So he stays to face Virginia’s wrath.
“You really are rude, you know that, Jim?”
“Come on, Virginia. Give me a break.”
How easily they fall back into it. All the variations on a theme: It’s all your fault. No it’s not; I’m not conceding a thing to you; it’s all your fault. Back and forth, back and forth. You’re a bad person. No I’m not, I’m a good person. You’re a bad person. There are a lot of ways to say these things, and Jim and Virginia rehearse the whole repertory on the way home, the little moment of camaraderie completely and utterly forgotten.
Their favorite coda, as Jim tracks into South Coast Plaza and stops the car: “I don’t want to ever see you again!” Virginia shouts.
“Good!” Jim shouts back. “You won’t!”
And Virginia slams the door and runs off.
Jim takes a deep sigh, puts his forehead down on the steering switch. How many people can he hurt at once? This day…
He sits for several minutes, head miserably on the dash, worrying about Hana. He’s got to do something, or he’ll… he doesn’t know what. Abe. Can’t find Abe. Tashi! Man, it’s hitting everywhere at once, as if the whole island is threatened by flood. All falling apart! He tracks down Bristol, heading toward Tashi’s place.
62
Up on Tashi’s roof it’s quiet and dark. The tent is lit on one side by the dull glow of a lamp inside. On the other side of the roof, among the vegetable trays, there’s a dim glow of hibachi coals. Tashi, a big bulk in the darkness, sits in a little folding beach chair beside the fire. A sweet soy smell of teriyaki sauce rises from the meat on the fire. “Hey, Jim.”
“Hey, Tash.” Jim picks up a folded beach chair from beside the tent wall and unfolds it. Sits.
Tash leans forward to flip over one of his infamous turkey burgers, and the grease flares on the coals for a moment, lighting Tashi’s face. He looks as impassive as ever, picking up a water bottle, spraying out the flames. In the renewed dark he squeezes a little of his homemade teriyaki on the turkey burgers, and they hiss and steam aromatically.
“I heard about Erica.”
“Hmm.”
“She just left?”
“… It was a little more complicated than that. But that’s what it comes down to.” Tash leans forward again, slides the spatula under the burger and checks it out. Puts it into a sandwich already prepared. Eats.
“Damn.” Jim finds himself furious with Erica. “She just… did it?”
“Umph.”
“Unbelievable.” To leave someone like Tash! “Stupid woman. Man, it’s such a dumb thing to do!”
Tash swallows. “Erica doesn’t think so.”
Jim clicks his tongue, irritated. Tash seems so even-headed about the whole thing, as if he has judged the matter and found he is perhaps in agreement with Erica.…
Tash finishes eating. “Let’s get stoned.”
They get out a full container of California Mello, and lid the whole thing, back and forth, back and forth, until the tears are running down Jim’s face, and his corneas feel like thick slabs of glass. White-orange clouds, heavily underlit by the city, roll slowly inland. Slowly, very slowly, Jim’s anger subsides. It’s still there, but it’s been muted, banked like the coals in the hibachi to a small, melancholy feeling of betrayal. That’s life. People betray you, betray your friends. He recalls the look on Debbie Riggs’s face as she yelled at him. He himself has betrayed more people than have ever betrayed him, and the realization dampens his anger even more. He was shifting onto Erica what he felt toward himself.…
“Angela called,” Tash says. “She said you went to dinner with Virginia?”
“Yeah. Damn it.”
Tash chuckles. “How is she?”
“Feeling enormous amounts of righteous indignation, I would guess, this very moment.”
“Virginia nirvana, eh?”
Jim laughs. They can insult each other’s ex-allies, and cheer each other up. Very sensible. The Mello continues to kick in and he sees how silly his thoughts are. He’s blasted into a calm almost beyond speech.
“Whoah.”
“No lie.”
“Heavy.”
“Untold.”
They chuckle, but only in a very mellow way.
Much cloud gazing later, Jim says, “So what will you do?”
“Who knows.” After a long silence: “I don’t think I can go on living this way, though. It’s too much work. I’ve been thinking about moving.” And suddenly Jim can hear pain in Tashi’s voice, he understands that the stoic mask is a mask and nothing more. Of course the man is hurt. Emotions punch their way through the fog of the Mello, and Jim regrets the anesthetizing. He feels, all of a sudden, overwhelmingly helpless. There’s nothing he can do to help, not a thing.
“Where to?”
“Don’t know. Far away.”
“Oh, man.”
They sit together in silence, and watch a whole lot of orange clouds float inland.
63
When Jim tracks home later that night, he is feeling about as low as he can remember feeling. He’s below music, he doesn’t even try it. Just the sounds of the freeway as he types in the program for home and tracks along, slumped back in his seat. Even in the middle of the night the lightshow is pinballing all over the basin, a clutch of silent helicopters hovering over the Marine Station like flying saucers, jets booming down onto John Wayne, the flying freeways almost at capacity.…
Again home strikes him as an empty shell, a dirty little studio under a freeway, filled with futile paper and plastic attempts to stave off reality. Which isn’t such a bad idea. He goes to the videotapes, sees the stack of them that Virginia and he made on their bedroom systems, when they were first going out. Perversely he feels a strong desire to look at one. Virginia undressing, in the casual routine of taking off clothes, with the thoughtlessness of untying shoelaces. Standing naked before a tall complex of mirrors, brushing her hair and watching the infinity of images of herself.…
“No!” The repugnance at his desire rises faster than the desire itself, a new feeling in Jim. If he becomes captive to her video image tonight, just hours after their last fight, how much easier will it be in the weeks and months to come? It’ll be so easy just to concentrate on the image… and he’ll be in thrall to it, having an affair with a video lady, like so many other men in America.
Fearfully he grabs up the stack of cassettes. “I’m pulling out for good,” he shouts at the video, and laughs crazily. He pulls an eyedropper of Buzz from his bookshelf and lids drops until he’s blind. Instant hum in all his nervous system, replacing lust. Like the buzz in the telephone wires, or the freeway magnetic tracks, a sort of drunkenness of the nerves, which makes him want to get really drunk. He goes to the fridge, pops a Bud, downs it. Downs another one.
Back to the cassettes. “I live a life of symbolic gestures, and not much more,” he tells the room. “But when it’s all you’ve got…”
There are nine cassettes of Virginia and him, the labels penciled over, sometimes in Virginia’s hand: US, IN BED. Should he save just one? “No, no, no.” He throws them all in his daypack, goes outside.
It’s a warm night. Overhead the freeway hums, right in phase with Jim’s nerves. He can see the sides of the cars in the fast lane zoom by, one headlight each. One of the freeway’s great concrete pylons thrusts out of the sidewalk just three houses down. The maintenance men’s ladder starts ten feet up, but the neighborhood kids have tied a nylon rope ladder to it. With some difficulty, aware of his buzz, his drunkenness, Jim gets the daypack on his back and ascends the ladder. When his head is at the level of the freeway he stops. Buzz of cars passing, lightshow of headlights strobing by, zoom zoom zoom zoom. Funny to think that only the little units extending down from the front axle, not quite touching the shiny strip of the track, are guiding the cars, and keeping them from running into each other, or over the rail above Jim’s head, down onto the houses below. Magnetism, what is it, anyway? Jim shakes his head, confused. Concentrates on the task at hand. Left arm wrapped over a step of the ladder, he frees the daypack from his right arm and twists it around to unzip it. Out comes a cassette. All the cars’ tires run over approximately the same part of the freeway; they’ve made two black bands on the freeway’s white concrete, a couple feet to left and right of the track, and almost two feet wide themselves. He’s not too far from the nearer one.