The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  “Your novel?”

  “Almost.” His shoulders went back a little when he said it. “I’ll send you the rest when it’s finished. And I wanted to give you this, too, since you don’t have a radio.”

  He had brought her his boombox. She took it from him and set it down on her writing desk. “I didn’t know you were going,” she said.

  Irritation flickered across his face.

  “I mean, I forgot,” she added. “I forgot you said that.”

  “Here’s my address.” He’d written it down for her. “And my sister’s phone number. But don’t give that to anyone. And don’t show anyone my novel.”

  “I don’t have a phone,” she said. “Write to me, okay?”

  “Isn’t there one upstairs?”

  “No. Well, yes, but it’s not mine. I don’t use it.” She had stopped paying her share of the phone bill. “Okay. Bye, I guess,” she said, anxious for him to leave. She felt tears coming and she didn’t want him to see them.

  She let herself cry for a while after he left. When she was done, she plugged in the boombox and played with the antenna, but the only station she could get through the thick basement walls was a sports talk show. Then she noticed a cassette in the tape player and hit play. For a moment it was just hiss and guitar feedback and thick bass notes dragging a beat. Then the voice came in: male, angry, but as naked and sad as Mary Weiss’s. Turn away, turn away from the wall. Face me now. Face me now. She took the tape out and looked at it. The label said “FLIPPER,” in Jim’s handwriting. She put it back in and hit play again. Show me, show me all your tears. Your pain, your pain makes me burn.

  She opened up the manila envelope and began reading. Someone was driving around in a van looking for someone else. She didn’t understand it, but she felt like she was being shown something almost unbearably intimate. She realized she was shivering.

  I saw you, I saw you shine.

  When the tape ended, she put Jim’s novel down. Now her face was burning. She went upstairs and found a thermometer and took her temperature.

  The fever went away, but after a few days it came back stronger than before. She was home from school when Jim’s first letter came. He had typed all across the back of the envelope. “I am now the only, sole, exclusive warehouseman at a furniture store,” he said. “I make $5.65 an hour.” He described his sister’s garage, and said he was going to buy a car from her neighbor when he got his first paycheck—a 1968 Plymouth Valiant. Gray. The envelope itself was empty.

  Kitty kept the thermometer by her bed, more out of curiosity than anything else. She stayed in her nightgown all week while her fever spiked and abated and spiked again. The pain was intense at times, but listening to Jim’s cassette tape helped. The sound traveled over a secret frequency, from a different basement room in a place she’d never seen. The hum of the bass and the cymbal’s tinny crash answered the dull and sharp sensations in her abdomen and organized them into a kind of music. On one song—a long one that she played over and over—the synthesizer dropped notes around her like falling stars.

  Mail came every day. Jim sent lyrics, dreams, a letter to Dear Abby that he had copied out in his own handwriting. She burned with fever while she read them. Sometimes the words ran together and re-formed into other words. At the beginning of the second week, she got a letter in response to one she had sent, apparently, answering questions she didn’t remember asking. “There are several schools of thought as to what the last word of “Real Life in California” will be,” he wrote. “A note exists in which I determined to end with the word “Oh,” which is used throughout the book to denote moments of special grief—just that word on its own. Oh.” He said he had borrowed money against his first check and bought the Valiant, and that he was tuning it up. He said he thought she would like California.

  Later she remembered standing in the kitchen, talking to Windex. “Oh Kitty,” the little gray cat said. “You’re moribund.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  And then she was being helped into an ambulance. A roommate had found her passed out on the kitchen floor. At the hospital, a nurse said they were going to test her blood pressure lying down and then sitting up. Kitty watched the cuff inflate and dimly felt it tighten around her arm.

  “Good news,” the nurse said. “You don’t have to sit up.” She put an IV needle in the back of Kitty’s wrist and taped it down.

  “Pelvic inflammatory disease,” explained the doctor sitting by Kitty’s bed. He clasped his soft, pudgy hands in his lap. A crucifix hung on the wall behind him. Kitty imagined an assembly line: factory workers in hairnets nailing little Christs to their crosses. The bed next to her was empty. Someone—one of her roommates, probably—had brought her some things: pens and a notebook and Jim’s boombox.

  “You’ll need to stay here for at least four or five days,” the pudgy doctor was saying, “so we can give you antibiotics and fluid. You were very dehydrated.” He stood up. “You should be feeling a lot livelier in a day or two.”

  “Can you plug that in before you go?” She pointed at the boombox. “And close the door?”

  When she was alone, she pressed play and listened for a minute with her eyes closed, waiting to see if the tape worked on her like it had under the heavy blanket of fever, then picked up the notebook and started a letter.

  “How is the Valiant running?” she wrote. “Come get me.”

  The Searchlite

  Kitty stood across the street from the Searchlite Lounge on Western and Fountain, just north of the 101 freeway. It didn’t look like much from the outside: torn cloth awning, soot-stained facade of imitation stone, a single barred window high up on the front wall. The door was propped open, but with the late afternoon sun backlighting the building she couldn’t see inside. She missed the type of bar she’d hung out in back east—taprooms with threadbare pool tables where you could settle in and get comfortable and chew the fat with the neighborhood rummies. People she met here, misunderstanding, kept directing her to places that looked promising but turned out to be imitations: fake English pubs, retro martini lounges.

  Her eyes were still adjusting to Los Angeles. She drove down legendary-sounding boulevards—Wilshire, Beverly, La Cienega—sweating into her vinyl car seat, impatient for the city to reveal its glamour. Sometimes as she drove, she spoke to herself in imaginary Raymond Chandler prose: “I followed the Nash west on Sunset and swung up Sepulveda, climbing until I lost his taillights in the fog.” She drove on and on, until she realized what should have been obvious from the start: vastness and anonymity were not impediments to her understanding of Los Angeles; they were the essence of the city. Once she accepted that, she started to notice things like the hand-painted Clorox and Palmolive bottles on the sides of Mexican markets, or the little fruit salad carts you saw at certain intersections, or sometimes, late at night, a coyote standing in the middle of a quiet side street.

  At a party a few weeks earlier, Kitty had found herself in the garden, one of those backyard shangri-las with Malibu lights and fan palms, in conversation with a man about her age. Like her, he had moved to Los Angeles from the northeast.

  “I’ve been here for almost ten years now,” he said when she asked.

  “Do you miss New York?”

  He shrugged as though the question were irrelevant. “How about you? How long?”

  “A little over six months. I moved for a software job.”

  “And?”

  “It’s apocalyptic, isn’t it?” she said cautiously. “It’s beautiful.” He smiled in recognition. The flame from the citronella torch flickered in the lenses of his thick-framed glasses. “To tell you the truth, the thing I miss most about Philadelphia is the bars. Regular neighborhood bars.”

  He nodded, took out a pocket-sized notepad and a pen, and began writing. “Here are some places I think you should check out.” He tore off a sheet and handed it to her. “I’m sorry I can’t stay and talk more.” He had filled both sides of the page
with a list of bars and their cross streets—mostly in East Hollywood, though a few had what looked like Skid Row addresses. He’d also written down his phone number, and a note: “Call me if you want a copilot.—Anton.”

  Something about his air of authority put Kitty off, but she tucked the paper in her wallet anyhow. Later she kept noticing bars from his list, like the Escape Room, or One-Eyed Jack’s on Beverly, or the Monte Carlo across from the Ralphs supermarket on Third and Vermont: such a generic sign that it had been invisible to her before. Or the Searchlite Lounge, which was just around the corner from her apartment on Fountain, and which she’d driven past hundreds of times on her way to and from the freeway until finally, today, curiosity overtook her.

  Kitty crossed Western and ducked in out of the glare. There were a few men in Carhartts sitting at the bar. An older Asian woman stood behind it, wiping a glass with a rag. No one looked up when she came in. They were all absorbed in a soccer game on the television. She sat on the last stool and ordered a beer. The room was small and seemed smaller because of the low ceiling, which, now that her eyes had adjusted, she saw was covered with what looked like black plastic trash bags. There was no decor to speak of. It looked like a good enough perch: a workingman’s bar. The kind of place that, if it were in South Philly, would have glass brick windows, and a jar of pickled eggs by the cash register, and penny tiles in the toilet. She pulled a book out of her bag and settled in.

  When she looked up again, a streetlight was buzzing outside the high window. She turned around on her stool and saw three new customers at a small table on the other side of the room. They were trashy-looking. Actually, they looked like hookers: shortie jackets, stripper heels, crotch-high skirts. They sat on the edges of their chairs, legs crossed high, smoking busily. On second glance, Kitty saw that they not women but transvestites. Of course, she thought, they must have come from Santa Monica Boulevard, a block down Western. She’d seen the trannies out at night, and even sometimes during the day: staking out the wide sidewalk, standing in groups under building overhangs, working their way out into traffic.

  Kitty signaled to the bartender for another beer. The soccer game had ended or been abandoned, and the jukebox came on. More girls arrived and hopped from table to table, talking loudly in Spanish and English, dancing in place, snapping open compacts to fix their make-up. A girl in an orange fur jacket squeezed her slim hips between two of the men sitting near Kitty and leaned across the bar. Squealing, she slapped one of the men’s hands off her ass.

  “You ain’t paid for that yet, honey,” she teased.

  “How ’bout I buy you a drink and put my hand in your dress?”

  “How ’bout he buy my friend a drink?” She jerked her head back at the man on her other side. “Se siente sola por allá.”

  Suddenly, Kitty wished there were someone here to share this with. She thought about calling Cathy, the woman whose cubicle was across the aisle from hers. They sometimes had coffee together. Cathy had invited her out for drinks after work a few times, and she’d never reciprocated. But she thought of Cathy’s sweater sets, and the framed photos of her husband and kids that she kept on her desk. No, she wouldn’t appreciate this scene at all. Then she remembered Anton in the garden, the shadow of the fan palm and the glow of the torch, and how he’d smiled at her word, “apocalyptic.” She took his list out of her wallet and dialed the phone number he’d written down, hesitating for a second before hitting Send. She was relieved when she got his voicemail, and considered hanging up.

  “Hi, it’s Kitty,” she said. “From Philadelphia. I’m at the Searchlite now if you want to come by.”

  The man sitting next to her got up while she was typing. She caught a whiff of floral perfume as someone sat down in his place. In the mirror behind the bar she saw a black Cleopatra wig and a green dress with three-quarter length sleeves. Glancing down, she saw matching green pumps. Her new neighbor sat attentively, hands resting on a pocket book, also green, on the bar in front of her—as though she were at the doctor’s office waiting for the receptionist to call her name.

  “What you want?” asked the bartender on her next pass.

  “A cosmopolitan?” said the transvestite. Her voice strained for an unnatural sweetness.

  The drink arrived in a plastic tumbler. When she looked up with obvious disappointment, her eyes met Kitty’s in the mirror. “I guess you have to ask for one of them glasses,” she said.

  Kitty smiled politely though, she hoped, not invitingly. She craned around to keep tabs on the girl in the orange jacket, but she’d lost the thread of that conversation.

  “I’m sorry, go on back to your book if you want,” her neighbor said.

  “It’s too dark to read in here anyhow.” Kitty might have been able to hide behind her book indefinitely as a cover for eavesdropping, but it was useless now, so she put it away.

  “It’s nice, though,” the transvestite said, looking around her.

  Some of the others had made only token efforts at cross-dressing. The girl leaning against the jukebox, for instance, was wearing jeans and high-top sneakers, and her hairstyle could have been a boy’s cut, but the fit of her jeans and her cap-sleeved blouse signified loudly enough to compensate. She and the others moved and smoked and laughed like they knew they were girls. Looking at the person sitting next to her, who had dressed so carefully, Kitty could only think of a man. Kitty was certain that she hadn’t come in with the others, or spent any time on Santa Monica Boulevard. She seemed completely out of place.

  “So, is this your first time here?” she asked. The question sounded more personal than she had intended.

  “Oh. Yes it is. I drove by and looked before, but, this is the first time I ever came in. What about you?”

  “Same as you. I drive past all the time, but I never came in.” She extended her hand. “I’m Kitty.”

  “Janice. Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course.”

  She leaned in conspiratorially. “This is my first time.”

  “You said that.”

  “No, I mean my first time,” Janice said, waving her hand over her dress. “My first time out.” Kitty saw now that she was young—though perhaps she looked younger than she was. She had a round, soft face, and she’d overshot her mouth slightly with dark lipstick. Her foundation stopped in a line at the base of her throat. She’d attempted a languorous, feline sweep in the application of her eyeliner. Her light-colored eyes searched Kitty’s face myopically.

  “Well,” Kitty said, “you look very pretty.”

  Janice beamed. “Can you watch my drink?” she asked, sliding off her stool. “I have to go to the john.” She felt behind her thighs for the hem of her dress to make sure it was in place and walked carefully across the room, pausing for a second before disappearing into the ladies’ room.

  Janice’s expression was full of news when she rejoined Kitty at the bar. “Did you know that they don’t have doors on the stalls?”

  “I guess so no one does anything illegal.”

  She considered this silently for a moment. “Shalimar used to come here,” she said.

  Shalimar. It sounded familiar. Kitty searched her mental inventory of one-named pop singers.

  “Wait,” Janice said, “I’ll show you.” She opened her purse and took out her billfold. Kitty peeked at the driver’s license showing through the little plastic window—glasses and short brown hair. She produced a much-folded clipping from the LA Weekly.

  What happened to Atisone Seiuli? read the headline. There was a picture of a dark-haired girl posing on a bedspread in a black bra and panties. Kitty began reading. On the morning of April 22, a woman walking her dog found the body of Atisone Seiuli, clad only in lingerie, on a sidewalk outside Seiuli’s Hollywood apartment building.

  Kitty skimmed the rest of the article. Atisone Seiuli, a.k.a. Shalimar, was the prostitute Eddie Murphy had been caught with back in 1997—a pre-operative transsexual. That must be why the name rang a bell. K
itty remembered the mug shot in the supermarket tabloids and the snarky jokes on David Letter-man. Apparently, Shalimar enjoyed a brief local celebrity after her arrest, then fell to her death from the roof of her apartment building a year later.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Oh, no,” said Janice, refolding the clipping carefully. “I was only sixteen when she died. But it says in there that she used to come to the Searchlite Lounge.”

  Now Kitty understood: Janice had chosen the Searchlite for her debut because of Shalimar. This article, basically a clipping from the police blotter, was her map of the stars.

  “She was from Samoa,” Janice continued. “That’s why she’s so exotic. You know, she was the captain of her cheerleading squad in high school. In Samoa.”

  “Really?”

  “They would have dragged her up and down the football field by her hair at Van Nuys High. Hey, let me get you a drink.” Janice waved at the bartender and pointed back and forth between Kitty’s empty bottle and her plastic cup. When the bartender turned away, she said, “Shoot, I forgot to ask for a nice glass again.”

  Taking the first gulp of her beer, Kitty remembered that she hadn’t eaten dinner. She was starting to feel a little drunk. The music had grown steadily louder and her throat was getting hoarse from talking over the jukebox.

  “I need to eat something,” she said.

  They leaned against the wall of a 99 Cent Only store, eating fish tacos from a truck parked near the 101 overpass on Santa Monica Boulevard. After Janice bought her a beer, Kitty had felt obliged to invite her along. They’d walked slowly so that Janice, wobbly on her heels, could keep up. It had clouded over and rained a little while they were in the bar, releasing an ionic, improbably fresh scent into the night air. Kitty could hear the slap of wet tires on the freeway beneath them. A police cruiser nosed onto the Boulevard and drove past slowly.

  “My dad’s LAPD,” said Janice. “If he saw me out here, he’d throw me out of the house for good.”