat skinnier than she liked. But she had confidence I wouldn’t tear the place up or steal anything or even take what might be considered mine, of which there was hardly a trace. She credited me with decency, like a responsible sublet; my toothbrush would go straight into the wastebasket. I would try to live up to that.

She looked clean, sweet, and a little too plump as she swept toward her dinner meeting, on time as usual. I sighed, didn’t doze, departed. How could I sleep in peace when her goodbye words were “And your breath smelled like shit.”

“It’s the kimchee,” I said. “Or maybe the garlic. Whatever.”

But she was gone.

Gradually it was beginning to sink in that I was no longer a promising young man. I was a promised older guy—promised to heaven. That was the optimistic way of looking at it.