by Peter Mattei
“Should I open it?” he said, and I think it is the most serious question that anyone has ever asked me. “Should I open it?”
That’s when I told him I was only kidding.
He stood and looked at me.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “I think you’re only saying that.” He reached for the lid to pull it off and I came up behind him and put my hand on his hand to stop him. I pushed down hard and prevented him from doing it. We started fighting and I was bigger than him and I kept him from opening the lid. He started punching me with his fists, fury and grief a heady brew. Then our father came outside in his Brooks Brothers boxer shorts and shook his head. “What the hell is wrong with you kids?” he said to us, and then looked at Tim, who was crying at this point.
“Go to bed,” he said.
When I went out drinking with my dad some twenty years later I told him what had transpired between me and Tim and Race that night. “You’re dwelling on it,” he said, and then got up and went to the bathroom. We got pretty drunk and ended up arguing about something (not my mom); we’ve never been in a bar together since.
By the time I get through the Korean section of Pico it’s late afternoon, almost evening, I’ve been walking all day, which is good, I needed the exercise, I needed to sweat it out. I feel good. I’m almost downtown now; I see a taxi and wave it down and get in. A few minutes later we are on the 10 heading toward Santa Monica. It takes us nearly an hour because it’s rush hour, but that’s a lot faster than if I had walked back. I consider having the cabbie take me directly to the offices of Gangrape, the production company, but I can’t remember where they are and besides, I need my laptop, my tablet, and my phone. When we get to Shutters on the Beach I pay the cabbie, the bellman opens the door for me, I go in, and as I’m heading across the lobby toward my room I see her standing there, twirling.
3.20
“Hey-dee-hi, heyo, yo!” she says with a broad smile that seems, insanely, genuine. It kind of lights up the place. “Fancy seeing you here!”
She’s wearing American Apparel purple tights under a vintage Christian Dior skirt, on top of that she’s got a frayed Van Halen T-shirt from the ’80s and at the bottom of it all, ballet slippers, and on top, a purple sunset smudged below her eye. What is she doing? Is this some kind of art project? Of course she looks ridiculously beautiful (in the moment, it occurs to me that I have never been able to give her a tagline; I stand there, stunned, incapable of coming up with one, and AFTER MUCH COGITATION NOTHING SUITABLE COMES TO MIND™.)
“What are you doing here?” I ask, thinking that I am being disarming, or starting at a complete disadvantage, I don’t know yet.
“Here? You mean LA?”
“Yeah I mean LA, I mean this hotel.”
“I guess I’m doing the same thing you are.”
“Me? And what am I doing?”
“Standing in the lobby of Shutters on the Beach.”
“Oh is that what I’m doing? Thank you, I never would have guessed.”
“Wow, really original sarcasm,” she says with a wink. “Aren’t you surprised to see me? Aren’t you even going to thank me for the fruit basket?”
“Answer my question first,” I say with a fake sternness.
“I’m here for the FreshIt shoot, dude!” she giggles. “Tom said I could come out as part of my internship. Don’t worry, Eric, I paid my own way, I’m not screwing with your production budget, I know how important it is to put as much of every dollar on the screen as you can,” she says, sounding like she’s done some homework. “And I’m not stalking you, even ironically like before, I’m just trying to learn everything I can about the business. Love the ’boards, by the way, this is a great concept, I threw in some ideas for the director, hope you don’t mind.” It’s the most she’s said coherently since I met her.
“I think we need to talk,” I say.
“About what? And where you been, yo, everyone thought you had quit and gone to Bali or something!”
“I’ve been walking,” I say. “I’ve walked from one end of Los Angeles to the other and I can safely say it is the greatest city in the world.”
“Cool,” she says. Then we stand there for a moment and I go, “I have to get my phone. I have to get to the shoot.”
She follows me back to my room; I don’t object to this, as I might as well sit her down and have the talk that we need to have, explain to her all of the strange and difficult shit she has caused in my life including, tangentially, the recurrence of oddly pleasurable and at the same time vaguely troubling memories from my happy Midwestern childhood, including but not limited to my recent full-blown and highly entertaining sense of metanoia, an ancient Greek term meaning, “everything you know is wrong.” We cross the pool deck and go down the hall, and when we get to my room my key card doesn’t work; Intern says she thinks they may have checked me out because of the fact I disappeared for two-and-a-half days.
“Let’s go to mine,” she says.
We go to her room, it’s one level up and around the corner on the ocean side. I know technically speaking it’s not a good idea for me to go with her to her room, but the new addition to my medication regimen that they gave me at UCLA had taken away most all my sexual proclivity, although my penis is, I think, sort of semitumescent as always. We get to her room and I ask her how she’s affording this room if the company isn’t paying for it and she isn’t getting remunerated as an intern. This is my proof, I realize, this is my proof that she is under the employ of Barry, brought in here to mess with me, to destroy me so they can get out of my contract.
“My parents,” she says. “I told them an internship is like graduate school. It’s expensive but it’s the only way to get a job anymore, and so they sprung for it.”
“There are cheaper hotels than Shutters on the Beach,” I remind her. “I think the Four Seasons is cheaper than this place.”
“I hate the Four Seasons,” she says as she opens her door, and I imagine her having an affair with Barry Spinotti at the Four Seasons; he’s been flying out here to do what he called some “triage” in our LA office recently: got it, Bar, say no more. We walk in. She lets the door slam closed and we stand there in the dark. The room, what I can see of it, is bigger than mine. She looks at me and this makes me uncomfortable so I go to the curtains and throw them open; she has a view of the bay. Then I go to the bathroom and turn on all the lights.
“Harrison Ford stays at this hotel when he’s in LA,” she says.
“I know.”
She tosses her Freitag messenger bag on the bed and looks at me again. Then she sits down.
“What are you doing?” I ask her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. She reaches for the phone. “I’m going to call the front desk and see what happened to your room. What was the number again?”
“Put the phone down,” I say in my serious voice.
She puts the phone down. “What?”
“We need to talk.”
“About what?”
“About that eye.”
“What about it?” she says. “Is it a problem or something?”
“Well when a nineteen-year-old girl tells her employer that one of her superiors fucked her and punched her in the face, yeah, that does cause some problems.”
There’s a long pause and then she says, “What are you talking about?”
“I was told you told them at Tate that I punched you in the face.”
“You were?”
“Yes.”
Then she laughs.
“Why would I tell them that? Are you fucking with me? I fell into the doorjamb in your loftlike aparment, as you call it, remember, the night we did those Black Beauties I bought from that French guy at Dressler. Shit, I wish we hadn’t done that. What were we thinking?” She smiles in a jaunty way. “It was fun, though. And who told you I’m nineteen? I’m twenty-four. Look, I get that you can’t have a relationship with me now that we work in the
same company, do you think I want to get us in trouble or something? No way. I’m trying to figure out my life, not fuck it up. By the way did you watch that Alejandro Jodorowsky movie I left on your desk? El Topo? I really think you would love it.”
I’m facing the big picture windows and she’s sitting on the bed, facing me, so she’s mostly in shadow. I’m having a hard time reading her, so I step back and turn on some lights. There are about sixteen light switches by the door and I just slide them all up so now the place is lit up like a sound stage. Every one of the five hundred threads in each of the sheets is hot white and every nook and crevice of every decorative conch shell is glowing pink and florid as it would in, say, Florida.
“Listen,” I say, “I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing with me, but it isn’t funny.”
“No?” she says, allowing the tiniest bit of pouty girlishness into her voice. “Why don’t you think it’s funny?” I’m standing right over her now and she takes her eyes off my eyes and looks at my belt. Then she’s reaching to undo it but I step away.
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“Why?” she says. “Why not? Oh come on, no one will know, and I promise we won’t do it again, you can totally trust me on this.”
I consider telling her the whole story, giving her the entire rundown that a) I’m not in the mood because I checked myself into the hospital because I was having a panic attack and thought I was going to die, and then I trashed the ER and they put me in the psych ward, where they gave me Halcion and Abilify and zinfandel and who knows what other antidepressants and antipsychotics, which have limited my desire to have sex and b), I don’t even remember what b) is, I’m trembling so much as she undoes me.
“Because I don’t want to,” I say.
“No? You don’t want to what? Do you realize we haven’t even properly made love yet? Yeah, we’ve done shit, but we haven’t actually had intercourse and I think it would be something of a shame if we didn’t know what that felt like.” Her little pouty voice again. I stand there shaking a bit, inside, maybe it’s just my stomach, due to the fact I forgot to eat during the long Pico journey. There were so many options and I had decided I would investigate them all visually, at least the taco-related ones, and stop at what seemed like the best on my way back to the beach, but that didn’t happen. She gets up and takes a step toward me and smiles, tilts her head to one side, this really is her best feature, not her face exactly but the youth and I suppose guilelessness that emanate from it when she smiles. She is too beautiful right now to attempt description; I don’t move, I don’t speak.
“I want to take a picture of you looking just like that,” she says.
“Why?” I say.
“Because there’s this website, it’s called Look At This Fucking Douchebag, I could put your photo on it!” Then she laughs. “Just kidding. You look nice. You look different out here, you look rested, it does you good.”
“Funny,” I say. Then she tells me about a series of pix that she and her friend took back in New York, they found these little stuffed animals that someone had thrown away, and they also found a Cincinnati Bengals jacket, and they put the stuffed animals inside the Bengals jacket in various funny and compromising positions and took dozens of pictures with their phones and made a Tumblr of it and got something like twenty thousand views in the first week.
“Cool,” I say, not really understanding anything at this point.
“It was Kaytlin’s idea,” she goes on. “She’s an artist.”
“I don’t know if I can believe a word of what you’re telling me,” I say.
“Good,” she says. “I like it that way.”
Then she gives me that look again and takes another step toward me; I don’t back off, I just stare at her. She takes my belt and undoes it. Then I grab hold of her wrists and stop her before she can unzip the AGs.
“Don’t.”
“Aw,” she says, maybe giving up for now. “And I was going to give you a Deep Whatsis.” I don’t know what that is; I just look at her blankly.
“What’s a Deep Whatsis?” I ask.
“Exactly. This boyfriend of mine, he said it was beyond the power of the human mind to comprehend, so that’s what he dubbed it,” she says. “But I made it up. It’s a super deluxe blowjob is all, using this certain kind of oil and, um … some other things.”
She looks up at me and smiles. I don’t smile back. Though I want to. But I know what will happen if I do.
“Oh well,” she says, “oh well.”
I look down at her, wishing I was still in the hospital, at least there I was safe. Ten seconds later I’m lying on the bed, she’s pulling my pants off and tossing them onto the floor. She reaches into her messenger bag and takes out a bottle of almond oil and a box of Fisherman’s Friend cough drops. I prop up my head on about five goose-down pillows and watch as she takes the top off the almond oil bottle, very slowly, and pours some on my now fully erect dick. She rubs it in with her left hand. Then she pops two lozenges into her mouth and upturns the bottle. She empties it and swishes the oil around between her cheeks, sucking for a minute on the menthol drops. Then she straddles me and gives me a look before going down on me, thrusting my cock into her fully lubricated gob, and thus it begins. The almond oil, she explains later, is an excellent a lubricant, and the menthol acts as a stimulant, increasing sensation in the nerve endings, and indeed it’s the first time I’ve ever experienced anything remotely like this. Her tongue and mouth go up and down and around my member with supreme conviction. She’s adept at understanding when I’m about to explode and backs off long enough to keep me in the game, over and over, again and again. This goes on, as I remember, pretty much the rest of the afternoon and into the night; when finally she lets me get off I see stars behind my eyes.
3.21
When I wake up it’s dark and she’s in bed with me and we’re naked. My face is up against her shoulder and my arm is wrapped around her. She senses me moving and shifts toward me.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” she says, kissing me lightly on my nose. “You were so sweet.”
Was I? With one eye open I look at her and try to focus. I want to move my arm, I don’t know how it got where it is, under her, my fingers entwined in hers on the other side of her body.
“I thought we said this wasn’t going to happen,” I say.
“I know, I didn’t think we would actually have sex like actual sex-havers either,” she says. “But oh well, we did, didn’t we, and we survived.”
“We had sex?” I asked, possibly the dumbest question ever.
“Yes, dummy,” she says, “we made love. After the, you know.”
Then she kisses me on the nose again and jumps up out of bed, her hair dancing on her head and off her shoulders like pre-CG glitter falling from the Good Witch’s wand.
“Let’s go to the beach!”
I look over at the so-called digital clock by the bed. It reads 4:49 AM.
“Let’s go swimming at the beach and then we’ll get breakfast!” This seems like a terrible idea to me but I am wide awake now, and my head is clear for the first time in at least two years if not my life, and my penis is soft. Hallelujah. It’s not yet 8 AM in New York, way too early to call Barry and explain to him my Plan Moving Forward, and so after a bit of coaxing I get dressed and we sneak out. We go out via the pool deck and down some steps to the bike path, each of us carrying a massive white towel from the hotel. There’s nobody here, no joggers or bikers, and even the early morning cleanup crews haven’t arrived. We trudge across the black beach toward the black water, heading slightly south toward Venice to avoid some kind of maintenance dig going on opposite the hotel; the sky is ink past the ocean but behind us there’s enough of a glow to indicate that day will in fact dawn on us in due time.
When we get to the water she drops her towel on the sand and takes off the CD skirt and the Van Halen tee. In the dim ochre wash cast by the sodium-vapor lights above the bike path, she looks lik
e a wisp of cotton candy held aloft by an anime princess.
Naked, she rushes out and disappears headlong into the waves.
As she moves into the surf I take my time pulling my pants and shirt off; up on the path I see a lone runner jogging toward the Palisades, a woman in a blue-and-white sweatsuit, with a visor on her head and an iPhone in her hand, its twin cords making a V around her chin. She sees us skinnydipping kids and looks over and seems to smile. I give her a feeble wavelike wave in return and she continues on without breaking her stride. I turn back to watch Intern frolicking in the sea, and feeling suddenly very bare I head into the water and it’s frigid. My arms are wrapped around my chest and I am mock shivering to cover my actual shivering as the water reaches my knees, splashing my balls and shrinking them to the size of dried peas. Far out in the distance I can see a couple of lights, perhaps they are sailboats that have moored overnight, more likely they are tankers or oceangoing barges on their way to the docks at San Pedro. Behind me I can barely make out the edge of the cliffs that rise up to Main Street, where Sushi Roku is, and I imagine a small army of illegals there already, mopping up and heaving rotting fish parts into a dumpster in the back. Intern turns and sees me heading toward her and laughs.
