The Mandarin Club (27 page)

There was no time in this place, in this memory. Late fall, and utterly still, as if the land were on tenterhooks, waiting in the sunlight for some subterranean motion. “Earthquake weather,” Mickey said the locals called it—a season when the tectonic plates were poised to shift.

“There is this African tribe, the Fantin or something,” Alexander said very slowly. He was pulling the cork of a Chardonnay bottle that had spent the first night of their camping trip chilling in a creek near their tents. “They offer their guests palm wine that they tap from tree trunks.”

“They sip it out of calabash gourds,” Alexander continued. “But first they pour it on the ground and chant ‘Come! Drink with us.’ It’s for their ancestors.”

Alexander splashed a bit too much wine on the powdery sienna soil, staring down to watch it clump like pancake mix in the dust.

“Hey! Easy with that, man,” Mickey warned as he reached over with a metal cup. “Navajos did the same thing with peyote, I think. Like a peace pipe.”

“You’re making things up again,” Alexander said, but he didn’t mind. That was Mickey.

They walked on, through shaded glens. A lower layer of fern was covered by a towering forest of cypress and laurel, sequoia and eucalyptus. Rounding bends as they rolled down toward the sea, they followed a trail that opened to small clearings, where deer and rabbits would scatter at their first footfall. Hawks and seagulls angled overhead. Sounds of smaller birds drifted out from deeper in the wood, where the darkness was thicker and more forbidding.

At the end of the trail, where it opened above an amphitheater of cliffs arcing about the sea, they sat on the bluff. Hundreds of feet below was a deserted beach, the waves slamming against stacks stretching nearly a mile out into the open waters. A thick bank of fog rested far out to sea.

Closer to shore, white ocean caps splashed between the marine layer and the beach. They could see all the way up the coastline to Drake’s Beach and the Pt. Reyes Lighthouse, ten miles to their west. The parkland was like an island. It was far removed from the noisy Marin County suburbs and the San Andreas Fault, which cut the land like a knife, north to south.

They had stumbled into a meandering debate about freedom, Rachel recalled, about the Vietnam War.

“What was so ignoble about helping a people fight annihilation?” Mickey said. He paced in a circle as he spoke, pontificating like some old time preacher. “Just because we lost? Look what happened to the guys we left in Saigon. Years in re-education camps. A million boat people. What was so fucking immoral about trying to help them save their country?”

“Mickey, we destroyed the country trying to save it. Remember?” Alexander continued the philosophical dispute which had raged for several years between them. Alexander was prone, Huckleberry Finn-like, a tube of straw grass in his teeth. “The Pentagon thought we could ship our tidy Eisenhower values overseas and drill them into anybody we wanted.”

“We were the last hope of Saigon’s freedom-loving people.”

“We were foreigners, trying to impose our rules on an ancient people, a people in a civil war—with a lot more at stake than we had.”

“History will prove us right. You’ll see. All you bleeding heart liberals will eat your words. You ridiculed the domino theory and now, watch them fall. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos are already gone. Taiwan and Hong Kong will be next. Then Singapore. The Communists will take them all over in time.” Mickey hurled a stone far over the cliff, its descent too steep for the eye to follow. “We shoulda stayed and won.”

Alexander started to pursue the argument, then waved him off. His knees were bent high and he was lying back in the sun, his backpack a perfect pillow on the headlands. He had discarded his straw and begun to munch on a red apple.

It was Lee, propped on one elbow, who took the bait. “You should hear yourselves,” he said.

“What?” Mickey said.

“Alexander’s right,” Lee insisted. “You Americans think you have life all figured out. You can be so very arrogant, for no good reason.”

“No good reason?” Mickey was hefting another chalky stone as he stood near Lee.

“You are such a childish country,” said Lee. “So very young, so self-absorbed. Your generals thought you could just beat people into submission. You had no sense of their culture or history, of what came before, of what would remain after you left.”

Booth regarded them intently before joining in. “And you know what?” he said. “We’ll make the exact same mistake when we finally get into China. Roaring in with all our salesmen panting after markets. Thinking we can remake their civilization if only every family buys a TV. A generation later, we’ll limp out, wondering why nobody likes us.”

“Asians hate individualists,” Lee said. “They threaten our whole belief system, that the common good is to be exalted above all else.”

“Makes for fewer identity crises,” Booth said.

Lee stood, intent upon his point as he gazed at the thrashing sea below. “You always forget,” he concluded. “We are not like you.”

They soon made their way down a slippery wash to the beach, then settled again in a semi-circle on the sand, where they ate a snack of bread and jam. Their backpacks and gear were piled against the base of the cliff. Gargantuan tree trunks and whips of kelp were scattered at the shoreline. The fog bank and the sea had achieved a tentative balance. The wind kicking about them began to calm.

They were quite alone, except for the distant barking of sea lions mounting the offshore stacks. The guys stripped to their boxers and T-shirts before they resumed their debate.

The subject was the Sixties this time, Mickey again leading the provocation. “Such a goddamn waste. All that potential for change, and the only legacy is bell bottoms and this new electronic disco crap.”

“Better pot, too,” Alexander added.

“The pill,” Barry offered.

“An uplifting of the humanities,” Booth said.

“Not for long,” Alexander countered. “I hear the Stanford Biz School’s applications are soaring. Everybody wants to get back to MBAs and law degrees and making money. The revolution’s over, folks.”

“Yeah,” Barry agreed. “From free love to easy money.”

“We get to trade the Beatles for the Bee Gees,” said Alexander.

“Actually, I agree with Mickey.” It was Branko this time. “The Sixties were shallow. There was something otherworldly about the obsession with higher consciousness. No realism about getting things done in the here and now.”

“Yeah,” said Mickey, “the
real
Cultural Revolution was in China, right, Lee? What’d they say in ’58? ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom.’ Well, it was a set-up. They encouraged the nonconformists to stick their heads up so the authorities could mow ’em all down.” Mickey was sorry he’d said it. But that was Mickey, speaking before thinking.

Lee sat up, his soft eyes squinting into the glare. “You have no clue how destructive our Cultural Revolution was. It is just some story in the textbooks for you. Some historical anecdote. We tortured ourselves, just because Mao wanted to shake things up. All that horror, then we try to pretend it never happened. Back to business as usual.”

“Business as usual?” Alexander asked.

But Lee didn’t hear, it seemed. “Do you know how dangerous that is? When a government comes after the creative minds, the most brilliant professors, the artists, even the university students? And then murders them? Do you know how dangerous that memory is, of a government that could do that? It breeds dissent among the young.”

“You are a fucking subversive, Lee.” It was Branko who saw it first, though none disputed the conclusion. “You’re going to get yourself shot someday.”

Rachel found that the natural power of place made her want to flee all the argumentation. She walked alone to the north, the coarse sand scouring her feet, harsh yet stimulating. Her sense of scale was thrown a-kilter on this wild peninsula, cleaved from the land like some iceberg. The driftwood, the offshore stacks, the reaching surf—all appeared supernaturally large. Even the cliffs seemed impossibly high, like some beanstalk disappearing into the sky.

She closed her eyes and imagined Francis Drake, keelhauling his boat on this beach as he prepared to cross the Pacific for Asia, then home to England. She could envision thousands of pounds in Spanish gold ingots stacked among sails and ropes, all the detritus of a year at sea. She imagined the faces of Miwok Indians, their teeth brown from acorn mush, peering anxiously from the brush at the hairy white men.

She lay down in her own cove now, sheltered by a beached whale of a tree. The trunk was white, its bark carved away by exposure. She felt some odd sense of closure in this seaside pilgrimage, as if the countless ocean dreams of her Wyoming youth were somehow fulfilled as she sat by the water. She recalled the T.S. Eliot poem: she’d arrived here at this tide-line, back at some beginning, and knew the place for the first time.

She thought of the guys dozing in the sun down the beach. The previous night, she and Barry had made love silently in their tent, set just away from the rest. But she still felt a yearning, a wildness, as if she wanted to holler into the wind. She slid out of her shorts and shirt, reaching back to unclasp her bra. Her nipples were erect in the moist air, and she stood, unobserved, toeing the sand, her mind flooding with images. She jogged the first few steps, then ran the last yards, issuing a primal shout as she plunged into the water, stumbling, then crashing hip-and-shoulder-first into the surf.

The shock of the frigid Pacific was beyond invigorating. She ran back across the sand, shivering uncontrollably. She could hear a distant cheer go up from the boys. Then they were stripping and streaking down toward the water, their calls echoing eerily off the cliffs. The boys thrashed naked in the waves for the few seconds they could endure the chill current.

Rachel dressed quickly, using her T-shirt as a towel, and then strode back toward the rest. They were assembling their gear when she came upon them.

“You missed the shooters we drank!” Mickey said.

“Didn’t need one.”

“Think you’re better than us?” Barry asked.

“We insist!” Mickey said, pulling out a flask of Southern Comfort. He poured a shot into the oversized cap and thrust it towards Rachel. His hair was swept long and mangy about his face, spilling out of a red kerchief. In his maroon shirt and jeans, standing tall with bare feet, Mickey looked like a celebrating pirate.

Rachel took the whiskey as the boys paused in their re-packing.

“Right.” She nodded, confident now, looking about to catch their eyes, acknowledging each in turn. “Live fully. Seek the sun. Never forget.”

“To The Mandarin Club!” They all said it together.

It was a grainy picture, formed in her memory, that remained with Rachel still. The smells of the glen. The moment of perfect equilibrium between sun and fog. The purgative plunge into the sea. The grinning guys gathered about, playing the Merry Men as they watched her drink. She tossed the shot back smoothly, its searing after-burn punctuating that time of perfect escape.