I go into Coco’s but Renee is gone. “Quit,” Ruby says, “without notice.” I drive by her apartment but it looks like she has moved. All the plants on her patio are gone. The car is not there. A rare storm approaches from the east. The sky is green. Renee is walking down the street in tears. I pull up alongside her, roll down the window.
The freeways are empty. The storm behind us grows darker. I cannot remember the city ever being this quiet.
Sweets and I drive west under chowdering clouds. Leaves clack all around us like ghosts on bicycles.
Renee is thinner and younger than I recall in her nightgown, so petulant, so classically spectral.
As you get older chances come along less frequently. The arrow that fate shot long ago has found its mark. You sprawl in regret, feathers in your back, the taste of earth in your mouth. Off to the left is the glitter of a hotel that looks like a chandelier.
I glance over at her legs. She shivers in her evening gown. She is barefoot. There is a Belmonts song on the radio, “Tell Me Why,” Surprise Records, 1961. She turns her face to me and says, “I know that Donny is alive.”
“Yes, I’ve been meaning to tell you. He sends his love.”
She hugs herself in ecstasy, and I wonder if anyone will ever love me like this.
A gaunt figure in a tattered baggy suit with a suitcase waves at me from the side of the road.
“We’re going to fix him up,” she says.
“He can’t be fixed,” I say. “His skull was broken into fifteen pieces.”
“Oh no,” she says, in the most unconcerned way.
If I did not know I was dreaming, I would tell her about the goddamn sparrows.
Shelly chuckles from the back seat.
My car begins to fill with flowers and the drench of their fragrance.
The three of us wrap Donny in a blanket and throw him over the fence.
There’s that shatter of glass and then the melodramatic “Ballad of the Dead Lover,” Tragedy Records, 1976.
We watch the bundle engulfed in warm green sea.
36.Love Does Not Experience Time
DAYS PASSED, AND WHILE I WAITED FOR SHELLY TO RETURN, I cleaned his house, resurrected his record business, and wondered where he had gone. The most recent Alabama number he’d given me was out of service. To raise cash I sold the Beatles on Parlophone and continued to comb garage sales and swap meets for valuable records to sell to collectors and dealers on my own.
On my way to a secondhand record store in Kensington on Adams Avenue one day with a copy of T-Bone Walker’s “Vida Lee” on Imperial, 1953, I passed a gallery window, slowed, and returned to study a few familiar black-and-white seascape photographs. I went in and asked the gallerist about them. “Can you tell me about the photographer?” I asked.
“Sofia Fouquet?”
“She’s still alive?” I said.
“Why wouldn’t she be? She’s thirty-seven.”
“Do you have her address?”
“I can’t give you that. She once lived in Ferndale, north of San Francisco, now she lives in Ocean Beach.”
“Can you call her for me?”
“Of course.”
“My name’s Eddie Plum.”
He dialed the number. I waited. “An Eddie Plum is inquiring about you, Sofia,” he said. He put his hand over the phone. “She squealed.”
“Can I have it?”
He handed the receiver across and I pressed it to my ear. “Hello.”
“Eddie! Is it really you?”
My entire body began to blossom and pop. “My god, Fasstink told me . . .”
“Faßtink der schweinpriester!” she cried. “Der scheißkauf püpenpantzen!”
“Why did you stop writing me?”
“I didn’t, the letters just came back. I thought you . . .”
“Fasstink!”
“Nüdledich!”
“Ocean Beach?” I said. “How’d you end up there?”
“I needed a change. Then I heard you broke out. I was hoping to run into you. I’m a longshot player, too.”
“Can we meet?”
“Where?”
“Sunset Cliffs?
“No, OB is a dump, a junkie every three feet. Where are you?”
“Inland. San Carlos.”
“Apartment?”
“House. Kind of creepy old place.”
“Give me directions. I’ll see you in an hour.”
37.Give Me Stilton, Blue and Gold
I WENT TO THE GROCERY STORE AND BOUGHT A BOTTLE OF GOOD wine and a wedge of the only English cheese they had, a Blue Stilton that you could smell through the wrapper. I straightened the house and had a talk with Sweets.
I’ve got someone coming over, so I want you to be on your best behavior.
Who?
An old friend. I haven’t seen her in years.
A she?
That’s right.
Oh, this is bad, he said, staring at me dolefully. A woman? With your history?
This one is different.
How?
She was with me at Napa State.
She’s a mental patient?
You’ll like her. Just give her a chance.
He lunged to chew on his knee and then vigorously kicked his ear with a back paw seven or eight times. Jesus Christ, I am seriously starting to itch, he said. This always happens when I get nervous.
Listen, I said, no matter what happens we’ll always be together. I promise. I rubbed him behind the ears, fetched him a pair of tortillas, and went out to wait for Sofia in the driveway.
In no time she rumbled up in a jade green convertible Trans Am, top down, and climbed out. I had forgotten how gracefully she moved. She had changed, of course, it had been many years. She was dressed in slacks and light jacket and gilded sandals, all saffrons and tans and oranges, like a gypsy wrapped in a sunset. A gold scarf was tied around her head. She flashed me one of her quick, secret smiles, removed her sunglasses and walked slowly toward me.
“You look taller,” I said, at a loss for words.
“My God, what happened to your face?”
“T-12 troglodyte named Kenny Monique.”
I thought she might cry as she embraced me. “He chewed you up pretty good.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, holding her awkwardly. “It’s given me the chance to work on my inner beauty.”
She pushed me away. “What are you doing in
