The Woman Lit by Fireflies Page 10

  She continued shuffling the cards but was swept away by the notion that if they hadn’t been sent away to prison for a year the five of them might have stayed close. Out the window the giant suburban sprawl of Los Angeles began to accumulate.

  At Union Station they said goodbye and on impulse she kissed Stuart directly on the lips. Then she hailed a cab for Le Parc which was off La Cienega. Sun had suggested the hotel, having read about it in one of the travel magazines favored by bright young girls far to the interior of our dream coasts.

  II

  It was not his habit but Billy got up at five A.M. that morning in Pacific Palisades on the western edge of Los Angeles. He had a great deal of work to do before he commandeered a company plane and flew up to San Francisco mid-afternoon to watch his beloved Giants play a twi-night double-header. Ever since he was a tyke stumbling along the dangerous edge of a large swimming pool (followed by a black nanny) in Hillsborough near San Francisco Billy had been enamored of baseball. There is a pith, gist, saw, that we offer hapless foreign visitors to the effect that you must understand baseball to understand America. The germ of truth here is so small as to be invisible under an electron microscope (a week on an Indian reservation gives a better understanding) but baseball can reveal a great deal about a man: to wit, an adult fan invariably has a lot of boy left within him, and this was very true with Billy though on the job the boy was kept well hidden.

  Before baseball Billy had liked horses but his sister, two years older, had had a bad fall from her pony resulting in a spiral fracture and a permanent, though minor, limp. The two ponies were taken away on Sunday while Billy was at his first baseball game. The sight of a merry-go-round still filled him with melancholy; when he saw his first one at five he wept because he thought the ponies had been speared through the middle. Baseball, however, stuck, and Billy’s not so secret dream was to own a major league team, something that would probably have to wait until his father passed on to the heaven that awaits wealthy, petulant and ruthless men.

  A garden-variety analyst could have explained to Billy that he had been destructively manipulated by his father. Only a year before, a Santa Monica marriage counselor had come close to suggesting this fact, but hadn’t wanted to endanger his ample fee. Billy’s (now) ex-wife knew it but the fact had worked to her advantage. Billy’s daughter Rebecca, a freshman at Stanford, knew it but was an extremely kind soul and had been trying to figure out a pleasant way of talking about it.

  Frankly, Billy had always been treated as somewhat of a disappointment by his father and had tended to behave like one into his late twenties. His early interests in baseball, athletics and cars made his grades suffer and his Stanford application was turned down despite his father’s enormous influence in the Bay Area. His father expressed his anger by contemptuous silence and Billy sailed off to the University of Colorado with the notion that, if he wasn’t smart, at least he could ski and play baseball.

  Much to everyone’s surprise Billy turned out to be a “late starter” and the tidal sweep of failure had reversed itself by his early thirties, and now at age forty-two, Billy was considered an unqualified success, a brilliant, albeit devious, international lawyer. The law firm begun in San Francisco by his grandfather William Creighton, a pleasant enough high school teacher trying to improve his lot, was now Creighton & Creighton and employed over a hundred lawyers in the complicated area of making it safe for American corporations to do business in foreign countries. The firm’s discreet stationery listed offices in San Francisco (home), Los Angeles, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Bonn, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. Billy directed the largest branch office, Los Angeles, but his eyes were set on his homeland, San Francisco, to which he would return on his father’s retirement, a few years in the offing. With his father’s death would come the major league ball team and the change of the firm’s name to Creighton & Creighton & Rosenthal, the latter being his sister’s second husband and the real brains behind the firm’s ten-year expansion phase. Billy’s father was a closet anti-Semite while Billy was a closet egalitarian, bursting with pretty well concealed goodwill toward the world.

  On the predawn ride from Pacific Palisades to Century Plaza Billy was hard at work in the back of his refurbished Checker cab (built in Kalamazoo, Michigan) which was equipped with a hot Chevy engine. (It had taken a full year for his driver, a black, former Padres outfielder, to get used to Billy’s reverse snobbism.) Everyone has a flip side, a partially hidden life or at least a secret religion, and Billy was revealing his own that morning by reviewing a folder of information on Theodore Frazer, known to his few friends as Zip, Billy’s roommate, friend and idol at the University of Colorado. He hadn’t seen Zip in the twenty years since they were all arrested, though he had been avidly following the case in the newspapers the past few weeks.

  But the media reports had quickly fizzled to nothing and then there had been a radio interview with Gwen on NPR out of Nogales that had provided some difficult moments. He had been driving his daughter Rebecca out to the airport from which she would fly to Spokane, Washington, to visit the boyfriend she had met at Stanford. The young man was a Nez Perce Indian, of all things, a fact which delighted Billy because he knew it would drive his ex-wife batty. Gwen’s voice on the radio had caused him to swerve in his lane, nearly causing an accident.

  At LAX he had had a short, very intense drink with Rebecca at the Ambassador Club. Rebecca was her father’s confidante and knew about Gwen, Zip, Patricia and Sam, even knew what they looked like because from the time she was a small child she had been allowed into her father’s secret room. When they lived in San Francisco the room had been in the attic, and when they moved to Pacific Palisades the contents had been hauled to the basement, back past the exercise and furnace rooms. It was all quite innocent and a little bit silly and to an outsider might resemble the child’s urge for a nest safe from the world: a lifetime of baseball mitts hanging from a string; autographed photos of Koufax, Drysdale, Willie Mays and many others; posters; minor awards from schools; a file cabinet full of expensive IBM printouts of research on every major league team; photos of him and his sister Marcia on ponies; a honeymoon photo of him and his ex-wife Sarah in Jamaica; and on the top shelf, photos of the wild bunch in various places, from mountain campsites to Washington marches to the streets of San Francisco. In the photos Zip always looked severe and somewhat posed, Sam invariably held a can or bottle of beer, and Gwen seemed as shy as Patricia was bold and direct. He had seen Patricia, who was a vice president of a movie studio, a few years before at a fund raiser for a senator from New Jersey. This single meeting in close to twenty years had been quite unpleasant for specific reasons that Billy didn’t like to think about. Next to the photos were a few of the books he had owned in common with Zip: radical texts by Herbert Marcuse, Régis Debray, Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the frighteningly real Dupont Blaster’s Handbook, a detailed manual on the use of explosives.

  At the airport Rebecca had been alternately soothing and alarming about Gwen’s radio comments. “Maybe you should try to help, Dad. But then, the way she sounded there’s nothing to do.”

  “I’ve already looked into it,” he lied, though he would begin the folder that evening with a call to Bonn to a trusted employee who had been a member of the diplomatic corps.

  “She sounded very sad. She sounded like she went down there to say goodbye and they wouldn’t even let her see him. Maybe you could at least fix it so she could see him.” Rebecca’s favorite book had been Wuthering Heights and no romantic situation was too extreme for her sympathies.

  “We don’t do Mexico and Latin America anymore. Dad thought we should pull out four years ago and we did.”

  “I love Grandpa but you know what? Grandpa doesn’t have any ethics. I think you still do, don’t you?”

  “Ease up. I’ll try to call her this evening.”

  But he didn’t make the call. Instead he sat in the secret room and stared at a photo of Gw
en in her hiking shorts, looking fondly at Zip who seemed to be lecturing the Rocky Mountain landscape. At the beginning of their sophomore year Billy had rented a fine house on the outskirts of Boulder on the proceeds of a trust established by his grandfather. His father would have preferred to keep him on a short string because of the Stanford failure but his grandfather liked to spoil him. He and Zip had met at freshman baseball tryouts and Zip had made the cut but Billy hadn’t. A month later Billy had run into Zip between classes and was shocked to discover that Zip had quit the freshman team. Zip had said that there were more important things in life than baseball, a point of view well beyond Billy’s comprehension. Zip invited Billy to a picnic at the home of a radical professor where Billy found himself quite embarrassed to be a rich kid. There were stares when he unwittingly flipped a twenty into the beer collection of one-dollar bills.

  That summer he had corresponded with Zip and in the fall Zip moved into the house. On a fine October afternoon while they were playing catch Gwen and Patricia rode by on horses from a rental stable down the road. Billy, who was rather swift with the ladies, invited them in for a beer and they stayed for dinner. Billy preferred Gwen while Zip was polite enough to concentrate on Patricia. Unfortunately, it was clear to Billy that both girls were drawn to Zip who already had a burgeoning reputation as a campus firebrand. The girls gradually moved in during the ensuing weeks and the four were joined by a fifth, Sam, after Billy had bailed him out of jail after an antiwar demonstration. Sam was a new sort of person for Billy, a hyperintelligent biology student from Durango, Colorado, who was also a brawler. It had often occurred to Billy that the nighttime invasion of the draft board office would have been impossible without Sam. Zip had been the master theoretician while Sam was a man of action.

  That morning, as the driver drew near Century Plaza Billy was dismayed at the information he had accrued on Zip. (He would have been even more dismayed had he known that Gwen lay sleeplessly staring down her travel alarm a few miles away.) The trouble with the information on Zip was that it had been gathered from the absolute top, from contacts in the State Department and Mexican government enforcement officials, both groups well removed from the actual scene. The folder lacked what Billy thought of as “textural concertia”—the sordid, heated and grimy quality of the scene of the crime itself; the who, what and why of the veiled opposing forces that limited the information available. It had struck him over the years in dozens of trips to the firm’s foreign offices that the real problem was rarely the one he had arrived to solve. He looked up from the folder and asked Fred, the driver, to repeat himself.

  “I asked if I could take your ex to the airport.”

  “You’re under no obligation. Remember, I won you in the divorce.”

  “She’s got a lot of luggage. She always gives me a C-note.”

  “Where’s she going?” They had been apart nearly two years but Billy was still curious.

  “She said Air France so it must be Paris. And I have to pick up that lady from the dress shop so I’d say this was a shopping trip.”

  Billy felt his wife deserved a black belt in shopping. His feelings, however, were tempered by a recent quarrel with his daughter where Rebecca had pointed out that her mother had been a relatively poor girl from Modesto and must have learned how to spend money from her husband. Rebecca was an expert in defending her parents to each other. It was true that Billy made an annual October trip to the London office to do business and to have some new suits and shirts made. In fact, everything Billy wore was handmade. It was one of the few items in his personal inventory that brought his father’s total approval. Dad felt that clothes were one of the many ways to control the world around us. When Billy grew tired of these suits which ran about fifteen hundred a copy he’d give them to his driver. Once Billy had run into Fred and a girlfriend at Guido’s on Santa Monica. They pretended they were strangers, laughed and shook hands because they were wearing the same suit. Guido’s was an unlikely place for Billy—a show business hangout—but the cioppino reminded him of San Francisco. He occasionally remarked to himself that he didn’t know anyone in show business except Patricia, and one meeting in fifteen years didn’t amount to much.

  As the car pulled up to Century Plaza he suddenly remembered an embarrassing moment with Patricia and Sam. The wild bunch had been in San Francisco for a few days for an antiwar and a Grateful Dead concert. By Monday morning they had run out of money so Billy called his mother down in Hillsborough to see if the coast was clear (that his dad was gone). Zip and Gwen were in North Beach at an early morning meeting so Billy had taken Patricia and Sam with him. In Hillsborough he had flippantly pointed out Bing Crosby’s house which stunned Patricia, and when they had reached Billy’s home a few blocks away Patricia and Sam were stiff and fretful at the idea of a “mansion.” Billy’s mother was a kind but somewhat benumbed San Francisco socialite who had a wretched relationship with her daughter Marcia but was convinced Billy could do no wrong. She, of late, was always hungry, so the moment Billy had called she had sent the cook off to the local food emporium, Jurgensen’s, to secure a lavishly weighted picnic basket for the kids’ trip back to Colorado. She mistook Patricia as Billy’s girlfriend and showed her around the house, inviting her to stay whenever she was shopping in San Francisco. Sam noticed Billy’s red ears and patted him on the back. By the time they left Patricia clutched a Hermès scarf and it was all the mighty Sam could do to carry the picnic basket to the van. At that period all that Billy wanted to be was a run-of-the-mill revolutionary so he apologized for the household. Sam and Patricia had comforted him that no one was responsible for their parents, as Sam popped a Watney and tore a leg and thigh from a roast pheasant. Zip had assured Billy that his family’s wealth had put him in a prime position to help the poor and oppressed.

  The meeting with three company lawyers had begun promptly at six-thirty A.M. and ran past nine, ordinarily the beginning of the business day. The three employees pretended to be happy to meet the dawn during the three minutes of small talk that preceded the meeting, knowing full well that the schedule was to accommodate Billy’s afternoon ball game.

  The question at hand was how to get a large amount of currency held by an American company out of Brazil legally: the laborious solution was a shipment of Brazilian manganese to Russia, a tanker of Russian oil to France brokered by Greeks, the payment to be deposited by the Greeks in Zurich. There was nothing disturbing in the meeting to Billy except that he no longer desired the fanny of the girl who served them breakfast. He hadn’t had a woman in over a year and only recently read a distressingly stupid article on “sexual burnout.” During the talk about manganese it occurred to him that the last pull in the groin he had felt was when he looked at the old photo of Gwen in her hiking shorts in his secret room.

  Thus it was a shocking coincidence when he heard his secretary’s whispered announcement over the intercom that a Ms. Gwen Simpson was in the office. In fact, his bowels jellied as if suddenly besieged by food poisoning and he rushed to his washroom. This loss of composure was totally out of character and he did his best in front of the mirror to regain balance. He stared at an eighteenth-century painting of absurdly elongated horses he had bought in England and it didn’t help. He wanted to be alone in a rowboat at the old camp in the Sierra. Where had all the blood gone that had drained from his face, he wondered.

  When he walked out of the washroom he could see the alarm on his colleagues’ faces.

  “I haven’t had a heart attack,” he quipped, then asked them to excuse him for fifteen minutes. He ushered them out and crossed the reception area to where Gwen pretended to be studying a large model of a container ship on a pedestal. She glanced at him, offered her hand and looked back at the ship. Then for a few moments there was something in their meeting, an ineffable awkwardness, of two eighth graders waltzing for the first time.

  “You should have called,” he finally said.

  “Then you could have said no.”

&nbs
p; He guided her by the elbow into his office and beyond the averted glances of the lawyers and secretary who were wondering their different thoughts about this unlikely visitor in jeans, Paul Bond boots, a lovely if antique tweed shooting jacket.

  If anything Gwen and Billy were more uncomfortable in his office. They didn’t pretend to be doing anything else but trying to accommodate each other’s presence and it seemed impossible.

  “Shouldn’t we hug?” she said, then caught herself. “But then we never did hug, did we?”

  “You were with my blood brother. It would have brought on thoughts of incest or worse,” he joked.

  “Sam was the only one brave enough. We were too stoned.”

  “We were going to be blood sisters and brothers but we were too stoned. Sam nicked his wrist and Patricia almost gagged. And Zip ran out of the room.” Billy pulled up a chair for her, then retreated behind the safety of his desk.

  “Zip never could stand blood. He couldn’t even clean a fish when we were camping. That’s why I don’t think he tried to kill a Federale, do you? How much do you know?”

  Billy drew Zip’s folder from his desk, exhaling as if finally on secure ground. He still couldn’t look directly into her eyes but was getting ready for another try.

  “I know pretty much everything there is to know in the official sense. I’m a corporate not a criminal lawyer. I’ve been led to believe that Mexican law is less intricate than our own but has a heavier hand. Down there the case is considered utterly closed. Look at Zip’s international rap sheet. Your cause is pretty hopeless.” Billy handed her a sheet of paper which she barely looked at before she flushed and put it on the desk.

  This isn’t a cause but a friend. Or maybe not. I’m not sure when a friend stops being a friend, are you?”

  This brought Billy to his feet for a long look at the plaza below. From the office in San Francisco he could see the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, which was a great deal more attractive than the white cement below him.