As for the second wedding photo, it was the same one I’d seen framed in Lily’s bedroom, of her and the red-haired man. I wondered how Lily lost that indistinct and careful smile from the first wedding photo for the calm allure of the second. There was nothing written on the back, but there was a photocopied marriage licence folded in the envelope. The licence said that Lily Dakin, 23, married Richard Harris, 30, in Burbank, California. In this second photograph her hair was scraped off her face, and you could see the crow’s feet around her eyes. I finished my cigarette on the kerbside, staring at these pictures, then walked into the 7-11 and asked the shop assistant whether he had a copy of the Yellow Pages I could borrow and a map of Los Angeles that I could buy.
7
There were twenty-two California listings for A. Walters. I sat with the sticky payphone up to my mouth and spoke to Abigail Walters in Napa, Abe Walters’s son in Eureka, Anna Walters’s boyfriend in Santa Maria, Ashley Walters in Orange County, Adam Walters’s mother in San Francisco and then a woman named Candy Britannia in Los Angeles, who informed me that she was subletting from a man named August. She didn’t know (or wouldn’t give me) August’s mobile number or new address, but she thought he worked in a Martini bar in LA – a place called Dragon Lounge or Dragon Bar or something to do with dragons, although she wasn’t sure where exactly it was.
I tossed and turned in the Venice Beach youth hostel that night, and the next day found an Internet café on the beach to look up the addresses of all the “dragon” establishments in Los Angeles that might serve Martinis. There was The Dragon, a Red Dragon, a Dragon Bar, and a Twin Dragon Drinks. I knew that the August I found wouldn’t be a boy my own age, but there was something about his Polaroid wedding photograph that made me want to find him anyway – perhaps it was because from the looks of things August must have been the person Lily called home in the years after she left me. While in the Venice Beach internet café I also typed the name “David Reed” and “photographer” into Google and got a bunch of results: a graphic designer from Texas, a professor of Computer Science in New Jersey, a Facebook page for a “freshman” in Northcentral University. Then there was a paparazzi website called “The List”, which had the Giant’s name connected to photographs of skeletal “It” girls stepping out of limousines, and small tanned men wearing sunglasses inside expensive restaurants. I figured that was the Giant, and pressed a “Contact us” button hidden at the bottom of the homepage, revealing the mailing address for their office in downtown Los Angeles. My return flight to London wasn’t for three days, and if Lily’s second husband wouldn’t even come down and see me because he was too hung over, I figured it couldn’t hurt to keep the suitcase for a few days and learn something about my mother.
It takes three hours to get anywhere on Los Angeles public transport. The same cooking channel was on the televisions at the front of every bus – men dressed as Zorro for some reason making omelettes on the beach. Out of the windows the city all looked derelict and vast with crouched buildings on either side of thick tarmac highways. At the Internet café I’d Google-mapped the places I wanted to go and marked them all out on my 7-11 tourist map, but still found it nearly impossible to understand where I was. I even looked again at the pretty road maps in Lily’s suitcase, but of course they weren’t helpful at all. Each one was drawn over with lines that on second glance were not exactly routes, but patterns, pictures, shapes. The outline of an angular woman with vast breasts was created by tracing the lines of Wyoming and Colorado, then two closed eyes were drawn onto an aerial photograph of roads in South Africa. There was a map of Tuscany in Italy, where the city of Florence seemed to be the hole between a woman’s legs; a version of New York where Central Park was clearly pubic hair, and a tourist map of Berlin where the Brandenburg Gate was a woman’s gnashing teeth in the middle of a cubist face. A badly photocopied map of Los Angeles had a woman’s silhouette drawn in black pen using the Western edges of different districts as the outline, and there was something very beautiful, very strange, about the detail.
On various complex bus routes I made my way from Venice Beach to Downtown LA, which equated to traveling from the elbow of the woman drawn on Lily’s photocopied and doodled-on map to maybe the belly button.
I decided to go to David’s office first, planning to move on to one of the possible dragon Martini bars in the evening. There’s a flower called “bird of paradise” all over Los Angeles: it has orange leaves shaped like knives, although from a certain angle the flowers also look like gaggles of slim-necked tropical birds. There were clumps of these savage plants outside the office block in which the Giant, David Reed, apparently worked. It was a grainy building made of concrete and glass, the foundations surrounded by an array of wilting foliage. There were ferns, cacti, birds of paradise and strange, waxy bougainvillea that seemed to be sweating in the sunlight. On my second day alone in Los Angeles I sat sweating, too, on some dusty stairs opposite the office building, ready to disappear if I actually saw him coming in or out of the revolving doors. But it was Sunday, so I supposed he wouldn’t come into the office at all. The stairs opposite the office building led up to a kind of raised mini-mall with a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Radio Shack. I’d peaked into the lobby and saw through the windows that there were lawyers and talent agencies and graphic designers listed on a board above the reception desk, along with “The List Photographic Agency”. There was a receptionist working behind the desk, but she was reading a gossip magazine and hardly anyone came in or out of the doors that afternoon. I sat there for a few hours, hoping to see David’s slouchy oversized body. Then when the sun started to go down I admitted defeat for the day and opened up my tourist map again to try and work out how to get to China Town, where one of the potential dragon Martini bars was.
I should have found somewhere to sleep and then gone to the bar, but it didn’t occur to me. I’d never been alone in a strange city before, let alone a strange country. I’d been on camping holidays with friends once or twice, and the occasional weekend away with Daphne and Dad, but I’d never checked into a hotel alone or found my way around a new city by myself. The first dragon bar I found that evening was a Chinese dive where a bouncer with yellow teeth threatened to have me chucked out even though I was only showing the cook a photograph of my mother on her wedding day. I must have seemed nervous and strange standing there with my school rucksack in one hand and Lily’s red suitcase in the other, baseball cap covering my boyish blonde hair. The Chinese bouncer didn’t believe that I was old enough to drink. Instead of finding August that night, I slept in the first youth hostel I found, which was luckily only a few roads away from the Dragon Bar. It was a China Town youth hostel that smelt of burnt rice and incense. The bedroom was meant to be communal, with two sets of bunk beds, but I was the only one in the room. I slept with the suitcase in bed with me, between my body and the wall, my sweaty fist on the handle. Every few minutes a new noise woke me up. First there were toilets flushing and doors slamming, then the scream of two cats having sex on the rooftop, then junkies or insomniacs babbling on the street under the window. I wondered what David was doing while I was sleepless in China Town. He was probably fast asleep and dreaming. I imagined him on his back, snoring slightly, splayed out on a big bed like a starfish. Then I imagined that he couldn’t sleep either and had his eyes open.
I left the China Town hostel as soon as it was light on Monday morning, and found another one in West Hollywood called the Serena Hostel, which was advertised on the back of the laminated tourist map from the 7-11 on Venice Beach. The Serena was next to a liquor store and opposite a depressing-looking icecream parlor that must have been a cover for something illegal, because nobody ever went in or out of it. It was a nice-enough place, though, with big rooms and messy communal areas full of candles stuffed in beer bottles, and notice boards offering bus tours of celebrity homes. Dust floated everywhere, and the plumbing creaked, but it wasn’t expensive. The Serena was run by a gruff woman named
Vanessa who wore long black dresses that made her look obese. She had three matted dreadlocks in her ashy hair and wore black lace-up boots even in ninety-degree heat. The co-manager, Tony, was an ex-bodybuilder who had a flattened nose and one finger missing off his left hand. They rented me a locker behind the reception desk where I could keep the suitcase safe and not have to drag it around the city with me all week. The lockers were big and wooden, a bit like the ones in left-luggage offices at some train stations, except these ones had padlocks. You had to give Vanessa or Tony the key and ask one of them to open the locker every time you wanted to get something. Before I gave them Lily’s suitcase to look after, I got dressed up slightly and took Lily’s driving licence from the purse in her suede bag. I still wore my grubby baseball cap, but it looked sort of trendy with Lily’s sunglasses and her slightly fitted black T-shirt in place of my hooded zip-up cardigan. I even wore a pair of her earrings: little silver-and-blue teardrops.
I crouched on the steps opposite David’s office again in my baseball cap and Lily’s sunglasses, not knowing what I’d say if he saw me. It would have been easier to speak with August than with David, since I had the wedding photograph to give to August. For David all I had to offer was a pile of letters that might not be from him at all. As I sat in the sunlight watching the revolving doors of David’s office, I could tell who were paparazzi, because they came out with their eyes darting, a camera swinging like a poacher’s gun across their shoulders. Many of them were bearded or thickly unshaven, and they’d slide sunglasses onto their noses as they walked away quickly, anxiously, like they were missing something; dirty-knuckled thumbs tapping away on mobile phones as they made for their cars or the coffee shop on the corner of the road. I ate a doughnut from the doughnut shop and felt sick, then flicked through the paperback novel that I’d taken from next to Lily’s bed at the Pink Hotel. It was called Enkidu, and had a drawing of an animal-like man on the cover underneath the embossed title. She’d only got three-quarters of the way through, by the looks of the partially dog-eared pages. According to the back cover, the book was based on some old epic poem about a black-eyed man-beast named Enkidu who grew up among animals, but flicking through the pages suggested it was top-shelf stuff. Sitting on the steps opposite David’s office, I read how Enkidu lollopped on all fours and suckled from the breasts of pigs until one day a hunter discovered him and sent a prostitute named Shamhat into the wilderness. There was a creepy sex scene in which Enkidu tried to suck milk out of Shamhat’s breasts and then bit her nipples till she bled. I kept glancing up from the pages to scan the faces and bodies of people traipsing in and out of the office, but I didn’t see anyone resembling David that day, and by the time I climbed on a bus to Boyle Heights with my annotated tourist map in my hands, my skin and clothes smelt of sweat and sunlight and doughnuts from the strip mall shops.
At a bar called Twin Dragon Drinks, a disco ball hung on the ceiling of a room with sticky floors and fake-wood panelled walls that you could hardly see behind the crowds of people palpitating to the music. I didn’t look a thing like Lily’s photo in her driving licence, but the bouncer ushered me in with a cursory glance. I shouted above the hip-hop music to ask all the barmen, doormen and waitresses whether they knew August. I showed them the photograph of Lily and August frowning solemnly on their wedding day, but everyone replied with shrugs and frowns.
“Na, never met anyone named August...”
“Like, what, the season? No...”
“He looks cute. Don’t know him...”
It was crowded in the bar, and people kept bumping into me, stepping on my toes and elbowing me as if I was invisible in the darkness. The drinkers and dancers seemed gigantically tall – white plastic platform shoes, hair extensions, muscular arms, tan girls and molasses-skinned men, baseball caps with the labels still on. Eventually I re-emerged into the warm Los Angeles evening and calmed down in the emptiness beyond the gaggle of smokers shifting from foot to foot in floodlights from the bar.
8
I decided to sit outside David’s office for one more day. If he didn’t appear I’d go to Venice Beach and give Richard back the suitcase as promised, but on the third day – when I was sick of smelling fried sugar and bland coffee from the doughnut shop – David stepped out of the revolving doors and into the sunshine. I hadn’t noticed him go in, and I held my breath for a moment when I saw him. He was even taller than I remembered, but slightly thinner and gaunter. He had a broad chest and big shoulders. He wore massive sunglasses and shapeless grey flannel trousers. I turned my head towards him, but stayed firmly out of sight around the corner. Again it was like he’d fallen into a pile of laundry and squirmed until he had clothes on. He paused outside the office building for a moment, looked at his wristwatch, then limped towards a coffee house on the corner of the street. I stayed on the opposite side of the road and felt sick. After two days of kicking my heels with nobody to talk to except a mean Radio Shack employee and a pre-pubescent Vietnamese doughnut maker whose vocabulary was limited to snack-related necessities, you might think I’d have come up with a plan about how to approach David. I hadn’t even thought about it, though, and on seeing him my mind went completely blank. I stayed crouched under my sunglasses and baseball cap on the steps. A few moments after going into the café, David came back out holding a paper cup in his hand. He walked back the way he came past the office and then four blocks down to his shiny black SUV. I watched from the other side of the road as he fumbled for his car keys and spilt hot coffee on his hand. He swore under his breath, or at least his lips moved, and he sucked his hand in a way that made me think of the half-animal Enkidu from Lily’s book. His large hands seemed to be shaking. Eventually he put the cup on top of the car and managed to climb inside, bringing the coffee with him. Then he just sat at the wheel for at least ten minutes, staring straight in front of him without taking a sip.
The night after seeing David I chain-smoked out of my hostel window, and then got dressed from Lily’s suitcase in her fuchsia silk dress and leather jacket. The sweat-stained ankles of her knee-high boots bit into the skin of my feet. There was even a little of Lily’s blood, a dissipating flower of the stuff at the heel of the left boot, maybe from a blister. There was nothing I could do about finding David again until the next day, and I needed time to think what to say to him, so in the meantime I went to a tiny downtown dive called just The Dragon, not too far from David’s office building in downtown Los Angeles. The Dragon was a long and thin room with an elaborate pastoral mural above the rows of vodka, gin and vermouth bottles behind the bar. Above the front door a beige stuffed cat bared his teeth and teetered on the wire spear that kept him upright, and along the walls were lots of different-sized mirrors. It was raining that evening. I could see in the mosaic of mirrors around the bar that Lily’s fuchsia sundress didn’t suit me. It was a beautiful thing with a high neck and a gold zip that traced my spine down the back, but it made me look pale and too skinny. I’d tried on some of Lily’s lipstick earlier, but anxiously smudged it off again at the last minute before leaving the hostel. By the time I arrived, my dress was polka-dotted with polluted rain and my hair was frizzy.
At first I only saw one barman, a man with the word “nomad” tattooed in Gothic letters on his wrist. The bar was busy for such a small space, with three couples at tables around the sides and one group of students with beers and books in the corner. I was just rummaging in my rucksack for Lily and August’s wedding photograph, planning on asking the nomad bartender if he knew August. Then August himself came backwards out of the kitchen with an armful of frosted Martini glasses. He wore a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up to above the elbow. He must have been older than Dad, at least forty, but he looked quite similar to the youthful face in his wedding photograph. August’s eyes were soft, his skin was thin, and he moved towards the bar with an aquatic elegance that belied his age. He walked like a teenage runway model, the complete opposite of the Giant’s oversized and tipsy limp that h
ad made me hold my breath earlier in the day. August had curly brown hair that was thinning slightly at the top of his head and was cut much shorter than in the wedding photograph. He didn’t look at me as I sat at the bar, but gruffly asked:
“What can I get you?” He wiped the smudge on a Martini glass with a checkered cloth.
“Whatever’s good,” I said. He stole a blank look at me, and then, without a word, filled a tumbler with ice. He poured a clear liquid over the ice, then filled the rest with vodka and stirred it all up before straining it into a Martini glass. He twisted a lemon slice into the liquid like he was wringing laundry, then spread the broken-fleshed lemon around the edge of the glass and dropped it into the vodka. He put it in front of me and gave me a quick, distracted smile.
The Pink Hotel Page 4