I was like a shark too-or like the homeless people. I needed to walk every day, wherever I was, traveling for a piece or just home. I needed constant movement. And every time I walked somewhere, I thought of Grady Jackson. Now that I was thirty-five, it seemed like my mind placed those rememories, as my mother called them, into the days just to assure me of my own existence.
I’d have time in the Garment District before lunch. One thing about walkin fools-they had to have shoes.
I had on black low-heeled half-boots today, and flared jeans, and a pure white cotton shirt with pleats that I’d gotten in Oaxaca. It was my uniform, for when I had to move a long way through a city. Boots, jeans, and plain shirt, and my hair slicked back and held in a bun. Nothing flashy, nothing too money or too poor. A woman walking-you wanted to look like you had somewhere to go, not like you were rich and ready to be robbed, and not like a manless searching female with too much jewelry and cleavage.
Down Sunset, the movement in my feet and hips and the way my arms swung gently and my little leather bag bumped my side calmed me. My brain wasn’t thinking about bills or my brother Lafayette, who’d just left his wife and boys, or that Al Green song I’d heard last night that made me cry because no one would ever sing that to me now and slide his hands across my back, like the boys did when we were at house parties back in Rio Seco. When we were young. “I’m so glad you’re mine,” Al sang, and his voice went through me like the homemade mescal I’d tried in Oaxaca, in an old lady’s yard where only a turkey watched us.
No one I knew now, in this life, at all the parties and receptions and gallery openings, felt like that-like the boys with us back home, in someone’s yard after midnight. Throats vibrating close to our foreheads, hands sliding across our shoulder blades. Girl, just-Just lemme get a taste now. Come on.
When I was home lately, I had trouble working. I looked at old things like my mother’s clothespins and a canvas bag I used to wear across my shoulder when we picked oranges in my father’s grove.
But walking, I was who I had become-a travel writer everyone wanted to hire.
I’d written about the Bernese Oberland for Conde Nast, about Belize for Vogue, about Brooklyn for Traveler.
I passed vacant lots tangled with morning glories like banks of silver-blue coins, and the sheared-off cliffs below an old apartment complex, where shopping carts huddled like ponies under the Grand Canyon.
I looked at my watch. 8:45. I smelled all the different coffees wending through the air from doughnut shops and convenience stores. Black bars were slid aside like stiffened spiderwebs. Every morning in late summer, my mother and I would brush aside the webs from the trees in our yard, the ones made each night by desperate garden spiders. Here, everyone was desperate to get the day started and make that money.
My cell rang while I was waiting for the light at Beaudry.
“FX?” It was Rick Schwarz, the editor.
“Yup,” I said.
“So what does that stand for?” He laughed. He was in his car.
“It stands for my name, Rick.”
He laughed again. “We still on for 1:00? Clifton’s Cafeteria?”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“So-I don’t know what you look like. You never have a contributor’s photo.”
“I look absolutely ordinary,” I said, my body lined up with a statue in the window of a botanica. “See you at 1.”
I stood there for a minute, the sun behind me, tracing the outline of the Virgen de Soledad. These people must be from Oaxaca, because this virgin, with her black robe in a wide triangle covered with gold, her face severe and impassive, was their patron saint. I had prayed before her in a cathedral there, because my mother asked me to do so each place I went. My mother’s house was full of saints.
Across Beaudry, I could see the mirrored buildings glinting like sequined disco dresses in the hot sun. My phone rang again.
“Fantine?”
“Yes, Papa,” I said. I tried to keep walking, but then he was silent, and I had to lean against a brick building in the shade.
“That your tite phone?” he said. My little phone-my cell.
“Yes, Papa.”
“You walk now?”
“I’m going downtown,” I said. “Does Mama want something? Some toys?” I could stop by the toy district today, if my nephews wanted something special.
My father said, “Fantine. Somebody kill Glorette. You better come home, oui. Tomorrow. Pay your respect, Fantine.”
Then he hung up.
No one ever called me by my name. I had been FX Antoine for ten years, since I decided to become a writer. Only my family and my Rio Seco friends knew my name at all.
That was why I’d always loved L.A., especially Downtown. No one knew who I was. No one knew what I was. People spoke to me in Spanish, in Farsi, in French. My skin was the color of walnut shells. My hair was black and straight and held tightly in a coil. My eyes were slanted and opaque. I just smiled and listened.
But Glorette-even if she’d worn a sack, when she walked men would stare at her. They wanted to touch her. And women hated her.
Glorette had skin like polished gold, and purple-black eyes, and brows like delicate crow feathers, and her lips were full and defined and pink without lipstick. She was nearly iridescent-did that fade when blood stopped moving? Now she was dead.
I bit my lip and walked, along Temple and down to Spring Street, where crowds of people moved quickly, all of them with phone to ear, or they spoke into those mouthpieces like schizophrenics. And the homeless people were talking quietly to themselves or already shouting. Everyone was speaking to invisible people.
My father’s voice had lasted only a few minutes. I don’t talk into no plastic and holes, he always said. Like breathin on a pincushion.
He’d said Glorette was dead.
I stopped at the El Rey, one of the tiny shacks with a dropdown window that sold burritos and coffee. My father, when he came from Louisiana to California and began working groves, learned to eat burritos instead of biscuits and syrup. I wanted horrible coffee, not good coffee like my mother’s, like Glorette’s mother’s, like all the women I’d grown up with on my small street. All of them from Louisiana, like my parents. The smell of their coffee beans roasting every morning, and the sound of the tiny cups they drank from even after dark, on the wood porches of our houses, when the air had cooled and the orange blossoms glowed white against the black leaves.
But the man who handed me the coffee smiled, and his Mayan face-eyes sharp and dark as oleander leaves, teeth square as Chiclets-looked down into mine. I put the coins in his palm. Pillows of callus there. I sipped the coffee and he said, “Bueno, no?”
So good-cinnamon and nighttime and oil. “Que bueno,” I said. “Gracias.” He thought I was Mexican.
Then tears were rolling down my face, and I ducked into an alley. Urine and beer and wet newspaper. Glorette was dead. I closed my eyes.
Glorette-when we were fourteen, we walked two miles to high school, and her long stride was slow and measured as a giraffe’s. Her legs long and thin, her body small, and the crescent of white underneath the purple-black iris that some-how made her seem as if she were sleepily studying everyone. Her hair to her waist, but every day I coiled it for her into a bun high on her skull. All day, men imagined her hair down along her back, tangled in their hands. I wore mine in a bun because I didn’t want it in my way while I did my homework and wrote my travel stories about places I’d made up. Always islands, with hummingbirds and star fruit because I liked the name.
Every boy in Rio Seco loved her. But I talked too much smack. I couldn’t wait to leave. If someone said, “Fantine, you think you butter, but your ass is Nucoa like everybody else,” I’d say, “Yet all you deserve is Crisco.”