The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel Page 6

  She told the cabdriver “Miracle Mile.” She’d decide which motel when they got near there. The cold wind had cleared the rum from her brain. The four years she had spent with Cherie had taught Seese about cheap motels. The cab went to the end of Miracle Mile and she still couldn’t decide. She had to be sure she didn’t stay at a place she and Cherie had ever stayed, even if it had been years ago. It was patterns they used when hunting for you. Your habits and routines.

  Seese wasn’t taking unnecessary chances. She asked for a room that would be “quiet,” meaning far from Miracle Mile, behind the other units. The night clerk was reading a textbook on basic chemistry. He was marking significant passages with a pale yellow marker. Seese hated people who marked books. But the clerk had given her the key without questions or hassle, something unusual for night clerks on Miracle Mile when a woman alone checked in. So Seese did not wisecrack about students who defaced books with yellow markers or mutter that writing in books should be against the law. Rum and cocaine always loosened her tongue, but now, she would have to take it easy for a while. She needed to lie low.

  STORMS

  THE ROOM SMELLED faintly of stale cigarettes, but that was all. Seese counted herself lucky the room didn’t reek of urine or sanitary napkins too long in the trash. She rolled a joint and propped herself up in the bed. The wind was whining along the eaves of the stucco bungalow. The gusts splattered sand against the sliding glass doors. Nights like these when she was a girl, she had pulled the covers up to her chin and had gone right to sleep. The sound of the wind had made her feel so snug and safe inside. The sound of rain did the same for other people. Eric had been the only other person who had liked the sound of the wind and sand. Because he had grown up in Lubbock, where, he said, West Texas sandstorms stripped the chrome right off the bumpers of new cars, and windshield glass was so badly sand-pitted it appeared to be fogged.

  Eric had talked about the hailstorms they had out on the West Texas plains. That was what she and Eric had done when David was gone with Beaufrey: they had talked. Because they had both been in love with David, and they liked each other too much for there to be hurt feelings. Eric had had a grand way of setting up a story. He claimed he’d learned it growing up with cowboys, but it turned out his father had had a Ford dealership. The cowboys Eric had listened to were ex-cowboys hired as car salesmen when the ranchers went broke.

  The hail, Eric said, was first recorded by the Spaniards with Coronado. Hailstones the size of turkey eggs had dented Spanish helmets and shields. The Spanish horses had bolted and scattered, and a few horses were never recovered. Here of course was where the Plains Indians first got horses. Seese loved to hear Eric go on and on. He knew many wonderful things. He had so much going for himself. It had always been difficult for Seese to imagine Eric with Beaufrey. A few months before it happened, Seese had asked Eric if going home for a visit might cheer him up. Eric had managed to laugh, then shook his head. West Texas was the source of his depression in the first place.

  Seese’s mother had worked out an arrangement years ago. She had always known how to spend the salary a lieutenant commander flying combat received. Seese had asked about that too, but her father had laughed. What he liked to do the navy paid him to do. He told Seese she should not be critical of her mother. “She can have whatever she wants. Because she married me, then didn’t get a marriage. That’s grounds for a lawsuit the way I figure it. I’m not the marrying kind.” So her father and mother had gotten even with one another; but Seese did not feel the score had been settled between herself and either of them. Her mother had remarried immediately after the divorce was final. Another military officer, this time air force. He was gone as much as her father had been. He even looked like her father. The last year Seese spent at home, the year she had turned sixteen and they had fought, Seese had screamed at her mother, “What’s the point in being married to him? He’s not even as good as Daddy!” Later Seese thought her mother’s remarriage might not have upset her if her father had lived.

  In her grief, Seese had hated that Al was alive when her father was not. She substituted Al for her father in the downed jet fighter whenever she visualized her father’s last mission. One night she and her mother had had a terrible fight over what to cook for Thanksgiving dinner. They had no near relatives. The guests would be couples from the base or friends of Al’s. Seese’s mother had remarked how much Seese’s “late father” had disliked turkey. Now that she was married to a man who ate turkey, that’s what she intended to cook.

  Seese had left the house that night, with a suitcase of clothes and $80. She had hitchhiked as far as Santa Barbara the first night. Then, as she had later told Eric, she had got lucky. She ran into Cherie and some other girls. It was a hop, skip, and a jump to Tiny and all the rest. It wasn’t true that she had never seen her mother again. She had stopped in San Antonio once after Al’s transfer.

  She had never thought she would be tracking down a psychic. Eric would have laughed if he were alive now. Eric had thought psychics were only for the ignorant or superstitious. Seese had laughed then because that’s what she had thought too. But catastrophe had changed her feelings. Seese turned off the light beside the bed, but she could not sleep. When she closed her eyes, mental images out of the past kept running through her brain like a high-speed movie. She tried to keep the focus only on those scenes or images that felt happy or good, because she had suffered breakdowns in the past. Two of her breakdowns had occurred before she had ever tried cocaine. Still, coke was probably the worst drug to use if your nerves were shaky, unless you really wanted to risk your sanity with LSD.

  Seese tried to visualize Monte laughing and playing with other children in a park or school playground. Seese was convinced that a child so beautiful and intelligent as Monte was being reared by people who were loving him as much as they could love any child. Seese had asked the psychiatrist if he agreed that here was the logical way to look at it: her child had been taken because he was valuable and beautiful, and it was not likely any harm would have come to him.

  DECOY

  SOMETIMES A VOICE inside Seese’s head cried out to Eric, “Why did you kill yourself? Is that what you do to the people who love you?” But she understood exactly why you might do that to the ones you loved. So then gradually, from the grief and the anger Seese had come to feel that she was no more alive than Eric was. That in death she and Eric would always be bound together—sister and brother. There did not seem to be a vocabulary for what they had felt. Or if there had been a vocabulary, she hadn’t understood it.

  Eric would start talking and mention names of books. The first few times he had done this, Seese had felt a panic—a sudden need for another beer. But later on, Eric told her he admired the people—women especially—who had gone out on their own when they had just finished high school. He had not done that, exactly, but when he had turned fourteen, he had asked the Baptist minister to remove his name from the church roster of baptized Baptists in what was a small town, Lubbock. Seese had been a little stunned. She had never belonged to any church. Her mother had not bothered to have Seese baptized.

  Eric had never told Seese the whole story about his years with Beaufrey. Eric said it had been because he had been so young then, and fucked up on drugs to boot. “Those were the years before I finally came out”—Eric had smiled faintly—“before I came out and told them I fell in love with guys, not women. But it was all anticlimactic. My father had identified me years before. I had the big fight with them over my art history major. He called me queer and swish and fairy. ‘Faggot.’ Never just ‘fag.’ ”

  David was ashamed for anyone to know. Of course, David had been seeing Seese on the sly for some months before. But David had also started spending afternoons swimming nude with Beaufrey.

  Beaufrey was always delighted with the quarrels. Beaufrey was always looking for new players. Eric confessed to Seese he had cried himself to sleep the night Beaufrey and David went driving alone in the Porsche along
the coast highway. Later Eric said, he had realized how provincial, how stupidly narrow, he was, despite the years away from Lubbock. Wanting David all for himself was just a stupid version of the Bible Belt bourgeois Eric rejected. Seese could rely on Eric to be her friend and ally. After all, they both loved David, didn’t they?

  Seese was the decoy. Because Beaufrey was as anxious as David was about his masculine image. Eric had laughed the first time he and Seese had ever met at G.’s gallery. “Oh,” he had said, “I was afraid I would hate you!” Seese had been too high to say more than, “Yeah, me too.” They had ended up alone at the punch bowl. David was doing the rounds with Beaufrey on his left arm and Serlo on his right.

  Seese could see it in Beaufrey’s eyes, the great hunger, the greed to have all of David. Beaufrey had only kept Seese and Eric around to humor David. Beaufrey had been intent on weaning David from them.

  Before Beaufrey had taken him in, before the gallery picked him up, David had worked for an exclusive Malibu escort service—live-in stud, for three to six months maximum, cash in advance, all medical and dental and incidental expenses extra, cash on the barrel head. Rich old queers in Bel Air, their withered vines and grapes shrunken to raisins; layers and layers of grayish, crepelike skin dropping off, flat asses covered with black hairs. David never lost the gag reflex at the sight of dewlap skin on turkeys and lizards. He’d seen too much loose skin during those years. David had a long list of sights he had to avoid. Another had been the thick, yellowish-stained toenails old men had. He had awakened screaming one night in Eric’s bed, wet with sweat, crying because he had been half-buried in great mounds and fields of old men’s toenails.

  David had bragged about the old men who had actually taught him “his art” by begging him to pose with them in front of their video and fancy 35mm cameras and lights. David had turned the tables on them. He had gone from art object to artist. He preferred to say he had been a live-in companion. What mattered was that it was clear he was the “companion,” not the male nurse or chauffeur and not the butler.

  TEXAS

  ERIC HAD CALLED SEESE. His voice sounded choked and hesitant, as if he was so sad he might cry instead of speak. David had given him the word, Eric said. “The straight stuff. Finito. Finished. The end.” “Oh, Eric,” Seese had said. “Don’t try to talk now. I’ll come over right away.”

  Eric had always said only the vibration and motion of the automobile around him calmed the roaring, surging feeling in all his blood vessels. He needed to see the southern-California coast at sundown with lovers parked at every scenic-view loop. At the edge of the water an old man had been walking an arthritic Great Dane and watching intently as the dog shit a load the size of a wedding cake. “Wedding cake?” Seese had said, starting to laugh. “Yeah, a wedding cake,” Eric had said, and then they had both laughed and laughed, and Seese was glad Eric had telephoned her.

  They had not talked about David or about the pregnancy. Eric had been thinking about leaving. He had lived on the West Coast—San Francisco then San Diego—for twelve years. He had been thinking about Texas again. Seese was not sure what to say because even when they had been laughing and joking together, Eric had seemed restless and distant. Seese had suggested a walk along the edge of the water. They could watch the sun go down. As the sun slid through colored bands of coastal clouds into the sea, Seese glanced at Eric, but he had been intent on his own bare feet, watching the thin sheen of seawater that oozed up between his toes and around the edges of his feet.

  The marijuana they’d smoked in the car was coming on full force. Seese had laughed and run to meet the waves. “We came here to see the ocean and the sunset, and by God, we will!” They broke into a run then, and raced all the way back to the car. Eric had put a hand on her thigh and pretended to roll his eyes from the thrill. “Marry me. We’ll have a great time!” Seese was laughing. She shoved her head out the window to smell the low, damp ocean smell before the heat of the freeway and exhaust buried it. But when her face was turned into the rush of air, Eric had said, “I’m serious. I mean it.”

  Seese turned to him suddenly to see if this was another tease. She pushed away the strands of hair blowing around her eyes to get a good look. Eric wasn’t joking. Waves of dread, cold, night-sweat fear had churned up from her belly to her chest and throat. Seese fumbled in the dark trying to light the joint. Eric had known both Beaufrey and David far longer than she. Eric assumed David was finished with her too.

  Eric had detected trouble from her silence and pulled the old Cadillac into an empty bank parking lot.

  Seese had nodded as she took a long drag on the marijuana cigarette and glanced over at Eric. He was watching her. “I wish you would come. We talked about it before.” Eric’s voice was calm as he added, “David’s with Beaufrey now.”

  The mercury-vapor lights around the parking lot gave their skin a bluish-silver glow. They passed the joint back and forth without talking. Seese had seen how David glowed when he talked about the baby when they were together alone. Eric had no way to know any of this about David. Eric had seen only what a man might see. The dark surge of fear in her chest and throat began to recede a little, like the tide going out. Dry and safe again soon. Seese had patted the car’s dashboard.

  Eric was watching her. Seese wanted Eric to take over, to begin telling his West Texas sandstorm stories, his West Texas grandma stories, his ’67 Cadillac Fleetwood stories. But when Eric kept his eyes on hers, Seese could feel herself floundering, then sinking. Eric wasn’t going to let her change the subject.

  “David never loved you. He made Beaufrey jealous with you. That’s all.”

  After the outburst, Eric had seemed to shrink, to sink into the peeling blue leather seat of the Cadillac. In the dim light, Eric had suddenly looked much older. Nearly as old as Beaufrey. Seese suddenly felt the sensation of falling inside herself. She fumbled in her purse for the vial of coke. While Eric took heaping spoonfuls up to his face in the rearview mirror, Seese glanced around, from habit, to be sure no cops were passing by. Eric let his head fall back on the car seat with his eyes closed. He nodded and smiled at her. While she leaned over to shove the little spoon in each nostril, Eric started talking. “When I was in high school, I used to imagine or pretend—yeah, pretend. I liked to pretend I was an orphan. No living relatives anywhere in the world.” Eric paused and sat up, flexing his shoulders, reaching for the key in the ignition. The streetlights had been on for fifteen or twenty minutes.

  • • •

  They had spent the rest of the night side by side on chaise lounges by the penthouse pool above Mission Bay, and the city lights. They had finished off a quart of tequila, talking about how they would go back to Lubbock as husband and wife and pick up Eric’s inheritance from Granny, drawing interest these past four years until Eric “came around.”

  In one version they had concocted that night, they stayed in Lubbock long enough to get married, picked up the cashier’s check and left town before the sun set. She and Eric had settled on that version as the one that would make everyone—from the Baptist preacher to Beaufrey—the happiest. Eric would have the money, and they would go on together as they had before, except they’d have money. Money might give them a better chance with David.

  But a week later, when Seese had mentioned the trip to Lubbock, Eric had shaken his head and laughed. “Oh, I never told you the whole story, darling,” Eric had said, waving a mock limp-wrist at her before he flipped the blender switch on their frozen daiquiris. Eric had seemed cheerful, and he’d been full of jokes the last week. Seese thought he was over his sadness. They had spent almost every day by the penthouse pool where they had enjoyed laughing about having a pool fifteen stories above the Pacific Ocean. Eric pointed out that a pool might be more confining, but at least the sharks couldn’t get him. “Oh, yeah?” Seese said, diving under to grab at his legs. Then David and Beaufrey had returned. David came and stretched out on a lounge chair. Seese could not see if his eyes were closed behind the
dark glasses. Beaufrey had stood in the doorway only a moment and then turned away. Serlo slid the glass door shut.

  MIRACLE MILE

  SEESE LISTENED to the toilet flush and refill in the dark. The motel was quieter than any of the cheap joints she and Cherie had ever stayed in. She was getting anxious about Cherie. As far as she knew, Cherie was still in Tucson. Cherie sent Christmas cards no matter how broke she was. Seese had tried to tease her about it once, but Cherie, who was usually easygoing, did not see any joke in Christmas cards. But Seese thought it was hilarious that Cherie, who had performed the most bizarre sex acts for paying customers and sometimes their women, that same Cherie never dreamed of neglecting to send Christmas cards. Cherie did not merely send Christmas cards. Cherie always wrote what she termed a “personal note.” Now Seese was going to cash in on Cherie’s Christmas cards. If Cherie herself was not living in Tucson, then Cherie was “keeping in touch” with people who did live in Tucson. Seese would be able to track her down, and then Seese would be able to collect on an old favor she had once done for Cherie.

  It was only ten to midnight. Seese put on jeans and a gray sweater and tore through the suitcases for a nylon windbreaker. Mostly the suitcases were full of the “settlement goods”—cash and cocaine. It didn’t matter. She just had to get from the door to the taxi. There was still time to catch Cherie at the Stage Coach. If Cherie was still dancing there. The possibility that Cherie had quit, had left town, brought a surge of the dark, hollow feeling Seese had long connected with coming down from cocaine. But it had been hours since she had had any coke, and even the marijuana she had smoked in bed had worn off. What she was feeling was the plain old jones—all nerves and her own guts reading false prophecies to her. So a little coke would readjust the world. She scattered a tiny spoonful across the peeling night table by the bed. Being around Beaufrey had got her into any number of bad habits, and wasting cocaine had been only one of them. She and Eric had always joked about the Mexican maids who cleaned the penthouse. How the maids put clean bags into their Electroluxes before they did the penthouse, and later all got high in the basement just from the sweepings off the carpet.