zin sins

And now from his high perch Jeremy could look over a deep green carpet and imagine the size of the suspended carpet’s support — the pillar-like trunks of the vines, each the size of a rancher’s forearm — and know that they were some of the oldest, best tended chardonnay vines in California.  He couldn’t help but crack a smile, yet in the crow’s feet about his eyes lurked an incredible sadness he could not hide.

Jeremy was so caught up in this rare chance to relax and review his situation that he had no idea he was under close scrutiny by someone only twenty feet behind him.  Slowly he felt the presence come over him.  He gathered in his thoughts and turned.

“Bobby, you — you should leave the sheik in solitude when he prays to Allah.”

“Looks more like a catatonic fit to me,” the young man replied.

The visage of a younger Jeremy peered down on the seated man.  But the son who stood before him appeared a bit too frangible, a bit out of place in the rugged landscape; he had quite a bit of his mother’s look to him.  Bobby wore the uniform of a typical rancher in The Valley: western shirt, Levi’s and Lama boots.  But his belt buckle was unique, for it was a huge ingot of silver pounded into a ten-pointed star and etched with the words in French, “Second Place, Paris Tasting, 1975.”  Jeremy had received it from Stan Bergen at The Winery, the purchaser of all his grapes.  Their wine, with his vineyard name on the label, had placed ahead of all the great French White Burgundies in what was one of the first Franco-American tastings held on the banks of the Seine.  In a fit of apparent generosity, the winemaker had awarded Jeremy The Winery’s silver medal during a local ceremony.  But compared to giving Jeremy that coveted trinket, the worldwide publicity for The Winery — coupled with a long-term contract for all of Jeremy’s chardonnay grapes — would have been worth the gift of a dozen French medals. 

Jeremy wasn’t much on all the hoopla and had the medal made into a belt buckle and gave it to his eldest son Daniel, who had been in direct charge of the famous vineyard during that particular vintage.  Bobby had inherited the belt buckle from Daniel.

But more than the unique medal set Bobby apart.  He was too well-groomed and kept himself too trim to be one of the good ol’ boys who had seen every sunrise in The Valley.  Jeremy thought he looked more like a Ralph Lauren model posing as a cowboy.  Jeremy remembered seeing Bobby come in after disking on a hot day the past spring and noticing that every hair on his head and lip was in place.  He wondered if Bobby kept a pocket mirror on the tractor.  But as soon as Jeremy thought that Bobby didn’t fit in with the surroundings, he remembered that Bobby should never have been there.

Bobby stepped through the panorama in front of his father and found his own rock on which to nest.  So there the two sat and brooded.  Jeremy noticed that the rock Bobby had chosen, unlike his own, was a deep, shiny ebony and appeared perfectly round — as if it had been placed there a dozen years before just for the one moment that Bobby would spot the prop and perch on it.  Roll up the klieg lights for the shoot — I’m at it again, Jeremy thought, and his eyes flashed a quick tremor of shame.

“So what brings you to the Mount, my son?” Jeremy asked in a mock biblical tone.

“There are a few changes I want to make with those tablets you gave me,” Bobby shot back.

The elder raised a pointed finger as if to say, “Touche,” and the pair lapsed into silence. Bobby broke the truce.

“You come up here often?  I don’t remember seeing you up here before,” Bobby said, trying to hide the lie.

“Off and on this little spot has been a retreat for me.  I was thinking just a minute ago about the time I sat up here as a kid and that whole valley was covered in plum blossoms.  Now that was something.”

Bobby tried hard to remember what their land looked like without vines.  He couldn’t.  Jeremy dug deeper into his collection of private thoughts and tried to verbalize one.

“I — I haven’t sat up here in almost two years.  Two years!  I’ve avoided coming up here, coming anywhere near here.  But today — I guess time heals all wounds.”

Bobby watched his father’s eyes glaze over and his stare drop as Jeremy mumbled those last few words.  Bobby felt an odd sensation — curiosity — as he watched the droplets fall between his father’s legs onto the pale dirt.  Each tear hit with a barely audible tap, raising a small puff of dust between his father’s boots. 

Bobby had been in shock two years before when he saw that same weakness, that chink in the hard facade of Jeremey.  But this time he only felt bewilderment at what it took to break down his father’s defenses.  And Bobby was amazed at how Jeremey’s physical appearance could be so affected by his emotional state.  Jeremy instantly aged a decade; he looked like an old man.

No matter what sympathetic thoughts flowed through Bobby, he knew he couldn’t act on them.  He couldn’t grasp Jeremy’s arm, pat his shoulder, hug him.  It just wasn’t done.  Bobby was trapped in the cage of the fearful, distant, second son.  He could only gaze at the profile of his sobbing father.

Perhaps it was for the old man’s dignity that Bobby didn’t move to console him.  Perhaps it was for his own dignity that Bobby didn’t flee.  After what seemed an eternity, the old man composed himself and slowly lifted his eyes to the late-afternoon sun.

“Olly-olly-ox-in-free,” Jeremy finally croaked, mostly to himself.

Bobby wondered where Jeremy came up with that one.  Sounded like something from Vonnegut, Jeremy’s favorite.  

“Son, I’ve got no right to carry on like that.  I’ve got you here now, and your mother and Tobie and all of this,” he said as he swept his hand across the vista before them.  “Are these reasons to sit up here still in a fit of despair?”

“We all have the right to be melancholy — to be depressed — when we feel like it.”

“Yes, I know.  I wasn’t even thinking about Daniel until you came up.”

That statement stung Bobby.  It hit him harder than watching Jeremy cry.  He had no answer for him.  Finally it came around to Jeremy how Bobby had taken his comment, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of anything to say to soften its impact.  So Jeremy plodded on.

“How could one unfortunate event have such a lasting impact on the direction of so many lives?  Where would you be, Bobby, if Daniel hadn’t died?  Where would we all be?”

Now there was a question that, no matter how long Bobby pondered it, he couldn’t even come close to answering.  He thought of the facts in the law case of McPherson v. Buick, and whether the theory of proximate cause hammered out in that landmark case couldn’t be applied here.

“Hell if I know,” was Bobby’s feeble reply.

Jeremy pressed on.  “Do you think you’d still be married to Carin?”

Here we go again, Bobby thought, yet he quickly realized that this was the first time that Jeremy  had asked the question since Bobby had moved home.  He had made the entire subject taboo, but in this rare discourse with Jeremy he knew he couldn’t help but open up.

“I couldn’t say” was his simple reply.

“Or won’t say, Bobby.  If your mother or I get anywhere near the subject you clam up.  You act like we’re trying to prod you into giving us a first-person account of a terminal illness.”

Bobby felt his coat of armor melting away under his father’s piercing eyes.  He felt so young, so helpless.  As if it was his turn to cry.  He believed he was fighting back his emotions valiantly.

“That’s a good description, Jeremy, because for the past year I’ve felt like I’ve had cancer of the heart, of the spirit.  As if my emotional outlet had been cauterized.”

Jeremy politely paused to let Bobby’s current policy statement on life have its impact.  He was in awe of Bobby’s ability to pinpoint in so few words what he had observed piecemeal  in his son since his return home.

“Don’t you think that if you quit being so introspective, if you found someone else — had a relationship — that you could shake a little of this bitterness?”

“Hell, you know I’ve gone out several times since I came home.  I was thinking about the women I’ve been with in the past year.  If they don’t cover the spectrum!  And yet I find myself bored with them.  Well, not bored, but disappointed.  In each I’ve found a flaw, or tried to find one, that I magnify until it becomes so prominent that it overshadows them.

“And even if I find someone who’s compatible with me, it seems I do everything in my power to avoid developing a relationship.  Why?  Because I don’t want to risk losing — losing her — again.”

Jeremy realized that he finally had Bobby talking, and he waited quietly for Bobby to continue his soliloquy.

“I’m a flawed perfectionist.  I’m like the sculptor who spends the best years of his life shaping what was a flawless piece of marble.  The end result  is a Venus di Milo.  He falls in love with the statue and professes undying devotion to his life’s greatest work, only to see her put on the auction block and sold to the highest bidder.  His life crumbles, yet he rationalizes that by setting his prize free from his clutches he provides the rest of the world the chance to behold such beauty.  But little does he know that his Venus has been spray-painted fleshtone by the new owner — a freeloading Saudi prince in Beverly Hills.”

Jeremy realized that if he didn’t herd this conversation into the confines of reality, he would no longer be part of it.

“That’s quite the contemporary parable there, but you’re forgetting that your mother and I have only the barest details of what’s gone on through the break-up and divorce. ”

“I don’t talk about it because it hurts.  And to talk about it too often would make it common and eventually so boring that it would all just fade away.  And to get over it — to get over her — would be the final step.  A step I never want to take.”

“No matter.  You’ve got to tell me about it, Bobby.”

“And reveal the deepest, darkest secret that I carry around inside?  That two weeks before I ‘sacrificed’ my law career to come home and help you with the ranch, Carin told me she was leaving me?  Moving out?  Our marriage hit the rocks long before I ever came home to help out.”

Jeremy sat frozen in disbelief.  This was news to him.

“Jeremy, I felt like one of those rare unfortunates who suffers once from spontaneous combustion.  You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?  Walking down the street one day and poof!  You go up in a cloud of smoke.  That’s how I was destroyed.  My marriage, my love, disintegrated with equal warning.

“I’ve always thought that I had good intuition.  And you’d think I had learned something in six years of college.  But to be nipped in the ass by what must have been a barking dog isn’t so much humiliating as it is eroding.  It erodes one’s confidence, one’s belief in the ability to make a judgement based on external stimuli.  I know longer trust myself.”

“Why have you bottled up all this inside for so long?”

“Why not?”

“Does Carin know how you feel?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t want to muck up her new life, and I don’t want to lose — lose her — again.  Did you know she’s living with someone else?”

“Well, your mother did say something to that effect a couple of months ago.  I think Tobie had told her.”

“That’s why I told him in the first place, so I wouldn’t have to announce it at a family dinner.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Wouldn’t it bother you?  My God, Jeremy, we live in a totally different world than the one in which you said your wedding vows.  You and Janie are an institution.  Today, though, it seems we have fine print clauses in the words we say that either party can revoke the contract at the slightest hint of a problem, of unpleasantness.”

“That’s the age you live in today, son.”

“What happened to me — to us – was a two-way street.  When she told me she was moving out, I didn’t get on my knees and beg for a second chance.  I didn’t try to convince her that we could work things out.  I started, right there on the couch with her sobbing away, to plan how to spend my new-found freedom.  This is the same person who a few moments ago said he was heartbroken!”

“Maybe you felt — “

“Haven’t you wondered how I was able to withdraw from school and move home so quickly after you went into the hospital?”

“I never gave it much thought.”

“If you had seen the date of my withdrawal from Vanderbilt, you’d have realized that I quit law school one week before your heart attack, two weeks before I came home  and sat with you in intensive care after your bypass.  Your heart attack wasn’t the reason I dropped out of law school — or the reason my marriage crumbled.  Carin and I made that our little secret.  Her parents don’t know — at least I don’t think they do.  So I guess we pulled off quite the scam.”

Jeremy sat there without moving as he fought back the feeling of betrayal — for his son not having confided in him sooner.

“It was all so convenient, Jeremy.  This may sound cruel, but you couldn’t have picked a better time to have the pump go out.  I needed direction and you gave it to me.  I was really burned out on law school.  I’ve made my holier-than-thou speeches enough times on why I quit.  The corruption in law, the lack of reality, the horror stories of clerking that summer for a criminal attorney in Houston.  Yet as each day goes by I can’t help but think that Carin was right.  She said I quit because I was bored and I’d make a shitty lawyer.”

Jeremy held his eyes away from him, as a priest would in a confessional.

“You don’t know how guilty I’ve felt about not telling you the real circumstances for me being here.  I guess I felt you’d accept me a little more, wouldn’t pressure me to go back and finish my last year, if you thought I had done this for some great, noble reason.  If you thought I came home on my own initiative to help out.”

Jeremy wanted to make the proper gesture to let Bobby know that it was alright, that he was forgiven if that was what he wanted to hear.  But Jeremy was selfishly preoccupied with a simple thought that prevented him from responding;  he suddenly missed Daniel now more than ever before.  Finally Jeremy spoke.

“Have you kept in contact with her?”

“No.  I had called her in Los Angeles the night after we heard that we had won the Gold at the LA County Fair.  Some guy answered and told me never to call at that hour again.  She called me back a few days later and that’s when I figured out that she was living with the guy.  I wrote her a long letter a couple weeks later and that was it.”

Jeremy never saw that last letter Bobby had sent from The Valley to his young wife in the waning days of a nonexistent marriage.  If he had, as a heavy reader of prose, perhaps Jeremy might have at least complimented Bobby on its sincerity.  It read:

Dear Carin:

What follows are excerpts from a phone conversation on a night three months before our unfortunate divorce becomes final:

BRRR . . . BRRR . . . BRRR . . . CLICK

Bobby:  Hello?

Carin:  . . . Hi.

B:  Oh . . . hi.  What’s up?

C:  I’m depressed.  I just don’t see why you don’t hate me for not telling you any sooner.

B:  Telling me what?  Oh . . . that you two are living together?

C:  Yeah.

B:  I just — at this very moment — figured it out.

C:  I’m sorry.

B:  Life goes on.

C:  At times I think back on how immature I’ve been, how impatient I’ve been, and you’ve been so confused and undirected –

B:  Misdirected.  Yes, it’s crazy.  You know what I was thinking about when you called?

C:  What?

B:  About when you would choreograph those elaborate candlelight dinners with our friends back at school.  Those were some of the best moments I’ve ever had.

C:  Bobby, did i ever tell you about going to see that psychic in Houston when I went home last summer?

B:  No.

C:  I went to her and she said I was going to be married three times.  Three times!  She said I was in the middle of splitting up with my husband but that I still loved him.  And you know what? She said I was going to marry again and my second husband was going to die unexpectedly and ‘d remarry my first.

B:  Does that mean I’m going to have to sit in the back row of the church and watch the ceremony before I begin to slowly poison him?

C:  You know, I look back and we seem like two people running at each other, arms open, and we missed!  And when we were ten yards away from each other we stopped and looked back and asked, “What happened?”  I feel like I’m jerking your chains when I say that.

B:  You’ll be jerking my chains for years.

There was a lot more to this phone conversation as my Pacific Bell bill will attest, but I think this shows where we’re coming from.  Is there hope?  At least there’s communication.  You jerked his chains and the love slave comes to life.  Yes, yes, yes, I still love you (if only I could write real small here I would so you could skim over it if it’s not what you want to see.)  Carin, I shouldn’t be writing this or even talking on the phone, because it might ruin what you’ve found with what’s his name, your new-found happiness.

Splendor in the Grass.  Remember that movie?  I think it was based on a Theodore Drieser novel.  We spent an eternity during the film finding out how much Warren and Natalie loved each other and how rocky that road to appiness was and kapoof! it’s all over and Natalie’s gone and so is Warren.  Then we have the absolutely saddest scene in the world.  Natalie comes back and visits Warren because deep down she really still cares for him.  She finds out he’s farming and lives down the road a piece.  She goes up to this old, rickety house and knocks and this plain woman, barefoot and pregnant, comes to the screen door.  Natalie asks to see Warren.  So here comes ‘ol Warren kinda creeping up to the door and gives her one of those looks like “Jeez, it’s you!”  And she is in semi-shock by now anyway.  So he comes out on the porch and he’s got on overalls (yes, Warren in overalls) and they stand there apart from each other and they really are finding it hard to communicate and everyone is sitting in their seats feeling about as uncomfortable as they are because we remember less than ten minutes ago when they were so happy together and why can’t this all work out?  (Although in the movie it has been a couple years because Warren has a kid now.)

Everyone:  Warren, Natalie, the audience, even the director and best boy must all be sitting there thinking, wow, Warren and Natalie, we can only guess what could have been.  Soooo dramatic.  After a couple minutes of stilted conversation, Natalie finally says goodbye and rides off and there is Warren and his wife in the dirt road watching her fade into the sunset, and you know what?  I think they were both barefoot!  Touching scene.  I’ve had that recurring dream in my head for a couple of weeks now.  So what does all this mean?  God if I know, but I thought I ought to tell you.  Violins, please.

Love,

Bobby

He never knew if Carin received the letter, or what she thought of it.

Jeremy continued to pry on the rotten oyster.  “Who’s this person she’s living with?”

“I know as little about him as possible.  They live in Bel Air.  He’s an actor, of course.  But he gets his money from a trust set up by his late father.  The old man was one of the founders of a scam-way home-products scheme.  His father blew his brains out in a fit of remorse a few years ago.  On the phone Carin had said the father was suffering from severe paranoia.  Sounds to me like he killed himself because he thought everyone in America was a product distributor and once they figured out they only could sell their stuff to themselves then surely they’d come after him.  As the only heir, Carin’s boyfriend lives in the late father’s mansion and gets a fat check every month.  And I heard he’s trying to parley his wealth into fame in Hollywood.  His claim to stardom so far consists of a five-minute part in the back seat of a car in a Nightrider episode.”

“That’s quite a dossier you have on him, Bobby.”

“In truth, that’s all I know.  And I haven’t seen that Nightrider episode.”

“How in the world did she meet him?  And end up in LA?”

“A friend of ours from school told me the story over the phone.  It seems the guy was doing a Coke commercial and was standing next to this blonde in the shot and fell temporarily in love.  Bit parts — they were just a couple of the fifty persons in the letter ‘O.’  You know, they were filming one of those aerial shots where a small army spells out the corporate logo while everyone sings with happy voices and dances with happy feet.  Anyway, this blonde was extremely upset because she was going to miss the public opening of the new wing at Graceland the next day.  So it was worth it for him to waste  a couple of first class tickets to Memphis for a good time.

“Carin was covering the story for Nashville’s UPI office.  She worked for them as an intern that summer — after your bypass.  She met him at Graceland at the ceremony and the rest is history.  He dumped the blonde airhead and flew Carin back to LA on the blonde’s return ticket, after Carin had filed her copy.  I guess that’s one story where she didn’t check out her facts.”

Jeremy could see that Bobby received morbid satisfaction in telling that one.

“Where is she working?  Janie said she has a good job in LA.”

“She’s making a bundle as the ‘Associate Fashion Editorial Coordinator’ for a chic woman’s magazine that just moved their offices from New York to Bel Air.  I think her title means that she handles the yellow highlighter in their ‘Fashion Viewpoint’ section.  She emphasizes trendy, self-evident fashion dogma like, ‘you must know that what once was an underrated accessory — a stocking — is being paid new attention this fall.’  Next issue they’ll focus on the other stocking.”

Jeremy thought that Bobby’s sickness was unusually amusing.  “And you two aren’t married anymore?  It’s official?”

“I guess.  I’ve thrown away every piece of mail I get from Bel Air Superior Court before I open it.  I’d hate to put a black mark forever on the day it became final.”

“That’s one way to handle it.  Son, I know it’s no consolation, but I really thought she was going to move out here after her visit during harvest, before she met him.”

“So did I.  We were communicating.  She wanted to try again.  I had great plans for refurbishing Daniel’s place after you and Janie gave me the okay.  Really fix it up, so it wouldn’t have been so painful for you two to come up to the ridge and visit.  I don’t know, though.  Carin seemed to have had such a good time here during Crush.  She sent a letter to me after she left, a beautiful letter that filled me with hope.”

The letter, seen only and often by Bobby, read:

Dearest Bobby:

It seems appropriate now, as at any time in the past five years, that I tell you just how very much I love you.  You are truly my rainbow’s end, the love of my life.

This has been an emotionally trying year for us, and I am grateful that we are so close to recreating the magic that has filled our relationship for so long.  I think we truly are soul mates, but we both know that it needs nurturing to stay healthy.

Of any gift I can give you, I guess a reassurance that you have the gift of my heart is most important.  I cherish the countless memories and hold a place in my heart that can only be yours.

I love you, and my hope is to find a way to try again and be live-in husband and wife once more.

Be happy — it means everything to me.

Love,

Carin

Bobby didn’t realize the irony of that last sentence when he would, from time to time, disinter the letter from its hiding place and with an old Carla Bonoff record playing softly in the background take a jolt of melancholia, a quake of the heart with aftershocks that lasted for days.

“I guess I pressured her too much, Jeremy.  I gave her an ultimatum.  And I guess The Valley was just too slow for her.  Too isolated.  She has never lived anywhere but in the suburb or the city.  She could barely handle ‘tiny’ Nashville.  Yet how can I cite the ‘urban/rural dichotomy’ as the cause for the dissolution of our marriage?”

“Bobby, she always had high hopes for her own career, didn’t she?”

“Yes, like Hitler had high hopes for a unified Europe.  I encouraged her, prodded her, because she was so intelligent and aggressive.  But she could be so romantic, nostalgic — soft.  A perfect balance.”

“I always thought she was special, Bobby, and I was sad to see things not work out.”

Bobby hopped up from his ebony egg as if it were about to hatch.  He fixed his eyes on the intermittent white puffs of steam coming from a geyser on the distant range.  Under his breath he whispered, “Oh, Manon.  If this were only Carmel and you would come to me in my monastery.”  Finally he negotiated the surrender within himself.

“Jeremy, to pick up the pieces and move on is a concession that something is broken.  In time I guess I’ll desensitize myself to the whole mess.  But I’ve been enjoying the perverse pleasure of wallowing in self-pity.”

He turned to face his father and, with a slight crack in his voice, closed the topic from further discussion. 

“Thank you for talking — for listening — to me about this.  It means a lot to know you care.”

Jeremy smiled and turned away to find his own tiny geyser spewing steam in the distance.

This entry was posted on December 18, 2009 at 9:45 pm and is filed under zin sins Part One: Lack of Faith . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.