and starfish.
“Look how nature keeps everything clean.”
“Imagine what this coast was like a hundred years ago,” Andrew agreed.
“How do the guys in the tide pools hold on? Tons of water falling on their heads, twenty-four/seven.”
“They have suckers.”
“I know, but still—”
“Hey,” said Andrew, shoulders hunched against the spray, “those guys don’t have a choice.”
“And we do?”
“Sure we do.”
“Here’s the thing, Andy.” I turned so my back was to the ocean and tried to put my elbows on the wooden railing but kept getting nudged off by the wind. “You told me yourself. You come off shift, you take a shower. Two showers, sometimes, you said, to get the cooties off — the TB bacillus from the homeless person, the dog shit from the backyard of a methamphetamine laboratory—” “So?” He ducked his head to wipe a tearing eye.
“My question is, how do you cleanse the soul?”
“The soul?”
“The stuff we were talking about coming up here. Your dad. My grandfather. How do we ever get past it?”
“You’re out of my realm of expertise.”
“No, I’m not.”
I squinted up at him although hair was whipping across my sight. My heels were planted and I really wanted to know how much he knew. Had twenty-plus years of being a cop washed through him, or had it put meat on his bones? Why was I attracted to this unconventional, craggy face and husky fighter’s build that overwhelmed me in ways I did not always like? What was he made of? I could get past the petty disconnects if I knew. We were standing on a platform at the end of the world, and I wanted to know if the trip had been worthwhile.
“You see it every day on the street,” I prompted. “Good and bad. Hell and redemption—”
“It’s not that simple,” Andrew replied. “Black-and-white.”
“What is it, then?”
He shook his head. “It’s a job, stop analyzing. I’m freezing. Let’s get something to eat.”
He took me to dinner in a nicely restored brick building on the main drag. Part restaurant and part retail store, it sold hand-knit sweaters and local jellies and jams, and served up one hell of an olallieberry cobbler, which we shared from a steaming crock, melting with vanilla ice cream. Andrew knew the waitress, a middle-aged teacher who worked two other jobs in order to live in Cambria. She asked when he was going to retire and move up. “It’s just a shot away,” he joked, quoting the Rolling Stones.
I smiled and sipped my decaf. It was clear to me this was Andrew Berringer’s patented getaway romantic weekend, for those girls nervy enough to make it past the big rock at Leo Carrillo Beach. All right. We would be making love (glancing at my watch) within the hour, and then I would simply walk away and become part of the crowd.
I was still smiling while Andrew retrieved the coconut-scented candle he seemed to know was kept in the armoire drawer and closed my eyes and let it happen while his thick fingers cleanly worked the tiny buttons of my white silk shirt. We knelt on the bed and kissed, and there arose in me an easy affection for the guy; I understood him, I thought — a loner who knew what he did and did not want in his life. Although I had been there only a couple of times, the way he ordered things inside his father’s house — baseball cap collection, weights, garden tools, pots and pans — stayed with me. It seemed a wishful gesture from a man whose daily task was to pull people out of the muck.
He drew me down on top of him and said things that took us away from Cambria, California, to an indeterminate meeting place where isolation and kindness merge. It was a lovely ride and there were no toll payments. We took care of each other.
As we dozed in the wavering white candlelight, Andrew’s barrel chest began to heave, at first in small convulsions, then uncontrollable sobs. He lay flat on his back and sobbed.
“What’s the matter, Andy?”
He could not answer. Wherever he was, he was in there, deeply. His hands lay palms-up, empty, and his knees and feet were splayed, body open to the grief that seemed to fall on him like rain.
“Talk to me, baby,” stroking his wet cheek.
All he could do was put a heavy hand over mine and press my palm to his heart as if to say,
He began to shiver. It was cold in the room. I covered his body with the brittle blanket and got up and pulled on a T-shirt and fussed with the thermostat. Instantly a gas fireplace in the corner roared into flame. When I turned, Andrew had gotten out of the bed and was standing at the open door, buck naked, staring out at the parking lot.
I laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Where are you going, buddy?”
“You can hear the ocean.”
He seemed so completely dream-bound that my anxiety rose to a panic. My fingers tightened around his hard wrist, breast up against his arm, legs braced, as if he might slip loose and run.
“Listen,” he insisted.
A rhythmic whisper carried from across the road, tiny, like a fountain in the neighbor’s yard.
“I’ll bet that water’s chilly.” I was thinking of jellyfish, billowing and diaphanous in the bitter gloom. “I’ll bet it’s fifty degrees.”
It was getting damn chilly standing in the open door, half starkers. The other rooms were dark. The motel office was closed, but rose-colored lights strung along the roof were shining in the mist, and the sky was powdered with stars.
“What is it, hon? Do you want to get some air?” I asked. “Let’s get dressed and take a walk.”
It did not matter that it was one in the morning. We could pick up the highway at an unspecified point, like the beginning of that movie where a woman is running along the white line of a darkened road, wearing nothing but a raincoat.
Andrew’s hands moved over his sticky groin.
“I have to take a shower first.”
“How about a bath?”
We turned from the doorway.
“Did I tell you that my dad committed suicide?” he said.
He was fifty years old, a strapping, handsome guy — had the boat, the house on the lake, everything going for a beautiful retirement except one thing: when he drank, he did it to excess.”
We were wedged into the motel bathtub, facing each other, his legs on the outside, mine on the inside. My feet were on his belly. He rubbed the puckered soles absentmindedly as he spoke. My thumb massaged his ankle. The shower curtains were pushed back carelessly and the door was closed, mirrors dripping with steam. The only source of light was the coconut candle on the vanity, now half melted into the shape of a woeful ghost.
“On a Saturday night he went out with some pals to this place that used to be down in Venice, isn’t anymore — a whole group of guys met, a number filtered out, Dad stayed, another group filtered in. They drank until the place closed and went in two cars to another party supposedly somewhere up in the Palisades Highlands.
“On the way over there, the other car, the one his friends were in, starts driving erratically, and a
“So my dad instructs the civilian driver to pull over. He was always a team player, standing up for his
