Timescape

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HE PICKED HIS WAY ALONG PEARL STREET, HITTING the brakes every moment or two as ruby tail lights winked in warning ahead. Traffic was getting thicker almost daily. Gordon felt for the first time the irritation at others moving in, gobbling up the landscape, crowding this slice of paradise, elbowing him. It seemed pointless, now that he was settled in, to develop this land any further. He smiled wanly as the thought struck him that he had now joined the legion of the genuinely transplanted; California was now here, other people were from there. New York was more a different idea than a different place.

Penny wasn’t at the bungalow. He had told her he would be late because of a recruiting cocktail party at Lakin’s house, and had half expected she would have a light supper ready. He prowled the apartment, wondering what to do next, feeling light and restless after three glasses of white wine. He found a can of peanuts and munched them. Penny’s papers from the composition class she taught were arranged neatly on the dining table, as though she had left in a hurry without putting them away. He frowned; that was unlike her. The papers were covered with her neat, curling handwriting, labeling paragraphs “tepid” or “arguable,” block letters shouting “SEN FRAG” or simply “AG”—failure of agreement between subject and predicate, she had explained to him, not a howl of anguish. At the top of one student essay on Kafka and Christ she had written “King Kong died for our sins?” Gordon wondered what it meant.

He decided to go out and buy some wine and nibble food. He certainly wasn’t going to wait around the apartment for her. On his way out the door he noticed a duffel bag leaning against the overstuffed armchair he usually sat in. He pulled at the sealing cord until the mouth sagged open. Inside was a man’s clothing. He frowned.

Full of a curious jangling energy, he delayed getting back in the Chevy and walked the half block down to Windansea Beach instead. Big combers battered at the smooth fingers of that rock that stretched into the sea. He wondered how long these rocks could stand the constant gnawing of the surf, booming in great bursts over them. To the south a few teenagers, brown as Indians, lounged around the small municipal water station pump house. They studied the tumbling surf in a languid stupor, some of them puffing on short cigarettes. Gordon had never been able to get more than three words out of them, no matter what he asked. Inscrutable natives, he thought, and turned away. Returning to his car along Nautilus he passed under Torrey pine trees that had ruptured the sidewalk, the concrete breaking on the hard and heavy bark like frozen waves.

He drove a winding route along the narrow back streets near the ocean. Tiny houses, almost doll-sized, crowded each other. Many were gingerbreaded or sported needless cupolas. Curls and latticework elbowed a neighbor’s elephant-eared begonias. Roses rubbed stands of lush bamboo. Filaments of every architectural style seemed to have splashed over the houses and clung, dripping. The streets were straight and silent, regimenting the babble of cultures and pasts that had washed up on this vest pocket village. La Jolla was a place where everything came together in a way unlike New York, with an odd and waiting energy. Gordon liked it. He took a swing around to 6005 Camino de la Costa on an impulse. It was a minor shrine now, the place where Raymond Chandler lived and worked in the ’40s and ’50s, with a flag-stoned courtyard and a jumbled rock garden that spread up the hill behind it. He had read every Chandler novel, immediately after seeing Bogart in The Big Sleep for the first time; Penny had said it was one way of finding out what California was about.

He bought food at Albertson’s and a case of various white wines at a liquor store near Wall Street, The parquet floors of the store hoarded the slackening dry heat of the day. A burly, tanned man eyed Gordon’s button-down shirt with a distant amusement as he sacked the bottles. Coming out of the store, Gordon saw Lakin getting out of an Austin-Healey down the street. He turned away quickly and walked down Prospect; in the dim twilight Lakin had probably missed seeing him. The paper on spontaneous resonance had sailed through ‘Physical Review Letters with ease, as Lakin predicted. The entire incident now seemed closed to Lakin, but Gordon still felt the unease of a man who is passing checks but knows his account is overdrawn. He put the bottles, clanking together, in the trunk of the Chevy, and then walked by the Valencia Hotel. There were no gaudy electrical apparitions yelling out their advertisements in La Jolla, no factories, pool halls, smokestacks, graveyards, railroad stations, or cheap diners to besmirch the ambience. The Valencia announced itself with a modestly lettered sign. On the veranda two middle-aged women were playing canasta and chattering with zest. They wore elaborate print dresses bunched at the waist, heavy metallic necklaces, and their hands sported at least three rings apiece. The two men playing with them looked older and tired. Probably worn out from signing checks, Gordon thought, and walked past them into the lobby. The hotel bar gave off a buzz of conversation. He made his way along ranks of rattan couches to the rear sitting room of the lobby; he liked to look down from here at the cove below. Ellen Browning Scripps had seen what the Land-gobblers were doing to the town and set aside a smooth green lawn around the cove, so that somebody beside the rich could watch the lazy swells roll in. As Gordon watched, the floodlights came on, making the white walls of churning water leap out of the sea’s darkness, chewing the land. Gordon’s few expeditions into the Pacific had been launched from the half-moon beaches below. Offshore there was a rock where you could stand and rise out of the lapping troughs of waves. It was slippery footing, but he liked to look back at the land, crusted with impermanent stucco and wood and whitewash, as though at this remove he could judge it, get a firm perspective. Chandler had said it was a town full of old people and their parents, but somehow he had never mentioned the sea and the remorseless, roaring breakers that punctuated the long rambling sentences of waves, always gnawing at the shore. It was as though some unnoticed force came over the horizon, all the way from Asia, and chipped away at this cozy pocket of Americana. Stubby breakwaters tried to blunt the effect, but Gordon could not understand how they could last. Time would eat all this away; it had to.

When he went back through the lobby, the bar’s murmur was about one drink louder than before. A blond gave him a look of appraisal and then, realizing he was no prospect, her face turned soft as sidewalk and she looked back down at her copy of Life. He stopped by the tobacco shop on Girard and bought a paperback for 35¢, fanning the pages to his nose as he left; they always carried the sweet humus smell of a pipe pouch.

He opened the door of their bungalow with his key. A man sat on the couch pouring some bourbon into a water glass.

“Oh, Gordon,” Penny said, her voice lilting as she got up from her seat next to the stranger. “This is Clifford Brock.”

The man rose. He was wearing khaki slacks and a brown wool shirt with pockets that buttoned. His feet were bare and Gordon could see a pair of zori lying beside the duffel bag by the couch. Clifford Brock was tall and chunky, with a slow grin that crinkled his eyes as he said, “Glad t’meet ya. Nice place you got here.”

Gordon murmured a greeting. “Cliff is an old high school buddy of mine,” Penny said merrily. “He’s the one took me to Stockton, that time for the races.”

“Oh,” Gordon said, as though this explained a great deal.

“Like some Old Granddad?” Cliff offered the open bottle on the coffee table, still giving off his fixed grin.

“No, no thanks. I just went out to buy some wine.”

“I got some, too,” Cliff said. He fished a gallon jug from under the coffee table.

“I went out with him to get some stuff to drink,” Penny volunteered. Her forehead was lightly beaded with perspiration. Gordon looked at the gallon jug. It was a Brookside red, wine they usually used for cooking.

“Wait’ll I bring in the rest from the car,” he said to sidestep Cliff’s proffered jug. He went out into the cooling evening and brought in the other bottles, storing some in a cabinet and the rest in the refrigerator. He corkscrewed one open, even though it wasn’t chilled, and poured himself a glass. In the living room Penny busied herself setting out Fritos and a bean dip and listening to Cliff’s slow drawl.

“You stayed late at the Lakin party?” Penny asked, as Gordon settled into their Boston rocker.

“No, I just stopped off to buy some things. Wine. The party was just another back-slapping thing.” The image of Roger Isaacs or Herb York slapping a venerated philosopher on the back, like Shriners on a binge, didn’t really fit, but Gordon let it go.

“Who was it?” Penny said, showing dutiful interest. “Who were they recruiting?”

“A Marxist critic, somebody said. He mumbled a lot and I couldn’t make out much of it. Something about capitalism repressing us and not letting us unleash our true creative energies.”

“Universities are great for hiring Reds,” Cliff said, blinking owlishly.

“I think he’s more of a theoretical communist,” Gordon temporized, not really wanting to defend the point.

“Do you think you’ll hire him?” Penny asked, obviously steering the conversation.

“I don’t have any say. That’s the Humanities people. Everybody was being very respectful, except for Feher. This guy was saying that under capitalism, man exploits man. Feher poked a finger at him and said, yeah, and under communism, it’s vice versa. That got a good laugh. Popkin didn’t like it, though.”

“Don’t need Reds to teach you anything you can’t learn in Laos,” Cliff said.

“What did he say about Cuba?” Penny persisted.

“The missile crisis? Nothing.”

“Hum.” Penny said triumphantly. “What’s he written, this guy, anyway?”

“There was a little stack of his publications. One-Dimensional Man one of them was, and—”

“Marcuse. That was Marcuse,” Penny said flatly.

“Who’s he?” Cliff murmured, pouring himself some Brookside into another glass.

“Not a bad thinker,” Penny admitted with a shrug. “I read that book. He—”

“Learn more about Reds in Laos,” Cliff said, hefting the gallon jug so he could pour by resting it on his shoulder. “Filling ’em up here?” he invited, looking at their glasses.

“I’ll pass,” Gordon said, holding his palm over his glass mouth, as though Cliff would pour into it anyway. “You’ve been in Laos?”

“Sure.” Cliff drank with relish. “I know this stuff isn’t up to that of yours—” gesture with glass, a ruby red sloshing—“but it’s one damn sight better’n stuff over there, I’ll tell you.”

“What were you doing?”

He looked at Gordon blankly. “Special Forces.”

Gordon nodded silently, a bit uneasily. He had gone through graduate, school with a student deferment. “What’s it like over there?” he asked lamely.

“Shitty.”

“What did the military people think about the Cuban missile settlement?” Penny asked seriously.

“Ol’ Jack earned his money that week.” Cliff took a long pull of the wine.

“Cliff is back for good,” Penny told Gordon.

“Right,” Cliff said. “R ‘n R forever. Flew me into El Toro. I knew ol’ Penny was around here somewhere so I called up her old man and he gave me her address. Caught a bus down.” He waved a hand airily, a shift of mood. “I mean, it’s okay, man, I’m just an ol’ friend. Nothing big. Right, Penny?”

She nodded. “Cliff took me to the senior prom.”

“Yeah, and did she look great. Ridin’ shotgun in a pink evenin’ gown in my T-bird.” Abruptly he began to sing “When I Waltz Again with You” in a high, wavering voice. “Boy, what crap. Teresa Brewer.”

Gordon said sourly, “I hated that stuff. All that high school hotshot business.”

Cliff said levelly, “I’ll bet you did. You from back east?”

“Yes.”

“Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront, all that? Boy, it’s a mess back there.”

“It’s not that bad,” Gordon murmured. Somehow Cliff had hit upon a precise similarity. Gordon had kept pigeons on the roof for a time, just like Brando, and had gone up there to talk to them on Saturday nights when he didn’t have a date, which was pretty often. After a while he had convinced himself that dating on Saturday night didn’t have to be the center of a teenage life and then sometime after that he had got rid of the pigeons. They were filthy anyway.

Gordon excused himself to get some more wine. When he came back with a glass for Penny the two of them were remembering old times. Ivy League styles; hot-wiring cars; the Ted Mack Variety Hour; the irritating retort “That’s for me to know and you to find out”; Sealtest ice cream; Ozzie and Harriet; Father Knows Best; duckass haircuts; the senior class repainting the water tower overnight; girls who popped bubble gum in class and left, pregnant, in their junior year; My Little Margie; the dipshit president of the senior class; strapless evening gowns that had to be wired to stay up; penny loafers; circle pins; Eloise, who ruined her crinolines falling in the pool at the all-night party; getting served in bars where they didn’t give a damn about your age; girls in straight skirts so tight they had to get on a bus stepping up sideways; the fire in the chem lab; beltless pants; and a parade of other things that Gordon had disliked at the time as he burrowed into his books and planned for Columbia, and saw no reason why he should be nostalgic about now. Penny and Cliff remembered it as dumb and pointless, too, but with a differently soft and fond contempt Gordon could not summon up.

“Sounds like some kind of country club.” He kept his voice light but he meant it. Cliff caught the disapproval.

“We were just havin’ fun, man. Before, you know, the roof caved in.”

“Things look okay to me.”

“Yeah, well they’re not. Get over there, in mud up to your ass, and you’ll find out. The Chinks are nibblin’ away at us. Cuba gets all the newspaper space, but where it’s really happenin’ is over there.” He finished his wine, poured another.

“I see,” Gordon said stonily.

“Cliff,” Penny said brightly, “tell him about the dead rabbit in Mrs. Hoskins’ class. Gordon, Cliff took—”

“Look, man,” Cliff said slowly, peering at Gordon as though he were nearsighted and waving a finger erratically in the air, “you just don’t—”

The telephone rang.

Gordon got up gratefully and answered it. Cliff began mumbling something in a low voice to Penny as Gordon left the room but he couldn’t make it out.

He put the receiver to his ear and heard among the hiss of static his mother’s voice say, “Gordon? That’s you?”

“Uh, yes.” He glanced toward the living room and lowered his voice. “Where are you?”

“At home, 2nd Avenue. Where should I be?”

“Well… I just wondered…”

“If I was back in California again, to see you?” his mother said with irritating perception.

“No, no,” he paused a fraction of a second, about to call her Mom and suddenly not wanting to, with Special Forces Cliff within earshot, “I didn’t think that at all, you’ve got it all wrong.”

“She’s there with you?” Her voice warbled high and faint, as though the connection were getting weak.

“Sure. Sure she’s here. What do you expect?”

“Who knows what to expect these days, my son.”

Whenever she called him “son” he knew there was a lecture on the way.

“You shouldn’t have left like that. With no word.”

“I know, I know.” Her voice weakened again. “My cousin Hazel said I was wrong to do that.”

“We had things to do, places we’d planned to take you,” he lied.

“I was so…” She couldn’t find the word.

“We could have talked about… things. You know.”

“We will. I’m not feeling so good right now but I hope I can come out there again soon.”

“Not so good? What do you mean, Mom, not so good?”

“A little pleurisy, it’s nothing. I threw away money on a doctor and some tests. Everything is fine now.”

“Oh, good. You take care of yourself, now.”

“It’s nothing worse than that strep throat you had, remember? I know these things, Gordon. Your sister was over for dinner yesterday and we remembered how—” and she was off in her usual tone of voice, recounting the events of the weeks, tracing an implied return to the fold of the wandering sister, of making cabbage soup and kugel and flanken and tongue with the famous Hungarian raisin sauce, all for one dinner. And after, the “thee-yater,” the two of them taking in Osborne’s Luther (“Such a fuss about things!”). She had never budged his father downtown to lay out his good hard money for such things, but now the process of reclaiming her children justified such small luxuries. He smiled fondly, listening to the easy flow of words from another, earlier life three thousand miles away, and wondering if Philip Roth had heard of Laos yet.

He had a picture in his head of her at the other end of the long copper cord, her hand at first clenched white around the telephone receiver. As her voice softened he could sense the hand relax, the knuckles not so pale now. He was feeling good as the call ended. He hung the heavy black receiver back into its wall mount and only then recognized the choking gasp of repressed crying coming from the living room.

Penny was sitting on the couch beside Cliff, holding him as he sobbed into his cupped hands. “I didn’t… We was goin’ across this paddy, followin’ a bunch of Pathet Lao from ‘Nam back to where we knew they were runnin’, toward the Plain of Jars. I was with this asshole platoon of ‘Nam regulars, me and Bernie—Bernie from our class, Penny—and… this AR opened up right on us, an’ Bernie’s head jerked… He sat down in the mud an’ his helmet fell into his hands, he was reachin’ up for his face, an’ he started to pick somethin’ up out of the helmet and he fell over sideways. I was down behind him with the AR fire goin’ right over us. I crawled up to him an’ the water was all pink aroun’ him and that’s when I knew. I looked in the helmet and what he was tryin’ to get out was part of his scalp, the hair still stuck in it, the round musta run up inside there an’ gone in his brain after it smashed his jaw.” Cliff was speaking more clearly now, heaving great sighs as the words tumbled out and his palms worked in the sockets of his eyes. Penny hugged him and murmured something. She reached over his broad shoulders and kissed him on the cheek with a sad, vacant gesture. Gordon saw with a sudden, gnawing shock that she had slept with him somewhere back in those rosy high school days. There was an old intimacy between them.

Cliff looked up and saw Gordon. He stiffened slightly and then shook his head, his mouth a blur. He sniffed. “It started to goddamn rain,” he said clearly, as if resolved to go on and tell the rest of it no matter who was there. “They couldn’t get any choppers in to us. Those pissass ‘Nam pilots won’t come in under fire. We was stuck in this little grove of bamboo, where we pulled back to. Pathet Lao and Cong had boxed us in. Me and Bernie were advisors, not supposed to give orders, they’d put us in with this platoon ’cause we weren’t s’posed to make contact at all. Ever’body thought with the rainy season comin’ on they’d pull out.”

He hoisted the Brookside jug and poured himself another glass. Penny sat beside him, hands folded demurely in her lap, eyes glistening. Gordon realized he was standing rigid, halfway between kitchen and living room, arms stiff. He made himself sit in the Boston rocker.

Cliff drank half the glass and rubbed his eyes on his sleeve, sighing. The emotion ebbed from him now and there was a settled fatigue about the way he went on, as though the words drained away the small drops of feeling as they emerged. “This ARVN platoon leader went spastic on me. Didn’t know which way was up, wanted to move out that night. The mist came in across the paddies. He wanted I should go out with ten ‘Nams, reconnoiter. So I did, these little guys carryin’ M-1’s and scared shitless. We didn’t get a hunnert yards before the point man rammed a punji up his boot. Started screamin’. AR fire comes in, we waddle our way back to the bamboo.”

Cliff leaned back in the couch and casually draped his arm around Penny, staring blankly at the Brook-side jug. “The rain feeds fungus that grows in your socks. Your feet get all white. I was tryin’ to sleep with that, your feet so cold you think they’re gone. An’ I woke up with a leech on my tongue.” He sat silently for a moment. Penny’s mouth sagged open but she said nothing. Gordon found he was rocking energetically and consciously slowed the rhythm.

“Thought it was a leaf or somethin’ at first. Couldn’t get it off. One of the ‘Nams got me to lie down—I was runnin’ around, screamin’. The pissass platoon leader thought we was infiltrated. So this ‘Nam puts boot cream on my tongue and I wait lyin’ there in the mud an’ he just picks this leech out of my mouth, a little furry thing. All the next day I taste that boot cream and it makes me shiver. Relief battalion drove off the Cong around noon.” He looked at Gordon. “Wasn’t till I got back to base that I thought about Bernie again.”

Cliff stayed until late, his stories about advising the ARVN becoming almost nostalgic as he drank more of the sweet wine. Penny sat with her legs tucked under her, arm cocked against the couch back and supporting her occasionally nodding head, a distant look on her face. Gordon supplied short questions, nods of agreement, murmurs of approval to Cliff’s stories, not really listening to them all that closely, watching Penny.

As he was leaving Cliff suddenly turned manically gay, wobbling from the wine, face bright and sweating slightly. He lurched toward Gordon, held up a finger with a wise wink, and said, “ ‘Take the prisoner to the deepest dungeon’, he said condescendingly.”

Gordon frowned, puzzled, sure the wine had scrambled the man’s brains.

Penny volunteered, “It’s a Tom Swiftie.”

“What?” Gordon rasped impatiently. Cliff nodded sagely.

“A, well, a joke. A pun,” she replied, imploring Gordon with her eyes to go along, to let the evening end on a happy note. “You’re supposed to top it.”

“Uh…” Gordon felt uncomfortable, hot. “I can’t…”

“My turn.” Penny patted Cliff’s shoulder, in part as though to steady him. “How about ‘I learned a lot about women in Paris,’ said Tom indifferently?”

Cliff barked with laughter, gave her a good-humored slap on the rear, and shuffled to the door. “You can keep the wine, Gordie,” he said. Penny followed him outside. Gordon leaned on the door frame. In the wan yellow glow of the outdoor lamp he saw her kiss him goodbye. Cliff grinned and was gone.

He put the Brookside jug in the trash and rinsed out the glasses. Penny rolled up the mouth of the Fritos bag. He said, “I don’t want you bringing any more of your old boy friends by here from now on.”

She whirled toward him, eyes widening, “What?”

“You heard what I said.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Uh huh. And why don’t you like it?”

“You’re with me now. I don’t want you starting up anything with anybody else.”

“Christ, I’m not ‘starting up’ with Cliff. I mean, he just came by. I haven’t seen him in years.”

“You didn’t have to kiss him so much.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh God.”

He felt hot and suddenly uncertain. How much had he drunk? No, not much, it couldn’t be that. “I mean it. I don’t like that kind of stuff. He’s going to get the wrong idea. You talking about your old high school days, arms wrapped around him—”

“Jee-sus, ‘get the wrong idea.’ That’s a Harry Highschool phrase. That’s where you’re stuck, Gordon.”

“You were leading him on.”

“Fuck I was. That man is walking wounded, Gordon. I was comforting him. Listening to him. From the moment he knocked on the door I knew he had something inside, something those rah-rah types in the Army hadn’t let him get out. He almost died over there, Gordon. And Bernie, his best friend—”

“Yeah, well, I still don’t like it.” His momentum blunted, he grasped for some other way he could prove the point. But what was the point? He had felt threatened by Cliff from the moment he saw him. If his mother had been able to see through that telephone, she’d have known quite well what to call the way Penny behaved. She’d have—

He stopped, avoiding Penny’s hostile, rigid face, and looked down at the Brookside jug waiting forlornly in the trash for its destruction, incompletely used. He had seen Penny and Cliff with his mother’s eyes, his New York imprinting, and he knew that he had missed the whole point. The war talk had put him off balance, unsure of how to react, and now in some odd way he was taking it all out on Penny.

LOOK, he began, “I’m sorry, I…” He brought his hands halfway up into the space between them and then let them drop. “I want to go for a walk.”

Penny shrugged. He shouldered past her.

Outside, in the cool and salty air, fog shrouded the tops of the crusty old live oaks. He marched through this La Jolla of the night, his face a sheen of sudden sweat.

Two blocks over, on Fern Glen, a figure emerging from a house distracted him from the jumble of his thoughts. It was Lakin. The man glanced to each side, seemed satisfied, and slipped quickly into his Austin-Healey. In the house Lakin had left, Venetian blinds fluttered at a window, momentarily silhouetting a woman’s body in the light that seeped from behind her. Gordon recognized the place; it was where two women graduate students from Humanities lived. He smiled to himself as Lakin’s Healey purred away. Somehow this small evidence of human frailty cheered him.

He walked a long way, past sealed-up summer cottages with yellowed newspapers on their doorsteps, occasionally passing by huge homes still ablaze with light. Cliff and Laos and the sense in Cliff’s words of things real and important, muddy and grim—the thoughts chewed at him, all churned together in the layered fog with Penny and his distant, inevitable mother. Experimental physics seemed a toy, no better than a crossword puzzle, beside these things. A distant war could roll across an ocean and crash on this shore. He thought muzzily to Scripps Pier, which jutted out below the campus, used as a loading dock for men and tanks and munitions. But then he snorted to himself, sure the drink was now fuzzing his mind. Around him the tight pocket of La Jolla could not be threatened by a bunch of little guys running around in black pajamas, trying to topple the Diem government. It didn’t make any goddamn sense. He turned back toward home and Penny. It was easy to get overexcited about threats—Cliff, the Cong, Lakin. Waves could not batter down a coastline overnight. And dim ideas about Cubans dumping fertilizer into the Atlantic and killing the life there—yeah, it was all too unlikely, more of his paranoia, yeah, he was sure of that tonight.