Byrd (6 page)

California

“Hello?”

“Roland?”

“Donna?”

“No. Addie. Addie Lockwood, remember?”

It's early December 1988, a Sunday afternoon. Outside her window the magnolia tree glistens with ice. There is a chilly quiet in the apartment, throughout the house; the store is closed—one reason she chose today to make her call. She has been up since early morning. She practiced in the shower what she would say.
I met a man who looks like you. He has your hands
. She's wearing her blue sweater. She's wearing makeup. She wants to feel pretty, even if he can't see her. For the last hour she has been sitting on her sofa, wrapped in her softest quilt, telephone on the coffee table in front of her, a scrap of paper with his number, and a bottle of Beaujolais, now half-empty. The wine makes her brave; it also makes her sad for having to spend so much bravery on a single phone call.

“Addie? I can't believe it. I was just thinking about you.”

“No you weren't.”
Who's Donna?
she wants to say.

“Okay, not really, but damn, baby, it's good to hear your voice. Are you okay, is everything okay?”

“Everything's fine. I was—, there was this guy, this piano player—”

“You just break up with somebody?”

She twists the phone cord around her finger. “As a matter of fact, yeah,” she says.

“I knew it. A breakup call. It's okay. Tell me all about him.”

“Oh no, that would put us both to sleep. Anyway, this isn't a breakup call. I just wanted to talk to you. I heard you were in L.A. making music and it made me happy and jealous. You're doing what you always meant to do.”

“Venice Beach, actually. Yeah, it's totally wild out here. It's fucking paradise is what it is. I'm four blocks from the beach. You can see the ocean from my roof.”

His voice is so familiar she can feel it, humming through her like electrical current. “Wow,” she says.

“Who told you where to find me?”

“Danny Brewster. Well, Shelia, but Danny told her. He works on your mother's car.”

“Danny that used to sell loose joints?”

“He married my friend Shelia and opened a garage.”

“You're in Carswell? I thought you left.”

“Greensboro. I came here for college and stayed.”

She pulls her quilt tighter. She can hear the tick of freezing rain outside her window. On the phone, too, in the background, there's a faint tapping. Then silence. Roland sniffs. Another pause. He lets out his breath.

“You still writing poems?” he says.

“Not since high school. I read like crazy, though. I work in a bookstore.”

“That's so
you
. I always loved that about you.”

“What?”

“Everything. I'm just flattered as hell to hear from you.”

She pours another glass of wine. “Tell me about you,” she says. “What are you up to?”

“Same thing as everybody else out here. Show business. I work for a company that builds movie sets. Ready Set. Get it?” He laughs his old laugh,
huck-huck-huck
.

“What about music?”

“Yeah, you know, I'm playing out some, making some contacts, trying to pick up some session work. I was on the road for fucking ever. I came out here and I said, never again. This is the place, man. This is where shit happens. Have you been?”

“To California? No.”

“You ought to check it out. It's wild.”

“I hear the weather's perfect.”

“You'd love it. You should come, you really should.” He's getting loud, insistent. “Come see me. Come for Christmas.”

“What?”

“Or New Year's. Come spend New Year's with me. I'll show you a good time.”

She waits for his laugh. He used to do that—let people take him seriously, then laugh. Even when he was serious he thought it was funny when people took him seriously.

“We'll have a blast,” he says. “It'll be just like old times, only better.”

She can't believe she's having this conversation. She still can't believe she picked up the phone and dialed Roland's number and he answered.

She knows better than to take him seriously. Even if L.A. at New Year's is exactly the kind of adventure she needs.

“My astrologer says I should travel,” she says.

“Always listen to your astrologer.”

“Is this a serious invitation, Roland?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

She packs early. She hopes that packing will make the trip seem real. She packs her paisley skirt, her tightest jeans, her black boots, her black jacket. She is thrilled and sickly nervous; she's also (though she wouldn't admit it) embarrassed to be traveling back in time to someone she used to know. Is this the only adventure she could come up with? Hasn't she outgrown Roland?

And what must Roland think? Does she seem as lonely and desperate and pathetic to him as the professor now seems to her?

“I'm going to California to spend New Year's with an old friend,” she tells John Dunn when she asks for time off. She says it casually.
California
. A word luscious as a piece of fruit.

John Dunn doesn't ask questions, or point out that this trip isn't the sort of thing Addie does. “I'll give you a ride to the airport,” he says.

She's braced for the obvious—the long flight, the strange city. But the flight is just a droning bus ride in the air. Los Angeles, too, is easy: a big, lazy, sprawled-out sunbather of a city where you can never be entirely lost because every street and neighborhood, every building, no matter how ordinary, is a place you've heard of.

She's less prepared for smaller things. The smell of diesel in the LAX terminal, making her afraid to breathe. The crush of people headed there, there, there. People with other people waiting for them. She claims her bag and finds a place to sit. She checks her watch, freshens her makeup, tugs at her dress and tries to convince herself she looks like someone a man would want to drive to the airport and pick up. Twice she calls Roland's apartment but there's no answer and no machine. She waits forty-five minutes. The crowd thins. She starts to panic. People actually stop for her. “Is there some problem, miss?” “Can I call someone for you? A cab?”

God deliver me
, she thinks,
from the kindness of strangers
.

Then she sees him. She knows him first by his walk, lean and smooth, his feet gliding along as if they don't quite touch the ground. He's wearing a denim jacket and a black T-shirt that says “Déjà Voodoo.” He has a mustache and his hair is cut in a mullet, short in front, layered on the sides, long in back. He looks like he just walked off an album cover.

“Baby,” he says, “I'm sorry. I couldn't find a place to park.” He smiles the lopsided, apologetic smile she remembers, and opens his arms, and she, too relieved to be angry, falls in.

She can tell from his apartment that there's a woman. Air freshener plugged into an electrical socket. An open box of baking soda in the refrigerator. A blouse in the closet.

There's only one closet; the apartment is an efficiency, no bigger than a motel room, with painted cinderblock walls and a filmy picture window. Roland takes her suitcase to the closet and pushes his clothes to one side, and there, crumpled on the floor in back, is a faded pink blouse with brown underarm stains. She pretends not to notice, but it gives her a quick, sharp pain, that blouse.

Roland invites his friends Pete and Golita over to meet her. “Un-fucking-believable,” he tells them. “We haven't seen each other in, like, ten thousand years, and then out of the blue she calls me up, and now here she is.”

“Nice.” Pete nods. He has wild orange hair like the singer in Simply Red. He's sitting at Roland's counter tapping a small pile of white powder onto a mirror, chopping it with a razor blade, carving it into thin lines. He passes Addie a rolled-up dollar bill. “Company first.”

“I don't know how.”

“Breathe in. Don't breathe out.”

She holds the dollar straw to one nostril, closes the other with her finger, and leans down. The powder burns her nose. Her eyes water. The back of her throat tastes bitter. Her ears start to buzz.

Roland touches her. “Okay?”

“Yeah, I'm good.” She smiles at his feathered hair. She smiles at his apartment, so tiny, so—
efficient
. The sofa unfolds into a bed; the dinette table holds his phone, stereo, and portable TV; the floor lamp doubles—triples—as a table and magazine rack.

“So, Addie,” says Golita. She has blue saucer eyes and a Carly Simon mouth. She is bosomy like Carly, dark blond, a singer herself. She sings nights and works days at Ready Set with Pete and Roland. “How come Roll never told us about you?”

On the boardwalk, which is not boards but pavement, everything moves fast and smooth and so do they, graceful as wild animals. Addie can't tell if she's walking or running or gliding or flying or dreaming. They serpentine through a strange circus of weightlifters, street skaters, men swallowing fire, guitar players on unicycles, women telling fortunes.

“The bar's around the corner,” Golita says.

They follow her out of the crowd and into a small yellow building. Inside it's all dark wood paneling with a Maple Leaf flag over the bar, a jukebox on the far wall, and a single pool table in the middle of the room. Pete buys beer, Golita puts quarters in the jukebox and Roland puts quarters in the table. He hands Addie a cue stick and shows her how to hold it, standing behind her with his arms on hers.

“I'm a slow learner,” she says.

“I've got all night,” he says.

She loses every game. She doesn't care. “Buy me another round,” she says. “Rack 'em.”

They monopolize the table until closing time. They walk home a different way, past giant murals and cafés (they haven't eaten but no one mentions food; no one is hungry), under swishing palm fronds. The night sky has faded to purple—an incandescent, glowy purple. Out here, it never gets completely dark.

When Roland opens the sofa bed there is a smell like salted cashews. The smell of sex.

He offers to sleep on the floor but she tells him no, she doesn't mind sharing. She turns out the lights and gets in bed without taking off her dress. She rolls onto her side, facing the wall, her back to Roland, and listens to the muffled sounds of traffic from the street and the distant moan and hiss of the ocean. She listens to Roland, unzipping his pants.

He lies down behind her, slides his hand under her dress.

She touches his hand, guides it.

He doesn't hurry. He takes a long time this time. She doesn't think he'll ever finish.

In the morning, they shower together and towel off in the tiny bathroom. Roland opens a canister of mousse, sprays a little in his hand, lets it swell to the size of a golf ball, and works it into his wet hair. He hangs his head upside down between his legs and aims the blow dryer straight up—“for volume,” he says, a trick he learned in show business.

“I want to know all your secrets,” she says.

She falls in love with the sound of the ocean, a constant
whoosh
behind all the other sounds.

She falls in love with the sun, which is different here, expansive and white, bleaching everything, making even the ugliest buildings gleam like laundry on a line.

She falls in love with the unreality of the place. On Hollywood Boulevard they have to stop for a man in chaps crossing the street with his bull. On the Santa Monica pier, a man at the bar offers to buy her a drink.

“I'm Kin,” he says.

“No, you're not,” she says. “I know you. You're Scotty from General Hospital.”

She falls in love with Roland's friends. One night they all go to dinner in a French café Pete knows, Maison Gerard (“the House of Jerry,” Roland translates), with red walls and posters advertising French soap and cigarettes, and a French lounge singer, Serge Gainsbourg, on the sound system. Their waiter is an actor studying to play a French waiter. His face is flat and round as an omelet pan. While they wait for their meal, Pete spreads potted cheese onto rounds of French bread and deals the bread like cards. “So,” he says to Addie, “wasn't the Lost Colony in North Carolina?”

“That's right. The first English settlement in America. By the time the new governor got there, the whole colony was gone.”

Roland says, “Remember how in school they used to tell us, ‘And no one ever knew what became of the settlers'? It was never any fucking mystery to me.” He tomahawk-chops the table with his hand.

“That's just what they wanted you to think,” Pete says. “Always blame the Indians.”

“What's that Opie Taylor movie,” Golita says, “where all the old people get in a boat and go to another planet and live forever?”

“That's
what happened,” Pete says. “They're probably on Mars right now, kicking up red dust.”

“With silver buckles on their shoes,” Addie says.

“Wearing top hats,” Pete says. “Trying to grow maize, but it won't grow. ‘We put fish in the ground the way the Indians showed us and still it
won't grow
.'”

Driving is her favorite drug. She becomes addicted to the motion, the forever-changing view. She loves watching Roland drive, how he stretches out his arm and drapes his hand over the steering wheel, every part of him long and loose. Whenever they come to a 7-Eleven he stops for pink wine and lottery tickets.

Late one night they drive up the coast to Zuma Beach with the windows rolled down. Salt air eddies in around them. Nina Simone purrs on the tape deck, “Since I Fell for You.” Strings of Christmas lights glitter on wooden fences along the road. Beyond is the big dark ocean.

“You're shaking,” Roland says. He pulls over and takes off his jacket, wraps it around her.

“Dance with me,” she says, turning up the volume.