A ntoniou awaited him at one of the Newport Harbor docks, wearing a captain’s hat that covered his bald pate and probably made his kids giggle. In his sixties, he had blinding white teeth under a gray mustache and a handshake that would make a weaker man cry. Ray made sure not to grimace. The bright summer evening was windless, the sea calm.
The client didn’t seem angry, about to pull the job. He put his arm around Ray, gesturing and talking about the harbor and the fish catch.
They walked a long way up the dock, passing dozens of boats, small, large, metal, multi- and single-hulled. While Antoniou talked about a race around the world won by a giant catamaran in sixty-two days, Ray steamed.
Martin was the schmoozer. Martin went out with clients to odd ethnic food places, sailed on their crummy boats, danced with the wives or cracked jokes with the husbands. Ray shouldn’t have to do this stuff. He was the artist.
Near the end of the dock, they stopped at one of the largest boats Ray had ever seen. White-painted double hulls lifted huge decks and a central saloon. Aisles along each side led to a wide wooden deck, where a green nylon net drape hung over the water.
“That’s the place to be when we get going,” Antoniou said, pointing forward. “It stays cool. Meanwhile, what can I get you to drink?” He led Ray into the cabin, which held leather plush seating in a luxurious booth arrangement, a stainless-steel long bar on one side, and a chef banging away behind it.
Antoniou saw Ray looking and smiled and rubbed the tips of the fingers of his right hand together. Yeah, I have plenty, the fingers boasted.
They set off, motoring slowly out of the harbor toward the open sea. Apparently, such large catamarans could have motors and did not necessarily teeter on one hull. Antoniou assured him that it had a high stability quotient, that he wanted a boat where he could play with the kids and not worry that one of them might take an unexpected plunge. “Someday I’ll go for one that’s suitable for racing. Maybe when the grandkids are teenagers, and all this starts to look stodgy.”
The crew, at least two additional people, took care of the work. One steered, another scurried around doing whatever needed doing, including serving a platter of shrimp in cocktail sauce, crab cakes, and crunchy bits of toast. He left Antoniou and Ray the heavy task of popping a champagne bottle.
“Now then,” he said. “No distraction. We talk. No, don’t pull out your drawings. We don’t need them. Relax. We are on the sea, on a glorious evening.”
“Denise said you had some problems with the drawings.”
“Problems. Yes, problems. Ray, you are a brilliant designer. Everybody says so. But-you bring me this house that looks like some science-fiction movie. Angles and concrete. Walls that appear and disappear. Don’t you know me better than this yet?”
“When you talked about it-my design-with Martin I thought he said-”
“It’s a beautiful design. But not for me. I want white columns, my friend. Through which I glimpse the infinite sea. A portico. A row of olives. A turquoise pool. You put in this long black skinny thing, Ray. It seems to be edged in metal. How can my family swim in that?”
“ Mediterranean,” Ray said, looking down. Boredom filled him. How many Mediterraneans had he designed in the last five years? They were all Mediterraneans. Every last jack one of them wanted a Mediterranean, and he was sick of designing them.
“You can redo the design? Along those lines?”
“Why not?” Ray said. “White columns, right?”
Antoniou’s face broke into a broad smile. “That’s a boy,” he said. “And one other important thing I didn’t mention to Martin. It just came to me, in fact. It makes me feel excited about building this home, Ray.”
Ray raised his eyebrows, smiled, looked accommodating.
“A man like me has needs beyond ordinary, you understand? I need a place where I can be myself. I never had one as a child. I’d like you to build me a secret room. A basement. An adult playroom. Stone walls, like a dungeon. A good lock on the door.”
“A dungeon?”
“For the ambiance. You know what I mean, Ray. I will tell you how to finish it later. Nothing illegal will happen there, I swear. Just personal play.”
“I know just the lock and key,” Ray said. “A big, ornate, medieval-looking key.”
“Only one key. And Ray-”
“Yes?” Ray, eager, at the ready to serve his master, listened carefully.
“I don’t want Martin to know.”
“Then I can’t put it on the official design, the plans. I can prepare you a private set of plans. I can help you get it built privately, yes.”
Antoniou smiled. “It’s fun, this idea, eh? I was hoping you were not the squeamish type.”
“You need two places to hang people upside down or one?”
“Ha, ha. That’s a boy. That’s a boy!” Then Antoniou leaned in with a serious expression and said, “Can you put a metal-you know, a hook sort of thing-in the mortar between the stones?”
“Sure,” Ray said. Consider it done, Saddam, he said to himself.
“And a safe for valuables?”
“No problem.” Now Ray thought of Esmé’s hidey-holes.
“I’m going to be grateful, Ray. You’ll see.” He sat back and had a drink, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “You know we meet again tomorrow, with Martin?”
“Okay.”
“Be ready for that.”
Ray removed himself, with the excuse that he needed to take a whiz in the boat’s tiny marbled head. When he came back, Antoniou was stuffing himself on canapés, bouzouki music playing softly in the background. His face in repose was sullen, the lines coming down from his nose to his mouth etched from decades exercising power. How had he ever mistaken this Marquis de Sade for someone who would allow him really to use his talents? Ray looked into the mirror above the sink, holding its sides, feeling trapped.
By now, the boat skimmed along the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The verdant hills displayed hundreds of Mediterraneans Ray automatically hated.
“Sit down by me.”
Ray obeyed. Water foamed alongside, making a rushing sound. Even through his sunglasses, reflections blazed like shots of lightning, so much so that he had to close his eyes.
Antoniou placed his hand on Ray’s thigh. He squinted up at Ray, who chewed on an olive.
Somehow, Ray had been expecting this. He didn’t flinch at the touch. Instead he took Antoniou’s hand in his own and held it. “Antoniou, if it was any guy, it’d be you, I swear. I’d be a lucky man. However.” He gave the hand a kiss, squeezed it again, and put it neatly back to rest on Antoniou’s own leg.
Antoniou, at first startled, began to laugh. “Lotta men like both, you know.”
“It never hurts to ask,” Ray agreed.
“At least I got a kiss out of you.”
Ray laughed. “Some big deal, huh?”
The client shrugged, totally accepting. For a while, they just drank and moved through the water, the clouds scudding by, the white foam spraying their faces, the sun going down. Then they moved down to the netting for a while, lying side by side, arms behind their heads, companionable, like a raptor and a naive proto-chicken. Ray felt thoroughly beaten. He kept his smile and told a few good ones even so.
Back on deck, Antoniou excused himself. He returned looking refreshed and perfectly pleased with his life of mansions and yachts and dungeons.
“I love it out here,” he said. “My wife expects me at nine, but let’s open another bottle. Now, I want to know more about you, Ray. I’m hoping this evening’s the first day of a beautiful”-he paused and waggled his eyebrows-“business relationship. You have any kids? Tell me about your wife.”
“No kids.” He talked about Leigh, taking care to say nothing real. He talked about her furniture-making, the church where they married, the vacation they had taken a few years ago in Brazil. As he talked, he pictured his wife; her gravity, hollow eyes, the way she would trace his eyebrow with her finger before leaning over to kiss him, the thrilling deep kiss. He remembered her complete abandonment in bed, her soft breasts-
But he told Antoniou nothing of this, nothing of the reality of his wife. This, the client had not earned.
“You continue to love her,” Antoniou said, pouring himself a final glass of champagne. “Lucky woman. And she loves you, I am sure.”
“Oh, yes,” Ray lied, relieved to see that Antoniou had now turned his regard toward the young chef, who, judging by the twinkle in his eye, welcomed the attention. Ray had been a passing yen and there were no hard feelings.
Later, as darkness came, driving home, Ray realized that he had returned to the tricks of his childhood, channeling another person. Not for the first time, he had mined Martin’s character, thinking, how would Martin handle this?
He wondered if this talent at impersonation masked an empty soul, as Leigh had once accused. Wasn’t he just calling up elements of himself to become other characters, tapping into places in his personality that lay undeveloped inside him? He couldn’t display grace under pressure, unless grace lurked somewhere inside there, correct?
He had kissed the client’s hand, pimped for the firm, saved the day. All right, it wasn’t grace he had displayed. Maybe he had been obsequious. He had nodded encouragingly while Antoniou talked about his columns and olive trees.
Leigh-her gray eyes. Her integrity. He swiped his fingers across his cheeks, erasing what he could.
Kat headed straight for the hospital. UCLA Medical Center held at least six hundred patients. Kat found the parking lot, vast, distant from the building, and tried to find a place as close to the palm-studded entrance as possible. Often, this counterintuitive action worked, and this time it did, when a blue Acura pulled out of a perfectly located spot not five spots from the front entry.
Kat let the Acura out, barely, then swerved her Echo into the spot it had left vacant, cutting off at least one other eager, possibly equally crazed, family member who would now have to spend the next hour cruising aimlessly.
Why hadn’t they called her?
She locked the car. Coming through the Westwood Plaza entrance, she made her way into the hospital.
A friendly receptionist told her she might find her sister on level five, so she waited with a motley crew for the double doors of the elevator to open. On her left, a man in a wheelchair, his head twisted to the right in a permanently frozen position, moaned. His wife bent down and caressed his cheek. On her left, a middle-aged woman, maybe fifty, with wiry blonde hair that flew out of her head like Medusa’s snakes, rested on crutches.
“What happened?” Kat asked, hoping this was not an awkward question.
“I fell off a sidewalk at a street fair,” the woman answered, “while checking out the bonsai booth. The silver lining is, I’m building my upper body strength.” She laughed.
The nurses’ station, a large central area surrounded by counter-space and speckled with computers, did not exhibit a neighborly air; no warm cuddly pictures, no flowers.
“Okay,” a male nurse said. “Her name comes up on page one.”
“What room?”
The man studied whatever it was he viewed on the computer screen. Games? Instant messages? Kat wondered.
“Hmm,” he said ominously.
I hate you, Kat replied internally. She realized the last time she had been in a hospital was when she went to find Tom there, and eventually found him in the morgue. “An ambulance brought her,” she said instead, helpfully.
“I’m thinking room five oh eight,” he said. “She’s in recovery. Just got there from the OR. Hmm.”
Stop saying that, Kat thought, or I will hit you.
“Through the double doors and on your right.”
She found 508 without too many wrong turns, opened the door, and greeted her sister inside. Raoul, looking like a man holding on to a lifeline, was clasping his wife’s hand with both of his.
Jacki had the window side. On the door side, Jacki’s roommate was a woman who spoke right up. “Arrgh,” the roommate cried in greeting. “Crap! I hate my life!” Thin and pallid as a tubercular character in a novel, she had thrown her white sheets off and lay splayed like an automobile crash dummy, post-collision.
“Hey,” Kat said to her sister.
“Hey.” Jacki’s droopy blue eyes gazed at her. “I know you.”
Scared, Kat just took her hand. Her sister, for the past few months whale-sized, now appeared diminished, the sheet over her stomach collapsed like a fallen parachute. Where was the baby? Kat didn’t dare ask.
Raoul said, “She’s okay, Kat. Really.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“No time. I’m really sorry. It happened really fast, and then they operated-”
All the pent-up concern Kat had been repressing flooded out and she started crying. “Jacki! Boo hoo hoo.”
“Quit that. Ma always said you sound like a dying animal when you cry and it’s true,” Jacki said groggily. “Ow, Raoul, something hurts bad down by my right foot.”
“She’s doped up, Kat,” Raoul said, apologizing for Jacki’s crankiness. “Just woke up. I’ll get the nurse in here, honey.”
“They doped me up, hoping I won’t notice every freaking thing went wrong that could go wrong.”
Kat said nothing, just squeezed Jacki’s hand.
“Ouch,” Jacki said weakly.
“Sorry,” Kat said. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was crossing Sepulveda. Big street, so many cars. This-oh-so-L.A.-this stretch limo came out of nowhere. What I remember is the part where I rolled along the street like a bowling ball. Speaking of which-” She stared down at her stomach. “Oh, my God! Raoul! Our baby!” She clutched her husband.
Raoul bent down and kissed her forehead. He stayed there, cheek pressed to hers, and whispered, “Honey, you’re a mother.”
“We had-our baby? While I was sleeping?”
He nodded. “You went into labor after the accident, while they were setting your foot. Everything went fine. My brave girl. I love you.”
“The baby came?”
“A boy, sweetheart.”
Kat’s heart filled at the sight of the joy on her sister’s face.
“We have another boy in the family,” Jacki said. Tears glittered in the corners of her eyes. “I want him! Where is he? Bring him here, my darling. Oh, Raoul, a little boy.”
“We can pick a name finally. Anything besides my dad’s, okay?” Raoul said.
“Middle name Thomas.” Jacki tried to sit up, but she groaned immediately and fell back on the bed.
“Congratulations,” Kat said. She smoothed Jacki’s hair and kissed her, then hugged Raoul. “I have a nephew,” she said wonderingly. A new being with an intimate connection to her had sparked into existence when she wasn’t looking.
“But where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
“You need to rest. Are you ready to see him?”
“Please. I am.”
At Raoul’s request, the nurses brought the shriveled and squalling newborn to Jacki, tightly swaddled in a white hospital cotton blanket, a blue band decorating his skinny wrist. Jacki cried at the sight of him. She pulled the tightly wrapped blanket down, which made him cry, too, examining his extremities and genitals.
“They’re perfect,” she said. “Ten toes. Look, Kat. All good.”
“Perfect,” Kat agreed.
Wrinkled and of an alarmingly bright pink hue, he was mostly bald, but Kat was as mesmerized by his velvety pate as Jacki. She reached out a tentative hand and rested it on the downy head. His skin felt moist, warm, and pliant under her touch.
Rather efficiently, the baby found Jacki’s nipple and clamped on. “It might hurt a little at first,” said the nurse. “Of course, you’ll toughen up.”
“Look, Kat. What a beautiful child. Do you believe it?”
“Be glad he’s healthy even though he’s small,” said the nurse. “One lady tonight had a baby with heart problems. He’ll need an operation before he can go home.”
Jacki kissed the baby’s head gently, as if conferring a blessing. “Send her flowers! Send her money for a college education!”
Raoul held her and his son, all together in one big bundle. When Jacki nodded off at last, Kat and Raoul had a wonderful time holding and passing the bundle back and forth and drinking freely from a bottle of chilled champagne Raoul had scored somewhere. The baby slept calmly in his bassinet by the side of the bed, as if perfectly comfortable already with his new surroundings.
“You did it,” Kat said. “You gave me a nephew, Raoul. Thank you.”
He stroked the boy’s cheek, who instantly rooted, searching for a nipple, hoping for more. He sucked his father’s baby finger, temporarily mollified. “What if-imagine me raising him without her. Alone.”
“You would never be alone.”
“I hope that’s true.”
“I might not have the colostrum but I have the will. No harm will come to this one, not when I’m around.” Hearing the fierceness in her own voice made her almost embarrassed.
“I’ll go get us a pizza,” Kat said later. They ate, and Raoul slept, and Kat watched Jacki wake up twice to take pills and feed her little one. The nurses didn’t bother them much. The door was closed and the small, plain room with its medical equipment and sleepers felt as beautiful as the Taj Mahal.
When Jacki woke up again at almost four in the morning and began feeding her baby, Kat left, but not before Jacki had the last word, as usual.
“I wish you could have this feeling,” she said wistfully, “that life goes on, and it’s good.”
She would admit to silver linings, Kat thought, punching the elevator button, new muscles, new life.
Kat had told Ray to pick her up at her work at nine-thirty that evening, but she wasn’t there. Ray missed her. He wanted to talk to her, had been holding on so that he could talk to her.
He looked at his watch again. Too late. She had abandoned him. This pressure in his chest-he had brought the tapes to play for her. They radiated on the seat beside him. He gave up and turned on the ignition, the infernal sound that punctuated all their days and nights.
Ray arrived at Memory Gardens in Brea after the sun sank, the great gardens of the cemetery, their grasses and plaques, immutable no matter what the light. The marker for Henry Jackson reposed in the crematorium. “How we miss him,” the simple script read, then showed dates of his birth and death, the death date close to Ray’s second birthday.
He didn’t believe that death date anymore. His father had died later; he was beginning to feel pretty sure about it.
She hadn’t loved his father. He was beginning to understand why, at last.
He wondered why Esmé had bothered with this memorial marker. She had told Ray his father’s ashes had been scattered by his great-aunt in New York. Maybe she had put it there for him, with a fake death date. She had told him about it years ago, but he couldn’t remember ever coming here with her. Ray had come a few times on his own, during those times when he felt the great pressure about the moves.
She was only trying to protect me, he thought, but I’m a man now. The lying becomes another kind of poison.
He put a bundle of tulips near the marker because there was no place for flowers. He had bought them at a florist just past the off-ramp, bright shiny green leaves with soft curling white flowers at the centers.
“I brought these,” he told the marker, “because it’s a celebration. You’re dead, safely dead, and that’s a blessing, it seems.” He hadn’t cared about his own kid enough to let him grow up in peace. Why had his father terrorized them? Sexual jealousy? He imagined he could guess. He couldn’t let go of a wife, felt insulted when she rejected him. He felt enraged.
Just like Ray had felt when Leigh cheated on him.
He pushed the thought down, and studied the marker.
“You ruined my childhood with your craziness. You made my mother live in fear. We were never free. We lived like outlaws, always running, always afraid, something behind us ready to attack, always catching up.”
He felt the vast emptiness, surrounded by the dead and his own dead hopes. Every boy without a father probably harbors a secret illusion that his father would have been one of the good guys, if only. He’d load up a camper with canned food for trips to Yosemite to climb to Glacier Peak or Alaska to catch halibut, waking his son at five in the morning. Or maybe he would be the guy who dragged his boy off to museums to study the dusty Indian exhibits, who went on and on about the tar pits, and all the groggy boy heard, all the boy had to hear, was his father’s voice, not what he said. All the boy heard was the love.
The time they had together would embed memories so deep, even if the man died, the boy could spend the rest of his lifetime savoring and honoring him.
When Ray had been very young, he had such fantasies. He knew it now because they rushed over him, threatening to drown him. He wondered what his own gravestone might say if Leigh had decided the words.
Ray didn’t even know what kind of work his father had done at the bank. Teller? CEO?
He leaned forward, clearing dust out of the engraved words with a finger. His mother, helped by a hundred scholarships large and small, along with student loans that ran into the tens of thousands, had managed to bring him up and educate him alone, with a baying hound at her heels, always on the lookout.
He owed her so much, everything that had turned out right in his life. Especially his work. Thank her and thank God for it. He loved what he did.
Now Ray had his fine education from Whittier College to fall back on, not to mention graduate school at Yale, which had forced his mother into working two jobs for many years. At least now, he could help her. At least now, she worked because she liked it, so she said, because she liked the people and needed the structure.
Somewhere inside, hadn’t he always suspected he had a bad father? His own badness had to come from somewhere, the fear and anger he had tried to hide from Leigh, from everyone.
“Good-bye, Henry Jackson,” he told his father, turning away. “You bastard.”