Everything Leads to You

“We can go back to my parents’ house,” I say. “Let’s go there.”


She nods and opens her door and we switch places.

~

Charlotte calls the restaurant as I drive us out of the desert and back into the city, and we arrive at home just as Eric does.

“Perfect timing,” he says. I hand him money and he hands me a bag full of warm food, egg flower soup and mu shu and noodles. It makes me hopeful.

My parents aren’t home so I let us in and we carry everything to the den.

“Let’s watch TV shows,” Jamal says. “Some kind of series. Something cheesy.”

So we eat our takeout and watch Melrose Place, lose ourselves in the early nineties hideous fashion, the day-to-day trials of the newly adult characters as they swim and work and spy on the neighbors. Ava isn’t laughing, but she’s eating. All things considered, she seems okay.

I watch the screen but all I can think about is us. We were on the verge of being together, and then on the verge of being strangers again. But what are we now?

I guess I was hoping for a cinematic love story. Like Clyde on his horse galloping toward the girl through dust clouds and brambles. “Well, hello you.” His cocky smirk. The girl squinting into the sun after having waited for so long to be discovered.

But our film would have been more modern noir than Western: Two girls in Los Angeles solving a mystery. A late, enigmatic star. A beautiful woman, drugs, and sex. We’d be swimming in the Marmont pool, driving down Sunset Boulevard, our hair wild in the wind from passing cars. A secret love affair, kissing in Ava’s trailer between shooting scenes, dodging paparazzi. All of it sounded amazing and so little of it was real.

But this is.

This is.

I thought I might get a cinematic love story, and I’ve gotten some of that.

But sitting here in my parents’ house, with Ava a couple feet away from me, eating chow fun and watching Melrose Place, I realize that all of the sets and the props and the performances, the scripts that take years to write; the perfect camera angles and painstaking lighting, the directors that call take after take until it turns out right, the projections on the huge theater screens—so much larger and louder than life—it’s all done in hopes of portraying what I’m feeling right now.

As much as I had wanted a love story out of a movie, I know now that movies can only hope to capture this kind of love.

~

Jamal leaves, heads back to the shelter to make curfew. Charlotte goes home to her mother.

“I know you’re tired,” I tell Ava. “And you can say no. But I have to go by the set one more time and I’d love it if you could come with me.”

She follows me to Toby’s place. We park next to each other and walk through the courtyard and up to his door together. I knew from the beginning that I wanted Juniper’s apartment to seem lived in and I’ve tried to make it feel real. But even the stacks of books and the little basket by the door full of mail don’t do enough.

Ava turns to me, her eyes pink rimmed, too tired for even her usual smile.

“This doesn’t have to take long,” I say. “We don’t even have to talk. I was just thinking that maybe you could spend some time in here. Like, live here. Even a few minutes would help.”

She nods. Lets her purse drop to the floor.

I take a seat in a corner chair that Morgan upholstered in lime-green fabric and watch as Ava makes a slow lap through the space. In the kitchen, she takes a white enamel pitcher, borrowed from Theo and Rebecca’s, and fills it at the sink. One by one, she waters the plants, and when the pitcher is empty, she sets it on the edge of a bookshelf next to a hanging fern.

She scans the novels and collections of poetry and pulls one out. Twenty-one Love Poems by Adrienne Rich, snatched along with most of the other books from the shelves in my mother’s office. She kicks off her shoes, then sinks into the sofa and reads for twenty minutes. Then she places the book, spine open, on the coffee table. She makes a cup of tea, contemplating something as she stares into the ceramic mug. When she transfers the teabag into the sink, a couple drops land on the counter. She doesn’t wipe them up. She crosses the room and, as she drinks, she studies the portraits. She looks for the longest time at one in particular. I found it by myself at the Rose Bowl when I was scavenging for George’s house. It’s a charcoal drawing of a young man, and something about his expression reminded me of Clyde when he was very young. When she runs her finger along the edge of the frame, it leaves the portrait just a tiny bit crooked.

She takes her last sip of tea and sets her mug in the sink. Her leather purse waits in the entry.

“Bye,” she says to me, and walks barefoot out the door.





Chapter Twenty-two