The Candy House(55)
“Hanging an uninsured Mondrian on your wall!”
There was a performative aspect to their sniping, a whiff of Hotheaded Offspring Rails Against Coolheaded Parent [2Pxixl] that made Chris doubt whether, without him and Lupa for an audience, they would even bother.
“You know,” Abuela said with a sidelong glance at Chris, “I ironed his Mohawk. For the punk rock.”
“Here we go,” his father said.
“On my ironing board. With my Aqua Net. He would have seared his head.”
“I remember,” Chris said.
“Everyone remembers,” his father huffed. “You won’t let them forget.”
“He looked like… like a monster, to scare children,” Abuela said, gazing lovingly at Chris’s father. “But I did it, why?”
“To make him happy,” Lupa finished.
They’d driven past the old Mabuhay Gardens after dinner. The Flaming Dildos had been the first of several opening bands, their set greeted with tossed trash. Chris had searched, in vain, for video footage of it (what a world that was, with so few cameras!). If he had bought into the Collective Consciousness, he doubtless could have viewed the concert from a multitude of viewpoints. But Chris recoiled from Own Your Unconscious—a reaction radically out of step with his cohort. Bix Bouton was a god in Chris’s world, but Chris secretly (very secretly) sided with the boomers who viewed Mandala’s “memorevolution” with existential horror. It was possibly the only thing he and his father agreed on.
Although the Dildos’ set was lost to Chris, threads from it managed to stretch across forty-three years to his present-day life: Scotty Hausmann, the folk hero who’d revived his father’s career a couple of years ago, had been the Flaming Dildos’ singer. Lou Kline, the late record producer, had attended the Dildos’ concert and afterward taken Chris’s father under his wing. Lou’s daughter Roxy, an unsteady creature who lived in San Francisco, occasionally joined Chris and his father for dinner. But the most staggering connection was one he’d stumbled on just recently when Miranda Kline, the anthropologist, kept floating into his mind unbidden. Digging deeper into her biography, Chris had discovered that she was briefly married to Lou Kline in the 1970s! The fact brought a chill of eerie recognition—confrontation, even—as if Miranda Kline were waving to Chris, or winking, from a distance.
* * *
Abuela tied a Mondrian-patterned apron over her dress and ladled chicken stew into Mondrian-patterned bowls. Her Mondrian merch included candleholders, vases, umbrellas, tea trays, glasses, place mats, towels, throw pillows, framed posters, coffee-table books, and a needlepoint footstool—all of which comprised, in her mind, a deviously impenetrable camouflage. “No one with a real Mondrian would ever acquire such crap,” she liked to say.
“Were you on a trip?” Gabriella called to Chris as she lounged at the dinner table waiting for him to serve her. She was eyeing the suitcase, which he’d set—unobtrusively, he hoped—inside the front door.
“Not mine,” he replied.
“Isn’t that a no-no? Carrying other people’s luggage?” She spoke with a visible quiver of pleasure.
“Not getting on a plane.”
Gabriella was heavyset, with a beautiful, brooding face. Her mother, Chris’s aunt Laura, had allegedly seethed with resentment at Chris’s father for being the treasured baby and only son, pampered and Mohawk-ironed while Laura struggled at home with teenage motherhood. Laura had since prospered, and now had a time-share in Scotland where she spent half of each summer golfing. But her resentment had decanted into Gabriella, who turned it on Chris whenever they met.
“What are you doing at work?” she asked him when they were all seated. “Making apps?”
“Not exactly.”
“Isn’t that what all Stanford grads do? Make apps?”
“You tell me.”
“I wouldn’t know. I went to Chico State.”
“What do Chico State grads do?”
“Become prison guards. Kidding, kidding,” she genuflected, for Abuela had a zero-tolerance policy toward self-pity. And anyway, Gabriella was a successful pharmacist.
“What product is your firm creating, Christopher?” their grandmother asked, regarding him with her calm, perceptive eyes.
“I’m… not totally sure,” Chris said. He’d never been able to lie, or even fib, to his abuela. “I mean, we’re an entertainment company. But what I’m mostly doing is breaking down stories into familiar parts, and then breaking down those parts into smaller parts, which I”—he couldn’t bring himself to say “algebraize”—“sort of diagram. I think the idea is…”
What was the idea? To make art—or make a way to make art—but as far as Chris knew, no product was in sight. He’d tried asking Aaron, his boss, where their work was leading, exactly, but Aaron merely replied, with his axlike finality, “DNA.”
“How do you like this work, Christopher?” Abuela asked.
“I love it,” he said fiercely.
Gabby had recused herself from their tender exchange by going to the bathroom. Now she stopped to examine the suitcase. “What’s in here, Chris?” she called. “I smell hydrochloric acid.”