The Price of the Ticket Page 16

  In spite of the day, in spite of his troubles, in spite of himself, in spite of Celeste, Pauley found himself laughing. “No. You don’t understand, babe. I’m tired. I’m worn out. I’ve lost it. I had such a lousy day my manhood is impeded.…”

  “Impeded!” She slapped his face. He barely felt it. “Asshole! I’ll show you impeded!” Even as she spoke, the cocaine and the brandy met head-on at their pre-arranged rendezvous, the nerve center in his brain one might just as well call Playland-by-the-Sea, and attended to the first order of the evening. The pain in his back diminished to a point, like the small dot of light on the screen of a television that’s just been turned off, lingered a moment, winked out.

  She helped him. The buttons on his denim fly parted in a soft percussive cadence, like a taste of warden’s birdshot cascading down through the waxen leaves of a magnolia tree. One a them Zen koans.

  Lieutenant Uhura tapped a hairy tarsus against the glass wall of her universe. Centimeters beyond, a talking head, centered like a fauxed knob in an escutcheon of colors carefully chosen to promote a soothing antinomy to a thesis of informative horror, raised its gums and showed teeth semiotically. Somewhere in other cages in other parts of the apartment, carefully tended by their mistress and deprived of television, reptiles slept.

  “There,” she said after a few minutes, “all unimpeded.” She rose, arched her back, and pulled aside the tails of her blouse so that its buttons popped off and ticked to the floor. She tied the shirttails together beneath her breasts so the fabric framed them. She held his hands to them and exchanged a long glance with him. They kissed. Then she turned her back. She still had on the black miniskirt she’d worn to the club interview. This had a zipper that ascended its back to her waist. Reaching behind her with both hands she pinched the hem in the fingers of one hand and pulled the tab of the zipper with the other. The skirt parted like a stage curtain to reveal the very globes at the tops of her thighs, where they merged most cunningly into the lower portion of her back. Colorful tattoos swarmed the flesh like fine wires baked in porcelain. The idea was for Pauley to take some initiative at this point. On the merry-go-round in Playland-by-the-Sea there is a rule: one is obliged to grab the brass ring before it hits one in the face, or certainly just after. Celeste placed her feet, still in heels, quite far apart, and leaned slowly forward, so that her breasts crushed against the glass a few inches above the tarantula. She placed the bat-mirror on top of the television, so as to have a little cocaine handy at the appropriate moment.

  The star Altair rose, as if impatiently, to meet the discovering starship, and give succour to its exhausted crew.

  Chapter Thirteen

  NOW PAULEY’S WORLD NARROWED TO TWO PEOPLE.

  A telephone call brought about the complicity of Martin Seam, who happened to be at home. A little nervous, but at home. Soothed by the influences of Celeste, Pauley mollified Seam. A mere second signature on the Toyota papers, his calm voice said, overlooked by first and second parties at the time. The State changes its paperwork every year. Used to be all you had to do was sign the pink slip and send it in. But now–Oh, running fine, just fine. Like a new watch. Made a big delivery today. Not a hitch–what’s that? Yeah, that’s right, a Japanese Seiko, ah ha, ah ha, ah ha. So. Only take a minute. After all, we don’t want you to be getting stuck with any of my parking tickets. I got tagged today, come to think of it. I’ll lay fifteen bucks on you. Half an hour? Make it forty-five minutes. See you then.

  “Kid’s jumpy,” Pauley said, replacing the receiver. “But he liked the idea of the fifteen bucks.”

  Celeste let the back of her hand drift over the day’s beard on Pauley’s cheek. “He should be jumpy.” They were in bed, propped on pillows against the headboard, with the lights out. In the gloom beneath the window her form rose and fell like a chain of distant foothills, its tattoos busy like secretive jungle life on their nocturnal slopes. “He sold a bum car to the wrong guy. You’re going to thrash him, right?”

  “Wrong. I just want my six hundred bucks back.”

  “Is that all? After what he–”

  “Six hundred bucks is all he’s into me for,” Pauley said, interrupting her. Then he changed the subject slightly. “Didn’t you bring home almost that much just tonight?”

  “Four seventy-five.”

  He slapped her bottom. “A little short.”

  “Oo,” she said, and raked his chest with her fingernails. “I’ll do better, I’ll do better.…”

  “I don’t want you to do it that way anymore.”

  “I can handle it.”

  He took her chin and turned her face toward his. Their eyes gleamed inches from each other in the darkness. “You listening?”

  She said nothing. He could feel her jaw tighten. Pauley moved his other hand down her back, into the cleft of her behind, and pulled.

  “Listening?”

  She squirmed and scratched like a bag of kittens. One arm was trapped beneath them. He pinned her other arm to her side and held on. After a while the struggle elided into arousal, and she stopped fighting.

  “Oh Pauley.…”

  “Listening?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she breathed, “oh yes.…”

  “What you’re doing for a few hundred bucks here and there,” he said carefully, speaking to her eyes, “is called armed robbery.”

  She kicked him. He held tight.

  “Nothing that you can steal,” he continued, “is worth what they’ll do to you when they catch you.”

  “Nothing’s as much as I started with!”

  “You’ll finish with less than that!” He shook her. “When they catch you, and they will catch you, you’ve failed at something that’s designed to fail. But the big deal comes when they break you. It’s big to you, but for them it’s easy. They put you in jail for a while. It’s all they have to do. Jail breaks you, it breaks everybody. It breaks you down, then it builds you into something else.”

  He realized he’d been holding her a little too tightly, and relaxed his grip.

  “You want to know something else?”

  Celeste said nothing. She knew prison terrified him. She wasn’t too thrilled by the institution herself.

  “I like you the way you are now,” he said, “and that’s the way you’ll go in. I can guarantee I won’t like whoever comes out the other side.”

  Still she said nothing.

  “You won’t like her either,” he added. “But you won’t have any choice.”

  She remained silent, waiting for the sex at the end of the tunnel.

  “But I will have a choice,” he said finally. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  It was fifteen or twenty minutes before he got up to dress.

  Celeste watched him from the bed as she toyed with an erect nipple. She tried the other one and found it in a similar condition, only less resilient, less sensitive. It was always like that with her nipples, arousal in the left one always exceeded that of the right. Was her left nipple connected to her right brain, to which center the graze of a chipped tooth always sent a direct message? Where imagination always dominated the mundane? Dominated bad lighting, insufficient emotional involvement, man in a hurry–the mundane, Not that Pauley had those problems. Pauley had more patience than any man she’d ever met, and was the first she’d known who could handle her emotional flights. Other men would take flight themselves when she took flight. The ones that didn’t fly in the opposite direction tried to keep up with her–anxious, cajoling, holding her hand. Desperately and often even logically attempting to cope with every nuance, invariably they got left behind. They were thrown off in a tight turn, left in the dust, disgusted, or just plain exhausted, long before she landed again.

  On the other side of the coin, she’d once made it with a man who started hitting her for making too much noise during sex. To be sure, he got away with it once and only once, but the point was, and is, that such clowns are out there, just waiting to ambush a girl.

 
; Pauley merely watched her flights. He might even enjoy them. Under his calm gaze she could stay aloft and beyond the horizon for days, if that was what she wanted. He’d be right where she’d left him when she returned–plus or minus a few blocks–glad to see her and willing to listen, if she felt like explaining herself. He modestly dismissed this ability as a result of stir calm, that efficient, necrobiotic patience bred in a man who had been told that it was going to be several years before he would be able to move freely beyond the confines of a thousand cubic feet. He had learned to slow down everything–to savor, to protract. Lighting a cigarette, smoking it, trimming the ash off it, extinguishing it–these things could be made to take time. What Celeste construed as patience was the only benefit of stir calm he was aware of or had noticed, but it accounted, at least in part, for his extraordinary ability to deal with toxic smoking railroad ties, tax assessors, erratic genius designers of torture racks, and volatile women–not to mention Celeste–without blowing his top. He claimed understanding the latter seemed simple to him: she was interesting, she was a change. He hadn’t asked for the hard lesson and it got taught him anyway. It took a long time but he caught on. Be cool: this, too, shall pass. Here was one man who appreciated what he had, and didn’t approach Celeste as if she were some kind of household chore. Not that she’d ever particularly had that problem. But Pauley had experienced enough deprivation in his life. He appreciated a good thing. She twirled. Things.

  She wondered what Pauley had been like when he was her age. Much the same? Acquisitive, ambitious, impatient? Reckless, cold, vicious? Wild, suicidal, deadly?

  It didn’t seem to her that he’d come out such a bad guy, on the other side.

  And really–so what if she goes in one person and comes out another? Considering the way things are.…

  She surveyed the apartment, dark except for the flickering silent television that illuminated Lieutenant Uhura’s cage. Prison. They probably didn’t let you keep tarantulas, in prison.

  A cockroach maybe?

  Pauley slipped out the door without saying goodbye. Encouraged to express himself, to say what he really thinks, and the curtain comes down: silence. One day, abruptly, you get it all. Then he’s real quiet for a time, as if the outburst breached some kind of code of behavior, and was something to be regretted.

  She lay naked on her back, without a cover, staring into the darkness, and played with her nipples.

  We don’t have it so bad.…

  Given the way things are.…

  Go in one way, come out another.…

  Who cares?

  Martin Seam lived at the western end of Pacific in the back of a Victorian mansion. Built as a dream house, later fallen into genteel decrepitude and since restored, a widowed daughter would now own it, or a flight attendant or real-estate agent or a last remaining great-grandson–someone who could no longer afford the style of his forebears. Accordingly the servant’s stair would have been converted into a separate entrance which climbed the back of the house from rented room to rented room, with here and there an occasional two-or three-room apartment or the better part of a whole floor or a former walk-in closet, to let. Pacific Heights was full of such mansions. Some of them held families with plenty of money and entire floors devoted to toys and walk-in doll houses and full-size indoor swing sets. In the ersatz Renaissance job next door a single bachelor would be whiling away months, years, decades, peregrinating from floor to floor with a bowl of damp corn flakes among expensive detritus generated by a lifetime of sourceless whims carefully tracked by a hierarchy of parasitic antique dealers. Others rock stars owned, or aristocrats, who remodeled them at the cost of a million or so, and allowed them to be painted and furnished under the meticulous auspices of a jet-setting interior decorator, and never lived in them. In still others countries from around the world had established consulates, building or taking over quarter- and half-block estates and turning them into tasteful tours de whatever force the efficiently fleeced home-country taxpayers were capable of paying for, with electric gates breaching a ten-foot stone perimeter wall, infrared motion-detectors, closed-circuit television, and 24-hour security to fend off inquisitive press, demonstrative anarchists, intruding spies, and the like.

  Amid this opulence lived the likes of Martin Seam–a pretender, a dreamer, a hopeful, a guy who believed that one’s neighborhood reflected, at least in part, the quality of one’s aspirations. Seam and people like him were perfectly capable of spending half and more of their miserable incomes on a single room that faced the street on the ground floor of a lovely building that was nothing more than a fancy boarding house with bougainvillea clinging to its bricks. Their lives were often presided over by some land-poor charlatan as a temporary expedient toward their own social aspirations, not to be so much as mentioned in the same paragraph as those of their tenants; yet who moated the least innocent priapisms of their boarders with the most suppurating imaginings of their own, in the form of rules: No loud noises, no immoral behavior, no telephone calls after 9:30 weekdays, 10:30 Fridays and Saturdays, and certainly no overnight visitors; showers (down the hall) limited to five minutes, baths (down another hall) to ten; parking limited to the space provided, no exceptions; rent for the apartment and the parking place separate and due on the first of the month, no exceptions, all loose ends strictly pro-rated; a first and last month’s rent on deposit along with hefty damage and cleaning security equal to if not exceeding a third month’s rent, ditto a deposit on the parking space in case your car leaks oil on the concrete. No pets mammalian, reptilian, riparian, sylvan, pelagic, lunar or otherwise, no exceptions. And so forth. Meals negotiable. Try crossing the rules and the eviction notice will arrive quicker than you can say Dorothy Montalvo Puente. Laundry in the basement, change for the washer and dryer available from the landlady’s office between the hours of 11:00 A.M. and noon on Saturdays only. No large bills accepted. Assure yourself that your social security check gets forwarded from your last address, it’s a scandal how those checks disappear. The next time she finds the basement door propped open after dark the laundry will be permanently closed. No whistling. No exceptions.

  Anybody in their right mind would be mentally incapable of abiding by such rules, let alone paying for the privilege. But this is late in the 20th century, when Right Mind is the name of an avant garde theater work–now closed. The people who knuckle under are too busy trying to accommodate the rate for their imagined luxury to break any rules at all.

  Every morning, five or six days a week, the scene is the same all over Pacific Heights. At Sacramento on the south side and all along Union Street on the north and Jackson straight up the middle, legions of the employed queue for the downtown buses.

  Pauley often saw them. The outbound bus hisses to a stop. The doors open. Chamberpersons, scullery maids, cleaning women, cooks, babysitters and valets get off the bus by the half dozen. Many carry a shopping bag filled with neatly folded work clothes, many are already in some kind of uniform, and sometimes their parcels include the morning pastries for those in the big house. They slowly scatter up the hill. The doors close, the bus departs westward, further into the fastness. Across the street, which glistens in the morning sunlight from the recent passage of the street-cleaning machine, the downtown employed attend the inbound lanes. Some read the Chronicle. Some have the Chronicle folded under an arm, unread, their hands in their pockets, and stare sightlessly before them. Others pace and smoke. All appear early, at the same time, five or six days a week, hair wet, dressed fashionably, conservatively breakfasted, and projecting themselves beyond their constitutional ability, in anticipation of the daily hammer.

  Evenings, it’s the same in reverse. The servants come down the hill. Even though gravity is with them they walk more slowly than they walked uphill this morning, much more slowly. Their shoulders droop; their shopping bags skim the pavement. If they’re whistling it doesn’t sound like whistling, it sounds more like a shop-keeper blowing the dust off a fifteen-thousand doll
ar Russian egg. Gravity having become their main problem, they stoop at the bus stop too exhausted even to be listless. Across the street the outbound bus arrives and stops with a hiss. The morning downtown-employed debark with their jackets in one hand and the handles of their little briefcases in the other. The afternoon Examiner has replaced the morning Chronicle. What’s in those little briefcases? They’re so small. The remnants of an alfalfa sprout sandwich? Cassettes for the walkman? Devices of birth control? Plans for the atomic bomb? No. It’s the indispensable Sunday entertainment supplement, of whose pink sheets now these readers are too used up to take advantage. These humans scatter slowly back up the hill. They, too, walk with less energy than they did this morning. Gravity is not with them, either; but they aren’t too bothered by it. Except for perhaps a jog around the Embarcadero or a chapter of Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steel instead of lunch, they aren’t precisely physically exhausted, it’s more a matter of spiritual depletion. Is there anything more terrifying than a man who runs from the end of his morning to the beginning of his afternoon? How about a woman who does it on a treadmill, while reading The Bridges of Madison County off a plexiglass desk screwed to the handlebars? Both are desperate to be in shape, to be ready, to be alert, perhaps even adroit, poised and just about forlorn to be ready in case something really beautiful happens to their lives, they’ll be prepared. The outbound bus closes its doors. A screech from its brakes, an expostulation from its air compressor, a roar of black diesel exhaust and it departs. Minutes later the inbound bus arrives. Silently the “help” get on. The morning outbounders are working to send their succeeding generation to college so they can be morning inbounders. The morning inbounders are working to get themselves a slightly larger room closer to the top of the hill. Somewhere downtown the people who employ them all by the twos and threes, by the tens and scores, by the hundreds and thousands, think they know why.