“Steven the something or other,” I said from what seemed like a great distance. I felt like I had to say something. After all, I'd been invited.
“Of Cloyes,” Miles said. “That was the French one. And Nicholas of Cologne leading the Kraut column,” he added, secure in the knowledge that there were no Germans in the room.
“Where were their parents?” Joyce said indignantly. “How come I've never heard of this?”
“You're a gerontologist,” Bernie said. “If there'd been a senior citizens' crusade, you'd probably be dazzling the whole room now.”
Wyatt slammed the door of the stove and looked to Annie for approval, but she'd gone into the kitchen in search of yet another bowl of her avocado-and-clam dip, with a bunch of mean little red chilies thrown into it as an unwelcome surprise. Two bowls had already turned brown at the edges and there was still no sign of dinner. I was almost hungry enough to attack the carob cake.
“But their families,” said Joyce, who supported, in addition to Bernie, a happily idle mother and father. “There have always been families. Where were their families?”
“The family is largely a literary invention,” Miles said cheerfully. He was a bachelor. “In the tenth century, painters depicted the children who were lucky enough to live as little adults, and that's what they were. They died so often in infancy that the Koreans, for example, held a birthday party on the child's hundredth day to celebrate its having survived so long. The Chinese did it at the end of the first month.”
“They still do,” I said. “I went to a one-month party with Eleanor a couple of weeks ago. There were lots of red eggs, sort of a Chinese Easter, except that the kids didn't have to die and get resurrected first.”
“And where is Eleanor?” Miles asked. “I didn't want to intrude into what might be touchy territory.”
“In China,” I said, wishing I hadn't brought her up.
“Doing what? Seems rather a long way to go to escape your admittedly peculiar charm.”
“Research on the extended family. Looking at ancestral shrines. She's going to write something,” I added, both to change the subject and to forestall the question I saw forming in Miles's mind.
Joyce wasn't interested in China. She folded two hands defensively over her swelling stomach. “What do you mean, the family is a literary invention?” she demanded.
Miles held up his empty glass, sighted through it, and poured some more red wine into it. He'd brought four bottles with him. “In medieval times, the family was purely and simply a unit of economic survival. The more kids, the more hands for harvest or for work, the greater the chance of passing along whatever miserable property the family might have managed to accumulate. Otherwise, when papa passed on, the neighbors would divide it, or the local lord- which is to say the closest armed thug-might simply annex it, just as he was likely to annex the prettiest daughter. Except that he'd keep the land, whereas he'd return the daughter after he'd had his way with her. ‘Had his way with her,’ ” he repeated, rolling the words and about twenty cc's of wine around in his mouth. “Such a delicious phrase.”
Joyce was one of the few humans of either sex I'd met who could ruffle, and she ruffled now. “I guess it's delicious to some,” she said.
“This is wonderful wine,” Miles said, congratulating himself. “Where were we?”
“We were listening to you,” Joyce said a trifle ungraciously.
Annie bustled in through the door, bowl in hand, looking domestic. “As the mother of two,” she said to Miles with a disarming smile, “I'd like to hear the rest even if it is a bunch of shit.”
“You were more respectful in college,” Miles said.
“I hadn't had kids then,” Annie said. “I thought the world was something real, and that people could explain it to you. I didn't know that it was something you invented as you went along.”
“Anyway,” Joyce said, “what about mother love? You can't tell me that mothers haven't always loved their children. It's the central fact of the female principle.” Bernie put his hand possessively and approximately on her stomach, and she gave his wrist a pat. He lifted his glass to his mouth with his other hand. “I'm driving,” she said.
“Of course they loved them,” Miles said soothingly. “They just couldn't get too attached to them. They were too likely to die.”
“Mine,” Wyatt said, pulling the cork from a bottle of cognac, “are going to live forever. Sometimes I think Jessica already has.” Jessica, his daughter, was thirteen years old and too pretty for her own good. Her little brother, Luke, was nine.
“Child mortality was fifty, sixty percent up through the seventeenth century,” Miles said. “Visit any old European graveyard and look at all the little stones.”
“No, thanks,” Annie said.
“It wasn't just child mortality,” Bernie said, surfacing from what had begun to look like a comfortable snooze. “Children were sacrificed, too. The archaeologists poking through the ruins of Carthage found the remains of more than twenty thousand children sacrificed to Baal and Tanit to avert bad fortune. In mitigation,” he added as Joyce gave him the kind of stare that Benedict Arnold must have seen a lot of, “they sacrificed sheep instead when things weren't so rough-say, to ward off a bad weather forecast.” Joyce got up, and Bernie, who had been leaning on her, toppled to the floor on his side. “Then there were the Polynesians,” he continued from his new position, ”ritually exposing kids on mountaintops or dropping them off cliffs every time the population reached overload, sort of Malthus as an active verb. Greek plays are full of children exposed on mountain-tops. Oedipus, right?”
Joyce went into the bathroom and pulled the door closed sharply behind her.
“I'd sell my girl right now,” Wyatt said, setting down a glass that had been full of cognac only moments earlier. “Anyone want to make an offer?”
“The point, if there is a point,” Miles said, “is that the disintegration of the family that people make such a fuss about these days is highly misleading. It wasn't until the seventeenth century that the family as we know it took shape. That was the first time that children were treated as children, that they wore different kinds of clothing, that they began to be sentimentalized. The trend reached its zenith in Victorian England about the time of the invention of the Christmas card, when children were transformed into symbols of innocence and it became the responsibility of adults to protect them from the evils of the world. Of course, we're talking about upper-class children here. The children of the lower classes were on their own. Or at the mercy of their parents, which was sometimes worse. Not much sentimentalizing over the little angels among the gin-drinkers. Child prostitution was a boom industry in Victorian England, and no one wanted to know about it.”
“They still don't,” I said. “Go down to Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood any night, and they're out on the sidewalk. Boys, girls, and kids who haven't figured out what they are.”
“Something tells me you're working again,” Wyatt said.
“I wish I weren't,” I said, meaning it.
“I still think it's a bunch of junk,” said Joyce, coming back in from the bathroom. “What about all those fairy tales?”
“Exactly,” Miles said with the air of someone who'd been waiting patiently for someone else to fall into a trap. “The most damning evidence of all. Find me a happy family in the fairy tales. They're about wicked stepmothers and children abandoned in the forest, boys and girls cooked for dinner, sisters separated from their brothers. Good Lord, they're a catalog of child abuse. No writers in history were ever more aptly named than the brothers Grimm.”
“The family is the basic unit of society,” Joyce said defiantly.
“It is these days,” Miles said. “Back then, it was the village. What are you working on, Simeon?”
It was just one more thing I didn't want to think about. “A little girl,” I said, wishing I were at home with all the doors locked, a safe distance from my friends. “She ran away.”
“How the hell do I know? Her father has a face that looks like he shaves by slamming himself with a two-by-four to drive the whiskers in so he can bite them off inside. Maybe she wanted to go somewhere where people had smooth faces.”
“Well, Lordamighty, excuse me,” Joyce said, lifting her eyebrows all the way into the southern reaches of her hairline.
“I'm apologizing a lot lately,” I said. “I'm sorry. She found her way here from Kansas City. She seems to have settled in with a bunch of kids who think so little of themselves that they seek their common level at the point where the scum surfaces on the pool. They're killing themselves, right out there in front of everybody. What else can I say? What I want right now is a house in the woods, about three hundred miles from the nearest neon light. I'd also like a nice, stupid dog. A spayed dog.”
“So excuse me,” Joyce said, meaning it this time.
“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe I should just go home and chew on the furniture.”
Annie came into the room. I hadn't even seen her leave. “Dinner,” she announced.
People made unsteady attempts to stand up. “Don't go home, Simeon,” Wyatt said. “Otherwise, we'll just worry about you. This party is already weird enough without that.”
“You're the birthday boy,” I said. “I'll even cheer up, if that's what you want.”
“Don't go overboard,” Wyatt said, clutching his cognac bottle to his chest.
“Would you like to call your children?” Annie asked him.
“They're my children, if you noticed,” Wyatt said. “That's a sure sign of how things are around here. If they get straight A's and they haven't killed anything lately, they're Annie's. If their mug shots are pinned to the telephone poles in the canyon, they're mine.” He went to the foot of the stairs and bellowed, “Luke. Jessica. Dinner, believe it or not.”
He turned away from the stairs and threw an arm around my shoulder. “Come on, Simeon. If you get to the table without saying anything else that's depressing, I'll share my cognac with you.”
The table, which Annie waxed obsessively as an outlet for nervous energy, of which she had an abundance, glowed supernaturally. The fireplace crackled. “It's so nice to eat someplace where people don't say grace first,” Miles was saying, ladling onto Joyce's plate something that looked disconcertingly like beef stew. “I never know what to do with my hands, not to mention my soul. And look, the salad has real lettuce in it, not arugula or radicchio or rocket, whatever that is. What in the world is rocket?” he said, looking up as we came in.
“The only lettuce that's not supposed to extinguish sexual desire,” I said. “In the Middle Ages, lettuce was prescribed for nymphomaniacs. Sort of the edible equivalent of a flannel nightgown.”
“I've known people who could eat their way through a flannel nightgown,” Joyce said. “Of course, they're all in jail now.”
“The Doctrine of Signatures,” Miles said, slopping food onto Bernie's plate. “Lettuce is limp, you see. According to the Doctrine of Signatures, which was a very hot theory in the fourteenth century, the way food looked was supposed to be a key to what it was good for. Walnuts looked like little brains, so they were good for brain fever, whatever that actually was. Oysters, because you had to pry them open, were supposed to help women conceive. Asparagus was erect, so it was-”
“We get the point,” Annie said. “Hello, Luke.”
Luke came into the room wearing a Superman T-shirt and red shorts. His knobby little legs ended in a pair of incongruously large furry slippers.
“Everybody looks pretty happy,” Luke said suspiciously. He was a well-known drug nihilist, a preadolescent Carrie Nation who had single-handedly reduced his father's marijuana habit from half an ounce a day, smoked in public, to a furtive joint or two snatched behind the woodpile when the little cop was in school.
“Happy?” Wyatt said as he surreptitiously put the cognac on the floor. “That's the first time this evening that anyone's used that word.”
“Have you been smoking?” Luke said, pulling himself up onto a chair. “Jesus,” he added, looking at the serving dish, “beef stew?”
“It's ropavieja” Annie said a little defensively.
“That's what I said,” Luke insisted. “Beef stew. The Ochoas serve it all the time.”
“Rachel Ochoa is his current girlfriend,” Annie announced to the table at large.
“Rachel is my only girlfriend,” Luke corrected her gravely.
“Yeah?” I said unwisely. “What happened to Ariel?”
“Ariel?” Miles said in tempered disbelief. Shakespeare was one of his specialties.
“Ancient history,” Luke said, throwing him a mean little glance. “Just give me some salad.”
“The kid is a born polygamist,” Wyatt said as Miles put a couple of glops of salad onto Luke's plate. “With a career like yours in front of you, you want to be careful with all that lettuce,” he added.
“Why?” Luke said, fork poised.
“Never mind,” Annie said, “and I know you hate it when I say that. Too bad. I'm still bigger than you.”
Wyatt took a slug off the cognac. “Where's your sister?”
Luke made a neat little pile of his salad, putting a piece of avocado on top like a green and suicidal skier poised for a run. His attention was focused entirely on his plate. Then he mashed the whole hill flat with his fork.
Annie had put down her silverware.
“Luke,” she said. “Your father asked you a question. Where's Jessica?”
“She's at Blister's,” Luke said in a small voice.
The silence in the room couldn't have been more profound if the moving finger had suddenly appeared and writ Luke's words large in letters of fire on the wall. Miles was carefully examining his salad. Bernie was leaning far back in his chair and gazing at the ceiling, on the final downhill stretch toward comatose, and Joyce was busy having second thoughts about parenthood.
“Blister,” I said brightly. “What an interesting name.”
“His real name is Lester,” Luke said in an artificially high voice that I recognized as a parody of his sister's. “We call him Blister because he's so hot.”
“That's enough,” Annie said. “When did she go?”
“A while ago. She said she'd be back for dinner.” Luke mashed his avocado into a puree fine enough to satisfy Wolfgang Puck.
“Well, she's not,” Wyatt said, gouging long angry scratches into the table's polished surface with the tip of his knife. “And I've had enough.” He pushed his chair back and stood up, then tossed the knife onto his plate, which promptly split in two. Luke looked down at his lap.
“Wyatt, don't,” Annie said, tight-lipped.
“Like hell I won't.” He grabbed a blue parka off a chair and started to put it on.
“Then take Simeon.”
“What am I, the Big Bad Wolf?” Wyatt said. There were small pinched white lines at the wings of his nostrils.
“Please,” Annie said. “Take him.”
“Wouldn't miss it for the world,” I said, rising. “I've never met anyone named Blister.”
Wyatt glared at me as though he'd never seen me before. It's a very peculiar feeling when your oldest friend suddenly looks dangerous.
“Whatever you want,” he said. “I'm going.”
As I followed him out, I heard Annie say in her Perfect Hostess voice, “Please. Eat your dinner.” Then I heard a chair slam to the floor, and Joyce said, “Bernie.”
In the Jeep Wyatt slugged the steering wheel a couple of times before he turned the key. The horn coughed each time. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch.1’ Then the motor caught and we jerked backward over the bridge across the creek. A Chevy van, heading north on Old Canyon Road, hit its brakes and slithered around us, its driver shouting one-syllable words with ancient Old English pedigrees that didn't make them sound any less rude.
“Double damn,” Wyatt said, acceler
ating and raising the cognac bottle to his lips. I hadn't realized he'd brought it, and the new knowledge wasn't reassuring. “I can handle enemies. What do you do about your own kids?”
“I've never had any.”
“So you're lucky. So shut up.”
I shut up for three or four miles that would have made Wyatt's insurance agent, had he been there, give serious thought to a new career. After we'd passed everything in the vicinity, and after Wyatt had settled the bottle between his thighs, I crossed my fingers and said, “So who's Blister?”
“A dealer,” Wyatt said, jerking the wheel to the right to avoid a plummet down to the creek, which was by then three hundred feet below us.
“Dealing what?”
“Mainly crack. Also regular old coke. Free-enterprise system, you know? Whatever the little kids want to buy.”
“How old?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty?” I asked, shocked in spite of myself. “Jessica's only thirteen.” She was, after all, my goddaughter. “How long has this been going on?”
“A month. Son of a bitch,” he said again. This time he pounded the dashboard with a closed fist.
“What happens if you maim him?” I asked.
“My daughter hates me.”
“Not for long.”
Wyatt caught up with something with four wheels, a Starion or a Jetta or a Sentra or something else with a name that was chosen because it sounded good to someone with an accent, and passed it on the right. Gravel rattled beneath the fenderguards, and the horizon took a dizzy spin. The creek, with its ample complement of hard sharp rocks, yawned beneath us, and then we were on the road again.
“Not for long,” I repeated when I could trust my voice.
“What? A week? Two weeks? Do you know how long that is when you're thirteen?”
At least he was conversing in whole sentences. Pushing my luck, I said, “Then let me be the heavy.”
He glanced over at me, and I instantly wished he hadn't.
“Wyatt” I mewed. He looked back at the road, crooked the wheel, and somehow managed to navigate between a car that was turning right and another that was coming straight toward us. Various brakes screeched, and he laughed for the first time in five minutes. “Another coat of paint on any of us,” he said, “and we'd be a memory.”
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