THE COAST (3)

5.

Sometimes it seems that life is full of delusory agency in which we think we are producing effects we are not. Or guiding events that are in fact guiding us. Is a life something we craft in fact? Or do we just sustain this fiction in order to survive? 

That false obituary of myself in the nightmare I’d had had horrified me. Russell might have considered hers an achievement. She’d said as much that long ago day in the dim sum restaurant in San Francisco, that you could be one thing and also be another. Later when I’d come to know more of what she meant, and share some of the dangers she lived with, it made more sense to me. 

A few months before that day in San Francisco with Russell, I had taken a job at a record company in Hollywood, rescuing me from a floundering episode as a singer-songwriter. Through a friend, I was hired as a creative director at Capitol Records. I was given a small office on the fifth floor of that odd, disc-shaped building, with a window overlooking a stretch of smog-shrouded Hollywood Freeway, and a monthly budget to oversee the creation of promotional materials for upcoming releases: album covers, posters, radio spots, music videos. It was the early 1970s, and illustrators, designers, photographers, and videographers passed through my office daily with their portfolios, hoping to get work on the next Paul McCartney, Bob Seger or Pink Floyd album. Unrecognizable to my previous freewheeling self, I would hold that job for a year to the day.

One afternoon, after lunch with my boss at The Brown Derby nearby, I shared the elevator ride up the center of the building with a tall, slim young woman dressed in black chinos, dark hair shorn boyish and spiky, no makeup. We each studiously looked down until we reached my floor and I got off. She got off too and followed me to my office. This was the Russell who had made an appointment to show me her photos. I had probably expected a man. 

She placed a small portfolio on the table and opened it. She was still a student at the Art Institute, she explained in a quiet voice, her only music credit a cover shoot for a Marin County folk ensemble. She had come to LA to make the rounds of the record companies, hoping to find work. 

I began leafing through a series of uncropped 8x10 black and white prints. They seemed to portray life in a rustic mountain community. A child walking up a road, a man fishing in a stream, two women sitting on a porch. The images were quiet, arresting, and lacked all artifice. 

“Where did you shoot these?” 

“In eastern Kentucky. I spent last summer there taking pictures for my graduate project.” 

Nothing could have been further from the glossy, facile imagery I curated daily. I turned the pages ever more slowly. Traffic streamed past outside, the murmurs in the corridor beyond my office, the clatter of the copy machines. Some disarming watchfulness was at work in the pictures, an ability to be utterly present. Nothing for effect, merely the moment, observed and rendered. A surrender of technique, releasing the naked eye. I couldn’t stop looking. 

This eerie attentiveness would later take Jazmin Kis and her Nikon F2 across the planet, forge volumes of celebrated work. It would also take her to places unannounced for other, different reasons the world would know nothing of.

“They’re extraordinary,” was all I could say, closing the last page and looking up. 

She gazed back at me with the large dark eyes that saw so much so clearly, and she thanked me. 

I had no idea what sort of work I could find for her in the flip, psychedelic milieu I was in. But I knew I would try to find something, and that I wanted to see her again. 

6.

The day after aunt Margit arrived on the island, she assured me she wouldn’t mind staying alone with Sofia. It seemed she hadn’t heard about her distant American cousin’s death and I didn’t see a reason to tell her. I booked the direct flight from the capital to LA leaving late Thursday. Then I bought a ticket on the three-hour ferry to the mainland rather than the plane, as I wanted to slow things down a little. I felt fragile after so long here on the island, and Sofia and I hadn’t really been apart since she’d first arrived here. 

On Tuesday I picked her up after school and drove us to a restaurant in the village run by an Afghani refugee family. We were the only customers, and as soon as we arrived they put on the pan flute recording of music from “Saturday Night Fever” they always played. Sofia gave me that bored teenager look as we waited for her falafel and my shawarma. 

“You’ll be okay with Margit?” 

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I’ll keep my phone on.”

“What’s the time difference?”

“Nine hours. When it’s noon there it’s nine in the evening here.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think you can remember that?”

“Yes, Paul. I can remember that.”

Sofia’s pout could be hard to read. Steeled to loss, she was invaded by solitude at times and then there became little of her available. She never talked about her mother and preferred I not bring it up. I worried that what lay remote within her would erupt one day and overwhelm her. 

After lunch, we drove to the little cove outside the village where everyone swam in the summer. Last year she’d wanted to jump off the three-meter platform but hadn’t quite gotten up the nerve. It had haunted her all winter.

“When you get back it’ll be warm enough for swimming,” she said.

“Almost.” 

“And I’m going to jump.”

“I know you are. But wait for me, ok?”

“Maybe.”

Starting the engine, I looked over at her. What would she do if something happened to me? Or I, if something happened to her?

I spent the day before departure packing the few things I’d take. I left Margit the keys to my car and enough money to cover things. I told her not to be too stern with Sofia, that she could do most things for herself now, and she always finished her homework, and she could help around the house. 

That night I had a dream of travel, reminiscent of those that used to plague me before I came to the island. The dreams always contained futility and threat and loss of control. A missed flight. Luggage lost. Can’t find the person I’m traveling with. Something has gone off the rails and there’s no way to stop it. 

In this one, I was on a bus entering a town I didn’t recognize. I took my ticket out of my pocket but the ink had smudged and I couldn’t read it. I wanted to get off and kept pressing a buzzer signaling for the bus to stop but it kept going, out into the countryside, along some coastline, up steep cliffs over the sea. I was being driven somewhere I didn’t want to go and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. 

I woke up in mild terror, at a loss. For some hours I couldn’t shake the dream. 

Later, after Sofia had left for school, Margit drove me to the ferry terminal. When we arrived, as I reached to grab my bag off the back seat, she said, “You are coming back, aren’t you?”

It seemed an odd thing to ask. “Of course,” I replied. 

 I was so taken aback I said it again: “Yes, of course.” 

It was a bright day, the water smooth and sparkling. I gathered my lunch on a tray at the ferry cafeteria - open-faced shrimp sandwich with egg, sparkling water, yogurt - and took it to a table by a window facing back towards the receding island, now just a low undulant line against the horizon. 

During my early years there, I’d had little idea of where I’d landed. The velocity of the life I’d left made existence on the island appear inert. The brutal winters and brief poignant summers, their absences and fullnesses, passed by me unregarded. I was still fanning the embers of projects I’d left behind. And the circumstances that had brought me there left me suspicious of people. Was I being observed, followed? Was my neighbor’s kindness sincere or a ploy? I imagined eyes upon me in the village, cars trailing mine through the forests and along the coastal roads.

My years of work in music had left little space for boredom. Moving from project to project, assignments and commissions crossfaded into each other. My credits list swelled. Copyrights, with their promise of perpetual income, piled up. Houses, studios, restaurants. Cars, airports, meetings. Words and music. 

Hurtling across my life, what had I failed to notice? Pretty much everything. As my paranoia subsided and I settled into the realities of island existence, singularities emerged. Granite cliffs, fields of wheat, aged granary walls. Fresh silvery Baltic catch pouring from nets. Things seen from a bicycle. The abiding clouds, the changeable sea. Seasons, so muted and subtle in California, waxed operatic on the island - the wide turning arc from black December afternoons to June’s midnight light. 

With Sofia’s arrival, her school rhythms became mine. Gathering the makings of a meal and coaxing it from the farmhouse stove. Bent over her homework in the twilight. Quotidian life, concrete and vivid.

The chorus of the world grew distant, supplanted by inner voicings. I began to perceive a sameness and repetition in human invention - music, films, books - that often drove me out of my studio to look at nature instead. 

The temple of memory, well furnished, provided its own entertainment: youth, childhood, origins extending back in time. And forward, too, where one day soon enough, the lights would go out on the whole show.

Sometimes, standing by the sea watching Sofia swim, I was seized by a sense of vast beauty, felt myself drawing close to some master narrative inscribed at the true heart of things. 

Then a grand desolation would fill me.

The ferry was on open water now, suspended between land masses. Amid the low, orderly murmur around me, I heard hearty laughter. I turned to see two young bearded Syrian men, smiling widely, flashing white teeth, their hands animated, enjoying a moment of pleasure, while the pale Scandinavian passengers nearby stiffened in private disapproval. The refugees’ innocent anarchy filled me with secret pleasure. 

Maybe it was truly time to get off the island, sojourn back into the world a little. 

As so often in the past, it was Russell who was affording me the occasion.

“No immediate survivors,” her obituary had concluded. 

Was I not to be considered immediate? 

Were there others, also unnamed, as immediate as I? 

After Russell appeared at the record company that day with her portfolio, I managed to scout up a few photo gigs for her. She didn’t need my help for long. She began picking up magazine shoots, portrait sittings, celebrity profiles. Disarming and astute, she easily gained clients’ trust. The intimate authority of her prints led to more work. On visits to LA she stayed with a friend until we became lovers. After that she stayed at my place in Beachwood Canyon. 

It was like having a cat in the house, a limber gamine in black chinos, tank top and jean jacket, invested with the power of repose. When she wasn’t on assignment she wandered, Nikon slung around her long neck, shooting what struck her. If I accompanied her, it was as if I weren’t there. 

Some weekends I flew or drove up to her place in North Beach. Her two roommates from the Art Institute, neither of whom would survive AIDS, sometimes joined us on our city hauntings of art house theaters, museums and cafes. We ate and drank, dawdled in parks. At night in her Vallejo flat high above the glittering city, she and I made love. 

The coastal arteries between our two cities became corridors of eros, charged with the fervor of our romance: a blue motel along Highway 1 in Santa Cruz, a Big Sur cabin in the woods, a leafy retreat off Highway 101 near Santa Barbara. 

In LA, we cruised punk bands in Chinatown, caught Tom Waits at the Troubadour, frequented midnight jams in downtown lofts. In the garden of my Beachwood cottage we lay in hammocks reading aloud to each other: Beckett, Cortazar, Sontag. While she shot a spread on a Jamaican singer for a rock magazine, I composed a title song for a friend’s independent film.

One evening, after we’d been together for some months, we drove across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley to meet her father. Miklos Kis was a nuclear physicist who worked at the Lawrence Livermore lab near Berkeley. “Top secret stuff,” Russell called it. He had left Hungary after the 1956 uprising in a prisoner exchange, with the help of US Intelligence, bringing Jazmin with him. Her mother, a set designer at Budapest’s National Theater, had chosen to stay behind. 

 We met in a Lebanese restaurant off Telegraph Avenue. Miklos, crew-cutted and squinting through unfiltered Camel smoke, seemed witty and serious at the same time. A jazz buff, he effused about Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. His accented quips I didn’t quite follow, but I could see he and Russell were close, and their soft, nodding asides in Hungarian both touched me and left me a little jealous. What realities did this pair of refugees share, far beyond anything I could imagine? 

Answering Miklos Kis’s mild interrogation of me, I could only sketch my pedestrian resume. Child of Midwest academics who had migrated to California. LA public schools, music and lit studies at UCLA. Some youthful travels, busking in metros, gigs in folk clubs. A contract with a small label as singer-songwriter. Compared to Jazmin and Miklos Kis’ odyssey of escape and resettlement, my story sounded trivial, weightless. But then California tended to equalize everyone, I’d always thought, life being less about where you came from than where you were headed.

Not long after that dinner, a demo tape of some songs of mine caught the ear of a large music publisher. Their offer of a contract as a staff writer with a monthly retainer brought my year at Capitol Records to a merciful close. If I was not to be the next Van Morrison, then I would lend my voice to others. 

Freedom from a day job also meant more time with Russell. With a fresh advance in my pocket and a travel magazine assignment for her, we flew to Morocco. It was my first time outside the Western conceptual frame, and I reveled in the dense winding medinas, the mysterious geometries of the mosques, the sinuous vocals of Fairuz snaking out of Radio Cairo. While I sat at the feet of oud and rabab players in the squares and cafes, she took photos in the souks. We seemed to be companionable adventurers; the odder the situation, the more we quickened to it. When our rental car broke down outside of Meknes in blazing heat, we hitchhiked to get help. A canceled hotel reservation in Ouzarzate led us by foot to an inn occupied by a troupe of dancers from Mali. 

Returning by car from Merzouga, at the edge of the Sahara, we stopped for lunch in a village in the Atlas Mountains. Over mint tea, Russell said, “Paul, you make me glad.” 

“Glad.” I repeated the word. “Is that like happy?”

She laughed. “Yes, I think so. Very much so.”

We beamed at each other, tanned and exultant, enfolded in the light and the warmth and the rush of our adventure. Being with her was as much happiness as I had known. 

After our return from Morocco, work separated us for some weeks. Finally, we made arrangements by phone to meet the following Saturday at Point Lobos, the nature reserve on the Monterey Peninsula where we’d interrupted our coastal trips more than once to wander its promontory trails among the cypresses, the tidepools, and the wild surf. 

I left early that morning, taking inland 101 north to shorten the journey. At Salinas I took the road westward to Monterey, then stopped for lunch on Cannery Row. From there it was a short drive to Point Lobos.  

Passing the ranger station entrance, I parked my car at a turnout by the sea,  facing south, where we were to meet at two. In my ardor to see her I was early. It was a brisk, clear day, the wind beating my cheeks. I stood on a rock watching gulls wheel above the heaving sea. 

Two came and went. My anxiety began to kindle. Russell was usually prompt. At two-thirty, I walked back to the reserve entrance, found a pay phone, and called her. Her machine picked up with her usual greeting. I left her a message saying I was there and waiting.

I hurried back to our meeting point. My worry grew. An accident on the Bayshore? Some misunderstanding about place and time? The sharp odor of brine cut my nostrils. Noisy gulls flocked above me. I felt helpless, desolate. Something had gone wrong.  

She had probably left a message on my answering machine at home. I cursed myself for not having set it up to allow me to pick up messages remotely. 

I called her again from the pay phone with the same result until I ran out of coins. It was close to three. I thought of driving up to San Francisco, though this made little sense if something had delayed her en route. I considered calling her father but I didn’t have his number, which was probably classified anyway. 

How close was I to Russell, really, to go chasing after her? Perhaps she’d had misgivings about us. Had I been deluding myself? Maybe Morocco hadn’t been the rapture I’d thought it was. 

Another possibility crossed my mind. Was there another? My spirits fell into an abyss. I sat in the car, staring out at the waves dashing against the rocks, torn between despair and rage. 

Finally a fog drifted in, enveloping the car. I started the engine, turned the car around, and began the long drive back. 

Crossing the San Fernando Valley that evening, I was convinced there was somebody else. 

You think you know another. It’s an illusion. Russell had blown me off. 

I tried rehearsing getting over her. I couldn’t even begin. 

Twisted with equal parts jealousy and fear for her safety, I burst through the door of my cottage. There were three messages on the answering machine. 

The first said: “Paul, I can’t come today.” A pause, and then: “I have to do something.”

The second message said, “Have you already left? I called early to reach you. I’m so sorry.” 

In the third message, she was sobbing. “Please forgive me. I love you, Paul. I love you so much.”

I called and left an angry, hurt message.