The Last Beach Bungalow

by Jennie Nash

  “It just seems more intense than I remember,” I said to Vanessa.

  “Fifteen is intense,” she said, “but I can promise you they’re not going to elope.”

  “They could have sex. They could be having sex right now. They could have had sex every day for the last three weeks. Do you have any idea how many opportunities there are to have sex?”

  “Jackie’s not stupid,” Vanessa said.

  “You don’t think?”

  “No, I don’t. But since we’re talking about sex,” Vanessa said, “how are things between you and Rick?”

  “That’s totally off topic.”

  “It’s totally on topic and you know it.”

  “I’m not answering.”

  “You just did, and you want to know what I think?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  "That you’re worrying about the wrong people having sex.”

  MONDAY

  People who work in offices are always asking me how I manage to ignore the myriad distractions of working at home. There is an assumption that you need an austere cubicle in order to get anything done—that a house with piles of dishes and laundry and mail poses an overwhelming temptation. That assumption is a myth. If I’m on deadline for an assignment, I can ignore almost everything. If I’ve set aside a day to research stories or write pitches or do invoices, that’s what I do. The only exception to that truth is when I become obsessed with something that can be looked up on the Internet. Jackie’s e-mails were one of those things, but there were a finite number of them; I couldn’t generate more of that story than was already there. When I ran out of material that would let me learn more about Jackie and her boyfriend, I turned, instead, to material that would tell me something about Mrs. Torrey’s beach bungalow.

  I looked up the original deed of sale. I looked up the property taxes. I hit upon looking up Harry Torrey and found a nearly endless stream of information. He had been a pediatric oncologist at a clinic that was part of the UCLA Medical Center. Day after day, he helped children live and he helped them die, and when he wasn’t doing that, he wrote about it. I found his journal articles, op-ed pieces, excerpts he’d written for textbooks and reviews he’d written of colleagues’ work. There were profiles of him in the Medical Center newsletter, tributes to him that colleagues and patients had written after he died, and announcements of gifts he and Peg had given to the hospital. He seemed like an extraordinary man.

  In the course of my poking around, I learned that the daughter, Sarah, was a baker of some renown. She was a graduate of the Culinary Institute of the Arts. She had a shop in Berkeley that was featured in a San Jose Mercury News series about artisan bakeries—a 1,200 word piece with a sidebar entitled “One Baker’s Beginnings”:

  We lived half a block from the beach but I never learned to hang ten, never fell for a beach volleyball player, never really felt the golden pull of the sun. I felt drawn to our kitchen instead—a kind of blasphemy in an L.A. beach town, but our house had a great kitchen. There was a big white farm sink set on the diagonal facing the ocean. Two windows met at that corner, with no wall between them, so you could stand at the sink, and look out at the ocean, all the way up to Point Mugu—a vast expanse of blue and white chop, birds and sky. Because of the cliffs that ringed our part of the bay, you couldn’t see any sand, surfers, skaters or runners from our kitchen; all that activity was hidden by the cliffs, contained down on the sand. Up above, it was just the water and sky, and the endless view.

  At first, my specialty was scrambled eggs, but I soon graduated to macaroni and cheese—the real kind— which I always baked in Mom’s best casserole pan, the white enameled Le Creuset with the handles. The cheese seemed to bubble best in the pan and cleanup was always a cinch. I also liked to bake cookies, but plain old oatmeal or peanut butter didn’t satisfy my creative urge. Sugar cookies were my passion, and for several years in junior high, I spent whole Saturdays doing nothing but testing what temperature and time produced the perfect sugar cookie: crisp on the outside, slightly chewy on the inside and evenly golden brown. When I mastered the cookie itself, I bought a special cookie cutter at Cook N’ Stuff on Palos Verdes Drive. I saved my babysitting money and rode my bike down to look at the racks of copper cookie cutters. They were one dollar each, which made them seem like the kind of tool a real cook would use. I debated getting a heart shape and a flower shape, and rejected the Christmas trees and the gingerbread men. I finally settled on a pig because I wanted to make pink icing. Whenever any of my friends or family had a birthday that year, they got a dozen large pig sugar cookies, perfectly frosted in pink, with little silver candy bead eyes, laid flat in a gift box, on pink tissue paper. They were among the most spectacular gifts I have ever given.

  Sidebars are one of my specialties. Give me a piece on organic cotton lingerie and I’ll give you a sidebar on the amount of pesticides it takes to grow the cotton needed for a conventional pair of underwear. Give me a piece on designers and their favorite chairs and I’ll give you a sidebar on how Corbusier came up with the design of his iconic lounger. You want books to read? Web sites to check? I can box off information in my sleep.

  There were several sidebars to the Town & Country sex article. One of them was about having sex when you didn’t feel like it. “Many couples claim they are too tired for sex, or they refrain from sex when other things in their life aren’t going well,” it said. “This is counterintuitive. Sex gives you energy. Sex brings you closer. It’s exactly the thing to do to reenergize a relationship.” A second sidebar was called, “Setting the Stage.” It was a call to action to make your sexual space sacred by making a conscious effort to engage the senses. You could use candles, scarves draped over lamps, oils with the essence of vanilla or sandalwood, and beautiful things to adorn the body. Things like lace. Silk.

  I left the magazine article on my desk, drove to the village and parked my car in front of Avisha, then sat there, working up the courage to go inside. I felt as if everyone on the street were staring at me, knowing exactly what I was about to do. Finally it seemed safer to go in than it did to stay out.

  Manon was behind the low counter. “Ah!” she said, when she saw me, “How can I help you today?”

  “I’d like the bra,” I said, as if I had been her only customer all week and she would know exactly what I was talking about.

  “Of course,” she said, and then walked over and plucked it off the rack—both the bra and the panties, in the size I had tried on.

  “And the dress?” she asked. I loved the dress, but the dress would make such a public statement. The dress was like a neon sign. It would blare out something about myself that I wasn’t sure I wanted to say—that I loved my body, that I felt good about flaunting it, and that I was comfortable with men’s eyes on it. Maybe I could do that in the privacy of my big new bedroom, but I was certain I couldn’t do it anywhere I’d be likely to wear that dress.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “This will be fine.”

  Manon wrapped my things in pale pink tissue paper, sealed them with a silver sticker and tucked them into a shimmering silver bag. “Enjoy,” she said, and though I expected her to wink or smirk, she had only the most lovely smile.

  When Jackie got home from the post-tournament pizza party, she went straight to her room to shower. I waited fifteen minutes after the water shut off before I went to check on her. The door was slightly ajar. I tapped on it, and pushed it open at the same time. Jackie was lying on her bed, her wet hair in a towel. She jerked her head up when she heard me. She was reading the Town & Country sex article. I could clearly see the sidebar on “Setting the Stage;” I recognized the photo and the type. She looked at me, but with an expression that was devoid of shame or embarrassment.

  “Are you and Dad getting divorced?” she asked.

  At other times, this question would have made me laugh. It would have seemed like the curious musings of a hypersensitive kid who has no room in her world for shades of gray. That day, h
owever, I didn’t know how to respond.

  “We’re fine,” I said, in a voice that even I wouldn’t have believed. “Remodeling is just, you know. . . . They say it’s one of the most stressful times in a marriage. It’s been hard, but we’re fine.”

  She nodded then, and handed the sex article to me. I took a step forward, took it from her hand and folded it in half.

  “Are you and Max thinking about sex?” I asked. I just blurted it. That was the only way I knew how to say something like that. There could be no deliberation, no planning.

  “Mom!” she said, and wrinkled up her nose. “I’m not an idiot. I’m not about to just throw my life away at age fifteen because I like some guy!”

  I wanted to tell her that sex wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that dangerous. I wanted to say that it was beautiful and enriching and that it could even be something close to sacred, but I didn’t trust my voice to get the message right, and mostly, I was relieved at her response, so I let it lie.

  “It’s just my job to ask,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes, then turned over, dismissing me.

  TUESDAY

  When we woke up the next morning, I told Rick about the conversation with Jackie—about the article, and finding her reading it, what she had asked me and what I had asked her. I was focused wholly on the sex part of the scene, how awkward it had been, how scary and funny all at the same time. But just like Vanessa had, Rick leapt right over all that.

  “She asked about divorce, huh?” he said. “She didn’t ask if we were having wild sex?”

  I didn’t laugh. “That’s why I pulled out that article, actually.”

  Rick raised his eyebrows, inviting me to say more.

  “It was a how-to article. How to make it a priority. And how to think of it as a celebration of being alive.”

  Rick stepped toward me.

  “I’m going to work on it,” I said.

  He took both my hands in his. He kissed first one and then another. “Let me know if you need any help practicing.”

  When Jackie left for school, I snuck back to her computer. Max had mailed her the lyrics to songs about longing and lust. He had mailed her greeting cards about not being able to bear being apart. In one e-mail, he asked her to wear the blue fuzzy sweater again because it made her eyes look amazing and because it was so soft to touch. “I love you in that sweater,” he wrote.

  I tried to go about my day, but I couldn’t remember the last time Rick had told me I looked good in anything. I kept thinking about a T-shirt he used to have—an old soft green one. He often wore it when he came back from surfing in the morning, and the sight of him walking in the door with wet hair would make me swoon.

  Around 2:00, I called Avisha.

  “Bonjour,” Manon said.

  “This is April Newton,” I said. “You sold me the brown bra and panties yesterday? I’d like to buy the brown dress.”

  I called Rick next and asked if he would pick something up for me on the way home. I gave him the address and said, “Just ask for Manon.”

  I don’t know what time of day Rick drove down to the Village, but I could imagine the whole thing. He would have parked his truck on the street, stood in his work boots on the sidewalk and looked back and forth from the piece of paper to the lingerie store. Gallantly, he would have stepped inside that garden of silk. He would have stood in the shadows of negligees and night-gowns, amid the whisper of lacy brassieres and thongs, and his throat would have gone dry.

  “I’m here to pick up something for my wife,” he would have croaked.

  And Manon would have swept across the store, bringing the slip of chocolate brown and the promise that his wife was, indeed, ready for a celebration.

  When Rick came home, I met him at the door and welcomed him home with a kiss. He didn’t stop to ask me what was going on, he just dropped the bag from the lingerie store and kissed me back.

  “Jackie’s gone,” I said, after a while. He took me by the hand, led me up the stairs and started taking off my clothes. The beautiful brown bra and panties were in the closet and the brown dress was in the silver bag in the doorway. I was wearing ratty old white cotton underwear and my gray stretched-out bra. But Rick hardly noticed. The light in that bedroom was clear, with a bluish cast from all that sky and sea. He traced his fingers on my face and on my belly and along all my scars. I just stood there, trying to feel his touch, trying to really feel it, and what I felt was electric. I remembered the Town & Country article and all the talk about being present and honoring each other’s bodies as sacred, so wherever Rick touched me, I touched him back. Ear, ear, heart, heart. After awhile, he caught on to what I was doing and began to touch me in places that harbored even more heat. It was magic, because we were both giving and receiving all at the same time.

  “I want to throw you down on this bed and ravage you,” he finally said.

  I smiled and whispered in his ear, “I wish you would.”

  It was over rather quickly. It had, after all, been a while. I lay there, suddenly, with tears running down my cheeks.

  “Are you OK?” Rick asked.

  “Just happy,” I said.

  FRIDAY

  Three days later, I unfolded the Beach Reporter and saw this headline:

  Local Family Wins Right to Buy Beach Bungalow

  The family, it turned out, had written Peg a letter from the point of view of their dog. This letter had been folded up and slipped between the pages of a children’s book called The Little House. I knew that book. Jackie had loved it. It was a story about a country cottage that slowly becomes swallowed up by the city. Into its green, open meadow comes a road, then cars, soon a train and skyscrapers. In the end, someone lifts the cottage onto a truck and hauls it back out to the country to start a new life away from the noise and the rush of the city—just like the house I had seen when I was thirteen years old, traveling north to the Boundary Waters. Farther down in the newspaper article, Peg was quoted as saying that there were a great many stories that had tempted her, but that the combination of the dog’s story and the picture book had swayed her. “I’ve never sold a house before,” she said, “and I enjoyed the process enormously. I will leave here knowing that the house I lived in all these years will be in good, loving hands.” She would be moving in two months’ time, the article concluded, to a retirement home near her daughter in Berkeley.

  I folded up the newspaper and made a note to myself to call the movers to come set my piano upright on its legs.

  I never bought the enormous pen and ink drawing of a tree that I saw in Portland, Oregon, when I was twenty-three, but I feel as if I’ve lived with that piece of art my entire life. I can close my eyes and see the whole picture—the subtle shading, the surprising scale, the whiteness of the white where it peeks out from underneath each leaf. I love that painting. The same is true of the bungalow. It’s not mine. I spent a grand total of about half an hour in it, but I love it all the same. I love that there exists a house with red walls and old wood floors and a fireplace made of Catalina tile, where a woman who loved her husband and her dogs once lived. In the weeks after the house was sold, I would sometimes drive down Pepper Tree Lane just to look at it again and re-assure myself that it was there.

  TUESDAY

  In the last week of January, on a day that was cloudless and crystal clear, I drove down to Starbucks in Redondo Village. I love the smell of coffee, the whole idea of it— the hot cup in your hand, the cheerful way you buzz through the day after you’ve enjoyed it—but I can’t drink it; it keeps me awake at night. And I’m an infinitely better human being when I sleep well, so I try to avoid coffee. On that day, however, I was doing revisions on the Chuck Williams piece, and at the same time I was trying to finish a draft for an article about a couple who had designed all the fabric for California Pizza Kitchen restaurants. I needed help to get through the day.

  I was standing in line at the counter trying to make sense of the vast number of choices before me, when I
heard Peg Torrey place an order. I looked up and saw her standing there, a few places ahead of me.

  “I tried to get your house,” I said.

  She smiled, and it was then I realized that she probably heard that statement several times a day. “What was your reason?” she asked. “It turns out there are only a handful, really, or at least only a handful people confess to.”

  “The house my husband and I were building was haunted.”

  Peg looked at as if she could see straight through me. “I haven’t heard that one,” she said. “You had a ghost?”

  “Sort of. We had fear, we had tension. We had our own mortality. They rub off on a house, I think. They stay in the wood and seep through the floors.”

  Peg looked at me in a way that made me nervous. “That’s exactly what I felt about my bungalow, only it was love and joy and the goodness of my husband that seeped through. He was a very good man.”

  “It sounds like it,” I said. “I heard you talk about him on TV.”

  She smiled again, paid for her coffee, and went outside to sit in the sun. It took me forever to get my cappuccino but when I walked outside, Peg was still sitting in the sun, like a cat at rest.

  I smiled at her.

  “I was wondering,” she said. “What you did with the haunted house.”

  “We’re living in it,” I said, “keeping the ghosts at bay. Your house changed everything for us.”

  “You sent your husband’s letters,” Peg said.

  I wasn’t, somehow, surprised by this revelation—that Peg Torrey had read what I had delivered on Christmas Day. “That’s right,” I said.

  “I kept those letters in a shoebox on my bedside table,” Peg explained. “I put all my favorites in there.”

  “I loved your house,” I said, “and I loved that you held the contest. I’m glad it turned out so well for you.” I hesitated, then turned to leave, as if the conversation were over.