“I know,” Alfredo said, forging onward. “Believe me, I’m not trying to take anything away from you—from what happened, I mean. Ramona is really unhappy about what… well, about what us getting back together has meant for… you and her.”
“Uhn,” Kevin said, hating the babble the subject of love always seemed to generate.
“And I’m sorry too, I mean I never would’ve tried to do anything like what’s happened. I was just…”
The margarita pitcher arrived, and they both set about busily filling and drinking the glasses, lapping up salt, their eyes not meeting.
“I was just a fool!” Alfredo said. “An arrogant stupid fool.”
Again, as from a distance of several feet, Kevin heard himself say, “We all lose track of what’s important sometimes.” Thinking of Doris. “You do what you feel.”
“I just wish it hadn’t worked out this way.”
Kevin shrugged. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
Had he said that? But it was as if he was taking something from Alfredo to say that, and he wanted to. He was by no means sure he believed any of the things he heard himself saying; yet out they came. He began to feel drunk.
Alfredo drank down his glass, refilled, drank more. “Hey, I’m sorry about that collision at third, too.”
Kevin waved it away. “I was in the baseline.”
“I shoulda slid, but I wasn’t planning to when I came in, and I couldn’t get down in time when I saw you were gonna stay there.”
“That’s softball.”
They drank in silence.
“What—”
They laughed awkwardly.
“What I was going to say,” said Alfredo, “is that, okay, I’m sorry our personal lives have gotten tangled up, and for fucking up in that regard. And for the collision and all. But I still don’t get it why you are so opposed to the idea of a really first-rate technical center on Rattlesnake Hill.”
“I was gonna say the same thing in reverse,” Kevin said. “Why you are so determined to build it up there on the hill?”
A long pause. Kevin regarded him curiously. Interesting to see Alfredo in this new light, knowing what he now knew about Heartech and the AAMT. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, pressing harder. “If this center is all you say it is, then it could do well anywhere in town. But we only have one hill like that, still empty and left alone. It’s a miracle it’s still that way after all these years, and to take that away now! I just don’t get it.”
Alfredo leaned forward, drew incomprehensible diagrams in the condensation and salt and spilled liquor on the table. “It’s just a matter of trying for the best. I like to do that, that’s the way I am. I mean sure, the better the center does the better it’ll be for me. I’m not free of that kind of thinking, but I don’t see why I should be, either. It’s part of trying for the best you can.”
So interesting, to see him rationalize like that—to see the strain there, under the moustache, behind the eyes!
Kevin said, “Okay, I’d like to be a hundred myself, and I like to do good work too. But good work means doing it without wrecking the town you live in.”
“It wouldn’t be wrecking it! To have a center that combined high tech labs and offices with restaurants, an open deck with a view, a small amphitheater for concerts and parties and just looking at the view—man, that’s been the goal of city planners for years and years. More people would use the hill than ever do now.”
“More isn’t better, that’s the point. Orange County is perfect proof of that. After a certain point more is worse, and we passed that point long ago. It’s gonna take years to scale things back down to where this basin is at the right population for people and the land. You take all the scaling back for granted, but you value the results of it too. Now you’re getting complacent and saying it’s okay for major growth to start again, but it isn’t. That hill is open land, it’s wilderness even if it’s in our backyards. It’s one of the few tiny patches of it left around here, and so it’s worth much more as wilderness than it ever could be as any kind of business center.”
Kevin stopped to catch his breath. To see how Alfredo would rationalize it.
Alfredo was shaking his head. “We have the whole back country, from Peter’s Canyon Reservoir to Black Star Canyon, with Irvine Park too. Meanwhile, that hill is on the town side of things, facing the plain. Putting the center up there would make it the premiere small center in southern California, and that would do the town a lot of good!”
Suddenly Kevin could hear the echo in the argument. Surely this was exactly what the AAMT representatives had said to Alfredo when they were putting the arm on him.
Fascinating. Kevin only had to shake his head, and Alfredo was pounding the table, trying to get his point through, raising his voice: “It would, Kevin! It would put us on the map!”
“I don’t care,” Kevin said. “I don’t want to be on the map.”
“That’s crazy!” Alfredo cried. “You don’t care, exactly!”
“I don’t care for your ideas,” Kevin said. “They sound to me like ideas out of a business magazine. Ideas from somewhere else.”
Alfredo blew out a breath. His eyebrows drew together, and he stared closely at Kevin. Kevin merely looked back.
“Well, hell,” Alfredo said. “That’s where we differ. I want El Modena on the map. I want on the map myself. I want to do something like this.”
“I can see that.” And behind the dispassion, the somehow scientific interest of watching Alfredo justify himself, Kevin felt a surge of strangely mixed emotion: hatred, disgust, a weird kind of sympathy, or pity. I want to do something like this. What did it take to say that?
“I just don’t want to get personal about it,” Alfredo said. He leaned forward, and his voice took on a touch of pleading: “I’ve felt what it’s like when we take this kind of disagreement personally, and I don’t like it. I’d rather dispense with that, and just agree to disagree and get on with it, without any animosity. I… I don’t like being angry at you, Kevin. And I don’t like you being angry at me.”
Kevin stared at him. He took a deep breath, let it out. “That may be part of the price you pay. I don’t like your plan, and I don’t like the way you’re keeping at it despite arguments against it that seem obvious to me. So, we’ll just have to see what happens. We have to do what we have to do, right?”
Taken aback, Alfredo didn’t answer. So used to getting his way, Kevin thought. So used to having everybody like him.
Alfredo shrugged. “I guess so,” he said morosely, and drained his glass.
Dear Claire:
…My living room is coming together, I have my armchair with its reading light, set next to the fireplace, with a bookstand set beside it, piled high with beautiful volumes of thought. Currently I have a stack of “California writers” there, as I struggle to understand this place I have moved to—to cut through the legends and stereotypes, and get to the locals’ view of things. Mary Austin, Jack London, Frank Norris, John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Ursula Le Guin, Cecelia Holland, some others… taken together, they express a vision that I am coming to admire more and more. Muir’s “athlete philosopher,” his “university of the wilderness,” these ideas infuse the whole tradition, and the result is a very vigorous, clear literature. The Greek ideal, yes, love of the land, healthy mind in healthy body—or, as Hank says, moderation in all things, including moderation of course! You can be sure I will remain moderate in my enthusiasm for the more physical aspects of this philosophy….
…Yes, the political battle here is heating up; a brush fire in the canyons to the east of town burned several hundred acres, including one structure, the house of Tom Barnard. The fire was not natural—someone started it, accidentally or deliberately. Which? No one can say. But now Barnard is planning to sail off with my wonderful Nadezhda.