Among the Living (22 page)

Jean came in. She carried a paper bag, another raid on a gas station store. She emptied it of bottles of juice and sunblock, a bag of sunflower seeds, sweatpants to match her sweatshirt, and a pair of pink canvas shoes she’d never wear at home.

“Look,” she said. She lifted out a cheap tape player. And a cassette tape. “Reggae.” She said it with an exclamation point.

Jimmy sat up against the headboard, watched her as she fit the C batteries into the machine and then went to work on the stretch-wrap around the cassette.

She said, “In the gift shop they had tapes of ‘Sounds of the Sea’ and ‘Sounds of the Big Trees.’
Relaxation
tapes.” She slotted the cassette into the machine.

“No Woman No Cry,”
she half sang, before it began.

“It bothered you that I said you weren’t the type who drives around the block to hear a song on the radio,” Jimmy said.

“I hardly ever think about it,” Jean said.

She smiled and the music started, a crack of a high hat and then a rolling rhythm. It wasn’t “No Woman No Cry,” but a song that began:

 

I don’t want to wait in vain for your love
. . .

 

But neither of them thought the song was about them, or at least about this. She turned it up and fiddled with the bass.

“I got two rooms,” Jimmy said.

She didn’t say anything, went into the bathroom and changed into her new sweatpants and cheap pink shoes. When she came out, she smiled at him and walked past him out the sliding door to see if she could see the water.

She went all the way out to the edge. She turned and looked back at him through the open door, happy.

She talked him into taking the ragged path zigzagging down the cliff-face to the rocks and the water. It took thirty minutes down, from the warning sign at the top to the sweet little cove and improbable beach below perfectly littered with driftwood, and almost an hour back up, the last half in the dark with Jimmy going ahead and Jean holding his shirttail and laughing.

They drank a bottle of Liebfraumilch over dinner at the seafood place next to the motel and then another. They took what was left in their glasses out to the cliff’s edge and listened to the wind and the surf far below that they couldn’t see except when the biggest waves blew out white against the rocks.

Jimmy pulled back the cover on the bed.

“Can we leave the sliding glass door open?” he asked.

It was chilly, but she nodded.

The lights were out. The moonlight lit the walls. He realized what the bias-cut paneling on the walls had reminded him of when he’d first come into the room: recording studios. There was a time when they all had walls that looked like this, diagonal redwood paneling. He’d spent hours in those rooms.

“People come to look at the trees and then sleep in redwood-paneled rooms,” Jimmy said.

“And come to the ocean and eat seafood,” Jean said. She was drunker than he was. She put on a funny voice. “ ‘Let’s go someplace beautiful—and eat it!’ ”

There was a silence. She kissed him. He touched her neck. Her breath in his face was sweet and warm, the last drink of the night.

“You proceed at your own risk,”
she said, laughing too much.

He was up early, before there was light. He sat in a chair and watched her sleeping. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman. As he watched her, as he listened to her breathe, he felt sorry for himself. It had been a while for that, too.

He showered. After he shaved, he dried his face and looked at himself in the mirror. The sunblock Jean bought was on the counter, a pink bottle, sunblock for kids,
no more tears.
He squeezed a white circle of it into his palm, rubbed his hands together, spread it across his forehead, nose and cheeks. The smell of it hit him, summers on the beach or on a sailboat, way back. That smell and the memories it brought with it, the Liebfraumilch last night,
Mother’s Milk,
the cypresses, this road into Carmel and Monterey—he knew already what the day was going to be about.

And wished he’d gone south instead of north.

Two hours later, he was on Point Lobos. There was a thin fog. Jimmy stepped out onto the point. Here the cypresses were gnarled, arthritic, almost bare but still alive, their roots reaching down to find unlikely nourishment in cracks and crevices in the rock. Lace lichen bearded the branches of understory trees. Cypress Cove and Pinnacle Cove were to his right, Bluefish Cove beyond. There were prettier places all around him, where the trees were fuller, where there was more color, but this was where he’d stood with his mother all those years ago.

He was sixteen. An hour earlier, in the car, after she’d gotten out, as he sat listening to the radio, he’d laid a tab of acid on his tongue.

“It’s a shame to shoot color,” Teresa Miles had said.

She had a Leica on a leather strap around her neck. On her, it looked like jewelry. Her hair had just been cut short and she kept running her fingers through it, what was left of it. She was flying away in a week for a movie. She wore a thin sweater that buttoned up the middle, buttons made of abalone. She had perfect breasts, full for a woman as thin as she was, and always wore French bras that offered them up with a little less self-consciousness than Playtex or Maidenform. It was another thing Jimmy resented about her, the way his friends looked her over when she stepped into the room, and the way she pretended not to notice.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy said. He leaned against a cypress. His mother was out in the open. It was overcast, a world of grays. “It’s going to look like black and white anyway.”

“No, it won’t,” she said. “It won’t have the
drama
of black and white!”

“Drama.” Jimmy repeated her word.

“Why don’t you play your guitar?” she said. “Get it out of the car. Play me one of your songs.”

Nothing was happening. Jimmy wondered if the acid was bad, or not acid at all, a trick played on a rich kid in the lot behind The Troubadour.

But then a rock flared at his feet and then another.

She brushed his hair out of his eyes. It was 1967. His hair was long, as long as The Beatles’ and The Beatles’ was getting longer with each LP.

She walked away across the rocks.

He’d been up all night and she didn’t know it, had come back at four or five from hanging out at Clover. It was the recording studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, a low-cost place, one main room and a booth for vocals, the control room, an “artists’ lounge” with a pinball machine, which was just the first skinny room you came into off the dirty street. A singer/songwriter had worked all night on one track. Nobody. Jimmy knew the producer, who was older than sixteen but just a kid, too. It was that time when hits could come out of anyplace, any
body
, so almost everyone was cutting tracks and getting paid for it.

And The Beatles were on Blue Jay Way.

“Come here!” his mother said, her voice bright and theatrical.

Below the point, in a small cove that had no name, out past the shore-break where the water rose and fell predictably, gently, four or five sea otters rafted among the swirling canopies of giant kelp, on their backs.

“See what they’re doing?”

“They swim down under the kelp and find a perfect flat rock and then a clam or an oyster or even an abalone and then they come back up to the surface and roll over and then pound away on their little rock until the shellfish cracks open and they can eat it.”

She held his hand, like he was six. “They used to say, until just a few years ago, that what separated Man and the lower animals was that only Man used
tools.
They don’t say that anymore, but that’s what they taught us in school, probably you, too. But I always knew it was wrong because I knew about this.”

She pulled him to her, put their hands behind her back. Her breast was against him. Her perfume had its hands around his throat. He loved her so much and, even now, he felt like she was already gone.

He let go, pulled away from her.

“So what do they say separates us now?” Jimmy said.

“I don’t know,” she had said.

A cormorant screeched overhead and Jimmy looked over at Jean, a hundred yards away, kneeling next to a rock in her pink canvas shoes.

Jimmy looked back down at the cove. The
selfsame
cove.

Back at the motel, the sign warning guests of the liabilities of the trail down to the beach had said more than,
You proceed at your own risk.
It also said, with an odd stiffness, as if the owners were Swiss or Austrian,
Be advised that the return is more difficult than the descent.

They went into Carmel for a late lunch. There was more wine. For some reason, Jean was under a cloud and not saying much.

Jimmy didn’t really know her but he blamed it on Carmel. He’d never liked the town. It was too relaxed, or relaxed for the wrong reasons. There was too much money here, or too much money too far removed from the labor that produced it. Carmel always seemed to him to have too many retired airline captains and their flight attendant wives, too many personal injury lawyers in their forties who’d had a wonderful tragedy walk into the office one day, the kind that meant more than just another Porsche, that meant
freedom
money. But, as it turned out, here it was only the freedom to fret over the lightness of the pasta or the year of the wine or the elasticity of the skin of the person across the table from you. Most of them didn’t even play golf. They just “lived well” and repeated too often that line about revenge.

Jean put her knife and fork across her plate. She ran her fingers through her hair, fluffed it out, like his mother had in his memory, and leaned back, her legs crossed at the ankles under the table. She smiled at him, the way you have to the day after you make love in a motel, if you haven’t split already. She had bought clothes at a shop a few doors down from the restaurant, had changed in the dressing room, a silk dress the color of the tarnish on a bell, or the lace lichen they’d just left on Point Lobos. Whether it was the dress or the light filtered through the oaks on the patio, her green eyes looked blue. Blue and sad.

Or maybe she was just hungover.

“Was that where you and your mother were, the memory you told me about when we were talking about perfume?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you?”

Of course he couldn’t tell her.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Fifteen or sixteen.
Six
teen. It was early in the summer, 1967. The Doors’ first album had just come out.