Harmony

The year I turned thirty, the woman I planned to marry abandoned me. The year prior, Lily and her boyfriend Alex dropped acid in a field on the foothills of the Santa Lucia mountains. Alex was killed when he wandered, hallucinating, onto the highway and was struck by an eighteen-wheeler.

We met at an artist’s collective in the town of Harmony.

How did I wind up in Harmony? I fled Los Angeles in the dead of night. By then everything was boxed in storage or sold and hauled away by strangers. Body cold, mind numb. I sat in the kitchen darkness, everything gone, not even a glass left for water or a plate for the pizza slice in the fridge. Audrey’s note on the floor where the breakfast table was just a day ago, the breakfast table where she poured me lattes with intricate leaves in the foam and where I wrote her love poems. That note, leering at me in the dark.

I’ll always love you.

Sometimes love isn’t enough.

The most painful thing would be to stay.

I want you to be happy.

Happy without you. So you can feel better.

1am blinking on the microwave. In my pocket: a piece of licorice and car keys to take me anywhere. I crashed into the night. I went anywhere.

And her? Harmony was where she grew up. After Alex died, she spent a year in a psychiatric facility fighting the urge to die. When the worst subsided (Sometimes. Enough at least. She thinks.), she limped home, battered, to be surrounded by family. Her mom lived nearby and her brother managed a bar on the water where divorced women picked up twenty-something year-olds, a feeding spot for bright-eye, thick-bicep graduates from the ag school down the road. She stayed with her mother for a while. But that became suffocating so she got a place of her own, a one-bedroom ten streets inland. Took a job as a barista in the mornings and did catering gigs weekends. Humbling for a girl educated like her.

I used to make 150k,” she says, her fingers playing with mine. “Now I ask people their first names so that I can write them on paper cups.”

“Is the catering better?”

“Worse; they boss you around. I had to drive a lot. It doesn’t matter though.”

“Why not?” I crawl my fingertips from her pelvic bone to her belly button.

“I got fired. I was having horrible days so my therapist upped the dosage of my medication. I fell asleep at the wheel while parked with the engine running. Trays of food freezing in the back seat at the venue we were catering.

“Your boss didn’t understand?”

Small voice. “He was nice. Said he’d give me another chance if my therapist could vouch for me.”

“She wouldn’t?” Fingertips chilly.

“I didn’t want my therapist to know I was taking triple what she’d doubled. And Xanax too.”

I loved her honesty. All of that a fast forward though, none of it happened yet, simply me recalling now.

I woke at noon. Heavy nothing. I brushed my teeth and walked down the hill. I found myself on Harmony’s main street, though that’s not the name and I don’t remember what it was.

It was teeming with life. On the corner a café, no seating, the whole thing a kitchen with silver wares, fronted by a cash register and an old lady manning it. An army of California girls heeding her barking orders. There was a rose bush so I stopped and smelled, one bleached white, torched from the blistering rays of the sun.

Down the block: a brown butter cookie company with samples in paper thimbles and a mother with her little girl telling her one now and one after dinner. IF you’re good. No bullets in the chamber of that threat.

Next to it an antique store with benches out front. I eased myself down. No octogenarian come with a broomstick to shoo me away for using the merchandise. I ate a toffee short bread and sipped my latte, too hot for the day thickening around me.

It’s heaven, this place, but in my mind I can see droves of angsty teenagers fleeing for the stars of L.A. or emerald cities further away like Chicago or New York. Nobody knows what they have until it’s gone. Los Angeles is a sprawling cement trap. It’s a dumpster fire burning shit in a heat dome. But, then again, how could any person possibly know what they have until they experience something new? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I don’t know about that. But I do know that bodies at rest stay at rest. Maybe that’s why young people desert small towns for the city; they fear they’ll ossify over time, that their muscles will atrophy and eventually cease. One day they’ll be sentient, immobile statues who picked their nose and sullied their diapers, fell in love and had kids all on the same scrap of earth. Over and over their kids too until the end of time.

That’s why I left.

No it’s not. I left because I had an ego. I left because I thought I had talent. That’s the problem with being young. You have no clue how fucking stupid you are.

You think winners have the most talent. You don’t understand that it’s not talent that wins, but talent paired with sprawling networks of powerful connections. And it’s not doggedness that get you there, but shamelessness in the means and pathetic self-promotion that would grind even the most devout into cynicism. You wouldn’t favor a merit-based world anyway. Because talent, you might have a wellspring, but there are countless others out there with whole tankers of the stuff, galaxies of skill that would snuff your paltry morning star.

You don’t believe the woman you love, the one who looked at you with lustrous eyes upon learning you were a writer, who urged you on forever in that dream, whose dreams you supported feverishly too, would run out of patience for it. That she’d leave you for the principal of a venture capital firm, some Vuori-pant, Oakley-shade motherfucker who does nothing but ejaculate money all over Silicon Valley.

It's true: money always wins.

I started toward the beach. The brightness was blinding and the heat rising. Halfway there I was snared by a sign overhead. The sign was copper chicken wire, hung from a brass hook, twisted into the shape of a skull with anchors for eyes, its sockets dripping candles.

Artwork. Original prints.

I ducked inside, coolness from the swelter.

Coolness everywhere. Glassblown turtles and dolphins. Records of local bands printed with layered illustrations of cosmic carnage, the stars falling, silver, gunmetal, comets speeding along, spewy fireballs in their wake, supernovas bursting and flinging everywhere their element dust, universe guts that become our blood and bones and hearts and minds. Landscape photographs printed on metal, overlaid with translucent black-and-white portraits, haunting, the work before me lilac waves crashing over anthracite shore rock, the portraits a trio of Mexican women in straw hats, paused from their work in the field, strawberries in their mouths, deep canyons carved in their wooden faces, sunlicked and old and beautiful. I heard in the café that the town’s taquerias have gone to shit. ICE came in unmarked vehicles and drove all the line cooks (the fathers, the mothers, the friends and neighbors) away. Tires screeched on scorched pavement and then they were all gone.

I rifled through a bin of movie posters, art house films from the seventies I’d never heard of. Dapper men in tuxedos in the background and women in plunging dresses holding martinis in the fore. Burnouts with lit joints, curly locks crazed and chaotic, their t-shirts full of holes as if sprayed by bullets and their legs dangling from the lip of a gigantic halfpipe. A mint VW bus below silhouetted palm trees, a throng of hippies gathered around an urban bonfire. Films made in California twenty, thirty years before I was born, and me from New York City, so why would I be familiar?

Everything California does reaches out into the world. Enchanting and ludicrous, it exports a curious magic that captures the imagination of those who have never seen it. Go west young man. Get your slice of the wild.

A poster for David Lynch’s Eraserhead in my hands, on it a bewildered man with hair resembling an atomic detonation. Grainy, eigengrau noise all around him.

And then, her voice.

“Love your print.”

It’s like honey dissolving in tea.

She’s devastatingly beautiful. Blonde hair, thick as an Icelandic pony. Tourmaline eyes. Curves everywhere, she’s wearing a floral white dress. The mood she emits is bright blue, happy sad.

It must be ten seconds before I get anything out because she has time to giggle and raise an eyebrow and she nearly turns away.

“You like David Lynch too?” I blurt finally. Stupid. Too? You don’t know shit about David Lynch.

“Oh, yeah”, she says, shifting the strap of her shoulder bag. “Eraserhead’s a great flick. Twin Peaks, too.” She smiles and the serotonin floods, some lever unavailable to me but possessed by her, like she’d seen it fall from my back pocket strolling down the sidewalk and was simply returning it to its rightful owner. “I wasn’t talking about the poster though. I like your outfit.”

My outfit? Jeans, white tee and a brown corduroy hat? The uniform of every disheveled shithead?

I shake my head. “They must not sell threads here. That or the men only get up in swim trunks. You like what I rolled out of bed in?” I return the poster to the bin and lean backwards. My thumbs I thread through the loops of my belt.

Radiant smile. Shy and alluring and completely her own. I’d never seen a smile like it; I’ve not seen one like hers since.

“Could be,” she says. “Christ, the guys that live here think a shirt is optional anywhere they go. I mean, if you call parking their shitty bus in a dirt lot and getting high on the roof living.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Oh, just about. The last guy that asked me out thought it was cool that I could see his sunburn from waist to neck. ‘We’re just going to the beach anyway,’ he told me.”

“Turned him down cause he’s a beach bum?” I unhook my thumbs and cross my arms. Head tilt. You’re cute.

“My mom taught me that the guys worth dating are the ones that’ll take you out. They’re the ones that will hold the door for you.”

“Spend a little money too?” I tease.

She shrugs and pouts. “Maybe. I don’t know. I do know one thing though.”

“What’s that?”

“No doors at the beach.”

A woman in a pink blouse sifts through children’s tees on the wall. Her eyes alternate the shirts and her two boys on the street. They’re flicking each other’s ears and roughhousing and horseplaying.

“Sounds like your mom was a classy lady.”

She nearly chokes. “My mom was a hippie. The whole thing-flower petals in her hair, bell-bottoms, gypsy jewelry, indigenous canvas vests. Up and down California. Protested Vietnam at Berkely and in Chicago. Sunflowers in gun barrels and around her anarchists in black leather lobbing Molotovs at the police lines. Free love, fucking in fields illuminated by the flames of burning cars.”

I shift the weight in my legs and smirk. I like her. She spills freely.

“But you don’t look like a hippie.”

“Lily,” she replies.

“What?”

“My name is Lily. Don’t you think you should know a girl’s name before you tell her what she does or doesn’t look like?”

A playful barb. Don’t assume. But come inside.

“Maybe I was nervous.” I pair that with a confident grin. “Telling me your name is a clever way to ask for mine.”

She flutters her lashes. “What? I don’t look like a clever girl to you?”

“Everett. Clever, yes, a hippie, no.”

Her lips are shining. So are her eyes. “Well, I’m not my mother, am I Everett?”

Shiver.

“I like your outfit Lily.” So much easier to compliment a woman when she’s given you one first. That’s all a man needs: the slightest breeze of interest and a moment of courage in which she expresses it. I’m looking at you, won’t you look at me too? Give me that and I’m yours to unravel. I’ll be bold unraveling you too. Put your hands up. Let’s shoot each other through the heart.

She moves closer. Only an inch, but perceptible. “Much better.” A moment of quiet. Heavy. “It’s your shoes that I like.” She nods towards my feet. “And your tattoos. I dig.”

Bright mango sneakers, track-inspired. Waffled soles and green swooshes.

“Nike fan?” I ask. “It’s embarrassing how many pairs I own.”

“A soft spot in my heart I guess. My dad sold Nikes.”

“Your dad wasn’t a hippie too? How did a corp man snag your mother?”

Belly laughs, watery eyes. Finally it tapers. “Sorry, it’s just my dad being called corporate. Hippies have bills to pay too, especially ones with kids. He’d drive his bus to the port in L.A. and pick the shoes up straight from the shipping container. Then he’d get high and sell them at track meets. He let my sister and me sell them too because the meets went all day and the high would fade and he’d nap. ‘Remember girls, tell em about the waffled sole and all the support. Tell em they’ll run like the wind. Tell em one more thing,’ he said to us.”

She wants me to guess. I can’t.

“What?”

The coyest smile. “Just do it.”

I look down. Her thumbs are in my belt.

Hours later. A walk on the beach, the ocean spraying. Drinks at a bar that wasn’t her brother’s. Flashing lights and dancing. Making out in a booth and more vigorously on the bathroom wall. Then stumbling into the street and kissing there too, long, deep, and staggering home before bursting through the door. Stripping clothes, tearing each other apart.

Unraveling after.

I couldn’t understand what he was yelling, I was high too. He jumped the barrier and ran onto the highway.

She knew I had a ring. That I would propose. She left the weekend we were gonna fly down to Tulum.

Paramedics couldn’t revive him. His torso was crushed. Eyes stuck open forever, his beautiful blue eyes.

Six years together. We discussed kid names. We were both grim; we had troubled pasts. Joked that a son or daughter would be a more natural anti-depressant.

Involuntarily committed. Depressive thoughts, a threat to myself. Nightmares and dreadful terror in the day that slaughters me.

I laid with her in the hospital bed for two days a month after our first date. She had to be hit with Narcan in the bathroom of a Hollywood nightclub. Her friends left her there. I stayed.

I’m ruined.

I’m numb.

I’m sorry she chose not to be with you.

I’m sorry you lost him.

Twirling fingers after spilling stories, two strangers intertwined. Trading single words in the sheets.

Sad.

Angry.

Confused.

Devastated.

Shellshocked.

Gutted.

Eviscerated.

Obliterated.

Tortured.

Dead.

It’s her fingers and those words that I recall now, twelve years later, strumming the railing on the balcony of this inn, back in Harmony, getting lost in universes that could have but did not happen. Does that make them less real? So harrowing, the memories we wish we could restore.

I stayed with Lily the whole summer. I cooked her breakfast in the morning; she liked eggs sunny side up with wheat toast and a slice of avocado. We ate pizza slices at night, showering them in oregano and parmigiana. I got a server job at a burger joint so I could give her a few bucks for the rent I was crashing. We biked in the hills. Walked on the beach. She plucked a six-string on the wicker chair in her living room while I wrote furiously on an old Olivetta Lettera I came across in the window of the antique store. Those three months I hammered away mercilessly, possessed. She was thrilling, Lily, such a muse-y girl. I’d give her sheets of words and she’d mark them with suggestions, with cuts, with notes that said I love this. Your mind is an animal. At summer’s end the first draft was done. We read and watched films and made love. Joy sprung from the ashes.

Sadness.

Summer closed. She didn’t ask me to stay. I was hurt. I didn’t want to ask her to ask. Pride corrupted by ego. I retreated to New York. The novel I wrote with Lily would become my first published work. It was a successful debut, but it would be my second novel that propelled me to commercial success. So curious the gods of culture. The book I wrote in Harmony is unquestionably the strongest of my career. But maybe that’s just because I loved her.

I met my wife in Manhattan, a nurse practitioner named Jenna. We have two children, a boy, Forrest, and a girl, Shae. Life’s wonderful. I think of Audrey never. Lily, at least once a day. Nobody saves us; we save ourselves. But Lily, she saved me. She’s since married too. Two daughters of her own, little blondies that she raises on the beach and whom I sometimes imagine with my nose and her eyes and my laugh and her smile.

I returned because my writing is blocked. Publisher wants chapters soon and I’ve not decided what the book is about. Love, maybe. The Lettera is waiting inside, a French architectural lamp clamped to the desk edge, burning scrutiny into the blank pages.

I peer at the midnight ocean. Life is short and endless and painful and strange.