THE COAST (7)

6.

The journey north along Highways 1 and 101, built over trails inscribed by Catalan and Spanish monks, always spoke to me of both ecstasy and erasure. The boundless Pacific to one side, hills and mountains to the other, had framed my share of operatic elation and spindrift oblivion. Running the lip of the infinite, where the sun never rose but only set.

 I sped past surfers awaiting swells, inert on their boards, past hillsides banked with festive spring wildflowers. Beyond Ventura, I turned inland, heading for a visit with my old painter friend Michael. 

I wound through lemon and avocado ranches, stands of mesquite and oak. Reaching Ojai, one of California’s myriad quasi-utopian pocket communities, I took the road traversing the village, then continued through a valley of orange groves. At a break in the trees, I turned into a driveway and parked in the shade of a eucalyptus.

“Welcome Paul. Off to buy lunch fixings. Back in a wink.”

The message, affixed to Michael’s studio door by a magnet, sent me back to the car to wait. 

I pulled out my phone. There was a message from Margit telling me Sofia’s period had arrived. Dizzy with relief, I wrote back and asked her to please have a talk with Sofia about birth control. Then I texted Sofia the presumptive answer to her math question of the day before. 

I felt far away from the island, longed for it, and feared I wouldn’t be able to get back, that I’d made a terrible mistake returning to California and that I would suffer for it.

There was a new email from the person who had first sent me the message about the event for Russell, setting me on this journey. Her name was Zoe and she wanted me to confirm that I was coming, as they would be buying food and drink for the “celebration.” Vegan and gluten-free, no doubt, I thought glumly.  

What had Russell died of? And where? Surely someone at the ceremony would know.

Did any of them know of her other life? Or her life with me?

And why did she die, if she did?

I was still nourishing the magical idea that she would appear at Point Lobos to debunk the obituaries, correct that primal defection of years ago when she had abandoned me to shoot that peace demonstration for Janos. She would complete the circle now, not leave me twice bereft, revealing her own death as the final deception. 

I wanted to recapture all she had inspired, incited, ignited in me, the mystery of her, what had been holy and alive with us. 

Before I could decide how to answer the email from Zoe, I looked up to see Michael mugging outside the car window.

I clambered out and we embraced. 

“Fettuccini with shrimp,” he said, brandishing his bag. 

I followed him across the small cactus garden to his studio, which was also where he lived. While he unpacked the groceries and began cooking lunch, I looked around. It was the same single, large high-ceilinged room with skylights, divided into studio, kitchen, upstairs loft. Clutter of books and records, upright piano, stacked canvases. The high wall before me, empty but for paint marks, was where he would later hang work for us to look at. 

“What brings you back?” Michael called from the kitchen. 

“Russell died.”

“I read that. Very sad news.”

He brought two plates of steaming pasta to a table then lowered himself, groaning, into a wicker chair.

“You holding up?” I asked.

 “A shell of my former self. Put me up to your ear and you can hear the ocean.” 

“But you work.”

“Daily.” 

We ate in silence. Michael had always been a good cook. 

In youth, we had discovered culture, high and low, together. Lenny Bruce to Beckett, Ray Charles to Messian, Mad Magazine to Carravagio. Later we’d kept in touch, intermittently. With his gifts, Michael would have done well in the popular creative trades as I had, but he had chosen to retire from the human fray early and simply paint. He had become the master he had aspired to be, though his life had not been free of difficulty: a young wife who had taken her life, ill health, poverty, battles with drink. The personal argot formed early between us, though, with its offhand ironies and arcane references to absurd California youths, and our unvoiced affection, had sustained.

So this is us now, I thought. Solitary figures, veterans of clamor and romance and epiphanies, paths taken and not. Had we learned anything at all? Or had we simply thrown ourselves against the bulwarks of life like so much splattered paint?

“So what direction are you headed in?”

“Point Lobos. A gathering to commemorate Russell.”

“Where will you stay tonight?”
“Somewhere up the coast.”

“Lompoc. Solvang. Oceano.”

“Pismo. Cambria. Gorda.” 

“The possibilities are endless, really.” 

We laughed. When we’d finished eating, Michael stood and took the plates to the kitchen. Then he began to bring canvases out, one by one, and hang them on the wall. 

Most were smaller, more focused than earlier work. Light-infused dream corridors. Portraits bearing rich Rembrantian gravity. Art looking at art. His skills had deepened. He had come through it all. I could only marvel. 

“There you have it,” he said, taking the last one down. 

I looked at him, full of admiration. “You’re getting better, Mick.”

“Working on it.” Then he turned and hung the last canvas back up on the wall. “Actually a bit left to do on this one.”

After we’d had coffee together, I stood to go.

“You left a bag here last time you came through,” he said. 

“I had forgotten.”

“Not surprised. You were in a state. Eight, nine years ago?” 

He walked to a stand-alone closet and removed a blue canvas duffel bag, bound shut with thick strips of silver duct tape. Seeing it raised a terror in me I thought I’d banished. I would have been content to leave it here, along with everything it contained and represented. 

We walked to my car together. I opened the rear door and placed the duffel on the floor.

“Until soon,” Michael said. 

I drove into the afternoon sun until I reached the coast road again. Then I took the onramp and wheeled north. 

7.

“Oh, Paul, it was wonderful. The castles, the baths, the old neighborhoods with little narrow streets and cafes, the river and the bridges. We shot in and around the National Theater for the magazine. My mother helped with the costumes. Then we went out to the villages. I took so many pictures. Look.” 

It must have been a week after Russell’s return from Budapest. Prints and contact sheets were spread across her dining room table, images rich with the mesmerizing intimacy I’d first seen in her work years earlier. Her subjects had surrendered to her presence without the least artificiality. This was Russell in the full flood of her gift, her mysterious alchemical eye. 

“It was like a homecoming. People said I looked Hungarian. I was able to answer yes, yes, I am, I was born here, and mumble a few things. I met two cousins I didn’t know. Oh, and the food, Paul.” 

I was glad for her happiness, thrilled at the work though equally distanced by it. I felt an envy I would not easily admit to, and a sense that what had inspired her in Hungary would only serve to further separate us, along with whatever work Janos had assigned her to do. 

“I felt I got back to the heart of what I do best in these photos.”

For all her ebullience, she seemed shaky. Russell became garrulous when she drank, which she did sometimes when she was nervous or distressed, and we were working a bottle of Pernod together.

“Of course it is still awful there too, the ugly Soviet buildings, the sense of oppression. People told me terrible things, personal histories. But the cloud is starting to lift, maybe.” 

The more she talked about her trip, the more our shared life seemed diminished by the magnitude of her encounter. I had no such origins to plumb, celebrate, or converse with. When I looked back I saw a bleached Midwestern plain of little mystery or magic, inducing the family’s westward drift. We were truly different Americans, I thought. Russell had been right all those years ago. 

Maybe her false life was truer than my true life.

Finally I said, “What about Janos?” 

She nodded gravely, as if she had been waiting for the question. “I broke my promise to you.” 

She drained the cloudy liquid from her glass. 

“Janos wanted me to shoot certain things in and around the theater, on a road outside the city, in one of the villages. A few days before my trip I was driven to a house outside of Manhattan to meet with some technical people who showed me how to pose models in front of certain things, installations. After that, I felt I couldn’t talk freely to you. I knew you’d probably realize why.” She began to sob and took my hand. “I had to do this, Paul. I don’t ask you to understand.” 

Over the next several years, Russell made more trips on magazine assignments into the Eastern bloc: Poland, Estonia, Russia. There were profiles in newspapers and magazines: “Photographer returns to her roots.” A book of her Hungary photos won an award. She was working the whole time under the auspices of Janos and US intelligence; they had turned her into, in effect, an operative. Sometimes I opened the daily news dreading I’d read she’d been apprehended in Krakow or St. Petersburg, charged with espionage, imprisoned or worse.  

From time to time I’d get a phone call from Miklos in Berkeley, pleased at his daughter’s success but as worried as I about her abduction at the hands of Soviet agents. He still didn’t seem to know of her intelligence work, which would have distressed him even more. He expressed even less faith in perestroika than before. “It’s bait and switch, Paul,” he said. “Brezhnev has no intention of freeing anybody.” He knew that Russell and I had drifted apart and he wasn’t happy about that either. To make things worse, jazz’s new forays into fusion and electronics he took as a personal affront. Where were Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young to set things straight? 

 It wasn’t as if Russell and I had decided anything. It was simply that her double life and her trips into the Eastern bloc had come between us. Meanwhile I was left with my music work. More producing, less composing; higher fees, a surfeit of formula pop. It was the era of Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, Dire Straits, and rampant sickly excess: half the people I knew were trundling in and out of rehab clinics in Palm Springs or Phoenix. Creatively, I was bored. The void left by Russell was unfillable by other means. I enhanced the studio I’d built in the backyard of my house in Santa Monica, got a dog. 

In November of 1989, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russell showed up at my door, looking frazzled. 

“I shot Berlin. Janos asked me for the negatives. Then he said, ‘Köszönjük, hogy a hazát szolgálod. Most már szabad vagy.’”

I looked at her, perplexed. 

She grinned. “‘Thank you for serving your country. You are free now.’”

8.

Further north on Highway 101, I turned off at Atascadero, a name Michael and I had omitted from our jocular list of lesser California coastal towns. It was late in the day, and from there it would be a short morning drive to a cutoff running west to Route 1 and the road into Big Sur.

Atascadero, founded a century earlier as a utopian, whites-only community, seemed to be trying to make itself over into a wine growing hub these days. I pulled up to a Motel 6, hazily recalled from an early journey to see Russell in North Beach. Then I hauled the small suitcase I’d borne from Europe into a featureless room, followed by the canvas duffel I’d stored at Michael’s, and parked them on the floor. 

A Denny’s restaurant nearby seemed to harmonize with the generic, franchised Motel 6. “America’s Diner,” proclaimed the red and yellow sign affixed to the one-story stucco building. Inside, red leatherette booths and shiny countertops echoed the American kitsch stylistics Michael and I used to brutally satirize, their ersatz cheer always reading to us as its opposite: vacuity, desolation. 

I slid into a booth and began working my way through a tall laminated menu with vivid photos of each plate: burger, fries, Coke in a glass. Various concessions to contemporary tastes were on offer: wraps, fajitas, Cobb salads. Whatever I chose would be a steep comedown from Michael’s handcrafted shrimp pasta. 

It took me a while to flag a waitress lost in her phone. 

“What can I get for you today, sir?” 

When she had taken my order, I opened my own phone to Zoe’s unanswered email asking about food for Russell’s ceremony. “I will be there,” I answered quickly.

There was an equally curt message from Sofia: “Part of your math solution was wrong.”

“Sorry!” I wrote back. 

I closed the phone and looked around. A smattering of customers ate or gazed into their phones. The waitress lowered Venetian blinds against the glare of sundown. I was of this America too, I supposed. I wondered what Sofia, or whatever callow boy she was shagging back on the island, would think of Denny’s. 

They’d probably love it. But then so had Russell. She’d borne none of my parochial snobbism towards homegrown tastelessness. Nothing was beneath or above her. Her photography flowed from her empathetic eye, which was to say her character. Being with her had been much more than our romance. She had amplified me, inducted me into the greater mystery of things. Through her I became more myself, such as that was.

I looked up at the other diners, then quickly back down into the expiring bubbles in my Coke glass, not wanting them to see my brimming tears, my trembling jaw.

“Have a nice evening,” the waitress said, inevitably, as I left. 

I lifted the blue duffel onto the motel bed, holding it away from me as if it were an irradiated object. I took a swallow from a bottle of bourbon I’d bought on the way back to the room. 

I began ripping off the silver duct tape as if undressing a wound. I flung sticky balls of the stuff at the wastebasket. 

Then I opened the zipper. 

Clots of bloody, hardened, discolored surgical bandages. I tore them out and flung them on the bed.  

A black plastic bag filled with rope, wirecutters, pliers, and a hacksaw. 

A second bag with surgical gloves, a hood, a black face mask. 

Rummaging further, I pulled out a Ziploc bag full of keys, key card locks, lock picks, and a torque wrench. 

I lifted out a plastic folder and opened it. Documents of another identity: passport and driver’s license with my photo and false name and address. A fake birth certificate and social security card. An expired credit card.

Another folder contained a map, photos, and a page of notes in English. 

At the bottom of the duffel, wrapped in a green towel, a Beretta M9 semi-automatic pistol. 

A bag of horrors. An inventory of deception. Tools befitting a second story man. 

I looked up. A car had pulled up outside, its headlights flaring on the room curtains. Panicked, I tucked the pistol back inside the towel. I listened until the engine turned off. The headlights went out, the car door slammed. I followed the sounds of somebody checking into the room next door to mine.

Hurriedly I gathered the objects strewn on the bed and stuffed them back into the duffel. I zipped it shut and shoved it under the bed.

I lay on the bed, waiting until there was no sound from next door. Then I extracted the duffel and opened the door to my room. 

I walked to the trunk of my car, placed the bag inside, and shut it. 

Back in the room, I went to the bathroom and stripped off my clothes. I ran a hot shower and stood under it, quaking.