Valley Fever (15 page)

“A little heavy on the mustard,” he said.

“It's the same amount as always.”

Dad said, “Inky, when was the last time you came to the office?”

“Christmas sometime,” I said. “You let me store Anne's bicycle there.” That was ten years ago, when I had the job in London, the last time I'd had enough income to buy elaborate Christmas presents: Loro Piana sweaters for Dad and Charlie and a copper stock pot for Mother and a pale blue beachcomber for Annie, who kept the bicycle in storage in anticipation of the Malibu summer cottage she intended to purchase, someday. Anne's storage unit was like a hope chest.

“You should come see the office.”

“I will. We can go to the Vineyard for lunch.”

“You could use Phillip's office while you're here,” he said. “Keep me company.”

“Who's going to keep me company?” Mother said.

“You warriors don't need company,” Dad said, taking her hand, kissing her knuckles.

“I'm not a warrior,” Mother said. “I'm just not as fragile as you think.”

“Or as you look,” I said.

“Do I look fragile?” she said. “I think I look quite tough.”

“You do look tough,” Dad said, smiling at her. “Tough and beautiful.” They held hands on the table. He looked at me. “Your mother was the most gorgeous girl in the whole valley. And I got her.”

“I'm still the most gorgeous girl,” she said.

“Yes,” said Dad, quite sincerely. “I thought that was too obvious to say.”

When Mother remodeled the kitchen more than twenty years ago, she had done the counters and backsplashes in these white-and-blue hand-painted Portuguese tiles. They looked slightly dated now—Portuguese tile had been very popular for a while—but she'd been right about the white tiles. White tiles made everything cooler, fresher, easier to touch in the Central Valley heat, even at night. And hers had pretty little boats and fishermen drawn on them with a slender brush.

Dad stood to put his plate in the sink. He coughed and spit into the disposal. Mother winced and tried to hide her wince.

“I'm going to change this filthy shirt,” he said.

“I didn't say it was filthy,” Mother told him.

“I think it's filthy,” he said. He spoke to us as he walked through the living room. “Farming is dirty.”

 

11.

Clever Bootsie sent an e-mail with two photographs attached. “Here is a picture of an olive branch,” she wrote beneath the first. “And see also attached, the image of a broken fence, next to a nice mended fence! Could you accept them?”

“That's a solid fence,” I wrote back. We know our fences in the valley.

She wrote: “I have fritters.”

It was afternoon. The orange light had started to come over the vineyards. I'd been lying in bed all day reading
Middlemarch
.
Middlemarch
is an excellent book for a hard time. It has all sorts of interesting things to say about love and change and small failures of character. It has this clever younger sister who gives excellent advice when the older sister's marriage starts to go wrong. There is so much to learn from
Middlemarch
.

The strong smell of rot came through the windows. Dad had gone back to the office, abandoning his rounds through the vineyards, something he rarely did in the afternoons. Mother retreated to her bedroom, where she closed the windows and the shades and put a free Lufthansa eye mask over her face, one of dozens she had purloined from stewardesses on international flights more than fifteen years ago.

I missed Bootsie, but with friendships as with cities, it's important to remember what caused you to flee. She had been a good friend to me for a long time, until she wasn't.

In New York, if Bootsie started wearing something (knee-high athletic socks, fur-trimmed collars, the color orange), the following year everyone would be wearing it. She knew the best restaurants before it became impossible to get reservations. To me and Anne and to George and to Hasso and to my heartbroken friend Gil, Bootsie was the most sophisticated and important person in the whole of the city, and we looked to her for guidance on how to exist in the world. The large, spiky personalities that go over well in New York don't always go over very well in a place like Fresno, a place that has very little patience for anything beyond the hills outside the valley. But Bootsie seemed to go over well everywhere. That summer, the tables at Bootsie's Quality Food and Beverage were frequently full, and there were always attractive people in expensive shoes standing outside smoking.

I phoned the restaurant.

“Come on in,” she said. “No one's here yet and we're all lonesome.”

“Lonesome?!” A restaurant staff is never lonesome. Restaurant work is a team sport.

“You should meet my little family here. Also I'm serving whole trout with roast potatoes done just like the English do them.”

“In duck fat?”

“Duck fat is nearly impossible to find. I'm using a local chicken fat.”

“Poor little chickens.”

“People get crazy about ducks and geese, but not about chickens.”

“Remember all those chickens in the river?” When we were in high school, the Masterson chicken plant, facing an unannounced inspection, had dumped thousands of sick birds into the San Joaquin. This was the same chicken plant that just a couple of years earlier had displaced twenty or thirty homes using eminent domain. Never had there been a clear argument that the Mastersons could make any money raising chickens.

“My brother was lifeguarding in Merced, remember? He had to pull them out of the lake with a rake.” Bootsie stretched her curly curls straight out from her forehead.

“That was the vomit summer,” I said.

“Yes! God, you remember everything.” It was the summer I decided not to go back east to school, and awful things kept happening, especially to Fionn Calhoun. After the Masterson chickens incident, a drunk bather waded too far into the lake. He went under and didn't come up, and then vomited into Fionn's mouth as Fionn performed CPR.

“Will you really make fritters?”

“Fritters are always on the menu for you.”

That year, everyone was in trouble with the banks, but plenty of people had the money to be eating at Bootsie's. It was her thorough Bootsieness, I decided: people wanted to be near her, hoped part of her charm and beauty and easy glamour might rub off on them, and eating in her restaurant was money invested in their cultural and culinary education.

“Are you going to move here?” Bootsie asked.

I sat at the bar with a copy of
The Paris Review
. I never read
The Paris Review
anywhere but California. In California, reading
The Paris Review
was a very good way to keep people from talking to you.

“I'm just here until I can bear going back to LA.”

“Why not stay here, then?”

“I can't bear here, either.”

“I used to think that.”

“And what happened.”

“It's easier to run Dad's businesses from here.” She stood at the bar next to me but kept her eye on the door. Bootsie always kept her eye on the door.

“I thought you ran your own business.”

“No, really Elliot does most of this.”

The bartender was called Elliot and he wasn't bad to talk to. During the day he taught German at the city college.

“I mean, he does the ordering and the books,” Bootsie said. “Right, Elliot?”

He said, “My parents had a restaurant.” He polished water glasses behind the bar. Elliot was always busying himself with something: polishing glasses, refilling ice, wiping bottles. He had the rawboned physique of a person in constant motion.

Elliot always refilled my drink before I was nearly done. He'd pour wonderful things I'd never have known to ask for, like the Springbank whisky I learned to like too much or an 1899 Madeira Bootsie had found two cases of in her father's basement.

“This really should be opened with a blowtorch,” he said, decanting the port into my glass through a kitchen strainer. The name and the year 1899 had been stenciled on the bottle in white paint. “The cork just disintegrates.”

It was lovely, like a hard syrup, rich and sweet and slightly tangy.

I said, “Elliot, is that true? Do you run this place?”

“She tells me what to do and I do it,” he said. One half of his face smiled. He wiped bottles even though he had poured hardly any drinks yet and the bottles were clean.

“You see,” said Bootsie, “he's perfect.”

“We shouldn't be drinking this,” I said. “How much is this per glass?”

“This is not on the menu,” said Bootsie. She got herself a rocks glass from behind the bar and Elliot poured her some. She swirled it like brandy. “Elliot, have one.”

“Later.”

“I wish I'd known he had this stuff, just so I could have asked him what he planned to do with it.”

“He planned to drink it,” I said.

“He planned to auction it,” said Elliot. “He planned to auction a lot of things, including the land, including the paintings.”

“What paintings?” I said, inelegantly.

“He had all these paintings,” Bootsie said. “That idiot who wasn't impressed when I got the job at the
Times
.”

“What paintings?” I said again.

“Minor American artists,” Bootsie said.

Elliot said, “And minor works by major artists.”

I said, “Where did you find them?”

“There was a Joseph Cornell ink-blot drawing,” said Bootsie.

“There was a Joan Mitchell painting,” Elliot said.

“There was a small Copley.”

“Bootsie, there was a Hopper sketch. It wasn't minor.”

“Anyway, there were all these pieces that told me basically nothing,” Bootsie said.

“Where did he keep them?” I said.

“He must have had someone telling him what to buy, but I have no idea who that could have been, because he never spoke to me like a person. He never told me anything, apparently.”

“You froze him out, too,” Elliot said.

“Elliot,” she said, raising her pointy hand as a shield, “you have no idea, so please be quiet now.”

Elliot crossed the bar and began to polish the wineglasses.

Bootsie said, “In the basement, behind the cases of emergency water.”

“The paintings?”

“Oh, the paintings,” she said. “In the map drawer in his office. It never crossed my mind there might be more than just maps in that drawer.” She poured more of the Madeira into her glass and mine. “Can you imagine, I study art my whole life, and he doesn't even tell me he's buying this stuff.”

“Maybe it was a surprise,” I said.

She smiled her wide, clear smile. “I love you. You are so generous.” She shook her head. Wild curly wisps were escaping her rubber band. “Elliot's right, he intended to auction it. That's why he never told me about it.”

“What did Fionn say?”

“Oh, poor Fionn. Fionn had no chance at not failing for my Dad. Fionn just lived up to my father's expectations.”

“Fionn will be okay.”

“No, I don't think he will be.” She tapped a pencil on the bar as if tamping down a cigarette. “If I had been anyone else's daughter, if I had been you, he would have been really proud of me.” The door swooshed and customers came in. “Hey!” she said, as if they had been friends a long time, the way she said “Hey!” to me.

I had my little Spring-issue
Paris Review
on the bar.

“You know, we make excellent ports in Madera,” Elliot said.

“I know, I know.” I had heard all my life about the excellent ports from Madera.

“It's the right climate. Same as the Portuguese climate.”

Another group came in, and another group right behind them. Elliot seemed to become smaller the more people he had to serve. This was the opposite of what I had observed of bartenders in large cities, who thrived on the show.

“Yes.” Suddenly the room seemed full, and all the seats at the bar were taken by three couples waiting for a fourth. Bootsie had set up a long table at the front. “I guess this is the busy hour,” I said.

“After work. This is our after-work crowd. In a little while we'll get the fancy crowd, and they wear too much cologne, and then later we get the after-dinner crowd, and they're okay.”

“This crowd?”

“This crowd I don't think knows about cologne.” He laughed a little, a cold laugh that said there's no reason for laughing.

Bootsie's waitresses seemed to appear from nowhere. Bootsie leaned against a booth, languid, as if she'd been waiting all day for those people to come talk to her. “My father grows grapes,” I said to Elliot.

“Oh,” he said, in the polite way of gentle men. “What kind of grapes?”

“All kinds.” Dad was, then, still one of the two or three largest growers in the valley. It was embarrassing to be such a failure when your father was such a success. “I mean in the context of port, that's why I know about the port in Madera.”

“Right. Of course.” He half smiled, kindly, his eyes behind me. “George,” he said, extending his hand over the bar.

Bootsie had told me George wouldn't come in until later. “George,” I said, turning toward him, no way to get out of it.

“Here we all are,” said George, taking the stool next to me. George took up more space than he used to.

I said, “We have a George and we have an Elliot, and I've been reading
Middlemarch
.”

Elliot poured George a glass of Famous Grouse, neat. When I'd known George previously, in high school and then college and then those painful couple of years after school was done, neither of us drank much. Now he'd become a more substantial man with a drink so well established he didn't have to ask for it. Even his hands were larger than they had been. Everything about George seemed expanded and grown up.