Like a Lake: A Story of Uneasy Love and Photography 9780823289349

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like a lake

like a lake

A Story of Uneasy Love and Photography C a r o l M av o r

Fordham University Press

n e w yo r k

2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of UrLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Control number: 2020910952 Printed in the United states of america designed and typeset in merope by amy ruth Buchanan / 3rd sister design 22 21 20

54321

First edition

for Nico

Contents

Millions of Years Ago 1 My Nico 2 Unfolding a Flood 4 Turning the Key 5 The Memory of Lake Tahoe 16 My Mother’s Eyes 17 My Mother 18 Coda 21 By Chance 25 When Bamboo Shoots Poke Their Heads out of the Earth 29 Blue Rambler 30 Tender Buttons 47 Waiting 49 Refusing to be Plucked 55 We Want Roses 56 She Sleeps with Him Every Night 59 She-Wolf Made of Rock 61 Blue Ticket 65 Learning to Swim 66 Floating Studio, Floating Zendo 67 Fannette Island 76 Floating Zendos and Mentorgartens 79 I Learned about Snowflakes 82 I Learned about the Birds of Lake Tahoe 84 Summer Snow Cake 86 Love or Affection 88 Mary’s Dream 89

Each Other’s Pockets 90 Black Cloth 91 Brown Kimono 94 Something Broke 96 The Voice of the Lake 101 Moon Writing 102 Artichoke 104 No Name for Him 107 What’s in a Name? 108 Like Piles of Laundry? 109 Frozen Pond 111 Coda’s Dream 113 Like Mother and Son 114 Fifteen Good Prints 115 Glass Moon 117 Tsukimi Udon (Moon Noodles) 118 Soaring 121 Walking Underwater 123 Open My Heart 125 Like Rice on Chopsticks 126 Like a Sequence of Poems 127 Waiting, Still 128 Morpheus 129 Blue Marble 131 Something Like Love 132 Afterword (Afterward): Like the Navel of My Dream of Nico 133 Acknowledgments 139 Illustrations 141 Notes 143

like a lake

MIllIons oF Years aGo

It all began millions of years ago. It was very cold as it began its descent. It hit our atmosphere and sped through the exosphere . . . the thermosphere . . . the mesosphere . . . the stratosphere . . . and the troposphere—6,200 miles, in a matter of seconds. It produced a huge ball of light, a gigantic bellow of silent, voiceless light. The light was so strong. The sound deafening for its absence. It landed as an ordinary rock, an extraordinary fallen stone, in the middle of Lake Tahoe. A visitor from the Milky Way who took up residence in the bottom of the second deepest lake in the United States, second only to Crater Lake. If you never see it. If you never say it. Did it happen?

1

MY nICo

I knocked on the gray door of box one (1967–1970) of the Niccolò Petroni Archive, Stanford University. The box was fittingly gray in tone. I was after the history of this twinkling boy called Nico, who grew up by Lake Tahoe. To ask is to knock. I knocked on this gray door and asked: “Who’s in there? Who are you? What happened?” For years, I have been knocking about with Nico. My Nico. My Nico. This is my Nico elegy.

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if you never see it. if you never say it. did it happen?

UnFolDInG a FlooD

When I opened the box, the thunderless sound of one hand clapping. Clap clap clap. Then the rushing of water. Rush rush rush. Out of the darkness came dark dark dark. As soon as I heard nothing, like a calm before the storm, you unfolded. Like a waterfall. Your waters broke. You cannot fold a flood and put it in a box. But Nico, you did. You scored your flood and folded it into six neat parts, for six neat drawers, with lids. Like eyes. Your flood was quite big, quite forceful. Like a desert’s flash flood. Lizards, jackrabbits, road runners, scorpions. Scurry scurry scurry. Swim swim swim. Land turning to water. You unfold me. You flood me. You soak me. Our voices flow together. Water in water. “Writ in water.” An I for an I. Like 1967, the summer of love. When I was ten years old.

4

tUrnInG tHe KeY

Ignorant of my boyish beauty, there I was standing waist-deep in the coldness of the blue lake. The swim trunks, bought for me by my mother with room to grow, cling to my coltish thinness, made thinner by glacier water. It is the start of summer, and already I am honey brown, the white negative image of my winter skin peeking out below my waist, where my swim trunks, heavy with water, slip down an inch or so. Coda Gray—though I do not know his name yet—walks barefoot, with his pant legs rolled up, through the cold water at the edge of the lake. He is following his enormous Newfoundland dog, who is splashing in the water near me. I am under the watchful eye of my beautiful seventeen-year-old babysitter. Corinna sits on the sandy beach of the lake, wearing 501 cut-offs, cut very short to show off her long legs, and a white cotton Mexican blouse with hand-embroidered flowers at the neck and sleeves—yellow, magenta, cobalt blue. She is wearing huaraches, still squeaky with newness. It is summer and my mother and father are busy with other things. My Italian father, Florenzo Petroni, with tending his roses or tinkering with his 1950 Triumph Thunderbird motorbike or designing houses and public fountains. He is an architect. My Japanese mother, Vera Matsumoto, with her Italian cooking (she loved all things Italian, especially quattrocento painting, rigatoni con la pajata, and my father, “Renzo”) or making her modernist paper lanterns and small biomorphic bronze casts. She is an artist. Newfoundlands, with their thick double coat, webbed feet, and innate swimming abilities (doing their own kind of stroke, which is not a dog paddle but more of a modified breaststroke) are perfect for all the pleasures the lake has to offer, even in snowy winter. Shasta, that is his name, is a delightful vision in the snow: his furry white paws, with a brown patch on each, pouncing through the soft snow—his pink tongue glistening with pure joy—white clouds of breath blossoming from his warm mouth. 5

But there is no snow today. It is a clear June day and all that is left of the snow is the icy cold of the water. At school, my fourth-grade teacher once asked the students where all the white went to when the snow melted. I said the white went to make up the clouds in the blue sky, and I was partly right, and the teacher put a gold star next to my name on the bulletin board. “It’s a Newfie,” I yell. I cannot control my enthusiasm, and I run screaming to the edge of the lake to give the big brown and white Newfoundland an adoring smile and a hearty scratch behind the ears. This is to the dog’s liking. Love at first sight. And if you were able to take your eyes off of me (I really was a gorgeous boy) and the stunning dog, you would see that the man is as enchanted with me as I am with the handsome man’s dog. Although I am not looking at Coda, I feel his gaze studying me. I shudder at the slight fissure it produces, as if my ribcage were opening, ever so slightly, with the tiniest turn of a key. One, two, three intermittent beats of the heart. He has noticed one of the most interesting things about me. It’s not so much my eyes—my mother’s eyes, blue-black pools sinking up from weeping willow leaves, so different from my father’s deepumber velvety eyes, which always appeared cushioned to me—it’s my belly button, an “outie,” which is unusually shaped. It looks like a tiny cabbage or a rose. Alive as a rose not plucked. Corinna runs over to make it clear that she is watching. But mostly she just wants the man to have a close look at her. She is so pretty with her long, brown-glistening-with-red hair, blowing up and off her neck and into her dark, woodsy eyes. Her whooshing, propelling strands of beckoning hair have a photographic effect. One wants to get in close. One wants to kiss her neck. She is newness and the ache of adolescence. Corinna feels things. Corinna sneaks a secret glance at Coda. Is he looking? But Coda takes no physical notice of her. Not even of her kissable neck. She is wounded by this. Suddenly, Shasta paddles out into the lake and retrieves a floating

6

stick. He proudly drops the branch glistening with cold water at my feet, releasing his long pink tongue with a dog smile. With his longing, sea-lion eyes, cast toward heaven and me, he pleads for play. In the early evening of that noteworthy June day in 1967, I am at the kitchen table drawing, as I am often drawing, and my mother is carefully and confidently preparing an Italian supper. I tell her more about Shasta swimming in the lake. My mother is not only a successful artist, she is also a great cook. Her specialty is Italian dishes, including Venetian snacks, cichèti, and desserts, like panna cotta—that sweetened cream thickened with gelatin and molded—my mother flavors hers traditionally with peach eau-de-vie. But for very special celebrations, my mother will mark the occasion by preparing a Japanese feast. We eat with chopsticks. The adults drink sake. My favorite dish is yellow flower shrimp. As an artist, my mother is known for her small abstract bronze casts, always round, which sit still on the floor like couples, like friends, like families, like mother and child, or sometimes all alone. And she is equally known for her Japanese lanterns, which hang from the ceiling, also like couples, like friends, like families, like mother and child, or sometimes all alone. Some lanterns stand in a black wire enclosure—like bars, like the cage around Alberto Giacometti’s Suspended Ball, like the wires that enclosed my mother, her sister, and her parents when they were interned at Manzanar. Her paper and wire lanterns appear as translucent moons, cocoons, wombs, hourglasses. Some critics have read my mother’s empty, light-filled lanterns as doppelgängers of the Zen-Buddhist parents who encouraged her to be an artist. Like Hope hanging from the ceiling or shining bright in a dark corner. But they are also me . . . my mother . . . my father . . . people not yet known. My mother hung her lanterns from the cathedral ceiling of our mahogany-paneled modern home and stood them on our polished knotty-pine floors. The lanterns nearly overpopulated our home. They used to haunt me. But no longer. I now find them to be exquisite. The emptiness of her lanterns has a weight.

7

. . . in a black wire enclosure . . .

Just like the past has a weight. And the water has a weight too. Her bronzes appear as archaic rock forms of birds, breasts, moons, eggs. Like stones fallen from the sky. There’s something of Eva Hesse in her work, or rather there is something of her in Eva Hesse. I don’t know if they ever met. My mother never gave her artworks individual titles, just numbers. My mother’s lanterns and cast bronzes are Manzanar memories (made of wires, tears, and empty hope) transubstantiated by the Edenic world in which we lived. From the night-time lake, she drew the light of the moon. From the roughly scrubbed river rocks, she transposed profound roundness. From the fish, she alchemized flickering scales of light. And there, by the lake, we lived in our very modern house, with the Italian faience pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. And there, I ate our bowls of Japanese clam consommé, enhanced with kombu, deep olive-brown kelp leaf and the rind of yuzu citron. And, there, I ate our Italian tureens of brodetto abruzzese, featuring mussels in their partially opened black shells, summer tomatoes, wine, fish stock, garlic, and chili. And there, I developed under my father’s eyes, deep umber velvety eyes, which always appeared cushioned to me—and my mother’s eyes, deep pools of blue-black sinking up from weeping willow leaves. And there, I reflected the paternal-Venetian and the maternal-Edokko ancestries from which I arose. From about the age of six, I had a penchant for copying the form of things. By the age of ten, I was very good at drawing. I am copying a watery ghost by the great printmaker Hokusai. In the picture, Kohada Koheiji is haunting his sleeping wife (who, with her lover, has murdered him by drowning). His black-pebble eyes in scallop-shell sockets eerily stare out from his octopus-head. Crayfish-like. Prawn-like. You can even see the insides of this underwater fishy ghoul: his pinkred-brown muscles and algae-green tendons. His bony fingers are

9

. . . something of eva hesse . . .

stony coral. In the vast viridian swamp of his condemnation, he pulls back the mosquito-net shroud of his wife in bed with her lover. Things will not turn out so well for the pair. (Later I will learn that Hokusai emerged from Ukiyo-e, “the floating world” school of art, which celebrates the hedonistic pleasures of Edo.) After carefully drawing in the lines, I will paint the corals and teals with the Winsor & Newton watercolors that my mother gave me as a gift. It is that time of day when the day is nearly finished. We are not yet eating our supper. I am full of anticipation of the meal to come. And on this particular spring evening, the sky is especially enchanting, is iridescently colored, like the scales of a rainbow trout fetched from the Truckee River. While I wait and draw, I watch my mother prepare the squid for our fritto misto, her delicious fried squid. I see her pull the tentacles from inside the body. She removes the guts and that strange plasticlike quill, which is its interior skeleton: the pen. She slices off the beaky part of the head, removes the membrane from the body, and cuts off the wings. She will cut the body into rings—and the wings and the tentacles into large mouthfuls. She will add prawns too, peeling off the shell and leaving the head and tail on. Whitebait will also be added. Sometimes, I help. I am not squeamish about cleaning and cutting fish. My mother isn’t, so why should I be? But I am not helping her today. I am drawing. Soon I will smell the fish frying up in its batter made extra light, with her secret ingredient: sparkling water, full of bubbles, which she gently whisks into the egg whites. This is my favorite hour in my childhood book of hours. “We come from the water,” I say to mother out of the blue, while staring at the two underwater zombie faces: Hokusai’s print and my copy of it. Tenderly and slowly, as if she is the child, not me, I tell her: “When we were little fetuses inside our mother, we looked like fish. We even had gills, but they are not really gills, and they are usually called gill slits. They’re in our neck and they turn into the tiny bones of our middle ear and our tonsils and stuff like that . . . Mom, did you know that?” “I think I knew that,” she replies.

11

. . . ‘the floating world’ . . .

. . . they can breathe underwater . . .

I had been looking at an old Life Magazine, featuring Lennart Nilsson’s photographs of fetuses. They look like little astronauts floating about in space, attached by umbilical lines. Not yet born, they can breathe underwater (like scuba divers in The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau). They are not astonished by this. They are not afraid. Nilsson’s Argonaut-astronauts are homunculi on the quest of their lifetime. For some of the photographs, Nilsson captured his little men and little women using a wide-angle endoscope camera. Through a tiny slit in the mother’s uterine wall, a thread-thin needle led the way for the camera. A light was put in with the fiber-optics to illuminate the subject’s surreal beauty inside his or her amniotic chamber. But most of the specimens were dead, or soon to die, and were photographed outside of their mother’s body. The aborted fetuses of failed quests, their journeys stopped short, were posed before the camera to suggest the living: a tiny thumb might be stuck in the mouth. Existing outside of calendar time, in a not-yet time, a future past, these fetal astronauts, frozen by photography, are not unlike that ice-age baby woolly mammoth perfectly preserved for forty thousand years. Oh my goodness, she’s perfect—even her eyelashes are there! It looked like she’d just drifted off to sleep. Those star-like spots around the little astronauts are merely bubbles in the fluid that the photographer used to support the amnion. All of us once existed in profound intimacy with the maternal body. We drank from our mother breathing in amniotic fluid. At school, I was astonished to learn that my body is mostly water and that the earth is mostly water too. We are water in water. My mother tells me again her memory of my birth. The audible pop when her waters broke. And how I took no time getting out. I remember nothing of that day when I entered the world through water. Memory is like water: laundering, swallowing, drowning, dissolving, floating memories. Water holds images; yet, water is impossible to hold. Memory is Lake Tahoe on a calm day reflecting the world, with the clarity of a mirror, around and above: a family of redwoods, a cumulus 14

cloud, even me. Memory is Lake Tahoe on a stormy day stirring its waters with unsettling blues and distressing blacks. Memory is Lake Tahoe on a sunless, cold winter day, turning seal-gray: reflecting nothing at all.

15

t H e M e M o r Y o F l a K e ta H o e

When I was a child, my mother, my father, and I lived in the Sierra Nevada on the California side of Lake Tahoe, which submerges the border of two states: California and Nevada. California: hippies, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Big Sur, the Pacific Ocean, Yosemite, Berkeley, La Jolla Cove, the Big Dipper Rollercoaster in Santa Cruz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mexico and Mexicans, artichokes, oranges, mushrooms, garlic, calamari, almonds, California missions, California quails. Nevada: Mojave Desert, legalized gambling, nuclear testing, legalized brothels, Las Vegas, silver mines, Hoover Dam, wild horses and burros, the mountain bluebird, prickly pear and beehive cacti, North America’s oldest petroglyphs—beautiful patterns, perhaps of clouds or trees—made by Native Americans in the Winnemucca Lake basin. Nuzzled in a basin of redwoods and pines, Lake Tahoe is the tenth deepest lake in the world. Lake Tahoe is in love with the sky. Wideeyed and star-struck, Lake Tahoe hardly blinks. Lake Tahoe is an ancient lake and is numbered as one of the twenty oldest lakes in the world. For about two million years, Lake Tahoe has been staring at its beloved sky.

16

MY MotHer’s eYes

My mother’s eyes are of the lake.

17

MY MotHer

My mother had deep blue-black eyes that you wanted to drink. Dark hair that shined black-blue, like the glassy surface of the lake, when the sun has just gone down. Teeth like cool, white, polished stones. Between her teeth were little gaps, like a small animal, an otter perhaps. One front tooth was slightly chipped. Her not-quite-perfect teeth gave a little shock, highlighting her almost-perfect beauty. Her waist was thin, the line of a crescent moon, and her hip bones were pronounced. Her skin was pale olive-white and translucent, slightly blue, like a glass of very cold skimmed milk. She was very tall for a Japanese woman. Cool, long, thin arms. I was fixated on my mother, as sons sometimes are. I used to watch her, after coming out of the lake. She would dry herself very slowly, limb by limb, gently rubbing the towel over her perfect skin, again and again. Leaning to one side, bending over. Halting at times in deep thought. Perhaps something that she had read in a novel. Perhaps an idea for one of her artworks. At times, a posture of indecent abandonment. At Meeks Bay—when she would take in the warmth of the summer protected from the sun by her huge oiled paper, Chinese umbrella, the color of rice powder, painted with large red flowers, its parchment texture like one of my mother’s lanterns, its twirling pleats like those of a girl’s dancing skirt, its handle bamboo—I was drawn to her armpits like shallow furrows, as if a smooth, round rock had been lifted, to reveal an indentation for me to caress. Threads of blue seagrass veins were barely visible below the surface of her pale skin. With her full breasts pushed up from her strapless maillot, I looked for her areolas. I wanted to see them. My mother had a slow, breezy voice, as if it had just blown off the lake. I wanted to float on her. I wanted to drift on her. I was not the only one who felt this way.

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My father was so afraid that he might lose my mother, he decided to marry her the day he met her. I used to watch Renzo moving his hands up my mother’s body at the beach, in the kitchen, waiting in line at the grocery store. He was not very discreet. But the effect was neither vulgar nor desperate, it was charming. Lapping her up with his hands, he confirmed that her body had been made for his hands: her armpits, her waist, her hip bones. He built our house for her as a gift. On a long black satin ribbon, my mother almost always wore a little white cameo copied after Ingres’s La Source, in which a nude woman holds a large ceramic urn over her shoulder, upside down, so as to empty it as a cascade of water, like a waterfall in a crease of stone. The ribbon was long. La Source fit perfectly in the V between the fullness of her breasts. Our twosome thirst—mine and Renzo’s—for my mother was insatiable. But she was always somewhat withholding. She slipped through our fingers like water. Like the snow from the Sierras that melts into her, every spring: more meltingly than sleep or death. Like the sixty-three tributary veins that feed her: Glenbrook, the Upper Truckee, Fallen Leaf Creek, Meeks Creek, Madden Creek, Blackwood Creeks . . . Like the Truckee River that drains her. In the current of the river, rainbow trout sway, their scales flickering like tesserae. Clear glass and yellow gold leaf. Spots of black ivory. Bellies of green amber. Fins, tails and noses of blue-violet amethyst. Their wavering bodies boast a broad stripe paved with rose quartz, the color of bougainvillea. Their cheeks are Tiepolo pink. Like Venice under water, only in California. How modern and pure my mother always looked. Hair tied back in a simple ponytail, just above the nape of her swan-like neck. She splurged on simple dresses: slim fitting solid-colored knits with minimal texture and matching skinny belts. She bought them in the colors of the 1960s: coral, seafoam, black, charcoal gray, chestnut brown, autumn gold, and geranium red. Her dresses hugged her crescent moon

19

waist, squeezed her clearly enunciated hip bones, embraced her ample but lean buttocks. Her laugh was surprising, like those tiny chasms between her teeth, pungent, sensual, and revealing as the scent of geraniums.

20

CoDa

That day at the lake, I did not know Coda yet. But after that first encounter, Corinna and I saw him regularly. Corinna, with her watcher eyes, kept tally of the photographer’s daily habits and then would judiciously plan our walks around his schedule, so we would just happen to bump into Coda along the shores of Lake Tahoe. And there would be Coda walking the beach in his just-washed, worn-soft Levi’s and his just-washed, worn-soft brown corduroy shirt—from which you could smell Tide and darkroom chemicals. His shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. His canvas boat shoes tied together and draped over his shoulders, leaving his large hands free. No watch. No wedding ring, even though he lives with Mary, who sometimes likes to call him Cody. Strong forearms. His damaged spatulate fingernails always immaculately clean. Corinna was in love with this man who took no notice of her. Corinna wanted to be photographed by Coda. To fall to the floor . . . naked. His large format camera above her. To feel the hot light, like sunshine . . . and his cool gaze, like the cool, damp mists of the forest floor. She was not shy. This never happened. Coda never heard the rustling of Corinna’s needle leaves, never smelled her sun-warmed bark. Coda never saw her small yellowish-brown tufts at the end of her leaves, which flowered the following autumn. For Corinna never saw him again after that summer. But he would remain in her dreams. I heard that she ended up going to the San Francisco Art Institute to become a photographer. Coda was solid muscle, bigger than my father, but he had very full feminine lips, and heavily freckled skin. A real weather-worn look about him. He had the greenest eyes and a crown of sandy auburn hair with gray at the temples. Below his emerald irises, you could see the whites of his eyes, like John F. Kennedy: what the Japanese call sanpaku. Thick, dark auburn eyebrows were punctuated by unruly, gray hairs. Long smile lines ran from his eyes down to his cheeks. 21

Coda would stop to talk to Corinna and me about so many things. His piercing good looks held us hostage along with his equally fascinating knowledge of life strange and beautiful. The Wahoe Indians and their sacred de’ek wadapush (Standing Gray Rock), which you can see across the lake from Meeks Bay, if you look toward the east. The hummingbirds of Lake Tahoe. Fishing for trout. John Lennon. The woman in the California desert who was badly bruised but survived the meteorite that blasted through her roof on January 3, 1957. But most importantly, Coda encouraged Shasta to play with me at the edge of the lake. As a child, I desperately longed for a dog. Coda recognized my hunger and nourished it.

◌ ◌◌ Coda is a photographer of Lake Tahoe and its nearby lakes (Echo Lake, Donner Laker, Fallen Leaf Lake), as well as the Truckee River, the Sierra Nevada, the coastline of Northern California, huge boulders on the beaches of Point Lobos, sand dunes, ice crystals, windblown California cypress trees, the roots of redwoods, mushrooms, kelp, caves, and the body in the tradition of Edward Weston. But for Coda, the body before his camera is always male. Young males. Subterranean treasures. Secret stone flowers carved out of aching rock, which will never fully blossom. Coda took his first photographs of me throughout my tenth summer, in shorts and T-shirt, often just my shorts: climbing up the craggy rocks off the beach, the lone figure within a panorama of mountain peaks, the trail of a river, the opening of a cave. He would often focus on that most noticeable thing about me: my belly button, alive as a rose not plucked. He had never photographed a child before. I do not know what happened to those pictures of me as a child. And I do not want to see them. Photographs force-feed memory, causing me to forget the real time and remember only the photograph. It was not until I was eighteen that I would become Coda’s model for his series and artist’s book, The Temptations of a Mirror Maker. For 22

. . . like the navel of a dream . . .

those pictures, I often posed nude, but I did not mind. I liked the way the camera felt on me. It was liberating. In Temptations, my feet have Christ-like purity, my nude body is bound in agony, seemingly guiltridden, my hands are beatific-redemptive. Hands like Martha Graham. Hands like Georgia O’Keefe. Hands like cypress grove branches. Hands like the wings of a dove. Hands like love. And, my unmistakable navel, my rose, unplucked, like the navel of a dream. Coda made a copy of the book for me, keeping the original for himself. We kept our copies hidden. But they really aren’t pictures of me. They are photographs of Coda. He is there, he is just too close to see. I can still feel the eye of Coda’s giant camera atop his tripod. I can still hear the slip-slap of the film being shifted in the magazine as I become him. I am not a famous person, but my nameless nude body was made famous by Coda Gray.

24

BY CHanCe

Vera is sitting at a small dinner party hosted for her by her gallerist at Bough Gallery on Fillmore Street, San Francisco. She has made the three-hour drive to the Bay Area in her white Karmann Ghia and is happy to be staying alone for a couple of nights in the gorgeous Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill. It is the eve of the opening of her exhibition: “The Lightness of Being.” Placed at every seat is the dinner menu, which has been typeset with a font designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and printed with pewter ink on heavy milky blue paper: ChiLLed meLon L o B s t e r n e w B e r g ( s e r v e d i n t h e ta i L s h e L L s ) P o tat o e s w i t h P a r s L e y B U t t e r Peas with mint L o g a n B e r r y ta r t CoFFee trUFFLes

Place cards are to the right of the menu, printed with the same pewter ink on heavy milky-blue paper. At the corner is an embossed image of a Vera Matsumoto lantern. The dinner is being served on a large teak wood table for an intimate group of eight. Renzo is not there. Although Renzo admires Vera’s art and loves her even more for making it—especially the bronze casts made from the wax forms that retain her fingerprints, her touch, her very being—the art world drives him crazy. “Architects are different,” he often tells my mother. At openings, Renzo’s irritation is palpable. Tonight, at Bough Gallery, Vera wants Renzo with her; but if he were there, they would both be miserable. So, Renzo and I are at home alone without my mother, which is not so bad. On the outdoor grill, we will cook cheeseburgers and roast corn smothered with butter, 25

wrapped in tin foil. The kind of food my mother never makes. It’s warm enough to cook outside now, but the spring evening mountain air is too cold to remain outdoors to eat our dinner in the garden. We’ll bring our food in, with the smells of freshly cooked meat and charcoal. I’ll have a bottle of coke with the fluted hourglass shape that feels so good in your hand. We’ll have ice cream sundaes for dessert with chocolate syrup and marshmallow cream. I’ll have fun with my father alone. He’ll have fun too. But this time, Renzo’s absence from the gallery scene will turn out to be regrettable. This is the beginning of what will develop into a confusing, unnamable darkness, which will spread over our family. For Coda, the evening is the beginning of something altogether different. Coda will see a moon, sleeping like a child in Vera’s blueblack hair, bundled neatly into her luxurious, thick ponytail, which is even darker at the nape of her long neck. In his diary that night, Coda will write: “I mark this day with a white stone.” To mark a day with a white stone is a Roman tradition to indicate unspeakable happiness. I suppose if Renzo kept a diary, he would mark this day with a black stone. Darkness has closed in with the San Francisco fog. The gallery is dramatically lit so as to theatrically light my mother’s lanterns, which dangle from the ceiling. The bronze casts nestle in corners and gather like families and friends—and outsiders—on the unvarnished pine floor. The walls have been painted a deep cerulean green. The miseen-scène is magical, evoking campfires, fireflies, moonlight, and those rare phosphorescent tides, or blue tides, in which ocean waves glimmer glacial-turquoise and deep-sapphire blues, like swells of silk: an event caused by an extraordinary bloom of dinoflagellates. The algal creatures of a phosphorescent tide are fireflies of the sea, firing their lights when agitated by movement. Vera had once seen a phosphorescent tide, when she was visiting a friend who lived by the ocean in Southern California. Vera’s place card is next to Coda’s. Coda knows the gallerist and requested the seating arrangement. Coda has recently learned that Vera is friends with Buckminster Fuller. My mother and father met at Black 26

Mountain College, where Fuller taught. They were both prize students of “Buckie.” Fuller even designed my mother’s wedding ring. Coda is curious to meet this student of Fuller. Coda finds himself seated next to the most beautiful female creature he has ever seen: the maker of the lanterns and bronze orbs, for whom the dinner party is in honor of. He, too, wants to drink from my mother’s deep blue-black eyes. My mother’s tip-tilted nose makes him smile. She smiles back with her always-crooked smile and reveals her not-quite perfect teeth. The otter gaps. The slightly broken front tooth. This bit of damage, this slight injury, he notes—as everyone does—makes her curiously more sexual, more beautiful, more perfect. Her teeth are like those little mouse tracks, bites in the snow, elusively appearing every winter, just outside his darkroom’s door. Her mouth is an invitation to nightfall, sweet and thick. He peers in like a swallow, long-tailed and eager. Even while sitting, her waist is revealed as a slender hourglass. My mother says very little. Coda waits for the next flash of my mother’s teeth between her dark gates. Coda is staring, is grinning. She answers with a laugh with the scent of geranium. For Coda, the dinner is not at all tedious. Although the food is too rich, too buttery, too soft, for his tastes. He leaves much of it behind. However, the color, tartness, and sweetness of the gorgeous loganberries—so carefully arranged between the walls of the individual tart pastry shells, hard and sweet like a cookie—give him great pleasure. While coffee is being served, my mother begins to tuck the afterdinner truffles into her raw silk reticule, the color of champagne, as tasteful as her. Intrigued, Coda asks her who the sweets are for. “For my son, who adores chocolate,” she replies, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. A conversation develops. “I am without children, but we have an enormous dog,” Coda explains. “She was a birthday present to Mary, the woman I live with. Mary picked him out from the litter because she was brown and white—the only puppy out of nine that was not black and white. We 27

think that her fur is like a dark brown mountain, patterned with snow: like the spectacular view that we witnessed on a visit to Mount Shasta, hence the name. We call the dog Shasta.” Immediately the penny dropped; she was talking to the man with the Newfoundland. The man whom Corinna and Nico sometimes saw on their walks. The man whom Nico tells fantastic stories about. The man with the green eyes who knows the names of all the mushrooms that grow near the lake, who tells tales of blue gentians and white thimble berries found in Squaw Valley, who can hear the sounds made by deer, blue jays, and flying squirrels. This is the man with the green eyes who can skim stones off the lake, tirelessly, and with more skill than anyone, who loves to look for crawfish and minnows, as if he were still a boy. An auspicious coincidence: a moon being passed around. Upon her return to the Fairmont Hotel, in my mother’s raw silk reticule, the color of champagne, will be the chocolate truffles for me and Coda’s phone number scribbled in pencil on the back of his place card. She has invited him to dinner. In her head, she was already planning the meal. Not the rigatoni con la pajata, pasta with the intestines of an unweaned calf, or her tiramisu with the addition of grated chocolate on top (rather than the usual cocoa powder), plus chunks of chocolate tucked inside the coffee-flavored mascarpone pudding, but clam consommé, trout sashimi, bean curd dengaku, yellow flower shrimp, asparagus with mustard dressing, bamboo rice, pickles, and sake. In the morning, she will visit San Francisco’s Uoki K. Sakai market. There, she will find many of the ingredients for her spring Japanese dinner. Back home at the lake, she will visit her fish monger for the freshest trout possible.

28

WHen BaMBoo sHoots PoKe tHeIr HeaDs oUt oF tHe eartH

Box one, 1967–1970, Niccolò Petroni Archive 5 × 7 kraft paper envelope, with a string and button enclosure. on the outside of the envelope, scribbled with soft pencil: “my mother’s grocery shopping list.” inside the envelope is a piece of heavy cream-colored stationary. across the top, printed in dark blue:

t h e F a i r m o n t at o P n o B h i L L 950 mason street san FranCisCo CaLiFornia.

on the heavy cream-colored stationary, written in vera’s handwriting, with a finely sharpened pencil:

wasabi sake yuzu white and black sesame seeds bean curd nori

kinome dried bonito fresh bamboo red and white miso karashi kombu

she would have put udo on the list. its delicate aroma, with a slight flavor of fennel, is delicious when added at the last minute to clear soups. vera has hardly ever seen it in america, even in the excellent Japanese food stores in san Francisco and Los angeles. she will use a little fennel as a substitute.

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BlUe raMBler

Utopia is a lifelong apprenticeship in making a home, which includes dressing for it. —Florenzo Petroni, Sunset Magazine, 1962

“Clankity, clankity, clankity-clank.” Rather shyly, our spinning doorbell rings its neat ceramic bell sound. And again, it sounds out—this time confident, faster, positively giddy: “Clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity-clank.” Coda and Mary have arrived. At 6:00 pm, the night is still light on this early summer evening. Mary is charmed by our black ceramic Mexican folk-art doorbell: a ringing pinwheel made out of clay. When the rope is pulled, the four handmade bells spin and beat their sides with ceramic pistil clangers: “Clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity-clank.” Mary pulled it not once, but twice. From inside our house, my mother opens the solid redwood front door and there is Mary: short brunette hair in a boy’s cut, featuring a very long side part and a charming front wave. At her ears are big brown velvet-covered button earrings, as much ears as earrings. She is wearing a boat-neck dress in a delicate Bohemian print of brown, black, yellow, and cream. She has the style of disregard that only young women from money are able to maintain. Her clavicles are enchantingly exposed. No necklace. The bodice of dress is tight. From Mary’s small cinched waist, the delicate Bohemian print explodes into a huge blossom of a skirt, further emphasizing Mary’s littleness, her erotics of tininess. She is wearing flat black ballet shoes. She stands pert and adorable, a touch of madness in her. Next to her, Coda is drawing a slow cowboy smile, as my mother pulls the door open all the way. The open plan of our modern wood-and-glass-box house is especially beautiful during this evening’s last light. My mother’s translucent white paper lanterns are carefully hung in groups and alone from 30

the cathedral ceiling. Another stands tall in a corner on its chrome grasshopper legs. The lanterns have not yet been switched on. A mirror in a gold-sunburst frame reflects these cocoons for light. Our glass dining room table is surrounded by six molded plywood Eames dining chairs. In one corner sits a prized elephant-hide gray, fiberglass-reinforced, plastic 1951 Eames rocking armchair with rod base, an RAR, with metal legs and birch runners. The rocker was given to my mother on the day that I was born: a gift from Renzo. Next to the RAR is one of my mother’s prized sculptures, comprised of two bronze balls: Untitled, No. 5, 1951. The orbs sit on the floor and face each other, like mother and child. The mother-figure is the size of a small cantaloupe, her offspring a large orange. But there is nothing about them that is suggestive of food, or even nourishment, or even color: they are solid and primordial. The cast-bronze looks like ancient rock: touched all over for thousands of years. Blind and armless, each reaches out to the other with their rounded bird-like beaks, which might be nipples on the ends of breasts or pursed lips in want of a kiss. The two lookalikes, one smaller than the other, touch: but barely so. They could be dividing, as if undergoing mitosis. Or they could be connecting in love. Despite, rather because of, their simplicity, they are very moving. Amid the meticulous modern aesthetics of the house are delightful theatrical surprises: objects that break the mold. There is the Mexican spinning doorbell. And, there are the geraniums and impatiens, also known as busy Lizzies, growing in the Italian faience pottery jars along the front of the house. These big urns are painted in bright enamels with lyrical scrolls of pears and pomegranates on a crackled tin glaze ground. Renzo picked them up in Deruta, a medieval hill town in Umbria, Italy, when my parents were on their honeymoon. And I will never forget the prettily patterned blue-and-white fluted Royal Copenhagen teapot, which my mother uses for genmai-cha (green tea with roasted grains and popped brown rice, like miniature popcorn). From the old Royal Copenhagen blue-and-white teapot pours genmai-cha, with its slightly nutty flavor, into my mother’s simple white Japanese porcelain tea bowls decorated with a snow glaze. 31

. . . like mother and child . . .

All of our dinners, whether an Italian supper or a Japanese meal, are served on old-fashioned French Arabian Nights dinner plates: an anniversary gift to my mother from my father. My mother always gave me and my father the same plate. For me: “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp.” For Renzo: “The Arrival of the Unknown Princess.” And, there is the large gray papier-mâché shark that I made when I was nine years old and which hangs over the turquoise-gray streamline-shaped fabric sofa with tapered oak legs and fabric-covered buttons, which have been sewed on by hand. “Have nothing in your home that you do not believe to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” a phrase coined by William Morris, which my father was very fond of quoting. My father christened our house, this gift to my mother, the “Lantern.” The Lantern began long before this day, long before me, when my mother first set eyes on Renzo and got that delicious sick feeling that you get when you fall in love (or lust) at first sight. Renzo was building his first house, the “Simple House,” along the shores of Lake Eden at Black Mountain College. A shirtless, browneyed buck: he was still a bit of a fawn, still with a few white spots, a face just-grown darker, a taut white belly, nubs before horns at the top of his head. Perhaps that is why the young modern dancers at Black Mountain had insisted that Renzo move about freely in their revision of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, even though he was not trained as a dancer. In the summer that Vera first laid eyes on Renzo, the south-facing glass panels of his Simple House were not in place. By April the small Simple House would be completed and would look out to a woodland of dogwood trees, blooming pink and white, which were punctuated by redbuds—which are not red but rather deep violet—giving the effect of pointillist dots reminiscent of Georges-Seurat paintings. The Simple House was built, stone by stone, out of carefully chosen pieces of North Carolina fieldstone: a mountain mix of colors, including dove gray, black regency, blue ridge, chocolate gray, cove white, and elk brown). The fireplace was made out of round river rocks, which 33

had been shaped and worn smooth for years and years by other rushing rocks and sediments caught in the velocity of the water. When my mother came to watch, she never hesitated to point out where Renzo had misplaced a rock. The first line to the lyrics of the Shaker dance song, “Simple Gifts,” comes to mind: “ ʼTis the gift to be simple, ʼtis the gift to be free.” To be simple is Shaker is Black Mountain is Renzo’s Simple House is the Lantern. Black Mountain College closed after only twenty-four years, in the year that I was born: 1957. Today all that is left of the Simple House are the river rocks of the fireplace. As an adult, I once went back to Black Mountain and found the rocks of the fireplace, next to it was a big turtle. He looked at me with his yellow eyes, before tucking himself back inside his house of stone.

◌ ◌◌ Before Mary and Coda can catch their breath, my father gets the festivities going for our guests who are visiting the Lantern for the first time. “Mary, would you like a whiskey? An Asahi, which is a Japanese beer? A glass of Vera’s plum wine over crushed ice?” Japanese ume, plum, never ripen well. During the humid rainy season, they fall off their branches all at once, as if in fear of growing old. It is to them that we owe the poetic name tsuyi, the Plum Rains. They are not naturally sweet. The green unripe fruit remains undeveloped. They are eaten as tight-fleshed and too-young: coming out in every Japanese market during late May and early June. “I’ll have a glass of the plum wine with Vera in the kitchen. Everything smells so fresh. I want to see what she’s up to,” says Mary. “Nico, your usual Roy Rogers?” asks my father. I respond with a big closed-lip smile and wide eyes and a nod of my head, which clearly means, “Yes . . . please.” “I’ll have a gin, lots of ice,” Coda chimes in without being asked. “Coda, there’s still a bit of light left; let me show you my roses and my motorbike in the shed out back. My two biggest passions, af34

ter Vera,” chuckles Renzo. For Renzo was not just my father and my mother’s husband, he was still my mother’s dedicated boyfriend—still in him all the love that leads to marriage. “Follow me,” commands my smiling father, who looks so tall and slim, and fashionable next to Coda, who is wearing his usual Levi’s, corduroy shirt, and canvas boat shoes, just as he did when I first saw him at the lake. Renzo is in his uniform, wearing one of his bespoke Oxford cotton shirts, tailored for him on Sutter Street in San Francisco. He has two of these shirts in shades of gray, charcoal-gray and pearl-gray; three in shades of blue, midnight-blue, pale sapphire-blue, and royal blue; two in shades of green, dark viridian-green and mossgreen; and three more in shades of white; ivory-white, cream-white, and butter-white. Tonight he is wearing the one in midnight-blue, made distinct with Navajo silver buttons. With careful inspection, one notices that there are small holes in his shirt, which have been exquisitely mended. Fortunately for my father, my mother had learned from her own mother to be an excellent seamstress. The nearly invisible mends add to Renzo’s very appealing disciplined rumpled appearance, along with his thick black hair, in want of a cut, and his five-o’clock shadow. My father had a very heavy beard, which he really should have shaved twice a day, but he rarely did. Tonight is no exception. For my whole life, I have wondered how he managed to shave in that deep dimple in the middle of his chin. His midnight-blue shirt is complemented by his chinos in dark gray. The effect is Vermeer. For as my father taught me, Vermeer’s blues look so richly blue, because they are next to gray. As always, he is wearing his round silverrimmed John Lennon glasses. Renzo’s look is not Savile Row or Madison Avenue, despite the bespoke shirts. “I’m an architect. I’m Italian, but I’m not wearing Italian clothes,” he said in an interview for Arts and Architecture magazine. When he wore a suit, it was single-breasted with four buttons. He wore only bow ties and he wore his bow ties loose. They were mostly tame in pattern and sophisticated in color, but one was patterned in black and white numbers. Whether he was wearing a suit or his chinos, my father always 35

wore his practical lace-ups that he ordered (in brown and black) from Sears: Gold Bond Oxfords, with neoprene soles. They were called “service shoes” and were a step up from the work shoes and boots from old. They were practical and functional, like an Eames-molded plywood chair. His contagious toothy smile, full of confidence and wholesomeness, stole something from the Kennedys, with a touch of Italianicity. His studied simplicity, of course, was not simple. As soon as everyone has a drink in hand, my father is quick to get Coda out of the house. Vera, Mary, and I stay behind with the yuzu citron and its marvelous aromatic rind (its fragrance resembles no citrus in the West), the sheets of dried seaweed and miso. Turning back to look at us, both men smile at once; despite differences in stature and dress, my father’s sprezzatura and something more freckly Irish in Coda—their grins share a brotherly likeness. Renzo’s roses grew in ivory, crimson, and pale pink. Never orange. Never yellow. He especially enjoyed growing a violet-blue variety popularly known as Cool Water roses. I used to watch him tending his roses from my bedroom window. I would see Renzo pick up the fallen roses and squeeze them hard, violently so, in his right fist. Then he would carelessly throw the squashed petals onto the ground before greedily inhaling their fragrance between his fingers. For all of his life, he tried, with some success, to cultivate the Rosa Veilchenblau, sometimes called a Blue Rambler, a Bleu Violet, a Blue Rosalie, or a Violet Blue. The color is not truly blue; it is mauve. His other blue passion was his 1950 motorbike, a turquoise-blue Triumph Thunderbird. Renzo would spend endless hours taking apart the engine of his blue scarab with handlebars for antennae and wheels with fenders for wings. A motorbike engine is finite. A motorbike engine does not have the infinite possibilities and muddle of love. My mother used to feel undone by the clutter of Renzo’s motorbike shed, with its smell of oil, metal, and rubber. His male nest was not a comfort to her. You could see on her face that it made her on edge, but she held her tongue. Clam consommé, trout sashimi, bean curd dengaku, yellow flower

36

shrimp, asparagus with mustard dressing, bamboo rice, pickles, and sake. This was a very special Japanese spring-into-summer dinner. “I know nothing about Japanese food,” confesses Mary. My mother tells Mary how you can tell if a trout is fresh enough for sashimi. Its eyes must be clear and bulging. It must smell fresh and ammonia-free. Its gills should be red and moist, its flesh light pink and firm, its skin shiny. The trout that my mother has already prepared with her very sharp, very shiny, very clean knife was a real beauty. Its dorsal fin had clear dark spots. Its colorful rainbow ran along its sides from head to tail. It had a dark olive-green back and a pure-white innocent belly. My mother prefers to fillet the fish herself (rather than having the fishmonger do it). She is quick. She has been filleting fish since she was a young girl, adapting her skills with tuna, sea bass, and mackerel to rainbow trout. She has softened the skin of the filleted trout and improved its color by pouring scalding water over the fish, swaddled in cheesecloth— only to quickly remove the cheesecloth in order to immediately plunge the fish in ice water for thirty seconds, swishing it gently and then patting it dry. Soon my mother ceases speaking at all and moves carefully and systematically through the final preparations of the meal. Mary quietly “oohs” and “aahs” while staying out of the way, which is not difficult at all for a woman of her stature. When Renzo and Coda return to the house through the French doors leading to the garden, all ten of my mother’s lanterns are switched on and the table is laid out. Like an abstract painting, the table-scape is breathtaking in its mysterious combination of attention to detail and free form. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” is playing on the stereo. Alive with the promising smell of a spring evening—damp earth, pine needles that have soaked up sun, new grass, and the first of my father’s roses to bloom after the last frost—the five us take our seats before a table covered in dishes of all sizes. For each of us: an antique

37

plate, not Japanese, but French, the ones with scenes from the Arabian Nights; an individual pot with a cover, so that when the lid is lifted, we will experience the quiet surprise of rice with the fragrance of bamboo, chicken leg in its skin, sake and black slivers of toasted nori, dried seaweed; a dipping bowl of cut crystal filled with amber soy sauce; a pair of plain cedar chopsticks, resting on a small piece of granite; and, a sake cup made by my father out of bamboo cut from our garden. When the warm sake is poured into the fresh bamboo, its perfume will make everyone feel drunk and happy without even taking a sip. A white ceramic bowl of clam consommé is soon put on top of our Arabian Nights plates by my mother, the perfect hostess. We sip its soothing clarity with a white Japanese porcelain spoon, its bowl deep and flat, its handle slightly curved, considerate, so as to hook onto the side of the bowl, preventing it from sliding in. I enjoy the tiny “clack” of the spoon—a prosthetic tongue made of china—against the enamel of my teeth. I like the polished hygiene smoothness of the spoon against the fleshiness of my pink tongue. At the fishmonger, my mother chose her clams carefully, striking two together. If the clams are alive, the sound is metallic. But if the sound is dull, the clam is dead, or the shell has been cracked or chipped and will produce a smelly soup. This morning, along with her fresh trout, my mother brought home ten metallic-clacking live clams. She dropped the live clams into gently boiling water in order to coax them open and flavor the broth. She further enhanced the consommé with dried kombu, yuzu rind, and a little fennel, as her substitute for udo. In each bowl are two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, with the meat of each resting on opposites sides of the hinged shell. These clams are said to represent the happy couple. We finish our soup quickly, with plenty of praise for my mother— both spoken in words and heard in our happy, greedy slurps. After clearing our empty soup bowls, with their ceramic spoons hooked to their sides, my mother brings out the platter of rainbow trout sashimi on a bed of finely sliced cucumbers and garnished with a sprig of shiso buds. The shiso came from my father’s herb garden. He grew it inside 38

the Victorian-modern greenhouse of enameled white iron and glass, which he designed and built himself. He built it for my mother, so that he could grow for her the herbs that she needed for her cooking, especially the ones she needed for her Italian cooking: basil, marjoram, bay leaf, mint, oregano, parsley, rosemary, sage, and thyme; but also shiso for the Japanese meals that, on occasion, cleansed our palettes, when she delved back into the foods of her heritage, not my father’s. My mother pauses with reverent eyes upon the thin slices of trout arranged on a bed of finely shred-cut daikon (white radish), garnished with ice cubes—before she carefully places pieces of sashimi upon each of our Arabian Nights plates. On the side of our plates she adds a little volcanic cone of wasabi, the color of pistachios: to awaken the fresh, clean sashimi, like a sleeping princess. The sashimi must be served first, in order to ensure its delicate freshness. Platters of bean curd dengaku and asparagus with mustard dressing soon follow. And then, my mother delivers the festive servings of yellow flower shrimp. The blossoms of shrimp are so visually stunning that she cannot hold back her sense of pride (a blush, an irrepressible smile, a sparkle in both eyes, a faint giggle), which is contrary to her characteristic humbleness. She has twisted the shrimp into flower shapes and glazed them with egg yolks. The pinky-reds of the shrimp peek through. Staring down at her flowers of yellow shrimp on her Arabian Nights plate (“The Talking Bird, The Singing Tree, and The Golden Water”), tiny Mary takes in a deep breath, her ribs rising high, her heart unlocked and happy. Then she raises her head slowly and looks all around her, her ultramarine, almond-shaped eyes in a liquid state of pleasure. She panoramically takes in the studied simplicity of the room all around her: the 1951 Eames rocking chair in elephant-hide gray; my mother’s Untitled, No. 5 bronze orbs; my papier-mâché shark; the turquoise-gray, streamline-shaped fabric sofa with tapered oak legs and fabric-covered buttons, which have been sewed on by hand; my father’s midnight-blue shirt, made distinct with Navajo silver buttons; and the mirror in a gold-sunburst frame reflecting my mother’s 39

lanterns that are turned on. Then Mary slowly and deliberately closes these breath-taking blue eyes, and it is as though a pair of curtains have been drawn to shut out a view of the sea. Even then, I could see that Mary was not of our world, of the lake. Mary was not only tiny. She was briny, like the ocean. Smiling slowly, with her thin pretty lips in a gentle bow, which repeated the same arc as her closed lids, her eyelashes appeared as the strokes of the handwriting of a child. Eyes still drawn, she says with a tender, childish laugh: “Everything is perfectly in place.” With his mouth still full of yellow flower shrimp and his brown eyes wet and passionate with sake, my father, prompted by Mary’s comment, is about ready to exalt on Shaker furniture design. I know it will not be long until he gets to Black Mountain.

◌ ◌ ◌

everYtHInG In Its PlaCe

“ ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’—that’s the Shaker motto,” so my father begins, as he always does. “The Shakers came up with that famous saying. As nineteenth-century American modernists, they were foremost experts in eliminating clutter. Hence their beautifully-designed, elegantly-stained, wooden nesting oval  boxes. A set of seven or eight ranged in size from quite large to very small and was used for the storage of dry items: spices, herbs, thread, buttons, and powdered paint pigments. The boxes even stored easily, as a smaller one could be put inside an empty larger one. In order to clear out a room for a good scrub, Shakers began the tradition of wall-mounted furniture by placing finely-crafted peg rails toward the ceilings of their rooms, which would hang chairs, sometimes upside down. Not only could they work with wood, they were geniuses with water, even using it to propel the machinery in their woodshops.” “Shakers did not use ornamentation,” my father says with approving eyes. “Design elements, which were not tied to function, were viewed as prideful, even deceitful. The Shakers were the original minimalists—at least in my mind. Expression was mostly withheld.

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But you can find it: in the small surprise of an asymmetrical drawer arrangement or arched ‘spider’ tripod legs on a bedside candle table. The impact of a Shaker room with chairs made of cherry, maple, or pine hanging, upside down, on a perfectly constructed peg rail takes my breath away. I am in love with the summer house that was built in the early twenties for the Shaker Sisters who lived at Hancock Village. Screened in on all sides to allow breezes to pass through, its purpose was singular: a place to drink tea, for afternoon and evening relaxation. It’s an architect’s simple dream.” “Is it true that sex wasn’t allowed in the Shaker community?” Mary asks my father, more elfin and more wide-eyed than usual. “Yep Mary that’s how it worked. Men and women were separated, and sex was not allowed. The founder of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee, made this clear from the very beginning. Very different from Black Mountain’s wildness, a utopian community of another kind. But because the Shakers were so successful with their farming and inventions—like the seed packet and water-propelled machinery—people were attracted to the financial security of being a Shaker, willing to become celibate, even break up their families. Of course, who knows what they did behind closed doors. And the Shakers also took in orphans. But the Shakers were not without sensuality; they found it in eating. They had incredible food, often using surprising spices and flavors. Mother Ann’s three-layered birthday cake with rose water frosting is decadent and heavenly.” And then with a smile and looking into my mother’s eyes, my father says in a near whisper: “My lovely wife Vera made it for me on my thirty-fifth birthday. It is right up there with my mother’s certosino, Christmas cake. The smell of roses in Mother Ann’s buttercream is other worldly, like an apparition.” “Oh Renzo, I think your mother’s certosino is better than my Mother Ann’s birthday cake,” my mother adds. “The aniseed and the cinnamon, the fresh apple puree, the blanched almonds, pine nuts, candied orange, and lemon peel, the surprise of the dark chocolate—now that’s divine. And certosino is so visually sumptuous with its apricot glaze and the Italian fruit, candied in honey, carefully arranged on top,

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like an Edwardian hat: tiny whole purple figs, red cherries, green cherries, slices of orange clementine, a white miniature pear, triangles of yellow pineapple.” “Vera, it pains me to admit it, but your Mother Ann’s birthday cake is better than my mother’s certosino.” “Well, I have learned a lot about European tastes from your mother, just as I did at Black Mountain, where it was my job to make the butter,” my mother announces with satisfaction. “And, because I used to get up every morning very early to make the butter for the college, Josef Albers decided it would be useful to have me as his alarm clock. At that time, Joseph had just become interested in photography and wanted to take pictures of the fog coming in. Early mornings at Black Mountain would start off very clear and then it would get very, very, very foggy. It covered the mountain like a gray blanket of silk. I would go to Josef ’s house at six o’clock every morning—save for Sunday— and knock on the door. And he would wake up, go out to take his photographs, and then return to bed. He got the job done, in true Joseph style, very systematically.” “And, I also made buttermilk,” my mother adds, turning up her nose. “The Europeans at Black Mountain loved the buttermilk. I don’t like it. But it made me very popular with Josef and his wife, Anni, who was such a skilled textile artist. Josef was head of Black Mountain and he was very strict. We all took the same design class from him every year. We did identical visual assignments over and over, with only slight differences. He liked repetition with subtle alterations, as is evident in the hundreds of rigorous paintings that make up his Homage to the Square series. Each painting is comprised of three or four squares of solid planes of color nested within one another. He began those during our last year at Black Mountain, in 1949, and kept making them for twenty-five years. He is so meticulous. He labeled the back of each painting with the precise name of each color used, as if from a cooking recipe. The interaction between the colors is affecting but not sentimental. For him, the colors were different “climates,” influencing and changing each other back and forth. There is one Homage to the Square that I like to daydream about, with squares of field-yellow, 42

morning-sun-yellow, and butter-yellow—a center square in fog-gray. I think I was the alarm clock for that painting too, even if it did not come to fruition until some ten years after my time at Black Mountain. Josef hated emotion in art. He used to say in class, with a thick German accent: ‘If you want to express yourself do that on your own time. Don’t do it in my class.’ I could relate to this because I come from a culture that does not think so highly of exposing one’s feelings. However, Elaine de Kooning once said that no matter how impersonal his paintings seem, no one but Josef could have painted them. He was very strong on the idea of making things your own, even outside of the studio. Seeing how close Renzo and I were becoming, Josef warned me against having a child. He said that my art was my child. And I said: ‘I am not giving up having a baby for my art. Art is a very chancy occupation.’ And he said, ‘well have it your way, just make sure that it is your child, what you want and how you want to raise it.’ Adding, ‘you paint flowers, but you have made sure that they are your own flowers.’ He was speaking of the abstracted flowers that I was making at the time, which were geometric and mathematical in approach and he liked them very much.” And then, looking over at me with that same sparkle in her eyes that she had when presenting the yellow flower shrimp, my mother added: “There’s no doubt that Nico is all my own!” And then, she quickly added with a slight blush, while looking down at her sake cup, “Of course, of course, he’s Renzo’s too.” As my mother continues, her joyful nostalgia for her Black Mountain days sinks unexpectedly. A slight reddening of her face. Tension in her beautiful long neck. In an effort to refuse this anger, she takes in a long slow breath through her nose. Her shoulders rise. And as her shoulders lower, you can see her throat visibly swallowing her rage. Her blush recedes. The muscles in her neck relax. But in her speech, suppressed resentment remains at the top of my mother’s voice. “I got to Black Mountain College, because I was told that I was not suited to be a teacher. After a couple of years at Milwaukee State Teacher’s College, my lecturers told me that I should give it up: no school will ever hire a Japanese. I was never clear as to whether they were protecting 43

me or not—whether they were speaking out of fear for me or hatred of me . . . I left without graduating and went on a trip to Mexico with my sister. On the long bus ride from Milwaukee to Mexico, I remember stopping somewhere in the middle of Missouri. And when we went to the toilet, I did not know whether we should use the colored toilet or the white toilet. We decided to use the colored toilet—well because we were colored, if an unusual color for that part of the country.”

◌ ◌ ◌

lIGHt

I do not recognize myself as Japanese or American. As a citizen of the cosmos, I draw with light, which seeps through the paper and into the room: its walls, floors, and ceiling. When I made my first lantern, I was excited to make a shape of light that was neither inside nor outside. My lanterns are not empty but emptied. —Vera Matsumoto in an interview, HERETICAL, 1965

And then my mother becomes a bit glassy-eyed. Her pronunciation softens. It was more than the sake. “In Mexico, I had the luck of attending art class at the Universidad de Mexico with a Cuban refugee, Benita Hernández Martinez, who was a friend of Josef ’s. Benita told me about the Black Mountain College and made our doorbell for us as a wedding gift. I arrived at Black Mountain in 1947. Renzo was there already. I was ready for Black Mountain. With me, I carried the stories that my mother had told me about her village of Shirakawa-gō. In my blood was her farmhouse, with its steeply slanted thatched roof— pressed together like hands in a steeple—with its warm spacious attic filled with trays of silkworms, stuffing themselves with mulberry leaves, until they spun themselves into cocoons. In Shirakawa-gō, my mother spent her days unwinding and joining the filaments of silkworm cocoons until there was enough thread to make a comforter or, as she always poetically added, ‘a dream.’ There in the desert of Cali-

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fornia, I imagined a silkworm embedded within the palm of my right hand. When I went to draw, the silkworm contracted its body and extruded its liquid silk—a slender thread of light—long, continuous, and never ending—enabling me to draw and draw and draw. The silkworm comforted my spirit. It enabled me the strength to become an artist. I became the silkworm. I found lightness in my dark memories of enclosure at Manzanar. I refused to be boiled out of my home—like the silkworms farmed by mother’s family. Through drawing, I let myself out of darkness as a great winged moth. I metamorphosed, filling my discarded cocoon with light.”

◌ ◌ ◌

v o I C e s I n s to n e

Just as a child can believe that a stone is alive because it can move, as it rolls down a hill, so do I believe that I can hear voices in my stones. —Vera Matsumoto, Caterpillar Art Journal, 1967

“Different, but the same, are my heavy bronze stones, in which I hear the lost voices of the war. In my stones, I hear Matsunosuke Murakami, who was the first man to die at windswept Manzanar and who was buried there in a circle of stones. In the summer sun, his stones can top one hundred degrees. In the winter, the stones are frozen with snow. In my stones, I hear the person who vanished on the steps of a Hiroshima bank on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 am. He or she stood at the epicenter of where the bomb fell, where all sound was silenced and where the temperature reached the surface of the sun. All that remains of this unknown person is the shadow of his or her own body: a kind of photograph on stone. In my stones, I hear the tiny voices of more than one hundred boys and girls—chatting, giggling, crying— who lived at the Children’s Village at Manzanar. These Japanese American orphans from the West Coast evacuation zone even included halfJapanese babies ‘stolen’ from their Caucasian foster homes. Directors of the California orphanages had pleaded for clemency for all of the

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orphans, but they were unable to save the children from being taken away to live with ten thousand unknown Japanese Americans in camp surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and eight watchtowers.” Looking out the window of the Lantern into the darkness, my mother is now full of an anger, which I have never witnessed before. My mother shakes as she continues speaking. “Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot of Colonel Paul Tibbets, who flew the plane that dropped ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, should have told her son this: ‘In Japan, people have mothers like me. Have children like the little child that you once were. Have fathers. Have grandmothers. Have grandfathers. Son, I would like you to target rice fields instead of cities and towns. Drop bombs to surprise the snails in rice fields.’ ” After hearing my mother speak like this, I felt the coolness of the lake, an emptiness of language, which is always there, even in summer. With an awkward smile of resignation on his face, my father left the table to finish the washing up. Turning back to me, my father said (his eyelids lowered, his brow furrowed): “Nico, you should hop into bed now. It’s after midnight.”

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t e n D e r B U t to n s

Box four, 1977–1980, Niccolò Petroni Archive 5 × 7 black paper envelope, with string and button closure. on the outside scribbled in soft pencil: “this could be my mother.” inside the envelope is a 4 × 5 contact print taken by ansel adams at the manzanar Japanese relocation Camp. the photograph is a departure from his signature style landscapes, although the sierras can clearly be seen in the background. the black-and-white image features young Japanese women doing their calisthenics. they are perfect in their perfect lines. as if everything was fine. their arms reach straight out like a letter t. the pretty adolescent girl at the front of the line smiles at me. this photograph moves me, stirs me, wounds me, pricks me, bruises me. why? it is not just the fact of iniquitous internment. it is the outstretched hand of the smiling girl almost touching the extended hand of the girl beside her, whose body and face remain offframe (unseen). a resounding emptiness. Like the sound of one hand clapping. it is the piece of the smiling girl’s shoulder-length straight black hair caught by the arid wind. it reaches up. Like an indian feather. (manzanar was once home to native americans before the ranchers came.) it is those tiny holes (visible in ansel’s impeccable print), on the arm of the smiling girl’s sweater, almost invisibly mended. Like tattered faith. it is the unbuttoned fifth button, on the bottom of the smiling girl’s sweater, which especially moves me, stirs me, wounds me, pricks me, bruises me. while all of the buttons appear too large, too graspable, bound to come off easily—like childhood itself—this one stands alone. decades later, it is still patiently waiting to be buttoned. Like a blue marble lost, still magically warm with summer, waiting to be found.

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. . . waiting to be buttoned . . .

Wa I t I n G

Our tears changed, with the invention of the camera, suddenly the past was not lost but held waiting. The photograph withholds. That is why certain photographs prick us, make us weep our weary tears filled with bucketfuls of pictures: insulting, beautiful, banal. —Interview with Coda Gray, Aperture, 1966

I am waiting for my mother to come to my bed. But she will not be here until Coda and Mary leave. She will not come until she has lied down for an hour or so with Renzo. He will fall asleep quickly. He always does. Sleep, like many things in life, is easy for Renzo. I hear the din of adult intimacy, but I cannot make out the words. I am laying my cheeks against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and fresh as the cheeks of childhood. Although it is very dark outside, I can see the light of the house streaming in underneath the door. More light shines from my nightlight next to my bed, which illuminates the single Japanese print that hangs on the wall of my austere, comfortable, pleasing bedroom. My mother has taught me that the picture is a woodblock print from the nineteenth century by Toyoshige. In the first two panels are three women in their kimonos making a gigantic snowball, big enough to contain all of them. A fourth woman watches, her fingers are in her mouth as if she is trying to warm them. The women must be frozen in their silk gowns and traditional wooden geta. The third panel features two other Japanese women, wearing kimonos in the snow: one holds a baby, the other is showing the infant a white rabbit, seemingly made of snow, on a rosecolored platter. A strange image, which to this day puzzles me. Is the rabbit real or a toy? For eating or play? Dream or waking life? I have my own white pet rabbit. My mother and I named him “Toy”: short

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for Toyoshige. A cherry tree blooms fat pink-white silkworm-cocoons. Plump snowflakes wriggle out of the gray sky like white larvae. Finally, the din of adult talk ceases. They are saying their goodbyes. I hear the front door close. Looking back at the house, as if she could see through the closed door, Mary exclaims to Coda: “Could life be more beautiful?” And then she rang the bell again. She could not help herself. “Clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity-clank.” I am waiting for my mother, my beautiful mother, with her blueblack eyes that you want to drink—with her dark hair that shines black-blue, like the glassy surface of the lake, when the sun has just gone down—with her pale, olive-white, translucent, slightly blue skin, like a glass of very cold skimmed milk. With her cool, long, thin arms. My mother comes from her bed, the bed that she shares with Renzo, nearly every night, seemingly with my father’s permission. After she arrives, she will sleep with me for the rest of the night. I am impatient for her arrival, and I am anxious about her arrival. I am ten, and I am very aware that this waiting for my mother to come to my bed is not right. To love is to wait. I already understand this. If I were a girl, it would be different. It would be okay for us to sleep together. Possibly sweet. Very touching. An attentive good mother giving comfort to her innocent daughter. I am feeling sexual urges in my body. I want . . . I want . . . I want to touch, and I want to be touched. I feel guilty, yet it was my mother who first set this ritual into place. She initiated these visits to my bed on her own, and not just to keep me company—for, more often than not, at least in the beginning, before I began to stay awake in excited anticipation of her visits, I would already be asleep. When I was about nine, I began to realize that I was the one keeping her company for what was left of the night. Often at the beginning, she seemed distracted or sad when she got into bed with me. Then, after a while, she simply seemed to arrive out of habit, as if sleeping with me was an ordinary thing to do. At times, I would gently rub her back for her. Play with her hair. Give her tickly rubs down her arm and blow into her neck to give her goosebumps. 50

Now I expect her arrival, usually about the same time every night. Like clockwork, really. Every night, I wait. I wait. I wait for the wishbone of her long legs to stand at the threshold of my bedroom door. I want to know . . . I want to know . . . I want to know what is underneath the nightgown that she wears at night, which teases me with its transparency as she pauses in the light of the opened bedroom door. Tonight, once in bed, we will cuddle, as usual. My front to her back. I will embrace her, holding my mother close to me, if loosely, at the waist. Her face is always away from me. Her long black hair is untied and travels straight down her back. Her hair, which smells of sandalwood, will touch my face. It will touch my lips. And her body, at night, seems to smell of snow, even in June. Loving someone is exactly like the idea of eating something good. I was very attached to my mother. I wanted to taste her, lick her coolness, swallow her very cold, skimmed milk–colored skin, mouth her silk nightgown. I wanted it all. I wanted to eat her. The tips of my fingers were the not-so-innocuous mouths of the white silkworm. I lived in fear of losing my mother. Starting when I was eight years old, it brought some relief to know that she would visit my bed, indeed spend most of the night with me, every night. This went on for two years. Over the two years, I have become more brazen. When rubbing her back and twisting her hair, I let my hands slide down further and further. Even over to the sides of her delicious hip bones. I believe that I am being discrete. I believe that my hand is accidentally discovering itself between her legs, unknowingly feeling a bit of the softness of her genitals, the coarseness of her pubic hair covered in satin. My mother allows me to believe this. I believe that my mother must not feel my own rigid arousal against her; I convince myself of this. Frightened, I push my pelvis away from her, curving my belly and my spine into a carved letter C, as best as I can: so as to create space between us. I believe that she does not feel my baser pleasures. I believe that she does suspect. She allows me to believe this. And I feel sick with desire and guilt. 51

Too late to nip the flower in the bud. The end comes without warning. After two years of this night-time ritual, Renzo cannot bear it any longer and my benevolent father turns terrifying. The covers and sheets are snatched off the bed: the rush of cold air freezes the situation. I hear my mother giving a loud gasp as she awakes: a choking, shuddering, shaking breath. I know that what is about to happen is awful. A terrible storm is ready to break. A heavy roof is ready to collapse. And then, I leave myself. I watch myself outside of my body: floating above my bed, like a medieval saint watching his temptations and tribulations as mirrors. I stare below at my tenyear-old self, my father and my mother. I will remember only three images, reflections, curiously still and silent. Living is a motion picture of silent stills. Burned on my brain are these three photographs untaken. The photograph of my mother’s eyes, wide-eyed with fear when my father first opens my bedroom door, letting in a blast of light and the chill of summer night in the High Sierras. The photograph of my father’s face, full of anger, but also full of hurt, looking shockingly childish. His mouth is blasted open in a scream. The boom of his voice falls silent upon my panicked ears. As if my ears had eyelids, they are closed to sound. But I do not see the tears in his eyes. The photograph of my small body curled up in a ball, face down, in a fetal position, the pads of my toes peeking out from under my bottom, the back of my neck covered in sweat, my hands clasped over my ears. I do not see my mother being pulled by my father down the hall back to their bed. But I do hear the dragging of her body on the wood floor. I hear my own sobs being echoed in the emptiness, like the whimpering of some other child: pathetic, lost sounds. Why wouldn’t I/he stop? My whimpering goes on for hours until I fall asleep in a bed suddenly grown large with my mother gone, save for the traces of where her body has been, like those footprints she left behind when she had cartwheeled on the beach. She has left two hairpins behind, wavering and bending their own secret speech that silently whispers

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a message to me, in a cypher language, which I cannot hear, cannot understand. After that night, Renzo never spoke about this shattering incident, which broke something between all of us forever. And, I think, Renzo even ceased to think about it himself. But now and then, in the months that followed that month of June, that time when bamboo shoots poke their heads out of the earth, that time when my mother made us a Japanese dinner—a delicious orchestrated event of clam consommé, trout sashimi, bean curd dengaku, yellow flower shrimp, asparagus with mustard dressing, bamboo rice, pickles and sake—the ferocious memory of that violent hour in the middle of the night, laying somewhere very deep, perhaps at the bottom of the lake, would thrust upward into my father’s consciousness, leaving him aching with a sharp, cold, deep-rooted pain. (Like brain freeze, when, as a child, I ate my ice cream cone too quickly.) And this pain was bodily, even though it was controlled by his mind. To try not to think of it, was to think of it, was to suffer from it still. Most of the time, Renzo would manage to forget about that night, until suddenly something (an image, a word, a smell, a sound) would trigger an involuntary memory of the last time that my mother came to my bed—changing his entire countenance—squeezing the origin of his pain. And then, his suffering would take place over again. The agony that Renzo felt in his body was not unlike that time, during the Christmas holidays, when I came home after ice skating with a friend. Unbeknownst to my father, I had injured my shoulder on the ice. And, when I walked in through the front door, my father, so happy to see me, gave me a squeezing “hello” on my upper arm, causing me to shout and pull away, nearly in tears from the pain. My father had unknowingly touched my wounded body where it hurt the most. Words can do this also. But as long as Renzo’s memory of our horrible hour in the night remained at the bottom of the lake, when he thought of my mother, he was happy. He recalled her deep blue-black eyes that he wanted to drink. Dark hair that shined black-blue, like the glassy surface of the

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lake, when the sun has just gone down. Teeth like cool, white, polished stones. And those little gaps, like a small animal, an otter perhaps, between her teeth. He smiled when he remembered exactly how one front tooth was slightly chipped. His body warmed at the thought of her not-quite-perfect teeth, which gave the beholder a little shock, because it highlighted her almost-perfect beauty. He even found himself enjoying Coda during the many dinners and lunches and drop-by visits during that summer of 1967. But then, sometimes, all at once, his jealousy, Renzo’s twin shadow of his love for Vera, inverted these same passionate, voluptuous memories. For like the moon, jealousy renews itself. When she made tiramisu, with the grated chocolate on top and the chunks of chocolate inside, it was not for him, as she claimed, it was for me. Suddenly my mother’s little teeth, with their gaps and a chipped front tooth, turned menacing. Her smile revolted him. But was it really me, a boy, still young, innocent enough, if getting older, who was at the center of Renzo’s envy? True, if Renzo really knew what awkwardly went on between my mother and myself—the caressing, the fondling, the feigning of innocent touch—he would be enraged with jealousy toward me, but he did not know these things. Could it have been the changes in my mother that night—that night of the clam consommé, trout sashimi, bean curd dengaku, yellow flower shrimp, asparagus with mustard dressing, bamboo rice, pickles, and sake? When she laid the splendid and lavish Japanese meal out for Coda, was she shutting out my father? Couldn’t we all see what was happening? Or was it simply how Coda looked at me in the light of my mother’s lanterns? That night, I was no longer young enough to know everything. And with time, I have only gotten older.

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r e F U s I n G to B e P l U C K e D

The navel comes after we are torn from our mothers. A hole left behind from the shedding of the umbilical stump. A tearing scar. An inscription that reminds us that we once belonged to the cosmos of our mother’s womb. My navel, botanical, like a rose not pruned, appears as if refusing to leave, refusing to be plucked . . . in want of watering.

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W e Wa n t r o s e s

As if he was a Fortuniana rose and his arm was a rootstock, the artist Petr Štembera, who was born in 1945, took a stab at it. He grafted a Bourbon Queen, right there in the softness of the crook of his elbow. Right there in that place of strong blue veins. A process common in arboriculture. He called his action Grafting. The Bourbon Queen, medium pink, veined darker and paling toward the edges, very freeflowering, tough, and reliable, may be grown as a tall shrub or climber. Petr’s attempt at grafting a rose into his arm was an attempt to make a memory of love, an attempt to make two into one (without betrayal). Alas the Bourbon Queen did not take to Petr. She weakened and died, before she could even form a tangled ball of white root threads. Once, after three sleepless nights, Petr spent the fourth night in a tree. He called his action Sleeping in a Tree.

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Like he was a Fortuniana and his arm was a rootstock, the artist Petr Štembera, who was born in 1945, took a stab at it.

sHe sleePs WItH HIM everY nIGHt

For Mary, a dog is an essential thing. Mary sleeps with Shasta every night. Mary could hardly say that she does the same with Coda. Coda and Mary hardly ever sleep together. Although they share a bed, it is not often that they are in their bed at the same time. Walking up the stairs of their 1920s Swiss chalet–style house, Mary can barely make her way up. Shasta throws his weight about, panting with enthusiasm, dripping strings of spit on every step, constantly looking back at her to make sure that she is there. It is after midnight. Tiny Mary is wearing the satin slip that she always sleeps in, ivory with spaghetti straps, which is very flattering on her small round bottom. She is reading Mary McCarthy’s The Group. The lumbering Shasta is nearly asleep and nearly on top of Mary. Just before the book falls out of her hands, Mary, too, begins to fall into sleep. Before long, the two are asleep: the wife and her companion animal with the adorable wet muzzle. The two are careful to remain on Mary’s side of the bed. With her unstoppable optimism, Mary has left an empty place for Coda, in anticipation of another warm body that she rarely feels, that she does not really expect to arrive. After a long night of writing in his journal and developing photographs in a darkroom studio that is directly outside of their house, Coda will come to bed—when the morning is turning light. Being in the dark and developing pictures, makes Coda feel things anew, like a blindfolded lover. Mary, like the sun, will rise early, as she almost always does, before Coda makes it to bed. Coda’s half of the bed is empty more often than it is occupied. But occasionally, in the middle of the night, when Mary appears to be asleep and dreaming, Coda comes to her in their bed. Seeing the dog, he efficiently snaps his fingers, with a clear, sliding click sound. This quietly awakens Shasta, who turns his soft massive head to look 59

obediently at Coda, who is now using his right index finger to silently, if almost violently, gesture “down, down, down.” The dog, always dutiful, gently slides off the bed, doing his best to monitor his sack-full-offlour heft. Shasta’s departure from the bed is impressively quiet, even with the scraping sound of his dog-paw nails hitting the hardwood floor, save for those curious dewclaws, commonly known as “dog’s thumbs.” Tufts of Shasta’s brown-and-white fur are left on the bed, a few hairs are caught in the air on the way down, like blown dandelion seeds that smell of big dog. Once the fur has settled, Coda slips in between the sheets. He is naked. He always sleeps naked. Perhaps once every two months Coda comes to Mary in this way. Like this. Sex happens quickly, without penetration. Coda’s eyes shut tight. Mary’s wide open. It is 2:00 am. Coda is filling the absence on his side of the bed with his tall, angular body. He does not have the usual bulk of someone edging past middle age. He looks his age, but is youthful, boyish. He breathes through his mouth. He does not want to smell dog, although he does like the smell of Mary. Mary smells, curiously and impossibly, of Monterey cypress. They have never discussed this fact. He does not know the origin of this clean, delicious, deep lemony odor. Mary is turned away from him. He raises his leg over her small body. Sheathed in the ivory satin nightgown that she always wears, with the thin spaghetti straps that is very flattering on her small round bottom but also make her clavicle bones look so pretty. She knows that her clavicle is key to her natural loveliness, hence her taste for spaghetti straps and boat-neck cashmere sweaters. But she has never thought about how the word clavicle comes from the Latin clavicula, “little key.” And she cannot stop thinking about how Coda has never unlocked her.

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sHe-WolF MaDe oF roCK

the insides of the mother's body dressed in rock.

Box two, 1971–1974, Niccolò Petroni Archive 5 × 7 black paper envelope with string and button closure. on the outside of an envelope, written in white ink: “Like a Jackson Pollock painting.” inside is a 4 × 5 test print of rock covered in bird lime, taken at Point Lobos, California, by Coda gray.

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◌ ◌◌ Looking at a photograph of dark crevices on Point Lobos seaside boulders, splattered with bird lime, like a Jackson Pollock drip painting, I ask Coda: “What are the dark crevices?” “The insides of the mother’s body dressed in rock,” responds Coda, never taking his eyes off the photograph. It was a Monday morning in 1925, when he was seventeen, already at school, when the earthquake was felt in Coda’s family home in Santa Barbara, California. Not a physical earthquake, but one so deeply psychological that it felt real. It shook Coda and his world apart. There were no foreshocks. Coda’s mother had found his private journal in the top drawer of his bureau, where he had carelessly thrown it that morning before breakfast. This one time, Coda had forgotten to carefully hide it under his mattress. His mother thought she would put his socks away before she finished the breakfast dishes. The home trembled as soon as she turned the first page. The chimney crumbled. The telephone stopped working. That afternoon, as soon as Coda opened the door of his family’s California bungalow, a wall of water swept through, destroying everything in its path. The water pipes had broken. Coda’s mother grabbed him and dug her fingernails deep into the flesh of his shoulders, while the flash flood rushed them along, taking everything in its path—pillows, cups, chairs, framed family photographs, a crocheted afghan, saucepans, waffle iron, a broom, a bucket, a mop, a mother’s insults, screams, memories. “You never came out of me . . . I love you, but I hate you . . . You have ruined your life . . . You have ruined my life . . . You’re a pervert . . . You’re a monster . . . You’re sick . . . You’re selfish.” Nearby seaside bluffs fell into the ocean. Coda’s father remained silent, somehow managing to dash the

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breakage, the hurling objects, the verbal abuses, the fears, and the rushing waters. He went about shutting off gas and electricity. He had spent a lifetime preventing or putting out his wife’s catastrophic fires. Coda’s older sister escaped the deluge. She was already married, living with her own little family in nearby Riverside, California. After that, the incident was never mentioned again—just as there were no foreshocks, there were no aftershocks—and his mother began treating him with a politeness and kindness that was distant and cruel. The father, under the rule of the mother, chose the path of least resistance. In public, and especially in her presence, he also treated his Coda with coldness. “Fortunately,” Coda told me, “my father would send me letters, in secret. He really was still my loving father, but he had to tuck his tenderness away. He could not allow my mother to see that he was this soft. I was not born from my father’s body, but it is his that has always remained a home for me. I believe that my father also loved men. But the subject was never breached. Such ‘love’ would have been unmentionable for him.”

April 8, 1925 Dear Coda, Growing up means growing into combat. But ever since WWI, the glory of fighting any kind of battle, has diminished. Sometimes, I wish you were a girl, like your sister, but of course, I really don’t . . . I will always love you. Fathers and sons can have a hard time of it. Dad “It’s unnatural,” Coda told me, referring to his mother’s indifference to him after breaking into his journal. “Her body gave me a place to begin my existence. How could she ever forget that I was once a part of her physically? At birth, we are all amputated from our mothers, yet most mothers continue to feel their children, like phantom limbs for

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the rest of their lives. Not my mother. From that day on, she treated me as a stranger and remained dressed in gray rock. Locked out I will never again be rocked to the rhythm of her heart and lungs, because they have turned to dead stone.”

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BlUe tICKet

Box three, 1974–1977, Niccolò Petroni Archive 8 × 10 kraft paper envelope, with string and button closure. on the outside of the envelope, written in black felt tip pen: “Blue ticket.” inside is Coda’s military discharge.

◌ ◌ ◌ Coda was inducted into the US Army at the start of World War II. While in the military, he attempted to bathe his sins away by being baptized into the Roman Catholic Church on Easter Sunday by an army chaplain. But things caught up with him. Despite being awarded a Bronze Star in 1944, he received the “blue ticket” discharge in 1945 for his homosexuality. The blue ticket was also used to get rid of men of color. The blue ticket was presented as a neutral discharge. But neutral is never innocent. Coda was released in San Francisco. And he felt free for the first time. Like thousands of other “blue ticketers” in San Francisco, rather than returning home—he could never go back to Santa Barbara—he stayed on and found men who loved men . . . and photography. And, the wet rolling fog. And, the sea-sprayed cypress tree, which can live to be 150 years old—their branches weave the sky. And, the magnificent Sutro Baths, on the edge of the San Francisco coast—seven giant pools, seven temperatures, glassed in on the edge of Land’s End. The pools were so large that the lifeguards had to use canoes to monitor the thousands of San Franciscans who learned to swim there. And Zen.

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l e a r n I n G to s W I M

My mother told me that the sounds that silkworms make when their hundreds of soft—but strong—jaws are eating mulberry leaves together is the song of summer rain. —Vera Matsumoto in an interview, Craft Horizons, 1964

Box four, 1971–1974, Niccolò Petroni Archive 5 × 7 red paper envelope with string and button closure. on the outside is written in blue pen: “sutro Baths.” inside is an american red Cross swim Badge.

◌ ◌◌ During the end of the war, Coda, a great swimmer, taught swim lessons at the Sutro Baths. My mother, who grew up in San Francisco, had learned to swim there. She remembers getting a swim badge from the American Red Cross to sew on her suit. She loved to swim at the Sutro Baths. But she would never have seen Coda there. When Coda was teaching swim lessons at the Sutor Baths, my mother was a young woman interned at Manzanar, with a silkworm embedded in the palm of her right hand. She was learning to draw—working and glowing within her enclosure, eventually tearing free from her cocoon as a great winged moth. I learned all about that silkworm in the palm of her right hand—that night that Coda first came to our house for dinner . . . that night when my mother opened up . . . that dark night of transformation.

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F l o at I n G s t U D I o , F l o at I n G Z e n D o

The summer of 1967 changed so much. I was ten and had gone all serious. Children do that at age ten. I grew taller and weedy. During that summer of being ten, I spent a lot of time with Coda and Mary. But mostly Coda. Corinna would regularly drive us down to Meeks Bay in her white VW Bug, wearing her tortoise-shell Ray-Bans, carrying a fresh tube of the clear, amber-tinted sun-tan gel Bain de Soleil, which I can still smell to this day. Corinna’s father managed Lake Tahoe’s famous Sugar Bowl ski resort and she had all the coolness of someone who grew up in that environment. At Meeks Bay, we would “bump into” Shasta walking along the lake with Coda, just like the first time that I saw him and the wonderful dog that took my boy-breath away. Coda, as always, didn’t take much notice of Corinna, even in her bikini that summer, her skin luminous with orange gelée and the delicious scent of summer-jasmine-ylang-ylang-clove-coconut-vanilla Bain de Soleil. That summer, it did not take long for Coda to begin dropping by our house unannounced, driving over in his white 1965 CJ-6 Universal Jeep, convertible top down, with Shasta sitting up front in the black passenger seat, panting and smiling. Almost always with his Leica 35mm camera, often his Rolleiflex camera. Or if he was out on a shoot, his 4 × 5 Sinar view camera. Coda, of course, knew better than to bring all that Newfoundland fur into the house so perfectly designed and furnished by my architect father—so Shasta would wait patiently for his owner outside the front door. If Coda showed up at lunchtime, my mother would cook something up for all four of us. My mother would serve her delicious cichèti, small snacks inspired by Venice. On their honeymoon tour of Italy, my mother’s favorite place was Venice, a city built on water that looks like a film set. They rode the Number 1 vaporetto down the Grand Canal, taking in the sugar-andsalt whiteness of the Doge’s Palace, the church of Santa Maria della 67

Salute, the Rialto Bridge, places that my mother knew from pictures. As if apparitions, only real, these fantastic places drifted by her as they soared on the waterway. Even the buildings in Venice seem to be made of water and light and, in some sense, they are. There are no automobiles to be heard, just the sound of lapping, splashing, trickling, dowsing, sousing, drenching, spattering, and sploshing everywhere which both muffles and carries the sound. Even though the thalassocracy of Venice was medievally born—centuries and centuries before the invention of photography and its eventual Kodachrome fade—it is as if the city was born into the color photography of the 1950s and 1960s, always already faded, even when bright. The palette of American Pan-Am tourism—the crimsons, the yellowed aquamarines, the lapis lazuli, the browned blacks, the russety reds, the grayed blues, the emeralds, the saffrony whites, found today stuffed into boxes and the backs of drawers. In this city of excess, my mother discovered the simplicity of food made with few, but especially fresh and distinct ingredients, at a bàcari owned by a cousin of Renzo’s. Inside, Renzo’s cousin had to shimmy sideways to even get behind the counter and he, like my father, was slim. Prepared in advance were small snacks: crostini made with prosciutto and fig (my mother adds a mint leaf ); crostini with sardines, pine nuts, soaked raisins, and sweet onions cooked in white wine vinegar; crostini with walnut and rocket pesto; bruschette with broad beans and ricotta; bruschette with soft cheese, salami, and quartered figs. Made fresh were arancini (which translates as small oranges): leftover risotto, rolled into small spheres, with a cube of mozzarella in the middle and deep-fried. “Clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity, clankity-clank.” “Coda, you are just in time for lunch,” says my gracious mother. My mother is prepared, always prepared, and we lunch on crostini with sardines, pine nuts, soaked raisins and sweet onions cooked in white wine vinegar, as well as broad bean, mint, and ricotta bruschette. My mother uses San Francisco’s sour dough bread for both, in a stick for the crostini and a round loaf for the bruschette, which she buys in

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large quantities when she is in the city and keeps frozen in our freezer. I am an adventuresome eater. It makes my mother happy. “Coda, Renzo and I are treating ourselves to an afternoon spritzer, just like we had in Venice, remember Renzo?” asks my mother, ending her query with a sweet, closed-lipped, delicious smile and knowing eyes, which she casts flirtatiously toward my father. And then my father, the great storyteller, tells yet again, the tale of taking my mother to Venice for their honeymoon and bringing her to meet his Italian cousin. This time around, even I, the child, could sense, the story was not really for me. It was an admonition for Coda, in Venetian light, gilded in gold. “Your mother was wearing a red knit dress with a slim teal belt around her very slim waist. Black pumps. I had my arm around her when I greeted my cousin with so much joy and pride. He gave my wife, your mother, our Vera, a small plate of pinky-red garlic prawns with their tail and head still on and a pinch of salt. These lovely critters were prepared fresh out of the sea for my beautiful new wife. Vera was afraid to eat the creatures with their heads sticking up out of the dish, as if they were gazing up at the sky. As if their beady little blackbutton-candy eyes and wispy antennae were in search of the direction of the wind. As if they were in search of the golden archangel Gabriel weathervane atop St. Mark’s Campanile.” My father never spared any of these details, carefully cultivated over the years of repeating this story, exactly the same way, stone by stone. “You have to eat them with your hands. And your mother eventually ate all five of them with such grace, you would have thought that she had been eating garlic prawns, glistening in olive oil and a knob of butter, with her fingers all her life.” At this point, my father looks over at my mother: her skin—pale olive-white and translucent, slightly blue, like a glass of very cold skimmed milk—blushes at his gaze. “ ‘Vera, Vera, you need a spritz to accompany your prawns and focaccia,’ my cousin says to my new wife when the prawns are first delivered and immediately brings her not one, but two! One is made with Campari (which is very red) and a green olive; the other made with

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Aperol (which is very orange) and a slice of lemon. The image of your mother in her red dress, with the plate of pinky-red prawns, one red spritz, and the other orange, her beautiful lips (wearing her indispensable Channel red lipstick), making a slightly crooked smile with her beguiling teeth: well, it is unforgettable.” And then Renzo turns to Coda and asks: “Coda, did you know that the distinctive red color of Campari originally came from the addition of crushed cochineal beetles?” Coda replies with an upside-down version of his cowboy smile and a slow raise of his eyebrows. And with that, my father quickly produced a Campari Spritz with a green olive for the three adults and a Roy Rogers with a maraschino cherry for me. For dessert, my mother pulled out little glass tumblers of panna cotta with olallieberries. While she was savoring the creamy mixture stirred with grappa and the giant olallieberries—so particular to California, like loganberries—my mother too reminisced about Venice. “I adore a special type of Venetian risotto, which is more liquidy than any other variety from other Italian regions, and is affectionately called all’onda, meaning ‘with the waves,’ ” she said with her faraway eyes traveling back in time to another place. Adding, “But most importantly, Renzo’s cousin’s bàcari is called Nico’s, named after an old childhood friend. And also, San Nicolò, who is a patron of sailors and, of course, a secret gift giver. There is a beautiful church dedicated to San Nicolò in Venice, San Nicolò al Lido. Our Nico is named after Renzo’s cousin’s bàcari and the happiness of that day. A gift to us.”

◌ ◌◌ Venice is all reflection, like Narcissus without the boy. No wonder Thomas Mann ended his Death in Venice with a camera on the beach. But such things would not occur to me until many years later, when I would visit Venice and make the pilgrimage to Nico’s. My father’s cousin was long dead. I stayed for spritzes, one with Campari and one with Aperol. I ordered some crostini, which tasted dull and stale. I thought I saw my mother there at the bar in a red knit dress with a 70

slim teal belt around her very slim waist. Black pumps. When I looked to see what she was eating, she vanished.

◌ ◌ ◌ Once the dishes are cleared from the table, my father announces that he has to get back to work. Both my parents have separate work studios in the back of our house. They are simple, elegant, twin buildings, long and narrow. Their large, light-filled windows face into the courtyard that both workspaces look out to. Sometimes they look and wave at each other from their respective windows, across the courtyard. More sun comes into each of their studios through the diligent placement of skylights. The studios were the first structures of the Lantern to be built and were in full operation as construction on the house began. My mother also announces that she has to get back to work. She has a new exhibition that she is getting ready for. “Okay, that’s fine. Do you mind if I take some photographs of Nico? That is, if it is agreeable to Nico,” says Coda, with that unbeatable smile of his. It is decided that my mother’s studio is a good place to start. Plenty of light and my mother knows that I will feel best if she is there working while Coda takes his first photographs of me. Coda goes out to the Jeep to get his tripod and 4 × 5 view camera, returning through the side gate with Shasta and his stainless-steel water bowl. Shasta will wait in the sun of the Sierras, in the courtyard of our house, stretched out so listlessly as to defy his very bones. One paw, seemingly lion-size, with its little black cushions and friendly nails, opens up to me, as he gazes into my eyes with his sleepy halfclosed, longing, sea-lion eyes. I kneel next to him in the sun and pet his adorable muzzle. I give him a long pet from his neck across the side of his body, feeling his ribs, confirming his bones in this state of lethargy and smile. It is really hot in the sun. I throw off my T-shirt. I am already barefoot. We enter my mother’s orderly studio; she is already busy with her hands softening the wax. Coda, undoubtedly with Edward Weston’s photographs glowing in the darkroom of his mind, is immediately taken with a very large white conch shell on my mother’s workbench. 71

From its aperture, the shell’s Tiepolo pink interior is scrolled-back, revealing its shiny, pigmented interior: like the surprising lining of a fine kimono. But the insides of this Cassis cornuta, presumably empty and scrubbed clean, remain mostly hidden as unreachable darkness. (The sea-snail has been expelled from its shell.) The door, the mouth, which opens unto the black hole of this giant conch, is fortified on each side with smooth, polished indentations—like teeth, like buttons for opening and closing. Coda sets up a shot of my mother’s Cassis cornuta with his big view camera on the tripod. He asks me to join him under the photographer’s black cloth. In the darkness of our tent, I see the shell tightly framed, magically appearing upside down and back to front on the ground glass. A phantasm of itself. He does not take the picture. He asks me to lie flat on my back on a bench in my mother’s studio. Later, Coda would show me the developed print. My navel is dramatically highlighted by the light streaming in from the skylight in my mother’s studio. This makes me feel uneasy, inexplicably guilty. Next, Coda takes me outside and asks me to cross my hands like the exposed branches of a cypress tree growing on the rock-line coast of Point Lobos. The backs of my hands face each other like the wings of a bird, or Martha Graham in “Appalachian Spring.” I will repeat this pose with him often through the years. For another shot, he boosts me up to sit atop a giant granite boulder in our garden. “Hug your arms around your folded legs. Grasp your ankles. Bury your head, as if you are hiding from the world.” Much more exciting than being photographed was being allowed to go into Coda’s darkroom and watch him develop prints. While under the red albino eyes of the safety light of the darkroom, from the photographic bath, images would emerge: a picture of the Sierra mountains, or a tall family of redwoods or a cumulus cloud or me, like the lake on a calm day reflecting the world around her and above. Coda has two darkrooms. The one in his landlocked studio directly outside of the house that he shares with Mary. The other on 72

. . . sound of one hand clapping . . .

his studio boat, the “Floating Zendo,” which he keeps on the lake. The floating studio is spectacularly modern with a fully equipped modern darkroom, along with beautiful alcoves for sitting, reading, sleeping, and eating. Clean. Minimal. Zen. On a calm day, his studio boat gave forth photographic prints with the Zen koan of the “sound of one hand clapping.” Coda claimed that the prints developed on the Floating Zendo were purer, would never fade, because they develop upon the waters of Lake Tahoe. In the late afternoon of this day, we all retire at the beach: Renzo, Vera, Coda, Mary, and me. I am floating on an inflatable raft. Renzo sets out into the cold lake toward me. Slow step by slow step. In my father’s fist is my big blue marble: what children call a boulder, a masher, a popper, a shooter, a taw, a bumbo, a crock, a bumboozer, a bowler, a tonk, a tronk, a godfather, a tom bowler, a giant, a biggie. We always bring the big blue marble to the beach for our little game, for which I am too big now, but we both still enjoy. I am already feeling nostalgic for the childhood that I am losing. My father reaches the raft. He is no more than six inches from me. My head is hanging face down over the edge of a raft, which whiffs of summer rubber. I lift a slow eyebrow in acknowledgment of my father. “What are you doing?” asks Renzo, who is waist-deep in the lake, whose skin is covered with goose pimples, whose tan line peeks through below his blue swim trunks, whose eyes are squinting in the bright sun that reflects off the lake. “Nothing,” I reply, an almost motionless turtle soaking up the sun. “Want to play bumboozer?” asks my father. “Okay!” I agree. I love to play with my father. My father drops my big blue marble into the water, right under my nose. “Kerplunk.” My father and I look down to see the marble lying in the granitecolored sand below, magnified as even larger by the water of the clear lake. This blue eye stares back at us. Diving under the lake water, the coldness takes my breath away. I hear the blue. Eyes wide open, I grab the marble and pop out of the water, like a jumping fish, holding his prize. 74

Renzo grabs the marble from me and throws the marble even further. My father and I take turns throwing and diving, as the raft bobs in the little waves of the lake onto shore: its ripples hiding how days must die. Until the marble is lost. I do not care, at least I think I do not care. The lake went pale. I look up at the beach and I see my mother sitting on a big blueand-white-striped bedspread under her huge oiled-paper, meringuecolored umbrella: its parchment texture like one of my mother’s lanterns; its twirling pleats like those of a girl’s skirt, its handle bamboo. Her red lipstick brings out the paleness of her skin. Next to her Mary and Coda are slick with suntan oil, as brown as can be, on their white chenille bedspread. My mother smiles her crooked smile back at me, and I feel at the center of the world. My father will give almost any game a “go” when it comes to me. When I am with him, he becomes open, freewheeling, without constraints of time. We race down the sandy beach of Meeks Bay. He wins. Shasta beats me too. The lake is for breathtakingly cold baths. The lake is a place to forget. The lake is our place, all of us: Renzo, Coda, Vera, and me—but maybe not Mary. She wishes she lived in San Francisco, next to the Pacific Ocean. Mary is of the Sea. When my father and I return to the others, we unroll our thick bathing towels and place them side by side in the sun next to Renzo and Mary. We are so cold from the lake water that we are visibly shaking. My teeth are chattering. Coda sits up. “Hey Vera and Renzo, would you mind if I took Nico out tomorrow on Floating Zendo?” “Please?!” I eagerly plead to my parents; I had never been on his studio boat. Coda flashes his smile at me. I bask in it. No fissure. Just a feeling of happy anticipation. “Mary and I thought that we would take the boat out to the old tea house on Fannette Island in Emerald Bay. We’ll bring a picnic.” 75

Fannette Isl anD

There I was, standing waist-deep in the coldness of the lake, its shallow waters a clear Listerine light blue, and then, as it goes deeper, blue-greens and ultramarine blues. I am standing in Lake Tahoe’s Emerald Bay. The sun is very bright, its reflection is jumping off the lake and into my eyes. I squint my eyes. I am looking toward the shore of Fannette Island and Coda’s camera. Thousands of years ago, when Emerald Bay was gouged by glaciers, a resistant rib of granite, which itself had been overridden by glacial ice some one million years ago, refused to budge. That stubborn rock is Fannette Island, Lake Tahoe’s only island. One hundred and fifty years ago, an old, corked champagne bottle was discovered in a crevice on the island. Inside the cloudy green glass bottle was a note: “This island is like a lady in the center of a brilliant circle of admirers who, attracted by her beauty, must still remember that she has a stony heart. I thereby christen the island Coquette.” But somewhere, somehow back in time, people began to say Fannette for Coquette. Before we reach Fannette, the Floating Zendo floats through the Sunken Forest, where gigantic trees have fallen deep into the lake: their dead white trunks and branches poke up out of the glassy emerald green-and-blue water. Like friends, they wave their immobile arms at me. Like ghosts, they seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life. You can see all the way to the bottom of the lake. Huge granite rocks sleep perfectly still. Like prehistoric dinosaur eggs, which will not awaken for another million years, if ever. Close to the rocky shore of Fannette, we stop and anchor the Floating Zendo. Coda rows the Zendo’s dinghy the short distance to the island, with tiny Mary, camera, tripod, and picnic on board. I insist upon swimming alongside the Wind Bell, Coda’s name for the dinghy. It wasn’t even as far as swimming to the big raft, permanently anchored to the bottom of the lake, at Meeks Bay. (When swimmers 76

reach the great raft, they bask on their backs, blissfully offering up each drop of glistening icy lake water on their goose-pimpled skin to the thirst of the summer sun. Only to freeze themselves again on the swim back to the beach: the end of the journey, where children reward themselves with a Nestlé’s Crunch bar and a bright Orange Crush soda and adults with Beer Nuts and a Michelob.) Before jumping off the Floating Zendo and into the lake, I look across to the tea house, atop the small, but steep, rocky peak of the island. Constructed out of California granite, found on Fannette and built stone by stone, the tea house looks like a miniature Viking castle. It was built by a woman named Lora Knight, who owned Vikingsholm, the mansion across the water, on the mainland of Emerald Bay. In the summer, Mrs. Knight enjoyed rowing her guests across the sheet of blue sapphire to the stone-hearted island for tea in a house made of rock, like she was Peggy Guggenheim in her gondola going across the Grand Canal wearing an aqua-blue silk Fortuny gown with pleats like little waves. Only Mrs. Knight was on Lake Tahoe, not the Grand Canal. I jump, and the lake receives me cold and smooth, opening up to every inch of me: her waters slipping around my body as a blue glacial membrane. The lake swallows me. Engulfs me. My heartbeat booms in my ears. The coolness achingly spreads throughout my body, like drinking a glass of very cold skimmed milk. Without reasoning, without thought, the water was always the same. We had the promised picnic on the granite island inside the stone teahouse, which looks not only like a miniature Viking castle but also like those beautiful rock-and-wood buildings of Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Mount Rainer which Renzo loves: “National Park Service rustic.” Parkitecture. We are the only people on Fannette. We eat peanut butter sandwiches with strawberry jam on soft white bread. Chocolate chip cookies. Oranges. We drink hot jasmine tea, with loads of sugar, poured from Mary’s plaid thermos into red plastic cups with funny square handles. Coda takes pictures from the inside of the teahouse—focusing his lens on a gigantic granite boulder perfectly within view through 77

the redwood frame of the unglazed window. Not quite satisfied with the shot, he asks me to step outside of the teahouse and to climb atop the boulder. This time Coda does not have to ask me to hug my arms around my folded legs, to grasp my ankles and bury my head, as if I am hiding from the world—as he did the day before when I posed for him on top of the big rock in our garden at home. I instinctively know to repeat the pose. I am already his model. When we returned home from Fannette, dusk had become nightfall. In the wake of the boat, the lights of the boat danced without partners. Beyond us, the lake was smooth and black. There was a crescent moon that night. The moon was heeding me, not with the despair of the trees of the Sunken Forest but with faith. She knew what I wanted. To speak to her. To touch her. To confess to her. She was arced for me like an ear in the night sky sprayed with stars, like the moon in William Blake’s The Gates of Paradise. And like Blake’s boy, my desire props up a long skinny ladder to reach her. I was not, yet, afraid of the climb. Below Blake’s image of the boy and the moon and the ladder and the stars, he writes: “I want! I want!” I have not, yet, noticed the embraced lovers who gaze at the boy, who already know that with each step on the ladder’s rungs the moon grows further away and ceases to listen. The darkness. The sound of fish jumping.

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F l o at I n G Z e n D o s a n D M e n to r G a r t e n s

The Mentorgarten welcomes every thinker who is sincere and earnest. . . . As a free citizen of the world, you should be able to come or go, whenever or wherever you please; for the world is a beautiful garden and no one should hinder you. —Nyoegen Senzaki, “Opening Day Address,” San Francisco, 1928

“A ‘zendo’ is a physical hall or place for Buddhist meditation. What better name for my darkroom boat than ‘Floating Zendo?,’ ” Coda asks me with a flash of his self-assured grin. Coda continues, piercing me with his greenest eyes, his smile lines relaxed: “The phrase ‘floating zendo’ belongs to the Japaneseborn Buddhist monk Nyogen Senzaki, known for bringing Buddhism to California. His ‘floating zendo,’ made of air—spiritual, not physical—weighed nothing, drifted with him everywhere. His buoyant Buddhism grew, in part, from his readings of Friedrich Froebel, a kind German philosopher who invented the ‘kindergarten’—like the one you went to when you were five.” “Nico, did you know that the word kindergarten means children’s garden in German? Kinder, children, + Garten, garden.” I nodded a thoughtful “no” and continued to dutifully listen to Coda. “Froebel imagined a school that grew a children’s garden and whose spiritual foundation was based on a garden of children. In 1901, long long ago, before you were born Nico, before even I was born, while still in Japan, Senzaki asked his Zen master: ‘May I leave the monastery to open a kindergarten?’ The request was granted. Senzaki called his kindergarten a ‘mentorgarten.’ A mentor is an advisor. Senzaki imagined his school as an advising garden. Although still a monk, Senzaki did not advise his little follower-flowers in religious instruc79

tion. Rather he helped them learn about nature while they were playing. He enabled the children to experience nature through beautiful, simple phrases, scattered like seeds: ‘See the sunrise and warm your heart.’ Or: ‘Swallow the beauty of the stars and enlighten yourself.’ And this one, Nico, is my favorite: ‘Wait like a mushroom, in order to appear out of nowhere and do what you must do.’ ” These approaches to the sunrise, the stars, a mushroom were echoed in the mentorgarten that Coda was making for the two of us to play in. “Nico, as you know from your father’s gardens, an earthworm is a tiny plough that breaks up the soil, so that air and water can get to the seeds and nourish the roots of the plants. Senzaki envisioned himself as an earthworm in the dark underworld, a potential garden where many dormant seeds of happiness lie.” I worked hard at not revealing how disturbing this story was to me. I could not possibly think of the dark dirty underground as holding happiness. And I had a real aversion to earthworms. For my father had told me that earthworms have no eyes, instead they have cells that can sense light and dark. Eyeless, the earthworm repulsed me. But I keep all this to myself. “And now, Nico, let me tell you how our humble earthworm came to America,” Coda continues with a look of self-satisfaction. “It was in 1905 that Senzaki floated from Japan to the United States, which he always called a ‘strange land.’ Landing in Seattle, Senzaki soon made his way down the coast and planted a mentorgarten for all ages in San Francisco. Here the members of the community could find language lessons, literary studies, philosophy, psychology, Buddhism—in sum, any garden of thought. He gave his Buddhist practice and his mentorgarten all the time he could, living very humbly—meagerly supporting himself with odd jobs, including being a hotel clerk and an elevator assistant. Senzaki spent his free time reading in the public library. As a lifelong student, he referred to himself, not just as an earthworm but also as ‘a fat and awkward book-worm.’ I have heard that he meditated in Golden Gate Park, down near Elk Glen Lake, under blossom-

80

ing cherry and plum trees. He looked so peaceful, no one would come near him, in fear of disturbing the purity of his actions.” Knowing full well the story of my mother at Manzanar, I asked Coda: “What happened to the earthworm during World War II? He was Japanese too.” “Senzaki was interned at Heart Mountain, in the desert of Wyoming. But no one could take his floating zendo away from him. It took form in the corner of the very small cramped cabin—which he shared with a man and his wife and their small child. There in his Heart Mountain floating zendo, ten or twelve other interned Japanese would join him for meditation and meetings—while he quietly stirred their soil.” Coda spoke to me, never down to me. To the panicked eyes of the outsider, perhaps even to my parents, he appeared as an invader of childhood. To this day, I wonder, should my mother and my father have nipped it in the bud? From that day of the picnic at Fannette Island, I regularly partook of Coda’s floating zendo, whether or not we were actually on the Floating Zendo. I was the cherished rose of Coda’s mentorgarten. I was his Nuage, his Silverton, his Amnesia, his Nautica, his Lady Moon, his Purple Haze, his Ocean Song, his Cool Water, his Moody Blues, his Deep Purple, his Rock Fire, his Queen of the Night, his Blueberry, his Cool Paris. He tossed the soil at my roots.

81

I learneD aBoUt snoWFlaKes

With happiness, I have polished off a grilled-cheese sandwich, potato chips, salad with Thousand Island Dressing, and a white cake with cherry bits made from a Betty Crocker mix frosted with Betty Crocker “Cherry Buttercream, Ready to Spread Frosting” in a can. Mary made it just for me. (My parents are out with one of Renzo’s architect friends.) “Every snowflake is different,” Coda explains during our post-dinner summer evening slide show. We are in the dark, looking at pictures of snowflakes taken by Wilson A. Bentley (1865–1931), best known as “The Snowflake Man.” They shine on the free-standing screen as big as me. The Kodak carousel projector has made the room warm and cozy. It can be cold down by the lake, even in summer. The steady drone of the fan and the satisfying clicks when a new slide drops into the carousel enchants me. I am interested. Coda, so pleased to be my teacher, with me as his entranced student, continues: “Bentley used a microscope and a camera to develop his original process for capturing and enlarging an image of an individual snowflake. Using his ‘photomicrography,’ Bentley took hundreds of pictures of snowflakes—wondrously revealing that each snowflake is not only different, but also that all snowflakes are the same, in that each and every one is based on the hexagon. John Muir called snowflakes ‘flowers in the air.’ Bentley called them ‘ice flowers.’ ” As a child, I remember inspecting the marvel of individual snowflakes on my mittened fingers. As soon as I could apprehend their astonishing tininess, they melted. My childhood memory of trying to hold snowflakes is like the photograph trying to hold an image. For a photograph is a paradox in time. In its hands, time is gone as soon as it is apprehended. The photographs preserve like ice. And in it we experience the pleasure and pains of ice. “Ice-pleasure,” Coda said when showing me one of his photographs of ice crystals in assorted stages of frozen on a glass window. Around the melting center, like a lake, are circles of time, different 82

aspects of water, snow, ice. Some crystals appear as sparkling white flowers. My hand reaches forward for the glass. I have a desire to hold the pretty ice flowers, to catch them like snowflakes on my tongue. In the spring, the snow melts into the lake, and around her edges, powdery echo azure butterflies softly float from the sky like blue snowflakes.

83

I l e a r n e D a B o U t t H e B I r D s o F l a K e ta H o e

“Coda, are those sea-gulls?” “They are. Sea-gulls fly back and forth from Lake Tahoe to the Pacific, but they never raise their young at the lake.” “Look Nico. See that serene blue heron? It is etching itself like a Japanese print by Suzuki Harunobu against the blue sky,” Coda says, with a self-satisfied grin, his smile lines stretching from his eyes down to his cheeks. “Nico, listen to the white-crowned sparrow,” says Coda. “Can you hear its sweet melancholic song singing ‘Oh dear me?’ ” We are standing in a meadow, where Coda has been shooting pictures of me leaning against a tree, with a focus on my bare feet. And I do hear it, “Oh dear me . . . Oh dear me . . . Oh dear me,” in falling cadence. Later, looking at the photograph as an adult, I discover, something anew from Coda: feet can be as beautiful and expressive as hands. “Nico, Nico, come look,” whispers Coda, while standing next to barefoot Mary, who is wearing a deep purple-pink-red full skirt with so many pleats and a waist so tight it is as if she is wearing a fuchsiaflower for a skirt. Pointing high to the eaves outside of his landlocked darkroom near the house, Coda gives me a boost: his strong warm arms hold the lower half of my body close to his upper half, his head is tight against my hips—I hear his heavy breathing. I peek into the cupshaped nest made of mud beads, lined with grasses, feathers, and algae. And inside, I see an adult barn swallow feeding a brood of madly bobbing chicks with greedy beaks (yellow inside and out), opened preposterously wide atop their skinny necks. They are frantically begging for the compressed pellets made of the bugs that their parents caught while flying in the air. Once I am let down, Mary looks at me eye to eye (we are nearly the same height) and slowly tells me in a teacherly voice: “Barn swallows breed for life. Although sometimes they breed with others and make extra families. Ornithologists say that barn swallows are genetically 84

polygamous, even though they are socially monogamous,” as if I could understand. Sitting on a picnic bench in the afternoon sun of Meeks Bay, Coda and I spot hummingbirds. “Coda, doesn’t it look as if they have wheels for wings?” I ask. When a pair turn absolutely ecstatic for a nearby Coca-Cola bottle cap—wheeling in and out, humming their dizzy music with their feathered spokes—Coda explains that they believe it is a red, honey-laden flower.

85

sUMMer snoW CaKe

Mary, Coda, Renzo, Vera and I are all eating a late-night dinner together. We are ready to polish off one of my mother’s tureens of brodetto abruzzese—a fish soup made of squid, mussels in their partially opened black shells, gray mullet, hake, summer tomatoes, wine, fish stock, garlic, and chili. It came to the table in an earthen pot, glazed with a family of quails, made by the Mexican folk artist Amado Galván. After taking a muscle shell in his right hand and pulling the meat out with a fork, which he promptly pops into his mouth, Coda tells us about how quails make families, while the rest of us slurp our delicious fish stew: “Quails are known to cluster together, into multifamily ‘communal broods’ which include at least two females, multiple males, and many offspring. Fathers associated with quail families are not always their biological father.” And with that, Coda sops the remaining juice in his mussel shell with a slice of toasted garlic-rubbed bread. Renzo responds, with a touch of intellectual competitiveness: “Sounds like a version of brood parasitism. As I am sure you know, bird parasites, like cuckoos and cowbirds, lay their eggs in nests established by other birds, who unknowingly end up raising the ‘foreign’ hatchlings as their own.” To which my mother adds: “It seems as if Nature enjoys contradicting natural morality with cuckoos, cowbirds, and quails.” To which Mary adds: “The blue jay is absolutely reprehensible when it comes to the young. Not only is the blue jay unlovable for its variable irritating song—screeching, clucking, squeaking, whistling—it is also a terror to smaller birds. They are cannibals! Blue jays are known to take and eat eggs and nestlings of other birds.” Then Mary pauses. Looking down at the empty shells from her bowl of brodetto abruzzese, she tells us how Shasta is so gentle and full of beans with everyone he meets. He seems to have been born to mother and amuse. “I have become a child with him. We play ridiculous games together, racing through the trees, making the new 86

snow fly, running up the stairs, chasing balls. Shasta loves to catch snowballs in his mouth. Shasta’s proper place is with glorious, noisy children. If only we had some, or even just one. One like Nico.” Then she looks over and smiles, looking at me right in the eyes, but ever so gently. “Nico, let’s get ready for dessert,” my mother asserts, interrupting the strange tension we all feel. I help my mother by clearing the bowls of empty shells and wiping off the table. I bring out clean forks and our yellow Fiesta ware dessert plates, the color of fresh egg yolks. These are the plates we always use for my mother’s torta di riso. The cake is served cold and is sweet with the taste of rice milk, almonds, pine nuts, lemon, vanilla, cinnamon, candied orange peel, and candied citron peel. Before serving, the chilled cake is sprinkled with powdered sugar. Each time my mother dusts her torta di riso with powdered sugar, she smiles and says “usuyuki,” meaning a light layer of snow in Japanese. We often call it our “summer snow cake.” This was the second and the last time that Mary would come to our table. This time she did not ring the bell when she left.

87

love or aFFeCtIon

As I am helping my mother and father with the dishes, my mother remarks, “Oh if we could only have koi, like the people of Harie,” as she often says while cleaning up after a meal. In the village of Japan’s Harie, people clean their dirty dishes by way of free-swimming koi in a large basin called a hataike. The fish can go anywhere they please, since each home’s hataike is connected to a canal or stream running outside. Everything that goes into the hataike—bits of rice, seaweed, tofu, tempura, fish, chicken, beef, watermelon rind—is eaten by the koi. It takes about three hours for them to completely clean a pot that was used to cook curry. The koi not only do the dishes, they also provide the entertainment—flashing their shimmering scales, intriguing colors, and Rorschach-like patterns: silver-white with ink-black; white cream with mandarin-orange spots; solid maple-tree red; snow-white with chrysanthemum-yellow spots; even, solid deep-blue-black lake. Pleasingly, the word koi is a homophone for another word in Japanese that means “love” or “affection.”

88

MarY’s DreaM

Two nights before Mary and Coda arrive at our house for the Italian dinner, Mary had a horrible dream. “I am not going out to the car to look for our baby. Please do not make me go. It’s dark and it is snowing very hard.” “But I left the baby in the car and I am afraid to look. I am afraid that the baby is frozen and dead. Please go. Cody, throw on your boots and go as fast as you can.” “We don’t have a baby Mary. I have told you a hundred times.” “Cody, how can you say that? How can you not remember?” And with that Mary runs out into snow, without boots, in her slippers, sinking with every step. Shasta is barking and running behind her, with great naïve dog glee. Mary runs down the steep snow-covered driveway and onto the street: she sees there is no car. “Of course!” she reasons. The car is under the covered carport. Mary trudges back up the snow-covered driveway, but the car is not under the covered carport. Mary cannot find the car with her baby freezing inside. She runs back into the house. She is hysterical. Shasta is right behind her, barking and shaking wet snow everywhere. The house fills with the smell of wet dog. “Cody, where, where is the car?!” “Mary, it is at the repair shop. We needed a new alternator. You know that,” says Coda without even looking up from his book. “You have not been listening.” In her head, all Mary can see is a baby, swaddled in a soft aquamarine and cream blanket, his lips turned cyan from the cold. “Well where is my baby?” shrieks Mary. “We don’t have a baby, Mary,” Coda replies with calm irritation, as if Mary were a child.

89

eaCH otHer’s PoCKets

That summer of 1967, we began to live in each other’s pockets. And, somehow, I soon began fiddling with Coda’s big 4 × 5 camera. I was happy living in his pocket. When I confessed to Coda my doubts that I could make a good photograph, he asked me: “Have you ever been in love?” “Yes,” I said. For I was in love. “Then,” he said, “you can make a good photograph.”

90

BlaCK ClotH

Using a photographer’s black cloth over my head, I saw my mother’s upside down and reversed image on the ground glass of Coda’s view camera. I came in close to her lips and teeth. I took the picture. I heard the camera’s mouth shutter with its smooth metallic teeth, the metallic shifting of the plates . . . I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way. We developed the negative on Floating Zendo, with the pure water of Lake Tahoe. Out on the lake, under the red albino eyes of the safety light, I could feel Coda’s hot breath . . . could smell Coda’s adult odors (cigarettes, coffee, sweat, garlic) . . . I could feel his muscular too-close presence . . . as we waited for the image to appear . . . like a night-blooming cereus . . . which blooms only once . . . only at night . . . only once a year. It was too late to nip the flower in the bud. Coda had fully invaded my childhood. Certainly the eyes of my mother and father would be panicked, if they could see in the dark? My heart was beating with excitement as I pushed the photographic paper with tongs in the developer tray. And then . . . I saw my mother’s beautiful face appear. Like the mirroring lake on a calm day reflecting the world around her and above. My first success. They say mirrors are just water specified. The next day, I taped the negative of my first photographic success onto my upper arm, as I was leaving the house for the sandy beach of Meeks Bay. In the 4 × 5 negative, my mother’s sensually fallen-open mouth appeared like an X-ray: the darks were light, and the lights were dark. Her mouth was a pout of light, strangely delicious. Her teeth were like black-and-gray polished stones, with little gaps of bright light between. Her slightly chipped front tooth was an invitation to come inside. Brightness radiated out of her small dragon nostrils and her neck of summer lightning. As if my mother had swallowed a lantern of light. The light of the sun, brightened by the white sand of the beach, printed my mother’s image onto my skin. Seeing her on my arm like 91

that astonished me. Like that time when, out of the blue, my mother turned a cartwheel on the edge of Meeks Bay in her floral maillot, with its big magenta and tangerine flowers printed all over. and like a tree that might find loose birds in its leafless hair, I am open to the surprises of the season Later that summer, my father took me to San Francisco to buy my first camera: a Rollei Magic. Coda came along. We visited the famous camera obscura, perched on a cliff, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, next to the Sutro Baths, below the Cliff House restaurant. Housed in a brightly painted box-house made to look like a huge camera: pale yellow, pale blue and creamy white, it sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Like a gigantic toy. Inside the camera obscura, it is nearly pitch-black and small: fitting only about six people at a time. Visitors must crowd around the magical parabolic round table, which receives the projected moving image of the outside world. Like a message from another world. Like watching a silent movie on an egg, a moon, inside a white womb. The magic of the camera works through mirrors and a kind of periscope that rotates on the roof, moving round and round. Like the hands of a clock. It takes six minutes to complete the 360-degree view around the building. For a thrill, as an experienced visitor to the giant camera, Coda went out to the cliffs while Renzo and I stayed inside, standing watch for him. Waiting, I witnessed the seals waving their fins on seal rock. I could not hear the barks. And the ocean waves. I could not hear the crashing. The wave of the blades of an old-fashioned windmill in Golden Gate Park. I could not hear their clacking. And then the lens caught Coda waving to me. Hello? Goodbye? I could hear my own heart beating. I waved back at the silent film of Coda in real time, forgetting that Coda could not see me. And suddenly I felt sad. My heart dropped down. We drove through Haight-Ashbury during that Summer of Love in 1967 and felt the one hundred thousand flower children that had descended upon the small district of the city. If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your hair. Back then, when I heard people 92

i waved back at the silent film of Coda in real time, forgetting that Coda could not see me.

speak of Haight-Ashbury, I heard the “hate” of the civil rights movement and the anti-war protests. I was confused by the “hate” of the Summer of Love and by the girls who wore T-shirts that said: “GIRLS SAY YES to boys who say NO.”

94

BroWn KIMono

Returning from San Francisco, I walked straight into the Lantern, full of pride, with my shiny new Rollei Magic hanging across my chest, over my right shoulder, by its thick brown leather strap fitted with alligator clips. During that summer of my tenth year, I went everywhere with my Rollei Magic—so much so that my mother began to worry that camera’s constant weight was causing bodily harm. If you were to look carefully at a photograph of me with my Rollei Magic, standing in Muir Woods, taken by Coda during the summer of 1967, you would see that my right shoulder is slightly sloped from constantly hauling my camera everywhere. But the picture is nowhere to be found—save for the camera obscura of my mind. When my Rollei was not strapped across my chest, it was carefully wrapped in the brown kimono that my mother gave me when I was nine. My mother had brought it back as a gift from a trip that she took to Japan, shortly before Christmas. The only time she ever went to the country where her mother and father were born. She was in a small traveling exhibition entitled America’s Japan, which was first shown in New York, at moma, and then went on to be exhibited in Tokyo at the National Museum of Modern Art. She was the only woman. When she returned, she brought me back the boy’s brown kimono with lanterns printed on it. It is the only kimono that I have ever worn. In it are all the memories of being not yet ten. Wrinkles . . . in the technical jargon of sewing are called “memory.” In the sleeves of that kimono, in the smell of the armpits, in the feel of the silk lives the little Nico that I once was. We all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child.

95

soMetHInG BroKe

This is not the body an audience sees, but the body a lover knows. —Charis Wilson, “Remembrance,” 1977

I am a ten-year-old boy. I am in the house. My parents are each working in their studios. I am alone, as I often am as an “only.” I am looking at a book of photographs by Edward Weston. Weston writes compellingly about seeing the marvelous in the everyday through the lens of his camera. But I am not reading his words today; I am in awe of his astonishing photographs. The flesh of women, peppers, toadstools, an artichoke halved, a pumpkin, a bunch of Japanese radishes and the nacreous apertures of sea-shells—all await the probe of my finger. I pause on a chambered nautilus shell, scrubbed of its cephalopod, prepared for some unknown catechism. The large pearlized orifice, which the animal once inhabited, opens clean as a porcelain basin, to a missing tongue for unspeaking. The silvery-white interior is a soaped mirror of light . . . a calla lily robbed of its yellow-orange spadix . . . an elephant’s trunk . . . an image of a departure, no longer imminent, but eternally present. Weston’s seashell prompted his lover, the Italianborn Tina Modotti, to see lilies and embryos. I notice a nude of a young boy. It is Weston’s son Neil. His head, arms, and legs (from the knee down) are cropped by the lens of the camera. The focus is on his genitals (strangely, disturbingly vegetal). He is white like a Japanese radish . . . like morbidity . . . a queasiness . . . a thumping heart . . . weak at the knees. The photograph gives me that same sickly feeling as guilt. I fixate on a nude woman. All we see is her back, rounded like a mushroom cap, atop her spherical, cleaved bottom. She’s a pear. She’s an egg. She’s the cloven hoof of a horse, of a satyr, of Pan. When Pan would unexpectedly awake from an afternoon nap, he would let out a shout, causing the flocks to stampede. The word panic comes from Pan 96

. . . all await the probe of my finger . . .

. . . opens clean as a porcelain basin, to a missing tongue for unspeaking . . .

. . . pear . . . egg . . . cloven hoof of a horse . . .

◌ ◌◌ Years later I will discover that the cloven buttocks belong to the author and anthropologist Anita Brenner, an acquaintance of my mother’s whom she met briefly in Mexico, before going to Black Mountain College. Anita wrote Idols Behind Altars, an important book on Mexican craft and folk art. Idols opens with an Edward Weston photograph of Amado Galván’s clay-encrusted hand, caught spanking a spherical pot out of slimy clay. Its unfinished form, like a breast with an extended nipple—as if just pulled out of the infant’s mouth—is reminiscent of my mother’s prized sculpture: her Untitled, No. 5. My mother’s copy of Idols Behind Altars is inscribed by Anita: “For Vera, with love and in memory of that day when you found the perfect earthen pot glazed with a family of white quail by Amado Galván.” This is the tureen, I will come to understand, that we always use for our brodetto abruzeese. I am fixated on the nudes of Charis Wilson. Hers is the body that makes Weston’s pictures so desired. Like a tiger-cowry shell, she is freckled. But where her swimsuit has covered her breasts, they are very white. Spotless. Like the apertural side of a tiger-cowry shell. Folded, sun-kissed arms support her two young white eggplant-breasts and their dark nipples. “Charis,” rhymes with Paris, with a hard “k,” meaning “Grace in Greek.” She grew up in Caramel, California, and as a teenager liked to sunbathe on the nearby beach, often without a swimsuit. (She’s a one, two, buckle-my-shoe girl who prefers nothing at all.) When Charis was twelve, she started a self-control club in grade school, where union initiates were subjected to ice baths. When I looked at these photographs, something broke. Like ice on the surface of the lake.

100

tHe voICe oF tHe laKe

How can I describe the voice of the lake? In winter, it holds its breath and moans at night with the feel of cold. But when the bright cold Sierra sun comes out, its icy shores crack apart. And the miniscule waves nudge the frozen pieces of water, which are like broken pieces of crystal glass. I hear the sound of little bells played austerely by John Cage or perhaps just gin over ice.

101

Moon WrItInG

When I was ten, I learned about a writing system of embossed type created for the blind called Moon Writing. It was developed by an Englishman named William Moon, who had lost his sight as an adult. Rather than the dots of braille, as developed by a Frenchman named Louis Braille, Moon type is a simplified Latin script of raised curves, angles, and lines. The characters are nice and large. Most of the letters look like the characters I know. I like the idea of feeling words . . . touching words. Eugene Cernan was the last man on the moon. The day before he left the moon, he got down on his knees and drew his daughter Tracy’s initials—T D C—into the dust. But Tracy will never see these letters— perhaps no one ever will see the letters, save for the father who wrote them. The letters may be there for as long as the moon exists. There is no weather on the moon. No volcanic activity. All water is ice: nothing gets washed away. There are solar winds, which carry a stream of charged particles from the sun, and create something like weather on Earth, scouring the surface of the moon, but the process is very, very slow. The only threat are meteorite showers. One little space rock could erase TDC. Or a footprint left by an astronaut.

102

. . . moon writing . . .

artICHoKe

In the last light of a summer night on the last day of August 1967, my mother made dinner for the four of us: not Italian, not Japanese, but American. A plump chicken pie, with a scattering of fennel seeds atop a perfect white flaky crust. The inside is hot and moist: a buttery cream sauce with chunks of tender chicken breast, fresh peas, pearl onions, and carrots. I listen to Coda and my mother as they talk about photography and lanterns. My father chimes in with something about his roses. He then says something about his latest architectural project: a public fountain in San Francisco. No one is really listening to him. All three listen to me talk about Shasta. We all talk about Shasta. But Renzo soon got tired of Shasta—and photography and lanterns. And, especially, Coda. While my mother and Coda and I talked on, Renzo excuses himself and rides off on his motorbike. Before dessert. Before the ginger cookies and orange sorbet. In the middle of the road there are five good-size artichokes. Must have fallen off a truck from the coastal farmland, thinks Renzo. As his motorbike whisks past these five medieval-looking vegetables, oddly threatening and sexual, he begins to daydream. The Latin name for the artichoke is Cynara scolymus. Renzo likes to remember Latin names. Renzo thinks about how artichokes are impossible to grow near the lake: the air is too cold and too dry. The artichoke grows best in sandy, coastal soil. Last April, when Renzo rode his motorbike up the northern coast, he saw fields filled with green artichokes poking up their spiky heads in farms blanketed by ocean mist. By May, there would be fields of olallieberries, and by October, fields of pumpkins. Artichokes are my mother’s favorite vegetable, especially the heart, which she likes to carve out with great precision, like a cat eating the best part of a captured bird. The price of an artichoke goes down when they have been bitten by the cold, what the farmers call “winter-kissed,” which gives them unattractive brown spots, not un104

she scrapes the leaves with her not-quite-perfect teeth.

like the ones that Renzo has started to see on his face and hands. Nevertheless, winter-kissed artichokes still taste good. When my mother makes an artichoke, she adds garlic and olive oil to the boiling water, which tastes very good alongside its natural taste of faint mint and asparagus. After cooking it to perfection, so its leaves are not too soft, yet are tender, she dips every fragrant bite into melted butter squeezed with lemon. She scrapes the leaves with her notquite-perfect teeth. The heart, the treasure, cannot be reached until all of the leaves have been pulled away. Renzo loves to watch her eat an artichoke. He finds it very sensual. So sensual, even by memory, that this must have been why Renzo does not see the hundreds of green artichokes covering the road. Nor does he see that the truck up ahead has come to a stop, even though its red emergency lights are flashing. After Renzo left the dinner table that night, I passed Toy to my mother and Coda. His nose wiggling feverishly. He felt so breathless. We held Toy’s soft belly to our ears, as if we were listening to a seashell at the ocean rather than a small white rabbit that lives near the lake. We could hear his breath and the rush of blood of his fast-beating heart. (In contrast, when you hold a seashell up to your ear, the dull roaring sound is the echo of your blood moving inside your ear. You are hearing yourself hear.) That night, I stayed up later than usual, with the light on in my bedroom long after I should have been asleep. I made an exquisite drawing of Toy with my colored pencils. I gave the rabbit a blue shadow. I was planning on how I would present it to my mother as a gift in the morning, when I heard an eerie wail. Like that time at the beach when I had made a big deep hole to lie in and my mother suddenly panicked when she could not see me. Looking out to the water she wailed my name.

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no naMe For HIM

On the night of my father’s death, my mother made a vow, as if it were their first wedding night: she promised to never say his name aloud again. She enclosed him in a watery tomb. My father’s name silently dropping into her head, letter by letter, like stones in water: R-E-N-ZO, making one concentric circle after another after another after . . . She would never say his name aloud again. He was not allowed out. Others might say his name aloud, but she would only answer with “your father.” “My lost husband.” Or just “he.” Renzo. She chooses to wear a particular photograph of him every day, deep inside her. Not in a locket. Not tucked inside her clothing against her skin. Not, even, burned on her brain as memory. But against her corporal heart, soaked in her blood. His heart against hers. The photograph is a 3 × 5 black-and-white snapshot of Renzo, with wide white and serrated borders (as was popular in the 1940s). My skinny father is pictured from the waist up, shirtless, and leaning against the stones of the Simple House. His head in profile. He has a bit of a beard: a boy who is not yet shaving; a boy who is waiting for his fuzzy face to become beard. Renzo’s jawbone is broken out with a few boyish blemishes. His lips are full. His chest and arms are lanky like a colt becoming horse. The adolescent was always in him. Every inch of his twentyyear-old body is beating. The sound of two hearts beating. The pounding. The thumping. My father’s heartbeat audible only to her. Inside her, the spirit of Renzo sees, as if with fetal eyes, amniotic-lake colors of saturated blue-blacks, violet-blacks, and crimson-blacks. Flickers of light leak in through the internal walls of Vera’s skin, blood and stretched muscle.

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W H at ’ s I n a n a M e ?

A coda is required to look back on the main body, allowing listeners to take it all in. Likewise, a photograph enables looking back—is a coda. And the beautiful and subtle ranges of gray moved Coda to stick with black-and-white pictures. Yet his love for me, for my mother, and for life itself was far from black and white, was really a grayscale.

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lIKe PIles oF laUnDrY

Apple cake with overly sweet caramel frosting and a strong taste of margarine. Chocolate cake with canned cherry filling between the layers. Fried chicken with hardened grease on its edges. Iceberg lettuce salad with pale tomatoes cut in chunks with a knife in need of sharpening, smothered with thick out-of-a-bottle mayonnaisey blue-cheese dressing. Enchilada casserole, with orange cheddar cheese, burned on the edges and an unexpected overpowering taste of vinegar. We have been living off food brought to us by neighbors, acquaintances, strangers. The food began to pile up. Uneaten. Like a family’s laundry after a long trip away. People pile up mourners with food that they will never eat. The grieved ones feel dumped upon, especially when the food is delivered with “Renzo is in a better place now.” And the smell. Unappealing. Not of us. Like noticing the odors of other people’s homes. Smells that are, to the occupants, not there. Just as voices are made of inflection, intonation, enunciation, drawl, twang, brogue. Every home has a smell. Our foods are particular to us. The food has to be thrown away. She makes herself cook something of our own. Something fresh. We sit down at the table to eat our spinach, soft egg, and parmesan pizzettas. The promising sunny yellow yolk at its center, inside the laurel of green spinach (kept green by boiling it for only a minute, then plunging it into ice-cold water for another minute) did not bode as well as hoped: for Renzo was not there. Spinach, soft egg, and parmesan pizzetta had always been Renzo’s favorite late-night meal. But Renzo is not in the molded plywood Eames dining chair that he always sat in when eating with us at our clear glass table. My mother had lost her taste for all things Italian. No desire for 109

rigatoni con la pajata—panna cotta—brodetto abruzzese—fritto misto— tiramisu—crostini with sardines, pine nuts, soaked raisins & sweet onions cooked in white wine vinegar—or broad bean, mint, & ricotta bruschette. She could not eat their Italian favorites without him. Likewise, she would never make him a Mother Ann’s birthday cake with rose water frosting without him. Sadness is a food: a food that feeds upon itself. No food any longer belonged to her. Not even clam consommé, trout sashimi, bean curd dengaku, yellow flower shrimp, asparagus with mustard dressing, bamboo rice, pickles, and sake. No food belonged to us. I was glad when school started up again. I could not take the sadness. I was ten.

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FroZen PonD

Renzo came back to Vera, not knowing that he had ______. Vera could not even dream the word. He came to her bed with arms like roses. She was between sleep and waking life. She had been reading. To Kill a Mockingbird has fallen from her hands. Renzo looks, just slightly, younger. He acts, as if, he has not been away. So like him. He sweetly smiles. He stares at her with half-closed eyes. The sun glistens upon them. His delicate lids are partially dropped shades to shield out the bright summer light of her bedroom. He has traveled from a dark world to find her. Renzo asks Vera, “Why is there a frozen pond in my garden?” “What pond?”—Vera asks, her diction slightly off, her voice rather hollow, as if she were practicing for a play. “We have no pond.” Vera suddenly notices that Renzo looks wintry. His lips are cerulean pink. His hair more silver than black. He stands before Vera in grays, whites, and silver-blue. His pupils are cold black holes into some other place. Vera runs to the back of the house, down the hill, and to the pond that is, in fact, there. A frozen eye staring at the sky. At its shore is an ice saw and a big red bucket. She somehow knows that she has to cut into the ice, and she does. Vera cuts an oval. The ice breaks up. In the summer breeze, the floating mirror-like shards make a clear sound with the cold water. She grabs the bucket and begins to drain all of the water out of the pond. She feels no iciness, just the warmth of the sun. She works fast and hard. She becomes hot and breathless, throwing bucketfuls of water over her shoulder. Vera empties the pond. “There is,” writes Freud, “at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.” The frozen staring eye becomes a green summer meadow. A nice scent of woodsy almonds and sweet clover honey scent 111

wafts from the meadow: the scent of roses. But, as if she is experiencing an apparition of the Virgin Mary (like the children in Fátima, Portugal, who smelled “Our Lady of the Rosary”), she now sees nothing. Vera is smelling Renzo’s roses in her sleep. Vera’s heart skips a beat. She gasps for air. She lets out the human cry of a lamb and awakes. Vera finds herself wide-eyed in bed, still smelling Renzo’s roses wafting in through the open window with the morning light. He’s still here today, thinks Vera. He is still here, even if he has disappeared.

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CoDa’s DreaM

He never dreamed.

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lIKe MotHer anD son

Coda is in my mother’s bed for the first time and he will spend the night. Just at the first break of morning light, Vera hears the hoot of the train as it goes through the tunnel in the mountain: startling like the yellow irises of a great horned owl. Startling like an owl twisting its head nearly full circle. Vera wakes first. She goes out into the big living room, with its glass wall that opens out to Renzo’s neglected garden, greenhouse, and the forest beyond. The sun is beginning to light their part of the world. Vera goes out to her studio and works on a drawing for a new bronze sculpture. When Vera returns to the bedroom to brush her hair, she sees that Coda has neatly made the bed. The silver-blue, quilted, upholstered bedspread is perfectly even on all sides and has been carefully smoothed with his hands. The thick spread has been tucked in under the pillows flawlessly, making a clean line. The two books on her side table have been perfectly stacked upon each other: their bindings flush. To Kill a Mockingbird, nearly finished, a bookmark just ten pages from the end, sits on top of Death in Venice and Seven Other Short Stories. Inside Thomas Mann’s book, a Rosa Veilchenblau is pressed flat between the pages of the story of Aschenbach’s pursuit of Tadzio. On the page opposite, the Blue Rambler has left a stain, a colorful (but mainly mauve) memory. Like a bruise. Did Coda ever see the bruised page? The night-time water glasses (hand-blown, aquamarine, from Venice) have been taken to the kitchen. The curtains have been drawn to let the sunlight in. The effect of such tender care with her things injures her. Vera wishes that the bed would have been left unmade, rumpled. Time does nothing to diminish Renzo’s presence. Coda will never come to Vera’s bed with arms like roses. 114

FIFteen GooD PrInts

Mary wore a tiara when she married Xavier Castro Pacheco (a musician much older than her, from Quintana Roo). They filmed the wedding ceremony with a Super 8 film camera. She wore a white silk vintage gown from the twenties. It showed off her clavicles. She had a new married life in San Francisco, along with her beloved Shasta. Tiny Mary caused quite a sensation when she took her enormous dog for walks in Golden Gate Park around Stow Lake, the Japanese Tea Garden with its moon bridge, Rainbow Falls, the Dutch and Murphy Windmills, and the Buffalo Paddock. Famously, Mary often wore her ankle-length Bohemian thin wool coat embroidered with brightly colored thick yarns of fuchsia-pink, red, orange, gray-blue, cornflower blue, red, white, and olive green in patterns inspired by the textiles of Central Asia: diamonds, sergeant stripes, tulips, turtles, suns, moons, carnations, irises, vines, and pomegranates. The collar and the wide cuffs were made of black rabbit fur. The lining was passion-fruit-pink silk. (In the morning, she would throw it over her pajamas and would drive Shasta, who sat in the front seat for his morning run.) Shasta nearly took up permanent residency in Golden Gate Park. Never again, however, would Shasta stand on his hind legs and box with Coda. Four months after her wedding, Mary lost the baby. And Coda asked my mother to marry him. “Vera, will you marry me?” The wedding was at the courthouse in Truckee . . . A private affair . . . Just Vera and Coda . . . And the snow. Underneath her thick olivegreen wool wrap coat, patterned with wide forest-green stripes and modern hexagonal flowers, with small-armed bias sleeves, my mother wore an oyster-colored raw silk dress and held a bouquet of winter flowers (Muscari, violets, and paperwhites). Coda wore a gray suit, a carefully ironed, white, polished-cotton Oxford shirt and a solid black silk tie. He wore a boutonniere of a single paperwhite. He smiled his

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easy grin, a glint in his eye caught every bit of light that it could. He made Vera feel secure, but not sick with love. The next night, after their wedding night, he does not come to bed until very late. No honeymoon. How could they? He goes to the darkroom at the Swiss chalet house that he used to share with Mary (that he will never sell) and prints and prints and prints. Out of the batch, he produces fifteen good prints of geological formations, formations of ice on the window, and the photographs of me standing waist-deep in the lake at dusk, from the day that we went to Fannette Island with Mary, on the Floating Zendo and had picnic. Coda could not bear the idea of being a stepfather, so he adopted me, and my mother just agreed. I wish that she would not have done that. But I could not break her heart anymore.

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Gl ass Moon

“Broken Plates” is written in heavy black pen on the outside of a black archival box, housed at California’s Lick Observatory. Inside are large 8 × 10 glass negatives of the moon taken in the 1890s by E. E. Barnard. The plates were dropped when packed for transport. Who broke them? Fortunately, when stored, each glass plate had been kept separated by paper, so that pieces could be put back together and printed. The cracks added to the mystery and a sense of lost time. In a dark purple-black-sepia print from a photograph taken on September 3, 1895, the moon is a mothball . . . a silkworm cocoon, gone round . . . a night marked by a white stone . . . a spider’s egg. The cracks are a web, protecting the egg-stone-cocoon-mothball moon. The moon is not broken. On July 21, 1969, after two men walked the surface of the moon, life, somehow, seemed less extraordinary. The moon lost its mystery. Something broke.

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. . . a night marked by a white stone . . .

tsUKIMI UDon (Moon nooDles)

Many years had elapsed since that day that the world changed, had ceased to be extraordinary, when I found myself in a noodle house, also in July. I was a grown man. It was a warm summer evening and very late. I went in planning to order zaru soba (noodles in basket): chilled buckwheat noodles served in a square bamboo box with a slatted bottom, with a very cold dipping sauce, strong with flavors: dashi (Japan’s all-purpose soup stock made from dried bonito flakes and dried giant kelp), mirin (heavily sweetened syrup), dark soy sauce, and a little sugar. The noodles are sprinkled with toasted nori. The coldness is enhanced by the grassy taste of finely chopped green onion, the refreshing spicy taste of daikon-oroshi (grated giant white radish), and the fire of wasabi. It was perfect for a warm summer night, too warm, even in the blackness of the night. When the waitress appeared, for no particular reason, I changed my mind and ordered tsukimi udon (moon noodles): not a summer dish, but a hearty dish for fall. Tsukimi translates as “moon viewing” and belongs to the humble pastime of observing the moon in autumn. The dish is comfort food, served in warmed deep bowls. A large serving of udon noodles in a bit of broth, pressed into the shape of a nest with the back of a spoon: in the center of the nest, a whole raw egg has been gently dropped, like an autumn moon. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a day of monotony, with the prospect of nothing better the next day, I broke the yolk of the raw egg with my chopsticks and mixed the egg into the soup. No sooner had the warm liquid touched my palate . . . than a shiver ran through me. And with a rush of memories, I suddenly recalled watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on television. I was twelve years old. We (my mother, Coda, and I) were at home, at the Lantern. My mother had whimsically thought we might eat some late-night moon noodles while we sat glued to the television. This unexpected change in my mother’s

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countenance (I had not seen anything like whimsy in her since the death of my father) set me at ease, with each mouthful of broth and slurp of noodles, while I watched in fear for the lives of the astronauts. I remember, especially, Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who flew solo around the dark side of the moon, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked its craggy surface and smelled its surprising smell: spent gunpowder. While floating around the unlit moon, Collins scribbled down these thoughts: “I am truly alone and absolutely alone from any known life—I am it. Three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon and one plus God knows what on this side.” Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, Collins added: “I like the feeling!” The moon lost its mystery. And, I realized, seemingly for the first time, that I would never see my father again.

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soarInG

Taking a curve in Coda’s white Jeep, with the top down, on the road as it hugs the lake. California is in a drought. Hotel California is on the radio. My mother is driving alone. She wasn’t feeling happy, but she was feeling alive. Her thick and shiny hair is bundled neatly into a tight ponytail, held back with a tortoise-shell clip. Her perfect ponytail springs from the back of her round head and spills down her long neck. She is daydreaming about her bronze casts and how Renzo always loved them. How his love for her art was something she so deeply needed. It fed her will to make work. It gave her ideas. Even now. Still. And then suddenly, the awful sound of metal pushing into metal is heard, but not by her. The terrifying crash of glass shattering into a hundred thousand pieces is heard, but not by her. The screech of rubber is heard, but not by her. The horrible burning scent of rubber can be smelled everywhere, but not by her. And she is gliding and flying in slow silence. Strangely free. Free from life. She is smelling the lake in the air. She can smell its wetness, its deepness, its blueness. She can smell the trout. She can smell the grass that grows in its shallow parts. She can smell its little warm parts amid its vast coldness. She can smell the petrol of its motorboats. She can smell the rocks, the dry hard, black, white, and gray granite. She can smell the heart of the forest. She closes her eyes and feels how hot the sun is on her face, although the air is so cool. But what is that sound? What? Is it the lake I hear? She has been thrown from the white 1965 CJ-6 Universal Jeep. She is in the air. Like a dream. Her nose full of the lake. She feels her heart beating fast and hard. She floats in the slow time of disaster. Very, very slow for a very, very brief few seconds of long time. She is a bird. A wingless bird, soaring in the air.

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One tiny impulsion, like the occasional wingbeat of a bird asleep in mid-air. She flies in the unbearable realism of film. And then she falls. She does not hear the horrible thud of a body hitting the ground: a recognizable, yet unfamiliar, sound. She skids on her left thigh. She bangs her head hard. She does not hear her bones crack. The pain is unbearable and makes her nauseous. She bleeds profusely from her left thigh. Her ears and nose ooze blood. Blood runs from her mouth. Her dress is destroyed. Her thrown shoes—leather lined, Italian tan suede moccasins, with curved kitten heals—have landed, far apart, no longer together, but mostly unmarred on the black asphalt road that hugs the lake. No sound comes from her mouth, because her whole body is in dedication to her pain. Her eyes—deep pools of blue-black sinking up from weeping willow leaves—stare with a surprising curiosity and a sense of calm. She does not know if she will go on. She does not even know if it is a possibility. And then, the black. Nothing but black. And with that, Vera’s pupils became mydriatic (two black moons). She is unconscious. Or she is dead. She is not sure which. She awakens in the hospital room. She sees only through one eye and not very well. She sees white and turquoise-green. Her mouth tastes of hospital, dry blood, and fear. A kind nurse with gold wire-framed glasses leans down, gently and close to her face, whispers something, whispers nothing, whispers her name. She sees a bit of herself in the reflection of the kind nurse’s glasses. The nurse takes her hand and it feels cool and clean. If only Renzo could be with her.

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Wa l K I n G U n D e r Wat e r

She is lingering. I bring her Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, a novel that she loves. Perhaps she would like to read it again? I also bring her a bag of White Rabbit candies, those little vanilla candies, that taste a bit like Tootsie Rolls, which she used to buy me when we went to Chinatown in San Francisco. The outside wrapper has a little white rabbit standing posed in front of a black artist’s palette with daubs of red and blue paint. My mother used to enjoy buying them for me because the white rabbit looked like Toy. Inside the printed paper, the candy was wrapped again in edible waxy rice paper. I loved the novelty of eating paper as a child. In a thin voice, my mother agrees to eat a few White Rabbit candies. We eat a few together, smiling. The smile that she gives me is submissive. In her eyes, we travel back in time, together, gently, like rice on cedar chopsticks. We go to that place before I was ten years old. Only now I am twenty years old and she is my little girl. I hold her gaze in mine. Our eyes gleam wetly. But no tears. Coda brings her a red tin of Amaretti cookies, made with almond flour and individually wrapped in crinkly paper, the colors of candy: Brach’s Orange-Slices orange, Now-and-Later lime green, and Jordan Almonds blue. At the hospital, I fall asleep in the chair next to her bed. I dream that she is teaching me to walk underwater. It feels as if we are walking through wet sheer curtains. We see each other as reflections in water. We breathe in. At first it is breaths of air. Then water. We breathe water in small gulps. It is easy and comforting. We are sleepwalking underwater. Under the lake. On our tongues: the taste of underwater grass, freshwater fish, mossy granite, cold blue. And then less walking. Just sleeping. My mother is holding my hand, but not

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tightly. We are carrying our secret with us underwater—like live coal— until it finally ceases to be red, or even warm. We pop up. And then one day, three weeks later, still in the hospital, the White Rabbit candies gone and the Amaretti cookies in the red tin untouched, my mother just died. It happened in her sleep. Eyes lowered. Eyes closed. Eyes asleep, like silhouettes of two weeping willow leaves. A long bow to the ground, until she finally met her own undialectical death. She could not be revived. She had lost the will to live. Having been breathed out, her heart froze. Her death began not when she flew from Coda’s Jeep: it began the day Renzo died. At first, she had tried to cope by setting out on a new journey, la vita nuova, to renounce the past: renouncing his name; renouncing the Italian food. But she could not. She could not do anything new. So, she gave her heart its due. Like going from the steam of the sauna into the half-frozen waters of the lake, during the coldest winter day. Two forms of water. Two forms of life. She slid from one into the other. Those who make the habit of leaving the hot sauna for the half-frozen waters of the lake describe it not as a jolt, but as “soft.” Is this so incomprehensible? I was not with her when she died. It was, as if, she was trying to spare me. She spared me from becoming a witness of her death. As if she could preclude my own future death. She let me remain her child. A child, not unmothered. I remain close to her. I can still pretend to have eternal life before me. I believe I can still find her. Despite the fact that she never lived in Japan, never wrote letters to her Japanese cousins, had only visited there once: I believe that I can find her in the country of our eyes. Japan is where I will go. To Japan. To the bottom of the lake. To the moon. To my mother. When I tell Coda of my plans, he seems relieved. The two of us alone, without her: impossible.

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oPen MY Heart

When he opened her heart, her heart had turned to a lump of blue glass.

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lIKe rICe on CHoPstICKs

When I was very small, I remember my mother carrying me gently like she holds rice on chopsticks. For, the Japanese do not pierce and stab their food with forks, but transport it to their mouths, with the same precisely measured care taken in moving a child. This maternal gesture was made still softer by the wood of the plain cedar chopsticks, which my mother insisted that we use when she cooked Japanese meals. And, undeniably, she carefully held me for all of my life, until I found myself suspended, without her.

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lIKe a seQUenCe oF PoeMs

One winter evening, before I take the one-way Pan Am flight from San Francisco to Tokyo, I go to the lake. I walk out to the end of the pier at Meeks Bay. I am soon to be twenty-one years old. I crouch down and ease my copy of The Temptations of a Mirror Maker into the icy water of the lake, as if it were a boat made out of newspaper, like the ones we used to make in school. A fish appears to make sure that it is not something to eat. Taking on the weight of the water, The Temptations of a Mirror Maker begins to sink. The pages swell. They bloom. Like a sequence of poems. As if the prints were returning to the waters from which they first emerged.

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Wa I t I n G , s t I l l

Just as I used to wait for my mother to come to my bed. I now wait for her to return to life. The last button remains unbuttoned. I keep a couple of things that she might need. Japanese slippers. Three Italian cookbooks.

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MorPHeUs

I walked into the living room of the Lantern and there you were sitting in our prized elephant-hide gray, fiberglass-reinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. The rocker was given to Mother on the day that I was born: a gift from you. Next to you and the rocking chair is one of Mother’s prized sculptures, comprised of two bronze balls: Untitled, No. 5, which look to be made of ancient rock—touched all over for thousands of years—blind and armless, each reaches out to the other with their rounded bird-like beaks. It’s another summer night. I smell your roses. It’s you, Father, but I do not recognize your face. You have let yourself go. There’s an unmended hole in your midnight blue shirt; it is wrinkled; a silver Navajo button is missing. Your five-o’clock shadow has grown into a scraggly short beard. The dimple in your chin is now barely visible. Your disciplined rumpled appearance is undisciplined. You sweetly smile. You stare at me with half-closed eyes. You look older. You have been suffering. “Tell me Nico, did you ever manage to find your blue marble?” I am shattered by your question. Not only because I am truly too old now to care about that blue marble, but because your voice is not your own: it is Coda’s voice. A voice so strong and so well-known to me, with its sound of American movie actors of another time. A bit of that affected Mid-Atlantic diction, like Gayne Whitman, the narrator of that little travelogue, Wings Over the Golden Gate. When I first met Coda, I was initially won over by his dog, Shasta, and then by his voice, which held a record of the past: at once unknown and familiar to me. I found its resonance comforting, like Gregory Peck’s voice in The Yearling or To Kill a Mockingbird. The way that Coda enunciated the T of water—and dropped the R of clear. I guess it had something to do with who Coda loved and all those movies that he escaped to at the Arlington Movie Theater, while growing up in Santa Barbara. Above Coda: the midnight-blue cavernous ceiling of the huge cinema, cov129

ered by hundreds of minuscule lights, like stars. Like the lake’s cloudfree night sky. When the stars dimmed in the Arlington, the plush velvet curtain parted, the movie began. Hearing Coda’s voice coming out of your mouth, Father, sends me into a panic. I wake up and remember that you, Father, are dead. That Coda has married my mother. That my mother is dead. In my slumber, you came to me as Morpheus: the ancient god of dreams who appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who transforms the pure matter of sleep into form. His metamorphosis contains the very mystery of sleep. When I fell asleep, I vanished as I, and I became you, Father, became Coda, became Morpheus, became full-of-cold-sweats afraid. An I for an I for an I for an I.

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BlUe MarBle

In 1972, the Apollo 17 crew took a picture of an almost fully illuminated Earth disk as they traveled toward the moon and called it the Blue Marble. The last manned lunar mission. Our vulnerability, beautiful and blue, could be seen, even from space.

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soMetHInG lIKe love

Seeing him felt something like love. He had his mother’s teeth, like cool, white, polished stones. Between his teeth were little gaps, like a small animal, an otter perhaps. I first tried to write to him. By email at his little black bar in Tokyo. No response. By mail at his little black bar. No response. I wrote again and again. I boldly showed up at “Nico’s”: Nico’s own little Japanese bàcari. I watched him from a seat at the bar, as I drank my warm sake served to me by a young Japanese woman who was working with Nico. I felt a bit like Scotty following Madeleine and it was thrilling. I was tempted to order a luminous orange spritz, but my body felt so cold. I had cold sweats. I love his voice—something very original is his accent and speech. I did not introduce myself. I did not tell him that I was the one who had been in the archives. That one who had spent years looking at the photographs, reading the journals, the letters. That one who had tried to reach him by email, by mail. There, I was. I saw so much of Vera in him. Not only the teeth, but his eyes, his mother’s eyes—deep pools of blue-black sinking up from weeping willow leaves. I sensed his heart, so difficult to reach.

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a F t e r W o r D ( a F t e r Wa r D )

Like the Navel of My Dream of Nico Like a Lake pictures aesthetic perfection, waiting to be broken. Nico’s very modern house, with the Italian pottery jars along the outside and its interior lit by Japanese lanterns. The elephant-hide gray, fiberglassreinforced plastic 1951 Eames rocking chair, with metal legs and birch runners. The delicious food. Clam consommé with deep, olive-brown kelp leaf, yuzu rind, and a little fennel—in each bowl are two clams opened like a pair of butterflies, symbols of the happy couple. Vera’s slim fitting solid-colored knit dresses. Renzo’s bespoke shirts with silver Navajo buttons, John Lennon glasses, and the surprise of his Sears work boots. Vera’s cast bronzes, which reflect the purity of her Zen Buddhist upbringing, as well as the heft of her internment during World War II. Nico’s boyish delight in developing photographs under the red safety light of Coda’s “Floating Zendo”—the darkroom boat that the photographer keeps on Lake Tahoe. The lives of Nico, his parents, and Coda all embody Northern California’s postwar landscape, which fissured into alternative lifestyles and poetic visions: including the gay baths, the Beat movement poets, and the San Francisco Zen Center. Just as water can freeze into snow and ice, melt back into water, and steam out of geysers, so too love can take on new forms with shifts of atmosphere. By a twist of fate, the photographer Coda Gray becomes stepfather to Nico. The Niccolò Petroni Archive holds letters, life objects (including the brown kimono that Nico wore as a boy and his mother’s Japanese woodblock print by Toyoshige), along with Gray’s journal, entitled The Temptation of St. Anthony. In the journal are test prints of Nico (often nude or shirtless) and experimental thoughts on “sequence” in poetry and photography. Gray’s career was devoted to his original concept of sequenced photographs: rearranging them, turning them upside

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down, which for him provided the best opportunity for the voice of the photographer to emerge. In Gray’s spirit, I read the archival afterlife of Nico like sequenced poetry. For “living,” as James Clifford notes, “does not easily organize itself into a continuous narrative.” Like a Lake developed, like a photograph, out of an archive. Only, there is no archive, no original negative. The archive, albeit imagined, is built on real histories, real events, real people, real feelings. As the California-born modern dancer Yvonne Rainer (who might have known Coda Gray) writes, quoting her psychotherapist from the 1960s: “Feelings are facts.” Using my imagined archive, Like a Lake takes on “child-loving” and “erotic innocence” (James Kincaid) between a grown man and a boy—as well as between this same boy and his mother. Ever since I first wrote my fat “mother book” (Reading Boyishly: J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D. W. Winnicott), I have been moved by Brooke Hopkins’s essay “A Question of Child Abuse,” which questions a mother’s erotic behavior toward her child rather than the other way around. Like a Lake is fed by Hopkins’s surprising, unsettling essay, along with the writings of Kincaid, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. My intimate relationship with the work of Roland Barthes is, as in all of my writing, still inescapable. (I remain aggressively unweaned.) “I was certain you were basing fiction on biography until my search for Nico and Coda proved me wrong—the surprise is very pleasing,” wrote an early reader of the manuscript. Well, not exactly wrong . . . The art of Ruth Asawa inspired my imagination of Vera Matsumoto. Her wire sculptures (along with photographs of her taken by her friend Imogen Cunningham) sent my mind dancing when I visited the 2006 exhibition of her work at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air). Like Asawa, Vera learned to draw in an internment camp, was a student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, wore a wedding ring designed by Buckminster Fuller, and went to Milwaukee’s State Teachers College 134

and left without a degree, because no one would hire “a Japanese.” Like Asawa, Vera was unsure, when in the middle of Missouri, as to whether to use the “colored” toilet or the “white” toilet. Asawa and Vera both made the butter at Black Mountain and were both warned by Albers not to have children. Asawa had six, Vera one. (My Nico.) Vera married the architect Renzo Pertroni, who has a bit of Asawa’s beloved husband (Albert Lanier) in him, but not much. Significantly, Renzo has the strong sartorial taste of Charles Eames. Asawa’s life is not a book. Nor is Lanier’s. And the two should not be confused with Like a Lake. The art of Minor White inspired my imagination of Coda Gray. He made two copies of an artist’s book—not entitled Temptations of a Mirror Maker, but something close: The Temptations of St. Anthony Is Mirrors. White kept a copy for himself and gave the other to his model/ muse Tom Murphy. But White did not meet Murphy as a boy. Nor did he invade Murphy’s family. Nor did he ever marry. Those of you who know the life of J. M. Barrie and his affection for the five LlewelynDavies boys, especially George, will know that the author of Peter Pan, who just happened to take photographs, is perhaps more central to my book than Minor White. Of the five Llewelyn-Davies boys, the youngest just happened to be named Nico. But Nico and Nico should not be confused—nor should White and Gray. No one lived in Lake Tahoe.

◌ ◌ ◌ Like a photograph, like a transitional object (D. W. Winnicott), Like a Lake is real and not real. Like a Lake performs Barthes’s “novelesque,” which makes indivisible fiction and nonfiction: “Like water in water” (Georges Bataille). Think of an analog print under the red safelight of the darkroom, emerging from the photographic bath. The analog photograph is historical, light (photo) from a moment in time, and fiction, writing (graph). I presented versions of Like a Lake at the Royal College of Art (London), the Ruskin School of Art (Oxford University), and at the John Rylands Library (University of Manchester), as oral performances, 135

aestheticized by projected images and sequenced like poetry. These lectures all withheld the fact that my stories were made of water. I did not own up to my condensation (both Freudian and meteorological) of art history, nonfiction, and fiction—until afterward, during the question-and-answer period. The resulting discussions were helpful, as well as tempestuous and exhilarating; I believe that my beloved supervisor Hayden White (The Content of the Form) would have enjoyed joining in. It was White who took me to Barthes and the “novelesque.” Barthes came to the novelesque through his lifetime interest in Marcel Proust. “Is there really ever a need to know a fact?” questions “Marcel,” the Narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Readers of the Search relish the “fact” that the Narrator of the Search is Marcel and not Marcel, at once. The book makes fiction and nonfiction indivisible. What is real in Proust (part memoir, part fiction, part criticism, part history) is never outwardly discussed, as it seeks inversion at every turn. The same is true for Like a Lake, which upends the excesses of Proust with brevity and never mentions the French author in its pared-down setting of clean California modernism. Like a Lake is written in the spirit of current essay collections, like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Brian Dillon’s Essayism, Rebecca Solnit’s Faraway Nearby, and Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter. And, naturally, Barthes is palpable in content and form (not only Camera Lucida but also Mythologies and Empire of Signs). But unlike Nelson, Dillon, Solnit, Zambreno, and Barthes—and unlike my six earlier books— this is no memoir, there is nothing of me in Like a Lake. Or is there? For I grew up with summer and winter holidays at Lake Tahoe. I remember a man like Coda Gray. I imagine being a boy under the gaze of his camera eyes. Like a Lake begins with a little jolt: a meteorite that falls into the earth’s atmosphere and lands, as an ordinary rock, an extraordinary fallen stone, in the middle of Lake Tahoe. The rock is a metaphor for the book’s questioning of truth and visibility, especially when it comes to photography. Afterward (afterword), the concentric circles, caused by the plop 136

of an extraordinary fallen stone into the second deepest lake in the Unites States, continue to reach out, one inside the other like the navel of my dream of Nico. If you never see it. If you never say it. Did it happen?

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aCKnoWleDGMents

My brain is a camera obscura (like those children that Baudelaire speaks of in his essay Morale du joujou) where my friends are my toys, coming and going in my play (often without their realization, or permission, like dreams, which, too, have no preference for morality). Fatema Abdoolcharim, Amy Ruth Buchanan, Alice Butler, Ali Criddle, Page duBois, Sarah Jones, Ranji Khanna, Patricia Patterson, Olivier Richon, Samantha Sweeting, and Marina Warner have left indelible traces on these pages, for which I am most grateful. I hope they do not mind living in my mind and blurring (like Morpheus himself ) with the souls of Like a Lake. I am Echo: my voice is made of water. Into the still water Esther Teichmann throws her stones. My watery words ring and ring and ring around her gifts. Thank you, Esther. I am fortunate. Jennifer Doyle, John McAuliffe, Ian McGuire, and Emma Wilson (four very smart, very original writers of our time) read various versions of Like a Lake. I cannot thank them enough for their criticism, encouragement, and generosity. My editor Richard Morrison read the manuscript more than once and surprised me with insights over and over. He is divine. I am lucky. Michael Koch was a brilliant copyeditor for Like a Lake, with an ear for language and an eye for design. Amy Ruth Buchanan’s stunning design of the book is beyond words. Marin J. B. Lewis of the Minor White Archive at the Princeton University Art Museum has been especially helpful in facilitating my research. My father taught me to love Lake Tahoe and artichokes, without him there would be no love in this book. Rune Gade and Stense Andrea Lind-Valdan opened up their hearts to me while living in Copenhagen, so I could polish the stones and bone the fish of Like a Lake.

My three boys (Augustine, Oliver and Ambrose) enable me to write. They keep me afloat. They inspire me more than they will ever know. Like I said, I am lucky. Thanks to Hayden for continuing to hold my hand as I write, crossing busy and open streets, sometimes going nowhere. To Romeo who taught me about the character of dogs. To Kevin who continues to quicken my heart. The most important thing of all.

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IMaGes

1.

regine Petersen, photograph, from her Find a Falling star (heidelberg and Berlin: kehrer, 2015). sylacauga, 1954. archival pigment ink print, 30 × 36.5 cm. Courtesy of alabama museum of natural history. Copyright regine Petersen.

2.

isamu noguchi, Lunar Lamp Prototype, mixed media, ca. 1951. Photo by kevin noble. Copyright the isamu noguchi Foundation and garden museum, new york.

3.

Photograph of artist eva hesse with Legs of an aching Ball and

ear in a Pond, 1965. 4.

katsushuka hokusai, “kohada kpheiji,” from the series one hun-

dred ghost tales, ca. 1833. Courtesy of British museum. 5.

Lennart nilsson, Untitled, fetal photograph, ca. 1965. Courtesy of Lennart nilsson Foundation.

6.

minor white, 1948. Proof card of negative 48-137: tom murphy, san Francisco, February 1948. Courtesy of the minor white archive, Princeton University art museum. Copyright trustees of Princeton University.

7.

isamu noguchi, mitosis, Bronze, 1962. Copyright the isamu noguchi Foundation and garden museum, new york.

8.

ansel adams, Calisthenics, manzanar war relocation Center, 1943. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

9. 10.

Petr Štembera, grafting, 1975. minor white, Bird Lime and surf, Point Lobos, California, 1951. Copyright Center for Creative Photography, the University of arizona Foundation.

11.

minor white, tom murphy, san Francisco, California, 1948. Princeton University art museum. Copyright trustees of Princeton University.

12.

Carole m. highsmith, Camera obscura located near the Cliff house restaurants just north of ocean Beach, san Francisco, California, 2012. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

13.

edward weston, radishes, photograph, 1933. Copyright Center for Creative Photography, the University of arizona Foundation.

14.

edward weston, nautilus, photograph, 1927. Copyright Center for Creative Photography, the University of arizona Foundation.

15.

edward weston, nude (anita Brenner), 1926. Copyright Center for Creative Photography, the University of arizona Foundation.

16.

dr. william moon, moon type, 1877.

17.

edward weston, artichoke halved, 1930. Copyright Center for Creative Photography, the University of arizona Foundation.

18.

Linda Connor, september 3, 1895 (Lunar eclipse [Broken Plate] original negative by e.e. Barnard, Lick observatory, mt. hamilton, California), 2019. Courtesy of Linda Connor and the University of California observatories, Lick observatory, mount hamilton Plate archive. Copyright held by the regents of the University of California.

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notes

Just as objects stick in my mind and color my writing, so do lines from a range of author and artists: from Marcel Proust to the photographer Francesca Woodman to the literary critic Peter Stallybrass to the novelist Marie Darieussecq to the philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes. Their words are of my body, not in it, like Georges Bataille’s “water in water.” They flow into me and out of me. Streams, currents, springs, floods, gushes become watery voices, which feed the tributaries of my lake. The goal is to present the integrity of their speech unharmed yet honored. Here I give them credit and thank them.

“you cannot fold a flood” —Emily Dickinson, “Poem 528,” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1961). “writ in water” —John Keats. The words were composed by Keats and requested in a letter to be engraved on his tombstone (in Rome) before his death. “Oh my goodness, she’s perfect—even her eyelashes are there” —Dan Fisher, quoted in Tom Mueller, “Ice Baby,” National Geographic, May 2009. “staring at its beloved sky” —Rebecca Solnit describes Lake Tahoe (and other high-altitude lakes) as “like blue eyes staring back at the blue sky,” Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York: Viking Books, 2005). “more meltingly than sleep or death” —Alkman (Spartan poet) from his “maiden song,” trans. David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric, vol. 2, Anacreon, Anacreontea, Choral Lyric from Olympus to Alcman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

“pungent, sensual and revealing as the scent of geranium” —Marcel Proust, “Sodom and Gomorrah,” in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2003). “I was no longer young enough to know everything” is a slight rephrasing of J. M. Barrie’s “I’m not young enough to know everything” in The Admirable Crichton, in Peter Pan and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). “ripples hiding how days must die” is a slight rephrasing of Edith Södergran’s “how your ripple conceals . . . days that die,” from “Pale Autumn Lake,” in Edith Södergran: Selected Pomes of 1916, trans. David Barrett (London: David Barrett, 2011). “Like ghosts, they seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life” —Marcel Proust, “Within a Budding Grove,” in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 2, trans. C. K. Moncrieff, D. J. Enright, and Terrence Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 1996). “without reasoning, without thoughts, the water was always the same” —Marie Darrieussecq, Tom is Dead, trans. Lia Hills (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009). “echo azure butterflies softly float from the sky like blue snowflakes” —Vladimir Nabokov writes similarly of butterflies like “blue snowflakes” in Pnin (London: Penguin, 2010). “the metallic shifting of the plates . . . I love these mechanical sounds” —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Classics, 1993). “They say mirrors are just water specified” —Francesca Woodman, Some Disordered Interior Geometries, ed. Daniel Tucker (Philadelphia: Synapse, 1981). “and like a tree / that might find loose birds in its / leafless hair, I am open to the surprises of the season,” — Elaine Feinstein, “Renaissance Feb. 7,” in The Clinic Memory: New and Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017). 144

“If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your hair” —Scott McKenzie, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (Ode, 1967). “Wrinkles . . . in the technical jargon of sewing are called ‘memory’ ” —Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds, Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things,” Yale Review 81, no. 2 (April 1993). “We all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child” —Christian Boltanski, “Studio: Christian Boltanski,” Tate Magazine, no. 2 (November/December 2002). “spanking a spherical pot out of slimy clay” —Jean Charlot, from An Artist on Art: Collected Essays of Jean Charlot, vol. 2 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1972). “No sooner had the warm liquid touched my palate . . . than a shiver ran through me” —Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way,” in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, trans. C. K. Moncrieff, D. J. Enright, and Terrence Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 1996). “unbearable realism of film” —Marie Darrieussecq, Tom is Dead, trans. Lia Hills (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009). “having been breathed out” —Sappho, If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho, ed. Anne Carson (London: Virago, 2003). “the same precisely measured care taken in moving a child” —Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). “the pure matter of sleep into form” —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

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C a r o l M a v o r is a writer who lives in Manchester England. Her most recent books are Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale; Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour; and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil and Hiroshima mon amour.