TELL ME A STORY

(This is the first part of a short story I wrote. If you all hate it I won't post fiction again!)

2005.

The Castle Fleming had long been regarded as one of the most glamorous hotels in America, but as Alison approached the bell desk, she realized it was actually kind of a dump. The cream damask wallpaper had gone Perkins Gilman yellow. The desk was scratched up like the piano in a school auditorium. Even the Castle’s signature candle, which flickered in a Romanesque alcove, had a musty scent, like the backseat of a classic car that had been garaged for decades.

And yet, it was this whiff of decay that drew people to the Castle. Other old hotels in Los Angeles tried to stay current: gutting and refreshing their lobbies in tones of cream and aqua, recruiting James Beard Award winners to helm their “reimagined” restaurants, wooing guests with pillow menus and water sommeliers. Castle Fleming made no such efforts. The Castle did not need to seduce anyone; it merely arched its Gothic eyebrows and lolled its tongue-red awnings, and all the right people came.

In this way, the hotel was like the movie star who had summoned Alison to it. Carl Ivins was so handsome, so magnetic that his first name— unfashionable for decades, a name with wiry ear-hair— had recently become one of the top 100 most-popular baby names in America. Carl would humbly refuse credit for this wave of infant Carls, but there was evidence to prove otherwise. The naming trend had developed over a decade, surging in tandem with Carl’s Hollywood career. Alison knew this because one night, she had cross-referenced several years of Social Security data with Carl’s IMDB page. When she’d told Carl this on one of their two telephone calls, he’d laughed.

Alison had just gotten off a bumpy flight from Denver, and before that, a flight from Des Moines. Her ponytail was flaccid. Her belly swelled over the waistband of her low-rise True Religion jeans. She’d bought the jeans at Merle Hay Mall an attempt to look more “L.A.” for her upcoming trip, but now she regretted the purchase. Every time she sat down, her ass rose out of the back of the jeans like the heaving bosom of a pirate queen. She’d bought the largest size— 31— but the jeans ran small, really small, and even when Alison avoided sitting, the side seams dug pink trenches into her outer thighs. “They’re supposed to be tight,” the Russian saleswoman had said. “If you go any bigger, it won’t look right.”

The Castle’s front desk employee (Brent, according to his gold name badge) was mostly affectless until he realized that Carl Ivins, or a member of Carl’s “team”, had arranged for Alison’s stay. Once this was revealed, Brent softened his eyes and bared his long white veneers. Oh, I do hope you enjoy your stay. If there’s anything you need at all… Alison smiled back like a deferential ape: I’m just excited to be here! I’m from Iowa. The signature Castle candle sizzled low in its glass drum, sending a ribbon of black smoke toward the lobby’s cove ceiling. 

Alison took the elevator up to her room on the fourth floor, and used her key, a real key, to open the door. The window in the room was open, the furnishings plain; it was not unlike the memory care facility where her Aunt Cookie routinely shit the bed. But as Alison entered the room, she spotted something exciting: a bottle of wine, with a fancy note card to accompany it. The card, thick as a shingle of velvet, read: “Alison, Enjoy! Love, Carl.” Alison read the card several times before taking out her new T-Mobile Sidekick 2, which had a full keyboard and an integrated camera, and snapping a photo. The resulting photo was murky— a bottle suspended in Loch Ness—  but it was an essential document nonetheless. Cabernet and a personal note from Carl Ivins waiting in her suite at the Castle Fleming! No one back home would believe it. She imagined herself breezily saying, Carl sent wine, which was cool. As she thought this, she heard herself say it out loud.

Alison didn’t like red wine. But she uncorked Carl’s bottle because she was an alcoholic and it was free. It was the only thing in the room that was. She toasted herself in the mirror and brought the glass of wine with her into the bathroom to pee. As she sat on the toilet, she texted Carl: hey, it’s alison. I’m here. let me know when you want to meet. thanks for the wine!” Remembering the surprising “Love, Carl” on the card (of course he could be guileless; he was Carl), Alison tapped out “XO” before sending.

Carl lived in a house in the Bird Streets of Los Angeles, not far from Castle Fleming. Alison knew this because she had seen an item in Variety about his latest real estate acquisition. At the age of 33, Carl owned a house on Broad Beach in Malibu, a penthouse with a terrace in the West Village, and of course, the flagship Bird Street house, which had its own theater, steam shower, and built-in Gaggia espresso bar. “HEART-STOPPING VIEWS”, the house’s listing had screamed, as if a sunset could really kill you.  Alison knew that she would never get tired of those views. If she were Carl Ivins she would spend her days walking back and forth from the largest window to a full-length mirror, grateful for the beauty revealed by both.

Alison didn’t like what she saw in the mirror. She had a face like a “before” in a gallery of celebrities who’d had plastic surgery: pretty, but beaky, with small, sleepy eyes that could surely be coaxed open with a scalpel if Alison had the money, which she didn’t. Alison did like her figure, ordinarily, but today was not ordinary, and she felt like she’d gained 15 pounds since her Northwest flight had touched down at LAX. Her body was pink and solid and reminded her of ham, and the last thing a girl from Iowa needed was to be plagued with that association. She imagined movie executives referring to her as “Ham Girl” behind closed doors. “It’s funny enough that she’s from a pork-producing state” they’d say, opening their Voss water bottles, “but she literally looked like ham.” 

Alison checked her phone for messages, but Carl had not replied. They had discussed meeting around 6 p.m. and it was currently 4:30. She considered calling Carl’s production office, which was housed in a bungalow in West Hollywood “even though our deal is at Paramount,” said Carl, as if Alison understood this strange hill dialect. Rather than calling Ali the assistant, Alison decided to head down to the pool and get a drink. She had brought a gold bikini from Gadzooks and she wore this, with a white strapless terry cloth dress, down to the pool area. The best word to describe the pool was “obligatory”; it was smaller than the one at Alison’s apartment complex in Des Moines. This briefly surprised Alison until she remembered that Castle Fleming’s power did not lie in its grandeur, but in its exclusivity. Yes, this pool was cold, its plaster flaking, its proximity to traffic shocking— a city bus cruised past the garden wall, not 15 feet away— but access to it was hard to come by. Illustrating this point was an actual celebrity sunning her hard, hungry body on a nearby chaise. Alison recognized her from a teen soap on the WB. She recalled that the actress was from South Dakota (she had read a profile of her in People magazine) and felt a pang of kinship as her eyes traveled up the actress’s legs to to the blue molecule of her bikini bottom. We’re the same! Alison wanted to shout, We’re both hicks! How did we get here? But instead  Alison ordered a Heineken from the attendant and descended the steps into the water. The beer, she discovered, was warmer than the pool.

***

By 8:40, when Carl had still not called, Alison began to panic. At that point, she was prone on her hotel bed watching America’s Next Top Model and eating the M&Ms she had bought at a nearby convenience store called Pink Dot. Alison could not allow herself to get fully comfortable; she felt she had to maintain a certain tension in her body in order to stay attractive for Carl. If she exhaled too deeply, if she laid her cheek too carelessly on the sour-smelling pillow, the invisible binding that contained her might snap, like the skin of a water balloon, releasing the mess that was the Real Alison. She had to keep this toxic spill contained until Carl called. Just as she realized she could hold the pose no longer, the phone in her room rang loudly.

“Alison!” Carl said, as if they were old friends. “It’s Carl. How’s it going?” 

“So great,” Alison replied, trying to sound cool and carefree and like she hadn’t just had  nervous diarrhea. “I’m having a wonderful time at the louche and lugubrious Castle Fleming.” This sentence was both stylistically awful and semantically dishonest, but Alison knew why Carl had brought her here. He’d read the novel she’d written— optioned it, in hill dialect—and he’d  enjoyed the lurid prose. “You’re like a girl Hunter Thompson,” Carl had declared in his first email to her, the one she had forwarded in a fever to her parents and three of her friends. Since then, Alison had tried very hard to be the Alison he’d optioned: a swaggering, irreverent character who flung adjectives around as if they were dollar bills and she were a rapper at a strip club. This routine left her feeling exhausted and dirty, as she was sure it also did for the rappers. 

“Ha ha ha!” Carl’s laugh was characteristically generous; this was a man who had drilled wells in Ghana. “I love that we put you up at the Fleming.”

“I love it too, it’s fucking great!” Alison squealed. “And thank you so much for the wine!”

“Oh, did we send wine?” Carl said. His pivot to we, along with his ignorance of the gift, made Alison feel stupid. She briefly remembered that she’d grown up a short distance of an anaerobic lagoon, which was the technical way of saying “giant manmade lake of pig shit.” 

“Yes, it’s fucking tremendous,” Alison lied. The wine was gross. Alison knew from experience that the only way to enjoy bad wine was to mix it with Coke, a trick she’d learned from her high school Spanish teacher. A Coke cost ten dollars at Castle Fleming and she’s forgotten to buy one at Pink Dot, so Alison was— as Optioned Alison might quip— S.O.L. Shit outta luck! 

“Great, great,” Carl said. “Listen, would you be cool with coming to my place tonight? I know we talked about meeting up at the Fleming, but a thing came up, and it’s just so scene-y there, anyway.” 

Alison imagined being the type of person who wanted to avoid a scene. At present, she hungered for all that the word “scene” implied. Staying at the Castle (or “the Fleming”, as she would call it from now on) was no longer enough for her— this experience was a mere flake of cocaine that she hoped would lead to mountains of electric validation. “The Fleming isn’t scene-y enough,” she wanted to shout into the phone. She needed Carl to take her to the most ostentatious club in Hollywood and lead her to the thundering heart of the room. There, with everyone watching, he would peel off her True Religion jeans and kiss her where the seams had cut her.

***