Before Led Zeppelin and After: 1973

"I see a man in your future. And somewhere, death." Two houses down the beach, Sabine's friend Cecilia pores over a veneer coffee table wearing a long skirt made from faded bell-bottom jeans with a tie-dyed peasant top and red bandana around her forehead, focusing. "Not in the immediate sense, you know. It could be someone around you. Or even a tree on your property." She looks up.

While Jules works long hours with his surgery clients, Sabine has taken to walking the kids down the sunny beach to neighbors' houses where the girls spend afternoons sharing macaroni and potato salads and Jello molds, selling Tupperware ensembles in an endless stream of daily get-togethers. On the days they don't trade Tupperware, they take turns painting on oily pink lipsticks from mini tube dispensers, matching the Avon lipsticks with butterfly shades of eye shadow in sky-blue, marigold, raw sienna, and burnt umber. With Jules paying off his boat, more upset about money than ever and threatening to put the house on the market, Sabine tells herself at least she is raising something.

She needs to make some money and thinks back to Alan, the high school sweetheart-turned entertainment lawyer she ran into on Sunset weeks ago. "Meet me at the Forum." Alan said before he sped toward Wilshire.

Day after day this month, the girls have been meeting in the long hours away from their husbands to read tarot cards and talk about stopping the Vietnam war, to sit Indian-style in their living rooms smoking hashish and listening to The Doors much too loud; the kids run out to the beach or ride bikes along the sun drenched path of the PCH. Last week, the kids put together a lemonade stand and sold seventy-eight cents worth to neighbors without Sabine coming to check on them once.

 "Yes, but the man." Cecilia starts to talk again. "He's a dark man. I see a knight. I'm not so sure you can trust him, though. The part about the death, I don't know. You smoke?" Cecilia takes another drag off her joint, squinting.

In the night, Jules turns up the television and adjusts the antenna. Sabine looks out at the moon and thinks of the day she met Alan.

"What happened? Mom says you married a doctor." Alan had said to her in the sun, skin fresh after a shower, fingers strumming his shining red Stingray. "You still model?" Alan lowered his voice to a whisper then watched as if trying to solve some complex puzzle.  "Or has married life taken you off the circuit?"

"When I can." Sabine cleared her throat. "I need to break into the design business."

"Hey, Zeppelin's down at the Forum this month." Alan said. "I'll be there with clients." Alan's car blended into the mass of colors that made up Sunset, leaving behind it a mixture of memories and longing.

People want to see my work, Sabine reminds herself.

She thinks of Jules. Even on the nights that they eat together, which they seldom do anymore, he is yawning. "You're in bed every night at ten except New Years. By 10:01, you've shut out the light," Sabine says to Jules, trying to get his attention after the kids are off to bed. Jules shrugs and turns up the 9 o'clock news. "Nixon's on." He holds up his hand as if to call a time out, makes no eye contact.

Even staying up to watch the moon over the water together never happens. On the hottest nights she watches it alone, falls asleep on the deck lounge chair wrapped in only a towel and dreams of her designs, of bringing her brother Ritchie home from Vietnam, of somehow escaping all this.

But as she lies on that deck and looks up to that moon, those words keep ringing through her, that vision of Alan in the sun. "Sure, we can we hook up. Bring the dresses."

The feeling whispers on her skin, that fresh wind of arousal and mystery, the thoughts of how far she can go with her art, how much she can do with it.