The winter of Frankie Machine

6

The old house is just that-an old house, something that’s getting more and more rare in downtown San Diego, even over here in Little Italy, which used to be a neighborhood of old, well-kept single-family homes but is now giving way to condo buildings, office buildings, trendy little hotels, and parking structures to service the airport.

Frank’s old house is a beautiful two-story Victorian, white with yellow trim. He parks in the narrow driveway, hops out of the van, and finds the right key on his big chain. He has the key in the lock when Patty opens it from the inside, as if she heard the van pulling up, which maybe she did.

“Took you long enough,” she says as she lets him in.

She can still get to me, Frank thinks as he feels a pang of annoyance. And something else, too. Patty is still an attractive woman. She’s gotten a little matronly, maybe, around the hips, but she’s kept herself in good shape, and those brown almond-shaped eyes still have a way of, well, getting to him.

“I’m here now,” he says, kissing her on the cheek. He walks past her into the kitchen, where one half of the deep double sink looks like high tide in a Third World harbor someplace.

“It’s not working,” Patty says, coming in behind him.

“I can see that,” Frank says. He sniffs the air. “Are you making gnocchi?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And did you peel all the potatoes and try to put them down the disposal?” Frank asks as he rolls up his sleeve, plunges his hand into the dirty water, and feels around the drain.

“Potato peels are garbage,” Patty says. “I tried to dispose of the garbage. Isn’t that what a garbage disposal is supposed to do?”

“It’s ‘garbage disposal,’” Frank says. “Not ‘garbage dispose-all.’ I mean, you don’t put tin cans down there, do you? Ordo you?”

“You want some coffee?” she asks. “I’ll make some fresh.”

“Sounds good, thanks.”

He goes to a hallway closet to get his tool chest. They go through this routine every time. She’ll make some fresh, weak coffee in the Krups maker that he bought her and that she refuses to learn how to run properly, and he’ll take a polite sip while he works and then leave the rest in the cup. Frank has discovered that rituals like this are even more important to a peaceful relationship when you’re divorced than when you were actually married.

But when he comes back down the hallway, he hears the whir of a coffee grinder, and when he reaches the kitchen, there’s a French press sitting on the stove beside a kettle of water on the boil. He raises his eyebrows.

“This is the way you like it now, isn’t it?” Patty says. “Jill says this is the way you like it.”

“That’s how I make it, yeah.” He doesn’t say a word when she pours in the boiling water and presses the plunger down right away instead of waiting the requisite four minutes. Instead, he keeps his mouth shut and crawls into the cabinet under the sink, stretches out on his back, and starts to work the crescent wrench on the disposal trap, where the potato peels are no doubt trapped. He hears her set the coffee cup on the floor by his knee.

“Thanks.”

“You could take a minute and have a cup of coffee,” she says.

Actually, I can’t, Frank thinks. He still has to get back to the bait shack for the sunset rush, then go home, shower, shave, and dress, and go pick up Donna. But he doesn’t say this to her, either. The subject of Donna might cause Patty to kick the coffee over on his leg accidentally, or to try to flush an entire roll of paper towels down the upstairs toilet. Or maybe just to kick me in the balls while I’m vulnerable, Frank thinks.

“I have to get to the bait shop,” he says. But he slides out, sits up, and takes a sip of the coffee. It’s actually not bad, which surprises him. He didn’t marry Patty for her cooking. He married her more because she looked like that movie star Ida Lupino and still does, and he was crazy about her, and, her being a good Italian girl, she wouldn’t let him past second base without a ring on her finger. So Frank did the bulk of the cooking at home when they were married, and they were already divorced when the termcontrol freak came into vogue. Now he says, “This is good.”

“Surprise,” she says, sitting on the floor next to him. “That’s really something about Jill, isn’t it?”

“I’ll find a way to pay for it.”

“I’m not nagging you about money,” she says, looking a little hurt. “I just thought it would be nice to take a moment and share some parental pride.”

“You did a good job with that kid, Patty,” Frank says.

“We both did.”

Her eyes start to tear up, and Frank feels his own eyes get a little moist. He knows what they’re both thinking about-that morning in the delivery room, after the long, hard labor, when Jill was finally born. And it was a busy morning, lots of babies, so the doctors and nurses finished up with them, and Frank was so tired that he crawled onto the gurney with his wife and new baby and they all fell asleep together. She gets up suddenly and says, “Fix the damn thing. You’ve got to get to the bait shop, and I’m going to be late for yoga.”

“Yoga?” he says, getting back under the sink.

“At our age,” she says, “it’s ‘use it or lose it.’”

“No, look, I think it’s good.”

“It’s mostly women,” she says, so quickly that Frank instantly gets that it’s mostly women but there’s at least one man there. He feels this little twinge of jealousy. Which is irrational and unfair, he tells himself. You have Donna; Patty should have somebody in her life. But still, he doesn’t like the thought. He gets the trap off, then reaches in and pulls out a wad of sodden potato peels. He holds it up to her and says, “Patty, please? Cooked food, not raw, and not five pounds at a time, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, but can’t help adding, “They should make those things better, though.”

So he knows she’s going to do it again, or something just like it, and he thinks, Next time, let your boyfriend fix it. With all that yoga, he can get under the sink with no problem, right?

He puts the trap back on, tightens it down, and crawls back out from under the sink.

“You want to try the gnocchi?” she asks.

“I thought you had yoga.”

“I could skip a class.”

He thinks about it for a second, then says, “No, you want to keep up with that. ‘Use it or lose it,’ like they say.”

You jerk, he thinks when he sees her eyes get sharp and cold. What a stupid thing to say. And Patty being Patty, she isn’t going to let it slide. “You could use a little yoga yourself,” she says, looking at his belly.

“Yeah, maybe I’ll join your class.”

“That’s all I need.”

He washes his hands, then gives her another quick kiss on the cheek, which she tries to turn away from.

“See you Friday,” he says.

“If I’m not here,” she tells him, “just leave the envelope in the drawer.”

“Thanks for the coffee. It was really good.”

He gets back to the bait shack just in time for the dusk rush. The kid Abe can handle the slow midafternoon business, but he starts to panic when the night fishermen begin to line up and demand their bait. Besides, Frank wants to be there to close out the register. He helps the kid Abe through the rush, closes out, locks the joint up, and heads home to grab a quick shower and wash the fish smell off him.

He showers, shaves, changes into a suit with a dress shirt but open collar, and takes the Mercedes, not the van, out of the garage. He has time to drop by three new restaurants before he goes to pick up Donna. His routine is the same at each place: He has a tonic water at the bar and asks to see the manager or owner. Then he presents his card and says, “If you’re happy with your linen service, pardon the intrusion. If you’re not, give me a call and I’ll tell you what I can do for you.”

Nine times out of ten, he gets the call.

He picks Donna up at her condo, which is in a large complex overlooking the beach. He parks in a visitor’s slot and rings the bell, even though he has a key to her place in case of emergencies, or if she’s traveling and the plants need to be watered, or if he’s coming in late at night and doesn’t want to get her out of bed.

She looks terrific.

She always does, and not just for a woman in her forties but for a woman of any age. She’s wearing a basic black dress, just short enough to show off her legs and cut just low enough to show a little cleavage.

Back in the day, Frank thinks as he opens the car door for her, we would have called her a “classy broad.” Course, you don’t talk like that anymore, but that’s what Donna is. Always was. A Vegas showgirl who didn’t hook or hustle, didn’t succumb to the booze or the dope, just did her job, saved her money, and knew when it was time to call it a day. Took her savings, moved to Solana Beach, and opened her boutique.

Makes herself a nice life.

They drive up the coast to Freddie’s by the Sea.

It’s an old San Diego place on the beach in Cardiff, and sometimes, like tonight, the water laps right up against the restaurant. The hostess knows Frank and shows them to a table by a window. With the storm front coming in, the waves are already approaching the glass.

Donna looks out at the weather. “Well, it will give me a chance to catch up on inventory anyway.”

“You could take a couple of days off.”

“You first.”

It’s a constant joke between them, and a constant hassle, two business-minded people trying to find time to go off for even a few days’ vacation. She doesn’t really feel comfortable with anyone else running the boutique, and Frank is, well, Frank. They made it to Kauai for five days three years ago, but since then, they’ve managed one overnight in Laguna and a weekend at Big Sur.

“We need to stop and smell the roses,” he tells her now.

“You could start by having two jobs instead of five,” she says. Still, she has a sense that maybe one reason their relationship works so well is that theydon’t have too much time for each other.

The waiter comes back and they order a bottle of red and then, in the interest of time, go ahead and order their appetizers and entrees, too. He goes for the seafood soup and the shrimp scampi; Donna orders a green salad-no dressing-and the baked halibut with tomatoes.

“The scampi is tempting,” she says, “but butter shows up on me the next day.”

She excuses herself to go to the ladies’, and Frank takes the opportunity to scamper into the kitchen for a hello call to the chef, for the usual: How’s the fish been? Any complaints? Wasn’t that yellowtail terrific last week? Hey, just to let you know, I’m going to have a good supply of shrimp next week, storm or no storm.

When he gets to the kitchen, John Heaney isn’t there.

Frank has known him for years. They used to surf a lot together back when John owned his own restaurant in Ocean Beach. But John lost that place on aMonday Night Football bet.

Frank was there that Tuesday morning, at the Gentlemen’s Hour, when John paddled out, hungover and looking like death.

“What’s the matter with you?” Frank asked him.

“Twenty large on the Vikes to cover,” John replied. “They blew an extra point. A goddamn fucking extra point.”

“You have the money?”

“No.”

So bye-bye restaurant.

John went to work out at the Viejas casino, which was kind of like an alcoholic going to work at the Jack Daniel’s distillery. Every two weeks, he’d pull a paycheck in the red, and finally the casino canned him. John bounced from job to job until Frank got him the gig at Freddie’s.

What are you going to do, Frank thinks. A buddy is a buddy.

John makes good money at Freddie’s, but good money is never good enough for a degenerate gambler. Last time Frank heard, John was moonlighting as the late-shift manager at Hunnybear’s.

“Where’s Johnny?” he asks the sous-chef, who nods his head toward the back door.

Frank understands: The chef is out back by the Dumpster, grabbing a smoke and maybe a quick drink. You go to any Dumpster in back of any restaurant, you’re going to find a pile of butts and maybe a few of those little airline bottles of booze that the staff is too lazy to toss into the garbage.

John’s sucking at a ciggy and staring at the ground like it has an answer for something, his tall, skinny frame bent over like one of those cheap sculptures made out of clothes-hanger wire.

“How’s it going, Johnny?” Frank asks.

John looks up, startled, like he’s surprised to see Frank standing there. “Jesus, Frank, you scared me.”

Johnny’s got to be-what, mid- to late fifties, maybe? He looks older.

“What’s wrong?” Frank asks.

John shakes his head. “World of shit right now, Frank.”

“This G-Sting business?” Frank asks. “Is Hunnybear’s involved in that?”

John holds his hand, palm down, up under his chin. “What if they close the place? I need the fuckin’ money, Frank.”

“It’ll blow over,” Frank says. “This stuff always does.”

John shakes his head. “I dunno.”

“You’ll always work, John,” Frank says. “You want me to drop a word somewhere…”

It would be easy to hook John up with a second job at some good restaurant. He’s a good cook, and besides, he’s a popular guy. Everybody likes him.

“Thanks, Frank. Not right now.”

“You let me know.”

“Thanks.”

Frank makes it back to the table just before Donna, and blesses the fact that there’s always a line at the ladies’ and that women take a lot longer to get all that complicated gear off and on again.

“How’s the chef?” Donna asks as he gets up and holds the chair out for her. Frank sits back down and shrugs with a look of hurt innocence.

“Incorrigible,” Donna says.

The rain really starts coming down while they’re having dessert. Well, Frank’s having dessert-cheesecake and an espresso-and Donna’s having a black coffee. The rain starts with slow, fat plops against the window, then picks up, and it’s only a minute or so before the wind starts to drive sheets of rain against the glass.

Most people in the restaurant cease their conversations to watch and listen. It doesn’t rain that often in San Diego-less than usual, in fact, the past few years-and it rarely rains hard like this. It’s the true beginning of winter, the short monsoon season in this Mediterranean climate, and the people just sit back and gaze at it.

Frank watches the whitecaps picking up.

It’s going to be something tomorrow.

Donna’s condo doesn’t have an ocean view. Her place is on the back side of the complex, away from the beach, so she got it for about 60 percent less. Doesn’t matter to Frank-when he goes to Donna’s place, all he wants to look at is Donna.

Their lovemaking has a ritual. Donna isn’t one of those off-with-the-clothes-and-into-bed women, even though they both know that’s where they’re headed. So tonight, like most nights he comes over, they go into her living room, and she puts some Sinatra on the stereo. Then she goes and gets two snifters of brandy and they sit on the sofa and neck.

Frank thinks he could live in the crook of Donna’s neck and never leave. It’s long and elegant, and the perfume she dots there makes his head whirl. He spends a long time kissing her neck and nuzzling her red hair, and then he moves down to her shoulder, and after some time there, he eases the strap of her dress off her shoulder and down her arm. She usually wears a black brassiere, which drives him crazy. He kisses the tops of her breasts while his hand makes the long, slow trip up her leg, then kisses her lips and hears her purr into his mouth. Then she gets up and takes him by the hand and leads him into her bedroom and says, “I’m going to get comfortable,” and disappears into her bathroom, leaving him lying, fully dressed, on her bed while he waits to see what she’s going to wear.

Donna has great lingerie.

She gets it wholesale from her suppliers. So she indulges herself. Well, she indulgesme, Frank thinks as he leans over to take off his shoes and then loosens his tie. Once, just once, he took all his clothes off and was in bed naked when she came out, and she asked, “And what areyou assuming?” and asked him to leave.

The wait is interminable, and he enjoys every second of it. He knows she’s dressing carefully to please him, freshening her makeup, putting on perfume, brushing her hair.

The door opens; she shuts off the bathroom light and comes out.

She never fails to knock him out.

Tonight, she’s wearing a sheer emerald green peignoir over a black garter belt and hose and has high freaking heels on. She turns around slowly, to let him enjoy every angle of her, and then he gets up and takes her in his arms. He knows that now she wants him to take over.

He knows you don’t “have sex” with Donna; you make love to her-slowly, carefully, finding each little pleasure spot on her amazing body and lingering there. And she’s a dancer-she wants it to be a dance, so she glides over him with a dancer’s grace and eroticism, using her breasts, her hands, her mouth, her hair on him, undressing him and making him hard. Then he lays her down on the bed and moves down her long frame and pushes up the peignoir, and she’s dotted perfume on her thighs, but she doesn’t need any perfume there, Frank thinks.

He takes his time. There’s no hurry and his own need can wait, wants to wait, because it will be all the better for the waiting.

It’s like the ocean, he thinks later, like a wave coming in and then receding. Again and again, and then building like an ocean swell, thick and heavy and picking up speed. He likes to look at her face when he’s making love to her, likes to see her green eyes brighten and the smile on her elegant lips, and, tonight, hear the sound of the rain pelting the window glass.

They lie there for a long time afterward, listening to the rain.

“That was beautiful,” he says.

“Always.”

“You okay?”

Frank, the working guy, always checking his work.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “You?”

“That was me screaming,” he says.

He’s lying there politely, considerately, but she knows that he’s already restless. It’s fine with her; she’s not that much of a cuddler, and anyway, morning comes early and she sleeps better alone. So she gives the standard cue: “I’m going to wash up a little.”

Which means that he can get dressed while she’s in the bathroom, and when she comes out, they can go through the comfortable ritual:

“Oh? Are you heading out?”

“Yeah, I think so. Busy day tomorrow.”

“You can stay if you want.”

And he’ll pretend to consider it, then say, “Nah, I’d better get home.”

And then they’ll have a warm kiss and he’ll say, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

And then he’ll be gone. To go home, grab a little sleep, and start the whole thing over again.

It’s the routine.

Except tonight turns out different.