The first two chapters from a novel by Richard Risemberg
These two chapters take place in the Echo Park and Silverlake neighborhoods of Los Angeles
1.
I'd missed the dawn. The sky was already blue in the window by the bed when the phone rang. Light comes early in the summer. It was a little after six by the clock. I let the phone ring for a while, because I get plenty of wrong numbers. Mostly people calling from Guatemala, looking for their brothers and uncles lost in the land of gold. Because I speak Spanish, they always think I'm someone they know at first. I try to get them off the phone real quick, because I know how much it must be costing them. But everyone sounds different on the phone, and they keep insisting that I'm Rafael or Guillermo. They seem so disappointed when they finally give up. Maybe they'll never find their cousin. What can I do? Even at six in the morning you have to answer the phone sooner or later. And I'm a morning person. I got up and went to the living room.My house is small, only four rooms, but because it's up on a hill and the front room is windows on three sides, it seems bigger than it is. That's what I like about it, that it lets the world inside. This morning the sun was already glaring through the fake-lace curtains, and even with no clothes on I felt warm. Over the treetops on the hill below the house I could see the tall glass buildings of downtown a few miles away. The sun reflecting from a thousand corner offices made it seem as though the heart of the city were melting. I could smell my neighbor's orange tree from the open window on the high side of the house. I loved my house at times like this. I would have loved it more if the phone hadn't kept ringing. I went to the desk and picked it up.
When the speaker croaked my name into my ear, I knew it was Dave, tragic Dave. He was losing his woman, and sometimes I thought he was losing his mind. I could understand what he was going through, as I'd gone through it myself a few years earlier, with the same woman. I didn't want to go through it again with Dave. But when your best friend seems to be losing his mind, you do what you can to help him out. Even at six AM on a sunny Saturday morning when you'd rather be thinking of anything except emotional torments, your own or anyone else's.
Even if his voice hadn't given it away I would've guessed that Dave had been up all night, wondering where she was.
"You up?" he said. "I didn't want to call too early...."
"You did too want to," I said. "But thanks for waiting. Kate, I suppose?"
"She's gone again--"
"You should be getting used to this by now."
"Don't say that! I don't want to be getting used to it. She's--"
"Gone," I butted in . "She's been gone, Dave, she just hasn't left completely."
He gave an exasperated sigh. "You've said that before. It doesn't help."
"I've said it before because I've meant it before. And it will help you--"
"It won't help me get her back."
It was my turn to sigh. "Dave. You're not going to get her back. And if you did, she wouldn't stay."
Silence. Then: "She might."
"Dave. Dave. She never has before." Silence. "I mean, how many times is this now?"
Silence. "I don't know--"
"That's right, you don't know and she doesn't care. Forget her."
"Have you?"
"Damn right I have."
This time Dave was the indignant one. "How can you lie like that? No one forgets her."
An oblivious bumblebee hovered at the open window, bathed in sunlight and green scents. Of course it was true. No one forgets her. But you have to try. You have to protect yourself. And here was Dave, my best friend, bringing her back to me even as she drifted away yet again....
2.
Dave wanted to meet me at a coffee shop not far from my house. He was always that way. I don't think he'd been anyplace where I'd lived more than ten or twelve times in the years we'd known each other. The same for meeting at his house. I'd been there, sure. It was a little apartment in a busy, run-down neighborhood with lots of small, cheap shops nearby. He lived up on the fourth floor in two rooms with two windows each. You could smell grease frying through the windows. All day long, and half the night, the sounds of motors and strident voices drifted up. Dave was from New York, and he said it was the only part of our town he'd ever felt comfortable in. There was nothing much in the apartment: a hot plate and a miniature refrigerator, a desk and a phone, an old typewriter, and one of those now-laughable computers that you used to build out of kits. And--since he'd been with Kate--a king-sized bed. Kate always insisted on a king-sized bed. I'd let her take ours when she left. It used up too much space. And my place was bigger than Dave's. I don't think that's why he liked to meet in coffee shops, though. To Dave, a man's house wasn't his castle, it was his cave. You ate, slept, fucked there, for everything else you went out. He was a real city person. He lived his life in public spaces.
The coffee shop wasn't far, a couple of miles, if even that. I decided to walk over. Since my neighborhood's all low hills, it hasn't been scraped and six-laned and parking-lotted over like so much of the rest of the city, and it makes for pleasant walking. We're near enough downtown that the houses are old and ramshackle, left over from World War One. There are trees everywhere, mostly old twisted sycamores in the canyon bottoms, here and there a few eucalyptus trees brought in fifty years ago. And people who live in quaint old houses seem to end up planting flower gardens in front of their porches, no matter who they are. Even the house down by the boulevard, where a couple of brothers lived who were in the local street gang, had a tangled row of geraniums between the porch and the weedy yard. But the real prize of the neighborhood was the hidden stairways. They were just vertical sidewalks, connecting the narrow streets that wound along the hillsides. Over the years they had become overgrown with arches of vines and bougainvillea and waist-deep nasturtium beds. Almost nobody used them: a few old folks, an occasional kid hurrying to school, and me. The one at the top of my block led to a little cul-de-sac populated by retired couples who spent the day gossiping as they half-heartedly clipped at masses of dark ivy. From there, another stairway zigzagged down the back of the hill to the local reservoir. From the reservoir it was couple of blocks to the coffee shop.
The Saturn coffee shop was a holdover from the 'Fifties, stuck at the edge of a parking lot that separated it from a supermarket and a row of smaller shops all built in that dreary shoebox style. In any other part of town, the Saturn would have been torn down for something with a more contemporary theme, or even just a Denny's. Here it hung on. All the other eating places were cozy little candle-and-tablecloth restaurants, so if you wanted breakfast, or just had an urge for bad food, you had to go to the Saturn. The booths were red vinyl, the tables formica, and there was a shiny curved counter and a bunch of waitresses in yellow polyester jumpers. Big windows facing north let a soft light swoop in under the upward-slanting overhang of the roof. I knew where Dave would be sitting and looked in the window as I walked up. He'd been watching for me, and waved without smiling. As I went to the door I saw him gesture to the waitress. By the time I sat down across from him, my cup of coffee was there.
"You still take decaf, right?" Dave said.
"I've got you and Kate to deal with now. I don't need caffeine too. You eating?"
"A little bit. I'm not too hungry."
"I didn't think you'd be."
The waitress came, carrying her order pad, and Dave looked up at her with his eternally sad eyes. He had a thin face and a little pointed black beard, so despite the eyeglasses he looked like the cliche of a New Testament saint. The waitress smiled down at him and absentmindedly stroked his shoulder. I wondered whether she even noticed she was doing it. Dave smiled back but his eyes stayed sad. He ordered a surprisingly large meal for a man whose heart was broken. I was the one who hardly ate. If I'd known what a long day I had ahead of me, I would've eaten more.
Richard Risemberg will eventually finish this novel. Really he will.
