We’d visited Rodeo when I was nine and my parents bought me a dress for $425 that required a slip. It was black with tiny white flowers and a Peter Pan collar. My mother was angry about the dress but she herself had gotten a pair of ruby earrings and it was only fair, said my father. Her birthstone is not even ruby, I spat, speaking to my father but looking at my mother. It’s garnet. When I see you in my dreams you are wearing all the dresses I ever wanted.
I took the Pacific Coast Highway to Sunset. If someone told me this was hell, I wouldn’t have been surprised; the palm trees might have risen from beneath the mantle of the earth. But if this was hell then it was nice, the feeling of having crossed over. I recalled one of the final descents with John Ford, how I felt like a canal that this small balding man was passing through. I’d turned around to see his scummy eyes fluttering like a slot machine as he came.
Are you a prostitute? a man once asked me. I was eating alone at the bar of a fine restaurant. I had a mouth full of burger. The burger was terrible, it tasted oxidized. I was using my sweater like a blanket over my bare legs. You look like a Sylvie, he said. Is your name Sylvie?
I’d loved only one man. Love was not the right word. He didn’t love me. To this day, I still couldn’t face that. He would have loved Alice.
I was eating dinner with that man, the one I loved, when Vic walked in and shot himself. He shot himself in the nose. I tell you the nose because details are important. The splatter of blood on the wall was the shape of a maple leaf. What remained of his face was a suggestion. I saw a fetus once when I worked in the hospital, its image in an ultrasound, and the baby had no nose. The mother, a heavy Brazilian woman, reacted to the news as it was translated for her by a young nurse. She nodded serenely. Como Deus quer, she said.
As God wishes.
The sunlight was white in Beverly Hills, whereas in Topanga it was orange and gaseous. I was learning that Los Angeles is made up of distinct countries that are merely minutes apart. Not even countries but ecosystems. The homeless beg differently from town to town.
I walked into Lanvin. I was still wearing the same white dress. It made me feel young. I wore also a canvas cross-body bag. On my feet were old dirty sandals. Women can tell another woman’s worth by her shoes and bag. You can wear a tarp across your body, but the shoes and bag have to pass. I was conscious of this when I was greeted by a heavily made-up young blonde.
There was a time when I wanted to have a lot of money. I wanted the best of everything because I’d come to realize that expensive things were truly made better, lasted longer, and helped you live longer. Expensive cleaning products did not cause cancer. Chanel nail color lasted at least four days longer than the kind they used in regular salons.
All of that was still true but now I thought of life differently. What I wanted most in that moment—in what I felt might be the last year of my life—was to be poor, with a child. To go through the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant and order two items from the secret menu plus a Coca-Cola to share. Sit in the Dodge, both of us in the front seats, pretending to eat delicately, like we were at a queen’s tea party instead of in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. The yellow splash of light from the sign would illuminate the crud in the cupholders. In the morning we would eat milk and biscuits, the kind you can get for free in the breakfast rooms of travel lodges.
In the store I tried on a beautiful pair of emerald suede sling-backs. The salesgirl had nothing better to do so she watched me. My feet were dusty. I lifted my dress to see how the shoes made my calves look.
I paraded around in the green heels. I was trying to feel normal, or not even normal but at the very least like the girl I was before I met Vic. Of course I knew I was half dead already by the time I met Vic—a great many segments of myself I pictured to look like the baba au rhum my mother used to love, little yeasty cakes saturated in rum. My lungs, for example. When at night I couldn’t breathe I imagined my lungs were soaked in sweet liqueur.
By the time I got to California it was even worse. I was embarrassed that I’d ever thought I could be a mother. The desire to be beautiful had been replaced by the lowly fear of looking ugly. But seeing Alice had done something I hadn’t expected. Her beauty made me remember my own.
My phone rang and I picked it up because it was a familiar-looking number and I thought it might be my aunt even though she was dead.
It was a woman with whom I’d never spoken but about whom I knew a lot.
—Is this Joan, she said.
—Who is this?
—My name is Mary. I’m Vic’s—I was Vic’s wife.
* * *
THE FIRST TIME VIC AND I had sex was in Scotland, but sex has little to do with any first time. For some it might mean the hand on the knee. The clearing of sticky hair from someone’s forehead.
The whole team was in Jekyll Island for a conference. I’d already begun to take oceanfront rooms for granted. The first morning I skipped the group breakfast and went alone to the breakfast room called Jasmine Porch, where I ordered sweet tea and grits and red-eye gravy with a side of country ham. I sat in that spacious dining room looking at all these people who hadn’t lived a lot. They were mostly older than me but I could tell this was their first time drinking from a glass with an iced orchid inside.
I was tan and young and careless. The waiter filled my large coffee cup from a polished silver pot. I saw a woman in her early thirties enter the restaurant, using two canes to walk. Her husband and their child walked ahead of her, following a hostess to a table, and an older woman, her mother probably, was holding the younger woman’s elbow. I had this urge to send over something, French toast for the table. After all, the firm was paying for our meals. I called the waiter, but before I could ask him, Vic materialized.
I wish I could include a picture of him. I don’t have any. He was more of a feeling sometimes. His nice but too-big suits. So much suit material, like a factory.
—Hey, kid, he said, looming.
—Oh, hey.
—Rolling solo?
—I wasn’t feeling a group situation.
—Me neither. Mind if I intrude?
I had with me a Departures and wanted badly to be alone. I knew the precise color I wanted my coffee and how to have an orgasm in under thirty seconds. I needed everybody in the world—including waiters—less than they needed me.
—Sure, I said.
—Sure you mind, or?
He was terribly afraid of me. He was the most gorgeous listener in the whole world.
—Of course I don’t mind.
How had he found me? How did he always seem to find me? One time, inexplicably, he found me on the second floor of a deli with buffet islands of old but glistening orange chicken.
He sat down and I forgot about sending over the French toast to the handicapped woman. I didn’t remember until later that night in Vic’s grand hotel room with the ocean just below us. I’d never stayed in such places with my parents.
It was me and this other girl who worked at the copy desk and who’d brought a complaint of unwanted sexual aggression to HR, and this young man, a sort of lackey of Vic’s, but then everyone was. Vic had a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue and we were drinking it on the balcony from rocks glasses with pebbled bottoms. Vic’s room was a suite so he had a couch out there and we’d dragged two chairs from the bedroom. It started out with the two of us girls on the couch, but at some point the pairings got rearranged and Vic was on the couch with me. I’d had two glasses of Scotch on top of the three glasses of red wine at dinner. I don’t know if I laid my head down. My guess is that he, by measured increments, lowered it down: Aw, poor, tired baby. I remember only the airplane runway of his lap, the navy miles. The ocean shushing. The other two watching me lie across him. Nothing happened, but merely the position of my head on his lap, it was somewhat a rape. That he had hunted me so quietly, that I had allowed my neck to get caught in the teeth of something stupid. I closed my eyes so that it was happening only for the others and not to me and that was when I remembered about the handicapped woman. And I felt sad about not sending the French toast with vanilla bourbon cream and whatever lavender flowers came on the side. Then a moment later I thought, She doesn’t need you, idiot. She has a mother and a child. You have nothing.