A

She had the name of a Greek goddess. I suppose her parents gave it to her, but this is LA and people name themselves, too. We met at the Viper Room. I’d gone because it is where River Phoenix overdosed. The California of the modern youth, where stars can be born and die.

We had a moment on the beach, like a moment from a film. It was after dark. Santa Monica, with the waves, it seems safer than it is. She sat on my lap, and her hair fell over my face, and I thought I knew why I’d come to California, to LA, to planet earth. I though I knew everything. Life wasn’t about much more than this, my back in the sand, the tiny waist in my hands, the good smelling hair.

She had a kitten; it was dying. Those straight LA suburb streets, tree lined, and the lamps softly illuminating everything, so that if you ever leave there, if you ever go back to what you’d once called home, the realreal darkness, it scares you. There are the hills, the Hollywood sign, houses called bungalows tucked away, and fruit, lemons, oranges, it really grows by accident on trees in backyards.

We’d been to dinner; you carry a pager around until it goes off and your table is ready; then there was the beach; now her apartment, the kitten, very small, gray, in a box. It was misery embodied. The vet couldn’t tell her what was wrong. There was test after test. Blood drawn directly from its shaved belly. Every couple of hours or so, she had to force turkey paste into its mouth. She’d quit her job to take care of it. A makeup artist. There would be other jobs. There would be other kittens.

This one, it wasn’t supposed to be alive. If it could have thought like that, it wouldn’t have wanted to. Sometimes, at least for awhile, it would mew.
I remember when she called, the same night we met, her voice on the phone. My friend, J, we weren’t roommates yet, had not yet fucked, she was over in that late night, we were making noodles, and A called, and J told me: I like her voice, I like her name.

The night of our dinner, of the beach, A never took the kitten out of the box. I guess she was used to it. I couldn’t get off of my mind. She was in her bra and panties, on the bed, a big kind, high off the ground, all comforter and pillow, her body was beautiful. This is why you come to California, everything is perfect, everything except the kitten.

I’d write about it later, turn it into a story. In the story, the narrator goes with the girl to the vet. Indeed, the next morning, I went with A. I held the kitten. It was dry, despondent, light. I thought it was a shame that she was forcing it alive; all these tortures of blood extraction and feeding; it made her, A, ugly to me, naked in her need. In the story, I hold my thumb over its nose. It claws my hand, but weakly. We’re at a light. I say to her: the kitten has died. She asks me What? I hand her the kitten, and I get out of the car.

She wouldn’t let me finish undressing her. I liked her name too. And her voice. I liked the way she looked in her bra and panties, and how she kneeled over me on the beach. I liked the promise of her body; what I could see of her x beneath the panties; that I had to imagine the rest, and that it would come to me. I would touch it, infiltrate it through her, cement myself to the city and to her.

I liked most of California.

I didn’t kill her kitten. But I remember, in the car, with it in my lap, feeling bound by it to her, or by her to it, feeling because of it, I was in something over my head, this girl who wouldn’t let die what no longer pleasured from living. She was pretty beside me, her name, her voice, but there was her desperation. And I began feeling an urge I’d have often afterwards, almost any time there was any kind of real connection, when you get past the surface, when the woman isn’t a picture, isn’t an idea, isn’t just the tips of her hair or the inside of her x, but a full on woman, and what you face is intimacy, and what you mean to do, it is to flee.