“What time do you leave tomorrow?” Susan said.
“Nine A.M.,” I said. “American flight 11. First class.”
“You deserve no less,” Susan said.
“Mindy,” I said, “the production coordinator. She looked at me and said clearly I don’t fit well in coach. Then said everyone else travels first class at Zenith Meridian.”
“Nonstop?” Susan said.
“To L.A.,” I said. “I’ll drive down from there. Nothing nonstop from Boston to San Diego.”
“I’ll miss you,” Susan said.
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t like to leave you.”
The logs had begun to catch in the fireplace, and the fire got deeper and richer and both of us stared into it in silence.
“You ever wonder why people stare into fires?” I said.
“Yes,” Susan said. She had shifted on the couch and now sat with her head on my shoulder. She held her martini in both hands and drank it in very sparing sips.
“You ever figure out why?”
“No.”
“You’re a shrink,” I said. “You’re supposed to know stuff like that.”
“Oh,” Susan said. “That’s right. Well, it’s probably a somatic impulse rooted in neonatal adaptivity. People will gaze at clothes in a dryer, too.”
“I liked your previous answer better,” I said.
“Me too,” Susan said.
We looked at the fire some more. As the logs became fully involved in the fire they settled in upon each other and burned stronger. Susan finished her martini.
“What’s for chow?” she said.
“Duck breast sliced on the diagonal and served rare, onion marmalade, brown rice, broccoli tossed with a spoonful of sesame tahini.”
“Sounds toothsome,” Susan said.
“You have several options in relationship to dinner and other matters,” I said.
“Un huh?”
“You may make love with me before or after dinner,” I said. “That’s one option.”
“Un huh.”
“You may make love with me here on the couch, or you and I may retire to the bedroom.”
“Un huh.”
“You make take the time to disrobe, or you may enjoy me in whatever disarray we create with our spontaneity.”
Susan ticked off the various choices thoughtfully on the fingers of her left hand.
“Are there any other choices?” she said.
“You may shower if you wish,” I said.
Susan turned her face toward me with that look of adult play in her eyes that I’d never seen anyone emulate.
“I showered before I came to your office,” she said.
“Am I to take that to imply that you intended to, ah, boff me even before you arrived?”
“You’re the detective,” Susan said. “You figure it out. I opt for now, here, in disarray.”
And she put her arms around my neck and pressed her mouth against mine.
“Good choice,” I murmured.
Chapter 21
THE drive down the San Diego Freeway from LAX takes about two and a half hours and seems like a week. Once you get below the reaches of L.A.’s industrial sprawl, the landscape is sere and unfriendly. The names of the beach towns come up and flash past and recede: Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Laguna, San Clemente. But you can’t see them from the freeway. Just the signs and the roads curving off through the brownish hills.
Mindy had gotten me a hotel room at the Hyatt Islandia in Mission Bay, and I pulled in there around 3:30 in the afternoon with the temperature at eightysix and the sky cloudless: They assigned me a room in one of the pseudo- rustic cabanas that ran along the bay, as a kind of meandering wing to the tall central hotel building. I stashed my bag, got my list of addresses and my city map, and headed back out to work.
San Diego, like San Francisco, and like Seattle, seems defined by its embrace of the sea. The presence of the Pacific Ocean is assertive even when the ocean itself is out of sight. There is a different ambient brightness where the steady sunshine hits the water and diffuses. The bay, the Navy, the bridge to
