“Okay, okay. Pretty good, really.”
They chat for a bit about what they’ve been up to. Same things. But there’s something bugging her. Debbie is one of the most straightforward people that Jim knows; if she’s irritated with you she just comes right out with it.
And she’s a good friend of Sheila Mayer’s.
So without too much delay it bursts out of her. “Jim, just what did you think you were doing about Sheila? I mean, you guys were allies for over four months, and then one day, wham, not a visit not a call! What kind of behavior is that?”
“Well,” Jim says uncomfortably. “I tried to call—”
“Bullshit! Bullshit! If you want to call someone you can get through to them, you know that. You can leave a message! There’s no way you tried to call her.” She points a finger at him accusatively and anger makes her voice harsh: “You screwed her, Jim! You fucked her over!”
Jim hangs his head. “I know.”
“You don’t know! I visited her after you suddenly disappeared out of her life, and I found her sitting in her living room, putting together one of Humphrey’s jigsaw puzzles, one of those ten-thousand-piece ones. That’s all she would do! And when she was done with that one she went out and bought some more, and she came back home and that’s all she did was sit there in her living room and put together those stupid fucking jigsaw puzzles, for a whole month!”
Eyes flashing, face flushed, relentlessly she holds Jim’s gaze: “And you did that to her, Jim! You did that to her.”
Long pause.
Jim’s throat is constricted shut. He can’t take his eyes from Debbie. He nods jerkily. The corners of his mouth are tight. “I know,” he gets out.
She sees that he has gotten it, that he sees the image of Sheila at that coffee table, understands what it means. Her expression shifts, then; he can see that she’s still his friend, even when she’s furious with him. Somehow that makes the anger more impossible to deny. And even though he’s gotten it, Debbie is so angry that that isn’t, at the moment, quite enough. Perhaps she has thought it would mean more to her. Jim can see her remembering the sight herself; her friend studiously sifting through the pieces, focusing on them, not letting her attention stray anywhere else; suddenly Debbie’s blinking rapidly, and abruptly she turns and walks off. And he sees the image better than ever; it’s burned into him by Debbie Riggs’s distress.
“Oh, man,” he says. He turns and leans on the balcony rail. Headlights and taillights swim through the night. He feels like he’s swallowed one of the flower pots by his elbow: giant weight in his stomach, tasting like dirt.
Jigsaw puzzles.
Why did he do it?
For Virginia Novello. But what about Sheila? Well, Jim didn’t think of her. He didn’t really believe that he mattered enough that anyone would care about him. Or he didn’t really believe in the reality of other people’s feelings. Of Sheila Mayer’s feelings. Because they got in the way of what he wanted to do.
He sees these reasons clearly for the first time, and disgust washes over him in a great wave.
Suddenly he sees himself from the outside, he escapes the viewpoint of consciousness and there’s Jim McPherson, no longer the invisible center of the universe, but one of a group of friends and acquaintances. A physical person out there just like everyone else, to be interacted with, to be judged! It’s a dizzying, almost nauseating experience, a physical shock. Out of body, look back, there’s this skinny intense guy, a hollow man with nothing inside to define him by—defined by his fashionable ally and his fashionable beliefs and his fashionable clothes and his fashionable habits, so that the people who care about him—Sheila—
Empty staring at a jigsaw puzzle. Concentrate on it. The headlights all blur out.
50
Stewart Lemon’s sitting at his desk, in a reverie. It’s been another miserable morning, Elsa keeping up the silent treatment and walking around the house mute, like a naked zombie … how long has it been since she stopped speaking? Lemon sits and dreams of leaving her for his secretary, starting a new alliance, free of such a long history of pain. But if he leaves he’ll lose the house. And doesn’t Ramona have an ally? Ah, it’s a fantasy; looked at realistically it falls apart. So that means he has to continue with Elsa.…
Ramona buzzes. Donald Hereford is in Los Angeles on Argo/Blessman business, and has decided to drop on down for a visit. He’ll be here in half an hour.
Lemon groans. What a day! It’s always tense for him when Hereford comes by, especially lately. Given the various troubles LSR is having, the visits can only be in the nature of judgments—check-ups to see whether Argo/Blessman’s aerospace subsidiary is worth keeping.… This is even more true when there is no specific reason for the visit, as in this case.
So as much as he tries to compose himself, he is nervous as Hereford arrives. He leads him into his office and they sit down. Hereford looks at the ocean as he listens to Lemon go over the latest on the various LSR projects of note.
“How’s the appeal of the Stormbee decision coming?”
“The court rules on it end of this week or the beginning of next. Did you see the GAO report?” Hereford shakes his head briefly. Lemon describes the report. “It’s pretty favorable,” he concludes, “but our lawyers can’t tell if it will be enough to sway Judge Tobiason. They think it should, but given Tobiason’s background they aren’t making any promises.”
“No.” Hereford sighs. “I wonder about that case.”
“Whether it was…” Lemon was going to say, “a good idea to protest the decision,” when he recalls that it was Hereford’s idea.
Hereford looks up at him from under mildly raised eyebrows, and laughs. “A good idea? I think so. We had to show the Air Force that they can’t just flaunt the rules and walk over us. But we’ve done that, now, I think. They’ve had to kowtow to the GAO pretty seriously. So that whatever Tobiason says, we may have accomplished our goals in the matter.”
“But—winning the contract?”
“Do you think the Air Force would ever allow that, now?”
Lemon considers it in silence.
Hereford says, “Tell me all the latest about the Ball Lightning program.”
Now it’s Lemon’s turn to sigh. In a matter-of-fact voice he describes the latest round of troubles the program has been experiencing. “McPherson has put them onto tracking the ICBMs longer, in a phased array, so that their defenses can be overcome, and it looks as promising as anything we’ve tried. But the Air Force specs don’t really allow for anything more than the first two minutes after launch, so we don’t know what they’ll make of this.”
“You have asked them?”
“Not yet.”
Hereford frowns. “Now the Air Force already has test results that show we could do it in the two minutes, right?”
“Under certain special circumstances, yes.”
“Which are?”
“Well, a stationary target, mainly.…”
Slowly and patiently Hereford drags the whole story out of Lemon. He gets Lemon to admit that the early test results reported by Dan Houston’s team could be interpreted as fraudulent if the Air Force wanted to get hard about it. And since LSR has gotten hard in the Stormbee matter.…
Lemon, squirming in his seat, gets the strong impression that Hereford already knew all these details, that he has been making him go through them again just to bake him a little. Lemon tries to relax.
“McPherson’s involved with this one too?”
“I assigned him to it to help Houston out. McPherson is a good troubleshooter.” And troublemaker, he thinks. Don’t the two always go together?
Hereford nods. “I want to see the on-site facilities for the Ball Lightning program.” He stands. Lemon gets to his feet, surprised. They walk to the elevator, take it down to the ground floor and leave the executive building. Over to the engineer’s offices, and the big building housing the labs and the assembly plant. It’s your typical Irvine Triangle indus
trial architecture: two stories high and a couple hundred yards to a side, the walls made of immense squares of coppery mirrored glass, reflecting the obligatory lawns and cypress trees.
They enter and Lemon leads Hereford, by request, through all the labs and assembly rooms that have any part in the Ball Lightning program. Hereford doesn’t really look at any single one very closely, but he seems interested in determining their locations in the building, strangely enough. When he’s done doing that, he wants to survey the grounds outside the plant: the picnic benches in the small groves of cypress, the high security fence surrounding the property … it’s strange. Lemon’s beginning to get a headache thinking about it, out in the bright sun, coffee wearing off, stomach growling.… Finally Hereford nods. “Let’s go have some lunch.”
Orange County just can’t provide the kind of culinary sophistication that Manhattan boasts, which is galling to Lemon when he has to try to impress Hereford. He takes him down to Dana Point, and they eat at the Charthouse over the harbor. Hereford concentrates on the salad bar, eats with obvious relish. “They still can’t do this properly in New York, I’m not sure why.” A couple of young women in bathing suits sit at the next table, and Lemon says, “Yes, there are certain advantages to living in California.” Hereford smiles briefly.
When they’re done eating Hereford asks, “So what do you make of this rash of sabotages against defense contractors in this area?”
Ah ha. Here might be the explanation for the inspection of the grounds. Lemon says, “Our security thinks it’s a local group of refusniks, and they’re working with the police on it. Apparently they won’t attack any place where there are people working, because they don’t want to kill or injure anyone. So we’ve taken the precaution of having several night watchmen in the plant, as well as people patrolling the perimeter of the grounds, and the beach below us. And we announced the fact at a press conference—it was pretty well reported.”
Hereford is disturbed by this. “You mean you’re assuming these saboteurs won’t make a mistake, or change their policy? If it is indeed their policy?”
“Well…”
Hereford shakes his head. “Get all the night watchmen out of the building.”
“But—”
“You heard me. The risk is too great. I don’t like the idea of using people’s lives as a shield, not when we’re dealing with an unknown enemy.” He pauses, purses his lips. “The truth is, we’ve got reason to believe that the sabotage out here is backed by a very large, very professional group.”
Lemon raises his eyebrows in unconscious imitation of Hereford. “Not the Soviets!”
“No no. Not directly, anyway. The truth is it may be one of our competitors, providing the money, anyway.”
Lemon’s eyebrows shoot up for real. “Which one?”
“We’re not sure. We’ve penetrated the organization on a lower level, and naturally the links between levels are well concealed.”
“I suppose it would have to be one of the companies that hasn’t been hit.”
“Not necessarily.”
Now, this statement turns certain tumblers in Lemon’s mind. He’s silent for a time as he considers the implications of what Hereford has said. A company attacks others to harm their work and eventually damage their reputation for efficiency with the Air Force. Then it attacks itself to keep suspicion away from it. And, at the same time, it could use the attack on itself to get rid of something potentially damaging in and of itself. Sure, it makes sense.
But say another company learned it was going to be attacked; and say it had something, say it had a program that was in really serious trouble for one reason or another.…
“Should we increase our security on the perimeter?” Lemon asks, testing his hypothesis.
“No reason to.” Around Hereford’s eyes there is an amused crinkle; perhaps he thinks that Lemon is dense, perhaps he is amused that Lemon has finally gotten it; no way of telling. “We’ve done what we can, I think. Our insurance is in good shape, and all we can do is hope for the best.”
“And … and get the night watchmen out of there.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you … do you have any information that indicates we might become…”
“A target?” Hereford shrugs. This goes too far, it shouldn’t be talked about. “Nothing definite enough to go to the police with.” But his eyes, Lemon thinks, his eyes; they look through the map of the Caribbean on their table, and they know. They know.
Lemon sits back in his seat, sips at his Pinot blanc. He’s been let in on it, really. If he’s smart enough to put it together, then he’s in the know. Maybe he had to be. Still, it’s a good sign.
And this means that maybe, just maybe, something will happen soon that will get him off the hook with the Ball Lightning program. Get LSR off the hook as well. And insurance … incredible. He swallows the wine.
51
Back at work in the First American Title Insurance and Real Estate Company, back at work in his night classes, Jim finds he cannot keep Sheila Mayer and her jigsaw puzzles from his mind. Now it’s the principal element of the uneasiness that oppresses him. And he can’t escape it.
Hana is still working hard, she has no time. Hana is working, he is not.
Finally, impelled to it, he sits at his computer and stares at the screen. He’s got to work, to really work, he’s got to. Tonight it’s as much an escape from his life, from his uneasiness, as anything else. But any motive will do at this point.
He thinks about his poetry. He considers the poetry of his time. The thing is, he doesn’t like the poetry of his time. Flashy, deliberately ignorant, concerned only with surfaces, with the look, the great California image, reflected in mirrors a million times.… It’s postmodernism, the tired end of postmodernism, which makes utterly useless all his culturevulturing, because for postmodernism there is no past. Any mall zombie can write postmodern literature, and in fact as far as Jim can tell from the video interviews, that’s who is writing it. No, no, no. He refuses. He can’t do that anymore.
And yet this is his time, his moment; what else can he write about but now? He lives in a postmodern world, there is no way out of that.
Two of the writers most important to Jim wrote about this matter of one’s subject. Albert Camus, and then Athol Fugard, echoing Camus—both said that it was one’s job to be a witness to one’s times. That was the writer’s crucial, central function. Camus and the Second World War, then the subjugation of Algeria—Fugard and apartheid in South Africa: they lived in miserable times, in some ways, but by God it gave them something to write about! They had something to witness!
While Jim—Jim lives in the richest country of all time, what’s happening man, nothing’s happening man.… Jack-in-the-Box is faster than McDonald’s!
My Lord, what a place to have to be a witness to.
But how did it get this way?
Hmm. Jim mulls that over. It isn’t really clear, yet; but something in that question seems to suggest a possible avenue of action for him. An approach.
But that brings up a second problem: it’s all been done before.
It’s like when his English teacher at Cal State Fullerton told the class to go out and write a poem about autumn. Great, Jim thought at the time. First of all, we live in Orange County—what is autumn to us? Football season. Wetsuits for surfing. Like that. He’s read that Brahms’s Third Symphony is autumnal, he’s read that the rhythms of the Book of Psalms are autumnal—okay, so what’s autumn? Brahms’s Third Symphony! The Book of Psalms! That’s the kind of circles you run in, when the natural world is gone. Okay, take those fragments and try to make something of it.
I listen to Brahms
And watch the Rams
I read from Psalms
We are only lambs
Putting on our wetsuits
To surf the autumn waves.
Hey, pretty good! But then the professor gets out “To Autumn” by John Keats, and reads it aloud. Oh. Wel
l. Take your poem and eat it. In fact scratch that topic entirely, it’s been done before to perfection. Well fine! Ain’t no such topic in OC anyway!
The trouble is that if you start that process you quickly find that every topic in the world goes out the window the same way. It’s either been covered to the max by the great writers of the past, or else it doesn’t exist in OC. Usually both.
Be a witness to what you see. Be a witness to the life you live. To the lives we live.
And why, why, why? How did it get this way?
Back to that again. All right. Make that the orientation point, Jim thinks, the organizing principle, the Newport Freeway of your writing method. He thinks of In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams. Williams’s book is a collection of prose meditations on various figures of American history, explaining it all with that fine poet’s eye and tongue. Of course Jim can’t duplicate that book: he doesn’t have any more writing ability than Williams had in his little fingernail. Every time WCW cut his fingernails, Jim thinks, he lopped off ten times more talent than I will ever have, and wrapped it in newspaper and tossed it in the wastebasket. He giggles at the thought. Somehow it makes him feel freer.
Duplication isn’t the problem, anyway. It’s OC Jim is concerned with, Orange County, the ultimate expression of the American Dream. And there aren’t any great individuals in OC’s history, that’s part of what OC means, what it is. So he couldn’t follow Williams’s program even if he wanted to.
But it gives him a clue. Collectively they made this place. And so it has a history. And tracing this history might help to explain it, which is more important to Jim, now, than just witnessing. How it got to its present state: “The Sleepwalkers and How We Came to Be.” He laughs again.
If he did something like that, if he made that his orienting point, then all his books, his culturevulturing, his obsession with the past—all that could be put to use. He recalls Walter Jackson Bate’s beautiful biography of Samuel Johnson, the point in it where Bate speaks of Johnson’s ultimate test for literature, the most important question: Can it be turned to use? When you read a book, and go back out into the world: can it be turned to use?
The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 29