shrewdness.
“I hope your tastes haven’t changed,” he said, indicating the waiting martini as Jack slipped into the booth across from him.
“Not that much.” They shook hands quickly. By that time, a waiter had appeared to pour Jack’s drink into the chilled stemmed glass. Jack nodded his thanks and took a sip. “Ah. Nobody does it better, I swear.”
Peter lifted his glass. “Welcome back to La-La Land.” He had a sip of his own drink. “How does it feel?”
“A little funny. You forget the essence of the place. They never seem to capture that in movies or books. For all its tackiness, it does have a charm of its own.”
“Admittedly a wacky charm,” Peter agreed. “You have to live here to get that.” He hesitated and looked down at his martini. “Did you hear about Catherine?” he asked without looking up.
Jack skipped the pretense of asking which Catherine. They both knew there was only one Peter would mention.
“I heard that she married Walter. That was years ago. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me they’re divorced.” He said it lightly, but he couldn’t help the little surge of hope that rose up inside him.
“Her daughter was killed. Kidnapped.”
“Jesus!” Jack slammed his drink down so hard that the stem on the glass broke. In an instant, a waiter was there. “It’s okay,” Jack said, snatching a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and using it to stem the little rivulet of blood.
“I’ll bring a new glass,” the waiter murmured, whisking up the broken one and deftly wiping the table. One quick, practiced glance had told him the problem was not one of overindulgence. Else, no further drinking would happen on his stint at this table. Musso’s wasn’t that kind of establishment and there wasn’t a name, or a tip, big enough to bend that rule.
They sat in silence until the waiter brought a new glass, already filled with a fresh drink. He set it down and gave Peter and the menus a meaningful glance. Peter shook his head and the waiter disappeared again.
“God, she must be crazy with grief,” Jack said finally.
“She was nearly killed herself.” He told him the whole story, so far as he knew it. Jack listened without interruption, sometimes looking down into the crystalline purity of his martini, sometimes up at the dingy murals over the booths, almost never directly at Peter.
He was thinking, what a horrible thing it must have been for her. If only he could have been there to comfort her. He couldn’t, of course. She didn’t love him. He could have borne that, if she had only let him love her; but she was married to another man, had married him within weeks of the day he had left Los Angeles, so whatever love she felt for Walter must have been there all along—all the time that she was with him.
Since he had arrived back in the city, he had been to nearly all the places they used to haunt. Yesterday he had lunch at The Apple Pan: a hickory burger with cheese, and apple pie à la mode. The day before, he had been to the pier at Santa Monica, where he had resisted the urge to ride the merry-go-round. A couple in love could do that and get nothing more than amused glances from passers-by. A single man could only engender suspicion.
He had been to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, Angel’s Flight and The Bradbury Building, the Farmers’ Market, The Witch’s House that the tourists never discovered, and The Original Pantry in the seedy part of downtown, where he’d eaten a French Dip in honor of its invention there. A one-man tourist trail, and all of it empty of pleasure, all of it spoiled for him by the absence of the one with whom he had shared it in the past, with whom he could never share it again.
Sitting across from him, as he talked, Peter watched all these emotions flit across his friend’s face. Should I have said anything, he wondered? Or kept my trap shut? He would have learned of it sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t he? For such a big city, Los Angeles could be a small town in that regard.
He finished his story and waited for Jack to respond. The silence grew uncomfortably long. He was about to speak up himself when at last Jack looked directly at him for the first time in many minutes.
“Let’s talk about that job you mentioned,” he said.
* * * *
It was nearly a month before she could go home. Brain damage, they explained, in terms too technical for her to grasp: stroke danger, seizures, black-outs. A whole litany of dire consequences, none of which mattered to her in the least. If she couldn’t die, couldn’t trade places with her daughter, what did it matter how she lived?
She never saw the woman doctor again, the one who had spoken to her of traveling. No one seemed to know who she was. Even Nurse Millie was unhelpful.
“There are so many doctors here,” she said when Catherine questioned her. “It’s hard to keep track of them all.” Millie was different now. She still took pains with her ministrations, but the easy intimacy that had existed between them before had vanished. She was wary with Catherine. Sometimes it seemed as if she were uncomfortable in Catherine’s presence.
“Who could blame her?” Catherine asked herself. “I am uncomfortable in my presence.”
* * * *
Walter brought her home, his air one of gentle solicitude. She had managed to give him at least some of the forgiveness she knew he sorely needed.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she assured him, this on the day before she left the hospital. “You are not to blame for their evil. How could you have known—how could any sane person expect that?”
He was grateful, of course, but it seemed to her as if her forgiveness embarrassed him in some way. They both knew it was not over, that perhaps the guilt would never go away. Perhaps she could never altogether stop blaming him, but it was a start, at least.
They had to try, if they were to save their marriage. If they were to save themselves. To linger in that hell of self-torture could only lead to insanity. She had felt since the moment she regained consciousness in that hospital bed that she was teetering at all times on the edge of that abyss. Sometimes she thought it might be easier to plunge into it.
Her mother was at the house when they got there. “I won’t be in the way,” Sandra Dodd promised, wary, because up till now, when she had visited at the hospital, her daughter had been distant and uncommunicative. “I’ll just finish getting dinner ready and then I’ll go home. Unless,” she added, and could not keep a hopeful note from her voice, “you want me to stay.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Catherine assured her, making the effort to smile gratefully. “I can manage.”
“Maybe she should stay for a night or two,” Walter said. “I’ll have to go to work. I’ve been away from the restaurant so much, and you know what happens when the cat’s away. People are getting sloppy.”
“I’ll be all right,” Catherine said, and, more emphatically when they both looked uncertain, “Really.”
She glanced around at the living room that should have been familiar, and looked utterly foreign to her. She focused on a vase filled with yellow roses that sat atop the piano. “Thank you for the flowers, Mom,” she said, to soften the stubbornness that she knew left mother and husband uneasy.
“Oh,
