breathing seemed perfectly easy. Of course, I was carrying eighty or ninety pounds more than she was. And I'd been shot several times in my life. That takes its toll.
'She's full of anger.'
'At?'
'At her husband, at men, at Penny, at a world where she is marginalized, and probably at the guitar player who dumped her.'
'Can I believe what she says about Penny?'
'No way to know,' Susan said. 'Her anger may be accurate, and well founded, or it may be a feeling she needs to have for other reasons.'
'Do you think she loves poetry and beauty and peace and flower power?'
'I think she hates being ordinary,' Susan said.
'You think she loves her daughters?'
'She left them when the youngest was, how old?'
'Fifteen.'
'And she moved to the other side of the continent and she sees them rarely.'
'So if she does love them, it's not a compelling emotion.'
'No.'
'And the money she didn't inherit?'
'It would have helped her to be not ordinary.'
'It will support her daughters,' I said.
'One thing you can count on,' Susan said, 'and this is an observation, not a guess: Whatever it is, it's about Sherry.'
'All of it,' I said.
'Every last bit.'
'I'm more confused than before I talked with her,' I said.
'And you came all the way out here to do it.'
'Well, you came out too.'
'Every dark cloud,' Susan said.
We reached California Street. Susan paused for a moment.
'I'm willing to give in first,' she said.
'You need to rest a little?' I said.
'Yes.'
'Thank God,' I said.
We stood on the corner watching people get on and off the cable cars. We were in the heart of Nob Hill hotel chic. The Stanford Court was behind us, the Fairmont across the street. Up a little past the Stanford Court was the Mark Hopkins, where one could still get a drink at the Top of the Mark. In the distance, the Bay was everywhere, creating the ambient luminescence of an impressionist painting. It imparted a nearly romantic glow to litter in the streets and the frequent shabbiness of the buildings. Behind us, below Union Square and along Market Street, there were so many street people, and they were so intrusive, that I didn't want Susan to walk around alone… Being Susan, of course, she walked around alone anyway, in the great light.
'What's confusing you most?' Susan said.
'There's so much conflicting testimony from so many unreliable witnesses.'
To the right, down California Street a little ways, was Chinatown, with its pagoda'd entrance, everything a Chinatown should be. And way down, on the flat, was downtown, which was everything a downtown should be. Even when no cable cars were in sight, the hum of the cable in the street was a kind of white noise as we talked.
'And yet there are some things which seem clear when I listen to you talk about it.'
'Like it's clear that I don't know what I'm doing?'
'Like everything changed after the father's death.'
'Maybe it was naturally, so to speak, the way it is now, and he prevented it.'
'Or maybe someone else has stepped into his place and reshaped it,' Susan said. 'Either way, he was the power and now he isn't. So who is?'
'A number of different people say Penny, and they say so in pretty much the same terms.'
'As Sherry,' Susan said.
'Yes.'
'As an outside observer, let me suggest that there is one thing which hasn't changed.'
'Suggest away,' I said.
