by Lisa Taddeo
* * *
WITH THE VASE IN THE car, I felt like I had all the important pieces I needed. The movers were meeting me at the house with the balance. A truckload of pieces I’d sat upon. I began the climb up the canyon. Wilted dark greens rose from the sandy cracks between the rocks. There were hot bushes, maiden-hair ferns, false indigo, and bent grass. There were occasional splashes of color, but mostly it was brown and olive and untidy beyond expectation. The houses I could see from the road were 1970s-style structures built of campfire wood and smudged glass. They looked out over the rattlers and the tanned grass. The view in the canyon was important. The realtor, Kathi, kept saying the word over and over. View. Eventually it stopped sounding like a word I knew.
She also talked about the coyotes and the rattlesnakes. But don’t worry, she said. On the phone she sounded red-haired and pretty. Don’t worry, Kevin likes to catch the rattlers and move them to a happier place, no problem.
Kevin was the former rap star who lived on the property. I wonder if he will mean anything to you. Relevance is fleeting. There was also a young man named River who lived in a yurt in the meadow. The landlord lives nearby, said the realtor. In case there are any issues. You are going to love it there. It’s fucking heaven.
I climbed the winding road until I saw the sign for Comanche Drive. I was filled with terror because already the street didn’t look charming. It was treeless and the house was at the top of a steep gravel driveway. It was the highest point of Topanga Canyon, nearly piercing the clouds. Mostly it looked like someplace to make meth.
There was no formal parking area, so I pulled up beside a black Dodge Charger on a strip of land overlooking a steep drop. Up close, the property resembled the pictures the realtor sent but not in the ways that counted. The realtor sent the dream. She sent the view through the glass windows plus the pellet stove. She did not send the rusted bathtub outside the front door that was filled with browned succulents. Next to the bathtub planter there was a wrought-iron table with two chairs. The ginger sand was scattered with pebbles so neither the table nor the chairs stood evenly. The windows were moth-skinned. The house was dark orange adobe and shaped like an ocean liner. There was nothing attractive about its design, nothing symmetrical. Both outside and inside it was the kind of hot that kills the old. When I think of you being alone in heat like that—the way that I would come to be—I have to force myself to think of something else.
I’d been instructed to knock on Kevin’s door. His place was a somewhat-attached structure beneath mine. I suppose it was a house with two apartments, but it didn’t read that way. Kevin would give me the keys. His stage name was the White Space. The realtor, Kathi, spoke of him the way that a certain type of white woman speaks of a Black man who’s achieved fame.
Before knocking I took a walk around the property. Kathi was right. The view was theatrical. Every time we spoke I pictured her at an outdoor table in the sun, nibbling gravlax. I felt sure that if I got to know her, I would hate her.
Beneath the mountain you could see the ocean and on the other side of the canyon the slim rectangles of the city rising behind the trees. The skyline was underwhelming. I walked to the tallest point of the property. It was miles above the car-phoned traffic. There was a delicate mist that must have been the clouds. When I was ten, my aunt Gosia told me that was where my parents were. Up in the clouds. But are they together up there? I would ask, and she would get up to wash a dish, or shut a window.
There was a large firepit at the highest point. It looked medieval with its big rocks and charred wood. There was a giant store of firewood under a black tarp. A Michelob beer bottle filled with rainwater.
I noticed the canvas yurt in the valley a few hundred feet below me. Down a grassy path in the other direction there was a small red saltbox. It looked like a glorified potting shed, something you bought at a home improvement store but larger and more elaborate. It was the only area with grass on the property, on account of the oaks. Everywhere else the ground was dry nut brown, but around that big potting shed it was moist and green. There were two flower boxes full of marigolds flanking a Dutch door. I worried the tiny home belonged to the landlord. I didn’t want to be so close to him. But Kathi hadn’t mentioned that sort of proximity. Not at all.
I peeled the dress away from my body and it clung back down with the gum of my sweat. I would come to learn there was no respite from taking a shower in the Canyon. It was a matter of moments before you turned a t-shirt translucent.
I knocked on Kevin’s door. I heard some bluesy rap and after a few moments I knocked again, louder. He cracked it just a quarter of the way, then blocked the view with his frame. It smelled like tinctures inside.
—Miss Joan, peace and welcome to the neighborhood. He was very tall and good-looking and his eyes were friendly. He didn’t look at me. He looked through me like I was barely there.
I extended a hand and he stepped outside and closed the door behind him. I’d seen him onstage, crouching with a mike. Strobes and girls in Lycra short shorts. The man in front of me looked like he’d never spoken loudly or danced.
—How was the drive?
I said that it was good.
—Man, I love that drive. It’s been too long. Planes trip me out.
He made wings of his long arms. By now my scalp had begun to sweat.
—Planes trip me out, too.
—You want your keys, I imagine? You need some help moving some things?
—I’ve got movers coming, thanks.
—All right, all right. I ain’t got no lemonade to offer. I didn’t bake no meringue pies. But I’ll get something to you. This is gonna be nice. You’ll like it here, Miss Joan. We like it here. We’re like a small family. You met my man Leonard? My boy River?
—Nobody.
—Whoosh, he said. The lady swoops in—his palm dove down and sliced by my waist—under cover of night. I’mma get your keys, Miss Joan. Let you get settled. Let you get your house in order.
When he returned, he handed me two keys held together by a twist tie.
—Mailbox, he said, pointing to one. House, he said, pointing to the other. No, wait, other way around. He laughed delightedly. I’m all turned ’round today. Forgive me, Miss Joan. I recorded all night. I do that and then sleep all afternoon. This is five a.m. for me.
I took my keys and our hands touched and I shivered and I thought, oh for God’s sake. I looked at him and he considered me; I could see him taking my measurements. Then he smiled. He was over it.
Along the drive I had been wanting to sleep with a real cowboy, someone without social media. Sex made me feel pretty. By the time I reached Texas the trip was almost over. The man I fucked was named John Ford. He wore a western shirt and placed my palm over his zipper in the lobby of the Thunderbird. The walls were aqua and there were cowhides on the floor. He said he’d once worked on a ranch. But it turned out to be a Boy Scout trip he remembered like it was yesterday. He was in liquor sales out of Chicago. He’d never heard of the film director who shared his name. Or Monument Valley, where the films were made, the soaring westerns I watched with my mother. He belched twice, too loud to ignore, and ordered the flatbread pizza with balsamic onions. But his name was John Ford.
3
INSIDE THE HOUSE IT SMELLED of toothpicks. What is it about moving into a new place that makes you want to kill yourself? I imagine this isn’t true for women with labeled boxes. Women who own flyswatters, who store their winter clothes for the summer. Me, I had my mother’s eyelash curler. I had old yellow lotions from stores that no longer existed. My unpacked boxes would stay unpacked. Full of mementos, full of smells and especially the pungent odor of the mothballs my mother placed inside her handbags. As a child I thought they were balls of crystal.
The house was a giant sauna, three floors of all wood. It could have been beautiful. It was, in a way. But as with many run-down places that had potential, you needed to bring a skill to it. The ability to position certain rugs and lamps.
You had to not mind dirt in places you couldn’t get to. I imagined Alice to be one of these people.
The first floor was made up of the kitchen and the living room and the only bathroom. In the living room the black pellet stove was filled with lilac crystals instead of wood. The side of the house that faced the mouth of the canyon was all windows. In the photographs the realtor sent me, there was a towering ficus and assorted singed palms. But without the plants the sun was white-hot and despotic. It illuminated the dust in the sockets of the outlets.
There was no dishwasher and none of the cabinets lined up with one another. The insides of the drawers were sticky, as though honey had been mopped up with plain water. I wouldn’t be able to cook long, lovely meals in there. Steaming bowls of mussels or crackling hens. It was a kitchen for turkey sandwiches. I once had a boyfriend from Ireland who would make these schoolboy sandwiches with old tomatoes and cheap turkey, slicked in gloss and full of nitrates. He would leave the turkey out on the counter after making the sandwiches, and in the morning it would still be there and then he would put it away.
I was reminded of that boyfriend in my new kitchen. The notion of making do. The first night we made love it was so hot in his railroad apartment that he was sweating profusely above me. The sweat dripped off the paintbrush ends of his hair onto my face and chest.
The second floor was supposed to be a bedroom. You reached it via a spiral staircase. There was only enough room for the bed. There was a small pine closet. It looked like Colorado in the bedroom. There was an old western saddle slung over a beam. I could picture a different life, Rossignol skis lining the walls.
I climbed a short attic staircase to the third floor, which had been advertised as an office. There was makeshift shelving left over from a former tenant, a few old record sleeves dredged in sand and hair. It felt like walking into a steam room. By that time droplets were falling from my underarms and plinking the floor.
I sat down on my thin white dress. I could feel the splinters of the wood pricking the silk and knew that when I got up, the dress would be ruined. I’d worn it across the country, washed it once in Terre Haute and again in Marfa, in the sink of John Ford’s hotel room. I’d pulled it on wet that morning and let it bake dry against my skin in the sun. It was my mother’s dress. She’d kept it for so many years in mint condition.
A silverfish sprinkled across my kneecap and then someone banged on the door. I ran downstairs and opened the door to two broad men in black shirts and denim shorts. I always thought, If I had to fuck one man in the room, to save my life. If I had to be ground down. Which would it be?
With these two, I couldn’t tell which was safer. The one with a neck tattoo looked like a man who lets a dog hump his leg until one day somebody sees, so he has to shoot the dog.
They asked me where I wanted certain things. When they saw the spiral staircase, the one with the neck tattoo grunted. For the first few minutes they made me feel alternately like a rich old lady and a babysitter. I didn’t want to be either.
The second man, the one with a gold front tooth, looked from my eyes to my breasts so often that I thought he had a tic. I wasn’t wearing a bra, so my nipples poked out, looking like whelks. I don’t know why these thoughts came to me, but I pictured myself being bent and raped by the one with the gold tooth over the shallow sink. I reasoned that I might then feel comfortable asking him to build my IKEA furniture.
Halfway through the move I realized that the men were doing meth in my bathroom. They were going in one after the other, every thirty minutes, and coming out like goblin versions of themselves. I wonder what to tell you about drugs. I took pills and I smoked marijuana and there were monthlong stretches here and there when I blew coke alone at night. I would snort it off of my mother’s antique makeup mirror with a five-hundred-dollar bill of Monopoly money. Then I would stay up until three and four, buying dresses online. But mostly it was pills. I wasn’t strong enough to get through life without being able to go to sleep on command. Maybe you won’t need to take pills. I dream that you’ll be so much stronger. One time on an island I swam in a green lagoon and saw through the clearness of the water the simple fact of my limbs. I watched the purple, red, and blue fish moving around my body and I paddled to keep myself afloat for a long time. Afterward, I lay down on the sand and concentrated on the sun warming my kneecaps and my shoulders. I can count moments like that on my hands. My dream is for you to have many such moments, so many that you notice only the times you slip into your own brain and recognize those instances for the traps that they are.
In the living room, while the men brought in heavy things, groaning, angry about the weight of my life, I shook my father into the frog vase and placed it on top of the pellet stove. For the time being I left my mother in the baggie beside it.
I walked around the place looking for interesting things. But the refrigerator was the kind you couldn’t put imposing bundles of romaine in. It wasn’t for kale or stocking beets. At best, bags of peeled baby carrots. There was barely room in the pantry for all of my pastina and the cartons of College Inn broth. As a child I’d had a girlfriend whose parents were nineteenth-century poor. They had a pantry full of old food in boxes brought by ladies from the church. One night when I was over, the mother opened a package of macaroni and cheese to find milk-colored maggots slipping around, tinkling the dry elbows. The mother picked over the pasta, tossing the maggots in the sink, and turned on the hot water to melt them. Later my friend looked at me across the table with bright, wet eyes. The family said grace and I tucked my chin and pretended to close my eyes but kept them instead on my plate, watching for movement. My dear friend’s hand in mine was small and warm. After that night we never played again. It was early enough in the relationship that it didn’t feel, at the time, like a wound. But now I think about her all the time. I think about her every time I open a box of pasta.
—Where you want this? asked the one with the neck tattoo. The movers were holding my burgundy Ploum loveseat, an armless velour nest that Vic gave to me. He’d had me on it more than once. That was the point of many gifts.
I wanted it on the third floor, but the movers were sweating. The beads of sweat glistened on their foreheads like those maggots.
I shook my oily hair out of a ponytail and rubbed my shoulder.
—You’re clearly very strong, but it’s probably impossible to get that up to the third floor?
—Nothin’s impossible, said the one with the gold tooth.
I smiled and thanked him. I fluttered my eyelids. It was something I actually did. Then I turned and moved sensually toward the kitchen. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using sex. I know some people think that there is, but I don’t understand why. I’d been coached by my aunt Gosia. Gosia wasn’t my aunt by blood; she was my father’s brother’s second wife. She was Austrian and garishly beautiful—blond pompadour, black Dolce & Gabbana suits, excessive filler. She trained me in the art of sexual combat. She told me that women must deploy all their strengths in order to prevail. People will call you names, she said. They are only hating themselves.
As they moved past me with the couch, I saw the lightened spot where I’d scrubbed Vic’s semen off. At first it was revolting but lately it had become a faded badge.
—Yo, you know the White Space lives under you? said the neck tattoo.
I told him that I did.
—Fuckin sick, said the one with the gold tooth. What kind place is this? Some artist commune’n shit?
—I have no idea, I said. The men had become very ugly to me. I looked out the windows, wishing again I had moved someplace where it snowed, with big yellow Bobcats that roared down blizzardy Ketchum mornings. I loved headlights in snowstorms. But I had come to Los Angeles for a reason. I’d stayed in New York for too long when I should have tried to find Alice. New York is a lie, I will tell you. Each city is its own lie, but New York is a whopper. I don’t expect you to listen about that. Everyone needs to learn it in their own time.
The men noticed I’d stopped playing. Men are never okay when you stop. I had the fear of angering a man. Of not being an amenable woman. I had the fear of being murdered. To assuage the guilt that I didn’t follow up the flirtation by fucking them, I gave the movers each a tip of fifty dollars. I wondered if they had to buy their meth or if it was something to cook in an oxidized Airstream. I pictured them eating oyster crackers from the soup counters of gloomy grocery stores in the Valley.
There had been times in my life when I didn’t think of a hundred dollars as anything. But when those fifties left my hand, my forehead grew hot. I felt the familiar fear. There was a month when I drove to a gas station every night and bought scratch-off tickets from the lottery vendor. I scratched them off under a bug lamp next to the air pressure machine. I used a dime because it had ridges. One spring evening I won fifty dollars and it made me feel like I could run for office.
I’d considered not tipping the movers, saying I had no cash on hand, that I would send something along in the mail. I thought, with some perverse relief, that if things got terrible anytime soon, if I couldn’t find work, I might perform blow jobs on the burgundy Ploum. I could sit the pizza deliveryman down, and the propane guy, separate their giant knees, and let them depress my head like a flush valve.
4
I KNEW WHERE TO FIND Alice, but you should never engage a stranger until you understand her world. Don’t let anyone have an advantage.
I drove to Froggy’s, which was built on the sharpest curve of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Kathi had told me it was where the locals went. It was a bar and a music venue and a fish market. It was decorated like a Mexican restaurant under the sea. They sold oysters on the half shell, steamers in nets, tacos with carnitas, coconut-crusted tilapia. I sat near the stage where live music played on the weekends. I ordered shrimp quesadillas to have a plate of food in front of me. I drank a Bloody Mary. It was the only thing stronger than wine that I liked. Perhaps it was the way the thickness of the tomato quieted the vodka, or perhaps it was because my father had ordered them. I used to eat the celery from his, the pimiento-stuffed olives.
