“To Santa Barbara?”
I looked at her then. “What?”
“Are you going to quit?”
That stopped me. I hadn’t thought about that.
“I’d understand if you wanted to.” She wasn’t remorseful in her attitude.
“Well, I’d like to, now that you mention it.” I’d had trepidations from the start about this. Now I had a reason to bail out.
“What would you tell people?” She stared at me, one hand holding her robe closed. “What would you tell the attorney general?”
That was a good question.
“You can’t tell them you’re quitting because I gave you a hand job in my hot tub, Luke. That’s one thing you can’t do.”
I faced her. “Is this some kind of not-so-subtle blackmail, Nora?” Now I was truly angry. “Some sword you’re going to bold over my head? If I wanted to quit, I could come up with dozens of legitimate reasons.” I paused. “And no one would believe you if you told about this.”
“Sure they would.” She said it calmly. “After Monica Lewinsky, people are never going to believe the man again.” She looked me in the eye. “Because they know men lie about these things, and women don’t. Even if it isn’t true.”
That stopped me cold. Pulling a cigarette and a lighter from the pocket of her robe, she lit up, blew smoke toward the ceiling.
“I didn’t know you smoked.” That was an inane thing to say; I didn’t know why I said it, except my mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Hardly on any.
“There’s a lot of things about me you don’t know, Luke.” She walked toward me, stopping a few feet away. “Tonight was one of them, but there are others.”
“I don’t want to know what they are, Nora.” I had to get out of here, and quick.
“No, you don’t,” she agreed. “Look,” she said, exhaling a plume of smoke in my direction, “what do you want, an apology? I’m sorry I fondled your cock? That I didn’t respect your marriage vows, to a woman I’ve never met and means nothing to me? Well, I’m not.” Another inhale, exhale. “If I’m sorry for anything, it’s that we didn’t have intercourse. After all these years, I still haven’t gotten laid.”
“Which is never going to happen with me.”
She took a step toward me. I took one back.
“Look, Luke. It’s not the end of the world, okay? I’m not going to bust you with your wife. No one’s going to know that you got into my hot tub with me—voluntarily—and that as soon as I touched your precious penis, it got hard, and that as upset as you were over my behavior, you didn’t stop me …immediately.”
My cheeks were burning—what she’d said was true, all of it.
She stubbed her cigarette out in her empty wineglass.
“If you want to feel guilty over this, that’s for you to decide. I don’t think it’s that big a deal, we didn’t shack up for the weekend and profess undying love to each other. You turn me on, okay? After all those years, when you came up here and I laid my eyes on you, I thought, “This could be nice.’ But you weren’t interested, and that’s okay.” She paused. “Actually, it’s not okay, but that’s the way it has to be, and I can live with that. I’ve lived with a lot worse.”
“I have to leave, Nora.” I was trying to stay calm, but I was shaking like hell inside. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“So you’re not quitting.”
“No,” I answered with resignation, “I’m not quitting.”
“I’m glad. We need you.”
I nodded. I wasn’t quitting. I couldn’t quit, I had no intention of quitting. We both knew that, from the start.
“Luke…”
I was at the door. I turned back to her.
“Don’t guilt-trip me, okay?”
I didn’t answer; because I was.
“Think of it as a mercy…well, it wasn’t a fuck. You could’ve done that, you know. A couple minutes of good old-fashioned screwing wouldn’t have been the end of the world, not even a pimple.” She sighed. “But it sure would’ve been nice for me.”
“You’re wrong, Nora. It would have mattered. To both of us.”
I knew it was a mercy whatever; that was my rationale for not thinking of myself as a complete bastard. It was a feeble rationale, though. Riva would never accept it, because that’s all it was—a crappy rationale. I also knew she’d never know, unless Nora busted me, and she wasn’t going to do that.
Nora nodded. “Yeah, I guess it would’ve.” She gestured at the open door. “You’d better get going. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ve got stuff to do. A day or two to cool this off wouldn’t be a bad idea. Your decision,” she said. “You know where to find me.”
I started to leave. She stopped me one last time.
“Don’t take it so seriously, Luke. It really is not that a big a deal.” She fished another cigarette out of her robe pocket. “And Luke—don’t make me feel guilty, okay? I’m glad I did what I did. I’m glad there’s still a woman inside this.” She tapped her chest.
“Good-bye, Nora.” All I wanted was to get the hell out of there.
“Good-bye, Luke. Take care driving. We need you safe up here in Blue River.”
Kate went through half a dozen administrators, office registrars, and faculty members before she found one who had been at Garfield for twenty years and remembered Reynaldo Juarez. A woman, Mrs. Escuela, who taught college-prep math. They sat together in the faculty lounge.
Mrs. Escuela was middle-aged, a few years older than Kate, so Kate guessed. Not in the best of shape—plump, her hair graying, which she wasn’t dyeing, a wisp of a mustache on her upper lip. Kate sized her up as a down-to-earth woman who had seen it all in her decades at this sprawling public high school. She was now the dean of the math department; back then, when Reynaldo Juarez was a student, she was a young teacher, not many years out of college, teaching the fundamentals to students who were woefully unprepared to go into the world and get a job, let alone go to college.
“Do you remember him?” Kate asked. They were peering at the yearbook of Juarez’s senior year. His face, youthful but already purposeful and intense, stared out at them.
Mrs. Escuela nodded. “Oh, yes. I remember Reynaldo. Very well.”
“Why was that?” Kate asked, curious. This woman had witnessed thousands of students passing through her classrooms. How many did she remember “very well”? And how come Juarez was one of them?
“Because he was one of my brightest. One of the best students I ever had. He could have done anything with his life,” she added sorrowfully.
“You know about how he turned out.”
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Escuela shook her head. “He was into that world even then. He drove a fancy car to school and wore designer clothes. And always a pager. One of the first at the school.” She leafed through some pages in the yearbook. “They’re banned now, of course. Or they’d be going off incessantly. Back then, it was kind of a novelty. That was before crack was such an epidemic.” She looked at the photo of teenage Reynaldo again. “He didn’t sell drugs here. He was careful about that. He was never in trouble here. But everyone knew.”
“Did he have many friends?”
“He was a figure of admiration because he was a big drug person, which is like being a big sports or entertainment figure to so many of these misguided kids. But he kept to himself. He didn’t let many people get close to him. He was a very private individual.”
He didn’t change in that regard, Kate thought.
“Do you know what happened to him after high school?” she asked. “No one I’ve talked to seems to know.”
Mrs. Escuela thought for a moment. “Perhaps he went to college, although I tend to doubt it. It wasn’t his vision of himself Like I said, though, he was very bright. Some of the faculty here encouraged him to apply not merely to college, but to elite schools, like Yale, Princeton, Stanford.”
“He was that bright?” Kate asked, not so surprised.
“Yes, he was.” Mrs. Escuela nodded. “And he could have afforded it. With the money he had made from his unlawful activities.”
“So did he? Apply to those schools?”
Mrs. Escuela shook her head. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t his adviser. That was…”
She turned some pages in the yearbook, coming to pictures of faculty members. She put her finger on one, a mousy-looking man of indeterminate age—the prototypical public school teacher of cartoons. “Mr. Winkowski. He was Reynaldo’s adviser. He might be able to tell you.”
Kate took out her #651 Reporter’s notebook. She always carried one with her; it fit in the back pocket of jeans, or in a side jacket pocket. “Does he still teach here?” She was starting to get excited.
A shake of the head. “No. He retired some years ago.” Mrs. Escuela sighed. “Burnt out. That happens all the time. It’s been building in me for years. I don’t know if I’m going to make it to my full retirement. Or still caring, if I do. That’s what happens when teachers stay on—they lose their zest, their love for teaching.” She turned back to Juarez’s picture in the yearbook. “It’s too much about discipline now. There isn’t enough teaching. Too many of them want to be like Reynaldo turned out, it’s glamorized in music, sports, movies, television. Get it now. And even for the ones who don’t think like that, who go to college, it’s an uphill struggle.” She closed the yearbook. “Everyone knows that California used to have the best schools in the country, and now we’re ranked at the bottom. It isn’t going to change soon. Not while I’m still a teacher, I’m afraid. Despite what the politicians promise.”
This is all important, Kate thought, but she wasn’t here to discuss the entire weight of the world, just the potential whereabouts of one student who became one of the country’s major drug dealers. That was enough weight for her at the moment.
“This Mr. Winkowski. How do I get in touch with him?”
“They have his home phone number in the office. I’ll walk you there. It’s time for my next class.”
Ten minutes later, Kate was on her cell phone, driving her car toward Interstate 5, making her way back to Santa Barbara. She was talking to Miklos Winkowski, Juarez’s high school adviser. She had called him in southwestern Michigan, where he was living in retirement.
“It’s cheap living here,” he explained over the line, as if divulging classified secrets, before she even asked why, which she wouldn’t have; she didn’t know the man, she wasn’t interested, all she cared about was finding whatever links she could to his former advisee, Reynaldo Juarez. But he was bound to tell her—the same spiel, she knew, that he gave everyone from California who called him.
“Half the price of L.A. I’ve got family here, it’s where I came from originally, so I fit right in, even after thirty-five years being away. A teacher’s pension and social security doesn’t cut it there in L.A.; here, I’m living good.”
Having presented his case, he was ready to answer questions.
“Yep, he was college material. Any college.”
“Did he go?”
“Um-hum.” He had a Midwesterner’s nasal inflection, coupled with a slight foreign accent. First-generation, she thought. It was second nature for her to guess where people came from and what they looked like, merely from their voices—always sleuthing, a detective’s work is never done.
She had her notebook out, pen ready. “Where?”
“Stanford.”
So that was it. The missing years. Jesus, she thought, I wonder if he was an undergrad there when Luke was in law school. And Nora Ray, too. Kate decided he wasn’t, Luke was too much older; but it was intriguing as hell.
“So he went to Stanford. Do you know anything about his life there?” She didn’t have to ask that question. She could do that research, now that she knew.
The old schoolteacher threw a bucket of cold water on her, long distance two thousand miles.
“He didn’t have one. He dropped out, end of his freshman year.”
She sagged. “You know that for a fact?”
“Sure do. He came by, summer after his freshman year. Told me he wasn’t going back.”
“Did he say why?” Fuck; right when she thought she’d made a breakthrough, she was right back at go, and she hadn’t collected her two hundred dollars.
“He didn’t fit in. He got homesick. He looked it, too. Like a whipped dog.”
Juarez insecure? So the guy was human after all.
“He never went back. You’re sure?”
“You can check it out, but from what I know, he didn’t. There weren’t many Latinos there in those days. He’d been king of the hill down here, up there he was just another beaner, pardon the expression. I’m not racially prejudiced, it’s the word they use.”
“It sounds like he was feeling sorry for himself.”
“Could be. Ray was strong, even as a young man. But he didn’t pull it off up there in Palo Alto. I think that was tough on him; he’d never felt overwhelmed before.”
“So what happened to him after that?” Please, give me something.
“Don’t know. I never saw him again, talked to him, anything. He vanished from my radar screen.”
“Did he go to another college?”
“Might have. He’d qualified to the state universities. So maybe he went to a public college. Where he wouldn’t be a novelty, if you understand me.”
The traffic was zipping by her at a good clip.
“Yes,” she said, ending the conversation, “I understand you.”
I
GOT HOME LATE
Friday night; later than I wanted, but there was work on the table I had to clear before I left. That’s always been a problem with me—I can’t let things go until tomorrow.
There was another reason I’d delayed my trip—I felt guilty, and ashamed. I have been through the hell of a bad divorce, the loss of what I’d thought would be a marriage that would last forever. Then I’d met Riva, and she’d pulled me out of the doldrums. We’re going to be together for the rest of our lives if I have anything to do with it, and I know she feels the same way; having had her own share of screwed-up relationships.
I’d seen it coming with Nora, and I let it happen anyway. I didn’t want it; it wasn’t about a quickie with someone from the past, a scratch of a sexual itch to see what it was like, nor was it some middle-aged affirmation of my own sexuality, which I don’t need to affirm. Nora had never been a woman on my sexual radar—she was already taken when I met her, and I wouldn’t have gone for her anyway, I’d never felt that kind of pull toward her.