The Ruins of California (16 page)

Justine? Had he mentioned coming to San Benito with her?

“She rides, you know. A beautiful rider.”

Marguerite kept some horses at the Arroyo Club, a part of her life that had always intrigued me. Why would my father and Justine come to San Benito—just to go to the races? It didn’t make sense. Had I known that Justine was an equestrian? I thought about the ponies in Griffith Park, the acrid smell of the stable, the little circle the ponies rode in, attached to metal arms like spokes of a wheel. Those were the only horses I’d ever ridden.

“It seems serious,” Marguerite was saying. “I suppose they might marry. Such a handsome couple. Don’t you think so, Inez?”

“Huh?”

“Paul and Justine Polk. They might marry.”

“No they won’t,” I said—probably with too much certainty.

“No?”

I shook my head. “He doesn’t believe in marriage.”

“Your father?”

“He doesn’t believe in it. He says it doesn’t work.” I smiled a little wickedly.

“Ha!” Marguerite cried out. “What a madman! Marriage doesn’t work
for him
, is more like it!” Her eyebrows lifted—and she suddenly looked a great deal younger. “Justine Polk is so lovely. Those blue eyes! And from a family that’s very…Well, how do you like her, Inez? She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she? Whitman seems completely enthralled.”

I shrugged.

“What?”

“She’s okay.”

Marguerite stifled a smile. “Just okay?”

“No, not really.”

“No?” Marguerite began to laugh really loudly—a deep, smoky cackling. It startled me, mostly because I had caused it. There’s no way to describe how rewarding this was, how suddenly happy I felt in my grandmother’s company as I watched her collapse into indescribable glee. She was still a girl, I could see that suddenly, and not much past my age.

“I’m just being honest,” I said.

“Of course you are!” Marguerite reached out—indicating she wanted help from her downy prison on the love seat. “Tell me more!
Tell me more! But let’s walk in the garden, shall we? My legs have fallen asleep.”

W
e covered most of the pathways of the garden, Marguerite explaining what was blooming and what was about to bloom, a parade of Latin names that I forgot instantly. When we rounded the bend and arrived at the pool house, we came upon the figure of an older man in pressed khakis, a handsome white shirt, and a straw hat, skimming the surface of the pool.

“Who’s that?” I whispered to Marguerite.

“My new pool man, Carlos. Very nice.”

He looked up for a minute, tipped his head—a confident, Old World nod—and continued to skim red bottlebrush needles from the water. Across the way, in a shaded area of the garden, I could see Jose kneeling and spreading white powder under the azaleas. “Bonemeal,” Marguerite said. “Doesn’t it smell just awful?” She stopped for a second, almost as though disoriented, then swung around quickly and faced me.

“What does he do?” she asked, grabbing my arm.

“Carlos?”

“No.
Your ridiculous father.
What does he do for a living? He seems to be making money, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how.”

I shrugged, shook my head, and turned down the corners of my mouth into an expression of abject disapproval. Marguerite let out a little whoop and laughed. Then she patted my hand—the softest, gentlest, most reassuring gesture. She was the only person in my life who ever did that.

“Impeach Nixon,” she said.

“What?”

“Ronald Reagan for president.”

“What?”

“I always check that dish.”

“You do?”

NINE

Wolfback

W
hat surprised me most—stunned me—was how my father could consider living someplace other than Telegraph Hill. His life there, particularly in the small neighborhood where he had lived since separating from my mother, seemed irrevocable and permanent. He was a fixture in North Beach, almost a part of its steep slopes and narrow alleyways, spaghetti restaurants and pizzerias. I couldn’t imagine him away from all the smells—the espresso, the incense, the sour wine (as if poured into the gutters), the mustiness of Alegrías, and the saffron and clams in El Bodega.

But he complained about traffic and noise—the huffing and grinding of the great tourist buses when they reached the top of Telegraph Hill. He hated the parking hassles and delays, the fireworks in neighboring Chinatown (“New Year never ends,” he’d sigh). He groused that North Beach, once an authentic ghetto of Italians and Beat Generation poets, had become commercial and touristy and expensive. “It’s an Italian theme park,” he said, “owned by the Chinese.”

He was just building a case—convincing himself it was okay to leave the city—but, in truth, abandoning North Beach never seemed the real goal. He was drawn, almost irrationally, to building a house. Inside the Marin Headlands, and between two state parks, he’d found a little slice of land not far from where we had walked that gloomy day six years before. He’d imagined it perfectly: a simple cottage of glass set snugly on a cliff overlooking the beach.

At first he talked constantly about the house—how it would look, where it would sit on the hillside, the way the teak would age with time. Later he grew quieter, ruminative, as if it were a secret mistress he wanted all to himself. Even when he called or wrote, wanting to discuss other things, it never seemed far from his mind.

He didn’t appear to care much about Harrison-Ruin anymore. The company was involved in developing a microprocessor, but this achievement left my father restless and bored, almost disdainful of his colleagues and partner, who talked only about stifling the competition—the handful of larger companies who might dominate the market with inferior products. “It’s a waste of time even thinking about IBM,” my father liked to say. “If you spend time and energy checking out who’s in the race with you,” he said, “you’ve already lost.” He preferred experimentation and being on the edge—ideas, not implementation. Rather than worrying about Harrison-Ruin, he focused his time and creativity on a slice of land and a house of glass. It was an irrational, almost crazy pursuit. He was forty-seven. Is that why? Or maybe the explanation was more fundamental: He’d finally made enough money to finance it.

After the land deal closed, and well before the permits were obtained—that took a year—he began interviewing architects and finally settled on a modernist named Ooee Lungo, a stocky South African with a symphony conductor’s wild head of hair and flinging arm gestures. Before long, Ooee had swept into our lives, always seeming to arrive with expensive bottles of wine and handfuls of fresh herbs. He loved to cook and drink, always with gusto and impatience. Like my father, he was single—a playboy, I suppose—and
he showed up for any event where some pretty women might be present: flamenco parties or
juergas,
art openings, El Bodega for dinner, the weekly “talent show” (as my father had started to call it) at Alegrías. He was gregarious and fun-loving, a devilish charmer who managed to fit into any scene. He arrived at Marguerite’s beach house for two nights and took over, cooking an enormous rack of lamb, playing cards, offering skim-boarding lessons to various assembled teens—he’d grown up at the beach—and then soaked in the bathtub until noon the next day, smoking cigars and reading the
International Herald Tribune
, which he’d gotten Aunt Julia to fetch in town.

My father called him by his first name—OH-ee—but to my cousins, who embraced him as a long-lost uncle, he was “Lungo” or “Lungs.” Food and wine and women (when Justine wasn’t around) were all he and my father talked about, when they weren’t discussing The House in pompous tones, using words like “breakthrough” and “statement.” They fought about the design details and loved making up by agreeing. They were competitive, particularly about their engineering skills. Since I was little, I’d watched my father take things apart—a clock, a television, a transistor radio—and put the pieces back together. He liked fixing things, reordering things, and toying with machines. When my parents were still together, he’d built a record turntable and stereo receiver out of parts he ordered from a German catalog, and then seemed determined to tell me all about it—how the needle read the grooves in the black disk, how the sound traveled into the speakers, how the music came alive. And later, whenever he took the MG to a garage for repairs, he spent a great deal of time talking to the mechanics about the problems and possible solutions. (He burned through
quite a lot of mechanics.) When workmen came to fix something in his apartment, he watched over their shoulders and asked questions until, pretty soon, he’d made it clear that he knew more about wiring or plumbing than they did.

Building a house was a way to employ all this knowledge, but not only that. He seemed to be searching for a chance to express himself, and his taste, and his ideas about the world. It wasn’t just a house but a series of daring experiments—and both he and Ooee enjoyed how impossible it would be to pull off. They were like boys planning to build a fort or a tree house. They’d formed a club of two and seemed to speak in their own language. The structure would be “both transparent and hidden,” they said. Even the stone steps to the beach would be camouflaged by trees and shrubs. But they weren’t just stone steps. They were “a transition” and “a conduit of energy” and “an invisible passageway to nature.” And the stone steps had to be just right.

Around Ooee my father was unguarded and passionate. But when old friends and colleagues—or, most of all, Marguerite—asked how the house was coming along (so much easier than inquiring about a computer), my father made the project sound effortless and routine. A simple thing. Just a little house across the bridge. “A cottage on the beach,” I heard him say to Aunt Julia, “almost Japanese and
very small.
” He was conspicuously modest and vague about his plans until he began trying to obtain licenses and permits to build next to state parkland, and then he became frustrated and irritable. “Who knows!” he’d say angrily if anybody asked how it was going, or “I’m pressing on! There’s nothing else to do.”

I visited North Beach just once that winter. I was always batting away his offers and invitations in those days. I had lots of
reasons—school events, parties, football games, and reports—but mostly, when I thought about heading to San Francisco for another weekend of wailing flamenco singers and being squeezed between the wilting Justine and the booming Ooee Lungo, I felt like dying.

It was always more fun, and more relaxed, to meet up in Laguna. And in that familiar setting—breakfast at the Jolly Roger (“But is it fresh or
frozen
?”), tidal-pool explorations, walking to town, sailing around Newport Harbor in Uncle Drew’s old wooden boat, a movie at night and bitter arguments about the movie (now a family tradition), the late bedtime, the sleeping in, getting up for the JR breakfast again—the differences between my father’s life and mine seemed smaller. I had room to be myself. And, although inquisitive as ever (“Lizzie,” he asked my seventeen-year-old cousin one morning at the JR, “are you really still a virgin?”), my father was pleasantly muted at the beach. Even his rhapsodies about Justine, which were tediously frequent in the early days of their love affair, were dwindling in number. Now he rarely spoke of her.

So that one visit to North Beach, on a cold weekend in February, I was treated like a visiting dignitary. Aside from a trip to the headlands—so he could proudly show me his vacant lot of land—the entire weekend unfolded like a production designed to please me. There were trips to Cost Plus and hippie shops to buy incense, candles, and an old army jacket. I was taken to the Gap for cords, Tower Records for the new Boz Scaggs album, and even indulged in my wish to see
Barry Lyndon
for a third time. Justine materialized with gifts: a string of pounded gold chain from Morocco, a bottle of scented bath water from Floris in London, a Buddhist
mala
of wooden prayer beads. In the past I’d always been just along for the ride, wedged into a social calendar and lifestyle that she and my father kept. Or wedged into Whitman’s ambitions. But Whitman was
traveling that year, and away, and I wasn’t wedged into anything—not even the back of the MG. My father borrowed Ooee’s blue Saab to drive us around.