i. You Look Like an Angel
“Oh. Hi, Christie. Will you come and have a cup of coffee with me?” Len asked at least once a week.
I felt bad that I never did, especially after he had his house taken away—the grand ramshackle Victorian with the porch across the whole peeling pinkish-beige front with wicker rocking chairs and metal ashtrays on legs like some dilapidated Miami Beach hotel that rents to old jazz musicians and manicurists by the month, and the cavernous margarine-yellow kitchen which his mother’s tiny hunched ghost still walked through regularly, nagging at him. (I don’t suppose she followed him to the assisted living home, or stayed on to nag the Palo Alto realtors who made out like bandits on the sale.)
I’ve often wished since then, since leaving the rooms I rented on the second story of that house, that I could have been more generous with my time and listened with less impatience to whatever he’d rushed out the back door to tell me as soon as I got home in the evening, the minute I opened my car door under the plum tree at the end of the worn-away brick driveway overgrown with society garlic. However quietly I tried to open it, there would be Len materialized, his old man’s hands in his baggy pockets, with Coco, the white dog who could have been put to good use as a mop head cleaning linoleum, dwarfed by the beautiful rank white-flowering weeds.
I wish I could have been a friend to him, but I never did go downstairs for coffee. He liked me anyway, more than I deserved. He once told me I looked like an angel. I felt chastened by that, and terribly ashamed.
“Yes, like Michael Landon,” he went on, with the usual short delighted “huh!” that was his laugh. (Sometimes, in the night, through the white door in my bathroom that led to the inside hallway and stairs and the rest of the house, I could hear a whole string of “huh”s, in response to the TV, or to nothing, that might as easily have been sobs.
Len told wonderful, run-on stories, when the mood was on. He told me how he and his brother swam the river where it met the ocean, knives between their teeth, pretending to be pirates, and then pried open oysters. That was on Puget Sound, or maybe in Costa Rica. I wasn’t really listening. His truths were not as fixed as most, because of the schizophrenia, because of what he saw that others didn’t (or pretended not to), because he didn’t hesitate to tell any of it.
I wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t listen, though. One late spring day I sat upstairs laughing inside my open windows over the porch, hearing the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had importantly rung the doorbell flee after five minutes because they couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
“Oh,” he said, the way he always started. “Let me tell you what Jesus was saying to me last night…”
ii. Treehouse
My dining room—or rather the fantastically eccentric room where the orange and yellow papier-mâché parrot smiled down from its swinging brass perch onto the bowls of penne or linguini Marty and I ate perfectly al dente at my unraveling wicker table—was made of hundreds of small panes of antique glass, rippled and cracked. As through a burning-glass the sun left scorch marks on the leaves of my rubber plant (known as “The Plant That Eats Its Young” by those who knew its character, because it put out a great number of enormous leaves but never seemed to get an inch taller) and the philodendron in a Folgers can that the housepainter in the cottage behind the house gave me when he moved out. It was a kind of dysfunctional greenhouse—charming and entirely impractical like everything else on the rambling property. Whole panels of the small window panes lifted open and hooked on the low wooden ceiling, so in that room you were all but outside. You could hear every sort of bird, from the table, besides some neighbor child practicing halting scales on the piano most evenings, and a few years later Chopin mazurkas. I thought of it as my treehouse, perched atop the branch of rickety redwood stairs—that delicious second-story sun porch I left my marriage for.
The door, too, scarcely kept the outside out. To keep it closed you had to loop the neck of a padlock through two paint-splattered metal rings. Since the only doorbell in the house was downstairs, nothing to do with me, Marty (the man who’d come into my life more or less simultaneously with my move from San Jose to Palo Alto with my piano, The Plant That Eats Its Young, and thirty-some boxes of books that the movers accused me of having cached lead ingots in) brought me a little brass bell that was a beautiful open-mouthed fish with a sinuous “S” tail like Disney’s Cleo, and pulled the black string that would ring it through the crack where the door frame had pulled away from the old wall. I left the door open most of the time, except at night (summer nights excluded), during the rainy season, and when wasps came to feed in the over-ripened South American strawberry tree beside the stairs. Or if I didn’t want to be interrupted by Len, trudging heavily up to bring me my mail instead of leaving it as arranged in the plastic breadbox on the bottom stairs.
But the really quirky thing about that room, and the tiny kitchen separated from it only by the clever corrugated plastic shoji screen Marty (leaving his own marriage) hammered up for me almost as soon as I moved in, with my grandmother’s sixteen crystal glasses hanging on a rack of pegs above it like a fragile glass curtain, was that it slanted forward, slanted decisively away from the main body of the house, as if ready to tip you at any unwatchful moment out into the trees—or even all the way onto the driveway. Since there were no cupboards we made a knotted pine cabinet for the room, with its two front legs an inch or two longer than its back legs to keep it level; and when I tried to bake my favorite chocolate and cinnamon cake it came out of the slanting oven thin as a pancake at one end and fat and stickily undone at the other.
But during the big earthquake in the fall, only one glass broke, in spite of the slant and all of those precarious open shelves, because things shook the other way.
iii. What Love Was Like
The door stood as usual wide open one long golden evening not long after I moved into my enchanted treehouse, that rented half of the second floor of the huge ramshackle Victorian house once owned by the Stanfords, fled from my deadly colorless marriage and the tract home in south San Jose where I couldn’t write or read or leave doors crazily open. (I left my husband, I said, for those other men—the poets and philosophers and Italian composers.) I was in the tiny pitched kitchen, with matchstick blinds I’d put up on all four windows, sautéing shrimp and onions in olive oil to make the Spaghetti Bartolo whose recipe Marty and I cajoled from the little whitewashed trattoria on the harbor in Pantelleria, the Italian island of lava and capers just thirty miles from Africa, Tunis, where we’d rented a house above the harbor in September and watched children frying eggs on the pavement. A record borrowed from the Palo Alto public library, Verdi’s Ernani, maybe; Marty’s red-striped necktie flung over an antique doorknob in one of the more solid of my rooms. He (out of his own marriage by then, more or less) was at the wicker table surrounded by tiny old window panes drinking Brolio Chianti Classico Riserva from one of my grandmother’s crystal glasses, reading something to me, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” maybe, or an art review from the Wall Street Journal.
When I looked up from the steamy pasta kettle, in the inner house—where my piano lived—there had appeared out of nowhere the most astonishingly beautiful cat I’ve ever seen before or since, a fluffy pearl gray Himalaya. He looked at me with beautiful water green eyes, and calmly, like an Eastern sage, indicated that he belonged there: he had chosen us, come to grace us.
We checked his tags, and saw that, fatally, his name was T.S. Eliot.
That’s what love was like.
iv. Easter Eggs
Every year again, on Easter Sunday, the neighborhood children came in their new finery, flowered cotton dresses, ankle socks, and patent leather shoes, or little navy shorts and clean buttoned shirts, to hunt for Easter eggs in the huge, rambling yard across the street (Forest Avenue, broad as a boulevard), next door to the private nursing home where every morning the old man would come out bundled up and stand at the curb and holler at the street for maybe ten minutes, holler and holler, then go inside again. One by one, holding parents by one hand and little painted buckets or baskets by the other, they would come and lift the latch of the waist-high gate, vanish into the yard that was like an English cottage garden.
I always looked forward to that, to seeing all the uncomplicated little kids on Easter. I watched them from my front windows, from the inner more serious room where I had my piano and my long Monet water lily poster and my books, and thought about my own parents who once held me by the hand on Easter Sunday (though Easter, I told myself, had never been that big a deal with us), and might not get around to calling me today from Santa Fe, where they’d be having brunch with sourdough pancakes and champagne and lots of friends. I thought about Marty, who would of course not come today or any other holiday because he was with his own daughters, and the wife who somehow never quite seemed to become ex-.
Though it was usually blustery, with tatters of clouds catching in the treetops like torn kites, the sun usually came out at least long enough for the Easter egg hunt. I’d get something special for myself, to mark the holiday, and whatever champagne I could find in half bottles. The last year I was there I made asparagus frittata, and sliced early strawberries into Devon cream. By then I’d given up waiting for Marty. Sometimes, looking down at the street from my second story, I would see the top of Len’s head as he came out with the dog, Coco, singing one of his tuneless songs, or set out on his old orange bicycle for town to buy cigarettes even though it was Easter. Holidays didn’t mean a lot to him, either, though one year he gave me a card for my birthday. (“Oh. Gemini likes to be around people, you know…”)
And after awhile, when my champagne was gone, and most often the sun with it, into a kind of chilly grayness, I would see the little kids in their heartbreaking Easter clothes coming back out of the gate, with one parent or two, walking carefully, carefully, cradling their colored eggs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Once a New Mexico Young Poet of the Year in Santa Fe, Christie B. Cochrell now lives and writes by the ocean in Santa Cruz, California. Informed by extensive travel over the years, her writing has been venturing off into international journals (Belle Ombre, The Wild Word, Mediterranean Poetry), but she’s delighted to have it nesting nearer home, in Birdland Journal and The Catamaran Literary Reader.