sitting on the floor by the fake fireplace that night, after I'd gotten my first contract offer? All the travel I was going to be doing? Do you remember what you said when I asked you what you wanted me to do? You said, ^“ I want you to go, Amber.' The go was loud and clear. I did the dirty work for both of us-I went.'
I know. I helped us crash.'
And had regretted it, even as the words were coming out that night. I could remember every second of that conversation, even now, as if it was a scene from a movie I'd watched a hundred times. To all the charges that have been brought against the male-pride, stubborness, unwillingness to communicate, selfishness, cowardice, insularity, macho inanity-I will gladly confess. Did I love her then? Certainly. But love is a poor excuse for anything. My sole defense is that I never desired any woman but Amber-at least not enough to act on it-when we were together, and for a truly frightening amount of time afterward. I was hers. Even when I began to take other lovers, I was hers. Until, that is, I stumbled on Isabella Sandoval sitting under a palapa amidst the sweet Valencias of the SunBlesst Ranch and my heart, so long detained, fled straight away to her.
'How could you let me go without a fight, Russ?' Amber whispered quietly.
Only time had given me the answer. If she had asked me this during one of our parting frays, I'd have told her she wasn't worth it. And she would have believed, because at that time I retained the ability to hurt her-she had not grown beyond me, yet. But that would not have been the truth.
^ 44 I thought then,' I said, 'that it was dangerous to take what wasn't offered. That I couldn't coax a love out of you that wasn't there to begin with.'
'Afraid it would vanish?'
'Yes, in the end. Afraid of the collateral damage, too.'
'Meaning what?'
'Meaning the love I felt for you.'
The light finally changed and I gunned the car back toward Laguna. I maintained a more prudent double-digit speed. To the west, the ocean was an endless plain of black.
'And what do you think now, Russ, about taking what isn't offered?'
'I haven't changed my position on that. Some things, you fight too hard to get them, get ruined in the war.'
'You never had to fight for Isabella, did you? She offered you everything you wanted. Handed it right over to you, all of it, all of herself.'
'Yes, she did.'
'How did you choose to deal with that? Wasn't she bargaining with a diluted currency?'
'I loved and honored her in every way I could.'
'Oh, Russell, you were a lucky man to find her.'
'I've always known that.'
'I'm so sorry for what happened to her. Will she ever be okay… ever?'
'No.'
'Russ, do you believe in miracles?'
'No.'
'What is it you hold on to late at night, when the devil’s grabbing at your soul?'
'His throat.' 'Do you feel anything tender inside at all?'
'Tenderness would unravel me.'
My agonies were storming their walls. Was I powerless to stop them, or just unwilling? I heard a wild ringing in my ears.
'Do you want to die?'
'Sometimes. Then I think. There has to be more to life than a desire to be taken out on a stretcher.'
'Is it really that bad?'
'I may just be exhibiting some sorry-ass version of brinksmanship. I've never considered myself cut out for this task-kindness just doesn't come easily. I don't know how much longer I can take care of her. I dream of tumors growing in my balls and lungs.'
'What do you want?'
'A job where I wear a shirt with my name on it. A straightforward life.'
'Really, I mean. Strip away all your self-pitying horseshit, all your writerly loop-the-loops, and what is it you truly want?'
'For the people I love to stop dying.'
'There, Russell. I can believe you now. Why does it take you so long sometimes to admit the truth?' The air whipped through the windows. 'Pull over,' she said.
I braked and signaled and crunched off onto the shoulder. When the car finally stopped, the dust blew forward and swirled in the headlights. We were between the towns, on a bluff that opened to the sea. Down on the beach, wavering white ribbons rushed and retreated. My heart was in my teeth.
Amber got out, shut her door, and walked over to the bluff edge. I followed. The smell of sage mixed with the salt air, each intensified by the heat. Amber waited until I caught up with her, then took my hand. We walked the perimeter of the bluff, stopping where a deep gash opened into the abyss. The face of the cliff was back-cut, too steep for me to actually see, and as my gaze followed its invisible plane, I continued to see nothing but darkness until the sand below focused in my view, pale acreage studded with sharp rocks exposed wholly now by the low tide. The sand at the waterline shone as if lacquered The ringing in my ears was so loud, my eyes began to blur, had never in my life-except for those three hellish days with Izzy in a Guadalajara hospital, where her tumor was diagnosed-felt so fragile, so ready to disassemble.
To my heartache was then added shock when Amber turned me toward her on the edge of this bluff high over the sea and offered her lips, wet and parted, to my own.
There was nothing exploratory in this act, nothing of negotiation or the art of the deal. No, this was a kiss as pure as sacrifice. It was an offer of everything. She blew the breath her lungs deep into my own as, two decades ago, she had: often done, always to the wilding of my blood.
I have a clear and permanent memory of what happened next. First, a breeze came off the sea, oddly cool in the static heat, and it struck my face directly. (How it got around Amber face-locked so close to mine-I cannot explain.) And as it pushed cooly against me, I felt what seemed like the total contents of my mind-thoughts, precepts, memory-being lift out and carried away. The Zapruder film is no more graphic than the vision I had, eyes closed, of everything inside me departing to join this fresh and unlikely breeze. But there was no violence to it. Rather, what was inside me simply stepped out and, like a child hand in hand with a grandparent, walk away.
Second, I remember the pink cotton material of Amber dress bunched up on the small of her back, clutched in one my hands, and the pure soft heat of her legs pressing against my trembling own, the forward bend and toe- strained perch her, the lift of her dark brown hair in that breeze, a black even darker than the ocean beyond us, the brace of my fingers on her belly. And I remember, too, that we hardly moved-no great histrionics here-because every tiny motion, every fractional of contact was an agony of pleasure I could barely stand. The tremors deep within Amber were all the movement we required.
Last, I remember where we ended up, though not how we got there. The logistics of the transition are not hard to imagine. I was lying in the dirt, amidst the fragrant sage, staring straight up through Amber's hair to the sky. Her back was still to me. My arms were wrapped around her, my left locked in her right armpit, my right still open against her stomach, holding tight. My legs were spread and her rump rested deep between them, where-I noted-we were still very much connected. Her heart beat hard against the bone of my left elbow. We were both breathing fast. My butt hurt. I was, for the moment, blessedly opinionless.
But as quickly as my thoughts had departed, so they came scampering back, like rabbits to the hole. There they huddled, frightened, buck-toothed, ashamed. They curled together, hid their faces. They confessed. I closed my eyes again and imagined a fig leaf the size of the heavens. But I did not loosen my grip on Amber; if I had traded everything for this, then I was not about to give it up. I was the monkey caught in a trap because he's unwilling to release the bait from his greedy fist. I was even ready for the electric chair, but I would clutch this treasure to my lap, lodged so high and deep inside her that I could feel the bottom of her heart, until the straps claimed me.
Or not. Because along with the searing reentry of my conscience came the cooling waters of reason-all that keep the soul from self-immolation. For a moment, a terrible storm of contradiction began to form inside me, but it
