Jody Gehrman - Summer in the Land of Skin

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Kathryn

One of my favorite shower fantasies while I was working on this book involved mentally composing this page. There have been so many indispensable people who have helped me, I’m afraid I’ll drag on and on like the worst of Academy Award winners. To avoid such a nightmare, I’ll try to be snappy. Thanks to: Ed Gehrman, Sherry Garner and Jamie Gehrman-Selby for lifelong love and support; my agent, Dorian Karchmar, for her sharp eye and spot-on instincts; Barbara Lowenstein for giving me a chance; my editor, Margaret Marbury, and her team at Red Dress for their hip sensibilities and professionalism; Tania Hannan for editing out every “throbbing clitoris” and thus saving me from infinite shame; my teachers, most notably Patti Reeves, Carolyn Moore, Carol Guess, Gina Nahai, David Scott Milton, T. C. Boyle, John Rechy and Tristine Rainer; my colleagues at Mendocino College for their ongoing support; my students, who teach me so much about writing daily; Tommy Zurhellen for years of rock-solid writerly encouragement and friendship; Ted O’Callahan, for reminding me during early drafts that fiction isn’t just about wish fulfillment; Chris Herrod and Dexter Johnson for their guidance in my luthier research; Arlan Lackie, Kathryn Stevenson, M. Harvey Anderson and Colville Melody for their inspiration. Most of all I want to thank David Wolf, the only man in the world who would stay up all night reading an early draft of this aloud, keeping me well-stocked in Kleenex when the chapters were awful and seeing beauty before it was even there.

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1: Learning to Taste

CHAPTER 2: So This Is Bellingham

CHAPTER 3: The Sex Queen of Fanny’s Barbecue Palace

CHAPTER 4: Caliban

CHAPTER 5: Déjà Vu

CHAPTER 6: Lemon Cookies

CHAPTER 7: Mama—Mama, Please

CHAPTER 8: Boulevard Park

CHAPTER 9: The Skins

CHAPTER 10: Independence Day

CHAPTER 11: The Penny Guy

CHAPTER 12: Stains

CHAPTER 13: The Edge of the World

CHAPTER 14: Bombay Sapphire Gin

CHAPTER 15: The Garden of Earthly Delights

CHAPTER 16: One More Dance Before the Apocalypse

EPILOGUE

Everyone has a summer that changes them forever. Mine takes place in a dilapidated Victorian in a rainy, northwestern town, where a good day smells like blackberries turning fat and moist on the vine, and a bad day smells like the ghosts of rancid pulp drifting east from the mill. The sound track is a slide guitar, a sad harmonica and the repeated click of a Zippo. The props are cigarettes, coffee cups, gin and tonics with wedges of lime suspended amidst clouds of bubbles. The days are textured with the fine dust of cocobolo rosewood, and the silk of a Honduras mahogany neck pressed tightly against the thumb. Every year of my life, when June rushes in with girls in spaghetti straps and boys strutting shirtless, their limbs still kissed with the pale of winter, I will think of the summer that gave me back my senses.

I guess it’s obvious now that my father had some secret fatal flaw—a defect eating away at him somewhere inside his heart—but in the years leading up to his death I remember him as filled with the vigor of a yogi. His body was sinewy, long and lean, his hair a wild mixture of silver and brown spilling over his shoulders. Everyone agrees he was a genius; he built some of the finest, most intricate guitars in the world. I used to spend hours in his shop, caressing the stacks of wood that felt warm and alive under my small hands, putting my cheek against the cool mother-of-pearl. I would watch him patiently bend the rosewood sides over a heated tube, then clamp them into S-shaped molds to be sure the curves came out just right— “like a beautiful woman’s hips,” he used to say. I replay my memories of watching him work; I search his unguarded face, looking for clues. But he always seemed too alive, too otherworldly to be headed for such a seedy death. He had strangely feral eyes, dark as polished mahogany, with a visionary zeal so startling he could only be a god or a demon.

I think of those eyes as I tighten the focus on my binoculars, getting ready to study Magdalena. I do a cursory search of the others, skimming over their windows quickly—an exhausted mother changing her baby’s diaper, a young couple arguing as they gesture with shiny martini glasses. But the one I’m looking for is the slim, kimono-clad woman with raised bamboo blinds. There she is, on the third floor, watching the fog roll over the western hills. A single, flawless black braid snakes over one shoulder and her skin is so pale it makes me think of calla lilies. There is something in her eyes that always reminds me of my father—it’s the look that infants get when they gaze into the air with wild, unfocused bliss. Just give her a few hours, though. By midnight, she will stare out over the city with the hollow listlessness of a concentration camp inmate, a gaze that says she’s seen too much to go on looking.

I sketch her quickly in my notebook, and label it Magdalena: Manic as Usual. Then I spend hours jotting down notes about her childhood in Florida, her career as a flamenco dancer, and her inevitable suicide here, in San Francisco. She’s the type to slit her wrists in a bathtub. She thinks it will be pretty—all that red—like liquid roses.

I know I’m supposed to be somewhere tomorrow morning at seven. Namely, decaying in a lukewarm office before a computer screen, accomplishing data entry. But somehow I haven’t been able to move from this spot for days. I have a secret life here, wrapped in my beige apartment, recording the lives and deaths of my neighbors. Their bodies are real. Their histories—and their suicides—are all mine.

Maybe this is how it started with my father. Genes are very tricky, you know, millions of random cells dividing in a state of anarchy. I could have easily inherited the fatal flaw, the firing synapses that led him to that Motel 6, left him staring blankly at the cheap, flocked ceiling, wet with his blood.

I know I will not sleep. I have insomnia. Like him.

This is how I pass the time. Watching other people trying to live.

It is early in the morning when my mother comes whipping into my apartment in her high heels and tasteful, butter-yellow pantsuit. She sees me with my head propped against the wall, binoculars cradled between my thighs. I am naked, except for the old army blanket I have draped over my shoulders. I have not slept in five days. Her expression tells me that I am a despicable sight. She stands there, her thumb hooked on the strap of her suede briefcase, and surveys me with the edges of her mouth twitching.

She tries to flip her hair away from her shoulder casually—a habit left over from when her hair was very long, though she’s worn it in a pixie cut for fourteen years now and there is no longer anything left to flip. She pretends not to notice herself doing this and comes to sit on the edge of my bed.

“Christ, Anna,” she whispers.

She can look very mournful in the right light, though it is her practice to wear an optimistic smear of blush on each cheek and a precise smile, not too toothy, since there’s a gold cap next to her right canine. She takes a handkerchief from her pocket and reaches over to wipe a bit of sleep from my eye.

“Let’s get you in the shower,” she says. “Then we’ll put something nice on and go get breakfast. How does that sound?”

The muted morning light is resting on her face and hands, and the graceful curve of her neck is shining. I can recognize the fragile beauty my father must have seen in her—pale and vulnerable, with a dancer’s delicacy.