She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me by Herbert Gold Page A

find a Universal Life minister.”
    But we passed a courthouse in Monterey first and decided to stop for lunch, a flower, and a wedding. The judge took time out from a drunk-driving trial and kept the culprit waiting while he asked if we thought the poor jerk—one prior alcohol-related accident—should go to jail and wished us a long happy life together and please drive carefully on Route 1, the winding narrow road to Ditjen’s Big Sur Inn. Congratulations, you are man and wife, don’t drink your wine till you get there.
    The cabins were nestled into the hollow of a steep, sun-dappled slope of alluvial granite which poured down through the pine and poppies, bush monkey flowers and wild mustard, ending abruptly in a jigsaw of rocky beaches, eddying tide pools, the Pacific Ocean. A Norwegian settler had built these rooms with Hansel and Gretel as his architects. There were hawks overhead, hummingbirds nearer by. Priscilla claimed to see a whale just this side of the fog bank and I didn’t argue the point.
    She was still holding the rose I had bought when we entered the courthouse. I asked why.
    â€œBecause I like it. Don’t cross me,” she said.
    When it was dark, we didn’t mind bringing our first day as man and wife to an early close. We built a fire. The bed smelled of mustiness and wood smoke. “Well, it’s been a long drive, no one’ll judge us if we don’t look for trouble in downtown Big Sur.”
    â€œNot that long a drive,” I said.
    â€œLet me be the judge of that. Long enough.”
    Her hands were on my shirt. Mine were on hers. The bed smelled of wood smoke and Priscilla and Dan.
    â€œWait. Wait,” she said. And then: “Stop waiting.”
    She came undone; it was a way she had, fainting with terrible sighs, seeming to scatter under me like a puzzle or break over me like a cloud, Priscilla fragments raining down. And then, after a moment when time stopped, the pieces came back together and she was ready to make jokes, sit up and hold her knees, look for something to eat. It took me longer to come together again and remember who I was. Her eager smile and fading freckled flush were already there to welcome me. “Hey! Let’s change the music, okay?”
    This was the other side of the mountain. It wasn’t the only other side.
    I dozed through furniture-buying expeditions. In my sleep I mumbled, “If you like it, sure.” The coffee table. The new plug-in appliances. A toaster that also baked—did it whistle “Abbey Road”? All I really cared about was the bed and a kitchen table for late-night snacking. Nevertheless, a house occurred, with closets, nothing not inside the closets that belonged inside the closets. In progress was an extreme late-sixties, early-seventies effort to be normal human beings despite San Francisco and an abnormally spirited woman.
    On the other side of the mountain lurked a creature no one truly anticipates until it suddenly makes its claim and the universe is filled.
    *   *   *
    After we moved into the proper Marina flat, pregnant Priscilla, a garage for the pregnant Priscilla’s automobile, a new life for the beatnik private eye on the other side of the mountain, it seemed important to share my blessings, each other, with my two best people, Alfonso and my wife. I said to Alfonso, “Just you for dinner, not a party.”
    â€œI’m bringing my dog.”
    â€œYou don’t have a dog, Alfonso.”
    â€œMy new puppy. I need a social life just like you.”
    â€œAlfonso, I don’t want a new puppy shitting on my new Marina hardwood floors.”
    He shook his head with wonderment at what Dan Kasdan, the married man, had become. “First place, Mingus wouldn’t do that. Second place, this is true love, too. I’m committed to this equal-opportunity puppy. Where I go, he goes.”
    â€œMingus?” I asked. “A cute