The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  “Hey, Paul!” Tomas would say if he answered the phone. “How ya doing, man?” They’d talk about the weather or whatever I’d been photographing, and then Tomas always signed off with, “Come visit!” before passing the phone over to me.

  “I’m never coming to visit,” my father would say once he’d heard my voice on the line. “I hate the tropics.”

  “I know that.”

  “You promised you’d come back in the fall.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I laughed. “I said I’d apply to college in the fall—that’s all.”

  It was weird how lonely Dad seemed, off-kilter and lost. He rarely mentioned his old girlfriends, old friends, or even Ooee. It was as if everything in his life had stopped. Night after night he called. Mostly after dinner. The time difference worked in his favor, making Whitman and me sitting targets long after anybody in the Bay Area had gone to sleep. Although I’m not sure Dad felt free to discuss Madam X—that’s what he called her—with them anyway. In those early days, I’m pretty sure that Whitman and I were the only ones who knew about her.

  She was difficult to reach, sometimes in seclusion, and still “having a hard time” and “going through a lot.” But Dad seemed to be the one who was going through the most. When Madam X left for a spa in Baden-Baden, he came unglued, calling me at midnight with pointless observations about a tennis match he was watching on TV and then, after an hour of useless blather, finally inching his way into a discussion of love’s latest wound. Madam X was finishing a book, he said, and much too busy to see him.

  “What kind of book?”

  “It’s probably wise not to say,” he said. “You might figure out who she is.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I’m three thousand miles away. Who cares if I figure it out?”

  “She writes romances,” he said very quickly, as though this fact were something to face bravely and squarely, without dwelling. “Very, very popular romances.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “Don’t be like that. Don’t be a snob.”

  “You’re the biggest snob of all.”

  “I am not. I’m the very soul of democracy. Anyway, her books are quite good, I promise you.”

  “Romances? That’s so sad.”

  “‘Sad’ is your new word,” he said sharply. “When you were little, the whole world was ‘neat.’ Then everything was ‘weird.’ Or ‘gross.’ For a while everything was ‘great.’ Now everything’s ‘sad.’ Since Marguerite, I think, everything’s sad.”

  Uncharacteristically, he never asked too much about Tomas or our life together. At first I thought that he’d finally decided to give me a zone of privacy and a little room to breathe, until I began to suspect that he wasn’t being generous or thoughtful at all. He just didn’t want to hear about the fun I was having while he languished so drastically. The stream of beauties, each more accomplished than the last—who gave him hope, made him feel alive, and young, and desired—seemed to have dried up. He was down to one unattainable siren. And his need to possess her and prompt her to leave her husband overwhelmed him. He stewed. He reconsidered. He loved Madam X and then hated her. He wrote her letters, lots and lots of letters, he said. Good-bye notes that he never sent.

  “Can you imagine?” he’d ask me. But I couldn’t.

  “What am I to do?” he wanted to know. But I had no idea.

  We descended into long sessions of analysis. He called her Madam X, but the woman might as well have been Madam Y or Madame N. She was the unknown variable that constantly moved around an equal sign. He drew diagrams of her nature in a journal. He recorded the arc of their relationship with a formula. (He hoped to deduce when entropy would set in.) When he and I spoke on the phone, we became co-therapists. Madam X was our only patient. We considered the facts of her childhood of deprivation and trauma—her mother was kept by a gangster, her father unknown—and deduced that this had made her insecure but imaginative. She walked with a slight limp from some kind of foot deformity, and we analyzed how this had made her feel unlovable. “She’s perfected how to walk so it’s undetectable,” Dad said. When he recounted again how unremarkable her appearance was, I tried to be reassuring. “That’s okay, Dad,” I said. “I was getting tired of all the drop-dead beauties.”

  But I had doubts about his new love. She was—as Dad finally revealed in a weak moment—a wildly successful romance novelist named Evie Valcour. She lived in a palatial house on Nob Hill that was filled with French furniture, mirrored bathrooms, antique wallpaper, and a personal staff of six. “It’s really so gauche—the whole scene,” Dad said, obviously hoping that a diatribe against her might make him feel better. “What does she need all that for?”

  “I didn’t realize that you’d been inside.”

  “Oh, I haven’t. But I’ve heard from friends. And the house was featured in Architectural Digest last year, and I went to the library to look it up. The pictures weren’t exactly perfectly clear on microfiche, but I saw enough. Believe me. She has a gold-leafed salon where she serves high tea.”

  “I can’t hear any more.”

  “And gold flatware.”

  “Stop.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s all so disgusting and terrible. What am I going to do?”

  Married for many years to a surgeon who abhorred society, Madam X made the rounds of the circuit alone. Sometimes Dad stole chances to see her by attending an opera ball or symphony auction, and she’d find a way to seat him at her table. At first I thought it was the game—the secrecy and plotting—that had engaged him so forcefully, but more and more, as I heard the confusion in his voice, and self-doubt, I worried that he’d finally fallen for a woman who was beating him at his own game. Madam X waffled about leaving her husband, whom she openly loved. When Dad had brought her to Wolfback, she hinted that it was small and a little too chilly. When they met up for a rendezvous in a city hotel suite, she sank into despair upon discovering that my father had stayed there many times with somebody else.

  She was a devout Catholic, it turned out, with an austere streak. She wrote her gothic potboilers in a very small, very plain maid’s room in the attic of her grand house. Dad seemed in love with the idea of Madam X toiling for hours on end with such discipline. And one night, when he was mentioning it for the seventh or eighth time, I suddenly remembered Marguerite’s house—and Fitzy, the maid who had lived in the small room at the top of the kitchen stairs. Whitman had told me about her.

  “Hey, wasn’t Fitzy your first love?”

  “Who?”

  “Fitzy. Miss FitzWilliam or whatever her name was. Marguerite’s maid in San Benito. Whitman told me you were in love with her. That’s why Marguerite moved your bedroom. So she could keep her eye on you.”

  “Oh,” he said. And after a long stretch of silence, “You’re too smart.”

  We had lots of long pauses in our conversations by then, empty moments that he and I didn’t try to fill with useless jabber. While he considered Fitzy in silence, I sat on the bed in Tomas’s room and watched the green hills turn black and the sky turn orange.

  “It doesn’t seem right,” I said finally, “that you’re sitting around waiting for this woman to see you. My God, Dad, find somebody else to play with! That’s what you used to tell me.”

  “Did I?”

  “Last summer. During my David Yamato phase.”

  “How insensitive of me. What bad advice.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “Love the one you’re with and all that. Ugh. But you stayed abjectly loyal to David, even when he was boring beyond all measure, didn’t write, forgot your birthday, and then didn’t return to L.A.”

  “I wasn’t loyal.”

  “In your heart you were. Nobody else mattered until you’d gotten David out of your system. I used to think monogamy was an awful lot of work, and not worth the trouble. But…well, maybe you’re rubbing off on me. When you find somebody worth waiting for, they’re worth waiting for. Rig
ht? Besides, Madam X goes berserk if I see anybody else.”

  “Do you?”

  “No, and I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” he confessed. “I said I’d marry her.”

  This explained why money—and whether he had enough—had suddenly entered into our conversations. Madam X worried about how much her husband would want from her if they divorced. And she had kids, lots of kids, a detail that Dad managed to keep from me for most of the summer. “All daughters. Gorgeous little things. She’s raising them very properly and carefully. Heading straight for cotillion and debutante balls.” When I said nothing, he changed the subject.

  “How are things with Tomas?”

  “Good. Great.”

  “How’s the sex?”

  “None of your business.”

  “That’s okay if you don’t want to tell me,” he said, “but just remember, it’s supposed to blow you away.”

  I had been blown away at the beginning, and things were like that for a month or so—nonstop sex and not talking, just clawing at each other until, exhausting all newness, Tomas led us into a pattern of being together that allowed for maximum sex but minimum relationship, mostly due to an endless supply of dope to smoke.

  Mornings, after a few tokes, I went to the beach and swam the length of Waimea Bay and back, a mile or so, to keep the birth control pills from making me fat. Then I drove Tomas’s white pickup to get an ice cream cone before lunch—the sort of thing you do, I suppose, the first year you leave home. And after another few tokes, the ice cream tasted so incredible. “You’re such a kid,” Tomas liked to joke, and rub my head. But, in truth, I’d never felt more grown up or sophisticated or serious. The North Shore was filled with perpetual adolescents, with stringy-haired Californians who wanted to be cool forever and with people from the East who were in the midst of remaking themselves into cool Californians, or people from the Midwest who looked the part, with dark tans and sun-streaked hair, but never figured out exactly how to dump their good manners and stop being too nice. No matter what age, the entire female population wore bikini tops with wraparound skirts. If a guy wore a clean T-shirt with a fancy logo—Heineken Beer or an expensive wetsuit line—that was considered dressed up. So compared to the hordes of tanned and frolicking adults around me, taking acid on the weekends, eating mushrooms between swells, dancing to country music at the Ding Dong Palace and the Dakini Bikini, it was easy to feel cultured and extremely mature, even at seventeen.

  In the afternoons when the light grew quieter, I took photographs and sometimes I tried to cook, except I only knew how to make pasta, my father’s scones, Ooee’s garlic-tarragon vinaigrette, and a vegetarian stir-fry that Whitman had taught me. An older woman cleaned the house, a Filipina who was short and stocky—and reminded me a little of Abuelita—so I didn’t have too many household duties beyond keeping a vegetable garden going. Sugar had planted it the previous winter, and, with some advice from Whitman, I weeded, watered, fertilized, and then harvested a bumper crop of tomatoes and okra and eggplant and everything else. Hawaii made gardening seem easy. Everything I planted reminded me of the magic beans that Jack throws out the window—and the next morning a giant beanstalk appears. The word “jungle” was an abstract concept before I went to Hawaii, along with “fecund.” When I chopped the buds and tops off the marijuana, the next time I’d look, the plants would be twice the size.

  Tomas was home during the day sometimes—and gone others. He’d return with an old sign that he’d found in a junkyard, or a kitschy postcard to frame. He had art director’s taste, a kind of theatrical love of old things cluttered together for effect. He had designed his house like a set, with a series of views. Less than a year old, it was almost ramshackle already, built with pieces of an old pineapple factory and salvaged yachts. Tomas had put up Hawaiian artifacts and signs everywhere, mostly old advertisements with images of hula girls and palm trees. In the kitchen there was a wall clock from an old diner, a jukebox with lights that flashed, and a ridiculous Lone Star beer advertisement from Texas—a clear plastic dome over a painted-plaster monkey who sat with a green hose. When Tomas got the motor of this thing working, water shot from the hose and splashed at the top of the dome while the monkey twirled.

  Saturday nights we went out. The North Shore was eternal high school—people drinking bottles of beer in their cars while they drove around trying to find where the best party was. We made the rounds every week, to Jerry’s house, to Leftie’s house, to Whitman’s—for a little dope, blender drinks, some dancing, or a few lines of cocaine. Tomas always had some on hand, probably the reason he was always greeted with great enthusiasm and affection wherever he went. Even by the standards of the day, and of the North Shore, Tomas was a cokehead. It wasn’t disgraceful in those days, but mystifyingly glamorous. Cocaine made you funny and smart. Cocaine made you sociable and lively and as close to urbane as imaginable in a place like Hawaii. Everybody had that much figured out. Grass made you Zen-like and contemplative. Alcohol made you bold (sometimes obnoxiously so). Cocaine made you irresistible—particularly in your own mind, which turns out to be the only place that counts. By the time the summer ended and I turned eighteen, when I wasn’t stoned or drunk or high, I was bragging about how wasted I’d been the day before—while desperately trying to employ as much island slang as possible. Da kine meant something was really good, or “the kind.” Ono meant something was the best, or number one. “Ono da kine bes pakalolo” was the way an idiot haole (white person) would say they’d had some really great grass. Then, if you wanted to say, in simple druggie jargon, that you’d had lots of toot, there was always, “My nose was packed all night, bra.” For my birthday Whitman brought me flowers and my father sent a check for $1,818.18. Tomas gave me an old movie poster and three grams of cocaine. It was gone in a week.

  At the onset of October—definitely still summer, no matter what the calendar said—I began to fill out forms for college. I answered all the questions—crowding information about myself in the narrow blanks—signed releases for transcripts and SAT scores, wrote a pathetic essay about what my camera meant to me and how I could make the world a better place with it. (I even mentioned wanting to be a war correspondent.) After Whitman proofread it, I drove to the Haleiwa post office, a dilapidated green cottage with full trash cans and worn-out linoleum, and stood next to the mail slot marked MAINLAND. The white paper envelope disappeared into the dark slot. It felt like stuffing a note in a bottle, a long shot and a faraway dream that I wasn’t sure was possible—or even mine.

  The sun. The cornmeal sand. The blue waves. Even Tomas, and his sense of humor—his way of looking at life with a kindly, bemused, slightly out-of-it smile—was like a wonderful dream, and sunny, endlessly sunny and easy. Waves of good things kept coming to me, and pleasure, and I felt so good all the time that I couldn’t make distinctions between my feelings anymore, because they were all much the same, almost as if the tropics had cooked the complications out of me. Any lingering anger and resentments seemed gone forever. Life was good. Life was easy. That’s what I kept telling myself—the little inconveniences about living in Hawaii weren’t going to get to me anymore. I’d gotten used to waiting for twenty minutes for the attendant at the gas station to fill up the truck. I’d gotten used to slow waitresses and bad food in restaurants, to melted ice in my mixed drinks and tepid beer in bars, to the laid-back shopkeepers who barely lifted a finger to help. Everything was ono and da kine, and everybody was on “Hawaii time,” including me.

  It seems crazy now, but I’d never thought about how Tomas had built the house—or where his money came from. Maybe he’d made a lot as a set designer, in the old days. Maybe he’d been a smart investor. How did I know? Money was mysterious and magical to me then—it came and went, had rules of its own that I didn’t know about, that never made sense to me. So I guess it seemed natural for Tomas to have mysterious money. Like Whitman and lots of other guys on the North Shore, he rarely seemed to be working. Sometimes he made calls.
Sometimes he drove around. He had “crews” of guys at his disposal, but I assumed they were gardening crews or stonemasons who were building fake waterfalls all over Oahu.

  Whitman was the one to spill the beans. “He’s a dealer, you innocent.”

  I chose to ignore that for a while. Not months. Not forever. But just long enough so that when it came back to me, this information seemed more like a recurring dream that might not be real. Everything in paradise felt negotiable anyway. Not quite real, not quite happening. Over the summer, when I heard from Abuelita that Robbie’s father had died, I hadn’t sent a note or even called. So far from home, and so far from what was considered civilization, the old rules didn’t seem to apply.

  Or maybe I was just too stoned. I’d go down the hill and smoke dope with Whitman, then run into Leftie, or Jerry, and get a pill of some kind, just for fun. And then I’d come back up the mountain and do a few lines of cocaine with Tomas. Sometimes the lower half of my face was so numb I wasn’t sure if it was still there. Sometimes I was afraid to eat—worried I’d bite off my tongue or start chewing on my cheeks.

  “So are you really a dealer?” I asked Tomas one night. I’d decided that I could live without him, I suppose, and that I wasn’t interested in fixing him either.

  He didn’t miss a beat. He didn’t seem stunned either. Being in Hawaii for six years had removed that option from his personality. “Who told you that, Little Girl?” he said, chopping another line.