too. It suddenly didn't seem fair to make her wait any longer.
'Are you going to invite me home?' Ira asked. Virginity hung heavy and embarrassing like something around his neck, to be discarded. Ira lived at home and had nowhere to go. Jonathan began to understand the weight that the boy carried with him.
Ira had taken so many risks. He was frightened of himself and of Jonathan-Jonathan might have been shocked or angry or answered with his fists. Ira's eyes were round, watching, hopeful, sad.
It was time for Jonathan to take charge.
'If I said no, just for tonight, would you stop asking me?' Jonathan asked, and quickly added, 'Because I don't want you to stop asking.'
Ira said nothing. He looked very young, very disappointed.
Jonathan sighed. 'It's just that if we did anything now, I'd feel slightly railroaded.'
'You're a nice boy and don't do it on the first date,' Ira murmured miserably.
'Something like that.'
'If you mean no, just say no.'
'I don't mean no.'
'I'm supposed to show up with my car on Friday nights with a bunch of flowers?'
'That would be nice. Only no flowers. The neighbors might think I was queer or something.'
Ira looked so dismayed that Jonathan felt compelled to kiss him, on the cheek, under streetlights. 'Bring chocolates instead.'
Ira broke into a terrible sweat. It trickled down his forehead and soaked in patches through his shirt. His conventionality had been taxed to its limits. 'Well,' he said. 'I guess I always did believe in long engagements.'
Jonathan drove him home. 'Ease up, guy,' Jonathan said, temporarily sounding American. Somewhere on the San Diego Freeway, Ira suddenly understood that he had won.
Ira became boisterous and bounced up and down on the car seat in time to the radio. He began to sing. He looked younger than ever. From the front porch of his parents' house, he turned and gave Jonathan a wave. For some reason, it was that wave that made Jonathan finally decide. Jonathan could still see Ira, ten years ago, standing and waving and smiling. Ira was history, too.
Jonathan woke up in his garden. It was bleary with sunlight. Oz, he reminded himself. I'm supposed to be in Oz. And as he awoke he seemed to hear laughter, high childish giggles of something hidden under leaves. Or was it only the last of the telephone, fading away?
His mother was there.
She was wearing her mink stole and narrow tartan trousers, blue and green, and little elfin bootees. She also wore sunglasses and was surrounded by a blaze of sunlight.
When had she last dressed like that?
'Mom?' he asked, sitting up. He was horrified. How long was she going to stay? How long was he going to have to pretend to be well? Already, with actorish skills, he was firming up his eyes and straightening his back. He stood up, with a spring in his step. It was like watching a very aged actor trying to be sprightly. Jonathan could see himself move, very plainly, though his limbs were weighted to the chair.
His mother backed away from him. 'I'm all right. You keep sitting,' she said. Vapor wreathed out of her mouth, like steam. She found her way to another garden chair, uncertainly, nervously.
At first Jonathan thought it was cigarette smoke coming out of her mouth. But then he saw that she was sitting in a field of snow. Sparkles of sunlight blasted back up from it, like sand in his eyes. It was cold, where his mother was.
She leaned forward, uncertain how to begin. This was not the confident businesswoman that his mother had become. Now in her sixties, Jonathan's mother had lost all sense of fear and, because of that, all sense of style.
This was his young and insecure mother, who had no assurances how well her life would turn out, who wanted everything to be new and modern, who threw out anything old, who was a model but who still did not believe she was beautiful. This was his mother when she was younger than he was now. Poor ghost.
Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
'Did you ever notice,' she began, hesitantly, 'how in biographies they never tell you much about the adult's relationship with his parents?'
'Yes,' said Jonathan. Indeed he had, being interested in history The words flowed out of his mouth slowly and messily like molasses.
'It's because people are embarrassed by it,' said his mother. There were no creases in her cheeks, no patches of scaly skin on her wrists. Her lipstick was ruby red and her hair black.
'It's embarrassing for everyone. Embarrassing for the child who needs to become independent. How can you be independent when there is someone who still calls you their child? For the parents, it's a constant reminder how old they are and how strange life is. They look at the face of a forty-year-old man and say, I gave birth to him. I held his hand as a baby.'
Jonathan couldn't see what was happening behind the snow-blind sunglasses.
'When you were first born,' his mother said, 'I took you out into a field of snow, like this one.' She held out her hands, and showed him the Canadian field. 'I held you up against my cheek and it was as though I were launching you into the future. It seemed to me you were like a branch, that would grow into the year 2000.'
Somehow they were back in Los Angeles.
