“You were making it worse.”
“Admitted. I have trouble keeping my mouth shut in boardrooms and penthouses and executive suites and stuff. It’s a bad habit. But I was still on your side. You weren’t alone.”
“You’re a man,” she said.
I had been leaning forward with my elbows on the table. I sat back and put my hands in my lap. “Jesus Christ,” I said.
“I was alone in there with five men, four of them actively hostile. It’s very hard. You don’t know what that’s like. He dismissed me like I was a beetle. A bug. Nothing. `Get out,‘ he said, `I’m going to speak to your boss.’ ”
“Jesus.”
“And my boss will say, `Sure, Pete, old pal, she’s a pushy broad. I’ll let her go.”‘
I took one hand out of my lap and rubbed the lower part of my face with it. The nacho supremes came. We ordered two bottles of Dos Equis beer.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re afraid for your job.”
Her eyes were filling again. “The only woman,” she said.
“Only woman is true,” I said. “Alone is not true.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Suze, where are you when I need you. “Talk a little more,” I said.
“Maybe I will.”
“You weren’t with me. You were there to protect me.”
“Ah-hah,” I said.
She looked at me. There was no humor in her look. Her eyes were wet and her face was somber. “What’s that mean?” she asked.
“It means, loosely, oh-oh. It means that since I’ve been with you, you’ve been between ScyIla and Charybdis. You need me to protect you, but the need compromises your sense of self.”
“It underscores female dependency.”
“And in the office up there, you were scared. And being scared, you were glad I was with you, and that underscored the female dependency even more.”
She shrugged.
“And when you told me you could get information from an agent you used to sleep with, you weren’t showing off your liberation, you were being bitter. You were trying to make light of your feeling that to get what you needed, you had to go to a man and get an I.O.U. in return for sexual favors, or something like that.”
She poked at her food with her fork, and ate a small bite. The nacho was about the size of a bluefin tuna. When they said supreme, they meant supreme.
“Something like that. You misunderstood.”
“Yes, I did. Now I don’t.”
“Maybe.”
I finished my beer.
Candy smiled at me a little. “Look,” she said. “You’re a good guy. I know you care about me, but you’re a white male, you can’t understand a minority situation. It’s not your fault.”
I gestured at the waitress for another beer. Candy hadn’t touched hers. Appalling.
While I waited for the beer, I worked on the nacho. When the beer came, I drank about a quarter of it and said to Candy, “Extend that logic, and we eventually have to decide that no one can understand anyone. Maybe the matter of understanding has been overrated. Maybe I don’t have to understand your situation to sympathize with it, to help you alter it, to be on your side. I’ve never experienced starvation either, but I’m opposed to it. When I encounter it, I try to alleviate it. I sympathize with its victims. The question of whether I understand it doesn’t arise.”
She shook her head. “That’s different,” she said.
“Maybe it isn’t. Maybe civilization is possible, if at all, only because people can care about conditions they haven’t experienced. Maybe you need understanding like a fish needs a bicycle.”
“You’re quite thoughtful,” she said, “for a man your size.”
“You never been my size,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Chapter 13
THE COPS FOUND Mickey Rafferty lying in the open door of his room at the Marmont with his feet sticking out into the hall and three bullets in his chest. Someone had heard shots and called the cops. but no one had seen anything and no one knew anything.
Candy and I got this from a cop named Samuelson in the empty studio where, mornings from nine to ten, a talk show called New Day L.A. bubbled and frothed. It was four fifty in the afternoon. Candy had some news to read at six.
