At the foot of the stairs she picked up a flimsy red cotton shirt and beneath it a bra with a 34D cup. She stood up slowly, her back perfectly straight, and screamed like a drill sergeant, “Harper, get down here this very instant!”
“Holy shit,” Harper said when he heard his mother at the door.
“Oh my God.” Rebecca sat up in bed. “Oh God, my mom is going to kill me.”
Harper was zipping his pants and Rebecca was still looking for her panties in the sheets when his mother screamed from the bottom of the stairs.
“My shirt. My bra.” Rebecca was frantically moving around the room. She found her pants between the twin bed and the wall.
“I don’t want to go down there,” Harper whispered.
“Don’t make me come up there!” Margaret yelled from below.
“Coming!” Harper pulled on a blue Izod, shoved his feet in loafers, and loped reluctantly down the stairs.
“Hey, Mom.” A foot and a half taller, he looked down into her eyes, which were like dark landscapes, two twisters on the horizon.
She put her hands on her hips and glared up into his face silently, then held out the bra and shirt.
Harper smiled, took the clothes from her hand. “Thank you. One moment.”
“I want to talk to you outside,” she said as he ran upstairs.
Rebecca looked like she might cry. He kissed her forehead, hugged her for a moment, then walked back downstairs.
His mother was outside in the sunshine. “Can you imagine Rebecca’s mom right now? She must be worried sick.”
Harper looked at his watch. It was seven-twenty. “Sorry, Mom.”
“Sorry, Mom,” she mimicked him. “I’m ashamed of you. Taking advantage of a young girl.”
Rebecca came quietly out the side door. Her face was blank. Margaret saw her thirty feet away and said sternly, “Beautiful morning, isn’t it, Rebecca?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rebecca replied.
Harper looked from his mother to Rebecca and noticed for the first time that they were built the same—short, a little fleshy, major boobs. His name jarred him from the little reverie.
“Harper! Pay attention. Give me the car keys. Go and strip the bed, make sure everything is in place, and bring the sheets home. You’re going to have to wash them and call Mrs. Patrick to apologize.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Harper yawned.
“Rebecca, get in the car. We’re going to go call your mother. She must be frantic.”
Harper loped back inside as they got in the car. Margaret had to sit up tall for her neck to be higher than the dashboard. Rebecca slouched in her seat as the car left the driveway.
Margaret said, “I don’t believe in free love. Sex should be a part of a marriage of souls. Franklin and I were virgins when we married. I believe that making love is sacred. Don’t take it lightly. You’ll be happier in the long run.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Rebecca squirmed in her seat. “I think it’s sacred, too.”
Margaret glanced over at Rebecca and smiled skeptically.
Margaret parked the Century in the carport. Passing through the garden, Rebecca said, “Oh, your azaleas are so beautiful.”
“Yes.” She had the sense that Rebecca was buttering her.
In the kitchen Margaret poured them both glasses of orange juice. When Rebecca finished hers, Margaret nodded toward the phone on the wall. Rebecca crossed the linoleum and picked it up slowly. She dialed the round plastic disk, which revolved back with each digit.
“Mama. I’m really sorry. I fell asleep. I’m at the Rutledges’.” Rebecca kept her back to Margaret. “Um, no, we didn’t spend the night here.” She twisted the long cord with one hand. “We were, um, at the Patricks’ tennis cottage.”
Margaret watched Rebecca with sympathy, hoping this would teach her to respect her body. She didn’t want to know whether they had intercourse. But she hoped that if they had, this would put a stop to it. It was just too serious, too connected with emotions, too intimate to be treated lightly by children.
“Oh, Mama, you don’t have to come over here.” Rebecca lived alone with her mother, who was a local news anchor. “Harper can drop me off.”
Margaret said, “Charlotte should come over.”
Harper put the laundry in the washing machine, which was in a room by the carport, connected to the house by a roofed walk, then came in the kitchen door just as Rebecca hung up. As Margaret topped off their juice glasses, he and Rebecca exchanged glances that asked, What’s next? They drank silently. Then Margaret delivered another sermon on the sacredness of sex.
I
t’s midafternoon when I get back. The oversize pockets of my cargo pants jingle with change as I jog up the stairs. At the door I take a deep breath, prepare to block a flying spike-heel shoe. I picture her in the morning, waking to learn that I threw out her syringes, wrestling her to the bed, pinning her down. She raked my cheek with her fingernails. No. That was two mornings ago. Hard to keep track. She might have shot up again by now. I turn the lock quickly and throw the door open, ready to charge in and tackle her fast. Always be prepared.
The room is full of tobacco smoke, a strange, nutty, burned smell, shadows, and soft light filtered by the curtains. Emma is lying against the headboard, smoking. She doesn’t look angry. She looks distant and bored.
Jingle-jangling like a joker, jester, Deadhead, I dance into the room and pull handfuls of coins from the cargo pockets, let them drop to the floor, slide the guitar from my shoulder, strum a blues riff, and say, “Nigga rich again, bitch.”
Emma giggles. “Guitar man.”
“Let’s go to Santa Cruz for my birthday.”
“Why?”
“I told Carla the White Witch that I was contemplating a birthday sojourn in Santa Cruz and she read her Tarots. The gist—a good omen. She wants to go with me!”
“Take her.” Emma sucks in noisily, holds the smoke in her lungs.
“I want to take you.”
“So what?”
I cartwheel across the floor and dive onto the bed and brush my lips against hers.
“You really care about me?” Emma’s eyes look almost normal.
“Yeah, sometimes you’re sweeter than Tupelo honey. You’re very pretty. You’re smart. You’re Episcopalian. You—”
“No, I’m not.” Her eyes flash like lightning bolts against a clear blue sky. She blows smoke in my face. “I’m not a fucking Episcopalian.”
“If thy mistress some rich anger shows”—I take her hand—“let her rave and feed deep upon her peerless eyes.”
“Another dead poet?”
“Keats. Paraphrased. What did your father do to you?” I ask her for the twentieth time.
“Nothing. He was never there.” Her voice is detached. “Not for me. Not for my mother. He’s a lunatic. I think he fucked half the women in his church.”
“The lonely ones. The ones whose husbands died or dumped them?”
“Yeah.” She exhales smoke and smiles sardonically, which makes her face look forty years old. “The lonely ones and the horny ones.”
“He made you and your mama miserable.” I lie on my back and watch her over my forehead.
“I grew up watching them fight. When I was about ten, Mom told me, ‘Never marry a handsome man.’ It took me about a year to figure out what she meant. Then Dad up in the pulpit. Please. Whiskeypalians. Cocktail Christians.”
“They were sticking it out until you left home?”
“Yeah. Living a lie.” Emma takes another drag, chokes back a cough.
“Did he get nailed?”
“No.” Emma smiles again ruefully like a middle-aged divorcée. “No. When I was sixteen, Mom moved to Hong Kong with an old boyfriend and dumped me in Portland with my grand’rents, you know, these nice old alcoholics who spend their golden years playing bridge and golf. They tried to help. They found a therapist to help me deal with my anger and rejection.”
“That obviously worked beautifully.” I reach up and touch her cheek.
Emma laughs, a sad sound.
“Your dad’s still in Seattle?”
“Negative. Rumors flew after Mom cruised. The vestry let him know that he should bolt at the first opportunity. He left Seattle, moved to L.A. St. something. He’s probably up to his old tricks.”
“I’m sorry. My parents have been faithful to each other for forty years.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty damn. Let’s go to Santa Cruz.”
“I lost my car.”
“I got us train tickets to San Jose. Bus tickets to the Cruz.”
“You’ve been up for two, three days.”
“I know. I’m
über
dude.”
“Did you fuck me five ways to Sunday the other morning or was I dreaming?”
“Might have been me. Might have been my doppelgänger.”
Emma laughs, her face young again. “Your what?”
“The other Cage, my alter ego.”
“I like him.” She holds out the hand-rolled cigarette. “Smoking it’s not so bad.”
I shake my head. “Don’t want to be smackified. I’ve got principles. Besides, tobacco makes me cough like a man dying of tuberculosis. You think you can get by just smoking it?”
“With your alterbanger by my side.” Emma smiles and strokes the hair out of my eyes. “I might even go cold turkey. I’ve got a friend in Santa Cruz. Her name’s Alisa.” Emma laughs gleefully. “Yeah. We should go and see her. Last time, she told me not to come back until I stopped shooting up.”
“It’s been thirty-six hours.” I kiss her and roll off the bed onto my feet. “That counts.”
Just after midnight I feel a positive, mystical vibe in Santa Cruz, the hippie surfer enclave nestled between the mountains and the sea. Maybe it’s the full moon. Maybe it’s because I just logged another orbit around the great gasbag in the sky. Or maybe it’s the acid that we dropped as the bus descended the steep mountain pass on a serpentine road, leaving Silicon Valley. Or all of the above.
“Wow. The stars,” Emma says. “It’s kicking in. Definitely kicking in.”
“What do you see?”
“Well . . .” She looks at me, then back at the sky. “Whoa. There it was again. You know . . .”
“No. Tell me.”
“It’s not doing this to you?”
“Doing what?”
Emma looks at me again. Even in the pale moonlight her eyes have a strong electric gleam. Then she drops her head back on her shoulders. “Whoa. There it goes. The stars all streak at once.”
“Like going into hyperspace on the original
Star Wars
?”
“Exactly.” Emma laughs.
“No,” I say. “But the moon is so bright and soooo 3-D. You can see how much it
weighs
.”
“I know what you mean.” Nodding her head like a serious child, Emma starts moving along a path by a stream that winds toward the sea beyond a big sixties roller coaster that looks derelict in the dark. In the still night the sound of waves hitting the shore carries for a quarter mile. The bicycle path climbs out of the river bottom away from the fun fair into curving rows of little houses set on a hill, follows an alley between backyards to the point of a peninsula that sticks out into the Monterey Bay. Emma stares in silence at the crashing waves. I take her by the hand and lead her on the path which curves along the sea cliffs for a time, then swings inland uphill to a bridge crossing another little river coming out of the mountains. In the middle of the bridge Emma stops and points at hundreds of poles sticking up out of a low blanket of fog, like needles in a pincushion. Moonlight colors the fog top a swirling yellow. Lightning spears the blackness of the bay but the thunder is too far to carry and overhead the sky is still clear.
“Masts,” I say. “Santa Cruz Harbor.”
“Boats are cool,” Emma says.
We cross the bridge, then walk downhill into the fog, lit inside by a few tall lamps, past some hulls on scaffolds and a closed taqueria toward three long docks that run out into the small harbor. On the bay side, surf pounds against a barrier wall.
“Look how the fog hangs just a foot over the water,” Emma says.
“Like a curtain.”
Not a soul is around. The wind slaps the halyards against the masts like chimes. Only a small square of chain-link fence framed by barbed wire blocks off the entrance to each dock. I set my guitar by the chain-link door and walk on the rocks to the edge of the water, where I climb up on the fence, then swing myself around, ripping a bit of my sleeve and pants leg as I pull myself to the other side.
“So acrobatic,” Emma says.
“Cat burglar.” I open the door. She laughs and hands me the guitar.
“Look at her. What a beauty.” Most of the sixty boats berthed along the dock are expensive and well kept. Silicon Valley sailors. “That ketch is all teak and mahogany.”
At the end of the dock Emma says, “Play a song, Cage.”
I strum the guitar and start making up words. “There’s a part of me that’s a part of you, there’s a part of you that’s a part of me, too, like the moon in the fog, like the salt in the sea, I’m faithful as a dog, but you sting like a bee.”
Laughing, Emma starts to sing, “There’s a part of you that’s a part of me . . .”
Strumming on, I look around, expecting to see a rent-a-cop or Harbor Patrol or the poe-lice but there’s nobody. Emma dances around with an air mic as if onstage. “There’s a part of me that’s a part of you.” Her voice is not bad. Big raindrops splatter on the wood and the water, a storm from nowhere. I shout through the downpour. “Shit, I left my case at what’s-her-name’s.”
“Alisa’s.” Emma raises her arms into the air and dances in a small circle, catching raindrops in her mouth.
“Yeah, Alisa’s.” I sling the strap over my shoulder and dash for the stern of the nearest boat I see with a canvas cover over the cockpit.
Day Tripper
is written in scroll across the stern. “How apro-fucking-pos!” I shout. The strangest coincidences always occur when tripping. Synchronicity. Climbing up a rope ladder slung over the starboard gunnel, I hum the Police song and try to remember the words. That song must be sixteen years old now,
B.E.
Before Emma. At least her rock and roll cognizance.