Nothing to Declare Page 11

  In the afternoon, he goes to bed and drifts on the border of sleep. When he closes his eyes, he urges the models to mind, their nipples, hipbones—one always smells of spoiled fruit as though she’s recently been fucked. He masturbates grimly, in repetition, feeling little but the heat of come against his leg. Downstairs, his roommates make their supper, play music, talk on the phone; there are arguments, the slamming of the screen door, Natalie running her meetings, giving orders to her troops. Jesse can picture her, in her glory, hands on her hips and leading with her stubborn chin. Under his covers, his legs grind restlessly. His clock ticks like a second heart. The alarm is set for eleven o’clock.

  One day in late October at close of shift, Isabel is waiting on the sidewalk near the factory loading dock. The morning is overcast and cold and she’s bundled into a sweater of homespun wool. Her bicycle leans against a laurel tree that’s planted in the verge of grass at the sidewalk’s edge. The foliage casts her in a somber, gray-green light.

  Jesse rests his portfolio between them. “This is how it comes down?” he says. “You just show up?”

  “I didn’t think about it too closely.” She touches the burn that scars his wrist. “I don’t like you on the midnight shift. It’s dangerous.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” he says. “I get by. I fucking triumph.”

  She looks at him with her steady gaze, the one she’s trained to snip out leather patterns to a feather edge. “You’re doing art again? I called the house, they said I might have to search for you on campus.”

  “I’m not shaking any walls,” says Jesse. “It fills my day.”

  Around them, departing workers descend the loading dock to the street, talking in Spanish and English, a torrent of Portuguese—the Sayao sisters, famous for their tempers and their flan. They stop their squabbling and nod, extend to Jesse the respectful distance due the patrón.

  Isabel watches them walk off. “They treat you like the boss.”

  “What I am. Midnight to eight.”

  “You’re not serious?” Isabel says. “Is that what you want, cracking the whip to speed up the line?”

  “What I want,” Jesse says with some urgency, “doesn’t feature into it.”

  Isabel hesitates before taking Jesse’s hand in both of hers. “No,” she says. “I guess it doesn’t.”

  There’s a tremor in her fingers and looming sadness on her face as she describes Marty and Emily’s flight, how they fell in love and might be getting married.

  “And I’d heard it was only roses and sunshine after New Orleans,” Jesse says. “Smash couplism, wasn’t that your motto? The revolution for real.”

  “Nothing was real,” she says. “Except what we did to you.” Her eyes well and what can Jesse do but circle her in his arms? The portfolio catches them at their ankles. He kicks it out of the way.

  “Careful,” Isabel says. “Your work.”

  Jesse holds her cautiously—the damp wool and her body rigid beneath, her breath spiky with exhaustion, her few tears. He tells her, “Come to the house, I’ll make you something wonderful for breakfast. You can walk me up the hill.”

  “That’s how we got started,” she says softly. Trouble has changed her, made her visible at last.

  “Different hill,” Jesse says. They walk together up the grade in silence.

  After breakfast, they decide to have a day of it, tramping miles through the redwood groves above the campus and ending at Lulu’s for pork adobo and too much rum. Isabel shifts between tears and apologies and fury; she leaves out nothing, even the specifics of how she and Marty and Emily were in bed.

  Jesse listens in a state of dull fatigue, aware of Lulu behind them in her doorway. She’s watching them, clicking her fingers to the jukebox beat. “Why don’t we leave the past where it belongs?” he says. “Convenient amnesia, I’m a big fan.”

  “No, I can’t be trusted. You have to see me as I am.”

  “I see you. You’re drunk and beautiful and kind of sad—you’re you,” Jesse says. “And I am way too wiped for work. I need my nap.” Isabel fishes an arm through his to make it out the door.

  At Escalona House, Isabel climbs the stairs as though by habit. She smooths a place on Jesse’s bed, sits and undoes her braid, staring out the window at the thickening fog. Jesse watches at the threshold. Her hands are cracked and cut and stained with leather dye; they show her age. But they perform with animal deftness, finding an easy way in the dark. She turns to Jesse, puts a finger to her lips as he tries to speak. She slips out of her sweater and reaches up with a tiny sigh of desire or regret. “They went to Irian Jaya,” she says, murmuring into his neck. “I don’t even know where that is.”

  SEVENTEEN

  ISABEL SLEEPS WITH HER LEGS AND ARMS CROWDING the full width of the mattress. Don’t let me be a bully, she’s said to Jesse—bop me once or twice and I’ll roll over. But if he tries even a flimsy tap, she rouses herself in a snarl of dislocation, as though her dreams were filled with violence and pain. Slowly, her eyes pool into focus and she pastes herself against him, her nightgown swimming toward her throat. They make love in a daze, bruising each other in the dark.

  Back on eight to four in the truck tire bay, Jesse’s lost the approval of his bosses, and he’s given up his raise. He’s drifted low in the sight of his old partner, Henry Johnson. Jesse’s a fool, Henry says, to turn down cash in favor of a little bit of squeeze, no matter how fine.

  “You love her, boy?” Henry calls to him one morning as they unload a trailer. Jesse stiffens his back.

  “We don’t talk like that. We live in the now.”

  The rain’s been falling steadily since dawn. It lays a clatter over the rumble of the idling trucks.

  “Live in the now, maybe the lady does,” says Henry. “She’s got you fussing on her as she pleases. But love’s all over you, boy. I can smell it a mile off. In love with yourself, too, appreciating what you think love’s done to you. That’s even worse.”

  Jesse dumps a box of tread onto the floor, and a pall of dust spills over the toes of his work boots. “You know a lot about the subject.”

  “I’ve got thirty years of track under me, should be enough to recognize upside down from right side up. You’re sailing now, think you’ve got it made, pussy every night, hot coffee in the morning. You wait—one day she’ll try and drop some changes over you, tell you how to dress or spend your money, what kind of car to drive. Do as she says, she’ll hate you for being her monkey. Don’t, and it’s nothing but fighting the whole day through. Of course you’re right to hang in there while the loving’s good.”

  “Thank you very much, Dear Abby,” Jesse says. “Look, we’re not in love, we’re friends. We care for each other. A human feeling. That’s not going to change, whatever goes down.”

  Henry nods his head and smiles his sharp smile. “You got it figured, then,” he says.

  “You bet I do,” says Jesse. He’ll take her to Lulu’s tonight and move her around the floor. They’re good together when they’re dancing.

  You’ve got to love Jesse’s hopeful thinking, the trajectory of his belief. There he was, playing in the bigs, making it up as he went along and doing almost all right. He was working toward a goal he didn’t even know he had—to turn himself into the kind of man that Isabel would be happy with forever. I can figure how he ran it, that he could estimate her moods, chart a tangent, keep to the shallows. It’s more than I could do, but still, I wish he’d toughed it out; life would have been better for us all. A for effort, pal, high points for hanging in the game.

  Bel was turned inward those days, especially on Sunday nights. I’d seen my fill of them, the lady rolling roaches into joints at her kitchen table, dipping them in Mexican vanilla to bring some honey to the smoke. Her freezing kitchen, rain hounding the windows and walls, Isabel cuddled up in deerskin gloves and booties, her robe buttoned to her neck. She’d be getting high by her lonesome, walled into a gloom so dark and concentrated the drug could bare
ly chip its surface. Jesse’d have to stay away from her, no gentle word or there’d be havoc.

  They’d be sore and rattled from over-fucking, the day diluted in bed, looking toward quantity where quality had fallen away. They never said “I love you” to each other. That’s a pity, isn’t it? Why couldn’t Jesse have pushed himself to have his say one of those bitter Sunday nights? Why didn’t he barge in and disturb the peace? It might have made a difference in the end. Isabel couldn’t have heard it very often, maybe never. Never from me, sweet on her as I was. “I love you” would have whacked some life into that kitchen, upped the kilowatts so high you could have smelled the heat. He might have won her, changed our story forever. Christ, win her or not, he could have had the worth of claiming everything he felt.

  Jesse waits by the tub while Isabel takes a bath. Her eyes are closed and her face is glossy with contentment. This is how he loves to think of her, slumped and undefended. He passes his hand through the water and Isabel’s eyes spark awake, then stall. She’s considerably stoned—it’s possible she isn’t sure he’s really there.

  “I didn’t know you’d come in,” she says.

  “I should paint you like this. Next time I’ll bring in my easel.”

  Isabel shakes her head in mild dismay and stands for Jesse to towel her off, silent as he dries her hair and hands and feet. In the muscle of her left calf, just above the ankle, there’s a faded scar. An old tattoo with the ink burnt away, a miniature thunderbolt with feathered wings. It’s a relic of ten years ago or more, he’s never felt comfortable to ask. Jesse lays his fingertips over the mark as though it were Braille.

  “Don’t,” says Isabel. “I want you up here.”

  “I never would’ve let you take it off.”

  Isabel rests her palms on the top of his head. “I forget how young you are. A baby.”

  When Jesse stands up, Isabel is fighting tears. She turns away from him and walks herself to bed. Jesse kneels again to pull the bathtub stopper. The water spirals down the drain.

  At first light, Isabel’s in the living room behind her Singer, her foot laying on the treadle as though she’s running laps. She’s embroidering onto the yoke of a leather vest, intricate stitches that flesh out the body of a green and yellow snake. Jesse brings her some tea.

  “The snake looks like it could bite,” he says. “If I were you, I’d dump Rags to Riches and think about a shop of your own. You could put me at the counter.”

  Isabel hugs her arms around herself, taking consolation from the touch of her body.

  “There’s no stopping you, is there?” she says. “Your bottomless good nature?”

  “I was only trying to be encouraging.”

  “No you weren’t. I feel it even when you’re not here. You’d be happy if you could live inside my head.”

  “That’s not what I want.”

  She stares at him and returns to her stitching.

  “I was living in Laurel Canyon when I got the thunderbolt on my ankle. The man I was with decided we were going to TJ to get matching ones. Twins in the skin, was how he put it. I was married to him for three years. Jimmy Lantana, he taught me how to hotwire a car and that’s about the whole story.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Jesse says.

  “No, I want to, now.” Isabel’s voice becomes distilled and matter-of-fact. Her mother had a fondness for Metrecal, vodka stingers and Beat the Clock; her dad managed the order desk at Pep Boys before he keeled over at a bowling alley when Isabel was twelve. She met Jimmy Lantana in high school and followed him to the Hollywood Hills after they graduated in ‘64. Isabel worked the lunch shift at Musso and Frank while Jimmy surfed.

  “I had an amazing pair of boots, pony leather with the most beautiful fringe way over my calves, and Jimmy and I danced almost every night at the Whiskey. We had a scene there, a kind of vagabond family where everybody was on the verge of glory—musicians and dancers and what have you. I found a weekend job sewing costumes for the bands, groups nobody remembers anymore, for good reason. But one night Jimmy hit me and nearly broke my jaw. I wouldn’t get on my knees for a disc jockey who promised to set me up with the costumer for Gary Lewis & the Playboys. Jimmy hit me and then he burst out crying, can you believe it? I couldn’t cry, not a single blessed teardrop. I closed the door behind me and never went back, abandoned everything I owned. I think about those boots sometimes.”

  The sewing machine stops, and Isabel looks at Jesse. The sunlight underlines the weariness on her face. “There it is, or almost. Enough anyway of what you were waiting for, the portrait you wish you could paint. So I want you to go, now, Jesse, go home to your friends on Escalona Court. It was mean of me to get involved with you, selfishness or spite. Revenge on Marty. We’re stopping it this morning.”

  “Wait,” says Jesse. “What are you talking about? Back up here.”

  “Don’t be difficult, please don’t, you have no ability for it. I want to do this before I learn to hate you. Before you hate me.”

  He makes an effort to go to her, but her posture holds him at bay—her tight grip on the edge of the sewing table as though she might sink from sight.

  “Let’s have breakfast and talk this out,” he says. “We could go for a walk—no questions, no days of old, just the tall trees and our feet in the mud and whatever you need to say.”

  Isabel shakes her head. “No.”

  “We’re breaking up? Out of nowhere, just like that?”

  “We were never together,” Isabel says. Her voice softens. “You’ll thank me later.”

  She stands in the doorway while he throws his things into a paper bag and walks out her drive to hitchhike home. His last memory of her is a half-wave goodbye, the arm jerked down as soon as he turns for a goodbye wave of his own.

  Jesse’s housemates are glad to see him and he fills his winter evenings by cooking dinners from Le Cordon Bleu and Julia Child. After supper, he follows Lucy for chanting in the damp backyard. The mantra will cool out the thinking motor, Lucy tells him. Notice but don’t judge what wanders through your brain. Impossible, Jesse decides, though he folds his legs into a passable lotus posture and matches his breath to an inner count. He can last ten minutes before leaving Lucy to herself.

  Sometimes, at the end of the day, Jesse walks by Rags to Riches. He tests himself, heart stilled, seeing what he can pick out through the display window. There are pieces of movement smeared through the glass, car headlights and customers at the changing mirror, Steely Dan at high volume on the stereo. No scrap of Isabel, though, her well-turned step. The walk home lasts twenty minutes, the wind at his back.

  In late December, Jesse flies the redeye to Boston for a holiday visit with his parents. Although his mother has breakfast on the table, Jesse jogs out into the neighborhood the first morning, kicking a trail through the crust of frozen sand and half-melted snow. Almost every house but his is mobbed by multicolored lights and life-size plastic Santas—an assault of seasonal goodwill and low-rent taste. After more than an hour Jesse comes home muddied to the shins and shaking with hunger. His mother watches him eat his pancakes. She piles second helpings on his plate before he asks.

  “You’re getting healthy out there in California?” she says. “I never knew you as a jogger.”

  “I jog now, I eat sprouts. Sometimes I do yoga. I haven’t had a hotdog in a year.”

  Louis Kerf has been charting stock prices on an index card. It’s an exercise he’s done as long as Jesse can remember, investing make-believe money and keeping score. “Leave him be, Barbara,” he says. “The boy flew all night. He won’t know which end is which.”

  Jesse licks syrup off his fork. “These are perfect,” he tells his mother. “Worth the trip for sure.”

  His father expects him to put in time at the store and Jesse obliges, dim long hours in the backroom inventorying fasteners and nuts and nails, more varieties and sizes than the mind can absorb. Hours of this and the spirit drains to absolute zero, he’ll have to tell Lucy
—the hardware way to Zen.

  After dinner, Jesse settles into the TV room with his parents, watching Flip Wilson and Dean Martin, a lost empire of Vegas comics and finger-popping belters of the old school. His mother gossips above the programs, catalogs the tribulations of family friends Jesse hasn’t thought about for years. Their children, to a soul, are drug-addicted, locked away in loony wards, or vanished into the Haight or Gastown or distant parts unknown.

  “Is this a warning or a compliment?” Jesse asks.

  “Can’t we watch the show without the chitchat?” his father says, pushing up the TV volume with his clicker. “These Gold Digger girls, look how high they kick.”

  The airport bus dumps Jesse and his luggage in the center of downtown Santa Cruz among the Frisbee players, sidewalk balladeers, and roach clip merchants, everyone brought out by unseasonably warm weather. There is no one he recognizes, but Jesse feels the balmy weightlessness of being among his own. The thin January sun is on his face, and what he wants is to have a look at Isabel.

  This time, she’s right where he wants her, as though called out by his imagination, sweeping up in the open doorway of her store. Or the back of her, anyway, muscles bunched beneath a T-shirt as she pushes her broom. It should be simple—to say hello—but she moves inside and flings her arms around someone who swoops her up for a midair kiss. His face is hidden by the shadows and by a long fall of gray-streaked curls, but the gesture is indelibly Marty’s. Jesse watches them kiss and part, Marty setting Isabel down lightly. Jesse holds back for a minute, deciding what to do. He’s tended his anger so carefully, pointing it at one of them or the other, at both together—at himself—he’s nearly breathless. And then he looks at Isabel again—the way she folds into Marty’s embrace and stays there. When Jesse walks in the shop door, his head is pounding, as if he’s surfaced after a too-long ocean dive.