I parked at the health food café next to her studio, which happened to be world-famous. Rod Rails Power Yoga. Rod Rails was one of the phony stars of the yoga community. Shirtless and long-haired with a crooked erection like the bone of a porterhouse, I would come to hear. In one picture holding a malnourished child in Nepal, the next with his arm around the spiky shoulders of an older actress. He led two times a month but mainly traveled to high holy grounds and franchises. Most of the classes were taught by girls like Alice. Hot girls who had never smoked a cigarette.
I walked up to the door. My legs trembled and I felt like a nobody. On top of that, I hadn’t planned what I would say.
There was a schedule on the door. I looked for her name. The day was a Tuesday. She wasn’t teaching until Friday. I was so relieved that everything inside of me quieted immediately. I would come back on Friday, I told myself. But I didn’t have to come back at all. I could find a nice used-car dealer, let him buy us a split-level in Baldwin Park and refuse to fuck in any position but doggy-style.
The other thing I always wanted to put off was getting a job. After running out of the money that came from selling my parents’ home, I’d held a lot of different jobs. Often I didn’t have a job at all. I would sell something a man gave me, and the profit might last several months.
Next door, I walked through the beaded curtain of the health café. Fat flies buzzed inside. The café sold kombucha, rope baskets, chapbooks of poems by local writers, chocolate bars made with Oregon peppermint. A sign that said HELP WANTED looked like it never came down. There was a bright pink La Marzocco machine. A young girl in a cowboy hat with two long braids stood behind the counter. An unlaminated name tag pinned to her chest said NATALIA. She was young enough to have been my daughter had I gotten pregnant at seventeen.
—May I have the frittata, I said.
—The spinach or the kale?
—Spinach.
—It comes with corn fritters.
—I don’t want them.
—I can wrap them up and you can take them home.
—You want to take them home? I said.
I ordered an Americano to see the girl use the bright pink machine. She was pretty, the kind of simple, inarguable pretty that I had never been. I was sexually attractive. Sometimes other women didn’t see it.
—May I also have a job application?
—Sorry?
I tapped the HELP WANTED sign with a dusty fingernail. The girl leaned across the counter, craning her head to see it. Her breasts were big and jammed together. She wore a rose quartz Buddha on a leather string around her neck.
—Oh, huh.
—Do they not need help?
—Yeah. I’m actually leaving for school.
—Great.
—How many do you need?
—Just the one.
—You want the frittata to stay or to go?
—I’ll stay.
I walked outside with the application and the coffee to the partially covered patio with bright butterfly chairs and old sewing tables and round wood tables, each with a bottle of Cholula on top. I felt a terrible premonition; I’ve had these throughout my life and few people have believed me because I’m always relating them after the fact. I don’t trust myself enough to say something when I have the feeling. So this time, like every time, I quieted my mind the best I could. I concentrated on the paper in front of me. I hadn’t filled out this type of application since I was in my teens. It asked if I was available to work weekends, holidays, how many hours I desired to work per week. It asked what subjects I studied in school. Yes, yes, many, I wrote, and art history.
Before Vic I had, for a time, kicked men in the testicles with high heels. One man gave me a painting I turned around and sold for twenty-five thousand dollars. Another gave me a vintage silver print of Diane Arbus’s A Widow in Her Bedroom. I treasured that photograph. Sometimes I felt it was the finest thing about me.
Suddenly there was an extreme noise on the road. I have to tell you that terrible things always happen around me. I was marked at ten. People don’t want to know that many bad things can happen to one person or around one person. A bad thing happens and coworkers circle your cubicle, their grating palms on your shoulders. Another bad thing happens and you’re no longer someone upon whom they could try out their munificence. You’re a squashed pack of Merits on the highway.
The girl, Natalia, came out with my frittata on a plate. A Chevy Tahoe had head-onned a yellow Beetle. The Beetle, which looked like a human being, was compacted, its face smashed. There was the braking of other cars and a single horn sounded but otherwise a snowy peace settled across the Canyon. I looked at the girl and the girl looked back at me.
It took the man a long time to come out of the Tahoe, and when he did, he was covered in frosty dust. He staggered toward the Beetle. It was a seventies model with the handlebar on the hood and the headlights like a ladybug’s eyes. Medium-dark gray smoke poured out.
It felt as though the driver of the Tahoe walked for hours but he never made it to the other car before the ambulance did. It was possible the ambulance came the quickest an ambulance had ever come. The driver of the Beetle, a woman, gave the impression of burned toast. She was laid out on a stretcher. The urgency they saved for the other passenger. I turned my head when an entire infant seat was lifted out by the broad-shouldered
