How to Get Into the Twin Palms (17 page)

“What you say?” she asked me. She slurred it really. I could smell booze on her breath and I knew.

She said something in Russian to the other women, the
women from the stall, and the woman with the Sucrets and Tic Tacs, and I still couldn’t understand.

All I heard was the word Lev.

She blocked the door and I looked behind me. There were no windows. No stained glass. Just metal-doored bathroom stalls and the Russian woman applying her carrot-colored lipstick. The other two chattering above me. The bathroom attendant stayed mute.

 

“Who you come with?” the leopard lady asked me.

The thin woman stood near the mirror with her friend, standing quiet and still. She was wearing a petal-pink suit-skirt and patterned silk shirt. Her shoes were open-toed and revealed swollen toes. She had bunions, I could tell. A hammer toe maybe. The shoes were misshapen and the material jutted out in strange directions. The polish on her toes was old, faded, and shimmery pink, chipping at the tips and her nails were splitting vertically. An old woman’s feet.

I wanted to look away but I didn’t want to face the barrel-busted woman and her question.

“
Nie rozumiem
,” I said again.

“You don’t understand English either?” she asked, low and slow.

I shook my head no and gave myself away.

The thin one spoke, finally. “I saw you come with Lev?” She said it like a question and I didn’t know how to respond. So I slowly nodded yes.

“You know him,” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

The leopard lady neighed at me, held her drink to her lips and slurped some up.

“That’s her husband.” She pointed at the thin woman, and her friend stopped applying her lipstick. Her mouth sufficiently orange.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said. They were circling me now and wouldn’t let me pass. They were older than me and they could all be my mother, young mothers or grandmothers.

“He has three kids at home. One baby.” She trilled the
th
of
three
. She held on to it long, like my mother would. “And two in Moscow.”

I wasn’t surprised but I wished I could be. I wanted to be.

The thin woman, Lev’s wife, glared at me. “What you think, you his first
shluha
?”

I could hear the big one snorting and I knew what was going to happen.

She let loose on me. I felt the warm wet against my scalp. She had spit on me. All of them were doing it. The bathroom attendant continued folding towels and acted like she wasn’t seeing it. The others took their turns too. On my face, my neck, the orange-lipped woman got her orange-tinged spit in my ear.

I started hitting them, whoever I could get. I smeared orange across the woman’s face. Got it on the palm of my hand. I launched after the leopard tank afterwards. I knocked her in the mouth. Her dentures flew out and left a pink-gummed crevice. She squealed and I saw her Soviet-era teeth break into bits, tooth by tooth on the bathroom floor, sliding beneath the toilet. She covered her mouth and yelped. A gaping-mouthed old woman. She didn’t look sinister anymore. She looked old and poor.

Lev’s wife looked at me; she had hung back, kept her petal-pink suit tidy and away from my flailing hands. We looked at each other then and I knew I had no right to attack her. She was everything I now realized I never wanted to become. A village girl with wired-in teeth, ruby-colored hair curled tight to her head. She couldn’t have been more than 35 but she looked 50. Smoke lines on her face and pink blush layered over loose skin. They were immigrants but they weren’t like my immigrant parents. They got married the Eastern European way, I figured. Pregnant while fucking. Then marriage. Then leaving the village.

The leopard lady hunted around the floor for her teeth, each porcelain nub, and I finally could leave. No one was in my way. Lev’s wife looked like she wanted to strike me but wouldn’t. The woman with the carrot-colored lips was wiping off and starting over, trying to clean up her face.

I pushed out of the bathroom. Lev was standing there, waiting for me. He looked fraught, scared for the first time. He was saying things like,
Devochka
,
are you okay
, things like that. He tried to pull me away from the door, with him, but I just pushed past him.

Out of the Twin Palms.

 

I broke my heel leaving, heading down the carpeted stairs with their thin fading flowers in red and pinkish hues on the green background. The spindle broke but I had a strong grip on the railing and only stuttered forward. People pushed past me and up the stairs, to where they belonged. I walked slowly down the sidewalk, away from the Twin Palms and on the ball of my right foot, balancing out the left.

I passed stores with neon sturgeons in the window and
CAVIAR
written in neon cursive inside the belly of the fish. Pawnshops with dirty, faded gold rings in the windows. The window said, “WE BUY GOLD.” Women’s rings lined the plush-holed display cases, everything looked worn out, faded down, and I didn’t want to look anymore.

Smoke was billowing behind the hills in front of me. And the light was fading against a line of palm trees, bright blue and then glowing orange in the distance. There were two places I could go to get a better look and I weighed my options. The top of the canyon had coyotes, homeless men in the bushes; that’s what I believed anyway. Griffith Park was the other. The observatory. I wasn’t sure what could be there. I had heard several things.

 

I stopped at home first, wiped my face off, and took my dress
and my shoes off. Threw all of it into the garbage and I changed into things that needed to make sense to me again. Pants, sneakers, a t-shirt. I took any remnant of Lev that I could find, his clothing, a gold ring, a comb, and shoved them in another bag and took it with me. I looked up at the sky as I was leaving, at the power lines where the birds used to sit, gone and quiet now, and up past the palm trees to see the smoke creeping forward.

 

I had to park on the street because the gate was closed.

The park looked long and dark and I had begun to believe this was a bad idea but I needed a better look at the city. I had been trawling the boulevards and avenues,
the flats
, and I needed to see things. Bright things.

At the mouth of the park I could still hear cars. Honks, the whirring of motors, fits and starts of traffic on Los Feliz Boulevard. I walked into the darkness and wished I had thought of bringing a flashlight. I heard bird noises, rustling noises, noises that were unfamiliar and unsettling. I walked further, where the park lights stopped shining, on the road twisting up the hill. There were probably coyotes here too. I could smell jasmine and the fires made the city warm, but pockets of cool air slipped over me as I climbed up, deeper into the dark. When I heard unfamiliar sounds, park sounds, I stopped and listened, my skin tingling, my spine feeling tense.

Then things became quiet. I hadn’t heard this kind of quiet before, dark quiet, empty quiet. The only thing to do was to keep moving. It took a while and when I reached the top I had sweat through my shirt and my upper lip was wet with perspiration. My bag felt heavy on my shoulder and I thought I had been walking for an hour. The air had made my chest heave, my hair probably smelled like smoke.

When I reached the top of the spiral, I could see the parking lot of the observatory, and it was empty. Lit up and glowing, and from up here the ash was really coming down, a blizzard of it,
whirring in circles. I couldn’t see the grid yet. The trees slouched toward the parking lot and obscured the view. I had to get closer. There was a dirt walkway on the side of the building and as I walked down, the city opened up beneath me. Blue squares lined the flat and intersected forever. I was sweating and breathing heavy and needed to collect myself. Here it was.

Los Angeles.

I didn’t know what to say or do so I just sat quietly on a rock, wiping the sweat from my face with the sleeve of Lev’s dress shirt, sticking out of my bag. There weren’t any fires in this direction but the glow of the sky was orange. The buildings jutted from the landscape and I just sat there, ash crinkling down around me. This city was cut up into neat squares. Avenues were dissected by boulevards which were dissected by streets and I wanted it all to mean something to me. I wanted to understand. I tried looking for my apartment. My alley. The Twin Palms. I sat there and studied the landscape, followed Los Feliz Boulevard to Sunset Boulevard to Fairfax Avenue and down. Down to where I was supposed to be and to where Lev might be.

IT WAS CLEAR TO ME THEN THAT THERE WAS
no way out. Greg was right. The neat and tidy squares couldn’t contain us anymore. The blur of blue and orange streetlights, the throb of cars snaking out of the city. They were crushing each other to get out. The highways were flooded with automobiles and I realized there was no way out. The glut was going to keep us in here forever. There was nothing to go to anyway. There was desert to the east of us, water to the west. North was the Grapevine and mountains that were burning. Los Angeles was trapped and I was trapped within it. And neither of us should have been here in the first place. The fires, the mudslides, earthquakes. Why didn’t anyone see that we didn’t belong here anymore, ever? I jumped up. I had parts of Lev that would help it along. We would help the purge.

The smell up here was of wood fires and smoke chimneys and cool pockets of air and hot waves of ash and I climbed away from the blinking and away from the observatory and the white glow on the hill and away into the woods. Away from Hollywood and Downtown and over to the valley. To the fires and the smoke and the hills and mountains. That’s where I belonged, closer to the ash and closer to the smoke, and fire lapping in the distance. I would add to it, make it bigger and more pronounced. I would finally make my mark. I hoped that Greg was somewhere up here. But he wasn’t. Yet.

The fires were closer now. No longer in Simi Valley or the outskirts of the city. I could see rows of red and orange, fire lines down the hills in Burbank and moving closer to us, along the ridges of the mountains. It was uncontainable and shrouded the valley with a thick cloud of smoke, dulling the grids on this side. There were helicopters dotting the sky up and around the fires. Channel 7 and Channel 4 were vying for a better view, trying to get closer to the action. They were circling up there in the sky, moving in zigzag motions, too far from where I was to get the story first. The dirt trail slid down under my weight and I saw the bright white letters floating up and over the ridges of the hill. H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D, the
LAND
long gone. It looked vulgar here in the dark, it looked like a lie.

It didn’t matter anymore.

Lev had left his clothes and they provided the perfect kindling. Cologne-soaked, the cheap suit fabric was highly flammable. I draped the pieces over dry brush and lit each corner and watched the flames lick and twist onto themselves. Trying to get bigger. I ran back and forth, lighting all of them.

The flames were slow at first. I didn’t think they would even take, or keep. The wind made it hard to light everything and my thumb became worn and bruised while I worked on the flaming. Lev’s shirt fluttered in a pile of dirt as the Santa Anas picked up and snuffed itself out. It was frustrating. I took his shirt, inhaled his smell now mixed with a thin stench of smoke and tried lighting it again. This time it took.

I stood back and watched the burn. The Santa Anas pushed the flames left and right, up trees nearby. This would get the glut moving again. This was me making it work.

I COLLECTED FUCHSIA BOUGAINVILLEA ON MY
way down the hill. Tugged at my hair to interlace the blooms with strands of hair and wrapped a branch around me as I made my way down to my car.

By the time I had got there, sirens weren’t far off and the petals of the bougainvillea had begun to wither and turn oily to the touch. The sky was growing brighter. I wasn’t sure if it was the fire enveloping Griffith Park or the sun rising. The clock in my car had stopped working so there was no way of knowing for sure. All I knew was that it was time to get home.

There was bougainvillea strewn in the middle console and on the carpet beneath my feet. I had fuchsia petals in my hair. I pulled them out with some strands of hair still attached and rolled down my window. Threw it all out at a stoplight, petals under my feet, from the seat next to me. Threw them all over Western.

I wasn’t feeling any better.

I WALKED UP THE STAIRS TO MY APARTMENT
and my neighbor, the mackerel-giver, was standing there, smiling at me. I sat down and there was a velvet painting of mountains and trees leaning against the metal grate of my door.

 

“Have you ever been to New York City?” he said.

I wasn’t in the mood for questions or conversation, so I said no.

“My daughter lives there. She’s getting married.”

I looked at his mustache, curled up over his smile. “You have a kid?”

“Yes, she’s getting married.” He stood there smiling in plaid shorts and sweat creeping out from the armpits of his shirt.

“Congratulations.”

“I was thinking of moving there. Be close to her.”

“What’s this?” I said.

“My mother wants you to have it. She has no more wall space.”

I held it up, the frame was gold flecked, ridged, and molding. The velvet was coarse and had a layer of dirt on it, the paint flecking off in whites and blues but the mountains looked majestic and popped off the velvet. I contemplated keeping it.

“I can’t take this,” I said.

“You must.”

His mother came out onto the balcony, toothless and spangle-scarfed. She looked like a gypsy to me. She smiled and shoved her hands at me. There was no giving it back.

“You should give it to your daughter,” I said.