The Orange Curtain Read online

  He tried to sit up to protest and pain shot through his head, so severe that he almost passed out.

  “I’m living with someone, Mrs. Joubert.”

  “Please call me Tien. I know you not happy. Your woman no good for you. I buy you things, dress you good.” She glared at the Timex on the dresser, the only possession of his she seemed to have kept. “Get you good Movado. Make you look sharp.”

  “If my clients saw a Movado, they’d think I was stealing from them.”

  “You not have to work. You kick back. Go out on boat. I only got harbor boat now. We get big boat with flying bridge and lots of wood.”

  He tried to imagine himself dressed up like a magazine ad, flaunting his leisure, the kept man of a millionaire businesswoman, tried to imagine what various people would think. He enjoyed the outrage he imagined Kathy venting, but Maeve was another question. And his feelings toward Marlena were such a mess that he got guilty even thinking her name.

  He had to call her, he thought abruptly. But there was no phone in the room that he could see, and he was so weary and sore that he dropped back onto the soft pillow and then fell into a drugged sleep.

  These convex osseous Tubercles are of the same kind with our English Bufonites or Toadstones.

  —Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1696)

  He parked the VW at a meter in Chinatown, though he’d seen the free parking lot for Philippe’s. He never liked to use official lots. There was always the troubling sensation that the lots were for other people, for normal customers, not for him.

  Billy Gudger made himself very small just inside the door to watch, and he noticed customers came in and stood in lines at the broad chest-high glass case where a dozen women made up the sandwiches and got the drinks. Then the customers carried away their brown trays and drifted across the sawdusty floor to stools at high counter-like tables spread all over the room, and around the corner in other rooms. It looked like the place hadn’t changed in a long time. The sign outside had said Since 1917.

  He waited behind an old man in a checkered shirt, and after the man said, “Beef dip and a Millers,” and gave the woman a five, he said exactly the same words and gave her a five, too. It was a way you knew you wouldn’t go wrong and do something embarrassing, even though he wasn’t quite sure what a beef dip was. Watching like a hawk, he had seen the man ahead of him leave two quarters in the glass tip cup and he did the same.

  “Here you go, sir.”

  It turned out to be sliced beef on a soft roll dipped in gravy, which didn’t seem very appetizing, and he carried his tray off to the right and around the corner and kept going through one big open room into another where he noticed a lot of posters and photos under glass on the walls. He sat at a little round table and let his eyes drift across the pictures within his view. There were large posed groups in front of tents, women on high wires, clowns putting on makeup, men standing on ponies, and bright vintage circus posters emblazoned with words that seemed to bulge out of the paper.

  A little girl in pigtails was walking along studying the pictures, so he figured it was okay for him, too, and he abandoned his tray. It took only a glance to check and dismiss them, one at a time: a group shot in a bleachers; a man kneeling beside a German shepherd with its forelegs on a colored barrel; a pretty woman with hefty legs in a tutu; two aerialists dangling side-by-side from a trapeze.

  He caught sight of a grizzled old man who was watching him. He was unshaven and his hands jutting out of tattered long sleeves were so filthy they were almost black. Billy moved on into the next room, where there were more pictures. There were a lot of posters here, too: Ringling Brothers; Clyde Beatty; circuses he’d never heard of; still more aerialists; a lion tamer in a cage; bareback riders; clowns. Finally, on a cubicle wall twenty feet away, he saw a man with a tiger, and a chill went down his spine.

  As he approached the picture, the filthy old man came into the room behind him. Billy slowed and pretended to study other pictures. A smiling face peered out of the muzzle of a big cannon. A bearded lady stood arm-in-arm with a man covered with tattoos. The old man came up and looked at one of the pictures, then at Billy.

  “I was in the circus.”

  “Go ’way.”

  Billy hurried to the tiger picture to get a look before something could go wrong. Disasters always loomed. The tiger looked bored, and the man stood with his palm calmly on the beast’s hips, square-jawed and poised and handsome. Alton Ford, King of the Tigers with Raju, the Tiger King, the caption said. It was wrong, Billy could see that instantly. He got no frisson of kinship at all, and he knew he looked nothing like that tall, strong, confident man.

  “Do you like the circus?” The dirty old man was back, he could smell him, reeking only a foot away, and Billy was starting to get panicky. Just then he noticed a smaller photo, fading and cut from a magazine. Will Detrick, Famed Circus Wagon Painter. He was short and round and held a fasces of brushes upright in his fist the way someone else might hold a bouquet of flowers. Behind the man was a gaudy wagon with Happy Time Dog and Pony Circus painted on it and a lot of tracery and dogs and ponies. It took almost no time at all to pull out all your guts and stomp on them and make you feel like you were going to die very soon.

  “Them was great days.”

  “Go ’way!”

  Billy bent close and found himself staring straight into his own face, blurry and cherubic, and he wondered if she had wanted him to find the picture for some perverse reason, or if she had forgot it was here. He was getting more and more nauseated, and he felt his hands tremble, and he begged the gods for just a few minutes to study the picture closer.

  “No jokes, man, no booze, just some money for food, okay?”

  Fingers plucked at Billy’s sleeve and he whirled, his hand diving into the pocket of his jacket. The ragged man took his arm with both hands.

  “Just a little spare change, man. I’m hungry.”

  “Get back!” Billy squealed. The hammer of the pistol caught in his jacket pocket or he might have lost it right there and shot his tormentor. He ripped his arm free and ran, deprived once again of his father. He knew he could never come back because they’d be waiting next time.

  When Jack Liffey woke up, Tien Joubert was in bed with him and her tiny gentle hands were passing up and down his body like thoughts.

  “Ah, peekie-boo,” she said. “You ’wake again. You just don’t move, I take care of you.”

  The top covers were off and she was naked beside him, small and nearly perfectly formed, with small brown nipples on her breasts. Age showed a little in her belly and thighs, and the way her breasts fell to one side with faint stretch marks. He liked the imperfections. It helped a lot.

  “Tien, this isn’t a good idea.”

  “Of course it good idea. All my idea good idea. Tomorrow, you don’t want me no more, you forget me and we forget this night ever happen, but right now I take charge and do all kind of stuff for you.” She pressed herself close against him and writhed a little and he moaned.

  In the morning he found himself alone in the bed, very achy, and bright sunlight sliced across the room to make a big trapezoid on the far wall. He got out of the bed gingerly, his head still throbbing, and, finding nothing else to wear, wrapped himself in one of the blue silk sheets. The living room was so bright and blue he had to look away for a moment, a rich blue carpet and powder blue velvet sofa and chairs. The tables and cabinets were all glass and stainless steel that reflected even more blue, and one wall was a three-dimensional sculpture made of mirrors at angles that gave so many crazy reflections that your eyes couldn’t focus. He did look long enough at one section of mirror to see a wasted-looking man wrapped in a blue sheet with a big shiner under his right eye.

  Beyond the sofa was a full wall of glass that looked out over a patio to a lightly rippling yacht channel. Across the channel there was a row of overlarge nouveau riche houses, each with a big boat tied up in front. Tien Joubert was sitting on the patio i
n a blue bathrobe, nursing tea and a laptop computer, and she hadn’t seen him yet. Just past her was a silly looking little boat with a fringed canvas top like something that plied the false jungle at Disneyland.

  She noticed him and grinned and clapped her hands. She beckoned to him just as an old woman appeared on the patio out of nowhere. He wrapped another fold of sheet around himself decorously and went out the sliding door into a sudden hum of traffic and a light breeze. He couldn’t see where the traffic noise came from. The bulldog sat impassively at her feet, snoring.

  “Good morning, Jack Liffey. Sit down. Auntie Pham will get you tea or coffee.”

  “Coffee.”

  “You don’t look so good, you know?”

  The old woman moved away with tiny steps.

  “You should see it from inside.”

  “You very sweet in bed last night but you fall asleep in middle. You owe me now.”

  “I really would like my own clothes back.” He tucked the sheet and sat, feeling every vinyl strap of the lawn chair under him.

  “Ah, you my prisoner here long as I keep clothes.”

  “I wouldn’t take kindly to that.”

  “Fantastic! Sorry, I got to finish, few second.” She pecked at the computer, and he noticed it was wired to a cell phone that sat on the cast iron ice cream table. She grinned and signed off. “I just double money on gloves, you know, surgery gloves. They open plant in Singapore and then sell to big American medical company. I just make twenty-three thousand dollars.”

  The coffee came and he was surprised at how shaky his hand was when he picked up the cup to sip at it. There was also a plate of croissants, and little pots of butter and strawberry jam.

  “Thanks,” he said to Auntie Pham but she left without acknowledging him.

  “All that money fall from sky, I can buy you fine clothes now easy.”

  “I can’t accept it, Tien. I’m kind of attached to my old pants.”

  “You going to redupiate me this morning?” she asked. Her eyes looked hurt all of a sudden.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Oh, that wrong word. You know, like pushing away.”

  He thought about it a moment.

  “Repudiate?”

  “Yeah, think so,” she said mournfully. He set his big clumsy-looking hand on hers. At another time, they might have had a big laugh about the malapropism, but not then.

  “You’re a sweet woman, and I think you’re a lot more vulnerable inside than you act. But I have to call the woman I live with and tell her I’m still alive.”

  “I use wrong word a lot.” He noticed she had a way of just ignoring the turns of the conversation where she didn’t want to follow. “I much smarter in Vietnamese, even French. You not ever have trouble in foreign language?”

  He settled back in the chair and sipped at the coffee, overwhelmed by a morning caffeine rush, a kind of thrill and lethargy at once, that he couldn’t remember experiencing since he’d quit smoking. “I don’t speak any other languages.” It must have been the lethargy that set him talking. Or, as she had insisted, maybe he felt he owed her something. “But I have a peculiar insight into the way language breaks down.”

  A yacht came slowly up the channel with a whole deck of bikini-clad women and one pot-bellied mariner in a Greek cap, and he worried for a moment about the sheet he was wearing, but he guessed it would probably look like a bathrobe, and who cared what the idle yachting rich thought, anyway?

  “Ten years ago, my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor.”

  “Oh, I so sorry.”

  “It was slow developing. They cut out a hemisphere right away and got a lot of it, and the rest took almost two years to kill him. On the way down, it hit his language center. His voice was okay with the half of his brain he had left, and he could recall simple verbs with little trouble, and he got the linking words, too, but nouns drove him crazy. He would talk along for a while and then come to a dead stop in frustration. He’d rage and go through the letters of the alphabet until he got what he thought was the right initial letter, he could usually do that, and then he’d throw out random additions to the letter, hunting for the word. Something as simple as table, he’d get to T and then flounder around, turnip, taco, telephone, until he got it or you got it for him.”

  She was touching his hand now, soft as a flower petal.

  “Watching him, I always imagined that the mind had some kind of somatic recall of verbs. You could shuffle your feet and the word walk would come back to you, but nouns were stored in all these arbitrary little cubby holes facing you, like at the post office, without much sense of order. It was the key to the order of the boxes that he’d lost and he had to scan them in some kind of imposed order.”

  He shrugged, remembering the terrible struggles his father had gone through, and also the way his looks had changed toward the end, with the chemotherapy taking his hair, and the bloat of inactivity, and his second wife, not Jack Liffey’s mother, overfeeding him. Cooking was the only thing she could do for him, and his face came to look far too small, a tiny set of features painted into the center of a big white hard-boiled egg.

  “And then I noticed that there was a pattern to the words he had the worst trouble with. Wife and son and sister. And then hour, day, week, year—all the words for time. They were the things that hurt. The family that he was leaving, and time—knowing he didn’t have time. Language betrayed him little by little. The cancer was a real bastard, hitting him when he was down.”

  He ran down. He was scaring himself with thoughts of death, and he could feel a line of sweat across his forehead.

  “That too much grief. It just break your heart there so much hurt in the world.” She gave his hand a platonic little squeeze. “I don’t want make it worse. You don’t have to do nothing you don’t want. You come back if you want or you stay away. We friend.”

  He nodded and felt the cool wind probing up the skirts of his sheet, stiffening his penis against his will. It just kept happening. At this rate, he’d have to walk back into the house bent double. It had been difficult to relate to the slippery, fast-talking, intense nugget of ego-energy she had put forward, but her sudden generosity and a peek at her vulnerability did a lot for his sense of affection.

  “I do you favor today. If you feel okay, I take you to Industrial League. I know them. You ask them about Phuong Minh. Then I take you back to your car.”

  “Thanks, Tien. I need to make a phone call now.”

  She detached the cellular from the computer and handed it to him. It turned out she hadn’t discarded his clothes after all. Auntie Pham had washed and ironed them and mended the tear at the pocket, and they were so tidy now he would have trouble convincing anybody he’d been mugged in them. Tien Joubert went into the house to let him call in privacy.

  First, putting off the hard one, he called MediaPros and delayed his visit a day, which didn’t upset them at all, then Marlena, who was nearly hysterical.

  “I know, Mar, I’m sorry. I was beaten unconscious last night by a half dozen thugs. I’m okay now except for a big black eye and a lot of bruises. A Vietnamese family here took me in and patched me up. I’ll be home in a while.”

  Vietnamese family, he thought. Another sidestep on the long downward ethical course of his life.

  EIGHT

  A Hamster Named Stuart

  It was a black Mercedes 560SL, pretty much what he would have guessed, and she didn’t drive it very well. She was erratic, slow for a block, then speeding up for a while as some tune in her head changed, decelerating abruptly, and every now and then drifting a foot into the next lane as her mind went to something else. He thought of asking if she’d ever considered hiring a chauffeur, but it wasn’t a chauffeur sort of car.

  Suddenly she pulled over in a red zone, a tow-away zone, and pushed the shifter all the way up into park and looked at him as if she was worried one of them was about to die. “I don’t want you to get wrong idea. You look at me and maybe think all Viet Nam pe
ople crazy and pushy like me. I not same as them mostly. I told you I want to be big and strong and loud because it’s the squeaky door that gets grease. You got to say what you want in the world. Most Viet Nam people not like that. Americans always want you to represent your people, like everybody got to be a little chip off the big blockade.”

  Indeed, he thought. A police car doodled past them. He was a little uneasy about the tow-away zone but he let her run.

  “The really most important thing my people love is delicacy and a very quiet, very strong respect. Buddhism say—the second big Truth of Buddhism say this thing—the big cause of problem in life is passion, you got to push passion away. You got to repudiate it.” She smiled in satisfaction at getting the word right this time.

  “But me, I get a taste for passion. Maybe in France I get this thing, and I say, No, the big problem in life is stay quiet and delicate and let yourself be floor mat. Passion is okay, make a squeak, make lots of squeak. You see what I say, I’m different?”

  “Yes, I see. You’re a remarkable woman.”

  She touched his knee lightly. “I want you come back to me, Jack Liff. Will you come back?”

  His ears burned and his forehead buzzed. “I don’t know, Tien. Do you just want a big hairy American? That shouldn’t be so hard.”

  “You something special. I been with American guy and they got a bad attitude. They don’t respect you. You different.”

  “I don’t know if I can come back the way you mean, Tien. Can we just let it sit for now?”

  She smiled. “Okay, man. I see you one torment guy.”

  “You’re going to get a ticket stopped here.”

  “Who cares? It just money.”

  She stopped on a red curb again in front of the nondescript high rise and jumped out. The building was not far from the Fashion Island Mall on the cliffs overlooking Newport, just another upended Kleenex box, but it would have super views of the town below and the sparkling blue-green ocean, with a wind stirring little whitecaps.