Deadline, page 2
ETA January. Six months away. I couldn’t help myself – I went down on my knees and lifted her purple silk dress up to her waist and laid the side of my face against her stomach, even though I knew it was too early to feel any movement. I just wanted to be close to the baby. We’d longed for a child, and we’d worked at it, trying our luck on the roulette wheel of reproduction – charts on the bedroom wall, computer calculations of her cycles, the difficult math of ovulation, my sperm count, fertility tests.
I was forty-three years of age, six years older than my wife, and we were aware of our clocks running a little too fast.
Life had been generous to us: I was successful in my profession, and Sondra made a good income as a marketing exec for LaBrea Records. And only one thing had been missing.
The notion of a baby – now it engulfed me. I thought of the purity of a new life amidst the dreck of the city, and briefly my mind drifted from the elevated redwood deck, plunging down to where the hot night alleys were fetid dead-ends, and doorways were filled with the disenfranchised and the socially crippled. I imagined hearing the whispers of lunatics and addicts and the sound of a wine bottle smashing or a clip thrust inside an automatic. We’d have to move from here, and I was glad.
We’d live in a small town beyond the toxic reaches of LA, a place of good schools and clean neighborhoods where you could raise a child in safety. A place of the kind you saw on pictorial calendars or postcards, or in coffee-table books about Americana, one of the friendly little towns that still existed out there like persistent myths.
I felt Sondra’s hand against the back of my neck.
‘Make love to me,’ she said. ‘Right here.’
I drew her down to the deck carefully. She’d always been precious to me, but now even more so, if such a thing were possible. My wife. My love … My family.
Jerry and Sondra Lomax and child. Two became three.
I listened to the quickened sound of her breathing and, glancing at her, saw her lips part and her eyelids flicker. The shampoo she used was suggestive of something exotic. The breeze rose again and rattled eucalyptus leaves. The night was filled with our whispered pleasures. Even the distant scream of an ambulance – an urban distress call for a gunshot victim, somebody being rushed to die in an emergency room, who knows – couldn’t intrude on this moment. The guy with the knife and the parking-lot were forgotten. And when the phone rang in the house, I didn’t feel the urge to answer it. The answering-machine kicked in.
I was galaxies removed from distractions. I was elsewhere. I made love as gently as I could, imagining the fragility of the womb, underestimating how much of a strongbox it was, and how securely it contained the unborn child.
Sondra said, ‘I’m not glass, Jerry. I won’t break. Don’t hold back.’
I closed my eyes. This intimacy with her was different from anything that had taken place before. A shift had occurred, a new level of commitment had been reached. We made love on the deck as if we were touching for the first time. Our energy was frantic. I lost all sense of my body as an entity separate from Sondra. A fusion, then a splintering, inevitable and seismic.
When I had nothing left to give, she held me inside her. ‘I don’t want to let you go,’ she said.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I said.
‘Are you happy?’ she asked. ‘Have I made you happy, Jerry?’
‘Happy’s a wimp word,’ I said. ‘Ecstatic.’ I looked up into the sky, wishing I could see stars. But the night was cloudy.
She was crying quietly.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Just …’
I wrapped a hand around hers and squeezed. She cried a moment longer, then forced out a little laugh. ‘I’m being all weepy about this.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly natural. This is as new to you as it is to me. You’re bound to experience strange emotions. Ups and downs. Fears. Joys. You’re carrying another life. I can’t imagine a responsibility as enormous as that.’
Out in the dark something boomed and reverberated. A backfire. A pistol. After a time, you went beyond the point of speculating about the source of such noises. They became background, soundtrack to the chaotic low-budget movie the city had become. And finally you stopped paying them any attention.
‘I want to be a good mother, Jerry. I want that so badly.’
‘You will be,’ I said. ‘Absolutely no doubt.’ With the edge of my shirt-cuff, I dried the tears on her cheeks. ‘Jacob for a boy. Louisa for a girl.’
‘No way,’ she said.
‘Something you don’t like about Jacob? Or is it Louisa that bothers you?’
‘Jacob’s sort of uncool. And Louisa … I don’t know, I associate it with whalebone corsets and croquet on lawns. Merry old England.’
We argued about names in a good-natured way for a time. And then, because a warm rain had begun to fall softly through the canyons, we went inside, where one of the two candles had died and the dining-room was a little darker than before.
Friday, 2.22 a.m.
An electric storm over the city: thunder rolled like mortar-fire through the canyons. The noise insinuated itself into my dream, and I saw two aircraft, banked in a holding-pattern over a busy airport, suddenly collide. The planes crumpled instantly, and bodies began to fall from the battered fuselages; all at once, imbued with the kind of powers you sometimes have in dreams, I was able to zoom in on the faces of those thrown from the gashed and buckled craft. The faces – and for some reason this was the truly upsetting thing – were without expression, showed no fear, no terror. Nor were there any sounds: no screams, no cries of anguish. The victims, strapped to their seats, were unresponsive, as if they’d silently accepted the inevitability of their doom.
Falling and falling, showered by the debris of the broken airplanes, they rained down through the sky in a manner that was almost regimented, row after row of them, their lips shut, their hands resting on the arms of their seats, their posture suggestive of passengers preparing themselves for the in-flight movie.
I snapped out of the dream. I sat upright, pushed the bedsheet aside. Sondra was asleep. I padded out of the bedroom to the kitchen and took a bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator and guzzled it without closing the door. I liked the feel of cold air. The night was clammy.
I went into my office, pulled the tiny chain that turned on the desk lamp, and sat down. I put on my glasses. On a yellow legal pad, I outlined the dream before the details faded. I’d been exploring the syntax of dreams for years, searching the mysteries for meaning. I encouraged my patients to record their dreams.
Airplanes. They’d been awaiting clearance to land and disgorge their passengers. Arrivals. The baby, the new arrival. Clearly I still hadn’t assimilated the fact of Sondra’s pregnancy. It would play on my mind for a long time. I expected to have all manner of dreams in the coming months that could be traced to the unborn child.
But the collision of the two craft? The expressionless faces of the passengers falling out of the sky? What was that supposed to suggest to me? Obstacles to the healthy arrival of the child, say? The whole gamut of unspeakable worries that ran from webbed feet to cleft palate to Down’s Syndrome to stillborn.
Or was it an echo of the violent encounter I’d had in the parking-lot? I rubbed the side of my neck, which ached.
I walked through the house. In the living-room I absently flicked the On button of the TV remote, and I thought of those dream people dropping, with no apparent fear, to their deaths. Not every dream yielded an interpretation. Some were obscure, wilfully so, the mind playing cryptic games. A joker loose in the head, a mischievous projectionist run amuck in the movie theater.
I opened a window because the room was stuffy. The hum of traffic never stopped. Brakes screeched somewhere, the next street, the next block. I saw a pale-blue WelCor car drive slowly past, wet and shining under a streetlamp like a pale shark. WelCor, a private security firm, patrolled the neighborhood every hour or so.
I sat down in front of the TV. The dream was already fading, even if the feeling of being unsettled still clung to me. I looked at CNN. A river had burst its banks in Louisiana; flooded streets, people paddling canoes through the floating debris of ruined households, sunken porches. Then the image changed and we were back in the studio, and the newscaster, a blond woman with unblinking eyes, was talking about something else: national events crammed into less than twenty-five minutes, everything was zap zap zap. Moving right along …
A familiar face appeared on the box. Intrigued, I leaned forward, elbows propped on my knees.
The newscaster said, ‘Rumors continue to grow in Washington that the President plans to nominate Emily Ford for the position of US Attorney-General. Ms Ford, former Los Angeles County DA, and presently Chief Consultant to the West Coast Division of the Presidential Task Force On Crime, is making no comment at this time. Stories about her possible nomination have been frequent in recent weeks. Ms Ford, who has become prominent for her hard line on crime, may not prove to be a popular choice with certain elements inside the Democratic Party.’
Now the screen was filled with recorded images. Emily Ford was pictured in bright sunshine outside a courthouse, smiling thinly and brushing aside the questions of the predators who kept shoving microphones into her face. She uttered the usual cant about how she’d make a statement at the appropriate time, and then she vanished inside a waiting car.
I heard a sound from behind, and turned to see Sondra come into the room. She was yawning, and looked tousled. ‘Storm woke me,’ she said. She sat beside me on the sofa, one hand flat on her stomach. She nodded toward the TV.
‘Your old pal Emily is going places, it would seem,’ she said. Her voice was icy. She’d never liked Emily Ford, whose personality and politics were the opposite of her own. ‘I’m just glad she’s out of your life, that’s all I can say.’
I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to sound as if I were rushing to the defense of Emily Ford. I didn’t want to make excuses on Emily’s behalf, or justify the amount of time I’d been obliged to spend with her. Almost two years had passed since Emily had last consulted me.
‘She’s all raw ambition,’ Sondra said.
‘She has goals,’ I said quietly.
‘Goals? Hey, goals are what ice-hockey players and kickers score. Goals are what salesmen have. Emily has this great big agenda that seems to involve the incarceration of half the population –’
‘Come on, you know that’s total exaggeration,’ I said.
‘I read about her, Jerry. And I don’t like what I read.’
I wanted to drop the subject. I made a small gesture with my hand, acquiescence, pax. I gazed at the TV. The newscaster was going for some kind of late-night, in-depth profiling.
‘During her time with the Presidential Task Force, Ms Ford has alienated certain influential Democratic congressmen, and she’s also been in conflict with prominent members of her own legal profession, most notably Dennis Nardini’ – here the screen was filled with footage of Nardini stepping out of a limousine. I knew the face. It appeared, albeit rarely, in social columns, always in connection with something tasteful or charitable – the opening of an art exhibit, a fund-raiser for the education of inner-city kids.
Good-looking in a dark-eyed Latino way, it was the kind of face that suggested culture, sophistication. Nardini was said to be an intensely private man, but I knew some of his background – I’d read about it somewhere. His grandfather had stepped off a steamship at Ellis Island on the first day of the twentieth century; perhaps it was this timing that had impressed the story on my mind: a new immigrant arriving on Day One of a new century, and turning himself into an American Success. He’d made a fortune importing spices. His son (Arturo? Antonio? I couldn’t remember) had expanded the business – cheeses and wines – but grandson Dennis, equipped with an Anglo-Saxon first name, broke from family tradition; he’d gone to Harvard Law School, trading parmesan for the kind of prosperity a hot-shot LA lawyer could expect.
He was a man of some influence in the city, and his law firm represented an assortment of highflying showbiz demi-gods and goddesses, as well as mega-rich clients whose occupations were less well-defined and whose public profiles somewhat murky. I recalled that Emily had subpoenaed one of Nardini’s clients in a criminal case the Task Force was trying to build, but the precise details eluded me: something to do with an oil-lease scam. I remembered the term ‘witch-hunt’ had been bruited about in newspapers by associates of Nardini, although Nardini himself remained aloof from anything as undignified as name-calling.
Sondra was watching the screen with a look of concentration.
I said, ‘I hear Nardini has some dubious connections.’
‘Really? I never knew you paid attention to gossip.’ She reached for my hand but she kept her eyes on the screen, where Nardini, in some library footage, was entering the offices of his law firm.
‘It’s just stuff you hear around,’ I said vaguely. ‘True, false, who knows?’ What did Nardini’s connections matter to me, anyway? I didn’t want to talk about him; I just wanted to steer the conversation away from Emily Ford.
‘He doesn’t look like a bad guy to me,’ she said.
‘I never said he was a bad guy, Sondra.’
‘Guilt by innuendo,’ she said, and smiled.
Now commercials bounced and exploded across the screen. I picked up the remote and killed the picture. Sondra rose, walked towards the bedroom. I told her I’d be a minute; I went inside the kitchen and drank a pint of ice water. I stood for a time at the sink, thinking about the possibility of Emily Ford going to Washington. Why not? She was qualified, experienced; her bad times were behind her – correct?
I entered the bedroom. Sondra lay turned away from me, already asleep. I got into bed beside her and lowered a hand against her hip, putting my palm around the pleasing curvature of bone. I looked at the red digital numbers on the bedside clock: 3.00 a.m.
She moved very slightly, turning an inch or so on the pillow, opening her mouth with a small plosive sound, a tiny pocket of air expelled.
She mumbled, ‘My love …’ in the flat inexpressive voice of a sleeper, a monotone I associated with messages uttered by mediums during trances.
I had never heard her speak in that lifeless way before, and it startled me a little; it was so unlike her own voice it might have emerged from a total stranger.
I wondered what she was dreaming about.
7.55 a.m.
Our working days were long, so we usually tried to spend as much time together as we could over breakfast. We drank coffee in the kitchen and ate sliced oranges and wholewheat toast spread with Dundee marmalade from a small specialty store in Santa Monica. I liked this routine, this little clearing of peace at the start of the day. I’d almost forgotten my skewed dream.
‘You were talking in your sleep,’ I said.
‘Bull. I never talk in my sleep,’ Sondra said.
‘Last night you did.’
‘OK. What did I say?’
‘My love.’
‘“My love?” That was all?’
I nodded. ‘You remember what you were dreaming?’
‘I never remember dreams.’ She sipped coffee and looked at me over the rim of her cup. She smiled.
I said, ‘You sounded very far away. Detached. Out of reach.’
‘People are always out of reach when they’re asleep and dreaming. They’re always strangers in strange places.’ She put her cup down and picked up a slice of orange and held it to her lips. ‘I bet I was dreaming something nice about you. We were probably having a picnic by a river on a warm summer’s day,’ and she tossed the crescent of orange into her mouth and walked around my side of the table. She ruffled my hair. ‘You look good this morning. Sort of fatherly. Proud. Pleased with yourself.’
I said, ‘Life’s wonderful.’
‘I agree.’ She took my hand, guided it to her stomach. The way she did this touched me unexpectedly. I felt an upsurge of emotion, a warmth fuse through my blood. The idea of wife and child, of family. I’ll be good to them, I thought. I’ll be fiercely protective. I’ll keep the bad things of the world away from them. We’ll leave the scum of this decaying city and head for some quiet place when that time comes.
I was surprised by the force of my feelings. It was as if the news of the baby had overjoyed me, and left me raw and vulnerable at the same time. I was already in love with this unborn, beautifully shapeless being Sondra carried. Like some ancient cave-dweller, I was already prepared to club to death anything that threatened this child’s existence. Deep fatherly feelings were rising to the surface: I was nervously patrolling the front-line of impending fatherhood like countless generations of men before me. I’d get used to it as the months passed, I was sure, and my tensions would recede, but for the moment I was undergoing sensations unfamiliar to me.
‘I just thought about something,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t I talk with Marv Sweetzer about the baby? I need to discuss my role in all this. I want to be present, you know. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
‘I already asked him about seeing you. He said to call him in a week and set up an appointment.’ She carried her cup to the sink. ‘What have you got on today?’
‘I have a lunch date with Harry Pushkas.’ Pushkas, a sixty-five-year-old wild-haired Hungarian immigrant too fond of aged brandy and infantile practical jokes, had been my mentor and advisor at UCLA. It was Harry who’d steered me towards psychiatry at a time when I was an intern unsure of my future specialty. I’d thought of general practice, but Harry had scoffed at the notion. Don’t be a mender of broken bones, my boy. Mend broken spirits. I was fond of Harry.
‘Give him my best,’ Sondra said.
‘I will.’
‘He’s an old lech.’
