Then he thought he had found the place he was looking for. At the north end of the beach the land was hilly and the coast fell steeply to the sea, bending inward toward the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. A street went up to the top of a hill, and Georg stopped in surprise in front of an acropolis. A square of low buildings and a classical arcade, and in the square in front a large circle with an empty fountain basin in the middle, and broad steps leading to the columned portico. He parked his car and walked around the circle. The sun had dissolved the clouds, and through the trees he looked down on the city, the ocean, and the twin red masts and arching roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge. Below him, two helicopters were flying along the shore. From the golf course, which came as far as the acropolis, one sometimes heard the strokes and voices of nearby players, or the soft hum of a golf cart. He could hear occasional cars in the distance coming closer and fading away again. Otherwise it was completely quiet. An enchanted place.
When he went up the steps to the portico he saw that this acropolis was an art museum, and that it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. He could imagine the cars that would be parked here side by side on Wednesday. And to destroy the enchanted mood, three cars drove up and disgorged a noisy Chinese or Japanese wedding party. He went back to his car. The bride was pretty.
On Monday evening he had grown tired of the city, but more tired of himself and his purposeful, meandering tourism. He liked the city’s clarity that one could almost touch, its fresh cool breeze despite the relentless sunshine, the variety of its districts, cultures, and enticements. He thought one might portray San Francisco as a seductive virgin in starched frills, a virgin simultaneously flaunting and withholding her charms, while New York was an old hag, heavy and squat, sweating, steamy, stinking, babbling incessantly, sometimes screaming. But he was also sick of his perceptions and his useless sensibility. He hadn’t found the place he was looking for. He parked the car and went to Jonathan and Fern’s place. Jill was still awake; he gave her her bottle and changed her diaper on the long table in the kitchen, where he could roll her right and left. He tried to teach her to crawl. She crowed with pleasure. Then he put her down in the wide bed he shared with her. He was anxious lest she fall out, or that he would roll over on her. She followed him into his dreams.
Jonathan and Fern were cooking, and invited Georg to dinner. Cordial and interested, they asked what his business was. He suffered from his evasive answers, again longing to be normal and open. The couple was happy, although Fern was between jobs and Jonathan had had to interrupt his painting to earn some money. Then all three of them drank too much, and Jonathan became loud and boisterous, took his pistol out of a desk drawer, and shot out the streetlight across the street. Fern laughed and played along, but knew how to let Jonathan know when it was time to go to bed. Georg, too, longed for a relationship that would make him feel as whole and accepted as Fern’s. What the hell, he thought, I long for Fran, whether or not she accepts me or pushes me away. I long to have the life with her that we only lived the shadow of in Cucuron and New York. And if living with Fran is like Fran herself, and there’s nothing left to discover behind what I see and know, nothing more to awaken with a kiss, then I want and like what I see and know.
Everything else could go to hell, he thought: Joe, Mermoz, and Gorgefield, his revenge, the big money. He knew that the next day he would go on looking for the meeting place, drive to Gorgefield, and speak with Buchanan. He realized that the two things didn’t go together or belong together, just like the clarity and intoxication in his head.
42
THE NEXT MORNING GEORG found himself alone in bed. Fern had left him a note that she was letting him sleep in and had taken Jill to go walking with the dog. In his pajamas he strolled through the apartment with a cup of coffee, looking at Jonathan’s paintings.
They were big oil paintings, six by nine feet and larger, in dark, matte colors out of which shone through, here and there, the glowing blue or red of the pattern of a carpet. They showed a nude at the desk, a nude on the sofa, a nude sitting on the floor with her back leaning against the wall, an empty room in which the torso of a man sleeping on the floor stood out against the wall. All the paintings radiated coldness, as if the air in those rooms were thin and the people frozen in their attitudes. Georg took a gulp of hot coffee. Or had Jonathan painted the pictures with painfully restrained passion, the paintings turning lifeless in the process? The next painting was of the back of a television set and a couple: she was sitting on the sofa looking at the screen, while he was standing behind the sofa and turning to leave. Or does Jonathan want to prove that communication is impossible and loneliness unavoidable? Then there were paintings of nature, a glacier landscape in front of which two men were locked in combat; a meadow with a couple sitting, more next to each other than with each other; a forest clearing in which a man is kneeling, holding and kissing a little girl. Now Georg saw the paintings from a different angle. Jonathan didn’t want to prove that loneliness was unavoidable, but everything went to show that it was, whether he wanted it to or not, presumably even against his will and against his attempts to capture and represent closeness. The closed eyes of the man kissing the little girl didn’t express self-abandon but tension; the girl seemed to want to run away.
Georg remembered how Fran had given Jill her breast, and how he hadn’t seen any closeness, warmth, or intimacy in it. Am I the man for whom loneliness has become unavoidable, communication impossible, even the perception of communication? A pack of cigarettes was lying on the table. He lit one. In New York one day he had simply stopped smoking. Now, after weeks of not smoking, the first deep draw was like a blow to his throat and his chest. He took another draw, went into the kitchen, held the cigarette under the running water, and threw it in the trash can.
The door to Jonathan’s bedroom was open, and Georg went in. Outside the window, at the level of the sill, was a terrace covered with gravel. He climbed out and looked down at the tops of the trucks and shipping containers of the transport company, and across the way at a loading dock; behind it were warehouses, the insulators and wires of an electricity substation, a tall chimney. And he looked down a street that led to the bay and ended there in an earthen berm. Georg swung himself up onto the roof above Jonathan’s bedroom and stood there. It was a corner building; Georg could see the intersection and had an unobstructed view of all four streets and, farther away, a view of a hill, a freeway, and a gas tank.
There it is! Georg thought, that’s the place I’m looking for! The street leading to the bay must be Twenty-fourth Street, the cross street is Illinois, and its parallel street is Third. I have the Russian take a cab to the corner of Third and Twenty-fourth streets and walk east to the end of Twenty-fourth. From up here I can see the cab stopping on the corner, the Russian walking up Twenty-fourth, and also see if beforehand or at the same time a suspicious car appears and stops on Twenty-fourth Street or Illinois, where there’s never much traffic.
Georg swung himself down. He got dressed and went out. When he stood on the earthen berm, he realized that it must be what was left of a park. Benches, paths, a dock for fishing, two blue port-o-johns, brown grass, and brown bushes. To the left was a short canal; behind it, old trolley cars, the warehouses again, and the chimney of a now audibly humming power plant. To the right was a fenced-in plot with construction material and machines, open ground with man-high underbrush, garbage, and automobile carcasses; farther off, green, yellow, red, and blue shipping containers, broad-legged container cranes, searchlights, and cables. In front of Georg was the bay, which stank of tar and dead fish, and in the distant haze the other shore.