Trinity, p.3
Trinity, page 3
“We’re not here to tell stories,” he’d say. Or: “We’re here to notice the events as they happen.”
But Frank couldn’t be stopped. We were still waiting at the red light, and he was still leaning back in his seat.
“Or maybe,” he said, “she’s not draped over the desk. Maybe she works for the Reds, but after she lures the scientist in, she has regrets about the whole ploy. As it turns out, she really loves him. She loves him despite the fact that he’s married. So later, after she helps the Reds procure their dirty photographs, she tries to get the photographs back. She goes to great lengths. She seduces her handler, even though he’s a scumbag. The scumbag lets her think he’s keeping the photographs in his desk. But after she’s already seduced him, she goes through his desk and realizes they’re gone. He’s already sent the prints back to Moscow.”
“He’s a Russian?” I said, keeping my eyes on the light.
“No,” Frank said. “He’s one of these American Reds the Russkis keep in their pocket. So now cut to the morning, and she’s in her car, and she’s slept with this scumbag handler. Let’s say he’s not just a scumbag. He’s also obese. He has greasy hair and bad teeth. And now the scientist’s already back on the mesa, where he lives with his wife. Let’s make the wife pretty. With two sweet little kids. So then the piece is in front of her handler’s house, alone in her car, and she’s in love with the scientist even though she betrayed him. And now it’s too late. And she’s sitting alone. And it’s very depressing. So instead of driving back to her apartment she drives to some lonely cliff over the ocean.”
“The light turned,” I said.
Frank pulled into traffic, weaving between a few cars because the girl had gotten too far ahead. “So she drives to some lonely cliff,” he said, shifting into second gear, “and she parks there. And she shoots herself in the mouth with a pistol.”
We were both quiet for a minute. Frank had gotten up close to the Plymouth.
“Why doesn’t she just drive off the cliff?” I said.
“Why would she drive off the cliff?” Frank said. He sounded annoyed with the question.
“Why would she go to a cliff if she doesn’t want to drive off it?”
“Because there’s nothing to see if the piece drives off a cliff,” Frank said. “There’s no body left to discover.”
The girl turned onto Market, and Frank held back for a minute, then turned behind her.
“No way,” he said, once we were heading down Market. “Can’t happen like that. It’s not a good ending.”
“It’s not always a good ending,” I said.
“People won’t be satisfied,” Frank said.
But then he was quiet for a few moments, as if considering the possibility. Then he shook his head again. “Plus why would she drive off a cliff? You don’t drive off a cliff unless you don’t want to be found.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
“She’s here, isn’t she?”
“Driving away.”
The girl was driving faster now, as if she’d found her rhythm. Frank had to pass a few cars to keep up.
“Anyway,” Frank said, once he was behind her again, “it doesn’t matter. She can’t drive off the cliff because the body has to be found. It’s an unsatisfying ending, if the body’s never discovered.”
At the next stoplight, he looked at me. His face was bloody because of her taillights. With two fingers and a thumb, he made the shape of a pistol. Then he swallowed the tip.
“She shoots herself,” he said. “Brains all over the seats.”
ON BROADWAY, THEY HEADED WEST. JUST BEFORE CHINATOWN, THE girl pulled over and parked. Frank found a spot at the far end of the block. We watched them in the side mirrors.
She didn’t wait for Opp to open her door. And once she’d stepped out onto the street, she brushed out the skirt of her dress with two brusque, practical gestures. Then she lifted one ankle and checked the sole of her shoe. Maybe she noticed the run in her stocking. Then she looked over her shoulder at Opp. He’d gotten out of the car and stepped off the sidewalk.
Crossing the street, they didn’t hold hands, but they walked so close together it wasn’t easy to see where her sleeve stopped and his arm began. By then, it was dark, and her dress was dark, too, so her pale face floated above it like some detached apparition. Where had she come from? He’d been at Los Alamos since the winter. He hadn’t told us anything about a girl he wanted to see in San Francisco. She was off the radar completely.
But now, suddenly, he’d flown back and summoned her out of the ether.
I watched her closely. I noted that while her lips were soft, her gait was a bit mannish. They headed toward a door with no sign overhead. He reached it first. Then he opened it for her, and she went in before him.
“Your turn, bub,” Frank said. He was already unfolding the crossword.
WHEN THE DOOR SWUNG SHUT BEHIND ME, IT SEEMED AS IF THE street outside had never really existed. The air was full of smoke. The lamps at the tables were dim. The waiters seemed to disappear every time they moved away from a table.
At the far end of the room, I saw Opp and the girl in a booth. I took a seat at the bar so I could watch them in the mirror. Then the bartender gave me a menu, and I saw the place was called the Xochimilco Café. They served Mexican food and cheap-looking cocktails. When I looked back up at the mirror to check on Opp and the girl, I realized it was almost opaque. It was as if the glass had been buttered. Opp and the girl were no more than shadows, flickering faintly at the back of the mirror. Every so often, I had to glance over my shoulder to reassure myself they were still sitting there at the table. Once I’d caught a glimpse—his hat, back on his head; the big silk bow at her neck—I turned back to the menu.
Looking down at the cocktails, I remembered the directives Pash gave us. You note every detail, he liked to say, striding up and down between the rows of desks where he had us sit during training. If he orders a martini, does he order a twist? Does he order it dirty? Often, during training, Pash got up close in our faces. There were sometimes white beads of spit on his moustache. What color are his socks? What material are they made from? It’s all important. For all you know the length of his fingernails is important. For all you know the size of his fucking ear holes is very fucking important. You don’t know. All you know is you watch him. You do what he does. He drinks a martini, you want a martini. He crosses the street, you cross the street, too. You’re a mirror image when there isn’t a mirror. You disappear if you’re doing your job right.
Outlining directives, he could work himself into a fever. With those beads of spit on his moustache, and that angry, rabbity face, he could seem ridiculous. Frank and the other agents imitated him when he was out of the office. But I had a soft spot for him and his stories. His father was a Russian Orthodox priest. They’d moved back from California to Moscow when Pash was a kid, just in time for the Bolsheviks to start burning cathedrals.
When he was sober, he drank beers and talked about coaching football. But if he got drunk, he’d switch to vodka. Then, if you let him, he could spend hours describing his father’s church: the lapis lazuli in the mosaics, the gold-leaf enamel, the dim light that filtered through the stained glass.
As a kid, he’d loved the way his father moved down the aisle, his chasuble belted with rope at the waist, a heavy cross on his chest, a trail of burning myrrh in his wake.
When the Bolsheviks took power and started rounding up priests, Pash joined the White Army. His claim to fame was serving under General Wrangel. The general, he told us, stood over six foot six inches tall. In a single tank, under heavy shell fire, he and a few soldiers single-handedly captured the fortified city of Tsaritsyn. It was a heroic time, he liked to remind us. But after the evacuation from the Crimea, when they’d washed up in Constantinople, there was too much waiting around. They were all in between, uncertain about where to go next. They spent their nights in opium dens. Even Wrangel fell into malaise. He lived on his yacht, moored in the harbor, and didn’t think about moving until the Reds tried to sink it.
After that, Pash moved to Germany for a year. Then he got married. He found his way to Pasadena. Wrangel was murdered by a servant in Brussels. Pash and his wife had a kid. He got a degree in physical education, and they changed their name from Pashkovsky.
Sometimes a man’s life goes to pieces. Then, if he has it in him, he pulls a life together again, though it’s usually not in the same shape that it once was.
In Pasadena, Pash trained for the reserves on the weekends. When he got called up the day after Pearl Harbor, they put him in charge of the San Francisco intelligence office. He ran it in remembrance of Wrangel, and also his defrocked father.
He stormed around with those beads of spit on his moustache, all action, no contemplation, until sometimes, in the late afternoon, when he’d called me into his office, he’d forget what he’d wanted to say.
He’d stare off out the window, over the bridge, past the blue whale humps of the peninsula, with his chin resting on his fingertips, pointed in the shape of a steeple. Sometimes I sat there in his office and could almost hear choral music rising off in the distance. As if the sun were made of gold leaf. As if the blue bay were lapis lazuli.
IN THE XOCHIMILCO CAFÉ, I TRIED TO FOLLOW PASH’S DIRECTIVES. I sipped my martini. I wondered why Opp had brought the girl there. Or why she’d brought him there, on the one night he was back in the city.
The martini was cheap, and the place was run-down. Both Opp and the girl seemed somewhat out of place, like they were trying to fit in somewhere they couldn’t.
For a while, I listened to the sounds of glasses clinking together when the waiters cleared off the tables. On the small dance floor, a few couples were dancing. Onstage, a Mexican girl was singing in front of the piano. It was dark on the stage, and you could barely distinguish her features. Her hair was drawn back from her face. She kept her eyes closed while she sang. And when the song finished, she opened them slowly, as if waking from a deep sleep.
Behind her, the piano was swallowed in darkness. All you could really hear was her voice.
Take my lips, she sang, I want to lose them. Take my arms, I’ll never use them.
I pulled a pen out of my pocket and jotted the lyrics down on my napkin. In the mirror, I saw the shapes of Opp and the girl flicker and rise. She followed him to the dance floor. They left their plates at the table.
Once they’d started dancing, he held her hand at his shoulder. His other hand braced the small of her back, and while he turned her around the floor, I saw her from different angles. From behind, she could have been any girl: that narrowing of her waist; the hem of her dress at the midpoint of her calves; the run in her stocking, which had worked up from her ankle. From another angle, when he’d turned her around, I saw only his back, and her fingertips clasping his hand. At a third angle, from the side, I could see the line of her profile.
Her hair was loosely pulled back on one side, fastened there with a clip. A few times, with the tip of her finger, she touched the high point of her cheekbone.
It struck me, even then, as a strange gesture. It was almost as if she were touching her cheekbone to make sure her face was still there. Then I thought, Is she crying?
I couldn’t say. Either way, I don’t think Opp ever noticed. His head was above hers. If she was crying, and maybe she wasn’t, I don’t think Opp ever realized. He never stepped back, or looked with any surprise at her face. They only kept dancing. When the song finished, the Mexican girl left the stage for a while, and Opp and the girl headed back to their table.
As soon as she sat, she reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a box of cigarettes. Almost at the same time, as if it were a choreographed aspect of a scene they’d planned in advance, Opp pulled out a lighter. Then he leaned over the table to help her.
ONCE, A FEW WEEKS AFTER WARREN SHIPPED OUT, I HEARD MAY GET out of bed. She moved over the floor and closed the door to the bedroom. Then I heard the sound of water running from the tap in the bathroom.
It went on a long time, too long for her to be washing her hands. Too long for her to be just washing her face. After a while, I started to worry, so I got up and went to the bathroom. I moved as quietly as I could. And I stopped before I got to the door, so she wouldn’t see my shadow under the crack.
I didn’t want her to think I was following her in her own house. I stood in the hall and craned my neck forward. I got my ear close to the door. Then I heard her crying. Or that was my best guess. If she was crying, she was crying very quietly, trying not to make any noise. It sounded like a faint succession of coughs, made gentler by the sound of the water.
Standing alone in the hall, wondering whether or not she was crying, I remembered my brother.
I thought of him, leaning on the railing of the back stoop. I remembered the smell of the jasmine, and the moths frying themselves on the streetlights, and the way he brought up the subject of May.
At first, it all seemed so mild and pleasant. He was happy, he said, that I’d found a woman I loved. He talked about her jokes for a while, and how quick she was at cards. Then he asked where her accent was from.
“What accent?” I said.
He shrugged, and made himself busy fiddling around with his lighter. We were quiet for a while. Then he started talking again.
“Tell me again,” he said, “where she’s from in Wisconsin?”
He said it lightly, not looking at me directly. Staring off past the fences cluttered with vines, past the yard where the Millers’ dog was lying outside its doghouse.
I answered the question. Warren nodded. “And which school did she say that she went to?”
By then, that metal taste had flooded the back of my mouth, but still, I answered the question. I hadn’t yet pinpointed the problem. I only realized once I’d already given the name of the school: he’d asked the question as if I didn’t know the right answer.
As if my wife might be lying to me, and I hadn’t realized. As if I’d been a fool to believe her.
Then I looked at him a little more closely. What did he think he knew that I didn’t?
When our mother asked us if we’d come with her, Warren went. I was older than he was. I knew what kind of life it would be. So I stayed with our father, and Warren went with our mother to Texas.
I was older than he was. I probably should have looked after him better. But I let him go. He survived it, but we had different lives. He left junior college to sign up for the army, and by the time I saw him again, he read car magazines and stood two inches taller than I did. And then he stayed with us for three nights, and maybe it was because of those years he spent in Texas, but immediately he saw what I’d made myself blind to.
Or he felt he did. Or wanted me to believe that.
I still don’t know. I can only picture him as he was when he leaned against that railing, wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He was tapping his cigarette box on his palm and squinting off down the alley, pretending he didn’t want to offend me. When I answered his question about where May went to high school, he started to say something, but I stood up. Then I went inside. The screen door banged in its frame when I left him.
Walking back to the bedroom, I paused a few times. I almost went back to join him. It was the night before he shipped out. I thought maybe I should let him say what he’d meant to.
But then I kept going. In the bedroom, I took off my clothes as quietly as I could. I draped them over the chair. I got under the covers. Then, in bed, I looked at the outline of May’s shoulder.
I looked at the slope of her waist. I looked at the rise of her hip, facing away from me in the darkness.
What accent? I thought. And why would she lie about the school that she went to?
IN THE BLURRED MIRROR OVER THE BAR, OPP AND THE GIRL WERE both smoking. She was listening, with her head cocked to one side. He spoke, gesturing with the hand that held his cigarette. Every so often, he flicked the ash off without taking his eyes away from her face.
When the waiter came to bring him the check, they both looked up as if startled. Then they dug around for their wallets. I didn’t wait to see which of them paid. I left a dollar on the bar and headed out with my face down.
“What’d you see?” Frank asked, once I’d climbed into the De Soto.
“They had dinner,” I said.
“What else?”
“They danced.”
“Anything else?”
I thought of her touching her cheek. I thought of the way he’d leaned forward to help her when she pulled out her cigarette.
“That’s it,” I said. “Dinner. And three rounds of martinis.”
FROM BROADWAY, WE FOLLOWED THE PLYMOUTH AT A SAFE DISTANCE. At Montgomery Street, they turned left, then climbed the hill, and they were nearly to the top when she pulled over and parked.
I checked my watch: 10:58. They’d gotten out of the car and were heading toward a three-story building.
“No way she survives this,” Frank said.
I tried to ignore him, but there was something unnerving about the way that building swallowed them whole. One minute they’d been on the sidewalk, the next minute they weren’t. Once they were inside, the building remained dark for what seemed like a long time. I guess they were climbing the stairs, but at that point we didn’t know. We’d lost sight of them for the moment. When the lights finally came on in the top-story apartment, even Frank breathed a sigh of relief. One by one, three windows came into play. The lights blazed on like signals.
“Out you go, bub,” Frank said.
I reached into the glove compartment and took out the camera.
OUTSIDE, THE NIGHT SMELLED LIKE THE BAY. IT MUST HAVE BEEN cloudy, because there was no starlight. I crossed the street and stood in the yard opposite the building they’d entered. I found a place close to the trunk of a big, leafy tree, trying to keep myself in the shadows.
Then I lifted the camera. From below, through the lit windows, I could see the lines where the walls hit the ceiling. I could see the top cabinets in the kitchen, the still fan in the bedroom. Then I saw the girl come to the window. There was her head, and the tops of her shoulders. Then she lifted one hand.
