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  CALIFORNIA

  The beauty of California is famous throughout the world. The sun shines almost every day. There are yellow and brown beaches where the glass-blue ocean shatters on the shore over and over and the sea-birds riot in the air above. The mountains are a gray spine shouldering through the center of the state, offering magnificent views. There is the dry, medicinal smell of eucalyptus and along the northern coast there are the great trees, large as cetaceans, with wood the color of bricks or blood and sharp needles all over to ward off predators. Scientists have recently discovered that these trees seem to be sending a gentle but persistent signal upward into the sky on a frequency that human beings can hardly detect even with our most advanced instruments, but what the signal says they cannot yet decipher.

  In spite of all this beauty, there is another, darker side to California that lurks beneath the pleasant surface and occasionally pushes its way up into the light. If you go to the border in the south you will see an example of what we are referring to. For many years, there was a fence that ran along the border to keep people from coming into the country to look for work without the proper papers or permission. A few years ago, this fence was taken down and an invisible, electric barrier erected in its place. If a person tries to cross the border, in spite of the many warnings posted in a multitude of languages, he now receives a huge electric shock, strong enough to send him sailing backward through the air onto his own side of the line. For a while after El Oscuro (as the barrier is known on the Mexican side) first went up, there were protests. People suffered damage to their nerves because of the strong current; some young children who could not read the warning signs were hurt. But instead of taking down the barrier, the government put up a loudspeaker system so that those too young or not fortunate enough to be able to read could be warned to keep away. Since then there have been fewer injuries and the protests have died down as people have become distracted by other things supposedly more pressing.

  We advise you to stay away from the border. Although it is not dangerous for you (you are not that kind of foreigner) the experience is upsetting and may ruin your impression of this otherwise bewitching place.

  After you have spent some time in California, you may feel you would like to stay forever. This is common among travelers from our country, where the weather is gloomy and cold and where, in the winter, it gets dark early in the afternoon. We arrive in California and are whirled around by the ubiquity of light, the trees that the sea wind has twisted into dark green candle flames, the way the ocean stretches out ahead of you as if it might go on forever. We feel elated, weightless and amazed. We feel that everyone we meet is someone we loved when we were very young and have not seen for years.

  This condition has come to be referred to as Golden Fever, and once it sets in it is difficult to shake. Our own researchers have sometimes fallen victim to it, and several of them have never returned home. To combat Golden Fever, there are now quite a few companies that make a business out of kidnapping foreign visitors whose families have become concerned about them. If your family hires one of these, masked men will come for you in the middle of the night and put a sack over your head, then drive you to the airport and put you on a plane that’s flying east. Unfortunately, this sudden departure can lead to withdrawal symptoms in certain travelers. In the back of the book, we provide a list of hospitals that can help you recover if you find yourself deprived of California and unable to cope emotionally with the shock.

  After several months of treatment, most of the afflicted are able to recover some sense of proportion and resume their ordinary lives. They will remember the feelings of mysterious elation they experienced as if they heard about them secondhand. Their memories of California will seem like photographs, static and arrested and somehow no longer their own. Eventually, they will be just the way they were before, as if they had never been away at all, except occasionally, when they will stare out the window at the heavy sky and early dark and start to cry.

  Even travelers from our country who are happy to be home may experience some strange emotions after they return. They may look around at our narrow streets and houses, our landscape that has been green and domesticated for a thousand years, or they may listen to the matter-of-fact way our people talk, their modest aspirations, their tendency to mock all that is too grand, and feel that there is something missing. This feeling will wear off after a while. For America, with all its beauty and variety, is wonderful to visit but not a place you’d really want to live. It lacks the substance and continuity of older, more established nations. Sometimes it seems to tremble like it might vanish at any moment; other times it seems like it is an imitation of a country, a set that will be taken down by a team of stagehands after you pass through it. After you have left, you may wonder whether it was real at all or just a trick of light and water, a mirage, a dream that you aren’t sure how to interpret. Was it good or bad or something else entirely? Most people who have been there find it is impossible to say for sure.

  Three Marriages

  1.

  Shortly after they moved from their own house in Darien, Connecticut, into a retirement home near Fort Myers, Florida, Lucinda announced that she didn’t want to be married anymore to Fred, her husband of fifty-nine years. When she told her children this, they were first horrified and then dismissive. She could not mean it, they said to her and to each other. She could not possibly be serious. They interpreted it as a sign that she was becoming senile, that her mind and judgment, which had until then remained very sharp, were becoming impaired. They took her to get tested for other signs of reduced cognitive functioning, but the doctors they spoke with found Lucinda to be lucid and competent, her memory of recent and distant events remarkably intact for someone of her age, which was eighty-three years old.

  “But what about this idea that she’s going to leave my father?” her son Harry asked the gerontologist who administered the battery of tests. “If that doesn’t count as crazy, I don’t know what does.”

  The doctor looked at him and shrugged.

  “I can’t comment on whether your mother is making a sensible choice in this matter,” he said. “But she is able to talk about her decision with perfect clarity. Being sane is in no way related to being wise.”

  “But what do you think we should do about it?” her elder daughter Karen asked.

  “There isn’t anything you can do,” the doctor said. “I suggest you take her home.”

  So they did and for a while they didn’t hear anything further about Lucinda’s plans to leave her husband. They decided among themselves that her desire must have been a passing fancy, a phase, a strange fit that she has gone through as a result of her recent move.

  But it was not. About a month later, with the reluctant help of her younger daughter Cynthia, Lucinda moved her belongings out of the apartment she and Fred shared in the Golden Years Retirement Community and got her own apartment in another, similar community nearby. She petitioned for a legal separation. She spoke to a lawyer about filing for divorce.

  Her children were furious with her. One after another they came to see her, her two daughters and one son, and they told her how angry her decision had made them, how selfish they thought she was being. How could she leave her husband now? Their father, they said, was old and not very well. He’d been through treatment for cancer a couple of years before, which no one thought he would survive. But he had survived it and recovered, although he never gained back all the strength he lost during his chemotherapy. Every day during that difficult time, Lucinda had gone with him to the hospital where he would be wheeled down the corridor by the same strong and friendly nurse with long blonde hair and peppermint-pink lipstick to the treatment room. Then Lucinda would wait while he was given the dose of chemicals and afterwards she would accompany him home. And in all that time she never faltered, never expressed impatience with him, was as steady and devoted as it is possible to be. When the doctor reported his tumor gone, she celebrated w
ith the whole family, and since then none of her friends or relatives had detected anything significantly wrong or altered between her and her husband. Why, then, was she leaving him now?

  Lucinda did not answer them, at least not in the way they wished to be answered. She merely said that it was what she wanted and she was sorry if it hurt them but she had to do what made her happy with what she had left of her own life. Then she smiled and changed the subject to something trivial and pleasant: the flowers she was planting in her window boxes, the outings she took with her friends to go shopping and to the movies. She seemed content.

  For his part, Fred was extremely upset and bewildered by Lucinda’s decision to leave; he could offer his children no insight at all into what had happened between him and their mother. After Lucinda moved out, he remained living in the apartment they had shared, surrounded by the belongings they had acquired through their long years together: the many souvenirs from their trips abroad, the photographs of their children, the gifts they’d been given by friends—a hundred daily reminders of his wife’s vanished presence. After his initial shock, he settled into a solitary routine; he would breakfast alone, then spend the morning reading the paper. Then he would go down and swim slowly up and down the pool in the recreation center until he was tired. Then he would have dinner with other people from the retirement community, friends, or sometimes one of his kids. He rarely had to dine alone. Occasionally he would run into his wife in one of the restaurants in the complex or in the community center where classes and lectures and musical events were held. The first few times this happened, she approached and asked him how he was. But since he either glared silently at her or stood up and walked away without a word, she soon stopped trying to be friendly and ignored him, too. This went on for several months. But one day, when he came back from supper, he found a note that had been slid under the door of his apartment. It said: Come and meet me by the lake. It was in Lucinda’s handwriting. He read it over, surprised, and decided to follow its directions. There was an ornamental lake on the grounds of the retirement complex and he put on his coat and went down in the elevator and walked over to it. He saw Lucinda waiting on a bench looking out over the smooth surface of the water. She was half-lit by the lamps that stood on posts alongside the footpath, and something about the way she was sitting made him remember how she had looked when they first met: tall and slender with an upright, formal posture and tidy movements and gestures. He came and sat beside her on the bench. Then he could see that her face was not the face of the young woman he remembered; it was lined, the skin delicate and fissured with veins. She turned to look at him.

  She said: “I found the letters.”

  For a moment he couldn’t think of what she meant.

  “What letters?” he asked. She didn’t reply. Then it came to him.

  When he’d been a young man, shortly after he was married, he had developed an infatuation for a woman at the insurance office where he worked. There had been letters exchanged, a brief affair conducted in hotel rooms around town, then contrition and a return to his marriage from which he had never strayed again. Shortly after the affair, his former mistress had moved to another state. Lucinda had never even suspected anything as far as he could tell, and he had not felt compelled to confess to her because the affair had never meant very much to him and was not a sign of any deep unhappiness at home so much as an accident of circumstance and immaturity—in other words, a mistake.

  But for some reason he had kept the letters. He did not know why, but he had kept them locked in the top drawer of the desk in his study through all his and Lucinda’s subsequent years together. And sometimes when they were fighting or when they were at odds with each other, he would go into his office and touch the handle of the drawer where the letters were and this would make him feel stronger, separate from his wife, a person with a secret. He felt the need to do this less and less as they aged, until he almost forgot about the letters altogether. Sometimes he would think of them and say to himself that he really should get rid of them, but he never got around to actually throwing them away; it just never seemed that important. In fact, the letters and the affair they chronicled seemed so insignificant that, when they moved the last time and he sold the desk, he had not felt it necessary to take any special steps to hide them. At their age, what did it matter? It was so long ago that he could not remember the woman’s face, only that she’d had dyed red hair and a birthmark down near her collarbone; sometimes he could not even recall her name right away. So he put the letters in a box along with other books and papers; he had not thought of them again until this minute.

  “Is that what this is all about?” he asked. “That’s ridiculous.”

  Lucinda shrugged. “I knew that would be what you’d say. I knew the children would say that too. That’s why I didn’t tell you until everything was arranged for us to separate.”

  Fred persisted: “But don’t you see? It doesn’t matter now—it didn’t even matter at the time. Why didn’t you tell me that was the problem? Are you really that angry at me for something that happened so long ago?” He paused from speaking and an idea came to him: “Are you angry with me because I didn’t tell you? Because I kept the secret all this time?” he asked.

  “No,” Lucinda said. “That isn’t it, either. I was unhappy to find that you’d had a love affair, of course. And I was also upset that you kept it secret for so long. But those things I could have forgiven, I think.

  “It was when I saw that you had stopped trying to hide the letters from me that I knew you no longer thought that I was a person capable of jealousy. You had stopped thinking about me as a woman and had begun to see me as just an old person who shouldn’t feel the same things as other people. If that is true then what is the point of being married?”

  “For companionship,” Fred said. “To keep us from being alone. Because it’s better than nothing.”

  Lucinda looked at him but didn’t answer. Then she stood up and smoothed down her skirt with both her hands. Without speaking another word, she turned away and walked along the lakeside path back toward the apartment building where she now lived and she did not turn around to look at him again.

  2.

  Karen and David were considered by their friends and families to be as close to a perfect couple as any of them had ever known. Both attractive but not so beautiful that it overwhelmed their other qualities, both clever but not unbalanced by a particular extraordinary talent or passionate calling, they met in college in New England, where they were students at a prestigious private school with a reputation for its programs in foreign languages and literature and for its proximity to wonderful ski resorts which the students often visited when they weren’t busy studying. They met in a class on Russian literature in translation. They dated during their final year as undergraduates and found that they had many things in common. They both liked hiking and tennis; they both had studied French and liked to travel. After they graduated they went together to do a year of social-service work in a school in rural Senegal, then moved to New York, where David began law school and Karen got a job in the editorial department of a women’s magazine. With help from their parents they bought an apartment in Manhattan. They married the fall that David took the bar and got his first job working for a big law firm headquartered in midtown.

  They lived like this for several years, David working at the law firm and Karen editing articles about interior design and fashion and women who ran nonprofit organizations in countries in the developing world. They had lots of friends in the city who had gone to the same college as them and whom they often met for drinks or dinner and with whom they went away for long weekends at the beach or up to Vermont to ski. They visited with Karen’s parents Lucinda and Fred at their house up in Connecticut often; David’s parents, who lived out in Colorado, did not like New York and did not come to visit much. David worked longer hours than he would have liked, and Karen felt from time to time that her job did not provide enough of
an intellectual challenge for her. But generally they considered themselves to be very happy. They talked in a noncommittal way about starting a family in a few years’ time.

  One day, Karen was at home in their apartment by herself. She was looking for a page she’d forgotten to bookmark on the browser of the computer in the second bedroom, which they used as a home office/exercise room when they didn’t have guests staying with them. The page she was looking for had the pattern for a sweater she was going to knit for David for his birthday and she couldn’t remember the name of the site where she had seen it. She was scrolling through the history file when she noticed an address that made her stop her search. The name in the URL was so strange and unexpected—www.pleasehitme.com—that she clicked on it before she thought about what she was doing. The screen winked and shifted and the site began to load, background first, then rows of images popping into view one after another.

  What she saw upset her right away. The page was filled with pictures of men and women, naked or nearly so, displaying various kinds of injuries on their faces and their bodies: black eyes, split and swollen lips, torn skin. Some of their injuries had obviously been inflicted by other human beings—bruises the size and shape of fingers, parallel gouges left by fingernails—while others were just maps of unexplained damage. Some of the men and women wore handcuffs or were tied with rope. But the pictures she found herself looking at most intently showed just expanses of blued and purpled flesh, lacerations and incisions in the smooth sheet of the skin, in which the faces of the subjects were not even visible, only the pale or dark angles of their bodies with their hair and creases, the shapes of the flesh and the bone beneath and the saturated colors of the wounds.