Early Warning

The teachers and his fellow students always smiled after he told them where he’d done his undergraduate work. Henry knew what they were thinking: wasn’t it a relief to be here, in Berkeley, the promised land? He even had one teacher who spoke more slowly and clearly to him than to the other students — Professor Pradet, a man who had never heard of “Iowa.” And when he did well in Old English, that teacher always gave him extra praise, as if he were consistently exceeding expectations. In that class, two students had come from Harvard and one from Stanford; the only public-university graduate was from UCLA. In his Chaucer seminar, there was another outcast, Pat Clayton from Ohio State. But Pat wore the same clothes every day, was about to become a father, and talked only about rents, food prices, and the scarcity of jobs in medieval lit. Henry had nothing in common with him, either.

It didn’t help that, before Christmas, Rosa embarked upon a highly volatile romance with an older man (well, he was almost thirty to her twenty-two), named Neal Cassady, who was very handsome but also the sort of person whose life was a performance — or, you might say, a mess, Henry thought. Aunt Eloise disapproved, too, which may or may not have egged Rosa on. Henry said a small thing (“I see what you see in him, but what do you see in him?”) in an almost sincerely inquisitive tone of voice. Rosa slammed down the phone and didn’t speak to him for a month. Then Cassady went back to his wife, and Rosa called Henry to insist that Neal Cassady was nothing like her father, and if Heloise said one more Freudian word, Rosa would wring her neck. When Henry said, “That’s very Greek of you” (he was thinking of Electra, Orestes, etc.), she suddenly laughed, and then started crying and asked if he would go away for the weekend with her, because she couldn’t “stand it anymore.” He made himself pause as if hesitating before saying yes.

He thought he accepted that he and Rosa were not going to advance their own relationship past the epistolary stage. He had accepted that they were cousins, that there was scandal awaiting them if they went any further, and he had decided to see it as his particular fate that he should fall hopelessly in love with his cousin (but there was plenty of precedent in Romance literature for forbidden love, and maybe it was the least inconvenient kind). Once he moved from Iowa to California to be in the same city as Rosa, and had even moved to Rosa’s neighborhood, off Shattuck, he was forced to admit that she was hot-tempered, selfish, and not terribly neat. But he loved her even more, and could not sincerely turn down a chance to be with her. She said she would pick him up in twenty minutes.

Rosa was driving Eloise’s car, a gray Deux Chevaux that normally she laughed at. Henry had expected Rosa to look rumpled and distraught, but she looked normal. She leaned over to give him a peck on the cheek and peeled away from the curb, then zipped to Telegraph Avenue. When they turned south on Route 27, he remembered to ask where they were going. She said, “Carmel.” Henry perked up. Maybe his hatred of Berkeley was specific. California was as big as France, and, everyone said, as various. It was his own fault that he had not even gotten on a bus or a train and gone somewhere.

And, sure enough, soon he observed that the lie of the land south of the Peninsula was different from San Francisco, and the weather was warmer, too, brighter and drier. Beyond that, though, he could take no interest in the local language, history, geology, or products — he only had eyes for Rosa. The more normal she seemed (Did she usually smoke three cigarettes in an hour, or was he only noticing that now? Was she looking thinner? When he said something about Francis Drake repairing his ships in California, was she making a face?), the more he focused only on her. They walked Carmel Beach, a flat, golden expanse at the foot of a pleasant, clean town that was much more Spanish-looking than San Francisco; he stared so deeply into her face that he fell into a hole some child or dog had dug in the sand, and went to his knees. Rosa laughed for the first time in hours as she held out her hand to him. Maybe he was good for something, then, he thought.

She had money. They ate sole caught nearby for supper and went to a movie in downtown Monterey. Henry watched Rosa’s profile as she gazed at the screen. She seemed to follow the plot, but Henry only noticed that it was about Grace Kelly somewhere in South America.