Nostalgia

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 22 of 45 · 20 per page

• From White Oleander (1999)

  It was dark even in the daytime, because it faced north, but it had a spectacular view of the Hollywood sign, the reason he took it in the first place. “Snow again,” he said along with Garbo, tilting his face up like hers. “Eternal snow.” He handed me a bowl of sunflower seeds. “I am Garbo.” I cracked seeds in my teeth and flicked off the rubber sandals I’d been wearing since April. I couldn’t tell my mother I’d outgrown my shoes again. I didn’t want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid’s shoes grown too small, the reason she was clawing at the windows like Michael’s dying tomatoes. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress. “What are you reading these days?” I asked Michael. He was an actor, but he didn’t work that much, and he wouldn’t do TV, so he made most of his money reading for Books on Tape. He had to do it under a pseudonym, Wolfram Malevich, because it was nonunion. We could hear him every morning, very early, through the wall. He knew German and Russian from the army, he’d been in army intelligence—an oxymoron, he always said—so they put him on German and Russian authors. “Chekhov short stories.” He leaned forward and handed me the book from the coffee table. It was full of notes and Post-its and underlines. I leafed through the book. “My mother hates Chekhov. She says anybody who ever read him knows why there had to be a revolution.” “Your mother.” Michael smiled. “Actually, you might really like him. There’s a lovely melancholy in Chekhov.” We both turned to the TV to catch the best line in Queen Christina , saying along with Garbo, “The snow is like a white sea, one could go out and be lost in it… and forget the world.” I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple. My deepest fear was that someday she would find her way back there and never return. It was why I always waited up when she went out on nights like this, no matter how late she came home. I had to hear her key in the lock, smell her violet perfume again. And I tried not to make it worse by asking for things, pulling her down with my thoughts. I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn’t they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners?

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  One reason is that we are Americans, and it is now over a century and a half since the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes announced, “We are the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people. Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes.” That is a claim repeated often today—by liberals sadly and conservatives gladly—as our leaders work on those “necessary accidents” in places like Iraq. Since 2000, therefore, we go on a regular annual pilgrimage to wander and ponder the shattered ruins of “our prototypes” in the Roman Empire of two thousand years ago. The other reason is that we are Christians traveling—but much more comfortably than he did—in the footsteps of Paul. We go to cities Paul visited, such as Antioch in Pisidia or Perga in Pamphylia. But we also go to ones Paul never visited, such as Aphrodisias in Caria or Priene in Ionia. There too we can see monuments to that Roman imperial theology against which he brought Pauline Christian theology as God’s alternative vision for global peace. That beautiful early fall morning, we come south from Ephesus to the city of Priene, which climbs up the base of Mount Mycale in a triumph of terrace over terrain. It was and is high above the Meander Plain and so—unlike Tarsus—far above marshes, mosquitoes, and malaria. The city has long been in ruins, but its mighty acropolis still towers above the ever expanding plain. And down there workers—now migratory ones from eastern Turkey—still toil in the cotton fields beneath the Mediterranean sun with little of the breeze that refreshes the heights above them. We climb up toward the ancient city’s main temple, dedicated to Athena, virgin goddess of war and wisdom—not oxymoron, but redundancy for the Greek empire and every empire before and after it. The temple complex was slowly but steadily constructed for three hundred years from the time of Alexander to that of Augustus, a tribute to the warrior goddess from one world conqueror after another. In the temple’s inner sanctum Athena’s cult statue was once helmeted; she held arms in her left hand and a statuette of Victory (Niké) in her right. On this late September morning, Athena’s great temple is indicated by only five of its original thirty outside columns. They were erected a half century ago by a local construction company to about 4 feet short of their original height. All around them is a vast array of shattered marble chunks and toppled marble drums destroyed by the area’s frequent earthquakes. We sit with our group, as we do each year, outside the temple’s east end on the broken remains of the altar to meditate on a fallen beam that was once located high above the main entrance to the temple’s inner shrine. It is now reconstructed on the ground at our feet, and its large Greek lettering is clearly legible across two huge chunks—two more were added by the time we returned in September 2004.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The sunrise was a pale rubbing along the eastern horizon, gray-white clouds like scumbled pastels, a sponge-painted sky. Gradually, the manmade features of the landscape receded—the train yards, freeway, houses, and roads—until all that remained was blue hills backlit by dawn light, red over the ridgeline. It was a set for a western movie. I could almost see the arms of giant saguaro, the scurry of coyote and kit fox. The Great Basin, Valley of Smoke. I held my breath. I wished it could always be like this, no people, no city, just rising sun and blue hills. But the sun cleared the ridge, returning the 2 and the 5, early traffic moving downtown, truck drivers heading to Bakersfield, thinking about pancakes, and us in the van on garbage day. We continued to sift the city’s flotsam, rescuing a wine rack and a couple of broken cane-bottom chairs. We took on an aluminum walker, a box of musty books, and a full recycling bin of Rolling Rock empties that sharpened the mold smell in the back. I pocketed a book about Buddhism, and one called My Antonia. I liked these winding streets and hillside spills of bougainvillea, the long flights of stairs. We drove by the house where Anaïs Nin lived, and I had no one to point it out to. My mother used to like to drive by the places famous writers lived in L.A.—Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, Isherwood, Huxley. I remembered this particular view of the lake, the Chinese mailbox. We had all her books. I liked their titles—Ladders to Fire, House of Incest —and her face on the covers, the false eyelashes, her storybook hair coiled and twisted. There was a picture of her with her head in a birdcage. But who was left to care? We stopped for doughnuts, startling a convention of parking lot pigeons that rose in a great flickering wheel of dark and light grays, taking the stale morning sun on their wings, the freshness already bled from the air. Yvonne stayed in the van, reading her magazine. The girl at the counter at Winchell’s rubbed sleep from her eyes as Rena, Niki, and I came into the shop. Rena bent over the glass case in her cherry-red pants, giving an on-purpose bust-and-rump show for the homeless men and mental patients from the nearby board and care, cruelly flaunting what they couldn’t have, and I couldn’t help thinking of Claire when the bum smelled her hair. We ordered our doughnuts, jelly-filled, custard, glazed. Rena had the girl refill her coffee cup. Outside, a man squatted by the door, in his arms a tray of ladybugs in plastic bubbles. “Ladybug,” he half sang. “Laaaady-bug.” He was a small man, wiry, of indeterminate age, his face weathered, his black beard and long ponytail shot with gray. Unlike most street people, he didn’t seem drunk or insane. Rena and Niki ignored him, but I stopped to look at the red specks crawling in the bubble.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Seven years ago today we took the leis from the florist’s boxes and shook the water in which they were packed onto the grass outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue. The white peacock spread his fan. The organ sounded. She wove white stephanotis into the thick braid that hung down her back. She dropped a tulle veil over her head and the stephanotis loosened and fell. The plumeria blossom tattooed just below her shoulder showed through the tulle. “Let’s do it,” she whispered. The little girls in leis and pale dresses skipped down the aisle and walked behind her up to the high altar. After all the words had been said the little girls followed her out the front doors of the cathedral and around past the peacocks (the two iridescent blue-and-green peacocks, the one white peacock) to the Cathedral house. There were cucumber and watercress sandwiches, a peach-colored cake from Payard, pink champagne. Her choices, all. Sentimental choices, things she remembered. I remembered them too. When she said she wanted cucumber and watercress sandwiches at her wedding I remembered her laying out plates of cucumber and watercress sandwiches on the tables we had set up around the pool for her sixteenth-birthday lunch. When she said she wanted leis in place of bouquets at her wedding I remembered her at three or four or five getting off a plane at Bradley Field in Hartford wearing the leis she had been given when she left Honolulu the night before. The temperature in Connecticut that morning was six degrees below zero and she had no coat (she had been wearing no coat when we left Los Angeles for Honolulu, we had not expected to go on to Hartford) but she had seen no problem. Children with leis don’t wear coats, she advised me. Sentimental choices. On the day of that wedding she got all her sentimental choices except one: she had wanted the little girls to go barefoot in the cathedral (memory of Malibu, she was always barefoot in Malibu, she always had splinters from the redwood deck, splinters from the deck and tar from the beach and iodine for the scratches from the nails in the stairs in between) but the little girls had new shoes for the occasion and wanted to wear them. MR. AND MRS. JOHN GREGORY DUNNE REQUEST THE HONOR OF YOUR PRESENCE AT THE MARRIAGE OF THEIR DAUGHTER, QUINTANA ROO TO MR. GERALD BRIAN MICHAEL ON SATURDAY THE TWENTY-SIXTH OF JULY AT TWO O’CLOCK The stephanotis. Was that another sentimental choice? Did she remember the stephanotis? Is that why she wanted it, is that why she wove it into her braid?

• From White Oleander (1999)

  From San Miguel. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to determine the quality of the poet’s oeuvre, but Alejandro the painter was very bad indeed. He should not have created at all. He should have simply sat on a stool and charged one to look at him. And so shy, he could never look in my eyes until after he’d finished speaking. Instead, he’d talk to my hand, the arch of my foot, the curve of my calf. Only after he had stopped could he look into my eyes. He trembled when we made love, the faint smell of geraniums. But he was never shy with you, was he? You had such long conversations—conspiring, head to head. I felt excluded. He was the one who taught you to draw. He would draw for you, and then you would draw after him. La mesa, la botilla, las mujeres. I tried to teach you poetry, but you were always so obstinate. Why would you never learn anything from me? I wish we’d never left Guanajuato. Mother. Alejandro the painter. Watching the line flow from his fingers, the movements of his arm. Was he a bad painter? It never occurred to me, as it never occurred to me that she could have felt excluded. She was beautiful there, she wore a white dress, and the buildings were ochre and yellow, her sandals crisscrossed like a Roman’s up her leg. I traced the white X’s when she took them off. The hotel with screens and scrollwork around the door, the rooms open to the tiled walkway. You could hear what everybody was saying. When she smoked a joint she had to blow it out the balcony doors. It was a strange room, ochre, taller than it was square. She liked it, said there was room to think. And the bands of mariachis competed in the street below, the sound of concerts every night, from our beds under the netting. “So?” Rena said. “Is she getting out?” “No,” I said. Driving up from San Miguel de Allende in his toy-sized Citroën car, his shirt very white against his copper skin. Was she admitting she made a mistake? If only she could admit it. Confess. I might lie for her then, talk to her lawyer, take the stand and swear beyond a shadow of a doubt that she never. Perhaps this was as close as she would get to admitting a thing. I wished we had stayed in Guanajuato too. THEN NIKI moved out. She was joining a Toronto band, it was one of Werner’s. “Come with me,” she said as she loaded her pickup. I handed her a suitcase, zebra-striped. We both smiled, checked each other for tears. She left me some addresses and phone numbers, but I knew I wouldn’t be using them. I had to face this, that people left and you didn’t see them again. Within a week, Rena moved two new girls into Niki’s room, Shana and Raquel, twelve and fourteen.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  My classmates knew about Paul and me, we were the wild children with all the talent, living on my waitress tips and sidewalk sales of our handmade rearview-mirror ornaments. They wished they could be us. We are the free birds, I could still hear Rena say. That year, I craved suitcases. I haunted the flea market near the Tiergarten, bargaining and trading for old-fashioned suitcases—there were thousands for sale now, since unification. Leather with yellow celluloid handles. Train cases and hatboxes. In the old Eastern sector, no one had ever thrown them out, because there had been nothing to replace them with. Now they sold cheap, the Easterners were buying the latest carry-ons, uprights with wheels. Along the flea market booths of the Strasse des 17 Juni, the dealers all knew me. Handkofferfräulein, they called me. Suitcase girl. I was making altars inside them. Secret, portable museums. Displacement being the modern condition, as Oskar Schein liked to say. He kept wanting to buy one, but I couldn’t sell, though Paul and I were quite obviously broke. I needed them. Instead, I made Oskar one of his own for his birthday, with Louise Brooks as Lulu, and inflation marks in denominations of hundreds of thousands, toy train tracks like veins, and a black plastic clay swamp in the bottom printed with a giant bootprint that I’d filled with clear, green-tinted gel. Through the Lucite you could see the submerged likenesses of Goethe, Schiller, and Rilke. All winter long I sat on the floor in the corner of the flat with my glue and my clay, resins and solvents and paint and thread and bags of scavenged materials, my coat still on, my fingerless gloves. I could never decide whether to work with the windows open to ventilate fumes, or closed to stay warm. It depended. Sometimes my sense of futurity was stronger, sometimes my sense there was only the past. I was creating my personal museum. They were all here: Claire and Olivia, my mother and Starr, Yvonne and Niki and Rena, Amelia Ramos, Marvel. The Musée de Astrid Magnussen. I’d had to leave everything behind at Rena’s when I went to New York to find Paul, all my boxes and souvenirs, everything but my mother’s four books and the jewelry I’d acquired, the aquamarine ring, the amethyst, and the stolen necklace, plus eight hundred dollars in cash. Before I left, Sergei slipped me the name of a Russian fence in Brighton Beach, Ivan Ivanov, who would help me transfer my stash into cash. “He don’t speak much of English, but he give you good price.” The phoenix must burn to emerge, I kept thinking as I took a bus across the country with nothing but the address of a comic book store on St. Marks Place to steer by. But now I’d assembled it again, my museum. There, against the wall, in this cold northern city, I’d re-created my life.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  To give myself countenance, to escape, I continued writing for seven hours, like all the others. I even made the most of the extra fifteen minutes of grace granted to the stragglers. That is because my whole life was rising up in my throat again, because I was writing without thinking, straight from the heart to the pen. At the close of this exhausting session, I had some fifty pages to carry away with me. Perhaps, as I now straighten out this narrative, I can manage to see more clearly into my own darkness and to find a way out. PART ONE The Blind Alley ~ 1. THE BLIND ALLEY ~ My father’s breathing, a rapid hissing, punctuated the nighttime silence of our room. The world of my childhood was reassured and protected by this asthmatic breathing that dispelled the terrors of my solitary awakenings. When the moon rose high and plunged its light deep into the narrow blind alley, the anxieties of night stopped at the bars of our window, as their shadows, slowly revolving, cast a pattern of squares on the wall of the room. But I hated to stare at the room that was all sticky with the darkness that seemed to distend the clothes hanging from nails in the wall behind the closed door, that appeared to stifle the mirror of the wardrobe, and then to dissolve itself in a bluish mist by the window. I kept my eyes closed and was soon asleep again. Now, I want to remember all this. My life has known days of innocence when I had only to close my eyes in order not to see. Regularly, at dawn, I was awakened by the muffled and spasmodic rumbling of the garbage carts. Frightened, I would nestle close to my father in the big family bed, with my legs against his belly. He would then place his heavy hand on my head, with a gesture that had become a ritual. After the resounding crashes of the empty garbage cans being dropped to the ground, the cart would move heavily away, stumbling with all its loosely joined boards over the uneven street-paving. I would then fall asleep again until morning. My mother was always the first to rise, always in a hurry to begin her daily life at once; and soon the odor of Turkish coffee would fill the kitchen and overflow into our room. My mornings of hope are still perfumed with Turkish coffee.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Sometimes you end up elsewhere; then you realize that the goal you had set yourself wasn’t really so worthwhile after all. I studied at a little dressing table which I covered with thick layers of newspaper to smooth its broken marble top and to avoid touching the cold stone surface which I detested. Each time I raised my eyes from my notebook, I met my own face in the broken mirror. I can see once more, in the wintry semidarkness, a thin boy with a long neck and hectic black eyes, his hair tousled by his nervous fingers; he had to put two cushions on his low stool in order to reach the high dressing table. I loved to study by myself and to ask the mirror who I was and what my face promised. From having worked before the glass all through my adolescence, much of it has remained vivid in my memory. Night fell early but, for the sake of economy, my mother was always late in lighting the tiny lamp that strained my eyes and made me nearsighted. To this day, I still experience real anguish from that yellow light. When I roam at night in poor neighborhoods and peep indiscreetly through their feebly-lighted windows, I am overcome by the painful memory of a crazily furnished flat with distant corners that the light could never reach. When my father came home, he noisily threw the big store key on the marble-topped dresser. Then he flung himself heavily on the creaking bed. Climbing the stairs had worn him out. He didn’t speak, nor did anyone else dare to speak until his breathing whistled less loudly. Since he never came home for lunch, we managed to forget him during the day; but seeing him each evening like this, glum and broken, was a poignant reminder of how hard his life was. His asthma attacks grew more and more frequent, more and more violent, and the idea of death began to torment him. In silence, we felt guilty as we watched him suffer. He left the house at seven in the morning, winter and summer, and worked without a break until night had fallen. When the days were too short, he managed to work longer by the light of a large oil lamp. The youngest among us always brought my father’s lunch to the shop; we had all had our turn at bringing the meal which not only turned cold on the way but arrived — meat, salad, and bread — jolted into one messy dish. We had often suggested he buy a little stove to heat his meal; but he always refused, rejecting any improvement in his life, as if he were too trapped to hope for any relief. “Rotten day,” he said at last. “Not one serious customer.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  For my ten o’clock snack, my mother always gave me two pennies and a big piece of bread crust, of the bread that she kneaded herself and took to the Arab oven to bake. With my two pennies, I could buy myself a piece of chocolate or the makings of a sandwich. Chaoul, the school janitor, did sell whole sandwiches made of exquisite small loaves of white bread, but these cost ten pennies. So Chaoul would dig with his agile finger into my piece of bread to bury in it a couple of green olives, as many black olives, a sliver of anchovy, a few crumbs of tuna fish, and a bit of boiled vegetable, all of which he then seasoned with olive oil. I watched this carefully to make sure that he gave me all the tuna I was entitled to and that he refrained from giving me any arissa, the strange sauce of fire-red peppers that all my compatriots carry with them wherever they travel, for fear of ever running out of it. Arissa always burned my palate and gave me a cold sweat.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Later, I was surprised to learn that there are people who dislike the odor of tanner’s bark; for me, it remains one of my basic experiences of smell. Beneath our big family bed we always had a store of skins of all kinds, and during the long summer siestas I often slept in our shop on improvised beds of leather that imposed their character on my dreams. I can reconstruct the whole world and find my way about it like a fox, guiding myself by the warm and masculine scent of the leathers from France, by the tart, heavy and greasy odor of white skins, the stink of stables that clings to fresh skins as they rot, the almond bitterness of blackened calfskins. In the big salesroom, we would meet my father’s artisan colleagues, all just as awkward in their Sunday clothes. Balancing themselves on the tips of their toes as they crouched so as not to dirty their clothes by sitting or kneeling, they felt the skins with their heavy fingers before they selected those they wanted. They greeted each other cheerlessly. Nakil, a big fellow with a face that was all hard angles around his piercing eyes, was the one they all watched most closely, the one they feared and envied most. Once a year he went to France to make a few purchases without having to go through the hands of the wholesalers. “He’s a devil,” my father always said, and I hated him too, with the hatred that all felt for him. Only later did I understand why he was so relentless in his attempts, in the hard day-to-day struggle for life, to snatch customers of merchandise from his colleagues: he was the father of two invalids, a paraplegic son who, at the age of eighteen, lived in a wheel chair, at the mercy of all the street urchins, and an idiot daughter whose mental development had stopped at the age of four. My father was more tolerant, however, of Bichik, a fantastic character, and of the terrifying Baba Fredj. The nose, mouth, and eyes of Fredj were normal, but they were all crowded together within a tiny area of his enormous head. Perhaps my childhood has left me a magnified image of them, but I am sure of the extraordinary size of his hands, because I was always surprised to see how small the hammer seemed when he held it.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  After the resounding crashes of the empty garbage cans being dropped to the ground, the cart would move heavily away, stumbling with all its loosely joined boards over the uneven street-paving. I would then fall asleep again until morning. My mother was always the first to rise, always in a hurry to begin her daily life at once; and soon the odor of Turkish coffee would fill the kitchen and overflow into our room. My mornings of hope are still perfumed with Turkish coffee. We lived at the bottom of the Impasse Tarfoune, in a little room where I was born one year after my sister Kalla. With the Barouch family we shared the ground floor of a shapeless old building, a sort of two-room apartment. The kitchen, half of it roofed over and the rest an open courtyard, was a long vertical passage toward the light. But before reaching this square of pure blue sky, it received, from a multitude of windows, all the smoke, the smells, and the gossip of our neighbors. At night, each locked himself up in his room; but in the morning, life was always communal, running along the tunnel of a kitchen, mingling the waters from the kitchen sinks, the smells of coffee, and the voices still muffled with sleep. We took turns with the Barouch family to go into the kitchen to the only washbasin with its single faucet. We came there fully dressed so as not to catch cold while crossing the little yard, and we had to be content with spreading a lather of soap over our faces as far as our ears while taking care not to wet the collars of our shirts. But it was forbidden for us, whether for reasons of self-esteem, hygiene, or religious belief, to sit down to a meal without first washing our faces. In our alley, the goatherd would announce his impatience with long blows on his horn. My mother would remove the two iron bars that protected our front door against thieves and pogroms. I never dared follow her as she pushed through the compact herd of goats that stared at her without blinking their insolent and surprised eyes. The Maltese goatherd wore a thick red flannel sash around his loins, and he would squat down against the wall, on his patched boots. He would take the brown earthenware pot and grab a goat at random to draw from her the sudden spurts of foaming milk. Angry infants, always numerous in our part of town, cried sourly. The street, seeming to awaken with regret, grumbled from all its open windows, shaking itself free from the sluggishness of a light mist that slowly settled on the damp paving stones. The sun was still benevolent.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I still saw no relationship between their riches and my own poverty, but Saul’s self-centered lack of any awareness established the first link between the two. He could take away from me the two pennies for my breakfast in order to purchase himself an unnecessary Nestlé bar, and then was able to throw away the chocolate that I could not afford. Saul never remembered to repay me my two pennies, which was quite natural, for it was such a small sum... ~ 3. OLD CLOTHES ~ Memory tends perhaps to exaggerate the length of this happy period when I was an innocent in a world that I still believed to be innocent. I belonged to my family and to our alley, I lived according to the laws of this world and joyfully accepted its sanctions. Once, because I had cursed the Name of God, I was severely whipped with a belt on the soles of my feet. For three days I was unable to walk, but I felt that my punishment was just and had even saved me from worse when I learned about the danger I had faced: in Hell, I would have had my eyelids torn off and would have been forced to stare without blinking at the midday sun. The mere thought of this otherworldly punishment made me imagine the sufferings so vividly that tears came to my eyes to protect them from so much light. But my easy happiness could not last very long, this life ruled by respect that was also confidence and by fears of punishments that were felt to be just. Very soon, some serious hints began to upset the established order, in spite of the uninterrupted presence of my parents and of the community . I was not born in the ghetto. Our alley was at the frontier of the Jewish quarter of Tunis, but this was enough to satisfy my father’s pride. In the cool twilight of summer days the heat often drove us out of our rooms, and we made ourselves comfortable in chairs leaned against the wall and cushioned with pillows. The men wore their long white underpants, the women their housecoats of printed cotton, and the blind alley took on the air of a common living-room. My father was a better talker than Barouch, so that everybody listened to him. He liked to contrast the dreamy silence of our alley, cool from having recently been watered, with the offensive stink of the ghetto alleys.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  At the house in Brentwood Park in which we lived from 1978 until 1988, a house so determinedly conventional (two stories, center-hall plan, shuttered windows, and a sitting room off every bedroom) as to seem in situ idiosyncratic (“their suburbia house in Brentwood” was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need), there was stephanotis growing outside the terrace doors. I would brush the waxy flowers when I went out to the garden. Outside the same doors there were beds of lavender and also mint, a tangle of mint, made lush by a dripping faucet. We moved into that house the summer she was about to start the seventh grade at what was then still the Westlake School for Girls in Holmby Hills. This was like yesterday. We moved out of that house the year she was about to graduate from Barnard. This too was like yesterday. The stephanotis and mint were dead by then, killed when the man who was buying the house insisted that we rid it of termites by tenting it and pumping in Vikane and chloropicrin. At the time this buyer bid on the house he sent us word via the brokers, apparently by way of closing the deal, that he wanted the house because he could picture his daughter marrying in the garden. This was a few weeks before he required us to pump in the Vikane that killed the stephanotis, killed the mint, and also killed the pink magnolia into which the twelve-year-old who took so assiduously removed a view of our suburbia house in Brentwood had until then been able to look from her second-floor sitting-room windows. The termites, I was quite sure, would come back. The pink magnolia, I was also quite sure, would not. We closed the deal and moved to New York. Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Condé Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married. Where I have lived again since 1988. Why then do I say I lived much of this time in California?

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I remember the Christmas she took that picture. We had arrived on Barbados at night. She had gone immediately to bed and I had sat outside listening to a radio and trying to locate a line I believed to be from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques but was never able to find: “The tropics are not exotic, they are merely out of date.” At some point after she went to sleep news had come on the radio: since our arrival on Barbados the United States had invaded Panama. When the first light came I had woken her with this necessary, or so it seemed to me, information. She had covered her face with the sheet, clearly indicating no interest in pursuing the topic. I had nonetheless pressed it. I knew “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night, she had said. I asked how she had known “exactly yesterday” we were going to invade Panama last night. Because all the SIPA photographers were stopping by the office yesterday, she said, picking up credentials for the Panama invasion. SIPA was the photo agency for which she then worked. She had again burrowed beneath the sheet. I did not ask why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour flight down. “For Mom and Dad,” the inscription on the photograph reads. “Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q.” She had known exactly yesterday we were going to invade Panama last night. The tropics were not exotic, they were merely out of date. Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can. Even in those Malibu photographs which are unfamiliar, I recognize certain elements: the improvised end table by a chair in the living room, one of my mother’s “Craftsman” dinner knives on the table we identified as “Aunt Kate’s,” the straightbacked wooden Hitchcock chairs my mother-in-law had painted black-and-gold to send to us from Connecticut. The oleander branch on which she swings is familiar, the curve of the beach on which she kicks through the wash is familiar. The clothes of course are familiar. I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window. I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines. Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working. So read the list of “Mom’s Sayings” that she posted one day in the garage, an artifact of the “club” she had started with a child who lived down the beach. What remained until now unfamiliar, what I recognize in the photographs but failed to see at the time they were taken, are the startling depths and shallows of her expressions, the quicksilver changes of mood.

• From What We Lost in the Swamp: Poems (2023)

  something to see through, something to show you there is beauty on the other side. I know that one day soon, he & I will be sitting on the floor by the big bay window, watching as the mother birds flutter by, as they hide in the sanctum of our green & leafy hedge & there you’ll be, turning the corner, ​waving as you walk up to our door. ROOTSNature vs. Nurture. Man vs. Man vs. Plant. I hear their laughter blooming in the highest of their branches. Sure disaster, one oak whispers, how they act as if us trees will not outlive them, how they think we cannot speak, how they choose to never see the roots connected. FOR THE LOVE OF DUSK IIBack East, dusk looks different, better than I remember. The autumn sky— a chilly silver screen of film noir, full of mystery, of romance between fleeting light & the silhouettes of branches. I breathe in brisk air & receive at this secret meeting of the trench coat trees, a coded message: remember the beauty that’s forgotten, the little things we leave behind anytime our road diverges. SANDBOXI miss the bliss of ignorance, the carefree days of youthful play, digging holes in search of gold, sculpting castles from my mounds of endless time. How fast the sandbox turns into an hourglass. But I am stubborn. I will build & I will play, as long as this sinking sand will have me. MY BROTHER,if all else fails, if every last tomato plant in the garden shrivels up, if we have nothing but ourselves, promise me you’ll be out front where the lawn meets the street, where the two leaning tree trunks twist into one; that if I’m brave enough this time to climb as high as you, you’ll be there waiting to hoist me up that final branch, to share the sunset view. LETTER TO MY FORMER SELFI’m the kind of guy who listens to rain on a clear day. You’re the kind of guy who’s always rainbows & butterflies (decaying on the inside). I’m the kind of guy who watches Hocus Pocus in July, who catches flies & lets them go, who likes the smell of fresh-laid mulch. You’re the kind of guy who thinks of death instead of growth, who thinks of dirt as something chewed & someday you. You’re the kind of guy who always paints the roses red, while I paint blue. You’re the kind of guy who always does the things he’s told. I live my truth. THE WAGON GAMEThat smell of summer rain on asphalt brings me back to the days of the wagon game. Our four little bodies packed like sardines in that red-green bin, teetering at the top of our driveway. How the wheels gave slowly, our tiny toes gnawed on by gravity, how whoever sat in front had the immense responsibility of steering, of guiding us down the steep terrain. Captain who had to make

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Quintana’s christening was in 1966, this Christian Dior show was two years later, 1968: 1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States but they were for women who presented themselves a certain way the same time. It was a way of looking, it was a way of being. It was a period. What became of that way of looking, that way of being, that time, that period? What became of the women smoking cigarettes in their Chanel suits and their David Webb bracelets, what became of Diana holding the champagne flute and one of Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton plates? What became of Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton plates? What became of the clay tennis court at the house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, the court I watched Quintana weed on her fat baby knees? What gave Quintana the idea that weeding a court on which no one ever played—even the net was down, punched through during years of neglect, dragging in the weeds and the dust that got scuffed off the clay—was a necessary task, her assignment, her duty? Was weeding the unused tennis court at the house on Franklin Avenue something like equipping the projection room in the doll’s house in Malibu? Was weeding the unused tennis court something like writing a novel? Was it one more way of assuming an adult role? Why did she so need to assume an adult role? Whatever became of those fat baby knees, whatever became of Bunny Rabbit? As it happens I know what became of Bunny Rabbit. She left Bunny Rabbit in a suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu. I learned this halfway across the Pacific, when she was sitting next to me in the darkened upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am flight back to Los Angeles. There was still a Pan Am then. There was still a TWA then. There was still a Pan Am and there was still a TWA and Bendel’s was still on West Fifty-seventh Street and it still had Holly’s Harp chiffons and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two. Sitting next to me on that evening flight back to Los Angeles my child mourned Bunny Rabbit’s cruel fate: Bunny Rabbit was lost, Bunny Rabbit was left behind, Bunny Rabbit had been abandoned. Yet by the time we taxied into the gate at LAX she had successfully translated Bunny Rabbit’s cruel fate into Bunny Rabbit’s good luck: the Royal Hawaiian, the suite, the room-service breakfasts. Where did the morning went. The white sand, the swimming pool. Walking to the reef. Swimming off the raft. Bunny Rabbit was even now, we could be certain, swimming off the raft. Swim off the raft, walk to the reef. Imagine a five-year-old walking to the reef. Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it. How could I not still need that child with me?

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  How could I have missed what was so clearly there to be seen? Did I not read the poem she brought home that year from the school on the steep hill? The school to which she wore the plaid uniform jumper and carried the blue lunchbox? The school to which John watched her walk every morning and thought it was as beautiful as anything he had ever seen? “The World,” this poem is called, and I recognize her careful printing, quixotically executed on a narrow strip of construction paper fourteen inches long but only two inches wide. I see that careful printing every day: the strip of construction paper is now framed on a wall behind my kitchen in New York, along with a few other mementos of the period: a copy of Karl Shapiro’s “California Winter,” torn from The New Yorker; a copy of Pablo Neruda’s “A Certain Weariness,” typed by me on one of the several dozen Royal manuals my father had bought (along with a few mess halls, a fire tower, and the regulation khaki Ford jeep on which I learned to drive) at a government auction; a postcard from Bogotá, sent by John and me to Quintana in Malibu; a photograph showing the coffee table in the beach house living room after dinner, the candles burning down and the silver baby cups filled with santolina; a mimeographed notice from the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District instructing residents of the district what to do “when the fire comes.” Do note: not “if the fire comes.” When the fire comes. No one at the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District was talking about what most people see when they hear the words “brush fire,” a few traces of smoke and an occasional lick of flame: at the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District they were talking about fires that burned on twenty-mile fronts and spotted ahead twelve-foot flames as they moved. This was not forgiving territory: consider finding the driveway. Also consider “The World” itself, its eccentric strip of construction paper and careful printing obscuring one side of the mimeographed notice from the Topanga–Las Virgenes Fire District. Since the choices made by the careful printer may or may not have meaning, I give you the text of “The World” with her spacing, her single misspelling: THE WORLD The world Has nothing But morning And night It has no Day or lunch So this world Is poor and desertid. This is some Kind of an Island with Only three Houses on it In these Families are 2,1,2, people In each house So 2,1,2 make Only 5 people On this Island.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘Oh, come. You knew him as well as you know yourself! The story of the will - so called - that he handed to Louise MacMillar. It was in i9°9> an<i at the time I am speaking of, I was one of the Gerault pack, his pack of “faithful hounds’* — and there were five of us he fed every evening at La Belle Meuniere down at Nice; but on the Promenade des Anglais, you must remember, we only had eyes for you - dolled up in white like an English baby, and Lea all in white as well. ... Ah! what a pair you made! You were the sensation - a miracle, straight from the hands of the Creator! Gerault used to tease Lda: “You’re far too youngs girlie, and what’s worse you’re too proud. I shan’t take you on for fifteen or twenty years at least. ...” And to think that such a man had to be taken from us! Not a tear at his funeral that wasn’t genuine, the whole nation was in mourning. And now let me get on with the story of the will. ...’ Cheri was deluged with a perfect flood of incidents, a tide of bygone regrets and harmless resurrections, all declaimed with the ease and rapidity of a professional mourner. The two of them formed a symmetrical pattern as they leaned towards each other. The Pal lowered her voice when she came to the dramatic passages, giving out a sudden laugh or exclamation; and he saw in one of the lookingglasses how closely they seemed to resemble the whispering couple whose place they had taken. He got up, finding it imperative to put an end to this resemblance. The barman imitated his movement, but from afar, like a discreet dog when its master comes to the end of a visit. ‘Ah! well ... yes ...’ said the Pal, ‘well, I’ll finish the rest another time.’ ‘After the next war,* said Cheri jokingly. ‘Tell me, those two capital letters. ... Yes, the monogram in little brilliants. ... It’s not yours, Pal?’ He pointed at the black bag wi th the tip of his forefinger, extending it slowly while withdrawing his body, as though the bag were alive. ‘Nothing escapes you,’ the Pal said in admiration. ‘You’re quite right. She gave it to me, of course. She said to me: “Such bits of finery are far too frivolous for me nowadays!” She said: “What the devil do you suppose I’d be doing with those mirrors and powder and things, when I’ve a great face like a country policeman’s?” She made me laugh. ...’ To stem the flood, Cheri pushed the change from his hundredfranc note towards the Pal. ‘For your taxi, Pal/ They went out on to the pavement by the tradesman’s entrance, and Cheri saw from the fainter lamplight that night was coming on. ‘Have you not got your motor?’ ‘My motor? No. I walked; it does me good/

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember. S 12 idney Korshak, 88, Dies; Fabled Fixer for the Chicago Mob: So read the headline on Sidney Korshak’s obituary, when he died in 1996, in The New York Times. “It was a tribute to Sidney Korshak’s success that he was never indicted, despite repeated Federal and state investigations,” the obituary continued. “And the widespread belief that he had in fact committed the very crimes the authorities could never prove made him an indispensable ally of leading Hollywood producers, corporate executives and politicians.” Thirty years before Morty Hall had declared on principle that he and Diana would refuse to go to any party given by Sidney Korshak. I remember Morty and Diana arguing heatedly at dinner one night over this entirely hypothetical point. Morty and Diana and the heated argument at dinner about whether or not to refuse to go to a party given by Sidney Korshak are, I have to conclude, what people mean when they mention my wonderful memories. I recently saw Diana in an old commercial, one of those curiosities that turn up on YouTube. She is wearing a pale mink stole, draping herself over the hood of an Olds 88. In her smoky voice, she introduces the Olds 88 as “the hottest number I know.” The Olds 88 at this point begins to talk to Diana, mentioning its own “rocket engine” and “hydra-matic drive.” Diana wraps herself in the pale mink stole. “This is great,” she replies to the Olds 88, again in the smoky voice. It occurs to me that Diana does not sound in this Olds 88 commercial as if she would necessarily refuse to go to a party given by Sidney Korshak. It also occurs to me that no one who now comes across this Olds 88 commercial on YouTube would know who Sidney Korshak was, or for that matter who Diana was, or even what an Olds 88 was. Time passes. Diana is dead now. She died in 1971, at age forty-five, of a cerebral bleed. She had collapsed after a wardrobe fitting for a picture she was due to start in a few days, the third lead, after Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, in Play It As It Lays, for which John and I had written the screenplay and in which she was replaced by Tammy Grimes. The last time I saw her was in an ICU at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. Lenny and I had gone together to Cedars to see her.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  512 Lecture 75: William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats Lecture 75 Born in Dublin in 1865, he was the eldest child of a middle-class, Anglo- Irish family. His father briefl y practiced law before giving it up to study painting in London, where he moved his family when the future poet was just 2 years old. W hen the boy was 7, his mother—Susan Mary Yeats—took him and his three new siblings off to Sligo, where they stayed for two years. They then returned to London, and at the age of 12 William entered the Godolphin School in Hammersmith—“an obscene, bullying place,” he later called it, where pretentious little English dimwits sneered at what one them called a “Mad Irishman.” None of them could have foreseen that he would eventually become the greatest Irish poet of his time. As a young man, he settled in London, where he launched the fi rst phase of his poetic career. Radiating nostalgia and a fascination with Celtic myth and folklore, Yeats’s early poems seek to recon fi rm “the ancient supremacy of the imagination.” Though he soon realized that poetry of this kind was escapist and that he had to shed the “old mythologies” like an old coat, he could never forsake aesthetic ornaments altogether, and like the women of “Adam’s Curse,” he knew that a poet “must labor to be beautiful”—even though labor alone could not ensure either beauty or art. In his plays and theater management, as well as in his poetry, Yeats labored to inspire the Irish through times of bitter con fl ict with England; much as he hated violence, he saluted the “terrible beauty” of the Easter Rising in 1916, Easter Uprising of 1916. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.