Some Can Whistle (40 page)

When Jesse was ready for college—it seemed to take her only a few years to grow up—I left L.A. for good and went back home to Texas. I settled back in at Los Dolores, replaced the ocean with the plain. I made reading lists for Amy’s very bright children; I used my still-considerable influence to get them into good schools. Occasionally I drove to Houston, to attend a benefit, see a show at a museum.

Always, when in Houston, I drifted over to the Lawndale area, an Asian barrio by this time. The Mr. Burger was gone, replaced by a spiffy little restaurant called The Wok.

Sometimes I visited Sue Lin; she and her husband owned a computer store, staffed mainly by their lively children.

I tried to find Dew, but no one was sure where Dew had gone.

Apart from having a larger Asian barrio, Houston had not changed much. The dance halls along Telephone Road and over by the ship channel were as sleazy as they had been in T.R.’s time or in my own youth. The city still had its funkiness, its odors, its beautiful clouds. Sometimes I drifted aimlessly in the older parts of town—the Heights, the Third Ward. Always I dreamed of my lost daughter, who had so loved to kick up her heels in just such places.

Sometimes I drove on down to Galveston and walked by the sea, dreaming of T.R. My mind continued to be tormented by the lost years; it wouldn’t just let them go; it picked at them. They had become an obsession with me.

In my obsession I remembered the name of the nice girl who had been killed in the wreck—Annie Elgin, T.R.’s high school friend. She was dead, but her mother was alive. I went again to East Texas and found Mrs. Elgin living in the same lovely, well-kept house the detective had sent me pictures of. She was a pleasant, courteous woman, but so plainly horrified by my appearance—I looked pretty weird by this time, I guess—that I excused myself after fifteen minutes and never bothered her again. I learned as little about T.R. from her as I had learned
from Lloyd Bynum. Accepting this lesson at last, I never went to East Texas again.

The last source that might have told me something about T.R.’s youth was the man who killed her, Earl Dee. Several times, before he himself was killed, I contemplated visiting him in prison. But if Lloyd Bynum and Annie Elgin’s mother weren’t really interested, could I expect better of Earl Dee? After all, she was just an old girlfriend to him, and a treacherous one at that. Probably he had forgotten her two weeks after he killed her. A visit with him might just make matters worse; in the end I let it go, and with it the hope of knowing very much about T.R.’s early years.

I remained obsessed, but my obsession was sterile; I never learned any of the things I wanted to know about T.R. It was as if she had risen unexpectedly from the dark sea of time, walked with me on the beach for a few bright moments, and had then gone quietly back to the long waters. But a critical human ability—the ability to let the lost be lost, the dead be dead—was another of the several I turned out not to have; not, at least, in any healthy measure. To this day I spend a lot of time just staring out the window, hoping to see a girl who isn’t there.

Into the rubble of this broken life stepped Jesse. Never as beautiful as her mother, never as brash, never as vivid, Jesse had in full T.R.’s dauntlessness, her absolute resolution. Only twenty months old when T.R. was killed, she forgot her mother quickly and set about making the most of what she had—in her case a rough brother and three crushed adults.

In my blackest days, when all I could really do was sit on the bed and look out the window, Jesse sat with me. She would push a chair over to the bed and climb up. Then for an hour or two she would be up and down, assembling doll families, stuffed animals, coloring books, scissors. Once she had everything she needed, she would stay on the bed with me for hours, coloring,
cutting, discussing weighty matters with her doll families, reprimanding the stuffed animals. When I napped, Jesse napped with me; when I fell silent, Jesse talked.

And talked and talked and talked: to me, to Gladys, to her father. She padded through the house tirelessly, ever hopeful; she wouldn’t let any of us alone. Rearranging furniture was her passion from the age of three on—we were soon predicting a great future for Jesse in interior design. Any piece of furniture small enough for her to lift or push would soon be traveling from room to room, being frequently repositioned. Jesse made up her mind quickly and changed it just as quickly.

She was six when we moved to Santa Monica and had a whole new house to furnish. Jeanie came out for a week. She and Jesse disappeared; a day or two later, truckfuls of furniture began to arrive.

Interior decoration was not Jesse’s only passion, however. As she grew older a month scarcely passed without her plunging into a new enthusiasm: architecture, movies, vintage clothes, surfboarding, dancing, hang-gliding, photography, girlfriends, boyfriends, anthropology, Mexico, the world. Guided by excellent teachers in excellent schools, often accompanied on her various journeys by Jeanie—one of the few people as hard to keep up with as Jesse—it soon seemed Jesse was everywhere, doing everything. I began to worry; I gave her lectures on the necessity of discipline and focus; I warned her solemnly of the danger of spreading herself too thin.

Jesse ignored my lectures and kept spreading, but by the time she was seventeen and a freshman at UCLA it seemed that either filmmaking or anthropology was most likely to capture her. She helped out a bit one summer on a commercial some friends were making; then she and a boyfriend took off for Nepal and made a film about the honey-hunters—old men who harvest honey from beehives up on the cliffs. It was called
High Honey
and got a lot of notice from both documentarians and anthropologists.

I watched with pleasure, with amazement, and finally with joy as my granddaughter’s mind expanded. Six months after
returning from Nepal, not yet eighteen, she decided that what she needed was more education. In rapid succession she left UCLA for Berkeley, Berkeley for the University of Chicago, Chicago for Columbia, Columbia for the Sorbonne. I visited her occasionally in several of her schools, marveling at the way she took what she wanted from each of the available brain pools; the great universities were like intellectual furniture warehouses to Jesse. She rushed through them with bright eyes open, made her selection in a few weeks, and went on to the next warehouse. After one look at Jesse, or one talk, many great brains made themselves available, more or less, for whatever Jesse had in mind.

She soon had boyfriends of all ages, and, it sometimes seemed, in all places. When men saw Jesse coming, their hopes immediately rose. She was pretty, she was hopeful, almost anything interesting or almost anyone friendly delighted her; but, most of all, Jesse was welcoming. She had no trouble sharing herself, and she possessed the rare knack of passing on without hurting those she was leaving. Jesse left, but her men stayed loyal—remarkably loyal, for men—and in time the whole North American continent seemed to be crowded with Jesse’s boyfriends, past, present, and would-be.

“They’re getting kinda thick,” she said to me with a quick, soft grin—the grin that never failed to remind me of all the fat lips she had sported as a little girl growing up with Bo.

We were in Texas, drinking beer on the patio; Jesse had just bought her ticket for France.

“Maybe the kindest thing to do is just skip the country,” she said. “What do you think, Grandpa?”

“Why not, sweetie?” I said. “Take a trip.”

“Yeah,” Jesse said. “I think I’ll just put a long tape on my message machine and skip the country.”

Jesse usually managed to do the kindest thing. Next morning she gave me a nice kiss and a long hug and skipped the country. The long tape on her message machine was exhausted in only a couple of days.

Next thing I knew Jesse had a Hungarian boyfriend and was
in Budapest. Then she had an Italian boyfriend and was in Positano. It was six months before she settled in Paris, but she did finally settle in Paris, to sit at the feet of people who had sat at the feet of Sartre or Roman Jakobson, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, and Ladurie, Barthes and Foucault.

Almost immediately she and one of her film professors embarked on a little movie about Madame Riccoboni. As it happened, I knew a little bit about Riccoboni—I had learned it nearly forty years earlier while doing a script about the Duchess of Dino. I was able to be slightly helpful.

Jesse called often, sometimes two or three times a week, to talk to me about the latest book, the latest film, the latest professor, Jeanie and Eric’s latest visit, or the latest boyfriend. Most of her calls were from her tiny apartment in Montparnasse, but Jesse loved to take trips and had no foolish inhibitions about spending money. She also shared my fondness for grande luxe hotels. Jesse and her new guy might be at the Villa Hassler, the Gritti Palace, the Hotel du Cap Eden Roc. One of her ongoing subjects was to improve my creaky French, so that when I finally came over and we did the Dordogne or the Camargue or the Loire valley Jesse wouldn’t have to do all the talking.

I expect she just didn’t want to see her famous grandfather embarrassed, but I knew perfectly well that was exactly what would happen when I did finally go, for the French language and I had never been on close or easy terms. One reason among many why I stuck close to the Mediterranean when in Europe was that conversational standards in the warm south were somewhat less severe than they were apt to be in the frosty north.

Jesse called and called; she called and called, talking and talking in her quick, slangy French, as I sat at my window looking out on the Texas plain. I watched the graceful hawks soaring above the hill south of Los Dolores; I saw the dawn’s colors to the east, where Jesse was, and the sunset’s colors fading in the west. Jesse called and called; she called and called; she was not about to let her grandfather go.

Sometimes if she called in the morning, before I managed to
emerge from sleep or migraine, I would get a little confused, be unable to follow the reasoning of some Godardian auteurist or poststructuralist semiotician. More and more often I tended to let the meaning go and merely let myself be lifted by the breeze of Jesse’s young voice, as the hawks on my hills were lifted by the south wind.

She was not only my breeze, she was—to borrow the immortal phrase of Governor Jimmy Davis—my sunshine, her love the only radiance likely to pierce the clouds of age and confusion beneath which I lived.

Jesse called and called; she called and called. Less and less could I follow what she was telling me—France had made her precise just as age was making me vague—but as her smart French poured it into my ear, I began to float back in memory; in my grand-daughter’s voice I began to hear the lovely echo of the voices of all those fabulous European girls I had had such fun with so long ago, the stars and the starlets—Pier, Senta, Françoise Dorléac, the glorious Romy Schneider. Their voices, like Jesse’s now, had once all whistled the brainy, sexual whistle of youth and health, tunes that those who once could whistle too lose but never forget.