I Will Be Complete Read online

  When I was alone in a room, I was never alone, for there was an audience I was meant to entertain, and after I was put to bed, time and again my mother or father had to come into the room to tell me to be quiet, because I was still telling the events of the day to my invisible confederates, whom I loved for giving me a purpose.

  There was a rule I hewed to like it was superstition. In bed, lights out, I only had to talk until I’d described my day well enough that it felt true. There was a comforting assurance that if I told the story right, I could finally go to sleep. This feeling has never left me. Now, I tell myself that if what I say here is true, I will be complete and that is what I’m looking for, too.

  2709 SETTING SUN DRIVE

  CORONA DEL MAR, CALIFORNIA

  92625

  I KNOW SOME FACTS, but they don’t make my mother any less of a mystery. She grew up in London during the war. She told me that bombs sometimes fell on her playground. She married an American GI, moved to Hollywood, divorced him, and met my father.

  When I was little, she talked about her first husband as if he’d been a tree branch fallen on a path, something she’d gotten around so she could be free to meet my dad. She told the stories of more recent times with leisure and nuance. It was as if everything that had happened in England was marked by fog and switchback trails overgrown with nettles. Everything in America was easily mapped—obstacles met and overcome, culminating, she wanted me to know, in my birth. “You were wanted,” she said often, emphasizing the first and last words of the sentence.

  I grew up in Corona del Mar, south of Los Angeles, in a house that faced the sunsets. I can’t imagine how different it was for my mother from her childhood.

  She didn’t fit in. She looked like she should—long blond hair, slender body, kind blue eyes, skin that tanned easily—but she was German blond, European stock, a stranger here, something her body knew well. She was a little deaf, and when she didn’t understand what someone said, she looked at them with curiosity that made her seem alien. She had a modest two-piece swimsuit of pale blue, insulated with many layers of material between its exterior and where it touched her body. Its bottom piece reached above her navel, the better to cover a mysterious curved scar on her back that, when I was very young, I would touch with my fingertips to try to understand the different ways skin could feel. When she herself was four years old, she’d been in the hospital for many months. No one had told her why. When she came to the United States, a doctor saw the scar and asked her why she’d had a kidney removed.

  She didn’t know she was missing a kidney.

  How disconcerting it must have been to hold in her mind both her gothic childhood and her present life of coastal breezes, sunglasses, money in the bank, her own swimming pool, going barefoot at cocktail parties, how even in wintertime her friends would pick fruit from their backyards, make bowls of sangria, and greet her at their front doors with a happy Mi casa es su casa.

  Because it was Southern California we took long drives almost every day. I learned that when we went by a pasture, if you relaxed your eyes and let the fence posts rush by, the tiny flickers of the sights beyond would resolve into glimpses of the farm. That’s what it was like with my mother’s past life.

  She sewed clothing for me. She made me tuna melts for lunch. When I couldn’t sleep, she sat on my bed and sang “Moon River.” She read up on ESP and decided she and I had it. I used to lie on my bed and try to send out brain waves to my mother. SOS! Sometimes, on a different day, she would come into my room and ask if I’d just been “calling” her, and I always said yes, and she would nod, significantly, admitting to a seasonal wind only she and I knew about.

  I was hers then. I loved my father but I belonged to my mother. She was very funny and knew how to be silly when I was little, and witty when I was a little older. But I knew a look on her face, an expression that needed to be solved, because it wasn’t anything like ease. Under big canvas reflective hats, zinc oxide on our noses, sunscreen on our shoulders, we hiked at the beach in our swimsuits, exploring the tide pools, tipping our big toes into sea anemones for the thrill of feeling them latch on, and something was wrong. When I learned how to swim beneath an approaching swell, I popped up safely, and yet my mother’s concerned eye fell on me with a weight I didn’t understand. Back onshore, she reached for my hand as if there were a border crossing only she could see, and there were armed guards whose graces she would have to court with politeness and fear. Her silent gaze, if it could be translated, said, You don’t know what you escaped. And, because her worry lingered, It might come back.

  * * *

  —

  I can see why she liked my father. His family was a block of Russian Jews, a solid, basalt-steady heredity. They were simply Russian Jews as far back as there had been deer in that particular forest. Then the Jews moved to Chicago and opened a hardware store and things got better and there was the sense that everyone was spreading out in similar directions—upward, onward. My great-grandfather had been a rabbi in a shtetl overrun by Cossacks. My grandfather ran G&M Hardware on 58th and Calumet. My uncles were lawyers. My father was an engineer. He traveled much of the year because he was making money for our future. That was a new, matching pair of gifts for her, his easy confidence that there would be both money and a future. His family’s trajectory of abundance was easier to hang on to than whatever hydra’s head of worry was on my mother’s side. It must have been seductive for a while.

  When I was six, I asked my mother to explain the world map. What country fit where? It was hard to comprehend where England was in relationship to, say, Israel. When my mother pointed out their great distances both from us and from each other, I felt desolate. I had so wanted Israel and England to be next door. I couldn’t explain why.

  “It’s normal,” she said. “When you’re young, you think the world revolves around you. You’ll start expanding outward. A young person thinks the world revolves around his country. When you’re grown up, you’ll see how the whole world fits together.”

  “What about now?” I asked.

  “You’re self-centered.”

  I thought about that. “Is that good?”

  “Only someone who was self-centered would ask that.”

  She said this with love, I should mention. Around the same time, I’d added up a column of numbers faster than she had, then I’d said to her, “It’s okay. Mommy’s brain is slow.” So that’s what she was up against.

  * * *

  —

  Our development was called Harbor View Hills. When we drove its gentle curves, it was in a new Mercedes 300 SEL on freshly poured streets that fanned out like the veins in palm fronds. When a road stubbed out in a cul-de-sac, its edges touched emptiness, scrub and raw earth. History only extended back five years or so.

  In the early 1960s, in Corona del Mar, Orange County, California, the landscape was all fields and open, rolling hills, and as the seasons turned, it was like money rained down upon the earth. Ranch houses and shopping centers for people like my family grew, and the more the money rained down, the larger the houses got. There was a middle school dropped into a local dirt field before the rest of the neighborhood had grown enough to be attached to it. One afternoon, the crew poured the school a sidewalk, and the next morning they found mountain lion tracks in the concrete. This was the end for the lions. No one saw a mountain lion in Corona del Mar again.

  I looked, every day. I wanted there to be a mountain lion. I loved lions.

  We owned a vacant lot, the last lot in the neighborhood. I explored it for dandelions to blow apart, reeds to make whistles from. I imagined finding sacks of Morgan silver dollars smuggled from Carson City. I loved to stand on the lot and know we were holding on to it as an investment. My father told me we invested. When kids from the neighborhood tackled each other in the grass, I would find a reason to stand near them and say, “Well, you know, this lot is jus
t an investment.”

  * * *

  —

  I was an anxious kid. I was born with a job. My parents told me they wanted to be parents so they could avoid the mistakes their own parents had made. I think they said this to let me know I was loved, but it made me feel pressure. I was going to have a better childhood. I wasn’t sure what that entailed, but it suggested responsibilities.

  I had insomnia. I was weaker and more fragile than the other kids, but my brain was enormous and my mother asked me to be kinder to my playmates than to keep letting them know that. I might have had allergies—they seemed to come and go. But I really loved lions. I had a pin-back button of Frasier, the lion who had fathered two dozen cubs at a local theme park. When I was too old for stuffed animals, I still had three of them, Gopa, Jespah, and little Elsa, lions named for the cubs in the Born Free sequels.

  My mother and father decided to get me a kitten. He was going to be my friend. He was a Siamese seal point from our local pet store. He was just a white dot with brown tips on his nose, ears, and tail and I cried when I met him because he was so tiny and frail. He grew up lush and heavy, with blue eyes that followed me wherever I went. When I left the room, he came with me, to see what I was doing. I named him Leo.

  I learned from Leo how to pet a cat. I became the best petter-of-cats anyone knew. It was a slow process, and I ended up with lots of scratches, but I never minded. Leo was teaching me how to listen. My mother was ill with migraines that lasted three days and I had to be quiet for long hours. So I played with Leo. I learned how to read the signs of changing atmosphere before he even gave them. When he fell asleep on my bed, I figured out how to curl myself around his body so that I could touch him.

  On those nights, I thought as I fell asleep, “I’ll be what you need me to be,” which felt like a perfect relationship.

  * * *

  —

  I asked my father what the happiest day of his life was.

  He said, “The day you were born,” and I knew he had to say that.

  I should mention that he was teetering toward raising a monster. Everything about me was reported to relatives as special, down to my birthday. I’d been born on both Easter and Passover, making me in their mythology a Matzo Bunny. The family legend was that I was smarter than either one of my parents, all of our relatives, and, just maybe, any other child yet born. They regarded my intelligence, whatever it actually was, like a pile of fissionable material that needed velvet ropes around it. My father wanted to send me to a gifted school. My mother, who had seen the worst of elitism in England, thought I should learn to fend for myself in public school.

  My father talked her out of this. Clearly at a public school I would make other children feel bad about being idiots. They would beat me up. I would probably get into drugs, a view confirmed by the headmistress of the Eldorado School, which had an intelligence test to get in. Public schools, the headmistress explained, were dens of violence and race war and—as she’d already mentioned—drugs. My father didn’t need to be convinced, but then again he was a happy elitist. I went to Eldorado, where we taunted each other on the playground in limericks and foreign insults, the bullies being not just tough but smart.

  My father truly enjoyed my brain. So of course my birth was something he would say was the happiest day of his life.

  I asked, “What was the second happiest day of your life?”

  “The day I met your mother.”

  I was pretty sure he had to say that, too. My mother was a prize. My father had been a teenager with thick glasses, a passion for engineering, and an unashamed interest in the accordion, and there are photos to prove it. He used to make jokes about the millihelen, the amount of beauty it takes to launch one ship.

  He was a smart Jewish boy who’d had enough therapy to know he should get away from his family. He’d selected a college by using a protractor to draw a circle the size of a one-day car trip around Chicago, and then he only looked at schools outside that circle. It worked—his family didn’t visit him.

  He married young and divorced young, and psychoanalysis lasted exactly long enough for him to decide he would never feel guilt again. He would be amoral, cheerfully so. If something gave him pleasure, he did it. He chased women. He got contact lenses. He became a Republican. He was a unicorn, the only Jewish Republican ever born between 1910 and 1960 in the city of Chicago.

  He moved to California with a Porsche like James Dean’s and got his hair cut a little like James Dean’s, which would have been effective had this not brought out his jug ears and Russian bear-baiter nose. The rest of his daily outfit—lab coat and bow tie, not quite right for a Porsche driver—showed him to be an egghead, passionate but inept, maybe a little adorable. On the second happiest day of his life, he introduced himself to my mother by shyly putting two tickets to the Hollywood Bowl and his phone number under her car’s windshield wiper. She accepted. On their second date, he brought his laundry over and he never left.

  With the love of repetition that only a seven-year-old has, I plowed on: third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh happiest. And that’s when it started to get interesting. “The day I left home to go to college…the day I got out of the Air Force…the day I became a millionaire…”

  I don’t recall how far down the list this was, but I made him go back to it. When had he become a millionaire? Recently. His company Certron made cassette tapes. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass was Certron’s client. They were the biggest recording stars in the country. I danced around my room to “Tijuana Taxi” and “Casino Royale” and “A Taste of Honey.” I lay on the floor to feel how sad “This Guy’s in Love with You” sounded. If I hadn’t felt sad enough, I played it again until I got the feeling of desolation right.

  When Herb Alpert signed his contract with Certron, my father became a millionaire.

  “Really, a millionaire? Not just a hundred thousandaire?” I asked. Was he still a millionaire? Were we rich?

  Yes. When I think of that moment, I see my father smiling behind his sunglasses. What a trajectory, from accordion-playing dork to a man with money and a gorgeous wife and, probably, so much more to come. We were driving in his 1969 Rolls-Royce Corniche and he was happy to let me know we were rich.

  I remember coming home from that discussion. Spinning back from the garage, arms pumping and me skidding to a halt in the kitchen. “Mom! Mom! Did you know we’re millionaires?”

  This went badly. I released those words and I instantly had the same feeling as when I’d pet Leo for one second too long. I wanted to unsay them, then I wanted to add something that would let my mother know I didn’t actually care about it in whatever way she disapproved of. I think she worried that even hearing the word “rich” was like being exposed to a virus. Being rich unnerved her. I can hear her voice saying, definitively, “You have to understand, money cannot…money cannot…” and then trailing off.

  My father only smiled, in a way that seemed to annoy her. And the angrier she got, the more smug he seemed. All my mother could tell me was that the world was more of a problem than my father believed. She had a rule: she did not read me fairy tales. She said she didn’t want me to think that anyone would rescue me. The world I lived in, she told me, wasn’t real. “You’re in a plush cocoon,” she said.

  My father thought my mother worried too much. Money delighted him the way his woodworking tools did, only more so. “There’s no substitute for information, except money,” he said, and only someone who loved both would have said that. He thought it was inelegant to own an object without knowing its value—not in dollars, but why it was worth having. Otherwise, it was like looking at Playboy without reading the articles. My father read the articles in Playboy. He allowed me to read his Playboys as long as I could pass the quiz he gave me every month. What had Roman Polanski said in his interview about fate?

  My mother said, “You can’t let your possessio
ns possess you,” which I thought sounded smart. She said that when she wrote her novel, it would be called Money Matters, and the title, she said, looking at my father, would be sardonic.

  My father appreciated my mother for double-checking him that way. She was the one with the conscience. Once in a Beverly Hills restaurant, my mother was mistaken for the actress Linda Evans, and then she spoke, and it turned out that Oh, this beautiful woman was from England. Which in my father’s universe made her a woman with value added.

  For a while, my father’s worldview won. We spent money. My parents went to an auction once. My mother came back alone that night, saying my father had stayed behind to bid on something spectacular. Her tone was reserved, in that she loved his enthusiasm and shuddered at its consequences. Around five in the morning, he came home, unshaven and triumphant as a woodsman, carrying a heavy velvet-draped case in both arms. It was a chess set.

  Now it seems one part real, one part dream. You could stage a Russian aristocratic tragedy on its gold and onyx squares that were surrounded by tiny silver posts and chains as if the game within took place in palace chambers. The four-inch-thick base presented a Baroque overload of cloisonné tableaux—medieval courtship scenes taken from Flemish tapestries. The pawns were soldiers, the bishops carried torches with a flame made of real gold, the castles were crowned with filigree of crenelated silver. The capes on the kings and queens were smooth with crushed semiprecious stones.