Clandestine

We drove up Vermont and parked in the observatory parking lot. We walked north, uphill, holding hands. We talked easily, and I laid on the more gentle, picaresque side of police work: the friendly drunks, the colorful jazz musicians in their zoot suits, the lost puppies Wacky and I repatriated to their youthful owners. I didn't tell her about the rape-o's, the abused kids, the stiffs at accident scenes or the felony suspects who got worked over regularly in the back rooms at Wilshire Station. She didn't need to hear it. Idealists like Sarah, despite their naiveté, thought that the world was basically a shit place. I needed to temper her sense of reality with some of the joy and mystery. There was no way she could accept that the darkness was part of the joy. I had to do my tempering Hollywood-style.

I showed her the site of the old jungle. I hadn't been here since 1938, thirteen years, and now it was just a clearing overgrown with weeds and littered with empty wine bottles.

"It all started here for you?" Sarah asked.

"Yes."

"Time and place awes me."

"Me, too. This is January 30, 1951. It's now and it won't ever be again."

"That scares me."

"Don't be scared. It's just the wonder. It's very dark here. Are you afraid of the dark?"

Sarah Kefalvian raised her beautiful head and laughed in the moonlight. Big, hearty laughter worthy of her Armenian ancestors. "I'm sorry, Joe. It's just that we're speaking so somberly, so symbolically that it's kind of funny."

"Then let's get literal. I've confided in you. You confide in me. Tell me something about yourself. Something dark and secretive that you've never told anyone."

She considered this and said, "It'll shock you. I like you and I don't want to offend you."

"You can't shock me. I'm immune to shock. Tell me."

"All right. When I was an undergrad in San Francisco I had an affair—with a married man. It ended. I was hurt and I started hating men. I was going to Cal Berkeley. I had a teacher, a woman. She was very beautiful. She took an interest in me. We became lovers and did things—sexual things that most people don't even guess about. This woman also liked young boys. Young boys. She seduced her twelve-year-old nephew. We shared him."

Sarah backed away from where we stood together, almost as if fearing a blow.

"Is that it?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied.

"All of it?"

"Yes! I won't get graphic with you. I loved that woman. She helped through a difficult time. Isn't that dark enough for you?"

Her anger and indignation had peaked and brought forth in me a warm rush of pure stuff. "It's enough. Come here, Sarah." She did and we held each other, her head pressed hard into my shoulder. When we disengaged, she looked up at me. She was smiling, and her cheeks were wet with tears. I wiped them away with my thumbs. "Let me take you home," I said.

We undressed wordlessly, in the dark front room of Sarah Kefalvian's garage apartment on Sycamore Street. Sarah was trembling and breathing shallowly in the cold room, and when we were naked I smothered her with my body to stanch her tremors, then lifted her and carried her in the direction of where the bedroom had to be.

There was no bed; just a mattress on a pallet covered with quilts. I laid her down and sat on the edge of the mattress, my long legs jammed up awkwardly. A shaft of light from a streetlamp cast a diffuse glow over the room and let me pick out shelves overflowing with books and walls adorned with Picasso prints and labor activist posters from the Depression.

Sarah looked up at me, her hand resting on my knee. I stroked her hair, then bent over and placed short dry kisses on her neck and shoulders. She sighed. I told her she was very beautiful, and she giggled. I looked for imperfections, the little body flaws that speak volumes. I found them: a small growth of dark hairs above her nipples, an acne cluster on her right shoulder blade. I kissed these places until Sarah grabbed my head and pulled my mouth to hers.

We kissed hard and long, then Sarah opened up yawningly and arched to receive me. We joined and coupled violently, strongly, muscles straining in our efforts to stay interlocked as we changed positions and thrashed the quilts off the mattress. We peaked together, Sarah sobbing as I mashed my face into her neck, rubbing my mouth and nose in the little rivulets of our combined sweat.

We lay still for a long time, gently stroking odd parts of each other. To talk would have been to betray the moment; I knew this from experience, and Sarah from instinct. After a while she pretended to sleep, a silent, loving way to ease the awkwardness of my departure.

I dressed in the dark, then reached over and brushed back her long dark hair and kissed the nape of her neck, thinking as I left that maybe this time I had given as much as I had taken.