The Burning Ground Read online

  He walked into the bedroom and stood under a lacquered wooden fan on to which four flower-shaped light-fittings were fixed. As he looked at the made-up bed Harvey remembered his last trip. The afternoon he arrived Teresa had been lying reading a script with the cover across her as Harvey dressed after showering. She had drawn back the duvet to reveal her naked lower half, instructing him to “kiss it.” She had smelled of fresh laundry and as he kissed her, as asked, he had tasted that unmistakable sweet, dry alkaline. He sat for a moment on the corner of the bed looking at a pile of jewelry on Teresa’s bedside table, the rings and fine chain-link bracelets tangled up inside on another, remembering that summer afternoon when the tang of eucalyptus came through the open window.

  The crows were loud in the garden outside, their raw cawing and flapping audible. Harvey went into the en suite bathroom. The surfaces were crammed with conditioners and beauty creams with French names: Beurre de Karité and Crème Vital. Harvey took a towel from the bar and, walking back through the bedroom and out of the sliding doors, arranged it for sunbathing on the lawn. He lay back and felt his face warming in the sun. He closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct the face of the girl from Aguilo. He tried to imagine what she might look like naked. Her high breasts, the silvery down in the small of her back, her long, tan, slightly bowed legs. How her skin might smell up close in the well of her collarbone or might feel as he ran his fingertips across it. If she would taste like Teresa or if she would have some different tang or musk. Unthinking, he tucked his erection under the belt of his jeans, rolled over on to his front and took a cigarette from the box. There was a single match left hanging from the book he had picked up at a bar back in London. He bent the head back against the strike-strip and clicked his fingers. He lit the cigarette and let the burning match fall onto the grass. He took a long drag, then watched the blue ribbons of smoke from his cigarette dissolve into the clear sky. Above him he heard a single-propeller plane heading toward Catalina. He looked up at the acacia in the far corner of the garden, the fringe of late afternoon light around its outer edge. He thought back to the last view of London from the cab on the way to the airport. How the trees were nearly bare. He remembered the wet leaves on the pavements and the gardens of the Victorian houses as he waited in traffic.

  As the afternoon wore on Harvey worked his way through a pile of old magazines, Italian and French Vogues, that Teresa had stacked in the corner of the living room. Picking up a new magazine every time he went inside to light another cigarette from the stove the previous owner had painstakingly restored, that Teresa had told him about in the car on the way over, the makers’ names, O’Keefe and Merritt, how the previous owner couldn’t afford to have it shipped to his new place. Harvey’s cigarette butts littered the terrace like the droppings of a caged bird. He thought he should collect them before Teresa got back, which would be any time now. As he lay out in the garden, the light softening, the late sun sluicing over his closed eyes, he felt a heaviness fall over him. He told himself he must not sleep.

  He was woken a few moments later by the telephone. By the time he reached it the answer-machine had kicked in. He listened to Teresa’s voice:

  “Harvey, baby, I have some bad news.” There was a pause. “I have to fly to New York . . . tonight. Don’t be mad,” then as if angered by her display of weakness, “I told you when you booked your ticket this was always a possibility.”

  Then she added in a staccato burst, “The car’s at the studio. Won’t be more than a couple of days. I’ll call you from the airport.”

  Harvey thought he should be angry but registered that anger was not forthcoming. He walked out into the garden and stood on the brick terrace. The light was fading now and a sliver of crescent moon was clear in the blue sky. Teresa’s neighbors were home. He had heard their car pull up as he listened to her message. Now he was back in the garden and heard them bickering behind the flannel bush separating the two properties. Then their back door slamming, followed by the sound of a man pedaling hard on an exercise bike in the garden. Harvey’s drowsiness had lifted. Maybe some exercise would do him good. He would take a stroll. Closing the doors to the garden, he pulled a woolen sweater from his hand luggage and picked up the spare set of keys from the counter.

  It was a short walk from the house to Lincoln Boulevard, where the freshly mown lawns suddenly gave on to four lanes of loud traffic and neon signs. Harvey walked along Lincoln past the strip malls offering manicures and discount household goods, the ten-dollar tire balancing, the car lots and charity shops with rotating signs on their roofs, past the taco shack where he had eaten hog maws with Teresa on his first trip out. The only other pedestrians were off to work night shifts or, having served their purpose for the day, were waiting at the bus stops to be ferried out of the city. Harvey had ridden on one on his first visit when Teresa had been delayed and unable to meet him at the airport. It had seemed to him a kind of mobile psychiatric ward, where the ill and the underpaid were condemned to spend their days. He stopped a few blocks before Pico outside a bar that advertised itself as a “British Pub and Restaurant.” The exterior was painted to resemble the whitewashed wattle-and-daub of an English country cottage. He peered in through the tinted and unwashed windows. The bar was hung with photographs of soccer players from the 1970s, some of whom he recognized, and faded reproduction advertisements for ale. He decided to go in. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a glass of lager, looking up at the three antique horse brasses set in the ceiling beams, a collection someone had begun and then clearly abandoned.

  The barmaid who served him had looked younger in the gloom as he had entered the bar, but up close Harvey saw the skin on her face was heavily lined and creased from what could only be decades of overexposure to the sun. She set the drink down on a paper napkin in front of him, strings of bubbles rising up inside the amber glass. “What’s that?” a grizzled man with a muzzle of pure white stubble, wearing a foam baseball cap with the name of a local moving company on it, called out to the barmaid as she flicked through the channels on the TV above the bar. “Storm. Blowing in from Alaska. Time to go home, old man,” she said, patting his arm. Harvey waved his glass at the barmaid, who promptly set another beer down in front of him. Perched on his stool, Harvey watched the bar fill up. The after-work crowd of middle managers and studio assistants, here to shoot a few frames of pool or watch a soccer game on the big screen. Harvey watched a pockmarked, mustachioed man flirting with a fat Latina. It seemed almost everyone in the bar was talking about the storm, questioning the barmaid, who was now the self-appointed authority on the subject, as they came to order more drinks. There was an atmosphere of growing excitement and anticipation in the crowded room as if a foreign dignitary were visiting the city. The bar filled up and then thinned out again but Harvey kept to his stool drinking steadily, unnoticed among the regulars. Before he left he changed three dollar bills into quarters. The barmaid was reluctant to spare the change until Harvey waved a thumb in the direction of the pool table in its tent of fluorescent light. Looking at his watch, in the second it took the numbers to swim into focus, Harvey saw that it was getting on for midnight now and he was drunk. He staggered on to Pico, the electric power lines on their wooden poles buzzing above him. He wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, to be near that massive expanse of water. To hear the waves breaking on the sand of Santa Monica State Beach, the fierce hiss as each one sank into the shore.

  It was raining as the pier came into view but Harvey could make out the lights of the fairground that occupied part of it. As if the big wheel was reeling in the weather from out at sea. Mountainous inky clouds formed on the horizon. His sweater was soaking, the wet wool releasing an acrid, peroxide smell. As he scrambled up the terrace of plantings to the mouth of the pier, Harvey spotted a phone booth and stumbled toward it. He fed a handful of quarters into the slot and punched in a number. The phone rang several times before someone picked up.

  “Nick, Nicky?”

  The person on
the other end of the line swallowed. Harvey heard the whistle and sigh of heavy nasal breathing, then the sound of someone rolling over heavily and faintly behind that the springs of the mattress.

  “Nick, it’s Harvey . . . from the plane.”

  “Mmmm.” Then nothing but the crackle of the line.

  “I wondered if . . . if you wanted to meet? For a drink or something?”

  “Mmmm,” lower this time. There was a pause and a soft click, then a recorded voice instructed Harvey to replace the receiver.

  The rain was falling heavily now, bouncing high off the slats of the pier, blurring the lights of the houses farther up the coast. Harvey stepped over the guardrail and made his way down the deserted pier as if walking out onto a frozen lake, the boards slippery under his feet. The lights of the fairground rides were reflected in the pooling water. He looked out to the ocean as the first fork of lightning split the sky. He imagined Nick Antonopoulos rolling back to sleep, waking early to call his wife and run through his speech for the sales conference. Wondering what had disturbed him in the night, the memory of someone using his name and wondering if he had dreamed it. Teresa, midair, working through a list of red-flagged emails. He thought of the storm clouds forming earlier in the day over the Gulf of Alaska, the pressure driving them down the length of the country, over Point Conception with its white lighthouse where they had picnicked last trip, all the way down to Santa Monica, the rain taking shape then falling on the lanes of traffic on Lincoln Boulevard. He stood at the end of the pier at what seemed like the very tip of this city. He listened to the thunder out at sea. A white line of lightning cut sideways through the cloud bank. He would stay here a while longer, Harvey thought, and see the storm through.

  The El Segundo Blue Butterfly

  1

  I am fourteen years old, on the backseat of a bus heading downtown. The seat covers are blue and faded, tiny lines of jade woven through the fabric. I’m watching dust motes spiral through diagonals of sunlight. The worn floor is sticky, and it glitters where the light is hitting it. In a copy of yesterday’s Daily News, abandoned on the seat next to me, I read that the El Segundo Blue Butterfly is now officially endangered. Last term I was chosen from a staff of twenty at the school newspaper, the Sentinel, to interview Michael Hogan Bernstein, the financier to whom Channel 7 recently dedicated a half-hour special. I am on my way to meet him at his office in the City National Tower. The air conditioner has broken down. I can smell diesel and feel the engine through my seat. Someone called Amancio has scratched their name onto the window. I look down onto the shining roofs of the cars on the freeway. We pass a sign for the Prophecy Speaks Bible Lectures and the Blue Oyster Cult at the Pavilion.

  My mother was up late with me last night going over my questions. I have them written on a sheet of notepaper from a set that was a gift from a customer at the laundry two Christmases ago. My mother had taken the afternoon off to help me prepare. Her section at the front of Triple-A on Coolridge Avenue sitting empty. I imagine it without her: the neon alterations sign in the window, the sewing machine on the Dresden-lace cloth that belonged to her grandmother, the fine cones of colored thread on the wooden rack on the wall, the dresses and suits hung in their plastic sheaths waiting for her to mend them. It is only the second day she has taken off since my father left when I was seven years old.

  She stands in her housecoat ironing the shirt she has bought for me to wear tomorrow. I watch her move the iron fluently over the collar, the yoke, the sleeves and the cuffs. There are damp patches under her arms and the faint smell of her sweat mixes with the steam from the iron. It reminds me of when my father still lived with us. The mornings I would get into their bed, under the cover, with the maroon-and-chocolate-colored leaves printed on it. How I would work myself into the gap between their backs, and lie there feeling safe in the commingled scents from their sleeping bodies. After he left my mother threw all their bedding out. The garbage sacks sat on the curb for three days before trashmen collected them. Last week I came home from school and found her asleep, face down on the mattress without any sheets, an incense stick burned to a stub on a saucer on the floor.

  As my mother irons I practice the questions I’ve prepared for Bernstein, trying to inject some gravity into my voice. My mother pauses, the shining underside of the iron in her raised right hand, and tells me I need to work on my diction. She hesitates at the word, and I know it is because she is not certain it is the right one. If it means exactly what she thinks it means. I laugh and tell her that’s funny, coming from her. But she pretends not to hear me. She picks up the remote control from the ironing board and flicks through the eight channels available. She turns up the sound on the television until it drowns out my voice. Walter Cronkite is introducing a report from Harrisburg five months on after the Pennsylvania leak. They are talking about the effect of a small dose of radiation on a fetus.

  We both wake up on the couch, the plastic cover sticking to our faces, the digital clock flashing 1:38 a.m. “Bed, Christopher. Now. Big day tomorrow,” my mother says. I walk down the hall to my bedroom and lie listening to the sound of the television for another hour or so. There are sirens, a car chase and gunshots, then a man with a deep voice talking to a woman who replies in husky monosyllables, whose conversation I cannot follow. Before I fall asleep I think about my mother and the time, at a burger joint she had taken me to in Mid-City, she told me my father once beat her so badly she passed blood in her urine for two days.

  My mother is subdued at breakfast the next morning. She fills my glass to overflowing. I watch the orange juice run down over the images of the Kentucky Derby that decorate the sides. My mother insists on brushing my hair before I leave. I stand impatiently before the big mirror in the hallway, by the flashing statue of Our Lady. “Go get him, Chris,” she tells me.

  Bernstein has recently taken over the twenty-fourth floor of the City National Tower. I learn from the press pack I was sent in advance of our meeting that Bernstein Inc. have offices in Mayfair, Tokyo, and New York City. The afternoon the press pack arrived my mother and I knelt at the glass coffee table in the living room going over the glossy documents, pinning each one under the paperweights she has collected since I was a baby. When I was younger I was fascinated by the collection she had gathered from thrift stores and mail order over the years, but she would always keep them out of reach, away from me, on a glass shelf. I can remember a time in my early childhood when my highest desire was to hold one of the paperweights in my hands. In one the stamen of a white flower opens out, in another there is a swirl that looks like a breaking wave—they cast their green and blue light across the documents from Bernstein.

  The concourse in front of the City National Tower is busy with black-suited office workers. Cherice is my first point of contact at the building. Dressed like a cop or some kind of paramilitary, she stands by the reception desk. I can smell Soul Glo in her hair. It reminds me of the girl in my class whose father was shot dead last year getting into his car after a shift at the post office in the Ambassador Hotel. She calls me Sugar and asks me who I’m here to see. I hand her my letter from Bernstein Inc. I notice the plastic window is torn and I suddenly feel ashamed I haven’t taken better care of it.

  Cherice tells me I need to make my way to the twenty-fourth floor, then asks if I know where that is. I shake my head. She walks me over to the bank of elevators and waits with me until one comes, our reflections blurred in the pitted steel doors. On the twenty-fourth floor the receptionist’s name badge says “Hi! I’m Debbie.” The skin on her face is sun-damaged, patches of brown pigment clustered under her eyes and down the sides of her mildly retroussé nose. The skin around the patches of pigment is opalescent. She is talking to someone on the telephone and looks at a point somewhere over my shoulder. I stand waiting for a pause in the conversation. She rolls her eyes as she talks and I notice how her mascara has gathered in broken clumps around her lower lashes—she wipes it away with the tip of her little finger.
Eventually she pauses, covering the mouth of the receiver with her hand. I give her my letter. She looks at it, trapping the telephone between her ear and her shoulder, then asks me who gave it to me, as if the letter had been stolen from her without her knowing.

  It’s Tuesday in the second week of the summer vacation. My mother is watching Jeopardy. A high school administrator from Irvine and a textbook sales tepresentative from Santa Monica are taking on the reigning champion. He has so far won a total of $24,525. My mother is shaking her head in disbelief. It’s sunny outside but the blinds in the living room are down so we can see the television. In a pan simmering on the front burner of the stove a chicken carcass is breaking apart. The fine bleached bones floating to the surface of the broth. We have the front door open and the ventilation fan on in the kitchen. A breeze, that is warm and smells of the fatty chicken flesh, is drifting through the room. The UPS man parks his van up outside the house. Hearing the engine shutting down, I turn from the TV and watch the man in the brown uniform walk across the small, untended garden to our porch. He kicks away the newspapers in their plastic wraps from the path into the long grass. He knocks at the inside of the door frame and says he has a package for Mr. Lewkoski.

  My mother flinches at my father’s name. I get up from in front of the television. I walk to the door. The man in the brown uniform asks me if I am Mr. Lewkoski. I tell him, somewhat uncertainly, that I am. He hands me a large padded envelope with my name and address typed in capital letters on the label. He turns his clipboard to me and takes the chewed stub of a pencil from behind his ear. I attempt a signature then worry if I’m meant to tip him. But he just smiles and tells me to enjoy my day now.