The Ruins of California (10 page)

Justine stared down at all the people, and the dirty linoleum, and the beads, and held out her hands. She cupped them as though she were feeding pigeons, but instead of birdseed flying out of them, the strangers in the airport were dropping beads in.

My father took up a collection of them, withdrawing a large white pocket handkerchief from his motorcycle jacket—a perfectly laundered and pressed square of the thinnest linen imaginable—and unfolded it. He made a pouch with his fingers and then carefully poured in the beads. When he had finished gathering up all the rest, taken them from me and Justine and from the crowd of good citizens who were still discovering them in tiny cracks and crevices, he twisted the pouch into a ball and meticulously tied a knot to keep the beads from falling out.

Without one word of complaint about my hideous new suitcase, which had now circled the belt twice—or grousing that I continued to check my luggage instead of traveling with a small carry-on, as he had long advised—he led Justine and me out to the airport garage. There the tan MG was parked beside another sports car, a very long, silver, bullet-shaped Lotus Elan. Justine’s slender hand pulled out a key.

“Your father claims you don’t mind being squashed into the back of his car,” she said to me. “But, Inez, how can you possibly fit? You’ve got to stop being such a good sport.”

She opened the thin door of the Lotus, and a cloud of powdery patchouli wafted out. “I was hoping you might drive back to the city with me.”

I’d have preferred sitting with my father—no question—or even being scrunched into the back of the MG. But it seemed impossible to turn down Justine’s offer when, suddenly, so much seemed to depend on our getting acquainted. Inside, the Lotus had a glossy wooden dashboard and an alluring array of dials. It was even lower to the ground than the MG, if that were possible. I stretched out my legs, now dotted in goose bumps, and pulled down on my navy blue polyester double-knit pea coat and skirt.

Justine positioned herself in front of the small steering wheel and drew a soft black leather driving glove over one hand. With the other she pulled out a hard red pack of cigarettes from the tiny glove box, removed one skinny brown cigarette, and twisted it into an ivory holder, which she held in her bare hand. “Do you mind?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“I probably shouldn’t,” Justine said. “I only wanted one because I guess I was feeling nervous to meet you.”

I looked over at the MG, where my father was putting on a pair of black driving gloves, too. And then, together, the cars growled and drove off, first in single file—my father ahead—and then parallel in adjoining lanes of Highway 101. Once we were under way, my father began to run through his various driving gags and got us laughing. They were reliable, and funny—even after he’d done them dozens of times. He accelerated quickly, so the engine would explode with sound. He pretended to be having a heart attack—something he did almost every time I rode in the car with him—and fell over into the passenger seat as though dead. After resuming a normal driving position for a few minutes, he tried another tireless routine: He sank so low in his seat that his eyes were barely
able to see over the dashboard, and it looked, to anyone else on the road, as if a child or, better still, a dwarf were driving the car.

“We’re neighbors, your father and I,” said Justine in a soft voice. “That’s how we met.”

“Oh.”

I watched her hands on the wheel. There was something about her wrists, her long hands and fingers, and the way she moved—graceful, almost floating—that reminded me of my father. And of Marguerite, too.

“He really sort of rescued me,” she continued. “I was having a very sad time. I was sort of sad and shut in. My marriage was falling apart, and I was so unhappy, crying all the time.”

Her eyes stayed on the road. I wondered why on earth anybody would tell a story like that.

“I kept seeing your father coming up the hill on the Triumph—his motorcycle—and pulling into my turnaround. The driveway. And I kept thinking,
Who is that incredible-looking man?
He’s so handsome! The more I looked at him, the more handsome he seemed.” She stopped for a second. “You must know how handsome your father is.”

“Yes.” I nodded and pulled my pea coat tighter.

“And so when I saw him down there cleaning his bike one afternoon, I just opened the window of my apartment and shouted out, ‘
Hey, Triumph!
When do I get a ride?’”

W
e pulled in to the city, after a few long silences, drove up the steep hill into North Beach, and then veered into the driveway of my father’s building, next to a space where two motorcycles
were sitting. One had a purple gas tank; the other tank was orange.

My father got out of the MG, didn’t say anything to Justine or me, just pointed at the bikes.

“Oh,” she said with a little sound of surprise.

“Later?”

“Sure,” she answered. “Do you want to come by after you get settled?” This unfathomable exchange ended, and Justine glided up to an iron gate next to my father’s building and opened it with a key. She walked through a small courtyard and opened a glass door on the other side, and then she vanished.

“She’s my neighbor,” my father said as he stood with me in the lobby of his apartment building waiting for the small elevator. “That’s her town house next door—has its own entrance. I used to see her come and go with her husband, Ricardo Monti. He’s a race-car driver, sort of well known. And one day she was looking out her window and yelled, “Hey, Triumph!” And I yelled back, “Hey, Neighbor Girl!” And that was it. We’ve seen each other every day since. We’ve been hit pretty hard. Do you know what that means?”

I shuffled around and found a way to say yes that might hint, in an unsubtle teenage way, that I would be very relieved for this conversation to end. But, squeezed into the tiny elevator, my father continued, unabated, seeming not to sense any hesitation in me, or discomfort, as though his enthusiasm for the subject at hand were blinding.

“Isn’t she spectacular?” When I said nothing, he kept on, excitedly. “You’ll see. She’s very special. So kind and gentle. She’s lived all over and speaks four or five languages. Her family used to own most
of downtown. You know Polk Street, where all the queens are? Her father’s a Polk. Anyway, she grew up here. Her mother lives in London—very proper, has a title. God, do I sound overly impressed? You know what I mean. It’s all very interesting, and it makes her interesting in some ways. She’s a Buddhist. Did she tell you that? Anyway, we get along like gangbusters, as they say. You know that expression, ‘as they say’?” He chuckled. “Please be nice to her, Inez. Will you? She’s very delicate—and been through a lot lately. She needs a friend.”

He neglected to mention what happened to the famed Ricardo Monti—but, more important, he had neglected to mention someone else. An hour later I made inquiries while he was grilling cheese sandwiches.

“Where’s Cary?” I asked.

“Cary,” he said. He flipped the sandwiches in the skillet and then pressed down on them with the back of the spatula. “Wonderful woman.”

“What happened to her?”

“What do you mean, ‘what happened?’”

“Did she die?”

“Of course not.” His voice had an edge—and when he turned around, there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “Listen, if you aren’t going to be reasonable, I won’t either.”

I left the kitchen for my familiar spot on the brown corduroy sofa, which, like the leather ledge in the back of the MG, I felt was mine. The sofa was where I slept, looked at the cartoons in the
New Yorker
and the nudes in
Playboy
, and where I watched TV. After a minute or so, my father came into the room and sat down on the arm of the sofa. He looked at me for a few moments—it
seemed like an endless period of time—while I stared at the table.

“We’re still friends,” he said. “We’re in touch. We talk. Cary finished her dissertation—that’s all—and she went back to Italy for a while. She likes it there. Her mother lives there. And she has friends there. And there was no reason for her to stay in California.” His eyes seemed hurt, and weary from having to explain himself. I wondered if by “friends” in Italy, he meant that Cary had other boyfriends.

“I’m not interested in getting married again,” he went on. There was a long pause, during which he held my eyes, and then he added, “In fact, I’m really not into marriage. Period. I’ve done quite a lot of thinking about it and decided that it doesn’t work.”

“It doesn’t?”

“It’s a bad deal for everybody—particularly women, I’m afraid.”

He was looking at the floor, just staring, almost like how he looked when he played flamenco. “Even more than my not wanting to be married again,” he said, “I don’t want any more children.”

I nodded as though I understood perfectly. But I noticed that my father said the word “children” with the same slightly bitter tone that my mother used when she said “bar” and “bus” and “Las Vegas.” A kind of angry sound.

“So?” I used a neutral voice that hid, I was certain, the hurt feelings I wasn’t sure I had, but if I did, I really didn’t want to discuss.

“So?”
He seemed a little deflated, like he knew I was about to corner him.

“Why not?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t you want more children?”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Just looked at me. “Well,” he said finally, “I wouldn’t do that to you and Whitman.”

I wasn’t sure what Whitman and I had to do with any of this—or my father’s plans for the future. Nor, frankly, at this moment did I feel like an enormous piece of my father’s life.

“You guys are very important to me. Do you understand?”

I looked down at my fingers. They were fidgeting and beginning to peel off an oval of frosted nail polish I’d applied the week before. God, what was he talking about?

SIX

The White Tent

J
ustine’s town house was very spare, even emptier than my father’s apartment. It seemed quite odd to me—a large empty space punctuated with things I’d never seen anywhere, ever.

In the past my father’s girlfriends entered our world and I never saw theirs. Marisa had come and gone without my knowing whether she lived in a house or an apartment. I’d never seen where Cary dwelled when she wasn’t with us—it had never occurred to me that she might live somewhere on her own. So gaining entrance into the private world of Justine was a revelation of sorts and carried a certain thrill, a peek behind a forbidden curtain. But there was something troubling about it, too, for it made her seem excruciatingly real and, even worse, permanent.

Outside, we walked up to her iron gate. My father pulled out a key and unlocked a glass door that led to a flight of polished steps. As we ascended, the by-now-signature smell of Justine grew stronger—patchouli and cigarettes, a waft of lavender incense. At the top of the landing, a child’s tricycle was parked on the wooden floor.
It shocked me. Bikes belonged in driveways, or garages, or under the roofs of carports next to the family garbage cans. What was a bike doing inside? Was it ridden inside or out? And where was the child?

My father disappeared down a wide center hallway to find Justine—I heard a “Hello, darling” followed by a pause and then the sound of a kiss. I wandered into the stark living room. The windows looked out on the bay and Alcatraz—the same view my father had—but inside this cavernous space with its tall ceiling, I felt on the edge of the world gazing out. Dusk was settling, and the headlights of cars crossing the Bay Bridge were flickering on.

An enormous white leather sofa was pushed up against one wall. A carved wooden table held a bronze Buddha and a collection of smoking paraphernalia—a little urn filled with cigarettes, a silver cup of wooden matches, an abalone-shell ashtray, a small clay pipe, and a scattering of ivory cigarette holders. Aside from this corner of activity, which fascinated me, there was nothing else except a large white tent.

It stood square in the middle of the room. It was made of a very fine silk, or parachute nylon, and pulled taut with ropes and thin white rods. The ceiling of the tent formed a whimsical peak at the top.

“Cool, isn’t it?” my father asked me, when he reentered the room alone.

A big white tent. Right in the middle of the room. “Yeah,” I said, trying to seem underwhelmed. “Neat.”

Justine appeared. She had changed into something else fluid and exotic, and she carried tasseled silk cushions for the floor. “Hello,” she said to me with another uncomfortable smile, then went
away, returning with a silver lantern. There was a lit candle inside it. She hooked the lantern high on the center pole of the tent so its walls became almost translucent and its peak a spire of light. “I’ll make some tea,” she said, then swept out of the room.

My father looked at me, and pointed at the glowing tent again. He nodded. I nodded back. Speechlessness seemed the appropriate reaction.

“Cool, isn’t it?” he said, nodding again. “Or, as you always say, ‘neat.’”

It
was
neat, as well as beautiful and playful and beckoning, if I’d had all those words at my disposal. But, for me, “neat” was meant to capture it all. The apartment was neat. The Lotus was neat. And watching those pre-Columbian beads scattering all over baggage claim had been kind of neat. What I really didn’t love was Justine.

She was carrying a large kettle away from the stove when I came into the kitchen. There were hooks on the ceiling where copper pots and pans and bowls of all sizes were hanging. I had never seen a copper pan before. I had never seen pots hanging from a ceiling before either. And just as I was about to ask if she needed any help with preparations—as my mother and Abuelita had taught me to do—Justine turned to me.

“Chamomile or ginseng?” A tendril of hair fell away from her topknot.

“What?” I watched as she tried to pat the tendril in place, but it kept falling down.

“Which would you like?”

I wasn’t sure what she meant.

“Chamomile helps you quiet down. Ginseng gives energy. Yin and yang.” She was looking at me, still waiting for something.