He was on his feet now, the screen behind him displaying seven neat rows of electronic cards, a subtle crepitating pain invading his knee, as if a rodent were trapped beneath the patella and gnawing to get out. “Listen,” he said, “it’s okay, don’t worry about it.” He wanted to take her in his arms and press her to him, but he couldn’t do that because she was the maid and he the employer, so he limped past her to the door and said, “Look, I’m going to the beach, okay? You finish up here and take the rest of the day off — and tomorrow, tomorrow too.”
The morning haze had burned off by the time he stepped out into the drive. The sky was a clear, depthless blue, the blue of childhood adventures, picnics, outings to Bear Mountain and the Island, the blue of good times, and he was thinking of his first wife, Sarah, thinking of Cap d’Antibes, Isla Mujeres, Molokai. They traveled in those days, on the beaten path and off it. There was no end to what he wanted to see: the Taj Mahal, the snow monkeys of Hokkaido, prayer wheels spinning idly on the naked slopes above Lhasa. They went everywhere. Saw it all. But that turned sour too, like everything else. He took a minute to duck behind a bank of Bougainvillea and empty his bladder — there was no place to pee on the beach, unless you did it surreptitiously in the flat water beyond the breakers, and since he’d hit forty he couldn’t seem to go more than an hour at a time without feeling that nagging pressure in his lower abdomen. And was that cool? No, no part of it was even remotely cool — it was called getting old.
There was a discolored place on the floor of the garage where Kim’s car had been, a kind of permanent shadow, but he didn’t dwell on it. He decided to take the sports car — a mint Austin-Healey 3000 he’d bought from a guy in the movie business with a garage full of them — because it made him feel good, and feeling good had been in short supply lately. The top was down, so he took a moment to rub a palmful of sunblock into the soft flesh under his eyes — no reason to wind up looking like one of the unwrapped mummies nodding over their white wine and appetizers in every café and trattoria in town. Then he adjusted his sunglasses, turned his cap backwards, and shot down the street with a modulated roar.
He’d nearly got to the beach — had actually turned into the broad, palm-lined boulevard that fronted it — before he remembered the three kids from yesterday. What if they showed up again? What if they were already there? The thought made him brake inappropriately, and the next thing he knew some jerk in a 4x4 with the frame jacked up eight feet off the ground was giving him the horn — and the finger. Normally, he would have had a fit — it was a New York thing, turf wars, attitude — but he was so put out he just pulled over meekly and let the jerk go by.
But then he told himself he wasn’t about to be chased off his own beach by anybody, especially not some punk-ass kids who wouldn’t know one end of hip from the other. He found a spot to park right across from the steps down to the beach and pulled his things out of the trunk with a quick angry jerk of his arm — if he could run, if he could only run, he’d chase them down till their stinking weed-choked little punk lungs gave out, even if it took miles. The shits. The little shits. He was breathing hard, sweating under the band of the cap.
Then he was on the concrete steps, the Pacific opening up before him in an endless array of waves, that cool, fathomless smell on the air, the white crescent of the beach, blankets and umbrellas spread out across the sand as far as he could see in either direction. There was something about the scene that always lightened his mood, no matter how sorry for himself he was feeling. That was one thing he could never understand about Kim. Kim didn’t like the beach. Too much sun. Bad for the skin. And the sand — the sand was just another kind of grit, and she always bitched when she found a white spill of it on the carpet in the hall. But she liked it when he came home to her all aflame because he’d just watched a hundred women strip down to the essentials and rub themselves all over with the sweetest unguents and emollients an eight-ounce tube could hold. She liked that, all right.
He was halfway down the steps, studying a pair of girls descending ahead of him, when he heard the high, frenzied barking of the dog. There they were, the three of them, in their boxcar shorts and thatch haircuts, laughing and jiving, throwing the stick as if nothing had happened. And nothing had, not to them, anyway. Edison froze, right there, six steps down. It was as if he were paralyzed, as if he’d suffered a stroke as he reached for the iron rail and set one gimpy leg down in front of the other. An older couple, trainwrecks of the flesh, brushed past him, then a young mother trailing kids and plastic buckets. He could not move. The dog barked. There was a shout from down the beach. The stick flew.
And then, patting down his pockets as if he’d forgotten something, he swung slowly round and limped up the steps. For a long moment he sat in the car, fiddling with the tuner until he found a rap station, and he cranked it as loud as it would go, though he hated the music, hated it. Finally he slammed the car in gear and took off with a lurch, the thunderous bass and hammering lyrics thrusting a dagger into the corpse of the afternoon, over and over, all the way down the street.
He thought of the bar — of lunch at the bar and a cocktail to pull the codeine up out of whatever hole it was hiding in — but he didn’t have the heart for it. He was Edison Banks. He’d had his own band. He’d created Savage Street. He didn’t eat lunch at one-thirty in the afternoon, and he didn’t eat lunch alone, either — or drink anything, even wine, before five o’clock. That was what the rest of them did, all his hopeless washed-out diamond-encrusted neighbors: they ate lunch. And then they had a couple of cocktails and bought flowers from the flower girl in the short skirt before picking up their prescriptions at the drugstore, and by then it was cocktail hour and they drank cocktails and ate dinner. Or ordered it, anyway.
He burned up the tires for the next half hour, taking the turns like a suicide — or a teenager, a thatch-headed, flat-stomached, stick-throwing teenager — and then the engine started to overheat and he switched off the radio and crawled back home like one of the living dead in their ancient Jags and Benzes. A nap, that was what he was thinking, elevate the knee, wrap the frozen peas round it, and doze over a book by the pool — where at least it was private. He winced when he climbed out of the car and put some weight on his right leg, but the peas and another codeine tab would take care of that, and he came up the back walk feeling nothing. He was digging for his keys, the sun pushing down like a weight on his shoulders while a pair of hummingbirds stitched the air with iridescent feints and dodges and the palms along the walk nodded in the faintest stirrings of a breeze, when he saw that the back door was open
And that was odd, because he was sure he’d shut and locked it when he left. Kim might have been clueless about security, leaving her handbag on the front seat of the car where anybody could see it, running out of the house with her makeup half on and never thinking twice about the door gaping behind her, but he was a rock. He never forgot anything, even when his brain was fuzzed with the little white pills the doctor kept feeding him. He wouldn’t have left the door open. He couldn’t have. His next thought was for the maid — she must not have left yet. But then he glanced over his shoulder, down the slope and past the fence to the spot out on the public road where she always parked her dirt-brown Corolla. It wasn’t there.