Los Angeles (4 page)

Which was exactly as I had pictured it, exactly as Angela had described it: the flashing laser lights, tubes of red, yellow,
and blue neon curling around the edges of the stage in wildly oscillating stripes. The music couldn’t have been worse. You’d
think they would have played something upbeat, something lighthearted and sexy, but instead, it was industrial dirge music,
disco for psychos. There were girls dancing on two separate platforms, each in her own metamorphosing pool of luminescence,
and around each of the dancers sat a ring of gawking imbeciles. In one, Japanese businessmen in dark suits and bright ties,
wearing their crisp white shirts and precise, salaryman haircuts, smiled serenely up into the hairless genitalia of a blonde
so thin she could have blended in at Buchenwald. In the other was a bunch of drugstore clerks on their night off. They had
overly gelled hair and underdeveloped mustaches; they wore heavy gold chains and T-shirts emblazoned with indecipherable,
but still somehow profane, slogans. The girl in their circle of light was darkly beautiful, with undulating hips, small, high
breasts, and eyes like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Her hair was so shiny that it flashed, reflecting shades and hues of light in
the laser beams like sheets of glistening rain.

In the back, under the exit sign, I noticed a colossal man in a formal suit, an even larger example of homo erectus than the
gorilla who guarded the door. He had one of those wide ties, silvery gray, the kind butlers wear in old movies. A
cravat,
I think it’s called. His shoulders were much narrower than his belly, and he was completely bald, which made him look like
a Buddha on his way to a funeral. He dangled his arms, eyes narrowed to inscrutable slits, and sat on his stool, criminally
huge, menacingly inert.

I took a seat on the banquette along the wall and looked around, hoping to see Angela right away, to get this the hell over
with.

“There’s a two-drink minimum,” a voice said, “and we don’t serve alcohol.” Its owner was a waitress, probably a former dancer.
She was a few years out-of-date but still sexy enough to command the leers of the nearby table of conventioneers.

I took a chance. “Do you have water?”

She had dark Bettie Page hair and a soft, round face. She wore a purple minidress and a small black velvet mask, the kind
a person would have worn to a costume ball decades ago. Looking around, I noticed that all the waitresses here wore black
masks. She pushed hers up onto her forehead so she could flutter her heavily eye-shadowed lids. “Pellegrino,” she recited,
“Evian, Mountain Spring, Vittel, or tap. But if you get tap, we still have to charge you eight bucks. So I’d get the Pellegrino.”
The waitress winked. “It’s the best value.”

“Pellegrino,” I said, adding, “I’m all about value.” I had taken so many Inderols before I left the apartment that I had enough
confidence to make small talk with a stranger. This had a two-sided effect, unfortunately — I had acquired the confidence
to kid around but had sacrificed the clarity to be funny.

“Two Pellegrino’s coming right up.”

“Oh —” I reached out a hand and almost touched her hip, but a glance over at the angry Buddha under the exit sign made me
think better of it. “Sorry,” I said, “but do you know… do you know Angela? I was supposed to meet her here.”

“You mean Cassandra? She’s in the back, probably changing.” The waitress gave me a discreet smirk. “And that makes you Angel.”

Funny. She hadn’t mentioned this other name. “Cassandra?”

“We all have different names in here, sweetie.” The waitress winked. “Are you really an angel?”

I think I may have blushed. “It’s just my name.”

“That’s not what Cassandra says.”

It felt weird to hear Angela referred to by another name; weirder to imagine her telling people about me. “What did she say?”

“Just that you were coming.” The waitress wrinkled her nose. “And to be nice.”

“Really?”

“I should have guessed when I saw you.” She raised an eyebrow so it disappeared beneath her mask. “We get all kinds, you know,
but not many”— she paused here, considering what in the world to call me —“angels.”

______

“Don’t move,” I said. This was another morning, whether before or after the night at the Mask, I’m still not sure.

“Why?”
Angela froze. “Is there a bug on me?”

“It’s the light.” A hard beam of sunlight had ruptured through the miniblinds of my living room window, and Angela’s face
had become starkly illuminated, chiaroscuro, like a Rembrandt. I ran into the bedroom to get my camera. I’d had it for years,
since college, a high-end Leica my father bought me in a futile hope that I would develop an interest in something he understood.
Recently, I had found it in an old shoe box, deep in the back of my closet, with a roll of film still inside it, amazingly
enough.

I took it back into the living room. “Ready?”

Angela turned toward me, shadowed, romantic, as I adjusted the focus. “Ready.” Then, just as I depressed the shutter release
and the automatic flash went off, she sneered and flipped me the bird.

“What did you do that for?”

She shrugged. “So take another one.”

I looked at the little read-out that displayed how many pictures remained. “That was the only one left.”

She lit another cigarette. She was smoking Salem’s today, the menthol vapors polluting the air. “So maybe sometimes I don’t
like to have my picture taken.” Sometimes Angela smoked constantly, crushing her cigarettes into little dishes all over the
apartment. When she was gone, I had to go around cleaning, vacuuming, dusting. Sometimes she didn’t smoke at all.

I sighed and sank down next to her on the rug. I had gotten into the habit of slipping out at night to gather more supplies,
another bottle of Stoli for Angela, Jack for me, to refill my prescriptions, and to load up on Stouffer’s entrées. I would
drop the roll of film off at the one-hour photo booth, I told myself, and pick the pictures up in a few days.

“Do you trust me?” Angela asked out of nowhere. Her arms, I remember, snaked around my waist.

But this was weeks later, weeks during which we had graduated from acquaintances to friends to something else entirely, though
I was still trying to work out exactly what that something else was. “Trust you?” I let a sigh leave my body. It contained
suspicion, doubt, misgivings. I looked into her eyes and saw that they were blue again. So recently they had been green. “What
are you going to do?” I asked her blue eyes.

“Where are your car keys?”

The keys were on a stack of books by the door. I indicated their direction with a slight nod of my head.

Angela turned and saw them, then got up, jumping quickly. “Get your clothes on,” she said, “and do it fast, before this passes.”

“Before what passes?” I got up, too, though less athletically, and stepped into the bedroom. I pulled on a pair of cargo pants
and buttoned a shirt.

When I turned around, I saw her holding my robe and slipping the belt out of its loops.

“What are you doing?”

“You said you trusted me.”

I didn’t sigh this time; this time, I lowered my eyes. “Are you planning to tie me up?”

She laughed, pulling my hand. She took the belt with her and led me through the living room, into the hallway, down the stairs,
through the lobby door of the apartment building, past the twin midget palms that guarded the entrance, around the side to
the parking lot. It had been a couple of days since I had taken out the Cadillac, and it was covered with waxy brown leaves
that had fallen from the old man’s laurel tree next door.

I seized the opportunity to look around for that cat. I still wanted to find her.

“She’s not out here, Angel,” Angela said now. “Leave it alone.”

“But I just heard her, just this morning.”

“We scared her away.”

Dark out, the air was angry and stale. The Santa Anas had been blowing all day, a vicious wind from the desert hills, and
the asphalt heat still radiated from the long day’s sun. Angela opened the passenger side door for me and I got in. She pulled
the seat belt across my chest.

“What is it?” I said finally.

“She’s in heat, that’s all.”

“No, what is it —” I was about to ask what it was Angela was doing, what it was she had planned, but in midsentence I changed
course. “What is it that you’re doing with me? What is it you see in me?”

She pulled out of the parking lot, taking the short, twisty street of San Raphael Crescent to Hollywood Boulevard, then onto
Sunset, where, a few minutes later, we passed the strip. The trendy bars and restaurants had filled with the shapes of people,
the crispy-haired young men holding their long-necked beers, the overly worked-out girls in their cleavage-revealing dresses
and bright red lipstick, and I could hear their peals of laughter, the throbbing bass beat of vapid pop polluting the already
lush night air. “I see all kinds of angelic things in you,” Angela answered eventually, “authenticity, truthfulness, purity,
but right now” — she handed me the belt from my robe, which had been curled serpentine on her lap — “right now, I need for
you not to see anything.”

At first I was confused by her twisted logic, but then I guessed at what she meant: “You want me to wear a blindfold?”

“You said you trusted me.”

“I know, but…” This time when I inhaled, I smelled the inside of what had once been my mother’s burgundy-colored Cadillac,
the accumulated years of dust, the nauseating odor of milk that I had spilled in the backseat at some point in the distant
past and that had never come out, as well as the perfume Angela wore, and I inhaled faith, conviction, belief.

I gave in, tying the belt around my eyes.

“Make sure you can’t see anything,” she said.

“How much longer is this going to be?” I was searching for some sort of clue, looking for anything, however vague.

Angela hesitated, then said, “It’s hard to say.”

I lowered the window and felt the warm air on my skin. I inhaled my way through the city, breathing the exhaust fumes of cars
and the scent of flowers and fresh-cut grass.

I stuck my head out the window like a dog.

“We’re on the freeway,” I yelled eventually. The wind was strong in my face. It smelled like gasoline and gardenias.

“You’re a regular detective.” I could hear the smirk on her face. I could hear the very arch of her eyebrow. “But do you know
which direction we’re heading, Lieutenant Columbo?”

I admitted I didn’t.

We sped along the night streets, me in my blindfold, the windows open, until I could feel the traffic slowing.

Angela was turning, sitting at corners, waiting at lights.

“Can anyone see me?” I asked.

“People are staring,” she taunted. “They’re all looking at you, Angel, pointing and laughing.”

“Really?”

“Jesus,” she said. “You’re so fucking paranoid.”

“Are we almost there?”

“Almost.”

We drove for a while longer, and I listened to the sounds of other engines, wheels on pavement, music blaring from the stereos
of other cars. We had been on the road for roughly forty-five minutes, which in L.A. meant we could have been anywhere.

“Okay,” she said, finally bringing the car to a stop.

I started to take off the blindfold, but Angela prevented me, clutching my hands.

“Not yet,” she said.

“This is starting to get…” I searched for the right word.
“Vertiginous.”

“Soon,” she promised.

“Can I at least get out?”

“Just be careful.”

I opened the door and stepped onto concrete, my hands extended searchingly to make sure there wasn’t anything in front of
me. My sightlessness had become disquieting. I believed that one step away was a precipitous cliff, a drop-off into pure space,
or maybe something worse, something pointy, a cactus or a wall of nails. Also, I had tied the blindfold too tightly, and I
was beginning to see a dizzying galaxy of stars, neon whorls, and patterns that flashed across my mind’s movie screen.

I felt Angela’s hand on my wrist, a slight pressure. “This way,” she said. She guided me across what I took to be a parking
lot, then made me wait while she opened a door. It sounded like metal against metal, and something closed behind us with a
hard
clang.
“Here,” she said, leading me farther.

We stepped into what sounded like a large room, a marble floor. Our footsteps echoed.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

“No questions,” she told me. “Just trust. Remember?”

“Do you have any idea how hard that is for me?”

“I know, little prince,” she said, “I know.”

“My mother used to call me that.” That was her nickname for me, in fact. She always said I looked like him.

“All alone on your little planet, all by yourself in your crazy apartment, surrounded by your books and your stacks of colored
papers…. I can see why.”

“You’re pulling me out of my shell,” I said. “Is that it? I’m a reclamation project?”

“Absolutely. This is an after-school special.”

I heard the hissing of elevator doors and I was ushered inside. There was a brief discontinuation of contact as Angela pressed
a button, then a pause, an infinitesimal dip, and I felt the elevator ascending, rising higher.

How tall was this building? I wondered. Were we going up three floors or three dozen?

It stopped then, and the doors opened with an electric sigh.

She led me into a hallway, then around a corner. “Careful,” she said, leading me by the waist. “There are stairs right in
front of you.”

Tentatively, I lifted my foot and felt the first step.

“Not too quickly.”

I lifted my foot again, one step after another.

“A landing,” she said. “Turn here.”

I turned, going up three short flights this way, and heard the squealing sound of a door opening.

“Ready?”

I felt a breeze, cool air mixed with warm. I smelled something vaguely familiar, something keen, acrid, ambiguously chemical.