exclamation point.

Jimmy sat up against the headboard, watched her as she fit the C batteries into the machine and then went to work on the stretch-wrap around the cassette.

She said, “In the gift shop they had tapes of ‘Sounds of the Sea’ and ‘Sounds of the Big Trees.’ Relaxation tapes.” She slotted the cassette into the machine.

“No Woman No Cry,” she half sang, before it began.

“It bothered you that I said you weren’t the type who drives around the block to hear a song on the radio,” Jimmy said.

“I hardly ever think about it,” Jean said.

She smiled and the music started, a crack of a high hat and then a rolling rhythm. It wasn’t “No Woman No Cry,” but a song that began:

I don’t want to wait in vain for your love . . .

But neither of them thought the song was about them, or at least about this. She turned it up and fiddled with the bass.

From the very first time I rest my eyes on you, my heart says follow

through . . .

“I got two rooms,” Jimmy said.

She didn’t say anything, went into the bathroom and changed into her new sweatpants and cheap pink shoes. When she came out, she smiled at him and walked past him out the sliding door to see if she could see the water.

She went all the way out to the edge. She turned and looked back at him through the open door, happy.

She talked him into taking the ragged path zigzagging down the cliff-face to the rocks and the water. It took thirty minutes down, from the warning sign at the top to the sweet little cove and improbable beach below perfectly littered with driftwood, and almost an hour back up, the last half in the dark with Jimmy going ahead and Jean holding his shirttail and laughing.

They drank a bottle of Liebfraumilch over dinner at the seafood place next to the motel and then another. They took what was left in their glasses out to the cliff’s edge and listened to the wind and the surf far below that they couldn’t see except when the biggest waves blew out white against the rocks.

Jimmy pulled back the cover on the bed.

“Can we leave the sliding glass door open?” he asked.

It was chilly, but she nodded.

The lights were out. The moonlight lit the walls. He realized what the bias-cut paneling on the walls had reminded him of when he’d first come into the room: recording studios. There was a time when they all had walls that looked like this, diagonal redwood paneling. He’d spent hours in those rooms.

“People come to look at the trees and then sleep in redwood-paneled rooms,” Jimmy said.

“And come to the ocean and eat seafood,” Jean said. She was drunker than he was. She put on a funny voice. “ ‘Let’s go someplace beautiful—and eat it!’ ”

There was a silence. She kissed him. He touched her neck. Her breath in his face was sweet and warm, the last drink of the night.

“You proceed at your own risk,” she said, laughing too much.

He was up early, before there was light. He sat in a chair and watched her sleeping. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman. As he watched her, as he listened to her breathe, he felt sorry for himself. It had been a while for that, too.

He showered. After he shaved, he dried his face and looked at himself in the mirror. The sunblock Jean bought was on the counter, a pink bottle, sunblock for kids, no more tears. He squeezed a white circle of it into his palm, rubbed his hands together, spread it across his forehead, nose and cheeks. The smell of it hit him, summers on the beach or on a sailboat, way back. That smell and the memories it brought with it, the Liebfraumilch last night, Mother’s Milk, the cypresses, this road into Carmel and Monterey—he knew already what the day was going to be about.

And wished he’d gone south instead of north.

Two hours later, he was on Point Lobos. There was a thin fog. Jimmy stepped out onto the point. Here the cypresses were gnarled, arthritic, almost bare but still alive, their roots reaching down to find unlikely nourishment in cracks and crevices in the rock. Lace lichen bearded the branches of understory trees. Cypress Cove and Pinnacle Cove were to his right, Bluefish Cove beyond. There were prettier places all around him, where the trees were fuller, where