The Golden Gate Is Red

  The Golden Gate Is Red

  The Golden Gate Is Red

  Jim Kohlberg

  This dedication, a long time in coming, falls upon the strong shoulders of my mother and father.

  Until that spring in San Francisco, I did not fuck with death and it did not fuck with me. Until then, mistakes could be rectified, regrets consumed by time, and kidnapped love recaptured. Until that March, I knew not death and it knew not me.

  But now it fills my heart and hands and nose, like the smell of the rich California loam I threw on Joe’s coffin, the dry peaty warmth of the clods thudding on the cherrywood, the dust of it staining my palms.

  We’re born dying and we know it—that’s what I found that spring of 2003. I carry it with me every waking day.

  Chapter 1

  The first Tuesday in March, Christina’s letter landed on my desk. March 4 was the kind of day San Franciscans smugly live for, bright and clear and dry. From my converted office in North Beach on the back side of Telegraph Hill, I could see the streets below were relatively empty, post-dotcom-crash traffic had thinned out, and parking was mercifully and shockingly available. The Gods of Ease had smiled upon the city just as the Titans of Commerce had deserted it.

  Christina and I had North Beach the way expats had Paris, full of pleasure and life. Our North Beach was the North Beach of Café Rico—family platters of garlic-stuffed veal and plates mounded with fusilli and bowls of grilled shrimp—of long coffee mornings and late night, wine-soaked walks down Broadway, giggling at the bunch of bordellos and theaters. North Beach was an innocent Paris, a pre-dotcom quiet that even now after the crash has never returned, if it was ever there at all. I should have been grateful to Christina for that brief and eternal city of love, but it’s always hard to feel grateful to someone who amputates a thigh without benefit of anesthesia. No, it’s hard to be grateful for that.

  Standing outside my office door, I watched two jays squawk and jabber from branch to branch. The new buds on the branches were that delicate shade of green that reminds me of young children. The still bare limbs the jays clung to recalled winter not long past.

  Inside, my assistant, Irene, was waiting for me, hands on her nonexistent hips, a farmhouse print dress sharply at odds with the blackbird eyes, jerky and annoyed, perched above too-bright red lips. Once, when I mentioned the thickness of her makeup, she pointedly added to it. Since then I’ve acquired enough wisdom, without the benefit of marriage, to keep my mouth shut. She stabbed the letter at me before I even crossed the threshold.

  “Open this,” she demanded.

  I looked down at the white corner, almost touching my breastbone, ready to eviscerate my upper ribs. There was a little tremor to the envelope as Irene’s fingers twisted with indignation or anger and God only knows what else. I stalled for time.

  “Mind if I have a cup of coffee first?” I asked.

  “It’s personal and confidential,” she said, “so I didn’t touch it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You know how I hate those. There’s no reason I can’t open them.”

  “No. There’s no reason, Irene. I really don’t need privacy. I don’t need to have one or two things that you don’t know about, a little tiny part of me you don’t get to see. Not any bigger than this envelope,” I said, reaching out for the envelope and pulling it from her three fingers.

  Irene and I had long ago settled into our domesticated habits; she learned about all my peccadilloes and miscues, then explained each as the fault of grasping harpies or the product of envious lies. She had written off men long ago, on the heels of a scattering husband who left her with a car hocked to its eyeballs and three months of back rent. A wayward uncle had materialized soon after, and she had taken him in like a stray cat, turning him into a decent househusband while she stayed in the world as the breadwinner.

  “It smells,” she said, her nose wrinkled in derision, nodding at the envelope disappearing into my overstuffed briefcase—the handles already stretched so that my fingers had become as strong as a tennis pro’s from lugging it around.

  “Of perfume,” she added.

  “Oh,” I said, putting the bulging sack down and taking up the letter again. I was a shade embarrassed to sniff the envelope in front of her, and it hovered again in approximately the same position she had pointed it at me.

  “There’s only one person who sends scented letters,” she said.

  This allowed me to put it to my face. Sure enough, the spicy earthy tones of Christina, strongest behind her small ears where she dabbed it with a pinky. The place where senses defeated caution. A scent unnamed and undivulged. No matter how many times I had asked.

  I looked at the writing. It looked like her hand, though there was a spikiness to this script that made me doubt it until I saw our familiar joke as the address: Max Smoller, Tax Detective. My address was scrawled on the front, but there was no return name on the back, just an apartment number and street. Typical of Christina’s misbegotten and quixotic notion of privacy: never a correct name but a perfectly valid address, waiting for some Internet pirate or simply a detective who could walk. I turned my eyes on Irene, looking up at her with as hard a look as I could manufacture.

  “So what?” I shrugged.

  “Don’t you let that hussy near you again.”

  “She’s married, Irene,” I said.

  “I think we both know that.”

  “It’s just a letter, for God’s sake.”

  “A scented letter,” she said, turning to stomp up the stairs in her plastic clogs and black socks. Her white freckled face had a flush of red, protective anger to it, and the black pageboy whipped around as she turned away. I read disgust in the hunched curve of her shoulders.

  I climbed the two short flights into the renovated octagonal tower that was my office. I had bought the building, a bankrupt restaurant, for the panoramic views of San Francisco and its bejeweled bay. The floor below my office, now the conference room, had been my ex-partner Joe’s office. Joe the shooting star. Pass the bar without law school Joe. Joe who was never going to last as a forensic tax accountant, slowly spinning his life away over the dry, dusty tax returns of wealthy patrons who weren’t smart enough or honest enough to pay their taxes and then called us in to rescue them when the government bloodhounds picked up their trails. That Joe.

  And bloodthirsty hounds they were. If you think hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, you should meet IRS agents when they get the pungent whiff of fraud on a tax return that should be coughing up millions while they’re making fifty or sixty thousand a year and driving home to the split-level in a twelve-year-old Taurus. They live for cases like that.

  Joe Dempsey was never going to stay in practice with me, battling vengeful or envious agents. He knew that he was meant for bigger things. Some of us know our destiny and have the strength to reach for it. Others are so sure of it that they don’t even have to try; it shines on them like moonbeams and pixie dust. Joe was one of those. It just so happens that when he left me on his moonbeam, he took Christina with him while I watched them disappear, chained to earth, bound to an empty North Beach where I walked with memories and ghosts.

  I tapped the letter against my jeans, telling myself I wouldn’t open it—that I had the strength not to. The kind Irene thought I had. In front of me I could see the sun bounce off the deep red of the Golden Gate’s painted steel. That was San Francisco’s first big lie. Mine was, I would leave that letter alone.

  I took a knife and attacked the edge of the envelope. I might as well rip the Band-Aid off the wound. Christina’s aroma wafted out as I pulled the note free and laid it on my table desk.

  “Dear Max,” it read, though I heard the musical but deep-th
roated voice in my ears as I silently read the words:

  I trust and pray this letter finds you well. I have often heard of your growing reputation for saving those who have much and are unable to part with it, even under the unbending eyes of the IRS.

  I must ask you for help, despite my anticipation that you will refuse. I plead in the name of the rare joy that was ours years ago. Please, Max. I need you.

  Forever yours,

  Christina

  Forever Yours, right. More like Never Yours. It seemed the rest of the world, or at least Joe and Christina, had the gift of reimagining memory to suit them. I missed that survival course.

  I sat back in my Aeron chair, leaned my head back, and twisted left to watch cars snaking out the Waldo Tunnel on the Sausalito side of the bay, approaching through the square buttresses and wide highway leading to the Golden Gate Bridge. Underneath the span, wind whipped the currents to a whitecapped, spraying frenzy, throwing off shafts of blue, green, and gray mist in the gleaming morning sun. Mist and fog hovered beyond the gate, out over the ocean, and the rust-colored bridge spans soaked up the sun as the flock of shiny cars passed under them.

  With a harsh closure and constriction burning in my throat, I dropped the letter, a flush crawling up my face. It was ridiculous and it was typical. It was pleading and demanding and manipulative all at the same time; the elegant English accent came through the page, a tiny, subtle or imagined break here and there betraying her Des Moines origins: the unembarrassed, imperious plea, white handkerchief wrung over tears, eyelashes batting. No apology, no admission, just the assumption that it was all fond memories and I was over her. She was right about that. Damn right.

  She had made one mistake, though. She had not come in person. It was hard to describe, really, her presence. Beauty doesn’t begin to announce such a heart attack, if only because she wasn’t exquisite. Her features were off-kilter and slightly out of place. Lovely curves, great legs, round ass, and fulsome breasts, oh yes. But none of these describe her fully.

  Perhaps it was just the whiteness of her teeth, the satin white she was continually checking in every shiny surface, or the green eyes—mercurial, changeable, shade-able, blue-able—framed by her winter wheat hair; but when she turned to you, putting a touch of light cool fingertips on your arm and focusing the smile and eyes on you . . . well, you thought you both were all alone on earth. Alone with ancients and gods. She somehow opened all the unfilled holes that remain closed. Those deep, mildewed wells we all rein in and cover with our straight and heavy manholes, those dark places opened to the light of her smile with the immediate presumption that she would fill them. Fill them with her blinding . . . what? A siren as old as man himself, as unhinged, and as irresistible.

  Yes, I could say she had made a mistake in not coming.

  “Irene,” I barked.

  “You don’t have to yell. I’m right here,” she said, suddenly materializing in the door of my office.

  “I wasn’t yelling.”

  “Your ears must be farther from your mouth than mine,” she said.

  “Take a letter,” I said.

  Eyebrows. Irene’s eyebrows were her most potent weapon. And now they were climbing spaceward like military jets over Crissy Field.

  “Your computer broken?” she asked.

  “What do you do around here?” I asked.

  “Filing, phones, mail, half of all the returns you look at, which means you bill me out at $250 per hour and pay me at what? Less than $100,” she said, hands on hips now. “Anything else I forgot?”

  “Yeah, back talk,” I answered. “But you’ll like this. So sit still a minute and write, please.”

  She managed to lean against my desk and prop a pen and small pad in her hand.

  Dear Christina,

  Good to hear from you after all this time. I hope you and Joe are well.

  Anyway, I am afraid I can’t really help now. I am very busy. Call Arthur Knopp at Rayburn and Marberry. He’s very competent. Very understanding. Joe knows him.

  Best,

  Max

  “Well. I do like that,” Irene said. “I’ll dig around for a current address. Seems you’ve finally gotten her out of your system?”

  “Long ago.”

  “I thought that endless procession of petite bottle blondes was simply revenge,” she said.

  “I like blondes. And anyway, I’m dating a brunette,” I said. “Or I was until a few days ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “What always happens. Arguments, boredom, expectations. Friendship goes poof.”

  “You might even be ready for a couple of blind dates,” she said.

  “With your friends? Not a chance.”

  “What’s wrong with my friends?” she said, putting her hands on her hips again. “They’re great women, not girls. Pretty, smart, together. They’re just in the wrong city for men. That’s all. Other­wise they’d be with someone and you’d be out of luck.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with your friends. They’re just your friends.”

  She shrugged after a bit of searching back into my face. “Suit yourself,” she said, closing the notebook over the snarled curlicues of her transcription as she clomped out. Her shorthand wasn’t school-taught or readable by anyone else. Which suited me fine.

  I turned in my chair to look out at the bay, the climbing sun reducing the morning dazzle to pedestrian brightness. I heard the soft whir of her computer starting up and then a brief staccato clicking of the keyboard. A few minutes later the phone downstairs arrested my assault on a 1040 form. Then my phone jingled and I picked it up.

  “Your ten o’clock is here,” Irene said.

  I hadn’t heard the door downstairs open. Usually I heard the small bells on the lintel chime.

  “A Mister Cleveland. McClellan Cleveland,” she continued.

  “McClellan? Is he wearing Confederate gray?”

  “Witty,” she said.

  “Did he hear our little altercation?”

  “Fight. Big words don’t impress me. We had a fight. And no, he’s in the downstairs parlor.” And with that, I was dismissed as she hung up.

  As I headed downstairs to the ground floor, her shadow moved across the dappled panes of glass between her cubicle and the conference room, then disappeared. I went to what had been the parlor, now conference space, still decorated with the original restaurant’s pictures of the city’s greater lights—Alioto shaking hands with Herb Caen, a middle-aged Willie Mays hunkered over a beer, and one of Old Man Hearst reading his son’s first edition of the Examiner. That one was actually valuable.

  I paused at the doorknob. It was time to listen to another client story, why they didn’t pay, why they shouldn’t. That was, in essence, my job. Create an adaptation, a translation of their story the IRS would buy. I took a breath before going down the rabbit hole of another tale from the economically blessed and ethically impaired.

  Chapter 2

  I opened the door to the parlor and walked through; Irene had converted it to a small conference room with a round table and coffee credenza.

  The man sitting at the table had a sallow face, the color of a beeswax candle. The jaw was long and narrow, ending in a receding chin, the skin flecked with dark stubble and a tiny razor nick. Thin, veined eyelids covered his gray eyes, and a pinched nose with a tip not quite bulbous hung between them. A crown of blond hair had faded and thinned under the man’s fifty-odd years. He got up quickly as I entered.

  “Mr. Smoller?” he asked, putting out his hand, his left hand. It startled me and I straightened up out of my habitual slouch. I heard my grandmother’s Brooklyn whine: “Max, don’t shtoop, people will tink you’re a schlomock.”

  “I’m Danny Cleveland,” he said while I blinked my grandmother’s voice away and came back to the hum of the air-­conditioning. I looked at my right fingertips on the table and almost shoved out the right hand from habit, then slung my left out from where it was hiding behind my hip. I po
ked it out and he grasped it and moved it up and down a couple of times in a strong bony hand. I left my unfamiliar hand in his until he let it go. I sneaked a look for his right hand, but it was still in his jacket pocket.

  “Max Smoller,” I said to the gray eyes, filmed with a dullness that didn’t match his suit. It was a three-piece, a blue so dark you could wear it to a funeral, with French cuffs and a matching tie clip with cuff links. A white shirt shimmered under the fluorescents, and a purple tie, the color I saw congressional leaders wearing on their photo-op days, splashed purplish light onto his face.

  He sat down and put his hands on the table. The right one had a thumb a different shade than the rest of the hand. There was a seam between the base of the thumb and his meaty palm. Both were ­plastic.

  Cleveland kept looking at me, and as I looked up I saw the eyes watch me with wearied amusement, calibrating my reaction with exquisite precision. I sat down across from him, waiting for him to say something about it, feeling the odd sensation of wanting to wiggle my own thumbs. I started to yank my hands into my lap, then moved them more slowly off the table.

  “So,” I said, to distract him, “what brings you here, Mr. Cleveland?”

  “Danny, if you don’t mind.”

  I looked at the hand on the table. “Danny?” I asked, tilting my head.

  He shrugged in a nod. “Joe Dempsey told me about you.”

  I almost reached to crush his plastic hand, but my hands remained hidden underneath the table. “Joe Dempsey. That was five years ago.” I looked out the window. “Same time of year, March.” Another false spring.

  “Joe said you were the only one who told him what he didn’t want to hear.”

  I waited a minute trying to figure out whether there was sarcasm underneath. “That’s how I make friends and influence people,” I said.

  Danny Cleveland rolled his plastic hand over and pushed at its palm with his fingertips. The plastic was soft but firm neoprene, and it was discolored and fading away on the back, liver spots gone mad.