by Don Lee
Lyndon leaned back in his chair, at a loss as to what he should say now.
“You probably think this is all hormonal, the way I’ve been acting,” Sheila told him. “The thing is, I don’t know who I am. I have no idea. The only thing of any worth I’ve ever produced is Hana, and now she’s leaving, and you know what? I resent her. My God, why did she have to become so fucking beautiful? I’ve seen the way men look at her. You’ve looked at her that way. Don’t lie and say you haven’t. And now this singing thing. She’s so young. She has her whole life ahead of her—very likely an exciting life, an extraordinary life. Mine’s pretty much over, and what do I have to show for it? Two ex-husbands, three failed businesses, and a lamebrained sometime lover. I always thought I would do extraordinary things. It’s terrible to realize the moment is gone.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’ve accomplished more than that, and you have an entire lifetime ahead of you. There’s still so much you could do.”
“What have I accomplished?” she asked. “I hated being an attorney, absolutely detested it. I couldn’t quit fast enough. I just took the money and ran. I retired at thirty-one. That’s obscene when you think about it.”
“You have your chocolate boutique,” Lyndon told her.
“I’ve become a cliché,” Sheila said. “I’m a postfeminist, over-privileged suburban matron, a middle-aged dilettante looking for fulfillment. A hysterical bitch with no purpose. I’ve done nothing with my life.”
“You’ve done a lot of good as mayor.”
“Now you’re just patronizing me,” she said. “You’ve disagreed with everything I’ve ever implemented.”
“I like the new bike paths.”
“Thanks.”
“The beaches are cleaner.”
“That they are,” she said.
“You’re still young, Sheila. You’re not too old to have another child.”
“What if it’s Steven’s child? The earliest you can do a DNA paternity test is the tenth week, but it’s not a hundred percent until the second trimester, and then it’d be too late for an abortion. I wouldn’t be able to go through with it then. If it turns out to be Steven’s, what would you do? You’d walk—that’s what you’d do. That’s your particular specialty, Lyndon, your singular talent. You’d walk away, you’d retreat to your farm to do God knows what.”
Lyndon read the titles of the pamphlets on the rack across from him: prenatal care, STDs, birth control, adoption alternatives, breast health, cancer screening, sterilization services. “Would you go back to Steven?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Never.”
A nurse called one of the college students—she could have been in high school, Hana’s age—and took her down the hall. Lyndon and Sheila sat quietly in the waiting room for a few minutes, staring at the wall before them. A poster announced that you could register to vote at the clinic. Another had a photo of George Bush and Dick Cheney in a jocular pose, the caption underneath them reading, “Do you trust these men to make decisions about your reproductive rights?”
“People who’ve never had children think it’s such a joy,” Sheila said. “It’s not. It’s about exhaustion. It’s about total collapse. Oh, there are those brief moments of unconditional love, innocence, but those moments get chipped away, bit by bit, and it becomes, ‘I hate you. Get away from me. Where’s my dinner?’ You know what that’s all about? It’s about them looking at you as a parent, as an adult, and finding you wanting, finding you’re not the person they’d hoped you’d be. It’s the saddest thing in the world, to have someone look at you like that. It’s devastating. It’s like being abandoned. It’s one series of departures after another. You love them and worry about them and do everything you can to shelter and provide for them, and then they leave you, feeling you’re a disappointment.”
“Hana loves you, Sheila,” Lyndon said. “You know she does. And she’ll be less than an hour away.”
“Not if she goes to Berklee. Boston is three thousand miles away. I won’t be a part of her life. I won’t be able to do things for her, help her. Not that she lets me help her now. She won’t confide squat to me anymore. For all I know, she’s already come to a clinic like this.”
“She’s a virgin,” Lyndon said.
“What?” Sheila asked. “How do you know that?”
“She told me.”
“She tells you and not me? Great. That’s just wonderful. That’s just peachy-keen.”
“Let’s go home, Sheila. We don’t have to decide this now. We can decide this later. Come home with me.”
“What home, Lyndon?” she said. “What home? We don’t have a home. We’re fuck buddies. We’ve never lived together. We’ve never done all the things that couples have to do. We’ve never bought a house or a car together, we’ve never had to figure out careers, we’ve never had to deal with kids or schools or bills, we’ve never shopped or done chores, we’ve never gone to teacher conferences, vacations. What kind of relationship is that? We hardly know each other. Sometimes I feel I don’t know you at all. I don’t know the first thing about you—not really.”
She began to cry, and he laid his hand over hers, but she swatted it away. “Fuck you,” she said. “Oh, that’s right, I already did that. Which is why I’m presently in this absurd predicament.”
“Sheila—”
“Shut up,” she said, and pulled out a tissue and blew her nose. “What a mess,” she said. “What an ungodly, unbelievable mess.”
“I’m a Brussels sprouts farmer and a welder and an ex-bartender,” Lyndon told her. “I was a famous artist once. I made more money than I knew what to do with. I gave most of it to my parents. I gave them the money to keep my brother out of jail sixteen years ago, but I will never tell him that because I can’t bring myself to forgive him. I smoke pot every night. I have a sculpture in my barn I can’t stop working on. I occasionally engage in petty criminal activity and mischief. I am far, far from perfect, but I think I’m a loyal person, a person, given a chance, who can be counted on. I have my faults. I need to be alone a lot. I’m moody and sullen. I need to withdraw now and then, and sometimes I don’t like to talk. I have problems with authority—any authority. In many ways, I admit, I’m immature. I’m someone who doesn’t like to look inward much, and probably never will. I am afraid—afraid of so many things, most of all change. I’m not expressive or especially communicative. I’m a guy incapable of spewing out niceties, who will refuse to go to parties or barbecues and make chitchat with people I don’t know or like. I’m not at all ambitious. I don’t have any interest in making more of my life than I have. I prefer my obscurity, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I’m a man committed to a simple, quiet life. I am a man, against all sense and reason, who is pathetically, incurably in love with a woman. I am yours, Sheila. Yours and this baby’s. If you will have me, I am yours.”
CHAPTER 10
THEY HAD A LITTLE MISHAP EN ROUTE TO THE VET. JUJU WAS DRIVING them to the animal hospital in town in his beater car, Ling Ling in the passenger seat, Woody in the back holding Bob, who was nearly comatose, when the front right tire blew out. The car began shaking and yawing, they smelled burning rubber, there was a loud, rapid thumping against the chassis, then the shriek of metal grinding on asphalt. JuJu squeezed his hands around the steering wheel and tried to stay in control, but they fishtailed and skidded sideways and spun into a telephone pole, crushing the rear door and imploding the window, glass shards showering the back seat.
Woody picked up Bob and ran the rest of the way to the animal hospital, and as he leaped over the curb to the entrance of the clinic, he landed on a crack in the sidewalk, supinating his foot and badly twisting his ankle, which made him cartwheel head over heels onto the concrete. But as he tumbled, he kept Bob wrapped in his arms, protected, and somehow he rolled upright in a continuous motion and limped inside with the dog.
The veterinarian pumped Bob’s stomach and performed blood tests for possible kidney
and liver damage. She would keep him overnight at the clinic and administer him with IV fluids, but he would be just fine, she assured them.
Woody’s injury was another matter. The X-rays at St. Catherine Hospital showed he had broken his fifth metatarsal, a minute but functionally essential bone. His foot was placed in a plastic boot, and he would have to be on crutches for six to eight weeks.
He sat in Lyndon’s kitchen that night, his foot propped up on a pillow and chair, an ice pack folded over his throbbing ankle, as his brother cooked dinner for him. Trudy and Margot were long gone, as was Ling Ling, all three on flights across the Pacific. JuJu had taken them to the airport in Skunk’s car and then had retired to his own apartment. The house was quiet, attended only by the sounds of the wind, cicadas, and ocean outside and the sizzle of the pans on the stove.
“Want a beer?” Lyndon asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Woody said.
Lyndon opened the fridge and popped off the tops of two bottles, and he limped over to Woody to hand him one, his knee brace strapped to the outside of his jeans, left arm in the sling.
Woody winced as he reached for the bottle. He was certain he had busted a rib or two in the car crash, although the radiologist had stubbornly contradicted him. The ER doc had also been skeptical about Woody’s self-diagnosis of whiplash, but he’d relented and given him a neck brace anyway, simply to get rid of him, no doubt, the son of bitch, good-for-nothing doctors.
He shook out a couple of Percocets (from his personal supply, way better than the useless anti-inflammatories he’d been prescribed) and swallowed them down with a swig of beer. He smoothed down the curling edges of the bandage—which matched the one on his brother’s forehead—over his temple. His face was covered with remnants of calamine lotion and tiny scabs, as if he’d been hit with birdshot, from the pieces of glass they’d picked out of his skin, and his left hand was bundled in gauze. “Jesus, we’re a sorry-looking pair, aren’t we?” he said to his brother. The first thing he would do when he returned to L.A. was see his dermatologist. And his allergist. And maybe a cosmetic surgeon. And set up a phone appointment with Dan. Then he planned to make the rounds with a pitch for a new project, spurred by the mention of studio interest in Charlie Chan. His brainchild was to do a feature remake of The Green Hornet. He could hold a worldwide search for the next Bruce Lee to play Kato—a competition, a reality TV series in multiple countries. The prospective payoffs were simply outrageous.
The bandage made Lyndon think of something that had happened when they were children, maybe in junior high. They were walking to the movies, passing a golf course, Lyndon on a low fieldstone wall that bordered a chain-link fence, Woody below him on the sidewalk. Just as Lyndon reached the corner of the wall and jumped off, Woody threw a rock, supposedly at the fence but hitting Lyndon in midair, striking him smack on the head, just above the ear. Lyndon crumpled to the ground and put his hand to the side of his head, his fingers coming away with blood. It was streaming down his neck, pooling in the hollow underneath his throat, staining his T-shirt. It enraged Lyndon, the blood, and he rose and tackled Woody, punching him and wrestling him to the ground. They returned home, smeared with blood and dirt and sweat. They refused to talk to one another for weeks. Their mother tried to convince Lyndon that it had been an accident, a complete fluke, jumping into the path of the rock, that it was a statistical impossibility for Woody to have actually been aiming for his head and been capable of hitting him, but Lyndon would not be swayed. It might have been pure luck, the fact that Woody had found his mark, but Lyndon knew, he knew, that Woody had wanted to hit him, bring him down, it was his will, his nature, his deepest impulse, he had meant to do it, and nothing—not then, not now, all these years later—could ever convince Lyndon otherwise. Such was the power and persistence of fraternal enmity. Cain and Abel. He knew that Woody had been plotting something against him with Kitchell. He would not forget that. He would never trust his brother. Although a few things about him had surprised Lyndon during this visit.
“You know,” he said, “you don’t seem too upset about your car.”
“Well,” Woody said, “I’m pretty well insured. Besides, I’d been thinking of getting rid of it.”
Lyndon had been able to talk Sheila into leaving the clinic, decision pending another day, but the Range Rover had not been where he had parked it. He assumed it had been towed and called San Francisco’s DPT, but they couldn’t check their logs without knowing the plate number. Lyndon had been unable to reach Woody, and it was only after his brother came back to the farm from the hospital that they determined the SUV had been stolen. Later on, they’d learn it was taken to a chop shop and swiftly dismantled, the parts shipped off to Colombia and other far-flung corners. Even in its mangled condition, the car had worth—its leather seats, touchscreen, sound system and DVD, its one intact Xenon-gas headlight. Lyndon would also figure out that Sunny Padaca had been the one who had filched his pot plants, sneaking onto the farm in the predawn hours before the raid, about which he had been somehow tipped, for a little nighttime gardening. The turpentine had not been intended for Lyndon. André Meeker and Jen de Leuw, the Udderly Licious lovers, were the self-appointed PLF terrorists, finally caught as they tried to torch Kitchell’s house. They had been responsible for firebombing the trailer and discharging the elephant, among other infractions—addled by lust and hormones and cannabis into becoming Rosarita Bay’s teenage Bonnie and Clyde. They had been transporting two fifty-five-gallon drums of paint thinner in the back of a borrowed flatbed truck, planning to dump them into The Centurion Group’s water supply, but they hadn’t secured the cargo very well, and the drums had fallen off the bed of the truck and rolled into the creek ditch that fed directly into Lyndon’s pond.
“Let me ask you,” Woody said, “that thing in your barn—what does it mean?”
“It’s not supposed to mean anything. That’s not the point.”
“What is, then?”
“The process,” Lyndon said. “Just doing the work.”
“Don’t you want something to come of it?”
“No. It’s just about being in that state of mind—the state of invention, spontaneity. That’s all I want. To be attuned to it. To be present in it—inside of it. That’s the only thing that matters to me.”
“I still don’t get it,” Woody said.
“I wouldn’t expect you to—or anyone else.”
“What are you going to do, Lyndon?” his brother asked. “Your Brussels sprouts are ruined.”
“Not all of them,” he said, pointing to the pot on the stove. Yesterday morning, before his crop had been tainted, he had happened to pick off a quarter of a bucket of Oliver—an early variety—from the bottom of a few plants.
“You’re going to have to sell your farm,” Woody said, wiping his flatware with a napkin.
“Yes, I am,” Lyndon said. “But not to The Centurion Group. There’s a nonprofit trust that’s been offering to buy my land and lease it back to me to farm. There would be a conservation easement so it could never be developed.” It wasn’t the best of arrangements—he would no longer own his farm or house outright, and, as a tenant, he was vulnerable to unforeseen changes in the land trust’s management. He could get kicked off at any time. That was why he had ignored them—their calls and letters—for as long as he could.
“What are they offering?”
“Enough. 1.2 million.”
Woody was flabbergasted. It wasn’t fair-market value, not anywhere near it, but it was a substantial chunk of change, enough—if properly invested—to carry Lyndon through to retirement. It would allow his brother, the stupid, intractable relic, to stay exactly where he was. Maybe he couldn’t hide from the world, but he could still manage to outwit it, eternally charmed, and Woody had to give him credit for that. “How long have you known about this?”
“I don’t know,” Lyndon said. “About a year, I guess.”
“You really are a secretive bastard, aren’t you?” h
e said, glad that his betrayal of Lyndon, snitching on him to Kitchell, had been a lapse without consequence. He would have regretted it as an unnecessary act of malice, perhaps cowardice. He was, he wanted to believe, a better person than that now. He had saved Trudy and Margot. He had saved Bob. Who knew what else he had the potential to do? A reservoir of goodness was there within him, somewhere.
“I’ve got chocolate ice cream—and a bowl of 420—for dessert,” Lyndon said, “if you’re interested.”
He took the lid off the rice cooker and scooped out two mounds for their plates. He forked the steaks from the pan and stirred the Brussels sprouts he’d been braising. He had browned slices of thick diced bacon, sautéed them with shallots, added chicken stock, thyme, parsley, as well as some sherry, salt and pepper, and a bay leaf, then the sprouts, brought everything to a boil, and simmered it, covered, for fifteen minutes. Now he served the sprouts with the steak and the rice to his brother—a simple meal, not much to it, just the basic elements, but filling.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
FOR THEIR EDITORIAL INSIGHTS AND SUPPORT, I WOULD LIKE TO THANK my editor, Alane Salierno Mason; my agent, Maria Massie; and my friends Jennifer Egan, Fred Leebron, Katherine Bell, Kathy Herold, Scott Buck, Katherine Palmer-Collins, and Rebecca Lee.
I'm particularly indebted to Don Murch of Gospel Flat Farm, who told me everything I needed to know about growing organic Brussels sprouts. Thanks as well to David Dewitt and Ilene Bezahler, formerly of Allandale Farm.
Laura Kina was instrumental in guiding me to a seminal text about Asian and Asian-American artists, Why Asia? by Alice Yang. Another source of substantial influence was On Seeing Nature by Steven J. Meyers, as were articles on Lee Bontecou by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker and Michael Duncan in Art in America. Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness Meditation and Steve Hagen's Buddhism Plain and Simple also deserve acknowledgment.