“They say that about old buildings.”
“That didn’t come out right,” Fin said. “I’m nervous. You’re the first woman that’s been in my Vette since last June.”
“Your dance card can’t look that bad.”
“It’s because of my last divorce,” Fin said. “I’m a three-time loser. Every time somebody rides in my Vette I marry her. I’ve learned to ask dates if they mind riding the bus.”
“So where’re we going for the beer?”
“Pacific Beach,” Fin said. “I know a place on the sand where we can get a free sunset with an overpriced beer.”
“I live in P.B.,” she said.
“Yeah? Then you’ve probably been everywhere in town.”
Nell decided that a sunset drink was about all this guy was good for. Three divorces? No way! To make conversation, she said, “Got any kids?”
“Never had kids,” Fin said. “Would it be too forward of me to explain that I have a very low sperm count? Negligible in fact.”
“I didn’t ask,” she said.
“Sorry if that was too intimate a revelation. It’s been several months since I talked to a date, not that this is a date. But let’s talk about me. Did you happen to catch my gig at Blackfriars’ Theatre? Or maybe at North Coast Rep? Or at Lamb’s Players Theatre last season?”
“I’ve never seen you perform,” she said. “But I think I read a small story in the paper a couple years ago about local actors. You were mentioned, right?”
“It wasn’t that small,” he said. “My picture was used in the story, though not one of my best. I’m, uh, being considered for a part in Harbor Nights.”
“What’s that, a play?”
“No, a TV series they’re shooting down here.”
“That should be interesting.”
“A contract killer. Can you see me as a killer?”
She turned and looked at him then, and he turned away from the traffic to face her. He was definitely one of them, Nell Salter thought. He had Peter Pan Policeman written all over him. Only he was worse than most: an actor to boot!
She said, “If you’re a real actor, you can be a killer or anything else.”
“That’s exactly right!” Fin said. “You’re smarter than all the yuppie casting agents I’ve read for in the past five years. ‘Not the type we’re looking for,’ they usually say. I say, ‘Was John Malkovich the type to play a world-class seducer in Dangerous Liaisons?’”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see it.”
“Okay, let’s talk about me” Fin said. “Do you like Irish types? My full name is Finbar Brendan Finnegan.”
Was it an omen? “As a matter of fact, I just had a passing thought about last St. Patrick’s Day,” she admitted.
“Really? What?”
“Not important. Yeah, I like the Irish except for the Kennedys and all their cousins including pets and livestock. I don’t like people that treat women like …”
“Like Marilyn Monroe?”
“You got it.”
“I’m the opposite,” Fin said. “I’ve been victimized by women all my life. My sisters were so protective they thought Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil’s stepchild. And they were so unbelievably cruel they made me learn the words to every song Patti Page ever recorded. Would you like me to sing ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window’?”
“I don’t think so,” Nell said, catching herself wondering if his little body held any interesting surprises, like a nice ass. His chatter was a bit disarming.
“Anyway, that’s my life story until I joined the marines and went to Vietnam and came home and joined the San Diego P.D. and got my own place just so I didn’t have to hear the Von Trapps yodeling in the Alps about the sound of mucous. My sisters think that’s the greatest musical ever made. They’re very Catholic. Then I met and married that sergeant you used to know who was the reincarnation of the Bitch of Buchenwald. Never marry somebody who thinks her handcuffs are a fashion statement.”
“Me, I learned about marriage the first time I tried it,” Nell said. “If I ever get real lonely I’ll buy a parrot. Better conversation than I get from most guys.”
“That’s ’cause you people’re more verbal than we are,” Fin said. “And more mature. Little boys stay little boys till they’re forty-something; little girls’re just sawed-off women.”
“And you?” Nell turned and looked at him. “Are you finally mature?”
“I haven’t got married since I was forty-two,” Fin said. “That might mean I’m growing up.”
Nell found herself wondering about his buns again. Then he wheeled the Vette into a parking lot across from the oceanfront.
The restaurant was by the Crystal Pier, one of the last structural relics of Southern California’s Golden Age of The Beach. It was a charming, seedy period piece. The main street of Pacific Beach, or “P.B.,” as the locals called it, fed right onto the pier, under a two-story arch that joined two whitewashed, teal-shingled buildings belonging to the Crystal Pier Hotel. Farther out on the wooden pier were twenty-one cottages lining both sides of the pier, where cars could park in front of their rooms, over a sandy beach and white water.
Beyond the cottages, the pier narrowed into a wide pedestrian boardwalk that opened up again onto a spacious fishing platform guarded by a white railing, one hundred yards out over blue water. From above, the pier looked like a sand shovel that had drifted away from a giant child and floated on the ocean.
The restaurant was a typical California chain. The emphasis was not on food but on drinks, expensive enough to justify the rent, but affordable enough not to completely discourage the locals who’d be needed when winter came and tourists went.
Fin and Nell were lucky to get a window table, where they ordered tropical drinks served in ceramic coconut shells by a waitress in a sarong. They looked out on a “boardwalk” made of concrete that stretched four miles south to Mission Beach. And because autumn was late in arriving, the boardwalk was loaded with joggers, walkers, rollerbladers and skateboarders draped in bag-rags out for their evening exposure. Most of the hardbodies wore combinations of Day-Glo shorts, tank tops, T-shirts, swimsuits and cutoffs. There was a bit of hip-hop and grunge, but not like at L.A.’s Venice Beach.
Continuing with his obsessive chatter, Fin said, “I’ve been around women all my life. You’ll find I’m easy to be with. In fact, women are very comfortable with me. I’m the sensitive artistic type. I wouldn’t hurt a Medfly.”
The weird thing was, whatever the guy was doing, it was starting to work on her. He was starting to look a little cuter, even after only one drink. Cute little guys could be dangerous though. She asked, “Did you bring your ex-wives here?”
“No, they preferred those trendy places in La Jolla where you can watch the sunset, but you’re surrounded by a lotta wealthy gentlemen from countries where camels’re still beasts of burden and occasional lovers. But enough about my ex-wives. Let’s talk about me.”
Then they didn’t talk much about anything for a few minutes, because of the impending sunset. Sitting there at the fake monkeypod cocktail table, drinking from a fake coconut shell, being brushed lightly by a fake potted-palm branch, they were getting caught up in the nostalgia. A hint of the way it was, the way it must have been, in bygone days when summer never ended along California’s coast. Because life was different then, or so they said, all who’d lived it.
Fin was delighted to see that it was going to be a great sunset, guaranteeing that people in the bar beside the windows would “Oh!” and “Ah!” the instant the fireball disappeared into the eternal sea. No matter how many times he’d seen it, Fin never stopped feeling exhilaration, followed by a sense of loss when the sky momentarily blazed crimson from the afterglow of the heavenly light.