However, when he tracks by that evening to pick her up, she’s wearing the very same army surplus pants, with their Jackson Pollock paint spray all over them. And yet another bulky brown-on-brown wool sweater. Jim winces. Then he notices that she has washed and brushed her hair, and it’s drying still, curling in a way he thinks stunning. Anyway who cares about this stuff? He doesn’t care about it. He doesn’t care at all. He shakes it off, they get in his battered old car and drive.

Abe lives in an annex of his parents’ house up on Saddleback Mountain, on the Santiago Peak side, just below the peak, overlooking all of OC and beyond. It’s the most exclusive neighborhood of all, in accordance with Humphrey’s law, height = money. Switchbacking up the steep residential road they pass mansion after mansion, most hidden from the road by a botanical garden’s variety of trees and lawns, all as exotic and glossy as houseplants. But some are right out there for people to see:

Mirrored boxes that resemble the industrial complexes in Irvine,

Pagodas, chateaux,

Complicated wooden-box structures à la Frank Lloyd Wright,

Or the Greene brothers’ Gamble house in Pasadena,

(Cardboard shacks in a field of mud!)

Mission-style monsters of whitewash and orange tile roofs,

Circus tent shapes of glass and steel that imitate

The dominant mall designs down on the floodplain.…

You live here, sure. There’s no doubt of it.

They track slowly and enjoy eyeballing the passing parade of architectural extravagance, making fun of most of the homes, ogling lustfully the few that strike them as tasteful, livable places. And marveling always that these are single-family dwellings, and not disguised duplexes, triplexes, aps or condos. It’s really hard to believe. “Like seeing an extinct animal,” Jim says.

“Dinosaurs, grazing in your backyard.”

Abe’s parents, the Bernards, live on the outside of one of the hairpin turns near the top of the road, on a little deck of land all their own. The home is a multilevel sprawl, made entirely of wood; a Japanese garden out front has bonsai pines overhanging moss lawns, big odd-shaped boulders, and a small pool with a bridge over it. They’ve arrived early, so there’s still parking on the street in front of the house. They get out, walk up and over the pool. “Just like the Modjeskas,” Hana says softly. “All they need are swans.”