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.

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• 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 Blue Nights (2011)

  34Ifind myself studying, in a copy of The New York Review of Books, a Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren taken during a Christian Dior fashion show in Paris in 1968. In this photograph Sophia Loren is sitting on a gilt chair, wearing a silk turban and smoking a cigarette, achingly polished, forever soignée as she watches “the bride,” the traditional end of the show. It occurs to me that this Magnum photograph would have been taken not long after Sophia Loren herself had been “the bride,” in fact twice the bride, married in France to Carlo Ponti for the second time after the annulment of their original Mexican marriage, the marriage for which he had been charged with bigamy and threatened with excommunication in Italy. A “scandal” of the time. It has become hard to remember how reliably “scandal” once came our way. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a scandal. Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, a scandal. Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, a scandal. I continue studying the photograph. I imagine the object of this particular scandal leaving Dior and going to lunch in the courtyard of the Plaza Athénée. I imagine her sitting with Carlo Ponti in the courtyard, eating an éclair with a fork, the vines that line the courtyard blowing slightly, ivy, lierre, sunlight glowing pink through the red canvas canopies over the windows. I imagine the sound of the little birds that flock in the lierre, a twittering, a constant presence and an occasional—when, say, a metal shutter is opened, or when, say, Sophia Loren rises from her table to cross the courtyard—swelling of birdsong. I imagine her leaving the Plaza Athénée, photographers flashing around her as she slides into a waiting car on the Avenue Montaigne. The cigarette, the silk turban. It strikes me that she looks in this photograph not unlike the women in the photographs Nick took at Quintana’s christening.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But Stephen went slowly downstairs to her study where Puddle was sitting in front of the fire, and she thought that Puddle sat there as though tired; her hands were quite idle, and after a moment Stephen noticed that she was dozing. Very quietly Stephen opened her book, unwilling to rouse the little grey woman who looked so small in the huge leather chair, and whose head kept guiltily nodding. But the book seemed scarcely worth troubling to read, so that presently Stephen laid it aside and sat staring into the flickering logs that hummed and burnt blue be- cause it was frosty. On the Malvern Hills there would probably be snow; deep snow might be capping the Worcestershire Beacon. The air up at British Camp would be sweet with the smell of winter and open spaces — little lights would be glinting far down in the valley. At Morton the lakes would be still and frozen, so Peter the swan would be feeling friendly — in winter he had always fed from her hand — he must be old now, the swan called Peter. Coup! C-o-u-p! and Peter waddling towards her. He, who was all gliding grace on the water, would come awkwardly wad- dling towards her hand for the chunk of dry bread that she held in her fingers. Jean with his Adèle along in the kitchen—a nice-looking boy he was, Stephen had seen him — they were young, and both were exceedingly happy, for their parents ap- proved, so some day they would marry. Then children would come, too many, no doubt, for Jean’s slender purse, and yet in this life one must pay for one’s pleasures — they would pay with their children, and this appeared perfectly fair to Stephen. She thought that it seemed a long time ago since she herself had been a small child, romping about on the floor with her father, bother- ing Williams down at the stables, dressing up as young Nelson and posing for Collins who had sometimes been cross to young THE WELL OF LONELINESS 289 Nelson. She was nearly thirty, and what had she done? Written one good novel and one very bad one, with few mediocre short stories thrown in. Oh, well, she was going to start writing again quite soon — she had an idea for a novel. But she sighed, and Puddle woke up with a start. ‘Is that you, my dear? Have I been asleep? ’ * Only for a very few minutes, Puddle.’ Puddle glanced at the new gold watch on her wrist; it had been a Christmas present from Stephen. ‘It’s past ten o’clock — I think [ll turn in.’ ‘Do. Why not? I hope Adéle’s filled your hot water bottle; she’s rather light-headed over her Jean.’ “Never mind, I can fill it myself,’ smiled Puddle.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Without turning a hair, he accepted this humble flattery, as he might from an old retainer, who fibs in order to fawn. He smiled knowingly, and scrutinized the folds of black tulle round her neck, looking in the shadows under the faded hat for a necklace of large fake pearls. Almost mechanically and sip by sip, he drank the whisky which had been put in front of him by mistake. He did not care for spirits as a rule, but this evening he enjoyed the whisky, for it helped him to smile easily and softened to his touch unpolished surfaces and rough materials; it enabled him to listen kindly to an old woman for whom the present did not exist. They met again on the further side of the superfluous war-years and the young, importunate dead: the Pal spanned the gap by throwing across to Cheri a bridge of names names of old men who bore charmed lives, of old women revitalized for the struggle or turned to stone in their ultimate shape, never to alter again. She recounted in detail a hard-luck story of 1913, some unhappiness that had taken place before August 1914, and something trembled in her voice when she spoke of La Loupiote — a woman now dead — ‘ The very week of your wedding, dear boy! you see what a coincidence it was? the hand of Fate was upon us, indeed’ — dead after four years of a pure and peaceful friendship. ‘We slanged each other day in, day out, dear boy, but only in front of other people. Because, don’t you see, it gave them the impression that we were “a couple”. Who would have believed it, had we not gone for each other hammer and tongs? So we called each other the most diabolical names, and the onlookers chuckled: “Have you ever seen such a devoted pair? ” Dear boy, I’ll tell you something else that will knock you flat - surely you must have heard about the will Massau was supposed to have made. ...’ ‘ What Massau? ’ Cheri asked languidly.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  The last time I saw the house in Brentwood Park before its title changed hands we stood outside watching the three-level Allied van pull away and turn onto Marlboro Street, everything we then owned, including a Volvo station wagon, already inside and on its way to New York. After the van moved out of sight we walked through the empty house and out across the terrace, a good-bye moment rendered less tender by the lingering reek of Vikane in the house and the stiff dead leaves where the pink magnolia and stephanotis had been. I smelled Vikane even in New York, every time I unpacked a carton. The next time I was in Los Angeles and drove past the house it was gone, a teardown, to be replaced a year or two later by a house marginally bigger (a new room over the garage, an additional foot or two in a kitchen already large enough to accommodate a square Chickering grand piano that remained mostly unnoticed) but lacking (for me) the resolute conventionality of the original. Some years later in a Washington bookstore I met the daughter, the one the buyer had said he could picture marrying in the garden. She was at school somewhere in Washington (Georgetown? George Washington?), I was there to give a reading at Politics and Prose. She introduced herself. I grew up in your house, she said. Not exactly, I refrained from saying. John always said we moved “back” to New York. I never did. Brentwood Park was then, New York was now. Brentwood Park before the Vikane had been a time, a period, a decade, during which everything had seemed to connect. Our suburbia house in Brentwood. It was exactly that. She called it. There had been cars, a swimming pool, a garden. There had been agapanthus, lilies of the Nile, intensely blue starbursts that floated on long stalks. There had been gaura, clouds of tiny white blossoms that became visible at eye level only as the daylight faded. There had been English chintzes, chinoiserie toile. There had been a Bouvier des Flandres motionless on the stair landing, one eye open, on guard. Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember. Even memory of the stephanotis in her braid, even memory of the plumeria tattoo showing through the tulle. It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoléon Bonaparte said that. What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripedes said that. When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. I said that.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  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 . In point of fact the beach on which we lived, our personal “some Kind of an Island,” did have “Only three Houses on it,” or, more correctly, it had only three houses that were occupied year-round. One of these three houses was owned by Dick Moore, a cinematographer who, when he was not on a location, lived there with his two daughters, Marina and Tita. It was Tita Moore who started the club with Quintana that entailed posting “Mom’s Sayings” in our garage. Tita and Quintana also had an entrepreneurial enterprise, “the soap factory,” the business mission of which was to melt down and reshape all remaining bars of the gardenia-scented I.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'S ROOM 183 took care of me and she was always there when I came in from work, in from the vineyards, and there was never any trouble between us, never. I was young then and did not know the things I learned later or the terrible things you have taught me. I thought all women were hke that. I thought all men were like me— I thought 1 was like all other men. I was not unhappy then and I was not lonely—for she was there— and I did not want to die. 1 wanted to stay forever in our village and work in the vineyards and drink the wine we made and make love to my girl. I have told you about my village— ? It is very old and In the south, it is on a hill. At night, when we walked by the wall, the world seemed to fall down before us, the whole, far-off, dirty world. I did not ever want to see it. Once we made love under the wall. Tes, 1 wanted to stay there forever and eat much spaghetti and drink much wine and make many babies and grow fat. You would not have liked me if 1 had stayed. I can see you, many years from now, coming through our village in the ugly, fat, American motor car you will surely have by then and looking at me and look- ing at all of us and tasting our wine and shitting on us with those empty smiles Americans wear everywhere and which you wear all the time and driving off with a great roar of the motors and a great sound of tires and teUing all the other Americans you meet that they must come and see our village because it is so picturesque. And you will have no idea of the life there.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Sign up now. 2 J uly 26 2010. Today would be her wedding anniversary. 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?

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Today Quintana is walking back up that hill. She’s not the towhead with the plaid jumper and the blue lunchbox and the ponytail. She’s the Princess Bride—and at the top of that hill stands her Prince. Will you join me please in toasting Gerry and Quintana. We did. We joined him in toasting Gerry and Quintana. We toasted Gerry and Quintana at St. John the Divine and a few hours later, in their absence, at a Chinese restaurant on West Sixty-fifth Street with my brother and his family, we toasted Gerry and Quintana again. We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.” 5Seven years later. July 26 2010. Laid out on a table in front of me today is a group of photographs sent to me only recently but all taken in 1971, summer or fall, in or around the unheated house in Malibu mentioned in the wedding toast. We had moved into that house in January 1971, on a perfectly clear day which turned so foggy that by the time I drove back to the house from a late-day run to the Trancas Market, three-and-a-half miles down the Pacific Coast Highway, I could no longer find the driveway. Since sundown fogs in January and February and March turned out to be as much a given of that stretch of coast as wildfires would be in September and October and November, this disappearance of the driveway was by no means an unusual turn of events: the preferred method for finding it was to hold your breath, avert your mind from the unseeable cliff below, rising two-hundred-some feet from open ocean, and turn left. Neither the fogs nor the wildfires figure in the photographs. There are eighteen images. Each is of the same child at the same age, Quintana at five, her hair, as noted in the wedding toast, bleached by the beach sun. In some she is wearing her plaid uniform jumper, also noted in the toast. In a few she is wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater I brought her from London when we went that May to do promotion for the European release of The Panic in Needle Park. In a few she is wearing a checked gingham dress trimmed in eyelet, a little faded and a little too big for her, the look of a hand-me-down. In others she has on cutoff jeans and a denim Levi jacket with metal studs, a bamboo fishing pole against her shoulder, artfully arranged there (by her) in a spirit less of fishing than of styling, a prop to accessorize the outfit.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  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 ? I feel impelled to locate, by way of establishing at least one survivor of the period, a recent photograph of Sophia Loren. I type her name into Google Images. I find such a photograph: Sophia Loren arriving at some kind of publicity event, one of those red-carpet arrivals during which the PR people hover close, alerting the photographers to the approach of the celebrity. As I check the caption on the photograph I notice in passing that Sophia Loren was born in 1934, the same year in which I myself was born.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  7The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait. There was a certain spot in the forest, a footbridge across a brown brook, where my father would piously pause to recall the rare butterfly that, on the seventeenth of August, 1883, his German tutor had netted for him. The thirty-year-old scene would be gone through again. He and his brothers had stopped short in helpless excitement at the sight of the coveted insect poised on a log and moving up and down, as though in alert respiration, its four cherry-red wings with a pavonian eyespot on each. In tense silence, not daring to strike himself, he had handed his net to Herr Rogge, who was groping for it, his eyes fixed on the splendid fly. My cabinet inherited that specimen a quarter of a century later. One touching detail: its wings had “sprung” because it had been removed from the setting board too early, too eagerly. In a villa which in the summer of 1904 we rented with my uncle Ivan de Peterson’s family on the Adriatic (the name was either “Neptune” or “Apollo”—I can still identify its crenelated, cream-colored tower in old pictures of Abbazia), aged five, mooning in my cot after lunch, I used to turn over on my stomach and, carefully, lovingly, hopelessly, in an artistically detailed fashion difficult to reconcile with the ridiculously small number of seasons that had gone to form the inexplicably nostalgic image of “home” (that I had not seen since September 1903), I would draw with my forefinger on my pillow the carriage road sweeping up to our Vyra house, the stone steps on the right, the carved back of a bench on the left, the alley of oaklings beginning beyond the bushes of honeysuckle, and a newly shed horseshoe, a collector’s item (much bigger and brighter than the rusty ones I used to find on the seashore), shining in the reddish dust of the drive. The recollection of that recollection is sixty years older than the latter, but far less unusual.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Did she remember the stephanotis? Is that why she wanted it, is that why she wove it into her braid? 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? Why then did I feel so sharp a sense of betrayal when I exchanged my California driver’s license for one issued by New York? Wasn’t that actually a straightforward enough transaction?