High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel (13 page)

The clock now read 9:04.

Amad was opening up the store, I was sure, and I expected him to call any minute now, wondering where I was. I put the mug on the windowsill and decided I would take the long way to work along the water, maybe give Dad a call. Have a chat. It would be three hours later in New York, about noon. A light spark of hungry angst fizzed in my belly.

I opened the window and looked out over the courtyard to the palm trees and the open back windows of all four buildings, curtain-sails ballooning with the morning breeze. I saw my neighbors’ pull-blinds all gone wonky. The barbecue grills, and the folding chairs, the tikis propped in buckets of sand. I looked up over the roofs to where the birds were squawking. I was expecting seagulls, and a breeze carried over the salt-rot stink of the bait-and-tackle shop around the corner. Morning clouds were laundry white, slack, and sprawling over blue. What a day. I was very proud of this view. It wasn’t cheap. And I remember there was a flood of blue sky that morning. I saw a shark’s eye in water, a pale moon east of the morning sun because nighttime hadn’t gone home just yet. I liked to think I wasn’t one for omens. But Dad was maybe not entirely fine, and there I was way up with the clouds, fastening clothespins, and still needing a cigarette. I heard the water, the soft crash of ocean waves just across the street. I’d taken up smoking again, not sure why. This world works in circles, or maybe more like squashed, elongated ovals. I went downstairs and got a new pack from the freezer.

Keys, wallet, phone.

I took the path through the courtyard and around the garden I shared with my neighbors, where I never did much more than put out the occasional butt in the flowerpot soil. Bev, on the other hand, in the condo diagonally opposite, took great care with our little garden. She watered almost every morning. And Charlie, who lived right next door, often tended to a scaly potted tree, his favorite. The condo walls were so thin I sometimes heard Charlie talking to his parrots. He was a volatile man of sixty, fond of bicycles—the kind of guy who’d lived alone for a long time by the water.

Unkosher? I was already late for work. But I was heartened that Sarah and I would share an evening meal.

Sarah liked to think she was responsible for bringing Dad and me back together—and she was. But she also liked to think that, if not for her continual upkeep, he and I would forever lose touch. She was my wife (ex-wife), his daughter-in-law, yes. But she was also a stereotypical Jewish mother to us both. Make sure he’s eating enough. Make sure
you’re
eating enough. Would it kill you to pick up the phone? Whether she believed it or not, Dad was forever on the borders of my brain, practically stalking every thought since Mom died. He and I talked on the phone, but also he was right there on the perimeter of my thinking, all ghostlike and circling like a buzzard. Don’t get me wrong. This is my father we’re talking about. I felt nothing but love for the man but, like I said, it was complicated.

The palm trees out front by the street were spread up high like God’s grabbing fingers. The fiery orange and midnight-blue birds-of-paradise bursting from the ground like frozen firework moments. And that fading neon pink bumper sticker on Bev’s yellow Gremlin: “Live Each Day Like It’s Your Last.” That always seemed to me to be a terrible idea.

I walked toward the water and called Amad. I told him not to worry, said I was on my way.

He said, “You’re late.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling. To tell you I’m on my way, but I’m late.”

He hung up on me. Very Amad.

I walked on and waved to Mrs. Dunbar, down the street, as she swept her driveway with a push broom. She waved back. I walked by, admiring the trees on her corner lot, the tall crepe myrtle with its brown-butter leaves, and her American persimmon in bloom with orange fruit hanging in orbit like succulent planets. We said a quick hello. Persimmon trees, at least the American ones, she’d told me once before, are naturally self-fertile. Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this, as I certainly had to on many a lonely night.… And the magnolias, Mrs. Dunbar loved her magnolias; she’d gone to great pains in the past pointing out to me the overt and subtle differences between the many types. The lily magnolia, the saucer, star, and pink star magnolias, all very beautiful and hung with those enormous and puffed-out flowers, a black eye staring from the center of each. A cork tree stood on the corner by the road. A wide monster of a thing, knotted, and tall as any tree I’ve ever seen. She’d also told me the cork was not native to California, and yet this one had to be a hundred years old at least. If that’s not native, I don’t know what is. I liked pressing my fingers inside its soft and fleshy give-way bark.

I headed for work along the beach, wondering if my father would answer his phone. Sometimes he flat-out refused even though I paid his cellular bill.

I called, and it rang and rang and rang …

Of all things Californian, probably my least favorite thing was the water. I liked the beach, yes, but you’d never catch me swimming. Water has no shape, and I like shape. I’ve had more than one nightmare of me going over some mammoth and rushing Niagara, on a spindly wooden raft, screaming my head off all the way down, only to wake like a petrified dead man born to his bed in the afterlife. I have to say I especially liked watching the sunset from where my street dead-ended. All clichés are true, so I say it’s our job to refresh them. I liked looking out past the grassy rise where the kids played Frisbee, and way out there beyond the boardwalk. Past the deep stretch of sand and the lifeguard’s tower of rough, white wood, and beyond the tower, where the ocean stretched out to the hazy silhouette of Catalina Island, where the sun goes down to sleep. I stood at the waterline sometimes, at the end of America, one of the ends anyway, and I imagined there was nothing else at all.

Only days before, Amad and I made a wager that I wouldn’t actually show up this particular Sunday. He told me Teri, his wife, had been asking questions lately: Seriously, how bad a shape was the store in? Was business so bad? Should he start looking for a new job? And what about the baby? (Teri was pregnant!) I mean, if Josie can successfully close down three stores, why not a fourth? Actually, Amad told me the bet was her idea. And I couldn’t blame her. The stakes were small—the loser bought breakfast burritos and coffee—but I got the message. Otter Computer, right there on Main Street, was my first and eventually my only location. At one time there were four. Then three. Number two closed during the divorce. And finally just one left. I worked there a few days a week, but never ever on a weekend. Business wasn’t great. Like I said, I was a bit unmotivated. But not the lovely Mister Amad Singh, my only remaining employee, and closest friend (also thirty-seven, such a complicated age). Amad was all things Otter Computer. He had been with me since the beginning. And I spent a good part of my days off avoiding his phone calls. The economy was tanking and he was worried about the business, with good reason. I always told him to calm down. I said I had a plan, and I knew what I was doing. Don’t forget I built this place from nothing. Then again, I’d been saying that for a long while, and not very convincingly.

Nevertheless, I promised him that we would turn things around pretty soon now. Do your best and stay focused. I told him once how crazy he was for having kids and, I swear, he stopped just short of slapping me across the face. I agreed to start working on Sundays because the weekend business had been getting better. Sarah would have laughed out loud at the idea of me working on a weekend.

A buzzing at my waist; it was Dad.

“Hey, I was gonna call you again. I just called you.”

“Hey yourself,” he said. “I can’t talk.”

Another one in a rush. “Okay.” I put on my talking-to-Dad voice. “So, tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I’m fine.” He coughed. “I’m fine.”

“Well, Sarah says you’re not.”

“Your wife is making up stories.”

“Not my wife anymore,” I said.

“Ridiculous. No divorce lawyers in Heaven.” His attention must have been drifting, because his voice was getting lower, like he was talking to the room he was in and not to me.

“Well, maybe I should look at some plane tickets.” Pause. “Dad…”

He coughed again. “I told you, I’m fine. Call me later. Sundays, I get a little busy.”

“I’m headed to work.”

“A little work and a little bit of wine. Good for the soul!” he laughed out. He was all of a sudden louder now, like he was shouting into the phone. “Hey! Maybe I can show you what I got going? You should come out and visit us!”

I didn’t say anything.

“Josiah,” he said.

“Like I said, I’ll look for a ticket.”

“Hey! Josiah?”

“Yeah.”

“You eat yet?” he said. “I’m hungry. Tell your pretty wife you love her!”

“I’ll call you later, okay?”

Since the divorce, I’d asked Dad more than once to please stop calling Sarah. But he couldn’t sit back while I did apparently nothing. He’d say something like “Her blood will not be on my hands, but yours, Josiah, come the Final Reckoning.” He still absolutely refused to call me Josie. And I’d say something like “I understand, Dad, and your heart’s in the right place, I know that. But you should also know that Sarah is definitely not in agreement with this statement. And at least she’s respectful enough not to tell you this. You do remember she’s Jewish, right? Please tell me you remember she’s actually Jewish.”

“And what about you, do you think I’m wrong?”

I would then change the subject because I don’t answer questions like this.

After Mom died, and then the divorce, Dad started calling Sarah even more. She’d told me, the last time we talked, really talked—this was weeks before, twenty-two days to be precise—that now he was calling her late at night and poetically describing the weather back east. He was sharing his more recent and memorable dreams. I recall one of her favorites, Dad in a desert eating the book of Daniel. Dipping the pages in a bowl of melted butter, one by one. If Sarah and I had ever had children, I think, they would have found her postdivorce friendship with Dad a little confusing. I found it confusing. But for whatever reason he sometimes felt less comfortable talking to his own son about whatever the two of them talked about. Whatever; we were fine. I think Sarah pitied him, maybe even hoped in some weird way that if she were generous with him it would be good for me by extension. Or I liked to think so, anyway. When I reached Main Street, I stood there at the beach end, where I came to the realization that I’d never once, not once, explicitly thanked her for being so generous with Dad, even after we split, and I felt very shitty for it.

Amad was standing in front of the store, on the sidewalk. He was looking up and down the street, back and forth, probably looking for me. There weren’t many people about. Just before the long pier that juts into the Pacific, I saw a family of five. Two young girls and an even younger boy were having their picture taken. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. They were all standing by the iron statue of an otter balancing a ball on its nose. The boy was trying to climb its smooth metal back. He was probably about Issy’s age, or Issy’s age the last time anyone had seen him, anyway. But I didn’t think of him then, watching that boy only now. Isn’t that odd? Why not think of him then? Why not think of him always? “We should all be thinking of Issy.…” I thought of Sarah instead, and of our possible dinner, and made a dumb smile. I hoped the little boy wouldn’t fall off the statue and crack his front teeth, because I’d seen it how many times before. I’d also seen ancient photos at swap meets of nineteenth-century ladies in full-body bathing suits posing by that very same statue. Nostalgia can sometimes be dangerous. Otter was always a minor tourist draw, but tourists aren’t really people. They’re all toe bouncers, invariably looking for some manifest version of Heaven. Maybe tourism is a sort of sin, I think. Whereas Otter was the kind of benign sleepy town where kids leapt from the splintering docks, where locals fished in the big sun, leathering happily until they died.

Someone who looked like my neighbor Charlie came riding from the pier on a bicycle. A fishing pole balanced from under his arm and rested on the basket attached to his handlebars.

I waved and his middle finger rose, right on schedule.

Amad went back in the store.

Wooster’s, beside the main beach lot and across from the clock tower, was teeming with hollering swimsuited kids. Sodas in hand, they ran off in a dispersive sprawl into burning sand. In the parking lot, surfboards stuck out from back windows of cars and trucks, like knife handles, and the voices of young women flittered, sliding my way on the hot breeze. I walked toward the water, toward the floral-printed bikini tops and torn jean shorts. Their young feet and candy-colored nails, pale between sunburned toes scampered over the hot white powder. The girls jumped, laughing, into the white, hand-blocked light of the blue sky, flip-flops dangling from fingers. I scrunched my eyes, and they all half dissolved in a sun-soaked vision of volleyball, flickering in the screaming radiant light. I had to catch my breath. And a throng of runners, immaculate, numbers pinned to their chests, came padding up the concrete path, and I wondered where on earth they were going. This was southern California, land of perpetual health. The religiously healthy nearly naked everywhere you looked. The roads like clogged arteries, but nobody seemed to give a shit, bouncing along beside each other, breathing smog and briny smoke blowing inland from the ocean. I was feeling hungry and thirsty. And tired, because I’d always been a light sleeper, suffered from scary colorful nightmares as far back as I could remember, and while I no longer prayed before sleep like I did as a child, to keep the nightmares at bay I did sometimes close my eyes and ask that I might dream of Sarah running.

I saw the taco line was way too long. I was sure Amad was steaming.

The grilled fish taco at Wooster’s was not a thing for which I’d moved to California, but had I known the simple joy of it, I would have. Red cabbage slaw and a fresh corn tortilla. Hot peppers, radish, and a lime slice, squeeze your lime slices. Even for breakfast. This is among the most perfect things I’ve encountered on earth. On occasion, back east for business, I’ve even made pilgrimages to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens in response to reverent whispers, rumors of a Latin authenticity, of, say, a short Dominican couple serving chimichurri in the back of an El Camino. I was always disappointed. I originally went west, I guess, because of the simple fact that it was about as far away from New York as I could get without leaving the States. I was a young man running. I chose Otter because of Main Street, which was really just so charming, but also for its rough beach and the eroding rocks along the shore. This was a humbling place, beaten down by water and wind. I was supposed to be here. A spot of such natural and open mystery that it let me fill up with wonder, and not have to give that wonder a name. New York had become a land of secret corners and dark side streets, all man-made. Everything we make seems to fall down anyway. And of course I went to California for the women. Who was I kidding? For the quivery dream of young women, the lusty blur that fills you just before waking. Pink mouth and breast, the unhinged leg hovering just above dream, still inside the still-asleep bubble. Until morning sun fills a gauzy window; then gone. Girls of my teenage American wet dreams. Barbie-doll drivers of classic cars laughing in the saltwater wind. Of course, I found no such thing. Sarah was nothing like that. She had freckles on her forehead. Really not so unlike some romantic runaway from a midwestern farm filled with dreams of a brand-new birth, placenta snail-trailing as you first cross Sunset Boulevard, fresh off the bus, I left under the oldest American spell of all: I ventured west to begin …