descent.

They went into Carmel for a late lunch. There was more wine. For some reason, Jean was under a cloud and not saying much.

Jimmy didn’t really know her but he blamed it on Carmel. He’d never liked the town. It was too relaxed, or relaxed for the wrong reasons. There was too much money here, or too much money too far removed from the labor that produced it. Carmel always seemed to him to have too many retired airline captains and their flight attendant wives, too many personal injury lawyers in their forties who’d had a wonderful tragedy walk into the office one day, the kind that meant more than just another Porsche, that meant freedom money. But, as it turned out, here it was only the freedom to fret over the lightness of the pasta or the year of the wine or the elasticity of the skin of the person across the table from you. Most of them didn’t even play golf. They just “lived well” and repeated too often that line about revenge.

Jean put her knife and fork across her plate. She ran her fingers through her hair, fluffed it out, like his mother had in his memory, and leaned back, her legs crossed at the ankles under the table. She smiled at him, the way you have to the day after you make love in a motel, if you haven’t split already. She had bought clothes at a shop a few doors down from the restaurant, had changed in the dressing room, a silk dress the color of the tarnish on a bell, or the lace lichen they’d just left on Point Lobos. Whether it was the dress or the light filtered through the oaks on the patio, her green eyes looked blue. Blue and sad.

Or maybe she was just hungover.

“Was that where you and your mother were, the memory you told me about when we were talking about perfume?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you?”

Of course he couldn’t tell her.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Fifteen or sixteen. Sixteen. It was early in the summer, 1967. The Doors’ first album had just come out.

“I looked at City of Light the other night,” she said.

City of Light was the movie Teresa Miles went off to shoot the week after the day on Point Lobos.

Jimmy wondered again what she knew, how much she knew.

“How many of her movies have you seen?” he said.

“I think they were called films.”

Jean smiled. Her eyes had gone back to green again.

“All of them,” Jean said. “I’m a fan. Now.”

A waiter came, asked if they wanted coffee. They didn’t. Jimmy ordered a crème brulee.

“We’ll share it.”

It was another thing you did the day after the night in the motel.

“Most of the books said she had no children,” Jean said.

“She tried to keep me out of it,” Jimmy said. He was telling her more than he should again.

“One said there was a son. Another that there were two boys, one who came along much later in her life. I guess that was—”

“Lies.”

“Who was your father?”

“He was a director. Married to someone else.”

A bird snapped down onto their table, a finch. It eyed a crust of bread, looked at Jimmy as if waiting for permission. Jimmy kept still. It pecked at the crumb then flew away as quickly as it had come when someone coughed at a table across the way.

“One of the books,” Jean began, “one of them said there was a rumor that your mother didn’t die, that she was still alive somewhere.”

Jimmy looked at her.

“No.”

When they finished, Jimmy gave the waiter cash and Jean crossed the patio into the restaurant to go to the ladies’ room. A man paused in his attention to his wife’s lines of dialogue to follow Jean with his eyes.

Jimmy stared at him, wanted to yank him out of his chair, shove him until he backed up with his hands in front of him.

He wondered where that came from.

They started up the sidewalk. The collectors’ car show was on in Monterey. A convoy of restored Corvairs came past in the tunnel of trees, eight or ten of them nose to tail, half of them turquoise. Coming along behind was an enormous old Packard with the spare on the running board and a Klaxon horn that the locals—were they called Carmelites?—probably didn’t appreciate.

Jean went into a hat store. Jimmy ducked into another shop to buy something for her. When he came out, she was across the street and down in the next short block.