Sleeping Tigers (18 page)
There was nobody following me. I looked around, panting, and recognized one of the houses by its creative paint job of aqua trim, pink clapboards and lime green door. My car wasn’t far away. I limped towards it, holding my side with one hand until I could lean against the car’s solid, comforting hulk and search for the keys in my purse.
What had I been thinking, taking my purse into People’s Park at sunset? Jesus, what an idiot.
I glanced around, relieved to see that the only other person on the street was a tall, broad-shouldered blonde in a short skirt. She walked towards me with brisk strides, her heels clacking along like horse’s hooves.
I turned my back on the woman to unlock the door. Within seconds she was on me, clutching my head beneath her arm in a muscular half-Nelson while she grabbed my purse and shoved me down onto the sidewalk. This was no she, I realized by the size of his feet and legs. My mugger wore platform shoes, but black stubble poked through his pale stockings like the bristles of a nail brush.
The assault was over in an instant, my little car speeding away from the curb before I could scramble to my feet. My purse was on the passenger seat. I brushed myself off, silently cursing my own stupidity. If this were a TV show, I’d want to turn it off. I’d been alone on a dark street and broken the cardinal rule of city dwellers everywhere: get into your car fast and lock the doors.
Miraculously, a patrol car rounded the corner. I bounded into the street and stood there like a deer trapped in headlights, waving my arms. My saviors were a pair of Berkeley cops, a black man and a white woman, both with bellies they carried like sacks over their belts. They approached me with hands on their guns and I blubbered out my story. Within a few minutes they’d whisked me to a police station lit up like a bus terminal.
“And you say the perp was wearing platform shoes?” The officer taking my statement on the computer was an older man with a scar across one eyebrow. “Any other identifying features?” he pressed.
“He had on a blonde wig and a red miniskirt.”
The officer in the cubicle behind us snorted, but my man remained professional. He poured a cup of sludge into a styrofoam cup and handed it to me, then tapped a few notes into a computer. “You seem pretty sure this was a male assailant.”
“He had a five o’clock shadow around his lipstick and his legs were covered with black stubble.”
A muscle in the cop’s jaw twitched. “You got anything of value in the car to report?”
“You mean my purse and car aren’t enough to lose?”
He shrugged. “This is the time to give your insurance company a full report of anything you lost.” He kept his eyes on the screen. “Anything at all.”
I sighed. “Nothing but my purse and an old pair of sneakers.” Luckily, I’d left the baby seat with Karin in case she had an emergency with Paris. I ached to call Karin. What if the baby had panicked in my absence, had another bout of croup, or suffered a bad reaction to those shots? I’d already left her longer than I’d promised. Not that Paris could understand about time at her age, of course, but still: a promise was a promise. Enough people had already let her down.
The cop delivered a pat speech about procedures, asked me to sign some papers, then offered me his phone. I called Karin. She was appropriately appalled and I felt instantly better. “Oh, poor you. That sounds horrible!”
“Well, it was my own damn fault,” I said. “I should have known that area wouldn’t be safe at night.”
“That’s ridiculous. It’s not your fault you were mugged. Look, give me half an hour and I’ll be there. I’ll bring you back to my house, and we’ll cry over spilled milk. You should see how your kid trashed my kitchen!”
Like anyone would notice the difference, I nearly said, but was stopped by the words “your kid.” Was that what I really wanted, for Paris to be mine?
Right now, I wanted Karin to rescue me. But that wouldn’t be the best thing for Paris, waking her and driving over here at night. I told Karin that I’d borrow subway fare from the police, and she encouraged me to go straight home instead of picking up the baby.
“You need a good night’s sleep,” she insisted. “Paris will be fine here until morning.”
So much for feeling essential. I hung up on the verge of tears, begged a few dollars from the cop, and walked to the BART station around the corner. The train arrived and departed with merciful efficiency. It was well after eight o’clock, yet the train was still clogged with evening commuters, mostly in suits and headphones, hypnotized by their phones. I couldn’t believe there was this much normalcy left in the world.
Half an hour later, I arrived at my station. No car, no purse. Just me and a pocketful of loose change. I started trudging towards Noe Valley, dreading the idea of my empty apartment.
I hadn’t walked more than two blocks before spotting a blue neon sign– Aunt Mary’s–outside a bar with a bright pink beaded curtain fluttering across the doorway. I fingered the change in my pocket. This was where David was meeting Enrique and the rest of his friends.
With luck, I could get them to buy me a drink before I went home. That might take the edge off the fact that I’d lost not only my wallet and my car, but my brother, too.
E
ntering Aunt Mary’s was like wading into a city swimming pool on the Fourth of July: lots of blue light and standing room only. This was an affluent, intellectual looking crowd, people in their twenties or thirties who dressed like Berkeley but had Silicon Valley money.
The band was working a noisy rhythm and blues set. I threaded my way through the crowd, noting the bits of car fenders, tires, and steering wheels comprising the giant mobiles dangling ominously above the crowd. Nobody could ever accuse San Francisco artists of wasting materials.
I felt claustrophobic and discouraged. I had as much chance of finding David in here as stealing my car back from that high-heeled mugger. I resigned myself to spending my last few dollars swilling a beer alone before going home to bury my head under a pillow. At least I could look forward to seeing Paris in the morning.
This accidental longing to see the baby left me feeling just as terrified of losing her as I’d been, only days ago, of raising her. That was scary: every baby belonged with her parents, if possible. I had to give Cam the opportunity to do the right thing, no matter what my feelings.
The room shuddered with bodies in motion. I spotted another doorway and angled towards it. This opened onto a swimming pool enclosed in a courtyard. The water was eerie, green lights gleaming from beneath its surface like cats’ eyes shining through the fog. The pool was covered with a thick sheet of plexiglass.
Dancers cavorted on top of the pool with the sweaty abandon of pagans celebrating the rites of spring. I half expected the men to have hooves. They certainly sounded as if they had hooves, stomping on the plastic like that. The band was playing a blues tune I recognized as “Got My Mojo Working,” and the pianist kept up pretty well with Otis Spann’s famous finger work on the keys.
Above the swimming pool, a crowd observed the dancers. It took me several minutes to realize that the onlookers weren’t people, but mannequins dressed in tropical tourist gear: Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts, sundresses, and sunglasses. I climbed the stairs to the balcony and scanned the club for any sign of David. I was excited to see him but anxious, too. Maybe he had only invited me along because Enrique mentioned it, and David was being polite.
The stage was directly below. The musicians were all men except the drummer, a black woman with bright red beads braided into her hair like ladybugs marching down her neck. The pianist, who had his back to me, was announcing the next tune.
“This here’s the
Gravier Street Rag
, made famous by the untouchable Champion Jack Dupree,” he shouted into the microphone, moving his fingers over the keys in a rapid blues shuffle.
The singer sauntered up to the piano. A tall, thin man with slick black hair and an enormous gold hoop in one ear, he choked the microphone with one hand, waggled his hips and howled like a wet cat. The singer’s rendition of wine-headed Sue made the crowd hoot in return. This was clearly a regular.
I laughed, drawn into the music despite my own blues. Or perhaps because the music fit my mood and hit my gut. There were sad blues and happy blues, I’d once heard Billie Holiday say in an interview. This was definitely the happy kind.
I gripped the railing and bobbed to the music. I still couldn’t believe the audacity of Cam’s vanishing act. And to Nepal, of all places! How many people even knew where Nepal was, much less flew there on a whim?
Jon must be rolling in dough, if he’d flown the coop and taken the others with him like a flock of geese. I imagined them in a perfect V formation, Jon in the lead, the rest frantically flapping their arms to keep up, as I leaned down over the balcony between a pair of mannequins and tapped my foot to the music. Then the pianist turned his head toward the microphone again, and my foot froze mid-tap.
That was David below me, playing the piano, his hands hopping across the keyboard. And Enrique, David’s nurse, was singing, all flexible hips and gleaming grin as he played to a cheering, hooting crowd. Impossible, but there they were.
It took me several minutes to make my way back down from the balcony. Once in front of the stage, I was drawn onto the floor by a group of dancers who gestured for me to join them. I did, working my way up to the stage that way, and began dancing in front of the band.
They finally broke set. Sweat was pouring down my face and neck by the time David stood up behind the upright piano and knocked back a bottle of water. Enrique, laughing at something the saxophonist shouted in his ear, spotted me first. He tapped David on the shoulder and pointed. David’s grin was all the invitation I needed. I reached up, and Enrique grabbed my hand and tugged me onto the stage.
“Told you she’d show!” he shouted to David before waltzing off with the saxophonist, their arms draped about each other’s waists.
I stood next to David at the piano. “I can’t believe that was really you playing!”
“It wasn’t. That was my alternate persona. The one who grew up in Chicago instead of a white bread suburb of Milwaukee. Want a drink?”
“Sure.” Then I remembered. “But I don’t have any money. I was in Berkeley and got mugged and car jacked. And my brother has disappeared! Left the country!”
He raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like a busy night. What about Paris?”
“Karin took the baby to her house while I went to Berkeley. Then, when things got complicated, we thought it was better to leave her there overnight.”
David’s grin broadened. “So you’re a free woman.”
“I guess so. Relatively speaking, anyway.”
“In this life, everything is relative,” he reminded me.
I danced until midnight, when the band brought down the house with “Who’s Gonna Be Your Sweet Man When I’m Gone.” After that, so suddenly that I scarcely knew how we’d arrived, David and I sat alone on the summit of Bernal Heights Hill, admiring the city’s necklaces of lights and sharing a bottle of wine.
David was slightly hoarse after the gig, so he encouraged me to do most of the talking. I recounted the day’s events, then backtracked to tell him about Cameron, Boston, my parents, the break-up with Peter, and teaching. Finally, I asked how he’d become both a musician and a doctor.
“Most people are lucky to be good at one thing, and here you are, Mr. Talent, pulling off two fabulous careers and putting the rest of us to shame,” I said.
“That’s Dr. Talent to you,” he said with a laugh, and lay down on the grass beside me.
I wanted to kiss David, to feel the length of him against me the way I had when we slept together. But did that mean I wanted sex with David, too, or just comfort? And was David only keeping me company because I was a friend of Karin’s?
David was telling me how he had studied classical piano but learned blues by ear, taking a bus to visit bars on Chicago’s south side whenever he could. “Music lessons were my mother’s idea,” he said, “but Dad wanted me to be a doctor. He used to tell me the names of bones at night instead of reading me stories.”
“So which do you like better? Music or medicine?”
“I’m glad I don’t have to choose. Both jobs feed my belly and spirit. I like my volunteer work, too, like what I was doing in Nepal.”
Nepal again! You’d think that was the only destination on earth. “My brother’s in Nepal now,” I said, “doing God knows what.”
“He’ll have lots of company. Kathmandu attracts people who go there, then try to figure out why.”
I plucked nervously at the grass between us. “Let’s not talk about my brother right now. Tell me how, if you’re out late every night playing music, you manage to get up early every morning and work at the clinic.”
“Easy. I just don’t sleep.” David yawned and stretched his arms over his head.
We both laughed. “Come on,” I said. “We’d better go home. You live around here, don’t you?”
“How about if I take you home instead? It’s right around the corner. We can just walk.”
I swallowed, trying not to show my disappointment. Why didn’t he want me at his place? Was David involved with someone? Not attracted to me? Maybe it was a bad thing that he hadn’t tried to have sex with me the night we slept together.
We wound our way down the narrow streets of Bernal Heights and crossed Dolores Street to my place. It wasn’t until we had reached my apartment door and I began fishing the keys out of my pocket that I realized they were probably still dangling from the ignition of my stolen car.
“Oh, God,” I moaned, and told David. Inwardly, I brightened: now David would have to take me to his place. I could see how he lived—and whether he lived alone.
“No key? No problem!” David fished a complicated tool out of his pocket, a knife with dozens of tiny attachments, and picked the lock in under a minute.
“Wow,” I said. “You’re a little scary.”
He looked pleased. “Am I? Why?”
“You broke into my house just like that, and you’re not even a jewel thief!”
“There’s really not much difference between musicians, physicians, and jewel thieves,” David pointed out. “We’ve all got good hands.” He gave me a steady look that nearly made my knees buckle. “If I ask you a question, will you say yes?”
“I don’t know. What’s the question?”
“Oh, it’s a very long question. Might take me all night to ask it.”
“And here I thought you’d never ask.”
David smiled. “I almost didn’t. As a general rule, I don’t take advantage of women who have just had babies dropped on their doorsteps, lost their brothers, gotten car jacked, been mugged, and downed more alcohol than three lumberjacks. Might just be the wrong time to ask a woman anything. Hell, she might do the wise thing and say no.”
“Or a woman might say yes.” I leaned over to kiss David’s neck, tasting salt, and he wrapped his arms around my waist. We stood there for a long time, swaying in the dark.
I only had toddler food in my kitchen: bananas, peanut butter, oatmeal, apple juice, and milk. David didn’t seem to mind. He rummaged about in my galley kitchen and slathered a banana with peanut butter for breakfast.
It was seven o’clock. We had only fallen asleep a couple of hours ago and I wanted David to come back to bed so that we could make love again. This surprised me. With Peter, sex was such a rote activity, a task to be crossed off our lists, that by the end of our relationship we were both relieved when it was over.
David, though. Oh, David. With David, sex was the best sort of conversation, the kind of exchange that covers all the bases and lets each of you say what’s on your mind. I didn’t want to miss a word.
Our love making had included actual words, too. Everything from simple questions, like, “Do you like that? Do you want this?” to phrases that would have made me blush if I had read them online. We talked, we moved, we rested, we talked and moved some more, each of us tender and frenzied by turn.
I hadn’t even flinched when, halfway through, David had stopped to touch my scar, tracing a finger along the curve of my breast and then kissing it. “What happened here?” he asked solemnly. I told him, and he kissed my breast again.
“You don’t mind it?” I asked. “It doesn’t put you off?”
“Of course not. It hardly shows.”
He meant it. Still. I had to be able to tell him this one thing. “I feel flawed,” I ventured. “Like a teacup with a chip in it.”