“What?” I said.
“Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
‘What?” I said.
“Go to sleep.”
“You’ve changed, Michael, I hate it.”
“Yeah? I haven’t. You’re just getting older. You’re just growing up. You’re the one who’s changed.”
John Ireland’s voice. It reminds me of my father.
The Morning of the Day They Leave
Lisa is cleaning Lorene’s house when Lorene makes her an offer. She shows Lisa her alarm system. She gives her space in the closet. They set up the guest room for the twins. Lorene feels exuberant doing this, letting Lisa stay in her house. She was going to be gone for a month or so, and maybe by then Lisa’s husband will have come back. Anyway, Lisa would enjoy it more than she did.
When Mina woke on her last day, she spent a minute staring at her husband. It was not even six o’clock. She couldn’t wake him. It was overly dramatic to leave him a note. Besides, she didn’t want to explain anything. She was so weary of trying to explain things. She sensed vaguely that she might regret that, and she started to walk to Lorene’s apartment.
The walk up Franklin facing the Hollywood Hills was eerie and quiet this early. There were hot, dry blasts of wind, the latesummer Santa Anas that made the city feel strange. Hot paradoxical winds — winds that made you sweat. Mina felt the sirocco blast of air, an undercurrent of desert. Perfect weather for an exit. The air felt heavy and pushy, hot, sudden northern blows that Raymond Chandler called red winds. Well, he ought to know, and it felt that way, red and hot and skewed, as if it might blow the pages of a calender back, the introduction of a flashback, an incantation to time slips. Mina stood at Hollywood and Franklin and looked back down, listening to tiny pieces of paper swirling in the street. The dawn light deflected and diffused, a fighting orange, a growing umbery red. The wind was red because you could feel the tabloid bloodrush ofthe city in it, a cracked Southern California creepiness that came from desert and sun and all its golden promise. You could feel Manson at the edges, and fires and riots combusting from within, and the funny way the city always seemed primed for retribution.
Mina walked on, regarding the mock paradise. Sure, verbena and maidenhair and palm fronds, but, hey, also a Lysol alley starlet with a venereal disease, a serial killer with a keen sense of irony, a movie actor twitching on the ground while everyone watched, and the ghoulish glee of teenagers getting stoned at the alley where Sal Mineo was stabbed, or at Marilyn’s crypt. There was no cliché that this place wearied of, nothing so shopworn and spent that it couldn’t be revived with the right recasting, the right lighting, and the right framing.
What a great city, Mina thought, and for a moment she didn’t want to leave, felt a kind of longing for it already.
Road Stop: New York
I am sitting at my mother’s kitchen table. The night before, when I arrived, my mother told me Michael had never shown up. Why does this not surprise me? We are looking at the little garden behind her building, Seventy-third Street behind us. It is one of those New York mornings, theTimesand the coffee and the toasted bagels. My mother is quiet. I feel my life as sordid and almost ridiculous. What have you been up to? she asksme, and I have nothing to say. I am thinking of our family. My father in Ojai, just trying to live down his mistakes. I imagine he is at the Krotona library, or meditating on the sunset, or cooking his food for dinner. It isn’t horrible. He seems not so bad from a distance.
“If Jack were a stranger, and I met him tomorrow, I might think he was kind of a cool guy, leaving his Hollywood life behind. I mean, dropping out so completely and just trying for some ordinary spiritual, whatever, transcendence.”
“Your brother and your father are mysteries to me,” she says.
“Michael, I thought I was coming here to save Michael. To finally make it up to him for making him a walking elegy to all my expectations. “
“I think it was always hard for you to accept him as he was, or as he is, I should say. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nothing would have turned out any differently. I tried a million times to help Michael. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Yeah, that’s what you think.”
“It’s true. Some things are just unfixable, unanswerable.”
“Well, I’m from fucking California and I want a goddamn answer.”
My mother stops sipping her coffee. Then she smiles.
“Right.”
My mother unscrews the top of a jar of jelly. She spreads some on her toast. I really like seeing this, my mother putting jelly on her toast. I feel as though I might cry, I’m just so happy watching her eat toast. I imagine David, waking alone and making his breakfast in our house. Isn’t it funny how the people so familar to you, so close to you can seem impossible to grasp? You have to imagine them as strangers sometimesjust to see them. I wish I could get far away enough from my own life to look at it like a stranger, see my own life from a distance and see it as all right. My mother is chewing and looking at me.
“What are you going to do?” she says. I shrug.
“I think I’m gonna sleep for about three days.”
Leaving
Mina stopped in Lorene’s kitchen to write David a note. She wanted to say something about how leaving was such a cliché thing, and to apologize for that. But instead she just said she was off with Lorene for a little break. Lorene stood by the door in her amber-tinted sunglasses, cell phone in one hand and car keys in the other.
“Shake a leg, doll.”
“I’m ready,” Mina said, pasting a stamp on the envelope and leaving it in Lorene’s mailbox.
In the ordinary moments of the past, in the uninterpreted, free-floating, sense-organized memories of childhood, she was inclined to look for clues. To rake over the randomness, to evaporate feelings and look for telltale facts. Why? Because she had convinced herself there was a moment in which these things were decided. What they were all too dense to notice. Where things could have been different. Or maybe he was this way all along. Now they know how to interpret him, put his oddness and dysfunction in perspective. The fragility wasalways in him. The family is absolved. OK, but if either scenario is true, how come Mina was just like him through all those years? How come they were so close they didn’t even have to whisper to each other, they just knew? How come one day it was this way with Mina and Michael, and the next day it was not? One day the mirror was there, the next day splintered in a thousand pieces? Because that’s how it seemed to her, that sudden — like a thing shattering. And she couldn’t do anything to change it.
CODA
“She’s not here, she left,” Lisa says. Michael is in the doorway of Lorene’s house. Michael nods. He smiles at Lisa for a minute. She has the door open just a crack. He isn’t as shiny as Lisa imagined Lorene’s friends might be. He looks slight and frail.
“Just like that, huh?” Michael says.
“Seemed like she was running away.” Lisa looks at Michael’s face. He smiles at her again, then looks down to where Alex and Alisa peer from behind her legs.
“What a funny thing, uh, uh. .”
“Lisa.”
“Lisa, to run away when you live by yourself.”
“Yeah,” Lisa says.
“Between you and me, Lisa, I think Lorene is, well, she’s a little nuts.” He laughs at this. “I’m Michael,” he says.