THE COAST (5)

3.

The plane leveled over LAX. Cabin lights came on, window shades up, muffled announcements. Torn from my journey of memory, I peered down at the termitary of daytime car traffic below. As the wheels bumped the tarmac, a spike of fear ran through me. Already I regretted my return. 

I deplaned with the herd and lurched off to customs. The officer leafed through my passport. “Been a while,” he said, then stamped it and handed it back to me. 

Outside, in the inert twilight air, I boarded a shuttle bus that delivered me to the car rental agency. I climbed into the sedan I’d rented for the week, pulled away from the lot, and headed up Lincoln Boulevard in rush hour traffic. 

LA, monument to transience: with its famously shallow history, it bore most of mine, a past inseparable from cars, that essential appendage from age sixteen. What kicked in now, though, hands gripping the wheel, was not those decades of easy speed but their noir finale. I kept glancing in the rearview, a habit I’d developed before leaving eight years ago, along with other maneuvers such as taking side streets, doubling back along boulevards, hunching down while parked so as not to be seen.

I’d booked a couple of nights at a small hotel in Santa Monica that had bungalows with kitchenettes where I used to hole up to write music on deadline. After checking in, I threw my bag on the bed, closed the curtains, and ate some Chinese takeout I’d picked up en route. 

Then I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Two nights here in LA, I figured, then on up the coast. 

Before leaving the island, I’d idly looked up some people from my Hollywood days. A few had become famous, or wealthy; others had dropped off the map or been supplanted by names unfamiliar to me; a rare few had moved on to substantial personal work - symphonies, novels, art exhibitions. Hundreds, thousands we were, a generation of culture workers, bees at the hive. Such fierce productivity, such formidable craft, such sizable talents employed to ephemeral ends. Good recompense, if spiritually enervating, and all of us expendable. Some reveled in the lively action, the white heat of it; others, refugees from the finer arts, muttered cynically of demeaning themselves. One of my collaborators used to moan, “We’re not composers, Paul. We’re composters.” Little attention was paid to human values, community, what a life might actually be, or mean. Brief liaisons, casual marriages, quick divorces, kids with weekend fathers. In my case, the one constant was, unconstantly, Jazmin Kis. 

The ceremony for her, the spreading of the ashes, was in three days. Why were they having it at Point Lobos, of all places, whoever they were? They couldn’t have known of that ancient episode when Russell stood me up there. Had she left instructions? Unlike her to do that.

I sat up on the bungalow bed and opened my laptop. I hadn’t slept on the plane but wasn’t tired. It was nine hours later back on the island; Sofia and her aunt Margit would still be asleep. I would have welcomed news from either, but of course to them, I’d just left.

I stood and went to the window. In the courtyard, a huge palm tree with its thick, patterned bark, was lit from below by a pair of orange floodlights. On Russell’s first trip to LA, when I first met her, we were walking past a fat palm tree with its crusty, woven bark and she said, “Does somebody braid those palms?” 

I’d laughed with delight. 

I turned off the light and tried to sleep.

The next morning I left early to drive around for a while before meeting an old composing colleague for lunch, partly to quell a restlessness but also to undertake what I imagined to be a small valedictory tour, thinking this might well be my last visit here. I had a life, a family, and safety on the island now. Sofia sometimes talked of coming here after high school graduation, drawn by the lure of Hollywood, but I suspected it might not happen, as she was as much European as American by now, whether she knew it or not.

I drifted north along Ocean Avenue, the stately rows of palms to my left, the sky a sheet of azure where it met the horizon of the sea far below. At the palisades’ end, I snaked down a two-lane road into Santa Monica Canyon, passing erstwhile bohemian cottages and bungalows razed to make way for grander dwellings. Then from the canyon floor, I ascended a twisting shaded road into Rustic Canyon, where my parents had finished their years in a small house. At first I couldn’t find it; then doubling back, I realized it too had been leveled to build a bigger home. I thought of the German emigres who had found shelter in these neighborhoods - Mann, Brecht, Adorno - fleeing trouble in their homeland. Now I had become an emigre myself, my refuge a European island the Nazis had once occupied until Russians bombs forced their surrender.

If my drive was intended as a sentimental journey, it wasn’t working so far. I felt little purchase on these spaces, these memories. I’d left a light footprint in this city I’d occupied since childhood, I realized. In no sense did it belong to me any more, nor me to it.

I headed back south along the coast road, noting a beach club where one summer at fifteen I’d had a job setting up umbrellas for wealthy patrons. Bright yellow and purple flowers festooned banks of iceplant cascading down the palisades slopes. Then re-entering the city, I passed a homeless encampment in the beachfront community that calls itself, with comic pretension, Venice. There I parked my car and walked to a collection of houses fronted by small canals, funky simulacrae of the grand Adriatic arterial waterways they purported to invoke. 

During my westward drift across the city from Beachwood Canyon, as my income had risen, I’d rented a house on the canals for some years, a two-story tumbledown craftsman dwelling. Russell would stay with me sometimes and we’d walk these footpaths by the water as I was doing now. This was a few years after our Grammy Awards outing, and that night in North Beach when I’d surreptitiously entered her darkroom. She was working a lot and so was I. We’d see each other when we could, often somewhere else - Kyoto, Dubrovnik, Chile - where she was shooting. There had been another dropout, a no-show I’d steeled myself to forgive. We still reveled in being together, our days and nights rich with pleasure, contentment, and discovery. 

The canal path I was walking along was empty but for a man some distance away taking photos with his phone. When he turned it in my direction, I paused, beset by old fears, and waited until he had passed. 

Russell and I had been walking these canals at dusk once when she said, out of the blue, “You were in my darkroom.”

I felt a bolt of shock, and with it, shame. “Was I? When?”

“You know when.” 

The guilt came rushing back. “How did you know?”

“My gloves. You had left them in the wrong place.” She smiled and put her hand on my arm. “You wouldn’t make a good spy, Paul. But it’s okay.”

“No it’s not.”

“Did you look at my black portfolio?”
I recalled those improbable images of Middle Eastern aqueducts, schools and prisons. “I did,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gone in there. I was missing you that night and I was curious what you were working on.”

“I left the darkroom open on purpose. I thought you’d look. I wanted you to.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought that one day I might have to tell you some things.”

That evening, at the house on the canal, we made dinner together in silence. We opened a bottle of Chilean red wine we’d brought back from Valparaiso. After we’d eaten, Russell got up and closed the curtains facing the canal then returned to the table. 

“That day I didn’t meet you at Point Lobos,” she said. “I had to go and shoot something for somebody.” 

“And stand me up, and offer no explanation afterwards.”

Russell took a sip of the wine then put it down.

“A few days before, I was walking home through North Beach and a man came up to me and asked if he could have a word with me. He spoke Hungarian. I was scared because I thought he must be a communist agent. My father had told me they were around. I asked him to please leave me alone. Then he showed me an American passport with his name and picture, and some kind of ID that said that he worked for the US State Department. Then I was even more afraid, that maybe my father and I would be deported. He said don’t worry, you’re in no danger. I just need to ask you a question.”

Russell’s hand shook as she reached for the wine again.

“We sat on a bench in Washington Square Park. He was a middle-aged guy dressed in slacks and a sports jacket. Same generation as my father, maybe a little older. He said his name was Janos. He’d left Hungary in 1956 during the uprising. He seemed to know things about me and my father. Then he said, ‘You are a good photographer. There is going to be a demonstration in Golden Gate Park on Saturday. We expect there will be communist agitators among them. We would like you to take some pictures of the crowd. You look like the demonstrators so you won’t be especially noticed.’” 

“The peace march from the Panhandle to Kezar Stadium.” 

“I probably would have been there anyway if I wasn’t planning to meet you. A lot of students from the Art Institute were going. To protest Nixon and Vietnam.”

“What did you tell the guy?”

“I said I can’t do that. I take pictures for my own purposes. He said, ‘I respect your views.’ He took out a cigarette and lit it. The Hungarian men of that generation, they all smoke like chimneys. Then he said, ‘You and your father were brought to freedom in this country, just like me. Sometimes we are asked to do a small favor in return.’” 

“He had no right to say that. That’s blackmail.” 

“He gave me his phone number and said, ‘Call me if you reconsider.’ The next day I began to worry that my refusal would have consequences for my father. Or me. That Saturday morning, the day I was supposed to meet you, I woke up and realized I was stuck. I tried to call you but you had already left LA. I called Janos and told him I’d do it. He said, ‘Good. But you must never tell anybody, of course.’” Russell put her glass down and looked at me through tears. “You and I broke up because of it.”

I reached across the table and took her hand.

“I went to the peace march. I took photos of the crowd. There were a hundred photographers there. What use were my pictures to them? I think they were just trying me out. Afterwards I gave Janos the negatives and contact sheets.” She looked at me gravely. “That’s how it starts. A small favor.” 

“So that’s what you meant when you said that I don’t live in history.” 

“I didn’t hear from Janos for a while. Then when I got the travel assignment to go to the Middle East, he contacted me again. He seemed to know I was going. He gave me a list of sites to shoot there.” 

“The photos I saw in your darkroom.” 

“Paul, if I could help defeat the communists who ruined Hungary, I would do it. I don’t have the soft ideas most young Americans have about that. All my family in Hungary has suffered. At the peace march, I took some useless pictures. What they did with them I have no idea. But Yemen and Iran are not about communism. When I went through customs in Tehran they pulled me aside and wanted to see my camera. I thought I was going to be arrested and put in jail. When I got back, I told Janos I won’t do this any more. He said he understood.”

She turned and gazed at the closed curtain separating us from the canals. 

“Everything has a price, I suppose. Very American, right? Is this the cost of freedom for my father and me? I hate it, but I understand if that is how it works. Yes, I am glad to be here. Sometimes I’ve tried to think of it like a student loan, a debt I have to pay off.” 

“You’re an artist, not a spy.” 

“I said that to Janos. Then last month before we left for Chile he asked me to take some photos there. He said it was important, a big communist threat.”

“Nixon and Kissinger want Salvador Allende, the leftist president, out.”

“One afternoon in Santiago I shot some sites near the Presidential Palace from a list Janos had given me. You were back at the hotel. Later I gave Janos the negs and told him that was the last time.”

“Does your father know?”

“No. He mustn’t. He would be furious, humiliated. He’d probably do something that would get us deported. But I did it to protect him too.” 

“Why are you telling me now?” 

She looked at me. “It’s complicated. This secret has come between us. I love you and I don’t want to lose you again. I decided that it is better that you are inside the secret, not outside it. Either way, I am afraid. You must promise to act like I never told you. Janos knows who you are, because you are often with me. But they’re not interested in you. You’re just a regular American.” 

“Living outside of history.” 

“Now you know. And now you are implicated.”

That night we lay on the bed in our clothes in the dark, staring at the ceiling. I was tasting the strange flavor of duplicity, of having a large secret. If it remained inconceivable that the person most intimate to me had been spying for our government, it was a relief to learn that what I had often feared wasn’t true: that there was another man in her life. Except there was: Janos. 

The arts communities we lived among were implicitly, impulsively liberal. We were against the war, all wars. We were for oppressed people and minorities and animal rights. We were for freedom of expression, peace and love. In youth we had backpacked through countries, including our own, breaking earnest bread with people whose difficult situations we could not begin to comprehend. Awash in good intentions, distrustful of authority and power, we would not have imagined for a minute that one among us was secretly aiding the very government we were often protesting. In that way, Russell was right: I was the innocent American they talk about. 

Late that night, when at last we had undressed and gotten into bed, she said, “Do you resent me for telling you this?”

“It’s better that I know. But I worry that you will never be free of those bastards, whichever agency it is that this Janos works for.” 

“He doesn’t say.” 

“CIA, probably. Or FBI.” What did I know?

Outside, a clamor of ducks broke out, males in the throes of spring mating,  making brutal work of assaulting the females. 

“You could change your phone number,” I said.

“That wouldn’t help. They can find me whenever they want. They’re the government.”

“So because they helped you and your father escape, you are now considered an ‘asset’.” 

“It’s the same for Janos, I suppose.” 

“Not at all. He is a willing, paid operative. You are not. What did he do in Hungary?”

“He was a journalist, he said.” 

We slept badly that night. On September 11th of that year, Salvador Allende was murdered in Chile’s Presidential Palace during the US-backed overthrow of his elected government. In October, war broke out between the Saudi-backed north and communist south Yemen. 

Then Russell stopped hearing from Janos. Interest in her appeared to have waned with the departure of Nixon and Kissinger. Or perhaps spying had been put back in the hands of professionals. Six years later, in 1978, the Iranian Revolution would erupt. 

During those years, Russell’s career bloomed. As a staff photographer for National Geographic, she roamed Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, shooting iconic photos, receiving award nominations. I wasn’t doing badly myself, mutating from contract songwriter to producer and composer, overseeing charted albums and singles for labels I used to pitch songs to. 

Distance enforced by our work only quickened our desire to be together again. Neither of us could imagine it being otherwise. We illuminated and completed each other. Does everyone have such luck? Oddly perhaps, her secret spying episodes served to reinforce our connection, the black portfolio a shadow engendering a paradoxical light, reminding us that something had come between us and could again. 

She had rented a flat in the Ansonia Building on New York’s upper west side to be near her agency. When I was producing tracks in a Manhattan studio I’d stay with her. I’d bought a house in Santa Monica and outfitted it with a small recording studio, and when work brought Russell back to the coast she’d stay with me there. Sometimes her father flew down from Berkeley to visit, and we’d go out and hear jazz, though Miklos always remained opaque about his work at the radiation lab. 

Often we traveled together to other countries, and while Russell was off shooting I’d haunt musical and literary trails, gather indigenous instruments, stalk obscure titles in bookstalls. When she got back from shooting, she’d want to know what I’d found. She was curious about how I composed, how I played, how I engendered lyrics. I remained amazed at the strange magic of her camera eye, how somebody could know to do that. 

There was no talk of marriage. What held us together was elective, alive in the moment, and we knew that marriage would suffocate it. Before Russell, I had seen love as ownership; with her, I was learning another way.

Across those vivid, mostly untroubled years, there were occasional disturbing bouts of paranoia. Russell would imagine she was being watched, or monitored, or tracked. A ringing phone: wrong number. A stranger knocking on the door: wrong apartment. A spectral figure in the landscape: an innocent stranger. Once, around the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1978, we were walking on a Manhattan street and she thought she saw Janos. She panicked, sending us on a frantic series of detours on foot, by bus, in taxis, until we finally reached her place. She confessed to feeling guilt over the clandestine photos she had taken, though I assured her they would have had little bearing on the events that transpired in the countries where she’d shot. 

Gradually she stopped looking over her shoulder, though she still worried that Janos would find her again one day and ask her to do something she couldn’t say no to. 

“There is nothing you can’t refuse,” I’d say. 

She would shake her head and say, “No, Paul. It’s not like that.” 

When a lover’s first language is not yours, there is always a shield, a curtain there. Her conversations with her father, or her cousin Lena in Berkeley, intrigued me, but of course I couldn’t follow them. During that time I took a stab at learning Hungarian, reducing Russell to tears of laughter, and I didn’t get very far. Though her English was quite perfect, she made surprising word choices at times which often delighted me, though I didn’t know whether to attribute them to her creativity or to how Hungarian worked. 

Russell was multitudes. I was just me.