Charlie and Rolph lie together under a palm tree. Charlie disdains the red Danskin one-piece she chose with her mother for this trip and decides she will borrow a pair of sharp scissors from the front desk and cut it into a bikini.
“I never want to go home,” she says sleepily.
“I miss Mom,” Rolph says. His father and Mindy are swimming. He can see the glitter of her swimsuit through the pale water.
“But if Mom could come.”
“Dad doesn’t love her anymore,” Rolph says. “She’s not crazy enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Rolph shrugs. “You think he loves Mindy?”
“No way. He’s tired of Mindy.”
“What if Mindy loves him?”
“Who cares?” Charlie says. “They all love him.”
After his swim, Lou goes in search of spears and snorkeling gear, resisting the temptation to follow Mindy back to their room, though clearly she’d like him to. She’s gone bananas in the sack since they left the tents (women can be funny about tents)—hungry for it now, pawing off Lou’s clothes at odd moments, ready to start again when he’s barely finished. He feels tenderly toward Mindy, now that the trip is winding down. She’s studying something at Berkeley, and Lou has never traveled for a woman. It’s doubtful that he’ll lay eyes on her again.
Rolph is reading in the sand when Lou arrives with the snorkeling equipment, but he puts aside The Hobbit without protest and stands. Charlie ignores them, and Lou wonders fleetingly if he should have included her. He and Rolph walk to the edge of the sea and pull on their masks and flippers, hanging their spears from belts at their sides. Rolph looks thin; he needs more exercise. He’s timid in the water. His mother is a reader and a gardener, and Lou is constantly having to fight her influence. He wishes that Rolph could live with him, but the lawyers just shake their heads whenever he mentions it.
The fish are gaudy, easy targets, nibbling at coral. Lou has speared seven by the time he realizes Rolph hasn’t killed a single one.
“What’s the problem, Son?” he asks, when they surface.
“I just like watching them,” Rolph says.
They’ve drifted toward a spit of rocks extending into the sea. Carefully they climb from the water. Tide pools throng with starfish and urchins and sea cucumbers; Rolph crouches, poring over them. Lou’s fish hang from a netted bag at his waist. From the beach, Mindy is watching them through Fiona’s binoculars. She waves, and Lou and Rolph wave back.
“Dad,” Rolph asks, lifting a tiny green crab from a tide pool, “what do you think about Mindy?”
“Mindy’s great. Why?”
The crab splays its little claws; Lou notes with approval that his son knows how to hold it safely. Rolph squints up at him. “You know. Is she the right amount of crazy.”
Lou gives a hoot of laughter. He’d forgotten the earlier conversation, but Rolph forgets nothing—a quality that delights his father. “She’s crazy enough. But crazy isn’t everything.”
“I think she’s rude,” Rolph says.
“Rude to you?”
“No. To Albert.”
Lou turns to his son, cocking his head. “Albert?”
Rolph releases the crab and begins to tell the story. He remembers each thing—the porch, the stairs, “Number three”—realizing as he speaks how much he’s wanted to tell his father this, as punishment to Mindy. His father listens keenly, without interrupting. But as Rolph goes on he senses the story landing heavily, in a way he doesn’t understand.
When he finishes talking, his father takes a long breath and lets it out. He looks back at the beach. It’s nearly sunset, and people are shaking fine white sand from their towels and packing up for the day. The hotel has a disco, and the group plans to go dancing there after dinner.
“When exactly did this happen?” Lou asks.
“The same day as the lions—that night.” Rolph waits a moment, then asks, “Why do you think she was rude like that?”
“Women are cunts,” his father says. “That’s why.”
Rolph gapes at him. His father is angry, a muscle jumping in his jaw, and without warning Rolph is angry too: assailed by a deep, sickening rage that stirs in him very occasionally—when he and Charlie come back from a riotous weekend around their father’s pool, rock stars jamming on the roof, guacamole and big pots of chili, to find their mother alone in her bungalow, drinking peppermint tea. Rage at this man who casts everyone aside.
“They are not—” He can’t make himself repeat the word.
“They are,” Lou says tightly. “Pretty soon you’ll know it for sure.”
Rolph turns away from his father. There is nowhere to go, so he jumps into the sea and begins slowly paddling back toward shore. The sun is low, the water choppy and full of shadows. Rolph imagines sharks just under his feet, but he doesn’t turn or look back. He keeps swimming toward that white sand, knowing instinctively that his struggle to stay afloat is the most exquisite torture he can concoct for his father—also that, if he sinks, Lou will jump in instantly and save him.
That night, Rolph and Charlie are allowed to have wine at dinner. Rolph dislikes the sour taste, but enjoys the swimmy blur it makes of his surroundings: the giant beaklike flowers all over the dining room; his father’s speared fish cooked by the chef with olives and tomatoes; Mindy in a shimmery green dress. His father’s arm is around her. He isn’t angry anymore, so neither is Rolph.
Lou has spent the past hour in bed, fucking Mindy senseless. Now he keeps one hand on her slim thigh, reaching under her hem, waiting for that cloudy look she gets. Lou is a man who cannot tolerate defeat—can’t perceive it as anything but a spur to his own inevitable victory. He has to win. He doesn’t give a shit about Albert—Albert is invisible, Albert is nothing (in fact, Albert has left the group and returned to his Mombasa apartment). What matters now is that Mindy understand this.
He refills Mildred’s and Fiona’s wineglasses until their cheeks are patchy and flushed. “You still haven’t taken me bird-watching,” he chides them. “I keep asking, but it never happens.”
“We could go tomorrow,” Mildred says. “There are some coastal birds we’re hoping to see.”
“Is that a promise?”
“A solemn promise.”
“Come on,” Charlie whispers to Rolph. “Let’s go outside.”
They slip from the crowded dining room and skitter onto the silvery beach. The palm trees make a slapping, rainy sound, but the air is dry.
“It’s like Hawaii,” Rolph says, wanting it to be true. The ingredients are there: the dark, the beach, his sister. But it doesn’t feel the same.
“Without the rain,” Charlie says.
“Without Mom,” Rolph says.
“I think he’s going to marry Mindy,” Charlie says.
“No way! You said he didn’t love her.”
“So? He can still marry her.”
They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow. The ghost sea tumbles against it.
“She’s not so bad,” Charlie says.
“I don’t like her. And why are you the world’s expert?”
Charlie shrugs. “I know Dad.”
Charlie doesn’t know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she’ll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she’ll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking.
But Charlie does know her father. He’ll marry Mindy because that’s what winning means, and because Mindy’s eagerness to conclude this odd episode and return to her studies will last until precisely the moment she opens the door to her Berkeley apartment and walks into the smell of simmering lentils: one of the cheap stews she and her roommates survive
on. She’ll collapse on a swaybacked couch they found on the sidewalk and unpack her many books, realizing that in weeks of lugging them through Africa, she’s read virtually nothing. And when the phone rings her heart will flip.
Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.
But we’re getting off the subject.
Rolph and Charlie are galloping up the beach, drawn by the pulse of light and music from the open-air disco. They run barefoot into the crowd, trailing powdery sand onto a translucent dance floor overlaid on lozenges of flashing color. The shuddering bass line seems to interfere with Rolph’s heartbeat.
“C’mon,” Charlie says. “Let’s dance.”
She begins to undulate in front of him—the way the new Charlie is planning to dance when she gets home. But Rolph is embarrassed; he can’t dance that way. The rest of the group surrounds them; chubby Louise, one year older than he, is dancing with Dean, the actor. Ramsey flings his arms around one of the Phoenix Faction moms. Lou and Mindy dance close together, their whole bodies touching, but Mindy is thinking of Albert, as she will periodically after marrying Lou and having two daughters, his fifth and sixth children, in quick succession, as if sprinting against the inevitable drift of his attention. On paper he’ll be penniless, and Mindy will end up working as a travel agent to support her little girls. For a time her life will be joyless; the girls will seem to cry too much, and she’ll think longingly of this trip to Africa as the last happy moment of her life, when she still had a choice, when she was free and unencumbered. She’ll dream senselessly, futilely, of Albert, wondering what he might be doing at particular times, how her life would have turned out if she’d run away with him as he’d suggested, half joking, when she visited him in room number three. Later, of course, she’ll recognize “Albert” as nothing more than a focus of regret for her own immaturity and disastrous choices. When both her children are in high school, she’ll finally resume her studies, complete her Ph.D. at UCLA, and begin an academic career at forty-five, spending long periods of the next thirty years doing social structures fieldwork in the Brazilian rain forest. Her youngest daughter will go to work for Lou, become his protégée, and inherit his business.
“Look,” Charlie tells Rolph, over the music. “The bird-watchers are watching us.”
Mildred and Fiona are sitting on chairs beside the dance floor, waving at Rolph and Charlie in their long print dresses. It’s the first time the children have seen them without binoculars.
“I guess they’re too old to dance,” Rolph says.
“Or maybe we remind them of birds,” Charlie says.
“Or maybe when there are no birds, they watch people,” Rolph says.
“Come on, Rolphus,” Charlie says. “Dance with me.”
She takes hold of his hands. As they move together, Rolph feels his self-consciousness miraculously fade, as if he is growing up right there on the dance floor, becoming a boy who dances with girls like his sister. Charlie feels it, too. In fact, this particular memory is one she’ll return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after Rolph has shot himself in the head in their father’s house at twenty-eight: her brother as a boy, hair slicked flat, eyes sparkling, shyly learning to dance. But the woman who remembers won’t be Charlie; after Rolph dies, she’ll revert to her real name—Charlene—unlatching herself forever from the girl who danced with her brother in Africa. Charlene will cut her hair short and go to law school. When she gives birth to a son she’ll want to name him Rolph, but her parents will still be too shattered. So she’ll call him that privately, just in her mind, and years later, she’ll stand with her mother among a crowd of cheering parents beside a field, watching him play, a dreamy look on his face as he glances at the sky.
“Charlie!” Rolph says. “Guess what I just figured out.”
Charlie leans toward her brother, who is grinning with his news. He cups both hands into her hair to be heard above the thudding beat. His warm, sweet breath fills her ear.
“I don’t think those ladies were ever watching birds,” Rolph says.
5
You (Plural)
It’s all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties?
But it’s nothing like that. Twenty years have passed.
He’s in the bedroom, in a hospital bed, tubes up his nose. The second stroke really knocked him out—the first one wasn’t so bad, just one of his legs was a little shaky. That’s what Bennie told me on the phone. Bennie from high school, our old friend. Lou’s protégé. He tracked me down at my mother’s, even though she left San Francisco years ago and followed me to LA. Bennie the organizer, rounding up people from the old days to say good-bye to Lou. It seems you can find almost anyone on a computer. He found Rhea all the way in Seattle, with a different last name.
Of our old gang, only Scotty has disappeared. No computer can find him.
Rhea and I stand by Lou’s bed, unsure what to do. We know him from a time when there was no such thing as normal people dying.
There were clues, hints about some bad alternative to being alive (we remembered them together over coffee, Rhea and I, before coming to see him—staring at each other’s new faces across the plastic table, our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood). There was Scotty’s mom, of course, who died from pills when we were still in high school, but she wasn’t normal. My father, from AIDS, but I hardly saw him by then. Anyway, those were catastrophes. Not like this: prescriptions by the bed, a leaden smell of medicine and vacuumed carpet. It reminds me of being in the hospital. Not the smell, exactly (the hospital doesn’t have carpets), but the dead air, the feeling of being far away from everything.
We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?
Instead I say, “Hi Lou,” and at the very same time, Rhea says, “Wow, everything is just the same!” and we both laugh.
Lou smiles, and the shape of that smile, even with the yellow shocked teeth inside it, is familiar, a warm finger poking at my gut. His smile, coming open in this strange place.
“You girls. Still look gorgeous,” he gasps.
He’s lying. I’m forty-three and so is Rhea, married with three children in Seattle. I can’t get over that: three. I’m back at my mother’s again, trying to finish my B.A. at UCLA Extension after some long, confusing detours. “Your desultory twenties,” my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted much longer. I’m praying it’s over. Some mornings, the sun looks wrong outside my window. I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: It’s finished. Everything went past, without me. Those days I know not to close my eyes for too long, or the fun will really start.
“Oh Lou, we’re two old bags—admit it,” Rhea says, swatting at his frail shoulder.
She shows him the pictures of her kids, holding them close to his face.
“She’s cute,” he says about the oldest, Nadine, who is sixteen. I think he winks, or maybe it’s his eye twitching.
“Cut it out, you,” Rhea says.
I don’t say anything. I feel it—the finger—again. In my stomach.
“What about your kids?” Rhea asks Lou. “You see them much???
?
“Some,” he says, in his strangled new voice.
He had six, from three marriages he bored through and then kicked away. Rolph, the second oldest, was his favorite. Rolph lived here, in this house, a gentle boy with blue eyes that broke a little whenever he stared down his father. Rolph and I were the same age, exactly. Same birthday, same year. I used to imagine us, tiny babies in different hospitals, crying at the same time. We stood naked once, side by side in a full-length mirror, trying to see if being born the same day had left a clue on us. Some mark we could find.
By the end, Rolph wouldn’t speak to me, would walk out of a room when I came in it.
Lou’s big bed with the crushed purple spread is gone—thank God. The TV is new, flat and long, and its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look smudged. A guy comes in dressed in black, a diamond in his ear, and he fiddles with Lou’s tubes and takes his blood pressure. From under the covers, tubes twirl from other parts of Lou into clear plastic bags I try not to look at.
A dog barks. Lou’s eyes are shut, and he snores. The stylish nurse-butler checks his wristwatch and leaves.
So this is it—what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty. I can’t help it, I start to cry. Rhea puts her arms around me. Even after all the years, she doesn’t hesitate. Her skin hangs loose—freckled skin ages prematurely, Lou told me once, and Rhea is all freckles. “Our friend Rhea,” he said, “she’s doomed.”
“You have three children,” I sob into her hair.
“Shhh.”
“What do I have?”
Kids I remember from high school are making movies, making computers. Making movies on computers. A revolution, I keep hearing people say. I’m trying to learn Spanish. At night, my mother tests me with flash cards.
Three children. The oldest, Nadine, is almost my age when I met Lou. Seventeen, hitchhiking. He was driving a red Mercedes. In 1979, that could be the beginning of an exciting story, a story where anything might happen. Now it’s a punch line. “It was all for no reason,” I say.