Sam Brown doesn’t make out the sign he passes, but with recklessness he U-turns for shoulder parking at what turns out to be Jade Cove. He takes the path through a wide-stretching field of tall, stiff grasses and weed-like coastal chaparral, the wind slapping his yellow nylon jacket to static cling against his pecan-colored skin. He is entirely alone, embracing only the company of wild vegetation thriving in fat-grained sandy dirt leading to the marine terrace. His ears feel like seashells, the wind tickling an immortal tune. Tempting vertigo, he looks down the steep trail that seems as long as half a mile leading to the bluff and the rocky cove. He imagines falling onto and dashing his head against the boulders. Who would find his body here? With painstaking care, he begins his climb down the hill, at times grabbing onto the prickly bushes that mock his fear in their sturdiness. What if he were followed and shoved? What if he were forever lost in the infinite body of water?
At this point, he cannot look all the way down. He loses balance twice, slipping a few footfalls down the rock and sand. He imagines snakes hissing and baring their fangs. For an eerie, ghoulish moment, he is his mother watching her own nude and lifeless body falling down the cliff to her death. As he picks himself up once more, by an inch he misses stepping on fresh dog shit near the branches of sage he must let go of before making his last gravitational-forced run onto the beach.
This story appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Here by the big breakers, there is really no beach to speak of but rocks, midnight-blue and deep-green schist, that look like volcanic eruption. He hops over the foamed stones and steps perilously up the slickenside of a giant boulder, where he sits at the peak, dangling his feet, and looking down at the waves lashing the graywacke and the nephrite jade the cove is named for.
Sam’s face is so kissed with mist that at first he thinks his sniffling, his cold, runny nose, and his welling eyes are due to allergy. As the sweat from his descent cools to a sickly chill at his neck, he questions his mental health. He should be enjoying this incredible beauty, he scolds himself. He should be taking it easy, reading this terrain of spiritual notation instead of feeling afraid of it. If his mother is truly trying to speak to him through pictures of water, he should listen.
What he needs, he decides, is to be around some people, anyone at all to take his mind off the only guarantee in life being death.
Sam pulls over at the Henry Miller Library, the first sign of homeyness he notices in Big Sur. He stands cloaked by the voluminous pines and oaks, waiting for the silver Toyota that missed its chance to take him at Jade Cove. He still can’t be sure that anyone is actually following him. Close to chalking it up to full-blown paranoia, he feels utterly absurd trying to hide by this guardian of a tree and steps out from behind its wide, scabbed trunk. His mother doesn’t seem to be with him now, though she’d made that torturous leap through him as he’d climbed down to the cove. She’d stayed so near in L.A., even while he made love to the weather girl, and she appeared so clearly, just after his talk with the old man in Santa Barbara. Sam looks up through the canopy of leaves, afraid once again of the omnipresence of beauty.
Sam strolls up the mulch path lined with beehive and computer sculptures. The lawn welcomes him with childlike carvings and posts. Past the outdoor wood-burning stove and inside the cozy cabin, he at first pretends to be interested in many of the books there, but he’d already bought one for the weather girl at the old man’s used bookstore in Santa Barbara. He scans the shelves of mostly Henry Miller titles, then spots the bathroom and heads for it. The light streams in, muted and thin on pale-green erotic tiles. There are whimsical drawings, bent and peeling postcards. As he stands there dreaming himself into the old flyers, faded watercolors, and engraved lines of intercourse, he gets the urge to have himself off with visions of the weather girl pressed against the wall.
When he opens the door, he’s embarrassed to find a woman waiting there, exactly as his mother had caught him once when he was 14. She had worn a pleasant knowing look, and her demeanor tried too hard not to make him feel ashamed. He couldn’t help feeling dirty, anyway. The woman before him now—with his mother’s eyes—is twice as wide as Sam, at least 200 pounds, and unintentionally blocking his way around her. He excuses himself to get by, and she looks up at him, her face only slightly pimpled, rubicund, and sweet. With the thickness of her long, shiny midnight hair, he can’t tell if she’s Greek, Italian, Iranian, Armenian, Mexican. Neither can he guess from her size and teenage complexion if she’s in her late 20s, 30s, or 40s. Her smile charms him. Something about her energy, her vibration, is familiar. He turns to watch her enter the bathroom and gently close the door.
Uncharacteristically quick for a woman, he thinks, she is back out by the time he finds what feels like a private room, filled with Miller watercolor prints and collector’s editions. She follows Sam into the room, while a clerk enters as well to answer any questions, and before he can give any historical acquainting either of them could be there for, the woman, who he notices has a kind of Hindu goddess light in her eyes, looks only at Sam. When the clerk turns to leave, the goddess says, “Don’t you feel better?”
“What do you mean?” Sam asks, glancing behind him at the wall as if someone were there.
“You look like you’re feeling better.”
“Better than when?”
“Better than probably, what, 10 minutes ago?”
Her hand repeatedly returns to the safekeeping of her munificent thigh, and her gestures stir up mirages of playfully punitive positions he’s never tried.
“Am I so obvious?” he asks, cracking a smile.
“No,” she says, smiling fully and grabbing at the oblong amber beads around her thick neck.
“I mean, depressive that I am?”
“I don’t really believe that’s you.”
Sam looks her in the eyes, trying to figure out if his mother is trying to talk to him through her. Then he realizes what he’s doing, and feeling crazy again, he turns to walk out the door.
“Are you hungry?” she boldly asks, hurrying to accompany him down the steps of the library.
“What?” He wants to hear her voice once more and make sure it’s not his mother’s.
“I said, are you hungry?”
“I could eat,” he says quickly, stopping to face her. He bats his long lashes like a girl, a glint of sun in his eyes.
“Are you from around here?”
“I could be.”
She smiles with satisfaction. “Well, have you been to Big Sur before?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“We should go just up the road to Nepenthe, then. The view is incredible.” She looks down at her feet in strappy, flat, green sandals. Her loose white pants billow like a flag with the cool breeze. She bites her bottom lip. “Then again, I don’t live all that far from here, in Carmel. It’s a bit of a haul, but I’m a mean cook, better than any restaurant you’ll find around here, which is saying plenty.”
Sam claps once with awkwardness, opens his hands. He didn’t mean to make it that loud. “Well, OK, then. You twisted my arm.”
She lightly scratches the side of her nose, flushes with self-consciousness, amazed at her own audacity. “We’re off, then.”
Back in the car, top down, he is following this stranger, a beautiful fat woman in a Lexus. He can imagine himself right now rather glamorous, devoid of problems, if only for five minutes. The phone rings again, and he knows it’s Haley, and he doesn’t want to feel the smell or sound of home in the desert. He doesn’t want to admit to her, or himself, that he’s leaving her, too.
“Hello?” he says, tapping the phone to speaker where it sits on the passenger seat.
“Hi, babe,” she says.
“Hi.”
“So you couldn’t call after three days?”
“Two, it’s been two days.”
“This is Wednesday, is it not? Sunday was the last day I saw you.”
“Technically, it was Monday morning. But how’s about a ‘How are you? I miss you’?”
“How about it?”
“You’re breaking up,” he lies.
“I hear you perfectly. And I’m calling you on a light note. Actually I was feeling really pretty good.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” he says, sounding formal, while looking ahead at the Lexus and feeling guilty toward this stranger rather than toward the one he’s called his girlfriend for the past two years.
“I saw Huell Howser today!” Haley exclaims, drastically shifting tone. “He said ‘Hi’ to me.”
“Really.”
“In Hadley’s.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I’m at the outlets right now, I’m shopping. I’m outside Gucci.”
“Why aren’t you at work instead of playing tourist?”
“I’m playing hooky.”
“You’re gonna get fired.”
“Why don’t you say something like ‘I’m glad you saw Huell Howser today and that he said “Hi” to you, because you love his show’?”
“OK, I’m glad.” He eases off the gas, feeling too close to the Lexus, as if the two women were coming too close to discovering each other.
“It’s better than me telling you my hours were cut down to part-time.”
“Why didn’t you say so before, Haley? ‘Playing hooky’? You lied.”
“I’m not lying. They cut my hours, so I walked out for air.”
“Now you’re shopping and spending money? Does that make sense?”
“It’s my birthday in a few days, Sam, or didn’t you remember?”
“Of course, I remember,” he convinces himself. “So, why don’t you let other people do the spending?”
“What other people? You? Far away and on some trip without me? Or Dad in his sick, fucked-up world?”
“You have friends, Haley.”
“Yes, well that. I’m trying to forget that Tish came in on her roommate the night before last, totally whacked on meth and screaming bloody in the bathroom. Literally bloody. When Tish went in, she found her roommate had cut out her own breast implants in their bathroom.”
“What?”
“Tish got her to the hospital before she bled to death.”
“What?”
“She told her she had this sudden clarity of her implants as foreign and infested and contaminated and just wanted them out.”
“That is so nasty,” Sam says, making a face. “So, so nasty. I am so glad I wasn’t on duty.”
“You don’t work emergency, you shit.”
“Why am I a shit?”
“Because you don’t understand what I’m saying.”
“You’re thinking about your implants?”
“I’m back at the club, Sam, and I hate it.”
“You know what?” Sam says, getting angry now, driving with too much swerve for the tight and dangerous Highway 1 curves. “This is not, I repeat, not going to get me to come back right now. I’m not trying to save you from the pole. You hear me?” His voice cracks with rage.
“I find out the monster who killed my mother when I was 15 years old was just released from prison after doing only 16 years, and I’m supposed to be thinking about you and your friend’s roommate’s meth habit and implants?”
He waits for her to say anything, but she’s totally silent, like she’s not even breathing.
“You better learn how to take better care of yourself, Haley, and all by yourself.” He grits his teeth, thinking that if she were here in his face, he would spit in hers.
She hangs up on him.
“F-you, too,” he says aloud, feeling so well-behaved that he could never actually curse her, or spit at her, and at the same time knowing that this inability to fully express himself is what will end up killing him.
As Sam makes a left, following the Lexus down Casanova Street, the whole neighborhood smells like a fireplace. He looks at all of the Hansel and Gretel houses, thinking, “This is the town that cute built,” signs in front of almost every home with a precious message of ownership. Up ahead, he sees a magnificent tree with roots like talons growing out from the front yard grass, gnarling out onto the sidewalk and bursting through the asphalt in the street. She parks just before it. As she gets out of the car, from this rear view he sees her as fat, and only as fat, wondering what he’s doing here. But then she turns around and motions with her hand toward the house, like a kindergarten teacher telling the kids they’re free to play outside. He steps out of his car, thinking that all he wants is to follow someone’s orders.
“Did I tell you my name is Wendy?” She takes his hand as he walks with her over the bumpy sidewalk. There is a fine spray of perspiration along the front of her hairline.
“Wendy. Sam.”
“Sam, watch your step here.”
They have to stoop under the grape arbor beckoning him up the path to her solemn-blue shuttered house with stripes of raised wood, wavy glass windows, and an ornate cedar shake roof. He follows her along the round stepping stones, which force him to do a kind of skip all the way to her front door. He cannot miss the “Love in a Mist” sign on the porch, and as she pushes open the door, he agrees with himself to be equally unabashed by the banner across the fireplace with “Welcome Home!” scrawled in red letters.
“For my cousin,” she says, with her hands on her hips. “Back from Iraq. He only stayed here for a few weeks. I’m his only family. Can I get you some iced tea?”
“Sure,” Sam says, wondering where her flirtation has gone.
He follows her into the kitchen. She seems shorter than before, reaching up to the cabinet for a drinking glass. The sound of the liquid hitting from the bottom to the top, the condensation around the glass, and the smell of lemon get him in the mood to romance her.
“Chocolate mint, lemon verbena, and a squeeze of orange,” she says, handing it to him. He takes the glass, his fingers lingering on hers, feeling her warmth against the slippery cold. He licks a small part of the rim, then gulps the drink down.
“Honey, too.” Sam smiles at her wickedly, thinking there is actually too much of it.
“Yes, honey.” She smiles too. He notices a beauty mark, almost black and infinitesimal, at the corner of her bottom lip. He bends to kiss her there. If he made his way inside of her, would his mother speak through her more clearly? Her mouth tastes faintly stale, her smell dusky with a tincture of mineral and cinnamon. They tussle softly with their tongues. Sam runs his hands over her contours, stopping at the friction of elastic at her waist. She guides him into her bedroom, and he is so quickly hard, and throughout the short foreplay so fast in coming, that he worries Wendy will lose interest before he can find out why his mother could have led him here.
With a second chance to satisfy her, he takes time now to meld to her, face, neck, mounds of shoulder, breasts, iridescent and beautiful with more desire. He should taste her this time, he thinks, but the smell of her is so pungent, he can’t. He prolongs his erection, plunging in and trying to hold the sweet absence of torture in his head like a meditation. He waits for her now, shy in her shuddering, then she finally lets go, and shouts above their heads. He can come now, but the release devastates him. She lays her hands gently on his middle back, pinkies touching, and though he shocks himself, he just can’t help but explode into tears.
“It’s OK,” she says, his face buried so deep in her chest, her voice booms and barrels into his ears like a man’s.
How did you know I wasn’t a psycho killer?” he asks, grabbing the seventh tissue from the bedside table, the used ones on the floor and on the bed.
She laughs with gusto, and he holds on to her through her shimmy. “What’s so funny?”
“You, a psycho killer.”
“That’s not funny.” How could his mother have had a relationship with the guy who killed her?
“I guess you still could be.” She laughs again, he rolls completely off her, and she seems glad. She stretches out her arms, still laughing. “I feel good. You should too. Everybody needs a good cry. I’ll take it as a compliment, a sign of your trust. You did it for me,” she says, winding down into soft giggles.
“Don’t you want to know what I do?” he asks.
“Not really.” Sam grabs his heart, as if fatally wounded. She laughs.
“Then I don’t want to know what you do either,” he says, sounding to himself like an eight-year-old.
“Good.”
“What were you doing at the library?” he asks.
She laughs again, and Sam feels his impatience coming on.
“I read Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch not all that long ago, and I was really moved by Miller’s way of thinking.”
Sam winks at her, and she laughs a little more.
“It’s really a spiritual book, I would say. He talks about ‘the task of genuine love.’ He poses questions of you, such as how would you order the world if you were given the powers of the Creator, and he asks what you desire that you don’t already possess.”
Sam blinks slowly, hoping Wendy will give all the way in to his mother, let her wholly invade her consciousness and speak.
“Actually, I was on my way back up from a friend’s in Pismo Beach. I stopped in on a whim, never having been, though I’ve lived so close to it all this time.”
“Really? Wow, I played Frisbee with a kid in Pismo Beach early this morning! Maybe you saw me,” Sam exclaims, getting excited.
She shakes her head, smiles lazily. Self-conscious in his disappointment that they missed this earlier chance to connect, Sam inches away.
“Where do you hang out here?” he asks, getting up to put his pants on. She frowns.
“I don’t hang out, really. Where’s to ‘hang out’ in Carmel?”
“I wouldn’t know. Isn’t there some…I don’t know…hip section of town?”
“Hip? Only hip in Carmel is hip replacements.” She laughs, almost festive again. “Where are you from?”
“The desert. Joshua Tree area.” He looks at her like she knows perfectly well where he’s from.
“I’ve never been.”
He smiles. “Either you’re a desert person, or you’re not. There’s no in between.”
She nods. “I’m a cool, temperate kind of person. But it doesn’t surprise me that you live there.” She sits up naked in bed, her breasts at once full and flat against the mushy soft flesh over her ribs.
“We should go take a walk at the beach. Fine white sand, soft and deep on the steep hills.”
Sam smiles politely. “You want to talk to me there?”
“Yes. Later maybe?” she asks carefully.
He shrugs, still smiling.
“You hungry?”
“Starved.”
Wendy lays out olives, rosemary bread, goat cheese, and foie gras. As he nibbles on the latter, he finds it perverse, the texture and the slide on his tongue. He glances up at her, hoping she missed his disapproval. She is as pleasant as before. He gazes out the kitchen window to her backyard dwarf fruit trees and the sunset beginning to blaze just beyond. He remembers his mother picking lemons from the tree, smiling as she squeezed them. The smells of oregano, tomato, and minty lamb rise in Wendy’s kitchen. She doesn’t talk to him as she cooks, and he feels himself steadily losing his nerve to come out with what he thinks.
Her meal tastes as mean as she had claimed. After dinner, they sit in her living room, and she pulls out her flute and plays. The timbre at first like a bee at his ear until he recognizes the tune, “Light My Fire,” and he tries not to laugh. The melody much like José Feliciano’s version, and he’s surprised that he could remember his name, though he pictures stepdad Joe’s CD collection, and finds it unalphabetized in his mind’s eye.
He could easily spend the night with her, but her conversation grows annoying and winsome when she describes how she’s gotten into Reiki healing. As a nurse, he tells her, he has heard a lot about it, never tried it himself, while the thought that they are both into making people feel better depresses the hell out of him.
Wendy’s eyes are less and less like his mother’s, so by the time he’s had it with waiting for his mother to speak through her, he makes up an excuse about having to hurry to a friend’s wedding tomorrow, and even resists the urge to add that he is best man. She hugs him goodbye with an overpowering comfort he can’t stand.
Back in his car and feeling alive in a scary fairy tale coming to life amidst cottages in the forest smelling high of seaside night and burning wood, he hopes he can find his way back to the highway. Spooked by the dearth of streetlights, he thinks as he pulls away from the curb: What if he got into an accident and lost all memory of his past? Maybe meeting someone like Wendy Carmel, Carmel Wendy in the kinder version of his life story would be like a sweet note in its song.•
Lisa Teasley is a native of Los Angeles and the author of Glow in the Dark, Heat Signature, Dive, and the story collection Fluid.
