I had my Ventura County Thomas Guide on the passenger seat, but I didn’t need it. Signal was a couple of intersections up, and 800 north meant a left turn.
Big trees and small houses, residential lots alternating with olive groves. A drainage ditch paved with fieldstones ran alongside the left side of the street, spanned every few yards by onestride foot bridges.
Wilbert Harrison’s address was near the top, one of the last houses before open fields took over.
It was a shingle-roofed wooden cottage painted an odd purplish-red and nearly hidden behind unruly snarls of agave cactus. The purple was vivid and it shone through the agave’s sawtooth leaves like a wound.
Atop a steep dirt driveway, a Chevy station wagon was parked up against a single garage. Four stone steps led up to the front porch. The screen door was shut, but the wooden one behind it was wide open.
I knocked on the frame while looking into a small, dark living room, plank floored and crowded with old furniture, shawls, throw pillows, an upright piano. A bay window was lined with dusty bottles.
Chamber music came from another room.
I knocked louder.
“One minute.” The music turned off and a man appeared from a doorway to the right.
Short. Chubby as in his old picture and white haired. He had on a polyester jumpsuit the same purplish-red as the house. Some of the furniture was upholstered that color, too.
He opened the screen door and gave me a curious but friendly look. His eyes were gray, but they picked up magenta accents from his surroundings. There was a softness to his face, but no weakness.
“Dr. Harrison?”
“Yes, I’m Bert Harrison.” His voice was a clear baritone. The jumpsuit was zipped in the front and had large, floppy lapels.
Short-sleeved, it exposed white, freckled arms. His face was freckled, too, and I noticed reddish-blond tints in his white hair. He wore a pinkie ring set with a violet cabochon, and a bolo tie with leather thongs held together by a big, shapeless purple rock. Sandals on his feet, no socks.
“My name is Alex Delaware. I’m a clinical psychologist from Los Angeles and I wondered if I could talk to you about Andres de Bosch and bad love.”” The eyes didn’t change shape or hue, but they became more focused.
He said, “I know you. We’ve met somewhere.”
“Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said. “There was a conference at Western Pediatric Medical Center on de Bosch’s work. You presented a paper and I was a co-chair, but we never actually met.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “You were there as the hospital’s representative, but your heart wasn’t in it.”
“You remember that?”
“Distinctly. The entire conference had that flavor–ambivalence all around.
You were very young–you wore a beard then, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, amazed.
“The beginnings of old age,” he said, still smiling. “Distant memories become clearer, but I can’t remember where I put my keys.”
“I’m still impressed, doctor.”
“I remember the beard vividly, perhaps because I have trouble growing one. And your voice. Full of stress. Just as it is right now. Well, come in, let’s take care of it. Coffee or tea?”
There was a small kitchen beyond the living room and a door that led to a single bedroom. The little I could see of the sleeping chamber was purple and book-lined.
The kitchen table was birch, not more than four feet long. The counters were old white tile trimmed with purple-red bullnoses.
He fixed instant coffee for both of us and we sat. The scale of the table put us close together, elbows nearly touching.
“In answer to your unasked question,” he said, whitening his coffee with lots of cream, then adding three spoonfuls of sugar, “it’s the only color I can see. A rare genetic condition. Everything else in my world is gray, so I do what I can to brighten it.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“Now that that’s out of the way, tell me what’s on your mind concerning Andres and bad love’–that was the title of the conference, wasn’t it.”
“Yes. You don’t seem surprised that I just popped in.”
“Oh, I am. But I like surprises–anything that breaks up routine has the ability to freshen our lives.”