Little Elvises (22 page)

I inhaled the mint and cinnamon. “So as far as you’re concerned, there’s nothing to worry about.”

She gave the spoon a final shake and then painstakingly unwrapped the string. Then she got up and went to the stove to pour more water into the cup. Without looking back, she said, “Nothing. She’ll be fine.”

Keeping an eye on her, I picked up the hinged picture frame. The left-hand photo was a pleasant-looking guy with a low hairline and a square jaw. The one on the right was the same guy and Amber, and between them was a boy of three or four with a shadow of his father’s square jaw. They all looked happy.

I put it down and pulled my hand away. “And that’s how you felt after the conversation a couple of weeks ago, that Doris would be fine.”

She turned to me and lifted the cup to her lips but kept her eyes on the floor, as though just noticing how badly it needed a mop. “Sure. Back then.”

“She told you all of that then, about Vegas and so forth. You haven’t talked to her since.”

“No,” she said. She grabbed a big breath and blew it out, then slid her slippered foot over the floor experimentally, back and forth. “Only that once.”

“Well, thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.” I got up and smiled goodbye and went through the dusty living room, with no sign of a child in it, and out across the dead yard and past the abandoned tricycle to my car. I sat there for a few minutes, exploring a tangle of emotions that included pity for Amber Schlumberg and a certain amount of guilt about Kathy, about my not having been able to work things out with Kathy. Something
my mother had once said to me suddenly took on fresh meaning.
Women fall in love with a man thinking they’re getting a ship that will take them somewhere
, she’d said,
but most of the time what they get is the anchor, and it drags them down
.

I caught myself sighing in imitation of Amber Schlumberg and banished the regret so I could try to figure out why she had lied to me.

Doris’s second friend wasn’t home. Her third was, but she didn’t want to talk at all. The moment I said Doris’s name, she said, “Oh,” and brought the tips of her fingers to her mouth. Then she said, “Oh,” again and closed the door in my face. The owner of the fourth starred name, the euphonious Melissa Simmons, lived over the hill, which is the term people in the Valley use to refer to the Los Angeles basin proper, and that people in the Los Angeles basin proper use to refer to the Valley. Either way,
over the hill
means a long, boring, bumper-to-bumper drive in a rich atmosphere of carbon monoxide at rush hour, which was what it now was.

I was toodling aimlessly north on Ventura through the darkening day, headed vaguely for Tarzana, when Paulie DiGaudio called with the info to go with the license plates from Vinnie’s driveway. I pulled over to write it down. “Any of these guys got anything to shake Vinnie loose, you’ll let me know, right?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I’ve had more fun in Burglars Anonymous meetings.”

“They really do that, you know,” DiGaudio said. “In the joint.
Hi, I’m Junior and I’m a burglar.”

“Thanks for the info,” I said, folding the pad.

“Call me if you learn anything. And
get moving
. Sooner or
later, Vinnie’s gonna get arrested. Right now, the DA’s not sure they can make the case, but every day there’s a little more pressure, know what I mean?”

“I’m on it,” I said and powered off. I’d always wanted to say
I’m on it
, and now I had. I didn’t feel much different. I checked the nearest address and pulled into traffic. If I were to keep drifting toward Tarzana, one of the guys who’d been parked at Vinnie’s was just about half a mile out of the way, a few long blocks north of the Boulevard, off of Woodman. I checked the guy’s house number to make sure, then looked at the name. I looked at it again, but it hadn’t changed. Ace Rabinowitz. I thought about calling old Ace and then figured he’d either be there or he wouldn’t, and I was going that way anyway.

Going, I now permitted myself to acknowledge, to check in on Kathy and Rina.

Amber Schlumberg was not Kathy. Kathy wasn’t adrift and abandoned. Wherever Mr. Square Jaw had gone, he’d taken the kid with him, while Kathy still had Rina. For that matter, Kathy still had
me
, if she actually wanted me. Which, with Bill on the scene, didn’t look likely. So Kathy also had good old Bill. Who laughed at the funny papers at the breakfast table early in the morning, sitting across from my daughter. Who was involved, or getting involved, with Tyrone. Who was so black it was as though he’d been set intentionally in front of me, a ring of fire through which I had to pass unburned in order to continue being the person I’d always thought I was instead of the boring middle-class bigot I seemed to have become.

All of this had happened in my absence. My self-imposed absence.

My mother notwithstanding, I hadn’t been a ship for Kathy, or if I had been, I’d abandoned the helm. Or maybe that was exactly the wrong way to look at it. Maybe it had been Kathy’s
ship all along, and she was steering it exactly where she wanted to go. Maybe I was just ballast, no longer needed now that Rina was aboard, just dead weight to be tossed over the side.

Or maybe, just
maybe
, the whole fucking world wasn’t about me.

I was so busy trying to keep my head above the dark and bottomless pool of myself that I almost missed Woodman. I angled sharply across the right lane, deeply satisfying someone who’d been wanting all day to plant both elbows on his horn. Ace lived on Burbank Boulevard, a street with so little character it might as well have been a dry gulch, in one of several hundred rectangular, two-story apartment houses set too close to the street.

I’ve always thought that one- and two-digit addresses have an aristocratic
you don’t live here
quality, while five-digit addresses sound like shorthand for
trailer park with large dogs
. Ace Rabinowitz lived squarely in five-digit territory, at 12478 Burbank Boulevard, a two-story building designed by someone to whom the French Quarter in New Orleans had once been described, badly. Apartment five was on the second floor facing the street, with double doors opening onto a balcony so shallow the edge of the door would have hit the railing before it was completely open. The day was far enough gone that lights were on here and there, and as I stood there, looking up, one snapped on behind Ace’s windows.

I felt elephant-heavy going up the stairs. Maybe it was lack of sleep, or maybe it was all the psychic weight from the chains of shattered relationships I was dragging around. Whatever it was, it made me want to fix my entire life somehow, to clear away all the fragments and false starts and buried bones and broken hearts, and start to redig the foundations, laying them true and straight and deep.

It sounded like a lot of work. As an alternative, I pressed Ace Rabinowitz’s doorbell.

And was surprised to recognize the guitar riff from “Blue Tubes,” a surf instrumental from the late 1960s that introduced me to the glory of the French horn when I first heard it in about 1985. I fell in love with the horn’s sound and, because of it, the record, although it was just another attempt to cash in on the Beach Boys.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I heard from inside. It was a high, reedy voice, a kind of vocal clarinet, and it sounded harried. “Just stand there. Shift your weight from foot to foot. Sing ‘A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.’ Imagine a couple dozen doughnuts and fill in the holes. Be there in a minute.”

Instead, I tried the knob and it turned. I opened it a couple of feet and watched a scrawny little guy with sparse gray hair hanging to his shoulders scurry around an over-furnished living room shoving evidence out of sight: mirrors with razor blades and straight white arctic lines of cocaine, decks of rolling papers, Ziploc bags bulging with marijuana, a brown golf ball that could have been opium. The little man was barefoot, dressed in faded jeans and a blue work shirt that had battered sequins sewed across the shoulders. The room reeked of pot and patchouli.

“Relax,” I said. “I’m not the cops.”

He whirled on me, one hand wrapped around a hookah holding a pint of water that had turned the color of something a big-league pitcher might spit. He was hugging the bong to his chest as though he expected me to snatch it away from him. A quick step back, away from me, brought his foot into contact with one of the room’s many, many guitars. It had been propped in front of a battered brown leather couch, and when he kicked it, the guitar described a lazy sideways arc toward the floor. For a millisecond I saw in his eyes a glimpse of what hell must be like as he tried to choose between the guitar and the hookah, the
hookah and the guitar. He dropped the hookah and grabbed the guitar, and the hookah hit the hardwood floor and exploded in a malodorous splash.

“Awwwww,
shit
,” he said. He picked up the guitar and laid it down on the sofa, pulling the nearer foot away from the spreading, reeking brown lake. “Man’s home is his
castle
, dude. Where’s your fucking manners at?”

“Hey, Ace,” I said.

He parted the hair in front of his face with both hands and peered through it at me, or just past me. He seemed to be having some trouble coordinating his eyes. He opened his mouth wide and worked his lower jaw from side to side. For some reason, this activity centered him, and his eyes settled on mine. “Yeah? Yeah? We know each other? Am I supposed to remember you from someplace?” He looked down at the floor. “
Look
at this shit, man. This is
messed up
.”

“Sorry. Where are your paper towels?”

“Kitchen, man. Wait,
wait
, I didn’t invite you—”

“No problem,” I said. “Through here, right?” I angled through the tiny dining area into the kitchen of someone who intended to live forever. Fresh vegetables were everywhere, piled highest in the vicinity of an enormous juicer that sat in the middle of a thick pool of green stickum. Eight or nine big glasses stood in a line on the counter, each coated with a residue of green, except for one that was lined in a viscous, arterial red that might have been a coating of beet juice. If it wasn’t, I didn’t want to speculate on it. I pulled the entire roll of paper towels from the holder next to the sink and carried it back into the living room.

“I mean, seriously, man,” Ace said the moment I came into sight. He was in the same place I’d left him. “Am I like supposed to know you? Is it in your head that we’re like buds or
something? ’Cause I gotta tell you, there’s no bells ringing in here, where I keep the old bells.” He was tapping his temple. “And I don’t forget, man. Once it’s in here, it’s in here for good.”

“Aww, Ace,” I said. “Can’t believe you forgot. Here.” I lobbed the roll of towels underhand at him, and he turned his head and watched them sail slowly past. He seemed to enjoy the sight. I said, “How’s what’s her name?”

He blinked heavily, trying to assemble the question in his mind as the brown liquid spread at his feet. He had the air of someone with a selective hearing impairment that removed all the important words from a conversation. After a couple of false starts, he said, “Fine, man, she’s fine.”

“Beautiful as ever?”

“She’s not—I mean, she’s never been all that beautiful.”

“Sure,” I said. “But as beautiful as she was, she’s about that beautiful?”

“Just about,” Ace said. He turned to look at the paper towels, which had landed on the couch, beside yet another guitar, this one a blistered old Martin steel-string. “Almost hit old Marty,” Ace said.

“Sorry, Marty,” I said.

“Marty says it’s okay,” Ace said, apparently seriously. He turned back to me and his eyes slid past, braked, and came back as he tried to snap his fingers. “You’re—I mean, you’re—your name’s not Freddie, is it?”

“Ace,” I said. “You’re amazing.”

“I’m telling you,” he said, tapping his temple again, “once it’s in here, it’s
in here
. Know what I mean?”

“It’s in there,” I said.

“Way in,” Ace said. “So, ahhh, what brings you here?”

“Came to help you clean that up.” I went past him and got the paper towels, pulled off a couple of yards’ worth, folded
them over, and dropped them onto the pool, then repeated the procedure until the floor was littered with sopping brown paper towels. Ace watched me with the concentrated attention of someone who hadn’t seen motion in days.

“Cool,” he said. “Don’t cut yourself.”

“Careful is my middle name.”

“Really?” He nodded a couple of times. “Far out.”

“Jesus,” I said. “The water smells like it got a lot of use.”

“Shame you can’t smoke water,” Ace said. “I tried a couple times, you know? Soaked tobacco in it, let it dry out, rolled it up, and made fire. Coughed so hard my ears fell off.” He sat on the couch and picked up the Martin. He hit the strings once, then again, and then he struck a chord, and I glanced up at him as he sat there, head bent over the guitar, hair hanging in his face, and the chord turned into a chord progression, and his right foot began to tap, and as far as he was concerned I was no longer in the room.