Chapter One

            I will never come back to this place, I thought and leaned back against the retaining wall to avoid touching the cars’ searing metal bumpers.  The church parking lot stood baking under a layer of its own dirt and someone passed me a lighter which I accepted and passed on before taking a drag off my cigarette.  I didn’t know most of the other kids in the lot and saw that this was probably because I was older than a good fraction of them, at least half looked like they were still in high school.  Others, the ones I recognized, had been in my classes at AZU, but I’d only exchanged perfunctory hello’s with them on these Sundays when the handful of kids brave enough to sneak out of the church would gather in the parking lot, take out their cigarettes, and wait for services to end.

Sometimes people chatted or played games, but mostly we just stood around and looked out across the hot asphalt at the cars that wore the desert dust like an extra layer of paint across their sides.  The parking lot was a microcosm of the Sonora, parched, barren, half-empty and full of dross.  I lit another cigarette, leaned against the wall, inhaled. 

I was not sorry to be leaving.

When the doors of the church finally angled open, the congregation spilled into the sun and the smokers scattered fast.  I stomped out my cigarette, looked up and waved a little at my parents.  My father nodded back at me, expression somber as his neat gray suit.  Eventually, all of the churchgoers, parents, siblings, better behaved friends, would file out of their pews and into the roasting cars, their movements defined by orderly rows, the long lines of pews, the even sidewalk squares, the narrow parking spaces. 

I was twenty two years old that Sunday, my last Sunday in the church parking lot and I had never seen the ocean or the city of Los Angeles until I left, the following morning, to begin graduate school at the Dorsey College of Dramatic Art, where I planned to try my hand at professional acting, to see if the town and all its glittering mythology didn’t hold out some soft piece of itself for me.  Something more than the neat lines and concrete squares and rows of clean church pews. 

Beyond an affinity for the dramatic arts and the year we spent together at Dorsey, I did not, nor do I now, have anything in common with the people I met in LA, their histories punctuated by swimming pools and parties, by spoonfuls of cocaine and smiling show business parents.  What we did have in common was Dorsey.  And something that resembled love for the stage and the screen, for the dramatic moment, perfectly realized.  Love.  With all of its dark complexities.  It was love, I think, that drove us to what we ultimately did.  And it was love that came between us in the end. 

But.  To begin at the beginning.

After high school, I attended the local public college, Arizona University, where on a whim, I studied theater and dance, the arts of expression, of cultivating the ability to feel the emotions of others.  I liked the idea of inhabiting the body of another, of living in the world like a hermit crab, scuttling along the ocean floor in another creature’s borrowed shell.  It had never mattered to me that my characters were only fictions or that my favorite playwrights were all long dead.  Under the lights of the performance stage, I could become someone else and escape the confines of my desert world, at least until the fall of the final curtain. 

My father had always expected me to go on to law school, to use the public education system to catapult myself into the ranks of the professional middle class, with all of the rights and privileges accorded thereto.  As a freshman, I’d tried to consign myself to a barrister’s fate, plowing through Formal Logic and Federalism, but after a few introductory law courses, I found the linearity of legal thinking appealed little to me and I abandoned the idea of practicing, unconvinced that human suffering could be reduced to numerical values and rote procedures. 

At a loss for a direction, I changed my major to Dramatic Art, clueless as to what I would do after graduation tore me from the solace of university campus and threw me, headlong, into the working world.  I worried only about the present and focused on my studies, training my tongue around the pentambic iambs of Shakespeare, my heart around the implacable fires of Williams.

I was good at theater, gifted at it, and when one of my teachers recommended acting graduate school, I accepted the suggestion as endemic to my fate.  I threw myself into the application process, knowing that there was something a little ill-starred about the advice of my professor, an aging beauty now fond of plummy caftans.  A failed actress, she still clung to the dreams of her past, implanting the seeds of forlorn ambition into the minds of her much younger students. 

It was under such tutelage that I decided to go on to graduate school, but I found Dorsey alone.  I hit on the college by a trick of fate. 

The Dorsey College of Dramatic Art, founded in 1948, the late end of Hollywood’s Golden Age, a time when the world, finally sensing itself free from the twin evils of Fascism and the Nazi party, drank in the myth of newborn innocence.  America had all the brass of a new penny then and, during those auspicious years, Dorsey had not wanted for students.  Early on, the school had advertised little, though in later, tougher times, the administration adopted a practice of sending its brochures out to undergraduate advisement offices across the country. 

After deciding that I would apply to programs, I’d taken an afternoon off and gone to the Drama Department Counseling Office.  There, I’d taken a pile of graduate school advertisements, filling my backpack with brochures until I was sure I had enough to conduct a thorough inquiry into my options.  I’d left my bag, heavy with the weight of so much material, in the hallway outside the Counseling Office while I checked my student mailbox.  When I returned to the cold, tiled hall, my backpack was gone, quietly stolen and never seen again.  I’d had nothing of real value in the bag, but, mail in hand, I went home a little dejected anyway, sorry to have lost so much scavenged paper.

Back at my parents’ house, I leafed through my department mail, usually just a dull heap of audition notices and photographers’ ads.  For whatever reason, that afternoon, among the mundane fliers, lay a Dorsey brochure, emerald hued and full of pictures.  In the service of advertising, someone must have stuffed it into my mailbox earlier that day.

            That night, while the desert air pressed in through my open bedroom window, I leafed through brochure, its shiny photographs all soft sunlight and trees.  On the last page of the booklet, next to a set of classroom photos, a large image showed a group of smiling students.  They grinned and stood barefoot on the beach while behind them, the sun sank over the waves, moving ever steadily, into the west. 

In Arizona, summer had yet to begin, but already the desert heat was palpable.  I imagined the cool fingers of a coastal breeze as it grazed my sunburnt cheeks and I thought of Los Angeles, a world away from the desert that lay, yawning in darkness, beyond my screened-in window.  Pulling the application form out of the booklet, I ran my hand over its creased center line and, in the space labeled “applicant name, please print,” wrote “Taylor Kreiss” in sharp, blue ink.

            My parents hated the idea of my going away, but, beyond refusing to pay my tuition, did little to dissuade me.  Weeks later, when my Dorsey acceptance letter arrived, delivered by postman in the early afternoon, I learned that I’d been awarded a scholarship and went to find my mother, to tell her I’d be leaving soon. 

            “Well, isn’t life just like that,” said, when I told her the news. 

She was then and is still prone to platitudes that involve some overt, and, though I can’t be sure, I think usually incorrect, statement of what life is “like.”  She’s spoken that way for as long as I can remember and I’ve always thought the habit came from living in the desert too long, a way to reduce large ideas to neatly cubed bullion thoughts, to shrink questions to a comfortable size, to wage war on the vastness of Arizona’s marathon summer. 

To reiterate her point, she repeated herself.  Then she sighed, walked down the tiled hall, and disappeared into the center of the house.  A self-trained make-up artist and cosmetics saleswoman, she had arranged the middle bedroom into a kind of beauty workshop and had furnished the place with an old barber shop chair and the kind of lighted mirror that reminded me of dingy backstage dressing rooms.  The room contained the largest and pinkest of the wicker sofas that adorned our house.  Used to seat waiting clients, the giant couch also served as theater seating when my mother watched her ancient black and white movies on the big television or old reel-to-reel that she kept hidden in the closet during business hours.  I always knew a viewing was underway when she closed the door and I heard the roar of the Metro Goldwyn lion or the trumpets of Twentieth Century Fox. 

My mother regarded all old movies with indiscriminate relish and, though she usually watched alone, sometimes retreating into the middle bedroom for days, by the time I was ten I had seen enough classic movies to know the names of all the Golden Age stars by heart.  Like my mother, I became addicted to movies, to drama, to the glamour of Old and New Hollywood.  In my elementary school class, I was the only fourth grader with a crush on Jimmy Stewart.

The room next door to the beauty workshop, the back bedroom, was mine and compared to the others, it boasted a superlative view, only partly obstructed by the beige tract house behind ours.  When I think back on the time before I left, it is this view that I remember, that I think of as partially responsible for what happened next. 

Looking out of my window at night, if I stood at just right place, I could see the evening street, the wide, empty road and deep suburban darkness that I knew continued, unmarred, into the open desert, bleeding into the vast brush and nothingness beyond.  

Staring into that empty space night after night, all of Tucson was a wish for flight, a longing to be anywhere else.  I stood at my window, peering out into the dark, and imagined other places, miles away and out of my reach.

___

Dorsey’s acceptance letter said that more information would follow and after it arrived I began checking the mail daily, walking the length of the driveway every day, my bare feet singing against the afternoon concrete.  

The heat showed no sign of waning early that summer and for months the nuclear sun hung, low and white, over the languid desert.  By July it was too hot to step outside for any but the most exigent reasons.  Heat radiated up from the pavement and down from the sky and even the lightest breeze blanketed the landscape with blistering air.  On those long, hot afternoons, I buried myself in the cool darkness of my mother’s viewing room.  We read celebrity magazines and watched the same movies over and over, laughing again at jokes we already knew by heart.  She was in love with Carey Grant that summer and I think we saw Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story four or five times apiece.

My father, a struggling shoe salesman, disliked anything to do with the arts and took my plan to attend Dorsey as a personal affront.  He wore disapproval in his face all through the long, hot summer.  I filled out forms and packed suitcases anyway, taking care to disregard his angry mutterings. 

 “I don’t know why you would go to a place like California,” he said, the night before I left.  “You’ll be afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles.  People always are.”  

We were sitting in the kitchen, surrounded by fading yellow wallpaper and the stale oil smell of take-out fried chicken.

“I’m not afraid,” I said.  “I’m just, you know.  Going.” 

            A tennis shoes salesman, he always wore his product when he went out on the road and after dinner I watched him lace up a pair of gleaming new runners in preparation for a sales trip.  When he finished tying and righted himself, I could see that he was scowling. 

“Nothing good will come of it.”

I shrugged. 

He stepped onto the front walk in his worn gray suit and bright white shoes, his brow already sweating in the heat of the febrile night.   

“Sell a lot of shoes,” I called after him. 

Back in my bedroom, I took a breath of stifling summer air and tossed a stack of folded t-shirts into my suitcase.  I was not afraid to merge onto freeways in Los Angeles.  I would never be.  

___

The next morning, my mother cried and vanished into her movie room, calling her final goodbyes from behind the locked door. 

Alone in my car, foot on the gas, I watched the western deserts pass slowly by.  The highway filled me with the emptiness of open space and I felt the kind of loneliness endemic to long car rides, when the highway unfolds in strips of black and yellow and the groundless feeling of continuous motion sets in, awakening in my driver’s mind the possibility of places as yet unimagined, bringing the dream of the interstate into focus as though for the first time. 

When I moved past the Tucson city limits the road opened further and the landscape blurred by, all scattered rock and sand, dotted here and there with cactus.  Every road sign I passed proved was proof of my inaugurate freedom, of my momentum toward the west, away from Sonaran isolation, toward a bright new life on the coast. 

The highway traffic was light that morning and I arrived at the student housing complex in the late afternoon.  The parking lot was nearly empty, but around it cars swarmed the streets.  A chorus of horns exploded and then died as I stepped out of my car.  At one end of the lot, a construction crew worked at building something out of a precarious stack of bright red bricks.

I got out of the car and stood there in the parking lot, a plastered over inch inside a giant plaster city.  The Los Angeles air smelled dirtier than I had expected and, just for a moment, I was overcome with a feeling that I had known this place before, as though everything I had seen in the movies and on television had not been fabrications but had been my own memories, preformed by others and absorbed in preparation for my encounter with this place.  I felt something like nostalgia then, a strange sensation that I was recalling the place without ever having been there.  I listened to the sound of the traffic, curiously like the sound of the ocean, and watched the construction crew sort light bricks from dark ones.  I knew, at that moment, that I would never be quite the same again.  To be in the city, to stand at the cusp of the continent’s western edge, and remain unchanged was impossible.  

My trunk, a mess of bags and boxes, demanded immediate attention and so, using all my strength, I hoisted a dark blue duffel out of the tightly packed space and set it down on the smooth asphalt.  I was tugging at the handle of my biggest bag, an old gray suitcase whose parts had a way of sticking at inopportune times, when I noticed three girls under the arched entrance of the Spanish courtyard, less than fifty feet from me.  Two brunettes stood with their backs to me.  The third girl, a pretty blonde in tight fitting jeans, sat on the end of a low retaining wall, crying.  Her chest trembled and shook with the force of her heavy sobs and  I could see that she was not acting.  The weight of her tears was too real for any rehearsal scene. 

I wiggled my big suitcase’s handle free, but continued to stand in front of my trunk, studying the handle with feigned interest, listening. 

“I’ve had it with you,” said the taller of two brunettes.

The tall brunette said something else, but had turned away from me before she spoke and I couldn’t hear what she’d said, my distance from her giving me space to imagine and re-imagine her words for myself.

I saw the little brunette purse her lips and stayed where I was, hoping to catch another snippet of the altercation and feeling a little self-conscious, as though I had walked in on a group of strangers half-undressed.

            “Do you know those girls?”  I jumped at the sound of a male voice behind me.

Surprised that the scene had captured the attention of some person as equally lost or alone as I was at just that minute, I turned to greet the owner of the voice.  He was a tall, unwieldy person who, despite his youthful thinness, had the lightly lined face of a man approaching thirty.

“They sound a little like potboiler characters to me,” he said.

Beneath his black hair, his face was fair and gently freckled from too many days in the sun.

“The lowest of the low,” I said.  I studied the pattern of spots across his nose and smiled.

He cocked his head and took a position that had all the earmarks of a practiced stance.  In green tennis shoes, a yellow button down, and navy blue dress pants, he had the appearance of someone you might meet in a tea room in an eccentric section of New York. 

“You know,” I said, “they’re really more like allegory than potboiler.”

He laughed.

“Allegory?  Absolutely not.  Definitely potboiler.  Melodrama, okay, but also potboiler.”

“Potboiler,” I said, savoring the hard sounds of the word.  “Who talks like that?  I bet that’s not even your expression.  I bet you read it in a book somewhere and appropriated it for personal use.”

“Maybe I did,” he smiled again and the freckles on his nose expanded.  “I’m an excellent thief.  Whatever I steal, I keep.”

“I’m Taylor,” I said.

Beyond our line of sight, three cars honked in rapid succession. 

“I’m Neil,” he said. “You know you have a boy’s name.”

“It keeps me out of trouble.”

I smiled the practiced smile I used to hide my annoyance whenever I was reminded of my name’s gender.  From an early age I had decided that strange sobriquets were no good in a world that, in my estimation, prized sameness above all else.

“Well, Taylor, it seems that you and I have witnessed a very special moment in the lives of those, poor, troubled souls.”

“Indeed we have,” I said in mock solemnity.

“And since you are a member of my first year Dorsey class, I think that makes us friends.”

I cleared my throat.

“Theater, film and television, the Dorsey School, right?”  He raised one eyebrow.  From the tone of his voice, I understood that the question was rhetorical.

I didn’t ask how he knew about my place in Dorsey’s class.  And maybe because he seemed so sure, I didn’t care how he knew.  I was being taken in by his easy demeanor, his informality.  I didn’t mind.  Alone in an empty parking lot corner of a strange and exhilarating new city, I was ready to be taken in.  

“Actually,” he said, “You and I are now best friends, since it turns out I am probably the only person you know here, at least so far.”

“I’m not sure how you decided that,” I said, not yet sure of what I wanted to say in the face of this professed intimacy.

“Don’t say no,” he said, reaching out and shuttering my mouth with the tips of his long, freckled fingers.  When he touched my skin, I could smell his scent, the bittersweet smell of ground coffee and a man’s long day in the sun.

“Now,” he went on, “As your new best friend, I feel it is my duty to inform you that Malarkey’s Pub is having a special on Blonde beer tonight.  But you can drink whatever you want, as long as you drink it with me.”

I hesitated.

“Of course,” he said, responding to my silence, “if you are opposed to spending a summer evening with the strange, new, and clearly fascinating young man you’ve only just met, by all means don’t accept.  I’m sure there is a dorm apartment somewhere in this building just waiting for you to grace it with the black and white photos you took during your summer in Paris.  During which you learned no French at all, of course.”

            He studied me.

 “Wrong,” I said.  “It was Spain for the summer.  And my Spanish is excellent.  And I will have a drink with you.  But just one.”

I waited in the parking lot while Neil deposited his bags in his apartment and noticed that the construction crew had disappeared while we talked, their red bricks abandoned, a desultory pile, silently awaiting the men who would return and use it to form a wall.  I heaved my duffel back into my trunk and stood alone in the parking lot, it’s black asphalt barren in the fading sunlight.  Horns blared again and I could feel Los Angeles along my spine.  It prickled at the back of my neck and settled into the creases of my skin.  I stood, waiting, thinking of the beach, of the endless water that stretched toward the horizon, farther than any distance I could ever know, somewhere to the west.

___

A small, dark bar set back from the street, Malarkey’s was the kind of place that smells like beer even before it opens for business.  Neil held the padded door for me before it swung shut behind us and obliterated what the left of the late afternoon.  Although it sat above ground, the windowless bar had the feel of a basement, its walls lined with old street signs, of no directional use to anyone anymore. 

We approached the wide, oak bar.

“What can I get you?” the bartender asked.

 “Corona for me,” I said, smirking a little, pleased, for once, to be the kind of girl who drank beer in sticky neighborhood bars.

“Make that two,” Neil said. 

We stood in silence and waited for our drinks.  I ran my index finger back and forth along the edge of the bar.  The wood was tacky and left a filmy spot where it had touched my skin. 

“Twelve-fifty,” the bartender said, scooting the beers across the gummy bar with a smile.

“I got it,” Neil said.  He pulled a slim wallet from his pants pocket. 

I held my beer and waited while Neil paid, trying to clean my finger by pressing it into the pearls of condensation that had gathered on the neck of my beer bottle.

“Well,” said Neil, tossing two additional dollar bills onto the bar.

I rubbed my finger against the underside of the bottle. 

“What’s going on with your finger there?”

 “Oh, nothing,” I said and forced a laugh. 

“It’s been a long day,”  I said, “the drive and everything.”

“Right,” he said. “The drive.  The move.  The change.  Herculean.”

I moved my still dirty finger to the neck of the bottle where, I hoped some condensation still remained.

“Do you always talk like that?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“Herculean?”

He shrugged and tapped a long finger against his beer bottle. 

“You wouldn’t want a shot of tequila, would you?” I asked. “Some real liquor?  It might ease the pain of your Herculean struggle.” 

“Didn’t you say it was going to be just one drink?” he asked.

I shrugged.  “Just two, I guess.”

“Well, this is our last day of summer,” he said, “we should bask in it.”

“And by bask, you mean get drunk in the middle of the day?”

“I’m not currently aware of any other definitions for ‘bask,’” he said.

“Okay.”  I strained my eyes back toward the bar, searching for the bartender’s attention in the dark.  Neil put his hand on my arm. 

“Get a table.  I’ll pay.”  

Someone turned up the volume on the jukebox and Billy Joel’s voice filled the darkness.  “I don’t want to be alone anymo-ore.”  The walls shook a little with the reverberation from the sound.  Two chairs stood vacant next to an empty table on the side of the bar, farthest away from the blaring speakers.

I slid into a wood-backed chair, crossed, then uncrossed my legs, and rubbed at my dirty finger.  Neil bounded across the room, smiling. 

“Our order for two tequilas is in,” he said and sat down, triumphant. 

I drank in big, worried gulps and had finished half my beer when a waiter arrived with two highball glasses, each filled nearly to the brim with pale amber booze.

“I got us doubles,” Neil said.

“Doubles?”  I shook my head.  “I can’t be stumbling blind in my empty apartment.”

“Nonsense.  We already established this as the last day of summer.  We have to celebrate.  If we don’t, we’ll always look back and wish we had.”

 “If I drink this, I’ll never be able to put my place together.”

With two massive swallows Neil drained his glass.

“Taylor,” he said, “what are you doing?  You’re falling behind in your drinking.  You must stay on pace.  Your apartment can wait a day or two.”

In the low light, his dark hair seemed even blacker than it had before. 

“Come on,” he said, “bottoms up.”

The tequila was a sting on my lips, familiar, cold, and bitter.  “This is really going to be my only one.” 

The waiter arrived with a fresh glass and Neil took it, smiling. 

“Another for the lady,” Neil said.

“No, I’m fine.”

“She’ll have one more.  Just go ahead and bring it and we’ll leave it on the table if we decide to stop.”

The waiter returned with another brimming glass.  I sipped the fresh drink and examined the pattern in the table’s wood grains, tracing my finger along their impossible lines.

It was dark outside and late when we left.  Through the curtains of my tequila haze, I could feel the heat from the day as it lingered, rising up from the pavement, gentler than the Tucson air, but full of desert warmth all the same. 

Neil’s apartment was a small two bedroom with a sparsely furnished common area.  One of the bedrooms sat unoccupied, presumably awaiting some as yet unknown owner.  What would the person would be like, what would he would think of Neil, his height and his freckles, his peculiar smile, I wondered, fumbling in my purse for a Pall Mall.

“Smoke?”  I said, offering up my crumpled pack.

“Nah.”  He shook his head.  “Share one?”

We opened a sliding glass door and stepped onto the stucco of a narrow balcony.  The butt end was damp when he handed the half-smoked cigarette back to me, sliding it through his thin, freckled fingers.  Then his mouth was on mine, hot and beery and bitter with the taste of smoke.  

His touch was a promise we both intended to keep.

When everything ended, we were a heap of tanned skin and white sheets, our limbs still pressed together, sweating in the diaphanous air that poured in through the open bedroom window.  Neil began to snore and, careful not to disturb him, I slid out of the bedclothes, found my jeans in the soft darkness and slipped into them. 

“You aren’t going to stay?” he said, his voice full of sleep.  

“No,” I whispered.  “I’ve got to go.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Forget you then.”  He rolled onto his side and faced the wall.

“You just did,” I said and crept silently toward the door.

“I’ll buy you breakfast,” he said from underneath the sheets.

“I thought you had already forgotten me.  Anyway, I really have to go.”

“Fine,” he said.  “Leave me here, alone, to wallow in my feelings of abandonment.”

I pulled my t-shirt over my head. 

By the time my hand was on the doorknob, Neil was breathing in the evenly spaced increments indicative of sleep.  I opened the front door and tiptoed across the threshold.  Outside, a breeze met me, full of night and jasmine, the briney smell of ocean air. 

In my dorm apartment, I lay down across the bare mattress and looked up to where the blinds hung open.  Moonlight streamed in through the uncurtained windows, making pools of white light on the nubby carpet.  Still drunk, I strained my gaze toward the window, searching out the shape of the moon. 

Then I stood and bolted for the bathroom. 

I was going to be sick.