After cleaning Room 208 (where someone has crushed a trail of M&Ms into the carpet), I take my break behind the kitchen dumpsters.
Melissa, the housekeeping manager, only lets you take breaks if you’re a smoker. This seems backwards to me, but I own a single pack of Virginia Slims for this purpose. I forgot them today. I wind through the kitchen and mime a smoking signal: Melissa wears a hairnet as she unpacks grocery-store croissants from the freezer, preparing for the morning’s continental breakfast. She nods permission. Sometimes she’ll join me outside, and I’ll light one up just for show, but I always end up coughing my brains out. Last time, I nearly puked in the rot-lined dumpster after Melissa had gone in for a room-service call.
I’ve stashed a Coke in my apron pocket to get me through the last two hours of this shift. Tonight feels particularly desolate. Cars whoosh by on the highway across from the hotel; garbage wind wafts over me. When I came outside, the sun was still glowing amber over the foothills. Now, I can barely see its forehead. I crack open the can of Coke and lean against the wall.
Halfway through the can, I notice that I have company.
Querida stands a few feet away, shimmering in the kitchen light that filters through the open door. I clear my throat, announcing myself in the shadows.
“Ah,” she says. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” I stammer.
Querida’s jeans tent over her calves in an outdated bell bottom. Her waist bulges a bit beneath a zip-up sweat shirt. She has an accent—I’ve never heard her speak before. Spanish, maybe.
“Is it okay if I smoke here?” she says, though she’s already flicking a lighter. She tosses a tangle of long black hair over her shoulder and inhales, shoulders slumping as smoke fills her lungs.
“Do you want one?” she says, passing me the pack.
“No, thanks,” I say, and take a sip of flat soda.
WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY BUT CAN’T WITHOUT BEING A DICK
A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns
EXT. HOTEL—NIGHT
Celly stands by the dumpsters behind the building, the highway just feet away. Cars whoosh by, a noise like a sea. Celly takes a drag of a cigarette and exhales the smoke coolly. WOMAN (28, beautiful) stands beside her.
CELLY
Will you tell me how it feels?
WOMAN
I’m sorry?
Celly blows a thin line of smoke away from Woman, then turns to face her.
CELLY
To be loved like that. How it feels. I can’t imagine.
“I am sorry?”
“What?”
“Did you say something?” Querida exhales a plume of smoke from the pursed corner of her mouth.
“No, I—”
“You asked how it feels.”
“Oh,” I say. “I mean, how does it feel to be loved like that? Like you and that guy upstairs?”
I can’t believe I’ve actually asked her such an idiotic question, this pretty woman in casual jeans, cloaked in her misty aura. Lust. Querida takes another drag; I wish I’d accepted a cigarette. I feel like a child, swirling around the last sip of flat Coke in a can.
“Wow,” she says, with a laugh. “This is a question.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to—”
“No,” she says. “It is okay. If I am being very honest, I have not thought enough about it. I’ll let you know later, okay?”
She drops her cigarette on the filthy pavement and stamps out the flame. Pulls her sweat shirt tight and retreats back into her sparkling heart-pound world.
“What’d you bring me today?” Howie asks.
Howie wears a peeling visor and an Ann Arbor sweat shirt he found last January. He leans against his shopping cart, legs crossed, jiggling one bare foot. The first time I saw Howie’s feet, I nearly vomited—they’re swollen. Cracked. So black with grime you can barely distinguish his toes.
“Sorry,” I say to Howie. “Slim pickings.”
I hand him a block of cheddar cheese, the cheap kind that comes by the prepackaged pound. It’s practically plastic, the sort of cheese the patrons of the Hilton Ranch won’t miss. Howie is well acquainted with the lost, back-end contents of the Hilton Ranch’s walk-in refrigerator: the half tub of olives I brought last Thursday, the still-frozen breakfast croissants from the Thursday before.
Howie pulls his cheek to the side with one swollen finger, using his molars to bite into the naked hunk of cheese. Like a sneer. Saliva leaks from the corner of his mouth into his crusty beard.
“Why do you eat like that?”
“Doesn’t hurt as much. You wouldn’t know. All that money your grandma paid for your teeth could feed me for a year, little Celly.”
Howie thinks my name is Celeste—call me Celly. I am an orphan living with my ailing grandmother in the hills (my parents were killed in a tragic car accident). I am nineteen, and engaged to be married to the love of my life. I justify these stories with canned artichokes—like if I leave some offering, I’m allowed to lie.
“Come sit,” he says.
“That’s okay.”
I sat on Howie’s blanket once, last winter. After a few minutes, he reached one nubby finger beneath my ski jacket and into the waistband of my jeans.
“You hear about that girl?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Pretty girl, she was,” he says. “I saw her picture in the paper. They came talking to me, but I don’t know nothing about her. Pretty girl, she was; pretty girl, I told them. But you know, Celly, my little Celly-girl, she’s got nothing on you.” Howie’s gaze travels from my neck to my boots. His eyelids droop.
This awful habit: trying to see myself through other people’s eyes. This is probably why I visit Howie on Thursdays, adding half a mile to my commute home from the Hilton Ranch. Around the back end of the suburb, past the small patch of forest, is the library, Howie’s shield from wind and snow. I park Ma’s car down the street even though half the time Howie’s eyes are shut and when they’re open it’s impossible to know what he sees.
“How’s your Ed-ward?” Howie asks. He licks his lips with a glazed, lazy hunger.
“Actually,” I say, “I have big news. Edouard and I are leaving in a few months. We’re moving to Paris together before the wedding.”
“Paris, eh?” he says. “Paris, Paris, Par-eee. That’s great for you, Celly; that’s great for you, my Celly-girl.”
I wish I wasn’t such a good goddamn liar. I swear, for the rest of my life I’ll remember how Howie looks now: huddled in the shadow of his shopping cart, gnawing the block of cheese I stole from the Hilton Ranch, swaying back and forth, lost in some fantasy.
Maybe he’s picturing me, in love, in front of the Eiffel Tower. Maybe this makes him both happy and jealous. This might be what I came for.
Then I see it: a painting. It rests between Howie’s shopping cart and the graffitied wall of the library. The bottom is browned and muddy from snow. But even then, her ankles—a ballerina. She’s lacing up her shoes. It’s Lucinda’s Degas, the same image she printed out and taped to the front of her notebook. Not hers, of course. Its long-lost twin.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask, but he’s nodding off, out of it. “Howie, where did you get that painting?”