'Did I reach the call center in India?'
A brief pause, and then he said, 'Oh, right. Andrew Danner. You were otherwise detained.'
But while extenuating circumstances had granted me my freedom, they were no match for the phone company. Serge remained unmoved, so I flipped my cell phone shut and powered off my computer, leaving the office in peace.
The bedroom told a story of its own, the tale of April's departure. Door ajar. Sheets thrown back. A few of my toiletries knocked over on the bathroom counter as she'd scrambled to pack up her overnight bag. Pink razor overlooked in the shower. Maybe I'd give it a try later for old times' sake. April had dropped one of her socks by the sink in her haste to leave.
We'd still been in the first flush of romance. An orthopedist with neat, pretty features and an even temperament I'd enviously put down to a midwestern upbringing, April had seen me after I'd snapped a collarbone playing pickup ball at Balboa Park. The firm medical touch, the caring tempered by reason, the proximity of our faces as she manipulated my arm through this test or that I hadn't stood a chance. We were three months new, full of imaginings that seemed youthful for a couple of hunkered-down thirty-eight-year-olds. Good-night calls. Ice cream from the carton in bed. Howard Hawks classics and Fabrocini's pizza. The occasional sleepover, just for practice. Then a brutal killing.
That interrupted a kind of levity and hopefulness I'd doubted I would feel again after Genevieve and I had gone our separate, bemused ways half a year before. Or, according to the prosecution and the cable anchors, our bitter, vituperative ways.
I picked up April's sock, feeling the emotion rising again before deciding I wouldn't allow myself to get all blubbery over footwear. I set my tumor on the nightstand, made the bed, then sat on top of the sheets, wondering what kind of loneliness we were in for. Me and my tumor.
Gazing at that suspended mass of brown cells, my mind pulled again to Genevieve, the horror of her death, the greater horror of my unknown implication in it. She'd brought a tinge of the exotic to her tastes, to her pronouncements, that I'd found irresistible. Most of her I found attractive. The finality of her judgments. The sureness of her passions. She was a big woman, thick around the thighs and hips, and refreshingly comfortable no, confident in her body and in what it could do. I remembered her mostly as a collection of sensations. The smoothness of a cheek brushing my chest. Traces of Petite Cherie on the pillowcase. Beads of sweat on her alabaster back. Her sleeping face smooth as a child's. She had no bad angles, Genevieve, and no bad-face days. It's much harder to resent someone when she has no bad angles. It takes a measure more of behavioral ugliness. But while I took my time getting there, she raced ahead, resenting her moods enough for us both. I was in love with her, certainly, but more in love with holding her together, and she was the only one of us perceptive enough to grasp that complexity.
The night of our breakup, she'd run her full gamut. I'd emerged from my office in the evening to find her sitting in my bedroom, watching The Bachelor's rose ceremony, pint of Chunky Monkey in her lap. She'd held up the spoon in my direction to prevent me from distracting her from the TV. 'Jane's a vile cow, and she needs to go home.' The trace of French accent undercut the prosaic declaration, making me suppress a smile. Then later, with a devilish giggle: 'Let's grab a bite. If we stay in, we'll just fight or fuck.' She'd held my hand across the restaurant table, face soft with ecstasy, while she named the spices in the merguez. We'd gone home and made love, sweaty in the hot breeze through the screen. That night I'd lost her into another dark mood, coming upon her sobbing in the shower. 'There's no dignity in anything anymore. It's all so cheap.'
She was sitting on the tile, water pounding her chest. I'd crouched, feeling the familiar helplessness, the streams striking my sleeve. 'What is?'
'All of it. TV. Nothing. I'm sorry. My head's not right. It's one of those… I'm sorry. This isn't fair to you. I should go.'
Later I'd awakened somewhere in the early-morning hours to find my hand clasped between her clammy palms, her front teeth worrying a pale lower lip, her eyes seeking comfort even as she said, 'It's not going to work with us.' I didn't have the energy to talk her around anymore. She packed up the few belongings she kept here, plugged in to opera on her iPod so we wouldn't argue as an excuse to lose nerve.
All the media confabulations about her made me realize how difficult she'd been to know. Despite her vague claims of managing a portion of the family real-estate portfolio, she hadn't worked. She read a lot. She went to matinees. She knew good bakeries. She hadn't asked a lot of life, and, in the end, it had given her less. I couldn't help but think now of the experiences she'd never get to have. The whole world denied to her, irrevocably.
I wanted to shake off the past four months like an unsettling dream. But certain facts are like boulders. They get in your way. They've got sharp edges that cut you when you try to move them. For weeks after my mother died, I awoke in the morning, reduced to the most basic, childlike thoughts. I want this not to be true. I want it not to have happened. I just couldn't bend my brain around it. My father's death a year and a half later was equally painful, though by then at least I'd had some practice. But where to file Genevieve with the gash through the solar plexus?
'I didn't do it,' I said to the tumor.
It gazed back indifferently.
I headed downstairs, opened the Jack Daniel's, and inhaled the rich, satisfying aroma. Then I walked over to the kitchen sink and poured the smoky single-barrel down the drain. The Jews leave a glass of wine for Elijah; the Buddhists offer fruit; the gangbangers pour one out for their dead homeys. You've got to feed the gods. Or the gods feed on you.
Not that they won't feed on you anyway.
A brass-plated cappuccino maker overcrowded the counter like a perched Labrador. I'd picked it up for Genevieve in the five-minute period when things were going smoothly between us, and it had put out fifteen shots of sludgelike espresso at a cost of $147 a cup. The refrigerator held three bottled waters and a dark chocolate bar, half eaten by April. Walking over to the cupboard, I removed the juice glass and white bowl that I'd just put away. I set them on the counter and stared at them as if I expected them to start talking.
Breakfast, September 23. My last memory before waking up in the recovery room.
I couldn't stop my gaze from moving to the knives resting in the wooden block on the counter. A dark curiosity stirred in the pit of my gut. It felt like a blue-hot flame. Like a twenty-year scotch hitting the blood after a two-hour jog. I walked over to the wooden block, guessing correctly at which was the boning knife. I bounced it, feeling its heft. Stainless gleam, Japanese character on the blade. I'd used my knives maybe four or five times. Why had my hand found the boning knife so easily?
I stared at my hands for a good long time, then at my reflection in the window above the sink, some guy holding a knife, a notched line of hair over his scar. The sight made me shudder.
I visited my humidor, then went out to a deck chair, put my feet on the railing, and smoked a cigar down to the yellow speckled band. My sole remaining vice. Except writing.
If I ever actually wrote again.
The night was dark and January-sharp. People forget how cool L.A. can be in the winter Pacific breeze, Santa Ana winds, angry spates of rain with half-assed lightning, like a constipated monsoon trying to find relief.
A view heals all woes. A view makes you feel as if you own something bigger than yourself, as if you own a place on the planet.
I watched the Valley twinkle in the heat below, like the ocean only prettier, because it was a sea of lights, because it was movement and life, because it let me be separate but connected to a thousand people in a thousand houses with a thousand stories, many sadder than my own. The mainline of Sepulveda charging north into worsening demographics. Van Nuys, beautiful only from a distance, where Mexicans play soccer workday mornings, crossing themselves before kickoff as if God cares about the outcome of a hungover pickup game. The 405, a curved waterfall of white headlights. Ventura moving east past the by-the-hour motels with glam studio names where johns bring broken street kids or vice versa. And around the Cahuenga Pass, where the city waits, an insatiable and inscrutable mistress, spread on a bed of neon with a sphinx smile, her just-pounced paws set down on punctured dreams.
I closed my eyes, cruising through Hollywood of the hipsters and wannabes, the culture consumers with brand names Roman-lettered across ass velour. Drifted behind the honk-oblivious Cutlass with Arkansas plates doing five miles per hour down the boulevard as heads inside craned on substantial southern necks, past black kids rat-a-tat-tatting on overturned white buckets, past peeling German noses, the sticky smell of suntan lotion,
