“I’d rather eat.”
“What kind of food do you want?”
“Don’t cops know the best spots? How about a cop place?”
“Okay. But there’s no turning back.”
I drove south, through a canyon of office towers, to the edge of downtown, hung a left, past a string of fashion district sweatshops and warehouses-the walls covered with savage graffiti, the tops bristling with razor wire-and stopped in front of a vacant lot overgrown with wild fennel, the breeze scented with the smell of licorice. A lunch wagon was parked across the lot, next to a liquor store, its windows opaque with soot.
“You wanted Mexican and you wanted a cop hangout,” I said. “This is both. It’s a roach coach, but they make the best tacos in the city.”
“I’ve been wined and dined at the finest restaurants in Santa Monica and West Hollywood,” she said, surveying the gritty landscape. “But none of them has the ambiance to compare to this place.”
I bought two cans of Tecate from the liquor store, slipped them into brown paper bags, and handed her one. We walked to the lunch wagon and waited behind a dozen Hispanic people in line. Ranchera music blared from inside the lunch wagon, and the smell of sizzling beef and cilantro filled the air. I had to kick several mangy dogs that tried to sniff Nicole’s pants. A woman behind the grill cranked out freshly made corn tortillas with a small hand roller.
When we reached the front of the line, I ordered, in Spanish, four tacos. I slipped in some cilantro and a few sliced radishes and sprinkled on peppery salsa thick with chopped chilies. We returned to my car and munched on the tacos, leaning against the trunk and hunched forward so the juice did not spill on our pants. We washed the tacos down with slugs of beer. I asked her if she liked the first taco I gave her. She nodded, her mouth full. I told her it was a sesos — cow brain-taco. She took a long, theatrical pull of her beer.
I drove over to 4th and Main and parked in a lot. We walked past a menacing-looking wino, shouting and swearing at a shopping cart, and into a restaurant located on the ground floor of a turn-of-the-century building that was once a cigar store, but had recently been renovated. We sat in the bar, ordered beers. I glanced at Nicole and watched her move her head to the sound of the jazz quartet, her eyes half-closed, her tongue peeking through her lips. I realized that tonight, for the first time in a long while, I didn’t have a lingering headache, a knot in the pit of my stomach, a tightness in my chest.
She asked me about growing up in L.A., and then told me she was born and raised in Detroit, but moved to Venice to attend grad school at UCLA.
“Both parents Lebanese?” I asked.
She shook her head. “My mom’s French.”
“Both parents Jewish?” she asked in a challenging tone.
“Very.”
“You don’t seem too religious.”
“I’m not. I’m Jewish culturally, I guess you’d say. The thing that ties me to Judaism, more than anything else, is the Holocaust. That, unfortunately, kind of shaped my Jewish identity. So I don’t go to synagogue much and my relationship to God is pretty tenuous. The Holocaust made a lot of Jews skeptics. I figure, if there was a God, what good was He?”
“You sound like a Jewish agnostic.”
“I wouldn’t say that. There’s some symbolism in the Kabala that suggests that God, like the Jews themselves, is in exile. That captures where I’m at. How about you?”
“A Lebanese-French atheist. You ever been to the Middle East?”
“Yeah-Israel.”
“What do you think about what the Israeli army did to Lebanon in ‘06?”
“Let’s discuss it another time. That’s a topic that could ruin our evening.” I decided not to tell her about my army patrols on the Lebanese border. “Any priors?”
She laughed. “One. He was another grad student. But the marriage didn’t last long. You?”
“One. Five years. Then she walked. But I always thought we’d eventually get back together.”
“Why’d she walk?”
“Irreconcilable differences, as they say in divorce court.”
“So was there another woman who alientated your affection, as they also say in divorce court?”
“Yeah, but it’s more complicated than that.”
“It usually is.”
“Let’s blow this place. You ready to go home?”
“I’d like to see your building. Finish off the architectural tour.”
I downed the rest of my beer in a few long gulps, stalling for time. I knew that, because of department regulations, I shouldn’t have asked her out; when she said no, I knew I shouldn’t have pressed her; and now, I knew I shouldn’t take her back to my place. A date was just an LAPD rules infraction; an affair would be something more. But I had a buzz from the beer, and she was looking damn good.
I pulled out of the lot, parked behind my building, walked around to the front, and punched my code in the keypad. We walked through the lobby, with its stamped tin ceiling, and entered the elevator, paneled in burnished mahogany. We rode to the top floor in silence. When we were inside the loft, Nicole stopped, and looked around. “I like the space. But you’re not much of a decorator. I’d call it Monk Modern. We need to get you some art on the walls.”
I flipped on the CD player and skipped past “So What” to the second cut-the bouncy, bluesy “Freddie Freeloader.” I grabbed beers from the refrigerator, and joined her on the sofa.
“The CD collection,” she said. “The window to the soul. What’s playing on the box? I like the sound?”
“It’s a Miles Davis album. I play it over and over. Whatever mood I’m in, there’s a cut on it for me.”
“And what kind of mood are you in now?” she asked, sipping her beer, but keeping her eyes on me.
“I used to be in a ‘So What’ mood. Tonight I’m in a ‘Freddie Freeloader’ kind of mood.”
“This a very old CD?”
“The album was recorded before we were born.”
“What’s the name?”
“Kind of Blue.”
“Good title for a cop like you.”
She closed her eyes and listened to the interplay between horns, piano, and drums. She opened her eyes when she heard the next cut. “What’s the name of this one?”
“Let me tell you a story about it. When I was a boot, my training officer and I were talking about music. He was an old salt who liked Tony Bennett and people like that. I figured he could relate to Miles. So I told him about this cut, “Blue in Green,” and how much I liked it. He told me that’s because it was the story of a young cop like me who didn’t know shit, only the words were twisted around. He said they should have called it, “Green in Blue.”
“So you’re really into jazz.”
“No. I’m really into ‘Kind of Blue.’ Most jazz today is too crazy for me. Space music. I like the straight-ahead sound. Not much of that around today.”
She walked over to the window and pointed to the crumbling St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, the cream-colored cupola catching the moonlight. “Pretty,” she said.
I walked up behind her, clasped my hands around her waist, and kissed her neck. She sighed and turned around. We kissed, standing by the window, for several minutes. She pulled away, looked into my eyes for a moment, then took my hand and led me across the room to the bed. She pulled my shirt over my head, kissing my neck, licking my nipples, running her forefinger along the jagged shrapnel wound beneath my ribs.
“I’ll bet there’s a story to explain the scar.”
“Actually a short one. About a hundredth of a second.” I lightly touched her cheek and said, “I’m not really ready for this tonight. I don’t have any protection here.”
She walked across the room, opened her purse, and tossed me a Trojan like she was flipping a Frisbee, the metal packet sweeping across the loft in a long, slow ellipsis. I stood there, frozen, as the Trojan seemed to hang in the air forever. Finally, I reached up and snatched it.
When she walked back to me, I began to unbutton her jacket, but she turned around and flicked off the lights. Then she kicked off her shoes, slipped off her leather pants, tossed her jacket on a chair, and unhooked and
