Portland Noir

look like a soldier who had just returned from war. I dreamt the girl would hold a rag to my forehead and whisper carefully in my ear.

While her mother took care of my mother, the girl slept in the room next to mine. When she outgrew one of her dresses it was folded, washed, and put on my bed. It was blue, terry cloth, a summer dress. I wore it until I could hold it in my hands and see right through.

But then my mother was well enough and the woman left and took the girl with her. My mother sometimes stood and walked around, and changed her clothes, but her eyes were blank as marbles and her mouth was slack. Sometimes she sat and played the accordion but it was always the same wheezing note. She kept a fifth of whiskey in the top drawer of her dresser and when she slept on the recliner I would sip from it, lie in her bed, and imagine that girl. Her blue dress like water, like a calm and perfect sea.

Lila came into the Tik Tok that night and I watched her for a long time. She was beautiful. She folded and refolded her napkin, looked around as though she was waiting for someone. After ten minutes a tall man came in and sat at the table and I heard him call her by her name. It was a beautiful name, I thought. He sat there for a bit and they spoke quietly. Then he stood up and left.

I waited awhile and ordered a fried egg so that I could ask her if she wanted some food. Maybe she was hungry, I thought, and didn’t have enough money, or maybe she couldn’t decide what she wanted. I moved into her booth. She didn’t look up.

“Listen,” she said, “I’m not a dyke. I don’t lick pussy so probably you should just go back to your eggs.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I replied. At that moment it seemed true. My apartment seemed like someplace I had resided in during a different lifetime. The job I had checking groceries was suddenly someone else’s, and I felt like I had been in the Tik Tok for days, weeks, the clocks turning their slow circles, the coffee growing cold until another waitress stretched her pale arm across the table toward my cup.

Lila shrugged. She pulled a cigarette from her pack and held it between her long fingers. Her nails were bitten. “Not my fucking problem,” she said. She put some money on the table, stood up, and walked out. I waited a few minutes and then I followed her, watched as she crossed the parking lot to the nearest motel, a ground-floor room marked 42, and let herself in.

From there it was easy. I didn’t have any savings, but the grocery store let me cash out my retirement plan, $470, minus the taxes. I kept the apartment. The motel was closer to my work, and I liked the way it looked.

“Room 43, please,” I said, and the man behind the counter took my money and handed me a key. There was a little table with cigarette burns ringing it like years of a tree, and heavy curtains that could shut out the light even in the middle of the day. The sheets were rough and when I turned against them, their scratching reminded me that I was there, that I was waiting for something. There was even a little refrigerator and I took the 72 bus to the store and bought things that I thought Lila might like-a tin of pink salmon, almonds in a pale candy shell. Above the bed was a painting of a ship tossing in a wild sea.

Every night at 7 the tall man from the Tik Tok drove up in a van and parked outside of the hotel. Lila would leave her room and climb inside. They would be gone until 3 or 4 in the morning, when I heard her unlock the door. She would set down her purse and sit on the bed; there was a click when she dropped her heels by their narrow leather straps to the floor. The water would run; I could imagine her as clearly as if the wall had fallen away-there she was in her slip, her bare feet toeing into the carpet. I slept when she slept.

It was a week before I knocked on the door. I had a fifth of whiskey and I held it out when she opened the door.

“What?” she asked.

“I was just sitting by my window,” I said, “and I saw you come in.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I thought, I should go over there and see if she wants some whiskey.” My voice sounded shaky. “You shouldn’t have to be alone,” I added.

Lila looked from me to the bottle. “I like being alone,” she said, but she opened the door anyway and grabbed the whiskey and took a long drink. In the corner was an open suitcase and inside it I could see a jumble of nylons, the egg cup of a bra. The painting above her bed showed a field, flowers, and tall grass.

She held onto the bottle and sat down on the bed. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt that went to her knees. Her feet were bare and she looked at me. “So what’s your story?” she asked. “You work out here? I’ve never seen you.” She didn’t remember me, I realized, and felt relieved. I wanted to start new. She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’ve been working for three years now. It’s shit.” She went into the bathroom and came out with the plastic cup from the bathroom sink, filled it with whiskey, and passed it to me. “But what else are you supposed to do?”

I took a drink and my throat burned. It tasted to me like the house after the accident, my mother sleeping in the living room while the television faded in and out of static.

Up close Lila was even more beautiful than I remembered. “And Mark is an asshole,” she said. Mark-the tall man, I thought. “I can’t believe I used to think we’d get married.” She darkened a little, and turned on the television, drank half of the bottle of whiskey, then asked me to leave.

I stopped going to work at the grocery store because Lila needed me. She didn’t have to say it, but I knew it was true. I didn’t hand in a notice, just left my apron and name tag next to the till and went back to the motel. If the van was gone I would knock on her door, bring her whiskey or rice paper candy from the store up the street. She didn’t seem to wonder why I was there. I sat at the little table while she flipped through the channels on the television, or talked about the places she wanted to live-Paris and Greece and New York and Prague. I remembered a man I met once, someone lonely, nursing a drink in a booth at Holman’s. He’d told me he might go to Prague, and now I imagined us all colliding in some narrow street, so far from home.

“Anywhere but here,” she said. “Anywhere but this fuck-ing motel.”

Then one night when I knocked on the door Lila answered it right away, smiling. Her front tooth was crooked and I felt bothered that I hadn’t noticed it before.

“He’s gone,” she said. “He’ll be back at the end of the week. He’s bringing some girls up from Los Angeles. Get in here.” She held the door open.

I thought, I have never seen her so beautiful. Her eyes were bright and she leaned against me and grabbed my hand.

“Four days!” she said. “Four days of nothing to do. Fucking thank God.” She sat at the little table and leaned over something, then looked up at me. “Gators,” she said, and that’s what they started to look like to me, white rows of teeth. She cut them with the sharp edge of a driver’s license with a picture that didn’t look like her.

When she was done I leaned over and she showed me how to snort them, how to follow each line with a palmful of water that dripped bitter down the back of my throat, until the room felt frantic and bright and both of us right in the center of it; fireflies, I thought, burning hot in the cup of someone’s hand.

“Let’s look outside,” Lila suggested. She opened the curtain and the only thing I could see were our own wavering faces in the glass. I kissed her then; her mouth was dry. She pulled back. “I’m not a dyke,” she said. The smell of her cigarette; I thought of my mother, waking for a second from her slow fugue when I came home with my hair cut close to my skull-No daughter of mine is going to be a fucking dyke, she’d said, and turned back to the wall. “I’m not,” Lila said again, but then she put her mouth to mine.

We kissed for a long time and then Lila stood and went to the sink and pulled something out of the makeup bag she kept there. A knife. “Cut an X,” she said. She took her shirt off and her breasts were pale and I thought about reaching out very carefully to touch them but was afraid.

She sat on the edge of the bed and put the knife in my hand. It was heavy and cold. “Just a single X,” she said. “Just two crossing lines.” Her skin was so white. She touched her shoulder blade. “Here… Ten years ago,” she continued, “they say you could stand at one end of Eighty-second and watch the girls jumping in and out of cars in beautiful dresses.”

I traced an X in the air above her perfect skin. I couldn’t do it, I thought.

“Where did you live before here?” Lila asked. “What were you like? Did you have some beautiful life?”

The cluttered apartment; the recliner with its smell of smoke and age; my mother, in her chair, with her heavy silver accordion, pushing the bellows in and out, her eyes on the wall behind me. It was another five years before she died, and then there were eight people at the funeral, all dressed in black, like a circle of bats fluttering at each other. A necklace of them, I had thought, standing around the terrible throat of her grave.

“It was beautiful,” I said. “I had a house with a garden. And a puppy named