Damnation Street

8.

I'm not sure-I'm never really sure-whether my own story is worth telling here, whether it's worth interrupting the main action with it. The romantic doings of my admittedly callow existence at that time seem pretty unimportant compared with the working out of Weiss's fate and Bishop's. Still, we all did converge in the end, and while I don't know-even all this long time later-whether I had any effect on what happened to the others, I do know that what happened to them, violent and terrible as it was, changed my life for- ever. In any case, as I say, we all did converge, so I guess my part in these events has to be told. I promise to get through it as quickly as I can.

To begin with, the main thing you have to know is I was in love. Her name was Emma McNair. She was a student at UC Berkeley, where her father was an English professor. She had an adorable heart-shaped face and witty green eyes and… Well, I guess it doesn't matter what she had, does it? The point is I met her one night in a pizzeria called Carlo's. I fell in love with her on the spot, convinced on the spot that she was my second soul, fashioned for me at the Creation. Before we parted, she wrote her phone number on a Carlo's coaster for me, and I promised to call her right away. Only I never did. That very night I became entangled in an affair with my superior at the Agency, Sissy Truitt. Day after day I didn't call Emma, because night after night I was with Sissy.

Now at this point-the point where Weiss suddenly left town and Bishop got thrown in jail and all-at this point I was already tired of Sissy in a thousand ways, but in one way I wasn't. She was older than I was by at least ten years, and she knew some sexual tricks that would've been illegal if the sort of people who made stuff like that illegal had ever heard of them, which they couldn't have or they wouldn't have been that sort of people. Me at that age: I was basically a penis with an idea for a human being attached. I wanted to leave Sissy and be with Emma, but I couldn't because of the things Sissy did with me in bed. I despised myself for this. In fact, I despised myself for my entire approach to Sissy, the way I pledged my loyalty to her at the same time I plotted to escape her as if she were some kind of Communist regime or something. Sissy was not a bad person at all. She was sweet and gentle and motherly, and so hungry to have a man in her life, she was even willing to settle for me. I liked her. I really did. I was just tired of her, that's all. I was tired of her and I was in love with Emma, my second soul.

Last night, the night before Bishop went to jail, I managed to get away from her somehow. I told her some lie or other. I haven't the stomach to remember what it was. Anyway, I drove out to Berkeley. I went to Carlo's. I figured Emma had come in there once; there was at least some chance she would come in again. Somehow, attempting to bump into her "accidentally" seemed less dishonest than calling her or going to her house while I was still involved with Sissy.

So there we find me, in Carlo's, at a corner table. Drinking a beer. Pretending not to watch the door.

It was Thursday night. The place was packed, noisy with talk and laughter. The chairs around the chunky wooden tables were full of kids from the university, kids not much younger than I. My gaze-my melancholy gaze-traveled over them: athletes pointing their chins and fingers at one another, shouting friendly insults back and forth; intellectuals talking vehemently nose to nose, as if they were disagreeing rather than working out the variations of a single ideology; outcasts in baggy clothes with sullen frowns and big ideas; and bright-eyed Businessmen and Businesswomen of Tomorrow who smiled across their pizzas as if they would be bright-eyed forever.

I gripped the handle of my beer mug, sipped the surface of my beer. I had been one of these very students not so long ago, one of the intellectual ones. I had been planning to continue on through graduate school, to become a college professor and write bad smart novels that critics praised and no one read, just like Emma's father did. God knows what lonely impulse of delight had led me to take a year off, to take a menial job at Weiss's agency. But there I found myself, working at a place and with people who seemed to have erupted whole out of the hard-boiled detective fiction I had loved since I was a boy. I wasn't one of those hard-boiled people. I knew that. But somehow being among them at the Agency had taught me something about myself. I didn't want to be a professor anymore. I didn't want to write bad smart novels. I wanted to live in the real world with real people and write the kind of novels I had always loved.

I told all this to Emma the night we met. She was the only one I had ever told or ever could tell. I told her and then I went back to the city and started up the thing with Sissy.

Now here I was and, oh, how melancholy it all seemed to me, how rife with personal symbolism. Which woman would I love? Which choice would I make? Which life would I lead?

Of course, looking back on it now, I see only one salient point about any of it, one fact that stood out above all others: to wit, I was a feckless poltroon-truly feckless; without a single feck. I was a moral coward to my bones. No wonder I despised myself.

I lifted my beer mug. Tilted it up. Drained it. I clapped it down on the table. I stood.

She would not come tonight, my Emma. She would never come again.

I drove back to the city in a state of high romantic sadness. I went home to my apartment. I slept alone.