by See, Carolyn
I’d had lots of strange men up for lunch in the old Topanga cabin over the years: that Pentagon colonel who brought the funny lunch, the brother of the television producer who talked about exposing himself. But this was weirder yet, because each of us knew it could be serious. And because of differences in our accents, social class, and ignorance of each other’s backgrounds we understood about one word in three that we said to each other.
“It’s a question of parity,” John said at one point about consideration between the sexes. I heard “parody.” “He’s a Coffin from Maine,” he told me. I’d never heard of a coffin from Maine. We both drank a lot of wine. I had to look at all those climbing photos. I asked him what he wanted out of the rest of his life. It was a beautiful Topanga afternoon, green trees clicking against windows on three out of four sides around us. He was sixty-one; I was forty.
“I want to travel before I die,” he said, “and I want to get back to my writing.” At the very time he spoke—despite those hearty backpacking photos—Mr. Espey had walking pneumonia and was about 70 percent convinced he was going to keel over and die. (For the first weeks of our courtship I thought it was my animal magnetism that made his temperature go up every time we embraced.) If he hadn’t thought he was going to die, he might not have made those heedless remarks about starting to write again.
John had two grown daughters, Alice and Susan, and a grandson, Jordan. When Susan had gone back to school so that she could support her son, John had stayed home with his grandson. John—because of the length of his wife’s illness, maybe—seemed divorced from the world. He thought you needed a tuxedo to go down to the dress circle of the Music Center. On the other hand, he knew medieval Italian. At one of the first university luncheons we went to together, I made the mistake of saying to an elderly matron seated next to me that my mother was Irish. “Irish!” the matron echoed, “the Irish are the servant class!”
Well, fuck you, lady.
I played to my own strong suit in those first days. John felt that we should be together, and be faithful. “Oh, I don’t think I could ever be faithful to anyone again,” I said meanly. “I just don’t think I’d want to tie myself down like that.”
Does it ever matter how two people get together? Does anybody ever care except the two people? What kept John and me together, especially during the first two or three years, was John’s relentless goodness, and the fact that we both loved to drink.
John Espey said that this picture of me, upset with pigs in our front yard in Mazatlán, made him consider that there might be a second woman in his life.
When Clara, nine years old and used to the idea of boyfriends who came and went, realized John had it in his mind to stay, she spat in his bottle of Coca-Cola. He smiled, chugalugged the Coke, and then chased it with about four fingers of Stoly. When he and I took my mother to a white Protestant resort that was over her head socially—and mine too—we stuck her in bed and headed for the bar, where we struck up an acquaintance with a brain surgeon and his wife. “There will always be brain tumors, so we’ll never have to worry about recessions,” the wife said brightly. “Thank God for that!” And martinis, thank God for them.
Clara told John straight out: “I’m jealous of you!” He retaliated by picking up Clara and her classmates from school every day, taking them to drama lessons in the Topanga Community House, along with sacks full of nuts and cookies and raisins, because Canyon kids were always hungry.
John got up every morning and made me coffee. He told silly stories. We drank a lot of vodka, and many of our memories are simpleminded and one-dimensional: sitting at bars down at Warner Hot Springs, or up in San Francisco, or out on a stony beach in Hawaii, or up in Oregon, or Washington, or over in Nevada or Colorado, drinking martinis in a happy haze. We liked each other; we loved each other. We didn’t have all that much in common, but, maybe again, we did.
Because it only looked as if John had come from a stable, happy home. (And he fostered this impression, with his graceful narratives.) In reality, he and his sister had been the only two American kids in the Shanghai Presbyterian Mission compound. His father was plagued with religious melancholia. (John himself had weathered two bouts of clinical depression.) John and his sister had been sent upcountry to a boarding school in Kuling, and such was his loneliness that he sometimes stole one of his mother’s cat’s-eye necklaces to wear when he was at school, under his collar …
He was too tall for China. And he was too thin. And he suffered from asthma. He was too smart for the lot of them—those missionaries who wouldn’t dance or play cards or drive anywhere on Sundays. He’d escaped into his studies, but when he won his Rhodes scholarship no one but his sister back in Shanghai had believed it. When Knopf bought his first book, his father had asked, “Are you sure you’re not putting any of your own money into this, John?” And on his forty-fifth birthday, John had received a letter from his missionary father reminding him that it was still not too late to “begin living a good and useful life.”
Our lives changed. I bought a bigger house in Topanga and invited John to live with me. We created a bit of a stir at UCLA, and I got to experience being the world’s oldest living floozy. I lost one of my best friends—Joan, the giddy, tortured girl I’d known since the seventh grade, the divorcée who, along with her three bundled-up kids and my two, would head off with me for a night of giggling at the China Palace. “I can’t stand your happiness,” she said. “I can’t stand that you’re with John.”
Night after night we’d put our families together in varying combinations—with varying degrees of success. But at lunch just the two of us played hooky at a restaurant in Westwood, eating crabmeat and papaya salad, washed down with three martinis. Oh, happy, harmless daze!
My liver rebelled. I had to stop drinking for a while. We made up new rules: we drank only when we were over the county line (which made for a lot of nice road trips out of LA). We moved toward a compromise. We drank white wine; we drank champagne. But nowhere in the story of John and me is there ever going to turn up the bitter nighttime brawl that starts out: “The trouble with you is …!” Because in twenty years that has never happened.
John Espey as a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, posing mighty hard.
Our lives began to slide into sleepy routine, punctuated by simple, soothing treats.
Lisa had been out of the house for a few years. Her childhood had been extremely rigorous: she’d started as a happy kid who’d loved to imitate kittens, but my divorce from her father had knocked that sense of joy right out of her. She’d been happy with Clara when she was born, and unbelievably sweet to her, but my divorce from Tom had modulated her affection into hard responsibility. While I earned a living, Lisa got stuck with endless maternal chores.
As a teenager in Topanga in the sixties she must have had her share of high times, but she tells me now: “Just say I smoked my first joint with my grandfather and Mom, and I haven’t touched the stuff for over twenty years!” Because of the circumstances of financial deprivation and divorce, she’d worked as hard as any of us just to keep afloat. She had a charming and natural ditzyness that had been crusted over by caution, control, dignity, and—I hate to even say it—a certain sadness. She’d found out, way too young, what can happen in a life. She was stunningly beautiful, fairy-tale beautiful, with translucent skin, delicate limbs, and flaming hair that hung to her knees, but she seemed careless about her beauty. She just blew it off. She was naturally good: once, carrying a rowdy Clara up the switchback path, she slipped and fell into the tramline bed. Instinctively, she twisted her body so that she landed on her back, saving Clara. And Lisa had a bad back ever afterward. She was the strongest of us all.
But after college she’d gone off to Greece with a nice guy named Roy. She’d put in years of grinding work. It was time for a good time—and she’d been studying demotic Greek for years.
Richard Kendall and Lisa See Kendall. I love the looks on their faces.
The newly
weds and their parents: Richard See, Carolyn See, Richard Kendall, Lisa See Kendall, Elaine Kendall, Herbert Kendall.
Somewhere in the year 1978 Lisa broke up with her boyfriend. She came home to live with us, and we—for fun—collaborated on two popular novels (where characters got to do what they wanted to do instead of what they had to do). Weekend after weekend we’d “play” Lotus Land. John, Lisa, and I, aided by plates of frozen waffles and caviar and bottles of champagne, either cheap or good, sat down to work. That champagne overcame the forty-two years that separated us—twenty-one between John and me, twenty-one between me and my older daughter. There were Sunday afternoons where we laughed so hard we fell off our couches. With enough Château Topanga in us we thought we were the funniest people in the world, and maybe we were.
Lisa married Richard Kendall, a wonderful man. It was a swell wedding, in the Lanai of the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. No one in our family that I could remember had actually done this the way my beautiful daughter did—walked down the aisle in a knock-’em-out dress—danced the afternoon away, looking more radiant than life itself. Her father had given up drinking years before and wasn’t going to start again now. He was an ornament to his daughter, looking handsome in his tux, with the same goatee he’d always sported, but now it was silver.
In the next fifteen years or so, John Espey and I would travel—back to China, twice—where he would find the old mission, and the patch of grass where the Japanese had blasted his parents’ home at the beginning of World War II. We traveled up the Rhine so I could write Rhine Maidens. We traveled to Paris for Christmas, and to Oxford for the Rhodes Scholars reunion. We traveled, as he’d said he wanted to. And we wrote. Some would say, big deal! But for us it was a big deal. When people would ask, “How’s John?” I’d say, “Oh, fine,” knowing that was a great conversation stopper, but he never did anything crazy, so what was there to report?
And John, after a certain amount of stalling, began to publish again, so much that one friend of ours remarked crabbily, “Who does he think he is, Grandma Moses?”
Then, finally, as we were flying to New York for a meeting of the National Book Critics Circle, John picked up a copy of Denis Wholey’s The Courage to Change, an anthology that chronicled the many ways that Americans from Jerry Falwell to Pete Townshend had stopped drinking. As I remember (and I remember it fuzzily, because I was scared to death of flying, and pouring down Bloody Marys as fast as the stewardess could bring them), John remarked that he thought he might stop drinking.
Well if he was going to, I would too, not that day because I was five Bloody Marys in the bag, and the plane hadn’t landed yet. But tomorrow, Sunday, before the NBCC convened on Monday, I would certainly stop with him, if that seemed to him like the right thing to do.
Sunday went by—we went to a matinee in Times Square and then came back to the Royalton, where I began to lose it. I thought about New York, and books, and all we wanted to do and hadn’t done yet, and all those critics I’d be meeting the next day: Elizabeth Hardwick and the woman who’d sat between me and Elizabeth Hardwick the year before and snubbed me so badly that when I looked in her direction all I saw was a seething morass of frizzy hair, never her face, so intent was she on attending to Elizabeth Hardwick. “I can’t do it, John. I need a drink. Just a beer, OK?”
He took me across to the Algonquin and bought me a beer in the lobby—two beers. He had a club soda. It was a tense time for us. He wanted a drink, and I was waiting for reproaches, either plain or fancy. But he never reproached me in the years that followed. We were close enough together now that I guess he trusted me not to drive a car off the road or throw up on his shoes or say something astonishingly cruel. I went on drinking—only white wine and champagne, but isn’t that what every alcoholic says, just as my stepdad Jim considered that he’d “stopped” drinking when he changed from scotch to vodka? I waited for the contemptuous look, or the rolled eye, or the zinging remark slung out at a party, but because John was so relentlessly good, none of those things ever happened. I believe John felt that you needed it as long as you needed it, and maybe his missionary parents had drummed it into him to judge not.
11. THE EMBARRASSING CALIFORNIANNESS OF IT ALL
Clara, Lisa, and me. We see abundance
everywhere!
Going back in time a couple of years—to 1976, when John and I moved into our new house in Topanga: it was kind of a jolt. The view was spectacular, celestial, but it was a new house, with nothing but scraped bare dirt around it. There were bourgeois things like a double garage and central heating and a scary yellow shag rug—wall to wall.
Clara didn’t like it. Lisa hadn’t come home yet, so just the three of us moved in. Tom and I went into one last screaming-and-hanging-up frenzy in a fight over a cat, who Tom insisted he wanted and wanted and then decided he didn’t want. Clara tried to be brave. Tom came into the kitchen a couple of times and opened the refrigerator looking for beer, but John took him to lunch and announced that if Tom did that again, John would hit him. Tom was enchanted. “Can you imagine? The guy said he’d hit me!” he told me on the phone, and then gave this match his limited blessing: “If anybody can live with you, he probably can.”
But it was hard—the cooking, the cleaning, John’s niceness—which could give you the heebie-jeebies sometimes. Mainly two things worried us: there was an eerie emptiness, even though we liked each other, loved each other. John’s first allegiance had to be to his daughters and grandson, and I had my own daughters to think of. The other worry was more concrete and pressing. Money. That mortgage. That gas bill. Food. So one afternoon when a plucky single mother, Lisa Connolly, called up and asked me to go to an afternoon “money seminar” for only ten bucks, I agreed.
In someone’s drab living room, a pleasant woman in a pink dress asked us all—about twenty dead-broke single moms—to please keep an open mind, and then began to talk to us about “scarcity consciousness” and “affirmations.” She suggested that our belief systems contributed directly and indirectly to the amount of money we had.
She suggested we take turns around the circle and say “My income increases daily, whether I’m working, playing, or sleeping,” or “My job is my pipeline by which I tap the infinite wealth of my United States economy.” One woman objected strongly. “It’s not my United States! And even if it were, the United States economy is going right into the toilet. What do you say to that?”
“I don’t know,” the woman replied hesitantly. “You want to say universal economy?” But the woman wanted her money back. The seminar leader, Susan Skye, displayed a small flash of temper. “What’s the big deal? You say ‘I’m broke, I’m going to lose this job, my boss hates me, I’ll never find a decent man,’ all the time! So what if you just say, ‘I stay on purpose joyously?’ Is that going to kill you or something? I mean, what do you want to do in your life?”
But this gaunt, gray, overworked mom didn’t know. Nobody had ever asked her.
“Well,” Susan said, “what if you went to a travel agent and said, ‘Give me a ticket out of here!’ And the guy said, ‘Where to, Madam?’ You couldn’t go anywhere if you didn’t know where you were going!”
When Susan suggested that we set up four bank accounts: one for daily life, one for “large purchases” like stereo equipment, one for investments, and one for permanent wealth, something you never spend but just look at and feel rich, about half the women looked as if they were going to throw up. “Put in a dollar a week,” Susan said. “Put in a quarter a week. That’ll be a quarter more than you have now!”
But some of us got pretty excited, and somewhere in the third hour of a four-hour seminar, Susan smiled. “You’re beginning to get it. This isn’t about money. Money is just the metaphor.” She talked about her two mentors: Leonard Orr and Leo Sunshine. “Leonard is the serious one. He sees the dark side of things. Leo is still a kid. He’s like a kid with a big new toy.”
This was November of 1976. In January of 1977,
Money magazine flew John and me to San Francisco to sit in on Leo’s two-day, four-night seminar, to debunk this New Age Fraud. On the hotel stairs to the mezzanine, I heard some guy say to his date: “This is supposed to be the most fun of all of them!”
And here in this (actually rather small) hotel meeting room the atmosphere was charged with anticipation. A young man in a purple velvet suit zoomed out and advised us to take a good look at the world we saw now, this Thursday night, because the one we’d see next Monday morning would be a different world, then Leo Sunshine appeared, cute and in his early twenties.
Leo was Brian Murphy in his other, less magical life. As a youth, he told us during the weekend, he’d run drugs from San Francisco to Tokyo and back. He’d got caught and his girlfriend, as he’d languished in an Asian jail, had sent him the devastating telegram: SENDING NO MONEY, DON’T WRITE. Leo did time in a second jail in Northern California, when Werner Erhardt himself had run an est seminar for the convicts and had repeated to them at some length that “they were responsible for their own condition.”
Leo bought the material, but he thought Werner was a glum kind of guy, and that he didn’t cover all the bases. When Leo got out of jail he went into a frenzy of New Age self-improvement—taking classes in judo, aikido, rolling-and-falling. He got Rolfed (and said that where it got him the most was in his right arm, from the many times he’d wanted to bash his mom). That didn’t keep him from taking a good backward glance at his mother and grandmother’s religion, Unity, which had started in the Midwest during the middle of the nineteenth century, and set great store by “affirmations,” “visualization,” “outflowing,” “treasure maps,” and so on. Leo persevered: he got “cleared” by Scientologists; he took classes in Feldenkries. “So then I realized I was the only one around who had all of it to offer,” he said modestly. “I thought I’d do a seminar of my own. Now we’re going to do a game about passing, and what you get to do is pass. Take as much money out of your pocket as you can be accountable for and start passing. Go ahead, get up. Walk around! Start passing.”