He had nice soft hair and a patrician face, but beyond that he was just another man who could smell it on me, the loss of a father.
—I’m late for an audition so I needed to be up, I said.
He was still nodding as I shut the door in his face.
5
ALICE’S FACE IN THAT MAGAZINE confirmed everything I’d always feared. She was more beautiful. At a rest stop on the way in Alamogordo I overheard a four-year-old child tell her mother that her friend’s mother was beautifuller. The little girl’s mother smiled and said, Yes, Vanna’s mom is really pretty. No, the little girl said, she’s beautiful.
After my brutal little landlord left, I got dressed. I used the same rose-colored balm on my cheeks and my mouth. I tried to look attractive but I knew before meeting her in person that she was, and would always be, beautifuller.
The notion of seeing her in person was nearly too much. I wanted to put it off indefinitely. But I couldn’t. It had become, by that point, irreversible. Seeing Alice would be the key not to my survival but to yours. Sometimes you are little more than a crimped apparition, like the heat that rises off the macadam in front of your car. By the time I’d been two days in the Canyon, you had come to exist. I couldn’t see your form, but I could feel you slipping from me. I could feel someone, something, pulling me away from you. Pulling me into a white room as I screamed for you. Give her back to me!
I would have burned the whole world down to get you back. But what if I could not?
LOS ANGELES WAS BOTH MORE remarkable and less beautiful than I expected. Cayennes and narrow streets and skinny women and the air of posh mystery. The grand homes of Beverly Hills were gruesome up close; the paint was chipping and everything felt empty, as though once-famous actors were dying inside.
But the canyon was different. It was orange and rocky, and the greens, the ragweed and the beach burr and the saltbush, were not plush but dry and brown or a singed yellow. In between the rocks sprouted sedge and mule fat. In the pictures I’d seen there had been up-close images of Indian paintbrush, the shocking canary of a beach evening primrose and the carpets of California poppy, like the Technicolor land of Oz. But now I saw it for what it was. The golden yarrow rattled with snakes.
A few weeks earlier it would have been just fine. I’d always taken comfort in knowing that as long as I could scrape together the money for gasoline, I could drive. I could visit the Grand Canyon. I could sleep in the Argo Tunnel and rise in the morning before the tour groups came through. But I couldn’t leave Los Angeles. It was the last place and I knew it. And here I was in the queerest part of it. I had to get a place minutes from where she worked. Just as when I was a child and I wanted a tennis skirt and tennis sneakers before ever once striking a tennis ball. As an adult I was no different. I needed to feel that I owned real estate before I used a bathroom.
There was no nucleus, no central village, of Topanga Canyon. Just clusters of shops a mile or more apart.
The old hardware store was otherworldly. It was not California-precious but neither was it a holdover from the fifties. It smelled of chalk inside. I loved the smell of hardware stores nearly as much as I loved the smell of chlorine.
I stopped at the thrift store scratchy with tutus and sequined dresses and polyester palazzo pants and vintage greeting cards and postcards that once upon a time were cherished.
Dear Mom,
The weather is beautiful, even in winter. School is going well. They sell 24-karat gold in the shops for a good price and I’m enclosing a necklace for Susan for Christmas. Please give it to Susan, Mom. Tell Dad I saw a Ferrari 312 here, just coasting the streets of downtown Padua. Cherry red, with a tan leather interior. Love to all.
Jack
Not too long ago everyone wrote in script. My father wrote in script. I used to think he had the most beautiful handwriting in the world. But everyone from his era did.
I drove up and down streets where you couldn’t see around the curves. People seemed to drive blind, on instinct. Every so often there was an impressive Spanish-tiled house, grazing horses. There were art installations and peace signs made of hubcaps. There were bamboo fences and no clouds in the sky. When I got hungry, I stopped at a place called La Choza, next to a dry cleaner. I was in the same white dress. It smelled of sweat but I hadn’t come across anyone who would notice.
A Mexican woman behind a counter waited with a wide tin spoon. There were instructions for how to order written on a piece of cardboard. PICK ONE: CHICKEN ADOBO, STEAK, CHAR VEG.
I wanted half chicken and half charred vegetables. I didn’t want any rice.
—You only pick one, said the woman.
—Can I have half of each, and you can charge me for the chicken, which is the more expensive one.
—No, you pick one. The woman wore a honeycomb hairnet that starred her dark head.
—But I want half of each, and you—the store—will be making money off this order. Because the chicken is more expensive and I am having less of it. Do you understand?
The woman shook her head.
—Why? I asked. Can you explain to me why?
The woman set the spoon down and wiped her plastic gloves on her apron, stained with yellow and brown juices. She picked up the spoon and aggressively scraped it under a section of rice.
—I don’t want rice, I said.
The woman walked away then, into the kitchen. I was still hungry.
Back in my
