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The question, now, was whether to interrupt Ray—in the yard constructing a half-pipe from the plywood they'd pried off the windows and doors of the starlet's ultramodern château—or to handle this prairie dog situation herself. Scree, it said. She went out onto the balcony and called down to her love.
Ray squinted up at her and whistled. "Looking good, babygirl."
Luz had forgotten about her mermaid ensemble, and a little zing of delight accompanied the compliment. "How's it coming?" she called.
"What an embarrassment," he said, shaking his head. "Ten million empty swimming pools in this city, and we get this one."
The embarrassment was adjacent to his would-be half-pipe: the starlet's long-drained swimming pool, its walls not smooth concrete but a posh cobble of black river stones, its shape not a scooped-out basin but a box. Hard edges and right angles. Patently unshreddable. A shame, was all Ray said when he first knelt down and felt it, though his eyes had gone a pair of those smooth, globular kidney pools in the Valley. Ray had been to the forever war—was a hero, though he'd forbidden the word—and he went places sometimes.
Here, he was shirtless, all but gaunt, torquing his knees against a pane of plywood. His unbound hair was getting long, clumped and curling at his shoulders. On the bottom of the dry pool were smeared a few dreadlocks of dehydrated slime, pea-colored and coppery. Haircuts, Luz thought. Tomorrow's project.
She watched him work a while, leaning on the balcony rail as the starlet might have. It was impossible to be original and inspired living as she was, basically another woman's ghost. Ray could dismantle the starlet, splinter her, hack her up and build with her bones, but Luz languished beneath her. They wore the same size everything.
When Ray said up in the canyon Luz had seen porticos and candelabra, artisanal tiles, a working bath with a dolphin-shaped spigot patinaed turquoise and matching starfish handles, birds' nests in chandeliers, bougainvillea creeping down marble columns and dripping from those curlicue shelves on the walls of villas—what were they called? But the place they found was boxy and mostly windows. All slate and birchply, its doors slid rather than swung, the wrong style for columns. Any and all vinery was dead. Plantwise there was the dried pool slime and the gnarled leafless grapevine and spiny somethings coming through the planks of the deck, too savage to kill.
Below her Ray's hammer went whap whap whap.
Sconces, they were called, and there were none.
Where were the wild things seeking refuge from the scorched hills? Where was the birdsong she'd promised herself? Instead: scorpions coming up through the drains, a pair of mummified frogs in the waterless fountain, a coyote carcass going wicker in the ravine. And sure, a scorpion had a certain wisdom, but she yearned for fauna more charismatic. "It's thinking like that that got us into this," Ray said, correct.
Nature had refused to offer herself to them. The water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been denied them so long that with each day, each project, it became more and more impossible to conceive of a time when it had not been denied them. The prospect of Mother Nature opening her legs and inviting Los Angeles back into her ripeness was, like the disks of water shimmering in the last foothill reservoirs patrolled by the National Guard, evaporating daily.
Yet Luz yearned for menagerie, left the windows and doors open day and night to invite it, even when Ray complained of the dust, even when he warned that the Santa Anas would drive her insane. Maybe true, for here was this varmint scurrying in her head. Here, finally, was a brave creature come down to commune in the house that wasn't theirs—it didn't belong to anyone!—and what had she done? Booted the little fellow in the gut and locked him away.
Excerpted from Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins. Copyright © 2015 by Claire Vaye Watkins. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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