Blonde Faith

14

On the drive to Brentan’s, I tried to imagine myself at Bonnie’s wedding. I got stuck on what color and kind of suit to wear. I knew that I would never be able to go, but I wanted to imagine being there at the ceremony, watching them kiss after promising each other forever. If I could see it in my mind, maybe I could get past it.

I parked on the street and climbed out of my car. It was 7:48 by the gold-and-copper Grumbacher watch on my wrist.

A police car was passing by. The cops slowed down and stared out their window at me. Me: dark as the approaching night, tall, in shape enough for one good round with a journeyman light heavyweight, dressed in a deep gray suit that fit me at least as well as the English language.

The car slowed down to three miles an hour, and the pale faces wondered if they should roust me.

I stood up straight and stared back at them.

They hesitated, exchanged a few words, and then sped off. Maybe it was close to the end of the shift for them, or maybe they realized that I was a citizen of the United States of America. Probably, though, some real crime had come in over the radio and they didn’t have the leisure to bring me under their control.

In the first-floor lobby, another white guard, this one tall and lanky, came up to me.

“May I help you, sir?” he asked.

Manners before insults. Little blessings.

“Goin’ up to the twenty-third floor to grab a bite,” I replied.

“Do you have a reservation?”

“Is the pope Catholic?”

“What?”

I walked past him to the express elevator door. I pressed the button, conflicted about whether I wanted the guard to come over to me so that I could break his jaw, or just to be left alone.

The car came and the doors slid open. The guard was nowhere in my vicinity.

ANOTHER WHITE WOMAN in a lovely gown adorned the podium. The dress was scarlet, and her face contained the beauty of youth. It was full, with green eyes and a nose that stood out like a petite lever on a whole world of laughter.

When the woman-child saw me, the potential for laughter dimmed a little.

“Yes?” she asked, giving me only her insincere smile.

“Rawlins for dinner for two at eight,” I said.

Without looking at the log in front of her, she asked, “Do you have a reservation?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

The pretty thing looked down and moved her finger around.

“Excuse me a moment,” she said very politely.

As she walked away, I lit up a cigarette. Jackson Blue had once told me that cigarette smoke constricts the veins and raises the blood pressure to a dangerous degree. But all I felt was calm. The smoke took off the sharp edge that I’d honed on the way to that restaurant.

A white couple came up behind me.

“Excuse me,” the tall white man said. He wore a tuxedo and had a white cashmere scarf around his neck. He was my age. She was twenty years younger, platinum from head to toe.

“It’s a line, man,” I said, no longer wanting to placate a world seemingly filled with my adversaries.

Hans Green arrived a minute or two after that. He was attended by the young scarlet-clad beauty. The man in the tuxedo went around me and said, “We’re here for our reservation.”

Hans turned to the hostess, saying, “Go change your clothes, Melinda.”

Tears appeared in her eyes and she hurried away.

The man in the tuxedo said, “Excuse me, sir, but we’d like to be seated.”

“Don’t you see this man standing in front of you?” Green asked. “Are you blind or simply an ass?”

The Tux backed up and Hans said, “Come on, Mr. Rawlins, let me show you to your table.”

On our way, Hans touched a waitress on her shoulder and whispered something to her.

“Right away, Mr. Green,” she said, and then made her way to the podium.

THE TABLE Hans had for me was perfect. Removed from the other tables, we were still in sight of everyone. The western view looked down upon an LA that was coming alive with electric light.

I sat and so did Hans.

“How do you do it?” he asked me.

“What?”

“I’m a white man,” he said. “An Aryan. I golf, belong to a men’s club. My parents came to America in order to be free and to share in democracy, but ten minutes with you and I’ve had arguments with four people about their bigotry. If that’s what I face in ten minutes, what must life be like for you twenty-four hours a day?”

“Ten years ago I didn’t have it so bad,” I said.

“Things have gotten worse?”

“In a way. Ten years ago you wouldn’t have been able to seat me. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have been in this neighborhood. Slavery and what came after are deep wounds, Hans. And, you know, healing hurts like hell.”

The ugly restaurateur sat back and stared at me. He shook his head and frowned. “How can you be so calm about it?” he asked.

“Because the other choice would kill me and a dozen other folks don’t know the difference between a fellow citizen and an imminent threat.”

“Hello,” a woman said. “I didn’t know it was going to be a party.”

Tourmaline was wearing a very tight fitting knee-length white dress. There was a blue hat shaped like a delicate seashell on the side of her head. The white high heels did not impede her grace.

Hans and I got to our feet.

I noticed that it was the woman Hans had whispered to who had brought Tourmaline to our table.

“Hi,” I said. “This is Hans Green, the manager here. Hans, this is Miss . . .”

“Goss,” she said, just in case I had forgotten her last name. It’s always nice when your date wants to keep you from being embarrassed.

Hans bowed and kissed her hand. “Easy is a lucky man.”

He held out a chair for Tourmaline, and she sat with exceptional grace. “Is there anything you don’t eat or drink, Miss Goss?” he asked, as I regained my seat.

“I don’t like veal very much,” she said.

“Then leave the rest to me.”

Hans and the new hostess walked off.

“I’m glad we didn’t go to some little place down on Central,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’d have to fight the men off down there. Hans had his eyes poppin’ outta his head and he just told me that he was an Aryan.”

Tourmaline smiled. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Easy Rawlins at your service.”

“I mean, how can you get into a place like this and have the manager visiting at your table? You a gangster or something?”

My blood was thrumming. I smiled and hunched my shoulders.

“Every once in a while I get together with my friends Ray and Jackson,” I said. “We shoot the shit and joke around. Jackson is what he calls an autodidact. That means —”

“Self-educated,” Tourmaline said.

“Yeah. Anyway, Jackson calls the three of us the vanguard, the people up front blazing new trails. We make inroads to all kinds of places. From this restaurant on.”

Tourmaline was impressed, but it hardly showed.

“Where’d you learn all those big words, Mr. Rawlins?”

“Reading and talking. What about you?”

Before Tourmaline could answer, Melinda, the demoted hostess, came over to our table. She was wearing a green-and-white waitress’s uniform and had her long red hair tied back.

She put glasses of water in front of us.

“Mr. Green and the chef are planning your meal, but is there anything special you want?”

I shook my head without speaking.

“No, thank you,” Tourmaline said graciously.

After Melinda walked away, Tourmaline observed, “She looks sad.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I wonder why.”

THE EVENING was the best I’d had in a year. Tourmaline was only working at the used-car lot for a few months. She was a student at UCLA full-time, getting her master’s in economics.

“Marxist economics or the kind that makes money?” I asked.

“The science,” she said with a smirk. “I’m political but not a revolutionary; interested in a good living, but I have no need to be rich.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you got to admit that the science meets man on the front page of the paper. I just glanced at the headlines today and I saw articles on Vietnam, the USSR, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”

“But what about that boy and his brother?” Tourmaline asked.

“I didn’t see that one.”

“It was on the lower left,” she said. “A sixteen-year-old boy carried his dying brother through the snow for ten hours in the San Gabriel Mountains. When the rescuers found them, the younger boy was dead.”

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lotta good strong hearts out there. Problem is they get lost when they wander too far from home.”

I had made up my mind not to mention the red truck until she did. There was a dance to our date. It was something we both needed. I didn’t know a thing about her as a person, and I was a mystery myself at that table.

Melinda served us duck with cherry sauce, ramps, and potatoes roasted with garlic and parsley. For dessert Hans brought us fresh strawberries in whipped cream with champagne for Tourmaline and Squirt grapefruit soda in a glass for me.

“You don’t drink?” Tourmaline asked.

“No.”

“You sound sad about it.” The way she let her head tilt to the side told me she cared. For the first time in a long time, I felt physically drawn to a woman.

“Whiskey for me is like having an allergy to aspirin along with the worst headache you could imagine.”

Tourmaline didn’t respond to that, not with words. She sipped from her flute and looked at me.

“I have the information you wanted,” she said. “And I’ll give it to you if you promise not to try and pay me.”

“I can’t even try?”

“No.”