The Candy House(36)
We rode an elevator to the very top: a sun-soaked office that overlooked the low, scuffed city and gray sea twinkling like static. It was only the tenth floor, but we had never been inside a tall building. We had never flown in an airplane. The glass went all the way to the floor.
Could the window break?
Hasn’t yet.
The walls were covered with gold and silver record albums inside frames.
Can we play those?
They’re not real, they’re trophies.
You won a lot of trophies!
Everywhere we looked were pictures of our father with musicians: at concerts, in recording studios, at parties. His age varied, the surfer’s shag retracting into stringiness, but he was always wearing shorts, always in motion. That was why he wore shorts, we realized—to move freely. Standing in that office, we recognized a link between our father’s restless, incessant motion and the trophies on his walls. One had produced the others.
* * *
Rolph was the only one of our half siblings that our mother ever asked about. “That sweet boy,” she called him, with a catch in her voice that perplexed us. Was it sympathy? Guilt? We found nothing sympathetic about Rolph; we feared him. He and Charlie were full siblings but nothing alike; where Charlie was easygoing and devoted to our father, Rolph’s strident black eyebrows telegraphed his perpetual outrage. He shared our father’s love of cars and arrived at the house with a shriek of tires and a hawking up of gravel that sometimes sprayed the windows. According to Roxy, Rolph raced cars in the desert, which our father had forbidden.
Rolph rarely looked at us directly. His gaze would wander into our vicinity, then swerve away as if from something painful.
Once, as we waited outside our father’s house to go home after swimming, we heard anguished cries coming from his fleet of cars. Thinking there might be a hurt animal, we crept among the cars to look. We discovered Rolph hunched in a backseat with the windows rolled up, sobbing with such hopeless abandon that he’d fogged the glass. Astounded, we stood watching him, and then Rolph caught sight of us through the window and went still. His face looked pale and tender, like a little boy’s. Years later, after his suicide, we would return again and again to that face through the car window, his misery and surprise. We gazed at Rolph and he watched us back: three sentient life-forms observing one another as if through aquarium glass.
Then our father called us, and we ran.
* * *
Rolph’s distress was one of many mysteries whose answers our father hid from us. He didn’t want us to know that drugs were consumed in his house; that he himself had a coke habit; that Roxy had dropped out of high school and that Kiki, at sixteen, had run away with her youth-group leader; that Charlie had joined a cult in Mexico that our father had to extract her from with hired gunmen; that Rolph, his only son and favorite child, did not speak to him even in his house. Above all, he wanted us not to know that Jocelyn, the beautiful Asian woman who often sat with us at dinner, was the very person who’d brought an end to our parents’ marriage back when she was still in high school. And there were things our father may have hidden from himself, like the fact that Rolph, who was Jocelyn’s age exactly—born the same day—was in love with her, too.
Our father took us straight home after dinners at his house. We never stayed overnight. He controlled what we saw of his life, and our blindfolded vision of it seemed to bring him relief.
* * *
As high school approached, we overheard our father tell our mother that he wanted to send us to boarding school. To get them away from the madness.
There’s no madness in their lives, Lou, unless you’re supplying it. Are you?
Of course not.
I’m not sending them away to get them away from you, if that’s what you’re asking.
I want the best for them. That’s all.
If you want them to have a grown-up father, then grow up.
Talking with our mother, our father seemed furthest from the loosey-goosey famous dad he became at night in his own house after several margaritas. He spoke to her in subdued tones, and she watched him evenly with her hazel eyes that seemed to blink less than most people’s. He was always the one to look away.
Once he told us, in her presence: The only mistake your mother ever made in her life was marrying me.
That’s silly, Lou. If we hadn’t married, we wouldn’t have these two perfect creatures.
You’re right, he said. Thank God.
* * *
So we stayed in Los Angeles for high school. After ten years in the palm-tree apartment, we moved with our mother into a two-bedroom near the UCLA campus, where she was finishing the coursework for her PhD. We were all students together. When we came home after parties, she was always there, in cutoff jeans shorts, surrounded by textbooks: an orb of feverish concentration in the sprawling, frivolous city. Only when she cut off her hair did we understand that our mother had been a beauty. No more. She was a Serious Student now.
* * *
Before she met our father, our mother had had an anthropology professor at UC Berkeley named Nair Fortunata. Professor Fortunata had written a classic ethnography about his years of living among a tribe in the Brazilian rainforest in the 1960s—that tribe’s first contact with the outside world. A number of Fortunata’s students later traveled to Brazil intending to locate this tribe. All but one returned disappointed, and that one—a twenty-six-year-old named Leslie Weiss—did not return at all. When months passed without a word from her, Professor Fortunata went to Brazil in search of Leslie Weiss and disappeared, too. This occasioned State Department involvement and a private search underwritten by Weiss’s desperate family. It emerged that a man matching Fortunata’s description had staggered from the jungle into the tiny village of Albaís, too sick with fever to be saved. He carried no identification, and when locals offered to contact his family, he seemed not to understand. He was buried just outside the village. When the man’s skull was exhumed, dental records revealed that it was Fortunata’s.