The Candy House(21)
“Absolutely,” I say, lunging for some way to pass the time. “We can take a look now, before dinner, if you don’t mind a walk.”
MILES
We left Sasha chopping vegetables in the kitchen. She looked the same—willowy figure, eyes narrowed against the sun, red hair gone pale with gray. But I was uncomfortable around her, and I sensed that she felt the same. My journey to visit Sasha, to understand Sasha, had been the focus of weeks of anticipation, but the logic for my visit seemed to evaporate the second I got off the plane. Why come all this way to see a cousin I’d never really known or liked?
In what she clearly meant to be a happy surprise, Sasha told me that Beatrice, my half sister from my father’s second marriage, would be coming to dinner that night. Beatrice had graduated from UCLA the year before and become close to Sasha’s family in her time there. But the prospect of seeing Beatrice filled me with shame. I hardly knew my half sister. And what could she know of me beyond my spectacular failure?
Once Drew and I left the house, I began to settle down. The sun was low, the light rosy, the scrubby flora a parched, iridescent silver. The emptiness of the desert felt biblical, as if nothing had ever happened there—as if all of history were yet to come. To my relief, Drew seemed content to walk in silence. Maybe we shared an impatience with small talk, being a heart surgeon and a drug counselor. The body and its needs: the thing itself. Beyond the tragedy of Drew’s college years, I knew little about him, but the not-knowing was comfortable. I found that I wanted to know him.
My first thought, when we happened on a flailing assemblage of colored lawn chairs, was that someone had dumped a pile of trash in the desert. Then I got it. “Is that a… sculpture?”
Drew laughed. “Part of one. They connect over a large area.”
“And it’s… all plastic?”
“Yep. Refuse from our whole county.”
“Sasha… attaches it together?”
“She designs a lot of it,” Drew said with evident pride. “But she and the other fabricators are a co-op; when collectors or museums acquire the bricks and photographs, everyone divides the proceeds.”
We followed a tributary of bright blue pipes that seemed a lurid blot upon the landscape. Eager to conceal my reaction, I asked, “How did she start?”
“Well, she’s always liked collecting things,” Drew said, and then, as if overhearing my caustic internal reply—Oh yeah. She collected a few things from me—he said, “I’m guessing you know what I mean.” I nodded, chastised.
“When the kids were little, she made sculptures out of their old toys,” he said. “Also collages out of paper artifacts: receipts, ticket stubs, to-do lists. And it just sort of evolved from there.”
Acid commentary bubbled up in me as we followed the trail of trash:
Recycling: how original!
The only thing more beautiful than these “sculptures” would be the desert without them.
We reached a section of plastic bags: bags inside bags inside bags inside bags, tens of thousands of crinkled plastic membranes crammed inside huge cracked plexiglass boxes that resembled gargantuan ice cubes.
“It all gets melted?” I asked.
“Everything. Monitors gauge the breakdown of the plastics with surface swabs to make sure they don’t leach.”
Hey, I have an idea: How about recycling this crap WITHOUT spreading it all over the desert in the first place?
Is there a direction we can walk where I DON’T have to look at this stuff?
The balloons floated overhead like silent sentinels. I had a guilty fear they were reading my thoughts.
You’re sure they’re not up there trying to ESCAPE from the art?
But I kept my mouth shut.
DREW
By the time we get back to the house, I’m having an uneasy feeling about Miles. I have to keep slowing my pace not to leave him behind, and he’s still breathing hard: troubling in a guy who was once such an athlete. I can’t tell whether he hates the art or doesn’t know what to say, and it irks me to have to wonder. All of which awakens a Pavlovian wish to go to my clinic, followed by the knowledge that I can’t—that my patient is right here, panting beside me after a two-mile walk. But I don’t know what’s wrong with him, or how to fix it.
At dinner he hangs back, watching the rest of us laugh around the firepit. I’d looked forward to showing off Lincoln—graduated early from Stanford and working nearby in tech—and Alison, who everyone loves, a junior at UCLA. But Miles’s awkward solitude makes me feel petty for having craved these triumphs. He hardly interacts with Beatrice, his half sister, and I wonder if it’s shyness—whether Sasha and I should be asking him more about what he’s doing. But Miles’s history makes those questions feel loaded, or patronizing, and anyway, we’re all in our fifties—do people even ask what we’re “doing” anymore? Hasn’t that already been decided?
The young people drift indoors, and the topic turns to a group of art collectors visiting tomorrow, from Virginia. They’re what I call the hardy rich—the types who climb Kilimanjaro, occasionally even Everest. They’ll want to do the predawn balloon launch, no question. Afterward, they’ll walk the sculptures with Sasha and decide how many pieces they want to buy.