Leaving Laguna

Originally included in The Encyclopedia of Exes (Three Rivers Press, 2005)

I was wrong to think that one last week together would change anything. All it did was postpone the inevitable. If anything, it improved our sex life, which had been so sporadic and so unrewarding for so long that I found the ease and sweet-ness of our last days together close to shocking and nearly good enough reason to stay. A bit of divine grace, then, a grand temptation.

We’d get up late in Eva’s tiny beach apartment, dawdle in bed, make love in the bright morning sun. Around noon we’d throw on clothes and walk the several sun-bleached blocks to Zinc Cafe for huge lattes in big French-style bowls. I’d cadge a sports section from a nearby table, and we’d sit outside, torpid in the sun, hunger eventually propelling us home. The days invariably filled up with long beach walks, naps, window shopping, quick swims in the Pacific. Nights we caught a flick or grabbed dinner at one of the few inexpensive restaurants in town. Eva’s favorite was the Hare Krishna place that offered all-you-can-eat dhal, where we took off our shoes and sat cross-legged at the low tables while the young staff, barefoot and freshly shaven, slipped behind the yard-sale screens like stagehands.

You’d think we were on our honeymoon, and in a way we were—only our moon was waning. A fact that became painfully clear to us both as the days added up, the surface layer of conviviality peeling back to expose the wounds of two years of frustrated effort and miscommunication. My infidelities were sufficiently recent that Eva could easily fall into a sulk about them, me, anything. For my part, if things weren’t working just right in bed, I’d slip back into my old pattern of despondency and muted anger, the mood ruined for hours.

But these moments came and went that week like fluke thunderstorms: driving in, pouring down wrath and leaving. For the most part, we were left those last few days with open skies and smooth sailing. It was all a mirage, of course. I had already made up my mind, quit my job, left my apartment, packed my car. The whole shebang. And even though she said she wanted me to stay, and may have even believed we could work things out, it was clear: we were simply waiting for time to run out. It was a foregone conclusion. At least it was for me.

I met Eva my senior year of college when she was working as a graduate student intern at the college art museum. She was older, beautiful in a red-haired Nordic way, awesomely unapproachable. But I was that breed of lonely student who had a knack for falling in love with beauty, who responded to the challenge of Eva like a mountain climber facing Mt. Everest.

My method of courtship was unruly and direct. I’d stop by the museum, make sure we ran into each other “accidentally,” then return with flowers stolen from the President’s office to invite her out for coffee. Once I blanketed Eva’s car in oranges from a nearby tree, leaving an O’Hara poem as a parking ticket under her Volvo’s wipers. She agreed to have lunch with me, mostly I think out of curiosity. We ended up at the botanical gardens, walking side by side on the dirt paths, bending under the drooping rubber plants, hands almost (but not quite) touching.

I didn’t say much those first strolls. I let Eva relate her turbulent history with men. Let her tell stories of growing up in a big family outside Sacramento and about her troubled brother, who wouldn’t let her turn from his pain. I knew with certainty—don’t ask me how I knew this, I just did—that the way to Eva’s heart was through a dogged companionship. That I had to move cautiously and pay close attention so as not to lose her burgeoning trust. If and when she opened up to my presence, I would bring forth the purest part of my romantic heart, laying simple words out before her in a simply-tied bouquet easy for her to see and smell and, if so desired, take up in her arms.

We met for dinners in town, usually in a corner booth at Walter’s, the campus hangout. I liked watching Eva’s mouth as she talked, the way she’d hold her tongue lightly on her teeth as she thought through an idea, tapping it sometimes to make a point. I liked watching her hands absent-mindedly fold and refold a napkin. How she leaned over to kiss my cheek suddenly, as if moved by some spirit to do so. And how, outside in the warm air, under a waxy-leafed tree, or up against the car, she’d release herself into my arms when I held her close, her whole small body pressing into mine. Finally, after months of long walks and soul-searching conversations, after furtive kisses and a series of passionate embraces in the alcoves of the museum, Eva invited me back to her place in Pasadena.

I moved into the city the day after graduation, desperate to prove my love. I wanted Eva to know I was in it for the long haul. Eva wasn’t so sure. She had me on a kind of relationship probation. She loved me, too, in a you-amuse-me-I-feel-sorry-for-you kind of way, but she was waiting for me to grow up into a man. She was older, more experienced, and so required I have a career and a palpable sense of the future before she would even think of committing to me. It was a well-intentioned, ill-advised gamble on her part that only made me yearn more for a quality of being, a presence, I had not yet discovered. I was play-acting—at being a man, a writer, a boyfriend.

When Eva took the assistant curator job in Laguna, I moved into her monk’s-quarters apartment at the tippy-top of Laurel Canyon, the intersection of Appian Way and Wonderland Avenue, overlooking the computer-board sprawl of Los Angeles. My new landlord, also my sitting meditation teacher, kept showing up to give me spiritual practices disguised as yard work.

At first, I was lonely without Eva around. I missed our late night take-out dinners and the impromptu road trips to the desert. But soon enough I took a liking to my young-bachelor-in-the-city status—flirting with the pretty women passing through the store, joining the staff on all-night club haunts.

Without a car—or, let’s face it, Eva around to give me a ride—I had to walk down the mountain to work. I headed out in the early afternoon after a morning trying, and usually failing to, write. It took over an hour to get down, but I didn’t mind. I saw it as my walking meditation. As free time to rustle up an adventure, something a wandering samurai might come upon. That’s how I saw myself then: a wandering ronin coming into the city. But the closer I got to Sunset, the more noise came up to meet me, the more billboards and high-rise condos cluttered up my hard-fought “empty mind.” It was like being on a river that suddenly starts to pick up pace: you turn a corner and all of a sudden you are in the rapids. It was already too late to back-paddle my way out.

Everyone said it: I needed a car. I’d heard Hondas were reliable and so grabbed the want ads Eva had left out for me and focused on them. The only thing I could find in my price range was a ’78 Honda Civic two-door. The ad stressed engine reliability, a fully documented history of repairs, good gas mileage. I jotted down the number. A young man’s friendly voice invited me to come and give it a look. He lived out in the Valley. Eva was up for the weekend, researching an exhibit of Californian “regionalist” painters, using the UCLA art library. But she had some free time and agreed to drive me out.

The guy lived so far out in the Valley, the San Gabriel Mountains had long since disappeared behind a curtain of smog. We headed north on Ventura, passing backwards down the history of American suburban sprawl as we went. Close to the mountains there were nice houses, sure—ranch style jobs, faux Mediterranean mansions—but pod malls dotted every corner, and block by block things begin to shrink and dirty. Soon we were on the edge of any Western city, desert creeping in, lawns not so green, buildings unkempt and dilapidated. A few miles out and we could just as easily have been in Texas or Arizona. The lawns morphed into parking lots lined with chain-link fences, into squat apartment complexes aligned in tracts.

The guy was out working on the car when we pulled up, which should have told me something right off the bat. But I was in one of those quick fix-blinders on, get-it-done-now moods. Eva tried warning me.

“You should just look at it, drive it maybe,” she said. “You need to check out other cars, see what’s out there.”

But I knew what was out there for $700 dollars, and this was it. I wanted to get the car and go. My life was blessed with magic; this was the perfect car.

The guy was young, clean, polite. He showed me the automobile with a nice flair. He even had the repair bills handy (there was quite a sheaf—another clue I didn’t pick up on) and revved the engine for me. It sounded good, except for that one deep stutter gasp at the beginning that sent out a little black puff of warning smoke. But I ignored that with a wave of the hand. We talked some more. Eva pulled me aside and told me I could do better. I didn’t want to hear it. What was she thinking? I could handle it.

I drove the thing around. It almost stalled a couple of times, but I attributed it to my rusty clutch skills. I liked the interior, the way the dash cracked in little rivulets. The feel of the asphalt under my body. I could drive this thing away today. I had the cash. Why not?

When I told Eva I was going to buy it right then and drive it home, she just shook her head slowly. She didn’t tell me I would be sorry, didn’t chastise me. She didn’t even try to stop me. She just got in her car and drove off.

I walked back to the car to find the guy buried under the hood. I was in the mood to make small talk.

“So whatcha do for a living?” I asked.

“I’m a magician,” he said, reaching for a wrench.

Cool, I thought. So am I. I swear nothing sounded off in my head, no warning bell. A magician, that’s a great job.

“Yeah,” he said, cleaning his hands on a dirty rag. “Mostly kids parties, weddings, you know, gigs here and there. I make things disappear, pull things out of my hat.”

I told him I was a writer. That I worked at a bookstore. He asked me about Eva and praised me for my fine taste in women.

“She’s quite a find,” he said. “You must be some lover.”

I laughed and, at the same time, gave him his money in a mock hand-off. He took the envelope and started running with it, arm out to block rushing defenders. We both laughed. After we signed the transfer papers and shook hands, I felt for sure I had met a fellow seeker on the path. A good man. Maybe I’d drive by sometime and pick him up, and we’d ride out ‘til we hit cattle ranches.

“Call me if you have any questions,” he said. I pulled into traffic, waving.

The car was a dud, of course. I didn’t even make it out of the Valley before the thing started bucking and smoking. A block from Laurel Canyon Boulevard the car came to a stop with smoke pouring out of the hood. I was in state of shock. I might have even cried a little. What had I done?

Eventually, I came back to my senses and called the guy. Got his machine. I shouted at it, telling the guy he was a liar and a thief. The thing turned off before I was done. I was going to call back but only had enough change for one more call. There was a long silence when I told Eva what had happened.

Finally, the tow truck came. (She had used her Triple A card.) The guy at the station just shook his head and told me he’d buy the car for parts. 50 bucks.

“Take it off your hands,” is how he put it. “Otherwise, what’s the use?”

It needed a new engine, to start. The engine block was cracked. Beyond that, the thing needed new plugs, a tune-up, new brakes, new rings and cables, a fan belt, new shocks, and, the clincher, a smog inspection sticker. I’d forgotten about that entirely. Total bill: $4,000. I was crestfallen.

Eventually, Eva came and got me. She was actually quite nice about it. I kept insisting that she hated me, but she bit her tongue and shook her head. Still, the whole ride up the mountain I couldn’t look at her. I knew I had failed her in some essential way. Her protracted silence only confirmed it.

Eva ended up finding me a car, against my stubborn wishes—a ‘84 Mercury Zephyr with red vinyl interior. Hawaii Five-O all the way. She fronted me the money and a friend of her father’s drove it down from his used lot. The radiator had a leak, so every time I wanted to go down to Laguna I had to top it off with water. I had fill up the leaky tires, too, not having the money for new ones. I could only put a few dollars of gas in at a time. It was the best I could do. It was how I treated myself. From my teeth to my emotional life, I’d leave things alone until they groaned loud enough for me to notice. Perform a quick patch job and hope for the best.

Eva and I had been together for nearly two years, the longest I’d been in a serious relationship. But we were seeing each other less and less. I was getting down to Laguna now every other weekend; and Eva was hanging out more with the art crowd, asking me to meet her at parties I always seemed underdressed for. One guy even asked me, out on a flimsy balcony overlooking the Pacific, if I were her younger brother. “Spring break?” he wondered aloud, sipping his mixed drink.

She had started hanging out with this hot young director, who was showing her around at premieres like a trophy girlfriend. Eva swore they were just friends—and I wanted to believe her—but it got under my skin. Though I had been faithful up to that point, I began eyeing the stock girl at the store, the one with the pouty lower lip and the Krazy Kat tattoo on her forearm. Said yes when she asked me out for beers.

When Eva headed out of town for a week to accompany her director friend on a press junket, she left me to watch her cat. (Frannie was a supremely strange animal, a stray Siamese she’d found on the streets of Sao Paulo, a beast so sensitive and tuned into Eva that whenever we fought, when I even raised my voice a notch, she would throw up in protest, depositing a little puddle of bile on the floor, then look up at me accusingly.) “Behave,” Eva told me as she kissed me goodbye, stroking the cat’s head. “Frannie is watching.” I went out with the stock girl the next night. We kissed a couple of times, that’s all. But when I got back to the apartment, the cat had thrown up on the carpet. The next night I found myself in Krazy Kat’s bed, listening to Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi is Dead” super-loud and drinking premixed tropical drinks.

It wasn’t long after that Eva and I decided to split. I told her about Krazy Kat as soon as she got back. Eva hadn’t wanted to instigate anything, but she seemed relieved. I think she finally realized how little I was actually offering her. None of the writing I was doing was going anywhere, or getting me anywhere, and I seemed stuck in a rut at the bookstore. (Of course, I was too wrapped up in myself to see any of this back then. I never could see Eva for who she was: a serious woman approaching her late 30s hoping to start a family. All I could ever see was my red-haired Nordic goddess. She was a romantic projection I kept throwing out onto the screen of my mind.)

The car ended up dying one night on the way back from Laguna. It had to be past 2, maybe 3. I hadn’t been able to pull myself away from Eva’s bed any earlier. (Sex then between us was touch and go, and since that night had been most definitely go, I took it was far as it went.) The drive through Laguna Canyon was its cathartic best, all wind through the windows and dark expanse and quiet hills looming at the periphery. The smell of sage wafted off the high desert floor. But somewhere outside of East L.A., the car just shut down. The lighted panels blacked out, and the music trailed off into silence. I let the car drift over to the breakdown lane, waited a few minutes. But the beast wouldn’t turn back on. Nothing. Not even that awful clicking. Just dead engine. The highway walls loomed, and the few cars out that late just whipped by in a tunnel of light.

After a few hours, these two Chicano guys took pity on me. They tied a rope to my car and towed me into the city. After what seemed like an endless slalom ride, we cut across two lanes and went down the off-ramp more than a little too fast and then, as if coming up out of a dream, emerged in a somewhat busy part of town lit up by all-night gas stations. My knuckles were white, I was holding onto the wheel so hard; my back had clenched in a hunched-over posture. The two men left me at a Texaco station, getting out long enough to take back their rope. I shook their hands and thanked them both profusely, but they only smiled politely. Their whole demeanor had changed, switching from friendly and open to guarded and cautious.

Miles was home when I called, still up in a stoned cloud, bless his soul. He picked me up twenty minutes later and took me to an all-night diner, first getting me high in the front seat of his Toyota. We ate a late night breakfast—big stacks of blueberry pancakes, sides of bacon—talking and smoking until sunrise. I told him the story and he laughed with me at my bad luck.

“I’m thinking of getting out of town,” I told him, taking myself by surprise saying it. “Just throw my things in my car and head north.”

Miles nodded his head sagely. “You’re doin’ the right thing, my friend. Eva’s a good woman, but you’re not ready to settle down.”

We headed west up La Brea, blasting Dylan Live in Dublin (Take your pick: “Just Like a Woman,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”). When Miles lit another bowl, steering the car with his knees, I started telling him about the change in the Chicano men’s behavior. It had been bothering me. I wondered if maybe they weren’t comfortable in that part of town. He thought about it for awhile. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said, handing me the pipe. “They were probably waiting for you to pay them something for their trouble. They cursed you the whole ride home, amigo.”

Things began to really fall apart after that. I got fired from the bookstore job. Miles got mad at me for something silly and stopped inviting me to parties. Eva found out somehow about my sideline flirtations and decided to leave for an extended trip with her gentleman friend. All of a sudden I was alone in a strange city, broke, feeling like shit.

Our last night in Laguna was excruciatingly polite. Eva was determined to end everything with civility and grace, but I could see the anger tightening her face. I could tell she was doing everything in her power to hold it in. As for me, well, I was too ashamed to do anything but tiptoe around. My pack was leaning against the back door, the newly repaired gassed up and ready to go on the street. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. I slept in my clothes, outside the covers, stroking Eva’s hair until she finally passed through her anger into sleep. Left the house at daybreak like a thief.

The radio fizzled out one last time as I passed out of town and entered into the high-desert funnel of Laguna Valley, leaving me for a brief, exalted time with open sky and the first of the day’s light. Some ancient Indian spirit deep in the hills filtered out the radio waves to remind me to pay better attention, to be present to the sacredness the valley held. I rolled down the windows one last time to say goodbye: to Eva, to the two years in L.A., to everything. I looked up at the last of the night’s stars that I never saw in the city. In the little gravel switchback I always turned into, I shut off the engine, got out, and stood there awhile, half-listening for coyote. The hills were completely quiet and still; I could make out a line of trees in the distance. The only movement was the wind blowing down off the hills, filled with the odor of distant ocean. My head jammed with thoughts and second thoughts.

Slowly, I calmed down and started tuning into the night around me. I could hear the car engine ticking under the hood, a desert animal rustling in the shrub, an eighteen-wheeler moving through its gears out on the highway more than two miles away, and underneath it all, low and rumbling, the ocean surf as it came down on the beach—the saddest, purest sound in the world. The longer I stood there, the more sense I had that my life outside that moment was out of whack. That if I could just plant myself there long enough, root myself somehow, maybe the feeling of calm that spooked me like a spirit would grow within me. But that wasn’t happening. The full weight and force of my actions seeped in and started taking its numbing effect. I’d just left the woman I loved, had gone and walked out, leaving a life behind like a sloughed-off skin.

Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now: that you can’t outrun the things you want to leave behind, because they are embedded in your body and move where you move, go where you go, are you. That life moves in a circle. I was young and thought a straight line up the coast meant up and out to freedom. That I would soon forget Eva’s soft voice, the way she lilted her words so everything sounded like a half-question, or an invitation. I thought that I was still in love with her, despite everything, and wanted more than anything to do right by her.

Out on the highway, the radio woke up out of its trance—some old-school jazz number emerged out of thin air, reconstructing itself first as fuzz then static then notes and tones. I rode its rhythms all the way down Highway 5 into the sleeping city of angels, then on through it, the sacred valley energy still pulsing through my body, mixing with the pulse of gas station coffee. Another good tune. Gigantic monoliths drifted by, pale sunlight licking at their tops. The flattened-out back of the Pacific dozed on my left, rolling hills on the right. My battered old Zephyr steered itself through the morning. I was moving on, heading out. Before I knew it, I was north on the Coast Highway bound for San Francisco. The wind on my face, everything.