there was more color, but this was where he’d stood with his mother all those years ago.
He was sixteen. An hour earlier, in the car, after she’d gotten out, as he sat listening to the radio, he’d laid a tab of acid on his tongue.
“It’s a shame to shoot color,” Teresa Miles had said.
She had a Leica on a leather strap around her neck. On her, it looked like jewelry. Her hair had just been cut short and she kept running her fingers through it, what was left of it. She was flying away in a week for a movie. She wore a thin sweater that buttoned up the middle, buttons made of abalone. She had perfect breasts, full for a woman as thin as she was, and always wore French bras that offered them up with a little less self-consciousness than Playtex or Maidenform. It was another thing Jimmy resented about her, the way his friends looked her over when she stepped into the room, and the way she pretended not to notice.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy said. He leaned against a cypress. His mother was out in the open. It was overcast, a world of grays. “It’s going to look like black and white anyway.”
“No, it won’t,” she said. “It won’t have the drama of black and white!”
“Drama.” Jimmy repeated her word.
“Why don’t you play your guitar?” she said. “Get it out of the car. Play me one of your songs.”
No. Because you asked me to.
Nothing was happening. Jimmy wondered if the acid was bad, or not acid at all, a trick played on a rich kid in the lot behind The Troubadour.
But then a rock flared at his feet and then another.
She brushed his hair out of his eyes. It was 1967. His hair was long, as long as The Beatles’ and The Beatles’ was getting longer with each LP.
She walked away across the rocks.
He’d been up all night and she didn’t know it, had come back at four or five from hanging out at Clover. It was the recording studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, a low-cost place, one main room and a booth for vocals, the control room, an “artists’ lounge” with a pinball machine, which was just the first skinny room you came into off the dirty street. A singer/songwriter had worked all night on one track. Nobody. Jimmy knew the producer, who was older than sixteen but just a kid, too. It was that time when hits could come out of anyplace, anybody, so almost everyone was cutting tracks and getting paid for it.
And The Beatles were on Blue Jay Way.
“Come here!” his mother said, her voice bright and theatrical.
Below the point, in a small cove that had no name, out past the shore-break where the water rose and fell predictably, gently, four or five sea otters rafted among the swirling canopies of giant kelp, on their backs.
“See what they’re doing?”
They’re beating their chests.
“They swim down under the kelp and find a perfect flat rock and then a clam or an oyster or even an abalone and then they come back up to the surface and roll over and then pound away on their little rock until the shellfish cracks open and they can eat it.”
She held his hand, like he was six. “They used to say, until just a few years ago, that what separated Man and the lower animals was that only Man used tools. They don’t say that anymore, but that’s what they taught us in school, probably you, too. But I always knew it was wrong because I knew about this.”
Tools. Could this get any more stupid?
She pulled him to her, put their hands behind her back. Her breast was against him. Her perfume had its hands around his throat. He loved her so much and, even now, he felt like she was already gone.
He let go, pulled away from her.
“So what do they say separates us now?” Jimmy said.
“I don’t know,” she had said.
A cormorant screeched overhead and Jimmy looked over at Jean, a hundred yards away, kneeling next to a rock in her pink canvas shoes.
Jimmy looked back down at the cove. The selfsame cove.
Back at the motel, the sign warning guests of the liabilities of the trail down to the beach had said more than, You proceed at your own risk. It also said, with an odd stiffness, as if the owners were Swiss or Austrian, Be advised that the return is more difficult than the