Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  The damp air followed them inside, into the enormous expanse of the hotel lobby. To the left of the check-in desk was a set of very modern square chairs and a molded plastic sofa, all of which looked about as comfortable as an enema. At the far end of the room, Anna glimpsed a computer carrel with one of those yacht-size Mac flatscreens floating atop it “for the convenience of our guests.” She averted her eyes, finding that Taj had already collapsed into a chair, leaving Anna to deal with registration and a tedious one-way conversation with the chirpy concierge about the neighborhood’s noteworthy lack of attractions and the miserable weather they could expect all week. When she was done, she went over to prod Taj awake, but was distracted by a plaque engraved with a quote that hung just above the sofa.

  I opened the door and they were in there. The clerks of the Federal Building. I noticed one girl, poor thing, only one arm. She’d be there forever. It was like being an old wino like me. Well, as the boys said, you had to work somewhere. So they accepted what there was. This was the wisdom of the slave.

  —CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920–1994)

  The Bukowski quote seemed highly out of place—sacrilegiously so—in a boutique hotel where the cheapest room was $250 per night. Bukowski would roll over in his grave, Anna thought. Eager to share this indignation with Taj and feeling more than a little anxious about their long silent spell, Anna nudged his foot. But when she pointed out the plaque, he shook his head, apparently too tired to read. Instead they followed a bellboy who was impossible to distinguish from the guests down an endless corridor and up two flights in the elevator to their room.

  Their room had a soaring ceiling and contained the same modernist, uncomfortable furniture as the lobby. But to Anna its most salient characteristic was the queen-size bed, of which there was only one. It sat there like a giant unasked question. She had, of course, brought along certain necessities. Lingerie. Those superthin Japanese condoms. A slim plastic pouch filled with massage oils of varying flavors and densities. She had a feeling their relationship would fall on one side of the fence or the other during this trip, but it was hard to say which side. Would it help if Anna played the cipher, like Brie? If she adopted Lauren’s cold hauteur? She knew men liked it best when women didn’t seem to care, and yet Anna had to admit that this attitude secretly dismayed her, especially after watching Brie and Rishi. Rishi would forget to text her for a day, so she would casually ignore him for five. Like secret adversaries in a Kurosawa film, they would enter a state of virtual détente, changing their relationship status on Facebook from It’s complicated to something even more nebulous, stealthily refreshing their OkCupid profile with a strategically withheld photo. Then that weekend they would meet up with some kickball friends at a bar for karaoke, careful not to speak to each other the entire night, only to go back to Rishi’s apartment to have, as Brie liked to put it, “an ass-twisting sexathon.” It was this dismal race to the bottom that passed for a normal relationship among Brie’s generation. Anna, old-fashioned though she may have been, could not help wanting more. She didn’t want to spend time vigorously affirming her low expectations. What she wanted was permission to care, for this phase of guessing and insecurity to end so that she could finally unleash her unrealistic, suppressed fantasies. But for that to happen, one of them would have to step forward and take responsibility for the relationship, and in this regard Anna felt mysteriously powerless. It was clear that Taj held the reins. It’s vague, Anna thought, would make for a better relationship catchphrase than It’s complicated. Vagueness was the scourge of their time. When Brie got pregnant, Anna remembered, she hadn’t even bothered to formally break up with Rishi. It would have been like challenging a cloud of mist to a duel. What was there to break? And yet this state of being vague with someone, Anna had to admit, was complicated. Anna was already exhausted. Maybe just It’s exhausting, then?

  “Sleep,” Taj said.

  “I know, but we really shouldn’t. It’s only eleven-thirty.”

  “I know.”

  She, too, could feel the distant pulse of nausea that accompanies sleep deprivation and wanted nothing so much as to lie down. Then she remembered they had skipped their in-flight breakfast.

  “We could eat something.”

  “Shower first,” Taj muttered.

  “OK,” Anna said.

  Taj sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stayed that way far too long, staring at the carpet, but eventually roused himself and staggered off to the bathroom.

  Anna took the opportunity to lie down. She closed her eyes and immediately felt the urge never to get up. It had been so long since she’d traveled, Anna had forgotten these things: the sleepless first-day torpor, the enthusiasm-sucking ritual of waiting on line at museums or for dreary river cruises that always look better from the shore, not to mention the search for a satisfactory meal—all that desperate leapfrogging from one restaurant/café/bar to another, scarcely finishing one meal before plotting the next. Then again, she wasn’t supposed to be having fun, was she? She was supposed to be overcoming her addiction. With that discomfiting thought, Anna opened her eyes only to confront Taj’s lathered and naked silhouette. She hadn’t noticed earlier but the bathroom wall was actually made of glass, shielded from the bedroom by a thin white curtain. Her eyes slipped down, almost of their own accord, to the vague bulge below his waist. She turned away quickly, hoping Taj hadn’t seen her looking.

  Taj emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, wearing the same clothes as before but looking refreshed, his black hair sticking up in attractive little spikes.

  “Good?” Anna said.

  Taj nodded. “Better.” He flipped open the leather binder on the bedside table that described the hotel’s amenities. “There’s a café on the first floor and a restaurant on the top floor.”

  “Restaurant,” Anna said, relieved that they wouldn’t have to drag themselves out to a bus stop, unfold some endless map, and stand on the street corner like a gift-wrapped present to a mugger.

  “Also, it says here that they’ll bring a goldfish to your room if you feel lonely.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yep.”

  “A real one?”

  “In a bowl, I hope.”

  “Do you feel lonely?” Anna asked.

  “No.” Taj smiled. “But I wouldn’t say no to a goldfish.”

  Feeling intrepid, Anna picked up the phone and dialed 0.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m in room three-oh-seven and we’d like a goldfish.”

  “Oh,” said the concierge. “We’re under new management and don’t do the goldfish thing anymore. We do have half-off drinks at the hotel bar from five to seven, though.”

  “That’s OK,” Anna said. She hung up and turned to Taj. “No goldfish,” she said.

  “Good,” Taj said.

  “But you wanted one.”

  “I wanted it and then as soon as you picked up the phone, I didn’t want it. It would have been a drag. We’d have to feed it, maybe clean its bowl—”

  “We’d be out somewhere, worrying—”

  “Worrying the fish was lonely.”

  “You’re right,” Anna said, getting into it.

  “Or what if it fucking died? That would become the symbol of our trip, the only thing we’d remember when we looked back.”

  “Our first pet.”

  “Who needs pointless obligations?”

  Anna nodded, meaning it and not meaning it. On the one hand, yes, who needed a pointless goldfish? On the other, wouldn’t it be nice to take care of someone else for a change? To have someone actually depend on her?

  “Besides,” Taj said, opening the door and making a gentlemanly motion for her to go first, “is there anything more depressing in the whole world than a goldfish alone in a tiny bowl?”

  * * *

  They made their way to the lift, a fashionably unfinished freight elevator, presumably used to haul pianos in the hotel’s previous life. At the top floor, the doors opened
to reveal a bar polished to a painful gleam. A hostess led them to a small table by the window and left them with their menus.

  “So,” Anna began, scanning the list of sandwiches, “what’s our plan for today?”

  “We should go to Silver Lake,” Taj said.

  “What’s in Silver Lake?”

  “Same exact stuff that’s in Brooklyn.”

  “OK,” Anna said, confused as to why they had left Brooklyn to go to Brooklyn.

  “OK. I’m getting the quiche,” Taj said.

  “I’m getting the panini.”

  “Is it too early for drinking?”

  “Well, it’s half past noon here, but that’s mid-afternoon back on the East Coast.”

  “Perfect! Then I’ll have a Long Island iced tea.”

  “When in Rome—” Anna said, and they both laughed. Almost like a couple, she thought.

  They continued their easy banter through lunch, and when they were done, Taj threw a couple of twenties and some change on the table.

  “On me,” he said.

  As she thanked him, she couldn’t help doing the math—now Taj owed her only thirty dollars, give or take a buck or two.

  As promised, Silver Lake really was exactly like Williamsburg, only California-style: a carousel of boutiques chasing cafés, chasing art galleries, chasing bars, interrupted by vast stretches of boring parking lots for some mundane grocery or pharmacy, monuments to the dreary reality that there were still certain staples a person actually needed in order to sustain life. Anna wanted to walk around and do a bit of clothes shopping; Taj wanted to sit and have coffee. They passed a café named Minutia. Underneath the sign, a smaller sign read: BEST COFFEE IN SILVER LAKE.

  “Would you care to join me for the best coffee in Silver Lake?” Taj asked.

  “Do you think it’s really the best?”

  “OK, would you like to join me for the allegedly best coffee in Silver Lake?”

  “The self-professed best coffee in Silver Lake?”

  “The averred best?”

  She wouldn’t mind wittily trading synonyms with Taj like this for the rest of the day, Anna thought, the rest of her life, even, but instead said, “I’ll walk around a bit and meet you here later.”

  They parted and Anna strolled around the corner. All the boutiques, Anna noticed, seem to arrange their almost-bare shelves around a minimum of merchandise, the truffles of the retail world. Two blocks up the street she paused in front of a shop whose window showcased designer clothes that all seemed to have been shredded, then recombined with canvas sacks and cascades of dirty shoelaces.

  “Come in!” read the sign on the door. “We’re closed!” Closed or open, Anna thought, which is it? She tried the door; it was open.

  “We’re closed,” said the woman behind the front desk, annoyed. Then she added, “But you can look around for a minute if you want.”

  Anna quickly parsed the threadbare clothes on the racks: T-shirts with x-rayed cow heads and glittery skulls, burning buildings in fluorescent colors, a Rubik’s cube, bits of soccer jerseys that had been torn up and randomly sewn together. She pulled a promising pair of pants dangling from a hanger toward her only to find they had only one leg. This, Anna decided, was her signal to leave. But she didn’t have much luck elsewhere. Everywhere the clothes were all depressingly small and hilariously overpriced. She wandered into a few gift shops—the kind that sold coasters with photos of flesh wounds or charming seven-dollar greeting cards saying “Fuck Off!”—then wandered back out onto the street again. After a few more turns around the block, she made her way back to Minutia, where she found Taj reading the L.A. Times and munching on a biscotti.

  “So how was the coffee?”

  “Just OK,” Taj said. “How were the clothes?”

  “Douchey.”

  “Now we switch,” Taj announced. He left her with the newspaper and went out for his stroll. What a lovely time they were having! Could it be, Anna wondered, that they had already reached that comfortable plateau where you don’t have to speak to each other, or even be together, in order to enjoy each other’s company? The man sitting next to her, a dreadlocked student type with an unopened philosophy book by his elbow, was pounding furiously away at a Blackberry with two fingers, double-fisting it as though he were unburdening his own personal Ulysses. With a measure of surprise, she found herself feeling sorry for him. She was here in Silver Lake with Taj, alive and busy knitting herself a new life out of raw experience. A life where time wasn’t measured in tweets tweeted or e-mail sent and social status remained unquantified by friend requests. She was an aspiring filmmaker sitting in a café, waiting for her boyfriend. OK, this was a stretch, but by the loosest of definitions, plausible. And maybe it wasn’t so bad to be vague, to let Taj’s boyfriendhood accrue softly and invisibly, like plaque on her teeth. She would go with the spirit of the times, she decided, and embrace vagueness. With that thought propelling her out of her seat, she ordered a coffee that tasted no different from the drip at the Korean bodega back home, then leaned her head against the wall and promptly fell asleep.

  It was Taj who shook her awake. He was holding a black paper bag covered in cursive letters that were also black, and thus indecipherable.

  “Check this out,” he said, holding up a T-shirt for her inspection. It was the x-rayed cow head Anna had seen earlier.

  That shirt, Anna recalled, had cost $120, and the bag was half full. She wasn’t sure exactly what it meant that Taj was the kind of person who could go off and casually drop so much money on such a T-shirt, but surely it meant something?

  “Let’s walk,” he said.

  They walked up Sunset Boulevard, down Myra, and back up Santa Monica. They didn’t hold hands, but did do that thing where they bumped into each other intentionally and jostled each other with their elbows more than was absolutely necessary. They walked farther, to a craft market set up in a strip-mall parking lot, where Anna spent thirty bucks on a needlepoint with the words so bored stitched in elaborate letters and surrounded by roses. Taj declared Silver Lake’s craft market no different from Brooklyn Flea, and Anna had to agree. Eventually, they ended up at a dingy and fluorescently lit curry shop, empty save for a quartet of unctuous waiters. Ten years ago a scene in an important film had been shot there and the walls were covered in framed, yellowed newspaper clips eulogizing this event. They sat on the same side of a red pleather booth and drank too many bottles of Singha and ordered too many appetizers in addition to their faux-chicken vindaloo, then got lost on their way back to the hotel.

  By the time they’d returned to their room, it was past eight and Anna felt fine about going to sleep but Taj insisted on going swimming instead. There was supposed to be an amazing pool in the basement, he said, designed by some famous artist. So they grabbed their bath towels and took the shuddering elevator down three flights.

  Finding herself alone in the ladies’ changing room, a dim cube covered entirely in shimmering, mosaic tiles, Anna suddenly felt overcome by the guilt of undeserved luxury. The hotel, the restaurants, the so bored needlepoint, and now the heartbreakingly hot water flowing over her unemployed, abundantly fleshy body, opened up a new ache within her. Before she left, she’d received a text from Leslie to never mind about Brie’s phone number, that she’d found her Tumblr and gotten in touch with her. She and Josh had already started couples therapy to get “copacetic” about the adoption thing. That same morning, Brie told her she planned to confront Pom, tell her she was done with interning and needed to start getting paid.

  “What will you do if she says no?” Anna had asked.

  “Temp.” Brie had shrugged, leaving Anna impressed with the strength and certainty of this response. Back home, everyone was dealing with such grim, real-world problems. Pregnancy. Money. Couples therapy. Leslie and Brie were moving forward and shrinking their gaps, while look at her: here on a lark, browsing one-legged pants and drinking four-dollar coffees with a man from the Internet. She scrubbed harder, as though aggr
essive shampooing could serve as a form of absolution, giving herself a little talk. When she got back home, she would get a new job. A real job. She would work on Taj’s film and her own film on nights and weekends, leaving no time for guilty showers. She would ask Leslie “How are you?” and support Brie in her brave decision to become a single mother. She would learn how to love her mother and encourage Brandon to pursue his dreams just like Taj had encouraged hers. She would move through her days with clarity and purpose.

  She stepped out of the shower, shivering in the sudden chill, and found herself staring at another brass plaque bolted to the wall. This one read:

  I am fearful of something more than fear: it’s something in the landscape surrounding the cities and smaller towns between here and the coast, something out there that feels so empty and it is not made of earth or muscle or fur; it’s like a pocket of death but with no form other than the light one might cast upon its trail of fragments.

  —DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954–1992)

  What the fuck? Anna thought. It was ridiculous—this hipster hostelry desecrating the memory of subversive American artists by mindlessly plonking their quotes in a sea of expensive opalescent tile. Just like that, her resolutions were swept away by scorn, and this was the feeling she carried with her out to the pool, where she found Taj sitting with his long brown legs dangling over the edge. The pool was round and polished to an egg-like smoothness, with water the color of fresh wasabi.

  “Did you have a weird quote in your bathroom?” Anna said. Immediately she regretted how loud and sharp her voice sounded. The room was an echo chamber.

  “Nope.”