Gosia told me as much as she knew, but she could not have prepared me for the reality of Alice.
Alice had a long, almost mannish nose, but it was offset by the largeness of her blue eyes and the thickness of her lips. It was a trick. Her big nose made you feel like you had to keep looking at her to determine what was so stunning. Her hair was thick and long and the color of Coca-Cola. She wore a bralette and a pair of Lycra pants. Her body was cartoonishly perfect. She had an hourglass waist and her hips were dramatically wide. I could picture someone gripping them from behind. She was twenty-seven.
Alice began the class with sun salutations. Unlike other instructors, she didn’t rhapsodize about energy or gratitude. She barely spoke but when she did the husk of her voice was hypnotizing.
The class made use of small arm weights and leg weights, five-pound sacks to Velcro around the ankles. The music was curated and varied—steampunk, blues, grindcore, Indian ghazel.
I tried hard to look elegant in the poses. During crow I was cognizant of the sinkhole between my breasts. I watched the men, inserted myself inside their heads and saw the ways they might bend the young instructor. It was erotic and eviscerating.
During corpse pose she played Cibo Matto’s “White Pepper Ice Cream.” She padded around the room to all the lying bodies, squatted by their heads, and flattened the flesh between their shoulders and chests. When she did this to me, my eyes involuntarily slipped open and we looked at each other. I saw the reflection of her blue eyes in mine. I almost passed out. I got up soon after and left the class before namaste.
THE ENCOUNTER LEFT ME FEELING like I was sixty. I wanted to call Vic. I wanted to call Gosia. I needed someone I already knew to stabilize me. I had nothing left but Alice.
Afterward I drove to Rodeo Drive because my mother loved it there. She was impossible to please or excite, but there were places she worshipped as though they were cast in gold, and Los Angeles was one of them. She’d seen so many noir films as a young woman—Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard—and Los Angeles was the rich velvety heart of them.
I counted palm trees and did not miss New York. I couldn’t divorce what had happened in New York from the rest of New York, from the Broome Street Bar with its copper cups and sexy bartender, from Spring Lounge the night I fell for the sexiest man in the world. From midnight on Broadway, way downtown where Manhattan looked like Rome, large and stone and anodyne. All of the city, now, was slicked in his big bright blood.
We’d visited Rodeo when I was nine and my parents bought me a dress for $425 that required a slip. It was black with tiny white flowers and a Peter Pan collar. My mother was angry about the dress but she herself had gotten a pair of ruby earrings and it was only fair, said my father. Her birthstone is not even ruby, I spat, speaking to my father but looking at my mother. It’s garnet. When I see you in my dreams you are wearing all the dresses I ever wanted.
I took the Pacific Coast Highway to Sunset. If someone told me this was hell, I wouldn’t have been surprised; the palm trees might have risen from beneath the mantle of the earth. But if this was hell then it was nice, the feeling of having crossed over. I recalled one of the final descents with John Ford, how I felt like a canal that this small balding man was passing through. I’d turned around to see his scummy eyes fluttering like a slot machine as he came.
Are you a prostitute? a man once asked me. I was eating alone at the bar of a fine restaurant. I had a mouth full of burger. The burger was terrible, it tasted oxidized. I was using my sweater like a blanket over my bare legs. You look like a Sylvie, he said. Is your name Sylvie?
I’d loved only one man. Love was not the right word. He didn’t love me. To this day, I still couldn’t face that. He would have loved Alice.
I was eating dinner with that man, the one I loved, when Vic walked in and shot himself. He shot himself in the nose. I tell you the nose because details are important. The splatter of blood on the wall was the shape of a maple leaf. What remained of his face was a suggestion. I saw a fetus once when I worked in the hospital, its image in an ultrasound, and the baby had no nose. The mother, a heavy Brazilian woman, reacted to the news as it was translated for her by a young nurse. She nodded serenely. Como Deus quer, she said.
As God wishes.
The sunlight was white in Beverly Hills, whereas in Topanga it was orange and gaseous. I was learning that Los Angeles is made up of distinct countries that are merely minutes apart. Not even countries but ecosystems. The homeless beg differently from town to town.
I walked into Lanvin. I was still wearing the same white dress.
