L.A. Weather

by María Amparo Escandón

  Monday, March 21st

  Who cares if they won’t approve another loan? thought Oscar.

  “I’m so sorry,” the bald branch manager had said. “We have to decline this application. In fact, any future applications.”

  “But why? I own my house free and clear. I’ve never filed for bankruptcy, never had a foreclosure, you can see my record: not a single delinquent payment, ever!” Oscar said, exasperated.

  “You’ve reached your limit, at least with us.”

  “Fine, then. I’ll take my business to another bank.”

  “Suit yourself. And good luck.”

  Oscar walked out of the bank holding a thick manila folder in his hand. With so many financial institutions out there, he didn’t need to worry. It was just a matter of finding the right one. His trees would be getting water no matter what. He’d find the money to pay for it. He owned the property free and clear. Perhaps an equity loan? Or a mortgage? Would he get approved with the amount of debt he’d accumulated? As he picked up his SUV from the valet, he began to wonder if he should have worn a suit instead of his preppy casual attire. In a city where the big shots were capable of wearing flip-flops, shorts, and baseball caps to important meetings, he had assumed that dress codes were irrelevant when visiting the banker. He tried to shake the feeling of self-doubt, straightened up in his seat, drove home, and sat in front of the TV for a half hour before he turned it on.

  Wednesday, March 23rd

  Precisely at 10:47 P.M., Patricia went outside to smoke a joint, her path lit up by the full moon. She lay on one of the lounge chairs around the cement keloid scar, bundled up in her adored, old, comfy Mexican wool sweater from Chiconcuac, the kind that Marilyn Monroe used to wear, and looked up to the sky. What was that longing she felt? It seemed to her that Eric had a very limited bandwidth when it came to feelings: he was basically transactional, so that she sometimes felt life with him was like having a sexual relationship with her bank teller, if she ever dealt with one anymore, as she banked only on her phone these days. Their intellectual and sexual connection was satisfying, but his emotional byte count was low. She felt shortchanged by the universe, and looking up at the moon only made it worse. Why did Earth only get one moon while other planets had so many? And why didn’t our moon have a sexy name, like Elara or Ananke? Just Moon. It was like having a dog and naming him Dog.

  Friday, March 25th

  Good Friday wasn’t so good for Oscar. He woke up trying to remember the last time he’d been to church, but drew a blank. Someone’s wedding, perhaps. Or when his mother died, maybe. He’d been a good Catholic boy, attending Mass without question or complaint, terrified by the statues of multiple saints bleeding and in agony, and wondering if martyrdom would be his destiny. Unable to see the altar due to his childhood stature, he’d avoid looking at the gore that surrounded him by focusing on the only other thing he could see from his vantage point: the behinds of the women standing in the pew in front of him, which oftentimes tempted him to delicately free their dresses from the crack between their glutes’ cheeks.

  Having married a Jew was not why he had drifted away from the Church. His disillusionment happened much later, after he’d heard so many stories of children molested by priests. Now he was too far away from his faith to ever come back, but if asked he’d always answer that he was a Catholic, which meant to him that he had lost his religion but not his identity.

  As he got out of bed and brushed his teeth, he realized he was on his own, with no god to ask for help. How would he solve his troubles with Keila? He took her toothbrush between his fingers, smelled it, then tasted it and sighed.

  Sunday, March 27th

  By Easter Sunday Olivia felt better about her decision to leave Felix and had already concluded that for the sake of the twins she would not make a fuss until it was a done deal. No one had to know. Not yet.

  The reason why Easter was a much-preferred holiday over Passover was obvious to everyone in the family: What was more fun, hunting for Easter eggs and eating chocolate bunnies or spending hours at the Passover table and eating matzo? But the Alvarados still celebrated both holidays, as was their tradition, and on that chilly, sixty-three-degree, cloudless Sunday the family gathered in the garden wearing their spring best to roll around in the grass and dig dirt out of the pots and planters to find the coveted candy eggs that Keila had spent hours hiding early in the morning.

  “Where is Claudia?” asked Patricia.

  “Someone call her,” said Oscar, a bit worried.

  Olivia dug in her purse for her phone and called her, but again, there was no answer. Was something wrong with her sister?

  April

  Saturday, April 2nd

  Truth is, Keila never really left Mexico. Often, say, once or twice a day, her mind would leave her body in Los Angeles, zoom past San Diego, jump over the rickety border fence, fly over the Sonora Desert, over the state of Durango, the Sierra Madre, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and helicopter-land right on top of the roof of her house in Mexico City, all in a split second. When she was barely a toddler, her parents had bought a home too large for her three-member family, right on the main drag of Polanco, the affluent Jewish neighborhood, on Avenida Presidente Masaryk. Why a street of such importance in Mexico City would be named after a Czech politician remained a mystery to Keila, one that never piqued her curiosity enough to research, even years after she’d moved to Los Angeles.

  Every time Keila transported her mind to the rooftop of her house, she scanned the neighborhood and checked what had remained and what had changed. To her disappointment, much was different. Barely anyone lived on Masaryk Avenue anymore. Over the years, most of the mansions where her childhood friends had lived had been converted into flagship stores for brands like Chanel, Prada, and Gucci, where salespeople earned a fraction of the price of a single garment in an entire month. The streets on which she rode her bike as a child, carefree and unsupervised, now were blocked by traffic gridlock, but crowds still flocked to the high-fashion mecca to window-shop, as most people couldn’t afford anything these boutiques had to offer, and those who could would prefer to take a quick weekend flight to Houston’s Galleria and save, even after paying for travel expenses, as most clothing brands were pricier in Mexico, with no thanks to NAFTA.

  But shopping wasn’t everything. Keila was delighted by the fact that the neighborhood had also become a hotbed for gastronomy, where celebrity chefs reinvented Mexican cuisine for demanding patrons. She considered herself a curious foodie, but it bothered her that boutique hotels with no remaining trace of Mexican architecture had popped up everywhere. You could go into any of those hotels, all of them designed in a new minimalistic, sleek style, and feel transported straight to New York, London, or any other metropolis in the world. There was no uniqueness anymore. Gone was the influence of the famous Mexican architect Luis Barragán. No more colorful walls, monumental geometric spaces, and wood beams. Keila missed the charm of the old California Spanish Revival carved stone façades, now replaced by double-height storefronts of glass and steel. But she also understood the pressing desire Mexicans had to be perceived as cosmopolitan, to project their country into the global landscape. Sacrifices needed to be made, elements of national identity had to be lost, and architecture was one of them.

  This time Keila was actually there, in the flesh. Not on her home’s rooftop, but in her parents’ bedroom, now hers, getting ready to meet with Simon Brik later at his gallery to finalize details of her show. She resisted applying more makeup than usual. She put her hair up in a ponytail, and although she’d brought a low-cut blouse, she kept it in her suitcase and instead wore a black turtleneck sweater, knowing how frequently Simon’s eyes wandered in the direction of her breasts.

  To avoid spending hours looking for a parking spot, Keila took an Uber to the gallery. Simon waited for her at the door.

  Aside from a last-minute removal of a piece Keila despised (it wasn’t representative of her feelings at the time she created it)
, Simon’s sculpture selection remained unaltered.

  “I sense you’re not fully comfortable with the show. Is there anything else you’d like me to change?” asked Simon, preoccupied, as he paced around the gallery’s main room.

  “You can’t change what I want changed.”

  “Try me.”

  “It’s not related to the show.”

  “Is it about us?”

  “There are so many questions I need answers to before I get to the subject of us.”

  “I can help. Let me. Please.”

  Simon put his hand on Keila’s. She withdrew it quickly, as if pressed by a hot iron.

  “I’ll wait. I’m the champion of waiting. Just be open to the idea,” he said.

  “I’m dealing with issues at home, and I need to go through it alone.”

  A spark of hope lit Simon’s face.

  “Let’s focus on the show,” said Keila, to shift the topic before she regretted confessing any more details of her angst.

  Most of Keila’s friends, collectors, art junkies, and people looking to score a free glass of wine went to the show that evening. At least a couple hundred, according to Simon. The unwritten dress code that encouraged people to wear black to gallery openings made it difficult to distinguish the event from a funeral, more so if one noticed Keila’s somber expression, as Simon did when he found her hiding in the back room instead of mingling with her fans.

  “You could be the widow at a wake,” said Simon in a soft voice, out of respect for a nonexistent deceased person. “We just sold the seventh piece. You should be happy.”

  “I’m very pleased to see that the show is going well,” said Keila as she took a swig of wine from a plastic cup. “Look, I’m sorry for spoiling the evening.”

  “How long have I known you? I’m a Keila expert by now. I could swear this doesn’t belong here,” said Simon, tracing Keila’s frown with his pinkie, barely staining the tip with her deep red lipstick. “That smile of yours, always there, even when you’ve delivered to me your worst statements of rejection. Where is it now?”

  “Buried in a crisis that I can’t confide to you, not just yet.”

  “Is it Oscar?”

  “It is, but it’s not the Oscar I’ve loved for so long. This Oscar is different,” she said, wondering which was the real one, scared of admitting she’d made a mistake, a life-wasting judgment error.

  “Go home, Keila. You have to.”

  Sunday, April 3rd

  Sixteen of the eighteen pieces sold during the show. Keila went back to Los Angeles with jumbled feelings. She had never been so close to keeping her hand under Simon’s and accepting his caress, but later she approved of her instinctive retreat. She acknowledged her sense of accomplishment for selling almost her entire inventory. Of course, she still had the other series of couples in conflict, but Simon had a fierce aversion to it. “All that back-turning in bed, it’s such a put-off,” he’d told her. She could start a new series, but she reminded herself of her Crossed Legs Strike in protest of Oscar’s odd behavior. Was she punishing herself? Although she missed working in her studio, she knew she’d only produce work depicting anger and disillusionment. That’s how revealing her work was about her state of mind.

  Oscar greeted her with his decision not to go back to therapy, as soon as she prompted him once again, as she’d done for the past few weeks.

  “There’s no point,” he said, sitting on a lounge chair facing the kidney-shaped cement patch in the middle of the lawn where the pool once sat, the infamous keloid scar reminding both Keila and Oscar of their near-fatal carelessness.

  “So you’re giving up. One single therapy session was enough? You’re done with our marriage?”

  “I’m done with therapy. You’re the one who started this nonsense! I’m happily married!”

  “‘Happily’ doesn’t describe who you are these days. Don’t try to sell that one to me.”

  “Let’s try on our own. I really want to.”

  Keila went to her studio and locked the door. She lay down on an old couch, her beloved red love seat, and forced herself to calm down, counting slowly to one thousand.

  Wednesday, April 6th

  Ever since she met Felix, Olivia had been the victim of love’s contradictory forces, hostage to bouts of joy, melancholy, misery, humiliation, and violence flooding her entire being all at once, leaving her spent, and now the scrambled feelings had hardened into a single one: rage.

  Searching for the original sensation, she dug deep into her well of shit, the one that doesn’t show up on chest X-rays but everyone has, right behind the sternum, and came up with the terrifying realization that the most perilous thing she’d ever done had been to kiss Felix in the TED Talk auditorium parking lot. That act was still reverberating. It would never be over.

  Olivia sat in front of the form sent by the fertility lab, now wrinkled around the edges and stained with coffee and still unsigned. Felix stared at her across the table, his lips tight, as if trying to prevent his mouth from spewing a vicious insult, but if that was the intention, he didn’t succeed.

  “I have no reason to bring to the world more people with your genes and mine. It’s like trying to mix oil and water.”

  Something happened when Olivia heard his rejection. The crack inside her was subtle but final, announcing that the accumulation of hurt had reached its limit. There was no point in wishing that Cupid had missed the shot. Life had happened and there she was, at her kitchen table, facing a truth she’d tried to reconfigure over the years into some fanciful myth of harmony and bliss that she could believe and bear to live with.

  “I don’t love you anymore, Felix.”

  Olivia couldn’t tell by Felix’s expression, which was devoid of emotion, whether he had been expecting a blow of such magnitude or if it had caught him by surprise. He slowly got up, picked up his car keys from the kitchen counter, and headed for the front door.

  “I’m moving on,” she said, waiting for the door to slam, but it didn’t.

  Olivia wondered if Felix’s final exit from her life would be as quiet and smooth, but in a flash she acknowledged this was not the way he operated. She began to imagine the turmoil and pain that she had just unleashed. He would force her out of the house. He’d take the girls, not out of fatherly love, but out of spite. He’d fight for the embryos just to destroy them. She feared that he knew how much she wanted them and he was not going to let her succeed, even if he lost, too.

  She ran outside and banged on Felix’s car’s windshield just as he was pulling out of the driveway.

  “Felix, stop!”

  He rolled down the window, unmoved.

  “Whatever we do, whatever happens between us, please don’t hurt the girls. Keep them out of this,” she pleaded.

  “You and I have nothing else to say to each other. Expect a call from my lawyer. And, just so you know, he’s a monster and he’s going to crush you.”

  As he drove off, he ran over a toy grocery cart that belonged to Andrea. Olivia picked up the broken pieces of yellow plastic scattered on the driveway, put them in the trash bin, and went inside.

  Teary-eyed, she went to Lola’s room and knocked on the door. It was late at night, but she knew Lola stayed up to watch Corazón de Oro, the hit prime-time Mexican soap opera on Univision that she was also hooked on—a story of betrayal, revenge, secrets, horrible sins, a blind character, and another one forever dying in the hospital.

  “It’s happening, Lola. We’re divorcing.”

  “Have you both made the decision?”

  “I made the decision.”

  Lola rubbed her face, as she did whenever she heard disturbing news. At the same time, she was glad to see that Olivia was gathering the courage to separate from Felix.

  There was only one thing more permanent than marriage and it was divorce. All of a sudden the weight of this realization pressed against Olivia’s chest and she began sobbing again. She would always be divorced from Felix and there was no wa
y to get out of it unless they remarried each other or one of them died. There was no divorce from divorce. No exit clause in that contract. She was ending a temporary relationship to begin a permanent—and acrimonious—one with the man she was beginning to loathe.

  “Come to me, let me hug you.”

  Olivia let Lola envelop her, like when she was a little girl. She whimpered slowly and used Lola’s pajama sleeve to wipe her face. In the background, the actress playing the lead role in the soap opera on Lola’s TV set whimpered, too.

  That evening, Olivia watched Felix come in and out of the house carrying suitcases and boxes packed with clothes, shoes, and books and loading them into his car. Without saying a word, he walked around taking pictures of silverware, artwork, furniture, rugs, kitchen appliances, and utensils. Clearly someone had started advising him while she had buried herself in her bed, incapacitated by grief. It took her over a week to meet with her friend Carolina Donoso, who was in the process of divorcing. She was hoping to get some pointers.

  Monday, April 11th

  After shooting one of her cooking shows, Claudia drove home to Malibu, but ended up in Redondo Beach, one hour and twenty minutes in the wrong direction. What was she doing there? How had she gotten so lost? As she turned around and jumped in the car-pool lane, now going north, she ruled the confusion a freeway oddity, the hypnotic effect of a road that turned drivers into mindless automatons. When she finally made it home, she walked inside, leaving the keys in the car and the front door open. Thankfully, Ramsay followed her into the bedroom and jumped into bed with her and Velcro, thus avoiding venturing outside and getting squashed by a speeding car on PCH.

  Wednesday, April 13th

  “If his lawyer’s a monster, then yours must be a fucking T. rex,” said Carolina with a sense of authority. She and Olivia lay on towels spread over the deck of the Ugly Duckling, moored in the Marina.