On a scorching Monday in May, I drove to Super King. The store’s tall windows reflected the towering palms thrashing and the sky was the color of an old steel blade. I stepped out of my car into a strange dry wind. Francisco leaned against the façade of the yellow building. He tossed a fruit pit into the garbage can.
“Did you just come from the ocean?” he said.
My surfboard was still tied to the roof racks and the ends of my hair were damp against my back. I’d gone out to the water early and spent a couple of hours riding choppy waves and trying not to run down any beginners.
“Topanga.” My favorite point break, more low-key and less crowded than Malibu.
Francisco built a mahogany bar at the restaurant in Beverly Hills where I cooked. There had always been a little heat between us. The last time I saw him he was loading tools into his truck; I waved to him but he didn’t see me. As a rule, I was a disciplined person and I prided myself on being a capable, exacting planner. But I decided to enter that parking lot instead of going home more or less on a whim. I didn’t expect to find Francisco there.
He led me inside, through the busy produce department where Super King employees in gold tee shirts replenished bright towers of cavalo nero and chard, past free-standing bins of fresh grape leaves, unshelled garbanzo beans, and almonds in their fuzzy green husks. We slipped through a pair of swinging doors that opened into a stockroom, and then, without turning to me, Francisco went out the back of the store.
* * *
I’d lived in Los Angeles for two years before I heard of Super King.
My friend Mara, who used to cook with me at a bistro in Atwater Village, pulled up in front of my garage. I’d just come home from buying rice, beans, cashews, some fruit, and a case of beer. As much as I enjoyed working with food, I didn’t care what I ate at home. Mara and I often commiserated about the perils of cooking professionally. She couldn’t bear to see a roomful of rich people stuffing their mouths with her glossy creations. I minded the complaints of bored customers that led to yelling at the cooks. Yelling at me. We wanted to make food for people who didn’t have showy, competitive appetites.
“It’s your day off. You could be surfing.” Mara laughed. “Why are you buying avocados in net bags? Avocados grow in abundance all over the city.”
In fact, avocados grew in the yard across the street, as well as figs, oranges, lemons and limes. Of course I’d noticed the trees before but I’d thought of them as ornamental. I stared at the lush greens only a few yards from where I parked my car every day. The branches were still in the heat. No one picked any of the fruit; it fell from the trees overripe and the gardeners cleared it away.
Mara told me I was a fool to be driving around the city like a dazed housewife. “Is that what you came all the way to L.A. for?” she said.
I was thirty-two years old and I thought that my life was hurtling along in an interesting way. I had a good job cooking four nights a week and plans to take a surfing trip to Costa Rica with my boyfriend Carl, who was sexy and quiet, albeit addicted to episodic television. We lived in a tiny bungalow that had a steeply sloped yard shaded by dragon trees and oleander.
“I forget myself sometimes.”
“Are you lost? What happened to you?” Mara put her car in gear. “I’m going to Super King. They sell French feta.” She blew me a kiss and zoomed off.
I’d never thought of myself that way but I knew Mara was right; she could be mean and bossy, but she wasn’t lost. She had a six-year old daughter, a job cooking for a family in Laurel Canyon and she made wild paintings and drawings of the desert. One of her drawings hung over my kitchen table: a quail hopping amid cholla cacti and mesquite.
The sound of jackhammers tearing up concrete made it impossible to concentrate on the book I tried to read. Half the houses on my block were under renovation. I thought of Mara driving toward the San Gabriels in her rattling diesel wagon, off to buy cheese for an heirloom tomato salad at a mysterious grocery store with a silly, hyperbolic name.
* * *
Behind Super King I expected to see a busy loading dock but instead Francisco and I walked down an empty wooden ramp the width of two wheelbarrows. A bamboo and palm frond shade structure swayed overhead. No one else was around. We followed a dirt path that wound through honeysuckle and agaves for about one hundred yards. Francisco appeared unhurried and I tried to move the same way. We reached a series of fifty thatched roof cabañas oriented around an oblong man-made lake. The vast settlement was surrounded by bamboo, loquats, pomegranates, quince, young pines, and, of course, avocado trees. Francisco guided me toward a cabaña with louvered wooden shades covering the windows (there was no glass or screen) that reminded me of surfing towns in Guerrero and Oaxaca.
“This is yours,” he said, “I am right next door. In case you need anything, day or night.”
I don’t know why I wasn’t afraid. Once Francisco left I felt relieved to be alone, grateful to be away from all my belongings, my obligations, which weren’t meaningful enough to me. Selling hours of my life and managing the little money I earned, tedious freeway driving over and around one bone-dry brown Los Angeles hill after another, trying to be on time, estimating and ordering food for the restaurant, carefully wielding knives and hot pans, predicting the tenor of Carl’s low moods to accommodate his entropic sloth – all of it required a degree of forethought and accuracy that zapped my interest. My efforts felt wasted, and now, however inadvertently, I’d walked away. I watched the sky turn black through the louvers before falling asleep on a narrow mat in the corner.
* * *
In the morning Francisco made me coffee before he left for work. Delicious steaming cinnamon coffee he cooked on a camp stove. The cement floor of his cabaña was painted blue; his bed was covered in saffron-yellow sheets and a woven blanket of wide brown, gold and red stripes. A shelf of books also held recent newspapers, in English and Spanish, and a short-wave radio. The windows were covered by the same louvered shades as mine.
Francisco returned in the late afternoon, hungry, dirty, too exhausted to speak. His footsteps told me the story of the hours he’d been away: the traffic he navigated between Super King and the canal in Venice Beach where he framed a new house for a film producer, the logistics of receiving lumber deliveries and delegating work to his crew, a short lunch with men he respected, the taste of the ocean air.
Francisco invited me to join him for a cold beer and a stroll around the lake. Our dusty feet began to move in step, the lizards shot from cactus to rock, the sun set over Mount Washington. Planes overhead descended into Burbank airport. None of this makes any sense, I thought, except for the tranquility of this uncanny place. Other people walked along or sat outside their cabañas eating dinner and reading, sometimes aloud. Now and then a baby cried until his mother or father went to hold him and tuck him back into bed. I had to fight off an anxious feeling, the need to know what would happen next.
* * *
I skimmed slices of mango for breakfast. Francisco plucked the sweet fruit off the end of my paring knife.
“What are the marks on your hands?” he said.
“Cuts and burns. From cooking.”
“Which is worse?”
“I would choose a cut, if I could choose.”
I helped Francisco with a square table he was building out of pallet wood; he wanted a place to sit and eat outside. He also cut the pieces to make two chairs. I sanded the wood in the shade of a Bottlebrush tree where hummingbirds and bees darted around my head. A brown dog found his way to my cabaña. I poured water into a stainless steel bowl and placed it beside him. He splashed as he drank and settled down to sleep in the open doorway. The honey-colored wood grew softer; the midday sun passed overhead; when I looked up Francisco was gone.
* * *
Outside Super King weed whackers and leaf blowers moaned and buzzed. I thought about Carl and the restaurant. How would I ever explain myself? The brown dog slept peacefully. I checked my pocket for money and found a few dollars to buy an ice cream or a tamarind soda, something cold and sweet, from the grocery. But instead I turned back to Francisco’s cabaña. I whistled the beginning of a tune he’d hummed when we walked around the lake at night and after a few moments he opened the door into the dark room. He slid his hand down my arm and I followed him to where he sat on the edge of his bed; a streak of sunlight cut through the louvers; an open book lay on the blue floor. Francisco’s movements were graceful and sleepy.
“I’ll read this to you,” he said.
I sat on the floor opposite, with my legs crossed in an effort to hide my feet, which were bare and filthy. A layer of sawdust clung to my skin and clothes. The sound of Francisco’s voice reading a poem about time and love in the guise of a harem of Cape Mountain zebras set me adrift. His voice touched me, its humor and strength, the echoes of all the places he had traveled, how tirelessly he had worked to come to this hidden corner of Los Angeles, thousands of miles from the city where he was born, where he had left everyone he knew.
“Why did you come here?”
“I was a teenager,” said Francisco. “I had to do something no one I knew had done. I crossed the border, I learned English; I work, I do what I please.”
I understood that to mean he’d chosen not to have family in California.
“Simple,” he added. “Nothing romantic.”
How long could we exist in this absurd, in-between place? Francisco poured water for us in ceramic mugs and we gulped it down. Then we went back to work. He glued and clamped the legs to the tabletop while I continued sanding the chair pieces. I’d never made anything that could be permanent. Meals and waves were finite. On nights I didn’t work I heated up a chicken potpie or a frozen pizza, Carl’s favorites. I served the food with a cold beer and we would sit together and talk about surfing. When Carl finished eating we would make love and then he would go flop on the couch and watch television. The sight of him lying there made me feel both tender toward him and angry. His passivity made me want to have sex with him again but once he was on that couch he became immovable.
* * *
Francisco and I worked in silence. Perhaps Super King would survive and I could stay there for the rest of my life reading novels, married to Francisco or one of my other neighbors. A man who lived at the far end of the lake had a spotted horse; I could marry him and take rides in the mountains and swim in the lake afterwards. The loud gurgle of my stomach interrupted my reverie. Francisco and I had only shared a couple of mangoes all morning. I dropped my sandpaper, wiped my hands on a rag and took off for the grocery. The few dollars in my pocket was enough for two pieces of tilapia, an eggplant, zucchini, garlic, onions, red and green peppers, tomatoes, olives. Some parsley and basil grew in a plot outside my cabaña. I cranked up Francisco’s little stove and heated a pan. Not until I was plating the fish, ratatouille and tapanade potatoes did I realize the brown dog had moved on.
“Do you think the dog just wandered off temporarily?”
Francisco shrugged, chewing.
“If he braves San Fernando Road, he’ll probably be run down by some jerk.”
“Thank you for this delicious food.”
Then he read aloud again, a story about a couple traveling across Spain, but again, my mind drifted away on the sound of Francisco’s deep, salty voice. My fingers smelled of cheap fish and onions and I hoped Francisco didn’t mind that I hadn’t washed my hands after eating and now sat in his home, leaning against his bed. He hadn’t washed his hands either but I didn’t care about that. Compulsive hand washing and strange soaps and gels that promise to kill every living thing you smear them on were more disgusting to me than having dirt and food on my hands. It may be a misperception, but I felt nostalgia for the time when I was a child and people were less fanatic about cleanliness. A little dust, a little clutter, a pile of yellowing newspapers, an hour or two of spare time, I remembered those things fondly.
Francisco continued to read. I went in and out of the story, one moment I followed the narrator’s description of the Spanish landscape, the passengers boarding the train in provincial towns, and the next moment I struggled to recall Carl’s face and our life in the bungalow. At that hour he would be sprawled out on the couch, hunkered down for prime time, shirt off, feet up. I didn’t miss him or his television.
Francisco seemed to concentrate easily and I could focus on what he read as long as I watched him closely. His hair, which had been very short when I first met him, had not been cut for many months and was a lustrous, mink black color. Judging from the lines around his eyes and mouth and across his forehead, he was probably in his mid-forties, though I could be off by five years in either direction. He hadn’t shaved recently and a rough pattern of whiskers splashed across his brown skin.
“Do you mind if I turn on a light?”
Without pausing in the story – the couple hurried through the rain toward a restaurant to meet her mother and sister – Francisco lit a glass lantern and placed it between us. In the flickering light I watched his lips pronounce the words. “He dried his face with a handkerchief.” Staring at him made me restless so I went outside. Someone grilled meat nearby and my mouth watered. I held my hands below my nose and took a long smell of the herbs on my skin. I decided to get my courage up to introduce myself to the neighbors and hopefully join their party. I had leftover ratatouille to contribute and I wouldn’t mind taking a turn on the grill; I had a knack for cooking over an open fire. I walked along the skewed paths between the cabañas and after some circling around, bumping into bicycles and tripping over rocks, I reached the spotted horse standing beneath a eucalyptus tree. A few yards away four men sat on plastic law chairs. They talked and laughed and ate with their fingers and drank beer from brown bottles they picked from a cooler. I felt unsure of myself for the first time since I had arrived at Super King.
A group of handsome men laughing is a thrilling sight to behold. Before I met Carl, during a romantic drought, I talked to Mara about a solo trip to Europe I planned, driving and sightseeing and surfing the Eisbach in Munich. “Unlike here, European men actually love women,” she said. “You’ll have a bonny hay boy if you want one.”
I gathered my nerve, tightened my ponytail, and took a purposeful, yet friendly step forward. Somewhere nearby a metallic pinging sound had started up. The four men stopped talking and looked in my direction. I hadn’t heard what they were discussing but that could be to my advantage; I would introduce a new topic. Snakes might work. I took another big step forward and all bonny four of them stood and mumbled low greetings. The pinging persisted, light and erratic, and I turned to locate the eerie sound. Once, at a friend’s house in Tujunga, I’d killed a rattlesnake with a garden shovel. The pinging stopped and Francisco approached from behind, smiling
I pointed to the spotted horse and vaguely at the man I thought was its rider.
“What?” said Francisco.
“I’m going to marry that guy.”
The men were still quiet until they heard us laugh and after a few seconds they started talking again.
“I used to work with him,” Francisco said. “He’s a carpenter too. His name is… I don’t remember. Juan? Maybe. He knows everything about horses.” He rubbed his eyes. “I need a coffee.”
I followed Francisco back to his cabaña where we sat outside on a makeshift bench (two planks elevated by two stacks of bricks) drank espressos and smoked cigarettes. We watched the crescent moon and all the airplanes criss-crossing in the navy sky.
“It’s crowded up there tonight.”
“I like it,” said Francisco.
The wind had picked up, rattling the palms, and I felt restless again.
“I got tired of all the anticipating, or in the absence of anticipating, the complaining. Also laugh tracks, which can send me into a murderous rage.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I only meant to say that I understand what’s going on here. I don’t feel afraid, I feel amused and optimistic.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Francisco.
“I hate waiting. But I don’t want to be a quitter, either. This is a dilemma I face over and over. We should finish building those chairs.”
“Come and see something,” Francisco whispered. “I think you will like it.”
We walked around the back of his cabaña where he had set up a tiny roofed-over area to store wood and tools. On top of the roof was a plastic barrel. I didn’t immediately make sense of what I was looking at.
“Take your clothes off.”
His tone didn’t match what he was asking. He stood a few feet away from me, sliding off his shoes and unbuttoning his jeans. I understood what was going to happen when I pulled my gray cotton dress over my head and hung it on the corner of a plywood scrap. I stood close to Francisco, both of us naked in the darkness, but not touching.
“Ready?”
“Ready!”
He pulled a rope and the barrel tilted and warm water splashed us unevenly.
“I love to take a nighttime shower under the stars,” he said, laughing.
“So do I.” I laughed also, remembering outdoor showers at the beach when I was a little girl and all the sand that collected in my bikini bottoms.
The last planes zoomed overhead. For a few moments I was afraid to meet Francisco’s eyes so I stared at my feet, pale against the black rubber doormat we stood on. The water poured over our slick bodies and we laughed long and hard. I looked up into the spray recalling my pre-Super King days, sitting in traffic, doodling in margins, waiting for a television show to end, always wishing something different would happen. I felt amazed at my new home behind the giant grocery, separate but still a part of the city, naked beneath the sun-heated water.
Then the water ran out and a warm wind crossed my body.
“Let’s go to your place, we never go there,” said Francisco.
Inside I lit two lanterns. The brown dog snored beside my mat in the corner. I was so happy to see him curled up on the bare floor. Francisco and I slipped under the covers. Yes, we kissed and held each other with ridiculous urgency, but that was not the point. No one knew where I was. But I wasn’t lost.
I lay awake for a while, hungry, watching the sky through the louvers. Francisco slept heavily. Between the low and distant sounds of the rest of Los Angeles and the strangers closest to me, I heard a soft whistling that could have been Francisco’s breath, or a snake. The brown dog rearranged himself. I wanted to eat, not eggs or any usual breakfast food. I’d poke around the meat department first thing and try to befriend the butcher. I felt eager to cook, to get my hands greasy and bloody, searing lamb or beef tenderloin or something more complicated than what I usually made, maybe paella or a fish soup. The world of fresh and dried peppers needed to be explored. Donuts and coffee could be great before deveining shrimp. At any rate, it would be a surprise, something to share later with whoever was around when I finished.
* * *
Infinite FiveChapters continues tomorrow with “H.S.S.H.” by Victor Lodato.
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