Loose Diamonds (11 page)

Sixteen

A Love
Story

“I
s my room
still there?”

“It is but—Ethan, I meant to tell you, we rented it
out.”

“You’re kidding—”

“You know, Alan started a new company
and . . .”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Yeah, I’m kidding but—you know, I’ve had a lot of
time on my hands and you know how I like to do needlepoint and stuff and—I
turned it into a sewing room . . .”

“You don’t do needlepoint. You’re kidding,
right?”

“Actually, I’m very good at needlepoint. But yeah,
I’m kidding. The truth is, and this isn’t really going to make you happy, you
know Anna doesn’t really like her roommate very much and—well, she’s moved in.
And I don’t know what we’re going to do this summer. It doesn’t really make
sense for her to keep her apartment.”

“You’re f—ing kidding, right?!”

“Okay, I have to tell you the truth. Please don’t
be mad. I turned it into an office. I really needed a place to work.”

“That is so not true. You can’t write unless you
have a view and you really like being in the middle of the living room. You’re
f—ing kidding!”

“Actually, I am. Your room’s fine. Just the way you
left it.”
Well, not exactly. The desk is a little cleaner
and there aren’t any clothes or wet towels on the floor. The bed is made.
“Yep, exactly as you left it, surfboards up against the wall.”

I hear him breathe on the other end of the
line.

He is a sophomore at college in Washington, D.C.,
and in the last few months, he’s joined the rugby team (I can’t explain that),
figured out that spring break in the Bahamas isn’t really his thing, decided to
move out of the frat house into a suite in the dorms next year where he’ll have
his own room (initial decision in the category of how do you rebel against a
bohemian parent), and seems to have a girlfriend (even though he won’t tell me
her last name). Half the time when I call him now, he’s whispering because he’s
in the library (or, at least, that’s what he says). He’s settled down, grown up,
or something . . .

So, I was a little surprised when he called and
said, “Is my room still there?” He was only half kidding and I couldn’t resist
the impulse to kid him back. Deadpan delivery usually works with him. We have a
history.

In his life, I have given him seven “surprise”
birthday parties. I got him every time. The first was easy. When he was in
pre-K, I figured out that if I only told the parents and made them promise not
to tell their kids until they were on the way to the party, I had a shot. I will
never forget the look on his face—I think he cried. I have not been able, many
years since, to resist the impulse to try it again. The plans get more complex,
the date shifts to before and after his birthday, which is in November, although
I haven’t resorted to June yet. And since he is fortunate to have many of the
same friends he had in pre-K, it’s become almost a game with us and every year
we get him again. The trick is not to do it every year, which sort of keeps him
off guard.

I think of him as a love story—all children are
love stories—and like many love stories, a bit tempestuous at times. I’ll never
understand those three years where he raged and screamed and, occasionally,
punched the walls. My sister Hallie believes it’s separation—they’re so attached
to you, in order to separate, they have to be really mean—a theory that I
considered, at the time, highly optimistic on her part. I sort of agree with her
now.

He is my third and youngest child and when he went
to college, I bought a two-door car. It has a backseat but it’s a little sporty.
I have a friend who had four children and the day the fourth was born, her
husband traded in his station wagon and bought a red Corvette. I think I would
have asked for a divorce right on the spot. But she sort of thought it was cool.
I wonder how they’re doing now. When Ethan went to college, we sold his car. Not
because he went to college, but because it broke and it was not cost-effective
to fix it. We didn’t buy him another one. It didn’t make sense to buy a car that
was just going to sit in the driveway. He was really mad about it. He stood on
his head last summer to try to get us to buy him a car—fits, flattery,
cajoling—but we just shrugged it off and rented one.

I thought he was coming home in May but he just
called. He’s been offered a research job in Washington, D.C., and wants to stay
there this summer. Of course, we’re on with this plan. But at the end of the
call, I can’t help myself from saying, “Good thing we didn’t buy you a car.”

“Very funny, Mom.”

As the fact that he’s not coming home sinks in, I
hear myself saying, “Your room’s still here.”

Without missing a beat, he answers, “That’s not
what I heard.”

Seventeen

Banana Trees and Bougainvillea

Y
ears ago, when I lived briefly in New York, I had a boyfriend whose family lived in New Jersey. One day he described to me the glass enclosure around his family’s swimming pool in the backyard. I naïvely asked if that was so they could swim in the winter. He gave me a curious smile and said, “No, that’s so Mommy can keep the banana trees and Bougainvillea warm.”

As arch and telling as that statement is, I understood the sentiment behind it. His mother had been partly raised on a small, remote British Virgin Island and it was her way of holding on to the landscape of her youth against the backdrop of a suburb in New Jersey, a rather high-end solution but a solution nonetheless.

I didn’t last that long in New York. Partly because I missed the landscape of Southern California. I missed the trees. I missed the birds. I missed the quiet that you sometimes find (if there isn’t a plane flying overhead or a party next door) in the hills of Los Angeles. I missed being able to walk out onto the grass.

A few years ago, Alan and I bought a house in Brentwood, a very pretty modern house with a sizable backyard that oddly resembled an abandoned ranch in the hills above Malibu. Dirt. More dirt. And a couple of construction shacks. (We learned later that the house had originally been a stable, which didn’t surprise us a bit since I found a horseshoe in the backyard that I immediately hung on the deck, thinking it would bring us luck, which might be true, but at this writing, it’s hard to tell.)

It had a long, treacherous driveway, which we were convinced would deter burglars—conventional wisdom is that burglars don’t like streets (or houses) from which there’s only one route of entry or escape. It had a lovely view of the Getty Museum once you got up to the top. It was very remote and the real estate agent assured us that it was surrounded by land owned by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy so that no one could ever build above us.

We immediately tore out a fair amount of Bougainvillea that had climbed up the glass wall of the kitchen and obscured the view of the adjacent hill. And since it’s sort of a glass house—the architecture of which I would describe as “Bavarian Moderne,” with pitched roofs and strange gingerbread molding on the outside rafters—we put in bamboo shades throughout the house through which you could see the view to the gardens (which at the time were dirt) and the Getty in the distance.

And then we started to plant. We planted roses (which the deer ate immediately), a native and drought-resistant garden, and a tropical garden on the hillside that I said was because I always wanted something in the backyard that looked like Trader Vic’s. But really, I think I always wanted something that reminded me of my childhood friend, Stiles Clements, who collected tropical birds, that it was my way of holding on to the landscape of my youth. The gardens we planted collected birds. Hummingbirds flew to the drought-resistant garden, and the tropical garden, where there are ferns, Torch Ginger, and banana trees, attracted tiny songbirds along with a flock of wild parrots that urban legend has it escaped from people’s homes and found each other in the skies above West L.A, so that it sometimes felt as if we were on an island of our own.

I put my desk in the corner of the living room as it had a lovely view of the Getty and I don’t subscribe to the Virginia Woolf theory that in order to write, a woman must have money and a room of one’s own. Money is definitely helpful, although if you don’t have money you can still feel compelled to write—it’s almost like an addiction. Writers write. But I can’t write in a little room alone with no view. It is the only thing that gives me writer’s block. I leave the room. Apparently, I’m happier in chaos.

I was alone in the house one day, on the phone with a friend, when I heard this terrible noise. It sounded like a tank and oddly spaced machine guns. It kept getting closer and closer. “Call 911,” I screamed into the phone. “We’re under attack.” It was during the second President Bush’s tenure when terror levels were going from orange to red on a daily basis.

My friend David, who’s known me for a long time and can tell the difference between faux hysteria and real hysteria, i.e., this was potentially serious, said very calmly, “You have to go outside and see what it is. I’ll stay on the phone.”

I really didn’t have a choice. It was the most terrible noise I’d ever heard but if the United States were under attack and I was the only person who knew it . . .

I opened the back door and stepped outside just as a ten-ton tractor barreled its way down the hill, bouncing from side to side, like a slowed-down version of the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland. It was coming from a construction site above us where theoretically nobody should have been able to build. I watched in awe as it took out everything that lay in its wake, old-growth trees from the land that was Mountains Conservancy, the tropical garden, the irrigation system for the garden, and the enormous amount of low-voltage lighting we’d put in to simulate Trader Vic’s. The driver jumped out and landed on his head as the tractor landed in the backyard and was barely prevented from hitting the house by the debris from a 30-foot podocarpus tree it took out on its last roll.

I called 911. Ten minutes later, there were six firemen standing around the tractor in a circle, looking slightly dazed like they’d just emerged from an Indian sweat lodge and all they could say was, “Wow! Wonder how you’re going to get that thing out of here.”

It was disabled. Its hydraulics were broken. And after the chief engineer from the Ford Motor Company’s tractor division came out and ascertained that it couldn’t be fixed and they couldn’t put it on ropes and drag it back up the hill without causing a landslide and it was too big to go down our driveway, they sent someone with a blowtorch and chopped it up into little pieces and took it out on a flatbed truck on Christmas Eve.

In a way, it’s a good news/bad news story. The garden had been terribly damaged, but not irrevocably. It could be repaired. The tractor hadn’t sailed through the house, which would have been a nightmare. No one had been seriously injured, not even the driver who’d landed on his head. So maybe we have an angel, but I’m not sure.

I thought it was curious that exactly two years later on exactly the same day in December, we were burglarized. But Alan thinks that some things are just a coincidence. This time we had five policemen standing in the living room shaking their heads. And the police photographer said something that resonates with me still, “Wow,” he said, “you guys are really lucky no one was home. Sometimes these things go sideways.” But no one was home and no one was hurt. We lost some things we loved, my jewelry, a guitar that belonged to my nephew Max that he was terribly attached to, camera equipment, our computers. But I got my work back. So maybe we have an angel, but I’m not sure.

Two years after that, on exactly the same day in December, we had a small electrical fire. Coincidence was starting to seem peculiar. We shut the heating system down before the house burned down. This time there were 24 firemen standing in the living room going, “Wow, you guys are really lucky, you were ninety seconds away from an explosion. Good thing you were awake.” We had some smoke damage but no one was really injured. We lost some things we loved but most of them are replaceable. We saved the art. So maybe we have an angel, but I’m not sure.

I stopped in at a spiritual bookstore the other day because they had a gorgeous Carl Jung book in the window and I was waiting for takeout from the restaurant next door. There was a medium healer behind the counter. I resisted the impulse to make a joke and say that I thought we might need a large healer but she was using medium as a noun not an adjective and I wasn’t sure she had a sense of humor. I also always think it’s wise not to get on the wrong side of anyone who professes to have psychic abilities. She suggested that we smoke the house out with herbs but since we already have smoke damage, that didn’t seem like a good idea. She also thought we should put pebbles all around the house. I didn’t ask what kind of pebbles. She asked if anyone had it in for us. Probably. A couple of people probably wish us ill. I hope not. She told me to throw up a wall around the house in my mind and put sparkles on it. I did that. It was an easy image to conjure.

My friend Ed Begley thinks that we should have the head of the Chumash Indian tribe over to bless the house, which probably isn’t a bad idea. Maybe it was Chumash Indian land once. Maybe we could give it back to them and be part owners in a casino.

I’m sure there are some people in my family who sometimes feel that they’re watching a horror movie and they want to scream, “Get out of the house. Now. Before something else happens.”

But we love our house. We were married in the backyard. We threw a party there for Sherrod Brown when he was running for his Senate seat in Ohio that he thinks turned the election around. (I think he was just being political when he told me that—but the polls did swing three points in his favor the next day.) We love the tropical garden, which reminds me of my friend when I was little, and the small orchard we’ve planted where the construction shacks used to be. The deer eat most of the apricots and apples but maybe this summer we’ll try netting. It’s complicated there and occasionally troubled but when it’s quiet, it’s a rare spot of peace.

That first Christmas, after the tractor fell, I gave Alan a baby five-foot podocarpus tree, a tiny version of the one that saved the house. We replanted and re-landscaped and, just for fun, put in a path along the hill. There’s a bench up there, and sometimes Alan sits up there and reads a book. Sometimes Ethan sits up there, too, but I’m not quite sure what it is he’s doing. But down at the bottom, just at the edge of the tropical garden with its banana trees, Plumeria, ferns, and Bougainvillea, is that baby podocarpus tree, small and proud, a beacon and a sentry and a reminder that every other December, more than likely something will go wrong.