Los Angeles

1

A woman in green chiffon stood on an island on the 101. She held her arm aloft—her jewelry flashed—like someone proposing a toast. I don’t know why I stopped. I’d never picked up a hitchhiker before and never would again. She moved toward my slowing car, bizarrely fluttering her fingers. Here are some roles I would play for her in the coming months: her help, her thief, her lover, her lover’s lover.

Well, hello. What time is it? asked the evening-gowned hitchhiker as she flopped onto the seat. It was two p.m. Just look at this. She put her feet up on my dashboard—I didn’t mind, my car was old—and pointed at the brown stain on her stomach. Is it coffee? Blood?

Heat emanated from her, as if, after many hours in the sun, she now possessed the freeway’s qualities.

What do you think?

Excuse me?

Blood or coffee?

Was she drunk? Or injured? Yes. And maybe. But if so, not very badly. Cautiously, I pulled back into traffic.

Take your pick. The bar’s wide open. She opened the sun visor mirror and rubbed her eyes, smearing her already smeared mascara. Some of it got on her forehead. Is today Ash Wednesday?

Umm, I think today is Monday, and not February.

It was May 2018.

You’re a Catholic! It sounded like an accusation.

You are okay? You are bleeding, your elbow, I said.

She adjusted her hair, examined her elbow. Yep! Well, what do you expect? I jumped from his car. Sometimes there’s just nothing else you can do, don’t you think? Her eyes shone as if from laughing or crying. I could smell her distinctly, perfume and whiskey, then a different whiskey, bad but good, as if a bottle inside another bottle had come uncorked.

You mean, someone stole you? I inquired, intimidated, suddenly a little drunk myself. My verbs, under stress, swooned and scattered in my head. Back in Poland, I thought I spoke English. In Chicago, where I’d spent the last year working at a restaurant, I learned I barely did. Here in LA, I had been strenuously faking fluency and failing to find a job.

So I should take you to police? The hospital? I said.

She effloresced in my peripheral vision in her ultra-green dress. The diamonds on her bracelets fired scattershot light all over my car’s cheap upholstery as she piled her hair on her head, then let it fall between her knees, her pumps on my dashboard.

Luckily, he was already pulling over, she said, licking her elbow. Otherwise, I would’ve skinned my face. One time, I asked him if he’d still like me if I was disfigured, and he said, ‘Yes, in the dark.’ I thought that was sexy and honest. Don’t you think that’s sexy and honest?

Cars passed on both sides. A sports car cut in front of us. I had a sense we were in a race and losing.

But who other than my grandma wants sex in the dark? She shrugged. She had a tremendous amount of blond hair. A bobby pin hung loose against her cheek. She paused, then chattered on. Moonlight sex. Corporations are dividing up the moon. They already own the sex. I’ll sell you two acres of moon for your ass. The moon is the new Wild West, did you know that? Her words frayed at the edges. She was drunk. The boys want to possess the moon. Anyway, I’m glad I jumped. Otherwise, we’d be in court right now getting a divorce. Divorces are such a mess. I hate them. Do you have any music? My phone’s dead. My fucking husband says no one can feel anything anymore without a pop song playing.

She spoke with her eyes closed. She almost resembled one of those sleeping Buddha masks that nobody buys from the knickknack stands on the Venice Beach boardwalk.

I said, Excuse me, but . . . where should I take you?

She was quiet. I waited. Are you asleep?

The hills of Hollywood flew by to either side.

Forget what I said about divorce, she said, gathering a compact from her purse, powdering her nose, then shaking the sun in the compact’s mirror. What was she doing, blinding drivers behind us? We could never live apart, she said. We’re a four-legged hermaphrodite.

I didn’t ask what a hermaphrodite was. Then she actually fell asleep. Neither my questions nor the radio—not even an ambulance passing—woke her.

In Los Angeles, you saw women like her on billboards above the boulevards and on the boulevards below the billboards. Magazine hair, designer purses. Out of the back doors of black cars, into restaurants. Some man’s girlfriend, some other man’s daughter. Somebody’s prize and worry. Nobody worried about me. I was completely alone in this city, country, continent. My loneliness was a radiating force. The year before last, I’d left my family in southern Poland. My mother, barefoot on her knees, bursting out of her slip, cleaning the floor. My cousins, pushing baby strollers, sitting behind cash registers, registering nothing.

I had a teaching degree, though nothing to teach. If I was at all like the women on the billboards, it was only inasmuch as I, too, didn’t like to speak. When I did, it was in questions and ellipses. I thought I was shy, but my oldest brother liked to call me nieprzystępna, zuchwała—standoffish, impudent.

I pulled off the freeway and into a gas station, not knowing what else to do. Her beaded clutch, her gown, the satin shoes—one on the floor, one on the dashboard—had to be worth together at least two thousand dollars. Each wrist had a dozen ropes, each with perhaps twelve tiny stones, each stone, I guessed, worth a few hundred dollars, maybe a month’s salary for a teacher in Poland. If you had so many, would you miss one? Maybe I was undervaluing the diamonds. I had always been undervalued. Do the rich suffer loss less than the poor?

She murmured something in her sleep.

Most people I’d become acquainted with in service jobs, in Poland and Chicago, hated or at least disliked the rich. I was confused about the rich. Disliking them meant not desiring to become them. Self-loathing wasn’t in my constitution. If I became the rich, I thought, I’d like myself. Time, freedom, luxurious foods. I was bland. I blandly understood this, but with money I would have a flavor. Yet I had no idea how one got money. I did not know I’d just met my unsentimental guide to loss and gain.

"You seem nice. Could we go to your place? I just need a nap so badly," she said, awake.

She had one of those faces you couldn’t define. A dash of mercury beneath the skin. The only constant in such faces is a promise—nudge a feature a few millimeters, it falls with the others into a striking arrangement. That promise made her beautiful. She had a strong jaw, a prominent forehead. Her right eye had the tiniest rip in the iris, a little lava leaking out. One fake eyelash had come undone. Bare, this eye regarded me sternly, its winged sister soft and vain.

My place?

I’m sorry. You must think I’m, like, a terrible person. You have better things to do.

I smiled and said, That’s okay.

Do you?

What?

"Do you have better things to do?"

No. It was the truth. No. No job interviews. No friends to see, that day or ever.

"So I’m not a bully. It’s so hard to find something actually worth doing, isn’t it? She laughed. Let me see . . . what’s worth doing? Getting your hair done? Then it rains on your way home. You’ve wasted your time and look like a wet dog."

Maybe you go to the toilet to wash. I pointed at the stain. It’s a beautiful dress.

I need a nap so badly.

—

Actually, I’d rather go home, she said thirty minutes later when we were on La Tijera, almost at my place. Back in the Hills, off Mulholland. Sorry! Do you mind? My phone’s out of battery, and my husband will kill me if I don’t get home soon.

He will hurt you? I asked.

Not unless I ask him to, but I’m not into that these days. Although sometimes I like to be spanked with a hairbrush, she said. Usually not, though, she added blithely.

So I made a U-turn, feeling no exasperation, just relief. I didn’t want her to see my place.

Do you have a phone charger?

I didn’t.

Tell me where you’re from at least.

I was from Straconka—once a village, then a district of Bielsko—its name derived from the Polish infinitive for to lose. The lost (straceńcy), the condemned. Historians claimed that the village was named after prisoners executed there in the mountains during the war. Geographers argued that the village took its name after the river, which got lost in the mountains.

I’m from noplace, I said.

Noplace? Never been, she said in a serious tone.

Where are you from? I asked.

Made in Poland, she said, picking up her Italian shoe and shaking a crumb out of it.

This wasn’t much of a coincidence. Polish people were everywhere in 2018. Could she tell I was Polish? Her being Polish, too, upended everything. My admiration for her jewels and shoes became resentment. My car had never looked as meager as with her inside it. Scrapes along the gearbox. Odors of spilled gas and cigarettes smoked years ago and not by me. How could she be Polish and so much better off? Was she from Warsaw? I wanted her out of my car. I wanted a better car with her in it.

I came here for college, she continued. "So long ago. I’m like Maria Callas."

For college? So she’d been rich before she came? Was that better or worse?

You sing?

Never.

But you said you are like Maria Callas, I said, changing lanes.

"Oh, I just meant my accent’s muddy, like Callas’s was. International, you know. I learned English in Switzerland at boarding school, but all my friends were Turkish. My English teacher was American, though, except my very first teacher was Australian, and she was married to my dog’s vet, not the dog I have now, but my accent’s Turkish-Swiss-Polish-American-Australian. I’m an accent slut. Better than a slut with an accent, don’t you think? That’s not my line, by the way. It’s Lance’s. I don’t mind stealing his lines, though. What’s his is mine. My name’s Roberta, but I go by Bobby. I was almost named Dominika, actually. You know, dominica means Sunday in Latin. My mom had a hunch about me—she knew I was a Sunday child. A lazy child. But my dad was the one who filled out the form, and he wrote Roberta."

And who is Lance?

Not my husband!

Ah. And your husband—

Sleeper? He’s the best, she said with genuine, bewildering affection. What about yours?

I don’t have a husband.

No, I meant your name.

Viva, I said. My name was Wioletta, anglicized into Viola. I’m not sure where Viva came from. It was born just then, with oil derricks passing in the window as we traveled north again.

La Cienega and up into the Hills. Sinuous roads, SUVs. Bobby spoke less and less the higher up we drove. Facades of houses through foliage. I imagined their inward lazy sprawl, tall women reclining on sofas and beds. Earthquake-proof buildings harboring salt-of-no-earth inhabitants. I drove carefully. A group of slim, good-looking people got out of an SUV, holding babies in baskets and baskets in cellophane.

We stopped in front of a gate. Except for a bit of the mansard roof and terrace, the house was hidden.

"Thank you very much! Merci." Shoes in hand, a swoop of green, out of the car—her departure was as abrupt as her arrival. I was a little shocked but put the car into reverse.

A tap on my window. Relieved, I rolled it down.

Can you write down your number? Oh, and, like, your address, in case I lose your number? I don’t do social media and hate writing emails and want to send you something.

I wrote my phone number and address on the base of a polystyrene cup. She grabbed the cup and kissed my hand—the way men from my mother’s generation kissed women’s hands—and opened the gate with a fob from her clutch.

Above the gate, between the trees, I saw a shirtless man, powerfully built, appear on a terrace, then disappear behind a grapevine-covered wall.

Bobby turned and yelled in Polish, Usually I don’t like Polish girls abroad, but you’re—

The gate clanged as it closed, eclipsing what she thought of me. Another shirtless man, of slighter frame, passed on the terrace.

2

Six days later, I still hadn’t heard from her. Nothing exciting had happened to me since I’d come to LA. Until Bobby. Though coincidental, her being Polish felt symmetrical, a sparkly event. And I had no friends. So I checked my phone for messages a hundred times a day. I’d drive to a job interview or the ocean, absurdly scanning freeway shoulders for figures in green.

In offices, people spoke English full of incomprehensible slang. On the beach, more people spoke Spanish than English. This freed me from the pressure to understand. I watched happy families, happy my family was absent.

Back in Straconka, I used to read novels about teenage rebellion, runaway girls, girls who went to psychiatric institutions. I was not the least bit disturbed. My situation wasn’t decadent enough to allow for disturbance or rebellion. There were no authorities to rebel against. There were teachers we mocked until we became them, priests who masturbated in confessionals as we generously fed them outrageous fictional sins, politicians on TV, gray, small, like people’s fathers. I had no father to resent. The man who raised me was an exterminator. He drove a van with a roach painted on it. The man who had impregnated my mother in a rapeseed field—not a metaphor, a major Polish crop—had ridden a motorcycle. He was gone by harvest. For a long time, when I saw vans, I thought of weak men. When I saw motorcycles, I thought of absent men, men of windy nightfall, men so obscure they barely existed.

My tenth interview that month was on one of those dismal LA streets where everything—dry cleaners, beauty parlors, shops, offices, parking lots—seems engineered for easy collapse and equally easy reassembly. This readiness for wreckage, for the earth to move or hills to burn, imposed a permanent impermanence that dryly mocked the glamour one expects to find. It took me a long time to understand that most of LA had the shabbiness of a movie set, a great backstage in which performance was to be not enjoyed but prepared. And if there were enclaves of glamour—houses, restaurants, clubs where beautiful beings strolled in dresses that cost five years of my family’s combined income—these weren’t accessible to immigrants like me. I thought of Bobby in her dress and her house, tucked in the hills.

I locked my car and crossed the potholed street. I imagined myself in a long green gown. It was morning. I felt warrantlessly optimistic about getting this job.

Inside, a woman with a rumpled mouth like a drawstring neckline asked me to sit down and list my weaknesses and strengths.

Unexperienced, I said. Scared of people. Manipulating, but so sometimes I don’t know I’m manipulating.

"The word is manipulative."

I’m still working on my English.

Not for us, her eyes were saying.

But I didn’t tell you my strengths. I have strengths.

The drawstring had pulled shut.

I did not get this job, I said to her, as she, after some small talk, showed me out. The hall was windowless and gray, the color of machine-made madness, and it matched the woman’s suit.

She shook her head. We have too many candidates, some with much more extensive experience in the field.

The field was filing, hard copy and electronic.

A word of advice, she offered. What you said about being manipulative . . . We don’t admit to such things so much here.

I wasn’t sure if she meant her office in particular, or Culver City, or the United States.

Also, she added in a theatrical whisper followed by a wink, that’s not really a weakness. As long as you don’t talk about it.

But in Poland, I am high school teacher, you know? I meant I was overeducated for the job, therefore I should get it. I wasn’t sure how to say it in English. I’m emotionally unstable, my eyes were saying. It wasn’t true.

Are you okay? She was more concerned about appearing concerned than about me. I’m sure you’ll find a job soon. Good luck.

No, I will never, ever find nothing, I said and willed my tears to stay in my head and turned to go, rejecting the handshake she’d offered.

On the freeway, I mocked her. Are you okay? On the radio, a woman sang about breaking up with some idiot. I’d never particularly wanted to leave Poland, but you don’t win the green card lottery and not use the card. That’s what everyone in my family said. That’s what the sensitive computer engineer who had made me apply for the lottery said. He lolled on my bed, talked left-wing politics, installed things on my laptop. I was twenty-one, about to receive my teaching degree, and Poland was back on the green card lottery list, a program that made fifty thousand visas available per year for immigrants from certain countries. I applied, and cried when I won. Leaving my puny life full of troublesome brothers, laundry bisecting the living room in winter, crotchety women crocheting, vodka, disco polo—leaving all this shabby comfort suddenly seemed a sacrifice. And so, less than a year later, with a suitcase with one busted wheel, bad jeans and sweaters, paperbacks, an aged laptop, and the address of a distant cousin in Chicago, I was on a plane. At least you can’t say I followed a dream. Where I’m from, fantasies tend to be about revenge, not aspiration.

Are you okay? I mocked not only the woman who wouldn’t employ me but her whole nation, obsessed with the question.

My building, by the airport, under the constant roar, had an open-corridor design, like a motel. I parked my car and crossed the courtyard. A deliveryman heaped flowers near my door.

You Viva? he asked.

Cellophane and chrysanthemums—maybe a dozen bouquets—had turned my door into a Polish grave, or the site of an accident in America. The place of someone who wasn’t okay.

Yes, I said.

I should’ve rung the door first, but I thought, like, why not carry some of the bouquets up while I’m at it? Should I bring them inside?

I resisted asking him if there were any openings at the florist. You are sure they are for me?

You Viva?

Together we doubted my identity for a moment. I’d never gotten flowers before. Flowers overfilled his arms; they rustled by our feet.

From who are they? I said and unlocked the door. Come in.

Chrysanthemums, piled in his arms in their cellophane crowns, disdained my poverty, their mindless yellow, purple, blood-orange heads shaming the fecal brown of the carpet.

Can you put them on the bed? I don’t have— The word for vase escaped me.

The card, when I unpinned it from the largest arrangement, which he’d laid upon my evil, bony sofa, read, Thanks for saving my life. I’ll text you, but in case I forget, meet me for lunch at 2 pm at Erő on Canon in Beverly. Something important to discuss. Bobby.

Guess I’ll be going. He didn’t move, apparently mesmerized by last night’s chicken bones in the take-out box on my nightstand.

Then I remembered what country I was in. Oh, wait. I fumbled in my purse but found only a single twenty. Oh, I have only . . . but, oh, but I— I flushed.

He flushed. We could’ve delivered many packages together, worked well and unhappily together.

Take a bouquet, I said to him. Please, take . . . for someone, I whispered and forced one of the smaller bouquets into his hands. With traffic, I’d hardly make it to Beverly Hills by two o’clock.

I ran a bath for the flowers.

—

"Welcome. How can we help you today?" The hostess, sheathed in white elastic, her Afro stop-sign red, exuded unwelcome. Beyond her station, against a bizarre wall made of something like woven tinsel, groups sat at wooden tables under exposed bulbs. The layout resembled a lab. In Poland, places and people resembled themselves. In LA, places, people resembled somewhere else, someone else.

I’m meeting a friend. She invited me. I think she reserves a table.

What’s the name?

Bobby. Or Roberta.

She tapped her tablet. We don’t have either on the list.

I can look?

She nodded. In the dining room, I scanned in vain for Bobby. Some women were dressed expensively, in bouclé blazers, blouses. Others were expensively shabby. Faded jeans, translucent threadbare tees. Legs in leggings, heads in hoodies. Leisurely people dressed for physical work. Bare midriffs, wrists loud with bracelets. All the genders, all bejeweled, poking at poké, drawing with provided crayons on white paper placemats. The waitresses also in white. Any job openings, girls?

Maybe it is another name and she still comes, I said to the hostess. I can wait?

You can wait in the waiting area.

On the street?

In the waiting area.

The waiting area was on the street. A discreet line formed behind a velvet rope. People read menus and phones. An alley led behind the restaurant—fruit crates, trash cans, exposed wires, sleeping bags, an upturned shopping cart. In front of the restaurant, the valet ballet took place. Men in white jumped in and out of cars, capered with keys and tickets. Any job openings, boys? Their faces were empty. I understood. In Chicago, for nearly a year, I had stood by a sink in a trash bag with armholes and called it a profession.

After seventy minutes, I found myself at the front of the line, then at a table for two. I sat with a glass of tap water, tapping my cheap ring against it for most of an hour. The rhythm of disappointment. I grabbed a crayon from the jar on the table. My mother’s aphasia had gotten worse just before my departure to the US, and I’d been marking items in her house with sticky notes. Lodówka, I wrote on her refrigerator. Okno, said the note on the window. Telefon, said the phone, though I knew my mother wouldn’t call.

Fuck yourself Roberta, I wrote in Polish with a crayon on the placemat. On my way home, at a drive-thru, crying into a cheeseburger, I realized no date had been indicated on the card and that I’d be desperate enough to go back to Erő at two every day for weeks.

—

"At any given moment, half the population of LA is giving therapy to the other half, she said on the fourth afternoon. In a black turtleneck and high-waisted pants, she swiveled a lipstick back into its tube. Fifty percent of LA is depressed. Only five percent of Bhutan is. You ever been here? she asked. The hamachi salad’s yummy." She threw the lipstick into her shoulder bag and, leaning across the rope into the waiting area, hugged me like Americans do.

No, I said.

I was pathetically delighted.

She pulled me out of line, into the restaurant. The hostess called her Roberta, gave her a kiss on each cheek and me a look of thinly concealed contempt, or maybe it was simply vague recognition.

Hope you didn’t wait too long, Bobby said, as we were seated. Truth or mockery? I couldn’t tell.

Look. No more blood! She pointed at her stomach. Hello, Carl! she greeted the waiter bringing a bottle of pink wine. Two servers followed with multiple plates of colorful food.

Cauliflower in blah sauce, sea bass with whatever, balls, like, fake, vegan balls, anorexic supermodel shrimp, Bobby narrated for my benefit. I called in the food in advance. I hope you don’t mind. Hate meeting people on an empty stomach. Hate waiting in general. Smiling, she turned to the waiter. "Is that my rosé? What’s it called—from Puglia?"

Carl assured her that it was. People hate rosé, she told me, but I love it. Do you mind it?

I—

Doesn’t give you as much of a headache, as long as it’s a quickie, not an affair. Never date a socialist unless he’s the champagne kind. Oh, hey, socialism! We’re going to share all the plates!

I smiled, barely following.

Speaking of sharing, I couldn’t park anywhere. All the spots are taken by BH housewives with BV. What about you?

What’s BV? I said.

Bacterial vaginosis. A real plague in Beverly Hills, or so I’m told by Lance.

Who’s Lance?

My live-in biographer. A fellow Marxist. Groucho Marxist—do you know what that is? It means he won’t join any club that would accept anybody as awful as he is. Oh my god, spit it! Right now!

What? I said through the shrimp I’d just put in my mouth.

Spit that shrimp out now! She extended her hand, and I, to my shock, spat into it.

A woman, possibly with vaginosis, who had possibly taken Bobby’s parking spot, looked at us archly from a neighboring table. Bobby placed the chewed-up shrimp on the edge of her plate, then reached for a fresh shrimp and ate it.

What is wrong with shrimp? I whispered.

"Oh, nothing. It’s just you’re not titrating right. You aren’t drinking fast enough. It’s crucial to have the first glass on an empty stomach. She filled my glass to the very top and raised hers to mine. Drink! Celebrate! You were on that stretch just when I needed someone to save me." The universe, I would learn, was Bobby-centric. All events led indirectly or directly, via multiple improbable coincidences that did not amaze her, to her.

What about you? she said. How come you were on the 101 heading into the Valley? Don’t tell me you live in the Valley!

You know where. I live near airport, I said.

Burbank?!

No.

What are you doing in America, dear?

I am because I won the lottery, I explained.

She rested a shrimp tail on her plate’s edge and leaned forward, attentive. How much?

No. Green card lottery.

How does that work? You pick some numbers and the balls spin and poof, you’re in America, legal and all that?

Something like this, I said, laughing.

Incredible. I always wanted to meet someone lucky. So far everyone I’ve known has been unlucky, including myself.

I won, but I’m still poor. A blush spread through my body, blood mixing with wine, as if I’d just committed a courageous