The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  “That’s what I’d like. No anxiety.”

  “Well, I can’t blame you. He forgot your birthday and all that. Not a great sign, in any case, that David deserves you. Even if the sex was great. But isn’t it interesting how the heart repairs itself? How you could be so in love with David and now be okay that he’s not coming back?”

  “I didn’t say I was okay—”

  “Oh, you’re great. You’re fine! And there’s really no reason you can’t stay friends with him. Once you love somebody, there’s no reason to turn him into a monster—just to help yourself get over it. I’ve always tried very hard to keep people in my life. It’s the civilized thing to do.”

  But two months later, when my mother and Bob eloped, my father didn’t sound so civilized after I broke the news.

  “Vegas?” he asked. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.” I decided not to elaborate—or tell him that my mother and Bob had called from the Riviera Hotel, where they’d gotten a giant suite. Bob sounded like the same old Bob. No change. But my mother’s voice was light and soft, not hysterical or loud or anything, just a little sad. Then again, maybe that was me.

  “She hates Vegas,” my father growled.

  “They just wanted to get it over with,” I said. “Isn’t that funny?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s funny,” he said. “I can’t imagine anybody being so stupid.”

  That was November. It wasn’t until a couple months later, after the holidays, that anybody noticed my college applications were long overdue.

  SEVENTEEN

  Haleiwa

  The arrival of a camera in my life, one of many unasked-for gifts from my Dad, had preceded any passion for using it. But once I’d discovered that I was good at taking pictures—people said I was a born photographer the way they’d said my mother was a born dancer—it went everywhere with me, kept snug in a leather case that hung over my shoulder. If I left it behind, or had the wrong film, and came across something beautiful or haunting or strange—the flicker of a transient, one-of-a-kind image—I felt miserable and sad. Something rare and wondrous had slipped by, undocumented. An opportunity lost.

  Taking pictures never felt like a defense against life or a nervous habit to distract me—something to do with my hands, or with myself, like smoking. It didn’t lessen my exposure to life, only enhanced it. When I was among people who made me uncomfortable or in a landscape too unfamiliar, it was almost impossible for me to take a picture. The photographer in me was shy, I suppose, and liked to hide. But the beauty of the world beguiled me, pulled me out. It charmed and tantalized my hesitant side, and the lover of surface and texture. The camera encouraged me, drew me out. It taught me how to seize a moment. It banged against my ribs and reminded me to engage. Even so, my pictures were of buildings and signs in those days—things just beginning to decay—and sometimes of people looking away.

  Hawaii seemed simple at first, and obvious, an oasis of clear blue water and yellow sand and salty breezes. On the tarmac of the Honolulu airport, the soft air surrounded me with a veil of sweetness, almost as if infused with syrup. Inside the airport there were refrigerated glass cases of bright plumeria leis to welcome bus charters, church groups, families on holiday, hordes of pale tourists in untropical clothes who seemed in dire need of transformation. By the time I reached baggage claim and found my two large duffel bags, so heavy I could barely lift them, I was dizzy and disoriented, intoxicated by the air and smells and colors and the sense of weightless removal from all cares of the world.

  At a small terminal for private planes, I was met by a young pilot named Billy who had blond hair and an eastern accent—he was from Queens, it turned out. The Yamatos had hired him to bring me to the island of Molokai in a small four-seater Cessna. Billy was good-natured and smiled a lot, and he lifted my heavy duffel bags into the backseat of the plane without a groan or remark. I sat in front and watched him pull levers and flip switches and listen to incomprehensible airport chatter on the crackling radio. Our tiny plane ascended, rising beyond the blue sky and into a lingering mass of heavy gray clouds. It was raining below us and around us. The small plane continued on, weaving around the weather. I wasn’t afraid. I rarely was in those days—youth’s armor against a big horizon, I suppose. The flight seemed no more dangerous to me than a ride at Disneyland or speeding along Pacific Coast Highway in the MG.

  At my father’s urging, I had remained friends with David Yamato. A handful of letters had traveled back and forth between us over the year, and a few phone calls. Even though he’d invited me to visit the family compound on Molokai when he’d learned that I was coming to see Whitman, my conversations with David never dipped below surface cheer. He’d disappointed me, and I didn’t want him to have that chance again. So we’d established a vague and undefined alliance of being not lovers and not quite just friends. We fell somewhere in the middle, a location that my father claimed was the very best spot for me and David and, in fact, for all future David Yamatos in my life.

  “Nobody is ever just a friend,” my father counseled, “and nobody is ever just a lover. It’s best to refrain from making those sorts of crude distinctions.”

  During my senior year of high school, there had been lots of guys around—not quite friends, not quite boyfriends—but nobody who came to matter or brought me much joy. Whatever libertine ideas my father had desperately tried to instill in me hadn’t stuck. David was the only one I’d slept with, and that, somehow, made a great difference.

  There’d been talk of sending me to Van Dale Community College—a joke, I’m sure, meant to punish me. My father had mentioned art school, or at least some classes in photography. My mother suggested a year working full-time in Bob’s office. I wasn’t opposed to art school or Bob’s office, as long as I could live in Hawaii for the summer. Three months, I said. I’d rent a room in Whitman’s house. I’d take pictures, lots of them, and put a portfolio together. For this my mother extracted one solemn promise: that I would apply to college in the fall.

  “Whitman didn’t have to go,” I complained to my father.

  “You aren’t Whitman,” he said. “And you have a different mother—a mother who wants you, very much, to go to college.”

  “She didn’t go to college.”

  “Perhaps that’s why.”

  “But it doesn’t seem fair. Whitman didn’t have to.”

  “Whitman has resources,” he said. “You don’t.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair either.”

  “It’s fair,” my father said after a pause. “And I wouldn’t get in the habit of seeing things that way. Fair or unfair. It’s an illusion—things only seem fair or unfair, but you can’t know the truth. So you might as well assume that good fortune is yours and the world is looking out for you. And for God’s sake, you know I am.”

  The remaining days of high school were agony. Each trip to my gray metal locker, each stinky gym class, each dreary drive home felt like sleeping in an old bed that needed to have its sheets changed. The world of Van Dale was tired, in need of a wash. I woke up every morning like an automaton and did as little as possible to get the decent grades I knew my mother expected. Shelley and I continued to take off Wednesdays but bickered more than ever. At the end of the year, we split up all the clothes we’d bought together, and the cigarette cases, lighters, compacts, and funny cocktail hats we’d never worn. And it was Shelley who drove me to LAX.

  “Don’t cry,” she said.

  “Why would I cry?” I felt my throat tightening.

  “Because we’re saying good-bye, you fool.”

  I was jolly at the prospect of seeing David again, and seeing a new place. From what David had said, I assumed that his family wouldn’t be too different from mine—if my parents had stayed together. His father was a businessman. His mother was a weaver. Ethnically they were a mix—part this, part that—and, most likely, adaptable people who had learned to fit in anywhere. As the tiny Cessna dangled in the air above the Molok
ai hills and jungle, the small island looked like the greenest place in the world, and so welcoming. On the ground it wasn’t quite the same.

  There was no control tower, no landing crew to meet us. Only David, who pulled onto the small asphalt airstrip in an old red van. He was smiling and sunny, but lacking whatever it was—enthusiasm, nervousness, even irritation—that might indicate he had romantic feelings for me. After a short drive full of mindless pleasantries, we arrived at the Yamato family compound, a series of stucco cottages topped by angled ceilings lined with long trunks of sliced bamboo. The rooms were small and filled with rattan furniture and leather chairs that, in the intense humidity, smelled like rotting, uncured beef. There was an odd assortment of fabrics everywhere, patterns that didn’t seem to harmonize, and in the middle of the living room there was an open rock pit where pigs were roasted whole.

  Mr. and Mrs. Yamato were a comfortable couple—two people who had learned to fit together so well that, even though she had gray-yellow hair and blue eyes and he was dark, they’d come to resemble each other. Round faces. Chipmunk cheeks. Lazy, complacent smiles. They were friendly but humorless, and they seemed a little unclear about me—in particular, why I had come to see their son. They focused on my father, whom they seemed to know by reputation, as if David’s old boss at Harrison-Ruin were our only real connection. Mr. Yamato was curious about my father. He’d heard things—or suspected things. I got the impression that they weren’t positive. “Is he still a partner at H-R?” Mr. Yamato wanted to know.

  “No.” I shook my head foggily. “I don’t think so anyway.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  I shrugged. “He might be a consultant now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Hardly a laid-back Hawaiian, Mr. Yamato was all business, a man who had built a pearl empire with offices in four cities and seemed unable to leave his competitive streak at work. My father’s career choices and life seemed frivolous to him, almost wasted. Why had he given up his post at H-R, where he was, as Mr. Yamato put it, “a founding father”? Wasn’t he interested in seeing his vision expand? Did he really not care about success?

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “He doesn’t like running things. I think he’d rather just have fun.”

  “What kind of fun?”

  I decided not to give a real answer and mumbled something about art and my father’s guest lecturing at the institute. It really didn’t matter what I said, though. All efforts to describe him to the Yamatos or articulate his strange approach to life only began to seem like romantic delusion or deliberate obfuscation for a darker, more troubling truth.

  “He just walked away from success? From a business that he started?”

  “Yep.” I nodded, feeling both defensive and cavalier. “I guess he doesn’t care about making money,” I added stupidly.

  “That’s what all the people in tech industries say,” Mr. Yamato replied.

  I looked over at David, desperately hoping he’d help out, but he just smiled and nodded and added nothing to my account, as if unwilling to engage in any conflict. When Mr. Yamato was done grilling me, comfortable that his mysterious preconceptions about Paul N. Ruin had been confirmed, David got up to show me the room where I’d be staying for the night, a little den with a futon off the kitchen. “Sorry about Dad,” he said, then gave me a soft peck on the cheek, the sort of kiss you’d give a sister. After he left, I looked around. My tiny room had a wet, depressing view of a green-corrugated fiberglass roof that was dripping rain on weedy gravel. Suddenly I was very glad to be staying only two days.

  Nice pictures of the Yamato family were everywhere. The walls of almost every room of the compound were covered with them. Good shots, taken carefully, and the Yamatos were displayed in every state of pleasure and bliss and at every age, like a museum show of family happiness through time. There were old people with tan, dried-apple cheeks—probably grandparents. There were pictures from the sixties, when Mrs. Yamato was very blond and wore beads and had bangs in her eyes. Mr. Yamato playing golf, another of him sitting in the back of a speedboat. There were pictures of David and his three sisters when they were small, a collection of faces that seemed on a trajectory to becoming more Japanese with each child. In the background the sun was always shining. The sea was always blue, the sand yellow, the tropical flowers bright.

  I couldn’t help but think of gloomy Wolfback and how my father lived. There wasn’t a picture of me or Whitman anywhere in the house. Aside from abstract paintings done by one of his friends—either all white or all black—the only images gracing the walls were a collection of Egon Schiele’s prints, skinny women with armpit hair in various states of undress.

  By dinnertime two of David’s sisters appeared, and I found myself even quieter in the throng of Yamatos. Aside from a short discussion of David’s new windsurfing company—he and his partner had created a line of boards and sails and were deciding on a logo—the family talked about neighbors and local developments with such insular passion that it didn’t occur to them to provide me with background information so I might follow along. They mentioned Hawaiian things and a family trip to Sweden over Christmas—also subjects on which I had nothing to offer. They seemed clannish, almost cultish. They had nicknames and slang words for each other and everything else, and some of their jargon seemed to be in pidgin English, which wasn’t considered a corrupt language of uneducated islanders but a much-admired way of talking. It meant you were Hawaiian. And I wasn’t.

  I wasn’t Swedish either, a fact that Mrs. Yamato seemed to find unfortunate—almost sad. I wasn’t Japanese, which seemed to make Mr. Yamato anxious. The family had decided that those two peoples ran the world and exceeded at all matters intellectual and artistic, even though, from what I could tell, David and his sisters weren’t particularly either.

  The sisters, Iris and Martika, were sleek and brown, their faces beautiful and exotic, but I had trouble reading their facial expressions—mostly because they didn’t seem to have any. They were even more languid and self-satisfied than David. They didn’t seem interested in the news, or movies, or things that anybody alive might have in common. More troubling, of course, they didn’t seem interested in me.

  “That’s the definition of provincial,” my father said when I complained on a transpacific call made from my den. “Sounds awful. I’m so sorry. That’s why people go to college—so they don’t wind up with nothing to say.”

  I counted the hours, the minutes, before Billy and the four-seater Cessna touched down on the tiny landing strip and took me away. I’d never been so happy to see anyone in my life. Billy smiled sphinxlike and put my heavy duffel bags in the backseat again. I gave David a dead kiss—purposefully lifeless, right on the mouth—and stepped away.

  The tiny plane hauled itself into the sky, rose above the island, a green and brown lump of land with craggy mountains and dark sand beaches ringed in light blue. In a short time, we passed over the enormous crater of Diamond Head and the swirling streets of fancy houses set at the foot of the volcano like strands of gems, and we soon found ourselves hovering over the vast concrete intersections of the Honolulu airport.

  Whitman was waiting at the gate with a huge smile and a hug and lots of questions for Billy—how long had he been flying, where was he from? What a relief. What an incredible relief. Before long we were inside Whitman’s car, an ancient Plymouth Valiant that was so old and out of date it had a push-button transmission and holes in the floorboard.

  It took a couple of highways to get to the North Shore of Oahu. We passed an exit for Pearl Harbor on the way, drove through pineapple fields and beside the arching spray of giant sprinklers that looked like starting gates at the horse races. Once on the coast, we passed Waimea Bay. In June there weren’t waves to speak of, just a stretch of open sand and flat blue sea. There was a massive rock with clusters of tourists standing on top of it, like birds. About ten minutes beyond, Whitman pulled the car onto Ke Iki Road.

  His ho
use was a one-story ranch, not unlike Abuelita’s, a box of yellow stucco and brown-painted trim that peeked out from behind trunks of palms and an overgrown garden. There were a couple of outbuildings—shacks, really—and off to the side of the house were three rusted cars with grass growing up around the fenders. “Whose are those?” I asked.

  Whitman shrugged. “Came with the house.”

  Inside, there were three bedrooms on one side of the house: a room where Whitman slept, which was dark and unadorned; a room that was rented by a marine who came on weekends from the base in Wahiawa; and a room for me, where a double mattress sat on the floor, a wetsuit and some old bowling shirts were hanging in the closet, and indoor plants sat on wooden crates near the window.

  “Whose stuff?” I asked Whitman.

  “The clothes belong to a guy who was staying here,” he said. “He’ll be back to clean it out.”