“Stafford.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Callie called.”

  “Let me guess. She missed a car payment.”

  “You’d better put your book down, Stafford. Something’s happened.”

  “What?”

  “She’s in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “She’s been arrested.”

  “What do you mean, ‘She’s been arrested’?”

  “I mean she’s been arrested, Stafford. Our daughter has been arrested.”

  “By the police?”

  “No. By her hairdresser. Who the fuck do you think arrested her? The police, Stafford, the police!”

  “Calm down. You’re getting hysterical.”

  “Our daughter is in jail, Stafford. She’s in jail!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Get hold of yourself!”

  “You have to call somebody. We have to get her out of there.”

  “What did she do now?”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “Stop it. Stop crying and just tell me!”

  “She thought he was older.”

  “Who?”

  “Some guy she met in a restaurant. A server, I think.”

  “How old was he? Agnes! How old was he!”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Well, fuck! That stupid, stupid girl.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling my lawyer.”

  Three days before Christmas, Callie went to an upscale restaurant in Malibu with her girlfriends. She had been depressed for weeks, slowly coming to terms with the realization that her current boyfriend, an up-and-coming agent, was still involved with his ex-wife, the mother of three small children, one of whom he believed to be his. Callie had drunk to excess the evening before, so she confined her alcohol intake to two or three Manhattans and a few glasses of excellent local Chardonnay. She noticed that the young man who kept their water glasses filled was unusually attractive, and, urged on by her easily amused friends, she struck up a conversation with him that led to other things. He was young, of course, but they—Callie and her friends—never thought for a single second he was less than nineteen or twenty and certainly not seventeen or they would have left him alone. In any event, Callie found him irresistible, or perhaps just, as her father later said, easy pickings, and when she left the restaurant, she took him home with her and kept him for two days before turning him out. The boy, recognizing an opportunity from start to finish, immediately pressed charges for the unlawful sexual confinement of a minor, and were it not for the swift steps taken by Callie’s father, the whole matter would have received far more publicity than it did. As it was, only a small item in two or three papers made any mention at all about the incident and even then, the details were sketchy. The boy, happy with his financial settlement, amended his story and did not bother them again—but Stafford lived with the knowledge that the improvidence of his only child filled him with shame.

  And Agnes? Well, Agnes had a different take on shame.

  “The age of consent is eighteen, Agnes. The boy was seventeen.”

  “And our daughter is twenty-five. I’m not seeing a crime here, Stafford.”

  “Under state law, a person under eighteen is a minor and cannot legally consent to sexual activity.”

  “Well, we’re going to need more prisons, then.”

  “That’s not the point. She got played, Agnes. She picked up an underage guy and took him back to the luxury condo her father bought her, no doubt littered with photos of her parents mixing it up with the rich and famous. He knew what he was doing. She didn’t. But she damn well should have.”

  “But he went willingly. Our five-foot-four daughter didn’t drag him back to her place kicking and screaming.”

  “It doesn’t matter! The point is, our daughter is picking up strangers in bars and hauling them back to her place for sex without asking any questions.”

  “Kinda like you and me.”

  “You weren’t underage.”

  “You never asked. And now that I think about it, I’m not sure anyone ever asked my mother, either. But what is that thing people are always saying? Something about apples and trees. Fill me in, Professor. You know so much.”

  “You’re taking this the wrong way. You’re missing the point.”

  “I guess I must be because that’s the third time you’ve made the point that I’m missing the point. But it strikes me that the point that you’re fixated on is not that our daughter is reckless and unhappy, but God forbid—stupid. And I think you’re more ashamed about that than the fact that she’s sitting in a Los Angeles jail right now for doing exactly what her mother did, what? Thirty years ago when she—none too bright herself—strolled into a campus bar and went home with the bartender.”

  “How can you not grasp the difference here?”

  “Oh, for Jesus’ sakes, Stafford. Enough!”

  “Wait. Agnes, what are you doing? Where are you going?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  “It’s Christmas Eve.”

  “Not this year.”

  She left him that night, moving into the pool house where she remained, comfortably enough all things considered, for the next forty days, a number Stafford couldn’t resist pointing out to her when she returned on February 2 with a box of jelly donuts for his birthday. She would stay, she said. She would not abandon him, but there would be no more talk about Callie. A truce. Nothing more. Nothing less. He had his shit. She had hers. But the bachelor beard would have to go, and he would have to honor their agreement to get off this fucking island once in a while.

  “Mrs. Hopkins. Excuse me, Mrs. Hopkins. Can I get you anything else?”

  “What?”

  “More coffee?”

  “No, no thank you. Sorry. Daydreaming! All done.”

  “You have an awesome day!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You have an awesome day.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  She got up from the table, suddenly anxious to find Stafford and go home. She could see there were many other people waiting for tables and she had been sitting there alone for too long, her bill paid and the receipt in front of her. She thanked the waiter and left quickly, but he had already begun resetting the table for his next customers and did not respond. The little birds that had fed off Stafford’s lunch hopped away from the table, lining up nearby in anticipation of their next meal. She slipped through the crowd by the entrance and walked across the grand lobby and then she went outside where Stafford would be waiting for her, but he was not there.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” said a young man, the captain, it seemed, of all the other young men who guarded the entrance to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel with clipboards and car keys.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” she answered. “My husband. He drives a black BMW, top down. Has he come by?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “no Beemers, not in the past hour anyways.”

  “Would you mind calling down to the tennis club and asking if Mr. Hopkins has picked up his car?” she asked.

  “Hopkins?”

  “Yes.”

  She waited nearby, annoyed with herself for feeling anxious, knowing Stafford disliked it when she responded to situations that had not yet presented themselves. But when the lobby captain hung up the phone and informed her that their car was still at the tennis club, and Mr. Hopkins had not yet returned for it, she could not help herself and she was afraid.

  “I’d better go find him, then,” she said.

  “There’s a shuttle service down to the club. Every ten minutes.”

  “Yes, I know,” she answered. “Thank you.”

  “It comes around to the front, ma’am. You can wait right here. Ma’am?”

  But she already knew she would not wait for the shuttle, with its aimless, cheerful passengers all smiling at themselves and one another, and instead she went back into the hotel, hurrying across the enormous lobby and down the wide marble stairs to the lower courtyards. She walked quickly past the swimming pools, vaguely aware that the wind was beginning to pick up again in sudden, unexpected gusts. She came to the poolside restaurant, where she cut through a large party of tourists peering at the posted menu and blocking her way.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “excuse me.”

  And she hurried on like a woman retracing her steps who suddenly realized that something important had been left behind or forgotten but was not yet lost. And when she passed the Honokahua Burial Site tucked into the hillside, she began to run.

  CHAPTER 8

  Despair

  Philosophy can make people sick.

  —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

  STAFFORD HAD LEFT THE restaurant with the single intention of walking down the hill to the tennis club and retrieving his car. He felt slightly better on his feet, and he walked briskly, feeling the faint hint of a breeze rattling the poolside umbrellas as he passed by. The wind was picking up, and the stillness of a day that seemed so remarkable and appealing a few hours earlier was over. Stafford decided the rest of his day would not be as unstructured as the first half, and he began to plan as he walked down the path. Retirement on Maui had challenged him more than he anticipated, and he was not immune to the enticements of a self-indulgent existence. His intellectual powers, though, had always protected him, and he was determined to maintain them. It was too easy for men of his class to measure their own accomplishments in simple, and generally economic, terms, and while Stafford had grown comfortable with his professional success, he feared, perhaps more than anything else, that when his intellectual powers faded, he would be unable to resist the world he had placed himself so carefully within. Hence his need for Aristotle, the philosopher of his youth and, he once thought, the beacon of his destiny. His soul, buried with the unnamed son of his youth, was of no lingering interest to him, and for that he was grateful.

  His plan, then, was to return to the house for a brief nap, after which he would get down to business. He would call the security company and have the entrance codes to the house reset. He would review the quarterly reports that had been piling up on his desk and reassess his security holdings, specifically the fixed-income investments that had become increasingly unproductive. He would finish the article he had agreed to write for an important industry magazine on management issues in foreign distribution companies. He would organize his preliminary notes on Aristotle’s formative relationships. He would swim a few laps in his swimming pool. He would eat lightly and spend a quiet evening at home with Agnes, who, it seemed, was beginning to come around. He had a fleeting moment of hope that it might still be possible for them to undo the many years of bartering and need that had replaced love. Perhaps they would sit outside together after dinner and go to bed early and leave the doors to their lanai wide open and sleep like young people again, untroubled and content. It had been a difficult time for both of them and he realized that now, knowing full well there was no point in mentioning it. His wife had always claimed he expected too much of her, but the truth was quite different and far more damaging. He expected too little, and he always had.

  “She’s just different, that’s all,” his mother had said repeatedly, but Stafford knew that different meant wrong and that his mother was not alone in her views.

  There was no one, in fact, no one at all who approved of their relationship, and when he told people he was going to marry her, the silence was brisk and disapproving and sometimes even sad. She was outside of all worlds familiar to him then—neither Catholic nor Canadian, rural nor academic, innocent nor worldly—but he had fallen so completely in love with her, he was unable to explain that it was precisely because of her lack of social, intellectual, and moral appeal that he needed her. Unable to rescue Emmett and incapable of rescuing himself, Stafford had chosen the uneducated and illegitimate daughter of a drug-addled suicide from Wisconsin to rescue him from the slow and painful truth that life was of no real value after all. And it was then, with this thought strangely clear in his mind, that he came upon Bruce Brown, or Brucie as he was once called, sitting bare-chested at the poolside bar, his legs wide apart, his gut resting between them like a great, sweating orb of human flesh.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned. Look who’s a-comin’ this way.”

  “Bruce. Bruce Brown.”

  “How the hell are you? Jesus Christ. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “Always the guy, Stafford, always the guy.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “Twenty goddamned years.”

  “It can’t be that long.”

  “And then some.”

  “Well, you look great,” Stafford said.

  “I feel great,” Bruce answered, and he lifted his drink by way of explanation.

  “Brucie,” said the young woman sitting on the barstool next to him, “aren’t you going to introduce us?”

  “Oh yeah. Sorry. Where are my fucking manners?”

  “Brucie!”

  “Sorry. Where are my manners?”

  “I’m Sierra,” the young woman said, and she gave Stafford a little wave with her left hand, turning it so he could see the ring on her fourth finger. “Brucie’s fiancée.”

  “Congratulations,” Stafford replied. “When’s the big day?”

  “Soon as the divorce comes through.”

  “Sit down, Stafford. Sit. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “Another time,” Stafford answered. “I have an appointment.”

  “Ah, c’mon, just sit down and have a drink,” said Bruce and he put his hand on Stafford’s arm, but Stafford stiffened and pulled his arm free. He did not like to be touched so freely by lesser men, and there was a moment between them that acknowledged this.

  “So you live here now, I heard,” Bruce finally said. “Built a big place on the water.”

  “It’s not on the water,” Stafford replied.

  “OMG! You’re that guy. That TV guy! I am so stupid. Brucie, why didn’t you say something? Stafford Hopkins! I am so thrilled to meet you. I am such a huge fan. I mean, wow! This is such an honor!”

  “How are you folks doing? Another round?”

  “What? Oh, sure. But please don’t salt the rim this time. I mean, I said so already once before. No salt. But then the rim was salted. So no salt, okay?”

  “No problem. Anything for you, sir?”

  “Same again.”

  “And you, sir?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” Stafford replied.

  “He doesn’t drink with old friends,” Bruce said, but the waitress merely smiled and nodded, changing the ashtray with one deft sweep of her hand before drifting away.

  In truth, Stafford and Bruce had never been friends. They had merely pretended, especially in the early days when Stafford and Agnes first arrived and Stafford had not yet separated himself from the pack of other ambitious newcomers. A native of Los Angeles, Bruce had family connections to the television business—an uncle who had done well as an art director and a cousin who worked steadily as a gaffer. With their help, Bruce had gotten in, once or twice, as someone’s assistant and gradually moved up through the ranks until he became the production manager on a cable TV show about inner-city teens pre-selected to save the world from something or other. He was an ambitious and hardworking man in those days, and he would have managed fine had he been even marginally competent. But he was not, and the people beneath him knew him as a bully and a cheat and he was disliked. In management, however, he found a champion, an alcoholic studio executive in post-production who took a shine to this young production manager’s tough talk and big claims. And it wasn’t long before, plucked from the ranks, Brucie Brown became an executive too, a production executive at a studio with his own parking space and an office and a steady stream of invitations to golf tournaments and breakfast meetings and corporate retreats.

  “Brucie! That wasn’t very nice.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Well, pardon me for living. I think somebody’s had one too many.”

  Stafford had spent too many years in the company of drinkers to waste any more time on them than necessary, so he smiled and nodded and turned to go as if the conversation had come to a pleasant and natural end.

  “Enjoy your holiday,” he said.

  “Asshole.”

  “Brucie! What is your problem?!”

  “Ask your big TV hero. Ask him why he got me fired. Ask him why he stabbed me in the fucking back first fucking chance he got.”

  “Brucie!”

  “And then ask him how it felt when it happened to him!”

  Stafford began to walk away. He would say nothing more to a man like Bruce Brown. He would leave him there, sitting on a barstool at a hotel he could no longer afford but was too dense to realize. Bruce had always been a fool, a bombastic fraud at best. His limitations had been obvious from the start and there was nothing unexpected in the outcome. Stafford would pick up his car and collect his wife and go home. He would devote no further time to this unpleasant encounter. He would forget about it. But in his haste to get away from Brucie Brown, Stafford was briefly inattentive and failed to notice the little girl sitting at the back of an oncoming shuttle, when she dropped her yellow beach pail and its contents, which rolled beneath his foot. He sidestepped the pail but he didn’t see the little ball, and when he put his foot down on it, his ankle buckled and he lost his balance. He turned his body toward the fall in a last-ditch effort to save himself, landing instead like a cat on all fours, as if dropped from above. His hands and knees hit the pavement with a thud, and he felt the skin break open, shocked at the impact and the immediacy of physical pain.

  “Is he okay?”

  “I’m fine.”