The end of Didion's story

At the very end, Didion writes about a florist she had lived near. After she moves away, there is one of those terrible fires that always plague California and she goes back to visit the florist whose greenhouses have been destroyed by the fire.

The place was now a range not of orchids but of shattered glass and melted metal and imploded shards of thousands of chemical beakers that had held the Freed seedlings, the new crosses. "I lost three years," Amado Vazquez said, and for an instant I thought we both would cry. "You want today to see the flowers," he said then, "we should go down to the other place." I did not want to see flowers. After I said goodbye to Amado Vazquez my husband and I went to look at the house on the Pacific Coast Highway in which we had lived for seven years. The fire had come to within 125 feet of the property, then stopped or turned or been beaten back, it was hard to tell which. In any case it was no longer our house.

For those of us who don't live in California, the words "Pacific Coast Highway" have mythological power. It's like saying "Lyonesse", "Arcadia" or "Xanadu". Years ago now, a friend of mine was down in California after the breakup of his second marriage. He rented a Porsche and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway very fast in the rain. He kept imagining losing control of the Porsche and dying in a fiery wreck. Before coming home, he went into a music store and asked the sexiest girl working there to suggest, "a song that will remind me of what it feels like to be driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in the rain thinking your life is a meaningless mess". She recommended this one: