Portland Noir (27 page)

It was a week before I knocked on the door. I had a fifth of whiskey and I held it out when she opened the door.

“What?” she asked.

“I was just sitting by my window,” I said, “and I saw you come in.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I thought,
I should go over there and see if she wants some whiskey.”
My voice sounded shaky. “You shouldn’t have to be alone,” I added.

Lila looked from me to the bottle. “I
like
being alone,” she said, but she opened the door anyway and grabbed the whiskey and took a long drink. In the corner was an open suitcase and inside it I could see a jumble of nylons, the egg cup of a bra. The painting above her bed showed a field, flowers, and tall grass.

She held onto the bottle and sat down on the bed. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt that went to her knees. Her feet were bare and she looked at me. “So what’s your story?” she asked. “You work out here? I’ve never seen you.” She didn’t remember me, I realized, and felt relieved. I wanted to start new. She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’ve been working for three years now. It’s shit.” She went into the bathroom and came out with the plastic cup from the bathroom sink, filled it with whiskey, and passed it to me. “But what else are you supposed to do?”

I took a drink and my throat burned. It tasted to me like the house after the accident, my mother sleeping in the living room while the television faded in and out of static.

Up close Lila was even more beautiful than I remembered. “And Mark is an asshole,” she said. Mark—the tall man, I thought. “I can’t believe I used to think we’d get married.” She darkened a little, and turned on the television, drank half of the bottle of whiskey, then asked me to leave.

I stopped going to work at the grocery store because Lila needed me. She didn’t have to say it, but I knew it was true. I didn’t hand in a notice, just left my apron and name tag next to the till and went back to the motel. If the van was gone I would knock on her door, bring her whiskey or rice paper candy from the store up the street. She didn’t seem to wonder why I was there. I sat at the little table while she flipped through the channels on the television, or talked about the places she wanted to live—Paris and Greece and New York and Prague. I remembered a man I met once, someone lonely, nursing a drink in a booth at Holman’s. He’d told me he might go to Prague, and now I imagined us all colliding in some narrow street, so far from home.

“Anywhere but here,” she said. “Anywhere but this fuck-ing motel.”

Then one night when I knocked on the door Lila answered it right away, smiling. Her front tooth was crooked and I felt bothered that I hadn’t noticed it before.

“He’s gone,” she said. “He’ll be back at the end of the week. He’s bringing some girls up from Los Angeles. Get in here.” She held the door open.

I thought, I
have never seen her so beautiful.
Her eyes were bright and she leaned against me and grabbed my hand.

“Four days!” she said. “Four days of nothing to do. Fucking thank God.” She sat at the little table and leaned over something, then looked up at me. “Gators,” she said, and that’s what they started to look like to me, white rows of teeth. She cut them with the sharp edge of a driver’s license with a picture that didn’t look like her.

When she was done I leaned over and she showed me how to snort them, how to follow each line with a palmful of water that dripped bitter down the back of my throat, until the room felt frantic and bright and both of us right in the center of it; fireflies, I thought, burning hot in the cup of someone’s hand.

“Let’s look outside,” Lila suggested. She opened the curtain and the only thing I could see were our own wavering faces in the glass. I kissed her then; her mouth was dry. She pulled back. “I’m not a dyke,” she said. The smell of her cigarette; I thought of my mother, waking for a second from her slow fugue when I came home with my hair cut close to my skull—
No daughter of mine is going to be a fucking dyke
, she’d said, and turned back to the wall. “I’m not,” Lila said again, but then she put her mouth to mine.

We kissed for a long time and then Lila stood and went to the sink and pulled something out of the makeup bag she kept there. A knife. “Cut an X,” she said. She took her shirt off and her breasts were pale and I thought about reaching out very carefully to touch them but was afraid.

She sat on the edge of the bed and put the knife in my hand. It was heavy and cold. “Just a single X,” she said. “Just two crossing lines.” Her skin was so white. She touched her shoulder blade. “Here … Ten years ago,” she continued, “they say you could stand at one end of Eighty-second and watch the girls jumping in and out of cars in beautiful dresses.”

I traced an X in the air above her perfect skin. I couldn’t do it, I thought.

“Where did you live before here?” Lila asked. “What were you like? Did you have some beautiful life?”

The cluttered apartment; the recliner with its smell of smoke and age; my mother, in her chair, with her heavy silver accordion, pushing the bellows in and out, her eyes on the wall behind me. It was another five years before she died, and then there were eight people at the funeral, all dressed in black, like a circle of bats fluttering at each other. A necklace of them, I had thought, standing around the terrible throat of her grave.

“It
was
beautiful,” I said. “I had a house with a garden. And a puppy named Soldier.”

Lila sighed. “It sounds nice.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “I thought I was in love with Mark, but then—” She looked up at me. “We could make a thousand dollars in a day, him and I, when we started. I didn’t used to mind it. We were going to get a house too.” She touched my arm. “An X,” she said. “Do it.” I squeezed the handle of the knife in my hand and pulled, twice. There were two thick red lines that swelled and spilled.

Mark came back late that night. I lay on the bed in my room next door and I could hear him through the thin wall. “What the fuck are you thinking?” he was saying. “No one will want you with that on you. What the hell is wrong with you?”

My face felt hot. What had she said, one night while she sat on the bed and flipped through a magazine, talking in long circles—
He left one girl with sixteen broken bones out by the gorge. He’s served six years in prison already.

When I heard the door slam I stood up, looked out the window until his van had pulled out of the parking lot. I counted to thirty and then knocked. There was no answer. “Lila,” I called out. I pounded on the door.

She finally opened up and her suitcase was upside down, the clothes everywhere. Her left eye was half-closed and starting to bruise. She looked at me. “He took the money,” she said. “And he won’t let me work until my back and my eye are healed.” She pulled the neckline of her T-shirt down over her shoulder and I could see what I had done, the X, red and raw.

I sat on the bed and pulled her down next to me. “So you don’t need him anymore,” I said. “We go somewhere else.” I thought of the two of us, months from now, lit up in the summer sun. We would take the bus into the city and dance drunk in a dark bar. It would be exactly as it should be. Her bottom lip between my careful teeth, far from the string of motels, the dented van that pulled up in the dark.

“You don’t get it,” Lila replied. She sounded angry, the way she had sounded that first night at the Tik Tok. “You don’t get it at all.”

I touched her hair. “We’ll be fine.”

She pushed my hand away. “No one walks out on Mark. Especially not me—he’d fucking kill me.”

“He can’t be that bad—”

“You haven’t worked for him,” she snapped. Her voice was cold and she didn’t look like the Lila I knew. “How would you know?”

I remembered a story my mother had told me about a woodcutter, clumsy, and his sharp axe. He kept missing the tree and his right arm went first, then the rest, left arm, right leg, left leg. Until a woman came by and looked at him, crippled and sad.
I’m sorry
, he said,
I am only half a man.
She laughed and answered,
Look
, and because she was so lovely and he was lucky, his legs grew right back to skin and bone. But his heart beat so fast it burnt right through his chest, and he died anyway, for love.

Lila stood up. “Just go,” she said.

In my own room in the dark I stared at the curve of the lampshade, the square of the doorframe, shadowy slips that floated and opened their angry mouths, and I thought,
She has to love me again
. Ten years ago the little girl and her mother had left with her puppy and I had never seen her again. Her blue dress at the foot of my bed like a broken promise.
She has to,
I thought.

Mark didn’t come back the next day, or the day after that. Lila knocked on my door and she didn’t seem angry anymore. I gave my key to the front desk and slept in her room, curled against her, listening to her slow breathing.

The next morning she shook me awake. “We need sixty-five dollars,” she said. “We need sixty-five dollars today.”

I thought about my apartment. There would be an eviction notice on the door by now. I couldn’t bring her there, not to that. The grocery store would have hired someone, and I couldn’t be that far away from Lila for eight hours, anyway. I had thirty-four dollars left. Not enough for another night. “Tell me what to do,” I said.

The man was neither more nor less handsome than I expected. He was wearing gray sweatpants and he pulled a white envelope from the stretched waistband. He coughed. “You have the greatest legs,” he said, “They’re truly great.”

I imagined his hands were Lila’s hands, running up over my breasts. His tongue became hers. It was all for her, I thought. The envelope was tucked under the little red handbag that she had loaned me.

“The gams of a movie star,” the man said. “The face of a dog, but the gams of a true old-time beauty.” His pink lips like two punctured balloons, dragging over my skin.

When I opened the door to Room 42 Lila was brushing her hair. We put the money inside the lining of her little suitcase. I lay beside her that night and she smelled like honey and when I couldn’t sleep I turned on the bedside lamp and the red of her hair lit up like a pyre.

Every day that week I saw someone different. After dark, I wandered through the parking lot of Area 69, stood inside by the racks of videos, the leather harnesses and handcuffs and dildos in plastic packaging, until someone asked me back to the booths. The time without Lila nagged at me, the socket left from a tooth pulled, the vague shape of what could be lost, but in an hour I could make $150, nearly three nights in Room 42. It was better this way, Lila said, than with Mark. Before she met him she would sit in the corner at Devil’s Point, the strip club on 53rd, and wait for someone to pick her up. The next day she’d be able to buy a new dress or go to the movies; she could make her rent in a day and a half. Now Mark took half the money and he wouldn’t let you go, she said, and he would know in a second if you’d been working on your own. He’d been locked up in Snake River after he pulled a fifteen-year-old onto the circuit, and the day after he was released he started running girls again. His probation officer was nowhere to be found. “This is better,” Lila kept saying. “We keep you a secret.” At night I stood in the shower until the water ran cold and then lay beside her until we both slept.

Mark came back four days later and I hid behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. “You start work again tomorrow,” he said. “And you never pull that shit again. I don’t ever want to see a fucking scratch on you that I didn’t give you myself.”

I could hear Lila, sweet and pleading. “Baby,” she said, and it was silent for a while. I closed my eyes, imagined a forest, my hands up in the trees, the cool of the leaves. I tried not to think of them kissing.

After a long time Mark cleared his throat. “We go back on the road tomorrow,” he said. “Have your shit packed.”

Lila’s voice was a murmur, something I couldn’t hear, and then she said, “I need you,” and panic welled up in me like a tide, a breathless gray.

She didn’t need Mark, I thought. That was how things would begin to go wrong, how they always began. My mother’s accident wasn’t really an accident. It was after my father had left her. For two weeks after he packed his things and took the car, she had laid on the sofa and watched daytime television, and spoke quietly, as though she was telling a secret. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, we were walking on a busy street and she squeezed my arm. “Stay here,” she said, and smiled, and walked in front of a rattling bus, and I understood that the calm had been a deceptive one, the first freeze that leaves the lake solid and the fish still swimming, fast and alarmed, a foot below ice. What kept pounding at the back of my head was that I didn’t know when it had begun, that the first sign of ruin was something never recovered.

The door slammed but I stood in the shower until Lila came and pushed the curtain back. “He’s gone,” she said.

We had $300, slipped into the lining of Lila’s suitcase. The Greyhound station was a half hour away, just off the 20 bus.

Lila wanted to go somewhere warm. “New Mexico,” she said. “Or Arizona. Someplace dry as a fucking bone where we can get tan and gorgeous.” She kissed my cheek. “And never again here.” She gave me scissors and I cut her hair until it fell at her chin and she pulled a hat over it. “Do I look like me?” she asked. “Would you recognize me?”

I thought,
I’ll always recognize you
.

I slept deeper that night than I had in what felt like years. In the dark I reached out and felt the curve of Lila’s bare back, the raised scar on her shoulder blade, and then slipped into some dream that later I couldn’t remember.

There was a sound like footsteps, and then a quick cold, and then in the dark I was awake and the bed was empty. The door was open.
Lila
, I thought. A sound of tires squealing and I was up out of bed. I must have been a moment too late, because there was only the empty parking lot, and the city spread out around me like a bowl of lights, a thousand smoke-gray rooms and in each one a person, waiting.