is correct.” Tory starts to walk toward the three surfers. Amiable: “I just want to explain the concept to this dickhead.”
Jack turns his back, on Tory and the ocean. Picks up his towel and begins to dry off. He feels a chill, but not the kind you get from cold air. He knows what’s coming. He tries not to think about what his options are.
Tory intercepts the three surfers down the beach as they come out of the water. They’ve seen him coming. The smallest kid puts a hand up, a gesture of genuine apology. Without any warning, Tory attacks him. Every punch connects, vicious.
Jack rubs the towel in his thick hair. The roar of the surf overpowers the sound of feet splashing in shallow tidal water, fists slapping skin, the kid’s screams for help. Dropping his towel, Jack wraps his clothes together and puts them on his board to keep them clear of the sand. He doesn’t want to look. If he can’t hear it, and he doesn’t see it, does it exist? A smoldering sun flares hot behind Jack’s head for an instant, lending him a sudden, dim halo. He feels its heat. He cannot stop himself. He looks.
What he sees down-beach, in the water, of course, requires him to run.
He reaches Tory and pulls him away from the gasping teenager whose eyes are already swollen red, shut, a pink slick of blood from split lips draining down his chin and neck and hairless, baby-fat chest.
Tory’s fury turns. He lashes out blindly, screaming incoherently, the gist of which suggests Jack mind his own fucking business, which—in an instant—Jack knows is good advice because Tory’s wildly thrown, bone-hard fist connects with the side of Jack’s head and a pain of molten shrieking sharpness splits through Jack’s eye and buries itself deep inside his skull. His body twists, dissolves, nausea washing over him, and he vomits into the water.
Now the Valley dudes are hauling their bloody companion away, and Jack is stumbling backward, and Tory, defused, is looking on in surprise, as if he just happened upon an accident. Jack’s thoughts in this moment are incredibly clear on one point: something bad has happened something bad has happened something bad has bad has bad has happened—has—has—
“Jack—hold still—let me look at it—”
“Oh Jesusfuck oh—”
“Jack—”
“Get away from me!”
“Jack—”
“Owshitowshitowshitshitshit—”
“Jack, will you let me look at your eye? Shit—here—sorry—but what is fucking wrong with you? You know? Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever try to—”
“Get out. Of my way.”
Then, Tory, seeing it: “Oh man. Oh fuck.”
What.
“Here put this—at least it’s—you just don’t—don’t do that, Jack, you just don’t—”
And Jack has never felt this kind of pain before and never will again, and never will shake the memory of the dull, black, searing screw someone is bearing down on, driving deep beneath the socket of his eye. All he can think about is the pain. Tory’s voice is distant, something overheard.
“It’s not bleeding. It’s okay.”
They’re moving. Up the beach. The sand, on the soles of his feet, burns.
“I’ll drive.”
Jack looks up into the sun. It burns through the haze, and bleaches everything
white.
C.
Now, a woman, improbably beautiful, coiled naked in the low hills of a white down duvet, waits for Jack, hopes crashing. Her platinum hair is tangled, her face flushed from lovemaking just minutes ago, eyes liquid, thighs slick. She’s three weeks past forty.
A toilet flushes. Watching him come out from the bathroom and circle the bed, Hannah’s face is willfully empty of emotion, as if to suggest it doesn’t matter what Jack does now, which only underlines the utter desperation that overtakes her despite the Ativan she popped as soon as he uncoupled and rolled out of bed.
Golf tees spill, scatter across the red Spanish pavers from the pocket of his shorts. He gropes for them. “Shit.”
“Don’t worry about it. Rosaria will clean up in here later.” Hannah stretches out, her breasts, nearly perfect spheres, levitating, defying all Newton’s laws of gravity. “Unless you can’t afford to waste the tees. Do you need money?” Then she covers her mouth, as if coy. “Oops. Sorry. Oh, Hannah, you castrating little slut.”
He smiles mechanically, pulls the baggy shorts up his legs, in a hurry, buttons them, feeling once again the urgent need to get out. White polo shirt. High-tech huaraches.
“I didn’t mean it.” Her voice reaches for him, clutches at him. He’s got to walk out now. “Shit. I’m not good at this part. Listen, baby, what if we—” She stops, he’s looking back at her. “No,” she realizes. Tears well in her eyes. “No.”
Tears, from cold blue eyes.
He leans down and kisses her forehead lightly before he walks out.
Jack is thirty-five.
It’s the year of the Rat.
Later, in his apartment, Jack’s face, like the rest of him, is glazed with sweat from the midday L.A. heat.
His eyes are closed. Only one of them needs to be. He is blind if he opens the wrong one, but that seldom happens and he doesn’t think about it. A world of diminished perspective is, for Jack, status quo. Colors explode against the inside of his eyelid, blossom with the hum of an electric fan. Damp tendrils of his hair tremble in the machine-made breeze.
A phone is ringing.
Jack’s eyes open. He waits.
He’s pretty sure it’s Hannah.
Calculating: she would still be in bed. He smells her perfume, Vera Wang, mixed with the residue of their recent, workmanlike act of copulation. It’s a smell, he decides, that is more than a little unpleasant.
The phone rings, and rings, and rings.
An off-key beep, followed by a moment of silence, then a freakishly compressed voice surges through the cheap speaker of the answering machine.
“Jack?” Jack doesn’t move. “Hey, Jack, it’s Tory. Are you there, man? Jack?” Tory. Shit. “You left your cell phone here.”
Shit.
“Must’ve been, I don’t know, yesterday? And you didn’t fucking notice? I mean, hell, what kind of actor are you, Jack? I mean, yo, it’s kind of like that joke about the actor who comes home, his wife’s been raped by his agent, his kids sold into white slavery, his house burned to the ground, and the guy’s
