“Get your own artiste.”
“Hey, I’m on your side on this one, Dez. She’s hot. I like the artistic thing. I bet she’s a little crazy.”
“Okay, whatever.”
“I mean crazy in bed.”
“Yeah, Rhonda, I got that. You don’t ever mean another kind of crazy.”
Rhonda grinned, a wicked smile that spread slowly across her face, as she stretched her arms above her head. “All right, I’ve got an early class tomorrow, and I’ve got a paper that isn’t going to write itself. You have fun with your little poetess.”
“Author.”
“Whatever. Tell me all the juicy details when you get home. Let me know if you’re moving in with her.”
“Shut up, Rhonda.”
“Seriously. I need a new roommate. Maybe someone with a decent toaster oven.” Rhonda flashed an evil smile at Dez and cackled, pulling herself to her feet and walking back upstairs.
Dez watched Rhonda disappear, and looked at the clock on the wall. It was only five-forty-five.
She walked around the house for a few minutes. The rain was still coming down, and it was the kind of rain she was tired of. She noticed a dirty spot on the sofa cushion where Rhonda must have put her feet up.
Dez turned on the television. It was still on the Weather Channel. The topic hadn’t changed, either: the big blue L, down from the Gulf of Alaska, wasn’t giving Los Angeles a break from the rain anytime soon.
Dez could feel herself getting restless. Now that there was a countdown before she had to pick Frankie up, she was distracted. She pointed the remote at the television, flipping around the stations, but nothing held her interest.
Finally, after about ten minutes, she turned off the television and grabbed her car keys. She could use some dinner. And maybe she should do some research on her date, as well.
She went to the hall closet and took out her rain jacket; light, but fleece-lined, and with a hood. It glistened, still wet from the rain earlier in the afternoon. Though the boxy design didn’t especially flatter her figure, Dez thought it went well with the tight-jeans-and-Oxford-shirt aesthetic she had perfected—which, she hoped, had attracted Frankie. She had warmer jackets; the Union Bay blue-checked polarfleece one came to mind, as it was cold—at least by Southern California standards—but the polarfleece didn’t stand up well to heavy rain. She spent a couple of minutes looking in vain for an umbrella and decided the hood would do.
Dez looked out the window. The sky had grown darker, the rain a little heavier. It was the kind of wet that got into everything, soaking Dez’s Levi’s, getting through to her socks, and leaving her shoes squishing around for several days. Dez sighed. She knew her car was damp inside from the rain tracked into it, and it wouldn’t be the most impressive vehicle to take an inspired writer like Frankie in. Frankie, who had an agent. The agent probably wined and dined Frankie in a fancy European car with leather seats before proffering the contract with the big advance.
Dez ran her hand over her short, tightly curled hair. Her hair had mostly dried out after the rainstorm that afternoon, and she wasn’t looking forward to getting it soaked again—especially not when she was trying to impress somebody. She hoped the hood would be effective enough.
She didn’t want to drive all the way to Redondo Beach; she didn’t even want to wade through the rain in the parking lot to get to her car. But she did really want to see Frankie.
She picked up her purse and opened the door to the pouring rain.
2
The bookstore was crowded, and at the entrance people jostled each other to get in out of the rain, and made almost no eye contact. Perhaps the darkened sky made them feel introspective and moody.
She had chosen BookEarth off Artesia Boulevard, more or less on the way to Redondo Beach. She’d heard about the huge selection, and it truly was a massive book store. But she wasn’t too familiar with the layout. She stepped around the New Releases tables—mostly big stacks of hardback editions of Needful Things and The Sum of All Fears, although a few copies of Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII were placed in a small stack on one of the back tables.
It took her a moment to find the Fiction & Literature section. She went on a search for Frankie Bethany in the “A–B” bookcase. A bearded man with thick, black plastic rimmed glasses and a brown fedora was reading Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear. He glanced at Dez and took a small step to the side.
She looked at the shelves near the bottom. There was a thin but noticeable layer of dust in front of the books: John Barth, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, and then at the end of the shelf, she saw it.
“Bethany,” read the thick spine. “Exodus Nights.” Then in smaller print, with a modern art-deco logo: “Showcase Monument Contemporaries.” There were two copies of Exodus Nights on the shelf, right next to each other. She picked up the one on the end. The books were so thick that the second copy didn’t budge when its twin was removed, even with the weight of the other books against it.
She flipped to the end of the book. 678 pages, and the type was fairly small. It was a massive tome, but that didn’t scare off Dez; she was used to thousand-page Stephen King books that Frankie apparently despised. She tried not to look at any of the words on the last page as she closed the book and flipped it over to look at the cover.
The cover was dark, predominantly black: a photograph of a man in a suit, his back to the camera, running into a stylized field of dark blue that blended smoothly into the blackness of the rest of the cover. “Exodus Nights” was below the photograph, and at the top, in larger text than the title, were the words “Frank Bethany.”
Hm, Dez thought. That’s interesting.
Dez turned the book back over and began to read the reviews.
The critical acclaim impressed her. “Nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.” “An astonishing debut, rich in texture and character.” “Bethany’s language is brilliant…the ambitious scope of the plot is matched by the assuredness of the writer.” “Bethany writes with such clarity that it’s hard to escape the emotional heft of many scenes.” “A stunning work.” “A tour de force.”
“Well, now that must be worth reading,” Dez murmured.
The bearded man looked up. “You talking about Exodus Nights?”
Dez glanced behind her and then realized he was talking to her. “Oh. Uh-huh. It looks pretty good.”
“It’s a real page-turner,” the man said. “It’s really powerful, too. It’s not one of those beachy summer reads that you don’t really have to pay attention to. I totally lost myself in it. It’s long, but I probably finished it in a couple of days.” He laughed. “I think I even called in sick to work just so I could read it.”
“This is Bethany’s debut novel?”
“Yeah, he’s got a couple of other ones too. Friendly Fire, I think the second one is called. It’s good, but it’s nowhere near as good as Exodus Nights.”
Dez wondered if she had missed something in the conversation with Frankie. Did Dez even have the right author? “Now, this is a local author, right?” Dez ventured.
The man shook his head, reached into the book as Dez was holding it, and turned to the end section, behind the last page. There was a poorly-reproduced black-and-white photo of a white man, with a mop of medium-toned hair, wearing a leather jacket. There was a short biography of Frank Bethany, from the minor literary awards he’d won with his short fiction to the announcement of his fourth book scheduled for publication the following spring. The bio ended with, “Bethany lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two Rottweilers.”
Dez’s head spun a bit. Was this an elaborate ruse to disguise Frankie’s gender? Was there something in the book that didn’t connect with a female author writing it? Or was Frankie lying? Dez wasn’t sure why Frankie would lie to her, though, especially over something so easily provable.
She carried the book with her to the information desk, and the young Asian woman with glasses behind the desk looked at D
ez expectantly. Dez thought the woman was stunning, and had to stammer to get the words out. “I’m looking for novelists with the last name Bethany,” she said. “I found Frank Bethany—obviously—but I was looking for a female writer.”
The woman nodded. “Any idea at all on the first name?”
Dez shook her head. The woman’s eyes, even hidden by the glasses, were breathtaking—so much so that she almost forgot about Frankie. She glanced at the woman’s nametag: Audrey.
“There’s a co-author of a book on the writings of Jacques Derrida named Marie Bethany-François,” Audrey said. “I could special order that—oh, that’s a textbook. It’s quite expensive.”
Dez shook her head. “No, no problem. I must have heard the name wrong or something.”
The woman nodded. “Perhaps it’s the woman’s first name. We have dozens of listings for novelists with the first name of Bethany.”
Dez shook her head. “No, that’s not going to be it. But thanks anyway,” Dez said.
She walked to the counter and stood in line. The bearded man was a few people in front of her, buying a small stack of four books. Dez couldn’t tell if The Clan of the Cave Bear was in there.
The line seemed to take a long time to get through. Dez checked her watch; she still had almost two hours to eat some dinner and drive the remaining twelve or so miles to Frankie’s apartment. The bearded man bought his books; he caught Dez’s eye and nodded, smiling. Dez nodded back, feeling phony. She got to the front of the line and pulled a ten-dollar bill out of her wallet. The teenager behind the second register motioned her over. He looked at the book and then at her.
“This is really good,” he said. “Very intense, but really good.”
Dez had an urge to tell him that she knew the author, but kept her mouth shut. “Yeah, you know, that’s what I heard,” she responded instead. “I heard it was better than his other ones too.”
The clerk leaned forward conspiratorially. “I liked Friendly Fire better,” he whispered. “I like it because it’s not as graphic, which I guess makes me a fag or something, but whatever. Better characters, too.”
Dez blinked hard at the clerk’s casual use of the pejorative term, and she wondered if she’d ever get used to it—movies, television, people on the street. She forced herself to smile.
“That’ll be nine seventy-three,” he said, putting the book in a plastic bag.
Dez handed over the ten and he gave her a quarter and two pennies.
“Enjoy your book,” he said. “Keep it dry.”
Dez, tight-lipped, simply nodded.
There was a Burger King farther along the parking lot and she went there to get something cheap to eat. The bistro’s drinks might be expensive—in her experience, calling a restaurant a bistro was just a license to charge fifty percent more and treat the customers badly.
She made sure the book was protected by the plastic bag and walked quickly across the parking lot to the Burger King. She pulled the door open and went in. The tile floor, which looked suspiciously like outdoor tile, had wet shoe prints all over the area in front of the door. Like weakening waves emanating from a rock dropped in the middle of a pool, the shoe prints got lighter and more spread out the farther away from the door it was.
There was no one in line and only a few people eating at the tables. Dez ordered, took her Coke, sat at one of the tables, and took out Exodus Nights.
The first page had Dez hooked.
The book opened with a detached account of a murder on a lifeboat at twilight. The victim was a man, that much was plain, but his relationship to the other people on the lifeboat was obfuscated. It also was unclear who the killer was—there were six people on the lifeboat, and there was a hunting knife the man had used to gut a fish several hours earlier. But the text, while passionate and lurid, took no pains to identify the one who actually stabbed the man.
It was clear, however, that everyone on the lifeboat wanted him dead. Everyone, that is, except for one man. He was elderly, had clear mental problems, and didn’t seem to understand, much less judge, what the other people did.
Dez heard her number called and got her food, bringing it back to the table. She unwrapped part of her burger so she could it eat it with one hand and went back to the book.
After the victim’s body was thrown overboard and the sky went dark, the remaining people on the boat fell into an uneasy sleep. They were awakened by the sound of a Navy helicopter at sunrise.
The narrator followed the elderly man to the hospital, which was quite surreal. Dez wasn’t sure of the location or the year, which she suspected was the author’s intent; still, it was off-putting, especially as a parade of hospital staff and visitors, each increasingly bizarre, visited the old man, poked and prodded him, asked personal and inappropriate questions, and left.
The last visitors were a male doctor and a female nurse, who callously grilled the old man about his sex life, but they were details from long ago, from a wife long passed away, and then the doctor and nurse began to kiss, began to undress each other, and then transformed before his eyes into wolves, who then started to copulate, transforming again into large, Kafkaesque insects, also copulating, finally transforming back into people, but the doctor was now a woman with similar facial features to the male doctor; vice versa for the male nurse. The doctor and nurse finished coupling—described rather graphically, but clinically—and proclaimed the old man healed. The old man was grateful, tears running down his face.
Dez realized she had been holding her breath, and breathed in and out deliberately. And stopped to think.
The weird, off-putting scene still made Dez marvel at the smooth, clear prose. Most writers wouldn’t be able to write that kind of scene without completely confusing the reader. Yes, the actual happenings were bizarre—beyond bizarre—but the straightforward writing style gave no opening for ambiguity, even as the wolves transformed into insects. Even in the clarity, the occasional clever metaphor gave perfect if disturbing mental pictures; vivid descriptions of the doctor and nurse, the two wolves, the two insects, the transformed doctor and nurse felt complete instead of drawn-out. None of it felt forced, none of it was over the top—crazy, given the over-the-top potential of the scene.
Dez looked at her watch: a quarter to eight. She cursed quietly; she had been reading so long that she was going to be late. She hoped that traffic wouldn’t be too bad, but knew that she’d be at least ten minutes late.
Dez’s head swam with the onslaught of lifeboats and characters and wolves and insects and grisly murders. Distracted, she crossed the parking lot, forgetting to pull her hood up, and got in the car. She smiled. Thoughts of Frankie stopped her from obsessing about the bad weather. That was probably a good thing.
She drove down Artesia Boulevard, and miraculously hit most of the green lights. But her luck ran out when she made a left on Hawthorne, and it crawled for a couple of miles until she finally escaped onto Sepulveda.
At a red light, she looked at the address again, and realized that Frankie’s address wasn’t in Redondo Beach; it was across the city limit in Torrance, although not by much. Dez grunted. She didn’t like it when people put on airs. On the other hand, she reasoned, it was closer to her apartment than going all the way down to the PCH or to Esplanade. And it was so much easier to forgive Frankie since she was attractive and interesting.
She missed the apartment complex at first, and had to make a U-turn. She found a spot marked VISITOR and checked her watch. She was seven minutes late, which was pretty good considering the backup on Hawthorne. She looked at herself in the mirror of her visor. Her hair had started to frizz. She kept it short for manageability, plus her first girlfriend had liked it short, and it had shocked her mother. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and Dez took off her boxy rain jacket and left it in the car.
She had no idea where Apartment 16 would be, but she quickly found it; it was a ground-floor apartment on the end. She rang the doorbell and waited. And waited.
&nbs
p; She checked her watch; it was ten minutes past. Scenarios ran through her head. Frankie had said tonight, right? What exactly had Frankie said over the phone? No—Frankie had definitely said tonight. She leaned over and rang the doorbell again.
She strained to listen for signs of life inside. The lights were on, but she could hear neither a television nor stereo. She knocked, feeling silly. Still nothing.
She was about to walk away when Frankie opened the door.
3
The red-and-white cherry dress was gone, the 1950s pin-up look replaced by thin-rimmed glasses, a tight aquamarine pullover sweater, and black palazzo pants. Frankie’s long brown hair was pulled back in a simple French braid. If the pin-up look had piqued Dez’s interest, this presentation—bordering on “hot librarian”—made her pulse race.
“I bet it’s eight o’clock already,” Frankie said, stepping aside to let Dez in.
The front door opened into a small living room, with a kitchen and dining nook directly beyond. The place smelled of computer paper. The living room, neither immaculate nor messy, was filled with furniture: in roughly the center, a sofa with a brown-and-gold rose pattern at least fifteen years out of date, that nonetheless looked well cared for. In front of this, a coffee table, on which were two stacks of paper, and between them an empty box of Chinese food with two cheap wooden chopsticks sticking out. Behind the sofa, a computer desk with an IBM PS/2, a monochrome monitor blaring its blue-and-white beacons, a keyboard and mouse drawer, and a printer below. Next to the wall facing the sofa, a small TV stand with a nineteen-inch television. The television was pushed back on the cart just enough to leave a ledge for the nearly-empty wineglass that stood there, blocking the screen.
The rabbit ears of the television were extended fully and at crazy angles, making Dez think Frankie wasn’t a fan of cable. The wineglass blocking the view of the screen made Dez think maybe Frankie wasn’t a fan of television at all.
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