Authors: Anna Stothard
I decided to sit outside David’s office for one more day. If he didn’t appear I’d go to Venice Beach and give Richard back the suitcase as promised, but on the third day – when I was sick of smelling fried sugar and bland coffee from the doughnut shop – David stepped out of the revolving doors and into the sunshine. I hadn’t noticed him go in, and I held my breath for a moment when I saw him. He was even taller than I remembered, but slightly thinner and gaunter. He had a broad chest and big shoulders. He wore massive sunglasses and shapeless grey flannel trousers. I turned my head towards him, but stayed firmly out of sight around the corner. Again it was like he’d fallen into a pile of laundry and squirmed until he had clothes on. He paused outside the office building for a moment, looked at his wristwatch, then limped towards a coffee house on the corner of the street. I stayed on the opposite side of the road and felt sick. After two days of kicking my heels with nobody to talk to except a mean Radio Shack employee and a pre-pubescent Vietnamese doughnut maker whose vocabulary was limited to snack-related necessities, you might think I’d have come up with a plan about how to approach David. I hadn’t even thought about it, though, and on seeing him my mind went completely blank. I stayed crouched under my sunglasses and baseball cap on the steps. A few moments after going into the café, David came back out holding a paper cup in his hand. He walked back the way he came past the office and then four blocks down to his shiny black SUV. I watched from the other side of the road as he fumbled for his car keys and spilt hot coffee on his hand. He swore under his breath, or at least his lips moved, and he sucked his hand in a way that made me think of the half-animal Enkidu from Lily’s book. His large hands seemed to be shaking. Eventually he put the cup on top of the car and managed to climb inside, bringing the coffee with him. Then he just sat at the wheel for at least ten minutes, staring straight in front of him without taking a sip.
The night after seeing David I chain-smoked out of my hostel window, and then got dressed from Lily’s suitcase in her fuchsia silk dress and leather jacket. The sweat-stained ankles of her knee-high boots bit into the skin of my feet. There was even a little of Lily’s blood, a dissipating flower of the stuff at the heel of the left boot, maybe from a blister. There was nothing I could do about finding David again until the next day, and I needed time to think what to say to him, so in the meantime I went to a tiny downtown dive called just The Dragon, not too far from David’s office building in downtown Los Angeles. The Dragon was a long and thin room with an elaborate pastoral mural above the rows of vodka, gin and vermouth bottles behind the bar. Above the front door a beige stuffed cat bared his teeth and teetered on the wire spear that kept him upright, and along the walls were lots of different-sized mirrors. It was raining that evening. I could see in the mosaic of mirrors around the bar that Lily’s fuchsia sundress didn’t suit me. It was a beautiful thing with a high neck and a gold zip that traced my spine down the back, but it made me look pale and too skinny. I’d tried on some of Lily’s lipstick earlier, but anxiously smudged it off again at the last minute before leaving the hostel. By the time I arrived, my dress was polka-dotted with polluted rain and my hair was frizzy.
At first I only saw one barman, a man with the word “nomad” tattooed in Gothic letters on his wrist. The bar was busy for such a small space, with three couples at tables around the sides and one group of students with beers and books in the corner. I was just rummaging in my rucksack for Lily and August’s wedding photograph, planning on asking the nomad bartender if he knew August. Then August himself came backwards out of the kitchen with an armful of frosted Martini glasses. He wore a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to above the elbow. He must have been older than Dad, at least forty, but he looked quite similar to the youthful face in his wedding photograph. August’s eyes were soft, his skin was thin, and he moved towards the bar with an aquatic elegance that belied his age. He walked like a teenage runway model, the complete opposite of the Giant’s oversized and tipsy limp that had made me hold my breath earlier in the day. August had curly brown hair that was thinning slightly at the top of his head and was cut much shorter than in the wedding photograph. He didn’t look at me as I sat at the bar, but gruffly asked:
“What can I get you?” He wiped the smudge on a Martini glass with a checkered cloth.
“Whatever’s good,” I said. He stole a blank look at me, and then, without a word, filled a tumbler with ice. He poured a clear liquid over the ice, then filled the rest with vodka and stirred it all up before straining it into a Martini glass. He twisted a lemon slice into the liquid like he was wringing laundry, then spread the broken-fleshed lemon around the edge of the glass and dropped it into the vodka. He put it in front of me and gave me a quick, distracted smile.
“Enjoy,” he said, and walked away. I put my fingers on the stem of the glass and was about to say something to make August come back, but my voice caught. I sipped vodka in silence and watched August’s pretty face light up at the sight of a woman in a business skirt-suit talking about a new rock band she’d seen at a club the other night. Suddenly I felt exposed and wobbly on the barstool, so I climbed off and retreated to an empty table with a clear vantage point of the bar.
“They were just awesome,” said the woman in the business suit, clasping her hands together and smiling, “Like, so cool. We danced for ages. It was fun.”
“Yeah? Guess I’ll check them out some time,” drawled August with his glossy brown eyes stuck on her.
“I’ll burn you a copy of their album if you like?”
“That’d be cool,” he said.
“No problem.” She smiled and leant on the bar to continue flirting with him, while I sat and watched the back of his head bob up and down in the occasional burst of appreciative laughter. Occasionally she wound her shoulder-length hair around her painted fingers, or bobbed down to fiddle with the buckle of her heeled white sandals. I got Lily’s book out of my bag and laid it out on the sticky table with the cover bent back to hide the drawing of a naked man on the front. I’d put the Polaroid wedding photograph in the paperback for safekeeping and it peeked out of the side. I sat alone at the table for ages while more people turned up – a bearded man holding hands with a platinum-blonde, bottle-tanned woman, two men who read newspapers in silence. Eventually August looked in my direction and caught my eye for half a second, but by now I’d left it so long that I figured I might as well wait until he was closing up before giving him the photograph. Otherwise he’d wonder why I didn’t just come out with the photo first thing. August slid back over to the other side of the bar while I went back to reading about Enkidu and Shamhat the whore. I read slowly, aware of August’s shadow shimmying back and forth across the bar. At one point I think August and the nomad bartender whispered something about me, because when I glanced up they both looked quickly away.
It was around midnight when people started to leave. Most of the couples peeled off first, then the group of students with beers and books who’d been sitting in the corner, then the men with the newspapers and a group of businessmen I hadn’t noticed come in, and the last to leave were the bearded man and his platinum-blonde girlfriend, who had been kissing him and giggling in the corner while August and the Nomad washed down the tables and turned all the lights on. I felt awkward still sitting there, but August smiled at me as the bar was flushed with phosphorescent light and the last people in the bar guffawed drunkenly out of the door. August’s smile was a half-smile, really, sort of perturbed, like he couldn’t second-guess the creature in an ill-fitting purple dress and knee-high boots reading in the corner. I thought he was going to say something to me or tell me they were closing, but he didn’t. So I said, almost too quietly to be heard:
“Are you closing now?”
“Huh?” August said, leaning his elbows on the bar as if to help him hear me. Music was still playing in the bar, even though the lights were on.
“Are you closing now?” I said, slightly louder.
“You’re English,” he said. “Yeah?”
I nodded.
“I should be off I guess,” I said without getting up.
“What you reading?” he said, smiling like he was laughing at me.
“It’s not that good,” I said, closing it and turning it on its back. “I borrowed it. It’s not very good.”
“You’ve been reading it all night, though,” he said. “Must have been interesting enough. You want another drink before you go? We’ve been making bets on whether you were meant to be meeting someone or not.”
“I wasn’t meant to be meeting anyone,” I said.
“No one stood you up?” August said. “Really? I mean, it’s happened to the best of us. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“No,” I said. “It just looked like a nice bar. Does that mean you lose the bet?”
“You looked like you were waiting for someone,” said August, shrugging. “But I didn’t realize you were English. The English are odd. Every English person I know has been fucked up,” he said. “Strange people, you know?”
“I just felt like reading my book,” I said. “I’ve been on holiday with friends, but they all left this morning and I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“I can’t hear you,” he said. “Speak up.” He turned back to where the nomad bartender was putting chairs on tables. “Rob! Turn the music down, will you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. Rob rolled his eyes at August and obligingly turned the music down a few notches, then kept going with his tidying.
“I was wrong then, you weren’t stood up, you’re just a bit odd,” August said, putting three Martini glasses on the bar. “I’m making Rob and myself a drink, I’ll make you one too since you’re here. It’s Rob’s birthday,” said August.
“I don’t want one,” said Rob. “I’m going home.”
“It’s your birthday,” said August. “You have to have one.”
“It’s my birthday and I want to go home to bed,” Rob said, but August made three drinks anyway. When August walked over to my table and passed me my second Martini I moved my finger, just half an inch, so that our skin touched slightly.
“Enjoy,” he said, and he smiled again. It was the smallest gesture, but my skin tingled. Maybe on some level his skin felt something of Lily in me, but what he probably recognized in this English girl wearing a rumpled sundress was her need to be touched. I should have taken out the photograph and given it to him at that point, right then before the other barman left, but I didn’t. Instead I took a deep breath and smoothed Lily’s dress over my legs. I thought of Laurence’s words about being visible when you’re aware of your body. My skin didn’t smell of nervous sweat and LA smog any more. It smelt of vodka and the fading remnants of Lily’s perfume.
“I’m beat,” said Rob, downing most of his Martini in one and turning off the music from a box behind the bar, then walking to the door. He looked disapprovingly at August again. “Are you going to lock up, then?” said Rob.
“I’ll lock up, dude, sure,” said August. My heart started to beat quite fast, and it got faster as the door clicked close on August and me alone in the silent bar. I should have taken the photo from the book as soon as Rob left. That would have made sense, but my fingers didn’t move. August gave me a puzzled look. He must have been wondering whether the potential result of this conversation had any chance of being worth the required effort, or whether he should just tell me to drink up and leave. August presumably thought I was some lonely tourist who’d been stood up and wouldn’t admit it, or who didn’t have anyone to spend time with in the first place. I took another sip of the Martini he made me. I touched the corner of the wedding Polaroid at the back of Lily’s book, and thought that if anything got out of hand I could just show him the picture. I hadn’t expected him to look at me like he was doing, so instead of showing him the photograph I smiled awkwardly at him across the bar. I’m not sure if I’m pretty – but I’m not ugly. And sitting in the empty bar with August I felt small and anxious.
“So you’ve been on holiday with friends?” he said, not believing me.
“Yeah.”
“From London?”
I nodded.
“Having fun in LA?”
“Uh-huh.” “Do you smoke?” he asked.
I nodded again.
“Let’s go have a cigarette on the fire escape,” he said.
And so I followed August through the back room of the bar where he grabbed a pack of Marlboro Reds and a Zippo from one of the many towers of boxes in an overcrowded, damp-smelling back room. The back door opened out into a little alley where deliveries were obviously made and the rubbish put out. August pulled down a ladder leading to a fire escape, and blood rushed to my skin as he took my hand to help me up the first few rungs of the ladder so I could sit just above him. I left my rucksack on the concrete floor amongst piles of cigarette butts under the ladder and climbed nearly to the first landing, then turned to sit down on the black-painted metal. August stood at the bottom, leaning on the brick wall with his face at the level of my knees. He lit my cigarette for me and passed it from his mouth, over my knees to my hand, then stood back a step and lit his own. We both inhaled.
“It’s a nice bar,” I said after a quiet moment.
“It’s okay. It’s fun.”
“Do you own it?”
“I’m the manager. I live up there at the moment,” he pointed to a window above the bar. “What have you been doing in LA? You had fun?”
“Just normal stuff. Tourist stuff,” I said.
“Shopping on Melrose?”
“That sort of thing,” I lied, not knowing what Melrose was. I sucked on my cigarette gratefully. I’m not great at small talk.
“And you had fun?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “Are you from LA?”
“Na, I’m from Nevada originally – the border between Nevada and Idaho. I’ve lived here a while now though.”
“Do you have family in Nevada?”
“Brothers and sisters, sure,” he said, but looked a bit bored with the conversation. He probably would rather have been talking to the girl in the business suit who wrapped her fingers around her hair and fiddled with the straps of high-heel sandals.