“Angel from Montgomery.”
“Blue Rodeo,” written and recorded by Cat Parker, a friend of ours who had passed on:
Come on shoot us a star
Play some guitar
So we can find where you are
In the blue rodeo …
I loved these songs. Beautiful things, straight from the heart. During that set I felt alone with her, happily trapped in a small room, the notes falling on me like stars. I wasn’t worried about the child who had come to me, then left, or the swell that might or might not come, or the giant waves I’d be trying to ride, or money, or the article I was writing for the LA Times.
The songs took me away.
Later, John went back to the theater to watch himself in some Tahiti surfing videos he’d never seen. John loved surf movies with him as the star, as almost all surfers do. It’s vanity, sure, but it’s also a way of seeing yourself as you never do when riding a wave. Another adrenaline-charged moment. Another high. And a way of learning, too.
But I wasn’t in the mood for enormous waves. I suspected I’d be seeing plenty of those soon enough.
So I hung around the steaming backyard swimming pool, where hired bartenders circulated through the crowd with trays, serving big-bowl “midnight margaritas” made from “secret ingredients.” At midnight, we counted down and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Our singing voices were bold and a bit wobbly by then. Our hosts lit against-the-law firecrackers on the pool deck, those snaky black ones that wiggle and smoke. I took a rare hit of grass off a hookah, and moments later was high beyond my experience. Felt like my horizontal hold was gone, and I was falling facedown and bouncing up, falling facedown and bouncing up, over and over—even though I was standing still. Flashes of color, floaters of light. Fragments of conversations, the words stretching and reforming like rubber. I found it incredibly funny when people—some fully clothed and some only in their underwear or less—started jumping into the pool. Someone pushed me in, so I purged most of my air and sank to the bottom and sat there in the overheated water, legs extended like an infant, blowing bubbles and watching them burst at the silver-blue surface. My denim pantsuit felt rough as shark skin. The deep-end pool light studied me—a monster’s eye. I wondered if John was enjoying his videos.
They had good towels for us New Year’s Eve party animals, so I got my long down coat from a rack in the foyer, wrung out my suit in the pool-house bathroom, ran my brush through my hair, and set out to find my husband.
Later, I found out that the midnight margaritas were laced with LSD and peyote, and the hookah weed with opium, and pharmaceutical cocaine supplied by a Laguna ear, nose, and throat specialist whose daughter was on our water polo team.
Some of our core Laguna surfers were in the theater toking up, the videos done and John gone. I sat down for a minute and watched the lights and colors on the projection screen. Eavesdropped on the surfers, loose-jawed and a little slurring as surfers can be, but with that stoked hopefulness we almost always have. It’s all about tomorrow. The next wave.
I went room to room, looking for John. The house was a three-story custom that climbed a steep hillside, and you could see the ocean from all the windows and the stairway landings. If I could afford a home in Laguna it would be something like this. I looked at myself in the mirror of a well-lit second-floor bathroom, and saw this almost cute chick with a pale green face and a bowl of orange hair on her head. Set one hand over the bottom of that bowl and lifted, seeing if it was attached. I leaned over and splashed some water on my face to sober up, but it sparkled musically going down the drain and I thought I heard a melody in it, so I let my face just hang there in the sink, watching the music go down.
Nobody on the third floor except behind a closed door, from which came the grunts and whimpers of Human Reproduction 101.
Muted and urgent.
A bump and a gasp.
A moan I knew.
John.
And—I realized, through a psychedelic and powerful surge of nausea—Ronna.
Of course, with my senses addled and perceptions blurred, I had to see.
So I shut myself in a catercorner hall bathroom, turned off the light, and left the door ajar.
Five minutes later John strode past, and five minutes after that, Ronna.
The longest ten minutes in sports.
I locked the door, ran the faucet, then turned and knelt on the cold tile, felt the foul surge rush out, splashing toilet water and vomit onto my face.
When the second wave of nausea ended, I rinsed in the sink, then zipped my long down coat up to my chin, and sat on the john.
Betrayed.
Hung on a noose of innocence.
One chapter concluded and another about to begin.
Over the next few days, John was as attentive and affectionate as he’d ever been, fueled by guilt and the brittle comfort that he had gotten away with something. He smiled more than usual, a sheepish, apologetic thing in which I also saw pity, which infuriated me.
I was a moody wreck but hid it. Threw myself into my weightlifting and breath-control exercises for the Monsters of Mavericks. Spent extra hours in the ocean, wrestling the jet ski through the local waves and whitewater, trying to master that eight-hundred-pound brute. Sometimes I’d head into the open sea and gun the throttle, cutting a straight line across the ocean, fast as the ski would go, pretending I was outrunning John’s betrayal. Outrunning John himself. Leaving him behind in the smoky roar of the machine.
Two nights after the New Year’s Eve party in the canyon, I led John into our bedroom and made love to him. It was heartbroken and powerful, and left me in tears. I wouldn’t let him go and we made love again, this time long and sweetly desperate for me. He told me he was sorry though he didn’t say for what.
Lying there after, I knew I’d catch that wandering spirit again, that life that had been trying to find a home inside me.
I knew it. Felt it.
Smiled as I lay there, listening to John’s soft, slow breathing.
John’s breath of life.
All ours.
33
This from Brawn, the latest far-right social platform that Brock figures will be out of business in a year:
