Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [72]
I turned up the volume. “If I said that I loved you, would you turn away … well, that’s all right, baby, ’cos I already know … believe me, baby, we got no choice …” I saw Larry, Ham, me, chasing aquamarine birds down terraced fields of emerald. “ ‘Come here,’ ” I sang along with the tape, patting the cozy space beside me, “ ‘come here, come here, come here, got to be closer to you.’ ”
“Got to check on the roast,” Ham said. “Wonder what’s keeping them, must have a lot to catch up on.” He slipped on a starched, white, professional-chef’s apron. “The trick to perfect chicken is a five-hundred-degree oven. I learned that from my last ex.”
I kicked my shoes off, and stretched my legs out on the banquette. The big toe of my right foot touched the boom-box’s STOP button, then traced huge hearts on the plush velvet nap of a cushion. I felt like pulling up anchor, dancing naked on deck, steering Last Chance into the eye of Hurricane Faustine. The boat tuned in to my mood, rocked on violent waves.
Ham got off on the subject of ex-wives. “Tess gave me the apron,” he said. “You’ve met Tess, right? She was at Fred’s wake?” He yanked down the door of the oven. A whoosh of hot, spicy air made his face red. “The mitts, cap and apron were her divorce-anniversary present. She was a CIA dropout.”
“You were married to a spy?”
“CIA as in the Culinary Institute of America.” Ham was recharging bitterness. “I got the Wüsthof knives in the settlement, the Chinese meat cleaver, the Japanese woks, the All-Clad pots. She kept the house.”
I arched my neck. Frankie once told me that I had the sexiest neck and clavicle he’d ever seen. Ham didn’t notice the seductive stretch.
“There’s justice, though. In the Oakland fire, the house went up in smoke.”
“What do you have to be so bitter about, Ham?”
He caught me eyeing the table set for two, the speckled orchid, the colored candles. “I’m not bitter. Who says I’m bitter? Did I ask for any insurance money?”
“Thanks for inviting me to stay for dinner,” I joked. “I’d love to. How about a splash more wine?”
Ham reached behind him and plucked the bottle nearest him off the wine rack. It was another red. “Who’s this friend that Jess’s dumped us for? What’s he written?”
“She met him in Asia.”
“Oh, Asia. She really did Asia.” He uncorked the bottle. “That makes the guy a hippie burnout.”
“If you’re part ethnic Chinese, part French Vietnamese, definitely part Pakistani and part you-never-figured-out-what, what does that make you?”
“Not a bad Merlot,” Ham said. He carried the bottle and two paper cups to the banquette, and slid in beside me. “The city council in the People’s Republic of Berkeley?”
I unlaced his running shoes. He finally took the hint, and played along, easing his feet out of the shoes. I peeled off his socks. No Mona Lisas on these socks. Just over-washed, yellowing white absorbent cotton. “And if you add half Californian to it all?” My toes stroked the feet’s pale, clammy arches.
Ham kissed me on the lips. “Trouble?” He kissed me again.
“Force of nature,” I reminded him.
“A fault creep,” he amended, working on the metal button of his baggies.
“What’s that?” I shrugged my shirt off.
Ham explained between kisses. About creeping and gliding and sliding movements along fault lines, pleasant pressure—“think of yourself as the Bay Area with fault lines running through,” he said, “and your body is being worked on by a master masseur”—and then, wham, bang, whoa! the Big One breaks the body in two. He calculated creep rates with his lips on my fingers, slip rates on my toes. “Happens every hundred years or so,” he whispered. “I don’t want to be around for the Big Quake.”
A quickie on a banquette in a houseboat may be no competition for acid-high sex with god-demon-snakeman, but for one nanosecond that night my brain could sleep. The immediate past and the about-to-happen both receded. It was my oldest past that suddenly surged forward.
I was on a country bus, tasting dust and diesel. My new Bata sandals were wedged between