Ever After. William Wharton

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      I wanted to move out of Venice. Wills was starting to grow up and we were in the middle of a big drug scene. The clinic where people would stand outside in the morning to get their ‘meth’ was only a block from our house.

      Dad came up with the idea we might enjoy living in Idylwild. This is a place in the Los Angeles mountains above Palm Springs, more than a mile high. It’s well located for Danny’s ‘territory.’

      We all drove up there, and I loved it right away. We lucked out and found just the kind of house I always wanted. Dad had made money writing Birdy and lent us some so we could buy the place.

      Danny and I were getting along better. Wills loved it up there. There were rocks to climb, the smell of pines, snow in the winter, and beautiful, clear, star-filled nights. Blue jays and raccoons, pine cones and acorns were everywhere. Wills adored his little nursery school and I sometimes worked there. Danny didn’t have any more driving to do than he did in Venice. His territory was huge. Idylwild was in the middle of it. The only trouble was the long drive up through the hills. But he was terrific about it.

      Then, Danny was offered a chance to work for Honeywell Bull. Dad had helped Danny write his application and résumé, and we were happy because it was much more money, with better prospects, than selling steel. The trouble was we had to move to Phoenix, Arizona, where Danny was put into a training program.

      It meant selling the house of my dreams. In a certain way, that was when the dream really ended. We sold the Idylwild house for a profit, paid back Dad, and bought a place in Phoenix. It was a new house, sitting in a bare space surrounded by other houses just like it, without even a lawn. I couldn’t get accustomed to living in an oasis surrounded by desert. I’d never lived like that. I couldn’t believe it was me living in this house, with Danny off to work most of the time.

      I did everything I could to make it a real home but I hated to look out the windows. Everything was so barren. I’d been spoiled by Idylwild, and even by Venice, but especially by living with my parents in Europe most of my childhood. At least there was always something interesting to see. Here there was nothing. It was so hot. Practically no one walked in the streets.

      Wills started school, and I announced to Danny I wanted a divorce. There were no other men in my life but I knew there would be soon and I just wanted out. Danny was broken up about the whole thing and we were up night after night, talking it all over. God, it was hell. Looking back, I can see I must have seemed a real bitch to him. Maybe I was.

      Dad and Mom couldn’t understand at all. Dad sat down with me for a quiet talk the way he did when things seemed to be getting out of hand. Most of the time he kept out of my private life, wanting me to work things out for myself, but once in a while he couldn’t hold himself back. It was the same when I started smoking. Then, again, when I first started having sex. It was the same with drugs. He’d explain his ideas and it was hard to argue with him.

      On the smoking thing, he talked very quietly to me in my bedroom, first asking if I smoked. There was no lying about it. I smelled of cigarettes all the time, I was getting up to a pack a day, and the teachers had told Mom I was spending time between classes in the smoking area. He was quiet.

      ‘Listen, Kate. I know it’s your life, but in a certain way your life is ours, too. We’ve spent a hell of a lot of time and effort getting you this far along, clearing up diaper rashes, pumping your stomach out when you drank Chlorodane, getting you through fevers when the doctor thought you had polio, keeping you from being run over, nursing you through chicken-pox, measles, mumps; the whole thing. We fed you vitamins, made sure you had all the shots to keep you from getting the worst diseases. You know you never had any other milk to drink except your mother’s milk or goat’s milk until you were four years old. I pulled milk from the teats of our goats every morning and evening.

      ‘It really makes us unhappy seeing you do this to yourself. Do you know why you smoke?’

      God, he could be so hard and mean in his quiet, tension-filled voice. I promised I’d stop but I didn’t. He knew I wouldn’t but he’d done what he felt he had to do. That’s the way Dad is.

      Then, with sex, he told me to be careful for health reasons, make sure the guy wears a condom. But he had to go on.

      ‘More than anything else, Kate, sex is one of the greatest joys on earth, like Christmas. But it can be the same as having Christmas every day in the year if one becomes promiscuous. There won’t be any thrill left.’ He tried to talk to me about the difference between romance and sex, that when sex came in the door, too often romance went out the window, cornball things like that.

      I didn’t know what the word promiscuous meant. When I told some of my friends what he’d said, they thought it was cute, and awfully funny.

      With the drug thing, they were having a big crackdown at school: even the president of the Board of Trustees’ and the Headmaster’s kids got busted. Sometimes I think there was more pot than cigarettes in the smoking area. This was the early seventies and we were all trying to catch up to the sixties. Dad cornered me in my room again. He pulled out a small bottle with about three ounces in it.

      ‘Look, Kate, do you know what this is?’

      He didn’t wait for me to answer.

      ‘It’s Mexican golden, some of the best pot you’ll find. A friend of mine sold it to me. He was going back to America and was afraid of customs.

      ‘This bottle will always be on the top shelf in my closet in the bedroom. Any time you want to smoke, take some, but only smoke it in the apartment here, and with none of your friends around.

      ‘The French are very tough on this stuff. If you get caught, since I’m not with a big company, we’ll all have to leave France in forty-eight hours. I really don’t want to do that. We like it here. You have to think about our lives, too.’

      He considered pot, and all other drugs, a cheap shot at what can be earned the hard, real way by personal creative activity. He was convinced it stopped people, chemically, from making the tremendous effort to get a personal ‘high’ based on their own capacities.

      ‘You see, Kate, when I was an art student at UCLA, I read Huxley’s Doors of Perception and was deeply impressed. I volunteered to participate in some experiments on LSD 25. That’s what they called acid back then. They wanted artists, and paid us thirty-five dollars a day to be guinea-pigs. I did it twice. They injected the stuff into my arm. After about five minutes, I became aware of the clothes on my body. It was really erotic. I could hear the clinking of neon lights, and was fascinated by the shadow of a typewriter being used by a secretary across the room.

      ‘They took me to the LA County Museum where they asked me to describe the paintings. The colors seemed phosphorescent and in different layers. On the way back to the university in the car, driven by the experimenters, I was suddenly on the edge of a bad trip and curled up on the seat.

      ‘The cars out the window seemed to be getting bigger and smaller. It was only normal perspective changes but my mind wasn’t up to that kind of rational realization.

      ‘I went back one more time when they wanted me to try painting after the injection. I thought I was painting the most beautiful painting in the world and was so happy I cried.

      ‘But after they’d cooled me off in a dim room for a few hours, I came out to look at the painting I’d done and it was just paints smeared together into a uniform brown, the kind of thing an untalented kindergartener might do.

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