The Gold Coast

55

They sleep together cuddled like spoons. In the morning Jim wakes to find Hana already at work, painting at a table in the main room. She’s put on a bulky sweater and army fatigues. He watches her, noticing the brusque concentration, the tangled hair, the tree-trunk legs. The indirection that is not really shyness, but some unnamed cousin to shyness. She gets up and walks into the kitchen, passes a mirror without even noticing it. He gets up to run give her a hug. She laughs at him.

“So,” she says after breakfast. “When do I get to read something of yours?”

“Oh, well.” He panics. “I really don’t have anything ready right now.”

And he cringes a little to see the quick grimace on her face. She thinks he’s being stupid. Wonders if he isn’t just lying about his poetry, a bogus artist trying to impress her, with nothing behind it. He can see all that in the quick flow of expression in her face, which is just as quickly suppressed. No, no! But he really is scared; his poetry is so trivial, and there is so little of it, he’s sure her estimation of him will drop radically when she reads it. So he doesn’t want her to. But that desire in itself gives it all away. She might even be imagining it’s worse than it really is. Jim sighs, confused. Hana lets the matter slide.

He fills in as he so often does, by telling tall tales of his friends’ exploits. Tashi and the night surfing. Humphrey’s empty tower. That kind of thing.

After a while Hana looks at the floor. “And when am I going to meet these amazing friends of yours?”

Jim gulps. It’s the same question, isn’t it: do I get to be part of your life? And by God, he wants her to be; he’s forgotten whatever reservations he might have had about her. What were they about, her clothes, her look? Absurd. “There’s a party at Abe’s house tonight. His parents are going on vacation and he has the house to himself. Want to come?”

“Yes.” She smiles, looks up at him.

Jim smiles too. Although he’s remembering that Virginia will probably be there. As well as two dozen other perfect examples of the Modern California Woman. But he doesn’t care, he tells himself. He doesn’t care at all.

However, when he tracks by that evening to pick her up, she’s wearing the very same army surplus pants, with their Jackson Pollock paint spray all over them. And yet another bulky brown-on-brown wool sweater. Jim winces. Then he notices that she has washed and brushed her hair, and it’s drying still, curling in a way he thinks stunning. Anyway who cares about this stuff? He doesn’t care about it. He doesn’t care at all. He shakes it off, they get in his battered old car and drive.

Abe lives in an annex of his parents’ house up on Saddleback Mountain, on the Santiago Peak side, just below the peak, overlooking all of OC and beyond. It’s the most exclusive neighborhood of all, in accordance with Humphrey’s law, height = money. Switchbacking up the steep residential road they pass mansion after mansion, most hidden from the road by a botanical garden’s variety of trees and lawns, all as exotic and glossy as houseplants. But some are right out there for people to see:

Mirrored boxes that resemble the industrial complexes in Irvine,

Pagodas, chateaux,

Complicated wooden-box structures à la Frank Lloyd Wright,

Or the Greene brothers’ Gamble house in Pasadena,

(Cardboard shacks in a field of mud!)

Mission-style monsters of whitewash and orange tile roofs,

Circus tent shapes of glass and steel that imitate

The dominant mall designs down on the floodplain.…

You live here, sure. There’s no doubt of it.

They track slowly and enjoy eyeballing the passing parade of architectural extravagance, making fun of most of the homes, ogling lustfully the few that strike them as tasteful, livable places. And marveling always that these are single-family dwellings, and not disguised duplexes, triplexes, aps or condos. It’s really hard to believe. “Like seeing an extinct animal,” Jim says.

“Dinosaurs, grazing in your backyard.”

Abe’s parents, the Bernards, live on the outside of one of the hairpin turns near the top of the road, on a little deck of land all their own. The home is a multilevel sprawl, made entirely of wood; a Japanese garden out front has bonsai pines overhanging moss lawns, big odd-shaped boulders, and a small pool with a bridge over it. They’ve arrived early, so there’s still parking on the street in front of the house. They get out, walk up and over the pool. “Just like the Modjeskas,” Hana says softly. “All they need are swans.”

As they approach the massive oak front doors, Abe and his father open them and walk out. Dr. Francis Bernard is a well-known logician who holds patents on some important computer software; he’s also been a diplomat and social activist. He is one of the calmest people Jim has ever met; very quiet, and not much like Abe, except for the sharp dark face, the black hair. Jim introduces Hana to them. Mrs. Bernard left for Maui a couple weeks before, and Abe and his father have been living together alone since that time; now Dr. Bernard is off to the airport, headed for Maui himself. The two of them shake hands. Abe says, “Well, brother…”

“Brother,” scoffs Dr. Bernard, obviously pleased. “See you in a month.” And with a quiet good-bye he’s off, into the garage.

“Come on in,” Abe says, glancing at Hana curiously.

They enter the house and follow Abe through a succession of rooms, to a kind of enclosed porch or pavilion, overlooking the terraced yard that stands high above OC. Below them spreads the whole lightshow, just sparking up to full power in the hazy dusk. A plain of light.

Hana notices the view and goes out on the terrace to have a look. Abe and Jim retire to the porch kitchen and work up a chili con queso dip in a big crockpot. Jim tells Abe about the things that impressed him during the trip to Europe, making each event into something profoundly significant, as he so often does with Abe. Abe responds with his sharp, interested questions, attentive to moods and significances himself. And then there is his sudden laugh, transforming something Jim has been solemn about to high comedy; supplying the wit but acting as if it were Jim’s. At times like this it’s hard to imagine Abe as the unresponsive and scornful friend that Jim often feels him to be; now Jim too is a “brother.” Is this a matter of mood, or is it just that whomever Abe fixes his full attention on becomes “brother” for that period of attention—which can be distracted, or missing from the start?

No way of knowing. Abe is the most inscrutable of Jim’s friends, that’s all there is to it. Visiting him up in this mansion Jim is reminded of Shelley’s visits to Byron. It’s gross flattery to compare himself to Shelley, he knows that, but there is something in the thought of the poor and idealistic poet visiting his rich, worldly, complex and powerful friend that reminds him of this feeling, up here on the very roof of OC.

So when Hana comes back inside and sits on a stool beside him, Jim watches with as much pleasure as apprehension the process of these two friends getting acquainted. Hana is plopped on a stool, the wind has pushed her hair into its usual disorder, and as Dennis would say, she looks like something the cat dragged in. But Abe clearly enjoys talking to her; she’s got a quick wit and can keep up with him. In that realm they’re both far beyond Jim, who only laughs and cuts chilis for the dip. Abe, curious as always about people’s work and their livelihoods, questions Hana closely about how the art business is carried on, and Jim learns things he didn’t know before.

“And you?” Hana says. “Jim says you’re a paramedic?”

Abruptly Abe laughs, elbows Jim. “Telling her about us, eh?”

Jim grins. “All lies, too.”

Abe nods at Hana. “Yeah, I work for the OC Freeway Rescue squads.”

“That must be hard work sometimes.”

Jim winces a little inside; when he says things along these lines Abe tends to scowl at him or ignore him. But now he says, “Sure, sometimes. It’s up and down. You get callused to the bad parts, though, and the good parts stay good always.”

Hana nods. She’s eyeing Abe closely, and he is inspecting the chili con queso; and she says, “So you two were on the wrestling team, hey? How long have you known each other?” Abe grins at Jim. “From the beginning.”

Then Sandy and Angela come in from the yard entrance, and it’s time for more introductions. With Sandy there the tempo jumps and pretty quickly they’re jabbering away like they’re old friends who haven’t seen each other in a year. Hana chatters as much as any of them, chiefly to Abe but increasingly with Sandy and Angela. Angela, bless her heart, couldn’t be friendlier. And then the crowd begins to arrive, Humphrey and his sometime ally Melina, Rose and Gabriela, Arthur, Tashi and Erica, Inez, John and Vikki, and so on; the party begins in earnest, people swirl in the slow ocean current patterns of parties everywhere. Hana stays on her stool and forms a sort of island around which one current swells; people stop in this eddy to talk to her. She asks a lot of questions, tries to sort out who’s who, laughs. She’s a hit. Jim, coming back to her after many small forays out into the currents, is pleased to see Hana and Abe engage in a long conversation, and Sandy join it; then Hana and Angela have a talk that leaves them laughing a lot, and even though Jim suspects that he is the subject of the laughter, he is pleased. All going so well.

Then Virginia arrives. When Jim sees her, blond mane breaking light in the hallway, his heart races. He moves to Hana and Angela and disrupts their conversation with some false heartiness, feeling nervous indeed. Virginia is quick to spot them, and she hurries over, smiling a bright smile full of malice. “Well hello, James. I haven’t seen you in a while!”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your new friend?”

“Oh, yeah. Virginia Novello, this is Hana Steentoft.”

“Hello, Hana.” Virginia extends a hand, and in her direct gaze there is a smiling, straightforward contempt. She’s judged this dowdy newcomer in a single glance, and wants Jim to know it. Angrily, fearfully, Jim looks sideways at Hana; she is gazing past Virginia, at the floor, indifferent to her, waiting for her to go. Virginia has been dismissed. Virginia smiles at Jim with open hostility, walks off without saying anything more.

Afterward, on the way home, Hana refuses to go to Jim’s place. “Let’s go to mine.”

So they do. As they track she says, “That’s one expensively dressed crowd of women you hang out with.”

“Ah, yeah.” Jim isn’t listening, he’s pleased at the whole evening, and at a final small gathering with Abe and Sandy and Angela. “They really go overboard into the whole thing. I’m so glad you don’t care about any of that.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jim.”

“Huh?”

“I said, don’t be stupid.”

“Huh?”

“Of course I care! What do you think I am?”

She’s angry with him, he’s just heard it. “Ah.”

And suddenly he gets it: no one can escape. You can pretend not to care about the image, but that’s as far as the culture will let you get. Inside you have to feel it; you can fight it but it’ll always be there, the contemptuous dismissal of you by the Virginia Novellos of the world.… No doubt Hana saw that look and was perfectly aware of it, all the rest of the evening. And she did look different from the rest of the women there; how could anyone forget that in such a crowd of them? And now he had implied that she was so far out of the norm that she wouldn’t have the common human response, wouldn’t even notice, wouldn’t even care.

He’s a fool, he thinks. Such a fool.… What to say? “Sorry, Hana. I think you’re beau—”

“Quiet, Jim. Just shut up about it, okay?”

“Okay.”

He drives her to her home in an awkward, ominous silence.