The Ruins of California Read Online Free Page A

and black leather pants. She was sitting on the back of a bike, slightly elevated, hugging a guy with a skull on the back of his jacket. My father traced her with his eyes, then sped up—seeming to want a closer look.
    “She must be freezing,” he said.
    “Wow.” Cary squinted. “That bike is so beautiful.
So are they
.” My father kept his eyes on the girl. In the middle of her back, a thin ridge of spine disappeared under the halter band and strings, then rose out again.
    “What do you think, Inez?”
    A Harley was a kind of motorcycle. I’d guessed that much. The girl on the back must be the angel. But where was hell?
    I opened my eyes. The light was bright and sharp and fell in blazing shapes around me. My father’s studio apartment on Telegraph Hill was an airy white room, decorated sparely and simply. There was a brown corduroy sofa where I always slept, a couple of low white tables, a flamenco poster, and two guitars leaning against a redbrick wall. Another wall, floor-to-ceiling windows, looked out over San Francisco Bay and the island of Alcatraz. Bisecting the room was a deep red folding screen, and behind that, the vast expanse of Dad’s king-size bed.
    Unlike Abuelita’s house in Van Dale, which was a forest of artifacts and souvenirs and yellowing snapshots collected over the years and never pared down, my father’s place was devoid of sentiment. No clutter. No framed pictures of family members. No treasured remains of boyhood or school days. No signs of his former life as a suburban dad or evidence of me or my mysterious half brother, Whitman, who lived in England. It took a little getting used to—the sterility of my father’s surroundings. While Abuelita kept things forever, as if, like a magic lamp, they might contain a genie of good feeling inside them, my father’s things carried no such hope. Objects were set out to be admired for beauty and contemplation: a single lily in a glass cylinder, a Japanese Go board, an ancient bird carved from marble. But when I looked at them, I felt sort of empty.
    “Inez, you’re awake!” He loomed over me with a smile. His hair was drier and looser than when I had seen him three months before on Christmas Day at my Grandmother Ruin’s house. And ratherthan the strained expression and three-piece suit he had worn for the holiday in San Benito, he was in jeans and a collarless white shirt and seemed in a cheery mood.
    “Great music last night, wasn’t it?”
    We’d gone to Alegrías, a flamenco club in North Beach. He went there every Friday night, whether I was visiting or not.
    “Antonio is amazing. A real
manitas de plata.
” He mimicked playing the guitar, hunched over.
    “Silver hands?”
    “Yes! But if you say somebody’s a
manitas de plata
, it means he’s a terrible show-off. Like,
‘Antonio, you egomaniac!’
What a cat. He’s just amazing. Hey, listen, if I could play like that, I’d be a show-off, too.”
    My father did play, but not like that. He’d lived in Spain after college and again when he was in the air force. He’d been stationed there and stayed—studying guitar in some dusty town called Morón de la Frontera that he still talked about. He’d been an outsider in a dark world that he never quite returned from. Flamenco captured his attention completely, struck him in a place the rest of us couldn’t reach.
    “Pancakes?” he asked. “Or what about waffles? I have a cool new waffle iron. It’s German and makes these perfect waffles—crunchy on the edges and top, a bit softer inside. What are you in the mood for?”
    During my previous visit, Marisa had spent the night and disappeared behind the folding screen in the living room, turning up the next morning in a white robe and wet hair. But this morning I saw no sign of Cary. She’d come to El Bodega for paella, the three of us waiting forever for our big bowls of saffron rice baked with clamsand spicy sausage and chicken. It must have been ten-thirty—way beyond my