Beachcombing at Miramar (15 page)

A fragrance, light as the breeze, sifts through the air. We stroll through the flower market, the sidewalk awash with color,
as if Pierre-Auguste Renoir himself had come to town and painted the scene. Men, women, children wander under the canopied
booths, make their purchases, and carry off their bouquets. Anna points to the flowers and says their names as we pass by:
baby’s breath, anemone, larkspur, yarrow. I buy a yellow tea rose and she puts it in her hair.

Across from the flower market there is an alley; halfway down the alley, a vintage clothing shop. We pause, look in a window,
and step inside. The shop is small, barely big enough to move around in. The merchandise is stacked on counters and tabletops.
In front of me lies a black velvet evening bag lined with ivory satin and lace. I pick it up and finger its rhinestone clasp.
It looks like something my grandmother might have carried with her to a formal dance—if my grandmother had ever gone to a
formal dance. I fish around inside and pull out a collapsible tortoiseshell comb with a narrow, oddly shaped handle at one
end.

Anna takes the object from the palm of my hand and flips it open. “Women would comb their hair like so,” she says, “then use
the rat-tail end to make a curl.” She tries to show me, but her hair is too tightly bound. She hands the comb back to me.

“Do you like it?” she asks.

I drop the comb in the bag and put the bag back on the table.

“No,” I reply. “I don’t like evening bags, and I don’t like curls.”

“Do you know what you like?”

“Yes, I know what I like.”

“And what do you like?”

I turn slowly, letting my eyes roam the room. A straight chair stands in a corner, with a triangular mass of material draped
over the back. It is black—black as her hair. I run my hand across its filigreed border and through its long, silky fringe.

“I like this,” I say.

“Do you? It’s a fine wool shawl, and it’s very old.”

She lifts it from the chair and arranges it over one shoulder, then over both shoulders, then over her head and shoulders.
She flips the loose ends over her arms. Finished, she folds it neatly and puts it back on the chair.

“And I like this,” I say, picking up a straw hat with a broad brim. She puts on the hat, tilting the brim first to one side,
then the other, and finally turning the brim up and back off her face. It is dark in the shop, but I can imagine the hat with
sunlight filtering through the swirls of woven straw.

“If I could paint,” I say, “I would paint you in that hat.”

“I will paint you in it,” she says. Before I can reply, she goes to the register, buys the hat, and hands it to me. It fits
perfectly.

We leave the shop and meander through the streets of the town, returning home the way we came, walking slowly along the beach,
pausing from time to time to share a thought.

Later, alone in the gathering darkness, I ponder a question that has been haunting me. Why didn’t I meet Anna ages ago, when
I was young? I didn’t meet her because I didn’t see her, even though I probably passed her, or someone like her, many times
without ever knowing she was there. Like an infant just out of its mother’s womb, my eyes were not yet fully opened.

After all these reflective days combing the sands of Miramar, I understand that we see only what we are ready to see when
we are ready to see it. There is a perpetual dawn rising within us. If we are awake to it, it continues to rise gradually,
imperceptibly, throughout our lives. With each passing day we shake the sleep from our eyes.

I came to Miramar seeking an end to my isolation and my loneliness. But before I could find Anna, I had to discover myself.
I had to locate the swift, sure current that courses through my life and stay with it straight through to the end. Once I
found the courage to do that, the woman I was looking for appeared, not as apparition but as flesh and blood, right before
my eyes.

I go to bed early and sleep deeply. In my dreams, I am at the Chamarita. Anna is with me, and we are standing side by side,
watching the parade. All through the night, I wake and dream, wake and dream, and the dream is always the same. I am at the
Chamarita with Anna, watching the boy with his parasol, the girl with her dove, the queen with her crown. Awake, the dream
remains: Anna and I standing together on the edge of the sidewalk, two separate people sharing the same space at the same
precious moment in time.

In the morning, I go out on my deck and sit, content to do nothing. It is late in the afternoon when I see a patch of washed-out
purple far down the shore. Anna is strolling along the water’s edge, one hand holding a canvas bag, the other lifting her
skirt as the waves wash over her legs. When she reaches a point below the beach house, her head disappears behind a dune,
then bobs up again at the bottom of the deck. She climbs the stairs. When she reaches the top rung, she puts down her bag
and looks at me.

“So,” she says, “are you ready?”

I nod.

She positions a rattan chair at the far end of the deck and slumps into it at an angle to the sea.

“Sit here,” she says, “like so.”

I sit as she says, my arms folded across my chest. She unlocks my arms; they fall loosely onto my lap. She picks up the straw
hat and fixes it on my head. I reach up to help and she lightly slaps my hand.

“Don’t touch,” she says.

She keeps urging me to hold still, but she doesn’t seem to mind if my eyes roam. I shift my gaze from Anna, sitting in a chair
with a drawing board on her lap, to the beach, then back to Anna again. What she doesn’t know is that while she is painting
me, I am painting her.

How is it, how is it, I wonder, that love can come this way? It is a blessing that falls of a sudden, like rain out of a summer
sky. One moment I am walking a lonely stretch of beach; the next I am talking to a woman fishing from a pier. She invites
me to the Chamarita. I buy her a flower; she buys me a hat. Now she is on my deck, looking at me carefully, her head tilted,
her lips pursed, a pastel crayon poised between the fingers of her hand.

It is late when she finishes. The sun has dropped behind the evening clouds. Flashes of burnt crimson fill the sky. I rise
from my chair and move toward her cautiously, afraid of what I might find. She lifts the drawing board from her lap, turns
it, and shows it to me. I am amazed at what I see. She has painted me in my own image.

Q
uietly, without fanfare, a sculptor has come to Miramar. I see his handiwork, one stone heaped upon another along the rocky
shore. Now, for the first time, I come upon the artist himself, a slim, slightly stooped man with thick tinted glasses, a
red bandanna wrapped around his head. Absorbed in his task, he moves easily, methodically, amid the riprap dumped beside a
seawall, carefully selecting boulders and stacking them so they resemble human forms.

I watch him rearrange rock and rubble, transforming the chaos along this stretch of coast into a sculpture garden. He lifts
an oblong chunk of concrete and lugs it twenty feet to an open area, places a sloping concave rock on top of it, and a rounded
smaller rock on top of that. Three rocks chosen at random, that’s how they appear to me. But the sculptor sees them in the
aggregate. Assembled, they become a woman in an ankle-length, deeply pleated skirt carrying a bread basket in her outstretched
arms.

The female figure, so perfectly proportioned, has the seductive grace and charm of ancient Buddhist idols I have often admired
in museums. I approach it cautiously, afraid that if I get too close it will tumble down. I want to touch it, but the structure
seems so precarious that I don’t dare.

The sculptor, who has ignored my presence until now, turns toward me. “Blow on it!” he says.

I take a deep breath and blow as hard as I can several times on all sides. The sculpture withstands the blasts of air from
my lungs.

“If it doesn’t fall over when you blow on it,” he says, “then the chances are good that only the incoming tide or a strong
wind will knock it down.”

“And when that happens?” I ask.

“When that happens, I come back another day and set it up again.”

Gently, I touch the structure; its stability surprises me. It seems to be defying gravity. I ask the sculptor if he notches
the rocks, applies an adhesive, or joins them with a hidden wire. He empties his pockets to prove that he uses no tools, employs
no artifice beyond the intuition lodged in his dexterous fingers and roving eyes.

“How do you do it?” I ask. “How do you balance them this way?”

He goes about his work, inspecting rocks, turning them over, moving them about. I wait, wondering if he is going to respond.
After a while he says, “I don’t think. I just pick up rocks and put them on top of each other.”

Despite his reticence, I manage to pull information from him. He tells me that he works on a flower farm farther down the
coast, and that he erects sculptures on the beach in his spare time. I press him, try to find out why he is drawn to these
rocks, why he feels compelled to transfigure them into human shapes and forms. There is no money in it, no glory, no enduring
fame. He does not gloat over his creations; he does not pander to the whims of admirers like me. He shrugs and goes on stacking
stones.

I continue on my way, contemplating the diversity of the human mind. I recall the advice of Paul Cézanne, how he urged young
painters to view nature as a profusion of cones, rectangles, circles, and squares. That was how he perceived the world, and
day after day, in still life and landscape, he painted what he saw. “Not since Moses has anyone looked at a mountain so greatly,”
the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote upon viewing a memorial exhibition of his work.

Geometric shapes impressed the Greek mathematician Pythagoras in a different way. When he observed a right triangle, he was
moved not to paint but to calculate, which is an art of a different kind. He determined that the square of the hypotenuse
equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. When I studied geometry ages ago, I accepted its theorems as given truths
handed down by an irrefutable god. But now I ask myself what manner of man looks at a triangle, filters it through his brain,
and formulates an equation that reveals the affinity among its angles and sides?

The mind vibrates like the strings of a harp in accord with what it perceives. One man beholds nature and produces a painting,
another an equation, another a cluster of statues along the shore. Each discovers his own métier, which is a way of saying
he expresses what he thinks and feels in his own distinctive way. The style is personal and particular; it does not arise
from a conscious decision, but flows as a river flows out of hidden springs.

The graceful performers of my lifetime rise in memory: Fred Astaire in dance, Ella Fitzgerald in song, Benny Goodman on the
clarinet, Joe DiMaggio in center field. I believe the talent was present in them, as it is in everyone, from birth, from before
birth, and they felt its tidal pull guiding them, directing them, from an early age. Astaire did not choose the dance; the
dance chose him. He had no choice but to tap his feet or die. There is a telling piece of dialogue between Astaire and Ginger
Rogers in the classic film
To p Hat
:

FRED:
You see every once in a while I suddenly find myself … dancing.

GINGER:
Oh, I suppose it’s some kind of affliction.

FRED:
Yes, yes … it’s an affliction .… I think I feel an attack coming on.

Hands, feet, head, and body—they all appear to be flying in different directions, and yet there is symmetry, fluency, abandon
in every step, lightness and verve in every turn, and no wasted movement anywhere. The style is not contrived, not imposed;
it comes from the brio of the dancer himself, and it is distinctly his own.

There is no cure for an “affliction” of this nature; one must give in to it, cultivate it through constant practice, endless
rehearsal, until the gift that comes from a power beyond ourselves is perfectly honed.

The popular presumption is that it is easy for talented people to do what comes naturally. Fred, Ella, Benny, Joe—everything
they did appeared unrestrained, as if there were never a time when they skipped a beat, missed a note, or dropped a long fly
ball. Even the sculptor down the beach wants me to believe that he picks up rocks and stacks them in an abstract, mindless
way. But I wonder what sacrifices he made, what self-doubts he overcame, to attain the clarity of vision that inspires his
forms.

Vincent van Gogh addressed the struggle of the artist, the struggle of everyman, in a letter to his brother, Theo:

And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed. What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is
working through an invisible iron wall that stands between what one feels and what one can do.

If I did not know it before, I know it now: Throughout my adult life I, too, have been trying to break through an invisible
iron wall. I have come closer to achieving that goal here on the sands of Miramar than anyplace I have ever dwelled before.
The journey has not been easy; I still have a distance to travel before I fully arrive. But I am on my way toward the center
of myself, doing my best to strip away layers of sham and pretense as I go along.

I believe we experience the pulse of our talent coursing through our bodies when we are young. The passion drives us on. We
know intuitively who we are and where we must go, in the same way birds know the migratory routes they must follow north in
spring and south in fall. But as we mature, we adopt patterns of behavior that stand between ourselves and what we feel.

When I was a boy, I wrote as I wanted to write, never striving for cleverness, for I was too young to know what cleverness
was. The words sprang out of my raw emotion, and the children who were my classmates and friends laughed and cried when the
teacher asked me to read aloud. But when I became a man, I began to write for the approval and applause of others, who I thought
controlled my destiny. It wasn’t until I went back to my childhood, to writing the way I wanted to write, thinking the way
I wanted to think, feeling the way I wanted to feel, that the words rose easily again.