The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  “Enjoy,” he said, and walked away. I put my fingers on the stem of the glass and was about to say something to make August come back, but my voice caught. I sipped vodka in silence and watched August’s pretty face light up at the sight of a woman in a business skirt-suit talking about a new rock band she’d seen at a club the other night. Suddenly I felt exposed and wobbly on the barstool, so I climbed off and retreated to an empty table with a clear vantage point of the bar.

  “They were just awesome,” said the woman in the business suit, clasping her hands together and smiling, “Like, so cool. We danced for ages. It was fun.”

  “Yeah? Guess I’ll check them out some time,” drawled August with his glossy brown eyes stuck on her.

  “I’ll burn you a copy of their album if you like?”

  “That’d be cool,” he said.

  “No problem.” She smiled and leant on the bar to continue flirting with him, while I sat and watched the back of his head bob up and down in the occasional burst of appreciative laughter. Occasionally she wound her shoulder-length hair around her painted fingers, or bobbed down to fiddle with the buckle of her heeled white sandals. I got Lily’s book out of my bag and laid it out on the sticky table with the cover bent back to hide the drawing of a naked man on the front. I’d put the Polaroid wedding photograph in the paperback for safekeeping and it peeked out of the side. I sat alone at the table for ages while more people turned up – a bearded man holding hands with a platinum-blonde, bottle-tanned woman, two men who read newspapers in silence. Eventually August looked in my direction and caught my eye for half a second, but by now I’d left it so long that I figured I might as well wait until he was closing up before giving him the photograph. Otherwise he’d wonder why I didn’t just come out with the photo first thing. August slid back over to the other side of the bar while I went back to reading about Enkidu and Shamhat the whore. I read slowly, aware of August’s shadow shimmying back and forth across the bar. At one point I think August and the nomad bartender whispered something about me, because when I glanced up they both looked quickly away.

  It was around midnight when people started to leave. Most of the couples peeled off first, then the group of students with beers and books who’d been sitting in the corner, then the men with the newspapers and a group of businessmen I hadn’t noticed come in, and the last to leave were the bearded man and his platinum-blonde girlfriend, who had been kissing him and giggling in the corner while August and the Nomad washed down the tables and turned all the lights on. I felt awkward still sitting there, but August smiled at me as the bar was flushed with phosphorescent light and the last people in the bar guffawed drunkenly out of the door. August’s smile was a half-smile, really, sort of perturbed, like he couldn’t second-guess the creature in an ill-fitting purple dress and knee-high boots reading in the corner. I thought he was going to say something to me or tell me they were closing, but he didn’t. So I said, almost too quietly to be heard:

  “Are you closing now?”

  “Huh?” August said, leaning his elbows on the bar as if to help him hear me. Music was still playing in the bar, even though the lights were on.

  “Are you closing now?” I said, slightly louder.

  “You’re English,” he said. “Yeah?”

  I nodded.

  “I should be off I guess,” I said without getting up.

  “What you reading?” he said, smiling like he was laughing at me.

  “It’s not that good,” I said, closing it and turning it on its back. “I borrowed it. It’s not very good.”

  “You’ve been reading it all night, though,” he said. “Must have been interesting enough. You want another drink before you go? We’ve been making bets on whether you were meant to be meeting someone or not.”

  “I wasn’t meant to be meeting anyone,” I said.

  “No one stood you up?” August said. “Really? I mean, it’s happened to the best of us. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “No,” I said. “It just looked like a nice bar. Does that mean you lose the bet?”

  “You looked like you were waiting for someone,” said August, shrugging. “But I didn’t realize you were English. The English are odd. Every English person I know has been fucked up,” he said. “Strange people, you know?”

  “I just felt like reading my book,” I said. “I’ve been on holiday with friends, but they all left this morning and I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “I can’t hear you,” he said. “Speak up.” He turned back to where the nomad bartender was putting chairs on tables. “Rob! Turn the music down, will you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. Rob rolled his eyes at August and obligingly turned the music down a few notches, then kept going with his tidying.

  “I was wrong then, you weren’t stood up, you’re just a bit odd,” August said, putting three Martini glasses on the bar. “I’m making Rob and myself a drink, I’ll make you one too since you’re here. It’s Rob’s birthday,” said August.

  “I don’t want one,” said Rob. “I’m going home.”

  “It’s your birthday,” said August. “You have to have one.”

  “It’s my birthday and I want to go home to bed,” Rob said, but August made three drinks anyway. When August walked over to my table and passed me my second Martini I moved my finger, just half an inch, so that our skin touched slightly.

  “Enjoy,” he said, and he smiled again. It was the smallest gesture, but my skin tingled. Maybe on some level his skin felt something of Lily in me, but what he probably recognized in this English girl wearing a rumpled sundress was her need to be touched. I should have taken out the photograph and given it to him at that point, right then before the other barman left, but I didn’t. Instead I took a deep breath and smoothed Lily’s dress over my legs. I thought of Laurence’s words about being visible when you’re aware of your body. My skin didn’t smell of nervous sweat and LA smog any more. It smelt of vodka and the fading remnants of Lily’s perfume.

  “I’m beat,” said Rob, downing most of his Martini in one and turning off the music from a box behind the bar, then walking to the door. He looked disapprovingly at August again. “Are you going to lock up, then?” said Rob.

  “I’ll lock up, dude, sure,” said August. My heart started to beat quite fast, and it got faster as the door clicked close on August and me alone in the silent bar. I should have taken the photo from the book as soon as Rob left. That would have made sense, but my fingers didn’t move. August gave me a puzzled look. He must have been wondering whether the potential result of this conversation had any chance of being worth the required effort, or whether he should just tell me to drink up and leave. August presumably thought I was some lonely tourist who’d been stood up and wouldn’t admit it, or who didn’t have anyone to spend time with in the first place. I took another sip of the Martini he made me. I touched the corner of the wedding Polaroid at the back of Lily’s book, and thought that if anything got out of hand I could just show him the picture. I hadn’t expected him to look at me like he was doing, so instead of showing him the photograph I smiled awkwardly at him across the bar. I’m not sure if I’m pretty – but I’m not ugly. And sitting in the empty bar with August I felt small and anxious.

  “So you’ve been on holiday with friends?” he said, not believing me.

  “Yeah.”

  “From London?”

  I nodded.

  “Having fun in LA?”

  “Uh-huh.” “Do you smoke?” he asked.

  I nodded again.

  “Let’s go have a cigarette on the fire escape,” he said.

  And so I followed August through the back room of the bar where he grabbed a pack of Marlboro Reds and a Zippo from one of the many towers of boxes in an overcrowded, damp-smelling back room. The back door opened out into a little alley where deliveries were obviously made and the rubbish put out. August pulled down a ladder leading to a fire escape, and blood rushed to my skin as he took my hand to help
me up the first few rungs of the ladder so I could sit just above him. I left my rucksack on the concrete floor amongst piles of cigarette butts under the ladder and climbed nearly to the first landing, then turned to sit down on the black-painted metal. August stood at the bottom, leaning on the brick wall with his face at the level of my knees. He lit my cigarette for me and passed it from his mouth, over my knees to my hand, then stood back a step and lit his own. We both inhaled.

  “It’s a nice bar,” I said after a quiet moment.

  “It’s okay. It’s fun.”

  “Do you own it?”

  “I’m the manager. I live up there at the moment,” he pointed to a window above the bar. “What have you been doing in LA? You had fun?”

  “Just normal stuff. Tourist stuff,” I said.

  “Shopping on Melrose?”

  “That sort of thing,” I lied, not knowing what Melrose was. I sucked on my cigarette gratefully. I’m not great at small talk.

  “And you had fun?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Are you from LA?”

  “Na, I’m from Nevada originally – the border between Nevada and Idaho. I’ve lived here a while now though.”

  “Do you have family in Nevada?”

  “Brothers and sisters, sure,” he said, but looked a bit bored with the conversation. He probably would rather have been talking to the girl in the business suit who wrapped her fingers around her hair and fiddled with the straps of high-heel sandals.

  “You’re shivering,” he said, and put his hands on my knees even though I wasn’t shivering at all. The air was damp from the rain, but not cold at all. He looked at my legs. Lily’s black leather boots and purple dress only made my knees and thighs look more alabaster, more bruised and babyish clamped together there on the fire escape. This sort of thing had never happened to me before, so I wasn’t aware of the “cigarette outside, arm around shoulder, small talk, can we see each other again some time” cliché of it all. We both finished our cigarettes, and he stamped them out on the damp floor.

  “Shall we go back inside?” he said.

  Perhaps that was it, I thought. He was bored and he’d like me to leave now, because I wasn’t pretty or confident enough to be worth flirting with. He helped me down off the fire escape, though, and he didn’t let go of my hand as I swung my rucksack over my shoulder and followed him back into the main bar, where he turned off the over-bright lights and plunged the room into half-darkness with two lamps on. He let go of my hand, and it fell down to the side of my hips. We looked at each other.

  “Maybe we could see each other again,” he said. He moved his face quite close to mine in the darkness. His breath smelt of olives, vodka and cigarette smoke.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I like you,” he said. “I can’t work you out. I’d like to take you to dinner some time. Is that something that might happen?”

  Of course he didn’t mean this, because I’d already told him that I was leaving the next day, but it didn’t seem to matter. He stood very close to me, then tucked my scraggly blond hair behind my ear and caressed my skin down from my earlobe to my elbow. I suppose I must have tilted my head up slightly, because somehow we were kissing in the middle of the bar, and only a moment later he unzipped the back of Lily’s purple dress and the silk fell to my feet. It happened very fast, and I didn’t have time to think. I had a sense of a crowd inside of me while all this happened, like I was sitting in a triple-exposed photograph with partially opaque faces layered underneath my own. I wondered how many women he’d shared cigarettes with in that alleyway, how many he’d asked for dinner in order that they kissed him and let him slip their dresses from their bodies. He kissed me under my ear. He kissed my shoulder blade, breathing damp cigarette breath onto my skin. Soon I was naked apart from my knickers and boots, his hands cold on my skin, but I couldn’t concentrate. I expect that Lily would have lived in the moment, but it was as if I could see the whole thing from the outside. Would she have moved in his arms like I was doing? How did her fingers feel against his body? Did he love her?

  “Wait,” I said to him.

  “Shhh... huh,” he mumbled into my skin, not really hearing me, and I let him continue for a moment, because the sensations were pleasant. I’d had sex a couple of times before, with Laurence, the shoplifting boy. The first time I had sex with him strange thoughts kept popping into my head. I had lain back and wondered who designed wallpaper and how it was made, then thought about whether it would be possible to melt tin in a saucepan. None of the feelings between my legs seemed half as interesting as the ache in my knees when I jumped off of a particularly high wall. This time, though, standing in the empty bar with August, I was trying to concentrate very hard on the present moment, the dots of bone snaking down August’s naked back and the changing textures under my toes as he unzipped my boots and I stepped out onto the floorboards of the bar. But really my mind kept fading away. Although the feeling of his tongue and fingers on my skin was far from unpleasant, it was still as if I was watching the scene from elsewhere. Then he began to undo the clasp on his belt and I frowned, suddenly scared.

  “Wait, stop. August, stop.”

  “How’d you know my name?” he said after an animal pause, his hand on the clasp of his belt. He pulled away and looked at me in the semi-darkness. “I’ve seen you before somewhere,” he said again, wary now. “I thought I recognized you when you first walked in. I said to Rob: she’s been here before, I recognize her. Have you been here before? Where do I know you from?”

  The room felt draughty, and I felt naked, especially so because he was still wearing trousers and I was only wearing underwear. He took a step back and looked at me, prompting me to struggle Lily’s dress off of the floor and back over my pale body while he watched. My elbows got caught in the armholes, and another button bounced off of the high-necked silk material onto the floor.

  “Sorry, August, sorry. I’m Lily’s daughter,” I said under my breath, as I straightened the dress over my body.

  He stopped.

  “Where is she?” he said.

  9

  I sat guiltily on the table where I’d been reading all night, and he sat on a table way across the room. He had his head in his hands, and I could see the thinning hair on the crown of his head. It took me half an hour to persuade him that he couldn’t under any circumstances be my father, and then he calmed down a little.

  “That sounds like Lily,” he said, when I explained how she died out on a desert Highway because she wasn’t wearing a helmet. “I wish someone had told me she was dead.”

  “When’s the last time you saw Lily?” I asked tentatively.

  “Ten years, I guess,” August said. “She was twenty-two when we divorced. We weren’t on great terms when she left though.”

  “You didn’t see her again?”

  “No.”

  “How old were you when you met?”

  “Eighteen,” he said. “Married when we were nineteen, divorce three years later.”

  “Were you happy?”

  “In a way.”

  “What sort of way?”

  “I’m not sure I feel comfortable talking to you about this,” he said. “I don’t believe I just tried to fuck Lily’s kid,” he laughed nervously, then frowned again and laughed again to himself. He wouldn’t look at me.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” I said. “That’s why I came tonight. Then I thought I’d wait till everyone left before I brought it up and then...”

  “And then. Yeah,” he said.

  We were silent for a few moments.

  “You really didn’t know Lily at all?” he said eventually, tilting his head and glancing thoughtfully up at me. He seemed a very long way away, across the bar. “She never wrote or came to visit?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well,” he said, taking a deep breath. Suddenly he looked like a different person, much more grown-up. “She was up and down. She was an adrenaline rush. Like
in one moment she could make me extraordinarily happy and then extraordinarily unhappy. So yeah, we were happy a lot of the time. But we were unhappy a lot, too.”

  “Did you meet in Los Angeles?” I asked.

  “Nevada actually,” he said. “She was sitting on the kerb outside my Dad’s grocery store in Jackpot, this little town on the edge of Idaho and Nevada. She had her hair in two French braids.” August grinned, relaxing more. “One resting on her shoulder and one down her back. She was wearing this shit-hot blue miniskirt, right, kind of tacky, but childish-tacky, you know? Like it was from a school uniform. She was only eighteen. And a white tank top with blue birds embroidered around the neckline.”

  “What was she doing in Jackpot?” I asked August. I imagined August strolling over the hot tarmac motorway in the middle of a non-descript town, towards my teenage mother. I imagined Lily’s bare feet resting in the dust and her arms around her stomach. With neatly painted fingers she shaded her face from a sun that was so clean it almost made the dry grass around the grocery store look as if it was about to bubble or go up in flames – and in my imagination August smiled at her.

  “She didn’t mean to be in Jackpot,” August said. “Nobody ever means to be in Jackpot. She was on her way from New York to LA, getting Greyhounds and hitching. Some trucker was giving her hassle, so she got out.”

  “Did she have an English accent?”

  “She’d only been in the States a few months when I met her. It was when we moved to LA that she started pretending she was from Nevada. She could do the accent, and she liked pretending. Pretending was her hobby. Every day was theatrical, you know? If she was sad, she’d dress entirely in black, if she was excited she’d sing show tunes in the shower till the neighbours complained. She wore high heels to the supermarket and fake fur to the cinema. We used to have ‘character nights’, where we’d go out bar-crawling pretending to be aristocrats, or invisible superheroes, or ninjas. She was never boring, but she was exhausting.”