Leave It to Me (9 page)

“Feel what?”

“Three-point-two, at least. You know what I was doing when the last one hit? Weighing a Bulgarian in a Berkeley weight-loss clinic for nudists, and the man jumped naked off the scales and raced right out into Shattuck, that’s a busy street!”

I hadn’t felt any tremor. Probably because I wasn’t tuned in to earthquake preparedness. I went back to haranguing.

Samantha didn’t enjoy the drive as much as I did. When she showed me into Ham’s office, I heard her whisper, “For your lunch, I recommend the Turns, boss.”

Ham Cohan wasn’t Asian according to Frankie’s formula, but he was a man with more needs than wants. I sized him up before I’d clocked fifteen minutes in his office. He needed to wheel and deal in human vanities, needed to do favors so he would be owed, needed to break down doors for friends so he’d be admired and to rescue waifs like me so he’d be adored. I figure a guy who makes himself that indispensable must collect in imaginative ways. He didn’t look it, but he could turn out to be more dangerous than Frankie.

At least Ham didn’t come on direct, forthright, as Frankie had, which was just as well. I was off men for the while, smelling smoke, seeing flames, when I thought of sex. I was attracted to Ham. I don’t deny it. It had to do with the game he played. Ham’s game was devotion. Devotion tending to the melodramatic.

He sat me on a chair under a framed
The Father of His Country
, Parts I, II, III poster triptych while he networked for me on the phone. “Hi, Simone, what’s up? Still desperate for a house sitter?… Does that mean what I think it means?… I think it means Padraic’s out of the picture, et cetera. Well, mazel tov, darling … I’ll ask around.
Shouldn’t be impossible to find someone … I know, I know, you have psycho goldfish and nervous plants.”

“I need a job, Ham. I have a place.”

“Hi, Verna, how’s the commute going? If you decide to spend the whole month with Larry in Tucson, I might be able to find you just the right tenant … Keep in touch, ciao!”

Pappy used to be a chain-smoker. Ham had to be a chain-telephoner.

“Hi, Jess, I have a very special friend sitting in my office … No, just arrived in town … Yeah, exactly, I’m trying to talk her into helping you out at the agency. Here, I’ll put Devi on so you can work your charm on her … Just for a second, though, we’re running late as it is … Day-Vee, yes … I don’t think it’s an Indian name, Jess. She hasn’t mentioned anything about being named for any Indian village or mountain. You’re thinking Uma, as in Thurman.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Is it a Hindu name?”

I shrugged. “Got it off a license plate.”

“Cool.” He laughed.

I went with the laugh.

“Okay, see you at Glide Sunday? You bring whichever tight-ass author you’re looking after this weekend, I’ll bring my new friend. Ciao!”

“Who’s Jess?” I asked.

“Just the woman who owns the hottest media escorting business in the country.” He punched up another number.

“Why did your friend Jess think my name’s Indian?”

Ham was still networking. “Hi, Francesca,
cara mia
, just checking in … Yeah, it’s moving, the director hasn’t shot himself in the head yet, and the cash cow from Osaka hasn’t cut us off yet, so we aren’t complaining … But how’re
you
doing?… That’s it, that’s why I’m calling. I just met someone who’d be perfect for your restaurant. Jaqui may’ve beat you to it …”

Ham worked the phone, part agent, part producer and wanna-be lover; I paced his overfurnished office. After the sixth call I stopped eavesdropping and read aloud the names in fine print off Ham’s posters of art films.
Lola Lavendar. Baby Tahbeez. F. A. Fong
. Frankie Fong high-kicking in
The Monster of Mandalay?
My Frankie in a pre-Flash horror flick? Guilt closed in. I let myself down into a chair directly below that poster.

“Weird,” I remarked. I meant the Flash connection between us.

“He’s moved to the States, you know.” Ham put the phone down, and sighed. “It’s sad, really sad. He’s making videos for some exercise firm. The man was a genius.”

Is, but I let the error pass.

“His house burned down in New York. Someplace upstate. I heard he’s being investigated for murder and arson.”

“Somebody died?”

“Some squeeze. Smoke inhalation.”

I didn’t have to believe the rumor about death from smoke inhalation. I didn’t have to believe there was any fatality. I didn’t have to believe there’d been a fire, except that I’d witnessed it.

“It must have been an accident. They said it was an old firetrap, and he’d added all sorts of electrical shit. Someone must have fallen asleep smoking. The cops picked him up ’cos he was screaming and running down the street like a maniac. The Oswald syndrome. He doesn’t belong in a state pen! Jeez, the Flash was a genius.”

I held my gaze on the Mandalay Monster. On the contrary, Flash was so vulnerable, a one-hundred-fourteen-pound woman destroyed him.
We knew that all along, bud, didn’t we?

Ham grinned, rolling his eyes up at the Mandalay Monster. “Acts like my ex-wife. Looks like all my ex-wives.” He beat his chest in mock horror. “You see where romantics end up?”

“Where?”

“Living alone on houseboats. On the lam from exes, lawyers, creditors.” He pointed to a Polaroid picture taped to the side of his computer. It was of an ordinary-looking houseboat, its name,
Last Chance
, painted in red across its prow. “It can be cozy.” He gave me an it’s-your-call kind of look. I must have scared him. “I’m starving, how about you? Wanna check out my favorite Chinese hole-in-the-wall?” He grabbed his jacket off a peg behind the door of his office and walked to the elevator while wriggling his arms into the sleeves. The jacket wasn’t cut like the blazers and sports jackets men wore in Schenectady. It was loosely fitted and collarless. You had to be confident to wear that. What’s next, sky-blue tuxedo with black piping?

Over lunch at Tung and Phuk on Stockton near Columbus, Ham went through a Coming-to-a-Theater-Near-You
version of his life epic. Suburban childhood. Parochial schools. Dad into Knights of Columbus and the Irish Rovers, Mum into Jack Daniel’s. Four surviving siblings, making adequate livings as photographer, graphics designer, prison warden and short-order cook. “I dropped out of Berkeley to look after Mum.” He sang a bar from “Beauty School Dropout.”

“Don’t be so defensive,” I soothed. I made the necessary entry in my mental Rolodex: Catholic; four divorces; no kids; impulsive but avoids commitment.

Ham turned his bad marriages into sitcoms, then prodded me. “Your turn, Day-Vee. I don’t know a thing about you.”

I chopsticked a perfect crisp-fried squid from its bed of spinach to Ham’s lips.
Take your time
, I told myself,
craft a bio to charm, don’t scare him with the little you know
.

“Give me your first impressions, Ham.”

“Oh, streetwise in a way,” he teased. “Actually, I see two people.”

“Only two?” I teased back.

“I noticed the New York plates. You’re about as Haight as a Japanese tourist.” He squirted pepper sauce on his noodles. “You ever model, do a little acting? On the lam? Drugs, maybe?”

“Okay, you’re good.”

“New York’s cool,” he said. “New York’s sexy.”

I played to Ham’s image of me. Mother was the innocent native-born Californian from one of those valley towns ending in o, a fun, normal late-sixties-early-seventies type who’d tried out all the good stuff like communes, bead curtains, Buddhism, drugs, headbands, drugs, lots of drugs,
Jimi, Janis, Morrison, am I missing something from those times, Ham?

Ham bought it, and played along. “Candlemakers on Telegraph, gurus on Sproul Plaza, ashrams in Napa. Jimi used to hide out in my place when he wanted to be with a chi—I mean, a woman—for longer than an hour. That’s before all the booze and drugs, of course. Who knows, I might even have met your mother.”

“Fucked her, you mean?”

Ham ignored that, and the distant implication. “That’s the way it was. Where’s she living now?”

“No clue.”

“Tell me something new.”

“She’s dead, for all I know. Like Jimi and Janis.”

“And if she isn’t?”

She’ll wish she were
. But I didn’t say that. I said instead, “I wouldn’t know where to look. My legal parents—I was adopted when I was two—don’t know and don’t care to know.”

Bio-Mom I painted as a flake who’d backpacked across three continents, chasing herbs and new gurus.

“Half the girls in Berkeley were on those trips.” He got mawkish nostalgic, and looked like an old man all of a sudden. “The girls of our youth.”

I stabbed at wilted greens that I didn’t have names for. “Women,” I corrected.

“Two of my wives knew their way around Katmandu a lot better than Oakland.” He sighed. “And add to them, oh god! Laura Ann, Melanie, Loni, Jess, Cindi, the Holbrook twins …”

“I think my mother was different from the women of your youth.”

Ham gave my knee a pat, then a squeeze. His message came through: the times had been unique, not the women. Your mother was the product of her times. I’m old enough to understand, to be your guide through it, not
that
old.

“Does my story bore you, Ham?” I said. “I can pitch it different. I should’ve known, you’re a producer, not a friend.”

“The war screwed us up.” He wasn’t speaking to me.

“I can think bankable script if that’s all you want. Backpacking blonde and swarthy, mysterious guru meet cute.”

I’d barely got started when Ham stopped me. “It’s not that, hon, I’m not bored. No one’s bored by the ocean. No one’s bored by a tornado.”

The Gray Nuns had named me Faustine after a typhoon, I remembered. Was my fury that obvious? “You find me scary, Ham?” I pulled my charmer pout. Frankie’d been putty when I pouted. “I scare you?” I waited for Ham to laugh. “Ham, what’s wrong?”

“No force in nature stronger than a child trying to find her mother.” He plucked a wad of bills from his inner pocket, peeled off a twenty without looking and called the waiter over.

“Everything satisfactory, Mr. Ham?” The waiter offered two fortune cookies; I grabbed one, Ham crushed the other and dropped the crumbs back on the tray.

“You’re scary all right. You’re trying to enlist me in a war, aren’t you?”

It was true; I needed Ham, needed the nets he cast, the people he knew, the visions and delusions he’d survived. Without him I’d be drifting downstream in the trivia of my mother’s times. I knew that their seventies had been more than cheap beads and headbands, but I was never easy about their music, never quite sure who’d died when of what self-indulgence. Forget their death-by-Nirvana and death-by-bombmaking; the truth was I had no experience of counterculture. In Wyatt’s Circle in Schenectady, the most we could boast of was shoplifting or spray-painting. “Expressions of ad hoc spite against the Establishment” is how Wyatt dismissed our misdemeanors. I had to understand Ham and Bio-Mom and their Berkeley times.
The girls of Ham’s youth
. That’s when I made up my mind to let Ham seduce me. I could be the youth of Ham’s middle age. Late middle age. Deep-fried squid is not the aphrodisiac.

He scraped his chair back across the red linoleum floor. “Poor fucking Jimi,” he sighed. “Now you have me all depressed.” He pulled the table forward so it’d be easier for me to slide out.

The cashier had the receipt and two more fortune cookies on a tiny plastic tray. “Everything fine?”

“Thanks, Lee.” Ham picked one cookie off the tray and tossed it to me. “I never look.”

I read my fortune.
Confucius says, Come back for marvelous meal to same restaurant
. Frankie would have been mortified; first we were sinister, now we’re getting cute.

Ham took out a ballpoint and scribbled on the receipt. “Who do you want to be, hon? Staff? Talent? Consultant? In case the IRS wants to know.”

“Force of nature,” I said. Deal with that, Mr. Accountant. “In case the Flash ever asks.”

The cashier said, “My grandson Byron, he has the acting bug, Mr. Ham.”

We’d almost made it out the door.

“Why not send him over sometime? Who knows, maybe we’ll cure him.”

We walked out into lemony-gray afternoon brightness, holding hands.

In North Beach the afternoon was still warm, but the stretchy shadows thrown by commercial buildings got me down. I slipped my arm around Ham’s waist as we strolled down a sloping block. “What now? What comes after squid?”

We were passing a café. A cozy café. Ham could have gone into it, ordered two espressos, we could have hunkered down at the wood counter and listened to Verdi.

Ham stopped. I caught his look. Sex, like grace, comes at you when you least expect it. “Your place?”

A mean question. “Not today,” I said.

“My office then.” We kept walking towards ShoeString.

“You’ll give me a VIP tour?”

“Maybe.”

I was in the studio’s guest suite on the floor directly above Ham’s office. You needed a special key to a special elevator to get to it. That’s where we found ourselves après-squid.

The whole floor was one big room, divided into purple and crimson alcoves for sleeping and partying. On the ceiling were murals of scenes from
The Father of His Country
, Part I. Fishing junks burning in a Hong Kong harbor. A half-naked white karate champ chopping bloody evil Japanese soldiers à la the young Frankie Fong. Grateful peasants stringing up fat tyrants. Asian belles with boob implants waving peacetime palm fronds.