The Decent Proposal (8 page)

And then, a brilliant idea hit him.

ELIZABETH RETURNED TO
the table at 9:28 p.m. with a Neapolitan shake (another item off the secret menu: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry swirled together). Richard's leg was shaking harder than ever—a habit of his that was already beginning to annoy her.

“Hey!” he said, smiling broadly. “So I have an idea. How
'bout we use our time every week as a sort of book and movie club? Like, we have a certain book we read on our own, in our own time, and then we use our two hours to talk about it? Or we watch a movie and then talk about it for two hours? Your favorite books, my favorite movies. It'll be a fun way to pass the time, and I don't think we'll be violating our contract, s'long we don't use the two hours to read or watch the movie?”

Relief washed over Elizabeth—no, it was more like submerging herself in a bath of warm, fragrant water. She thought about the structure this would bring their dates. It was perfect. This she could handle.
Maybe.
Why hadn't she thought of it?

“Deal!” she said, flashing her perfect teeth. And before she had a chance to think too hard about it, she closed her eyes and counted on one hand to five. She'd never done this in front of another person before, and when she opened her eyes he was staring at her.

“What was that about?” he asked, more amused than curious.

She told him about her habit of taking time out to appreciate the good in an otherwise bad situation.

“So the good thing is my idea, and the bad thing is that we have to see each other every week?”

“I didn't mean it like
that
—”

“It's okay,” he said, chuckling. “I get it.”

They spent the next twenty minutes debating the best book and movie to kick off the club. In the end they decided to make it easy on themselves and start with what they knew—
Jane Eyre
and
Harold and Maude
. At 9:52, they emerged from In-N-Out into the cool evening air. Even though the temperature had hit 80 during the day, it hovered somewhere around 60 now, the habitually dry Los Angeles air incapable of retaining much heat
once the sun went down. At the center of the CityWalk lay a sprawling multiplex playing the blockbuster hits of the day. Richard paused to check out the movies listed on the marquee. He felt an urge for popcorn, which he felt every time he was in the vicinity of a movie theater.

“Man, I'd love some popcorn right now.”

“Why don't you go get some?” asked Elizabeth, with the simplicity of a child who wonders why adults don't just make themselves happy.

“Nah, not without a ticket. How'd I get in?”

“Just explain and I'm sure they'll let you. They make all their money off concessions anyway.” (
And it'll kill a few more minutes
, she thought. It was 9:54. They were so close!)

She was right. Richard ran into the theater, getting in easily and emerging five minutes later with a big bucket of salty, buttery popcorn. He'd never done this before, gotten a tub of movie popcorn without seeing a movie. It was kind of a revelation.

He walked closer to her, angling the bucket her way. He figured that after a burger, fries, lemonade, and a milk shake she wouldn't want any, but she grabbed a handful and popped it in her mouth.

She saw him watching her, and parted her lips without hesitating, the golden-brown chunks marring her beautiful teeth. She smiled wider, owning it.

“
So
good, isn't it?” he mumbled through his own mouthful.

She nodded, swallowing. “I'll ask Jonathan Hertzfeld if we can add the books and movies to our expenses when I talk to him tomorrow.”

“Ooh, good thinking.” And then, after a pause: “I wonder if this is what our mysterious benefactor had in mind when he thought this whole thing up.”

“Who cares?” said Elizabeth. “He—or she—is obviously insane.”

He laughed, and they ambled toward their cars. Before they parted, Elizabeth checked her watch one last time: 10:01. They'd done it.

The first two hours had passed.

ELIZABETH TURNED INTO
her driveway, which was always a challenging endeavor since it was so minuscule: exactly the size of her car, maybe even a little smaller. Maneuvering into it was like pouring a sausage into its casing, and required her undivided attention. For this reason it wasn't till she was unbuckling her seat belt that she saw her front door, and froze.

It was open. Her front door was open. Why the hell was her front door open? This seemed impossible, but there it was, swaying in the ocean breeze, welcoming everyone inside as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Which it wasn't. Elizabeth never forgot to lock her door. The importance of looking after her things had been ingrained in her from an early age, and despite its doll-sized proportions, this two-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalow was easily her biggest possession. It had cost her a fortune (Venice was prime real estate these days, especially two blocks from the beach), and sometimes, when
she thought about the size of her down payment and the long years of monthly mortgage bills to come, she checked in with her accountant the same way a new mother consults the family physician: to make sure nothing was amiss, to be reassured it was all going to be okay. Each time she left, she jiggled the locked doorknob exactly eight times, and this afternoon she'd done it sixteen times for good measure, knowing she'd be home late from the CityWalk.

Her heart convulsed like a bird trapped inside her chest, its tiny wings fluttering in a panic. She could have driven straight to the police station at Culver and Centinela, or dialed 911 on her cell and waited for help to come. She could have at least alerted another human being to the fact that there was a potentially dangerous situation at hand. But she did none of these things, because just then she saw something else in the shadow of her door.

It was a wheeled suitcase, the compact carry-on kind flight attendants toted briskly through airports. Once red, it was now brown, or gray, or whatever the color of filth was. Elizabeth's fear gave way to outrage and she left her car, creeping forward, retrieving a tiny can of Mace from the bottom of her purse and brandishing it before her like a gun, right index finger poised over the nozzle.

She stepped inside on tiptoe. It was dark. She couldn't see a thing. A layer of salty grime had coated the threshold, and her shoes squeaked while crossing it. She winced, every one of her senses on high alert. Seconds later her ear discerned a soft, cyclical rising and falling: the sound of deep, untroubled sleep.
Unbelievable!
she thought, flicking on the overhead lights, and letting the can fall harmlessly to her side.

He was sprawled facedown on her white sofa, his right arm spilling off the edge and pointing to the floor, the tips of his fingers brushing against the side of an overturned wine bottle, as if
it were a lover. A burgundy pool leaked from the bottle's lip into the creamy white carpet beneath it. Elizabeth swooped down, setting the bottle upright, emitting a raspy sound of surprise and annoyance that came out something like:

“GRAGH!”

The carpet was ruined.

The man stirred, flipping onto his back. He did not wake; he began, in fact, to snore. Elizabeth bent over him, shaking him by the shoulders:

“Orpheus! Wake up! Goddamnit, Orpheus! Wake UP!”

Two crusted eyelids unstuck themselves. A pair of bloodshot eyes opened to the world. He shot up in a sitting position.

They bonked heads like cartoon characters.

“O
wwww!
Damn it!” she howled, making more of it than it really was, rubbing her forehead ostentatiously. “What the hell?”

He blinked at her, unseeing, but after a second or two his eyes found focus. “Sorry, Lily,” he croaked at her, eyes rolling downward to something below. “I fucked up.”

She thought he meant the wine, but then she smelled it. His pants were dark around the crotch. Beneath him, a yellow circle with scalloped edges had been etched onto her sofa.

In her adult life, Elizabeth almost never spoke Spanish. Even with her parents, she insisted on speaking English the few times a year they spoke, which was an easy and effective way of maintaining the distance established between them for years now. There were the rare occasions on which people spoke it to her, such as when the waiters at Versailles (a chain of Cuban restaurants) flirted with her, or when recent immigrants (a cashier in a convenience store, an attendant at a valet station) could not speak even rudimentary English, but for the most part she abstained. Now, perhaps as a latent effort by her calmer self—who had already processed what had happened and wanted to shield
him from her fury—she unleashed upon his head a torrent of expletives in her first language.

This was what she got for reaching out to people.

Six months earlier she'd noticed him on the Boardwalk, which was only a few minutes from her house. It was a lively scene—a patchwork mess of wacky street performers, aged hippies, young burnouts, yuppie joggers, Euro tourists, and a generous helping of homeless people, such as the one collecting the juiciest cigarette butts from between the cracks in the basketball courts, and stowing them in one of those black plastic bags that came with purchases in small convenience stores.
Is he actually going to smoke them later?
she wondered.
Gross.
His nylon Dodgers jacket had faded to a sickly yellow, the ruined elastic waistband sagging off his sunken frame. Salt-and-pepper dreadlocks sprouted from his head like the fronds of a palm tree or the bloom of a firework; a more modest row ringed his greasy neck, little pod-shaped excrescences that looked as if they harbored some unspeakable pestilence that would burst forth one day, fully winged, and take off into the air. His grizzled beard was thick and puffy; his nose, cheeks, and forehead were so bumpy and discolored, it looked as if his skin had melted and then hardened again. Never before had she seen so much sun damage on a black person's skin; she didn't even know it was possible.
He must have been living out here for years
, she thought.
I wonder how old he is.
It was hard to tell how much of the wear and tear was due to age as opposed to the elements; he could have been anywhere from forty to seventy. He reminded her of Robinson Crusoe, but worse—a castaway trapped inside a crowd, surviving off whatever scraps of human refuse he could find.

He caught her staring. She turned, but it was too late. He extracted a beaten-up coffee cup from his shopping bag and approached her.

“Hey, girl!” he shouted.

Elizabeth pitied the homeless, but as a single woman she made it a rule not to engage with them. You never knew what they were going to do; many of them were mentally ill. She lifted the book she was reading a little higher to cover her face.

“
To the Lighthouse
,” he read aloud.

Oh, Lord
, thought Elizabeth, eyes glued to the page.
What now?

“Always liked that Lily Briscoe.”

She froze, waiting for more.

“Always had a thing for her. My kinda woman.” He emitted a single, staccato burst of a chuckle from somewhere between his chest and throat—a growly, gurgly “huh” that she would come to recognize as his signature noise. “Hey, what's that thing she keeps moving around? On the table? Com'on, you know what I mean. At dinnertime?”

A saltshaker; it was a saltshaker. Lily Briscoe was Elizabeth's favorite too, a confirmed spinster and amateur painter who by the novel's end achieves a measure of artistic greatness, though it will almost certainly go unrecognized and unremembered—like Lily herself. And yet she wasn't a tragic character. She was, by her own reckoning and that of her creator, triumphant. Transcendent.

Despite her rule, Elizabeth put down the book and turned to him.

“You've read
To the Lighthouse
?”

“Whadda
you
think? Huh. Used to teach it,” he said, before adding as if it were a natural segue, “Spare change? I gotta get drunk.”

Elizabeth refused him the change, but she offered to buy him a coffee at Café Collage on the corner of Pacific and Windward Avenues, just off the Boardwalk. It was a crowded Sunday afternoon; there were people everywhere, and she was too curious to let him go without more of an explanation. She wasn't averse
to a little companionship, either. There were plenty of ways to occupy her
time
on the weekends, but every so often she felt unable to occupy her
mind
the way she did at work, and for this reason the weekends were occasionally a trial. It had been easier in New York, where she had friends who were always a subway ride away. In L.A. she had no one, not even the prospect of running into an acquaintance on the street, since everyone was spread so far apart. There was a reason why this anonymous homeless man had reminded her of a castaway: sometimes Los Angeles felt like a string of desert islands—millions of them, stretching to the horizon, and each holding a single exile. You had to take the initiative and affirmatively leave your island if you ever wanted to connect with another human being, or else wait for someone to come to you. And Elizabeth had grown tired of waiting.

The homeless man grumbled, but agreed, retrieving the soiled suitcase she would learn never strayed more than a few feet away from him. As they walked from the courts to the café, a few people gawked, and she allowed herself a glance in their direction, as if to say,
That's right. I'm walking and talking with a homeless man. You got a problem with that?
She hadn't felt so bold in years.

They sat on rusty metal chairs beneath a classical arcade—the kind meant for silent monks contemplating God rather than feverish teens committing videogame atrocities—built over a hundred years ago to evoke the arcades of the Piazza San Marco in the original Venice, in Italy. (When she had been forced to move back to L.A., Elizabeth had decided the only way to make her new reality tolerable was to live as close to the water as possible and become a “beach person.” To her surprise, she discovered an affinity for Venice's peculiar atmosphere. Though the neighborhood's interior portions had acquired a sheen of gentrification in recent years, the beachfront was as much of a
modern ruins as it had been fifty years ago: the crumbly remains of a century-old amusement park populated largely by outcasts. On Fridays after In-N-Out, she parked in her tiny driveway and tried not to move her car again till Monday morning.) It was January, and even though the sun was shining it was chilly outside. Her companion cupped his hands around his coffee, dipping his grizzled chin into the warm current curling off the top.

“Hard to talk about that book,” he said, removing his fuzzy chin from the warmth and jutting it in the direction of her lap, where her copy lay. “Not like other books, where you say what happened, you said it all.”

Elizabeth nodded encouragingly. “It doesn't really have a plot,” she said. Who
was
this guy?

“That's right. Power's in the words.” His voice grew softer. “You talk
about
the words rather'n juss reading 'em, you lose something.”

Elizabeth began leafing through her copy for the section at the dinner party, but before she could find it he had jumped out of his chair:

“Yo yo yo, my
man
!” he crowed. It was one of his homeless cohorts, who had wandered nearby. “You got anything on you, make this coffee a l'il more inneresting? Huh.”

He made the universal booze sign (thumb pointed mouthward, fingers waggling), punctuating it with a puckish bray of laughter, his wide gray tongue flopping well past his bottom lip. The friend produced a plastic Poland Spring bottle from inside his coat, an amber liquid sparkling inside it.

By this time Elizabeth was already across the street. One homeless man was enough of an adventure; two wasn't happening, especially two who were drinking. When he saw she had left, the man merely shrugged his shoulders and poured the liquid into his coffee.

The next morning, she went to Café Collage before work
and was surprised to see him sitting outside. She took his presence as a sign, and got two coffees that morning instead of one. (It occurred to her later that he might have always sat there in the mornings. It was a popular spot for vagrants, and that Monday was the first time she knew to look for him.) Elizabeth handed him the extra coffee without saying a word, and on Tuesday there he was again. She bought him another coffee, and another one the morning after that. On Thursday she added a bagel with cream cheese, and on Friday she beckoned him to follow her, which he did without hesitation, his wheeled suitcase clattering along behind him.

They went to the basketball courts. It was early, but there were runners and surfers dotting the area, and in her front pocket she had placed the tiny can of Mace that usually lived at the bottom of her purse. She knew it was a risk to lure him away from his group, but she also knew they had to be alone for him to speak plainly. And she had to hear more; she had to know who this Virginia Woolf–loving, cigarette butt–smoking homeless man was. Usually she was not so inquisitive when it came to other people. Elizabeth preferred to learn about humanity by way of books, which could be closed at will and placed upon a shelf. With real people it was only a matter of time before the questions turned the other way—before the questioner was forced to share. But the rule of reciprocity didn't quite apply here. It was an ugly yet undeniable truth that at the root of Elizabeth's eagerness to question this man lay not only a yearning for companionship but the snobbish notion that he wasn't her equal, that she could ask him as many questions as she wanted without feeling an obligation to share anything about herself. If she became uncomfortable, she could press the eject button any time she wanted. For once, she failed to see the downside.

They sat on a bench situated atop the rim of a large concrete
bowl inside of which a few early-rising skateboarders whizzed up, down, and around, like fish that had learned to swim in the air.