THE COAST (8)

THREE

POINT LOBOS

1.

“They’re through with me, Paul.” 

We were walking on a beach, as we often did not to be overheard. Cynically I thought, “We’ll see,” figuring Russell’s pronouncement contained more hope than certainty. Deception was so woven into our lives by then that even as the world proclaimed the end of the Cold War it almost seemed irrelevant. 

 It was a beach in southern California, though I can’t recall which one. Late afternoon, clusters of terns skittered along the flat shimmering tideline. The spring of 1990, and Russell was moving back to San Francisco. Established as a photographer, she no longer needed a base in Manhattan, and Miklos, her father, was being treated for prostate cancer. She had leased a studio south of Market Street, near her photo lab, with an option to buy it. 

“I just want to be a regular person now, make my pictures.” She turned to me. “You can have me back if you still want me.”

“A regular person you’ll never be,” I said, laughing. 

We sat on the sand watching the sunset’s flare. I put my arm around her. We were no longer young. Secrets had corroded our trust yet our ardor sustained. Sometimes I even wondered if the secrets had fueled it.  

We’d try and go on if we could. 

We stood and continued walking into the twilight. 

At times I’d think that Russell’s clandestine episodes were not all that grievous, in fact. She had been called upon to perform a patriotic duty, you might say; I hadn’t. But then I would recall who was in office during her spying: Nixon, Reagan, regimes reeking of dirty tricks, invasions and deceit, bad faith. 

No, they had exploited and endangered her. 

One day I was helping her set up her new studio and I said, “Would you do it again?” 

“You mean the work for Janos?”

“When he first approached you, what if you had said no? They would have found someone else to shoot that demonstration. Life would have gone on.”  

“So easy for you to say, Paul. You were born here. My father and I were not on firm ground. He could have lost his security clearance.” 

It probably hadn’t been a good day to bring it up. Miklos would be joining us for lunch after his latest round of chemo. 

“I can’t regret Hungary,” she said. “I was good at it. People trusted me.” 

When Miklos arrived, bald and frail from the treatment, Russell rushed to greet him. I was reminded how much she cared for him, how bound they were through exile and resettlement. He still didn’t know of her work for the government and never would. And she, as far as I knew, knew nothing of his.

What do secrets wreak upon those who bear them and those near to them? If deceptions are carried out in the wide field of nations, daily domestic life is no less full of them. 

Gradually that spring, the mistrust between us began to fade, as it had before. It might have been less a result of anything we did but simply that the great heaving of the world had died down a little. A respite from history, if not the end of it, as a popular book would soon proclaim. If only it were that simple. But into this quiescence, we began to reinhabit the dream coast of our youths, our tale of two cities and the spaces in between.

Life in the music studios hadn’t changed because the Soviet Union was collapsing. I had my own publishing company by then, the royalty stream more than enough to make my house payments. Producing fees and teaching supplied the rest of what I needed. And new digital tools allowed me to work mostly from home, even while collaborating with others. I had given up performing some years earlier, preferring a life offstage.

So had Russell, it seemed, for now. She cut back on travel assignments to spend time with Miklos, recovering at his home in Berkeley. She took a teaching gig at her old school, the San Francisco Institute of Art. And in her new studio, she began developing fresh prints of her early work in rural Kentucky, preparing a book. 

Finding each other again, we undertook a studied attempt at a normalcy we’d never known. In the early heat of work and love and travel, during her disquieting episodes of intelligence work, all had been provisional, improvised. Now it charmed me to see Russell standing in my back garden, bereft of her camera, staring perplexedly at the trowel in her hand without a clue as to what to do with it. Watching me in the open kitchen of her studio with oven mitts on, awkwardly trying to extract a hot baked bread or a Hungarian potato casserole, she would laugh until tears came. 

Our earlier experiences had both bound and cleaved us, leaving us permanently unsure how much we had of the other. An unexpected ringing of her phone could still send a bolt of fear through me. My command of the idiomatic shadings of American life could make her feel alien even after all her years here. Yet we happily warmed each others’ beds, our early passions modulating into something more resembling contentment. She took to my dog; I felt an honorary part of her family with Miklos.  

We’d seldom ventured out socially before, as if it had been better to shun others before being shunned by them, creative folk who would have been aghast to learn that one among them was working undercover for US intelligence. Timidly at first, we began to let others into our lives: my composing partner Cheryl, a few others from my milieu, and in San Francisco some of Russell’s teaching colleagues and students at the Art Institute. A dinner, an art opening, a book signing, a fundraiser. Trying to get used to the idea that we no longer had something to hide. 

Cooking, shopping, hiking in Muir Woods with her students or in Santa Monica Canyon with mine. Once after a day like this, Russell said, “Are we becoming boring, do you think?”

“I guess we’re working at it.”

If those years lacked the high drama and fitful uncertainties of before, we found relief in the rhythms and routines, the calm and concentration that creative work calls for. If truth is beauty, beauty truth, then perhaps deception can make for bad art. The tasks our government had prevailed upon Jazmin Kis to carry out entailed lying, faking, falsity. Now she had returned to the luminous innocence of art. This is how I thought about it at the time. Along with photo assignments and teaching, she was devoting herself to personal work. So was I, crafting words and music for an album of my own, at long last. 

One Friday evening in May, after an intensive week of work at my studio, Russell called from San Francisco. 

“I miss you,” she said. “Can we meet somewhere?” 

“Where?”

“Big Sur?”

The next morning I threw a few things in the car and left early, as the drive was twice as long for me as for her.

Speeding north to meet Russell, the first hours passed quickly. It was a crystalline morning, a breeze fluttering in off the ocean, the windows down, the music on, the thought of seeing her exhilarating. Then as I turned onto Route 1 and the start of the long ascent into Big Sur, a crippling flashback of that day at Point Lobos overtook me, raising the fear that she wouldn’t show up. 

Then I thought: No, we’ve come to the end of that. No more Janos to call her away. She was fully mine again. My spirits rose with the twisting heights and promontories. The day seemed borderless, the sun flashing on the Pacific far below. The transfiguring coastline was mine. 

Just after noon, I pulled into the graveled parking space below Nepenthe, the restaurant where we were to meet. I got out and tried without luck to spot her car. Then I heard her call my name. I wheeled and she was there, all willowy limbs in black chinos and sleeveless print blouse and dark glasses and cropped hair, a pair of cameras dangling from her neck. We flew into each other’s arms. 

Entwined, we climbed the path to the bookshop below the restaurant. We started browsing titles but kept looking over at each other. We had planned lunch at Nepenthe but were too restless. We wanted to be alone somewhere. 

We returned to the parking area and climbed in my car. A short distance back down the highway, Russell pressing herself against me, I turned off at a wooded inn with cottages where we had stayed years before. There would be a room free in an hour. We left our things in the car and took a path behind the cottages that led over a stream and up into the woods, stopping to embrace. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. At a turn in the path, out of sight of the inn and the highway, we made love up against a tall tree, our cries muffled by the pines.

When the room was ready, we went in and drew the curtains. We clutched each other in a frenzy all afternoon. At sundown we got in the car and drove a short distance to a lookout point, Russell’s head in my lap. 

The sharpness of the air, the smell of pine and sea spume. It felt like our early days. 

Back in the room we resumed, unsated. Something was being exorcized, or invited in. 

Like so many photographers, Russell never liked to have her picture taken. But the next morning, before leaving the inn, she let me shoot a roll at the bridge over the stream. Years later I would carry those photos to the island. They never failed to stir my desire. 

That morning, back at the parking area below Nepenthe, we stood by our cars, reluctant to let each other go. 

“Point Lobos,” she said suddenly. “Let’s.”

I wasn’t certain I wanted to do that, but if it was her wish, we would. 

She followed my car north through Pfeiffer Canyon, beside the Big Sur River, along the winding height of Bixby Creek Bridge, until we arrived forty minutes later at the entrance to Point Lobos. 

Past the ranger station, I drove to the south turnout where years ago I had waited for her. Russell pulled up beside me and got out.

It was another sparkling day, the sea calm. We stood among the rocks and the tidepools, struck silent by the beauty. Pelicans swooped low over swaying kelp beds. Sea lions trumpeted from offshore rocks. It felt like we’d slipped into a fissure in time. 

Russell unsheathed her camera and began to shoot an otter floating on its back, cracking open a mussel shell on its stomach, using a flat rock as an anvil. Laughing with delight, she took my hand. We began walking the peninsular trail westward. 

“I had never seen the sea, you know,” she said. “Hungary is landlocked. But I imagined it like this.” She waved an arm to encompass where we were. “I kept asking my parents when we could go to the sea. Next summer, when you’re six, they said. We’ll take you to Yugoslavia, to the Dalmatian Coast. So I started swimming lessons. Then my father was arrested. He was gone for almost a year. We couldn’t leave Budapest that summer. Instead one day my mother said, ‘Let’s pack your things. You and your father are going on a trip.’ I asked her why she wasn’t coming and she said she had to work.”

The stacked, craggy cliffs pushed out into the sea ahead of us. Gnarled cypresses erupted from the stones, frozen testaments to the winds’ designs. 

“We went to the train station. My father was there waiting with some soldiers. My mother was hugging me and crying.” 

Wildflowers twined a wooden guardrail where Russell crouched, shooting nesting cormorants in a cliff crevice. When she had replaced her lens cap we found a bench and sat. 

“We got to Scandinavia and boarded a ferry to the island. There were American and Hungarian officials and soldiers there. We stayed a couple of weeks while my father was being debriefed. I didn’t know it was a prisoner exchange until years later when he explained they traded him for some leftist emigre scientist at Los Alamos the Americans wanted to get rid of. It was a beautiful island with forests and cliffs and sandy beaches. I swam in the Baltic Sea. I want to take you there one day, Paul.”

We wandered Point Lobos far into the afternoon. Its odd, dramatic outcroppings had seen indigenous settlers long before us, then Portuguese whale hunters with their longboats and blubber pots, cattle herders, Japanese abalone fishermen. Russell shot what she saw, which became what I saw. Shorebirds, seal pups, pines. She was my eyes, we’d joke, as I was her ears. 

At the westernmost point on the path of cliffs, she threw her arms around me. “I made it this time,” she said, voicing what had lain unspoken, as if setting it to rest.

Then a fog swept in as if from nowhere, cooling the air, swallowing the landscape. All became ghostly shapes. People hurried to their cars. We embraced and got in our separate ones, she heading north, me south.

It was not until the news of her death and this journey back to California that I wondered, vainly perhaps, if it was the memory of that day together that had led her, or someone for her, to choose Point Lobos as the site to cast her ashes.

2.

Following our Big Sur interlude, work projects often separated us. Russell’s Kentucky book came out, to acclaim, and as a result she was invited to teach a semester at a Russian art school. My self-titled album slipped into the world, accompanied by a brief tour, finding more favor with critics than the public. After producing a couple of compilation albums, I was hired to compose original music for a lucrative series of Japanese television commercials. I often found myself in Tokyo for weeks at a stretch. When Russell concluded her stint in St. Petersburg, she was off on new travel assignments. 

In those years, we culture workers, or content providers, in the new terminology, were less conspicuously distracted by conflict in the greater human arena. Still Russell and I were visible enough within our fields, and to some extent beyond, that our signatures adorned petitions calling out world hunger, homelessness, racial justice, women’s rights. Our attendance was solicited at charitable events and fundraisers. Russell went further, seeking out photo projects along the gritty margins of lands in turmoil, among migrants and refugees. 

In my trade, the massive, cumbersome recording paraphernalia of studios was being winnowed down to a few digital tools on a desktop. Photography changed too, and Russell, after years of eye and lung irritation from darkroom chemicals, surrendered much of her own lab work to custom shops and began exploring digital cameras. 

When work schedules allowed, we’d meet somewhere. I was on a film music gig in Dubrovnik and she was shooting in Romania when we arranged to meet in the Transylvanian town of Sibiu. Another time it was a Buddhist complex in Myanmar. If our professions brought us in regular contact with desirable people, we always swerved back to each other. We had never sworn fidelity but simply preferred each other to others. She must have had other men, as I had had other encounters on occasion. We never discussed it.

One of our few constants during those years was Russell’s father’s house in Berkeley for the Christmas holidays. My parents were long gone, my only surviving relatives sunk far in the agrarian midwest, and so in a sense these Hungarians were the nearest thing I had to a family. 

Miklos was still around, reduced but unbowed, and as the century drew to its end, we gathered at his house in Berkeley - Russell, Miklos, his wife Ginny, and Russell’s cousin Lena, the Slavic language professor - awaiting midnight and the advent of 2000. Y2K, the millennium bug, was expected to derail computers across the planet, though Miklos scoffed at the idea. 

Well into his third palinka, a double-distilled Hungarian brandy he favored, Miklos held forth out on the porch overlooking the bay, the rest of us bundled in blankets. 

“So Paul. Now that jazz is dead, what’s left? Disco.”

“I don’t think that has much of a future either,” I said.

“I bought Jazmin her first camera, you know. Have I told you that?”

“In fact you have,” I said.

“It’s all your fault, father,” Russell said, smiling.

“It began on that island,” Miklos said, undeterred from repeating the story. “I was stuck with the American authorities interrogating me all day and Jazmin was pestering me for attention. An American GI offered to loan her one of those Kodak Brownie cameras so she would have something to do. She shot all day, all over the island. Later I got the rolls of film developed. Those were her beginnings in photography. And the rest,” Miklos said, smiling proudly, “is history.”

We raised our palinkas and toasted to the rest that was history, just as fireworks erupted across the city below. We stood and embraced each other and welcomed in the new millennium. And Miklos turned out to be right about Y2K. 

Late that New Year’s Day, Russell and I, still a little hung over from the palinkas, slipped away and drove into Berkeley to take a break from the family and have lunch alone at a restaurant we liked. 

After we’d ordered, Russell said, “My cousin Lena broke up with her boyfriend.” 

“What happened? They were together for years.” 

“She wanted to have a child, he didn’t.”

“How old is Lena?”

“Thirty six.” 

“Well, she’s attractive and bright and accomplished. She shouldn’t have trouble finding a man who’s willing.”

“She wants to get pregnant and raise a child alone. She says she’s had it with men.” 

“Until she meets a new one.” 

Salads arrived, a relief after the heavy Hungarian food and drink at Miklos’s house. 

“We know so many women who didn’t have children,” I said. “For most of them, once they get past that point of wanting one, they realize they are free. They have money and can travel and do what they wish, be other kids’ favorite aunt.” 

“It’s different for Lena. She’s a settled academic. She thinks she’ll regret it if she doesn’t do it. When I tell her what you just said, she says, ‘Yes, I understand that, Jazmin. But there needs to be more love in the world.’”

“Hard to argue with that.” 

“She’s fertile. She’s been tested. She researched sperm banks but thinks they’re too impersonal. She wants to know the donor.”

“Donor. It’s all so mechanical, isn’t it?” 

Coffees arrived. Russell looked down into hers and smiled. “Lena is wondering if someone like you might be willing to be the father of her child.”

“Someone like me.”

“Well, you.”

“You mean, be a donor?”

“Whatever word you want to use.”

It raised an odd welter of feelings, not excluding a sudden urge to run. “If I were going to be a father to a child,” I said, “it would be with you.”

“We used to talk about it.”

“I guess that train left the station.” 

“I wouldn’t do that to a child. I’m too involved with my work.”

“So am I, I suppose.” 

“I guess Lena thinks you look like a good specimen.”

“Am I supposed to be flattered?” 

“You don’t need to get upset about it. It’s just something she said to me.” Russell called for the check. “She doesn’t know I’m speaking to you about it. I was just curious how you might feel.” 

“I like Lena. She’s always at the gatherings at your father’s house. But conception in the absence of desire seems strange to me. I mean, you go into some cubicle and jerk off into a test tube, right?” 

“Or you could sleep with her.”

“I assume you’re kidding,” I said. 

As we stood up to go, Russell took my hand and squeezed it.

Driving back to Miklos’s, I told Russell about a songwriter I knew who wanted a child and became pregnant by a handsome, penniless tour guide she met in Italy. He was perfectly indifferent to being a father, which was fine by her, as she didn’t want him around. Then after the child was born, the man became wildly sentimental and possessive about his progeny, the bambina, and wouldn’t leave them alone.  

“That’s funny and kind of awful, I guess,” Russell said. “I can’t imagine you reacting that way.” 

That evening back at Miklos’s house, Lena and I ended up in the kitchen peeling vegetables together. I kept glancing furtively at her. I had never considered her in a sensual light. It wasn’t that difficult, but with Russell around it felt slightly deceitful. Over dinner, Lena was unusually witty, making multilingual jokes about her students’ cross-cultural snafus. Russell remained deadpan but at one point shot me a glance. Lena, often taciturn, came alive when the subject turned to something she cared about. She would have a fine child with someone, I expected. 

The next day I drove Russell to the San Francisco Airport. She was flying to a shoot in New Orleans and I’d be driving back down to LA. As we swung onto the Bayshore, traffic slowed. 

“So what ever happened to Janos?” I said. 

“I have no idea.” 

“No more Christmas cards?

“No.”

I glanced over at her. She was frowning. “What is it?” I said.

“There were other things I didn’t tell you then. I couldn’t.” 

“When?”

“Before Budapest.” 

“Why not?”

“It would have implicated you.”

“I was already implicated, wasn’t I?”

“No, not really.” Russell looked straight ahead. “The weekend before I flew to Hungary, I was driven in the back of a van to meet with those intelligence specialists. It was a big house in the woods somewhere, full of weapons and computers and high tech gadgets. A dirty tricks lab. There were these tough-talking military guys. They said, ‘You look innocent. You gain people’s trust easily. You’ll make an excellent operative.’ They showed me these miniature cameras, undetectable, that attach to your clothes. Others were the size of a fingernail and operated remotely. I told them I wouldn’t be using those things. They said, ‘It’s good to know this stuff. You never know when one day you’ll be called on to use it.’ They kept talking to me as if I were some super-patriot. Semper fi, they kept saying. Semper fi. They wanted to teach me how to dress in disguises, jump out of helicopters. It was scary.” 

Russell looked at me, her eyes haunted.

“They kept me there overnight. They wanted to party. They had drugs and liquor. It gave me the creeps. All I wanted was to see Hungary freed from the Soviets.”

The airport offramp loomed. I glanced over at Russell.  

“Thank god it’s over,” she said. 

“Thank god.”

3.

On the day that Russell’s ashes were to be scattered in the sea, I woke up early in the motel in Atascadero. Light bled through the curtain. I stumbled up, stinking of drink. I had slept in my clothes. I heated some motel swill calling itself coffee and sat down on the edge of the bed. My brief sleep had been wracked by terrible dreams. Rivers of blood. Corridors of gunshots like jackhammers. Stuck in a plane sunk in desert sand, losing hope of reaching someone resembling Russell. 

I downed the coffee and threw the paper cup in the trash. Dropping to my knees, I looked frantically under the bed for the duffel bag. Then I remembered I’d put it in the trunk of the car the night before. I stood up, collected my phone from its charger, and sat back down on the bed. 

There was a message from Sofia: “Hey have you found a guitar yet?”

“Zoe” had emailed a map with a red X at the spot where we were to meet that afternoon for the “intimate farewell gathering.”  

My head throbbed. I looked down at my rumpled clothes. Delving into the duffel bag the night before had awakened old terrors. Was Zoe from Russell’s straight life or her secret one? Point Lobos was three hours north from here, LA four hours south. Simple enough to turn back, pick up that guitar for Sofia in LA, bear my unslaked grief and unanswered questions onto the flight back to the island and safety.

I wrote Sofia back: “I’ll bring a guitar. I miss you.”

I jammed my things in the suitcase, minus the bottle of bourbon, and shut it. Outside, it was another bright, cloudless day. I opened the trunk of the car and tossed the suitcase in beside the duffel.

The access road beside the motel fed onto the freeway north. A few minutes later, I took the 46 cutoff west to Highway 1, the winding ocean road into Big Sur. The one thing I knew was that I had to get rid of the duffel. I couldn’t travel further with its toxic cargo, its indicting contents. 

The sun broke the hills behind me as I ascended the last ridge before the Pacific. At the top of the pass, wind buffeted the car. The blue enormity of the ocean spread far below. I pulled over at a turnout, planning to heave the bag into a ravine, but when I got out I could see that it would still be visible. 

The wind billowed my shirt, chilled my cheeks. I gazed down at the narrow ribbon of highway below running north and south. If only we’d had more time, time just to be human. Why was I always losing you? Why did you have a past you had to serve? Why did I have to share you with history? Were we ever truly with each other? Why couldn’t you have been just a little more ordinary? We could have lived together along this coast somewhere, had kids, grown old together…

I got back in the car and drove down to the coast road. I found an entry to a secluded cove where the sea was strong. High tide blasted the rocks. I took the duffel and hurled it out and watched it until it sank. 

Up on the road behind me, cars streamed past, running north, running south.