Then I turned and the thought vanished. She was there, in the middle of the staircase. She was watching me.
Alice, it took no more time than the tick of a clock, but let me play with time a little; after all, it has played with me. You wore a long white gown, drizzled with embroidery and lace, the sleeves mere veils for your arms, some kind of silver belt coming to a point below your waist, and the long train falling behind you on the stairs in a glittering coil; a dress that clung to you the way the delicate germ clings to its pale seed. There was nothing around your neck, nothing at all, just your pale skin rippling like a river as you swallowed—I learned later you had taken a belt of whiskey just before—as you looked down at me beneath a pompadour that I knew would smell of lavender, with the grandeur of a woman over thirty, no worries of youth, no confusions or fluttering eyes, a woman of passion on those stairs with one hand on the banister. Alice, there were stars in your hair.
“Asgar, Mother isn’t feeling well.”
“She isn’t?”
“That cold of hers, you know.” You held a little feather fan and tapped it on the stair rail.
“Typical.”
You laughed. The net on your shoulders fell down an inch; the belt winked in silver. More fan-tapping. Beautiful, more beautiful.
“Come down here,” I told you.
You looked at a glossy set of women making their way past. “Why?” you asked. “I like it up here.”
“Come down and have dinner with me.”
“I’m not sure I’m hungry.”
“Come down!” I shouted happily.
You leaned back your head and laughed, every bell within you ringing. The rotund clock chimed four, five, eight thousand times. Alice, I pity everyone who has not known you.
That night, we sat together on a little velvet couch, side by side, and the waiter winked as he pushed the linened table over our laps, trapping us together just as one is trapped inside a roller coaster out at Funland-by-the-Sea. We drank a bottle of wine, unchaperoned, and chewed on the tender bones of ortolans, which I had never tasted before, and when at one point she picked up the wrong glass, I was left with hers through the rest of dinner, imprinted with the pink lunar mark of her lip on the rim. All evening I kept lifting it to my mouth, my lips to hers. And on my Alice drank, laughing more freely, staring around the room as if the golden ceiling were hers, all hers, a spot of color appearing on her left cheek like the tinted heart of a white rose. After dinner, she stood up and said we were going outside to the little stone balcony, where I sputtered into a dull and meandering story before she cut me short, asking about my first kiss.
“Oh no, I’d much rather hear about you,” I said, risking the great danger of hearing your life told to you by another.
“Hmm. It wasn’t my husband,” she said. “Maybe it’s a sad story.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“As long as you tell me yours.” Her smile was made more erotic by the half-closed orchids of her eyes. Then she began: “Actually, you know this story. It was Max Tivoli who debauched me, your old colleague.”
“I never knew him …”
She laughed, only teasing; I was not caught. “He lived above us. He was an old man but he tried to act younger. He was sweet, actually, or was he really? I can’t decide, it’s all mixed up for me. I was fourteen. I remember he wore funny clothes, dyed his hair, spoke in a funny voice, was so strange, he told me he was really a boy inside. Not an old man but a child, like me. I was a mess that night—I was in love. I’d had my heart broken, and I went to him because—well, sort of as a father and sort of, honestly, because I knew he liked me. He watched me all the time. And I was so lonely that night and I’d never kissed a man before and I wanted it to be over with, forget love, or what mothers teach us. So I chose Max Tivoli.” Alice chuckled, remembering. “He smelled like an adult, like whiskey, and shoe leather. But he tasted, you know he did taste like a boy. Like oranges. He was trembling. I think—even at fourteen you know these things—that he was in love with me, in his strange way. Ugly old coot. So that was it. My first kiss. I think it’s kind of sad, don’t you?”
She brought her eyes back to me and they were calm; the thought of that pitiful kiss was not so awful, after all.
“So who was yours?” she asked.
“Just a girl.”
“Just a girl,” she repeated. Her eyes traveled in a triangle around my face. “That poor girl, what would she think if she heard that?”
“A girl I knew. She loved somebody else.”
“You knew that?”
“Oh I knew.”
There was that crooked little smile. She said, “You evil little man. You seduced her, didn’t you?”
I could smell the jasmine from the vine, and the pine trees, and her perfume. I could think of nothing to say. For the first time, I wondered if she might be drunk. “Well, but … well, I loved her.”
Her eyes softened in sympathy. “You really did, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How old were you?”
“I was seventeen.”
She walked a little bit away from me, as if the memory of these old loves of ours, these antique statues, had to be left behind for us to continue. “People always say the greatest love story in the world is Romeo and Juliet. I don’t know. At fourteen, at seventeen, I remember, it takes over your whole life.” Alice was worked up now, her face flushed and alive, her hands cutting through the night-blooming air. “You think about nobody, nothing else, you don’t eat or sleep, you just think about this … it’s overwhelming. I know, I remember. But is it love? Like how you have cheap brandy when you’re young and you think it’s marvelous, just so elegant, and you don’t know, you don’t know anything … because, you’ve never tasted anything better. You’re fourteen.”
It was no time for lying. “I think it’s love.”
“You do?”
“I think maybe it’s the only true love.”
She was about to say something, and stopped herself. I’d surprised her, I suppose. “How sad if you’re right,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment. “Because we never end up with them. How sad and stupid if that’s how it works.”
“Don’t be sad.”
“What?”
“Don’t be sad, Alice.”
That was when I kissed her. It happened quite naturally—after all, I had been kissing her glass all night—and afterwards it occurred to me that this was Max’s second time with Alice, but only Asgar’s first, so it had the thrill of an impossible moment as well as the comfort of something that had returned to me at last. I’m not sure how I did it—it makes no difference what a man does at this point; it is either going to happen or it isn’t—but somehow I found my sweet girl in my arms and I tasted the wine all over again.
She grabbed the lapels of my waistcoat and I felt, in the haze of
my memory and delight, the bite of her teeth on my lips—oh Alice, let no one say that you were timid in your youth. That you did not take what you wanted. I stood with my eyes wide open at this miracle, but yours were closed, rose-powdered, your knowledgeable widow-fingers everywhere, touching, searching, and I was like one of those ridiculous machines that swallow a nickel and quiver deliciously for exactly two minutes. Hell, I was like anything you can think of: an aspen, a thundering timpani, a locomotive boiler about to blow his gust of steam.
But so brief. A moment later she was across the balcony, flushcheeked, hand on her glowing breast, a look in her eyes as if she had overheard a terrible secret.
Was it possible? That my bargain with time had undone me and Alice had recognized me at last, had tasted in our kiss the Max I used to be?
“Alice, I …”
She shook her head. I could see some complicated equation moving behind her eyes. She gave a little smile and told me she had to see her mother. I asked her to stay; I said I had impetuously ordered another bottle and now it would go to waste. Her cheek flushed again, and I saw now that it wasn’t the wine at all but her heart, beating too fast for her own blood. That little factory working overtime within her breast. Oh darling, you didn’t recognize a thing; you didn’t mind my mouth at all, did you? Though you would hate to hear it, you were like your mother before you, a woman in white in the dark, body all abloom, and you had to decide what to do with me now.
“Alice, I’m sorry, I thought you—”
She laughed. “Don’t, Asgar.”
“I understand.”
“No you don’t.”
I did not know what to do; I could not explain that I did understand, that in fact I was the only one who ever would, but I said
nothing. I watched her breast go sunset-pink. I knew this was not love here, not exactly, and besides, I am no Casanova; I could never convince a woman that life is too short to walk away from moonlit balconies.
“Tomorrow morning,” I said.
She touched my face gently and said nothing. She bent down, hooked her finger into the cloth loop of her train, and walked away from me into the dining room, stumbling through the chairs and tables because, of course, she’d belted whiskey to keep her nerves up that night. My sweet Alice, she had wanted to be charming and alive. For me, you see.
I finished the wine and treated myself, in the gentlemen’s bar, to a drink or four. I remember staggering back to my room, hearing the dogs barking from the lawn, and a milk horse whinnying in distress as he made his early rounds. I recall thinking that the world was restless and sad, and after that, I remember nothing of my waking life.
Sammy, these are dull facts, but I give them because they are my only excuse. The distance from my city, the solid bedrock of the Del Monte, the thick soup of my dreams—my only excuse for why I missed what happened next.
I awoke to a hail of splinters—the door to my hotel room being burst open at its lock.
“Mr. Dollar?”
I can sleep almost anywhere—a train, a car, and perhaps an airplane although I have never been on one—but I can’t awaken anywhere. I open my eyes, unsure of where I am, and I grow briefly afraid. I am used to waking up in a strange body, but strange rooms terrify me. You will remember, Sammy, how my first week here I
bumped my head on your bunk each morning, then cried out like a maiden; you never knew that I thought I was a thousand miles away, a century before, in old South Park, Maggie’s sausages frying on the stove, only to discover myself in a miniature bed in the plain, plaid Midwest.
So, that morning at the Del Monte, it took me nearly a minute to register, first of all, that I was in a hotel room and had somehow ended up on the floor, cocooned in quilts, and, second, that Bitsy stood above me in a dazzle of morning light.
“Mr. Dollar?”
A bellboy was beside her, and I later discovered it was he, and not the powerful Levy maid, who had broken the door. I was terrified, as I’ve said, and a brief tenderness broke the hardness of that woman’s face, and I swear she almost reached out to comfort me, but her hand went back to her thick waist and she shouted: “He’s alive!”
“What’s going on?”
She looked over me appraisingly. “You okay? Looks like you got thrown out of bed.”
“Well, I’ve been known to sleepwalk …”
“Why didn’t you answer?”
“Answer what?”
Bitsy gave her head that cockatoo tilt. “I been calling you.”
“What’s happened?”
She grinned a little and nudged the bellboy. “He wants to know what’s happened. Huh.”
“Bitsy, could you hand me my robe?”
She ignored my command and instead turned to the bellboy, who held my robe for me. “You got that paper? Give him that. I’m downstairs packing, Mr. Dollar. Off to friends in Pasadena if we can, and we won’t be back.”
I put on my robe as she left. A shout came from down the hall,
and the bellboy quickly handed me the paper. It was an early edition of the
San Jose Evening News,
sparsely laid out and full of typos:
Stanford University buildings badly wrecked, with heavy loss of life.
Santa Cruz badly shaken, loss of life heavy; all important buildings destroyed.
No trains from north or south had arrived at 8 o’clock.
The wires being down the reports could not be verified.
A man is reported to have arrived from San Francisco, in an auto, reporting that the disaster there is worse than in San Jose.
Late—Thousands of people reported killed in San Francisco.
“What happened?” I whispered. “What happened?”
The answer came: a careless roll of the earth. It felt like a maid making a bed and flicking the sheet until it lies flat, a roll that seemed to come across the room towards me, sending me down face-first. I tasted dust. It was perhaps the fourth aftershock that morning, but the first that I had felt. Earthquake, of course.
It will seem brave or heartless to you, but it simply never occurred to me that Mother and Mina might be dead. I think it came from the childish notion that family is too permanent to die, or that God, knowing I had lost a grandmother and a father, would not be so wicked as to take every other lovely thing from my life. This was my hope as I lay there, my heart buzzing and oozing like a shaken hive, and I came to learn it was a common one. In the following weeks, after the fire had burned its last, you could still see sad handbills—for instance, “Missing: Mrs. Bessie O. Steele, age 33, dark hair, slender, who was to be at the Rex Hotel”—and every one of us understood it was a stupid hope, but a good one. We could not tear them down.