I found the 118 on-ramp within the concrete pretzel, traveled west for a few miles, and got off on a brand-new exit marked COLLEGE ROAD. West Valley C.C. was a half-mile up — the only thing in sight.
Nothing at all like the campus I’d just left. This one was announced by a huge, near-empty parking lot. Beyond that, a series of one-story prefab bungalows and trailers were distributed gracelessly over a ten-acre patchwork of concrete and dirt. The landscaping was tentative, unsuccessful in places. A sprinkling of students walked on plain-wrap concrete pathways.
I got out and made my way to the nearest trailer. The midday sun cast a tinfoil glare over the Valley and I had to squint. Most of the students were walking alone. Very little conversation filtered through the heat.
After a series of false starts, I managed to locate someone who could tell me where Sociology was. Bungalows 3A through 3F.
The departmental office was in 3A. The departmental secretary was blond and thin and looked just out of high school. She seemed put-upon when I asked her where Professor Jones’s office was, but said, “Two buildings up, in Three-C.”
Dirt separated the bungalows, cracked and trenched. So hard and dry that not a single footprint showed. A far cry from the Ivy League. Chip Jones’s office was one of six in the small pink stucco building. His door was locked and the card listing his office hours was marked:
All the other offices were locked too. I went back to the secretary and asked her if Professor Jones was on campus. She consulted a schedule and said, “Oh, yeah. He’s teaching Soc One-oh-two over in Five-J.”
“When’s the class over?”
“In an hour — it’s a two-hour seminar, twelve to two.”
“Do they take a break in the middle?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned her back on me. I said, “Excuse me,” managed to get her to tell me where 5J was, and walked there.
The building was a trailer, one of three on the western edge of the campus, overlooking a shallow ravine.
Despite the heat, Chip Jones was conducting class outside, sitting on one of the few patches of grass in sight, in the partial shade of a young oak, facing ten or so students, all but two of them women. The men sat at the back; the women circled close to his knees.
I stopped a hundred feet away.
His face was half-turned away from me and his arms were moving. He had on a white polo shirt and jeans. Despite his position, he was able to inject a lot of body English into his delivery. As he moved from side to side the students’ heads followed and a lot of long female hair swayed.
I realized I had nothing to say to him — had no reason to be there — and turned to leave.
Then I heard a shout, looked over my shoulder and saw him waving.
He said something to the class, sprang to his feet, and loped toward me. I waited for him and when he got to me, he looked scared.
“I thought it was you. Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Didn’t want to alarm you. Just thought I’d drop by before heading over to your house.”
“Oh — sure.” He blew out breath. “Well, that’s a relief. I just wish you’d told me you were coming, so I could’ve scheduled some time for us to talk. As it stands, I’ve got a two-hour seminar until two — you’re welcome to sit in, but I don’t imagine you want to hear about the structure of organizations. And after that there’s a faculty meeting till three and another class.”
“Sounds like a busy day.”
He smiled. “My kind of day.” The smile vanished. “Actually, Cindy’s the one with the tough job. I can escape.”
He smoothed his beard. Today’s earring was a tiny sapphire, inflamed by the sun. His bare arms were tan and hairless and sinewy.
“Is there anything specific you wanted to talk to me about?” he said. “I can have them break for a few minutes.”
“No, not really.” I looked around at all the empty space.
“Not exactly Yale,” he said, as if reading me. “I keep telling them a few trees would help. But I like being on the cutting edge — building something from scratch. This whole area’s the high-growth region of the L.A. basin. Come back in a few years and it’ll be teeming.”
“Despite the slump?”
He frowned, tugged on his beard, and said, “Yes, I think so. The population can only go one way.” Smile. “Or at least that’s what my demographer friends tell me.”
He turned toward the students, who were staring at us, and held up a hand. “Do you know how to get to the house from here?”
“Approximately.”
“Let me tell you exactly. Just get back on the freeway — on the One-eighteen — and get off at the seventh exit. After that you can’t miss it.”
“Great. I won’t keep you,” I said.
He looked at me but seemed to be somewhere else.
“Thanks,” he said. Another backward glance. “This is what keeps me sane — gives me the illusion of freedom. I’m sure you know what I mean.”
“Absolutely.”
“Well,” he said, “I’d better be getting back. Love to my ladies.”
27
The ride to the house wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes, leaving forty-five to go before my two-thirty with Cassie.
Remembering Cindy’s odd resistance to my coming out any earlier, I decided to head over there right now. Do things on my terms, for a change.
Each exit on the 118 took me farther into the isolation of brown mountains, deforested by five years of drought. The seventh was marked Westview, and it deposited me on a gently curving road of red clay darkened by the mountain’s hulk. A few minutes later the clay turned to twin lanes of new asphalt, and red pennants on high metal poles began appearing at fifty-foot intervals. A yellow backhoe was parked on a turnoff. No other vehicles were in sight. Baked hillside and blue sky filled my eyes. The pennant poles flashed by like jail bars.
The asphalt tabled at a hundred square feet of brick, shaded by olive trees. High metal gates were rolled wide open. A big wooden sign to the left of the aperture read WESTVIEW ESTATES in red block letters. Below the legend was an artist’s rendition of a spreading pastel-hued housing development set into too-green alps.
I rolled close enough to the sign to read it. A timetable beneath the painting listed six construction phases, each with “twenty to a hundred custom estate homesites, 1/2 to 5 acres.” According to the dates, three phases should have been completed. When I looked through the gates I saw a sprinkle of rooftops, lots of brown. Chip’s comments about population growth, a few minutes ago, seemed a bit of wishful thinking.
I drove past an untended guardhouse whose windows still bore masking-tape Xs, into a completely empty parking lot fringed with yellow gazania. The exit from the lot fed to a wide, empty street named Sequoia Lane. The sidewalks were so new they looked whitewashed.
The left side of the street was an ivy-covered embankment. A half-block in, to the right, sat the first houses, a quartet of big, bright, creatively windowed structures, but unmistakably a tract.
Mock Tudor, mock hacienda, mock Regency, mock Ponderosa Ranch, all fronted by sod lawns crosscut with beds of succulents and more gazania. Tennis court tarp backed the Tudor house; peacock-blue pool water glimmered behind the open lots of the others. Signs on the doors of all four read MODEL. Business hours were posted on a small billboard on the lawn of the Regency, along with the phone number of a real estate company in Agoura. More red pennants. All four doors were closed and the windows were dark.