The Candy House(44)
As I watched all of this through my father’s eyes, I found myself asking a question he was likely too stoned or disoriented to ask for himself: Why? Why are Tor and Bari—and Quinn, for that matter—giving the red-carpet treatment to three squares who are entirely on the consuming end of the business? Well, how many reasons can there be? Money or sex: Pick your poison! For Quinn, it’s sex, which he’s had before with men at A-Frame (including Tor once) and which he’s hoping he’ll have tonight with Ben Hobart, based on nothing more than a hunch. For Tor, it’s money. He’s run through most of his inheritance building this place and planting ten acres of marijuana; he could use an investor or two. But there’s a deeper reason: Tor has thrown himself into creating an alternate world, but hardly anyone has seen it. As a person who feels most alive in the act of awakening others, he longs to witness his vision ablaze in new eyes.
Toward the end of the meal, the sun drops behind the mountains, leaving the redwoods silhouetted like iron cutouts through the windows. As if at a signal, the younger revelers leave the table and begin pulling instruments from the nook where Tor and Bari stow them: bongos and castanets, shakers and recorders and ukuleles, plenty of options for those who can’t carry a tune. The formerly naked girl appears with a clarinet that must be her own. Several people have guitars, and Tor carries a flute. They begin to leave the house, walking in twos and threes along a path that leads uphill through the redwoods. Lou and his friends are swept along into the cool, fragrant woods. Quinn dares to sling an arm around Ben Hobart’s shoulders, causing a rogue flash of electricity to judder down Ben’s spine. He glances at Quinn, deeply startled, and doesn’t move away.
Tim Breezely trudges along in the rear. He’d like a drink. Smoking grass has drained his vigor, and added to the weight of his invisible valises is that of a mandolin someone handed him to carry. He’s last to reach the hilltop. When he does, the redwoods give way to cleared land and it’s sunny again, final rays browsing among the serrated leaves of a waist-high marijuana crop. Tim Breezely’s mood lifts in this openness and light. The air has a dry, tart snap. A circle has already been cleared for bonfires on cold nights, and the group assembles there as if by habit, each putting down their instruments to take the hands of those adjacent before they sit. Emboldened by his earlier success, Quinn seizes Ben Hobart’s hand, eliciting jolts of sensation in Ben that approach the orgasms he has with his wife. Lou happens, just happens, to find himself beside the formerly naked clarinetist, but his legs won’t really cross; he hasn’t sat “Indian-style” since boyhood.
Once seated, they close their eyes as if in meditation. I’ve witnessed this silent period from every available consciousness in the collective, and I have glints of what ran through each mind as they sat together in the dregs of sunlight: First Communion on a rainy morning; scooping black goldfish from a pond; a ringing in his ears; the sensation of landing a backflip… But my problem is the same one had by everyone who gathers information: What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it?
Not every story needs to be told.
Tor breaks the silence with the first and only sustained utterance his guests will hear from him today. In a thin voice, he asks them to feel the presence of a higher power in the food they’ve eaten, in the land beneath them and the sky above; to feel the uniqueness of this moment of the twentieth century—to forget, briefly, the scourge of wars and apocalyptic weaponry in favor of this beauty, this peace. “Feel it, my friends,” Tor says, “and be grateful for our blessed convergence.”
A vibration seems to roll up from inside the warm earth. The sun slips behind the mountain with a click of cold, an intimation of the Pacific Ocean snarling at cliffs just a few miles west. Tim Breezely finds that his eyes are wet. He wipes them discreetly as the others begin to play their instruments, and then he gives the mandolin a tentative strum. A guitarist with a fledgling beard leads the group, along with the clarinetist, through “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” It’s a song these two know from their church growing up. They’re an older sister and younger brother, like Rolph and me.
The array of instruments and harmonizing voices has a rousing effect. Bari floats to her feet and begins to dance. The others do the same, still playing their instruments. Quinn and Ben Hobart dance together, hands vehemently clasped; Tim Breezely dances with his mandolin. All of them move and sway, together and apart, in the fading light.
Lou and Tor alone remain seated. For Lou, my father, the music and dancing provoke a riot of alarmed awareness, as if he were remembering a flame left on, a door left open, a car left running beside a cliff. With a prescience that will distinguish him to the end of his life, Lou understands that the change he’s been awaiting is now upon him. He has reached its source, can feel it in the soles of his feet. But he knows he’s too old to partake. He’s thirty-one, an old man! At the surprise thirtieth party he threw for Christine a few months back, a friend gave her a cane painted with polka dots! But Lou Kline won’t tolerate being left behind. He must catapult himself into a producer’s role, like Tor—who’s older than he is, for Christ’s sake! Not by growing grass; agriculture is too redolent of the Iowa terrain he left behind. But the music, there he can do something. He remembers the night in his cul-de-sac when everyone danced by the lake. Different dancing, different sound; the Yardbirds and their ilk have nothing to do with the life Lou Kline planned for himself, the one he’s living now. They belong to the life he’ll live next. He watches the brother-and-sister musicians and imagines them together on a stage. He thinks: I can put them there. And he does. We all know their music today.