The Ruins of California (11 page)

My father popped his head in. “She’s asking what kind of tea you’d like, Inez.”

“Oh.”

“Chamomile or ginseng,” he said. “They are both kind of herbally tasting, except I guess the ginseng is a bit spicy. Yin and yang are male and female energy. I bet you’ve seen that yin/yang symbol—the circle with the black and white teardrops that fit together? It’s sort of a hippie icon.” He drew it on a little notepad to show me. “An ancient Chinese concept, but the hippies have taken it over as their own.” He laughed and turned to Justine, “Hey, Neighbor Girl, that smells marvelous.”

“Your favorite.”

“I thought my new favorite was lops suchuan.”

“Gunka nijing oolong.”

They both laughed.

“Oh,
thaaaat’s
right,” he said merrily. “But let’s not forget the effects of the red hibiscus. Wow. Wasn’t it red?”

It was hard to burst in. Were they still talking about tea? “I’ll have ginseng,” I said finally.

“Ginseng?” Justine said, seeming startled, as though she’d forgotten I was in the room.

“Good choice!” my father said, shaking himself out of reverie. “You’ll love this chamomile Justine’s got. I’ll have some, too.”

D
inner at El Bodega remained largely the same long ritual. The restaurant was small—only big enough for six or eight tables—and the ceiling was low, creating a cozy space where Hector played guitar, served dinner after an endless wait, and his bony wife with armpit
hair danced in the middle of the room while the clients ate paella. Justine seemed familiar with the drill, as though she’d been going there all her life.

“Pablo!”

Hector always called out my father’s name, as if he hadn’t just seen him the week before.

“Hola cabrón!” my father responded to his friend. “We’ll have three paellas. And whatever questionable flamenco you’re prepared to provide.”

There were laughs and a few more harmless jabs. Then, once we’d settled into a booth, the men discussed a new classical guitar album by Julian Bream and an appearance in town over the week by flamenco guitarist Paco Peña. “Aside from that den of inequity, Alegrías, there’s not much happening in town, flamenco-wise,” Hector said. He leaned his heavy hands on the edge of our table. He was a burly guy with a thick head of hair and furry arms. “And I can’t take Ernesto’s dancing anymore. I mean, why doesn’t he just put on a dress?”

“I know, I know,” my father laughed. “That red sash! Antonio’s good, though.”

“Oh, sure. That cat plays better than anybody else around,” Hector answered. “It’s good for the scene that he stays in San Francisco. Although I’m not sure why he does.”

Antonio was always discussed—and after a handful of Friday nights I’d spent watching the guitarist through the cigarette smoke at Alegrías, he seemed to me, and apparently to everyone, a fantastically attractive figure.
Manitas de plata.
He was still young—not much older than Whitman—and had the same dark looks as Whitman, and romantic hair that fell tragically in his eyes.

“Played a powerful
taranta
last week,” my father said.

“I heard, I heard,” said Hector. “He can bring it on, in spite of the jones. He’s got a real—”

“I know.” My father cut in.

“It’s gotten so bad that—” Hector looked over at me and didn’t continue. I was surprised, because I was usually invisible to him. We all were—the children or girlfriends of my father, probably because we had nothing intelligent to say about flamenco. So it was even more shocking when, in the next moment, Hector looked into my eyes.

“How’s your mother?”

I froze, momentarily shaken.

“I was thinking about her this week,” Hector continued, looking over at my father. “So gorgeous. Really added something to a production. Paco Peña was good, you know. But the troop is pretty bland. Didn’t you think so, Pablo? Cotton legs and no passion. They don’t have a Consuela Garcia.”

“Well, who does?” my father said, chucking uncomfortably. He was hoping this subject would be dropped soon.

“Oh, well, that’s true.” Hector was studying me, as though searching my face for something he’d lost. “Where’s she dancing these days?”

I felt myself growing hot—and I looked down at the table, almost involuntarily, when I realized that I was the only person at the table who knew the answer to Hector’s question. My father never asked me about my mother. And now, coming from Hector—how did he know my mother?—the conversation felt so personal, particularly after all the years that he’d treated me like I didn’t exist.

“She’s taking time off,” I said.

“Time off?” Hector looked over at my father, who shrugged. “What’s she taking time off for?” Hector continued. “I mean, if she’s not dancing what’s she doing?”

Not wanting to launch into a long description or reveal too much, suddenly feeling protective about Mom—Hector couldn’t possibly understand her or why she was dancing or not dancing—I came up with something as innocuous as possible. “Tennis,” I said. “She’s gotten into tennis.” This was suitably bland information, and the focus of attention might turn elsewhere.

“Tango?”
Hector asked.

My father perked up. “She’s gotten into—”

“Tennis,” I corrected.

The men shared a look and then returned their gaze to me, as if to demand elaboration. I felt a funny rush of power. I hadn’t realized that my mother generated this kind of interest—now or at any time. I looked over at Justine and wondered if it was okay to keep going, but I did anyway.

“She’s really good—a natural,” I said with a swelling of pride, parroting a line that I’d heard Coach Weeger say. “She’s dating the basketball coach at my school, and she’s already better than him.”

“Dating…” Hector had a twisted look on his face.

“The basketball coach,”
my father finished.

There was another long silence.

Hector shook his head. “Playing tennis. Jesus God.”

“I know,” my father agreed.

“Can you imagine?”

“No.”

“I’m so sorry,” Justine leaned over with a solemn whisper, as though there’d been a death in my family—the cause of which had been
the most gruesome accident imaginable. “Everybody says your mother was one of the great
flamencas
of her generation.”

She was?

W
hitman arrived at the airport the next morning. We waited for him at the gate—our new tradition—and he emerged with a sleepy face and bloodshot eyes. He was wearing a pair of army fatigues, a long-sleeved T-shirt that said
JACKS SURFBOARDS, HUNTINGTON BEACH PIER,
a necklace of brown beads, and a beige fisherman’s sweater tied around his waist. His hair was below his shoulders and sun-bleached to copper on its wispy ends.

He walked up to Justine first—gave her a kiss on the cheek and greeted her in a startlingly loud voice, as though trying to yell her awkwardness away. (It seemed to work.) Then he bent down, gave me a kiss that turned into a hug. He whispered in my ear, “Hey. Looking good.”

My father threw his arm around Whitman’s shoulder, and they walked ahead, their voices rising in humor. Something about Whitman’s bloodshot eyes. “Are you stoned?” I heard my father say. And then he and Whitman both smiled and broke into laughter. Whitman said something about “buds,” and they laughed again. “Hope you saved some for me.” Watching them from behind, I noticed that Whitman was as tall as my father now, but his body was stockier than my father’s and seemed stronger. His arms were muscular, and his neck had thickened. As they turned their heads toward each other, I noticed a slightly changed feeling between them, a kind of distance or wariness or mutual respect—it was hard for me to know which. The fraternizing of equals, perhaps. In the old days, when Whitman first moved to California with Patricia, my father
seemed to dote on him, encouraged his interests and eccentricities—and I’d always suspected that he favored my brother in some quiet, subtle way. They had male things in common, an interest in cars and motorcycles, natural history and physics, and they were always recounting some story about an explorer or military hero, Sir Edmund Hillary or Admiral Nelson. But now, since the summer, I guess, my father seemed to study Whitman with a judgmental eye. He was a man, and, I supposed, more was expected. My father seemed quick to criticize—or instruct. At the same time, I began to notice that my father was more lenient with me, still coddled me with flattery and indulgences. He doted on me and greeted almost every remark with an outburst of amusement and applause.

To Justine, though, my brother was like a young god—and capable of unleashing her most unguarded, enthusiastic self. At the baggage claim, when a handler emerged from a back room with Whitman’s surfboard encased in the sleeping bag and wrapped in duct tape, Justine rushed over to the sleeping bag, threw her thin arms in the air, and exclaimed, “Far out!”

“It looks like a mummy!” I called out, excited.

“Whitman,”
my father said, a little sourly. “What’s with all that duct tape? Don’t you think you might have overdone it? How are we going to get the board unpacked?”

We walked to the airport parking lot, where the two sports cars were parked together again. The men discussed wind resistance and aerodynamics—then attached four Styrofoam blocks to the roof of the MG. The mummy was carefully laid to rest on top and strapped on.

Justine and I rode in the Lotus—and I watched my father and Whitman talking in the MG as it moved along in traffic, a lane away.
They seemed cheerful and buoyant. After a few minutes, a lit joint was passing between them.

R
ipper Lane was a forbidding surf spot, called “Ripper Jacks” or simply “Rippers” by locals, and even then with an intonation of awe and wonder. There was no sand, no beach—only rocks, and most of them very pointy. The nonpointy ones were dotted here and there with sea lions that snarled and snapped at the air, when they woke up. Fog or morning haze hung over the spot, and waves seemed to loom out of nowhere and crash on the base of a low cliff. The kelp beds were so thick—an unusual variety with large pods the size of cannonballs—that when the waves rolled in, the pods rose up, too, and the surface of the swells looked like a seething tangle of snakes.

Aside from our pilgrimages to Fort Point—or the day my father took me across the bridge to the Marin Headlands—I had never been to the beach in Northern California. It was always too cold, too windy, and nothing like the beaches of the south, where the sand was toasty and the ocean warm enough for bathing in the spring and summer and sometimes into October. In the south, getting in the water didn’t require much courage or planning. In the north it seemed to require both.

It was freezing at Rippers and damp inside the shadows of a eucalyptus grove where my father and Justine parked the MG and the Lotus. The eucalyptus trees smelled like mint, but a bitter mint, so strong that it almost burned your eyes. How did Whitman stand the cold? This ran through my mind as he stood by the side of the MG and unfastened the mummy from its blocks on top of the car. He unzipped the top of the sleeping bag and easily slipped the
glistening green-and-blue board out of its casing, like a smooth bug emerging from a chrysalis, and leaned the board against a tree. He pulled off his army fatigues and wool sweater and slowly stretched into his long wetsuit.

Justine stood off by herself—not wanting to see Whitman changing, I suppose. She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a pair of high-heeled black boots. Her bracelets were heavy and abundant. Her hair was up in the topknot—but lots of tendrils were cascading down in the wind. To keep warm, my father wore a turtleneck under a heavy shearling jacket, and I’d put on three layers of clothes—all the tops that I’d brought for the weekend. When Justine saw me shivering, she opened the hatch of the Lotus and pulled out an enormous fur coat. “You better wear this,” she said. Her face was pink from the cold, and her eyes were very blue and insistent.

“Chinchilla,” Justine said, holding open the thick coat. It seemed like a huge dead animal with all its bones removed, and I stepped into the coat as if I were entering an entire room of fur. As soon as I got inside, I felt enveloped in warmth and the scent of patchouli.

The sky was gray and murky overhead—the color of the coat—and Whitman led us beyond the grove toward the open sky and where a narrow pathway ran along an edge of a cliff. There was something wild in the air, a kind of electricity and freshness from the sea spray and wind, and suddenly we were giddy, almost jubilant. We were all surfers now, as if Whitman had taken us into a new world and transformed us at the same time.

“Whitman, this is so exciting!” Justine cried out.

“Way out!” my father shouted. I’d never seen him look so happy to be anywhere—or so expectant of a good time.

As we drew closer to the water, the wind got stronger and whistled in my ears. I saw the gray ocean water far off. I heard Whitman say,
“Whoa,”
but it wasn’t until we arrived at the bluff that I saw what he meant. There were huge waves, coming one after another and breaking onto the rocky cliff. There was only one other surfer in the water, as far as I could tell—neither male nor female, old or young. Just a dark speck, way out, with a long white board.

“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” my father said to nobody in particular.

Whitman was silent.

“Whaddya think?” my father said. He was treading lightly, I could tell—not wanting to spoil things.

Whitman was undeterred. He walked past us with his shiny board under his arm, the leash dangling on the ground behind him.

I looked for a comfortable place on the cliff to sit down and watch—but at the same time I worried about the borrowed coat. Justine and my father remained standing, so I did, too. Whitman climbed down a pathway in the cliff that led to the rocks below and disappeared for a minute below us, and then reappeared as he made his way across the rocks. He moved slowly, gingerly. By the time he reached the water, he was a small figure in the distance. He strode through five yards of shore break, then carefully lowered himself to the board and paddled out.