The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  “She just never felt comfortable with the terms,” he said cryptically one night, in an effort to explain—soon after Whitman had seen her. What terms? “I couldn’t promise there wouldn’t be other people,” he said, “but I promised I’d never lie to her. And I never did.” He couldn’t promise there wouldn’t be other people. I was too young to comprehend the difficulties of that arrangement or to marvel how they’d stayed together as long as they did.

  “She needed me too much,” he said at another time, in a burst of candor. Her dependency made him “feel a way that I didn’t want to feel,” he said. She’d wanted to get married, too. “Which, of course, I couldn’t do.” The most surprising thing was how much my father seemed to enjoy feeling wistful about her. “She was so wonderful,” he’d sigh, “wasn’t she?”

  After Laurel, a big mouth who brandished her college background with such frequency that it became a joke (“Let’s count how many minutes it takes her to utter the word ‘Radcliffe,’” Whitman said at the start of one weekend), my father fell in with Shanti, a quiet waif, an out-of-work programmer with a honey brown bob and a lisp.

  Shanti wasn’t her real name—there’d been a conversion to Hinduism at some point—and she’d met my father through the now-forgotten Marisa. (“She’s a very close friend of Marisa’s,” my father kept saying, as if this connection added to Shanti’s appeal.) Before long he’d helped her find a job at Harrison-Ruin, where my father still showed up occasionally for board meetings and consultations. Shanti seemed happy there, and happy with my father. She was smart and quick but relatively uncultured, which my father appeared to find fascinating, as if he’d discovered a pure savage to indoctrinate. To say she “blossomed” under his tutelage seems an understatement. She was around for the better part of a year, long enough to be queried on every personal subject under the sun, to read Great Expectations and Portrait of a Lady and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, to be taken to Lawrence of Arabia and given a Rolex watch on her birthday. I’d even seen the inside of Shanti’s apartment in the Marina one day. It was very small and drab—no light or style—and I was able to imagine, for once, how glamorous my father and his world must have seemed to her.

  How old was Shanti? She wasn’t up to code, that’s all I know. My father and Ooee Lungo had worked out a simple math equation for what they believed was the perfect age difference between a man and a woman. The man’s age was divided by two, and then seven years were added: Y/2 + 7 = X. Since my father was on the precipice of fifty, his ideal mate would have been thirty-two. But sweet, pliant Shanti couldn’t have been much beyond twenty-five or -six, which is partly why, eventually, she was pushed out of the nest, encouraged to see other people, and then, when she consulted my father on her love life, urged to begin an affair with another young programmer at Harrison-Ruin, a guy named Bill Stein—who was brilliant, resourceful, and about a foot shorter than my father. Dad approved of Bill Stein enormously. And when Shanti would call my father and say she missed him and missed his company, he’d take her to dinner again and maybe sleep with her again, all the while counseling her on the myriad of ways she could improve and deepen her relationship with Bill.

  After Shanti there was a stretch of L names, all short-termers: Lonnie, Louisa, Lauren. It was almost as though he were playing a game with himself. Lonnie was a ballet dancer. Louisa was a young architect in Ooee’s firm whom I met only once—when she was still dating Ooee. I never knew too much about Lauren, an aspiring fashion designer, except she was also a friend of Marisa’s and she’d gotten so stoned with my father once that she’d walked right into a glass door at Wolfback and smashed her tiny nose so thoroughly that she had to have an operation to make it bigger so she could breathe again.

  Ooee wasn’t around as much in those days. His architectural style had evolved—he’d added Palladian windows and Ionic columns to his bag of tricks—and he made a name for himself building museums and libraries in Atlanta and Houston. But he still kept a houseboat in Sausalito, just down the hill from Wolfback. And he was certainly around that September weekend after I turned sixteen, when Shelley and I flew up to San Francisco to collect the MG.

  My father and Ooee were standing at our arrival gate when Shelley and I got off the plane from Hollywood-Burbank. Ooee’s face looked very tan, and he was wearing a brown corduroy jacket and a blue oxford-cloth shirt. He’d gotten a new pair of horn-rim glasses in the Woody Allen fashion of the day, and these set off his fluffy white hair and brown eyes in a nice way. He looked adorable, like an enormous teddy bear. When he saw us approaching—Shelley and me—a look of wonder and thrill came onto his face that he couldn’t possibly hide, or have faked, no matter how hard he tried. The gates of heaven had opened up. That’s how he looked. We were two angels who’d come to deliver him to paradise.

  “Oh, well!” Ooee called out, almost involuntarily. “Look at you two!”

  My father was more restrained. His dark hair seemed severe next to Ooee’s flyaway mane, and I noticed he was wearing a crisp new getup: a blue denim jacket over a thin white cotton shirt with the collar upturned. Rather than rumpled and approachable like Ooee, he looked almost too handsome to be real. And serious—so serious I worried that he might have changed his mind about the car. Was that it? Maybe my mother and Abuelita had finally gotten through to him. (They were both dubious about the car.) Then I realized it was about Shelley. My father hadn’t met her.

  “You’re not at all how I imagined,” he said to her right off. “I thought you’d be tall—at least taller than Inez.”

  “Nobody’s taller than Inez,” Shelley said without a smile. Her eyes were steady but gave off something else, a flicker of amusement.

  “I’m taller than Inez,” Ooee said, putting his arm around me.

  “I mean girls,” Shelley said.

  “How tall are you?” my father asked, stepping closer to zero in on Shelley. He and Ooee were now circling her, moving in as if their noses were trying to catch a drift of her scent.

  “Five-eight.”

  “That’s pretty tall,” said Ooee.

  “I suppose,” my father said.

  Shelley shot me a look—an I’m-suffering-these-fools expression—and I wondered if she was okay, until we got to Ooee’s Saab and I realized she’d been lying low and plotting her revenge.

  “You’re better-looking than I thought you’d be,” she said to my father as he held the door for her.

  “Am I?” he said.

  “I thought you’d show up at the airport in pajamas and smoking a pipe like Hugh Hefner. Look at him. He’s not very cute. I always figured that playboys weren’t.”

  “Ouch,” said Ooee, ducking into the driver’s seat.

  My father smiled and said nothing, just folded himself into the front passenger seat. Shelley and I were sitting in back. “Am I cute?” he asked after all the doors were closed. “I’ve never wanted to be cute. Paul McCartney is cute. John Denver is cute. My goal has always been not to be cute—just scary and delightful and take women where they’ve never gone before.”

  “Dad.”

  Shelley laughed.

  “You’d better be careful, Pablo,” said Ooee. “She’ll believe you.”

  “I’m serious,” my father said.

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  Ooee shrugged with his mouth.

  “Nobody believes me,” my father said. “Nobody ever believes me.” He threw his hands in the air. “Do you believe me, Shelley?”

  “I do,” she said. And she laughed again.

  Shelley was given the full-length tour of Wolfback, with all the gushing and marveling that that required, and then she and I got settled in the living room. Sharing the brown corduroy sofa—recently expanded into a rather large sectional—we assumed our usual lazy positions. It’s funny how easy it was to create a separate female space for ourselves, almost as if there were invisible walls around us. We filed our nails and applied new clear polish. We drank green tea and laughed at the cartoons in my
father’s New Yorker and Playboy magazines. We discussed what we might wear to Alegrías later that night. (“I’m getting so sick of that brown poncho,” Shelley said.) Ooee and my father made phone calls and planned the afternoon. An hour or more passed by, and then it was finally decided that I should be taken out in the MG for my first stick-shifting lesson. But where?

  “San Raphael?” said Ooee.

  “Too far,” said my father.

  “The parking lot of Ralph’s?”

  “That hobo is there—shouting at the shrubs.”

  “The Marina? At least it’s flat.”

  “The Presidio,” my father said with great finality. But as soon as we’d crossed the bridge in the MG, he turned left toward the city, and not into the Presidio. He’d changed his mind. He had some coffee beans to pick up and wanted to “swing by” Walgreens pharmacy for some pills he needed.

  In the parking lot of Walgreens, where I waited alone in the car, I looked at the dashboard—the gauges and switches, the black dials with white numbers and letters. “Hello,” I whispered out loud. “Hello, MG. Are you really coming home with me after all these years?” I ran my hand along the black leather seats and white piping, then gripped the glossy wooden steering wheel.

  “Why not drive it now?” my father asked, opening the door.

  “But…” I stammered. “We’re still in the city.”

  “It’s not that congested,” he said. “You can pull out into the street over there”—pointing to another entrance to the lot. “It’s a dead end.”

  “Right now?”

  “Once you get the hang of it, you’ll see how simple it is,” he said. “But let me take a few minutes to explain how the transmission of a car works and how the clutch operates. That’ll make things easier for you.”

  He came by the side of the passenger door, waiting for me to switch places with him. I got out, walked around the small car, and sat down for the first time behind the wheel. How strange it felt, as if the world had gone lopsided.

  “It’s all very simple,” my father said, oblivious to the momentousness of the occasion. And then, rather unsimply, he began to describe in agonizing detail the mechanical difference between an automatic and a manual shift and how an automobile clutch is designed to latch on to the various gears. “When you put your foot on the clutch pedal,” he explained, “you are releasing the clutch from all gear options. When your foot is off the pedal, you are allowing the clutch to latch again.” He cupped his hands and used his fingers to demonstrate a clutch that was “in gear” and “out of gear.”

  I followed his description and even found parts of it illuminating, but when it came time to find first gear and drive onto the dead-end street, the car lurched ahead horribly. “Release the clutch!” my father called out.

  Quickly I took my foot off the pedal. As I did, the jerking and lurching only increased—accompanied by a loud thunking sound. “Release the clutch!” my father called out again.

  “I have!”

  The car died.

  “But your foot is off the pedal!”

  I put my foot back on the clutch, returned the gearshift to neutral, and started the car again.

  “Don’t hold the key on the starter!” he yelled. “You’re— Hear that?”

  I looked over. His face was red—the color of cooked lobster—and for some reason this gave me enormous satisfaction. “You mean,” I said, holding the key on the starting position again, too long, until the screeching began, “that sound?”

  “Stop it!” He reached over and tried to take the key. I grabbed it first. “Inez!” he exploded in a rage. “Have you been listening to me or not?”

  “I heard every word.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking a big breath. “Let’s try again.”

  I turned the key gently until the car started and produced a wonderful low rumbling. It was a soothing sound, almost tranquilizing—and full of memories. I pressed down on the clutch pedal, put the car in first gear, and slowly began to lift my foot off the clutch. But again the car lurched forward in weird jumps and made a loud popping sound.

  “Release the clutch!!” my father yelled.

  “I have!”

  “Release it!!”

  “My foot is off the pedal!”

  “YOU ARE ENGAGING THE CLUTCH, NOT RELEASING IT!”

  Engaging the clutch? What was he talking about?

  “Get out,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Get out of the car.”

  I had troubled looking at him for the first few minutes. He seemed a forlorn figure in the middle of the parking lot—some kind of artsy drifter with nowhere to go. I hated the way that his shirt collar rose up against his cheek. And his legs looked too long. His hair, overly considered. What a fop. What an idiot. After a few turns around the lot, I went out to the street. I began to get the hang of the thing—the way you have to take your left foot off the clutch while you put your right foot slowly on the gas.

  My father was standing perfectly still in the middle of the parking lot, like a great heron, and I noticed that he was nodding his head. The next time I looked over, he smiled and waved. The next time he’d thrown his hands in the air and was applauding.

  He ran alongside the car and knocked on the window. “You did it, Inez! You did it! You doped it out on your own! Good for you!”

  My father hadn’t gone to El Bodega for a long time, it seemed. When we arrived for dinner, Hector looked stunned—not his usual fake surprise but something more honest. “Pablo, is it really you? I thought you’d died.”

  “No, just moved over the bridge,” my father said stiffly. “But I’m back tonight.”

  “Good to see you. And the señoritas. And you, Señor Lungo.”

  But after all the buildup that I’d given Shelley, the paella didn’t taste as delicious as I remembered—the clams were rubbery and cold. Alegrías seemed seedier than ever, too. The red walls were shiny in some places, dull in others, as though several kinds of paint had been used to patch things up. The wooden stage was banged up and in need of a broom. It smelled like mold, and wine, and maybe urine. When the dancers came out, they were bleary-eyed and off—or drunk. The sparse crowd consisted of no real flamenco aficionados, as far as I could tell. Aside from my father’s old table in the back, it was mostly tourists and retirees. “They’ve made us a stop on a bus tour,” Ricardo said dolefully at the break.

  Shelley and I waited impatiently for Antonio to appear—I’d been telling her about him for two years already. As soon as the dancing started, we moved our chairs closer so we could talk. “Which one is he?” she asked. As each new guitarist emerged from behind the curtain and joined the ensemble of singers and dancers, I shook my head. “Not him either.” Halfway through the show, when Antonio hadn’t turned up, I finally leaned over to Ooee.

  “What happened to Antonio?”

  Ooee shrugged, then looked over at my father.

  “Where is Antonio?” I said again.

  My father shook his head. “Who? Forget about him,” he said with a scowl. “He’s into junk, not girls.”

  There was a disagreement about what to do on our last night. It was our family tradition to see a movie together, but Ooee objected. “Network?” he groaned. “Jesus, Paul. The girls can see a movie anywhere. I think we should go out on the town.”

  “Yeah,” said Shelley. Her face was kind of open, along with her mouth. She looked up at my father with a funny self-consciousness, keeping her chin down as if trying to appear blasé, but she wasn’t. “Come on, Paul. It’ll be fun.”

  “Out on the town?” my father seemed incredulous. “What town?”

  “Just a night out,” Ooee said. “Play it by ear. Maybe hit some of those punk clubs by the modern art museum.”

  Shelley didn’t say anything right away, just stepped closer to my father, as though trying to convince him with her body or smell or something. “Let’s do it. Come on, Paul.”

  He ignored her and spoke
directly to Ooee. “No thank you. I’d rather see a movie. That’s what Inez and I are going to do. Right, Inez?”

  I nodded. Shelley looked kind of disappointed, or rattled, but not for long. After spending twenty minutes in the bathroom, she emerged in tight pants, very high heels, and a slather of heavy lip gloss, and she headed off with Ooee for the city. As soon as they were gone, my father and I studied the movie listings in the newspaper and tried to guess how long we’d have to wait in line. We’d stood for two hours to see The Godfather, Part II on its first weekend at the North Point and watched a joint being passed down the line until the roach got so small somebody ate it.

  “Hey, the movie starts in ninety minutes,” my father said, pointing at the paper. “We better get going.”

  A few minutes later, he was waiting for me in the driveway next to his Triumph and wearing a black leather jacket. He had a helmet under his arm. A smaller helmet was sitting on the seat of the motorcycle, along with a woman’s black leather jacket.

  “Whose are these?” I asked, picking up the helmet and the jacket.

  “Nobody’s. I just keep them around.”

  I was putting on the jacket when he pulled from his breast pocket a small silver pipe that Justine had given him. I could see he’d already loaded it with a small pinch of grass. “Want some?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “Don’t do that anymore.”

  “No? Probably wise. I thought it would make the movie better and the wait a little more interesting. But you don’t need it.”

  Just as he was tossing out that tepid approval, I extended my hand for the lit pipe and took a long drag, then passed it back. Then took another. After a third drag, he said, “That’s enough,” and put the pipe away.

  He started up the bike with a few explosions of sound—so loud, unbearably loud—and we were off, down the paved driveway, onto the dirt road. I was on the back, hanging on to his waist, the seat rumbling under me and the sky hovering above. I began to notice the languid shapes of eucalyptus trees, the sound of the wind. The coolness on my neck and cheeks. When we got to the farm gate, my father pulled out his remote control. The gate lifted, and we sailed through.