Mystery Girl: A Novel (5 page)

I got out of the car and scurried in a crouch across the street, like a Marine taking a position. This felt ridiculous as well as conspicuous, so I straightened up and walked as if I belonged there, strolling among the palms. I knew Lonsky wanted details, and in the dimness I would be able to sneak up on her place, but being on the job didn’t make it any less creepy or illegal. Was I a private dick or a Peeping Tom? Now I could hear music coming from number five. It was Prince. Ramona Doon’s curtains were still over the open windows. There was no breeze. No one was looking. I ducked into the shrubs.

Dogshit. That smell was the first thing I noticed as I crept through the bushes, or beneath them really, they had a sparse set of gnarled branches below a canopy of wilted leaves and blossoms. I don’t know what kind, just bushes, with plenty of stale crap under them. I squatted there, listening to Prince (that song about how you don’t have to be a star to rule his world. Kiss?), working up the courage to peek. Holding my breath, I raised my head above the sill. And saw nothing. Or no people anyway. There were objects of course, and to Lonsky they would no doubt reveal a biography’s worth of choice tidbits, but to me it was just stuff: a rust-colored couch, a rocking chair, two wooden café-type chairs next to a little round table. On the table, a vase holding a sunflower. A TV, a few books, mostly paperbacks, I
couldn’t see titles from this distance, and an Indian blanket on the wall. A desk in the corner with a glowing computer and beside that a coffee cup, a spoon. The door to the back room was partly open. The music was coming from in there.

Steeling myself, I crouched back down—this detective business was hard on the back—and stole along the wall to the bedroom window. It was open as well, shrouded with another lacey curtain. Again, I held my breath, as if that might give me away and, easing up, peered over the edge.

She was dancing. What’s more, she was dancing just like Prince, or a pretty close approximation of what I remembered from the video. She wasn’t dressed like him, she wore pink underpants and a white T-shirt. She was barefoot, with pink-painted toes, and her breasts jumped as she popped her hips to the bass pulse. Her skin was a perfect shade of tan. Her black hair swung and scattered in a cloud around her head and her lips formed Prince’s words. Her eyes were closed tight, which made me feel better. Amazingly, when the guitar kicked in, she shivered like a wire, leapt high in the air and landed in a James Brown split. Then she hopped right up and, on the drumbeat, spun around and did it all again, this time with her back to me. Her round bottom twitched. I couldn’t help nodding along.

Then the song switched, perhaps her iPod shuffled, and a slow number came on. I knew this song, too. It was “Dark End of the Street,” sung by the incomparable Percy Sledge. Lala and I had danced to it. Or she had, really. I was a clumsy oaf, of course, but she knew all the old dances, the cha-cha, the foxtrot, the waltz. And she loved the oldies, anything soul from the ’60s and ’70s especially, as well as Mexican oldies, the cholo music that the folks in the barrio still played and that I found for her on CD collections like
Brown-Eyed Soul
or
East Side Story.
Of course I was way too shy to dance in public, and too awkward to move much at all, but she taught me to dance cholo-style, the one step even I could do. You slung one arm around your girl’s waist, while she hung both of hers from your
shoulders, and you swayed together, barely moving, so cool and so slow. Some guys even hooked their loose hand into their pocket. We’d cling like that in our kitchen, alone where no one could see, and dance standing still, holding each other up, eyes closed.

Just then I heard footsteps on the path and a barking dog, like in a POW escape movie. I ducked down lower and peered through the shrubs. I couldn’t see anything but long, creepy shadows. The barking grew near. I reheld my breath.

“OK Sparkle, good girl!” I heard a male voice cheering. “Go get it, girl!”

To my horror, I heard the dog come sniffling through the branches, barking louder, tracking my scent. I wanted to flee but there was nowhere to go except back out to where the beast’s master waited. I braced myself for attack. Then a scrawny little creature, a terrier of some kind, a fuzzy rodent, popped from the undergrowth, demon eyes shining, baring its needle teeth.

“Psst! Psst!”
I hissed, afraid to raise my voice. The little bitch barked at me. Her owner called.

“Whatcha smell there, Spark? A mouse?”

Ducking even lower under the window, afraid to so much as move, I picked up a pebble and threw it at my tormentor. I missed. The dog barked louder. Then Ramona appeared. She leaned out the window, right above me, like Juliet. I froze in terror against the side of her house. Her hair, the cotton of her shirt, I could have brushed them with my face or tickled her nose with my breath. Her fingers curled over the sill, inches from my head. The polish on the nails was red.

“Shush, go away!” she yelled at the barking mutt. “Be quiet!” Then she shut the window. The dog was unfazed, but stopped barking, as if used to this routine. It squatted and, fixing me with a quizzical expression, took a corkscrew dump by the roots of the shrub.

“Come on, girl. Do your business,” the owner called. Sparkle finished up, and, as if to show her contempt, turned and back-kicked some dirt at me before trotting away. “Good girl!”

Their steps faded. My heart slowly resumed beating and I realized that the song had ended. Silence reigned. I took a few breaths, not too deep on account of the fresh crap near my feet, and then checked on Ms. Doon. She was in the front room, in the little kitchenette, chopping chicken and broccoli, dropping the pieces into a pan of crackling oil, adding onions and soy sauce. The food smelled good and I realized I was hungry. What had I eaten that day, besides nuts and raisins? Just some peanut butter and jelly on pita chips I’d gobbled before meeting Lonsky, sometime in the early afternoon. Food, like laundry, sex, and sleep, no longer figured into my domestic life.

While Ramona cooked and ate her dinner, I crouched in the dust and listened to the palms. Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the sound. As a low wind gathers, the long, slender trunks of the coconut palms shift, and the fronds at their heads knock and scratch dryly together. It is like lying awake on a ship, far out to sea, hearing the hull sway and the rigging creak. You remember, tasting the dry wind, hearing the trees whisper, that LA is not a beach. It’s a desert.

My mind wandered back to my own life, over a few hills, in another empty house. The image stabbed at my throat. That’s how it goes for a dog like me, on the short leash of love, pulled back every time, with a choke, to the same driven stake. That’s why almost all books about obsession are to some degree artful lies: real obsession, thinking that one thought over and over forever, is so boring it would be unreadable. In this regard, all of literature’s great maniacs of love, Stendhal, Miller, Hamsun, Nabokov, even Proust (although he pushes it furthest for sure), distort the endlessness of true fixation, the monotony of pain and desire, as they transform it into pleasure, into art. The one exception is Sade, who makes everything, incestuous rape, eating poop, skinning people alive, exquisitely, transcendently, hypnotically boring. Only he, locked alone in the Bastille, produced a work whose monstrousness, by every measure, truly mirrors the monster of obsessive desire.

Now, my wife can’t cook for shit, and in our home I always played
chef and she washed dishes, but that night, smelling the Dark Lady’s caramelized onions and her soy sauce reducing sweetly in her pan, I yearned, not for my own really pretty OK cooking, but for the horrible food that Lala prepared for me on one of our very first dates. In her apartment, by candlelight, she served: a dry, over-cooked steak like a scorched flat tire, rice that was somehow both mushy and hard, and limp, lifeless vegetables, all of it blanketed in so much salt that I had to refill my water glass twice to get it down. But I ate it. I ate it all and asked for seconds, and squatting under that window I remembered it, with a pang, as one of the great meals of my life, because I knew, when she cooked me that disgusting slop, that she was in love. And when I managed to get it down without gagging, she knew that I was in love, too.

The music came back on, the soul, and I checked my watch. It was ten. Ramona was back in her bedroom, no doubt dancing with herself. With less trepidation, and more stiff-jointedness, than before (how quickly fear leaves us, how quickly it returns), I hoisted myself up and peeked.

I was wrong. She was not dancing. She was, to put it bluntly, masturbating. She was on the bed. Her legs were far apart. She sat up straight, shoulders back, one arm behind, propping her up, her other hand in her underpants, fingers playing rapidly under the cotton. Her breasts trembled as her breathing grew faster. This was all rather shocking, but it was not what frightened me most. The scary part was that she was staring right at me.

I gasped, but luckily she couldn’t hear me with Al Green praying so loudly. My brain issued a command to start running, but I was paralyzed. I couldn’t stop staring, as though I’d been struck by a miracle. I’d probably go down in a burning ship with a naked lady. Meanwhile, she worked by touch, facing straight ahead while her nimble fingers operated, expertly, precisely, like she was dialing in a distant station, head up to listen, tuning a far-off signal. Like a fool, I thought: she wants me to watch, she’s putting on a show for me! But then I realized: light inside, dark without. She wasn’t seeing me
at all, was blind to everything beyond her own reflection in the window glass. She was looking at herself.

11

I DROVE BACK TO LONSKY’S
and made my report around eleven. One window in the house was aglow. The rest of the block was dark with a few blue licks of TV light here and there. As instructed, I tapped the pane, then went to the door, which I found unlocked. Lonsky loomed in the hallway. He still wore a tie beneath his silk robe, the belt tight across the equator of his belly, and there were slippers on his feet. He put a finger to his lips and I followed, through the dark living room to the study. Impressive snoring roared from above, as if a small sawmill were in operation. Was it his mother? Mrs. Moon? Neither of the little women seemed capable of summoning such a sound. Perhaps they were both snoring in tandem, stoking the furnace of their dreams.

In silence, Lonsky led me into the study, shut the door, and settled his bulk behind the desk, like a ship listing against a dock. He leaned back and shut his eyes. Then he said, “Begin.”

“Well.” I cleared my throat. “She put on some music and danced by herself, then went in the kitchen and cooked…”

“Wait.” He held up a hand, like a crossing guard. “Go back. Begin again. Tell me everything.”

“OK, right, sorry.” I peered at my notes. I’d been scribbling in the dark, crouched under the dogshit tree, and my already slanted lefty scrawl had wandered all over the page, at times crossing its own tracks. “Um, OK, it was the oldies.
Al Green Is Love,
I think.” I was proud of this, naming the record, how many detectives could pull that off? But Lonsky stopped me again.

“No.” He opened one eye, like a whale peering over the waterline. “Put the notes away.”

Confused, I did so. Did this mean I was fired? Didn’t he want to hear my exact list of what she ate for dinner?

“Now,” he said, “shut your eyes.”

“What? Why?” I felt a little panicked. “She fried vegetables with chicken.”

“Please, just do it,” he said calmly, like a doctor about to sting a patient. “Just sit back, relax, and shut your eyes. I will shut mine too,” he added reassuringly.

I lowered my eyelids gingerly, sneaking a shuttered glimpse through the lashes. I settled into the chair and pretended to relax, like the reluctant birthday boy at a magic show.

“Now then,” he went on, in that deep, rolling tone, “tell me everything you see. Don’t worry about remembering. It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry if it seems pointless. Just tell me what you see now as you recall it. Tell me the story of tonight.”

So I did. I closed my eyes, and let myself drift, forgetting the details of where I was at the moment, and seeing what came back of that distant time, an hour or two ago, which now seemed no closer or further away than my childhood or the brief, bright flickers that remained from last night’s dreams. In recollection, time is no longer a line. It is a circle and you are at the center, with all of your memories playing around you, rotating in and out of reach. As if tucked in bed, I told him a story, about the house, the light, the smell of dogshit, the curtains, the song. I told him about the palm trees scratching themselves like insects in the dry wind. I told him about watching her cook and how the smell made me think of another warm night long ago with my wife, before she was my wife. I told him about the strange freedom of loneliness I’d found without her, about the lonely freedom of estrangement. How long had it been since I went out, alone, at night, like a stray, with no one at home to know or ask where I had been? I told him about the shut window, the hand moving between her legs, the shock, the fear, the staring eyes.

“Are you sure?” he asked me suddenly, breaking my trance. My own eyes popped open. He was leaning forward, hands on the arms
of his chair. “Are you sure her eyes were closed when she was dancing but open when she masturbated?”

“Um…” I hesitated, while he waited, staring at me intently, as if a great deal depended on this point. Was this a vital clue?

“Yes,” I said, seeing it all again, clear as day. “Yes, I’m certain.”

He smiled and leaned back, nodding. “Very good. See, I told you. You see everything, whether you know it or not. It’s all there.” He retied his belt and folded his hands across the meridian. “Now I wonder, did she want to escape into darkness when she danced but expose herself to the light of her own eyes when she masturbated? Or, on the contrary, was she hoping to connect with herself, to shut her eyes in order to turn within and inhabit her own moving body while she was dancing and then to see herself as an image, a reflection, an erotic object, when she arrived at her orgasm?”