The Ruins of California (32 page)

How come Shelley just yanked her underpants off and did it with
Greg and Ooee and anybody else? How come everybody—Ooee and all those girlfriends, all those grown-ups on the houseboat—just slept with whomever they wanted, no big deal, like it was a gymnastics event?

“Inez?”

I made a crying sound that I knew he could hear.

“Oh,
Inez
,” he said. His voice was breaking. “Oh, sweetie, I know just how you feel.”

“You do?”

SIXTEEN

Dr. Lasso’s Office, Please Hold

M
y father didn’t continue his drumbeat for long about David’s being “such a lovely man.” In a matter of weeks after David’s departure—maybe days—he’d grown weary of David and my endless need to talk about him. He became “a smart character,” according to my father, and “a nice guy, I suppose.” Then he finally descended to, “He’s okay if you’re into Asians. Are they really hairless, by the way?”

When I broached the possibility of a trip to the islands that summer—I was “dying to see Whitman” and “dying to see Hawaii” suddenly—Dad saw through my tactics and snapped, “My God, don’t you have better things to do?”

“Not really.”

This tropical dream died for other reasons, though. Whitman sounded uncertain when I floated the idea by him, as though he weren’t quite ready to share paradise. David was perplexingly noncommittal on the subject, hedging with vague concerns about
whether there was room for me at his parents’ house on Molokai (wasn’t it a compound?) until it was clear I couldn’t come anyway.

Why wasn’t I getting a job instead? My mother and Abuelita were insistent and almost immovable on the summer-job thing, as though it were an obligation to the universe that was long overdue. They pestered me and glared with Easter Island faces. What was with them? A job?
Work?
How had this awful development come about? And why now? Almost out of the blue, a new attitude toward me had emerged, accompanied by new expectations. It seemed so badly timed. I wanted all the fun accessories of adulthood—the car, the cigarettes, nighttime adventures, a sex life, things that had just come into my reach. But a job? My mother and Abuelita acted like I was on the precipice of needing to support myself. Filled with quiet hostility, I dodged the summer-employment issue until the end of June and then prevaricated until the Fourth of July had passed, only faking an interest in the help-wanted ads in the
Van Dale Star
while debating with Shelley (an unlikely “mother’s helper” at three dollars an hour) about whether I could deliver pizza in the MG.

Then fate took over. A job fell on me. My mother’s boyfriend announced that he could use some help in the front office of his dental practice in Montrose. One of his receptionists had undergone an emergency hysterectomy and would need the summer to recover. Bob was confident that I could handle record keeping, filing, and some “light typing,” as he put it, and I didn’t bother putting up a fight. Everything was stacked against me. My mother was elated. Abuelita was relieved. Even my father weighed in with, “A little work never hurt anybody,” and chuckled sadistically. So I absentmindedly misfiled and answered the phone saying, “Dr. Lasso’s office,”
as sullenly as I could, waiting for the long, hot summer to slump along to its end.

I should have been good at alphabetizing and filing—just the kind of rote organizing that I excelled at—but I was distracted by Bob’s dental hygienist, an overweight bottle blonde with incredible stories about sex in the woods with drunken deer hunters and blow jobs in the backs of camper vans. In between tooth polishing and positioning the giant X-ray nozzle on patients’ cheeks, Donna sat in a corner of the front office next to me, filing her long nails—hoping to achieve some kind of ideal equal length—while spinning her sexy recollections. She was always looking around to see if “Dr. Lasso” was in earshot. When he wasn’t, she’d dig into a faux-leather tote for manicure tools and talk about the size of some guy’s “schlong.” She made me cry with laughter, and her raunchy stories made me ache. All I could think about that summer was David anyway. David nude. David on top of me. David in my bathroom, peeing in my toilet. Instead of keeping my mind on alphabetizing, I was in bed with him—and repeating our one night together again and again. I swooned over the open file drawers and sometimes nearly passed out.

“How’s it going at Dr. Bob’s?” my father would ask. He called too frequently, pretending he had a quick question. But he was checking up on me, fascinated by my painful descent into love. He’d track me down at work and try to humor me out of blue moods. “Whose mouth is Bob looking into right now?” he’d say with an edge in his voice. “Can you imagine the tedium of
that
?”

“No,” I’d say. “I can’t.”

We were both anti-Bob, pretty much, and plotted against him for reasons that were never fully articulated. We were mean and
unrelentingly petty. Bob’s politics bugged us—he proselytized about the virtues of democracy like it was a religion. (“Why can’t he leave the poor Soviets alone?” my father complained.) There was another matter, too: Furiously in love, Bob was proprietary about my mother, as if he were the first person to truly care about her. He had proposed and given her a huge diamond ring—something my father had never done. (“He didn’t really give her a
diamond
ring, did he?” my father asked. “God, people are so uncreative.”) How Bob won my mother’s heart seems simple to me now. He did it with devotion, with honesty, with thoughtfulness, and with an aggressive campaign that made him seem forceful and manly. He wasn’t charming or good-looking or anything like that—Bob was a wiry guy and not too tall, a suburban tennis player with a meatless track-and-field body, but there was something tough about him. It was a mental toughness, a clarity and determination. He had a certainty that made the rest of us look blurry and out of focus. Among the earliest graduates of est, he’d considered dropping dentistry to become a trainer. “How’d he luck out and land your mother?” my father asked with wistfulness in his voice.

“He’s angry,” I said. “She likes angry men.”

“Does she?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Really? Am
I
angry?”

“I’m not sure,” I hedged, suddenly embarrassed. “I think the deal is…when she married you, she married her father.”

“Oh, Christ, don’t give me that mumbo jumbo.”

I liked working in Bob’s office, as it turned out. Bob was okay—a decent guy who’d never understand me, or probably never want to—and his office was a study in efficiency and good humor. He never tried to jolly up his patients but won them over, as he had
Mom, with decency and attentiveness. I liked sitting behind the open window in the front office and studying people as they came and went, looking at their faces, and their clothes, and then peeking into their private files and gazing at the gaudy color photographs of their teeth and gums. “It’s really kinda fun,” I told my father after a couple weeks. “And the hygienist is hysterical.”

“Donna?”

“Yes.”

“The big blonde?”

Through a doorway I caught sight of Donna carefully clipping a paper bib around the neck of a reclining patient. Then she reached down and scratched her thigh, her long nails raking over her nude pantyhose and making a sound that I’ll never forget. “She’s not for you, Dad.”

“No? She sounds like a riot. Hey, heard anything from dear old David?”

I said nothing.

“Inez?”

I said nothing.

“No?”

“Quit asking.”

“I care. That’s all.”

“You’re asking all the time. I told you, he’s busy. He’s working—he’s designing a new sailboard. He might even go into business.”

“You told me. All that Caltech know-how being dumped into sailboards.”

“You’re asking about him so much,” I went on, “it’s like you want me to notice he’s not calling. Like he’s ignoring me or something. But I
know
he’s not calling me. Okay?
I’m
the one he’s not calling, not
you.
”

“That jerk!”

“
Dad.
”

“Time to find somebody else, Inez. Time to have some fun and play around. Don’t get all tied up with one guy. Don’t make that mistake. You’ve got the world on a string.”

“No I don’t.”

“Are you kidding? Of course you do.
The world on a string.
”

“It’s more like dental floss.”

Dad nagged me to visit—even tossing out mentions of Ooee like bait. “He’s back in town after working on the fine-arts museum in Cleveland,” he said. “And…”

Blah, blah, blah. I barely heard him. My old passion for Ooee seemed ludicrous to me now. Under the magic spell of David’s young body and his wordlessness, and his not calling, and all those unwritten letters, Ooee’s white hair and belly reminded me of Captain Kangaroo.

David. Thinking about him was like a methadone treatment program to help me ride out his absence. When I wasn’t daydreaming about him that summer, I bored everybody with constant mentions of him, with musings and anecdotes pulled from a very limited supply—every topic made me think of him, or Caltech, or Hawaii, or sailboarding, or pearls—until I’d driven away everybody but Donna. “Does he have a nice schlong?” she asked.
“Oh, my God
,
”
I’d whimper in love-drunk exhalations. Just thinking about David made me anxious and distracted. Just thinking about him made me feel miserable and wonderful at the same time. His lack of communication—only two letters all summer—fanned the flames in my heart and loins. He didn’t write particularly well and demonstrated no originality. Nor did he come out and declare love for me.
Yet every word seemed magical, every loopy
y
and dotted
i
inspired. Even his writing paper seemed imbued with his love and depth of feeling for me, if his words weren’t. In my mind he wasn’t maddeningly cryptic, he was bursting with desire! So in love he could barely speak! My imagination spun into the future, and I saw our life together perfectly: our wedding at the foot of a volcano, our little house on the edge of a Hawaiian beach, our gorgeous Mexican-Peruvian-Anglo-Japanese-Swedish babies. The only thing standing in the way of this tangible happiness was my graduation from high school ten months away. So far off it depressed me to think of it.

“Lovesickness is like seasickness,” my father said whenever I sounded down or listless. “Everybody else thinks it’s hilarious, and you think you’re going to die. Is that how you feel, Inez?”

“Pretty much.”

Toward the middle of August, when my mother and Bob went on a package tour to Europe—seeing Rome, Florence, Geneva, Zurich, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, and London in thirteen days—I drove to Wolfback and remained there for two weeks, the longest stretch of uninterrupted time that my father and I had spent together since I was six. Dad made waffles in the morning, wearing his powder blue pajamas and green silk robe, and ran his noisy espresso machine. He did the dishes, chirpily asking a slew of personal questions—“Do you have bad menstrual cramps?”—and then he’d wander into his home office, still not dressed, and paid bills, logged on to his H-R computer that was hooked up to a mainframe in the Midwest somewhere, and made very long phone calls. I had no idea to whom, nor was I even curious. (When people talk about the curiosity of youth, I always laugh.) He seemed involved in something, or someone, with almost the same intensity
as when he’d built his house, and this seemed to confine him inside all day, near the phone. He made BLTs for lunch, poached fish for dinner, and was uninterested in exercise of any kind, although he did have a reawakened passion for the piano. (He hadn’t played since childhood.) All his inactivity made me restless, so after breakfast each morning, and a shower, I put on a pair of baggy painter’s pants and a pair of hiking boots and left.

I went down the stone steps to the beach, then followed the shoreline until it ended. I climbed a steep hill of rocky chert to a pathway that wandered into to the dry red hills of the headlands and down into their middle parts and green valleys. I crushed eucalyptus leaves in my hands and stuffed the pods in my pockets. I saw hawks circling in the sky, a fox trotting off with a droopy mouse in its mouth. I heard a rattling snake and picked wild sage. It was so beautiful in the headlands and so empty—but rather than feeling liberated from incessant thoughts of David, I found ways to feel the whole of nature connecting me to him. The pale moon rose in the daytime sky, and I wondered if David had seen its face the night before. The wind buffeted my cheek, and I wondered where that air had been. David, David. Was I drawing a breath that had been in his lungs just days before?

Returning from my hike one day at noon, I saw my father outside the house in his green robe and stocking feet. His hair was still messy from bed, and his chin was peppered with stubble. He was standing in one spot, looking at a bare wall on the other side of the kitchen.

“Ooee and I were talking about a few small revisions,” he explained, pointing to an edge of the garden where nothing had been planted. “Here’s the corner where we could expand. See there? We could dig out a bit, add some foundation, and then build a separate
apartment for you. Wouldn’t that be nice? It wouldn’t be very big,” he said. “But I thought you might be coming up here for college next year, and you’d have a nice little dugout, with your own pathway and steps down to the beach.”

H
e seemed alone that summer, kind of aimless and expectant. He was pushing Shanti into the arms of Bill Stein and had taken up with Louisa and Lauren, but they were off somewhere, both of them, and traveling with friends. During lulls like this, he usually looked up an old flame, picking up where he left off until somebody new appeared. But nobody was materializing.

Just when I began to worry that my father’s supply of women had dried up, he took me out to lunch with Karen, a dark-haired lawyer and social activist who, at thirty-seven, seemed a bit older than his usual. Afterward, he and I drove over to Union Square and dropped in on Carol, a former girlfriend, the retail executive. She worked at Shreve’s now and walked us around the jewelry store while Dad said he was looking for a birthday present for me.