“Married three times,” noted Jack when they were out of earshot.
“All brief wives,” muttered Tony.
“Brief wives once made the briefs rise,” Jack retorted. “Now they fill the court’s briefs with lies.”
Tony snorted a laugh. “A new mantra?”
“Not new,” Jack said. “Just haven’t thought about it for a while.”
“Well, go easy on the Rachel juice. You don’t want your ex-wife coming up on you.”
“True enough. It’s just that she’s been on my mind.”
“Because…?”
“I think it’s a default setting. Things come apart like they did the other day, it shoots me to my own blast zones-Iraq or Rachel.”
“Familiar turf, stuff you’ve already wrestled with. Lets you get your footing to process new trauma.”
“Something like that, I guess,” Jack said.
The more he thought about it, the more Jack realized Tony had a point. Any time something bad happened, he went to the evils he already knew. It made sense.
Columbus crested near a Chinese herb store where Tony bought a cure for prostatitis twenty years back. Small black pills. Took them for just four days. Never another ache. The instructions showed which herbs were in the pill and what each did in the body. The theory behind the cure was explained. The herbalist thought all prostatitis was first caused by an uncured venereal infection, a sort of latent gonorrhea. The pill contained a powerful antibacterial plant. It worked so well that Tony bought bottles for his friends, who were amazed by the results.
At the top of the hill, Jack and Tony both smiled inside at the view of the bay past Alcatraz to the green hills of Marin. It was one of those sunny but cool winter days where the water was “china blue,” as Tony often described it. This was one of the good touchstones, a place Jack visited to purge the negativity. It was like those old World War II newsreels, Why We Fight.
This was why. His home. It never failed to raise his spirits.
At the restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, where old-timers who still knew where to get the best seafood still ate despite the touristy nightmare they called the “redneck Riviera,” Tony and Jack enjoyed a quick lunch. After a few glasses of wine, Jack became loud. Pointing through the large picture windows, he almost shouted at Tony. “Look, see over there, in Ghirardelli Square-that clock tower. Most clock towers, even our famous tower at Berkeley, they’re all derived from Giotto’s Campanile.”
He went on while Tony stared at him. “Think about this, Tony. Built in the fourteenth century and how many thousands of structures have been derived from his genius design. What do we have now? Web designers, fake artists, no new music of any value. What will the derivatives be from this wasteland?”
Tony nodded as he devoured his scungilli. He was used to Jack’s enthusiasms, and although he agreed with most of them, he had long ago decided that living well was, in fact, the best revenge.
The rest of Jack’s nights were mostly spent kicking back on the Sea Wrighter, listening to the gulls in the harbor and the gentle lap of the bay. Tony always seemed to have a new wine sample. One night he brought a bottle and poured Jack a glass, saying, “Try this… tell me what you think.”
Jack was a sipper not a twirler. Dry. Tannic. Ruby red.
“Good,” he said. “Better than that other one-what was it, a Gaja? Did this one cost five hundred a bottle, too?”
“Thirty-five bucks with my BevMo discount,” Tony said with a wry smile.
“Amazing. What is it?”
“It’s French, from Bordeaux. St. Emilion. From the airplane manufacturer’s estate. Chateau Dassault, 2005.”
“How the hell do you find these?” Jack asked.
“Taste, my friend, taste. Gotta keep tryin’.”
Amen to that, Jack thought as a long week drew to a close.
Nearly a week and a half after the blast, Jack was dreaming of a beautiful blue-eyed Czech woman he’d met at a bar in town, reliving in vivid detail the night they’d spent at her apartment in North Beach.
She was a stunning woman, with the longest legs Jack had ever seen close-up, and when she peeled off her dress, revealing that she had no tan lines whatsoever, he found himself instantly ready for her.
Jack had always been a proponent of the slow build but this woman had no interest in that. Before he could get his pants all the way off, she was reaching for him like a groupie with a rock star, pulling him to her bed, her body trembling, her breathing shallow, and a look in her eyes that said, You can do anything you want to me, but do it now.
Jack did, with fierce intensity as she clutched him to her, her breasts pressed against him, her nails digging into his back, her teeth scraping at his earlobe as she whispered softly to him.
The whispers were quickly replaced by moans that grew louder and more urgent with every passing moment-to the point where Jack thought he might be causing her pain. Finally she cried out, clutching him even tighter as her body stiffened, then shuddered in release. Jack soon followed, then collapsed against her, every nerve ending tingling. Then he rolled away from her and fell against the pillow, trying to catch his breath, and fell asleep.
He was awakened from his dream not by the rising sun but by a tongue licking his face.
Eddie. The eleven-pound bundle of trouble he’d inherited in the divorce.
When Jack realized what was going on he started to laugh. He had originally intended for Rachel to keep the little gray poodle, but after a series of nips, bites, and soiled rugs it turned out that Eddie was even less fond of her than he was and he happily retrieved the two-year-old dog. Ever since then Eddie had slept with Jack, always at his feet. Sometimes the little guy would moan in his sleep, sounding like a child having a bad dream, and Jack would only have to touch him gently with a toe to break the nightmare. Despite any macho posturing to the contrary, he always thought of Eddie as his guardian angel with fur.
Of course, a boat was no real home for an animal-even a ball of fluff not much bigger than a rabbit-but Eddie had adapted remarkably well, if you didn’t count the annoying habit of waking Jack up at six A.M. every morning.
Sure enough, when Jack gave him a scratch behind the ears and glanced at the digital clock next to his bed it read 5:59.
Uncanny.
Jack had to wonder if Tony Antiniori had somehow put the dog up to this. The two had taken to each other like fellow conspirators when they were first introduced, and Tony would often look after Eddie while Jack was working, teaching him little tricks to keep them both entertained. Tony’s father had been a dog handler in World War II, and had a Doberman during the Tarawa Campaign that had saved his life more times than he could remember. Those skills had been passed from father to son, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to think that Tony was behind this particular stunt.
Tony often protested that Eddie was more trouble than he was worth, but Jack knew this was merely the old guy’s way of proving that he was still a hard-ass. The truth was, they were both completely smitten with the shaggy little poodle, even if neither of them was willing to admit it out loud.
Dragging himself from bed, Jack adjusted the drawstring on his sweats, grabbed some change, then hooked Eddie to a leash and headed for the marina clubhouse. There was a patch of grass set aside specifically for this purpose, and it wasn’t unusual for Jack to find several of his neighbors walking their dogs every morning.
Eddie never failed to bring a smile to their faces.
This morning, however, the area was deserted, and Jack let the dog roam as he looked out at the morning sky and the bobbing boats on the marina.
Jack had always been awestruck by the morning sun on the bay. On calm days, when the water was flat, even a dim sun behind clouds and fog lit the surface in a light show unmatched by any digitally equipped house on earth. Here, or even in the cabin, as Jack peered out he inevitably found himself wondering about God, creation, the meaning of life, and all those grand, universal questions. In that sense he was a spiritual man. He knew that life did not end when we died-he had seen too many deaths in Iraq to take the NatGeo view of things.
