Mystery Girl: A Novel by David Gordon

the traffic is rolling and the air is flowing and KXLU is playing and your time is paid, it can actually be a very pleasant ride. There were the billboards and the hotels and the shuttered nightclubs. There was the former health food restaurant were Woody freaks out in Annie Hall, and the long-ago strip club that Ben Gazarra runs in Killing of a Chinese Bookie. There was the rest of humanity washing past you—the ugly, the pretty, the angry, the bored, the sweaty tourist, the smoking Mexican gardener, the junior executive yelling into his headset—each one bobbing to the surface for a second before fate carried them away. Perhaps it was being here in the city of movies, or perhaps it was just the automatic magic of movement, music, and cars, but I felt comforted, as if my own stupid drama were part of some larger show, some movie set against the sweep of this landscape that scrolled by me as I drove into the wind. To give our lives a form, however fleeting, and lend our losses a name, these too are among the consolations of art.
    We left West Hollywood and sailed through Beverly Hills, passing the green lawns, olive canyons, and pink hotels, the cartoon mansions of every style and period—a ten-bedroom thatched English cottage beside a Tudor mansion with five cars in the drive, next to Monticello, the Pantheon, and the Doge—like a miniature golf course blown up bigger than life. Then came Brentwood, the Palisades, those other, lower-keyed neighborhoods, somehow even more unreal. While Beverly Hills, in its exuberant overkill and luxury, is utterly itself, these further lands of fabulous wealth, poised on the western edge of the country, are more like fake hometowns, with ranch-style spreads, shingles and shutters and cute shopping pockets, except that everything, from a house to a house salad, is ten, or a hundred, or maybe even a thousand times what it costs back home, and despite the warm, folksy aura, you know, as soon as you see the ideally gorgeous moms, brutally rich dads, and the junior millionaires on their bikes: you don’t belong.
    But it’s worth every penny, for those who can spare the change. The warm light is rubbed with sage and rosemary. The breeze smells like organic cough drops and artisanal focaccia. You can feel the unseen sea on your skin. You dip and rise, shadow to sun, through treelined glades of eucalyptus that shed their bark in long soft curls, and hillsides glowing gray-green and deep red. And then, beyond that last hill, dazzling you always no matter how much you expect it, the ocean is there again. Ms. Doon took a right onto the PCH, and, as if I were the one leading her, we rode right past all the tourist spots, past Malibu and Zuma Beach, past waving paragliders and sliding surfers and detoxing movie stars, way up by the county line, to El Matador, my favorite beach.
    El Matador is cut like cake from the cliffside, eaten out by the ocean from beneath into caves and crumbs and columns, while sugared waves lay down in thick ruffles on the satin sand. The beach is slick and narrow, mirror-bright in the shallows. In the surf, a spindly tower of rock stands alone, like a bad tooth, severed from the cliffsby the lick of waves relentlessly swirling around it. Its top forms a tiny plateau, a little garden covered with bright clinging plants and grasses lying down in the wind. Perhaps this lone, thin rock is the matador whom those first Spanish warriors named when they too came and prayed, knee-deep in the surf, facing the bleeding sun.
    I recalled my drives up here with Lala, hiking along the ridges and ravines of Topanga Canyon, walking on the beach, kissing in the caves, sucking back clams in Neptune’s Net, then napping on a blanket on the sand, sea-cooled breezes chilling my arms, sunshine baking my face. Those were good days, and as I trailed my subject along the coast, longing shot through me again. It was a physical pain, this loss of a former happiness, and a possible future joy, a sharp