I was amazed she was looking for me. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to find me, afraid she might take me someplace even further beyond what I knew how to deal with. Glen, here’s the harem. Glen, here’s the rifle range. Glen, let’s rob a liquor store and turn over some cars and set them on fire together. I would have done any of that with Sue. And pinball was something I knew from my old life of several hours ago.
I followed her through the kitchen—so many open bottles of wine!—how strange to have a hulking refrigerator from the 1950s, a stove from the 1920s, who had ever thought of stuffing olives with blue cheese, was that a braid of garlic hanging from the ceiling?—to a mud room, where there was a pinball machine not too different from my own.
The room’s walls were peeling so that paint chips feathered the nests of newspaper and cordwood. There were faded Art Nouveau posters tacked to the walls. Sue said the house had been built in the 1870s and that after the earthquake it had been a makeshift hospital. Survivors had brought the owners gift baskets she’d found in the attic. She was pretty sure it was haunted. My home in Corona del Mar felt inadequate.
Sue turned on the pinball machine so she could play with me. She asked if I’d read any books by Tom Robbins. Or Grapefruit by Yoko Ono? Had I heard of a comic strip called Odd Bodkins? She asked all this while rolling a joint.
I didn’t know how to talk to her. I lunged for the only thing I thought I knew. “You can play as hard as you want,” I said.
“What do you mean ‘play hard’?” she asked.
“I mean, don’t be nice or anything.”
“I’m never nice,” she said. I flushed with embarrassment. And within a few minutes she was massacring me. The joint went to embers on the edge of the pinball machine. Her long, polished fingernails were atop the flipper buttons, not so much banging on the machine as massaging it to do her bidding. “I do this for hours,” she said.
She was a potter and her kiln was behind the house in a little studio that was her private space. When she was blocked, she came in to play pinball. Her work was all over the house, thick-walled vases and tiny hanging mirrors set into subtle, color-shifting glazes. I couldn’t say whether I liked them, but they spoke of artistic confidence. She had an affinity for when to smooth the clay out and when to leave a thumbprint so it looked rustic.
When it was my turn, my eyes darted back and forth from the machine to Sue, who was pulling on her joint. “Your mom has pretty eyes. So do you.”
I didn’t know what to say about that.
“Do you like girls?” She came across as much as she could like another kid asking the question, but still I couldn’t think how to answer. “I don’t mean to embarrass you. Do girls like you?”
“I don’t think so.” It was my turn again. Flip, flip, plunk. Without warning, she laughed. I could feel my throat hurting. “You don’t have to laugh at me.”
“I’m sorry. I just realized that when you get older, girls are going to like you. Hey, look at me.”
Her eyes were huge.
“Do you believe in ESP?”
I didn’t want to sound stupid. But it wasn’t a trick question. “My mom and I have this psychic link.”
There was shuffling all around us. Hors d’oeuvres moving into the kitchen, platters moving out. Laughter. Music. Sue licked her finger and tapped at the joint to extinguish it. “Some people think I’m a witch because I can see the future. You’re going to end up very handsome. You’ll have lots of girlfriends.” I imagine being hypnotized would feel like this did. “Not yet, but when they do they’ll all be very pretty women who love you. You’re a lucky kid.”
Somewhere out there, my mother was drinking her glass of wine and having a conversation with someone. Was it like this? Did everyone in San Francisco have conversations like this? Was that what being here meant? It would be like living in a Tarot card.
Sue was calm. I finally asked, “Are you really a witch?”
“Well.” She shrugged. “I am from Wichita.”
* * *
—
The doorbell rang. It was now my job to answer it, as Peter thought it would be great, “decadent,” he said, to have a kid greet people and hand them glasses of Zinfandel.
When I opened the door there were two cops on the porch.
They asked for Peter, and as I remember it he was already on his way to the door. He winked at me.
I was so traumatized I have no idea how the next hour or so passed. What I remember was sitting on the stairs and looking through the wooden posts like jail bars at one of the cops. The party was still going. The cop asked how old I was. I told him I was twelve, which sounded better to my ears than ten.
I asked, “Do you care that people here are smoking pot?”
He wriggled a finger at me in a “come here” gesture. I pressed against the railing to get closer. He exhaled pot smoke into my face.
The next morning Peter, Sue, my mother, and I took a walk down to Aquatic Park, where Peter pointed out the Italian widowers playing bocce ball. My mother had a cappuccino in North Beach and the four of us sat at a café table. I didn’t know air could feel cold in the mornings. The light was sharp and crisp. That my mother ordered cappuccino so easily reminded me that she had been missing Europe since coming to California.
She struggled to explain how wonderful this all was, and Peter said San Francisco was enchanting, but not as great as it had once been. He and some friends had co-owned a nightclub by the Cannery called Arthur. Up all night, coffee in the morning on Broadway at Enrico’s, watching secretaries pass by, seeing if they could make them stop and say hello, new girls every day. His friend Ron was an opera singer with the Met, Trevor was a fashion designer, and maybe they dabbled at actually doing that stuff, but mostly they owned a nightclub.
Mom asked, “Do people have jobs here?” because it didn’t seem like anyone took anything seriously. It wasn’t frivolous. San Francisco ran on melancholy. People here knew San Francisco wasn’t what it had been. If only you’d been here a little while ago, that era when things were more festive. The attitude was, We’ll play, we’ll make life a game, but that other time we can’t quite put our finger on, that’s when you should have been here. Every boutique owner, every bearded street artisan with a booth of hammered silver rings, every cab driver loved it here, but the love came with sadness. San Francisco forgave that feeling. I know you’re sad, let’s all be sad together.
* * *
—
Mom and I went home.
I stood on our vacant lot in Corona del Mar as the winter sun was going down. It was just me, a boy who’d been told he was a thirty-six-year-old midget, and his croquet set. Listlessly I hammered balls through wickets, not feeling committed, instead making panoramic circles to take in every bit of the scenery. My croquet set was no longer enough. My house and my street and my view were no longer enough. It felt like there should be sad music playing for me as I for the last time gathered up my mallets and posts and said goodbye.
My mother explained to me that the plush cocoon was over. The stars were lining up. Everything she knew suggested that with a little effort, luck, élan, a prosperous life would be ours. Which is of course the crux of a good con game.
3055 PACIFIC AVENUE
APT. 2
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
94115
ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE was the first movie my mother and I saw in San Francisco. It played at the Alhambra, a 1920s Moorish theater that was exotic, with stamped tin chandeliers and heavy velvet curtains trimmed with arabesques.
The movie was about Alice, played by Ellen Burstyn, widowed, starting her life over again in a new town. She tries to be a singer but ends up a waitress, and meets terrible men before finding a handsome rancher, Kris Kristofferson, who takes care of her. In one scene, on a long drive from one town to the next, Burstyn is trying to figu
re out the roads while Alfred Lutter, playing her son, my age, tells her an annoying and dirty joke. “Shoot the dog! Shoot the dog!” was the punch line.
I knew that joke. Further, my mom and I had just driven from Corona del Mar to San Francisco, staying overnight in a motel that was seedy enough to allow Leo in our room. Like Alice, we had our belongings in the car, and I told jokes, but mine were funnier than Alfred Lutter’s, even if my mother couldn’t hear that. I also kept letting Leo out of his cage because I felt sorry for him. That turned out to be a mistake every time.
When we left the theater, Mom and I felt exhilarated. We’d just seen a movie about us! Except instead of singing, my mother was going to be an investor. And she wasn’t going to fail.
“We’ll live frugally,” my mother said, “within our means.” We had a flat on the second floor of a 1920s apartment building with twenty-year-old appliances to which we added the Amana Radarange microwave. The Persian rugs overlapped in the living room and dining room. My coins were in a safety deposit box. I was in public school. Sixth grade at Winfield Scott was 70 percent Chinese, 29 percent black, and me. The Chinese and black kids hated each other. But I was looked at as a kind of an albino buffalo, something so strange bumbling through the hallways that they preferred to ignore me. It was all right.
Sometimes I sat on the end of my mom’s bed while she rolled a joint. She didn’t want to hide anything from me. I liked her smoking pot—she became silly when stoned, and more talkative about her past. Also, I wasn’t positive about this, but she seemed less deaf when she was high. I wondered if marijuana helped deafness.
Her, waving the joint. “Don’t you do this.”
“I’m not interested. Adults are boring.”
“Ha. Good.” She took a hit. “You realize I’m only doing this for my second childhood, right?”
“Your first.”
“You’re a good kid, Charlie Brown. My first childhood.”
In September 1939, a few days after war was declared, my grandfather was taken away in the dead of night to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. This was supposed to be temporary, but none of his British relatives would vouch for him. As the war wound down, and people in his circle were returned home, George remained in the camp for months and then years longer than anyone else he knew. My mother had letters between her parents outlining the hardships and deprivations that each of them faced—him, a prisoner, and her, a single woman with a boardinghouse filled with children and soldiers. There were so many milestones he missed, and so many hopes raised then dashed that he might return. This was how my mother learned the concept of “when,” as in “when your father comes back, we’ll finally make a go of being happy.”
The family was never sure, but he seemed to be the very last man released, late in the war. My mother had missed him terribly and had simultaneously known almost nothing about him. When he was taken away, she was four years old. When he was back, she was almost ten.
His return was difficult. No one would hire a prisoner from the Isle of Man. Regardless of his polyglot background (he had been a translator before the war) and his intellectual backbone, he could only find jobs in manual labor. And then, more children, more mouths to feed. He took out his frustrations on my mother, lecturing her in French when he was angry.
“He knew I didn’t speak French,” she said. The burden of being daughter to a genius was huge. Worse, a genius whose potential wouldn’t be fulfilled. “I never felt like I could give back anything, it was never enough. I’d disappointed him by being born. It’s been a slow process, my son, slow but steady, letting go of those hang-ups.”
“Why did they stay together?”
“My parents?” She exhaled a hit of pot. “It must have been the sex.” And then she laughed, and I laughed, too.
Like my father, my mother had started dressing more in fashion, but it looked good on her. Cream-colored linen bell-bottom trousers that trembled with the winds, with knit blouses, buttoned at the line between discreet and otherwise. For high-fashion evenings, she had a vest made of feathers, which she once wore with no shirt underneath to an art opening. She was noticed.
She hadn’t moved us so she could date Peter. I’m not sure their physical relationship continued after the move. I remember Peter throwing his arm around her at a party and whispering, loud enough that I could hear it, “You and I are both more sophisticated than the people we sleep with.”
It was beautifully said. My mother got to feel smart and independent and yet part of the club. Peter continued not to shit where he ate.
“There are no limits,” she said. “Not for you, either. You can do anything.” She said I didn’t have to think the way other people did. I could go to boarding school, she said, I could go to Switzerland.
That last part made me feel a little dizzy, excited but terrified, and she said she was only suggesting it to get me to think how much potential I had. I could be an artist.
“I was a model when I was seventeen. Did I tell you that already? Did you know I used to sing? I used to sing when I was seventeen. I sang ‘Moon River’ to you when you had ear infections and couldn’t sleep. I always used to wonder if I could sing in a nightclub. Maybe I can now.” But not like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
* * *
—
My mother was right—she was about to launch into a great adventure. She was smart, determined, had money, and lived in a town that took pride in supporting even crazier dreams. But there was an obstacle to her getting the life she wanted.
Maybe it was one of those joint-smoking moments, maybe another time. My mother told me the story of the last day she saw my father before the move to San Francisco. She told it so vividly that I remember it as if I’d been there. She said she and my father had met in the house on Setting Sun Drive. Five thousand square feet echoing now, as boxes were half-packed, parcels stacked in the terra-cotta-tiled hallways, “Fragile” stickers from Bekins Movers on the crystal. Discolorations on the wall where sunlight had fallen around the framed things that had been a sign of prosperity, then prosperity fleeing. My mother with a handkerchief on her head, dusting, was having my father over to sell him back some things she’d gotten in the settlement. This would buy her some breathing room.
My father showed up with Ann. This was how my mother met her. Ann and my father walked through the house, Ann pointing out the things she wanted to buy. Some artwork. Some jewelry my father had given my mother. It wasn’t a long visit, less than an hour, and in that hour, the younger woman my father was sleeping with bought my mother’s possessions at a bargain price.
Sometimes I imagined my father writing a check in what must have been a silent room. I imagined the three of them standing in the kitchen, empty counters, gashes in the walls where the artwork used to be, and him making a futile joke as he handed the check over.
As she needed that check, my mother would hold her tongue about all the ways she felt. My father didn’t see what was wrong, she told me. It was a financial arrangement to him.
My mother told me my father had chosen Ann for her money. She said this with sympathy. She told me the story to better narrate the end of our old lives. My father valued things, not people, because he was afraid. She felt sad for him. “Your father and I were in love. He doesn’t want to risk that again.”
She didn’t want me to grow up like him, cold and remote. Walling off your heart, she explained, was worse than being willing to risk it again.
This was a beautiful lesson. I still believe in it even if that meeting in the house never happened.
Since I started working on a memoir my father has been answering my questions like he’s giving the instructions to defuse an especially tricky bomb. He’s been explaining what happened, but he doesn’t justify his behavior. He sees justifying things as caving to guilt. When I ask what he’d been thinking that day, he laughs. “Are you kiddin
g? Me, taking Ann to that house? We didn’t do that. I can’t imagine doing that. I mean, think about it.”
I have. For a man who claims he has no conscience, he still tends to misremember his more hurtful decisions. My parents both would like to believe themselves the wronged party here.
So I asked Ann. She says that my father did indeed take her to the house. It was during the divorce, before my mother and I had moved out. It wasn’t to buy anything—Dad wanted to show off. Specifically, he drove her to Corona del Mar to indicate he was still rich. He was going to pretend the accumulation of objects with such good stories behind them meant he could still afford them. He was going to give Ann the house tour of his life.
I was prepared to hear that my mother’s version was correct, and that’s how she met Ann. But Ann says that when my father opened the door to the house, it was empty. There wasn’t a thing there except a closet of my father’s suits.
My mother hadn’t left a note. Neither my father nor Ann knew where we’d gone. My father told me the same story, down to the suits in the closet. He said he panicked because he had no idea where I was. He had to ask a neighbor what had happened, and he heard that a thirty-foot moving van had pulled away earlier. My mom had moved us without telling him.
So when my mother told me about that upsetting encounter with Dad and Ann, it’s not just that it never happened, it’s that something else, entirely of her own making, had happened instead.
And yet my mother wasn’t lying to me. She had a strong backbone, a moral compass. But at the same time she was forging an identity, a plucky survivor who’d been victimized in the past by people like my father. I don’t think it was too far from my own fantasy of washing up on a beach after a storm, battered and bruised and just barely surviving. However, she saw a storm no one else could see. It was one made just for her.
I Will Be Complete Page 6