“This is our house. My mom’s house.”
“But I—”
“We only lived on a farm co-op when we first moved to Ojala. Mom was just getting the lay of the land and learning about California gardens, western varieties and all that. You know it’s a completely different climate from the East Coast or England. Different plants and an entirely different growing season. It’s really two springs, two falls, a long, dry summer—”
“I thought—”
He went on, a bit defensively, “She bought this house four years ago. It was a working ranch at the turn of the century—and, of course, modernized at some point. Then it was a second home for a propmaster at Paramount Studios. He lived here between pictures. He planted most of the stone-fruit orchards and liked doing all these wild horticultural experiments, grafting a branch of an apricot onto a peach tree.”
Whitman’s eyes were flashing. “Mom’s got—I don’t know—almost twenty acres. We sell only a small amount from the orange groves and the avocados. That goes to independent farm markets to offset the costs of running everything else. But she doesn’t live off the proceeds of the farm—or break even.” He turned away, with his back to me.
“And beyond that barn,” he said, pointing to a brown wooden structure in the distance, “which is mostly empty except for a couple old tractors that don’t work, is Ocotillo Creek. It’s a ways down, and there’s a great swimming hole, if you don’t mind leeches.”
By dinnertime we were all laughing about the impression I’d had—and how wrong it had been. We sat down at a small wooden farm table in the kitchen, the three of us, and ate a simple meal of cold leek and potato soup with cream, crusty bread, and a salad from the garden tossed in a fresh mustard and garlic vinaigrette that I’d watched Patricia make, her tan hands holding the small white bowl and a whisk.
“Now I know what they are saying about me in San Benito,” she said. “That I’m a dangerous hippie.”
“It’s not that,” I said, feeling sorry I’d been so candid. Was Patricia hurt or not? I couldn’t tell. “Marguerite only talks about Ojala, never you. She doesn’t say that much about my mother either. I don’t think she likes talking about the past too much.”
“Except she talks about N.C. all the time,” said Whitman.
“And Paul—he never mentions me?” Patricia’s eyes were piercing and strong.
“Not to me,” I said. “Never.”
“Oh, that’s so interesting,” she said. “Maybe I should be relieved. God only knows what he’d say.”
“He talks about you to me, Mum,” Whitman broke in. “Always asks how you’re doing. But I don’t think he really likes to analyze the past or revisit it. He’s too shallow and self-centered for that.”
I was surprised by his assessment—and that Whitman was allowed to openly air such a harsh view. Abuelita and my mother would never have let me say anything disrespectful about my father. But at the same time, it was a thrill to be in a place where brutal honesty was allowed.
“I don’t think that’s it at all,” Patricia said to Whitman, as if reading my mind. “Your father’s much deeper and more complicated than you want to make out. Although I can’t exactly say that I haven’t been tempted, from time to time, to draw similar conclusions.”
Whitman smiled. Patricia chuckled. “He doesn’t say much about his marriages,” she went on, “because it’s the only thing in life that he’s been a total failure at.” She leaned over her bitter greens and looked at me with a quizzical expression. “I mean, don’t you think that’s got to be it, Inez? He hates his failures. It’s certainly not that unusual—lots of people can’t seem to stay married—but I think he was ashamed in a peculiar way, not because of N.C. and Marguerite or any embarrassment he might have caused them. He never cared what they thought. He enjoyed torturing them, in fact. But there was something about our divorce that injured his pride and sense of infallibility. Honestly, I don’t think it occurred to him that I was devastated. I remember a telephone conversation we had one night, after his marriage to Consuela had fallen apart. He seemed so sad, so disappointed in himself. It was as if he were ashamed he didn’t know himself any better—that he’d fooled himself twice, or been fooled by his heart, before figuring things out.”
My mother never had any words to describe my father, aside from the occasional dig that slipped out when she wasn’t careful. A few years earlier, she had decided that she didn’t approve of him anymore—his ritzy boho lifestyle, the cape-and-fedora thing. She’d lumped all his failings into class failings, I suppose. He was spoiled. He was careless. Everything had been too easy. She’d made up her mind about him and didn’t want to know anything more. Sometimes she played dumb when his name was mentioned, as if surprised to learn that he was still alive.
“What didn’t he figure out?” I asked.
Patricia picked up the bottle of wine and poured herself another glass.
“You said that he married twice, made the same mistake twice,” I went on, “before he’d figured something out. What?”
“Oh,” Patricia said, taking a sip. “Monogamy isn’t the problem so much. It’s really about sustaining it. Over time one woman isn’t enough—that’s all. I think at first he thought it was me. That I wasn’t enough. So it was my fault. I’d let him down. And I think he hated me for that. And when he met your mother—my God, he was so in love with her—he figured she would be enough. I mean, just look at her. How could that not be enough? She looks like Sophia Loren, for God’s sake. And she was probably a lot nicer to him than I was. And when she got pregnant with you—everything was so different in those days, of course. If you were pregnant, you got married. Maybe Paul knew by then, I don’t know, but eventually Consuela wasn’t enough either. He needed somebody new. He needed to be in love—and have somebody wonderful in love with him.”
When I didn’t speak up right away, she said, “What does your mother say, Inez?”
“She doesn’t talk about him too much.”
“No?” Whitman seemed disbelieving.
“Not really.”
“Consuela’s very private,” Patricia said, smiling a little crookedly at her son, as if only part of her wanted to smile. “That’s all.”
“She had trouble making up her mind,” I ventured. “I know that. When I was little, when we left—when she left him. She seemed sorry she had. And then it was like she was waiting for him to come back. But he didn’t.”
“No,” Patricia said. “He’s brilliant at making it look like it’s all your idea. As if you’re the one leaving, not him. But he’d already found somebody else—right off. There was a graduate student, wasn’t there?” Patricia and Whitman were both looking at me, but my mind was miles away, and my heart pounding. All these things—a revelation. I’d never known people could talk like this.
“What was her name?” Patricia asked me.
“You mean Marisa?” I answered.
Patricia nodded.
“Oh, right,” said Whitman. “We were still in England then.”
“She was his math student,” I said. “Beautiful blue eyes—like yours, Patricia. And giant boobs like Mom.”
Patricia laughed.
“Actually,” I said, “she was really sweet.”
“Of course she was,” Patricia said.
Then I had to say it—the words were on my tongue, pushing against my lips. “I didn’t know they had to get married,” I said. “Nobody ever told me that.”
Patricia looked up, casually, almost as if she’d been waiting for it. Almost as if the whole thing had been planned—and it probably was. “Oh, but, Inez—it’s not what you think. Really. I didn’t want any more children—one was enough for me. I thought I’d hit the jackpot with Whitman. And it did seem as if your father was excited to have another.”
The next morning there was no wind or clouds, and Ojala seemed suddenly like a very dry and hot place. When I woke up and looked out my sunny bedroom window, I saw Patricia moving a hose ar
ound the vegetable garden, watering. She and Whitman were talking quietly in the kitchen when I arrived there. After breakfast it was decided somehow that Whitman and I should take a swim. Curious to see the swimming hole, and trying not to worry about the leeches, I put on a small bikini, some shorts, and a heavy pair of hiking boots that I’d borrowed from Patricia, who was cooking up something for a group of people who were coming by for lunch.
We took a short hike through the woods, and Whitman led me to a sunny area beyond the trees where he had a forest of marijuana plants growing. He walked me around his tall grove of contraband, pulling off leaves and smelling them, examining tops. His mother knew about it, he said—and didn’t disapprove. He pulled a small metal pipe from a pocket of his shorts, pressed some dry buds from another pocket into the snout, and held it out.
“No thanks.”
“Ah, come on,” he said. “They’re very mellow buds.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I thought you were into it.”
“Just once.”
“Once? But nothing happens the first time,” he said. “Didn’t you know that? Come on. Might as well try it again. Nothing will happen this time either.”
When he lit up the pipe, the smoke smelled musky and sweet, and clouds of it came and went as we walked into the shady woods. I took a few careful puffs, and Whitman called out the names of the trees as we passed them—the old live oaks and white pines and dried-out cedars. But as the minutes passed, he grew quiet. That was the bad thing. I’d noticed it before, that day at Ripper Jacks and other times. When Whitman was stoned, he retreated, went inside himself. He grew silent and seemed almost sullen. Where had he gone? And when would he return? I hated how much he seemed to desire that separation from the world, and distance from me. I was lonely suddenly, even more than if I’d been walking in the woods by myself.
We came to the edge of Ocotillo Creek and walked uphill to a wide spot in the stream where the clear water had pooled in the sun and shadows and formed a swimming hole. The air smelled fresh and green and wet—almost a faint metallic smell. Huge gray boulders stood at the edge of the water, dappled with sunlight and spots of pale lichen. I was looking at a beautiful, smooth boulder, the swirling green water that grew brown at the muddy bank, and worrying again about leeches, when I heard a sound.
Two naked bodies—horizontal blurs of pink-white flesh—were sunning themselves on a large rock across the way.
Whitman yelled out. “Hey-ya, Ross!”
“Hey, man.”
“Nice hot day.”
“Yeah,” Ross said. He twisted his head around and saw me. “Who dat?”
“My sister.”
“You got a sister?”
Both heads lifted off the rock. They belonged to two guys—and one of them, Ross, looked as if he might swim over. Sure enough, he sat up, slid off his boulder, and hit the surface with a splash. Underwater, his body looked long and pale—yellowish, not pink—and his hair was much shorter than Whitman’s, a honey color and full to his ears. With each stroke of his short journey, my dread grew. I became intensely aware of my shorts, my T-shirt and bathing suit, my socks and clunky hiking boots. How was I to greet a nude man? Would he stand up, full frontal, and shake my hand?
Whitman, completely oblivious to my distress, was quickly removing his shoes and socks—then inching his shorts and underwear over his buttocks. Within seconds he was naked, and without the slightest hesitation he scrambled up a large boulder next to us and took a leaping jump into the air.
Meanwhile Ross had made his way to the shore and rose from the swimming hole like Poseidon. “Hey,” he said, smoothing his hair with his wet hands and wiping the water from his eyes. “Didn’t know Whitman had a sister.” He hugged himself to keep warm.
“I’m Inez,” I replied with great nonchalance. Years of practicing a blasé expression were serving me well. But it was awfully hard to keep my eyes from drifting to Ross’s taut waist, and below.
“The water’s unreal,” he said.
“Can’t wait,” I said, as if I swam with naked men every day. I unzipped my cutoffs, then fumbled with my hiking boots—the laces seemed to have been knotted three times—and when I’d finally gotten them off, Ross was back in. His big nude body wasn’t visible anymore, except for his head on the surface of the green water, next to Whitman’s, as they watched me.
I suppose that I could have swum in my bathing suit. But to keep it on—when everybody else was naked—seemed to me prudish and awkward. While removing the suit seemed unimaginable, and nightmarishly scary, the kind of exposure I’d spent my whole life avoiding, it also became, in my mind, the better choice. It was the progressive choice. It was the confident choice. After all, I wanted to be the sort of person who could tear off her clothes and plunge naked into swimming holes. And at some point I’d have to start. Later on, in my fantasies of what happened that day, I threw my bathing suit and shorts into the branches of a nearby tree, climbed the tallest boulder, stretched my arms high up over my head, and did an elegant dive into the water with a great hollering of naked exhilaration. That would be my mother’s way—the shy panic and laughter. It would have been my father’s way, too—the detachment and theatricality. But in reality I unsheathed myself as nimbly and quietly as I could, like a little mouse, stepped onto a flat rock at the water’s edge, and slipped in without fanfare or shouts of exhilaration. As I submerged into the cool water, I felt a great groaning weight lifted from my being.
My mother didn’t have close friends, really—aside from Coach Weeger. She had tennis partners, old classmates from Van Dale High, and clients she’d found or sold houses for. Their conversations were about practical matters and daily life—which dry cleaner did the best job, which butcher had the best steaks. Mostly they talked about tennis. It was a complete universe and language and religion in those days. You didn’t need friends or ideology. You just had to know what players you liked. Pancho Gonzales, Arthur Ashe, Björn Borg. Those were the gods of Van Dale, and my mother’s gods. Below them in Olympus, there were only lesser mortals and demons. There was a young man with funny bangs and knee socks named Jimmy Connors. My mother and her Van Dale friends weren’t sure they liked him. A young girl named Chrissie Evert was always winning, but like Connors, she seemed dogged and square and had no personality beyond her amazing tennis playing. For my mother she was like a dancer who knew all the steps and performed technically well but had no style.
In North Beach my father and Justine had a small circle of intimate friends. They never talked about sports—or seemed aware of the World Series or the Super Bowl or when the U.S. Open was being played. They never talked much about the news either. They rarely gossiped or even exchanged much information. Rather they shared a wavelength, an attitude, a sensibility. And, like my father and Ooee, they were members of some undefined worldwide bohemian movement. They weren’t sellouts. That was the main thing. They had their own ideas about things—and none of them particularly practical or grown up. One of my father’s oldest friends was a filmmaker who had worked for six years on a short documentary about fog. Another was a painter of all-white paintings and then, a few years later, of all-black paintings. And aside from the artists and flamencos, who were loyal to the music but little else, my father’s other friends were mostly academics—engineers and mathematicians, none of whom I was able to communicate with. They were friendly enough and I admired them, but I never knew what they were talking about.
At Patricia’s that day, I was introduced to an entirely different tribe of characters. She said she was having some people “over for lunch,” and they began to pour into the house, one by one, two by two, and in clumps. Eventually the house grew so crowded with people that it was hard to move from room to room. Patricia swirled around in a bright blue tent of a dress, almost a caftan, and a heavy gold necklace that she said had been a gift from Marguerite years ago. People kept arriving and arriving—neighbors and more friends—and there was lots of food a
nd wine—lots of wine—and Patricia’s friends knew labels, vineyards, grapes, and they compared various vintages of Chablis and Zinfandel with epicurean relish. There was a garden designer named Mickey with a loose red Afro to his shoulders. A tall, Norse-looking woman named Gertruda had a huge straw hat that she didn’t take off all day. A British writer named Sebastian came with a Turkish woman named Sebnam, who wore a gold lamé bikini top and tight white capris. There was a pair of men who stood next to each other from room to room and talked like an old married couple. Were they?
“How’d you like the creek?” a young man with blond hair asked me. He was wearing jeans and a pink button-down with the sleeves rolled up. It took me a few seconds before I realized it was Ross, all covered up and dry and barely recognizable.
“Perfect temperature.”
“Not too cold?”
Ross looked awfully good in clothes—would the boys in Van Dale have dared to wear pink? I tried not to think about how, just a couple hours ago, he’d seen me naked.
“Was it colder than usual today?” I asked.
“It seemed that way—although I’m not sure the actual temperature really changes that much. I was at the hot springs earlier in the morning, and maybe by comparison the creek seemed frigid to me.” Ross stood really close when he talked to me. In fact, most of Patricia’s friends did that.
“No leeches, though,” I said.
“They’re harmless, if you don’t let them hang on too long.”
“Whitman promised that I’d see one.”
“There’s always tomorrow,” Ross said with a smile, “or later tonight.”
I nodded, trying to contain an explosion of feeling that I was having in that moment, a mix of joy and dread and excitement—the thought of nighttime, and water, in combination with Ross. He had none of the jitters of the adolescent boys in Van Dale who stood next to me in their bathing suits at swim parties or on the grass at the Verdugo Community Center, all bottled up and clammy, barely containing their secret plans for touches and feels and grabs. But Ross, when we’d finished swimming and were standing around naked, hadn’t jittered. He didn’t even stare—or not stare. He’d just gotten out of the water and moved to the warmest boulder and lain down in the sunshine. I stole glances at his penis, watched it loosen and grow longer. I couldn’t believe how unscary it was. How relaxed, how quiet, and how lovely his body looked, so smooth and tan.
The Ruins of California Page 15