He sat in front of the television, and while the presenter interviewed a local politician, Jack imagined the challenge of putting his whole life into one painting. Taking his nebulous mass of memories and somehow summing them up with oil on a single canvas. How satisfying it would be, to frame it, hang it on the wall, step back and look at it and say, Well, there it all is! It might make some sense then.
‘Jack?’
‘Yes, honey?’
‘Where are the peppercorns?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Okay.’
Seemed like he just filled that pepper grinder! Which perfectly illustrated his point. So – the painting of his life: Birth. Dot. Childhood. The twelve years of his mostly unremembered childhood would become a three-inch line of cobalt and chrome yellow. Hot dusty days of boredom. He remembered years of feeling shy, not at home but at school. Lonely. Add some dabs of transparent viridian for each trout he caught while fishing alone on the Sacramento River. Riding his bike home with the fish in a bag hanging from the handlebars. Pretending to go to church with his sister, then sneaking off to the park instead – that would deserve a dollop of chartreuse. Meeting their parents later in front of the church, and making up lies about the service. Being bad with Ivy had been great. Listening to his parents bicker had not been great. They bickered continually, with real venom. Mostly about money. Blue and yellow to make irritating green strokes. High school. A horizontal line less than an inch, like a dash. Squiggles of burnt sienna and cadmium red would burst from it like a fountain, with patches of deep French ultramarine. Blissful days of swimming and sunbathing and walking for hundreds of hours with Ernie, back and forth to see movies at the Sebastiani Theatre. Talking about nothing and everything. Laughing their heads off. Girls, well, they’d been okay to date, sure, but he’d enjoyed those long walks with Ernie more. And Ivy taking off with that young husband of hers. Oh! That would be deepest darkest indigo, and moist from all those tears he did not cry. Then his dad died, aged forty-eight, and six months later Glenn Miller died too. Black smudges, grey at the edges.
Army. Fewer splotches of paint than high school. Some zinc white in there, which would be grey where it mixed with black, in between an inch or two of horizontal blue. That nameless girl in Japan. He could honour her now, with a shape that was both sensual and dignified. Perhaps tones of pure ivory. And though he remembered laughing a lot with all those other soldiers, it hadn’t been real laughter. Not the kind he had with Ernie. He’d not kept in touch with a single army friend.
College. An oddly shaped ellipse of time, with no horizontal lines at all. It would be an alizarin crimson explosion, running vertically right off the canvas. Yards and yards of Lizbeth’s breasts! Hemingway! Harry James! So many discoveries, so many firsts, it was as if those times had been too large somehow to fit into their allotted minutes and hours. Had leaked into another, more eternal, dimension. That must be what timelessness meant. Literally unattached to time in the normal sense. Defying the laws of physics. Most of all, he remembered consciously refining his own personality. By the time he graduated, Jacko MacAlister was solid, both inside and out. Witty, assured, sexy. Or at least he was under the impression he was, he now realised.
Billie. First week knowing her had lasted about three years – probably an excitable orange, with the oil so thick it would dry in spikes. But that romance had disappeared in a whirlwind gust, and since marriage, the years had gone by without leaving a week’s worth of trace, really. More like the transparency of watercolours – mostly green and pale blue. Sure, the babies came, and that had been exciting in a way, little wriggly splodges each of them, but in memorable terms, overall it had been blurry. Losing Charlie would be magenta jabbing into deepest blue. Jab jab jab. But then that too had been absorbed into smoother, more forgettable days. And forgettable days didn’t count. Their shape was nowhere near the size it ought to be.
Every change stretched time, but only initially. Like walking the same route every day through the field to the beach, thought Jack. Initially it felt like a long walk, but eventually a path was created. And soon the path was walked in a daydream, feet carving deep ruts. Probably the same as everybody’s life, he thought with a sigh. Not so special after all, damn it.
Four years ago they’d stopped moving house. Perhaps that would explain his building restlessness. The sense that something would have to give soon. Like a fault that was due for a quake. If there were to be no more adrenalin-charged house moves, or new jobs, or more babies, or more wives – then what else could change? He told himself that tomorrow he’d attack his great novel again, or start that great painting depicting his life. Quit his job and find a way to start his own publishing house. Make a stance against time passing. Against death itself.
He closed his eyes and let his daily routine run through him. Get up, do a few push-ups, grab some coffee, read the paper, drive down San Pedro, passing the same old man jogging at 4th and Heatherton. And the lady with the three babies in the giant stroller. And the tattooed teenage boy hitching. It always seemed like just five minutes since he last saw them.
He focused on the television again. The hippies were still marching. Was this live news? It seemed so. Life was happening elsewhere, to other people. And it seemed to have happened overnight, all these social changes. He and Billie had been holding steady at young, young, youngish, then suddenly wham! Not young. Ponytailed boys and long-haired girls were having sex all the time and laughing at guys like himself. Uptight dudes in suits. Squares. The world was full of undulating copulating bodies, humping away right in plain view.
Free love.
Jealous? Oh yes, he admitted it. Jack was bitterly, passionately jealous. It was so unfair. When he’d been their age, he’d been in Japan wearing an army uniform. And then studying, then working to support a family. Not having an entirely unpleasant time (who said army food was terrible? Jack had loved K-rations), but still. Rewards were supposed to come from hard work and discipline; hippies were cheating. They didn’t pay their dues to sing the blues; they didn’t even want to sing the blues. Dreadful racket, their music. Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish. But what really annoyed him was the way hippies called themselves freaks and rebels. They were spoiled babies; nothing radical about them at all. Even his own kids pissed him off. Sam, who was nearly fifteen, was about to join the peace-and-love-man club, he could tell.
‘Stop being such a drag, man.’
‘Don’t you call me man,’ Jack had scolded his son.
‘Okay, Jack.’
‘And don’t call me Jack either. Dad. You call me Dad.’ Fledgling flower child, with his tie-dye shirts and KMPX blaring on the radio. 1967 was laughing at Jack, all right. And San Francisco was a party he had not been invited to. He was forty years old during the summer of love and pissed as hell. He could hear his wife whistling in the kitchen, as she clattered pots and pans.
‘Billie!’
‘What is it now, honey?’
Wiping her hands on her jeans again. Her roots were showing. This was made more obvious because she’d pulled her shoulder length blonde hair into a tight ponytail high on her head, fifties-style. Her bangs were about an inch above her eyebrows. Those sexy caterpillars. Looking at her, even while irritated at absolutely everything, he still couldn’t help thinking: Damn fine figure of a woman, my wife.
‘Any more nuts?’ He offered up the empty nut dish.
‘I’ll have a look.’
She took the dish, and he took a Viceroy from the bronze turtle cigarette holder. Lit it for something to put in his mouth, watched Billie return to the kitchen. He could do this from his living room chair. Did other men still check out their wives, after sixteen years? It felt a bit furtive, watching her lean over to find the bag of nuts in the bottom cupboard. She brought the nuts and sat on the arm of his chair, trying to sense his thoughts. He was in a bad mood, she knew that for certain, and whenever he was tense, he did seem to get more…affectionate.
‘Oh, look, Jack, isn’t that Union Square?’
To Billie, it seemed innocent – a whole generation of kids had cottoned on to the war-is-bad idea, as if they’d just discovered the wheel. Bless! Just look at them flash each other the peace sign, like a tribal code. They all seemed adorable. Like Sam and Elisabeth. Silly, soft kids, doing silly semi-dangerous things. Half the time she wanted to walk right up to them, scold them for their own good. Give the girls baggy shirts to cover up their nipples. Pass out bus tickets to the boys hitching on the on-ramps. Overall, she preferred hippies to the beatniks. The Beat movement had never really interested her; black was unflattering, unless you were fat. Loners and show-offs and pretentious queer poets were beatniks. Oh, well. She guessed everyone had to belong to some group when they were young. But wait, had she ever belonged to a group? She’d been a cheerleader once.
She thought of her mother’s world, and her grandmother’s. All those silent movies, the Buster Keatons and Laurel & Hardys. The rattling little black cars that needed to be crank-started, the stiff corsets and eternal gloves, the way every man and woman had worn a hat. How those things must, in their own day, have seemed so exciting, so modern compared to what had come before. And now look at them. People just laughed at their old-fashioned ways. As for the clothes – well, it had recently occurred to her that the outfits her mom wore, were simply the clothes she’d always worn. And her grandmother hadn’t suddenly started wearing flowery dresses when she’d turned seventy; she’d always favoured floral. No doubt, the Levi jeans and L.L. Bean polo shirt that felt youthful to her right now, would one day be perceived as old lady clothes too. She thought it strange and amusing, that every generation felt superior to the previous one. Not only superior, but less innocent. She’d often wondered when it would apply to her own generation, and here it was. Happening right before her still-young eyes.
Billie was secretly enchanted by hippies. They reminded her of the travelling show that used to come to the county fairground every spring. The rides, the costumes, the exoticness, the way all her friends and family would become slightly exotic that weekend too. Stuffing pink cotton candy into their mouths, addicted to the sensation of melting-to-sweet-nothingness on their tongues. Drinking too much beer, laughing hard, shooting plastic rifles for lurid stuffed pandas. The late sixties, so far, had that same glorious anarchy. So shamelessly raunchy! She’d never forget her sister, Louise, screaming from the top of the Ferris wheel, that she loved Johnny Tib, who was, of course, still married to that tramp he got pregnant in sophomore year. Betsy Snodgrass, with her pointy bra and kohl eyeliner.
Johnny, on the ground, shouting up to Louise: ‘Run away with me then!’
And Louise screaming back: ‘Yes! Yes!’
By Monday he’d finished with Louise, and she’d consoled herself with bespectacled sweet Chuck, who’d always been too shy to ask her out, and now, in her humiliation, saw his chance at last. Billie remembered her sister clinging to him as if he’d rescued her from a burning building, but for years now, Louise had done nothing but complain that Chuck was boring. His hair was still a crew cut, he liked his jeans ironed and his mealtimes regular, while she’d let her hair grow long, wore headbands, and begun meditation classes. Come to think of it, she’d stopped shaving her legs too. God only knew what was going on with her armpits.
The sixties was a travelling show her sister might be joining, but Billie didn’t have an admission ticket for it. There it was, just the other side of the chain-link fence. Visible, audible, smellable. Once, alone in the bathroom, she’d made the peace sign to herself in the mirror. Smiled the way she’d seen some of the long-haired bare-faced girls smile: sleepily, carelessly, sexily. Eyes half shut. Did being Mrs Jack MacAlister, mother of two, driver of a station wagon, mean she was forever banned from summers of love? And how had this happened so quickly? She’d thought they were the hip ones. Even the word hip was not hip anymore.
She was still on the arm of his chair, and they were both still watching the news. Weather now. Tomorrow would be in the nineties again. Crazy-making headachy heat.
‘Jack, the kids are on vacation.’
‘So?’
‘So how can they do homework?’
‘Jesus, Billie. I don’t know. I just meant…go to your rooms! The homework bit just came out automatically. They were both rude.’
‘Can I tell them they can come out now?’
