4.

MY LAST DAY SQUATTING at Vic’s, though I didn’t know it then, was Friday, January 20, 2023, and while it ended violently, it began peacefully, as I followed my usual routine.

I was up at five, had a coffee, a joint, and two hard-boiled eggs with salt.

Then, in the predawn light, I jogged down the driveway to the east-west dirt road.

It was chilly out, high fifties, and I was wearing my bathing suit (a pair of khaki pants I had cut off at mid-thigh), a T-shirt, a ratty old sweater, and sneakers. Clouds obscured the stars and the moon, but there was enough light to see by, and I was all alone in the empty desert world, with its magnificent silence: no sounds of man, no hum of machinery.

A few minutes into my run, I jogged past Kathy and Zim’s yurt, which glowed white in the predawn. Kathy and Zim, both in their early seventies, were old pot growers from Humboldt County and had been coming down to the East Cape since the ’70s. They were the closest thing I had to friends—they were my weed suppliers—and a mile after I passed their yurt, I hit the coastal dirt road and the cliff line, and straight ahead was the ocean, vast and monstrous. The sea at night has always felt menacing to me, even though I was in the Navy for years. I turned right on the cliff road, jogging at a nice clip, and after two hundred yards, the road dipped down to an old arroyo and then rose again steeply.

It was here, at the mouth of the arroyo, that one could gain entry to the beach, and just in from the dirt road was where Dan lived with his wife, Yuko. They were also in their early seventies, and I guess you could say they were my other two friends in Dos Ballenas, but we weren’t that close, because I was, more or less, Dan’s employee. Also, he was surly as hell, and Yuko was very private, though once a month, she would cut my hair and gently touch my shoulders, which was my only human contact for years.

That winter, Dan and Yuko had been living on the beach since mid-November, having come down from Tacoma in their old Lance Camper, which they parked right on the sand, ten yards from the road and thirty yards from the water. But they didn’t sleep in the camper. They slept in a big tent and had chairs around a firepit, where they did their cooking.

People could live and camp on the beach in Dos Ballenas—there was no government presence—and most of the camper tourists were transient, would stay just a week or two, but Dan and Yuko nested there every year for about five months total and had been coming to that exact spot for decades. Up in Tacoma, Dan still made a living as a commercial fisherman, but from November to March, he and Yuko lived off the sea in Dos Ballenas.

They had a ten-foot metal skiff, which they towed behind the camper, and it used to be their son and then grandson who would go out fishing with Dan, because to get the skiff in the ocean and past the first break, you needed two people. But their grandson got married in 2019 and wasn’t coming down to Mexico anymore, and so I became Dan’s first mate my first winter there and the next two that followed, and my payment was in fish.

Luckily, Dan wasn’t a talkative guy, which made spending time with him in a boat easy to take, and he liked to be in the water between 5:30 and 5:45, as the sun was rising. Monday, Wednesday, Friday was our usual schedule, and we’d fish till nine or ten, before it got too hot.

It was a good routine, and we’d catch enough in those three days to feed Dan, Yuko, George, me, and Walter for the whole week, with some extra to share or trade, like I traded fish for weed from Kathy and Zim, and traded fish for eggs from the local Mexican families, who lived in small ranches to the west, at the base of the mountains.

Anyway, that morning, when I arrived at the campsite, Dan grunted hello, which was a lot from him. He was barefoot, in a bathing suit and cardigan sweater, and he was sitting in a camp chair by the firepit, sipping a coffee.

Yuko was still asleep in their tent, and the firelight dramatized Dan’s stoic features: his face was seamed from years of sun exposure, and he had a long, bony nose, like a heron, which was probably why fishing was his vocation.

As I took off my sneakers, he stood up—he was tall, with ropy muscles—and threw the rest of his coffee in the fire. He was always anxious to get going in the morning, and if I was a few minutes late, he didn’t like it and would let me know, but that morning, thankfully, I was on time, and once my sneakers were off, he went immediately to the front of the ten-foot metal skiff, and I went to the stern.

I threw my T-shirt and sweater into the boat—all the fishing gear was already in there—and then Dan, with his back to me, reached behind himself, got his hands on the edge of the boat, and, together, we lifted the metal skiff.

We then had to carry it the thirty yards to the water, which wasn’t easy, but Dan, even in his seventies, was still incredibly strong from years of working outdoors, and his hands were noticeably powerful, covered as they were with thick veins, like a tangle of bait worms.

As we carried the boat across the sand, the light was rapidly changing—from purple to light purple to pink—and we had to stop every ten yards or so because the metal skiff, with its oars and its outboard motor, was quite heavy, and walking in the sand made it even heavier.

But then we got the boat into the cold water, which was gunmetal gray melting into violet. The morning light was playing with the sea, like it was mixing paints, and we waded the skiff out to where the violet-colored water was about three feet deep.

Then Dan climbed in, sat on the middle bench, facing me, and readied the oars.

On the horizon, the sun was beginning to emerge from the sea, a fiery crescent, and I stood behind the boat, waiting for a big wave to break and rush past us, and as it did, Dan shouted, “Now!”

Which was when I began to push the boat as hard as I could—my legs churning in the shallow water—while Dan was working the oars like crazy, fighting the current.

We had to get the boat through the first break before it crashed on him or flipped the boat backwards if we didn’t time it right, and when the water suddenly became deep, I started swimming behind the boat, pushing it the best I could, and, like every morning, we made it just in time, and Dan and the boat rose and crested the tall wave right before it crashed, though then it crashed on me, as it always did, but I ducked under it, while Dan kept rowing to be well clear of the next breaker.

When I came up for air, I swam after him and clambered on board, pushing myself up on the edge of the skiff. I banged my legs as I did most mornings—I had notches up and down my shin bones—but then I was in the boat, and Dan, who had shifted over to the back bench, threw me a towel, which I wrapped around my shoulders. Then he lowered the large propeller and yanked the cord, viciously, and nothing happened. But on the second pull, the motor coughed awake, and we set off, moving fast right away, up and down the swells. I was on the middle bench, facing forward, and there were long sun candles across the surface of the sea, golden pathways to the edge of the world.

Then I looked back at the beach for a moment and an enormous half-moon was now visible, setting behind the mountains to the west, like a giant sleepy eye, and perhaps having a premonition, I wondered if it was an evil eye.

We caught a tuna and a dorado, and, luckily, they were both males, because it was an unwritten rule that the females, with their thousands of precious eggs, had to be thrown back. The Sea of Cortez was still quite vital and full of life, but Dan had told me that in the last forty years, the stock of fish had dropped at least 30 percent.

Around ten a.m., we headed back, and I jumped out fifty yards from shore and swam and bodysurfed my way in. This way Dan could manage the boat with less weight, which made it easier for him, and it was always so impressive the way he guided that metal boat to shore.

That day the waves were especially big, four or five feet, and for a moment the skiff hovered on the lip of the giant wave that Dan had chosen for passage, and the boat was sticking straight out of the water, aimed at the shore like a missile.

Then, with Dan in the back, using one of the oars like a rudder, the skiff suddenly came shooting down the face of the wave, going much too fast, barely ahead of the curling tunnel, but Dan and the boat outraced it and were carried all the way in, the skiff coming to a stop in the wet shoreline sand.

I caught the tail end of the same wave and bodysurfed in, and Dan, accustomed to his own heroics, stepped out of the boat like a Viking, and we carried it back across the sand, our last exertion of the day.

At the campsite, I sat in a beach chair and sipped a beer and watched Yuko clean the fish at a portable table. The sun, over the years, had baked her a dark brown, and she had a long, beautiful braid of iron-gray hair that went to the middle of her back. She was naked under a simple cotton housedress—the sunlight made the thin fabric translucent—and I thought about her cutting my hair.

When she was done cleaning the fish, I took my share home, wrapped in paper, and George, Walter, and I had some of the raw tuna for our late morning breakfast—I guess you could call it sashimi. After we ate, we all got into bed, Vic’s old bed, for our siesta.

Walter started off by sitting on my chest and drooling on me, a sign of feline affection, I’ve been told. Then he positioned himself above my head on the pillow, and George, under the meager blanket, snuggled in next to my torso, our usual threesome arrangement, and I let out a childlike giggle of pure happiness, which harkened back to some childhood I never even had.

Then, after a little more shifting about, we all sighed at the same time, our breaths slowing in unison as we fell asleep.

After our nap, I ate a marijuana cookie—part of my trade agreement with Kathy and Zim—and walked to the beach to go snorkeling, which would prove to be my undoing.

My favorite diving spot was a quarter mile up the sand from Dan and Yuko’s camp and was marked by two things: (1) on the cliff above there was a modern glass house, and (2) out in the water, about a hundred yards, were enormous boulders, arranged, by chance, like a wall, and this wall created a wide swath of water that was nearly calm, with the rocks dissipating the big waves. Which made the snorkeling here fantastic. The calmer water had excellent visibility—no churn—and what made this spot, this natural harbor, truly special was a sunken fishing boat. It was a trawler about forty feet long, which had hit the rocks twenty years ago during a storm and sunk, and thousands of fish now used it like a coral reef.

That day, as I began to feel the cookie, I swam out and started diving down by the boat, watching the schools of silvery fish swim in and out of the broken vessel and through shafts of sunlight from the world above. It was all so beautiful. The doomed boat, to me, was as mysterious as the Titanic, and some days, when I was out there, an octopus would emerge from inside the hull and look at me with very sad eyes—how could it not be sad with a brain that big?—but I didn’t see the octopus that day, and as for humans, I was all alone.

Almost no one in Dos Ballenas, which had a population of about fifty souls, liked to snorkel, which was great for me—I had the snorkeling spot all to myself—and these non-snorkelers I had divided into three categories: the Mexican ranch families, to the west, at the base of the mountains; the retired working-class American expats on the plain; and the eight wealthy families, from various countries, who owned the cliff houses that overlooked the water and the miles of empty, pristine beach.

Vic had been part of the expat plain dwellers, old contractors and tradesfolk, most of them from the Pacific Northwest, with a few from Nevada. These people lived in squat concrete boxes or old trailers or house-like palapas, all on tiny parcels of land they had purchased for next to nothing back in the ’80s and early ’90s. There were also, on the plain, a few old hippie types, like Kathy and Zim.

The wealthy class of Dos Ballenas was the eight families on the cliffs, and they lived in beautiful white houses, Spanish stucco or modern sleek, and these cliff houses were rigged with expensive solar-powered systems, large water tanks, and powerful backup generators.

About a mile separated each cliff house from its neighbors, which gave them plenty of privacy, and they all had long staircases down to the sand and the water, to basically their own private beach. The house by the snorkeling spot, for example, had concrete steps, painted white and built zigzag fashion into the scrubby cliffside, climbing up about a hundred feet.

But you couldn’t see this house from the beach; it was set too far back from the cliff edge, though I had seen it while out fishing with Dan. It was one of the modern houses, and it had two stories, like two big glass boxes, one piled on top of the other.

The second-floor box had an enormous balcony, which must have had incredible views, and the ground-floor box opened onto a large infinity swimming pool that was surrounded by white lounges. The whole place looked amazing from the sea, and the other houses on the cliffs were all owned by families who would make an appearance at some point during the year, but this was the one house where the owner never showed up.

The only people who stayed there were renters, though not that often. Every six weeks or so, the house would be occupied, usually just for a few days, and none of the local expats even knew who owned the place, which had been built in the last five years and was sometimes called the Rock House, because of the rocks out in the water in front of it, and because Mick Jagger had supposedly stayed there once, though nobody had actually seen him.

The people who did stay there would arrive in expensive tinted-window SUVs, part of the package with the house, it seemed. They would be driven in from San José del Cabo or La Paz, and sometimes the renters ventured down to the water to swim, but it was surprising how infrequently they took advantage of the empty beach; they preferred to stay up by the pool, looking out at the sea, which in many ways made sense. There were sharks out in the water—not any more than in most places, but you don’t need many—and the nearest hospitals were ninety minutes away.

When the renters did come down to the beach, they were often very beautiful people: young women with legs that started at their shoulders, and men who looked like tennis stars a few years past their prime. These renters were mostly rich South Americans or Europeans, though sometimes wealthy Americans stayed there as well.

When I was out in Dan’s boat, it did look very glamorous around that pool, and sometimes I had wished, during my three years in Dos Ballenas, that I would get invited up there, just to see what it was like, but of course it had never happened. No one from the Rock House had ever even spoken to me, probably because I had something of a feral look going on. Three years in the sun had turned me a cancerous dark brown, like I had been shipwrecked, and I often had a thick black and silver beard, which I would hack off every three months or so.

That day, I was at a peak of beard growth, and I was doing my usual thing, just snorkeling about, stoned on my cookie, and when I would dive down to get a closer look at the ruins of the boat, I could hear the underwater cries of the gray whales.

November to March was when they would arrive from the cold northern Pacific to mate and have babies in the warm, bulblike dead end of the Sea of Cortez, and often the whales would pass Dan and me in our little boat, swimming north, like up a tube, behaving like salmon or, more lewdly, sperm, and if you look at it on a map, the shape of the Sea of Cortez does look cervical. But nothing surprising in that. Nature repeats itself, as we all know, in the miniature and the macro.

Anyway, after about an hour of snorkeling, I did one final dive, and when I resurfaced and lifted my head out of the water, to orient myself to the shore, I saw a woman on the beach, sitting on a towel. One of the beautiful people from the Rock House had ventured down.

As I emerged from the water, carrying my fins, she stood up from her towel, which was right next to where I had left my towel and gear bag.

“Hola,” she said brightly, with a non-Spanish accent.

Then she added, haltingly, “¿Como estuvo el snorkeling?”

She was smiling and very pretty, with an elegant unpainted mouth, a small, fine nose, and large blue eyes that seemed both innocent and intelligent, which would match the age I placed her at: late twenties or early thirties, someone not yet broken by life, but also no longer a child. She was on the small side, maybe five four, and her hair was sandy blonde, pulled back tightly from her forehead with a white band. There were charming freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, but she was mostly quite pale, and I didn’t want to let my eyes drop, but I could see, peripherally, that she was wearing a flimsy white bikini and that she had a lovely, discreet figure, not bursting at the seams, but not malnourished, either.

“I speak English,” I said.

“You’re American? I’m shocked,” she said, rather confidently. Her accent was English, maybe working-class, I thought, but it was hard for me to tell. All English accents, to my provincial ears, sound quite sophisticated.

“Yes, I’m American… but I… I live here.”

“You look—I didn’t think you were American. Well, how was the snorkeling?”

“Very beautiful,” I said, and I was finding it hard to get the words out. I hadn’t spoken to a young woman—or a young person for that matter—in a very long time. In my social set of septuagenarians, I had gotten used to being the baby of the group.

“I bet it was beautiful,” she said, and then she picked up a large mesh bag from her towel, and inside it, I could see fins, a mask, and a snorkel. She took out the mask, seemingly to prove a point, and said, “Do you think you could take me? I’ve watched you the last few days from up there.” She pointed at the cliff. “And today is my last day. My last chance.”

She was very forward, but also somehow polite. Maybe it was the English accent. But before I could say anything, she said, “Just for ten minutes? I’ve never actually been snorkeling, and I’ve been stuck up there wondering what it’s like.”

She looked at me pleadingly, and it felt impossible to say no. I mumbled, “I guess I could keep an eye on you…”

“I should tell you I’m not a very good swimmer. But there’s a life vest in here. I found all this stuff up at the house.”

She then pulled a white vest out of the bag and held it out to me, as proof.

This alarmed me. I said, “If you’re not a good swimmer, I don’t know if we should—”

“I promise I won’t drown. I’ve been practicing in the pool. With the mask and the snorkel, and the fins.”

I looked away, uncertain, stoned, and confused. A beautiful young woman, who couldn’t swim well, wanted me to take her snorkeling, and it was like my brain had no reference point for such things. I had spent most of the last three years reading the Dalai Lama and conversing one-sidedly with George and Walter in a gibberish kind of baby talk, full of my declarations of love, and so I felt wholly unprepared for the current situation. I went into a bit of a fugue state, and the girl jumped in. “I’m sorry to be all over you like this. It’s so rude. My name’s Frances.”

She reached out her hand, rather proudly, and we shook. It was the first woman’s hand I had held since the apparition of Ines on the beach in La Paz, and I told her my name was Lou. I was very used to the lie at this point, but it had also become a kind of truth, like it was a new name to go with a new face.

“So do you think you could take me?” she asked. “I’m sorry to be pushy.”

I wanted to take her—it seemed so important to her—but it also felt like a foolish thing to do: she had said she wasn’t a good swimmer, and so I tried to get out of it. I gestured to the cliff. “There’s nobody up there who can go with you?”

She looked away, like I had said something painful, and then she said, “No. No one up there… Listen, I understand. I’m being so pushy. I just… Well, it’s nice to meet you.”

She offered me her hand again, awkwardly. She was all confused and young, and we shook again, and I said, wanting to please her, “You really want to snorkel?”

“Yes, very much,” she said, smiling brightly.

“Okay. We’ll go for ten minutes. And put the vest on.”

She did this right away, zipping it up, and I figured with the vest there was no chance she could drown and so the risk wasn’t too great. We then walked down to the water’s edge, and I showed her how to prepare her mask, with a bit of saliva and saltwater, to keep it from fogging up. Then we put our fins on, and I said, “We walk in backwards. It’s easier.”

“Okay,” she said, and we took two steps, but then she stopped. “Are there sharks out there?”

I hesitated, then said, “Yes, but they don’t usually come in this close and almost never this time of day.”

“What time of day do they come in?”

“Like I said, they usually don’t come in this close, but if they did, they only feed very early in the morning or at night. I’ve been snorkeling here for three years, and I’ve never seen a shark this time of day.”

Which wasn’t entirely true; I had occasionally seen sand sharks, which scared the shit out of me every time, but they weren’t man-eaters, and they would only bite if provoked, and I didn’t provoke. I’d hightail it back to shore and not snorkel for a week to appease the gods and build my courage back up. “So don’t worry,” I added. “The chances of getting bit by a shark are almost like being in a plane crash.”

“All right,” she said, a little meekly—my plane crash reference wasn’t the most reassuring—and we started stepping backwards into the water.

When it was deep enough, we turned around and I said, “We’ll swim out about thirty, forty yards, and when you look down, you’ll see a sunken ship and lots of fish. Okay?”

She nodded, and I could see, even behind her snorkeling mask, that she was quite scared. I said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” she said, and to show me how brave she was, she put her snorkel in her mouth and started doggy-paddling, with her head out of the water. It was effective enough, not quite a proper crawl, and I paddled alongside her.

When we were out about forty yards, I said, “Look down and you’ll see fish. The water is very clear.”

But instead of looking down, she looked back at the beach, spat the snorkel out, and said, “I didn’t realize we were out so far. Oh, my God!”

She looked on the verge of panicking, and if she hadn’t had the life vest buoying her, she might have started drowning, and then she did start drowning. She threw her arms around my neck, squeezing me tight, and tried to push me down under the water, which is the common reaction of a drowning person: to attack anyone within range, including the person who could help them. Luckily, she was a small thing, and I was able to detach her. Treading water, I held her at arm’s length and said firmly, “You have to calm down, Frances!”

It took a moment, but then I saw the panic go out of her eyes and she realized she was okay, that the vest would keep her afloat, and that she was somewhere beautiful: in the warm blue-green sea, looking at the magnificent empty beach and the cliffs from a perspective she had never experienced before. And a calm came over her, and she even smiled.

She said, “I’m sorry… I…”

“It’s okay,” I said, letting go of her. “Just take one look below, don’t worry about using the snorkel, and then we’ll swim back.”

“All right,” she said. “Can you hold my hand?”

“Yes,” I said, and I took her lovely, delicate hand—what had I gotten into?—and she lowered her mask into the water. After twenty seconds, she lifted her face out and said, “God, it’s so beautiful! I’m not ready to go back. Is that okay?”

I was a little nervous but said, “All right. You seem better now.”

Smiling behind her mask, she put her face back down in the water, and for the next ten minutes, we hovered about, holding hands, as she spied on a world she had never seen before. Then, breathless, she said, bringing her face out of the water, “I’m ready to go back.”

I said, “One last thing, since we’re out here. Put your whole head under water and see if you can hear the whales.”

“Really? We’ve been watching them from up there, but I didn’t know you could actually hear them.”

“Yes, you can hear them. It’s beautiful. Very plaintive.”

She cocked her head at me. I think she was impressed by my vocabulary, and then she bravely ducked her whole head under the water, and when she reemerged, she said, “Does it sound like high-pitched whistles?”

“Yes. Or coyotes under water. That’s what it sounds like to me.”

She ducked back under and listened some more, and then we swam in.

When we got back to the towels, she sat down, simultaneously exhausted and excited, and she started going on about the whales and all the fish she had seen, all the colors, and how eerie the boat was, and then she said, “When I was a kid we never went on holiday—we couldn’t afford it—but this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. Thank you so much for taking me.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, sitting on my towel, and for a moment she was quiet, staring out at the sea, very satisfied with her adventure. Then she turned and said, with a more serious tone, “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure,” I said, with some reluctance, and I felt like a bartender. I could tell that this was one of those moments when a stranger, out of a pressing need, opens up, perhaps inappropriately, to someone they don’t know. “What do you want to tell me?”

“I made a terrible mistake coming to Mexico,” she said, beginning her confession.

“Why?”

“I’ve been so dumb.”

She stopped and stared out at the water, and I didn’t say anything. She had to tell it at her own pace. “So I’m here with a guy,” she continued after a deep inhale. “And it’s been really bad. I don’t really know him, but thank God, we’re leaving tomorrow. I just have to get through tonight.”

She stopped again, almost seemed on the verge of crying, then said, “Sorry to drop this on you—you don’t know me or anything—but I’m all alone, and my phone doesn’t really work. The first day it did, but now for three days nothing. I can’t even text. I’ve never been this cut off, and the house doesn’t have internet; I can’t even email.”

“Yeah, there’s none of that here or much cell phone reception. But one of the rich people, in one of these cliff houses, put up their own cell tower, if you can believe it, and sometimes it works for the rest of us, but most days it doesn’t. Seems to depend on the wind.”

She nodded, and I realized I wasn’t being very comforting, talking about cell phone towers, so I said, “How did you end up down here with someone you don’t know that well? Where have you come from? England?”

“No, Los Angeles,” she said, and I felt a shiver of anxiety. I had to get back there and sell my house, but I couldn’t, I was paralyzed, mired in procrastination, and I zoned out for a second. The girl was still talking. Then I refocused, and she was saying, “I’m from Canterbury, originally, you know, like the poem, Chaucer, but I live in LA now and that’s where I met Sebastian.”

“Sebastian’s the man?”

“Yes.”

“So how did you meet him?”

“Because I’m an actress, which means I’m mostly a waitress… Do you actually want to hear this sob story?”

I didn’t want to hear it because I didn’t like where it was going, but I said, somewhat noncommittally, “If you want to tell me, I can listen.”

“Okay… well, it’s just pathetic more than anything else. Anyway, he was a customer—I work at this steak house downtown—and he was eating alone, and he told me, after a few glasses of wine, that his girlfriend had broken up with him. A lot of men flirt at that place, even when they’re with their wives, but this one, I actually… I don’t know, I liked him. Maybe I felt sorry for him. And then at the end of the night—he stayed till closing—he asked me to come to Mexico with him the next day. He had figured out I was an actress and he told me he was a producer. Said he could help me with my career. Biggest cliché ever. And I fell for it.”

I was silent, not sure how to respond, and so she kept going. “And he made a big point of saying there was no pressure to sleep together, he just wanted the company and had already rented this place for a trip with his girlfriend and wouldn’t be able to get his money back. He showed me pictures of the house and this beach… It looked so beautiful.”

She stared out at the water again, and I still didn’t know what to say. I managed to eke out, “Has he hurt you?”

She looked at me, a bit shocked. “No, thank God. Nothing like that. Turns out, it wasn’t just the two of us coming here. But he failed to mention that part, and so it was a bunch of his friends and their girlfriends, and I think he wanted to show off that he could get somebody at the last minute, a waitress. They all made a big thing of it, that he had picked me up the night before. It was gross—he could have just hired a prostitute—and on top of that they were all doing cocaine the whole time and smoking blues.”

“What’s that?”

“Smoking blue fentanyl pills, the powder, you sprinkle it on a joint or in a cigarette.”

“I didn’t know that was a thing.”

“Neither did I. I didn’t try it. I didn’t do any coke, either. I hate cocaine. And they all left this morning, except for us, our flight’s tomorrow, and he passed out last night at like seven. Every night, to come down from the coke, he takes a bunch of Valium and sleeps for like twelve hours. Why come all the way here and do that?”

“So, he’s not hurt you?”

“No. He’s a bit of a cunt,” she said dismissively, and I was a little thrown by the word, but then I remembered that the English are fond of it. She continued. “And he’s a little mean, but mostly he’s been out of it on drugs, and I just thought it would be, I don’t know, magical. I’ve been wanting something special to happen my whole time in LA, you know? And… sorry to dump all this on you, but my mom died at the start of COVID, back in England.”

I was taken aback. I managed to say, “I’m very sorry.”

“Yeah… She was already pretty sick with emphysema and my dad died a long time ago, so I’m kind of solo in the world now, no family, and I thought maybe somehow this trip was a gift from my mom. Like she wanted me to be happy. I mean, I knew I was taking a risk coming here with him, someone I don’t know, but then I thought life is short, I’ll just go for it… but… but it’s just been so… ugly… they’re all just a bunch of trust-fund cokeheads, including him. He’s only produced two music videos that nobody’s ever seen, and it was with his father’s money, anyway, who’s some sort of big shot in LA, and one of his friends told me all this behind his back. It was all so gross. They could have been anywhere. They didn’t care about the beauty. But you saved the whole trip for me. This made it worth it.” She smiled at me then and said, “You’re a nice person.”

I nodded. She didn’t know me at all, of course, but maybe my Buddhist studies had made me a good listener, and I felt bad that she was alone in the world. Her pent-up troubles had poured out of her in a rush, but she also seemed resilient. She had that going for her, and I said, “So you just have to get through tonight. What’s this man, Sebastian, like, exactly? How old is he?”

“He’s older, thirty-six. I’m twenty-eight, and… and he is very good-looking, but arrogant. He was so much nicer at the restaurant. He fooled me. But I guess I wanted to be fooled. And I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but we’ve been sleeping in the same bed. But nothing happens, because of the drugs. And I don’t want anything to happen. I just want to go home. So crazy to be in one of the most beautiful places in the world and just want to leave.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s passed out again. They partied so much. Anyway, that’s my sad little story.”

I wanted to say something wise and to caution her to be more careful in life, but all I came out with was, “I’m glad you got to snorkel at least.”

“So am I,” she said, and then I stood up, rather abruptly. All at once, I felt overwhelmed by the conversation and wanted to get back to George and Walter. I wasn’t used to this much talking, this much of the troubled world, and I said, somewhat robotically, “Well, I’m going home now. It was nice to meet you, Frances.”

She looked surprised that I was ready to go, especially so soon after she had unburdened herself, but then she stood up, and I walked her to the bottom of the white concrete stairs, and she reached out her hand to shake goodbye. She liked to shake hands, it was the tic of a young woman trying to find her way in the world, but then after we shook, she suddenly got up on her toes and kissed me on the cheek and said, “Goodbye, Lou.”

Then she turned quickly and, carrying her snorkel bag, she started climbing the stairs.

Feeling a little giddy, I staggered a few feet in the sand, in the direction of home. A woman hadn’t kissed me on the cheek in a long time—in fact, I had been celibate for eight years—and then Frances called out to me and said, “Lou, would you like to come sit by the pool and have a drink with me?”

I turned and looked at her.

I had finally been invited up, and I felt like that young man in The Great Gatsby, the one who lived next door to all the parties and wondered what it was all about.

I said, “Yes, I’d like a drink very much.”

Then I walked back and climbed the stairs to join her.