Three-Martini Lunch (29 page)

“Now,” she said, taking on an imperious tone, “give Miles a proper toast.” She raised her paper cup high in the air.

Joey looked at me. “I don't know if I can do it justice,” he said, shaking his head.

“May I say something?” I interjected.

“Of course,” said Sally Ann. “Go right ahead.”

“I don't believe I would've found my father's journal without you, Joey,” I said. “I was very lucky, that night, when I picked up the wrong coat by mistake.” I raised my glass.

Not yet privy to the context, Sally Ann appeared vaguely intrigued.

Joey raised his cup. “I'm happy for you, Miles, that you found what you were looking for. I'm happy that I got to help, if only a little bit. I wish . . .” He trailed off and looked at the carpet. All around us, the party raged on, but I was so focused on Joey in that moment, it was as if someone had turned the sound down. Joey cleared his throat and looked back up. “It's a shame you can't stay here longer.”

“To Miles,” Sally Ann chimed in, taking over, “who is no doubt a true charmer, for he has evidently managed to beguile the infamously impossible Joey.” She winked again, glancing back and forth between our faces and smiling to herself upon seeing our mutual discomfort.

No one said anything further. We clinked paper cups, the sound of waxed paper tapping together, and all of us took a sip. It was warm and a bit foamy; the bottle should have been put on ice.

“I've just had the most brilliant idea,” Sally Ann blurted, breaking the lull. “Maybe Miles
doesn't
have to leave town so soon after all. I mean . . . if it's only a question of hotel expense.”

I should have known what was coming next. Sally Ann was the type of girl who expressed her jealousy by pushing her unrequited love closer to his object of desire. I had seen girls do this to other girls, pretending mad glee at the prospect of playing matchmaker and madam for the boy who got away. But I had never seen a woman do this to two men. Given the perils of the day, it struck me as cruel-spirited on her part.

“What are you talking about, Sally Ann?” Joey asked.

“I happen to own an old houseboat,” she replied. “Across the bay in Sausalito. My grandfather left it to me, and I don't really do much with it. Mainly I've kept it in order to hold parties on it; you know, little bohemian affairs in the summertime.

“I throw a mean campout,” she added, giving Joey a little knowing smile and nudge. “In any case, it's not exactly the Ritz, but it's got all the necessities . . . plumbing and electricity and all that.”

She turned to me.

“I don't see why you couldn't stay on it, if you wanted to.” She smiled, a wicked gleam creeping into her eye.

“Say . . . that might not be a bad idea . . . What do you think, Miles?” Joey asked with a sudden wave of fresh energy. “You could stay on a little longer, see the sights. After all . . . three thousand miles is an awful long way. Who knows when you'll ever make it out here again?”

I considered. “That's true,” I said. I still hesitated.

“C'mon, what do you have waiting for you back in New York, anyhow?” Joey prodded.

I shrugged. I realized I
did
want to spend more time in San Francisco. With Joey.

“And of course Joey will keep you company,” Sally Ann added, as though reading my mind. We both turned to look at her, unsure how she meant this comment. “You'll stay with him on the houseboat, won't you, dear?” she said to Joey in a glib, casual voice.

Joey blinked.

“I've only just met Miles,” she explained, “and I would be more comfortable loaning the houseboat out to a stranger if I knew someone I trusted would also be there.”

Her red lips twisted into a tight, closed-mouth smile. It was a challenge, a dare. Sally Ann had offered Joey something she knew he wanted. She was daring him to accept.

“I . . . suppose I could do that,” Joey replied hesitantly. He studied my face for some signal of approval or rejection, but there was nothing there for him to see; I was as still as a stone, frozen on the surface while my heart beat wildly within my chest. I could feel it pumping so hard as to rise into my throat. “If Miles doesn't mind the arrangement.”

Joey had told me he and Eddie were crashing with a buddy of Eddie's. I supposed one free place was as good as another, but of course there was more to Sally Ann's proposal than just that. Standing there, sipping our champagne, we all knew it, but nobody was willing to say so—not even
Sally Ann, who clearly delighted in our awkwardness. I wondered what Joey would tell Eddie, and Eddie's buddy.

“Good!” she exclaimed now. “Then it's settled. I'll give you the key,” she said to Joey, “and Miles can check out of his hotel first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Great,” Joey murmured.

“Great,” I echoed. I turned to Sally Ann and thanked her in a rote voice as she smirked at me, smug and knowing.

Sally Ann drank the rest of the champagne with us and handed over a key with a rabbit's foot key chain that was worn through to the shiny tendons. Then she released us back into the thrumming energy of the party, an expert fisherman throwing back her catch. She smiled over her shoulder as she swished away. Joey and I bumped around the room, making small talk with other party guests as if terrified to be alone together, manic and jumpy and excited and thoroughly discomfited.

The same question repeated over and over in my mind . . . What had I agreed to? The answer was something that both Joey and I would decide together, and at the same time I knew it had already been decided. I knew one thing: I would not have made the same decision back home in New York. There was something permissive about this faraway city, barely hanging on to the edge of the Western Hemisphere. I was a different person here. I, too, was hanging on to an edge of sorts, but for the first time in my life was willing to let go.

It wasn't until a full day or two later that I realized when Joey had asked me
What do you have waiting for you back in New York, anyhow?
I had missed my chance to say:
Janet. I have Janet waiting for me.

I
t was daw
n by the time we left Sally Ann's party. We went to my hotel. It was clear the man in the reception booth recognized Joey from the day before. He watched us out of the corner of his eye, his lips faintly twisted in an expression of disgust, so Joey waited downstairs while I went upstairs to quickly pack up my things.

“Here is my forwarding address,” I said upon checking out. I pushed a slip of paper under the window. On it I'd scribbled the number of the Sausalito P.O. box Sally Ann had given us. The clerk accepted the slip of paper with a grunt. He looked me over with a flat, stoic gaze and spat the sunflower seed he'd been chewing into a cup. I found myself feeling skeptical that I'd ever see any forwarded messages.

“Ready?” Joey asked.

•   •   •

A
s we walked down to the pier to catch the ferry, I took off my coat and carried it folded awkwardly over my arm. The weather in San Francisco, I
had decided, had something of the coquette about it. It was impossible to dress for it. One minute you might find yourself basking in the blinding sunshine and sweating under the heavy weight of your winter coat, while the next you might be shivering in the kind of gray, bitter cold usually reserved for Gothic novels.

The ferry ride was pleasant. Once in Sausalito, we followed the shoreline past the marina to a group of eccentric-looking structures. Joey later told me the history behind the houseboat, as it had clearly been cobbled together over the years. Sally Ann's grandfather had purchased the houseboat, as well as a small fishing boat, back when Sausalito was still a fishing village. With no Golden Gate Bridge at that time, San Francisco was a faraway place, a glowing orb across the bay that meant a lot to the yachtsmen who made port and talked loudly about their holdings in El Dorado gold mines, but was little more to the local fishermen than a glorified lighthouse. When both her grandfather and father had died and this meager legacy passed on to Sally Ann, she sold the fishing boat but retained the houseboat, mostly—as she had told us—as a secondary location for the infamous parties she threw.

The day we moved in, we picked our way around the deck and past the plants in their chipped terra-cotta planters, and turned the key for the first time. Right away, nothing was how I'd pictured it. When I had first heard the word
houseboat
, I expected lots of white and navy paint, and for everything to be airy and lightweight and able to float on water. Contrary to my expectations, the front door was a heavy piece of redwood. Joey pushed it open and we were met with a rush of cool, somber, wet air. It smelled of silt and marine salt and of fragrant herbs and at the same time of a cold, moldy basement.

Like the front door, the walls of the houseboat were made out of redwood. But unlike the front door, which had lost most of its natural red pigment to the elements, the wood of the walls was alive with color. The paneling inside the houseboat was a marbled combination of crimson,
amber, and gold. There was a tinge of shiny gloss to the walls—not from any owner's attempt to seal them with a gloss, but from the simple passage of time rubbing them smooth with human contact. In a far corner sat a wood-burning stove made out of black iron. This was by far the most unexpected item in the room as far as I was concerned. I don't know what I had imagined should keep the boat warm, but certainly not this. Its heaviness alarmed me; it seemed to me the boat might sink under its weight. And the idea that one should heat the boat by burning the very thing that kept it afloat—wood! Nonetheless, there it sat, belching heat into the room once it had been properly fed.

The interior of the houseboat bore the evidence of several curious attempts to fix it up. Someone had laid down felt as a sort of makeshift wall-to-wall carpeting. It was billiard green and wet to the touch during my entire stay on the houseboat. If you walked over it in socks, your soles were wet for the rest of the evening. When I think about it now, it makes sense that perhaps the green felt accounted for a good portion of the cold, moldy basement odor that seemed to permeate everything.

The houseboat was sparsely furnished, yet somehow felt stuffed with bric-a-brac. Various tools and fishing accouterments hung from nails hammered all over the walls of the boat's one main room. Magazines and newspapers were stacked waist-high, and the windowsills were littered with scraps of paper and receipts. A pair of outdoor deck chairs sat in the middle of the room, surrounding a small wooden table too high for the chairs. It was a height difference that rendered all three items somewhat useless; this observation was verified when I sat in one of the deck chairs and promptly found the table came to my chin. The only other major piece of furniture on the houseboat was a captain's bed built into the far corner. It was an unusual size: ostensibly it was a double bed, but was a good six inches shorter than one might ordinarily expect. I'll admit I had quite a bit of trouble with that bed. The nights I slept there, my feet
dangled over the edge, and I often woke up only to discover they had gone numb due to the night's chill and poor circulation.

Joey and I took two very different attitudes towards the houseboat. We both saw it for the dingy dump that it was, but we responded to its dull sheen and drab environment in opposite ways. Joey made changes. He began with the windows, wiping clean the crust of white haze some previous occupant had purposely applied with soap. He dragged what little furniture we had around the room, seeking their ideal arrangement. He lifted whole stacks of newspapers and magazines and dumped them into the bay. “The fish can catch up on the headlines,” he said.

It was obvious Joey was in the mood to create some kind of true home on that houseboat. I did not notice or understand this at the time, but I see it now. I had a very different reaction to the houseboat. I moved around the space like a stranger, careful not to leave my mark. If I needed something that might require that I hunt in the cabinets or in the trunks, I waited until Joey came home. Or, even more often, I went without. I touched nothing, I opened nothing, I dusted nothing.

It was not that I was leery of Sally Ann, worried that she might turn up unannounced. It was more nebulous than that. It was the houseboat itself I didn't want to disturb, as though it might swallow me up if I opened the wrong drawer or stirred the wrong cobweb. The truth is I was afraid.

Up until the moment I packed my suitcase and checked out of my hotel, Joey was merely a helpful stranger who had developed a vested interest in helping me look for my father's journal. This is the lie I told myself. And this is the lie that kept me comfortable in his presence and allowed me to continue inching closer to him without feeling the space between us diminishing. But the day we moved onto the houseboat, this lie evaporated, carried off by some more substantial breeze. I was well aware that as soon as we unlocked the door and let ourselves in, I should have turned and left. There was only one bed and no sofa; I'm certain
Sally Ann was conscious of this fact when she offered the houseboat in the first place.

We didn't speak about sleeping arrangements as Joey and I began to nervously unpack our things. The banter between us was too easy, and too difficult, all at the same time. I knew I should get out of there and never look back. But by then the lie had delivered me into the hands of the truth, so to speak, and there
was
no going back. I was, for the first wonderful, terrible time, exactly where I belonged. Together we put our things away with a shared sense of solemn, frightened dignity. When our suitcases were empty, we turned to face each other in the middle of the room, and with a soldier's bravery Joey reached out to hold the back of my skull, very gently, in his hand.

We were lost to each other after that.