I THOUGHT BEING SHOCKED by beauty might help us. Let us be knocked on the head by it. Pummeled. Beat up and smoothed out by beauty. That was my plan. On the flight from New York, I’d had a vision. I saw us on a cliff, my son and me, looking out at a rough, cold ocean, the tide rising against a new indifference.

Not indifference, my son explained. Impatience. He stared across the windshield of our rental car, only willing to look inland. He said, “I’m impatient.”

We drove from Oakland to Ojai, south on the 101, stopping midway for lunch at the Madonna Inn.

“I know kids my age can start to feel upset,” my son said, placing his hands gently on the table between us. “I’ve been searching for those feelings within myself. Anger or depression. But I don’t find them.”

“I’m so glad,” I said.

“But things are changing, and I am easily annoyed.” He paused, flipped his menu. “And,” he continued, “I seem to save it, all the worst of it, just for you.”

We laughed. A giant plate of cake arrived. I watched my son’s face. At thirteen, there were now two tenants occupying his body—my same sweet child and some surly new adult. Both of these selves regarded the cake, his posture shifting from delight to disgust.

Get the pink cake, Aggie had texted when I told her where we were. You should try it once.

And so here it was, from its dusty case to our table, the pink cake, delicate and ominous, like a child’s glass-eyed doll, with waxy curls of stiff frosting, sitting like fists on top of a foot of flavorless layers. We took bites. Felt regret. But in the pictures, my son is only smiling.

We arrived at Aggie’s house in Ojai. We sat on the couch and watched her young daughter play with plastic horses. I became aware of my unusual body odor. It had been a full day’s drive. Hot in the car. I felt embarrassed. I was stinking up the home of my dearest old friend. At night, I showered but smelled the same! I slept fitfully in the guest bedroom. I worried something was wrong with me. Was I sick? Was I full of harmful toxins? Was my stench emanating?

In the morning, I saw them. Everywhere. In the bathroom, next to the bed, behind the couch. Pungent bunches, arranged in vases, of some musky species of Salvia.

“I love this scent,” Aggie said when I asked about the bouquets. She breathed in deeply and said, “These blossoms!”

The blossoms stunk, not me. I was relieved. The grip of self-consciousness eased and, in its place, came annoyance. I was ill-humored and underslept. But now, when I think back on it, this moment of discovery is only funny—or, no, it is more than that. It is precious to me. My peculiar Aggie, my steadfast friend, lover of things that seem hard to love.

My son and I headed back north. Weekend traffic stopped us near Ventura. He didn’t mind at all. It wasn’t our traffic, was not New York City traffic, not our daily trouble, not the traffic that asked us what we could have done differently. This was someone else’s traffic. It could slow us down but couldn’t touch us. My son stared past me, out to the ocean.

In the afternoon, we stopped at a seal sanctuary. The boardwalk leading to the beach was crowded with tourists. It was pupping
season. Mother seals and their pups moved together on their bellies through the sand in a motion I learned was called “galumphing.” I took a video.

“Those seals reeked, didn’t they?” I said later to my son.

“This is amazing,” he said, watching the video. We were in our hotel room. He’d moved from his bed to mine. He was barefoot.

Yes, I can see that now, all these months later, when I play the video back to myself. Amazing. These big creatures, galumphing along.

We entered San Simeon. My son was charming. My son was funny. He sometimes said odd and overly formal sentences. His pocketknife was on his lap in the passenger seat. The day he’d been given the knife, last year’s birthday present, he’d stared at it for several seconds, completely overwhelmed. Then he’d collected himself and said, in the grave voice of the gentleman soldier, “I am seen. You have correctly assessed my innermost desires.”

We cracked up in the rental car, remembering this. “Where does this language come from?” I asked, still laughing.

He shrugged. “There may be,” he said,“the diary of a Victorian farmhand living inside me.”

We pulled into the parking lot. It was packed. The newspaper man’s mansion loomed above us, far up on the hill.

You do it once, Aggie texted.

And we agreed it was worth doing, until we got there. The visitor center swarmed with tourists. Tickets were expensive. It was a walking tour and although it was foggy and cool at sea level, we were warned of extreme heat once up on the hill.

“Is this worth it?” I asked my son. “Should we leave?”

He was quiet for a minute, then a minute more. I waited. He stayed silent. What was happening? Was he ignoring me? His face seemed set against me. These days, his moods shifted quickly. Sometimes I would reach for my child and find him gone, lost behind a wall I could not scale. A sweetness of his youth was gone. Not all his sweetness, but a certain piece of it. When he was born, I could hold both his tiny feet in one hand. His two feet fit in my palm.

I was anxious. “What do you think?” I said. “Should we just go?”

“Well,” he said at last. “I did a thought experiment.”

“Good, good,” I said.

“I imagined us driving out of the parking lot. I pictured us leaving and not seeing this castle. And I felt relief.”

“Okay!” I said.

“But then,” my son continued. “I thought of us later. Down the road. Like an hour or two on the highway. How would I feel then?”

“Right,” I said.

“It might not be fun,” he said. “But I have faith it’s worth doing. Maybe just to avoid regret. We’ll go together. We’ll be able to say we saw it through. And when it’s over, you know, we won’t ever be here again.”

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