—Salinas, she said. My dad works on a farm. It was the most she volunteered. She asked absolutely nothing of me.
She came very close to me while demonstrating a knob under the La Marzocco. She smelled like drugstore vanilla perfume. When she texted on her phone, her pretty pink nails stabbed the screen adroitly. I flipped through the manual for the coffee machine. I read the ingredients on the chocolate bars.
Around noon the bell over the door jingled and a man walked in. He was in his fifties and wrecked and seedy and handsome.
—How are you doing, Natalia? he said.
—Good, thanks, she said.
He looked at me. How are you? he said. He said it like he didn’t need a response, but it was enough for me. I nodded and smiled.
I ferried the dry mugs from the rack onto the shelf. He ordered a green soup from Natalia. The cook, a shrewd Mexican woman named Rita, made it once every three days and it lived in a vat. It was a puree of asparagus, kale, and onions, and full of butter. The whole canyon was crazy for it. He went to sit outside.
I’d been struck by him and suddenly realized why. He reminded me of Big Sky, of what Big Sky would look like a decade from now. Alice would make me see these things, my penchant for a certain flavor of man, a certain type of imbecilic self-destruction.
—Is he a regular? I asked Natalia.
—Dean. Yeah. He used to be famous.
—What’s his last name?
—Um, I don’t know. But he was Doctor Johnson? The lead singer of them.
When his soup was ready, I told Natalia I’d take it out to him. I didn’t know much about Doctor Johnson. I knew the song “Jessica’s Father” and that they sang Shel Silverstein poems.
He was leaning back in his chair, his jeaned legs spread. His loafers were expensive and his brows reddish, as though he’d tried to dye them from gray. I could tell he’d had eyelid surgery and I can’t explain why I was attracted to old, young-acting men. I also liked big noses, dishonest expressions. Men who couldn’t be bothered but were friendly. Ego. Former high school quarterbacks. Cheaters.
—Goddess soup, I said, setting the earthenware bowl down in front of him.
—Thank you. You’re new?
—I am.
—New to the Canyon as well?
—Yes.
—How do you like it so far?
—Oh, I don’t know.
—That was a stupid question. I hate when people ask me stupid questions like that.
He smiled. I could see clear through to his young self. I saw older men the way they still saw themselves. That was why they liked me so much; I was a solar panel, absorbing and refracting and reenergizing.
—It can get strange up here, he said, but it’s the best air in Los Angeles. He had an accent like just about every man I’ve liked.
Big Sky, of course, had an accent. He’d grown up down south. His voice was heroic. Accents are also a lie.
I met him in a nice bar on Wall Street, beneath street level, with hanging lamplights and red leather banquettes. This was during Vic. Almost always in my life there had been one man I desired who was giving me nothing at the same time that there was another who didn’t move me but from whom I was taking very much.
Big Sky wore a cashmere jacket. Underneath it a fishing vest. The second I saw him I thought, Here is the greatest man in all of Manhattan. We made eye contact from thirty feet away. He had blue eyes, too, a deeper blue, even, than my father’s. I began to sweat as he walked toward me. Instant dampness under my arms. I had a plate of oysters in front of me and a glass of Gewürztraminer. He was on his way to the bathroom. He purposefully paused near my seat and the bartender introduced us. We said hello and right away we both knew what was between us.
On his way back from the bathroom he asked me about my oysters. Like an asshole, I talked about why I preferred West Coast to East. After politely but ludicrously asking if he could try one, he slurped it off its rocky beach like he knew how much I already wanted him.
He was there with a friend, a blondish man who was married and lived in the suburbs. The chasm between them was considerable. The friend was a regular guy with a regular tie. He took the train into work and his wife didn’t have to worry.
I wondered if Big Sky’s wife had to worry. I saw a picture of her when he showed me one of his young son. Long brown hair, in shape, uninteresting legs. She’d held a good job in the city, something creative, before quitting it for the kid. She was from a city and from a family that made Big Sky proud. She ran every morning around the park.
Big Sky pointed at his friend with a gorgeous thumb.
—He still gives up shit for Lent, isn’t that tragic?
I laughed too loud.
The bar, intended for after-work cocktails, began to clear at nine p.m. The bartender opened the door and I felt the cool spring air. I got cold. I was wearing a sleeveless dress. A man I knew from the bar came by with his coat, a thick patchwork pelt, and draped it across my shoulders. It was heavy and it laid across my slight frame in a tyrannical manner. It wasn’t a nice gesture. It was like he’d rolled his balls out and stretched the sticky dough against me. Men were always putting their coats around my shoulders. They mark their territory that way. It’s better to freeze to death.
Big Sky had been in the bathroom or making a phone call and I’d thought of nothing but him, but also I had tolerated other people’s conversation because the first day you meet someone like that you still have your self-decency, you still can have an interest in life beyond every tendril of their hair.
He came back and said, What’s this, and he took the pelt off of me and replaced it with his cashmere jacket; he laid it across my shoulders and one of his fingers brushed my flesh and he said, That’s better, isn’t it?
The friend left because he had to catch a train. We talked for an hour more. He worked in finance. He spoke candidly of what was going on, the collapse of Wall Street.
He looked me in the eye over his bitter-smelling beer and said that he and all the men down there were a sad bunch of losers.
—We don’t create shit, he whispered at my mouth. We trade paper. It’s all worthless.
It was the same type of thing Tim had said, but Big Sky made even more money. His dishonor was grander, sexier.
When men tell you they are pieces of shit, when they tell you they are scumbags, they do it because they subconsciously know that you are hooked. It hooks you more. They push you away to pull you in and the most terrible thing is they don’t even do it on purpose.
I told him I needed an accountant, that I was in the midst of my own collapse. He smiled and said he had the best one. He said he himself would give me sound investment advice. He said his accountant was the type who should go to jail but never would.
—Write or call me, he said. I’ll make an intro.
Then he said he should go, too. He wrote down his full name and number and email on an order slip.
I went home that night feeling beautiful.
A couple of days later I wrote to him. My note was all business and he wrote back, How about a drink next wed?
He wasn’t much for punctuation, which I liked because it showed confidence and carelessness. Sure, I said, same place?
He wrote, How about spring lounge?
It was north about twenty blocks from the people he worked with and the place I lived.
I walked the whole way there. It was a bright day in early spring. I wore a leather halter top and jeans and riding boots. I’d pulled my hair into two loose pigtails. Some hypochondriacal thoughts were passing through. Cancer, mostly. A black-and-blue on the inside of my arm that I thought could be the first sign of blood cancer. A sharp headache meant it had now spread to my brain. I soothed myself with the thought that if I were dying it would all be over soon, including not being able to have this man who was the only man for whom I had ever felt this strongly, even after just one meeting.