River was even more attractive than Jack had been. I laughed off his dream even though it had the power to make me feel gamy. I told him to have a good day at work and I walked back to my door in a way that would make him look at my backside. I was wearing small gray pajama shorts. The pills hit and my head went wavy.
Just inside the door, I pressed medium-hard with two fingers up between my thighs. I could have come like that, right then. I wanted to and then call Vic, say there was a new kid on the block. I felt sick to my stomach.
I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO dress for my first day of work at the health café. I’d always wished I didn’t care so much. I have my mother’s clothes to give you and a few of my favorite pieces. You can throw it all away but I found it’s nice to have fabric. It stores memory in an accessible way.
I parked in the small lot. My Dodge looked old and sad next to two impudent convertibles. I walked by the studio but did not look inside. It was daunting to know she was in there. I imagined her sitting on the bench made of a single tree, my mother and my father flanking her. They would be talking about me as though I wouldn’t understand something. Picturing the three of them together was one of the most sordid things I had ever done.
When I walked in, Natalia was rinsing mugs in the immense silver sink.
—How are you? I said, looking into her big Bambi eyes.
—Uh, good, she said, and asked if I wanted a coffee, which was nice. It seemed we were going to pretend the accident we’d witnessed together had never happened. I could tell she was nervous to be training someone nearly two decades older than she was.
I half-listened about everything except the coffee machine and the cash register. Both things had so many parts and I was nervous to make a mistake. Natalia was not a good teacher. She spoke too quietly and too quickly and hurried over the important things. To help her relax, I asked where she was from. She was so stupid.
—Salinas, she said. My dad works on a farm. It was the most she volunteered. She asked absolutely nothing of me.
She came very close to me while demonstrating a knob under the La Marzocco. She smelled like drugstore vanilla perfume. When she texted on her phone, her pretty pink nails stabbed the screen adroitly. I flipped through the manual for the coffee machine. I read the ingredients on the chocolate bars.
Around noon the bell over the door jingled and a man walked in. He was in his fifties and wrecked and seedy and handsome.
—How are you doing, Natalia? he said.
—Good, thanks, she said.
He looked at me. How are you? he said. He said it like he didn’t need a response, but it was enough for me. I nodded and smiled.
I ferried the dry mugs from the rack onto the shelf. He ordered a green soup from Natalia. The cook, a shrewd Mexican woman named Rita, made it once every three days and it lived in a vat. It was a puree of asparagus, kale, and onions, and full of butter. The whole canyon was crazy for it. He went to sit outside.
I’d been struck by him and suddenly realized why. He reminded me of Big Sky, of what Big Sky would look like a decade from now. Alice would make me see these things, my penchant for a certain flavor of man, a certain type of imbecilic self-destruction.
—Is he a regular? I asked Natalia.
—Dean. Yeah. He used to be famous.
—What’s his last name?
—Um, I don’t know. But he was Doctor Johnson? The lead singer of them.
When his soup was ready, I told Natalia I’d take it out to him. I didn’t know much about Doctor Johnson. I knew the song “Jessica’s Father” and that they sang Shel Silverstein poems.
He was leaning back in his chair, his jeaned legs spread. His loafers were expensive and his brows reddish, as though he’d tried to dye them from gray. I could tell he’d had eyelid surgery and I can’t explain why I was attracted to old, young-acting men. I also liked big noses, dishonest expressions. Men who couldn’t be bothered but were friendly. Ego. Former high school quarterbacks. Cheaters.
—Goddess soup, I said, setting the earthenware bowl down in front of him.
—Thank you. You’re new?
—I am.
—New to the Canyon as well?
—Yes.
—How do you like it so far?
—Oh, I don’t know.
—That was a stupid question. I hate when people ask me stupid questions like that.
He smiled. I could see clear through to his young self. I saw older men the way they still saw themselves. That was why they liked me so much; I was a solar panel, absorbing and refracting and reenergizing.
—It can get strange up here, he said, but it’s the best air in Los Angeles. He had an accent like just about every man I’ve liked.
Big Sky, of course, had an accent. He’d grown up down south. His voice was heroic. Accents are also a lie.
I met him in a nice bar on Wall Street, beneath street level, with hanging lamplights and red leather banquettes. This was during Vic. Almost always in my life there had been one man I desired who was giving me nothing at the same time that there was another who didn’t move me but from whom I was taking very much.
Big Sky wore a cashmere jacket. Underneath it
