And the only question is: How long does it last?
I was drinking my tea, tasting the tea and the sugar in the tea, and seeing this person in front of me, her teeth when she smiled, and the gums above her teeth. And her lips. The shape of her lips reminded me of a certain movie star, and I began thinking about the various roles I’d seen that particular movie star play, and while I was thinking, and while I was involved in the various narratives that led from that thinking, I wasn’t actually seeing the wide blue eyes of the assistant scientist. It wasn’t that I wasn’t paying attention; I didn’t even know I wasn’t paying attention. I was sitting there, in the middle of what might have been a normal conversation, and I was creating, not a cage exactly, but a sense of who I was.
I’d been living with a woman in New York. When she moved out of the apartment we shared, I lived there a while longer, but the magazines I’d been writing for didn’t pay enough to support living there alone. And I didn’t want to live there alone. And since I’d been thinking about moving to Los Angeles, that’s what I did. I put most of what I owned in storage, and the second thing I did when I arrived was buy a car, an old Toyota Camry. I was giving myself a month to test the waters of California, and since I wasn’t sure what I would be doing, instead of renting an apartment, the first thing I did was find a downtown hotel offering rooms by the month — the Hotel Metropole — and that’s where I was living.
Alan, the one who told me I should “come to L.A. and write about movies,” worked for the Los Angeles Times, and at the moment I was sitting with him, at a low table in a nostalgic bar off Wilshire Boulevard, talking about a piece he wanted about celebrity impersonators. I don’t know why Alan chose that particular bar, but I call it “nostalgic” because, whether or not it actually existed in the 1950s, it was made to seem as if, sitting at the low table, with the bamboo walls and the Polynesian masks, you were somewhere in the middle part of the last century. It was a cultural memento, or more accurately, a memento mori; the past it referred to, the playboy, beach-party aesthetic that came into being after World War II, had long since passed away. The photographs on the walls — publicity stills of movie stars like Dean Martin and Tony Curtis — were cultural souvenirs, bits of the past, and like the past, they were mutable. Because I’d been thinking about changing my own name I was aware, for instance, that Dean Martin was born Dino Crocetti, that Tony Curtis was Bernard Schwartz, and that Barbara Stanwyck, in her flowing gown, was originally Ruby Stevens.
Anyway, I was sitting there with Alan, and next to Alan was a tall young woman named Jane, an ex-dancer apparently, who wanted to learn about photography. She had a short, boyish haircut, and although she wasn’t all that garrulous, the conversation seemed to flow. Alan, who was trying to get me work at the Times, did most of the talking. I’d come to Los Angeles knowing only two people, and one of them was Alan, and this woman was an acquaintance of his, someone he wanted to be an acquaintance of mine, a romantic acquaintance. And although I also wanted that, I was still slightly uncomfortable jumping into the ocean of romance. That’s what it seemed like, an ocean, and Alan’s way of pushing me into the water of that ocean was to introduce me to this person.
We were drinking our drinks and talking about photography, and I said to her, “Alan told me you wanted to know about cameras.”
“I think I have the camera part figured out,” she said, and she reached into her bag and pulled out a film camera with adjustable dials and levers.
Alan, a mojito in one hand, a cheese cracker in the other, sat back in his chair, so that the triangle formed by the three of us left him slightly removed. He’d told her I knew something about photography — which wasn’t an absolute lie, because I did take pictures — but I certainly wasn’t an expert, and I told Jane, “I really don’t know that much.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” Alan said. “He’s got an outstanding eye.”
“That’s what I want to develop,” she said.
“Then he’s your man.”
Alan had the habit of treating people as if they were stupid, not because he believed they were, but because by assuming they were, until they told him otherwise, he was able to feel safe.
My way to feel safe was different. A writer in Los Angeles is fairly far from the top of the food chain, and I wanted to seem a little more substantial, a little more sure of myself than I actually was. I sat with my back straight, my collarbones extended, and I looked into her eyes in what I hoped was a meaningful way. I told her about the two books I’d written, and she told me she also wrote books, young-adult novels. We started talking about books and photography, and I noticed, when she smiled, that her teeth, although they were white, were not quite even, and as I looked at them I tried to imagine what it would be like to love uneven teeth, and by extension, the person behind the teeth.
Unless Alan had hired a prostitute. There was always the possibility that this was a joke he was playing, on me. He’d mentioned something about a life she’d had before the life she was living now, but I didn’t care, and she didn’t seem to care, and we talked like that for a while, but the talking isn’t what I’m getting at. The talking was pleasant, but it was preparatory. What really happened, happened later, when we took Alan up on his suggestion and walked outside.
He’d suggested we stop talking about photographs and actually do it. So we finished our drinks, stood up, and “You two go,” he said. “I have to take this call.”
I don’t know if there actually was a call, but we left Alan, walked through the lunchtime drinkers, past the bamboo walls of photographs, and when we opened the heavy wooden doors, suddenly there was light. It took a while for our eyes to adjust to the light, and when they had, I asked her where she wanted me to stand. She was going to take my picture.
“Where do you think?” she said.
We were standing at the edge of the parking lot. The cars were in bright sunlight, and from what I knew about photography I knew it required light, so I suggested I stand in the sun. “I’ll stand by this car,” I said, staking out an area next to an expensive-looking black sedan.
She told me, at one point, to do something.
“Do what?”
“You’re the model,” she said. “Right? Everyone thinks it’s so easy.”
I didn’t know how I wanted to stand, or how she wanted me to stand, and “How much are you taking?” I said, meaning how much of my body was caught by the frame of the camera.
“Act like you’re walking.”
I tried to do that.
“I mean, really walk.”
And I walked, but apparently I walked too fast, or too slow. And it would be safe to say that things, literally, weren’t clicking. I made an attempt to strike a pose, and she didn’t say anything, but I could tell that she didn’t like it, and I said, “If you were me, getting your photograph taken, how would you stand? Here,” I said, and took out my little silver camera and pointed it at her.