On the beach there was a group of women—thin and fidgety as sandpipers—who were gathered watching surfers take their last rides of the day. The surfers looked slight as they waited for waves, like black dogs paddling toward the dimming horizon. Alice had introduced herself to the women, and after asking if they knew her brother, August, she became cause for a small celebration.
There were two Karens: Skinny Karen and Surfer Karen (who was admirably off fighting for waves). There was Autumn, a quick talker, a former speed freak from Orange County, and Christa, the beauty, quiet in nothing but a crocheted bikini even though it was really quite chilly, now that the sun was gone.
“You two are really close?” asked Autumn, as if needing Alice to verify her credentials.
“He’s my only family” Alice replied, not answering her question.
“That’s cool,” Autumn nodded, working on a cuticle with her little white teeth.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s cool’?” Skinny Karen said. “Are your parents … dead?” she asked with trepidation, squinting in Alice’s direction.
“I didn’t mean—” sputtered Autumn.
“That’s okay,” Alice said, smiling, a little punchy from so much walking, from the off-kilter conversation with Erika. “I know what you meant.” They were so young, she realized; they were probably some ten years younger than she was.
A slight shift occurred in the air, and as Karen tossed her hair over one shoulder, Autumn crossed her legs into an insanely flexible position, and Christa did nothing but smile, Alice looked up to see Gus making his way in, stepping over the rocks. She viewed the girls with partial sympathy and partial disdain for their apparent collective objective.
“Oh,” Gus said, “hi, Alice. Hey, ladies,” he said to the others, flashing them a lazy smile. Christa offered a neatly folded towel and he took it. He couldn’t help flirting. Alice knew flirting consoled him and that it had nothing to do with these girls. She felt bad for not telling them so. “What?” he asked, replying to Alice’s embittered look. He set his board against a truck with elaborate care, and, as if to point out the imposition, he sighed. He made a vague gesture as if the beach were a dance floor and he was a spoiled young prince, who, at the queen mother’s orders, had asked a homely heiress to dance.
“You didn’t show,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I got tied up.”
“I can see that.”
Gus put his hands in his hair and tugged. “Alice, did I ask you to come here?”
“That doesn’t matter anymore. I’m here.”
“What is it you want?” Gus asked. “Just… what?”
“I only want to know what is happening to you,” said Alice, her voice as gentle as it was disingenuous.
“Alice, I’m telling you: find your own mess.”
“Give me time.”
He was, Alice could tell, about to start walking away.
“You do know,” Alice said, assuming what she hoped was a judicious tone, “I won’t go home until you’ve talked with me. I don’t understand why you can’t just tell me what happened there.”
“Look, Alice, I promise—”
“What can you promise? Everything is on your terms.”
“Right now,” he said blankly, “that’s true.”
Alice followed Gus’s gaze, out at the Pacific. The opposing view was nothing but scrub brush, cactus, abandoned houses, and a language he didn’t understand. “That’s why you’re here.”
She watched him nod.
“Well,” she said, “maybe that’s why I’m here too.”
“Don’t,” he said, finally turning toward her.
“Don’t what? I bet you can’t picture me doing anything besides hounding you.”
“You’re right,” he said, in a tone strangely tender. “I can’t.”
The motel corridor was even dingier than she recalled. She could bet some of those surfers would be making a grand entrance at any moment. Someone was listening to music in one of the rooms, and the bass was pulsing underfoot. She fumbled with the key, fully prepared to accept the sight of all her belongings having been stolen. As she turned the key she heard a door close right around the corner.
“Turn it down,” she heard a stern voice yell, and it was he of course, he of the pissed-off demeanor and clean white shirt, now rounding the corner.
“You found a room,” she said. “Lucky you.”
“Yeah, well, you gotta sleep someplace, and I’m not a big fan of camping—I’ve done my share; don’t get me wrong—but after my most recent attempt, I’m thinking of starting a toll-free number,” he said, smiling bitterly, revealing deep lines around his eyes and mouth. “A preventive hot line—so that, should the camping urge ever come over you, there’d be someone to talk you down.”
Alice laughed along with him, all the while waiting for his bad manners to resurface.
He said, “I come down here every year, and I’m telling you every year something goes wrong. This year my rental fell through and no one thought to tell me before I showed up.”
“But you come every year?”
“Oh,” he said, “oh, yeah, of course. For ten years now, actually.” And with that assertion he seemed to relax by degrees.
“I see,” she said.
“What do you see?”
“I see someone who’s horrified to be staying here.” She smiled. “Afraid you’ll be taken for a tourist?”
He smiled right back at her; the tips of his ears were red.
“What’s your name?” Alice asked.
“Stephen,” he said.
In the silence that followed, he took his keys from his pocket and suddenly tossed them to Alice. “First one to drop them pays for dinner,” he said.
She tossed them back and they played catch with his keys until finally she said she was hungry, and he let the keys fall.
The cafe on the plaza—the one with the high-arched wooden door and small tasteful sign—was closed. “Damn it,” he said, putting his hand on the beautiful wood. “It’s a Monday. I completely forgot.”
“I see someone’s a regular,” Alice said, raising her eyebrows.
“My friend opened this place about ten years ago. He and his wife are actually responsible for bringing the tourists; they put this town on the map, so to speak. The guy is one of these fanatic Italians. He eats in his restaurant every night, and if he’s traveling he’ll bring a few containers of his pasta, just in case. Every conversation always comes back to what is the best, the freshest, the purest.”
“It’s an Italian restaurant? Here?”
“It defies classification; it’s that spectacular. They’re totally self-sustained—their own garden, their own cheeses, local employees. …”
“And it’s closed.” There was a small cluster of teenagers in the plaza, but other than the clicking of typing from an open window in the judiciale building, the streets were silent. “So what is this place?” Alice asked.
“What do you mean?”
“This town. I don’t understand where I am. I followed someone here on very short notice. I didn’t exactly do a whole lot of research.”
He shrugged, smiling. “This town … let’s see. Home to quite a few UFO sightings.”
“Is that right?”
“Actually, yes, although the sightings around here were more likely Juarez cartel jets carrying vast amounts of cocaine from Colombia. Did you read about that plane crash a little while back?”
Alice shook her head. “And is that what drew you here,” Alice asked, “an abundance of fine Colombian?”
Stephen laughed a little too hard. “Oh, I’ve been coming down here since before the drug trade made its cameo appearance. I’m just that old. For the most part—minor tales of the drug trade aside—it’s an agricultural town, a fishing village. The old brick homes are from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was a real bourgeoisie here, believe it or not.” As they crossed a street, he silently steered Alice away from a pile of manure. “What I want to know is who got you to follow anyone anywhere. You seem fairly, shall we say, strong-willed.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I think you just pushed my final button.”
“So you came down here and he wasn’t what you thought?”
“Something like that,” Alice said.
He smiled sympathetically. “There’s kind of a romance to the failed ones, don’t you think?”
She couldn’t tell if he was making fun of her or of himself. “No,” she said, “not really.”
“Maybe you haven’t had the right kind of failures,” he said.
She looked at him and noticed that she couldn’t guess much about him. He was gruff but also refined in a way—his white shirt stained in places but rolled up carefully at the sleeves, the hands a bit gnarled but clean. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe so.”
“So are we eating dinner or what?”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it? What a weird day.”
“Day’s not over yet,” he said, waving her down a steep un-paved hill.
It was, she had to admit, a relief to do some following. He moved with the gait of someone perfectly comfortable with being not particularly thin. Although he was fairly tall, he appeared even more so, as he had bulky shoulders and there was nothing compact about him. He pointed frequently and halfheartedly to different buildings, not quite finishing his sentences, and this sloppy gesturing made him seem expansive somehow instead of careless.
The last of four dinner possibilities hosted an exhausted-looking woman who intoned, “solamente cocktails,” while not bothering to look away from a TV variety show featuring two grown women dressed like infants watching a juggling cowboy. Stephen gestured for Alice to exit the doorway. Behind the church, on the other side of the plaza, there was a lit-up street cart, and Stephen did his by-now-familiar pointing. And so they bought hot dogs from a toothless ancient man who piled on so many toppings that Alice was thankful for the dark. Stephen bought a case of Tecate from the market next to the motel, and they sat on the steps of an empty house (he swore it was empty; he promised he knew the owner) and they ate hot dogs and drank beer, while only random cars and begging dogs disturbed the eerie quiet.
He told her about the American couple from the Southwest who began hearing a low-grade humming noise in their town. So insidious was this humming noise, so ever present and soul sapping, that the couple packed up all of their belongings and headed for the Mexican border, although not before convincing many other members of their community that the sound— this “hum,” as it soon became known—was some kind of right-wing conspiracy aimed toward wiping out Native Americans once and for all. And now, Stephen explained, the couple lived right here in Santa Lucia in a huge adobe palace with bars on all the windows. They were famous around town for complaining about noise.
“I think I saw a TV show about that hum,” Alice said, recalling a phase of conspiracy programs to which she and her father had been briefly addicted.
He looked at her somewhat askance.
“I, ah, watched a whole lot of television this past year.”
“Well, they discovered it. They discovered the Hum.”
“And,” Alice asked, “who owns this house?”
“My ex-wife,” he said, taking a swig from his beer. He’d already started on his third beer and she hadn’t even finished her first.
“Aha,” Alice said. “Is she one of your romantic failures?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Unfortunately not. Are you married?”
Alice coughed a little, and took a sip of beer. “Married? No.”
“Kids?”
“No, God, no. You?”
“Why do you say it that way? You don’t want kids?”
Everything he asked made her feel like he was about to make a joke at her expense, but especially this question, because he seemed so improbably sincere. “I don’t know,” Alice said. “I suppose I do.”
“I really want kids.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said, shaking his head, apparently at Alice’s skepticism. “Definitely.”
She looked out in the distance; she looked down at her shoe. “Your ex-wife wasn’t the maternal type?”
“Which one?” he said, laughing.
“How many ex-wives do you have?”
“Oh, six,” he said. And then he shook his head.
“Ha, ha.”
“I like to start with a high number, so that in comparison the real number seems insignificant. I have two. I’ve been married twice.”
He cracked open another beer. “I’ve gotten really good at getting divorced, though. I’m an expert. Both times I’ve signed the papers, I’ve come down here, rented the same place on the beach, and watched the whales. Once I get to the beach, once I get out of whatever trouble always seems to greet me, it’s really pretty peaceful.”
What Alice wanted to know was, Am I trouble?“There really are whales here?” she asked instead.
“Don’t worry; you’ll see them.”
“I don’t know if I’m staying long enough.”
“Well,” he said, “you should.” Then he crushed the empty beer can in his hand and tossed it in the paper bag. “For the whales,” he said.
By the time they got going, Stephen had put away three hot dogs and six beers. He’d burped out loud. He’d told her that he’d bought a small plot of land for which he was not exactly sure he had the legal title.
“Well,” Stephen said, as they approached La Balena, “I got you all wrong. When I saw you I made a snap judgment. I’m usually very astute.” He was drunk.
“And what did you think?”
“I assumed you were, to be perfectly honest, like most American women I’ve met down here.”
“And that would mean?”
“Oh, you know, seeing auras, using the last of your alimony, starting a ceramic career or meditation retreat, with prurient hopes of entertaining a Mexican boy or two.” He was smiling.
“Good night, Stephen,” she said. “I’m going inside now.”
“Good night, Alice,” he said. “I’m not.”
And when she had to step over one of the surfers sitting in the hallway with a blond dreadlocked girl, when she made it to her room and closed the door, she looked outside in the courtyard and there was Stephen, attempting to right one of the plastic chairs. She watched him struggle with it for a moment, and she smiled at the way he seemed loath to put down his beer. When he finally sat in the chair, he didn’t pick the beer up again. In fact, he did nothing but stare straight ahead. When he looked up at her window, she’d been watching so long with the curtain wide open, she didn’t even try to hide it. Neither of them waved.