“The first store?”I asked blankly.
“I don't know why he agreed to do it,”she went on. “All I had was an idea; no experience, and next to nothing in the way of money. I went to him because I was told that Albert Craven was the best lawyer in the city for that kind of thing. I wanted the best,”she added with a bright, self-deprecating grin. “It never really occurred to me that it might be expensive. When he told me what it would cost, I must have looked like I had just swallowed something awful. Poor Albert! He couldn't help himself: He felt sorry for me. He denies it, but that is exactly what happened: He felt sorry for me and he decided to help. He became my lawyer and his only fee was a small percentage of the stock.”
“What kind of store was it—the first one you opened?”
“Women's apparel. I called it The Way of All Flesh,”she said, her eyes sparkling. “Do you like it?”
“I liked the book; I've never seen the store. It's a wonderful name, though.”
“You read Samuel Butler?”
“Long time ago. But if you've known Albert Craven that long, you must know my cousin, Craven's partner.”
She looked at me with a puzzled expression. “Albert's partner?”
“Bobby—I mean Robert—Medlin.”
At first she seemed not to believe it. “You're Bobby's cousin?”she asked, glancing at me and then turning back to the road. “Bobby's wife was one of my best friends.”
We had taken the scenic route, all the way down to the bottom of California Street, where the cable car tracks ended, then back up Market to Powell and then the few blocks around to Union Square. She pulled up in front of the hotel.
“I was thinking of driving up to the Napa Valley in the morning,”she said as I started to open the door. “Would you like to come along?”
E
arly the next morning Marissa Kane picked me up in front of the St. Francis Hotel.
“I thought you might need this,”she said, laughing quietly, as she handed me a steaming cup of black coffee.
The night before, the top had been up on her green Jaguar convertible, but this morning she had taken it down. Her hair was wrapped in a dark red silk scarf and her eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark glasses. We drove through the deserted streets of the city and out onto the Golden Gate Bridge, where for a moment we were almost blinded by the sun rising above the low-lying hills on the far side of the bay. The pale blue high-arching sky was streaked pink and scarlet and gold. The cool moving air rushed past my face, while down below the bay glistened silver-smooth, as still and shiny as glass. I turned up the collar of my jacket and slouched down until my head was resting against the top of the leather seat.
She was driving in the outside lane, next to the railing, keeping a steady pace. In the morning light, all the thousands of buildings that curled their way around the farther reaches of the bay looked like an enormous Bedouin encampment, just arrived after a long night's journey, that would be gone again when the sun slipped down below the far horizon.
“Do you know,”she said when we were halfway across, “that more than a thousand people have jumped off the bridge, and not one of them ever did it from the other side?”
We were so close that our shoulders touched, but her voice, though clear and distinct, seemed to come from a distance.
“They always jump facing the city,”she went on. “They want to die, and the only thing they can think about is seeing San Francisco one last time. I know it sounds strange,”she said with a soft, self-deprecating laugh, “but I think there is something rather wonderful, something sad and haunting and romantic about that.”
I looked up at the steel cables, strung like harp strings down each side of the bridge.
“I don't think it sounds strange at all. Would you do that?”I asked after a pause. “Jump off the bridge—if you were going to take your own life.”
“No,”she said, suddenly quite serious. “I'd never do it in such a public way. I'd get a prescription for something, something that wouldn't hurt at all—I'm not a great believer in pain of any kind—and then I'd get into my own bed and close my eyes and go to sleep and never wake up,”she said, as her voice trailed off.
“What about you?”she asked a moment later, her face once again full of expression. “Would you—jump off the bridge?”
“I have a fear of heights,”I admitted. “Besides, halfway down I'd probably change my mind.”
With a look of concern, she glanced across at me. “Does it bother you—driving across like this?”
Suddenly I felt like a coward. “No,”I lied, “it doesn't bother me at all.”
Then, to make the lie credible, I told the truth. “I don't think I'd want to walk across it, though.”
She tossed her head, darted a look back, and changed lanes as we left the bridge behind us.
“Would you do it with me?”she asked, a teasing lilt in her voice. “I wouldn't let you fall. I promise. I like high places—I like the view. I wouldn't want to jump off the bridge—that's true,”she said, laughing, as she gunned the engine. “But there are days—great, glorious days—when you almost wish you could just walk right out to the edge of the world and into the setting sun.”
She made it sound like it would be the simplest thing imaginable and the only thing you had ever really wanted to do, though you had never once in your life had that thought before.
We drove on, heading north, away from the bay. An hour later we were in the Napa Valley, crawling along the narrow street through St. Helena. On the other side of town, we passed under a tunnel of dark trees reaching across from each side of the road trying to touch. Off to the right, like some green-coated army, row after row of dusty grapevines swept across the valley to a temporary line of advance halfway up the surrounding hills.
Without warning, Marissa cut across the road into a large gravel parking lot already filled with tourist buses and private cars. Lost in a crowd of strangers, we wandered through a cave carved into the hillside, listening to the echoing voice of a guide explain why the wine was left to age so long in the vast oaken casks that lined the smooth cement floor. At the end of the tour, after we had seen everything there was to see, we stumbled out into the light. Marissa took hold of my sleeve to steady herself, laughing at how awkward she had for the moment become, and then let it go.
I bought us a soft drink and we sat on a stone bench behind the narrow Victorian mansion that had originally been built for the owner of the vineyard. For a number of years it had served as the office and the tasting room for the winery. Now it was a gift shop for tourists.
“When I first came out here, to San Francisco,”said Marissa, remembering something now gone forever, “you could come up here on a Saturday or a Sunday and stop at any winery you liked and almost never see anyone else at all.”
Two young couples came out of the gift shop together, carrying paper shopping bags with the logo of the winery fashioned on the side.
“By the end of the day, if you stopped at enough places,”continued Marissa, “you could be pretty well buzzed.”
Her long arms stretched straight behind her and her legs sprawled out in front of her, she turned her face, glistening in the light, up to the sun.
“It was better then, I think.”
There were people all around, crunching the gravel with their steps as they moved to and from the gift shop, filling the air with the muffled sound of their many voices; but it all seemed to come from far away, somewhere outside the circle where we sat. Bending forward, I rested my elbows on my knees and scratched the dirt with a twig.
“We were younger,”I reminded her.
“There weren't so many people,”she said in a soft, dreamy voice.
She closed her eyes all the way and lifted her face even closer to the sun.
“And the ones there were,”she whispered, moving her face slowly from side to side, savoring the warmth, “I liked better than the ones I know now.”
Her eyes opened and she rolled her head to the side until she was looking at me.
“Not all the ones I know now, of course. It's strange, though.”
I dragged the small stick through the final curve of a figure eight. “What's strange?”
“That you should be Bobby Medlin's cousin.”
“Why is that strange?”I stared at her for a moment and then looked back down at the ground, stirring the dust until the figure eight was gone and I could start another one.
“You're not the least alike.”
I could feel her eyes on me. I kept mine fixed on the point of the stick as I kept moving it around.
“Bobby is so outgoing—brash, even, full of life, always a good time. He can always make me laugh.”
I started to smile, not just because she was so right about Bobby.
“Bobby is never serious, or almost never serious, and you're always serious, even when you don't mean to be.”She thought of something. “Even the way you walk.”
“The way I walk?”I asked, laughing self-consciously.
“Bobby walks like he doesn't care where he is going; you walk like there is always someplace you have to be.”
I knew what she meant—about Bobby, at least. It was that way he had of seeming to be able to move at any moment in any direction he wanted to go.
“Bobby was an All-American,”I started to explain.
She did not hear me, or if she did, she paid no attention. “When I was in college, I knew a boy like you: always so serious, so intense.”
She tilted her head, gazing at me as if there were something she wanted to be sure about. “He had eyes just like yours— dark, brooding eyes. I could have fallen in love with him.”
She paused and then, her eyes glittering, added, “Maybe I did and just never admitted it to myself.”
I was a little confused. “You didn't want to fall in love with him?”
“I couldn't,”she replied with a hushed, rueful laugh. “I knew I would, though—if I kept seeing him. So after our third date …”She laughed again. “Date! We went out for coffee— in the afternoon. I told him we couldn't do it anymore. And when he asked why, I said in my nineteen-year-old cleverness that I was 'anti-hurt.' Yes, I said that. Anti-hurt.”
She shrugged her shoulders and, almost imperceptibly, bobbed her head from side to side, the amused and not altogether displeased spectator of her own youthful performance.
“We were walking across campus, the grass covered with the last leaves of autumn. The air was biting cold. I remember watching his breath when he started to tell me that it didn't make any sense. He wasn't the kind of boy who could ever just let anything go: He thought there were reasons for everything. I think he really thought,”she said with a shrewd glance, “that if you gave him a reason for something, he could find a better reason than the one you had and talk you out of it.”
She bit her lip and smiled sadly to herself. “I told him that we couldn't see each other anymore; I told him that my mother had always told me that if I ever brought home a boy who wasn't Jewish, I could never come home again.”
I looked at her, not certain whether to believe it. “What did he say to that?”
“He didn't believe me, not at first. He knew there were people who didn't like Jews; he didn't know it worked the other way around as well.”
She did not say anything more about it, and there was nothing I could think to ask. We began to talk about other things, and then, after a while, we left the winery and drove farther north, hugging the road that ran along the base of the western hills, past the spreading vineyards that covered the valley floor, until we reached the outskirts of Calistoga. High on a billboard, a pair of goggled eyes stared out from a face covered with an oozing brown liquid. The original Calistoga mud baths, discovered a century before, were, according to the sign, guaranteed to draw out through every pore every kind of bodily infirmity.
We parked the car and started to walk along the single street that ran the short length of the town. It was clogged with short-sleeved visitors, and when we reached the other end we ducked into the restaurant of a small two-story white stucco hotel.
There was a thirty-minute wait for a table inside. We quickly accepted the invitation to help ourselves to sit at one of the available wooden tables scattered around the deck outside. We found one next to a railing, just above a narrow, rock-filled creek. The fall rains, if they came at all, were still months away. The shallow creek bottom was dry and cracked and filled with brown, brittle reeds. Through the branches of an oak tree, the sunlight made a latticework pattern on the table. In the warm, still air, everything seemed to move with as little hurry as something seen through a twilit dust.
“Lawrence Goldman,”she repeated, raising her eyes from the menu, when I asked if she had heard of him. A smile danced across her lower lip and lingered at the corners of her mouth. She put the menu down and gave the waiter her order.
“Everyone knows Lawrence. Did you think I didn't?”she asked with a look that warned me I had come close to injuring her feelings.
“No, of course not,”I assured her. “I'm the one who doesn't know him; and it seems like I'm the only one who doesn't know him.”
She was eager and even, I thought, a little excited to tell someone who had only just learned Lawrence Goldman's name everything she could about him.
“Everyone knows Lawrence Goldman because Lawrence has spent fifty years or more making sure they do,”she began. “His name is the first one mentioned in the newspaper stories about any social event he attends; his name invariably heads the list of all the wealthy, socially prominent people who pledge contributions to any charitable cause. I don't think you can find a plaque on a building in the city that doesn't have his name on it.”
She paused while the waiter brought our order.
“Thank you,”she said when he had finished. “It looks wonderful.”
He must have heard it a dozen times a day, but when he heard it from her, heard that magical voice, you would have thought no one had ever thanked him for anything before.
She picked up her fork, then put it down. With a quick glance first to one side, then the other, she leaned forward, playing the conspirator.