She steadied herself, licked the dryness of her wine-tart lips. Anna too had something she needed to confide. She leaned over to whisper it: “Fuck you,” she said.
They were a handsome couple, or so they were always told, and they did mirror one another in a certain way. She saw the two in her mind’s eye: blond, large-faced, freckles scattered across their good cheekbones. The clinical name for what was happening to her, Anna remembered, was disassociation. Anna and her husband turned, she thought. Anna and her husband began to walk the cobbled streets of this ancient capital back toward their room, which lay in the Dark Zone beyond the thumping disco.
“Excuse me, Charlie?” she asked after another moment. “But do you know what?” His head was down to listen carefully—he was clearly penitential. “You?” He nodded. “Your parents—her parents—that whole sad story?” He nodded. “It’s completely sordid.” She listened, heard her words veer off, going clipped and strange.
This old and dignified capital had been so carefully rendered in this phony theme park of this jigsaw Europe that the phony flickering gas lamps were turning out to be real. She watched these lamps as they begin to halo. There was a shine on the street and on the sidewalk and on slick wet roofs, which were made of what? Some kind of slate or tile? The shine began to blur, certain places in her vision began to bounce and magnify. She put one hand out, long fingers facing up, to feel if anything was falling. Had it been raining? Anna couldn’t remember. The water shortage was so extreme that year in California that half the counties ended the summer in emergency rationing.
“Charlie?” Anna asked after another moment. “You know what else?” He nodded a little too eagerly. “My mother has never liked you.” Then she leaned over and, as if to make a physical point of this, she threw up onto his shoes.
7
These Shades Of
Frustrated by the melancholy traces left by his faithless pencil while sketching on the shores of Lake Como. . . .
FILIPPINO LIPPI,
exhibit caption at
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
EV-VEN-NING, VERONIQUE SAID. Eeeeev-ven-ning, as if it was an even-ing out, the place where light came to its great pause, a halt, a shift, a place the world balanced, waiting before it went ahead and plunged headfirst into
8
Laws of Return
ONE SUMMER ALEC and Gina moved with the kids up from Oxford Street; then almost immediately his parents came. The new house, built only a quarter mile from the strike-slip fault, was bolted to bedrock, as he pointed out to Stu and Viv. Its idiom was postmodern, Alec said. Its materials, he told them, were Wrightian. He enunciated as if his parents were hard of hearing. The two of them were small and sweet and clean; they blinked in stupid unison. The house had been shot for Architectural Record, he embarrassed himself by mentioning—this didn’t impress them either.
The house was simply perplexing to his father, hidden as it was up a drive in the center of a block so it didn’t even seem to sit on a real street and did nothing therefore to proclaim itself. Alec could see Stuart struggling to find adequate words of praise, saying it was unlike any house he’d ever seen, more like an art museum with the big rooms and Gina’s work put out on the floor around.
“What’s the matter with them, Stu?” he heard his mother whisper. “That they don’t own furniture? No furniture, no drapes or curtains, but they have these naked women sitting on the floor with their legs spread wide?” These were abstract landscapes, actually, hills, valleys, new mountains, the more ancient ones. What threw Viv off was that Gina called the pieces, which were done in rough plaster, The Great White Nudes.
It was August, yet his parents went around bundled up indoors, shivering dramatically . Alec once found them sitting in his car, where they had the motor on and the heater going, reading the travel pages of the newspaper as if plotting their escape. They found their son residing with his family in a hardship post, Stu said, in his most smug and jocular tone, the one he got with his degree at Yale. This was Alec’s father’s little joke; he repeated it to Viv nearly every single day. Ulysses S. Grant’s proclaiming San Francisco a hardship post meant he and his men got extra pay when they were stationed at the Presidio. Stuart found this fact by browsing in Alec’s life of Grant. Stuart was also reading whole stories from the Chronicle aloud to Viv at breakfast so they could laugh together at the ridiculousness of Californians, never mind these were Gina’s people. “Oh look, Stu!” Viv said one day. “That must be the mayor!” They were on Telegraph Avenue on their way to a concert at Zellerbach Hall. She was pointing at a barefoot, obese, homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk.
Alec’s parents, who once traveled and were sophisticated, now spent their time whispering between themselves about anything unfamiliar—what was the strange orange meat in the Chinese food? They shielded their eyes dramatically from the glare of the afternoon sun glancing off the too-bright bay. Because the house followed the hill’s slope, there were a few steps between the two main rooms. Alec’s parents couldn’t go up or down between the living room or dining room without remarking upon these steps, always in new surprise. More disturbingly, Viv had begun to keep her pocketbook clasped tightly to her side indoors, as if she expected to meet muggers in the hallway.
“That’s Mount Tam, Grandma,” Cecily pointed out helpfully. “And that’s the Golden Gate Bridge.” Cecily was so little then, her beauty seemed heartbreakingly pure to Alec—why didn’t her grandparents seem to really care for her? Had they become utter narcissists, entered the mirror world in which no one else any longer exists? They did now look almost exactly alike. Vivian couldn’t get over Cecily’s long blond hair, kept asking and asking when she was getting it cut, couldn’t believe her granddaughter was allowed to keep rats as pets.
“Oh, I know, dear,” Viv sniffed. “And believe me, by my age, if you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen them all.”
His folks sat overbundled with their hands clasped in their laps, bolt upright on the plain, straight-backed Stickley furniture in an attitude of bland endurance. Alec squinted, tried to see the place as they saw it, a trick he used with clients: a house built of rocks and metal and glass, as cold and blinding as a snowstorm. Home, on their tree-lined street in Queens, people sat out on the stoop in shirtsleeves on a summer evening to escape the air-conditioning. Home, there were lightning bugs, robins, real blue jays, the air was thickly humid. In Queens light was soft, old green trees overarched the pavement. The ice-cream truck would be along and Stuart would buy her one.
This was in 1987, a couple of years before the earthquake completely wrecked the transportation systems of the Bay Area, both freeways and public transit. Peter had just been born. Alec had never known such joy as that event aroused—their little family now was mathematically balanced in a way it hadn’t been before, and Gina had the second child she so desperately wanted, the baby who canceled the bad reproductive luck she thought she might have inherited from the unbalanced equation that was her parents’s tragic lives.
The house faced the bay, one blank wall sitting recessed behind an apron of glass panels facing the fall-away into the steeper part of the canyon. Alec called the entry the Water Room. He remembered the words etched on the first sketches he ever did of this house. The room preexisted in a Platonic sense, it seemed to him—he had simply been always striding ahead into the future in order to discover himself within the room he would one day make.
The room was positioned to catch sharp-edge morning light that poured in as the sun rose over the shaggy treetops. Light pooled, spilled back into the house from a line of interior dormers that ran just below the roofline.