She walked faster. Faster and faster. She didn’t even notice that above Gower as it crossed Sunset the slightly sloping Hollywood sign was visible through the afternoon haze. From Gower you could see a red-tile-and-adobe church with a tower and a cross atop the tower. And only from this particular vantage point of Gower and Sunset did the cross seem to punctuate the “Hollywood.” She didn’t notice this today, although it was just the sort of thing she liked to notice, some hyper-unsubtle Babylon irony, one that you could imagine a fifties soundtrack punctuating grandly with telltale-sudden-realization music. One that surely was in some film, at some time.
Lorene watched water collect in pools on the white tile floor.
“Keep breathing,” he said. The water moved from rivulets to tiny pools. Eventually, a puddle. It collected, swelling, and then married other nearby puddles. The room must have a drain.
“Concentrate on your breathing only,” he said.
She was naked, perched on a bench with her back to him. She felt his hands — large, soft — on her lower back.
“Expand your diaphragm. Expel all your breath slowly.”
Mina walked from Max’s apartment off Rossmore to Beverly Boulevard. There she turned right and walked to La Brea. She moved briskly, attaining a sort of rhythm she found relaxing, even liberating. She was damp from the shower, and the hot, flat heat of the afternoon streets slowly penetrated her skin, replacing outward dampness incrementally with her own perspiration. She wore no stockings, just bare legs under a cotton dress and flat shoes. She felt peasantish and pure, but with a sort of sexy Sicilian-widow world-weariness. She walked along La Brea down to Wilshire. She walked, quickly as she could, west on Wilshire toward the streamlined moderne facade of the former May Company Department Store dimly visible in the hazy distance. This was it, the Miracle Mile. The first shopping district built for car shoppers instead of pedestrians. She was in true enemy territory now. She walked defiantly on, window-shopping the cul-de-sacs of parking lots, strip mall-ettes, and monolithic gray-faced buildings set back, way back, from the street. There was, miraculously, still a sidewalk. She laughed at this, their lack of commitment. Total car culture shouldn’t have sidewalks, should it?
Lorene’s Talk-n-Touch Advanced Well-Being Therapy sessions with Beryl were even rougher than basic touch therapy. She sat naked on a towel-covered bench in a steam-filled room. At some point she would have to speak, not incessant rantings, but speak out of some inner hypnotic state. Beryl would lightly touch pressure points on her back, his hands hovering over energy points. Where energy collected, tension would beexcised through speech. She felt dizzy. When she took deep breaths, she felt her breasts rise. She was steamy wet; her nipples felt hard and swollen. She looked down with a careful pride. Still perfect, beautiful breasts at thirty-two. Not her original breasts, of course, but from this angle the scars from her breast augmentation were invisible, she had a flawless, natural-looking C cup. They looked even larger, though, because she was so slender and the skin was so white. She thought, I want the whole world to see my breasts. She almost laughed at the absurdity of this, but it was halfway true. Here was the greatest cultural asset a girl could have (attained at no small expense) and no one had seen them in years.
“You can begin speaking at any time, Lorene. Just speak without editing. Just let the words flow out of you.” Christ. She closed her eyes. His hands were on her lower back. They felt good. She wouldn’t mind showing Beryl her breasts. Forget Beryl, call the old man himself, St. John. He could put his hands on her breasts. If the warm, large healer hands moved from back to front, if they started to rub and pull at her nipples very gently — Lorene felt the dampness between her legs, the way it was so easy to distinguish from the steamy dampness over the rest of her body. It was a darker wetness, a deeper kind of heat. She moved slightly on the cotton towel on the bench and let her vaginal muscles contract stealthily. The discretion of female sexuality, its secret demureness, its endless interiority— in her case, particularly so. Yes, it was secret — solitary and contained at all times.
“Speak,” he said. “Breathe and empty yourself.” How could she? She could say she was thinking of his hands on her breasts — or how she hadn’t been touched in that way in so long. (Was it truly years? Why was everything in her life suddenlymeasurable in years? Years seemed like months, months like weeks.) How long had it been? Since she saw Michael in the hospital. No, but that would be a nice fantasy to stick with, something she could almost make true by sheer will. Why not, if that’s better than the truth. More truthful than the truth. No, the last one was Dean, of course. His name gave her an inward wince. Lorene told herself there was nothing to be ashamed of — she should regret nothing. But Dean was as far from Michael as possible, as uncomplicated and unmindful as they come. But that was a fantasy, too. She hadn’t wanted Dean because he was the opposite of Michael. She had wanted Dean because he was great-looking and edgy and aloof and a bit nasty. It was her vanity. She found him very sexy.
Mina took only forty-five minutes to finish the walk to the hotel on Wilshire. She was, of course, late to meet Scott. She had never gone from Max to Scott on the same day. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t like it, but she had to walk somewhere — she didn’t want to be home or at work. And she felt needed by Scott. Max hardly touched her anymore anyway. She wanted Scott’s devotion. He was there at the bar, waiting, obviously relieved to see her. It was touching, almost, his ordering a drink for her, clutching her hand, acting as if his good luck would be snatched from him at any moment, or if he might be arrested for desire or pleasure. It was endlessly appealing, but then she felt sorry for him, and removed and suddenly bored. Here’s the drink, now what to say? Drink it fast, get it in your head.
Lorene had slept with Dean and then feigned indifference. Dean flirted with her friends and seemed to hardly notice. Then they would collide through all the rooms in Lorene’s apartment, having frenzied, intense movie sex. SometimesDean would leave before dawn. It went on for several months. But the sex wasn’t really good. It was department-store-lingerie,Cosmo-quiz tacky sex: it satisfied briefly and then bored her completely. And when she no longer wanted Dean, it wasn’t gradual. It went all at once, with no warning. She just felt irritation and a vague revulsion in his presence. He didn’t read that right, he thought it was part of their game. It worried her — that he didn’t realize things had come to an end. He pursued her anyway. He began to hang around her restaurants. She ignored him and was utterly unresponsive. He began to sleep with her waitresses. Lorene wondered if he spoke about her, about the sex they had had. She started to feel the price of things, of the way he was still in her life even if she didn’t want him to be. The low-grade menace of it — because surely by now he saw it was no game and he just lingered out of spite. She felt the weight of not being able to make ex-lovers disappear. It amazed her that Mina managed so well. Without all this bulimic self-reproach.