9780874173215

Chapter One

small craft warnings

It was the winter my grandmother Danielle discovered candles and scents. It was her season of fragrances and textures, she often said that. If I had been younger, I might have thought she had become a witch, that's how intensely she breathed the creamy flames into her body, how her whole torso contrived to sculpt itself around the squat glass vases that held the fragrant wax in a kind of embrace.

But my grandmother Danielle was not a witch. She was merely corrupt and sociopathic. That's how my mother described her. It was January. I know that, absolutely, because my mother had taken me to her mother's house on my birthday and then left me there. I wasn't precisely abandoned. I knew my mother would return for me, that I wasn't in immediate danger. This time, my mother had gone to Paris.

She did this periodically, sold what we had managed to accumulate, took me to my grandmother Danielle's, and left me there while she went to Amsterdam, Rome, Vienna, London, and now France. She claimed it was research for her dissertation. She had grants and fellowships to attest to the importance of her scholarship. My grandmother and I both agreed, with perfect nonverbal communication, that my mother's European jaunts had nothing to do with furthering human understanding of sculpture or architecture, design or graphics or any of the other evolutions my mother's studies had taken across the decade.

"She can't find her own angle," Danielle told me, smoking a cigarette in the sun-room. Her voice was smooth with certainty and contempt. "She can't invent her own spin. That's why she spends her life staring at other people's faces and walls."

I didn't know what to say. There were evolutions everywhere. There were progressions, and the stakes inexorably rose. Now there was the complication of my grandmother's increasingly unsavory personal affairs. My mother had to arrange her European sojourns to coincide with periods when we were on speaking terms with Danielle. My grandmother was only in our lives sporadically, when she was between men. When my mother realized that Danielle was alone, she seized the moment, deposited me in the house on the hill, and stayed in Europe until her fellowship expired.

The entire process usually took five or six months. Then it was over. My mother returned as if she had only been gone for a weekend, and we resumed our life as it had been. I was used to sleeping on sofas and constantly changing schools. I thought it was simply another irritating and nonsensical part of childhood, like vaccinations and orthodontia, like the violin for a year, the piano for three years, and teachers who were blatantly unfair, who always favored the blonds who had doctors for fathers.

I was used to sudden departures and arrivals that disappointed, how nothing matched the description, not the apartment complex or the neighborhood, not the school or the park or the beach. Someone wrote glossy paragraphs in italics about deep-tufted grassy lawns, but that had nothing to do with my life.

"You'll learn plenty from your grandmother," my mother said, in a hurry. Suddenly, my grandmother had been revised, cleansed of sin and taint. There were always generous dispensations when my mother had a plane to catch. "Danielle's better than seventh grade. Trust me."

"What about school?" I asked. I wasn't even sure I cared if I went back to school again or not. The water fountain by the cafeteria was, in whatever school I went to, perpetually broken, the pretty girls with names like Lisa and Julie got better grades and school had already failed me.

I was leaning against a wall. Our suitcases were packed. My mother's were tagged for TWA Airlines. We both had sleeping bags. I hadn't washed my hair in two weeks. It occurred to me that I had nothing left to lose.

"School? School?" My mother repeated, lighting a French cigarette, staring at the rising gray calligraphy of the smoke and considering the strange syllable as if she had never encountered it before.

"Don't I have to go to school?" I repeated. I knew I was right. This was mandatory.

"Christ. You're so American," my mother decided, annoyed. "All over the world, kids have adventures. They hitchhike through Africa. They walk to India. Only Americans worry about school. They believe there's some correlation between civilization and education," she postulated, exhaling smoke.

"Is there?" I demanded.

"Of course not, you idiot," my mother yelled. "Look at this country." Then we drove to my grandmother's house.

My grandmother had a real house in the hills above Santa Monica. My mother and I always lived in apartments--in an interminable hell of graduate-school limbo--was my mother's description. "Dante couldn't have imagined this," my mother once said. She was talking about Van Nuys.

I was momentarily stunned when first seeing Danielle's house again, how substantial it was on the top of the hill, after the exactly one hundred and seven blue flagstone steps you had to climb to the front door. The door was behind a gray iron lattice. You had to be buzzed through the bars, which were twined with bougainvillea and wisteria. It was like a form of blue initiation.

"Do you know what style house this is?" my mother asked.

I considered colonial, traditional and contemporary, Cape Cod, California bungalow, English country, the classic Spanish of the late '20s. I looked at my mother's face, searching for clues. She was wearing her anonymous airport persona, no makeup, a scarf in her hair, blue jeans and layers that made her appear unattractively large. The look that said I'm not interesting on any level, don't mug or rape or bomb me. I was still sorting through possible architectural styles when my mother said, "It's called Marrying Well Repeatedly." She laughed.

Danielle's house was made from the sorts of materials my mother and I never had, wooden floors in fine vertical strips, enclosed orange tile patios that always felt cold under my feet, built-in cabinets and built-in book shelves in a dark wood that glistened as if it had just been polished. The house seemed not built or constructed but rather composed. Danielle had real canvas paintings on her walls, and whole sides of rooms were glass and looked down at the canyon and, farther, the city.

At night, I thought I was experiencing vertigo, watching the lights of Los Angeles that seemed to want to rise to meet the lights of the helicopters and planes that were landing. The light was everywhere alive, like an entity, and it seemed volitional, capable of choosing its own function, whether it wished to be a blue airport guide light or one lone green beacon floating on a buoy in the Santa Monica Harbor. Or a lemon-yellow porch light, a traffic light with three predictable phases or something more dazzling, like a display-case window strung with multiple bulbs flaunting their possibilities like a litter of gold and amber things I imagined sounded like bells. The city could be a kind of music if one was attentive and knew how to listen.

Then my mother was buzzing us through the iron lattice. I knew I was already learning to listen in an entirely new way. There were aviaries of color strung on invisible wires. There were transformations in sequences of sunlight and moonlight and smoke. There were chimes and chords inside stones and ways to open them, gut them, make them reveal their secrets of wind and rain. Then my grandmother opened the door.

I remember this particular visit as being not a night sojourn but rather an afternoon one. I think of my grandmother in her study with the door closed and half a dozen vanilla candles burning. She made rooms into rituals. She had housewarmer candles in heavy squat glass vases, and she would lean over them as they burned, breathing the vanilla smell deep into her body. I thought of exotic cargoes in the holds of ships, mangoes and Chinese vegetables in colors like glazed violet and cerulean. That's how she was taking the odor into her lungs, like she was a vessel containing it. I recognized bodies were for storage and transport.

"I never understood opulence," my grandmother said. It was during my first week back in her house. "I never understood taste or smell. I never had the ABC's."

She is elegant and sad, grave, her face like pewter. She is at her desk, her bare feet pressed into a flower-print Moroccan rug. A man who loved her or loved her money gave her that rug, and she would rub her feet into it. I wanted to peel off pieces of her skin and, like flower petals, keep them pressed between pages of books I would never lose.

In my memory of this visit, it is always winter in her study, the smallest room in the house. It is completely permeated with her fragrances. She is holding a glass-encased candle in her two hands, breathing the flamey vapor in, eyes closed. I think she could eat it, like a sacred food, a wafer, a bit of unleavened bread. I watch as she bends her face so close to the fire, her bangs are sometimes singed. I smell burned hair then, mixed in with the vanilla. It is like a sour red wire in the midst of what I imagine melted orchids smell like, something bewitched and lacquered. I thought magic was something that could be identified, cut out and laminated, like a photograph in a wallet.

"Vanilla shares the same properties as orchids," Danielle told me. "The Empress of China ate orchids. She smoked opium. The combination drove her mad."

My grandmother's voice was hoarse, rough edged, like she had opened her mouth to too much wind. It was a throat things had blown into, autumn leaves the red of maples in abrupt transit, leaves russet and auburn. And rocks, and the residues of olive and almond trees with their sweet and subtle scents.

"Do you hear her voice? That's what forty years of pot smoking will do for you," my mother had once said. "That woman must eat nails."

I thought there were mysterious essences, ways of being transmuted that came through the skin. I must have thought sex was like that, some conjunction of rain-forest night-blooming flower that entered you and changed you forever. I lacked systematic processes of discrimination then. I lurched between beacons of intuition, rage and sorrow. I knew what the stones know in their pretense of sleep. I knew city lights longed to be freed from their flagrant neon signs, from their overly representational prisons. They dreamed of being released, allowed to loiter instead in stained-glass cathedrals. They wanted to pour their bodies into the faces and capes of saints. I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy and the resurrection of the dead. I had deja vu many times each day. I was thirteen.

My grandmother was in her study, reading sporadically, underlining passages in yellow Magic Marker. She was saving sections of poems and novels for me to read later, even though she knew I probably wouldn't. I wasn't even going to junior high school anymore. But that was the least of it. Danielle said everything she loved would be out of fashion by the time I was an undergraduate. Pablo Neruda. Octavio Paz. T. S. Eliot. Sylvia Plath.

"I know," I told her, with mock sympathy. "There won't even be books when I grow up. The whole world will be on-line."

My grandmother shrugged. "Oh, that," she said, dismissing the future she had so recently lamented with a flick of her wrist. "That's irrelevant. I finally understand all gestures are egocentric. This has nothing to do with you," she said, holding the yellow pen in the vanilla-thickened air, as if she was leading an invisible yellow orchestra. I imagined she was conducting something composed entirely of brass, some real instruments, others that were creatures, alive, like rare insects with intricate wings that could be taught when to buzz and when to be mute.

I thought my grandmother could read minds. I thought she had mastered telepathy. There were burning candles all over the house and I thought she would die from fire or smoke inhalation before she died from heart disease. Heart disease sounded vague and open to interpretation, phases, and gradations. It lacked definite borders. It seemed like something creeping so slowly, one could forget about it entirely. It would never march far enough to catch my grandmother at the top of one hundred and seven perfect stone stairs a man who had loved her had built for her. It had taken him an entire summer, dawn to dusk. My grandmother with her permanently blond hair, with her size-six figure, with her tennis games and her convertible sports car. She was too fast for this disease. After all, my grandmother was the keeper of the scented flame.

I believed Danielle was somehow camouflaged by her fragrances and how they folded invisible leaves and fronds around her shoulders, her suddenly too thin neck. I thought nothing could find her beneath that woody vanilla, that startled, burned, sweet whiteness that wasn't magnolias or moonlight, not roses with tiny baby mouths, but something intrinsic to skin itself. That's what gave the vanilla its poignancy. It was the way it interacted with my grandmother's flesh, mysteriously, like a night forest where anything is possible.

I sensed there were confusions in her skin. There were always too many possibilities. Her body continually betrayed her, in one way or another. First there had been the men too young for her, long-haired men who took drugs and didn't have jobs. The men Danielle collected that forced my mother to repeatedly shun her. There were long periods when my grandmother was viewed as contaminated. We could not visit. She was living with a bass player from a second-rate San Francisco band.

"Not even San Francisco. They're from a garage in Vallejo. An opening act in its one best moment," my mother had assured me.

That was Danielle's most recent lapse, a liaison with a man thirty years younger than she. I had glimpsed them on the street once, purely by accident. He was blond like my grandmother and slight, thinner than she was. I had at first thought he was a woman. Then my mother said I could not visit, could not spend the night in the house on the hill where I had my own bedroom painted in my favorite shade of purple, August Lilac. This man was the worst yet, my mother informed me. The ultimate blond bimbo, she called him, and because he was now officially living in the house on the hill, I was not even allowed to telephone.

It took two years for the blond man to pass from my grandmother's house and life, and there were details my mother didn't even want to discuss. Something about the paintings and the car, something about tailored suits and the silver, something that had nothing to do with burglary. Now there was the matter of how my grandmother's body was again betraying her, this time with the heart disease.

It was the first year I was officially a teenager and I was hungry for symbols. I thought I possessed an innate capacity for metaphor. My grandmother crossed borders with her skin and now her heart was rotting. My grandmother gave herself to bad men, men who were merely opening acts, salaried players, for Christ sake, my mother had said, and now, as a result, she was going to die.

My beliefs about death were ambiguous, barbaric, phobic. I closed my eyes and entered a realm of phantasmagoria. Sometimes I did not even need to close my eyes for this to occur. I believed rooms were haunted. I thought there were creatures caught between worlds, some warp in the space/time continuum that existed just behind my left shoulder. I entertained the notion that death was the consequence of bad thoughts and immoral actions. I was convinced that there were machines for reading thoughts and decoding images and if one strayed, graphically, sexually, a kind of plaque formed in your arteries. After enough such nights, you would need open-heart surgery, a bypass and a transplant and even that probably wouldn't work.

If Danielle needed it, I would give her my heart. I wanted to write a will, bequeathing my organs to her if I was shot or killed in a car crash. Then I realized my grandmother was too beautiful for death. Her skin was very white, it reminded me of her porcelain teacups, which she always drank from, the bone-thin cups with their gold rims and tiny violet flowers like a faint pulse on their sides. It was like they were breathing.

We often had tea together in the late afternoons. "Use objects," Danielle said, "or they're just boring pretensions." She was pouring tea from a pot that was three hundred years old. It had belonged to a warlord's fourteen-year-old concubine. My grandmother had carried it back from China herself.

I could watch her drink tea indefinitely, for afternoons or years. She had long blondish hair with a hint of red and freckles across her face and arms. Her eyes were huge and completely blue, so blue they looked painted. They were a blue I rarely saw in human beings. They reminded me of chemicals and bodies of water in certain seasons, fall perhaps, when the wind blows from the north. Danielle wore tight black lace leggings under miniskirts and very high heels, no matter where she was going. She looked nothing like me. I was much darker, olive skinned, and I was heavy, my bones were big, my head and feet and hands were larger than hers.

"You're sturdy," Danielle reassured me, smoking a cigarette I knew contained marijuana. I could smell it. "You'll live through the winter. What's wrong with that?"

It was the real, not metaphorical winter that I was thirteen and I wasn't going to school. Danielle never brought up the subject. After all, only Americans were compulsive about attending classes. The rest of the world spent their time having adventures, creating sculptures and paintings and enjoying good medical care. They went to palaces to live with warlords. As if reading my thoughts, Danielle said, "Let's do something exciting. I want to learn to sail."

She made two quick phone calls, and it was done. Everything seemed to be happening so fast. The space between ideas and their slow enactment was diminishing, and I was glad. We drove the red convertible Jaguar to the marina, and a man named Gordo appeared with a sailboat and a smile.

It was a California February rocked clean by storms, by fires and floods in the hills, by an earthquake, by elements that had scrubbed and anointed it. It was the clean-to-a-subatomic level that only California knows in the pause between disasters, in its intervals of pure color. These are the stalled moments when you know Los Angeles is chartreuse and lime. These are the subdued tropics where the green molts along the alleys and boulevards between the red of the poinsettias and the tanning of the sycamores. It is in February in Los Angeles that you know redemption is cyclic and eternal, indigenous like the palms and the desert winds and the crumbling cliffs above the Pacific.

Gordo motored us out of the marina. First, he put up the mainsail and then, as we left the artificial channel and entered the gray-blue bay, he raised the headsail. There were reasons for what he was doing; he was explaining the order of procedures to Danielle, the special knots the ropes required, how they must be rolled away, but I wasn't listening. The sails were called sheets, and Danielle said, "That's one thing I've always been good with."

"I can sure see that," Gordo answered with a laugh. He looked at my grandmother, but he couldn't see her withered heart, how the vessels were collapsing. Her cargo would be trapped. It would be lost at sea, mingling itself with doubloons and heirloom linen, with pianos and trinkets, with silver music boxes and love letters and all the things that never reach home. Danielle wasn't going to return to her port of origin, either.

We were sailing the harbor, which I decided was a kind of gray-hazel, capable of blue or green. It was a substance for a sorcerer. There were unknown variables. I could see the Santa Monica Mountains rising behind what looked like toy buildings. The mountains were the color of festering jade. It was suddenly very cold. Afternoon was like a slap, and I thought, yes, of course, it is in the air that we are redeemed.

I was standing next to Danielle. She leaned over to me suddenly and whispered in my ear, "What if one life isn't enough? What if three dimensions aren't right?" She was staring at the deceptive shifting bay, at the fluid mirror. "What if I can't find the coordinates home?"

"But you can," I said, without hesitation. It wasn't an act of kindness. It wasn't deliberate or contrived. It was like breathing in and out. I loved her.

After that, we drove to the dock almost every day. I had begun to see the city with a new clarity. The boulevards were festooned with desiccated ornamental plum trees and leaves that looked like leather pouches. I thought I could live off the land if I had to. There were hybrid hibiscus near the fence by the dock. They were the size of a clenched fist or a stabbed heart. No one asked me about school.

Our teacher, Gordo, would be waiting with his down vest over a denim shirt, with his smell of cigarettes and cold bay. My grandmother would not remove her high heels until we were already on the sail boat. She seemed small in her tennis shoes, close to the ground and her coffin. We usually had the same boat, the Gabrielle Rose . The name was painted in pink cursive letters. But the stern didn't indicate where it was from. Los Angeles had somehow taken over the world. It went without saying.

Then we were motoring out to the bay. We were attaching the halyard to our mainsail. We were cleating our ropes. We were unfurling the headsail with our winch. We were working our sheets, setting our course, aiming north to Malibu or south past the airport. We were on a broad reach, a close haul. We were tacking to starboard, we were jibing to port. The ocean was a hall of blue mirrors with a kinetic language. There were stairs down, currents and reasons.

The air was so utterly without interruption that it wasn't air as it is ordinarily known but rather an avenue for deciphering. There was no residue, no litter of foul pastels. Everything was abnormally etched the way white rock is. I could see the details on the individual houses and condominiums near the shore. I could identify their balconies, their sun decks, their garden roofs with banks of assertive red geraniums.

I would duck as the mainsail swung and my grandmother yelled, cheerfully, "Hard a-lee," into the agitated wind. I thought she was saying "heartily," and somehow talking about her heart, how it was dissolving in her chest cavity, how it was beating erratically, how it was somehow fading like stamps on an old passport. Where we enter and where we depart, all of it fading.

I thought of tattoos, how they too were blue and how they faded. I considered the question of whether or not you could actually see a tattoo fade. This would only be possible if you were able to watch time pass. It would be a matter of adjusting the machinery. Watching time pass was a sort of paradox. I spent my afternoons on the hazel Santa Monica Bay, constructing conceptual contradictions about time and space.

The last afternoon we went sailing was on a red-flag day at the beginning of March. We passed the red flag by the Coast Guard station and I said, "Shouldn't we turn back?"

I had been with my grandmother for nearly three months. My mother hadn't sent a single postcard. My grandmother was meeting with her lawyer and drafting her will. I knew a red flag meant small craft warnings.

Gordo looked at Danielle and shrugged. "Just the tail end of a real small storm," he said. "I wouldn't lose sleep over it."

Danielle studied the triangular flag shaking in the wind. "I've always liked red," she said. "It's festive, like blood and brandy. Let's keep going."

We entered the bay, and the wind was suddenly tame. It was the wind that returned after serious punishment, subdued and normal. We were on the cusp between seasons. I wanted my grandmother to live until spring. It occurred to me that there is no imprecision on the cusp between seasons. The zones surrounding seasons have their own identities, their own assurances, languages and passwords. This day the edges were elegant under a grainy pewter half-light that reminded me of a new razor. The place between actual seasons is filled with tiny roses in transition. There are murders and amputations in the garden. There are choirs on the sandy floors beneath oceans.

That evening, my mother would be waiting back at the house on the hill. She would take me away with her. I would stand at a window of a new apartment, looking for the gutted stars in their coral burrows. I would see the moon, in multiple identities, hanging like clothes drying on a balcony or a flank on a meat hook. I would start school the next morning with a headache and a bad attitude.

I would come to know dusk and abhor it, the stainless steel gray in which I saw something like fine spiders encroaching toward the stars. The stars were far above the stucco, abstract in their fatal distance, anchored in their sullen silver. It was better than lying down and the affliction of dreams. Later still, I would spend what remained of my adolescence trying to reconstruct my last frayed season with my grandmother.

I remember once, driving home in the red Jaguar after one of our first sailing lessons, we passed a homeless woman lying on her side on a strip of green in the middle of a boulevard. "That's courage," Danielle said.

"That's mental illness," I replied.

"You're so conventional," Danielle laughed. There was nothing mean in her tone. "Can't you imagine choosing vagrancy? No address or chest x-rays? No florist or priest? Only a vast clarity at the juncture. Do you understand?"

"No," I said.

"I wish I had her conviction," Danielle told me. We were driving east along Wilshire Boulevard, and I knew she was talking about the homeless woman. "Some women divest themselves of sabbath. Sin becomes a kind of flame, a blue friend warm in your hand. Some women divest themselves of answers. Cause and effect, balancing the checkbook, rotating the linen. Jesus. I wish I'd gotten a tattoo."

"Of what?" I tried to imagine her porcelain skin with a green rose on the shoulder. Or a heart, perhaps, with a black guitar in the center.

"A blue crescent moon on my thigh. Done in jail ink. Something I couldn't be put in the family plot with." My grandmother smiled.

What I remember with the most clarity is that red flag March day when we sailed Santa Monica Bay for the last time. I had stayed up all the previous night, alone in the sun-room with its three-sided windows, knowing I wouldn't be living there long. Danielle needed a cane now. She refused to use it, walked with it slowly from room to room, holding it, like a misshapen star lily. Her expression seemed astonished, that she would have this wooden implement, that any of this would be happening to her.

I saw a shooting star that March night. I thought the stars were burning down like red flowers, poinsettias or hibiscus. I knew I would spend the rest of my life standing alone at one window or another, considering the heavens. I would be solitude, distilled and refined. I would be alone beneath the coral reefs of constellations. I knew they were merely somber russet shells, uninhabited bodies of water abandoned as they slept. I thought this is why we often wake and feel wounded. There have been splinters of star as we slept and some of these red disks lodged in our flesh.

At my grandmother's house, I could tell time by the bells from St. Anthony's Cathedral. Danielle came and stood beside me at precisely five. She was wearing a red silk bathrobe she had gotten on a trip to Thailand. There were red dragons and red chrysanthemums embossed on the red silk. You had to see the designs with your fingers. They were meant to be traced by someone who loved you. Danielle had taken a young man with her on that cruise. I hadn't been allowed to see her for eight months. I knew. I counted and remembered. I had a calendar. I didn't hitchhike through Africa or marry soldiers, but I kept track of things. Now her hair looked too thin. Her eyes were streaked with red. She was smoking a cloisonne pipe.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Opium," my grandmother said. "It's very hard to get. Do you want some?"

I said no. But after a moment, in which I heard the five bells die like five distant bullets, the residue of a drive-by shooting hitting someone else's infant, I inquired, voice soft, "Can I sit on your lap?"

"I thought you'd never ask," Danielle said. She sat on a sofa in the living room. I perched myself on her thighs. The bells from St. Anthony's had not quite faded, had contrived somehow to remain in the air. The bells were a sort of net, a kind of tattoo in the darkness, an embroidery that lingered. Everything was the color of stained silver.

"Ah, the somber hour of church bells plying their trade through the night. Time for remorse and abstinence. If you have the time," my grandmother said. Then she put her arms around me, pressed me hard against her wrapped-in-red-silk chest, and wept, loud and broken. I touched the dragons with my cheek. Then she howled.

In the morning, we sailed on the red-flagged, small craft warning harbor. "Hard a-lee!" Danielle cried, again and again.

I thought she was talking about her heart, how there were waves in it, channels, eddies, sandbars, places where you must post triangular warning signs. We are all like that, with our hearts littered from the residues of dredging and storms. It is always a season of small craft warnings. You sail into it, face first, as if you were canvas. You consider only the essence of red, the core, with its festive implications.

We sailed all day, through the day, sifting its hours and increments into navigational knots. We cleated it. We reinvented time and travel. The harbor was filled with spilled cargoes from sunken galleons. There were silver Peruvian flutes and fine linens. There were white jungle orchids and bolts of white lace for bridal dresses with patterns you could only recognize with your hands. There were fields of white poppies and strands of drowned pearls, and everything smelled of vanilla.

Danielle was yelling something into the wind as the mainsail swung, her voice hoarse and charged from a variety of self-inflicted sabotage. Certainly she was talking about her heart and how it belonged to the sea and the wind and the fluid elements, tattooed and unfading, the deceptive hazels and silvers in which we do not randomly drift. And of all that occurred to me then and later, this is the one truth of which I remain absolutely convinced.

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Small Craft Warnings

0874173213

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