Lucia Berlin was a writer whose work went under-read for much of her life. For many readers, “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” a collection of selected stories published in 2015, eleven years after her death, at the age of sixty-eight, was the first introduction to stories that, as Lydia Davis, long an admirer of Berlin’s, observed, “are electric, they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch.”
At the time of her death, in 2004, Berlin had been working on a new project, a series of sketches which traced her life from her birth in Alaska, in 1936, to her early childhood in the mining towns of the West, where her father was an engineer, to the years she spent in El Paso with her maternal grandfather, a dentist, before her family moved to Chile after the Second World War. Berlin drew often on her own experiences in her stories, using incidents and characters from her life, but the writing in the new project was quite different—she’s still looking at the world with the eye of a fiction writer, but she’s no longer isolating specific moments. Instead, she’s showing how they combine to form a life.
The passages published here, originally titled “Welcome Home,” are the final pages she completed—the last sentence, in fact, is left unfinished. As they open, it’s 1961. She’s in Mexico, by the beach in Acapulco. She’s twenty-five, and the mother of two young boys, Mark and Jeff. Her first marriage, to a sculptor, has ended. While studying in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she met the poet Edward Dorn, and through Dorn the writer Robert Creeley and two of his Harvard classmates, Race Newton and Buddy Berlin. She marries Newton, a jazz pianist, but she has left him to travel to Mexico with Berlin, a saxophonist, who will become her third husband (they will divorce in 1968). Buddy’s charm, his easiness, his warmth, she soon learns, is cut through by an addiction to heroin.
—Cressida Leyshon
17. Mirador Hotel, Acapulco, Mexico
My memories of Acapulco come in snapshots, like the childlike drawings in “Babar the Elephant.” Palm trees above the hotel on the edge of the cliffs. The boys in sailor suits rode rented blue tricycles round and round a track ringed with red cannas. Brightly colored taxis. Parrots in cafés with wooden fans. Buddy and I sat on wrought-iron benches in front of the church, Mark and Jeff shot marbles with a new friend on the grass in the plaza. Sand castles on the beach, the boys brown, with red pails and shovels, arms akimbo. Buddy and I kissed inside a blue-and-white beach cabana. All of us laughing in the calm waves at Caleta Beach.
The wooden shutters of our room let in the scent of ginger and tuberoses, moonlight and stars, the sound of the surf. In the morning, we took a funicular down to a green-tiled pool set into the rocks by the ocean. Waves crashed against the rocks, misting us with spray. I lay flat on the hot cement, eyes level with the pool, watching Buddy teach the boys to swim. Even when he was not holding them to teach them, he would hold them, or me.
We met people, on the beach, in the plaza, at cafés. People liked us, invited us over to their table, home for tea. Flamenco dancers gave us tickets to concerts; a trapeze artist asked us to the circus. Manuel, one of the divers at the Quebrada, joined us for a drink, then had us over every Sunday for steamed clams with his wife and children. We spent most evenings with Don and Maria, who became close friends for many years. Maria and I talked while Don and Buddy played chess and the boys colored and read until they fell asleep.
We went out often to dinner with Jacques and Michele, a French couple whose little girl, Marie, played with Mark and Jeff at the beach. We went to parties at Teddy Stauffer’s with Acapulco society people and movie stars, to concerts with a Mexican doctor and his wife. When the boys and I were in New York, we chatted, sometimes they chattered, but now in Acapulco the three of us were talking all the time, in English and Spanish . . . the boys even in French! Everybody embraced us hello and kissed us goodbye.
Just after we got to Mexico, I woke up one night and Buddy wasn’t next to me. Sleepy, I went into the bathroom, where I found him shooting heroin. I wasn’t as shocked as I would have been if I had known what heroin was, what addiction was. He said he was going to get off it, even though it would be rough for a few days.
It was bad food poisoning, we told people. Diarrhea, I told our friend the doctor, who didn’t give me paregoric, prescribed tea and apple. Jacques and Michele took the boys boating and to the beach for several days; after that we went to the usually empty pool by the ocean. The boys spent hours diving over and over into the water. We all played Monopoly, ate enchiladas suizas, drank lemonade. Buddy shook violently under his towel in the sunshine.
He got well finally, and then weeks went by, busy and lazy, such warmhearted weeks. The heroin became but a quick scary moment. After several months, we were ready to go home to New Mexico. I would divorce Race and we would be married.
Buddy and his wife, Wuzza, had lived and travelled for years, mostly in Spain, on her money. He had studied bullfighting, had continued to play saxophone and race Porsche Spyders. She finally insisted that he do something; so, with her backing, he got one of the first Volkswagen franchises in the West, back when the few VW drivers waved to one another on the road. In only a few years he paid her back, had made so much money that there was no need for him ever to do anything at all.
Buddy enjoyed. He did this so well. He really enjoyed people and music, books and paintings. The next enthusiasms would be Native American culture and history, photography and flying. Oh, and the three of us.
We thought then that our love would protect us from heroin, that we were starting out on a new life.
Nate Bishop came to fly us back in the new Beechcraft Bonanza, a tax write-off that Buddy was going to learn to fly.
Maybe that’s where Babar came from—our toy red plane. We circled low over the city and its lovely bays, white sand, tile roofs and palms, a crayon-blue sea. Oh, we had all been so happy there, with the old lady and the monkey.
An hour out of Albuquerque, Buddy started to shake. His nose was running and he had cramps in his legs. As soon as the plane landed, he took off to make a phone call.
18. Edith Boulevard, Albuquerque, New Mexico
A sprawling old adobe with fireplaces in most of the rooms. Bedrooms, baths, pantries, and studies had been added on over the years, at different levels, in every direction, but every new room had the same three-foot-wide walls, high windows facing the pool and garden. The front entrance opened into the huge wood-plank-floored kitchen, the main room of the house. In the old days this had been the hacienda, set among acres and acres of grazing land. Now it was hidden in an industrial area, with lumberyards and sheet-metal shops nearby, a car-parts dump on one side and a school-bus yard on either side. In back of us in a tiny house lived the Luceros, with two children in their early teens, many ducks and chickens, and a cow.
I learned fear here. My fear of the drug dealers, my fear of the drug, their fear of the narcs, one another, of not having a fix. The house, hidden away as it was, with thick walls that kept out all sound, enhanced the feeling of always hiding, sneaking. With addiction comes hiding, lying, suspicion. “You only look in my eyes now to see if they are pinned,” he said. True.
Those first years on Edith went by with him on and off heroin, with us all in and out of happiness. Each time he went through a run on drugs and still another withdrawal, I swore that was the end.
He was not just a seducer or charmer. Well, yes, he was. He was sexy and charming, sharp and witty. His energy lit up any room he walked into. When the boys saw him, they didn’t just say, “Hello, Dad!,” but immediately ran over to touch him, hug him. So did I.
We climbed and explored Acoma and Bandelier, Mesa Verde, went to Indian dances and ceremonials and powwows. Camped out at Canyon de Chelly and Chaco. Awoke late at night under the stars, wondering what the people living there had been like.
We had many good friends then. Bill and Martha Eastlake, the Creeleys, Liz and Jay in Taos. Buddy got his flying license. We all loved the plane. In the evening, we would fly into the sunset, red and orange cumulus all around us, on and on we flew, with the colors toward the west. Buddy used to fly to Pocatello to visit the Dorns, or he would fly up and bring them down. We flew several times to Boston to visit Buddy’s family, stopping to refuel in small towns that had no highways going through, whose people hadn’t seen tourists ever, that seemed preserved in another era. Amish towns were the most obvious, but other remote towns in Kansas and Tennessee seemed almost to have their own language, and were as strange to us as we to them. We would land on crop dusters’ strips—fields with only a gas tank and a wind sock—get gas and a pickup ride to the town café, where Buddy would get even the most suspicious farmers to warm to him and talk to us.