Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [58]
“No.” She must not have covered the mouthpiece as she turned her head away and coughed again. “But it’ll drive the ghost away.”
“Did you say ghost, Jess?” I couldn’t see Jess barefoot and pregnant in a Marin kitchen, but I could picture Fred’s ghost fluttering above our heads at his own wake.
“The sins of my youth have come back to haunt me big time,” she said.
I know about the blackmailer; Jess. “You are the fox, my love for you the bloodhound.” Fred knew, too; now Fred’s dead.
“Devi, there actually is one favor you could do for me.”
“I was serious when I said I wanted to help.”
“Take over my authors for the rest of the week?” The boss begging her employee to work overtime, while she hits on the employee’s lover, without overtime pay.
Why should I mind? We go back a long way, Jess and I, in the rejection business. I’ve bench-pressed disappointment. “No problema,” I assured her. “Just leave it to me.”
I hung up on Jess, and rode the 43 Masonic to Clay Street. Then I strolled around the block that the Leave It to Me office was on. Five times I circled that block. Five times felt reasonable, downright biblical, because I was following Loco Larry and Beth Hendon, holding hands, laughing and walking just ahead of me. Whatever animosity there had been between them that night in Lafayette, they’d made up. No misunderstanding that couldn’t be straightened out, Beth. No problema that can’t be solved, Larry. In that generous mood, I ceased my pacing.
The “nobody’s in right now to take your call …” tape was rolling as I entered the agency office. Then a cheery male voice came on. “You can flee, but you can’t hide, ma chère. See you in Sausalito. À bientôt!”
Loco Larry’d prepared me for just this. Things were out there, he’d warned, ordinary things, harmless everyday things, but they were going to get me. They were stalking and baiting me. I didn’t have Larry’s night-vision implants, but I was starting to sense them, smell them, feel their damp heavy breath on my skin.
The voice on the answering machine left me alone. I updated the itineraries of Jess’s authors for the week—she had a Random House novelist, a retired politician with a Simon & Schuster memoir and a New Age nutritionist with a MindWorks Press best-seller—faxed off the changes to the publicists, gave up the idea of a decaf and avocado-and-sprouts sandwich at Middle Grounds for another walk around the block, heard a Chihuahua bark insults at me and disclosed a phantom handgun to scare it, watched a tree weep leaves, then locked the office door against more things.
Two more messages from Jess’s tormentor were on the tape. “You put me through hell, but I forgive you.” And “Don’t call me, I’ll call you. That’s a promise, ma chère.”
I was about to call Jess when I remembered that she was with Ham in Sausalito, probably bunked down and in a consoling mode. The second-last time I was on Ham’s houseboat, I made a baked-goat-cheese salad, Ham uncorked a bottle of Merlot, and for dessert we invented pleasures that women in their fifties, even buff ones like Jess, might find uncomfortable. Those good times hadn’t receded far enough. I put the phone back on its cradle and speed-read two hundred and thirty-one pages of the Random House novel. If I got it right, terrorists from outer space kidnap the first lady and plan to clone her in the millions. When I got home to Beulah Street, past Stoop Man and the others, outer space didn’t feel all that far away.
That night the Somali family invited me for dinner. It was more feast than dinner, and they didn’t exactly invite me, I just hung around the microwave with my Weight Watcher’s cabbage rolls in the kitchen we shared, and made an inspired monologue on the multicultural riches of San Francisco while the youngest of the Somali women stewed goat meat in sneezy-hot spices, then asked me to reach for a heavy platter on the top shelf to serve the bread topped with stew. They ate with their fingers, out of that one dish. Family bonding over a communal