The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  Among all of this, the Thai restaurant listed on the birthday invitation was an old-timer. Established way back in 1985, the plaque attached to the black marble façade of the building boasted. Given the changing, the almost immorally changing tastes and fads of Los Angeles eateries in the several decades since then, Chaya Dan was truly a monument of stability. Indeed part of its fun, it later turned out, was to look at those old photos and holographs on corridor walls near the men’s, ladies’ and ‘whatever’ restroom, showing the place in earlier times. Flanked by a Domestic Help Office on one side, a Medical Prosthetics shop on the other, during its first decade in business; the entire open front area, now garden and outdoors dining, had been given over then to being a small, surpassingly unattractive parking lot; the blocks surrounding the place dreary’ and utterly pedestrianless, with only an old Nissan 300Z parked in view. Or, a decade later, once the restaurant had taken over its neighbors’ space and it had become for a while a hot biz (i.e. film and TV business) hangout, the surrounding area even less frequented, with nothing but the BMWs and Rolls-Corniches of the agents, stars and other players filling the front parking lot. And finally, a few years ago, when Music City had just opened.

  The food, however, was said to be virtually unchanged, or only a bit updated to reflect new diet beliefs. It smelled great and looked wonderful on diners’ plates as I entered, a bit later than the invitation had called for.

  I was directed up a flight of stairs all but wrapped in an aluminum sculpture titled Anaconda to a balcony where several booths and tables had been moved about to form a single large table.

  Luckily, people were just arriving or standing around or sipping aperitifs and nibbling at appetizers. So I wasn’t too late.

  Bev Grigio noticed me first. ‘You made it! Great!’

  ‘Where do the gifts go?’ I’d wrapped a first edition of Damon Von Slyke’s The Japonica Tree, certain that it wouldn’t be missed among the dozen or more of the books I’d found huddled in a lower shelf of the library subcloset.

  She pointed to a pile of packages on the floor. ‘Just put it there. Don’t you look handsome, all dressed up,’ Bev said, and blushed at the same time.

  Before I could say anything, she added, ‘All the guys do, tonight. That’s one of the nice things about LA weather. No matter how hot it gets by day, you can still wear a jacket at night and look formal.’

  ‘You a native?’ I asked, less out of interest than to make small talk and meanwhile look around us.

  ‘Oh, no! I’m from Hawaii. Big Island.’

  ‘Hilo?’ I asked.

  ‘Actually Pahoa.’

  As we spoke, a waiter offered me drinks. I took a white wine spritzer and what looked to be lightly floured, sauteed zucchini.

  Pamela Agosian was in the corner, by her gifts now. She wore a metallic teal-colored single-piece sheath of a dress. Very appropriately Asian-looking. Her thick blonde hair was up on her head, wrapped in some sort of European-looking-style bun I didn’t know what to call. It was held in place by a jeweled pin the size of her hand, composed of a dozen or more green and blue gemstones. It made her look elegant and grown-up.

  Talking to Pamela were Danielle Tsieh, her twin Michelle, Kathy Tranh and another young woman not in my class. Already sitting down were Perry Valentine and Cheryl Taylor, two other classmates who were what passed for African-American in southern California, i.e. not very. Ben-Torres, in an expensive sport coat and slacks, was standing at the top of the stairs talking to the Samoan linebacker Taponaupoa, also wearing a sport coat but with shorts and sandaled sockless feet. And behind them was Ray Rice in a similar-looking outfit, except his jacket was a navy blazer. He stepped aside to let two more younger women come upstairs, both obviously Pamela’s sisters, Tanya and Tonya, which Bev confirmed. A minute later we were all seated.

  Pamela claimed to be thrilled to have me attend, as had been predicted, and made sure I sat on her right. I couldn’t help but notice Ray Rice placed himself among males opposite, all the jocks in a row.

  The dinner was in the form of a Thai banquet, the dishes brought out two or three at a time in great metal-covered salvers, their lids removed with a flourish for us to ooh and ahh over before they were served. Since we all more or less faced each other, it wasn’t difficult to see the various interchanges between diners. I’d only been out of undergrad classes a few years and though I was now their teacher, it was obvious that little had changed in those few years. The young women were trying to be dignified yet light-hearted. They were flirting with myself and the other four younger men, without making too much of it, at the same time that they were checking out the lie of the land to truly assess any serious interest among us.

  Ben-Torres, Perry, Ray and Taponaupoa, on the other hand, were about ninety-five percent oblivious to what was going on, not only between themselves and the women, but among the women themselves. Indeed, if I was a bit more conscious of it, it was not because I was so much older or more worldly-wise, it was more because 1) as a teacher I was in the somewhat more aloof position of being an observer and 2) not too long ago, a woman had gone out of her way to point out my own general ignorance in these matters and had attempted to if not quite correct them, then at least lead me into a general area where some repair might take place.

  Thus I could see that Danielle, Michelle and Kathy Tranh all ‘liked’ Ben-Torres, but were all afraid of him a little, mostly given his general lack of communicativeness and more specifically his opacity about feelings and emotions. As obvious to me was Bev Grigio’s amused interest in the gigunda Samoan linebacker: an interest she kept going by managing to needle him whenever possible – in the gentlest of manners. Equally clear, Cheryl Taylor had no interest at all in Perry Valentine besides student camaraderie – an attitude he was only partly aware of.

  Among the other women present, only Pamela was a mystery to me. She treated all four men students with the sort of slightly patronizing interest one uses to deal with people one is forced together with on a much-delayed, long and not especially interesting plane ride. Toward me she was less constant. In class she was usually ‘Junior Miss’ – perfect in behavior and attitude. But then I’d come across her on campus, or in the library or in some shop in nearby Westwood Village, and she would look momentarily uncomfortable, as though unprepared for me outside of the formal situation she’d consigned me to. Of course that could be the entire answer. Undergrads had plenty on their minds. She probably did pigeonhole me, as she did her other summer-session teachers. And it was true that she usually regained her class composure quickly enough. Why, then, did I intuit that within her gape-mouthed surprise at those unexpected encounters along Bruin Walk or along Broxton Avenue was some other even more salubrious sensation: a sheer pleasure, lighting up her face, and especially her large pale eyes, and animating her to an altogether higher pitch of both alertness and intelligence? Was I utterly vain in thinking she had something of a crush on me? An interest in me less overt than, say, Ray Rice’s more disturbing interest; one she’d probably never make a move on; and thus one I had to admit I unaccountably much preferred.

  Before dessert – and I assumed some sort of cake – a break was called. The tables were cleared. We stood up and milled about. Ben-Torres and Ray Rice approached me. Taponaupoa hovering just behind them.

  ‘So, Professor Ohrenstedt!’ Ray waved me closer into their tall trinity. ‘Settle a question for us.’

  ‘What question?’ I asked warily. As I joined them I noticed the group shifting ever so slightly, with the big Samoan blocking us from the others. What was going on?

  ‘Well, Ben and Tappy and me are curious about this ghost-dance business.’

  I looked up at Taponaupoa. ‘You read Black Elk Speaks too?’ I couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t even in our class.

  ‘I can read, you know?’

  ‘He read the section about the ghost-dancing,’ Ray Rice clarified. ‘We got to talking about it, trying to figure out what it meant. Tappy here comes fr
om a sort of tribal society, so we thought he might have something like it back home.’

  ‘Do you?’ I asked.

  ‘Hell, no! That stuff is weird, man.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Perry had joined our group. ‘What exactly were they all doing?’

  ‘Well, you understand that by 1885, any Native American of any intelligence and foresight saw the writing on the wall and knew that their life as they’d lived it was over.’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Check!’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Black Elk was already in training from the time he was a small boy to become a great medicine man,’ I added.

  ‘At seven years old he knew,’ Ben-Torres said.

  ‘Right. Well, at twenty or so, he was already pretty high in the many-nationed congress of chiefs and medicine men. So he was there when they decided to initiate the ghost dances.’

  ‘But what were they?’ Ben-Torres asked.

  ‘He tells you what they were. All-day and all-night dance sessions of all of the most important braves and chiefs of all of the remaining tribes. Two or three days on end. Until they all dropped. They did – what? – a hundred ghost dances over four years. All over what was left of their homelands in the West.’

  ‘We know. We know, but why did they do them?’ Ray asked.

  ‘He tells you that too,’ I replied. ‘They all painted themselves white to look like ghosts. And they danced until the noise they made attracted their future people. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.’

  ‘You mean the Native Americans of a hundred years later?’ Ben-Torres was getting it.

  ‘And of 2085 and 2185. They believed time is a continuum. It isn’t as solid as, say, space is, it has points where it can be crossed. If you did some extraordinary act, that would cross time. Maybe forever. That’s what they did. They danced and sang until they had effected a rip in time. They brought their life and times and troubles into the future.’

  ‘They thought they did,’ Perry said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘they actually did it. By a hundred years later, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were suing the American and Canadian governments and getting their land back, and getting reparations. As well as having books, TV shows, movies all being sent out to revive their people and their time. To revive them not only in their own minds, but in the minds and culture of other Americans.’

  ‘But they thought they would come back too?’

  ‘Maybe they did. Maybe they were reincarnated in that post World War II baby boom. My parents’ generation. Look how tribal they all were? How they gathered at what amounted to being huge music and dance powwows days on end. At Woodstock. At Monterey. At Altamont. Then, too, look at Dominic De Petrie and Aaron Axenfeld’s stories and novels about the ’70s and early ’80s disco-dance era. How they too believed they were the old tribes come alive again. Look at that poem where De Petrie writes, “We are the Paiutes, the Dakotas, the Perce-Nez/ and ours the dance eternal atop/ mountains, in tented cities, in caves/ below the ground where we return/ to dance again. This time in triumph!”’

  ‘So they did cross time,’ Ben-Torres mused.

  ‘They knew they were lost in their own time. They had no choice but to cross out of their time. Not that Native Americans will ever be fully compensated. But they sure are in a better position today than they have been for more than a century. In terms of land ownership, financially through oil and mines and casinos on their land. In terms of freedom from government interference. In terms of outside interest and respect for their culture?

  ‘We thought it was like a metaphor,’ Ray Rice said. ‘We didn’t know they expected it to really work?’

  ‘Can a female enter this conversation?’

  We all turned. Bev Grigio. ‘Cake and presents!’ she announced.

  ‘No metaphor,’ I said when she was gone. ‘They expected it to really work?

  A half-hour later, people were still in an up mood, but the restaurant was undoubtedly finished with us, even if we were upstairs and out of their way. Bev and Taponaupoa were two-stepping.

  Pamela and Ray were arguing over where to take the party next, as no one seemed to want it to end yet. There were clubs nearby and cafes with recorded and live music. But everyone agreed they were too touristy. If we were going somewhere to dance, we should head to the Sunset Strip. Or to one of the nameless places around the area. But this led to some of the women deciding that it was getting a bit late: tomorrow was after all a school day.

  I wasn’t precisely aware when and how it was that Ray Rice said, ‘Hey! Professor! You live near here, don’t you? I hear it’s a big place. Maybe we could drop by there?’

  Expecting one of the women to shoot down the idea, I didn’t instantly protest.

  ‘Is it nearby?’ Pamela asked.

  How could I lie? ‘A mile or so. Just off Franklin Avenue.’

  ‘But where would we all park?’ Kathy Tranh asked. ‘We’ve got – what – a dozen cars among us.’

  I heard myself saying, ‘It’s got a big circular driveway.’

  Fifteen minutes later, as I dialed open the gate to Casa Herrera y Lopez, I received the first hesitancy from, of all people, Pamela, in the passenger seat of my Celica. ‘You’re sure we’re not imposing on you?’

  Behind us a row of cars all the way back to Outpost Road told me I’d not been able to lose the others despite my fast driving. I shrugged and mumbled something and drove into the gate. I parked in the porte-cochere and guided the other vehicles in and to parking spots: two canvas-sided Wranglers (Perry and Ben-Torres), one 1976 Buick Electra (Taponaupoa, natch), a Beemer Micro-Sport (Cheryl), a shiny new dark pickup truck (Ray Rice, who else?), and assorted Asian marque coupes (the women).

  ‘This place is huge!’ Michelle Tsieh said.

  I managed to herd all of them into the partly roofed-over front patio, and into the house through the double front doors. Milling about in the corridor the group looked larger than it had in the restaurant. I must be out of my mind!

  ‘Mr Ohrenstedt!’ Kathy Tranh raised her hand, looking apologetic. ‘I need the ladies’ room.’

  ‘Me too!’ Bev Grigio agreed. Cheryl seconded her.

  I guided the group into the living room, which I’d never even sat in, not once in the time I’d lived here. Then said, ‘Those for the ladies’ room follow me.’

  ‘I could use ice for this,’ Taponaupoa held up a soft drink in a crush tube.

  ‘Okay, and anyone else want a drink? Three, four. Tappy, follow me.’

  I led a half-dozen of them toward ‘my’ wing of the house.

  ‘Is that the dining room?’ Pamela asked. We were now peering through the adobe-wall opening down into the high-ceilinged room.

  ‘Looks big enough to hold twenty people,’ Danielle said.

  ‘Is this someone famous’s house?’ Perry Valentine asked.

  ‘Damon Von Slyke,’ I replied.

  ‘No. I meant someone famous before him.’

  ‘The actor George Peppard lived here in the ’60s.’

  ‘Who? Petard?’

  ‘It was supposedly built for a famous Latina courtesan in the ’20s.

  ‘Courtesan?’ Tappy asked.

  ‘Prostitute,’ Kathy dead-panned.

  ‘Really?’ the linebacker asked, evidently impressed.

  ‘A high-faluting, evidently very well-kept prostitute,’ I agreed. Then, ‘Ladies! There’s a lav off the library. And another downstairs way over there, next to my bedroom, if two of you are desperate.’

  I didn’t particularly want any students down there, but I wasn’t sure if Conchita was sleeping over in her maid’s room. Hers was the only other bathroom on this side of the house besides the two I’d already mentioned.

  ‘Right here!’ I showed them the library powder room.

  ‘Jeez. Look at all the books!’

  ‘Is this Von Slyke’s library?’

  ‘Sure is. Do not touch a thing!’ I was strict. ‘Got it?’<
br />
  ‘We can look, can’t we?’ Kathy asked.

  ‘Look. But do not touch.’

  I left Kathy and Danielle there and led Perry, Cheryl, Pamela and Taponaupoa downstairs. As we passed the balcony giving onto the dining room, Pamela asked what all that on the dining-room floor was.

  ‘Manuscripts!’ I explained. ‘Von Slyke’s papers. I’m getting them ready for the Timrod Collection.’

  Past the door to Conchita’s room, down the stairs. ‘Here’s the kitchen! Stick around and help me get soft drinks.’ I left Cheryl, Pamela and Tappy there and led Perry further along the hall to my bedroom bathroom.

  When I got back to the kitchen only Cheryl was there. I noticed the kitchen door to the courtyard was ajar. Pamela was standing at the fountain. The Samoan was not in view.

  I located and flipped on courtyard lights: pale green and blue and fawn.

  Pamela gasped.

  Tappy hove into view. ‘This place is something. Hey, Pam! There’s a huge hot tub back there. Big enough for six people.’

  I’d only lighted up this garden once before at night. I had to admit it looked wonderful. Pamela was twirling around in a slow arabesque; her shimmering metallic teal dress caught and reflected light and shadow.

  ‘What’s that you’re humming?’ Taponaupoa asked her.

  ‘“Nights in the Gardens of Spain”, Manuel de Falla.’ She continued to twirl, now iridescent as a goldfish: he partnered her, with that light grace of the big-bodied.

  ‘Way cool!’ It was Perry now, in the garden too.