“They do have a tendency to fall back in after breakups.”
“Not this time,” I said. “I saw her at Woodcat this morning, alone.”
“Did you text everyone else?” she asked.
“I’m going to wait at least twenty-four hours before freaking everyone else out.” Probably none of my not-as-close friends would take my panic seriously, and even if they did, I knew Ezra best so they probably couldn’t help me anyway.
Georgie sucked on her lip. “I’m not saying this Ezra thing is like Miggy, at all, okay? But I think it would’ve been better for you last year if you’d called someone else when you were worried about Miggy. Not that you could’ve saved his life. But you didn’t have to be alone.”
I took the last sip of my Budweiser instead of saying something. I tried to wave Michael down, but he either didn’t see me or pretended not to.
“You’ve had a really rough year,” Georgie said. “We all know that, we all tried to help you through that. But so did Ezra, and maybe it’s just coming to a head right now.”
I gestured again for Michael. He came over at his usual glacial pace. “Did you see Ezra this morning?” I asked him again. “The guy I’m always here with.”
“I wasn’t here until noon,” Michael said.
“Who was?” I asked. “Do you think I could call him? I’m worried about my friend.”
Michael fixed his full attention on me for the first time. He’d lived, like all bodies do, through broken bones and sinus infections, cutting fingers while cooking, rope burn. At this bar, he’d seen worse than me. He could see ghosts.
“Does your boyfriend drink?” he asked, skeptically. He was probably used to wives coming in, asking him to spill the whereabouts of their alcoholic husbands, but it was always a surprise when people didn’t read me as gay. I looked really dykey on purpose.
“He’s just my friend and I can’t reach him. He’s not a drunk.”
“The guy who was working here this morning, he’s a fucking idiot,” Michael said. “I could ask him, but I wouldn’t rely on him.”
“Try him anyway?” I asked.
I turned back to Georgie and she was looking at the floor like a hole had opened up in the linoleum leading straight down to hell.
“You okay, Georgie?”
“Yeah,” she said, like she’d been startled. She shrugged, she sipped her beer. “It’s a bad weekend for all of us.”
My phone lit up. Work was calling, my supervisor.
“Work,” I said to Georgie. I scrambled to plug my earphones into the audio input hole, and answered.
“Heyyy, Eve,” Jeff answered, the connection was glitchy and he sounded distracted, “Did you send your report from this morning to me and James Danielson?”
“I’m so sorry, I should’ve flagged this to you earlier, I’m having some technology issues this morning. My phone wouldn’t transfer any images from my computer, and I tried upgrading everything, then I had to call Apple Care and wait on the line. Finally got it all sorted out but I’m a little bit behind.”
“It’s no problem, just try to loop us all in when you’re going to be behind, or log into Slack so we can get in touch with you quickly.”
“Absolutely. Sorry Jeff. Won’t happen again.”
“No problem. Let’s touch base again in a few hours.”
I took out my earbuds. “Georgie, I’m sorry, I’ve gotta go. I’m late sending in my report.”
“I’ll close out,” Georgie said, finishing up her beer.
“Thanks for meeting me for a minute,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m so tunnel vision right now.”
“It’s okay, we can talk about me next time,” Georgie said.
I’d spent a million hours in this bar and others, talking about myself, hearing my friends talk about themselves. The things we told each other were important, but I’d forgotten so many of them. I deal daily with the absence of things I’ve forgotten—smaller things, mostly, like my third date with Bea and what Georgie’s brother’s name is—but at bars I’m most used to forgetting to close my tab. It is not unfamiliar territory for Ezra and me to forget to close out, then spend a night wandering through bars looking for the credit cards we left behind, getting happily giggly drunk together.
“Hey Michael,” I said, “Can you see if there was a card left behind, last name Levinson?”
Michael handed Georgie her receipt to sign and thumbed through his box of unclosed tabs. “Yup,” he said. Michael handed me the card, with a receipt wrapped around it. I examined the receipt: two whiskeys and two vodka cranberries, total twenty-eight dollars. The time on the receipt, marking when it was printed, was 9:32 a.m.
I’d left Ezra’s house in the early morning, still dark, and though I was no longer a witness to his movements or an in-person interpreter of his thoughts, I could picture them as clearly as if I’d been invisibly hovering over his shoulder the whole time: He hadn’t been able to fall asleep, he’d been restless, the day starting and heating up. He sweated into his sheets, thinking about Nozlee. When he couldn’t stay in bed any longer he’d gotten up, gotten dressed, and driven to the Drawing Room, where he’d gotten two whiskeys; suddenly, somehow, a woman was with him, someone who ordered vodka cranberries. She’d been at the bar when he arrived, maybe, and pretty enough to drink with. Sometime before 9:32 a.m., he’d finished his last whiskey, probably gone to the bathroom, and left. I was five and a half hours behind him.
Friday, 3:00 p.m.
Even absent, Ezra was at my fingertips. In the long backwards scroll of my Instagram grid: there was his hand wrapped around a margarita glass from last weekend; there he was across the table from me at El Condor, his biggest doofy smile; sitting on a couch on Georgie’s porch, surrounded by all of our friends, waving at me in a continued loop because I’d used the Boomerang setting to take the picture; there he is sandwiched between Noz and me in a booth at The Holloway, Noz’s left arm reaching away from us to hold the phone that took the pic; Noz, Ezra, and me out in Joshua Tree, posing next to a rock where we’d stopped to take pictures because someone had graffitied the words “Sick Boy” on it; Ezra and me in the pastel outdoor chairs in the back garden area of the wine bar Tabula Rasa, Ezra staring at the camera and me looking somewhere off to the left; Ezra’s arms outstretched, under a bright pink sunset; Ezra in a bar with Nozlee, her face scrunched up and him sticking his tongue out; Ezra sitting on Lydia’s floor, mid-conversation; Ezra looking grim at the beach; Ezra in the park; Ezra outside his building; Ezra in a Dodgers hat. The quicker I scroll the more he blurs into unrecognizability, until he is nothing but shapes and color. At the bottom of the scroll there is a picture of me, Ezra, and Miggy. They have their arms around me and we all look happy.
Friday, 3:20 p.m.
I didn’t want to go to my bungalow, which would’ve been stale-aired in the heat, so a few blocks before I reached my street, I flicked on my turn signal, swerved into an empty parking spot, slid my credit card jerkily into the parking meter, and dashed across Sunset at the crosswalk. I pulled on the heavy doors of my favorite spot in Los Angeles, Taix.
Taix is one of the last Old Hollywood restaurants, living LA history. It’s cavernous and ninety years old and sells soup in tureens, bottomless as Olive Garden’s breadsticks, enough to satiate a full table of underpaid creative kids eking out enough money to pay rent while freelancing. The restaurant has white tablecloths and the servers in the lounge are neighborhood girls with good braids and clear skin; the patrons are a mix of cool kids and older couples and groups of female friends in their sixties. Taix has free Wi-Fi.
My favorite booth in the lounge was free, isolated in a corner, and Happy Hour was on. I ordered a well gin martini with a twist from a familiar waiter and opened my laptop; it flickered on and there came all of yesterday’s open tabs I’d left unread: reviews of the new Rihanna album, a no-nonsense breakdown of all the bad
things that were going to happen to me specifically as a result of Trump’s new executive order, a new profile of Kristen Stewart from the latest issue of Italian Vogue. Each of them semi-magnetic, perhaps enough to inspire a burst of procrastination, but instead I attached my phone to my computer via its USB cable. While the photos uploaded, Messages loaded up my most recent texts. All my unanswered pleading to Ezra’s inbox’s deaf ears. My screen flickered, and my message chain with Miggy once again appeared.
Miggy
He’ll text you back when he’s ready
Today 3:39 PM
do you miss olive garden?
I MISS THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY IN BEVERLY HILLS WHERE I ONCE SAW LAUREN CONRAD EATING A KALE SALAD
i’m at taix do you miss taix
I miss you
I’m going to forgive you being a bitch to me earlier, ok?
thanks
i guess you love me
I guess I love you
i love you too, The Ghost of Miguel
I scrolled back up, to Ezra.
EzraIsTexting
jus tell me if you’re alive out there bc i have a bad feeling
if u don’t answer imma come over to your place
ezra please i’m getting so stressed
Lydia
YOU PROMISED TO CALL ME BACK, BITCH
I STILL WILL CALL U BACK, BITCH
I’M BEHIND ON WORK BUT IMMA HIT YOU BACK, BITCH
Miggy
i guess you love me
I guess I love you
i love you too, The Ghost of Miguel
i haven’t heard from ezra in hours.
i told him i was scared and still i haven’t heard back
if he was dead, would you know
I think so
I don’t think he’s dead
thanks bb
My Photos program dinged, the shots from this morning, all the #glassbricks uploaded and ready to insert into my PowerPoint format for my daily report. I catalogued each possible stop on the next walk, each possible piece of history our loyal user base would hungrily absorb.
The glass bricks thing was getting a little passé, a little untrendy. This was the kind of red flag I used to pass on to my bosses when I was first hired: to highlight glass bricks would be to telegraph to the world that we are behind the turn of the cycle, on the wrong side of the trend. This was before I was given access to the user metrics of our LA by Foot app, which showed me that while we had a strong 19ish percent of users in the twenty-four to thirty-five range, the vast majority of active users were in the forty-five-plus demographic. These were users who didn’t want the hottest thing, they wanted the most interesting but also established ideas. Glass brick appreciation had reached enough of a cultural saturation level to appeal to the over-forty walkers, the slow staircase climbers, the seekers of a breathtaking view over a tony neighborhood near their own tony neighborhood. They were ready for a walk among the glass bricks of the late eighties early nineties, to gawk at their own history in the same way they giggled at their own prom haircuts and puffy-sleeved wedding dresses. Sometimes I took a walk in the days right after it was added to the app, to look for them, lean and gray-haired, stopping in front of a house I picked, reading things I’d written. I watched their bodies, looked for ways to know them better.
At the bottom of the scroll of my uploaded pictures, I clicked through the images of the dilapidated house, the sign for the realtor who used to date Ezra, the crumpled Rams Bud Light can. It was strange, seeing an image of Paris Montgomery’s face, seeing another one of those commemorative cans that Ezra and I had been drinking last night, before he tried to sleep and couldn’t and got up and had drinks with someone who ordered cranberry and vodka. I zoomed in on my shot of the crumpled can; I didn’t know what I was looking for. A message from Jeff slid into the upper-right-hand corner of my screen, Can you send me an ETA for when we can expect that report?, and I didn’t answer him but I did stop looking at the picture of the can and return to my PowerPoint. I finished it up, and sent it on to Jeff, with another apology for its lateness.
The waitress came back to my closed computer and empty martini glass, her bun a tight knot on her head.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
Was I?
“I need a second,” I said, even though the service is languid at Taix and if you send away a waiter you might not see them again for a solid twenty minutes.
My phone lit up with an incoming text, I looked at it on my computer.
Lydia
I STILL WILL CALL U BACK, BITCH
I’M BEHIND ON WORK BUT IMMA HIT YOU BACK, BITCH
Have you eaten?
I decided I wasn’t actually hungry but I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten. A bag of gummy bears at Ezra’s apartment, and then what?
Miggy
I think so
I don’t think he’s dead
thanks bb
All you’ve had to eat today is an espresso and shot of whiskey and a beer and a martini.
whoopsie.
I agreed to meet Lydia at El Condor, which years ago had been a restaurant called El Conquistador, with purple walls and queer customers, then had been rebought and redecorated and renamed. I miss the tchotchkes that used to decorate the walls, and the old, faggy Mexican waiters who’d lewdly hit on Miggy in suggestive Spanish, which he’d mostly understood and translated to me over fishbowls of sticky margaritas, even though he didn’t have enough of a grasp of Spanish grammar to respond. We’d made lots of good jokes about glasses with salted rims and rim jobs. The longtime Echo Park gentrifiers, like me, still come to El Condor, but now we mingle with Instagram influencers and fitness bros and Silver Lake moms who take their colicky babies everywhere despite the nonstop screaming, instead of the old regulars, who like the waiters had been in their fifties and Mexican and gay. I don’t know where those guys congregate now; all their bars have been gentrified away.
Miggy
going to Condor now are you jealous again?
Can’t get your ass eaten when you don’t have a body
a truism worthy of including in those suicide prevention brochures they pass out at the LGBT Center
You really need to start volunteering for the Trevor Project
i’ll volunteer when i’m dead
How about when I’m dead?
I stopped at home to take off my bra and change into my good tank top with little holes in it, just sheer enough that the girls at the bars wondered if they could see my nipples. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about how Ezra used to joke with me that the shirt made everyone around me feel like a big pervert and the way he valued naked desire and his deactivated Twitter (gray and blank) and his all-day absence and the shifting and turning of my mind towards him and also the blank spaces where he used to be. All my empty text message fields. I guess he could’ve been fucking the girl from the Drawing Room, on and off all day, social accounts off because of Noz. But that didn’t explain his sinister lack of communication with me.
* * *
—
When I arrived at El Condor, Lydia was already sitting at a small table among other small tables, kept separate by only the narrowest of aisles that the waitstaff passed precariously, turning sideways to squeeze through, hands full of plates of enchiladas. It was like the worst parts of the New York City restaurant scene: no room, everyone screaming. Lydia was on her phone, swiping. Lydia used to use Tinder like Serena Williams played tennis. Since she’d gotten her boyfriend, she had turned that ferocious energy to BarkBuddy, “Tinder for adopting dogs.” It looked like it was going to take her as long to find a perfect small dog as it did to fin
d a good boyfriend.
“I ordered margaritas for us, and queso,” Lydia said, while I awkwardly tried to scoot into my seat at the same time as a waiter put our drinks and dip on the table.
She was wearing a red bandana in her hair and her usual Friday-night look of a white t-shirt with rolled sleeves and high-waisted black jeans, which arranged her curves into a neat hourglass and emphasized the ampleness of all of her: ass, tits, thighs. Lydia had a cascade of naturally auburn hair and a thick speckling of freckles over the most perfectly symmetrical, angelic face I’d ever seen. She was a little bit famous online for being the first high-fashion teen plus-size model and for an essay for the Atlantic that had gone viral about what it felt like to find an old webpage with a countdown clock to her eighteenth birthday. When she found it, the comment section had been long since abandoned, and she’d aged out of being that particular kind of object of obsession.
I sat down and sipped on my margarita. It was smoky, made from mezcal instead of whatever well tequila. “Thank god,” I said. “You always know what I want.”
Despite not eating I wasn’t really feeling hungry. Despite not feeling hungry I dipped a chip in queso and ate it. I felt warmed by it, at least.
Lydia set her phone on the table, face down. “Cheers,” she said, and we clinked, and we sucked in a few good sips. “So,” she said, “What’s with you today?”
U UP? Page 9
