The Ruins of California (28 page)

We were making plans for a visit. Summer was starting—the summer after Marguerite had died—and Picasso and Chameleon
had been sold, and there was no beach house to go to and no riding camp in Colorado. But for some reason I wasn’t feeling too sorry for myself. Turning sixteen seemed like an amazing thing in itself.

“I’ve been thinking about your birthday,” my father said. “How about the MG?”

“What about it?”

“Would you want it?”

I must have misheard him. “What?”

“The MG. I was thinking of giving it to you.”

I couldn’t speak. I had died, really, and was completely surrounded in white light.
“The MG?”
I worried that if I uttered those two glamorous letters aloud, they might disappear. I’d never dared to imagine driving the car, much less owning something so fine and beautiful. My body came alive with desire, and excitement, and so much elation, that I wanted to hang up and call Shelley and, at the same time, race around the house shouting to Abuelita and my mother.

“I’ve got the Alfa Romeo now,” he said very calmly. “And the MG—it’s looking kind of lonely. Do you think you could take care of it?”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m certainly not. What’s the matter—do you have something else in mind, like a new Porsche?”

At first, after Marguerite—why did everything spin around her death date?—he showed up at the airport with Gretchen. She was an artist. She made paper, actually, which always seemed like a strange thing for somebody to make. She had red hair that fell in ringlets and googly green eyes and freckles. In her studio, off in some ratty part of San Francisco, she mixed vats of hot, starchy water with bits of fiber floating around in them. It looked exactly
like swirling clumps of toilet paper in an overflowing bowl, and then she poured dye into the vats and then scooped out the colored tissue with a big slotted spoon and placed it onto a screen, almost like a window screen, but with bigger holes. When the water ran out and the clumps of tissue dried, it became “paper,” and Gretchen framed the large sheets behind Plexiglas. They hung in hospital corridors and on the walls of banks. It was amazing to me that people really paid her for them. They all reminded me of toilet paper, or dried vomit. But Gretchen was nice, super nice. She was followed by a decisive blonde named Carol, who was an executive at I. Magnin, a department store—not really my father’s usual type, not artsy enough and no overbite—and then by a few women whom he only mentioned on the phone (“I met the nicest ballet dancer!”) but who didn’t endure long enough for me to meet.

“Has he told you about Laurel yet?” Whitman asked me on the phone one night. He was back by then, finally, living in Ojala with Patricia—and helping her with a big landscaping project. Somehow I’d managed to keep Shelley from meeting him. It wasn’t that hard, really. Whitman was around for only a couple months before he’d begun contemplating a visit to Hawaii and the winter waves.

“Who’s Laurel?” I asked.

“A computer programmer,” he said. “Not at Harrison-Ruin. Somewhere else. He seems really smitten. He went on and on about her the other night. She went to Radcliffe and has him reading Ovid.”

“What happened to Carol?”

“Too into clothes, I think, and charity fund-raisers. She drove him into the arms of Laurel. She’s into Catullus, too.”

None of that meant anything to me. Ovid, Catullus, who were they? I imagined that Laurel looked like Ali MacGraw in
Love Story
, my only Radcliffe association, but she wound up leaning toward a
semi–Bionic Woman type. Anyway, it was pointless to get caught up in my father’s girlfriends or to follow their interests, because nobody lasted anymore. They came. They went. It was just a matter of weeks, or a few months. He made them cappuccinos in the morning with his new espresso machine. He made them salmon at night in his copper fish poacher—and poured glasses of Veuve Clicquot for them. They smoked very good dope and went to very good movies, and sometimes, if they were very special and it would be awkward otherwise, Whitman and I got to spend a day with them. We were treated like celebrities, visiting dignitaries. And I could tell, from the look on the new girlfriend’s face, that my father had been bragging about us to her—making us sound like two geniuses, two beauties, the prince and princess of his permanent life.

The black driving gloves had disappeared, and the cape, and several other reminders of Justine. But a few of the things she’d brought to his daily life endured. He was eating off Marguerite’s good china—and using his great-aunt’s heavy silver. He had continued to collect Egon Schiele prints, and his laundry was still picked up and dropped off by Perignon. He’d gotten involved at the art institute where Justine had so much influence and had become a guest lecturer there, giving slideshows on a mystifyingly broad range of topics: artificial intelligence, industrial design, the psychological impact of typeface, the use of computers to verify the authenticity of Old Masters paintings. How he qualified as “an expert” on any of these subjects eluded me but never seemed to trouble the beautiful young students who followed him home.

“I talked to Justine a few days ago,” he’d say every so often. “She says hello and asked how you are. Boy, she sounds great.”

She had moved out of the city and wound up in Big Sur. She’d revamped her life and downscaled—no grand house, no housekeeper,
no Lotus, and her daughter, Lara, was going to public school. Whitman had visited them on a drive up the coast and reported back that Justine had given up meat, caffeine, and alcohol. She didn’t seem to have a boyfriend, as far as he could tell, and spent most of her spare time at a Buddhist monastery in the hills.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have let her drift away,” my father had said, himself drifting into complete banality. There were a number of moments like that—when it seemed as if he hadn’t been able to put Justine behind him. Maybe all of us felt that way. We missed her elegance and dignity, her shyness and honesty. We missed the stability and permanence she gave to our lives, even the sense of destiny. With Justine my father seemed part of something fated and special—as if he had unwittingly stumbled upon a soul mate.

“She just never felt comfortable with the terms,” he said cryptically one night, in an effort to explain—soon after Whitman had seen her. What terms? “I couldn’t promise there wouldn’t be other people,” he said, “but I promised I’d never lie to her. And I never did.”
He couldn’t promise there wouldn’t be other people.
I was too young to comprehend the difficulties of that arrangement or to marvel how they’d stayed together as long as they did.

“She needed me too much,” he said at another time, in a burst of candor. Her dependency made him “feel a way that I didn’t want to feel,” he said. She’d wanted to get married, too. “Which, of course, I couldn’t do.” The most surprising thing was how much my father seemed to enjoy feeling wistful about her. “She was so wonderful,” he’d sigh, “wasn’t she?”

After Laurel, a big mouth who brandished her college background with such frequency that it became a joke (“Let’s count how many minutes it takes her to utter the word ‘Radcliffe,’” Whitman said at the start of one weekend), my father fell in with
Shanti, a quiet waif, an out-of-work programmer with a honey brown bob and a lisp.

Shanti wasn’t her real name—there’d been a conversion to Hinduism at some point—and she’d met my father through the now-forgotten Marisa. (“She’s a very
close friend
of Marisa’s,” my father kept saying, as if this connection added to Shanti’s appeal.) Before long he’d helped her find a job at Harrison-Ruin, where my father still showed up occasionally for board meetings and consultations. Shanti seemed happy there, and happy with my father. She was smart and quick but relatively uncultured, which my father appeared to find fascinating, as if he’d discovered a pure savage to indoctrinate. To say she “blossomed” under his tutelage seems an understatement. She was around for the better part of a year, long enough to be queried on every personal subject under the sun, to read
Great Expectations
and
Portrait of a Lady
and
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,
to be taken to
Lawrence of Arabia
and given a Rolex watch on her birthday. I’d even seen the inside of Shanti’s apartment in the Marina one day. It was very small and drab—no light or style—and I was able to imagine, for once, how glamorous my father and his world must have seemed to her.

How old was Shanti? She wasn’t up to code, that’s all I know. My father and Ooee Lungo had worked out a simple math equation for what they believed was the perfect age difference between a man and a woman. The man’s age was divided by two, and then seven years were added:
Y
/2 + 7 =
X
. Since my father was on the precipice of fifty, his ideal mate would have been thirty-two. But sweet, pliant Shanti couldn’t have been much beyond twenty-five or -six, which is partly why, eventually, she was pushed out of the nest, encouraged to see other people, and then, when she consulted my father on her love life, urged to begin an affair with another young programmer
at Harrison-Ruin, a guy named Bill Stein—who was brilliant, resourceful, and about a foot shorter than my father. Dad approved of Bill Stein enormously. And when Shanti would call my father and say she missed him and missed his company, he’d take her to dinner again and maybe sleep with her again, all the while counseling her on the myriad of ways she could improve and deepen her relationship with Bill.

After Shanti there was a stretch of
L
names, all short-termers: Lonnie, Louisa, Lauren. It was almost as though he were playing a game with himself. Lonnie was a ballet dancer. Louisa was a young architect in Ooee’s firm whom I met only once—when she was still dating Ooee. I never knew too much about Lauren, an aspiring fashion designer, except she was also a friend of Marisa’s and she’d gotten so stoned with my father once that she’d walked right into a glass door at Wolfback and smashed her tiny nose so thoroughly that she had to have an operation to make it bigger so she could breathe again.

Ooee wasn’t around as much in those days. His architectural style had evolved—he’d added Palladian windows and Ionic columns to his bag of tricks—and he made a name for himself building museums and libraries in Atlanta and Houston. But he still kept a houseboat in Sausalito, just down the hill from Wolfback. And he was certainly around that September weekend after I turned sixteen, when Shelley and I flew up to San Francisco to collect the MG.

M
y father and Ooee were standing at our arrival gate when Shelley and I got off the plane from Hollywood-Burbank. Ooee’s face looked very tan, and he was wearing a brown corduroy jacket and a blue oxford-cloth shirt. He’d gotten a new pair of horn-rim
glasses in the Woody Allen fashion of the day, and these set off his fluffy white hair and brown eyes in a nice way. He looked adorable, like an enormous teddy bear. When he saw us approaching—Shelley and me—a look of wonder and thrill came onto his face that he couldn’t possibly hide, or have faked, no matter how hard he tried. The gates of heaven had opened up. That’s how he looked. We were two angels who’d come to deliver him to paradise.

“Oh, well!” Ooee called out, almost involuntarily. “Look at you two!”

My father was more restrained. His dark hair seemed severe next to Ooee’s flyaway mane, and I noticed he was wearing a crisp new getup: a blue denim jacket over a thin white cotton shirt with the collar upturned. Rather than rumpled and approachable like Ooee, he looked almost too handsome to be real. And serious—so serious I worried that he might have changed his mind about the car. Was that it? Maybe my mother and Abuelita had finally gotten through to him. (They were both dubious about the car.) Then I realized it was about Shelley. My father hadn’t met her.

“You’re not at all how I imagined,” he said to her right off. “I thought you’d be tall—at least taller than Inez.”

“Nobody’s taller than Inez,” Shelley said without a smile. Her eyes were steady but gave off something else, a flicker of amusement.

“
I’m
taller than Inez,” Ooee said, putting his arm around me.

“I mean girls,” Shelley said.

“How tall are you?” my father asked, stepping closer to zero in on Shelley. He and Ooee were now circling her, moving in as if their noses were trying to catch a drift of her scent.

“Five-eight.”

“That’s pretty tall,” said Ooee.

“I suppose,” my father said.

Shelley shot me a look—an I’m-suffering-these-fools expression—and I wondered if she was okay, until we got to Ooee’s Saab and I realized she’d been lying low and plotting her revenge.

“You’re better-looking than I thought you’d be,” she said to my father as he held the door for her.

“Am I?” he said.

“I thought you’d show up at the airport in pajamas and smoking a pipe like Hugh Hefner. Look at him. He’s not very cute. I always figured that playboys weren’t.”

“Ouch,” said Ooee, ducking into the driver’s seat.

My father smiled and said nothing, just folded himself into the front passenger seat. Shelley and I were sitting in back. “Am I cute?” he asked after all the doors were closed. “I’ve never wanted to be cute. Paul McCartney is cute. John Denver is cute. My goal has always been
not
to be cute—just scary and delightful and take women where they’ve never gone before.”

“Dad.”

Shelley laughed.

“You’d better be careful, Pablo,” said Ooee. “She’ll believe you.”

“I’m serious,” my father said.

“Yeah, right,” I said.

Ooee shrugged with his mouth.

“Nobody believes me,” my father said. “Nobody ever believes me.” He threw his hands in the air. “Do
you
believe me, Shelley?”

“I do,” she said. And she laughed again.

S
helley was given the full-length tour of Wolfback, with all the gushing and marveling that that required, and then she and I got settled in the living room. Sharing the brown corduroy sofa—
recently expanded into a rather large sectional—we assumed our usual lazy positions. It’s funny how easy it was to create a separate female space for ourselves, almost as if there were invisible walls around us. We filed our nails and applied new clear polish. We drank green tea and laughed at the cartoons in my father’s
New Yorker
and
Playboy
magazines. We discussed what we might wear to Alegrías later that night. (“I’m getting so sick of that brown poncho,” Shelley said.) Ooee and my father made phone calls and planned the afternoon. An hour or more passed by, and then it was finally decided that I should be taken out in the MG for my first stick-shifting lesson. But where?