The Ruins of California (27 page)

I took a deep breath, trying not to exhale so loudly that it would sound like a huff, but it might have anyway.

“However, you have a point about the gate,” he continued, sort of warming up again. “I could attach an electrical wire to the pulley, I guess. And there would have to be some kind of small motor. It would be neat, very neat. Maybe you’re onto something, Inez. Maybe I was being too sensitive. I’m a little sensitive these days, particularly about the house, so you might be careful what you say.”

“Okay,” I said. Lately everybody was talking about sensitivity and being sensitive, or oversensitive. But Whitman didn’t have to come home from his surf hut for the funeral. He wasn’t “into ceremony,”
he said, and he’d be with Marguerite “in spirit.” Was he with me and my father in spirit? Did he care about us? What was the point of being sensitive if you couldn’t bother with things like that?

My father led me to a small bridge over a dry creek of pebbles. We walked to a simple wooden door that opened onto a glassy atrium. There was a ceramic bowl of water there, with an orange goldfish swimming in it. There were some beautiful plants and river rocks, too, and from inside I could see various rooms of the house, almost like stage sets or boxes. Inside each glass box, the sun shone down from skylights and lit up the floor in long rectangles of light.

Across the atrium there was a bigger wooden door. With a gentle push, we entered the main foyer. I still remember the feeling, and the excitement, when it seemed to me that my father’s efforts, and perhaps all the ruminating and gestating and secrecy, and all those shares of Harrison-Ruin Computing that he’d sold off, had been worth it. I had never been inside a house so magnificent. Every surface—from the sandstone fireplace that was shared by two rooms to the redwood paneling to the tall white walls and wooden ceiling—was simple and perfect. Long decks ran along the length of the living room and kitchen, giving the place the feeling of being part of the dry hillside, and protected by it, before one noticed that the house turned dramatically on one side to face the boisterous sea. Aside from a large round glass dining table and rattan-and-leather chairs, my father hadn’t bought much new furniture either. He’d simply spread his small amount of stuff from the Telegraph Hill apartment into five times the amount of living space. The screens, the flamenco poster, the Egon Schiele nudes—there were now three of them—were all there, and welcomed me like old friends.

Having seen the first floor of the house—most of it taken up
with a master bedroom suite with an enormous bath, dressing room, and office—we sat down in the kitchen to drink tea. I was curious to see the guest room—or my room and Whitman’s—but my father had made some scones for my visit, the ones I liked, so we took a few minutes to eat them and watch a low layer of fog and mist sweep in from the hillside and overtake the beach. The house still seemed cheerful and open, surprisingly so, even though the hillside and beach were now encased in a gloomy wet mist. “Most people don’t like the thick fog—which can last all day—but I do,” he said, almost proudly. “I’m not sure why, but I think you’re going to feel the same way. This side of the ridge has its own microclimate, really. Dense fog, mists—and then, just down the hill in Sausalito, there’s blazing sunshine every day.”

I felt like changing my clothes after the flight, maybe taking a shower. I walked back to the foyer of the house, grabbed my duffel bag, and looked around.

“Where’s my room?” I asked. “Downstairs?”

“What do you mean, ‘downstairs’? my father laughed. “There’s no downstairs. This is it, Inez. And you’re right here”—he pointed to the open living room—“on the ever-popular brown sofa. That’s your favorite spot, isn’t it?”

FOURTEEN

Just Some Playboy

B
ehind the wheel of the MG, I was mobile and irresponsible. It was nighttime, always nighttime, and the world was waiting for me.

“Market Basket always sells to us,” Shelley was saying. We needed some beer for a party—an event that we’d heard about via some strange party grapevine. I didn’t know who was throwing the party or the exact address, but I assumed we’d find it, as Shelley and I always did, based on the din emanating from the kid’s house or the twirling light on the policeman’s car. Neighbors always complained, and the police always came.

I popped out my retainer, left it near the gearshift of the MG. I opened my wallet and pulled out my real ID—the one that revealed I was sixteen. And then I made sure my other ID was still there, the fake one that said my name was “Jade Dunaway” and I was twenty-one.

I didn’t like smoking grass anymore—that was largely abandoned after Marguerite died—but what I missed in terms of giddy
dislocation, I made up for with alcohol. Every weekend I drank in Shelley’s backyard, in the backs of vans, in the balconies of movie theaters, and I drank at parties—at the houses of classmates that I’d never really talked to or knew. Sometimes I woke up in my bedroom at Abuelita’s and smelled the cigarette smoke in my hair and tasted the sourness in my mouth and had no memory of coming home. How late was I out? How’d I wind up here? I’d open the curtains of my bedroom and see the MG sitting in the driveway, safe and clean and silent, keeping my secrets, awaiting another adventure. The nighttime called to me. The car called to me. Underneath the dark, starry canopy of the western sky, we drove to mixers and parties and discos, to gatherings of teenagers in vacant lots and Logo Park. We went to clubs on Sunset, concerts at the Greek and Shrine and Santa Monica Civic. The MG transported me, carried me along, protected me, lifted me, always waiting for me in parking lots and along roadsides to come back. I floated and laughed and drank and smoked, batted away the hands and mouths of boys—a tease, a public temptation—and then Shelley and the MG and I would drive to In-N-Out or Bob’s Big Boy and have another beer on the way, a roadie, and for some reason—some bizarre, miraculous reason—I always found my way home.

At the parking lot of Market Basket, I looked at myself in the small rearview mirror. Did I look twenty-one? It seemed impossibly old, and mature, and glamorous, and so far away. I pursed my lips and sucked in my cheeks. But my eyes were still dewy and young—and maybe a little scared.

“You’re doing that look again,” Shelley said.

“What look?”

“That pathetic expression you always get when you’re looking at yourself in the mirror but nowhere else.”

Why were we still friends? Shelley indulged in heartlessness. She dispensed unbridled honesty. She ridiculed me for “being afraid of men” and said that I was insecure and had a complex. She was always talking about how Gary Kloss was “dying to do it” with me or how somebody else was “salivating” when he saw me. She loved dragging me into a room and watching guys’ reactions. But I’d taken her for a pregnancy test at the We Care Clinic in Torrance, where the nurses were chirpy and upbeat, and then I had to take her back a week later. While waiting for her “procedure” to be over, I read every pamphlet available about vaginitis, venereal disease, herpes simplex, and genital warts, about chlamydia and unwanted pregnancies. And then I’d seen her cry really hard—some kind of hormone deal—and writhe in pain. I wasn’t going to be that stupid. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. Ever. Why were we still friends? Because she did the bold dumb things. And I’d thrown in my lot with her. Besides, she knew me inside and out. She got what I was up to. That counted for a lot. And we had a plan for our lives.

Instead of going to school on Wednesdays, we split up the week with a “field trip”—for mind expansion and sophistication and all the things we were missing by being stuck in the cultural desert of the suburbs. Sometimes we took the Van Dale Freeway into downtown Los Angeles and shopped. Sometimes, if we were dressed up, we went into Bullocks Wilshire and checked out the handbags or marveled at the hosiery and makeup. We never bought anything there, just gaped and fondled. It was on Melrose Avenue where we got most of our clothes—at crummy vintage shops full of musty racks and mannequins with missing limbs and deco posters under flickering lights. We searched for berets and old compacts, cigarette holders and cigarette cases and lighters—the ones with tired flints and cotton wicks that looked like clouds. We bought polka-dotted
dresses with belted waists from the 1940s. We got into heavy coats with padded shoulders that it was never cold enough to wear, ever, along with boxy handbags that had small, tight handles and zippered compartments only big enough to slip a square mirror into.

When I wasn’t in the mood for something previously worn—when I’d grown disgusted with my wardrobe of used clothes purchased with built-in BO that couldn’t be eradicated, and maybe some light sweat stains—I wore a pair of lean Chemin de Fer jeans with an open-collared satin shirt. I was sleek and shiny, taut and long. My hair was dark brown again, and my perm had grown out and become a loose, shoulder-length hive of waves. I’d plucked my eyebrows down to a fine line that arched delicately over my eyes.

Sometimes we saw foreign movies at the NuArt or the Fox in Venice or the Tiffany on Sunset.
The Conformist. Rules of the Game. Jules et Jim.
We sat in the smoking section of the theater. Sometimes we drank wine. We put our Frye boots up on the backs of the seats in front of us—and took over an entire aisle with all our shopping bags and purses and coats that we never needed in L.A. but liked to carry around anyway.

We went to museums—to the Norton Simon, to LACMA, to the Getty that had just opened in Malibu. (So scary how the parking attendant checked my driver’s license at the kiosk and said, “Okay, Miss Dunaway.”) Shelley wanted to be a painter or a graphics designer—whatever that was—and I’d gotten into photography. For Christmas Dad had given me an enormous Nikon camera with a motor-drive and a 200-millimeter lens, and, like the MG, it was a little too much, and it overwhelmed me. I hadn’t taken a photography course, but I read the manual, figured out the basics, and brought the camera everywhere with me: to Griffith Park Observatory,
where Shelley and I went to see the laser light show; to Yamashiro’s, a Japanese restaurant above Hillcrest, where I photographed the view of Hollywood and all the swimming pools. I drove the MG far up into the hills, along the ridge of Mulholland Drive where Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty lived, but the road was surprisingly narrow and dusty, and the famous canyons and movie stars never came into view.

One midweek excursion we went south to Laguna Beach. It took a couple hours in those days, before all the highways were put in. Shelley had never been to Laguna—and I wanted to show her the village, and Crystal Cove, and Bluebird Canyon, and Main Beach, where all the aimless cute guys played basketball. I was dying for a banana-pineapple smoothie from the Orange Inn, and I wanted to have lunch at the JR for old times’ sake. Shelley had never seen Marguerite’s bungalow on Moss Cove either, or gone inside. But the closer we got to the old house, the more freaked I felt. Something unexpected happened—it was so weird. The house looked exactly the same, exactly, and this played some kind of trick on me, as if my body or some other part of me believed that it was the old days again. I couldn’t shake that feeling. And my heart was pounding, because maybe Whitman would come out the screen door, and he’d wave. And maybe Marguerite was still alive inside there, and a bridge game was going, or cribbage, or everybody was having a bowl of cereal. It seemed impossible that I couldn’t walk in the door and flop on a sofa or turn on the TV and watch
Gilligan’s Island.
What made the whole thing even weirder was that my Aunt Ann and Uncle Drew lived in the house now. I hadn’t seen them since the funeral. I hadn’t seen Lizzie or Lisa or Amanda either, except at a Fourth of July thing at the Arroyo. I went just to be nice, and for old times’ sake. But Lizzie and Lisa
had gotten into the preppy thing so heavily—too heavily—and were covered in monograms and grosgrain and wore horrible khaki skirts that made their butts look huge. It was like they’d had memory loss, too, because suddenly they’d forgotten they’d ever burned incense or taken a macramé class or worn low-rider cords. Or smoked a joint.
What do you mean? We’ve always dressed this way.
They looked at me like I was from another planet, like some unpreppy lowlife who’d wandered into the club and was going to foul up their chances for junior membership. That’s how it felt anyway. But they were the big embarrassment as far as I was concerned, not me. They were the ones who were lost and didn’t know who they were anymore. Not me.

M
y father taught me how to drive a stick. At Van Dale High, there was a driving class with driving simulators, and we’d sit in a dark theater and watch a big screen while we turned fake steering wheels and pretended to be driving—and not hitting that old lady or the child running after a ball. After that useless exercise, we were able to drive in a real car that was owned by the high school. It was an automatic, a huge American thing. One of those dinosaurs that nobody in California drove anymore, because of the gas lines. We were accompanied by an instructor, Mr. Luza, who was just another dim-bulb PE coach who smelled like sharp, stinky aftershave and used expressions like “golly gee.” Mr. Luza encouraged us to practice driving with our parents, so I drove my mother’s VW Rabbit diesel to the supermarket while she tried not to have a heart attack on the seat next to me. Then my father called one afternoon.