“Aud Torvingen, you are deeply stupid.”
I missed my stroke, barely clipping the cue ball and sending it spinning in slow majesty into the corner pocket. He fished it out, polished it on his jeans, whistling, and put it three inches behind the eleven, in a direct line with the same corner pocket.
“Not a good idea,” I said.
“And why is that?”
“Just look at it.” He would pot the eleven ball, then without the skill to spin and bend the cue ball, would be trapped behind the eight ball and two of mine.
“It looks to be a perfectly reasonable position,” he said, and potted his ball, and was sadly puzzled as to how to hit anything else. He walked around the table twice. “I see,” he said. “I see now. You could have explained. ”
“It was obvious.”
“Maybe to you.” He pursed his lips. Walked around the table again. “So. Kick. You asked her to go to Atlanta, where the heat will make her ill and she knows nobody and there’s no work for her. Why?”
“Because it’s where I live.”
“Is it?”
“Don’t be gnomic. I didn’t understand you the first time you said that and I don’t understand you this time. I want her to come and see where I live. I’ve seen where she lives. One weekend, that’s all I ask. It’s not like it’s forever.”
“Ah.” He nodded smugly to himself.
“What does that mean? Explain it to me. Stop. Stop walking around that table. Look, I understand the pool table. It’s orderly. There are clear rules. It’s obvious. But I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. Clearly there are rules about things that are just as obvious to you that I’m missing. About Kick.”
“Not about Kick,” he said gently. “About you. As you would say, it’s perfectly obvious. You’ve been intending to come and live in Seattle since the first day you met her.”
I stared at him. “I have?”
“Of course you have. It’s as clear as day. It is to you, too, you simply haven’t yet put it into words. I was hoping you’d figure it out for yourself, it’s better that way, but, well, all right, here it is: Atlanta isn’t your home. I’m not sure it ever was.”
I heard the words, but they made no sense. “It’s where I live. Where I used to work. People I know.” You. “A whole system.”
“Which is exactly what you’ve been building in Seattle, only better.”
He was insane.
“You stopped talking about selling the warehouse almost as soon as you saw it. Ooh, you said, they need my help.”
“Not anymore. It’s all gone, nothing left but burnt timber,” but even as I said it, at a deeper level I felt the words rolling magisterially towards their pockets, dropping one by one, making sense. For a moment my ribs seemed as though clamped in a vise. I couldn’t breathe, but it was just a memory of standing outside the woodworkers’ collective, thinking, I’ll get to know these people.
“And you do know people. You know electricians and carpenters, movie producers and actors, private detectives and reporters, politicians and local government agencies, bankers and real estate agents, even a criminal or two, not to mention two police officers who won’t forget your face in a hurry. You’ve found a dojo. Discovered parks and restaurants and pubs.”
He coughed.
“Can I have a bit of that?” He borrowed my beer. “Ah, that’s better. No, there’s no question. You’ve made more of a life here in three weeks than you’ve done in five years in Atlanta. I only wonder that you’ve managed to hide from the obvious for so long. This place is ideal for a Norwegian who isn’t really Norwegian anymore. It positively reeks of Scandinavia, all clean and shiny and Americanized, full of rules that people obey with a smile when it pleases them and break with a smile when it doesn’t. Ideal for you.”
I thought of the Jante law, and the painting. Of Gas Works Park, the little pocket park by the Duwamish, the land I’d bought. What hope felt like burning beneath the breastbone.
“For God’s sake, there’s even your own personal troll under the bridge. Do you understand now? Good. Now, return the favor, please, and show me how to beat you at this bloody game.”
BACK DOWNSTAIRS I reclaimed my corner seat and settled in with a fresh beer. At the next table, Finkel was entertaining an industry journalist. “…stroke of luck. The warehouse and its contents—the sets, the props, the costumes—were a total write-off, but we’d more or less finished shooting anyhow. The beauty of it is we get reimbursed for all that stuff we had no more use for. The negatives were stored off-site and we had the foresight to back up the EDL twice a day. Not a frame was lost. And no one was hurt.”
“What are you, chopped liver?” Kick slid into the chair next to me. “How’s the face? I can hardly see any blisters.”
She wore a cool, summery dress the color of the Caribbean, a necklace of green turquoise tubes, doubled casually into a choker, and her hair loose. Her bare shoulders gleamed.
“…product placement for post-production has tripled,” Finkel continued expansively, “and I have two studio meetings next week.”
“The man’s glee is unholy,” she said. “But in a way this has worked out well. We’re almost certain of some kind of deal now. It wouldn’t surprise me to find he’s cooking up a side deal for a Hallmark movie of the week about the Great Seattle Movie Drama.”
“Not if I have anything to do with it. What’s EDL?”
“Edit decision line.”
Which left me none the wiser.
“Anyhow, I won’t have any difficulty getting work for a while, coordinating or catering.”
“So you’ll be busy. You won’t want to come to Atlanta. I fly back tomorrow. ”
Silence. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I—”
“Don’t say it. Just listen for a minute. I’m going back to Atlanta tomorrow. There are some things I have to sort out there. Some papers to sign. But it should all be done by the end of September or October. The movie season will be slowing down here, and it will be cooler by then, and I’m hoping you’ll come out, just for a visit, just for a weekend. You could see how I live and work, the people I know, see my life. As it was. No, please, don’t say anything yet.”
I began to strip the label from my beer.
“You probably think I live in a giant house with servants. My house is about the same size as yours.”
She looked skeptical.
“Maybe a little bigger. But not much. And I rebuilt it myself. With these hands. The point is, I’d like you to see. One weekend. And then I’ll come back. I have some tables to build for you. And I’m setting up a foundation.”
She watched me pick at the white underlayer left by the label. “What kind of foundation?”
“I don’t know. For people who don’t know how to fight back. Sometimes that will be street people, people who’ve given up hope, but sometimes it will be people who have been hopelessly civilized, to the point where they’re powerless to fight back against convention. I’ve bought the land. It’ll be a series of small buildings, set in peaceful grounds along the Duwamish. There’ll be classrooms and offices, some low-cost housing. Offices. General admin for the foundation, of course. My offices—I can see that there would be a good business here in film security—and your offices. For your catering business, maybe, or your stunt work. Maybe even rehearsal space, and studio space, and teaching space for would-be stunters. And a garden, where we could grow things, things to attract wildlife, or things to cook in the cooking classes. I don’t know. Something that makes people feel good while they’re doing it. Maybe skills workshops, like carpentry. Opportunities for people to interact with their physical world. We spend so much time in our heads. And there would be classes on the basics of survival—not just self-defense but cooking, how to balance a checkbook, basic legal rights. Maybe we’ll even have some law offices for idealistic young lawyers who want to help the community.”