by C.P. Kemabia
As soon as he woke up, two hours later, Antwone decided to go out for lunch.
The first couple days after checking in, he had tried out the hotel’s food, but it wasn’t exactly gorgeous. It wasn’t bad though. But it was just not gorgeous. So he’d found this nice chop house somewhere on Wilshire Boulevard where they made delicious spicy salmon and other things.
The restaurant was behind an art deco building and could be easily missed. But he’d stumbled into it by chance. And every now and then, he went there to eat.
There was this young Caucasian waitress that worked there who, from time to time, always looked to make eye contact with him.
He didn’t know her name and he did not mind the surreptitious eye contact, which he responded to with enough reservation to avoid any misunderstanding. But she kept this on whenever he’d come around during her shift.
It was sort of an awkward game.
At first, he’d thought the personal attention thing was part of her waitress duty to make the customers feel appreciated. He had especially come to believe so because, once or twice, she had taken his order without saying anything to him other than the usual amiable lines about the menu.
She had a smooth, husky voice that brought down your defenses. She smiled a lot and Antwone reckoned that her smile was beautiful. It literally made her mouth the centerpiece of her face. With her greenish eyes and auburn hair that waved smoothly over her ears, she had this ‘Vogue girl’ face that made you wonder why she was waiting tables instead of making their front cover.
One day, after she’d given Antwone yet another persistent glance, he figured maybe she had recognized him for the author he was and was shy to come forward as a fan. Yeah that was it, he thought that day, which was two days ago.
But in reality, that wasn’t it. By now Antwone was done eating his orange chicken salad and there was this thoughtful look about his face from mentally planning out the rest of his day and making an inventory of his options only to realize going back to his hotel room to get busy with the typewriter was the only option with any real appeal to him. That’s when she casually came to his table.
“Was everything good?” she asked him.
“Yeah, it was.”
“Can I get you something else or are you ready for the bill?
“Just the bill, thanks.”
“Alright…”
She pulled out a pen and a receipt notebook and wrote on it. She tore a page from it and deposited it on the table. Antwone looked at it and was surprised by the total.
“Really, that’s it?” he said
“The appetizers were on the house,” she said. “Appreciation Day.”
He paid up and told her to keep the change. She made to leave but then turned back to him, smiling and slightly shaking her head. He saw that she was a little nervous.
“This is kind of weird,” she said. “I was pretty sure by now you would’ve recognized me.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Antwone told her.
“So you really don’t recognize me?”
This time around Antwone took a good moment to look her over, to see beyond the obvious.
She was in her early twenties, or more exactly, her body was in its early twenties but her face had this juvenile sensitivity you only see in preteens who are fraught with the immaturity of their age. Because of that maybe, he no longer found her attractive but rather he found her pleasant to look at especially when she had her lip between her teeth the way a child does when anxiously waiting to get his Christmas toy.
Antwone looked at her and she returned his gaze. There was a strange stream of consciousness that seemed to pass between them. He was almost one hundred percent sure that he did not know her, to the extent of recognizing her that was.
Suddenly his cell phone rang, breaking the spell of the moment. And while fumbling it out from his coat, he said to her, “Look, I get a lot of this sometimes.”
“A lot of what?”
“You know … this.” His face winced. In his hurry, the cell phone had caught in his pocket and his elbow banged the table as he tried to dislodge it. When he took the cell phone out, he tried to smile and added, “I’m a writer, miss, and people often come up to me saying they’re the spitting image of my characters, so ––”
“—Oh, I see”
“Excuse me,” he said, looking at the caller ID on his cell phone screen. “I gotta take this.”
“Okay, sorry I bothered you.”
She turned back and walked away, the receipt notebook clutched to her small-breasted chest.
Antwone didn’t answer the still-ringing cell phone right away though. He looked after her as she went about tending to another customer. He felt a little hollow, sick inside his stomach because he realized he had probably come off as obnoxious to her when he replayed the scene in his mind.
“Hello,” he said when he answered the call.
It was Ava. She was calling to let him know she was in town on business and wanted to know if they could see each other later that night and catch up.
Hearing her voice like that after a while had this strange, bittersweet effect on him. It was like gobbling ice-cream at a gulp and feeling the sweetness of it coat your mouth while the coldness froze your brain.
Usually, when he was away to write, she would call him from time to time to check in on his progress. He did not like that, but he had never told her so, because, as his agent, it was her job to make sure he did the writing and kept his mind focused on it at all times. That was his living. It was hers too—symbolically, only. She came from privilege and was already financially secure enough to manage without a job, but she liked agenting anyway because it was a family affair, so to speak. She had grown up into it and even married into it. And she was very passionate about it.
“I’ll be at the Ray at around seven p.m.,” she told him.
“Yeah, what’s that?”
She chuckled. She did that a lot. And when she did that, the droopy corner of her mouth gave her a mocking pout.
“I forgot you were not a social butterfly,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m more like the oyster hermit type.”
“You’re a pearl oyster to me,” she said. “Anyway, the Ray is this cool bar on west Olympic boulevard. Why don’t you join me there? And we can head on over to my place from there. Hank got this new apartment and it’s marvelous. Just marvelous. I just saw it today when I got in and I understand now why he likes to come down here a lot. You should see it, Antwone, I’m sure you’ll love it.”
“Is he here too? Hank, I mean.”
“No,” she said. “But he will be in a few days or so,”
“The two of you made plans or something?”
She chuckled again.
“Do be serious, will you? He’s got an art exhibition that he’s prepping somewhere downtown. He found a handful of new original works he says will make a splash, in a good and bad way. He’s been getting his kicks lately from teasing his usual collectors about it. He showed me a sample; I didn’t know what to think of it. But then he said that was okay because that was the point. I tell you sometimes, I wonder about him you know. I know I shouldn’t but I just do. And––are you still there?”
“I’d tell you if you bored me,” he said.
“Aww come on,” she said. “Listen, why don’t you want to join me, eh?”
“When did I say that?”
“You didn’t say you’d come either. I’ll be hanging out with a few city friends of mine. Some would die just to meet you. They only have lovely things to say about your work.”
“I don’t think I want to meet your friends to hear sing-songy comments about my literary prowess.”
“Well if it gets too uncomfortable we’ll leave,” she said. “I promise you we’ll leave if you feel the least bit annoyed.”
“That’ll make me look bad, won’t it?”
“Since when do you care about that kind of thing” she said and she chuckled again. And he saw her
face in his mind, her full, womanly face accented by plump cheeks, a smart nose and round brow, and not even his will could dispel that Mona Lisa portrait of imperfect beauty. She added, “Or is it just a part of you that you haven’t shown me?”
“Believe it or not, you’ve seen everything there was to see.”
Another waiter came around to his table and asked him if he needed anything else or if he was already being taken care of. He capped the mouthpiece of his cell phone with his hand and told the waiter he was finished and that he’d be leaving in a moment.
When he got back to the conversation with Ava, she said, “What did you say? I couldn’t hear.”
“Oh sorry––I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m having lunch.”
“So will you come?”
He said nothing and she said, “Alright I really want to see you. There I said it.”
Sometimes, when she was with him, she had these moments where a screw would just get loose somewhere inside her head and she would subliminally regress to a childlike mentality. Not that it was a bad thing or a good thing or that it even mattered to him. But it was a trick that guaranteed her to get as a childish version of herself whatever she couldn’t get easily otherwise as an adult resenting all opposition.
“I can meet you at your place,” Antwone told her.
“’Don’t know when I’ll be home,” she said. “And I can’t rain check on this. I’m sort of the guest of honor. This night out is kinda like a reunion. Plus, they’re really swell people to be around. But I’ll have more fun if you’re around. Come on, you’ve dropped out for what … five months? Don’t you miss me, huh? Just a little? Just a tiny little bit? ”
“Alright Ava, I’ll see you then.”
“Around seven o’clock?”
“Yeah I’ll come.”
“Is it ‘yeah, I’ll come’ like last time?”
He smiled inside remembering how he hadn’t gone to a party attended by the crème de la crème of the literary world back in New York. She had given him an invitation and had been a little annoyed by his not coming.
“No, it isn’t like last time,” he said.
“It better not be,” she said. “That’ll make me mad.”
She gave him the address, reminded him of the time, told him that she was looking forward to it and hung up.
Antwone left the restaurant. He didn’t see the waitress anywhere. And as he walked out, he wondered why he had looked back for her.
Antwone returned to the hotel and started working on his book again. He wrote steadily for three hours, putting in as much fire he could between the words. And after winning the battle against his typewriter, he started feeling like hell.
It was one of these feelings he sometimes had. It always whitewashed the sentiment of pride he’d get after achieving a good day’s work. And it made him feel as if his writing amounted to nothing but lifeless words on the flat surface of the paper, words that said nothing and meant nothing and could not even be said to have any worth because they were poorly chosen to begin with and, worst of all, they looked more like empty, meaningless symbols.
He felt a little irritated and went from the room to the balcony. He leaned on the rail. An afternoon sun was lighting a dismal sky streaked with cottony clouds. The street below was busy on all sides and the noise from it rose to him unalloyed by the distance it travelled to reach his six-story high balcony.
He took out a cigarette pack, stuck one limp stick into his mouth and lit up.
Quietly, he concentrated his senses as he inhaled the tobacco along with the city and its vibe and its nuances and its noises and its monochrome colors and its multicolored people, and all that complex mosaic was stimulating his brain when all he wanted was total rest.
A little while later, Antwone descended to the hotel bar and got himself a glass of brandy. Something was playing on the wall-mounted TV set behind the counter but he did not care much for it, some reality TV show, it looked like. That’s all he could tell from a quick glance.
The bar counter was all mahogany stuff and it was polished up expertly to the point you could see your own reflection in it. Antwone thought that was nice.
Off to his left, a man and a woman were seated at the same counter. They seemed to be a couple, hobnobbing together the way they were.
Antwone discreetly observed them through the large framed mirror propped atop the bar. They were bantering around in a low voice while holding mouth-high a glass of Blue Hawaii in their hand. Then the woman laughed about something her companion had said and deposited her glass so as not to spill it.
After a bit, she picked it up but then had to put it back down because he had made her laugh again. And for the next thirty minutes, Antwone saw the man spew out joke after joke to keep the woman entertained. He suddenly felt depressed.
Men always had to entertain women to keep them from getting bored and leaving. And it was a very tiring affair like a performance that must go on and on and on until you either lose your act or forget your line and then it’s all curtains for you…
Suddenly Antwone was glad he didn’t have to do that with Ava. He was glad he didn’t have to do anything at all.
4
