Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

Frank had made reservations for the night at a motel in Encinitas, but for some reason he was nervous about that; and besides, he wanted to take Caroline up to Leucadia. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep until he did.

So he explained as they left the Belly-Up, and she nodded, and he drove north on the coast highway.

“So?” Frank said. “How are you liking it?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “And I like your friends. But, you know—I’m not sure what I would do out here.”

“Well—anything you want, right? I mean, you’re going to have to do something different anyway. You aren’t going to be going back into intelligence….”

But maybe she thought she was. Maybe that was it.

She didn’t say anything, so he dropped the matter, feeling more uncertain than ever.

He turned left off the coast highway in Leucadia, onto the street that led to Neptune.

He parked a little down from Leo’s house. As they walked up the street, gaps to their left again revealed the enormous expanse of the Pacific, vast and gray under the marine layer, which was patterned by moonlight. Like something out of a dream. He had her here at last. Breaking waves cracked and grumbled underfoot, and the usual faint haze of mist salted the air.

He stopped in the street in front of one of the cliffside houses. The cliff here had given way in the big storms, and even the streetside wall of this particular house was cracked. It appeared that one corner of its outer foundation overhung the new face of the cliff. There was a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign stuck in the Bermuda grass of a narrow front lawn.

Frank said, “I followed up on something Leo said, and checked the USGS study of this part of the coast, and he’s right—this is a little buttress here, a little bit of a point, see? We’re a touch higher, and the iceplant doesn’t grow as well on the cliff, and there was this erosion, but the point itself is strong. I think this will be the last erosion you see here for a while. And there are things you can do to shore things up. And, you know, if worse came to worst, we could tear down this house entirely and build nearer the street. Something small and neat.”

“Like in this tree?” Caroline said, gesturing at the big eucalyptus tilting over them.

Frank grinned. “Well, incorporating it maybe. We’d have to save it somehow.”

She smiled briefly, nodded. “My treehouse man.”

She walked out to the edge of the cliff, looked down curiously. Anywhere else on Earth this would be a major sea cliff; here it was a little lower than average for North County, at about seventy feet. Everywhere sea cliffs were eroding at one rate or another.

“There’s a staircase down to the beach, just past Leo and Roxanne’s,” Frank told her, pointing to the south. “There’s a bike lane on the coast highway that runs from here all the way down to UCSD. I think it’s about twelve miles. You could get a job down there on campus, or nearby, and we could bike down there to work. Take the coast cruiser when we need to. We could make it work.”

“Well good,” Caroline said, staring at him in the moonlight. “Because I’m pregnant.”

FRANK DREAMED THAT CHARLIE CAMEto him at the end of a day’s work and said, “Phil wants to see Rock Creek,” and off they went in a parade of black Priuses. In the park it was as snowy as in the depths of the long winter, and they crunched on snowshoes through air like dry ice. At Site 21 the bros had a bonfire going, and Frank introduced the bundled-up Phil as an old friend and the bros did not notice him, they were focused on the bonfire and their talk—all except Fedpage, who looked up from the Post he was feeding to the fire. He studied Phil for a second and his eyebrows shot up. “Whoah!” he said, and knocked his glasses up his nose to have a better look. “What’s this, some kind of Prince Hal thing going on here?” He jerked his head to the side to redirect Zeno’s attention to the visitor. “Oh, hey,” Zeno said as he saw who it was. Frank was afraid he would go all blustery and false like he often did with Frank himself, but Phil slipped through all that and soon they were adding fuel to the fire, and talking about Vietnam, and Zeno was fine. Frank felt a glow of pleasure at that. But otherwise it was cold, unless you sat too close to the fire, and the hour grew late, and yet on the Viet vets reminisced; Frank shared a glance with the Secret Service man sitting beside him, a black man he had never seen (and on waking he would remember this man’s face so clearly, it was utterly distinct, a face he had never seen before—where did the faces like that come from, who were they?) and their shared glance told them that they both had realized that the president liked this kind of scene, that he was a bullshitter at heart, like Clinton, like—how far did it go back? Washington? And so they were going to be there all night, talking about Vietnam.

But then Spencer and Robin and Robert came roaring through and Frank leaped up to join their night golf. They were going long, they said. It was too beautiful not to. They were shooting new holes all the way down Rock Creek and past the Watergate, curving one shot into the Lincoln Memorial to smack Abe’s left knee, then across to the Korean vets, where one of the doomed statues had his hand out as if to make a catch; then on to the Tidal Basin, threading the cherry trees lining the west bank, so that it took finesse as well as brute distance to do well; and then out to the FDR Memorial, where the final hole was declared to be the gold forefinger of Roosevelt’s second statue. Frank threw his frisbee and realized as it curved away that its flight was so perfect that it would hit the finger right on the tip, and so he woke up.

THEY GOT BACK TO D.C. JUST IN TIMEfor the Saturday of another party at the Khembali farm. It was a day on which Frank had a zoo morning scheduled with Nick, so he showed up at the Quiblers’ house at around ten.

“How was San Diego?” they asked him. They knew that he was planning to move back there.

“It was good.” He smiled what Anna called his real smile. “I found out that my girlfriend is pregnant.”

“Pregnant?” Anna cried—

“Girlfriend?” Charlie exclaimed.

The two of them looked at each other and laughed at their nicely timed response, also their mutual ignorance.

Then Anna snapped her fingers and pointed at Frank. “It’s that woman you met in the elevator, I bet.”

“Well yes, that’s right.”

“Ha! I knew it! Well!” She gave him a hug. “I guess you’re glad now that you went to that brown bag talk at NSF!”

“And came to your party afterward. Yes, that was quite a day. You did a good thing to set that up.” Frank shook his head as he remembered it. “Everything changed on that day.”

Anna clapped her hands a little. “Frank that is good news, so when do we get to meet her?”

“She’s coming to the party this afternoon, so you’ll meet her out there. She couldn’t make it to the zoo, though, she had to do some stuff.”

“Okay, good then. Off we go.”

They walked up to the Bethesda Metro, trained down to the zoo. In through the front gates—an entry Frank and Nick rarely used—past the pandas, then down toward the tigers, Joe racing ahead in perpetual danger of catching a toe and launching himself into a horrible face-plant. “Joe, slow down!” Charlie cried uselessly as he took off in pursuit.

Frank walked between Nick and Anna, all three looking for the golden tamarind monkeys and other little ferals squirreling around freely in the trees. By the time they had dropped in to see which gibbons were out, and continued down to the tiger enclosure, Joe was up on Charlie’s shoulders, and dangerously canted over the moat.