The Vanished

CHAPTER FIVE

The Golden Door was a neighborhood cocktail lounge, but it was that kind of quiet, sedate, well-mannered place where you would take a wife or a mistress with equal freedom. Beyond the gold-painted door which gave it its name, there was a long narrow room with a bar on the right and some low tables on a raised section to the left. At the far end, the room widened like the bulb on the end of a thermometer into a sunken circular area; in there were a couple of kiln-type fireplaces made out of white brick, extending to the ceiling, and some wall nooks and booths where you could have plenty of privacy. The decor was gold and brown, and they kept it relatively dark with diffused amber lights in the walls and ceiling.

I arrived a few minutes before nine, and Cheryl was not there as yet. I sat at the bar and drank a beer and watched the door. I kept going over in my mind what I was going to say to her; I wanted it to be just right, completely open, completely honest.

A beer-company clock over the backbar said that it was 9:02 when she came in through the door.

She stopped when she saw me, holding a small black purse in front of her at the waist. She was wearing a suede coat and she had a dark scarf tied over her hair. I stood up and went to her, and we looked at each other like two timid children in a dark playground. I said, ‘Do you want to take one of the booths in the back?’

She nodded, and we went along parallel to the bar and down the cement steps into the circular area. There was not much of a crowd this early on a week night, and we found a place at the far end, before one of the fireplaces.

A waitress came around and I asked Cheryl what she wanted; it was a gimlet. I ordered another beer, and the waitress went away. Cheryl took off her coat and unknotted the scarf, tossing her head slightly; the right side of her face was to the wood fire in the brick kiln, and the flickering light gave her hair the impression of burning, like the streak of red-gold fire a setting sun puts across the surface of a clear-day ocean. She wore the same white-and-lavender sweater she had had on that afternoon.

Our drinks came quickly. Cheryl raised her glass and looked at me directly for the first time, over the rim of it. I stared into her eyes, but it was too dark, even with the fire, to see all or any of the things I had seen there earlier. I wanted to tell her she was very lovely, but I did not know how she would interpret it; it was the right thing to say, and it wasn’t. You said those same words to a girl you were interested only in seducing, without strings, to a girl you thought no more of than a quick lay, a quick coming, a quick good-bye.

‘Well,’ she asked at length, ‘do you want to talk about Roy Sands?’

‘No,’ I said honestly, ‘I want to talk about you.’

‘You told me you wanted some help in your investigation.’

‘And you told me you didn’t know anything.’

‘I don’t. Roy and I went out together a couple of times, and he came to the house now and then before he and Doug went to Germany. I really don’t know him that well.’

‘All right, then. Now we can talk about you.’

‘Why do you want to talk about me?’

‘I want to know you.’

‘I see.’

‘I hope you do, Cheryl.’

She raised her glass again and drank from it, looking away. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me you fell in love with me this afternoon. You looked into my eyes there at the door, and you fell in love with me just like that.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Love at first sight is a lot of hooey. But there’s attraction at first sight, a kind of immediate fascination. That’s the way I feel about you-and maybe, a little, it’s the way you feel about me.’

Cheryl was silent for a time. Then, slowly, she said, ‘We’re two strangers-two adults. It’s silly, this kind of thing.’

She was starting to admit it now, to me as well as to herself. ‘It’s not silly,’ I told her. ‘It happens-it happened today. And we don’t have to be strangers very long. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it-why I asked you out and why you accepted? The real reason? To become something more than strangers?’

‘I… don’t know. Maybe it is.’

‘It is, Cheryl. Listen, the simplest way to start it off is by being open and frank with one another. So I’ll tell you some things about me. All right?’

She did not answer, and so I went on with it before I could change my mind. I said, ‘There was this woman, and I was in love with her, the first time I was ever really in love, an old bachelor like me. I asked her to marry me three or four times, but she always said no, with regrets. She’d been divorced a couple of times, and she said she was afraid of trying again, afraid of having to go through another divorce because the first two had been pretty rough on her. But she wanted security, her own kind of security, and I know she would have married me if it hadn’t been for my job. She didn’t like that, anything about it. She said it was foolish, a losing proposition, a childish fantasy-world of cops and robbers, and she kept after me to give it up. We argued about that, and about some other things, and finally she gave me an ultimatum: the job or her, take your choice. One or the other, but not both- never both.’

I got a cigarette out and put fire on it, and I could feel Cheryl’s eyes on my face. She would be trying to determine if what I was telling her was straight goods or just a fine old polished line, and that was all right; the answer was the right one.

She said softly, ‘And you chose your job.’

‘Yeah,’ I answered, ‘I chose my job. I had to do it that way, because even though I loved her, I couldn’t quit doing the thing I’ve done all my life, the only thing I care about doing, the thing that motivates me and keeps me alive.’

‘This all happened recently, didn’t it?’

‘Almost three months ago.’

‘Have you seen her since you… made your decision?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be any good any more, for her or for me. It’s over and it’s dead and I keep telling myself that’s the best for both of us; but I keep thinking about her and wondering why she couldn’t have understood the way it had to be for me. That’s all it would have taken, just for her to understand.’

Silence formed and built between us. I had a grittiness far down in the back of my throat, but I was not sorry I had told Cheryl about Erika; except for Eberhardt-a close friend on the San Francisco cops-and his wife, she was the only person I had talked to about it. It had been festering inside me like pus gathering in a deep sore.

Cheryl drank what was left of her gimlet, set the glass down, and then turned slightly in her chair to look into the dancing flames inside the kiln fireplace. I smoked, watching her face, the set of her small jaw, the wisp of hair that curled like something spun by Rapunzel on the shoulder of her sweater.

She said, ‘You must be a very lonely man.’

Coming from someone else, those words might have been sharply painful; but from her, they served only in filling me with a sense of warmth and relief. We were all right, I knew that suddenly. It really was going to be fine between us.

I said, ‘Sometimes. Sometimes I am.’

‘It’s a terrible thing, to be lonely.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s worse to be hurt. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I think I do.’

‘I’ve been hurt a lot of times, in a lot of ways,’ she said in a faraway kind of voice. She was still staring into the fire, and the fluctuating shadows were deep on her face, hiding her eyes. ‘I’ve been deceived and used and slapped around, always giving and never receiving. If you’ve been hurt that way, enough that way, you reach a point where you can’t take any more hurt, and you’d rather be completely and forever alone than to be hurt even the littlest bit again. Can you understand how that is?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It was Tom, my ex-husband, that did it for me. I loved him, I thought he was everything good and sweet in the world, the one really wonderful thing to happen in my life. I gave him everything I had to give or knew how to give-emotionally, physically. I gave him everything and he…’

She stopped, abruptly, and held her hands extended, palms outward toward the fire, as if warming them, as if warding off something cold and dark manifesting itself in the canyons of her memory. For a moment I thought she would not go on, and then she began talking again, so softly I had to lean forward to hear her.

‘One night, a Saturday, I was sleeping and there were some noises, laughter and some other sounds, and I woke up. It was four a.m. Tom had gone out that night without telling me where and he hadn’t come home when I went to bed at midnight. I got out of bed and put a robe on and went to the living room, and he was there-Tom-he was there on the couch with this woman and they were naked and just… doing it, there on the couch, very drunk, both of them, and the woman was on top, she… she was fat and she was old and she had lipstick and rouge smeared all over her face like a clown. It was… it was…’

She stopped again, and shuddered, and I wanted to get up and go to her and put my arms around her. But it was not the thing to do, not in this kind of situation, not at this time.

‘I moved out that night and went to a lawyer the next morning and filed for a divorce. A friend of mine got me the house on Vicente and I stayed there, and it was very bad for a while. I came close to a breakdown and-other things; but then I got over it, with Doug’s help, he was home then, and I was all right. Six weeks afterward Tom and some woman-a different one, I think-were drinking at a place up in Sonoma County and they went off the road coming back and ran into a culvert and killed themselves, both of them. That’s why I’m a widow now, instead of just another divorcee.’

And that’s why you took your maiden name again, I thought. I said nothing, waiting for her to go on.

‘I didn’t feel anything for him then, when I found out he was dead,’ she said. ‘He was… just nothing to me any more. I didn’t even go to his funeral.’

I asked quietly, ‘How long ago did this happen, Cheryl?’

‘Two years now. Two years last October sixth.’

‘And you’ve been living alone since then?’

‘Except when Doug comes home for the holidays, or on one of his vacation leaves,’ she said. ‘We’re very close, Doug and I. He’s all I have left.’

She continued to stare into the fire, and I let her have a few moments with the privacy of her thoughts. The confessions each of us had made as to why we were the lonely people we were had established a bond and a foundation for our relationship, and I knew that when we spoke again, it would be much easier, more natural, between us. That was the way it was. She turned from the fire, and a moment later we were asking questions of each other and there were no hesitations with any of the answers.

Cheryl told me she was a waitress-cashier at Saxon’s Coffee Shop on 19th Avenue-she made the statement almost defensively, as if I might attach some kind of stigma to her position, the old nonsense about waitresses being dim-witted pushovers-and that Tuesdays were her days off, which was why she had been free today and tonight. She told me she had been born and raised in Truckee, in the High Sierras, but that she and Doug had been orphaned in their teens and had both come to San Francisco shortly after the death of their parents. She had gone to college for a year, liberal arts because that was what all the other girls who had no idea what they wanted out of life had studied, but she had not had the money to continue with her education. For a time she had been a secretary in the Traffic Bureau at Southern Pacific, and then she had been a cocktail waitress, and then she had met this Tom and gotten married, ‘well, I told you about that, didn’t I?’

I filled her in on my own background, my youth in the Noe Valley District, on the fringe of San Francisco’s tough Mission; my military and war service in Texas and Hawaii and the South Pacific; my desire to become a cop and my enrollment in the Police Academy; the fifteen years I had spent on the San Francisco police, and the afternoon I had gone out on a homicide squeal and found a guy who had hacked his wife and two kids to pieces with an ax and decided that I had had it with direct police work; the acceptance of my application to the State Board of Licenses for a private investigator’s certificate; the lean years since; a little more about Erika, ‘well, I told you about that, didn’t I?’

We smiled at each other across the table, and there was more to say, more to ask. But we had talked enough for one night; part of any relationship is the anticipation of more knowledge, of stronger ties. She sensed it, too, and she said, ‘I’d better be going now. It’s almost eleven, and I have to be to work at eight in the morning.’

I nodded. ‘When can I see you again, Cheryl?’

‘You can call, if you like.’

‘I have to go out of town for a day or two,’ I said. ‘I’ll call as soon as I get back, and we’ll have dinner together, and dancing or a show afterward-whatever you like to do.’

‘All right.’

I helped her on with her coat, and we went through the long narrow section of the lounge and outside. A thick blanket of fog had come in off the ocean, and it was cold and damp on the sidewalk. I walked her to her car, at the end of the block, and it was there that we said good night.

For the first time, but not for the last.