California

California is where Henry Pelham travels to meet Celia Favreau after five years without a word between them, and its landscapes give that uncertain reunion a setting of deceptive calm. From the open road of the Central Coast to Carmel-by-the-Sea’s carefully quaint center, the state becomes more than a destination: it is the place where Henry tries to understand the life Celia has made apart from him.

Arrival and the Central Coast

Henry reaches California exhausted after fifteen hours of flying and six thousand miles of travel. He has tried not to think about planes, but the memory of the Flughafen and its high-definition video of a hundred and twenty bodies aboard an airplane has left him unable to relax in coach. Celia is the journey’s real destination, though he prepares himself for the possibility that she will not come. If she is absent, he plans to eat, return to the airport, and fly back to Vienna; not having to face her, he admits to himself, would make both his work and his life easier.

On Highway 1, the California landscape sharpens rather than relieves his loneliness. With the rental car’s roof retracted, he merges onto the road as trees overhang the breakdown lanes and the mountains of the Central Coast rise ahead. The beauty makes being alone more acute: there is no one with whom to share the view. He turns up the radio and drives slowly, letting the wind in, in contrast to the narrow, crowded European roads he has driven for years. The easy pace of California driving suggests an easier life to him, and he can see why Celia retired there.

Carmel-by-the-Sea

The route into Carmel-by-the-Sea slows further. A sign directs Henry down Ocean Avenue, where the speed limit falls to twenty-five miles per hour and the road descends toward the coast. The town has no traffic lights; four-way stops appear among trees and cottages. The fresh air and measured pace make Henry feel almost tranquilized.

Its shopping district presents a polished village scene: cultivated trees divide the street, local cottage-style shops line it, and chains are prohibited. Henry drives through the center to the beach, passing older shoppers walking small dogs before taking the sandy parking loop for a brief view of the white shore and rough waves in the fading light. The calm is interrupted by tourists behind him, and he soon returns to the town center to wait near Lincoln Street as evening falls.

A Place to Become Someone Else

Carmel’s appeal is inseparable from the contrast between its imagined past and its present. In the early twentieth century, writers and artists stayed in primitive cabins along the beach; after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake brought an influx of homeless bohemians, local residents began taking city building seriously. The town’s literary associations include Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Robinson Jeffers, yet Henry doubts those artists could now afford to dine there. The history of a bohemian refuge sits beside a prosperous, curated village.

For Henry, that curated quality makes Carmel a fitting place for reinvention. He sees it as an image of an image, an idealized seaside village rather than the unvarnished real thing. Celia has built a life there with Drew Favreau, a retired GM manager who had spent half his working life in Vienna. Henry understands Carmel as a place where someone might live as something other than what they once were; that reading frames the town both as Celia’s chosen haven and as evidence of the distance separating her new life from their past.