Thirty-Nine
GINNY AND I VENTURE PAST the gate for the first time in a week.
We use rags to clear the ash from the car’s windows, climb in to drive around.
Even with the reports and the news footage and the smoke and the noise, nothing prepared us for it.
Streets we drive daily, turned unrecognizable.
Entire blocks, razed. Rubble, like a scene from a war movie, like after a hurricane.
I drive us toward Gerard’s shop. Ginny sucks in a breath as we turn the corner.
There, as Lionel promised, his little building stands.
The windows are boarded up, Blood Brother Please Let Me Live spray-painted across the plywood.
A couple other stores on the block remain, boarded up, too. Negro own. Spare me. Pass me bye.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” I say. “Let’s go have lunch.” I drive north, end up in Chinatown. Ginny knows a restaurant here. We’re seated in the busy dining room, eat wonton soup and chicken chow mein, and at every table surrounding us, people are talking about Watts.
When we get back to the house, Nathalie’s on the patio.
“I thought you went home,” I say.
“I decided we should go to San Francisco.”
“Now?”
“I called Elise and asked her where we should stay. I told her I wanted somewhere simple and quiet. Somewhere we could take walks. After everything this past week … I can’t handle crowds.”
I nod. I feel the same.
“She suggested an inn right across from the ocean,” Nathalie says. “In a mellow part of town. I booked us a room for tonight and tomorrow. And made a dinner reservation nearby at a place called the Cliff House, for three of us for tomorrow night.”
“That’s a quick trip for such a far drive.”
“It’s all I can do. Some of the girls and I are singing this weekend at an engagement party in Beverly Hills.”
“It’s hard to believe that anyone in Los Angeles is throwing a party at a time like this.”
“I know,” she says. “But they are.”
“Should we call Delphine and make sure that tomorrow night works for her?”
“Can you do it?”
“Okay.”
I pretend, for Nathalie’s sake, that the thought of it doesn’t frighten me.
I leave the door open to the kitchen and Nathalie stays where she is.
I unfold the letter and dial the number she gave us.
A woman answers. Not Delphine’s voice, but then again, it’s been so many years. I say my name, ask if Delphine’s there.
“Oh!” the woman says. “She’ll be so glad you called. She’s at work right now, though. My name’s Mary Beth, I’m one of her flatmates. Can I take a message down for her?”
“Will you ask her if she can go to dinner tomorrow night at the Cliff House? Seven o’clock? We’re driving up tonight.”
A pause. “Sure,” Mary Beth says. “She usually gets home from work at around six. Is there a number where she could reach you just in case?”
I move the receiver away from my mouth. “Nathalie, what’s the name of the hotel?”
“The Seal Rock Inn,” she says from outside.
I repeat it and Mary Beth takes it down.
Ginny and I go into the bedroom. I pack my bag.
When I’m finished, we look at each other.
She’s calm, present. And there’s a different version of my life, one in which she’s been with me this whole time, ever since we met, knowing me and seeing me through every hard moment, so it’s fine to leave her every now and then.
But that isn’t how it went for us. And now that I have her, I don’t want to stray far, not even for a couple of nights. “I love you,” she says. “Good luck.”
And then we’re driving, Nathalie searching the radio for songs.
We stop for fuel, neither of us talking while the attendant fills our car, driving for hours and hours, the feeling that we’re headed somewhere forbidden.
It’s almost midnight when we reach the hotel.
We fall into bed, sleep into the morning.
There’s a television in the lobby, its volume turned low.
I carry the San Francisco Examiner and two cups of coffee up the stairs to our room and we sit in bed together, backs against pillows, reading about LA.
On the front page, below an article on Eisenhower and Bobby Kennedy’s clashing views on the riots, is a close-up photograph of Dr. King, his eyes wide, listening to Negro leaders in Watts.
Nathalie reads aloud. “‘The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flew into Los Angeles yesterday hoping to “redeem despite their guilt” the Negroes who took part in a six-day riot that took thirty-three lives.’ What about the police who actually took those people’s lives?
Where’s the part where he calls them guilty? ”
“I agree with you,” I say. “Of course, he’s devoted to nonviolence. But it still lands like a betrayal, for him to talk that way.”
She sets the paper aside, shifts her position so she’s facing me.
Her hair’s fastened in a loose bun, freckles smattering the bridge of her nose.
“Can you believe we lived through that?” she asks.
“I’m still in shock. Uncanny, right? Hearing all the noise, and everyone coming and going, but never going out into it.
And then the streets after. All covered in glass and broken things, and the buildings burned.
And now we’re in an inn in San Francisco? And maybe we’ll see Delphine?”
“I know,” I say. “It’s so much. I know.”
In the early afternoon we go downstairs and eat in the inn’s restaurant.
Bright white tulip tables and matching chairs, burnt-orange water glasses, black teapots, floor-to-ceiling windows like at Elise and Espen’s house.
When we’re finished eating we walk down the hill and the view catches us by surprise.
Somewhere, to the east of us, there’s a city.
Cable cars and skyscrapers and paved hills, bookstores and record stores and Macy’s.
Art galleries. A bay. But it’s hard to imagine any of that here.
This place where we are is called Land’s End.
The ground drops off and all we see are cliffs and ocean and sky.
We follow the road, pass the restaurant where we’ll have dinner later, the prospect of it sending a bolt of anxiety down my spine.
“Look at that funny building,” Nathalie says, pointing down some steps from the Cliff House.
A miniature castle, something built for children.
But no—it’s in the shape of an oversize camera, turned on its back.
What I thought was a tower is a lens. We go closer to see what it is.
GIANT CAMERA is painted across its side, admission is twenty-five cents.
“It’s a camera obscura,” she says. “Remember when you made us one?” I do.
The eve of my twenty-seventh birthday. All of us so young.
We pay and go in. It’s a small room with a six-foot concave circle at its center.
Pure darkness but for the light that streams through a point in the ceiling, the circle it illuminates, its reflection on the few people gathered around.
Nathalie and I find a spot on the circle’s perimeter.
First, we see trees and the road in saturated color and sharp focus.
Slowly, the picture shifts, turning. Trees give way to a long strip of beach, and then cliffs, and then water.
A glimmer, growing bright until it hurts my eyes, bursting with light, the sun shining on the ocean.
We stay and stay and watch the circle. Sometimes the world is on its side and other times it’s upside down and then it’s right again.
People come and go but we don’t know what else to do.
We’re waiting for evening. The attendant pokes his head in, tells us he’s closing up.
The brightness of stepping outside, the softer mist in the distance.
“Should we call her house again?” I ask. “To see if she’s planning on coming?”
But Nathalie shakes her head, and secretly I’m relieved.
Baths at the inn. A quiet hour, getting ready.
Nathalie wears a pink-and-yellow checkerboard dress cut high above the knee.
I wear a black top and skirt with a camel-colored jacket.
We’re windswept by the time we reach the Cliff House, its pink fluorescent sign bright through the fog.
The restaurant is bustling, warm. We’re led to our table and we sit on the same side of the booth, both of us staring at the door.
It’s been fifteen years. She might not look the same.
I don’t know. Out the window is the ocean.
The vast, misty sky, the gray-blue water, and Nathalie says, “She’s not going to come. ”
I’m terrified. Almost hope Nathalie’s right, that we’ll go home and continue as we have been.
Two mothers. I’ve said it so many times but suddenly, shamefully, I ache to be her only one.
“Maybe not,” I say. “But maybe she will.” I imagine Delphine arriving and it being okay.
I imagine rising to greet her, a tight embrace, smiling, saying she looks well, not sobbing or trembling or running away.
Not steeling my heart against her. Not feeling under attack.
Greeting her as simply a person greeting another person.
We’ll be three women in a restaurant on a Wednesday night.
But even remembering her in the hospital, her jolt, her pain a living thing, there’s a current of fury running under my skin.
I would have stayed with her through anything.
But she left me for Bill, and then she left me again.
A betrayal, after years of listening carefully to everything she ever told me.
After years of always telling her the truth.
The waitress comes to our table, sets a cup of hot water and lemon at my place. It’s the perfect thing, exactly what I want. “How did she know to bring me this?” I ask when she’s gone.
“You ordered it,” Nathalie says.