“Addie? I can’t believe it. I was just thinking about you.”
“No you weren’t.” Who’s Donna? she wants to say.
“Okay, not really, but damn, baby, it’s good to hear your voice. Are you okay, is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. I was—, there was this guy, this piano player—”
“You just break up with somebody?”
She twists the phone cord around her finger. “As a matter of fact, yeah,” she says.
“I knew it. A breakup call. It’s okay. Tell me all about him.”
“Oh no, that would put us both to sleep. Anyway, this isn’t a breakup call. I just wanted to talk to you. I heard you were in L.A. making music and it made me happy and jealous. You’re doing what you always meant to do.”
“Venice Beach, actually. Yeah, it’s totally wild out here. It’s fucking paradise is what it is. I’m four blocks from the beach. You can see the ocean from my roof.”
His voice is so familiar she can feel it, humming through her like electrical current. “Wow,” she says.
“Who told you where to find me?”
“Danny Brewster. Well, Shelia, but Danny told her. He works on your mother’s car.”
“Danny that used to sell loose joints?”
“He married my friend Shelia and opened a garage.”
“You’re in Carswell? I thought you left.”
“Greensboro. I came here for college and stayed.”
She pulls her quilt tighter. She can hear the tick of freezing rain outside her window. On the phone, too, in the background, there’s a faint tapping. Then silence. Roland sniffs. Another pause. He lets out his breath.
“You still writing poems?” he says.
“Not since high school. I read like crazy, though. I work in a bookstore.”
“That’s so you. I always loved that about you.”
“What?”
“Everything. I’m just flattered as hell to hear from you.”
She pours another glass of wine. “Tell me about you,” she says. “What are you up to?”
“Same thing as everybody else out here. Show business. I work for a company that builds movie sets. Ready Set. Get it?” He laughs his old laugh, huck-huck-huck.
“What about music?”
“Yeah, you know, I’m playing out some, making some contacts, trying to pick up some session work. I was on the road for fucking ever. I came out here and I said, never again. This is the place, man. This is where shit happens. Have you been?”
“To California? No.”
“You ought to check it out. It’s wild.”
“I hear the weather’s perfect.”
“You’d love it. You should come, you really should.” He’s getting loud, insistent. “Come see me. Come for Christmas.”
“What?”
“Or New Year’s. Come spend New Year’s with me. I’ll show you a good time.”
She waits for his laugh. He used to do that — let people take him seriously, then laugh. Even when he was serious he thought it was funny when people took him seriously.
“We’ll have a blast,” he says. “It’ll be just like old times, only better.”
She can’t believe she’s having this conversation. She still can’t believe she picked up the phone and dialed Roland’s number and he answered.
She knows better than to take him seriously. Even if L.A. at New Year’s is exactly the kind of adventure she needs.
“My astrologer says I should travel,” she says.
“Always listen to your astrologer.”
“Is this a serious invitation, Roland?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
She packs early. She hopes that packing will make the trip seem real. She packs her paisley skirt, her tightest jeans, her black boots, her black jacket. She is thrilled and sickly nervous; she’s also (though she wouldn’t admit it) embarrassed to be traveling back in time to someone she used to know. Is this the only adventure she could come up with? Hasn’t she outgrown Roland?
And what must Roland think? Does she seem as lonely and desperate and pathetic to him as the professor now seems to her?
“I’m going to California to spend New Year’s with an old friend,” she tells John Dunn when she asks for time off. She says it casually. California. A word luscious as a piece of fruit.
John Dunn doesn’t ask questions, or point out that this trip isn’t the sort of thing Addie does. “I’ll give you a ride to the airport,” he says.
She’s braced for the obvious — the long flight, the strange city. But the flight is just a droning bus ride in the air. Los Angeles, too, is easy: a big, lazy, sprawled-out sunbather of a city where you can never be entirely lost because every street and neighborhood, every building, no matter how ordinary, is a place you’ve heard of.
She’s less prepared for smaller things. The smell of diesel in the LAX terminal, making her afraid to breathe. The crush of people headed there, there, there. People with other people waiting for them. She claims her bag and finds a place to sit. She checks her watch, freshens her makeup, tugs at her dress and tries to convince herself she looks like someone a man would want to drive to the airport and pick up. Twice she calls Roland’s apartment but there’s no answer and no machine. She waits forty-five minutes. The crowd thins. She starts to panic. People actually stop for her. “Is there some problem, miss?” “Can I call someone for you? A cab?”
God deliver me, she thinks, from the kindness of strangers.
Then she sees him. She knows him first by his walk, lean and smooth, his feet gliding along as if they don’t quite touch the ground. He’s wearing a denim jacket and a black T-shirt that says “Déjà Voodoo.” He has a mustache and his hair is cut in a mullet, short in front, layered on the sides, long in back. He looks like he just walked off an album cover.
“Baby,” he says, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t find a place to park.” He smiles the lopsided, apologetic smile she remembers, and opens his arms, and she, too relieved to be angry, falls in.
She can tell from his apartment that there’s a woman. Air freshener plugged into an electrical socket. An open box of baking soda in the refrigerator. A blouse in the closet.
There’s only one closet; the apartment is an efficiency, no bigger than a motel room, with painted cinderblock walls and a filmy picture window. Roland takes her suitcase to the closet and pushes his clothes to one side, and there, crumpled on the floor in back, is a faded pink blouse with brown underarm stains. She pretends not to notice, but it gives her a quick, sharp pain, that blouse.
Roland invites his friends Pete and Golita over to meet her. “Un-fucking-believable,” he tells them. “We haven’t seen each other in, like, ten thousand years, and then out of the blue she calls me up, and now here she is.”
“Nice.” Pete nods. He has wild orange hair like the singer in Simply Red. He’s sitting at Roland’s counter tapping a small pile of white powder onto a mirror, chopping it with a razor blade, carving it into thin lines. He passes Addie a rolled-up dollar bill. “Company first.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Breathe in. Don’t breathe out.”
She holds the dollar straw to one nostril, closes the other with her finger, and leans down. The powder burns her nose. Her eyes water. The back of her throat tastes bitter. Her ears start to buzz.