Los Angeles (3 page)

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t have anything in the kitchen,” she answered, “and I haven’t eaten in forever.”

“Spaghetti and meatballs,” I blurted, “or chicken with mushroom gravy and wild rice?” These were the meals that I ate in those
days, mostly, although I had been known to get on a French bread pizza kick that could last weeks.

She followed me down the hall. “Chicken” — she inhaled dramatically — “with mushroom gravy and wild rice.”

I hurried into my kitchen, opened the freezer, and grabbed a box of Stouffer’s. “You’re seven minutes from heaven,” I said,
activating the microwave.

She was looking around the living room, and despite the meds I had taken, I became instantly self-conscious.

My apartment was not exactly designed for company. The walls were lined with paperbacks; and since I didn’t have any shelves,
I had stacked them in precarious columns, some of which had fallen over and lay in broken piles on the floor. In the middle
of the space, I had an old, creaking swivel chair and a gray metal conference table on which my computers nestled amid piles
of junk mail and scraps of note paper. There was nowhere for anyone else to sit, really, other than the floor, which was covered
by a soft, black, fuzzy rug called a flokati — something my mother had bought me as a housewarming gift years before, when
I moved in. Even more embarrassing were the stacks of colored paper all around my desk, each color representing a draft of
the movie I had supposedly been writing and arranged according to the hues of the electromagnetic spectrum.

“This is so… weird,” Angela said finally.

“Yeah, well,” I said from the kitchen, “I don’t really have people over very often.”

“You’re a writer?”

“I edit technical manuals, professionally.” This was a lie, of course. I only said that because I was embarrassed to explain
that I accepted money from my father and that I had never had an actual job. “But I’m writing a screenplay, you know, which
is my real work.”

I heard the sound of her fingernails tapping on a stack of paper. “Is that what this is?”

“Yeah.” I stepped back into the living room. “An early draft.”

“What’s it called?”

I told her the truth because I didn’t have time to think of a better answer.
“Los Angeles.
But that’s just a working title. I have a number of other —”

“Wow, I like that.”

“Really?”

“Sounds important.”

No one had ever expressed any interest in my writing before, not even my psychiatrist, and I have to admit, I didn’t know
how to react. “Important?” I said. “Do you really —”

“Why is this on?”

Angela had turned around to stare at my television, the colors muted, the sound impossibly faint. At the moment, it was the
scene where Deckard is attacked by Pris, the most beautiful of the replicants. A pleasure model, Pris leaps up and wraps her
legs around Deckard’s neck, then pulls his head around by his nostrils, then punches him.

“Are you watching this?” Angela asked, touching a finger to the screen.

I experienced a wave of panic.
“Don’t touch that.”

______

Frozen dinner entrées followed, chicken with wild rice on the flokati, a shared exchange that gravitated imperceptibly toward
talking and drinking, me sipping Jack Daniel’s and coffee, Angela bringing over her bottle of Stoli and a carton of orange
juice. Then, over the course of the next few weeks, there developed between us an even more indistinct transition from talking
and drinking to kissing and sampling the prescriptions that cluttered my kitchen countertop. I fell into a delirium, a waking
dream fueled by all those meds but also by a fathomless infatuation. Amazingly, Angela’s eyes, which I had first thought were
so blue, changed mysteriously — from blue to brown to green, even violet, virtually every color of the spectrum. Some people’s
eyes appear to change slightly depending on what they’re wearing or the ambient light, but Angela’s morphed completely, dependent,
it seemed, on her state of mind, like a pair of mood rings. Her heels would clack noisily on the steps outside my door, and
minutes later she would appear, smiling, eyes transformed.

We would lie on the flokati and listen to the messages on the answering machine: Dr. Silowicz calling to reschedule sessions,
so deeply concerned about my psychological well-being; Melanie, my father’s young wife, inviting me, no,
begging
me, to visit little Gabriel and my dad; my father’s lawyer calling, too, the satanic Frank Heile, Esquire, ostensibly to
relay some practical detail, to question a cash advance on one of my credit cards, but really to remind me I was a drain on
the system, a character who was dragging the whole production down and was better off cut from the story line. Angela and
I — we ate, drank, fed each other’s appetites. We slept, we kissed, we stared — there’s no better word for it than
longingly,
I swear — into one another’s eyes. It was every night like this, and I have to admit I was starting to think of her as more
than just a neighbor. I was still too reticent to use the word
girlfriend
in a sentence, but I was envisioning scenarios, projecting more than one day into the future, for the first time in recollection.

And throughout — and this is not insignificant — there was that cat. That fucking cat. Mewling, crying, caterwauling, shrieking
like a disturbed inhuman spirit from a gothic novel, she leapt from car to car, crying insanely up at my kitchen window, baying
pathetically at the Hollywood moon.

______

“I want you to come see me,” Angela said. This was a week, maybe two, after the lamb stew introduction. She sat up and stabbed
out a burning Ultra Light in a dish. “I want you to see me at work.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant. I looked into her eyes and saw that they were brown tonight, flecked with miniature spots of
yellow. “Come where?”

“I want you to see what it’s like,” she whispered. “I’ll give you a free lap dance.”

I had known it, actually, had guessed from her clothes, the glitter she wore on her skin, the ridiculously high heels, the
strange hours.

“I appreciate the offer.” I shook my head.

Angela hit me, a bejeweled fist on my upper arm that was a little too hard to be playful. “What’s wrong with you?
Everyone
wants a free lap dance.”

What was wrong with me was that I was terrified. A public place was frightening enough, and over the past several years, I
had developed the courage, with psychotropic help, of course, to visit the supermarket, the pharmacy, Supercuts, and even
the Gap. But a topless club…

“I have a problem with new places.”

“Then let’s go somewhere familiar.” Angela dragged me into my bedroom and pushed me down on the mattress. She pulled my shirt
over my head. She undid my pants, pulling the zipper, sliding them off my legs, slipping them off my feet. She reached for
my boxers.

“What are you doing?” I grabbed her hands.

“Shhhh.”
She tugged on the elastic waistband.

“Angela, please.” I had an erection. My penis was ready for this, all too conspicuously, but I wasn’t.

“Okay.” She shrugged. “So leave them on.”

I tried to keep my eyelids open but couldn’t. An hour or so earlier, I had taken several tabs of Ambien. I felt the warmth
of her body, skin as smooth as cotton sheets. I felt her warm breath in my ear. “What are you doing to me?” I was too self-conscious
to have sex, and it had been too long.

And I was so tired. So incredibly tired.

And afraid.

She reached over to the side table and turned on my electronic wave machine, then nestled in next to me, wiggling her hips.
“What do you like?”

We had slept together, kissed, held one another, nuzzled, spooned, sighed into one another’s eyes, done everything, anything
but sex. “I like orange sherbet,” I answered childishly. “I like green Jell-O.”

“I mean sexually.” Then she laughed. “Or is that what you mean?”

An electronic surf washed over the room, a placid ocean of synthetic noise enshrouding the too-loud televisions blaring in
the upstairs apartments, the car engines igniting in the parking lot outside. The wave machine was something Dr. Silowicz
had recommended, years ago, to help me sleep, and right now it was working all too well.

Angela reached over to the side table for another cigarette. “I’m serious, Angel. Don’t you like sex?” She lit it and exhaled.

I felt the warm smoke against my face. “I don’t really —,” I began. “I don’t really think about that kind of thing very much.”

This was a lie, of course. I thought about it constantly. Sex was all I ever thought about.

She brushed her lips against my cheek. “Don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you.”

“Then tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Something perverted.”

“You
want
me to be a pervert?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

I turned onto my side, facing her.

She dropped her cigarette into a glass by the bed and slid down, pressing her entire self against me. Angela crushed her face
into my neck and squeezed her legs around mine, her surprisingly strong arms tight around my torso.

“You’re not really white, Angel, do you know that?”

“I’m not?”

“Your aura, your true colors.”

“My aura?” This erection would not go away. “What color am I, then?”

“Red. Orange. Bright yellow.” She laughed. “Burning.”

I thought for a moment about what this could mean. “What color are you?” I asked.

“Blue,” she whispered. “Blue, blue, electric blue.”

“Like your eyes?”

She reached inside my boxers and placed her hand over my penis. Her fingers were cool. It must have been around six in the
morning because a blade of incandescence appeared on my bedroom wall, a thin band of yellow-white that was growing exponentially
brighter.

Red. Orange. Bright yellow. Burning.

It was cast there by a fissure in the miniblinds, like a crack in the shell of the universe itself.

“Sure,” she answered, “like my eyes.”

“Your eyes are brown,” I said, as though exposing a terrible secret.

“Tell me something,” Angela insisted another night. “Tell me anything.” Her lips touched the back of my neck, and I could
feel the dampness of her mouth, and I thought I could hear the liquid insides of her body.

“There isn’t anything.”

“Do you like this?” She touched her tongue to my skin, just below my ear. She tucked her knees under my knees, burrowing into
me.

I didn’t answer.

“This?” She bit the edge of my earlobe. Her teeth felt huge.

I was quiet.

“This?” She nuzzled into my neck, pushing her wet lips over my skin.

Mornings, after she left, I would slip downstairs and look around the parking lot for that cat. She was so desperate for contact,
it seemed, screaming for attention, and I wanted to find out if I could quiet her, soothe her screaming even for a moment,
by scratching that patch of sensitive skin behind her ears. But as soon as I stepped into the lot, she would vanish, hiding
under a car or running into the old man’s garden next door. It had become a kind of game, actually, though I didn’t know why
I was playing. I wasn’t sure what I was planning to do if I found her, either. I certainly wasn’t prepared to take an alley
cat into my apartment. Can you imagine the fleas? I just wanted to touch her, I guess, to see if she would stop wailing, if
only for a few moments.

And sometimes I would get stuck, caught by the impossible gorgeousness of the Los Angeles morning, catatonic in the apprehension
of a phenomenon too beautiful, too cinematic to be real.

I
T WAS BECAUSE HER EYES KEPT CHANGING COLORS. IT WAS BE
cause her breasts were fake. It was because she came home at half past three in the morning but acted like it was three in
the afternoon. It was because she said she was a vegetarian and made me lamb stew. It was because she was older than me but
wouldn’t admit it. It was because she constantly contradicted herself, denying entire conversations. It was because she was
a liar and so was I. It was because she wore way too much perfume and way too much makeup and way too high high heels. It
was because when she slept, she rested the back of her hand on her forehead like Scarlett O’Hara. It was because of her laugh,
soft and low and wicked. It was because sometimes she bit me. It was because of the way she pressed herself into me, as though
she were literally trying to crawl under my skin. It was because she had those tiny cracks at the corners of her eyes. It
was because she never asked me why I lived alone, staying awake through the Hollywood night, writing my senseless, pointless
scenes. It was because she understood every crazy thing I said, or pretended to, anyway.

It was because when I saw her, when she came into my apartment, she would smile, smiling at me, only me, because of me.

It was because of all these things that a few days later, I parked the Cadillac in the rear lot of the strip mall strip club,
walked around to the front through the yellow illumination of the Sunset Boulevard street lamps, and approached the door.
The bouncer who guarded it wore prison denim and sunglasses even darker than mine. I gave him my ten-dollar entrance fee and
flinched as he tried to stamp my hand.

“I won’t be needing that,” I said. I shook my head, backing away. I didn’t like the idea of that infrared ink touching my
skin.

The bouncer shrugged. “You’ll need it when you want to get back in.”

“If I leave,” I told him, “I won’t want to get back in.”

He didn’t bother to look at me, just hunched over like Rodin’s
Thinker
on a bar stool and said, “
Everybody
wants to get back in.”

The Velvet Mask was a strip club I’d been driving by for years. Only tourists went in there, I’d always thought, or Japanese
businessmen, or ad guys from New York. Only assholes.

I walked down a narrow corridor, the snarling music inside the club growing exponentially louder, and emerged through a pair
of swinging saloon-style shutters into the main room.