Magnetic Field(s) Read online

  “ ‘Hi, you must be Connie. I’m your Uncle Daniel. Is your mother home?’ ”

  “ ‘No, Uncle Daniel. She went out with Uncle Malcolm. She told me she wouldn’t be home all night and I have to stay here all by myself. Would you like to come in for a glass of lemonade?’ ”

  “ ‘Why, I’d love to, Connie.’ ”

  Perfect.

  “Do you think anyone actually lives in Ely?” David asked as they walked along its main street in the gathering dusk, trying to choose a casino in which to lose the ten dollars apiece they had allowed themselves.

  “Sure,” Jane said, “and some of these people call it home.”

  The air of the West felt different—thinner and drier, he thought. There was a difference too in the openness of the perceptual field. When you looked, as he did now, straight ahead into the failing light of late summer evening, you saw ground and buildings, a distant horizon with maybe some craggy mountains to mark it and then, above that, the sky. In New York City your perceptual field was absolutely jammed with city—with buildings and people, cars, the whole cacophony of urban geometry. There was no horizon. In the Hudson Valley and the area around the Taconic Parkway, even as far east as the Berkshires, the horizon was always pushed near—a succession of broad, shallow valleys. But here in the West the sense of a nearly horizonless openness and possibility was overwhelming. Some people could call these literally wide-open spaces home. But not he. He needed a sense of structure and of limit to play against.

  That was one reason it felt so good to be actually coming home. For most of this summer they had been away, staying at friends’ or relatives’ houses on their trip East, and then for two months at the Mortimers’, and the prospect now of being in his own house again was almost palpably sweet. To stand again on the stairs, looking down into the living room as the afternoon light came through the tall casement windows, and feel the spaces of the house as they enfolded him and his life with all the details of his and Jane’s choosing—the bird kites on the wall, the neon cocktail glass the Riordans had given them, which they turned on now mostly only for parties.

  The Riordans. Daniel. Daniel, it seemed to him, had always enjoyed the house that he and Annie had lived in now for—what was it—seven years? It was not a big house, but the spaciousness of its rooms made it comfortable, the fact that you could look all the way through the house. From the deck that Daniel had built overlooking the backyard with its functioning vegetable garden, you could look straight through the dining room and living room and out the front bay window that looked down on Dolores Park, and beyond that, the city, and beyond that, the Bay. Daniel had built the deck; he had terraced the backyard and brought in sacks of topsoil. He had terraced the front yard and consulted with a landscape architect about how to plant it. He was always involved with projects—painting or stripping paint or building shelves or organizing storage space in the basement.

  During the past two years, had Daniel stood in the kitchen picking shreds of meat off the carcass of a chicken at two or so in the morning when he could not sleep, and had he then felt the self he had, the self that was his as it was conscious of the spaces of these rooms, the birches outside the window over the sink, the funky old ceramic dish David and Jane had given them that said “The road to a friend’s house is never long”? Had he sat in the dark living room while Annie was asleep upstairs and quietly clinked the ice in his glass to drink a toast to this city whose lights now gave themselves to his view? Had he gotten up with the morning light flooding the bathroom and been only-half aware of its tiles?

  Or had he had that being with Connie, to drift off to sleep in her apartment, wrapped in the knowledge of its sliding glass doors and their aluminum tracks? Had he looked at his own face in Connie’s mirror when he shaved in the morning, taking for granted the tub behind him with its clear plastic shower curtain bordered in red to look like the cover of Time magazine?

  And her, Connie (was that Constance? or Cornelia? or?), what knowledge did he have of her? In The External World he’d written a story about a strange man who wandered through the stacks of the library, taking down books at random and reading only their dedication pages: he’d never admitted to anyone that the man was himself. Connie now was like one of those books that that man looked into as if he were looking into an office that was someone else’s, seeing through the partly open door only a thin slice of the end wall and part of a couch covered with an afghan. What did he see of her when she had taken all her clothes off? What did he taste of her in their most abandoned lovemaking, when she tilted back her head and closed her eyes, leaving him lying there looking at the skin of her face and her eyelids?

  With “Uncle Daniel” and the “farmer’s daughter,” they had been inspired. Her apartment had been their world. They would run together in the Presidio, but there was almost no place else where they could be absolutely certain of not meeting someone who knew them—or him. They did not even go to movies together at first for fear of that. It was only close to the end of the first year that they began checking out the movie listings in places like Daly City, Orinda and Fremont. Then, on one of his “fishing trips,” they took the silver Amtrak train down to Santa Barbara for one of her modeling assignments. The art director wanted to use some tony resort down there as a backdrop, and then she would tape a commercial for tampons. They stayed at a wonderful beachfront motel and flew back. The ride down was something quite new. There were other people around. This was the outside world, and they were out in it.

  Daniel could not remember anymore whose idea it was, but somehow it got decided that they would separate and then he would “pick her up” in the club car. After she left him, he looked out the window. What town was this they were passing through at half speed, some bell clanging patiently somewhere, that seemed emptied of its people in the gathering dusk? They passed a post office, but he could not read the sign. Coming Home was playing at the local movie theater. Laundry was hanging from the clotheslines in the backyards. As they passed a school yard, he saw two kids playing basketball: one of them jumped and sank a perfect twelve-footer, the ball touching nothing but the net. At the edge of the woods, in the front yard of a large white house with many roofs slanting at odd angles, a young boy was shooting a bow and arrow at a target Daniel could barely see in the failing light. The sense of space was so engrossing that for a moment he found he had even forgotten Connie, and he jumped to his feet.

  He sat down at her table in the club car and put his hand on hers, wanting to tell her how he felt, how the long, moving, constantly swaying space of the train had affected him: a kind of nostalgia or dislocation in which suddenly he felt closer to her than ever before. This was love, he knew now, more than his love for her beauty, for her perfection, but a love for the place—hard to describe in any other word—the zone or area that their being together like this in the outside world, actually moving through that world, created. It was the first time he had thought of using the phrase “our life.” “This is our life, Connie, and I love it.” He felt his eyes well up with the intensity of his affection.

  “Pardon me, mister,” she said, pulling her hand away huffily. “I don’t even know you!”

  They decided to check out the singles bars around town because no one he knew would have dared to go near one. At first she would go in alone and let herself be approached by single men, whom she would put off, one by one, while he watched from a seat behind some ferns at the other end of the room. Then, while the rejected dudes were still milling around, he would go over and make his move. She would melt for him and they would leave together while the scorned men eyed them surreptitiously.

  He began to see her picture around town, and once, on the wall of the Montgomery Street BART station, she was looking directly at him from across the tracks holding an enormous kosher salami. Something in Hebrew blazed out at him in red characters from the wall beside her perfect face. He had no idea what the writing said, but he looked into her eyes and looked at the way
her hands held that salami and he felt the full weight of his happiness.

  Their final wrinkle on the singles bar was for him to go in first and get a seat at the bar. Then she would come in, sit alone and let herself be approached. On a busy Friday night when she wore a satiny cocktail dress with absolutely nothing on underneath it, the weight of her breasts moving visibly under the cloth and her nipples just there, she had four or five men hitting on her at once—an account executive, a young engineer in a woolen shirt, a redhead who owned a string of hardware stores (probably bullshit), an Arab who said he was studying architecture at Berkeley. She let them fall all over her while Daniel “ignored” them. Suddenly she spotted him. “Who the hell is that?”

  “Who?”

  “That man at the end of the bar, with the salt-and-pepper gray hair?”

  “Him? He’s old! That man looks to me like he’s at death’s door. And too weak with age to knock. Think he can get it up? No way, José.”

  “What do you want to bet he’ll get it up when I lick his balls?”

  Silence.

  Then she would go over and fawn on him till he disdainfully allowed her to pick him up. Daniel would put on his raincoat languorously, looking over the field he had just vanquished.

  They stopped doing that after the night they enjoyed it so much in Henry Africa’s that they took the same act to Perry’s on Union Street. One of the young guys Connie had rejected at the first bar showed up at Perry’s, asking, “Hey, what the hell is this, Candid Camera?”

  What the hell was this? David thought now. Where the hell was it that his friend had his being? Which of the faces Daniel presented to the world was his real face and how the hell did he find that reality acknowledged or affirmed? Where was it that Daniel actually lived his life? And there, driving across the flat open desert strewn with tumble-weed, David wondered also, as every moment brought him closer and closer to his home, where he had lived for ten years with Jane and their son, where he created his music and paid his bills, and ate his meals and dreamed his dreams, where he felt hungry and made love with his wife and jammed blues with her and Danny, where he had stood at any time of day and night tasting the quality of the spaces of those rooms, by himself and sometimes even when people were over, either for dinner or to play, those high beamed ceilings, those quirky alcoves—where was it that he had his own being?

  The hard part about getting home to their own house was not learning to work the new burglar-alarm system, but adjusting to the fortress mentality it implied. The bell box (plainly visible from the street) and the signs and stickers all announced affluence and distrust, a paranoia that everyone accepted as simply being realistic. “Well, you’ve got to do something.” And the fortress reasserted itself every time they left or came home, when they had to arm the system or turn it off with a little key that now of course each one of them had to have. If, when they got ready to leave, they had remembered to close all the relevant doors and windows, an LED on the panel showed them a green light. If they weren’t getting that green light, they then had to go over the whole circuit—upstairs and down—till they found the door or window that was open and then closed it. Then, holding the front door open, they had to turn the little key in the control panel, which now showed them a red LED, indicating the system was armed. The alarm then gave them twelve seconds to get out and close the door. Coming in was the same story in reverse. As soon as they unlocked and pushed open the front door, they heard a high-pitched whistle that gave them twelve seconds to find the alarm key, insert it into the panel and turn it. Once or twice they just didn’t move quickly enough or dropped the key or had to shuffle bags of groceries around, and before they could get the key into the panel their twelve seconds were up and they heard what a burglar would hear if he broke in—a breath-catching clangor of bells and sirens that they were told could be heard a block away.

  “Good,” David said. “I don’t want a silent alarm that will allow the cops to sneak up and catch the guy. I want a really loud bell that will scare him away. I just don’t want to come home again and find some dude coming out of my backyard with my tape deck in his hands. God knows we haven’t got much—outside of the equipment in the studio, I think the alarm system itself cost more than anything we’ve got. It isn’t even the property, really, since the insurance will replace that. It’s the fact that the guy could pull a knife or a gun—and even beyond that, just the horrible feeling of being violated, of having your territory, your life, invaded like that.”

  In the pile of mail the Jerk family had left for them was a letter from the Career Criminal Division of the D.A.’s office telling them that Albert Boone had pleaded guilty to three counts of burglary and one count each of car theft and carrying a concealed weapon, and had been sentenced to a series of five two-year sentences, which were to be served concurrently. In two years—maybe less—the son of a bitch would be out on the street again. They also had to complete their dealings with the insurance company about replacing the receiver and headphones and some turquoise-and-silver things Jane had bought years before in Albuquerque. Then David had to take the turntable in to get the cut cables repaired and the stylus replaced.

  So the robbery was very much on their minds when the heat wave hit a few days after they got back, when the temperature barely got below ninety, even at night, and was well over a hundred in the daytime, and it went on for damn near a week. Nobody could remember anything like it in San Francisco, and David had to keep reminding Danny, “When you feed the livestock”—handing him the cat food—“be sure their water dish is full. They can get dehydrated so easily in this kind of heat.”

  “Well, if they get that bad they can always drink out of the fish pond. They do already.”

  “Danny—”

  “Dad—”

  That night about ten he came out of the studio and stepped into the downstairs bathroom to shave. The heat reminded both him and Jane of their two months at the Mortimers’, when they would make love in the afternoon, and earlier that day they had got a little turned on standing there in the backyard necking. Now he would shave and go on upstairs where she would be waiting for him in their bedroom wearing something sexy and they would make sure Danny was in bed and then— Both the cats were prowling around his feet as he rinsed off the last of the shave cream, looking into the mirror and thinking, So this is me, huh? Well, Jane loves it.

  But when he looked down he saw that the cats were meowing their heads off and their fur was all fluffed out. When he tried to pick them up to put them out, they both squirmed free and hid behind the washing machine. “What the hell?”

  He looked out through the glass panels of the back door, but could not see anything. He opened the door and looked out. Still nothing, but he could hear the bamboo wind chimes that Jane had hung from a corner of the roof clicking and tinkling away, and also a loud crunching sound, like something crisp being chewed. It took him a moment or two to realize something was wrong: the wind chimes were moving, but there wasn’t any wind. The crunching, he figured, was one of the neighbor’s cats who came into their yard periodically to rip off some of the dry cat food they left in bowls out on the patio for Girl and Geoffrey, along with their water dish. So as he walked out into the darkness he was already yelling, “All right, scoot! Get out of here!” and clapping his hands sharply.

  But the crunching did not stop as it always did when the neighborhood cats scurried across the yard and over the fence, and the wind chimes kept rattling, and now something splashed once, loudly, in the fish pond. In the darkness of the corner where the cats’ dishes sat, something big moved grayly. “What the hell?”

  He backtracked up onto the deck and found the switch and turned on the light, and there they were, four raccoons, looking directly at him with eyes that were serenely unperturbed or threatened by his sudden appearance. One was reclining languorously on the roof, reaching down casually from time to time to pull on the string, rattling the chimes. Even now, looking straight at him, the raccoon
reached down and calmly twanged the string. Two were in the fish pond, one holding a dripping paw to its mouth while the other looked away from him now to the water it was sitting in and made a scoop into the water and brought the paw up, dripping, to its mouth.

  “They’re after the fish!” David heard himself say aloud. He could only stand there with his mouth open. The closest one was not more than ten feet away, still busy scooping up pawfuls of the cats’ food, dipping them into the water dish and then stuffing them into its mouth. Crunch.

  There was something about the way they sat there, in his yard, as if they had appropriated it, as if it were theirs and they were putting up with his interruption with a disdainful patience. They infuriated him, with their bandit masks and their sharp little teeth and their sublimely unconcerned eyes. He yelled at them, “Get the hell out of here! Get out!” But they only continued to look at him. “There is no telling what some fool like this might do,” they seemed to tell each other as they stopped crunching and eating and twanging just to be able to keep an eye on him better, but it was obvious that they did not feel in any way threatened by his presence.

  He did not want to go down off the deck into the yard, for fear they might rush him. They couldn’t hurt him very much, but there was no telling whether or not they were rabid or carried who knows what diseases, and he wasn’t about to take any stupid chances. Clearly, he thought, they’ve come down from Mount Sutro, driven out of their usual hangouts by the drought and the heat. Raccoons don’t have any salivary glands, so they have to soak their food or they can’t eat it. So now here they are in my backyard. They’ve totally freaked out the cats, they’re ripping off their food and God knows how many of the fish they’ve eaten or terrorized. He might have sent Danny out here to feed the cats, and in the dark the boy might have tripped over that one—and then what? What if they were rabid and one of them had bitten him?