My Education (44 page)

I had arrived in the late afternoon, dinnertime where I came from, and the air was so still I could hear the sheep, dotted over a pasture uphill from the house, emitting their bland affirmations; apart from that only the wind.

“Joachim went into Willits with friends,” she said, as if she'd sensed my inventory of the farm's living things. “He'll be back around seven for dinner. He's hoping you'll stay. He almost canceled his plans when he heard you'd be coming. He doesn't meet many people out here so he's named you the Grand Visitation.”

“Who does he think that I am?”

“An ‘old friend.' But he's probably guessed we were lovers. He's canny that way.”

“He's seen you in other relationships.”

“Sure. None that stuck. Yours has stuck,” she said, after a moment, and it was strangely so natural, as she observed this, to kiss her again, and more roughly, some urgency creeping back in with returning acquaintance. “Can I give you a piece of advice,” she said.

“That would be very ironic, in this situation, your giving advice.”

“Be with me for the time that you're here. For the next couple hours, or a night. I won't mess up your life. I promise, Regina. I'm a lonely old woman who sleeps with two dogs. I won't do that to you.”

“You
won't do it.”

“You won't do it either,” she said. And so I passed through the screen and wood doors of her house, and climbed her stairs just behind her, the fingers of my left hand loosely hooked into the fingers of her right, our connection the feather-light kind children make when they realize control over adults can sometimes be achieved by mere touch, that they don't need to grip the whole thick adult hand in their little inadequate fist. The wooden treads of her staircase were as worn as the boards of some shack by the sea, the grain standing out in hard ridges I wished I could feel through the soles of my shoes. And Martha rose steadily two steps above me, so that I imagined the staircase removed, and her floating ahead at that slight elevation, like some supernatural guide. I faced the small of her back and took in the elaborate powerful scent, the faint blue-gray dusting of mildew baked dry by departed sunshine rising out of her jeans, and the moist confined hot pungency of her body, of collapsed low-tide sea vegetables, and peat moss, and her slick and metallic tartness I forever connected with lemon curd licked off a spoon.

It was not a long staircase at all, in fact must have been short, as the ceilings were low, but it seemed not just long but enormous, dilated in every direction.

She slept in a room full of ancient, hard-used furniture that had proved itself up to this point by not falling apart, and each piece seemed to feel entitled to provide commentary, so that as we lay on her bed, it set up a resonant hum from the depths of its springs, while the side table scraped on the bed frame, and the floorboards beneath us, though we'd hardly begun, popped and moaned.

She was devilishly sly in her virginal caution, for she let me, or required me, to strip her, without lifting a finger to help, and I did, in almost threatening silence, never taking my eyes from her face. In return her eyes never left mine, studying it with such peculiar absorption I almost thought all the years of my life she had missed must be on display there, like a silent movie, so that by the time we were finished, and her hardy old furnishings probably really done for, she would have come to the end of the movie as well, and would know the whole story far better than I could have told her.

Her body had changed. I thought of the tide going out of a marsh, that slow removal of repletion, and the tender exposure, so that beneath my fingers and tongue her skin gave slightly more than it had in the past, for the slightest moment longer held my mark—and so that I uncovered her that much more quickly, with a mercilessness that stole the human from her voice and the grace from her limbs, so a deafening animal groan tore from her and her drenched pubis, bucking at me, split my lip on my teeth.

“No permanent damage,” she afterward said, repeating her earlier promise while kissing the blood from my wound.

•   •   •

We slept and woke up in near darkness. When I followed her back down the stairs there in the kitchen sat Joachim, a disembodied white face in the glow from his laptop computer. “Turn a light on,” said Martha, proceeding to do it herself. I'd thought the photographs I'd seen of him would spare me any shock, but they might have increased it by misrepresenting his scale. Even crumpled as he was into a chair I could see he was taller than Martha. He was all legs and arms and the pallid and delicate face, and in his black jeans and a giant black jacket of thin shiny stuff, like a raincoat, which he'd pulled past his folded-up knees to midshin, he looked like an upside-down bat in repose. He had dyed his hair black and deformed Martha's mouth, which he wore slightly wider and fuller, with a thin silver ring. The sight of him filled me with tender amazement that the mold for the boys I'd pursued as a teenager still was in use, and I thought I should leave Martha's house before my numerous sins multiplied even more.

“The Grand Visitation!” he cried, seeing me, and with a struggle found one of his hands and extended it. “Thank you for reading my blog. You're my most far-flung reader I know of apart from my dad.”

“Stand
up
when you're shaking hands,” Martha said, lightly slapping his shoulder.

“Sorry, I've been raised on a farm and I'm very uncouth. So you live in New York? We lived there until evildoers assaulted our freedoms. Now we live here. Lots of freedoms.”

“How was Willits?” Martha asked him as she handed me a beer. “Oops!” she said, smiling blindingly at me and taking it back.

“Oh, it was fabulous, Mommy. We watched the traffic light change. It has three different colors: a bright green, a sort of dull orangey yellow, and a really nice red.”

“Joachim hasn't forgiven me for moving us out of New York. Even though he can barely remember it.”

“Actually, I remember it perfectly.”

“Actually, you remember everything perfectly.”

“Do you remember me?” I said. “I met you when you were a baby. I even babysat you a few times.” If it were possible he made himself even more handsome by blushing.

“I guess childhood amnesia is real,” he said. “Tell me what I was like.”

“You were very meditative.”

“Oh, it's so nice how you said that! You mean I just sat there and drooled.” Delighted, he made a brief hailstorm of noise on his keyboard.

“Are you blogging right now?”

“Just trying to catch up a little. Sorry, that's rude,” and the tide of his blush rolled back in.

“It is rude,” Martha said from the kitchen. “Please go do your chores.”

“I don't mind,” I said, “I'd just rather, if you were thinking of mentioning me—”

“The Grand Visitation. You'd rather I didn't? Okay. Of course.” I could sense disappointment, and wondered what he would have said. “The glare of the Media Spotlight has been very stressful for Mom,” he agreed.

“Our hired girl reads it,” said Martha.

“You have a hired girl?”

“Two, actually.”

“A veritable harem. What services do they perform?”

“Joachim,
do
your
chores
,” she repeated, and this time he snapped shut the laptop and smilingly sprang from the room.

•   •   •

I had told Dutra, when I called from New York after booking my flight, that I was coming to the Bay Area for a couple of days to do some sort of “research.” It was wonderful, leading a life of which any amount could be labeled “research.” Having known me as long as he had Dutra didn't inquire what the research involved. My sincere research was generally fruitless, and most things that bore fruit were only labeled as research long after the fact, so that what I told him did not feel permanently dishonest. In any case, it only needed to spare him the offensive idea that I was worried about him, which, in any form, he was poised on the ramparts to soundly defeat. “You're not flying out here to give back the check? Because if you are you should save yourself money and time. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Ginny.”

“Do you even know what that means? It means don't look to see if the horse has bad teeth.”

“That's fine. Don't look at my teeth.”

Earlier in the same conversation I'd already thanked him at length for the money, having to talk through and finally scold his impatience with gratitude: “Matthew and I were really touched and overwhelmed—”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

“Would you shut up and let me say thank you?”

“You're welcome! I'm not fishing for gratitude!”

“You still have to accept it, for fuck's sake!” I'd cried. Now, brushing gingerly again on the subject, I said, “I'd still like to talk about the check when I see you, but don't worry, I'm not planning to stuff it back into your pocket,” and I silently thanked Matthew for his astuteness.

“There's nothing to discuss, it's just money. So when'll you be here?”

“I could see you on Sunday.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I don't know, just some stupid hotel—I was thinking I'd come see your place. It's about an hour, right?”

“Nothing to see here. I'll drive up and meet you.”

“Then I won't see the Buddha,” I essayed.

“It's a concrete fucking Buddha from a garden store. I'll come up and we'll go to Ishida. It's the most unbelievable sushi. Once you eat there everything in New York'll taste rotten.”

“That sounds great, but can't I come and see your place?”

“That's such a bore, Ginny. There's nothing to eat here.”

“Then why are you living there?”

“For the peace.”

“So. I like peace.”

“I'll meet you at Ishida on Sunday at seven. Eighteenth and Mission. Your hotel concierge can tell you how to get there.”

“Dutra, are you really refusing to let me come to your place?”

“I'm not refusing, it's just there's no point. You've seen places I've lived. You've lived in them. It's exactly the same, except it's in California, and there's a cheap Buddha next to the steps.”

“Are you living with someone?”

“Are you flying out here to check up on me?” The temperature dropped very slightly. Either I responded with too much haste, or too much hesitation.

“Yeah,” I said scornfully, “that's what I'm spending your money on, spying on you.”

“Well, Virginia, that's a lousy investment, because there ain't nothing here to find out. I'm leading an extremely quiet life.”

“Doing what?”

“Doing what? Doing nothing. Relaxing for once.”

“You've never relaxed for one minute. Are you working?”

“Why the fuck would I work?”

“Volunteering or something?”

“Jesus, Ginny.”

“Dutra, you used to fly to the third world in your spare time and operate on poor people who'd otherwise die.”

“Exactly! So didn't I earn me a fucking vacation?” he shouted.

Through the phone I could hear him pacing, pacing, like he might carve a trench in the floor. A door slapping its frame and the aural expansion of insects and wind, the door slapping again and the room closing in. He had never sat still in his life. “Okay, okay, Dutra,” I said, my heart clubbing my ribs. “Save your breath and you can yell at me in person.” I wondered what image he'd held in his mind, fleeing west. Maybe his own Eastern medicine institute, bearing his name carved above the front door. Maybe a dazzling second career in competitive surfing. Regardless of what he had thought, it had just been a pretext. He had only been running as far as he could. I tried to imagine what Dutra in idleness looked like. Not peace but despair. Unlike Alicia I couldn't believe he would ever try harming himself. He too much hated waste, which included the waste of himself. But when we got off the phone I'd felt physical panic, as if it had bled through the wire. I had actually wanted to call the La Honda police.

•   •   •

It turned out there was plenty of work on a sheep farm, even on such a miniature, amateur, half-baked operation as Martha was running, to use Martha's words. The next morning when I came down at eight, she'd already been out of the house for three hours. “A farmer's work is never done,” Joachim assured me, folded up in his chair at the table in front of the sodden remains of some cold cereal and his open laptop. “It's just neglected at times so the farmer can eat, sleep, and check his Facebook.”

“Is that what you're doing?” I asked, pouring the last of the coffee. Joachim rose hunchbacked out of his chair, reached the empty pot from me, replaced the spent filter and grounds, filled the pot with fresh water, slotted and poured all ingredients into their places, and pressed the red button for “Brew,” all the while never taking his eyes off his screen.

“Must keep the fresh java flowing all day for the Boss,” he explained, climbing back in his chair. “To answer you, Yes, I am giving The Facebook a quick morning tend. It's like anything else on a farm. If you don't tend it first thing in the morning it starts making this loud MOOing noise, or it kicks in a fence, or it sprouts all these weeds. So much work!”

“Can I see?”

He shoved aside, making room at the table. “Dare I ask if you're on the FB?”

“I am not. I'm an old lady, set in my ways. I know nothing of your Brave New World.”

“Pshaw! You've read my blog, so I know that's not true. And much older ladies than you are on Facebook. Oh, ugh! That came out really bad. You're not old at all.” Blushing furiously, he clicked open a window. “Let's see some of my friends. Here's my not-really-grandma. Oh, look at her! She's been posting a storm.” He leaned in, his face lit with pleasure, and I leaned in beside him. Onscreen, an appealingly overjoyed toad was embraced from all sides by a many-aged crowd of her obvious offspring.
Great-grand-baby Livia's High School Graduation!!!!!
exulted the caption. She hadn't aged a day nor faded a shade, and my amazement took the form of a Magnavox ad:
My puffy Nikes are brand-new pure white, my velveteen sweat suit with hoodie is vibrant fuchsia, my hair is the orange of an overripe pumpkin, and my eyelids, to the overplucked brows, are deep-end-of-the-swimming-pool aquamarine! If you're not seeing these colors, you're not seeing Lucia on Facebook in 2007
.