The Flaming Motel

VII


I called Liz on the way home and got her voicemail. I checked my watch. It was damned near four. She was probably out doing something with her mother. They’d probably gone shopping. That would make sense. Walking the Gaslamp District, splitting a tostada and drinking cold Coronas at a Mexican place overlooking the street. That was the kind of thing they normally did together.

I tried to relax and look forward to a quiet evening at home. I tried to think about what I might do. Maybe read. Go have some dinner. Not do much of anything. Go to bed early, maybe get up early and go for a bike ride on the beach or a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains behind Malibu. It was a perfect time of year to be outside. The air was cool and clear and there were no crowds anywhere, all the tourists long gone.

But when I got home, all I wanted to do was sleep. I opened a beer and sat on the couch with a novel I’d been reading for what seemed like months. Five minutes later, I was out. Drifting through blackness toward a woman I hadn’t seen in a very long time, a woman who nearly destroyed Liz and me, or, perhaps, only permitted me to nearly destroy myself.

Her name was Morgan Stapleton and I only slept with her once. It was during the summer I worked at K&C. We were both so drunk at the time, I hardly remembered any of it. It was five years ago, and Liz almost never found out. When she did, I was sure it was over for us. When Liz and I finally patched things up, I was sure she’d never really forgive me, that somehow we’d never be able to get past it. And then, after enough time went by, it all seemed to fade far enough into the past that I stopped worrying about it. It was almost like it never happened.

But it did happen. And although I never thought about it anymore, her memory came back to me now. Dressed in a stop sign red gown, she stood on the stairs of the Vargas mansion, twirling a revolver on her finger and winking at me. “You haven’t changed a bit,” she said.

She always wore black when I knew her, but she looked good in red. I didn’t know what to say. I climbed a couple of steps toward her and stopped. “What happened to you?” I asked.

She laughed, throwing her hair back, just the way I remembered. “Same thing that happened to you. I turned into another unhappy person drifting toward middle age.”

“What?”

“Life doesn’t have to be boring,” she said, and stopped twirling the gun. She shot me on the steps and I awoke with a start.

The room was dark. It was after eight and I was starving and alone. The image of Morgan in her red dress sent a chill through me and I flipped on the light. I walked through the apartment aimlessly, washed my face, took some Tylenol. I was groggy, yet restless. I called Liz again. Still no answer. I didn’t feel like talking anyway, so not getting her didn’t bother me, but not knowing where she was did. Finally, I threw on a light jacket and headed down Montana Avenue on foot.

Even on a Saturday night, traffic is light in that part of Santa Monica. A few restaurants were doing good business, but the highbrow shops were all closed. The price of homes north of Montana had climbed into the stratosphere during the previous decade, while the apartments south of Montana, where Liz and I lived, had stayed oddly affordable.

On weekends, when we had nothing to do, we would sometimes walk a few blocks north and peek into an open house, tricking the real estate agent into believing we were a studio couple in our early thirties. It was easy to do. Hollywood made fortunes for people so quickly, anyone could pretend to be worth millions. It was always a laugh. A three bedroom, two bath stucco home, 1800 square feet, could easily hit two million dollars. But the beach was twelve blocks away, the streets were safe, and the public schools were some of the best in the country. So there you go.

But that night I walked all the way to the water. I stopped on the way at Father’s Office, a tiny bar with the best hamburgers in the city. I drank two pints of Chimay like I was dying of thirst. Then I ate the burger, drank another pint, and wondered what had happened to my life.

Five years ago, I had been third in my law school class, just starting a summer job at one of the most elite law firms in the world. I was on the fast track to be living in one of those places north of Montana by the time I was thirty-five. It was like climbing on an escalator that would take me up and up and up for the rest of my life; to higher income, higher status, to the very top of the legal profession. But I got off the escalator at the very first floor.

It was a floor where people lived in one bedroom apartments, practiced law in a small suite of offices with a radical ex-hippy who’d lost the fire in his belly, and stayed in a once passionate relationship that was drifting toward sexless monotony. Washed up at twenty-nine. Could that really be right? Was I being too hard on myself? I thought of my dream of Morgan Stapleton, the paramour who nearly destroyed my life, and the words I’d put in her mouth: life doesn’t have to be boring.

I ordered another beer, my head already starting to swim from the first three. I started imagining another life. A life resulting from something radical, a dramatic shift of my own making. What if I left Liz? Given the way things were going, would she be surprised? Would she be hurt that bad? If I wasn’t going to marry her, why stay with her? What was I doing? Where was it all heading? What was the point?

When I’d finished the fourth pint of 12% Belgian suds, I was ready to order another when the light bulb went on. What if I didn’t need to leave Liz? What if she’d already left me? She hadn’t answered her phone all day. She’d gone out of town a day early to attend a conference with Ben Cross. What if they were in San Diego together, right now? Worse yet, what if they weren’t in San Diego at all?

I was out on the street and walking fast. My arms and legs tingled and my head buzzed, but I walked quick and smooth, like I was stone sober and ready for action. Ten minutes later, I crossed Ocean Avenue, through the perfectly trimmed strip of park that lines the ocean side of the street. Ocean Avenue sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach beyond it. From the wood rail at the top of the bluff I looked down on the small row of houses that sat right on the beach. One of them belonged to Ben Cross.

I hesitated at the railing, feeling the breeze sweep up off the ocean and listening to the hum of the traffic below me on PCH. I wondered if Liz would really be so bold. And then I wondered if I cared. If she had already left me, even if only in her mind, and temporarily, wouldn’t I be free? Wouldn’t that be what I wanted, after all?

I took the pedestrian overpass over PCH and it dropped me on the beach. The strand, normally clogged with rollerbladers, bikers, and foot traffic, was empty—just a concrete swath across the dark, windswept sand. Ben Cross’s beachfront condo was a half mile north and I headed out, determined, the alcohol numbing me from the cold air.

It seemed to take forever to get there. I plodded along, focused on walking, feeling a dryness creep into my mouth. The rhythm of my footfalls coming faster and faster, keeping time with my escalating heartbeat, as my thoughts spiraled in a thousand directions, churning with the static roar of the ocean.

When I came to it, there were lights on inside. I stood on the strand, looking up, the bottom floor was a garage, so the deck loomed above me and back, behind a high concrete wall that shielded Cross’s property from the people who used the beach. I could hear music inside, something muffled, but mellow. The kind of thing I imagined Ben Cross playing while he cooked for Liz.

I crept closer to the wall, trying to hear, but the sounds remained jumbled. I looked for some way to scale the wall, to get inside, or for something to climb up on, but there was nothing. Great care had been taken to ensure that people on the beach could not get into the houses. Homeless people lived beneath the piers and in the park along Ocean Avenue, which made safety a primary concern of the wealthy who lived on the beach.

I don’t know how long I stood outside and listened. It felt like an hour, but it could have been only ten or twenty minutes. I began thinking about the warmth of the bar, having another beer, just going home and sleeping, for my own good. But I couldn’t, I had to find out if she was there. What good it could possibly do, I had no idea. What I would do with the information, I had no idea. But I needed to know, and that fact kept me lingering below his deck like a desperate, drunk, and possibly dangerous man.

And then I heard the sliding glass door open and the swell of the music—Van Morrison—then a woman’s laughter. There were a few clumsy steps on the deck. I could hear her pause and call back inside, “Come out here. It’s nice and cool out.”

Her voice was drowning in the sound of the surf on the beach and the wind in my ears, and I listened hard. Was it her? Crouched against the wall and looking up, I could see only the railing of the deck. I listened for more. I hunched down, ready to drop below the line of sight if anyone appeared. Then I heard his voice. “I’m coming, just let me get this first.”

I heard the unmistakable pop of a champagne cork followed by a squeal of feminine laughter. It made me cringe. The cork dropped to the pavement beside me. I thought of leaving, of creeping down the wall and away into the darkness. But I still did not know.

I stood paralyzed, like a man tied to a post watching the firing squad clean its weapons, slowly resigning himself to his fate, and growing impatient in the process. Then there were more footsteps. I saw Ben Cross appear at the rail, glass and bottle in hand, motioning back behind him. “Come here,” he laughed.

And she did. I saw her come from behind him. And, in the moonlight, a flash of blonde hair told me I was safe, for the moment.