Lauren found the sleeper car area of the train claustrophobic and labyrinthine. She walked from one end of the car to the other, twice passing the door marked “shower” and the two doors opposite marked “toilet,” and came again to a dead end and turned back around. It was such a small confined space and yet there seemed to be no way out. The minute the train had begun its slow roll everyone had shut themselves into their private roomettes and drawn their curtains, leaving Lauren feeling on the outside and inside of everything simultaneously.
Hours earlier in the Chicago train station, Lauren had found herself seated across from a woman her age and the woman’s considerably younger boyfriend, a man the woman referred to as “baby babe.” Baby-babe wore a bright orange hoodie and basketball shorts and looked like a druggier version of a popular young actor, by which, Lauren assessed, he was good looking in a slightly reckless manner. He reminded Lauren of a short story she’d read and typed out and memorized years ago, for an undergrad literature course before dropping out of school. In the short story, a man is holed up in a Holiday Inn with his girlfriend, the most beautiful woman he ever saw, shooting drugs, eating steaks, making love, puking and fighting. Lauren had for a long time after reading that story tried to imagine what it would be like to live inside of it, in a chain hotel with such a man, doing those things, and when she’d imagined it, the man had looked, she now realized, a lot like baby-babe.
“What about Gamestop?” the woman had said, staring at her phone while at the same time thumbing it.
“Gamestop won’t have DVD players,” baby-babe had said, thumbing his own phone.
“Target? It’s a nine minute walk from here.”
“Far walk.”
“No, it’s not. It’s less than two miles, roundtrip. I’ll go, baby-babe,” the woman had said, one arm already in her jacket.
“Okay, okay, let me put my sweats on,” baby-babe had said.
Lauren had watched baby-babe pull his sweats up over his basketball shorts without appearing to look up from her newspaper. It had been obvious to her for years that she was too controlled a person to do drugs in a hotel room with someone like baby-babe, even as some part of her envied the woman’s close proximity to him and his basketball shorts, the thin black nylon of which intrigued her.
She sat a while in her roomette, staring out the window trying to imagine what DVDs baby-babe and the woman might be watching, something with Vin Diesel or The Rock, maybe. Then she wondered if she’d ever seen a movie featuring either of those actors and she couldn’t remember if she had. Greg had probably watched some or all of the films without her, on his laptop in his campus office, both of them enjoying, separately, his time away from the house.
When she’d first been shown her roomette by the car attendant, Terence, who went, he said, by T, she’d left her curtain open. She’d sat, legs crossed, on the tiny, blue couch across from another identical tiny, blue couch, alternately flipping through the complimentary train magazine and looking out the window. In person, the roomette was much tinier than it’d appeared on the Amtrack website. Lauren felt as though she was sitting within a dollhouse’s replication of a movie set. Every item was miniature and precious. A silver wall-mounted reading lamp, a console containing spaces for the setting of water bottles and magazines, a hook onto which several hangers had been hung, a small control panel with buttons that dimmed the lights and forced air.
Lauren pushed the button that increased the forced air. She could feel the beginnings of tiny sweat beads forming on her forehead, a slight mustiness in the folds under her arms. It probably just took some time to acclimate to the smallness of train travel, she told herself. She was thinking of the hockey game Greg and she had attended earlier in the year. Their seats had been in the very highest row and the first twelve minutes both Greg and she had felt lightheaded and dizzy. There had been the unavoidable feeling that any slight movement would send them toppling head first down over the many rows of hockey fans, onto the ice. They had sat rigid and upright the entire first period, unable to eat or drink or to peer down at the game. By the final period, however, they’d both been on their feet with the rest of the crowd, singing and dancing to old favorite rock songs; the dizziness having completely left them somewhere in the middle of the second period.
She couldn’t imagine if Greg were here now, how she would feel. The roomette had been designed as a space for two people. There was a top bunk that folded out from the wall overhead and a seatbelt like strap to secure over the person. Lauren found it challenging to share a house with Greg, let alone a roomette. He’d only recently moved back in after having spent the last two years in a studio apartment meant for grad students on the other side of campus. This was another adjustment: relearning how to live with another person. Sometimes Lauren didn’t want to learn. Sometimes Lauren wanted to live like an old spinster in an earlier time period in American history. But too long apart and she began to miss Greg. And then the dogs had died, their little bodies buried together in a hole Greg had dug in the back of the garden, and for some time she had not wanted to be alone.
Lauren had waited until the old couple opposite her had shut their door and closed their curtain to do the same. By then, it was a relief to be sealed off from them, to be enclosed within her miniature world. Until then, she had been unable to disassociate herself from their silence and stillness. They had sat opposite one another, as though wax figures in a museum, all four feet planted firmly on the floor, two sets of hands clasped in laps, mirror images of inactivity. She could not imagine the man hoisting himself up into the top bunk, strapping himself in for the night. She wondered if once up there, he would pass gas all night, over top his wife, and if the wife would say anything or silently allow the emissions.
Lauren had moved into the upstairs guest room when Greg moved back into the house. She’d quickly found she couldn’t sleep next to him anymore. She tossed and turned and lay awake. Upstairs alone, she could stretch out on her stomach, toes reaching to opposite sides of the mattress, and pass gas without concern for Greg.
Half an hour later, Lauren again passed the door marked “shower,” and opened it enough to peek in. It was an ugly room: three walls of beige plastic and a slender metal bar. She imagined all the old men who’d ever ridden the train pissing while standing up in there.
She quickly closed the door, not wanting to become somehow accidentally locked inside. She turned left down the hall and then seeing her own roomette again, turned back to the right. These were her only options. She didn’t understand why one wasn’t leading her to the snack car.
One more time, she said to herself, taking a deep breath. I’m going to try this one more time. Again, she passed her own roomette, the shower, the toilets, but this time she suddenly found herself standing in the entryway to a wide-mouthed room at the hall end lined with a row of oxygen tanks. Lauren thought maybe she’d somehow stumbled into a medical closet. She started to back out, to see if there was a sign on the outside of the opened door, when a stranger’s voice interrupted her.
“You’re in the wrong room,” it said.
“Sorry,” Lauren said, turning toward the voice. “I’m looking for the snack car.”
“This isn’t the snack car,” a woman seated below her said. “This is my private room.”
The woman looked about fifty, fifty-five, egg-shaped with long, greasy black and grey hair. Her voice was low and monotone and accusatory. Lauren wondered why she left her door open if she hated people so much or if she hated people in her room. It seemed almost like entrapment.
“Sorry,” Lauren repeated. “I’m looking for the snack car.” She hadn’t noticed the little plastic tubes leading out of the woman’s nose to one of the oxygen tanks until now.
“The other way,” the woman said, pointing toward the end of the hall from which Lauren had just come.
“Okay, thanks,” Lauren said, even though the woman had been of no help. She turned around and started back down the hall at a good clip and it was then she noticed the circular set of stairs leading up to the second floor. Aha!
Forty minutes later Lauren was back in her roomette, sipping from a can of Diet Coke and eating a roll of Lifesavers. Once upstairs, a man dressed in a white smock with a nametag she didn’t have a chance to read had led her through the upstairs sleeping car to the dining car, through the dining car to the viewing car, through the viewing car to another set of circular stairs leading back down to the first floor where the snack car resided. Weeks ago, when she’d bought her train ticket, she’d imagined herself seated in the viewing car, glamorously sipping a cocktail as she watched the American countryside pass by outside the enormously modern glass walls. But the viewing car had been full - Lauren hadn’t noticed a seat empty as they passed through - and had smelled overwhelmingly of B.O. Maybe her sense of smell was increasing; perhaps this was another one of the early onset of symptoms she’d read about, along with blurred vision, paranoid thoughts and trembling hands, on the internet. She had noticed her hands shaking a bit when handing the snack car cashier her money. It was hard to know whether to attribute such observations to more common causes, such as the large amounts of caffeine she had so far ingested today, or to a rarer occurrence, such as the brain disease that had killed her father at age fifty-two, an age she was rapidly approaching. Once out and visible to her fellow passengers, she’d been overcome with an urgency to return to her roomette, to shut herself inside of it, closing the door and drawing the curtains. One of the first things Lauren remembered her father telling her in the weeks before his disease was diagnosed, was that he could no longer wait in line at the grocery store. He could no longer take his daily run because the sounds of the passing cars and trucks were too overwhelming.
Around four-thirty, a woman’s voice came over the train’s sound system, informing those in the sleeping cars that dinner was “community style,” meaning anyone in a group of less than three people would be seated at a table with others. “Someone will be coming by soon to record your preferred dinner time and number of guests,” the woman said.
Lauren changed into a silk blouse, a pair of thin wool pants, ran a brush through her hair, dabbed her wrists with perfume, fastened her watch. Greg said she intimidated people. He compared her with the actresses Hitchcock preferred, the ones often referred to as cool icy blondes. It’d taken her thirty years to develop this effect. Prior to age forty, she’d been one of those shrinking violet types; quiet, meek, overlooked. It made her nauseous now to think about. She wasn’t sure when the change had taken place – perhaps when she’d inherited a portion of her father’s estate, which had occurred sometime in her late thirties, when women are often said to enter into a newfound confidence, anyway - but Greg had known her before it had. “I liked you when you were quiet,” he sometimes said now, a wistful look on his face that may as well have been a red ball cap bearing the words, “Make Lauren Great Again,” and Lauren knew that along with quiet, he also meant: young, poor, dependent.
Of course, what Greg didn’t realize, because she was careful, oh so very careful, not to allow him or anyone else access to it, was that the quiet, meek, insecure young woman he had met and fallen in love with was still here, somewhere under this carefully maintained, icy blond exterior. It was on her daughter’s behalf, as well, that she kept that identity at bay. Her daughter was only twenty, newly independent in the world, newly reckoning with things like young male anger directed (with no sense of rationality) at her. Lauren saw her covering her insecurities with a similar icy brunette front. More Joan Crawford than Grace Kelly. A young, tough-as-nails Angelina Jolie shielding a vulnerable, softer Judy Blume character, Deenie, maybe, or Margaret. Lauren’s own greatest fear was that she herself would crack, be undone by a breakdown too great to cover up, one requiring drugs, a legal guardianship, hospitalization. She couldn’t bear the idea of her daughter having to go through that, a mother’s unraveling. Every time she saw another story of a certain middle-aged actress being arrested, hospitalized, in rehab, she thought of the actress’s daughter, who was the same age as her own. Similarly, if she was, in fact, developing the disease of her father – and she had read there was a seven percent likelihood she would - she didn’t want her daughter to know. She didn’t want her to have to witness her rapidly deteriorating body, the monsterlike outer shell (perpetually open mouth, foul odor, sunken face, blank stare), as she’d been forced to view her father as he lay comatose on morphine in a hospitable bed in the middle of his living room when she was twenty-five.
At five twenty-nine, Lauren stood at the front of the dining car waiting to be seated. Lauren was finding it harder and harder, with the lulling movement of the train, to stay awake. She was feeling herself more and more somnambulistic. She held her wrist to her nose, hoping the faint scent of Chanel might momentarily wake her.
The woman showed her to a table where two middle-aged women were seated opposite one another at a table set for four. Lauren felt immediately relieved not to be seated with one of the older married couples with whom she had been dreading making forced conversation. One of the women had dark curly hair and a serious face, while the other had frosted hair and smiled up at Lauren as she approached the table.
“Hi,” the frosted haired woman said, and Lauren sat in the empty seat beside her, rather than next to the curly haired woman who had yet to acknowledge her.
The waiter came to take their drink order before any further introductions or conversation could be had, and she waited to see if either woman would order an alcoholic beverage.
“Just water,” the curly haired woman said quickly.
“I’ll have one of your half bottles of wine, please,” the frosted haired woman said to the waiter, and, turning to her tablemates, “I can drink half tonight and save the other half for tomorrow night.”
“I’ll have a Jack, neat,” Lauren said. It was only recently she had begun ordering alcoholic drinks when without Greg. For years, before they met, she had been a teetotaler and then, for years, while they dated, she had imbibed a single drink, always fearful of pushing past tipsy into drunkenness, like her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles…she had believed herself better than all of them, due to her ability to stop. And then her father had come down with this terrible, unpronounceable disease - Creutzfeldt-Jakob, out of nowhere, and within three months he was dead, and nothing made sense anymore, including her rigidity. She had started smoking again and stopped eating beef. She began to allow herself a second drink, though she still couldn’t push past two to three. On their wedding night, six years earlier, it was Lauren who had driven a carload of people from the reception venue to their hotel.
Each of the women took a turn telling why she was on the train. The curly haired woman, whose name was Glenn, lived on the East Coast and was visiting grandchildren on the West Coast and the frosted haired woman, whose name was Dinah, was returning to the West Coast from a visit to see her grandchildren on the East Coast. Both women said they were afraid to fly.
Lauren had decided during the others’ stories to rely on the fear of flying narrative rather than the truth, which was more off-putting and might be viewed as somewhat alarming.
“I’m also an actress,” she told the women, figuring this would be something to talk about. “That’s why I’m taking the train to L.A.”
“Oh, have we seen you in anything?” Glenn asked, leaning in a little closer, a bit more interested in her tablemate.
“Maybe,” Lauren said. “I’ve been in several national commercials. One for a deodorant and one for a cell phone service. I’ve also been in several plays, though mostly in the Midwest; Chicago and Cleveland and Detroit.”
Glenn leaned back again in her seat, unimpressed.
“I’ve also had a few small roles in film,” Lauren added.
The waiter by now had brought their drinks and bread, and Lauren unscrewed her cap and watched as the Jack filled a quarter of her glass with its amber-colored hue. She was thinking, for some reason, of the Led Zeppelin drummer who had drank something like forty shots of whisky the night he died.
“What films?” Dinah asked, pouring half of her half bottle of wine into a glass. Lauren noticed she was wearing a jacket made of denim, but not one she would refer to as a ‘jean jacket.’ More the sort older women bought at a store like Chico’s in a mall.
“I was in a street scene in a movie George Clooney directed,” Lauren said. “And a bar scene of a Drew Barrymore film. Oh, and I had a line in a Jason Segel film, do you know who that is?” Lauren paused while her tablemates thought and then shook their head or nodded. “For a while they were shooting a lot of movies in Michigan, but then a new governor changed the laws around filming and taxes and people stopped coming to make movies in our state again.”
“That’s too bad,” Dinah said, passing the basket of bread to Lauren who in turn passed it to Glenn.
“Neither of you is having a roll?” Glenn said, removing one along with a pat of butter and placing them on the small plate in front of her.
Both Dinah and Lauren shook their heads and took another sip from their drinks. It was then Lauren was conscious of Dinah being rather petite and Glenn being somewhat more large-boned.
“I’m going to L.A. to do research for a screenplay I’m writing,” Lauren added. She felt compelled, for some reason, to lie.
“Oh, how fascinating,” Dinah said. “Where will you be staying in L.A.?”
“I’m staying at a hotel in Beverly Hills,” Lauren said. And she could feel Glenn’s surprise and judgment, at the excess. “It’s part of my research,” Lauren added.
“Oh,” Glenn said, nodding. Lauren knew all she had to do was say something was research, be it an activity or behavior or purchased item, for people to accept it. She’d been doing “research” for roles her entire life, it seemed. Mostly, the ones she didn’t get: a lot of Tennessee Williams’ characters.
At some point, they’d ordered – Dinah some sort of vegetarian pasta, Lauren the chicken and Glenn a steak – and now that their food was in front of them, the conversation waned a bit, offering Lauren a moment to think about the Beverly Hills hotel and the famous pop star who’d died there a few years back. She was wondering the odds of getting that room, of the possibility of asking outright for it. The pop singer’s daughter, now also deceased, had been in the neighboring room and Lauren thought it possible she would be assigned the daughter’s room instead.
“Do you have any children?” Dinah asked, setting her fork down on her plate.
“Yes, a daughter,” Lauren said, thinking how her daughter had been the same age as the pop star’s daughter and how she’d read the pop star’s daughter had had to be taken to the hospital and given drugs the night her mother was found drowned in her hotel bathtub. And now, she, too, was dead. “She’s twenty,” Lauren said. “A science major.”
“Oh, what sort of science?” Glenn asked, not looking up but watching her knife cut into her steak, the blood oozing out. “Rare,” she’d said when asked her cooking preference.
“Forensics,” Lauren said.
“How interesting,” Dinah said.
“She won’t be depressed, working with all that … crime scenes and .. death and … blood and stuff?” Glenn asked, and Lauren wondered if they were all, or just her, picturing the scene outside Nicole Brown Simpson’s condo the night of the murder.
“I guess not,” Lauren said. She was used to this question now that her daughter had changed her major from the sunnier, dolphin-infused Marine Biology. “She says she is highly motivated to help women.” Her daughter had gone through a ‘bad breakup’ six months earlier. She hadn’t told Lauren until after the break up that the young man in question had been, at times, both emotionally and physically abusive. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed someone some day,” she told Lauren and Lauren had sat across from her daughter, wide-eyed, withholding comment, thinking of the pop star’s daughter, how she’d been found face down in a bathtub like her mother, her boyfriend downstairs on the couch.
“That’s good,” Dinah said, nodding her head as she cut a green bean in half. “We need more women doing work like that, especially now.”
“I couldn’t do it,” Glenn said. “I can’t stand bodily fluids. I bring my own cleaning supplies with me everywhere I go. The first thing I do when I get on the train is put on my gloves and clean the bathroom. They’re disgusting. They used to be so nice. They’re really letting things go. The train is not what it used to be. Everything is old and dirty now.”
Lauren wanted another mini bottle of Jack. She had one more swallow left in her glass, but she didn’t want to order it in front of Glenn. Something about Glenn made her feel self-conscious and bad.
“I suppose neither of you is having dessert?” Glenn said, looking over the menu again now that she’d finished her steak.
“I would but I’m so full,” Dinah said. “The pasta was very filling.”
“My doctor says I have to lose forty pounds but I probably never will; I like my nighttime snacks too much,” Glenn said.
“What sort of snacks do you like?” Dinah asked.
“Oh, potato chips and apple pie and chocolate chip cookies,” Glenn said, and Lauren noticed it was the first time since they’d met that Glenn seemed to express joy about something.
Dinah nodded. “Those are all good things.”
“I’ll get a dessert,” Lauren said, and when the waiter came back around Lauren ordered the most fattening dessert on the menu, the torte, while Glenn ordered the reduced-calorie pudding. She probably has a whole stash of chocolate-chip cookies and chips in her roomette, Lauren thought.
After dinner, the three of them strolled along the platform aside the train during its fifteen minute stop. Some of the older couples walked up and down at a quick pace as older couples did at the mall. Now that they were no longer sitting, but were up walking, Lauren could see that Glenn was dressed in oversized clothing: a jacket and pants, like a woman running for political office or a woman with an extra forty pounds. Further down the tracks, people from the regular passenger cars stood in small groups, smoking and talking. Lauren scanned the groups for baby-babe, for his orange hoodie.
“Can you imagine?” Glenn said, leaning in toward Lauren and Dinah. “Smoking with an oxygen tank?”
Lauren hadn’t noticed, but now she saw that the woman whose room she had accidentally entered was standing outside the train with T, smoking a cigarette, her oxygen tank on the ground beside her, a small tube running from her nose. Lauren looked around and everyone else was watching, too, probably feeling good about their life choices. But Lauren felt worse. She had the distinct feeling again that she wasn’t living because no one was judging her.
“Addiction,” another middle-aged woman observed as they lined up to climb back onto the train, watching as T helped the oxygen tank woman up the three steps. “It’s a bitch.”
Lauren stood in the hall near the luggage rack waiting for T to finish making her bed. She could see over his head a pair of underwear she’d forgotten to put away before leaving for dinner. It was off white – the tag had said ecru - and silk and hanging from one of the hangers on the single hook on the wall. The cotton crotch of the underwear was slightly pink due to a period stain she had been unable to entirely remove. Every month Lauren felt certain would be the last she would ovulate or the last she would bleed out the lining of her uterus. She had read several books by Jane Fonda about menopause and sex after menopause and behavior changes due to menopause. There were overlapping symptoms of menopause and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and plain old mental illness.
Once, Lauren would have been vastly ashamed of a period stain, of all things to do with menstruation: belts and pads and tampons and douching and female sanitary wipes. She’d kept the whole female cycle paraphernalia hidden beneath the bathroom counter, behind rolls of toilet paper and stacks of neatly folded towels. Now that she was approaching menstruation’s end, however, she didn’t give as much of a shit about hiding it any longer. She remembered reading in a biography of Marilyn Monroe how right before she died she went to a party at Peter Lawford’s house with people like Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty lolling about, and was so intoxicated, she didn’t realize when she bled through her white capris. Lauren used to find that story tragic. She’d felt embarrassed for Marilyn and wished she’d been with her to help her, to get her cleaned up and sobered. Now when she thought of that image, Marilyn in tight white pants, drunkenly moving about the beach party with a red stain seeping through her pants and a cocktail in her hand, sleepy-eyed and giggling, Lauren was envious, of Marilyn’s unstoppable bleeding (aka fertility) and caution-to-the-wind lifestyle. She asked herself: on her deathbed would she wish she’d been more moral or had more sex? And by ‘more sex’ she meant more partners. Jane Fonda claimed you could have a healthy sex life long after menopause, but maybe she was lying. Maybe Jane Fonda was lying to sell books or lying to herself about her future.
After T finished and went back upstairs to help other passengers, Lauren sat on the couches that had now been converted into a bed, her suitcase open at the foot of it, struggling to get into her pajamas. Her silk shirt was hanging overhead on the plastic hanger with her ecru underwear. She had to lie down to pull up her pajama pants, as there was no room to stand. She pushed the button for the air a few more times, adjusted the lighting to a lower setting. It was still so warm. Her face felt flushed and her head a bit dizzied. She tried to imagine having sex in her roomette. She tried to imagine Jane Fonda having sex. She remembered that Tony Randall had fathered a child in his 80s, maybe his 90s. She wondered what insane god decided a man in his eighth decade of life should have the capability to reproduce when he couldn’t even keep his piss contained to the toilet. She grabbed her toothbrush and toothpaste and shuffled down the hall. As soon as she was inside the small airplane-sized cubicle, she wished Glenn were staying on her floor. There were dirty tissues and paper towels on the floor and water all over the tiny sink area and the scent of old man urine all around her. The faucet had to be continuously held down with one hand while brushing one’s teeth or holding one’s hair out of one’s face with the other. Everything on the train was a struggle. Back home everything was so monotonous and easy. A person could go crazy from the repetitiveness. Every morning, Lauren had a cup of strong coffee at ten and by eleven she had moved her bowels. She hadn’t moved her bowels yet today and she strained for a minute or two on the toilet, her toothbrush on her lap so that it wouldn’t come into contact with any germs on the half inch of counter space, before wiping (force of habit) and shuffling back down the hall to her roomette.
She opened the curtain, trying to see out, but it was pitch black. She turned the overhead reading lamp on and got out her Kindle. She was reading about Leopold and Loeb, a pair of young men who in the 1920s had murdered a fourteen-year-old boy at random just to experience murder. Everything about the case fascinated her: from their families sending them meals from their favorite Chicago restaurants along with flasks of whiskey every night while they were in jail, to the ‘age of majority’ then being twenty-one. Loeb had graduated college at age seventeen and Leopold had legally shot birds in Chicago parks for his attic collection, which housed over two thousand specimens. They were both wealthy and Jewish and avoided the death penalty by hiring the famous attorney Clarence Darrow to represent them. Lauren was almost finished with the book. She was reading the part where Loeb is stabbed to death in a prison shower by another inmate and Leopold is allowed to go with him to the hospital and to wash his body after he is pronounced dead.
Lauren tried to imagine Greg washing her dead body. Would she be naked on a metal gurney? Would he use a washcloth and a bar of soap? Would he wash her vagina? Her labia and asshole? Or was the washing of the dead more a ceremonial practice? Less a literal cleansing.
Just then a woman’s voice came over the train’s sound system: “This is a reminder: G-rated language only on the train, please.” Immediately, Lauren thought of baby-babe sitting in a passenger car, talking to his woman, in his orange hoodie. She imagined him speaking roughly, because he looked rough, though she hadn’t heard him use any profanities in the minutes she’d been within earshot. She turned out the overhead lamp and closed her eyes, remembering the way baby-babe had pulled his sweats up over his basketball shorts, the way they’d caught for a second on the way up, as she found her way under the covers, down into her pajama’s bottoms, pulling the tops of individual pubic hairs up through her underwear with the fingers of her left hand. This was a habit she’d developed sometime in her teen years and carried with her, secretly, into adulthood. It was an addictive self-soothing ritual performed while reading or watching TV alone and that ended with underpants having to be thrown out due to holes she wore in them with her fingers and with pubic hair grown out to natural lengths as it was easier this way to pull through. Occasionally, though not often, it led to masturbation. Tonight, however, Lauren was too tired to masturbate. She pulled three or four pubes through and fell asleep.
At a stop the next afternoon in Albuquerque, Lauren wandered away from the train station. The female announcer had said it would be their longest stop: forty-five minutes, and Lauren wanted to get some exercise. She’d woken after thirteen hours of sleep (seven more than she was used to getting at home), feeling lethargic and stiff; her limbs not wanting to bend and then trembling, when Lauren forced them to, anyway, like spoiled children not often called on their shit. Also, she wanted a cigarette.
It was hot in Albuquerque and she’d forgotten a water bottle. She walked four or five blocks in the opposite direction from the train and lit her cigarette and kept walking. She was careful to keep track of where she’d taken a left and where a right. She remembered Dinah saying how, once, at a stop in Santa Barbara, she’d been left behind by the train and had to pay a taxi driver to drive her to the next stop to get back on. Lauren had no idea where the next stop was, how far or how long it would take to get there. She was a little lightheaded from the heat and the cigarette and because she hadn’t eaten anything but Lifesavers in twenty-two hours. She was rethinking last night’s dinner conversation, wondering what had made her tell those women she was an actress. It was an embarrassment and she’d sensed Glenn’s embarrassment for her. It was like introducing yourself as an artist when all you did was take Wine & Paint classes through the community center or YMCA.
The local theater scene was depressing and incestuous, which would be fine (the incestuous part) if there were any decent-looking or interesting men (or women) in the local theater company to have sex with. Lauren wasn’t that interesting to look at or to talk to herself. That was the hard pill she’d had to swallow (this was what her one-time agent had told her after her hundredth failed casting call in 1995). She’d left L.A. in her mid-twenties, pregnant with her daughter. She’d had the unfortunate fortune of breeding with one of the bartenders at Canter’s deli. How cliché could you get? The fortunate part was he didn’t want to go to the Midwest with her and the baby. No, the father of her child planned to live out his life in L.A. where he was famous for being in a photograph that hung on the deli wall with three of the members of Guns N’ Roses. Lauren didn’t point out that not one of the three was Axl or Slash.
Maybe if her father hadn’t died and left her money, it wouldn’t have been so easy to give up her career and leave L.A. But she had no regrets. Or not many. One or two. Never having met Mickey Rourke, one. Two, never having been asked to be a presenter at an awards show. She didn’t care so much about the awards themselves, or maybe she was aware in a healthy way she was never going to be nominated for an award; but she’d spent a good deal of time while living in Hollywood thinking about which ribbon she would wear if asked to present, which cause or plight she felt strongly enough about to champion publicly, no matter the damage to her career, if it was a controversial viewpoint. She just wanted to use her time in front of the camera to speak about something important, like farming or worldwide hunger or Chlamydia (this was the 90s).
The last play she’d acted in had been written by a local playwright, directed by a local director, and had featured only three other actors, one of whom had been Janey’s teacher her senior year of high school and who had awkwardly hit on Lauren by telling her some crap about how he was a method actor and he couldn’t feign having sex with her on stage if they didn’t have sex in real life. (She’d told him to try harder.) The theater itself had been built by and still bore the name of an actor famous enough to have starred in a Woody Allen movie in the 80s, as well as a buddy comedy with Jim Carrey in the 90s. It seated 168 people. Lauren had never met the famous actor (she’d once fantasized having a passionate affair with him – sort of in line with the Woody Allen movie – that would lead to him getting her roles in real Hollywood films; a fantasy probably shared by every actress who came through his playhouse), though he was said to own a house nearby. Lauren didn’t even bother going to the cast parties, most of the time. What was the point? There weren’t any Peter Lawfords or Frank Sinatras or Warren Beattys around to have affairs with, to bother yourself with ingesting sleeping pills over. Instead she went home to Greg, who, for a time, had convinced her (well into her early 40s, she was embarrassed to admit) there was still time for her to be a star, on par with Marilyn and Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. She had even, with Greg’s urging, written a play based on Tippi Hedren’s screen tests for The Birds, which she had planned to star in and direct, as some sort of post-modern feminist statement on Hollywood and the casting couch. In the screen tests, Tippi is poised, styled, charming, and seductive in a varying wardrobe of dresses, white gloves, pearls, heels. Her hair is alternately in a chignon and bob. She improvises with a balding man in a suit on camera while off camera Hitchcock directs her to turn or to show her face in profile or to speak in a lower voice.
Marty: we were speaking of paroxysms and necrophilia, don’t you remember?
Tippi: well, I remember the necrophilia
Marty: you remember the necrophilia?
Tippi: Yes
Marty: that’s marvelous
Tippi: isn’t that wonderful?
Marty: yes. Well, what do you say? Wanna necrophilia?
Tippi: [laughs somewhat nervously]
Tippi: no. I think this has ruined me forever
Marty: why’s that?
Hitch: we better change the subject
Tippi: I think so, too!
Tippi: would you like to see my new suit?
[Stands, removes jacket, turns very slowly]
But Lauren had never gotten any further than the outlining stage of writing the play. Later, she had had the additional idea to shoot a remake of each screen test, shot for shot, the way Gus Van Sant had remade Psycho, and to put the screen tests on YouTube. But again she hadn’t gotten much farther with the project than the planning stages (though Greg and she had made a thirty-second video of her standing in her grandmother’s cheetah coat, reciting a few of Tippi’s ad-libbed lines as sort of a screen test for the screen test).
A couple blocks from the station, a man began calling to her. “Ma’am!” he said. “Ma’am, Ma’am!” He kept repeating the overly-formal address, as though it guaranteed Lauren’s safety. She dropped her cigarette and stepped on it with her kitten heel. She had overheard T telling some women that downtown Albuquerque was not safe but she had assumed “not safe” for old women. She wasn’t quite that old yet.
“Ma’am!” the man called again. He was very close behind her. She sped up her gait. She could see the platform now. She was halfway up the steep inclining ramp that led to the tracks.
“I don’t speak to people,” she said over her shoulder.
“I just wanted to ask you something,” the man called back. He was finally standing still, as though the incline was not worth the effort. As though an inclined surface was what was required to keep a man from pursuing a woman.
“Go ask someone else,” she called back. She was already at the top of the platform. She saw from her periphery the man had already turned to another woman, a younger woman, and was speaking to her. She felt slightly annoyed that she’d been so quickly replaced. There was nothing specific about her that had drawn him to her, only a generality, only her gender. She felt more insulted by this realization than she had by his harassment.
She walked further down the platform to where a group of tables had been erected by local Native Americans. Lauren saw Glenn there, looking over a table of jewelry. She got in line behind her, noticing her broad backside, the deep brown stain on the seat of her pants that must have been chocolate since she was at least ten years too old to have her period.
“These are made out of cedar berries,” a Native woman said, as Lauren held a bracelet in her hand. “The children wear these to take away bad dreams.”
“Interesting,” Glenn said, having turned to look.
The bracelet was fifteen dollars and Lauren handed the woman a twenty, waving away the change. On the outside of the small, plastic package was a label that read:
Ghost Beads “Good Luck Beads” Are believed to provide protection from evil spirits. Lauren waited until she was back in her roomette to remove the bracelet from the bag and wrap it around her wrist. It was cheap and costumey and reminded her of something her daughter would have given her as a child and Lauren had the thought that the beads might actually be bad luck, sold to gullible white people as payback for earlier wrongdoings. But she left it on her wrist anyhow. She was curious about luck in general, good or bad. She didn’t know if anything could change the path of her life now, even for a moment.
When the woman came around to ask her time for dinner that evening the only times available were seven and later. Earlier, outside on the platform, Lauren had asked Glenn and Dinah what time they planned to go to dinner and they had both answered “six,” so she took the ticket that said seven but at five to six she climbed the steps to the second floor and waited until Glenn and Dinah walked down the hall and got in line behind them. The three of them were seated at a table, about to order beverages, when suddenly the woman brought a man to their table.
“One more to join you,” she said, and quickly walked away.
The man stood there a moment, hesitating, grinning awkwardly, almost shyly – giving Lauren the chance to make a quick appraisal: early thirties, chubby, balding, single, probably still lives at home – before taking the extra seat next to Glenn. He reminded Lauren of the title character of an old black-and-white movie her mother had made her watch as a teenager. In the movie, a man – early thirties, chubby, unattractive, insecure, single – still lives at home with his mother and can’t find a girl. When he finally does, and brings her home, his mother chases her away.
The man said hello and introduced himself and immediately Lauren forgot his name, preferring to refer to him in her head as the character’s name in the movie. Marty.
“Are you afraid to fly, too?” she asked.
They had all just ordered drinks – Lauren a Jack, Glenn water, Dinah had brought her remaining wine with her to the table, and the man – “Marty” - had ordered a beer.
“No, I’m not afraid to fly,” Marty said, though Lauren thought a man had more to lose by admitting such a fear. “I fly all the time. I have to travel a lot for my job so I like to mix it up, sometimes. The train is more relaxing.”
Lauren stared at Marty, wondering if he were some sort of traveling salesman but not wanting to ask. Did such creatures still exist? Maybe he was a drug mule, transporting bags of cocaine aboard trains in his suitcase. Or maybe he sold pharmaceuticals to vet clinics. She’d had a step-cousin once who did that and became an addict. It turns out they give the same shitty pills to cats and dogs, you just have to take more of them. Unless you got hold of some of the horse tranquilizers. Then you could really fuck yourself up with one or two.
A pair of young Amish women walked past the table and were seated with a couple at the table behind them. Lauren was envious. She’d seen the young women earlier in the day on the platform outside the train. One of them was very beautiful and wore makeup. She was very curious to talk with her. When she was eight, her mother and stepfather had moved them out to the country during their hippie period and their neighbors on both sides had been Amish. She’d gone next door to buy eggs from them and her mother had taken her to the Amish store to buy bread and apple butter. Everyone was very friendly out in the country; every Amish person waved when they drove by.
“Oh that reminds me,” Dinah said, setting her wine glass back on the table. “One time I was on the train and an Amish man asked to borrow my phone. I didn’t think too much of it. But he was on it quite a while, at least ten minutes. And then his friend asked to use it, too. And I thought, wait a minute, these are my minutes they’re using.”
“Get a different religion,” Glenn said, nodding. “If you don’t want to live by the rules of it.”
“I mean, really, will they ever join the 21st century?” Dinah said, holding her wine glass again.
Lauren tuned out. Drank her Jack. Wondered what Marty was thinking, if he, too, was bored, if he was planning in his head the ingesting of veterinarian pharmaceuticals later in the evening, if he found her attractive. Glenn and Dinah continued discussing the hypocrisy of the Amish people until the waiter brought the basket of rolls.
“The bread on the train is very good,” Marty said.
“Yes,” Dinah said, though she’d broken a roll in half and then only eaten a tiny tear of its flesh with her fingernails.
“By the way,” Marty continued, now that there had been a lull in the conversation. “Did any of you hear the men getting thrown off the train last night?”
“I did,” Dinah said, nodding.
“I heard the announcement,” Glenn added, slathering the outside of a roll with a large pat of butter.
“No,” Lauren said. “I must have slept through it.”
“Shortly after dinner last night they made an announcement that anyone caught smoking on the train would be escorted off by the police at the next stop.”
“And apparently that did nothing to deter them,” Dinah said.
“I heard one of the men told someone he’d rather smoke and get thrown off than wait to smoke outside,” Marty said, and Lauren pictured baby-babe smoking in one of the tiny toilets, his orange hoody up over his head.
“I’m surprised it wasn’t our oxygen tank friend,” Glenn said, a sly smile on her buttery lips.
“Wouldn’t that be something,” Dinah said.
“Have you ever been on the train when there’s a suicide?” Marty asked.
“Yes, I have,” Dinah nodded.
“I have, too,” Glenn added.
“Adds two or three hours to your trip,” Glenn said, grabbing another pat of butter from the bowl.
“At least,” Dinah added. “Two out of five of my trips so far it’s happened.”
“Then you just sit there and wait,” Glenn said.
“And you know what they call it?” Marty said. “The euphemism Amtrak uses, to speak about it? ‘Person under train.’”
“Can you imagine doing that?” Dinah said, filling her glass with the last of her wine.
Glenn shook her head. “Awful,” she said, and Lauren noticed a crumb stuck to her lipstick.
“It’s awful to hear someone talk about it all the time, too,” Marty said. “Trust me, I know. I know this guy from online gaming who’s always talking about suicide. Sometimes, he won’t shut up about it. He lives with his mom and is constantly changing jobs…He’s probably had ten different jobs since I’ve known him, which hasn’t been that long. He’ll get a new one and it’ll seem promising and then a week later he’s complaining about something about it, the coworkers or his boss or something else. Some nights he just goes on and on about it to the point I’m so sick and tired of hearing it I just want to scream, ‘Okay, just do it already!’ I know that probably sounds mean.”
Something caused Lauren to glance at Glenn who was seated next to Marty. Her mouth was wide open and her eyebrows lifted. She mouthed the words ohmygod for Lauren and Dinah to see. Clearly, Lauren thought, she’s never known a depressed alcoholic.
“He probably does that late at night when he’s been drinking, huh?” Lauren said.
“Yeah, usually. That’s usually when it is,” Marty nodded, and the waiter brought him his second beer.
“I had a friend like that in college. Every weekend she’d get smashed and then come downstairs to my apartment and weep to me about how much she hated herself and her life. It can get tiring,” Lauren said, and for effect she rolled her eyes.
“How far are you going?” Glenn asked.
“Flagstaff,” Marty said. “I was supposed to get there an hour from now but then we had that downtime after Albuquerque and now I probably won’t be there ‘til one in the morning, maybe two.”
There had been some malfunction with one of the train cars and they had sat, unmoving, for two and a half hours, waiting for someone to arrive and separate the malfunctioning car from the rest of the train.
“That’s too bad, you have someone to pick you up?” Dinah asked.
“I have a car parked there, waiting for me, it’ll be fine,” Marty said. “I just have to find a way to stay awake now until we get there. I’m no good at waking up once I’ve fallen asleep.”
The waiter had returned with their plates of steak and pasta and chicken, and, for Marty, a burger. He set them down in front of them and smiled. He was at least seventy-five. Maybe eighty.
“He’s been working on the train forty years,” Glenn said, once he’d left. “I asked him.”
“Is that right?” Dinah asked. “That’s impressive. He’s very good at his job.”
“You know, it’s not PC to say porter anymore,” Glenn said. “For many years that’s what we called the men who worked on trains.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Dinah said. “I remember that.”
“It’s not PC because they were mostly black,” Glenn said. “The men.”
“Mmmhmmm,” Dinah agreed. “That’s right.”
“Now you’re supposed to say car attendant,” Glenn said.
“Yes, that’s what I say,” Dinah said. “I always say that.”
After dinner and a walk outside with Glenn and Dinah (Marty had excused himself, saying he didn’t feel well), Lauren went back to her roomette. T had already been there to make it up and she lay down on the bed, rehashing the dinner conversation again in her head. At the most embarrassing point, Glenn and Dinah had told Marty about Lauren being an actress, and he had made the required, “oh” sound, and feigned interest. “Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she’d said. “I’m just a medium-sized fish in a very tiny pond. I went to Hollywood once; they definitely didn’t want me.”
She got out a notebook she’d brought with her and tried to make a list of places she wanted to go in L.A., but her hand was shaking, she could barely read her own writing. Her vision was blurried. She held her hand out in front of her, as people do, and it shook quite noticeably. It was hard to know if she were a victim of her own hypochondria and mental illness or if there was truly something physically wrong with her; if she was going to die in two or three months like her father.
She got out her compact and reapplied her lipstick best she could with her shaking hand, dabbed her wrists with perfume, brushed the sides and back of her hair, tried to evoke Tippi and Eva Marie Saint. She hadn’t heard from Greg in two days. Her wedding ring was tucked inside a small pouch in her suitcase. She unbuttoned a top button of her silk blouse before sliding open the door of her roomette.
The halls of the sleeping cars were dark and quiet. After ten, there were no more announcements until six or seven in the morning, and all the lights on the train were turned down. The snack car was only open another half an hour. Lauren had pictured the train being more lively: a bar car open all hours. Or at least until midnight. Cocktails flowing late. Instead it was a bunch of senior citizens tucked into their bunk beds by nine.
In the dining car, the older black man was sitting at one of the tables, folding napkins, a glass of orange juice in front of him.
“Looking for more Jack?” he said, winking at Lauren.
“Something like that,” she said, smiling, moving through the car. The observation car was dark except for the moonlight coming through the glass ceiling, and half the people seated in it were already sleeping. As soon as she got to the bottom of the staircase Lauren saw Marty; he was embracing an armful of beer.
“Thought you had to stay awake,” Lauren said, on her approach.
“I do. Believe it or not, beer keeps me up,” he said. “Also Pringles. Stacking them in various formations before eating them helps stimulate the brain.”
“I didn’t know that,” Lauren said. She was standing in front of the cashier, trying to see the various mini bottles available for sale.
“What are you thinking?” Marty said. “Cuz I was thinking vodka, maybe some gin, or…I don’t now. Scotch?”
“Sure,” Lauren said, feeling unlike her self, like a character she’d not played before, one who wasn’t going crazy or entering menopause or rapidly growing a fatal disease inside of her brain.
Five minutes later, they were seated at one of the tables just outside the snack car and the man who worked inside of it was closing and locking the gate for the night.
“Well, between the two of us, we really cleaned him out,” Marty said, stacking their goods between them on the table. “I’m surprised there isn’t a limit on how much you can buy.”
“I figured I’d help you stay awake,” Lauren said, opening a mini bottle of Malibu.
Marty opened the can of Pringles and they began to build various towers, all of which invariably fell, causing Lauren to laugh. Or maybe the Malibu/Bailey’s combo was responsible for her laughter. Either way.
“Folks, you’re going to have to keep it down out here,” one of the passenger car attendants said, sticking his head in. “We got folks sleeping now ‘til morning.”
Lauren tried to peer down the hall from which the car attendant had come. She wondered where baby-babe and his old lady were seated, if they were still watching their Vin Diesel movies or smoking in the bathroom. Maybe baby-babe was sleeping, his hood strings pulled tight around his tough, baby gangster face.
“Do you wanna go back to one of our rooms?” Lauren said.
“I feel like that was his idea in coming to tell us to be quiet,” Marty said.
“I hope you have a bigger room than mine. If not we’re going to have to sit in the shower, “ Lauren said, climbing the spiral stairs to the second floor where Marty had one of the end rooms, like the woman with the oxygen tanks. It seemed larger without all the oxygen tanks lined up around it.
“Have you ever been married?” Lauren asked. They were seated beside one another on the couch in Marty’s room, passing a second can of Pringles between them. Lauren was sitting cross legged with her shoes off and her silk blouse rolled up to her elbows, reaching far into the can for the last pieces.
“What do you call that color?” Marty said.
“Huh?” Lauren said, uttering noises rather than words and scrunching up her face the way she had a tendency to do when drinking.
“On your toes,” he said, pointing to Lauren’s chipped nails.
“Pink?” Lauren said. “Or some variation thereof.”
“In answer to your question, no, I’ve never been married. I still live at home, if you can believe that,” Marty said.
“Oh,” Lauren said, and opened a tiny bottle of Red Stag, drinking it down in one, long, nauseating sip. She held the empty bottle in front of her. Miraculously, it didn’t shake, or if it did, she failed to notice. Marty removed a plastic baggie with some sort of powdery substance of indeterminate coloring, given the room’s dim lighting, from his pant pocket. Lauren’s only real experiences with drug use were the times she had requested laughing gas at the dentist; each time she had found herself immediately after texting Janey – who had recommended the gas after her own dental visits - from her car, comparing notes on the feeling of flying, the intense feelings of euphoria, the immediate desire to obtain more nitrous for old-fashioned, Gatsby-like parties in which guests would inhale the fantastical gas from colorful balloons, dance and sing and behave in an uninhibited, joyful manner. Those feelings and desires were short-lived, however, like the effects of the gas itself, and soon forgotten the next day, or even later on in the evening. Currently, Lauren felt herself being directed, as from some off-screen director: inhale the powder, turn your head in profile. She did as she was told, picturing the scene as played by Kim Novak; cool, icy, nonchalant.
The iciness didn’t last, though, nor did her self-conscious composure. Within minutes, or seconds, it was hard to determine elements of time, Lauren began to feel drowsy, itchy, warm, not unlike how she’d felt in the dental chair but not exactly like that, either. She felt a far off nausea coming closer and receding. She no longer felt herself directed. She didn’t feel herself pulled in any particular direction at all. She realized that before she had been improvising. She and Greg had met at an improv class fifteen years earlier. She hadn’t gone back after the first class, though Greg had kept going.
“Let me see you with shure shirt off,” Lauren said. Was she slurring? Or was it the replay in her head that was experiencing technical difficulties? She wanted a cigarette but remembered the men taken off the train; briefly, she thought of baby-babe, she thought of the color orange, she thought of a taut abdomen and the tattoos that might be displayed across it: rest in peace so-and-so; a heavy metal song lyric.
Marty pulled off his shirt, revealing his stomach in the process. It was round, flabby, like Greg’s used to be, before Greg heard about a specific diet for men on one of the podcasts he listened to, before he started running, and eating meat, exclusively, and lost forty pounds. She missed his old body; its softness and tender parts, the places for her head. His new body didn’t seem to belong to her anymore.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been more disciplined,” Marty said, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “I don’t have very good impulse control.”
“Huh?” Lauren said. She sat up on her knees and removed her blouse, unhooked her bra. She waited for the familiar embarrassment, for the feeling that made her want to hide her aging body, to conceal its loss of elasticity, her thickening thighs and midsection – imagined or real, in expensive lingerie and silk robes. But it didn’t come.
“Want another?” Marty said, and Lauren found herself leaning over the table, her hair in her hands, feeling her breasts push against the glass, then reclined back on her heels and watched as he did the same, giggling at the absurdity of the cliché dollar bill in his hand.
Lauren found that she liked the weight of Marty on top of her. She liked the wet warmth of his mouth, too. She giggled again; another cliché moment, like balmy bathwater, like submergence; voluntarily drowning. She heard herself cry out as though from another room, as though another actress, somewhere else on set, had orgasmed, or feigned a stabbing. Was this what she sounded like? She couldn’t remember. After, she tried to reciprocate, kneeling beside the couch, but his penis had gone or remained flaccid. “Sorry,” he offered. “Drugs. Just say no.” She took it in her mouth anyway, as though she hadn’t heard; nothing happened. It didn’t matter. The last thing she remembered was Marty getting up to vomit. She considered, momentarily, getting up to help. She was still on her knees, her head turned sideways, in profile, on the couch, her arms dangling at her sides.
She woke, moments or hours later – again, she couldn’t be certain - feeling nauseated, her feet and hands asleep. She stood a moment, getting her bearings, shaking out the numbness; standing only increased the sick feeling. She walked to the bathroom and vomited loudly into the toilet. She sat back on her heels again, then vomited some more and brushed her teeth with a toothbrush left on the counter. She hobbled back out to the main room and lay down quickly, before she could remember too much. Marty. That was what she had called him in her head. She remembered now. Marty - like the old black-and-white movie. She remembered him saying something about getting off in Flagstaff. She buttoned up her blouse and tucked it in. Ran her hands over her hair, slipped on her shoes. She looked around the room for anything else she may have removed or laid on a tabletop. Which was when she saw the note. Suddenly she had the vague memory of his having said something like, “Fuck it, tonight might as well be our last night on earth,” before doing the second line. Then she remembered him saying he lived at home, with his parents, or maybe he said his mother, and that he’d recently lost another job.
By the time she got to the stairs, T and other passengers were standing around the coffee maker. Glenn and Dinah and one of the older couples.
“Did you hear what happened?” Glenn said, eyes wide with something reminiscent of glee.
“We lost two hours last night on account of it,” Dinah said, shaking her head.
“Person under train,” T said.
“Just outside Flagstaff,” Glenn said.
“Just after our friend got let off, I guess,” Dinah said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t feel well,” Lauren said. “I need to get back to my room.”
She circled down the steps to one of the rooms marked Toilet and stood inside it waiting to be sick. The note was in her pocket. She decided not to read it. She tore it into tiny pieces and watched the pieces disappear in one single, circular motion. She’d noticed only a single wet word: true. Then, finally, she was sick.
When she opened the door, the woman with the oxygen tank was standing in the hall, an unlit cigarette in her hand. “We’re stopping soon,” she said. “Last stop before L.A. I’m waiting for T to help me off.”
Lauren tried to offer a smile. She was having a hard time moving her feet, the muscles in her face. Paranoia. Menopause. The onset of symptoms associated with CJD. The onset of insanity.
“I’m meeting my son in L.A.,” the woman continued. “He just graduated law school. He’s going to be an attorney.”
Lauren nodded. “That’s nice,” she heard herself say. “Congratulations.”
“I just had to get to L.A. to watch him walk in his cap and gown,” the woman said and Lauren nodded again. “Of course,” she said. “That’ll be nice.”
Lauren imagined the other parents watching this woman with her oxygen tank and her cigarettes at her son’s graduation, the things they would whisper to one another. Was it a fear of death? That made people so cruel?
Five hours later, Lauren was asking the woman at the information counter of the Westwood Library where the cemetery was located. She’d rented a car, stocked up on coffee and cigarettes, been to the tar pits, Griffith Observatory, Brentwood; vomited quietly in public bathrooms. The woman must have been used to this question from tourists. Probably got asked it once a day, at least.
“Around back. Behind the parking garage,” the librarian said.
Lauren exited the building and walked around to the back. The cemetery was much smaller than she’d imagined, smaller than her backyard at home in Michigan. There were several large trees, well-maintained shrubbery and lawn, a few well-placed benches, rows of headstones in the grass, a long wall of crypts. A young blonde woman walked by with a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of flowers. Lauren followed her at a distance, watched her place the flowers on a bench marked, “Remembrance of Marilyn for her many fans.” There was a red velvet rope and a sign that read, “No admittance beyond this point,” next to the bench. Lauren waited for the young woman to leave to approach the rope. Just beyond it was the wall with Marilyn’s name on a plaque and the wall surrounding it was covered in red lipstick kisses. Lauren wanted to add her lips to the wall but she sensed people walking up behind her. She walked away, quickly, went and sat on a bench under a nearby tree. She watched the group of three - two men and a woman – take turns photographing each other in front of the velvet rope. Not long after they left, a black limo pulled into the cemetery. Lauren watched as a tall, older, blonde woman dressed in a full length, red sequined gown and heels got out and walked toward the red velvet rope. She paused a second or two, as Lauren had seen people do before a cross in a church, and then stepped over it, moving toward the wall to push her mouth against it. It was only as the woman turned to walk back to the waiting limo, that Lauren realized she was a trans woman. Lauren guessed it was like this all day, a string of blondes coming to visit Marilyn.
She got up and walked around. There were other famous people buried here: Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Truman Capote, Jackie Collins, Hugh Hefner. She waited for a time in which she would be alone with Marilyn, but always there was another young blonde woman walking toward the red velvet rope. Maybe this was how Joe DiMaggio had felt. Why they’d gotten divorced, why he couldn’t save her at the end when it seemed like they were getting back together.
Lauren had applied red lipstick to her mouth, circling the stick three times around. But she couldn’t bring herself to climb over the rope. Maybe if she’d had a line of whatever drug she’d done last night …but in the light of day she was fearful again, nauseated, paranoid. She wanted a cigarette and the privacy of a room in which to smoke it. What she really wanted was to break into Marilyn’s Brentwood house, to lie down on the unmade bed where Marilyn had last lain, drink champagne and smoke cigarettes; talk on an old landline phone, the cord encircling her wrist. She felt dizzied and tired, the sort of tired that doesn’t go away with a good meal and a good night’s sleep.
Instead, she checked into the Beverly Hills hotel in which the famous pop star had died. But the young woman at the counter had been energetic and full of youthful cheer and Lauren hadn’t been able to sour her mood by asking for room 434. The room she was given was by the pool and the pool’s soundtrack could be heard through the glass sliding door. The room was large, though not a suite; the tub in the bathroom deep enough to soak her entire body. There were full-sized bottles of shampoo and conditioner and lotion, but no shower gel, only the bar of soap on the counter for washing hands. She walked back through the hotel to the gift shop. It was a long walk: 339 steps. There was a line of bath products she’d never heard of in fancy looking bottles. The shower gel was amber-colored and cost $35. She bought a bottle and walked back through the hotel, stepping over the paper runway in front of the photo backdrop where celebrities would stand later in the evening to have their picture taken as they entered the hotel for some ceremony. She’d overheard two photographers discussing it earlier in the parking garage elevator.
British man: “Kenneth Branagh certainly has been around a lot this week, hasn’t he?”
American woman: “I don’t know. I feel like lately I shoot with my eyes closed.”
Lauren ran the bathwater, pouring a generous amount of the shower gel under the faucet so that the bath filled with perfumed bubbles. She went to the cabinet in which the mini bar was located and pulled out all the small bottles of alcohol. There were two bottles of gin, two of whiskey, two of vodka, one scotch, one rum, a small bottle of wine and a half bottle of champagne. She carried them all into the bathroom and lined them up on the tub’s edge. She got the baggie from her purse, the one the man had intentionally left for her or left on accident, who knew his intention. A pink straw was slid inside and she pulled it out, inhaling a bit of the powder before removing her clothing and retrieving her phone. She stepped inside the wall of bubbles; it was every bit as luxurious as she had imagined it would be when back in the Midwest, planning the Beverly Hills trip three months earlier. She started with the rum and wine, then moved on to the gin and scotch. She opened the champagne and texted Greg: I’m sorry. Why did people always do that? This was what she immediately wondered. Text people clues or hints as to their demise? She upended the bottle of champagne and as she set it back down, she felt it coming back up her esophagus. She leaned over the edge of the tub, ready to retch onto the pretty white bath mat, but then the champagne retreated back down toward her stomach, and she inhaled some more from the bag. She wondered if this was how the famous pop star had felt: warm and ready. Lauren had read an article online detailing revelations of the autopsy, all the prescription and street drugs that had been in her system, but also that she’d been wearing a wig, had dental implants, breast augmentation scars. Lauren’s body wasn’t that interesting. She was missing a tooth on the upper left side of her mouth; had some slight scarring between her vagina and anus where she’d been sewn up after giving birth to Janey, stretch marks on her hips and thighs.
She used a towel behind her head as a pillow and lay back in the tub. Her head and body were heavy now as they had been when the dental assistant had turned on the nitrous the time she’d had her tooth pulled. She remembered how instantly relaxed she’d felt, how very quickly she’d had the thought: I wouldn’t care if a monkey were on my chest right now. She thought of the pop star; she thought of Marilyn.
Three hours earlier, in the L.A. train station, she’d seen baby-babe buying a pack of Marlboro Reds from a vendor while she was waiting in line for her car. He was still wearing his orange hoodie but Lauren didn’t see the woman anywhere nearby. She had turned to smile at him as he passed. There was a cut over his right eye, a slight bruising surrounding it. But he’d walked right by her, hitting the pack of cigarettes against the palm of his hand. He hadn’t recognized or remembered her. He hadn’t thought of her at all. She’d considered following him, tapping him on the shoulder, showing him the baggie the man had left her, inviting him to the hotel. But she was tired of chasing people. She was tired of chasing the American dream.
Lauren felt for the champagne bottle with her hand. She wanted to keep her eyes closed. She wanted to feel what Marilyn felt, what the famous pop star had felt. This was method acting, she thought, thinking of her daughter’s teacher, thinking of River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, preparing for their roles. She finished the champagne, wetted a finger in her mouth and dipped it in the baggie, sucking the remaining powder off her finger like she’d done as a child with flavored sugar. She turned on her side, curled into a fetal position. Her daughter would be upset but she wouldn’t have to look at her. She would get over it sooner, without an unrecognizable image of her mother’s wasting body stuck in her head.
Of course Greg had called people: the front desk, 911. He had her itinerary. There was going to be a knock at the door, several knocks, followed by a forced opening. There were going to be men and gloves and a gurney. Aziz Ansari and Matt Damon standing with cocktails in their hands in the area overlooking the pool. An ambulance parked out front next to a Rolls Royce. A drive down Merv Griffin Parkway. But that didn’t mean she would survive. She’d be taken to the same hospital they’d taken the famous pop star and the famous pop star’s daughter. Maybe that was better than dying in a hospital bed in your living room, maybe it wasn’t. Who could say? Lauren didn’t think anyone knew.
