Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide


Belmar.

Leave your car at the parking lot by the public beach access.  Walk up Ocean Road.  Admire the starch of the early spring bulbs in the decaying planter boxes of the pale blue and pink beach cottages on your right.  Embroider on the daily habits, the histories of the cottage owners.  Are they residents at work?  Absentee landlords who come down only too rarely, rent their places out when they can't come?  Small-scale speculators turning older homes for a profit?  Here is a nondescript ranch style, painted an aggressively ordinary putty color.  Dark brown gutters.  Is there a thought in such a choice?  What is passing through the thinker's head?  Economy?  Some other T1-11-clad house?  A condo they pass every day on the way to work?  Or something totally unrelated?     A box score, a need for refined sugar, a pain behind the knee?  Here someone has carved their family name in a piece of driftwood and decorated the sign with statuettes of gulls.  Next to the gulls is inserted a pinwheel.  It is whirring so fast that you wonder if it will take off soon.  Cross a side street, Windsock.  On the other side a dignified if weathered Queen Anne with glassed-in porch.  You are closer to the core of the town.  On the north side of the Queen Anne houses give way to one-story commercial buildings, some brick, some plaster, all streaked with salt, algae.  Here is the fire department, signed with the name of the fire district, probably a vast, creaking universe of spruce and fir, silver snags, beaver marshes, estuaries, mountains of brown and red rock, headlands of boiling green, all served, as fire risk anyway, by twenty or thirty trucks and one or two red battalion chief Suburbans.  The fire department is an old auto service shop.  In places the yellow-green paint is peeling and you can see the old service shop sign peeking through.  

Follow Cove to its terminus and look down.  Where you expect to see more black/brown rock and rich foam there is a broad shelf, bordered on the north and west by a mustache of spiky silver and orange logs.   Someone has built a simple but solid stairway of treated lumber that takes you down by easy stages, past the layers of blue cobble and orange sand and cutting beach grass of the bluff at street level.

On the shelf is a shack, looking like a heap of driftwood that somehow detached itself from the mass.  Look closer, though, and you see a roof, a smokestack, a sash window.  Opposite the sash is a window of wine bottles on end with their bottoms facing out.  The diamonds between are glazed with mortar.  

Tonight

Tonight, while you pause at the end of Cove and look at the shack and the stairs and hesitate-- do I go down?-- You see a green glow in the wine bottles.  Someone is inside.  A beachcomber caught out late?  A photographer waiting for the perfect moment?  Kids playing spin-the-bottle behind bottles clearly already spun?  Lovers?  The smokestack, too, is breathing.  Lovers, you think.  They are lovers on a night like this.  There must be coffee in the downtown, you think, and you walk up Ocean Road.  

Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Belmar.

Drive on Ocean Road and you can see the half-eaten remnant of the coast.  Here a pile of bowling ball-sized rocks, once hard rectangles, now barely recognizable as rectilinear things, in their present form more like gigantic grey and blue beans or rock candy.  There a tuft of salal and sea pink arcing in a wave over a cove of yellow and orange sand, like a teddy boy's hairstyle.  And further on a sign warning pedestrians away from the edge, itself slowly toppling, more eloquent in its attitude than in its original purpose.  If you are a scofflaw you will be rewarded by the hidden treasure of an old concrete staircase, now part of the tidepool garden it accessed.  It descends to greater depths hidden by sand and jagged volcanic rock; its rusting handrail helps no one appreciate the beauty of the public beach.  Around it spews a meringue of foam.  A distance back of the sea pink and yellow-green grass, safe for now apparently, lies a small parking lot and battered brown message board, covered with warnings and regulations and a barely-readable tide table encased in plastic.  

One evening Don's crew cab occupies the space close to the board.  He and Carrie Taylor sit in the truck, watching the spume rise and fall like New Year's confetti.  Occasionally the shore pines and salal bushes strain toward the rocks and surf, as if they were trying for a better view.  Don, not given to such things generally, hears himself saying "My dad's down there somewhere."  Carrie turns to him.  "Down where?  In the ocean?"  He looks beyond the cove below the parking lot, into the lowering grey over the horizon.  Where was the horizon exactly?  Where did the sky end and the ocean begin?  He had never thought of it before, but on the coast, there was so much water in the sky all the time, you could say the ocean flowed up in a way.  And the clouds, weren't they just as much soil as water?  Dust particles and so on?  So the land was up there too.  Without taking his eyes off the distant wash, he says "What am I doing here Carrie?"  He hears her say "You think too much."  She takes his hand and gives it a squeeze.    

Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Belmar.

Drive south from Tie Camp for about a half hour and you pass the sign for Belmar, population 559.  Actually now it's considerably less, since an unusually destructive winter storm obliterated the marina that was the town's largest employer and one of the few reasons for visitors.  Two local residents, Tom Madigan and John Big Snake, have since rebuilt it, but the fishermen that moved up or down the coast when they realized the marina had gone had all changed their runs and found new and better holes.  It would take some time before they came back.

Belmar used to be a mill town, before World War II, but consolidation in the timber industry shuttered the mill and the loggers and operators left behind either stayed on if they could or simply followed the mill.  The town barely survived as a bedroom community until after the war, when a few developers saw an opportunity for business in the form of beach tourists looking for relaxation on the beach or a round of golf at the new course up at Tie Camp.  The town was reborn as a modest tourist destination, a place that offered the sort of plain, clean, reasonably-priced lodging that was the reason for being for most of the old mill towns on the coast.

If you turn left just past the sign on Chinook you climb a steep hill dominated by a few old Queen Annes that look across the highway, past the marina and into the dimpled green of ocean.  In one of the Queen Annes the rooms have been cleared of all signs of the previous occupant and covered with plastic and masking film.  Two painters can be seen either crouching at the baseboards with a sash brush or looking up at the ceiling as they roll.  When one rolls the ceiling he occasionally removes his safety glasses and wipes them with a cloth sprayed with cleaner.  The one rolling is usually Don Rosner, a painter recently laid off and put back to work by his neighbor, the new owner.   The man with the brush (usually) is Bill McCord, Don's friend and coworker, who came in on Don's call.  They had jumped at the chance.  The owner was in town doing research and staying at a hotel in Tie Camp.  Meantime they could stay in a nice old house on the beach, take frequent payments in cash, and even visit a marina that rented boats which they could use on the weekends.  The owner, Gil Binder, had practically insisted they take the weekends, because he did not want them "exhausted."  Whatever they left undone, in case they were called off on another project, Gil would finish himself.  Otherwise, Bill, Don had said on his first call, it's strictly T and M.  It was the kind of job that was so ideal you would talk about pipe dreams like starting your own company, leasing a van, putting decals on, the whole bit.  It was a way of making this kind of thing seem like more than just a short break in a monotony of shopping malls and clinics in the suburbs.

It was pretty sweet, he had to admit.  Don used to like to party, but that was a long time ago and lately he didn't mind so much a quiet drink and just some time to himself.  Maybe that was why he liked Bill; Bill was fairly reserved and didn't seem to mind if you just wanted to sit there and have a smoke and not say anything.  Don used to think that was strange, but the more he realized what you talked about, and the other guys on the crew, the more it all sounded the same and the more he came around to the way of guys like Bill.  Some nights they would even sit in the empty master bedroom with the curved glass with a couple beers and watch the lights of the distant fishing boats.  Don would imagine his dad out there, out for one last haul before coming in.  The sea had taken him.  Him and a couple other guys.  Sometimes even now he would forget and wonder if the winking orange dots out there were on his boat.  

One of these nights he dreamed about the ocean, in fact.  There was this island, he told Bill, that was connected to the mainland by a kind of bridge or causeway.  And the only way you could cross it was to ride this bus that ran out there.  It was like a city bus, one line, and it just ran to the island.  And it was like one of those rock islands out there, just rocks and a couple clumps of plants and a lot of birdshit.  And I rode the bus out there and sat on the island watching the gulls.  I would watch 'em fly in the wind out there.  The wind was high, always high, and lots of crossbreezes.  And it was like the gulls were playing in it.  They would dive bomb each other and do all these tricks and stunts and it was like, what other reason could they have but the hell of it?  Then they would come back down screeching and pick in the rocks for crabs or bugs or whatever.

Well, while I was sitting there watching the birds, I see this boat about eight miles out.  I can just barely see it, but it gets bigger and bigger and I recognize it.  It's my dad's old boat.  And my dad is steering.  He comes motoring up to the island and somehow ties off.  He climbs up to where I'm sitting and says "You ready?"  and I say "Sure" and we get on the boat and cast off.
"And that's it?"  says Bill.
"That's it," says Don.

Later they drive up to Tie Camp and Don decides this is the night.  He figured if he thought about Carrie three nights in a row he would call her.  But for some reason he has to tell her about the weird dream he had.  He would call her for that alone.  He would wait til he'd had a couple drinks though.

Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Station Hill.

In the northwest corner of the neighborhood, in the retail-heavy district lining the freeway, you could find dollar stores, electronics warehouses, asian groceries, burger shacks.  Only the most stubborn features of that landscape that existed a hundred years ago remained now:  the creek that fed the irrigation lines now flowed through corrugated steel and under truss bridges.  The hills that once challenged horse-drawn carriages now provided "vistas" or "bluffs" for the developers.  All the dutch style white houses and interurban tracks, all the storefronts with their plate glass and elaborate signs, all the taverns with massive oak bars and unsmiling bartenders had gone for good.  The hard shell of applied technology had covered all and the rare glimpses of human faces were seen through a lens:  car windows, box store doors, bank airlocks.   So the life that animated Station Hill had gone underground, or more aptly under its own frozen mantle, dark gray fingers of liquid water under the ice.

Don Rosner felt his phone vibrating in his jacket while he scanned the candy aisle.  He'd learned to exit early on the way back from the coast to buy his hard candy at the dollar store.  There was a certain mix that only they carried and he ate them on his way to work.  Work was still a couple days off today, though.  He liked to have a couple days at the duplex to clean out his grip, detail his truck and all the other little shit you had to attend to before the busy work week.

He looked at the screen.  It was Bill.  They had been working together and Don liked his style.  He would even ask for him specifically when the foreman wanted him someplace else.  He told him he missed him at the coast, they could have double dated.  "Oh yeah?" Bill said.  "Who's that?"  Don told him about Carrie, the garbage compactor drinks, the scene in the parking lot, the night in his room. "You gonna see her again?" Bill said.
"I might at that."  Don said that maybe it was better Bill wasn't there, she may have turned his head.  Bill formed a picture in his mind:  a woman slightly heavy through the hips, big breasts, round face, sharp chin.  Around the eyes a secret knowledge to be released as reproof, disappointment or the gentle chiding of pillow talk.  This was the picture of a girlfriend of his own, a woman he had not seen or spoken to in years.  Her eyes had been green.  She was the closest double to Linda, Don's ex-wife, based on the little Don had told him.

This detailed picture, based on such shaky evidence, was in fact fairly accurate.  Don, however, had not seen her eyes on first meeting, but the way she bent over her work, the economy of movement of a person either completely engrossed in their work or so practiced that their motions were seamless and without hesitation or abruptness.  In the crew cab, as he watched the alder buds in a pink blur past his windows, he could say without hesitation that he loved her motion, from the very first.

Bill gave Don his news:  the project was on hold, some legal tie-up.  The crew was laid off for now.  "Shit," Don said.  "And here I'd psyched myself up to go back to work.  Not to worry, I have a neighbor who gave me some side work one time.  I think he's a professor or something.  I'll cut you in if I can."  Bill thanked him and said he had to go, his wife was waiting in the car.  "You do what you gotta do," Don said.  "Drive safe."

So when Don turned at Laburnum he was already thinking of Mr. (Professor?) Binder.  He noticed the pale grey square of sidewalk, the new fire hydrant.  Then he saw the old Brougham in Binder's carport.  You had to hand it to him, keeping up a classic like that.  In his own way, he had style.  He decided to clean his truck, so he parked at the end of his driveway, so that he and the truck were visible across the green chain link fence from Binder's yard.

Binder emerged just as he was finishing up.  He knew his man.     "Hi Don," he called.  Don crossed to the fence.  "Hi Gil.  How're things?"
"Pretty good."  Gil threw his shoulder bag in the car walked over.  "It's lucky I saw you just now."  Side work!  Don thought.  Right on Professor!  "I just signed some papers on a property on the coast and it's going to need a lot of work.  I was hoping you might be available, you and maybe a helper."
"That is lucky.  I just hear our crew was laid off, and I happen to know a very good guy that needs some work.  Where's the property?"
"It's in a little town called Belmar.  You know it?"
"That is weird.  I was just there, I mean, just north of it in Tie Camp.  I painted a Best Buy up there.  So you're buying a house there?  It's a beautiful area."
"Yes, I was there doing research and I kind of fell in love with it.  I had a little money put away and I just decided the place must have been what I was saving it for."  

Don didn't really know Gil all that well, but he guessed something signal must have happened.  He just did not seem the type of guy to be impulsive about a thing like buying a house.  He didn't look different.  Same parka, same tweed jacket, same glasses.  Same funny walk.  Same Brougham.  But something had changed.  They worked out the details and Don finished washing his truck.  Then he went inside, turned the game on, opened a beer and called Bill.  "Good news," he said.

Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Tie Camp.  A coastal town that's never been much.  When the forest was all around, a tie camp for the loggers and mill operators and laborers that supplied railroad ties to the freight and logging companies in the region.  Early on, a muddy, gloomy, violent place.  The mill managed to keep the town going through the fifties.  Then a few beach cottages.  Now a stop between Rock River to the south and Pink Bluff to the north.  Still, incredibly, those same few cottages, keeping their registers, scraping and painting each summer.  More incredible still, a modest motor hotel, piggybacking on the guests turned away from the busier hotels in Pink Bluff.  Now the beneficiary of the expansion of Pink Bluff south in the form of an outlet mall.  Stop in at the motel sometime.  You can't miss the big cabinet sign, right off the coast highway:  The Lighthouse Motel.  The restaurant has good fish and chips, a decent selection of ales and beers.  Really the only night life in Tie Camp.  It boasts a wall of glass that looks out on a bluff over the ocean.  On Friday nights the lounge features canned music for dancing, sometimes singer-songwriters with amplified acoustic guitars.  In the off- season the restaurant and lounge are populated by locals and the workers from the outlet mall expansion.  One one of these Fridays a worker parked his crew cab in one of the many empty spots in front of the main entrance and walked through the sweet warmth of the lobby to the lounge stairs.  He found a table by the window, no problem tonight.

He watched the lights.  For minutes on end they would shine steadily, as if they were mounted on some distant headland, then would go dark suddenly.  Must be some dirty water out there, he thought.  He stirred his drink.  God damn his knee hurt.  Guess the drink didn't help.  But it fixed other things.  He looked around.  Most of the older types (easy, he was one of those 'older types') had gone home.  Some local guys were dancing on the little parquet floor with their girls.  One didn't even bother to take his measuring tape off his jeans.  The tune was "San Antonio Rose", one of his favorites.

He heard a glass break behind him and a woman's voice.  "Shit," she said.  He looked around.  She looked to be about thirty, thirty-five, overworked and disappointed about something.  She wore the burgundy apron and black clothes they all had to wear there.  "I'm so sorry," she said.  He wasn't sure whether she was apologizing for the language or the glass.  He figured it was the language.  "Shit, it's all right," he said.  At least he made her laugh.  "Hard night?" he asked her.  "Yeah," she said.  "Hard day too."  He thought about his long drive back to town, his stuffy hotel room, the blinking message light.  "Hey, do you ever get a break?  I mean, why don't you join me?"  He saw a jagged piece of glass under a chair.  "Don't move," he said.  He reached for the glass and put it on her tray.  "Thanks," she said.  She looked down at the glasses and schooners on her tray.  "Uh, I don't--  Sure."  He cocked his head.  "Wow," he said.  "That was not what I expected.  Usually it's no."  She smiled.  It came and went, like a short left-turn signal.  "Maybe you're asking the wrong people."  He stirred his drink.  "Yeah, you're probably right," he said.  "Anyway I'm well pleased I don't have to drink by myself.  I always thought they tasted better with someone."  She smiled again, this time longer.  "Me too," she said.  "I'm off in a few minutes."  He smiled back.  "I'll be here."  He sat back in the horseshoe and hummed in time to the music, tapping his fingers on the formica.

When she sat down her face had softened.  Maybe she's closer to thirty, Don thought, a bit nervous for the first time.  "You don't have to close?  I mean, I'm happy you're joining me, you don't know how-- but I figured you'd be here for the duration."  She cocked her head now and sipped through the tiny black straws in her drink.  They were drinking Long Island Iced Teas.  "Well," she said, sliding her glass back and forth.  "I was supposed to meet my boyfriend for a night out, but he had other plans."  Don put his hands on the table.  "Oh, shit," he said.  "I'm real sorry.  That really sucks."  She smiled with half her mouth and took another sip.  "Oh, it's ok," she said.  "I think I knew he probably wouldn't show up.  There was a part of me that thought he just might, but I think--" she slid her glass back and forth again.  "I think I really always knew it wouldn't last."  Don sighed and looked at his hands.  "I know how that goes.  Hell, I could be that guy."  His eyes widened a little and he stared at his drink.  "I AM that guy."  He shook his head, pulled out his straws and took a long drink.  The girl watched him and smiled.  "No, if you were that guy you wouldn't say that."  Don looked at her.  "I was that guy, but I think I just got tired of how it made me feel.  I'm Don by the way, Don Rosner."  The woman smiled and shook his hand.  "Carrie Taylor," she said.  "It's real nice to meet you," Don said.  "You too," she said.  "So what brings you to Tie Camp?"  Don sipped his drink.  "I'm a commercial painter," he said.  "We just finished a big project at the Tie Camp Outlet Mall, the Best Buy out there.  I took my vacation time now so I could see some of the coast.  My dad was a fisherman and I just wanted to see the ocean again.  I was down in Vegas before this gig."  Carrie stirred her drink.  "You staying here?" she said.  "Yeah," Don said.  "The company pays us a per diem to stay here and buy a few groceries.  It ain't much, but it's enough.  I'm so tired most days all I want to do is sleep anyway."  Carrie kept her eyes down.  "You have family out of town?"  Don stirred.  "Nah-- well, I have a little guy who spends most of his time with his mom.  We've been divorced a few years.  I've been on my own.  I see him as much as I can."  Carrie sat back and looked out at the ocean through the windows.  "That must be hard," she said.  Don looked out with her.  "It can be.  It ain't so bad.  We don't really get along, but my ex is basically a good person and she never makes any trouble when I want to see Sam.  It turned out as good as it could have.  God knows I was no picnic to live with either.  Fact, leaving me was probably the smartest thing she ever did."  He blew his breath out and drained his drink.  He let his glass down hard.  "How the hell did I do that?  We ain't even been talkin' for five minutes and I'm already talkin' about my divorce.  Come on Don!"  Carrie laughed.  "It's ok.  At least you're honest."  Don looked down.  "Nah, I'm just dumb."  Then he laughed.

It turned out all right.  They even danced a bit.  Then they had more drinks.  He thought they got into some kind of conversation about Jackson Browne, he couldn't remember.  She reminded him of Linda a little bit, and he wasn't sure if this was good or not.  If something had changed since his divorce it could be good.  That would mean that if he met another Linda that things could turn out ok this time.  That was if he wanted things to turn out at all.  He sometimes thought that Sam and his work was enough.  But there were other times-- like tonight-- when it was a real drag.  He would finish a big job somewhere and go back to the stuffy hotel room, the putty-colored phone, the ugly bedspreads, the ice bucket, the TV set, not always tired enough-- or sometimes too tired-- to go to sleep right away.  Then, he had to own, it was pretty lonely.  He turned from the window and looked down the aisle at the partition outside the bathrooms.  He had no idea of going back to the room with Carrie.  He didn't think that's what she was looking for, even if she gave the impression now that it was a possibility.  They'd had a lot of drinks.  And even if she was looking for something like that, and it pained him to admit it, he wasn't sure he would want to.  Didn't that same type of guy just let her down tonight?  And he wasn't doing so bad; he just wanted someone to have a few drinks with.  What was the use of hurting her feelings even more than they were already hurt?  He sighed and stabbed at the cubes at the bottom of his glass.  "You're losin' that killer instinct, Don," he said to the table.  "What was that?" Carrie said as she sat down.  Don looked up.  "Oh, I say I'm losing my killer instinct.  I haven't tried any of my lines on you yet."
"Come on Don," she said, sounding half-tired and half-indulgent.  "You don't use lines.  Rick used lines."  She put a lift on the word 'Rick', like a skier flying off a jump.  "You want another drink?" Don said.  She blew her breath out and looked at her empty glass.  "How many is that?"  Don looked at his, as if that would tell him how many had gone down before.  "I lost count."
"Then yes," she said, like a little girl peeling back her fortune in a cootie catcher.  "Your funeral," Don said as he twisted to signal the waitress.

He was relieved and disappointed when he saw Carrie head for her car.  He had been right not to press the issue.  She would go home and he would go-- well, not exactly home.  He would go wherever he went.  To bed.  They were in the chilly breezeway outside the front doors.     Then he was ashamed and glad when he saw her walk to the passenger side and try the door without even reaching for her keys.  How could he let her even head for her car?  They must've had at least five drinks apiece, all high-octane garbage compactor types.   Then the gladness was gone, replaced by a species of urgency and anxiety that he hadn't felt in a long time.  He even tried to fend it off at first, like a loud alarm early on a hangover morning.  God damn it, why now? he thought.  But then, was there ever a good time for this kind of thing?  What kind of thing, Don?  They were both dangerously drunk.  Nothing was going to happen.  One thing, she was not even getting into that car.  "What are you doing, Carrie?" he called.
"Going home," she said.  He didn't realize how drunk she really was.  "Belmar."
"Belmar?" he repeated loudly.  "You ain't driving down the block like that."  He walked over, double time.  "Come on, Carrie
," he said, softer.    "Give me those keys.  You can sleep in my bed, I've got a couch."
"You come on, Don," she said.  He couldn't decide if she was angry or amused.  "You sound like Rick."  Then she leaned on the fender, looking down.  At first he thought she had dropped the keys and he moved for them.  They were in her other hand.  She was breathing hard.  "Oh honey," he said.  "I'm sorry.  I should have stopped you.  Come on, let's just walk for a bit.  Okay?"  She put her hand on her forehead.  "Oh Don, I feel like shit," she said.  "I know," he said.  "Come on, let's walk."  She gave him her keys.

When she saw him pull out his room key she said "I knew it.  You're just trying to get me in the sack."  This time it was his turn to give her the half-smile.  "Believe me Carrie, even if I thought you wanted to, I wouldn't know where to start, I'm so tanked."  He jammed his car key in the knob.  "See?" he said, holding it up.  "My fuckin' car key."  They both laughed.  "Oh, jesus," he sighed as they walked in.  He felt for the switch.  "Why do you think I don't want to?" she said, before he found it.  He let the question settle into the warmth and general mustiness of a cheap coastal hotel in the off-season.  He even looked at the phone, almost hoping the message light was blinking; the signal that meant another job, another round of cheap hotels and watery beer in front of a flickering television.  He turned to her shape in the door.  "Well I ain't exactly what you'd call a catch.  And I guess I didn't want to get into anything when I could see you'd been let down once already."  She crossed to the blinds, opened them.  He turned on the lights.  She looked out at the black square.  "I know we're both drunk off our asses," she said.  "I just liked to think you wouldn't let me down if things were a little different."  He went to her.  "Hey, Carrie," he said.  "I had a great time.  I really like being with you.  Maybe my getting so drunk is my way of trying to do right by you, if you know what I mean.  I know that sounds fucked up."  He sighed and looked out, tried to find the lights on the horizon he had been watching earlier.  It seemed like a hundred hears ago.  Nothing out there but black.  His knee was hurting again.  Carrie sniffed.  Oh shit, he thought.  Oh shit, she's crying.  "Hey, come on," he said.  He took her to the bed.  "Come on.  It's gonna be ok."  She let him sit her down on the foot and he sat beside her.  He put his hand on her back.  He was terrified.  "Look, you get into bed, I'm going out for a smoke.  Ok?  See, there's the couch.  I'll sleep on the couch.  You get into bed.  You can worry about the rest in the morning.  It'll be a lot better in the morning, I promise."  She nodded, still sniffing.  She squeezed his hand.

He was relieved to find her in the bed with the covers pulled up.  He had smoked two cigarettes, hoping that gave her enough time.  He found some extra blankets in the closet and got into the couch.  It was a little too short.  Around two in the morning he got up and had another smoke.  His neck hurt like hell.

Something made him open his eyes.  Some of the darkness at the end of the couch had gone.  It felt like four, four-thirty.  "Don," she said.  "Come on, get off that couch.  You must be miserable."  He twisted to see her.  He must have made a sound.  "See?  Come up here.  I won't make you marry me, I promise."  He stared at the bed.  "Don.  You're keeping me awake.  I just want to sleep.  I know you do too."  He sighed, got up.  "Yeah, ok," he said.  He climbed in next to her.  She took his hand, drew his arm around her.  He was out like a light.

Central Valley and the Coast:  A Guide

Station Hill.  A neighborhood built around a rural interurban station.  Greatly expanded after World War II by developers trading on the down payments of returning G.I.s.  Ranch styles, carports.  Small, carefully tended lawns.  Abbreviated split-rail fences.  Miniature wishing wells.

Laburnum.  Follow it to Maynard.  You see more passing cars, headed for Line Street and the freeway.  But at Laburnum and Maynard is a garden spot:  a large triangular yard with a modest water feature and dogwood tree.  Across the street a house that could be 16591's twin, with a smaller yard and a driveway instead of a carport.  Maynard is at the first light after you come down the hill from the freeway exit, so these houses seem to anchor that quiet backwater just south of all the noise.  Walk by 16591 slowly and study it.  The dormer is decorated modestly by vertical siding ending in a scallop pattern.  The dormer is a rich red-brown, the lap siding pure white.  Under the front windows is a parti-colored brick veneer.  A winding walk leads from the driveway/sidewalk corner to the front stoop.  The winters are wet and long here, so the entrance is sheltered under a deep eave.

 The dark corner is lit by a light fixture that seems to be a ship's light cut in half and mounted on the wall.  This, in fact, is precisely what it is.  The owner found the lamp in a stuffy shop on the coast and paid the price marked in grease pencil on a piece of masking tape.  He carefully peeled off the tape and cleaned off the gum with a solvent, then polished the brasswork and glass and took the lantern to a friend who was a glassworker.  He cut the brassworks in half and the glass while the owner bought a fixture that would fit under the glass and replaced the old jelly jar light with it.     Then he climbed in his butterscotch brown Brougham with the white vinyl top and drove to the glass shop.  His friend had carefully wrapped the half-lamp in paper and boxed it.  They talked for a while over some strong coffee, about the weather, the superbowl, the arrest of the glassblower's brother for a lid found under the seat of his squareback.

The glassblower, a sandy-haired, laid-back man named Stuart Smith, had considerately soldered some loops under the upper part of the brassworks, so the owner, whose name was Gil Binder, could mark their location on the wall above the fixture and drive some screws there.  He hung the lamp and was pleased with how straight and permanent it looked, as if it had always been there.  He was gratified completely when night fell and he saw the rich green glow it made by the front door.  Later he would sit on his couch in the front room, under a brass floor lamp, and read through a thousand-page typewritten report on ocean currents.  The couch was covered with a coarse-knit fabric decorated by exploded yellow and brown plaid squares.  The arms terminated in dark brown turned-wood posts that resembled the details on a heavy RCA console television that sat opposite.

Most nights, if you were walking down Laburnum, you could see him sitting there, either writing or reading.  He was a researcher and spent a great deal of time reading journals and reports and writing grants.  You would see his butterscotch Brougham first, parked in the carport.  The walls there were lined with well- concealed plywood cabinets that contained not a lot:  some diatomaceous earth, some ten-year-old potting soil, a bag of lime.  In another cabinet some well-worn hand tools and a small orange chainsaw.  If you knew him and knocked on the front door you may have heard Zoot Sims from behind the red and gold panes of glass set in the wall there.  And if you walked in and stood on the flagstone square on the other side you would have seen the TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck slowly turning in its place on the bookshelf by the television set.  Underneath was a turntable that played mostly instrumental jazz and what was once called, without irony or derision, "easy listening".  He was especially proud of his large collection of Jimmy Smith albums.  

That wall, that backed the television and stereo and separated the living room from the kitchen and back office, was covered with books and journals, mostly written on the subject of ocean currents, water composition and marine life.  Gil Binder was an oceanographer and taught at a community college about fifteen minutes away from his house.  The front regions, comprising the living room, its baked-orange enameled conical wood stove, nautical prints and blonde wood shelves, the partition, with its bullseye gold plastic panels looking on the kitchen and its orange countertops and dark wood cabinets, the vinyl-covered back entry that was usually crammed with outerwear and duffels, all of these were suffused with a faint smell of dust and burnt sugar.  For Gil Binder liked to make a sort of peanut brittle and keep it in a heavy jar on his coffee table.  Late at night, and sometimes into the morning, he would mark up reports and papers with a Flair felt tip and reach with his other hand for the heavy glass lid and jagged yellow-brown slabs inside.  His sister Susan would wonder, and comment to her friends, about his consistent lack of cavities, all the years he ate brittles and hard candies, from high school, through college, graduate school and his teaching career.  His shape, too, remained tall and thin, no matter how much of it he ate.  In fact he ate a great deal.  He was fond of spicy curries.  Susan used to say that he could have made a living as a competition eater.  Sometimes he would think about this when he watched a starfish envelop some soft-bodied animal over the course of a half hour.  

His sister was the only woman, besides his mother, who had died some time ago, who took any permanent interest in his personal habits.  He had dated in a small way in college, and even during his graduate work, but the relationships always ended amicably, if sadly, and he would catch himself settling into his brown and yellow couch with something like relief.  This lack of yearning on his part bothered him in some unguarded moments, but they were few and far between, and his work occupied his mind most of the time.

If you had walked down Laburnum one evening after an eternity of drives from the college in the Brougham, late-night papers graded, peanut brittle crunched, Flair felt-tips exhausted, you would find him, smaller, whiter, but still in his couch, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, a thousand-page report on one knee, the pages read curled under the spine in a wave of white.  Other than his appearance, nothing had changed.  The same Brougham sat in the same carport, the same bag of lime, now an antique, sat in the same plywood cabinet.

His career had changed a great deal.  An ambitious grant he had been developing for years finally had borne fruit, thanks to a friend who had been promoted to director of an important foundation.  His research had led him to the hamlet of Belmar, a coastal town almost dead but for a restaurant of some local note.  In fact, his research was connected to the restaurant:  their signature dish was a kind of rockfish that should have been plentiful up and down the coast but whose numbers had taken a nosedive except in the waters near the town.  He had gone just to meet the owner and tour the area, but now it was time to collect all the data he could find on the place and develop a hypothesis.

He remembered his conversation with Tom Madigan, one of the owners.  He seemed a valuable resource, a longtime resident who could give him the sort of first-hand data that you could only get in interviews.

He watched the light change.  The trees in the parkway had turned orange and gold and there was a hard grey-brown crust on the ground.  He passed the severe Lutheran church and waited for a woman to jog across the street.  She seemed barely aware of him.  What could she be thinking about?  Gil was always working on some problem or idea, turning it and seeing it from every possible angle.  But her expression was vacant.  Could you really have nothing in your head, a vacuum?  He was ashamed of the idea, because it was more than a little absurd, but he always thought that everything would simply shut down if you developed such a vacuum:  heart, spinal column, everything.  It seemed gruesome to him.

A yorkie terrier interrupted his train of thought by dashing in front of his car.  He saw its furry body and a leather lead trailing before he swerved and jerked forward.  At first he thought the transmission had failed and had torn itself out of the car.  Then he saw a geyser in front of the hood and realized he had struck the fire hydrant on the corner in front of his house.  His neighbor, Susan Hata, came running towards his car.  The dog was hers and she carried it like a bag of groceries.  It twisted in her arms, barking loudly.  She peered into the car and shouted at Gil, and at first he thought she was angry.  But she was shouting to be heard over the dog.  She wanted to know if he was ok.  He nodded, still confused.  He felt his neck and knees.  He felt a little tenderness on his knee but knew it was just a bruise.

Susan called the police and the city, then convinced Gil to come in her house and drink some tea.  She apologized over and over.  At one point Gil thought she might start crying.  He was mortified.  Gradually, though, the formality wore off.  She even waited with him while the city trucks and tow driver came.  After they had gone, he heard himself say "Sure" when she asked if he would like to come with her to walk the dog, whose name was "Princess".  He stood in her kitchen while she changed into a pair of heavy walking shoes.  This was what she was doing when Princess had run out.  He admired some prints hung in a vertical series by the window.  They looked like woodcuts, all of trees, all finely detailed and in different colors of ink.  She had made them; she used linoleum.  She taught printmaking at a local art school.  She used to camp quite a lot with her husband.  They liked to drive out to the mountains and scrublands around the town of Power and Light.  Gil had heard of it, usually as the definition of a place that was in the middle of nowhere.  But then he got sick, she said.  He passed away a couple years ago.   Stomach cancer.  Gil studied one of the prints, a coastal pine with its branches swept back.  "I'm sorry to hear that," he said.  She tied her shoe and rose to look out the window.  Outside was a small rock garden, landscaped with white quartz, some mossy stones and a pagoda lantern.  She rubbed her hands on her knees slowly, as if she were trying to scrub something off.  "I have my work now," she said.

That night, while he sat on his couch with his papers, he thought of her face staring out the window.  He pulled aside one slat of his blinds.  The beads that joined them made a dry, rattling sound against the glass.  He looked at her house, the empty yard, the darkened carport.  Next to the door was a litter of advertising supplements in tight white plastic bags.  He released the slat and it swung over the scene.  He got up and put on a Zoot Sims album, one with a sweet, complex version of the theme from "Rosemary's Baby".  He poured himself a glass of rye and lay on the couch and closed his eyes to listen to the music.

Later, the phone rang, but he was asleep.