Imagine my surprise. But then, of course, I didn’t have access to the earlier volumes, which for all I knew might have portrayed an awkward first meeting, a tender courtship and a marriage as deep and committed and sweetly strong as the one Chrissie and I have been able to make together. So give him credit. If anyone’s at fault here, it’s me, for having entered his story at random, for hovering over it like some sort of vulture, for being a thief, an expropriator — and yet as I look back on it now, everything I did, even if it was questionable, even if it was ultimately futile, was for a reason. For the better, that is. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.
The next surprise was his daughter. Two lines after he mentioned the wife, in trotted the daughter. A three-year-old. Terri. And whether she was a prodigy or autistic, tall or short or fat or thin, dark or blond (and here something clicked: the pouf-haired toddler in the photo?), I couldn’t have said, not yet, not without reading on. I looked up. My coffee cup was empty and the plate before me held nothing but crumbs, so I closed the book, slipped it back into the newspaper and went home to my wife.
—
That night I took Chrissie out to La Maison, the new restaurant in the village that was so popular you couldn’t get in the door unless you had connections, but, of course, I always had connections. I walked her the long way around, avoiding Carey Fortunoff’s street, making up some excuse about wanting to stop off at the ATM for cash, when, in fact, I had more than enough with me, not to mention half a dozen credit cards, all fully paid up. The maitre d’, who was fooling nobody with his simulated French accent, practically went down on his knees when we came through the door, and we were soon sitting at our favorite table on the patio, where we liked to watch the evening light mellow over the village and cling to the mountains beyond till everything was in shadow but for the highest peak. Our daughter, Patricia, was away for the summer on a fellowship in Florence, studying art restoration, and though we both missed her, it was nice to be free to come and go as we pleased, almost as if we were dating again. When the waiter poured out our first glass of wine, I took Chrissie’s hand and raised my glass to her.
We were on our second glass, Chrissie as ebullient as ever, her voice rising and falling like birdsong as she gossiped about this neighbor or that and filled me in on the details of Mary Ellen Stovall’s marital tribulations, when she suddenly glanced up and said, “Oh, you remember that house? The one on Runyon?”
“What house?” I said, though I knew perfectly well what she was talking about.
“The one where the guy died? The musician?”
This was my chance to come clean, to tell her about the leather-bound volume I’d secreted in the garage behind a shelf of old National Geographics, but I held back, and I still don’t know why. I shifted my eyes. Broke off a crust of bread and chased a dollop of tapenade across my plate.
“Mary Ellen says there’s no way they can ever get the smell out of the house — it’s like that boat in the harbor, remember, where the seal climbed up and then fell through the skylight into the galley and couldn’t get out?” She gestured with her glass. “And rotted there, for what, weeks, wasn’t it? Or months. Maybe it was months.”
“So what are they going to do?”
She shrugged, her bracelets faintly chiming as she worked her fork delicately in the flaking white flesh of the halibut Provençal, which was her favorite thing on the menu. Mine too, actually, as neither of us eats much meat anymore. “I don’t know — but it’s got to be a teardown, don’t you think?”
—
There had been problems with Carey Fortunoff’s marriage almost from the start. Pamela was one of the hangers-on, one of the original groupies, when the band had first formed and was still rehearsing in somebody’s mother’s garage. She was nineteen years old, shining like a rocket blazing across the sky (Carey’s words, not mine), and she had musical ambitions of her own. She played guitar. Wrote her own songs. She’d been performing in a local coffeehouse since she was fourteen (this was in Torrance, from what I could gather, the town where Carey had been raised by a single mother with a drinking problem), and for a while she’d sat in with the band during rehearsals and they’d even covered one or two of her songs. But then she got pregnant. And Topper Hogg joined the band and felt they should go in a different direction. So she stayed home. And Carey, a self-confessed sex addict, went on the road.
All this came out in the July entries, this and more — how she’d refused to have an abortion, how she swore she’d stick to him till the seas boiled and the flesh melted from her bones no matter what he threw at her, whether he gave her a dose of the clap (twice) or chlamydia (once) or whether he loved her or not. It came out because he was back with her now, living in a two-room apartment in Redondo Beach and trying both to shake off the uneasiness — fright — of having burned his bridges with Metalavox and forge on with new music for a solo album. He was feeling introspective. Or confused. Or both. At any rate, this was where the journal became something more than a compilation of trivia and deepened into something more — a life, that is. I was hooked. That night, after Chrissie had gone to bed, I went out to the garage and read it through to the end.
For the first few weeks, they went to the beach nearly every day — to “kick back,” as he put it. There was the sun, the sand, there were the surfboards he and Pamela paddled out on the ocean while whoever they could grab hold of watched the little girl so she didn’t drown herself, the days lazy and long and memorialized by the potent aroma of suntan oil and the hiss of cold beer in the can. But Carey wasn’t much of a surfer and the waves were all taken in any case (prioritized, that is, by a clique of locals who resented outsiders and one another too), and by August he and his family were headed north, for the Russian River, where they were going to stay for the remainder of the summer with another couple — friends from high school, from what I could gather. Jim and Francie. Jim was a writer, Francie taught school. And they’d rented a “funky” cabin in the redwoods just three blocks from the river and a place called Ginger’s Rancho, where local bands played six nights a week and on Mondays there were poetry readings.
It was an ongoing party, shared meals, a surfeit of beer and wine and drugs, swimming in the river, dancing in the club at night, yet what Pamela didn’t know — or Jim either — was that Carey was having sex with Francie every chance he could get. They’d make excuses, going out to the market while Jim was writing and Pamela babysitting, taking long walks, swimming, canoeing, berry picking, their eyes complicit and yet no one the wiser. Then came a sultry afternoon in mid-August when they all went down to Ginger’s in their shorts and swimsuits to sit in the bar there, at a table in the corner where the window was thrust open and they could gaze out on the river as it made its swift dense progress to the sea. Francie was wearing her two-piece — a leopard-skin pattern, gold and black like the sun spotting the floor of the jungle — and Carey, in a pair of cut-off jeans, leaned into the table to admire the pattern of moles in the cleft between her breasts. (Orion’s Belt, he liked to call it — privately, of course — and he was writing a song named after one of the three stars of the constellation, Alnilam, though how he expected to find a rhyme for it I couldn’t imagine.) Pamela was in a one-piece and a baggy T-shirt and was trying her best to keep the little girl — Terri — entertained. Jim was Jim, with hair that hung in his eyes, a chain-drinker and chain-smoker who seemed content to let the world roll on by.
An hour passed. They took turns buying rounds for the table. There was music on the jukebox and time slowed in the way it does when simply drawing breath is all that matters. Even Terri seemed content, sprawled on the floor and playing with her Barbies. Then, at a signal, Carey got up to go to the men’s room and a moment later Francie went to the ladies’, making sure the coast was clear before pulling him in with her and locking the door. It was risky, it was mad, but that made it all the more intensely erotic, a hurried bottomless grinding up against the sink while the jukebox thumped through the wall and the shouts of children at play in the shallows ricocheted eerily round them in that echoing space. Francie came back to the table first, after having hastily dabbed at herself with a wad of paper towels, and if her smooth tanned abdomen showed a trace of Carey’s fluids shining there, no one noticed. A moment later Carey sauntered across the room, four fresh gin and tonics cradled against his chest. “What took you so long?” Pamela wanted to know. He set down the drinks, one at a time, shrugged. “There was a line like you wouldn’t believe.”