Nora Jane (8 page)

“We could go by the Komatsu showroom and watch ourselves driving by in their glass walls. When I first got the DeLorean I
used to do that all the time. Don’t look like that, NJ. It’s okay to have a car. Cars are all right. They satisfy our need
for strong emotions.”

“Just tell me where to go.”

“I want to take you to the park and show you the Brundage collection but I’m afraid they’re closed this time of day. They
have this jade Buddha. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in your life. I know, let’s give it a try. Go down University. We’ll
drive across a couple of bridges. You need to learn the bridges.”

“I can’t drive across a bridge. I told you that.”

“Of course you can. We’ll do the Oakland first, then the Golden Gate. You can’t live here if you can’t go across the bridges.
You won’t be able to go anywhere.”

“I can’t do it, Freddy. I can’t even drive across the Huey P. Long, and it’s only over the Mississippi.”

“Listen to me a minute,” he said. “I want to tell you about these bridges. People like us didn’t built these bridges, N.J.
People like Teddy Roosevelt and Albert Einstein and Aristotle built those bridges. People like my father. The Golden Gate
is so overbuilt you could stack cars two deep on it and it wouldn’t fall.”

“Go on,” she said. “I’m listening.” She was making straight for the Oakland Bridge, with the top down. In the distance the
red girders of the Golden Gate gleamed in the sun. She gripped the wheel and turned onto University Avenue leading to the
bay.

“All right,” he continued, “about these bridge builders. They get up every morning and put on a clean shirt and fill their
pockets with pencils. They go out and add and subtract and read blueprints and put pilings all the way down to the bedrock.
Then they build a bridge so strong their great-grandchildren can ride across it without getting hurt. My father helped raise
money for the Golden Gate. That’s how strong it is.”

Nora Jane had driven right by the sign pointing to the Oakland Bridge. The little car hummed beneath her fingers. She straightened
her shoulders. She kept on going. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try it. I’ll give it a try.”

“I wish to hell the Brundage was open. You’ve got to see this Buddha. It’s unbelievable. It’s only ten inches high. You can
see every wrinkle. You can see every rib. The jade’s the color of celadon. Oh, lighter than that. It’s translucent. It just
floats there.”

“Don’t talk so much until I get through the gate,” she said. She almost sideswiped a black Mazda station wagon. There was
a little boy in the backseat wearing a crown. He put his face to the window and waved.

“Did you see that?” Nora Jane said. “Did you see what he’s wearing?” She drove through the toll gate and out onto the bridge.
She was into it now. She was doing it.

“Loosen up,” Freddy said. “Loosen up on the wheel. This Buddha I was telling you about, N.J. It’s more the color of sea foam.
You’ve never seen jade like this. It’s indescribable. It’s got a light of its own. Well, we’ll never make it today. I know
what, we’ll stop in Chinatown and have dinner. I want you to have some Dim Sum. And tomorrow, tomorrow we’re going to Mendocino.
The hills there are like yellow velvet this time of year. You’ll want to put them on and wear them.”

I haven’t been to confession in two years, Nora Jane was thinking. What am I doing in this car?

The Mazda passed them again. The boy with the crown was at the back window now. Looking out the open window of the tailgate,
eating a package of Nacho Cheese Flavored Doritos and drinking a Coke. He held up a Dorito to Nora Jane. He waved it out the
window in the air. The Mazda moved on. A metallic green Buick took its place. In the front seat was a young Chinese businessman
wearing a suit. In the backseat, a Chinese gentleman wearing a pigtail.

A plane flew over, trailing a banner. HAPPY 40th, ED AND DEB, the banner said. Things were happening too fast. “I just saw
an airplane fly by trailing bread crumbs,” she said.

“What did you say?” he said. “What did you just say?”

“I said …oh, never mind. I was thinking too many things at once. I’m going over there, Freddy, in the lane by the water.”
She put the turn signal on and moved over into the right-hand lane. “Now don’t talk to me anymore,” she said, squeezing the
steering wheel, leaning into it, trying to concentrate on the girders and forget the water. “Don’t say any more until I get
this car across this bridge.”

N
ORA JANE WHITTINGTON
was going to have a baby. There was no getting around that. First Freddy Harwood talked her into taking out her Lippes Loop.
“I don’t like the idea of a piece of copper stuck up your vagina,” he said. “I think you ought to get it out.”

“It’s not in my vagina. It’s in my womb. And it’s real small. I saw it before they put it in.”

“How small?” he said. “Let me see.” Nora Jane held up a thumb and forefinger and made a circle. “Like this,” she said. ’About
like this.”

“Hmmmmmmmm.” he said, and let it go at that. But the idea was planted. She kept thinking about the little piece of copper.
How it resembled a mosquito coil. Like shrapnel, she thought. Like having some kind of weapon in me. Nora Jane had a very
good imagination for things like that. Finally imagination won out over science and she called the obstetrician and made an
appointment. There was really not much to it. She lay down on the table and squeezed her eyes shut and the doctor reached
up inside her with a small cold instrument and the Lippes Loop came sliding out.

“Now what will you do?” the doctor said. “Would you like me to start you on the pill?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Let me think it over for a while.”

“Don’t wait too long,” he said. “You’re a healthy girl. It can happen very quickly.”

“All right,” she said. “I won’t.” She gathered up her things and drove on over to Freddy’s house to cook things in his gorgeous
redwood kitchen.

“Now what will we do?” she said. “You think I ought to take the pill? Or what?” It was much later that evening. Nora Jane
was sitting on the edge of the hot tub looking up at the banks of clouds passing before the moon. It was one of those paradisial
San Francisco nights, flowers and pine trees, eucalyptus and white wine and Danish bread and brie.

Nora Jane’s legs were in the hot tub. Her back was to the breeze coming from the bay. She was wearing a red playsuit with
a red and yellow scarf tied around her forehead like a flag. Freddy Harwood thought she was the most desirable thing he had
ever seen in his whole life.

“We’ll think of something,” he said. He took off his Camp Pericles senior counselor camp shorts and lowered himself into the
water. He was thirty-five years old and every summer he still packed his foot locker full of tee-shirts and flashlight batteries
and went off to the Adirondacks to be a counselor in his old camp. That’s how crazy he was. The rest of the year he ran a
bookstore in Berkeley.

“What do you think we’ll think of?” she said, joining him in the water, sinking down until the ends of the scarf floated in
the artificial waves. What they thought of lasted half the night and moved from the hot tub to the den floor to the bedroom.
Freddy Harwood thought it was the most meaningful evening he had spent since the night he lost his cherry to his mother’s
best friend. Nora Jane didn’t think it was all that great. It lacked danger, that aphrodisiac, that sugar to end all sugars.

“We have to get married,” he told her in the morning. “You’ll have to marry me.” He walked around a ladder and picked up a
kimono and pulled it on and tied the belt into a bowline. The ladder was the only furniture in the room except the bed they
had been sleeping in. Freddy was in the process of turning his bedroom into a planetarium. He was putting the universe on
the ceiling, little dots of heat-absorbing cotton that glowed in the night like stars. Each dot had to be measured with long
paper measuring strips from the four corners of the room. It was taking a lot longer to put the universe on the ceiling than
Freddy had thought it would. He turned his eyes to a spot he had reserved for Aldebaran. It was the summer sky he was re-creating,
as seen from Minneapolis where the kits were made. “Yes,” he said, as if he were talking to himself. “We are going to have
to get married.”

“I don’t want to get married,” she said. “I’m not in love with you.”

“You are in love with me. You just don’t know it yet.”

“I am not in love with you. I’ve never told you that I was. Besides, I wouldn’t want to change my name. Nora Harwood, how
would that sound?”

“How could you make love to someone like last night if you didn’t love them? I don’t believe it.”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m weird or abnormal or something. But I know whether I’m in love with someone or not. Anyway, I like
you better than anyone I’ve met in San Francisco. I’ve told you that.” She was getting dressed now, pulling a white cotton
sweater over a green cotton skirt, starting to look even more marvelous than she did with no clothes on at all. Freddy sighed,
gathered his forces, walked across the room and took her in his arms. “Do you want to have a priest? Or would you settle for
a judge. I have this friend that’s a federal judge who would love to marry us.”

“I’m not marrying you, Freddy. Not for all the tea in China. Not even for your money and I want you to stop being in love
with me. I want you to be my friend and have fun like we used to. Now listen, do you want me to give you back that car you
gave me? I’ll give you back the car.”

“Please don’t give me back the car. All my life I wanted to give someone a blue convertible. Don’t ruin it by talking like
that.”

“I’m sorry. That was mean of me. I knew better than to say that. I’ll keep that car forever. You know that. I might get buried
in that car.” She gave him a kiss on his freckled chest, tied a green scarf around her hair, floated out of the house, got
into the blue convertible and away she went, weaving in and out of the lanes of traffic, thinking about how hard it was to
find out what you wanted in the world, much less what to do to get it.

It was either that night that fertilized one of Nora Jane Whittington’s wonderful, never to be replaced or duplicated as long
as the species lasts, small, wet, murky, secret-bearing eggs. Or it was two nights later when she heard a love song coming
out an open doorway and broke down and called Sandy Halter and he came and got her and they went off to a motel and made each
other cry.

Sandy was the boy Nora Jane had lived with in New Orleans. She had come to California to be with him but there was a mix-up
and he didn’t meet her plane. Then she found out he’d been seeing a girl named Pam. After that she couldn’t love him anymore.
Nora Jane was very practical about love. She only loved people that loved her back. She never was sure what made her call
up Sandy that night in Berkeley. First she dreamed about him. Then she passed a doorway and heard Bob Dylan singing. “Lay,
lady, lay. Lay across my big brass bed.” The next thing she knew she was in a motel room making love and crying. Nora Jane
was only practical about love most of the time. Part of the time she was just as dumb about it as everybody else in the world.

“How can we make up?” she said, sitting up in the rented bed. “After what you did to me.”

“We can’t help making up. We love each other. I’ve got some big things going on, Nora Jane. I want you working with me. It’s
real money this time. Big money.” He sat up beside her and put his hands on his knees. He looked wonderful. She had to admit
that. He was as tan as an Indian and his hair was as blond as sunlight and his mind as faraway and unavailable as a star.

“Last night I dreamed about you,” she said. “That’s why I called you up. It was raining like crazy in my dream and we were
back in New Orleans, on Magazine Street, looking out the window, and the trees were blowing all over the place, and I said,
Sandy, there’s going to be a hurricane. Let’s turn on the radio. And you said, no, the best thing to do is go to the park
and ride it out in a live oak tree. Then we went out onto the street. It was a dream, remember, and Webster Street and Henry
Clay were under water and they were trying to get patients out of the Home for the Incurables. They were bringing them out
on stretchers. It was awful. It was raining so hard. Then I got separated from you. I was standing in the door of the Webster
Street Bar calling to you and no one was coming and the water was rising. It was a terrible dream. Then you were down the
street with that girl. I guess it was her. She was blond and sort of fat and she was holding on to you. Pam, I guess it was
Pam.”

“I haven’t seen Pam since all that happened. Pam doesn’t mean a thing to me. Pam’s nothing.”

“Then why was I dreaming about her?”

“Don’t ruin everything, Nora Jane. Let’s just love each other.”

“You want to make love to me some more? Well, do you?”

“No, right now I want a cigarette. Then I want to take you to this restaurant I like. I want to tell you about this outfit
I’m working for. I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I have to take Mirium’s car back so I’ll take you with me and
show you what’s going on.”

“I’ve been wondering what you were up to.”

“Just wait till you meet Mirium. She’s my boss. I’ve told her all about you. Now come on, let’s get dressed and get some dinner.
I haven’t eaten all day.” Sandy had gotten out of bed and was putting on his clothes. White linen pants and a blue shirt with
long full sleeves. He liked to dress up even more than Nora Jane did.

Sandy’s boss, Mirium Sallisaw, was forty-three years old. She lived in a house on a bluff overlooking the sea between Pacifica
and Montara. It was a very expensive house she bought with money she made arranging trips to Mexico for people that wanted
to cure cancer with Laetrile. The Laetrile market was dying out but Mirium wasn’t worried. She was getting into Interferon
as fast as she could make the right connections. Interferon and Energy. Those were Mirium’s key words for 1983.