The Ruins of California (20 page)

“No thanks.”

“Ah, come on,” he said. “They’re very mellow buds.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I thought you were into it.”

“Just once.”

“Once? But nothing happens the first time,” he said. “Didn’t you know that? Come on. Might as well try it again. Nothing will happen this time either.”

When he lit up the pipe, the smoke smelled musky and sweet, and clouds of it came and went as we walked into the shady woods. I took a few careful puffs, and Whitman called out the names of the trees as we passed them—the old live oaks and white pines and dried-out cedars. But as the minutes passed, he grew quiet. That was the bad thing. I’d noticed it before, that day at Ripper Jacks and other times. When Whitman was stoned, he retreated, went inside himself. He grew silent and seemed almost sullen. Where had he gone? And when would he return? I hated how much he
seemed to desire that separation from the world, and distance from me. I was lonely suddenly, even more than if I’d been walking in the woods by myself.

We came to the edge of Ocotillo Creek and walked uphill to a wide spot in the stream where the clear water had pooled in the sun and shadows and formed a swimming hole. The air smelled fresh and green and wet—almost a faint metallic smell. Huge gray boulders stood at the edge of the water, dappled with sunlight and spots of pale lichen. I was looking at a beautiful, smooth boulder, the swirling green water that grew brown at the muddy bank, and worrying again about leeches, when I heard a sound.

Two naked bodies—horizontal blurs of pink-white flesh—were sunning themselves on a large rock across the way.

Whitman yelled out. “Hey-ya, Ross!”

“Hey, man.”

“Nice hot day.”

“Yeah,” Ross said. He twisted his head around and saw me. “Who dat?”

“My sister.”

“You got a sister?”

Both heads lifted off the rock. They belonged to two guys—and one of them, Ross, looked as if he might swim over. Sure enough, he sat up, slid off his boulder, and hit the surface with a splash. Underwater, his body looked long and pale—yellowish, not pink—and his hair was much shorter than Whitman’s, a honey color and full to his ears. With each stroke of his short journey, my dread grew. I became intensely aware of my shorts, my T-shirt and bathing suit, my socks and clunky hiking boots. How was I to greet a nude man? Would he stand up, full frontal, and shake my hand?

Whitman, completely oblivious to my distress, was quickly
removing his shoes and socks—then inching his shorts and underwear over his buttocks. Within seconds he was naked, and without the slightest hesitation he scrambled up a large boulder next to us and took a leaping jump into the air.

Meanwhile Ross had made his way to the shore and rose from the swimming hole like Poseidon. “Hey,” he said, smoothing his hair with his wet hands and wiping the water from his eyes. “Didn’t know Whitman had a sister.” He hugged himself to keep warm.

“I’m Inez,” I replied with great nonchalance. Years of practicing a blasé expression were serving me well. But it was awfully hard to keep my eyes from drifting to Ross’s taut waist, and below.

“The water’s unreal,” he said.

“Can’t wait,” I said, as if I swam with naked men every day. I unzipped my cutoffs, then fumbled with my hiking boots—the laces seemed to have been knotted three times—and when I’d finally gotten them off, Ross was back in. His big nude body wasn’t visible anymore, except for his head on the surface of the green water, next to Whitman’s, as they watched me.

I suppose that I could have swum in my bathing suit. But to keep it on—when everybody else was naked—seemed to me prudish and awkward. While removing the suit seemed unimaginable, and nightmarishly scary, the kind of exposure I’d spent my whole life avoiding, it also became, in my mind, the better choice. It was the progressive choice. It was the confident choice. After all, I wanted to be the sort of person who could tear off her clothes and plunge naked into swimming holes. And at some point I’d have to start. Later on, in my fantasies of what happened that day, I threw my bathing suit and shorts into the branches of a nearby tree, climbed the tallest boulder, stretched my arms high up over my head, and did an elegant dive into the water with a great hollering
of naked exhilaration. That would be my mother’s way—the shy panic and laughter. It would have been my father’s way, too—the detachment and theatricality. But in reality I unsheathed myself as nimbly and quietly as I could, like a little mouse, stepped onto a flat rock at the water’s edge, and slipped in without fanfare or shouts of exhilaration. As I submerged into the cool water, I felt a great groaning weight lifted from my being.

M
y mother didn’t have close friends, really—aside from Coach Weeger. She had tennis partners, old classmates from Van Dale High, and clients she’d found or sold houses for. Their conversations were about practical matters and daily life—which dry cleaner did the best job, which butcher had the best steaks. Mostly they talked about tennis. It was a complete universe and language and religion in those days. You didn’t need friends or ideology. You just had to know what players you liked. Pancho Gonzales, Arthur Ashe, Björn Borg. Those were the gods of Van Dale, and my mother’s gods. Below them in Olympus, there were only lesser mortals and demons. There was a young man with funny bangs and knee socks named Jimmy Connors. My mother and her Van Dale friends weren’t sure they liked him. A young girl named Chrissie Evert was always winning, but like Connors, she seemed dogged and square and had no personality beyond her amazing tennis playing. For my mother she was like a dancer who knew all the steps and performed technically well but had no style.

In North Beach my father and Justine had a small circle of intimate friends. They never talked about sports—or seemed aware of the World Series or the Super Bowl or when the U.S. Open was being played. They never talked much about the news either. They
rarely gossiped or even exchanged much information. Rather they shared a wavelength, an attitude, a sensibility. And, like my father and Ooee, they were members of some undefined worldwide bohemian movement. They weren’t sellouts. That was the main thing. They had their own ideas about things—and none of them particularly practical or grown up. One of my father’s oldest friends was a filmmaker who had worked for six years on a short documentary about fog. Another was a painter of all-white paintings and then, a few years later, of all-black paintings. And aside from the artists and
flamencos
, who were loyal to the music but little else, my father’s other friends were mostly academics—engineers and mathematicians, none of whom I was able to communicate with. They were friendly enough and I admired them, but I never knew what they were talking about.

At Patricia’s that day, I was introduced to an entirely different tribe of characters. She said she was having some people “over for lunch,” and they began to pour into the house, one by one, two by two, and in clumps. Eventually the house grew so crowded with people that it was hard to move from room to room. Patricia swirled around in a bright blue tent of a dress, almost a caftan, and a heavy gold necklace that she said had been a gift from Marguerite years ago. People kept arriving and arriving—neighbors and more friends—and there was lots of food and wine—lots of wine—and Patricia’s friends knew labels, vineyards, grapes, and they compared various vintages of Chablis and Zinfandel with epicurean relish. There was a garden designer named Mickey with a loose red Afro to his shoulders. A tall, Norse-looking woman named Gertruda had a huge straw hat that she didn’t take off all day. A British writer named Sebastian came with a Turkish woman named Sebnam, who wore a gold lamé bikini top and tight white capris. There was
a pair of men who stood next to each other from room to room and talked like an old married couple. Were they?

“How’d you like the creek?” a young man with blond hair asked me. He was wearing jeans and a pink button-down with the sleeves rolled up. It took me a few seconds before I realized it was Ross, all covered up and dry and barely recognizable.

“Perfect temperature.”

“Not too cold?”

Ross looked awfully good in clothes—would the boys in Van Dale have dared to wear pink? I tried not to think about how, just a couple hours ago, he’d seen me naked.

“Was it colder than usual today?” I asked.

“It seemed that way—although I’m not sure the actual temperature really changes that much. I was at the hot springs earlier in the morning, and maybe by comparison the creek seemed frigid to me.” Ross stood really close when he talked to me. In fact, most of Patricia’s friends did that.

“No leeches, though,” I said.

“They’re harmless, if you don’t let them hang on too long.”

“Whitman promised that I’d see one.”

“There’s always tomorrow,” Ross said with a smile, “or later tonight.”

I nodded, trying to contain an explosion of feeling that I was having in that moment, a mix of joy and dread and excitement—the thought of nighttime, and water, in combination with Ross. He had none of the jitters of the adolescent boys in Van Dale who stood next to me in their bathing suits at swim parties or on the grass at the Verdugo Community Center, all bottled up and clammy, barely containing their secret plans for touches and feels and grabs. But Ross, when we’d finished swimming and were standing around naked, hadn’t jittered. He didn’t even stare—or not stare. He’d just
gotten out of the water and moved to the warmest boulder and lain down in the sunshine. I stole glances at his penis, watched it loosen and grow longer. I couldn’t believe how unscary it was. How relaxed, how quiet, and how lovely his body looked, so smooth and tan.

Patricia glided from room to room at lunch, made people laugh and then, just as quickly, disappeared. The burden of entertaining wasn’t a burden but a release. She grew lighter and easier in a crowd. Not many of her friends seemed to be native Californians. They were from the East or Midwest, parts of Europe or Israel. It was an odd assortment—farmers and artists and writers and people who just worked in Ojala, in cheese shops or coffee shops or waiting tables. It was hard to tell what anybody did, exactly, because none of them talked about their work. They talked about their gardens, or a recent day at the beach, or a hike in the hills, or a meal they’d eaten. They talked about books they were reading, foreign movies they’d just seen, and things they wanted to do in life—dreams they had, trips they wanted to make. They were all enormously supportive of Whitman. They loved how adventurous and resourceful he was. They asked where he was going next. And they seemed excited for me, too, just for being a girl with my future in front of me and Whitman for a brother. The lunch—I realized later—had been thrown in my honor, or for my amusement. But Patricia had handled this so quietly, with the gentlest touch, that I never felt the strain of being an honoree.

She wasn’t from California—that was why, I felt sure. She wasn’t descended from frontier robber barons like Justine, who’d been raised with so much room and money that she didn’t know how to be around regular people. Patricia wasn’t a first-generation assimilation test case like my mother, who, besides being
stunningly beautiful, just wanted to fit in. And, unlike Marguerite, a traditionalist who looked at the world and felt it was going down the tubes—the quality of everything was deteriorating—Patricia was excited by anything new, anything she didn’t know about. Every tomato she tasted was the best, every friend she introduced to me was the most amazing of all. I’d never met anybody so easy and enthusiastic, and more than once I wished she were my mother—not just Whitman’s. But at the same time, it was impossible to imagine that my father had ever been in love with somebody so fat or so old.

A few days later, when I got home to Van Dale, Patricia’s lust for all things in life hadn’t traveled with me. Abuelita’s house looked darker than ever, the upholstery shabbier. The streets seemed so regular, too uniform and straight, all the houses so close together. The sidewalks bugged me, and the tall, brushed-aluminum lampposts that hung over the street. The Verdugo pool was so antiseptic and chlorinated. I looked at the kids in their nose plugs and goggles and neon-colored bathing suits, and I felt sorry for them. I missed the swimming hole and the large, smooth boulders. Where was the dappled sunlight and shade of the woods? And why weren’t there any boys in Van Dale like Ross or Whitman, who swam with me and just let me swim—no grabby hands—all of us enjoying the water, the nighttime, and the glimpses of the full moon behind the branches of the oaks? I hadn’t been gone that long, but sometimes just a couple days in a strange new paradise can change the way you see things forever.

ELEVEN

Shelley Strelow

W
hitman left that fall for South Africa, where it had been arranged he’d live with Ooee Lungo’s sister in Cape Town. She was married to the head of an airline and offered Whitman a guest cottage on the grounds of her house. I don’t remember when he left, really—or how I said good-bye. I was starting Van Dale High and feeling barraged by low-level anxieties. I wondered how strange and overwhelming my new school might be, how hard the classes would be, and whether Justine’s elegant castoffs were the right clothes for such a place. And then, as soon as the school year started, I had to deal with my mother. She was suddenly trying to connect with me, grasping at me as if I were slipping through her fingers. She cocked her head when she looked at me, as though I weren’t the same person anymore, as though I’d mutated, become possessed, or a stranger had taken over the body of Inez Ruin. But believe me, after est, she was the one who’d turned weird.

One morning I caught her looking down at a notepad by the phone where I had doodled

“Who’s that?” my mother said.

“My friend Shelley,” I said. “You remember. We went hiking?”