“You’re in high school?”
“No, I’m in college.”
“At seventeen?” Clearly he thought she was lying.
“I skipped the third grade. I graduated high school just after I turned seventeen.” She could almost read the word “jailbait” in his expression.
The loudspeaker crackled on. “Attention, please, we are now arriving at the Avalon dock, Catalina Island. Make certain you have all your personal belongings. All passengers will disembark on the starboard side of the ship. For safety, please securely hold the hands of all young children as you leave.” The loudspeaker cut off.
She gave him a direct look. “Do you want to hold my hand securely as we disembark?”
He didn’t laugh.
“I guess my age killed your sense of humor.”
For just a moment she thought he wanted to say something kind to her, but a group of young kids scattered away from the nearby railing and jumped up and down, shouting, “We’re here! We’re here!”
“We’re here,” she said over their noisy little bouncing heads. The kids ran around them in rambunctious circles. She broke eye contact, and when she looked up again he was shaking his head.
“I’m sorry.” He walked away and never once looked back.
She stood there, empty, embarrassed, ashamed, and upset. Maybe because of him. Maybe because of her. Listlessly, she picked up her thick book with its conservative literary jacket and dark, unaffected type. The things you could hide … She slipped off the paper jacket. Hot pink lettering glared back at her from the real cover—The Adventurers, by Harold Robbins. She dropped the other jacket into a nearby trash can, tucked the book under an arm, and made her way toward the gangplank.
Behind the hills the sunset glowed pink, and a noisy hum came from the crowds. Pole lights lit the dock and shone down on the boarding ramp. Only a few hundred feet down the dock was Crescent Street and the heart of town. Local boys sold newspapers and, for fifty cents, offered to cart suitcases in red wagons to side-street hotels and cozy island inns. The crowd split around girls in white shorts and sandals who handed out flyers with discount coupons for abalone burgers, lobsters, and pitchers of draft beer at two for one.
But nowhere in that crowd below her did Laurel see a tall, handsome man in a lemon yellow shirt. He had disappeared as if he had never existed. And for her, he didn’t exist. Not really, because she didn’t even know his name.
Victor checked the clock on his desk, stood—his foot on a floor button that buzzed his secretary—and effectively brought the magazine interview to an end. The interviewer’s questions had just gone in a direction he disliked. “I have another appointment.”
“But I have more questions, Mr. Banning … Victor. It’s only five thirty. You know this is our cover story.”
Victor laughed at him. “I wouldn’t be talking to you if this weren’t your cover story.”
The door to his office swung open and his secretary recited, “The car’s waiting, Mr. Banning. You’re running late.”
The journalist still sat there, a tape recorder on the arm of the chair and a shiny Italian pen in hand. He wore a clipped beard and his dark curly hair in a ponytail, which fell halfway down the back of a five-hundred-dollar suit.
Victor came from behind his desk. “I see I’ve reduced you to silence, which is best. We don’t speak the same language, son.” He left the young man juggling his pad and recorder, stammering for him to wait, and headed down the hall toward his private elevator.
The article would label him a corporate villain. At his center he was a hardscrabble oilman born in a boom-or-bust era, and the polar opposite of a journalist out to cauterize enterprise and whose radical point of view smacked of being all too trendy. An ill-fitting sobriety emanated from men like him, a languidness in the face of the real and vital things that changed the world around them.
That reporter’s Berkeleyesque scorn was detectable even when cloaked by a professional voice. With high degrees from expensive schools, his kind persuaded courts to stop the building of freeways, put hundreds of people out of work, boondoggled, and stopped progress to save a damned frog. Victor could have respected them if they were actually doing it for the frog, but men like him were faux avant-garde—the ultimate luxury for those who already had everything.
Victor and men of his ilk made things better for everyone: gas stations with car washes and streets fitted with drains so they wouldn’t flood; tax dollars that fed the public schools and highways, and opportunity for golden equity in land and homes with values that rose monthly.
Later, at home, he took an overly long shower—an attempt to wash off the grit of an interview that implied what he had accomplished in his life was all wrong. His annoyance was difficult to shake off. The seeds of it stayed with him even as he traveled north along the 405, Harlan at the wheel of his Bentley.
In the distance, covered in a green veil of haze, were the rolling hills connecting San Pedro to Palos Verdes. Victor could remember those hills when they were just purple wildflowers, waist-high mustard, and a crumbling Spanish hacienda with its scattering of guest ranches, land deeded before California was ever a state. Now streets with expensive homes cut along those hillsides, looking as pronounced as veins on the arm of a growing economy.
It was change. It was good. So he told himself he didn’t mind articles written about men like him—a generation hungry for success and power, winners who carried with them accomplishment and the pride of building something out of nothing, instead of making a brouhaha out of nothing in order to sell magazines.
Lately he’d been the topic of too many articles, and the human interest ones made him clam up faster than today. Perhaps he was annoyed now because he’d had a touchy interview for Look six weeks ago. Newspapers and magazines sent women reporters for human interest stories, armed with his family history and seeking an angle that was lonely, silly, and romantic—something his life was anything but.
Victor had been married twice and in love only once. He’d worked most of his life, hardest when he had a wife and young son. Anna died with no warning, and he couldn’t remember crying for her, a woman forbidden to him whom he’d married after a long chase.
His son was a stranger, barely three when he buried Anna. Victor remembered thinking he had nothing in common with Rudy other than bone and blood and the same last name. His son cried every time Victor came home—took one look at him and ran away, disappearing for hours in some nook of the monstrous Pasadena house that belonged to his wife’s family.
The day Victor found his son cowering in Anna’s closet symbolized their dismal relationship: the father who had been locked in a closet and his son who sought refuge in one. It was a long time before Rudy could sit in the same room with him, longer still before he accepted that Victor was the man who fathered him.
Victor had spent his childhood fighting for acceptance. Not even for his son would he fight for acceptance again. Soon he recognized in his own son’s expression his father’s look of failure. He and Rudy were doomed from the start. The Banning curse had skipped a generation, and nothing Rudy ever did changed Victor’s opinion that he was a weak young man, destined for nothing. The only thing his son ever had the strength to do was walk away from Victor and stay away.
The second wife also walked away
