Wrack and Ruin Read online

  WRACK and RUIN

  ALSO BY Don Lee

  Country of Origin

  Yellow

  WRACK and RUIN

  A NOVEL

  Don Lee

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON

  Portions of this novel originally appeared in

  American Short Fiction and Narrative.

  Copyright © 2008 by Don Lee

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce

  selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Lee, Don, 1959–

  Wrack and ruin: a novel / Don Lee.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-11376-1

  1. Brothers—Fiction. 2. Sculptors—Fiction.

  3. Farmers—Fiction. 4. Motion picture producers

  and directors—Fiction. 5. California—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.E339W73 2008

  813'.54—dc22

  2007040464

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  for

  TERRY AND RICK

  WRACK and RUIN

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1

  ALL THROUGH THE END OF AUGUST, THINGS KEPT BREAKING DOWN on Lyndon. First the PTO on one of his tractors gave out—an expensive and untimely repair. Then his computer crashed and burned, his dishwasher died, he cracked a molar on a popcorn kernel, and he got flats on consecutive days, both times from shiny new truss nails, the barbed shanks sunk deep into the same front right tire, very mysterious, since he had not been anywhere near a construction site.

  Lyndon considered the string of breakages a sign, a harbinger of misfortune. His brother, Woody, after all, was coming to visit over Labor Day weekend—Woody, ever greedy and malevolent, sure to wreak some sort of havoc on Lyndon’s life. Despite all evidence to the contrary, their mother used to say that Woody, whatever his faults and transgressions, meant well. Maybe he couldn’t be trusted with the silverware, maybe he’d embezzle and lose his parents’ entire portfolio (which, Lyndon had to keep reminding his mother, was exactly what Woody had done), but at least he meant well, she always insisted. He didn’t mean well, Lyndon knew. Woody was a huckster, a misfit. He was a charlatan and a cheat. He was a liar. He was a thief. Until last summer, Lyndon had not talked to him for sixteen years.

  But Lyndon wasn’t focusing just yet on Woody, who wouldn’t be arriving until the end of the week. He was too tired, too beleaguered by the everyday preoccupations of running his Brussels sprouts farm and welding business. He ordered a new transmission for his tractor. He had the flats on his tire patched and drove all the way over the hill to San Vicente, hoping to rescue his hard drive. He got a temporary crown on his tooth. He decided he could live without a dishwasher for a while, but then—what in the world was going on here?—he developed a migraine, accompanied overnight by a searing, debilitating neck spasm.

  He could barely move, he was so paralyzed with pain. Multiple doses of ibuprofen provided no relief. Neither did a hot bath, stretching, ointment, or mentholated pads. What he really needed was a massage, which in Rosarita Bay presented a problem.

  When Lyndon had first moved to the town, it had been a sleepy little backwater with a population of ten thousand. Less than an hour south of San Francisco on the coast, Rosarita Bay had been isolated and quiet, with no industry to speak of, surrounded by rolling foothills and farmland. It had been the perfect place for Lyndon, who, at the time, with his money and fame, could have chosen to live anywhere in the world, and several factors had assured him that the area would remain remote and bucolic. The first was geography. There were only two roads into town, Highway 1 along the coast and Highway 71 over the peninsula mountains, both of them just two lanes and prone to landslides, the traffic murderous going to and from San Francisco and San Vicente. The second was the weather. Gray and dismal almost year-round. It rained unceasingly during the winter, spring was cold and windy, and fog shrouded the town during the entire summer, leaving just two barely tolerable months, September and October. The overriding factor, however, had been the town’s reputation as a developer’s graveyard. Nothing ever got built in Rosarita Bay. Backed by some of the most stringent zoning regulations in the country, it was the prototypical land of NIMBY (Not in My Backyard), BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), CAVE (Citizens Against Virtually Everything), NOPE (Not on Planet Earth), and NOTE (Not Over There Either). Of course, with no tax base, no commerce, no easy way to commute to jobs, businesses kept failing, people kept moving out, and Rosarita Bay fell into disrepair. This was an acceptable trade-off to a lot of residents, who weren’t so much environmentalists or conservationists but isolationists—independent spirits, loners, libertarians, iconoclasts, garden-variety curmudgeons, people such as Lyndon, who, on principle, did not like other people, regardless of whether they meant well or not. It was a wonderfully sad, forlorn, gone-to-seed town with gone-to-seed inhabitants, a good majority of whom, for one reason or another, preferred to be forgotten.

  But in the past few years, a group of new, younger residents had somehow managed to get themselves elected to the town’s governing council and planning, sewage, and water commissions, and things began to change. Subtly at first, then dramatically. A gated community of fancy homes sprang up one day. Hip coffeehouses and art galleries and restaurants started dotting Main Street. Near the Safeway a mile up Highway 1—heretofore the lone chain store permitted within town limits—a strip mall with, of all things, a McDonald’s emerged. Revitalization was now the call of the day, and developers and builders and realtors were appearing in droves. Most startlingly, a proposal that had been shot down time and time again for thirty years—a massive hotel and conference center and golf course along prime oceanfront—all of a sudden got the go-ahead. The only thing stalling the project, in fact, was Lyndon, whose twenty-acre Brussels sprouts farm sat smack between the parcels for the hotel and golf course, meaning he was being pestered incessantly by attorneys and various developer minions, offering him ever more ridiculous sums of money to vacate.

  All this growth and gentrification meant that Lyndon had a mystifying choice of remedies for his neck spasm. He could get reflexology, myofascial bodywork, or custom aromatherapy; he could get his body contoured and enlightened, detoxified and moisturized; he could get his polarity unblocked, his meridians balanced, his lymphatic fluids flowing; his life force could be integrated and viscerally manipulated; he could be empowered and stimulated and released with hot stones, seaweed wraps, salt scrubs, and parafango cellulite treatments; but he could not, apparently, get a simple old-fashioned massage wherein his muscles would be pounded and kneaded into submission.

  California. After all of these years living in California, Lyndon still harbored certain prejudices from his former life as a New York artist, with an attendant East Coast disdain for anything New Age or holistic. The closest thing to a real massage he could find in Rosarita Bay was shiatsu, a Japanese variant of acupressure, and even that didn’t look very promising, seeing the list of available “practitioners.” Not an Asian name among them. Lyndon Song
was half Korean American and half Chinese American, and although he didn’t subscribe to any Old Country notions, he still would have been more comfortable with a shiate—if there was such a word—who had at least a dollop of Oriental blood.

  The Coastside Institute of Shiatsu was a block off Main Street near the library, in a two-story house that had been divided into “medical” suites. Lyndon had called in advance for an appointment, but when he opened the door to the shiatsu institute, there was no one in the foyer. Though it was a bright day outside, the office was dim, the windows blocked off, lit by a few incandescent lamps. Music was playing—airy-fairy flutes and synthesizers and water effects. Beige linen curtains served as partitioning walls for the single large room, which was decorated here and there with the requisite shoji screens, bonsai trees, Japanese scrolls, and woodblock prints.

  Lyndon took a seat in a chair and flipped through a magazine, Massage & Bodywork, forced to hold the pages directly in front of his face since he couldn’t tilt his head. After five minutes, someone stepped from behind a curtain, and painfully he turned his body to look the person over. The woman wasn’t the tie-dye-and-braids, earth-mother flake he had expected. She was petite, late thirties, Latina, dressed in a well-tailored blouse and slacks and nylon stockings. He opened his mouth to introduce himself, but she abruptly swung her finger to her lips and shushed him.

  “Lyndon Song?” she whispered. She handed him a clipboard. “Could you fill this out? As completely as you can. I’ll be right with you.”

  It was a four-page personal and medical history questionnaire, which seemed a bit excessive for a massage. In short order, the woman returned, escorting a blond teenage girl out the door, and then she sat down in front of Lyndon, who was laboring to finish the questionnaire.

  “I’m Laura Díaz-McClatchey,” she said. “It’s your neck?”

  “I woke up with it. I think I slept on it funny.”

  “You don’t have to whisper anymore. Here, let me help you with that,” she said, taking the clipboard from him. “Has this happened before?”

  “Once last summer.”

  “You’re, let’s see, forty-three? And you’re a welder on a farm.”

  “They’re two separate jobs, farming and welding. I also fill in once in a while at the Oar House. As a bartender. I didn’t put that down.”

  “Is your life stressful?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Any old injuries? Were you an athlete?”

  “No.”

  “You look fit.”

  “I kayak. I run with my dog.” The latter wasn’t actually true anymore. He no longer ran the redwood trails every day, down to a two-mile jog on the beach every couple of weeks, and his dog no longer accompanied him. He didn’t know why he was lying. Perhaps because his vanity was being engaged, and he wasn’t above attending to his vanity. Despite her clipped, businesslike manner, Laura Díaz-McClatchey was undeniably attractive.

  “What kind of dog?” she asked.

  “Black Lab.”

  “I love Labs,” she said. “Injuries?”

  He was, in fact, falling apart in middle age: severely worn cartilage in both knees, the patellas floating on nothing, bursitis in his rotator cuff, a perpetually stiff lower back, a hip that clicked and hitched as if geared on an oblong.

  She noted what he was willing to reveal—the knees and rotator cuff—on the questionnaire. “How have you been sleeping?” she asked.

  “Okay. Once in a while I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep.”

  “Why is that? Are you thinking about things?”

  “I guess.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  This was like going to a shrink, Lyndon thought. What kinds of things? His life, money, weeds and aphids, sparks and puddles and slag, sex, his aloneness, cormorants and least terns, reality TV, blue elderberries and flannel bush and cellulose and lamina and the transparency of shed snakeskin, the fetch of wind swells, pecorino cheese, the cholo in the low-rider who had nodded and let him go through the intersection first, X-ray machines, global destruction. A few other things. Laura Díaz-McClatchey waited for an answer. Brown eyes, skin that didn’t need makeup. “I’m not sure,” Lyndon told her. “Just random thoughts.”

  “What about your digestion?”

  “What about it?”

  “How are your bowel movements?”

  He found the question highly invasive; this whole line of inquiry was far too hinky for his taste. “My bowel movements are fine.”

  She made another notation, raised her hand to scratch her nose, and said, “Song. Lyndon Song. I don’t know why, but your name’s very familiar to me. What about sexual activity?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you sexually active?”

  “Yes,” he said automatically, although it had been a while.

  “Married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Girlfriend? Or boyfriend?”

  He looked at her. “None at the moment,” he said, then realized this contradicted his answer about sexual activity.

  “Girl?” She paused. “Or boy?”

  She stared at him without a hint of mischief or irony. “I prefer women,” he said, unable to read her. Was she flirting with him? This had always been one of his acute failings: even when women were throwing themselves at him, he often wondered if they were interested in him at all.

  She nodded. “All righty. Shall we?”

  She had him take off his shoes and led him into one of the curtained areas with a tatami floor. She asked him to remove his belt and anything from his pockets and lie on his back on the thin white futon on the floor, and she left him to settle in. Usually he would have been mortified by the idea of a stranger touching him. He was in too much pain to care, however, and from his research on the Internet at the library, he knew that the massage would be with his clothes on, a deep-tissue treatment with Laura Díaz-McClatchey applying pressure with her thumbs and palms on his muscles and joints.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, again whispering, when she rejoined him in the room. “Beginning to relax? Let me put this eye pillow on you.”

  It was a tiny pillow, maybe filled with flaxseeds, smelling of lavender. It weighed next to nothing, but it sank pleasingly into his eye sockets, blocking out all light, and instantly soothed him.

  He sensed her kneeling down beside him. “I’m just going to take an assessment,” she said, and she laid her hands on his stomach, probing and almost shifting aside his liver, stomach, and intestines, a weird, disquieting sensation that startled him and made him feel vulnerable.

  “It’s just my neck that’s the problem,” he said.

  “It’s all connected,” she said. “Everyone assumes that things are isolated, but they’re not. Every part speaks to another. Did you eat recently?”

  “No.”

  “Hm,” she said, sounding concerned.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Shhh. Can you turn onto your side?” The little pillow slipped off his face. “Close your eyes,” she whispered. He lay on his side, and she positioned a large pillow under his knee as she gently angled his upper leg and straightened his arm. She placed her hands on his ribs and hip and pressed down with her body weight. She drew back momentarily, then pressed again.

  “You can go harder than that,” Lyndon said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t hold back. The harder, the better. I want the full treatment.”

  “I don’t know if you’re ready for the full treatment. It might scare you.”

  A strange thing to say, Lyndon thought. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Are you prepared for what might happen? People always think they’re prepared, but they seldom are. They just become overwhelmed.”

  A tad melodramatic? “I’ll be fine,” he told her. “Really.”

  “Breathe in, breathe out,” she said, and she pressed harder. He could hear her own breathing, inhaling and exha
ling deeply through her nostrils as she weighted and unweighted, and he found himself mimicking her, breath for breath. As she turned him onto his other side, he caught a faint scent, not lavender, but something else, feminine, sensuous, her shampoo, perhaps. Wait, was that…chocolate? No, it was ice cream. Chocolate ice cream. Did ice cream have a smell?

  “Breathe in, breathe out,” she said.

  She was strong, and she worked fluidly, moving to different parts of his body in a rhythmic, regimented sequence, his arms, his legs, flipping him to his stomach, then to his back again, pushing, pulling, stretching. It hurt at times, but he could feel his muscles loosening bit by bit. “Let it go. Relax,” she said. He gave in to her touch. Her hands were emanating a discernible heat. It had been a while since he had been touched like this, and for a second he felt himself getting an erection and worried he would embarrass them both—this was why he had worn briefs instead of boxers, afraid of exactly this sort of involuntary response—yet he managed to contain it, and he let his mind sag into an agreeable nothingness. Eventually she moved up to his shoulders, neck, and head. He rode the current of her warm hands, allowing his body to ebb and flow with her propulsions, losing time until she roughly grasped his ankles and lifted his legs high into the air in a wide circle. She set his legs down and tugged on the cuffs of his pants and said, “Don’t rush. Lie here till you’re ready.”

  When he collected his wallet and keys and watch, he was surprised to see that an hour had passed. He walked out to the foyer, where she was sitting at the desk.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “A little disoriented.”

  “You might feel achy later, but it’ll go away.”

  He wrote her a check, including a small tip.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Come back if you need to.”