“He continued to grow through his twenties, when most people have stopped growing,” she said. “I saw it.”
Of course the parts did not go together. He was rich but had holes in his jeans; he was successful but hardly talked; his figure was graceful, elegant, but he was clumsy and awkward; he was famous but seemed bereft and alone; he invented a computer and named it after me but didn’t seem to notice me, and didn’t mention it. Still, I could see how all these contrasting qualities could be an attribute, spun in a certain way.
“I heard when it gets a scratch, he buys a new one,” I overheard my mother say to Ron.
“A new what?” I asked.
“Porsche.”
“Couldn’t he just paint over the scratch?” I asked.
“Car paint doesn’t work like that,” Ron said. “You can’t just paint over black with black; it wouldn’t blend. There are thousands of different blacks. They’d have to repaint the whole thing.”
The next time he came over, I wondered if it was the same car he’d been driving the last time, or if it was a new one that just looked the same.
One day he came over and brought someone with him. She was petite and pretty, wore jeans, had red hair that fell in a line below her jaw, large dark-blue eyes, and a wide mouth that took over her face in a pleasing way when she smiled.
“This is my sister,” he said. She was an author, Mona Simpson. After giving my father up for adoption, his biological parents got married, had a daughter a few years later, and kept her. She and my father were soon close, kindred spirits, alike even though they’d just met. She had just published her first novel, Anywhere but Here, a book that would be on the bestseller list for many weeks and would become a movie starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. I read it when I was twelve: it was brilliant. Steve and Mona looked different—tall and petite, dark and light, man and woman—you couldn’t tell they were brother and sister until they both smiled and their faces opened and folded in the same way. They had similar lips, and wide teeth.
That my father’s sister happened to be named Mona struck me as a great coincidence. What were the chances that she would have a name that went so well with mine as to form, in combination, the name of the most famous painting in the world?
They’d both been successful on their own, neither knowing of the other’s existence. They shared an aesthetic sensibility, my father buying expensive lamps, carpets, and books while Mona patrolled flea markets for vintage mercury bulbs, wooden figures, magnolia-patterned plates, glasses with a stripe of silver painted on the rim.
Later, it was Mona who insisted that he rent us a nicer house than our tiny one on Melville; who insisted that he re-carpet and paint the small apartment within the Woodside house where he slept and I slept when I stayed with him, and that he change my bedroom from the one with the red shag rug, which required me to walk through his room to get to the bathroom, to one beside the bathroom. She who bought me a bed, and later argued that he should buy my mother and me a house. She was supportive of my mother’s artwork and took intense interest in the details of my life in a way that seemed to elevate them. When Mona visited, she brought with her excitement about food, jewelry, clothing. She would find the good restaurants, the places that served the best pie. She wore the same pair of earrings, always, that looked like a long drip of gold on each ear, the front and back sides hitting below her jawline.
Mona had also grown up with a single mother, after her father left. It seemed to me that her mother was unhinged, from stories I insisted she tell me later—one Christmas her mother had bought gifts for her boyfriend’s children but not for Mona; once she’d made her order the steak at a restaurant when they didn’t have the money for it. Mona’s stories gave me a thrill like looking down a steep cliff face, close to danger but safe at the same time. Mona took an interest in me: she noticed and commented on my tastes, judged me wise, gave me a first gift, the Arabian Nights.
Mona gazed at me as if she was particularly interested in my face; she watched me sometimes even when she was conversing with the adults. At a restaurant, I doodled on a paper placemat and she pronounced it great, took it, framed it, and put it up in her apartment in New York.
I would grow to be the same height as Mona, and also petite; I would also study English literature in college, and write.
One year she wrote me long letters every week on thick paper in sepia ink. She gave me adult gifts: silver pointed dangly earrings, a set of collected Chekhov stories in pastel-colored paperbacks, a gold Tiffany ring with an amethyst eye.
These gifts were windows into a more sophisticated world to which I hoped I’d belong, later. She had survived her own childhood, and now was successful; the gifts were proof of that.
When I was a senior in high school, she would publish a new book. Before it was published, she sent me the bound galleys and asked me what I thought of the novel, if there was anything I would change. I was honored, but when I started reading I was surprised to find characters like my father, my mother, and myself in the pages. My character was named Jane. I’d had no idea she was writing about us. Mona had collected details of my life and put them into her book—an antique Chinese enameled pillbox she bought for me, with chrysanthemums and multicolored birds painted on a blue background. Other parts were made up—it was fiction—and the combination was confusing. At first I’d felt hurt to find my things on the pages, as if she’d taken the gifts back. Still, when I read Mona’s books, they made me want to write my own sentences.
“People write about family in fictional form,” she said. “Fiction writers use details from life.” We were at Caffe Verona, where we’d gone to talk about it. When she’d learned I was upset after reading the galleys, she flew to Palo Alto the next day from where she lived in Los Angeles to talk with me.
“It’s just what writers do. I didn’t mean to upset you. Not at all.”
Reading her book, I felt there would be nothing left for me to write about. I felt emptied out. Jane didn’t like sushi because it felt like a tongue on her tongue. The details she described made me disconsolate, as if, having described them so well, they belonged to her now, not to me.
“Why didn’t you tell me right after you read it?” she asked. “I would have changed it, or waited, or even not published at all.” But at eighteen, the idea that I could have told her what to do with her work had not felt possible.
Now the book was almost on the shelves.
Also, after reading half the book, I’d stopped. I didn’t even know what happened with my character in the end.
“You haven’t finished?” she asked. “You’ll like it, what happens to Jane.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Perhaps you’ll mention my book in your book someday,” she said, surprising me with the idea that one book might refer to another like Russian dolls; and that there might be room for more than one book about the same people, and the same time.
In the end Jane is wearing a school uniform and she rushes into a classroom with the other children. She finally belongs.
Ron thought my private school was elitist and lacked academic rigor, and he managed to convince my mother, too, so we moved house in order to be in the Palo Alto School District so I could attend public school.