Strip

16

JEFFERSON DAVIS FALKINS SAT in his favorite seat in the diner and ate an early lunch while he used his cell phone to call Carrie’s cell number. Each time he called he heard, “Your call has been transferred to the message center.” He had plenty of time to think, but didn’t want it. He had known Lila since they were in the ninth grade together at Louis Agassiz Central High School in Waldorf, Indiana. Or he had at least seen her and learned her name. It was true that they’d never had much use for each other at the time. She was chubby for a while, he seemed to remember, and then suddenly became tall and thin. He had pushed her into his peripheral vision for the four years of high school. She was over there to the left someplace doing something he didn’t bother to quite see, or maybe she was a hundred feet down the hall beyond the girl he was actually looking at.

A few months ago, he had conceived the idea that it might be time to move to Los Angeles and called an acquaintance to find out whether he had any high school classmates living there. The person he called was Heather Fields. She had been in his homeroom, the F through H room, and they had gotten to know each other fairly well. She had been one of those girls who acted as a kind of talent scout to direct boys’ attention to appropriate girls. There had always been a hint of the traitor about her, an implication that she had, at least conditionally, decided to be on the boys’ side. Being a girl, she knew other girls’ secrets—what they had done, and with whom, and what they might be willing to do again. She would suggest a girl, and say far too much about her, in order to interest the right boy. She spoke plainly to boys and was a favorite for that reason. Heather had a great deal of power among the girls, because she was a kind of attention broker. It wasn’t until years later that Jeff realized she was not a special person who was essentially sexless and therefore abnormally wise. She was just a girl who wanted that attention for herself, but never got it.

When Jeff called her, she told him that she’d heard Lila Porter was living in Los Angeles and she knew how to get her phone number. In return, Jeff gave her the phone number of his own apartment in Tucson, which he was about to vacate. He said he’d call with his new number when he got settled, but he never did.

He had called Lila, said he was going to be in Los Angeles, and wondered if she would have dinner with him. She accepted, and when he picked her up, his first surprise was that she was no longer a tall and gawky, ill-proportioned girl with a plain face and thick glasses. She had grown into her body and looked better at twenty-eight than she had at eighteen. The fine, corn-silk hair was thick and flowing now, not the thin stuff that had let her ears stick out. When she mentioned that she was working at a strip club called Siren, he was intrigued.

By the time the entrée was served, he realized that she must have secretly liked him in high school. Before dessert was over, she admitted it and laughed at herself, but kept touching her hair. He ordered them both after-dinner cognacs and waited for hers to take effect before he mentioned that he was having trouble finding a suitable apartment.

She said, “I have a small place and it’s kind of crummy, but there’s a secondhand couch I inherited from the last tenant. You could crash there for a couple of days, if you want.”

He not only wanted to, but it had been his whole goal for the evening, until he’d actually seen the way she had grown up. At that point his list of wishes and desires expanded dramatically.

He should have tried harder to flatter her and make her feel appreciated. He should have talked about how beautiful she was. Having sex with her, while it implied attractiveness, apparently wasn’t clear enough for women. He should have pretended to have a job. He should have pretended to think about her whenever she was gone, pretended to listen to her when she told him about her days and her thoughts and her memories. He simply had not thought things through. He should have planned, not just reacted. And he should have given her some money almost immediately after his first robbery.

All of Jeff’s belongings were stuffed into the trunk of his black Trans Am out in the parking lot. He had an impulse to look in his address book and see if there was anyone else he knew around here, or anyone who might have connections, but his address book depressed him. It was a black notebook about five by eight inches that held many phone numbers, most of them crossed out. Many of the ones that were left were so old that they had to be obsolete. It was a record of people he’d offended.

Jeff finished his breakfast, drove to the movie theater where he and Lila had gone on a couple of occasions, then selected the movie with the longest running time. He bought a ticket, went to a seat to the far right along the aisle at the dark, empty back of the theater, and went to sleep. Last night he had gone almost without sleep, and now there was an opportunity to catch up.

He slept through the previews and the movie, and woke up when the lights came on again. Then he bought a ticket for another movie and fell asleep while he was waiting for the theater to fill up. This one was apparently no better than the first, because the seats nearly all remained empty. When the lights came on the second time, he felt rested and full of energy.

He stood, stepped into the lobby, and turned on his cell phone. The screen said “Eleven missed calls.” He used his right thumb to show the whole list. Lila’s number was not among them. All of the calls were from Carrie. He pressed Call and heard the ring.

“Hi,” she said. “I wanted to tell you that I’m awake. Are you?”

“Yeah. I woke up a minute ago. I was wondering if you were a dream.” He hadn’t been. “You’re too good to be real.”

“So you’re eager to take me out tonight?”

“Absolutely. What time do you want me to pick you up?”

“I think I’d rather meet you somewhere.”

“The diner where we met last night?”

“No. I can’t stand the idea of going to a diner so much that they remember us and say things like ‘How you been?’ If you tell them, then you’re a regular. See? Sometime they’d say, ‘Oh, her? She’s one of our regulars.’ Then I’d have to shoot myself.”

“I can see the reasonableness of that. How about somewhere else?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping this would be one of the times when you would surprise me and say something like, ‘Even though I’m an outlaw now, I used to be one of the five best chefs in Shanghai. Why don’t you come to my place and I’ll cook for you?’”

“Sorry. I’m not a great chef, and I don’t even have a place right now. But Chinese food does sound good. What’s the best Chinese restaurant around here?”

“People in the know say you can get the best food outside of Asia right now in Monterey Park. Don’t ask me why a bunch of great Chinese chefs would suddenly move to Monterey Park, but that’s the story. I’ll make a call or two and get us a reservation for eight.”

“What time should I pick you up?”

“You don’t know where Monterey Park is, do you?”

“Never heard of it. But I can read a map.”

“Come to my place at seven and I’ll drive.”

“Can I come a bit earlier?”

“Why?”

“It you don’t mind, I’d like to use your shower.”

“That’ll be fun. Come at five.”

As the number on Melisande Carr’s kitchen clock changed from 4:59 to 5:00, she heard the sound of the black Trans Am turning into the driveway. She looked out the window and pressed the remote control unit to open the garage door, then watched the black car glide into the unoccupied space beside her white Acura.

She watched Jeff Falkins swing his legs out of the black car, stand, and slam the door. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn last night. He opened the trunk and took out a bundle of clean clothes, and then walked to the kitchen door. She opened it quickly and pulled him inside, then pressed the button to close the garage door and hide his car. “We have some talking to do.”

“And some showering,” he said.

She looked at him with narrowing eyes. “And some shaving. But first, the talk.”

“What about?”

“Why do you suddenly not have a place anymore?”

“I don’t really want to go into it right now.”

“If you want to be with me, you have to.”

He looked down at his bundle of clothes but held her in the corner of his eye as he said, “It’s just temporary. It happened this morning, and I haven’t had time to do anything about it yet.”

“So it was unplanned. You just got here a month or two ago, right? So you must have been renting. I know you have enough money to pay the rent, because we stole it together last night. So it was a fight with a roommate, right?”

He wobbled his head from side to side. “Well, sort of. Don’t worry about me. I’ll find a nice place in a day or so and invite you over to see it.” He held up the roll of clothes. “Is it all right if I take my shower now? I think we’d both like me better after I’m clean.”

“Not yet,” she said. “It was a girl roommate, wasn’t it? Tell me the truth.”

“Yes.”

“And she figured out what you were doing last night and threw you out on the street.”

He wobbled his head again. “Not exactly. Are you sure talking about this doesn’t make you uncomfortable?”

“I’m positively enthralled.”

“All right, then. She didn’t figure out what I was doing last night. She and I didn’t even talk about last night. She was asleep when I came in. I waited until she was up and awake, and then told her I was going to have to move out.”

“You did?”

“Yeah,” he said in a low, sad voice. “She’s a nice person, and I realized that it wouldn’t be fair to keep living there and giving her the impression that we might have some kind of future together. This isn’t her fault.”

“It’s about me, isn’t it?”

“It’s about me. I know you’ve got some commitments of your own—a boyfriend and all that. It’s just that if I could meet you by chance in a diner and feel the way I do about you after a couple of hours, then I have no business living with somebody else.”

“Wow,” Carrie said. “Wow.” She reeled like a fighter after an unexpected punch. “I can’t believe you’re real. Where did you come from?”

“Indiana, originally.”

“You’re so sweet and dumb. Didn’t it even occur to you that if you kept quiet you could have both of us?”

“I won’t lie to you. Of course it did. But I went out for a walk this morning and thought about it. I decided I wouldn’t want a woman to do the same to me.”

“Amazing,” she said. “He’s reinvented karma, all by himself.”

“My mother always called it the golden rule.” He studied her expression, wondering if he had gone too far with that one. He saw that she was studying him too. Her eyes narrowed and her brow crinkled. Yes, he must have gone too far. She was going to throw him out too—the second one in a day.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “You’re blushing.” She placed both small, graceful hands on the sides of his face and lifted his head a little. “I can’t remember seeing a man who blushed—and an outlaw like you too. A regular desperado.” She kissed him. “Your face is so warm. Come on. Let’s go get that shower now.”

She took his hand and led him through the house to the master bathroom. She opened the shower door and reached in to turn on the faucets and adjust the temperature, then stepped back. She unbuttoned her blouse, took it off, and then the bra, and then seemed to notice that he was watching her. “Get undressed.”

“Are you taking a shower too?”

“You just dumped your girlfriend for me. If I don’t scrub your back, who’s left to do it?”

“Look, Carrie. I didn’t break up with her to make you feel guilty or something.”

“Who’s guilty? I don’t do guilt. You just got me all turned on.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s good.”

“You bet it’s good. Hurry up. We’ve got a lot to do before we leave for the restaurant.” She stepped into the shower and held the glass door open while he stepped out of his clothes and into the torrent of warm water.

They made love in the shower, and then again on the bed. In the lazy, comfortable minutes afterward, she sat up suddenly. “We’ve got to get ready.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I’m getting hungry too.”

“Did you happen to notice the way I was dressed when you arrived?”

“Yes.”

“Like it?”

“Obviously.”

“Then I’ll wear those clothes. I only had them on for five minutes while I was waiting for you.” She was up and scurrying around, stepping over him and leaning down to snatch up clothes she had left on towel racks and counters. She glanced at him. “Get moving, Bud. The razors and shaving cream are in this drawer.” She opened it and stepped away. “Don’t dawdle.”

He stood and put on the clean clothes he had brought, and then shaved with a pink razor. While he was cleaning the sink, she reappeared with her makeup on and her hair brushed and her purse over her shoulder.

“You look amazing.”

“Just so I don’t look as though I just got laid. Toss your dirty clothes in the hamper in my dressing room. We’ll wash them tomorrow.”

“We will?”

“Can you really not know that I’d want you to stay here tonight?”

“I didn’t ask because it seemed like assuming a lot.”

“Get over it, and get going. Zip-zip-zip.”

As he went into the dressing room and put his dirty clothes in the hamper, he marveled at the world. How could a woman as cynical, crazy, and alert be such a sucker? She was far too smart and too self-indulgent to get manipulated into taking him in like this. She should have seen him coming from two streets away. And there was the question of her appearance. A woman that beautiful must have been conned by older and more experienced men when she was about fifteen. By now she should have assumed that every man who spoke to her was a liar.

“Jeffrey!”

“I’m not a Jeffrey,” he said. “I’m a Jefferson.”

“Well, whoever you are, come on. Thousands of years of Chinese cooking and I have plans for tonight, and we’re waiting for you.” She snatched up a tissue from her vanity and whisked it across his cheek. “Missed a spot. Now you’re beautiful.”

She stepped past him to the dresser built into her walk-in closet and pulled out her big .45 pistol. She checked the magazine, clicked it back in, and put it in her purse.

“They’ll kill the chickens before we get there. You won’t need a gun.”

“Don’t you have yours?”

“Not on me. It’s in the trunk of my car with my stuff.”

She stopped and folded her arms. “Go get it. I’ll wait.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do.”

He studied her. She stared back up at him, unmoving.

“You’re weird about guns, aren’t you?”

“I could remind you that we robbed some armed guys last night and shot one of them. I could say there are circumstances and reasons right now why your being armed will make me feel safer.” She paused. “But yes. I’m weird about guns.”

“You might want to put your therapist to work on that one.”

She kept her head up and her eyes on him. “If you wanted me to wear a nurse’s uniform or a French maid costume or a skirt with no panties or something, I’d do it. So I think you should wear a gun for me.”

“Then so do I.” He went out to his car, got the gun from the outer pocket of his suitcase, and put it in the inner pocket of his black summer-weight sport coat. Carrie seemed to be a woman who never lost an argument.

She came out and got into the driver’s seat of her white car, and he got in beside her. He flashed the inside of his coat.

“There. Was that so hard to do?”

“Not so far. So where are we going?”

She backed out of the driveway, closed the garage door with the remote control, and headed down the hill. “I called some friends, and the word is that the Emerald Cloud Dragon is la place du jour. It’s actually pretty new, but it’s a version of a place the family owns in Taipei, which is a version of one they owned in Beijing until 1949. My friend said that about a month ago an important politician-slash-gangster from Taiwan had a reception there. He flew everybody to L.A. and then home two days later.”

“Your friends really know how to research a place. My friends would say ‘Stay away from the egg roll.’”

“This isn’t the kind of place where you stay away from things. It’s the equivalent of a two-star place in France. Maybe even three.”

“Am I dressed okay?”

“Have you got lots of other choices?”

“At the moment, no. I packed in kind of a hurry.”

“Then we’re just right.”

It was a long drive on the freeway from the Valley to Monterey Park. The freeway traffic moved in surges, pushing forward at seventy or seventy-five for a few minutes and then slowing to a complete stop. Carrie drove with the feral alertness of a Los Angeles native. She was quick to make a lane change to get around a slow-moving truck, but if she was trapped for a time, she waited without any outward sign of her impatience.

The trip was a pleasant change for Jeff, because he had almost forgotten what it was like not to be the driver. He got to study buildings and streets that he had only seen in flashes as he drove past at high speed. And he got to look at Carrie while she drove.

Unexpectedly, he thought about Lila. He had made a foolish mistake. This morning, when he was trying to keep her fooled about him, he had shown her the canvas bag of money that he had stolen last night. He had even made a point of spelling out the Bank of America name printed on the bag. In his attempt to persuade her, he had momentarily forgotten that the three men he had robbed worked at the strip club where she worked. The only reason he had known enough to steal the night’s receipts the first time was because Lila had worked at the club and he had seen her boss with a similar canvas money bag. Lila was not, by nature, a suspicious person, but she wasn’t stupid either, and right now she was hurt and angry. She was probably thinking about him a lot today, finding fault with everything he had ever said or done. Could she fail to notice that the bag that had been stolen and the bag that he’d shown her were both from the Bank of America?

“Why are you so quiet?”

“I was wondering why things happen the way they do. You know, unexpectedly.”

“I think I know part of it.”

“Really?”

“Character is destiny, but not the way people think. Were you wondering how I turned up?”

“Yes. That’s exactly it.” He had noticed that she was one of those women who thought they knew what other people were thinking. She was almost always wrong, but letting her think she was right was a good way to control her mood.

“I saw you in the diner and thought you were cute. I was bored, so I came back to meet you. The reason I stayed was that you’re the one I’m going to tell my grandchildren about.” She shook her head. “No, maybe just one of them, my favorite granddaughter.”

“Tell her what?”

“Everything, pretty much. That when I was still young and pretty, one of the things I did was have a passionate affair with an armed robber.”

“You’re going to tell her that’s a great idea?”

She looked at him and smiled. “It depends. I don’t know how this is going to work out yet.”

Carrie parked her car on a side street, away from the shops and restaurants, and they walked to the Emerald Cloud Dragon. As they approached, Jeff could see through the big windows that the dining room was very large. He counted twenty-eight tables, all a blond wood that matched the floors, then stopped because he thought he must have counted a few twice. Carrie seemed to know exactly where she wanted to sit and pointed it out to the host.

When they were seated, Jeff said, “Sure you’ve never been here before?”

“No. But everyone I asked said this is the place.”

“For what? What are we looking for?”

“Perfection,” she said. “A perfect experience changes your life.”

The waiter seated them and left them with menus.

Three waiters gave them tea and water and drinks from the bar while one stood sentinel over them to answer questions about the menu. When the proper interval had passed, Carrie held out her hand to the waiter and gave him a piece of paper with Chinese characters on it. He read it, bowed formally, and said, “Excellent!” before he left.

Jeff looked at her. “You know I’m going to ask.”

“Of course. I asked too. I was told it means ‘the Emerald Cloud Dragon’s best dinner,’ but not in those words.”

“Who is your source for all this?”

“A friend of mine named Jenny Wang. Her parents are Chinese, and they take her to Monterey Park a lot.”

The dinner was a spectacular succession of delicacies on little plates served with great care. To Jeff, it began to seem tragic that he could only eat so many pieces of wrapped meat or seasoned shellfish in one evening.

He and Carrie each tasted every dish set before them, trying a tidbit and then finding they couldn’t resist another, then another. After two hours and forty-five minutes in the Emerald Cloud Dragon, Jeff paid the check in cash, and the two walked out into the night.

It was late and the street was quiet, and Jeff felt a sensation he remembered from summers when he was a teenager in Indiana. Other kids had rules about going home at some particular hour, so Jeff had often found himself out as the numbers dwindled and he was finally alone on a dark street. He had always stayed until the last one left, because for him, being with people meant being out.

He was the only child, and his mother was the only parent, and neither of them was good at the role. His mother had been seventeen when he was born, and the forty-year-old truck driver from Alabama who had talked her into naming their baby Jefferson Davis had quit making his Indiana layovers in her town after about a year.

When Jeff was ten, his mother was twenty-seven and pretty. She dated the way avid outdoorsmen hunted. She took small game from the local area five or six nights a week throughout the year, and then occasionally went on month-long safaris in places far from Indiana. Jeff would be alone while she was in some warm place where rich older men spent their winters, and then again during the spring, when college students and people who could pass for that age partied. Her movements during the summer were unpredictable and varied. He would wake up late in the morning sometimes and find her bed still made and a message on the answering machine that she’d recorded for her male friends, not for him.

Whatever money she left for his use, he spent buying the best clothes for himself and small presents for the mothers of his friends, who invited him to family dinners. On holidays, if he received a gift from any of his mother’s relatives, shamefaced because they had never done much to help her, he would exchange it for something that would make him look better.

As he and his mother grew up and got to know each other, they liked each other less and less. They argued loudly until he was about thirteen, and then avoided talking much during the rare times when they had to be together. Summer nights were freedom, a time for going out and staying out as long as the companionship and excitement could be made to last.

Carrie leaned on him as they walked. “I’m glad I found you.” It was as though she had sensed what he was thinking and wanted to make him feel better.

Affection was an opening. “What’s your name?”

“I haven’t named myself yet.”

“Your parents gave you the name Melisande?”

“Melisande Carroway Carr. If they had an excuse, they must have told me when I was too young to remember.”

“When you wrote down your name and number for me, why did you use that one?”

“Balance.”

“Balance because I told you my real name?”

“No. Because you already saw and touched everything about me, but didn’t know anything.”

As they approached her car, she took the keys out of her purse and handed them to Jeff. He looked to both sides, up and down the street, and back toward the alley behind the restaurant. “What are you doing?”

He said, “We just pulled out a lot of cash to pay in there. Sometimes it attracts attention.”

She laughed. “From people like us.”

He opened the car door for her and then went around to the driver’s side, started the car, and drove toward the freeway entrance.

They were on the freeway for thirty seconds before she said, “I want to pull a robbery.”

He felt a sudden tightness in his stomach. “I just finished eating the biggest meal I ever had in my life.”

“It doesn’t have to be right now. It’s not even eleven o’clock. We can wait around until we feel less full.”

“Don’t we have enough money after last night?”

“If we do something tonight, we’ll have even more money. And who’s going to expect us to go out again two nights in a row?”

“But why take the risk?”

“That’s why. The risk is what I love. You can have the money.”

He glanced at her and brought back with him a picture of her beautiful face, the big brown eyes gleaming in excited anticipation. She looked absolutely crazy, but he could feel the beginning of an erection. He shifted in his seat. “I’ll think about it.”

“Not too long. If you don’t want to, I’ll have to drop you off and find someone else to go with me.”