LA Sunday Approaches Perfection

The perfection of yesterday came with no warning. I'd gone to sleep with the sound of Doris Day's voice belting "Che Sara, Sara" at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, echoing across the gravestones where the stars lie "asleep in Jesus," then in my head. I'd woken up at 1, 4 and 6:30 AM. My sleep has been bad for weeks, interrupted either by telephone calls from across the country or by their lack thereof. I wake definitively at 7, biting the outer lip of a dream, in which I am pulling an elongated, glowing cyst from my left breast.

The translation of the first three chapters of Dan's novel is nearly done; we go over the final revisions over instant messenger, but at 9 o'clock I call Jacob. "We are going to the beach."

Lately, if I can help it, I drive West on the 10 late at night, flying, the way Alexandra and I flew a few months ago, blasting The Knife and Depeche Mode. Only now it's Feist or The National, and it's a little different on a Sunday morning, the buzz is missing and and the music can't surround me in all that brightness the way it does in the dark, but it is nearly as good, still flying West, then up the PCH, to El Matador! Jacob, whose voice and laughing and manner remind me of Gage's, pulls out an unexpected bag of baby carrots.

I laugh in my sleep, people tell me. How could I not? Life is infinite jest.

At El Matador Jacob and I talk about the years in between, turn the pages to a book with Indian circus photographs, admiring those dark, glistening eyes, marveling at the contorted appendages, the gentle light. The water is warm now and so the kelp forests flourish and draw nearer to the land and when we come up from under a wave we are garlanded and tangled in the grass. Jacob is very white and boney. He breaks the surface, and he has something of that rock, its bleached head shining in the soft focus behind him. I get rolled a couple of times, and when I try to release the pressure by holding my nose and blowing into it, there is a sound of dolphins in both ears.

We drive back to Santa Monica, where I meet up with Blake and Conor for our first workshop on script analysis. I'd like to take it seriously, but something in Conor's metered exposition makes me want to throw spit-balls and pass notes and screw around in the back of the class. I want to make him laugh. We go to a screening of an Irish film, well-written, good "craic," as they'd say, but it's not cinema. Afterwards, I am racing home on Wilshire, the feeling is real and sweet, I like my skin and salty exhaustion, and there is a half a pack of menthols in the pocket of a coat I haven't worn since I was in New York.