A Desert of Pure Feeling

I think back over the years to the time in the mid-70s when I finally left home for good and headed for Los Angeles, driving an old car that broke down twice on the way to California.

I have never let go of the idea, instilled in me years earlier in a literature class, that I might become a writer myself, and it seemed to me that Los Angeles was the place where I needed to be. I wanted to be in a city, to meet people who were doing something with their lives. And yet I discovered it wasn’t easy living in a city like L.A. Or to make such a big change. My first apartment was a place near Western Avenue and Beverly Boulevard, in a building where I was the only person who didn’t speak Spanish. I understood for the first time how it was possible to feel like a foreigner in your own country.

I remember once, not long after I arrived in Los Angeles, I went to a department store on Wilshire Boulevard to buy a few things I needed and the clerk wouldn’t take my check because it was out-of-state. She was rude to me and I made the mistake of arguing with her until I’d gotten myself thoroughly upset, and then when I went out to the parking lot, my old car wouldn’t start, and I discovered I didn’t have any money, not even a quarter for a phone call, not that I knew anyone at that point whom I could call for help. I was supposed to pick my son Justin up from school and I was already a few minutes late. I began to panic, thinking of him waiting for me. He was only 9 and I was sure he didn’t know the city well enough yet to find his way back to the apartment, and in any case, I didn’t like to think of him walking home alone.

In desperation I decided I had no choice but to take a bus, although I didn’t know the bus system yet and I wasn’t even sure whether I could get a bus that would take me near his school, even if I’d had the fare, which I didn’t. I stood in front of the department store for a while, watching the buses come and go, and then I got up my courage and I began asking passersby for change. I thought it would be easy to come up with a dollar once somebody heard my story--my car broken down, my kid waiting for me at school, my money left at home--but it wasn’t. Person after person walked away from me, usually not even bothering to listen to me finish my story. I saw how cruel and indifferent people could be, and how you could so easily be taken for a liar. I must have asked two dozen people before an elderly woman gave me a dollar and a short lecture about how I shouldn’t spend it on drugs.

When I got to the school, Justin wasn’t there. I began to feel very afraid. All my shortcomings as a mother became glaringly clear. I began running down the street and, a little while later, arrived at the apartment, out of breath. There was Justin, sitting on the front steps, playing with a neighbor’s dog. “My God,” I said, “how did you get home?” “Easy,” he replied, “I just walked.”

I met a man named Richard Taylor, who was a lot older than me. He used to come into the cafe where I worked, and we’d end up chatting. He was a writer and he worked in the film business. When he mentioned the movies he’d written, I took pleasure from the fact I had seen some of them.

He was a very decent man--kind, generous, intelligent. And he was funny. That, in many ways, was the thing I liked most about him: He could, and did, make me laugh.

I had been writing some stories in the evenings after I’d gotten Justin to bed, and when Richard Taylor discovered I had an interest in writing, he persuaded me to let him see some of these stories. He liked them, he said they showed promise, and after that he began encouraging me. Sometimes he offered suggestions about how I might change something to make a story stronger. He became my mentor, in a way. And then he became my lover.

It lasted only a few years, the relationship with Richard, but everything changed during those years. Justin and I moved into his house in the Hollywood Hills, a Spanish-style villa surrounded by beautiful gardens that looked out over the city.

I quit my job at the drugstore, at Richard’s insistence, and also at his urging I began devoting myself full-time to my writing. I began meeting people--writers, artists, actors--interesting people who led interesting lives.

I began getting a few of my stories published in small magazines. Many of these stories featured a much older lover, sometimes of foreign nationality, or a sick child or a girl raised on a farm at the edge of a lake. I think Richard assumed he was the model for the older man in these stories, and I never let on that he wasn’t, although the passion, the longing so evident in these stories, was not quite the same as what I felt for him.

I traveled to Europe with Richard, spent a summer living in Ireland, returned and wrote more short stories, which were eventually published as a collection and which enjoyed a small success. Then I finished a novel, “The Invention of Light,” about my childhood and early marriage. It featured an older, aristocratic lover who changes the course of the heroine’s life and brings her into a different consciousness of the world, only to discover an incompatibility he finds insurmountable. “The Invention of Light” was eventually made into a movie. On the first day of filming, I stood on the shores of Lake Sherwood, inland from Malibu and the sea, looking at a director, actors, cameras--the sun bright upon the water and the bodies moving into position--and watched as others took my story and began to make it their own. It did not seem to matter at that moment that this story might become something different than the one I had told. I felt only the happiness of money in my pocket, and the excitement of the day, what seemed to me an alchemy of motion and beauty and light.

Quite suddenly everything changed. I found I had an income of my own, as well as a new identity as a writer. I began to feel more independent, more capable, less reliant on Richard not only for the necessities of life but also for a sense of myself. Perhaps this was the beginning of our troubles.

Eventually, everything between Richard and me just sort of fell apart--not with bitterness, but with a kind of benign understanding that we were not absolutely suited to each other, though we might care about one another deeply--and I moved out and found a place for Justin and myself in West Hollywood.

The next few years weren’t easy for me, but I think they were even more difficult for Justin. I moved again, this time to a cottage in Santa Monica Canyon, near the beach. By then, he had changed schools three times in six years. He was tired of making new friends. He felt a little lost, and more than a little lonely. I tried to make it up to him with trips to Disneyland, with presents and surprise visits to see his grandparents. But what he really wanted was more of me. What he really wanted was a home life, and a real family and a mother who didn’t go out so much in the evenings. And that I wasn’t able to give him.

*

I often wonder what it would have been like to have had a son when I was 30, or 35, instead of bringing a child into the world when I was only 17. Would I have known any more about mothering? Or is parenting, like bingo, a matter of luck?

Justin never held anything against me--not the divorce, which occurred when he was 5 and took him from his father. Nor the decisions I made afterward. He didn’t even fault me for my later self-involvement, for the way in which I put myself first, always first, in a splendid display of egoism.

In any case, he did get back at me later. I’m sure he didn’t intend it. I’m sure it wasn’t simply a matter of punishing me, though it seemed that way at the time.

It was one thing for Justin to decide to reject me when he was 14 and left my house in order to go live with his father. That I could understand. A boy needs a man in his life at that age. I had to let him go (let’s tell the truth: I was ready to let him go). But how could he have so fervently embraced, just a short while later, the religion I had so scrupulously kept from contaminating him? How could he have so willingly joined the church whose influence I had spent my whole adult life purging from my being?

The easy answer is, it was his father’s doing. He joined a religious household--a stepmother, a half brother, and a father who had gone back to the church not long after we divorced--and they had influenced him.

But he was nobody’s pawn, I know that. He was a strong boy, with a strong mind. He made his choice. I’m afraid he actually believed. He had a testimony, as he put it, of the truthfulness of the gospel, which he believed was being restored on earth, in these latter days. He wanted to be baptized, to go down into the waters beneath his father’s hands and emerge a newborn and cleansed being.

When he turned 20 and decided to accept a mission call to Guatemala, I pleaded with him not to go. Believe in it all if you must, I said. But a mission? Do you really think it correct to proselytize? Must you try to convert those poor Guatemalans?

I did everything to dissuade him from going on a mission. But to no avail.

He had driven down from Idaho, where he had been going to school, in order to give me the news, although he didn’t mention the matter of the mission right away. It had been months since I’d seen him, and as always, there was a little tension between us at first. I believe I made some comment about his needing a haircut when he first arrived, a comment he didn’t like.

“Why do you always have to find fault with me?” he said. “There’s always something you have to criticize, isn’t there?”

“I only meant I could give you a haircut,” I said. “Like I used to do when you were little. Come, let me cut your hair. I promise you’ll like it when I’m finished.”

He acquiesced, and we went out into the garden of the house where I was then living, in Santa Monica Canyon. I remember that day very clearly, the feel of the sea on the air, the bright colors of the hibiscus and ginger and oleander forming a fragrant backdrop, the whiteness of his slender torso as he removed his shirt, the feeling of his hair, thick in my hands, and how it fell, as I snipped away at it, in weightless little golden clumps onto the emerald grass.

I wanted to touch him again, as I had touched him so often in the past, and I remember how we laughed and joked with one another that afternoon while I cut his hair, and then later walked to the beach and took a swim together in the ocean, diving beneath the waves and surfacing while pelicans cruised by just above our heads.

Later, over dinner, we had argued over something silly. It began with his saying how happy he was to be an American. He was very happy to live in this country, he said, when he considered what life was like in other places in the world. With my characteristic bluntness, I replied that perhaps he should feel a little shame, too, that he was able exist in a privileged world at the expense of others--we did consume far more than our share of the earth’s resources after all--and that simply feeling happy maybe didn’t quite cover it. He was offended by my remark and grew silent.

Later, I found him sitting in my study, staring out the window into the blackness of the night. He looked so fragile, so confused and hurt, that I had gone to him and laid my hand on his newly shorn head and told him I was sorry. I said I didn’t mean for him to take what I said personally, it was simply a political observation.

“It’s all right,” he said.

I wanted to repair the damage I’d done. At that moment I very much wanted him to love me, and for him to know that I loved him. I wanted all the misunderstanding of our lives to disappear, all the hurt and struggle and longings to fade away. I wanted to be forgiven for all my shortcomings--for my bluntness and insensitivity, for the way I had uprooted him time and again in his youth. For the loneliness he had suffered being an only child of a single mother. I stroked his hair and said, “I wasn’t the best mother, was I? But I wasn’t the worst, either.”

He looked up at me and said, “You were a good mother.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What did I manage to give you? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“You showed me that it’s possible to do anything in life. I saw you do it. I think that’s what you gave me, more than anything else. You wanted to be a writer, and you became one. I guess that means I can do anything, too.”

I had been touched by his words. For a brief moment I felt that I had perhaps not failed completely, that in spite of my self-absorption I had managed to give something valuable to my son.

“Nothing was ever more important to me than you were--are--Justin.”

“I know that,” he said. “I guess I’ve always known that.”

It was our last moment of intimacy. And I cannot help thinking now how he used the past tense when he said “You were a good mother,” as if foreshadowing the end, and how I said “Nothing was ever more important to me than you were” before I thought to correct myself.

He waited until the next morning to tell me about his mission call. And once again we were at odds.

In the years since his disappearance from that village in Guatemala, I have tried to visualize what might have become of him. I’ve imaged things I’ve never wanted to imagine, had visions of unspeakable horrors. Much worse than my recurring nightmare of him calling out to me for help, and being unable to locate him. I imagine the faces of the people who took him, faces heavy with menace--soldiers, guerrillas, ordinary peasants--figures with an immunity to violence written on their features. I try to imagine what they might have done with him.

More often, I try not to.