Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  Sometimes I got carried away and returned late on set. It happened on the day when they were shooting in the Valentino apartments. The suite had been mentioned in the Variety article and everyone wanted to see it, so when I arrived in the dressing room to drop off my new purchases, no one was there. Max’s muffled voice spoke on the phone in a small, adjacent room. When I passed in front of him, he gave me a look I’d never seen before, a kind of goofy embarrassed grin. He switched to Spanish and I kept on walking.

  18

  It rained hard, soaking the earth. No more ancient glories and haunted ballrooms for me. The canyon’s life force drew me as I made my way back in. Terraced apple orchards, ancient olive trees, meadows, and crooked cottages with wind chimes and prisms refracting through dirty windows. Wooden homes guarded by statues of angels and saints. Bells with rainbow tassels hanging from their clappers. The earth was claylike and the smells coming from chimneys took me back to Tuscan winters and Christmas parties. Topanga was one of the few places where seasons felt real. I walked on the fringes of the main road, high on Vicodin. Deva had been on painkillers for days. She’d said she hurt her shoulder falling off the hammock in her yard, rolling down the garden knoll. Bob was right. She needed to pay more attention. She’d guzzled all her prescription meds and wanted more from him.

  We were soaking when we arrived at the commune. Heide noticed us from the windows of the main house and walked out. She pointed ten fingers in our direction as if lightning rods and pestilent rats could spout out of them. She shooed us away with a witchy face, muttering incomprehensible Dutch words.

  I wanted to leave, but Deva insisted on finding Bob and gave me her last two pills so I’d shut up.

  We climbed back, avoiding the front façade of the main house so Heide would not see us. The open sewers around the barracks were overflowing. Strong winds had ripped the Tibetan flags off their poles and sent them flowing down the drains. The commune dwellers abandoned the flooded cottages, running into the main house to take shelter.

  When we reached Bob’s studio on top of the hill my Vicodin started to kick in and I relaxed. He was in a session so we had to wait outside in the rain. We perched under the tin roof, looking through the fogged-up windows like we’d done so many times before. He breathed on a naked woman’s belly, pounding against her chest with open hands. The woman sprawled on the floor, copied his moves.

  “I’m a worthy mother!” she howled.

  “More!” Bob encouraged her, rolling over her body with sinuous motions.

  She kept screaming about how good a mother she was, while we stared at her big bush in a daze. Mud was starting to pile behind the cottages. One of the smaller ones farther up the hill began to slide down. A young man came running out barefoot with an umbrella, a bongo drum, and a knapsack. Bob didn’t interrupt the session, but kept looking at the window with a ghastly expression. It was raining so hard I thought the muddy ground might wash away the commune along with its screaming naked ladies and feral children.

  When the session was over Bob rushed out and we startled him with our wet hair and our indifference to rain or mud. Deva gave him a belligerent hug, still far too laid-back considering the urgency of what was happening around us.

  Bob glanced at me. “Are you serious? Look at yourselves.”

  But we insisted on Vicodin even though the place was coming apart. Alarmed naked young women ran, sliding down the muddy hills. We didn’t care. We got what we wanted and took off in the storm.

  Deva’s face changed once she had her pills. It opened and fleshed out. We sledded down the muck laughing, shoes and pants squelching in mud. We chain-smoked wet cigarettes that kept going out and laughed at how loose our body parts felt. The stream we usually crossed to visit the bathtub cabin on the other side of the woods was a flowing river now. When we finally reached the main road, it was crowded with firefighters and police cars flashing their lights. They looked like fuzzy luminous gems. In front of us stood a colossal, oval-shaped rock. It sat firmly on the small highway with a majestic presence, twenty-five feet tall. The boulder had fallen from the mountain, blocking traffic and tearing up a section of the highway that connected the Valley to the Pacific Coast Highway. Commuters and visitors were off-limits until further notice. We were isolated from the rest of the city.

  When we got to Deva’s house, we spread bay leaves over our mouths and hair to hide the cigarette smoke, but the leaves were wet and didn’t smell like much. The windows and doors to the main house were open, banging into the storm.

  “Deva! Is that you?” her father called from inside. “Get up here!”

  She pushed me inside her cabin and closed the door behind us, sharp and sober. She quickly straightened her hair and rubbed her fingers below her eye sockets for a fresher look. She advised me to go home and hurried out. I looked at the storm, trying to gauge whether it was possible to walk down the mountain and back to the Valley, but every crevice in the canyon was now a riverbed. I waited. The room was cold. The water level beneath the cabin was beginning to rise. Soon it would flow through the floorboards and under the bed. I kept my ears pointed toward the main house. Silence and rain, then Deva’s father screamed about something I could not understand. A door slammed, resolute steps came down the hill, the crepitation of mulch under someone’s feet.

  Deva’s cabin door swung open. Her father stood there with his hair pulled back in the usual meager ponytail, beady eyes striving to open wide. His beard had grown further and was now split down the middle. The hair on the center of his chin had not grown as fast as that on either side. His face was particularly red and his jeans dirty and frayed. His crow’s-feet reached the top of his cheeks, but somehow that was not the thing you took in when you saw him. It was the eyes. They were a golden brown, so penetrating and bright they made him ageless.

  “So Deva says she didn’t go to work because you were up in the canyon and didn’t know how to get back to the Valley?”

  “Yes…there is a boulder in the way and traffic is blocked.”

  He took a breath, looked around the room inquisitively, then back at me. “I’ve seen you before, right?”

  “I came here once. With Chris.”

  He walked toward the bedroom window and pushed it all the way shut. “Here, otherwise it’ll get so humid your bones will ache,” he said.

  I smiled and thanked him.

  “Well don’t just stand there. It’s cold in here. Come up to the house and call your parents!”

  I followed him up the yard toward the main house. He moved slowly like a bison, undulating from side to side. Inside was just one big room lined with dusty record covers and Deva’s father’s rock music awards from the eighties. The albums had earthy mystical names like Cosmic Sands, Vesuvius, and Vacant Voodoo. One of the record covers read Sarofeen and Smoke and featured a bunch of cool-looking musicians sitting cross-legged on a rock in what looked like the Topanga creek. Deva’s father was probably one of them but I couldn’t recognize him without the beard. There was a beautiful woman in the forefront.

  “She had a voice,” Deva’s father commented, noticing my curiosity. “Better than Janis Joplin and Ellen McIlwaine. One of those guys went on to perform with Muddy Waters, you know.”

  I smiled widely to show him I was impressed. Beneath the vinyl albums were boxes filled with CDs and tapes. I picked up a broken CD case. Phil Collins’s face was on the cover—a sultry black-and-white profile looking down; it was Another Day in Paradise. I turned the cover over with anticipation, looking for Max’s name in bold somewhere. I scanned the booklet, but his name didn’t appear anywhere in there. I put the CD back in the box and took in the house for the first time.

  It looked like a dump. Rain had blown through the open windows and soaked the floor that was now covered in mud. Wet towels and empty beer cans were scattered about, and rotten plants hung from the ceiling inside cracked pots. Only one corner of the room was dry and clean. It was furnished with a pristine office desk. Deva was sittin
g on a swivel chair in front of it.

  Her father pointed me to the fax machine on the desk and invited me to call my parents, then disappeared into another room. Deva spun lightly in the chair and passed me the receiver. She held her pained shoulder with her hand, shielding it defensively from the space around her. Next to the fax machine was a computer monitor and a silver frame with a picture of Deva. She was a pale ten-year-old girl, squinting at the sun from a natural watering hole in the canyon. A stash of her father’s glossy black-and-white portfolio pictures were set almost votively around her photo. It looked like a strange altar.

  When my father picked up the phone I told him the road was blocked off and I didn’t know how to get home.

  “But we need you back on set! This is so unprofessional!” he screamed.

  He liked using that word now. It was part of his new armory. He flaunted it, entitled by his Johnny Depp Polaroids and Miramax correspondences. He hung up. I acted like the line had dropped and called back.

  “Don’t hang up on me. It’s not my fault,” I said.

  “I have too much to do now. Call when the road is clear.” Then he hung up again.

  I held the receiver in my hand and kept speaking Italian, pretending he was still on the line. I didn’t want anyone to think my family would get rid of me so quickly. I glanced at the immaculate altar desk, the neatly arranged folders and portfolio pictures. It made me think of my father’s oak desk at home, the only thing that was ever kept in order during those days, piled with perfect production schedules that my mother and Max printed out each week. I felt a surge of guilt. My father said he needed me, but I could not be there for him.

  Chris was in the room, leaning against a wall in a corner of the kitchen, nibbling from a plastic bag of cashews. He had not said a word—just nodded at me.

  A toilet flushed. Deva’s father walked out of the bathroom and gave me a look.

  “I guess you’re staying, then?”

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go while the road is blocked.”

  He rolled his eyes at me, then turned to Deva.

  “Did you fax those press releases today?” he asked her.

  Deva got up immediately from her chair and started fumbling, searching through the folders on the desk. “Oh my God, I forgot!”

  “I told you a hundred times! They were supposed to go in yesterday. I don’t have time for this.” He groaned as he walked over to us. He gave Deva a light little smack on the back of her head, then grabbed the sheets from her hands, annoyed. She giggled apologetically.

  “One thing I ask! One thing.”

  Her father assembled the sheets demonstratively, then handed them to his daughter so she could load them into the fax machine.

  “I was doing that!” Deva complained and started over.

  He stood over her, watching. When she bent forward he pulled back slightly and glanced down her back. Her shirt had ridden up and her crack was showing.

  “I don’t like you wearing these pants. Everyone can see your ass.”

  Deva didn’t answer. The sound of the fax went off and she cautiously placed the papers in it. The two of them stood in front of the machine, waiting for the pages to scroll through.

  “That’s good,” Deva’s father said as the last page went through. He caressed his daughter’s bare lower back absentmindedly. “Off you go. All of you. Get out of here. I need to work. There’s bread and eggs if you girls want to make dinner.”

  He took Deva’s place on the chair, switched on the monitor, and slipped a pair of headphones on.

  “Let’s go,” Deva whispered, rolling her eyes, implying he was a pain.

  As I walked out, I turned to the desk one last time. The muffled sounds of guitars came from her father’s headphones. There was a music video playing on the screen. Deva pulled me by a sleeve, trying to keep me from looking, but I lingered long enough to see her wavy long hair bounce from side to side. It was she in the video. She wore her usual bell-bottoms and a tight white T-shirt cropped above her stomach, with a silver belly chain. She walked on a dirt path through a row of acacias. Her lips sang a song I couldn’t hear, but I could see how much effort she put in to it because she kept her fist on her belly, almost punching the music out of her body. Close-ups of her freckled face were intercut with images of her father, slightly bloated but quite elegant. Younger looking and clean shaven, not the guy with the dirty jeans and skinny ponytail who walked around the house. He leaned on a picket fence. In the video’s narrative the two singers were looking for each other—desire, longing, and melancholy all showing on their faces. I turned back to Deva, but she avoided me and pushed me toward Chris, who was cracking eggs open into a pan by the stove.

  “Let’s have dinner in my bedroom,” she said, haphazardly assembling two pieces of toast and an avocado on a plate.

  Chris started scrambling.

  —

  Rain trickled through the ceiling in Deva’s cabin. We put pots on the floor, lit candles, and got under the blankets making shivering sounds, still high from the Vicodin. The avocado sat on the desk, untouched. Neither of us was hungry.

  “Sorry about that,” Deva said. “He can be an asshole sometimes.”

  “How did he end up living here?” I asked, trying to keep things vague.

  “He moved from Montana in the sixties. He came to the canyon because all the musicians lived here. Topanga was really special when we were kids. We used to camp out without tents at night. Our dad taught us to sleep under the stars.”

  “So that’s where you got your wild side.” I chuckled.

  Deva sighed. She cracked open the window, even though it was cold, and lit a cigarette.

  “We were completely free,” she said, exhaling the smoke, hunching over through the crack. “Home-schooled by our mom with a few kids from the neighborhood. We were all different ages, of course. So my mom’s classes were kind of strange…but we were happy, my brother and me. We were the canyon’s mascots. They called us ‘the fairy twins’ because we looked like we’d come out of an Irish folk tale. You know, the red hair, the green eyes. Of course my brother looks nothing like me, so I felt even cooler, like I was the true thing. Neighbors fed us, gave us things to take home, tools to build things with, juice. It was fun.”

  When I asked about her mother, Deva cringed. She said that when they were kids she remembered a warm, smiling woman. She tried to think about that woman instead of the person she became later.

  “Who did she become?” I asked, moving closer to her on the bed.

  “My father was this bare-chested handsome guy with thick long hair, no ugly long beard yet. Super skinny, always a beer in his hand and a guitar close by, always moving someplace, or going to somebody’s house to play music. His hair was so soft. I used to twist it in my fingers to fall asleep. He looked like David Gilmour, but even more beautiful. He partied a lot, but he was, you know, present. But my mom didn’t party. She was at home, lying on a bed on the terrace. She spent her days making these really long quilts. She just quilted. All the time. She collected tons of scraps. My image of her is just pieces of fabric and sewing needles. A cigarette smoking in a glass ashtray by the bed.”

  I giggled, thinking about Serena. I told her my mother did the same thing. The “motionless collector.” I told her about the news clippings, the stories she gathered.

  “My dad was messy, but you knew what you were getting into. My mom was just completely unpredictable. She spent all her savings to open this really cool rare-parrot shop and then managed to kill off all the birds within two months. Then she went back to quilting. I think she was depressed. That’s when she found Jesus. When I was eight she took off with this weird Christian hippie from Utah, Don. She met him at a county fair in Malibu. When my dad asked her why she was leaving us, she said she had done a lot of walking and talking with God and was inspired by Eve.”

  “Who’s Eve?” I asked.

  “Fucking Adam and Eve, Eve.”

  “Oh my God.”


  “Yes. Just like Eve she was ready to move on from the Garden which, it turned out, was Topanga Canyon. Now she and Don visit once a year. They have this kind of white-trash trailer attached to their car that they sleep in. Dad won’t let her inside the house. I don’t blame him.”

  Deva exhaled the last of her cigarette and put it out in a small tin box she kept tucked in a crevice between the mattress and the window. She chased the smoke out the window and curled back up on the bed.

  I couldn’t put the pieces together. Watering pools, camping under the stars, musical performances, hanging out with rock stars. If her father was so cool, then why did Deva have to cover herself in bay leaves and sneak out at night? Why couldn’t she just wear the pants she wanted even if her butt crack showed?

  Deva wrapped herself in a wool blanket and moved down to the foot of the bed. I could tell it was hard to talk about those things and I knew I should have been grateful for the little information she had given me already. She rarely liked to speak about her family. But I felt that a gap was closing between us and I wanted to go on. I curled myself in another blanket on the bed and held a candle between us. If we focused on the flame perhaps it would be easier for her to talk.

  “So what happened when she left?” I asked.

  “My father had to hold down the home fort while all the other canyon musicians moved on to bigger and better things. The rug had been pulled out from under his feet. He started drinking more than normal and became kind of bitter.”