Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

“Yes,” he said. Melanie appeared not to have planned what to say after this. She sat and looked at her shoes. This made him uncomfortable, so he asked her what her and her daughter’s plans for the rest of the day were. Outside, the whitecaps stretched across the bay. There was a thick fog sitting beyond the bridge.

“Forbes Island,” she said. “I saw a program about it and have always wanted to go. Do you know what it is?”

He said that he did not.

“It’s a houseboat, or more of a barge, really,” Melanie said. She looked to her daughter as if for confirmation. “I don’t know. It’s a floating island. There’s a restaurant there.”

The ferry landed. Melanie and her daughter disembarked before he did. They were waiting for him when he got off the boat. The wind was still blowing, but he was now able to feel that it blew in off the water. “My daughter is going back to our hotel to do some schoolwork,” Melanie said. “I was thinking a glass of wine at Forbes sounded pretty good about now. Care to join me?”

Melanie’s daughter looked at him and said, as though he had accused her of not knowing, “The hotel is just over there.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.” He watched Melanie’s daughter walk away from them, her hair blowing with the wind away from the water and toward the city. Soon he and Melanie were walking slowly in the opposite direction along the busy and wide sidewalk of the Embarcadero.

“There used to be sea lions here,” Melanie said. They’d come to Pier 39. Even in the late afternoon it was busy with tourists and traffic. Martin disliked crowds. “But they’re all gone now for some reason. The guide on our tour told us yesterday.”

At Forbes Island they ordered drinks and went to the edge of one of the sand patios. Behind them the heavy leaves from one of the palm trees made a scratching noise. He couldn’t tell if the tree was real or just a very good replica. They watched the fog. Ferryboats made their way back to the city from Angel Island and Alcatraz. In the far distance, he counted at least a dozen sailboats. Melanie touched his shoulder.

Because he was too polite to come up with a reasonable excuse not to stretch a glass of wine into a meal, they ate together in the subaquatic dining room. He watched the green water outside the window above their table and tried not to think about being submerged. His wife, he thought, would love it here. She enjoyed unusual places like this. He knew exactly what she would tell her friends about the restaurant. “Only in America,” she’d say. “A floating island! Can you imagine?”

Melanie was divorced. She and her daughter had been visiting colleges in San Francisco, where her daughter wanted to go to school. This was their last day in the Bay Area. She wasn’t really from Salinas, but it was the first city that came to mind when the tour guide asked.

During the meal, she asked if the bar at his hotel was nice. She asked what the view was like from his room. She leaned close to him across the table, mirroring his arm movements. She told him she was lonely. He understood what she was doing. To each of her questions, he answered honestly and briefly. He told her about his job, about his trip to California so far, though he was careful to leave out San Luis Obispo altogether. He also did not tell her he was married. He told her about how in middle school he’d lost the tip of his left index finger to frostbite. His class had been orienteering and he’d missed one of the control points near the end of the course and wandered into the thick forest until he’d reached a farmhouse about five kilometers from the orienteering course. He thought the story spoke to his carelessness, so he rarely told it. But at Forbes Island, he felt it might somehow dissuade Melanie from her pursuit. She asked to see his finger, and he showed her. She took it between two of her fingers and squeezed. Then she turned her head side to side, examining the stub from every angle. He watched her do this. There was really nothing remarkable about the missing finger. It looked like a normal finger, only a little shorter and missing a fingernail.

“Do you have phantom limb syndrome?” Melanie asked.

He said he’d never felt anything like that, and it wasn’t an expression he’d heard in English, but he knew what she meant. He pulled his hand from hers. When it came, Martin paid the bill, although she offered to help.

“It’s unseasonably warm,” she told him outside. “The weather report this morning on the news said so. Unseasonably warm is a strange expression, don’t you think? It’s summer. It’s supposed to be warm.”

“Summer is often cold here,” he said, repeating something he’d heard from one of the bartenders at his hotel just the night before. Whenever he was aware he’d done so, he felt embarrassed to correct women this way. They crossed the Embarcadero and walked several blocks into North Beach, finally catching a cab on Columbus not far from Washington Square Park, which Melanie pointed out as they passed. “You know your way around,” Martin said. Melanie shifted nervously when he said this. She looked embarrassed, but he didn’t know English well enough to know why. At the hotel, she suggested they have a nightcap. “Something for the road,” she said. “Unless?”

He led Melanie into the bar, where they found a table near the television. The Giants, she explained while turning the pages of the cocktail menu, were playing the Dodgers. “It’s a great rivalry.”

After they’d ordered something to drink, he excused himself to use the restroom. He left the bar and entered the lobby, where he turned and looked back at Melanie. The drinks arrived while he was watching. Melanie sipped her drink through a straw and watched the baseball game. She clapped quietly when one of the Giants hit the ball deep into the outfield, and Martin wanted nothing more than to go home.

He took the elevator back to his floor and entered his room and locked the door behind him. He didn’t answer the phone when it rang, and he didn’t go to the door when someone knocked on it. He lay on the bed in the dark room and waited until he fell asleep. In the morning, he again checked out early and drove back to Los Angeles, where he stayed, uneventfully, for the rest of his trip.

The waitress at the Sakura Karaoke Bar brought another round of sake and Chinese beer. She knocked before entering. The room was warm and when the thick glass door opened, cold air rushed in and Martin felt this on his face. He was holding the microphone, waiting for the song to start. The waitress set the bottles on the table, gave a shallow bow, and backed out of the room. One of his colleagues pressed the play button on the console below the television. “Hotel California” began to play over the tinny speakers. Martin sang along for the first few bars. But soon he found himself thinking of Cesar in bed in San Luis Obispo. He saw the dark motel room, and through the opening in the curtains the black of the sky. Outside, a lamp mounted on the wall just above the large window cast an orange light back into the room, over Cesar and around him, and he moved side to side to music Martin could not now recall.

He tried again to explain it to his wife. Using first his hands, one fisted into a globe, the first finger on his other circling an exaggerated wobble, and then a crude sketch on the back page of the sports section of DN , he illustrated the inclination of the earth’s axis. Agneta shook her head, said, “We’re moving into darker days.” His wife’s figurative thinking often frustrated him. It was early, just ten after four in the morning. They were up to witness the right-hand traffic diversion. He had been waiting for months through the slow buildup of changes across the city. New street signs, bus stops. A new fleet of trams with doors on both sides. The measure to switch the flow of traffic from the left-hand to the right-hand side of the road had passed narrowly through parliament. Despite a widespread public education initiative and an aggressive advertising campaign, including songs and humorous sketches on state television and a line of women’s underwear with the date September 3, 1967, printed across the seat, the change remained unpopular. But it was one he supported.