12 Bliss Street Page 3

  “Let’s do something foolish,” he said.

  Three

  After lunch Nicola went up the side staircase of her building and in through the fire door—which claimed to be alarmed but wasn’t—so she would not have to see anyone right away. The hallway was empty; the whole floor seemed empty. Group lunch, she guessed. She hated the smell of this side of the building, which had recently been recarpeted, and went straight to the bathroom, which was large and cold with exposed pipes and a cement floor and a large poster of Audrey Hepburn in tights.

  The door closed behind her. No one was here, thank goodness. Nicola went over to the mirror and looked at herself. Oh, my God, her hair looked just terrible. She touched it, trying to rearrange it back into something more reasonably called hair, then started to cry.

  Oh Christ, oh God, she was thinking. What was wrong with her? Things had been going so well with Chorizo. Outside it looked like rain, but it had looked like rain for days without anything and newscasters were beginning to throw around the word drought. Nicola was just looking for a tissue in her purse when she heard a movement in one of the stalls and someone said, “I’ll be gone in a minute.”

  She stopped crying. “Who is that?” she asked.

  “Nicola?”

  “Audrey?”

  “What’s going on?” Audrey asked from inside the stall. Her voice sounded faint, as if passing through a sieve.

  “Oh nothing,” Nicola said. She thought she might start crying again. “It’s just, you would not believe what a bad day I’ve had and how awful my hair looks,” she said.

  Audrey came out and washed her hands and looked at Nicola, then she soaked some paper towels in cold water.

  “Your hair doesn’t look so bad,” she said. She gave Nicola a wet paper towel. “Here, put this on your eyes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What is it, Scooter?”

  “Scooter?” Nicola had forgotten about him. “No. God, no. No, it’s just, there was this man at lunch today. At the café. I’ve seen him there for the past couple of weeks, actually, but today for the first time we began to talk and it was amazing because I was, to tell you the truth, I was fantasizing about him while I was eating and I don’t know, I was into it, and then out of nowhere he began to talk to me. It was like he knew what I was doing, that’s what it felt like at least, and I found that very exciting, it was very exciting, and our conversation was … it had a rhythm, you know? When things are, I don’t know, going. And then we got to the part where he asked me out. And you know what I did? I said no.”

  “Why did you say no?”

  “I don’t know! He said he was taking the afternoon off to see the Picasso exhibit, and did I want to come? And although I was expecting something—well, really I thought he was just going to ask me for my phone number and maybe that was what freaked me, this immediate decision. I got all timid and I did what I always do, I said no.”

  “You don’t always say no.”

  “I always say no, my first response is always to say no.”

  “What about that other guy, the C.P.A.?” Audrey asked. “What happened to him?”

  “Oh, he had really chubby fingers, which was especially apparent when he wore his wedding ring.” Nicola took the paper towels off her eyes and looked in the mirror.

  “No way!”

  “Yeah I ran into him at the Safeway last weekend and he was wearing this wedding ring.”

  “Okay, so he’s not a good example,” Audrey conceded.

  “I feel like I’ve flunked math class again,” Nicola said.

  “You’ve never flunked a math class in your life.”

  “But I know what it feels like.”

  Audrey laughed and gave Nicola new wet towels and took the old ones and resoaked them.

  “To say I’m disappointed in myself just doesn’t begin to cover it,” Nicola said. She adjusted the silk teddy inside her shirt. “There’s something very fraudulent about me, you have no idea. I like to pretend I’m something I’m not.”

  “Welcome to adulthood,” Audrey said.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Neither am I.”

  They laughed, looking at each other through the mirror. Audrey had a round face and dimples and she could be incredibly feisty. The first time they met Nicola thought, Well, I won’t be friends with her. But it didn’t turn out that way. Audrey worked out every morning before work and her arms were incredibly strong and Declan, her husband, could lift his own weight. He was from San Diego, where they sold surfboards at yard sales, and he got his first boogie board at something like age three, then moved on to skateboards in kindergarten. Every Saturday he and Audrey either drove three hours north to ski board or three hours south to surf, and in addition they were building a house in Marin by themselves. Nicola usually went over to their place after work to drink beers and complain about Guy and to see her dog Lester, who lived with them since her own landlord wouldn’t allow pets.

  Nicola lifted the wet paper towel to check the puffiness of her eyes. She thought of Chorizo’s fingers, the silver bracelet on his dark wrist. Even his awful shoes were somehow endearing.

  “I wish I could just say yes,” she told Audrey. “For once in my life I would like to say yes.”

  “I think you do okay.”

  “Do you remember Francis? From our freshman year? Maybe this was before I met you. He was a senior and premed and he was really funny. There were always old dirty clothes all over my room and he made up this game called sockball that he used to play with my dirty socks.”

  “Anyway,” Audrey said.

  “Anyway,” Nicola said. She touched her eyelid. “One night he came over and he said he had something to say to me but that he was embarrassed and he thought he would be more comfortable if I had a bag or something that he could put over his head while he was saying it. But I didn’t have a bag. So he said, what about a towel? So I gave him a towel and he put it over his head and then he told me he liked me and would I go out with him some time.”

  “That’s very funny,” Audrey said, looking at herself in the mirror.

  “But guess what I said.”

  “Well, but he had a towel over his head.”

  “Why can’t I just say yes? Francis was a really nice guy! He was funny! He was premed!”

  “I’m sure he’ll end up forty years old and channel-flipping like everyone else,” Audrey told her.

  “My point is that there is something seriously wrong with me.”

  “You’re having a bad day,” Audrey said. “Have you spoken to Lester today? Why don’t you call her? Declan is probably home.”

  “That’s a good idea. You know, I was thinking yesterday that maybe I should give Lester a girlie middle name. To avoid all the gender confusion.”

  “What, like Lester Anna?”

  “Or Lester Louisa.”

  “Or Lester Pearl.”

  Nicola laughed. “Lester Pearl,” she repeated, and reapplied the paper towel to her eyelids. “I like that,” she said.

  * * *

  She called Lester when she got back to her desk; Declan, who was in fact home, switched to speaker phone so Nicola could hear Lester’s paws click over the hardwood floors. Then Louise brought back some chocolate cookies and after two of those Nicola did feel better.

  What it was, she decided, was an episode day. This was a technique she had learned from Scooter; once when he was watching some science fiction show and the characters were even more than normally stupid he said, Don’t they realize this is one of those episode days? And it was true, Nicola thought—there are days that are simply uncontrollably unavoidably bad and you better just expect more of the same and not try to fight it.

  That was today.

  She looked at her watch; her cardio-kickboxing class was at six. Then it was the weekend and she would relax, go to a movie, or do something fun. What? In any case she would not look at the rentals in the classifieds, not this weekend. And she would not drive up a
nd down streets looking for for-rent signs in windows. Well, maybe just the street along the beach, the Great Highway, a street named in the old Scots tradition of long high narrow roads and not in the modern tradition of on-ramps. But, on second thought, apartments along there would be so expensive. No, she would not drive down any streets. Maybe she would just peek at the classifieds.

  “Do you want to go out with Declan and me tonight?” Audrey asked her.

  “I have my kickboxing class,” Nicola said.

  “Well, call us later if you want.”

  Her class was held at a Karate Academy down the street and Nicola considered not going. The truth was she didn’t like jumping, which almost all sports, she found, required. Also exercise clothes depressed her. Also she disliked locker rooms, all that gray expanse of gray with identical locks on the lockers, which was ludicrous when you thought about it because who would ever want whatever was inside? The chocolate cookies were definitely wearing off. At the gym Nicola changed her clothes, then took her place in the line of women, most of whom had clenched jaws and were already kicking the air and punching.

  “And jab! Jab! Jab!” her instructor Alicia shouted. “Get that leg up, Nicola!”

  One hour, she told herself, then pizza with anchovies and a cornmeal crust. She fell down twice during the matches trying to kick her opponent, an apologetic lesbian who never even made contact. After the second fall Alicia told Nicola she wasn’t trying. Wasn’t trying! She had been the kickball champion of her third grade, but everything had fallen apart since then. Alicia, meanwhile, was slim with the whitest teeth Nicola had ever seen.

  “Nicola, raise your leg!”

  “Nicola, your leg!”

  “Nicola, leg!”

  I’m getting worse with each class, Nicola thought. Worse. How could that be? A gritty sweat was trickling down her temples and her arms felt only loosely connected to her body, as if stuck on with paper fasteners.

  Afterwards Nicola showered then tried to do something with her hair, which looked even worse than before. It was dark when she finally left. The sidewalk was crowded with people walking their dogs or reading posted restaurant menus and, down the street, some kids were selling chocolate or something for their school. Nicola walked in their direction, heading for the gourmet pizza place on the corner. Although she tried to remind herself it was just an episode day, she couldn’t help feeling disheartened.

  She was hungry and tired and her arm felt bruised where she had fallen on it. The sidewalk was sloppy with worms of wet paper and bird poop, and Nicola caught herself going over the bad points of the day from the top. If I see Chorizo on Monday, she told herself, and if he asks me out again, I’ll say yes. Or maybe I’ll ask him out. Or maybe I’ll ask if I can share his table, and then I’ll eat lunch with him and then ask him out.

  Probably she would think up various responses for various circumstances over the entire weekend, and this sort of depressed her. Yes, she practiced. Yes, yes. Yes. She never noticed before how much it sounded like sex.

  “Help our school, buy a candy bar?” the high school girl asked as Nicola approached. She was tall with inky black hair and bangs that seemed to have been cut with pinking shears. Her long arms held the chocolate protectively against her chest—or was she just cold? Next to her a boy in combat pants was leaning against the low brick wall that separated the sidewalk from a small parking lot. They were young, maybe sixteen. Nicola didn’t catch the name of their school.

  “No thanks,” she said. Then she stopped. What had she just been telling herself? “Wait. Actually, why not.”

  “Chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, or something with nougat?” the girl asked.

  “What’s the difference between chocolate and milk chocolate or dark chocolate?”

  “I don’t know,” said the girl. She wore black jeans and a big puffy black coat and she pursed her lips into an uncertain smile.

  “I’ll take the milk chocolate,” Nicola told her.

  “A bunch of these got stolen,” the girl said, “from some seventh graders. Can you believe that? Stealing candy from kids?”

  “From babies,” Nicola said, looking in her wallet. “Like the saying.”

  “Hunh?”

  “Stealing candy from babies.”

  “I know, I can’t believe it,” the girl said. “Do you believe in karma?”

  “I only have a twenty,” Nicola said.

  The girl and the boy exchanged a look.

  “You go,” the girl said.

  The boy pulled himself away from the wall, and Nicola noticed some duct tape stuck on his jeans. Was this what they used as patches these days? “We keep the money in my mom’s minivan,” he explained. “Over here.”

  He headed toward a caramel-colored minivan in the corner and Nicola followed him. The lot was just a few feet from the street but it was quiet here and dark and felt weirdly empty after the sidewalk scene and Nicola thought under the right circumstances this would seem creepy.

  “Did you know that people who eat chocolate live longer?” the boy asked her. He had a raspy voice, maybe a shade too high, and his hair was buzzed short, army-style. “Studies show,” he said.

  He took Nicola’s twenty, then went around to the other side of the van and pulled open the door. For a second he disappeared. When he came back his hand was closed, but when he opened it there was no money inside. Instead he suddenly grabbed her wrist.

  “What?” Nicola said, as if he had said something she hadn’t quite heard.

  “Come here,” he said, and his expression tightened.

  All at once she understood and a cold flush went through her. He pulled her toward him and put something—the duct tape—on her mouth with one hard push so that it wrinkled and didn’t adhere very well. Instinctively she pulled at it with her free hand and thought: The girl will help. Then she remembered the girl was with him.

  “Hey,” the boy said as she tugged at the tape, and he pushed her hand from her face. “Dave!” he called.

  The girl came up from behind Nicola and took her other hand.

  “Quickly,” she said.

  They were standing in the dark shadows of cars. The boy pulled off another strip of duct tape from his jeans and Nicola felt her arms being pulled behind her from two directions, the boy’s and the girl’s, and she realized they were trying to get her hands behind her so they could tape them up. She struggled and then let her legs collapse so she was kneeling on the parking lot, her head bowed in front of her execution style. Mainly she was just trying to keep her left arm—the arm the girl called Dave was holding—in her lap or in front of her chest so they could not tape her up, and she found herself staring hard at the blacktop: a dark, almost glittering surface.

  “Stop!” the boy said in his raspy voice.

  Why was no one coming into the parking lot?

  “Come on, Dave, you have to be quick,” the girl said to him.

  Wait, Nicola thought, which one is named Dave? And as if they sensed her distraction, they both pulled on her arms hard at the same time and got them behind her, and the boy quickly taped her two wrists together. Nicola’s mouth went dry and she curled to the ground feeling altogether submissive without the use of her hands. Her mind seemed to have shrunk to a pinpoint which could understand almost nothing of what was happening.

  The boy and the girl pulled her into the back row of the minivan, then the girl, who may or may not be the one called Dave, wound some dark cloth around her eyes. She said, “You know, you won’t be hurt.”

  Her arms hurt, her face hurt, and she had skinned at least one knee falling down on the blacktop. The girl tightened Nicola’s seat belt, then climbed into the front seat.

  She said, “You did it.”

  “Yeah,” said the boy. “Do you have the candy?”

  “How did you do it? I don’t think I coulda.”

  “Visualization. The whole time we were at it I saw her taped up in the back.”

  And here I am, Nicol
a thought. Although she wanted to believe the girl when she said she wouldn’t be hurt, her mouth was still dry and her heart was still racing. From the front seat she heard the click of seat belts connecting. Then the boy started the engine, and the doors locked in unison.

  Four

  At the first stoplight the van turned left, then left again, heading downtown. Overhead wires crisscrossed like shattered glass and behind them the ocean glittered darkly, blowing off foam. It was cold in the van. The boy, who was driving, put his palm to the instrument panel, then adjusted the airflow through the vents. He was smaller than the girl and had a thin, strained face. The girl stared straight ahead with the candy in her lap.

  “We should do a circle when we get there,” she said.

  The boy didn’t answer. The van swerved a little and Nicola righted herself awkwardly, her hands taped behind her. What did that mean, a circle? Were they witches or warlocks or what do you call them, wicca?

  Light came up from beneath her blindfold, and when she looked down Nicola could see a pinkish blur which was the tip of her nose. She didn’t think witches called themselves Dave. Or was this a new gang thing, the Dave gang? Nicola almost laughed at that and realized she was still in shock.

  She tested the strength of the duct tape on her hands and tried to think if she’d seen any weapons, any bulges that might have been weapons. When she first saw the boy, didn’t he have his hand in his pocket? Like he was holding onto something there?

  Boy Dave and Girl Dave. Dave and Davette. Maybe they’re trying to get into a gang. Maybe this is some kind of Dave wicca gang initiation thing.

  It was quiet in the van. Nicola figured they were on Portola Street now, winding their way past Twin Peaks. For a while she was able to mentally follow their progress. At the top of the hill Portola became Market Street and the van lurched down, beginning its descent. A picture of the area formed in her mind as if she were touch typing: the cars and lit cafés, the people walking slowly as if they were blind. For a moment she felt as if she was floating helplessly among them.

  No one knew she was here.

  After a while Davette opened the box of candy bars and broke off a square for Dave, then took one for herself. The smell of nougat wafted back. Still no one spoke. Where were they taking her? Their silence was beginning to feel menacing.