We went across the border to Mexico the next day, but the Jai Alai Palace was closed, so we got drunk at the Long Bar instead. Then we took a cab to the dog races, where Jackie won a trifecta without even knowing what a trifecta was. We found two more bars, then she bought me dinner at an outdoor broiler and made me promise to take her to Disneyland. I had never stayed in Tijuana past 2 a.m. before. We walked the two miles back to the border drinking a narrow pint of Cuervo Gold and singing “Feliz Navidad” with our arms around each other. The customs agents took us into a little briefing room, perhaps because appearing to have so much fun could only be a cover for a drug-smuggling operation. Or maybe they hated us because we were singing Mexican Christmas songs in January. But when they got a good look at Jackie and the kitten green sparkle of her eyes and the metal glow of her sexy cocktail innocence, they let us go. She was my passport in more ways than one. I honestly don’t remember how we got home.

Then came the whirlwind of being with her and simply wanting to be with her and not understanding it in any way and not wanting to understand it. In the day we trampled over the worn-out sights, and at night we drove around the city in my new truck with our headsets on, singing the songs on the radio and stopping now and then at a liquor store.

On the fourth day it was raining and we’d been drinking and playing blackjack with Joe all afternoon in the hotel room, Joe’s golf game and our trip to the zoo having been canceled. I was sixteen dollars down. Jackie sat barefoot on the bed, serene as a queen lacquering her toenails. Joe stopped shuffling the cards, slapped the deck down on the table, and said, Take us to the best restaurant in town; I’m buying. So we drove in the rain down to Pacific Beach to the best restaurant in town, without any reservations. We sat in the bar and waited for a table and drank Gibsons and ate oysters on the half shell. My left eye swelled shut from the oysters and I couldn’t help but talk like a pirate, a linen napkin pressed against half my face. Joe talked like a pirate, too. The wait was long. The rainwater slid in rippled fans down the windows. We had several more Beefeater Gibsons before we were finally seated, still talking like pirates. Joe sent the abalone back. The waiter was wounded and apologetic, but there was nothing wrong with the abalone. Then Joe decided he wouldn’t pay the bill. He slipped it under his dinner plate and directed us to walk out. We were proving something. His daughter was chagrined. There was no worse type of customer than the stiff, the cheater. But I was the boy under the power of the man, dazzled by the daughter of the man. (Gutless is a shorter word for it.) And my eye was swollen shut. We got out of there, but Joe had left his glasses behind and we had to return for them, with some trepidation, a few minutes later. No mention of the unpaid bill.

Joe was too drunk to drive, but he drove nonetheless, crossing lines, running over curbs, shouting at me for directions. We stopped at a bar in La Jolla, where he challenged the table at pool, spoke of his prowess (you know, he earned his way through college with a pool cue), cut ahead of a player, made enemies of all. But Jackie worked the crowd behind him, softening and sweetening the air. She was the anti-Joe, the giver, the tipper, the laugher, the pleaser, his traveling companion, his opposite charge. She talked him into letting me drive home. Everyone has a talent. Mine was driving under the influence. The cops waved to me as they went by. We survived the trip. Jackie made everything worthwhile.

Then it was three days before she would leave. Joe was restless and moved them down to the Catamaran Hotel, right across the street from the Pacific Ocean. Jackie and I bought a bottle of Grand Marnier and built a fire on the beach. She had fallen in love with San Diego. We set the bottle at the edge of the fire to warm. It was clear and cold that night, the stars flickering from blue to green and the flames leaping up like trained fish to touch them. We drank the hot orange liqueur out of styrofoam cups and kept throwing wood on the fire. I had no thought of spoiling everything by trying for intimacy. We had not kissed since the first day, had not touched each other in any way other than how children or drunks might touch when they play. We had no intention of staying up late, staying out all night, staying up till all the wood on earth was burned and the dinosaurs were rising once again out of the sea. There was only the pure joy of being with her. Nothing more natural had ever happened to me. It was undoubtedly some kind of accident or dream of God. Her father came down and stood with us for a while, but he did not belong in the dream. No one but us belonged in that orange-liqueur-and-firelight dream. It was ours, yet not made by us. He took me aside as if to give me a fatherly speech, but then he saw the folly of it, like giving a speech to the ocean, a speech to a dream, and he laughed. He asked if I would go into business with him. I told him I would think about it, though it was the furthest thing from my mind. He told me to take good care of her, and then he smiled weakly and patted me on the shoulder and walked out of the firelight and out of the dream.

The sun came up as if launched from a catapult. We got about three hours’ sleep and drove to the zoo. For once, I did not feel sorry for the kangaroos. I did not buy any fish for the seals. The sun dropped in a streak back down through the trees. We had hot dogs and cocoa by the peacock cage. It was twilight by five, the time now roaring up through the blue hole in the circus-tent sky. She would be gone in two days. In the hotel room that evening, her father was out, and she poured us both a drink and we were suddenly stage-lit like Adam and Eve in the beam of the serpent’s eye. We lay on the bed and watched Vice President George Bush deliver a speech about the state of the nation, one of the funniest, most delightfully innocent speeches ever, and we howled and had another drink and then we were on the floor and I was looking into the secret niceness of her face and she was putting out heat and we were about to wreck this Peter Pan season, have a baby and get a silver ice bucket and a big dark gloomy painting to go over the fireplace and eventually a divorce.

I said, You sure are giving out a lot of heat.

And she said, I didn’t know you felt that way about me.

And I didn’t know how to take this exactly, although the attitude of our bodies and the silver cosmic dust in her eyes made it obvious what she meant. But her father would be back soon, so we got up and smoothed our hair and had one more drink before the old man burst through the door to dazzle us with war stories of the American Business Frontier and card tricks that would shorten me by about four dollars.

The following night we were grave and economical as ducks before winter. We got away from the old man with an unspoken contract. We stayed out late, drove the Pacific Coast Highway to Moonlight Beach, sat on a blanket on a cliff and drank a bottle of wine. We saw an ocean liner far out on the horizon, glittering like the tiny jewels on a gold watch. It moved almost imperceptibly south, then it was gone, like everything one day is gone. Even the stillness cannot stand still.

Let’s go to my house, I said.

Yes, let’s go, she said.

We sat on the big gold couch in the living room with the mantel clock scratching off the minutes and my father snoring gloriously down the hall. Finally I got up and turned off the lights and we kissed for real for the first time, a tender touching of the lips, like cousins in a small town with a six-pack of 3.2 beer and the car for the night. I kissed her again and then we kissed until our sweaters became one, and she was not like she was that night with Timmy the handsome chemically dependent bartender, whipping off her shirt in the Mardi Gras of union, but rather awkward and gentle, as if it had not happened to her like this before, the same as it had never happened to me, the same as it would never happen to me again.

Then we were having lunch by the pool of the Catamaran Hotel. She was in her bathing suit and I kept looking at her and thinking, My goodness, she is something. How could I be so lucky? Where did this gift come from? And her father was dealing poker and bluffing every hand, and if I’d had enough money I would’ve raised him and called and beaten the old bully for a going-away present, but he got eight bucks off me that day. Then the lunch was over. The swimming was over. The drinks were over. And I was standing under the stone arch in the parking lot, kissing a girl I would never see again. In the distance the sunbeams scattered and flashed over the surface of the pool. Joe sat under the tilted metal umbrella playing cards by himself. What is happiness, I thought, but another word for luck? Then Jackie walked away under the pale blue curve of the dreary California sky.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE