Sunset twisted and curved and dipped and rose and dipped again on its way down to the sea. Guerriero kept the van at a steady forty-five, even on the trickier curves, and we slid around them nicely.
As we went past the east gates to Bel Air he jerked a thumb at them. “If we ever have a fuckin’ revolution in this country, that’s where it’s going to start,” he said.
“You think so?”
“Yeah. UCLA’s right next door, you know, so all you have to do is get the crazies there all fired up. Then the blacks and the Chicanos will come sweeping in from east L.A. and they’ll just burn the goddamned place down.”
“When do you think it’ll happen? The revolution, I mean.”
Guerriero shrugged. “Not soon. Things aren’t bad enough yet. They’re going to have to get real bad, like in the thirties, or worse.”
“Where’re you going to be when it comes,” I said, “on the barricades?”
He gave me a hard, crooked grin. “Out of town,” he said.
The Pacific Ocean was grey that day, not blue, and the long heavy swells rolled in and pounded themselves flat on the beach. Some seagulls were out investigating the possibilities for lunch while a number of self-important sandpipers trotted briskly up and down at the edge of the surf, making sure not to get their feet wet. A solitary stroller, his head bent, worked his way down the beach, stopping now and then to kick at something maybe strange and wonderful that lay half buried in the sand.
We rolled along the Pacific Coast Highway with the ocean on our left and some mud cliffs on our right, which gave way to hills that weren’t quite mountains. For a while, on the ocean side, there would be a row of some boxy-looking beach houses, a restaurant or two, some shops, and then a stretch of beach bordered by a parking lot. On our right were more shops and houses and fast-food places and delicatessens and then there would be what looked like an almost carefully marked-off stretch of hill and heather, or whatever it is that grows there by the sea, as though somebody had decided that right here we will give them a taste of greenery and then get back to the commercial junk.
It went on like that for seven or eight miles until we came to a small shopping center with a big Market Basket chain food store sign. We stopped at a light at Webb Way, turned left, and right again onto a narrow blacktop road that hugged the beach and was almost completely lined with houses.
“This is it,” Guerriero said. “Malibu Road. A lot of them live along here.”
“Who?”
“Picture people.”
Although there were a couple of architectural adventures among them, most of the houses were of conventional-enough design. A few of them were even small enough to be called cottages, and nearly all of them were built out on pilings that had been driven deep into the sand.
“The Colony’s back that way,” Guerriero said. “They keep a guard on the gate to discourage the riffraff. Along here it’s not quite so fancy. You can probably buy one of these places for maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand.”
The house numbers along Malibu Road ran high, up into the 24,000’s, and the number we were looking for was attached in metal letters to a high brown cinderblock wall that ran for fifty or sixty feet before it ended at a two-car garage. Behind and above the wall I caught a glimpse of a white-graveled, sloping shed roof and some shake shingles, but it was only a glimpse because the high wall did just what it was intended to, which was insure complete privacy.
Guerriero parked the van along the wall in front of a No Parking sign.
“I’ll wait for you,” he said.
“I shouldn’t be long.”
I got out of the van and moved down to the wooden gate in the wall. It was open and I went through it. Behind the gate was a patio bordered by all kinds of succulent shrubs and bushes and small twisted trees that seemed to thrive in the sea air. Nearly all of them looked ripe and juicy and just on the verge of bursting into bloom, although I wasn’t sure that any of them ever did.
The patio grounds were covered with irregular pieces of slate that had been cleverly fitted together, like a jigsaw puzzle. Growing in the inch-wide cracks between the pieces of slate was green grass, cropped short and carefully tended. Here and there were a couple of lounges for sunning, a round metal table with a glass top, some metal chairs, and a metal barbecue affair with an electric motor to drive the grill.
I crossed the patio and went down three steps and rang an ivory-colored button. The door opened almost immediately and I got my first look at Maude Goodwater.
I must have had a preconceived notion of what she would look like — probably something blond and brittle and tall with too much green eye shadow. But she wasn’t very tall, not over five-five, and her hair wasn’t blond, but rather a thick, glossy black that hung straight down until it curved up and under itself just at the base of a slender neck.
Her eyes were green, really green like dark wet jade, and her high cheekbones made them seem to slant a little bit, although they probably didn’t. She had a nice enough nose and a full wide mouth and perhaps not quite enough chin, although there were many who would probably argue that it was just right.
Altogether it was a striking face, the kind that you would turn to look at because it just escaped being pretty and went into something that was richer than pretty and therefore more memorable. It could even have been beauty, although I’m still not sure.
She wore a sleeveless blue blouse and white pants and white sandals and nothing else, not even makeup, not that she would ever need it with that smooth skin that seemed to glow with its light tan.
She looked at me and tilted her head slightly to one side, as though she were looking at a curious picture that she couldn’t quite decide about, and said, “Hello, Mr. St. Ives, I’m Maude Goodwater.”
Then she held out her hand and gave mine a firm shake and stood back so that I could go through the door. As I went past her I looked carefully at her green eyes, but they didn’t seem to have done much crying recently.
I stood there in a small foyer with its white stucco walls and its cool grey tiles and waited for her to indicate which way we should go. She made a small gesture and I followed her into a large room that somebody had cleverly decorated with the Pacific Ocean.
The glass did it, of course. It ran from floor to ceiling on two sides and it seemed to bring the sea almost into the living room. There was a redwood deck that served to cut off the view of the beach so that, on first glance, the house seemed to be perched out over the ocean.
The sea made it hard to notice the rest of the furniture, but I remember some easy chairs in muted colors, a couch, a fireplace, some paintings and a few rugs here and there. But it was the ocean that demanded your attention and the only thing in the room that really competed with it was Maude Goodwater.
She indicated that I could try the couch, if I liked, so I sat down. She chose one of the easy chairs.
“It’s a remarkable view,” I said.
She nodded. “You never get tired of it. I’ve been trying to save the house, but I’m afraid that’s going to be impossible. I’m putting it up for sale. This house, Mr. St. Ives, is all that’s left of a rather large fortune accumulated by a man who didn’t understand much about money.”
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
“There’s also the book, the Pliny book.”