make it all lie down in his head one more time. The director always had a crowd over, standing around the black-bottomed pool, looking down at the lights, drinks in their hands, or joints between their fingers like they were cigarettes. Strangers. New people every time.
In the rearview mirror, Jimmy saw her push the button on the squawk box and wait. She pushed it again.
He wasn’t in any hurry to get home. In just a part of a week, she’d gotten him into some new music, new to him. Gloomy Canadian singer songwriters, as it turned out. She’d made him a tape, two-sided, 120 minutes. So, driving around, killing time, he had Leonard Cohen and the last cigarette from the pack of Lucky Strikes she’d given him that first night. He almost hated to smoke it, but he smoked it, cruising east on Sunset into East L.A. Lately he’d been spending more and more time with his friend Angel, had come back around again, reconnected. Everything seemed to go in circles. Angel was a Sailor who worked on vintage cars, who had a shop downtown, who was also a preacher in a way, a street preacher to gangbangers and their knocked-up girlfriends, to the people almost everybody else wrote off. He went by his apartment, went by the storefront church where Angel spent a lot of time, but never found him. He wanted to talk cars, nothing else. He headed for home.
The phone was ringing when he came in. When he answered it, it was just screaming.
TEN
He slept. The phone had detonated a couple of times, but he’d slept through it. He sat up. There was a knife-edge of light under the drapes. He’d drawn them when he came back from Tiburon. He’d slept. He’d even dreamed. It wasn’t that Sailors never slept, but it was rare. They’d sleep an hour or two once a month. But they almost never dreamed. What had he dreamed? Like the rest of us, he couldn’t exactly remember. Angel was in it. There was a gathering of some kind, characters moving in from all quarters, in some kind of empty room. It felt ordinary, obvious, pedestrian. The surprise was that Mary wasn’t in it.
He ordered breakfast, a big breakfast. He was acting like a Norm all of a sudden. It came, and he ate it. He took a shower and put on a clean shirt. Like it was the first day of the rest of his life.
When he stepped out into the hallway in the hotel, he had to step over the Chronicle. If it had been facedown, he wouldn’t have stopped, and his day might have gone a different way, but it was faceup, looking right at him, with a headline across half the page:THREE GOLDEN GATE SUICIDES
WITHIN SPAN OF ONE HOUR
“Span.” At least someone on the headline desk had a sense of humor about it. Jimmy picked up the paper and tucked it under his arm. He took the elevator straight down to the garage. While he waited for the car, he read the details. The three suicides off the bridge were unrelated. One was a German tourist, a woman. One was a woman in her nineties. (You had to wonder how she got up and over the rail.) The third was an anomaly, a man in his twenties who’d gone off the west side of the bridge, the side facing out to sea, something that almost never happened. Maybe he was a sailor. Small s.
It made Jimmy go back to the bridge. Maybe he was looking for something to bring him back to the present.
He drove along the Marina, the broad sweep of created land, a former marsh filled in a hundred years ago with ’06 earthquake rubble. Now it was as if it had been there all along, another pricey district with its rows of two- and three-story houses, shoulder to shoulder on the left, red-tile roofs and pale ice cream colors, and the expanse of Marina Green and St. Francis Yacht Club to the right. And the Presidio ahead.
And Fort Point, under the southern anchorage of the bridge. Jimmy parked in the lot next to the rocks, the water so close that the cars’ windshields would all be grayed out, misted, when the drivers returned. The massive red/orange ironwork of the bridge, this end of it, was overhead. Sometimes you could hear the traffic noise above all the sounds of the Bay. To stand underneath it felt a little