"No, I'm going to try the meat loaf."

"It's pretty good," she admits, jotting it down. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing all alone on a night like this?"

"I'm always alone at Christmas," I tell her.

She rolls her dark eyes and says, "You're lucky. I've got four kids. Two of my own, two of my husband's. Tomorrow is going to be h.e.l.l. Somebody is going to start screaming by ten o'clock. I can't wait till they leave home."

"Don't say that," I offer mildly, not meaning it.

She says, "Honey, if you only knew. Christmas is all about the children, and they never let you forget it. My feet hurt so bad, I'm thinking of asking my doctor to cut them off. How bad can a wheelchair be? People have to push you places. Sounds good to me."

"You don't mean that," I tell her. Gloria is a diabetic, and I realize that the eventuality of having her limbs cut off is in the proverbial cards.

People who get sick do it for a reason, I figure. And if you want someone to push you around in a wheelchair, you must have a sound purpose. Gloria is tired, and I can see where the idea of being pushed around might appeal to her. But those of us who eat at Rae's don't want to reckon with that just yet.

"I'll get your meat loaf," she says, sounding exhausted. "Anything else?"

"Just some iced tea."

"No problem," she says, moving away.

I am reading the print on the back of a Tabas...o...b..ttle when I hear my name.

"Pearl," the voice says.

I look up. Patrick is sitting not far down the counter, eating a hamburger.

I feel embarra.s.sed and annoyed. I don't want to see anyone from work here. Not on Christmas Eve, when I'm supposed to be on vacation.

"What brings you here?" he asks.

I shrug, embarra.s.sed, wanting to invent a story, but at the same time wanting to tell the truth. I strike a compromise.

I say, "I have some parties to go to. Thought it might be smart to eat first."

Patrick smiles. He says, "Yeah, I have some parties, too. It's always smart to eat."

I stifle a yawn, then say, "Where are your parties?"

He says, "Where are yours?"

"Here in Santa Monica," I answer quickly. It's true that I've been invited. Clive asked me to a party down in Venice, and my next-door neighbor asked me over for drinks. I declined both invitations. No need for him to know about that.

Gloria brings my meat loaf. She shoots a look at Patrick and says, "Now, don't make trouble."

"You know I wouldn't," he tells her, and smiles at me.

I start eating my meat loaf, hoping he'll ignore me, but he doesn't. He is staring at me. He eventually moves down a couple of seats till he is two seats away from me.

He leans toward me and says, "I have to go to a party, and I don't want to go alone. How would you feel about going with me?"

"I'd feel cranky," I say, biting into the meat loaf. It's good, and I know I'd feel a lot less cranky if I could be left alone.

Patrick says, "I live in Venice. In a loft near the beach. This party is close to my house. I could drive us. I could drive you home. I just don't want to go by myself."

Keep in mind that all of these sentences are laced with his particular speech impediment, the s's sounding like sh's.

The meat loaf is really good, so I feel happy and comfortable enough to say, "Patrick, I just want to eat, and then I want to go home and go to bed."

He smiles. His eyes are a brighter blue than I had imagined. I am remembering Cive's eyes and thinking that if they were as piercing and sincere as Patrick's, the subsequent morning would not have ended so badly.

But this is a dangerous thing to think.

Patrick says, "Just come with me to this party. I'll drive you home. What do you say?"

"I'd say you are relentless."

He grins. He says, "That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me."

I know I am going with him. I just don't know what it means.

THE PARTY IS AT someone's house on one of the Venice ca.n.a.ls. What most people know about Venice Beach is its history of crime, wackiness, and weirdos. They know about Muscle Beach, that bizarre stretch of sand where the denizens of the Sun Belt come to show off their peculiar talents. Weight lifters, fire-eaters, breakdancers, in-line skaters, human mannequins, chain-saw jugglers- the list goes on. It is the place you take visitors from out of town, ostensibly to show them the local color, but secretly (I believe) to discourage them from moving here. It usually works. People leave Venice shaking their heads, laughing and amazed but a little bit sick to their stomachs, the way you feel leaving any circus. A little taste of freakiness goes a long way.

Not many people, even the ones who live in L.A., know about the Venice ca.n.a.ls. The city itself was built in homage, as it were, to the real Venice, and in true Los Angeles fashion, the developer (a Mr. Abbot Kinney, I'm told) culled everything that was bad about the original city and omitted the good. The bad being an impractical array of houses on unstable land, surrounded by vaguely smelly and polluted waters. The good being excellent Italian cuisine, hundreds of years of architectural superiority, a profitable gla.s.s factory, and a link to the European continent.

That is my jaded view of the Venice ca.n.a.ls, but the truth is, they are reasonably quaint and romantic, particularly at night, when the murky waters are invisible and the Craftsman-style houses are softly lit. The sound of the water lapping against the sidewalks is soothing, and on this particular night, Christmas Eve, the atmosphere is almost magical, with a tasteful display of white Christmas lights linking the houses in a common theme. It is almost breathtaking.

Patrick leads me to one of the nicer houses on the block, which is full of happy people holding festive drinks, talking in moderate tones, laughing, and clapping one another on the back. The house is lit mostly by candles, and an enormous Christmas tree takes up most of the living room. Cla.s.sical Christmas carols are playing softly on the stereo, and as soon as I walk in, I never want to leave. I want to be friends with every person in this house, and they seem to want to be friends with me, too. Patrick introduces me as Pearl, giving no explanation as to how he knows me (leaving us open to speculation that we're a couple, I'm thinking), and goes off to get me a drink. No one asks me what I do for a living; nor do they offer such information about themselves. Which might not seem so strange to an outsider, but in Los Angeles, what you do for a living is everything.

I've engaged in half a dozen conversations before Patrick returns. I've talked to a pleasant man named Gerald, who seems to be Austrian or German, and his attractive girlfriend, Lucia, who seems to be not Austrian or German, and I've talked to a large, funny woman named Justine, who revealed to me that she's recently divorced and this is her first Christmas alone, but it's not so bad. I've talked to a large, bearded man named Toby, who offered a positive dissertation on the NFL, and I've talked to a quiet blond Englishwoman with a baby on her hip. The woman is named Rosemary; the baby is named Imogen. They both seem to live here, and Rosemary is worried that the eggnog is not up to snuff. Excusing herself and her baby, she goes off in search of a man named Simon. This is when Patrick returns, offering me a gla.s.s of white wine. I accept it gratefully.

He clinks gla.s.ses with me (he's drinking an amber-colored drink on ice) and says, "Merry Christmas."

"How do you know these people?" I ask.

"From my former life," he says enigmatically.

"What former life?"

"When I was a teacher. Simon and I were in the same department."

"Where did you teach?"

"At UCLA," he says without much fanfare.

I feel a kind of jolt, the kind you feel when two entirely disparate worlds accidentally collide. When that happens, I feel that either G.o.d or the devil is at work, and I can't relax until I know which one.

"Do you know Mark Hooper?" I ask.

"No. What department is he in?"

"He's a history professor."

He shakes his head, with just a hint of disdain. "We didn't mix with those people."

"What department were you in?"

"Physics," he says.

I struggle to hide my reaction. He looks at me, and as my reaction rises to the surface anyway, he looks away. Something in my expression bothers him. I think it must be disbelief.

"You're a physics teacher?"

"I was," he says.

"Why did you stop?"

He shrugs. "It made me crazy. Physics will do that to you."

"Well, how did you end up working in a music store?"

"It was a logical progression," he says.

"How is that?"

He shrugs, pausing to sip from his gla.s.s. "Music and physics are the same thing."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes, really." He laughs now, looking straight at me. "Pearl, no one knows that better than you."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Frequencies. Vibrations. Sound waves."

"Physics and music are connected. They aren't the same thing."

"What makes you say that?"

"One is a science."

He raises an eyebrow at me. "Which one?"

"Music is not a science."

"Prove it."

"I don't have to. I play it."

"So do I," he insists.

I decide not to challenge him. After all, he is a physics teacher. He knows stuff.

He's also a person with a life. This is his life I'm standing in, and it's bigger than mine, with more people in it. How did I let myself get so isolated? I wonder, but I know. I've always been isolated. It was a condition I was born with, like asthma or cerebral palsy. It was exacerbated by parents who were surprised and baffled by me. Some children, like Imogen, get to arrive on earth with this one simple a.s.surance: You were invited, and you are welcome. Those of us who imposed our existence on a couple of angry and resistant partic.i.p.ants spend most of our lives feeling sorry that we came. Wondering why we did come. And not knowing, we stand aside and try not to make a fuss.

Some of that dissipated when I met Mark. My abject nothingness went away when we got married. I am here to be a certain man's wife. That was enough of a thing to be, for many years. But when that went away, I had to find another purpose. When I started to work at McCoy's, I came to a better conclusion. I am here to work. I am here to teach people. There really is a place for me, after all.

Hallie became the strongest evidence of that. And there were weeks, maybe even months, when I thought she was my whole reason for existence.

When she went away, I didn't know what to do.

I haven't known what to do for a long time.

Suddenly Patrick says, "Okay, here's the truth. I taught physics for eight years, and then I got involved in research. I was doing quite well with it, but . . . I don't know how to explain it, except to say that my brain overheated. It ran too hot, like a car engine. I had a little breakdown. I went away for a while. When I came back, I wanted to be around music. That's how I ended up at McCoy's."

"But what instrument do you play?" I ask, still stuck on that point. He just smiles at the ground, and I say, "You have to play something. Franklin doesn't hire people unless they can play something."

"I told you before," he says.

"Tell me again."

"I play them all," he says quietly. As if he wants it to remain a secret.

"What do you mean?" I ask, feeling a little desperate.

"Just that, Pearl. I hear them all, I play them all. I can pick up any instrument and play it. I don't know why or how. I've never had a lesson. I look at musical notation, and it makes sense to me. It's just math. Easy math, at that. In fact, music was one of the earliest scientific experiments- the realization that the length of a string determines its pitch. As far as the sounds are concerned, they are just waves, you know? They exist in certain frequencies, on certain planes. They are already out there. All you do on your violin is pull the waves out of the air and transform them from one dimension to another."

As Patrick is saying this, I've noticed that his strange lisp has gone away. He is speaking normally.

I say, "I think I do more than that when I play the violin."

"Of course you think so. But you're wrong. It's not magic. It's science."

I have no argument, so he goes on speaking. He says, "In quantum physics, there is this notion- this belief, I suppose- that we are all connected by a kind of ether. We're all in the same soup. There is a finite amount of energy on earth. We tap into it or we reject it. If you choose to reject it, you're like a free radical, bouncing off the walls, dividing and subdividing at will, creating illness and chaos. But if you accept the ether, if you accept that energy is finite, while still holding the paradoxical belief that s.p.a.ce itself is infinite, then you are in striking distance of the truth. You can get a glimpse of the keys to the kingdom. You can't own the keys to the kingdom, but knowing they exist is almost the same. Do you understand?"

I say, "Wait a minute. Does the physics prove chaos or does it prove order?"

"It suggests both."

"It can't be both, Patrick. You have to pick."

"We can't prove either one. Einstein set out to prove the unified field theory. Order. His efforts to prove it resulted in the atom bomb. Chaos."

"All that means is that the answer hasn't been found. It doesn't mean there's no answer."

He looks at me, raising his chin in an authoritative gesture. "You tell me. Does your life have meaning?"

"That's a horrible question."