Abandon (9 page)

“If you’d like.”

“I’d really like. That road we went on before?”

She got into the car, and placed a blue overnight case at her feet. Then, as he began driving along the hills, she said, “Are you mad?” and jammed a tape into his system as if to drown out the answer. By the time he turned off the main road, and onto the narrow one that curls around the mountains—bare golden hills above them, and the city half lost in a haze below—Bing Crosby was singing about tropical sunsets and girls with flowers in their hair. Someone else, with an old voice that made him think of Fred Astaire, was hymning the Southern Seas, and the moon over Burma; there was a song about a cruise, a shipboard romance, the sadness as the port came into view.

She looked out the window, alert, expectant as a visitor.

“All these songs about traveling?” The traffic had thinned out now; Santa Barbara was a greyish blur in the distance.

“When I was young, I always thought I’d travel.”

“And in fact?”

“In fact, I haven’t.” The trace of anger that lay just behind the eagerness.

“Well, you can make up for it now,” he said brightly, and then realized that what he’d said could be taken in the wrong way.

“I will,” she said. “I am.” The light slowly returning to her voice.

The sky looked guiltless as they crossed the Pass, and each curve brought them some new outline of a house, barricaded behind gates and rebuking the ash-filled slopes all around. “Like phoenixes,” she said, and he thought that she was right: they were indeed like mythical creatures of a kind, living far above the city, in a place where they were sure nothing bad could happen to them.

A man was jogging along the narrow, steep road, a dog bounding beside him, and the sea far below. Though it was a Saturday in summer, few other cars were to be seen, and, high above, the tumult of the town far away, it was easier to believe that you were in some previous California, before anyone had thought to call it Eden. The smell of wild anise, and the sky sharp over the lake to the north; an absolute emptiness across the classic Western landscape of ridges and orchards and valleys: California, before it had a name.

In the car, meanwhile, the men bowed in black ties and the ladies’ dresses swirled around a dance floor off at sea. Lovers met under tropical moons, and reality was nothing that couldn’t be wished away. He thought of his coming trip to Spain, and then, catching sight of her looking out towards the town and ocean, bit the truant thought back.

“You still wish you could travel.”

“Of course,” she said, with more conviction than the question had deserved. “I wish I could do many things.”

“You can, can’t you? That’s what California is about.”

“For some people, I guess.” The wistful tone softened the traces of bitterness. “I believed all that once upon a time—”

“Now?”

“Now I don’t know.”

As they turned onto Painted Cave Road, an ancient canyon on one side, poison oak, thick trees, a gurgling stream at the bottom, they were taken farther from the world than ever, the road closing in on them on both sides and the rocks above enforcing a kind of sovereignty. The switchbacks were harsh, and up above, when they stopped beside the canyon, the markings in the Chumash cave showed scorpions, circles, snakes. Whatever you might believe about California was here, on this shaded road: the ancient signs, the open bright sky. Farther up, nothing but rolling hills and mountains in the distance, Cachuma Lake blue in the sultry afternoon.

“Can we walk a little?” she said as they went up higher, and her manner was so uncertain, so far from the local presumption, that he was touched; the way she asked for favors carried with it the tremor of an expected refusal. He parked the car under a tree and followed her, scrambling, up to a rough, dusty path that cut a thin trail towards a farther hill. They walked and walked, thirty minutes or more, everything falling away from them, and then the trail ended at what seemed to lie at the terminus of every mountain path here: a ruined house. Once upon a time, someone had tried to build a Roman villa here, it seemed, commanding the valley below, and so far from the city that no rules applied; now they could see broken bottles, torn condom wrappers, a few uneven stones poking out of the worn grass.

She took herself down to a flat open space—once a living room, perhaps—and slipped through the broken arches, bending down to pick up rocks now and then, or peeping out at him and smiling from behind a shrunken red-brick chimney. She loved to gambol through other people’s spaces, it seemed, the actress again, free as long as no one took her for herself.

“Tell me a story,” she said at last, having scoured the site thoroughly and settled down on a line of broken wall, the sun beginning to sink behind them. The wind had come up, as it always does on summer dusks in the hills, and with its bluster came a trace of chill.

The flat open space looked strangely like a tiny open-air stage, made for recitations, and so he went down to it, stood before her, maybe thirty feet away, and said, “There was once an old man, who was young in years, and who lived in the old city of Konya. He was a respected teacher, a father of two, a pillar of the local courts. He led a good and pious life and was famous for the judgments he passed on religious matters.”

The words came easily to him, and from a place he couldn’t name. Learn and master all the rules, Sefadhi had said, and then throw them all away.

“But one day, for the first time ever, without warning, the man of religion found God. It sounds like a dramatic thing—a thunderbolt from the heavens. In fact, it was a very simple thing: he met a stranger who gave him back a sense of who he might be. ‘Who is better?’ the rough traveler, much older than he, called out in the marketplace. ‘The one who studies God or the one who is God?’

“It was a strange question and perhaps a heretical one, and it shocked him so much he became someone a little different from the person who’d woken up and left the house that morning. Someone, in fact, who thought only of his duties, his students, the case of the moment.”

She was looking down at him happily—glad, he realized, just to be in this unlikely site with the sun setting and nothing else around. All the struggle and paleness was gone from her now: as if a storm had passed and she had come into a clearing.

“And then, as suddenly as the stranger had come, this new friend disappeared. The old man wept; he walked and walked to see if he could find him. He sang songs, wrote poems, even, when he heard the new friend might be in Damascus, sent his son there to bring him back.

“But then”—and here, to his pleasure and surprise, the story took hold of him, and he left everything real behind—“as seasons passed, it became clear that his friend was never coming back. That his purpose, in some sense, had been served. And so, picking up an old leather bag from beside his bed, he walked out of the house, out of the town, and up into the hills.

“The town of Konya is surrounded by mountains, and in winter they grow cold, impassable. Travelers stay in the inns till spring, and everyone waits for the first sign of wild flowers. But this man went in the opposite direction, climbing up the mountains in winter as if determined that no one could follow him.

“Days passed, his wife and children looked everywhere, but of course they could not find him. Neighbors muttered that they had been ‘abandoned,’ but his wife knew that in some sense her husband was just going home. He was not lost, she thought, but found, and now was on his way to a place as distant as the place where he had been born. Though shopkeepers searched all the places where he was known to sit and drink and talk, they never found him, and his wife never helped them in their search. ‘He is not there,’ she said, ‘because the person you know is dead.’ ”

The wind picked up now, blowing her long hair into squalls and tangles round her face. She pushed away the strands that flew into her mouth, and he raised his voice to be heard over the whistle and the roar, his words filling and echoing around the abandoned space.

“The police sent horses and dogs, the best climbers in the town traveled as far as they could, children were told to look out for a ragged man where they played, but it was all, of course, in vain. He was beyond their calls now, and it was easy to believe that words were among the things he’d left at home.

“In time the search was stopped, and families returned to their usual rounds. His students became teachers, with schools of their own; his children became parents. One day, many years later, a traveler came down from the mountains, in February, when the snow was thickest, with a curious tale. He was a bedraggled man, of twigs and branches, and he said something rough and strange about a young old man, seen many years before, beating a trail into the mountains, to somewhere from which you could see valleys and distant lakes. Without saying a word, he had followed the man to a rock at the end of the last trail, where the path ran out, and seen him arrive at the ruins of what must once have been a large house. There was someone waiting for him there, as if they had planned to meet all along, and as soon as he saw the wanderer arrive, to be found by the stranger, he, the man who spoke to them now, turned round and came back out into the world.”

A silence fell, broken only by the wind, the flapping of her hair against her cheeks and shoulders, the sound of his steps scrambling back to where she sat.

“That’s beautiful. Where does it come from?”

“Here,” he said, tapping his chest.

“Dangerous, too.”

“I suppose it is. I hadn’t meant for it to come out like that.”

“I don’t think everyone would be so happy about his abandoning his wife and family.”

“I know. It must have come out of one of the texts I’ve been reading. You know how you read a story—about a pavilion in the desert, say—and then you dream about it, only better?”

She was holding on to her hair as it streamed about her face; the sky was on the edge of navy blue, and the first stars seemed imminent.

“We should be heading back. You must be cold.”

She shook her head no. “I like it here. It’s free.”

An unexpected word to use, but he sat beside her on the rock, leaving her free to explore some more.

“A long way from Los Angeles,” he said, somewhat obviously, as if words were less dangerous than silence.

She nodded and turned to him, expectant. In most people it is the eyes that tell you who they are; in her, the small pursed mouth, strangely prim and shy.

“Well, I’m heading back even if you aren’t.” He pulled himself up and began walking along the path: the afternoon was taking strange turns along the road, and he’d found himself in a place he’d never expected to visit. He held on to the thought of the Rumi story as if to prevent himself from losing balance.

She followed him as he walked, and when they arrived back at the car there were stars in the branches above them. The road was close to pitch-black, and it was easy to imagine that not a single car had driven past in all the time they’d been walking. Their own car looked touchingly brave and resolute, alone under the tree full of stars.

He unlocked her door, and closed it behind her, and when he got in at his side, he moved into a waiting silence. He didn’t want to intrude on it—her quietness pulled him in as much as her chattering pushed him away—and he put on the heater and sat behind the wheel, waiting till she returned from wherever she was.

“Thank you for a lovely walk.”

“My pleasure.” Such observation of ceremonial courtesies in anything-goes California.

Then, after a few moments, “Do I get another kiss?”

“I don’t think so. I’m taken, remember?”

“And not with me.”

“It wouldn’t be fair—in the circumstances.”

“ ‘In the circumstances,’ ” she said, mocking the pompousness, and leaning forward to kiss him lightly on the lips.

She kissed, somehow, as if she’d never kissed before: suddenly the girl who listened to the songs of travel was in the tiny car beside him. It was strange to see all this just from the way she said, “You’re so warm,” and rested her head on his shoulder, but he could feel somehow the weight of all the things she hadn’t done or thought, saving them up for a rainy day that might never come. She was like someone whose life had not begun.

“Thank you,” she said. “You really touch me.”

“I’m glad.”

The words could hardly have been more inadequate.

“I could get in trouble with you, big trouble.” The very girlishness of the phrasing making her point better than she could.

“You’re lonely,” he said, not knowing why exactly.

“In a way. As much as anyone. Like you, I bet.” She turned to look away from him, out the window. “All the time I was growing up, I never seemed to belong. My parents were outsiders everywhere we went.”

He didn’t say anything, to leave her where she was.

When she turned back to him, her eyes were full.

“I’m sorry,” he said, smoothing the fall of hair behind her ears. “I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories.”

“That’s okay. I don’t mind. As long as you make them better.”

The strange, antique diction again, the sense of her removal from the world, and then, as if pushing aside what was fragile in her, she climbed over the gearstick—a tomboy on her way into the hills again—and sat in his lap. Her long hair, golden where it fell around her face, highlighted the hurt eyes.