The Sea Came in at Midnight (3 page)

When they got off the elevator they were in the penthouse. To Kristin, who had never been in a big-city hotel, let alone a penthouse, it seemed lavish and glamorous beyond belief; in fact it was a small though sleek penthouse in a small though chic hotel. The hotel was located half a block from the Dragon Gate into Chinatown, where it wasn’t even the new year, let alone a new millennium: I am still surrounded, was all Kristin could think, staring out the window of the hotel, by nothing but old Chinese dreams; and it was the sounds of Chinatown that invaded her sleep at night, Chinese jabber and the clamor of gongs echoing through the cave of unconsciousness.

I
SABELLE SAID THE PENTHOUSE
belonged to her brother. But while there were photos of a good-looking young man with parents and boyfriends and even someone who appeared as though she might be a sister, there was no sign of Isabelle among the effects at all. The two women went through the apartment with the detached curiosity of complete and distinct strangers, picking up things and casting them aside with indifference; they made no effort to tidy up, and gave no indication they expected anyone else to show up any time soon. When the phone rang, they never answered. They stayed for several days, and after a while the messages Kristin heard coming in over the phone machine tended to sound a little mystified and concerned, until Isabelle turned the volume down.

The livelier and more reckless of the two women, Isabelle was prettier—taken feature for feature—than her thin mouth and small eyes would have suggested, with dark hair falling just above her shoulders. Cynda, perpetual passenger, was more pinched, with short blond hair just a little longer than Kristin’s. She almost never spoke to Kristin, not over pasta dinners in North Beach or in the afternoons when the women routinely polished off a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, or in the morning over coffee when they finally emerged before noon from the bedroom where they slept together. So it was a shock to Kristin, who assumed Cynda hated her, when she tried to kiss Kristin the fourth night, in retaliation against Isabelle, who had kissed Kristin the third night, to Cynda’s great rage. “That was when I figured it was time to get out of there,” Kristin tells the old doctor in the Hotel Ryu. She now has his undivided attention.

In the dwindling hours of that last night in San Francisco, alone in the dark of her bedroom, Kristin heard Isabelle and Cynda in the next room engaged in a terrible argument. It ranged from matters of fidelity and desire to more mysterious implications that on the one hand didn’t explain anything but on the other hand confirmed everything. By now it was obvious that whoever lived in the penthouse wasn’t Isabelle’s brother, and that in fact his acquaintance with the two women began and ended New Year’s Eve, and culminated in a desperate drive to some remote dumping ground a hundred miles or so north of San Francisco. It’s insane, Cynda sputtered, that we’re here at all, staying here of all places, to which Isabelle had laughed that Cynda worried too much. It’s only a matter of time, Cynda had continued, before someone shows up and starts asking questions, and what are we going to do about the kid, it was stupid to pick her up that night, you have to have your toys don’t you Isabelle always your toys, and on and on a little more hysterically until Kristin heard Isabelle finally answer, very quietly and evenly, all the amusement suddenly gone from her voice, Calm down, you’re losing it. We’ll get out of here when it’s time, and we’ll do something about the kid when it’s time.

Then Kristin heard Cynda start to cry, and Isabelle begin to giggle like she had in the van the night they had picked Kristin up. Then Isabelle’s giggling tapered off along with Cynda’s crying, and about forty-five minutes later—because she had learned that people sleep most soundly after they’ve first slipped into unconsciousness, especially when they’re drunk—Kristin got up and dressed in the dark. She peered through the doorway of the women’s bedroom and reached in and pulled a pair of jeans from the nearby chair, and going through the pockets found some money and the keys to the van and the key to the penthouse. “I took the money,” Kristin admits now, “and I took the penthouse key—I needed the key to operate the elevator.” She was sure the noise of the elevator was going to wake them, since the shaft was right behind the wall of their bedroom; as she waited in the dark, it seemed to take forever.

H
ER BAG OF BOOKS
had gone the way of the old millennium, smashed on the ocean rocks in her place, so she had nothing but the clothes on her back and, adding the money she took from Isabelle and Cynda to what she had brought of her own from Davenhall, $319.

Part of that got her a ticket on a bus out of San Francisco down Highway 1 past Santa Cruz to Monterey. Then the bus cut inland to avoid the winding and perilous road through Big Sur, then back to the coast picking up Highway 1 again at San Luis Obispo, proceeding to Santa Barbara and many small stops in between. Mexican laborers, for whom the coastal trek was as routine as a crosstown line, got on and off. Kristin arrived in L.A. at the Hollywood station on Vine Street, five days into the new year at one in the morning in a rainstorm, when it was impossible to know if the hush of the place was from sleep or the sort of anticlimax that comes so naturally to a city unimpressed by time.

What remained of the $319 lasted three days. In the first early-morning hours of her arrival, she walked about two miles west on Sunset Boulevard in the rain, cop cars pulling up alongside and slowing, studying her and then moving on. She would have been just as happy to spend a night or two in jail. She would have been just as happy to confess to whatever felony might have gotten her there. The next day, exhausted but still going on the adrenaline of her near brush with salvation five nights before and whatever fate her deadly dalliance with Isabelle and Cynda had held in store for her, she checked into a hotel called the Hamblin just south of the Strip.

The hotel was just dilapidated enough that Kristin’s remaining funds covered three nights, paid for up front. Stiffing the hotel for the fourth night, she slipped out at three in the morning and pressed her New Year survivor’s luck by hitching a ride on Santa Monica Boulevard with a man whose predilection for molestation was fortunately disposed to seventeen-year-old boys rather than seventeen-year-old girls. Her size and cropped hair, seen through his windshield at three-thirty in the morning, fooled him just long enough to get her inside the car; disgruntled, he reluctantly drove her to Century City. She slept in an alcove of one of the towers until a little past eight, when a security guard woke her.

By now all the New Year adrenaline was wearing off. Her focus was sharpened only by the fact that there was nothing behind her to which she could return. She wandered Century City raiding trash cans like an animal, then walked down to Pico Boulevard, where she hitched another ride with a boy about her own age whom she could handle if she needed to. Once they reached the beach he seemed, if anything, all too happy to drop her off. Stumbling through the streets of Baghdadville, as lacking in prospects as she was in dreams, she begged for food outside restaurants until she was chased away, scorn and hostility the only interruptions in the hush of anticlimax that still gripped the city. She spent that night in an alley and then the next in the kitchen of a seaside grill where the late-night cook took pity on her. Twice she nearly prostituted herself, first with a huge black man in a red Chevy who kept circling the block, and then with a bisexual art dealer who craved diversion, soul-numbingly bored in his empty gallery, surrounded by a dreary series of eight black canvases. Even Kristin couldn’t entirely be sure whether her rejection of him was an act of morality or aesthetics.

L
ATER, AFTER SHE MOVED
into the spare room of the Occupant’s house in the Hollywood Hills, she would understand a little better what mysterious force had directed her attention to the advertisement in the week-old newspaper.

I want you at the end of your rope,
it read, back among the personals,
lashed to the mast of my dreams.
She was sitting in the seaside grill sipping a bowl of charity soup, having just read, on page five, the sketchy details of the mass murder/suicide of two thousand women and children off the coast of Northern California.
I do not want a wife, I do not want a girlfriend. I do not want a mistress or a maid or a cook or a cleaning woman. My heart has no needs, except to be left alone with the memories that have already wounded it. Beauty is as unnecessary as intelligence. Best if you are desperate. Best if you are either absolutely self-knowing, so preternaturally secure about who you are that no physical defilement can violate it, or absolutely empty of self-concern, so primally attuned to basic appetites that pathology is beside the point. The naturally indignant need not apply. You will be given a place to live, a room of your own, access to the kitchen and most parts of the house, a weekly stipend of $100, and whatever free time in which you are not otherwise needed. Of course you are free to end the arrangement and leave at any moment. Auditions voluntary.

“Well,” she sighs now to the old dead doctor, “that part about not being beautiful was certainly a relief, even if there
was
a post office box to send a photo.” In fact, Kristin secretly held out hope she wasn’t as plain as all that: “I know my eyes are a little too far apart,” she acknowledged, “and my mouth’s a little too thin,” but it did have an appealing way of curling up on one side into a sly smile. Her hair was its dirty and undistinguished blond chopped to prisoner-of-war length. A big girl, she nonetheless had an exaggerated sense of her own size; she certainly regretted about ten pounds, none of which had the decency to accumulate in her breasts, of course, but steadfastly located themselves instead on her hips. Rereading the ad, she wondered if it automatically assumed she was stupid too. He probably thinks I’m another idiotic seventeen-year-old who doesn’t know what preternatural means, she said to herself.

Still, she felt as though the ad had been written expressly to her. In the hope that the call would ultimately lead to her departure, the bartender let her use the phone; he rather liked her, actually, but could already anticipate a moment in the very foreseeable future when she would overstay her welcome. Along with the post office box there was, at the bottom of the ad, a phone and reference number that connected Kristin to a voice-mail service. “Yes, well,” she said into the phone, clearing her throat, “we girls at the end of our rope don’t happen to have our portfolio of eight-by-ten glossies with us today. I’m at Jay’s Grill on Ocean Avenue in Baghdadville, near—” She turned to the bartender.

“Pico Boulevard,” he said.

“Pico Boulevard. It’s … Wednesday—”

“Friday,” the bartender corrected.

“Friday the … eleventh—”

“Thirteenth.”

“The thirteenth of January. And I’ll be here at noon tomorrow … on Saturday, and the day after that.” The bartender winced. She hung up. She slurped down the rest of her soup and wandered out toward the beach, and slept that night on the pier, smoking cigarettes to suppress the hunger. It rained Saturday, and in the rain on the beach in the broad gray daylight she took off her clothes and laid them on a rock and washed herself. Several people passing by on Ocean Avenue saw her, and two members of what she concluded to be a distinctly cretinous strain of teenage boydom watched devoutly. For a few seconds she caressed her breasts at them suggestively, just for laughs, and then decided she better stop when they looked like they were going to start bouncing off the palm trees.

But no one showed up that day at the grill, and she spent yet another night on the pier sleeping behind the old carousel. By now she was almost nostalgic for the good old days of Isabelle and Cynda. Up and down the pier in the rain she rummaged through the garbage with little success, reduced to licking the browning mustard off hot-dog wrappers and the pink residue of sugar off disposed cotton-candy cones. By Sunday she was staggering deliriously between exhaustion and starvation, and pedestrians on the street gave her a wide berth, assuming she was drunk or on drugs. By Sunday the bartender and the cook at the grill weren’t nearly as friendly. “You can’t come back here anymore,” the bartender said when she showed up out of the rain a little before noon on Sunday.

She was weaving in the doorway as though she would faint. “It’s Sunday,” she murmured shamelessly, perfectly ready to try whatever worked. “You’re not going to feel so good later, making me leave on a Sunday.”

“Probably,” he admitted. He didn’t look like he felt so good about it now.

“I’m really hungry,” was all she could think to add.

“I’m sorry,” he just kept saying, “you can’t come back anymore.” The rain fell harder. They both turned to look at it through the window; one lone car was parked across the street, metallic blue like the rain and the water rushing by in the gutter. “When the rain lets up, you have to go.” When the rain let up she lingered for a moment, and as she lingered the door of the car across the street opened and a man got out. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and he didn’t run in the rain but walked across the street with his hands shoved in the pockets of his pants, staring at the ground in front of him. He looked to neither left nor right; a truck could have flattened him as easily as not, and he gave no indication it would have mattered to him in the least.

He came into the grill and gazed around. Other than Kristin and the bartender and the cook, no one was there. Kristin suddenly felt a lot more lucid; she stepped toward the stranger and said, “It’s me.” He was around six feet tall, a bulky man in his early forties with black hair and a black beard splattered white with premature age, disheveled in an absentminded way, a shirt button in the wrong hole and the collar askew. He looked as exhausted as she felt; later she would learn he had aimlessly driven the city in clockwise circles the entire night—racked by one of his excruciating headaches—having come by the grill the previous day without stopping. His startling blue eyes were filled with hurt.