Geography (2 page)

‘How's LA?' he asked.

‘Good. Busy. I've eaten out so much I suspect I am about to turn into a burrito.'

‘You have been a burrito for some time.'

‘Ignoring that. Did you know I stopped over in Bangkok and saw Dad? We went to see
Groundhog Day
, and then afterwards he said he'd already seen it with you. It's very Buddhist, isn't it? The perfect mix of profound and silly.'

‘So we all watched the same film, both of us with Dad. That's very family-like.' I could almost hear him smiling down the phone.

‘Everyone told me LA would be awful, but I love it. The architecture is wild and the hotel where I'm staying in West Hollywood is fantastic. All the guys who work here look like Tom Waits and wear shoestring ties. Janis Joplin died here.'

‘To be in a hotel that's famous because of a dead person is very cool in the States, you know.'

‘I know,' I replied. ‘Hey, listen to this.' I'd circled a paragraph in that day's
LA Times
: ‘
No man should be condemned in this case because of the fear of a riot. My client is on trial. But you are also on trial. Your courage is on trial
.'

‘Deep.'

‘Fuck off,' I laughed. ‘You're a big dork.'

I arranged to meet Michael at a cafe on Melrose. When I walked into the place—all chrome counters and strange macrobiotic salads piled high behind glass—he stood and bowed slightly. I was struck by the particularity of that gesture, the old-fashionedness of it. The other particular thing I noticed was his eyes, an intense blue and all the more compelling for the contrast with his tanned skin. What I said to Marion when I wrote to her next was that his eyes were like Peter O'Toole's in
Lawrence of Arabia
, and she laughed at me of course. But I couldn't stop looking at them, looking into them.

‘How does an academic get a tan?' I asked him.

He grinned. ‘This is California,' he said. ‘Tans are compulsory.'

He was twenty years older than me and he looked it, but the fact that his face was lined, that he was lanky to the point of skinny boniness, and that he retained all the confidence of a good-looking man without the looks themselves, just made me more interested. As lunch went on, I could feel my laugh becoming bigger, my movements more exaggerated, my lips fuller. His life, I thought, is written on his face. And there was something more—this man had slept with a lot of women; I could see that written into his face as well. I remember thinking I wanted to know what that was like, to have had sex with a lot of people. I have read about men like you. I have seen men like you in movies.

We talked. There was an intensity to him, a combination of argumentativeness and attentiveness. He kept touching me on the arm, and once, for a second, on the cheek, with his forefinger as he made his point. I thought he was gorgeous. When I told people about him later I would draw out the vowels of that word: he was
gooor-geous
. I agreed to have dinner with him the next night, kicking myself all the while that I had left it so late in my trip to contact him.

All the next day, I ran this fantasy that he would knock on my hotel room door and that I'd greet him by saying, ‘Let's forget dinner. Let's fuck.' All day that was all I thought about. Fucking him.

He was late and I lay on the couch channel surfing until I stumbled over a sitcom about a stand-up comedian. He was doing a routine on men and commitment. ‘When a man is driving down that freeway of love, the woman he's involved with is like an exit, but he doesn't want to get off there…' There was something about ending up on the kerb with smoke pouring out of the engine, but I missed that because Michael walked in. He opened the door without knocking, like he was staying here in the hotel. Like he was staying here with me.

‘What's this show?' I turned to him—drew breath, like I always would when I saw him.

‘You don't know “Seinfeld”? It's lotsa laughs,' he said. ‘Me, I'm a Kramer fan.'

‘Kramer? I haven't got to him.' Michael was moving back out the door already, beckoning me with his hand. I followed him out through the lobby.

The streets were full of sirens, everything felt edgy. ‘After the police were let off last year, whole suburbs went up in flames,' Michael said. ‘According to tonight's news, and I quote, there are 3000 LAPD officers, 1350 Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies, 1500 California Highway Patrol officers, 700 members of the National Guard and assorted others placed at strategic points around the city.' He put an arm around my shoulders and drew me to him briefly. ‘We should be safe.'

‘We're in the final scene of
The Blues Brothers
, aren't we?' I said. But like everyone I'd seen the video of Rodney King being worked over by police officers and even thousands of miles away in Melbourne I'd found it distressing. I hoped that this time around, the police would be convicted.

After we'd eaten, we cruised down Sunset Boulevard past a bookshop called Duck Soup, past bars, past a billboard of Marky Mark muscled, hung and metres tall in his Calvins. Then we drove up through the Hollywood Hills along Mulholland Drive.

‘Let me take you somewhere special,' Michael said.

And even though I had driven there myself just a few nights earlier, even though I knew it was a cliché, even though I had seen men drive women to this place so they could make out in more movies than I could count, when Michael stopped at a point where I could see Los Angeles spread out below me, a blanket of lights twinkling like stars, it felt like he had given me a gift. Like it had all been laid out there, especially for me.

I got out of the car and gazed across this cityscape that felt as familiar to me as Melbourne, and more beautiful than I had ever imagined it would be. Michael came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘There's more,' he said. ‘Get back in the car.'

We drove further, then stopped again. I clambered up onto a fence so I was sitting up high and could see the valley spreading out northwards. There was nothing—no hills, curves, coastline—to soften the grid of it, the huge expanse of the San Fernando Valley. It was a city too heavy for the desert it was built on. It was ugly, it was beautiful. I looked into those blue eyes of his and he seemed like this to me as well: ugly and beautiful at the same time.

I was here, with the lights of Los Angeles spread below me. I was here with Michael, holding his hand out to me, to help me step down. I went to take his hand but he leaned forward, held my waist and lifted me into the air. When my feet hit the ground we held onto each other for a moment too long. We looked into each other's eyes. Just like in the movies.

We came down from the hills and drove to some bars in west LA, along Wilshire Boulevard. I was surprised by how closed down the place was—Melbourne would have been livelier at this time of night.

‘Everyone's been frightened by the trial,' Michael said, ‘but this isn't a great night city at the best of times. People stay home, watch videos—preferably videos starring themselves—then get up early to go to the gym.' He had a dry way of speaking. The way someone speaks if they know a lot and have been a lot of places. He talked to me like I was that kind of person as well, though I was so much younger.

We traded stories about work. He had moved to Los Angeles to study but even though he'd finished his PhD a few years ago he'd stayed on. He'd even scored a green card. I explained my slightly erratic career path from journalist to marketing consultant for a travel agency. ‘It merges my favourite things: words and travel,' I told him truthfully, but he looked dubious.

‘Academics don't understand marketing,' he said. ‘Although the way things are going in universities, we're having to learn.'

Michael told me he had written his PhD on the history of the epistolary form with particular reference to Choderlos Laclos. ‘You mean letters?' I asked. ‘That's very old-school. I thought it was all about theory these days. Who was Laclos anyway?'

‘He wrote
Dangerous Liaisons
. You know the film?'

‘Yeah, Malkovich was a total prick. What is it with these films and young girls? Why are men obsessed with virgins?'

‘You have to ask?' Michael smiled. ‘When they look like Uma Thurman? You're like her, you know. Tall. Blonde, grey eyes, young. What man wouldn't find you attractive?'

‘Give it a rest.'

‘It's a compliment,' he persisted. ‘Women your age think everything is sexist. Everything is about politics, about being politically correct. But that's not what the story is about. It's about desire. It's about love.'

‘It's about power, not love.'

‘If you can explain the difference to me, I'd be pleased to hear it. People destroy each other. That is what they do. One day you'll understand.' He stopped himself.

I didn't like what he was saying; but he
affected
me. I felt like when I breathed him in, he changed me. He made my heart race, my eyes sting. I wondered if this was what people meant by ‘chemistry'.

‘You can see why I don't like to talk about my taste in books on the first date,' he said. ‘Want another margarita?'

At the end of the night Michael took me along Rodeo Drive. We were driving through Beverly Hills at three or so in the morning when a siren went off behind us and stayed there. Michael pulled over. Drunk, I opened the door to get out of the car and Michael pushed me back into my seat, startling me.

‘What are you doing driving around at this hour?' asked one of the cops, the one who was looming—slightly theatrically it seemed to me—over Michael. His gun was in his hand, though, which was not the kind of theatre I wanted to see.

‘My friend is new in town, I'm showing her around.'

‘Sure.' They stood over him, belligerent, lecturing him to be more careful. Their guns remained in their hands all the while.

After they left Michael sat staring at the wheel. ‘I will never, never get used to the police in this country. They really make you feel they could shoot you at any moment. I need a drink.' He turned to me, agitated. ‘And what did
you
think you were doing? You could have been shot, trying to get out of the car like that.'

I apologised, put a hand on his arm. ‘Come back to my room,' I said. ‘I think there's something to drink there.' I was lying, I had no idea if there was anything to drink in my room or not.

As it turned out there wasn't a mini bar. Michael sat down on the only chair, his head in his hands. ‘Let's go to my place. I've got some tequila.'

I sat on the end of the bed, reached out, barely touched the back of his trembling hand with a finger. ‘Stay here,' I said.

Michael hesitated a long, long moment before sliding out of the chair and kneeling on the floor before me. He took my face in his hands, and paused again. ‘I'm not sure about this,' he said. And then we kissed.

‘Feel free to keep trying,' I said, after Michael and I had been having sex for an hour or so, ‘but I can tell you now it's not going to happen. Not after hours of drinking. Not the first time.'

‘There might not be a second,' he said and I couldn't tell from his voice whether he was joking or not. ‘I'd make the most of it if I were you.' It had been a long night. We finally called it quits, the job half done.

‘You are beautiful, you know,' he stroked me gently. ‘I meant what I said. But you've got more flesh on you than Uma. I like your flesh.'

‘One more mention of Uma Thurman and this affair
is
over,' I said, causing Michael to laugh out loud.

‘What are you thinking?' he murmured as I was dozing off. As if he had a right to my thoughts and feelings.

‘I was thinking about something very corny,' I said. ‘About a poem that seems geographically appropriate:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go / Behind, before, above between, below / Oh my America, my new found land
.'

I can't believe I said that now, looking back. The things you say when you are young and confident.

‘You don't need to quote Donne at me,' Michael rolled me over so my back was to him, spooning in behind me, putting his arm over my waist and placing it between my breasts, pulling me close. ‘You've got yourself laid already.'

When I woke he was putting on his socks and shoes. He was polite, but all the intimacy of the night before had evaporated. ‘I'll call,' he said, ‘about dinner tonight,' but in such a way that I wasn't sure if he would; I couldn't read him at all. My relief when he did call was immense.

We went to a Mexican place that night and I ate chocolate chicken for the first time. Food tasted good around him. Wine went more quickly to my head. All my senses had become more intense in the three days since we'd met.

‘I'm going to give you a Hollywood tour,' Michael said, ‘then let's go to a movie. I missed
The Piano
the first time around, but since Holly Hunter's won the Oscar I've got a second shot at it.' I didn't tell him I had seen it already. I'd been to Hollywood Boulevard too, though when we got there it was different to the times I'd seen it during the day, looking like a rundown fairground. At night the lights brought it to life, and the shadows covered the seediness.

We started the tour at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, which, according to Michael, was the centre of Hollywood in the twenties. We zigzagged back and forth across the boulevard and looked at the buildings on either side. We walked past the Frederick's and Newberry Company buildings, in all their art deco glory. Past the Egyptian Theatre, which struck me as having seen much better days. We stopped at the Lee Drug Company building on the corner of Hollywood and Highland to look at the neon Coca-Cola signs set under frosted glass in the pavement of the entrance. We passed the Max Factor Building, the Paramount Theatre and the Masonic Temple.