The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  Walking outside again, where I hoped to get some air—and put some distance between myself and all those glamorous women—I bumped into a guy with shaggy blond hair and almond eyes. He was younger than most of the other guests and seemed, like me, a little out of his element. Standing alone and looking at the bay, he wasn’t drinking red wine, like everybody else, but holding a glass of water.

  “Aren’t you Paul Ruin’s daughter?”

  He explained that he had worked at Harrison-Ruin a few years ago, before going back to graduate school, and had seen me at a party once. “Really?” I asked, so overcome with flattery that I didn’t realize it wasn’t nice to openly not remember him.

  “It was at your father’s apartment on Telegraph Hill,” he said. “I saw you across the room.”

  “The party for all the flamencos?” I asked. “A really long time ago?”

  “Two years ago,” he said, nodding. “On June seventeenth to be exact. I have a good memory for dates, almost like a chronic brain malfunction. Somebody else at the party told me that you were only fourteen or fifteen, and I remember thinking, Oh, I can’t talk to her. She’s too young. I wanted to, though. I’ve always been a big fan of your father’s. I guess I wondered what it would be like to be Paul’s daughter. You guys look so much alike.” Then he jerked out his right hand. “I’m David Yamato, by the way.”

  “I’m Inez.”

  He nodded and seemed to know that already.

  “David!” I heard my father call out. “Inez!” He was standing across the deck of the houseboat, near the dock. “You found each other!” It relaxed me to see him, feeling sure that he’d come over and grease the wheels conversationally, help me feel less inept. But rather than walking over, he stood near the dock waving and smiling. Then I saw Shanti coming aboard. She was wearing a bright yellow sari.

  “I’m in Pasadena now,” David was saying, “at Caltech.”

  “Oh,” I said. “My dad hated going there.”

  “I hate it, too,” David said, nodding so vigorously that his bangs danced around his eyes. “But not the school, just L.A. Living there is a drag.”

  He’d grown up in Hawaii, he said. His family had a pearl business on the Big Island and spent holidays on Molokai—at a spot so remote they had to fly in on a small private plane. A place like that, I imagined, could make Los Angeles look pretty lousy to almost anybody. As David talked about Hawaii and his family, he seemed to grow more comfortable and outgoing, as if just thinking about home gave him strength. His mother was Swedish, he said. His father was Japanese. He had an older sister and two younger ones, and there was something in the way he talked about them, sort of proudly but without mention of any specific accomplishments, that made me feel certain they were very pretty. “When I lived in San Francisco, they loved to come visit me,” he said. “But now they don’t. They hate L.A., too.”

  I nodded, didn’t say much. The superiority of Northern California—it was always there, like the cold summer. It was always there, a smugness and attitude. People in L.A. rarely said they hated San Francisco. It didn’t work that way.

  “My brother lives in Hawaii,” I said.

  “You have a brother?” David said with surprise. “Paul’s never talked about him—not the way he does about you.”

  I described Whitman in gushing tones, as if to make up for my father’s strange oversight. And as I told what I knew about Whitman’s house in Haleiwa—a town that David seemed to know well—I realized that there was something nice and brotherly about David, too. He reminded me of Whitman a little, in fact. There was something about his jawline and the way his head and neck sat on his broad shoulders. He had the posture of an athlete, I suppose—a swimmer. And, like Whitman, David gave off the feeling of a guy who’d grown up at the beach—a deliberate cool, a relaxed reserve, like there wasn’t too much to get excited about, except maybe a storm. “I don’t surf too much anymore,” he said. “I sailboard. Ever heard of that?”

  The next week my father called me to say that David had asked for my phone number at home. Was that okay? “He’s a lovely fellow,” my father added in a collaborative, encouraging way. “Very bright. I think he finished an undergraduate degree at Stanford before he was nineteen. Impressive, huh? Anyway, I think he’s just looking for a friend. He’s apparently not too happy in L.A.”

  David’s voice on the phone sounded young and sweet, almost like a girl’s. “Hey, do you want to get together?” he asked. It didn’t occur to me until later that he was twenty-five—almost ten years older. He raised the possibility of several things we could do together, all of them outdoorsy and athletic—tennis, hiking, or riding bikes to the beach. He talked a ton about sailboarding. He was so taken with the sport that he’d begun to shape his own fiberglass boards and experiment with various fins and sizes of sails. It wasn’t quite sailing, he said, but not really surfing either. There were some good spots in Malibu for it, not far from Zuma Beach. Did I want a lesson? “How about this weekend?” he posed. “I have a spare wetsuit you could borrow.”

  We went hiking instead—accompanied by Shelley. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to learn how to surf and sail at the same time. Or wear a borrowed wetsuit. And for some reason, still unclear to me, I hadn’t wanted to be alone with David. Looking back, I guess I was a little scared, worried that he wasn’t just a friend but had called for a date.

  “He seems kind of faggy,” Shelley said later.

  “You think everybody’s like that.”

  The following week we played tennis with my mother and Bob, her boyfriend. It wasn’t a serious doubles game, just “batting around a few balls,” as my mother would say. Bob was nicer than usual—impressed by David’s Stanford/Caltech credentials—and David played tennis well, much better than I, and had a quiet sort of depth that seemed to make him fit into any group yet not become lost. He wasn’t like Whitman at all, I remember thinking as I watched him play next to me. He wasn’t chatty or buoyant or full of opinions. He was more methodical and studious. After an hour or two of playing and some banter, my mother and Bob left to see a new house that was coming on the market. David drove me back to Abuelita’s in his blue Toyota Celica. He jumped out to open my car door, then quickly jumped back in and waved good-bye.

  “He’s a natural athlete,” my mother said later, approvingly. In the last decade, her ideas about what made a man attractive had changed drastically. Athletic ability was now an essential ingredient, a reaction, as far as I could tell, to my father, who had no interest in sports and did nothing remotely physical besides having sex or riding his motorcycle.

  “We’re just friends,” I insisted to Shelley—and to my mother, when she found the courage to ask me outright. And this felt entirely true until the end of May, when David casually mentioned that he’d be spending the summer in Hawaii, at his family’s “retreat” on Molokai. He seemed so thrilled to be leaving and lavishly praised his family’s property with its waterfall and “amazing swimming hole.” He was packing up his sailboards and all his equipment, he said, and sending them ahead by freighter.

  We were eating salads at Polly’s Pies while David talked about his approaching summer. As I pictured him in the swimming hole and standing under its waterfall, I felt a sudden sense of loss and defeat—almost abandonment. How could he go without me? What would I do all summer? I found myself noticing how handsome he was. And I stared at his strong hands. By the time I got into bed that night, the transformation was complete. There was little else to think of but David, David, David. His hands. His shoulders. The nape of his neck. I thought back on our first meeting, the way he smiled at me on Ooee’s barge. I wondered if his sisters had cute friends who might be in love with him. I wondered if he would be in contact with his old friend Gabby. He’d mentioned her in passing a few times. Did they ever date, or was that just my imagination? I even did the math—Y/2 + 7 = X—and was disheartened to discover that David was supposed to be with an older woman, a nineteen-year-old and not me.

 
; By morning my feelings had mushroomed exponentially, as if a sheet had been pulled off David’s head to expose the most wondrous boyfriend alive. With only a few days left before he’d leave for Hawaii, I kicked myself for not waking up to the obvious earlier.

  As we made plans to have dinner on his last night in California, I had an idea—it just hit me suddenly—that it would be fun to eat at a restaurant in Burbank that Shelley and I had seen while hiking one afternoon. It was an old place, all wood and beams and decks, up in the hills. It overlooked residential Burbank and its downtown. It was called the Castaways. Come to think of it, the food was Polynesian.

  “Hawaiian food?” David sounded dispirited. “That’s what you want? Really?”

  “Oh, please,” I said in my sultriest voice. “I’m just dying to eat there. I’ve wanted to go there for years.” I hoped that somehow, magically, the way I spoke these words would communicate exactly what I really meant. I was ready. And I wanted Hawaiian.

  Hi,” my father said. His voice sounded contemplative—but a little curious, too.

  “Hi.”

  “I’ve been trying to call all morning. What’s the matter? Your voice sounds funny.”

  “I’m sick.”

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  I said nothing.

  “A head cold?”

  “I’m not sure. I just feel awful. My head is killing me, and my chest feels tight. Like I can’t breathe.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  After a few minutes of discussion, during which I elaborated upon my various symptoms and he listened with great patience, he said, “David Yamato called me this morning.”

  “He did?”

  “He’s leaving for Hawaii, and…well, he said he was calling to say good-bye. He’s such a lovely fellow, isn’t he? But I think he was really calling to check up on you.”

  I said nothing.

  “He’s been trying to get a hold of you. He said that he was flying out later today and had promised to say good-bye before he did. I guess he went by the house, and you weren’t there. And I guess he tried calling, as I did. Anyway, he’s such a nice man. I hope you aren’t playing head games, Inez. He sounded a little—I don’t know—not himself. But I’m glad to find you at home.”

  “I’m sick.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” My father stretched out the vowels in those words for a long time, like he was thinking very carefully about how to play a hand of cards. “Inez?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  He was quiet again for a moment. “Do you need my help with anything? Do you—”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” I said. “God, I feel so lousy.”

  “I’m very sorry about that.” He was talking slowly, and so carefully, and so gently, he was beginning to remind me of Mr. Rogers. “Do you mind me asking when you last saw David?”

  “Last night. We went to dinner.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe it was something I ate.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “What did you eat?”

  “Pork something. Cooked pineapples. It was Hawaiian food. Fake Hawaiian.”

  “Did you get sick right away?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause. “So you finished dinner, and then what happened?”

  “We had dessert and came back here—to Abuelita’s. I knew David was leaving today.”

  It had started on the sofa in the living room. I suppose I’d hoped for it, and planned for it, because before the Castaways I had showered with incredible thoroughness, as though I were embarking on a long journey and might never have the chance to shower again. I’d shaved so carefully that not one tiny bit of stubble was poking up. I’d scrubbed my face with crushed apricot hulls and oatmeal. I’d Q-tipped my ears. I shampooed my hair three times with Pantene—and left the conditioner on a really long time. After I toweled off, I creamed my legs and arms, every single inch of my skin, with buttery lotion that smelled like lemons. If I were a goose, I’d have been ready for the oven.

  David was all over me—I couldn’t believe how loud his breathing was or how frantic his mouth was. It was like he was gasping and dying at the same time. And we rubbed up against each other and began pulling off our clothes like it was a race to nudity. We wound up in my bedroom with the door open—so we could hear if anybody was coming home—and we were writhing and lunging and pulsating and moving all over each other like two animals that were trying to burrow a home inside each other and stay for the winter. That’s how it felt: I wanted to crawl inside David Yamato and live there forever.

  And in the very early morning, after he put on his clothes and I heard the quiet motor of his Toyota Celica pulling away, I cried. A few hours later, when I woke up, I wanted to die.

  A little before noon, he came back and rang the bell—I saw him through a crack in my window curtain. But I couldn’t bear to answer the door. He rang the bell three times and stood there. And kept standing there. Like he couldn’t believe I wasn’t opening the door.

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Inez?” my father asked on the phone.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “It’s important,” he said. “It’s about something important—so I do really want to ask it.”

  “What?”

  “Are you sleeping with him?”

  I felt myself sort of warming up, kind of melting and getting liquidy. Almost as if my throat were filling up with water. Just the way my father said it—not like that old, creepy, prying, busybody way of his—but in a way that was different. Like he was trying really hard not to be upset, too.

  “Just last night,” I said. “We did.”

  “Oh.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. I think he was stunned. And then, I don’t know, it seemed like he was making a wild guess about something and was calculating the odds of being right. “Do you think you’re in love with him? Because otherwise I can’t—”

  That’s when I started to cry. There were too many things I’d never wanted to say, or think about, or feel. It felt suddenly as if all the things that I wanted in life—and hadn’t even known I’d wanted—had gone. And all the people I loved. Marguerite was dead, Whitman was off. My mother was making sounds like she was going to marry Bob Lasso, the dentist. And now David would be just like that, too, wouldn’t he? He’d joined a parade of people who were wandering away. He was going to be another person that I’d miss all the time, and feel sad about. When he’d rung the bell and I’d peeked outside my window and seen him, I hated him—hated to even look at him. And I never wanted to see him again. Now I realized it was worse than that. I never wanted him to go.

  How come Shelley just yanked her underpants off and did it with Greg and Ooee and anybody else? How come everybody—Ooee and all those girlfriends, all those grown-ups on the houseboat—just slept with whomever they wanted, no big deal, like it was a gymnastics event?

  “Inez?”

  I made a crying sound that I knew he could hear.

  “Oh, Inez,” he said. His voice was breaking. “Oh, sweetie, I know just how you feel.”

  “You do?”

  SIXTEEN

  Dr. Lasso’s Office, Please Hold

  My father didn’t continue his drumbeat for long about David’s being “such a lovely man.” In a matter of weeks after David’s departure—maybe days—he’d grown weary of David and my endless need to talk about him. He became “a smart character,” according to my father, and “a nice guy, I suppose.” Then he finally descended to, “He’s okay if you’re into Asians. Are they really hairless, by the way?”

  When I broached the possibility of a trip to the islands that summer—I was “dying to see Whitman” and “dying to see Hawaii” suddenly—Dad saw through my tactics and snapped, “My God, don’t you have better things to do?”

  “Not really.” />
  This tropical dream died for other reasons, though. Whitman sounded uncertain when I floated the idea by him, as though he weren’t quite ready to share paradise. David was perplexingly noncommittal on the subject, hedging with vague concerns about whether there was room for me at his parents’ house on Molokai (wasn’t it a compound?) until it was clear I couldn’t come anyway.

  Why wasn’t I getting a job instead? My mother and Abuelita were insistent and almost immovable on the summer-job thing, as though it were an obligation to the universe that was long overdue. They pestered me and glared with Easter Island faces. What was with them? A job? Work? How had this awful development come about? And why now? Almost out of the blue, a new attitude toward me had emerged, accompanied by new expectations. It seemed so badly timed. I wanted all the fun accessories of adulthood—the car, the cigarettes, nighttime adventures, a sex life, things that had just come into my reach. But a job? My mother and Abuelita acted like I was on the precipice of needing to support myself. Filled with quiet hostility, I dodged the summer-employment issue until the end of June and then prevaricated until the Fourth of July had passed, only faking an interest in the help-wanted ads in the Van Dale Star while debating with Shelley (an unlikely “mother’s helper” at three dollars an hour) about whether I could deliver pizza in the MG.

  Then fate took over. A job fell on me. My mother’s boyfriend announced that he could use some help in the front office of his dental practice in Montrose. One of his receptionists had undergone an emergency hysterectomy and would need the summer to recover. Bob was confident that I could handle record keeping, filing, and some “light typing,” as he put it, and I didn’t bother putting up a fight. Everything was stacked against me. My mother was elated. Abuelita was relieved. Even my father weighed in with, “A little work never hurt anybody,” and chuckled sadistically. So I absentmindedly misfiled and answered the phone saying, “Dr. Lasso’s office,” as sullenly as I could, waiting for the long, hot summer to slump along to its end.