American Spirit: A Novel (21 page)

These are all great questions to address. But not now, not while texting back and forth feverishly with a relative stranger and using a phone’s tiny Web browser to cash in frequent-flier miles for plane tickets while night skies permit the connection. Not while packing up at a vacation rental cabin and rushing to aim a long, dark, lonely car three hours south toward an airport’s long-term parking. No, these are probably not the times one questions whether or not one should be living like this. The heart shoves this line up from the chest and it comes right out of the mouth in a whisper for nobody in particular: “Jesus, enough, just go see her.”

The City of Angels Bleeding and Peeing

S
O, THIS IS WHAT THEY
mean by flying economy. But who is blowing ninety thousand miles to sit up front, certainly not Matthew, not even with half a million miles amassed during gainful employ, all waiting to be spent. Traveling is quite different when it’s not on the dime of a media conglomerate, that much is certain. Still, the routine is comforting, like prison. Sit down, belt up, shut up, here comes your cup of hydration, we’ll tell you when you can use your electronic gadgets and when you can’t, and it’s for your own good, damnit. Make your little cup of water or coffee last, make a pillow out of your sweatshirt, make perfect order of your trash to be collected, make a dream about driving down dirt roads from the way the window rattles you back here
when you lean your big dumb head against it. Save your tiny bag of peanuts like it’s something you can trade for a cigarette or protection once the beautiful screws aren’t looking; a general sense of surrender and you-can-make-this-easy-or-you-can-make-this-difficult logic wafts through the cabin.

And it turns out, way back here behind the wings, the plane rocks and bounces like mother swaying child. God, if only someone would key the intercom during the maternal sway of it and say that everything was going to be all right forever; remind one that even if things don’t go well with the woman in Los Angeles that they’re rocketing toward at 549 miles an hour, one could visit their failed Wall Street friend who is living in a park in Wyoming or Montana or something.

In the amniotic calm of discount commercial aviation comes the moment when one understands why career criminals get a taste of freedom and then violate parole to rush their way right back into the penal system. The authority figures sitting in the very front of this thing have flung the steel tube up over Long Island and banked it hard right to head west where more temporary living awaits. With the cabin lights dimmed, one gets to feeling like part of a silhouetted troupe dedicated to the mission of going to any length to find another one of life’s magic moments that make all the other days worth it.

In Los Angeles, Matthew checks in at The Standard downtown, far away from the Four Seasons on Doheny and even farther from the Mondrian and Chateau Marmont. The
lobby is a late-night gaggle of twenty-somethings dressed poorly in a way that only youth permits. If you’re young and beautiful enough, you can wear something terrible and ridiculous as if to say,
See, even in this ridiculous shit that looks like it was stolen from retarded teen runaways and even with my hair like this, cut in chunks so randomly it looks like I was the victim of a perverse crime, I am beautiful and most likely living longer than you.
They undulate under lights like half-blind bioluminescent sea life; they gush over a DJ for subjecting them to one endless dirge of house music. This is one of the rare moments when Matthew realizes there are dear prices to pay for youth and its vitality; comforting to think that it’s better to be carving one’s way through their forties than to be standing around hearing this so-called house music, ears trying to find one measure that sounds like it might be leading to the bridge or a big finish.

Upstairs, the room is physically modern and sparse and emotionally very similar to the lonely pornography that comes from this side of the nation; which is to say that after one walks past the glass wall to the room’s shower and imagines the ghosts of travelers past, after the small baggage hits the bed, one simply sits in a hard, plastic urbane chair in front of a long, skinny bureau staring out at downtown Los Angeles, feeling equal parts aroused and ready to be drained and instantly done with the experience. And so Matthew sits; a lonely man in a sparsely furnished temporary den, wondering if this is really all there is to travel and leisure. He walks to the little refrigerator in the corner and silently
hovers over a small wicker tray of snack items and scans the prices on the laminated card that accompanies them. The clock radio is playing a thin ribbon of community radio jazz that the maids must be instructed to tune in after they clean and abandon the room for a new check-in.

He switches on the television and stares at a handful of channels; flicks through them with a remote even though he sits within arm’s reach of the television. All reality shows; one about sixteen-year-olds with wealthy parents, and the kids are dealing with the rigors of being rich in America and trying to have a better birthday party than their friends. One about a pawnshop where desperados sell what little they have left for a fraction of what they paid for it—wasn’t there a time when television was an escape from reality, not a lonely hotel room overdose of it? It’s easy to start thinking that this is not what one is supposed to be doing as a tourist in sunny Southern California. It’s hard for Matthew to imagine a brochure about the region that boasts a big color photograph of a man sitting in a sleek plastic chair a few feet from a television, with a lump in the throat and eyes brimful with salty tears waiting for surface tension to break and permit their ocular exit. But there’s hope for the wayward man here in the lonely little room, there is the hotel restaurant that’s open all night and mostly empty at an hour when the jam-packed lobby has no interest in food.

Tatiana shows up at the restaurant like she texted she would. There are hugs, kisses, that way people kiss on each cheek, but not with actual kissing. Matthew is dragged
through this choreography like a grandmother unsure of what to do; or an undercover cop trying to participate in the secret handshake of a gang member and figuring it out as he goes. Tatiana ducks and weaves gracefully through this intercontinental ritual and Matthew follows the cues like a fourth-grader learning to square dance, or like a forty-five-year-old man from Connecticut in over his head again. But the thing about modern love and modern living is this: You can be slow and old-fashioned, but if you look the part—if your hair is going long in unemployment, if you’re prone to wearing the kind of clothes you learned about and were given for free at the magazines you created marketing plans for, if your legs and trunk are long and skinny from a diet of heartache and financial uncertainty—the initiated will drag you into modern love and fast living, no matter how square and slow you are on the inside. This is a dangerous situation for all parties, really. If you don’t look the part, count yourself among the lucky, take comfort in loving someone, and take comfort in your home and watching movies and living correctly; go to sleep next to each other assured that you are missing nothing.

After the ballet of hello, and kisses that land four inches shy of skin, Matthew starts his version of hello, which is basically staring at Tatiana for seemingly one solid minute, unable to say anything during it. This welcoming homeostasis ends with Matthew jerking into action and presenting Tatiana with a coffee mug that has a blurry picture of an androgynous, long, thin person sitting on the floor and beneath
it, text that says:
I’m going to meditate so well that I make all of you disappear.
Tatiana reads this and squeals with delight.

“Is this for me?”

“Yeah, yes. This is this thing I’m doing now; I’m making these coffee mug things now. Well, I come up with them. I have people making them, some friends, this place in Westport makes them for me after I give them one as an example.”

“You’re selling them?”

“I have been, yeah, but it’s hard.”

“No, I’m sure, you have to glaze stuff and put it in kilns and all that. My mom used to make tons of pottery stuff.”

“Guys do it, too.”

“Oh, I know, no, I’m just saying I know it’s hard to do.”

“Making them is pretty easy, really. Since I basically don’t do it. I just meant selling them is hard. It’s hard trying to figure out how to make it a real business. And there’s the cops and all of that.”

This last part about police brings silence and more staring. And so Matthew and Tatiana quickly move into the business of menus, ordering, eating, and the luxury of using eyes and millions of muscles in the face to telegraph late-night sentiment instead of having to text or dream it.

One can drink rum with an order of French toast, but it isn’t recommended. It takes three or five of them to do the proper work of corrosives and soak through a gut of doughy night breakfast and find some blood to thin. And the road to the brain and heart seems laced with speed bumps of eggy bread soaked in syrup; the buzz comes, but the whole commute
for the booze is roughshod and gimped; gummed up and sullen. After the bloodstream’s traffic jams, Matthew pays the tab by stretching and breaking a rubber band, hacking, and unfurling a roll of wad. Tatiana stares at this form of financial management, so Matthew offers up a breezy explanation.

“I’m kind of not using the bank and ATMs.”

They get up and head out of the hotel restaurant into the lobby, Matthew rummed up like a mail-order bride who just landed. Once through the sea of American youth plankton still balled up under the lights and beats, one assumes there will appear a bank of elevators waiting to whisk them up to the roof for drinks or something. Instead, after a series of gentle pushes through the clouds of youthful brine shrimp, in which Matthew follows Tatiana the way a shark is followed by pilot fish, they are at the side door leading outside to a gas fire pit surrounded by chairs and chaise lounges.

Tatiana doesn’t break no stride; walks past the fire, pulling a piece of cash and ticket from a tiny pocket up near the top of her twenty-one-foot-long leg. She hands it to a handsome young man with hair styled to the day’s fashion and a red jacket with narrow lapels that feels like it was stolen from a Las Vegas bellhop in 1967. The kid smiles and says hello to her, disappears in a flash, comes back around in a car best described as a long, dark blue piece of sculpture stolen from a museum; a form of transportation boasting hood- and trunk-logo medallions from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Tatiana jumps in smiling, Matthew approaches the passenger
side; pulls the door handles about an inch, at which time the door handle starts pulling itself open with a tiny hydraulic hiss. His ass hits the passenger seat, he yanks the door shut, but the door won’t slam, it rushes pretty quickly closed over 95 percent of the space and then just whispers a
hush
and very slowly completes those last few inches of closing. Real money will not let you slam doors behind you, it bears considering as French toast sponges continue to time-release half of Jamaica into the blood and brain at the moment.

Tatiana takes them on a drive up Wilshire then a right or a left, or an upside-down clover or corkscrew to Hollywood via La Cienega to Sunset. Her car’s speakers ooze truth from young people playing bluegrass, lyrics asking musical questions like whether or not a gigantic crush can tend to a young man’s dog for one week because he’s about to be gone for three. And another song that says we don’t know what lies in the days before we die, since we never know when we’re going to die. Somehow none of it is sad; somehow banjos and fiddles and half-assed washboards and drums played with heart make the sights of Los Angeles whizzing past the passenger window feel beautiful and quaint. Melrose turns to Mayberry, a sign for Rodeo Drive reads like it’s alerting motorists to a rodeo that’s in town tonight, and Sunset Boulevard, one is reminded, was named for the fact that you can see a beautiful day’s end by driving westbound on it.

“I need to get to a store at some point. I have a friend I’m visiting while I’m out here. I’m driving up to his, um, house.
So, long drive, need some water and snacks, and stuff like that.”

The head likes the idea of having a backup plan, and taking the pressure off the visit. Tatiana is smiling for some reason, as if she’s never heard of putting good snacks in a rented Ford Taurus so that there’s stuff to munch on for a road trip. She whips left with the long, slender, and slightly oval foreign art piece she’s driving and starts up Laurel Canyon and pulls in at the tiny parking lot next to the Country Store. They get out, the two of them, walk across the little lot and up onto the wooden deck in front of the place, the smell of jasmine making strong synaptic connection between the landscape and the sight of Tatiana, triggering some spastic switch of dopamine and cueing the pursuit of her heart and sex. She moves with arch and sway, looking back over her shoulder to compensate for Matthew’s lag, saying things about Jim Morrison, pointing to the building that borders the tiny parking lot, talking about how he used to live right there.