Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (2 page)

My favorite anecdote about Aunt Paige comes from one of those babysitting sessions. Dad worked from home, which meant that even when he was there he was busy behind the closed door of the spare room he'd converted into an office, so, whenever Mom had to dash out, Paige would volunteer to come over and keep us entertained. It was Christmastime, and my mom had hung a series of (now that I think about it) rather cubist-looking stained-glass nativity scenes on our front windows. Each one was about six inches in diameter and affixed to the window with a suction cup. Aunt Paige—whose much-vaunted “zaniness” I then found exciting and hilarious but now strikes me as masking a profound loneliness and an inability to connect with anyone other than small children—took one of these decorations off a window—
pop
went the suction cup—and stuck it to her forehead. I squealed as Aunt Paige chased me around the house with three stained-glass wise men suction-cupped to her forehead. “I'm looking for baby Jesus!” she exclaimed in an Italian accent. (She was quite fond of accents, though no matter the intended nationality, after a few sentences as a Japanese or a German—Paige never really got over the War—she always bounced into one of her Guinea schticks. [I use that term, “Guinea,” not as my enlightened self of today, but as my childhood
self who had been raised amid the casual anti-Axis racism. The term for this, narratologically speaking, is “focalizing,” whereby language is filtered through the character whose point of view we're in, and I feel I should make this clear, lest you think I'm a bigot—I like Italians!]) Aunt Paige caught up to me in the hallway, grabbed me, and said, “Found him!” I was hyperventilating from laughter but managed to calm down a bit until, as a final punch line, she pulled the Christmas decoration off her forehead to reveal a bright red, silver-dollar-size welt above her left eyebrow. The center was a brighter red, making it look like a target. When she saw my reaction (more laughing), she went to the bathroom mirror. I could see a moment of self-kicking sadness on her face, but then she saw me watching her and started doing her funny accent again, until Edie came around the corner and scolded us, said we were making too much noise, said we were disturbing Dad.

(I just checked the Chandler story I paraphrased that Santa Ana line from on the previous page, and I got it all wrong. The original, from “Red Wind,” goes like this: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.” Great stuff, huh? Oliver said that my novels
Season of All Natures
and
Rarer Monsters
, which are still on the market, have a certain Chandler-esque evocation of Los Angeles and prose style.)

Anyway, when my father died in 1964, Aunt Paige moved into our house, where she preserved all of Dad's old scripts (the plays he wrote
in school; the countless
Rampart
episodes, mimeographed in purple ink on tissue-like paper; the novel he'd worked on for years without ever completing) and Hollywood memorabilia (including the Emmy Award that she'd later have to write the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to get a replacement for after Edie, about twenty years ago, pawned it for, we can assume, drug money). Aunt Paige adored her brother, and that house became a museum, though a rather disorganized one, in his honor. She lived for those moments when some amateur Hollywood historian or grad student would contact her to ask her questions about George McWeeney's contribution to
Rampart
, and
Rampart
's contribution to the mythology of the American cop. She'd invite them over, tell them her nostalgia-tinted memories of her Brother the Great Writer, give them a tour of the house. Then she'd call me, tell me that someone was writing a biography of my father, which would surely spark serious interest in him and his work, so I'd better come over and help her organize his papers. I'd say, “Sure, Aunt Paige, I'm a little busy now, but soon,” knowing full well that this biography she was imagining would actually be a small footnote in a book or article no one would ever read.

Anyway. So Aunt Paige passed away over a year and a half ago, September 1994. And when she did, Edie came back into town. She (Edie) called me at home one Saturday morning.

“Paulie.”

“Edie?”

“It's Edie.”

“Hi.”

“I heard about Aunt Paige.”

“Yeah.”

These were our first words to each other in (what she later calculated to be) over four years, and as I transcribe them from memory I find myself wishing for more to type, for a less staccato style between us, but I suppose it was pretty easy for us to slip back into the old rhythms.

“Did I miss the funeral?” she asked. “The obit didn't mention one.”

“Oh. There hasn't been one. Or at least not yet. I've been trying to find friends of hers, people who'd like to come, but so far haven't found many people.” This was, I admit, a lie. I'd been meaning to do this, or at least considered it, briefly, but I was simply too busy.

On the line, I heard the ionic crepitation of either static or my sister clicking her teeth, a strange habit of hers.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Can I come over?”

“Are you in L.A.?”

“Are you still in that place off Franklin?”

“Are you in L.A.?”

“Can you come pick me up?”

“Where are you?”

“Eagle Rock. In a motel. Come pick me up.”

This was not a good time for me to drive across Los Angeles. I had papers to grade. Forty of them, to be exact. I should mention here that I teach at the College of Los Angeles, better known by the acronym COLA. It used to be the City College of Los Angeles, but they dropped the “City” to make it sound less like what people used to call, back before smoking was bad for you, “high school with ashtrays.” (As a former COLA student myself from the days of ashtrays, I
can attest to the accuracy of that description.) Every semester I teach seven classes, a combination of English 1 (freshman composition) and English 2 (intro to literature), which means I have on average about two hundred students per semester. There is never a time when I am not mired in grading, and the only way to get through it is to give myself daily quotas (that day it was forty essays) and occasionally some Ritalin (which I'd taken that day to keep me focused on the Sisyphean task). Perhaps it was the drug that gave me a slight rush of capability—yes, of course I could go pick up my sister, come back, and finish all these papers—or maybe it was the fact that Edie needed me again, but either way I got in my car and made my start-stop way east on the 101 to Eagle Rock, a small and generally pleasant nook between Glendale and Pasadena so named because of a large rock formation that people say has an eagle-shaped jut, though every time I look at it I just see a rock-shaped jut, perfectly amorphous in the way that large rocks are and free of zoomorphic contours. As a literary artist, however, my failure to see the eagle makes me worried, every I time I visit its eponymous neighborhood, that I'm too literal minded, that my failure as a novelist has something to do with my failure to imagine some great raptor emerging from stone, my failure to recognize the similarity between disparate things, my failure to harmonize the world with a network of similes. I mean, sure, I can make an okay metaphor, but it's always such a labored, conscious act, forcing myself to see the world in a way I'm no longer sure I actually do. It's not an innate skill, and that's what worries me. Don't they give kids tests like this in those Montessori schools, along with allergy fetishism and disdain for the conventions of grammar? The kids who say the splotch of ink looks like something
other than what it is—they grow up to be the artists, teaching the rest of the world how to navigate the horrors of postmodernity; while the kids who say that's just a splotch of ink—they grow up to be the unambitious number-pushers and pencil-crunchers of the world. I'm pretty sure they have tests like that.

I took the Eagle Rock exit, noticing that those clouds over there looked like cotton balls, while those other clouds looked like slightly dirty cotton balls, and that cloud there looked like an eagle, covered in cotton balls. I found my sister's motel, found her room, and knocked on the door.

“Coming, coming,” she said from inside. She opened the door and said, “Come in, come in,” and I wondered if she was doing that childhood thing she'd do when she wanted to be annoying, that thing of saying everything twice. “I'm just getting my stuff together.” She went back into the room and I walked in.

Edie scooted around the room in slippers. There was stuff everywhere. She gathered all the stuff into a suitcase. She tried to zip up the suitcase but some of the stuff was sticking out the sides, so it wouldn't zip up. Then she opened it back up to arrange all the stuff, and a lot of stuff fell out onto the floor, and the whole stuff-gathering process began again.

She was wearing a tank top that had some sort of wolf howling on it. She was looking her age, a realization that made me consider my own age, only five years less than hers, and I snuck a glimpse of myself in the mirror beside the TV. The narrow peninsula of hair that was stubbornly holding ground on my freckled pate was matted to the side thanks to a cowlick that just exaggerated the sparser side of my head.
I finger-combed it a bit, tried to counteract the cowlick, without going full comb-over with it. A comb-over conveys vanity; vanity conveys, paradoxically, vulnerability. A man comfortable with his aging is the epitome of virility. Ralph Hockney, the dean at COLA, said that in a meeting once. He's bald as a bean. I think he waxes his dome; it's awfully shiny. I noticed, too, in the motel mirror, that my stomach was looking a little fuller than I'd like. I suppose one is more likely to notice these things in a strange new mirror, since we become so accustomed to our appearances in the mirrors we encounter on a daily basis. The mirror in my own bathroom, for example, is fairly flattering, if only because it's not very large and doesn't show a great deal of me. When I go into Chris's bedroom, however—which is not very often, as the cloistered rituals of the teenage male make me nervous (is he merely masturbating or drawing detailed pictures of slaughtered classmates?), all the more so since he's not actually my brood and so I feel nervous even acknowledging whatever it is he does in there, like I don't have the parental right, though by this point I should have the de facto parental right—when I go into Chris's room, and catch a glimpse of myself in those floor-to-ceiling mirrored closet doors, I'm always taken aback. I am never quite the man I imagine I am.

Edie seemed concerned about the time (almost eleven), so we hustled out of the room and down to the front desk to deposit the key before checkout time (eleven).

Edie was hungry, so I drove us first to a Starbucks for some scones and coffee. I was thinking now about all those papers to grade and worried that I would lose steam if this detour became too much of a detour, so I got a venti Americano. Once back on the highway, I tried to break
the awkwardness with Edie by riffing on the ridiculous language of coffee sizes at Starbucks, trying to connect its rebranding of basic small, medium, and large to a bigger problem of what I will call (though it did not occur to me in the moment) the cult of esotericism: that is, the renaming of things to give the sayer of those names and user of those things (presumably the same person) the warming sensation of inclusion in a small, elite group who knows the meaning of those names, despite the fact that those new names are utter gibberish, an example of language as social marker, a corporate co-opting of the black bebop argotic methods of the postwar years. “It's a class issue,” I said.

“Actually, it's Italian,” Edie said. “‘Venti' means twenty. That coffee is twenty ounces.”

Traffic suddenly slowed, and I said, “Be careful with that scone, please. Those crumbs get everywhere.”

“Didn't you take Italian in college?” she asked.

I hoped that there was an accident up ahead. While that might sound sadistic, let me explain: If the traffic was slowing because of an accident, that meant that once we passed the accident, things would speed up again—and there is really nothing as satisfying as suddenly having free rein of the open highway after being packed into a traffic jam, the pleasure almost sexual in its tense-release combo. Plus, an accident would mean that someone had suffered the appropriate consequence for making the rest of us late.

“We have to have a funeral for Aunt Paige,” Edie said.

“Okay. You have to organize it, though. I'm too busy.”

If, however, traffic was slowing due to the inexplicable groupthink of the commuting populace, then we'd be here awhile.

“Then I will organize it,” Edie said. “It's important. Without a funeral her soul will be forever tethered to her earthly shell.”

I wondered if she was serious or sarcastic, but didn't pursue it. Perhaps her howling wolf tank top was a sign that in the vision quest of her life she'd begun dabbling in some ancient Comanche religion, or at least the misapprehended and misappropriated white stoner version of it that surely thrived out in the dive bars and twelve-step groups of California's Central Valley.