Even in the morning I can still taste her final salty kiss upon my lips, the kiss she bestowed when I dropped her at the airport, along with her parting words: 'I hope you call.'
I check out of the Townsend early. There's a place I want to revisit before I return my car. I drive out to Van Buren Heights, pass the Pembroke Club, then stop in front of 1558 Demington, the house where I was brought up.
The place looks different than on the night I drove here from Izzy Mendoza's. It appeared moody then, spooky even, hulking and only vaguely outlined in the darkness. This morning the sun is out full force, sharpening the edges and brickwork, polishing the dark timbers recessed in the facade.
I look more closely. The front door has a reddish hue… just as it did the morning my mother, sister, and I left twenty-five years ago. It was winter then, a blizzard was raging through the Calista Valley, but there came a moment when we were seated inside our taxi, I in the front seat, Mom and Rachel in back, that I turned to look at the house a final time and sunlight suddenly broke through the slate gray sky and glinted off the cordovan panels of the open door.
Tears spring to my eyes as I recall the image of my father in his shirtsleeves shivering in the icy wind, standing lean and tall and lonely in the doorway, a stricken look upon his face.
Peering at him through the passenger window, I wondered when I would see him again. Then he moved a little, the sun caught the water glistening in his eyes, and suddenly I felt hollow and turned away to face the windshield. A few moments later we were on our way to the airport, to our new life in Southern California, leaving Dad to face the winter alone and the demons raging in his heart.
San Francisco
I've been back here a week, sleeping poorly, trying to impose order on everything I discovered in Calista, wondering too how the end of my quest will now affect my life.
Thinking has never been my best route to understanding. For me drawing works better, mapping my discoveries and insights on human faces. And so I have been drawing since seven o'clock last night, working at my drafting table surrounded by windows overlooking the city and the bay.
The sun was shining when I set to work. I paused at twilight to watch as darkness began to coat the buildings, bridges, and surrounding waters, draining away the colors, turning my view into a nightscape of grays and blacks. Then I set to work again, and, without my willing it, the planchette effect took hold. Once that happened, time had no meaning. With a good thirty or more Calista faces stored in my memory, I drew and drew, covering sheet after sheet, depicting scenes between the actors in the overlapping dramas nearly as rapidly as I could imagine them being played:
My shocked expression, as, seven years old, I stand outside a bathroom door hearing the sound as Becky Hallworth slaps little Belle Fulraine across the face;
Max Rakoubian's jolly smile while photographing Barbara Fulraine in his Doubleton Building studio, counterpoised with the crafty expression on his face as he betrays her by installing a camera behind the grate above her love-nest bed;
Barbara's grimace of ecstasy while making love with Jack Cody in his bedroom above the gaming room at The Elms;
Waldo Channing, left eyeball twitching, telling police investigators that Barbara Fulraine was some kind of slut;
Andrew Fulraine, cold as ice, promising Spencer Deval a fortune if he will but do him the kindness of committing murder;
My father, Dr. Thomas Rubin, pausing outside the door to room 201 at the Flaming, hesitating, then discovering he has no choice but to knock;
Tom Jessup, possessed by passion and lust, daydreaming of his beloved Barbara when he should have been fairly refereeing my boxing match with Mark in the Hayes School gym;
Scuzzy Walter Maritz mercilessly beaten in a garage by Cody's henchmen while Cody watches from the shadows, a cruel half smile playing on his lip;
Me sitting hunched over my bedroom desk drawing cartoon after cartoon of happy smiling families, trying to blot out the shouting coming from down the hall as my mother accuses my father of having loved my classmate's murdered mom;
Tom Jessup sitting with the Steadmans in the basement recreation room of their house on Thistle Ridge Road, gazing at photos of little blond girls in their casting book, wondering how his life has come to such a turn;
On and on, encounter after encounter, scene after scene, all encapsulated in images… until, at last, I reach the double ending, the twin finale of suffering and blood:
A man and a woman in a motel room have finished making love. Now they lie naked on the bed, bodies striped by light cast by venetian blinds, the woman explaining to the man why they cannot meet again, the man listening, feeling a crushing in his chest…
A middle-aged man stares out the open window of his office as late afternoon snow drifts slowly by. He thinks about a woman he has loved who now is dead, and then how he can barely bring himself to return to the empty house where he and his family once lived in happiness. As the snow settles upon the ledge outside, clings to the bare limbs of trees, carpets the tops of cars below, he considers how he has brought all this grief and sadness upon himself…
A telephone rings in the motel room. The young man hands the receiver to the woman, watches as she listens, speaks angry words, then hangs up. She points up at the ceiling above the bed. They put a camera up there! Her face is panicked. They have pictures of us! Oh, God! As he moves toward her, there's a sound outside. Both turn as the room door bursts open. A thin man wearing a dark hat and coat is silhouetted against the blazing light. He raises a gun. Feeling his intent, the lovers cling to one another while squirming back against the headboard…
The man steps out the open office window onto a narrow parapet. It's dark outside. The cold night wind batters his face. The falling snow is so thick he cannot see the ground. He shivers in the cold, feeling powerless to resist the mysterious force he has studied professionally for many years, the force he knows as the death instinct, Thanatos. Balancing on the ledge like a gymnast on a balance bar, he pauses, spreads his arms, then swan dives ever so gently into the murk of softly falling flakes…
The woman, seeing the gunman's finger tighten on the trigger, understands she is going to die. With that her consciousness blurs and she retreats into a dream state. She barely hears the first explosion, so deep has she withdrawn into herself. When the second shot comes, riddling her body, causing it to spasm against her lover, she involuntarily rises and falls, twists and turns, as the hot steel balls perforate her flesh. Then this woman, who has loved so intensely and unwisely, imagines herself astride a horse, riding, riding… and then she feels the horse breaking, breaking, breaking beneath her, until she and the horse are all broken-broken-broken into pieces strewn like shards upon the dark-shadowed ground…
The man, soaring downward through the mist of perfect hexagons of snow, feels close to the woman in her death throes. He smiles slightly as he falls, imagining himself galloping beside her. He knows this sweet sensation must soon end… yet it seems to go on and on. And then he feels himself start to break, and he thinks: The horses broke… and broke… and broke… and then he knows that he too is broken… that the broken horses mean death… and then he feels himself falling into a dreamless state as he lies broken and dying in the soft, soft, cold Calista snow…
The drama is over. I put my pencil down. The planchette effect deserts my hand.
It's dawn. My bay window faces east, and the sun, like a great airship catching fire, rises out of the dark foothills of the sierra, projecting scarlet slashes across the morning sky.
