Blue Nights Part 2

No one at the TopangaLas Virgenes Fire District was talking about what most people see when they hear the words "brush fire," a few traces of smoke and an occasional lick of flame: at the TopangaLas Virgenes Fire District they were talking about fires that burned on twenty-mile fronts and spotted ahead twelve-foot flames as they moved.

This was not forgiving territory: consider finding the driveway.

Also consider "The World" itself, its eccentric strip of construction paper and careful printing obscuring one side of the mimeographed notice from the TopangaLas Virgenes Fire District. Since the choices made by the careful printer may or may not have meaning, I give you the text of "The World" with her s.p.a.cing, her single misspelling: THE.

WORLD.

The world Has nothing But morning And night It has no Day or lunch So this world Is poor and desertid.

This is some Kind of an Island with Only three Houses on it In these Families are 2,1,2, people In each house So 2,1,2 make Only 5 people On this Island.

In point of fact the beach on which we lived, our personal "some Kind of an Island," did have "Only three Houses on it," or, more correctly, it had only three houses that were occupied year-round. One of these three houses was owned by d.i.c.k Moore, a cinematographer who, when he was not on a location, lived there with his two daughters, Marina and t.i.ta. It was t.i.ta Moore who started the club with Quintana that entailed posting "Mom's Sayings" in our garage. t.i.ta and Quintana also had an entrepreneurial enterprise, "the soap factory," the business mission of which was to melt down and reshape all remaining bars of the gardenia-scented I. Magnin soap I used to order by the box and sell the result to pa.s.sers-by on the beach. Since both ends of this beach were submerged by the tide, no more than two or three pa.s.sers-by would actually materialize during the soap factory's operating hours, enabling me to buy back my own I. Magnin soap, reconfigured from pristine ivory ovals into gray blobs. I have no memory of the other "Families" in these houses, but in our own I would have said that there were not "2, 1, 2, people" but "3 people."

Possibly Quintana saw our personal "some Kind of an Island" differently.

Possibly she had reason to.

Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I'm working.

Once when we were living in the beach house we came home to find that she had placed a call to what was known familiarly on our stretch of the coast as "Camarillo." Camarillo was at that time a state psychiatric facility twenty-some miles north of us in Ventura County, the hospital in which Charlie Parker once detoxed and then memorialized in "Relaxin' at Camarillo," the inst.i.tution sometimes said to have provided inspiration to the Eagles for "Hotel California."

She had called Camarillo, she advised us, to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy.

She was five years old.

On another occasion we came home to the beach house and found that she had placed a call to Twentieth CenturyFox.

She had called Twentieth CenturyFox, she explained, to find out what she needed to do to be a star.

Again, she was five years old, maybe six.

t.i.ta Moore is dead now, she died before Quintana did.

d.i.c.k Moore is dead now too, he died last year.

Marina called me recently.

I do not remember what Marina and I talked about but I know we did not talk about the club with "Mom's Sayings" in the garage and I know we did not talk about the soap factory and I know we did not talk about how the ends of the beach got submerged by the tide.

I say this because I do not believe that either Marina or I could have managed such a conversation.

Relax, said the night man- We are programmed to receive- You can check out any time you like- But you can never leave- So goes the lyric to "Hotel California."

Depths and shallows, quicksilver changes.

She was already a person. I could never afford to see that.

6.

What about the "Craftsman" dinner knife of my mother's?

The "Craftsman" dinner knife on Aunt Kate's table, the one I recognize in the photographs? Was it the same "Craftsman" dinner knife that dropped through the redwood slats of the deck into the iceplant on the slope? The same "Craftsman" dinner knife that stayed lost in the iceplant until the blade was pitted and the handle scratched? The knife we found only when we were correcting the drainage on the slope in order to pa.s.s the geological inspection required to sell the house and move to Brentwood Park? The knife I saved to pa.s.s on to her, a memento of the beach, of her grandmother, of her childhood?

I still have the knife.

Still pitted, still scratched.

I also still have the baby tooth her cousin Tony pulled, saved in a satin-lined jeweler's box, along with the baby teeth she herself eventually pulled and three loose pearls.

The baby teeth were to have been hers as well.

7.

In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did.

A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their "things," their totems.

The detritus of this misplaced belief now fills the drawers and closets of my apartment in New York. There is no drawer I can open without seeing something I do not want, on reflection, to see. There is no closet I can open with room left for the clothes I might actually want to wear. In one closet that might otherwise be put to such use I see, instead, three old Burberry raincoats of John's, a suede jacket given to Quintana by the mother of her first boyfriend, and an angora cape, long since moth-eaten, given to my mother by my father not long after World War Two. In another closet I find a chest of drawers and perilously stacked a.s.sortment of boxes. I open one of the boxes. I find photographs taken by my grandfather when he was a mining engineer in the Sierra Nevada in the early years of the twentieth century. In another of the boxes I find the sc.r.a.ps of lace and embroidery that my mother had salvaged from her own mother's boxes of mementos.

The jet beads.

The ivory rosaries.

The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.

In the third of the boxes I find skein after skein of needlepoint yarn, saved in the eventuality that remedial st.i.tches might ever be required on a canvas completed and given away in 2001. In the chest of drawers I find papers written by Quintana when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls: the research study on stress, the a.n.a.lysis of Angel Clare's role in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. I find her Westlake summer uniforms, I find her navy-blue gym shorts. I find the blue-and-white pinafore she wore for volunteering at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. I find the black wool challis dress I bought her when she was four at Bendel's on West Fifty-seventh Street. When I bought that black wool challis dress Bendel's was still on West Fifty-seventh Street. It was that long ago. Bendel's became after Geraldine Stutz stopped running it just another store but when it was still on West Fifty-seventh Street and I bought that dress it was special, it was everything I wanted either one of us to wear, it was all Holly's Harp chiffon and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two.

Other objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.

I continue opening boxes.

I find more faded and cracked photographs than I want ever again to see.

I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married.

I find many ma.s.s cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember.

In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.

In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.

How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

8.

Her depths and shallows, her quicksilver changes.

Of course they were not allowed to remain just that, depths, shallows, quicksilver changes.

Of course they were eventually a.s.signed names, a "diagnosis." The names kept changing. Manic depression for example became OCD and OCD was short for obsessive-compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder became something else, I could never remember just what but in any case it made no difference because by the time I did remember there would be a new name, a new "diagnosis." I put the word "diagnosis" in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a "diagnosis" led to a "cure," or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.

Yet another demonstration of medicine as an imperfect art.

She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself. Alcohol has its own well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested-ask any doctor-that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known. This would seem a fairly straight-forward dynamic, yet, once medicalized-once the depths and shallows and quicksilver changes had been a.s.signed names-it appeared not to be. We went through many diagnoses, many conditions that got called by many names, before the least programmatic among her doctors settled on one that seemed to apply. The name of the condition that seemed to apply was this: "borderline personality disorder." "Patients with this diagnosis are a complex mixture of strengths and weaknesses that confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist." So notes a 2001 New England Journal of Medicine review of John G. Gunderson's Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide. "Such patients may seem charming, composed, and psychologically intact one day and collapse into suicidal despair the next." The review continues: "Impulsivity, affective lability, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, and ident.i.ty diffusion are all hallmarks."

I had seen most of these hallmarks.

I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair.

I had seen her wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia. Let me just be in the ground, she had kept sobbing. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

I had seen the impulsivity.

I had seen the "affective lability," the "ident.i.ty diffusion."

What I had not seen, or what I had in fact seen but had failed to recognize, were the "frantic efforts to avoid abandonment."

How could she have ever imagined that we could abandon her?

Had she no idea how much we needed her?

I recently read for the first time several fragments of what she had referred to at the time she wrote them as "the novel I'm writing just to show you." She must have been thirteen or fourteen when this project occurred to her. "Some of the events are based on the truth and the others are fict.i.tious," she advises the reader at the outset. "The names have not yet been definitively changed." The protagonist in these fragments, also fourteen and also named Quintana (although sometimes referred to by other names, presumably trials for the definitive changes to come), believes she may be pregnant. She consults, in a plot point that seems specifically crafted to "confuse the diagnostician and frustrate the psychotherapist," her pediatrician. The pediatrician advises her that she must tell her parents. She does so. Her idea of how her parents would respond seems, like the entire rest of the plot point involving the pregnancy, confused, a fantasy, a manifestation of what might be extreme emotional distress or might be no more than narrative inventiveness: "They said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more. She could live in their suburbia house in Brentwood, but they didn't even care what she did any more. That was fine in her book. Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn't even care any more. Quintana would lead her life any way she wanted."

At this point the fragment skids to an abrupt close: "On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen."

So ended the novel she was writing just to show us.

Show us what?

Show us that she could write a novel?

Show us why and how she would die?

Show us what she believed our reaction would be?

Now, they didn't even care any more.

No.

She had no idea how much we needed her.

How could we have so misunderstood one another?

Had she chosen to write a novel because we wrote novels? Had it been one more obligation pressed on her? Had she felt it as a fear? Had we?

What follows are notes I made about a figure who at an earlier point had populated her nightmares, a fantast she called The Broken Man and described so often and with such troubling specificity that I was frequently moved to check for him on the terrace outside her second-floor windows. "He has on a blue work shirt, like a repair man," she repeatedly told me. "Short sleeves. He has his name always on his shirt. On the right-hand side. His name is David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names. I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine. Cap like a Dodger cap, navy blue, GULF on it. Brown belt, navy-blue pants, black really shiny shoes. And he talks to me in a really deep voice: h.e.l.lo, Quintana. I'm going to lock you here in the garage. After I became five I never ever dreamed about him."

David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names?

Name always on his shirt? On the right-hand side?

Cap like a Dodger cap, navy blue, GULF on it?

After she became five she never ever dreamed about him?

It was when she said "I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine" that I realized my fear of The Broken Man to be as unquestioning as her own.

9.