Free The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley Page A

Then she would want to be a painter
    or some sort of artist. And the worst part of it was that
    she could do damn near anything she set her mind to.
    For instance, I wasn't a great tennis player-though I
    nearly made the team at Cal--and when I could get her
    on the courts, she gave me a hell of a time, let me tell
    you." He paused to look at his drink, then decided to
    drink about half of it in a gulp. "And, you know, in
    spite of all the things she could do, she was the loneliest
    person I ever knew. That was the heartbreaking part of
    it, that loneliness. I couldn't help her at all. Sometimes
    it seemed my attempts just made it worse. I couldn't
    stop her from being lonely at all. "
    "Not even i n bed?"
    "You're a nosy bastard, aren't you?" he said quietly.
    "Professional habit."
    "Well, the truth is that I never laid a hand on her,"
    he said with proper sadness. "Maybe if I had, I
    wouldn't still be carrying her around on my back."
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    "Did anybody else lay a hand on her?"
    "I always suspected that she wasn't a virgin," he said
    with a slight smile. "But she wouldn't talk about it. "
    "Did you two fight about it?"
    "I fought, but she wouldn't fight back," he said.
    "She'd just sit there, drawn into some sort of shell, and
    weep. Or else she'd make me take her home."
    "Did you have a fight the day she walked away?"
    "No," he murmured, shaking his head. "It was just a
    normal day. We drove over to San Francisco for dinner
    and a movie, and on the way she decided that she
    wanted to drive through the Haight to see the hippies.
    We got stuck in a line of traffic, and she just opened the
    car door, stepped out, and walked away. Without
    looking back. Without saying a word," he said slowly,
    as if he had repeated the lines to himself too many
    times.
    "You didn't chase her?"
    "How could I?" he cried. "I didn't know she was
    running away, and I couldn't just leave my car sitting in
    the street, man."
    "I thought you had tickets for a play," I said.
    "Hell, I don't know," he said. "It was ten years ago,
    ten god damned years ago."
    "Right.,
    "Need another drink," he either said or asked. When
    he stood up, I handed him my glass, but he paced
    around the office with it in his hand.
    "Can you tell me anything else about her?'' I asked.
    He stopped and stared at me as if I were mad, then
    started pacing again, taking the controlled steps of a
    drunk man. But his hands and mouth moved with a will
    of their own; he waved his arms and nearly shouted,
    "Tell you about her? My god, man, I could tell you
    about her all day and you still wouldn't see her. Tell you
    what? That I had loved her since she was a child, that I
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    couldn't just stop because she ran away? I tried to stop,
    believe me I tried to stop loving her." Then he paused.
    "It all sounds so silly now, doesn't it?"
    "What?"
    "That the disappearance of a damned high school
    chick that I'd never touched was the most traumatic
    experience of my life," he said. "And let me tell
    you, I know something about trauma, growing up
    with a drunken father. What do you want to know anyway?"
    "Everything. Anything."
    "That I married a safely dull woman and fathered
    two safely dull children that I can't bear to face and
    can't bear to leave and can't bear to love because they
    might all run away too," he said.
    "Hey, man," I said, "take that crap upstairs to the
    shrinks. Don't tell me about it. I asked about her, not
    you." He stopped to stare at his feet. "You've already
    been upstairs, right?"
    "I've been going for two years now," he said with
    that mixture of pride and shame people in analysis so
    often have. "And, in spite of the jokes, it's working. I
    meant to go to medical school, you know, but all those
    visits to the morgue, all those anonymous faces beneath
    the rubber sheets, were too much for me." He went to
    the bar to splash whiskey aimlessly into our glasses,
    then kept mine in his hand. "As you so aptly said, as a
    lawyer I'm not even a good joke. But I'm enrolled