Byrd (7 page)

They get out and he pulls her close and they slow-dance to Nina Simone right there on the edge of Pacific Coast Highway, a twinkling fence and an ocean on one side of them and the threat of traffic on the other.

When the song is over, they get back in the van and drive some more.

“I'm sure he's a sweet piece of ass,” Golita says to Addie. “He's also a total fuckup. You know that, right?” The two of them are in Golita's kitchen. Pete and Roland are in the living room with the new Michael Jackson album turned up. “I mean, I love the man, and Pete's fucking
in
love with him. But he's a mess.”

“How?”

“Oh, you know. He's always late. When it's his turn to drive we always get docked at work. He's the only person I know that ever runs out of gas. He's always running out of something. Money, coke. He loses stuff. Burns stuff. See my floor? I mean the landlord's floor that me and Pete will have to pay for.” She points out a patch of brown blisters at the foot of the stove. “One night we left him alone to make popcorn and he plugged in the popper and set it on the stove and turned the stove on high.”

“When he was young,” Addie says, “he hit his head.”

“In the swimming pool,” Golita says. “Everybody's heard that story.”

Pete knows a drummer in a bar band and arranges for Roland to sit in so that Addie can see him play before she leaves town. It's a nicer-than-average Venice bar, with tables and chairs and a tile dance floor. The band opens its first set with love songs: “Cold Love,” “Part Time Love,” “Hoodoo Love,” “I Stole Some Love.” Roland sits at the back of the stage, cradling his unplugged guitar, tapping his foot, fingering silent chords.

“Why isn't he playing?” Addie says.

“This isn't his gig,” Golita says.

“He will,” Pete says.

The band plays “I Feel a Sin Comin' On.” Roland is stranded in the shadows.

“So what's going on with you and Roll?” Pete asks Addie. “You like him?”

“Sure. We're old friends.” Addie takes a swig of beer, sets down her mug. “When's somebody going to tell me about the woman?”

Pete and Golita look at each other.

“I've seen her things in Roland's apartment.”

“Elle,” Golita says.

“Don't worry about Elle,” Pete says. “She's just some chick who followed Roll home one night. You know Roll. What's he gonna do.”

“He needed help with rent,” Golita says.

“Where is she now?”

“Gone,” Pete says. “Moved out. Don't worry. It's a good thing. Tell her, babe. You ever seen Roll this good?”

Golita shrugs.

“Look,” Pete says and touches Addie's arm, “you want to step outside? Get some air?”

She gets up with him. They leave Golita to save the table.

The sand parking lot behind the bar backs onto a canal. Moonlight shivers on the water. “Like the real Venice,” Addie says, though she has never been to Italy. There's a mattress on the bank, and a tire, and a broken shopping cart. Pete takes a brown bottle out of his pocket, unscrews the cap, which is also a tiny spoon, and offers it to Addie. He opens his jacket to shelter her as she lifts the spoon to each nostril.

“My doll's tea set had spoons like this,” she says.

“You have a tea set?”

“My doll did. When I was young. I don't know what happened to it.”

Behind the dull thudding of the band she can hear the faint sound of water lapping. This is what she loves about coke, how you notice everything. The cool, perfect air. How close Pete is standing. The fine red stubble on his cheeks, how it catches the light. She cups her hands around his face. He leans closer, until they are head to head. He puts his mouth on hers. She tastes salt, and pulls away.

“Sorry, I wasn't—”

“Sorry.”

“I didn't mean—”

“Me either.”

She wonders which of them is sorrier. Which of them loves Roland more.

When they go back in, he's plugged in and standing with the band. “You missed him on ‘Dark End of the Street,'” Golita says. Now the band's playing “After Midnight,” a slowed-down version, more JJ Cale than Clapton. Two verses in, the singer nods at Roland, and Roland steps up. His shirtsleeves are rolled back. This is his moment, and Addie wonders if he'll break out, burn it up, play some scorching lead, something truly incendiary, even though incendiary isn't what the song calls for. The song is about what's going to happen
after
midnight. In the song, midnight isn't here yet.

Roland knows. He holds back, plays it spare. Long, slow notes with plenty of space in between. It sounds like the front end of a thunderstorm, when the first rain begins to hit the pavement: those slow, fat, hard drops just before the whole sky comes crashing down.

Sandalwood

A cold, bright Saturday morning in Greensboro. Warren Finch is brewing a pot of chamomile tea for his favorite client, who is seated at the kitchen table with her hands folded in front of her. Her long red hair is pulled back. Her face is golden in the sunlight through the Indian-print curtain. A calendar of Hindu deities hangs on the wall behind her. February is Shiva, god of creation and destruction.

“What do I smell?” she asks.

“Incense,” Warren says. “Sandalwood.”

The smell reminds him of India, where everywhere, always, there was the smell of burning. Burning sandalwood, burning hashish, burning opium, burning bodies on the ghats at Benares.

“It smells like burnt toast,” Addie says.

“I burned my toast, but that was yesterday.” He pours their tea into china cups—his mother's wedding pattern, white with yellow roses. He sets the cups on a tray, carries the tray to the table and sets it down stiffly. Getting started is always awkward, a little like striking up a love affair, Warren imagines. The trick is to be both casual and purposeful. He has found with clients that chamomile helps, gentles things.

He serves Addie her tea and offers her half a candy bar. “For this kind of reading, I usually like to have both parties present.”

“The other party is in California,” she says.

“I know. I'm just saying.” He wishes his voice weren't so nasal. People always think he's complaining when in fact it is his practice, in readings and in all things, to remain neutral. To live his life without attachments, to be as a still pond (an
empty
pond, the Buddha would have said, but that's not so picturesque), brilliant as glass, without a ripple. No emotion, no desire—except the one wish, for a different voice, one that could express him perfectly. A deep, resonant, comforting voice that he could wrap around his clients like a coat.

“What's this candy?” Addie says. “It tastes like coconut.”

“Bean curd. It's the Indian version of a Mounds bar. Believe it or not, it's called a Barfy.”

Addie laughs. Warren laughs. Laughter is good, an auspicious beginning.

“So,” he says, “what can I tell you? Which aspects of the relationship are unclear?”

“All aspects. I don't even know what to call the relationship, much less what to do about it.”

“What to do, what to do,” Warren says, trying to sound lighthearted. “That's the Leo in you, wanting to do, never content simply to be.” As a rule, he isn't attracted to Leos—too outward-manifesting. But Addie is an unusual Leo, with three planets in Virgo. She is powerful but doesn't feel her power. She's capable without knowing it.

“He needs to be in L.A. for his music,” she says. “I've been thinking about going back. Maybe staying awhile. You keep saying I should travel.”

“You don't mean move? Give up your place here? Your job?”

Warren has long been in the habit of stopping in the Readery on his nightly walks. The store is only two blocks away, in a once-fine Victorian house. A calm, welcoming place, full of lamplight and the tapioca smell of old books. Warren doesn't much care for reading himself; his mind is too full already. But he likes to be around other people reading. He likes sitting on a lumpy sofa, drinking tea, listening to pages turn. He likes watching Addie at her square oak desk, an old teacher's desk, wrapping books in clear plastic jackets. She works slowly, meditatively, laying the books open to measure them, folding the jackets down to size. Sometimes, for the smaller books, cutting the jackets. She handles the books tenderly, a glow of utter devotion on her face.

She lives in an apartment on the top floor. Her window has a yellow lace curtain, always a vase of flowers on the sill.

“Travel doesn't necessarily mean move,” he tells her. “It can, but it doesn't have to.”

He himself is recently home from India. He went traveling as a sort of purification ritual, a way of renouncing his dependence on material comforts, of escaping the numbing day-in-day-outness of life in Greensboro. He wanted a spiritual adventure. He wanted to be able to hear the voice of God if God should speak to him. It's when you're between places, he has always believed, on your way from somewhere to somewhere else, that you're most likely to hear God, because that's when you're most alert. Take Moses. When Moses came upon God in the burning bush he was on his way out of Egypt—fleeing, in fact, after killing a man. God said to Moses, “Go home. Go back to Egypt and take care of your people.”

In India, Warren put on orange robes and followed sadhus. He traipsed through streets where skinny men squatted over open gutters and girls skipped along kicking up dust with their bare feet, bells on their ankles tinkling insanely. He sat in an ashram listening to flies he was not allowed to swat. He braved the crowds in Benares to wash his feet in the holy filth of the Ganges. It was there, finally, in that strange, bright, teeming, burning place, that God spoke to him. And, surely not a coincidence, God told him the same thing he'd told Moses: “Go home. Go home and take care of your mother, Warren. She doesn't know who you are, but she doesn't have anyone else to love her.”

So Warren returned to Greensboro. To clean, tree-lined streets and the conveniences of his mother's house—his house now. His bathtub, his gas range, his tea kettle. He returned to his clients, some of whom didn't even realize he'd been away, and to his day job in the insurance office. Now, every evening after work, true to the promise he made to God, he stops in the nursing home to read tarot cards for his mother.

“What's this one?” she'll ask. “This one is pretty.”

“The Two of Cups,” Warren will say. “It's about connecting. About healing broken relationships.”

“And what's
this
one? What are these big gold things they're holding?”

“The Two of Cups. Those are cups, Mother.”

You don't have to go to India to know death in the midst of life, to hear the sound of silence behind the quickening pulse, to know the nothingness at the core of all being.

“I don't think you came here to talk about moving,” he says to Addie. “Where you live, where he lives, that's just geography.”

Addie knots her hands. “We have history,” she says. “Not a completely nice history, to be honest. But we're connected in a way I've never been connected to anyone else. When I was with him this time, I felt that. I felt like I was
with
him. Like my showing up in his life again after so many years had filled in some missing piece.”

Poor Addie, Warren thinks. Getting involved with a Gemini. A mental, moony Gemini—exactly the sort of man who would appeal to her.

“What I can tell you,” he says evenly, “is that you aren't going to be able to figure him out. That's the whole point of the relationship for you.”

“How can not figuring somebody out be the point of a relationship?”

“Look.” Warren shows her Roland's birth chart. “Your friend has no Earth in his chart. Not a trace. In fact there's no Earth in the composite chart, despite your three planets in Virgo.” He lays her birth chart on the table alongside the composite. “Roland epitomizes everything you're afraid of. He's the mystery, the unknown. His sun is in the twelfth house of the relationship, the house of mystery. Which means that, to you, he will always be unknowable. Your magical mystery man. That's his role.”

Addie studies the charts. “One night he played in a bar,” she says, delicately lifting her teacup from its saucer. “I was at a table with his friends and they were telling me how he was the most natural, open, out-there person they'd ever met, and I wanted to say to them,
Really? How do you know?
Because I'm never sure what he's thinking.”

“His friends have a different configuration with him than you do. They experience him on a more surface level. On that level he's very direct. But you have a deeper connection, more of a soul-mate connection. Soulful playmates.”

“He's been calling me. He forgets the time difference and calls in the middle of the night, when I'm asleep. We don't always talk. Sometimes he just plays his guitar and I listen. He's amazing, even when he's wasted.”

“He affects people in powerful ways,” Warren says, “though he may not realize it. His Gemini energy makes him so scattered that he's a bit of a mystery even to himself. Capricorn in his seventh house: he needs somebody solid, responsible. He doesn't have much of that in his own life so he has to get it from somebody else.”

“Like me.”

“Your moon is falling in the fourth house, the house of security and family and rootedness, so yes, you'd be providing that part of the relationship.”