'We
She knocked her precise silverware arrangement cockeyed. 'You idiot,' she said. 'Of course we are.'
'I love you, too.' I reached over and straightened the two remaining forks. The upwardly mobile woman at the next table laughed tinnily.
'How come men can laugh boom-boom-boom and women sound like goats?' Eleanor said. 'How come men can chew gum and women look like cows when they do it? How come it's okay for men to get wasted and throw up, but a drunk woman embarrasses everybody?'
'I love you, too,' I said again.
'Maybe people have a higher expectation for women,' she said, looking everywhere in the restaurant except at me. 'What a pain in the rear.'
I didn't say anything.
Eleanor lifted an edge of her plate and let it drop onto the immaculate white tablecloth. The delicate muscles of her jaw worked, once and then again. 'What a total, unadulterated, one-hundred-percent pain in the
12
It may have been one p.m. to the rest of the world, but to Saffron it was early morning.
She lived in the kind of neighborhood where they park on the lawn. The dry swimming pool was half-full of trash. I'd had to knock four times before a thick moan of protest announced that she was coming to the door. There was a prolonged fumbling with multiple chains and latches inside, a muttered expletive or two, and then the door swung open four inches, and Saffron peered out into the sunlight. Her chin rested on the taut chain.
'I paid the rent,' she said. Then she focused. 'Oh, shit. It's you.' She pushed at the door, but it wouldn't close.
'The old foot in the door,' I said. 'It's amazing how many people still let you get a foot in the door.'
'Listen, I just went to bed. How about you get out of here and come back next week? Or maybe Labor Day.' She gave the door an exploratory shove.
The apartment behind her was dark, and I could hear the hum of a window air conditioner, part of a night person's standard insulation against the day. A door closed behind me, and a youngish man with vivid pimples decorating a pasty complexion beneath slicked-back black hair walked quickly across the courtyard and toward the street. He gave me a nervous glance. It seemed like a pretty furtive apartment house, all things considered.
'Saffron, I'm coming in, and you're going to talk to me.'
'Fuck off,' she said, shoving again at the door. It didn't budge. Her puffy face suddenly arranged itself into the expression of a four-year-old headed for a tantrum. It wasn't pretty.
'I could knock this door in with one hand,' I said. 'Then you'd have to talk to me, and you'd have to get your door fixed, too. Why don't you do it the easy way?'
'You push this door in and I'll call the cops.'
'Oh, no, you won't.'
She stamped her foot. She was wearing little white ankle socks and a short nightgown. Her chin trembled, and I thought for a moment she was going to cry. I wondered what wretched drugs she was on.
'Open the door,' I said as gently as I could. 'Please?'
She stared up at me through petulant eyes that looked like black-and-blue marks. 'You'll have to move your foot,' she said in an angry little-girl voice. 'I can't undo the chain if you don't.'
'Lock it and I'll come in through the window.'
'I'm not going to lock it.'
'Oh, good,' I said. 'My first opportunity to trust you.'
I pulled my foot back, putting both palms against the door as a precaution. I needn't have bothered. She didn't close it all the way, just slid the lock off the catch and retreated back into the gloom. The door slowly swung open. It was cheap, hollow fiberboard. I probably could have walked through it.
'Let yourself in,' she said.
I followed her into the darkness. The apartment was in total disorder. Saffron had more shoes than Imelda Marcos, but nowhere near the closet space. They were everywhere, on the floor, on the table and couch, even on the messy single bed that Saffron had just vacated. They fought for space with dresses, pants, blouses, slips, underwear. Saffron obviously belonged to the drop-it-where-you-take-it-off school of undressing. Blankets masked the light from the windows, so I left the door standing open.
Ashtrays overflowed with cigarettes. Most of them had half the filter torn out; white, fibrous little piles of whatever they make filters out of were everywhere. Saffron was smoking a lot of cocaine.
She sat on the bed, reached over to the table for one of her coco-puffs, and lit it. Sweet smoke curled toward me. Over the bed was a Day-Glo poster of Jimi Hendrix from the halcyon days of the Fillmore West. I revised my estimate of her age upward.
'Nice place,' I said conversationally.
She took a deep hit. 'Yours ain't exactly Camelot. What do you want?' One foot was curled beneath her, and it jiggled up and down nervously. Her shin needed shaving. Probably both of them did.
'Just a talk. Can you sleep after you smoke one of those?'
'I can sleep after a dozen. That what you want to talk about?'
'I want to talk about Amber.'
'We've already done this scene. There was no payoff. Like I said before, go away.'
'And Toby.'
She inhaled again, held it for a second, and yawned out a plume of smoke. 'Fuck Toby. Fuck you, too. I'm sorry I ever met him.'
'Why?'
'Why not? Who needs the All-American boy when his idea of a sex toy is a Louisville Slugger?' She tried a laugh, but it didn't work. 'It's enough to make you wish you liked girls.' One strap of her nightgown fell loose over her shoulder. She left it there.
I leaned over and straightened it. She pulled away from me, regarded me darkly for a second, and then went back to work on the cigarette.
'Did he rough you up?'
She exhaled vehemently and coughed, doubling over on the bed. 'Toby can't say hello without sticking his elbow in your eye,' she said when she'd caught her breath. 'It's like a character flaw.'
'It's a blemish the size of Van Nuys. You're an actress?'
She looked surprised. 'Sure,' she said. 'I'm really Meryl Streep.' She waved her cigarette around to indicate the apartment. 'All this is just part of getting into character.'
'But you came here-to Hollywood, I mean-to be an actress.'
'Who says?' She sounded suspicious.
'You. You said we'd already done this scene. No payoff, you said. Real people don't talk like that. What do the folks back home think you're doing?'
Saffron started to stub out her cigarette and then thought better of it. She used it to light another and dropped the butt into an already overloaded ashtray. She sucked up the smoke from the new one. Wrinkles creased the area around her mouth.
Closing her eyes to get away from me, she exhaled. 'They think I wait tables,' she said after a moment.
'Well, you do, in a way.'
'Yeah, and the pope's a Protestant. Stop sucking around and get to the point.'
'Did Toby tell you he'd help you?'
Something that might have had a smile as a distant ancestor flitted across her tired face. 'Well, he really did help, you know? That's the worst thing about Toby. We all know he's an asshole, but sometimes he comes through.
