Sinner
“I don’t know.”
“You live in L.A. and you don’t know?” I actually didn’t know who was playing, either, but it felt like something that I would know if I actually lived here.
“I don’t like concerts. People jump around and smell, and the music sounds like crap.”
“I don’t know if I can talk to you if you’re going to be spewing this blasphemy all the time.” I paused to look at a sign that advertised a professional phrenologist. The sign also featured a line drawing of a bald man in profile with stars around his head.
It was hard to understand what the product on offer was. “Have you never been to a concert that you liked?”
“Let me think about it; no, no, I haven’t. Have you ever been to one you actually like? Or do you just think you ought to like them?”
“That’s a ridiculous question,” I replied, although possibly it wasn’t. I hadn’t been to a lot of shows until I was the show, and it turned out that the music industry disapproved of you missing your own concerts, even if you didn’t think they were a good time. “Is Sofia real?”
“What? I don’t even know why she is the way she is. Nothing in her childhood seems to support her level of neuroticism.
Wait. You mean is she a real person? I didn’t invent a cousin to get out of dinner, Cole. I’d just tell you.”
I asked, “Are you going to pick up next time I call you?”
“I did this time, didn’t I?”
“Say yes.”
“Yes. Conditionally yes.”
I finished the orange juice. I was trying to be magnanimous in light of the discovery that tonight wasn’t going to involve Isabel Culpeper’s lips. This juice had changed my future in unpleasant ways. “What conditions?”
“Sometimes you do things like call me forty times a day and leave obscene voicemails and that’s why I don’t pick up.”
“Ridiculous. That doesn’t sound like me. I would never call an even number of times.”
“Also, sometimes you call only because you’re bored and not because you have anything to say, and I don’t want to be some sort of living Internet that you summon to entertain yourself.”
That did sound like me.
“So go home and write your album and then call me in the morning and tell me where we’re going this weekend.”
“I’ll be all alone.”
“We’re all alone, Cole.”
“That’s my little optimist,” I said.
After I hung up, I walked back to the house.
I thought about kissing Isabel in the shower.
I thought about how I had the evening alone in this strange New Age paradise.
I thought about working on the songs for the album.
I thought about calling Sam.
I thought about getting high in the bathroom.
I crossed the yard to the stucco house where Leyla was staying.
The sliding door to the yard stood open.
Inside, it was mostly just a white sofa and a lot of bamboo.
The evening light through the front windows made it look like an elegant eco-car showroom, minus a car. Leyla sat in the middle of the floor performing yoga or meditation. I couldn’t remember if they were actually different things. I thought meditation was the one that didn’t require special pants.
I knocked on the doorjamb.
“Lily. Leyla. Can I talk to you a second about tomorrow?
When we make the world a better place?”
Leyla blanketed me with a heavy-lidded, pacific gaze.
“Oh, you.”
“Yes, me. Funny story: That is also the first thing my mother said to me.”
Leyla didn’t laugh.
“I just thought I ought to let you know,” she said, “because I believe in honesty: I don’t respect your work or anything about your personal sense of life.”
“God. Well. That’s out there now.”
Leyla extended an arm and stretched. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”
I wondered if it was some kind of milestone, to be dissed by a hippie. “I wasn’t really reaching for the word good, but okay.
Do you want to play any variations on that note, or was once enough for you?”
She switched arms. Her speed ranged between excruciating and sloth-like. “People are totally expendable to you. They’re just, like, objects.”
“Okay, and?”
“And you are in it for the celebrity, not the music.”
“That is where you’re wrong, my friend,” I told her. “I am in it for the both of those things. Fifty-fifty, at least. Maybe even forty-sixty.”
“Have you even written the album we’re supposed to record in six weeks?”
“Now you’re harshing my buzz.”
It wasn’t even fun to mock someone who couldn’t tell that you were.
Leyla asked, “How do you know you’re not going to hate my playing, too?”
I gave her the Cole St. Clair smile to buy some time.
The thing was, I could audition for new bass players because Jeremy, my old bass player, had been sitting beside me. I could get another bassist because I wasn’t really replacing the old one. Jeremy hadn’t gone, just moved. But the drummer from NARKOTIKA wasn’t living in a house somewhere in the canyons.
He was dead in a hole, dead in a wolf’s body. And if I started thinking about drummers in an are-they-better-than-Victor way, I didn’t think I could handle it. I had stuffed my guilt and my grief into that grave. I’d said sorry to a dead man, and it was over.
Tenuously over.
I said, “I have a plan. Everything’s under control.”
She closed her eyes again. “Control is an illusion. Animals have no delusions of control.”
Suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted to be with Isabel and only Isabel so badly that I couldn’t believe I had to spend the evening alone here in this place with just Leyla to look at.
“You’re a hippie freak,” I said. I didn’t care if the cameras heard me.
“There are no hippie animals,” Leyla replied, “because every animal is, by its nature, at one with its surroundings.”
I knocked on the threshold and I stepped back over it into the yard. Desire was still burning in me. “I might fire you tomorrow.”
She didn’t open her eyes. “I am fine with whatever tomorrow brings.”
Which was a ridiculous sentiment. Tomorrow brought exactly what you told it to bring. If you told it nothing, nothing was what you got. I was done with nothing. I wanted something.