The Pink Hotel (19 page)

After fainting I woke up abruptly and found myself at the Kaiser Hospital in Los Feliz. Out of the seven of us who got sick that night on set only I was still in the hospital four days later. David wasn’t in the hospital with me, and when I asked where he was, the nurse said she wasn’t aware that anyone called David had come in to see me. The other people from the set who got food poisoning from the same pizza toppings had been discharged two days earlier. There had been “complications” in my situation. The nurse kindly explained that she was afraid I’d “lost the foetus” – for some reason I just laughed. The air smelt of disinfectant. Then with baffled pride I nodded solemnly and frowned, pretending to her that “the” foetus was an entity I was even vaguely familiar with. It was only a few weeks old, so nothing really, but overwhelming nausea came over me again. The nurse also told me that my friend Sam was coming to visit me later that afternoon, and that he’d been very worried. They assumed Sam was the dad of this empty space in my tummy.

It didn’t matter at all. I didn’t think about what might have happened or could have happened or what I would have done if it weren’t for the Adderall and the food poisoning. “The” foetus only existed for the fraction of a second after she told me it was dead, since only then did I acknowledge that at one point it had been alive. There was a sweet old woman in the hospital room with me who’d just had a stroke. She kept sticking out her tongue at me and telling me the beginning of a joke about how many Jewish Grandmothers it took to screw in a light bulb, but she couldn’t remember the punch line. She looked terribly confused, and I wanted to telephone Dad, but didn’t know what I’d say to him. I think I would have liked to tell him that it was suddenly apparent to me that he’d done his best and failed. That I should have tried harder to stay out of trouble at school and that I wouldn’t be going back.

I picked up Lily’s suede shoulder bag and left the hospital early that morning without waiting to see Sam. I took the bus back to David’s. It was just getting light when my clumsy fingers shoved the key hurriedly into David’s gate and swung it open. I walked upstairs. “Broken bird,” David had said once while he kissed my shoulder blades, which stuck out just like broken wings from the bones of my back. I was most fond of David in the morning, when he was grumpy and clumsy. I liked his moments of brokenness, too, just as he liked mine. I loved him when he burnt his fingers, spilled coffee on the business section of the New York Times, bumped his head, forgot to close the fridge. It was in these living moments that I saw an amalgamation of his past and his present, momentary visions of what he might have been like as a child or during gawky adolescence. I loved David most during the moments I pretended not to notice, when he dropped cereal on the floor or when he lost his car keys and had to hunt through the wash basket for yesterday’s pair of trousers. Perhaps this is how love works – in flashes of banality that become brilliant because of love. One night, when we lay bedraggled in bed, he read the beginning of
Paradise Lost
to me with a sonorous and theatrical voice. There’s a bit when Satan has just fallen from heaven into hell and is described as having “baleful eyes”, with which he glances around the sordid place he’s fallen into. I thought that “baleful” meant woebegone, because that’s how the word sounds. To me it suggested that the fallen angel had melancholy, but purposeful eyes. For a while after he read me that, I thought that David cast “baleful eyes”, just like Satan’s, especially in the morning, when he had to confront a broken light bulb or a burnt piece of toast. I checked in a dictionary, though, and the word actually means “hostile” and “mean”.

I got to the top of the stairs and noticed that the window of his flat, which looks into the balconied corridor, seemed different. Before I opened the door, I saw through the window that the flat was empty. The sofa, the glass-topped coffee table that he cleaned so lovingly twice a day, the flat-screen TV, the saucepan I’d cooked him scrambled eggs with, it was all gone. There were shadows of his possessions, like indentations in the carpet where his furniture used to lie, but this only intensified the absence. There were rectangles of bright paint where his pictures had hung, surrounded by faded white. The flat looked much bigger without anything in it, and the fitted carpet looked uglier. There were balls of red fluff from his carpet, paper clips, Kirby grips and stray rubber bands in dusty corners. The bedroom was empty too, as was the bathroom. He was gone. He had evaporated.

I went and stood where the kitchen table had been, and bent down to touch the dents in the laminate flooring and the skid marks on the walls from where he must have attacked the chair a week earlier, when really he ought to have been attacking me. The dents in the floor looked like dimples, the marks on the walls looked like scars on very pale skin. I walked to the kitchen and took a sip of water from the familiar tap. I drank from my hands, because there weren’t any cups. I didn’t wait for the water to cool down, and glugged it lukewarm from my skin, which still tasted slightly acidic, like illness and hospitals. I don’t actually remember falling asleep, lying on the pressed bit of carpet where the sofa bed used to be. I didn’t dream of anything. Not animals or dust or sunsets.

“Excuse me,” said a voice. I opened my eyes. It was Yuri, the Armenian building manager, standing at the door with his arms crossed over his belly and his earphones half attached to his ears, as always. It was funny that he always stood as far away from other people as he could. It meant I had a very clear sense of his shape – the too-short T-shirt over his belly, his out-turned legs and slumped shoulders. I rubbed my eyes and sat up, still lying where the sofa ought to have been.

“What happened?” I said groggily.

“What, um, do you mean?”

“Where is he?” I clarified, as I stumbled to my feet in front of Yuri. Perhaps I looked a little feral, because Yuri frowned and took a step back as I took a step forwards. He looked like one of the scared younger boys who used to watch us play football at the Swiss Cottage football pitch, too nervous to join in.

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“I think,” Yuri said, “he moved out.”

“Clearly,” I said, frowning. “When did he go? Where?”

Yuri shrugged, helplessly. “I don’t know,” he said. “He didn’t give forwarding address. I don’t know.”

“He can’t have just...gone,” I said. “When?”

“Three days,” said Yuri.

“Three days,” I repeated. Something awful must have happened. If he’d known I was in hospital, however angry he was, he wouldn’t have left. I know that. My voice remained steady, but Yuri looked like he was watching a necklace break at his feet, bits falling everywhere. Yuri was looking directly at his trainers, not at me.

“He left your clothes, though,” Yuri said, pointing to a couple of supermarket bags in the corner. I hate it when the voice inside your head is different from the image you’re presenting. I believed myself to be standing in the empty flat looking a little impish, a little crumpled as I noticed David’s shopping bag of clothes. I believed myself to look righteous and perhaps just adequately pitiful, but in fact I probably looked more like one of those alley cats that skulk around dustbins at night with their fur fraying. My skin and hair were dull, my body was anxiously thin, my lips chapped, and I was holding onto the wall as if I was about to collapse at the knees and cease to exist.

I almost laughed at myself as I stared at the neatly folded clothes in the bags at the corner of the room, but the fizz of false amusement got stuck in my throat and turned into a shiver as I glanced at the clothes he’d bought for me at the outlet mall. I walked over to the corner and bent down. There was my pink toothbrush, some lipstick, some “volumizing shampoo”, my hairbrush, my little pearl earrings. Lily’s white dress with the black buttons, Lily’s jeans and T-shirts and scuffed grey ballet pumps. My baseball cap. My Adidas jumper. Lily’s teardrop earrings and lipstick and sunglasses. From one of the bags I unearthed a bunch of photographs that I’d never seen before – the ones he’d mentioned that he was going to develop when we were walking up to the Observatory. Some of the pictures were of me in my red baseball cap and sports clothes from that first day when I arrived in Los Angeles, and some from when David took playful photographs of me laughing that day when he’d persuaded me to take off my clothes in the living room.

“Fuck,” I said, and felt a little dizzy. My eyes stung as if tears were brimming there. “Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.”

“Are you all right?” Yuri asked.

“Fuck,” I said, and Yuri quietly left the room.

I flicked through the photographs. There were dozens of them, at least thirty. Most of them are like the rest of the photos around David’s flat: weird, anonymous, disembodied. One was of the skin on my hand clutching a cigarette, and an ugly hangnail; another was the shadow of my baseball cap obliterating my eyes, my back to the camera. In the third photograph I was asleep on the bench with my hat slightly askew and my cheek pressed onto Lily’s Play-Doh red suitcase. It was before I woke up that first morning after the wake, ten weeks ago, when I was dreaming about drowning. One of my tracksuit legs was rolled up, and you could see the scabs on my pale knees. Then there was a close-up of my face, which looked like a baby’s face. It’s funny to imagine how tough I thought I was, because in the photo I looked exhausted and innocent.

The next three photographs were from only a week or so ago, of me in various stages of undress. They made me cringe. There was a photo of just my belly button, a photo of my nipple, a photo of my smile. There was a photo of me with my back to the camera turning around to smile at David, but the one he meant me to look at – the one that changed everything – was a photograph of me wearing a white T-shirt over a bikini and laughing at the camera. After that laughing photograph, the next photograph in the pile was one of Lily. It was the photograph David stole from the Pink Hotel on the night of the wake. In the stolen photograph Lily had her legs crossed under a tree, wearing a white T-shirt over a bikini and laughing, her pale eyebrows crouched playfully over dark eyes. She was a bit older than me in the stolen photograph, with much longer and darker hair. She was sitting under a tree, and I was standing inside a shadowy apartment, but comparing the two photos Lily and I looked eerily similar. The colour and shape of our eyes were the same as we laughed, and our mouths were folded into the same shape. It was also something about the gesture, both our hands hovering up near our mouths slightly like we were embarrassed to be laughing so hard. I imagined David watching as the photo of me developed in the darkroom he used at work. I wondered how long it took for him to realize how much I resembled Lily. I felt sick again, and dropped the photographs onto the carpet.

Yuri let me sleep on the floor of the empty apartment until the afternoon, when the Armenian mothers came to hover around me in the empty flat. They brought a smell of chlorine and slow-roasted garlic with them into the sticky air. Dalita was in her faded tropical bikini with a T-shirt from some pizza restaurant, plastic bangles jumping on her brown wrists as she consoled me with a cup of homemade nettle tea. The first sip was bitter and boiling. It burnt my tongue, and the shock made me blink.

“You’re too good for that son of a bitch,” said Dalita, looking solemnly around while my tongue blistered.

“He was too old for you,” said another, leaning her bony shoulders on the door frame and artfully flicking cigarette ash back onto the corridor floor.

“He was packed full of darkness,” said another of the women, with her bottom perched on David’s windowsill.

“In the name of Bartholomew I swear, that man, he wasn’t any good at all,” another chimed in. Nobody had anything constructive to add about David’s disappearance, except for admitting that they’d been pleased with the domestic booty he quietly passed onto them.

“We thought it was you who told him to give us the stuff, though,” said Dalita carefully, shrugging her freckled shoulders. “We thought you were getting married or something, yes, and moving some place nicer than here. We were expecting you to come and say goodbye.”

Dalita apparently received a slightly dilapidated microwave, a wooden salad bowl with matching spoons, and even the IKEA sofa bed that I slept on for the first week in David’s flat. Another mother got David’s television, another his crockery and cups, but no one got an explanation about where he was going.

“Dalita didn’t like the man a bit, of course,” one of the Armenian housewives said, “but she’ll take his sofa bed.”

“It’s IKEA!” said Dalita in protestation. “You can’t leave psychic traces on IKEA furniture. Not possible.”

“Is that a fact?” Dalita’s friend giggled.

“He looked drunk, though,” said another of the women to me knowingly. Then the woman glanced quickly away.

“Oh,” I said, pained.

Even the voyeuristic contingent of teenagers on the wall outside the building didn’t have anything much to add about David’s abrupt disappearance.

“He scrammed on Monday, dawg, when you were at work. Just with a bag, though. Didn’t think much of it. He came back, again, what, two days later?”

“He asked if we’d seen you. We said you must have run away or sommit, cause you hadn’t been back.”

“He came back for me?” My blood thinned and everything lifted. I noticed that one of the boys was wearing a shirt of David’s, an orange one with a silky black collar. Another was wearing a pair of David’s massive brightly coloured trainers.

“He came back for his stuff, dawg,” said one of the boys.

“Guess he thought you’d left him.”

“Packed all his shit and handed it around the building,” said another boy. “Loaded the rest of his stuff in his car. He gave us a whole bunch of his shirts. He had rad clothes, man, rad.”

After that I called David’s mobile from the strip-mall pay-phone. I called three times, but it was disconnected, just like Richard’s phone. There was a dial tone, like the phone was off or out of range. I put it down and dialled Sam’s number instead.

“Where the fuck are you?” Sam snapped. “I just went to the hospital. They said you checked yourself out.”

“I don’t like hospitals.”

“Nobody likes hospitals.”

“The woman in the bed next to me was crazy.”

“
You’re
crazy.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I feel better. Thank you.”

We paused.

“I managed to smuggle you under the company emergency insurance,” he said. “Lucky girl.”

“I can pay you back,” I said.

“It’s covered now, don’t worry,” he said. “No harm done.”

“Do you know where David is?” I said. “He’s not at home.”

“I couldn’t get hold of him,” said Sam. “His phone’s off.”

“Did you call?” I said.

“Course,” he said.

“The first night?” I said.

“I didn’t think of it the first night, to be honest,” Sam said. “It was hectic.”

“When did you?” I asked.

“The third night, but his phone was off,” Sam said quietly. I was silent on my end of the phone and could hear my heart beat. Sam started to talk quite fast: “I felt bad about not calling earlier, so went around to his place and stuff, but he wasn’t there. I even called his work a couple of times. They haven’t heard from him either. I thought it would be fine. I looked after you, right?”

“You called his work?” I said.

“I tried to find him,” he said. “I really tried hard.”

My hands shook as I lit a cigarette.

“We had an argument the night before,” I said to Sam. “I told you he was angry with me. Why didn’t you call the first night?”

“I’m sorry,” Sam said.

“He wouldn’t have left if he’d known I was ill,” I said.

“I know,” said Sam.

I put the phone receiver away from my mouth for a moment. It smelt sort of like oily fish, or maybe that was a smell from one of the take-out restaurants around me.

“Let me come see you,” he said. “Where are you?”

“I can’t, Sam, I don’t want to.”

“Please,” he said.

I was too tired to argue about it, so ten minutes later Sam met me at the Starbucks on the corner of North Vermont and Franklin, but I didn’t get in the car with him. He parked and looked up at me from the driver’s seat.

“Let’s go get something to eat,” Sam said.

“Thanks for looking after me, but I just want to be on my own right now,” I said without getting in the car. “I’m sorry, I’m a mess. I need to think.”

“Get in the car and talk to me,” said Sam, but when I didn’t move he climbed out of the driver’s seat into the sunshine. He leant his elbows on the top of the car and didn’t come any closer. “We’ll think together.”

“I can’t, Sam, I have to go now. I don’t want to get in the car with you.”

“David didn’t even look for you,” Sam said. “Have you thought of that? If you didn’t come home to me one night, I would have looked for you.”

“He was angry with me that first night,” I said. “He found something out about me. He must have thought I’d left him.”

“What did he find out?”

“It doesn’t matter, Sam. I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble.”

I didn’t walk away, because I knew Sam would just follow me. I didn’t want to give him an excuse to make a scene or to touch me. My skin felt raw, and the sun wasn’t helping. I shouldn’t have arranged to meet Sam at all, but everything just felt strange. I didn’t have the energy to fight or even be angry, although if he crossed over to my side of the car I thought I might actually just run. Instead I stood there in the heat for a while and felt drained. Neither of us moved.

“Go away, Sam. Please, I just want to be on my own,” I’d say every so often in variation.

“Please get in the car,” he’d say.

I promised to call Sam the next day, and he eventually conceded to drive away. As he rounded the corner, a bus pulled up to the bus stop just outside Starbucks. I ran to follow two schoolgirls through the sliding doors and climbed on after them.