Red Admirable

I was at a deafening party last night with a lot of people who either lived in or were intimately connected to Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties.

Jeanne Moreau

Before we sat down to dinner, I hadn’t registered the extent of the wildfires there except to glare at a Red Cross volunteer who’d asked me for money on the corner of 116th and Broadway and feel momentarily startled that the Times webpage was leading with one of its “blogs” instead of a published story.

from “Jules et Jim” (François Truffant, 1962)

No one at the dinner table had much to say to each other, but I knew that one of my young companions had just flown in from the West Coast, so I finished my glass of Chardonnay and decided to go for it.

I yelped “Jasper!” across the table and over the din and tried to smile in a way that was endearing rather than insufferable.

“Were you evacuated?”

His father, who was sitting next to me and really in a superb position to come down firmly on the “insufferable” side of my personal binary, turned his head toward mine in mock confidence and stage whispered, “Jasper lives with his mother, step-dad, and step-siblings in Malibu. He was not evacuated, but they were.”

Every time Jasper’s father said his son’s name it lasted for several beats and I got the impression I was supposed to be blushing.

Moreau, Henri Serre and Oskar Werner in “Jules et Jim”

Rather than blush, I looked away and realized Jasper was excited. He seemed to be telling a story.

“There’s a system, where at the bottom of the pool there’s a drain, and the drain connects to sprinklers in the front yard.”

No one was really getting how lawn maintenance was relevant except for my mother, who had apparently been listening from the beginning. I think she was annoyed when she had to explain “the fire! It came within ten feet of the house! That’s how they were saved! Those sprinklers!” Jasper looked gratified.

My mother turned to my end of the table and suddenly looked flirty. Flirty is my absolute favorite way for my mother to look; it happens about once a year for approximately eight minutes straight. “I heard,” she was looking at me and Jasper’s dad, who had continued to play a coquette, too, “I heard that some people were not following the evacuation orders.”

This made no sense to me. “People never follow the evacuation orders,” I said. “Remember New Orleans?”

We all did remember New Orleans, but the evening was growing woozier, and it became clear that we didn’t really remember any of the Katrina non-evacuations from the time they were happening. We had just folded their reality in with the larger hurricane narrative of class, race, or bureaucratic ineptitude, whichever was most appealing. These small imagistic facts are like the pull-quotes of our linear national narrative, and have been disembodied from the chaos of lived experience.

—

On the morning of September 11th I was in Mr. Cotter’s AP U.S. History class when Mrs. Schmaus, a pastel sphere of a woman four feet around, slammed open the door and said “they flew a plane into the World Trade Center.” No one said anything. Mrs. Schmaus was gross. Also racist. “And guess!” she was already triumphant, “who they think did it!”

Everyone in the class refused to guess, and Mr. Cotter shooed Mrs. Schmaus out. Nevertheless, the next period, during studio art, Sarah, Sam, Anna, Danny and I left class to drive up to the top of our town, the South Mountain Reservation on the eastern tip of the Watchung Range (everyone doesn’t know that is what it’s called) to watch the buildings. We saw things fall and we tasted smoke, but I’m not sure anymore which memories belong to me and which belong to a CNN newsreel loop.

What I do have that is mine is the third class period of that morning, where I was student teaching a freshman World History course. The actual teacher, the football coach, had sounded like he was choking as he told me I had to stay with the kids while he made some phone calls. His brother worked at the south tower.

Later that night, Ryan Plunkett and I drove back to his house after a long afternoon of smoking joints and painting in our friend’s garage. His father was lying in the hammock in their backyard. We walked over, and he stood up. He said “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

We all stood there, looking up at the smoke, and I remember feeling confused, because whatever was happening seemed like it already had.

—

All of my other memories from September 11th have been scalped from news footage, paranoid left-wing broadsides and low-budget documentaries. I know that Hurricane Katrina happened because I saw all of Spike Lee’s documentary on it, and he gave Wynton Marsalis a lot of airtime. All I’ll probably ever know about the fires in California is that one family’s pool was drained to save its mansion. Images endure.

As I was leaving the party with my family, Hannah saw something and started giggling. I looked. Jasper’s father was blowing me kisses.I squinted at him for a second, and then decided it wouldn’t hurt to blow a kiss back. I tried to make it a reluctant kiss.

He walked over.

“Maybe I’ll see you at Oren’s. How often do you go to Oren’s?”

“What?” I said.

Oren’s is a coffee shop very near my school. It is only slightly less near Jasper’s father’s house.

“How often do you go there?”

I looked at him. “I hardly ever go to Oren’s.”

“Me either.” We nodded at each other and everyone said goodnight.

Moreau, Serre, Werner.