Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  “I grew up in California, in Rio Seco,” I said. I should shut up now. Now. “A world away from here.”

  She grinned widely again. “Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I’m from Anaheim, a little tract house. Need I say more?”

  But whenever anyone said something like that—I’m from Fresno, I’m from the Valley, oh my God I know what you mean—they didn’t know what I meant. I wasn’t from LA, with millions of people, or even Rio Seco, which was big enough, with a population of 300,000. Drive out farther, to the very edge of the city limits, to the orange groves near the river, and go down a long dirt road. Inside the trees was Sarrat, a place unto itself, a place my father had made on his own, for his people.

  I should just walk home now—from here to Los Feliz, and then I’d sleep. Grady Jackson had taught me to walk that far. We were walkin fools.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to get going.”

  She grinned. Her teeth were perfect. She handed me a card. “I’d love to work with you sometime.”

  “The outlaw Jesse James,” I said, and reached for her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  Outside on the terrace I called Rick. “Hey—I’m going home.”

  “It’s that bad?” he said.

  I looked at the shadows moving inside the loft. “No. Not bad. Kind of desultory.”

  “No Tony?” he said.

  Rick didn’t know about Tony’s ritual. He would have thought it excessive and sentimental. “He’s really tired,” I said.

  “Okay. Come by the office and get coffee and talk about some new pieces.”

  The homeless men below were laughing and shouting at the domino game. Three concrete circles stood on the terrace, way above the earth, filled with grass as green as antifreeze.

  I made my way to the door. Jesse James Miller was in the hallway. Near the bar, Gerald John Fitzgerald bowed in farewell. I lifted my hand and called out to him, “I’d like to call you. About the war. I’m going to write tonight about the Franco-Prussian conflict.”

  He opened his mouth in surprise. I opened the door.

  The Greatest Generation. My father and Gustave and all the men from their generation had fought in that war, too. They left their little villages in Louisiana and Georgia and Mississippi, and returned to the country that still hated them and wouldn’t let them drink water from white porcelain and silver faucet, or release water into stained porcelain and silver handle. My father and Gustave had gotten back from killing strangers in Europe, but they couldn’t send girls walking down a road without danger.

  They came to California and re-created their villages or towns, like everyone else. I took the stairs. The dank stairwell still smelled of toy factory. Who’d made the toys?

  It was California, but all the little villages the fathers and mothers made, with their food and music and fears, were carried around inside us. We’d been born here, the people of my generation, gone to school together in the ’70s and ’80s, eaten the same cafeteria brown gravy and mashed potatoes, read the same books and kicked the same balls, but even though we wore platform shoes and bell bottoms and tight Qiana shirts, we carried around our individual villages, and what our parents gave us—their caution and fear and anger and vigilance and stories. No one left Sarrat except Glorette, and me.

  I had not lit a candle for her. On the sidewalk, the light had barely changed. It was three thirty and August—the sun wouldn’t go down for a long time.

  MITLA

  THE IMMERSE OFFICE WAS on Eighth, near Hill. On Eighth and Olive was a bar called the Golden Gopher. Five years ago, that’s where Grady Jackson had told me how he stole Sere Dakar from Glorette.

  I should tell Victor the truth. I’d known it for this long and hadn’t ever told him. How did you tell a story like that now, all these years later? Your father didn’t abandon you—he was murdered. How would that make Victor feel better? Even Glorette had never known.

  When Victor was growing up, Glorette had always been high or sleeping, and she might have told him stories, but she didn’t know that one. She’d told him about her palm tree sparkler, and the barn owls, the Perseid meteor shower in August, and coyotes. Sometimes he’d stayed with his grandfather, and he heard stories there for sure, but Gustave and my father didn’t know about Grady and Sere Dakar.

  I couldn’t call him now and tell him anything, while he was in the Navigator. But I’d see him tomorrow, and I could judge whether the truth would help him or hurt him.

  At the mouth of the alley, I paused and listened to the men. People were still passing in waves on the sidewalk, leaving work early. Then the door opened on a Porta-Potty at the back of the alley, and a woman propped herself against the blue plastic wall. She leaned there, her palm pressed to her temple as if she were trying to keep something from falling out of her head. Her black hair was like dead seaweed, and her knees ashy gray as rain puddles. A man approached, and she pulled him nearer to the door.

  She was working. She stared at me and I moved past the alley.

  I walked down Spring Street toward Third. Construction workers were gutting an old bank and a SRO hotel. Signs for luxury lofts were lit with spotlights on the roofs. Thousands of homeless people had packed their tents and bags and boxes and coats and melted into invisibility when the sun rose high enough—now they came out with the approaching end of the workday like emissaries sent among the rest of us.

  I headed down Third toward Broadway. I’d meet with Rick and then walk home. It would feel good.

  Nobody walked home from Downtown to Los Feliz. Only a walkin fool.

  On Broadway, the butt mannequins showed off curvier jeans than you’d see on Melrose or Rodeo. Just the bottom half, cheeks turned to shoppers. All the stereos blasting cumbia and salesmen calling out and jewelry flashing gold.

  All over the world, wherever I walked, I had my uniform for moving through a city. My black leather bag, holding only my thin wallet and a small notebook and pen. Nothing flashy, nothing too money or too poor. A woman walking for miles and miles—you had to look like you had somewhere to go. Not like you were rich and ready to be robbed, and not like a man-magnet with cleavage and jewelry.

  And just as every time I walked, settling into a rhythm of long even strides so that I could think—about the Aare River and the wooden houses perched high on the steep slopes above it—first I thought of Grady. Maybe he was still alive, and maybe his sister Hattie was still at the Golden Gopher.

  No one would ever kill for me, like Grady Jackson had killed for Glorette.

  No one looked at me. My earrings plain silver hoops, my only makeup black eyeliner and a lip gloss called Fig. My eyes slanted and opaque.

  But Glorette—even if she’d worn a sack, men stared at her. She was nearly iridescent—when I’d first learned the word in junior high, I knew it meant Glorette.

  Another alley, and a homeless woman lay in a heap, curled tight as a dog around herself. Glorette—her face so lovely that her life was ruined, and my face so bland and neutral that I had always been allowed to lie to people, and imagine myself.

  We could have been twins, when we were children. But then we turned fourteen and everything changed—her face rearranged itself, and her body moved differently. Her eyelashes, her legs, her breasts.

  Our Barbies sat on the shelf above her bed, their sharp feet dangling over us, and she brushed mascara onto her lashes while I watched.

  Glorette, walking the two miles to school beside me, her stride slow and measured as a gazelle’s, her legs long and thin, the crescent of white underneath the purple-black iris that somehow made her seem as if she were sleepily studying everyone, and the men could not look away. Every day our mothers coiled our long hair into buns high on our skulls. All day, men imagined pulling the pins from Glorette’s hair and the river falling down along her back, tangled in their hands.

  Junior high—one day a hand pulled Glorette into a broom closet while she paused in the hallway. I left her behind on my way to class. She’d been ty
ing her shoe. I glanced back to see her looking up, as if someone had spoken to her, and then moving toward a doorway. Then she disappeared.

  When we walked home that afternoon, a hickey marked the back of her neck. A cloud of blood that teeth had sucked toward the surface. I wished someone would want to touch his lips to my neck. But she said nothing. And it was the back of her neck—why would someone stand behind her?

  That weekend, she showed me the five-dollar bill. We never had more than quarters. She held it in her palm, like a dead leaf, and said, “Mr. Darmand. That janitor. The young one. He stood behind me. Did something behind me. On my jeans. He ain’t touched no other part a me, cept my hair. Pulled back my hair and held on to my neck.” She put her fingers over her eyes, a visor against the light in the room, and then she sat on the floor. “Like I was a shadow. Like—the picture of me.”

  I didn’t understand until a long time later. I felt sick at the idea of him pushing and pushing at her from behind, but by then I never wanted to bring it up again.

  Two homeless men started shoving each other in the street, and the pedestrians in the crosswalk swerved like ants around a pebble, and the cars brayed like huge donkeys.

  All the men here downtown—sleeping with outstretched fingers near my heels, pushing carts, doing ballet moves between the stalled cars—a Mexican man with a handlebar mustache and no teeth under it who grinned at me, and a man my age, with skin like mine, his hair dreaded up in a non-hip way. Like bad coral. He sat down on the curb and stared at the tires of the nearest cars.

  Where was Grady?

  I pushed the button on the intercom in the doorway, and Rick said, “I’m coming down. Need coffee.”

  He bounded down the stairs and said, “See the new place next door?”

  It was a tiny restaurant with MITLA stenciled on the window. The ancient ruins of a Mayan kingdom that I’d seen in Oaxaca. I touched the electric blue stucco walls—the texture felt fresh and prickly. Burnt umber curtains at the window, and the door was actually gold. Spray-painted?

  Rick grinned. “You said Oaxaca had great coffee, and you weren’t kidding.” When he hugged me, his arms were the same as when I’d met him five years ago. Slender, but gym-toned. He was maybe an inch taller than me, his black hair cut short like broom bristles, standing up with gel. He grinned and said, “I missed you.” Then I heard the gentle moo of his phone on vibrate, and he turned toward the doorway and waved me in. “Damn. Gotta take this one, FX. Advertiser.”

  I sat down at the table near the window, and a man bent and smiled. “Café con leche, por favor,” I said, smiling back.

  His Mayan face—eyes dark and sharp as oleander leaves—looked down at me while I sipped the coffee, and he said, “Bueno, no?”

  So good—cinnamon and nighttime and something secret. “Que bueno,” I said, and he might have thought I was Honduran, or Panamanian.

  The first time I met Rick, he’d said, “I’ve been reading your stuff forever. Since you’re a world traveler with a hundred bylines but no contributor’s photo, I always wondered where you were from.”

  “Here,” I’d said.

  “LA?”

  “Rio Seco.”

  I remember how he had studied me. “Where’s that?”

  “Have you been to Palm Springs?”

  “Of course! I love midcentury architecture.”

  “Then you passed Rio Seco,” I’d told him, and that was it.

  When he got to the reception, would he meet Jesse James Miller? Would she say, “So is FX black? Louisiana, wow. I never would have guessed from her work.”

  Rick dropped into the seat, out of breath. “So damn hot out there.”

  “Remember when we first met, and you said you were from Brooklyn all defensive, like I wouldn’t know shit about it, and then you said, Fort Greene, and I said Tillie’s was a great coffeehouse?”

  “I was impressed,” he said. The waiter brought him black coffee without being asked, and Rick grinned wide. “Can you tell I’ve been here a few times?”

  Back then, he’d said, “Can you find somewhere different to go, to immerse yourself completely? That’s what I want this magazine to be about.”

  Immersion. I finished my coffee. Too much liquid. The wine was wearing off. I said to the waiter, “Chilaquiles?” A dark man in a janitor’s uniform was eating a plate full of torn soft tortillas in sauce and cheese. The waiter smiled again.

  Rick’s hair glistened like needles in the harsh light. “How was the Aare? Not a river I’d heard of. Worth it?”

  “It was great. Little towns and cities in the shadow of the Alps.”

  “You gonna get anything good out of it?”

  “If you pay me.” He was waiting for the word I’d bring. I said, “Botz tunsig.”

  “I can’t even guess that one.”

  “It’s like oh-my-gosh,” I said. “In some little village outside Thun. Tunsig is Swiss-German for thousand, and even Jane doesn’t know what bot means.”

  “You saw Jane?”

  “Yeah. She met me in Luzern for the day.” I smiled. “She asked if you were still good at desultory conversation. I said not with me.”

  He laughed. “We never did desultory. Not since the first day we met.”

  “Yeah. I asked you if you’d ever been in love.”

  “And I said twice.” Rick put his hands around the cup. “In high school, and she dumped me for a football player, and in college, and she dumped me for a professor.”

  “You told me you were in love with your job and your apartment,” I said. That night, I’d realized why everyone I knew in LA made good money and ate good food and lived in great houses or apartments—because we were mostly not in love. Sometimes we fell in love with the idea of love, but it hardly ever worked out. Love was about having things already, trying to share those things or buying more things together, and then arguing about the things.

  Except for Tony. He’d actually been in love.

  Rick raised his eyebrows and said, “Found him yet?”

  He meant the Intrepid Gentleman or the Unlikely Companion—the one who could accompany me on my travels and feature as a straight man in my essays. The man some other writers had. And as always, I said, “I wasn’t looking.”

  The sidewalk outside was glittering as the sun shifted. He said, “I just bought a loft on Spring Street. Not far from Arthur Graves’s place, actually.”

  “What?”

  He shifted his body away from the table. The cloth was dark red. “How does he snare those women?”

  “You bought this place? Aha—more room for Jenny.”

  He shrugged. Jenny was a photographer’s assistant at the magazine—twenty-eight, that kind of dark-eyed messy-hairbun girl who went skiing in winter and mountain biking in summer.

  But then he leaned forward. “It’ll take me a year to ask her. You know it will. Shit. Six months to figure out the place as far as furniture and paint and another six before I get up the nerve. By then she’ll be with some goddamn ski instructor.”

  See? I thought. It’s not love. It’s sharing things. I said, “So ask her now.”

  “Says the woman who’s never told me anything serious about herself. Who remains a mystery.”

  I pushed the plate of chilaquiles toward him to taste. The red sauce spread along my tongue, the pebbly corn kernels nestled in my molars.

  “I need the Oaxaca piece by September 20—we’re running that one in December.” He looked down at the plate. “You said they hardly ever use flour tortillas. Just corn. This is like bread pudding, only with tortillas. And spicy.”

  I said, “Rye bread, pumpernickel, baguettes, tortillas. What’s the Ethiopian bread?”

  “Injera.”

  “Yeah. Then you have places with no bread. Just rice.”

  “And I think of bagels.”

  This was how we always ended up. Knowledge for the sake of ourselves and no one else—the kind of conversation my family would never have. They would talk only abou
t people and places we already knew and hated or loved.

  Except Victor. He wanted Bourbaki and botz tunsig. He wanted chilaquiles.

  Rick grinned. “So I was thinking of Turkey, or somewhere along the Dalmatian coast.” Shifting into business, the other language we shared. “New beaches are good,” he said. “And ports, for cruise advertisers. We need some water. Boats.”

  “Everybody wants to be around water.” Then I looked at the indigo blue of the walls. Indigo—that smell kill Moinette’s grandmère, my grandmother had said. Grow indigo to make them blue soldier coat, she said. So Lafitte pirate can kill them soldier. Lafitte pirate take away the maman of Moinette.

  “There’s always pirates,” I said.

  “What?” Rick said. “You’re going Johnny Depp on me?”

  “I went to Cornwall once, and they still talk about pirates. And in Belize some guy told me about pirates. Just thinking.”

  He left money on the table, and we got up to leave. “The romantic idea of pirates is hot now,” I said. “The allure of the ports and coasts.” Cinnamon scent. Spices from the Orient. “Family legend is we knew some pirates.”

  Rick folded his arms. “Come on. A, you’re finally going to tell me something about yourself, and B, it’s a pirate joke?”

  If I said Lafitte, it meant Louisiana. I didn’t want to go there again this afternoon.

  My phone rang when we were on the sidewalk. Victor’s voice was loud and deep. “Marraine? She’s here. My moms. Her picture’s here.”

  Rick mouthed, “The Tieless Companion?” I rolled my eyes.

  Victor shouted, “I swear it’s her. But it says sweet voodoo. Not her name. Marraine, you have to come to this club. In Burbank.”

  I said, “Burbank?” Rick studiously unwrapped some gum.

  “Yeah—remember I won tickets? Zee brought me to get them from the radio station. Clear Channel. Hollywood Way. The place is called Dimples. I can’t go in there—I knocked but the old guy just shook his head. Marraine, please. You have to find out why she’s here.”