Losing Clementine (24 page)

“You're not into this.”

I looked down. When had he stopped?

“I suppose I'm not.”

“Is there anything I can do different?”

“Age twenty years.” That was out of my mouth before I could stop it. “Sorry.”

He rolled over on his side and rested his head on his palm. “It was worth a try, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

Poor kid was still in his dress shirt and trousers, which were fitting snug in the crotch.

“You want to spend the night?”

Oh God, I really did not want to spend the night. The booze would soon start to leave my bloodstream and leach out through my pores, leaving me all too aware of my surroundings. The air smelled of something that could have been microwave burritos mixed with cigarette smoke, and I was about to have to use the bathroom, which I wasn't looking forward to. Seeing it all in the smog-diffused sunrise was more than I could bear.

“Can I have a glass of water?” I asked. “Can I have three?”

He fetched a cold bottle out of the minifridge, which did not, as it turned out, contain any yogurt. I opened it and drank. The bathroom was not the horror show that it could have been. There were no cigarette stubs in the toilet or pubic hair in the sink. Used condoms did not lie gushily on the floor of the shower. It did have the moldy smell of poor ventilation, no window, and the approximate square footage allotted airplane lavatories. I peed and washed my hands and straightened myself, all without facing my reflection.

When I stepped out, he was stretched out on the bed with the television on. Jon Stewart was behind an anchor desk. We watched it together while I finished two and a half bottles of grocery-store-brand water, which was the kind I bought, too.

Each gulp brought more and more sobriety until I was pretty sure I could stand on one foot and touch my nose.

My shoes were on the floor, and I slipped them on. Barefoot at Annabelle's was one thing. Barefoot walking down the sidewalk in this neighborhood was another. William walked me to the front door of his building and kissed both cheeks good-bye.

Cars were parked nose to tail on both sides of the street, and the sidewalk was cracked and uneven where tree roots had broken through. The buildings were close together, all stucco with the arched doorways and tiled roofs of L.A. architecture. Some of them were pretty, even in their worn, decayed states. Vacancy signs were posted in upper-floor windows, and the grass had been worn to the sandy, unfertile dirt below.

I was less than a block off the main roadway but walking deeper into the neighborhood. I'd circled twice before finding parking. Sounds of traffic and late-night commerce faded as I walked, and quieter residential noises, fewer and farther between, took over. A car door slammed on another block. Two voices argued then laughed as I walked past a group of shirtless men smoking on a porch. My shoes
click, click, clicked
on the concrete like the sound effects in a monster movie before the ominous music starts to swell. I tried not to think about that.

I found my car, drank the last of my bottle of water, and climbed in.

I was close enough to the freeway to see the entrance sign when the yowl of the siren startled me. I glanced down at the speedometer. Ten miles per hour over.
Crap
. I looked in the rearview mirror. He was right on my tail, lights flashing, turning the siren on and off so it yelped like a wounded puppy instead of the long blare of an emergency chase.

I pulled over, turned off the engine, and fumbled for my driver's license and registration. I wiped my sweaty hands on my dress, which had no doubt picked up the aroma of microwave burrito. When he got to my window, I handed him my identification. He read it and my registration and took them both with him back to his car.

I waited. The dashboard clock read 2:14. I dug in my purse for a petrified piece of gum and crammed it in my mouth. I checked the rearview mirror again. No movement.

2:20.

2:29.

2:34.

My body didn't know whether to get less nervous or more nervous as time went by, but sitting still was becoming unbearable. Would it be considered a sign of aggression to knock on his window? Could he have had a stroke sitting in his cruiser? What were the odds he was in desperate need of CPR at the very moment I was tapping my thumbs on the steering wheel?

It was after the thirty-minute point that worry began to morph into anger. It crept up the back of my neck and flushed my cheeks. This was not how I wanted to spend the time I had left. I put my hand back on the keys still dangling from the ignition and checked the rearview mirror one last time.

He was stepping out of his car.

My annoyance did not abate.

“Ma'am,” he said, when he got back to my window, “have you been drinking tonight?”

Trick question.

“Not so that it's a problem,” I said.

“Would you step out of the car, please?”

The breathalyzer read 1.0, only 0.2 over the legal limit. I felt pretty good about that under the circumstances.

“You're going to have to hire a lawyer,” Richard said. “Your insurance is going to go through the roof. You'll probably lose your license.”

“Technically, I already lost it.” I held up the piece of paper I'd been issued in lieu of my real California ID.

“Jesus Christ, Clementine. Why couldn't you have just stayed wherever the fuck you were?”

“He was young enough to be my kid. He had a studio apartment with no kitchen. It smelled like burritos.”

The vein in the side of Richard's neck bulged, and he didn't look at me. “That was fast.”

I leaned my head back against the seat. Sunrise was no more than an hour away. I was so tired my eyes itched, and moving my arms seemed like too much work. Richard took the on-ramp too fast, and my shoes rolled around on the floorboard.

“What's fast?”

“You were just in bed with me a week ago!”

“It was two weeks ago. Stop yelling.”

“Out of one bed and into the other.”

“Hey, screw you. You going to tell me you've stopped sleeping with Sheila out of respect for our little fling?”

Richard didn't say anything.

“That's what I thought.”

We drove in heavy silence down the freeway. Even at this undefined hour, too late for night but too early for morning, cars were in every lane. Where were all these people going? I wasn't complaining. I liked how the city was always in motion at all hours, no matter what.

“You cut your hair.”

I jerked my head up off my chest. I was asleep enough to drop my head and awake enough to know it.

“What?”

“You cut your hair. I like it.”

We were nearing my exit.

“Is that ex-husband-speak for ‘Sorry I called you a slut'?”

“I didn't call you a slut. I wouldn't say that. I just like your hair.”

He was wearing sweatpants, flip-flops, and a giveaway T-shirt advertising a software company. His hair looked like he'd been running his hands through it the wrong way, and there was just enough product left in it from the day before to make it stick like that.

When he pulled up to the curb, I unbuckled my seat belt. “Tell Sheila I'm sorry I woke her up.”

“She wasn't there.”

“Okay.”

He didn't say anything else, and I didn't, either. Maybe she was on a trip. Maybe she'd taken to pitching a tent in the backyard. Maybe she'd entered a fugue state. It wasn't my business.

I gathered up my shoes and climbed out. He rolled down the passenger-side window, and I leaned down to look in.

“You could've been hurt,” he admonished. “You could've hurt someone else.”

“I was barely over the limit. I wasn't impaired.”

“You've never been a very good judge of that.”

“Are we still talking about booze?” I asked.

“No,” he said and rolled up the window.

The phone rang, and the number showed the call box on the front of the building.

“Son of a bitch,” I told Chuckles. “They're early.”

I picked up the receiver and punched the access code to unlock the door.

The buffalo piece was on the floor. The animal was filled in, what you could still see clearly of it. I'd slept until noon the day before, taken a taxi to get my car out of impound, and then come home to work. I'd taken the widest brush I could find, like a housepainter's brush, and dipped it in bright red paint thinned to make it translucent. Then I'd made the animal bleed. All afternoon and evening I'd paced around it, adding gore, creating a scene of pain and destruction. The bucking outline of the animal that before could've been a defiant leap was now a death throe, and I was happy with it. It leaned against the wall, and a fresh, primed canvas with its first coat of paint was on the easel.

I hadn't showered since before going to Annabelle's. I was wearing jeans and a black tank top I'd found on the floor. I had red paint settled into my nails and the wrinkles of my hands up to my elbows. I had it on my pants and a smear across my boobs. I even had some in my hair from when I'd pushed it out of my face.

I'd stopped yesterday only to eat a little dinner and to answer the e-mail of a man from Silver Lake who wanted to meet Chuckles. He was supposed to come by at noon. By then I was planning on looking a little less as if I'd recently dismembered a body. Chuckles, who was on the verge of going feral, was going to be brushed, probably with my own comb, as I had no idea where Jenny kept his—or frankly if he even had one of his own. She could've been using my toothbrush to groom between his toes for all I knew. I had, in a moment of grandeur, imagined giving him a bath, but the mania dissipated, and I decided to just spray him down with room deodorizer instead.

But it was just after eleven, and all I'd done was add a coat of orange paint to my fingers. There was nothing to do but man the battle stations and hope for the best. I ran for the bathroom and lathered up to my elbows, leaving a sink full of sunset-colored bubbles. I sniffed my armpits, detected telltale, day-two musk, and added more deodorant. I snagged the Spring Fresh spray off the toilet tank, found Chuckles sunbathing in a pile of dust and crumbs on the kitchen floor, picked him up, brushed him off as best I could, and squirted his belly with the cold aerosol, which had the unintended consequence of pissing him off no end.

He turned his squished face to mine, yowled, and used his back feet to disembowel my bare bicep. Then, like a porcupine shooting quills, he let loose enough white fur to assemble a new, better-tempered cat, which stuck all over my black tank top.

By the time I got to the door, still clutching him, we were both furious, and one of us was bleeding. At least I could lie and say it was paint.

“Hey, there. I …” The words died in my mouth.

Elaine Sacks was standing in the hall with her hands shoved in the oversized patch pockets of her tunic. She'd showered and was probably wearing perfume that didn't come from a poop-stink-no-more can.

“You can't have Chuckles.”

It was the first thing that came to mind, and he reiterated the point by slamming his back jackrabbit feet into my gut and launching himself out of my arms, making for the space under the bed without a single paw touching the floor.

“What?”

“You didn't answer the ad about the cat?”

“No.”

It would've been a lame prank, signing Paul to the bottom of an e-mail about a soon-to-be-orphaned animal.

She was wearing black leggings underneath a button-down gray top, which was long enough to have been a dress. Her brown curls were pinned back in a low ponytail, and she wore black ballet slippers, all of which made her look more fragile, vulnerable, and feminine than I preferred to think she was. I preferred to think of her as not unlike Chuckles on a bad day except taller and with less shedding.

“Can I come in?”

“Why?”

I was genuinely asking.

“I thought we could talk. There are some things I want to say.”

The ground underneath me felt unsure. I wanted to check for traps. I turned my wrist as though to look at a watch that wasn't there.

“I have company coming in an hour.”

“I'll be quick,” she promised.

I turned and walked back inside, leaving the door open for her. I threw a drop cloth over the buffalo, which wasn't yet completely dry. I hoped it wouldn't hurt it.

She saw me, and I didn't care that she saw me. The other pieces, the ones that never went to the show, were stacked up, too. Those I left out in the open in defiance.

She stood in the entryway, unsure of what to do with herself. I pointed to the kitchen table, which was covered by my computer, newspapers, mail, and other debris that needed a place to land. She pulled out one of the chairs and sat down.