" 'Mary Claire,' I say, 'I wouldn't hit you with somebody else's fist.' And I shake up the bottle of champagne and pop the cork in her direction, and she's sitting there all wet, holding the sheet up above her tits, and I say, 'Welcome home,' and throw the flowers at her. 'Yeek,' she says, like I hit her with a baseball bat, and then I'm out of there. I don't even stop to see Angel or Ansel, not even Ansel. It's like I'm mad at them too, for some reason. The car's still waiting outside, although the driver's pretty gaga at these two naked guys who just sailed out the window and are now crawling for the shrubbery, and it's time for Perino's. So I go. But first I go back onto the lawn and give my Listener a good kick or two. Then I go to Perino's and drink my dinner to the point where it takes three waiters to get me back into the car, and I tell the driver to take me back to the ship. Two days later I sail for Christ knows where, and I still haven't talked to my kids."
Behind him, Eleanor came into the room. "Asleep," she said, seating herself next to me.
Ellspeth nodded to her, tilted his head back for a second in the listening position, and continued. "I have talked to my lawyer, though, some jerk from the Church-I didn't know who else to ask, I'd spent all my time in L.A. with my kids and my wife and the people in the Church-and the lawyer tells me not to worry.
"So, like the world's ultimate end-of-the-line asshole, pardon me, miss-I don't worry. And then, I think I'm in Tokyo at the time, I learn that she's run up my credit cards to nine thousand bucks, which is as high as they'll go without dissolving in the hand, and she's got the apartment and four-fifty a month for her plus another five each for Angel and Ansel, and my pay is attached because I owe on the credit cards. So the light dawns in the east that maybe she's been porking my lawyer too."
"Sounds like a logical assumption," I said.
"Yeah, and so forth and so on. Except it turns out that maybe it's wrong, because a couple of months later, who's the Church's new Speaker? My little girl, Angel, who's never said anything more complicated than she wants a glass of water. I mean this was a kid who didn't learn to read until everybody else in the class was doing square roots or something. Slow, Mary Claire used to say, the kid's slow. She's going to wind up scouring some clown's pots and pans, Mary Claire used to say, like there was something wrong with that, like Angel was supposed to be a nuclear physicist or translate the Bible into Farsi. And all of a sudden she's the Speaker, spouting stuff… Well, you've heard it-sounds like the Gettysburg Address in drag."
"What did you do?"
"Went down there, naturally. What would you have done?"
"And what happened?"
"They wouldn't let me see her. Like she's the Queen of England. First I get these two weight lifters at the door, guys that look like they bench-press the Arco Tower on Saturday morning, and they ripple their muscles at me like their tailors got nothing to do but fix the tears in their cute little uniforms. So I make some noise and they take me inside after they figure I'm not going to shut up, and they put me in a room. And who comes in? My shithead lawyer."
"Meredith Brooks," I said.
"Meredith Fucking Brooks. Only guy in the world who polishes his face. Eight million bucks' worth of clothes and he still looks like twenty pounds of cat shit. So what's the first thing he says to me?"
"I give up."
"He says, 'Jesus, I wish you'd been here. The judge figured you'd run off, that's why he gave her everything.'
" 'I had a lawyer,' I said. 'I thought maybe a lawyer, all that college, could manage to explain that I was in the Navy. I thought maybe "He's on a boat" was something a well-trained lawyer could manage to say. And by the way,' I said, 'she fucks pretty good, huh?' Sorry again, miss.
"Well, he got all grave-looking. You know how he rubs his chin?"
I said I knew.
"Guy loves to rub his chin. I figure when work is over he goes home, fixes dinner for his chin, and then the two of them sit around and watch TV. After Johnny Carson they go to bed and he rubs it different. Well, he rubs his chin and says I shouldn't talk that way about Mary Claire. She's the Speaker's mother, you know? So I get up to murder him and the two weight lifters pick me up and smear me across a wall and hold me there with my feet off the ground. And I'm kicking and swearing a blue streak and Meredith Brooks gives me the world's oiliest smile and tells me that I'd better be careful because all my Listenings are on tape."
"What had you told them?" Eleanor asked unwillingly.
He leveled his brown eyes at her and blinked twice. "I might as well say it right out," he said. "At least then I won't have to worry about it anymore."
"What was it?"
"That once, right after he was born, I'd tried to kill Ansel."
Chapter 19
I had about four hours to kill before I was due to turn up at Bernie's, bottle in hand, so I killed them by driving Eleanor back downtown. She was silent for the first twenty minutes or so, and when she spoke, all she said was, "That woman should be in jail."
"When she goes," I said, "she's going to have a lot of company."
Before dropping Eleanor at the Times, I parked around the corner from the Borzoi while she ran into the lobby to buy some of the books and tapes I'd seen on sale there. If anyplace in the Borzoi was safe, it was the lobby.
Nevertheless it seemed like a hell of a lot longer than ten minutes before she opened Alice's door and slid onto the front seat, clutching one of those flimsy plastic shopping bags that the cheap supermarkets now give you, the ones that manage somehow both to break easily and to remain in the environment forever. It had a picture of Angel and Mary Claire on it. It was a new picture: Angel was holding her kitten.
"The collected works of Angel Ellspeth," Eleanor said, "and one tape by the little girl called Anna. Eighty-one dollars and forty cents, if you can believe it. Who's paying for this?"
"That's a good question. For the moment, I guess you are."
"I'd better get a story out of this. I can't put all this wisdom on my expense account if I don't write something."
"Poor you," I said. "I haven't even got a client."
"Sure, you do. Truth, justice, and the American way." Eleanor spoke in series commas.
When she opened the door to get out at the Times she kissed her index finger and touched it lightly to the tip of my nose. "I'll call Chantra," she said. "It's only for a week, right?"
"At the most."
She gave me a long look. "So now who's the optimist?" she said, sliding out. She crossed the crowded sidewalk and hurried into the building without glancing back, and I headed Alice around the block and back toward the Borzoi.
I found what I needed only about a block away from it: the Russell Arms. The Russell Arms had never been as fancy as the Borzoi, and it might never be home to a hot new religion, but the rooms were not dirty enough to be terrifying, the place was almost empty, and the desk clerk was willing to take cash. I booked myself in for the night, ignored the unspoken question about my luggage, grabbed the change of clothes I kept in Alice's trunk, and went up to the room.
The stream of water from the shower was lukewarm and irresolute, and it took all the soap the Russell Arms was willing to provide before I stopped looking like a particularly slovenly anthracite miner. I pulled back the shower curtain and looked out twice before I finished. Nobody there but a cockroach. There was no singing in the shower.
Leaving the ring around the tub for the maid to swear at, I took the stairs down to the street and checked out the service entrances to the Borzoi again before popping Angel into Alice's cassette player and hitting the thickening traffic for Westwood.