SUMMER 1979
Jess stopped her truck at the corner of Beverly and Rossmore, just outside the gates of the Wilshire Country Club. Two women waited for the light at the corner. They were doing their best Chris Evert impressions—short white tennis skirts, matching blond ponytails, terry-cloth wristbands. Jess watched them, impatient. When the light changed they crossed Beverly, revealing what Jess had come to see, the thick old palm with its scaly-skinned trunk and wispy feathered top. It looked like a nodding drunk with a bad wig. Old and tired, the palm was out of place in this landscaped neighborhood of keen young beeches and elms, a holdover from some earlier concept of topiary glamour.
Maybe it was the conversation with Gabe that had brought her back here, or the news that Christine was looking for her. Maybe it was the drink at the Spotted Gull before leaving Venice. On a stool by the open windows, Jess had watched a group of girls roller-skating on the boardwalk, solos and pairs, long socks and long legs, turning corkscrews and pirouettes. A leering crowd of surfers watched in a loose circle, clapping along to the rhythm from a boom box in a record store window. Anita Ward, “Ring My Bell.” Jess knew the song by osmosis. It was everywhere that summer, in bars and supermarkets, all across the radio dial, pumping from the windows of every other passing car. The girls skated an elaborate, ornamental slalom through a long route of empty iced-tea cans, crossing ankles and knees, wrists and elbows, coming together and spinning apart as they glided down the boardwalk.
Jess had ordered a whiskey sour, then another, then spent half an hour waiting for gas at the 76 station on Fairfax Avenue, the shortest line she could find. Gas rationing had been going on for months, with no end in sight. A group of men stood beside their idling cars, hashing through conspiracy theories. The whole thing was an Iranian plot, one said. The ayatollah controlled President Carter, Governor Brown, the oil companies. Some kind of mind voodoo. Khomeini’s jacking up prices, the man said, to finance his revolution.
The gas line inched along. Jess didn’t mind. She was dragging her feet, feeling both the pull of the street corner a few blocks away and the need to delay her arrival as long as possible.
But now she was here, yet again. Beverly and Rossmore. It sounded like an old movie pairing, a studio romance, names above the title on a marquee. The palm tree’s wound was disappearing, the garish gash that seemed like it should have cracked the trunk in two was now covered over with a slab of smooth new skin. The traces of Alex’s accident were fading. She didn’t know how she felt about that. Whenever she found herself here she wanted the reminder, the proof, but part of her also hoped that the scars had healed.
What didn’t disappear: images and memories that still felt immediate. Alex in bed, moving on top of her, below her; Alex behind the wheel of his cobalt Karmann Ghia; Alex sitting in a plain wooden chair in the campus gallery, waiting.
They had met freshman year at Pomona, in a Materials and Methods class. Jess was still painting then, struggling to find something using color and canvas, and here was this boy who had already found his tools, his techniques, the questions for which he wanted answers.
Sitting in that gallery chair for three days, not moving or speaking or eating or drinking. Visitors coming to watch, sitting on the floor before him or standing in the doorway or against the wall. Joking about the audacity of the stunt, the boredom, when and how he went to the bathroom. And then not joking, just watching. The gallery lights burning at all hours. Jess walking by at two in the morning, alone, drawn to the lighted windows and the boy inside, afraid that she would look in and see him devouring a contraband meal, guzzling water, laughing with friends. She didn’t even know him then, but his intensity of purpose was magnetic. Standing at the window and finding him still in the chair, motionless and alone, she had felt so relieved by his honesty, and then fearful, wondering how far he was willing to go.
Alex in the chair; Alex stretched out across a bed of nails. Hammering slim spikes into the plywood slab until each tip split through to the other side. Jess watching but unable to help. Understanding what he was trying to do, what he said he was trying to do, but unable or unwilling to facilitate the means of his coming pain. Alex flipping the plywood over to reveal the forest of sharp brown points. Standing before the bed with a gallery full of onlookers. Waiting. An hour, then two, until the gallery began to empty. Grumblings of a hoax, a failure of nerve. And then, finally, when everyone had gone, when even Jess had gone because she knew that she must, Alex setting his body down, stretching his long limbs to the corners, his weight sinking in.
The only proof was the wounds on his back, his neck and arms and legs. Pinprick blood spots appearing through the thin fabric of his T-shirts, Rorschach blottings emerging like points on a map of where he had gone, where no one else was willing to go.
They all talked about the void. Painters, sculptors, writers, performers, they felt it approaching, its ragged edges bleeding in on the nightly news, in the morning paper, images of street protests and napalmed villages, a chaotic war both home and abroad. They tried to fight back. They sat-in and marched. Alex’s physical bravery brought out something similar in Jess. She was surprised by her own courage, standing nose to nose with police in riot gear in front of a draft-board office, refusing to move until security guards dragged her from President Johnson’s speech at the Century Plaza Hotel. But Alex was the only one, Jess thought, who truly confronted the void beneath the violence. His work made it personal, tearing it from the newspaper page and TV screen, forcing it into the safety and comfort of their lives. He presented the truth, whether anyone liked it or not.
He was celebrated as a visionary; he was dismissed as a stuntman, a sadist. His art was a courageous exploration of the limits of mind and body; his art wasn’t art at all, it was a sick plea for attention. But in the days before one of Alex’s pieces, and in the days during and after, it was all anyone talked about. It was the lifeblood of the campus, the measure by which the rest of them—whether they admitted it or not—judged their own capacity for risk.
She was drawn to the questions he posed and his willingness to push himself to an edge everyone else refused even to consider. But she was also drawn to the paradox of his personality, his prankster’s sense of humor, his grace and kindness. He never played the tortured young artist. He was a sun-kissed child of the beach, tall and muscular and boyishly handsome, with full cheeks and a generous, toothy smile, like the older brother in a white-bread TV comedy. He could have become anyone, with his looks and family pedigree: a captain of industry like his father, a politician, a movie star. He drove a three-thousand-dollar car with the respect that beautiful machine deserved but with none of the ego such a luxury might encourage. Easy, lucrative paths stretched before him in every direction, but he refused them. Jess didn’t see this as self-destructive rebellion, or needy exhibitionism. She saw it as integrity and courage.
He questioned everything, including her painting, her intentions, their relationship. They broke up and made up and broke up. She challenged him on methods that seemed showy or hollow or needlessly dangerous. He asked why she wanted to add yet another painting to the world, how she could get at anything meaningful by following in so many well-worn footsteps. When she hit a wall, threatening to throw it all out, screaming at the canvas, he said, Good, good, this is where you want to be.
Storms and stillness. She woke in the mornings with his face nestled into her neck, gentle and quiet and warm.
They tried other relationships but always returned to each other. It seemed, at least to Jess, that this would be the pattern of their lives. They would rupture and seal again, they would break off and go out into the world but always find their way back.
Jess gave up painting, and Alex encouraged her abandonment of traditional forms. Her work began to take shape, slowly finding an audience.
He had shows in L.A. and New York. There were plans for Prague, Barcelona, Berlin. Critics said he was a privileged brat looking for attention; they said he was a brave and honest artist making the only reasonable gestures in a world hell-bent on self-destruction.
His father could have maneuvered him out of the draft, but when Alex was called he felt that he needed to go. Not out of a sense of patriotism, but a duty to step into the mouth of the very thing his work had always spoken with.
He spent a year in Vietnam. He returned with a camera given to him by a fellow soldier. He had always played around with photography but was now obsessed. Jess found him harder to reach. He was drinking heavily, chain-smoking. He began taking and showing pictures of disasters, after the fact. Car crashes, crime scenes, protests that devolved into riots. Not the events themselves but the eerily calm spaces that opened when the violence ended. Rubber on the road, police tape, broken signs with half-visible slogans. Children gathering in the wake of adult carnage. Silent witnesses. He traveled to conflict zones: Israel, Angola, Laos, Argentina. Some of his photographs were published in newspapers and magazines, some were acquired by museums. A few became famous, emblematic of a particular struggle or atrocity.
Just after the war ended, Alex returned to Vietnam, and that’s where he met Christine, a girl from Ohio working with a small, unchartered relief agency, what Alex would later describe with great affection as an anarchist version of the Red Cross. Six months later they were married in a backyard ceremony in Laurel Canyon. Three months after that, Henry was born.
At the time, Jess felt as if she had missed something, like she had fallen asleep for a year. She and Alex had been apart for a few months, and then he was back in Vietnam, and then a mutual friend told her that Alex was getting married; that he, this friend, had been invited to the ceremony. That the wife-to-be was pregnant. That Alex seemed incredibly happy, as if he had finally found something he had been lacking, some missing piece.
Of course they came back together and broke apart and came together. So now their relationship mutated into a shameful thing, an uncomfortable open secret in their circles, and Jess found herself in a new unasked-for role: mistress, hetaera, potential homewrecker.
None of it could hold. Alex was drinking more, popping Benzedrine like aspirin. He was still obsessed with his work and still, at times, obsessed with Jess. But his guilt was crushing him. The tenor of their arguments changed. He began pushing into places of no return. Art was a lie, he told her. Her art, all art. Art was a distraction from the truth. What truth? she shouted back. His truth? Not everyone, Jess said, wanted his truth.
One morning she received a call from the same friend who had told her about the wedding. The night before, Alex had lost control of the Karmann Ghia on Beverly Boulevard. The call seemed like a cruel joke, or part of some elaborate and distasteful new piece Alex had created. She walked from her studio to the newsstand on Abbot Kinney as if in a trance, turning the pages of the morning’s paper until she found the photo in the Metro section: the car split nearly in half by the broad trunk of an old roadside palm. The photo was claustrophobically cropped, artlessly composed. Looking at it, feeling its impermanence, the ink already peeling away onto her thumbs, Jess couldn’t help but think that Alex would have wanted it that way—the captured moment after a disaster. Cheap, temporary, honest. His only regret, she thought, would have been that he wasn’t the one who had taken the picture.
He was driving upward of seventy miles an hour when he hit the tree. He was heartbroken and lonely and high and drunk. He loved Christine, he loved their baby, and he loved Jess, probably, still. He was doing what he did best, staring down pain, pushing into the void. Only this time, he had pushed all the way through.
A breeze moved across the intersection, bending the top of the palm, continuing into the open windows of Jess’s truck. An acknowledgment, maybe, of her return to this place. More magical thinking. Her truck was a ’69 Harvester Scout, a stout, sturdy bread box on wheels, honey mustard, though faded now from years of sun and salt air. Alex had loved the Scout. It wasn’t quite a truck, he said; it wasn’t quite a Jeep. It was something else, something hard to define. He always said it was perfect for her.
The morning was heating up, sepia-toned with smog. Jess looked through the windshield grit to the swaying palm. In a children’s story, this tree would conceal a portal, a doorway. With the right sequence of words it would swing open and Jess could pass through to join him. But she had run out of words. She went days at a time now without speaking to anyone. Only that single set of Alex’s photos remained, the ones Christine was looking for, hidden away in a box under Jess’s bed. And even those photos were ruined, corrupted by Jess’s need to transform her anger and grief into something new. But she had only managed to create more anger and grief, infecting others with what she made.
Popopopopop. Knuckles banged against her window. A man’s face pressed close to the glass, red, damp, his mouth opening from under a mustache overhang.
“Hey, honey, you have a stroke?”
Jess hit the horn to back him away, looking into the rearview mirror to a line of impatient cars. The man approached again, and Jess returned to the horn, a sustained blast to keep him back, to keep all of them back, a wall of sound she carried with her until the man and the tree and the line of cars were far behind.