Roland touches her. “Okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good.” She smiles at his feathered hair. She smiles at his apartment, so tiny, so—efficient. The sofa unfolds into a bed; the dinette table holds his phone, stereo, and portable TV; the floor lamp doubles — triples — as a table and magazine rack.
“So, Addie,” says Golita. She has blue saucer eyes and a Carly Simon mouth. She is bosomy like Carly, dark blond, a singer herself. She sings nights and works days at Ready Set with Pete and Roland. “How come Roll never told us about you?”
On the boardwalk, which is not boards but pavement, everything moves fast and smooth and so do they, graceful as wild animals. Addie can’t tell if she’s walking or running or gliding or flying or dreaming. They serpentine through a strange circus of weightlifters, street skaters, men swallowing fire, guitar players on unicycles, women telling fortunes.
“The bar’s around the corner,” Golita says.
They follow her out of the crowd and into a small yellow building. Inside it’s all dark wood paneling with a Maple Leaf flag over the bar, a jukebox on the far wall, and a single pool table in the middle of the room. Pete buys beer, Golita puts quarters in the jukebox and Roland puts quarters in the table. He hands Addie a cue stick and shows her how to hold it, standing behind her with his arms on hers.
“I’m a slow learner,” she says.
“I’ve got all night,” he says.
She loses every game. She doesn’t care. “Buy me another round,” she says. “Rack ’em.”
They monopolize the table until closing time. They walk home a different way, past giant murals and cafés (they haven’t eaten but no one mentions food; no one is hungry), under swishing palm fronds. The night sky has faded to purple — an incandescent, glowy purple. Out here, it never gets completely dark.
When Roland opens the sofa bed there is a smell like salted cashews. The smell of sex.
He offers to sleep on the floor but she tells him no, she doesn’t mind sharing. She turns out the lights and gets in bed without taking off her dress. She rolls onto her side, facing the wall, her back to Roland, and listens to the muffled sounds of traffic from the street and the distant moan and hiss of the ocean. She listens to Roland, unzipping his pants.
He lies down behind her, slides his hand under her dress.
She touches his hand, guides it.
He doesn’t hurry. He takes a long time this time. She doesn’t think he’ll ever finish.
In the morning, they shower together and towel off in the tiny bathroom. Roland opens a canister of mousse, sprays a little in his hand, lets it swell to the size of a golf ball, and works it into his wet hair. He hangs his head upside down between his legs and aims the blow dryer straight up—“for volume,” he says, a trick he learned in show business.
“I want to know all your secrets,” she says.
She falls in love with the sound of the ocean, a constant whoosh behind all the other sounds.
She falls in love with the sun, which is different here, expansive and white, bleaching everything, making even the ugliest buildings gleam like laundry on a line.
She falls in love with the unreality of the place. On Hollywood Boulevard they have to stop for a man in chaps crossing the street with his bull. On the Santa Monica pier, a man at the bar offers to buy her a drink.
“I’m Kin,” he says.
“No, you’re not,” she says. “I know you. You’re Scotty from General Hospital.”
She falls in love with Roland’s friends. One night they all go to dinner in a French café Pete knows, Maison Gerard (“the House of Jerry,” Roland translates), with red walls and posters advertising French soap and cigarettes, and a French lounge singer, Serge Gainsbourg, on the sound system. Their waiter is an actor studying to play a French waiter. His face is flat and round as an omelet pan. While they wait for their meal, Pete spreads potted cheese onto rounds of French bread and deals the bread like cards. “So,” he says to Addie, “wasn’t the Lost Colony in North Carolina?”
“That’s right. The first English settlement in America. By the time the new governor got there, the whole colony was gone.”
Roland says, “Remember how in school they used to tell us, ‘And no one ever knew what became of the settlers’? It was never any fucking mystery to me.” He tomahawk-chops the table with his hand.
“That’s just what they wanted you to think,” Pete says. “Always blame the Indians.”
“What’s that Opie Taylor movie,” Golita says, “where all the old people get in a boat and go to another planet and live forever?”
“That’s what happened,” Pete says. “They’re probably on Mars right now, kicking up red dust.”
“With silver buckles on their shoes,” Addie says.
“Wearing top hats,” Pete says. “Trying to grow maize, but it won’t grow. ‘We put fish in the ground the way the Indians showed us and still it won’t grow.’”
Driving is her favorite drug. She becomes addicted to the motion, the forever-changing view. She loves watching Roland drive, how he stretches out his arm and drapes his hand over the steering wheel, every part of him long and loose. Whenever they come to a 7-Eleven he stops for pink wine and lottery tickets.
Late one night they drive up the coast to Zuma Beach with the windows rolled down. Salt air eddies in around them. Nina Simone purrs on the tape deck, “Since I Fell for You.” Strings of Christmas lights glitter on wooden fences along the road. Beyond is the big dark ocean.
“You’re shaking,” Roland says. He pulls over and takes off his jacket, wraps it around her.
“Dance with me,” she says, turning up the volume.
They get out and he pulls her close and they slow-dance to Nina Simone right there on the edge of Pacific Coast Highway, a twinkling fence and an ocean on one side of them and the threat of traffic on the other.
When the song is over, they get back in the van and drive some more.
“I’m sure he’s a sweet piece of ass,” Golita says to Addie. “He’s also a total fuckup. You know that, right?” The two of them are in Golita’s kitchen. Pete and Roland are in the living room with the new Michael Jackson album turned up. “I mean, I love the man, and Pete’s fucking in love with him. But he’s a mess.”
“How?”
“Oh, you know. He’s always late. When it’s his turn to drive we always get docked at work. He’s the only person I know that ever runs out of gas. He’s always running out of something. Money, coke. He loses stuff. Burns stuff. See my floor? I mean the landlord’s floor that me and Pete will have to pay for.” She points out a patch of brown blisters at the foot of the stove. “One night we left him alone to make popcorn and he plugged in the popper and set it on the stove and turned the stove on high.”
“When he was young,” Addie says, “he hit his head.”
“In the swimming pool,” Golita says. “Everybody’s heard that story.”
Pete knows a drummer in a bar band and arranges for Roland to sit in so that Addie can see him play before she leaves town. It’s a nicer-than-average Venice bar, with tables and chairs and a tile dance floor. The band opens its first set with love songs: “Cold Love,” “Part Time Love,” “Hoodoo Love,” “I Stole Some Love.” Roland sits at the back of the stage, cradling his unplugged guitar, tapping his foot, fingering silent chords.
“Why isn’t he playing?” Addie says.
“This isn’t his gig,” Golita says.
“He will,” Pete says.