Losing Clementine Read online

  “You mean, like, spiritually?” he asked.

  “I need to practice giving injections. Would you recommend a chicken for that?”

  “I sure wouldn’t recommend a frozen chicken.” He pushed off the case and let his bulky shoulders settle down away from his ears. He put his hairy fingers in his lab coat pockets. “Fresh one might be all right.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  He disappeared through the swinging doors behind which, I presumed, were the dismemberment tables where chickens, pigs, and wild-caught Alaskan salmon went to be disassembled into their most delicious parts. He came back with my chicken wrapped in white butcher’s paper and plopped it down on the scale.

  “One T-bone, also,” I said.

  “You going to give that shots, too?”

  “No, that one I’m going to eat.”

  At home, I learned the hard way that Chuckles needed to be shut in the bathroom. He had no respect for scientific experimentation.

  I had gone hunting in my metal supply lockers for the rubber doctor’s gloves Jenny had used when mixing something she considered particularly toxic. Raw chicken juices seemed at least equivalent to cadmium. I wanted to kill myself, not get the runs.

  Chuckles had taken advantage of my distraction and hopped from the floor to a stool to the kitchen counter, launching himself onto his prey as if it might sprout feathers and take flight. He’d gotten his fangs good and sunk into the ass end of the chicken when I looked up and yelled something at once profane and unintelligible. Ears flat to his overbred, smooshed-in head, Chuckles dragged the corpse, which was at least as big as he was, backward across the counter. Like Harrison Ford facing a leap from the top of a dam in The Fugitive, Chuckles threw himself and the bird over the side. It was a blur of cold, dead meat and fur, and it landed with a thud on the polished concrete floor.

  “Chuckles!” I yelled.

  I am almost certain I heard him let out an “oomph” as the air rushed from his lungs, and prey and predator rolled to a stop near the fridge. All four of Chuckles’s legs were wrapped around the decapitated bird, holding it tight to his fuzzy chest like some horrific, interspecies 69 sexual position. His eyes were wild with meaty fervor as he unwrapped himself and tried to pull the five-pound bird under the kitchen table.

  “Chuckles, you monkey’s ass!”

  I grabbed him by his scruff and separated him from his mate-slash-meal before carrying him at arm’s length into the bathroom. I considered holding him down in the tub and squirting shampoo all over his germy body, but—if we’re being honest here—it wasn’t a battle I was sure I could win. And even if I did, there were revenge scenarios to consider.

  “If you give me the flaming shits,” I told him instead, “so help me God, I will feed you to the neighbor’s golden retriever.”

  Then I dropped him on the bathmat and shut the door.

  Chuckles yowled like a baby being fed into a meat grinder and stuck a white paw under the crack at the bottom of the door.

  It took half a bottle of Lysol to make the kitchen right again. Afterward, I filled one of the repurposed glass jars I used for mixing glue solutions with tap water and dribbled in some India ink. I’d slept with a man for a couple of months who’d been diabetic. He’d left syringes in the bathroom, which I’d moved into the supply locker after moving him out of my bed. You never knew what would turn out to be useful. I filled one of the syringes with the diluted ink, like I’d seen people do on medical soap operas. Then, with the web’s “most trusted medical site” open on my screen, I slid the needle slowly into the chicken’s breast muscle before depressing the plunger with steady pressure. Ink emptied from the plastic cylinder and bloomed black under the translucent, creamy white skin, bringing up what looked like a very painful bruise.

  I tried it a half-dozen more times until the carcass looked like it had been taken out into the alley and rolled for its wallet and watch. By then, it was also well into room temperature territory and starting to smell like, well, something dead. I put it in the fridge to arrest the stink or at least contain it.

  If Jenny were here, she would’ve made a bologna sandwich with tomatoes, mayonnaise, and cheese by now. She’d have put it on a plate and left it along with a Diet Coke on the worktable behind the easels next to the tubes of acrylic paint. My stomach growled, and I thought about calling her and leaving a message on her voice mail or maybe just listening to her message and hanging up. Maybe she missed making my sandwiches, too.

  Before I embarrassed myself, I held my breath, opened the refrigerator door, and pulled out some leftover Tibetan food. Inside the cardboard box, the curry had congealed into an orange mass. I put the whole thing, take-out container and all, into the microwave and hoped for the best.

  To distract myself from Jenny, I found a Web page for Parker, Combs, and Jimenez, an accounting firm “serving its clients since 1965.” Aunt Trudy had faults, but her memory wasn’t one of them. The page was just as gray and conservative as you would expect the Web site of an accounting firm to be. There were school-photo–style head shots of the partners along with short biographies that made you hope you would never be seated next to one of them at a dinner party. There was no mention of my father or any other employees. No photos of company picnics or even the office lobby. Though I did find a brief company history and quotes from satisfied clients extolling the firm’s core values of “transparency, accuracy, and accountability.” You’d have thought they were running for public office.

  I tried to imagine my father in a beige cubicle somewhere in Encino, these men in the head shots behind him like a Greek chorus. I tried to picture him toiling for decades to be as transparent and accurate as possible, his hair going gray and his posture getting more and more stooped over time. He was vague in my memory, a compilation of physical traits like the description of a fugitive on the evening news. Caucasian. Above average height. Brown hair. Last seen wearing a mustache. It wasn’t a very clear picture.

  I plugged the address into my phone and looked down. I was wearing the same work boots as the day before, the same jeans worn to strings around the ankle hems, a different ribbed tank top. At least I’d changed my shirt. Blue paint had settled into my fingerprints and the creases in the palms of my hand. It had gotten under my short fingernails and made a home around my cuticles.

  After letting Chuckles out of the bathroom and taking a shower, my hands were no less blue, but my black hair was damp, combed straight, and smelled like juniper shampoo. I put a drop of Moroccan oil in my hands and worked it through to the ends that just touched my shoulders. I made a part on the left and tucked the bobbed ends behind my right ear. Makeup is more mysterious to me than alchemy, but I took out a pressed compact made of swirled beiges and browns, golds and bronzers. I touched a big, fluffy brush to the center and put it to my cheeks, then coated the pad of my finger and rubbed more across my eyelids. They were crepier than they used to be. The skin wasn’t as taut, and the lines around my eyes had settled in for keeps. I pulled the glass stopper from a bottle of floral perfume and touched it to the soft indentions under my jaw.

  My study of the womanly arts had been interrupted. My mother and younger sister died when I was fifteen. If my father had just waited around seven more years, he could’ve saved himself the trouble of having to leave them.

  He’d disappeared after we went to bed. I don’t know what time. Mom never said, and he didn’t wake me up. My sister and I got up the next morning and ate pancakes off paper plates and watched Scooby-Doo reruns on television. All three of us thought he’d come back. For a while, two of us didn’t really understand he was gone. All he took was a suitcase and his hot rod car, which had a small tear in the passenger-side seat I had made with scissors. When we went to school on Monday, he wasn’t back, and my sister had to go to the school nurse because she was too upset and it was disturbing the class. My mother came to get her. I didn’t know that until I went to ride the school bus home, and my sister wasn’t on it. I f
lipped out pretty good, because third-graders get that way when family members start disappearing en masse. He didn’t send a postcard or call, and he never did come back. Sometime after Christmas, we stopped expecting him to. By summer break, Mom had thrown out his underwear and pants but not his shoes, because shoes aren’t cheap like underwear.

  Encino is a small community in the San Fernando Valley smashed up against and completely indistinguishable from all other Valley communities. You can drive from one to the other, passing the same dry cleaners, dubious sushi restaurants, and gas stations, without so much as a sign to mark your transition. It does not, frankly, matter much where you are. If anything at all marks Encino from its clone neighbors, it’s that it isn’t aging quite as well. Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills have kept their figures and shown up on time for regular collagen injections while Encino is really starting to let itself go.

  I took the 101 either north or west, depending on which sign you happened to read. That’s one of the joys of the L.A. freeway system. I exited onto a main commercial street and waited at a light every four blocks until the chandelier and rug stores next to the nail salons and curry take-out shops faded into tall and then taller business towers. Afternoon Valley sun, hotter and brighter than suns across the rest of the country, reflected in the dark windows that focused the light like giant magnifying glasses, threatening to burn us all up like ants.

  I parked on a side street at a broken meter, prayed for no ticket, and walked through the front door. It was heavy and whooshed open with the suck of air-conditioning and atmospheric pressure. No guard kept watch over the large black desk or the white plastic orchid that looked liked overdeveloped labia. The building smelled like printer toner and recycled air, and the sudden change in temperature turned the sweat on my back to slushy ice. The directory by the elevators listed Parker, Combs, and Jimenez on the seventh floor. Lucky.

  The elevator was lined with mirrors, which I tried not to look into because if I looked I’d start fussing, and seven floors wasn’t enough to fix what was wrong. I watched the floor readout tick up in glowing numbers, and at seven a bell dinged and the doors slid open. The wall in front of my face, the one on the other side of the lobby that should’ve held some sort of sign, maybe brass, telling me what lair I had entered, was blank and scratched. Hanging hooks still protruded from the drywall, and someone had spackled over but not yet painted a small hole near the baseboard.

  I stepped off anyway. To my right, the clear glass entry doors were shut, and beyond them the reception area was empty. A built-in desk to the left stood as lonely as the one downstairs. Lonelier even. No plastic flower. There was no other furniture. No signs. No fluorescent-light–loving office plants. A bit of brown packing paper was wadded up and lying on the gray industrial carpet.

  I tried the door. Locked. I would’ve been surprised if it hadn’t been. I turned my back, pressed the button to call the elevator again, and didn’t look back.

  Downstairs in the lobby, I walked to the desk and waited. A woman in a black skirted suit came in from the street and click-clack-clacked her way across the marble to the elevator, which opened as soon as she pressed the button. Still, no one came to the desk. It was quiet except for faint voices too high and fast and excited to have anything to do with corporate accounting. I followed them around behind the desk and put my ear to a plain black door painted to match the surrounding walls. Now I could make out a Spanish-language soap opera, the one the cleaning service people who came once a week to my studio liked to watch. The star wore a lot of silver bangles and favored off-the-shoulder blouses that showed off improbably round, full breasts. She looked as if she should be advertising Tecate. She probably did.

  I opened the door. A security guard in gray sat with his back to me. The air smelled a little sweet and a little like rotten skunk. The front legs of the guard’s chair smashed down as he tipped it back flat and spun around to face me, smoke curling out of his nostrils. I was willing to bet the television in front of him, one of three, was meant for security tapes. On it, a man and woman were embracing passionately while music swelled and the credits started to play.

  I smiled. He didn’t.

  “Off-limits, ma’am. I need you to wait outside.”

  I didn’t care about the pot, but I didn’t much like being called “ma’am.”

  “¿Quiere compartir?”

  He had the joint down by his side, a little behind his back. I stood there quietly while he weighed the risk. His eyebrows pinched together over his nose, and I thought I’d be sent away. Then he relaxed.

  He passed me the joint, and I took a hit, turning my head to the side as I exhaled and handed it back.

  “What happened to Parker, Combs, and Jimenez on the seventh floor? They move?”

  My Spanish was too slow, clunky, and unreliable for a whole conversation.

  “They closed,” he said. “Packed up everything and had a big auction for the furniture.” He shrugged. “I bought a couch. It was a good price.”

  “Forwarding address?”

  He shook his head and took another drag off the joint, which had burned almost to his fingers. He stubbed it out in a bright green plastic ashtray and blew out the last of the smoke.

  “I don’t know anything. They owe you money or something?”

  “I’m looking for one of the employees. It’s a family matter.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  I heard the elevator ding in the lobby and so did he.

  “A lot of the people who worked there went to another place in Studio City, a big place with its own building and parking lot. Gave them free gym memberships and everything.”

  “You know the name?”

  “Something Mayer, like Oscar Mayer, you know?”

  A whoosh from the front door and more clackity-clacking.

  “Thanks, man,” I said. “For the puff, too.”

  He nodded and turned back to his T.V.

  “All dressed up for nothing,” I told Chuckles when I got home over an hour later. While I’d been chasing geese, the 101 had been filling up and overflowing, backing up cars onto the entrance ramps. There were stoplights that let only one or two cars merge at a time. It was supposed to alleviate gridlock. It did not.

  Chuckles was standing on the worktable and raised his smooshed nose toward my neck when I bent to pet him. He sniffed and turned his face. He disapproved of the perfume.

  The answering machine blinked the number 4 at me. That was four more messages than were usually there when I got home. I poured what was left of the Jack Daniel’s bottle into a juice glass and pressed the PLAY button.

  Carla’s voice came out of the speaker all four times, each time angrier and more desperate than the last. She threatened to call Jenny. She threatened to sue me. She did call Jenny. I hit DELETE after all of them then stripped naked and dumped the clothes in the overflowing hamper after first pulling the ones from that morning out.

  I put my gray denim work apron on over my tank top and jeans and went to mixing acrylics. I made up a dove gray with a little blue, the same color as the guard’s uniform. I mixed a lot of it and chose a good-size brush and started at the bottom of the canvas. I laid it on heavily and blended upward. Darker at the bottom and feathering until it disappeared into the gesso white. It wasn’t enough. I added a little black and blended it into the mix on the palette. Blend, blend, blend. I loaded my brush and went at the base again, brushing up toward the center. I added some dark, dark green and blended. I brought the color up higher and higher until only a strip toward the top stayed white. Then I started a new mix, blending more blues this time. I started at the top and painted down, down, down. The bristles of the brush scratched at the canvas surface as the paint deposited and left the bristles dry and unlubricated.

  I took a step back and then forward and mixed again, yellow this time, using my brush to pull some of the blue and gray mixes from before into it, making it murky and dirty. I started in the middle wh
ere the two colors already on the canvas met and became one. Beginning on the left, I made long strokes up and down, blending in both directions at once. One-third of the way across the canvas, I stopped and left it.

  27 Days

  Chuckles was yowling inside his carrier as if all the vets in California were after his testicles. I put him in the backseat and went to toss my bag into the trunk.

  Mrs. Epstein, who was nearing Aunt Trudy’s age, was standing in front of her own trunk unloading cases of soda and oversized bottles of dishwashing detergent and toilet paper. She stared at me out of the corner of her eye. I had not been forgiven for the teapot incident, nor should I have been. I did, after all, lack remorse. I was a hardened criminal.

  “You going on a trip?” she asked, looking at my bag as if it might be full of venomous snakes.

  “Yep.” I avoided eye contact, closed the trunk, and opened the driver’s door, which unmuffled the sounds of brutal torture coming from inside the carrier. It was possible Chuckles was throwing his body against the metal door. Soon he’d start expelling fluids from every orifice. I hoped to be at Richard’s house when that happened.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Tijuana.”

  “You can’t just drive to Tijuana.” She dropped her detergent to the concrete floor with a thud, barely missing her off-brand tennis shoe. “You could be kidnapped and turned into a drug runner.” She pointed at me. Her finger was weighed down with a large silver and turquoise ring. “I saw a program on CNBC where women were forced to be prostitutes and carry cocaine in their lady parts.”

  I hadn’t considered exactly how I was going to smuggle the tranquilizers back across the border. That was an interesting possibility.

  “Thanks for the warning,” I said, dropping into the driver’s seat and pulling the belt across me. “Have a nice week.”

  “There is something wrong with that cat,” she spat, just as I slammed the door closed and pushed the button to raise the gate.