by Kate Braverman

Zoë and Clarissa meet at irregular intervals, always at the Santa Monica Pier. This is the neutral zone. Here it is the landscape of perpetual unmolested adolescence. The carousel spins in its predictable orbit and the original neon alphabet does not deviate. It is before proportion, heartbreak and mortality. It’s a region where coherence is not required, one floats between the dead and gravity is intermittent. After all, Los Angeles was once called the city of dream.

“I’m here,” Zoë says from her cell phone.

“At the pier?” Clarissa asks.

“Little blue waves at my feet. Corn dogs that give you cancer. Old men catching bonito with so much mercury they explode as they reel them in,” Zoë notes.

“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”

Zoë closes her phone and turns it off. She has no interest in how Clarissa will clear her day. Who will be cancelled or stranded, left in limbo at a conference table or restaurant, abandoned on a tennis court or a ballet rehearsal studio. Children will not have their usual play dates and soccer practices today. And Clarissa won’t sign any documents, either. No callbacks, a medical emergency, Clarissa will inform her staff, and she is not available. Then the ordinary dissolves.

Zoë and Clarissa meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its obligatory narrative of consensual commitments and collectively unassailable version of behavior has proved too intimate and restrictive for them. They recognized this and the long season of blame is behind them. Clarissa didn’t attend Zoë’s only baby shower, even though it was half a mile from her house and a car had been arranged. Zoë didn’t formally recognize the birth of any of Clarissa’s children. She didn’t even meet the youngest son, Guthrie, until he was ten and then only by accident. There have been husbands, dead or divorced, known only by anecdote or photograph. Houses never seen. Entire strata of their lives are less than footnotes. There were years when they did not even know one another’s addresses or current last names. Decades when they could have been driftwood to one another, vessels lost at sea. A drowned stranger, perhaps, why bother?

“The blaming is becoming tedious,” Zoë recognized once.

It was a mid-thirties birthday. It was November on the Santa Monica Pier. It was bluer than Maui. She was thinking about Hawaii, where she had lived two years without electricity in a shack on a nameless river of red orchids in the jungle near Hana. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably didn’t know there were seasons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening, and the way the mosquitoes went into temporary remission. In the autumn seasons in Maui, you could envision Philadelphia and Dallas again. You could remember streets, houses, lawns. There were faces with mouths and you could hear what they were saying. People told you where they were born, the names of their parents.

“Let’s just dismantle the past,” Clarissa had offered. “We’ll go post-modern.”

“Let’s go further,” Zoë suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just a movement of light from one radiance to another.”

Zoë was proposing that they reject linearity entirely. They could cut out the barbed wire completely. Bite it off with their teeth. Then there would only be a sequence of volcanoes and blood-encrusted poppies floating like prayer offerings in the toxic bay.

“Discreet and unpredictable meetings. We’ll communicate by blow torch,” Clarissa had been enthusiastic. They had shaken hands. They had agreed.

There has been a process of accommodation and evolution. They have developed an interaction of sporadic moments of illumination and revelation in altitudes so high, Clarissa once met her with a matched set of oxygen masks. They were movie set props and they rode the carousel wearing them. Their reunions are random events of spectacular voltage. Zoë sent Clarissa an asbestos jacket one fourth of July. Yes, they have failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving, the predictable packages and bouquets with ribbons the calendar dictates. They have divested themselves of the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret. The human perimeters are razor thin wire strung in the background, almost invisible, and they have agreed to render them irrelevant.

Now Zoë sees Clarissa. Clarissa, exiting a black Mercedes Benz, wearing her usual work clothing, aerobics pants and sweat shirt, Gucci sunglasses and baseball cap. It’s the camouflaged movie star look that makes you appear to be someone important attempting to be incognito. Clarissa is carrying not a gym bag, of course, but a Chanel purse with leather quilting and gold braid handles. Still, it’s the acceptable uniform the narcissistic personality disorder necessitates. Clarissa hasn’t crossed over the line. Not yet.

They kiss on each cheek. “You forgot my birthday,” Clarissa begins.

“I didn’t sign on as a soccer Mom. I don’t decorate for holidays. I don’t bake or send thank you cards. I don’t answer the phone. I throw away personal mail. You know this,” Zoë reminds her.

“Don’t you go to bed before Thanksgiving and not get up until after Valentine’s Day?” Clarissa wasn’t asking a question.

“That was my mother,” Zoë said. “I’ve learned to simply leave the country at appropriate intervals.”

Actually, Zoë was fond of Christmas in Southeast Asia. The ornately decorated pine trees in the air-conditioned hotel lobbies like vestiges from another planet. The bamboo balconies draped in red velvets, antique brocades and holly wreaths. More fetishes. And the Christmas carols rendered in versions so mangled by distance and erroneous translation that they became almost tolerable. Outside, rivers smelled of rotting vegetables and petrol. The air was layers of decaying prayers that made her think of a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as metal but as streams of origami. In Bangkok, in December, it was 98 degrees.

“Let’s just be here, now,” Clarissa offers. Her mouth glistens with a red lipstick that seems to have small stars encrusted within it. There are implications in the sheen that Zoë doesn’t want to consider.

The pier is almost deserted. It’s mid-day, mid-week in an undifferentiated season. It is another windswept November day. They walk hand in hand down the pier past occasional immigrant fishing men and assorted teenagers toward the ocean. There is a café at the edge of the pier where they usually have coffee. Clarissa seems speciously conciliatory.

“I want to formalize our alliance,” Zoë said suddenly. This year she will be forty.

“Do you want to get married?” Clarissa smiled. Zoë can’t remember Clarissa’s current marital status.

“I want a document with terms, precise specifications,” Zoë realizes.

“Contracts are worthless,” Clarissa points out. “They’re like a wish list for Santa.” She is a lawyer. She knows.

“We could become cousins,” Zoë suggests.

This appeals to her. Cousins evoked a blood connection that might both substantiate and obviate certain complexities, the ebbs and flows, droughts and monsoons of their relationship. Such a device would highlight and justify their erratic and pathologically intense conjunction.

“I could draw up the papers.” Clarissa seems expansive. “But adoption is superior.”

They have passed the tourist arcades and souvenir stands with the authorized images of Los Angeles that bare no resemblance to the actual landscape and reached the café. They might drink coffee, perhaps with Dexedrine. They might get drunk on something festive, like White Russians or champagne. Since Zoë is technically in AA, she decides to let Clarissa set the tenor. Clarissa orders Bloody Marys. From a caloric standpoint, it is certainly the most plausible choice.

“I’ve missed you like a first love,” Clarissa reveals.

“I was your first love,” Zoë reminds her. “And you mine.”

They lean across the faux wood table etched with knife gouged gang insignias and the names of rock bands and kiss again. They are both manic this autumn day. Zoë and Clarissa share numerous similar personality disorders. They are both bi-polar 2 with many borderline features. Substance abuse has been a persistent irritant. Incest lingers. Recently, they have both been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

However, on this particular day, sun has turned the bay purple. To articulate such facets, to know and chart them feels like a spasm of thunder inside her, a tiny birth the size of a violet’s mouth. If she managed to extract this entity from her body, she could give it to Clarissa like an infant.

Zoë looks into her almost cousin’s eyes. Even through the dark sunglasses, they are inordinately bright. Zoë senses that she is also glowing. Her eyes feel like brass corridors reflecting fluorescent light. They are both candles today, unusually in sync, radiant with clarity and energy. She notices Clarissa is wearing a silk scarf, a vivid purple that might be implying motion. It seems to have waves within it.

“Do you like it?” Clarissa asks. “Hermes. Take it. I just stole it.”

“You still shoplift?” Zoë takes the scarf. It feels moist and sanctified. It’s like an embrace around her neck.

“It’s an attitude, like guerrilla warfare,” Clarissa explains. They’ve finished their second round of drinks. “Mental discipline. You put it on and keep walking. You know you’ve had it for years. You bought it on the Champs Elysées. It was raining. You remember the details absolutely. No one could question you. And no one does. Let’s ride the Ferris wheel.”

The Ferris wheel is closed. Clarissa makes a cell phone call and a man appears. She produces a hundred dollar bill. They wait for the right seats, choosing a recently painted red one, and ride for half an hour. Clarissa vomits twice. Zoë asks if she is OK.

“I understand how children discover bulimia,” Clarissa says, excited. “It’s an accidental miracle.” She borrows back the purple scarf to wipe her mouth.

“Maybe you can get retroactive psychiatric insight points,” Zoë says. Despite the gym suit camouflage, it’s obvious Clarissa has gained weight. But even they have rules. Weight is a forbidden topic. The meet on neutral ground, but there are still no fly zones and areas of fragmentation bombs. Land mines. Shrapnel is a constant possibility.

“If a contract is insufficient, what can we do?” Zoë wonders.

Clarissa has contaminated the scarf, but Zoë still wants it back. She thinks, suddenly, of flower bouquets and their inadequacy. The floral arrangements of her life have been too much and not enough. The petals stained. They were debris.

“We could get a tattoo,” Clarissa proposes. “Our names together in a heart.”

They are standing on the pier where the Ferris wheel is no longer operating. Gone are the circles they inscribed in the too blue air. She felt her body carving the afternoon as they whirled and spun, engraving trails of cobalt like marks made by fins. Somewhere they were floating into a river winding down to a bay, more invisible origami.

“A tattoo?” Zoë repeats, delighted. “Won’t it be painful and dangerous? The possibility of AIDS and infection?”

“But you love needles,” Clarissa seems annoyed. “You’re a professional junky.”

“I’m in remission,” Zoë said quickly, feeling unexpectedly defensive.

In truth, during one particularly virulent Ferris wheel rotation, she had begun to think about a drug dealer she had known on the Venice Canals. It was walking distance, over wooden bridges above stalled water green with slime and duck excrement. She knew the house. She knew the grain in every wooden floorboard and the way sunset displayed itself through each glass pane in every room. That was information she would be buried with.

“You always relapse,” Clarissa said. It was just an observation, like stating an historical date or a chemical formula. “And don’t you already have AIDS?”

Zoë is shocked. She stares at Clarissa. Even with the Gucci sunglasses, there is a distinct softening around the chin, a loss of definition in her cheeks. “No, dear cousin. I have hepatitis C. A symptomatic. And you need to get your face done.”

“What part?” Clarissa is concerned. They are walking down the pier to a tattoo parlor past shops of plaster statues, saints and children, dwarves and frogs designed to be painted. Women will purchase and paint these objects and consider themselves artists.

“What part?” Zoë said. “It isn’t a fucking contract. It’s a composition. Just give the guy a blank check. And don’t use a Jewish surgeon. You’ll end up looking like everybody else. I found an Italian in Pittsburgh.”

“I did notice you finally got your father off your face,” Clarissa said.

“Well, the police wouldn’t do it,” Zoë remembers. “And Mommy was so busy.”

There are waves in the bay now. The bay is a fluid representation of fall. It’s always in transition. It’s a form of treachery. All fluid bodies are autumnal and promise betrayal. That’s what those leaves changing mean, the reds and ochre, the yellows like lanterns. It’s about packing and disappearing. It’s a season for divorce. That’s the fundamental imperative the wind is hinting at. It’s the time of the severing. That’s the obvious subtext. And it occurs to Zoë that her elation could dissipate. Emotions have their own seasons, inexplicable currents and lightning storms.

Zoë follows Clarissa into the tattoo parlor. “Let’s rock,” Clarissa says. “Lock and load.”

The Eagles are playing. It’s Hotel California, of course. A tanned man with a blond ponytail who looks like he might be a yoga instructor displays his wares. Dragons. Butterflies. Demons. Flowers. Guitars. Spiders. Zoë vaguely remembers a sequence of negotiations that included the procurement on a fifth of vodka, tomato juice, and a long argument with Clarissa about the choice of a script. Eventually they selected a gothic font. At one point, she may have passed out.

Zoë realizes they are standing in an arcade. It’s two hours and six Bloody Marys later. They have gauze and adhesive tape on their shoulders where their names have been carved into the flesh of their left upper arms in an identical black lettering they had finally agreed upon. She remembers they decided to leave the surrounding heart in red ink for their next meeting. Now they are surrounded by banks of garish video games, hip-hop music blasts from speakers in the ceilings and floors. Boys who all look part Asian or Mexican are armed with laser levers and plastic machine guns. This is not the global village she once envisioned.

There is an automatic photographic booth on the far side of the arcade. Four shots. Zoë remembers when it cost a quarter. Now it takes dollars. This photographic session is a ritual element in each of their meetings. Then they cut the strip in half, dividing it in two. Zoë throws her away. She suspects Clarissa does the same.

The photographs are necessary. Zoë understands that they can only see one another by laminated representations. It would be too intimate if they could actually perceive one another without artificial mediation. They communicate by email and fax, newspaper clippings and photographs. The telephone is unbearable. They only use it to arrange an immanent unplanned meeting.

“Marvin’s jowls are definitely gone,” Clarissa is studying the thin strip of four facial shots. “You have cheekbones. Are those implants? Jesus. You’re gorgeous. You never looked this good, not at sixteen, even. Cosmetic surgery already.”

“We’re approaching forty,” Zoë is bewildered. Certainly Clarissa knew the necessity of proactive facial procedures. This is Los Angeles. Was Clarissa in denial? Were her medications interfering with her functioning on so obvious and primitive a level?

“I thought you had to wait as long as possible.” Clarissa said. Her words are slurred.

“After you psychologically remove the slap across the face, and its more damaging verbal resonances.” Zoë began.

“And that takes decades and costs what? A quarter of a million?” Clarissa is still staring at the strip of photographs.

“Then the next step is actual surgical removal. It’s a natural progression. It’s how to treat emotional cancer. Here, keep them,” Zoe said. “Get some reference points.”

They sit on a bench on the south side of the pier where the sun is tamed and restrained. The bay is becoming agitated. The bay reminds Zoe of women in autumn in a medical imaging office. First the locker, the paper bathrobes, then the mammogram. Then the stasis before the results. Yes, the bay was waiting for a biopsy.

“Remember how we walked here? What were we? Eleven, twelve?” Clarissa asks. Her mood also seems to be shifting. Of course, they’re both still drunk.

Zoë and Clarissa, gauze and bandages on their shoulders, sit on the bench holding hands. Zoë is thinking memory is in flux. It mutates with time and accumulation. There’s a give, the way the cliffs above the Pacific Coast Highway shed themselves across decades. In a region of bamboo and petals there are always too few artifacts. The sea breeze mixes night blooming jasmine, citrus and salt in the air like tiny bullets.

She came to Los Angeles when she was seven. Her father, Marvin, had terminal cancer. Her mother was mentally ill. They were bankrupt. Her childhood was cataclysmic, defined by poverty and isolation. Los Angeles, the destination city, capital of film and media did not yet exist. LA was where you went after the divorce and scandal. It was an internal exile, a gulag. There was nothing glamorous about it. You arrived from calamity, lured by the promise of winter in permanent remission where you could die with a minimal heating bill. Take a breath of rancid lemon and don’t linger. When Zoë considers her childhood, it is the yellow of trailer park kitchen cabinets and the almost invisible poisons that leak from the pores of father’s undergoing chemotherapy. The greatest fear was to linger at the edges of death too long. They had a final punctuation for that. The iron lung.

“They hadn’t invented a vocabulary for us yet,” Clarissa says to the waves. “Dysfunctional families. Latchkey children. Remember when I lost my key? What my father did? Jerry tied me up in the carport in pajamas for a week.”

“I brought you a canteen with orange juice. And little cherry pies in wax paper,” Zoë recalls. “And a bottle of vitamins. A few joints. I cut up a cantaloupe for you in little pieces. You were hand cuffed. I fed you like a sick bird.”

“How did you get a canteen?” Clarissa almost looks at her.

“I found it in the hospital outpatient closet,” Zoë says. Her head is throbbing.

She is staring at the waves, which are the process by which autumn becomes water. If you understood the bay, it would smell like slow burning cedar. The midnight currents are like leaves brushing the waves with russet and amber. Only adepts recognize this. The waves answer to the moon and immutable laws of spin and fall. They don’t get dinner on the table at the appointed hour. They don’t carpool or pick up the suits on time or have the cuff links and invitations ready.

“Only you know,” Clarissa says. She looks like she may vomit again.

Zoë nods. Yes, only I was there at ground zero when it happened. This is why we have tattooed ourselves. They could never explain to anyone else what it was to grow up in the margins of a hardscrabble town that moved with the slow lull of a fishing village. The conceptual latitudes, rocked with a Spanish rhythm and an Oakie beat. The late Fifties. And the world was stucco tenements nailed in rows like the fruit trees above the gashes of alley, oranges and lemons so bitter they burned your mouth.

“We sat next to each other in home room,” Zoë says.

It was seventh grade and they were learning about cities. Their names were Sherry and Judy then but they do not ever mention this. Cities had inviolate definitions. Monuments and bridges, parks with rose gardens and roads with names one recognized from history, kings and sculptors and generals. But their Los Angeles had no statues or subways. Their city could only grow in an ungainly manner, sprawl it was called, implying the crippled, the drunken and misshapen.

“We rode buses, trying to find the city,” Clarissa remembers. “We had library cards.”

True, Zoë thinks, books were another form of defeat. They could not find their geography or psychological circumstances in literature. Nature was oaks and maples, not a riot of magenta bougainvillea, not a blaze of red and yellow canna bursting through bamboo fences sticky with pink oleander. Families had two parents and pastel houses behind lawns with white picket fences where characters had angst rather than hunger and rage. Such children did not sift through trashcans in dusk alleys searching for glass soda bottles that could be redeemed for two cents apiece. Gather enough glass and you had bus fare. On a fortunate hunt, one could trap enough coins for lunch.

“Remember digging for coke bottles for food money?” Zoë asks.

“I remember what you said,” Clarissa smiles. “You said Holden Caulfield would have taken a taxi.”

Zoë also smiles, does not remember this particular remark. The heroines of literature experienced revelation while carrying umbrellas, further shaping her conviction that culture and moisture were inexorably connected. They lived on sand lots and didn’t even have seasons.

“Remember our black berets? We wore them everyday. We got lice,” Zoë says.

Clarissa shrugs. “And we carried raincoats. We looked for beatniks right here. Boys with sketchbooks and bongo drums. We said we were French. We practiced our accents at recess.”

Recess in the region of broken families, of divorcés and single mothers, of stigma and words that could not be spoken out loud. Alcoholism. Cancer. Child abuse. Illegitimacy. Domestic violence. The stucco tenements designed for transience, already shabby and festering like sun sores. The minimal architecture of pragmatism, conformity and greed in the pseudo-tropical fashion that would become the blue print for the new slums in the sun.

“I still have nightmares about the apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard,” Clarissa reveals.

They lived next door, with a cement hall between them. The interior of this apartment forms a grain within the fabric of her body, within her neural net. Their stucco bungalows amplified the message of how inconsequential they were. The apartments were designed without dinning rooms, as if anticipating a future where families disintegrated in front of televisions. Or compulsively dieted or ate alone. Anonymous rooms constructed for people who would be spending their lives in lines, identified by number rather than name. The first draft of the welfare state, Sunbelt style.

“Remember the neighbors?” Zoë asks. She feels dizzy. Her arm burns.

“The Oakies and hillbillies? All the blonds with drawls?” Clarissa remembers, yes, of course. “It was still the Depression. I had a friend once. Another friend, not like you, Zoë. A hillbilly. Jerry found us listening to the radio together. It was Elvis. Jerry started yelling, you playing nigger music? You putting nigger music in my house? He threw the radio at my face. Took out my front tooth. That’s how I discovered caps.”

“That was me,” Zoë corrects. “It was Marvin, not Jerry.”

“Well, we had the same father. A heathen with bad grammar who didn’t know what a yarmulke was. A guy who could plaster and paint. They were house painters when they were employed. House painters,” Clarissa stares at the bay.

“Like Hitler,” Zoë points out. Then, “Had your mother run away yet?”

“Ruthie? She was on the verge. She was molting, becoming River or Rainbow or something. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”

Zoë tries to remember Clarissa’s mother. A quiet woman, sheathed in dark fabrics who kept to the shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery. Jerry had knocked out her front teeth. He had broken her leg, twice. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the hibiscus, draped in long skirts, shawls, and sandals. She couldn’t have been more than thirty.

Then Clarissa had a family of subtraction. All the neighbors had incomplete families. Photographs displayed the father or sister still in an Asian port or mountain pueblo. Soon, if Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a smaller family, too. In between, they celebrated the Day of the Dead and the birth of Buddha. We of the stucco tenements, an anomalous caste without white picket fences. Our mothers worked between nervous breakdowns. They rode buses. Even second hand cars were an aberration. And literature taught us that natural names had syllables that formed church steeples on your lips. This did not apply to us, not to Nakamara and Hernandez, not to Chin and Kim.

“Did you realize we were Jewish?” Zoë wonders.

“I was instructed to never to reveal this. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers. And owned all the banks,” Clarissa says.

“Like we just marched out of cargo and sent our sons to medical school. They didn’t know my people. My grandparents had to be evicted from the ship. They had a blanket and free rent. Life had never been so sweet.” Zoë says.

“And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland. We’d practice being Jewish with the sugar cube. Remember? Jerry had a cube of sugar suspended on a string hanging from the ceiling. We drank black coffee. We were supposed to imagine the sugar cube was in the cup. That’s what being Jewish was.” Clarissa closes her eyes.

“I wanted a bar mitzvah,” Zoë suddenly remembers. “I don’t know how I even knew the word. I told Marvin I wanted to go to a temple. He said a temple? You mean a chink thing? Chink thing.”

“I heard you the first time,” Clarissa’s eyes are still closed.

“I said, no, a synagogue. And Marvin said, you mean a Jew thing? You can’t do that. You need special clothes to belong. You need passwords. You have to show them your penis. It costs a fortune to get into that club. They don’t let people like us in.” Zoë examines the bay. There is less agitation, swells softer, a haze grazes what was amethyst. The diagnosis has come in. The bay has had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal. It is threatening to linger.

“Is that when Marvin broke your hand?” Clarissa does not look at her.

“Mommy did it, actually. She was between mental hospitals that month. I remember her contemptuous glare. It cut through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out to Marvin. She said, Marvin, look. That kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands? I remember precisely. She said, you think you’re a neurosurgeon? You think you’re a symphony conductor? You’re not even human. Then she broke my hand. I had three fractured fingers and they took her in the ambulance.”

They are quiet. The bay, too, is still. It’s in remission. Through the haze, sun is lemon yellow on the swollen waters. There are floating orchards rooted in sand. Wave break and dog bark are a language. It’s important to remember. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s some elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. The way you are no longer blind, cold, bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.

“Speaking of Marvin’s penis, do you remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a thirteen-year-old?” Clarissa asks.

It happened in Los Angeles. It was front-page news in a time when newspapers were read and discussed. Of course Zoë remembers.

“You know what Jerry said? He said, listen, I knew that guy in Poland. He’s 5’2”. He’s got a three-inch dick. He mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers, of course. Then he said, why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a needle dick?” Clarissa tells her.

“Is that when he raped you? When you moved away? He disconnected the phone. I couldn’t find you for a year.” Zoë is trying to form a chronology.

“It wasn’t rape. It was appropriation. It was a natural process, an inevitability. When Ruthie left, he moved me into their bedroom. They he found us an apartment in the Valley. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”

“But she came back for you,” Zoë remembers. “She took you to commune. You went to college. You got out.”

“You don’t get out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”

Zoë is holding Clarissa’s hand. She notices that Clarissa is wearing a Tiffany diamond of at least three carats. And a gold Rolex with the oyster diamond setting. She withdraws her hand.

Clarissa dismisses the implication. “You know how it is. When other women consider the state of their black velvets and red silk jackets, I think of a cool set of razor blades.”

Zoë is considering their squalid adolescence. They were aberrations in the already decaying city without seasons. Their unique anomalous caste. Jews who had been marginalized for generations. And their offspring, who had become mute with shock. There, in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow hibiscus and magenta bougainvillea. There, behind the banks of startled red geraniums and brittle canna. They were the spawn of hillsides of boldly eccentric succulents made exquisite by the lash of sun.

“We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus and coyotes. Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles.” Zoë realizes.

“We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Keep it simple.”

They are standing now. Everything is suspended. The bay seems to be barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just come back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung over. Or in a coma. Maybe it needs an iron lung.

“But we have instincts,” Zoë feels exhausted. Her arm with the gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, the peninsula to Malibu and a suggestion of something beyond.

“We understand ambushes and guerrilla actions. We’re expert with camouflage.” Clarissa agrees.

“They’ll never take us by surprise,” Zoë says.

Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen, the sudden vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning. They are random spears. One must constantly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.

“I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces.

“Me too,” Zoë recognizes. There is a pause.“ You still doing the venture capital movie deals? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on the map? Everybody loses but you?”

“When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. Pay day. Then détente. Who would have thought? The Russian mafia money poured in.” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And, as an afterthought asks, “What about you?”

“I’m getting married,” Zoë says. “I’m moving to Pennsylvania.”

“Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a wood stove? Twenty below zero with the wind chill? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small cocaine problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.

“Fuck you.” Zoë is enraged.

“I apologize. That was completely inappropriate.” Clarissa is immediately conciliatory. The bay is almost dark. “We have separation anxiety. Partings are difficult. Forgive me, please. Brillstein says we’re improving in this area.”

“You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” Zoë stares at her. She is so startled, she feels almost sober.

“He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.

The stylish phone opens, the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists and in our pockets. Clarissa’s phone is voice activated. Clarissa says, “Driver.” Then she says, “The Santa Monica Pier. Now.”

“Does your shoulder hurt?” Zoë wonders. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire.

“No pain, no gain. My dear cousin.” Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will be in touch with yours. “My car can take you where you’re going.”

Zoë suddenly feels as if she is on a borderless layover. Her entire life is a layover. It’s like the trip she took last Christmas that began four hours from Goa, then the six-hour delay, the last flight to Bombay, a day room, Frankfurt and another day room and delay, then the fourteen-hour flight to New York. Seventy hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual sequence of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, where no time zones applied. Of course, they haven’t mentioned their children. This is a topic they do not discuss. Ever. Zoë and Clarissa kiss on both cheeks. They seem to have fallen into a European movie neither of them has interest or affection for.

There is a certain pause just before sunset, when the bay seems veiled in azure.

Is that the bell from a ship or a cathedral? Is there a line between drowning and communion? And inland, the cyclone fenced freeways beside stucco bungalows with miniature balconies where parched geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. Perhaps the bay is merely a defeated blue, depressed and contained. It might be on antidepressants. Above, pollution has turned the setting sun into strata of brandy and claret. The sky seems smeared with iodine and curry.

Clarissa’s driver has appeared. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open. And she’s waving the purple scarf in the air like a banner. Zoë refuses to admit that she doesn’t where she is going, turns away instead and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, Zoë can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk now, in the alleys and sides of small streets with ridiculous insipid seaside names.

It is always a form of autumn. You just keep walking and the shadows find you. They are the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. Such shadows taste like wounded sherry. You can drink it or pour it in your cuts. You can use it for bath oil and become immune to infection. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you are more dangerous than they can imagine. They know they cannot fill in your blanks. You simply surrender and they do everything.

There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delusionary construct, like movie contracts. Satellites have mapped each zip code and tapped every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat areas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re in our genes, passed down from one generation to the next, like poisonous heirlooms. It’s always ground zero. Zoë can sense the car moving behind and away from her and she is grateful. She never wants to see Clarissa again.