On the Hillside in San Clemente

From this padded captain’s chair, over the vinyl tablecloth where he spread out the news, he made his last peace with the excellent and terrible world, the ocean out there going flat to deep to flat, and always the far but definite line, and always, first, the things between the coast and him: thickening traffic north to south, neighbors downslope building into his view, these roses in need of deadheading surviving still the greedy ice plant that kills the lawn, the emptying planters weeded until nothing remains, these torn curtains pulled aside and behind where Olive always sat, and these newspapers—ragged columns of rage and heartache—these hands bulging with the old blood’s excavations.

How many mornings must have seemed like the last when, at 5:30 a.m., sweater buttoned halfway, he sat down to steaming decaf, pulled a tight rubber band off the Los Angeles Times and slipped it temporarily over his wrist. He knew the headline and photo right off, as if he’d been the editor to choose them, and he read the whole first page before continuing any one story, saying under his breath the day and date and edition, knowing there were differences always from bulldog to final. He cursed and blessed, quiet as the sleep just ended. By now, he saw on the water the first charter boat, or Catalina, or an idle destroyer.

That last night, he got up to use the bathroom at 2:00 a.m., left the light on, and returned to bed. In the morning she found him curled fetal, as always, but blue now and cold, with no kind of look. She sits in his chair now as someone drawn to the same ocean, but not its sterile coast, where the rich have no backyards. She rises early to bring in the news to this meeting ground, to lay the news out and read, to lift her eyes suddenly and look into the neighbors’ early kitchen, gold dog already scuffling near the sliding door, to curse their smug palm dusting ten degrees of horizon, to come back to the world she’s made, picture and word come to haunt easy as the ghost with the hand and breath she feels but won’t touch. Close as it is, she won’t even try, steering through the obstructions—still, like him, in a dangerous human current.