Losing Clementine (27 page)

Half a mile in, I saw the Asian-inspired, squared-off wooden arch I'd been told to spot. I turned on my blinker, signaling to the prowling mountain lions, and bumped onto the gravel driveway. Two ruts with a grassy strip down the middle guided my tires toward her house and studio, which, now that I was off the road, glowed like a campfire lantern in the near-full dark.

“I come in peace,” I said when she opened the door.

“That's good. No one can hear me scream out here.”

I followed her inside. Obviously she knew that bit of Manson trivia, too.

“There's a city just over those mountains,” I told her. “We have indoor plumbing and takeout.”

“Actually,” she said, “I like it here.”

The inside of the house looked like below deck on a sailing boat, all polished wood surfaces and built-in furniture. The recessed lighting bounced off the oak and made it glow like light passing through honey. A flat-screen TV hung over the fireplace, and through a doorway on my right, I could see chef-quality kitchen appliances.

My television, when I'd had one, had been two feet deep, full of vacuum tubes, and powered by a rat on a squeaky wheel. Probably I could've replaced it if I'd cared enough, but this was another level entirely.

“Where did all this money come from?”

It was out of my mouth before the full rudeness of it registered.

“Trust fund.”

“I thought those were an urban legend,” I said, “like people who have their kidneys stolen and wake up in a bathtub full of ice.”

I looked up. Even the ceiling was wood. There was a lot of art. Paintings and photographs on the walls, a little of everything, none of it hers. Mostly thirties- and forties-era stuff. Sculptures, too. Small-scale abstract pieces on the coffee table and tucked into bookshelves, built-in, of course.

It was such a crapshoot, wasn't it? How differently her life must've gone from mine. I'd never thought about it before. We had the same job, showed at the same gallery. I never thought our lives—our day-to-day, taking-out-the-trash lives—would be so different.

“What did your father do?” I asked.

“Engineer by trade. He had some aerospace patents, started his own company.”

“Did your mom stay at home?”

“Until she died.”

“Died of what?”

“Ovarian cancer.”

“My mom died, too, when I was a kid.”

“I didn't know that,” she said. “I'm sorry. What did she have?”

“A gunshot wound.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it again.

“It's okay,” I said and pointed at the dispenser on the door of her refrigerator. “Does that make crushed ice?”

“Yes. Do you want some?”

“Do you have Coke?”

“With a cherry and a bendy straw?” she offered.

“Absolutely.”

She made my drink and pointed out a glass door to a small outbuilding twenty yards away. Lights were on inside it, and a flagstone path through a bed of gravel lit with ankle-height lanterns marked the way.

“I laid a robe out for you in the bathroom. Just come out when you're ready.”

The bathroom was down the hall. It had a modern claw-foot tub and a hammered copper sink basin. I opened the cabinets underneath, but this wasn't her private bathroom. There were no toiletries or medicines, only spare toilet paper rolls and hand towels. I peed and washed my hands. The soap in the dispenser smelled like honeysuckle.

I took off my clothes and folded them up in a pile on the marble tiled floor. It was good, I thought, that the bathroom mirror was hung high, and I couldn't see anything in it from the nipples down. Otherwise vanity might have stopped me. The robe was white and fluffy like you might get at a high-end spa. I put it on and took my Coke with me.

Out on the flagstones, I shivered and hurried to the studio.

Inside, Elaine was setting up her materials. She had a handful of heavy, fibrous pieces of paper, off-white and with raw edges, alligator-clipped to a drawing board and set up on her easel. They were each two feet tall, and a hell of a lot more expensive than anything I'd have used for sketching.

She pointed to a stool ten feet away. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “Whatever position you prefer.”

There was track lighting above us with most of it pointed over her drawing space and my modeling space. It was like having a soft spotlight shining on you. It was warm in there. I didn't really need the robe.

“I'm not usually so easy to get naked,” I said.

“Everyone's nervous the first time.”

She was barefoot and wearing an embroidered peasant blouse over moss-green hiking shorts and was at a quarter profile to me. It was easy for her to shift her gaze to me when she needed without either of us having to stare directly into the eyes of the other.

“I'm not nervous,” I said.

She waited.

“Okay, I'm nervous.”

My stomach felt like I'd swallowed a handful of jumping beans, and I was thinking about how, after years of meds, I'd put on weight and my butt was dimply. I took off the robe quickly and tossed it toward the worktable, but only part of it made it and then the whole thing slid off onto the floor.

“I'm not going to ask you not to draw my butt fat because if someone asked me not to draw their butt fat, I'd probably decide the butt fat was the most interesting thing.”

“You won't even be recognizable when I'm done,” she said.

I'd perched myself on the edge of the model's stool, one foot on the rung and one on the floor. My hands were on the seat behind me, my elbows straight and locked. “If I'm not recognizable, you'll have to talk about me a lot so people know I posed for you.”

She smiled with teeth. “You know I will.”

“What the hell happened to all your stuff?” Richard demanded when I opened the door.

He was wearing long cargo shorts and a gray T-shirt. He hadn't shaved in a couple of days, nor, I suspected, had he showered before showing up at my place that morning. He had a Dodgers baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and didn't look like he'd slept.

“I sold it,” I said, letting him in.

“Why?”

“It wouldn't fit in the economy-size pyramid my slaves are building to guide me into the afterlife.”

He did not think that was funny. In truth, it wasn't one of my better jokes, but I still thought I should've gotten points for trying.

“You haven't called me about your appointments,” he whined. “I told you I wanted to go.”

“There hasn't been a good time.”

“It's never a good time. It doesn't matter.”

“You have a life.”

“Sheila and I broke up.”

Well, there. Now we were getting to it.

“That's too bad,” I said, because that's what you're supposed to say, and those sorts of things just come out like farts and sneezes.

“Thanks.”

“What happened?”

Chuckles came over to rub the length of his body on Richard's sneakers and then roll over on top of his foot to display both his shaggy stomach and his preference for my ex over me.

Richard bent down to scratch the cat's undercarriage as directed. “You know how sometimes you fight about something, like who's running up the electric bill, but you don't even care about the electric bill?”

“So you broke up over an electric bill because you wanted to break up and that's the best you could come up with?”

“Pretty much. She thought I was insane.”

“You are insane.”

“I was going to ask if I could sleep on your couch.” He looked at the empty and slightly cleaner spot on the floor where the couch had been. “Guess not.”

“I sold it to a Swedish couple,” I said. “IKEA was closed.”

We stopped at a taco truck, which was doing a brisk early lunch business with the construction workers who'd torn up a particularly inconvenient section of Santa Monica Boulevard. While we waited for our order, we listened to traffic, and I sipped a tamarind Jarritos and thought about how much time I'd spent hearing traffic in L.A. and how I'd never really noticed it before.

“You notice how L.A. is a city of sound more than smell?” I asked.

“What?”

Richard had a can of Diet Coke and was wiping condensation off the sides with a napkin. The truck gave out the sort of napkins you buy at the grocery store and use in your own house rather than the kind that come out of dispensers at diner tables.

“Some cities are all about the smell. New York is all about the smell. L.A. doesn't really smell much, but it has this low-grade ambient noise all the time. Mostly cars.”

“The Santa Monica Library smells like piss,” said one of the workers waiting for his order. He had on an orange vest and was wearing long pants and sleeves despite the heat.

“I'm not saying there are no smells,” I said. “I'm just saying smell doesn't define it.”

“And when the tide goes out, the beach smells like rotten fish,” his buddy offered.

They were missing my point.

“Everybody says the ocean is supposed to smell clean and refreshing,” Richard said.

“It doesn't,” the first guy said. “Except sometimes at night. Then it's okay.”

I was glad when the cook pushed their order through the window and they moved off. Conversation vultures.

Our order was up next. We each took our double-layer paper plates loaded with tacos to the salsa bar. I picked the one that looked spiciest and dribbled it across all four of mine, already loaded up with chopped raw onion and cilantro with sliced radishes and a side of lime wedges. Each taco was built on small corn tortillas that, like the plates, were doubled up for better engineering and stability.

“Cabeza
means ‘head,' you know.”

“I know,” I said, squeezing my limes and tucking in for a bite of my head taco. Each one was about three bites for a total of twelve bites of heaven. All for under five bucks.

Richard had ordered
carne asada,
which is what he always ordered and is fine if you don't know enough to order the
cabeza,
which isn't brain but more like cheek that's been stewed and stewed until it's so tender you don't need teeth. The
carne asada
is usually tough. My superior taco selection allowed me to save on chewing time.

“At least I don't have to feel guilty anymore,” he said.

“About what?”

I had a nearly empty plate and was down to eating the bits of fallen meat, which left orange stains on the paper. I chewed on the stray radish slices. Radish was key to a good taco.

“About us, what we did.”

I folded my empty plate in half and tossed it into the trash can along with my napkin.

“Jesus Christ, Richard.”

“What?”

“You broke her heart and fucked up her life so you wouldn't have to feel bad about sleeping with your ex-wife?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No, she broke up with me. Technically.”

“You're such a tool.”

“What the hell?” He threw up his hand, forgot he was still holding half a taco, and spilled meat and onion across the sidewalk.

An hour later, we were standing in the showroom of a funeral home the cemetery had recommended. The carpet under our feet was dark teal with heavy, matching drapes, and the wallpaper was a camel color that alternated satin and matte stripes. All the artwork was framed in ornate gold and featured the French Revolution, when presumably coffin sales were way up. The saleswoman, who wore a lady suit and sensible shoes, had gone to fetch brochures and left us alone with a roomful of empty caskets. Some of them were on display racks that tilted at a forty-five-degree angle so you could appreciate the tufted satin and the little pillows that came with them.

I reached in and tested the cushioning, which really gave Richard the heebie-jeebies.

“Do you think all this fluffy stuff would be, I don't know, claustrophobic?”

“Normal people don't pick out their own coffins.”

He was refusing to look directly at them, as though they might become aggressive.

“Who else is going to do it?” I asked. “You? Besides, it's part of the package deal.”

The options boiled down to either metal or wood, with large gradations in price. The steel was economical, but I was leaning toward a bronze finish. You only die once, right? I would, however, probably skip the customizable embroidery on the inside of the lid lining, which felt just a little too much like having your shirts monogrammed.

He dodged the question. “I don't think it's healthy. Have you told your doctor you're doing this? Aren't you supposed to be doing positive thinking exercises?”