THE COAST (4)

7.

Lost in recollection, I had barely noticed that the ferry from the island had landed on the mainland. I stood and joined the other passengers streaming out of the terminal onto the wharf. A taxi delivered me to the airport, and a few hours later I was seated at a window of a Boeing Dreamliner, ascending westward through clouds, still in the grip of memory of that day Russell had stood me up.

I had spent the following days at my house in Beachwood Canyon alone, poisoned with jealousy and the ache of missing her, tortured by what she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me. 

Late that week she showed up at my door unannounced, brandishing a CD of Gnawa drummers we’d thrilled to in Marrakech’s great square, the Jemaa el-Fnaa.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” I murmured, still angry but relieved to see her. 

“May I come in?”

“I waited for hours,” I said, closing the door behind her. “I didn’t know if you were dead or alive. What is it that you had to do?”

“I can’t tell you.” 

“Is there somebody else?”

“No, Paul. There is only you. You are everything to me.”

She began to tremble. I held her.

“If it’s something you’re embarrassed about,” I said, “it doesn’t matter.”

“Please don’t ask any more.” 

“Will it happen again?” 

She took a deep breath. “I hope not.” 

Still wounded and mystified, I was glad to have her with me again. We spent that weekend together, and it took little to rekindle our common pleasures. We took walks in the hills, listened to music. We went to a photography exhibit downtown, ate Thai food in East Hollywood. Yet I couldn’t shake what had happened. It felt as if something had changed in her too. She seemed edgy, had lost a little weight, muttered in her sleep. 

She had a meeting Monday morning with a client. Afterwards I drove her to the airport and her plane back to San Francisco. On the way, my frustration resurfaced. 

“You have to tell me,” I said. “How can we be together if you have this secret?” 

“You have to trust me.”

“I don’t know if I can do that any more.”

She wheeled on me. “Paul, you are an innocent. You swim in water you don’t even notice you are swimming in, here in your endless summer. You don’t live in history.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“We are emigres, my father and I. We don’t breathe the same air as you do.” She turned away and stared out the window. “Things have consequences.”

“Like hiding the truth,” I shot back.

Our parting at the airport was brief and strained. 

Driving home, I thought: What did she mean, that I didn’t live in history? Who doesn’t? Wars raged; we protested them. Poverty and injustice remained; we tried to contribute to their solution. Of course these things happened at a distance from my own life. The draft had ended; I knew few who’d entered the military. The Cold War persisted but seemed containable. 

What did she mean? I supposed my parents’ migration from the Midwest could be understood as an attempt to attain freedom from history’s burdens. My father, after a World War Two stint in the benign precincts of the Coast Guard and a brief career as a professor of engineering, headed West to join JPL, work on the moon landing. He ended up teaching again, at Cal Tech. Mom sold real estate dream homes in the new paradise, played the piano she taught me, drank a few too many martinis at cocktail hour. Aerospace, movies, the Beat movement. Forging the artifacts of a new culture, outdistancing history’s tragic arc. The central Ohio we’d left felt as distant as Europe.  Liberal, open, hedonistic California, with its blending of ethnicities, its health foods, its new religions. Exiles and refugees dragged fraught pasts to these Pacific shores to be cleansed of them, to start over. The promise of a new, better tomorrow: that was the project out here.  

If my own roots extended hardly much further than the mid-century modern ranch-style house in smoggy Pasadena where I was raised, was that important? The past formed little of our conversation around the family dinner table. We would have had to reach far back among our English and German Protestant forbears to find persecution, exile, poverty’s true blight. My experiences of adversity were limited to high school bullies, hecklers while busking in subways, catcalls while singing onstage. Duck and cover. My identity here was implicit, unquestioned. I trailed few ghosts, if that’s what Russell meant.

Still in the days following her visit I couldn’t get past her refusal to tell me why she didn’t show up at Point Lobos that day. Childishly, I didn’t answer her calls. When an old girlfriend looked me up, I slept with her. Afterwards I let Russell know. 

I broke her heart. 

We stopped seeing each other. 

BOOK TWO

The Black Portfolio

1.

Sometimes they paired me with other writers. Other times it was just my music, my words. The publisher paid a modest monthly stipend and collected my recording royalties. ASCAP, the licensing agency, tracked airplay and performances. Depending upon the assignment, I usually received 25% of the publishing rights, terms that would later improve. Other times it was a straight buyout and I received a fee in lieu of royalties.

I worked out of my flat in Beachwood with a Yamaha electric keyboard, a few guitars, and simple recording equipment for rough demos. Cassettes, lead sheets, or film clips on DVDs arrived at my door by mail or by messenger service. For a project in an early stage, I’d usually make a cassette at the house and send it back. When more was called for, I’d book time at a 16-track studio in Burbank contracted to the publisher, accompany myself on piano or guitar, or overdub a track I’d been sent, and deliver a more polished version. 

Once a month I drove to the music publishers’ offices, a tall building in the 9000 block of Sunset Boulevard, where Hollywood merges into Beverly Hills, to collect my stipend and any royalties due me. On occasion I met there with an executive, a producer, a potential collaborator, or to screen a rough cut of a film or discuss an upcoming album project. 

I liked to think I could write anything - intros, outros, themes, title songs; ambient sounds, jingles, even pop anthems - but this wasn’t really true. In the post-disco 1980’s era of Olivia Newton John and Lionel Richie, I couldn’t write a commercial hook to save my soul. Soon enough, the publishers had profiled me as an “eclectic” or “art” writer, which brought fewer lucrative assignments but less pressure. Still, I was free of the day gig at Capitol and back in my creative life, such as it was at that point. And I liked keeping my own hours, which tended to run deep into the night.  

There was no nexus of creative activity in LA, no Brill Building as in Manhattan where music writers got together, and I rarely met colleagues or collaborators. Sometimes days passed without my seeing anyone but the messengers delivering or picking up cassettes and lead sheets. The sequestration suited me, as I was still mourning the loss of Russell. Writing into the void of her absence, I crafted some decent heartbreak songs during that period.

On occasion I was hired as a lyricist only. Other times I ended up as one of four or five composers credited to a song. I found collaboration uncomfortable, and the easiest work was when they simply sent me someone’s music to lyricize. My submissions were usually accepted with little or no changes, then either used or not. But there were times when I had to rework something repeatedly for an insecure artist or co-composer, and those I sweated. But that’s how the industry worked. 

Sometimes I had to jump in my car and rush a cassette to a producer or an artist in the middle of a recording session. I became a familiar figure at the gates of Warner Bros, A&M, Universal, Paramount, 20th Century Fox. 

On good days, the work offered the pleasure of a facile exercise in craft. A youth spent submerged in literature and music equipped me well for this. I was steeped in the American songbook, from the Gershwins to the Beatles and the bards of my own time, from the quirky ditties of Spike Jones to the prophetic murmurings of Captain Beefheart, from West African kora music to North Indian ragas. I had literary tools to hand as well, sprung lines and rhymes, allusions to Donne, Yeats, Lorca. And I was clear about where America’s musical bedrock lay: in its fathomless Black invention. 

Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. But composing to order left me spiritually enervated, pacing my studio, grousing about casting pearls before swine. I still considered myself a solo artist, my tapes circulating among the record labels to choruses of faint praise and airy promises but no offer of a contract. I performed occasional Monday nights at the Troubador, did a few guest shots at a friend’s club. Meanwhile I was settling, too easily perhaps, into my new role as a contract composer, a hired gun.

Into this productive desolation, Russell’s parting words haunted my sleep: “Paul, you are an innocent. You swim in water you don’t even notice you are swimming in.” 

Who among us isn’t blind to our context, trapped in an aquarium not of our own making? Was her comment from an immigrant’s perspective, as Jazmin Kis? I took it as a chastening instruction, a warning to attend more to my surroundings, become less oblivious of circumstance. 

I missed her terribly. A few other women, familiar types from my musical milieu, passed through my life, but there was nothing compared to the happiness of being with Jazmin Kis, with her Nikon F2, her asymmetrical wit, and her revelatory gaze that opened my own eyes. 

In nights of despair, I’d reach for the phone to call her. Then the memory of the afternoon at Point Lobos would return, the empty hours staring out the car window at the thrashing surf, the bleak ride home, the explanation I deserved that never arrived. The mystery of what she wouldn’t tell me could only read as one thing: betrayal. Our joys had been an illusion. She was not to be trusted; I had to go on without her.

“Here in your endless summer...” 

Summer bled imperceptibly into fall in Beachwood Canyon. I wrote a theme for a children’s cartoon series. A song I’d gangbanged with five other contributing composers was nominated for a Grammy. My own work flagged, fell silent. 

One night I couldn’t bear it any more. I picked up the phone and called. 

I was about to hang up when she answered. All I could think to say was, “It’s me.” 

She was silent for a while. Then she said, “I have missed you so much.” 

It sounded as if she had begun to sob. My eyes filled with tears. It was worse than the sentimental Grammy nominee I’d contributed a fistful of forgettable lines to. 

 She was working a lot, she said, travel assignments mostly. She was about to leave for Yemen on a shoot for a French magazine. 

“Yemen?” 

“Yes, and then Iran. Isfahan.”

“That sounds better.”

“What about you, Paul?”

I told her what I’d been doing. It began to pour out. 

We talked for a long time, quickly falling into the polyglot shorthand forged in our time together, regaining the ease we’d lost. She’d been alone a lot, she said, watching movies, listening to music, or out shooting. She often imagined I was there beside her, she said, heard through my ears. I told her of things I’d seen in my solitary canyon walks that I’d wanted to show her, how I’d thought of buying a Nikon like hers. 

“It makes me so glad, talking with you,” she said. “I’m sorry for what happened.” 

“Can we see each other?”

“Maybe you could come to San Francisco when I get back?”

Breathless and relieved, I felt we’d found each other anew. In my thoughts, the blown encounter at Point Lobos faded into simply a misunderstanding. 

“When?”

“In two weeks.”

Life would begin again. 

2.

In the darkened rumbling plane cabin, the screen monitor placed us somewhere between Greenland and eastern Canada, halfway through the eleven-hour flight to LA. My head, lodged stiffly between seat and window, had become the site of some dream corridor between sleep and waking, Russell alive in my thoughts. How could it be that she was no longer here, on earth?

A shudder of turbulence creaked the cabin. Switching off the monitor, I fumbled for a bottle of water. For the first time since boarding, I thought of Sofia and her aunt, wondered how they were managing back on the island. Would Sofia get through her math without me? And if Margit encountered a deer in my car? 

What was the point of this trip? I was in another life now. It was Russell again, drawing me back beyond reason. For a moment I resented her, as I had that day driving back from Point Lobos.

I turned off the monitor and lay my head back against the seat. 

When Russell returned from her Middle East trip, we resumed our affair, our tale of two cities. Fewer coastal journeys by car, more one-hour flights between LA and San Francisco. Her roommates had moved out of the flat on Vallejo and one room she had converted into a darkroom; the other I used as a studio when I was there, outfitting it with a small Casio keyboard, a guitar, a Nagra portable tape recorder and headphones. 

Clinging to our renewed happiness, we seldom saw others. Our days were taken up with work, whichever city we were in. Evenings we’d head off to a restaurant, a movie, a club with live music. Afterwards we’d tumble into bed and into each other. 

It was over breakfast that we’d talk. I wanted to know more about her Budapest life. She said she was too young when they left to remember much, and now it wasn’t safe to return because of her father’s defection. She’d kept in touch with her mother - a self-absorbed woman, it seemed, whose life revolved around the Budapest National Theater - and they had met once, in Prague, but had found little to say. An affair her mother had had was part of what had precipitated her father’s flight from Hungary, she said. 

In Prague, her mother had given her a cache of childhood photos which one morning she spread out on the table, evidence of a lost world: the young father, cigarette and overcoat, standing in snow before a Czech Skoda in a bleak Soviet apartment block with little Jazmin, her gloved hand in his, her watchful eyes fixed on the camera. Playing dressup with Mom backstage among the costumes at the National Theater. 

“What do you think when you see these photos?” I said.

“They’re curiosities to me. I have sketches of memories. But I don’t know that girl.” 

“You’ve spent most of your life here.” 

“Yes. But I’ve always found California strange, alien. The saddest place. All this fake cheer, this ‘have a nice day’.”

“I’ve never connected to that either.”

“No, Paul. You say that, but you belong. You’re a native. It’s different.” 

“Maybe people like us find identity more through what we encounter than where we began. I discover Dostoevsky and Kafka, Bergman and Debussy and Miles Davis, and take them in. Grafting histories onto the spindly vines of our own. Your father falls in love with the West through jazz on the Voice of America and escapes to half a world away. You see images of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus and Tarkovsky and here you are. Is it so different?” 

“For people who have been displaced, the past remains alive. Imprinted, like a genetic stamp. It keeps resurfacing, it haunts you.” 

She had signed with an international photo agency with offices in Paris and New York. Now she sent much of her contracted work to a high-quality lab on Market Street; other projects she developed herself in her darkroom. New assignments began arriving, some involving travel: short trips mostly, and sometimes I’d come along. Once we drove to northern Arizona and stood at dawn on the rim of Canyon de Chelly, our hands entwined, watching wild horses gallop across the valley floor far below. Other times Russell went alone, and I always felt relief when she returned. I traveled a little, too, to New York to meet a producer, to Seattle to hear a band. Russell would come along if she was free, always with her camera.

We didn’t speak again about her “dropout”, as I thought of it now, the incident that had precipitated our breakup. In spite of our renewed closeness, I sensed there were things in her I could not gain access to. Or maybe I imagined them, a lover’s paranoia. Something she guarded, some cloud that would pass over her at times. Still, she seemed open and guileless with me mostly and I felt guilty for harboring suspicions. We all remain unreadable to others in the end, I supposed. 

She talked to her father on the phone in Hungarian. He had his worries, it seemed, a Berkeley divorcee he’d become entangled with. Miklos played soprano sax alone in his house in the Berkeley hills, Russell said, to assuage the strains of whatever work he did at Lawrence Livermore lab, or to mourn the life he’d left behind. Russell said she didn’t understand what he did at all, and it probably didn’t matter because he wasn’t supposed to talk about it anyway. 

I liked Miklos. One night we met him at Keystone Korner, a jazz club near Russell’s house, and when Sonny Rollins walked onstage you would have thought God had entered the house, the way Miklos lit up. 

Not long after New Year’s, my invitation to the Grammy awards ceremony arrived in an embossed envelope. I asked Russell if she wanted to go. She broke into a grin. “Can I bring my camera?”

“They probably have rules about that.”

“Maybe I could get accredited through my agency.”

“Then you’d have to work.”

“I’d rather be with you. And what if you win?”

“It won’t happen. I’m one of five credited composers. I’m not even sure which lines I contributed. And it’s up against a couple of songs that are actually decent.” 

In LA the week before the ceremony, I offered to buy her a dress to wear. I’d never seen her in anything but chinos and tank tops or teeshirts or sweaters or jackets, or nothing at all. 

“I want to wear a tuxedo like you,” she said.

We drove to a rental shop on Melrose Avenue and got fitted for a matching pair. The night of the awards, she wore her black tux over a white teeshirt, jeans with the cuffs rolled up, and bright red lipstick. She turned heads, this tall slender woman with short black hair and large dark eyes who didn’t quite look like she was from anywhere. Russell was too busy looking at everything to notice she was being observed. “Wish I had my camera,” she whispered. We mingled with Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones on the ballroom floor, and later we were seated in the auditorium with the unfamiliar co-authors of “our” song, which predictably didn’t win. 

The next day we flew back to San Francisco. Russell had a shoot scheduled down the peninsula, in Palo Alto, the following morning. When she didn’t come back that evening as planned, I became anxious. I didn’t want to call her if she was working. Finally she called late and left a message saying she’d be back the next day, with no explanation. 

This left me in a foul mood. It invoked the earlier incident, which had mostly faded from view. I paced the apartment in agitation, unable to calm myself. 

Passing the door to the room she used as a darkroom, I noticed it was ajar. This was odd, as she usually kept it closed and locked. Recently, I had asked her why she needed her own darkroom when the agency she was contracted with paid to have everything developed professionally. Personal work, she said. Art projects, experiments. Things the agency wouldn’t want or be expected to pay for. 

I was disinclined to poke into others’ affairs, and I expected the same respect in turn. But that night, in my agitation, an urge to violate overtook me. I opened the door. The metallic smell of developer solution hit me. By the hall light, I could make out strips of negatives and prints hanging by clothespins. I fumbled along the wall until I found the light switch and flipped on the safelight, a bare red bulb. I shut the door behind me. 

Beside a rectangular sink, there were stop baths and bottles of fixer. On a shelf above, boxes of emulsion paper, a stack of developed prints, and a large black folder. 

I craned my head to look at the images hanging from the clothespins. They seemed to be from the trip to Arizona, negatives she hadn’t sent to the lab: Canyon de Chelly, the Navajo reservation, and several of the two of us together a stranger had snapped with Russell’s camera at a diner in Flagstaff. 

I took a pair of plastic gloves lying by the sink and worked my hands into them. I removed the stack of prints from the shelf. They were 8 x 11 black and whites from her Middle East trip, images of people in Yemen, Iran. Two boys playing in a muddy village. A girl and her horse in a field. A gathering of schoolchildren. A tribal family standing before a wooden door. Three women in a shaded bazaar. A toothless smiling man offering her a sweet. Faces hidden and revealed, costumed bodies. Each image bore the remarkable intimacy Russell was able to summon, taking me back to the first time I’d seen her Kentucky photos in my office at Capitol Records. Looking at them, my rage began to dissolve. Blinded by selfish suspicion, I’d forgotten that I was in love with a person bearing a gift. I felt ashamed of being in there and knew I should leave.

I carefully stacked the photos back on the shelf in the same order as I’d found them. Then I took down the black notebook lying beside them and opened it. I began leafing through prints from the same Middle East trip. 

They couldn’t have been more different. Each was labeled with a Post-it, the date and location written with a pen.

The first one was of a power station. Sanaa, Yemen September 26th. 

A long shot of two men talking outside a restaurant. Sanaa, September 28th.

A large metal door. Al-Habrah Prison, Sanaa September 29th.

A minaret. Tehran, October 2nd. 

A long gray wall. Evin prison, south wall. Tehran, October 3rd. 

A car from the roof of a building. 

An engraved door.

A bolted fence.

An aqueduct. Isfahan, October 6th.

A police station. Isfahan, October 6th.

A laboratory. Isfahan U. of Technology, chem lab 103. October 7th.

A bridge, shot from below. Kahaju, Isfahan. October 7th. 

I closed the notebook and placed it back on the shelf. 

Stripping off the gloves, I wondered what I had just seen. The images were so far from her usual work. A power station? A laboratory? A prison? They seemed shot with a different camera, though I couldn’t be sure. 

I switched off the safelight and opened the door to the hallway. Why had she taken these pictures? A personal interest in citiscapes? Was this another aspect of her work, or her? Or was it simply another series for another client? 

I stepped out into the hall and closed the door to the darkroom, mystified and unsettled. 

Russell arrived home late the next morning, apologetic for the delay. I greeted her uneasily, flushed with guilt at my darkroom transgression. She didn’t seem to notice. The shoot had been difficult, she said; they’d had to stay over and reshoot some of it that morning early. 

By afternoon she was back in her darkroom, me in my studio. That evening we walked down Vallejo into the city as usual to find a place to eat and talk. 

Our life together continued as before. There was no possible way for me to ask her about those photos because I wasn’t supposed to have seen them. They remained an enigma to me. I couldn’t relate them to anything I knew of her work and I couldn’t forget them. Undoubtedly there was an innocuous explanation, but I wasn’t going to hear it. A few times I tried to bend our conversations in a direction that might invite disclosure but nothing came of it. I sensed that if I brought it up directly, confessed that I’d been in her darkroom, she would be aghast, we would quarrel, and we would lose each other again, an unbearable thought. I only wanted us to continue. 

So I drew a curtain over it, relegated it to the shadows, as I’d done with the unexplained incident at Point Lobos. This is what we do sometimes, to keep going. We harbor secrets, we lie, we deceive.