An Accidental Affair (8 page)

I asked, “How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Twenty-one.”

“You look younger.”

“It’s the hair.”

“Of course.”

She said, “Poppa didn’t talk about your art. He told me about the books, the furniture mostly, but he made it all sound boring. Like he was up here moving a lot of junk for free.”

“I took him to breakfast afterward.”

“When he was gone all that night I was a little pissed off. Actually, a lot. He just left me and helped you moved in and stayed out all night with some guy that I had never heard of, and then he comes back at sunrise with this fishy story. I wanted to see everything myself.”

Mr. Holder said, “What y’all talking about over there?”

Isabel said, “Let the woman enjoy talking to someone her own age for a change.”

Mr. Holder threw his hands up. “Isabel, must you get in my business all the time?”

“I don’t have to, but I take pleasure in making you sweat.”

Everyone except me laughed. I was the outsider in this verbal war.

Baby on her hip, she went back to Mr. Holder. He loved her. I could tell.

Music kicked on next door. Loud music. Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull were on the floor, but in the background, from other parts of the building I heard Lady Gaga and Dr. Dre.

Isabel read my expression and said, “Get used to it. But the people who live over you are the ones with whom you are going to be the most intimate. Late night is when you will be entertained the most. At least that’s when the lovely uphill gardeners who live above me are the friskiest. Their crude music is never loud enough to mask the sounds that come from their weights on their cheap bed as their fornication enters the assertive last moments of its final act.”

Mr. Holder said, “Isabel, you remember what fornication is?”

“And I still practice it every chance I get.”

“With who?”

“No one as old as you, that’s for sure.”

Again we laughed. Her British accent and blunt humor were enchanting.

“People from my side of the pond invented fornication, you bloody wanker. Where do you think the bloody Yanks came from? They came from dumping the results of our fornication over here with the bloody natives so they could fornicate and destroy their culture.”

I said, “God bless the queen.”

Vera-Anne laughed, laughed harder for me than she did for Isabel, did that as if to be rebellious and prove a point, but by the darkness of her eyes I could tell that she wasn’t amused.

Her laugh was as fabricated as Sweet Isabel’s lovely smile.

Not long after that, Mr. Holder walked his ready-made family back home. He left with his young queen like a king leading his imperial family to their castle.

Isabel stayed. She was as sharp and as clever as she was kind and
patient. A riddle sat before her, a misleading man, a mystifying man who owned leather-bound books and she wanted this enigma solved, wanted to conquer the conundrum before her. She was like water and I was stone. Over time, drops of water would wear down the toughest of stones, would erode all.

I asked, “A round of tea?”

“I never turn down a spot of tea with a gent, even if he’s a liar.”

“Earl Grey?”

“Especially Earl Grey.”

“What shall we talk about?”

“You can be the gentleman and choose the topic.”

“The complexities of life and the immorality of slavery leading up to the Civil War.”

“I was a history teacher. History and literature. I’m much smarter than you.”

“Again, the truth. You are full of the truth.”

“And you, my charming neighbor and gracious host, are quite the opposite.”

“Vera-Anne.”

“What about her?”

“I detect that you don’t care for her.”

“If only she would get out and try to a get a job. Chet pays for everything and she’s real comfortable not working. She uses those children as an excuse not to do any better. She hides behind those kids. And that’s not fair to them. When I’m up in the morning running, I see men and women leaving here. But I notice the women, some in McDonald’s uniforms, some in nice businesses clothes. Food Lion, Target, Starbucks, there are a million places to look for a job on Imperial Highway, from the bottom of Palos Verdes all the way down to where it ends at the beach by LAX. Vera-Anne’s babies have become crutches, one for each arm.”

I didn’t respond.

Mr. Holder returned with a worn box of dominoes. The energy shifted when he came back. Intellectualism and gossip went away. That quiet energy Isabel and I had shared was over, and Isabel lost the inquisitive, hawk-like expression. We cleared the kitchen table.

Isabel surprised me. The beautiful Brit owned a very gritty side as well.

She played dominoes better than both of us.

An hour later, a little past midnight, the neighbor over my head started having loud, obnoxious sex. When that moaning kicked in, we decided that it was time to shut it down.

Sweet Isabel left first. Mr. Holder stayed.

He shook his head and said, “Your wife. Regina Baptiste. You married a movie star.”

I changed the subject, told him that Vera-Anne was as nice as she was beautiful.

He chuckled. “She’s the same age my wife was when my first marriage went bad.”

I nodded. And in that pause, he took the reins and turned the conversation again.

He said, “I think that I’m looking for redemption. Leaving my daughter haunts me. Maybe since I failed back then, when my daughter’s mom was Vera-Anne’s age…I don’t know.”

His words were so heavy that they made my plight seem like a feather in the breeze.

He readjusted and said, “Well, no one around here has recognized you.”

“Someone will connect me with Regina Baptiste. If Johnny Bergs has filed assault charges, I’ll be found. Anybody can find anybody, when they have money, given enough time. And since I have money, I’m sure that Bergs won’t hesitate to sue for ten to twenty million.”

Mr. Holder paused for a moment. “How much do you have?”

I smiled. “It’s not polite to talk money.”

“It’s not polite for people with money to talk money with people who don’t have money.”

I sensed that he was offended. Still I said, “However you interpret that is fine by me.”

“I’m still blown away. Your wife is getting paid to have sex with another man on camera.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“You said she had sex on camera. And she’s getting paid for that acting.”

“She is.”

“So she was getting paid to have sex with another man on camera.”

His logical progression was flawless. I swallowed as much discomfort as I could.

He added, “And that man she was with was getting paid to do the same.”

Again I swallowed. Those images that had been sent to me put fire in my eyes.

He said, “You brought a lot of nice stuff with you. You brought a whole house with you.”

I looked around. “I could’ve gotten by with a mattress, a table, and a chair.”

“Still, if this is what you brought by accident, what are you leaving behind on purpose?”

I didn’t say. Mr. Holder was grabbing pieces of my life, constructing a puzzle.

I faked a yawn, looked at my watch and said, “We’d better call it a night, Mr. Holder.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Holla if you need anything. You need me to run out and get anything for you, because I know you’re not driving around in that smancy car of yours, just let me know.”

Then he glanced at my Italian furniture, shook his head with envy, and left.

He had a beautiful young woman in his apartment, sharing his bed, sharing her gifts, and he didn’t want to leave until I put him out. I had lived in eight thousand square feet with one woman. He lived inside of eight hundred square feet with an unindustrious woman and two children.

Every man needed a cave. Every man needed his own toilet.

A newspaper was on the table. Entertainment section. Mr. Holder had brought that with him when he came back with the dominoes. I picked it up to see what he had been reading.

It was an article about Johnny Handsome and Regina Baptiste. Johnny Handsome was officially Hollywood’s stud of the year and my wife was regarded as a conquest on film.

Mr. Holder had been studying my agony. He’d been researching my misery.

He’d circled my wife’s name with a red pen in a second article.

I was richer than Mr. Holder, but he wanted to feel smarter than me, better than me. Ridicule was fueled by envy. Jealousy was fueled by hate. I knew people like him. They competed on all levels; small, meaningless victories validated self. He’d won that round.

I took my .38, tucked it inside the small of my back, put on a USC jacket, picked up my Nikon, and went for a stroll. Outside, I took random photos of the beautiful ugliness.

I was a stranger in a strange land, as foreign as the accents around me.

After a twenty-minute stroll around no man’s land, I went back to my apartment and put my camera down next to Underwood. Then I
put a sheet of paper in Underwood and started typing. Fell into a lull, the rapid
click click click click click
of the old-fashioned keys calming my nerves, but not enough. My mind was on fire and I wanted that fire put out.

Soon I was in my zone. The writer in me was the inner Chandler inside of me. Chandler was a master communicator. I’d run into a lot of self-proclaimed writers, screenwriters, and novelists, but not many effective communicators and wordsmiths. Most had never taken a typing class and I doubt if many had ever even owned a typewriter. Typewriters were heavy machinery and in the old days were good at keeping a lot of the hacks out of the business. Computers had invited everyone in and now the market was flooded with mediocrity.

I was stirred from my reverie by a soft knock at my front door.

I picked up the gun and moved across the carpet, easy steps, like I was a burglar.

When I opened the door, on the other side stood Mrs. Patrice Evans.

Her hair was down. She smelled freshly showered, and she wore a smile, a short black skirt, a dark CSULB hoodie with nothing underneath, sandals, and she held a box of condoms.

Mrs. Patrice Evans took fast breaths, eyes closed tight and mouth opened in the letter
O
. With each exhale she released powerful
ahhhhs
. Her approaching orgasm was strong. Five minutes removed from that moment, as heart rates slowed down and breathing smoothed out, Patrice frowned like she was upset, but her leg bounced like she was living in joy.

“Ted had an allergy attack. I drove him to the emergency room at the Kaiser on Cadillac; got there around ten, and the doctor gave him a Benadryl shot in his ass. It knocked him the hell out. He looked like he had been hit by Tyson, a train, and a bill from the IRS. So I crept back.”

“I needed this. But we’re going to have to talk about this Post-it thing.”

“Turn the ceiling fan on and open a window. I’m suffocating. Never mind, I’ll do it.”

She did, then pulled off her hoodie and kicked off her sandals before she took off her skirt. That was all she wore. She took a pillow and crawled inside my bed like she was settling in for a long stay. I went to the bathroom and took the condom off, then eased back in the bed.

We rested in silence, fan blowing, our heads at opposite ends of the bed.

I picked up my camera before turning on a small lamp that had a low wattage bulb.

She was tipsy and naked. Breasts showing. I took photos of her as she trembled. She was in silhouette, her face impossible to make out, the act of sex apparent, this sin documented.

I told her, “Chin down. Eyes up. Like you’re giving a blowjob. Yeah. Like that.”

She did what I asked her to do. I snapped a few more shots of her angst before I put the camera away. Her expression remained troubled, a riled Doberman on a leash of barbed wire.

She handed me a condom then laid back, her legs open like the doors of a church.

Minutes later, orgasms had been shared again and we were both out of breath.

Patrice panted. “Now that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what it’s all about.”

She took the condom off me, staggered to the bathroom and flushed it, then came back.

She said, “You have a lot of nice magazines. Were those your wife’s?”

“Packed them accidentally.”

“She must be a big Regina Baptiste fan.”

I said, “She’s her number one fan. That’s who matters to her the most.”

“People tell me that I look like her. Pisses me off. I don’t really care for her. Her singing is horrible and I can’t watch her movies. I can’t stand looking at her for some reason.”

“I can’t stand looking at her either.”

She fell asleep within a minute. I was wide awake and heard her heavy breathing.

The timer on her watch went off and she jerked awake, yawned, and gathered her clothes. Above me, the neighbors started back to having sex, hard relentless sex.

Patrice said, “Whoever is up there, they make love like they’re newlyweds.”

Skirt and hoodie on, sandals in hand, she walked to the door, each step slow and heavy like she didn’t want to leave. Mrs. Patrice Evans bounced her sandals against her leg and waited for me. I went to the door and peeped out into the hallway. She was afraid to walk out without me checking first. I nodded that all was clear. She dropped the sandals then slipped them on.

We kissed. She smiled like this wrongness gave her a thrill.

I said, “Post-it Girl, use the Post-it plan.”

“Okay, baby. Okay. I’ll stick to the Post-it system.”

Then she left, her stroll casual, empowered, confident, very brazen, and dangerous.

She was going to be a problem. I knew that. I just didn’t know to what extent.

I stripped, showered, and sat on my bed naked, covers pulled back, fan circulating Patrice’s scent as I went online. Obsessed with pain, I used my iPad, searched for more news.