Valparaíso (5)

5.

Maddie Haden sat next to me on a cushion by the lap pool, her skirt hiked up enough to reveal a nasty, gnarled scar, feathering off into a sutured pink streak, on her right shin. She traced it with her forefinger. “Does it look like Africa to you?” she said. “Alex says it does.”

“Or maybe Italy?” I ventured. 

Maddie had the best laugh. It seemed to emerge from the same chamber as her singing voice. I wanted to tell her it was the most beautiful scar I’ve ever seen. But I just said, “How did you get it?”

“Oh, it’s a dumb story. My older sister and I went on a ride with some boys. We’d all been drinking. They flipped the car over into a ditch. The boys got off with scratches, wouldn’t you know. Louise got a concussion, I got two months in the hospital. Wheelchair, physical therapy, and this little scar.” 

We’d all pulled deck chair cushions down onto the flagstone tiles in the balmy night, Alex and Harry talking and laughing about something, Dryden distributing pizza and beer. 

Still contemplating the scar on her pale, skinny leg, Maddie said, “There’s a metal pin in my hip. It hurts pretty bad at night. Thank god for painkillers.” She looked towards her cousin and said, “Dryden helps me with that. He wants to be a doctor one day.” 

Dryden stood by the door, eating pizza and watching us. 

“Your brother and I,” Maddie said suddenly. “We just connect. Musically and otherwise. He’s so talented, so sweet.” 

I’d never quite thought of Alex as sweet. Their music, and the lovemaking I’d witnessed, seemed far more ardent than that. Sweet. The word sounded toothless, and set off some vague alarm inside me.

Extracting a gooey triangle of pizza from its box, I struggled to distance the memory of what I’d seen Maddie doing with Alex behind the blinds that day from the reality of the girl I sat hip to hip with on the pool cushion. Since then, I’d daily done nameless things with Maddie, to Maddie, in the fervid theater of my imagination. I’d existed so thoroughly in my parallel universe of private reverie that fourteenth summer, with my books, my Henry Orlowe, and my onanistic raptures that my relationship to the outer world had turned essentially voyeuristic, so that the girl munching pepperoni next to me, her broken thigh shifting against mine, seemed almost unreal. Who among us wasn’t a spy? Maybe Dryden Poe and his family already understood this. But it was a new, uneasy exercise for me, dousing the little arousals I was having there on the cushion, and I was thankful we weren’t climbing into bathing suits, let alone out of them, exposing my shame there by the lap pool. Maddie! I wanted to burst out. I feel all Alex feels! I’m your true secret lover, truest of all! Of course my hidden ardors made me my brother’s betrayer as well, tangling things further. I wondered if Maddie knew all this somehow – how could she not, and Alex too, since that day behind the blinds? - and that they laughed about it together. Then I wondered if the scar on Maddie’s shin, not to mention the pin in her hip, was going to enter my next round of fantasies. 

“You’re heading back to Colorado,” Maddie said.

“Sunday.” 

“It must be nice up in those mountains.” 

“It gets pretty cold,” I said. 

“Your mother sounds like quite a character, Garth. She should meet mine. Mama’s right out of Tennessee Williams. Goes through mint juleps like a weevil through grits.”

I had no idea what Maddie had just said to me, but I’d repeat those words to myself for a long time until I’d run down each of them: Tennessee Williams, mint juleps, weevil, grits. The accent in which she’d delivered them suggested some impossibly distant Southern argot and manner of experience inseparable from the words themselves. Of course I just nodded as if I’d understood. 

Whatever Maddie Haden’s burdens of pain and confusion and damage, she melted everything into light for me. In this, I wasn’t far behind my brother. Wise in her unearthly voice, she made me think that maybe not all wisdom is earned but just abides there - that you could be both wise and helpless at the same time. In fact, maybe wisdom made you helpless, or was a kind of helplessness. 

“I’m supposed to go back home too,” Maddie said. “Finish my senior year in Savannah. My grandma wants me there and my mom’s sick. That’s why we’re pushing it with these demo sessions. I’d rather stay out here with Alex and Dryden and make our music.” 

That sounded like an excellent idea to me. Alex and Maddie could get married and I could visit them, bask in their aura as an astonished, grateful world rained fame and fortune upon Fate’s Angels. But why had she included her cousin in what she’d just said? We’d have to get rid of him somehow.

“So I hear you read and write a lot,” Maddie said.

“Read, mostly.” 

“Words,” Maddie said. “When I sing, they get real chewy. As if I can taste all their flavors.” Then she turned, fixed her pale green eyes on me, and said: “Garth, why don’t you write some lyrics for us?”

She would never know what that innocent invitation, surely extended for no other reason than that I was Alex’s kid brother, would trigger. By offering herself as my muse, Maddie invited release from the chimera of Henry Orlowe, and the glassed prison of my imaginings, into a richer dream: finding real words to set to Alex’s music, and the fantasy of inclusion in the magic circle that seemed to be forming around them. 

“Um, sure,” I muttered to Maddie. 

But her attention had shifted and she just said “’Scuse me, Garth,” and scurried up. 

I heard Harry’s lubricated baritone rise over the cricket chorus, describing to Alex some priceless instruction he hoped to receive from maestro Casals in Puerto Rico that winter. Beyond him, Dryden Poe stood against the cantilevered hillside, stabbing some sort of tall metal Hawaiian torch pole into the earth, as if to bring more illumination to this night of no moon. Then I realized the outdoor electricity had cut out, killing the pool lights, and we’d all been sitting in near-darkness. 

As Maddie walked towards Alex and Harry, I noticed for the first time her limp. By the pool, Dryden was trying to light the tiki torch, which he’d managed to successfully impale in the grass. It was like some bizarre, faux-Polynesian element, echoing the kitsch effects of the entire house. It seemed to go with the silk bathrobe, the den furniture, the lacrosse stick. 

But I no longer cared. The dark canyon night, the pool waters lapping lightly against its gunnels, the guard dogs snuffling contentedly nearby, bound us all now, Alex and Harry and Maddie talking softly together, the earlier tensions of the rehearsal dissipated. My unnerving tour of the house, and Henry Orlowe’s ominous deductions, were fading. Now I just felt tired and glad to be part of this night so rich with promise. 

Taking out my little disposable camera, I snapped off a photo of Maddie and Alex and Harry, the flash startling us all. 

Dryden had finally managed to light the torch. He turned and smiled triumphantly in the jumping orange light - erect, cold, handsome, like some sort of odd Olympian, gripping the thin black column as if it were a javelin, or a flag he’d just planted at the top of a mountain. 

We stood, all of us, frozen in each other’s gazes by flickering torchlight. Then a wind came up, rippling the azure lap pool waters and stirring the trees, trailing jasmine aroma across the patio, mixing with the smell of kerosene. Surely they all felt what I felt in that moment: a mad, voiceless knowing, on the brink of something grand, and that there wouldn’t be another summer night like this one. 

Then the wind blew out the torch, leaving us in hushed blackness, only the afterimage of torchlight lingering in our eyes. Down in the canyon, a coyote howled. I could just make out the three ghostly figures trudging silently back to the music room. Then I saw the white of Dryden’s teeth through the dark. Then he vanished too.

6.

Marimar and I stood at the lookout at Cerro Concepción, watching the cargo winches turning slowly in the harbor under a gull-strewn sky. It was the day before Christmas, a clangor of bells rising from Valparaíso’s churches down along el plan. After walking back from Arturo Wright’s empty house, we’d paused here without really deciding it. 

Gazing out at the harbor, I thought how I probably knew everything I needed to know at fourteen, after that night of the rehearsal at Dryden Poe’s house, if only I could have read it: my brother Alex, Harry Winter, Dryden Poe and his dogs - and Maddie. Time collapses, a folded telescope. On September 11^th of that same year, Salvador Allende, overthrown by Pinochet’s forces, died in La Moneda, the government palace in Santiago, whose bullet-stained parapets I’d seen when I arrived in Chile. A few days later, Pablo Neruda died too, heartbroken.

In a boy’s room, a freckled, wide-eyed Charlie McCarthy puppet lolls on a chair. Mounted butterflies, a perfectly made bed. The paraphernalia of magic. A syringe, a little tin box. Maddie Haden crosses the rehearsal room, her hands in mantis pose. The mother in the mantel photograph. An inanimate dwelling breathing secrecy, adherence to some fierce code. But what was it?

Marimar and I watched a lone man in a wide-brimmed straw hat, a canvas knapsack hung from his shoulder, mounting the steep cerro path just below us. 

“Arturo Wright?” I said, my heart pounding. 

“No,” she said, her face radiant, tear-swept. “My father, home from the sea.”

That night at Dryden’s house, I awoke to someone shaking my shoulder. A figure stood over me in the darkness. I thought it was Dryden, whom I’d been dreaming about, but then I heard Alex whisper, “Garth, let’s go.”

I lay there, still snared in the dream, inhaling the scent of sage and chlorine. I’d fallen asleep on one of the pool loungers and someone had laid a piano blanket over me. A heavy wind shook the eucalyptus, showering leaves. The Dobermans were complaining, car alarms going off in the canyon. 

Struggling up, I saw by faint light that Dryden’s torch had toppled. I could smell kerosene dripping on the pool tiles. I thought I heard a woman moaning softly somewhere, or it might have been a cat. 

Half asleep, I trailed Alex out the front door onto the veranda. A strip of bruised violet dawn hung along the Pacific horizon. “Where’s Harry?” I said as we climbed into Alex’s car.

“He took a taxi home.” 

Alex, backing the car down the driveway, looked disheveled, strained. 

“Was that Maddie crying?” 

“She’ll be okay. It’s her leg. She takes something for it.”

Then we were hurtling down the dark canyon road, trailed by echoes of music heard during fitful sleep, and the dream I’d been in. 

In the dream, Alex and Maddie were huddled by the pool in half-light. Then Dryden Poe suddenly surfaced in the water, spouting. But it wasn’t Dryden, it was Alex. I looked back over at Maddie and it wasn’t Alex now but Dryden embracing her. I lunged at Dryden, barking, but found myself restrained on a choker leash tied to the pepper tree. Alex hung on the lip of the pool, dripping, smiling at Dryden. 

Then Maggie and Dryden jackknifed, in perfect synch, into the pool. 

We crossed Sunset and sped into the waking city. “The songs are there,” said Alex excitedly. “Just a few more arrangements to tweak.” Street lights winked out along Wilshire Boulevard. Alex was driving so fast I was relieved when he pulled into a 24-hour donut shop near our house. We bought a dozen and ate them in the car.

“So what did you think?” Alex said.

“About what?”

“All of it.”

“I really liked the music. That house was…”

“What?”

“Sterile,” I said, using a ten-dollar word I’d recently come upon. 

“They just moved here from back East. You remember what that’s like.” 

Then I said, “Dryden’s bathrobe.” 

Alex laughed. “They’re from another culture. Not everybody’s artistic, Garth. Different tribe.”

“Harry said they’re spies.”

“He was just being theatrical.” Alex handed me a maple swirl. “Dryden’s father works in international policy studies. It’s not the same.” 

“I saw a needle in Dryden’s room Is he a drug addict or something?” 

“You little ferret. You were poking around up there, weren’t you?” Alex said irritably. “That’s for Maddie’s medicine.”

“Does Dryden love Maddie too?”

Alex looked at me. “Garth, what’s up with you? Sure, I mean, they’re cousins. Everybody loves Maddie.”

“What tribe is Maddie?”

“Ours, of course.” 

Reeling with fatigue and the night’s myriad impressions, the unsettling dream, the excitement of Maddie’s invitation to write words for them, I was probably making little sense and knew I should shut up now. The morning air had paled, traffic currents surging past. Alex reached over and brushed sugar crumbs from my face, flicked long, untended hair away from my eyes. 

“Garth, I’m sorry about this summer. I’ve been so into this thing.” 

“Dad’s worried about you,” I said. 

“Dad’s a great guy but he doesn’t know much about the world. He teaches stuff other people live. He’s nervous that Dryden’s backing us. He thinks Russell Poe is some kind of evil spook because he works at RAND. Dad’s discomfort isn’t about Maddie or me, it’s ideological.” Alex looked out the window as if searching for something. “Music doesn’t lie. Art cleanses what it moves through. I have to trust to that.”

Back in my room that morning, I couldn’t sleep, but not from the pills Dryden had been doling out. I was so excited at the prospect of writing something for Maddie and Alex that I tried putting down words in a notebook, but all that arose were snatches of Dad’s and Alex’s old standards. Once I had a secret love... Georgia on my mind…You’ll never know how much I love you…You give me fever all through the night…Deflated, I realized I was standing at the foot of a mountain I had no idea how to scale. 

Music doesn’t lie, Alex had said. But people do. Henry Orlowe knew all about deception. I wasn’t as I’d appeared to Maddie, simply Alex’s innocent kid brother, but a lustful maniac. Now I saw that Alex, warm and defenseless and sincere like my father, sometimes wished he weren’t, and that Dryden Poe’s access, his worldly ability to provide, intrigued him. Remembering that afternoon on the Santa Monica pier with Dad, I thought, no: our father’s concern was personal. He feared his son was in jeopardy of losing himself, that Alex had a dangerous new friend. 

Different tribes, Alex had said. Maybe there was a kind of split in the world and I’d just peered into it. Russell Poe and his family lived somewhere in the matrix of “current events,” the name of a class I’d soon be taking in high school - one of the few my father couldn’t, or wouldn’t, teach. I’d see their faces on television, in the newspapers – a dimly discerned terrain of fact out there where headlines raged: Vietnam, Richard Nixon, Watergate, Biafra, the coup in Chile. 

I started pulling clothes out of drawers and stuffing them in my backpack, eager to leave LA now, hungering for the chill snap of the mountains. I needed time and space to absorb all I’d heard and seen. When I finally tumbled into bed that morning, the last thing I heard were raised voices in the kitchen, muffled words that seemed to be about me. “Just leave him out of it, do you hear?” Dad shouted at Alex.