Follow the Money

10


Although Ben & Bev’s is a restaurant, it has the kind of little bar you expect to find in the financial districts of big cities, but that doesn’t generally exist in LA. It has dark wood. It has brass. It has raw oysters, good scotch, and a bartender who will light a woman’s cigarette. It is the place where young lawyers, stockbrokers, and accountants go after work to drink hard liquor and lie about how successful they are. I had never been there before.

It was crowded, but not too crowded. You could get space at the bar, you could move easily from place to place, but the noise and the clusters of bodies clad in business attire and illuminated by subdued, colored lights, told the casual observer that this place was happening. I looked for familiar faces — one in particular — among the otherwise homogenous professionals. My eyes moved from blonde head to blonde head, from black dress to black dress, and, not seeing her, I wondered instantly if it had all been a joke and made my way to the bar to wait and avoid looking like the insecure young man I was.

My thoughts had started to drift back to the threat from Matt’s crony. The voice had a quality to it that I didn’t recognize directly, but still felt communicated a familiarity with cruelty, with pointless violence and pain for the sake of pain and nothing more. But I barely had time to dwell on it. Before the waiter had even returned with my gin and tonic, I felt a tap on the shoulder, turned, and saw her standing there wearing a wide smile, a light jacket draped over her arm.

“Been here long?”

The bartender set a fizzing Collins glass on the bar, asked me for twelve dollars, and I nodded my head at the drink. “Just got here.”

It was the closest I’d been to her — almost face to face in the crowded bar — and I could see small clusters of very light freckles on each of her otherwise smooth and unblemished cheeks. Her teeth were perfectly straight, her eyebrows perfectly trimmed, her hair perfectly cut and curled.

She ordered a cosmopolitan and squeezed in beside me at the bar. I looked down at her as she struggled to place her purse and jacket at her feet. Bending down, the hair fell away from the back of her neck as she turned her face, glancing up at me from below. The curve of flesh running from the base of her ear, down between her shoulders, possessed a mystical geometry that stunned me.

She laughed and smiled, uttering, “Whaaaaat?” like the purr of a kitten.

“Nothing.” I caught myself, and shook my head as though I’d been deep in thought. “I was just thinking about that damned research. It’s a nightmare.” The work. Always blame the work.

“Ugh, I know.” She responded. The bartender brought the cosmo. I threw a twenty on the bar. The bartender took it and never even thought about returning with change. Morgan picked up the drink. “Cheers.” We touched glasses. “Let’s forget about all that for awhile.” She said as she sipped, peering up at me over the rim of the glass.

“Forget about what?” I smiled and sucked down half the gin and tonic. Morgan smiled too and looked around the bar.

“Have you seen anyone else?”

“Who else was supposed to come?”

“Oh, Jenna and I think Britney and Ed. Have you met them?” I told her I hadn’t. “Oh, they’re great. I go to law school with Ed and I know Jenna from college. Britney is a friend of Jenna’s from Columbia. They’re all really fun.”

I watched her drain half the cosmopolitan in one gulp. “Whoo! That’s good.” She licked her lips and smiled. “So you’re from LA?”

“Well, Riverside, actually. It’s east of here about sixty miles.”

“Your family still there?”

“Yeah.”

“What do they do?”

“My dad owns a tile business, you know tile work in houses and stuff.” I lied. My father only worked for a tile contractor. Somehow I thought it would impress her if she thought my dad was a business owner. But she didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

“Your mom?”

“She stays at home and chases my little brothers and sister around the house. I’m pretty sure she’s got the tougher job.” I hoped my acknowledgment that raising children was hard work would also impress her. Again, she nodded blankly, finished her drink and leaned into the bar sideways, kicking her hip out and resting her hand on it.

“What about you?” I finally asked.

“Chicago. My dad’s a heart surgeon. My mom spends his money. My two older brothers and I have all moved away and none of us plan to go back. I’ve been living in New Haven for six years, making trips to New York for fun and decided to spend the summer out here. Between Chicago and New England, I think I may have had enough snow to last a lifetime.”

“I hear you.” I had never lived anywhere where it snowed.

“Although, sometimes it’s nice to bundle up in the cold.” She smiled again — that wide mouth, full lips, and faint freckles — and squinted, almost winking. She faced the bar and brushed against me as she turned. “Crowded in here.” She said, and tried to signal the bartender. I finished my drink, set the glass down and shifted my position slightly away from her to avoid her accidentally rubbing up against my erection. “Two more!” She called to the bartender.

I wondered what her comment meant. Was she thinking of a permanent move to Los Angeles? For an instant, I wondered if a woman like her would be interested in a kid from Riverside. Don’t be silly, I told myself, as she turned to hand me another gin and tonic.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“So I’m hoping to see as much of the city as I can before the end of the summer.”

“There’s a lot here.” I said, stating the obvious and suddenly wondering where the other people who were supposed to be coming were.

After two more rounds and forty minutes of continuous gossip about the firm and which partners were rumored to sleep with the associates, the secretaries, the clients, and anyone else they could, it was clear that no one else was going to show.

Morgan huffed slightly, looked around the bar, and then poked my chest with her index finger. “Guess what?”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t think any of these people are showing. Why don’t we get the hell out of here?”

I thought briefly about work, I thought of checking my watch to see what time it was, I even thought of Liz for half a second. But I was four drinks into the evening and she was mesmerizing and I figured, why not? When was this going to happen again?

“Sure.” I replied. “Where to?”

“I’ve been wanting to go to this place I heard about over at Hollywood and Vine. I’m guessing it won’t be packed tonight.”

***

We took a cab; at three grand a week, we could afford it. Morgan sat in the middle of the back seat. Her leg pressed tight against mine. The bottom of her black dress was halfway up her thigh and I resisted the urge to touch it, somehow, to shift or move or drop something or to otherwise devise an artifice that would result in my hand caressing the smooth, firm flesh of her thigh.

“So why doesn’t a good looking guy like you have a girlfriend?” She asked, her head back on the seat and tilted sideways, toward me. “Or do you,” she continued, “and you’re just not mentioning her?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.” I replied, dreaming up questions to ask the cabbie that would require me to lean forward and accidentally grab her knee.

“Touché.” She winked and dropped the subject, having apparently resolved any moral conflict she might have had. I, however, still had a few waning thoughts of Liz and feelings of concomitant guilt. But they vanished as the car turned north off of Sunset up Vine and stopped just south of Hollywood Boulevard in front of a dimly lit doorway below a tiny neon sign that read simply “Mack’s.”

The lights of the Pantages Theatre gleamed up on Hollywood where the tourists snapped pictures of the stars on the sidewalk, but this stretch of Vine was only partially lit. There was a small crowd standing around the doorway smoking and wearing leather coats that served no purpose in the late June evening other than to look good.

Mack’s is a hipster bar. Self-consciously eclectic music mingles with red and blue lights and everyone inside is always cooler than the next guy. It was the kind of place you never went alone because no one but your own friends would ever speak to you. There were couches and cushions everywhere. Long drapes hung on the walls and down from the center of the room, creating small chambers of soft cloth, warm light, and just enough shadow to hide your lack of self-esteem. It was the essence of Los Angeles nightlife: snobby, snazzy, and completely self-absorbed.

We sat on a large cushion in a corner of the room. Morgan continued her assault on the cosmopolitan and I, not wanting to risk upsetting the delicate balance of the evening, stayed with gin and tonic. Morgan regaled me with stories of her various unsuccessful efforts to get kicked out of the elite prep school she attended. It was a litany of routine pranks, some more ballsy than others, but none particularly radical. She clearly enjoyed talking about herself and her exhibitionism. I kept wondering why someone with that kind of opportunity would try to sabotage or squander it.

But just when her behavior seemed to paint her into a stereotype I was well prepared to apply, she would do something like stare up at the mock frieze behind the bar and laugh as she read the words written in it. “They’ve mixed Latin and Italian,” she said in an almost derisive tone. “And worse, the dialects they’ve used are over a thousand years apart.” She shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows, doing her best impression of a cute, dumb blonde. “I guess it’s true what they say about LA — all style and no substance.” She laughed and leaned back into a massive pillow, slowly lifting her legs up and resting them across my knees. “But the atmosphere is absolutely faaaaabulous!”

I looked down at the curves of her legs. She wiggled her toes, having slipped off her shoes. I watched the red lights move across her face. She smiled, slumped back, almost supine, resting her drink on her chest between her breasts and peering around it.

I shifted toward her, turning slightly and resting a hand on her ankle. My heart was pounding as I felt her ankle move beneath my fingers, settling in, getting comfortable. She was fine with me touching her. She only sipped her cosmo and continued talking. My head swam. The music throbbed, lights pulsing, and my dry mouth seemed to require more and more of the fizzy drinks the waitress kept bringing.

Two hours later, after Morgan had told me all about her friends from college, her trips to Europe, and the crazy boyfriend she once had who she swore would be a famous writer one day but who didn’t pay enough attention to her for her to stay with; after she had laughed at something I had said and leaned forward to touch me on the shoulder for the twelfth time; and after I had managed to slide my hand up to the middle of her calf, just below the knee, and torture myself with distracting thoughts of what the rest of her must feel like; Morgan got up and went to the bathroom. When she returned, she stood in front of me and said, “I think I need something to eat. Where do people in LA go at midnight on a Monday? Take me somewhere local, some nasty place with greasy food.”

***

Pink’s is a hot dog stand on La Brea. Pink’s is also an institution, a landmark dedicated to late night consumption, and one of the few places in the world where hundreds of drunks, drug addicts, stars, and socialites will wait in line for over an hour at two o’clock in the morning to choke down a foot long Polish sausage smothered in chili and onions. But this was a weeknight, and there was virtually no wait.

“This is great. I love these things,” Morgan mumbled, almost incoherent, as she cocked her head to one side and bit off the end of a bratwurst. I watched her in her black dress and coat as she bounced and twirled around absent-mindedly on the wide sidewalk. The lights of La Brea extended away to the south behind her, slowly coming together in the distance, forming an elongated electric V that seemed to point to the heart of an infinite swarm of neon and night.

I handed the man behind the counter a twenty and took my change and my dog. I stood for a second, watching her drift south toward Melrose. The images of her movements came through like a series of snapshots of some other night, with some other people. It was hard for me to believe I was there, standing at the curb with my jacket flailing, one arm clutching a Coney dog and the other raised and waving at the passing cabs. Morgan leaned against me, bouncing from foot to foot, off balance and laughing at the dot of mustard on my nose.

Morgan lived in Beverly Hills, just off Pico and east of Beverly Drive where two story, four unit buildings, old growth palm trees, and decorative streetlights line the blocks. The cab stopped. We both got out with no discussion, no coy comments, no entendres, almost without thought of any kind. We went inside and up the narrow stairs to her second floor doorway.

“I’m subletting a place from a law student at USC who’s in San Francisco for the summer.” She tried three times before getting the key in the lock. “Oh, that won’t do.” She laughed and glanced up at me. “You’ve got to get it in the hole.” When she finally got the door open she walked in and flipped on the light, snorting as she laughed again. “F*ckin’ chick has no taste.” She spun around in the center of the room, slowly, with her arms out. “There’s no place like home!” She doubled over, laughing silently. “If I only had some red slippers!”

The room was done in a farmhouse motif. It was filled with kitschy painted ducks and cows, old tea kettles and glass bottles sat on shelves, and on the wall beside the entrance to the kitchen was a series of wooden hearts connected with bailing wire from which hung a sign in the shape of a sheep that read “Bless this Country Home.”

“Isn’t this just hideous?” She asked, after regaining her composure.

“It’s a bit of a shock. I thought I’d stumbled into a Willa Cather novel all of a sudden.”

Morgan went into the kitchen. I could hear the fridge open and bottles clinking together. She returned with two open Heinekens and handed one to me. We sat on the couch and there was silence for the first time that night — no music, no voices in the background, no conversation, no static from a car radio, no rushing noise of fries hitting a deep fryer, no lonely traffic on the wide midnight streets of a sleeping Hollywood. The beer felt good in my mouth and I filled my cheeks and swallowed it slowly, wondering what to do with the awkward quiet. My movements were impaired and exaggerated. I turned and smiled at her. She smiled back and moved toward me, whispering loudly.

“Hey! Guess what?” She was chuckling, her eyes narrow, almost closed. With one knee on the couch and one foot one the floor, she crawled toward me. “I liked that Pink’s place.”

“Good. I wasn’t sure you would.” I held my breath, afraid that any sudden movement or poor choice of words might kill the moment. I felt numb; my body tingled at its extremities.

“Why?” She brought her face close to mine, our noses nearly touching. “You don’t think a girl like me likes sausage?” I could feel her hand on the couch, between my legs and pressing up against me. I couldn’t believe she’d said it. And it was only at that moment that I knew it was really going to happen. I slouched down beneath her. The alcohol on her breath mixed with the perfume and the smell of the bars and cabs and streets. She was rubbing me. My hands slid down her back and pulled her black dress up over her hips, gripping her and pulling her down on me.

She groped behind me, up along the wall, her chest soft and warm in my face. She struggled to reach the switch on the wall and then collapsed on top of me as the room went dark. She slid her body forward to straddle me and I could see her above me, lit softly by the streetlamp outside.

She giggled in the dark and leaned forward to kiss me. Her breath was hot. “You ever f*ck a girl in the ass?” She whispered, smiling as she bit lightly at my lips. I had no idea what to say. I could feel my face flush.

“Don’t get shy now.” She laughed, her head slowly swaying from side to side, her eyes glazed over and dull, her thoughts spinning wildly into the waning haze of the cosmos.