South of Bixby Bridge Read online

  I hear voices outside and giving up on the Kung Pao, I step out on the deck to investigate. Laughter spills from a contemporary yacht across the marina. I see a couple of guys on its party deck and one of them sees me and waves. Hey there, neighbor! he says. Come on over and say hello.

  Why not? I backtrack to the gates and get onto the other dock, but by the time I get there, I can’t tell which yacht is which because they all look different from the back. I feel stupid. I’m about to turn back when the guy leans out from the door of a sleek yacht called the SS Reel Talk. Howdy neighbor, he says. I’m Scott.

  I shake his hand. I’m Trevor.

  He ushers me inside. What do you drink, Trevor?

  Nothing.

  You sure?

  I nod. Why do people always ask me if I’m sure when I say no to a drink? Scott takes me out to the party deck and introduces me to Justin. Scott looks like a playboy, but Justin looks like a bird. There’s a fat guy named Bill passed out in a hammock stressing beneath his weight. Scott tells me Bill started celebrating a little early. I ask what he’s celebrating. Scott and Justin both laugh. Scott says he’s probably just celebrating the fact that it’s Tuesday.

  I join them at the table where they’re playing cards and sipping Scotch. Scott says,

  You sure you don’t want a drink?

  Thanks, I say. But I’m sure.

  I’ll go get the hooker then, he says.

  Just one? Justin asks.

  Yes, but three people can do it.

  I jump up and say, I’m not into that!

  Not into fruit?

  Fruit? What?

  The hookah pipe, Scott says.

  My face flushes with embarrassment. Oh, God, I say, I thought you said hooker.

  They laugh at my mistake. No way, man, Scott says, hookah just fucks your head. Hookers are a whole other thing.

  Scott goes inside to retrieve the hookah and Justin picks up the conversation. How long have you been a member? he says.

  A member?

  Of the club.

  Oh, I’m just visiting.

  Where from?

  Well, from here. It’s just that I’m watching my friend’s boat.

  How long you staying?

  Not sure—awhile.

  Scott returns carrying a tall chrome hookah pipe with a scoop at the top and three rubber hoses stretching like umbilical cords from its swollen middle. He sets it on the table, pulls out a torch lighter and fires it up. He says,

  The torch is just a fast start. I take this with me everywhere.

  You ever been pulled over with that in your car? Justin says.

  It’s just a hookah, Scott says, not a bong.

  Scott hands me a hose. I say,

  What’s the difference between a hookah and a bong?

  Well, it’s . . . it’s kind of like a bong, Scott says, but we only smoke dried fruit.

  Scott and Justin puff the hookah. They blow out thin sprays of gray smoke that dissolve into the cool night air. I hold my hose but don’t raise it to my lips.

  Scott nods toward the Valombrosa II. How do you know that Valombrosa fellow? he says.

  I work for him.

  You work for him?

  That’s a nice ship, Justin says, what’s this fella into?

  Scott pulls the hose away from his mouth and says, Some kind of fancy fuck-people-over-hedge-fund guy, right Trevor?

  We sure don’t fuck anyone over, I say, and we do institutional investing too.

  Same thing, Scott says. You money-business guys are always cooking up new ways to steal it from people like us who have it.

  I don’t know what happened but these guys are turning into dicks. I stand up and stick my hand out to Scott. I’m a little tired, I say. Think I’ll go crash.

  Scott just looks at my hand and sneers. Then Bill stirs awake in his hammock. I keep telling people that Valombrosa is a damn fraud, he says. Nobody listens.

  I turn to Bill. Excuse me?

  He props his huge head up on his hand, the hammock swings beneath his weight. I’ve read his prospectus, he says. Nobody can generate those returns.

  The SEC Commissioner who owes him her job helps keep the heat away, Scott says.

  I turn back to Scott. Well, you’re such a big shot, I say, what do you do for work?

  Work? he says laughing. Did you hear that, guys? The kid here wants to know what I do for work. Then they all laugh. I leave them on the deck and show myself out. It was a mistake to come. They’re just jealous of Paul. Screw those guys.

  I can hear them laughing all the way back to Paul’s yacht.

  THE NEXT MORNING, on my way up the dock, I look over at the SS Reel Talk moored in its berth and I rerun what those jerks said to me last night. It runs like a tape that won’t turn off, and it plays until my scalp itches.

  ~~~

  When I was at Edward & Bliss, before things soured, I went to the health club every day after work. Usually, I swam. Sometimes, I did cardio. It helped quiet my mind. In treatment, I was itching to get back to the gym but all Brave Ascent had was a flimsy ping-pong table propped up in the basement. Mr. Shaw said they didn’t have a gym because sometimes people cross-addict into fitness. He said physical exercise is a plus as long as spiritual health comes first. But I suspect a gym would have taken away beds and beds mean dollars.

  ~~~

  I pop into the office and ask Francis if the yacht club has a gym. He says they closed it down years ago to make space for wine storage but he makes two quick calls and gets me a temporary membership at the Tiburon Tennis Club and a towncar to bring me to work. Before I leave, I ask him about Scott and the SS Reel Talk. He laughs and dismisses my question with a flip of his hand. He says,

  Don’t bother yourself with those trust-fund fellas, mate.

  PAUL’S NOT IN HIS OFFICE. Britney says he doesn’t keep regular hours and I guess I wouldn’t either if I were a billionaire.

  On my lunch break, I walk to Union Square and buy shorts, a gym shirt, and a pair of sneakers from the Nike store.

  After work, I have the towncar drive me past the yacht club a half-mile down to the tip of Tiburon and the Tennis Club. They have signs everywhere that say MEMBERS ONLY.

  I check in at the front desk. The prissy manager puckers her small mouth and takes on the attitude of the rich clientele she serves. She says it’s a member-owned club—she says there’s a wait list—and she says she can’t even get me in to see about getting on the wait list until next week. I tell her that Francis from the yacht club called this morning and took care of it. Three key strokes in her computer and her sour face stretches into a fake smile. She says,

  Would you like a towel for your workout, Mr. Roberts?

  Outside the club’s windows, on this side of the caged, empty tennis courts, are two heated lap pools and a sunken spa. Men sit in the lounge drinking wine and watching the news from leather recliners. Private rooms have yoga and Pilates schedules on their doors and women hustle in and out of them working out their jaws chattering with one another.

  The cardio room is empty except for a young lady on a treadmill. I climb on the machine next to her and when she smiles at me, I notice she has Down syndrome. She’s watching VH1 on her machine-mounted flat-panel TV and she’s dancing on the moving treadmill to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” video.

  She grabs the handles of her treadmill and dances to the music while she jog-walks. She’s happy and carefree and it’s catching. I smile back at her and dance on my machine too. It feels good. She giggles and speeds up her machine dancing faster. I speed up my machine and swing along to the beat keeping pace with her.

  She blushes.

  We both laugh.

  Then the door opens and a woman charges in gossiping into her cell phone about her pending divorce and how much money she’s set to get. She sees us dancing and glares at me. As she approaches, I see she has the same hair as the young lady next to me but none of her smile. She stops her daughter’s treadmill, tugs her
off the machine by the arm, and without even removing the cell phone from her ear, she drags her daughter kicking from the gym.

  It’s as if these plastic people have nothing better to do than sit around, sip wine, gossip, and smoke hookahs while poking fun at working people. Their lives are empty shells, husks gilded in gold and diamonds and stuffed full of broken hopes. When I was a boy in Modesto dreaming of escape, I looked up to these people. Now that I’ve been here, fallen, and come back again, I see that their lives are nothing to dream for because they’re all just trying to escape too.

  I change in the locker room and head for the pool. Outside under the stars, it feels good to glide through the warm blue water. The smell of chlorine smoking off the pool as I stroke through the lane sends me back to the club I swam at in Folsom when I first started at Edward & Bliss.

  ~~~

  I remember how nervous I was, how unsure. I remember the Men’s Wearhouse salesman teaching me to tie a half-Windsor because the only necktie I ever wore was a clip-on for my mom’s funeral.

  I remember how included I felt accepting my first offer for after-work drinks from the guys, and having them accept my offer to buy a round when my turn came. I remember the thrill of learning all the different drinks—that whiskey isn’t just whiskey—it’s a family of Bourbon and Scotch, and Cognac is a brandy, and sweet vermouth plus whiskey and bitters make a Manhattan. I remember learning to mix a martini, decant a bottle of wine.

  Then too, I recall the invitation to the after-party, the surge of anticipation I felt looking at a line of cocaine on a colleague’s coffee table for the first time, the rush of euphoria and energy that swept me in infinity when the powder hit my nose, dripping its numbing epiphany down my throat—this is what I’ve been missing!

  But cocaine is an unpredictable dance partner and I don’t know when the music stopped, but that enlightenment faded and left only a smoldering discovery that the world is, and always has been, dim lit, and the future even darker.

  I’ll never know how cocaine made me a stranger to my own life. How it dragged me down without me noticing. How it turned my promising career into a nightmare of weary days broken only by trips to the office bathroom, trips I timed against the routine of my co-workers’ bladders so I could snort blow without an angry line forming outside the door.

  And I’ll never know how my ethics disappeared leaving only the self-serving lie that says it’s win-win the minute greedy Mr. Charles suggested a way to make easy rips by churning my clients’ trust into commission checks cashed and spent on bottles and baggies and babes, how I forgot about Stephanie as our relationship lay dying with her in my lonely bed while I searched for sweet oblivion between the legs of lesser women.

  ~~~

  This time will be different.

  This time I’m armed with information.

  This time I won’t be caught in a circular track chasing the dreams of other men.

  I’ve got a real shot with a real billionaire in a real business—a business that makes Edward & Bliss look like a corporate cage of hamsters spinning the plastic wheels of go-nowhere lives. I’m going to work hard. I’m going to do whatever Paul asks of me. I’m going to show him he made the right choice giving me a shot. Then I’ll show Stephanie that I have changed and I’ll ask her to marry me and I’ll never take her for granted again.

  It would’ve been easy to disappear but I’m not built that way and I came from nothing and made something of my life and it wasn’t luck the first time and I know damn well I can lift myself up from the bottom again.

  And this time, I’ll do it right—with a fit, healthy body and a clear, sober mind.

  17 Trust Me

  Thirteen-hundred bucks for a Tiffany’s diamond solitaire on a platinum lariat and Stephanie hasn’t even called me.

  It’s Friday. Paul said today was payday but I haven’t seen anything yet. I haven’t even seen Paul since Monday when he gave me the yacht keys. All week it’s been just Britney and me on the executive floor and analyzing these commodity reports is like eating paint. I’ve tried talking to Britney—even flirt with her a little although I know she’s Paul’s—but so far, my charm has failed to melt her ice-queen exterior.

  I’m bored. I’ve been swimming at the tennis club and my body feels lean and fit, but I’m vibrating with energy and sex drive that I have nowhere to put. Maybe I should just stop waiting and call Stephanie. I pick up the phone. Britney knocks on my open office door. I set the phone back in the cradle and say,

  Let me guess, Britney—you wanna ask me on a date tonight.

  She almost smiles, but not quite. She says,

  You’re not my type.

  Hey there, I say, I only have one feeling and you just hurt it.

  Britney lays a large manila envelope on my desk. She says,

  You’re not free tonight anyway.

  Is this my paycheck?

  I don’t know what it is, she says. Paul wants you to deliver it to his home after work. I wrote you directions on the outside.

  I pick up the thick envelope—it’s sealed shut and stamped across the seal in red ink it says CONFIDENTIAL. There’s a lavender sticky note with handwritten directions to an address in Napa.

  I drop the envelope on my desk. On Friday? I say. Really? All the way to Napa? How am I supposed to get there, Britney?

  Britney smiles at me for the first time all week. She tosses the keys to my Porsche on top of the envelope. She says,

  It’s parked in the garage.

  I LOVE THE EDGES of the day. I crack the car window letting the damp evening air trickle in. It smells like rain. I’ve been on the road almost an hour watching the sunset over grape vines rising and falling with the rolling hills and it feels like I drove right into a car commercial. Why have I not been to Napa before? Passing a roadside sign that says WELCOME TO NAPA VALLEY, I say it aloud. I like the way it rolls around my mouth. It sounds much better than ‘‘Welcome to Modesto’’—muy modesto, meaning ‘‘very modest.’’ There’s nothing modest about Napa.

  Atlas Peak Road snakes me past the wide green lawns of the whitewashed Silverado Country Club, then twists me up where it narrows and winds in switchbacks up a wooded mountain. The last light disappears as the trees close overhead and my headlights bore holes through the blackness in front of me.

  I feel drunk on the night—invincible, immortal, infinite. This feeling is why I loved cocaine. But for the first time since treatment, for the first time since Edward & Bliss, for the first time since that first 40 of Old English maybe, I feel perfect peace without anything mind-bending in my body. Sober life is good.

  Mine seems to be the only car on the road. Downshifting, I accelerate and cross into the opposite lane banking a tight corner—the Porsche hugs the pavement. Another corner and the road dips into a deep gulch and my headlights shine on rows of miniature headstones. My mother’s face appears in the night. The road cuts left. I floor it and her face fades with the pet cemetery in my rearview mirror. I’m done living in the past.

  At the top of Atlas Peak, the road levels off and the Valombrosa mansion glows in the distance like Atlantis rising in a midnight sea. I don’t even need to look for an address to know it’s Paul’s estate.

  I pull up to black-iron gates with a golden V twisted into the center, a golden V for a golden name—Valombrosa. A call box rises from the ground like a periscope but before I can press anything, the gates swing open. I idle up the lantern-lit drive toward the massive Mediterranean mansion.

  In front of the tall mansion, I round a giant marble fountain with a naked God wearing a headdress of grape vines tipping a jug of wine to the thirsty mouths turning up at him from three naked women lying at his feet. The fountain is dry. Combed gravel crunches beneath my tires. I park. I grab the confidential envelope, climb the wide stairs, lift the heavy iron knocker and tap it twice. Raindrops begin to fall on the gravel drive behind me.

  Paul opens the door and plucks the envelope from my hand. Tara’s sleeping, he
says, meet me around back in the garden.

  Then he closes the door. I stand there for a minute trying to remember what he just said about the garden.

  I follow the path around the house. The side of the house is dark. My toe catches a paving stone and I trip and then catch myself, scraping my palms. I step behind the house. Pool lights reflect off fan palms and copper lanterns cast twisting glows through rosebushes and the shadows they make look like people in the gloom.

  Paul emerges from a door wearing a red raincoat. He grabs my arm and pulls me along the garden path leading me out into the dark. Thunderclaps. I hold my jacket over my head. The rain falls fast, drops so big they sound like frogs plopping in the pool behind us. Paul passes the pool house and leads me off the path. He clicks on a flashlight. The beam slices through the rain and penetrates the trees shining on a crumbling replica of Michelangelo’s Madonna. I wonder why it’s abandoned out here. Maybe the garden used to go back this far before it went wild. The rain pounds down in buckets. I grab Paul’s arm. Where are you taking me? I say.

  He spins around with the flashlight beam pointed up at his dripping, hooded face like a kid playing monster in a tent. He says,

  Trust me.

  As we push farther in, the garden continues to give way to wilder plants until we come on the crumbling stone foundation of an old building. Paul shines the light on a wooden crate the size of a dog coffin. He pulls me to it. Then he sweeps dead leaves off the crate revealing a wine company crest. The crest has two skeleton keys crossing behind a banner that reads PÉTRUS 1989.

  IN PAUL’S STUDY, I shrug off my wet jacket and toss it on a chair beside a cavernous gas fireplace. The orange glow of flames dances on the carved limestone mantel wrapping around the fireplace like a living sea of fantastic animal heads and twisted human faces. Bookcases on either side of the fireplace display just the right books in just the right places and a large antique dictionary sits on a pedestal with a brass lamp hanging over it. There’s not a speck of dust to tell if any of the books are ever pulled out and read, but I doubt they ever are. A hog-hair sofa sits in a corner with dried pig hooves for feet. In the other corner, near the interior door, Paul stands at the bar examining a bottle of wine from the open crate.