I walked around the place looking for interesting things. But the refrigerator was the kind you couldn’t put imposing bundles of romaine in. It wasn’t for kale or stocking beets. At best, bags of peeled baby carrots. There was barely room in the pantry for all of my pastina and the cartons of College Inn broth. As a child I’d had a girlfriend whose parents were nineteenth-century poor. They had a pantry full of old food in boxes brought by ladies from the church. One night when I was over, the mother opened a package of macaroni and cheese to find milk-colored maggots slipping around, tinkling the dry elbows. The mother picked over the pasta, tossing the maggots in the sink, and turned on the hot water to melt them. Later my friend looked at me across the table with bright, wet eyes. The family said grace and I tucked my chin and pretended to close my eyes but kept them instead on my plate, watching for movement. My dear friend’s hand in mine was small and warm. After that night we never played again. It was early enough in the relationship that it didn’t feel, at the time, like a wound. But now I think about her all the time. I think about her every time I open a box of pasta.
—Where you want this? asked the one with the neck tattoo. The movers were holding my burgundy Ploum loveseat, an armless velour nest that Vic gave to me. He’d had me on it more than once. That was the point of many gifts.
I wanted it on the third floor, but the movers were sweating. The beads of sweat glistened on their foreheads like those maggots.
I shook my oily hair out of a ponytail and rubbed my shoulder.
—You’re clearly very strong, but it’s probably impossible to get that up to the third floor?
—Nothin’s impossible, said the one with the gold tooth.
I smiled and thanked him. I fluttered my eyelids. It was something I actually did. Then I turned and moved sensually toward the kitchen. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using sex. I know some people think that there is, but I don’t understand why. I’d been coached by my aunt Gosia. Gosia wasn’t my aunt by blood; she was my father’s brother’s second wife. She was Austrian and garishly beautiful—blond pompadour, black Dolce & Gabbana suits, excessive filler. She trained me in the art of sexual combat. She told me that women must deploy all their strengths in order to prevail. People will call you names, she said. They are only hating themselves.
As they moved past me with the couch, I saw the lightened spot where I’d scrubbed Vic’s semen off. At first it was revolting but lately it had become a faded badge.
—Yo, you know the White Space lives under you? said the neck tattoo.
I told him that I did.
—Fuckin sick, said the one with the gold tooth. What kind place is this? Some artist commune’n shit?
—I have no idea, I said. The men had become very ugly to me. I looked out the windows, wishing again I had moved someplace where it snowed, with big yellow Bobcats that roared down blizzardy Ketchum mornings. I loved headlights in snowstorms. But I had come to Los Angeles for a reason. I’d stayed in New York for too long when I should have tried to find Alice. New York is a lie, I will tell you. Each city is its own lie, but New York is a whopper. I don’t expect you to listen about that. Everyone needs to learn it in their own time.
The men noticed I’d stopped playing. Men are never okay when you stop. I had the fear of angering a man. Of not being an amenable woman. I had the fear of being murdered. To assuage the guilt that I didn’t follow up the flirtation by fucking them, I gave the movers each a tip of fifty dollars. I wondered if they had to buy their meth or if it was something to cook in an oxidized Airstream. I pictured them eating oyster crackers from the soup counters of gloomy grocery stores in the Valley.
There had been times in my life when I didn’t think of a hundred dollars as anything. But when those fifties left my hand, my forehead grew hot. I felt the familiar fear. There was a month when I drove to a gas station every night and bought scratch-off tickets from the lottery vendor. I scratched them off under a bug lamp next to the air pressure machine. I used a dime because it had ridges. One spring evening I won fifty dollars and it made me feel like I could run for office.
I’d considered not tipping the movers, saying I had no cash on hand, that I would send something along in the mail. I thought, with some perverse relief, that if things got terrible anytime soon, if I couldn’t find work, I might perform blow jobs on the burgundy Ploum. I could sit the pizza deliveryman down, and the propane guy, separate their giant knees, and let them depress my head like a flush valve.
4
I KNEW WHERE TO FIND Alice, but you should never engage a stranger until you understand her world. Don’t let anyone have an advantage.
I drove to Froggy’s, which was built on the sharpest curve of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Kathi had told me it was where the locals went. It was a bar and a music venue and a fish market. It was decorated like a Mexican restaurant under the sea. They sold oysters on the half shell, steamers in nets, tacos with carnitas, coconut-crusted tilapia. I sat near the
