She first sees him on a Tuesday night at the rooftop bar of the Ace Hotel. He’s wearing dark blue jeans, a white button-up shirt, and black boots, and he and the bartender, an attractive woman in her late thirties with a black rose tattooed on the side of her neck, are deep in conversation. It is the last night of September. The Santa Ana Winds have been swirling for the better part of the month. Shayla’s friends won’t arrive for another half an hour, so she nurses a glass of red wine and tries to place where she has seen the man before.
At first, she wonders if they’d crossed paths during the years she’d worked at the agency. After all, he has the look of so many of the men from those years, former models on their way to aging out of the business who hoped to make the transition into acting. They were sad cases for the most part, kind and well-meaning souls smart enough to know their golden boy days were numbered, but not yet wise enough to comprehend that their futures would have to lie in towns other than Hollywood.
As this silent interior montage of faces rolls in Shayla’s memory, she finds herself studying the man even more closely. His short brown hair, natural tan, and easy smile mark him as the type of individual who, though clearly in his mid-forties, can pass for a decade younger simply on the strength of a relaxed, open-hearted affability that few men, she has found—especially in a place like Los Angeles—possess.
Soon she wonders if she should remove the “aspiring” part. If the man is, in fact, a working actor who may never have had a big-budget film or network show built around him, but who has spent his career headlining the type of B pictures made by second-tier producers and released by third-tier studios that feature on streaming services for years at a time.
In other words, a journeyman, even if his good looks must, even now, make him sometimes feel as if he were meant for brighter lights and bigger screens.
Yet by the time the man exchanges a series of cheek kisses with the bartender a few minutes later, Shayla is no closer to placing him. She watches him exit the bar while half-listening to Katherine recount how she has spent the past few days.
Eleven months later, in the final hour of an August afternoon that she has mostly spent avoiding the last act of a screenplay she’d promised herself would be done by the end of summer, she enters a bookstore downtown that she did not know existed. In fact, the entire building seems out of place and time. It’s an old Victorian nestled in between two post-war concrete facades that look not unlike the Stalin-era fortresses she remembers from the week she spent in St. Petersburg researching a film whose financing, at the eleventh hour, had fallen through. The place is cozy inside, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, wheeled ladders, and bay window seats, all of which make the place feel as if it could be the setting for the type of early twentieth-century fantasy novels she had loved as a young child.
In the fiction aisle, where she is scanning the shelves in search of a particular work by Borges, she looks up from the books to see he is standing before a circular display table in the middle of the store. After settling into her surprise—and after noticing his appearance is entirely unchanged from the previous year—she moves out of the aisle, crosses to the display table, and picks up a book whose cover she vaguely recognizes and pretends to browse while sneaking as many glances his way as possible.
This time she notices that his eyes are slightly different colors—one green, one the lightest shade of brown—and that he has a small scar on the right side of his neck whose origins she will spend the rest of the day thinking about. His brown hair, cut short on the sides but relatively long and curly on top, remind her of so many of the lifeguards she has seen on the shores of Venice and Santa Monica, Zuma and Malibu. On his wrist, in addition to an old watch with a dark band, he is wearing a braided bracelet whose handmade nature doesn’t mask its obvious luxury.
Soon enough the man returns the book he’d been browsing back to its place on the display, checks his watch, and slowly makes his way towards the exit.
And it is then, framed as he is by the shadows cast by the oversized double doors at the entrance, that she realizes who the man is, and where she has seen him before.
She takes in a deep breath and smiles, enjoying as she is the small exhilaration that so often comes after the solving of a mystery, even one as ultimately minor as this. Rather than hurrying immediately out of the store to confirm what she now believes to be true, she spends another hour browsing the aisles, occasionally pulling a book from the shelf and reading a few pages before either deciding to purchase it or placing the book back into its spot. By the time she approaches the counter—whose clerk is a woman in her early twenties with silver streaks in her hair and a trio of hoops through her right nostril—she has, in addition to the Borges collection, picked up works by John O’Hara, Anais Nin, Milan Kundera, and Maile Meloy.
The freeway, even on a Sunday in early evening such as this, is bumper-to-bumper traffic, and so she turns on the radio, gazes up at the shining dome of the Griffith Observatory, and listens to a track sung by a woman who sounds a great deal like Joni Mitchell, although whose accompanying instrument is, rather than the strummed acoustic that Mitchell so often favored, a drone-heavy electric Stratocaster that gives the ballad an avant-garde subtext.
When she arrives at her condo she pulls the car into an unmarked spot on the street, and takes the stairs to the third floor. Once inside she deposits her purse and books on the dining room table and crosses the living room to enter a long hallway, which is lined with a series of framed black-and-white postcards taken and printed by a photographer friend of hers a decade prior.
The one Shayla is interested in is the third one from the left. It features a nude man, standing in front of a what looks like the opening to a large, weather-beaten tunnel whose outer rim is lined with small etchings of what look like classical female deities. The tunnel, the deeper one looks into it, falls further into shadow, although a slim ray of light shimmers from its other end in the shape of a slim crescent. The man’s body arcs a little to one side, his left leg is crossed in front of his right, and his arms both cross diagonally in front of his torso. If there is something intimidating about the man’s beauty—his long legs, slim hips, and tapered shoulders—it is softened by the smallness of his sex, which is barely visible against the dark hair surrounding it. On certain days, and in certain moods, Shayla has often felt as if the man’s body, in both its beauty and its lack, is an emblem meant to represent the intersection of myth and reality. He is both aspiration and acceptance; bounty and dearth.
Shayla spends a few more moments staring at the image of the man whom the city has offered up to her for viewing in two unexpected ways over the last twelve months, then exits the hall, places a record on the turntable, and settles onto the sofa to begin reading.
Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
