Golden Orange Read Free Page A

the pathetic kneeling wire man and squashed it flat.
    Reliving that meeting with Chip Simon brought forth a dive-bombing attack from one of the winged scavengers. Fear plummeted straight for his guts. Winnie cried out and bolted upright in bed. The huge turkey buzzard retreated and grinned like a gargoyle, a coil of Winnie’s large intestine dangling and dancing from that horrible leering rictus.

2

    The Ghetto
    T ess Binder secretly hated the ocean because she feared infinity. Of course, the water in Newport Harbor is usually placid, particularly in the summer, but it is seawater, even though at night the harbor sometimes reminded her of lily pads and frogs. The water never reassured her, not like the water of Lake Arrowhead where she’d summered as a girl.
    Tess liked to pretend that it didn’t chase the moon and tide, this normally placid water outside her home on Linda Isle, but it certainly did impose definite limits in her life: north to Dover Shores in upper Newport Bay, so-called because of the white cliffs, then south to the Balboa peninsula, west to Balboa Coves, and east … She didn’t like to think of east. East was the harbor jetty and beyond. There her water turned into the vast bleak ocean. Infinity.
    It wasn’t only infinity that frightened Tess Binder. Since her latest divorce she had discovered that she was afraid of crowds, sagging triceps, AIDS, herpes, being single, trying to survive on her last $50,000.
    Tess Binder was forty-three years old, and had been searching with growing despair for another husband, one who would not insist on a prenuptial agreement. But there were very few of those around The Golden Orange these days.
    Tess opened the balcony door of the master bedroom and put on her round tortoiseshell serious glasses to look west toward Bayshores. But she didn’t have a main channel view. She was forced to face Pacific Coast Highway and to endure traffic noise. Once, at a party on Spyglass Hill, she heard her side of the island called “the ghetto” by a Linda Isle neighbor on the other side.
    She had made the mistake of starting the day by going grocery shopping in the market she’d used during her short marriage to Ralph Cunningham: one of those where white eggplant, apple pears, elephant garlic, and Maui onions are individually wrapped in little nets. And the long-stemmed strawberries are so big that only eight of them fit in a basket, and Pepino melons go for nearly ten dollars a pound, ditto for Holland purple bell peppers. She did note that soft-shell crab was on sale at thirty bucks. And white truffles were being “offered” at sixteen hundred dollars a kilo. In short, a week’s shopping could overdraw a plumber’s Visa card.
    Just shopping there made it impossible not to think of her present state of affairs. She was surrounded in the store by people she knew casually, people who could still afford to buy anything they wanted. She saw the parvenue wife of a Costa Mesa car dealer, buying slabs of abalone like it was lunch meat, at forty dollars per pound. That was when a panic attack struck Tess Binder, the first since Ralph Cunningham left her. She had to get out of that place in a hurry. She had to go to the beach.
    When she reached her five-year-old Mercedes (the one Ralph Cunningham let his office help use to run errands), she discovered with amazement that she was holding an empty banana skin! She’d been compulsively eating a banana while she was in the store and hadn’t even realized it. When she got in the car she almost wept. Tess Binder wasn’t just an abandoned woman. She was a goddamn thief.
    The Easter season had brought with it Santa Ana winds from the desert. It was 85 degrees Fahrenheit on the sand at her club, and the club’s hot mommas were white-hot on that Saturday afternoon. There was a tanker load of Bain de Soleil sliding over a thousand square yards of winter-white, health-club–firm,