The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  “Sometimes I think of you not as the beautiful one dancing the mamba or talking to me about her dreams, but as a slut with her back to me on that first night when you hardly even kissed me. I am writing in anger. I’m sorry. I don’t mean it. I love you too much, sometimes. With love, for ever, for always.”

  I thought the letter was beautiful. But at the same time it made me nervous. I folded it up along its original creases and put it away. The letters implied something unstable and unfinished.

  Often David didn’t even come home all night, but he seemed to like having me in the flat when he did. I was always relieved when he came home. I’d catch him smiling at me, but he also complained that I was taking up space, that he was too hospitable for his own good, wondering why he’d invited a stranger to sleep on his sofa. He was moody, like a child. I ignored him when he was in a bad mood, but even then he was fascinating. Was he so lonely that he let a stranger with kleptomaniac tendencies lodge in his house? He was gregarious and charming, if a little awkward, so why didn’t he seem to have friends? Nobody came to the house, and he didn’t speak about meeting friends when he went out. Where were the glamorous and bedraggled-looking friends from the hidden photographs in his underwear drawer? Often we ate dinner together in those first two weeks, before we started sharing a bed. He told me that he used to get terrible seizures as a child, so he had thick white pills to counteract that. In return I told him strange and pointless lies about my childhood. I told him how Dad and I used to make model boats together and then sail them on the Serpentine in Hyde Park. I told him that we went to Midnight Mass every Christmas even though we weren’t religious at all, and that I was once grounded for winning a game of scrabble using the word “clitoris”. I lied about how Dad threw me a surprise 21st-birthday party in our local pub. I don’t know where these stories came from, but they made him laugh. He suggested books for me to read, too, and I started to make my way through his library.

  The residents of David’s block were mainly Mexican or Armenian, but there was the odd student and actress living there too. Armenian teenagers sat on a tattered wall outside David’s apartment in the afternoon, lifting their hooded eyes to scrutinize the passers-by, like ogres at a concrete drawbridge. They spoke in hybrid Armenian-American, but their language was really a series of glances, frowns and lugubrious adolescent shrugs. They knew that Belle, a fat Texan woman with a sausage dog, was in love with Yuri, the building’s Armenian manager. They listened to Yuri as he played the viola for two hours every evening, the strangled sounds of his imagination spreading musical nostalgia over Los Angeles streets. The boys knew that Belle sat at her window every night wearing a baseball T-shirt and filled Sudoku puzzle books while listening to the aching viola from the floor below. The boys knew that sometimes Belle cried, and that a bald Spanish hipster was a secret smoker, hovering like a hooker on the corner of the street and then stuffing his face from a tin of Altoid mints so his all-organic actress wife wouldn’t find out. The Armenian boys would watch and comment with their eyes on the amalgamation of skinny models with fake breasts, the male actors who wore different fedora hats every day, the retired Armenians, the Thai cooks wearing white overalls, the film students wearing tortoise-shell Ray-Bans.

  Like the area he lived in, David wasn’t easy to understand. He cleaned the glass top of his coffee table with Ajax at least twice a day, yet if there were no cigarettes in the flat he’d rummage through last night’s ashtray, digging through the dislocated smiles and frowns, looking for something to smoke. If you walked out of his tidy and minimalist living room, there was a balcony packed with broken air-conditioning units, rags, a rusted mini-barbeque, a fan and a gaudy plastic Christmas tree with a white plastic angel. The floor of his balcony was thick with a weird white dust, and the one time I ever went out on it I left footprints in his own personal beach. The balcony detritus was left there by the previous occupant of his flat, and he hadn’t got round to moving it yet, six years after moving in.

  I told David that I was looking for a job as a waitress or in the tourist industry. But most of the time I wandered around the streets in the heat, among the Armenian grandfathers playing checkers on the pavement and grandmothers in brightly coloured deckchairs wearing ill-advised swimsuits, flicking through soporific magazines like the ones that David did most of his work for. It was as if the social layers of the adults in Little Armenia were parallel universes. The Armenian grandmothers didn’t glance up to see the jogging porn stars, who didn’t seem to register the quiet Thai couples squatting outside the nail parlours. The Armenian pseudo-gangsters who sold little bags of marijuana outside Starbucks in the nearest strip mall only noticed Armenian women. I could have walked by in a miniskirt and no bra, and they would see me but they wouldn’t react, because I didn’t walk through the same dimensions as they did. The pseudo-gangsters listened to their own music on earphones and wore white trainers, which they used to try and trip up pretty Armenian girls wearing tight jeans. Nearer to the doors of Starbucks there would be chess games spread on tables and furrowed fingers twitching over black or white wooden pieces. It smelt like coffee and stale sweat out there, but I enjoyed watching those earnest games. I’d feel content, less aggressive than usual, like I was watching through a crack in the door. It was only the younger generations, the newcomers, who saw the layers.

  David had no idea he even lived in Little Armenia, which was really a pocket of Los Feliz and melted confusingly with the slightly more visible, beauty-parlour-and-take-out-famous Thai town. “I live in Los Feliz,” David said, bored, glancing out the window and seeing a platinum-blonde Yummy Mummy with a three-hundred-dollar stroller walking past a hissing traffic jam of smoking SUVs. He didn’t see the watchful Armenian adolescents sitting on the wall. He was aware that we lived near Thai town, but only because of the speed with which greasy chili-and-coconut polystyrene would arrive at his front door. He only saw the layer of his surroundings that affected him.

  After two weeks, the middle-aged Armenian women who lived in David’s building seemed to see me, too, and they became my friends. I needed friends, because otherwise I found myself sitting at David’s window watching for Richard or the thuggish man with the schoolboy haircut and the nose stud. The friendly Armenian women were the mothers of the adolescent voyeurs who saw everything and the pseudo-gangsters who saw nothing, although I could never work out who belonged to whom. Perhaps they were also the daughters of the deckchair grandmothers, but that was too complicated.

  “I was born in a village at the base of Mount Ararat, that very same mount, child, where Noah came to moor his boat after the Great Flood,” one of them told me while we smoked next to the fetid courtyard swimming pool that nobody ever dared jump into. “I lost a father, a cousin and a brother to finding Noah’s mythical shipwreck, which was meant to be just there where we lived. Why they need to find it, huh? That’s what I always said, but they kept climbing and climbing for the damn thing, so there was never any peace. My sister married an ugly man from the Bible Archeology Search and Exploration Institute when she was eighteen. He left her pregnant with a boy that she named Noah, just like the other twenty-five Noahs at the local school.” I smiled at the woman, who dabbled her dirty feet in the water. Little ribbons of tattered dust lifted up from between her toes and dissipated in the water.

  “Oh what a hoo-ha, child, when some local troublemakers claimed they’d found the ark years ago, found it and walked it and played it since childhood. What a hoo-ha, child, really, about a few bits of old wood they’d pulled off a barn and buried in the snow for a few weeks. They claimed to play tag in the sacred bowels of God’s vessel, which my father and brother died searching for.” I offered the lady a cigarette, and she took short, sharp puffs, like she thought it was going to be taken away in a moment. Her knees were worn ragged like leather pouches full of different-shaped stones. Mine were white with jigsaw pieces of white scar tissue from football and fights.

  “How did you come to America?” I asked
her politely.

  “My twin sister and I, we weren’t interested in marrying men named Noah, you know?” she said, a slight American twang entering her speech as another woman from David’s building leant over the motel-like balconies that framed the courtyard. This woman was smaller and slightly balding, which accentuated her already high forehead.

  “Dalita telling you ’bout Noah?” said the balding woman from above.

  “Na,” said Dalita.

  “Dalita was crazy ’bout Noah, would have followed him to the bottom of the ocean any day.”

  “Would not,” said Dalita, looking at her knees. These women never asked about what I was doing in Los Angeles, but they liked to tell me things about myself.

  “You’re anaemic, child,” said one of them, looking at the bruises on my body.

  “That boy you live with has done some wrong things,” said another.

  “Haven’t we all,” said another.

  “You must not be scared,” said one.

  “You mustn’t be angry,” another said to me.

  “Your soul is lonely,” another said.

  “Things are going to fall apart,” said another.

  22

  Three weeks after Lily’s wake I did a handstand for David, showing him how straight I could get my back and how I could walk on my hands across his living room. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, my bare toes stretching up against gravity and the tendons in my feet arching forwards. An hour later we were fucking, but I don’t remember it clearly. I remember the childishness of doing the handstands in front of him – how the blood rushed to my head and my spine tingled as it stretched upwards. I remember that it was evening, and that he said I should have been a gymnast. I said gym class was for pansies, it was all about football, but then there’s a big blank space, an explosion of noise and eradicated synapses in which we must have kissed and touched properly for the first time.

  The absence of any lasting recollection of these moments makes me think of my mind as a city, and that first evening with him as one of those bulldozed Los Angeles buildings. There is the outline of a memory in the rubble, but it’s sunken and tumbled. Amongst the burnt-out foliage and gang graffiti of it I have no idea how we got to the point of me itching black cotton knickers off my ankles, like a cricket playing music, and realizing with horror that I was still wearing blue cotton socks. There is no lasting memory of how we got from the over-lit living room to the darkened bedroom. I couldn’t tell you what he looked like naked that night, or what I felt like naked in front of him. I couldn’t tell you who did what to whom or the patterns of our bodies on the bedsheets. I couldn’t tell you if it was scary kissing someone whose body was so oddly large compared to mine. I couldn’t tell you how that worked, logistically. I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking about, what it smelt like, or what noises happened to be going on in his building at the time. I couldn’t tell you if we were silent or loud.

  The next thing I remember was sitting on the edge of his bed and knowing, without looking, that he was watching me while I put Lily’s tan-coloured lace bra back on and tugged a white T-shirt over my head. I sucked my tummy in slightly because he was watching, and when I lifted up my arms to pull the T-shirt on, I smelt him on my skin. Together, we had an entirely different smell than apart. It was deodorant and wet flesh, dampness and unwashed sheets, dried saliva and jogging in the dark. I smiled happily to myself at the thought of the last hour, knowing David was watching me smile.

  23

  Daphne was always telling me “not to be so angry”. Daphne moved in with Dad when I was eleven. For some reason she thought I was going to be something she could play with, but I wouldn’t be a doll or a daughter or even a friend to her. A few months after she moved in, I was already ignoring her existence, and she was already talking about me in the third person. “Why does she have to dress like that?” Daphne would say, with me standing right there in front of her. “Why doesn’t she help more at the café? Why can’t she smile sometimes, huh? Why is she always so bloody angry?”

  The only thing that Daphne and I had in common after she moved in was an addiction to sleep that I copied off her. She had always been a compulsive sleeper, I think, but for me the dependency only came the year after Grandma and Grandpa died. Daphne moved into our flat the same week Grandma moved to the hospice. For those few months while Grandma was still alive, two important people in my life were desperate to be unconscious. Grandma would talk at great length in her nonsense-poetry language about how she couldn’t understand her surroundings any more. She wanted desperately to die, squirming darkly to herself in a hospice room that smelt of damp flesh and antiseptic soap. She wanted to be “out there”. She wanted to be “no”. She wanted to be “dust” and to be “gone now please”. Meanwhile there was Daphne, who would come upstairs after her waitressing shifts, pop a Valium or two and not wake up until twenty minutes before her next shift.

  Daphne and Dad’s bedroom developed a thick, acidic smell. At breakfast time most mornings before I fell in love with sleep, I’d stand at their bedroom door and inhale the edges of that tangible sleep bubble. Every step into that scented blister sent adrenalin into my brain: I was scared that at any moment she might wake up. She’d be all tangled with limbs akimbo and cocooned in limp sheets, a look of concentration on her face as if she was counting out change in the café. Without even touching her, she’d radiate this thick heat that made me feel pleasantly claustrophobic. There was one time when I wanted to ask her something, but couldn’t bring myself to wake her up. It was around 5:00 p.m. and she was napping, an activity that ate up most of the afternoon. Her waitressing shifts at the café seemed to diminish rather than increase after she started sleeping in Dad’s bed every night. I snuck bravely through the creaky door, which used to be Grandma and Grandpa’s creaky door, then tiptoed through the bubble of sleep smell and extended my fingers over her body. Where should I touch her? My fingers hovered, doubtful, towards her pale shoulder, when suddenly she flinched and grabbed my wrist. She held it tight, without seeming to recognize or even see me. She looked me in the eye as if I was an unpleasant creature from her unconscious, and I froze, appalled. The moment hung there in the air for enough time for me to notice some mascara residue lodged in the crow’s feet around her eyes, then her painted fingers peeled away from my skin and she started to snore again, while I backed out of the room into the corridor.

  Oddly enough David did nearly the same thing to me once. David mostly had insomnia, but when he did sleep he fell into a coma-like trance and was nearly impossible to wake up. No amount of music or coffee-making or telephones ringing worked. There was one time when his mobile phone kept ringing and he wasn’t waking up, so I stepped hesitantly into his bedroom and stretched out my hand to shake him. He looked sweet, asleep. Then suddenly his big hands grabbed and held my wrist hard enough to leave a clumsy bracelet of heart-shaped bruises that he claimed he didn’t remember creating. He looked me bang in the eye, and then let go of my hand. I’d been leaning away from him, scared, so when he let go of me I stumbled backwards onto his carpet. He nonchalantly turned away from me and started to snore.

  “She’s copying you!” I remember Dad shouting at Daphne six months after I started my obsessive sleeping, when he finally realized that I’d been missing school several times a week and not seeing my friends. “You’re a role model now, babe, you can’t just be a lazy slag.”

  “I’m not a slag,” said Daphne, missing the point. She wasn’t very bright.

  “The doctor says she’s not got Mono and she’s not got narcolepsy. She’s not addicted to sleepers, either,” said Dad pointedly to Daphne. “All I can think is she’s copying you.”

  “I’m not her mother. I never signed on to be a fucking mother.”

  “I’m not asking you to be a mother! I’m asking you to be conscious. Occasionally.”

  After Dad started to take an interest in my sleeping, it became even more obsessive. If he made me go to school, I wo
uld fall asleep at my desk or in the playground. Teachers would find me asleep in the stationery cupboard, sweating like I was having a seizure. I’d fall asleep behind the games shed, or in the cafeteria, or curled up in the girls’ locker rooms. My favourite feeling was the sinking sensation between being awake and asleep, when I could only half-control my thoughts and they half-controlled me. Eventually Dad took me to a big white hospital in the suburbs, where I tried to tell a moustached Asian doctor about my interest in half-thoughts. I tried to explain to him that colours were stronger in my unconscious. The doctor made notes while I told him that within twenty minutes of closing my eyes each evening after school, deities would fall in love with me over candle-lit séances in the jungle. On other nights I invented perfect languages, full of perfect onomatopoeic words, which united continents of warring tribes in a mythical version of Africa. I explained how I often murdered evangelical dictators and escaped capture by climbing into train carriages full of corpses, or became the zoo keeper at a miniature zoo full of calf-high giraffes and ankle-high gazelles in my dreams.

  “Do you ever think about falling asleep for ever?” asked the Doctor. The Doctor’s office was full of mahogany furniture and waxy pot plants that made sinister shadows on the walls. There were bookshelves in all the corners and books on shelves above the desk – John Locke and the Paradox of Forgetting, Freud’s Unconscious, that sort of stuff.

  “Like, dying?” I said, looking at a poster of a sleeping baby behind the doctor’s head. Half the baby’s head was open to reveal his brain, and there were anatomical descriptions of each sleep-related section of the brain.

  “Do you think that death is like being asleep for a long time?” he said.