Valley Fever (23 page)

“Your legs go practically up through your head,” she said, which is the kind of thing she says to make sure you forgive her for walking in on you.

“You smell like smoke. I can smell it from here.”

“I'm not smoking,” she said.

“I just thought something might be wrong.”

“There is something wrong, Ingrid.”

I didn't say anything. Anne always comes up with something smarter than what you have to say. She always wins.

“Is this what you want?” she asked. “You want to come back here and be a farmer?”

You see: she got mean anyway, while I was trying to be nice and quiet. “Did I say this is what I want?” I said.

“I want you to get out of here.”

“I'm not you. This is fine for me, for now.”

“This isn't you, either.”

“I don't know.” I was still thinking that I wanted to talk her out of smoking cigarettes. But the real thing is, cigarettes aren't so bad—they're just a good way for us all to feel superior to everyone else. I feel superior to Anne, who smokes occasionally, and she feels superior to Bootsie, who smokes every day, and Bootsie feels superior to George, who smokes first thing in the morning and last thing at night. “Why are you being so mean to me?”

“I am not being mean,” she said. “Let's go outside.”

“You're being so critical.”

“I want you to do something with yourself.”

“I want to do something with myself, too, Anne.”

“Well.”

“For now, I'm going to look after things here.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Let's go outside.”

Outside, the crickets had started and the heat hadn't wound down. The nighttime heat might not wind down until October, at least. The stone steps were still hot from the day. Anne and I never wore shoes at night in the Fresno summer. You want to feel your toes in the grass, on the pavement, sinking through the dust and dirt. We sat in the old lawn chairs by the tennis court, two terraces down from the house, ostensibly so Mother and Dad wouldn't smell Anne's smoke.

The cigarette was a thing to hold on to as she talked, a point of focus.

“Charlie is moving out,” she said.

“I knew something had happened,” I said.

“Because you think I'm a bitch.”

“I don't think you're a bitch.”

“Charlie thinks I'm a bitch.”

“You two just need a rest. You just need a little break, Anne.”

“I don't know how people stay married.”

“I don't know how people even get to the point where they get married.”

“Well, we were young. We didn't know yet how stupid we were.”

“What's happened?”

“Nothing happened. He doesn't like me.” She exhaled and watched the cigarette's smoke. “I'm not sure I like him, either.”

“Well, I like him,” I said.

“Ingrid, that is not nice. Be on my side.”

“I am on your side. This is temporary.”

“Everything is temporary,” she said. “Except divorce. Divorce is permanent.” We heard an owl. Farmers love the sound of owls, which they hope are eating the bunnies and squirrels that ruin the crops. “The smoke looks pretty in the night, against the moon,” she said. “Doesn't it?”

“You're not getting a divorce,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “I think I am.” She started to cry. “And then I will always be divorced.”

“Even if you were, being divorced is kind of glamorous.”

“Don't try to be funny. You're not funny.”

I looked at her, and she watched her hand. She flicked ashes into the air. It had been a long time since I'd seen Anne cry. Even when she scrunched up her face and wiped her nose with the back of her free hand, she couldn't help being pretty. The crying gave her a fragility and softness she didn't have otherwise. “William Saroyan married the same woman twice.”

“He divorced the same woman twice.”

“All the great women are divorced.”

“Is that true? Who?”

I couldn't think of any. “All of them.”

“Not Margaret Thatcher.”

“She couldn't get divorced for political reasons.”

“Mrs. Gandhi.”

“Well,” I said. “She was exceptional.”

“Remember when we thought we were exceptional?”

I scratched the back of her head. “I still think you're exceptional,” I told her.

“I just thought of one,” she said.

“Who.”

“Grace Paley.”

I had forgotten Grace Paley.

“Susan Sontag,” I said.

“You see,” she said. “You
can
have children and still be exceptional. Everything has gone wrong.”

*   *   *

Anne refused to ride with me in the truck. “I'm depressed enough,” she said. She was in bed, in her stark room, wearing one of my father's large white T-shirts.

“A woman crosses a room,” I said. It was just before lunch and I had spent the morning driving around, weighing grapes in my hand, walking through the rows for any sign that the tops of the vines had started to burn. The tops of the vines had started to burn.

“I don't want to play this now.” It was a game we had—I started a story and then she gave me the next line, and I gave her the next, and on and on. It was a boring game that had kept us occupied during the long car rides of our childhood.

“A woman crosses a room and falls into a pool,” I said.

“Come on, Inky.”

“A woman crosses a room and falls into a pool and tries to drown herself but forgets to put rocks in her pocket and keeps popping up.”

“This is the most depressing version of this game I've ever heard,” Anne said.

“You don't want to just ride with me?” I said. “Don't stay in bed the whole day. The truck has air-conditioning.” Mother and Dad were off the air-conditioning again. Even the dried food in the pantry had begun to smell like dehydration. The boxed raisins from last year had turned hard like pebbles.

“I am beginning to understand that you and I are much more different than I thought,” Anne said.

“I feel like you mean that in a derogatory way.”

“You always think the worst of me. I'm not derogatory, I am just being frank. I could never come back and drive around in that truck, like you have apparently chosen to do, like you are apparently enjoying.” All the softness from last night had disappeared.

“You would, if you had to.”

“You don't have to, Ingrid.”

“Have you spoken to Charlie?”

She became still and emotionless. “I think at some point in the future we're going to have to stop mentioning his name, or anyone called Charlie.”

“What did he say?”

Charlie had e-mailed to say he had begun to pack his clothes and books and audio equipment and the contents of his wine collection. He'd taken the first apartment he looked at, near his office on the Westside, on the second floor of a glassy high-rise on Wilshire. “An absolute bachelor pad,” Anne said. “Near all the coeds of UCLA.”

“Near work,” I said.

“It's about as far away as you can get from a pokey house in Beachwood Canyon.”

“He's just having a tantrum.”

“He's going to find someone else quickly,” she said. “He wants to have a family.” She pulled the sheet up over her head. From under the covers she said, “I don't feel well.”

“Staying in bed all day is going to make you feel worse.”

“The heart is a muscle,” she said. “It regenerates. It needs rest.”

“We could go out and buy underwear.”

“I don't need new underwear,” she said. “What I need is paperbacks. Charlie is going to take all the books. I know him.”

“We could go out and buy paperbacks.”

“He's going to take everything he wants with no consideration for the things I'll miss.”

“You can buy it all again, Anne. None of that stuff means anything.”

“But it means something that he takes it. It's not the objects, Ingrid, it's the gesture, and the lack of consideration. The lack, the lack of love.”

“Why don't you speak to him and divvy things up, like everyone else does?”

“I don't want to do that. He should know the things I'll miss. You see, this is the problem.”

“Why don't you speak to him, and tell him that, then?”

“God, Ingrid, do you think I'm a moron? Of course I've spoken to him about all this. But it does no good to go on speaking if the other person doesn't listen. It does no good if Charlie can't hear, and Charlie can't hear.”

“Hardly anyone can hear,” I said. “That's not a failing specific to Charlie.”

“It's an epidemic,” Anne said. Then, “You know, I read that the brain can't tell the difference between the pain of rejection and the pain of a broken arm. All the same receptors light up.”

“I read that, too. That same article.” The broken-arm parts of my own brain had started to heal, or maybe had healed almost entirely. Feeling responsible for something, having people rely on you, was a very good remedy for all sorts of pain.

Anne would go back to a house half full of furniture: a bed and two coconut chairs and the Copenhagen dining table, but no sofa and no armoire. Charlie would take the pots and flatware. Anne would keep the everyday dishes, the china, the Saint-Louis crystal. Anne would start smoking indoors, exhaling out windows and leaving ashtrays in every room.

The Karastan rug would be slightly brighter in the rectangle where the sofa had been.

Charlie did take all the paperbacks, and the hardcovers, too. He left the lopsided IKEA bookshelf and the Samuel French copies of all the plays Anne had done in college.

“I knew he would leave the plays,” she said later. “They all have my handwriting in them.”

 

17.

I found Uncle Felix at the Vineyard. He was at his table in the corner, bent head to head with bald Billy Moradian, both of them eating fried calamari with their fingers. When I was a child, Billy had gone to jail for five years after killing his show horse for the insurance money. I remembered his fat face and broken nose from the pictures I'd seen in the paper. Many of Uncle Felix's friends had been in and out of jail. Felix seemed to admire these characters, men who valued money over integrity, men who did whatever they thought they could get away with, until they couldn't.

“Uncle Felix.”

“Inky! Do you know Billy Moradian?”

“Hi, I'm Ingrid.”

“Ned Palamede's kid,” Uncle Felix told him.

Billy had a fat, slippery mouth, now glistening with grease. He wiped his thick fingers on the edge of the tablecloth and reached to shake my hand. “Billy Moradian,” he said. “He's a good guy, your dad. He's got good land.”

“Uncle Felix,” I began.

“And a good operation,” Billy continued.

“A great operation,” said Uncle Felix. “Best grapes in the valley.”

I had never before heard Felix refer to Dad's grapes as the best. “What about your grapes, Uncle Felix?”

He shook his head. “No grapes compare to Ned Palamede's. Not in the valley. Your dad knew all the land to pick up. He knew what he was doing all those years, your dad.”

“All those water rights,” Billy said. “Nobody goes broke with that kind of water access.”

“Uncle Felix,” I said, “I've got some numbers I'd like to show you when you have a moment.”

“Have some lunch,” he said, pulling the leather armchair from the side of the table, waving to the waitress for another wineglass. “We're drinking the viognier.”

“Harry Cline's grapes.”

Uncle Felix held up the bottle for me to read. “They call this Napa wine,” he said, tapping the label. “It's all grown in Madera.”

“The artichokes,” Billy said. “Ingrid, I'm going to order you a plate of the best fried artichokes you'll ever eat. You tell your dad I ordered you the artichokes. And you tell him we ate them with the viognier.” Billy was the type of man who snapped at waitresses.

“Why are you looking at numbers?” Uncle Felix said. “What numbers?”

“There are some things I want to show you.”

“What things?”

“The sugar, mostly. We can talk about it after lunch. I can take you over to the vines if you like.”

“Where's your dad?”

“Haven't you talked to Dad?”

“I talk to him all the time,” Felix said.

“Oh,” I said. “He's at home.” I didn't know what else to say. “I'm just trying to learn,” I said.

“No one better to learn from than this guy right here,” said Billy, hitching his fat thumb toward Uncle Felix.

“What happened to not interested?” said Uncle Felix.

“I'm interested,” I said. “I told you if I were interested I'd work for Dad.”

The waitress brought my glass. “Drink this,” Billy Moradian said, pouring the wine. “Tell me this isn't better than anything they grow up north.”

They were right, you know, it was a beautiful wine: sharp and crispy with citrus blossoms. The kind of wine that didn't make you itch right below the ears. (Bad wine makes me itchy right at the jaw hinge.) “Gorgeous.” These guys were used to sharing two or three bottles at lunch and then climbing in their trucks to drive around all afternoon, or going back to the office to make deals drunk. “Young and complicated.”

“Like you,” said Uncle Felix. “Why don't you come by tonight and show me what it is you want to show me.”

“I have the dove dinner tonight.”

“Dove dinner, huh?” He nodded. He raised his eyebrows. “Dove dinner.”

Billy said, “Fucking doves.”

“Hey.” Uncle Felix held his hand up to Billy. “Watch your mouth in front of my goddaughter.”

Long ago, Uncle Felix had used his clout with the Bank of America and then the Bank of Fresno and then Guarantee Savings to refuse young Bint Masterson the loan he needed to build a shopping center over what had been the Masterson family's orange grove. Bint, now the owner of many shopping centers from Fresno to Sacramento, made no secret how he felt about Felix. Felix, for his part, made no secret how he felt about Masterson's destruction of the land. So Bint never invited Felix or Felix's friends to the annual dove dinner. “Can you come after lunch?” I said. “I want you to come by the vineyards and look at them. I want you to see something.” The high sugar is what I wanted him to see. The burnt leaves and grapes beginning to shrivel at the top of the vines is what I wanted him to see. “It can't wait too much longer.”