—What was her second fetish?
—The second fetish was cowboy boots. She said she didn’t like them. They disgusted her. They made her think of backwoods things, Jimmy Dean sausage.
—It sounds, I said, like she didn’t understand the meaning of the word fetish.
Lenny blinked.
—She was young. She was hardly twenty-four. I was in my late thirties, probably your age right now.
—Did you sleep together on the date? I always wondered that about Love Connection.
—People did the same things then that they do now.
—So you fucked right away.
Kevin, showered and dressed all in black, came outside at the hottest point of the day. He said hello to both of us on his way to his car. I felt like a whore.
6
THE FRIDAY THAT ALICE WAS working, I dressed in Lycra pants and a tank top. I applied mascara and blew out my hair. I drove to the studio. I was sweating so much that warm rivulets ran down my arms.
There was no evidence of the crash. It was wiped from the Canyon. The air was crisp because it was early and the sun was imposing like in a Hollywood western. In New York the sun was a pellet. We get over a death as though it happened only in a movie.
Looking in the rearview mirror, I absorbed the oil from my cheeks and nose with a powdered rose-scented blotting paper. I stared at my face, hating it, for so long that I became embarrassed for myself, as though others were watching me hate myself, and judging me for it. Then I got out and walked languidly to the door, an entirely different person from the one I’d been in the car. When I opened the door a brass bell tinkled. Like everything else in Los Angeles, it was nothing like what I expected. I expected white glossy walls and orchids the color of dawn. Instead there were dusty snake plants and mammillaria in terra-cotta pots. The green paint was peeling off the walls and the place smelled like summer camp. Waiting in line to register, I watched sweaty thin women exit with towels around their necks and rolled-up mats on cords over their shoulders. I thought of the way men talked about women who’d lost their beauty. I knew what they meant because it was happening to me. There was a fading in the eyes and an overall parch, like an old orange. But I believed it was less a physical change than a by-product of seeing their husbands become moony over a babysitter, as though the babysitter had solved the unsolvable equation or brokered world peace instead of merely braiding the child’s hair without the child crying.
I paid for a single class, twenty-six dollars out of a wad of cash that felt like last breaths. I wrote down my age and it looked back at me. Through the glass door I saw her. At first I saw only the back of her head and I was struck at once. Sometimes you can be struck by the back of someone. You won’t have to wonder if that person is as striking from the front. When she turned, I gasped. She had the kind of look that you saw very rarely, even in a place full of beautiful girls. She was so unequivocally flawless that I wanted to hit her.
My aunt Gosia was the one who told me about her, or left me information about her, in any case. When Gosia and my mother became close, I was disgusted. She was an interloper, a second wife, and I was jealous. Apparently they talked on the phone often, three times a week or more, when I was at school. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know. I was intimately involved with every part of my mother’s routine, to her increasing irritation. I can’t even change my bloody pad without you in the room.
After my parents died, I went to stay with Gosia. But living with her was not like living with a caretaker or a mother. It was like living with a casual woman friend. We shopped for clothes, she told me I had sex appeal, even at ten years old, and she showed me how to use it. She let me grow up alone. I went to school and I came back to the house and I ate her beet soup with its funny mushroom dumplings, but if I didn’t want to eat it, I didn’t have to. Most summers I spent in Italy with my mother’s cousins. There was a laxity, I didn’t have to come home if I didn’t want to. But Gosia gave me love whenever I needed it. If I wanted to be missed, she missed me. If I didn’t, she let me be. I won’t be able to give you that.
She also gave me all my parents’ money that I wasn’t supposed to receive until I turned twenty-one. Gosia didn’t believe that I should be controlled by the government or by her and my uncle. I blew a lot of the money on clothes, on shoes, on hotels with televisions in the bathroom, on caviar and foie gras and steak tartare and oysters.
After high school, which was a blur of bad grades, stupid bangs, and cigarettes, I moved into Manhattan. Gosia didn’t push me to go to college. My first apartment was on Rivington. The kitchen was a short strip of Formica with a butter-yellow fridge and a rusted white stove, but I was proud of it. I hung my mother’s precious Venetian dish towels from the steel rod of the oven door. Gosia came in and we would go to Barneys and have tea and poached salmon. She would give me a few hundred dollars every month, even though I was still living off of my inheritance. She bought me expensive shoes. She was the first one to do that. Manolos and Louboutins. One pair of petal-pink Chanel mules that I wear only when the weather is gorgeous.
Gosia told me as much as she knew, but she could not have prepared me for the reality of Alice.
Alice had a long, almost mannish nose, but it was offset by the largeness of her blue eyes and the thickness of her lips. It was a trick. Her big nose made you feel like you had to keep looking at her to determine what was so stunning. Her hair was thick and long and the color of Coca-Cola. She wore a bralette and a pair of Lycra pants. Her body was cartoonishly perfect. She had an hourglass waist and her hips were dramatically wide. I could picture someone gripping them from behind. She was twenty-seven.
Alice began the class with sun salutations. Unlike other instructors, she didn’t rhapsodize about energy or gratitude. She barely spoke but when she did the husk of her voice was hypnotizing.
The class made use of small arm weights and leg weights, five-pound sacks to Velcro around the ankles. The music was curated and varied—steampunk, blues, grindcore, Indian ghazel.
I tried hard to look elegant in the poses. During crow I was cognizant of the sinkhole between my breasts. I watched the men, inserted myself inside their heads and saw the ways they might bend the young instructor. It was erotic and eviscerating.
During corpse pose she played Cibo Matto’s “White Pepper Ice Cream.” She padded around the room to all the lying bodies, squatted by their heads, and flattened the flesh between their shoulders and chests. When she did this to me, my eyes involuntarily slipped open and we looked at each other. I saw the reflection of her blue eyes in mine. I almost passed out. I got up soon after and left the class before namaste.
* * *
THE ENCOUNTER LEFT ME FEELING like I was sixty. I wanted to call Vic. I wanted to call Gosia. I needed someone I already knew to stabilize me. I had nothing left but Alice.
Afterward I drove to Rodeo Drive because my mother loved it there. She was impossible to please or excite, but there were places she worshipped as though they were cast in gold, and Los Angeles was one of them. She’d seen so many noir films as a young woman—Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard—and Los Angeles was the rich velvety heart of them.
I counted palm trees and did not miss New York. I couldn’t divorce what had happened in New York from the rest of New York, from the Broome Street Bar with its copper cups and sexy bartender, from Spring Lounge the night I fell for the sexiest man in the world. From midnight on Broadway, way downtown where Manhattan looked like Rome, large and stone and anodyne. All of the city, now, was slicked in his big bright blood.