“One day,
Gabster
, your obsession with
Hollywood interrelationships will pay off.” Darren clicked his laptop closed.
“But not today.”
***
I think one could be at Hotel K, get blindfolded, taken to the
Stock, and believe they’d been driven around and dropped in the same place they
started: same pool, same chairs, same couches, same music, and same assholes
clutching the same drinks and passing off the same tips. What was different was
that there was no Freddie. the Stock had Debbie, a tall Asian lady who wore
mandarin collar embroidered shirts and black trousers. She knew every superstar
from just their face, and they loved her as much as she loved them. She could
tell a movie mogul from an actress and sat them where they’d have the most
professional friction. She coordinated the waitresses’ tables according to the
patron’s taste and coddled the girls until they worked like a machine.
She was the nicest person I’d ever worked for.
“Smile, girl,” Debbie said. I’d been there a week and she knew
exactly how many tables I could handle, how fast I was compared to the others,
and my strong suit, which appeared to be my magnetic personality. “People look
at you,” she said. “They can’t help it. Be smiling.”
It was hard to smile. We’d had three good shows in a row, then
Vinny
disappeared into thin air. We’d banged on his office
door in Thai Town, went to his house in East Hollywood, and called four hundred
times. No
Vinny
. Every gig he had lined up for us
fell through. My momentum was slowing and I didn’t like it.
“What’s your freaking problem?” said one dude as he threw a
dollar bill and three dimes on my tray. “You need a blast of coke or
something?” He’d looked like every other spikey-haired, fake-blonde, Hugo
Boss-wearing
douchenozzle
who namedropped from zero
to sixty in three beers. But Debbie had put his name on the ticket, probably as
a favor to me. His name was Eugene
Testarossa
, the
one guy at WDE I’d wanted to meet for months. In my depression over stupid
Vinny
, I hadn’t recognized him.
I stalked toward the bathroom on my break and bumped into a hard
chest that smelled of sage green and fog.
“Monica,” Jonathan said. “Hey. Sam told me he hired you.” His
green eyes looked down at me and I wanted to break apart under the weight of
them. As he looked at me, his face went from amused to concerned. “Are you
okay?”
“Fine, just a bad day. Whatever.” I stepped toward the bathroom,
but he seemed disinclined to let me go so easily.
“I got your report. Thanks. It was very professional.”
“You assumed a waitress couldn’t put together a sentence?” His
glance down told me I’d been a bitch. He didn’t deserve my worst side. I tried
to think fast; I didn’t want a barrage of questions about my life right then.
“The Dodgers lost and I’m from Echo Park and all, so I got a little down.”
“The Dodgers won tonight.” His pressed lips and bemused eyes told
me he understood I was half joking.
I shuffled my feet, feeling like a kid caught lying about kissing
behind the gym. “Yeah. Fucking Jesus Renaldo pulling it out in the ninth like
that.”
“He’s got five good pitches in him per game.”
“He tends to throw them in the bullpen.”
“Or trying to pick a guy off.” He shook his head. He looked
normal just then, not like the guy behind the desk undressing me with his eyes.
“I’m sorry I was such a bitch, just now.”
“I’m used to it.”
“No, you’re not. Come on. People are nice to you all day.”
He shrugged. “You lied about why you were upset. I get to lie
about how people treat me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat. “I have season tickets on
the first base line.”
I felt my eyes light up a little, and getting so excited over
something someone else had embarrassed me.
“I could bring you sometime,” he said.
“You haven’t seen a Dodger game until you’ve seen it from the
bleachers. Six
dolla
seats,
yo
.”
He laughed, and I laughed too. Then Debbie showed up at the end
of the hall.
“Monica!” she called out, tapping her wrist.
“Shit!” I cried out and ran back to my station, turning to give
Jonathan a wave before rounding the corner.
I put on a smile and made myself as intensely personable as I
could. I saw Jonathan at the head of the bar, talking to Sam and Debbie,
laughing at some joke I couldn’t hear. When I went to the station to pick up my
tray, he looked at me and I felt his sight. He was gorgeous, no doubt. I could
write songs about that face, those cheekbones, those eyes, that dry scent.
I wished he’d go away. I tried not to look at him, but he and Sam
were still talking at one in the morning. Debbie stood at the end of the
service bar, counting receipts, when I came by with a ticket, and I couldn’t
take it anymore.
“I’m sorry I was talking to Mister Drazen in the hall,” I said.
“I used to work for him.”
“I know.”
“How often does he come around here?”
“He and Sam have been close since they went to Stanford together,
so…once a week? Should I arrange for him to be here more often?”
My cheeks got hot. To Debbie, who read people like neon street
signs, the blushing was visible even in the dim lights. I glanced at him across
the bar. He was looking at Debbie and me. He lifted his rocks glass, a bunch of
melting ice in the bottom. Sam had gone to take care of some late-night hotel
business and Jonathan was alone.
“Perfect,” Debbie said to me. “You will bring him his refill.”
She hailed the bartender, a buffed out model who worked his body more than his
mind. “Robert, give Mister
Drazen’s
drink to Monica.”
“Debbie, really,” I said.
“Why?” asked Robert, pouring a glass of single malt from a shelf
so high I would have needed a cherry picker to reach it. “I’m not pretty
enough?”
“You’re plenty pretty,” Debbie said. “Now do it.” She put her
hand on my forearm and spoke quietly. “You need more practice dealing with his
social class. For you, as a person. Getting used to it will only benefit you.
Now go.”
Being mothered was nice, I guess. My mother had been more or less
absent since I went to high school, which was about when she and dad moved to
Castaic. I never felt abandoned, but I could have used a hand with the day to
day bullshit.
Drazen watched me come around the bar with his scotch. I wondered
if he knew that made me uncomfortable or if he even gave it a thought. I
wondered if the difference in our relative positions bothered him or turned him
on. He was a
bazillionaire
and customer. I was a
waitress with two nickels making heat.
This had to be a turn on.
“Thanks,” he said when I placed the napkin and drink on the bar,
a job Robert could have done in half the time.
“You’re welcome.”
We looked at each other for a second or ten. I had nothing to add
to the conversation, but his magnetic pull made words irrelevant. I was
stepping away to leave when he said, “I meant it, about seeing a game.”
“I meant it about the bleachers.”
“I like to get to know someone before they drag me out past
centerfield.” He clinked his ice against the sides of his glass. “The company
has to be pretty engaging that far from the plate.”
I wanted to mention the stunning color of his eyes. I wanted to
touch his hand as it rested on the edges of the bar. Instead I said, “Your
fellow fans keep you on your toes, especially if you wear red.”
“Can I see you after work?”
The clattering noise in my chest must have been audible. It
wasn’t that I hadn’t been asked out or the object of a proposition in the last
year and a half; all of the men who wanted me were simply too easy to politely
reject. If I had a brain in my head, I would reject Jonathan Drazen right out
of hand. Politely.
“Maybe,” I said. “Company’s got to be pretty engaging at two
thirty in the morning.”
Sam showed up, and since I didn’t want to be seen talking up my
ex-boss, I walked away without confirming that he’d feel engaging at that
ungodly hour.
CHAPTER 4.
I spent the next hour and a half talking myself out of meeting with
Jonathan after work, if he even showed. He was going to be a distraction, I
could tell. I couldn’t be in the same room with him without feeling like I
needed to touch him.
I thought about Kevin. A fine specimen of a man, he’d had much
the same effect on me as Jonathan Drazen, complete with fluttery stomach and
tingling cheeks.
I’d been with Darren over six years when he admitted to kissing
Dana
Fasano
. We were in the process of either
breaking up or getting married. I went to a party downtown with a friend whose
name eluded me right then, and there he was. Kevin was talking to some girl in
the corner, and when he glanced over her head, his eyes found mine like he was
looking for them. I froze in place. He had brown eyes and thick black lashes,
and when we saw each other, the distance between us became a plucked cello
string, vibrating, making a beautiful sound.
I didn’t see him again for another half an hour, yet I had felt
him circling me, tethered, even when we talked to different people. Finally, in
the crowded kitchen, he was behind me, and I knew it because I could feel him
before I even saw him reach over me to slide a beer from the sink.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
He held the beer bottle toward me, his hands slick on the glass,
cold water pooling in the crevice between his skin and the bottle. “Is the
opener over there?”
I took the bottle from him, overreaching, as I’d done with
Drazen, so I could touch his cool, wet hand. Then I put the bottle cap on the
metal edge of the counter and pulled down swiftly. The cap bent and popped off,
clinking to the floor. I held up the bottle for him. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” He considered the bottle, then me. “See that girl over
there?” He pointed at a girl about my age with short, dark hair and striped
leggings.
“Yeah.”
“In twenty seconds, she’s going to come over here and ask what
I’m working on for my show. I don’t want to tell her.”
“So don’t.”
As if on cue, the girl saw Kevin and walked over. It was the
first time I experienced him as a charmed person, and it would not be the last.
“It would be better if she didn’t ask. My paintings are secret
before a show. If I tell her, she’ll own them. Her soul will own them. I can’t
explain it.” The kitchen was crowded, slowing the striped leggings’ progress
and pushing us together, forcing us to whisper.
“I get it,” I said. I would have gotten anything he said at that
point. I would have claimed to understand quantum mechanics if he explained it
to me. “They aren’t born yet,” I continued. “If she sees them while they’re
being made, she knows them as children. Their insides.”
“My God, you get me.”
I had no snappy reply. I wanted to get him. I wanted to get
everything he said from now on. He touched my chin. “If I kiss you, she’ll turn
around and go away.”
In retrospect, that was the lamest come on imaginable from him.
He’d done much better in the year following. But at the party, the word “kiss”
breathed from his beautiful lips, was all I needed. I put my hand on his
shoulder, and he slipped one around my waist. Our lips met, and I held back a
groan of pleasure. I’d only ever been with Darren, and I loved him. I would
always love him, but kissing that man, like that, with his taste of malt and
chocolate, uncovered physical sensations I didn’t know could come from a kiss.
I felt every pore of his tongue, every turn of his lips. The world shut off and
my identity became a glow of sexual desire.
I went home barely able to walk from wanting him and completed my
breakup with Darren the next day. If desire was supposed to feel like that, I
needed more of it. I felt awake, alive, not just sexy, but sexual. Thoughts of
him infected me until I saw him again and we tumbled into bed, screwing like
wild animals.
A year later, when I walked away from him, weeping, I realized
I’d let my sexuality control and manipulate me through him. He took my music
and crushed it under the weight of his own talent. He ignored what I created,
dismissing it, degenerating it, so that within three months, I couldn’t sing a
word and any instrument I picked up became a bludgeon. I’d never felt so
creatively dead and so sexually alive.
When I got the strength to walk away from him, I vowed never
again.
***
I snapped my locker closed, thinking about those Dodger seats on
the first base line. A corporation gets a skybox. A real fan gets tickets at
field level, luxuries be damned. I’d never seen a game from that angle.
Debbie came into the locker room, buzzing with talk and flirting
and locker doors banging, and handed out our tip envelopes. “A good night for
everyone,” she said, then got close to me. “Someone is waiting for you at the
front exit. If you want to avoid him, go through the parking lot, but be nice.
He’s a friend of the hotel.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Quickly, I have to count out.”
“How many drinks did he have?” I asked as quietly as I could.
Debbie smiled as if I’d asked the exact right question. “Two. He
nurses like a baby.”
“I know you don’t know me that well yet, but… would going out the
front be a mistake?”
“Only if you take it too seriously.”
“Thanks.”
Debbie walked off to hand out the rest of the envelopes. What she
said had been a relief, actually. It made the boundaries that much clearer. I
could hang out, be close to him and feel the buzz of sex between us, but I had
to be careful about climbing into bed with him. Fair warning.