Читать книгу After Surfing Ocean Beach - Mary Soderstrom - Страница 5

It is true that I wasn’t functioning very well by the time I got to the complex where Lil was going to move. The time between mid-November and New Year’s is always busy when you have a restaurant, and that year it was the usual multiplied by ten. So much has happened since then, both in my life and in the world, that all the plans to celebrate the end of the twentieth century seem trivial in retrospect, but at the time the countdown to the millennium was both exciting and one hell of a lot of work.

That’s why I was travelling that first weekend in December. It was the only window of time I had to check things out for my stepmother and then help her move. Thanksgiving was safely over—we’d been fully booked all four days of the holiday weekend—and the Christmas and New Year’s rush hadn’t quite started.

The plan was for me to catch an afternoon flight from Albany, change in Detroit, and then go on to L.A. I’d get an evening flight to San Diego, where I’d rent a car at the airport. Then I’d go by and see Lil at the house. I planned on staying the night in a motel, however. She had invited me to stay with her, but I’d ducked the invitation. After my mother died I never liked staying in the house, and besides, I decided it would be good for Lil and me not to be in each other’s pockets. She had made the arrangements for movers, she had file folders of information that she’d photocopied and sent to me, but I knew there’d be some—well, “organizing” is what my wife, Jenny, would call it—for me to do. I didn’t want to argue with Lil and then have to sit around in the evening watching television with her.

Don’t get me wrong, I would be the first to say that Lil’s one hell of a fine woman. My father was lucky when she agreed to marry him. She kept him on his toes and brought him into the l990s. She didn’t take any guff from him, either, which is what he needed, I see now.

What I did not need that day in December was a snowstorm, but I got one, nevertheless.

Kingston gets mountains of snow every winter, and when people learn that I grew up in California, they ask me why I ever left. I tell them that things are better here than the first place I went after I left the West Coast. My former wife was from Montreal, and she talked me into going there. Big mistake, I always say, but I leave it hanging whether I mean Caroline or Montreal or both.

So that Saturday there was a lot of snow. When I left the house at about 4:00 A.M. an inch already covered the pavement, and by the time Jenny came to the restaurant to take me to the airport at a little after noon the snow was a foot and a half deep where the plows hadn’t yet passed.

We live on the same property as my restaurant, Chez Cassis, which means that Jenny and Cassis—our daughter, the restaurant’s named after her—only had to drive out to the main road and then turn into the restaurant drive to come pick me up. It should have been a piece of cake, even with the snow.

The guy who plows most of the driveways along this stretch of the highway was asleep at the switch, though. He’s a second cousin of Jenny’s, and her father, who runs road construction around here, got him the job, but the fool hadn’t gotten around to putting his plow on the front of his pickup. He had to spend at least an hour getting it attached, and then it wasn’t on right, so he couldn’t get it to lower all the way. When Jenny came down the drive in her Jeep, he was stopped halfway, tinkering with the lift bar.

Even that shouldn’t have meant a problem: Jenny knows how to drive under winter conditions. We got the Jeep for its four-wheel drive back before SUVs became popular just so she wouldn’t have to miss any court dates because of the weather, so she could get into New York or Albany or wherever with no problem. So she took one look at her cousin and another at her watch, and she dropped into four-wheel mode and turned off the drive onto the lawn.

I was at the window so I saw her churn though the snow that the guy had succeeded in pushing up off the drive, but I bent over to pick up my small sports bag, so I didn’t see her right wheels slip into the pond in the middle of the lawn. It was filled by the snow, of course, and I guess she must have misjudged where it was, because I know she knew it was there. She’s the one who wanted it, actually. She’s the one who drew up the landscaping plans, which we’d started to work on the fall before.

When I opened the front door, ready to hop in the Jeep with her and Cassis, I saw her jumping out of the vehicle, which was now listing steeply to starboard. She was yelling at her cousin, and Cassis was standing a couple of feet behind her taking it all in. Jenny is a small woman, but she’s dynamite. You don’t want to be in her way once she starts going.

Of course, I didn’t have my snow boots on, and I’d changed out of my kitchen whites into khakis, a cotton dress shirt, and a lightweight jacket because you don’t wear heavy pants and sweaters when you’re going to California. I looked for my boots where I thought I’d left them by the door to the kitchen, but they weren’t there. The only thing for me to do was wade out in the snow in my running shoes.

Cassis saw me first and started to run toward me, lifting her skinny little legs high as she waded through the snow. She was only eight, and she looked as if she came straight out of those photos of Italian orphans after the Second World War.

“Daddy,” Cassis was crying. “Come help Mommy. Come help Mommy.” She had a cold, she’d been out of school three days that week, and I didn’t like the idea of her out there knee deep in snow. Because Jenny’s so often busy with cases and I’m always around, I’m the one who does the medical appointments and earache-in-the-middle-of-the-night duty. I don’t mind, I’m pleased to do it, actually. There’s some guilt involved in this, Jenny has helped me see: I was far from being a Sensitive New Age Guy when Caroline’s boys were this age.

So I raced over to the lawn, took several big steps through the snow, and picked Cassis up. The snow started to come in over the tops of my shoes, and as I turned to head back toward the cleared part of the driveway, I could feel something give in the tendon that holds your kneecap in place. It’s happened before; I had arthroscopic surgery on it about ten years ago when I tore it pretty badly, back in the days when I was trying to get away from what I was doing to my life by running marathons.

“Shit,” I said aloud. That’s not a word I use around Cassis usually. Working in a kitchen you develop a pretty awful vocabulary, but kids imitate everything you do and say so I watch my language when she’s within earshot.

“Daddy,” she said. “Don’t talk like that.” She had such a shocked and disappointed expression on her face that I had to smile despite the pain in my knee. I lunged through the snow to take her back to the road edge, and when she was safely in the clear I went back to help the snow removal guy. He’d gotten his blade fixed and was now in the back of his truck getting a cable to attach to his winch so he could pull Jenny’s Jeep out.

“No,” she was saying. “No, you don’t need to do that at all. What I need is for you and Rick to push. Just rock me back and forth a couple of times, and then as soon as the front wheels grab the edge of the pond, I’ll be out.”

The guy glanced at me as he continued to fiddle with his gear.

“Come on,” she said to me. “We need to hustle if you’re going to make the plane.”

I slapped the guy on his back. “Yeah, come on,” I said, and I started to wade out in the snow again.

That early in the year snow is usually sloppy, wet, and heavy, the kind that cakes under your feet. Because the air isn’t very cold, it melts quickly and within a couple of minutes you’re wet from the outside in. If you’re working, you get soaked by sweat from the inside out, too. By the time Jenny’s vehicle was out of the hole and headed for the driveway, I was dripping and my feet had begun to ache from the cold. What was worse was the throbbing in my knee.

Jenny leaned over so she could open the door on the passenger’s side. “Where’s your stuff, big guy? We’ve got to move,” she said.

I watched to make sure Cassis opened the side door and got safely in back while I debated making Jenny swing by the house so I could change my clothes. My larger suitcase was in the back, I’d put it there the night before, and I’d have to either get something out of it or paw through my drawers to find something to put on. But we already were a good half-hour behind schedule, so as I got in and put my small bag at my feet I told Jenny to turn the heat up high. Then I took off my jacket and handed it to Cassis before I fastened my seatbelt. “Hey, sweetheart, put this over the place where the hot air comes out,” I said. “Maybe it will dry out.”

Jenny’s cousin had gotten his rig out of the way, and Jenny roared around him and then off onto the highway. The airport at Albany is about forty-five minutes from Kingston, taking a couple of shortcuts we know and the Thruway for part of the way. However, we got stuck behind a snowplow for a good ten miles, and then when Jenny tried to make up time on the straightaway, she skidded going around a corner and ended up in a snow bank. Getting out was no big deal—Jenny just had to back up—but by the time we got to the airport my nerves were jangled.

The kicker was that the flight was delayed because of the weather. Nothing we could do about that, though. I told Jenny and Cassis to go home after they’d stood around with me for half an hour, as I checked in and tried to get good information about whether I’d make my connections in Detroit and L.A.

Cassis didn’t want to go. She always likes airports, but she hates to say goodbye to people. She’s a sweetheart that way, she always looks so pathetic. But there was no point, and besides, I really wanted to sit down with a beer and put my leg up. Because by then my knee had really started to hurt.

My shoes were still wet, and I decided that if I could find a nice corner in front of a radiator I could catch my breath, dry out, and keep the knee from progressing to the next stage of pain. The stiff joint was already making me limp a little—luckily Jenny was so concerned with getting back and finishing the brief she needed for Monday that she didn’t notice—and suddenly I felt myself running on empty. After all, I’d put in a good eight hours already that day, standing in the kitchen making sure that stuff was organized so my sous-chef could run the show for the next few days, as well as doing what I usually do on Saturday, which is supervise the prep for the lunch and evening meals.

Suddenly I was hungry. Airport restaurants are terrible. In principle I have nothing to do with them, because they’re the opposite of what Jenny and I believe in and are trying to create with Chez Cassis. There are times, however, when a hamburger just calls out to me, and so first I wolfed down two Big Macs, and then I retreated to the bar, where I could nurse a beer in front of the window that looked out over the runways. I dozed off, and woke up after an hour when a great gust of wind blew snow against the window beside to me, rattling the glass in its frame. An elderly couple was standing next to me, looking at the three chairs in which no one was sitting.

“May we sit down?” the man asked me.

“Of course,” I said, putting my leg down so the man could pull out the chair on the other side. Shit, I said to myself. I could hardly bend my leg.

So it was clear that it was going to be a long, boring, difficult trip even before I got off the ground at Albany. When we finally got to Detroit shortly before midnight, the storm had blown past, leaving huge piles of snow on either side of the runways and what seemed like twenty-five thousand people milling around inside the airport, trying to get connections on the next flights out. Northwest put on a bigger plane for the red-eye to Los Angeles because so many people had had earlier flights cancelled. But getting all the seating sorted out took time, and we didn’t get in the air until after midnight, which meant it was about 3:00 A.M. Pacific time when we finally landed in L.A. That was a good eighteen hours since Jenny had picked me up, and maybe twenty-five, twenty-six hours since I’d gone to work Saturday morning.

My bags had been checked through to San Diego, but in Detroit I’d been able to get them pulled so I could pick them up in L.A. since there was no way I was going to make my San Diego flight. I’d reserved a car too, which meant that even though my knee hurt so much I had to hobble to the baggage claim, within forty-five minutes of touching down I was out of the airport and in the little blue Neon rental car, which was all they had left at that hour.

Two hours before dawn, in California again and on the freeway. It wasn’t cold, my clothes and shoes had dried out long ago, but I shivered anyway. California has that effect on me.

I was born in California. There are probably 20 million people who can say that now, but when I was growing up there were far, far fewer. In my first grade class, of the twenty-eight students, only five of us were native Californians. Everybody else had come with their parents from somewhere else when the Golden State boomed after the war.

Golden State, that’s what all the newspapers called it, what that first grade teacher said when she told us the story about the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada back in the old days. No irony at all in her voice, in anyone’s voice. Almost everyone was convinced that they’d found a heaven on earth. The gold might have been all mined out, but there were ways to make fortunes still, and even ordinary people could live a life of comfort unimagined by many fifteen years previously.

My father was an exception, but then he’d probably be an exception anywhere. He was a surgeon, the son of a surgeon, trained like his father at Stanford. He said occasionally that there were far too many people coming into California. He went further than that: when I was thirteen I heard him say that San Diego was ruined by the war, which changed it from a rather pleasant, sleepy town into a half-grown city full of “poorly educated, over-enthusiastic fools.”

We were standing in front of the church, on a hot Sunday in May, and he was talking to one of the scientists who worked at the Naval Electronics Lab, further out on the Point Loma. I remember being scandalized, and looking around to see if anyone had overheard. That wasn’t the kind of thing that our teachers or the parents of any of my friends said.

My mother laughed at him. “James never got over being invited to the Bohemian Club,” she said. This was before she got sick, when she still was tall and elegant. “He’s such a snob.” Then she looped her arm through his and smiled. “That’s why he married me.”

My mother.

But I hadn’t come to the coast to think about her.

I turned on the radio and tried to get something loud and pounding to help keep me awake. The drive to San Diego was a good two hours even early on Sunday when there was less traffic than usual. I decided I’d stop around Oceanside on the other side of Camp Pendleton to get something to eat and stretch my legs. Jenny had said she’d call to tell Lil to expect me in the morning, and knowing Lil I decided she’d be looking for me early.

But even the music wasn’t enough to keep me awake, I realized as I drove down Interstate 405, heading over to Interstate 5 and the run down the coast to San Diego. The headlights approaching through the fog were disorienting, and my eyes drifted closed twice. It was dangerous to drive like that. I was tired, I was annoyed, I was regretting that I had ever decided to make the trip. I began to think about the uppers I had stowed in the bottom of my shaving kit.

Anybody who’s read Anthony Bourdain’s books about chefs and cooking knows that a certain percentage of people who work in kitchens are crazy. During the two years when I did the Culinary Institute of America course and the two years after that when I worked in kitchens up and down the Hudson I met quite a few, and got into a couple of altercations with one or two, also. There was a certain amount of cocaine, a lot of alcohol, not as much speed as you’d find among truck drivers: sometimes a bit of chemical help is called for in the kitchen. I was much older than the crews I worked with as a rule, and I had Jenny and Cassis as anchors, so I wasn’t as tempted as the other guys. But on the other hand I didn’t have the energy the younger ones did, and there were times when I felt the need for an upper or two. So I still had three pills I’d gotten the last time I’d worked in someone else’s kitchen. They had shifted to the bottom of the little aspirin bottle I kept for emergencies, and I’d almost thrown them out the last time I refilled it from the thousand-aspirin bottle that Jenny picked up at Price Club.

So there it is, I admit I had them with me in my shaving kit.

But I didn’t open the shaving kit, I didn’t take even an aspirin, although that might have been good for my knee. It is important for everyone to know that. What happened after was not affected by anything chemical. I was, I am, I have been ever since Jenny took me over, a good citizen, a boy scout, not somebody who gets cranked up on meth or who needs a line of cocaine to wake up in the morning.

So when I came to the interchange south of Laguna Beach, I bought a ten-ounce cup of coffee and a can of Coke at a fast food place and hobbled around the parking lot. Despite the roar of the freeway I imagined I could hear the surf not too far away. Certainly the air was damp with fog and filled with a hint of the smell you find on mornings like this along the beach. My knee hurt—I had trouble getting out of the car, and the first few steps were agony—but something of the peace I always remember from being by the ocean crept into my bones. Yes, being in California did funny things to me, but maybe, I thought, just maybe this trip would be all right. Then I went back to the car, got my small bag out of the back seat, and opened it up next to me so I could fish out the big manila envelope with the papers Lil had sent me.

I continued south making very good time, until I realized that I was going to arrive at Lil’s far too early for her to be receiving visitors. However, I had told her I’d look over the complex, and I’d initially thought we might drive up Sunday afternoon. The better plan, I saw, the better plan by far, would be to stop at the complex now. That way I could spend the afternoon making sure that Lil was ready for the movers when they came the next day.

The sky was growing a little lighter off to the east: sunrise would be sometime around 6:00 A.M. I pulled the car over onto the shoulder so I could check where I should turn off the freeway. The brochure from the complex had a map in it, I knew, so I slit the manila envelope open with my penknife, which I’d also retrieved from the bottom of the bag. The directions said to take Highway 78 east toward Escondido from the interchange south of Oceanside, then the San Marcos off-ramp and a couple of county roads that wound around the tops of the hills. That wouldn’t be too hard to find, I’d been in that country before, I remembered.

I put the knife back in my pants pocket. I’m sure of that. I’m sure of that because, while I love knives, I have great respect for them. A cook has to. You keep them righteous sharp, you have one in your hand half your waking time, and you are surrounded by people working under pressure who also are cutting and chopping and slicing with instruments just as sharp and strong as yours.

This knife wasn’t one I used at work, but it has a connection with Chez Cassis. On that famous trip to Europe that Jenny and I took, when I’d finally decided to take the leap into a new life, she bought it for me. At the time, she thought it might be useful for cooking; we were wrong, but neither of us knew that much then. Without a doubt it was a beautiful knife, however. It was a Laguiole, handmade in a little village in the Massif Central with a handle carved from a cow’s horn. It fit the hand perfectly, it closed on itself with a satisfied gasp, the blade kept its edge like the best surgical tool. I used it half a dozen times a day, every day, and every time I thought of Jenny and her faith in me.

So the knife was in my pocket when I drove into the parking lot at the complex and the sun was beginning to rise from behind the mountains to the east. I parked around in the back so I could look at the sunrise on my left and at the complex in front of me and on my right.

One of the things I always forget about Southern California is how high the mountains are. The Sierra Nevada, which form the backbone of the state, are the stars: Mount Whitney is the highest mountain in the continental U.S., and the long range of granite peaks capture so much moisture from the ocean that everything on their east side is near desert. But the ranges of mountains that run the length of the state not far from the coast are impressive too, especially when you consider that they rise from near sea level. Mount Palomar—the one with the big telescope—is over a mile high. So is Mount Cuyamaca, where we used to go in the wintertime to see the snow.

I don’t think you can see either of them from the complex, but what I saw that morning were shadowy, purple-grey cutouts of mountains with the sky pink and orange behind. The Camino Real Care Complex sat on the edge of the valley where the highway ran. I couldn’t see the bottom, though, because the low places were still filled with fog. Above, the air seemed more or less clear, although it was tinted with something—smog, maybe. Nevertheless, it was all very pretty, and I sat for several minutes, taking it in.

However, I was there to get a fix on the complex, not the landscape. Lil had written that this place looked the best of all the assisted living facilities she had visited. Built about fifteen years previously, it had forty-five apartments for people who could get around on their own, who only needed help with the housework, two meals a day, and the backup of having staff on the premises twenty-four/seven. The place also had two other levels of care: one for people who needed help with personal stuff like dressing and bathing, and another for those who had to have full-time care.

“As you get more and more ancient you can just go from one level to another,” Lil had written. “But not all the people have one foot in the grave. They do a lot of rehabilitation on people after accidents, and I saw quite a few young faces in the dining hall. That should liven the place up, it won’t all be bingo and Alzheimer’s.” She’d added on the phone that there was a liquor store with a good wine selection in a strip mall nearby that made deliveries on telephone orders, “so I can have a drink before dinner and a glass of wine during it.”

I laughed at that: my father had always been a good drinker, but he’d stuck to martinis or scotch and soda until Lil took him in hand. She knew wine, and she got him enthusiastic about grands crus and small wineries in the Napa Valley and monthly selections from vintage clubs. In return he insisted on a drink of the hard stuff at least once a day, whether at the cocktail hour or earlier in the afternoon.

The apartments were in the two-storey building furthest to my right: they had curtains, some of which were drawn, and individual balconies with patio furniture and window boxes. To the left was a four-storey building, which I guessed held the higher levels of care. In between was a low building that must be administration, the dining hall, and the kitchen. From where I sat I could see the dumpsters for garbage right next to a double door that probably led to the kitchen. I remember thinking it would be good to take a look in there, because you can tell a lot about a place from the kitchen.

A small, dark man came out and threw a couple of garbage bags in the dumpster. Someone in a motorized wheelchair came and headed down a path at the edge of the parking lot. Through the windows of the third floor of the bigger building I could see all the lights snap on inside. Then the sentinel lights set around the parking lot went off.

I checked my watch: slightly before seven o’clock. Too early for an official visit; they’d tell me to come back at a more civilized time if I went around to the main door and introduced myself as Mrs. Lillian Mercer’s stepson come to check the place out.

But I had to pee after all that coffee and the Coke, so I said to myself, I’ll go ask if I can use their restroom. Lil had said she’d told them to expect me sometime before she moved, she’d given us the name of someone who had been very helpful. If I went around and asked for that person I’d seem a little more businesslike, more like someone you’d give the key to the restroom to, whom you wouldn’t suspect of planning a crime.

What was the name of the person? I shook the contents of the manila envelope out on the seat beside me. Along with the brochure there were a summary of Lil’s investment income, a budget written in her large, careful teacher’s handwriting, and the letter in which she’d sent us all the details, including why she had decided she needed more help with living.

Jenny had cried when she read the letter. At that point she hadn’t had much experience with seeing the end of life approaching. Her own parents were just beginning to think of retiring—her father is only twelve years older than me. She loved Lil too, and Lil loved her, she’s the daughter that Lil never had.

But the letter had the name of Lil’s contact, and after Jenny had read it, she’d put it back, still wet with her tears, in the business envelope that it had come in. I fumbled with that envelope, trying to get to it open, but the flap had stuck shut again. To reopen it, I reached in my pocket for my knife and I slit the letter open.

Then I looked up.

A pickup pulled into the lot, followed by a station wagon and a van. Two heavy-set women got out of the wagon and the van and waved to each other. Each was dressed in pale blue scrubs and dark blue windbreakers.

The pickup’s license plates were vanity ones: “ANNIE.” The woman driving it took a bit longer to collect her things, and when she was out on the asphalt her arms were full of bags of something. She was also heavy, and her voice, when she called to the other two women to come help her, made me think of something that bothered me. Suddenly I was sad, angry, I don’t know what. Then one of the other women said something about Christmas before they all went in the building through a door next to the kitchen entrance.

That was when I suddenly found myself shaking uncontrollably.

Oh God, I hate hospitals, I have ever since the three long years it took my mother to die. I thought I had gotten over that, I thought all the times that Jenny had talked me down had been enough to shine a light in those shadows. I did not want to be here, the mention of Christmas made me think of all I should be doing back at home. This was the year that Chez Cassis had made it on the map. It had been featured in Gourmet, there’d been a profile about Jenny and me in the New York Times“ dining out” section, our New Year’s Eve celebration had been sold out since November 1.

I should be back home, planning and chopping and stirring and getting ready. I should be working on fulfilling the dream that was Jenny’s as much as mine. I was tired, I was God damn exhausted, and here I was, playing the good son for a woman whom I liked, but to whom I really didn’t owe much. I was angry, I was furious, I was ... I don’t know.

Then the motorcycle roared into the lot as if this were a bad movie with the Hell’s Angel taking possession of his turf, the place where payoffs get made. Oh shit, I remember thinking. What is this place? Who works here? How much money has Lil already put into it?

I had to go over and find out ... I had to ask somebody ... My head had started to hurt, I could hear myself panting and felt my face go red. I opened the car door and I started to stand. The pain shot upward from my knee and I had to grab the roof of the car with my free left hand.

How long did I stand there with my head whirling and my eyes ready to burst out of my head? A minute, two minutes. Long enough for the thug on the motorcycle to see me, to come over, to ... what? I wasn’t sure. Settle some kind of account, prey on someone injured, attack ...

He grabbed me, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I can’t remember clearly. It was as if some red curtain fell over me and I had to fight my way out. I still had, I realized, the knife in my right hand. His right hand was on my left shoulder, his jacket had fallen open. I moved forward, I stuck the knife, I stuck my lovely, extremely sharp French knife into him.

He fell to the pavement, and I fell back into the car. For a moment I sat there, looking out the open door at him. He looked up at me. He said, “What the hell? I was only trying to ...”

And I panicked. I admit it, I completely lost it. I was vanquished by all those hours without sleep, all those terrible memories ...

I shut the car door. I started the engine. I drove away.