City on Fire (73 page)

Her growing up, however, had been done in the other world, the world of Jenny, with its miles of highways, its drive-ins, beaches, and bougainvillea, chaparral, Tastee Freez, wildfires, stucco, cineplexes, bumper cars, in-ground pools, planned subdivisions up in the foothills with grids of paved streets and manholes and streetlights, as if someone had forgotten to build the houses, or as if some B-movie bomb had vaporized them. In high school, she would drive up here with Chip McGillicuddy after double features or beer blasts. Mouths sort of sore from kissing, they’d park in one of the deserted cul-de-sacs and look out over the corresponding cul-de-sacs below. She thought of this as the essential Californian activity, gazing upon your life from a great distance, trying to infer from trees and highways and restaurants shaped like the foods they served which house was your own. (This was before she moved to New York and discovered that recasting your life in cinematic terms was a national phenomenon, possibly a global one.) From this height, and with smog framing the sodium lights in soft focus, her house looked like everyone else’s. And when Chip worked his hand up under her shirt and handled a small breast clumsily, like an avocado he was testing for ripeness, she could have been anyone’s girlfriend, could have been anyone, which at the time seemed like what she wanted. She reclined in her seat and stared at the leatherette ceiling of the McGillicuddy family wagon and thanked God for the Golden West.

She stayed in-state for college, on a scholarship to Berkeley. Her father clucked about it and read aloud an editorial about recent misbehavior on campus, but he was attached as only an immigrant with a doctorate can be to the idea of public education, and he knew it was the best school in the system. She and Chip continued to go steady, though he was at U.C. Santa Barbara and she was concerned about where all this was headed. He was one of those people who, set walking toward a point on the horizon, would keep on in a straight line without ever noticing that the horizon never got any closer. He would have marched straight into marriage, though what he’d meant those times he’d said he loved her couldn’t possibly have been what she meant when she thought of being loved.

College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more. She wanted to cast her self-reinvention as Jenny from the Valley in theoretical terms, as a form of resistance, or a heroic negative capability—probably because somewhere underneath, she was ashamed. It had been painful, being two people. There was a civil war inside her. Phone calls grew strained.

Then, in December, Chip invited her family to his family’s Christmas party—an overture that felt like a sneak attack, in that the invitation, addressed to , came in the mail while she was still finishing exams upstate, and she didn’t have a chance to stop her father from opening it, from RSVPing enthusiastically and posthaste. Her mother was seeing a chiropractor now, the headaches seemed further apart and milder in intensity and duration, and as they drove together through the weird SoCal Yuletide, the fake snow on the roofs of bungalows, fir trees in the windows of service stations flanked by palms, the massive cognitive dissonance generated by consumer culture, the Cartesian fallacy, and so forth, Jenny saw Mom flinch a little when Dad reached across the seat to take her hand.

She watched them at the party, too, a bourgeois affair where men in hibiscus-colored shirts stood around drinking buttered rum while women circulated restlessly and kids reconnoitered out back behind the pool house to watch planes streak in over the Valley and get high. The desert moon stayed up for as many as eighteen hours a day. The desert could seem, itself, like the surface of the moon.

Having ignored Chip’s hints that they should go for a drive, she returned to find her mother surrounded by a little scrum of husbands. Mom’s English wasn’t stellar, on account of her years of isolation, encountering America through a tube, but you wouldn’t have known that to look at her. She laughed almost silently at the men’s jokes. There was condescension on Chip’s father’s face, as if he were saying to his friends, Look how easy it is to make these Celestials laugh. Also, the man was drunk. He was an alcoholic, according to his son, and this was the first time Jenny had seen him inter pocula, but the implications for Chip and for family life in general seemed to fall away beside the manifest injustice of being made to perform for these people like trained monkeys, of having to be Jenny, and of not quite being able to recall the country that was supposed to be hers, on whose benighted people the fascist Nixon was even now dumping his bombs. She squeezed her mother’s elbow. “We have to go.”

“But we have such a good time,” Mom enunciated, as if it were a phrase learned from a book.

“I’m not feeling good. We need to go.”

She lay on the backseat on the ride home, faking menstrual cramps and watching colored lights slide across the window. While Mom continued to practice her English—What a lovely home—and Dad pretended they would return the invitation, she kept seeing the way they’d bowed when they laughed, like spring-mounted toys. Kept hearing their tiny coughing fits of laughter.

Back at school, she started to go by Minh. Whereas her parents’ Viet-ness had once been something to conceal, it now provoked from people—when it had been established, through decorous indirection, that she wasn’t in fact Chinese, or Thai—a kind of awe. It was something she’d accomplished, rather than something she was. It didn’t seem worth mentioning that her dad, a Catholic, had supported the Diem regime. Her grades suffered, but only slightly, as a result of the rallies and parties and self-criticism circles and hybrids thereof she began attending, and of nights spent doing her own small part for the sexual revolution. (Even this, she later reflected, was not an unmixed good, in that it created an unrealistic picture of the world to come. But what didn’t, in those days?) As Mother Mountain, she appeared weekly on the 10-watt student radio station, punctuating excerpts from Minima Moralia and philippics about the aerospace industry and modern kitchen appliances with renditions of Stockhausen on her detuned violin. Relative to the rest of the student body, her drug intake was moderate-to-fair. She went home less. It was a heady time.

Then came the occupation of the deans’ building, and the arrest, and Dad showing up alone to bail her out. At the start of the long drive south, he told her her mother was leaving him—for the chiropractor.

Jenny turned her face to the window, feeling at last the full force of something she must have been concealing from herself for a very long time. As if the point of the blade were aimed not into her but out. She wanted it not to hurt, the institution of marriage being such a heteronormative cop-out and all. Or was it possible to love something and hate it at the same time? For liberty to be tyrannical, and tyranny liberating?

They arrived at home to find the house empty, and finally, after so long, she could smell it, like salt and paper. It didn’t smell any more or less weird than Trish’s house had probably smelled to Mandy, or Mandy’s to Nell, and she wanted to call them all up with a belated invitation to spend the night, so that she wouldn’t have to cry alone, but she hadn’t spoken to Nell or Mandy or Trish in a long time, and all she had now was her father, and later, in the chiropractor’s houseboat on the far side of the 405, her mom, and the two Valiums she’d smuggled home in her laundry bag.

Philosophy seemed to require that one take a position on the questions that reasserted themselves now. Tradition vs. Progress. Reason vs. Passion. Being vs. Time or vs. Nothingness. Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn’t decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you’d lived, and the places you’d come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

61

SNOWING HELL OUT HERE. Through the windshield, Regan couldn’t see the road, or even trees beyond their skeletal trunks. She kept picturing herself and the car sliding off among them, into the nothing. With the dashboard lighter. With Kotex and peanut butter and a pack of chewing gum gone brittle from the cold. Over and over her little inventory she ran, like the girl with the prayer in the Salinger story. Or the kids who sang that song on the radio. How many times had it played in the hours she’d been driving? She’d listened till their dumb sweet voices hurt too much, and then turned it off until that hurt too much, and then back on, and there was the song again. She could count on hearing it several more times, drifted in at the forest’s edge, as she warmed herself with the lighter and sucked the last nutrients from the gum. Snow mounting over the ragtop. Air dimming as night fell. Blood slowing, mercury dropping. And finally miles of uninflected white. Nuclear oblivion had been a nightmare since childhood; now she knew it was what she deserved. For in these last few days, what was in her womb had seemed to stir. Probably that, too, was just her imagination, but it had forced her to examine her choices. Say she really had waited too long. She could never tell L., much less marry him, as Daddy, still in the dark, would want. And a child with no father would shackle her to the tainted fortune she planned to give up as soon as her acting would support her. True, she could change her name, go somewhere far from New York. But what if she hated the kid for forcing her into a grim life in the provinces, the way she’d hated having it inside her, this thing made not of love, but of pain?

BACK IN THE FALL, when she’d first approached one of the gentle theater boys, the son of an OB/GYN, hatred had been closer to panic. She’d asked if he could make discreet inquiries on behalf of a sorority sister who’d gotten herself in trouble. He’d come back with the names of a few places near the city, but if discretion was a concern, he thought she might be better off—the sister, he meant—crossing the border to Ontario. The laws there were even stricter than in the U.S., but his father had a colleague … Only later, consulting an atlas, had she realized what lay between her and Ontario. She kept wondering about her last run-in with Amory Gould. He’d expected her, as Daddy’s obedient daughter, to play along with the chosen suitor, show him the Hamilton-Sweeneys weren’t that bad. But We’ve been out a couple times already this summer, L. had said. So had Amory known even beforehand what L. was? At a minimum, he knew after the fact, and said nothing. Perhaps for him it was a matter of indifference. Perhaps by saying nothing herself, she was even now playing along. There was only one secret, she thought, that was still hers alone: the pregnancy. She couldn’t have the Demon Brother find out what she was about to do with it. To it. And where was the one place in the world from which he’d turned his all-seeing eyes? There it was, on the map before her. The city he’d come from. Buffalo.

Tundra having failed to stop her, she reached it just after noon. The streets downtown were white and lightly trafficked, forsaken under Christmas tinsel keening with the wind. She took the bridge over to Canada, checked into a motel with her supplies. Then she called a taxi and went out onto the frozen balcony to wait. The cab that came was not yellow. It idled in the parking lot, hadn’t seen her through the snow. And so there was still time to decide, she thought, on that balcony. And in the cab. And at the clinic. She was free, said the nurse who took her vital signs, to change her mind at any point. Regan meant to find out if it was possible what was in her was already a life. Instead, she said, “Why are you telling me this?” But the answer was obvious. It was the same reason the waiting room they made her pass back through was so horrifically genteel, with its potted plants and piped-in music: so she would know that what happened after they fit the mask over her mouth and nose and turned on the gas was nobody’s fault but her own.

YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE SOMEONE drive you home, take care of you for the first seventy-two hours, but Regan, by design, had no one. As far as anyone in her other life knew, she’d taken off after Christmas not for Canada, but for Italy, to spend a semester studying the commedia dell’arte. She’d started laying the groundwork at Thanksgiving; this ancient theatrical rite, she said, survived in its purest form in rocky little Piemontese villages that would be hard to reach by phone. It had still seemed possible, so far before any quickening, that things would turn out differently, that she would carry her baby to term and then put it up for adoption. And in either case, she couldn’t stay so close to home. Daddy was preoccupied as usual, but Felicia remembered, suddenly: “What about the wedding? You’ll be back by June? We’ve always talked about a June wedding.”

“But Daddy said you’d agreed to wait for William to graduate first,” Regan pointed out. “And this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me. If you want a June wedding, you’ll have to wait till ’61.” At which William looked up from the napkin he’d been doodling on and mouthed the words Thank you.

Now, lying in bed the morning after the procedure, she thought of phoning him and confessing everything. William would have been on a plane within hours and never breathed a word. Instead, she changed the two pads she’d bled through in the night and propped herself by the window. The motel was so hard-up that they’d turned off the vacancy sign to save money, and beyond it she could just see Lake Erie, the wind stiffening the waves into peaks. The room had two TVs, stacked one atop the other, but only one of them worked. She left it on all afternoon to cover her crying—not that there was anyone to listen—and ate peanut butter out of the jar.

WHEN SHE WAS WELL ENOUGH to drive, she headed back to Buffalo. The address where the Goulds had grown up was on Essex Street. She’d expected something grander than a dilapidated townhouse on a tiny lot. She got out of the car and tested the boards on the windows. The nails held; nothing in there was going to get out. Then she went to see a realtor and signed a six-month lease on a bungalow near the university, sight unseen. Insofar as she had any plan left at all, she was sure the place would be fine, and it was. The tarpaulin covering an unshingled patch of roof would remain there for the length of her occupancy, but there was a deep tub in the bathroom and a fireplace in the den, and shops and restaurants to serve the people her age nearby. She rang in the 1960s downing an entire pizza in front of a fire she’d built with her own hands. Her mom used to chivvy them into the pews at St. John the Martyr for the New Year’s Day service; what you do the first day of the year decides what you’ll be doing the rest of it, was her superstition. Regan wasn’t sure what crappy Buffalo pizza signified, or the lone glass of wine with which she chased it, except that for the foreseeable future, she’d be doing a lot of things on her own.