The Sweetman Curve Read online

  ‘Okay,’ he said, finding it extremely difficult to smile. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Vicki reached across the table and held his hand. She looked very serious. ‘I must admit I had a fantasy about Ed. I had this brilliant vision of some kind of athletic superstud, all bulging jockey shorts and gleaming teeth. And I must admit,’ she said, so quietly that he could hardly hear, ‘the idea of it turned me on.’

  John slowly shook his head in disbelief. ‘Are you telling me that we went through all these arguments, all this fighting, just because you thought you fancied some childhood superjock from Cannon Balls, Minnesota?’

  ‘Cannon Falls.’

  ‘Falls, balls, who cares.’

  Vicki was silent with embarrassment for a moment, and then she nodded.

  ‘He called me Mpnday,’ she said. ‘He asked me to come out for dinner.’

  ‘So instead of going to see Phoebe, like you told me, you went out with him?’

  She nodded again. ‘It was terrible to lie. But I didn’t know what else to do. I had to see him again. I had to find out if the fantasy was true.’

  ‘Well,’ he asked her, ‘what was he like?’

  She looked up at him, her expression full of regret for deceiving him, but bursting with amusement at her own absurd attempt to rekindle a long lost love affair.

  ‘He was terrible,’ she said. ‘He was so terrible. He was about as casual as H. R. Haldeman in his Sunday best. I met him at Dino’s and you know how damned dark it is in there. I didn’t spot him when I first walked in, because if I had, I would have turned right around and made a run for it. He was such a nerd, I can’t tell you. In the end, I told him I was a lesbian, just to get rid of him. I told him I was madly in love with a girl from Mishawaka, Indiana, and that our only problem was that our busts were both so healthily large that we couldn’t get near each other.’

  John stared at her for almost a minute, saying nothing. Then, quite softly, he said: ‘You know something, I’m beginning to love you like I never loved anyone before. You lesbian, you.’

  She leaned over and kissed him. ‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘It shows.’

  They finished their wine, and then they climbed up the stone steps to the street. John’s powder-blue Chrysler Imperial Crown was parked a little way down, its roof gleaming in the afternoon sun. John opened the door for Vicki, and then walked around the front of the car and climbed in himself.

  As he sorted out his ignition key, he chuckled. ‘I wish I could have been hiding in Dino’s when you walked in and saw that childhood sweetheart of yours. I think I would have ruptured myself laughing.’

  Vicki pretended to look annoyed, and tilted her nose up.

  ‘Aw, come on,’ he told her. ‘You weren’t to know that he’d grown up a nerd.’

  She kissed him. ‘I think we’d better drop the subject, or we’re going to be late for your dear papa.’

  He started the motor, and pulled out into the traffic of Sunset Boulevard. This was one of his favourite cars of the Fifties; he had spent two years finding one and two thousand dollars restoring it. It had an immense grille of chrome teeth, an eleven-foot wheelbase, and twin fins at the back with torpedo-shaped stoplights. It bounced and glided along on air suspension, and their next-door neighbour up in Topanga Canyon, a sad and dedicated environmentalist called Mel, had christened it U.S.S. Enterprise.

  John used the forecourt of the Hyatt Hotel to turn the car around and head west, into a dazzling sun that was already beginning to fall. Vicki turned on the radio, and snuggled up next to him, her hand ruffling his hair and her big breasts pressed against his arm. The tangerine light of mid-afternoon crisscrossed them in bright slices as they drove along Sunset through Beverly Hills, past the pink Beverly Hills Hotel and the gates of Bel-Air, until they reached the curve that took them down to the overpass where the San Diego Freeway ran.

  The freeway was busier than usual, and John had to weave from lane to lane to keep his speed up. They were headed south, towards the airport, and the freeway was a glittering river of traffic, rising and falling over the hills and valleys of West Los Angeles and Mar Vista. The radio was playing: ‘You’re a native New Yorker… you should know the score by now…’

  Smog still hung in the air in dim veils as they passed Palms and Culver City. John coughed, and wondered how long you went on aching for a cigarette before the craving died away.

  Vicki said, ‘What’s your father like? Is he a fatherly father, or a buddy-buddy father?’

  ‘Oh, positively a fatherly father,’ said John, overtaking a brace of Hell’s Angels and a custom ranch wagon crowded with Chinese children. ‘I was expected to call him “sir” until I was twenty-one. But he’s a friend, too. He’s very understanding, you know, and he doesn’t have any prejudices about anything. One of nature’s real kind people.’

  He turned off at Sepulveda Boulevard, and drove in towards the airport. Then, with Vicki giving imaginative and confusing directions, he located the parking lot, and took a ticket at the booth. The parking attendant leaned out of his window, surveyed the Chrysler, and said ‘Who sold you that? Batman?’

  They were twenty minutes early. The flight from JFK wasn’t expected until ten after four, and so they ambled around the bookstalls, and then went to the bar for cocktails, a bloody mary and an old-fashioned, served by mini-skirted waitresses who looked like suburban America’s answer to Hugh Hefner.

  John said: ‘Isn’t it crazy? All of a sudden, I feel nervous.’

  *

  He was waiting behind the wheel of his silver Grand Prix at the junction of 83rd Street, Westchester, and Sepulveda Boulevard. The time by his digital clock was 3:57. He had seen the powder-blue Imperial pass by on its way to the airport, and he had called the United Airways desk from a phonebooth to check when the flight was due. He gave them twenty-five minutes after the flight touched down to pass this way again: disembarkation, baggage claim, parking lot, exit.

  Now it was time to lift the automatic out of its chamois holster, slide out the magazine, and carefully reload it. One cartridge went into the chamber, seven into the magazine. Each cartridge contained 4 1/2 grains of powder, and 105 grains of lead. Loaded, the automatic weighed 32 ounces. He hefted it in his hand, and slid it back into its holster.

  He lifted his mirrored sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept too well last night, because his neighbour’s dog had been barking. He’d been thinking of moving out of San Juan Avenue for a few months now, but somehow he never seemed to be able to get around to finding a new place to go. At least his part of Venice was quiet, and nobody bothered him. He could sit on his bed all evening, dismantling and cleaning his guns, and watching Kojak repeats on television, and that was the way he liked his life to be. Secure, private, orderly. He took his sheets to the laundromat every Thursday afternoon, ate a Chinese take-away every Saturday night, went to the sex movies Mondays, and spent all day in bed Sundays reading The Los Angeles Times, right down to the advertisements, for cut-price rococo bedroom furniture. Once a month or so, he drove up to Hollywood and picked up a whore, the younger the better, and blew fifty or sixty dollars indulging his fantasies. He had an electric ring for cooking, and on the back of his wardrobe door was Scotch-taped a photograph of Chesty Morgan, the lady with the 76-inch bust.

  He glanced at his clock. It was 4:04. Through the tinted glass of his car window, he could see people shopping, and a bunch of scruffy kids sitting on the steps of a rundown apartment building, chewing bubblegum and tossing jacks. He yawned. It was the first indication he had given all day that he was bored.

  Five

  Vicki caught sight of him first. She said, ‘Is that him? He looks so much like you!’

  And there he was, coming across the baggage hall, a tallish, grey-haired man in a brown herringbone tweed jacket, a fawn raincoat over his arm. He wore rimless eyeglasses, and his face had the thinness and softness of age, but he was unmistakably John’s father.

  They walked towards e
ach other, John and his father, and Vicki didn’t want to do anything else but stay by John’s side and watch them, because she’d never seen such open affection between a son and his father before. John held out his arms, and embraced his father close, feeling the roughness of his tweed jacket and smelling the lingering aroma of his favourite tobacco, Jacob’s Golden Returns.

  ‘Dad,’ said John. ‘It’s so damned good to see you.’ His father held him tight, and looked at him proudly. ‘You’ve grown younger,’ he said. ‘Is it California that does that to you, or giving up architecture?’

  ‘It’s good, clean living,’ smiled Vicki, and John’s father turned and saw her for the first time.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’ he nudged John. ‘It looks like you’ve found yourself a little bit more than sunshine around here.’

  John grinned. ‘Still the rampant old goat I know and love. Vicki, this is my father, William Cullen. Doctor William Cullen, to be strictly accurate. Dad, this is Vicki Wallace.’

  William Cullen, with his copy of Newsweek rolled up in his jacket pocket, bent forward and took Vicki’s hand, and kissed it.

  ‘Us doddery old fathers are always supposed to do chivalrous things like that,’ he smiled. ‘And besides that, it’s the only way we can get our rocks off.’ They all laughed, Vicki without a trace of embarrassment.

  They went to collect William’s luggage. They didn’t say very much as other people’s bags, trunks, plaid hold-alls, fishing-poles, buffalo-hide matching suitcase sets, and baby strollers went around and around on the carousel, but there was a warm feeling that surrounded them all, as if there was plenty to talk about later, and right now they just wanted to be out of this public place and alone together.

  At last, William’s battered green suitcase appeared, and John heaved it off the carousel. They walked out of the doors into the heat of the afternoon, and John led the way towards the parking lot.

  ‘Oh, this is bliss,’ said William. ‘Do you know what the temperature is in Jersey? Eight below, and still dropping.’

  ‘Don’t count on it staying like this,’ remarked John. ‘We’re having a heatwave.’

  ‘I don’t care if it snows,’ said William. ‘I haven’t had a vacation since your mother died.’

  ‘You can have the loft,’ John told him. ‘I know you like 1940s architecture, and it has a fine view of the back of Topanga fire station. Trash cans, worn-out firehoses, rusting ladders, everything.’

  They reached John’s Chrysler, and stowed the suitcase away next to Vicki’s motorbike. William took an admiring stroll around the car, and then said, ‘This is some kind of transport, huh? I know you sent me a Polaroid, but this thing has to be seen to be believed, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the triumph of money over good sense,’ said John, opening the door. ‘That’s what I like about it.’

  ‘You never did have any taste,’ said William, as he climbed in beside John and Vicki, and closed the car door. ‘I hate to think what would have happened to America if you’d have made the grade as an architect. Vulgar wouldn’t have been the word.’

  ‘Oh, I think everybody needs a little vulgarity now and again,’ said Vicki, snuggling up to John as they glided out of the car park and headed north on Sepulveda Boulevard.

  William wound down his window, and leaned his arm on the sill. ‘The trouble with your generation is that you think the Fifties were all rock’n’roll and high school crushes and borrowing your suffering father’s car keys. You never thought about anything that really mattered. You were too busy combing your pompadours and leaning on juke boxes.’

  ‘Are we going to get into a generation argument our first day together?’ asked Vicki, as they stopped for traffic signals at Manchester Avenue.

  ‘I’d rather get myself into a tub, to tell you the truth,’ said William. ‘I feel like I’ve been wearing the same shirt for five years.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said John, sniffing. ‘Maybe you should have sat in the back.’

  They were still laughing about that as they passed 83rd Street, six minutes ahead of the schedule that the tall man in the Grand Prix had estimated for them. John, driving his Imperial Crown through the mid-afternoon traffic and feeling buoyant with pleasure, didn’t notice the silver car emerge from the intersection behind them and follow them cautiously northward along Sepulveda.

  ‘Actually, I’m leading a very docile life these days,’ said William, taking out his briar pipe and his old leather tobacco pouch. ‘I think the trouble is that I’m too young for most of my senior colleagues’ wife-swapping parties, and too damned old for my sexy female students.’

  ‘So how do you pass your time?’ asked John. ‘Weaving macramé dictionary covers?’

  William smiled. ‘I wish I could. There’s probably more money in it than politics.’

  ‘You’re back with the equal rights crowd?’

  ‘Kind of. They’ve matured and developed now. We’re trying to work towards what we call a society of mutual respect. That is, we want individuals to be respected by their government, legally and morally; and we reckon that, in return, individuals will slowly grow to respect and trust their government. It’s going to be a long, slow process, but it has to happen. Government has gotten so impersonal today that it has to make a supreme effort to make contact with the folks who elect it.’

  ‘Pretty idealistic,’ remarked John, pulling up at the traffic signals just before the San Diego Freeway. He checked his mirror, and saw the silver Grand Prix drawing right up behind him. He couldn’t see the driver’s face, though – it was obscured by a triangular reflection of the concrete freeway overpass.

  The lights changed to green, and John drove under the bridge and turned up the freeway approach ramp. The Grand Prix followed.

  ‘I’ve been writing quite a few articles on the kind of conditions that we ought to impose on our next government,’ said William. ‘I brought some along to show you, if you’re interested. Thought they might appeal to that journal of yours. The Trenton Liberal liked them.’

  ‘L.A.’s kind of weirder than Trenton,’ said John, crossing two lanes of freeway traffic and putting his foot down. ‘I mean, they’re more into TA and mystic cults around here, rather than straightforward liberal politics. We met a guy at a party the other night who claimed he was Tutankhamun back from the dead. He even offered to show me his discarded bandages.’

  William grunted. ‘That’s nothing. I met a lecturer’s wife at a party and she offered to let me feel her corsets.’

  ‘I hope you took her up on it,’ grinned Vicki.

  John glanced at his rear view mirror. The silver Grand Prix was just emerging from behind a truck, and slowly overhauling them. John reached for the radio and said, ‘How about some music?’

  ‘Anything you like, so long as it isn’t country-western,’ said William.

  The Grand Prix was now drawing alongside them, on their right. John was touching sixty miles an hour, and the silver car was matching his speed. They drove neck-and-neck as far as the Santa Monica Freeway crossover, and then a Coca-Cola truck pulled out in front of the Grand Prix and forced it to slow down. John, oblivious, kept up his speed.

  William was sitting back comfortably, his hands in his lap, watching the concrete scenery flash past. ‘The last time I visited L.A. this freeway didn’t even exist,’ he told them. ‘Getting around was comparative hell.’ John moved across out of the left-hand lane, overtook a string of trucks, and then moved across, yet again to pass a dawdling ranch wagon with a trailing exhaust. He crossed back to the left-hand lane, and he glimpsed the silver Grand Prix again in his mirror.

  ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it?’ he said to his father. ‘I was real nervous about seeing you again. I didn’t know what I was going to say.’

  ‘You were nervous?’ laughed William. ‘I was having an acute attack of the sweaty palms.’

  ‘Now I’m convinced you should sit in the back.’

  The Grand Prix was catching up with them now, and
as they passed the Santa Monica Boulevard exit ramp, it was almost alongside. Then, it stayed where it was, on John’s blind side, a few feet behind them, not overtaking, not falling back. John glanced in his mirror and said, ‘What’s that creep doing?’

  They drove for a half-mile, side by side, and all the time the Grand Prix was hovering just out of John’s line of sight. William turned to look at it, and remarked, ‘That guy’s pretty damned close.’

  Abruptly, they heard a heavy metallic bang, which made John swerve out of nervous response.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he yelled. But instantly, there was another bang, and the car flinched as if it had been struck by a ten-pound hammer.

  ‘He’s shooting! John! He’s shooting!’ Vicki screamed.

  Desperate, John hit the gas hard, and the huge Chrysler surged forward. But the Grand Prix accelerated after them, and kept pace, even while John’s speedometer needle climbed through eighty, ninety, ninety-five.

  Ahead of him, a camper was driving at half his speed in the same lane. The Grand Prix raced beside him on his right, determined to box him in. On his left, the concrete-and-steel divider zipped past, only three feet away.

  ‘What’s he doing? John, what’s he doing? He’s trying to kill us!’ Vicki shrieked.

  Desperate, John slewed the Chrysler in towards the Grand Prix, and there was a shuddering grind of metal and plastic as the two cars collided and bounced. Vicki screamed, and fell heavily against John’s shoulder. There was a long, drawn-out, horrific howl of tyres as the two cars skidded away from each other, and then came back together in another jarring collision. John couldn’t see anything but hurtling concrete and cars; he couldn’t hear anything but crunching bodywork and the drone of other drivers’ horns.

  He felt for a stomach-turning moment that he’d lost control of the Chrysler altogether, and he spun the wheel frantically, trying to correct its endless, graceless slide. But even as the car seemed to straighten, he saw the Grand Prix coming in again, like a battered silver shark worrying a whale, and with odd and frightening clarity, so close that he could have tossed him a cigarette, he saw the face of a man with mirrors for eyes.