My dress felt too tight. She was right, we were getting somewhere. As I told her each part, from the end backward, we were getting to the beginning. We were getting to the reason why I was there. Some people say they do work inside their own brain. They learn that jealousy is a childish emotion. They teach themselves such things. But I could do no work inside my own brain. The interior of my brain was a snake pit. I couldn’t survive in there alone.
—I’m not the important one.
—Yes, you are! Alice said. I won’t say I feel like I’ve known you forever because that’s the kind of thing that woman Lara would say. Over bee pollen shots. She has celiac disease, so the housekeeper has to be very careful.
—Maybe one day the housekeeper won’t be careful enough.
She reached over, laughing, and placed both of her palms on my shoulders. Her forehead went into my chest. I thought, grotesquely, of my father having a type.
—Everybody is full of shit, she said. I called my mother Maman from the age of ten until the age of sixteen.
—What happened at sixteen?
—She died, Alice said, still laughing.
—I’m sorry.
—She was only in the hospital for two weeks, getting gray. She was an amazing woman. A perfect mother. I really think I’d think that even if she weren’t my maman.
I asked her to tell me about Rod Rails. She said that he was one of these gurus who left his penis inside of a woman to calm her. That he would never thrust.
—How did you get the job?
—You mean why did I take the job? she asked, as though of course, if a man were hiring, she would get the job. I want to open my own place someday. Not in LA. Back in Italy, maybe. A small oak studio amid the olive groves and the cypresses. And this is the best. Rod, for all of his tantric nonsense, is the best at combining business and the spirit of yoga. He may not believe in it, but I believe in what he claims to believe in. And that’s all I need.
—You’re very smart for your age.
—You say that like you’re so much older. What are you, thirty?
—I’m nearly thirty-seven.
—Well, you don’t look thirty-six, but even so, thirty-six is nothing.
—Thirty-six may be nothing, but thirty-seven is the end.
—Are you almost done here?
—Closing time was a half hour ago.
—Were you waiting for me? she asked, nearly lasciviously.
—No, I stuttered.
—It’s okay. I was waiting to see you, too.
Already she had the power to coax rage from me one moment and make me feel lucky and loved the next.
—Let’s go to the beach, she said.
We got into her Prius. A cherry air freshener dangled from the smudged rearview mirror. It smelled like the 1980s and everything that was the color red.
On the way down we stopped at my house because I said I had a pack of cigarettes lying around. She didn’t seem surprised by the absurdity of the compound. While I went upstairs to my stupid lofted bedroom, I heard her moving around downstairs.
—I shouldn’t smoke, she said. It aggravates my throat.
I found the pack of American Spirits. I’d taken them from my rapist’s hotel room.
—What’s wrong with your throat?
—I pulled something back in my bulimic days. Took months to heal properly. I wouldn’t have stopped otherwise.
—You were bulimic? I said.
—Give me a break, Alice said, fanning herself with her palm and looking all around. Jesus Christ, it’s so hot in here. Jesus! You know there’s an AC unit up there?
—I can’t use it. It’s in the lease.
—What?
—It’s in the lease that I can’t use it. He can hear it from his house.
I pointed Lenny’s shed out to Alice through the kitchen window.
—I’m turning it on, she said. She dragged one of my unpacked boxes to the wall, climbed it, and switched the unit on. An oily sweat glistened between her breasts. Why don’t you buy some window units?
The notion of the accordion, of stuffing the gaps, it was so large-seeming a problem that it made me want to curl into a fetal position.
—I hate window units, I said.
—Window air conditioners make me feel cozy.
—They make me feel poor.
—In Maremma, Alice said, most everywhere in Italy, as I’m sure you know, air-conditioning isn’t necessary at night. The breeze is enough. There is nearly always a breeze. And it’s really only at night that you need to feel cool.
Alice had told me earlier that the house they moved to in Italy was across the road from a dairy farm and on the same dirt road as a rifle range. She would look out the window to see the brown cows on the dusty knolls, finding swatches of grass and munching in their homely way, and then she would hear a gunshot; both she and the cows would flinch, each in her own fashion. Violently bucolic, she called it. I wondered how many times she’d said that to a man who admired her.
—Is that why your mother went back to Italy? I asked. The night breeze?
—You want to know the truth? It makes me sick to say it.
I nodded. I felt the cold of the air conditioner against my face and weirdly missed the oppressive heat. In the Poconos we had a miserable old toaster that darkened one side of the bread while barely warming the other and so you would have to flip the bread and babysit the process. When, that final summer, we bought a new toaster from the Two Guys in Harrison, the settings were precisely calibrated, the toast came out perfectly every time, and it made me irrationally sad.
—My mother left America, Alice said, following the death of her lover.
—Lover, I said.
—A married one. Perhaps the same sort of situation as yours. Everything reminded her of him. It was too painful. She couldn’t be in the same country where he died. She told me some of the story when I was younger, and then when she was dying, she told me the man was my father.
—Oh. How did he die?
—Cancer, she said. Throat.
Right then I wanted to tell her the truth of how it actually happened, in part because I hated her for not knowing. For having had the childhood that had been ripped from me.
* * *
WE TOOK TUNA CANYON TO the beach. It was a one-way road through the Canyon, from the village down the mountain to the base, ending bluntly at the Pacific Coast Highway. People raced their cars from the summit to the beach, Alice told me. Jimmy Dean died on that road. In his perfect little car. She opened all four windows and the sunroof to give the impression of a convertible. Her caramel hair whipped against her face. There were no guardrails on the road and Alice took the twists fearlessly. Through the gaps in the sycamores you could see the extent of the canyon, the mop of jade like the canopy of a rainforest.
When we arrived at the bottom, it was like everything else I’d seen in Los Angeles—you came out of something gorgeous and untamed into something lurid, the unlovely row of houses on the ocean side of the Pacific Coast Highway. The gas stations and the garden centers with overpriced terra-cotta pots.
She pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant with nets and buoys. She said we were going to get some clams and beer and bring them to the beach. There was a red neon sign that said REEL INN. The air smelled of crabs as we got out and the sun hit me in that evocative way it does after you have a beer on an empty stomach. Inside there were colored lights strung from the ceiling, plastic red gingham tablecloths across long tables, an ordering booth for clam rolls, raw clams and oysters, thick steaks of Chilean sea bass on paper plates. There was a patio with heat lamps and pebbles on the ground and picnic tables and petunias in galvanized Corona buckets.