The Royal Family (116 page)

It’s beautiful, she said.

There’s nothing beautiful about it, he said happily. It’s just suburban, that’s all.

The Sacramento River was wide and pale and sparkling along the levee. On the other side stretched long furrow-etched fields, and vineyards whose stakes offered multiple vanishing points as the car rushed along. A speedboat whined up the river, and John smiled, remembering how he had shaken off his virginity in a speedboat. He switched on the radio, which announced a rollover on Interstate-5, nobody killed. —Lots of stupid drivers out there, he sighed, switching it off in a restless, almost anxious motion. The reflective orchard puddles in John’s dream were now yellow and rubbery-looking with algae.

See, there are no pear blossoms, he said triumphantly. I’m telling you, they’re gone. They’ve all fallen off.

And what kind of tree is that?

You know, you ask me these things, and it’s frustrating, because I don’t know anything about trees.

Passing through Courtland, John raised his arm like a maestro so that Celia would pay attention to the bells and the humming as the yellow bridge slowly parted company from itself, the bright halves straining at the sky’s sunny wind and citrus smell, and finally a solitary high-masted vessel passed through, sails furled, and then the drawbridge redescended for the sake of the queue of cars.

This is doing
so
well, that white azalea, John said.

She cleared her throat.

Ceel, you think Mom is okay?

Well, I . . . I guess. She seems to be, the girl said, anxious or sleepy (in fact she was
thinking that Mrs. Tyler looked very poorly, and she knew that if John were to ask her whether she believed that his mother would soon die she would truthfully answer: I can’t bear the idea of it), and then they passed the orchard where John had once made love with a girl named Mary, a girl from one of these hot still Delta towns; there’d been emerald grass beneath, no puddles the way there were in spring, and he remembered sparkles on the cool blue river like the drops of sweat on Mary’s forehead; and as he drove on, Celia gazing tolerantly upon Courtland’s pale white and grey buildings, upon the tiny pillared courthouse, upon big-tired farm vehicles rolling down the levee road, John found himself longing to make love with Celia right now, perhaps beneath this palm tree whose leaves were loose, glossy, dark like an excited lover’s hairy labia; but he extricated himself from his desire by convincing himself rightly or wrongly that such lovemaking would be an act of violation and exploitation, using Celia in Mary’s place as he had used her to be Irene (strangely enough, he didn’t think of Domino, either because her image would have scalded him or because she was so unique as to be a placeholder for nobody else before or since in his life). John remembered swimming past the Levee Cafe with little blonde Isleton girls who wore baseball caps in the water; he must have been very young then. And then he’d met Allie, the one to whom he’d husked his virginity in the speedboat, and then he’d found Mary, whose skin and soul were both as white as a new houseboat on the Sacramento River. Celia cleared her throat, allergically or anxiously, he couldn’t tell. Driving past Queen Anne’s lace so tall and white, John longed for Mary frivolously and desperately. He’d met her in China Mike’s bar in Locke. Her cunt had reminded him of soft-cut brown and golden fields. Did he comprehend that this Mary who touched him now wasn’t even Mary anymore, and that Mary had never been
his
memory, that all he felt now was a carnal ghost like one of the shadows which sometimes came down upon his brother like flesh in a black miniskirt walking, flesh in black high heels, flesh and a black purse, flesh and long red hair or black hair or the face of a sister-in-law or a Queen, meaningless flesh, to which all flesh is susceptible, because pleasure hides death? He tried to think of Celia, who left him cold, and of Irene, who left him cold, and then Celia smiled and touched his wrist very lightly with her long sensitive fingers and he was overwhelmed by love and guilt.

Ceel? he said, a little awkwardly.

What?

Do you feel like making love?

Celia looked away. —I think sex is wonderful when I feel safe and loved.

So you don’t feel safe? he said, trying to be angry, but unable to because the bitter taste of guilt remained in his mouth.

I—

Oh, forget it, he said. The pear groves were now an indistinct mass of life. Rich orchards looked up at the leveee, merging and blurring.

Uh, John, listen, I—

I don’t know, he sighed. Maybe I’m getting too stressed out over nothing. You think I’m a jerk, don’t you?

Then Celia was stroking his neck and saying: Yes, honey, yes I want to make love with you . . . —and John smiled in happy triumph.

And so in a wet mustard-yellow sunny fog they came to Locke with its smell of river-rot and old wood, its chamomile flowers, its dark damp plankwork spanning the gap from the weedy levee to the two-storey houses, some boarded up, some leaning, some
with laundry hanging and dogs sleeping. The same sensations inspired in his brother by ageing prostitutes slowly going bust were felt by John in this weedgrown old Chinese town whose bleached ideograms hung like crushed moths in the blackened windows. They parked across from the marina and John led her down River Road past the Joe Shoong Chinese school whose walls were pale yellow and grey, their ideograms the color of teahouse smoke.

Lovely, said Celia.

You see? said John, waving his hand.

Ancient dolls grimaced at her from a dark window, and at Locke China Imports there were heart-shaped old doilies. Silver clouds weighed down white clouds. Birds and silent gnats were everywhere.

John took her to the Dai Loy Museum and paid a dollar for each of them so that beneath the leaking skylight he could show her how the giant, red-and-white-dot-studded dice used to be shaken for illegal gambling games of
pai ngow. —
You see all those white money chips on the tables? he said. Just think what it would have been like to win!

Did you ever gamble? Celia asked, amused by his excitement.

Well, one time Hank and I . . .

His voice trailed off. There was a cold and moldy smell. He pointed to a row of mahjong pieces laid out on a long black box. Sticks of ivory, black with ideograms and wheels and flowers, seemed to offer Celia some gnomic key to her “situation,” but she didn’t really believe in fortune-telling and anyway John was explaining something to her regarding the rich indigo blueprint of Locke in the old days with its numbered squares of fields.

She stared down at a dry-rotted old butterfly harp.

Now we’re going to China Mike’s to meet Ronnie, John said. That’s the whole point of this trip—for you to meet Ronnie.

They sat at the bar beneath the faded notice which read:
WARNING: DRINKING BEER, WINE OR OTHER ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES CAN CAUSE SEXUAL AROUSAL AND MAY RESULT IN PREGNANCY.
He showed her the three baseball caps on the antlers of the stags’ heads, the dollar bills on the ceiling. He longed to order beers and greasy fries on the worn bar which glowed unevenly like the river; a second river, a glowing uneven river of copper, ran where the bar joined the floor.

Look, said John, grinning. There’s Ronnie himself. He’s a real character. Ronnie’s kind of my hero in a way. I remember the time I—

That would be yours, Ronnie was saying to another customer.

Smiling, John waited for Ronnie to notice him.

You’re perfect, Ronnie said to an old Chinese lady.

Celia had begun to feel anxious. John was drumming his fingers.

Almost got you with the bloody mary! Ronnie shouted to a tattooed Brady’s Boy.

Ronnie! John called out at last. Hey, Ronnie!

Who the fuck are you? said Ronnie.

John turned white. Horrified, Celia tried to speak. Ronnie glared viciously into her eyes and said: Shut up, bitch! Or do
you
wanna make the same mistake?

•

But the Light, since he possessed a great power, knew the abasement of the Darkness and his disorder, namely that the root was not straight. But the crookedness of the Darkness was lack of perception, namely the illusion that there is no one above him.

 

G
NOSTIC
S
CRIPTURES
,
The Paraphrase of Shem,
VII, 1, 10–15 (date unknown)

•

At the beginning of the new year there were floods in the farmland around Sacramento and dozens of homes went underwater to the eaves. —Those poor people, said Mrs. Tyler, shaking her head. —On the seventeenth Tyler was driving in to San Francisco and the flats just west of the river gleamed silver with mist and water, above which the railroad embankment shrugged its endless shoulder. White pickup trucks dazzled him with their unearthliness. Then above a long narrow green field a green billboard said
MENTHOL
. Inside garages and greenhouses, stale incandescent yellow glowed like sunlight through worn seashells. The road quivered under him as he sped most pleasantly alongside the divider-hedge.

It was a very cold January night at Leidesdorff and Commercial, where the triangular sign said
A CULTURED SALAD
. A man in livery passed, and his shadow stained the clean, empty street-wall which was otherwise hemorrhaging light. He half expected to see John, simply because this part of town was John’s kingdom. Granting the childishness of his conceptions did not dispell them. John did not appear. He felt disappointment and relief. Inside Boudin Sourdough, upended chairs went on and on like a chain of mahogany vertebrae.

On Washington Street he entered a very brightly lit Chinese ginseng place and had a cup of tea for fifty cents. On the topmost glass shelf lay some human-shaped roots for three hundred dollars a pound, but when he explained that he only wanted to eat some to get strong, the man recommended broken pieces like wood-chips. He bought five dollars’ worth and the man’s daughter put them in a little plastic bag for him. Then he went out, that good dirt taste of ginseng in his mouth, a strange feeling of excitement in his heart as he gazed upon the ruby-scaled snake of night-traffic, the families holding each others’ hands, the wide-striding loners with their paper bags.

New Year’s Day! A new orbit, new lies, new juries empaneled! The Queen had given him permission to go to Los Angeles; she said that it would do him good. She said that someday maybe he could love the whole world as much as he loved Irene. He asked her whether she knew that he loved her more than he loved Irene, and she said: I don’t care about that. I know you love me. —From his car he saw Irene’s relatives kneeling on plastic bags around the wet grave, scissoring away grass-tufts from the headstone, scrubbing with window ammonia, uncovering the flower-holder from the sod and filling it with water before they lowered the carefully trimmed carnations in. Now they were upraising their golden-foredged Korean hymnals, and they began to sing with closed eyes, the kids merely earnest, the older relations dabbing at their eyes. He wondered if they would prostrate themselves like the family two graves down, the mother in a sky-blue robe, the pigtailed daughter’s dress, snow-white, with bright red, blue, yellow and green stripes, the father in black—that family actually touched their heads to earth, but Irene had not
been old enough to gain much ancestral seniority before she died. Besides, that other family appeared to be Chinese; their necromantic rites might be different.

By now maybe she would have been serving giant won tons with a baby tied to her back with a blue sash—but she was moving farther and farther away from that as it was, her rotten bones partially demineralized.

He stood on Sacramento Street, lonely and helpless, chewing his chunks of ginseng.

It was at that moment that time began to come undone for him, as if the Beasts of Light and the Beasts of Darkness were eating each other; and he truly believed that the Queen’s reign must close. A moment later, it seemed, he was harvesting the honey from days long past when Irene still lived; and a moment after that it was already a foggy Easter Sunday and he found himself trapped in a fair on Union Street, almost every float being an ad for some business. Peruvian musicians, in rain-bowed national or pseudonational dress, sweetly, liquidly piped, so that once again he remembered that hot day in Union Square last July, just after Irene’s suicide. Mostly he remained preoccupied with continuing to display his futile love and loyalty for his Queen. He had memorized her like a poem and now he could recite her; perhaps his mother’s books and all the hours he’d spent browsing at City Lights had done that much for him. He freely acknowledged, of course, that she was but the local solution to a universal equation. Other citizens solved each other’s philosophical and erotic problems in coffeeshops without any reference to her; and a bald man smiled, wrinkling his head all the way to the crown. A brown girl tossed her head, sulkish. It began to rain, and when he tore the already sodden parking ticket off his windshield and drove down Filbert Street, tiny drops appeared between him and the world, like the ominous spheres of the old “Space Invaders” game which John had been crazy about in law school. John had killed those electronic aliens very well. When they’d been children there’d been a fallen log in the river, and John had walked on it, keeping his balance, instructing his brother: If you don’t think about it, you won’t fall. —That would be a perfect epitaph for John, thought Tyler malevolently, crushing the space invader raindrops with his windshield wipers.