EIGHT
It was late afternoon but the light wasn’t golden, just yellow, as it angled through the high windows of the lab at Jean’s perfume company. It was a longroomwithblack-topped tables and real-life blue flame Bunsen burners. Technicians in white smocks worked over chemical analyzers and beakers of liquids, swirling them, holding them up to the light, making notations, conferring with too-serious looks, like scientists in TV commercials.
Jimmy sneezed. One of the white coats looked over, annoyed. Jimmy waved his apology.
Jean stepped toward him from the end of the room.
They took his car, left hers in the lot. They went first to Ike’s for a drink. It was Jimmy’s hangout, a nouveau-something cave on a Hollywood street called Argyle. The light was blue light from the flying saucer fixtures suspended over the bar. There was a Rockola jukebox and it was playing Marvin Gaye, “Come Get to This,” the dead man’s song still rocking, somehow new again, like the light of a burned-out star just reaching earth. It was early yet.
The bartender, Scott, brought Jean a cosmopolitan and then set two drinks in front of Jimmy, a martini and a manhattan. The drinks waited, spotlighted, on the bar, like something about to be beamed up into the UFO light fixtures.
Jimmy picked up the martini, took a sip.
“Has Krisha been in?”
Scott shook his head. He looked like he could have been an actor waiting for his break, too, tall enough and still young enough and good-looking in an obvious, immediate way, but Scott didn’t want to act. He hadn’t come to California for its show business.
“I guess you’re still looking for her.”
“I just haven’t seen her lately,” Jimmy said.
Jean wondered who she was, tried not to show it.
Scott stepped away to talk to a customer at the end of the bar.
Jean smiled at Jimmy. She didn’t ask him about the case, his work. He wondered why. She had another cosmo and he had another martini and they talked about nothing, about the music and a solitary dancer on the floor.
And then they got up to go. She picked up her little purse on the bar. The manhattan was still there, untouched in its perfect circle of light.
It was almost nine by the time they got to the Long Beach Yacht Club. They’d driven by another place closer to downtown where her car was but the restaurant parking lot was too crowded for Jimmy and he changed his mind and waved to the valet parkers and made a loop through the lot and drove south. There wasn’t any boat traffic in and out of the marina so the lights were left to reflect clean and still on the black water. The club was quiet. The early crowd had finished and left. The late crowd was still drinking somewhere else.
Jean ordered a steak. The waiter took her menu.
Jimmy handed him his. “I’d just like a plate of tomatoes,” he said. “Bring it when you bring her steak. And another bottle of water.”
The waiter nodded and stepped away.
“I don’t think I know any women who still eat steaks,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, I’m strange all right,” Jean said. She was making fun of him. She took a sip of her drink.
“What happened to your eye?” she said. He had a cut over his right eye from the business with the men on the roof on the Roosevelt Hotel, a little bandage.
“I got falling down drunk last night,” he said.
An older couple was shown to the next table. The man held his wife’s chair and she smiled at him as he sat down to her right instead of across from her.
Jean watched them. She wondered what her parents would look like if they were still alive. What would be left of the young faces in the old pictures? She looked around, the yacht clubbers, the polished brass ship’s fittings, the photos on the walls, the hurricane flags hung over the long bar.
She wondered how much like her mother she was.
“Is it all right, being here?” Jimmy said.
“Of course,” Jean said. “I’m not sentimental . . . and I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Your parents aren’t in any of the pictures.”
She wondered if he knew everything she was thinking.
“You’ve already been here,” she said, not as a question. She moved her drink so the light from the candle floating in the bowl lit it up, made it even prettier.
“You wanted to know how I worked. This is how I work.”
“Tell me what that means,” she said.
“Everything carries its own history with it,” he said. “You do. I do. Objects do. Places. Whatever happened in this room is still here in a way. If you want to see it. If you let yourself see it.”
He didn’t look away from her. “So there are ghosts,” he said.
“Are they sentimental?” she said and smiled.
“Some of them,” he said.
She didn’t want to talk about ghosts.
“Have you ever been here before?” he said.
“There are pictures of me with my parents here.”
“But you haven’t been here since?”
She shook her head. “Why would I?”
“You must have always wondered the things you wonder now, whether he did it, who she really was.”
“No.”
“So what makes you want to know now?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but it wasn’t true.
Someone dimmed the lights. It was nine o’clock.
The linen of the tablecloth was so white, the marigolds in the clear vase so bright and perfect. He breathed in her scent. It filled his head. Starting from when they were at Ike’s he was saying more than he usually said, letting her see more. I’m falling for her, he thought, and thought again how good a word for it it was, falling, wherever it led, whatever happened now.
“What are you wearing?”
“It doesn’t have a name,” she said.
“Your own concoction?”
“Do you like it?” she said.
“I don’t know if that’s the word,” Jimmy said.
She smiled again and looked away. Maybe she was falling, too.
“What is perfume made out of?”
“Oils, mostly. And alcohol.”
“How did you get into this?” he said.
“A woman taught me the business.”
“How does it work?”
“The business or the perfume?”
“Perfume.”
“The molecules of the scent activate receptors in the nose and the mouth, which excite certain areas of the brain.”
She drew her drink across the table closer to her, turning it in her fingers. “That’s the simple explanation,” she said, as a way of teasing him.
“A minute ago,” Jimmy said, “I remembered a day with my mother. On Point Lobos. Carmel and Monterey. Out of nowhere. I thought maybe it was your perfume.”
“Were there flowers?” Jean said.
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I remember the cypress trees.” He knew he was telling her more than he should.
“It’s not supposed to work that way,” she said. “That’s called ‘a headache. ’ It’s when a scent—” She broke off. “How much of this do you really want to know?”
“More,” he said.
“A basic, low-quality scent acts directly on the limbic system in the temporal lobe of the brain. It calls up what are called ‘moment memories. ’ It’s better for a scent to be more general. The smell of cotton candy reminds you of a trip to the carnival when you were six. A good perfume reminds you . . .” And here she paused, because she knew how it would sound. “Of being in love.”
The ghosts in the room leaned closer.
“Mixing memory and desire . . .” Jimmy said.
She knew the line, but didn’t remember what it was from. “What is that?”
“Freshman English. T. S. Eliot,” Jimmy said. “ ‘April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain . . .’ The Wasteland. I read it—and quit school.”
She laughed. “You just stood up and walked out?”
“I waited until the end of the day,” he said.
Even when he lied he was telling her too much.
015
They walked along the canal, past the houses. Jean had taken off her shoes. It usually cooled down at night in L.A., particularly on the water, but this night was as warm as the afternoon had been and the canal stank a little. Every once in a while there would be a flash of white over their heads, a gull reeling. Maybe they fed at night. Most of the living rooms were open to the walkway, drapes drawn back, shutters open. People read in chairs or watched TV. They would look up at the movement outside, unconcerned when they saw that it was a young man and a young woman. Some of the houses flew their own bright flags on angled poles, picto graphic statements about the people within, crests and flowers and boats and too many rainbows. One banner brushed across their heads as they walked under it, like a magician’s scarf.
“When I was a little girl,” Jean said, “I used to wonder what it would be like if your footprints could be seen everywhere you’d ever gone. A path of them. My little footprints would be up and down this walk, I guess. It’s almost too much to bear.”
They passed three more houses. The wind changed direction suddenly and the temperature dropped ten degrees, a gift.
Somewhere along the way, she took his hand.
A rat watched them from under a painted cement mushroom.
“This is odd,” she said, “letting someone into your life so quickly. You already know things about me no one else knows. And you’re strange.”
“I think you said that already.”
“What did you think when you first saw me?”
“That you were beautiful.”
He thought better than to tell her his idea about a beautiful woman and a beautiful car, how its time was gone already even as you looked at it.
At this moment, she seemed very present.
“That’s what men always say,” she said. “I guess it gets the desired response.”
“I also thought you looked sad,” Jimmy said. “In the eyes. Maybe from thinking the same sad thing over and over.”
He thought she would let go of his hand but she didn’t and they walked on without either of them saying anything. Steps climbed up and over the haunches of a bridge and there was just another short block.
And then they were in front of 110 Rivo Alto Canal.
Now Jean let go of his hand and held herself, like the girl on Sunset after she’d kissed Jimmy and felt a chill run through her. The watchful neighbor across the canal was away or asleep and the house of the Abba neighbor was dark, too. They were alone, or at least as alone as Jimmy’s worldview allowed.
She was about to say something, to fill the silence.
“There’s a woman living in the back bedroom,” Jimmy said.
Jean didn’t look away from the house. Even in the dim light he could tell she was trying not to react, or at least not to show it.
Jimmy said, “I don’t know if she lives there all the time or just comes and goes.”
Jean turned away from the house.
“Have any idea who she is?” Jimmy said.
“No.” Then she said, to try to put a period on it, “It doesn’t matter.”
Jimmy wasn’t going to let it go. “Gee, it seems like it would,” he said. “Maybe she bought it after—”
Jean looked at him.
“I own the house.”
He really hadn’t thought of that.
“It sat empty while my father was in prison during the years of appeals. Then it went to my brother Carey and he didn’t want to have anything to do with it and needed the money, so I bought it from him.”
“Why?”
“He needed money.”
“Why did you want it?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought the answers were there. Here.”
“When was this?”
“When I was at Stanford.”
She made herself turn and look at it again, or to let him know she wasn’t afraid to.
“What’s it like inside?”
“You’ve never been back?” Jimmy said.
She shook her head. “My business manager pays the gardeners, the electricity.”
“It’s like a museum, like a World’s Fair exhibit from 1977.”
Another chill ran through her.
“A little creepy,” Jimmy said. “So who is the woman?”
“I said I don’t know. I guess a transient. I should sell it, tear it down.”
Jean stared at the dark face of the house for a long moment.
“Are your parents alive?” she said.
The question knocked him off balance.
“No,” he said.
Her eyes were fixed on the house, as if waiting for the front door to open, as if she’d knocked.
“If I could see my mother’s face, at the moment it happened,” she said, “I’d know everything.”
“Or your father’s face,” Jimmy said.
Jean turned her back on the house again. This time he took her hand. He drew her to him, held her like a dancer. The wind came up again and it made the tackle on the mast of the sailboat across the canal clang, like a signal that something should be starting or ending.
She touched his forehead, where he’d been cut, knew somehow that it was part of this, that he had already given up something for her.
After a moment, she said, “I have trouble getting close to people.”
“I don’t know anybody who doesn’t anymore,” Jimmy said. “Maybe my friend Angel.”
“Why is that?” she said. “Do you know?”
“No.”
“We should go,” Jean said.
They were next to the seawall.
“Stand up on the wall,” Jimmy said.
She took his hand and stepped up onto the low wall, like the little girl who had lived in that house and been afraid. She walked along, balancing dramatically, happy again for a second, and when she stepped down she went into his arms and kissed him, both of them out of the reach of the past for another second, even though they were this close to it.