What It’s Like to Love on Highway 99

I.

Most traces of you  

had disappeared from the back roads of Lodi

by the time I arrived:

the reverberations of your hooting laughter

in the rafters of the oak trees, the glint

of your father’s new truck, the slight shadows

made by the brim of your hat, the web

draped over the landscape by your

wandering gaze. I rolled down my

windows. Even the scent of your worn

fabrics had floated down to the dust.

There I was, with a blue farmhouse

to my left, and a map that told me

you should be to my right, where I could see

only vineyards. Most traces of you

had disappeared from the back roads of Lodi

by the time I arrived. That grace of yours

was the only exception: it clung

to the gravel roads bathing in the strokes

of early evening sunlight. There is a vividness

to the places you pass through. A rising

to everything you touch, like a child on tiptoe.

As though the grass and the stones and

the people were just waking up.

And so when I couldn’t find you,

I turned onto a road that led straight

into the vineyards. That’s when I heard

music tumbling toward me in that

lively backyard way of California’s

when it’s still early summer.

I parked in the middle of that vineyard

and I walked toward those lifting sounds

of yours.

II.

Even at 3 AM (or perhaps especially

at 3 AM), you have a musical gait,

a way of walking like every step

is part of a conversation with the ground.

You have a way of loving strangers

from a respectful distance. There’s always

enough time to speak to the woman sweeping

the floor in Taco Bell, to the security guards

shivering in the cold, to the dining hall staff.

The ones who know you always tell me

how lucky I am. Most of the time,

I’m tired, aching for bed, but I stop

and wait for you and hope your love

for humans in contagious, that some of it

will rub off on me.

III.

What I remember from the night I met you

is the glimmer of downtown L.A., the way

everyone’s body kept angling toward you,

the way you rolled up your jeans to dip

your feet in the hot tub. I remembered

something as soon as we started talking.

What mattered was not so much what

I had remembered (I still don’t know exactly),

but the certainty with which I had remembered it.

Maybe part of it was the place we share.

I thought of that later, after the concert in Lodi,

when your mom and sister burst into the kitchen

in bathing suits, wrapped in towels, having just

emerged from a neighbor’s swimming pool. I thought

of that too when I first saw your father’s murals,

and when he showed me his workshop

in the garage. Something about the intimate

way he paints the fruit, the fields of central

and northern California—

that’s when I understood how deeply rooted

you are in this place.

IV.

As transplants, we both know that

L.A. has a way with February,

a hush-hush trade.

Every year it swears to enough

bluster to pass as winter, in exchange

for one or two impossible afternoons:

bright air from the San Gabriels,

a light breeze, and a gentle,

explosive warmth. Every year

on those days I feel like I’m keeping

a secret for the city. The night after a day

like that last year we got Chinese takeout

sometime around midnight. We’d been

listening to a comedy album on the way over.

Outside the restaurant were a wild-eyed

woman and her daughter. They stopped you

and asked for some change. You talked

to them for a little while, they looked hungry.

The woman told us they were running

from people who wanted to turn her daughter

into a model. While she talked, I looked

at her daughter, whose face I couldn’t read.

Her expression was more stoic

than that of any 11-year-old I had ever met.

There was something unbearably sad

about the two women. You listened

and bought them dinner. On the way home,

you looked serious, something unusual,

and you didn’t turn the comedy back on. You

asked me whether you had done the right thing.

I felt you had and told you so. To myself,

I admitted that I probably wouldn’t have

stopped to talk in the first place, and that knowledge

frightened me. All I could think of was your

unconditional love for people. I thought

of the other side of your part of the valley—

all the foreclosure, bankruptcy, corruption,

homelessness, violence—pain that didn’t flood

my part of the valley in the way it did yours.

I thought of your fierce defenses of your city,

of the roots of the trees in the orchards

in your father’s paintings and your childhood,

of the first time you laid down your saxophone

to dance me through the last song,

in the middle of those vineyards in Lodi.

We spun circles up and around our love of

that valley. The hem of my skirt wavered

and each blade of grass seemed to bless my ankles.