*
Leia stood in the doorway, wings still erect on her back. Felix had snorted two more lines and was starting to grind his teeth. She watched him for a couple of minutes before speaking.
‘Your bathroom’s cool – so decadent to have that Miquel Barceló in there. And I found this—’ She held out a black and purple striped baseball. ‘Kind of freaky – I mean me coming from Denver and all. This is a Colorado Rockies ball, right?’
At the sight of the ball a wave of vertigo swept through Felix. He steadied his smile to prevent it becoming a grimace.
She continued, oblivious, ‘Don’t tell me you support the Rockies, because that would be another really weird synchronicity between us – my brother played in their junior team a few years ago. Like, the whole family is Rockie crazy. But you’re from New Mexico, right?’
He stood and took the ball from her. ‘Yep, a friend left that here a couple of months ago. I think it belonged to his son.’ He shoved the ball into a drawer and shut it, the roar of memories pounding at the back of his brain. ‘I went there once, to the stadium – Coors Field, right?’
‘That’s right. Weird that you know Coors Field! I mean, that’s kind of prosaic for you, right?’
‘A one-off.’
They were interrupted by the doorbell ringing. Both of them looked up, startled.
‘That’ll be the pizza guy.’ He sauntered to the front door and, after tipping the delivery boy five dollars, carried the box back into the apartment and then placed it on a side table in the living room, where it sat unopened, grease seeping through the cardboard.
*
On the other side of the street Latisha watched from her perch, making a note of both the pizza delivery and the exact brand of pizza Felix Baum had chosen. It felt good to be up there, spying on this man, as if, just by concentrating, she would be able to direct his movements, goldfish-like behind the large glass windows. She stared across as he stepped back into the room, the girl gazing up at him.
‘Child, you dancing with the devil there, and you just don’t know it,’ Latisha whispered into the wind.
*
The room was spinning as Susie switched off the lights and, by the light of the full moon and the neon glow of New York, drunkenly navigated her way on all fours across the polished floor, pulling off her clothes as she went. There was something liberating about the cool concrete against her knees and feet. By the time she reached the foot of the bed she was naked and a trail of underwear, shoes and dress stretched behind her. Jet lag had addled her memory and the timeline of the past 24 hours ran jumbled through her brain. However, there was one thing she couldn’t deny: her recollections were peppered with images of Felix Baum – visual snippets now embedded into her erotic lexicon: Felix smiling, Felix’s fingers, the scent of him as he leaned toward her, the touch of his hand.
‘Fuck you,’ she said out loud, then fell into the bed.
*
Leia drank her third glass of water, then flopped back onto the couch.
‘That’s better. I was so thirsty.’ She draped her long legs over Felix’s. ‘You’re so beautiful. But I guess you get told that all the time.’
Felix pushed the pizza box away; the coke had destroyed his appetite.
‘You’re just out of it,’ he told her as she gazed up at him, her huge blue eyes smudged with mascara. Her adoration was turning him off; seducing her was too easy – he needed an edge, a push-back to make having her worth it.
Oblivious, the girl prattled on. ‘Tell me about growing up in Taos. I read about it in Rolling Stone – your father was a hippie involved in the Chicano art movement, right?’
Now Felix was fired up, the cocaine-fired urge to talk tripping past any long-held strategy. ‘Yeah, he was a tattoo artist and wannabe mural artist. Mom was Mexican – she died when I was three… ’
‘That’s rough.’
‘We survived, after a fashion. But I think that’s where I get my eye from: my father and all those Latin Kings that used to hang around the trailer.’
‘Wow, you grew up in a trailer park?’
Now he was on a roll, back on the standard-issue biog. ‘Until I was 15, then I hitched east. Poverty, it makes you hungry.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Man, they were crazy! We used to go out at dawn to spray-paint the overpasses along the freeway – great sweeping political landscapes, bright colour on concrete, the desert stretching out either side, the stillness before the sun roared up over the horizon. It was like worship, you know what I’m saying? Like a religious experience.’