“Talk to me,” he says, so gently that a tear actually leaks from my eye.
I shake my head silently. I don’t understand these overpowering, nameless sensations. I can’t seem to get control of my voice.
Someone passes us. I turn my face away. Donnato calls out very brightly, “How’re ya doin’?” and the person continues to clatter down the stairs.
“Seven-year burnout,” he says when they are gone.
“Is that what it is?”
“Unless you’re psycho and been hiding it from me all these years.”
A crooked smile: “Been trying.”
“This is a new Ana Grey. What’s going on?”
I can’t describe it. “Pressure.”
“I can dig that. Let me buy you a drink.”
I am deeply ashamed of having behaved like an asshole and certainly don’t want to sit around and dwell on it. If I weren’t fixated on the searing humiliation of having lost control, I might have heard the tenderness in Donnato’s voice.
“Thanks but it’s better if I work out in the pool.”
“You’re too good.”
“Hey, I’m perfect.”
“You try to be. That’s why you’re throwing phones against the wall.”
We are moving back toward the doorway of the stairwell. My body feels like it has been run over by a truck.
“It’s not just Carter.” Struggling to put a label on it: “There’s some weird stuff that came up that might involve my family.”
“I hope your grandfather is okay.”
“Him? Healthy as a horse and knocking the hell out of golf balls in Palm Desert.” It makes me feel brighter to think of Poppy in his yellow Bermuda shorts out there at seven in the morning with the other old farts — a foursome of retired policemen if you can picture that, cursing and telling racist jokes all the way down the fairway — embraced by the baking heat of the rising desert sun and the infantile pleasure of their unbroken routine.
“Poppy’s got it wrapped,” I tell Donnato. “No, it’s these other people.”
“Relatives.” Donnato shakes his head. “Take ’em to Disneyland.”
The wonderful simplicity of that idea makes me laugh.
“Okay now?”
I nod.
“Can you take care of it?”
“Sure.”
Donnato squeezes my arm. “Good triceps.” That wry, affectionate look. “Go swimming. See you tomorrow.”
When I duck inside to grab my bag I notice the Bank Dick’s Undercover Disguise embracing the phone in a tangled heap on the floor, the empty hanger still rocking above it.
SIX
A FEW DAYS later I slip into my car with the intention of returning a humidifier. I hadn’t been too precise about changing the water so it stopped working last winter and rotted in the bedroom all spring. When I finally dumped the tank out sometime around Halloween it was evident that new life forms had sprouted inside. The store where I bought it guarantees a “lifetime warranty” so you can keep bringing in the old fishy-smelling one and exchanging it for a brand-new one, no questions asked, for the rest of your life. I know, because I already pulled this stunt last year, when the original humidifier dried up and died.
Somehow despite the excellent intention of running over to Century City and back during my lunch break, I am still sitting here in the G-ride without having turned on the engine. I have found the Bible that belonged to Violeta Alvarado thrown on the passenger seat along with a ton of papers and law books and am looking through it, suddenly disoriented in the middle of the parking lot of the Federal Building.
Slowly removing the crossed rubber bands with the same care as Mrs. Gutierrez, I run my finger down the dense type printed in Spanish on delicate tissuey pages and look through the faded snapshots again, stopping at the one of Violeta’s mother holding a baby. Behind them the landscape is gray green, scrubby and heartless.
I have never been to the tropics. I cannot know what life is for that woman and that baby. My past begins and ends with my grandfather — his California boyhood, his own mother’s trek across this country from Kansas, his devotion to the moral duties of police work in the expansive fifties, have formed my sense of myself as a full- blooded optimistic American and, growing up, there was never any reason to question any of it.
Now I am forced to question it all as I hold a piece of paper torn from a small notebook upon which is written the name of a white woman who allegedly fired a cousin of mine who was Hispanic. The name is Claire Eberhardt. The address is on Twentieth Street, eight blocks from Poppy’s old house, north of Montana, where I spent the first five years of my life, in the city of Santa Monica — a former beach town of funky bungalows and windswept Pacific views that has now become an overbuilt upscale enclave on the westernmost edge of the Los Angeles sprawl.
Even pulling out of the parking lot I hesitate, then make a decisive turn away from Century City and the sweet new humidifier, west down Wilshire and on to San Vicente Boulevard. These days I come to Santa Monica on Bureau business or to catch a movie at the Third Street Promenade, but north of Montana is definitely not my turf. This is the land of the newly rich where noontime joggers pass beneath scarlet-tipped coral trees on a wide grassy meridian. The Ford looks stupid next to Mercedeses and BMWs and hot Toyota Land Cruisers that have never seen a speck of mud. I take the fork onto Montana Avenue and curve past a golf course. Already the air is flooded with the scent of flowers and cool watered grass, pine and eucalyptus.
The top end of Montana Avenue could be a small nondescript residential street anywhere, but as you pass a school and start down an incline all of a sudden you are hit by a row of shops with blue awnings.
I have noticed that whenever you have awnings you have quaint.
On Montana Avenue there are lots of awnings: maroon awnings with white scallops, artsy-fartsy modernistic awnings that hang by steel cords.… The stores that don’t have awnings make up for it with two-story glass windows and dramatic lettering, letting you know that it takes a special kind of money to shop here: a lot.
Males and females amble along carrying shopping bags or pushing baby strollers, enjoying themselves. I guess they have nothing else to do all day. Sidewalk tables are filled with folks taking a leisurely lunch under green umbrellas, watching the steady stream of traffic flow down Montana Avenue to the ocean, which you can actually see at the rise on Fifteenth Street, a flat band of blue straight ahead.
I’m kind of mesmerized, it’s a different pace from the rest of the city and my old neighborhood after all, even if I could never afford to live here today. Passing the vintage Aero Theatre now wrapped in a slick retailing complex, I wonder if as a girl I ever saw a movie there, then on impulse turn up Twelfth Street looking for our old address.
There it is, just past Marguerita, beside some big pink modern construction with round windows: an old California cottage, which must have been built in the 1920s, with a pitched roof and a real estate company’s For Sale sign out front. I park with the engine idling. The house is
Something hits my windshield, a spiny round seedpod from a gum tree growing near the curb. I wait for some revelatory memory to hit me over the head but there is nothing, just an abandoned old house. The property
