Early Warning

“How much are the tickets?”

“Three fifty apiece. One-way.”

Eloise pretended to think for a moment by gazing out the window, but what she really did was note the two men walking down her street; they had been walking the other direction a few minutes before. She said, “You want a check?” She thought that seven hundred dollars, for Janet’s and Lucas’s tickets, was not too high a price to pay to get Cat and Jorge out of the country. She said, “What about Lena?”

“The reverend is taking care of her. He likes to have her with him.”

Eloise thought, I’ll bet he does. Then she thought that Lenin may have been a pig but he was not a religious, lecherous pig.

She said, “Let me find my checkbook.” Then she said, “Do you know those two guys who keep walking back and forth in front of my house?”

Jorge glanced out the window. He said, “That’s Zeb and Vic.”

“What are they doing?”

Jorge said, “We are all in danger. It’s better to travel in groups.”

Eloise, who had lived in Oakland for years without a second thought, had a second thought.

—

CAT KEPT URGING Janet to up her tithe, especially since “we don’t have the reverend’s golden tongue to help us raise funds anymore, at least for now.” She acted as though Reverend Jones’s flight to Guyana and the article in New West magazine meant nothing — of course Reverend Jones had made enemies, and those enemies were glad to talk. Cat kept going to the Temple, kept chatting about whom she saw there and what they did. And then, right on schedule, on August 16, she disappeared from her room. When Lucas called the house where Jorge was living, he got no answer. He went over to the house, in the Mission District. It was empty, the back door unlocked. Janet kept taking out her ticket and putting it away again. When she looked at the destinations — Georgetown, Guyana; change at JFK, New York — the very words made her nervous, but she didn’t know which affected her more.

Lucas was at first happy. He came over three days in a row, but then it was Friday, he had to play, and he didn’t invite her to come watch. After he, too, disappeared — this was the part that she thought she should have noticed — she had watched him onstage so many times, smiling and waving his sticks, leaning into the drums and staring intently as the beat got faster and more complicated, then, when the song ended, throwing his arms in the air and grinning. Would she ever see that again? Not if he had gone to Guyana. Maybe he had changed his ticket, taken a later flight, used this opportunity to leave her behind because he saw that she was a bourgeois materialist after all. It was a mystery. But she pulled herself together. She went to work, she said that she would take the manager’s job at the branch her restaurant was opening on Fulton Street, she said that she would move across the bay, find a room in the Castro, or, because she would be making a little more money, maybe a one-bedroom apartment. Maybe communal living was not for her. Maybe she needed some boundaries, and boundaries started with a locked door. Nor did she hear from Marla. Jorge had told her that Marla had gone to the agricultural paradise after all, had decided that Paris was corrupt and shallow, had turned over a new leaf. So they were all there; they had all left her behind.

She did not run out the back of the restaurant when she saw Aunt Eloise in her section. After being prodded by the maître d’, she went over and set the menu in front of her aunt and said, “Would you like to hear today’s specials?”

Aunt Eloise looked up at her. “I really did wonder whether you had gone.”

“I didn’t.”

“Thank God! I read the article. I was appalled.”

Janet was about to say that the article was all lies and everyone was out to get Reverend Jones, but she said, “I was, too.” Then, “You should try the risotto. It’s rice cooked in broth with mushrooms, garlic, and Parmesan.”

“I know what it is.”

Eloise stared at the menu as if she couldn’t help herself, then said, “What about Lucas?”

“He went.”

Janet sat down in the chair beside Eloise at the table and put her head in her hands. Her hair fell in a dirty curtain around her, and that made her all the sadder, somehow. Aunt Eloise gently pushed it back, looked her in the eye, took her hand. Then she whispered, “Honey, do you want to leave here and go back home?”

Janet nodded.

—