Biking down the Newport Freeway the wind cut through him, and with clear road ahead he shifted into high gear and started pumping hard. Ramona drafted him and after a while took the lead, and they zipped down the gentle slope of the coastal basin pumping so hard that they passed the cars in the next lane, and all for the fun of going fast. On the narrow streets of Costa Mesa and Newport Beach they had to slow and negotiate the traffic, following it out to the end of Balboa Peninsula. Here apartment blocks jumbled high on both sides of the street. Nothing could be done to reduce the population along such a fine beach, and besides the ocean-mad residents seemed to enjoy the crowd. Many of the old crackerbox apartments had been joined and reworked, and now big tentlike complexes quivered like flags in the wind, sheltering co-ops, tribes, big families, vacation groups, complete strangers—every social unit ever imagined was housed there, behind fabric walls bright with the traditional Newport Beach pastels.
They coasted to the end of the peninsula, under rows of palm trees. Scraps of green tossed overhead in the strong onshore breeze. They came to the Wedge and stopped. This was the world’s most famous body surfing beach. Here waves from the west came in at an angle to the long jetty at the Newport Harbor channel, and as the waves approached the beach, masses of water built up against the rocks. Eventually these masses surged back out to sea in a huge backwash, a counterwave which crossed subsequent incoming swells at an angle, creating peaks, fast powerful cusps that moved across the waves very rapidly, often just at the point they were breaking. It was like something out of a physics class wave tank, and it was tremendously popular with body surfers, because the secondary wave could propel a body across the face of the primary wave with heartstopping speed. Add an element of danger—the water was often only three feet deep at the break, and tales of paralysis and death were common—and the result was a perfect adrenalin rush for the OC ocean maniac.
Today, however, the Pacific was pacific, almost lakelike, and the Wedge Effect was not working. This was fine with Ramona and Kevin, they were happy just to swim. Cool salt tang, the luxurious sensuality of immersion, flotation, the return to the sea. Kevin sharked over the rippled tawny sand on the bottom, looked up through silver bubbles at the surface, saw its rise and fall, its curious partial reflectivity, sky and sand both visible at once. Long graceful body in a dark red suit, swimming overhead with powerful strokes. Women are dolphins, he thought, and laughed a burst of silver at the sky. He ran out of air and shot to the surface, broke into blinding white air, eyes scored by salt and sun, delicious stinging. “Outside,” Ramona called, but she was fooling; no waves of any size out there, only flat glary blue, all the way to the horizon. Nothing but shore break. They grunioned around in that for a long time, mindless, lifted up and down by the moon. After that their suits were full of sand, they had to swim out again to flush them clean.
Back on the beach. Sitting on sand, half dry. Salt crust on smooth brown skin. The smell of salt and seaweed, the cool wind.
“Want to walk out the jetty?”
Onto the mound of giant boulders, stepping carefully. Rough uneven surfaces of basalt and feldspar gleamed in the light, gray and black and white and red and brown. Between the rocks the swells rose and fell, sucking and slapping the barnacles.
“We used to come out here all the time when we were kids.”
“Us too,” Ramona said. “The whole house. Boulder ballet, we called it. Only on the other jetty, because my mom always took us to Corona del Mar.” Newport Harbor’s channel was flanked on both sides by jetties, the other one was some two hundred yards across the water.
“It was always the Wedge for us. There was something magical about walking out this jetty when I was a kid. A big adventure, like going to the end of the world.”
They stepped and balanced, hopped and teetered. Occasionally they bumped together, arm to arm. Their skin was warm in the sun. They talked about this and that, and Kevin felt certain boundaries disappearing. Ramona was willing to talk about anything, now, about things beyond the present moment. Childhoods in El Modena and at the beach. The boats offshore. Their work. The people they knew. The huge rocks jumbled under them: “Where did they come from, anyway?” They didn’t know. It didn’t matter. What do you talk about when you’re falling in love? It doesn’t matter. All the questions are, Who are you? How do you think? Are you like me? Will you love me? And all the answers are, I am like this, like this, like this. I am like you. I like you.
“We used to race out to the end sometimes, running over these rocks! Crazy!”
“Yeah, we’re a lot more sensible now,” Ramona said, and grinned.
They came to the end, where the causeway of stone plunged into the sea. The horizon stood before them at eye level, a hazy white bar. Sunlight broke on the sea in a billion points, flickering like gold signal mirrors, sending a Morse of infinite complexity.
They sat on a flat boulder, side by side. Ramona leaned back on both hands, jacking her elbows forward. Muscley brown forearms bulged side to side, muscley brown biceps bulged front to back. Triceps stood out like the swells between the jetties.
“How’s things at your house?”
“Okay,” Kevin said. “Andrea’s back is bothering her. Yoshi is sick of teaching English, Sylvia’s worried that the kids have chicken pox. Donna and Cindy are still drinking too much, and Tomas still spends all his time at the screen. The usual lunacy. I bet Nadezhda thinks we’re bedlam.”
“She’s nice.”
“Yeah. But sometimes the house is just howling, and the look on her face…”
“It can’t be any worse than India.”
“Maybe. Maybe it bothers me more than her. I tell you, some nights when the kids are wild I wonder if living in small families isn’t a good idea.”
“Oh no,” Ramona said. “Do you think so? I mean, they’re so isolated.”
“Quieter.”
“Sure, but so what? I mean, you’ve always got your room. But if it were only you and a partner and kids! Try to imagine Rosa and Josh doing that! Rosa doesn’t do a thing to take care of Doug and Ginger, she’s always working or down here surfing. So those kids are there and they’re really into being entertained constantly, and sometime I know Josh would just go crazy if he were in a little house all by himself. He almost does already.”
“A lot of them did, I guess. Mothers.”
“Yeah. But at our place Josh can get me or my mom to take the kids while he goes out to swim or something, and we can talk with him, and he tells us about it and feels better, and by the time Rosa’s back he’s having a good time and he doesn’t care. Unless he’s really pissed at her. But they manage. I don’t think their marriage would survive if they lived by themselves.”
Kevin nodded. “But what about other couples who’re different? What you’re saying is that marriages are less intense now because people tend to live in groups. But what about the really good marriages? Then reducing the intensity is just diffusing something good.”
“Diffusing it, yeah, spreading it around. Maybe we need to have that kind of good diffused out. The couple won’t suffer.”
“No? Well. Maybe not.” What about us, then? Kevin wanted to say. He had never even found someone he felt like trying with. And she and Alfredo, fifteen years? What went wrong? “But… something is gone, I think. Something I think I’d like.”
Ramona frowned, considering it. They watched swells run up and down the seaweedy, mussel-crusted band of rock at sea level. Talked about other things. Felt light crash into their skin.
Ramona pointed north. “Couple of big ships coming.”
“Oh, I love to watch those.” He sat up, shaded his eyes with a hand. Two tall ships had risen over the horizon, converging on the harbor from slightly different angles, one from San Pedro, and the other rounding Catalina from the north. Both were combinations of square rigged and fore-and-aft rigged, the current favorite of ship designers. They resembled the giant barkentines built in the last years of sailing’s classic age, only the fore-and-aft sails were rigid, and bulged around the masts in an airfoil shape. Each ship had five masts, and the one rounding Catalina had an isosceles mast for its foremast, two spars rising from the hull to meet overhead.