Los Angeles is like a white world, filled with ever smaller white circles, leading to some perfect white core. Los Angeles is where the angels, with their white capped teeth and their white tennis dresses, gradually edged closer to the pure center, ambrosia, the fountain of youth.
Francine swung her skirt in a peach swish against her legs. In her way she was saying, look at me, I’m not really an orphan. See the box they just hand-delivered, the big one with the fat round red ribbon? That’s for me. I’m on a list with engraved invitations. I’m not alone.
“He isn’t worth death by maggots,” Francine said to the mirror. She was talking about Gerald. “You could probably get him committed, but why bother? He’s got no assets, right? Christ, he’s an embarrassment. He’s garbage,” she added.
My father wasn’t going to the film premiere. He was going to watch a boxing match on television. My parents never went anywhere together. Once they had quarreled violently, kicked holes in doors and broken windows. Twice neighbors called the police. No one on the street spoke to us. They said our shouting made the dogs bark.
Now a strange calm had settled between them. They rarely spoke. There was a terrible sense of finality, of bitter ends beyond the possibility of synthesis or regeneration.
“We have nothing in common,” my father explained. I stood near his shoulder while he picked avocados. “She has no sense of values. Her priorities are shallow.” My father studied an avocado. He put it down gently in a rounded wicker basket. “She’s been one hell of a disappointment.”
“I’ll call the lawyer for you,” Francine said. She was walking down to her car. She was still talking about Gerald. “We’ll nail that bastard. Maybe he doesn’t have anything now, but when he does, we’ll know about it.”
I watched Francine get in her car. I watched my mother disappear down the street. I never seriously tried to talk to her again.
3
“Go see your father,” Francine said to the mirror, making her eyes big, making her mouth red. “It’s a bad night. The night before the hospital. I’ll check him in tomorrow.”
“You will?”
“Of course.” Her tone was sharp and offended. She stared at me. “Do you actually think I’d let the old man die alone? After what he did for me?” My mother shook her head. “He took me off the streets. The bars with pimps and hookers. The hunger. The last foster family the state sent me to had three sons-in-law. It wasn’t a family. It was two solid months at a gang bang.”
My mother looked pale and tired. Her face was drawn tight and strained. Her skin seemed too thin. The proposed star of her new series had broken both legs in a car crash. He might never walk again. Her private secretary had eloped without giving two weeks notice. The calls were piled up, a stack of small square yellow slips. New York. Newspapers. San Francisco. London. Boston. Chicago. She tapped her fingers against the stack of paper.
“Kid, you don’t know what bonds are,” Francine pronounced. “I’ve loved that man for thirty years. He’s been a father and a lover to me, a husband and a friend.” Francine studied me as if I were oddly out of proportion, as if I had a scar or birthmark she had never seen before.
“You look terrible. Go clean yourself up before you see him.”
In my mother’s bathroom, with the special imported large round mirror bordered by fist-sized coral-colored sea shells, I improvised. I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the bathtub, tied my arm off with my mother’s bathrobe belt and shot up. I put the needle away. I stood up and the dull haze lifted. The room sparkled gold and radiant, seething and alive. The room was composed entirely of tiny orangy bulbs like brain cells. Each was distinct, each blinked open and closed. Within my body, a billion cells moaned, oh, thank you, thank you. I brushed my long hair. I ran the cold-water tap and patted cold water against my cheeks and forehead.
“You look much better,” my mother observed.
The telephone rang. Francine was leaning on one elbow. She didn’t seem to be looking at anything, not her face in the globe of mirror or even her tan and cream walls in the distance. She held the telephone receiver absently, running her fingertips across a stack of papers. She seemed exhausted. And part of me wanted to scream, Francine, Mother, abandoned, victorious, montage of babble, travel, swish of silk and hissing, the snake beneath the rock, absolved, holy asp, slow down, slow down.
“Yeah, I read the script.” Pause. “You make the whole world sound like poison. Can’t you find something pretty?” Pause. “How the fuck would I know? The Huntington Gardens? A new seal at Marineland? The goddamned sailboats?” my mother was saying as I closed her front door.
I drove to my father’s house, the house where we had once lived together as a family. Once this house was my anchor, unchanging. Once my world was neatly contained between Pico, Olympic and Santa Monica boulevards. I knew the special seasons of West Los Angeles, seasons of white hot or stinging red at Christmas, lights strung on poles, glitter in the palms and the shopwindows brushed with machine frost. Dusks were a cold splinter at my back as I walked home from the school bus, the deformed sun dissolving above me and spitting sick orange blood on the pavement, the poinsettias, and the cats just fed and exiled to side streets with trimmed bushes.
Slowly I walked up the small hill, a hump struggling from the curb and covered with the thinning ivy my father planted. I glanced at the rounded sides of orange tiles on the low-domed garage roof. The roof was jammed with old newspapers, red rubber bands strangling their throats. They were tossed there by little boys on bicycles who knew better than to stop. Watch out for them, the neighbors cautioned, their midnight shouting, the sounds of things breaking. They’re not our kind. Be careful.
I followed the narrow gorge of steep cement carved between house and ivy to the sliding glass back door. There had been long bad years, when my father was draped in a silence, when he sat alone, strangely fermenting. The years when he seemed to suck in all the air around him and give birth to vacuums, to cursing, my mother and father fighting, my father with the veins in his neck throbbing and his fist balled up tight and breaking a window.
There were the bad years, waiting for my mother to come home from work, the sound of her high heels on sun-baked cement, her arms wrapped around folders, free-lance assignments. She would pull the glass doors apart and sink into the closest chair, exhausted, pouring Scotch and eating scrambled eggs alone. My father would be watching baseball or hockey on television. My mother would run a hot bath. Basketball would become boxing. Francine would pull the covers over her bony shoulders.
I would wake to breaking and shrieking, my mother screaming and packing a suitcase at midnight. She was a pale shape by lamplight, crying, crumpled on the stubby wet grass in front of the house. A lone car passed near her head. My father would go down to the curb and bring her back.
I looked at the house. It seemed innocuous by dusk. The shame was covered with fresh pastel paint. The hate was covered with fresh pastel paint. My father would sit in his piece of fenced patio, silent and impossible as the banana plants along the back hedge.
This was the house my mother found. She collected the down payment and promised them anything, everything, after the orphanages, the cold stoops and red bricks of slums in winter. After the hospitals, this house, my mother and father together. And my father was master at last, with built-in barbecue, rain-birds and leaves to sweep. A man of property in a land of second chances.
I walked through the backyard. Absently, as if taking inventory, I noted the firm new branches on the peach tree. Lilies pushed up by the side gate. He had cut the apricot tree back. The branches looked blank and stripped, almost amputated.