THE COAST (6)

4. 

Leaving the Venice canals that morning, I headed into the city for my lunch date. From the 10 Freeway running east, the LA basin, swept clear by an offshore breeze, looked crystalline and sharp, the flatlands to the south visible all the way past the airport to Signal Hill. North along the run-up to the Santa Monica Mountains, the silvery palm branches shimmered like streamers and the low stucco buildings looked fresh-scrubbed in the late morning light. Ahead, distant Mount Baldy’s peak appeared as close as a hood ornament.

This light, diffusing through what Faulkner once called “the vague high soft almost nebulous California haze,” aroused in him, and most writers who came here, a sense of menace. The painters, though - Hockney, Diebenkorn, Ruscha - reveled in it.

I rolled the window down. East of the 405 interchange, the air abruptly lost its saltiness, warming by five or six degrees. Some days a gentle wind lofted the sea air further inland; I’d smelled it as far east as Chinatown, seen seagulls in Pasadena. People paid extra for view homes perched on the granite slopes of the Hollywood foothills, though many days the picture windows offered little more than a pall of particulate waste.

Accelerating, I felt the buffeting breeze rush through the open window. I thought of Joan Didion’s Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays, daily driving these interchanges “as a riverman runs a river.” LA as sensory text, a kind of Braille for the sighted: a city in code, bearing letters in place of a name. But then freeways subvert the very idea of a city, which says: Slow down, enter the density, relate. Speed provides a substitute for experience - a quick release from history, especially one’s own. The on-ramp ascent, with its sudden velocity burst, is irresistible. The moment I got behind the wheel of a car at sixteen, I was lost to my parents forever. Every southern California kid has the contours of this hurtling topography inscribed in his blood.  

The off-ramps drifted by, each sign laminated with memory. I’d moved so often I could probably claim a dozen neighborhoods as mine. The downtown office towers appeared, ebony monoliths backlit by morning sun. 

As I was still early for lunch, I briefly considered driving by a few of the music studios I’d serviced with music and words. But in the spirit of the city that tended to erase memory, I chose to skip it. It wasn’t as if Paramount, Capitol, Universal, A&M, ASCAP, and my publishers’ offices would be commemorating me with statues. 

I veered onto an offramp and dropped down onto the city floor. Heading north on the surface arteries, I began tracking a car in the rearview mirror. It was a late model Ford, green. After some blocks I became reasonably convinced that it was tailing me. It evoked the twisted unreality that had overtaken my life eight years earlier, spreading through me like a chemical stain. When might a car have picked up my trail? In Venice? At the airport? It made no sense. But why was I looking for sense?  

I knew the neighborhood I was in. I considered instigating a couple of feints - a block left, then right, then left - until I had shaken my real or imagined tail. Then I thought, come on, calm down. Nearing the restaurant, I tried to quell the unnerving encounter with a self I thought I’d left behind.

The restaurant’s neon sign loomed ahead: a Mexican eatery and hangout from my old creative life. I pulled up on the street a half block away, turned off the engine, and sat quietly for a few moments, waiting. The green Ford sped by, a lone male driver at the wheel, staring ahead. 

I had set my phone on the passenger seat. Picking it up, I noticed there was a message from Sofia. I opened it and found a math question, something about measuring volumes. I couldn’t answer it on the spot if in fact I could solve it at all. It was the middle of the night on the island; there would be time later to respond. 

Typical of Sofia, I thought. Concrete, nothing sentimental. I missed her, I missed the island, I wished I were back there and not here. 

“Paul. Can it be?”

Cheryl was standing inside the entrance with a wide warming smile.

“You look exactly the same,” I said, meaning it. 

I embraced her, then we found our way to a red leatherette booth. 

“Eight years?”

“Something like that.”

Among the few ex-colleagues I’d kept in touch with, Cheryl was the one I valued most. If there was something she couldn’t do, I didn’t know what it was. She composed music and lyrics, played most instruments, acted and taught. From conducting the Memphis Youth Symphony at 18 to Julliard to her own Hollywood production company, she cared little for the celebrity she could have easily attained. Part Cherokee, mostly Beale Street Black, Cheryl was always too fast for everybody yet held to the still center of things. Witty, smart, shamefully talented, Cheryl embodied all I’d found best in the milieu I once inhabited.

She looked at me over her menu. “You okay, Paul?”

“I think so. It’s strange to be back.”

“You look less haunted than before you left. I can say that much.”

“I probably take better care of myself these days.” 

We’d met on a film music assignment years earlier and it was as if we already knew each other. After that, we collaborated as often as we could. We shared the intimacy and humor of ex-lovers although we hadn’t been that but could have been. We simply understood each other, at the core.

“Do you watch American news over there on your island?” 

“I try not to.”

“How can you live without your daily dose of sex crime race drugs?”

“I prefer the local news. Alfalfa crops, wind conditions, in a language I can barely follow.”

“So are Scandinavians really the happiest people in the world?”

“‘Smug’ might better describe it.” 

Cheryl laughed. “I used to conduct Sibelius. If you run into him, tell him hello from a big fan.”

The booths around us were filling up. Cheryl flagged a waiter.

“You’re composing these days?” I said after we’d ordered.

“With two boys in college, I do whatever comes my way. Some acting too, and a part-time teaching gig at UCLA.”

A grizzled man with a cane paused before our table and stared at me as if trying to place me. Finally I said, “Can I help you?” He murmured something and ambled off towards the entrance. 

Cheryl stared at me wordlessly then burst out laughing. “A shade from your past?”

“Somebody else’s past. Never seen him before.”

“Actually, Paul, I’ve got a gig for us. If you want it.”

“Do I have to be here to do it?”

“I don’t see why. Music and a title song for a documentary on climate change. Double union scale. I’ll do the orchestration. Good filmmakers.” 

“It would be nice to do something together,” I said. “I’ve missed it.”

When our food arrived and the waiter had left, Cheryl said, “I read about Russell. I assume that’s why you came back.” 

“There’s a ceremony in a few days.”

“What took her?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Such a shame. I was in awe of that woman.” 

“Coming from you, that’s saying a lot.”

“She taught a workshop at my kids’ school once. Her book on Haiti had just come out. She was this celebrated photographer. She didn’t have to do that.”

Russell did a lot of things she didn’t have to do, I thought.

“And you and her,” Cheryl said. “Goodness. The mystery couple.” 

In my years with Russell, we seldom ventured out socially together. We were working, or traveling somewhere, or constrained by her secret, shadow life. Gradually Russell’s alter existence had seeped into mine until it became mine. If there were years when that dimension wasn’t in play, it always returned, threading our days with uncertainty and dread. Our destinies remained linked, if not quite in a way anybody would imagine. Recalling this, a melancholy swept me, and a sadness. It was still hard to grasp that she was gone. I wasn’t getting far with acceptance at all.

Cheryl grabbed the check when it arrived. “I can charge it to the job.” 

“That’s a good start,” I said. “Thanks for lunch and the company. And the gig.”

“I’ll send you the details later. How long will you be here?”

“Up the coast tomorrow. Then back to Europe at the end of the week.”

As we said goodbye outside the restaurant, Cheryl said softly, “I’ll be ready for my island pretty soon.”

“You’ll get there,” I said, already looking around for a green Ford.

5.

The two lane stretch winding north through Malibu was a speed trap, as I recalled it, so I hugged the right lane to allow traffic to stream past. Foothills, singed and scoured of foliage from recent fires, rose above the small storefronts. On the ocean side, between the houses, low green waves collapsed on pale strips of sand in the silvery morning light. 

I had risen early, eager to get on my way, choosing the coast road over inland 101 for the esthetics, and because I was in no hurry, and because it would be easier to spot a tail if I were being followed. 

I’d awoken to an unsettling message from Margit back on the island. Sofia’s period was late. I was flummoxed. I had no idea she was having sex with anyone. It wasn’t part of our conversations, which I considered intimate and frank. Should I have counseled this motherless girl about birth control? Should I write her now? 

If it were true that she was pregnant, what would we do? Fifteen was far too young. This seemed an end of innocence, not just for her but between us. The life of simple certainties I’d presumed to fashion there in the Baltic was just another illusion. What was normal about raising Sofia by myself anyway, a girl who wouldn’t have existed had I not impregnated Russell’s cousin? 

Yet how could I ever regret Sofia, whom I loved? 

The road beyond Malibu Colony was a ribbon of memories, too many of them of Russell. I pictured her emerging from a shower in a Zuma Beach motel that had once hosted our raptures. Skirting downtown Oxnard, I recalled her describing the Soviet socialist Budapest of her childhood. Circling onto the 101 north at Ventura, I passed a gas station where we’d stopped so Russell, doubled over with stress incited by a message from Janos, could vomit. 

The Christmas before, we’d been at her apartment in New York. It was snowing outside and we both had colds. She was correcting proofs of her photo book on Haiti, I was working on music for a film. Our problems were heady, elective; there was money. We’d even bought a Christmas tree that year, and recently we’d dared to talk of having a child. After New Years we’d fly to the coast to visit her father in Berkeley. Miklos, soon to retire from the Rad Lab, had married the divorcee who had been pursuing him. 

Enough years had passed to assume that any interest US Intelligence had had in Russell had waned. When she wasn’t on assignment, she devoted herself to teaching photo workshops, shooting for international relief agencies, volunteering for charitable events - projects she’d sometimes allude to as penance for the clandestine shootings she’d done in those early years. Now it was the era of glasnost and perestroika, and the magazines were proposing sending her into the newly opened Eastern Bloc. 

Since we hadn’t bought any decorations for the tree, we decided to hang Christmas cards. I was threading some with colored ribbons when I noticed one inscribed in Hungarian. It said: A Jazmin. Boldog Karácsonyt. Janos. 

I showed it to her. “What does this mean?”

“Merry Christmas.”

“The same Janos?”

She paled. “Yes, Paul.”

It was a generic Hallmark card, Santa wrapped in an American flag.  “He knows where you live.” 

“I’m not that hard to find.” 

“Does he send a card every year?”

“Just this one. Maybe to celebrate glasnost.”

“Where’s the envelope?”

“Paul, calm down. It’s just a Christmas card.” 

I rummaged through the trash and found the envelope. It was postmarked Arlington, Virginia, with no return address. 

“He’s probably retired with his family,” Russell said, “had his feet up by the fire and decided to send me a greeting.” 

“How do you know he has a family?”

“He told me.”

“When?”

“Back then.” 

Back then. Suddenly we were back then. The old suspicions swirled through the room. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“That a Christmas card came? I didn’t think it was important.” 

“Nothing is innocent with those guys. It’s a prelude to something.” 

“Now you are the paranoid one,” she said.

I wouldn’t be consoled. “Reagan’s in his second term. The covert ops are on the loose. Contras, dirty tricks.” 

She waved her hands in distress. “Please stop.” She looked at me in desperation. “It was a mistake to tell you about it all those years ago. I’ve often thought that.” 

“Too late now. I’m in. I don’t want to be in the dark.” 

“But you’re not. You’re in the light. That’s where you should stay.”

I wanted to be part of her secret so as to protect her from it. She wanted to shield me from that secret for the same reason. We both knew how quickly this subject could turn us into strangers. We tried to let it out of our minds. It was like bucking a strong wind. 

Before we left for California, I said, “Promise you’ll tell me if there’s another contact.”

“I will.”

In Berkeley, at her father’s house for New Year’s dinner, I met his new spouse. Ginny was a tall redhead, witty and affectionate, a science editor at a university press with a couple of grown kids. And I met Lena, Russel’s cousin and Sofia’s future mother, for the first time. She and Miklos had prepared a Hungarian feast of stews, stuffed cabbage, flatbreads, tortes, and kifli, a toothsome bread that resembled a croissant. 

After we had eaten to satiety, Miklos and I stood outside on the porch while he smoked. We lamented the closing of Keystone Korner, the club where we used to go to hear jazz. Then he said, “Paul, I have a worse worry than that. A magazine offered Jazmin a job to shoot in Hungary.”

“She mentioned it.” 

“I told her to wait. It’s too soon. We have to see about this glasnost business.” Below us, the lights of Berkeley spread away to the black void of the bay. Miklos lit another Camel. “Okay, maybe things are opening up there a little. But those sons of bitches can’t be trusted. She’s the daughter of a defector. They won’t forget that.”

“I don’t think she’s going to take the job.”

“They want her to shoot in Szolnok, a city a few hours from Budapest. My family comes from there. It was mostly destroyed during the War.”

“The Germans.”

“No. Allied bombings.”

So much I don’t know, I thought.  

“Thirty years ago Soviet tanks mowed down my brother. That was in Budapest.” 

After Berkeley, Russell and I flew to LA to attend an album release party, a benefit project to raise money to combat world hunger. I’d co-written a song for it. A cavernous recording studio in Hollywood was thronged with celebrities who’d performed on the album. We milled among the consoles and mikes, the baffles and booms. 

Afterwards, driving Russell to the airport to catch the red-eye back to New York, I said, “Your father is worried about you working in Hungary.”

“He would be. I think he’s a little bit stuck in the past about that.”

I kept thinking about Miklos’s brother, who would have been Russell’s uncle, mowed down by the tank.

“The magazine wants me to shoot in one of the old thermal spas, Turkish baths that go back to the Ottoman occupation.” As we approached the airport, she said, “It would be nice to see my country. My old country, I mean.”

Outside the United terminal, we kissed goodbye.

It turned out I was right about Janos. Soon after, he approached her in Central Park. He seemed to know about the proposed shoot in Hungary and said the State Department could guarantee her protection if she went. He didn’t want her to shoot anything for them, just report what she saw while working in Szolnok and Budapest. He would provide her with a checklist she was to memorize, then they’d debrief her when she got back.

She told me about it, as she’d promised she would. 

“How can our government offer you protection in a country they don’t control?” I asked her. 

In the end, the magazine canceled the shoot. But Reagan’s government seemed to see perestroika as simply an opportunity to gather more intelligence. To the magazines, Russell was a natural to send on assignment into the newly opened Soviet states, and Janos knew that Russell had her own reasons for wanting to see the demise of communism in the Eastern bloc. 

For a while, we acted as if things were the same. Work kept us on separate coasts much of the time. Then that spring she received another offer, this one from a large American travel magazine, to shoot the people of the National Theater in Budapest, where her mother had worked until recently retiring. The money was significant, the assignment irresistible, an ideal occasion for Jazmin Kis’s return to the country of her birth.  

I called her from LA the Saturday before she was to leave. She didn’t answer.

Late Sunday she called back.

“Where were you?”

She didn’t reply for a long time. Then she said, “It’s probably not a good idea for us to talk on the phone.”

I knew what she meant immediately. And that she had broken her promise to me.

“When, then?”

“When I get back.”

I felt desperate, abandoned. “I could come with you.”

“No, Paul.” 

“Why not?”

“I’ll have no time. And it wouldn’t be safe.” 

There was no sound for a while but our breathing. 

“Is there anything more I should know?”

More silence, and then: “I love you.”

I knew right then that I had lost her again.