The Burning Ground Read online

  THE

  BURNING

  GROUND

  Adam

  O’Riordan

  W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York London

  For Tom and Eva

  For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth. “You are perfectly welcome,” it tells him, “during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don’t blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don’t cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy.”

  —Christopher Isherwood

  Contents

  A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica

  The El Segundo Blue Butterfly

  Rambla Pacifico

  Wave-Riding Giants

  Black Bear in the Snow

  The Burning Ground

  ’98 Mercury Sable

  Magda’s a Dancer

  A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica

  Harvey was sitting with Teresa in the courtyard of Aguilo, a fashionable restaurant on Abbott Kinney. They had come straight from the airport. Teresa would drop him at the house after lunch before returning to the office, but promised they would do something special that evening. This was Harvey’s third trip to Los Angeles in the past eighteen months. He had met Teresa at a private view in London. She had been at Vassar with Eric Harkness, a friend who owned the advertising agency where he occasionally worked freelance as a copywriter. She was in the city looking to finance a film. At the private view she had mocked the untidy blocks of color on the massive canvases, each named after a Station of the Cross, and he had liked her for that. That night they had made love in her hotel suite overlooking Hyde Park. As Teresa slept, the sheets tangled around her legs, Harvey sat smoking in an armchair by the window, looking out at the chain of orange lamps winding through the deserted park.

  At ten to six, after an hour dozing beside her, Harvey kissed Teresa on the ear and left. He heard her murmur as he clicked the door shut and had been surprised to find himself hesitating in the corridor, his corduroy jacket draped across his arm. The jacket smelled of fried food and damp, of his cramped studio apartment, with its three exterior walls and bad light after midday, where he had moved after his marriage had broken down.

  A fortnight later her note arrived, alongside an envelope bearing his accountants’ insignia and stamped URGENT. Eric must have given her the address. Teresa’s letter asked him to come to Los Angeles. No strings, no promises. Why not? Harvey asked himself, as he rinsed a handful of cutlery in the sink, rubbing the cold tines of a fork with his thumb as he waited for the tap to run hot. It might be what he needed. Shake things up. Harvey borrowed the money for that first flight to LA from Eric, who watched from behind his desk, making a steeple of his stubby fingers as Harvey explained what the money was for. Harvey, in a tubular steel chair, tobacco tin on his knee, rolled a cigarette as he waited for Eric’s response to his petition. “Go. Soak it in,” Eric said in his terse, semi-Anglicized way as he tore the check from its book and slid it across the desk. He beckoned Harvey in for a hug—beaming, gregarious, like a small-town mayor, his arms spread wide before his chest. Harvey wondered if Eric and Teresa had once been lovers.

  What had been a whim had now become an expensive and, Harvey knew, unsustainable habit. It wasn’t the sex, the tide of Teresa’s desire hard to navigate or predict; sometimes animalistic, his torso raised with welts and scratches as they lay together in the afterglow. Other times, as tentative as teenagers as Teresa’s hands slowly mapped the geometry of Harvey’s face. It wasn’t the play at coupledom they made on strolls along Venice boardwalk past the street performers and panhandlers with their brassy handwritten signs. And it wasn’t their in-jokes at the industry parties Teresa was obliged to attend, where they met and mocked with a look or squeeze of the hand the people, restless in their spheres, who came to court Teresa’s influence. Otherworldly models teetering unsteady as foals in their high heels, their big, underwater eyes expressing a desire to act; downtrodden actors locked into five-year deals with prime-time shows, confessing a compulsion to direct; directors sick of being pushed around by studio heads, who now wanted to exec-produce for themselves. “I can confirm it: the earth is tipped toward Los Angeles, all the prettiest girls roll this way,” Harvey told Eric one evening during that first trip, feeling alien and unfettered for the first time in years. He had Teresa pinned to an island table of a sports bar as he talked. They had retreated inside after walking by the ocean to see if they could catch a glimpse of the famous green flash said to appear on the horizon at sundown. “Here, Teresa wants to speak to you,” Harvey said, passing the phone, looking up at the massive glistening athletes, sweat-drenched on the big screens around the bar.

  No, it wasn’t any of these things, Harvey told himself. What he was hooked on, he was sure, was the eleven-hour lacuna of the flight and all it entailed. It began at takeoff. The cabin hushed. The cutlery rattling in the galley as the plane gained speed, the plastic cabin beginning to creak. The engines roaring like beasts heard from the bowels of an amphitheater. The focused quiet of an examination hall as passengers concentrated on keeping calm and pretending what was happening was perfectly normal. The plane would continue to ascend, the patchwork of fields dropping away below as London’s suburbs petered out into countryside. As the plane gained height Harvey would feel his body respond, increasing the pressure on his heels, righting itself as it tried to adjust to the altitude. Until the nose of the plane dropped a few degrees and the plangent note of the electronic gong told passengers takeoff was over and they were free to undo their seat belts. After the thrill of takeoff came the endurance test of the hours midair. He would start and then abandon films, leaving their protagonists frozen on the small screen. Harvey relished this restlessness, the boredom of a quality last known in childhood. Then would come a few hours of fitful sleep. Slack-mouthed, snapping awake as his neck gave under the weight of his head.

  Then, just when the tedium seemed interminable, the limbo of the flight never ending, the captain would come over the intercom and announce the final hour in the air and the beginning of the descent. Then came the prospect of landing and the dissipating tension as time reengaged and found its thrust. Now the plane would pass for miles over Los Angeles, the low-rise city; its dense acreage of parking lots and freeways punctuated by the oasis of a baseball ground or a football field; the light charged with a biblical intensity. Looking out to the brown mountains that hemmed in the city and seemed to drive its seething mass toward the ocean. Then the sound of the landing gear like a winch hauling the world below toward the belly of the plane and a final thrill: that burst of speed toward the runway. Then the judder as the plane touched down, past the tower and the terminals until he could make out the faces of the baggage handlers and engineers in their coveralls. Then the spell was broken. He would adjust his watch. He was certain it was this—not Teresa, not the distance from his life in London—that he had come to crave.

  In the courtyard of Aguilo, a bank of railway sleepers and an ivy-covered wall provided shade from the swimming-pool-size section of sky. Teresa was busy at her BlackBerry straining to hear over the noise of the lunchtime crowd, as she pushed the glossy black tear of the headset into her ear. She looked over to Harvey who had paused his meal, anxious not to finish before Teresa had started hers. She flashed two f
ingers at him, grimacing theatrically. Harvey set down his fork and watched a Mexican busboy in his fifties deliver a baked egg floating in a pool of green lentils to a pregnant woman at the table opposite. A skinny compatriot refilled her water glass. A blond waiter with a clover tattooed behind his ear hovered nearby with his notepad, as if scoring their performance.

  Harvey inspected himself in the back of his spoon. His eyes were puffy from the flight. He was still a little tanned from his last trip out. The lines on his brow had grown deeper over the past few years. He tilted the spoon to inspect the few silver strands that had recently appeared at his temples. As Teresa continued her conversation Harvey noticed a girl in a floral-print dress, looking up at him from her dessert. She could be no more than nineteen, wore no makeup or had been made up to appear as if she wasn’t wearing any. Harvey couldn’t decide. She had a soft, cherubic face and wore two slides in her short hair in an attempt to suppress the natural curl or disguise a recent change in length. He caught her eye and she looked away.

  Harvey glanced over to Teresa, still on the phone, the food on her plate untouched. She had been there to meet him at the airport. He had spotted her checking her watch by the Arrivals board. Teresa would be forty-eight next month. Compared to the girl she had an unshowy beauty, but she carried herself with a lightness that was itself girlish. When Teresa had spotted Harvey at Arrivals, she had run to hug him. She had brought him flowers: huge sunflowers, their long stems wrapped in brown paper. Harvey imagined her picking them out, double-parked outside the florist on Washington Boulevard, shaking her head at the alternatives before holding out a crisp twenty when the right bunch was proffered. All this without breaking from her conversation on her BlackBerry.

  “You made it!” Teresa had said. Then pulling him close into her, “So good to have you back, baby.”

  The plane had been empty when Harvey boarded. At check-in he had gambled on a seat in a central section between the bulkheads. In front of his seat there was a fold-down platform for a bassinet. Harvey had reasoned that a midweek midday flight to Los Angeles would not be full of families. As a tinny aria was pumped through the cabin, he wondered if he might have the whole row to himself. He changed into his complimentary flight socks, pushed his shoes out of sight below his seat and buckled himself in. Contemplating the flight ahead he closed his eyes.

  “Nick Antonopoulos,” said a voice.

  The words pulled him from a maze of memories, a fervid series of unconnected images, summoned before takeoff in his semidreaming doze. The voice repeated:

  “Nick Antonopoulos.”

  Harvey opened his eyes this time and looked at the hand held out to him. Standing above him was a man in his thirties. He was dressed in khaki slacks, the crease ironed sharp down the front of each leg, and a black long-sleeved polo shirt, the shining nylon like something a professional golfer might wear. His dark hair was clipped militarily short around his ears and at his neck. He seemed generically clean-cut, politely forthright, indistinguishable from many other Americans you might meet in airport lounges traveling on business across the western world. He was smiling softly, a large and sensual mouth, a smile that suggested he was amused by the archetype he found himself inhabiting. Nick Antonopoulos gave off the impression that the two men shared a long-standing arrangement to meet and that he was now finally making himself known. Harvey offered his own hand and attempted to stand, before realizing this was impractical.

  “Second flight of the day for me,” Nick said, smiling more broadly now as he unpacked his briefcase. He pulled out a magazine. On the cover were arrayed pyramids of unnaturally bright apples and oranges. As he sat down Nick gestured to the cover and explained that he worked in the fruit industry. He had spent the previous night in Versailles, in what he described as a heinously small hotel room, where he had been attending his firm’s annual European sales conference. He was now flying to Los Angeles, deputizing for his manager at the International Conference where he would be delivering a paper on the drivers and barriers behind consumers’ fresh fruit choices. He would be flying back to England after two nights at the Four Seasons on Doheny. At first the men exchanged a few platitudes: the clichés and curiosities of international travel; stories from Nick’s life on the road, told with great exuberance where little actually happened. A mention of his wife and two daughters at home in Windsor where they had moved recently, and where, walking through the Great Park one day with his daughter, he was sure he had seen Queen Elizabeth drive past.

  As the plane taxied toward the foot of the runway, Nick took a mobile phone from his briefcase. He scrolled through the names, then pressed his thumb on the touchpad.

  “Samantha?”

  Something in the sureness of Nick’s responses gave Harvey an unexpected comfort.

  “OK. About to take off now. Love to the kids. Talk later. I know. I know,” and then with a lingering smile, “OK.”

  Nick finished his call and turned off the phone, gesturing with a raised palm to the air-hostess who had been approaching with a frown. He turned and flashed a smile at Harvey.

  When they hit the turbulence Harvey was sleeping. The map on the headrest screen was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes. They were somewhere over northern Canada. The jolt was so hard it lifted him from his seat, his lap belt biting into the top of his pelvis. He glanced to his right and saw Nick gripping his armrests, bracing himself against the movements of the plane. The plane was rattling harder now, throwing passengers from side to side. Harvey heard a sharp intake of breath from an air-hostess as she pulled herself along the aisle to the jump seat. He watched as she exchanged a brief and unmistakably fearful glance with her colleague in the aisle opposite. Now the noise of the engines increased as if struggling to keep the plane airborne. Harvey knew something was terribly wrong. An elderly woman in the row to their right had begun to sob and was being comforted by her husband, who was patting her bony shoulder ineffectually with one hand, while gripping his armrest with the other. Her husband’s single-serving wine bottle had fallen from his tray and was cannoning along the aisle as the plane was buffeted roughly. Harvey thought of the footage he had once seen of an office during an earthquake in the Philippines. Then he thought about the flight deck, as he knew from the reconstructions he had watched on TV, the pilots wrestling at their dual controls trying desperately to keep the plane aloft, some series of fatal mistakes already placing them beyond safety. Harvey was sure this was the end. In a moment the plane would be lost in vast white tracts below. It would be days before the rescue parties reached them, or what parts of them were left. Their luggage, the bright clothes picked out for beach holidays in California, would be strewn for miles across the snow. It was then that Nick placed his hand on top of Harvey’s. He gripped it strongly with a force that left Harvey in no doubt it was deliberate, before returning it to his own armrest. Neither man looked at the other but it was understood by Harvey that he had been reached out to in his last moments. That humanity had prevailed and that men had faced their fate together. They endured several minutes more of extreme turbulence before the plane’s movements became at first less frequent and then less severe. The first officer came over the intercom to announce they had hit several big pockets of air as they passed around a storm front and that as they were expecting a little more chop up ahead, he would be leaving the seat-belt sign on for now. The first officer sounded relieved to be delivering this news.

  As the flight wore on, both men retreated into themselves but Nick continued to offer the same amused, ironic smile whenever Harvey got up to stretch his legs or use the toilet. Harvey watched Nick scrolling through spreadsheets on a laptop, biting the thumbnail on one hand while running the forefinger of the other down the columns of numbers. As they waited to disembark, standing in the aisle of the business class section, the empty seats littered with newspapers and magazines, Nick turned to Harvey and offered him his card. “This is me. Keep in touch,” he smiled, and patted Harvey on the back. Harvey
placed the card in his pocket. He wanted to thank Nick Antonopoulos, if not for his company—for a few minutes of conversation over the eleven hours in the air could hardly be called company—then for his proximity. To tell him of the unexpected comfort his fleeting companionship had given him. He felt he was taking leave of an old friend. But instead he nodded and smiled and said, “Yes, thanks, well, good luck with everything.”

  Harvey stood in the empty living room of Teresa’s house, more drunk than he would have expected to be from the bottle of Gavi at Aguilo. When Teresa had dropped him off she had pointed out an elderly neighbor in front of one of the smaller houses across the street, staring at them from below a Stars and Stripes the size of a double bedspread that flew above his lawn. “Poor Republicans. Worst kind,” Teresa said as Harvey got out of the car. “I’ll see you later.” She had waved an arm from the window as she drove off. The house was between owners—Teresa had taken up a series of sublets since selling her own place in the Palisades. She was waiting for the market to even out before buying somewhere new, probably farther up the coast toward Malibu. Where, in her fantasy life, she would hike and paddleboard every weekend and buy two Weimaraners and walk the ghost-gray gundogs out along the shining sands each evening. But as she had to travel so often for work this place was fine for now. The living room of Teresa’s house was bare except for a few sticks of furniture: an oversize easy chair that sat on top of two thick wooden rockers, some wilted roses in a narrow-necked vase, a pair of shot-silk curtains in translucent green that only partially covered the doors leading onto the brick terrace with its hip-height wall and the small lawn slanting upward above it. Harvey walked through the rooms of the house, absentmindedly opening and closing the closets and drawers. This was the third rental Harvey had visited Teresa in. No matter how earnestly she talked about the life she planned in Malibu, she seemed drawn to these temporary, transitory, anonymous spaces, the residue of someone else’s life hanging about them still.