of what The Club had in store for them. I was unusually eager to get back.
I was finding the vacations harder and harder for some reason, the days in the outside world curiously unreal. And the visit with my family in Berkeley had been unbearable, as I avoided the same old questions about what I did and where I lived most of the year. 'Why is it such a secret, for the love of heaven? Where do you go?' There were moments at the table when I absolutely could not hear anything my father was saying, just see his lips moving, and when he asked me a question I had to make up something about having a headache, feeling sick because I'd lost the thread. The best times oddly enough were those I hated when I was a little girl: the two of us walking around the block together, uphill and downhill in the early evening, and him saying his rosary, and the night sounds of the Berkeley hills all around us, and not a word said. I didn't feel miserable during those walks as I had when I was little, only quiet as he was quiet, and inexplicably sad. One night I drove into San Francisco with my sister and we had dinner alone together at a glossy little North Beach place called Saint Pierre. There was a man standing at the bar who kept looking at me, the classically handsome young lawyer type wearing a white cable-knit sweater under his gray houndstooth jacket, hair cut full to look windblown, mouth ready to smile.
Just the sort I always avoided in the past, no matter how beautiful the mouth, how brilliant the expression. My sister said, 'Don't look now, but he's eating you alive.' And I had the strongest desire to get up, go to the bar and start talking to him, give my sister the car keys, and tell her I'd see her the next day. Why can't I do that, I kept thinking? Just talk to him? After all, he was with a couple and he obviously didn't have a date. What would that have been like, vanilla sex as they call it, in some little hotel room hanging over the Pacific with this wonderfully wholesome Mr. Straight who never dreamed he was sleeping with Miss Lace 'n' Leather from the grandest exotic sex club in the world? Maybe we'd even go to his apartment, some little place full of hardwood and mirrors with a bay view. He'd put on Miles Davis, and together we'd cook dinner in a wok. Something wrong with your head, Lisa. Your stock and trade is fantasies, but not fantasies like that. Get out of California right away.
But the usual distractions hadn't done much for me afterwards, though I'd raided Rodeo Drive for a new wardrobe, spent a whirlwind afternoon at Sakowitz in Dallas, gone on to New York to see Cats and My One and Only, and a couple of Off-Broadway shows that were great. I'd haunted the museums, been to the Met twice, seen the ballet everywhere I could catch it, and bought books, lots of books, and films on disc to last me the next twelve months. All of that should have been fun.
I'd made more money at twenty-seven than I'd ever dreamed I'd make in a lifetime. Now and then I'd try to remember what it was like when I wanted all those gold-covered lipsticks in Bill's Drugstore on Shattuck Avenue, and only had a quarter for a pack of gum. But the spending didn't mean very much. It had left me exhausted, on edge. Except for a very few moments, sort of bittersweet moments, when the dancing and music in New York had been utterly exalting, I'd been listening to this inner voice that kept saying: Go home, go back to The Club. Because if you don't turn around right now and go back, it might not be there anymore. And everything you see in front of you is unreal.
Odd feeling. A sense of the absurd as the French philosophers call it, making me so pervasively uncomfortable that I felt like I couldn't find a place just to take a deep breath. In the beginning I had always needed the vacations, needed to walk through normal streets. So why the anxiety this time, the impatience, the feeling of being dangerous to the peace of those I loved? I had ended up the vacation finally watching the same video