HOPE FOR CHANGE... But Settle for a Bailout (12 page)

“It doesn’t come right away,” said Larry.
“Six weeks or so.”

“Hey, that’s okay,” said Lori. “You got a
pretty stable thing going at home, so you just gotta hang tight for
a month or two.”

Two of the men from the bar migrated to our
group, and as Larry and Lori were talking, they asked December if
she would sign their conference badges. The second asked her to
sign his arm.

“And Larry’s gonna be my banker,” said
Larry, pointing to me. “I mean Lawrence.” Larry’s face brightened.
“You can
all
work for me. You don’t have to, like,
do
stuff, but you can all work for me and I’ll, like, just give you
money.”

Three more men came over, asking December
for autographs. The first asked her to sign his bald head. She used
a marker the second one had to write out “D.C. missmilkshakes.com”
as he leaned in close to her, before a bell staff worker approached
and shooed him and his friends away from December.

.

“Where’s Lori,” Larry asked, back in my
room.

“Down swimming,” said December. “Been down
dere forever,”

Larry took a towel from the bathroom and
headed out.

.

Lori was wearing the swimsuit combo from
Harris Ranch and paid no notice to Larry, as he dangled his feet in
the pool. Lori swam another twenty minutes before joining Larry at
the pool’s edge.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi,” he said.

“You okay, buddy?”

“Just worried.”

“I’d think your worrying days are over,”
said Lori, hopping up, out of the pool. They sat together on the
edge of the pool. She had wrapped the towel Larry brought around
herself and reached to hold Larry’s hand. “Why’re you worried?”

“Everyone in my family who’s got money,”
said Larry, “it fucked ‘em up.” He kicked at the water. “I don’t
want to end up like my dad.”

“Well, just have Lawrence take care of all
that business and you’ll be fine,” said Lori. “He’s good with that
shit. Just give it to him. You can be like your grandmother. She’s
not messed up over money.”

“I suppose,” said Larry.

“I gotta go back, tho,” said Lori. “I love
you, but I gotta get home and return this car. I may not have a job
when I get back, but I’m not gonna get tossed in the klink for
theft.” Lori stood, and Larry did as well. She put the towel on a
lounger and slipped on a pair of cut-offs and a tee-shirt. “And
please take December with you guys.”

“She seems to like you better,” said
Larry.

“She likes the orgasms,” said Lori, “but I
don’t like being a sex toy.”

The two began walking back to the room.

.

December sorted through the items in her
suitcase, counting swimsuits before putting them in. She
occasionally glanced over to Lori, her eyes lingering.

“Oh, I just have my card,” said Larry. “I
don’t have any actual cash, so I can’t give you anything to get
home. They gotta have an ATM here.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Lori. “I have
enough to get home. I just want to get back. Hotels and fancy
eating are tripping me out. This all feels really foreign to
me.”

“I’m going with Blondie,” said December,
packing the last of her things, and zipping and locking her
suitcase. “I got business to take care of and this is seriously
throwing off my timing.” She looked at Lori as a sailor would look
at a girl on a beach. “Besides, I’m going where the fun is.”

“Fine,” said Lori. “If we just drive, and
get there... that’s fine. I just wanna get home.”

“Oh, I’ll take you home, Blondie….”

Chapter Eight

Astrid’s Travels

Emma Mathilde van der Bix carried a
leather-bound album across to the dining room table and sat, the
morning sun streaming in through beaded crystal panes and breaking
into the colors of the rainbow.

Pushing aside a plate with toast and cheese,
she opened the heavy leather flap and lifted up a large magnifying
glass that had sat next to her glass of orange juice. She looked
closely at each of the six photos on the front page, of her tall,
thin, elegantly-dressed, blonde mother, clearly engaged in pleasure
travel.

“Astrid, San Francisco, 1931, w/ Harald
Lander,” read her father’s handwriting on an image of the two
riding a cable car. Next to it, another image, of a deeply-wrinkled
Chinese man playing a single-stringed instrument.

Emma opened the book to the back, and pulled
out a faded envelope holding several dozen pages of onion-skin
typing paper. At the top of the page she read from were typed the
words “First Tutor”:

“
Oct 1927 – Emma’s first tutor
stayed with us only a short time. The child is a niece of A’s
colleague from the Royal Troupe and quickly took up the role of
older sibling, with Emma too small for book learning and the child
little able to offer much beyond companionship. She proved helpful
until she would wander off to the seashore or the Pike and its
pleasure zone. When we motor across San Pedro bay to the Seafarer’s
Church, the tutor lay on the foredeck of the skiff – the sons of
the Swedes and the Norwegians watching our approach with great
interest. She rode without a word in the Vanderlip’s buckboard,
alongside their stable hand, as we climbed the Hill by wagon, to
reach Nansen Field for Constitution Day festivities. While adults
listened to speeches, she and the stablehand ate cookies and
danced. The families brought all variety of home-brewed beer,
saying Astrid should move from backward Long Beach to the Hill,
where people could drink beer with less fear. The tutor was not shy
there either. She spent many long afternoons riding in the
buckboard. Her marriage to the Vanderlip’s stable hand soon brought
on the need for a new tutor.”

Emma delicately pulled her finger across the
typed words, creating a tiny smudge.

.

The Old Man afforded no display of interest
in Carl’s childhood, asking no questions when the boy would ride
his bicycle to watch local aviator Earl Dougherty land his
aeroplane on the shoreline. The boy’s love of flight merely made it
easier for the Old Man to force Carl to join him in taking the
Pacific Electric Red Car to the Dominguez hills every morning for
ten days, to pass out fliers advertising home sales in Long Beach
to the vast crowds gathered for the great air show of 1910. Carl
marveled at a sky filled with all manner of flying craft, as he sat
at a folding table bearing a sign for “v.d. Bix Land Co., Long
Beach, Ca.” The Old Man scoffed when later that year Carl tried to
enlist in the army, but said nothing when, just after his 17th
birthday, Carl was visited at home by a colonel, who told the Old
Man that his son would rise quickly through the ranks, as there
were very few soldiers with any background in flight. In 1912, Carl
van der Bix, then 18, was commissioned a lieutenant and assigned as
a mechanic at the army’s air field in Los Angeles and, later, San
Francisco. When America went to war, in 1917, and Carl’s unit was
deployed, he made captain, at 23. He was in the air, training a
pilot, when word came that Congress had promoted Carl to major, at
24.

Carl met Astrid Ullagård – the Scandinavian
dancer – after the Armistice had been signed, ending the Great War.
The tall Yank who carried a ukulele and could sing and dance like a
stage performer traveled the Continent and sent letters home, with
addresses of where to wire cash. Soon came mentions of a ballerina
in a royal troupe he had met in Paris at a benefit for the wounded.
“Don’t worry about me,” Carl wrote from Brest, where unreported in
the letter, he had proposed marriage to his ballerina, several
years his junior and considered a likely Principal Dancer with her
Royal Troupe. “War damage profound,” wrote Carl, on a card from
Amsterdam, where perhaps space did not permit mention of the points
that Carl and Astrid were negotiating, if she were to forever
forego the possibility of attaining a rank in this troupe – older
then America itself – which five generations of her family had not
reached in dancing on the same stage. In Carl’s last letter, from
Stockholm, where the couple stayed with her friends, he wrote
expansively, with suggestions of a life in Europe for himself, and
asked only for money to last til spring in Copenhagen, where
holidays and the royal audience ensured remarkable productions with
the woman he intended to marry. No cash came from America. Only a
telegram, reading: “
SINGLE PASSAGE AWAITS
SOUTHAMPTON
.”

Upon his return, Carl fought the Old Man’s
insistence that he join the family business, but soon shifted,
accepting a shingle, insisting that Astrid’s arrival would bring
prestige within the community and credibility to the family.

Long after the Old Man said yes, Astrid
hedged, saying her Artistic Director was keeping alive talk of her
becoming Principal Dancer, though he made no moves to alter the
troupe’s assignments. Carl promised a private suite constructed
atop the three floors, made of the finest European materials and
designed by an architect of her choice, with a dance studio
suitable for recitals that would honor a visiting maestro or
visitor. She would enjoy sunshine virtually every day and Long
Beach was now a city 30 years old, and had its own pleasure zone,
municipal airport and seaport, as well as elegant hotels and
department stores, and the Red Car trolley line that linked the
town to Los Angeles and Newport Beach, each less than an hour
away.

In 1923, Astrid arrived to fanfare – a
prominent dancer in an ancient royal European troupe, arriving by
ship from Copenhagen, to marry the sole legitimate heir of one of
the most powerful land dealers in town. She stood on the deck of
the steamship, waving a red-and-white Danish flag, waiting to join
her army aviator to live in a suite designed by the noted Norwegian
architect, Tim Olson, and constructed of Italian stone and Baltic
lumber, built above the van der Bix mansion. An elegant, enclosed
grand marble stairway – complete with an electric, mechanical
gliding chairlift to ascend the four flights – led to a main entry
that centered itself upon the most spectacular gift of all: a
friend of the bride’s father had given the wedded couple an
alabaster female nude carved by the Danish master sculptor, Bertel
Thorvaldsen. Sunlight streaming in caused the pink alabaster to
glow, like human skin illuminated in a spotlight. So far as anyone
knew, it was the first Thorvaldsen on the west coast, perhaps in
all of America.

.

She dug randomly with her fingers into the
scrapbook. Looking with the magnifying glass to a page containing
six photos, five of Astrid Ullagård and a group image, Emma spent a
moment with the group shot and turned to the next page.

She placed a finger on the chest of her
father, in a third picture, he standing with his wife and Harald
Lander, in front of San Francisco’s grand Opera building. Written
on the edge of the photo was, “1931.” Two years later, Lander – a
fellow dancer who rose to become the new Artistic Director of the
Danish Royal Ballet – sent for Astrid, asking her to return to the
stage as Principal Dancer.

“Mor, before leaving for the 1933 season in
Copenhagen,” read another caption, below a photo showing Astrid
standing, smiling, at the base of a gangplank to the ship that
carried her from Long Beach to Europe. She held an American flag in
one hand and the Danish flag in the other.

Emma rested her finger on one of the photos
showing her father, raising the magnifying glass so she could see
his face, his eyes, his smile.

Chapter Nine

Waiting for the Dough

When Lori left with the hot Italian or
Spanish girl, the air got sucked out of my vacation. The last thing
I wanted was to drive Larry van der Bix around in a rented car, but
I did agree to go to San Francisco, with a stop in Berkeley, before
driving south.

“Upstairs,” said Larry, carrying his double
cappuccino and croissant to the loft of the Cafe Mediterraneum, on
Telegraph Avenue. College kids with laptops and people who looked
homeless slumped and slouched in close quarters, virtually every
table filled; everyone drinking from wide, white, porcelain mugs.
With virtually every table filled, Larry squeezed his way to a pair
of chairs at a small round table alongside the railing that
overlooked the incredibly busy ground floor.

“Coffee for the proletariat,” I muttered
aloud.

Larry waved, as though I would miss him as
he stood next to the table, ten feet ahead of me.

“It’s good you have some time before the
check gets cut,” I said, “as we can come up with some investments
and shells that allow you to hold on to more of the money.”

“I don’t care about that,” said Larry. “It
isn’t about the money. It’s the freedom.” He pulled the tip of
croissant away and ate it.

“Larry, you can create ‘freedom’ for every
van der Bix that comes after you. This jackpot is big enough that
if you handle it right, your investments could allow you to reach a
billion dollars of value in your lifetime.”

Larry lifted and chewed away on his
turkey-and-cheese croissant, melted cheese clinging in a thin
string to his chin. I pointed to my own chin, and Larry reached up
with his other hand and brushed. Seeing the string of cheese, he
lifted his hand to his mouth. “If you’ll notice,” said Larry,
taking another bite of his croissant, and, after chewing and
swallowing, continued, “I don’t have kids. I’m never gonna have
kids. So this isn’t about me handing money down the line.”

“What do you mean, you’re not gonna have
kids?” I asked. “How can you know that?”

“Lawrence,” said Larry, “look at me. Do I
look like someone who’s gonna get married? gonna make some woman
pregnant? gonna raise a bunch of kids?” He sipped from his coffee,
leaving foam on his upper lip. “I mean, seriously.”