Back at his table, sipping ice-cold beer, he surveyed the other patrons. Several were famous.
An action-movie hero three tables away was even more stubbled than Joe, and his hair was matted and tousled like that of a small boy just awakened from a nap. He was dressed in tattered black jeans and a pleated tuxedo shirt.
Nearer was an Oscar-nominated actor and well-known heroin addict in an eccentric outfit fumbled from the closet in a state of chemical bliss: black loafers without socks, green-plaid golf pants, a brown-chequered sportscoat, and a pale blue-denim shirt. In spite of his ensemble, the most colourful things about him were his bloodshot eyes and his swollen, flame-red eyelids.
Joe relaxed and enjoyed dinner. Pureed corn and black-bean soups were poured into the same dish in such a way as to form a yellow and black yin-and-yang pattern. The mesquite-grilled salmon was on a bed of mango-and-red-pepper salsa. Everything was delicious.
While he ate, he spent as much time watching the customers as he did staring at the sea. Even those who were not famous were colourful, frequently ravishing, and generally engaged in one sort of performance or another.
Los Angeles was the most glamorous, tackiest, most elegant, seediest, most clever, dumbest, most beautiful, ugliest, forward looking, retro—thinking, altruistic, self-absorbed, deal-savvy, politically ignorant, artistic-minded, criminal-loving, meaning-obsessed, money-grubbing, laid-back, frantic city on the planet. And any two slices of it, as different as Bel Air and Watts, were nevertheless uncannily alike in essence: rich with the same crazy hungers, hopes, and despairs.
By the time he was finishing dinner with mango bread pudding and jalapeno ice cream, Joe was surprised to realize how much he enjoyed this people-watching. He and Michelle had spent afternoons strolling places as disparate as Rodeo Drive and City Walk, checking out the “two-footed entertainment,” but he had not been interested in other people for the past year, only in himself and his pain.
The realization that Nina was alive and the prospect of finding her were slowly bringing Joe out of himself and back to life.
A heavy-set black woman in a red and gold muumuu and two pounds of jewellery had been spelling the hostess. Now she escorted two men to a nearby table.
Both of these new patrons were dressed in black slacks, white silk shirts, and black leather jackets as supple as silk. The older of the two, approximately forty, had enormous sad eyes and a mouth sufficiently sensuous to assure him a contract to star in Revlon lipstick advertisements. He would have been handsome enough to be a waiter—except that his nose was red and misshapen from years of heavy drinking, and he never quite closed his mouth, which gave him a vacuous look. His blue-eyed companion, ten years younger, was as pink-faced as if he had been boiled—and plagued by a nervous smile that he couldn’t control, as if chronically unsure of himself.
The willowy brunette having dinner with the movie-star-slash-heroin-addict developed an instant attraction for the guy with the Mick Jagger mouth, in spite of his rose-bloom nose. She stared at him so hard and so insistently that he responded to her as quickly as a trout would respond to a fat bug bobbing on the surface of a stream—though it was difficult to say which of these two was the trout and which the tender morsel.
The actor-addict became aware of his companion’s infatuation, and he, too, began to stare at the man with the melancholy eyes—though he was glaring rather than flirting. Suddenly he rose from the table, almost knocking over his chair, and weaved across the restaurant, as if intending either to strike or regurgitate upon his rival. Instead, he curved away from the two men’s table and disappeared into the hall that led to the restrooms.
By this time, the sad-eyed man was eating baby shrimps on a bed of polenta. He speared each tiny crustacean on the point of his fork and studied it appreciatively before sucking it off the tines with obscene relish. As he leisurely savoured each bite, he looked toward the brunette as if to say that if he ever got a chance to bed her, she could rest assured that she would wind up as thoroughly shelled and de-veined as the shrimps.