A Way of Life, Like Any Other Read online

  On Christmas Eve we went to dinner at Lüchow’s restaurant with an old friend of Mother’s called Mr. Johnny Standfast.

  “The Germans have the best Christmases,” Mother said. “I never feel it’s really Christmas unless I’m at Lüchow’s.”

  Mr. Standfast asked me what I was going to be when I grew up.

  “He’ll be an actor over my dead body,” said Mother.

  “I think I’ll be a diplomat,” I said. I had read about Cordell Hull in the newspaper.

  “You’d make a charming diplomat, dear.”

  “I could use a diplomat,” said Mr. Standfast. “I could use a diplomat right now. I could use a diplomat tomorrow morning. How’d you like to be my diplomat?”

  “I never thought of that,” I said.

  The dinner was the best thing in New York. I said I wished we could eat at Lüchow’s every night.

  “He’s a terrible little snob,” Mother said.

  “Is he?” said Mr. Standfast.

  I praised my mother’s appearance. She was beautiful in a navy blue suit with a white collar, her red hair swept up into a pompadour. Mr. Standfast said Mother was the most beautiful woman on Broadway.

  “That’s all finished,” she said. “To hell with it.” She gave me a glass of wine because I was so grown-up in my suit. I liked the wine but it did something peculiar to my eyes.

  “You both look very far away,” I said.

  When we reached Casa Fiesta my father had returned from location. He wanted to celebrate our reunion with a horseback ride up to Santa Barbara.

  “Just like the old padres,” he said. “El Camino Real. We’ll take Don Enrique along and he’ll cook Mexican breakfasts on the open fire. Huevos rancheros. Muy bueno.”

  “I’m exhausted,” Mother said. “I wasn’t able to sleep at all on the train. I think I’ve a migraine coming on. Besides, you know I detest sleeping on the ground. You go. Big he-man stuff, no, thank you very much. And do take the child, we haven’t been apart for a month.”

  “Do you want me to call Doc Skaletar?” my father asked.

  “I’m perfectly capable of calling him myself.”

  So my father, Don Enrique, and I set off from Malibu, over the tops of the hills above the sea. From his hat to his boots my father was all in black, just as in his pictures. His horse Tom was black and his saddle black with silver trimmings, his name engraved in silver across the cantleboard. He was a big, powerful man but Tom was big and powerful too and they moved together as one, my father sitting straight with chin out, gazing back and forth across the hills and the sea. He broke the trail, with me second and Don Enrique behind, leading a mule loaded with provisions. We were an outlaw band, we were hunting for gold, we were running down the killers, we were the only survivors of a savage ambush.

  We sweated under clear skies, and when we felt like it we turned down to the sea, swam in the icy water and lay on the beach. My father showed me how to get a jump on a wave, swim a few strokes, pull your arms in flat under your body and ride to shore. At night we ate Don Enrique’s good food and the two men told stories, and when the sun woke me in the morning breakfast was already cooking. I drank coffee with a lot of milk in it and leapt on my pony feeling like a million dollars.

  About noon on the fourth day we rode into Santa Barbara, checked into the Biltmore, and took hot showers. The manager of the hotel had worked as a bit player in a couple of my father’s pictures.

  “Amigos! This is a great honor and a great pleasure! And the señora, I am sure she is well?”

  My father assured the manager that she was well and that she would be sorry not to have seen him, and he introduced me. The manager said it was a great honor to have me as his guest and was I going to be a great cowboy like my father?

  “I might try,” I said.

  “He’s a better man than I am,” said my father. “You should see him ride the waves. He’ll be an Olympic champ. But whatever he wants is okay with me. I believe in giving a boy his head.”

  The manager and Don Enrique agreed with this.

  We had a huge lunch of cold crab on the terrace overlooking the sea, watching the fishing boats and talking of what a swell ride it had been. The men drank lots of Mexican beer.

  “This is the life,” my father said.

  My father telephoned the ranch and we took a siesta. Then the big green Lincoln arrived and two trucks for the horses and the mule. My father told the driver to put the top down and drive fast. We sang songs all the way to Casa Fiesta.

  2

  GROWTH

  BUT AS THE hare, whom hounds and horns pursue, pants to the place from which at first she flew, so life turned round on Mother and Dad, and stripped them of their goods and pleasures. It was not the war that did it, but by the end of the war everything had changed. I lived in a house in Los Angeles with my mother.

  One night I was awakened by cries from her bedroom. I went in to find her weeping and unclothed, clinging to the bedpost like Christ awaiting the scourge.

  “My little man,” she said to me, “my poor dear little man. Come, see what has happened to me.”

  She displayed her wrists, criss-crossed with razor cuts, the blood dried.

  “You see,” she said, “what desperate condition I am in. Save me. Sauve moi! Comme je suis douloureuse! Mais, I couldn’t do it to you, my poor darling. Comme tu es jeune! Too jeune to bear it. I couldn’t let you see me like that, with blood soaking the damask and in my hair and in pools on the parquet. You can thank me for that, my darling, I love you too much, like a mother.”

  I thanked her and asked would she like a glass of water.

  “Water? Water? But I’ve taken so many pills, I shan’t be with you much longer. You had better call the doctor.”

  I started for the telephone.

  “No,” she said, “no, wait. Sweetheart, don’t you know I take sleeping pills every night? Don’t you know what I’ve been through? Poor baby, how could you know? But you must know. Don’t call the doctor yet. If you will stay with me, I won’t need the doctor. Stay with me and hear my sad story. It is the sad story of a woman.”

  I helped her into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. She had never looked worse, yet she was often so bad that I was uncertain how to act in the present drama. She had lost much of her beauty. Her puffed face was reticulated with frantic capillaries. She kept a bottle close, secreting it behind the salad oil or deep in the folds of her sarong. She sucked on sen-sen and sprayed herself with strong perfume.

  “All my life,” she began, “I have been looking for the perfect man, the perfect love. Is there anything wrong with that? Thank God I’m romantic. I love Roman churches in the winter light, the great ball of lapis lazuli. And all the little cafés. I journeyed up the Nile. I worshipped at Abu Simbel, I have ridden on camelback through the blowing sands of the Sahara. I have stood in the frozen streets of Leningrad wishing on polar stars, rapt before the glories of the Hermitage. Yes, I was disillusioned when they used the same rag to clean the toilet they wiped the tea glasses out with for the samovar on the Trans-Siberian Railway, but I could live with disillusionment, I knew they did that before the Bolsheviks, the Russians have a cruel history, cruelest on the earth, you must read Anna Karenina, darling, but I have never found the perfect man.”

  I told her that I would always love her. She said that meant more to her than anything in the world. I told her that my father loved her too.

  “Your father is a fool, darling, and an idiot. I believed in him once. Oh my God, how I believed in him! He was glamorous. Always the finest tailors. Look at him now, those ridiculous old suits he wears. Hasn’t he any pride left? Do you know that he used to put on white cotton gloves and run his fingers over the top of the refrigerator to see that Gerda and Walter, they were the best damned couple we ever had, cleaned it properly? It was the sack for them if they didn’t, that was the kind of man he was. Look at him now.”

  I resisted speaking ill of my father to her, it seemed a ki
nd of betrayal. But it always made her feel better.

  “He’s degenerated, all right,” I said.

  “He certainly has.”

  “He’s not the man he was.”

  “You’re so mature for your age.”

  “I don’t know what’s happened to him.”

  “Who would want to stay with that?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “You’re very understanding.”

  “What could you be expected to do?”

  “God only knows. I reached a point.”

  “When did it start happening?”

  “There was always a suspicion. But I tried to look for the best. The time he got himself all mosquito-bitten stripped to the waist watching the men put in electricity at the ranch, he looked like such a moron puffed up covered with Calamine lotion, I could have spit in his face. He knew he knew nothing about electricity. He had to pretend. And in South America, the pilots were fabulous, how they maneuvered through the Andes, higher than birds dared fly, it was such a thrill, but your father didn’t know the first thing about crocodile hunting, all he wanted was the publicity photographs. The hotel in Rio was crawling with Jewish refugees, but the food was first-rate. I always had suspicions. He has very little hair on his body, did you ever notice that? But he was a wonderful lover in the beginning, I don’t think he ever had another woman in his whole life.

  “You’ll be a man soon. You always were more of a man than your father, God forgive me for saying so, but you reach a point where truth is the most important thing. Hold me, my little man, are my feet growing cold? Always searching, but I have never found the perfect one.”

  She raised herself onto her knees, arms flung out.

  “Oh God in heaven, God of prayer wheels and the priests in their lovely saffron robes, God of Inca artifacts, God of Bedouins eating figs in tents, God of the Pope in ostrich feathers, Sun God, Moon God, Rain God, God of the seven seas and the lakes with fishes in them, the great whale, the soft rabbit, and I include the snakes and the prairie dogs, God help me find the perfect man. My feet are growing cold, darling. Feel my feet.”

  They were indeed cold, stiff, and had bad color. I telephoned the doctor as Mother passed from consciousness. The doctor sank a needle into her buttock, shielding me with his body from the sight. She recovered, and no word of the events of that night ever passed between us; and I did not tell my father. But I gave her a bunch of violets, and this note: “Dear Mother. Please don’t die. The bad times will pass. I love you.”

  At school I had my own life, which I enjoyed, and I took a certain pride in what help and comfort I could give my mother. I felt that she was coming through a rough passage but that she would make it one day, perhaps by finding her perfect man. Often we would have long talks as she sat in the bathtub, soaping herself and letting water from a sponge fall over her body. Her belly was big now and her breasts droopy, but I was able to imagine her former self and to see how an older man might find her attractive still. The hair on her parts was such a bright red that I had difficulty keeping my eyes from it, but we managed to converse in a lively and civilized way, and there was something about the small, steamy room and the pleasant informality of it all that made possible an intimacy not otherwise easily arrived at. We talked of the joys and sorrows of her life, her hatred of her mother, to whom she had not spoken since the divorce, her favorite composer, Chopin, and of my father, against whom she remained very bitter. We planned dinner parties, the guests, the food and what wine should be served with it. As she toweled and powdered herself, I cleaned out the bathtub, and she would say,

  “I wonder how many mothers and sons can talk to each other this way. We’re very fortunate.”

  The dinner parties were amusing unless Mother allowed herself to get too drunk before they were well under way. I would act as bartender and I would know it as a sign of trouble if she took little drink from me, because that meant she was swilling in the kitchen. Guests praised my highballs and martinis and wondered that a twelve-year-old could attain such skills.

  “He’s the man of the house,” my mother would say. “Children should be treated as adults. Make Maggie another bourbon.”

  Maggie was a big woman. She often came to dinner. She had a husband, Sterling, who was always recovering from an operation. Maggie had been my father’s agent. She had other clients now, and Sterling was in the avocado business. He said it was a good business for him to be in because he was sick a lot, and the avocados more or less took care of themselves. All over America people were eating more avocados. He couldn’t get enough of them. They were good for you, much better than a lot of other fruits.

  “People should eat two or three avocados a day,” Sterling said. “The Mexicans understand this better than we do. I always know I’m recovering when I can eat avocados again. I like them plain, maybe with a little lemon juice. Some people like a vinaigrette sauce. There’s no better breakfast than an avocado sliced on a piece of whole wheat toast and a cup of coffee. Black coffee, no sugar. People eat too much sugar anyway. It even looks nice, the dark green of the avocado and the black coffee. Sometimes I just look at it for a while before I start. Then there’s guacamole, of course. It’s going to be the most popular dip in the US in five years’ time. Around five o’clock if I’m feeling pretty good, I mix up some guacamole, not too much tabasco sauce, and a pitcher of martinis. It’s really nice. I can sit by the pool for hours with plenty of guacamole and a pitcher of martinis. Then maybe half an avocado as a first course. Maggie and I can split one. Sometimes I don’t even feel like a second course. Then there’s a big firm going to bring out an avocado ice cream. You see, they’re such a wonderful fruit you can do anything with them. They make some kind of serum from the pits. I don’t know what it cures, but we have a very heavy demand for the pits now. They’re such a terrific fruit. People say you can do more things with a tomato, but—”

  “Would you shut up with your goddamned avocados!” Maggie would say, and Sterling would be quiet for the rest of the evening, silent in a corner of the couch or at the table, getting up to go to the bathroom three or four times, but moving slowly and carefully, because of his stitches.

  We were sitting down to dinner, Maggie and Sterling, Mother and I, and Tony Amalfitano, who ran a camera store in the Farmers Market. Tony was sweet on Mother. He had seen her in the Farmers Market one day and asked if he could take her picture. They had been friends ever since, and he had given me an expensive camera.

  “You learn to use that camera yet?” Tony asked me.

  “I’m afraid it’s too complicated for me,” I said. It was, and I had no interest in taking pictures.

  “I don’t understand this kid,” Tony said. “You give him a two-hundred-dollar camera and he won’t use it. What does it take?”

  “He takes after his father,” Mother said. “He’s no mechanical genius. He won’t fix a faucet.”

  “He’s an intellectual. You like to read books?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “His father is no intellectual,” Mother said. “I tried to interest him in the Russian novelists once. Jesus Christ, it was like talking to a tree. Zane Grey was about his speed.”

  “I always said he should have been a tuna boat captain,” Maggie said. “A tuna boat captain. Plenty of fresh air and all those dumb fish.”

  “If you mix . . .” Sterling began.

  “I’ve got a terrific part for you, honey,” Maggie said to my mother. “You’re the wife of the mayor of a big city that’s invaded by giant insects from outer space. Your husband gets eaten up but you rally the populace and save everybody. There’s a love interest, the young scientist who hits on the right insecticide or something. It’s a gas. Sam Caliban is directing. He’ll wrap it up in three weeks.”

  “Sam Caliban,” Mother said. “He directed me in a picture with Will Rogers. I don’t know which of them was more repulsive.”

  “Sam never lost money on a picture,” Maggie said.

>   “Hold it, right there,” Tony said. “Everybody stop eating. I got to get a couple of shots of this.”

  Tony started flashing away. No photo bug could resist that room, the way Mother had decorated it. She had a passion for dining al fresco indoors. The rug was imitation grass and it looked so real that you had to warn people with dogs. The chairs were wrought iron garden chairs and the table was a thick piece of round glass, supported by three plaster columns. There were potted plants around and in a corner on another column a plaster statue of Aphrodite. One night, during an earthquake, Mother had rushed from her bedroom just in time to catch the household goddess, carrying her with hysterical cries safely to the couch, where I found them.

  Mother knocked over her wine glass.

  “Get a towel,” she said to me. “Would you, dear?”

  In the kitchen I found a bottle of vodka and poured it down the sink. I came back with a towel, and Tony got several shots of me wiping up the mess and pouring salt on the grass. I helped Mother clear the plates and bring out the next course.

  Halfway through the Wienerschnitzel, Mother reached across me toward the wine bottle. Her movement was quick and I jerked myself backward in my chair, bringing one hand up to my face, as if to ward off a blow, and grabbing the table with my other hand, to keep from tipping over. Everyone froze, and Mother’s face purpled.

  “John Agar was around last week,” Maggie said. “After a part. He looked terrible.”

  “My Dad used to give all of us kids a belt,” Tony said. “Kept us on our toes.”

  “My but you’re a thick fellow, aren’t you, Mr. Amalfitano,” Maggie said, and went on to John Agar’s drinking problem.

  In the kitchen Mother cracked two plates putting them into the sink. We had had a maid but she drank and slept with people on the job, so Mother fired her.

  “You little bastard,” Mother said to me. “Don’t you ever do a thing like that again!” She gave me a pretty good slap across the face. “Embarrassing me in front of my guests!”