T. Parker - Summer Of Fear

"Yes. Consulting with Mr. Saltz on any of Amber's many financial messes is a balm to me. Not surprisingly, she only trusts me with the small stuff, the liquid diet, she calls it."

This I understood. Amber's parsimony and hypercautiousness regarding money had been clear to me from the beginning, back when she was poor and had good enough reason to act that way. I recalled a caustic remark from Martin Parish, made a few years ago, after Amber had "settled" their divorce with a mere $75,000 for the vastly out earned Marty-something to the effect of her wallet being even tighter than her ass. Could Martin's resentment have festered? I also recalled, oh, quite clearly, how Amber had previously offered me that same amount-$75,000-as enticement to keep me from filing a palimony suit. I had no intention of suing her, nor of accepting the money, and I clearly remember the bitterly comic battles we had over the issue.

What I would have given at that point, some twenty years later, to have $75,000 in the bank!

"I can smell her perfume on the checks," said Erik. "I'd screw them if I could get them to hold still long enough. It's amazing how a person so beautiful and bright can be so stupid. Speaking of beauty, how is Izzy?"

"Isabella is perfect."

"Your insurance doing what it's supposed to?"

"Yes."

"Let me know if there's something I can do for you two. We rejects have to stand together."

"The proud, the many."

"Take care, Russell, and don't try to pass yourself off as me again. You're not nearly smart, handsome, or dangerous enough."

"But I've got the same pain-in-the-ass attitude."

"Mine's better. It comes from the heart."

"When did you get one of those?"

That night, distressed and despairing, I made dinner for Isabella Our dinners were always complex productions because Isabel was once a superlative cook and loves to eat. The steroids she was taking to reduce swelling in her head also gave her a robust appetite. She planned the menu; I followed her directions as best I could. The maid prepared breakfast and lunch, then went home. Dinnertime was strictly for us.

Isabella would sit in her wheelchair and direct. She was rested by then, up from a long afternoon nap that sometime started after lunch. I would fuss around in the kitchen, trying to do things right, open a bottle of wine, and start in on it. We would talk.

It was a lot like the old days, if anything can be said to be the way it was before you have a massive seizure, are diagnosed with an inoperable tumor, undergo an experimental radiation-implant procedure, and lose most of the use of your legs because of it. No, it was really not very much like the ole days at all. In fact, Isabella couldn't even look at pictures of herself from earlier times. The smiling, black-haired woman she saw in them seemed a prior blessing that had since been revoked. Isabella is not a vain person-no more than any of us are-but to see that old, strong, vital self was too much for her. She was a big woman. She had gone from 130 shapely, capable pounds to almost 200. Her coal black hair (Isabella is of Mexican descent, her maiden name is Sandoval) had fallen out with the treatments, every last beautiful, wavy shoulder-length strand. Her legs had shrunken from disuse.

It was all that Isabella-a woman who could once skip along on one ski behind a boat doing forty miles an hour- could do to struggle up from her chair and use the cane to move across a room. The stairs leading up to our bedroom were impossible, so we had an elevator installed. The first time Isabella used it, she put on a pair of angels' wings and a halo that she'd worn to a costume party just a few months before. On her lap, she carried the plastic toy-store harp. She started out smiling and ended up crying. I stood there and watched her descend, filled with that strange combination of love for this woman and fury at what had happened to her.

Isabella's world fluctuated between transcendent humor and bitter despair. So did mine.

One thing that Isabella's disease hadn't threatened was her piano playing, the lovely sounds of which would fill our home each afternoon when she got up from her nap. She played Bach and Mozart; she played the show tunes of the thirties, she played Jerry Lee and Elton John; but most of all she played her own compositions, which had come, over the last year, to be the most achingly longing music I had ever heard. When her chords echoed through our stilt house on late afternoons, it was as if Isabella herself were in the air, vibrating through every particle of the place that we called home. It was her breath, her heart, her life. She no longer taught-travel was too difficult and she didn't want her students to see the weight she'd gain and the hair she'd lost. No, Isabella's music was no Ionger profession, but it was one of the two main things that kept her sane. The other-I realized later-was me.

That night, she had chosen an impossible recipe-roast lamb and a chutney sauce I couldn't get right. The vegetables were slaughtered. The rice was dripping but hard. The meat was overdone. Every time I looked down into my wineglass, I saw the puddled ooze on Amber's carpet. I drank the bottle fast.

We were sitting outside on the deck, next to each other, facing south down the canyon toward the sea. Isabella spent hours there during the day, staring off at the parched hills.

"You drink a lot of wine," she said.

"I'm a lot of man."

"Well," she said finally, "be careful, Russ. It's getting be every night. More than a little."

"I know."

"It w-w-worries me."

The truth of the matter is that I was drinking an awful lot then. There were two different worlds for me-the regular one and the one I could enter through alcohol. I preferred the latter. It was a place of only the past and the future, no present, place where action won out over thought, where possibility seemed to wait. There was no cancer in it. I was drunk when I'd called Amber the night before. I was drunk when I'd gone over there. Sober, I'd have done neither. Sober, my world had begun to be a land of pure obligation and utility. I felt like a post in the ground. But from the bottle called the twin worlds of yesterday and tomorrow-thoughtless acceleration, unrestrained speed. I needed motion. I craved it.

So I opened the second bottle. The sun had gone down but there was still an orange glow over the hills. A vulture Ianded on the power pole and looked down at us. I despised it. It was a huge bird, and Izzy had named him Black Death. She named a lot of things in our hillsides. I threw the empty wine bottle at it and it flew away. The bottle vanished into the sagebrush that thrives on our thirsty hillside. Predictably, with all the new development to the south and west behind Laguna, the displaced wildlife has begun to concentrate in our hills. Deer and coyote abound, much to the denigration of local roses and cats. Hawks and vultures fill the air daily, and I have spotted, just recently and for the first time, several bobcats. I killed two five-foot rattlesnakes on my driveway last summer and captured a third that had two heads, which I donated to the Los Angeles Zoo. An older woman on our street was walking her teacup poodle one spring afternoon, only to have the tiny dog swept from the pavement by a vulture (possibly Black Death himself). Since the vulture is, according to ornithologists, strictly a scavenger, the vulture attack was downgraded to a hawk attack by the local press. But I know the old woman-her name is Astrid Kilfoy- and she's lived in this canyon long enough to tell a vulture from a red-tail. As nature is compressed, she metastasizes terrible, aberrant things. Like the tumor in Isabella's skull. Like the Midnight Eye.

I told Isabella about my day-mainly hanging around the cops trying to get the scent for my next book. I came that close to telling her about Amber, but that close was still a million miles away.