I improvise. “We should have dinner sometime soon. There’s a good Greek place in town. You know, a neutral site.”
He reacts as if I’ve asked him to spend the night.
“No, no…I don’t think, well…Really, uh, not wise.”
And to think I’m here because I wanted to escape California by winning fifty thousand dollars on a quiz show.
“I’m sorry. Five-point penalty, and I’ll repeat the entire question for Ohio Wesleyan. British novelist Thomas Hardy was the author of a series of novels set in the mythical county of Wessex….”
Violet’s round, cream-puff face has tightened with — what is it? Fear? Shame? This is her third incorrect, and premature, answer in a row. Her “team” is falling far behind.
“Santa Clara, Feilinghaus.”
“Would that be Henry the Fourth?” Her voice sails into a harsh upper register.
“No, I’m sorry…”
It could be my imagination, but Violet’s prim sweater seems to have darkened with flop sweat. Her hair, though heavily sprayed, has begun to undo itself in response to some magnetic field of humiliation.
Consider the divergences possible inside the same family. A week or so after our return from Las Vegas, Violet’s mother and young sisters came from Redlands for a celebratory weekend of shopping and dining out. A surprise weekend. I’d spent most of that Friday pollinating orchids with my friend Marsh, returned, and found strangers at home. They introduced themselves: Rose and Jonquil. I received new-brother-in-law kisses from two girls who were totally, and quite casually, naked.
“We’re cleaning your apartment as a wedding present and we don’t want to get our clothes dirty,” Rose said, brushing cigarette ash off her breasts.
Smiling, Jonquil returned to her vacuuming. Had to get the job done before Sis and Mom got back from Magnin’s.
Compare this nonchalance with the urgent insecurities of Violet, a woman who could negotiate Santa Monica Boulevard at 50 mph, but needed half a bottle of Chablis to nerve herself for a freshman lecture and bowed to the opinions of boutique salesgirls.
I freeze the image. Her circled lips nearly touching the microphone, Violet bends far forward, as though shrinking from a whip. The eyes of the bow-tied classmate on her left are caught in mid-roll; he anticipates another blunder. Had they warned her during the brownie mix commercial to keep her mouth shut?
“Mr. Earl, the work is Growing Up in Samoa and the author is Margaret Mead.”
“That is correct. All right, once again, Santa Clara, the subject is astronomy and your question is in three parts….”
Consider the artificial logic of one thing we name “destiny.” My ex-wife recalls her fascination with the migrants who came to harvest the family orchards and supposes it led her to her current work. My friend and coworker has told me of the secret attentions paid her by a favorite aunt and how they were crucial to her emergence as a lover of women. But I doubt they believe in this sort of continuity any more than I do.
Consider the pure illogic of the realities that pen us in. For Violet, no medication can shorten the hours of insomniac despair which have dogged her all her life. For Ellen, there is no escaping her Seattle cat disease, tiny parasitic bundles that lie in dormant wait on the surface of her kidneys. For both, sharp intelligence is a frequently unwanted gift, a precision tool for the measurement of pain. But I doubt either one of them would trade places with the other.
It’s Ohio Wesleyan in a romp, but Violet has regained her poise. Of the four Santa Clarans, she is the only one to rise above defeat, a flat smile hinting at scorn for the whole exercise. So, with some physical discrepancies (vestiges of baby fat, nails long and painted instead of chewed away), I recognize my wife at thirty-five in this girl of twenty. Switching faces, evading judgment: that mercurial essence is here.
Violet made a joke of subtlety. We were together quite a while before I learned not to anticipate. The fretful neurotic would suddenly take on the hauteur of her noble Bavarian forebears. It was best not to grow comfortable with one’s conclusions. Violet could be at her most tyrannical while pleading for support. Similarly, when arranging some form of subjugation for herself, she was always in command, the author of the playlet. But don’t let such dualities lead you to suspect a simple scheme. Because Violet made all the stops. Her feelings were irresistibly lush and came in tropical profusion.
I’ve found all I’m going to in this tape; no point sitting through it a second time. Ah, swollen youth, how quickly it deflates. And anyway, who was it filed for the divorce? Shit. Can’t go forward, can’t go back. Nobody’s fault, no one to prosecute on this one. We can’t overcome time, separately or together, or clear away the residue it leaves in passing. Still, it should be possible to replicate small pieces of the past. I know how that would be….
Bit by bit, my sleepless fruit heiress cradles into me. Her skin is hot and smooth, like her breath. I decree the smell of orange blossoms. The trees are reaching in the window, I say. And into fine, Aryan hair, I sing the soft, slow tunes that please her. “Mood Indigo” and “Buttermilk Sky” and so on.
Violet, my fragrant bloom, if only you could learn to be casual about things like that.
36
THE SUNSET, LACED WITH hydrocarbons, was deep purple. Unseen mechanisms turned on lights that beamed cheerlessly on antique shops and design studios along Wilshire Boulevard. Knees against the dashboard, I filled my nose with the smell of good green government ink. I was with my friend Marsh; we had just delivered three crates of psilocybin mushrooms grown from mycelia sent by his stepmother in Olympia, and the money was spilled between us on the seat — fresh, clean bills like chard right out of the garden.
“I’ve been curious about the Solomon Islands,” Marsh said.
I said that was fine, but neither one of us had a passport
“They grow a variety of banana that can weigh up to—”
He was interrupted by an oncoming skateboarder with phosphorescent tape strips hanging from his chin and a bubble pipe clenched in his teeth.
“Youth,” he said, as the kid swerved around our fenders and jumped the curb. “What a dismal job.”
We were passing a carton of orange drink back and forth, working away at a sack of jelly doughnuts. Spotted with confectioners’ sugar, the steering wheel looked as if it had been incompetently dusted for prints. What a pair of night crawlers we made. I craved a leather banquette in some maudlin piano bar, but Marsh, whose enthusiasms were unpredictable, wanted to play miniature golf.
“Precision, precision,” he said. “Like the blossoming of a…”
Who cares! Enough of this aimless remembering. One damn thing I don’t need is to develop a new bad habit. Stick to the tense present and thrive.
Good advice. Except the immediate issue is a thing thirty years old. Double takes and padded shoulders. My Little Margie.
I could be pulling the lobster shift in a machine shop, crumbs of steel flying off my lathe. I could be sitting on a tractor, discing fragrant black ground for sugar beets. But this is my hazardous profession; it turns me backward, pushes me into not just my own past, but everyone else’s. It propels me without pause from one memory bit to another, feeding on parallels and associations.
I see the cardboard skyline through the window of Vern Albright’s office at Honeywell and Todd, Investment Bankers. I see the spires of the Woolworth Tower and the Chrysler Building paralleled in the fountain pen set on Vern’s desk. I remember staying home from a fourth-grade geography test, the images of a marvelously complete Margie world, city styles distant as Rangoon viewed from a terrace of indulgent pillows.