‘You can’t imagine how depressing London was.’
She turned to face me.
‘Come on, let’s go out. Stop staring at me like that, would you, sweetheart?’
*
There was gym equipment on the beach, with a low wall around it; in the semi-darkness a man was practicing on the bars. She took off her low-heeled shoes and we walked through the sand to the pier. The words were burning in my mouth, but I couldn’t spit them out.
‘People surf here during the day,’ she said. ‘Boys with those boards, what do you call them. .’
‘Surfboards.’
‘It’s amazing, the things they can do with them. They’re completely at home on the waves, they know exactly what they’re going to do. You should take lessons while you’re here.’
A few good moments were all that remained. Who would want to go and spoil them?
‘First I want one of those grains of rice with my name on it,’ I said.
We crossed the heavy timbers onto the boardwalk. Along the way there were people fishing, and others offering useless services. The man who wrote your name on a grain of rice was there too. There was a Latino girl selling Disney balloons, a little stand where you could buy soft drinks, magazines and cigarettes. The Ferris wheel was deserted. It was almost dark, except for a deep purple stripe along the horizon. We stood at the railing. A ring of buoys with bells attached had been set around the end of the pier: an audible warning to those approaching in the fog, which had a way of coming up suddenly here. They made a lonely sound. She said, ‘The pier at home didn’t have bells like that, did it?’
We walked back. The rice-grain man was still sitting close to the entrance. A light-skinned Negro, his hair hanging in matted strips.
‘Lookie there,’ he said in a voice that could make heavy objects shiver.
My mother smiled.
‘This is no woman,’ he said, ‘this is a story. I’ll write it for you on a grain of rice.’
‘It’s for him,’ my mother said.
She nodded in my direction.
‘His name is. .’
He held a finger to his lips.
‘Your name is enough. I’ll be gentle, I’ll write it between heartbeats.’
He bent over and took a grain of rice between thumb and index finger. The hand holding the thin fountain pen moved under the lamp.
‘But it’s for him,’ my mother said, ‘Ludwig.’
‘Magic formulas first,’ the man said.
We stood and waited, curious and ill at ease. The shaman made a zooming sound as he wrote. Beneath the timbers, the water was slapping against the pilings.
A little later he held up the prize triumphantly, and put it in a little glass tube.
‘A grain of rice for you, from your humble scribe on the banks of the Nile.’
He added a drop of oily fluid and sealed the tube with a silver cap on a string. She took it from him. We looked at it. The name was magnified by the curve of the tube and the oil in it: Eve LeSage.
‘What does it say?’ asked my mother, who wasn’t wearing her reading glasses.
‘Can’t you read your own name?’ the Negro asked.
Then she got it.
‘Oh,’ she said coolly.
‘It’s all here in black and white,’ he said, ‘look!’
Reaching around behind him into the box in which he carried his things, he produced a magazine. LA Weekly, with my mother on the cover: EVE LESAGE BACK IN THE LIMELIGHT. A come-hither pose, her forearms crossed beneath her breasts, her face held up alluringly. The snakes hissed on the Negro’s head. My mother, sustenance for the poor.
I took the glass tube out of her hand and slid it back across the table.
‘Don’t believe everything you read,’ I said.
We walked beside each other without a word, away from the pier. I was thinking Eastern thoughts, fortune-cookie things like he who wishes to hide the truth must beware even the grain of rice, which was comical, but not right then.
‘You knew,’ she said.
‘More or less.’
‘That’s why you came.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘I had the feeling you knew.’
‘I’ll never not know anymore.’
‘That’s life, sweetheart. That’s part of growing up.’
‘Don’t give me that horseshit. Please.’
It was silent for a bit. We plowed on through the sand.
‘That’s no way to talk to your mother, you know, I deserve a little. .’
‘Don’t say respect. That’s not one of the matching words.’
‘We’ve talked about this before, Ludwig. I can’t make things any better for you, this is how it is.’
‘And so now you’re going to say you didn’t have any choice in the matter?’
‘Did I?’
The words caught in my throat. From far away I could hear the bells at sea. My voice was thick with frustration.
‘You didn’t have to do this.’
‘You know, I earn ten thousand dollars for every day on the set. That makes up for a lot, okay? Not for all of it. But for a lot.’
‘A well-paid whore is still a whore.’
‘Ludwig, I don’t want. .’
‘But isn’t that the way it is? Do I have to call it something else, just so it’s easier for you to take? Get used to it: the world sees you as a whore. For what you are. For what I am.’
‘Oh please, don’t make such a production of it,’ she said, suddenly calm.
I reach out and grabbed her arm.
‘But that’s the way it is, isn’t it?!’
‘I respect your feelings, Ludwig, but I also have a life of my own. I don’t have to take you into account in all my decisions anymore. I spent twenty years. .’
‘Oh, I see, a sacrifice. Of course. You made a sacrifice, for me. . I was an inconvenient interruption to your life as a whore.’
‘That’s not what I am,’ she said quietly, ‘so please stop it. I have a contract for three films, and Rollo’s trying to arrange a show for me in Las Vegas, along with Annie Sprinkle and one of these new girls, Holly Cranes or something. I’ve heard that Linda Lovelace got thirty-five thousand a week in Las Vegas. We could make a new start, Ludwig, start something new.’
‘So this Liban is your pimp.’
‘My agent.’
We had arrived at a broad channel that ran down to the sea. We couldn’t go any further, we had to go up, to the paved path used during the day by cyclists, skaters and pedestrians. An asphalt road through the desert.
‘They dump straight into the ocean,’ my mother said. ‘Swimmers get sick from it.’
The water was covered in thick foam. It moved. I couldn’t help but think about puréed shit.
She walked on, back to the hotel; I went looking for something to eat. I was not pleased. There were certain words. Whore. Pimp. They bothered me. It was pathetic. I crossed them out of my vocabulary.
On Appian Way I saw a big man screaming into his cell phone. The man’s voice cut through the darkness.
‘No, now you’re gonna listen! We’re talking here, you and me. I buy a drink, you buy a drink, and that’s it. No, I’m talking now. No! First you’re going to let me finish. .’
He was giving someone hell. It was all completely revolting. Before I even reached the corner, a woman came running past me. She was holding a cell phone to her ear as well. She screamed.
‘I wanna fucking die! Do you hear me?!’
She slalomed through the cars waiting at the light on Ocean Avenue. A shopping bag fluttered wildly on her arm. She ran into a parking lot and was gone.
Russian cabbies on Colorado Avenue were chewing on seeds, spitting out the hulls. A couple of blocks further along I went into a restaurant. The realization that it was a vegan place arrived with the menu. The mint tea, pumpkin soup and spring rolls all landed on the table at the same time, because, the boy waiting on me said, we’re closing in a minute. He put the bill on the table as well.