Small Vices

Chapter 37

The house was in Montecito, white stucco and red tile, up in the subtropical hills, off East Valley Road, surrounded by greenery, with the hills continuing up past it and eventually easing into the Sierra Madre Mountains. From the upstairs balcony you could see the Santa Barbara Channel, with the Channel Islands in the background, and the Jurassic-looking oil platforms marching along off the coast. Around us were expensive homes and gated estates, redolent with orange trees and palm trees and vines with red flowers and vines with purple flowers. The houses weren’t that far from each other, but the vegetation was so dense you couldn’t see your neighbors. The streets had no streetlights, you rarely saw anyone walking along, and at night you could hear coyotes calling, and sometimes during the day you would see them, small and mongrelish, trotting through the open field behind the house. We felt like Swiss Family Robinson. Pearl ignored them.

“Would they hurt her?” Susan asked.

“She’s too big for them,” I said.

“What if there’s a bunch of them?” Susan said.

“We shoot them,” Hawk said.

“The people around here have little slogans about them,” Susan said. “Like, ‘You can’t shoot them, they were here first.’”

“So were the Indians,” I said.

About a quarter mile from the house was a hill that went up sharply at right angles to the much gentler hill we lived on. Each morning, Hawk and Pearl and I walked up to the foot of the hill and looked at it. Actually Pearl dashed. Hawk walked. I shuffled. But after the first week I shuffled without holding on. Pearl would race up the hill, barrel chested and wasp waisted. Bred to run for hours, she rubbed it in every day, looking puzzled that I couldn’t do at all what she did so effortlessly. Then we’d walk back to the house and rest. Then we’d walk to the hill and back and rest and walk to the hill and back and rest. We’d do that until noon. Then we’d have lunch. I would take a nap. And in the afternoon we would work on weights. I started with three-pound dumbbells. I would do curls with them, and flies and triceps extensions, and reverse curls. That is, I would do these things with my left hand. With my right I was barely able at first to twitch the three pounds. The consolation was that Pearl couldn’t do this either.

In the best of times repetitious workouts are boring. When I could barely do it, the boredom became life threatening. I would reach the foot of the steep hill each time gasping for breath, the sweat soaking through my tee-shirt. I weighed less than 170 pounds and I walked like an old man. I wasn’t much of a challenge for Hawk any more than I was for Pearl, but if he was bored he didn’t show it.

Susan went with us once every morning and ran up the hill with Pearl. The thought of going up that hill at any speed made me nauseated. Susan took on the responsibility for feeding us. Fortunately she found a place in the upper village that had food to take out. So we dined on an endless assortment of healthful salads and cold roast meats and pasta and fresh bread, and drank wine from the local vineyards.

One of the oddities of life in Southern California was the sense of timelessness that set in. There were no real seasons in California and each day was about like the last one. People were probably startled out here to find that they’d aged. For me the days were barely distinguishable, a repetitive sequence of effort and sweat and exhaustion and failure, briefly interrupted by sleep and food. Drinking some of the local wine each evening became more exciting than anything I’d imagined.

Susan and Pearl and I slept in a very big bed in the master bedroom. I kept the Detective Special on the bedside table. A sawed-off double-barreled.12-gauge shotgun leaned on the wall near Susan’s bed. There was a nearly full moon and at this time of night it shined directly into the bedroom, through the French doors on the upstairs balcony. It was almost daylight except for the opalescence of the light.

“Could you do it?” I said.

“Hawk showed me,” Susan said, “while we were waiting for you to get out of the hospital. Cock both hammers, aim for the middle of the mass, squeeze one trigger at a time. He says it is pretty hard to miss with one of those things at close range.”

“It is,” I said. “But could you do it?”

She turned her head on the pillow and her big eyes rested on me silently for a moment. “Yes,” she said.

We were quiet together in the bright flower-scented darkness.

“Are you ever going to shave?” she said.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Is this some kind of guy thing?” Susan said. “I won’t shave until I’ve rehabbed?”

“Not exactly.”

We were silent while Susan thought about this. Then in the bright darkness she smiled.

“You have a plan, don’t you,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You are changing your appearance.”

“Yes.”

“So that when you’re well you can find the Gray Man and he won’t recognize you.”

“Seemed like a good idea. Give me something to aim at.”

“May I suggest that you let your hair grow and comb it differently?”

“You may.”

“I do.”

We lay on our backs, with our shoulders and hips touching.

“You’re smart for a Harvard Ph.D.,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

In the quiet night a coyote howled somewhere in earshot. For a couple of city kids it was a startling sound. Susan made a face. Pearl the Wonder Dog remained asleep. If she heard the yowl she didn’t care.

“Pearl doesn’t seem responsive to the call of the wild,” I said.

“No,” Susan said. “But I am.”

“That’s what all the guys at the Harvard Faculty Club say.”

“The guys at the Harvard Faculty Club say nothing that visceral,” Susan said. “Would you like to make love?”

I was silent for a while thinking about that. Slanted diagonally across the lower half of the bed so that she took up twice as much room as she needed to, Pearl snored softly and made occasional lip-smacking sounds as if she might be dreaming of Devil Dogs.

“What about the baby?” I said.

“We could ask her to visit Uncle Hawk for a while.”

I thought about that.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it would be better to wait.”

“For what?” Susan said.

“Until I can do something better than fumble at you with my left hand,” I said.

“There’s nothing wrong with your left hand,” Susan said.

I shrugged in the darkness.

“I think we should wait until I’m together again,” I said.

“He didn’t kill you,” Susan said. “You shouldn’t act like he did.”

“Hell, Suze, I can barely turn over by myself, for crissake. I can’t even walk up the goddamned hill that you run up every morning. I can barely walk to it.”

“Yet,” Susan said. “You’ll walk up it, and eventually you’ll run up it and you’ll run up it faster than I can.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Hawk and I didn’t drag you out here for maybes,” Susan said. “You’re not all you were yet. But you will be. But there’s no reason to be less than you are now. If you can’t move around as you might wish to, I can. And would be happy to.”

I thought about that while Susan got out of bed and took off her green flowered pajamas and draped them over a chair. I looked at her naked with the same feelings I always got. I’d seen her naked thousands of times by now, and it didn’t matter. It was the same experience it had been the first time. She was always like the first time, always the one that wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever been with.

“Maybe the machinery won’t work right,” I said.

“Maybe it will,” Susan said and came to the bed and lay down beside me.

In a moment she said, “It appears to be working.”

“That’s heartening,” I said.

“Just lie still,” Susan said. “I’ll do everything.”

“Lying still is more difficult than I thought it would be,” I said.

“You may yell yahoo now and then if you’d like.”

Pearl shifted at the foot of the bed and made a grumpy sound as if she resented being disturbed.

“What about the baby,” I said.

“It’s time she knew,” Susan said.

Later in the night the moon moved its location so it was probably shining into Uncle Hawk’s room. In the much deeper darkness I was pressed against Susan, listening to her regular breathing. Pearl had worked her way under the covers at the foot of the bed and slept silently except for an occasional snore.

“You awake?” I said.

“Yes.”

“There’s no guarantee I’ll come all the way back,” I said.

“I think you will,” she said.

“And if I don’t?”

“For richer, for poorer,” she murmured, “in sickness and in health.”

“You’ll be here,” I said.

“I will always be here,” she said.

And she pressed closer to me and we were silent and I smelled her, and felt her and listened to her, and knew that if I had nothing else but this, this would be enough.