Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern

Author:Sue Halpern
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Nature, General
ISBN: 9780307787491
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Secret Beach

IN my appointment book for March that year are the notes I took during lunch with S. at a Los Angeles restaurant. “Snorkel at Shipwreck. Tropical Taco. Gaylord’s (late). Brickoven Pizza (local hangout).” As the calendar shows, I was going to Hawaii the next day, from the airport at Oahu directly to Kauai, the green island. Kauai was his favorite island, S. said, and Hawaii his favorite place in the world. He had been there eighteen times. This was my first trip. S. said he was jealous. I knew what he meant. Years before, in college, where we met in a short story class, S. had delivered the wisdom that you can only fall in love for the first time once.

The restaurant where we were to have lunch was in a yellow clapboard house that stood out in the middle of downtown Hollywood like a man in chinos at a formal dinner. S. was late, and while I waited, I read scripts from the cops-and-robbers TV show another college friend was producing for one of the networks. That morning I had sat in on one of the show’s story meetings (“Why don’t we have the fucking jogger run past and turn and fucking blow her away?” one writer said. “What about the fucking bodyguard?” another writer, who happened to be her husband, said. “So how about a fucking bomb and get them out like that?” the first writer said) and had gone away with a stack of party favors. By this time I had been in L. A. a week, interviewing people at the Chris Brownlie AIDS hospice, and the scripts’ violence seemed purposeful to me. Everyone died to advance the plot.

S. rushed in the door and stopped short, looking for me. This rushing was very familiar. Even if I didn’t recognize him, I would recognize it. And the odd thing was, I didn’t recognize him, really. His hair, which I remembered being thick and the color of cedar, was sparse and the color of pine. And his frame had shrunk. It was as if the photographer, having first printed the picture at eight by ten, had pulled in the borders by a third.

My friend caught sight of me, waved, and smiled. He was so skinny that when he did, his face folded into long gullies on either side of his mouth, like spillways beside a stream. When he moved toward me, my body started to hum the way I imagine a divining rod does in the presence of water. He has it, I thought. He has it too.

But no, I must be mistaken. A week at the hospice has warped my perceptions. He can’t have it. He’s my friend. This is aging—what happens when you haven’t seen each other in four years. His clothes fit, he had a job, he went to the office. He wouldn’t be laughing if he had it. He wouldn’t be going on CNN in forty minutes for a live interview. I tell him about the hospice, I give him openings.

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