The Ruins of California (39 page)

I
couldn’t reach him—that’s how it started. Since leaving Hawaii, I’d gotten into the habit of calling more often. A few times a week, usually at night. I said that I was homesick for the North Shore and wanted to hear how things were. What was going on, what parties I’d missed, how the waves were. What Waimea was doing. “Same old, same old,” Whitman always said, reassuringly. But I was really calling to check on him. He couldn’t be that bad if he was getting up at six in the morning and tying his surfboards onto the roof of the Valiant, I told myself. He couldn’t be that bad if he was answering the phone and making jokes. “You’re not missing much,” he said cheerfully. “Jerry’s still drowning women in his hot tub. I hear the moans every night.”

And when a new girl moved into Tomas’s house—just a couple months after I’d left Haleiwa—Whitman treated this development carefully and thoughtfully, filling in the blanks that Tomas had left.
“Her name is Kennan. I kind of knew her in Ojala,” Whitman said. “She’s the stepdaughter of a woman who used to live with a guy my mom dated for a couple months.” It bothered me a little that Kennan was a photographer, or said she was. And it bothered me a little when she turned out to be older than me, twenty-four, exactly the golden age difference from Tomas. But I was always happy that Whitman was okay, and I hung up the phone relieved. It was as if Hawaii didn’t exist anymore, and Tomas was gone, and who cared about Kennan?

I’d lived with Abuelita over the summer before college, working at Bob’s again. He and my mother were at Abuelita’s for long stretches, too, while renovations were being done on their house in La Cañada—a staircase was coming out, a courtyard being put in, all new bathrooms. They seemed so happy, and absorbed with protein shakes, weight training, and fitness. On weekends they dressed in matching tennis warm-ups and headed to the gym. I didn’t do too much that summer. I read a lot. I got ready to move up north. I worked.

To be honest, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of living with my father. But he’d gone to the trouble of building an apartment for me, getting another remote control for the gate out front, and he seemed so excited. I felt like I had to move in—even if the commute was a nightmare and the apartment was kind of dark and cavelike and when I was taking a shower it felt like the entire city of San Francisco could see me.

When I complained to Whitman, he called it the “subterranean Wolfbackean lair,” which made me laugh. And made me think, all over again, that he was okay. But I started college and began calling Whitman’s house at night and never getting an answer. Or I’d call and get some tenant, some unknown person, who was almost
incomprehensible on the phone. It was only late September—and the waves were probably still bad. So where was he? But then, a few days later, Whitman would finally return the call and sound great, and we’d pass the phone back and forth over the dinner table.

“What’s his day like, Inez?” Dad asked one night. “I mean, what does Whitman really
do
? Is he really working?”

I shrugged. “He has a couple hotels—fern-grotto places, indoor gardens with fake waterfalls, that kind of thing. He feeds and prunes the plants. The trunk of his car is full of chemicals and wands and clippers and plastic buckets. But I have to say, his heart doesn’t seem in it.”

“Where is it?”

I shrugged again, not wanting to say what I thought.

“I can’t believe,” my father said, “that kids are allowed to live so far away from their parents.” And then he laughed. The funny thing was, he wasn’t kidding.

Not long afterwards Evie left her husband. Dad had pressured her—given her an ultimatum. But almost immediately she’d begun to wobble and regret her decision. She worried that Dad couldn’t be faithful, that he wasn’t considerate enough or kind enough, that he wouldn’t be able to “take care” of her feelings, as she put it to him in a letter. She suggested that they see a therapist together. He agreed, a concession on his part that seemed larger and more significant than his proposal of marriage, which was still apparently on the table.

How to explain the people we fall in love with? Freud said it was a decision made so far into you, in the dark, that it wasn’t the result of reason. Love was a thing of urges, and needs, and fears. My father liked to pretend he knew the answers to all the human
riddles—as though there were equations that could be worked out, laws of nature that governed all. He had theories about how to start an affair. How to choose the proper person. How to keep it going. How to end it. Why it was necessary to leave eventually, and find somebody else. “A relationship is like a potted plant,” he told me once. “At some point the plant gets too big and needs a new pot. And if one of you doesn’t have the energy to switch pots and make the necessary changes, it’s time to move on.”

But his kind of romance seemed like a dying thing. His kind of romance depended upon a magic trick, a veil that wound up hiding everything worth seeing. I’d done the equation in my head and projected myself into time. According to his golden rule, when I was forty-five, the perfect man would be seventy-six. When I was fifty-two, he’d be ninety.

Evie had been separated from her husband for a month or so when Dad began wobbling, too. He wondered whether he could really marry her—or anyone. It meant giving up Wolfback, most likely, and giving up the freedom that he’d made so many other sacrifices for, sacrifices like Cary and Justine, Gretchen and Shanti and Lauren. Wonderful women, all of them. Sacrifices like Patricia and my mother, too. “And besides,” he said one night after dinner, “it wouldn’t be fair to you kids.”

“What do we have to do with it?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have as much time to spend with you, would I? Who’d read with you? Who’d make you scones in the morning? I couldn’t be as hovering and devoted, could I? Evie would have to be number one.”

“I’d get by,” I said. But he had a point. Now that I had him all to myself finally, why should I share?

The battle in his mind waged on. “Maybe she’s right,” he said
one morning. “This house is impractical. It’s leaking. There’s a smell of sewage coming from the septic field that we can’t figure out.”

“What smell?” I said. “I don’t smell anything.”

“I know,” he said, flip-flopping again. “There’s no smell of sewage. She’s out of control. I’m tired of all her demands and complaints.”

Just before Christmas, before I was able to meet her—something Dad kept trying to arrange, and I kept dodging—Evie returned to her husband. The air in the house was lighter and breezier. The storm had passed. Dad seemed himself again, relieved the ordeal was over.

Not long afterward I walked into his bedroom to look for something and noticed a cluster of framed pictures leaning against a wall of his dressing room. Four or five frames—old, covered with chipped paint and dust. Curious, I flipped through them. A diploma from Caltech, another from Stanford. A math award of some kind. When I came across two photographs of a nude girl, I remembered that I’d seen her before: in my father’s old closet in San Benito. Whitman and I had looked at them the day we met.

In one photograph the girl was standing in a shallow pond or lake. She was bent over, admiring the water. The picture was hand-tinted and almost campy—her skin was as pink as a doll’s and the water too blue. In the second picture, she was lying on a chaise or bed. Her arms were very long and thin—like sticks—stretched over her head. Her face was long and familiar. And she was looking directly at the camera.

Marguerite. Suddenly I could see that. Her eyes were the same. And so intense, so alive and immediate. It was strange that hadn’t been obvious before.

“She was so lovely, wasn’t she?” Dad said when I carried the pictures out to the kitchen. “Don’t you love those poses? I was just looking at them again last night.”

“Where have these been?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” he said. “I’ve always had them. Since Mother died anyway. Aren’t they fantastic? She was such a beautiful woman, wasn’t she? I was thinking it might be nice to put them up—maybe in my bedroom. Make a little memorial. Why not? I’ve been missing her lately and thinking about her. That’s all.”

I
called to ask Whitman about the photographs—and if he’d known that Marguerite had been an artist’s model in New York before she met N.C. It wasn’t a secret, Dad insisted, just a piece of information that, by coincidence, nobody had mentioned to me before. “She had to make a living,” Dad said. “Her family was completely broke and had nothing. She worked for a photographer, an older man. He probably kept her, God only knows. Or maybe he was just in love with her. He wrote to her for the longest time. Even when I was a boy. What’s the big deal?”

I tried Whitman twice and got no answer. Later that night, when we were making dinner—some stir-fry that made me think of Whitman again—Dad and I tried his house one more time. “You’re obsessed with turning this Marguerite thing into
a big secret
,” Dad said, sort of mocking me, but nobody picked up the phone. Before going to bed, we tried again. No answer.

The next day, on Christmas Eve, I tried yet again. My mother and Bob were in Baja, at a Mexican resort for people who needed to play tennis constantly. Abuelita was working through the holidays—Mr. Feinman had droves of family members arriving. So I had wound up with Dad, even though he was aggressively antiholiday and refused to have a tree, or put up lights, or do anything remotely festive. There’d been some talk about Whitman’s coming to Wolfback
to join us, but he’d never bothered to let us know for sure. That seemed a little weird, too.

“I can’t imagine that nobody’s home,” I said after the third attempt to reach him. “This time of year, the house should be full of people—particularly at night.”

“Maybe he’s got a new girlfriend,” Dad said.

“Yeah,” I said, shooting him a look.

“That’s just pie in the sky, isn’t it? Santa Claus talk.”

I waited until the next morning before deciding to call Leftie or Jerry or John—had they seen Whitman? I figured it wouldn’t be too intrusive to call them, except it was Christmas Day. But I didn’t have their phone numbers and couldn’t obtain them from information. I didn’t know their last names. Nobody on the North Shore seemed to have one.

When I called Tomas, a woman answered the phone.

“Kennan?”

“Oh, no,” the voice said a little awkwardly, in a decisively laid-back way, as if she were working it really hard. “Kennan doesn’t live here anymore,” the voice said. “This is Chris.”

“Hi, Chris,” I said. “This is Inez Ruin. Is Tomas there?”

“No,” she said. Her voice had hardened, and the edges were sharp. “He’s out.”

“Can I leave a message?”

“Sure.” She knew who I was.

“I’m looking for my brother,” I said. “For Whitman. I was wondering if Tomas had seen him lately.”

“Oh.”

“Have you seen him?”

Quiet. “I’m not sure,” she said. “But I think he got hurt—there
was some kind of accident. I heard that somewhere.” But I got nothing else out of her.

When the hospitals had no record of him, Dad and I started calling the Ke Iki house every thirty minutes. Early the next morning, I almost gave up.

“Hello, Tomas?”

“What? Who’s this?”

“I’m sorry to call in the middle of the night,” I said. “I’m sorry to wake you up. It’s Inez.”

“Oh.”

“Did you get the message that I’d called?”

“No.” His voice sounded sleepy.

There was a pause. I could hear sheets rustling, movement. Tomas was getting out of bed, walking somewhere.

“I’m looking for Whitman. He’s not at the house.” I stopped and waited for him to say something.

“Yeah,” Tomas said, “there was some kind of accident. But hey, you know what? I don’t want to get involved. He’s
your
brother. You know the story.”

I
arrived in Honolulu at eleven in the morning. It was still the day after Christmas. And it seemed to have been eleven o’clock for two days already. During the five-hour flight, I could bring myself to think about Whitman only sporadically, in fleeting moments of dread—where he might be, how I might find him. Then my mind would rest again on Marguerite. Christmas always made me think of her, and the way the house in San Benito smelled like pine trees. The way things were decorated. The way the long dining room table
was set with pressed white linen place mats and the dull shine of old sterling. She put bunches of holly with red berries in little silver cups of water. And white candles. She served turkey with stuffing and side dishes that never changed: shrimp cocktail, carrot and turnip ring, squash pie, chocolate steamed pudding. There were tiny stockings on the mantel in the living room for all six grandchildren with a check for fifty dollars inside each one. The tree was ablaze with lights. New candy was piled inside the tiny covered dishes.

I thought Christmas at her house would never end. A whole world without end. Marguerite seemed so solid, and tradition-bound, and completely changeless. She fooled me, maybe all of us, with that. In the four years since she’d died, I’d come to see how stupid I’d been—how fooled and ungrateful. I regretted all the moments I’d spent with Marguerite that I hadn’t bothered to notice. I regretted all the things that I thought would be forever, the things that Marguerite brought into my life and took away when she died. The big house in San Benito, the veranda and the garden, the afternoons at the Arroyo, tea in her living room. The feeling of her looking after me—and paying attention. People always say that you take things for granted when you’re a kid, but it never stops, does it? When I thought about it on that plane ride, weeping in my cozy airplane seat, I saw that there were things I was taking for granted right now—just by pondering how much I’d taken Marguerite for granted—things that would eventually pass away or die or just stop. Things I’d lose someday. Things that would never come back. The long talks with my father. The books we read together. The stupid TV shows we watched, and all the movies we’d analyzed and fought over. The way he’d always asked for my opinion, for my thoughts, and treated me like a grown-up. The way he’d never
sugarcoated things or lied. The freedom that gave me, to speak my mind. And the presents he sent, which were always too nice and too expensive. He bragged about me to his girlfriends, made me feel loved, and then he’d play the
Pathétique
endlessly, almost as if trying to drive me mad with the song. And his ridiculous questions—the way he’d hang on the phone and was impossible to get off. Wolfback. I loved that house, didn’t I? And Whitman. Whitman, of course.