In LA
Colm Tóibín
It was all sweetness verging on smugness. On the evening of Monday, 6 January we sat in the hot tub in the backyard and looked at the unfull moon. There were really only two small questions preoccupying me. Was that star actually Venus? And, also, was I wrong to feel slightly sad that the Christmas tree had finally been disentangled from its ornaments and was going into the garbage?
In the night I noticed something banging in the wind, a door maybe, or a loose piece of fencing. The next morning was a bit windy. When I got an email from Ireland asking if the fires were near us – we are in Highland Park, near Pasadena in east LA – I replied that Pacific Palisades was an hour away even when the traffic was good. After lunch, as the wind died down, we went and played tennis.
I realised that, since the death last year of the literary critic Marjorie Perloff, a long-time resident of Pacific Palisades, I knew no one at all who lived in the Palisades. Of course I knew the Mann house – the house Thomas Mann built in 1942 and inhabited until he left America a decade later – and had stayed there a few years ago. The house has been bought and refurbished by the German state.
When, in the late 1980s, the Germans acquired the nearby Villa Aurora, the house of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, they did not plan to restore the swimming pool. It was believed that the German taxpayer would not smile on funding a pool. Thus, the excuse for the pool in the Mann house had to be that it would be useful if ever there was a fire. The Germans agreed to that. As I write this, the Thomas Mann house remains undamaged; Villa Aurora has suffered partial damage.
On Tuesday, 7 January Gary Indiana’s personal library arrived in LA from New York. Gary died in his apartment in the East Village in New York on 23 October. His books had been three-deep on his shelves. It was decided to take his library to Altadena, to a place that was to be used as a residence for artists. It would be the core library for the house. The books were put into boxes, carried down six floors to the street in the East Village and then taken across America.
When we came back from tennis at around 4.30 p.m. that Tuesday the wind was up. By the time it was fully dark, the wind was howling. I had never heard a wind like it before. As each big gust came whistling around the house it seemed natural that it would die down for a second, but instead it built up even more, and then more again.
In the spring, when it rained, I thought the rain was good. But it isn’t good. Rain is only good when you need it. In the spring, the rain makes the scrub and the brush grow stronger so when they get dry later in the year they are liable to burn more strongly.
On Tuesday evening, houses in Altadena, a more varied community than Pacific Palisades, a place where many artists and writers live, began to burn, including the house of a close friend. For the fire to come down to Highland Park from Altadena, it would have to cross the 134, which leads to the 210. There was no sign on Tuesday night that it was doing so, but the area where the fire was raging was not that far from here. I would think nothing of going to Altadena in the normal course of events. Why should it not come here? The wind was strong enough to take embers a few miles. We went for a walk and saw fires burning in the distance.
What was strange as I was going to bed was that the water in the narrow swimming pool in the backyard was churning, as though the wind had somehow got underneath it. By Wednesday morning, the surface water was fully coated with grit and soot and ashes.
At seven in the morning on Wednesday my phone made an alarming sound. A message came that we were to evacuate now. I had been fast asleep just a second before. Now it was all go. I ran around the house. If only I had pumped up the wheels of the bicycles – if only – we could go zooming down the hill like heroes! The problem was that my boyfriend’s phone was silent on the question of evacuation. Now he checked all the news outlets and saw that the evacuation zone was still about two miles away.
By this time, I was already making plans. One of them included a scenario of me in the middle of the swimming pool, not drowning or waving, just screaming as I fended off the fire and smoke around me. I have no idea why this image involved adding a decade and a half to my age and switching gender, but I was a very old lady in the pool, much like the brave and relentless Barbara Frietchie.
Back in the real world, I looked out of the window. There was no one on the street outside. This was not unusual. In the suburbs of LA there is usually no one on the street outside. My boyfriend thought we should take a drive around. As he saw me with my briefcase (laptop, phone, notebooks, passport, pills, credit card) and a tote bag from the Charleston Literary Festival with a clean shirt, underpants, toothbrush, socks, shoes, he wondered what I was doing.
I had convinced myself that, at the very moment we would seek to return, a group of men in uniforms would place a barricade across the road. They would not let us pass. And I would, for the little that is left of my life, always regret that I had not taken this briefcase and tote bag. We drove around; we saw a bewildered-looking coyote. There was no one on the street, no traffic much. But branches of trees were down, or hanging loose, and whole trees had been uprooted, and fences had toppled over. But that was just the wind.
As the day went on, we could smell the fire. And the light seemed brighter, as though it was lit for a film. Later, a dense greyness appeared to the north. No further order came to evacuate. We went to the supermarket, where things were normal. The mail came, a little bit late, but it came. A great number of houses lost electricity, but we still had power.
A new fire started in Hollywood. It might have looked as though we were now surrounded on three sides by fires, but it didn’t feel like that. Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica were far away. The worry, however, was that the Altadena fire would spread further or that a little autonomous fire would start around here in some hilly scrubland and, with the help of a new wind, make its way down the dry hill towards us, wooden-framed house by wooden-framed house, shrubs and garden trees, and then everything we own. My boyfriend began to study the house, eyeing what he could take and how he could protect other things, such as a beautiful chair a friend had made from found wood. He thought of throwing that into the pool where the water might keep it safe.
Then the sun began to go down. It was a livid red with a sickly fog all around it. It stayed just over the horizon for longer than necessary, showing off. We drove up to the hill to look at it. There was thick smoke in the distance and there was smoke in the air. The sun went down.
I was on deadline for a catalogue essay. I had my notebooks and some art books and my laptop on my desk. I spent Wednesday evening writing. ‘This is how they found him,’ I could imagine them saying, ‘writing his little sentences while LAburned.’ News came of many more friends who had lost their houses in Altadena.
I went to bed late on Wednesday, with my two bags packed and placed where they could be easily found if we woke with no power in the house and the need to get out of here fast. I really should have put air into the tyres of the two bicycles, but I didn’t.
Thursday morning was quiet. The Hollywood fire got put out, but the others were still raging. The acrid smell got into the house. Outside, thin pieces of ash flew wistfully in the air. There was no wind. Still, there were many friends with no electricity and no sign that it would come back. When we went out in the car at around midday some shops were open, but most were not. At the corner of York and 64th, the man who sells chopped fruit was still there, chopping away. Word came that the very air was poisonous.
I stayed in with an air filter in a small room, watching the funeral of Jimmy Carter. At 4 p.m., the phone sounded with another evacuation order, but fifteen minutes later it sounded again, much in the manner of the little girl who shouted ‘fire’, with an order to ignore the last order. The air, as dusk came, grew yellow, like the fog in Prufrock that licks its tongue into the corners of the evening. At five o’clock, oddly enough, tennis balls I had ordered online were delivered. It seemed to me, in these areas filled with toxic air, that people should be encouraged to stay home. I could have waited for the tennis balls. News came of the destruction by fire of a friend’s beautiful house up the hill in Malibu. It seems now that this sort of news is going to come hour after hour.
On Tuesday when Gary Indiana’s library came to Los Angeles, it rested for a while in the appointed house in Altadena. But it was the wrong day. If they – the signed editions, the rare art books, the weird books, the books Gary treasured – had come a day later, there would have been no address to deliver them to, so they would have been saved. But on that Tuesday, unfortunately, there still was an address.
9 January
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