T. Boyle - Riven Rock

He was on his second round — or was it his third? — when Dolores Isringhausen walked in. She was with another woman, both of them in furs, cloche hats, bobbed hair and skirts crawling up their calves, and a whole noisy mob of people shouldering in behind them. She was from New York, Dolores, married to a rich man off playing boy scout on the Italian front, and she ran with a fast crowd. Nobody in Santa Barbara had ever seen anything like her. She smoked, drank Jack Rose cocktails and drove her own car, a little Maxwell runabout with all-white tires she’d had shipped out from the East. O‘Kane was fascinated by her. He’d sat with her a couple of times with one group or another and he loved the knowing look on her face and her glassy cold eyes and the way the dress clung to her hips, always something silky and tactile and never the stiff penitential weeds half the women in town dragged themselves around in, as if they were traipsing from one funeral to another. And she didn’t seem to have any objection to saloons, either.

“Hello, Eddie,” she said, coming right up to him at the end of the bar, the other woman trailing behind her with a pasted-on smile and an empty greeting for this one or that. “You’re looking glum. What’s the matter? It’s Saturday. The night beckons.”

As if to prove her wrong — about the glumness, that is — he flashed her a smile, all teeth, the smile of a caveman just back from clubbing a mastodon and laying it at the feet of his cavewoman inamorata, and he shifted his shoulders inside his jacket to show her what he had there. His eyes fastened on hers. “I was just waiting for you to come in and brighten the day.”

Her eyes were the strangest color — purple, he guessed you’d call them — and he saw that she was wearing some sort of theatrical makeup on her upper lids to bring them out. She didn’t respond to his overture, not directly. Ducking her head, she fished a cigarette holder out of a black bead reticule and gave him a look. “Why don’t you come sit with us,” she said, nodding toward the restaurant in back, where Cody Menhoff himself was scurrying around setting up a table for her. “You can light my cigarette for me.” And then she was sweeping across the room, the other woman right behind her and the rest of the group converging on the table with its clean white cloth and a platter of sandwiches and a Jack Rose cocktail in a tall-stemmed glass set right in the center of it like a tribute.

There were four men in her party (all jerks, and O‘Kane could have whipped any two of them with one hand tied behind his back) and three women made up to look like Parisian streetwalkers, or what O’Kane supposed Parisian streetwalkers would look like. He wouldn’t know. Not actually. Unlike these swells, with their thin-lipped smiles and their cigarette holders and racquet club drawl, he’d never been to Paris. Or to New York, for that matter.

Dolores and her friend of the vapid smile made the party nine, and O‘Kane brought it to ten. She made a place for him right beside her and as the conversation veered from the War to skirt lengths to gossip about people O’Kane didn’t know, she leaned in close and gave him the full benefit of her eyes and her husky timbreless voice: “How about that light you promised me?”

O‘Kane put a match to her cigarette and the whole table lit up, smoke everywhere, glasses already empty and the waiter bringing another round, and every one of them drinking a Jack Rose cocktail (1½ oz. apple brandy, juice of ½ lime, 1 tsp. grenadine; shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass).

“What’s the matter, Eddie,” Dolores purred, lifting her chin to exhale, her lips contracted in a little pout, “don’t you smoke?”

He shrugged. Smiled. Let his eyes climb right out of his head and into hers. “Once in a while I like a cigar with a glass of whiskey, usually late at night. I’m not one for cigarettes, though, not generally.”

“Oh, you’ll like these. Here, try one.”

And then she was touching the glowing tip of her cigarette to the one he’d plucked from her monogrammed case and he was as close to her as he’d been to Giovannella an hour ago, only this was different, this was nice, the beginning of the dance instead of the end. “Swell,” he said, exhaling. “Very smooth.”

She looked at him. “They ought to be. They came all the way from Turkey.”

They talked through the afternoon and into the evening, and she drank Jack Rose cocktails as if they were no more potent than lamb’s milk and smoked up all the cigarettes in her case. And what did they talk about? Life. Santa Barbara. Mr. McCormick. Her husband. Italy. The War. Music. Did he like music? He did, and when they went out front arm-in-arm to climb into her car and drive out to Mattei’s for supper and the rest of the party be damned, he pressed her up against the hood and sang to her in the soft lilting tenor that was another legacy of his father:

You shall have rings on your fingers

And bells on your toes,

Elephants to ride upon

My little Irish rose.

She let him kiss her then, a lingering oneiric kiss that gave him time to adjust to her — she was taller than Giovannella, leaner, her lips taut as rope — and then they were in the car and breathing hard, both of them. “That was beautiful, Eddie — the song, I mean,” she murmured, her voice husky and low, “and the kiss too, that was nice,” and then she put the car in gear and it was the first time in his life he’d been in an automobile and a woman driving, and he told her his ma had taught him the song, back East, back in Boston, where he was born.

“And the kiss?”

He took hold of her hand. She was playing a game he liked better than any he could of. “It was a hundred girls taught me that, but none as pretty as you.”

It was still light out, and as the car climbed smoothly up through the San Marcos Pass and snaked down into the farmland of the Santa Ynez Valley, O‘Kane gazed out on the world and saw it in all its lambent immanence, caught there for him as if on a motion picture screen, only in color, living color. Every bush along the roadway was on fire with blossoms, the trees arching up and away from the windscreen of the car in a wash of leaves and each a different shade of green, the mountains cut into sections like towering blocks of maple sugar pressed in a mold, enough maple sugar to sweeten all the tea in China. He was glowing with the whiskey and the anticipation of what was coming, a sure thing, the deserted wife and the husband off sitting around a campfire in one of those places you read about in the newspaper, and he sank back in the seat and listened to the engine, gazing out into all that spread of the natural earth, and didn’t he see the face of God there, God the all-forgiving, and His Son the redeemer?

Sure he did. And this wasn’t a fierce and recriminating God who would rear back and hurl bolts of lightning and cause the earth to erupt and point the infinite finger of damnation at a child-murdering adulterer hurrying on his way to indulge yet another sin of the flesh… no, no, not at all. The Lord was smiling, a smile broad as a river, tall as any tree, and that smile made O‘Kane feel as if a lamp had been lit inside him. Everything would work out, he was sure of it. Of course, he was stewed to the gills, and that might have had something to do with this sudden manifestation of the Deity and the feeling of benevolence and well-being that had stolen over him in the space of a breath… but still, there it was, and as he sat there molded into the seat beside Dolores Isringhausen with the whiskey in his veins and the slanting sun warm against the swell of his jaw, he thought maybe he’d died and gone on to his reward after all.