Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

(…continued from Part 1…)

You really haven’t heard from her?

Alice’s disbelief was understandable.

Our quartet was Elin, me, and our longtime friends Simon and Zander. The last time Alice saw us we were likely all heads down, noses in books, or playing pinochle across a picnic table in the quad. She would never have seen one of us without the others. We were the Gang of Four, a diminutive Academy of Arts and Sciences, each of us wildly independent, each with complementary strengths and weaknesses. Alice, like everyone else, saw the four of us as a unit, but from the inside, we knew that we were all as different from each other as the homes in which we lived.

My family was as white-bread as they came. We lived in a large boxy house my father had designed: a 1970s mélange of Better Homes and Gardens tradition mixed with Sunset Magazine experimentation. From its raked roof to its slanted outer wall, it was unusual without being outlandish. But it had a secret; though it looked fine from the outside, a series of mishaps and misunderstandings between my father and the contractors had left the inside a little off, a little awkward. The landing of the main stairs was four feet from where it should have been. The foundation was dug five feet too deep, so our view of the bay could only be seen through a snarl of telephone wires. The front half of the house was eighteen inches lower than the back half, necessitating the introduction of small, unexpected, three-step staircases between rooms.

Likewise, our family—though constructed of Dad, Mom, four kids, dog; all the standard parts of the 1970s model—appeared different from within than from without. On the placid surface we were happy, normal, and well-adjusted, but underneath we roiled and boiled with what we all would later learn to call “dysfunction.” We didn’t talk about my mother, who had died when I was young, for fear of insulting my stepmother. We did not discuss my father’s difficult youth or indeed much of anything about our ethnic Italian heritage. As the kid in the middle, I was caught between a dead past and a living present, trying to honor one while pleasing the other, but the only thing that really worked was to avoid notice altogether, which distressed me. I did not want to be unnoticed. I wanted to be distinctive. I wanted to be fascinating.

I wanted to be memorable.

My parents discouraged this with small, subtle directions. Don’t be arrogant. Don’t be obvious or proud. Remember that there’s always someone better, smarter, richer than you. It’s all right to shine, as long as you do so quietly, and none too brightly. And preferably in a small corner, where you won’t attract attention.

I learned to please. I turned my musical ability away from excellence and instead picked up whatever instrument my teachers needed. I started with violin, then taught myself bass guitar to help the jazz ensemble, learned tuba to fill the empty spot in band, and eventually settled on viola because as every high school music teacher knows, you can never have enough violas. I turned my hunger for self-expression into writing, read pithy, social fiction, and wrote dense, verb-filled essays. I won prizes for my poetry and awards for my writing, but never top prize, never the highest award. I learned to achieve without standing out.

I learned to be invisible.

Simon was not invisible, though he wanted to be. A violinist, Simon was my stand partner for many years, but he was also Jewish and therefore (by our community’s waspish standards) exotic. With curly hair and sleepy eyes, he came from a quirky family—mother, father, siblings, two dogs, and an indeterminate number of cats—that lived in a dusty, bleary-paned house hanging on a hillside amid a eucalyptus grove. The trees were nature imitating Simon’s family, always shedding outer layers of bark in search for their essential, inner truth.

There was nothing about Simon’s home life that I did not find fascinating. His parents limited the kids’ television viewing to a few hours a week, enforcing it by installing European-style outlets and hiding the adaptors. His family bickered and laughed and shouted at each other from one end of the house to the other, and I wanted nothing so much as to be one of them.

My family’s early traditions were agnostic followed by a pogrom of Roman Catholicism that never really “took” with us kids. I believed in God, but the stuffy, wool-suited Sunday gatherings seemed more a garbled, poorly choreographed line dance with bad music than any real celebration of life. By comparison, Simon’s religious life was vivacious. I attended services at his synagogue and loved the cantor’s voice, the bright colors of the congregants’ clothes, and the exuberance of the songs. Over the years of our friendship, Simon and I would speak the same words at the same time, finish other people’s sentences with the same thought. I knew his heart like I knew my own, and I was sure that, if only I could be bar mitzvahed, my life would become the predictable, joyous, desirable thing I believed it should be.

Where Simon was heart, Zander was brain. The product of what the ‘70s still called a “broken” home, my friendship with Zander was marked by empty weekends as he shuttled between mother and father. Zander’s father was the first gay man I ever met, but I met him only once, as Zander built a wall of silence around his father that kept the rest of us out. He did not build it out of shame, though. Rather, he adored his father, was profoundly possessive of their time together, and refused to share him with anyone.

Zander’s intellect resembled his home: a large, rambling, dark-shingled, fin de siècle craftsman surrounded by towering horse-chestnut trees. Conversations with him never kept on course. They rambled beatifically from room to room, wandering the halls, pulling books off shelves in search of a substantiating fact, taking a turn into the kitchen for a snack or running outside for a game of Kick the Can. In every room there was a knickknack, some remembrance of a different time, a different place. A camel saddle. Leather from an elephant’s ear. A sabre of Toledo steel. A brocade tapestry woven with thread-of-gold. Zander could read a book in an afternoon and tell you everything about it over dinner. He could explain the smallest particles of matter yet known to the mind of Man and discuss with ease the nature of the cosmos.

But he was entirely incapable of telling you how he felt. About anything. Such was his curse.

If Elin had a curse, it was her name. As long as I had known her, teachers mispronounced it, calling her “Eland.” It was an easy trip of the tongue, especially in those days when unusual names were still…unusual. But, even though “Elin” and “eland” are relatively homonymous, it betokened a certain disrespect to turn and essentially label her “a large African antelope.” If she really had short, twisted horns, I know of at least one English don who would have been gored.

As for her home, she lived in a small, clapboard-sided, post-war house with her mother and brother. There were no pictures in the home. There was no banter between the relations. There was also never a mention of a Mr. Abington (though that fact didn’t strike me as odd until many years later.) Had Mr. Abington left? Had he died? We never knew nor did we three boys ever think to ask. It was just the way things were: Mrs. Abington, Elin, and the oft-absent Nils, all snug in their small, plushly upholstered home on a quiet, sunny back street, all without history, seemingly without ancestry, as if they had simply appeared, dropped from the sky the day before we all met.

That was us. Four different kids, drawn together by our distinctive natures, our feelings of isolation, and the overlapping leaves of our intersecting passions.

Simon, Zander, and I were a trio of back-road travelers who had forged our bonds on hundred-mile bike tours up and down the long, winding highways of the California coast. A different trio was formed by Elin’s French horn, Simon’s violin, and my viola, tempered by the pressure of rehearsals, performances, and shared stage-fright. Simon and Zander were the gods of science. Zander and I played in dramatics. Elin was the political beast of our group, keeping our social conscience aware and well-informed. She was also our goddess, adored and desired but pristine and inviolate. We joked about it over partnered pinochle, over smoked joints, during rehearsals, and in class, but we three boys—shame us or laud us—never acted on our carnal urges. Personally, I felt I would probably catch flame if ever I tried.

Together, we passed through our high school years, breezing through our specialties and slogging through the rest. It was in many ways a blissful time for me, happy in the company of three dear friends who I was sure would be with me for the rest of time. And why wouldn’t they be? My formative years were peopled with televised examples of friends who stayed friends forever. Dick and Laura had Jerry and Millie. Ralph and Alice had Ed and Trixie. We might fight and argue, but in the end we four would remain close, bound by shared history, held together by love.

Then, one February, with graduation on the horizon, the foursome fractured.

One day she was there…

(…continued in Part 3…)