“Whitman.”
Tomas nodded and just kept nodding. Very slowly. He pursed his lips and then smirked. “Well, I guess, then, I’m supposed to tell you that he’s a junkie. Or maybe you’ve figured that out already.”
I didn’t leave Hawaii right away. And I can’t really say why—denial, listlessness, or indecision. Maybe I didn’t have any energy left for consciousness. Winter came. The air temperature hovered in the mid-seventies, and aside from more rain clouds passing over my towel on the beach and occasionally drenching me, the days of sunshine and perfection continued. The humidity lessened, or I got used to it. The waves picked up and up and up—grew as tall and thick as buildings—and I barely recognized my old beach spots anymore. The storms took away the sand and a few other things, too. As Jerry had said on my first day in Haleiwa, there were supposedly seven guys for every girl on the North Shore—a nice ratio, if you could find the guys anymore. They were in the water at Pipeline or Sunset or just hanging out at any one of the beaches that ran the length of the North Shore. There were dozens of them, surf spots with informal names and shifting locations due to changing sandbars. One lazy afternoon, after Whitman had come back to his house all tired and worn out, almost nodding off, we ate dried cuttlefish and Maui Chips and drank beers and listed the nicknames of the surf spots in order: Velseyland, Secretspots, Backyards, Sunset, Kammieland, Rockies, Gas Chambers, Pipeline Lefts, Backdoor Pipeline, Off the Walls, Shit-Fucks, Bonzai Rocks, Leons, Log Cabins, Changes, Daystar, Rainbows, Avalanche, Haleiwa, Himalayas, Laniakea, Chums Reef, Marijuana’s, All Rights, Waimea Bay.
That afternoon I remember feeling as though I’d lived in Hawaii my whole life. My skin was so dark, people asked if I was part Hawaiian. That pleased me. I’d nod vaguely. Maybe I was. Did it matter anymore?
By Christmas, like a true native, I’d even gotten bored of the beach. The waves were too big for swimming anyway.
“What are you reading?” Dad asked on the phone.
“Nothing.”
“You haven’t sent me a new batch of pictures in a long time.”
“Haven’t taken any.”
“Are you worried about getting in?”
“Getting in where?”
“College.”
“Oh.” The application was something else I kept forgetting about. It seemed like years ago—another lifetime ago, before the big waves and the surfing tournaments and all the winter parties, which were now nonstop—that I’d sent the thing off. “I don’t really care,” I said. “I mean, I was into it when I sent it, I really was. But now I don’t really see the point. Maybe I don’t see the point of anything.”
“You don’t?”
“Not really. It’s weird. But living here—the perfect weather just goes on and on. It almost creeps into your soul and bleaches it out. I mean, there’s a wreath on the Star Market, and lights on a few palm trees, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas. It doesn’t matter. I hate Christmas anyway.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t?”
“I’m the one who hates Christmas—not you,” he said. “I know what the problem is.”
“Please don’t say I need to come home.”
“No,” he said. “You need to quit smoking pot.”
His voice was very certain, had a kind of firmness that I hadn’t heard since I was very young. When I didn’t say anything right away, he lightened up. “For two weeks. That’s all. Just try it.”
After two weeks, he asked, “Feel any better?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your disappearing joie de vivre—and new hatred of Christmas. Your apathy.”
“Nothing’s changed,” I said. “I’m fine anyway. I just don’t feel anything. Well, maybe I feel a tiny bit better. I bought one of Madam X’s books, the kind of thing I never read, and I actually liked it for a while.”
“Oh, that’s not a good sign. What else are you doing—besides the pot?”
“Not much,” I said. “Whatever turns up. Sometimes a Quaalude here and there. Cocaine once in a—”
“Cocaine?” He raised his voice, almost to a shout. “How stupid. Who gave you permission to do that?”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. I do remember thinking it seemed a little hypocritical for him to be complaining about my drug use.
“You’re drinking, too?”
“Where are you going with this? You make it sound like Lost Weekend or something. It’s not that bad. And I’m not depressed or anything. I just…The world seems flat. That’s all. I’m flatlining and floating all the time. Nothing sticks. You know what I mean? I’m not hooked on anything—it’s almost the opposite. I couldn’t get hooked on anything if I tried.”
“Another two weeks,” he said. “You’ve got to go another two weeks. Stop everything—whatever you’re taking or drinking or smoking. You’ll feel better soon. You’re just in a slog.”
It might have been a week later—I was driving to meet Tomas at Kammieland for some bodysurfing, and on the way I saw a dark horse in a meadow. There was a young girl on the horse, and there was something about her, and the horse, and how they moved together, that made me start to cry. The next day, when I was shopping in the Star Market, I saw a newsmagazine with Jerry Brown on the cover and felt homesick, so terribly homesick. He’d been the governor of California for so long I’d forgotten about him too. That evening, as a test, I picked up Madam X’s book again and tore through it in one sitting.
The next morning, when it was still too early to call my father, I went down to the rocks in front of Whitman’s and took pictures of the local kids fishing for eels with their drop lines. They stood so proudly with their buckets and smiled so hugely for my camera. When Whitman wandered out, I took a sleepy picture of him in the morning light. Whitman—golden, so golden and brown and smiling at me.
In the next week, I had so many momentary epiphanies that it would be difficult to chronicle them. They came sporadically, in a rush, almost as if all the thoughts that I hadn’t had all summer and fall were now desperately trying to find their way out. I was alive with thoughts, and reconsiderations, and feelings, and almost manic energy. Mostly I was just alive. I bought coffee and a newspaper at the café in Kua Aina, and while I was drinking the coffee, I came across an article with a New Delhi dateline, and suddenly I remembered, almost from the depths of my being, that there was a real place called New Delhi and it was still there, along with the rest of the world, teeming with stories and people, teeming with life, beckoning to me and calling me. I wanted so much to be there, in the world again, and not pacified in a tropical haze of adolescent dreams and decadence and stupidity. What was I doing with my life? I lifted my head from the paper and slowly looked around the Kua Aina café and felt, for the first time in a long time—perhaps ever—that I knew who I was. But how had I wound up in Hawaii?
In January, when the news came from University of California that I’d been admitted, I was capable of wild excitement. I couldn’t wait to buy books and notebooks, to start classes, to feel cool weather again. I stretched out in bed and dreamed about needing to wear a sweater. I thought about Wolfback—its wonderful fog and gloomy microclimate. The gray sky, the chill, the dark clouds, the windswept beach. But how could I leave Tomas?
“You’ve got to be honest with him,” Dad advised in the serious tone he always adopted when he was giving me love advice. “None of the head games you played on David. If you’re going to enjoy the freedom and pleasures of adulthood, then you’ve got to act like an adult yourself. Even if it’s just an act, or a rehearsal. Be an adult. Level with him. Simply tell the man how you really feel. Tell him it’s hard to leave—but you have to—and cry if you feel like crying. He’s a decent guy. He’ll understand how you feel.”
A few days later, a copy of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies arrived in the mail with a funny note. Dad called more frequently than before, asking if I needed anything. He seemed as energized a
nd excited by my return as I was. “I’ve made the most perfect apricot scones,” he said one night. “Too bad you’re not here. My best batch ever.”
And Whitman? Tomas could be wrong, I told myself. Was it my business anyway? But Whitman did seem thin, and distracted. He fell asleep in the middle of dinner and was out of money sometimes. When the swells came, sometimes he didn’t bother going into the water. Why didn’t I just ask him? In books and movies, people always ask direct questions and get direct answers. In life it always seemed too hard. I was afraid of losing him. Even though, in some way, I suppose that I already had.
It was a long flight back to civilization. At the last second, I wasn’t sure if I was ready. The airport felt too busy and hectic. The plane felt strange and futuristic and way too clean. I ordered a gin and tonic from the hostess, and then another, and moved to the back of the plane, to the smoking section, and pulled out a fresh pack of Camel cigarettes—and I smoked them. I felt sorry for myself, I suppose. I wondered what the waves were doing at Waimea. I wondered if the local kids were fishing on the rocks in front of Whitman’s house. I wondered who’d look after the garden at Tomas’s house now and whether I’d really come back over the summer like I said I would.
Getting off the plane at LAX, I looked around for Abuelita and my mother and remembered they were meeting me in baggage claim. I gathered up my things, wondered if my breath smelled like gin and how cold it was outside. I was wearing a pair of baggy white shorts with a red-wine stain that I couldn’t get out, flip-flops, a skinny camisole that said DA KINE across my breasts, and a string of water-buffalo beads that Tomas had gotten me in Indonesia. My hair was loose, not brushed, and almost blond at the ends. My mother had said it was going to be sixty-two degrees in Los Angeles, but that number was meaningless to me. It felt like years since I’d been in weather that cold.
I entered an underground tunnel that was paved in turquoise-blue tile and lit by a long tube of fluorescent light. I felt a little drunk, and sad. Most of me was still in Hawaii, I suppose, or wishing I were. In an odd, dreamlike moment, I looked at the far end of the blue tunnel and saw Robbie and Mrs. Morrison coming toward me. They were talking to each other and walking quickly. Robbie was wearing something very wintry and collegiate, almost eastern—a plaid skirt and a hunter green sweater. She was wearing a pair of brown loafers, too, the kind of shoes I hadn’t seen or thought about in ten months. They looked very leathery and strange and old-fashioned. Like shoes from another century. The whole getup was like a costume.
Her hair was still long, but darker and held back by an Alice in Wonderland headband. Then she saw me.
“Oh, my gosh!” Robbie called out. “Is that you, Inny??”
“It’s me.”
“Oh, my gosh! You’re so tan. Where have you been?”
She was excited and almost hollering. I’d forgotten all about that—how people could be enthusiastic and jump around.
“Hawaii,” I said, trying very hard to show a little spirit, too. “I’ve been living there—since summer.”
“You have?”
“At the University of Hawaii?” Mrs. Morrison asked. And then I remembered that there were lots of Mormons in Hawaii—not that I met any. They ran a big tourist site called the Polynesian Cultural Center. The whole Morrison family had visited it years ago, way back in days of Mrs. Shockley and Camp Fire Girls.
I shook my head. A burst of good feeling was running through me, though, because I’d suddenly come up with a way to say everything I needed about the last ten months of my life—how to couch my experience in a nutshell. “I wish I’d been getting some school credit,” I said to Mrs. Morrison. “But I’m afraid I’ve just been a degenerate instead.”
Boo laughed very hard—exactly like she always did. Robbie was laughing, too. “Oh, Inny,” they kept saying. “You’re so funny. You’re so funny.”
The next day, when I tried the old number, Boo answered. She seeming thrilled to talk to me again. “Hawaii! Oh, Inny, that must have been so wonderful.”
I played up the photography thing, made it sound like I was verging on professional. “My mom got married,” I said.
“Wasn’t that a while ago?” Mrs. Morrison asked. “Last year? But I didn’t know you were in Hawaii all this time. You clever girl—a year off. And all that healthy sunshine. I thought it might be too cold for Robbie at BYU, but she’s learning to ski instead. Just shows you.”
Boo made out like I’d been on a Mormon mission or something, like I’d been saving souls and making the world a better place, not culminating a sad, years-long descent into indolence and self-deception. She acted as if Robbie and I were still in touch, too, as if nothing were different, but I could tell she was wondering why I’d called. She acted happy about it, but curious. Boo liked me; she always had. No matter what I did. When Marguerite died, she’d sent a small basket of carnations and daisies that got lost in the grandeur of the tall lilies and topiary azalea of the San Benito types. (“Who are the Morrisons?” Aunt Julia wanted to know. “It’s hard to write a thank-you to people in Van Dale you’ve never heard of.”) Boo had a kind of faith in me, and high expectations. And I wondered why I’d thrown all that away so easily—a whole family of nice people, who knew me, who liked me.
“I was really sorry to hear about Dr. Morrison,” I said finally. “That’s the reason I’m calling, really. I meant to call last summer, Mrs. Morrison, but—”
“Oh, Inny, goodness gracious don’t apologize. Gosh, I can’t wait to tell Robbie that you called—do you need her number in Provo?”
NINETEEN
Big Bang
I wish I could say that everything was smooth sailing after that, that I went to college and became a better person. That life stopped being confusing and I knew who I was, every day, and what the point of things was. But maybe nobody feels that way.
I’d been back in California almost nine months when all hell broke loose. It was after New Year’s and my second quarter at Berkeley was starting. I missed the first week of classes and then wobbled for the next three. I suppose I might have dropped out, except I’d struggle home in the car traffic at night and climb the stairs from my apartment underneath Wolfback, and Dad would have all my textbooks out on the kitchen table, and he’d be reading them.
“Have you considered looking at some other explanations of the big bang—because this astronomy book isn’t particularly well written. The book makes things more confusing than they need to be. The theory’s very simple, actually, one of the reasons for its great success.”
“We did the big bang. We did it the first week.”
“I see that from your syllabus. But you were gone, and I worry that you didn’t nail it in your mind. I don’t care about your grade on the midterms, or any of your grades. I’m talking about the rest of your life, and when will you ever revisit the big bang? I’ve found a better chapter—over here, see? One of my books dwells mostly on the flaws of the theory but does a very nice job of explaining it, too, and how the planets were formed.”
“All from the same matter. After a billion-year explosion.”
“You’ve reduced it to a cartoon.”
“I thought that was the point.”
He was wearing beautiful dark pinstripe suits in those days, and always on the way to a museum board meeting, or the opera board, or some artificial-intelligence symposium, or to discuss investing in a new software company. He was busy, busier than he’d been in a long time, and always folding himself into the back of his restored Cadillac limousine (I was not allowed to call it a “limo”) with Hector in front and looking less like a chauffeur than anybody on earth. A couple of hours later, he’d unfold himself and appear at Wolfback again. He was never gone for long. The house was his epicenter, his HQ, and he hung around the place like the fog. He’d set up quite a nice life there. He baked and cooked. He played piano—after a few years back at the instrument, he’d gotten quite good, playing Beethoven’s Pathétique again and again, perfecting it
the way he used to perfect a soleares on the guitar. Most evenings, if Evie was tied up, he was following the presidential campaign on TV with an intense interest that I’d never seen in him before. (“I’m ready for a whole new decade, Inez, aren’t you?”)
Mornings he spent an enormous amount of time in preparation for the day. The steam from his shower carried the smell of fancy unguents about the house, and Dad would stand before the tall mirror in his spacious master bath, combing his hair straight back like Count Dracula’s or putting on one of his impeccable shirts. They were special-ordered—after a long debate over whether French cuffs were gauche or not, and then he’d succumbed. He was wearing handmade Belgian slippers from a small store in New York, something Evie had turned him on to, and I didn’t mind the slippers or the fact that he wore them without socks like some kind of fraudulent prince. But the black velvet ones, with the monogrammed PNR in gold cord and a little gold crown, were way too much for me.
He was loyal to Wolfback, despite Evie’s occasional outcries that it was too small or too cold or too remote. And he’d remained loyal to me, of course. That second quarter at Berkeley, when things were tough, he read the complete textbook of my ab-psych class in a night and highlighted all essential terminology. (Next to a paragraph on autism, he wrote in the margin, “This sounds like me, doesn’t it?” Next to narcissism: “Me, too.”) Although he wasn’t pleased to learn that I’d declared psychology as my major. News of this, in fact, provoked a rare tantrum. “Oh, God,” he cried out, “how awful to be draining emotional bedpans for a living!”
I’d been busy draining his emotional bedpan most of the year already. The previous spring, when I’d come back from Hawaii, he had entered a state of emergency. Evie—or Madam X, as she was still called then—was on the brink of leaving her husband, then not on the brink, and then brinking again, a roller-coaster ride that my father did not enjoy or ever get used to, in spite of all his advice to me about what fun love was. For my part I’d grown very tired of Evie and the special grip she seemed to have on him.
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