Losing Clementine (16 page)

“Hell, Trudy, it was thirty years ago. You wouldn't remember what I told you.”

“You didn't call.”

“Got busy.”

“Can I take you to dinner?”

I let the question hang for a minute. I had three dozen magazines spread out across my worktable and a few on the floor. My hand was cramping around the X-Acto knife. I'd been at it for ten hours and had eaten nothing but toast and the last of the orange juice. Chuckles, who'd been sprawled out on top of a stack of three-year-old
W
magazines, yawned. He opened his jaw so wide I got a direct view of his scaly tongue and deeply ridged palate. He was the only person I'd seen all day, and he wasn't actually a person.

“Pizza?” I asked.

“Pizza,” he agreed.

“Gribaldi's?”

“Affirmative.”

“One hour.”

I hung up the phone and capped the pot of glue. I leaned my hip against the table and peeled the thin dried membrane of adhesive from my fingers. It had built up all day like another skin, copying even my fingerprints.

The back of the buffalo was filled in with the lightest human flesh tones I could find in six years' worth of
Vogue
magazines, a saddle-shaped spot of filleted Eastern European teenage models. The darker skin for the rest of the back was proving much harder to find. When and if Jenny came back, I'd ask her for more
Ebony
and
Essence
magazines. The ones I had were full of skin indistinguishable from that in
Vogue
. I cut them out, held them up against the buffalo's back, and then wadded them all up and threw them away. Not enough contrast. Not near enough.

By the time Miles pushed the buzzer downstairs, I was out of the shower and dressed in one of two pairs of jeans I owned not speckled with paint. I pushed the button to let him in, unlocked the front door, and went back into the bathroom. I had been attempting to work the directional nozzle attachment on the blow dryer while holding a brush at the same time, which is really only possible if you happen to be a multi-armed Hindu god. I kept aiming the hot air at my knuckles, which had turned the color of boiled lobsters, and my hair was not appreciably improved. Chuckles, who made no distinction between the blow dryer and the vacuum, was hiding under the bed, and I was considering giving it all up as a bad job.

“Are you almost ready?” Miles called from the entryway.

I turned off the blow dryer, gathered the tortured strands in a clip at the nape of my neck, and smeared cream concealer across the zit still on my chin. It was unreasonable that in my twilight days I should have to deal with clogged pores.

We ordered bottles of cold beer and two small pizzas because there is beauty in a simple pizza margherita, especially if the basil is torn, not chopped, but it's a fool who argues against the pizza Diablo with spicy sausage and hunks of jalapeño. Sometimes the answer in life is not one or the other but both.

Miles used napkins to dab spicy sausage grease off the piece on his plate, because when you're not dying you have to do things like that. I, on the other hand, was considering asking for a little straw to suck the pooling neon-orange fat right off the top, sort of the way fancy restaurants sometimes give you straws for marrowbones. Let no meat by-product go unsucked.

Gribaldi's, staunchly Italian, was on Hollywood Boulevard just at the edge of Thai Town, which only makes sense in Los Angeles. The ethnic neighborhoods had been morphing and joining and morphing again since Wilshire Boulevard was a dirt road. West Hollywood, for example, the once and current home for recent Russian immigrants with their root vegetable diets and black-scarved babushka grandmothers, had now also turned into a gay meat market. The Russians and gays go along side by side with a minimal amount of fuss. I love that about L.A. It's one of the things no one ever tells you about the place.

So next to the fourth-best place in the city for dry curry and a twenty-four-hour Laundromat was this pizza, which is not an easy thing to find. Good pizza was the only thing other than subways that I missed about New York. Not that I would imply Gribaldi's was New York–caliber pizza. But it was good for a city that did better with dry curry and borscht and illegal taco trucks and all other things decidedly un-European.

Our table was covered with Magic Marker and ballpoint pen graffiti and even some of the old-fashioned, scratched-in-with-a-car-key kind, which gave you something to read while you chewed. I preferred the philosophical scrawls. The one under my beer said, “You are doomed,” which was a good bit funnier than “Janice was here.”

I looked behind me. The to-go line was out the door, and I counted three babies with mohawks, which were the new “it” accessory, displacing nervous Chihuahuas in handbags. Bonus points if your baby wears an ironic T-shirt. A woman in shredded stockings—on purpose, not like her cat went nuts and she didn't have time to change—bumped into my chair on her way out. Miles was the only person in the place wearing a tie, which in the language of hipsters could've made him cool but didn't quite.

I finished off a slice of Diablo and went for a basil-scented palate cleanser. Miles took a drink of his beer. He was only halfway through and falling behind.

“So when did you decide to buy a cemetery plot?”

It got hard to concentrate on the pure, milky flavor of the dolloped mozzarella.

“Excuse me?”

“I saw you bought a plot and was wondering if there was a reason you decided to do that now. It's the same cemetery as your mother and sister, isn't it?”

Anger started in my gut and spread like a Southern California wildfire in August.

“I will kill you. I will kill you and shove your balls down your throat so that you choke on them.”

“Clementine—”

“Don't you speak to me, you snooping bastard.”

“It was on the kitchen table.”

“Inside my bag inside an envelope, which was sealed!” My voice carried, and people in the to-go line stared.

“I was concerned about you. I was looking to see if you had any medications. I saw the return address on the envelope, and I just thought—”

“Fuck you! Fuck you and that lying bullshit.” A little bit of spit flew out of my mouth and landed on his grease-free pizza. I leaned across the table. “That could've been a bill. That could've been anything, and whatever it was it wasn't fucking yours. What else did you do? Count the condoms in my nightstand?”

“I am not your ex-husband.”

“What?”

“I am not your ex-husband.”

“My ex-husband didn't snoop.”

“Your ex-husband left you, and you've never resolved it. That's why you're pushing me away. You're trying to reenact that with me. You're transferring your feelings about that relationship onto this one to play them out again.”

I felt my cheeks flame red. He'd screwed up, but, of course, it was my head that was really the problem. Nothing—nothing!—could possibly be wrong with him, the shrink who fucked his patients. I wanted to tear his guts out with my bare hands and hang him by his own intestines.

I did the next best thing. I slipped a hand under each half-eaten pie and flipped them both across the table. The margherita grazed his left arm, leaving a blood-colored war wound of sauce on his sleeve, but the Diablo, true to its name, landed grease and all on his crotch, taking his beer with it. I was only sorry the pans were no longer searing hot. Foamy, piss-colored liquid
glug-glug-glugged
out across the scarred table and dripped onto the floor, and the restaurant went quiet enough to hear it.

I knocked my chair backward on my way up and out, while Miles just sat there, clinical and calm, with pork fat soaking through his pants.

The to-go line parted as if Moses had commanded it, and I walked through the empty space out to the street and to my car, fantasizing the whole way about turning his ass in to the medical licensing board for sexual misconduct.

I was fastening my seat belt when I thought of Richard and missed him so much tears dampened my bottom lashes. Richard wouldn't have done that. Why hadn't he been the one to show up at my door?

I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and told myself they were angry tears, so I could start the car.

Van Nuys is one of those places where no one chooses to live or wants to go. It's what happens when your other options are too crime-ridden to be considered. Compton, maybe. Or Watts. It's the sort of place that makes you sigh and say, “Well, I guess it could be worse.”

The tears had dried, but my stomach still had that tight feeling that signaled either an emotional meltdown or food poisoning. I did the opposite of reflection and concentrated hard on not concentrating on my insides. Instead, I stared out the windows and took note of everything. Jane Goodall studying the chimps.

It was just after eight o'clock, and things were getting started along Van Nuys Boulevard. Potbellied, white-haired men sat outside with their potbellied women on folding lawn chairs. As many as could fit were crammed around tables outside the hole-in-the-wall diner that, if the sign was to be believed, specialized in pie. Classic cars in varying states of refurbishment were parked in the supermarket's lot with their hoods up and their windows down.

New arrivals filed past me until the line of hot rods waiting to get in started to block traffic, and an LAPD cop on a motorcycle pulled up alongside and turned on his public address system.

“You are creating gridlock. Please move. You are creating gridlock. Please move.”

One or two cars pulled out of the line and made their way around the block, and the cop moved on, too, apparently calling it victory enough.

The sun was sinking, and the crowd was growing and changing. Motorcycles and choppers were showing up, some of them lined with glowing lights. The short-haired, middle-aged men were being joined by skinnier, long-haired guys in Harley vests. They brought along their women, too, one of whom stopped to light a smoke next to my window. Her hair was dyed the same flat black as a few of the scragglier cars pulling in. It matched her T-shirt, which advertised beer. She'd ripped out the sleeves and the neckline, so it drooped over one shoulder and left her arms, tattooed in full sleeves, out in the open. When she brought her ciggie up to take a puff, the red spider's web over her elbow stretched and contracted.

I started to wonder if my father, the accountant, had had a secret life.

By the time the cigarette was done and my companion had moved on, the crowd was morphing a third time. A loud hiss and puff of air like something out the back of a fighter jet made me jump in my seat. A white car to my left that was longer than most yachts and piloted by a kid straight out of East L.A. rose up on its back tires like a proud jungle cat, a steady
boom-boom-boom
coming out of its speakers. Coming down the road from the opposite direction a smaller version done up in purple sparkles like a drag queen started bouncing up and down, its shiny wheels and thin tires threatening to pop with every impact. The white yacht rose and lowered in response.

Wild Kingdom,
I thought. Mating dance.

Dusk was closing in fast and flirting with dark, making the underchassis lights on the cars glow bright. I got out, shoved my hands in my pockets, and headed toward the parking lot. On the way, I got hit up by a guy passing out business cards for custom paint and a woman selling coupon books for a drug recovery shelter. From the looks of her, I guessed she might need to go back soon, but everyone else gave the impression of sobriety. If they were drinking, they were keeping it hidden. It was too bad. After that dinner, I could've done with another beer.

Every spot in that part of the lot was taken up by some piece of automobile love. Ninety-five percent American steel. Five percent British. Not a Japanese model in sight. Not even a bike, which were exclusively Harley or so tricked out it was impossible to know what they had once been.

The thick-bodied Hispanic boys from East L.A. stood next to newer models with flashy paint. Flames were so ubiquitous they didn't even count. Some hung with their boys, while others brought girlfriends and kids. The two white groups—the bikers and the old-school classic guys—mostly came in pairs and talked to other pairs of their same species. It was clear where my interests lay.

I snaked my way through the crowd and around slow-moving cars still trying to find their spot in the parade. Every time the light at the nearby intersection changed from red to green, a thunder of engines revved, and the one or two grocery shoppers just trying to make their way to the store for onion bagels winced and reconsidered.

I shoved my hands deeper in my pockets and cursed myself for not bringing a sweater.

Speakers competed with one another, creating a din of sound that only turned into a song when you got close enough for its decibels to drown out all the other decibels around it, like microclimates of sound. I moved from Snoop Dog to the Beastie Boys to the Doors doing “L.A. Woman.”

I stopped there and pushed up against two couples, both easily in their sixties. The tallest of the bunch sported a belly that made him look sixteen months pregnant. I wondered if his back hurt.