To Live and Love In L.A.

by Ben Peller

  This triumph only fueled my enthusiasm as I continued to spiel on about my book to passing readers from my station at a booth appropriated from some author who though according to their banner had written a book that would change lives, didn’t have the capability to locate a famous college campus. Soon an official from the festival stepped up to me. “What’s going on here?” he demanded amicably.

  Still on a high from my encounter with Meredith, I answered with meaning, “Just spreading my words. In the spirit of the Festival. By the way, I noticed you noticing me a while ago. And I appreciate you letting me stay here. I’ll leave if you want…”

  He looked to be late-forties, probably a professor at the college. Thick glasses and a lean jaw. He just grinned. “Yeah, we know the people who were supposed to be here weren’t coming. Tell me. Do you go to school here?”

  “I couldn’t afford one semester here,” I admitted.

  “Well…” he dipped his head a bit. “We haven’t had any complaints. So keep doing what you’re doing.” He glanced at the cover of my book, a raw replication of the flyer dangling above me. “But for whatever it’s worth, in the future you should probably get a better cover for your book.”

  Within ten minutes I’d sold another three copies. I was loving this. Money in my pocket, words flowing into the universe… all I needed now was love.

  As if sent by the fates, love proceeded to elbow its way into my life. It came in the form of Helena, which I would soon determine could be a wonderful name for the next disastrous hurricane Mother Nature decides to stir up.

  She dashed up with such urgency I was afraid she’d slam into me. A beautiful Latina wearing a red dress and wielding a spontaneous smile. Her dark hair looked like a waterfall. “Wow!” she exclaimed. “You don’t even have a table or chairs.”

  “Don’t need them,” I answered grandly. “All I need is literature.”

  I presented her with the final unsold copy of my manuscript, and while she perused it I chugged half a bottle of fuel. Several things about this woman had unnerved me in just this first minute since we’d accepted one another’s existence. She had a dynamic sexuality; her eyes were volcanoes. Her wise and powerful facial structure was undeniable. Her way of running her tongue around her full red lips as she pored over my words was totally hot on many degrees. In addition, as I turned back around from replacing the bottle from my backpack, she was holding out a crisp ten dollar bill to me.

  “This is great,” she gushed. “I want to buy five more copies for my friends. They’ll love it.”

  “But…” I blinked. “I don’t have any more copies with me. I’m sold out.” Sold out. Such a cool phrase. It made me feel like a blockbuster movie on its opening night.

  “In that case,” she smiled. “I could give you my number and we could meet somewhere and you could bring more. Or you could come by my gallery. It’s in Santa Monica. Do you live near there?”

  Indeed I did. So we exchanged numbers, and I signed her book. Then as she turned to go she reached out and ran her hand through my hair. Her freckles were radiant on her dark skin.

  “You didn’t flinch,” she said. “I like that in a man.”

  Then she was gone. And boy, was I in trouble.

  That next Tuesday I visited Helena at her studio in Venice. It was a squat grey building sandwiched between a bookstore that advertised Organically Produced Books and a shop that appeared to sell nothing but large silver-painted boxes. The door to her gallery was wide open, so I stepped inside. It was a cavernous space. Canvases lined the walls and many spilled onto the floor. Brushes and half filled cans of color lay strewn about like artistic land mines. Substitute paintbrushes and paint cans for pen and paper, and I might as well have been in my apartment.

  Might be my kind of woman, I thought.

  “Helena?” I called out hesitantly. Then again: “Helena.”

  She emerged from behind a large work of art that depicted howling faces and a sea of dancing skeletal figures. She was wearing a kimono that accentuated her own figure, which was certainly fleshy and curvaceous in all the right places. Her breasts, in particular, caught my eye. Her left one seemed to be larger than the other. Both looked delicious.

  “Hello there, you!” she smiled. “I’m so glad you came by.”

  “Sorry I didn’t call first-“

  “It’s all right,” she came up and hugged me. It was impossible to tell if she smelled of paint or perfume. “I’m happy to see you. I’ve been reading your work. I think it’s wonderful.”

  Definitely my kind of woman, I thought, returning her hug.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  We sat down and began to talk. As we did I looked around and became genuinely awed by her artwork. Her paintings mixed mostly blues and greens, with slashes of black, white, and red sewn in. Haunting swirls combined objects such as eyeballs, open books and horses. One painting in particular stood out: two figures on a dock with a green ocean under them, a blue sky above, and a spew of red where their faces should’ve been.

  We exchanged histories. She mentioned she was in her forties, divorced, had a daughter who her ex-husband had turned against her. Her ex-husband was, according to her, “a monster” who made a ton of money at some mortgage company.

  “Now I’m happily divorced,” she sighed. “And finding myself as an artist.”

  As admittedly impressed by her art and her life’s trajectory as I was, I couldn’t help but feel that her left breast was desperately trying to burst out of her kimono and into my mouth.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Um…” she paused. “No. Actually I haven’t dated in a while.”

  I nodded. “Neither have I,” I lied.

  “I actually have a new rule since my divorce,” she went on, picking up a stray paint brush and twiddling it. “Wait two before yahoo.”

  “Two before what?” I asked, telling myself there was nothing erotic about the way her fingers were nimbly handling that brush.

  “You know,” she winked, and gave a slight thrust of her hips. “I have to be seeing a guy two months before… ya-hooooo.”

  “Ahh…” I said. “I admire that. Most guys have a thirty before getting dirty.”

  Now she looked a bit confused.

  “Thirty minutes,” I explained. “Before getting dirr-ty.”

  Her laugh was one that made me want to hear more of it. The afternoon gently slipped into evening, when she mentioned that she had to pick up her daughter. Before I left, she ran her hand through my hair again, and this time followed it with a kiss on my cheek. Remembering that she admired how I didn’t flinch, I remained as still a statue.

  “I’d like to paint your portrait,” she whispered, and this time I did flinch.

  That night, I figured if Helena was going to use her art to canvas me, I should at least attempt to return the favor. I had a few cocktails and, suitably inebriated, did something I swore years ago I would never do again: I wrote a romantic poem.

  If life is but a stage, and we merely players, I am definitely blessed to be sharing a theater with you.

  On our next meeting a few nights later, this time at a bar near my apartment, I revealed the poem to her.

  She read it and laughed. “This is so cheesy!”

  I slammed the rest of my drink and was getting ready to tell her that was the whole damn point when she reached over and kissed me between the eyes. “I mean cheesy in a beautiful way,” she smiled, pulling back just a bit but still staying close enough so that I could smell her candy-tinted scent. My eyes were drawn together, both wanting to focus on the place where her lips had just touched me.

  The night ended back at my apartment, where Helena and I tore each other’s clothes off and flung them everywhere. A lamp got knocked over by one of her heels and crashed to the floor. Not that either of us noticed its breaking.

  After several bouts of blatantly breaking Helena’s “Wait two before Yahoo” rule, we lay in each other’s arms, s
oaked with that succulent sweat that lovemaking seems to inspire.

  “Yah-hoooo,” Helena breathed into my ear.

  The next day, I awoke to find Helena already dressed and slipping on her shoes.

  “Are you leaving already?” I asked.

  “I have to get to my studio,” she answered. “I want to start on your portrait.”

  “Shouldn’t I come with you?” I sat up in bed. “I mean, so you can see me while you paint?”

  “No!” she said, eyes wide. “I need to do this from memory.”

  With that she blew me a kiss and was out the door.

  I lay back in bed, unsure of everything. Except that for some bizarre reason I was falling in love with this woman.

  Eventually I got up and poured a cocktail and sat down to ponder this deluge of feelings. Surely they couldn’t be attributed to only the four times I’d come, even though this was a record for me. A curious thing about tolerances; I had a friend back in Chicago who claimed he would often come up to ten times during a single bout of sex. And yet he got tipsy after two drinks.

  “I don’t know how you can drink so much and still function semi-reasonably,” he would often tell me during our telephone calls. Semi-reasonably, of course, being open to wide interpretation.

  ”I don’t know how you can come more than two times in a night,” I would fire back. Then we would laugh, and probably wish we could exchange places for a month or so.

  But here I was, on my fourth cocktail, feeling not nearly buzzed enough, when the phone rang. I looked at my caller ID and saw Helena’s number.

  “Hello, my darling.” I answered, cringing as I did so. What the hell was happening to me? “Hello, you sonofabitch!” she screamed back into my ear. “I told you I was vulnerable last night! And still you went ahead and took advantage of me!”

  “But…” I stammered. “If anything, didn’t we take advantage of each other?”

  “You knew I was vulnerable, and still you stuck that…” her voice was quavering. “That thing inside of me. You even came inside me! How do you think that made me feel?”

  I was lost in uncertain waters. “Good?” I ventured.

  Wrong answer. “Like a piece of meat!” her scream was accompanied by a shattering of some sort.

  “What was that, Helena?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  She was right. I really didn’t.

  “So… you never want to see me again?” I proposed. Part of me wanted this to be true, another part didn’t.

  “No, I do!” she came back quickly, sounding a touch as desperately confused as I was. “I liked talking about art and stuff with you, I liked sharing stories with you, and I think you’re a pretty brilliant person. But I think at this stage we should just remain good pals. Okay?”

  So Helena and I entered into a vicious cycle in which we’d swear to be “nothing more than friends” and then wind up in bed less than two hours after we’d meet up.

  What about Helena had such a strong hold on me I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Who’s to say what inspires passion, however seemingly irrational? It may have been because she was obviously a fellow lunatic. She could be loving and tender one minute, crazy the next. On more than one disturbing occasion I pondered the possibility that I cared about her so much because she was so much like my mother. On even more disturbing occasions I took to calling her “mommy” while making love to her.

  “My baby,” she’d reply, while I would furiously suck on her nipple.

  Though we clearly both needed therapy, we were also both resistant to this possibility. As Norman Mailer once maintained after stabbing his wife and almost killing her, he didn’t want to be sent to a mental hospital because to allow this would mean his work in the future would be “considered that of a disordered mind.”

  As if an ordered mind could produce a piece of art worth a shit.

  In addition to Mr. Mailer’s valid point regarding art and sanity, to go into therapy would mean to confront ourselves, and Helena and I much preferred confronting each other. In a way it was wonderful; with each date we never knew how it would end. We might end up telling ourselves to go fuck ourselves, or we might end up fucking each other in marathon sessions while moaning how much we loved one another.

  Dysfunctional? Disordered? Possible. A hell of a lot of fun? Definitely.

  Throughout the first few months we saw each other Helena was working continuously on her portrait of me. Then about four months into our relationship she finally called me and announced the portrait was “as complete as it could be.” So I went to her studio to view it.

  She was clad in a tight red dress and had blonde highlights through her hair that glistened in the afternoon light. Helena took my hand, holding it only by the tips of its fingers, and led me inside.

  “Come,” she said. “Come see yourself.”

  I let her lead me around an army of canvases, and finally we stopped before one that hung on the rear wall. It was about six feet by nine feet, and was, in a word, jarring.

  A black circle occupied the center of the piece, and around it danced chattering skeletons, green and blue shaped creatures with blood pouring from their mouths, and a sea of other shapes that could be mistaken for anything from lions to turtles. In one corner an animal that looked like a unicorn feasted on a long haired human. And atop the black circle was an array of bottles, some broken and some erect and shining.

  “What in Christ’s name is that supposed to be?” I questioned, in what I thought was an admiring tone.

  Helena, apparently, thought otherwise. “It’s supposed to be you!” she shouted. “You don’t like it?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I protested. “It’s just really… there.”

  “You’re probably too drunk to even appreciate it!” she yelled. “You’ve probably been drinking all day, you sonofabitch!”

  An understandable enough accusation, given that whenever Helena and I had had a sleepover I’d usually pour an “eye-opener” (or as I termed them, “heart-opener”) to greet the day. But in this case her charge was utterly without merit. I actually hadn’t touched a drop all day. I’d wanted to be sober when I saw her rendering of me. Now I was wishing I’d had a few to prepare me for its chaos.

  “If I was drunk, I’d probably love it!”

  “Why don’t you just take your bottle and go to hell?!”

  “Because I’d probably find you already there waiting for me!” I yelled back.

  “Just get the fuck out of my studio! And don’t come back!”

  I was only too happy to acquiesce. She’ll never see me again, I determined for what seemed like the hundredth time in the roughly hundred I’d known Helena. And I don’t ever want to see her again.

  The L.A. afternoon sun felt good on my face as I strode out of her studio and resolved to find a normal person to get involved with.

  My resolve lasted all of two blocks before I veered into a liquor store. There I purchased a bottle of Pierre and a bottle of Gatorade. I went to a park a block further and sat there. I didn’t drink, just sat brooded over my feelings for Helena. Was it possible that after just three months I loved this woman?

  I finally did discreetly mix a few drinks in the park, and enjoyed them thoroughly while the sun made its descent. A proper buzz always has made sunsets look just a shade better.

  Maybe I’m being hasty, I proposed. Why not go back and see her just one more time? If only to give her a piece of my mind? And tell her that I was going to write all about our relationship and how much of a jerk she could be?

  Even as I thought this I knew it was complete nonsense. I wanted to see Helena again, to hear her voice, feel her skin and consume her scent.

  I shuffled back to her studio, tail tucked properly between my legs.

  Inside I found her sitting against the rear wall, knees pulled up against her chest and face squeezed between her legs. White paint coated her fingers. Her breathing seemed labored.

  “Helena?”
I said softly. Probably about as soft as I’d ever spoken to a woman in my life, other than, cringingly, my mother.

  She looked up at me, and the tears in her eyes astonished me. “You came back,” she said huskily. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”

  By the time I reached her she’d risen to her feet. We embraced and she jerked her head toward my portrait.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  There, in the center of the black circle, she’d drawn a smiley face in the white paint that now stained her hands. Just two blank eyes and a wide smile.

  “I think it’s wonderful,” I said honestly.

  We embraced, kissed, and after wishing one another to hell just hours ago spent the next several hours making love on the floor in front of a portrait of skewed caricatures of life and death encircling a smiley face.

  It seemed a fitting metaphor. Somehow.

  During a particularly savage ravaging of one another just a few weeks later, Helena pulled back and began to purr a bit.

  I was stunned.

  “Meow,” she cooed softly, and licked my cheek.

  The last time this had happened had been with Georgette. I shuddered as my memory rolled a clip of Georgette’s innards being shoveled into a black Hefty bag.

  Quickly I pushed Helena away. “No!” I shouted.

  She seemed more perplexed than angry. “What the hell’s your problem?” she asked wearily. It wasn’t like this was the first time she’d asked me this question.

  “I just…” I sighed. I’d never told anyone about Georgette. But, naked and covered in shared liquids with a woman I loved, it seemed like as good a time as any.

  As I put forth the tale, Helena’s expression ran a marathon. Curious, stunned, shocked, outraged, emphatic, and finally understanding.

  She embraced me. “I’m so sorry, Shawn,” she whispered into my ear. “I won’t meow if you don’t want me to.”

  “It’s okay,” I whispered back. “I can take it.”

  She meowed softly into my ear, and I felt like crying from happiness. So this was how people fell in love. This was how people got better.