not cute and sad and a totally great guy.’
‘Yes you are. Even if you did get thrown out of that hotel. You lied to me. You’re the Falling Detective. You’re famous.’
Gina didn’t come to the door when I walked in. Lots of lights on, but no music. No sounds from the back. No smell of cooking. The house had an odd feel, like something had changed. I stood in the living room for a moment.
‘Gina?’
I hustled into the bedroom but she wasn’t there. The bed was made and it almost never was. There was an envelope on my pillow and a letter inside. I read in Gina’s cheerful, big-looped handwriting:
Dear Robbie,
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I hate myself and you deserve an explanation. I feel like my heart is shrinking down to almost nothing and I don’t know why. I often feel so unhappy. I do love you. It’s not that I don’t. But I need some space right now, so I’m with friends from Sultra. I need some time to think and to work through the problems inside me. I wish I could take out the unhappy parts and fix them and put me back together whole and happy like when we first got married. Hard to believe that was five years ago, isn’t it? I’m going to come back tomorrow while you’re at work to get a few more things. Please don’t come by the salon looking for me. I think I’d just cry and make an even bigger mess of things and if Chambers saw that he might toss me out and get someone lower maintenance. You know how Chambers is. I drove through Taco Bell so there’s two tacos and a Burrito Grande in the fridge for you. You got a little box of fishing stuff from The Fly Shop so maybe that will help take your mind off things. It’s on the kitchen table. I’m sorry I’m putting you through this. I’m so, so, so, so sorry. Maybe someday we’ll still be the best friends in the world and we’ll look back at this and laugh.
Love,
Gina
I stood there and read it two more times. The very first thing I thought was what a surprise this was. What a huge and horrible surprise.
My second thought was no. This was not a surprise at all. You saw this coming. You knew something was wrong and you did nothing about it.
I lay down on our bed and wrapped her pillow around my head. Clamped my arms across it. Listened to the throb of blood in my ears and smelled her perfume and imagined her face. For a long moment I felt like I was falling from the Las Palmas again, only slower.
‘No,’ I said. ‘This cannot happen.’
I jerked upright, sat there for another minute, then tossed the pillow against the wall.
I called Rachel and got her machine. I said if Gina was there, I wanted her to know I loved her and understood how she felt and was looking forward to talking to her about it. I tried to think of something optimistic and soothing to say before I hung up but I couldn’t think of anything except I love you and don’t worry, Gina, we’ll get over this hump.
I opened a bottle of brandy we’d gotten for Christmas one year and poured a coffee cup almost full. I forced down a couple of big gulps, then poured the rest down the drain and opened a beer.
I put the dinner Gina had gotten me in the microwave and mistakenly set it for two hours instead of for two minutes. By the time I realized what I’d done, it was severely overheated. It sat before me on the breakfast-nook table billowing steam and bubbling. I thought of calling my buddy Paul, but he was working swing shift, repaving Interstate 5 up near Carlsbad. I thought this would be a good time to have a brother or a sister.
I thought of calling my mother and father but didn’t want to make them anxious about a misunderstanding. They lived down in El Cajon, just east of San Diego. My father is a sales representative for Pacifi-Glide, a subsidiary of Great West Consolidated. They manufacture sliding tub and shower doors. My mother has worked as a secretary in the San Diego School District for twenty-four years, ever since I started kindergarten. They’re not old people, but I saw no reason to upset and alarm them. My father had a heart attack last year, though it was considered minor and stress-related. Besides, things between Gina and me were going to work out. Why get other people worried?
After dinner I sat at my table in the cold garage and tried to tie some flies. But I kept wondering why Gina was so unhappy, and I couldn’t concentrate on the tiny hooks and feathers. How long had this been happening? Five years ago, when we first got married, she was happy. She was only nineteen then, but she was almost through the College of Beauty and had a job waiting for her when she got out. I was twenty-four and had just started working fraud. We got married in June at the Pala Mission out on Highway 76, because Gina is Catholic and St Agnes Church in San Diego was booked up that day. We rented a place here in Normal Heights and all we did for two straight years was work hard, party, and make love. Between her friends and mine we always had something fun to do. Sometimes I might have spoiled things for Gina’s crowd because they wanted to do drugs. I didn’t mind but I didn’t want to watch them do it or see them drive a vehicle while acutely impaired. Rachel would occasionally pass joints under my nose and smile tauntingly, but mostly she pretended I wasn’t there. I tried to take up cigarettes as a way of fitting in but they made my mouth and fingers stink. Most of Gina’s friends were pretty and nice. In general, hairstylists are a talkative people. They are curious and have an eye for the unusual. They don’t stick closely to the facts. They are tremendous gossips. Many of the men were gay, though not all of them.
I sat there at my fly-tying table, drinking another beer, fingering the new packets of feathers. The new #3 Metz Brown Capes looked good, though I would have liked the higher-quality #1. Cops are always on a budget, unless they’re on the take. I dropped them back to the tabletop, shut off the garage light, and went back into the empty house.
So when did it start to go wrong?
I remembered a night about a year ago, when Gina had discouraged me from going to a party with her. It was a loft party in Little Italy thrown by a producer of surfing movies. She came home just before daylight. She was jittery and chilled in her flimsy clothes and I could tell she’d taken some kind of stimulant, which she denied. I wondered why someone as chipper and verbal as Gina would want more stimulation. I made her some herbal tea and as she sat at the table I wrapped a blanket over her shoulders. She threw it off and said, You’re smothering me don’t smother me, don’t smother me. She stormed off to the shower and when she came out, told me she only meant smothering her with the blanket. We made incredible love, one of our top ten, at least for me. She was extraordinarily passionate and cried after. I think she had begun to slip away.
Later that morning at roll call I overheard some of the night-shift patrol talking about the party at the movie producer’s loft in Little Italy. ‘Babes and buns and boobs all over the place,’ is how one patrolman put it, out of earshot of our female officers. They’d shaken down some of the louder partiers on the street outside, popped one for coke, one for ecstasy, and one for Mexican brown heroin. Hey, Brownlaw, isn’t your wife a redhead that cuts hair downtown?
Since then, scenes similar to the smother scene have played out more than once. I admit it. None has been quite as surprising as that first one, and our reunifying lovemaking happens less often. But Gina and I are durable. We’ve always eased back together from these sudden fights and everything is fine for a long time. We have never slept in separate beds except for two nights when she visited her parents in Nevada.
So tonight would be
