Pacific Edge

7

Last week a nightmare. Landed at Dulles and arrested in Immigration. On a list, accused of violating the Hayes-Green Act. Swiss gov’t must have told them I was coming, flight number and everything. What do you mean? I shouted at officious official. I’m an American citizen! I haven’t broken any laws! Such a release to be able to speak my mind in my native tongue—everything pent up from the past weeks spilled out in a rush, I was really furious and shouting at him, and it felt so good but it was a mistake as he took a dislike to me.

Against the law to advocate overthrowing US gov’t.

What do you mean! I’ve never done anything of the kind!

Membership in California Lawyers for the Environment, right? Worked for American Socialist Legal Action Group, right?

So what? We never advocated anything but change!

Smirk of scorn, hatred. He knew he had me.

Got a lawyer but before he arrived they put me through physical and took blood sample. Told to stay in county. Next day told I tested positive for HIV virus. I’m sure this is a lie, Swiss test Ausländer every four months and no problem there, but told to remain county till follow-up tests analyzed. Possessions being held. Quarantine possible if results stay positive.

My lawyer says law is currently being challenged. Meanwhile I’m in a motel near his place. Called Pam and she suggested sending Liddy on to folks in OC so can deal better with things here. Put Liddy on plane this morning, poor girl crying for Pam, me too. Now two days to wait for test results.

Got to work. Got to. At local library, on an old manual typewriter. The book mocks: how can you, little worm crushed in gears, possibly aspire to me? Got to continue nevertheless. In a way it’s all I have left.

The problem of an adequate history bothers me still. I mean not my personal troubles, but the depression, the wars, the AIDS plague. (Fear.) Every day everything a little worse. Twelve years past the millenium, maybe the apocalyptics were just a bit early in their predictions, too tied to numbers. Maybe it just takes a while for the world to end.

Sometimes I read what I’ve written sick with anger, for them it’s all so easy. Oh to really be that narrator, to sit back and write with cool ironic detachment about individual characters and their little lives because those lives really mattered! Utopia is when our lives matter. I see him writing on a hilltop in an Orange County covered with trees, at a table under an olive tree, looking over a garden plain and the distant Pacific shining with sunlight, or on Mars, why not, chronicling how his new world was born out of the healthy fertility of the old earth mother, while I’m stuck here in 2012 with my wife an ocean to the east and my daughter a continent to the west, “enjoined not to leave the county” (the sheriff) and none of our lives matter a damn.

Days passed and Kevin never came down, never returned to feeling normal. Late that week, watching a news report on the Mars landing, it dawned on him that he was never going to feel normal again. This startled him, made him faintly uneasy.

Not that he wasn’t happy. When he recalled the night in the hills with Ramona he got lighter, physically lighter, especially when working or swimming. Exhilaration resisted gravity as if it were a direct counterforce. “Walking on air”—this extravagant figure of speech was actually an accurate description of a lived reality. Amazing.

But it had been such a strange night. It felt like a dream, parts of it seemed to slip away each time he thought of other things, so that he didn’t want to think of anything else, for fear the whole night might slip away. When he saw Ramona again, down at their streetwork, his heart skipped a beat, and shyly he looked down. Would she acknowledge it? Had it really happened?

Then when he looked up he saw that Ramona smile, a beacon of pleasure, black eyes looking right at him. She remembered too. If it was a dream, they had dreamed it together. Relief gave his exhilaration another lift, he slammed a pick into the broken asphalt and felt like he might be tossed aloft.

Now he was truly in love. And for the first time. Late bloomer indeed! Most of us first fall in love in our teens, it’s part of the intensity of those years, falling for some schoolmate, not so much because of the qualities of the loved one but because of a powerful unspoken desire to be in love. It is part of the growth of the soul. And though the actual nature of the loved one is not crucially important, it would not be true to say that first love is thereby lessened, or less intensely felt. On the contrary—because of its newness, perhaps, it is often felt with particular strength. Most adults forget this in the flood of events that the rest of life pours over them, or perhaps they’re disinclined to remember those years at all, filled as they were with foolishness, awkwardness, shame. Often enough first love was part of the awkwardness, inappropriately directed, poorly expressed, seldom reciprocated… we prefer not to remember. But remember with courage and you will feel again its biting power; few things since will have made you as joyfully, painfully alive.

Kevin Claiborne, however, had not fallen in love in adolescence—or, really, at any time thereafter. The desire never struck him, and no one he met inspired him to it. He had gone through life enjoying his sexual relationships, but something was missing, even if Kevin was only vaguely aware of it. Doris’s angry attempts to tell him that, years before, had alerted him to the fact that there was something others felt which he did not. It was confusing, because he felt that he loved—loved Doris, his friends, his family, his housemates, his teammates…. Apparently it wasn’t what she was talking about.

So the affair with Doris had ended almost as it began. And when Kevin felt romantic love for the first time, at the age of thirty-two, after years of work at home and abroad, after a thousand acquaintances and long years of experience with them, it was not because of the obscure adolescent desire to love somebody. Nor was it just forces in his own soul, though no doubt there was movement there too, as there always is, even if it is glacially slow. Instead it was a particular response, to Ramona Sanchez, his friend. She embodied what Kevin Claiborne loved most in women, he had known that for some time, somewhere in him. And when suddenly she became free and turned her attention to him—her affection to him—well, if Kevin’s soul had been glacially slow, then it was now like a certain glacier in Alaska, which had crawled for centuries until one year it crashed down hundreds of yards, cutting off a whole bay.

It was a remarkable thing, this being in love. It changed everything. When he worked it was with an extra charge of satisfaction, feeling the sensual rush of the labor. At home he felt like a good housemate, a good friend. People relaxed around him, they felt they were having a good time, they could talk to him—they always could, but now he seemed to have more to give back. At the pool he swam like a champion, the water was like air and he flew through it, loving the exertion. And he was playing ball better than ever. The hitting streak extended without any worry, it was just something that happened. It wasn’t very hard to hit a softball, after all. A smooth stroke, good timing, a line drive was almost inevitable. Was inevitable, apparently. He was 43 for 43 now, and everyone was calling him Mr. Thousand, making a terrible racket when he came to bat. He laughed, he didn’t care, the streak didn’t matter. And that made it easier.

And the time spent with Ramona. That morning in their torn-up street he understood what it would be like—she was there, he could look over at her whenever he wanted, and there she would be, graceful, strong, unselfconsciously beautiful—and when she looked at him, he knew just what it said. I remember. I’m yours.

My God. It was love.

For Doris, the days after their party were like a truly enormous hangover. She felt queasy, disoriented, dizzy, and very irritable. One night when Hank was over for dinner she said angrily to him, “God damn it, Hank, somehow you always get me to drink about ten times more of your damned tequila than I really want to! Why do you do that!”

“Well, you know,” Hank said, looking sheepish. “I try to live by the old Greek rule, you know. Moderation in all things.”

“Moderation in all things!” Doris shouted, disgusted.

The rest of the table hooted. “Moderation in all things,” Rafael said, laughing. “Right, Hank, that’s you to a T.”

Nadezhda said, “I visited Rhodes once, where that saying was born. Cleobolus said it, around 650 B.C. The guide book I bought was a translation, and they had it ‘Measure is in all the best.’”

Andrea smiled. “Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it.”

“What the hell do you mean, Hank?” Doris demanded. “Just how does moderation in all things explain pounding twenty-five bottles of atrocious tequila?”

“Well, you know—if you say moderation in all things, then among all things you gotta include moderation itself, see what I mean? So you gotta go crazy once in a while, if you ask me.”

Then Tom showed up, and after dinner he and Doris began poring over the records Doris had taken from Avending. At one point Tom shook his head. “First of all, a lot of this looks to be coded. It may just be a cipher, but if it’s in cipher and coded too then we’re shit out of luck.”

Doris scowled.

“Besides,” Tom went on, “even if we break the code—hell, even with the straight stuff—it won’t make that much sense to me. I’m no financial records analyst, never have been.”

“I thought you might be able to see at least some trends,” Doris said.

“Well, maybe. But look, your friend John is not likely to have had access to Avending’s most intimate secrets anyway, especially if they’ve been involved in some funny stuff. His clearance just wouldn’t go that high.”

“Well, shit,” Doris said, “why did I bother to take this stuff in the first place!”

“Don’t ask me.”

Nadezhda said to Tom, “Don’t you have any friends left in Washington who could be helping you with this kind of problem?”

Tom considered it. “Maybe. I’ll have to make some calls. Here, while I’m doing that, sort this stuff into what’s in English and what’s coded. Where you can tell the difference.”

“Actually John’s clearance is pretty damn high,” Doris said.

Tom just shook his head and got on the TV. For a while he talked to a small gray-haired black woman, leaning back in a rotating chair; then to a tall man with a shiny bald head; then to the blank screen, for three or four conversations. There was a lot of incidental chat as he renewed old acquaintances, caught up on news: “Nylphonia, it’s me. Tom Barnard.”

“I thought you were dead.”

That sort of thing. Finally he got into a long conversation with a female voice and a blank screen, one punctuated several times by laughter. “That’ll take hours,” Tom said at one point. “We’ve got thousands of pages here.”

“That’s your problem,” the voice said. “If you want us to help, you’ll have to send it all along. Just stick them in front of the screen one at a time and I’ll set my end to photo. I’m off to breakfast anyway, and I’ll get back to you later when we’ve gone through them.”

“You think it’ll be worth it?”

“How do I know? But from what you’ve said, I think we’ll be able to come up with something. That much data should reveal the shape of the company’s financial relations, and if they’re hiding things, that’ll show in the shape of what they’re not hiding. We’ll show you.”

“What about the coding?”

Laughter.

“Well, thanks, Em.” Tom turned to Doris and Nadezhda. “Okay, we’ve got to put every one of these sheets of paper on the TV screen, and the better order they’re in, the easier it’ll be for my friends to analyze them.”

So they set to work getting the data transferred. Kevin came in and took his turn. Each sheet sat on the screen for only a second before there was a beep from the phone. Even so it took them until well into the night to get everything photographed. “And to think most of this stuff is irrelevant,” Doris said at one point.

“Worse for my friends than for us,” Tom replied.

“Are we going to have to pay them for this?”

“You bet. But it’s a whole network of friends we’re plugging into, and some of them owe me. We’ll figure something out after they’ve looked at this stuff.”

“What exactly will they be looking for?” Kevin asked.

“Infractions of the laws governing company size, capital dispersion and that sort of thing. Corporate law is a gigantic body of stuff, see, very complex. The main thrust of the twenty-forty international agreements was to cut down on the size of corporations, cut them down so far that only companies remain. It’s actually anti-corporate law, I mean that’s what we were doing for twenty-five years. We chopped up the corporations and left behind a teeming mass of small companies, and a bunch of associations and information networks—all well and good, but there are projects in this world that need a lot of capital to be carried off, and so mechanisms for that had to be instituted, new banking practices and company teamwork programs, and that’s where you get the morass of law dealing with that. Alfredo’s lawyers are undoubtedly playing all those angles and it may be that Avending has been brought in in a legal way, or it could be that there’s an illegal corporate ownership aspect to things. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t have used legal methods, it’s not that hard and a lot safer for their project. But they might be cutting corners—hell, it might have been forced on them, by someone with some leverage. The way Alfredo has introduced the zoning and water stuff…”

“It’s sure that Alfredo and his Heartech partners got to be hundreds damned fast,” Doris said.

“And live like more than hundreds,” Kevin added.

“Do they? Well, it’s worth looking into.”

A few days later the environmental impact statement was filed by Higgins, Ramirez and Bretner, and there it was in the town computer for anyone to call up and inspect. Kevin read it while eating lunch over at Oscar’s house. By the time he was done reading, he had lost his appetite. Theatrically he cast a half-eaten sandwich onto the table. These days even getting angry felt sort of good. “What do they mean erosion on the western side? There’s no erosion at all there!”

“Them ravines,” Hank said. “Must be erosion, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but it’s perfectly natural, I mean it isn’t accelerated or anything. I know every inch of that hill and there’s no unusual erosion at all there!”

Oscar came into the kitchen to make his own lunch. “Ah. HRB strikes again. Natural state equals erosion, litter, underuse. Sure.” He read the TV screen while putting together a Reuben sandwich. “See the way alternative four is slanted. Construction of a commercial center, paths to the peak—this is probably the best description of what Alfredo has in mind that we’ve seen so far. Parking lot down at the head of Crawford Canyon. This will help stop erosion on the western slope, clean up the refuse on the peak, add sightly landscaping, and increase town awareness and enjoyment of the prospect.”

“Shit,” Kevin said.

“That’s an LA Special all right. Hmm. Other alternatives are generally downplayed, I see. Hill turned into park, how can they downplay that? Ah. Would be a small addition to Santiago Park, which is already underutilized, and some seventeen percent of town property. Indeed.”

“Shit!” Kevin said.

Oscar went back to his sandwich. Environmental impact statements had come a long way since the early days, he told Hank and Kevin. LA’s Metropolitan Water Department had once submitted four unacceptable statements in a row, for instance, when attempting to finesse the fact that excessive mining of the groundwater in Owens Valley was going to destroy even the desert flora that had survived the earlier diversions of surface water. The obvious bias in those statements had been one factor in Inyo County’s eventual victory over LA, in the Sacramento courts and legislature; and every agency forced to submit an EIS had learned a lesson from that. Alternative uses had to be described in detail. Obvious harmful effects could not be ignored. The appearance, at least, of a complete and balanced study had to be maintained. “The days of ‘There is no environment here’ are over. Consulting firms like HRB are extremely sophisticated—they make their reputations by writing statements that will stand up to challenges. Complete, but still getting the job done, you know—making whatever impression the agency that hired them wants.”

“Well, shit!” Kevin said.

Gabriela, walking through the kitchen on her way to the roof, said “Time to poison his blood, hey Kev?”

That night Kevin made a chicken stroganoff dinner, while the others checked out the California Environmental Quality Act and the town charter, looking for ways to challenge the EIS.

“Look, the land belongs to us!” Kevin said from the kitchen.

Tom grinned. “El Modena has a population of about ten thousand, so we’re three ten-thousandth owners.”

“Not enough,” Doris said.

“No. But it is true that essentially this is a battle for the opinion of the rest of the owners. The rest of the state and the nation and the world have a say as well, and we might be able to manipulate those forces to our purpose, but the main thing is convincing the people in town to agree with us. The rest of the world doesn’t care that much about Rattlesnake Hill.”

Oscar had dinner with them fairly often, as his kitchen was in an inconvenient state of renovation. One night he came in with the tiniest hint of a smile on his face, and seeing him, Kevin said “Hey, what’s up?”

Oscar lifted an eyebrow. “Well, you know I have been making inquiries with the State Water Resources Control Board.”

“Yeah, yeah?”

Oscar accepted a glass of water from Doris, sat heavily by the pool. Things were a mess in Sacramento, he told them, as usual. On the one hand, Inyo County’s victory over the city of Los Angeles had had the statewide effect of making each county the master of its groundwater. But groundwater basins paid no heed to county lines, and so use of the groundwater in many cases had to be adjudicated by the courts. In many cases state control was stronger than ever. The waterscape was simply bigger than local governments could effectively manage. And so there was a mixed effect; some counties now had control over water that had previously been mined out from under them, while other counties were suddenly feeling pinched. Into that mix came the new source of water from the north, controlled by the state, and funneled through the canals of the old Central Water Project. Confusion, disarray—in other words, the typical California waterscape, in its general feel. But many of the particulars were new.

“So,” Oscar said, “it has taken me a while to find out what the board would make of this proposal of Alfredo’s, to buy water from the MWD and then sell whatever excess there might be to the OCWD. Because no one on the board is inclined to talk about hypothetical cases. They have enough real cases to keep them occupied, and hypothetical cases are usually too vague to make a judgment on. But one of the board members is a good friend of Sally’s, they were on the board together. I finally got her cornered long enough to listen to me, and she prevaricated for a long time, but it comes down to this—they wouldn’t allow it.”

“Great!”

“How does she mean that?” Tom asked.

“Buying water and selling it, or using it for other water credits, is not something the board allows municipalities to do any more—it’s the state’s prerogative.”

“What about the MWD?”

“They’ve been turned into a kind of non-profit clearing house.”

“You mean after all those years of manipulation and control and raking it in at the expense of Owens Valley and the rest of the south, LA is now collecting and distributing all that water as a non-profit operation?”

“That’s right.”

Tom laughed for a long time.

Oscar surged up out of his chair, went to the kitchen to refill his glass. “There’s no swamp like water law,” he muttered under the sound of Tom’s laughter.

So Kevin was feeling good about things, and late one afternoon after a hard day’s work at Oscar’s place, he gave Ramona a call. “Want to go to the beach for sunset?”

“Sure.”

It was that easy. “Hey, isn’t your birthday sometime soon?”

She laughed. “Tomorrow, in fact.”

“I thought so! We can celebrate, I’ll take you to dinner at the Crab Cooker.”

“It’s a deal.”

It seemed like his bike had a little hidden motor in it.

It was a fine evening at Newport Beach. They went to the long strand west of the 15th Street pier, walked behind the stone groins. The evening onshore wind was weak, a yellow haze lay in the air. The sun sank in an orange smear over Palos Verdes. The bluffs behind the coastal highway were dark and furry, and it seemed this beach was cut off from the world, a place of its own. Stars blurred in the salt air. They scuffed through the warm sand barefoot, arms around each other. Down the beach a fire licked over the edge of a concrete firepit, silhouetting children who held hot dogs out on coathangers bent straight. The twined scent of charred meat and lighter fluid wafted past, cutting through the cold wet smell of seaweed. Waves swept in at an angle, rushed whitely toward them, retreated hissing, left bubbling wet sand. We do this once, it never happens again.

At the Santa Ana River’s mouth they stopped. A lifeguard stand stared blankly at the waves, which gleamed in the dark. They climbed the seven wooden steps which lifeguards could descend in a single leap. They sat on the damp painted plywood, watched waves, kissed until they were dizzy. Lay on the wood, on their sides, embracing and kissing until that was all that existed. How perfect the noise of surf was for making out; why should that be? A waft from the barbecue blew by. “Hungry?” “Yeah.”

Biking lazily to the Crab Cooker, Kevin felt better than he could ever remember feeling. That happiness could be such a physical sensation! Ravenously he ate salad, bread, and crab legs. The white wine coursed through him like Hank’s tequila. He was very aware of Ramona’s hands, of the lips that had so recently been kissing his. She really was stunning.

They sat over coffee after dinner, talking about nothing much. They concentrated on what had been theirs together, laying out for their mutual inspection their long friendship, defining it, celebrating it.

Outside the night was cool. They biked in the slow lane of the Newport Freeway, taking almost an hour to get home. Without a word Ramona led the way down Fairhaven, past the gliderport to her house, a squarish old renovated apartment block. They rolled the bikes into the racks, and she led him by the hand into the building. Through the atrium and by the pool, up the stairs to the inner balcony, and around and up again, to her room. He had never been in it before. It was a big square room—big enough for two, of course—set above the rest of that wing of the house, so that there were windows on all four sides. “Ooh, nice,” he said, checking out the design. “Great idea.” Big bed in one corner, desk in the other corner, shelves extending from the desk along walls on both sides, under the windows. Occasional gaps on the shelves were the only signs of the recently departed occupant. Kevin ignored them. One corner of the room was taken up with bathroom and closet nook. There were clothes on the floor, knick-knacks here and there, a general clutter. Music system on a lower shelf, but she didn’t turn it on.

They sat on the floor, kissed. Soon they were stretched out beside each other, getting clothes off slowly. Making love.

Kevin drifted in and out. Sometimes his skin was his mind, and did all his thinking. Then something would happen, they would stop moving for a moment, perhaps, and he would see his fingers tangled in her black hair. Under her head the carpet was a light brown, the nap worn and frayed. She whispered something wordless, moved under him. This is Ramona, he thought, Ramona Sanchez. The surge of feeling for her was stronger than the physical pleasure pouring through his nerves, and the combination of the two was… he’d never felt anything like it. This was why sex was so… he lost the thought. If they kissed at the same time they moved together, he would burst. They were creeping across the carpet, soon their heads would bump the wall. Ramona made little squeaks at his every plunge into her, which made him want to move faster. Moving under him, tigerish… He held her in his arms, bumped the top of his head firmly against the wall, thump, thump, they were off into the last slide, breath quick and ragged and wordless, his mind saying Ramona, Ramona, Ramona.

Afterward he lay in her arms, warm except for where sweat dried on his back and legs. His face was buried in the fragrant hair behind her ear. I love you, I love you. The intensity of it shocked him. All his life, he thought, his happiness had been no more than animal contentment, like a cow in the sun. A carpenter roofing on a sunny day with a breeze, hitting good nails with a good hammer. Swinging the bat and barely feeling the ball when he struck it. Animal sensation, wonderful as far as it went. But now something in him had changed, and without being able to articulate it, he knew he would never be the same again. And he didn’t want to be, either. Because he was lying on an old brown carpet next to his love, head against a wall, in an entirely new world.

“Let’s go to bed,” Ramona said. He sat back, watched her stand and walk to the bathroom. Such a strong body.

She returned, pulled him to his feet, led him to her bed. Pulled the covers down. They got in and drew a sheet over them. The ordinary reality of it, the sheer domesticity of it, filled Kevin up—the world sheered away and after a while they were making love again, using the springiness of the bed to rock into each other. Euphoria set every nerve singing, this was the best time yet. Their night in the hills had been so strange, after all. Kevin had not known how to think of it. It could have been a stroke of magic, falling through his life just once—a result of Mars, Hank’s tequila, the sage hills themselves, intoxicating the whole party. But tonight was an ordinary night, in Ramona’s every-night bed, with white cotton sheets that made her body dark as molasses, that made everything more real. He was there and so was she, lying beside him, one long leg spreadeagled over his, the other disappearing under sheets. Really there.

Her breathing slowed. She was getting drowsy. “Remember Swing Tree?” she asked, voice sleepy.

“Yes?”

“That one swing—the long one?”

“I think we must have been out there an hour.”

She laughed softly. “All night. It felt like we did everything in that one ride. I thought we had our clothes off and everything.”

“Me too!”

“So wonderful. The long swing.”

“Happy birthday,” Kevin whispered after a while.

“Wonderful presents.”

She fell asleep.

Kevin watched her. His eyes adjusted to the dark. Far away in the house a door closed, voices sounded. Someone up late.

Then it was quiet. Time passed. Kevin kept looking at her, soaking her in. He was lying on his left side, head propped on his left hand. Ramona lay on her back, head turned to the side, mouth open, looking girlish. Kevin closed his eyes, found he didn’t want to. He wanted to look at her.

She had really powerful shoulders, you could see where her bullet throws came from. Funny how flat-chested she was. Dark nipples made little breast shapes of their own. He remembered her once, laughing resentfully and saying, Alfredo’s always looking at women with tits. Still she looked so female. Small breasts drew attention to the greyhound proportions of torso, flanks, hips, bottom, legs. She was perfectly proportioned as she was.

Time passed, but Kevin didn’t grow tired. In a way he wanted to wake her and make love again. Then again, just to lie against her side while she slept… a long quiver shook him, he thought it might wake her. No chance—she was out.

His hand fell asleep, and he lowered his head. Her hair spilled over the pillow, black shot silk against the white cotton. Perhaps he dozed for a while. He shifted and felt her, looked at her again. Occasionally he had seen love stories on TV. I adore you, I worship you. He had watched them thinking, how stories exaggerate. But they didn’t—in fact they couldn’t express it at all—poor stories, trying to match the intensity of the real! They never got it, they never could. Adore—it was all wrong, it didn’t explain it at all, it was just a word, an attempt to get beyond love. He loved his sister, his parents, his friends. He needed another word for this, no doubt about it.

The room was lightening. Dawn on its way. No! he thought. Too fast! The slow increase of illumination brought the room’s dimensions into focus, made everything a bit translucent, as if it were a world made entirely of gray glass. In this light Ramona glowed with a dark, sensuous presence. She stirred, spoke briefly. Talking in her sleep. Kevin stared at her, drank her in, the fine skin, the occasional freckle or mole shifting over ribs, the sleek curve of her flank and hip. Outside birds chirped.

And day came, too quickly. Because when the sun cracked over the hills and the little studio room was fully lit, Ramona shifted, rolled, sighed, woke up. The night was over.

They took turns in the bathroom, and when Kevin came out she had on gym shorts and a T-shirt. “Shower?” he said.

She shook her head. “Not yet. You go ahead, I’ll start up some coffee.”

So he showered, wishing she was under the crash of warm water with him. Why not?

Then later as he sat on the floor beside the coffee-maker, she quickly showered herself. What the hell, he thought. Hadn’t it been an invitation?… Well, whatever. Maybe she liked to shower alone.

Then she was out, hair slicked back with a comb, towel around her neck, dressed again. They sat on the floor in the sun, drinking coffee from her little machine. She asked him what his plans were for the day. He told her a little about Oscar’s house, the progress of the work there.

There was a knock at the door. She looked surprised. It was still a little before eight. She went to answer, coffee mug in hand. She opened the door.

“Happy birthday!” said a voice from the landing at the top of the stairs.

Alfredo.

“Thanks,” Ramona said, and stepped outside. Closed the door behind her.

Kevin’s diaphragm was in a hard knot under his ribs. He relaxed it, deliberately took a sip of coffee. He stared at the door. Well, Alfredo would have had to find out eventually. Hard way to do it, though. He could just hear their voices out there. Suddenly the door opened and he jumped. Ramona stuck her head in. “Just a sec, Kev. It’s Alfredo.”

“I know,” Kevin said, but the door was closing. He could hear Alfredo’s voice, sounding strained, upset. He was keeping it low, and so was she.

What were they saying? Curious, Kevin stood and approached the door. He still couldn’t distinguish their words. Just tones: Alfredo upset, perhaps pleading. Certainly asking questions. Ramona flat, not saying much.

He wandered away from the door, feeling more and more uncomfortable. Fright and confidence both filled him, canceling each other out and leaving him nearly blank, except for a light oscillation, a confused feeling. A discomfort. This was strange, he thought. Very strange.

All the objects in the room had taken on a kind of lit thereness, as things will on a morning when you have had little or no sleep. There on her desk, a few books: dictionaries, Webster’s and a yellow Spanish/English one. Several books in Spanish. A volume of the sonnets of Petrarch. He picked it up but couldn’t concentrate enough to read even a line. Something by Ambrose Bierce. A sewing repair kit. Six or seven small seashells, with a few grains of sand scattered under them. A desk lamp with a long extendable metal arm. From this window one looked into the branches of the Torrey pine in their atrium. What could they be saying?

After perhaps fifteen minutes Ramona opened the door and came in alone. She approached him directly, took his hand. Her expression was worried, guarded. “Listen, Kevin. Alfredo and I, we have a lot of things to talk about—things that never got said, that need to be said now. He’s upset, and I need to explain to him about us.” She squeezed his hand. “I don’t want you to just be sitting around in here trapped by us going over a bunch of old stuff.”

Kevin nodded. “I understand.” No time to think.

“Why don’t you go ahead and go to work, and I’ll come over later.”

“Okay,” he said blankly.

She walked him to the door. Alfredo would see his damp hair and assume they had showered together. In any case he knew Kevin had spent the night. Good. Kevin stopped her before she opened the door, gave her a kiss. She was distracted. But she smiled at him, and the previous night returned in a rush. Then she opened the door, and Kevin stepped out.

Alfredo was standing at one side of the landing, leaning against the railing, looking down. Kevin paused at the head of the stairs and looked at him. Alfredo looked up, and Kevin nodded a hello. Alfredo nodded back very briefly, his face pinched and unhappy. His glance shifted away, to the open door and Ramona. Kevin walked down the stairs. When he looked up Alfredo was inside, the door was closed.

Kevin went to work on Oscar’s place. He and Hank and Gabriela worked on the roof, pulling out the old cracked concrete tiles to clear the way for the clerestory windows that would stand on top of the south-facing rooms. All day he expected Ramona to come biking down the street from Prospect, any minute now, for minute after minute after minute. Long time. Memories of the previous night struck him so strongly that sometimes he forgot what he was doing and had to stop right in the middle of things, looking around to catch his balance. Sometimes this happened while he was working with Hank. “Shit, Kev, you’re acting kinda like me today, what’s the problem?”

“Nothing.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Flashbacking, eh?”

“I guess so.”

The only person who biked up to the house was Oscar himself, trundling home for lunch. He stared up at them for a while, then went inside and made lunch for everyone. After they ate he questioned them about the day’s work, ascended a creaking ladder to take a look at it. Then he biked away, and they went back to work.

And still no Ramona. Well, perhaps she didn’t know he was at Oscar’s. No, she knew. It was odd. Then again didn’t she have to teach today? Of course. So she couldn’t come by till after three or four. And what time was it now?

And so the afternoon ticked along, inching through a dull haze of anxiety. What had Ramona and Alfredo said to each other? If… It must have been a shock to Alfredo, to find Kevin there. He couldn’t have had any warning. Unless someone who had been up at the hot springs had mentioned something and news had spread, the way it tended to in El Modena. Still, there wouldn’t have been any warning about last night, or this morning. But why had he come by to say happy birthday so damned early?

“You sure you’re okay?” Hank asked as they put their tools in Oscar’s garden shed.

“Yeah, yeah.”

He biked home, ate a dinner he didn’t notice. Afterwards he stood in the atrium for ten minutes fidgeting, then walked over to Ramona’s house. He couldn’t help it.

Hesitantly he knocked at the kitchen door, looked in. Pedro, Ramona’s father, was in there washing dishes. “Come on in,” Pedro said.

“Thanks. Is Ramona home?”

“I don’t think so. She didn’t eat here.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Nope. Actually I thought she was at your place. I haven’t seen her today.”

“Oh.” Kevin shifted uncomfortably. Part of him wondered how much Pedro knew, but mostly he was thinking where is she? He found he couldn’t talk very well. Pedro was shorter than Ramona but he had the same coloring, his black hair now sprinkled with white. A handsome man. The way he spoke reminded Kevin of Ramona, obviously the daughter had imitated him in years past. Now there was just the same crease between his eyebrows, a mild frown of concern as he chatted.

“I guess I’ll try back tomorrow,” Kevin said. “Will you tell her I dropped by?”

“Sure. Do you want me to have her call you when she gets in?”

“Yeah,” he said gratefully, “do that.”

But that was a mistake, because he spent the evening waiting for the phone to ring. Well into the night, in fact. And it never rang.

The next day he worked in the morning, and then spent the afternoon up at Tom’s, working on the pump, which had broken. While he was there Tom got a call, and spent half an hour inside.

When Tom came back down to the pump he said, “My friends think there may be an outside connection in the Heartech-Avending deal.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means Avending or Heartech might have an illegal source of capital. It might be here or it might be in Hong Kong, they’re getting signs of both.”

“Hong Kong?”

“The Chinese are using Hong Kong to generate money—they overlook all kinds of black conglomerates there, even though they’ve agreed to the international protocols that should make the conglomerates illegal. Then the Chinese zap them for a good bit of whatever profit they make.”

“So we might have something. That would be nice.”

“Nice? If my friends can pin it down, that would do your job for you! What’s bugging you, boy?”

“Nothing. I’m just wondering how it will all turn out, that’s all. Say, where’s Nadezhda?”

“She’s down at her ship. They’ll be leaving before too long—I guess they’ve got a delay. Waiting for some stuff from Minnesota.”

Kevin listened to Tom talk about it for a while, but there was grit in his thinking, and he kept losing track of the conversation. Finally Tom said, “Go home, boy, you must be tired. Get some rest.”

Then when he got home he found Ramona sitting in the kitchen, helping Denise and Jay with their homework. She looked up at him and smiled, and he felt a rush of relief so powerful that he had to sit. Until that moment he hadn’t known how anxious he was.

Ramona set the kids to work on their own, led Kevin into the atrium. He caught her up in the dark and gave her a hug. She hugged back, but there was a stiffness in her spine, and she avoided his kiss. He pulled back frowning, the knot back in his stomach.

She laughed at his expression. “Don’t worry!” she said, and leaned up to kiss him briefly.

“What happened? Where have you been? What did he want? Why didn’t you call?”

Ramona laughed again, led him by the hand to poolside. They sat on the low chairs.

“Well, I’ve been talking to Alfredo,” she said. “I guess that answers all your questions at once. He came over yesterday morning to talk about things, apparently. Then when he found you there and realized we had spent the night together, he—well, he fell apart. He needed to talk anyway, and the more that sank in, the more he needed to.”

“About what?”

“About him and me. You know. What happened, what went wrong.”

“Does he want you two to get back together?” Kevin asked, hearing the strain in his voice.

“Well.” She looked away. “Maybe so. I’m not sure why, though, even after all the talking we did. I don’t know.”

“And you?” Kevin asked, pressing right to the point, too nervous to avoid it.

Ramona reach over, took his hand. “I… I don’t know what I want, Kev.”

He felt his diaphragm seizing up, getting tighter with every breath, every absence of breath. Oh my God, he thought. Oh my God.

“I mean,” she said, “Alfredo and I were together for a long time. We went through a lot together. But a lot of it was bad. Really bad. And you and I—well, you know how I feel about you, Kev. I love you. And I love the way we are together. I haven’t felt the way I have the last week in a long time.”

I’ve never felt like I have in the last week! Kevin wanted to say, and he only just bit back the words, suddenly frightened of speech.

“Anyway,” Ramona said, still squeezing his hand, “I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what I feel about things with Alfredo. He says he wants to get back together, but I don’t know….”

“Seeing us together,” Kevin suggested.

“Yeah, I know. Believe me.” And suddenly she was blinking rapidly, about to cry. What was this? Kevin’s fright grew. “I don’t know what to do,” she exclaimed painfully. “I can’t be sure about Alfredo, and I hate having anything happen between you and me, to get in the way when we were just beginning!”

Exactly, Kevin thought, squeezing her hand in turn. Don’t let it! Should he say that, or would it just be more pressure? He shifted his chair closer to hers, tried to put an arm around her.

“But,” she said, pulling herself together, putting a hand to his arm and forestalling him. “The fact is, it’s happened. I can’t just ignore it. I mean that’s fifteen years of my life, there. I can’t just tell him to leave me alone, not after all that—especially—well, especially”—losing it again, voice getting desperate—“especially when I don’t know what I feel!” She turned to him beseechingly, said, “Don’t you see?”

“I see.” He couldn’t swallow well. His diaphragm was as hard as if a block of wood had been inserted under his ribs. “But Ramona,” he said, not able to stop himself, “I love you.”

“Ah,” she said, as if he’d stuck her with a pin; and suddenly he was terrified.

She threw herself up out of her chair as if to run away, collapsed against him as he stood, embraced him, head against his chest, breathing in convulsive gasps, almost sobs. Kevin held her against him, feeling her warmth, frightened in a way he had never been before. Another new feeling! It was as if he had been exiled from a whole enormous world of emotion, and now he was in it—but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be, because this love that caused him to clutch Ramona to him so tightly—this love made him so vulnerable…. If she left. He couldn’t think of it. Was this what it meant to be in love, to feel this horrible fear?

“Come upstairs,” he said into her hair.

“No,” she said, muffled into his shirt. “No.” She composed herself, sniffed hard, pulled away from him, stood fully. Eye to eye she faced him, her wet eyes unblinking, her gaze firm. “I’m not going to sleep with anybody for a while. It’s too… it’s too much. I need to know what I think, what I want. I’ve got to have some time to myself. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” he said, barely able to form the words. Such fear…

“I do love you,” she said, as if she had to convince him of it, as if he were doubting her. Horrible!

“I know,” he said weakly. He didn’t know what to say. He was stunned. A new world.

She was watching his face, nodding. “You should know,” she said firmly. Then, after a pause, “I’m going home now. I’ll see you at the games and the street work and all. Please. Don’t worry.”

He laughed briefly, weakly. “Don’t worry.”

“Please?”

He took a deep breath. “Oh, Ramona…” His voice was unsteady, his throat suddenly clamped. “I won’t be able to help it,” he got out.

She sniffed, sighed. “I’m sorry. But I’ve got to have some time!” she cried softly, and darted forward to peck him with a kiss, and was off, across the dark atrium and out the door.

The following days were long. Kevin had never known this kind of tension, and it disagreed with him. At times he found himself wishing that Ramona and Alfredo had never broken up, that he had never thought of her as free, or gone up in the ultralite with her, or walked into the night hills with her, or spent the night in her room. Any of it. Better to leave him the way he had been before, happy in himself, in his own life! To have his happiness, even his ability to function, dependent on someone else… he hated it.

Two or three days passed, and he found out that Ramona had gone to San Diego to stay with friends. She left a short note on his house screen. Jody was substituting for her at school, and she expected to be away a week. Damn, he thought when he read the note. Why didn’t you tell me? Why are you doing this? Make up your mind! Don’t leave my whole life hanging like this!

Still, it was somewhat easier knowing that she wasn’t in town. He couldn’t see her, and didn’t have to decide not to try. Alfredo couldn’t see her either. He could try to pretend that everything was normal, go on with daily life.

That Wednesday’s town council meeting, for instance. It was an ordinary agenda on the face of it, fire-fighting equipment expenditures, the fate of the old oak on Prospect and Fairhaven, the raccoon problem along Santiago Creek, permission for a convenience store, et cetera. Alfredo led them through these matters with his usual skill, but without aplomb. To Kevin he seemed distracted and remote, his face still pinched. He never looked Kevin in the eye, but addressed him while tapping a pencil on his notes, looking down at them. Kevin for his part tried to appear as relaxed as he could, joking a bit with witnesses and the like. But it was an effort, an act. In reality he felt as nervous as Alfredo looked.

He wondered how many people at the meeting knew what was going on. Certainly many in town knew he and Ramona had been getting close. Oscar, over at his table with his moonlike impassive face; he wouldn’t be telling people about it. Nor Hank, nor Tom and Nadezhda. Jody? Gabriela or Mike? It would only take one leak for the story to spread everywhere, that was town life for you. Were some of the audience here tonight to see Alfredo and him pick at each other? Ach… no wonder Alfredo looked so guarded. Oh well. Not worth worrying about, not with the agenda in that department already full.

He remembered something Tom had said. “Every issue is related to this zoning change issue now, because you’re on a council of seven, and your ability to act is determined by your working relationship with the other six members. Some will be your opponents no matter what, but others are in the middle, undecided. Those are the ones you have to cultivate. You have to back them on the things they care about most. That’s the obvious angle. But then there’s the unobtrusive stuff, following up their remarks with something that reinforces what they said—asking them questions to defer to their areas of expertise—that sort of thing. It has to be subtle—very, very, very subtle. And continuous. You have to think, Kev. Diplomacy is hard work.”

So Kevin sucked on his coffee and worked. Hiroko Washington was impatient indeed with the witnesses who wanted the Santiago Creek raccoons left entirely alone. “Just where do you live? Do you have kids there?” she demanded of them. Jerry Geiger seemed down on the raccoon fans as well. It was doubtful Jerry could be influenced by anything, his memory was only one agenda item long, but still, both him and Hiroko…

“Have we got a population count on them?” Kevin asked the Fish and Game rep.

“No, not a recent one.”

“Can you guess reliably from the data you have?”

“Well…”

“Aren’t there maximum populations beyond which it’s bad for them?”

“Sure.”

“So we may be near that number, and killing some would be good for the remaining raccoons?”

“Sure.”

“How long would it take to make a count?”

And so on. And once or twice he saw Hiroko nod vigorously, and it was she who moved that a new population count be made. And Jerry who seconded it.

Good. Diplomacy in action. One hand washes the other. Kevin pursed his lips, feeling cynical. But it was a cynical business, diplomacy. He was beginning to understand that.

And then they were on to the convenience store, and he lost his close focus on it, and it all seemed trivial. My God, is this what it meant to be a citizen in a democracy? Is this what he was actually spending the evenings of his only life doing? His whole existence stood in the balance, and they were arguing over whether or not to give permission to build a convenience store?

And so the tension came and went, obsession then distraction.

How slowly time passed. Hours dragged like whole afternoons. He had trouble sleeping, nights seemed unbearably long. So much of life was wasted lying down, comatose. Sometimes, unable to sleep, he hated the very idea of sleep, hated the way his body forced him to live.

At work he kept forgetting what the next task was supposed to be. The June overcast extended into July, clouds rolling in from the sea every day. And he found himself standing on Oscar’s roof shivering, staring up at clouds, feeling stunned.

Hank and Gabby, who knew now what was going on, left him alone. Sometimes Hank brought along some dumpies of beer, and at the end of the day they sat down on stacks of two-by-eights and drank them, not saying much of anything. Then it was home for another long night.

Kevin took to spending a lot of time at the TV, talking with the house’s sister families around the world, catching up on what they were all doing. Awful the way people tended to ignore these humans who appeared on their screens once a month, in a regular rotation. Oh sure, there were occasional conversations over meals, but often the people on both sides of the screens avoided the commitments these screen relationships represented. Still, it only took paying attention, an inquiry, a hello; the translating machines went to work and there he was in another place, involved in distant lives. He needed that now, so he turned up the sound, faced the screen, said Hi, asked how people were doing. The Indonesian couple had just had their third child and were facing killer taxes. The South African family was complaining about their government’s bungling trade policies. The big Russian household near Moscow was building a new wing onto their complex, and they talked to Kevin for almost two hours about it. He promised to be there next month to check in on how they were doing.

And then every night the screen would go blank, and he’d be left with his own household, whatever members of it were at home. They were a distraction, though he would have preferred to talk to Tom. But Tom was usually out with Nadezhda. So he wished his sister would call. He would try calling her, but she was never in Dakka. He didn’t want to talk about it with his parents. Jill, however… he wanted to talk to her, needed to. But she was never home. He could only leave messages.

Life on pause. His hitting streak, going beyond all laws of chance and good fortune, began to seem like a macabre joke. He hated it. And yet it seemed vitally important that he keep it going, as if when the streak broke, he would too. Then he went to bat afraid, aware of the overwhelming likelihood of making an out. In one game, in his first at-bat he nubbed one but managed to beat it out. The next time he took a pitch on a full count, and Fred Spaulding called it a ball despite the funny bounce to one side that it took. The third time up he nubbed another one, directly in front of the plate. He took off running to first base thinking it’s over now, it’s over. But, as they told him afterward, the Tigers’ catcher, Joe Sampson, slipped on the strike carpet and fell face first into the grass, fingers just inches from the ball. And since the fielder had never touched the ball, it couldn’t be scored an error. It was a hit, even though the ball had traveled less than four feet.

“Holy moly,” Hank said afterwards. “That was the lamest two-for-two I ever expect to see in the life of the universe!”

Kevin could only hang his head and agree. The streak was a curse in disguise. It was mocking him, it was out to drive him crazy. Better if it were ended. And nothing would be easier, actually. He could just go up to the plate and whiff at a couple and it would all be over, the pressure gone.

In the next game he decided to do it. He would commit streak suicide. So in his first at bat he squeezed his eyes shut, waited, swung, missed. Everyone laughed. He gritted his teeth, feeling horrible. Next pitch he squeezed his eyes shut harder than before, groaned, swung the bat hard. Thump. He opened his eyes, astonished. The right fielder was going to field the ball on a hop. His teammates were yelling at him to run. He jogged to first, feeling dazed, as if he had jumped off a building and a safety net had appeared from nowhere.

Of course he could keep his eyes open and miss for sure. But now he was scared to try.

When the inning was over he went to the dugout to get his glove, and Jody said, “Pressure getting to you, eh?”

“No!” Kevin cried.

Everyone laughed.

“Well, it’s not!” Kevin insisted, feeling his face flush.

They laughed harder.

“That’s all right,” Jody said. “I’d be crazy by now. Why don’t you just go up there next time and take two whiffs and get it over with?”

“No way!” Kevin cried, jumping away from her. Had she seen his eyes squeezed shut? Had all of them seen?

But they all were laughing cheerily. “That’s the spirit,” Stacey said, and slapped his shoulder in passing. They ran out onto the field chattering, Kevin’s stress-out forgotten. But Kevin couldn’t forget, couldn’t loosen up. Here he was in a softball game, and his diaphragm was a block of wood inside him. He was falling apart.

The following week felt like either a month or a day, Kevin couldn’t say which, but there he was in the council meeting again, so a week it was. Numbly he went through his paces, bored by the meeting, inattentive. It went smoothly, and near the end Matt Chung said, “We’ve got the information we need to proceed on the question of the proposal from the Metropolitan Water District, shall we use this time and go ahead on that? It’ll be item two next week anyway.”

No one objected, and so suddenly they were in the discussion. Should they buy the extra water from MWD or not?

Kevin tried to gather his thoughts.

While he was still at it Doris said, “Alfredo, what will we do with the extra water there will undoubtedly be?”

Alfredo explained again that it would be a smart move financially to pour it into the groundwater basin and get credits against their drafting from the OCWD.

Doris nodded. “Excuse me, Mr. Baldarramma, have you checked on the legality of such a move?”

Oscar nodded. “I have.”

“And?”

“Wait a second,” Alfredo interrupted, staring at Oscar. “Why did you do that?”

Oscar met his stare, said blandly, “As I understand it, my job as town attorney is to check the legal status of council actions.”

“There’s been no action on this yet.”

“A proposal is an action.”

“It is not! We’ve only just discussed this.”

“Do you object to knowing the legal status of your suggestions?”

“Well no, of course not. I just think you’re getting ahead of yourself here.”

Oscar shrugged. “We can discuss my job description after the meeting, if you like. Meanwhile, would you like to hear the legal status of your suggestion concerning the use of this water?”

“Sure, of course.”

Oscar moved a sheaf of paper in front of him, glanced at the members of the council. “Several years ago the State Water Resource Control Board responded to new laws passed by the California State Assembly by writing a new set of regulations governing water sales. The Revised California Water Code states that no California municipality can buy water and later sell it or use it as credit, unless said municipality has made the water available for consumption for the first time, and in that case, only for as long as is necessary to pay for the method of procurement. The right to buy and then sell water without using it is reserved to the state.”

“So we couldn’t sell any excess we had if we bought this water from MWD,” Doris said quickly.

“That’s right.”

“So we’d have to use it all.”

“Or give it to OCWD, yes.”

A silence in the council chambers.

Doris pressed on. “So we don’t need this water, and it won’t save us money to buy it, because we can’t resell it. And buying it would be breaking the council resolution of twenty twenty-two that ordered El Modena to do everything it could to reduce our water dependency on MWD. Look here, I move that we vote on this item, and turn it down. We simply don’t need this water.”

“Wait a second,” Alfredo said. “The discussion isn’t finished.”

But the discussion was out of his hands, for the moment. Doris kept pressing, asked for a vote in every pause, inquired acidly whether there really was anything left to be said. Before too long Alfredo was forced to call for a vote. He and Matt voted to buy the water. The rest of the council voted against it.

Afterwards, walking over to the house to celebrate, the others were in fine spirits. “All right,” Kevin said. At least something was going well. “That look on Alfredo’s face when Oscar zapped him—ha.” Fine. Fuck him.

In a deep voice Doris said, “‘Do you object to knowing the legal status of your suggestions?’” She laughed out loud.

Tom was there at the house, sitting with Nadezhda and Rafael and Cindy and Donna by the pool. Kevin and Doris told him all about it. Kevin downed most of a dumpie of beer in one swallow. “So much for messing with our hill!” he said.

“Come on,” Tom said. He laughed. “It only means they’ll have to change their strategy.”

“What do you mean?” Kevin said.

“They were trying to lay the groundwork for this development before they proposed it, to make things easier. Now that that’s failed, they’ll probably propose the development anyway, and try to convince the town it’s a good thing. If they can do that then they can say, Hey, we need more water, we need different zoning. If the general concept has been approved then it’ll happen.”

“So,” Kevin said, staring at the dumpie of beer.

“Hey, it’s still a good thing.” Tom slapped him on the arm. “Momentum, you know. But it’s a battle won, not the war.”

Four days later Kevin heard that Ramona was back in town. He heard it from Stacey down at the chickenhouse, accidentally, as Stacey was talking to Susan. That he had heard about it like that frightened him, and he jogged home with his package of breasts and thighs, desperately trying not to think about it. That she was back in El Modena and hadn’t told him, hadn’t come by his place first thing….

He got home and called her up. Pedro answered, went to get her. She came on. “I hear you’re back,” Kevin said.

“Yeah, I just got in this morning.” She smiled, as if there was nothing unusual happening. But it was just before sunset. Her eyes watched him guardedly. “Why don’t you come over and we can talk.”

He blanked the screen, rode over to her house.

She came out and met him in the yard, and they turned and walked down the path toward Santiago Creek. She was wearing jeans worn almost white, frayed at the cuffs. A white blouse with a scoop neck.

Suddenly she stopped him, faced him, took up his hands in hers, so that they hung between the two of them. Curious how held hands could make a barrier.

“Kevin—Alfredo and I are going to get back together. Stay together. He wants to, and I want to too.”

Kevin disengaged his hands from hers. “But…” He didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t think. “But you broke up,” he heard himself saying. “You gave it a try for years and years and it didn’t work. Nothing’s changed except you and I got started. We just started.”

“I know,” Ramona said. She bit her lip, looked down. “But…” She shook her head. “I don’t want it to be like this.” She looked off to one side. “But Alfredo came down to San Diego, and we talked about it for a long—”

“What?” Kevin said. “Alfredo came to San Diego?”

She looked up at him, eyes bright in the twilight. “Yes.”

“But”—a twist in him, ribs pulled in—“Well shit! You said you were going to get away from us both and think about it and that’s what I thought you were doing! And here you were off with him!”

“I meant to get away. But he followed me down there. He found out where I was staying and he went down there, and I told him to leave but he wouldn’t, he refused to. He just stood out there on the lawn. He said he had to talk, and he wouldn’t leave, all night long, and so we started to talk, and—”

Kevin took off walking, fast.

“Kevin!”

He ran. Around a corner he felt the muscles in his legs and he ran even harder. He sprinted as fast as he could for over a minute, right up Chapman and into the hills. On a sudden impulse, the instinct of an animal running for cover, he turned left and crashed up through the brush, onto Rattlesnake Hill.

He sat under the sycamores and black walnuts at the top.

Time passed.

He stared at the branches against the sky. He broke up leaves, stuck their stems in the earth. Occasionally he thought of crushing lines to say, in long imaginary arguments with Ramona. Mostly he was a blank.

Much later he tromped down through cool wet midnight air to his house, weary and heartsick. He was completely startled to find Ramona sitting on the ground outside the back door of the house, head on her knees.

She looked up at him. She had been crying.

“I don’t want it to be this way,” she said. “I love you, Kevin, don’t you know that?”

“How can I know that? If you loved me you’d stay with me.”

She pressed her hands to the sides of her head. “I… I hate not to, Kevin. But Alfredo and I have been together for so long. And now he’s really unhappy, he really wants us to be together. And I’ve put so much work into making that relationship go, I’ve tried so hard. I can’t just give all those years up, don’t you see?”

“It doesn’t make sense. You tried hard all those years, right, and it didn’t work, you were both unhappy. Why should it work now? Nothing’s different.”

She shivered. “Things are different—”

“All that’s different is you and I fell in love! And now Alfredo is jealous! He didn’t want you, but now that I do….”

She shook her head, hard. “It’s more than that, Kevin. He was coming over on my birthday to say all the same things he said afterwards, and he didn’t even know about us.”

“So he says now.”

“I believe him.”

“So what was I, then? What about you, what do you want?”

She took a deep breath. “I want to try again with Alfredo. I do. I love him, Kevin, I’ve always loved him. It’s part of my whole life. I want to make it work, so that all those years—that part of me—my whole life…” Her mouth twisted. “He’s part of what I am.”

“So I was just a, a, a kind of crowbar to get Alfredo’s thinking straight!”

Tears welled up in her eyes, spilled down her cheeks. “Not fair! I didn’t want this!”

Kevin felt a grim satisfaction, he wanted her unhappy, he wanted her as miserable as he was—

She stood. “I’m sorry. I can’t take this.” She started to walk away and he grasped her arm. She pulled free. “Please! I said I’m sorry, please don’t torture me!”

“Me torture you!”

But she was the one running away now, her white shirt a blur in the darkness.

His satisfaction dissipated. For a while he felt bad. Surely she hadn’t wanted things to come to this. She hadn’t planned it.

Still, he got angrier and angrier at her. And Alfredo, going down to San Diego to find her! Fucking hypocrite, he hadn’t cared for her when he had her, only when he didn’t, only when it looked like he might lose her. Jealousy, nothing more; jealousy. So she was a fool to go back to him, and he got even angrier at her. She should have sent Alfredo away when he showed up in San Diego, if she wanted to be fair! Instead a talk with him, many talks, a reconciliation. A happy return to some San Diego bed.

He couldn’t sleep that night. A dull ache filled him. Other than that he couldn’t feel anything.

Two days later the Lobos had a game. Kevin showed up late. He coasted down to the field and dropped his bike. Ramona biked in right behind him, and everyone else was already paired off and warming up, so without a word they put on their cleats and walked out to the outfield, to throw a ball back and forth. All without a word.

And so it comes to this: out on the far edge of a busy softball diamond, two people play catch, in silence. A man and a woman. The evening sun casts long shadows away from them. The man throws the ball harder and harder with every throw, so that it looks like they’re playing a game of Bullet. But the woman never says a word, or flinches, or steps back. She puts up her glove and catches each throw right in the pocket, on the thin leather over her palm. The ball smacks with a loud pop each time she catches it. Right on the palm. The man only throws the ball harder. The woman bites her lower lip. She throws the ball back almost as hard as it comes, with a smooth violent snap of the wrist. And the man only throws harder.

And so back and forth the white ball flies, straight and hard, like a little cannonball. Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack.