Pacific Beat

What happened last night changes everything, and I have to write this down, I must write this down. Maybe it’s because I can’t tell these things to anyone, that I need to tell them to myself. Dear One, you will never see this, but this is for you. Now that I know you are here and will someday be with me, everything has changed.

It started — started again, I should say — at a party on this huge, elegant motor yacht called Lady of the Bay. It was January tenth. It was a fund-raising party for Brian Dennison, who was running for mayor of Newport. I took the job to get out of the Whale’s Tale, and believe me — you would have, too. Ten years of that place is enough. Plus, I knew the tips would be good and the night would be lovely if the storm didn’t hit early. I was right. It was ferociously cold, with the paper lanterns strung above the deck swaying furiously in the wind. I could feel that wind right up to the crotch of my panty hose, blowing up under that little skirt. I am thirty-nine years old. Thirty-nine years old, married and childless, with legs still worth showing off — the sum total of my accomplishments to date. It is almost the end of the century, and I am just beginning to realize that more of my life is behind me than ahead. Dear One, if you ever have these thoughts at my age, I pray you will understand how much can happen, how much can still lie ahead!

I got there late, just before Lady of the Bay shoved off, because I had a huge load of laundry to do before Ray went to school in the morning. The ship was already full. All of the Power Crowd was there, because they all wanted Brian to be mayor. Brian was a Power Crowd Wanna Be. He was wearing a dark blue suit that must have cost him a grand at least, but the lapels pooched out because his chest was too big and his shirt looked like it was choking him. His eyebrows were bouncing around on his face like field mice. The congressman was there, Cox, just back from Eastern Europe. And Eleanor, the outgoing mayor, hobbling around with those terrible varicose veins she tries to hold in with the ortho stockings. Poor woman. Then all the usual Power faces, Bren from the Irvine Company, James Roosevelt, the catsup people — the Heinzes — who had the Dalai Lama when he won the Nobel Prize, Argyros, the airline owner, the Segerstroms, the Tappans, Kathryn Thompson, even Pilar Wayne and Buddy Ebsen. The Watergate guy was there — John Dean, and so was Mr. Black well with a new face-lift, and Buzz and Lois Aldrin, and I couldn’t believe it, Charlton Heston. Why would Moses care who’s the mayor of Newport Beach, anyway? These people will be dead and gone by the time you are my age, Dear One, but know that these were the movers and shakers in our little city back then. They were the people who made things happen, for better and worse. I wish you could know all this. I know you never will.

I worked the crowd, hauling around a silver platter of appetizers for their Power Crowd Mouths. I didn’t mind them. The difference between the powerful and the rest of us is that we work for them, but they make most of the money. Raymond would disagree; he says that the richest man still quivers before the Law, that the Law is the real power and money only makes people feel safe. Buddy Ebsen and I had a little chat — he’s such a nice old guy. I imagine you’ve seen him in reruns. Then I decided to go above decks and brave the elements to do my job. There was only one group of people there, too cold and windy, but the stars looked like they were about ten feet away and the lights of the houses twinkled like jewels and the leftover Christmas bulbs blipped red and green in the wind. And all the halyards and lanyards chimed away against the masts; it was like music when the wind blew in the harbor then. Is it still, now?

I went over to the group with my tray. It was only four guys. On the left was Harley Wright, the supervisor, smoking a cigar as usual. Next to him was Brian Dennison. Then Francis Messenger, the oil millionaire, and beside him — a man I had known for twenty-five years — David Cantrell. I hadn’t seen him since he moved back to Newport, five years ago. I knew I’d run into him sooner or later, but honestly, I had no idea how it would feel or what I would say. Right then, I just felt nervous.

Harley said to me, “What a sight you are on a cold winter’s night.”

“A sight on any night, Ann,” said Francis, smiling and taking a shrimp off my tray.

“If you gentlemen had any sense, you’d be below decks,” I said.

Dennison asked me if I’d quit the Whale, and I told him this was just a freelance job for a change of pace.

David looked at me very warmly and said, “Hello, Ann.”

I said hello Mr. Cantrell. How strange the words sounded, Mr. Cantrell. He looked pale and tired, but he also had that air of being ready to spring, of something coiled.

Dennison asked me if Becky Flynn had sent me to spy on his fund-raiser. Becky is my best friend, and she was running against him for mayor. It was meant as a joke, but Dennison was always half-serious and suspicious as hell — a true cop.

What appetizers you eat won’t make or break the June election, I said. He really is vain.

She’s a formidable opponent, he said, his eyebrows dancing up and down.

I said, “She’s a good friend, too.”

Supervisor Wright exhaled hugely from his cigar. The wind seemed to be drawing the smoke from his mouth. He is a powerful man who wears his power casually. Too casually, if you listened to people like my mother. Well, he said, if Becky wins, she ought to make you her flack. You’d be great at it, Ann.

“Two jobs is enough for me,” I said. I looked at each of them in turn, but couldn’t wait to get to Mr. Cantrell. He’s one of the few Power Crowders who really came from among us; most of the others are tourists who stayed. Of all the boys I’d known since high school, he had changed the least on the outside, in spite of the fact that he owned half the county and was worth about $3 billion, way ahead of Donald Trump, if you believed the papers. By the time you have grown up, Dear One, the world will probably have forgotten Donald Trump and C. David Cantrell. Back then, they were coastal versions of each other. Trump liked being rich and famous; Cantrell liked being rich and mysterious. And there he was, looking at me with this expression of utter blankness.

I smiled at each of them, offered the tray once more, then turned and leaned against the wind on my way to the stairs. Inside, I felt as uneasy as the ocean around us.

Five minutes later, I was serving some Power Crowd Wives and I got The Feeling. The Feeling is when you know something that there’s no reason to, but you know, anyway. My father, Poon, taught me about it. The photographer was pulling my sleeve to get me away from the Wives — how they love to have their pictures taken — and I just kept moving away from them, through the crowd, past the bar and the piano and the Victorian sofas, past Mr. Blackwell consoling Dori DeWeiss because she’d worn the same dress (beautiful) as Flo Baldwin and oh what a chuckle that was getting — to the stairway, and climbed back up again. Of course, everybody was gone by then, but... well what can I say? I knew he’d be there. He was mostly in the shadow of the bridge deck, just a splash of white shirt against a tuxedo coat, the black triangles of his bow tie, and a bunch of dark hair lifted by the wind.

He asked me how I was and I said fine, last I checked.

There was a moment of silence while the lanterns rocked and the laughter and music came from below. The wind was just about freezing. He kept looking at me from the darkness. Finally he said, “I was wondering when I’d see you. Five years back in Newport now, and I haven’t gone to the Whale’s Tale once.”

I asked him where he’d been, even though I already knew. It’s demeaning to tell someone you’ve followed him in the newspapers and magazines, especially someone with whom you have... well, I’ll come to that, Dear One.

He said Montana, where he owned a ranch.

I said he owned half the state, from what I heard.

“People say I own half of Orange County, too, but that’s not even close to true.”

“I think it’s good you’re back,” I said. After everything we went through, I couldn’t believe, standing there looking at him, how good it was to see him again. David Cantrell has an unhappy face, though he’s quick enough with that smile to look boyish in the papers. He has the look of a future sour old man. He did even in college. I don’t think he’s ever been surprised by the darkness of human nature — maybe that’s why he does so well. But you could see it in his face.

He told me I looked wonderful.

I told him he looked all right himself. “But you’re pale. Don’t you Power Crowders ever get outside?”

Not enough, I guess, he said apologetically.

I’ve often wondered why the same men who will kill each other over the silliest things stand there dumb and oaf-like when a woman gives them a little needle.

What he said to me next hit me hard, much harder than any gust of wind.

He said that he still thought about me. He said it like he was surprised, like he’d thought of me in spite of himself. Know what I think? I think that women deceive men, but men deceive themselves.

“Well, I’ve thought about you, too,” I said. How can you have been pregnant by a man, for chrissakes, and not think of him? Think about him a lot--the same way you think about something that’s gone forever and not coming back, like your father maybe, or your first dog.

He said it was nice to get my letter.

“When was that?” I asked him. “Eight years ago?”

We were out past the jetties now, rocking steadily on that wild sea. I thought of the Titanic.

“Nine,” said David, then asked me if I still ran the preschool.

I said yes and asked if he was going to be sending us a toddler soon. I will admit to knowing the answer ahead of time.

He said his wife, Christine, could not conceive. “I won’t adopt,” he said, in much the same tone of voice that Raymond used when he pronounced his feelings on adoption.

I told him I was sorry.

“How about you?”

David knew about my trip to New York that summer long ago, because he was the reason for it. But I had never told him all the details of the aftermath, the terrible hemorrhage and the infection that set in later. Between the two, I was made infertile.

I told him New York had taken care of that.

God, Ann, he said, I had no idea.

“It’s all over and done with. You just move on to what you have left, that’s all. I’ve never been one to dwell.”

Ho-ho.

He nodded. Nothing makes a man strong like a woman who is, some genetic obligation to outdo you. But I could tell he was very shaken, and his next questions came out in a disturbed jumble — are you healthy... are you happy... do you have a good life...

I told him I had a great life and wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

I don’t know why I lied.

But I do, thought Joseph Goins. He stared for a long moment at a knothole in the pine paneling of his kitchen. He could smell the oven gas, faintly. The rock and roll next door was over, and the sounds of the cars on the boulevard rushed in to claim the silence. Reading Ann’s journal always made him think how wise a woman can think she is, how... in control. They just keep insisting there’s something good in the world, bubbling happily about this and that, right up to the time it ends for them. That’s why you love them so much, he thought, because they won’t give in to the dark currents, even when the water rises up to their lovely smooth throats. Look what happened to Cricket at the hospital, that nervous, beautiful, chubby girl who came to the fifth floor — the infamous fifth floor — and bestowed upon all of us her presence. What a mouth, what a smile — I could see the glow around her as she walked by, past the bars and the double-paned reinforced steel-meshed safety glass and the nets and the fabric of drugs that was always pulled across my eyes like a curtain across a window. One week was all she lasted before Papini handled her in her own office — Papini, a trusty, medicated into oblivion, but he cut through it all for a few prodding moments up against her — and she fled. For those few days, though, the confidence she had, the grace. The knowledge that Lima State Hospital was a better place because she believed it could be a better place. Look what happened when your world ran into Papini’s. And look what happened to you, sweet Ann, when your world took you to the Back Bay.

You lied, Ann, thought Joseph Goins, so that you could hope.

It was enough to make him sick. He turned back to the journal.

And how about your life, I asked him.

The same, he said, wouldn’t trade it. He smiled. David always knew when I was lying, but he was generous enough to play along. “What I think is, we work like slaves to keep from admitting that we really are.”

I said amen to that.

He asked about Ray.

“He’s fine. He’s a wonderful husband.” It made him sound icky, not what I’d intended at all.

David said that Brian Dennison thought a lot of Ray.

“Made lieutenant at thirty-five,” I said proudly.

The difference between Raymond making lieutenant young and David Cantrell owning half of the universe was never a difference that meant much to me. It still doesn’t. But somehow, the sheer size of it loomed there a moment around us. It was kind of an acknowledgment that the two of them — the two of us — were simply components of two different worlds. I was never able to understand how David could maintain all this humility and ambition at the same time. There may be some arrogance roosting inside his seeming good nature, but I didn’t see it that night, and I’ve never seen it since. As a college boy, he was actually shy — even with me — seven years younger, just a high school sophomore. Still, I believe that there are borders to defend in life, so I defended away.

“Don’t be so humble,” I said. “You’re not that great.” I stole the line from Indira Gandhi, I think, always a favorite.

He laughed and said it was nice to see me.

I said it was nice to see him.

He turned and walked past me with a nod, the kind of nod I imagined him giving some corporate doofus in a hallway of the PacifiCo Tower. That nod was an insult. What I yapped at him next was supposed to be a rebuttal, the kind of glib remark that tells someone you could care less about them. But the second I said it, I realized it was really a much more simple message. And I can say now, Dear One, that it contained your very beginnings. “Well, be sure and write,” I said.

He stopped and looked at me with what I can only call flattered surprise. And I heard then what he had heard, and suddenly it didn’t sound like such a bad idea at all. It sounded like a wonderful thing. It sounded like opening a small window to the sun on a hot and stifling day.

“I’d love to,” he said.

“That would be box two-two-one-two, Newport,” I said, my heart pounding. “No sense in pulling the lion’s tail.”

He looked surprised again, feigning an innocence about human nature I know he never had.

“Send mine to Dave Smith, at Cheverton Sewer and Septic in Newport. I’ve got lions, too. They wear pinstripes.”

I laughed and so did he. There were a million things I could have said, about writing “secret” letters to a sewer place, but for once I held my tongue. My head was spinning like the lanterns on the wire. Damn, I thought — what if Ray found out? What if Mom found out? As if Dave Cantrell hasn’t put us all through enough.

I saw him a few more times that night, always with Christine, who is an attractive woman, if a little self-conscious. Our eyes kept bouncing off each other’s like billiard balls. The Power Crowders made Buddy get up and dance while someone played piano. There he was, Jed Clampett, eighty-plus, limber and graceful and casting his tall, lanky shadow up against the teakwood ceiling while the ship rocked and the lanterns swayed, and I thought, Buddy, you’re a beautiful man. Across the room, through the gowns and the tuxedos, beyond Buddy and his devoted dancing shadow, I caught David looking at me.

Dennison raised $85,000 for his campaign that night, but the Power Crowd buzz was that most of it would go to the No On Proposition A Committee, of which Brian was, of course, treasurer. GROW, DON’T SLOW! was their motto, because most of the Power Crowders were businessmen of one kind or another, and businessmen are always happy for new people to sell things to.

I made three hundred in tips.

More than that, I made the realization that everything in my life was about to change. In fact, it already had.

I haven’t kept a journal since I was ten, but I feel I’ve got to get this down now. Too much confusion. Too much deceit. Too much betrayal. Can we do bad things for good reasons? I wish I had someone to talk to. I can talk to my Dear One, warm and snug inside me.