Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

Horace opened the door, looking like someone who'd just bungee-jumped off the Eiffel Tower tied to a shoelace: hair on end, pouches of flesh beneath the eyes, a broken pencil dangling from his mouth like a dead yellow cigarette. One corner of his shirt collar poked a dimple in his left earlobe.

“Oh, yeah,” he said by way of greeting. “Bravo's here somewhere.”

“How are you?”

“Awake,” he said. “Alive.”

“Eleanor here?” Bravo bounded out and, seeing me, started to bark.

“No, she's, I don't know. Shut up, Bravo.”

“Pansy asleep?”

“Not now,” Horace said sourly, looking down at Bravo.

“I’ll get him out of here."

“Good idea. I'll call you if anything happens.” Horace closed the door on Bravo's rear end, and I stood on the porch, rebuffed. With Bravo at my heels, I went down the stairs and got in the car, feeling walled out.

Despite all the ups and downs Eleanor and I had endured, this was something new. We'd been friends briefly and then lovers for years, first in various student hovels around UCLA, and then in the awful little shack Eleanor found for us in Topanga Canyon, a tilting, rickety, three-room tribute to threepenny nails and wishful thinking, with nothing to recommend it except the best view in Southern California. I'd been accepted by Horace as a drinking partner almost at once. Mrs. Chan, who, after almost thirty years in the States, still considered all non-Chinese to be foreign devils, was a bit more difficult. It took months before she stopped calling Eleanor every forty-eight hours to harangue her about pure blood. Eventually she invited me home for the sole purpose of feeding me things she was sure no Westerner could eat. Over the course of ten or twelve dinners I swallowed steamed sea cucumber, the eyes and cheeks of fish, a veritable Fannie Farmer Assortment of entrails. I got it all down, nodded, smiled, asked for more. Most of it was delicious, although I have to admit the fish eyes later rolled uninvited into my dreams, goggled at me in threes, and waved at me with tiny white gloves.

I completed my trial by fire one evening when Mrs. Chan uncovered a dish of brown, dense, grainless meat surrounded by some kind of fungus and proudly announced that it was dog. It was too much.

“Does it have a name?” I'd asked Eleanor.

“Spot,” Eleanor said, catching a smile from Horace. “Dick and Jane are out combing the streets for him now.” There were just the four of us at the table; Pansy was still living, undreamed-of, in Singapore. Husband Number Two had skillfully fled the scene after only seven months.

Mrs. Chan said something to me in Chinese, gave me a thousand-watt smile, and cut off a great whacking piece. It made a slapping noise as it hit the plate.

“I wonder whether it could do tricks,” I said, feeling my stomach shrink away to nothing and threaten to invert itself.

“I have to say this very fast,” Horace said, looking at Eleanor but talking to me, “this is really venison.”

Eleanor nodded at Horace and smiled. Their mother looked suspiciously from son to daughter and back again, and Eleanor held up her plate like a good little daughter. A couple of minutes later, we all dug into Bambi. When we finished, I was a member of the family.

Months later Mrs. Chan clarified matters by admitting over yet another meal that she'd consulted a fortune-teller on the morning of the Bambi Banquet, and that the soothsayer had peered into my future and seen a golden shower. Horace, who was translating, stopped suddenly, looked down, and scratched his nose, and Eleanor remarked that it was a good thing her mother didn't understand American slang.

“If she did,” she'd said, “God only knows what you'd be eating.”

And I'd been a guest of honor at Horace and Pansy's wedding and at the twins' hundred-day party, and welcome always in the cramped apartment that Mrs. Chan ruled. I'd seen Husband Number Three abandon ship in haste after his wife, having already gone to all the nearby barber shops to pick up hair clippings for her backyard compost heap, dragged a comb through his brush and found several long blond hairs. There had been a scene. There was always a scene.

I wasn't used to scenes. My family didn't have them. We loved each other politely and fought with silence. No one in my family ever threatened a relative with a meat cleaver or kicked a hole in a door. We touched each other's clothing, not each other's skin. I found that I liked scenes. I liked getting the anger out and over with, the spontaneous upwellings of love, the unpredictable eddies from some deep, lovingly familial current.

Horace's roomful of broken computers and applications for jobs he never intended to take. The encyclopedic, uncataloged knowledge of wholly unrelated facts that he unveiled in long, rambling lists. Pansy's cameras and quiet wit and shy, blinding smile. The big round heads and sweet, unblinking eyes of the twins. The sheer variety of Mrs. Chan's husbands. Everything about Eleanor. I'd isolated myself in years of study, wondering where I was going and who I was going there with. I woke up next to Eleanor one morning, sometime after the death of Jennie Chu, and thought I'd figured it out at last.

Bravo sat bolt upright in the backseat, indulging the conceit that he was in a limo and I was the chauffeur. I reached back to pet him, and he dodged my hand, discouraging familiarity from a mere driver, and I pointed the car south toward Wilshire.

It had all held together until Topanga. As long as Eleanor and I moved from temporary dwelling to temporary dwelling, a couple of nomads setting up and striking our tents, we were inseparable.

Maybe it was something about the idea of a house. I said I wanted it, and I thought I did. I said I looked forward to the prospect of more time together without friends and acquaintances to bother us. After months in the house, after she'd finished her first book and sent it off and I'd earned some money as an investigator, we began to talk, loosely and theoretically but earnestly, about marriage. I immediately had an affair.

And then another and another. They were meaningless, joyless, mechanical, purely technical violations of faith. She found out about one and forgave me. Later she forgave me again. Then she received simultaneously an advance for book number two and the news of affair number three, and she stopped forgiving me and moved out, into the little house in Venice in which she still lived.

Once separated we became close again and remained close, closer to each other than we were to anyone else in the world, and then the twins came along. We both loved the twins and they drew us closer, until her publisher, a New Age entrepreneur named Burt, took her to bed. Or maybe Eleanor took him to bed. It didn't help matters that I thought he was a vulgar, pretentious clown. Even then, though, I still had the family to love. I could still share in their lives.

But now they'd become Chinese, and they'd built a wall around their crisis that only a Chinese could pass through. I didn't have the password.

As I drove I asked myself whether my feelings were hurt and answered the question untruthfully in the negative. What was burning a hole in my stomach, I persuaded myself, was that they had done so much for me-they'd opened my life emotionally, they'd given me their love without asking themselves whether I was worth it-and here was an opportunity for me to do something for them, something I was reasonably good at, and my help was being refused.

I wanted desperately to see Eleanor.

Colored Christmas bulbs gleamed and winked in the gathering November dusk, framing the houses of the impatient. We picked up a little drizzle halfway to Santa Monica, not really rain but low fog sliding in from the ocean. Bravo put his head out the back window and let the wind pin his ears back, and I fought the temptation to do the same as the windshield slowly went from transparent to translucent to opaque. “Maybe you'd like to drive,” I said to him as I pulled over on Santa Monica Boulevard and got out to wipe the glass. He barked.