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  “I wouldn’t suggest that you ever phrase it like that. Ten years dead, he’ll still probably kick your butt.”

  She chuckled, and leaned back into her chair.

  His mind spun away into the silence. He tried to keep his mind locked on the silky, golden length of the woman next to him, but instead, his thoughts went back to the family he’d met in Claremont, six years before. He’d often thought of them, and the strange thing was that the chance for an invigorating tumble with Muriel Tong just brought them more vividly to mind.

  Sand kept thinking about the kid Patrick, and his mother Vivian, seeing something in their eyes that spooked him.

  They didn’t have money. They weren’t the kind of people to have success in any of the traditional west-coast ways. But they had something that he’d never really possessed. Something that he probably feared he’d never have. Family. One thing was certain: whatever the future held for that boy, Patrick Emory was going to have his family behind him, all the way.

  And that triggered something new inside Sand, a kind of longing that went far beyond mere sexual hunger. Beyond it, but inclusive of it: a sweet-sour ache that made his groin feel tender and tight. He turned and looked at Muriel. She was very close, short straight black hair lustrous, lips soft and moist, eyes luminous.

  It would have been ungentlemanly not to kiss her. So he did. The old Renny Sand would have gone for that and the whole enchilada and damn the consequences, damn the fact that on some very deep and basic level he knew that the relationship was the Titanic. He didn’t want to ride a boat that was going nowhere but down. Been there, done that.

  The kiss ended.

  She rolled back to her chair, her eyes gently inquisitive. Measuring, unsure, surprised that her offer had been acknowledged and refused. Women like Muriel weren’t used to things like that.

  “Something wrong?”

  Yes. I drove past a town I hadn’t seen in years, and now I can’t get a woman I’ve never touched out of my mind.

  “It’s not you,” he said honestly. It’s not who you are. It’s who you aren’t. “It’s just not the right time. I’m sorry, Muriel.”

  Her eyes flashed fire, so briefly it was like a spark in the night. Then she lowered her lids, and looked away.

  Renny felt a sudden burst of pity for Muriel Tong. En route to her career, she had sacrificed whatever hopes of home and hearth that might ever have graced her youthful dreams. Children? Husband? Perhaps the comfort of growing old with someone who, whatever physical changes time and tide wrought, would always see the beautiful young girl she had once been.

  Now, as the Big Four-Oh came and went, she was doubtlessly seeing one set of doors opening, another closing tight. Regardless of the trash-heap he’d made of his life, she and Renny were kindred spirits. Because they were, she used to be able to count on him for an hour or two of moist, fevered, meaningless amusement. Could trust him to make the moves, say the words, leave in the morning—or that night—without leaving any essential part of himself behind. No psychic follicles in the hairbrush of her heart. So to speak.

  But that boy in the courtroom …

  During the past week, he’d thought so much about Patrick, his mother, and her smile.

  Her answering e-mail message: If you find yourself in this area again …

  Mere politeness? But if it was mere politeness, why mention that her marriage was troubled? Was she so isolated and alone?

  He longed for a place to pause. A place to put his heart. And in the face of that realization, he just couldn’t pretend any more.

  But he could pretend to pretend.

  “It’s the fact that I’m your boss?” Her voice brought him back. Muriel took a sip, but hadn’t busied her hands quite fast enough to conceal the tremble.

  He accepted the olive branch. “Yeah. But I tell you what: What if I quit and go to work for Newsweek, and we fly off for a dirty weekend in Puerto Vallarta?” As if Newsweek would have him.

  “Sure,” she answered, watching him carefully. “It’s a date.” She smiled. When she smiled, her eyes crinkled. When her face relaxed, the wrinkles didn’t.

  12

  There wasn’t a whole lot more to say, but they spent an hour saying it, pretending that the intent of the evening’s invitation had been conversation and camaraderie, rather than a solid, practiced roll in the office hay.

  He made his excuses and headed home, driving down Sunset to Westwood to the Woodley Towers. The Towers were reasonably upscale, appealing to UCLA students with wealthy parents, or low-rent cosmetic surgeons working out of little cubbyholes on Santa Monica boulevard.

  He checked his computer for messages, and in the midst of all the ads for triple-X rated delights, he found a bunch from friends and contacts, and one that instantly caught his eye from Costumes, Period. Vivian had put him on her mailing list, which apparently went out to over two thousand friends, customers, and suppliers across the country. Most of it was general talk, a mention of new offerings, and notices about something called a Renaissance Pleasure Faire to be conducted in Northern California. Apparently, several of her costumes were on display there.

  At the bottom of the flyer she had tacked a more personal note: “No, not looking for any promotional help, and I bet costumes bore you. Just saying ‘hello,’ Mr. Big-Town Reporter. Vivian.”

  He leaned back, one knot of tension in his chest dissolving, another one tightening. He could feel the door opening between them. She was throwing out the fragile, tentative line. A chance for Sand to tell her who he was, really was.

  And for some reason, the knowledge of her interest was almost paralyzing. Some small, wounded voice asked what any decent woman would want with him.

  He walked out to the balcony and looked out over the jeweled strands of the city lights, and felt his heart breaking. He could barely afford the Towers on his current salary. It made him feel like a fraud. But some inviolable part of him still dreamed of bonuses and book contracts. Maybe he operated on the theory that if he lived the lifestyle he wanted to reclaim, some tiny spark inside him might rise to the challenge. He believed that was called “fake it until you make it.”

  Of course, they also call that “self-delusion.”

  Not his fault that he thought this way. His mom, bless her heart, got him started in the psycho-cybernetics loop back when he was a kid, and it could be as addictive as cocaine.

  He’d known too many people who wanted something, and went after it, and just didn’t have what it took. They broke their heads and hearts and spirits on the rocks of insufficient talent or luck. He sometimes thought that what might work, in terms of self-improvement efforts, would be a national talent test, followed by a barrage of psychologists to help people cope with the cold reality that they just didn’t have what it took.

  Reporting was sort of an accidental profession. Through all high school he was certain that there was a novelist lurking under the surface, burrowing steadily upward, eager to emerge to acclaim and applause. Sympathetic counselors had advised him to join the school newspaper. He was given the example of all kinds of great novelists who had started out or moonlighted as journalists: Twain, Steinbeck and others. They said an ambitious young man could learn discipline, and make contacts, and learn research and clarity, and all manner of other crucial bits by going this route.

  In college, he took the plunge and chose Journalism over LACC’s creative writing department, which seemed full of blue-haired little old ladies who wrote astrological poetry, and professors who spent years drafting, rewriting and polishing a single short story.

  He waited tables at Denny’s morning shift, went to school in the afternoon and wrote at night.

  Some say that everyone has a novel in them. By the late nineties, Sand figured that if there was one in him, it had to be the ugliest, most misbegotten breech birth in history.

  Get far enough along that rocky road and you forget why you ever wanted to be a writer in the first place. Instead of passion, all you get is a
dull ache, like a rotten tooth, if you don’t pick up one of the old projects every month or two.

  “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” the poem goes. Sand’s high school English teacher explained Whitman’s words as an observation that the experiences of childhood are with us for a lifetime. Hard to argue with that.

  Sand was an only child, mostly raised by a divorced mother. His mother and father split the sheets when he was eight, probably because Dad spent too much time chasing his own dream, singing. At least the old man had made it part of the way there. Never to the top, but close enough to covet the view. He sang with some of the best: Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Johnny Mathis. But his voice wasn’t strong enough, or original enough, to sustain a solo career, so he never quite made it. Working the night shift at the downtown post office was a poor substitute.

  Renny had a nasty suspicion that Mom married Dad assuming that she’d hitched her wagon to a star. When Daddy’s career went bust, when talent and ambition carried him no further than a two-bedroom house in South Central L.A., the marriage started to curdle. But this was just supposition. Truth to tell, he didn’t really know: it was murder to pry information out of either of them.

  Mom was always scared that baby Renny was going to follow in Dad’s footsteps, and do something just as rash. God knows he never meant to hurt her, or hurt anyone, but maybe that’s exactly what he did.

  Along the way he had the hideous misfortune to learn that a steady paycheck is the most addictive drug in the world. If he’d never gotten that first job at the San Diego Examiner, interning that summer of ’80, who knew what might have happened.

  Not that he stopped writing fiction. Not at all. But his first novel, Timestream, made the rounds of twenty-two publishers, and then sat in the big green filing cabinet in the corner of his living room. Three years later, his second, After the Fall, made it to eighteen houses. It took four years to finish the next one, The Equation. All three were science fiction, all of them metaphorical journeys along an inner road.

  He remembered working on The Equation furtively, at night, with a bottle of beer on the side of the desk. By this time, the suds were a necessity: he needed a little help getting going.

  The first two books were written while working at the Examiner, and then later in San Jose at the Chronicle. The third was written in Minnesota, at the Twin City, a weekly liberal rag with a readership of about half a million.

  The first two books he wrote in the morning, bounding out of bed, showering to heat his body up and spending a half hour on the treadmill, then another shower, then eating yogurt out of a cup as he sat at the computer and pounded out five hundred words or so, every damn day.

  Going to work after that regimen felt downright righteous, no matter what lame story they threw at him. He could always tell himself, “I’m not here for the duration. Just passing through.” However silly that might seem in retrospect, that perspective actually put some extra bounce in his step. By the third book, he’d started to view the computer with suspicion.

  An old Peanuts comic strip was one of Sand’s favorite memories. In it, Charlie Brown’s beagle wrote prospective editors a note reading: “Dear Sirs. I recently sent you a manuscript. You were supposed to publish it, and make me rich and famous. If you were not aware of this, I hereby give you thirty days to correct an intolerable situation. Sincerely, Snoopy.”

  Every day, Sand felt more like Charlie Brown’s hallucinating pooch.

  Discipline and creativity began to break down. It got to a point where only three hundred words a day made it out of his computer. After a year, he had an unpublishable chunk of garbage, twice rescued from the trash can. And the computer keyboard became a thing to fear.

  Maybe he should have gotten damned mad instead of frightened. Fought back by launching into another book. But the fear grew too large, loomed like some kind of grinning jackal over his crippled ego. No idea escaped unscathed. No word made it onto the page without merciless critique, and in time, he lost what remained of his confidence. There was just some little place inside him that didn’t have the ability to climb that mountain again, to put his chin up again, and take the chance of another knockout. It happens to boxers all the time. Good boxers. Promising fighters. They never make it back.

  He kept promising himself that he’d get back to that next book, that he’d finish it, polish it, send it out.

  And he didn’t.

  The work that was certain: the newspaper work, the magazine work, called to him. He wasn’t risking himself, because his heart wasn’t in it. He could make money, and hide behind cleverness, and no one would ever know that he wasn’t giving them anything of himself.

  No one knew, no one cared. Least of all Renny Sand.

  And that was how, ten years and three relationships later, he had found himself working in Los Angeles, flirting with a Pulitzer, courted and groomed for duty at Marcus Communications.

  That was also how he had, with the very best of intentions, made the very worst mistake of his life. A little mistake named Benny Alvarez.

  And how he ended up in a pissant town called Claremont, covering a little trial for Marcus Communication’s lowest rung, Eyeful, and meeting a woman who touched him in ways he didn’t think he could be touched anymore. How he ended up years later driving back through that town, and reawakening memories and dreams that he had never allowed to emerge into the full light of day.

  And how, ultimately, he ended up declining an interlude with the firm, warm body of a woman who knew too much about him, knew that once upon a time he’d been on the way up, that now he was holding on for dear life.

  And lastly, how he happened to be sitting on the terrace of his Westwood apartment, looking out over the rail at a city that didn’t know his name, drinking his third canned daiquiri, breath hitching in his chest as the pain slid away into a bubbling black haze.

  Packed away somewhere in a box was his third novel, the stunted literary albatross that he might as well hang around his neck as tangible evidence of failure. He’d carried that cold dead thing with him from job to job, swearing that one day, somehow, he’d pick it back up again, begin to write again, and dig himself out of this hole.

  But even if he couldn’t do that, he could do something else, and this he pledged:

  He would make this city know who he was. He would make them talk about Renny Sand. Make them eager to open their papers and magazines to see if his byline was on an article, a news item, a column today. He’d win their love.

  He’d find a story bigger and better than the one that had gone so terribly, fatally wrong. They’d know Renny Sand, by God.

  And if he could do that, maybe he would be able to return to that lethal manuscript, and resurrect from it the spirit of his aborted dream.

  I’m a writer, damn it.

  13

  THURSDAY, MAY 17

  Otis Emory worked the gears on his Peterbilt, sliding the fork under a 500-pound bale of particle board. The front springs sagged as he levered the load up. Gravel crunched beneath the wheels as the tractor found its balance, and then shifted into reverse. He backed up until he had a clear run down the aisle.

  He was a man of power and strength, a man intended for hunting, or fighting, or crashing through an opposing line to sack the hapless quarterback. Otis was too damned many years past eighteen now, but on good days he still felt the springy power in his legs and back, still felt that crazy electric juice in his blood that said One More Game. Just one more good game. Once more, let me hear the crowd roar, and watch the cheerleaders twirl, and feel my body doing what it was meant to do. What I was born to do.

  That was on the good days.

  On bad days he thought about shuttling endless flats of precut board onto boxcars or ships that would take them to Albuquerque or Salt Lake or up the Columbia River to primo markets in Japan. Eight, ten, sometimes twelve-hour days that stuck a hot, dull knife in his lower back no matter what salves or crèmes or pills he tried. Or he thought about what had
happened to his family, and tried to wrap his mind around the possibility that it was actually over with Vivian.

  That was hard to take. He still remembered when Vivian was sixteen, the sweetest thing he had ever seen. She still was, but back then, the admiration was mutual, and passionate, and if they had been naïve and frightened on that first night up in Riverview cemetery, there had been something special about that cool, dark grass, their sleeping bags linked together as tightly as their bodies. She had trembled, her small hands laced around his neck, but her eyes were clear and focused on his, and they said yes, yes, I want this, Otis—

  “Big load there, Oat,” Ellie Krup said.

  Otis yanked himself out of his reverie, and focused his eyes on a buxom blonde with a sharp nose and wide, generous lips. She smiled at him in a lazy, predatory fashion. He had known Ellie Krup almost as long as he had known Vivian, back when Ellie was a sexy cheerleader, too strapping to be called “cute,” with a taste for running backs. Black, white, color didn’t matter at all, as long as they wore the green and gold.

  “You handle it nice and easy, Oat.” He smiled a bit, not too much. Ellie was more than a flirt. She was trouble, and it would be very, very foolish to ever forget that.

  “Always do, Ellie,” he said.

  Ellie Krup ran her portable scanner over the UPC bar code on the side of the bundled lumber, checked the display, nodded at what her clipboard computer told her.

  “Seen that. You got a nice, light touch. Gets the job done, don’t it?” The way she smiled at him gave him an odd, crawly sensation.

  “Always has,” he said neutrally.

  “I’ll just bet.”

  She was about to say something else, about to define the playing field more precisely, when Cappy emerged from around the corner.

  Cappy Swenson was an out of towner, had only arrived in Claremont three years ago, but had found a way to fit in pretty quick. The first year or so the big, bearded man had ingratiated himself, or created pressure, to land random jobs around town. He had finally ended up here at the lumber mill, working around the shipping department. Not long after that he’d actually moved into their trailer park. Ugh.