The Last Beach Bungalow (16 page)

She bent down and picked up the basket, the bottle of wine, my photo and my letters, then disappeared inside the front door. I imagined that the long dining room table was groaning with gifts. There were probably honey-baked hams and tins of English toffee, exotic coffee and potted poinsettias. My wish was that my offering would stand out like the house itself—that Peg Torrey would see it, and respond to it, just like I had when I came across her house on a day when I was least expecting it.

When I got home, Jackie was sitting at the kitchen counter, looking grim. I resisted the urge to hug her the way you’d hug a small child who had packed a suitcase and tried to run away.

“Dad drove me by the house,” she said. She slipped off her stool and began walking toward her room. “And just so you know, I’m never living there. Never.”

Vanessa had us over for Christmas dinner. She had a huge family with sisters and brothers and cousins who all lived nearby, so their holidays were always loud and boisterous. They often roasted three turkeys, and people brought everything from Jell-O salads to nutmeg martinis. Jackie disappeared into the rec room with Tom and the other kids. I spent much of the evening talking to Jane, a friend of one of Vanessa’s sisters, who was a breast cancer survivor of ten years. She had recently opened a boutique in Hermosa Beach called p*i*n*k. It was an upscale clothing shop that sold Isabella Fiori purses for $450 a pop, and Diesel jeans for $265, and she wanted to pick my brain about publicity. What was the best way to get to the fashion editors, she asked, and how did you go about sending around a press release? I asked her what her hook was because usually when people ask me that question, they’re talking about an aunt who ran in a marathon or an old roommate who was working in the Peace Corps and wondering how they could land them on the cover of
O, The Oprah Magazine.

“I’m giving one hundred percent of the profits to a foundation that’s running clinical trials for breast cancer patients with metastatic disease,” she said.

“One hundred percent?” I asked, astonished. She had such a good story. In a world where giant corporations were donating one percent off the sale of a candle, or one dollar for every customer in the month of October, giving away every penny you make is a good story.

“I’m eager to help all women,” she explained, “but I’m mostly eager to help myself.”

I had assumed that when she had said ten years, she meant ten years and done. What she meant, however, was ten years and still sick, ten years and still fighting, ten years and still praying for a cure. Her hair, I now noticed, wasn’t just cut fashionably short. It was growing in from chemo.

“It’s a great story,” I said. “I’d love to pitch it myself.”

“You mean it?”

“Absolutely.”

She shrugged. “At least I’m going to die surrounded by great clothes,” she said.

It’s possible to try to argue someone out of a stance like that—to try to say,
Oh, no, you’re going to be fine
or
Come, now, you can’t think like that.
But people die the way they live. To try to take that away from them or talk them out of it is to deny the power of death. There was no way I was going to do that. I laughed and told her she sure would.

Secretly, I was jealous of every single thing about that woman except for one.

It was Christmas, and she was going to die.

F
RIDAY

Jackie played in the Holiday Classic, just like she promised she would. I sat in the stands, as always, and mostly watched Max watching Jackie.

“How’s the boy?” Gina asked, following my line of sight.

“He’s nice,” I said, “but it’s hard not to wonder what’s going on.”

“Don’t you read Jackie’s e-mail?”

I turned and stared. “You do that?”

"Of course I do,” Gina said. “I’m the mother. It’s my right.”

“If Jackie found out I was reading her e-mail she’d never speak to me again.”

“You can’t be scared of your own daughter.”

I turned back toward the game. She had a good point.

Jackie had thousands of e-mails, none of them with any recognizable names attached. I poked around a few threads about the Iraqi soldier project, the final paper in English, and what people were wearing to the winter formal before I stumbled on a note from Max. His screen name was flyboy247, which made some sense for a swimmer. He was having a hard time selecting a Christmas gift for her, he wrote, because he wanted to give her the whole world. He wanted her to know exactly how much he adored her, and exactly how beautiful she was, and exactly how he couldn’t stand to be without her. She was, he said, the most amazing girl he’d ever known, and no mere trinket could possibly convey his feelings.

I clicked the note shut and then scanned the e-mail list, terrified of what I would see and hungry for it at the same time.

In one note, he was supposed to be studying but was instead dreaming about holding her close.

In another, he was supposed to be doing math but instead remembering their kiss by the cafeteria.

She wrote back saying she couldn’t stop thinking about it, either.

I love you,
he said.

I love you, too,
she said.

I clicked off and called Vanessa.

“Have you ever read Tom’s e-mails?” I asked.

“All the time,” she said.

“I just read through a month of Jackie’s and I’m freaking out.”

“What’s going on?”

“She loves this boy. He loves her. I think they’re going to elope.”

“You don’t remember being in love at that age?”

What I remembered was being in love when I was ten. There was a boy who lived next door named Charles Gray. He had a tree house in his backyard, which made him something of a rugged hero in my mind. It was built around the massive trunk of a pine tree. A big flat floor had been built around the tree trunk, with a ladder that went up through a hole right in the middle. You could see three of the neighbors’ houses from the platform and a corner of the playground at school. We kept books up there in a wooden box. There was a copy of
Treasure Island
and
Stuart Little.
The paper was flaky and spotted with mold, but reading those books wasn’t the point. They were the leaping-off point for adventures where we would pretend we were stranded or being chased or hiding out. When Charles was in the tree house, he would throw pinecones into my backyard. There was a thin space in the enormous hedge that separated my yard from his. I would slip through the brush and climb up the ladder. By the time I emerged on the platform, I would have assumed a persona, and our story would be set in motion.

Charles Gray was the boy I always thought I would marry. Even when we moved away and I lost touch with him, I would still dream about him and how we would meet someday on a bus or a train or a boat or a plane. But he was almost wholly the stuff of dreams. I don’t recall that I ever touched him. I certainly never kissed him or exchanged passionate promises of love. And when I was fifteen and would have wanted to, I was a new kid in a new school, too shy to even say hello to the boys I liked.

“It just seems more intense than I remember,” I said to Vanessa.

“Fifteen is intense,” she said, “but I can promise you they’re not going to elope.”

“They could have sex. They could be having sex right now. They could have had sex every day for the last three weeks. Do you have any idea how many opportunities there are to have sex?”

“Jackie’s not stupid,” Vanessa said.

“You don’t think?”

“No, I don’t. But since we’re talking about sex,” Vanessa said, “how are things between you and Rick?”

“That’s totally off topic.”

“It’s totally on topic and you know it.”

“I’m not answering.”

“You just did, and you want to know what I think?”

“Not really,” I said.

"That you’re worrying about the wrong people having sex.”

M
ONDAY

People who work in offices are always asking me how I manage to ignore the myriad distractions of working at home. There is an assumption that you need an austere cubicle in order to get anything done—that a house with piles of dishes and laundry and mail poses an overwhelming temptation. That assumption is a myth. If I’m on deadline for an assignment, I can ignore almost everything. If I’ve set aside a day to research stories or write pitches or do invoices, that’s what I do. The only exception to that truth is when I become obsessed with something that can be looked up on the Internet. Jackie’s e-mails were one of those things, but there were a finite number of them; I couldn’t generate more of that story than was already there. When I ran out of material that would let me learn more about Jackie and her boyfriend, I turned, instead, to material that would tell me something about Mrs. Torrey’s beach bungalow.

I looked up the original deed of sale. I looked up the property taxes. I hit upon looking up Harry Torrey and found a nearly endless stream of information. He had been a pediatric oncologist at a clinic that was part of the UCLA Medical Center. Day after day, he helped children live and he helped them die, and when he wasn’t doing that, he wrote about it. I found his journal articles, op-ed pieces, excerpts he’d written for textbooks and reviews he’d written of colleagues’ work. There were profiles of him in the Medical Center newsletter, tributes to him that colleagues and patients had written after he died, and announcements of gifts he and Peg had given to the hospital. He seemed like an extraordinary man.

In the course of my poking around, I learned that the daughter, Sarah, was a baker of some renown. She was a graduate of the Culinary Institute of the Arts. She had a shop in Berkeley that was featured in a
San Jose Mercury News
series about artisan bakeries—a 1,200 word piece with a sidebar entitled “One Baker’s Beginnings”:

We lived half a block from the beach but I never learned to hang ten, never fell for a beach volleyball player, never really felt the golden pull of the sun. I felt drawn to our kitchen instead—a kind of blasphemy in an L.A. beach town, but our house had a great kitchen. There was a big white farm sink set on the diagonal facing the ocean. Two windows met at that corner, with no wall between them, so you could stand at the sink, and look out at the ocean, all the way up to Point Mugu—a vast expanse of blue and white chop, birds and sky. Because of the cliffs that ringed our part of the bay, you couldn’t see any sand, surfers, skaters or runners from our kitchen; all that activity was hidden by the cliffs, contained down on the sand. Up above, it was just the water and sky, and the endless view.

At first, my specialty was scrambled eggs, but I soon graduated to macaroni and cheese—the real kind— which I always baked in Mom’s best casserole pan, the white enameled Le Creuset with the handles. The cheese seemed to bubble best in the pan and cleanup was always a cinch. I also liked to bake cookies, but plain old oatmeal or peanut butter didn’t satisfy my creative urge. Sugar cookies were my passion, and for several years in junior high, I spent whole Saturdays doing nothing but testing what temperature and time produced the perfect sugar cookie: crisp on the outside, slightly chewy on the inside and evenly golden brown. When I mastered the cookie itself, I bought a special cookie cutter at Cook N’ Stuff on Palos Verdes Drive. I saved my babysitting money and rode my bike down to look at the racks of copper cookie cutters. They were one dollar each, which made them seem like the kind of tool a real cook would use. I debated getting a heart shape and a flower shape, and rejected the Christmas trees and the gingerbread men. I finally settled on a pig because I wanted to make pink icing. Whenever any of my friends or family had a birthday that year, they got a dozen large pig sugar cookies, perfectly frosted in pink, with little silver candy bead eyes, laid flat in a gift box, on pink tissue paper. They were among the most spectacular gifts I have ever given.

Sidebars are one of my specialties. Give me a piece on organic cotton lingerie and I’ll give you a sidebar on the amount of pesticides it takes to grow the cotton needed for a conventional pair of underwear. Give me a piece on designers and their favorite chairs and I’ll give you a sidebar on how Corbusier came up with the design of his iconic lounger. You want books to read? Web sites to check? I can box off information in my sleep.

There were several sidebars to the
Town & Country
sex article. One of them was about having sex when you didn’t feel like it. “Many couples claim they are too tired for sex, or they refrain from sex when other things in their life aren’t going well,” it said. “This is counterintuitive. Sex gives you energy. Sex brings you closer. It’s exactly the thing to do to reenergize a relationship.” A second sidebar was called, “Setting the Stage.” It was a call to action to make your sexual space sacred by making a conscious effort to engage the senses. You could use candles, scarves draped over lamps, oils with the essence of vanilla or sandalwood, and beautiful things to adorn the body. Things like lace. Silk.

I left the magazine article on my desk, drove to the village and parked my car in front of Avisha, then sat there, working up the courage to go inside. I felt as if everyone on the street were staring at me, knowing exactly what I was about to do. Finally it seemed safer to go in than it did to stay out.

Manon was behind the low counter. “Ah!” she said, when she saw me, “How can I help you today?”

“I’d like the bra,” I said, as if I had been her only customer all week and she would know exactly what I was talking about.

“Of course,” she said, and then walked over and plucked it off the rack—both the bra and the panties, in the size I had tried on.

“And the dress?” she asked. I loved the dress, but the dress would make such a public statement. The dress was like a neon sign. It would blare out something about myself that I wasn’t sure I wanted to say—that I loved my body, that I felt good about flaunting it, and that I was comfortable with men’s eyes on it. Maybe I could do that in the privacy of my big new bedroom, but I was certain I couldn’t do it anywhere I’d be likely to wear that dress.