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London, we’d gone out on the ferry deck in a gray drizzle, and she had said that the first thing she was going to do in St. Tropez was take her shirt off and sunburn her key onto her left breast. And, after a quick check that we were alone, she had opened her shirt, her nipples tight in the cold channel air, and placed the necklace in the spot. Two days later, she did just that, creating a little white shape that looked like that key for a long time. On the ferry that day, she had looked for a minute like a short blond figurehead; she’d said that too.
    When I return, Judith is out on the pier rail. She holds up the last token and tells me that I’m not getting my last turn. I know that it will soon be another necklace. She has one like it with a Chucky Cheese token on it which reads, “In Pizza We Trust.”
    She puts the token in her pocket and turns to the sea. The day here is shot, the sun gone, the cloud cover a bald dusk, but in the far west that fuzzy line of light persists on the sea’s edge.
    â€œThey’re having brunch on the veranda in Waikiki.”
    â€œI’m as far West as I go.” Judith says into the wind. “This is it for me.”
    I don’t want to argue with her. It is a relief not wanting to argue. It is not my fault she came to California. I don’t want to say that again. I don’t want to attack Reichert or defend him or any of the dozen other people we both still see, all of them bright, well-educated, charming people, mostly young, and every one of them integrally involved in film projects that are hideous or silly. I won’t argue. It is a relief. All I want is a beer. I want to push off this rail and walk back, swinging my legs, feeling my knees as we climb the steps, and go back across the street and have another beer.
    â€œYou think it’s possible to write a good movie?” Judith says, turning to me.
    â€œI think it’s less possible than a year ago.”
    â€œOh good, I can’t wait until tomorrow.”
    I nearly say Neither can I, but that is exactly how we used to talk. I say: “Judith, let me buy you a pint of bitter and a sandwich.”
    â€œYou think this is a good country? You think this is a livable country?”
    I am not going to do this. “Judith, I can’t go on without a pint,” I say, stepping away from the rail. It is an old joke from London. I walk back to the first silver owl, as Judith calls the coin-operated binoculars on the pier.
    Way out there I can see the guy from Paramount leaning back on one elbow drinking wine in the gray wind. Where do they learn that stuff? I close my eyes. I try to remember the name of the pub in Highgate across from Coleridge’s grave. I can’t get it. We walked there once on Easter, up through the cemetery where we stood before Marx’s tomb, and now I’m trying to remember Marx’s tomb: “Workers of the World Unite, ours is not to something something, but to change something.” There was a green-headed mallard on every stone crucifer. Judith and I sat on a green bench in the park and argued about something. The ducks were all mating, walking in circles around us, and then we walked up to the pub which had been a real coach stop in the old days, and it’s name was. I can’t remember.
    I can remember Judith, after she started writing for Reichert, coming home late in the car. She wouldn’t come in the house. I would go out after a while and find her sitting in the Rabbit, listening to the end of a Jackson Browne tape. I should have known. It was Reichert’s tape: “Hold Out.” It was the Era of Maximum Smiling; she called it that. She’d look up from the car and smile. “This is the Era of Maximum Smiling,” she’d say.
    I wanted then to remind her that the Era of Quality Smiling was when we could watch the kites on Parliament Hill on the heath, when we could see all of London grumbling beneath