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Summer Of Love
To die for. Cliché, no doubt, but in her case, apt. Dr. David Stearn pretended to read the term’s last term paper, but his mind’s eye, and then his blue eyes, kept drifting back to A. Kincaid.
Thirty-seven pens scratched in thirty-seven blue books, the next century’s novelists and screenwriters giving the Twentieth Century Lit final their all, but A. Kincaid might as well have been the only student in the room.
Raindrops pattered monotonously against the windows of Savery Hall, as they had almost continuously since October. Only the intense green of the University of Washington campus outside and the muggy atmosphere inside made summer seem imminent.
David Stearn had been one of the promising young turks on this campus in the late Sixties, a radical idealist who transferred from San Francisco State to focus on writing instead of on drugs, with mixed results. He still affected the sandals and the beard, but the curly black Fro had been tonsured and silvered to a halo, and the lean and hungry look of his youth had yielded to the sag of middle-age. His crow’s-feet, though, hadn’t dimmed the fire in his cobalt blue eyes.
The good, imaginative term paper he was supposed to be reading was the work of the very same A. Kincaid. But he couldn’t focus on her writing when she sat right there in the room. After all, he might never see her again.
Today she wore a black velvet top, stone-washed jeans, and creamy leather boots. She sat by the window and the soft green daylight caught in her hair.
He had most of her colors now. Her complexion: apricot sherbet. Her eyes: the swirled blues of a Bermuda reef. Her lips, glossed but not tinted: guava. But her hair color eluded him. The best he had done so far was the warm gradient from auburn to blonde that you see sometimes on the weathered logs of a cabin in the high Rockies.
But those superficialities meant nothing without her poise. Tall and lithe, she slipped into the writing chairs in the classroom with the grace of a snake.
He could accept his physical attraction to her. What troubled him was how much influence, if any, it had on his judgment about her performance in this course.
He was proud of himself for not knowing what the A in A. Kincaid stood for. In fact, he’d put an A at the top of three of A. Kincaid’s papers before he matched the name to the person. He forced himself to read a few paragraphs from her term paper.
Her writing showed real ability, real insight, and it would be just as discriminatory to hold her to some higher standard because of her looks as it would be to overlook mistakes because of them.
But now, the last day of classes and the beginning of his sabbatical, he indulged himself in some fantasies that belied his half century and his thinning hair and his respected position. A. Kincaid, he thought. Boy, I don’t know what a “caid” is, but I know about A. Kin. I ache for you, A. Kincaid.
Even that might be bravado, a testosterone-induced delusion. Three years ago his wife Elaine had divorced him and moved back to Wisconsin, saying she felt unfulfilled, unneeded, unloved. David had felt unfulfilled, unneeded, and unloved for three celebate years now.
For a while it had been a relief to work unimpeded by the distractions of a loveless marriage. He had tried dating a few times, never his strong suit, and the resulting minor disasters only added to his checklist of inadequacies.
In the last year or two he had immersed himself in his work, taking on extra courses, coaching a handful of doctoral theses, revising all his unpublished papers against the day when the will or the capacity faded. In fact, he figured that at this point he might as well work himself to death.
He thought regularly, soberly, of suicide. It had helped him, as it had Nietzsche, “get successfully through many a bad night.” He already had a method: he had persuaded Phil Dwyer, his doctor, to give him some phenobarbitol, ostensibly to help him sleep. This sabbatical had loomed for some time now as a cut-off date, a blank beyond which his schedule showed nothing else.
Martin Lee, head of the English Department, had recommended the sabbatical. “Read. Write. Travel. Think. Don’t teach,” he had told him, not unkindly. Rumors evidently had reached him about David’s threat to require anyone who submitted a paper asserting that Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” was a science fiction story about a giant beetle to find Waldo in every Where’s Waldo? book.
Reality intruded. Several students glancing at the clock made him realize he had drifted off and given them four extra minutes.
“Time, people,” he told them. “Close your books.”
A collective sigh, almost a groan, filled the room, followed by the sound of shuffling feet and folding paper and muttering. He walked between the rows, collecting the finals.
“Thanks, everyone,” he said. “Grades will be posted Thursday afternoon. Of all the classes I’ve had, this has been one of them. Enjoy your summer. I’m off to the Antipodes.”
His upcoming sabbatical had been widely discussed among the undergraduates, and he’d even received a few cards. There was some polite laughter and then the room cleared, the retreating voices, relieved of the tension, rising in timbre. Patches of blue appeared out the window.
A. Kincaid lingered.
David finished erasing the board, brushed the chalkdust from his hands, and said, “Ah, Ms. Kincaid.”
“I wanted to thank you for your generosity,” she said, smiling to see her term paper open on his desk.
“I’ve tried to be guided by fairness, not generosity. Your work has always justified your grade.” He sounded formal and defensive, aware that he had just debated this subject internally.
“I meant your generosity in sharing yourself with us. I’ve really enjoyed this class.”
Feeling off-balance already, he scolded himself again for being intimidated by her looks, her composure. She was certainly older than most of his students, but he couldn’t tell by how much. She was what—twenty five? Thirty?
“Thanks. I’m glad,” he replied. He could feel warm, damp air rising from beneath his herring-bone jacket.
“I guess we’re both done with school, at least for now.”
“What’s next for you?” he asked.
“I thought I might go to the Sahara.”
“Really? That sounds exciting,” he said. “How long do you plan to be there?”
“Just for lunch. It’s that Middle Eastern restaurant up on University.”
Cool and steady, her eyes remained as unruffled as the reef.
“And after that?” he asked.
“I’m considering several projects, but there’s nothing definite yet. What about you?”
Good question. Six months in sunny Majorca? Wrestling with that Pynchon paper again? The Big Sleep? When in doubt, joke.
“I’m trying to decide between striving for the betterment of mankind and getting a tattoo.”
“Tabboo.”
“Tabboo?”
“Teachers and students.”
Her eyes smiled at him.
“Not tabboo,” he said gently. “Just not wise.”
His eyes grappled with hers and, not for the first time, he knew that a connection existed between them, that they had more in common than this course, and that they both knew it. He had felt it the first day of class, and it hadn’t gone away. He wanted to say something about it but couldn’t find the words.
She smiled faintly through the long pause, then said, “Anyway, thanks again.”
“Thank you,” he replied after she’d gone.
Flattered and flustered, he cleaned off the desk and filled his briefcase and headed outside.
June ambushed him. The rain had drifted over to Bellevue and the sun poured through the breaks in the clouds. Rhododendron petals confettied the sidewalks. Squirrels gamboled, robins warbled, butterflies fluttered by.
This is stupid, he thought. I’m acting like tomorrow’s just another cog in the gear. I’ve got to do some sabbatting. If this is the end of this life and the beginning of the next, I might as well go out in style. Maybe I’ll try something new for lunch, he decided, trying not to kid himself too much about his motivations. Middle Eastern food sounds good.
The Sahara, small but tasteful with black and indigo walls and virginal white tablecloths, was crowded and quietly festive, peopled with mercifully few familiar faces. An aproned waiter was leading him to a table for one when A. Kincaid’s voice spoke his name.
“Well, hello,” he said, feigning some surprise for the waiter’s benefit. “May I join you?”
“Please do, Dr. Stearn,” she replied, pushing out a chair.
“Now that we’re off campus, call me David,” he said, fishing for her first name.
“How did the tattoo come out?” was all she said, mocking but not bruising him.
“I just got a flesh-colored one,” he quipped as he scanned the menu. “How’s lunch?”
“Hot.” A light dew beaded her upper lip.
“Do you like it hot?”
“You’ve got to work on some better lines than that.”
“It wasn’t a line, it was a question,” he replied, returning her volley. “Here’s another. Am I supposed to be trying to pick you up?”
She arched a respectful eyebrow and said, “Touché. Yes, I do like it hot. And actually I was just hoping I could get a chance to talk to you on a personal level. You’re an interesting man.”
“I haven’t been accused of that in a while.”
“Didn’t you help found The Rag?”
For a moment he thought there had been a small earthquake. No one had mentioned The Rag in years. Ordering lunch, baba ghaunouj and falafel, brought a brief respite while he regrouped. Somewhere in his gut a larva of doubt and suspicion hatched.
“I thought your focus was modern lit, not ancient history,” he said without looking up.
“I’ve been considering a documentary film project about the Sixties,” she said. “It was an interesting time.”
“That sounds like an old Chinese curse: ‘May you live in interesting times’,” he said. “In any case it was before your time.”
“It was the beginning of my time.”
She had a model’s face, flawless and intriguing, with a model’s ability to choose what emotion it expressed or to leave it, as now, inscrutable. She sipped her tea as the waiter cleared her plate.
“What kind of interview do you want?” he asked warily, disappointed that she was interested in him intellectually rather than physically, in his past more than his present.
She chuckled. “That sounds so formal! I was just curious, that’s all. The legend of The Rag lives on.”
“How much do you know?”
“Just that you and Jon Taylor founded a small but influential underground newspaper in 1966 that was at the fore-front of the anti-war movement here in the Northwest.”
Jon had rushed into the ramshackle house on Brooklyn that was both their home and their workplace over the summer of 1967 and threw the afternoon Seattle Times on the table.
“Have you seen the shit that’s going down in Detroit, Deese?” he said to David, obviously high, sweating from the July sun, pushing his long blonde hair off his forehead. “I guess genocide in Southeast Asia isn’t enough, now they’ve got to sic the troops on Americans too. Of course, it’s probably just a coincidence that the Americans getting shot also happen to be black.”
“This is fucked,” David agreed.
“The cutting edge was easier to get to back then,” David told her. “We were in the right place at the right time.”
“You got the public’s attention,” she said. “You helped turn the tide.”
He decided he couldn’t take it any more. “What’s your name?” he asked.
She shrugged, puzzled. “Kincaid.”
“No, what’s the A stand for?”
She winced slightly. “Amber.”
David winced mentally. Didn’t “amber” translate to “electra” in Greek? Wasn’t Electra Agamemnon’s loving daughter? Hadn’t Freudian psychology appropriated her name for the feminine counterpart to the Oedipus complex? Hmm.
“Interesting,” he said aloud.
“I hate it. My mother was in her hippie phase. I find just the A makes people take me more seriously.”
“So, A, what else would you like to know?” He checked his watch, thinking about his meeting with Martin Lee at 4:30.
She settled back in her chair, watching him eat.
“Most of my friends think the Sixties were pretty bogus,” she said. “Some of the music is cool, but peace and love? Flower power? What’s that all about?
“But to me,” she went on, “it was a decade of strife because people really did try to talk to each other, to let go of their preconceptions and to be open to new ideas. Things are quiet now because everybody’s scared to talk.”
“Is there a question in there?” he asked.
“You and Jon Taylor did some great work for The Rag. I’ve read some back issues in the library, and the writing is good, the ideas are fresh. But you couldn’t hold it together. Why not? What went wrong?”
What had been harmony was drifting into dissonance in the Summer of Love.
For one thing, Jon had the vibrating meth jitters, afraid to sleep through any of the changes each day brought, while David floated along peacefully on Panama Red.
For another, The Rag was sponsoring and promoting The Great Northwest Music Rendevouz with the help and guidance of John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, who had been instrumental in getting The Monterey Pop Festival together. The Mamas and Papas were scheduled at the Center Arena in August, and he and David talked daily on the phone.
“Okay, the Wailers confirmed, and the Kingsmen look good,” David told Jon slowly, reading his notes.“The Raiders have escaped this scene for Hollywood. That Hendrix guy is still in England.”
“Deese, man, we can’t get away with just locals. If we want to attract attention, we’ve got to get some national acts. At least the Byrds, or the Spoonful.” Jon’s words lingered as puffs of cigarette smoke. “There’s a new band from L.A. called the Doors who are pretty good.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“We’ll charge admission.”
“This isn’t about bread.”
“Every-fucking-thing is about bread. You and your digger friends better wake up to that.”
“I’m not a digger and you know it. But at least they’re about something more than egos.”
“Like what?”
“Like actual bread.”
“There were philosophical differences,” David said to Amber, pushing his plate away unfinished.
“I thought the guiding principle of The Rag was to embrace alternative points of view, achieve some sort of synthesis, if not consensus.”
The waiter brought two checks and David picked up both.
“It sounds to me as if you’ve read more than just a few back issues.”
“Okay. So I’ve read them all. I like to be prepared.”
For what? David wondered. The larva in his gut began to wriggle.
“All but one,” he informed her, counting some bills onto the table. “The last issue never made it to the printer.”
She was plainly intrigued. “What happened to it?”
“It’s in a box in my bedroom closet.”
“I’d love to see it.”
“Now there’s a line that works.”
Since he had to be back on campus at 4:30 anyway, they went together in his old red Porsche 914. His little bungalow on the north side of Capital Hill was cramped and run down, but the view of Portage Bay and the campus beyond doubled the value of the house.
He pulled a dusty box from the closet shelf and took out a sheaf of yellowing onion skin covered with the faint blue pika of his old portable Corona. The familiar acrid scent of marijuana smoke teased his nostrils before he got back out to the living room.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said as he handed her the manuscript. She offered the small wooden pipe to him.
So, Deese, how sabbatical do want to get? he asked himself. He hadn’t gotten high in years. “Doctor says it kills you but he don’t know when,” the old song went. He took a toke.
Amber was already absorbed in the manuscript. David put on a Sting CD and sat down in his wing-backed chair to watch her reactions as she read.
Jon got enough backing from the Arts Council and from Pepsico, Inc., to afford the Leaves and John Lee Hooker and still keep it a free concert. He was completely dissatisfied with the lack of political content though, until one night when he came back to the house with most of a local band called Fresh Air who mixed blues, jazz, and politics, fronted by an outspoken ball of fire named Annie Wannamaker. Annie welcomed any agenda that favored the helpless or down-trodden, and she and Jon resonated for a couple of hours about civil rights and Vietnam and impure drugs.
David could shake his black curly Fro in front of his deep-set blue eyes to observe unobserved. He couldn’t take his eyes off of Annie, her lean frame, the passionate fire of her gray eyes, the elegant architecture of her breasts and hips.
Elaine, his fiance, spent that summer in Wisconsin with her parents, and David felt lonely and bored. Loving Elaine was safe but uneventful, even when she was around. Annie had pizzazz. Life with her would never be dull.
Such a pity, he thought. Jon, with his noble face and absolute self-assurance, could afford to be nonchalant about a beauty like that. David was paralyzed.
Amber relit the pipe, nodding her head as she read, clearly enjoying herself.
“This is great stuff!” she said, passing the pipe to him again. “It’s a shame this didn’t make it into print.”
He took a long drag. Martin will understand if I don’t make it today, he thought. He suggested this sabbatical, after all. Talking old times with a pretty girl hits the spot precisely.
The dope tickled his synapses. He could already feel the ache in his atrophying cheek muscles from the latent smiles welling up.
“Good writing is no match for bad business,” he replied to her comment.
“Your writing styles were so complementary, though. Jon is so sarcastic, so pessimistic, almost paranoid sometimes. And then you send it out to left field with your goofiness. ‘LBJ+CIA=KIA+MIA.’ Your name must have ended up on all sorts of lists.”
“For a while my phone had more taps than a Shirley Temple movie. It was like a party line.”
She laughed and he smiled.
“Thanks for coming over,” he told her. “I’m having a great time.”
“Am I keeping you?” she asked, glancing at her watch. “Are you going to be able to make your appointment?”
“Screw it,” he said decisively. “But you must have better things to do than reading yesterday’s papers with the geezer set.”
“Are you kidding? You’re one of the most eligible, intriguing men on campus.”
His libido did a handspring. Sure, she was massaging his ego, but it needed a massage.
“Careful now,” he said. “I’m a desperate man.”
“Ooo, I’m scared,” she said, pretending to adjust her top modestly.
“You know, it occurs to me that the student-teacher thing doesn’t apply now that the semester has ended.”
“You know, I had just as much trouble ignoring you all semester as you had ignoring me.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“It still is.”
“What should we do about it?”
“Go in the bedroom.”
“Got any more herb?”
“I can’t imagine smoking anything now,” he had said to Annie as she lit a cigarette. Her long blonde hair flowed like wheat, then water, then honey, across her bare shoulders.
This hadn’t been his idea. Jon and Annie had spent the last three weeks banging the headboard onto the wall between the bedrooms, and Jon, nobody’s fool, could see that it was eating David alive.
“Why don’t you sleep with her, Deese?” he asked finally.
“Get real.”
“She likes you, man. We’re all friends here, right? Ever hear a song by David Crosby called ‘Triad’? Why can’t we go on as three?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it. I’ve got to go to Portland tonight anyway. In fact, take these. I don’t know if they’ll help, but things are bound to get interesting.” He handed David two tan pharmaceutical capsules.
“What are they?”
“Sandoz acid. The best and purest in the world. Puts Owsley’s stuff to shame.”
Indeed it did. The woodgrain in the paneling sorted itself into glyphs and runes. Swirling pools of paint boiled across the paisley sheets. “Crystal Ship” by the Doors lasted three hours.
Annie giggled and wound his curly hair around her fingers. He knelt beside the bed, shamelessly worshiping her naked body, the little mole on her left breast becoming the single, intentional flaw of a Navajo sand painting. They couldn’t make love. They were love.
These sheets were white and cool and the music had stopped. The smoke, though tasty, wasn’t on a par with that Sandoz. Still, he was only about half ready to make love, and Amber patiently played with his chest hair.
He hadn’t seen many naked women in his life, but Amber topped them all. Only Annie came close, and some of his decades-old memories of that night had begun to fade. He had the same impulse to get out of bed, get on his knees, and worship her. Not Amber so much as what she represented: beauty, grace, youth, intelligence. He felt fairly sure that would only make matters worse, however.
The most important aspect of the dèjá vu experience is not that you’ve been there, done that, but that there’s some relevance, some meaning, which you can’t quite grasp but which would be stupid to ignore. What did it mean that he couldn’t make love to the two best women he’d been to bed with? Was it just the unfortunate coincidence of the acid distractions back then and the lack of practise now? Or was this his own tantalizing hell that kept what he so longed for just out of reach? An ugly thought.
Thought is more the problem than the solution here, he realized. Stopping thought is absurd. Redirecting it might prove useful. If Annie’s going to intrude here, so be it. He closed his eyes.
By the time the sun came up he and Annie had talked for six hours with barely a pause. The perceptual distortions from the acid had given way to insight and intimacy. He’d fallen head over heels in love with her, and he felt he’d tapped some reserve of her emotions that she’d hidden for years. Now that their time was almost up and the long day was about to intrude, he had the overwhelming desire, and then suddenly the ability, to make love to her. That orgasm loomed large as one of the most profound experiences of his life.
It was working. It felt strange to fantasize about Annie and to block out Amber, but he felt sure that if he could just get started…
Annie kissed him on her way out into the hot morning. “Oh, my purse!” she said, and then, “Shit!”
“What?”
“I don’t believe this!”
“What!”
“I forgot to use my diaphragm.”
Just as he gained the momentum to roll over onto Amber, that alarm went off.
“Don’t go away,” he said, getting up.
“What is it?”
“Condoms are like brains. It’s not enough to have them. You have to use them too.”
He rummaged through his sock drawer, finally found one and unwrapped it, got back in bed, and discovered that once again he was prepared only for the safest sex of all.
“I’m really sorry,” he said to her, kissing her forehead. “I guess this shoots my eligibility.”
“I only came here to talk, remember?”
That hurt. The larva had grown now to a cutworm, gnawing away at the stem of his self-esteem.
“Oh goodie. By all means, let’s talk.”
“I am still curious about The Rag.”
“Fire when ready, Gridley.”
“You talked about bad business, philosophical differences. But I couldn’t see any more difference in your philosophies in that last issue than in the first issue. And from what I heard you two barely spoke after that.”
“You know he died a couple of years later, right?”
She averted her eyes. “Yes, I knew that.”
He watched her. Maybe I owe it to her to open up about this a little more, drop my guard, he thought. After all, Annie not only played a role in the demise of The Rag, she’s at least part of the reason I’m not making love right now.
“Cherche la femme,” he said.
“I heard rumors about that too, but I wanted you to bring it up.”
“She was the lead singer in a local band. In those days of expanding consciousness, we cherished the notion that love wasn’t just for couples.”
“That still seems like a noble sentiment to me.”
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know just what that meant, so he went on. “She and Jon were an item and none of us knew it. I confess, I had the hots for her, big time. So we tried to be liberal and modern and hip, and it thoroughly screwed us up. I spent the night with her one time, at Jon’s insistence, and he couldn’t handle it. None of us could. The friendship, the paper, even some of the ideals, went down the drain. The two of them moved to L.A. and shortly afterward he went to Vietnam for Rolling Stone and got himself blown to bits.”
“What became of her? Do you know?”
“I never heard. I wish I knew.”
The useless condom had left an odor on his hands, and he went into the adjoining bathroom to wash. Whether it was the lunch or the weed or the topic or his recent failure, the cutworm in his gut had metamorphosed into a big fluttering moth that made him wonder if he was going to lose the lunch. He looked in the medicine chest for a remedy. Nothing there but the three weeks worth of phenobarbitol that he’d talked Dr. Dwyer into. He took it down and looked at it, wondering for the umpteenth time if the contents, taken liberally, weren’t in fact the remedy for a host of ills.
“What was her name?” Amber asked from the bed.
“Annie Wannamaker,” he said, feeling like he was burning a bridge by saying the name aloud.
“Did you really have the hots for her?”
“I really did,” he said with resignation, leaning head-down over the sink, not wanting to face her, the bottle of pills clutched in his fist. “I’ve never known anyone else quite like her.”
“I know what you mean,” Amber said quietly.
“You do?” he had to ask, filled with doubt, then dread.
“She’s my mother.”
His knees abruptly turned to jelly and he sank to the linoleum, his elbows on the toilet seat. Now he wanted to throw up and couldn’t.
God Almighty, how the chickens have come home to roost! he thought. That girl in there might be my daughter. Good Lord, what if I…
The difficulty with suicide lies not so much in the philosophical decision, which can be made as a matter of principle, but in the practical aspect of choosing the moment, when the balance tips irrevocably to one side and no doubt remains that things from now on will only get worse. Naked, nauseated, his pride, his decency, and his obligations all gone, embracing that cold porcelain throne, he thought he could hear that subtle metallic chink of the balance bar coming to rest. He looked again at the pill bottle, thinking, just pour a glass of water and choke down the sticky capsules. Better to die with doubts than to live with certainties.
He pulled his left arm from the toilet seat and tried to will it to the sink and the empty glass, but once again his body betrayed him. Every flabby muscle from his sternum to his groin contracted at once and he doubled back up. He felt something welling up from within, the dusty moth flailing about, trying to break free. He thought he was going to vomit, and the thought filled him with loathing and shame. Then, even worse, even more humiliating, he knew he was going to cry, and even as he realized it the first wrenching sob constricted his throat. When it finally escaped it sounded more like a groan than a sob, but he knew it was fatal, that he had missed the moment. Sure enough, even as the second moan died in his throat he heard her anxious footsteps.
“David, what’s wrong?” she cried, falling to her knees and putting her arm around his quaking shoulders.
“Unngh,” was all he could manage.
She took the pill bottle from his weak fist and read the label. “Oh, God, what is it? What have I done?”
“Nothing— I can’t—” he mumbled, feeling the acid tears that refused to start from his eyes trickling through his nose instead.
“Did you take these?” she demanded quietly.
He shook his head no.
She leaned her head against his and he could feel her warm sweet breath against his ear. “Are you lying to me?”
He shook his head again, trying to pull himself together but feeling like the effort only made things worse.
“Do you need to throw up?” she asked patiently.
He nodded, and he felt her grow tense, so he managed to mumble to the toilet seat, “Not because I took anything.”
“Want to be alone?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said disconsolately and heaved a sigh. “I probably couldn’t do that either.”
She punched him lightly on the shoulder and the spell was broken. They stayed in that position while his sobs turned to sighs, then she helped him to his feet.
They went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, and then simultaneously they reached for some clothes. He slipped into his boxers and trousers and she put on his shirt and buttoned it.
Traffic on 520, having rushed all afternoon, now crawled through rush hour from the interstate to the floating bridge, but the weary commuters leaned on their cell phones rather than their car horns. Down on the ship canal the gulls pleaded with a pensioner for more bread. The ticking of a clock echoed through the still house now, and the unanswered, inevitable questions hung heavy in the air.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he replied.
He took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, paused, shrugged, then blew his nose too.
“So what was that all about?” she asked.
“I should have known,” he said, looking at her face in the golden light, seeing now the familiar traits that Annie had contributed, searching for some trace of himself.
“People used to think we were sisters.” The emphasis should have been on the word “sisters,” but the weight she gave to “used” and the far-away look in her eyes puzzled him.
So what does she know? he wondered. For that matter, what doesn’t she know?
Tread lightly, Deese. Maybe Annie had never told her who her father was. Maybe Annie didn’t know who her father was.
“Your mother always was a looker,” he commented neutrally.
She nodded agreement and then realized she’d been complimented and, to his surprise, she blushed. “She said you were a charmer, in an awkward sort of way.”
So evidently Annie had mentioned him. Can’t knock that.
So evidently Amber had sought him out. But if she knew he was her father, why seduce him? What kind of bizarre scheme would that be? Or had he seduced her? It was hard to tell. His queasy stomach flipped over again. He had an ugly vision of sitting in the hot stage lights of the “Fathers Who Unwittingly Seduce Their Daughters” edition of “The Jerry Springer Show.”
“Well, thanks,” he said awkwardly. “A charmer, huh? I guess it depends on how much you like impotence, hysterics, and drug-induced suicide.”
She glanced at the bottle of pills still in her hand. “Maybe I better hang onto these,” she said distractedly, putting them into her purse.
His heart swelled to know that she cared enough to intervene, but his mind balked at seeing her rip up his emergency ticket out. He couldn’t think of a way to ask her to give the pills back without arousing suspicions, though. Now he felt stuck in this version of reality.
“Anything else?” he asked petulantly. “My sandals don’t have laces, so I couldn’t hang myself, my only razor is electric, so I can’t slit my wrists, and my kitchen is all electric too, so sticking my head in the oven would only bake it.”
“Please don’t joke,” she said seriously.
“But it’s all I have left.”
He could tell her mind was increasingly elsewhere, and this remark seemed to help her to come to some conclusion.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” she said after a pause.
“Okay.”
“I suppose any child who grows up without a father wonders what he was really like,” she began, sounding like she had rehearsed it. “So when my mother moved back up here to Seattle—”
In spite of himself, in spite of the complicated situation he was in, his heart skipped a beat. So Annie’s back in town!
“—and she mentioned that you were teaching at the U Dub—”
So she’s kept track of me!
“—I really wanted to meet you.”
“So you took my lit course.”
“And enjoyed it very much, thank you. I learned a lot.”
“About your father?” he asked, trying to force the issue.
“Most of what I know about my father I learned here this afternoon.”
The time had come. “I hope you’re referring to Jon Taylor,” he said, cringing.
“Of course,” she said, momentarily puzzled. When it dawned on her what he meant, she started to laugh. “Oh, so you thought— Oh my God!” She shrieked and fell back on the bed, rolling with laughter.
“I’m glad I could amuse you,” he said cooly.
“I’m sorry,” she said genuinely, collecting herself and sitting back up. “My mother said that you and she never…”
“Well, we did.”
“So when I sprang it on you that she was my mother—”
“I just naturally assumed there was a possibility—”
“And if I had been and hadn’t known—no wonder you were upset!” She took his hand and gently squeezed it.
Such a simple act, but he felt his fears breaking up and floating away, like river ice in the spring sun. Oddly enough, left behind was a small shred of regret that she wasn’t his daughter. Considering he hadn’t known her first name this morning, he already felt very close to her. But then, why shouldn’t he feel close? He might have been in the next room the night she was conceived, after all.
“You’re positive,” he said.
“I was a love child,” she reassured him. “My parents had a premonition that my father might not return from Vietnam. I was conceived three weeks before he left.”
“Why didn’t you introduce yourself to me earlier?” he asked her. “There’s so much we could have shared.”
“Ulterior motives,” she replied simply.
How much more ulterior can there be? he wondered. Some of his doubts returned.
“Like what?” he asked.
“For one thing, the very first day of class I knew why my mother found you charming,” she said, looking into his eyes.
“Where did the ‘Kincaid’ come from, anyway?” he asked obliquely, glancing at her unadorned ring finger.
“I was young and foolish.”
“And--”
“And I married a musician.”
“Whose name was Kincaid.”
“Jimmy Kincaid. His stage name was Torch. He played bass for a thrasher band called The End. They were big in the early Nineties.”
“Ah, the good old days.”
She ignored it. “For two years I thought my choice was between abuse and neglect. Then one day a good friend brought up the word divorce.”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“After that I did some modeling. I made three quarters of a million dollars year before last.”
His eyebrows went up involuntarily.
“But it’s so empty,” she went on, tucking his shirt tail between her thighs. “One day I stood, sat, crouched and knelt for 10 hours on a beach in Tahiti wearing just a string bikini, and it occured to me that it was great money but a waste of time. So I called Mom in L.A.—”
“What was she doing there?” he interrupted.
“At that time she was doing A&R work for Geffen Records. She was part of the music biz in L.A. for a long time. In fact, she was married for about ten years to Richard Oberlin, who is now a vice-president at Atlantic. Anyway, she thought I should finish the journalism degree that I dropped to marry Torch.
“And when I found out that you were teaching that lit course I decided I couldn’t pass up a chance to learn from my father’s partner at The Rag. But I thought that if you knew who I was you would find it awfully difficult to be objective.”
“Okay, so now you’ve aced the course and found out some more about your father. Mission accomplished. But—and correct me if I misread this—didn’t you try to seduce me this afternoon?”
“I said there were ulterior motives.”
“Well, I guess I pretty well foiled that part of your scheme.”
“Actually, no, you passed with flying colors.”
“You wanted to get me into bed and not make love.”
“In a way.”
“Glad I could oblige,” he said bitterly.
“Let me explain. Mom told me that the one time you and she tried to make love you were caring and funny and gentle and sincere, but that you struggled—”
“I struggled.”
“—and couldn’t do it.”
“Well, I did do it,” he said defensively, feeling like they’d already covered this. Some of his memories were foggy, but his orgasm that morning three decades ago was as vivid as yesterday. “Evidently she just forgot. There’s a hell of an ego boost. How is your mother, anyway? And what brings her back to the Great Northwest?”
“The Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center.”
The fading rays of the evening sun played across a Japanese print on his wall: two old blind men helping one another to cross a log bridge. His neighbor’s wisteria perfumed the breeze from the window. The old wind-up clock on his mantlepiece struck eight times.
“Oh, Amber, I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said, holding both of her hands in both of his. “How bad is it?”
Her eyes welled with tears. “It’s as bad as it can be!”
Suddenly she was in his arms, crying and shaking. He carressed her hair and patted her back, comforting her as best he could, trying to get his mind to accept the mortality of Annie’s eternal beauty.
“The Hutch is the best,” he told her. “What is it?”
“Her cervyx,” she sobbed into his chest. “They’ve already done a complete hysterectomy. She’s on chemo now, but it looks hopeless.”
“How long do we have?” he asked, conscious of how easily the “we” came out.
“Two months. Maybe three.” She had quit sobbing but her voice sounded bleak. “At least that was her doctor’s best guess two weeks ago.”
“How’s she taking it?”
“Some of the time it’s a lark. She’s got a wig for every day of the week, and a personality for each. She plays games on the computer, watches old movies. But then the pain and the nausea take over. Her doctor got her that marijuana, the stuff we smoked earlier, and it helps, but with each round of the fight she sinks closer to the canvas.”
“We smoked her medication?” he asked, feeling very guilty now.
“Her doctor’s cool. There’s more,” she reassured him. “It doesn’t help that much anymore anyway. Besides, you may end up returning the favor.” She pulled the phenobarbitol from her purse.
“Oh God,” he said when he comprehended what she meant.
His feelings wouldn’t fit into words. How could he possibly help Annie die? How could he not? In the end the only hope is for sweet mercy. His self-indulgent ennui seemed so childish now. Five hundred years after Copernicus, and David’s just getting the news that he’s not the center of the universe. He hung his head.
Amber got up and started putting her own clothes back on. “I’m sorry I laid all this on you at once,” she said. “There probably was a better way, but I haven’t been thinking clearly lately.”
He pulled himself together and slipped his shirt back on, her scent lingering on it still. “Doesn’t say much for my little lit course, does it? You breezed through that.”
“That’s my father in me,” she said, fastening her bra. “He always functioned best under pressure, from what I’ve heard.”
He looked up from buttoning his shirt. “Your parents are two of the best people I’ve ever known,” he told her. “The stubbornness of youth—no, youth’s delusions of immortality—prevented me from expressing that to your father. I hope I can do better with your mother.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“Not that I thought it would be, but what do you mean?”
“For one thing, she’s not only very sick, she’s also extremely self-conscious. It could be a hell of a jolt for you to reappear from her past now.” She lowered her eyes. “I never told her I was taking your course,” she admitted.
“Why not?”
“I wasn’t sure how it would go. Maybe I wouldn’t like you.” She walked over to him and touched his sleeve. “Then it turned out I liked you too much.”
An earlier comment of hers began to make sense. “That’s what you meant by my passing with flying colors. It wouldn’t be right. Your mom’s got enough to deal with.”
“Maybe someday we can finish what we started here today. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“I can wait.”
“She can’t. In fact, I should get home.”
“Let’s go.”
By now they were both dressed and the quiet house had become gloomy in the dusk. Outside the air was warm and redolent with flowers and the damp earth. They were lost in thought as the Porsche muttered through the blue pools cast by the streetlamps.
“So what happens now?” he asked at last.
“That’s mostly up to you.”
“Where’s your car?”
“Lot B.”
“Where’s your house?”
“On 63rd, by Green Lake.” She watched his hand vibrating on the stick shift as they waited for a light. “But are you sure you’re up to this?”
“I’m not sure of much any more,” he admitted. “But I sure am ready for a change.”
Her fingers tugged gently at the beard along his jaw. “I’m sorry I put you through that.”
Back up to speed now, he rested his hand on her knee and said, “You did what you had to do.”
“I had to find out what you were like.” She looked down at the water as they crossed University Bridge. “Some men find my looks…distracting.”
He looked over at her. “What if I hadn’t shown up at the Sahara?”
She mused awhile, then turned to him and said, “But you did.”
“What if I had made mad, passionate love to you?”
She thought about that too and said, “But you didn’t.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “And I’m glad,” she said, and then added “for now” when she saw his disappointment.
They drove into Lot B and he stopped by the Acura she pointed out as hers. He put the Porsche in neutral and took both her hands in both of his again.
“Love’s a mighty thin thread sometimes,” he said.
“It’s not for the faint of heart,” she cautioned him.
“Shall I follow you?”
She smiled at him with shining eyes. “Okay, but you’d better give me a few minutes when we get there to explain some of this to her. Shall we just call this a chance encounter?”
“That might be best,” he agreed. “I’ll be right behind you.”
She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek, then got out and into her car and rolled down the window. Her radio was set to the oldies station. “…And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair,” the Beach Boys were singing.
This could work, he thought as he followed her home. A summer of love.
The End