Always

SEVENTEEN

THERE WAS A RED DOT BY THE PAINTING. “WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?” I SAID TO the sales associate. But I knew.

“It’s sold,” she said.

“Sold.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. You must be very disappointed. But there are several of his other pictures available.”

“I want this one.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s no longer available.”

HIPPOWORKS RENTED The Last Supper Club and invited all the cast and crew and dozens of industry insiders, local celebrities and hangers-on, and corporate sponsors.

The party had been going for three hours with some serious drinking, including bartender stunts involving flaming shots and leaping balls of flame that were probably illegal. I stayed in a corner. My eyebrow stung and my ribs ached and I didn’t want anything to do with fire for a very long time.

“Hey,” said someone with a bright red face and messy black hair. John. Wardrobe. “Hey, there’s a rumor going round that you strangled that kid.”

“Why would I do that?”

He looked puzzled. “I don’t know,” he said, and wandered off. Kick and Rusen and Finkel were surrounded by admirers at the other end of the club.

I took my beer upstairs, where I found a pool table. There was no one else around so I racked the balls and began potting them in order. The color and motion and geometry were soothing, and it was good to keep my muscles moving, work the stiffness out.

“Here’s where you’re hiding,” Dornan said.

“I’m not hiding.”

“No, of course not.” He watched for a while as I stroked the balls into their pockets. He coughed once or twice. We’d all been doing that, particularly the ones who had left the warehouse last. “All packed for tomorrow? Oh, you should have had that one. No doubt it’s your bandaged rib.”

“No doubt.”

“Would you find an actual game more interesting?”

“I might.” I banged the eight ball in. “Help me set up.”

He dug the balls obligingly from the top pockets and rolled them towards me. I racked them. He broke. For Dornan, it was a brilliant stroke: the cue ball actually hit the clustered balls at the other end of the table. It wasn’t a legal break, because only one ball touched a cushion, but Dornan and I had long ago found that making him play strictly by the rules led to a great deal of frustration. He leaned on his cue. “Try not to pot all yours in one go.”

I cracked in the two and the six. He sighed loudly.

“We should give you a handicap.”

Handicap. I wondered how much longer we’d able to use that word in casual conversation.

“Kick’s looking very pretty tonight.”

“Yes,” I said, squinting down the cue at the four, which was hiding behind the eight ball. I could do it if I banked off the left-hand cushion.

“Oh, nice shot. So why is she down there and you’re hiding up here?”

I chalked my cue, walked around the table, leaned, measured, stroked in the five. “I’m not hiding,” I said, lining up the next shot. “I’m waiting. I asked her a question. She hasn’t answered me yet.”

“Aud Torvingen, you are deeply stupid.”

I missed my stroke, barely clipping the cue ball and sending it spinning in slow majesty into the corner pocket. He fished it out, polished it on his jeans, whistling, and put it three inches behind the eleven, in a direct line with the same corner pocket.

“Not a good idea,” I said.

“And why is that?”

“Just look at it.” He would pot the eleven ball, then without the skill to spin and bend the cue ball, would be trapped behind the eight ball and two of mine.

“It looks to be a perfectly reasonable position,” he said, and potted his ball, and was sadly puzzled as to how to hit anything else. He walked around the table twice. “I see,” he said. “I see now. You could have explained. ”

“It was obvious.”

“Maybe to you.” He pursed his lips. Walked around the table again. “So. Kick. You asked her to go to Atlanta, where the heat will make her ill and she knows nobody and there’s no work for her. Why?”

“Because it’s where I live.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t be gnomic. I didn’t understand you the first time you said that and I don’t understand you this time. I want her to come and see where I live. I’ve seen where she lives. One weekend, that’s all I ask. It’s not like it’s forever.”

“Ah.” He nodded smugly to himself.

“What does that mean? Explain it to me. Stop. Stop walking around that table. Look, I understand the pool table. It’s orderly. There are clear rules. It’s obvious. But I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. Clearly there are rules about things that are just as obvious to you that I’m missing. About Kick.”

“Not about Kick,” he said gently. “About you. As you would say, it’s perfectly obvious. You’ve been intending to come and live in Seattle since the first day you met her.”

I stared at him. “I have?”

“Of course you have. It’s as clear as day. It is to you, too, you simply haven’t yet put it into words. I was hoping you’d figure it out for yourself, it’s better that way, but, well, all right, here it is: Atlanta isn’t your home. I’m not sure it ever was.”

I heard the words, but they made no sense. “It’s where I live. Where I used to work. People I know.” You. “A whole system.”

“Which is exactly what you’ve been building in Seattle, only better.”

He was insane.

“You stopped talking about selling the warehouse almost as soon as you saw it. Ooh, you said, they need my help.”

“Not anymore. It’s all gone, nothing left but burnt timber,” but even as I said it, at a deeper level I felt the words rolling magisterially towards their pockets, dropping one by one, making sense. For a moment my ribs seemed as though clamped in a vise. I couldn’t breathe, but it was just a memory of standing outside the woodworkers’ collective, thinking, I’ll get to know these people.

“And you do know people. You know electricians and carpenters, movie producers and actors, private detectives and reporters, politicians and local government agencies, bankers and real estate agents, even a criminal or two, not to mention two police officers who won’t forget your face in a hurry. You’ve found a dojo. Discovered parks and restaurants and pubs.”

He coughed.

“Can I have a bit of that?” He borrowed my beer. “Ah, that’s better. No, there’s no question. You’ve made more of a life here in three weeks than you’ve done in five years in Atlanta. I only wonder that you’ve managed to hide from the obvious for so long. This place is ideal for a Norwegian who isn’t really Norwegian anymore. It positively reeks of Scandinavia, all clean and shiny and Americanized, full of rules that people obey with a smile when it pleases them and break with a smile when it doesn’t. Ideal for you.”

I thought of the Jante law, and the painting. Of Gas Works Park, the little pocket park by the Duwamish, the land I’d bought. What hope felt like burning beneath the breastbone.

“For God’s sake, there’s even your own personal troll under the bridge. Do you understand now? Good. Now, return the favor, please, and show me how to beat you at this bloody game.”

BACK DOWNSTAIRS I reclaimed my corner seat and settled in with a fresh beer. At the next table, Finkel was entertaining an industry journalist. “…stroke of luck. The warehouse and its contents—the sets, the props, the costumes—were a total write-off, but we’d more or less finished shooting anyhow. The beauty of it is we get reimbursed for all that stuff we had no more use for. The negatives were stored off-site and we had the foresight to back up the EDL twice a day. Not a frame was lost. And no one was hurt.”

“What are you, chopped liver?” Kick slid into the chair next to me. “How’s the face? I can hardly see any blisters.”

She wore a cool, summery dress the color of the Caribbean, a necklace of green turquoise tubes, doubled casually into a choker, and her hair loose. Her bare shoulders gleamed.

“…product placement for post-production has tripled,” Finkel continued expansively, “and I have two studio meetings next week.”

“The man’s glee is unholy,” she said. “But in a way this has worked out well. We’re almost certain of some kind of deal now. It wouldn’t surprise me to find he’s cooking up a side deal for a Hallmark movie of the week about the Great Seattle Movie Drama.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it. What’s EDL?”

“Edit decision line.”

Which left me none the wiser.

“Anyhow, I won’t have any difficulty getting work for a while, coordinating or catering.”

“So you’ll be busy. You won’t want to come to Atlanta. I fly back tomorrow. ”

Silence. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I—”

“Don’t say it. Just listen for a minute. I’m going back to Atlanta tomorrow. There are some things I have to sort out there. Some papers to sign. But it should all be done by the end of September or October. The movie season will be slowing down here, and it will be cooler by then, and I’m hoping you’ll come out, just for a visit, just for a weekend. You could see how I live and work, the people I know, see my life. As it was. No, please, don’t say anything yet.”

I began to strip the label from my beer.

“You probably think I live in a giant house with servants. My house is about the same size as yours.”

She looked skeptical.

“Maybe a little bigger. But not much. And I rebuilt it myself. With these hands. The point is, I’d like you to see. One weekend. And then I’ll come back. I have some tables to build for you. And I’m setting up a foundation.”

She watched me pick at the white underlayer left by the label. “What kind of foundation?”

“I don’t know. For people who don’t know how to fight back. Sometimes that will be street people, people who’ve given up hope, but sometimes it will be people who have been hopelessly civilized, to the point where they’re powerless to fight back against convention. I’ve bought the land. It’ll be a series of small buildings, set in peaceful grounds along the Duwamish. There’ll be classrooms and offices, some low-cost housing. Offices. General admin for the foundation, of course. My offices—I can see that there would be a good business here in film security—and your offices. For your catering business, maybe, or your stunt work. Maybe even rehearsal space, and studio space, and teaching space for would-be stunters. And a garden, where we could grow things, things to attract wildlife, or things to cook in the cooking classes. I don’t know. Something that makes people feel good while they’re doing it. Maybe skills workshops, like carpentry. Opportunities for people to interact with their physical world. We spend so much time in our heads. And there would be classes on the basics of survival—not just self-defense but cooking, how to balance a checkbook, basic legal rights. Maybe we’ll even have some law offices for idealistic young lawyers who want to help the community.”

“That’s all?” I wasn’t sure, but I thought she was smiling.

“I have a lot of money. I want to use it. Money shouldn’t frighten people. It’s a tool. A very versatile one. Take, for example, your stunt work.”

“Ex-stunt work.”

“No.” I started working on the label around the collar of the bottle. “We talked about that. I can form an insurance company whose primary client will be you and whichever production company you’re working with. Maybe others, too. I’ve looked into it. Underwriters make a lot of money.” All the more to feed back into the foundation.

She was silent; so still that her sea-colored dress didn’t move. I couldn’t even see her breathing.

“You’d accept money if you won the lottery, wouldn’t you?”

“You bet.”

“Even if it was me who gave you the winning ticket?”

“Well, yeah. I think. Sure.”

“I could do that, you know, if that’s the only way you’d accept my help. I could buy every single ticket for the Washington State Lottery, and give them to you. But it would be easier to just put ten million dollars in an account under your name. Yours forever, no matter what. It’s just a tool. Don’t be afraid of it. Of me. It would be yours, not mine. You could play with it, or spend it, or hoard it, or set it on fire. Whatever it would take for you to not be frightened of it, or me, anymore.” I put down the bottle, collected all the strips of paper in a ball. “Or you could just earn what you earn and we could figure it out. That what’s people who love each other do.”

She reached for my beer.

“I do love you.”

She drank. “You haven’t forgotten that I’m ill.”

“I haven’t forgotten. You have MS. But you’re fit now, as long as you stay cool, and maybe you’ll be able to do stunt work for years. You also leap to conclusions without thinking, you give everything, even trees, their own name, you get weird and don’t talk when you should.” I looked at the oddly bald bottle in her hand. “And you steal my beer.”

“What? You can spare me ten million but not half your beer?”

“Half wouldn’t be a problem. You drank it all.”

She looked at the bottle in surprise. “Huh.” She put it down. “How do you know I wouldn’t take all your money, too?”

“Because my lawyer, who looks like a lizard in pearls, would eat you for lunch. Besides, I trust you. I trust you with my life.”

“You already did that.”

“Yes.” My blistered face hurt. I was smiling again. “And you saved me.”

“You let me.”

“Yes. I let you help. That’s what people who love each other do. I helped Dornan last year. He just helped me.”

She looked around.

“Upstairs. Over a game of pool.”

“He plays pool?”

“After a fashion.”

“I could probably beat you at pool.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her golden ear.

“No, you couldn’t.”

“I beat you at darts.”

“We’re getting off the subject.”

“You just hate being beaten.”

“Call it one of my imperfections.”

She laid her hand on mine. Small on large.

“Kick, I want to be able to send you flowers without you threatening to kill me. I want to oil the hinge on your gate and build you better railings. I want to sit with you in our park and watch herons catch their dinner, to ride with you in a limousine to the premiere of Feral. I want to find out who would win at pool. So stay here and sort through all your job offers, and pick a couple, and do the work, and maybe see your doctors, and understand the shape of things to come, and then come see me—just for the weekend, if you like—and see my life. See where I’ve been. The weather will be lovely. But come.”

"Yes,” she said. "Yes.”

ALL THE way back to Atlanta I stared out of the window at the clouds.

“When will she come?” Dornan said.

“September.”

“Did you buy the painting?”

“No.”

Another hundred miles of cloud went by.

“So what will you be doing with yourself when we get back?”

“Flying to Arkansas to talk to Luz and the Carpenters about adoption.”

“You’ve signed?”

“I’ve signed. Then I’ll be organizing my foundation. You’ll be helping.”

“Me?”

“I need people I trust on the board. And people who know how to make money. I don’t want it to be one of those institutions that just sucks money into a black hole. You’ll have to fly back and forth, Seattle to Atlanta, but I’ll pay for first class, of course.”

“Of course,” he said faintly, then rang for the cabin attendant. “I don’t suppose you know how to make a kamikaze?” She didn’t; they agreed on a nice glass of cabernet sauvignon.

“And you?” I said.

“Ah, well, I expect Jonie will greet me with the accounts all nicely balanced and the perfect cup of Americano. No one makes Americano like Jonie.”

Maybe when I come home at night I want comfort and the smell of coffee and to feel safe. For the first time, I understood something about Dornan before he did.

“What?” he said.

I smiled.