Golden State: A Novel (17 page)

I wondered if she remembered that it was the same couch on
which the social worker had sat that afternoon, side by side with Ethan.

“Is Tom working?” she asked. “Or is he just avoiding me?”

“He doesn’t like this. Me, you. He thinks I should cut you off completely.”

“I don’t blame him.” Heather was fidgeting with her ring. “If you need me to leave—”

I shook my head. “He’ll come around,” I said, although I was having a harder and harder time believing that. “Do you still like pot roast?”

“Love it.”

“Good, it’s got a while to go. But meanwhile, we have the first season of
The Bionic Woman
on Netflix.”

Heather squealed with delight. When we were kids, we watched the show religiously. I settled on the couch and turned the TV on, and Lindsay Wagner’s golden hair floated across the screen in slow motion.

“Jimmy knows her,” Heather said offhandedly. “She dated his cousin or something.”

“Jimmy?” I said. “Is that—”

She nodded. The father was still a touchy subject, one she rarely brought up. I had stopped asking, for fear of starting an argument. This was the first time she had mentioned a name.

“You’ve seen him?” I asked.

“He was in town last night for a big fund-raiser at some swank home in Los Altos Hills. I met him afterward at his hotel.”

“That’s weird. I was supposed to go to a fund-raiser in Los Altos Hills last night too, but I ended up working late. Some health-care-reform thing with the governor.”

“At the Bertram estate,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, confused. “How did you know?”

She glanced at me slyly, the corners of her mouth turning up. “Jimmy always sees the guest list ahead of time.”

“Stop messing around.”

Heather didn’t say anything.

“You don’t mean to imply—” I couldn’t finish my sentence. Jimmy.
James
.

She raised her eyebrows.

“James Dupree,” I said.

She nodded, cracking ice between her teeth.

“
The
James Dupree,” I said, incredulous. This was too much, even for Heather.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” she said matter-of-factly. Her eyes were shining.

“You’re right.”

“Suit yourself. But don’t you even want to know how I met him?”

“Sure,” I said, shaking my head. “This ought to be good.”

8:20 a.m
.

The cable car comes to a stop between the two towering pagodas. Here is Chinatown proper, the length of Grant Avenue canopied with hanging lanterns. As the driver brakes, sharp pains shoot up my leg.

One block over is the office I visited more than a year ago in search of some miracle cure. I found myself one afternoon climbing the rickety stairs of a three-story building, clutching the name and address that had been given to me by my neighbor Mrs. Yiu. At the top of the stairs was a red door, and tacked to the door was a sign I couldn’t read, black calligraphy on cream-colored paper. Beneath the sign was a framed eight-by-ten, which appeared to have been taken from a magazine, of a smiling young Chinese woman holding an infant in her arms.

I rang the buzzer and waited. There was a rustling sound behind the door. Seconds later, it opened to reveal a man in a white oxford shirt and white pants. He was younger and taller than I’d thought he’d be. The voice on the telephone had led me to expect someone elderly.

“I’m looking for Dr. Alex Wu,” I said uncertainly.

“I am Dr. Wu. Please come in.” The door closed softly behind me. On the wall was a diploma in biology from San Francisco State,
a master’s in science from U.C. Davis, a certificate in traditional Chinese medicine from the Academy of Chinese Culture and Health Sciences, and, below that, Dr. Wu’s NCCAOM certification. He smiled kindly as I glanced over the diplomas. “You’re in good hands,” he proclaimed. At this he held up his hands, palms forward, as if I might want to inspect them.

“Yes,” I said. “You come highly recommended by my neighbor Alice Yiu.”

“Alice was my piano teacher many years ago. She was once a great pianist, you know. As a child in Beijing, she was famous, a prodigy.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “I had no idea.” I’d never once heard piano music coming through the thin walls that separated our two houses. Sometimes, she and I would talk, standing on either side of our shared wooden fence. I used to lift Ethan over the fence to Alice so he could pet the dog. “You’re a strong boy,” she would say, and Ethan, beaming, would push against the wobbly wooden fence with all his might and proclaim, “I super strong.”

Alice had never been shy with her questions, which is how she came to know the intimate fact of my failure to conceive. I, too, had asked questions, but she had somehow managed to avoid most of them. I knew very little about her. What, I wondered, could have made her give up the piano? I thought of what Dr. Bariloche said all those years ago: life is a series of beginnings and endings. You leave one self behind and move on to another.

Dr. Wu led me to a large rectangular room. Opposite the desk was a red leather sofa, flanked on either side by small tables, on which rested identical potted plants. The place smelled earthy and vaguely herbal.

“Let’s begin with your personal history,” he said, taking a seat behind the desk and gesturing toward the sofa. I sank into the cushions, embarrassed to observe my own knees jutting so high in the air. It felt unseemly, like some strange prelude to the pelvic exam.

From his desk drawer, Dr. Wu removed a black notebook with red trim, still wrapped in cellophane. He meticulously unwrapped
the notebook and opened it to the first page. “How long have you been trying to conceive?” he asked, pen poised above the page.

“Forever,” I said.

Dr. Wu frowned, and I felt my face redden. I never liked it when patients talked in codes that only they could understand. The best patients were the ones who identified their symptoms and the attending time lines precisely, factually. From this, I could construct a patient’s story and begin the path to diagnosis. “Forever” was not a quantity; it was merely a statement of emotion, of fatigue, of thwarted desire.

“Almost three years.”

He smiled and jotted something down in his notebook. “Very good.” I wasn’t sure what pleased him more: the fact that I was cooperating or the promise of a professional challenge. “And could you describe your fertility regimen?”

“I just finished my second round of IVF,” I said. Then I rattled off a list of drugs and shots and hormones, timetables and temperatures. There was the IUI; the Clomid, which made me crazy; the Follistim, which made me puke, and the Novarel, which made me gain weight so fast that I looked like I really was pregnant. My past read like a laundry list of all the traditional methods, which made up in thoroughness what they lacked in romance. “Nothing works.” It seemed like the only thing we hadn’t tried was surrogacy, which both Tom and I had agreed was not for us. “Too many hands in the pie,” as he put it.

“And your husband?” Dr. Wu asked delicately. “You’re certain this isn’t his problem?”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t until we lost Ethan that we began trying to conceive. While we knew that having a baby wouldn’t replace Ethan, losing him sparked an urgency that consumed me. Six months in, Tom got tested, and we discovered that the problem was entirely mine. My eggs simply were not vital. Again and again, I awoke sweating from nightmares in which my eggs took ugly forms: hard gray pebbles, black ashes, tiny metal spikes that rebuffed anything that tried to
touch them. Each month, I felt the sense of failure anew. As a physician, I understood that the human body does not necessarily bow to one’s bidding, yet I was startled to realize how much of my identity turned out to be tied up with that most basic biological skill: the ability to conceive. No amount of work or persistence could get me what I suddenly wanted most: a baby.

Of course, I said none of this to Dr. Wu. Instead, I asked, “Can you help me?”

He prescribed twice-weekly massage therapy and weekly acupuncture, in addition to a bitter concoction of red clover, raspberry leaf, lady’s mantle, and something called false unicorn root, “to restore hormonal balance and encourage ovulation,” he said. I choked down the concoction twice a day for several months, all the while keeping close tabs on the calendar, my temperature, and the rest. This, like everything, led nowhere.

“Did I ever tell you what my parents said when I joined the National Guard?” Dennis asks.

His voice sounds tired.

“They said the military wasn’t right for you.”

“Their exact words were ‘The military isn’t for people like us.’ Meaning, it’s the poor people’s job to go fight the wars. That’s part of why I joined; I knew that wasn’t fair. I’d gotten everything I wanted all my life, but my friend Jeremy, this kid who worked at the stables where my mom kept her horses, joined the National Guard to pay for school. He does great, top of his class, but he gets pulled out of college senior year and sent to Dhahran. He’s a week from coming home when he gets killed by fucking friendly fire. Friendly fire! What asshole came up with that term?”

“I’m really sorry,” I say.

“They had it right in Vietnam. Not the war itself, but the draft. A draft makes everybody equal. You had guys like Elvis going to war. That would never happen now. Can you imagine Justin Timberlake stuck in a bunker in Afghanistan? Every time I see one of those fucking
CALIFORNIA IS MY COUNTRY
bumper stickers, I think of Jeremy. And all these guys who came back from Iraq and Afghanistan missing legs and arms, or worse. All that sacrifice amounts
to shit if any state can just say, Guess what, we don’t want to be Americans anymore.”

I can hear him breathing heavily on the other end of the line. “Hell, I don’t have to tell you any of this. I’m sure you’ve already heard it from your sister.”

“Yes,” I say. I understand why he’s so angry. Most of my patients feel the same way. Not Heather. She’s always been starry-eyed about California.

I don’t tell him about the sweatpants she gave me a few weeks ago, bearing the slogan
REPUBLIC OF CALIFORNIA
right across the derriere. I’ve yet to wear them, but I’ve been tempted. It’s startling, really, how enamored the good citizens of California have suddenly become with the symbolism of our tottering statehood.

Children in schools across the state, from Eureka to Riverside, have begun saluting the California state flag. I’d be willing to bet that, until recently, most Californians didn’t know what has, in recent weeks, become common knowledge: the flag was first raised in Sonoma in 1846, by a group of thirty-three American settlers revolting against Mexican rule. In coming years, the handmade burlap flag would be the subject of much derision, on account of the fact that the beast in the center of it looked more like a hog than a bear. The commander of the short-lived California Republic was William B. Ide, a farmer and sometime teacher from Massachusetts who had arrived on the scene less than a year before. When U.S. Army captain John C. Frémont showed up and claimed the area for the United States just twenty-five days after the revolt began, Ide enlisted in the U.S. Army. A historic state park in Red Bluff still bears his name.

Revolt. Protest. That’s something San Franciscans are good at, for better or worse. You can’t walk past the Federal Building without running into a group of activists decrying global warming, animal cruelty, the World Trade Organization, the government in general. It makes sense that the flag grew out of an impulse for independence, a thrusting of the middle finger at the powers that be.

A few days ago, the evening news played footage of boys and girls
standing at attention, hands over their hearts, gazing up at that lunky, half-grinning grizzly bear heavy-footing it across a white background, a single red star in the sky to the west of his head, a red band across the bottom.
CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC
, it declares, as if we’d joined the Union reluctantly in the first place, as if that grizzly bear always had one foot out the door.

Earlier this week on Channel 4, I saw a classroom full of third-grade children singing the state song, a rather odd little tune called “I Love You, California”:

A radio station in Sacramento is running a contest for the best state pledge, because we don’t have one. Apparently, only six states do. It’s news to me. This whole process has been a crash course in civics. As it turns out, most states require public school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag; California doesn’t. The California constitution does, however, require that public schools provide “patriotic exercises” on a daily basis. The phrasing smacks of a different era. I picture rosy children in red, white, and blue doing calisthenics on a golden lawn—a bit of Communist-style group exercise for the democracy set.

Growing up, we had to recite two pledges each morning in school, one to the American flag, the other to the Christian flag—white, with a blue square in the upper left corner and, in the square, a red cross. Although it was a public school, no one took the separation of church and state seriously. I recited both pledges with passion. It did not occur to me that allegiances could shift, that the things I believed in as absolutes would fade. The things I learned in Sunday school now seem absurd to me—multiplying loaves of bread, tongues of fire, Jonah in the belly of the whale, a day when believers will be whisked up into the sky. Back then, it was not necessary
to think about these outlandish stories, to analyze them. They simply
were
, just as America simply
is
my country. I did nothing to earn my citizenship. I was born into it, the laziest form of patriotism.

If the ballot initiative passes, a million things we take for granted will suddenly be turned on end. When the San Francisco Giants play at AT&T Park, will the fans stand and hold their hands over their hearts while someone sings the new California anthem? And who will get to write it? Tom tells me that invitations have already gone out from the secessionist faction of the state legislature to several California-based acts, from Oakland’s own Green Day and Counting Crows to Don Henley and Glenn Frey.