The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  “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.”

  In 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 collab
orations 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

  Most 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.

  “I had ginseng tea once,” I blurted, still hopelessly out of sync, “and couldn’t sleep that night. Whitman and I can stay up as late as we want at Dad’s.”

  “Well, why not?” Marguerite chuckled and made a few slurping sounds with her mouth. “It’s fun to stay up late, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Your father was always a night owl. Me, too. N.C. was the only one who liked the morning. As far as I’m concerned, I could do entirely without it.”

  I’d stayed over at Marguerite’s—and endured the nighttime tolling of the grandfather clock—when Lisa was visiting from Newport. We carried our small suitcases into Aunt Ann’s old room and quickly scattered our things everywhere, then tried on each other’s bras. We pretended that we were spies for a while, Nancy Drew or the Girls from U.N.C.L.E., and went outdoors to hide by the brick barbecue that nobody used, or in the pool house, which really had a wicked smell. We looked for secret notes—sometimes Whitman left them around. We tried to find secret panels and hidden money in the library. And we liked to raid the pantry, off the kitchen, where Marguerite kept ancient fruitcakes and all kinds of sweets and boxes of expensive chocolates. At night Marguerite made us root beer floats, and we watched the ten o’clock news with George Putnam in my father’s old bedroom—and later the beginnings of the Carson show. Then we’d say good night to Marguerite, and the rest of the night was a blur. Lisa and I closed the door to Aunt Ann’s room and stayed up, talking about boys at school, swapping stories about our friends, analyzing family members, and musing about Whitman’s love life. As in, did he have one?

  When we woke in the morning, around nine or ten, Marguerite’s bedroom door was still closed. It would stay closed until around ten-thirty or eleven, when it opened a crack. That meant my grandmother was taking breakfast in her room—black coffee, half a grapefruit, a bowl of cereal on a tray—and would see visitors. We’d peek around the door, and there she’d be, looking shockingly pale against huge pillows on her pink canopy bed, like an uncooked turkey. Her thin white hair was messy and vaguely Medusa-ish or, once, pressed down by a strange hairnet that didn’t match the color of her hair. She wore a satin bed jacket over the top of her sheer nightgown—Lisa and I could see peeps of Marguerite’s nipples and protruding belly. But all that was too horrible to focus on. Her gray-blue eyes were the main thing, and they shone with outrage in the morning, as though she were barely able to contain an urge to kill something.

  “Inez.” Marguerite turned around in the kitchen and was staring at me with a look of disbelief. “Inez.”

  “What?”

  “I was asking about where you’d like to sit. Since we’re having a proper tea, I thought we’d take it in the living room. Shall we?”

  She carried a large silver tray out of the kitchen. Numbly, I followed her. It felt like a long distance, like crossing the desert to Aqaba. Halfway to the living room, I realized that I was meant to bring a tray with me, too, and not just follow my grandmother like a mindless gosling. So as Marguerite wobbled her way across the obstacle course of Oriental and Native American carpets, each of varying thicknesses which her pencil-thin legs must have memorized, I doubled back to the kitchen, slid another silver tray off the counter, and hurried to find that Marguerite was already setting up on a tiered table next to the piano.

  “Can you manage?” she asked. “Can you? Good girl. Fine. Yes, just rest it there.”

  She immediately left th
e room, heading to the kitchen once more for cookies and cakes, and I watched her—what a lot of work this all was—vaguely wondering if I was supposed to follow again, and help.

  Exhausted, I collapsed into a striped chair instead.

  In the low light of the wall sconces, N.C.’s face looked down at me from a portrait. He seemed flat and unreal. In the background of the painting, there was a tiny rendering of Lawton Dam that was done in great detail, whereas my grandfather looked about as out of focus as a face on Mount Rushmore. He’d built a lot of dams in California—and, according to Whitman, destroyed forests and wildlife and exploited untold hordes of Mexican laborers. I had no idea why Lawton was special. Marguerite might have told me once, during one of her long monologues about N.C. and how brilliant and perfect he was and how he rescued her from a sad childhood and brought her west and made a fortune as an engineer. But aside from passing references to dams, N.C.’s career was a mystery to me, the way everybody’s career was something of a mystery to me—and a very dull mystery, too. Anyway, engineering feats weren’t really what the Ruins talked about when they talked about N.C. In the twelve years since his death, he’d been reduced to just three attributes: He loved the horse races. He loved to sail. And he loved reading about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, sometimes in other languages. The dams that he built were just his job, and in California, as everybody knows, it only matters what you do on weekends.

  At some point or another, Marguerite had attached a poignant little story to most of the objects in the room. She had walked me around and rather laboriously explained the provenance of every piece of furniture, every porcelain figurine. It was a pretty dreary mélange of stuff. There were cumbersome chairs, sconces dripping with cut crystal, and ornate decorative objects—combined to create a kind of somber clutter that seemed at great odds with the simple California sunlight and mild climate outside the heavy curtains. In the corners, curio cabinets were filled with small porcelain shoes, Battersea boxes, carved bottles, and netsukes from Japan. In front of the fireplace was a large paper fan—why?—and above the mantel a haunting portrait of a very young girl, a New England ancestor with a sour expression and a determined little grip on the arm of an Empire chair. Marguerite had lots of sour-faced New England ancestors but not many family heirlooms—her father had gambled and lost everything well before the Depression. Yet somehow she’d wound up with a portrait of her great-aunt, Nettie Snow. I didn’t seem to know much about Nettie, however, except that she was dead.