L.A. streets seem dated and new, the city hollowing from center out, motilities of force, motilities of empire, the We the They concentric like rings from a drop of water or where a bullet passes through a window. Or motilities of consumption, like rings of mold through a loaf of bread.
I haven't seen Grey since before Paris; soon he gets to Perthe. I pedal across town because it's Grey, not someone else, but I spill about my Situation, which hasn't changed since Lakewood.
I have made conversation hygeinic. I'm doing that with everything. I even push fear out the pedals when I ride, pull safety from the handlebars. Since I could blow this all in a sneeze, it's just as well I sneezed at Grey's. He'll tell no one; I don't need to ask. He's even worried about me instead of the plant. I find myself defensive of my endeavor: "I'm not a fool."
Ouch.
We had a few hours; then he left for work in his cab, and I had that sense of having passed time without partaking: Has it been hygeinic for you, too?
His roommate had shot into her room with his first mention of work; Trish eventually picked up her cell, so I pedaled up to Studio City, a bit of a trek with the grit and the slope. Trish lives up Fredonia, an alley that crooks straight up into the damned mountain, so I actually got off the bike for the last couple blocks. I'd rested at the liquor store so as not to arrive early, but I felt just as well walking.
"No sex," she opens. "How was France?"
Not half what it seemed a couple of seconds ago.
"But I'd like to act in ways that might seem like we were."
I'd hoped she'd clear my mind -- a lot to ask of anybody, as you will have observed. But we sat in the jacuzzi with a demi of cold chardonnay and the sun casting shadows across the 101 so far below it seemed actually far enough, Trish stark naked and the water just over her nipples. Mn?
"No."
She's on about her website business. She does intranets, mostly: company presence for company personnel. She likes playing in Photoshop and Dreamweaver and talking to business managers about concrete desires that she can fulfill. But work takes her time and she had thought of a child and I am glad she has the place and the jacuzzi and the picture I don't remember at just that perfect place on the wall. And she's Trish whom I would tell most anything but I can't timeshare even this wine and we both know it. So I watch the freeway spread San Fernando into the Basin and vice versa to create the illusion of seeing all: the Souths go south; the Norths go north, but if one arrives, one gets off the freeway. And look at the freeway.
A musician would be perfect, Trish informs me: intense, romantic, absent.
She wants to pay for a massage: "I'll enjoy it more." I slink and accept, and stay an hour after the hour and a half touching her back and her neck until something in my insistence wakes her and she stumbles to bed, the sheet gathered around her breasts and momentarily translucent between her thighs.
She has pointed to the linen closet, and I look at the furniture and consider curling up near her cat and leaving early, but I lock her door behind pretending I'm a ghost and slide off down the river valleys past the streetlights guarding the curves and slopes so it's downhill most all the way in to Lakewood.
Which leaves us where?
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