Body Copy - Michael Craven [34]
Then he said, “So, what’s Darryl like?”
Nina, looking at her bookshelf, yanked her head around and said, with some terror in her eyes, “How’d you know about Darryl?”
“Because he’s right here. I read his tag.”
Darryl had entered silently, had slinked across the floor, and had quietly, deftly hopped up on a stool next to Tremaine. He was sitting, almost posing, looking right at Nina.
“Oh, Darryl’s great. Does what he pleases, all the time.”
“Darryl?”
“This little girl on my block back in Connecticut named him. He was just a kitten. Sean and I, Sean’s my ex, got him from a neighbor, and we were walking home, and this little girl rode up on her bike and said, ‘You should name him Darryl.’ That’s all she said. So we did.”
Darryl looked at Tremaine with those magical, wild, 105
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beautiful cat eyes. And then one of Darryl’s eyes, just one of them, slowly closed and opened. It was a slow, strange, cat wink, that said to Tremaine, I know you, man, you’ve been here before. And then Darryl sprung down from the stool and zipped out the open sliding glass door, just as Tremaine had.
Tremaine left Nina’s feeling good, looking forward to his next report with her, even if he didn’t have anything to say.
Driving away from Nina’s, Tremaine thought about their conversation, particularly the divorce part. Thought about the passage he’d read of her book and how much he liked it, knew it. He pulled out a smoke and lit it up.
Man, it’s brave for Nina to pull out the memories from her divorce and turn them into something. He wanted to read more. Maybe he needed to read more. Tremaine knew the pain of divorce, how it hurt to think about it at all, even for a second. And how, even though he’d never be back with Susan, some of him still loved her, and always would.
He dropped down onto the PCH, the sky black now.
He couldn’t help it; he was going over the things that led to his split. He remembered, first, when he and Susan met, how it felt so right. And then as time passed, how he began to slowly shut down, almost like a dying machine. He couldn’t control it. She was always there for him, beautiful, bright, loving, everything. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t function as one of two. And so he, almost in a predetermined way, began to destroy it. He thought about how eventually he just turned off, trapped in a permanent 106
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state of ambivalence. He remembered how Susan had said that his inability to love her all the way was a result of the incident during his surfing days, the incident they never talked about. And Tremaine thought now as he did then that she was right. And it made him sick to think about it, how she’d said she’d do anything to help him get over it, how she’d questioned why he didn’t want to try. Questioned why he seemed to want the solitary life she had pulled him out of. And how she’d eventually began to accuse him of simply being afraid, of fearing the intimacy she’d offered him.
Bingo. Susan, hitting the target dead center. But, Tremaine thought now, as he had then, he just couldn’t see not doing what he did. Leaving. He remembered, it was crystal clear, how he’d left her, standing there, beautiful and willing to keep trying. He knew, then, now, always, that he was better off alone.
Yeah, Tremaine thought, pulling into the trailer park transfixed on the wretched memory of his divorce, Nina’s brave to dredge that up. But she’ll get something out of it.
And other people will, too.
Me, probably.
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C H A P T E R 1 6
Tremaine woke up, 7:00 a.m., feeling good, feeling rested, lying in his bed in the back of the trailer. The first thought that popped into his head: Who killed Roger Gale and why? The second thought that popped into his head: Where’s my L.A. Times? I’m going to crucify that goddamn Jumble. And he did. He sat there at his desk, coffee not ready yet, but that’s okay, he didn’t need its help, not this morning. The words were: ossue, purep, yathap, and kiptec. The riddle was What the timber boss took to work. His “_ _ _