The Elizas: A Novel(47)

ELIZA


“WHAT THE HELL is that?” I ask as I step onto the sidewalk.

Desmond, who has changed from his cape into a shiny-looking button-down, jeans that show exactly how thin his hips are, and a red beret, stands at the passenger door. “The Batmobile. And you are my Vicki Vale.”

“I look nothing like Vicki Vale.” The garish vehicle is all angles and wings and covered in a cheap-looking matte paint. It has a long front end with a launcher. There are vents on the sides and exaggerated wings at the back and some sort of rocket booster where a tailpipe should be.

“Does it drive?” I ask.

“Naturally.”

“And it’s yours?”

Desmond opens the passenger door, which flips up like a DeLorean. “Naturally.”

“Why didn’t I see this at my house the other day?”

“It was in the shop, getting new paint,” Desmond says. “That day, I came on a bike.”

The car uses a normal key and has a Buick logo on the steering wheel. The dials and readouts are less techie than I thought they’d be; the speedometer’s top speed is a tame one hundred thirty miles an hour. As we pull away from the curb, people barely give us a glance. It’s Venice, though. We could be octopus people in a penis-shaped spaceship and no one would care.

“Where to?” Desmond asks.

“This office in Westwood. Not far.”

This morning, I found Leonidas on Facebook. It took some doing. His is a fan page, for one thing, and he lists himself as “The Only Leonidas You’ll Ever Need to Know.” He isn’t my friend on my fan page, but perhaps he had been on that other page I used to have that disappeared into the ether, if I’m to believe that it existed. He’s the only twenty-two-year-old Leonidas Lorre in Los Angeles—the only one you’ll ever need to know, clearly—and thank God his page is public. Naturally, I carefully scrolled back to see if there were phantom pictures of him and me together. The guy has a thing for taking pictures of sunsets, really bad tattoos he spots around town, and his breakfast every morning, but there are none of me.

The page says Leonidas works part-time in reception at his father’s plastic surgery office in Westwood. It’s the same block of office buildings where my mother works, too, as an assistant to a podiatrist. I can picture the Whole Foods down the block with its parking garage and bike racks. I looked up the office number, called it, and heard his voice answer. It jingled bells in my head. That voice had spoken to me. It had said nice things. But had it yelled, too, like in my one memory of him? Had it yelled a lot?

I touch my temple. An MRI is in the books at a walk-in clinic in Los Feliz that doesn’t ask any questions and doesn’t take insurance. The schedule was so jam-packed with other people wanting mammograms and bone scans and whatever else that I have to wait three weeks. The tumor feels like a foregone conclusion, really; maybe I don’t even need an MRI. After all, what else could have stolen my memories so effectively? I picture the tumor as the Grinch who stole Christmas, chuckling as he stuffed my life experiences in a Santa sack and climbed up the chimney.

We drive several mural-riddled Venice blocks in silence, Desmond cruising in his Batmobile with only one hand on the wheel. This American Life on NPR plays scratchily through the car’s speakers. Ira Glass’s nasal voice is incongruous in such a vessel.

“Tell me seriously,” I ask Desmond. “Did you steal this thing from a museum?”

“Not at all. I got it at an auction a few years ago.”

“Didn’t it cost a fortune?”

He gives me a saucy smile. “I had a small inheritance.”

What a stupid thing to spend money on, I almost say, but I catch myself. When I got my book advance, I went through this phase of special-ordering my produce from a company who swore all their crops had been blessed by the Dalai Lama.

We drive through astoundingly light traffic on Santa Monica, managing to make almost every traffic light. As we’re gliding toward Westwood, Desmond gestures at an apartment complex down Camden Avenue. “That’s my building. Camden Arms, apartment 105,” he answers, glancing at me with a grin. “It has Tesla EV parking, in case you’ve got one of those.”

I stare at the large, gleaming building. A Porsche has just pulled into the roundabout. “Can most convention marketers afford such a nice place?”

“Well, technically, it’s my parents’ apartment. But they’re rarely there. My brother lives there, too. Stefan. He’s a dabbler.”

“A what?”

“He dabbles. In many things. You’ll see when you meet him.”

I slide closer to the window. There’s no way I’m meeting Desmond’s creepy brother, Stefan the Dabbler.

Stoplights, pedestrians, strip malls. I fill Desmond in about Leonidas and what I’d overheard at the hotel, trying hard not to give away the fact that I’d only recently relearned about Leonidas’s existence. “He seemed to be in cahoots with someone. Apparently, the police have been asking questions.” This buoys me—perhaps the cops had taken me seriously after all. “I want to know if Leonidas was in Palm Springs that night. If he was, he could have done it.” I bite down hard on my lip. “I just don’t know why.”

“Was it a bad breakup?” Desmond asks.