Mulling over his letters in the plane, I decided not to answer for the time being. He’d kind of started off on the wrong foot by inviting himself out to Los Angeles, which he subsequently took back, saying that his “health” would “probably” prevent long-distance travel. In the third or fourth e-mail he backtracked again, that it would still be “really and truly special” to see me and go to Berkeley together; now that bygones were bygones he thought it would be “cathartic” for us both, he was “dying” to see where I’d spent my youth, having heard so much about it. I was extremely happy there, he knew, couldn’t we … etc. etc.
No, we couldn’t.
I eventually managed to iron things out with Sotomayor up in his Stone Tower penthouse. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d been summoned back to that mahogany-polish-stinking office of his just as a reminder of who was boss. After an interminable prelude on his part, the business details were worked out in a matter of minutes; he then led me through two heavy doors to an adjacent space. Valued business partners, he said with satisfaction, should have the opportunity to see this. What’s up, you Cuban porker, I thought. For the moment I was afraid Víctor had got wind of our plans for his Barracks, that Rusty had shot off that flounder-mouth of his. He led me into an ominously old-fashioned-looking office: large, dusty succulents in brown gravel, yellowy-brown Venetian blinds I hadn’t seen in any of the other offices. The spherical feet of a heavy oak desk rested on a faded Persian carpet. On the desktop with inlaid green leather stood an ancient, bulky computer in the same mashed-potato color as the rest of the room. Lots of photos in gilded frames. Right in front of the high-backed, cracked leather desk chair was a pile of yellowed documents, a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses, and, on a flattened-out gentleman’s handkerchief, a small steel-nosed instrument whose tongs clutched tiny curls of black hair. I eventually realized it was a nose-hair trimmer.
Behind the desk was an open cupboard holding about 100 black cardboard dossiers, with the year—ranging from the mid-’60s until 1991—handwritten on the spine. It smelled like death in here. I wasn’t completely comfortable with this setup, I expected a hairy paw at any moment to grab my neck and force me to bend over that desk. So I asked the asthmatic Sotomayor, who stood panting behind me, if his secretary had the day off. “Here, Miss Sigerius”—his high-pitched voice took on an emotional warble—“in this very room, this cherished chamber, my dear father once worked. My late father was the founder and first director of our company.” But even with this holdup I finished with Sotomayor surprisingly quickly, and after reporting back to Rusty I treated myself to a London broil in the steak house next to my hotel. It was so quiet all I could hear was the grinding of my own molars. I got the uneasy suspicion that Aaron was already on his way. Could be, of course. That he got it into his head to book a flight. When I flew back to L.A. the next morning I seriously considered the possibility that I’d find him standing on my doorstep with outstretched arms. But I found my house as quiet as I’d left it.
I had to be off again straightaway. For the past year or so I had been Rollerblading with a group of about forty people every Tuesday evening through Santa Monica, often into West Hollywood or downtown L.A. Relaxing outings which required just enough concentration that for the entire evening I felt completely at one with the warm air flowing through my hair and the purring asphalt under my wheels. The ever-growing club met at the Pacific Coast Highway, just beyond the pier across from Seaside Terrace, a little more than half a mile from my house.
I buttered a bagel and carried my Rollerblades to the elevator that would take me down to street level. I skated the first few meters between the imposing pillars that supported most of my house, hummed around Sunset’s curves toward Ocean Drive, but instead of liberation I felt a nervous kind of melancholy. Aaron was troubling me. Twice I was passed by oncoming taxis, and twice I saw him sitting in the passenger’s seat. I turned onto the coastal road, crossed a busy line of traffic, and skated with measured glides toward the pier.
But I had second thoughts once I got a glimpse of the raucous group off in the distance. I just couldn’t face it. With a sharp turn I skated up onto the pier, took off my Rollerblades and socks and strolled among the throngs of tourists. My gaze focused on the warm, knotty planks; I walked past the seafood stalls and Pacific Park’s neon-lit Ferris wheel. The slamming of the waves against the piles under my feet. At the end of the pier, a couple of hundred yards into the ocean, I spent the next half hour staring out onto the glistening expanse, and then headed home.
I had to laugh at my own paranoia: a new message from Aaron. His tone was agitated. “I won’t be coming any time soon,” he wrote. “Berkeley is probably a bad idea anyway. You probably went there with Stol. Am I right?”
Bo and I had been living in San Francisco for a while when, one Saturday morning, we strapped Mike into the backseat of the Land Rover and drove across the Bay Bridge over to Berkeley. Mike was screaming blue murder so we made a short stop on Treasure Island, a man-made island halfway across the bay, and wondered over a cup of coffee whether we should just turn around. “Is this a good idea?” Boudewijn asked. “All those memories.” “No,” I answered, “but it’s also stupid not to go. It’s a stone’s throw. It would be ridiculous not to.”
We continued along I-80 through Oakland, through rundown Oakland, I noticed, and drove down University Avenue to the entrance gate at the west edge of the UC Berkeley campus. We parked the Land Rover and Bo put the drowsing Mike in the baby sling. We walked onto the campus past drumming students in Bears sweatshirts. Boudewijn asked what was going on: didn’t we know?—in a couple of hours the Berkeley football team was playing UCLA, you guys need some tickets?—but our goal was farther along. Evans Hall, the cube-shaped Mathematics Department where my father had cooped himself up with his knots for those two eternal years. I recognized the gravel paths, the white neoclassical academic buildings that had survived twenty years of seismic stir. Students sat under enormous oak and willow trees, chatting and laughing like actors in a campus soap. Bo, who in his redvelour hip pants and herringbone jacket looked like a well-heeled alumnus, seemed impressed by the pastoral beauty. We crossed a six-sided court planted with a matrix of pollard willows, on which he figured Nobel Prizes grew, walked around a trimmed lawn and suddenly found ourselves in front of the hideous Evans Hall. As though it were yesterday, I pushed open the brown steel and reinforced-glass door and led Boudewijn and Mike to a wood-paneled elevator that took us up to the tenth and top floor. I automatically turned left and walked down the oatmeal-colored linoleum to the small office where my father worked.
“Go ahead and knock,” Boudewijn said when he saw me hesitate in front of the door. The next room, a classroom, was open; you could see whiteboards and lecterns and the open air. “Or we could just have a look in here,” I suggested, but Boudewijn said: “Knock.”
No one answered. I turned the door handle downward and pushed, but the room once inhabited by Dr. S. Sigerius was locked up tight.
“And now?” Boudewijn had strapped Mike in and started the car.
“Just drive.”
I directed him to Telegraph Avenue, after which we followed Bancroft back toward the bay, so we could swing by Berkwood Hedge, the small elementary school with the waxed floors where Janis and I walked, hand in hand, every weekday morning for two years. Here, too, typical Californian streets, every house different from the others, Cedar Street undulating like a gray belt toward the bay, the glistening vanishing point of every perspective here. The intersections we crossed, with their just-for-show traffic lights, brought me inexorably back to 1982, and suddenly I saw the school building, damn, there it was, a stuccoed thing with a blacktop playground out in front.
“You want me to stop?” Boudewijn asked.
A classroom full of American know-it-alls, sharp as tacks and not particularly nice. Back in Utrecht, six months before I parachuted into their midst, I knelt in front of the record player as it cranked out the red Be
atles double LP and looked up “Love Me Do” word for word in an English dictionary. That was the extent of my English. But I just pretended I understood. A yes here, a no there, mustn’t let them get me down, and if they managed to get Janis down I cheered her up all the way back to Bonita Avenue. Buck up. Don’t cry. What will Mom and Dad think?
“Turn left here,” I said to Boudewijn, “we’re getting close to our old house.”
A few blocks northward on the busy Martin Luther King Way, a jog right and left, and we drove onto Bonita Avenue, a quiet street with telephone poles and neatly parked family cars and lush, full trees. Siem said he’d picked this street especially because I thought “Bonita” was such a nifty word. I wrote the address at the front of the Enid Blyton book I’d brought with me from Utrecht. Joni Sigerius, 1908 Bonita Ave., Oakland, CA, USA, World, Universe. Maybe because the trees in the yards and along the sidewalks had grown since then, greener, fuller—but after a short delay I realized that everything else seemed smaller. What a crummy little street. The Land Rover crept along the spotty asphalt. With my hand resting on the warm roof I peered at the passing wooden houses.
God, there it was. The shingled house appeared from behind an overgrown hedge and an olive tree, the two small dormer windows peeking like eyes out of the pitched roof. As a kid I always thought the front of the clapboard house resembled a surprised face, and now I saw it again. That foolish expression was partly because of the front door, a gaping mouth exactly centered under a tar-paper-covered overhang. The soft bang of the wood as the door closed behind him when he got back from the university at night, suddenly standing there in the living room, boom, his leather briefcase hitting the floor, two firm kisses on my mother’s mouth. “Hello girls, I’m home!”
To the left of the house, separated by a gravel path, the McCoys’ pharmacy, now an abandoned brick building with a side extension. A “For Rent” sign on the front, stacks of waterlogged and then driedout moving boxes on the front porch, two bright-blue garbage cans on wheels. The bedridden Mrs. McCoy, long dead for sure. Cancer in her voice, the neighborhood boys said. She talked through a kind of tube in her stalky neck, a raspy, unamplified croak that would startle me awake at night, in a cold sweat. Voice cancer. A brownish hole in her throat, you could see it. Didn’t really tally with running a pharmacy, the only brick house in the neighborhood, stacked to the rafters with pills and potions. Comes from smoking, my mother said, so for a while when I was home alone I’d flush her open pouches of shag down the toilet. That yammering of Mrs. McCoy, that raspy grumbling. A croak that carried across our yard, across the oil stains on the driveway, drowned out the rooster somewhere behind the houses across the road. “Got a frog in her throat,” our new father said, which our mother didn’t approve of, making fun like that, but I could see she also had to try not to laugh. The McCoys had a Great Dane, one of those bareback horses that the pharmacist, a friendly man with horn-rimmed glasses, took for walks in Live Oak Park. And he always had his arm around a diminutive black lady. The dog all to and fro with a stick, he laughing with the woman snuggled up against him. “Did you know,” I apparently said, “that Mr. McCoy’s sister is black?”
“Stop—here it is.”
Boudewijn pulled over to the curb and shut off the engine. He tugged his polo shirt loose from his belly. The chirping of crickets, somewhere a bus pulling out.
“I’ll be right back. You stay with Mike.”
Curdled air. I’d lived in California for more than a year and a half now, every day I felt the mugginess, saw palm trees, and smelled the sea—and still the atmosphere on this street was different. An older America. Incongruous Luxaflex, half shut, hung in the windows. We had light-brown curtains with orange circles, my mother sewed them, suddenly having entire days to herself. I only learned later that she couldn’t get a work permit. At the end she used to go to the shipyard in the morning, on the sly.
Mike started crying. I slid between gleaming car bumpers, onto the wide sidewalk, and laid my hand on the wooden fence, still splintery. On the bare grass a plastic kiddie playhouse with peeling Bugs Bunny decals, a bike with a child’s seat leaning against one of the pillars supporting the overhang—still, the yard looked better than when we lived there. It was a mess back then. A mother with a Black & Decker workmate. Old cabinets in the yard, particle board, sawdust, tools, work gloves. It didn’t take the neighborhood kids long to figure out that this was the place to be, you could do anything at Janis and Joni’s. In the back of the living room my mother had a candy jar full of Dutch licorice drops sent over by Grandma and Grandpa. All day long, even if no one was home, children would walk in and help themselves to a handful. My mother knew how to spoil an American brat.
Boudewijn quieted Mike down; his voice sounded surprisingly close by. “Why not ring the bell?” he called through the open window. “Maybe they’ll let you look around inside.”
The Luxaflex in the left-hand dormer window went up. A sturdy, middle-aged Latina threw open the window, stuck her arm out and shook a dustcloth. She saw me, I withdrew my hand from the fence and smiled. She gave a barely discernible nod, peered down the street, and pulled the window closed.
A Spanish-speaking woman, it came back to me, was a fixture at Scotty’s parents’ house. A bitter, peevish poltergeist who did the washing and ironing. I looked across an overgrown driveway toward their front yard. Scotty, the chubby blond son of Wyoming natives who had come to work in the Oakland harbor. “Billy Bunter,” Siem called him. Always came over to play, usually just as we were sitting down to lunch. His fat little sausage-fingers on the fence: “Joni!” Shrill and persistent, until my mother would eventually lay down her cutlery and get up from the table with a sigh.
“Can Joni come out and play?”
“Joni’s eating right now, Scott.”
“Only one sandwich, tell her.”
“I’m going to have a look farther up,” I said to Boudewijn, gave the Land Rover a little slap on the roof and walked over toward Scotty’s house.
It was still there, of course, just as I left it. The prettified, high-gloss, prim little palace. Two-storey bay window and classical veranda with—just like back then—a porch swing. Pristine white paint, the trim in what they call Delft blue back in Holland. Inside, brass bowls, brass lampshades, a wall-mounted antique rifle with brass fittings. I recalled a pried-open violin with dried flowers sticking out. I spent remarkably little time inside that house. Shoes off, don’t break anything. Scott and his younger sister had to play outdoors; the warden who so closely guarded the house was a talkative housewife who, every other day at a fixed time, appeared on the porch with pink rubber gloves and a bucket of suds to give the front of the house a thorough going-over. Scotty had a mountain bike, and when we weren’t cycling together through the neighborhood he’d pull me on my roller skates by a rope tied around his waist, up and down the hilly streets, up north behind the Berkeley campus where the students had their sandwich shops and bars and coffee houses. Sometimes he would stop abruptly, lay down his BMX, and sit cross-legged in his short pants on the blacktop.
“What’re you doing?”
“I’ll be done in a minute.”
“But what are you doing?”
“Waiting until I don’t need to anymore.”
“Need to what?”
“Poop. I push it back, then I don’t need to anymore.”
Poop-sitting, that’s what the little stinker called it. Once, one afternoon in this dream landscape, I explained to Scott with a piece of chalk on the sidewalk how you spelled his name. Skot, I wrote, S-k-o-t, with a k, and certainly not with two “t”s. But that bossy little poop-pusher, a grade behind me, kept insisting that you wrote Scott with a c; a half hour later we were still at it and tears streamed down his pudgy cheeks. I let him dry up and said: OK, let’s go ask your mother. I was mistaken, and Scott’s mother made sure I knew it; she called me uppity, sassy, and ill-bred. “And take your hand off that chair.” “That’s not a chair,” I answe
red in perfect English, “it’s a sofa”—and although I was right, it was a sofa, a flowery love seat, this exchange did not exactly endear me to Scotty’s mother.
Scott loved us. During our second summer in that house he used to drop by at about seven in the evening. He’d walk around to the backyard and greet us collectively with “hi Joni,” upon which we’d respond in chorus with “hey Scotty,” and then I’d laugh and my mother would sigh, and even Janis, five years old, got the joke—everyone except Scott himself. His eyes scanned the overgrown grass until he spotted the leather soccer ball we’d brought with us from Holland, holding it clumsily above his head, trampling my mother’s plants, calling out “excuse me” while my father, exhausted from a day of advanced mathematics, did the washing-up with the elder of his brand-new daughters like a machine of flesh and blood, singing or joking all the while, or inquiring after my day at school. Sometimes I would go out back with a wet plate to join in my mother and Scotty’s chit-chat, and hear him whisper in my ear to ask my father if we could go play soccer. Because that’s what he came for: football with Siem. What he felt for that friendly, funny, interested, strong, athletic man back there in the kitchen, I felt too. The energetic pace of his dish-washing routine, his handling of the platters and pans and glasses and lids, told me that we had lucked out, that Mom, my sister, and I should be mighty pleased with this new dad.
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