The Pink Hotel (15 page)

A week later I found piles of carefully chosen women’s clothes arranged on David’s bed. Laid out like shadows were a pair of sturdy jeans, five high-necked cotton T-shirts, black and white cotton knickers, a brown jumper made out of some synthetic woollen material, a knee-length chiffon skirt, some tights and slip-on shoes with little heels. There was even a pair of faux-pearl earrings. Everything was from an outlet mall in Fresno, and each piece had something wrong with it – you could see a squelch of glue where the faux pearls had been sunk into their platinum shell, and the jumper had a hole in the sleeve.

“I’m sorry it’s nothing extravagant,” David said as he came in the room, making me jump. I touched the sweetly chosen clothes. He must have looked absurd in the dress shop, his big Gilgamesh hands picking up little shiny kitten heels and tiny white cotton knickers. Warmth came into me with the most phenomenal surge. I imagined him looking lost among the isles of silk and zips and buttons, getting everything completely wrong. Is this the girl he wanted? Pearls and knee-length skirts? Or was this what he thought I wanted? The sensation that filled me up at that moment felt like hunger, or desperation. In retrospect, it was love, but at the time it was a sudden, overwhelming nausea. I couldn’t even look at him.

“You don’t like them,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I do, I like them,” I said.

“They’re not you,” David said.

“They are,” I said. “They could be.”

The day before he bought me the new clothes David had got me a day job working as a script supervisor for a man named Sam, who had the face of a prematurely balding child. He was tubby, with kind eyes, and he wore oversized T-shirts emblazoned with creatures from
Star Wars
or
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. David said Sam came from a wealthy family, and his uncle had put up some of the money for his latest films. Although I didn’t have any experience on movie sets, Sam took David’s word for it that I was observant and could do the job. I was to be paid cash.

“Close your eyes,” said David to me only a few moments after we met Sam in a Silver Lake bar with big chunks of plywood nailed to the floor. “What colour are Sam’s shoes and is he wearing a belt?” David asked me.

“He’s wearing white Nikes,” I smiled. “The left lace is trailing on the floor. He’s not wearing a belt, but he should be, cos I can see the top of his boxers.”

“What colour are his boxers?” David laughed.

“Blue.” I smiled, the knuckle of David’s right hands resting on my nose.

“Awesome,” laughed Sam. “That’s pretty awesome.”

“She’s oddly observant,” said David. “It’ll be perfect.”

“How’d you two meet?” said Sam.

“At Venice Beach,” said David.

“Guess that’s why we haven’t seen you for weeks,” he said. “We going to party tonight?”

“I’ve got to work,” said David.

“Where you been the last two months, though, dude? We haven’t seen you.”

“Cleaning up my act a bit,” David said.

“Well come to Vegas with us next weekend and we’ll get you good and dirty again.”

“I’m in AA,” said David. I looked at David. He hadn’t told me that he went to AA meetings.

“I’m hoping you’re talking about American Airlines or the Car Insurance, dude,” said Sam.

“No more booze,” said David.

“No more weekends?” said Sam, taking off his hat for a moment and rubbing his balding head. “Ever?”

“Not if the weekends include getting wasted and waking up in gutters. I want to remember the second half of my life. Thought it might be a nice change.”

“You’re not even staying for one drink tonight? To toast your girlfriend’s new job?”

David tilted his head to the side, indicating “no”.

“There was this one time,” grinned Sam. He looked at David, then cheekily at me: “Right? We’re on a bender in San José. We haven’t slept for twenty-four hours but we’re on fire. Like, blazing. Then we realize, where’s David? We’re like, dude, he was here a minute ago. Then my cell phone rings and it’s David telling me he’s woken up in, like, some chick’s bedroom in Mexico.” David smiled somewhat nostalgically at the memory, then looked nervously at me as if I might be retrospectively jealous or angry. “This man,” continued Sam, nodding at David and ignoring the awkwardness, “is downright the best dude to have at a party. The best.”

“I don’t really want to know,” I said blankly.

“Oh, feisty,” said Sam, looking at me and then glancing over at David. “So has she tamed you, then? You whipped now?”

“Give it a rest man, can she have a job?”

“Course. Anything for a buddy,” said Sam.

It turned out that I was a very good script supervisor. I notice the details. Being a script supervisor made me think of the comment about solar eclipses being “coincidences of geometry”, which Lily’s anonymous lover talked about in one of his letters. This is what the day-to-day construction of movies seemed to be about. In order to make it appear that people were having a natural conversation on screen, the coincidences of geometry had to be perfect. It was a mess of angles, of eye lines that needed to “match up” and coverage that needed to slot together. Everyone on set was always talking about the “180-degree rule”, where two people in conversation should have the same left/right relationship to each other at all times. If the heroine is on the left and the hero on the right, then she should be facing right at all times and he needs to face left. Jumping to the other side of the characters on a cut would be disorientating. A script supervisor is someone who details the geometry of continuity. I’d note down whether the actor exited stage right or left, whether his shirt was tucked or not, whether he was wearing a watch or whether his cuffs were buttoned up.

Sam hardly ever looked directly at anyone, let alone noticed anything that went on around him. Los Angeles is a city of sideways glances – over shoulders, through car windows – and Sam epitomized it. He had an anxious sideways glance for when he wanted to escape a conversation, an upwards tilt when he was lying, a burrowing stare when he was embarrassed or anxious, and a sharply flung sideways look when he was trying to be flirtatious. Mostly Sam and I talked while he was driving me back from set, both staring straight ahead at the battalion of armoured worker ants zooming down the freeways. It was in cars that he told me his secrets, hardly noticing that I never said a word. He told me about the hundreds of women he’d slept with in San Francisco before he moved to Los Angeles and lost all his hair, and about how his ex-wife cheated on him during their annual Christmas party.

“Actually during the party?” I asked.

“In our bed,” he said. “But a couple of months before that I did a chick in the kitchen while my wife was listening to Tracy Chapman in the bathtub.”

“Huh,” I said as we merged into the freeway.

“You’re such a good listener,” he said earnestly.

“Did you know Lily?” I asked Sam, once.

“Lily who?” he said.

“Harris. She and David were friends.”

“David’s not particularly charitable with information about his private life. Guess you’ve found that out,” Sam laughed. “I chalk it up to him not remembering most of his private life! Drunk fuck. Was she a girlfriend?”

“Think so,” I said.

“Are you checking up on him?” he said.

“Just curious.”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” said Sam.

As Sam started to like me more and more, he stopped asking anything about me. I listened to him endlessly constructing his identity, telling me what he was and what he wasn’t. His mother had an all-consuming obsession with true-crime novels, so she saw everything as a potential crime, which made Sam a very jumpy child. Sam hated: pushing past people in movie theatres, crumbs, seeing people eating, any sort of white sauce, seafood, conversations about cheese and missing the first or last second of a movie. He literally had to sit in his seat until the credits were over and the screen went silent. Every evening after work and after long, monologizing drives across glittering Los Angeles, Sam would drop me off at David’s place. I never told David about Sam’s confessed fetish for wearing designer women’s underwear, or how Sam no longer had sex with his girlfriend because she had a mole on her lower stomach that made him feel physically sick. The mole was mountainous and had two hairs, Sam said, like television antennae. It was difficult to have sex without touching it, so he didn’t have sex any more. I didn’t even tell David when Sam parked the car outside the Starbucks on North Vermont and Franklin one morning and told me that he loved me. Nobody had ever, in my life, said the words “I love you” directed at me, and the first person who did say it was someone I’d only met a few weeks before and I didn’t care about in the least. I would have liked to ask him what colour my eyes were, or where in London I was from. Why didn’t I live in England any more? What did I want from life? How old was I? Instead I smiled stiffly and told him that I didn’t feel the same way as he did.

“You’re living with David,” Sam said.

I nodded.

“You’re a brave girl,” Sam said.

“He doesn’t drink any more, he’s different,” I said.

“I understand,” he said, not looking at me. We both stared forwards at a row of cars, a burrito stand and the back entrance to a large, flat-roofed, beige Starbucks. Both Sam’s window and mine were rolled down in his little car, and we were smoking anxiously out of them, our elbows dipping from the car, both of us sipping ice black coffee that felt amazing in the heat. The air was heavy and the car smelt horrible because we’d started using a Coca Cola can to throw our cigarettes into since yet another forest fire was raging through the hills above us.

Every time we blinked that strange summer, fires hit the headlines. More often than not the dry air was thick with soot. The heatwave had finally ignited, and LA had a halo of fire over it. One of the fires even came close to consuming the Zoo, and they had to relocate all the animals before the fog and soot in the city turned into the smell of an exotic barbeque. One of the fires started when I was watching television at Sam’s house. His living room looked out on a layer of rooftops, and then out towards Griffith Park Observatory. Sam’s flat was a bric-a-brac of collectable figurines trapped in packaging. Each little Vampire Slayer, Darth Vader, Spider Man and Princess Leia was poised in earnest combat with the stale air still in their box, their panic-stricken painted eyes threatening mutiny. Apparently the toys were worth a fortune, though. He once told me that he had a comic-book collection worth more than his penthouse. When the fire started I was playing with the wax from some rose-scented candles. Sam was working in the other room. With red eyes and slow reactions, I dripped the wax onto my knee and made a dotted line up the inside of my thigh. Each blob of pale wax burnt my shaved thighs and left continent-shaped raw skin as I peeled off the wax puddles. Wax doesn’t turn me on. I like that immediate surface-level sting of it, but mostly it makes me feel nostalgic for crayons. In autumn I used to spend hours tracing around leaves from London trees, copying their veins like a cartographer. But hot wax did have a certain appeal, in relation to pain. Unlike cutting, wax burns didn’t leave a scar or any telltale droplets of blood in between the bathroom tiles. Wax was a clean, frivolous pain. While I dripped wax on my thighs I noticed the grazes on my knees had healed. I wondered where Richard was now, and if he’d forgotten about looking for me and looking for the suitcase. Vanessa said nobody had come to the Serena since the day the man stole my bag, so perhaps Richard had forgotten about me.

I can’t remember what was on television at Sam’s place the night the crazy fire started, but the programme was interrupted to show footage of Griffith Park starting to burn. Then I looked up through the big window behind the television and saw the actual fire spitting up in the middle distance.

“The sky is blood-red outside my window tonight, and I’m thinking of you,” I read, closing my eyes to feel the sun on my body while imagining the anonymous author of the letters. I’d read the letters so many times, now, that the words were becoming familiar.

“The first time we met you were holding a small red umbrella,” the man wrote. “Remember? And now the colour red makes me think of you.” I tried to concentrate on the words. “Later, I came to know your little red dresses,” the letter continued, “and the army of incendiary lipsticks on your dresser. That first sight of you made me think, immediately, of red-light districts, of the bullfighter’s tempting rag, of revving engines, of battle decks stained red from the start, so that the sight of blood would cause no alarm. These images flashed in front of me as you turned and smiled at me. Right now the sky outside my window is the colour of that nail polish you have called ‘The Battle of Magenta’. It’s making me think of you, but also somehow, of childhood.

“I made paint once when I was boy,’ the typed words continued. “Carmine is a particularly deep red colour, different from Magenta, produced by boiling dried insects in water, then treating the resultant acid with alum, cream of tartar, stannous chloride or potassium hydrogen oxalate. Sometimes egg white, fish glue or gelatin were added, but since I had no fish glue or gelatin, I stole eggs from the fridge. What fascinated me most, apart from a natural boyish interest in boiling bugs, was that the quality of the carmine was affected by the temperature and the degree of illumination present during its preparation, sunlight being essential for a perfect hue. The colour red, then, in my eyes, was made from dead insects and sunlight. Perhaps I would have forgotten about sunshine and dead insects, if it wasn’t for that moment outside the café when I saw you, beautiful, swinging your red umbrella. And perhaps if I’d been unlucky enough never to have known that carmine was made from death and sunshine, I never would have fallen in love with you. With love, for ever, for always.”

The next day David was out, while Sam and I weren’t filming, so I sat around the swimming pool with the Armenian women again. They all wore faded swimming costumes, great big sunglasses, and sat with their feet in the chlorinated water until lunchtime most days, shelling peas or peeling potatoes into metal mixing bowls. I was wearing a navy-blue bikini that the Armenian ladies leant me, with a white T-shirt on top. Over the last weeks I’d started to sit with the Armenian women nearly every day, either reading Lily’s notes or one of David’s books.

“I’ve lost my tea strainer,” one of the Armenian women yelped from inside a first-floor flat at the corner of the swimming pool courtyard. “Has anyone seen it?”

“Look under the bed, that’s what my mother always used to say. According to my mother, everything that got lost could always be found under the bed,” said another woman. “If I lost my religious faith or my virginity, it probably would have been under the bed with the TV remote and my father’s dentures, as far as she was concerned.”

“It’s a tea strainer, why would it be under the bed?” said the first woman, humourless.

“Ah you were lucky,” said Dalita to the woman whose religious faith was under the bed. “Just one thing to remember! My mother, yes? She had a continual monologue, a waterfall, yes? Of advice. Whatever we were doing, she had advice.” Dalita put on a high-pitched know-it-all voice that was meant to be a parody of her mother: “See that flower, yes? That’s an Arataraticum. Lovely flowers. If you ever keep them indoors, remember not to over-water them. They’re delicate, yes? They’re delicate and they need a lot of sunlight.” Dalita continued, getting into the role and making her friends laugh. “Talking of which, aren’t you hot in that T-shirt, little one? Take it off or you’ll get heatstroke. If you ever do get heatstroke, put ice cubes under your tongue and on your wrists. Don’t believe anyone who tells you to take a cold bath, you’ll catch your death, yes? Talking of which, never bite ice cubes, you’ll break your teeth. It’s important to look after your teeth if you want a good husband...” Dalita took a breath. “She could go on for ever, a regular panic of strange advice.”

“High heels ruin the shape of your feet,” remembered another woman. “Which is gobbledygook. I wore heels all my life just to spite her, and my feet are just fine.”

“People don’t get what they deserve,” said another, “they have to fight for it.”

“Do everything once,” said another woman, “was advice written by a dead man.”

“Be careful what you wish for, it might come true,” said another of the women.

“What about your mother?” said Dalita to me.

“She told me never to start smoking,” I lied, somewhat randomly, lighting up a cigarette and offering them to Dalita. Dalita cackled, and took a cigarette from me.

When I went upstairs, David was already back. He was in a playful mood. He had his camera out, and the minute I walked through the door, all sweaty from sitting by the pool, smelling of chlorine and sunlight, he snapped a photo of me. He smiled. It reminded me of the morning after Lily’s wake, when he wouldn’t stop taking photos in the dusty early light. I wondered if it reminded him of that too.

“Don’t,” I said to him.

“Smile, beautiful,” he said.

“No,” I said, and turned around so my back was to him. We were both quiet and still for a moment, neither moving. I loved him, God. I did. Nothing mattered, not even Lily. Not Richard, not the Pink Hotel. Nothing. I knew the glass eye of his camera was on my back. I felt like a deer caught in range. My spine tingled underneath the sweaty T-shirt. My toes wriggled. Then I broke, and peeked over my shoulder at him. He immediately took a photo. Flash. I was dead.

“Whatever happened to the photos from the beach?” I said after I turned away from him again and stood with my back to him, silhouetted by the window.

“What photos?”

“After the wake,” I said.

He shrugged.

“Probably at the office,” he said. His expression clouded for a second, then brightened again. “I’ll have a look. Take off your T-shirt, lovely thief girl.”

“No,” I laughed. “Hey, David, why don’t you have any personal photos around the flat? Like the photo in your sock drawer of you and your friends in that car?”

“Have you been snooping?” he smiled.

“What happened to all those people? Like Sam and stuff? How come you don’t want to see them at all any more?”

“I don’t remember those moments except from the photos. I don’t much remember the people, they didn’t mean anything. I dumped that ugly car. It reminded me of being drunk.”

“And you dumped the friends, too?”

David was silent for a moment.

“If you take off your T-shirt then I’ll put photos of you all over my walls,” he said eventually. “To make up for my lack of personal history.”

“Please don’t,” I laughed.

“Come on,” he goaded. “Please get naked.”

“No,” I laughed. “You take off
your
top.”

So, of course, he took off his top without a moment of hesitation. He took off his T-shirts and then his trousers and then his boxers, until he was standing there starkers in the living room, just wearing mismatching socks. I laughed and glanced out of the window, because the living room looked out on the corridor. Anyone could have walked past and seen his tan line, his hairy legs. He had amazing calves: big, hairy, sinewy.

“Now your turn,” he said. His gaze relaxed and unnerved me at the same time. His eyes were always mischievous, like he was thinking of a joke and I was the punch line.

“Not going to happen,” I said, shaking my head. He took a step towards me and I took a step towards the door.

“Please?” he said. “How about just one flip-flop?”

So we laughed and he took some photos – of me laughing, of my head lost inside my T-shirt, of me taking off one flip-flop, then the other, and soon I was only wearing bikini bottoms, laughing for David in the living room. He kissed a freckle on my shoulder, and kissed my spine.