Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

He was part of that light, and she could not stop watching him in it. Through their window. From a distance. Not just that, but his unawareness of her watching.

For the past two hours she had done the unthinkable, the violate: she walked. First through the Vista Del Mar neighborhood of old tiny 1920s bungalows, sort of Spanish Colonial with odd Moorish and Eastern flourishes, stuccoed and surrounded by palm trees, so arranged and moderne they seemed carved in Bakelite. Car-free, in summer ballet flats, the only one besides gardeners and children, Mina walked along curbs and looked through interior-lit windows, the fading dusk light affording anonymity, the TVs and stereos and nearly audible conversations providing a schizoid soundtrackstrange juxtapositions of familiar radio sounds with other peoples lives at an audio glance. Sometimes just a name, spoken and unanswered, hung in the air, or whole arguments at high volume. She could pause and listen for hours to fragments of conversations about dinner or car keys or mail.

She had walked the long way from Maxs apartment in the Hills, then headed down Gower past Sunset and Santa Monica. The streets had already thickened with homebound cars, five oclock sliding into six oclock, a special segue time that was once called, by someone, somewhere, the cocktail hour. People used to slip seamlessly from Hollywood General on Highland, from all the rattan and wickered bungalows on the Paramount lot over on Gower, to, where? Maybe the Cinegrill at the Roosevelt Hotel. To a padded banquette at the Dresden, around crescent-shaped tables seemingly designed for fourth-wall-theater staging, or an In a Lonely Place lonely stool at the bar at the Brown Derby, or Musso and Franks. Or a dozen other bars, long gone, that used to line Gower and Hollywood. Gowers Gulch. Actors, extrascowboys and gladiators. And all those suit-spectacled execs, in her mind all as young and three-buttoned and black-and-white as the photo of Irving Thalberg her father used to have in his study. It had that name, Gowers Gulch, back when it had a history, used to be called Gowers Gulch when cowboy-actor extras hung out, waiting in between calls at Paramount and Hollywood General. Minas father told her (and where did he learn it, because it was well before his time, this ancient Hollywood history he seemed to know a priori and with detailed authority) theyd still be in costume, bursting into bars as if they were Wild West saloons, Max Factord pink plastic cowboys getting drunk, starting fights, feeling the difference between real bottles and breakaway glass. Mina walked past the corner minimall with its Western-style burnt-wood hanging sign. Gowers Gulch Convenience Center. Nice touch, and she wished, particularly when she passed the huge wrought-iron and adobe gates of the studio, that one teensy cowboy-actor bar had been salvaged, a secret perfect dive where she could have a drink that would afford her sanctuary, someplace simple and unself-conscious, a modest, sad dilapidated spot, an establishment offering mere refreshment and a minute of quiet solitary enjoymenta real drink, away from the ubiquitous new and bright and sandblasted. A bar, her father would have said, where there is no shame in ordering a scotch. Where a person could smoke a cigarette unmolested. But there were none, and Mina instead wandered into the old Paramount studio store, where in a montage of lightning editscolor, hand, pocket, money, color, exitshe quickly bought an armful of expensive cosmetics. A teal eye powder. A tiny brush to apply it. A waxy-smelling lipstick in a blue red (Caput Mortuum) made for black-and-white photography. Translucent face powder, loose, of course, and the fluffy real-horsehair brush to apply it. A bottle of Red nail polish. A concealer stick, in Bisque #9, Medium Fair. She left quickly, buzzing with the secrets of the universe in her paper bag, followed by, within seconds, dire regret. She opened the bag, there on the sidewalk, out in the sunlight, and stared at the Red nail polish, all wrong, really, the polishactually a Midwestern near-red, sort of weathered-barn colorednot what she wanted at all. She stood there, dismayed by her failure to even address the shelf of red nail polishesthe Original Real Red polish, so close to Raven Red and Scarlet Red but darker, oddly, than Carmine Crimson Redhow she avoided the issue altogether, just grabbing Red, not even Simple Red, and of course the polish would never be exchanged, but tossed in a drawer with thirty other nearly perfect unused colors, until it became old and its chemical components started to separate, all the colors finally turning into an umber-orangey rusty red topped with a pool of murky colorless oil. She would just have to wait until she could devote the time, until she felt up to determining which, finally, would be Rita Hayworth Red. She barely resisted the urge to toss the whole bag of cosmetic purchases and go back in, to do it right, microexamine the red polishes, head back in there and trial-and-error the whole row. Spend hours on it. But instead she ambled in a zigzag on the pavement, staggering vaguely away from the place, her head looking back while her body went forward, nearly stumbling into a young woman approaching her, unexpected and unnoticed, seemingly curb-sprung, touching her arm (touching her!) on the sidewalk.