Authors: Anna Stothard
Sometimes I’d go to Julie’s Place when David was out. It was like I was tempting fate now that Richard hadn’t bothered with me for a while. I’d go back to the hostel and dress up in Lily’s clothes first – the fuchsia sundress and teardrop earrings, or the tight black dress and the red stilettos – then I’d change back into David’s dresses and wipe off Lily’s lipstick before I went home. Vanessa and Tony thought it was hysterical. They smiled when I went into the backroom dressed in jeans and came out in high heels and dresses. I don’t know what they thought I was doing, but they didn’t seem to mind.
I was fascinated by the way Julie was beginning to look at me. It was so different from her derisive shrugs the first time I came to the bar. Now she looked at me in this strange, searching way, like a fleeting version of the way that David looked at me. She looked at me like she could see me, while before she’d looked at me like she was waiting for me not to be there. Now she would cock her head to the side and smile knowingly at me like she was my best friend. And she didn’t tell me I was too young to drink. Perhaps it was because I wore Lily’s clothes with more confidence. At Julie’s Place I found myself asking people questions all the time. How long would you wait in a restaurant for a date? Have you ever been arrested? Would you rather have a bath or a shower? What superhero would you be? If you had to lose one of your senses, what would it be? If you had to lose a limb which would it be? Do you have any piercings? There are mountains of people in my memory of those semi-drunken evenings, plus an insatiable desire to know what made each one of them happy or sad. The bravado of those conversations scared me, though, because no one told the truth. I don’t think it was their fault, though. I think the truth is actually very difficult to know about. It’s as hard to tell the truth as it is to see it in other people. These people presented bite-sized chunks of their identity, and wittily irritating one-liners that meant nothing to anyone.
“Piercings? You can look for them later... ”
“I’ll be batman if you’re cat woman...”
“I’d wait for ever for you, baby... ”
It felt like I’d spent each evening trying desperately to conjure cardboard cutouts into 3D form.
Julie either spoke slowly, like a mouth on the moon, or a mile a minute, without punctuation, as if I were a tape recorder coming to the end of my capacity. Mostly she filled me up with a tizzy of words. “You know when I knew I was a heroin addict?” she said to me one evening, her jagged elbows on the bar and her wrists gesticulating wildly, “cos, believe me, at first it was recreational. But then it was New Year’s Eve and I was wearing a red Yves Saint Laurent dress on the F train into Manhattan, and there was a hobo next to me who’d just had a hit – but he’s nodding in and out, do you know what nodding is? He was happy. He was blitzed. And I knew I had to get help, because I wanted to be him. I didn’t want to wear silk blend and go look at paintings in an Upper East Side apartment, I wanted nobody to watch me shoot up in a corner some place, I could pass out easy enough when I wanted... ”
“Did you lend Richard and Lily money particularly to buy drugs for the parties?” I interrupted. “Were they drug dealers or something? Maybe that’s why he just, you know, disappeared?”
“Richard?” she said. “Richard?”
“Lily’s husband,” I reminded.
“I know who Richard is!” she said. She was high as a kite that night. The pupils of her eyes were dilated, bursting, and she was pouring vodka down her throat at an alarming speed. “They had amazing parties,” she said. “I hope he’s okay.”
“Has anyone heard from him?”
“Nobody’s heard from him since the wake.”
“Did a guy called David Reed ever come to the bar? Maybe he met Lily here sometimes?” I asked.
“I never forget a name,” she paused, then continued: “But there were lots of guys. Richard knew that. She was beautiful.”
“Affairs?”
“Sure. Of course. My God.”
“With who?”
“She and I weren’t tight like that, not after she divorced that pretty boy and started to understand the world. She followed me around like a dog when she first started working here, thought I was awesome, but she learnt fast. Anyway she wouldn’t have told me about her indiscretions, didn’t tell me about the men she fucked, cos Richard was my friend more than she was.”
“Are you sure she had affairs?”
Julie nodded and made herself another drink.
“She modelled, right? Did she date her photographers?” I asked, smiling at Julie.
“Richard didn’t like her modelling. He liked her being a nurse, you know? Fair enough. Her ego didn’t need fanning. And she had a good time as a nurse, it worked out well for them. God, Richard loved her.”
“Lots of people seemed to,” I said.
“And then they got the hotel, so she stopped nursing too,” Julie said. “I think then they were happy for a while.”
“When did they buy the hotel, exactly?”
“Oh,” she said and, just then, Julie’s elbow slipped off the bar. She nearly hit her chin on the metallic surface before righting herself with a giggle. The upward tilt of her thin lips didn’t suit her: it sort of stretched her face in all the wrong places. She was so thin, like a wig on a clothes pin. I never knew quite what was true in Julie’s ramblings. Sometimes she drank Coca Cola at the bar and looked haughtily at the youngsters around her drinking harder things and coming out of the bathroom with glittery smiles. Occasionally she’d get roaring drunk or high and whisper at me with pale lips that chewed the air and spat it out as mangled words. She’d talk of the buttercups in her garden at home, the time she wiped her arse with poison oak during a camping trip and nearly died, her compulsive fear of cockroaches, which reminded her of her father. One night Julie got paralytic, and I ended up taking her home in a taxi while one of the blue-eyed barmen locked up. Julie lived close to the bar, in the smoggy hills above Griffith Park. Her place looked small on the outside, with paint peeling off the stucco and big clumsy umbrellas of trees lolloping across the windows. We finally found her keys from the tissue-laden depths of her snakeskin purse and stumbled into the hallway. The ground floor was the top floor, with a worn red carpet and a framed promotional poster of
The Nutcracker
at the New York State Theatre twenty years ago. Then there was a narrow staircase that opened out onto a living room with hard-wood floors and yellow lace curtains covering a breathtaking view of winking late-night Los Angeles. It smelt like soup, just like Julie did, and there was no living-room furniture apart from a grey Pilates exercise ball, a blue foam mat and a black-leather bench press. There was drug paraphernalia – a syringe, a lighter – on the marble kitchen counter, next to some carrot sticks. There were lots of framed photographs all over the walls, of Julie at different stages of her life. There was Julie grinning behind the bar, Julie on a row boat with a man, Julie blowing out birthday candles at a small kitchen table. One picture caught my attention, of Julie and Richard and a bunch of people I didn’t recognize all posing outside Julie’s bar with their motorcycles. Richard’s motorcycle was slim and elegant, with a visible engine and leather seats just like the one in Lily’s photo. The other bikes were bigger, like most of the bikes in the mechanics shops I’d trawled through a while back.
“So Richard was really into bikes, then?” I asked Julie.
“I’m sorry to cause trouble,” slurred Julie.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Do you and Richard still ride?”
“I sold my bike years ago,” she said. “I never rode it any more, wasn’t worth the hassle.”
“Does Richard still ride, then?”
“Sure, Lily, sure. You know he wouldn’t give that up.”
“I’m not Lily,” I said. I was wearing the tight black dress and her red stilettos, which were uncomfortable and made me stand very straight.
She was silent. With her tiny body resting against my shoulder, I went in search of her bedroom. Two doors escaped off the living room. One contained a futon, a collection of shoes – over a hundred pairs – and a small collection of children’s books: Lewis Carroll,
The Famous Five
,
Eloise of the Plaza Hotel
. The other bedroom had a quaint four-poster bed covered with colourful scarves. There were ballerina shoes hung on the wall and ballerina memorabilia placed neatly, on lace doilies, over every surface. There was a teddy bear bleeding stuffing from his ear on her bedside table, next to a copy of Aesop’s
Fables
, a cut-glass tumbler of water and a thermometer. I carefully flopped Julie down amongst the throw pillows and pink silk blankets on the bed, wondering if she’d always been that thin. She was beautiful, though, like an aging doll.
“Who are you?” Julie said. She stared at me and frowned.
“I’m not Lily,” I said. The arches of my feet ached in Lily’s stilettos.
“No,” she said. “No I guess you’re not,” she said. Julie’s bloodshot eyes fluttered closed.
“Did you have an affair with Richard?” I said.
“No,” said Julie. “He loved Lily. It’s such a pity they broke up, they made a great team.”
“What do you mean, broke up?” I said.
“Oh, you know. They got a divorce not long before she died. A month or two, maybe. Not too many people know that I guess. He told me though. He was my friend.”
“How come they broke up?” I said.
“Her affairs, his depression. Money trouble, too, I think. You’re so lovely, though,” Julie purred. “You’re divine. You two should make another go of it; see if you can make it work. He loves you so much.”
“I’m not Lily,” I said again.
“I know you’re not, I know you’re not,” she slurred.
I stepped out from the acidic smell of vodka sweat and restless sleep that was creeping up in Julie’s bedroom with every breath she exhaled. I wondered if what she’d said was true, or just the drugs messing with her head. I looked at the photo of Julie and Richard with their motorcycles, both looking young. I padded over to Julie’s living-room window and leant my hot forehead against the cold glass, then opened the window and breathed the smell of pine needles and night air.
The radio earlier had said that it topped a hundred in the valley that afternoon, but the evening was cool and still with a perfectly black sky shot over by a firefly orgy of street and billboard lights. If it was true they were divorced, I wondered if she’d left Richard for David, and I wondered what I felt about that. Who wrote the letters about umbrellas and love? Did Richard hurt Lily because of her affairs, or perhaps because of their money trouble? I felt very small and perturbed, and for a moment got my mind off Lily by letting myself think about the café. It would be 11:00 a.m. there, and Dad would be in a cloud of heat as chip-fat bubbles burst on the meniscus of grease and strips of potato browned in front of him, or he’d be getting bread out for sandwiches. He’d have hired some kid to take my weekend shifts. If it was a boy, it’ll take him a few weeks to notice that his acne is getting significantly worse and his skin reeks of bacon grease. Dad and the boy probably wouldn’t talk except to grunt over balancing the register at seven every evening, but Dad would give the boy more than his fair share of the tip jar. I tried to stop thinking, but my mind kept going – café, Daphne’s fingernails, Grandma’s swollen ankles, Lily’s love letters, Julie’s toes, then I thought of the little girl falling through the air and smashing on the floor. I opened my eyes with a jolt and tried to blink all my thoughts away, but couldn’t clear my head.
One night David and I compared scars, and continued the conversation we’d started in the car outside the Platinum Club a month and a bit ago. First I kissed the scar that split his right eyebrow and one on his cheek under his eye. They were just little indentations; slightly more textured than his skin, but not ice-coloured like my scars.
“Where’s this one from?” I asked, touching his cheek with the tip of my finger, my other hand resting across his torso.
“Bar fight,” he said, turning his head slightly to kiss the scar under my chin near my ear, which was shaped like Italy. “This one?” he asked, touching it.
“A savage game of Red Rover when I was ten,” I smiled.
“This one?” he said, and pointed to a curved Cheshire-cat-smile shape on my shoulder.
“I smashed a window by mistake once,” I said.
“Jesus,” he laughed.
“Yeah,” I blushed and kissed the soft space on David’s hand, between forefinger and thumb. He kissed the raised white globe under my right lip, where I bite down when I’m nervous. I showed him the scar on my bottom from when I was thrown in a skip and metal cut through my jeans, and the slice on my wrist from when I fell on a shard of metal during a scuffle at the football field. I even showed him the four-inch blue knife line inside my thigh, and he kissed it. Then I kissed the snake-shaped scar on his lower back, from falling off a balcony when he was wasted with Sam one night. One or two scars, like one on the side of his forehead, and one on his neck, looked fresher than the others. They’d healed, but they had that shiny, slightly raised look of freshly formed scars.
“What about your limp?” I said.
“The scars seem strange now,” he said to answer, touching his ankle, where there was a scar on his Achilles heel.
“Why?”
“I guess cos for the first time in my life I’m not drunk,” he said. “That’s why everything is so... empty, in my apartment. I got rid of everything that reminded me of alcohol. The scars remind me of alcohol. I think the ankle’s from... walking into a window, something dumb.”
“Do you miss her?” I asked.
“Who?” he said.
“Lily.”
He turned to look at me, but didn’t get angry. We were silent for a while. He touched his forehead.
“I think about her more than I’d like to,” he said. “But I wish I didn’t. I don’t want to have to think about her.”
“You must have loved her a lot,” I said.
“I said I don’t want to have to think about her,” he snapped, sitting up in bed and facing me. “I wish you wouldn’t bring her up. It’s so nice here with you. Then you have to mention some other woman.”
“Did she used to come with you on your drunken weekends, ever, outside LA?” I said to him.
“I’m not talking about this,” he said, and I thought for a moment that he was even going to hit me. My skin lifted, tingling, bracing itself, eager, but he deflated. His fist fell back onto the pillow, and he sunk back into the bed sheets.
“Sorry,” I said, and looked away from his sunken body. We were silent for a while, then he put his hand on mine. From his bed we could see a panorama of rooftops, washing lines and palm trees.
“Tell me a story,” David said.
“What sort?”
“Any. A story. Whatever you want. Tell me how you turned into a half-human, half-dove hybrid? Since you’re no mermaid.”
“My mother took off her dove costume and did it with my father at the back of a theatre,” I said. Then I thought for a moment. “No,” I said. “It happened when I was kidnapped by bandits.”
“Bandits?” he smiled.
“Bandits.”
“How were you kidnapped?” he asked.
“From a bar in the little village we’re travelling through with... It’s stupidly hot and we’ve been arguing all day... ”
“You and I?”
“No. Not you and I. Just a boy,” I said.
“What are you and this boy arguing about?”
“Mostly about how he left the top off the toothpaste and now all our clothes smell minty.”
David smiled.
“One cut can unravel a jumper,” he said.
“We’re drinking Coca Cola in a local bar, which is empty apart from a crouched old man, a barman with skin like dehydrated beef, and a tiny television set showing Olympic reruns of 100-metre sprinters. All the doors and windows are open, but the air is heavy and giving me a headache. All the humidity from months of travelling has finally soaked through my skull. My brain is damp laundry, mildewed wood, or week-old bikini bottoms found screwed up in some forgotten crevice of a suitcase. I excuse myself, the boyfriend has one eye on the sports channel anyway... ”
“Bastard,” David added.
“And I step outside onto a little dirt courtyard behind the bar.”
“What country are you in?” David said.
I shrug.
“It’s a country in my imagination.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, outside the bar there’s a man smoking a cigarette. He glares at me and I look away, over at the tips of the trees reaching out into the jungle. The man offers me a cigarette, and I hesitate, but he seems nonchalant and I’d like to inhale something, so I take it. He lights it for me, and as I kiss the filter to my mouth there’s a look in his eye, an unpleasant look. It’s a split second, but I know from the look in his eyes that everything in my life is about to change. The smoke rolls down my throat, and it suddenly feels like I’ve swallowed a bag of marbles and can’t breathe. I turn away from him.”
“A poison cigarette?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“Shhh,” I replied. “The next thing I know, I’m vomiting on myself and trying to stand up while three men help me out from the boot of an oversized car.”
“You’ve jumped in time.”
“I passed out. I don’t know where I am and I pass out again. When I wake up for the second time I’m on a small white bed in a small white room with no windows.”
“Who is the boyfriend?” David asked.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“If it’s not me, who is it?”
“He’s no one. He has blue eyes and a slightly frizzy, dusty brown ponytail. Even when we’re sitting in the bar, he’s already disappearing in my mind. I mean, I’m already forgetting who he is before we’ve even broken up, and he’s in my imagination. Do you know what I mean?”
“Your imagination is very detailed.”
“Are you jealous of a fictional character I just made up?”
“Perhaps you’ll meet him for ‘real’ one day, Mr Pony Tail. He sounds like an idiot, but perhaps one day you’ll meet him in a bar, or Whole Foods or something, and recognize him, recognize him as a future memory. Or he’ll recognize you.”
“Shall we kill him off right now? Just to make sure he doesn’t turn up in the vegetable section of Whole Foods and want to take my digits.”
“Sure.”
“Fine,” I smiled. “After I smoke the drugged cigarette and am folded into the boot of the car, a crazed jungle pirate with solid gold teeth robs the bar and guns down everyone inside it. It’s a completely unrelated and very unfortunate incident. The pirate kills the crouched old man, the barman and my fictional boyfriend, all for a small television and the equivalent of twelve dollars and fifty cents cash.”
“They assume you met the same fate, so nobody looks for you.”
“Nobody would look for me anyway.”
“Of course they would,” David said. “I would.”
“As an odd point of interest,” I replied, ignoring him, “although slightly off the subject, the pirate slept with his wife that night and they conceived a kid, who twenty years from now will end up winning a bronze Olympic medal in the 100 metres.”
“Huh. But back to the bandits.”
“I wake up in a dirty bed that smells a little bit like piss and mildew. My body is dirtier than it was when I passed out. There are ecosystems of jungle dirt in the frills of my belly button, and dried sweat clinging to the creases of skin at my armpits. My short blond hair is a helmet of grease and dirt, at the same time greasy and brittle to the touch. My skin is a shade darker than it was when I passed out.”
“You’re turning me on,” David said.
“The words ‘greasy and brittle’ turn you on?”
“No,” he laughed.
“Dirty?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a cliché,” I said.
“All men are clichés,” he said, and kissed me.