Moonlight Water, con’t (3)
Chapter 3: DESTRUCTION
From the front archway one set of high heels clicked their way, and one pair of slippers shushed, across acres of Mexican tile. Robbie set the bottle on the counter and waited. Two days ago the death of their unborn child. Yesterday silence. Today, no one had called him, and Nora brings his wife home. What now?
They stopped ten steps away, Nora a step in front of Georgia. “We’re in love,” she said. “Georgia and me. We want to get married.” Nora looked hard into Robbie’s eyes, Georgia looked at Nora.
Those words stopped his breath and his heart. Robbie couldn’t open his mind or his throat.
She went on. “You two . . . It’s been over for a long time.” She waited, as though he might say something. “Things like this happen, you understand.”
He was going to suffocate.
Nora went on and on in a business-like tone, drivel about financial and legal work to be done — truckloads of it — how her office and their lawyers could work it out.
Robbie couldn’t listen. He was fighting for breath. He wanted to charge into battle with Nora, or Georgia, or himself, but he couldn’t even move.
He looked into Georgia’s eyes and saw grief. She looked down. He forced his body to pull over a chair for Georgia, then took her hand and helped her sit. Nora stood still, watching, but only for a moment.
“Naturally, Georgia wants the house,” droned Nora.
“House is mine,” Rob mumbled.
In California a spouse could keep the wealth he came into the marriage with.
“The lawyers will work it out. There’s no reason things can’t be settled quickly and amicably.”
Breath finally came in a heaving gasp, as after a blow to the diaphragm.
Robbie willed himself to be quiet inside, and looked around his house, what was in sight and what wasn’t. Odd things, the over-sized shower with twin shower heads, the bamboo garden and koi pond. His state-of-the-art recording studio. Georgia’s collection of contemporary art, strange, sterile stuff. Except for his studio, Georgia had made the house hers.
“We think a week is a reasonable amount of time for you to get out of the house. Meanwhile, Georgia will stay with me.”
Robbie realized they were waiting for him to say something.
He looked from the face of his wife to the face of her lover. But his throat wouldn’t make words. His mind slashed with violent answers, which fit Rob Roy of the Elegant Demons but were wet noodles in the hands of Robbie Macgregor, husband.
No goddamn words were right. He squatted in front of his wife. She closed the blinds on all feeling and shut him out.
He looked up and tried to peer inside the heart of the woman who was stealing his wife. Nora stood behind brick walls.
“One minute,” he finally muttered.
He held his wife’s chin. He felt her head sink onto his hand, but she kept her eyes down. Georgia was no Julee, his first wife of long ago. Julee walked through the world chirping, chatting, and popping her gum. Georgia was a good woman, intelligent, spiritually aware, and — in his eyes — the best-looking woman in Marin County. So she’d explored herself and found she preferred women. My fury is stupid.
Robbie prodded himself to full height and shot a look down at Nora. Homely, tough, middle-aged, armored in classy suits and silver hair. Outspoken, honest, hard-nosed. At this moment he hated her. At any time he would refuse to negotiate with her. That’s what he had a lawyer for, his best friend, Gianni Montella.
He hurled the words he spoke like boulders. “I’ll be gone day after tomorrow.” He let them feel the weight of the boulders. “Anything to say, say it to Gianni.”
Georgia blinked tears downward.
Robbie clenched his stomach to keep from throwing up. He turned and slammed his back to them.
As their shoes clicked and padded away, they sounded out Robbie’s silent words all the way to the front door. I despise you. I despise this house. I despise this too-too Marin County. I despise the music business. And, even more mutely, I despise myself as a fool.
At the heavy, carved door Georgia turned. “Robbie?” She waited until he looked around. “It’s not just about Nora. It’s about you. I can’t find you. I lost us.”
He ignored the words. Though she shut the door gently, he heard a slam, one that sounded like it was inside him.
Chapter 4: HOW DO WE GET THERE FROM HERE?
Robbie sat at his own bar, drank two Anchor Steams, and put the third back. He knew what to do — go ask the one person who always had wise words for him. Robbie needed his grandfather, and he needed him big-time. Top of his car down, and time for a visit.
In his Alfa he zipped through the tunnel just north of the city and cruised into the world’s finest vista — the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay. The city’s spires caught light and held it. To the west stretched the vast Pacific. It was a perfect day with the kind of clarity that comes rarely, an extraordinary gift. He could have seen, maybe, a hundred miles out to sea, but he didn’t glance that way. He listened to his own heartbeat. That was surprising. The double-thump drummed freedom, freedom, freedom.
Grandpa, here I come.
Robbie’s only relative now lived in the Columbarium, a sanctum of the deified dead in the middle of Pacific Heights. Like a grand old dowager, the Columbarium faced the world in the style of her youth, Beaux Arts, a high-flown elegance.
Her function was simple: She housed the ashes of San Francisco’s finest and quirkiest. Here they rested forever, in a fairyland that fulfilled their mannered or freakish dreams.
Grandfather Angus Stuart first brought Robbie here, just after he came home from his stint in the army. Though the Columbarium had a caretaker and guide, Grandfather Angus conducted his own tour. “This is the end you come to,” he said, “when you waste your life on society.” Grandfather Angus was a lifelong socialist, and started as an IWW man, one of Harry Bridges’ stevedores during the days when unions ruled the docks.
“Look here now. Here’s a man gone to his rest, and on his urn are two martini shakers. Sums up his life, don’t it, and a wasted life it was. Here’s another’n, gone to his grave with a big cigar and a highball glass for a memorial.” Grandpa snorted in disgust.
“Now this lady, per’aps she wasn’t such a wastrel.” Her niche featured a big ceramic baseball in front of a painted backdrop and tiny players surrounding it. “Loved the game, she did, and the Giants. A magnetic key turns on that little light, and the robotic players make motions of throwing, catching, and hitting. Those grown-ups and kids in the bleachers there, they cheer for the team. Nothing beats passion. It’s the only reason for being.
“Look here, now, at this niche.” It bore two tobacco canisters behind a glass wall, Balkan Sobranie brand, but no legend bearing the name of the deceased. Robbie was antsy — the place would give anyone the creeps. “Pay attention! I want you to put me to rest here.”
“Grandpa?”
“Yes, right here. When I was a young man, I had two friends, name of Brian Connery and Hamish McDougal. Real mates we was, did everything together. One night we pooled our cash and made the bet of our lives. The headlines had been beating the drums for the big fight between the new heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Louis, and Max Schmeling. Everyone knew a war was coming, and this was America vs. Germany, freedom vs. fascism, our way vs. theirs. Note, Robbie, that it was the first time a black man carried the flag of American ideals.
“It was the purest patriotism to place a bet, and we won a bundle. We celebrated with Laphroaig, and decided to go afloat on that prince of Scotch Whisky for a month. Then Brian, he was the thinker, had a different idea. “Two bottles, then let’s go buy a spot in the Columbarium.”
Says I, “There’s only rich stiffs in that place.”
“’Exactly,’ says Brian. ‘That place needs a working man to pollute the cologne of the swells’.”
“Hamish and me, stinking drunk, we laughed and come down here with Brian and bought this niche. We drew straws for which of us should rest forever among the bleeding rich. I lost.” He fixed Robbie with his eyes. “So you will put me right here,” said Grandfather Angus. “Swear it.”
When Grandfather Angus went to his reward in great age, Robbie dutifully deposited the ashes inside the two tobacco canisters.
Now he stood spread-legged before the man who felt like his real father. There were no benches or other seats in the Columbarium, which was a nuisance. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and read the words engraved on the plate below the canisters.
ANGUS STUART, 1910–1995
WARRIOR FOR HIS PEOPLE
DEFENDER OF THE POOR
REST IN PEACE
Robbie had been an agnostic for twenty years, or what he sometimes called a Seventh Day Absentist. Nevertheless, he said a prayer. Then he held a Sobranie out toward the canister, a toast to the old man. If Grandfather Angus was hovering nearby, nothing he’d like better than a puff of strong Turkish tobacco. But a hint was all Angus would get — no smoking allowed inside The Palace of the Dead.
“Light it,” said a sepulchral voice. Robbie turned into a head of frizzy hair at the level of his chest. A bony face gazed up at Robbie, skeletal except for the eyes, which were mad, lit with the avidity of the devotee. “It’s all right. I have the honor of being the caretaker here. Light it.”
Robbie did, took a deep drag, and blew the smoke toward Grandfather Angus’s ashes. He offered a cigarette to the caretaker but got a smiling shake of the head.
“Does he ever speak to you?”
Robbie stubbed out the cigarette, thinking. Somewhere in this caretaker of the dead burned an ancient and mystic flame twisted wrong. “Not directly. No. But right now he’d probably like a little piping.”
“The bagpipes?” asked the caretaker. “I don’t know much about them.”
Robbie said, “Perhaps you could read a Robbie Burns poem for him. He loved Robbie Burns. Don’t all Scots?” He heard the skepticism in his own voice.
The caretaker whisked Robbie’s comment aside. “I know. Some people think I’m crazy. But I’ve found that if I’m to spend my days among these dead, I must befriend them. Maybe it keeps me sane. And it seems essential. Their lives continue through me, through my stories of them. I yearn to pass them along to other pilgrims who come here.”
Those eyes gave Robbie the willies.
“You said he’s your grandfather. Were you close?”
Robbie took in a deep breath and let it out. “Lived with him when I was a teenager. My mother’s father. Grandfather Angus.”
“You don’t say now.”
What the hell! The weirdo was doing a bad Scots’ brogue.
They looked into each other, one man a hungry skeleton, the other a car wreck and wandering soul.
“My Grandma,” Robbie said, “she died early on. Then it was just me and Grandpa Angus — my mother was off chasing romance. Pretty soon she married an accountant and moved to Ohio. Me and Grandpa, we lived in the old apartment, rented out the downstairs for a shop, made ends meet. We were the gravity of each other’s lives. When I think of him, I start striding big, like him. Scots all the way, he was, with a fighting spirit.”
Somehow Robbie wanted to talk about his family, and this man had the need to taste these lives and swallow them whole. Robbie looked at the caretaker and understood. The man was less a guardian of the dead than a spirit cannibal.
“I’m a musician,” Robbie said, as if that were a shield. Looked at the strange man once more. “Think I’d better go now.”
“Glad to hear your stories, Mr. Macgregor.”
Robbie’s stomach went into a double knot. How’d this ghoul know his name? “I won’t be seeing you again,” Robbie said.
“Everyone comes back, sooner or later.”
Robbie leveled him with a gaze. “Give me a moment alone with him, will you?”
“Certainly.” He wafted away.
Robbie turned back to the canisters.
Deep breath. He relit the Balkan Sobranie and blew smoke toward the canisters. “So long, Grandpa.” Robbie kissed his fingers, touched them to the glass, and strode out. There was a friend to see, things to do.
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Originally published at medium.com on March 1, 2018.
