One Night (26 page)

It was an hour before sunrise.

When the sun rises in one place, it always sets in another. And when the sun sets somewhere, someone is experiencing a sunrise. Darkness gives way to light as light gives way to darkness.

Life will always be that way.

There was a marine layer along the coast that helped decrease visibility to about a quarter of a mile, a rolling fog that made everything from the 405 to the ocean look like it was being accosted by London fog. After I loaded up my VW, I put a Barbie doll in the passenger seat, buckled her in, and followed Orange County through traffic to Venice Beach. He had taken Lincoln Boulevard, avoided the freeway, but there was still traffic, moving slower than cold molasses flows. A group passed by us in the rain, all on Fatback aluminum bicycles, bikes that cost around four grand. Then a man in a Santa Claus suit passed by pushing a shopping cart overloaded with plastics, cans, and bottles. This is common; this is life in the beach areas. It is a culture inside a culture wrapped around another culture; professionals surrounded by slackers and sipping coffee with bums and weirdoes as gang members spray-paint coded gang signs and encrypted messages of death and terror on dull stucco walls. It is a world that fascinates me, one I love and hate at once. We pulled into a pay lot and drove to the far back corner, away from the entry, to a spot that was empty. It was going to be another rainy winter day, now a mixture with fog. There wouldn't be a wild crowd. The chainsaw jugglers and dancers and joke-tellers and henna-booth vendors might skip half a day. At the malls, at coffeehouses, at twenty-four-hour gyms, the die-hards might get up and feed their addictions. But there wouldn't be a crowd here for a while.

I told him, “I want to meet your distraught wife.”

“I don't want to show you.”

“I want to see her. I want to see who was going to kill me.”

He nodded and opened the trunk of his damaged car.

I said, “Jesus.”

“You okay?”

“I saw her at the hotel.”

“And she saw you.”

There was a gash in her head, and a tile sat on top of her body.

The tile was broken at the corner.

I asked, “What happened?”

He told me that she had been getting off the elevator in the hotel lobby when he had come back with the cheesecake. She saw him at the same moment he saw her. An incredulous moment. Christmas songs were still playing, the Christmas parties and the inebriated now in overtime, the rappers in the lobby as well. She made a scene. He was at a hotel. There was lipstick on his collar, and my perfume was on his suit. I had bitten his neck as well, had put at least half a dozen marks on his neck. She saw the signs of betrayal, all the things I would have looked for, the same signs I had seen on the functional alcoholic I had married once upon a time in Las Vegas.

He looked at me, evaluated me as he told his tale, then said, “You're not freaking out.”

“Have you ever seen the body of a dead child after a fire? Ever lost all that mattered?”

“No. I can't say that I have.”

I left it at that, and with mild sarcasm said, “Looks like you Donkey Punched her.”

“Snapped. Anger. Frustration.”

“Lack of sleep.”

“That, too. All of that mixed with irresistible impulse.”

“I guess it's too late for you two to engage in conscious uncoupling.”

“Way too late.”

“She was in our room.”

“So I heard.”

“She was in the room and left.”

“Just be glad she did.”

“Is she dead?”

“She could be dead. Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Jesus Christmas. She was so jealous, so hot-blooded she was going to kill me.”

“She was. After what I had done to her friend, I was on the hit list, too.”

“I need you to back up. Slow down. Tell me this from the hotel.”

“I can only tell you what she told me when she was ranting, when she was making threats to divorce me. She'd seen you. She saw you go back to the hotel room. She walked behind you, already knew the room number, but was surprised when she realized that was you in the hallway, as if you had been waiting for her to get off the elevator. Then you walked away from her, leading her toward the room like you wanted her to follow you, like you were going to fight her in private. It threw her for a loop.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“I don't understand.”

“What's to understand? You left, I was sad, I missed you, and each second felt like an hour.”

“Why were you in the hallway naked? Did you get locked out?”

“I had on my boots, so technically I wasn't naked.”

“What she told me made no sense. She told me that she had seen my wedding ring. She had been in the room, had seen the food, the bed, and had seen the wedding ring I had left on the dresser. She told me the exact spot where I had left the ring. I thought she had done something to you.”

“She was close enough to touch me. How did she know which floor we were on?”

“She's authorized on my card.”

I said, “You checked us in as husband and wife.”

“So she went to the desk, simply said my name, our surname, showed her identification, smiled, didn't cause a fuss, and they gave her a key. She was smooth with it. Maybe the staff's shift had changed; maybe whoever was covering the reception desk was asleep at the wheel, or just didn't care.”

“So she showed up, went to the front desk, and showed them her identification.”

“They gave her a room key and the room number. She had a room key when she came across me. Like I said, I was walking into the lobby, and she was getting off the elevator.”

“She drove here from the hospital.”

“No. She called a car service. She'd been dropped off.”

“Jesus. How much did she know?”

“She told me I bought gas in Hawaiian Gardens, knew how much I had spent at Denny's, knew I wasn't there alone, knew the time I paid my bill based on the charge, even knew that I had charged a haircut in Santa Monica. She had basically traced my steps from the moment I left Orange County.”

I moved my dreadlocks from my face, whispered, “We were face-to-face.”

“She came to the hotel armed and angry.”

“For me? I just met you, don't know her from Eve, and the loon was coming for me?”

“For you, for us, but you were in the hallway. Why were you in the hallway?”

“I was in front of the elevator when she got off.”

“She said you were
naked
in the hallway.”

“I told you, I wasn't naked. I had on purple boots.”

“Made no sense. She described you, your dreadlocks, your tattoos, your weight—”

“What did she say about my weight?”

“Nothing that matters. And your purple boots. She said purple boots, and I knew she had seen you for sure. She saw me and wanted to go back up to the room.”

“You're joking.”

“She wanted me to bring her to you. She wanted to have it out in the hotel room.”

“What happened? Why didn't she bring it? Why didn't she come back?”

“That's when I told her that I had a Christmas present for her and it was in the car.”

“You're kidding.”

“She heard I had a present, and she paused to find out what the gift was.”

Just as there had been an outburst of entertainment in the two-star Denny's in Lakewood, there was an outburst in the lobby of the five-star hotel, one that made high-class people have less class than rappers. But when he had mentioned there was a present for her in the new car, she wanted to see the present. As hotel staff and security had looked at them without intervening, they had left the hotel lobby together and gone to the covered parking lot. They argued, and their voices echoed.

I said, “Wait. Back up. She came to the hotel, and just like that she wanted a Christmas present?”

He told me that he said the word
present
and the arguing, the screaming, the cursing stopped.

He said the word
present
and there was a Pavlovian response, like she was a child at heart.

He had hickeys on his neck, and she cursed him for that, said vile things, but she wanted her Christmas present before they continued the fight. His wife was a woman with unwavering priorities.

I asked, “What type of woman did you marry?”

“A very ambitious, jealous, and materialistic one.”

“Damn. So, you told her that you had a present, and . . . ?”

“She followed me to the parking lot.”

“She's cheated on you for years, a man has been beaten to death's doorstep, you're in the hotel with me committing adultery, and she pauses the madness because she wants a Christmas present?”

“She stood in the parking lot complaining, arguing, making so many threats.”

“Awww. That's so sweet. So she didn't forget about me.”

“I yelled at her, argued about the old man she was seeing, and she yelled at me, insulted you.”

“Then what?”

“She saw the car. She saw the new car that was going to be her big gift this year.”

“What did she do?”

“She changed gears, jumped up and down, screaming. Until she saw the damage.”

“Bet that was a downer.”

“While she went off about that, I put the cheesecake on the roof of the car, opened the door, took out the MacBook Pro you sold me. Everything else is fuzzy.”

“The tiles? How did she end up in the trunk with a gash in her head?”

“I handed her the box. She ripped open the seal. Ripped up the flaps. Took out the tiles.”

“Okay.”

“She handed me one. You had glued the image of an open MacBook Pro to the tile, but it still looked like a tile. She held it up, looked at it like it was supposed to change into a MacBook Pro.”

“I can't believe that. You're kidding me, right?”

“She tapped the tile with her fingers, tapped it like it was the touch screen on an iPad, then turned it on its side and looked for a switch, for a power button, shook it, stood there trying to make it come on.”

“Are you serious?”

“I told her I'd bought the MacBook Pro from a nice girl at a gas station. Told her that the nice girl worked for Best Buy and had done a run and found one computer too many left in her care. Told her while I had pumped gas, a girl wearing a wig, a yellow polo shirt, Dockers, and a Best Buy badge had stepped out of a truck and asked me if I wanted to buy it before she sold it to someone else. I told her that I had paid two grand for her second-tier present.”

“Then?”

“She called me stupid and kept trying to make it turn on. She called me stupid, just like a self-centered girlfriend did a long time ago on Christmas morning—the selfish woman who'd been unfaithful since before I put a Garrard eighteen-carat blue sapphire–white diamond engagement ring on her finger, the woman who'd worn her wedding ring and gone to swingers' clubs and did God only knows what . . . she called me stupid. There was no remorse, not one tear, no apology.”

“She was angry because she had been exposed.”

“My wife called me stupid after having an affair with a man older than her father and coming home smelling like old-man come, while she held a kitchen tile, trying to make it power up.”

“She got to you with one word. She knew how to get to you.”

“She called me stupid and I went back in time, back to the girlfriend from Vail, the one I had given a present to and she had insulted me, back to all of them at once, and I realized that I had dated the same woman over and over, that I had married that same type of woman, and I was furious, angry at myself, at my choices, incensed at the way I had been a fool, and rage, the rage came on so strong. The rage came on so damn strong.”

“Jesus.”

“I wanted to destroy them all. And for a moment, she looked like all of them at the same time.”

“Jesus Christmas. She complained and ranted and you went old-school Bible and smote her with a tile. Like in the Bible, in Numbers, where God gave death to all those who complained.”

“She called me stupid. She had an affair with my friend, my mentor, her father figure, was a member of at least two swingers' clubs, had done only God knows what, and she snapped at me, called me stupid; stupid because I loved her too much to see the signs? Stupid for marrying her?”

“How did that make you feel?”

“It made me feel like I was less than a man. What I felt was indescribable.”

“I'm sorry, but that mischaracterization of your masculinity, that low blow, was her objective.”

“She stands before God, marries me, cheats on me, and the slut of all sluts calls me stupid.”

“Your wife came to find you. You beat up her lover, then she came to deal with you.”

“She didn't respect me. The guy she had the ongoing affair with, he didn't respect me, either.”

“Did she love the old guy? Did she love him, have him for sex, and marry you for money?”

“Ask her.”

“Kinda late to do that.”

“She had an affair for years, and then rushed to confront me after she saw I was at a hotel.”

“That's how a guilty conscience works. She figured you were here getting your revenge.”

“I have no idea.”

“She didn't come after you until she knew you had checked into a hotel.”

“I guess not.”

I shivered. “She was standing behind me, and you're telling me she had a gun.”

“You were naked. She saw the food. Saw my wedding ring on the dresser. The messy bed.”

“And my neck. She saw the love bites on my neck.”

“She saw your neck, too.”

“She had a gun, but security came in.”

“If that's what happened, then that's what happened.”

“That is what happened. Security came knocking.”