The Gold Coast

  He goes to the funeral the next morning, and stands at the back of the chapel at Fairhaven Cemetery. Watches the ceremony dully. He knew Lillian Keilbacher mostly in churches, he thinks. There was a time in high school when he was volunteered by Lucy to help build the Bible school on the back of the church lot; the church was too poor to hire a real construction crew, and the work was all volunteer, led by two churchgoing carpenters who seemed to get a kick out of it all, though it went awfully slowly. Every day that Jim was there he saw a skinny blond girl with braces who had the biggest, most enthusiastic hammer swing you could imagine. The carpenters used to go pale as they watched, but she was surprisingly accurate. That was Lillian. Jim can see perfectly the delighted brace-bright grin of the girl as she knocked a nail all the way in to the wood with one immense swing, Don the head carpenter clutching his heart and spluttering with laughter.…

  They move outside into a shaft of sun. The cemetery is under the upper level of the Freeway Triangle, a concrete sky like low threatening clouds, but there is a big skylight gap overhead to let a little sunlight down. They walk slowly behind a hearse as it navigates the complex street plan of the city of the dead. Population over 200,000. Again Jim walks behind, watching the little crowd of people around the Keilbachers, the way they hold together. There is a feeling in their church community, standing on its little island of belief in the flood of twenty-first-century America, a feeling of solidarity that Jim has never experienced again since he stopped going. The camaraderie, the joy they shared, building that little Bible school! And it turned out solid, too, it’s still there. Yes, there’s no doubt Lucy is on to something with her involvement in the church.… But his faith. He has no faith. And it can’t be faked. And without faith.…

  Beyond the last row of graves is an orange grove, standing under a big skylight. The procession is in shade now, under the concrete underside of the Triangle, and the wide shaft of light falling on the green-and-orange trees is thick with dust, very bright. The trees are almost spheres, sitting on the ground: green spheres, dotted with many bright orange spheres. It’s the last orange grove in all of Orange County. It belongs to the cemetery, and is slowly being taken out to make room for the dead.

  The ceremony at graveside is short. No sign of Abe, Jim notes. He excuses himself to a disapproving Lucy, and slips off; the idea of a wake is too much.

  He tracks up Saddleback Mountain, listening to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. There’s no one home at Abe’s place.

  He follows the road up to the lookout parking lot on Santiago Peak, the easternmost of Saddleback’s two. The western one, Modjeska Peak, is a few feet lower. He gets out of the car, walks to the stone wall on the parking lot’s edge, looks down at Orange County.

  There spread below him is his hometown. During the daytime it’s a hazy jumble of buildings and flying freeway viaducts, no pattern visible. Even the upper level in the Freeway Triangle, which dominates the central plain, is hard to pick out. It’s as if they brought cement trucks with their big cylindrical barrels up to this peak, and let loose a flood of concrete lava that covered the entire plain. Western civilization’s last city.

  Jim recalls the view from the hilltop in Itanos.

  His thoughts are scattered, he can’t make them cohere. Things are changing in him, the old channels of thought are breaking up and disappearing, with nothing new to take their place. He feels incoherent.

  Depressed, he drives back down the mountain. He feels he should locate Abe, so he goes to Sandy’s. Abe is not there, and neither is Sandy. Angela has heard of the accident, and she takes Jim out to the balcony, talks to him about other things. Jim sits there dully, touched by Angela’s concern. She really is a wonderful person, one of his best friends, the sister his family didn’t provide.

  Now she stares at the palms of her hands, looking troubled. “Everything seems to be going wrong,” she says. “Have you heard that Erica has broken off the alliance with Tashi?”

  “No—what?”

  “Yeah. She did it at last. She’s stopped coming by here, too. I guess she decided on a total change.” Angela isn’t bitter, but she does sound sad. They sit on the balcony, looking at each other. The hum of the freeway wafts over them.

  “It’s no big surprise,” Angela says. “Erica’s been unhappy now for a long time.”

  “I know.… I wonder how Tash is taking it.”

  “It’s so hard to tell with Tash. I’m sure he’s upset, but he doesn’t say much.”

  He does to Jim, though. Sometimes. “I should go see him. My God, everyone!…”

  “I know.”

  The doorbell rings, and through the houseplants comes Virginia. “Hello, Jim.” Quick kiss on the cheek. “I heard about your friend. I’m really sorry.”

  Jim nods, touched by her concern. Seems everyone pulls together at times like these.

  Virginia looks lovely in the hazy afternoon light, hair banded white gold, flashing with an almost painful brightness. It’s all part of the pattern, Jim sees. This is what it means to have friends, to be part of a functioning community. And that’s what they are; another island poking out of the concrete.…

  “Let me take you out to dinner,” Virginia says, and gratefully Jim agrees. Angela sees them off with determined cheerfulness. They take Jim’s car and track down to the Hungry Crab in Newport Beach.

  Since they haven’t talked in a while, there is a fair amount to say; and as they work their way through two bottles of wine and a crab feast, they get more and more festive. Jim can even describe the various comedies of the European jaunt; their fighting is past, they’re beyond that, into a more mature stage of their relationship. Jim watches Virginia laugh, and the sight of her is more intoxicating than the wine: perfect glossy hair like a cap of jewels, deep beach tan, snub nose, freckles, wide white smile, a perfect match for the decor, perfect, perfect, perfect.

  So he is quite drunk, both with wine and with his proximity to this beautiful animal, when they pay the bill and leave. Out into the salt cool of a Newport Beach evening, lurching together, holding hands, laughing at a pair of goggle-eyed sunburnt tourists—thoroughly enjoying themselves as they approach a group of students walking their way.

  Then Jim sees Hana Steentoft in the group, head down in characteristic pose. As the group passes them she looks up at him, looks down again. The group walks by and into the Crab.

  Jim has stopped, and at some point jerked his hand free of Virginia’s. Now as he looks back at the restaurant the old sardonic smile is on her face. She says, “Ashamed to be seen with me, eh?”

  “No, no.”

  “Sure.”

  Jim doesn’t know what to say, he can’t concentrate on Virginia right now, he doesn’t care what Virginia thinks or feels. All he wants to do is rush into the Crab and try to explain things to Hana. It’s like a nightmare: somehow trapped in an old disaster alliance, which poisons the new relationship—he’s had nightmares just like this! How could it be happening?

  But it is happening, and here he is, standing on the sidewalk with a furious Virginia Novello. Abandoning her in Newport Beach and running in to throw himself at Hana’s feet in a group of friends is just too melodramatic for Jim, too extreme, he can’t see himself doing it.

  So he stays to face Virginia’s wrath.

  “You really are rude, you know that, Jim?”

  “Come on, Virginia. Give me a break.”

  How easily they fall back into it. All the variations on a theme: It’s all your fault. No it’s not; I’m not conceding a thing to you; it’s all your fault. Back and forth, back and forth. You’re a bad person. No I’m not, I’m a good person. You’re a bad person. There are a lot of ways to say these things, and Jim and Virginia rehearse the whole repertory on the way home, the little moment of camaraderie completely and utterly forgotten.

  Their favorite coda, as Jim tracks into South Coast Plaza and stops the car: “I don’t want to ever see you again!” Virginia shouts.

  “Good!”
Jim shouts back. “You won’t!”

  And Virginia slams the door and runs off.

  Jim takes a deep sigh, puts his forehead down on the steering switch. How many people can he hurt at once? This day …

  He sits for several minutes, head miserably on the dash, worrying about Hana. He’s got to do something, or he’ll … he doesn’t know what. Abe. Can’t find Abe. Tashi! Man, it’s hitting everywhere at once, as if the whole island is threatened by flood. All falling apart! He tracks down Bristol, heading toward Tashi’s place.

  62

  Up on Tashi’s roof it’s quiet and dark. The tent is lit on one side by the dull glow of a lamp inside. On the other side of the roof, among the vegetable trays, there’s a dim glow of hibachi coals. Tashi, a big bulk in the darkness, sits in a little folding beach chair beside the fire. A sweet soy smell of teriyaki sauce rises from the meat on the fire. “Hey, Jim.”

  “Hey, Tash.” Jim picks up a folded beach chair from beside the tent wall and unfolds it. Sits.

  Tash leans forward to flip over one of his infamous turkey burgers, and the grease flares on the coals for a moment, lighting Tashi’s face. He looks as impassive as ever, picking up a water bottle, spraying out the flames. In the renewed dark he squeezes a little of his homemade teriyaki on the turkey burgers, and they hiss and steam aromatically.

  “I heard about Erica.”

  “Hmm.”

  “She just left?”

  “… It was a little more complicated than that. But that’s what it comes down to.” Tash leans forward again, slides the spatula under the burger and checks it out. Puts it into a sandwich already prepared. Eats.

  “Damn.” Jim finds himself furious with Erica. “She just … did it?”

  “Umph.”

  “Unbelievable.” To leave someone like Tash! “Stupid woman. Man, it’s such a dumb thing to do!”

  Tash swallows. “Erica doesn’t think so.”

  Jim clicks his tongue, irritated. Tash seems so even-headed about the whole thing, as if he has judged the matter and found he is perhaps in agreement with Erica.…

  Tash finishes eating. “Let’s get stoned.”

  They get out a full container of California Mello, and lid the whole thing, back and forth, back and forth, until the tears are running down Jim’s face, and his corneas feel like thick slabs of glass. White-orange clouds, heavily underlit by the city, roll slowly inland. Slowly, very slowly, Jim’s anger subsides. It’s still there, but it’s been muted, banked like the coals in the hibachi to a small, melancholy feeling of betrayal. That’s life. People betray you, betray your friends. He recalls the look on Debbie Riggs’s face as she yelled at him. He himself has betrayed more people than have ever betrayed him, and the realization dampens his anger even more. He was shifting onto Erica what he felt toward himself.…

  “Angela called,” Tash says. “She said you went to dinner with Virginia?”

  “Yeah. Damn it.”

  Tash chuckles. “How is she?”

  “Feeling enormous amounts of righteous indignation, I would guess, this very moment.”

  “Virginia nirvana, eh?”

  Jim laughs. They can insult each other’s ex-allies, and cheer each other up. Very sensible. The Mello continues to kick in and he sees how silly his thoughts are. He’s blasted into a calm almost beyond speech.

  “Whoah.”

  “No lie.”

  “Heavy.”

  “Untold.”

  They chuckle, but only in a very mellow way.

  Much cloud gazing later, Jim says, “So what will you do?”

  “Who knows.” After a long silence: “I don’t think I can go on living this way, though. It’s too much work. I’ve been thinking about moving.” And suddenly Jim can hear pain in Tashi’s voice, he understands that the stoic mask is a mask and nothing more. Of course the man is hurt. Emotions punch their way through the fog of the Mello, and Jim regrets the anesthetizing. He feels, all of a sudden, overwhelmingly helpless. There’s nothing he can do to help, not a thing.

  “Where to?”

  “Don’t know. Far away.”

  “Oh, man.”

  They sit together in silence, and watch a whole lot of orange clouds float inland.

  63

  When Jim tracks home later that night, he is feeling about as low as he can remember feeling. He’s below music, he doesn’t even try it. Just the sounds of the freeway as he types in the program for home and tracks along, slumped back in his seat. Even in the middle of the night the lightshow is pinballing all over the basin, a clutch of silent helicopters hovering over the Marine Station like flying saucers, jets booming down onto John Wayne, the flying freeways almost at capacity.…

  Again home strikes him as an empty shell, a dirty little studio under a freeway, filled with futile paper and plastic attempts to stave off reality. Which isn’t such a bad idea. He goes to the videotapes, sees the stack of them that Virginia and he made on their bedroom systems, when they were first going out. Perversely he feels a strong desire to look at one. Virginia undressing, in the casual routine of taking off clothes, with the thoughtlessness of untying shoelaces. Standing naked before a tall complex of mirrors, brushing her hair and watching the infinity of images of herself.…

  “No!” The repugnance at his desire rises faster than the desire itself, a new feeling in Jim. If he becomes captive to her video image tonight, just hours after their last fight, how much easier will it be in the weeks and months to come? It’ll be so easy just to concentrate on the image … and he’ll be in thrall to it, having an affair with a video lady, like so many other men in America.

  Fearfully he grabs up the stack of cassettes. “I’m pulling out for good,” he shouts at the video, and laughs crazily. He pulls an eyedropper of Buzz from his bookshelf and lids drops until he’s blind. Instant hum in all his nervous system, replacing lust. Like the buzz in the telephone wires, or the freeway magnetic tracks, a sort of drunkenness of the nerves, which makes him want to get really drunk. He goes to the fridge, pops a Bud, downs it. Downs another one.

  Back to the cassettes. “I live a life of symbolic gestures, and not much more,” he tells the room. “But when it’s all you’ve got…”

  There are nine cassettes of Virginia and him, the labels penciled over, sometimes in Virginia’s hand: US, IN BED. Should he save just one? “No, no, no.” He throws them all in his daypack, goes outside.

  It’s a warm night. Overhead the freeway hums, right in phase with Jim’s nerves. He can see the sides of the cars in the fast lane zoom by, one headlight each. One of the freeway’s great concrete pylons thrusts out of the sidewalk just three houses down. The maintenance men’s ladder starts ten feet up, but the neighborhood kids have tied a nylon rope ladder to it. With some difficulty, aware of his buzz, his drunkenness, Jim gets the daypack on his back and ascends the ladder. When his head is at the level of the freeway he stops. Buzz of cars passing, lightshow of headlights strobing by, zoom zoom zoom zoom. Funny to think that only the little units extending down from the front axle, not quite touching the shiny strip of the track, are guiding the cars, and keeping them from running into each other, or over the rail above Jim’s head, down onto the houses below. Magnetism, what is it, anyway? Jim shakes his head, confused. Concentrates on the task at hand. Left arm wrapped over a step of the ladder, he frees the daypack from his right arm and twists it around to unzip it. Out comes a cassette. All the cars’ tires run over approximately the same part of the freeway; they’ve made two black bands on the freeway’s white concrete, a couple feet to left and right of the track, and almost two feet wide themselves. He’s not too far from the nearer one.

  He slides a cassette over the concrete, and it stops right in the black band. The next car to pass crunches it to smithereens. Loops of tape blow off to the side.

  “Yeah! Good shot!” Jim continues to cheer himself on as cassette after cassette skids onto the tire track of the fast lane, and is reduced to plastic fragments and stre
amers of tape.

  The last one, however, goes too far, landing between the tire marks and the guidance track. Without pausing to think about it Jim climbs onto the freeway, catching the daypack on the rail and practically pulling himself off into space. Oops. During one of the rare gaps in traffic he runs out into the fast lane, recovers the cassette, trips and staggers, puts the cassette on the tire marks, scrambles desperately back to the ladder.

  A big car crunches the cassette under its wheels.

  Carefully, awkwardly, Jim descends. Safe on the ground again, he sucks in a deep breath. “Probably should have kept just one.” He laughs. “No backsliding now, boy! You’re free whether you like it or not.” Overhead, long tangles of videotape float across the sky.

  64

  No sooner has Jim returned to his ap, which, to tell the truth, looks just as dreary and lifeless as before, than there’s a sharp knock at the door. He opens it.

  “Abe! What are you doing here?”

  Abe smiles lopsidedly.

  Stupid question. Abe’s eyes have a drawn, tired, defiant look, and Jim understands: he’s here for the company. For help. Jim can hardly believe it. Abe’s never come to Jim’s place before, except once or twice to pick him up. Given their homes it makes sense to go up Saddleback and hang out there, on the roof of OC, if hanging out is what they’re going to do.

  “I’m here to get wasted,” Abe says harshly, and laughs.

  “What, Sandy’s not home?”

  “That’s right.” Again the abrupt laugh. But then Abe’s direct gaze catches Jim’s eye, admitting that there’s more to it than that. Abe steps in, looks around. Jim sees it through Abe’s eyes.

  “Let’s go outside,” he says, “and sit on the curb. I’m sick of this place.”

  Seated on the curb, next to the fire hydrant at the corner, feet crossed in the gutter, they can look up at the freeway overhead and see the roofs of the cars in the fast lane, see the fans of light from the headlights, sweeping by. Two men sitting on a curb.