LILY died the day we signed the escrow papers for the bed-and-breakfast.

It was late October and one of those wonderful Cambria days. Fog raced across the treetops and wrapped around their trunks like cloaks of mist. Yet it wasn't cold. The sun was glorious as it flickered from every facet of the sea. Cambria is special in this way, fog and sunshine sharing the day like loving siblings.

We were realizing Lily's dream of living in the tiny seaside California town. It wasn't my dream. Truth is, I had no dream, and stole hers like a pickpocket. I wanted to write, but about what I didn't know. Nonfiction, as it turned out. I wrote nonfiction because it was about something from outside me. Lily, on the other hand, had wanted to live in Cambria and become one of its quaint denizens since her parents brought her to the place when she was a child.

I took her to Moonstone Gardens for lunch after we left the escrow office. We ate salads and relished our dessert of lemon ice cream and raspberries. Lily talked of Monroe House, as our recent purchase was called, a ramshackle two-story Victorian dating from the turn of the century--the century before last. It had been run as a bed-and-breakfast before our entrance into its aura, and a badly managed one at that. It was located half a block off Burton Way in the East Village--Cambria is divided into villages, east and west, god knows why--and had failed because it was obscured by curio shops and restaurants. Lily had a plan to correct this deficiency, of course. Lily was filled with plans. It's the curse of those destined to die.

"We'll place a sign on Main Street," Lily said between spoonfuls of yellow ice cream and red raspberries. "Just like The Brambles. You know, an in-your-face kind of sign."

The Brambles was Cambria's most famous establishment, a four-star restaurant that early on, as Cambria began to transform itself from a sleepy little mining and logging community into a tourist attraction, had put the town on the map. The restaurant was a converted house, as many of Cambria's more established businesses were, with a sign at the corner of Main and Burton that left no doubt where it was located.

"They might not let you put a sign there," I suggested.

"They let The Brambles do it," Lily retorted.

"The Brambles is famous. Monroe House isn't."

"We'll make it famous!"

"Lily, I'm just saying, it might take a little convincing for us to be allowed to put up a sign like The Brambles's, that's all."

"Do you like the wallpaper in the lobby?" That was the way with Lily. Opposition was either overwhelmed or ignored, and changing the subject was a tactical maneuver. She knew I didn't like the wallpaper in the lobby--knew, in fact, that I didn't like wallpaper at all. It's anachronistic. The lobby wallpaper in Monroe House was a dark, dingy representation of flowers I couldn't identify. It had been put up by the previous owners recently, another miscalculation on the way to accumulative failure.

"It's awful," I responded.

"It has character."

"So do punch-drunk fighters," I said.

"Even so, I think we need to have wallpaper throughout the place."

"Sure. It's your hotel."

Technically, it was our place. Community property. But the money to purchase Monroe House came from Lily's trust fund, a small inheritance left by Lily's grandfather that barely covered the cost of the bed-and-breakfast. It was ours; it was hers.

"It's yours, too!" she protested.

"Fine. Will this town give me a variance for slot machines?"

"Wallpaper," she insisted.

"I demand veto power. Otherwise, you decorate the place by yourself."

"But something brighter."

Yes, something brighter. That was Lily. Something brighter.

We met in Los Angeles. I was born there thirty-four years ago. She had taken a job doing ad layouts at the magazine where I wrote and sometimes edited. She was a star the day she walked through the door, and unlike many beautiful women, and some not so beautiful, Lily had handled the knuckle-callused attempts of her male coworkers to get her into bed with grace and wit.

I was living with someone then and, ever the loyalist, didn't realize it was over until she arranged to have me walk in on her making nice with another guy. Had I been a drinking man, I would have dove into a bottle and not surfaced for a month. My way of handling hurt is to clam up, to withdraw inside and replace sentences with grunts and groans. Lily noticed this, somehow, as no one else had. She made an effort to cheer me up, a crusade that did not utilize her body or her femininity. She made me laugh. She was a great physical comedian. She had wit, as I mentioned earlier. And she was an empath who finally said, "Geez, Parker, who wants a woman who arranges for you to walk in on her with another man?"

At that moment I realized several things. One, everyone at the magazine knew about the incident, probably because Nancy wanted them to know about it, and she worked in distribution. Two, the only one in the place with any guts had just put her professional relationship with me on the line. And three, really, who would want a woman who arranged to hurt you and break up with you at the same time? Had I been a drinking man, I would have ordered a Coke.

A week later I asked Lily out. She said no.

"Seeing someone?" I asked.

"Not you," she replied, not unkindly.

Two weeks later I said, "You know, I'm really not a bad guy, no matter what Nancy says."

"I don't know what Nancy says," Lily replied. "She's too busy rutting. But I still won't go out with you."

"Why not?"

"You're the only person at this magazine I like." Lily logic. There it was.

So the campaign began. Flowers failed early on. I tried humor. I left notes on her desk, e-mail in her computer mailbox, and grinned repeatedly and without masculine grace from across the room whenever I could. I stood by and watched her with disapproval as she briefly dated a guy from accounting. I made myself annoying, an achievement of little repute, true, but there it was.

"Is there some way I can make you desist?" she asked one day at the coffee hutch.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," retorted I.

"You're making me anxious."

"You mean, you have a nervous condition?"

"No, apparently I have you."

"Then let me buy you dinner."

"No. And you've used the last of the half-and-half."

I have an endearing trait. I don't give up. If it were not for my disarming smile and dismissing shrug, cops would have hauled me off long ago and placed me where I could annoy no one. But I was always charming in these little pursuits, witty whenever wit struck like lightning and was available for theft.

I left notes wrapped in origami. Paper fish with a joke inside, birds with wit droppings. I clipped cartoons, drew several of my own, and sent them all to Lily's desk. Depictions of twosomes in awkward, sweet, cute, or just bawdy situations suggesting the bliss, clumsiness, adorability, or rapture that might await us.

"Okay," she said one day in May, and with an exasperation that tingled my heart, "I'll go out with you. But dutch, and for lunch only."

So we went to lunch. She chose the place. Plastic blinds and plastic tabletops. Paper napkins. Too much light and too little atmosphere. And the house wine was iced tea.

"I thought you liked me," I said, leading with my chin, another endearing trait.

"Lunch," she replied. "We're having it. So don't push it, buster."

Buster. What an adorable little word. Women used to use that word back when the world expected them to say things like, "Straighten up and fly right," or "Keep your hands to yourself." My hands were to myself; I had them inches away from hers.

"No," I said in uncharacteristic earnestness, "I mean it. I thought you liked me."

"I'm not staying in Los Angeles, Parker."

"Well hell, of course not," I said. "No one plans to stay in Los Angeles anymore. The Beach Boys left. So did The Mamas and the Papas, and aren't The Doors buried somewhere in Paris?"

"Jim Morrison."

"Same thing."

"I'm not staying here. I'm just sorting a few things out, and doing it here, and then I'm leaving."

"Yeah, so?"

"So I'm not getting involved with anyone who is staying in Los Angeles."

Ah, she liked me even more than I thought.

"Lily, what makes you think I want to stay in Los Angeles or give a rat's ass"--I said rat's ass because it made me sound more manly than rodent's heinie--"about staying in Los Angeles?"

"You have a career."

"I have a job."

"You have a condo."

"It's an apartment with pretension. It has a fireplace and a mortgage. It means nothing." For the briefest of moments I thought she might be jealous of the condo, as if to say, I'm just an apartment kind of girl, while you, you're a condo man. We come from two different classes, Parker, and that would always stand between us.

"In a few months I'm going to receive a small inheritance, Parker," she said earnestly, "and then I'm going to a small town to live. I'm going to open a bed-and-breakfast there. It's my dream. It's what I want to do. I couldn't expect someone to set aside their dreams for mine."

But of course at this point Lily didn't know I had no dreams, no ambitions, nothing really except the aforementioned condo that my previous significant other had insisted I buy. But of course none of this was meaningful because I wasn't asking Lily to marry me, or even to become my lover. (Well, okay, so maybe I might have asked that, if I thought I could get away with it.) No, I was just interested in the girl herself and wanted to spend time with her. I told her so.

"Well, you see, Parker, that's the problem. You know how you can tell sometimes how things will work out?" Actually, I didn't. I almost never saw how things were going to work out. "I can just tell that if you and I, if we...It's just better if things never get that far."

...