But I didn’t. Not really. Because while I was growing up in my sunny seaside home much of the world was in misery, hungry, sick, living in cardboard shacks, killed by soldiers or their own police. I had been on an island. In a pocket utopia. It was the childhood of someone born into the aristocracy, and understanding that I understood the memory of my childhood differently; but still I know what it was like, I lived it and I know! And everyone should get to know that, not in the particulars, of course, but in the general outline, in the blessing of a happy childhood, in the lifelong sense of security and health.
So I am going to work for that. And if—if! if someday the whole world reaches utopia, then that dream California will become a precursor, a sign of things to come, and my childhood is redeemed. I may never know which it will be, it might not be clear until after we’re dead, but the future will judge us! They will look back and judge us, as aristocrats’ refuge or emerging utopia, and I want utopia, I want that redemption and so I’m going to stay here and fight for it, because I was there and I lived it and I know. It was a perfect childhood.
Kevin was working at Oscar’s place when he heard the news. He was up on the roof finishing the seal and trim around the bedroom skylights, and Pedro, Ramona’s father, came zooming up on his hill bike, skidding to a stop on the sidewalk. “Kevin?” he called.
“Yeah, Pedro! What’s up?”
Serious look, hands on hips. “Get down here, I’ve got bad news.”
Kevin hustled down the ladder, heart thumping, thinking something’s happened to her, she’s hurt and wants me there.
“It’s Tom,” Pedro said as he reached the ground. Kevin’s heart leaped in a different direction. Just the look on Pedro’s face told him. Deep furrow between his eyebrows. He grasped Kevin’s upper arm. “Their ship was wrecked in a storm, and Tom—he was washed overboard.”
“He what?”
It took some explaining, and Pedro didn’t have all the particulars. Gradually it dawned on Kevin that they didn’t matter. Killed by a storm. Lost at sea. Details didn’t matter.
He sat on a workhorse. Oscar’s front yard was cluttered with their stuff, dusty in the sun. He couldn’t believe it.
“I thought ships didn’t sink these days.” Proud Ganesh flying away from Newport’s jetties.
“It didn’t really sink, but a lot of compartments flooded, and they judged it safer to get out into the lifeboats in case it did sink. It’s still out there wrecked, dead in the water. I guess it was a typhoon, and they got hit by a load of lumber, tore the ship all up.”
Pedro was holding his arm again. Looking up Kevin saw on his face the strain of telling him, the bunched jaw muscles. He looked as much like Ramona as a short gray-haired sixty-year-old man could, and suddenly a spasm of grief arrowed through Kevin’s numbness. “Thanks for telling me.” Pedro just shook his head. Kevin swallowed. From his Adam’s apple down he was numb. He still had a putty knife in his hand. It was Pedro’s kindness he felt most, it was that that would make him weep. He stared at the dirt, feeling the hand on his arm.
Pedro left.
He stood in Oscar’s yard, looking around. Working alone this afternoon. Was that better or worse? He couldn’t decide. He was a lot more solitary than he used to be. He climbed back onto the roof, returned to work on the trim around the skylights. Putty. He sat on the roof, stared at it. When he was a kid he and Tom had hiked in the hills together, sun just up and birds in the trees. Bushwhacking while Tom claimed to be on an animal trail. They’d get lost and Kevin would say, “Animal trail, right Grandpa?” Seven years old and Tom laughing like crazy. Once Kevin tripped and skinned both knees bad and he was about to scream when Tom grabbed him up and exclaimed like it was a great deed, an extraordinary opportunity, and pulled up his own pantlegs to reveal the scars on his knees, then had taken out his Swiss army knife and nicked a scar on each knee, touched their four wounds together and then actually sucked blood from Kevin’s shins, which had shocked Kevin, and spit it in four directions rattling out the nonsense words of an ancient Indian blood oath, until Kevin was strutting around glowing with pride at his stinging knees, badge of the highest distinction, mark of manhood and oneness with the hills.
That evening and the next day, the whole unwanted raft of condolences. He preferred swimming alone. Laps at the pool, thousands of yards.
He made calls to Jill and his parents. Jill gone as usual. He left a message, feeling bad. He got his mother on screen: weird moment of power and helplessness combined as he gave her the news. Suddenly he appreciated what Pedro had done, to come over and tell him like that. A hard thing to do. The little face on the screen, so familiar—shocked by the news, twisted with grief. After an awkward brief conversation they promised each other they would talk again soon.
Later that day he watched Doris cook a dinner for the house, when it was his turn. “You know we don’t have any way to find those friends of his,” she said. “I hope they’ll get in touch with us.”
“Yeah.”
She frowned.
He was angry at the crew of Ganesh, angry at Nadezhda. Then she reached him on the phone and he saw her, arm in a sling, grim, distracted. He recalled what Tom had told him of her life, a tough one it sounded. She told him what she knew of the wreck. Four other crew members missing, apparently they had been trapped in a forward compartment and had tried to make their way back over the deck. Tom had disappeared in the chaos of the foundering, no one sure what had happened to him. Disappeared. Everyone had thought he was in one of the other lifeboats. She went on until Kevin stopped her. He asked her to come back to El Modena, he wanted her to return, wanted to see her. She said that she would, but she looked tired, hurt, empty. When the call was over he couldn’t be sure if she would come or not. And then he really believed in the disaster. Tom was dead.
They finished the work on Oscar’s house a couple of weeks later, in the burning heat of late September. They walked around it in their work boots and their greased, creased, and sawdusted work-shorts, brown as nuts, checking out every little point, the seal on the suntek and cloudgel, the paint, the computer (ask it odd questions it said “Sorry I fail the Turing test very quickly”), everything. Standing out in the middle of the street and looking at it, they shook Oscar’s hand and laughed: it looked like a clear tent draped over one or two small dwellings, red and blue brick facades covered by new greenery. Oscar did a dance shuffle to the front door, singing “I’m the Sheik, of Ar—a—bee” in a horrible baritone. “And your love, belongs, to meee,” pirouetting like the hippopotami in Fantasia, mugging Valentino-like swoops at Jody and Gabriela, who squeaked “Don’t—stop—don’t—stop” in unison, pushing him back and forth between them.
Inside they split up and wandered through the rooms, looking things over. Kevin came across Oscar and Hank standing together in the central atrium. Hank said, “These black pillars are neat. They give it an Egyptian Roman wrapped in plastic look that I like.”