Chapter 5

Now let’s go back a few years to when I was a former philosophy instructor who had gone into the groovier trade of private investigator. (Person imagines his future teaching philosophy at Hayward State until retirement and finds a message of nausea waiting in his belly; person during beatnik overture to the Age of Aquarius notices there’s more to life than he ever dreamed of, including under-the-table income; person takes an internship with Hal Lipset, pioneer of the sneaky mike hidden in a martini olive out there in the real world.) It was that time long, long ago when adult males sewed embroidered strips, or astrological symbols, or peace signs on their shirts; young women ironed their hair straight and practiced inner voyages, sticking mandala decals on their hair irons; it was so long ago, in the misty reaches of the sixties, that chalk-faced street mimes were not yet obsolete—back, back we go.

The days when I was the youngest person in the room were already gone and I pretended not to miss them. I was settling into bachelor middle age, except that I called it early middle age, hoping for a merry twinkle in my wise old eyes. And just about the time I began to get used to what is unavoidable, letting the sweet seasons of San Francisco wash over me, the world changed—and not only drugs, rock and roll, the Vietnam War, and Bob Dylan songs full of nasal lists and ambiguous inventories, those external delights that entertained the late sixties in the hundred-year-long operetta of San Francisco. Something abruptly disappeared—my comfortable loneliness, dailiness, beer drinking, grass smoking, hanging out with Alfonso. The years were silting up and then suddenly they were flooded away.

Comfort was taken from my grasp. I consented. It was a case of complete surrender. Alfonso looked at me and said: “The full catastrophe, you’re gone now.”

It had nothing to do with hormones or the solitude I had come to enjoy. Love was crackling in the sky and wings unfolded across my back; it can happen to almost anyone, even to me, even at the blandest, most unlikely occasion. Such as dinner offered by the nervy, twitchy, recently divorced Lillian to whom I found myself appointed companion. Young Priscilla was the friend of a friend, recently arrived in San Francisco, teaching kids at the Museum of Modern Art, and my sociable companion believed a sweet thing, a friend of a friend, should have something to do on a Saturday night. “Let’s be helpful, shall we?” Lillian asked.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

Priscilla was willing to take what came along, at least this once. When she needed a ride home, I offered it, although our hostess was planning for me to spend the night, and I drove Priscilla past my flat, pointing at the dark windows. “That’s where I live. Not that you’ll ever need to know.”

Later, she said she took this as a challenge. She would not only come to know where I lived but also would make me forget that any other woman had left traces in my middle-aged lair. On her first visit she reached into a closet and held a raincoat between her fingers like a dead rat, commanding: “Get this thing out of here.”

It was a blue Pan Am Airways raincoat.

“Out!”

We were both laughing and falling all over each other.

Tall, bony, and reddish, with a careless insulation of extra flesh that would soon melt off, since it was unneeded by a fast-moving athlete; yellowish square teeth which got brightness from their intensity of use in grinning; hugely amused avid—that’s hungry—blue eyes; a look of turbulent health for which youth was only partly to blame.

The style was not cute; I had seen enough cuteness in California. It was beauty. Her stride was long, she threw a ball long; she took a long view of things while accepting the day on its conditions, at least until she decided not to. I didn’t understand her at all.

Before I could proceed to the vital business of not understanding this woman, exploring the lack of understanding, entering the mystery between us, the full catastrophe, I had to settle things with Lillian. It was embarrassing to go crazy for the guest she so kindly, tolerantly, with a sigh, felt obliged to feed one Saturday night, but I could live with embarrassment. Lillian might be the nervous, noisy, angry kind of person in a procedure of parting ways; it was her right. I took earnest thought to the matter. I asked Alfonso, who managed to live with a weight problem, women problems, the problem of being a black cop, plus all the other normal problems.

“In public,” he said. “Won’t want to screw up the place screaming if she knows the waiters. Put her in a little jail where she’ll try to behave if she can.”

“Jail?”

“Take her to Enrico’s, it’s not exactly lockup, but figure it out for yourself, my man.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s your hope. Worst thing can happen, she breaks a bottle over your dumb head.”

There are many wise men in the world, of whom I am not one; I’ve learned to take plausible advice. The trouble is that it’s usually plausible without being comforting, but Alfonso made sense. In a public place, Lillian’s good manners might prevail and she would not create a noisy, destructive, glassware-breaking scene. Such was my prayer.

I invited Lillian to Enrico’s Coffee House for a bit of wine and to tell her I had fallen in love with her last-minute guest at dinner. I ordered the bottle, a chardonnay. I started my tale. She drank the wine in long gulps (the California whites have really taken hold) as I kept refilling her glass.

I talked about the mystery.

She stared at her empty glass.

I poured.

I explained.

She dabbed at her lips and gazed accusingly at the few drops left alone on the rim of the glass. I repoured.

Lillian seemed unable to speak. She was inhibited by the presence of familiar faces in this neighborhood hangout. Her head was thrown slightly back, tendons standing out on her neck, as if she were ready to sing an aria from Manon (I pick that opera at random), but paralysis stopped the music.

She began to cry. She began to squirm in her chair and cry and make little farting noises—farts, she made, not noticing that she was doing so—and at the same time sipped the wine without clear explication of her emotions, only those squeaking sounds as she shifted in her chair and nodded at me to replenish the supply. “Chardonnay from Napa,” she said, “sweeter than the French, but a lovely bouquet.”

It was unnerving. I wanted something more.

“Hey, I never really liked you that much anyway,” Lillian said. “You were an interim solution.”

Alfonso had turned out to be correct in his analysis of the Lillian situation; and if so much care and wine hadn’t been necessary, I’d never have known, would I? Alfonso wasn’t perfect, either. He thought she might break a bottle; she only broke wind.

The air was cleared. I was free to pursue Priscilla, the lady who felt irritated when I said she’d never need to know where I lived. She liked challenges. I called to invite her to dinner; she offered a counterinvitation—a picnic among the flowers on the springtime mountainside just outside town; Mount Tamalpais, where the Tamalpais Indians once hunted game and hid from the Miwoks, who specialized in fishing but sometimes wandered up to kill a Tamalpais.

“Great,” I said, rushing, “there’s the Mountain Home Inn, they have a nice view, it’s a pretty place.”

“No. Stop.”

“Stop? No?”

“I have something else in mind.”

“Pardon?”

“Picnic—listen, will you?” She explained about her straw basket and how she liked a certain kind of eggs, I’d see, and she had some wine in stock, and would I mind too much if she just put together a little lunch for us?

Graciously I did not object. I don’t take offense easily.

She drove a red TR-3, battered but clean, smelling of sun-baked leather. The top was down and her hair flew in the wind. Freckles and need for shampoo result from the sun, she said. I sort of knew what she meant. I felt a silly grin on my face that I couldn’t erase. We shambled up a hillside, holding the straw basket between us. When she opened the basket and everything was nicely lined up, stacked inside, I noticed there were cloth napkins, pale blue ones, rolled into napkin rings.

“You could have brought paper napkins.”

“We’ll use these again next time,” she said. She had written my name on one of the napkin rings.

The sun pure and dry, dappled shadows from the redwoods overhead shading us, flickering heat and coolness in the air, we allowed ourselves to answer the questions that lovers who plan ahead, or plan to plan ahead, allow themselves to ask. What did I want for the rest of my life? (Her, but I wasn’t ready to say that aloud.) I liked looking for and finding people who needed to be found, I liked collecting money for people who were owed it, I liked the edge of improvisation and even the bit of risk when a reluctant debtor or adolescent speed freak got pissed off. I enjoyed runaways, credit violators, and deadbeat fathers.

“You’re serious about your job?” she asked.

“I have to admit it.”

“That could be good, depending on how serious. I’m serious, too.”

“About what?”

“How do you feel about real ambition? How about real money?”

“Never been a huge priority. Maybe been in California too long.”

She was playing with a twig. “Hey, there are lots of Californias—think LA, think San Jose.”

She poked at my palm with the twig. I closed my hand around hers. “Together,” I said, “my seriousness, your restlessness, we make a good team.”

“Probably we might.” She grinned. She liked keeping things a little out of balance. But then she added in her formal way, very politely: “Dear man.”

She peeled the foil off a dish of caviar from Marcel and Henri; a picnic needs surprises. Our promises should be taken fresh, like caviar, and enjoyed for what they are right now, on a mountain day in the sun and shade, with sharp and salty tastes and no doubts.

*   *   *

The next times lasted eight years and a son. On that secluded mountain slope in the spring green and brightness, she uplifted her thighs to me hilariously, her pale eyes defying the sunlight flooding down upon us, going dreamy and wide and dissolving into the vision of the two of us alone in the world, on a mountainside, forever.

Then she was laughing, laughing, and asking, “Hope there wasn’t any poison oak, don’t you?”

A toadstool grew in the shade nearby, a giant prick with a shiny carapace, and Priscilla blew a kiss toward it, saying, “I’ll be right there.” Her nostrils moved with a little fishlike oscillation as the deep after-pleasure breath went in and out, in and out, easing down and continuing oh please God forever. It was the full catastrophe.

The afternoon shadows were lengthening. We stretched and stared at each other. Then we straightened this hollow on Mount Tamalpais where we had lived for a time. I hooked the lightened picnic basket under one arm; she took the other. I felt her long fingers on my elbow; her hand sliding up to find a place; hand holding and resting. She took my arm as if she loved me. This is the most beautiful sentence of my life. She took my arm as if she loved me. This was the happiest sentence of my life.

“When we get back,” she said, “I want to get the twigs out of my hair, I want a good bath.”

“Not a bad idea for me, too.”

“And then,” she said, “I want to do all that again.”

She touched me as if she loved me. She looked at me as if she loved me. She took my arm. I surrendered to the full catastrophe.

*   *   *

How her eyes faded blue to black and then to pale blue again when we made love, the dreamy distance of her gaze. The headband around her forehead when her hair was sunlit and we were pedaling our bicycles in Golden Gate Park. At Ocean Beach, she stared out at the sea, leaning on her bike, and I thought she had forgotten I was there until she suddenly touched my arm. “Save water, take a bath with a friend,” she said. “Let’s go now, it’s time to start saving water. We’ll be an example to future generations.”

She was like one of those shiny new several-plex movie operations—different shows going at different times, but the facilities shared by folks whose dreams could only be guessed at. We stretched out; water lapped against the edges of people and sometimes over the edge of an antique deep-bellied tub with clawed feet. I hoped, as we bathed together, we were scheduling ourselves for the same program.

Priscilla’s legs were a long and very interesting evolutionary event, slim at the ankles, widening, bunches of smooth musculature up to the complex juncture at the knee, sockets, and joints (try sorting these things out through the medium of kisses at the surprisingly warm backs of knees); and then after a brief reprise of slimness the event turned full and muscled again on the way up to oceanic mysteries. The better to grip you with, dearest; the better to hold you, my love; the better to walk speedily away, if necessary.

The message up at Brain Central, a galaxy removed from the moist warmth of the oasis at the joining of her legs, the estuary, the slow warm heading out to sea—the message up there in the control panel seemed to be: Not only do I want you to want me but also I personally, on my own, choose to want you. I select you from the hazards and accidents of millions.

How rare and wondrous this conjunction of ideas. I’ll take this happiness above all others.

Just, please God, don’t let me lose the memory of good luck. We saved water together. She put on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde to dance to. She didn’t mean dance. Whoever would think of dancing to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”? Well, folks can, lovers can, moving with that lazy beat under the nasal thrumming of a voice that seemed to drift over the walls of the madhouse of the sixties. But she didn’t really mean dance. Dance was only in the heart and soul. She meant climb into each other, sing into each other, keep humming and keep it on forever.