Surf. Work. Surf.
Carol and the girls of the Laguna Beach cycling club stopped coming around. Carol and Frannie shared a soda once and she looked at Frannie like she’d lost her way.
That wasn’t it at all. This was the way.
She had seen a vision of the golem and the blankness of life. It had led her here.
A week after they socked away Hooky’s ghost, Saul took Frannie off tables entirely and dedicated her to the bookstore. Most hours she served up bestsellers to vacationers who wandered over from the Riviera, people looking for something fat and meaty to read as they baked in the sun and tried to catch a glimpse of Victor Mature or George Burns whenever they happened to wander out on private balconies. But that wasn’t the real work; the real work was the Blanks.
A twenty-something guy called Dan with a sport coat and ink on his fingers heard the call when he was new in town. He’d come in from Kansas, son of a drycleaner franchise man who shipped his whole family west when Jew-haters made their lives uncomfortable. But Dan was a writer and Los Angeles was where he needed to be, anyway, and the Blank he chose showed him all of that. Frannie saw Dan see a woman on a train, a lonely woman making a trip straight into a Gothic world of New England that never could exist. The guy was steeped in Gothic, looming houses and dark shadows and ancient secrets. The young man had a story to spin out, and when he left he was set, and it was going to take years. Frannie never saw him again, never saw any of them again.
A truly gorgeous Italian boy, seventeen years old and a headlining trumpet player at the Riviera, wandered in. Truly pulled her aside and said, “That boy has made lots of jazz records. He’s famous.” He stood in the book section, all knobby joints and greasy hair, confused.
“Like you’re not sure why you’re in here, right?” Frannie asked. She shook his hand. “The girls on stage really like you. Your name’s Francesco; that’s close to mine, Frances. Frannie.”
“Frankie,” he said, shaking back. He had a deep voice, she was surprised he didn’t sing, too.
Frannie was seeing a lot of Newp but she wasn’t above flirting with the people called by the Blanks. “You surf?” she asked. He had the lean look of an athlete.
“Nah,” he laughed. “Tennis, but no time, really...” drifting again as he eyes found their way to the Blanks on the top shelf.
For Frankie she didn’t really understand any of it. Flashes of the trumpet and those crowds, a million eager girls showing up at his hotel room since he was about 12, first sent away, later not sent away. Then the rest got weird, he was surfing after all but against a gray cement wall, which must be a dream or something, and there was a long-haired Italian girl, again and again in his life, but not a love, more of an anchor. On and on. He left stunned.
“See ya round, Frankie,” she said.
She was taking all these visits herself, now. Saul wanted it that way. “I have years more to do, but maybe not so many as I hope.” That unsettled Frannie a little because she didn’t like to think about the future.
Because what was the future? The summer wouldn’t go on forever, even though she felt lost in endless sun-washed days now. And Saul was talking not as if he would die—and who wouldn’t? But that she was going to be here with these books and these Blanks when he was gone. That might be great, but it was jazz, just talk and she didn’t want to think beyond the days right up to when she’d have to go back to high school. When the old man got maudlin like that, she’d hit the tables for a change, then head to the beach to surf out the last rays of sun.
On the beach she was one of Hooky’s crew now, and they called her lots of names. Newp and Hooky tried to come up with one that would stick but Frannie defied all nicknames. She was the girl on the surfboard.
Sometimes the boys on the beach would give her the willies—there was a college boy like that who knew Newp from school. He came around for a few weeks, kept trying to get close to her, but he wasn’t a surfer and when he asked her for a lesson he took the opportunity to get all hands-y while they were paddling out. She wished at that point that the Korean ghost were still around and would start expanding her tastes. And yet she liked the attention—what’s sixteen for, after all?
One day Newp saw her nearly sock the guy in the jaw and then he didn’t come around anymore. What happened to him and what was said, neither Newp nor Hooky would fess up.
The woman called Callie came back to the store once, and when Frannie touched her she got a flash of the many armed goddess of destruction the Indians worshipped. That wasn’t even with the Blanks present. Because it was rubbing off, and she couldn’t get enough.
Callie wanted a Blank. She had seen one before and run from it. She was very vague about it, but Frannie got the gist. Frannie showed her a Blank and when Callie opened it Frannie got flashes she didn’t like to see and turned away from, of teen boys mowing her lawn and invited inside, of her husband dead in a car and her baby daughter dead in a pink blow-up swimming pool, and ache and ache and ache.
Callie didn’t like Cafe Monstro or its power over her, Frannie could see that. The lady put the Blank back angrily and walked out, saying this place should be burnt to the ground. And then, under her breath, something worse, though Frannie had no clue why:
Before he finds it.
“Wait!” Frannie called after Callie as she ripped through the beaded curtain and headed for the door, the brilliant sun shining through the glass walls, lighting her blond hair so it shone like a golden halo. “Before who finds it?”
Callie turned. “What?”
“You said, ‘before he finds it.’” Frannie had to raise her voice because Betty and Truly were setting up for the night and they and Newp were dragging equipment and making a crazy racket. “Before who finds it?”
“I said no such thing.” Scowling down her perky nose, which wrinkled as she swayed a little. Rattled and confused. All of this wasn’t so strange because the Blanks did a number, people who consulted them often seemed like they were waking up, forgetting half of it.
But this seemed important. She had as good as threatened them and then said something worse. “Before he, who?”
“I don’t know what you’re prattling on about, young lady,” Callie said, sounding awfully haughty for someone who seduced every boy who mowed her lawn and then cried herself to sleep every night in a little cave of baby clothes in her closet. Frannie had the urge to hug her and smack her at the same time. Callie disappeared into the blinding sun.
And as she had studies under Saul, she unwound it all with her lessons from Hooky on the beach, lessons that were pushing her from enthusiast to something more, just as she was getting expert on the men and women who came in to see what Mary White had called the big, terrible things they have done and the big, wonderful things they will do, except sometimes it was the opposite and always it was true, either way.
For Frannie learned many things from the Zohar and the Sefer Yetzirah, and she learned of the worlds of man and spirit and the Ten Sefirot, the forces we all bring to bear, the will and wisdom and the judgment and balance—
But the surf helped her understand it, in the surf you barreled into the curl and you looked for the end and sometimes you sail on through and sometimes you wipe out and sometimes, sometimes, you die.