“The downstairs tenant moved out. I’ve got to spackle his walls and repaint before I can rent his room.”
“Howard,” Connie continued, “it’s not your house. You’re just a tenant there. You slave over that place like it was the family mansion.”
Connie’s words could have been mine,
had
been mine more times than I was comfortably remembering.
But it was harder for Howard to deal with them from her. I rested my head against the wall.
“Someday the house will be mine and—”
“Yeah, sure, if the landlord is dumb enough to sell when he’s got a tenant handling the shit work and spending all his free time increasing his investment.”
“Connie, I just—”
“Howard, you are obsessed. You’re so obsessed you can’t even take a break to enjoy your free weekend.”
As one Leonard, Acosta, and Murakawa shrank back; things were getting too domestic for them. I was beginning to feel protective of Howard myself, but I could hardly jump in on his side when everything Pereira was saying she’d heard from me.
“Anyway,” Howard said, “I can’t go to Tahoe because I’m going on loan to Fresno next week.”
But Pereira was not to be deterred. “And how are you planning to spend your last days here with your live-in lover?”
I expected Howard to tell her that wasn’t for her virgin ears. But clearly he’d had enough. “Connie, whatever you think, the room needs to be painted, and done before I go.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then—”
“Howard, you
are
obsessed.”
Howard looked at me.
There are moments in life when Truth flashes clear and bright. This was one of them. “Howard,” I said, “do you remember that fifty-one fifty call you got when you were first on patrol years ago, the guy who had kept every newspaper he’d ever gotten stacked in his house so he’d never lose a fact of his life?”
Howard tapped his finger on my thigh. He was considering the argument more seriously than I had expected. I was impressed. I was just about to tell him so when I spotted the hint of a smile. He turned to me as if we were alone in the office. “Jill, I realize you don’t understand. It makes you uncomfortable to have your name on the house lease. You’d rather cut off your foot than actually own a home. You can’t even bring yourself to think what it’s like to feel as I do about this place.” There was no resentment in his words; they were just statements of fact. But statements that were clearly leading somewhere. “You once made a point of showing me how difficult it is for someone to really understand a situation he never wants to face.”
I nodded. Leonard, Murakawa, Acosta, and even Pereira didn’t know what he was referring to, but none of them interrupted. I knew exactly what he meant. I’d wanted Howard to realize what it was like to be a woman confined by society’s proscriptions—don’t walk alone after dark; don’t wear seductive clothes; never stop in a bar alone; always, always be careful—because if you break these rules and lure some man to attack you, it will be your fault. I’d engineered a sting of my own so that he, the six-foot-six cop, used to walking where he wanted with gun and baton could really feel bound by the walls inside which women have lived. I’d shown him, but the manipulation of that sting had left him with a debt unpaid. Now he was calling it in. I had no choice but to say, “Okay.”
“You want to know what it’s like to give up something I care about as much as this house?” he said.
I
didn’t,
of course. Murakawa and the rest of them
really
didn’t want to know. I could see Connie Pereira behind Howard and her expression said she would have given up almost anything just to get out of the room. “Okay.”
Howard lifted his hand off my leg. “I’ll stop working on the house for the rest of the month, Jill, if you will make a similar commitment.”
I’d have been better off dealing with Sam Johnson. Not for nothing was Howard known as the king of sting. On the spur of the moment he could come up with great gotchas. Given a week’s preparation time, he created cons worthy of Hollywood. He had had over a year to lick his wounds from my sting, to recall how easily he’d fallen in with it, to grasp vainly for the signs he should have seen, the things he should have done, to take to heart how the sting had changed things between us. To plot his revenge. With a year’s prep time Howard could make the Trojan horse look like a lawn flamingo. I squeaked out, “Just what kind of commitment do you want me to make?”
“Give up junk food.”
“Junk food?” Relief washed over me. Howard was letting me off easy. It would be no big deal to adjust my food intake for the rest of the month. Food was not a big item in my life. I ate what I could grab. So I’d grab something different.
“Starting now.”
“Okay.” Ridiculously easy, but I wasn’t about to argue. I leaned down and gave Howard a kiss. “Okay, leave your work clothes in the closet. Tahoe, here we come. Hey, we could even drive partway tonight. I’m getting a second wind, how about you? I can make us a thermos of coffee. And there’s still some pizza in the fridge, right? We can eat that—”
Howard grinned. “I don’t think so.”
A
FTER FORTY, THEY SAY
, dimmed light is a boon. In the case of Howard’s house, that was an understatement. The neighbors to the south had already complained about the sagging porch off the corner bedroom that looked like the top of an antique canopy bed. At least they didn’t have to worry about a noisy neighbor sitting out there at night listening to the A’s game. (The last tenant who had used that balcony was a large man who did, in fact, sunbathe with the A’s. He went through the floor one bright afternoon, sort of a pop fly unto himself.)
We had had a call from the neighbor to the north about the decrepit garage, and one from the guy across the street about the condition of the wood shake roof. But we already knew the shingles were thin, old, cracked, and separated. We had discovered that during the previous rainy season.
The six-bedroom house had many flaws. But at night, in the softening glow of the moon, it stood dark and appealing under the graceful umbrella of the jacaranda tree in front, crowned by the evergreen in the back.
At 3:30
A.M.
the tenants—an increasingly motley array Howard had been forced to accept for need of rent—were most likely asleep, or at least in their rooms. Howard and I had decided to leave for Tahoe in the morning. Now all I could think of was food. I headed inside.
So I wouldn’t have pizza. Like as not, the remains of last night’s pepperoni and black olive had been devoured hours ago when the night was young and the tenants prowling. But just yesterday I’d bought a gallon of chocolate marzipan ice cream, the kind with swaths of dark chocolate cutting the sweetness of the almond paste. I’d hidden it behind the ice trays. Some of that was bound to be left.
I started toward the kitchen—I could taste the marzipan, feel the ground almonds between my teeth, smell the—I stopped. No. I couldn’t have ice cream, either. Howard classified that not as the staff of life, which it is in my life, but as junk food.
Damn, I needed to eat
something.
There was a box of chocolate chip cookies Howard’s mother had sent in the …
No.
There were some Snickers in the bedroom.
He’d probably consider them junk food, too.
Suddenly I was starved. What
could
I eat? It was way too early for Noah’s Bagels to open. The scones at Peet’s Coffee wouldn’t be available for four more hours. What else was there? I was ravenous and there wasn’t one thing available.
I was going to shrivel and die. And the only keening at my wake would be Howard’s laughter.
In the meantime I’d spend the rest of the night lying awake thinking how hungry—and stupid—I was.
In the end I—and Howard—decided to test the theory that sating one appetite dulls the others.
It was close to 11
A.M.
when I woke up. Starved. I went through the whole food litany again—pizza, ice cream, cookies, the emergency Snickers in the night stand. The Snickers was out anyway. Howard, the crumb, had devoured it after concluding that the Law of Cross-sating is erroneous. He’d taken it into the bathroom as a courtesy to me, but I could still hear the wrapper crackling and catch a whiff of that chocolate and caramel. It had been the last smell in my mind before I fell asleep. It must have stayed there all night—I remembered a dream in which I was buried, happily, in a mudslide—and now the whole bedroom smelled like suburban Hershey. Miserably, hungrily, I sank back under the covers. What did Prozac taste like? But even if it came in chocolate, the tablets had to be too small to matter.
In a wicker chair across the room, Howard sat, elbows on thighs, chin in hands, eyes glazed. “Walls are filthy,” he grumbled. “Need a coat of paint.”
The walls—deep green—could have gone half a century without showing dirt. In fact, Howard had painted them a year ago. I smiled. “A little lost for things to do?” Caught in my own anguish, I’d almost forgotten Howard’s half of the bargain.
“Nah. I’m going to the Y. Or maybe I’ll just come back to bed.”
“Maybe you should just do that.”
He was dressed, but undressing was another of his skills. He dropped his jeans to the floor, exposing his long lightly furred legs, stretched, and wriggled out of the yellow turtleneck I’d gotten him from Eddie Bauer, displaying his lightly muscled chest and those sinewy shoulders that told of hours of crawl and butterfly. And when his Jockeys hit the floor, I noted once again what a fine tight set of buns the man had. I clasped one of them as he slid under the sheets and kicked off the blankets. My nipples hardened against his chest; I ran my lips across his collarbone, and when he pulled me closer, I arched my neck so I could continue to breathe. I loved the man; he had a great body, but practically speaking, in bed there was too much of it. And there had been times when he’d clutched me to him and pressed my mouth and both nostrils hard into his chest. Sex is like swimming, though, and over the years I’d learned where the air pockets were. And now I luxuriated in the smooth warm feel of his skin, the communion of his kisses that required no words.
But an hour later, after we’d traipsed sweatily to the shower, I was hungry.
“Let’s get on the road,” Howard said.
“Okay, if we can go by Peet’s first.” At least I could have a latte. No one in Berkeley would label Peet’s as junk food.
A scone occupied me till we crossed the Carquinez Straits, the latte all the way past Vallejo, but after that the road rolled on undifferentiated like a giant cruller. Howard and I were on the far side of Sacramento when we figured out exactly how long it had been since we’d been out of the Bay Area together. Between tiling, shingling, spackling, and painting commitments and my overtime in Homicide (a little obsession of my own I decided not to bring up), we had become the stable homebodies of our neighborhood.
It wasn’t until we started up into the Sierra that I realized we never had gotten around to discussing either of the cases. With all the conflict and accusations between Bryn Wiley and Sam Johnson, I’d almost forgotten the Bare Buns Brigade. “Any word on the naked runner?”
“No.”
“We have an ID?”
“No.”
“Didn’t his friends ID him?”
“No.”
“Howard, why not? It’s not like the Bare Buns Brigade lures passing men off the street to a life of lewdity. They had to know the guy.”
“Right, but they knew him as Dingo. I suppose I could contact the Australian Feral Dog Society and see if any of their charges have hightailed it east.”
“The guy knew the terrain better than I did,” I insisted, a mite churlishly. Sugar deprivation does that.
“Could be a transient who cased the area.”
“A transient casing beat two? Naked? It’s not like he was planning to burgle, at least not and hide the loot.”
Howard shook his head and concentrated on the road, and the bittersweet pleasure of driving his new truck. He would not be taking it to Fresno; if it had been made of marzipan, I would have been pleased about that. The road was clear, but snow sugared the trees and bushes. I turned the heater up. If I had stayed home, I would have sat out in the yard, lapping up the warmth of that big caramel sun and reading the latest Oliver Sacks article in
The New Yorker.
In the Bay Area you sunbathe in March and drive to see snow. Even ghetto schools close for Ski Week.
Howard downshifted as the traffic slowed. “I questioned the two guys, them bitching the whole time about being cold, like the salmon-pink Hilton should have offered them terry-cloth robes instead of jail clothes. What I got out of them was that Dingo’d been in town a couple of weeks.”
“And he’d masterminded their routine?” I speculated.
“No, they’d done the dance before.”
“But the location, Howard, Dingo chose that, didn’t he?”
“They swore they didn’t.”
“You believed them?”
Howard hesitated. “Yeah. They’d given their performances before, on the Avenue, on Shattuck, outside the Ashby BART station, places where there are students and the like. But Rose Walk, for them it made no sense.”
I nodded. “It’s not like they’re an outreach program taking their art to nudity-deprived neighborhoods. But they did choose Rose Walk, or Dingo chose it.” I sighed. “I just can’t believe it has no connection to Sam Johnson or Bryn Wiley.”
Howard laughed. “Jill, you
want
to believe that.”
“Well …”
“Okay, here’s the question: If you could choose to discover Dingo was Sam Johnson’s spy, or that the hotel in Tahoe served broccoli that tasted like chocolate, which would you pick?”
“Low blow, Howard. And this from a man who’s missing the antique baseboard sale at Recycled Home.”
The vacation would have made Connie Pereira proud. We cross-country skied enough to develop aches in places I didn’t know I had muscles (and I guess I didn’t have them
before
). We took in shows. Howard won a hundred thirty-six dollars at blackjack, and our only argument was whether maple syrup pushed pancakes into the junk food category. (I won twenty of Howard’s dollars when ten out of ten people agreed with me. Then to rub it in, I ordered the manhandler’s special, forgetting that I don’t like either pancakes or maple syrup.)