“That sucks,” I said.
“Yeah, I expected G to protest the decision, at least behind closed doors—she was a strong person, driven, but instead she told me that the judges confirmed what she had known all along, that while she might have been gifted in the craft, her work was bloodless. This was a gross distortion, as far as I was concerned. Her work wasn’t bloodless—people had been moved by it. But she wouldn’t budge. Once she had decided on something, that was that. She was that kind of person.
“After graduation, she ended up at one of the talent agencies—she wanted to know the business from the inside. It was an insane job with insane hours, but she loved it. Meanwhile I picked up work with a startup, an internet-based city guide, like a curated yellow pages, this was back when the search engines had human editors indexing and categorizing stuff. The upshot of which was that my days were unstructured and full of roaming while she was tethered to desk and phone. It made me anxious, that imbalance, though I don’t think I could have put it into words at the time, and so—it’s amazing how these things cascade—drunk on champagne at her father’s second wedding, I proposed to her. I don’t think I wanted so much to be married as I was trying to wipe out the anxiety I was feeling about our inevitable drifting apart. I have to give her credit, she didn’t say no. She laughed and kissed me. When we got back to Los Angeles, though, she’d already made up her mind. She had seen the future, and it didn’t include our being together. As far as she was concerned, there was no point in prolonging things. Broke both our hearts. I thought we could choose not to be brokenhearted, by deciding to stay together, but like I said, she had a strong personality.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“She was right, of course.”
“Still,” I said.
“I loved her, by which I mean I loved the idea of her. It wasn’t until a while after we had split up that I began to see how the real her, the actual her, had been obstructed by the idea of her I carried around in my head.”
He swigged his beer.
“In the wake of the breakup I was miserable, no real money, no close friends. I was living in a house in the canyons, house-sitting for an actor I knew. Actually, I was house-sitting for an actor who was house-sitting for an actor. I had nothing going on.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said.
“Jesus, that was a long time ago.”
3
One morning, he said, he awoke to the sound of air whistling through G’s nose, only to discover that the source of the sound had been his own nose, congested, and that he was alone.
Since they’d broken up, Jeff had found himself remembering and cherishing things he couldn’t have imagined caring about when they were still together. Such was the case with the whistling sound G sometimes made when deeply asleep. The part of him that loved her most tenderly, like the love one might feel for a small, fragile animal, had been activated for him by memories of the nocturnal whistling, faint and rhythmic and above all suffused with a vulnerability she didn’t display in waking life, perhaps because she herself was small, a few inches above five feet, barely a hundred pounds. When her breath coursed through the tiny gap in her sinuses or septum or nose itself, it sang a song of shields-down, of a kind of sweetness she rarely allowed him to see. The nose from which that song issued, a wonderfully convex-bridged, slightly out-of-proportion nose, balanced on either side by freckles on either cheek (only later did he realize that people must have treated her like a child), that nose became for him a special feature, which by interrupting her otherwise delicate beauty, enhanced it.
He thought about going back to bed. In that bed, the actor’s bed, he and G had run through baby names, joke names, pure hubris, but acknowledged as such, which he thought might lend them a little protection. In that bed, in that house, they had played at adult life, pretending that they had furnished it themselves, that the art on the walls had been purchased on impossibly expensive trips to far-off destinations. The duck painting picked up on La Rambla in Barcelona, the kilim from a man with shaky hands in Istanbul. He would pretend not to know where the dishes had come from, and she would spin a tale of their origins. In creating a glamorous past they were also envisioning a glorious future. Now, though, everything vibrated with false provenance, the house echoed with associations, both fictional and real, the lightest and most playful now the most oppressive.
He needed out. He dressed, climbed into his old Volvo, and drove west toward Santa Monica.
The sun was not yet up. From atop the bluffs the beach was a dark gray strip, the ocean black. In the dark he walked across the pedestrian bridge over PCH, from one pool of light to the next. The beach lot was empty, nobody around other than a cyclist whizzing past, chasing an amber beam emanating from a box on his handlebars. The sky was a deep brown-black, low clouds reflecting the city’s light back onto itself. A distant lump in the sand was either a nuzzling couple or a sleeping homeless person.
The immensity of the ocean was already having an effect on him, diminishing the size of his problems, connecting him to everything elemental and all-but-eternal.
He took off his shoes and socks, then stepped barefoot onto the cold sand, feeling a sense of liberation at his own insignificance, while also feeling—because he was alone, because it was dark, because the entire city lay behind him, asleep—a sense of himself as a sort of local god, surveying his domain under a cloak of invisibility and omnipotence, two sides of the same coin.
He sat at the water’s edge, the dry sand just above the high-tide line, and the cold seeped through the seat of his pants. He could make out the horizon, splitting the view, the most distant visible thing on Earth. He fantasized about being dropped off out there, halfway to Japan, treading water, succumbing to exhaustion. He didn’t know then that from his vantage the seemingly infinitely distant line was less than two nautical miles away. He was no better at estimating the dimensions of his heartbreak. With G, he’d felt like he was going somewhere, building a life, and now he felt like he’d been sent back to the starting line. As absurd as it would seem to him later, and actually impossible to re-create in his memory, to recapture the intensity of it, G’s absence from his life felt unrelenting and ever present, the first thing he thought of upon waking and the last thing he thought of before sleep descended.
A glow simmered behind him, fiat lux, a slow reveal, coaxing sea and sky from the void. Another day begun. Pelicans skimmed the slick water. The hazy outline of a ship appeared in the channel. Nearby seagulls squabbled over a piece of cellophane. High-tide crests peaked but didn’t break until they met the shore, ripples crossing the ocean from whatever storm had drummed them up, a rising of the waters, energy passed from one molecule to another like a baton in a relay, transmitted all this way only to fizzle out on the sand.