The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  Across the atrium there was a bigger wooden door. With a gentle push, we entered the main foyer. I still remember the feeling, and the excitement, when it seemed to me that my father’s efforts, and perhaps all the ruminating and gestating and secrecy, and all those shares of Harrison-Ruin Computing that he’d sold off, had been worth it. I had never been inside a house so magnificent. Every surface—from the sandstone fireplace that was shared by two rooms to the redwood paneling to the tall white walls and wooden ceiling—was simple and perfect. Long decks ran along the length of the living room and kitchen, giving the place the feeling of being part of the dry hillside, and protected by it, before one noticed that the house turned dramatically on one side to face the boisterous sea. Aside from a large round glass dining table and rattan-and-leather chairs, my father hadn’t bought much new furniture either. He’d simply spread his small amount of stuff from the Telegraph Hill apartment into five times the amount of living space. The screens, the flamenco poster, the Egon Schiele nudes—there were now three of them—were all there, and welcomed me like old friends.

  Having seen the first floor of the house—most of it taken up with a master bedroom suite with an enormous bath, dressing room, and office—we sat down in the kitchen to drink tea. I was curious to see the guest room—or my room and Whitman’s—but my father had made some scones for my visit, the ones I liked, so we took a few minutes to eat them and watch a low layer of fog and mist sweep in from the hillside and overtake the beach. The house still seemed cheerful and open, surprisingly so, even though the hillside and beach were now encased in a gloomy wet mist. “Most people don’t like the thick fog—which can last all day—but I do,” he said, almost proudly. “I’m not sure why, but I think you’re going to feel the same way. This side of the ridge has its own microclimate, really. Dense fog, mists—and then, just down the hill in Sausalito, there’s blazing sunshine every day.”

  I felt like changing my clothes after the flight, maybe taking a shower. I walked back to the foyer of the house, grabbed my duffel bag, and looked around.

  “Where’s my room?” I asked. “Downstairs?”

  “What do you mean, ‘downstairs’? my father laughed. “There’s no downstairs. This is it, Inez. And you’re right here”—he pointed to the open living room—“on the ever-popular brown sofa. That’s your favorite spot, isn’t it?”

  FOURTEEN

  Just Some Playboy

  Behind the wheel of the MG, I was mobile and irresponsible. It was nighttime, always nighttime, and the world was waiting for me.

  “Market Basket always sells to us,” Shelley was saying. We needed some beer for a party—an event that we’d heard about via some strange party grapevine. I didn’t know who was throwing the party or the exact address, but I assumed we’d find it, as Shelley and I always did, based on the din emanating from the kid’s house or the twirling light on the policeman’s car. Neighbors always complained, and the police always came.

  I popped out my retainer, left it near the gearshift of the MG. I opened my wallet and pulled out my real ID—the one that revealed I was sixteen. And then I made sure my other ID was still there, the fake one that said my name was “Jade Dunaway” and I was twenty-one.

  I didn’t like smoking grass anymore—that was largely abandoned after Marguerite died—but what I missed in terms of giddy dislocation, I made up for with alcohol. Every weekend I drank in Shelley’s backyard, in the backs of vans, in the balconies of movie theaters, and I drank at parties—at the houses of classmates that I’d never really talked to or knew. Sometimes I woke up in my bedroom at Abuelita’s and smelled the cigarette smoke in my hair and tasted the sourness in my mouth and had no memory of coming home. How late was I out? How’d I wind up here? I’d open the curtains of my bedroom and see the MG sitting in the driveway, safe and clean and silent, keeping my secrets, awaiting another adventure. The nighttime called to me. The car called to me. Underneath the dark, starry canopy of the western sky, we drove to mixers and parties and discos, to gatherings of teenagers in vacant lots and Logo Park. We went to clubs on Sunset, concerts at the Greek and Shrine and Santa Monica Civic. The MG transported me, carried me along, protected me, lifted me, always waiting for me in parking lots and along roadsides to come back. I floated and laughed and drank and smoked, batted away the hands and mouths of boys—a tease, a public temptation—and then Shelley and the MG and I would drive to In-N-Out or Bob’s Big Boy and have another beer on the way, a roadie, and for some reason—some bizarre, miraculous reason—I always found my way home.

  At the parking lot of Market Basket, I looked at myself in the small rearview mirror. Did I look twenty-one? It seemed impossibly old, and mature, and glamorous, and so far away. I pursed my lips and sucked in my cheeks. But my eyes were still dewy and young—and maybe a little scared.

  “You’re doing that look again,” Shelley said.

  “What look?”

  “That pathetic expression you always get when you’re looking at yourself in the mirror but nowhere else.”

  Why were we still friends? Shelley indulged in heartlessness. She dispensed unbridled honesty. She ridiculed me for “being afraid of men” and said that I was insecure and had a complex. She was always talking about how Gary Kloss was “dying to do it” with me or how somebody else was “salivating” when he saw me. She loved dragging me into a room and watching guys’ reactions. But I’d taken her for a pregnancy test at the We Care Clinic in Torrance, where the nurses were chirpy and upbeat, and then I had to take her back a week later. While waiting for her “procedure” to be over, I read every pamphlet available about vaginitis, venereal disease, herpes simplex, and genital warts, about chlamydia and unwanted pregnancies. And then I’d seen her cry really hard—some kind of hormone deal—and writhe in pain. I wasn’t going to be that stupid. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. Ever. Why were we still friends? Because she did the bold dumb things. And I’d thrown in my lot with her. Besides, she knew me inside and out. She got what I was up to. That counted for a lot. And we had a plan for our lives.

  Instead of going to school on Wednesdays, we split up the week with a “field trip”—for mind expansion and sophistication and all the things we were missing by being stuck in the cultural desert of the suburbs. Sometimes we took the Van Dale Freeway into downtown Los Angeles and shopped. Sometimes, if we were dressed up, we went into Bullocks Wilshire and checked out the handbags or marveled at the hosiery and makeup. We never bought anything there, just gaped and fondled. It was on Melrose Avenue where we got most of our clothes—at crummy vintage shops full of musty racks and mannequins with missing limbs and deco posters under flickering lights. We searched for berets and old compacts, cigarette holders and cigarette cases and lighters—the ones with tired flints and cotton wicks that looked like clouds. We bought polka-dotted dresses with belted waists from the 1940s. We got into heavy coats with padded shoulders that it was never cold enough to wear, ever, along with boxy handbags that had small, tight handles and zippered compartments only big enough to slip a square mirror into.

  When I wasn’t in the mood for something previously worn—when I’d grown disgusted with my wardrobe of used clothes purchased with built-in BO that couldn’t be eradicated, and maybe some light sweat stains—I wore a pair of lean Chemin de Fer jeans with an open-collared satin shirt. I was sleek and shiny, taut and long. My hair was dark brown again, and my perm had grown out and become a loose, shoulder-length hive of waves. I’d plucked my eyebrows down to a fine line that arched delicately over my eyes.

  Sometimes we saw foreign movies at the NuArt or the Fox in Venice or the Tiffany on Sunset. The Conformist. Rules of the Game. Jules et Jim. We sat in the smoking section of the theater. Sometimes we drank wine. We put our Frye boots up on the backs of the seats in front of us—and took over an entire aisle with all our shopping bags and purses and coats that we never needed in L.A. but liked to carry around anyway.

  We went to museums—to the Norton Sim
on, to LACMA, to the Getty that had just opened in Malibu. (So scary how the parking attendant checked my driver’s license at the kiosk and said, “Okay, Miss Dunaway.”) Shelley wanted to be a painter or a graphics designer—whatever that was—and I’d gotten into photography. For Christmas Dad had given me an enormous Nikon camera with a motor-drive and a 200-millimeter lens, and, like the MG, it was a little too much, and it overwhelmed me. I hadn’t taken a photography course, but I read the manual, figured out the basics, and brought the camera everywhere with me: to Griffith Park Observatory, where Shelley and I went to see the laser light show; to Yamashiro’s, a Japanese restaurant above Hillcrest, where I photographed the view of Hollywood and all the swimming pools. I drove the MG far up into the hills, along the ridge of Mulholland Drive where Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty lived, but the road was surprisingly narrow and dusty, and the famous canyons and movie stars never came into view.

  One midweek excursion we went south to Laguna Beach. It took a couple hours in those days, before all the highways were put in. Shelley had never been to Laguna—and I wanted to show her the village, and Crystal Cove, and Bluebird Canyon, and Main Beach, where all the aimless cute guys played basketball. I was dying for a banana-pineapple smoothie from the Orange Inn, and I wanted to have lunch at the JR for old times’ sake. Shelley had never seen Marguerite’s bungalow on Moss Cove either, or gone inside. But the closer we got to the old house, the more freaked I felt. Something unexpected happened—it was so weird. The house looked exactly the same, exactly, and this played some kind of trick on me, as if my body or some other part of me believed that it was the old days again. I couldn’t shake that feeling. And my heart was pounding, because maybe Whitman would come out the screen door, and he’d wave. And maybe Marguerite was still alive inside there, and a bridge game was going, or cribbage, or everybody was having a bowl of cereal. It seemed impossible that I couldn’t walk in the door and flop on a sofa or turn on the TV and watch Gilligan’s Island. What made the whole thing even weirder was that my Aunt Ann and Uncle Drew lived in the house now. I hadn’t seen them since the funeral. I hadn’t seen Lizzie or Lisa or Amanda either, except at a Fourth of July thing at the Arroyo. I went just to be nice, and for old times’ sake. But Lizzie and Lisa had gotten into the preppy thing so heavily—too heavily—and were covered in monograms and grosgrain and wore horrible khaki skirts that made their butts look huge. It was like they’d had memory loss, too, because suddenly they’d forgotten they’d ever burned incense or taken a macramé class or worn low-rider cords. Or smoked a joint. What do you mean? We’ve always dressed this way. They looked at me like I was from another planet, like some unpreppy lowlife who’d wandered into the club and was going to foul up their chances for junior membership. That’s how it felt anyway. But they were the big embarrassment as far as I was concerned, not me. They were the ones who were lost and didn’t know who they were anymore. Not me.

  My father taught me how to drive a stick. At Van Dale High, there was a driving class with driving simulators, and we’d sit in a dark theater and watch a big screen while we turned fake steering wheels and pretended to be driving—and not hitting that old lady or the child running after a ball. After that useless exercise, we were able to drive in a real car that was owned by the high school. It was an automatic, a huge American thing. One of those dinosaurs that nobody in California drove anymore, because of the gas lines. We were accompanied by an instructor, Mr. Luza, who was just another dim-bulb PE coach who smelled like sharp, stinky aftershave and used expressions like “golly gee.” Mr. Luza encouraged us to practice driving with our parents, so I drove my mother’s VW Rabbit diesel to the supermarket while she tried not to have a heart attack on the seat next to me. Then my father called one afternoon.

  We were making plans for a visit. Summer was starting—the summer after Marguerite had died—and Picasso and Chameleon had been sold, and there was no beach house to go to and no riding camp in Colorado. But for some reason I wasn’t feeling too sorry for myself. Turning sixteen seemed like an amazing thing in itself.

  “I’ve been thinking about your birthday,” my father said. “How about the MG?”

  “What about it?”

  “Would you want it?”

  I must have misheard him. “What?”

  “The MG. I was thinking of giving it to you.”

  I couldn’t speak. I had died, really, and was completely surrounded in white light. “The MG?” I worried that if I uttered those two glamorous letters aloud, they might disappear. I’d never dared to imagine driving the car, much less owning something so fine and beautiful. My body came alive with desire, and excitement, and so much elation, that I wanted to hang up and call Shelley and, at the same time, race around the house shouting to Abuelita and my mother.

  “I’ve got the Alfa Romeo now,” he said very calmly. “And the MG—it’s looking kind of lonely. Do you think you could take care of it?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m certainly not. What’s the matter—do you have something else in mind, like a new Porsche?”

  At first, after Marguerite—why did everything spin around her death date?—he showed up at the airport with Gretchen. She was an artist. She made paper, actually, which always seemed like a strange thing for somebody to make. She had red hair that fell in ringlets and googly green eyes and freckles. In her studio, off in some ratty part of San Francisco, she mixed vats of hot, starchy water with bits of fiber floating around in them. It looked exactly like swirling clumps of toilet paper in an overflowing bowl, and then she poured dye into the vats and then scooped out the colored tissue with a big slotted spoon and placed it onto a screen, almost like a window screen, but with bigger holes. When the water ran out and the clumps of tissue dried, it became “paper,” and Gretchen framed the large sheets behind Plexiglas. They hung in hospital corridors and on the walls of banks. It was amazing to me that people really paid her for them. They all reminded me of toilet paper, or dried vomit. But Gretchen was nice, super nice. She was followed by a decisive blonde named Carol, who was an executive at I. Magnin, a department store—not really my father’s usual type, not artsy enough and no overbite—and then by a few women whom he only mentioned on the phone (“I met the nicest ballet dancer!”) but who didn’t endure long enough for me to meet.

  “Has he told you about Laurel yet?” Whitman asked me on the phone one night. He was back by then, finally, living in Ojala with Patricia—and helping her with a big landscaping project. Somehow I’d managed to keep Shelley from meeting him. It wasn’t that hard, really. Whitman was around for only a couple months before he’d begun contemplating a visit to Hawaii and the winter waves.

  “Who’s Laurel?” I asked.

  “A computer programmer,” he said. “Not at Harrison-Ruin. Somewhere else. He seems really smitten. He went on and on about her the other night. She went to Radcliffe and has him reading Ovid.”

  “What happened to Carol?”

  “Too into clothes, I think, and charity fund-raisers. She drove him into the arms of Laurel. She’s into Catullus, too.”

  None of that meant anything to me. Ovid, Catullus, who were they? I imagined that Laurel looked like Ali MacGraw in Love Story, my only Radcliffe association, but she wound up leaning toward a semi–Bionic Woman type. Anyway, it was pointless to get caught up in my father’s girlfriends or to follow their interests, because nobody lasted anymore. They came. They went. It was just a matter of weeks, or a few months. He made them cappuccinos in the morning with his new espresso machine. He made them salmon at night in his copper fish poacher—and poured glasses of Veuve Clicquot for them. They smoked very good dope and went to very good movies, and sometimes, if they were very special and it would be awkward otherwise, Whitman and I got to spend a day with them. We were treated like celebrities, visiting dignitaries. And I could tell, from the look on the new girlfriend’s face, that my father had been bragging about us to her—making us sound like two
geniuses, two beauties, the prince and princess of his permanent life.

  The black driving gloves had disappeared, and the cape, and several other reminders of Justine. But a few of the things she’d brought to his daily life endured. He was eating off Marguerite’s good china—and using his great-aunt’s heavy silver. He had continued to collect Egon Schiele prints, and his laundry was still picked up and dropped off by Perignon. He’d gotten involved at the art institute where Justine had so much influence and had become a guest lecturer there, giving slideshows on a mystifyingly broad range of topics: artificial intelligence, industrial design, the psychological impact of typeface, the use of computers to verify the authenticity of Old Masters paintings. How he qualified as “an expert” on any of these subjects eluded me but never seemed to trouble the beautiful young students who followed him home.

  “I talked to Justine a few days ago,” he’d say every so often. “She says hello and asked how you are. Boy, she sounds great.”

  She had moved out of the city and wound up in Big Sur. She’d revamped her life and downscaled—no grand house, no housekeeper, no Lotus, and her daughter, Lara, was going to public school. Whitman had visited them on a drive up the coast and reported back that Justine had given up meat, caffeine, and alcohol. She didn’t seem to have a boyfriend, as far as he could tell, and spent most of her spare time at a Buddhist monastery in the hills.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have let her drift away,” my father had said, himself drifting into complete banality. There were a number of moments like that—when it seemed as if he hadn’t been able to put Justine behind him. Maybe all of us felt that way. We missed her elegance and dignity, her shyness and honesty. We missed the stability and permanence she gave to our lives, even the sense of destiny. With Justine my father seemed part of something fated and special—as if he had unwittingly stumbled upon a soul mate.