The Ruins of California (14 page)

“Yes!” Amanda cried out.

“Yes!” Lizzie yelled.

I looked across the way at Kathleen and felt sorry for her. “No way,” I said under my breath. “That’s so gross.”

“Someday you might feel different,” my father said to me.

“But,” Whitman replied, “she might not.”

My brother was my defender—and did this without disturbing any of my many (and various) delicate boundaries. When personal subjects were discussed, he displayed an overriding gentility and discretion that my father, and indeed most of the Ruin family, seemed
to lack. He was capable of a diatribe against leg shaving, which he found bourgeois. He might remark that in England, where he had been partly raised, “people weren’t as hung up about their bodies.” But he would never have asked me, as my father did that summer afternoon when the brownish stains on my bathing suit didn’t come out, if I “needed anything at the Laguna pharmacy, like Kotex.” And Whitman would never have attempted to pry and poke his way into what could have been the most delicate territory of all, as my father did on the night the three of us went to
La Dolce Vita
at the Lido Theatre and I announced afterward (from my increasingly awkward perch in the back of the MG) that Marcello Mastroianni wasn’t my “type.”

“Did I hear that right?” my father asked with a weird tightness in his throat. “Mastroianni is not
your type
?” He chuckled and tried to make the discussion jolly, but I could tell that my revelation had struck him personally. Until then I hadn’t realized how much he looked like the Italian actor, or at least must have thought so.

“No.”

“Really?
Mastroianni?
”

“Really, really,” I said. “He’s gross.”

“Oh, Inez. You think everything’s gross.”

“No I don’t.”

“You don’t think Marcello Mastroianni is good-looking? Good God, Inez.” He turned the MG onto Pacific Coast Highway and headed south for Laguna. I said nothing, realizing that it was time to lie low.

“I can see why,” Whitman offered from the front passenger seat. “He’s almost
too
good-looking. And he’s really a weenie in
La Dolce Vita
. I mean, that’s the whole point. Isn’t it? He’s a shallow weenie, and so is everybody else in the movie.”

I tried to stifle a chuckle.

“I’m just interested in getting to know Inez better,” my father continued, now serious and unemotional, as if he removed all personal investment in this debate and had only a clinical fascination with the subject. “It’s interesting that she says somebody isn’t her type. It means she has a type, that’s all. And I’m only curious what that type would be.”

“Not him,” I said.

“‘Not him,’”
my father repeated. He smiled and shook his head. “And how do you feel about Steve McQueen? James Coburn? Charles Bronson?”
I
shook
my
head. “Eastwood?” Then he turned and faced Whitman but seemed still to be talking to me.

“You know, Inez. It’s completely okay if you’re not into men.”

A funny sound, like a gurgle, came out of Whitman’s throat.

“That would be perfectly okay. I mean,” my father continued, “if I were a woman, I’d be into women. Without a doubt. They’re so much more interesting and evolved.”

“And if I were a man,” I answered. “I’d be a homo.”

Whitman laughed with an explosion of air, managing to spray gobs of spit on the dashboard. My father shot him a look. “Homo isn’t exactly the way— Inez, don’t say ‘homo.’”

“What’s wrong with ‘homo’?” I said. “You’re always talking about the queens on Polk Street.”

“I just wanted you to know it would be okay,” he said. “I was trying to be serious—and say something important. I wanted you to know that there’s nothing wrong with being a—”

“I know,” I said.

“But you should feel fine about—”

“I get it,” I said.

“I just—”

“
I get it
, Dad.”

“You—”

“She gets it, Dad,” said Whitman.

“Okay,” my father said with a sigh. “She gets it. She gets it. We all get it.”

I
n Laguna he missed Justine, and that may have accounted for his occasional irritability during our days there. Love made him foggier and nicer at home in North Beach, but during absences from Justine in the summer and over the Christmas holidays, he seemed restless sometimes. After tanning and swimming, he’d go off by himself in the beach-house apartment and call Justine on the phone.

“You’ve never been to Laguna?” I overheard him say one day. “It’s got lots of fake artsy charm—shingled cottages, surf shops. Ice cream cones, frozen bananas. Corn dogs. That kind of thing.” He paused. “
You’ve never heard of a corn dog?
It’s a hot dog coated in an inch of cornmeal and deep-fried. I know. Gag.
Wretch.
The name ‘corn dog’ says everything you need to know, really. The whole scene is very Middle America—and geared for perpetual youth and bad taste.”

He paused again, for a longer time. “I know it has that reputation. The beaches are lovely, kind of like the Amalfi coast. There are some nice houses in the hills, I suppose. Mother’s isn’t one of those. She’s got this big bungalow that’s depressingly overdecorated. Terrible French stuff. One of the bedrooms is done in pink and gray. Sort of a bubble-gum pink meets battleship. Looks like she’s expecting Mamie Eisenhower to turn up any second.”

Over the year Justine had made an impact on his life in many small but noticeable ways—the driving gloves he wore, a heavy cashmere throw at the foot of his bed, a black-faced Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch on his wrist, an Egon Schiele lithograph of a nude with her legs akimbo on his bedroom wall. He’d given up his modern stainless-steel flatware for every day and was using a set of heavy sterling that Marguerite had parted with. His laundry was now picked up and returned by Perignon—he’d stopped bothering to shuttle it around himself. And his wardrobe, which had previously consisted of corduroys and turtleneck sweaters, jeans and the occasional black knit tie—the epitome of hip academic understatement—had become more eccentric. He was wearing collarless shirts in very fine linen, left open to the middle of his chest. At night he’d taken to wearing a black sealskin fedora around North Beach. This was joined by a black turtleneck and, later, a black wool cape that he’d gotten made in London. “It’s my new look,” he said to me a few times, as if amused by his own nerve. “Whaddya think?” I always smiled and said, “Neat,” but in my mind I was wondering why a man so good-looking would want to dress like Vincent Price in
The House of Wax.

With Justine he’d grown more social, too. They went out a great deal—dinner parties, film screenings, museum openings, Haight-Ashbury happenings. Justine sat on the boards of a Zen center and an art school, which required a certain amount of boho entertaining. As though wanting to keep up his end of things, my father organized a flamenco festival at Alegrías and began to throw
juergas,
or flamenco parties, of his own—inspiring the local dancers and musicians with good wine that they otherwise couldn’t afford, and good dope. Spending most nights with Justine—and her angelic, yellow
-haired daughter, Lara, whom he seemed to tolerate with calibrated affection—his apartment next door on Telegraph Hill Boulevard became mostly an office.

His company, Harrison-Ruin Computing, was doing well in the race to develop and manufacture semiconductor parts but required more managing and travel and attention than my father seemed interested in. He rarely mentioned his partner, Don Harrison—as if a gulf had grown between them. In fact, he rarely discussed Harrison-Ruin, almost as if he were embarrassed to have to be working at all. (When people asked him what he did for a living, he had three different stock replies: “I’m in the trades,” or “As little as possible,” or sometimes, if he was feeling a bit hostile, “I used to be a doctor but decided people weren’t worth saving.”) Aside from puzzles and problems that he enjoyed solving, like riddles, or talking with colleagues about burgeoning technologies, my father didn’t seem interested in business or making money. Rather, he just craved independence and freedom—and more time to play. The more successful he became, the more he talked about wanting to travel or moving across the bay or designing his own house, but those dreams didn’t seem any more serious than his periodic threat to sell the MG and buy an old Bugatti.

I still thought of Cary from time to time. There were no pictures or lingering signs of her at my father’s office-apartment on Telegraph Hill, but she hovered like a ghost in the air around my bedroom in Van Dale, where the tarot cards were kept in good order in their velvet pouch, as if they could still communicate her advice and sweetness. As the days passed and months unfolded and brought more occasions with Justine, and more time for me to see how unusual she was, and vulnerable, and extravagant—there was a garageful of motorcycles, a closetful of fur coats—and how crazy my
father was about her, it was clear that reminiscing about Cary, or even missing her so much, was both pointless and painful. The childlike intensity and easy warmth that Cary had brought to every visit to San Francisco began to seem something to outgrow, like my baby blanket. But more and more, without much to draw me in, I didn’t really care for my weekends in San Francisco—and began to resist going at all.

“Marguerite thinks you’re at a crossroads,” Whitman said to me on the phone. “That’s what she told Dad. You’re at a crossroads, and she thinks it’s time for her to step in.”

“That’s so stupid,” I said. But I suppose she was right. If at eight I had been drawn to pairs and even numbers and symmetry—to sorting the world around me into collaborations and harmony—now that I was thirteen, my mind made studies of discord and asymmetry. I noticed the odd thing, what was off kilter. I was acutely aware of what didn’t seem to fit and what was out of place. And when I was with my father and Justine, visiting their foggy universe of beautiful people and rich hippies, I felt out of place. My clothes were wrong, and I never knew what to say. My father didn’t fit into my world, and I didn’t fit into his. Where did I belong?

EIGHT

Tea with Marguerite

M
ost of my memories in San Benito are of watching Marguerite in her own house. I followed her around, room to room, while she explained things to me, showing me how to wind the mantel clock or telling me the story of some ashtray or figurine. She loved her things. And she was always straightening, or fixing, or perfecting something that she felt had gone to seed. I watched her make the beds in Aunt Ann’s room before my first sleepover there. She rejected several smooth sheets for being wrinkled and improperly laundered, then spent a great deal of time demonstrating how a bed should be made with hospital corners. She had me practice hospital corners, finally shouting out, “Good girl! That’s it!” and went on to show me, in detail, what constituted a fine wool blanket and which blanket covers—they were seersucker—were “the good ones” to buy.

The afternoon we had “proper tea,” agonizing care was taken with each chicken salad sandwich—the perfect cubing of a chicken breast, the measuring of five level teaspoonfuls of mayonnaise,
the chopping of equal-size celery bits, the slow sprinkling of celery salt. She laid out the slices of Northridge white sandwich bread on a wooden cutting board and carefully buttered each slice from edge to edge, leaving no surface area dry, before she spooned the chicken salad onto it. Every so often she wiped her hands on a white apron that was tied over her navy blue dotted dress.

It was warm, and I could barely stand anywhere without leaning on something or slouching, as though my body were feeling its weight intensely. I watched Marguerite from behind. Her body was slender—jutting collarbones, a big rib cage, toothpick legs. Her arms were a bit too long and disproportionately thin, the way a snowman looks when you use sticks for arms. I used to stare at the bumpy blue veins in her hands and drift off into a foggy state of mind. Was it adolescence? Was it something else? I always lacked energy in those days, or what Marguerite called “gumption.” At home in Van Dale, I would have hopped onto the kitchen counter and watched the cooking. Or I would have slumped to the linoleum in my low-rider jeans and Mexican top with a drawstring neckline. Without even asking, I knew this wasn’t an option in San Benito, where a certain formality was maintained.

“Lettuce, Inez?”

“Huh?”

Marguerite turned around and shot me a look. Everywhere lately, people were shooting me looks like that. My mother, Abuelita, teachers in school. “Lettuce on your sandwich?”

“Yeah—I mean, yes,
please.
”

The kitchen in San Benito seemed a vast space to me—and usually accommodated two or three cooks with room to spare during the holidays or when Marguerite threw parties. Unlike our tiny kitchen at Abuelita’s, where the shelves and window ledges were cluttered
with gummy teapots, framed postcards pictures of Peru, a plastic hula girl that Mr. Feinman had brought back from Hawaii, Marguerite’s kitchen didn’t look homey at all. Marguerite felt that a decorated kitchen was tacky. She preferred an impersonal, institutional look. The walls and cabinets were white. There were no patterned curtains or wallpaper. The countertops were dark wood, and glossy, and held a large white porcelain sink that I had a faint memory of sitting in as a baby.

“Inez, do you drink—
Inez?
” Marguerite was cutting off the crusts of the sandwiches.

“Yes?”

“You drink tea, don’t you?”

“I drink coffee with hot milk sometimes at Dad’s,” I said through a yawn, not really answering the question. “But not at home. Mom won’t let me.”

“I suspect,” said Marguerite, “that you do all kinds of things with your father that you don’t do at home. Am I right?”

Marguerite was arranging the sandwiches on top of a paper doily. When she moved over by the window, the bright sunlight came through her thin white hair, and I could see the outlines of her scalp and the shape of her small head. It had never occurred to me that my grandmother had a scalp—or a head, really. Marguerite was one of those old women—San Benito seemed populated with them—whose appearance was entirely about her straight white hair and her tan, and maybe the gold rope she wore with her cashmere sweaters.