“I did have a good reason!” Noz said, harshly but still whispering, she didn’t even want her friends to overhear this part of the argument. “Did you look at your email today?”
“I deleted it without reading it,” I said.
“I hate it when you act like such a fucking brat. Read your email. Listen to me. Firstly, you know I’m not a stranger to snorting eggshells when you’re like, on a family vacation to a Civil War battleground and you don’t want to see gross ghosts, but right now you’re cutting off your best friend on the anniversary of his death for the sake of your own convenience.”
Nozlee paused, accidentally gave me the floor.
“Before you go on,” I said, not shouting now in order to keep the high road for myself, “You breaking up with Ezra hurt me because you were breaking apart the last bit of our friend group, which Miggy had already broken in half last year. And you didn’t have a reason to leave us.”
The air in my apartment felt prickly. My eyes stung like when I had allergies; the water in them felt hot and poisonous and ready to spill. If I’d been allowed to just live how I wanted, I wouldn’t have been forced to feel sad right now. I can’t do anything when I’m sad, and I have so much I need to do. I heard Nozlee breathing into the phone, I could hear her breath but I’d never again get to hop in the car for a spontaneous road trip to get dim sum for breakfast, or wrap my arms around her neck on the dance floor and shimmy while the DJ played “Return of the Mack,” or pass out in the same bed in Palm Springs as the sun came up over the hotel’s swimming pool, or get high and wander around the Americana mall, trying on all the jeans and ordering lychee martinis and pork soup dumplings at Din Thai Fung. She broke up with Ezra, didn’t give him a reason, and didn’t care that by breaking up with him, she was also leaving me behind.
“I don’t want to leave you, Eve,” Nozlee said.
“You have a funny way of showing it,” I said, and hung up the call.
My Cascarilla lines were done, all white and neat, cut to exactly equal length. I opened my text chain with Miggy and typed with my thumbs:
Miggy
That’s so fucking rude.
I never call you out on your bad patterns, and I thought we’d get to spend this weekend at least a little bit together, and all you’ve done is snort ghost-blocker drugs and freak out about Ezra.
if you wanted to “spend this weekend together” you could’ve fucking tried not killing yourself. you and i both know, death is something that happens to the people left alive, not the people who’ve died.
Then I took the lines, then I left the house.
Saturday, 1:45 p.m.
I drove from the twisting hill streets above Echo Park down into the gridded, super-urban zone of downtown Los Angeles. Around me, the air thinned out, making room for the towering apartment high-rises and office buildings; most neighborhoods in Los Angeles were bound by regulations that dictated that buildings stay short enough to accommodate the sky, but downtown they block it out with metal and mirrored glass. This part of the city glistens. It’s beautiful to look at from above like when you’re on a hike in Elysian Park, but from inside DTLA, the buildings make me feel claustrophobic and cut off, like I’m not even in Los Angeles anymore. As I started to look for a parking spot, I passed a sporty gold Maserati that was parked neatly in the intersection of two metered parking spaces, rendering them both useless for other parkers, obviously done so that the owner of that gaudy piece of trash wouldn’t get any scratches on his delicate fucking bumpers. All I wanted in that moment, stronger even than my desire to find Ezra, was to be legally allowed to ram my car into that asshole’s dumb vehicle in punishment for keeping me from a parking spot that was rightly mine. Over and over again, I circled back to the Maserati, because certainly the fuckhead who’d committed this crime against the social contract wouldn’t have done so for an extended period of time. I circled the cloying streets for almost twenty minutes waiting for justice to be served, waiting to get the visceral satisfaction of spotting a parking ticket below his windshield wiper, waiting at least for him to move his goddamn car.
2:15 PM 818-976-4545
Hey I’m here
I’ll wait for you by the bar
I gave up, and pulled into one of the public lots that charge an atrocious twenty dollars for any stay longer than fifteen minutes. I begrudgingly parted with my money.
818-976-4545
parking was a nightmare
i’m on my way in
Walking, I navigated the thick-for-LA foot traffic, stopped to hand off a few dollar bills to a homeless guy who crossed my path and asked for the money, waited at the light, darted across the street, and arrived at the doorstep of Clifton’s Cafeteria. I went inside, and into another world.
The bottom floor of Clifton’s was designed to look like a Redwood forest, picnic tables nestled between actual Redwoods and plastic re-creations, booths nestled into the rock that covered all the walls, chairs arranged in a semicircle next to the tiny waterfall that emptied into a little pond that glowed with the green neon lights nestled into the sides. A plastic Redwood tree with a fireplace carved into the base towered above me; three floors of bars encircled its plastic branches.
I looked at the small crowd of daytime drinkers but didn’t see Paris sitting at the nearby bar, or in the leather chairs artfully placed near the Redwood or the glass cases with the taxidermy mountain lion and Buffalo. I looked at my phone.
818-976-4545
parking was a nightmare
i’m on my way in
Meet me in Pacific Seas
I went up the side staircase, stopped at the seven-foot-tall mirror, resettled my curls and hiked up my jeans, and pushed on the left side of the mirror. It swung open, a hidden door. Inside, all woven bamboo and sunset murals, was Pacific Seas, the tiki bar. The light was dim and the music was crickets and ukulele.
I saw Paris right away, alone at the slick wooden bar, hunched slightly over her phone and bright blue drink-in-a-fishbowl, ice melting; I slid onto the stool next to her and hung my bag on a hook under the bar. Looking up from her phone, Paris blinked at me, then registered who I was, then leaned forward to hook one arm around my shoulders into the kind of awkward little hug that acquaintances often share when they unexpectedly run into each other at a cocktail party. I hadn’t liked Paris, but I hadn’t disliked her either; we were different species of women. The entire time she was with Ezra, we hadn’t found one topic to talk about, we didn’t even watch the same reality TV shows. I had always wondered why someone who loved me so much could’ve also been interested in her, and assume she’d regarded me with the same mixture of uncertainty and skepticism.
Compared to the messy frizz of my hangover hair, Paris looked artfully put together with her mermaid-long extensions, pointed red acrylic nails, and perfectly even liquid eyeliner; her only blemish was a cluster of pimples on her chin that were so tiny, they practically disappeared into her otherwise smooth and glimmering super-dark skin. Despite the half-finished boozy-looking drink sweating on the bar beside her, Paris looked clear-eyed and solid. She did, however, grip the rounded glass with the intensity of a terrified child holding fast to her mother’s hand.
“So how have you been doing?” Paris asked, useless small talk, at the same time as a sexy, freckly, redheaded bartender brandished a menu in my direction, with a nerdy gentlemanly gesture style used only by the least-cool butch dykes who had just come to the city from some square Midwestern place and hadn’t adapted to the cold vibes of the LA lesbian scene yet. This bartender was too hot to be so dumb. “Do you need to look at our cocktail menu?” she asked.
“No,” I said. I didn’t say “nope” because “no” was sexier. “I’ll have a Penicillin.”
She smiled, “Coming right up,” and busied herself with the glassware and
ice and rum, at a station right next to where Paris and I were sitting. We watched the bartender do her work in silence, a mutual and unspoken decision to hold off on our conversation until we were more alone. After the tiki drink was in front of me, after I’d opened a tab, after the bartender had gone down to the end of the bar to clean something or look at her phone, I spoke first, to keep from having to endure any useless small talk:
“You saw Ezra on Friday night?”
“Friday morning,” Paris said apparently as ready and as willing to skip the small talk as I was. She liked being the one with something to say, a story to tell. “You know I can’t sleep?”
I nodded, familiar with Paris’s insomnia. Women like to talk about their afflictions.
“So on Friday at like sixish, Ezra texted me.”
“That must’ve been weird,” I said, “You guys have been broken up for a while.”
“Not really,” Paris said, “I mean like, we still text all the time.”
This was news to me, Ezra and Paris texting this whole time, while he was with Nozlee? Learning something new about Ezra’s patterns unsettled me; I drummed the stubs of my fingernails against my glass and took a big swig.
“Oh it wasn’t like that,” Paris said, “we only got drinks once or twice and we never did anything physical when he was with Noz.”
“Sure sure,” I said. What had these texts been like? Cursory, checking in, hi how are you, did you read that article that’s been going around, did you see any movies this week? But how could you sustain that kind of bland contact with an ex, how could Ezra sustain a slog of nothingness? Their texts must’ve been meaningful, maybe about problems he was having with Nozlee, the same things he shared with me? And Paris, to him, talking about men she was seeing, the two of them shifting from lovers into friends with a uniquely insightful perspective on each other’s romantic situations; that would probably be fine, I’d feel okay about that. Or maybe they’d been sexting, not cheating exactly, just reminiscing one night about a tryst that morphed into some kind of steady exchange of flashes of sexual fantasy, deleted the next morning to hide from whomever. I couldn’t get my head around it, I didn’t like the thought of Ezra looking for something outside of what he already had, didn’t he get enough from his relationship with Nozlee and his friendship with me? Didn’t we cover all the bases for him? Unless he just wanted to get laid, what was he looking for at 6:00 a.m. with Paris that I wouldn’t have been happy to wake up and provide?
“I was awake, as usual,” Paris said. She was picking up her story at six o’clock, when Ezra had texted her.
I interrupted with, “Sorry, but can you tell me the exact time?”
“Like 6:30.”
“No, like, can you check on your phone?”
She raised her eyebrows like I was being weird, when she was the one that had reached out to me on the basis of just an Instagram post, but she pulled out her phone to check timing without verbal comment.
“Uh, 6:23 a.m.,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. I’d left around 4:00 a.m. and he’d gotten at least a few hours of rest, maybe sleeping, maybe unable to sleep but lying in bed while Bonnie hovered nearby like a controlling spouse. Then, he’d texted Paris. Only interrupting herself once, to order another Blue Hawaiian, Paris recounted her relatively brief encounter with Ezra.
She’d been lying on her back, bored out of her mind and too exhausted to be excited about any of her usual television shows or the YA novel she’d been reading, Grace and the Fever, so when Ezra texted she felt saved. (Oh yes, sweet phone and glorious late-night texter, yes I was up!) Ezra told her about the breakup, probably with some version of the texts he’d sent me on Friday after midnight, “u wanna come out for an early drink at the Drawing Room?” then in a second text, “Noz broke up with me last night.” Was Paris just the early-morning version of me?
Though Paris would’ve loved to live a normal orderly life, a life all her friends lived, with spin classes before work, and happy hour drinks, but never getting drunk the night before a big meeting, Paris’s persistent insomnia pushed her into a strange shadow world populated by food service workers and the weird population of thirty-year-olds who made their money writing for or doing things on the internet, a population of people who did the things they wanted to do at whatever time they wanted to do them. Like her coworkers, like her friends, Paris put on trendy athleisure when she left the house before 7:00 a.m., but while they went to Yoga Works or Soul Cycle or Bar Method, she parked in front of the Drawing Room under a pink rising sun, and went into a bar where the sun didn’t matter.
Ezra was there when she arrived, looking ragged from his haircut, sagging from lack of sleep, but he still looked good, Paris noted; why, even when she could see that he looked like shit, did he still look good to her? Paris didn’t understand her attraction to Ezra, didn’t know if it was chemical or psychological, didn’t know how she could think of herself as a basically good person when the first thing she thought, when she saw Ezra sitting at the bar, was that if Ezra said he and Nozlee were really over for good, that she’d be willing to go into the men’s bathroom of that dark dive bar and lean over the sink, so she could watch it in the mirror while he fucked her. It wasn’t unusual for Paris to give me this kind of visceral detail. I remembered we did actually have one point of connection when she was dating Ezra, a frankness about sex; we both preferred it when we knew exactly what was going on in all of our friends’ bedrooms.
Ezra put Paris’s drinks—vodka cranberry? Yes—on his tab; he told Paris he didn’t know what to do, should he try to get Nozlee back? Should he follow my advice and let the rocky romance finally and fully end? He was wearing a white t-shirt that had just the barest hint of sweat stains in the armpit, which Paris thought was a little bit sexy, combined with his obvious anguish. Why, sometimes, does another person’s heartbreak make us want to fuck them? Paris tried to be a good friend. She asked him a lot of questions to try to help him find his way through his own mind, which was twisting in on itself, trapping him in a maze of repetitive thoughts, of unending dead-ends. Sometimes he characterized Noz as an uncaring bitch, sometimes he was the asshole that pushed her and pushed her until she had no choice but to break free of him.
This man needs something he’s not getting, Paris thought while Ezra spoke. Is it because no one is giving it to him, or is it because he can’t see it when it’s right in front of him?
After they ordered their second round, Ezra apologized for being messy and upset. Paris scooted her barstool a little bit closer to his, and hugged him, one of her knees slid in between his knees, and when he hugged her back he also squeezed her leg with his; she felt the hug like a current through her body. She felt strong, like she was the only thing holding him upright, like he was a churning stormy sea and she was a rocky cliff, the only thing stopping him from raging too hard and too far; together they were a beautiful natural thing. It felt like time didn’t exist inside the Drawing Room, everything was so hazy, and Paris felt needed and wanted and loved.
They were quiet for almost ten minutes while Ezra looked at his cell phone. He’d gotten an upsetting text from Nozlee, and was texting back furiously, demonstratively. He was arguing with Noz right in front of Paris, but there wasn’t anything for her to overhear; she watched his shoulders hunch and tighten, she watched his mouth screw up into a frustrated scowl, she saw him freeze all over his body after he sent a text and waited for the response. She looked at her own Instagram feed while Ezra texted and when she looked up, his phone was facedown on the bar and he’d shifted from sad to actively fucking angry.
Ezra took a big sip of his fresh glass of whiskey, he didn’t wince. He told Paris that a little more than a year ago, if you’d asked him, he would’ve said that his life was alarmingly close to perfect. He and Noz were in a very loving phase, and he had two perfect best friends in Miguel and me, and when all four of us were together it felt l
ike he’d found the place where he was supposed to be. “And then, you know,” Paris said, stuttering around Miggy’s death like so many people did, “what happened with Miguel kind of blew things up for him, he said.” Then Paris looked right at me and then right away from me, and I could tell she was going to say something I didn’t already know.
“He was sounding a little tipsy at this point,” Paris said, “Not incoherent or slurry, just like, he was saying things he wouldn’t normally say. And what he said was, after Miggy died, he felt like things slipped out of place a little for you guys too.”
“Me?” I said, stupidly.
“Yeah,” Paris said, “He said you got weird, secretive. He felt guilty that your style of mourning was hard for him.”
“My style of mourning? What the fuck?”
“Just that you really freaked out at first, and then it was like nothing had happened at all. Like you got out all your sadness in one huge, really fucked up burst, while all the people around you had to go through the normal, slow, mourning process and you left them behind. Left him behind. Started spending all your time with Bea, even though your dynamic with her was really fucked up.”
Who the fuck was he to speak about fucked up dynamics!? I felt hot all over, suddenly, a fresh ripe anger burst into bloom inside of me. I felt so close to that anger, like the way people on most reality TV shows must have a deep oil well of it inside, one that is tapped and always gushing to the surface.
“Goddamn it, that is so rude and reductive.”
Paris shrugged. “He seemed very hurt by you.”
Paris had never liked me, though. She had been inclined against me since the moment she’d started dating Ezra, as if I were a romantic rival. No matter how often I paraded Bea in front of her, she’d acted like every time Ezra and I got stoned and went to the movies, or dressed in suits and went to Dan Tana’s, or stayed up all night watching the first season of Alias, that Ezra was somehow stepping out on her. Intimidated, as if I had any kind of sexual power over Ezra, which I obviously did not; possessive, as if his best friend shouldn’t have special and intimate access to his life. Despite their apparent continued closeness, I refused to believe she could know him well enough to understand him. She was probably interpreting what he said incorrectly; and I was taking her viewpoint too seriously.
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