18mm Blues (16 page)

“You don't appear to be hurt or bitter,” Julia said.

“I'm not, just bristling.”

“Bristling's only a first-degree reaction. You'll soon be over it.”

“You're an expert, huh?”

“I've never been divorced but I've been bristled, any number of times,” she grinned.

“How many is any number?”

“I don't know, really. I don't count some that I used to count. In fact the grand total is constantly decreasing. What was she like, this wife who's given up on you?”

“Complex.”

That was kind enough of him for him to still be in love with her, Julia thought. She asked if he was and believed his
no
. “What was her name?”

“She's still alive.”

“I prefer to speak of her in the past tense, do you mind?”

“I guess not. Her name was Gayle.”

“Was she pretty?”

A shrug and then a conceding nod from Grady.

“Gorgeous?”

“Gorgeous.”

“Not just in your eyes?”

“That's for sure.” He hoped she didn't press him for any more. He didn't want to go into the lying and the fucking around because there wouldn't be any way for it not to come out sounding as though he felt victimized and sorry for himself. Neither of which was the case. Gayle had been Gayle, the daughter of Harold, and he'd come down an altogether different road with a more fortunate bundle of values. As he saw it, the worst thing about the marriage had been the waste of years. He wondered if he told Julia that would she understand. He sort of thought she might. He watched her catch the waiter and convey without a word that she wanted a refill of coffee. A negligible but giveaway indication of her larger self-sufficiency. It occurred to him that on first impression she was unlike any of the women he'd known, been with.

She brought her attention around and on him again, like a boat resuming its tack. “Let me ask you something just out of female curiosity. And you don't have to answer if it purges up something too sordid or messy.” She waited a long beat to allow him to refuse. “What was the one thing that Gayle did that you disliked the most?”

“Big or little thing?”

“Let's stick with little.”

Grady laughed, a private, self-amused laugh as he ran down that inventory. “It's a toss-up,” he said, “between buying luggage and posturing.”

“Buying luggage?”

“Yeah. She refused to take a trip anywhere, even for just a weekend, unless she had new luggage, brand-new whole sets, from Mark Cross, Fendi, Hermès…”

“Morabito?”

“Probably. We had closets and a basement storage area crammed with once-used luggage.”

“Strange.”

“It was phobic, I think. She wouldn't discuss it and I eventually gave up asking her about it.”

“What about the posturing?”

“That wasn't as odd. I've seen women do it but not so obviously and to the extent that Gayle did it. We'd be sitting talking, and all of a sudden without a lapse in attention she'd slip herself into a pose, turn a shoulder this way or that, suspend an arm, tilt her chin, look at me over her cheekbones.”

“She did it when you were out someplace?”

“Even more when we were home alone.”

“That griped you?”

“Christ yes, why couldn't she just be herself?”

“Maybe she didn't think herself was enough.”

Grady wanted to get off Gayle.

With perfect timing Julia excused herself and went to the ladies' room. Grady watched her walk, believed she had legs equal to Doris's. Some woman, he thought. She was evidently bright, possibly very intelligent. Spunky, perhaps strong willed. Although she wasn't a raving beauty she was above average attractive and, in her favor, not straining to make too much of her looks. Yes, he liked Julia Elkins. Yes, he'd like to know her better.

When she returned to the table he sensed she'd prefer silence for a while. She looked around and at him. He looked around and at her. They were eyes-to-eyes for a long moment. Without breaking the look she told him, “I read somewhere that whenever a woman is looking at something she wants her pupils dilate.”

“At the moment yours appear normal.”

“Then it's not true,” she quipped, too late to reach out and recapture the words and have them unsaid. What had gotten into her? Only rarely in her life had she been aggressively vampy and never on such short acquaintance. Now that she thought of it she hadn't been the same in quite a few ways since her recent death-defying sleep.

“Regarding your pearls…”

“Oh … yes, my pearls,” she muttered, a bit embarrassed that what was supposed to have been foremost in her mind was last.

“I don't have them for you.”

“That's not what you told me.”

“I know. They were being restrung by a Hungarian woman I've used before. Dependable and by far the best stringer around. She was supposed to have them ready by Wednesday. When I stopped by her place this morning she wasn't there.”

Thank you, Hungarian pearl stringer, Julia thought, for guaranteeing this wouldn't be a first and only meeting. Now she could slow down. Her second thought was how delightful it would be if Grady was fabricating the Hungarian woman's inaccessibility and actually had her pearls in his pocket.

CHAPTER SIX

That was the start of Grady and Julia.

They remained at that table in the Garden Court of the Sheraton Palace long after the other Saturday lunchers were gone, long after Grady thoughtfully settled the check so the waiter wouldn't have to be attending. The table for four, round and really large enough to accommodate six, turned into a white-covered horizontal barrier, which Grady overcame by moving his chair around next to Julia's. Not just to facilitate their talk but to also put them in range of touching. They didn't touch, didn't even clasp hands, however the possibility was there and the imminence and the anticipation.

The following day was Sunday, and they spent it together, learning each other as they walked some of San Francisco, climbed steps and had espresso and dipped chocolate biscotti at Caffe Puccini on Columbus Avenue in North Beach. They sat with legs dangling over the sea wall of the Marina to watch windsurfers. Ended up on the grass of Golden State Park sharing the Sunday
Chronicle
while around them islands of families and lovers sprang up or disappeared.

For Julia the day was like a canvas that she was preparing, layering it with background so that soon it could take detail and color more vibrant.

For Grady the day was like preparing a garden, enhancing the soil of it with acquaintance, getting it comfortable for planting.

Julia told him about some of her days in France, didn't omit Jean Luc but didn't elaborate on him either. She assumed Grady guessed there'd been involvement. She recalled how, when she'd first arrived in Paris, she'd taken an apartment in Montparnasse, a seventh-floor walk-up hardly more than a closet. Because the concierge had confided that it had once been occupied by Kiki Prin, better known as Kiki of Montparnasse, the celebrated intimate of numerous accomplished artists during the twenties and thirties. Julia related how she'd suffered the climb and cramp in order to imagine the incorporeal visits of Pascin and Dubuffet, Soutine, Foujita, Léger, Man Ray and others. Before too long she found out that nearly all the concierges of the area misled with that Kiki fib, that Kiki had actually lived in more generous quarters at 5 rue Delambre and later at 1 rue Brea.

She'd told the concierge off.

No, actually she was obliged to him for having inadvertently supplied so much inspiration.

What about Cody, Wyoming? Why had she chosen to live in Cody?

It wasn't something she'd planned, she'd decided on it after she was all packed and ready to move. Someone had circled it on a map of the western states that she'd bought for a dime at Goodwill, so her eyes had been drawn to it and in that instant she'd made it her destination. At times when she looked back to finding that circle on that map she thought it providential, because Cody had been so right for her, right from the start.

She'd found an ideal situation on a thousand-acre spread in the valley of the Upper South Fork on the Shoshone River. The people who owned it were from St. Louis and usually only came there during the warm months. They needed someone on the property year-round, just to be there and oversee, not really to caretake. Her place would be the four-room plank-sided structure with all the conveniences situated three hundred yards from the main ranch house. They worried that it would be too isolated for her.

Not at all. She indulged in the solitude, got carried away with it, became annoyed whenever the pickup of the caretaker came rooster-tailing up the road or came thinking he was doing her a service by snowplowing her an access.

Her talent took hard hold while she was in Cody. One autumn she must have painted the Absaroka Mountains fifty times.

She saw nature in finer detail and expressed it in masses. Masses that surely weren't or barely weren't adjacent. The mountains not adjacent to the sky or the tree line not adjacent to the meadow the way she saw them. And the vitality of everything almost hiding. In her renderings an underlain mass of brilliance usually peeked around the edges of a sullen mass of overlay, the components of reality contributed to the appearance of illusion. She would never be able to paint any other way.

“I really like your paintings,” Grady told her.

She doubted he'd even seen one.

“A business acquaintance in New York has one of your works hung on the prime wall in his office. I coveted it and told him so, but he wouldn't part with it. I've also seen your work in a gallery downtown, on Octavia Street I believe it was.”

Another point in his favor, Julia thought. Was he ever piling them up!

In turn Grady told her some about himself, what it had been like growing up in Litchfield. Described his family one by one, told her how his father, a pharmacist, had owned the only drugstore in town and from the prescriptions he filled knew the diagnosed ailments of everyone in the vicinity. The store had had a luncheon counter for toasted cheese sandwiches, milkshakes and fizzed-up, cloud-topped ice cream sodas. His father was retired, sold the store to a chain that had taken out the soda fountain and counter and otherwise modernized the place with too much fluorescent light, Formica shelving and pegboard.

Grady and Julia got together a lot during the next week. Went across the Bay Bridge for some jazz at Yoshi's and stayed for only one set because they wanted to talk, not listen. Went to the “Stick” to see the Giants blank the Dodgers. Went out thirty miles to Woodside to the estate called Filoli to marvel at its formal gardens and allow Grady to impress with his knowledge of plants and trees, the Chilean myrtles, the New Zealand beeches. Went to a movie. Grady suggested a newly released comedy that was playing at the Northpoint but didn't insist when Julia was for a Japanese film at the Gateway called
Heaven and Earth
, a samurai epic directed by Haruki Kadokawa. Slashing of swords, decapitations and struttings, subtitles that seemed contradictory to the overemphatic dialogue. Grady found the film colorful, tried to get a hold on the plot. Julia, on the other hand, seemed as though she understood every word and nuance, sat enrapt throughout.

Friday night Grady purposely stayed away from her. He hadn't said he'd see her or promised to phone. He grabbed a slice and a Pepsi at a pizza place on Pacific and drifted downhill to Geary. At Pat O'Shea's Mad Hatter he stood at the bar with a double Glenfiddich. Eyes aimed up at the baseball on television but not much registering. He was getting into Julia Elkins way too deep and too fast, he told himself. No matter that he didn't feel as though he was being irrational, there was no denying that he was on the emotional ricochet and prone to making another huge mistake.

He hadn't given Gayle a thought all week. Julia had chased Gayle, swept out the remnants of her. To that extent Julia had been good, but it didn't mean he needed Julia. Need was a big admission. Anyway, he thought, being out alone tonight was a way of gauging what was what. He felt fine in his space. If he were to lop the last week or so out of his life, have amnesia about it or whatever, it wouldn't be that big a deal; he wouldn't have missed much, just Julia.

Fuck you, just.

At eleven he was all out of resistance, went to the pay phone. Her voice went into his ear and down to his knees and got to everything else along the way.

“How late is it?”

He told her.

“I was getting ready for bed,” she said. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

No one except his mother had ever asked caring like that. “I just thought I'd say good night. I'm fine.”

“What did you do today?”

“Leased an office for one thing.”

“I know you mentioned you'd been looking. Is it what you want?”

“It'll do. Can we get together tomorrow?”

“I was planning on painting tomorrow. If I don't paint I'll get stiff.”

“Can I come watch you paint?”

“I've never painted for an audience. Probably it's something better done alone.”

“Seems like it would be.” There she was, he thought, not a lot of miles away but near enough to walk to. So, why couldn't he be with her? Too late tonight, too busy tomorrow. He'd heard of and known women who enjoyed the getting but not the having. Was she one of those? Should he risk asking her about the day after tomorrow?

“Do you really want to come watch me paint?”

“Yeah.”

“You'll get bored.”

“What time shall I be there?”

“Whenever you want, just come.”

Much happier, he had another drink and went home, which was now the week by week affordable hotel room on Fillmore Street. Didn't sleep solidly, kept waking and seeing if it was tomorrow. Got up at three and watched Gleason reruns until four. Got up for good at six-thirty. He had in mind waiting until ten. Parked down the hill from Julia's and read the morning paper as long as he could. Shortly after nine he drove up and parked in her driveway. Thinking he was early and his eagerness obvious. He went around the side to the studio entrance. The door was open and she was at the easel.