The Gold Coast

49

Hana’s too busy to see Jim for several nights running, and he goes down to Sandy’s party depressed. She’s working, he’s not. What must she think of him?

At Sandy’s he stands leaning against the balcony wall, watching cars flow through the great interchange pretzel of the five freeways. Something to stare at for hours.

Suddenly there’s Humphrey’s younger sister Debbie Riggs, standing beside him and elbowing his arm to get his attention. “Oh hi, Debbie! How are you?” He hasn’t seen her in a while. They’re good friends, they’ve known each other since junior high; in years past she’s been sort of a sister to him, he thinks.

“I’m fine, Jimbo. You?”

“Okay, okay. Pretty good, really.”

They chat for a bit about what they’ve been up to. Same things. But there’s something bugging her. Debbie is one of the most straightforward people that Jim knows; if she’s irritated with you she just comes right out with it.

And she’s a good friend of Sheila Mayer’s.

So without too much delay it bursts out of her. “Jim, just what did you think you were doing about Sheila? I mean, you guys were allies for over four months, and then one day, wham, not a visit not a call! What kind of behavior is that?”

“Well,” Jim says uncomfortably. “I tried to call—”

“Bullshit! Bullshit! If you want to call someone you can get through to them, you know that. You can leave a message! There’s no way you tried to call her.” She points a finger at him accusatively and anger makes her voice harsh: “You screwed her, Jim! You fucked her over!”

Jim hangs his head. “I know.”

“You don’t know! I visited her after you suddenly disappeared out of her life, and I found her sitting in her living room, putting together one of Humphrey’s jigsaw puzzles, one of those ten-thousand-piece ones. That’s all she would do! And when she was done with that one she went out and bought some more, and she came back home and that’s all she did was sit there in her living room and put together those stupid fucking jigsaw puzzles, for a whole month!”

Eyes flashing, face flushed, relentlessly she holds Jim’s gaze: “And you did that to her, Jim! You did that to her.”

Long pause.

Jim’s throat is constricted shut. He can’t take his eyes from Debbie. He nods jerkily. The corners of his mouth are tight. “I know,” he gets out.

She sees that he has gotten it, that he sees the image of Sheila at that coffee table, understands what it means. Her expression shifts, then; he can see that she’s still his friend, even when she’s furious with him. Somehow that makes the anger more impossible to deny. And even though he’s gotten it, Debbie is so angry that that isn’t, at the moment, quite enough. Perhaps she has thought it would mean more to her. Jim can see her remembering the sight herself; her friend studiously sifting through the pieces, focusing on them, not letting her attention stray anywhere else; suddenly Debbie’s blinking rapidly, and abruptly she turns and walks off. And he sees the image better than ever; it’s burned into him by Debbie Riggs’s distress.

“Oh, man,” he says. He turns and leans on the balcony rail. Headlights and taillights swim through the night. He feels like he’s swallowed one of the flower pots by his elbow: giant weight in his stomach, tasting like dirt.

Jigsaw puzzles.

Why did he do it?

For Virginia Novello. But what about Sheila? Well, Jim didn’t think of her. He didn’t really believe that he mattered enough that anyone would care about him. Or he didn’t really believe in the reality of other people’s feelings. Of Sheila Mayer’s feelings. Because they got in the way of what he wanted to do.

He sees these reasons clearly for the first time, and disgust washes over him in a great wave.

Suddenly he sees himself from the outside, he escapes the viewpoint of consciousness and there’s Jim McPherson, no longer the invisible center of the universe, but one of a group of friends and acquaintances. A physical person out there just like everyone else, to be interacted with, to be judged! It’s a dizzying, almost nauseating experience, a physical shock. Out of body, look back, there’s this skinny intense guy, a hollow man with nothing inside to define him by—defined by his fashionable ally and his fashionable beliefs and his fashionable clothes and his fashionable habits, so that the people who care about him—Sheila—

Empty staring at a jigsaw puzzle. Concentrate on it. The headlights all blur out.