CHAPTER FIVE

      Joseph stretched out on a lounge chair with a florid towel spread over his legs. He listened to Peter’s report with a grey, still face. Not even the sun shining through the sunhouse glass over the pool could improve his pallor. He looked impassive, like an old king who has seen and done it all.

      When Peter finished, Joseph started to tap his thumb on his draped knee. Peter did not tell the rest of the story. He still had not made any sense of that part of the night’s events.

      ‘Sandaji took my money?’ Joseph asked.

      ‘Her assistant did,’ Peter said.

      ‘All God’s children need money,’ Joseph said with yielding disappointment. Peter had never heard such a tone of defeat coming from the man.

      ‘Actually, I forgot to hand it over and had to go back,’ Peter said. ‘I thought about just keeping it.’ Sometimes Joseph was cheered by confessions of human greed and weakness.

      ‘I would have,’ Joseph said. ‘What did she mean by that answer?’

      Peter shrugged. ‘I’m not much on this soul business, you know that.’

      ‘I didn’t used to be. I’m giving it some real thought.’

      ‘We’re getting old,’ Peter sympathized.

      ‘Hell, you can still jog around the house and fuck when you want. For me, just going to the bathroom is a thrill.’

      ‘Bull,’ Peter said, shading his eyes.

      ‘Yeah,’ Joseph said. ‘Old man bullshit. I can still get it up, but I don’t know that I want to any more.’ They sat for a minute.

      ‘I’ve led a wicked life, Peter,’ Joseph said. ‘I’ve hurt people. Messed around and messed up every which way. Despite it all, here I am with the sun and the sea and the hills and the cool night breezes, living on twenty acres of paradise. Makes you think. What’s the downside? Where’s the comeuppance?’

      Peter left that one alone. He was not in the mood for discussing ultimates.

      ‘Where do we all go?’ Joseph asked in a husky whisper.

      ‘I’m going to Marin,’ Peter said. ‘To a wake. That’s sober enough, isn’t it?’

      ‘Was your friend a good man?’

      Peter shrugged. ‘A better man than me, Gunga Din.’

      Joseph cracked a dry smile. ‘Was he your water bearer?’

      ‘He saved my life when I was at the end of my tether. And he braved many an insult for a chance to peer at the ladies.’

      ‘Sounds like he had at least one good friend,’ Joseph said, softening. Right before his eyes, Peter thought, the sun was melting this chilly man with the grey face. The sun and the thought of a wake.

      ‘You’d love what I saw last night,’ Joseph said, apropos of nothing. He stared at the horizon, the hazy blue sea beyond the grass and hills. ‘Do you believe in spooks, Peter?’

      ‘You know I don’t.’

      ‘I hope I never see them again.’

      Peter shivered involuntarily. He did not like this.

      Another silence.

      Joseph grimaced as if experiencing a stomach pain and waved his hand. ‘I’ll tell Michelle to give you a five-hundred-dollar bonus. Come say howdy when you’re back.’

      Peter prepared to leave. Joseph spoke out from across the pool. ‘Michelle tells me those damn plastic thingies actually work. She’s passing them around to her friends. Maybe I booted that whelp son of a bitch too early.’

      Joseph waved his hand again. All was square.

      Michelle was unusually quiet as she handed Peter five hundred dollars in cash in the foyer. It was eleven o’clock. The whole damned house felt sad, Peter thought.

      ‘When are you going to use a checking account?’ she bugged him, a favorite topic. Peter had cut up all his credit cards and never carried a checkbook. He had a small savings account and that was it. He was now strictly cash-and-carry, paying his bills in person when he could, and having Helen write his tax and other checks when he visited to make child-care payments.

      ‘When I deserve to be a yuppie again,’ he answered.

      ‘You can be such a pill,’ Michelle said.

      As he left, she gave him a quick peck on the cheek and a friendly pat on the buns and wished him a good trip to Marin. ‘Don’t let it get you down,’ she warned.

      Peter had already put his bags in the Porsche. He descended the winding road to Pacific Coast Highway and turned left into light traffic. He had had his share and more of grief, of unbearable loss and hopeful speculation. After his lowest moment, when manic anguish and drink had almost killed him, he had come down firmly on the side of tee totaling skepticism. Put on armor, wrapped himself in blankets.

      Now, for reasons he could not fathom, people were trying to poke him through the blankets. First Sandaji, and now Joseph.

      ‘Blow it off,’ he suggested. Then he glanced in the rearview mirror, looking into eyes made cynical by the rush of warm air. He puffed his upper lip into a feline pout and said ‘Spooks’ several times, mimicking Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in the forest of Oz.

      Fifty miles north of the Grapevine, driving north on 5, lulled by the road, he felt an oddly comforting, bluntly selective silence fill the Porsche. He could still hear the slipstream, the whine of the engine, the rumble of tires on the grooved freeway. Still, the silence was there. Sometimes that happened. He would be in a quiet room and the ambient noise would flicker, replaced by a distant, high-pitched hum that faded slowly into a new silence. He remembered listening to the whine of the air as a boy, back when his ears had been far more sensitive.

      He instinctively patted his pocket and felt the green Trans.

      His thoughts wandered as the traffic grew sparse and the freeway straight and monotonous. Someday, he mused, before all passion was spent, in this world of high-tech communications, his own final true love would call him and her voice would rise above the ambient noise of all the other women. That was Peter’s one supernatural quest now: the perfect woman, a beauty who watched him with cool amusement from behind his thoughts and memories, elusive and brazenly sexy.

      Peter had met only one woman that came close to that impossible ideal, a model and sometime actress named Sascha Lauten. Buxom, smart, cheerfully supportive, Sascha had been sufficiently vulnerable and sad about her life to make his heart puddle. Phil had warned him about Sascha. ‘She sees right through you,’ he had said. ‘Your charms do not soothe her magnificent breasts.’ Sascha had ultimately turned down his proposal and married a skinny-assed salesman with bad skin. They now lived quietly in Compton.

      He stuck his hand through the half-open window to feel the speed. Over the wind he sang, ‘I hate this crap, burn up the road, I hate this shit, burn up the ROAD.’