The Royal Family (16 page)

So how are you doing? he said finally.

Oh, you know how it is, she said. Her eyes were red and swollen.

Do you feel the baby yet?

I feel something. I don’t know if it’s the baby or not.

You look so sad, he said. What’s wrong, honey? Please tell me what the matter is.

You know what the matter is, said Irene. That’s all I ever talk about. I’m sorry . . .

There was a black cat on the window-seat, basking—a creature of great elegance and self-assurance which presently began to purr in the soft low buzz of an electric razor. Irene smiled at it and made kissing sounds, but it ignored her.

Did you have pets when you were a kid? said Tyler.

Irene nodded, her glass at her lips. The waitress had begun to unload the usual immense appetizer tray of kimchees white and red, pickled fish, dried fish, seaweed soup, miso paste. Irene set her glass down, took her chopsticks from the paper envelope, and began to grate them back and forth against each other in case there might be splinters. The cat went on purring.

And how’s work for you? asked Irene.

Slow. Still looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found. You had cats, you said?

She nodded again, listlessly. Then she took her chopstick wrapper and began twisting it, teeth sinking ruthlessly into her lower lip as she stared aimlessly about, spurious, objectless copy of some fighting-girl on speed who rushed back and forth along Valencia Street, looking for the two girls she had beaten because she lusted to beat them again. Irene, of course, was not the fighting kind.

John and I always had dogs, Tyler said. Sheep dogs, border collies, you know . . .

How’s Mugsy?

I don’t know. I didn’t ask Mom . . .

I always had bad luck with cats and I love them so much, said Irene. In Korea we had one cat, and when he was hardly more than a baby he went out one night and I guess he must have found some poison. Maybe rat poison. He came into the house real early in the morning, throwing up blood and this horrible yellow stuff, and he was in
convulsions. I guess he came home because he thought we could save him. With cats and dogs, one of the most amazing things about them is the way they get to trust you. You can do anything to them, even if it hurts, because they know you love them and are trying to do the best thing for them. And that cat—I said he was our cat, but really he was my cat; he loved me the best, and I loved him—well, Henry, he kept looking into my eyes. He was rolling around on the rug and screaming and whenever he caught his breath he kept looking into my face ’cause he believed in me. He was sure I could do something. I took him to the vet before school. I was actually a little late for school. And I was nervous about that, ’cause I’d never been late before. I wasn’t a good girl in school that day. I kept crying and praying. And I just ran home. I asked my grandmother if the vet had been able to fix my cat, and she said, no, they couldn’t fix him. Because the intestines were all torn. The vet buried him.

Probably threw him in the garbage, Tyler thought to himself.

Bending over, the waitress reached beneath the table, turned on the gas jet, and then lit it. Blue flames danced evilly up. With tongs and scissors, the waitress took the
kalbi
and
bulgoki
strips out of the marinade and laid them into the grill, where they began to sizzle loudly. With a mechanical smile, Irene accepted the tongs from her and began to turn the meat. Then the waitress thrust the scissors into the marinade bowl and carried it away.

So they got me another cat, Irene said. Another boy cat. I was about fifteen then. I was late starting my period, but one day it came. And the cat knew right off. He started to lick me.

Were your parents happy that you’d become a woman?

I didn’t tell them. In my family we don’t talk about those things.

I know one Japanese girl whose mother cooked red beans that night to celebrate, said Tyler. And when her father wanted to know what the fuss was all about, her mother just said that a very good thing had happened.

I guess my mother must have known, because my underpants were bloody, Irene said, picking up strips of well-done meat with the tongs and putting them on his plate. —My cat sure knew. In our house the cats weren’t supposed to sleep inside. But every night at around midnight this cat would scratch at my window, and I’d get up and let him in. And he’d come into my bed and lick my nightgown all night, right between my breasts. His tongue was kind of rough, and sometimes it almost hurt, but it also felt really good. He licked so much that my nightgown turned black there. Every night he’d come and do that, and sleep with me. It was kind of my secret, I guess. It made me feel special. And in the morning when I went to school, that cat would follow me along the top of the wall as far as he could, and then in the afternoon when I came home he’d be waiting for me. Well, we were getting ready to move to America then. My grandmother was already in Los Angeles, and then my big aunt and uncle, and then little aunt and uncle, and then it was just us and we’d already sold our house. I asked my mother what was going to happen to my cat, and she didn’t answer. And one night that cat didn’t come scratching at my window. I kind of wondered and worried about that, ’cause he’d never failed to come to me before. And in the morning I didn’t see him. My mother said that he knew we were going to leave him, so he was sad and ran away. Cats just know.

Your mother probably gave him away and didn’t have the guts to tell you, Tyler thought.

You want another beer, Irene? he said. Here’s to fetal alcohol syndrome!

Oh, Henry, I’m feeling—I don’t know how I’m feeling. Can we please please finish? I want to go home and lie down . . .

Irene . . .

I don’t know. I’ve almost had it with everything.

And John?

He’s good at digging into everything. I used to tell my parents and they’d say trust your busband, but they are not saying trust your husband anymore. He’s taken away all my credit cards. He takes all my paycheck. He’s never satisfied. I’m sorry; he’s your brother; maybe you—

You know better than that, Irene.

Can we please please go now? I want to lie down. I want to go to bed.

Irene was supposed to meet him on Union Street. He stood waiting in front of the shop with the phony picket fence below the window. Inside lay a long narrow glass table whose legs were naked bronze women bending backward and supporting the top with their outstretched arms. Behind the table he perceived stained glass lamps (he didn’t know whether they were real Tiffanys or not,) and green drinking glasses like magnifying lenses. —He looked at his watch. —Another shop window boasting of gold-ivied dinner plates as round and white as the breasts of a girl with whom he’d once gone skinnydipping in high school, a shy girl who probably never undressed except at night, for her skin had been as pale and perfect as a hardwood floor kept under a ratty old carpet. In the next window he saw a cat made of milk-porcelain, watching herself in the mirror, a seven-drawer lingerie chest in the Queen Anne style on sale for $279.00—how many pairs of underpants did a woman need, to take up seven drawers? Next was the window of the optometrist’s shop, whose many double lenses, yes, those, too, reminded him of breasts.

Irene had not arrived. He went to the espresso bar and ordered a double shot. The coffee soon began to kick in, rewarding him with a pleasantly twitchy feeling. He went out and looked for her black Volkswagen Rabbit but didn’t see it. The orange and white # 45 bus with its long feelers drank from wires and disappeared, and that moment he knew that she was not going to show up. A watch-gaze: Forty minutes late. Irene was never late.

He began to walk east, toward the Tenderloin, and suddenly right in front of the next coffeehouse or maybe the next he met a grizzled grimy panhandler whose hands were streaked with blackish-grey, as if human flesh, like the silver it so often sells for, could tarnish; and the panhandler said: Can you give me anything?

Why, sure I can, said Tyler, grateful that for the next twenty to thirty seconds that heavy sadness in his chest and the nervousness in the cesspool of his churning stomach and the anger against Irene that dwelled behind his eyes might not be felt. He turned out his pocket, finding three dimes, which he gave the man, for the first time looking into his face. But the panhandler was gazing far beyond him. Tyler would never see what he saw.

Past Buchanan the shops were not so fancy, the jewelry plated rather than solid, the shop windows weary with glass eggs or glass snail shells or cast ballerinas whose tits he
could barely see. Skinny, hairy-legged joggers headed back toward their medium-rent apartments, clutching freshly purchased cappuccinos and raspberry-papaya smoothies, emanations of royalty.

He gazed down the gentle slope between white houses that led to the Marina district where John and Irene lived.

When he got to the next pay phone he reached into his pocket and then remembered that he’d given all his change to that panhandler. He went into the corner deli and bought a candy bar with a dollar bill. They gave him two quarters back. He dialled.

Yes? said his brother before the second ring.

Hello, John, he said as mildly as he could.

What did you have to do with this? said the cruelly level voice.

His heart sank. —What do you mean?

Don’t lie to me ever again, said John in the weariest voice that he had ever heard. I just don’t have any more time for your lies.

Tyler thought for a moment. Then he hung up the phone, changed another dollar, and called his mother, who also answered before the second ring.

How’s everything, Mom?

His mother began to cry. —Oh, Henry, she wept. John just called. Oh, poor, poor Irene.

•

The nonuniformed or plainclothes investigator is in a good position to observe illegal activities and obtain evidence. For example, a male plainclothes officer may appear to accept the solicitations of a prostitute . . .

 

W
AYNE
W. B
ENNETT
AND K
ÄREN
M. H
ESS
,
Criminal Investigation
(1991)

•

Tyler’s car still smelled of flowers. Just before driving down to Los Angeles, he’d stopped at a florist’s in the Mission and filled the back seat with funeral wreaths upon double plastic bags of melting ice.

A blonde salesgirl stood outside of a bridal shop, leaning against one of the parted steel shutters and smoking a cigarette. Her windows screamed with whiteness.

Previously Tyler had allowed himself to blueprint the structure of a future life lonely but not unpleasant, a life of sitting on empty bleachers on Sundays and holidays, gazing unseeing through the mesh of some park fence, politely oriented toward the baseball diamond upon which shouting Little Leaguers might or might not be practicing as he listened to the crows declaim:
Ewww, ewww!
in demagogic accents—not a bad life at all, a privileged one, in fact, a thickening-around-the-middle life of birthday cards to nieces and nephews, of going to movies; maybe he’d take up fine art photography in earnest some day. He already had the equipment and the technique; it sounded less tedious than jerking off into the locator fluid. And John and Irene would have their mixed-race children, the ones to whom on birthdays he’d send stupid cards; Irene, who’d owned cats as a child, but always wanted a dog, would have a German shepherd or maybe a border collie by then—the eternal Mugsy. Irene and John could visit Tyler’s mother in the nursing home in which she’d surely be settled, if in fact she were still above the dirt. Tyler himself would accordingly be free to relocate. His needs were low; perhaps he couldn’t live on three hundred a year, like the Unabomber, but ten grand per annum might well see him through. —No more photography, then, and no fancy women—maybe a bottle of bourbon when he wanted it. His grandfather had done nicely on Black Velvet. In the old man’s accounts of his vacations, whiskey of some sort would always figure. —I remember when Elma and I took a trip out to Salt Lake in a Pullman car, he’d say. Those were good times, Henry; you can’t imagine how good. Elma liked to rest, of course, so I’d sit with her and we’d have a few nips, and then when I got sick of that, why, I’d leave her alone and head to the dining car, order a couple shots . . . —Now his grandfather was dead. Life passed, full of passions like a van crammed with shouting dogs; every year there’d come another Easter without a resurrection, a Fourth of July without children or hot dogs or fireworks, a silent telephone, every month half a dozen bills in the mail.