“It’s empty,” he told me. “It’s a rental. I checked it out the other day.”
Inside, it was dark in a way that Sierra’s house hadn’t been. It was dark in a way that was dusky and imperfect, comforting in its realness. The furniture was shabby chic, sparse and pleasant and inexpensive in the way of rental furniture.
Cole gave me a tour, throwing open doors, barely looking inside each. “Bedroom. Kitchen. Mudroom. Half bath. Stair to roof deck. Bedroom. Hallway to side yard.”
Then he led me through a tiny sitting area to a sliding door hidden by a bamboo shade. He threw his shoulder against it until it gave way. On the other side, impossibly, was a miniature garden world. I couldn’t understand it until I stepped through the door. A white sofa sat in the middle of it; just ten feet away was another sliding door to the rest of the house. In between, in this small room, the walls climbed and sprouted and unfolded tropical leaves of all shapes and sizes. Oranges studded one tree, lemons another. Ferns crowded densely at the bases of small palms. Mysterious flowers like exotic birds revealed themselves only slowly, only on a second look. The air smelled like growing things and beautiful things, things people put in bottles and rubbed behind their ears.
Cole put his hand around my hair and used it to pull my head back until I was gazing straight up. I saw what he was directing my attention to: the ceiling, far overhead, peaked and made of glass. This was a greenhouse. No, what was the proper word? A conservatory.
The walls of plants and the night eliminated any road or party noise. We were in the middle of nowhere. Back in Minnesota again. No, farther than that, stranger than that. Someplace no one else had ever been.
Cole walked to the couch and threw himself onto it as if he had seen the entire world and was bored with it. After a moment, he sighed deeply enough that I saw it instead of heard it, the great lift of his chest and then the release.
I set my purse beside the couch and sat on the other end of the sofa. Throwing my legs across his, I leaned back on the sofa arm and released a sigh of my own. Cole rested his arms on top of my legs and blinked at the wall opposite. There was something threadbare about his expression.
We sat like that for several gray-green minutes, the fronds of palms and ferns barely moving. Beside me, a lustrous trumpet flower hung like a waiting silent bell. We didn’t say anything. Cole kept looking at the wall, and I kept looking at him and at the orange tree on the other side of him.
Cole moved his hand, brushing his fingers over the knob of my anklebone.
I breathed in.
His fingers lingered, playing over my skin, nearly tickling. With them, he described the shape of my ankle, the edge of my sandal: a sculptor’s hands.
I looked at him. He looked back.
Carefully, he unbuckled the strap of my sandal. The heel hit the floor first. He slid his hand over my foot, my ankle, up my calf. Goose bumps trailed after his fingers.
I breathed out.
The second sandal joined the first. Again he ran his palms up my leg. I was caught in the way that he touched me. It was as if his fingers found me beautiful. As if I were a lovely thing. As if it were a privilege just to trace his fingertips across my body.
I didn’t move. He didn’t know how only hours before, back at the party, I’d let someone else touch me, and had touched him back.
But —
Cole stretched forward to meet my lips. This kiss — his mouth was hungry, wanting. But still his hands were on my back and pressed against my hip, and still his touch was a silent shout: I love you.
How stupid I’d been to think I couldn’t tell the difference between this kiss and Mark’s kiss. How ridiculous to reduce Cole to his mess and his loudness, to be so furious with him that I erased the other true parts. What was I with the kindness scrubbed from the record?
Eyeliner in a white dress.
We were so little, when you took away all our sins.
As I linked my arms around his neck, I was crying.
What an idiot I was. This perfect moment, this perfect kiss, and I was crying. There was so much wrong with me. I was so incredibly messed up that I couldn’t cry when everything was wrong and I couldn’t not when everything was fine.
Our lips were salty with it. Cole didn’t stop or pause, but his hands crept up my back to hold me tighter. After a moment, he pressed his forehead against mine and I put my hands on his face and we just stayed like that, breathing each other’s breaths. It was so much us and so little him and me. Us, us, us. The opposite of lonely was this.
Cole said, “You’re the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
I replied, “I’m sorry I’m such a wreck.”
He kissed me again. My mouth, my throat, under my ear.
He hesitated. Pulling back, he said, “Tell me this means something to you.”
It was a strange thing to be asked. It seemed like it should have been the other way around. He was the one who had been the touring rock star with countless girls on countless nights. He was the one with the cavalier smile and the easy laugh.
But that wasn’t the truth. Not really. Not now. Now the truth was that I was the one with the heart of metal. I was the one always walking away.
A tear dripped off my chin and onto my leg. It was gray with my eyeliner.
I said, “Don’t let me leave you.”
Then, in our secret bit of Los Angeles, we kissed and slid from our clothing. His hands adored my body and my mouth explored his and in the end it was this: us us us.
This place, this place. Dry Venice, invented Eden, glowing New Age hipster palace where people come to believe in fate and destiny and karma and all of the things that are only true here and only if you make them true.
I was dead in Los Angeles once.
I opened my eyes and didn’t know where I was. And then, even after waking more fully, I suddenly knew, but I didn’t understand. My brain was a tangle of images and sensations. My own bare legs on top of a comforter, a streetlight moon outside a cracked window, a spidery shadow cast on the wall from a pitcher of dried baby’s breath. Cole’s stubbled chin in the curve of my breastbone, his side, tan and even and endless, his belly button, his hips, his legs, one of his ankles hooked over one of mine, one of his hands carelessly sprawled up against my neck, the other curled in the silky space below my breasts.
My mind took the images, finally, and put them all together into thoughts and memory. Finally, I understood: I was so, so naked.
We were in one of the bedrooms of the rental. Drunk with each other, existing in a sweaty place outside of logic, we’d stumbled in here last night and fallen asleep on top of the comforter here. Now it was some ungodly time of the morning and —
What was I even doing? Who was this other person? What was I thinking?
I extricated myself from Cole and found my clothing on the floor. I reached past it to where my phone was tucked into my purse. Two A.M. My mother would still be at work; she wouldn’t be worried. But of course Sofia had been watching and waiting with sleepless owl eyes, anxious for my welfare. I had four missed calls from her.
“Hey,” Cole said. He looked young and uncomplicated and half asleep. He lifted just his fingers from the comforter in my direction. Sleepily, he said again, “Hey.”
I was suddenly petrified that he would say a name other than mine. I knew in a bruising, truthful way that if he said another girl’s name right now, it would break my heart.
“Isabel,” he said, “what are you doing?”
I didn’t know. I felt unsteady on my legs. I started putting on clothing.
“I have to go,” I said. My voice sounded a lot more awake than his in this room. In the light from the streetlight, I could clearly see the dresser, the mirror, the glass sculpture in the corner of the room. It seemed like it was never dark in any place in this city. I longed suddenly and fiercely for actual night, for a perfect blackness to hide me more completely.
“No,” he replied simply. He lifted his enti
re arm now, and stretched it toward me. “Stay.”
“I can’t. People are — no one knows where I am. I need to go.”
“They’ll be okay till morning. Come back. Come sleep.”
“I’m not going to sleep. I need to —” I couldn’t seem to work out how to get my dress back on. No part of it was right side out. It was all wrong sides, and my fingers were clumsy.
Cole pushed himself up on an elbow to watch me struggle angrily with the garment. Finally, I aggressively zipped it; the zipper wasn’t even. Who was going to see it this time of night anyway? No one. I couldn’t remember where I’d put my car keys. Maybe they were still out in the conservatory. I couldn’t find them on the side table or in my purse or on the floor or — no, no, I’d come in Cole’s car, I needed a cab, I’d have to call one, I couldn’t even think of —
“Isabel,” Cole said from right behind me. He took my elbows and turned me around to him. I resisted, body stiff. I couldn’t look him in the eye. “If you have to go, I’ll drive you. You’re out of your mind.”
“Please let go,” I said, and it was the meanest thing I’d ever said, and I didn’t even want what I was asking for.
He let go. I expected his face to be blank, the real Cole gone someplace where I couldn’t poke at him, but he was still there. “Don’t do this to me.”
The emphasis, somehow, was on the word me. That he didn’t expect me to be able to stop from doing the this, whatever it was, but I could at least stop aiming it at him.
I wanted my hands to stop shaking. I wanted my brain to regain control of my body.
“I have to go,” I said. “I’m going to go. Don’t be an asshole about it.”
I didn’t even know what I was saying. I just knew that I was going. I had everything together. I would call a cab. I would walk to Abbot Kinney and get into it.
Cole’s voice was raw. “Fine, Isabel. Just — I get it. You get to call the shots. Call me when it’s good for you, right? It doesn’t matter what I need. It doesn’t matter how much I … I get it. Whatever. I’ll play your game.”
I didn’t reply. I was already gone.
light on
which one looks good today
Maybe me
Maybe not
do i match your shoes
your hair
your face
Maybe me
Maybe not
back on the rack
stretched but not worn
i am the used
I wrote the album.
I had nothing else to do.
The L.A. sky turned overcast and smoggy. Everything looked different without the brilliant sun and saturated colors. The houses were flatter, the cracks in the streets deeper, the palms drier. It didn’t feel like the L.A. I loved was gone, just like it was hiding or sleeping or had been knocked out and lay in a ditch waiting for me to find it.
I was tired of waiting. Of making. Of doing. I wanted some closure, an ending, a feeling I had gotten somewhere.
I wanted Isabel to call me and tell me she had been wrong, that she wanted me, that she loved me.
I called Leon. “Comrade. Do you want to get lunch with a famous person?”
“I wish I could,” he said kindly. “But I have pickups until midnight today.”
That was one thousand years from now. L.A. could be dead by then. I said, “Tomorrow, then. Chili dogs. Put it in your datebook. This time I get to drive.”
I got in the Mustang and drove. I didn’t know where I was going, but it took me to Santa Monica. I knew Isabel was here, but the car didn’t know she didn’t want to see me. I drove into a massive parking garage and sat there. I wanted to shoot up. I touched my skin where I would inject the wolf. I could almost feel it. I wondered if it was possible to invoke the shift without a needle or a temperature change, like that time I’d smelled of wolf when the topless girls came over.
I’d told Jeremy I was taking it off the table.
It was off the table. I’d meant it. It was just harder to really mean it than I’d expected. No. Not really. I knew it was going to be hard.
Withdrawal was never easy.
Isabel was just blocks away. I was tired of checking my phone for messages.
The car was getting stuffy. I opened the door and sat there in the dim blue parking garage and touched my wrist and the inside of my elbow and thought about disappearing.
I heard my name.
“Cole? Cole?”
I turned my head. It was a smallish sort of guy with a biggish nose and sort of greasy auburn curls, standing just outside the car. He was probably my age. His face had a religious cast to it. A familiar, glowing expression.
This was a fan.
I made sure I had my Cole St. Clair face on. I didn’t have a pen to sign anything, but maybe he’d brought one.
“Hey,” I said, climbing reluctantly from the car. I shut the door. “What’s up?”
He mouthed what’s up in a wondering, amazed way. “I’m, uh, I’m sort of, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry, I’m, uh, awkward, you’re just, I’m …”
“That’s okay, slick,” I told him. “Take your time.”
“I’m not a stalker, I swear, I totally am not,” he said.
This was never the best way to start a conversation, but I’d heard it before. I just waited.
“I saw you come in here, I’ve been watching the show, I’m a huge fan of NARKOTIKA. I have, like, all of your albums, twice, and I buy them all the time to recommend them to, like, everyone I know.”
There was absolutely nothing wrong with what he was saying, but for some reason, I felt a little buzz in my throat when he said NARKOTIKA. A sort of claustrophobic squeeze. I had had this conversation, or one a lot like it, on tour. It felt like I was living a memory instead of a minute I was really in. Like I had dreamed two years and now I was waking up and I had never left my old life behind.
“That’s awesome,” I told him. “Always great to meet a fan.”
“Wait,” he said. “Wait, it’s not just that. When you disappeared, Cole …”
My ears felt a little ring-y.
“When you disappeared, I was having a rough time, too,” he said. He pulled up his sleeves. In the crooked blue shadows of the stairwell, his arms were a mess of scars. Track marks and cutting. But old. Old scars. “But when I heard on the radio that you were in rehab, I thought, I can do it, too. And I did. I totally did, because of you. Because if you could come back from that, back from the dead, I could do it, too. You changed my life. That song you guys had, I put the coffin inside/you don’t need to bury me, I know it’s about, about rebirth….”
“Coffinbone” wasn’t about rebirth. It was about wanting to die. All of the songs back then were about wanting to die. My chest felt small.
“When I heard you were in town recording, I knew the time was right for this. And when I saw you drive in here, I knew this was my, this was my chance to tell you thanks. And show you — sorry, it’s still a little raw.” The guy half turned, jacking up his shirt. The skin of his back was red and angry with the irritation of a brand-new tattoo.
In cursive it said, I put the coffin inside/you don’t need to bury me. And then a date. The date he got out of rehab or went in or something. Probably he wanted me to ask. But I didn’t.
There was nothing wrong with any of it except that he’d taken a quote about wanting to die every second of every day and tattooed it on his body because he didn’t understand. There was nothing really wrong with that, either, because it meant what he wanted it to mean.
But I knew what it had meant in the beginning, and the permanence of it, of marking his body forever with my desire to die, made my stomach churn sickly. The feeling didn’t go away when he pulled down his shirt.
“That’s amazing, man,” I told him. “Good for you. Give me a — give me a fist bump.”
He shivered and wiped his left eye and then gave me the most timid fist bump known to man. He looked like he might fall down.
“I just wanted to tell you,” he said again, “what an inspiration you are. I don’t want to stop you from your, whatever. Oh, gosh, this is the best day of my life.”
I summoned a little wave for him as I turned away. As I headed down the stairs, the metal echoed and rattled beneath me. My legs felt wobbly, and my pulse had suddenly begun to race.
He’d done everything right. He hadn’t detained me. Hadn’t asked me to sign his face or his dick. Just said his piece and then gone on his way. Cleaned himself up and unfairly credited me with the burden of his recovery.
But my recovery was such a fragile thing. What happened if you hung your cure on someone else’s, and they turned out to be still sick? I wished for the sailing optimism of my first days here. My bulletproof confidence.
By the time I got to .blush., my skin was clammy. I could feel my heart tripping. My mind said: anxiety attack. My body just screamed. Every piece of my skin was sending a thousand messages a second to my brain. Run. Fight. Get the hell out of here.
There was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to be anxious over. But then I would turn over the image of that tattoo like a shovel turning over grave dirt. And my stomach would churn. It felt as if the temperature were plummeting.
It’s not cold out here, I told myself. Even overcast, it wasn’t cold. I looked out at the street and imagined blistering sun brilliant on the car mirrors, white light searing the sides of the buildings. But my brain howled the cold at me. My arms were goose bumps with the fake cold.
I had known all along that the more times I forced the shift, the more likely I was to shift accidentally. I had been playing this game for weeks now.
No.
I called Isabel. My fingers were already shaking enough to make hitting the buttons difficult.
Her voice was another cool thing in the whitewashed day. “Culpep —”
“Is the store empty?”
“Cole, this isn’t —”
“Is it empty?” She had to say yes, because I was already there, my face reflected in the black-ice mirror of the door, my hand on the door handle. I needed to put my head between my legs, to breathe into a damn paper bag, to shut myself in a room far away from the clouds and the world. I needed to get off the street.
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