Halfway Home (10 page)

We laughed and had a cup of tea, and afterward he spent a couple of hours tinkering over the property, checking for leaks in the red-tile roof, lashing a couple of flapping shutters. He said he'd be back next day with groceries, and we set the lunch with Foo for the following Monday. I'd long since stopped protesting that he didn't have to keep me provisioned, but in fact I guess I'd gotten pretty spoiled by his almost daily attentions. For Tuesday came and nearly
went, and I was scrunched on the sofa wondering if Emma would
ever
stop cock-teasing Mr. Knightly, when my heart leaped at the sound of the back door opening.

I went to the kitchen and came face-to-face with a hulk of an Indian chief. Two-twenty-five and blue-black hair, weathered profile craggy as the buffalo nickel, wearing a Stetson and a buff suede jacket. I must have blanched, for he smiled apologetically and spoke with curious elegance for one who looked so adamantly untamed. "Mr. Baldwin sent me," he said, gesturing with the sack of groceries as he set them on the counter. "He's got the flu. He didn't want you catching anything."

I thanked him. He was called Merle, some kind of overseer at the ranch—which, despite its having evolved into a conference center and think-tank institute, still had horses, and fences to mend. Thrown off balance, I sent him away with a hasty get-well to Gray. Only when I'd curled up on the sofa again and picked up Jane did I realize how disappointed I was that my patron and friend wouldn't be coming by. First time I wished the beach house had a phone.

Still, I'm very good at being solo. I holed up cozily for the next three days, venturing out whenever the rain would take a breather, sloshing around my acreage. The ocean was too furious below for me to go down to the beach, and the beach stairs shuddered from the battering of the surf till it seemed they would tear away from the bluff. The goldfish pond was brimful, the overflow coursing away and digging channels in the lawn. But the water in the pond was icy clear, and the fish seemed to love it, flashing about in figure eights, bright as new-minted doubloons. Everything loved the rain, the sycamores and the beds of ivy, even a pelican flapping its wings in exultation out on the terrace.

I didn't think much about Miss Jesus, never being the sort who hungered for reviews, but I did think now and then about Brian. I tried to remember when his birthday was—August?—and how I might send him a card. The address in Southport still lay scrawled on the pad by the stove. I wondered what he and Daniel did on Saturdays, if it was ever anything else but sports.

And Thursday afternoon, when Merle showed up again, I couldn't wait for news of Gray. Feeling a good deal stronger, said the big man, who looked to be about forty-five. "He says to tell you lunch is on for Monday. He's just playin' it safe, with the germs and all." Again he had brought me food, which he unpacked out of the sack. Gray must've given him a list, for then he went outside and checked the drains and dragged the barrels out to the end of the drive for trash pickup.

In the kitchen I tore off the sheet with Brian's address from the pad and scribbled a note. "Who is this warrior chieftain you send to me? I miss your plain and earthy WASPness, and he is no substitute. Mona and I will take care of the Foo occasion. You just get better. I thought I was the sick boy. Love, Miss J."

I folded the paper and ran out just as Merle was climbing into the pickup. I handed it over, smiling, and he looked away as he took it, awkward and uncomfortable. I wondered if perhaps he couldn't read himself, or was I treating him too much like a servant? I could tell that Merle and I were destined to be out of phase, though he gave me a hearty wave as he drove away.

Next morning I walked in the rain all the way to the Chevron station, garbed in an ancient voluminous slicker that had been hanging in the pantry since the days of Captain Ahab. Also a brute black umbrella with a six-foot span—the aunts did not go in for dainty things. The rain wasn't heavy, but the wind was brisk and buffeting, and I felt like the Morton's salt girl. Panting with exertion, I folded myself in the phone booth and dialed Mona's number in Westwood, reversing the charges. Which she accepted—a bit reluctantly, I thought.

"Don't worry," I said in a wounded tone, "I'll pay you the fifty cents."

"It's not you, Tommy," she sighed. "Daphne just left."

Christ. Why is it one's friends never behave and never seem to learn? Daphne is Mona's ex—ex-
torturer
—a shrink by profession and beady-eyed, with a chip on her shoulder the size of a two-by-four. They've broken up ten different times, new girlfriends right and left, but something draws them back together to reenact their misery. I braced myself for the details, but Mona was too embarrassed or bored to go through it all again. She shook her self-absorption, inquired if I was surviving the typhoon, and I zeroed in on Monday's lunch.

"Get a bunch of ridiculous salads at Irvine Ranch," I instructed. "Curried pesto, that kind of thing. And fruit and cheese for dessert."

"Wait—what should I wear for this old lady? My Chanel suit?"

"Darling, it's the
beach.
Funky-cazh."

"And what if it rains?"

"The rain will stop," I intoned with a gravel of authority, tough as John Huston. "You just get rid of that two-bit Jungian sociopath, you hear? Or else
you'll
be the old lady, wondering where it all went."

She whimpered uncle. I've found that since my illness I can cut right to the chase with my friends, demanding that they jettison the bullshit from their lives. I am like the toller of the bell: my very presence seizes them with how little time is left. Exacting a promise that Mona would be at the house on Monday by eleven, I ventured back into the rain again. This time heading into the wind, the umbrella held before me as a shield. Every footstep felt like lead. My command that the storm would end seemed laughable and puny.

Then a red van pulled to the side of the road in front of me. A lift! I whumped ahead through a thirty-foot puddle and pulled the door and clambered in. The driver was one of those perfect surfers, Redford-blond and a Maui tan, even after a week of rain. His surfboard stuck through the seats between us, white with zaps of Day-Glo green. We chatted beachtalk as we rode the two miles up the road. He clearly loved the rain as much as I, and had seen a whole family of seals that morning, huddled under a lifeguard's platform.

It was a less-than-nothing encounter, yet he put me in mind of Brian, this nameless boy in his twenties reeking of health. When we reached my driveway and I got out, he grinned out his window and said the storm would be over in forty-eight hours. "And then the waves'll be
banzai!"
he enthused with a mock salute, peeling off into the rain. Leaving me desolate, shocked by the storm of his beauty, trapped in the spotted frailty of my body. I stumbled down the muddy drive, shot through with an unconsolable grief for the man I had ceased to be.

Oh, I got over it. Another night in front of the fire, dozing over
Emma.
A whole package of frozen waffles for breakfast. At two in the afternoon, bundled up in my afghan, Emma and Mr. Knightly finally took their fatal turn in the garden. "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more," he says to her with exquisite feeling. And I found myself swallowing a lump along with the last of the Lido cookies. Then I heard a rattle at the back door, and leaped up to go greet Merle.

"She won't use a wheelchair," he said, unpacking still more food, "and she'll never get acrost that lawn with her cane, 'specially if it's this soggy. So I'll come down here with 'em and carry her into the house."

"Okay," I replied, juggling logistics. "So we'll be five for lunch."

He shook his head as he drew an envelope from his jacket. "I won't be eatin'."

"Well, of course you will. There'll be plenty."

"No thanks," he retorted, snapping slightly, as he handed over the envelope. His firmness in the matter brooked no further protest on my part. He obviously had his own fierce reasons, having to do with a certain pride of place. Not a class thing at all, somehow, unless
he
was the upper class, too aloof to break bread with the rest of us. He nodded curtly, issue closed, and headed out the back door with another list of yard chores.

I pulled out Gray's note. It was written on cream-colored paper thick as a biscuit, with a crest embossed in forest green. Very Baldwin. "He's half Chumash and half Malibu, a marriage of the two purest strains in the region. It's
his
land we're on, make no mistake. My temp is normal again, and my head's stopped throbbing. I'll be frisky by Monday, and then we can all try keeping up with Foo. I miss the beach house—I love it in the rain. You dress warm. And EAT."

Immediately I grabbed the pad and pen. Brian's address, now a loose sheet, fluttered off behind the coffee maker. As I bent to write I flashed on me and Gray as a couple of eighteenth-century gentlemen, with a footman to bear our letters back and forth. Who needed the telephone?

"Miss Mona and I expect you all about 12:30. Don't be late, as we will be nervous wrecks. I don't think the Native American likes me. I feel so unprepared for Foo—never got a chance to grill you for details. Indeed the rain is magical. It seems months since I've seen you. Have you changed? Don't you dare. T."

This time I put it in an envelope. Merle took it from me with studied indifference, squinted up at the mackerel sky, and then said, "Storm'll be out of here tomorrow." We're all weathermen in these parts.

And still that night it came down like the Flood, with a wind that shook the windows in their frames. I lay on the sofa and listened, arms around my knees as I fixed my eyes on the fire, and hated to see the tempest go. Its fury matched something inside me, cheap as a pulp romance, though I couldn't have put it into words. I fell asleep to a mad squall drumming against the ocean side of the house and woke up just before dawn. The fire was blue and orange coals, and the rain was a bare drizzle. I stumbled up to bed.

By midday Sunday the clouds were rolling away, fast-forward, eastward over the hills. I opened the parlor windows to rid the place of stale wood-smoke, and nearly swooned in the heady rush of freshness. I had to be out. I grabbed my parka and, almost an afterthought, the notepad and pen from the kitchen counter, stuffing them in my pocket. Outside the air was crystal, the clouds speeding overhead as white as cotton, all the gray rained out. I headed straight for the beach stairs.

Tramping down, I could see the white surf roiling below me. The last twenty steps had sprung free from the bluff, hanging by a thread and waterlogged like a beached wreck. Gingerly I descended, feeling the last steps sway and strain. Though the tide was officially low, the storm waves heaved and smashed, leaving a bare few feet of beach between the bluff and the water. I walked south for a while, my hood up and my face glazed with the salt spray. The water was magnificent, mad with power, spewing seaweed, foam that seemed a foot thick.

I'd gone a few hundred yards when I was stopped short by a huge pile of rocks extending out into the rushing tide. A crag of the bluff had apparently split off and tumbled down. One slab of sandstone teetering on the pile was covered with grass, which meant it had hurtled all the way from the top. Part of the aerospace mogul's lawn. He must be crazed, I thought with wicked satisfaction, to see his zillion-dollar shorefront crumble away. This slab alone, maybe ten by twelve, was probably worth a hundred grand.

I turned and wandered back, my southward footprints already nearly vanished along the wet sand. I thought of the Malibu tribe, which probably commanded these heights and beaches a thousand years before the Baldwins. There was an old story that made the rounds of the tanning summer flocks—that the Malibus invented the surfboard, not those big Kahunas in Hawaii. I couldn't help but feel a pang for the kingdom Merle had lost, though he certainly didn't act like a man dispossessed. In the wild of the storm's aftermath, it was hard not to think Los Angeles itself was the mirage. Impossible that all that urban shit and negative entropy lay only a half hour south of this new world.

I reached the base of the steps, rapturous as Crusoe. I could see that the hollow behind was clean as a bleached skull, the high waves having flushed it. I ducked under the steps and sat on the stone sill, protected from the wind. Sat there I don't know how long, watching the clouds break now and then to a piercing glimpse of blue. When I brought out the pad and pen from my pocket, I honestly thought I was going to jot some nature notes. I was startled as if by a blip of ESP when I brought the pen to the paper and wrote: "Dear Brian—" Oh. It took a couple of moments for my head to catch up with my heart. Then I started writing in earnest. "I just wanted you to know I'm glad you came. I don't exactly forgive you for the past—not the abuse when I was a kid and certainly not the dumb-fuck attitude about being gay that severed us for good. But I sort of see you as somebody else now. We'd still fight, no matter how much we saw each other, because the old blood never forgets. All the same, I think you're probably an okay guy—"

I stopped at the wimpy idiocy of that remark and contemplated the surf again. Just then, a black-green crab two feet between the claws came scampering out of the foam and stared at me. It swayed on its pontoon legs and bugged its eyes, positively prehistoric. Then it skittered sideways down the beach. I bent over the pad once more, telling myself this was all a first draft.

"I'll probably never meet Susan and Daniel, so give them my love. I wish all of you long life. What I've learned from this thing is just to say what I feel—"

That didn't sound remotely true, not to mention self-important. It was probably best not to try to organize my feelings ten feet away from the roaring maw of the ocean god. Besides, I was getting a chill. Slipping the pad in my pocket I came around and started up the stairs, which groaned and shuddered under me. The first twenty steps I was ready to jump away if the stairway gave, hoping I'd land in the sand and break no bones.