Four
Shape of a Human Ear
I was beginning to doubt Hessie’s
predictions about me and Frosted Glass Man.
Four days had passed, and I had yet to catch a glimpse of him. In order to keep myself in the target area for
as long as possible, I extended my morning walks all the way to the waterbreak
below Archer Bridge. I wasn’t gaining
any male attention, but I was certainly losing weight.
I generally drove down to the waterfront
in the afternoon, my appetite fully stoked for seafood. My favorite hangout was a little place
called Snapper’s; they had a long counter with a built-in aquarium full of
exotic salt-water fish. The best was a
little rock-sucker I nicknamed Hal, a pale yellow telescope who would swallow
spoonfuls of gravel and then filter them back out through his gills. If you ignored the basic cruelty of eating
dead fish in front of their still-living colleagues, the place was quite nice,
and equipped with a trio of hanging steamer pots purchased from the U.S.
Navy. They steamed the fish right in
front of you, in a white wine and garlic sauce that I would gladly lap up
directly from the counter.
Seafood never failed to make me sleepy,
so if the meal’s-end cappuccino was enough to get me back to the Bel Canto, I
would head directly to my room for a nap (I had been moved to the Rosenkavalier
Suite, adorned with silver roses, cityscapes of Vienna, a bust of Strauss, and
pictures of famous middle-aged women like Gertrude Stein, Georgia O’Keefe and
Queen Elizabeth).
Dinners at the Bel Canto provided a nice
ice-breaker for unattached guests, in that one could always assume a common
interest in opera. And thank God for
that, as the dining room offered only large, 12-seat, cafeteria-style
tables. This was also good for my soul,
since, retreat or no, I began the week feeling like the most alone person on
the planet. Even this temporal, shallow contact with other humans made me feel
better.
It also gave me a kind of educational
mission. I had certainly earned a
balls-out, empty-headed escape, but a little cultural enrichment made me feel
less like the tide was eating away on my bulkhead. Truth be told, before meeting Hessie my
knowledge of opera was barely ankle-deep.
I once took my nieces to La Boheme
in Capitola just so I could make them cry for Mimi (which they dutifully did),
and one time I inherited a couple of tickets to a lavish David Hockney-designed
Turandot in San Francisco, courtesy
of the boss of a man whose name I’d rather not mention. But that was it. Still, I felt no need to hide this dilettante
status from my Bel Canto tablemates - and, in fact, found them quite receptive
to the stupid questions I’d throw at them.
The next day, I took their recommendations to the listening room, and by
my fourth day of study I felt like I was getting the hang of it.
Most of the recommendations traveled
along the reliable triumvirate of Puccini, Verdi and Wagner, with occasional
side trips into Mozart and Strauss.
Friday night, however, I shared a scrumptious swordfish dinner with the
Margisons, an older couple from Chicago who regaled me for hours with plot
points, musical highlights and favorite performances from the great Italian bel
canto era: Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and anything else that sounded like you
could have it on a sandwich with provolone.
I became absolutely enchanted with
Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” and for the most aesthetically suspect of
reasons. It was the title. Such beautiful syllables. “Sonn” as in in-som-niac, son-orous –
sleep. “Ambula” as in ambulance,
ambulate, perambulate – amble? Walk.
On the following afternoon, freshly
digested of a bowl of cioppino at a place called The Schooner, I dug up a Joan
Sutherland LP from 1968, hooked myself up to the headphones and, halfway
through the liner notes, fell asleep.
I can’t be sure what woke me, but looking
back I’d guess it was the combination of a particularly refulgent cadenza
(okay, I stole “refulgent” from the liner notes) and a shaft of sunlight
cutting in through the oceanward windows.
It was the first sunlight I’d seen since arriving in Hirshfield, so I
decided to exploit it at once, rousting myself from my easy chair and
adjourning to the tiny balcony outside the listening room (a precarious little
perch the staff refers to as “the bucket”).
Sunshine or no, the breeze that hailed me
on my exit was brisk enough to frost an Eskimo.
Between that and the blinding, refulgent light (sorry), my senses were
already prickling when I looked sandward to discover Frosted Glass Man, in the
flesh, treading the surfline directly across from me, taking occasional
curtsies to inspect something. As I
watched the way he gently evaded the breakers without seeming to actually look
at them, the long-hidden secret finally struck me: Of course! You idiot. When did
you meet him? In the afternoon!
Descending on him just then would have seemed
entirely ungraceful, and shouting from the bucket a little too operatic. Instead, I made a pledge to immediately
transfer my beach walks to the afternoon.
I went to the kitchen for a cup of green tea and returned to La Sonnambula a rejuvenated woman. A woman with plans.
My schedule switch went against every one
of my morning-walk instincts, and with exciting possibilities in mind, the a.m.
seemed to drag on forever. I ended up at
some kind of defective-discount clothing barn on the main strip, trying on
inch-thick plaid hunting shirts and discolored University of Oregon booster
jackets. I would have stepped into the
cafe next door, but there was some kind of step-aerobics class being conducted
directly in front of the espresso machines.
By the time I got around to the
mismatched luminescent-heel basketball shoes, I had worked up the courage to
glance at my watch. Five till
twelve. Thank God! I went for a New England clam chowder at the
Shamrock Inn, down the block from the Bel Canto, took a completely superfluous
shower and spent a half-hour in front of my antique Austrian mirror, picking
out my hiking-wear. I reappeared in
shocking white tennies, faded jeans, Cape Cod T-shirt, brown Land’s End
corduroy overshirt, canary yellow mariner’s windbreaker and – yeah, I don’t
know why – tortoise-shell La Dolce Vita sunglasses. Too much?
Yeah, sure. But Frosted Glass Man
seemed to have many facets to his personality, and I wanted to have an article
of clothing for each.
I expected to wander for a while,
presenting a slow-moving target in the best passive-aggressive female style,
but egad, there he was, the moment I struck off on the sand, coming right at
me, the two of us like team captains striding the fifty-yard line for a coin
flip. I slowed to a stop as he kept
coming, wearing a strangely intent look on his face. I prepared a nonchalant Noel Coward greeting;
he came up and knelt at my feet. Worship?
So soon?
“Green glass,” he said, holding a moss-colored potato chip to his
eye. “You can spot these devils a mile
away in a snowstorm.”
“Oh,” I said. He found my response charming (bless him),
and let out a gorgeous mountain-man laugh, a skinny Orson Welles raised in the
Appalachians.
“Take this,” he said, “in remembrance of me.” He opened my palm, slid
in the glass like a secret coin, and folded my fingers over its edges. “Are you
a collector?”
“A collector?” I said. Dazzle
dazzle.
He ran a single fingernail over the arc
of my shoulder and ducked down his head to peer at me from the tops of his
eyes. “Are you a woman of glass. Do you seek the same treasures I do?”
(Say yes.) “Yes,” I said. Shimmer shimmer. Glow.
“Yes, I... it’s one of my
favorite things, frosted... glass.”
“Beach glass, sea glass, ocean sapphires,
beautiful... litter. You picked a wonderful afternoon for it. It’s a ten-foot day.”
“A ten-foot day?” Shimmer echo dazzle (Oh
God, stop!).
Frosty cocked his hip like a hammer on a
gun. “Yeah. You can’t move ten feet without finding a
piece. It’s the most common of holy days
on the cosmological calendar of Frosted Glass Woman. Here.
Follow me to the Path of Opportunity.”
He pivoted on the cocked hip and strode
to the ocean. He was the most beautiful
madman I’d ever met. I caught up with
him at the edge of the breakers, where the waves had deposited a five-foot
swath of small rocks, peppered across the sand like a five-o’clock shadow. I expected a guided tour, but Frosty had
already pulled out a Zip-Lock bag and started down the path, bending at odd
intervals. I tracked him carefully
across the buckskin sand and watched his every move.
I soon realized that Frosty would have to
let a few pieces through his radar or I’d be shit out of luck. Which was, obviously, what he was doing, as
every twenty feet or so I found a white button, green pixie stick or brown
poker chip.
Ten minutes later, I came upon a
semi-circle of bluish-white, the color of Caribbean water on postcards, little
rippled fragments worn away from the edges.
I felt Frosty’s eyes all over me as I crouched.
“I was hoping you would find that one.”
He unwrapped me with a broad gypsy smile.
“That’s a special one. The glass
gods use those for Frisbee golf.”
“It’s gorgeous,” I said, and smiled as
sweetly as I could.
“Why don’t you take the lead for a while?
I feel like a cad, hogging the frontier like this.”
“My pleasure,” I answered, and headed out
for virgin sand. I hadn’t taken five
steps before I came upon a trifecta of perfect isosceles triangles, each a
half-inch tall, each a primary color. I
almost hated to disturb them.
I continued on like that, cutting
snake-like through the sand, quickening my step when a far-rolling breaker
chased me up the beach. I feared, in
fact, that I was being too efficient, but whenever I stopped to look back I’d
find my guru bending to the sand at regular intervals, harvesting the pieces
that had slipped my vision. Hmm, I thought. There
are higher levels to this. After
that, I went a hundred feet without a single sighting. It was like I’d hit a wall or something. Frosty was quick to notice.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Suddenly you can’t tell frosted glass from
the Queen of England, and... you’re sort of losing your place on the sand. Feeling...
disoriented.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That about describes it.”
He grinned. “You’re trying too hard.” When you begin... to lose...
your sight... just rub the last
piece you found… and listen… to the ocean.”
To illustrate, he held up a broad square of grayish-green and rubbed it
next to his ear, crooning like a dimestore Sinatra. “Come to me-ee, ooh! Glassy-glassy ba-bee,
co-o-ome!”
Once I stopped laughing, I followed the
guardrail of Frosty’s track and wandered forward, trying my best not to try so
hard. Thirty feet on I began to lose
heart, having failed to spot so much as a sliver, but then I recalled Frosty’s
words and turned my attention to the ocean.
Before the crash of wave number two, I came upon a curl of white in the
shape of a human ear. I held it to
my... well, to my ear, and proceeded to
grip the glass against my palm as my fingers took turns rubbing harmonium notes
against its shower-door surface.
A hundred paces later I had myself a nice
little handful. Not realizing how much
ground we had covered, I straightened up for a backstretch and was surprised to
find Whalespout Rock directly to my left.
It was, at that moment, earning its nickname, firing a spray of frigid
water precisely in my direction.
“It’s different today,” said Frosty,
hovering over my shoulder.
“Different?”
“Yah.
Not sure how. Wait a minute...”
He held up a hand and watched another wave rip through the slot. Frosty’s eyes became glazed, turning the
slightest bit... animal, as he processed
what he was observing. “Ye-e-es. The sound – it’s just a tad bit lower in
pitch. I wonder what would cause that? So… you wanna come to my campsite for
dinner?”
Normally, I’d have been caught off guard,
but I was ready. I smiled coyly and said,
“Yes.”
Photo by MJV
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