“See, a Chinese guy in your situation…”
Jesus Christ, enough about the Chinese.
“…He wouldn’t do what you’re doing. He would just off her in their home, then bury her out back. Whole little private Chinese community would know, but they wouldn’t care. They’d say she had it coming. Honor. Wouldn’t cry a tear for her. Husband would have the right to keep his honor. That’s how they work. Honor and privacy. That’s the Chinese for you.”
“You think she’s my wife? That’s not my wife. She’s double my age. She would be my mother, if anything.” He was irritated that he found himself justifying his position to someone who was ultimately going to charge him when all was said and done.
“I told you I don’t want to meddle.”
“She’s just someone who I’ve been trying to catch up with.”
“You a private dick for somebody else?”
“It’s not like that.”
“If you say so…So there she is. Should I turn off the meter now?”
Baker couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t that he was chicken shit, or even that he was too inebriated to steady his thoughts, it was that he wasn’t ready. He had his subject. He had his chance to get her, turn in a story, and get Scott off his back. But he didn’t have his angle. If he went in now the very least that he might get out with was some puff piece that would sadly chart a second-rate comparison to Seabright, something that would slaughter his credibility on the news beat (and that stuff will dog you the rest of your life). He closed his eyes for a moment, heavy and tired from the weight of the alcohol. In his mind he saw the Phoenix, Arizona, that he had grown up in. Small streets with low roofs. The intense heat thundering down. Tall brown mountains surrounding the valley, cutting a jagged edge across the horizon. A city of five thousand people who were all afraid to cross over Baltimore Street, terrified by the thought of open desert and vengeful Navajos. To a young man dreaming of escaping the livery stables and ostrich farms of Grand Avenue, the bright splashing orange sunsets seemed like they took place in some land greater and more powerful, whose color was not a gift but an accidental overflow pouring down the mountains. It took twenty years of dreaming to get across those mountains. Twenty years to find the center of the sunset. And he still didn’t know which way to turn.
“Let’s go,” Baker said. “Drive.”
“Sure?”
“I said, let’s go…And try to avoid Second. I don’t want to go by the cathedral there.”
The cabbie released the brake. “Where to then?”
“Take me down by C. C. Brown’s. You know it?”
Cabbie just nodded and drove, like it was all inside code.
Baker looked back at Ralph’s. Couldn’t see a goddamned thing. He had to trust his instincts and hope that he hadn’t let one get away.
CHAPTER FOUR
May 16, 1906
THE dilemma for insomniacs is distinguishing the line between night and morning. The moment when Sarah gives up all hope of sleeping, driven by the rationale that it is morning anyway, and the promise of night has now been completely abandoned. She checked her clock to see a painful reading of 4:57 A.M. Partway into five o’clock meant usually giving in to the morning, forgetting about rest altogether, drawing a bath, and opening a curtain and letting the dusty little portents of the day filter in. But the three minutes before five were just enough to abuse the system, pitting a sleep deprivation that begged for mercy against an incarcerated web of nerves pleading for an early pardon.
They had been up late last night, she and Max. That greasy pit had indulged them until the doors were actually locked. They had sat at the rear booth while chairs were stacked on tables and the stench of ammonia sanitized the floor, their stomachs churning and cackling in deep-fry regret. The lights had dimmed to a conservative working level, while the volume from the kitchen rose in aggressive English and timid Spanish and banging cast iron. She hadn’t even brought up the idea of getting out of the business—not especially after all the attention she had received earlier in that opera set restaurant. But in the midst of the everyday world, where the grilled cheese ruled the plate, and the purple darkness diminished the front window, she could see an end. The point where the young Sarah would turn to a fabled memory, freeing this Sarah from all responsibility of keeping the candle burning.
They had come a long way from passing their nights in opium dens, where they had tried to hang on long enough for the morning light to splinter, when they would crawl deathly toward their beds with the superiority of battered warriors claiming victory through their wounds. She was old now. Remarkable energy, intrepid spirit, and two layers of pancake could not disguise the fact that she had become an old woman. Her age was perhaps made diminutive by the youthful characters that she portrayed, and her brashness and reckless bullying that had introduced (and maintained) her reputation around the world. But in truth the edginess her life skated upon, the cold steel razor that at once chilled her veins and threatened to sever them, was now dulled and rusted and left out of view. Before, she had burned opium for enlightenment, seeing the present in a way that let it unroll and display itself as an entirely new vision, a new possibility that challenged itself through the ironies. But now when she smoked she was just a pathetic sixty-one-year-old hag, doped-up baggage that only weighted down the earth and slowed its turning. No wonder Max was concerned. She had turned from the rebellious boozer into the alleyway drunk, all because of a matter of thirty years that were nothing more than just the sum cumulative total of days passing.
She hadn’t said so much to Max, but she had intimated that she was feeling wearied by this latest boycott, leaving it vague and open to interpretation. (Shouldn’t it be obvious? Those kinds of melees are only really meant for the battle-excited young. Imagine, being exiled to the carnival!) Max immediately jumped on the opium issue, apparently sensing her openness as an invitation to express his concern, rather than any professionally motivated irritation. “The fact of the matter,” he said, “is that the hop is terrible for you. Never mind your career, but just for your health and sanity. It’s just bad.”
Again, she wanted to tell him to stop saying hop. It sounded so juvenile and falsely vogue, and that the word came as stiffly off his mouth as a crippled old man holding on lustily to his buxom nursemaid. But then she realized that for most of her life her entire vocabulary had been a series of slang and exclusive nomenclature for the privileged insiders, only changing when the terms seeped across the borders and polluted the mainstream. Then there was some indefinable point—maybe a milestone—when the old words died away and the new ones seemed shallow or contrived, leaving the general formalities of the language to best express the details. “You are right,” she said, restraining herself from correcting him. “Bad.”
“It’s just that it is so dulling.”
She reached over and placed her hand on his forearm. Her sculpted fingers and thumb now bent slightly at the joints with the skin loosened, lines made deeper by the shadows from the dimmed lights. “I am telling you that I understand. It is not addiction, though. Just a way to cope.” And as she said those words she felt an anger seethe through her body. The real Sarah Bernhardt, the younger version who hadn’t been hideously taken over by this battered old-leathered shell, never needed to cope. If some freakish American church group had come after her, well then je m’en fou! That kind of thing would only serve to inspire the real Sarah. She would tease them, mug at them, and flaunt her virtues, then go out on the town to celebrate, spilling her points of view on the correlation of religious fanaticism and sold-out houses into the drinks and notes of every reporter who would listen. The best way to weather a shock had been to shock back (in her case in a way that reached the whole world). But this Sarah was rattled. Driven to panic and strange memories, where only the narcotics and booze could calm her. Bottom line: She couldn’t take the pressure anymore. She didn’t want to turn into an actress like Cissy Loftus, the kind of star whose perfection was her métier, but nobody could stand her, because when she wasn’t arrogantly demanding perfection she was privately falling apart.