Claire Watkins: Gold Fame Citrus

Punting the prairie dog into the library was a mistake. Luz Dunn knew that now, but it had been a long time since she’d seen a little live thing, and the beast had startled her. She’d woke near noon having dreamed a grand plan and intending to enact it: she would try on every dress in the house. They hung like plumage in the master closet, in every luscious color, each one unspeakably expensive — imagine the ones the starlet had taken with her! In the dream Luz had worn every dress all at once, her breasts bestudded with rhinestones and drenched in silver dust, her ass embroidered with coppery alleyways of sequins, pleated plumes of satin fanning from her hips, pale confectioners’ tulle floating like spun sugar at her feet. Of course, things went one-at-a-time in the lifeless waking world.

It was important to have a project, Ray said, no matter how frivolous. The Santa Anas winged through the canyon now, bearing their invisible crazy-making particulate, and Ray said she should try to keep her hands busy. She should try not to sleep so much. Some of Ray’s projects included digging out the shitting hole and siphoning gasoline from the luxury cars abandoned throughout the canyon.

Yesterday, Luz’s project had been to present Ray with a gift of herself swaddled like a chocolate in a fur coat she’d excavated from one of the cavernous hall closets, though she was not so dark as chocolate. She’d roasted under the mink, her upper lip already jeweled over and trembling with sweat when she breached the backyard where Ray was working, into the ever-beaming, ever-heating, ever-evaporating sun. Sun of suns. Drought of droughts. These were their days now, Luz and Ray and the merciless sun up in the canyon, a family of light in this mansion cantilevered into the hillside, a bridge for a driveway. Luz had shucked the preposterous coat to the dirt and instead napped naked on a sun-stiffened chaise under the lines of a leafless grapevine until dinner. The once Ray approached her, sliding his hand between her knees, she’d groaned: too hot for sex. The mink was still heaped out back, sculpture of a failure.

This project was better, she confirmed, twisting before the easel mirror in a peachy silk shift, lovely even against her grimy skin. In the closet was a handwoven poncho of oranges and golds, perfect for the shift, except wool was suicide. Instead, a Hermès scarf — no, a delicate tennis bracelet whose tiny clasp gave her some trouble. Like dewdrops strung around her wafer wrist, something the photographers would have said. But practically everyone was thin now. Luz stepped out of the shift and wriggled into a clinging cobalt mermaid gown dense with beads. It was gorgeous and she was gorgeous in it, even with her filthy hair and bulgy eyes and bushy brows and teeth that jutted out from her mouth as if leading the way, the front two with a gummy gap between them that caused her to seal her thin top lip to her plump bottom lip, even when she was alone, even now as she twirled and the dangly beads went click click click , softly. She looked liquid and wanted to show Ray.

Luz tromped down the floating railless stairs in the gown and rubber galoshes and a feather headpiece, baubles winking on every finger and one wrist. At the bottom of the stairs, she froze. Across the foyer, watching her, the tawny, beady-eyed rodent. It stood on its hind legs. It sniffed the air. Its nimble claws worked at something. Kind of cute. Except it dipped its head and maybe came at her. Luz panicked, shrieked, and executed a long-stride slo-mo kick of unexpected grace and force, some long-lost AYSO girlhood reflex risen from the resin of her quads.

They were a tired joke, the galoshes. Ditto umbrellas, slickers, gutters and storm drains, windshield wipers. This place had not seen so much rainfall as to necessitate galoshes in her entire life. But thank God for them, else the rodent might have ribboned her bare foot with its claws instead of flying through the open door of the library, going scree . A horrifying sound, that scree , and in her horror Luz slammed the blond wood door closed, setting it shuddering on its casters. A cruel instinct she was paying for hours later, for she was now plagued with a hefty boredom and the melancholy of finishing an excellent book — a biography of John Wesley Powell — and had nothing new to read.

The question, now, was whether to interrupt Ray — in the yard constructing a half-pipe from the plywood they’d pried off the windows and doors of the starlet’s ultramodern château — or to handle this prairie dog situation herself. Scree, it said. She went out onto the balcony and called down to her love.

Ray squinted up at her and whistled. “Looking good, babygirl.”

Luz had forgotten about her mermaid ensemble, and a little zing of delight accompanied the compliment. “How’s it coming?” she called.

“What an embarrassment,” he said, shaking his head. “Ten million empty swimming pools in this city, and we get this one.”

The embarrassment was adjacent to his would-be half-pipe: the starlet’s long-drained swimming pool, its walls not smooth concrete but a posh cobble of black river stones, its shape not a scooped-out basin but a box. Hard edges and right angles. Patently unshreddable. A shame, was all Ray said when he first knelt down and felt it, though his eyes had gone a pair of those smooth, globular kidney pools in the Valley. Ray had been to the forever war — was a hero, though he’d forbidden the word — and he went places sometimes.

Here, he was shirtless, all but gaunt, torquing his knees against a pane of plywood. His unbound hair was getting long, clumped and curling at his shoulders. On the bottom of the dry pool were smeared a few dreadlocks of dehydrated slime, pea-colored and coppery. Haircuts, Luz thought. Tomorrow’s project.

She watched him work a while, leaning on the balcony rail as the starlet might have. It was impossible to be original and inspired living as she was, basically another woman’s ghost. Ray could dismantle the starlet, splinter her, hack her up and build with her bones, but Luz languished beneath her. They wore the same size everything.

When Ray said up in the canyon Luz had seen porticos and candelabra, artisanal tiles, a working bath with a dolphin-shaped spigot patinaed turquoise and matching starfish handles, birds’ nests in chandeliers, bougainvillea creeping down marble columns and dripping from those curlicue shelves on the walls of villas — what were they called? But the place they found was boxy and mostly windows. All slate and birchply, its doors slid rather than swung, the wrong style for columns. Any and all vinery was dead. Plantwise there was the dried pool slime and the gnarled leafless grapevine and spiny somethings coming through the planks of the deck, too savage to kill.

Below her Ray’s hammer went whap whap whap .

Sconces, they were called, and there were none.

Where were the wild things seeking refuge from the scorched hills? Where was the birdsong she’d promised herself? Instead: scorpions coming up through the drains, a pair of mummified frogs in the waterless fountain, a coyote carcass going wicker in the ravine. And sure, a scorpion had a certain wisdom, but she yearned for fauna more charismatic. “It’s thinking like that that got us into this,” Ray said, correct.

Nature had refused to offer herself to them. The water, the green, the mammalian, the tropical, the semitropical, the leafy, the verdant, the motherloving citrus, all of it was denied them and had been denied them so long that with each day, each project, it became more and more impossible to conceive of a time when it had not been denied them. The prospect of Mother Nature opening her legs and inviting Los Angeles back into her ripeness was, like the disks of water shimmering in the last foothill reservoirs patrolled by the National Guard, evaporating daily.