“G’day, mate.”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing pimping me out like that, Hughie? Huh?”
“Calm down, Miles.” I could picture Hughie, a ruddy-faced man in his fifties, balding, overweight, short of stature, eclectically intelligent, headset clamped over his head, ensconced in his office. We had never met in person. The University of Otago fellowship and publishing deal had gone down over Zoom and emails. He was, he expressed, a “fanboy” of mine, but I’ve learned from painful experience that, deep down, every fanboy is out to leverage me, work an angle on me. Fame is a curse worse than failure, I once quipped to an interviewer, who then asked me to read his novel in hopes I would pass it along to my agent.
“Calm down?” I said. “I’m all over the fucking internet.”
“And book sales are soaring. Congratulations.”
“This isn’t how I want to sell books, Hughie, being humiliated by a gaggle of horny Kiwi housewives whose partners stopped servicing them during the pandemic and didn’t pick up where they’d left off. And where’s my fucking fifteen grand?”
“It wasn’t fifteen grand,” corrected the parsimonious, first-time-publisher miser.
“It fucking-A was, and I have double confirmation on that, you Janus-faced hypocrite.”
He tacked. “How do you think I’m footing the bill for this book tour?”
“I thought you were shooting wallabies to cull the infestation and funneling the funds to our operation.” He chuckled sardonically, a fan of my derisive wit, no matter how personally derogatory. “I don’t know how you’re paying for the tour and I don’t fucking care, Hughie. I want my fifteen grand, or I’m either going to bail, or when I get to Wellington I’m going to go on the news and tell them what a crook you are, then come over to your house and strangle you to death!”
“You realize that was my ex-wife your mate Jack had sex with?”
“I didn’t know, and I don’t care, Hughie. The thought repulses me. I hope she was finally able to enjoy climaxing for the first time in her miserable life.”
“I’ll ignore that.”
“Let’s get off the despicable night that shouldn’t have happened. I want that fifteen grand, Hughie.”
“The Cougars are demanding a refund because you and Jack cut out early.”
“Oh, bullshit. And if they are, I’m positive you’ll stiff them the way you stiffed me on this camper-van bait-and-switch nightmare.”
“You don’t like the camper van?”
“Lovely, Hughie. In this arctic weather?!”
“We’ll work out a split if the Cougars pay.”
“I know they paid because of the way that Eileen harridan came after me.”
“We’ll split it,” he tacitly admitted his lie.
“This is not a negotiation. I’m the one who had to eat a penis pâté.”
“A what?”
“You’d better wire the fifteen K into my account, or I’m going to snap.”
“Looks like you already did.”
“That was an appetizer, Hughie.” I ended the phone call, seething.
Hana, eavesdropping, returned to the drawing room and said, “Everything okay?”
“No, nothing is okay. Let’s go meet some shattered winemakers living out of their campers in where?”
“Kaikōura.”
“Kaikōura. Did you ever see that film Krakatoa, East of Java?”
“I heard about it.”
“It’s actually west of Java.”
“Oh.”
“That’s how fucked up the entertainment business is.” Where was Max? I needed Max!
We packed up and drove out of Pegasus Bay. Hana led us north on Highway 1 to Kaikōura. The walkie-talkies were back on and crackling with life, and relations had seminormalized, despite the fractious call with Hughie, despite the portent of Amanda cutting us off at the pass. This time Hana didn’t race ahead and kept us firmly in her rearview mirror, not trusting my twitching finger on the walkie power-off button. Jack had reassumed the driving duties—his eighteen-wheeler experience coming in handy as buffeting winds battered us now that we were in an open area unprotected by mountains. He drove the Beast like a pro. I held Max in my lap and stroked him repeatedly, bent over so Jack couldn’t hear, and whispered in his ear I love you, little guy, I love you. Thank God for Max because the past week had been emotionally harrowing.
Jack’s cell, mounted on the dash tray, was incandescent with text messages, all of which he noted with a darting left eye, none of which he responded to.
We crossed the Jed River and noticed a billboard advertising what looked like a place to stop, stretch, eat a goat pie, and pee, preferably not in a crisper drawer.
“We need to pull over and you need to take the helm,” Jack said in a solemn tone, eyes glued on the red badge on his Messages app, now alarmingly in the triple digits.
I radioed Hana about needing to stop, and her voice snapped back over the walkie with a better idea than the one advertised on the billboard. “Number Eight Café. Follow me.”
A few miles later we angled off the road into a dirt-and-gravel driveway at Number Eight Café, a white, wood-framed structure in the comatose town of Cheviot. Charcoal-gray skies, whorling menacingly and painting an empyreal apocalypse, threatened more rain but had held off so far. As we climbed out of the camper van and stretched, we could make out snowcapped mountains to the west. Nowhere in New Zealand was farther than seventy-five miles from an ocean, or a short drive from a mountain range or folds of green drapery unfurling from hilltops and acned with dun-white sheep. Its sublimity was a stark contrast to my agonistic self.
We found a table at Number Eight Café without any trouble. It was winter and the tourists hadn’t poured in yet, and who would be as harebrained as Jack and me to be driving in a camper van on the South Island in the middle of July anyway? As Hana and I perused our menus, I could make out Jack through the café’s windows, phone pressed to one ear, pacing back and forth, occasionally stopping to explain the inexplicable with an expressive face and windmilling of arms.
“Everything okay with Jack?” Hana asked.
“I don’t know. He’s a chaotic guy.” I didn’t want to get into Jack’s complicated romantic entanglement with Amanda. She would have to be apprised of the distinction between an inveterate dog like Jack and a serial monogamist like me, and neither thumbnail sounded flattering in the inchoation of an explanation, so I chose brevity.
“Female problems?” she ventured.
“He’s had female problems all his life.”
“What about you?”
“Half my life. Mostly issues with my mother. Headshrinker said I turned to art because I wasn’t breastfed.”
Hana chuckled in spite of herself.
I pretended to study my menu, but Hughie’s ripping me off still had me ragingly pissed.
“What brought you to Aotearoa New Zealand?” Hana asked ingenuously. “I mean, I know you had a teaching gig, but why did you stay on?”
I stared at my menu and all the items went out of focus. “I needed to get out of LA. It’s a miserable place, Hana. Decent people move there, but the ones who remain are the ones who turned savage, ruthless, pachydermic—thick skinned—and it eats away at your sense of morality and what brought you there in the first place.”
“What did?”
“To write. To make movies. But the process sours you, corrodes you from inside until one day you wake up sucking the marrow of your own brain hoping this time, this project, will be the ticket out.”
“To what?”
“Sanity.” I looked up from my menu. “The pure pleasure of making art.”
“Why New Zealand?”
“It was as far away as I could imagine, but of course the internet follows you like a mongrel dog. As a writer, I couldn’t get arrested in the US. Unless you count the IRS—” Hana laughed; I was on a roll. “Hughie emailed me out of the blue, one thing led to another, the teaching job in Dunedin, the chance to write a book for Hughie and his fledgling imprint. So, on broken wings, I flew over. Fell in love with Central Otago, less so teaching creative writing. Cashed out all my few retirement accounts and splurged on a half hectare of my all-time favorite grape, Pinot, and thought I would hang it up, write the book you’re promoting, pull down the shade. The End. And then I met someone, and she introduced me to the possibility of love again. But with love comes responsibilities, obligations, reciprocities, relationship shit I’m lacking in—ex-wife told me I wasn’t raised right.” I paused, narrowed my eyes, and looked off to a world gone out of focus again. “Then I got an email a week ago. And that changed everything.”
Hana telescoped her head forward. “What email?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to go into it, Hana. I don’t know you well enough.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I trust you.” I raised a flattened hand to my chin. “Up to here.”
“Okay.” She let it go and pointed at my menu. “Do you want to order?”
“Yeah, let’s.” I told Hana what I wanted, and she crossed the café to the counter to place the order.
A minute later she returned to the table and stood over me with a mortified look. “Do you have any cash?”
“What?”
“The corporate card’s been declined,” she said.
Disgusted, but not surprised, I blew air out my nose and reached back for my wallet and produced a hundred New Zealand dollars. “Tell Hughie to take some of that fifteen grand and fuel up his card,” I scoffed.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the money. “I will. He said it should be back up and working by tomorrow.”
“Right. Along with the delinquent second half of the advance.”
Hana returned to the counter with my cash. Now I was not only the monkey on the leash, the freak in the carny act, I was funding my own humiliating book tour.
Shaking off the cold, Jack blustered inside and wearily, noisily plopped down in a chair across from me. He shook his head with an accompanying sigh and raked a hand through his tangled mane of graying hair, the faded TV actor, without makeup and pep pills, in visible decline.
When Hana returned, I held up a hand to her to give Jack and me a moment, and she nodded assent, drifted off, instinctively reaching for her world microcosmically contained in her phone.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Amanda’s pissed off.”
“What’s the story?”
“That fucking video that Russian uploaded. Tagged me. Everyone saw it, Miles,” Jack said in an aggrieved voice, and I knew he wasn’t acting.
“That doesn’t mean you were present,” I said.
Jack smirked. “She fucking fingerprint ID’d me while I was sleeping and has been inside my phone all this time.” He closed both hands over his face like a bivalve. “She read some of our texts. I wasn’t straight up with her about the book tour, and now with the Christchurch debacle . . .”
“What did you tell her?”
“She’s got me geo-located, Miles. The truth. Sans Olivia. She said if she couldn’t join us she’s dumping me into the Tasman.” Jack leaned forward on both elbows. “I can’t lose her, Miles.”
“Oh, Jesus. With all the shit we have going on, you’re going to let her join us? Jack!”
“I know,” he said, “I know. I’m thinking it through. I’m trying to talk her down. I mean, I would blow it off, but the Dan O’Neill connection for your book option is hanging in the balance. She’ll scuttle that, too.” He looked off, a tongue pouching out one cheek. “And she got me the Washed-Up Celebrities gig, as you know. It was her idea. I can’t fuck this up. She’s all I’ve got between the comfort of Byron Bay and tent city in Venice.”
“But of course, you’re, as usual, doing everything you can to fuck it up.”
“No one could have predicted last night. Seismically off the charts.”
“No. That is true. We’re in a different arena, Jackson. That shit that went down in the Santa Ynez Valley a decade-plus ago couldn’t have happened today.”
Jack smiled wryly. “I miss those days.” He looked off. “Plus, she’s eager to start doing the documentary.”
“What?!”
“To calm her down, I said she could do the documentary of this tour, the one your publisher wanted to fund, the one Amanda got TV One excited about.”
“I can’t believe all this shit has been going on behind my back.”
“It’s going to be great publicity for you, Miles.”
“Yeah, but with Amanda in tow?”
Jack opened his arms up in resignation. “She’s going to come and make my life hell. Let’s let her do the doc, and if it’s awful, I’ll figure a way out of it.”
I dropped my eyes to the table. “Can’t we put that on hold? Do we need to document this new ignominy?”
Jack scratched his unshaven face. There were things he wasn’t telling me. He, Hughie, and now Amanda had all been scheming behind my back. As usual, I felt pinched between two realities: mine and someone else’s. There was never any purity in the work itself. There was always someone else. Fucking it up. “Not to dampen the romance of your bachelor trip nostalgia,” I said, “but I was informed by Hana the corporate card just got declined.”
“What?” Jack said, dropping his cradling hands from his head.
“It’ll be back online tomorrow, Hughie promised.”
“Fucking asshole. He’s got fifteen grand of your coin burning a hole in his wallet.”
“Don’t remind me. If it isn’t back on by tomorrow, his publishing house goes up in flames. He may have missed a payment.”
“The guy’s broke, Miles. He used you. He used your celebrity. You should let me do your deals. Your agent is a bloodsucking loser.”
Hana returned to the table with our order number mounted in a little silver clip holder. I nodded for her to join us. She corkscrewed into a chair next to Jack, directly across from me.
“I got you steak and fries,” she said to Jack.
“Thank you, Hana. I hope it doesn’t break the bank.”
“You okay? You look aggie.”
“I’m okay and I’m not okay, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, laughing.
The three of us had rallied in the cauldron of obloquy. I found myself, yet again, facing the treacherous world of money, corruption, false promises, dreams as vanishing as rainbows.
Our lunch orders arrived in a commotion of plates. Famished, we dug in. Hana ate ravenously, as if she hadn’t had breakfast or was worried the corporate card wasn’t going to come back online and was trying to pack in the calories in preparation for even leaner times in her maiden voyage masquerading as a publicist. Jack and I each had a beer to better shoulder our different burdens.
Glancing over the schedule, I said to Hana, “Kaikōura Quake Book Club?”
“That’s right. Also known as ‘the Long Drop Book Club.’ Esses is pouring.”
“Esses. What’s their specialty?”
“Bubbles.”
“Oh no,” said Jack. “Not more bubbles. My head’s still killing me.”
The epicenter of a massive 7.8 earthquake had dealt seaside Kaikōura a tremendous blow a few years before the pandemic. Roads buckled. Houses and buildings pancaked and were rendered uninhabitable. Then the pandemic hit, New Zealand shut down, and local businesses were doubly, trebly, hammered. Kaikōura collapsed into a ghost town. Relief trickled in from the government, but many of the residents were still living in makeshift shelters: tents, campers, partially demolished houses roofed with plastic tarps . . . Hana explained all this to a dismayed Jack and me, who both feared this as our future, the odd couple, once marginally famous, now unsheltered, begging for alms from those who bore dim memories of our exploits in a movie that was barely a glimmer in the youths’ cinematic memory.
I drove the short distance from Number Eight Café to Kaikōura, following Hana in her coughing and ailing Subaru. Max was parked on the passenger seat, head tilted up over the dash, darting glances this way and that at the surrounding countryside. He appeared to be getting acclimatized to being on the road. Jack was slouched in the back working his phone with propitiatory texts to Amanda. When it rang and he picked up, over the growl of the diesel engine, I made out snippets of conversation. “Look, honey, nothing happened. Nothing, okay?” “I do love you, and I do want this to work.” “I know when Miles and I get together things can get nutty, but he’s matured.” I laughed and shook my head. “Nothing happened! Okay?” “Yes, of course, we want you to direct this documentary.”
I tuned out, petted Max with my left hand, let my mind “have a wander,” as Kiwis liked to say. Ella’s beautiful apparition materialized wraithlike into the foreground. If I had told her why I was returning to California, would she have had more compassion for my plight? But I couldn’t tell her. It was too personal, too earth-shattering. It would raise too many questions. Jack, okay. He took it in stride. He probably had a few he didn’t know about! Even I had yet to fully process the unwelcome news. I knew it was why I was once again adrift on the River Styx, the glorious wines of New Zealand providing an ameliorant, if ephemerally, as wine is wont to do. New Zealand had been my home for two blissful years. I wrote a book I had wanted to write, damn the attention-deficit readers, damn the political correctness, to hell with money and all the rest. But my past had surreally caught up with me. The bad drinking years. The Hollywood years. The celebrity years. I had needed the isolation and distance New Zealand vouchsafed me, but California was unwittingly pulling me back. I didn’t have to go; I had to go.
Aotearoa New Zealand can fool you. Just when some piker publisher reneges on his promises, prevaricating to you like any motherfucking, scumbag, pathologically lying Hollywood producer would do without compunctions, you gaze out on the natural beauty of this extraordinary country and it ushers in a tsunami of absolution. One feels fortunate to be here. Even as the planet implodes—relentless heat waves, flash floods, droughts, Santa Ana wind-whipped conflagrations, island-obliterating hurricanes, revolutions—you deludingly hope that here, in New Zealand, the country down under will be spared all eco-calamities, all revolutions sprung from mass poverty and the horrible dictatorships that arise out of earth’s ills. There’ll be water. The hillsides are dotted with tasty lambs. Surely, vegetables are ripening somewhere. And if all seems hopeless, just pull up to Kaikōura Beach and drink in the resplendent coastline. As we neared the destroyed city, sea lions lounged on lichen-slick rocks. Waves clapped politely at the rocky shore. You would never think an earthquake had shaken this place to a gravesite of rubble and rendered its inhabitants in a gallimaufry of destitution.
Following Hana, we turned in to a makeshift seaside campground. A cluster of campers and tents were respectively positioned and pitched in a circle, a modern-day wagon train. A bonfire was roaring in a makeshift pit fashioned of bricks. Covering it was an iron grill, through which the flames flicked fiery tongues at the sky. Twilight was upon us when we arrived, and the ocean was touched with a magenta hue painted from the fading rays of the sun’s brush. The snowcapped mountains to the west shone incandescent against the violet spectrum of the empyrean’s nothingness. The highest peak is named Tapuae-o-Uenuku or, as Hana translated as we climbed out of the camper van and I stared up at its majestic height, “the footprint of the rainbow.”
“The footprint of the rainbow,” I repeated. “That’s beautiful.” I pointed it out to Jack. “Footprint of the rainbow,” I said to him.
“What?” he said.
“That mountain. That’s its name. We don’t have names like that in America. Mount Shasta. Fucking soda pop.”
Jack read a text and a smile brightened his face. “I think I’ve got it sorted out, Miles.”
“Great, Jack, because I can’t lose you. I don’t think I can drive the Beast by myself. Certainly not alone with Max.”
Jack, who seemed in a suddenly ebullient mood, clapped me on the back. “The ship is righted.” I was afraid to ask him what rapprochement with Amanda he had brokered for fear I would have to have a heart-to-heart with Hana about the documentary. She’d had a rough night, too, and I didn’t want to spring anything new on her.
“Ready for the Long Drop Book Club with Esses House of Bubbles pouring?” Hana said, a smile emblazoning her face.
“We are ready for more bubbles,” said Jack, putting his phone away in a back pocket and clapping his hands.
“What’s the etymology of the Long Drop Book Club?” I asked Hana.
“Ask them,” she said, tittering, as if she knew but didn’t want to spoil its punch line.
Upon our arrival, from the camper vans, trailers, and tents emptied a motley crew of North Canterbury–region winemakers. They ranged in age from twenties to seventies and rose out of the murky light like refugees from a civilization that had gone nearly extinct. The hosts tonight were Mel and Aaron Skinner and their Esses House of Bubbles, a minuscule winery that only produced sparkling wines. Mel, a woman, was in a wacky sartorial getup complemented with colorful oversized eyewear. Her diffident husband, Aaron, looked like an accountant with his serious countenance but in reality was an esteemed viticulturist of the region. After the two back-to-back temblors that foundered them, literally and figuratively, to the ground, they had formed the Long Drop Book Club because, as they noted on their Facebook page, they wanted to reconnect with something real, something tangible, something palpable; they wanted to reestablish a sense of community on the destroyed ruins of Kaikōura, and a book club afforded them a cultural reason to assemble over a mutual ambition to reacquaint one another with the Luddite pleasures of reading and conversation, a return to the slow, a return to the days before the internet, which, after the earthquake, seemed to capriciously ebb and flow here in Kaikōura. It was a refreshing mission statement.
We gathered in canvas-upholstered fold-up beach chairs in a circle around the leaping bonfire. Giant crawfish one of the Long Drop members had trapped in the ocean lapping mere feet away from where we were assembled were speared on skewers and positioned over the fire, juices sizzling and hissing over the lava-red embers. They all had a copy of my A Year of Pure Feeling clutched in their hands and were eager to ask me questions. After the Cougars of Christchurch, this sedate clambake-style affair was a welcome respite.
“How long did it take you to write it?” one of them queried, silhouetted through the fire, her face obscured.
“It’s hard to say,” I said reflectively. “Do you count the years I suffered the ideation process or just the months I spent actually typing on my laptop?” I paused. “Or the years my ex-wife verbally abused me?”
Chortling laughter crisscrossed over the flames among the members.
Mel deftly uncorked a bottle of her Millésime 2016 Brut Cuvée, a stunning blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir that had spent five years maturing on the lees.
“How can you afford, with all this devastation, to keep a wine that long in bottle?” I asked, after she had introduced the sparkling wine.
Mel and Aaron looked at me with surprise. “That’s how we make it,” she said.
“Nothing changes for us,” chimed in Aaron.
“Miles?” said a woman with a raised hand. “Do you think you’ll write another one? I’ve read interviews with you where you bemoan the death of literature.” She held up my book with a talismanic reverence. “We here in Kaikōura still believe in the written word.”
“That’s gratifying to hear. I don’t know,” I said, sipping the sublime champagne here, for me, at the end of the world, its inhabitants housed in temporary shelters, the disembodied sea lions plangently barking, pelicans gliding feet above the surface of the ocean in a primeval scene out of another epoch where humans had yet to plunder and rape the planet of its profuse resources and disrupt its harmonious natural state. “Novels have only been with us for five hundred years, movies for only a hundred. Who’s to say what will last, what has to last? If no one reads, then my question to you is, does a book exist?”
Everyone looked at one another, baffled by my words. Coming from an author, I guess they expected a less pessimistic prognosis of literature’s future. Crawfish were dipped in gravy boats of herb-infused butter. I noticed the tide flooding in and imagined it drowning a scholar’s study lined floor to ceiling with books and could see the tomes floating in an aqueous room in an underwater city aswarm with fish and wraithlike ghouls of a doomed civilization.
“I mean, of course they exist, in a repository, like a relic, but are they actually alive if no one reads anymore?” I challenged them.
“If no one reads anymore,” said the woman who had asked the question, “then what is the hope for humanity?”
I pondered her profundity, then asked, “Why do you call yourself the Long Drop Book Club?”
A collective snicker met my cold ears. Aaron explained: “A lot of us don’t have working toilets, so when we have to—you know—we go to this shed”—he pointed—“and sit on a hole and take a long drop.” His explanation detonated another gust of laughter.
I stood. “And where would I, famous author, be introduced to the long drop? We have a toilet in our camper van, but Jack and I are afraid to use it for fear it’ll back up and we’ll be stuck driving in a sanitation vehicle.”
Laughing, Aaron gestured somewhere beyond the perimeter of the campsite, and I took off on foot in the direction of a crude wood-framed structure that faced the ocean, an astonishing view to accompany a defecation. The door swung open on rusty hinges. I perched myself over the dark hole of human waste, fixed my gaze on the incoming swells, and waited for relief. There was something utterly uncomplicated, so elemental in the act, I wondered why we didn’t vacate our bowels like this more often. Ideas flooded me. I pondered again the email from Milena that had upended my world. Darker thoughts drifted to Ella and how much I missed her and whether there was hope we’d ever get back together again. Bleaker memories intruded as I propped my head in my hands, elbows on thighs, and waited for “the long drop” to come, the humor of the double entendre not escaping me. I needed the evacuation of my bowels as much as I needed some answers to my existential questions. The only thing missing was Rodin’s The Thinker perched on the hole next to me, chin on hand, staring perplexedly at the world, immortalized in marble. Would that be me one day, sitting on this wooden plank, pants crumpled to my ankles, immortalized by the Kiwis as the writer who came here and was best remembered for taking a long drop?
I let go, waited a seeming eternity before I heard an echoic splash. I imagined it passing through the earth’s core and landing on Hollywood, and that produced a laugh. I wiped myself with the provided roll, pulled up my jeans, then returned to the book club.
We camped on the beach in a prime location. Standing outside the camper van, Hana explained to me, holding Max while Jack snored away on the upper bunk, she was going to sleep in her car because she had consumed too much champagne to drive into Kaikōura and grab a motel. I didn’t believe that was the reason. The bum corporate card was the culprit, but she was too proud, too Kiwi, to admit it.
“I’ll pay for a hotel, Hana,” I offered.
“No, that’s okay,” she said, puffing on a joint, relaxing after another long day on the road. “It’s all good.”
“It was a wonderful night tonight,” I said as we sat on our haunches at the shore’s edge, a bottle of Madame Sec 2012 Vintage Sec Cuvée, a sparkler that had spent an extraordinary nine years on the lees before Esses released it, planted in the sand between us.
“I’m glad you liked it.”
“They asked intelligent questions.”
“They did, yeah,” she said, sipping the champagne.
“And they had all indisputably read my book. Which almost brought tears to my eyes.”
“What else are they going to do in their campers?” she said.
“Good point. It sounded like they actually liked it.”
“They did. You write with a forthrightness they can relate to.” She turned to me with a sheepish grin. “You got a good review in the New Zealand Herald yesterday,” she said. She produced her phone and started swiping with her index finger. “Want me to read it to you?”
“No,” I said, fashioning a cross with my arms to hide my eyes. “When I’m done with a book, I’m done. I don’t want to know anything about it.”
“Are you sure? It’s super positive.”
“It’s been such a perfect evening, let’s not spoil it with anything positive.”
She laughed. “You’re a funny guy, Miles.”
“Without humor, I would be dead. With humor, I can handle anything.”
“Yeah.” She sipped her flute of champagne. “Great bubbly,” she commented.
“Ethereal.”
She turned to me with her large brown eyes and locked them on me. “What’s in California you might have to go back?” I looked away. “Jack said something about ending the tour with you flying back.”
“Can’t keep a secret with that guy.” I rolled my tongue over my upper teeth and didn’t say anything in reply. “I don’t want to go into it, Hana.” She looked away. A silence descended. Knee-high waves expired at the shore’s edge, each its own spuming death.
After a moment, Hana produced a small jar from her handbag and passed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“It’s bee pollen. Māori.”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
She pulled her upper lip into her mouth and exhaled through her nostrils. “I was talking to Jack the other night and asking him how you were doing, and he . . . uh . . . told me you were having a little problem down there.” She gestured to my crotch.
“I don’t have performance issues, Hana. Yet.”
Her face colored and she stifled a laugh. “No, silly.” She paused for seeming dramatic effect. “Your tumor.”
“Jack told you that?”
She shrugged. “Try the bee pollen. It’s curative.”
“Bee pollen is no match for the Big C.”