He hung up. I palmed the phone and let my hand fall to my lap.
“Well?” Mai said impatiently.
I peered at Suzy’s prescription bottle in my other hand with a mixture of relief and old dread. “All right,” I said. “We’re not leaving yet.”
8
AS MAI DROVE US up Paradise Road, with the Stratosphere Hotel looming in the distance, a giant alien scepter, I told her about her mother’s most recent episode with Sonny. Twenty minutes was barely enough time to state the facts, let alone explain the truth of the matter, which after ten years still felt as far away from me as ever.
“She used to be like that with me,” I said. “Scared me shitless. I didn’t know what to do half the time.”
“Jesus,” she muttered with a disbelieving chuckle and a shake of her head. “Woke up this morning thinking I’d meet my long-lost mother. Now I find out she’s a thief and she’s crazy.”
“Don’t say that,” I told her. “Your mother’s not crazy.”
What she was, I could not say. The doctor — her physician actually, the only doctor she ever saw — called it acute depression. I would always think of it as a sadness she carried around like something she needed.
Mai slowed down as we passed Flamingo Road. We started looking for the bar. It was frigid in the Jeep, but the sunlight warmed my cheek, made me think of warmer days in the past when I’d go driving with Suzy by the ocean. I was never the passenger with her. I drove us everywhere, even when we took her car. It was my role and I insisted on it, and to some degree she did too, though I know now that I drove because I simply didn’t trust her to do it.
Had we the time, I would’ve told Mai about my honeymoon with her mother. I would’ve told her about how we had gone to San Diego, a drive that took us an entire day, and how her mother got carsick and vomited several times onto the Pacific Coast Highway.
It was July, traffic was horrendous, and the car’s air conditioning was weak and intermittently didn’t work at all, not to mention I had forgotten the cooler with all the drinks and snacks she prepared. She spent most of the ride with her seat reclined, staring out the window at the ocean as the tape deck played her yowling Vietnamese ballads.
San Diego was my idea. We could go to the zoo, eat authentic Mexican food, visit the beaches and see Tijuana in the distance. She agreed but seemed less than thrilled. I suspected a honeymoon in our living room would have suited her just fine. She had this irrational fear of leaving town and being unable to come home, of us somehow getting lost and never finding our way back. That’s what she told me, anyway.
Even before I was old enough to understand my parents’ arguments, my father used to tell me — usually after one of my mother’s fits throwing dishes or books or whatever — that women lose control when they’re afraid and that men lose control when they’re in love. Naturally I took all this on faith until I finally fell in love myself and realized, with some horror, that it was often no different than being afraid, and that my father had been simply confessing how little he loved my mother and how much it terrified her to know that.
When we finally got to San Diego that evening, I decided to take Suzy to an expensive and secluded seafood restaurant on the shore, a place I once took a girlfriend years ago. She was quiet throughout dinner. She still looked a little white but was also, I knew, silently blaming me for everything that had gone wrong that day. I ordered all her favorite seafood — oysters, squid, lobster. I must have spent half a week’s salary. She ate some bread and pasta but barely touched anything else, so I let her sulk and stuffed myself, nearly finishing everything on my own.
When the bill came, she got onto me for spending so much. I told her to calm the hell down, which was when she snapped and demanded that I drive us back home. I suggested she walk home if she wanted to because I wasn’t driving another goddamn mile, and that’s when she flung her fork onto her plate, shot up, and stormed out of the restaurant, abandoning me to a restaurant full of curious glances. I hadn’t yet paid the bill and had to toss my card on the table as I hurried after her.
I’d had women do this to me before and was already rolling my eyes when I saw her marching alongside the dark windy road that led away from the restaurant. The key was to let them cool off, to avoid forcing anything. So I followed, calmly calling after her, insisting that we should drive to the hotel and get some rest, that she’d feel much better after a night’s sleep. She continued down the side of the road in silence until we had walked nearly half a mile.
Finally I decided to catch up, and I grabbed her arm and she turned and looked through me, as though at something frightening behind me.
“I want to go home,” she muttered in a distracted voice and wrenched her arm away. “I need to go home,” she kept repeating to herself as headlights from a passing car illuminated her dress and her petite figure and yanked her shadow across the two-lane road. Even in that moment, I desired her.
We had known each other for only four months then. I was humoring her not yet out of understanding, not yet out of exasperation, or resentment, or a lack of options. My love was still too new for me to see this as anything more than a problem I could always fix later, a nuisance that came with the territory.
So I continued following her, hoping she’d just tire herself out. We could have easily been mistaken for a couple on an evening stroll along the shore, with her leading the way as the ocean waves mesmerized us and kept us silent. And in fact, they did. I was bone-tired from the drive and busting at the seams after eating so much, but the moonlit evening was breezy and the rumbling waves were lulling me into a calm that I found more pleasant than anything we’d experienced that day.
The road turned lonelier, just the ocean on our right and hills on our left, and very little light save the moon and a single dim streetlamp every quarter mile. Suzy veered away from the road, climbed casually over the guardrail. She approached the edge of a grassy cliff that overlooked the dark beach below us.
I came up beside her. “What are you looking at?”
She said nothing for a few moments. Then she took another step forward and pointed, almost sadly.
I squinted and finally made out a solitary figure strolling alongside the water’s edge. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Do you want to go down there?” I asked. “I’m sure we can find a path.”
“Yes,” she murmured but did not move. A moment later, in a wounded voice, she said, “I don’t want to bother them. Maybe they want to be alone.” She had a habit of referring to an individual in the plural, almost like it was rude to refer to anyone as only one person.
“The beach is big enough for all three of us. I’m sure they won’t mind.”
The figure began wading out into the water, dipping hands into the ocean.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said. “I’ll find the path for us.” I tried to take her hand, but it was balled into a fist. “Why are you crying? Come on, it’ll be nice down there. The water will do us good. And the sand—”
But she was shaking her head, her shoulders trembling a little now. She started backing away.
“What is it now?” I tried to check the annoyance in my voice. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“No,” she replied and climbed back over the guardrail as I moved toward her.
“Well, then we should get back to the restaurant. I left my card there, you know.”
I was raising my voice again, a thing I would always have a problem controlling with her. But she was moving faster and farther away from me and still murmuring “No” to herself and shaking her head and crying in her muffled way.