Stein Stung Read online

  She popped from the kitchen onto the patio, bent over Stein’s reclined head and kissed him lightly near the lips. She was taking Angie today for her first mani-pedi. Her wide-brimmed straw hat momentarily shaded the sun from Stein’s bare chest. She smelled good. She was dressed in a swanky silk blouse and white slacks with a tasteful gold necklace. Her cosmetician had taught her well how to soften the sharp bone structure and enhance the vibrancy of her dark eyes.

  “For a second I thought I was being kissed by Winona Ryder’s mother,” Stein said.

  “You should be so lucky.”

  “See ya, Pops.” Angie popped her head out to say goodbye. Stein roused himself and turned around. She had let her hair go back from its mélange of colors to its natural copper blond. Her eyes had the pixyish wisdom that Stein felt was his genetic contribution.

  “I can’t believe you’re going over to the other side,” he said, affecting profound dismay. “Getting your nails done at a Beverly Hills salon. What would Ani DiFranco say?”

  “Probably that geezers should learn to pronounce pop stars’ names before they try to make cultural references.” She grabbed Lila’s elbow and herded her away toward the gate that led to the driveway where Lila’s brand-new 2001 white Lexus coupe sat waiting. Stein closed his eyes, basking in spongy security. The timer clicked on for the Jacuzzi heater. The mechanism engaged or attempted to engage, and instead gasped and clunked and gnashed its gears, hissed … and then nothing.

  He had been so sure he’d be able to fix the busted heating coil. No event in his life had ever offered the slightest foundation to support that belief. Yet, he expected that since he lived here now, somehow he would have osmotically absorbed a oneness with the appliances and the intuitive ability to make right whatever was wrong. He bore the same delusion about his power, that his continued presence in it would gather a critical mass and return things to the way they were in the sixties.

  His effort to replace the heating gasket and thermostat, which in the proper hands would have been a thirty-two-dollar operation, had resulted in the entire Jacuzzi having to be dug up, along with the main plumbing line that supplied the house and a sizable chunk of what had formerly been Lila’s backyard. At a cost of fourteen thousand dollars. So far.

  Lila had been upset, of course. But amazingly, not that upset. He had been pilloried (or, in the case of his ex-wife, Hillaried) far worse for far less. Once the love of your life has died of cancer you see life in a new perspective and a few broken pipes aren’t that big a deal.

  The contractors had left a gaping maw of oozing, oily muck that was coming from a subterranean channel connected to the La Brea Tar Pits—or so Stein extrapolated from the few cognates he got from the foreman’s combination of English and Tagalog. He took it as his penance to wait for them, as he had done each day for the week they had promised to return.

  He kept a secret from Lila. He never stayed here alone. Soon after the girls had departed for their beauty venture, Stein was in his Toyota Camry heading east on Olympic. As soon as he crossed the border out of Beverly Hills the socio-ethnographics began to change. Landscaping was less lush, the sun less shaded. A mile east of Fairfax he took a left at Hauser. A casual observer might think he was driving just to clear his head, to think, to drift. But he had driven this route so many times it had become ingrained in the engine’s DNA.

  On the other side of Third Street sat an enclave of single-story private homes and cool funky duplexes, including the one where Stein had resided since the separation and divorce from Hillary, with his now deceased dog, Watson, and on alternate weekends with Angie. He parked out front and sat in the car for a few moments. The unkempt pine welcomed his arrival by dropping a few dusty sprigs of greenery on his hood. He fished through the random clutter in the glove compartment (funny that it was still called a glove compartment) for the small metal box that had originally held licorice pastilles. He opened the lid and let the apartment key drop into his open palm.

  His was the second unit in the little horseshoe-shaped courtyard. There was a cluster of mail stuck in the slot. Penelope Kim, his irrepressible twenty-year-old Korean bisexual neighbor, was away this week, having been named Miss Long Bed Trailer 2001 and flown to Bent Fruit, Virginia, to preside over the annual Truck Pull. The rubber tree that commanded the courtyard made it seem like New Orleans. The six duplexes all had wood-hewn balconies built out from their second-floor French doors. The bougainvillea grew up along the balustrades and carpeted the walkway below them in purple blossoms on windy days.

  He used his key and went inside. He still half expected to hear Watson’s excited bark at his arrival. He had been the archetypal sixties dog, a complete optimist. He always expected the next thing to happen would be good. Stein hadn’t taken a lot of his stuff with him to Lila’s. His pinball machine, his rows of standing orange gym lockers and mismatched easy chairs purchased at different garage sales did not exactly complement her décor.

  He went upstairs, stopping first at the room that had once been Angie’s. Random remnants of her former tenancy lay fossilizing in corners. A baseball glove and a poster of Ani DiFranco, the dresser she had put together, refusing help, its emptied drawers splayed open, listing to one side on uneven legs like an ancient relative you have to help to the bathroom.

  His bed was still here, the box spring and Serta. The framed picture taken on his twenty-fourth birthday with him grinning between John and Yoko still hung on the wall above his old dresser. Stein’s beard in the photograph was longer than his hair was now. He sat on the floor with his back propped up against the stucco wall and stretched his legs and sifted through the mail: solicitations from all the causes he supported. Veterans Against The War, Doctors Without Borders, ACLU, Special Olympics, SDS, NARAL. Those, amid the colossal mountain of penny savers and brochures, catalogs and throwaways. All the ink and paper it took to manufacture this crap. Waste had become America’s chief manufactured product.

  From the apartment next door, the unmistakable sounds of copulation began. The wall he leaned against was the common boundary between the adjacent apartments. The gasps of female pleasure rose and quickened. He had never met the girl who lived there. She had moved in after Stein had moved out. She was gloriously uninhibited. Her middle alto register yowled her chant to Dionysius. After a goodly aria, the thumping recessed into a gentle rocking sound, the descending glissando of an ingénue expiring of the vapors, and then silence. Stein had a fierce impulse to knock on the wall and hail a congratulatory, “Well fucked, young man,” but he resisted.

  ***

  A familiar white limo of astonishing length was idling in Lila’s driveway when Stein returned. The first time he had seen that white whale he dubbed it Moby Dick and thought of himself as Ahab until he remembered the end of the story. The tinted driver’s-side window receded, revealing an impeccably dressed Asian man in his early twenties.

  “Andrew, is that you?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Stein. That’s right.”

  “Did you just happen to be driving by?”

  “Mrs. Pope-Lassiter wants to chat with you.”

  “She doesn’t believe in phones?”

  “One of you doesn’t,” he said with a circumspect formality. No matter what Andrew did, his suits never creased.

  “Point taken.” Stein assured Andrew that he would definitely call her back, but he couldn’t come right now as he was waiting for contractors.

  “Mrs. Pope-Lassiter was pretty confident the contractors wouldn’t be here today.”

  “How the hell would she know?” And then painful recognition. “Oh, don’t tell me.”

  “You know Mrs. Pope-Lassiter.”

  Indeed he did know Millicent Pope-Lassiter and the Re-insurance

  company of Lassiter and Frank that bore her name. He had known her since she was twenty-two-year-old Millie Pope, hair down to her gorgeous round ass, eyes that were half awake and half in a dream, glistening mango lips. She could suck ice cream out of both ends of a co
ne and catch the drippings out of midair with a snap of her chameleon tongue. She had thickened and Republicanized, gone from Lady Godiva to Lady Bracknell. For years, through an intricate loan-out arrangement where Stein’s services were commoditized and monetized, a majority of Stein’s income had come by way of that arrangement.

  “Ten minutes is all I’m giving her,” Stein declared as he got into the limo.

  “My business is just getting you there.”

  Andrew’s Class II nuclear destroyer drove west on Little Santa Monica Boulevard and veered down into the parking lot beneath the most elegant of the Century City smog scrapers. Andrew left the car with the valet and conducted Stein through the atrium into the private elevator, which rose to the penthouse suite occupied by the product liability firm of Lassiter and Frank.

  “Ah,” Millicent Pope-Lassiter said upon seeing Stein.

  Her voice was an instrument strung more for power than inflection. Her office had the scope of a planetarium, floor-to-ceiling windows with a 270-degree view from Santa Monica to San Bernardino. “Sit,” she invited, in a tone a Great Dane would obey. Stein declined the command, which felt idiotic to him because he had been about to sit on his own volition before she told him to.

  She glanced up at him for a moment as if he had just walked in. “Do you know anything about honey and bees?”

  “You want to know if I know anything about honey and bees?

  “Yes, Harry. Who else would I be asking?” Only she and Hillary called him Harry. Probably for the same reason.

  “I know they make honey and they were put on Earth to be my mortal enemies. Why have you abducted me?”

  “Just once I hoped you would know more about a subject than I did.”

  “You know I don’t work for you anymore, right? Even when I was technically doing work for you, I wasn’t employed by you. You understand that. I was an independent contractor.”

  “I admit. Some of your past assignments were a bit on the dry side. That’s why I have this one to make up for them.”

  He regarded her with a skeptical tilt of the head. “You do not represent an old hippie from Ojai.”

  “Did you read about that humorous little incident yesterday up around Fresno? Some citizen became encased in a swarm of bees?”

  “Sorry. I canceled my subscription to the Enquirer.”

  “Some of those bees apparently belong to, or more to the point, belonged to a beekeeper named Karma Moonblossom. He claims a dozen of his colonies were stolen from him. I simply want you to confirm that his claim is accurate. He’s one of your people. An old hippie living in the hills outside of Ojai.”

  “First of all, Moonblossom?”

  “I’m guessing there was a name change somewhere along the line.”

  “And second of all, no! You know my history with bees.”

  “You’re not listening, Harry. I said his bees have been stolen. Which means there would be no bees.”

  “You said his bees had apparently been stolen.”

  “Does exhaustion always have to be the cost of doing business with you?”

  “How would you even steal bees anyway? Lasso them with little ropes?”

  “You see? You’re immediately asking the right questions.”

  He rose from the chair, told her it had been nice seeing her again

  “Harry.” The command in her voice was like bolas that wrapped around his psyche. “This is for you. Your mind is getting as soft as your body.”

  “You give altruism a bad name.”

  “You could pay Lila back some of what your little Jacuzzi peccadillo has cost her.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  She gestured benignly to the scope of her airy roost. “Knowledge is power, Harry.”

  “God, do you remember when you had a social conscience and a benevolent world view?”

  “And now I have a penthouse with an ocean view. And you still keep your apartment in the Fairfax district you’re still paying fourteen hundred and seventy-five dollars rent every month.”

  “What is this, blackmail?”

  “I’m giving you five thousand dollars to take a nice drive to Ojai this weekend. Talk to Mr. Moonblossom. Use those great gut instincts of yours. Tell me if he’s lying.”

  “That’s all you want?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Fine but I want the money in cash.” He knew that would never happen. The next moment, a stack of hundred dollar bills was in his hand and the moment after that, Andrew was driving him home.

  So much for bliss.

  Chapter Two

  The girls gave it to Stein relentlessly over breakfast. Angie kept referring to the caper as honeybee “wrestling” no matter how many times he said no, it was rustling. And Lila chimed in, “What do they do, turn them over and brand them with tiny little branding irons?” Angie had a greater affinity for humor than Lila. She was younger, hipper, quicker, and never had to worry about her father breaking up with her if she stepped over the line.

  Lila was still insecure about the jump from friend-girl to girlfriend. They had been lovers for a brief time years earlier, then “flovers,” friends who had once been lovers. She knew that Stein loved her but was not in love with her, and that living here would change that. For the better, she hoped. Though she knew the odds favored the other outcome. They had a quickie before breakfast in Lila’s elevated platform bed. A skiing injury to Lila’s sacrum in her thirties and a repressed childhood had limited her repertoire of comfortable sexual positions. Given Stein’s more worldly experiences she was apprehensive that he expected a more adventurous sexual partner. She was pleased that he was a sexual middle-of-the-roader as well. He had grown less self-centered, less performance-oriented. He had come to understand, as some men do when they get older, that the instrument he wields is a baton, not a hammer.

  ***

  Lila practically foisted the Lexus upon him. It was a long trip, she insisted, why risk snapping a fan belt or throwing a rod? (Whatever those things were.) So Stein found himself cruising westbound on the Ventura Freeway on a sunny Saturday afternoon, leaning back in the contoured leather seat of a brand-new 2001 Lexus sport coupe with less than six thousand miles on it, with a vintage Dylan CD playing on the quadraphonic speakers, and a cell phone that he had no idea how to use. The car held the road like it had talons but flew when he just tapped the pedal. He had to admit, it took the stress out of driving.

  As the 101 hit Oxnard and bent around to the north to follow the coastline, the only slight cloud on the emotional horizon was the prospect of bees. Despite Millicent Pope-Lassiter’s assurance that the theft of her client’s colonies had rendered his environment bee-free, Stein had arranged to meet Karma Moonblossom at a neutral location.

  Off Route 33 into the coastal range, then three turnoffs onto smaller and smaller byways, with road signs giving the mileage to towns Stein had never heard of, there was an old ramshackle taverna called Scooter’s. The place had originally belonged to a guy named Scooter, a biker dude. Its three wooden steps looked like a junkie’s dental work. The porch slanted downhill, then up, as if someone had just stopped building at some point and called it done. The joint had recently been purchased by a consortium of transcendental lawyers who had renamed it Incarnation and were remodeling it. There were signs for both names. People called it what it was named when they first started coming.

  “Don’t tell me. You’re Stein.” The voice and the solid handshake belonged to the stunningly handsome, sandy-haired college-football-hero-looking guy wearing a short-sleeved tan work shirt and khaki shorts. His mountaineer’s calves had a virile dusting of hair and great, thick, ropey veins that Stein envied. He could have been a male model except for two things: his squinty smile that would drive photographers nuts, and that modeling would be the last thing on earth Karma Moonblossom would ever do.

  “What makes you think I’m Stein?” Stein joked.

  “I’m pretty good at identifying foreign species.” K
arma squinted up toward the woods and sky, and in that small gesture Stein reckoned that he knew the mating and migration habits, the songs and nesting places of most of the winged creatures that habituated the canyon. He pointed toward an empty table out on the unkempt lawn. They were slabs of solid oak, cut and shellacked. The benches were split pine logs held on triangular crotches.

  “I appreciate your meeting me here,” said Stein. “I hope you didn’t have to come too far.”

  “Nah, I’m just a little ways up.” Karma shook the back of his hand toward the adjacent hills.

  “I have a kind of adversarial history with bees.”

  “Probably you have some past-life issues with them to work through. Bees are very psychic creatures.”

  “Funny. That’s what the ER doctor said.”

  “Very hip doctor.”

  The waitress wore a body apron over her T-shirt and tight jeans. She had twenty-year-old skin made out of sunlight and ivory. She described the components of each of several batches of flavored sun teas and their specific palliative powers.

  “How’s the organic Diet Coke?” Stein deadpanned. She had not learned irony. Beauty never has to.

  “Bring a couple of mulled lemonades for me and my humorous friend,” Karma said.

  She, even she, lingered an extra moment inside Karma’s aura.

  “So,” Stein said, after the waitress had pried herself away and they were alone, “Karma? Long for ‘Car’?”

  “Short for Carmichael.”

  “Carmichael fits you so perfectly.”

  “You know how it is with names. You grow into them or you molt them.”

  “And Moonblossom?”

  “Just for the honey jars. Sounds better than Mundschein.”

  Stein opened the blue file folder that Millicent Pope-Lassiter had messengered to Lila’s house and riffled through some of the papers. “I’ve been reading through these reports …”