I should have been good at alphabetizing and filing—just the kind of rote organizing that I excelled at—but I was distracted by Bob’s dental hygienist, an overweight bottle blonde with incredible stories about sex in the woods with drunken deer hunters and blow jobs in the backs of camper vans. In between tooth polishing and positioning the giant X-ray nozzle on patients’ cheeks, Donna sat in a corner of the front office next to me, filing her long nails—hoping to achieve some kind of ideal equal length—while spinning her sexy recollections. She was always looking around to see if “Dr. Lasso” was in earshot. When he wasn’t, she’d dig into a faux-leather tote for manicure tools and talk about the size of some guy’s “schlong.” She made me cry with laughter, and her raunchy stories made me ache. All I could think about that summer was David anyway. David nude. David on top of me. David in my bathroom, peeing in my toilet. Instead of keeping my mind on alphabetizing, I was in bed with him—and repeating our one night together again and again. I swooned over the open file drawers and sometimes nearly passed out.
“How’s it going at Dr. Bob’s?” my father would ask. He called too frequently, pretending he had a quick question. But he was checking up on me, fascinated by my painful descent into love. He’d track me down at work and try to humor me out of blue moods. “Whose mouth is Bob looking into right now?” he’d say with an edge in his voice. “Can you imagine the tedium of that?”
“No,” I’d say. “I can’t.”
We were both anti-Bob, pretty much, and plotted against him for reasons that were never fully articulated. We were mean and unrelentingly petty. Bob’s politics bugged us—he proselytized about the virtues of democracy like it was a religion. (“Why can’t he leave the poor Soviets alone?” my father complained.) There was another matter, too: Furiously in love, Bob was proprietary about my mother, as if he were the first person to truly care about her. He had proposed and given her a huge diamond ring—something my father had never done. (“He didn’t really give her a diamond ring, did he?” my father asked. “God, people are so uncreative.”) How Bob won my mother’s heart seems simple to me now. He did it with devotion, with honesty, with thoughtfulness, and with an aggressive campaign that made him seem forceful and manly. He wasn’t charming or good-looking or anything like that—Bob was a wiry guy and not too tall, a suburban tennis player with a meatless track-and-field body, but there was something tough about him. It was a mental toughness, a clarity and determination. He had a certainty that made the rest of us look blurry and out of focus. Among the earliest graduates of est, he’d considered dropping dentistry to become a trainer. “How’d he luck out and land your mother?” my father asked with wistfulness in his voice.
“He’s angry,” I said. “She likes angry men.”
“Does she?”
“That’s what she told me.”
“Really? Am I angry?”
“I’m not sure,” I hedged, suddenly embarrassed. “I think the deal is…when she married you, she married her father.”
“Oh, Christ, don’t give me that mumbo jumbo.”
I liked working in Bob’s office, as it turned out. Bob was okay—a decent guy who’d never understand me, or probably never want to—and his office was a study in efficiency and good humor. He never tried to jolly up his patients but won them over, as he had Mom, with decency and attentiveness. I liked sitting behind the open window in the front office and studying people as they came and went, looking at their faces, and their clothes, and then peeking into their private files and gazing at the gaudy color photographs of their teeth and gums. “It’s really kinda fun,” I told my father after a couple weeks. “And the hygienist is hysterical.”
“Donna?”
“Yes.”
“The big blonde?”
Through a doorway I caught sight of Donna carefully clipping a paper bib around the neck of a reclining patient. Then she reached down and scratched her thigh, her long nails raking over her nude pantyhose and making a sound that I’ll never forget. “She’s not for you, Dad.”
“No? She sounds like a riot. Hey, heard anything from dear old David?”
I said nothing.
“Inez?”
I said nothing.
“No?”
“Quit asking.”
“I care. That’s all.”
“You’re asking all the time. I told you, he’s busy. He’s working—he’s designing a new sailboard. He might even go into business.”
“You told me. All that Caltech know-how being dumped into sailboards.”
“You’re asking about him so much,” I went on, “it’s like you want me to notice he’s not calling. Like he’s ignoring me or something. But I know he’s not calling me. Okay? I’m the one he’s not calling, not you.”
“That jerk!”
“Dad.”
“Time to find somebody else, Inez. Time to have some fun and play around. Don’t get all tied up with one guy. Don’t make that mistake. You’ve got the world on a string.”
“No I don’t.”
“Are you kidding? Of course you do. The world on a string.”
“It’s more like dental floss.”
Dad nagged me to visit—even tossing out mentions of Ooee like bait. “He’s back in town after working on the fine-arts museum in Cleveland,” he said. “And…”
Blah, blah, blah. I barely heard him. My old passion for Ooee seemed ludicrous to me now. Under the magic spell of David’s young body and his wordlessness, and his not calling, and all those unwritten letters, Ooee’s white hair and belly reminded me of Captain Kangaroo.
David. Thinking about him was like a methadone treatment program to help me ride out his absence. When I wasn’t daydreaming about him that summer, I bored everybody with constant mentions of him, with musings and anecdotes pulled from a very limited supply—every topic made me think of him, or Caltech, or Hawaii, or sailboarding, or pearls—until I’d driven away everybody but Donna. “Does he have a nice schlong?” she asked. “Oh, my God,” I’d whimper in love-drunk exhalations. Just thinking about David made me anxious and distracted. Just thinking about him made me feel miserable and wonderful at the same time. His lack of communication—only two letters all summer—fanned the flames in my heart and loins. He didn’t write particularly well and demonstrated no originality. Nor did he come out and declare love for me. Yet every word seemed magical, every loopy y and dotted i inspired. Even his writing paper seemed imbued with his love and depth of feeling for me, if his words weren’t. In my mind he wasn’t maddeningly cryptic, he was bursting with desire! So in love he could barely speak! My imagination spun into the future, and I saw our life together perfectly: our wedding at the foot of a volcano, our little house on the edge of a Hawaiian beach, our gorgeous Mexican-Peruvian-Anglo-Japanese-Swedish babies. The only thing standing in the way of this tangible happiness was my graduation from high school ten months away. So far off it depressed me to think of it.
“Lovesickness is like seasickness,” my father said whenever I sounded down or listless. “Everybody else thinks it’s hilarious, and you think you’re going to die. Is that how you feel, Inez?”
“Pretty much.”
Toward the middle of August, when my mother and Bob went on a package tour to Europe—seeing Rome, Florence, Geneva, Zurich, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and London in thirteen days—I drove to Wolfback and remained there for two weeks, the longest stretch of uninterrupted time that my father and I had spent together since I was six. Dad made waffles in the morning, wearing his powder blue pajamas and green silk robe, and ran his noisy espresso machine. He did the dishes, chirpily asking a slew of personal questions—“Do you have bad menstrual cramps?”—and then he’d wander into his home office, still not dressed, and paid bills, logged on to his H-R computer that was hooked up to a mainframe in the Midwest somewhere, and made very long phone calls. I had no idea to whom, nor was I even curious. (When people talk about the curiosity of youth, I always laugh.) He seemed involved
in something, or someone, with almost the same intensity as when he’d built his house, and this seemed to confine him inside all day, near the phone. He made BLTs for lunch, poached fish for dinner, and was uninterested in exercise of any kind, although he did have a reawakened passion for the piano. (He hadn’t played since childhood.) All his inactivity made me restless, so after breakfast each morning, and a shower, I put on a pair of baggy painter’s pants and a pair of hiking boots and left.
I went down the stone steps to the beach, then followed the shoreline until it ended. I climbed a steep hill of rocky chert to a pathway that wandered into to the dry red hills of the headlands and down into their middle parts and green valleys. I crushed eucalyptus leaves in my hands and stuffed the pods in my pockets. I saw hawks circling in the sky, a fox trotting off with a droopy mouse in its mouth. I heard a rattling snake and picked wild sage. It was so beautiful in the headlands and so empty—but rather than feeling liberated from incessant thoughts of David, I found ways to feel the whole of nature connecting me to him. The pale moon rose in the daytime sky, and I wondered if David had seen its face the night before. The wind buffeted my cheek, and I wondered where that air had been. David, David. Was I drawing a breath that had been in his lungs just days before?
Returning from my hike one day at noon, I saw my father outside the house in his green robe and stocking feet. His hair was still messy from bed, and his chin was peppered with stubble. He was standing in one spot, looking at a bare wall on the other side of the kitchen.
“Ooee and I were talking about a few small revisions,” he explained, pointing to an edge of the garden where nothing had been planted. “Here’s the corner where we could expand. See there? We could dig out a bit, add some foundation, and then build a separate apartment for you. Wouldn’t that be nice? It wouldn’t be very big,” he said. “But I thought you might be coming up here for college next year, and you’d have a nice little dugout, with your own pathway and steps down to the beach.”
He seemed alone that summer, kind of aimless and expectant. He was pushing Shanti into the arms of Bill Stein and had taken up with Louisa and Lauren, but they were off somewhere, both of them, and traveling with friends. During lulls like this, he usually looked up an old flame, picking up where he left off until somebody new appeared. But nobody was materializing.
Just when I began to worry that my father’s supply of women had dried up, he took me out to lunch with Karen, a dark-haired lawyer and social activist who, at thirty-seven, seemed a bit older than his usual. Afterward, he and I drove over to Union Square and dropped in on Carol, a former girlfriend, the retail executive. She worked at Shreve’s now and walked us around the jewelry store while Dad said he was looking for a birthday present for me.
“Where are you applying to college?” Carol asked in a matter-of-fact way.
I shrugged. I hadn’t really thought about it yet, I said.
“Don’t you have to apply in a few months?” She seemed troubled, almost stepmotherish.
“I guess so.”
“Paul, haven’t you taken her around to see some schools?”
“I was hoping,” he said, “she’d want to go to Berkeley.”
“Well, that’s pretty hard to get into,” Carol responded with a whiff of disapproval. “You’ll have to broaden your— But didn’t you teach there, Paul? Still, I don’t think you can pull strings at a state university. I suppose you’d be close by, though,” she said, turning to me again. “Wouldn’t you?”
Was it a sign of parental neglect or healthy lack of pressure that we’d never discussed college? I assumed the wind would blow me someplace, the way it always had. Shelley was planning to go to art school in Rhode Island somewhere. But Berkeley? It was definitely too far away from David.
“Carol is so pushy,” my father said once we were tucked inside his little Alfa Romeo and pulling away from Union Square. “Can you believe all that grilling about college? Hard to get in. Give me a break! She doesn’t know how smart you are.”
I nodded, but inside I was thinking, A year from now, David and I will be married. And we’ll be living on our own compound in Molokai.
“I think you’d like Berkeley,” my father continued. “I really do. Hey, that’s an idea. Should we cruise over there now and check it out? Let’s do it!”
But Berkeley seemed shabby and uninviting and even seedier than North Beach. The campus was empty, and the only people on the streets were winos and druggies and scowling Vietnam vets in wheelchairs. “Doesn’t look like much in the summer,” my father said. “Not too many kids around.” Then we picked up a local paper, checked the movie listings, and trotted off to see Star Wars. Afterward, inspired by the movie, we loaded up his pipe and took a few hits in the car. I held the smoke in my lungs for a long time, and he was watching me carefully, seemed to hesitate—but plunged in anyway.
“I hope you’re not buying dope on the street, Inez.” He was trying to seem casual when he said it, but I could tell he wasn’t feeling that way. “Don’t be that stupid, okay? There could be angel dust or God-only-knows-what-else in it. Pesticides and all kinds of poisonous stuff.”
I shrugged, blew out the smoke, and said, “I’ve never bought anything, ever.”
“Where does Shelley get her stash?”
“Some guy. I don’t know. From her old school.”
He sent me back to Van Dale a few days later with a plastic Baggie of sticky marijuana buds. “I’d feel a lot better if you smoked this and not Shelley’s,” he said with a vulnerable smile. A few weeks later, when school started, he asked me on the phone, “How’s your supply? Do you and Shelley need any more?”
My birthday that year brought the usual greetings and celebration, trumped by a Rolex watch that my father sent, which—like the Nikon camera, and the MG before it, and perhaps the bag of dope—was way too much of a good thing for a young girl. The watch was nice, and a surprise, but most of my memories of the day are about waiting for a package to come from Hawaii—or a phone call, or something. With each minute that passed, from the moment I woke up in bed, I felt a growing dread. Each minute ticked by and seemed to steal something from me, a pint of blood, a piece of heart. A faith and hopefulness that I’d never regain. When a long cardboard box came with a bunch of waxy tropical flowers in reds and pinks with long yellow pistils, my heart raced with excitement until I read the little white card.
You are the sunshine of my life,
Love,
Whitman
I’d never felt such piercing sorrow. How had I sunk into such unhappiness? Just months before, I’d been a carefree girl in a sports car, driving from party to party, a tease, a public temptation. I bounced out of bed, sang in the shower, merrily dressed in one of my thrift-shop outfits, passed notes to Shelley in class, snuck off to smoke a cigarette. I was always laughing, always having fun.
The race to love was sweet, but the arrival miserable. My feelings were fizzy and out of control—lifting and plummeting. Love had made me more sensitive and expressive and almost manic, but also pathetic and dramatic, narcissistic and so confused. Love didn’t seem governed by laws that I was familiar with—or had encountered before—but ruled by magic and spells and wishes made on shooting stars. By the time the news came, I was almost ready for it.
David had decided to stay in Hawaii—and not return to Caltech. My father was the first person I called. “Dad,” I whined, “he’s not coming back this year.”
“Oh.”
“He’s designed a board. He says it’s called ‘windsurfing’ now, and his family gave him some money to make a bunch of boards and sell them.”
“He’s starting a business?”
“Yeah, with a big-name professional surfer and all that.”
“Good for him,” my father said. “Academia is overrated. And anyway, he’ll be good at making money. He’s got those Jap genes.”
“Dad.”
“But you must be sad. Are you?”
“I am. I guess. But
not as much as I thought I’d be.” Just a summer of being in love with David and waiting for a letter, for a call, for anything, had exhausted me. The downsides of romance—and this new thing, sex—were hard to ignore. I’d spent an entire day waiting in the We Care Clinic for a doctor to give me a prescription for birth control pills. And after a few weeks of taking them, my face had broken out, I’d gained eight pounds, and I had no energy for anything, even getting out of bed.
“It’s like having another job,” I said, “this whole love thing.”
“Oh, that’s a funny observation,” my father said. “You mean because it’s so all-consuming? It does seem to absorb a great deal of time. But I like that part—all the hours spent thinking about the person, and daydreaming, and wishing, and aching to be together. And then imagining that they’re thinking about you. The beginning of an affair is so wonderful.”
“Not for me.” The bladder infection I’d gotten after David left wasn’t so wonderful, and how the bedsheets had been dotted with weird wet spots and gunk and scary blood, and then the constant stream of erotic thoughts that had bubbled up afterward, like lava after a volcanic eruption. “My whole summer was wasted thinking about him. Down the drain.”
“Oh, don’t say that! Not wasted. Think of all the things you know about now. And all the new feelings you’ve had. It gets easier—I promise. After the first few tries at love, you’ll start to know what to expect. Then it will be more manageable and fun. And you learn so much! There’s nothing like meeting somebody new and waking up parts of yourself that you’d forgotten were there—or never knew you had. The onslaught of new feelings and new experiences you can have when you’re first in love…well, it’s unlike anything else. Just a few more times and you’ll get the hang of it. Really, love is like learning to drive. After a while you become accustomed to the new sensations and intense feelings, and they aren’t so scary anymore. You know those nightmares you used to have about the Garter Belt Man? Well, it’s like that. At first they seemed real, and you were afraid. Right? Well, after you had a few of them, you started to realize it was the same dream—another Garter Belt Man dream! And he wasn’t really chasing you, and you weren’t going to die or anything. Falling in love is kind of like that. The fear is only in your mind. You’re afraid of being hurt, afraid of losing control. Afraid of change, newness, all the overwhelming sensations you’re having. Right? But it’s really nothing more than your own fears you’re battling and getting used to. And after a while, after a few times, you can enjoy it, almost like an amusement-park ride, without much anxiety. The uncertainties that cause anxiety go away. Well, I guess they don’t go away completely, all those feelings, but somehow you learn to enjoy having them.”
The Ruins of California Page 25