Paying for Amber Again
Ruby Elliott Zuckerman
I picked Amber up at her palm-tree patterned apartment building. She was wearing a little black dress and rose tinted lipstick. She had a sad look in her eyes.
“How have you been doing?” I asked as I drove her towards the 110.
“Oh, you know,” she said, “yesterday I managed to go for a walk. Today I tried to make breakfast but the time just slipped through my fingers.”
I pressed down harder on the gas.
“I’ve been there,” I said. “You just have to treat yourself like you’re a child. Like it’s your job to take care of yourself.”
“A job…” she said.
We drove through the hills by Dodgers Stadium. We turned onto Sunset, a hazy warm orange evening on its way.
“Thank you for inviting me to this,” I said. We were going to get dinner and then go to a screening of an old movie that I had never seen but that Amber had seen many times.
“Of course,” she said, “I’m trying to close the generational gap between us.”
“I think it’s working,” I said, and turned up the music I was playing, which had been recorded and released in the 1980s.
“I love this song,” Amber said, and snuggled deeper into the black leather of my seat.
I drove Amber past my apartment and a Jiffy Lube and an Erewhon and into Los Feliz. We circled around for parking for over ten minutes but I never felt bored. Amber would hop out of the passenger seat to look and see if my car fit into a spot or if I had room to keep reversing and then she would slowly shake her head.
“We need a man to help us,” she said. “Girls like us just don’t have the same kind of spatial visual skills.”
We squeezed ourselves through fashionable young people eating on the sidewalk and into a mid-quality French restaurant. I would have felt more self conscious here if I came by myself, or with anyone else that I knew, but with Amber I felt invincible and glamorous. I felt every man wish they were in my shoes and every woman wish they were as pretty as Amber. We ordered gin martinis and Amber whispered to me after her first sip that she was sure it would go straight to her head. She had nothing else in her stomach.
We ordered oysters, mussels, and shrimp. Amber made little noises about the cost of the things on the menu.
“Things are weird with my boss right now,” I said, and tilted my head back to swallow an oyster, doused in so much vinegar and lemon juice that the actual briney taste was obscured by sourness.
“Tell me everything,” Amber smiled at me.
“Well, at the beginning of this week, my boss told me to stop bringing a lunch. He told me that he would cook for us.”
My boss is a gay man with a beer belly. My office is in his house. He dresses very well. His house is decorated perfectly, like my dream house, full of vintage and antique mirrors. I often pass him, while I go through my work day, entertaining important people with huge bowls of pasta. Leafy salads that aren’t made up of arugula or spinach or romaine but instead veiny pink leaves, endive, frisee.
“Well that’s very nice,” said Amber, “I wish I had a man to cook for me.”
“It would be nice, except that it feels like psychological terrorism. You see, I’ll be waiting at my desk. And it’ll be 12pm, and then 12:30. And I get really hungry. Normally, I can just walk down the street and grab myself a bagel when I get hungry. But now, I’m waiting for my boss to come over and dismiss me. And I’ll be getting hungrier and hungrier, and he’ll be walking back and forth past my office with a stapler or a roll of newsprint in hand and I’ll know he’s deeply occupied with something that has nothing to do with cooking. That cooking isn’t even on his agenda.”
“Oh god,” said Amber.
“He has this total control over me.”
“You know,” she said, and lowered her eyes. “Sometimes I think that if people were just more honest about the kind of sadomasochistic relationships they wanted… we would all just be a lot happier.”
The words felt heavy and true, like she had unlocked something deep down and secret not just about me but about everyone I knew. She had invented a secret code for deciphering every relationship I could see, starting with my own mother and zigzagging through failed friendships and passive aggressive roommates and my own boyfriend.
I took out my phone and Amber posed perfectly, the sun making her brown hair gleam with red undertones the same color as her lipstick. She tilted her head and smiled wide as I took a flurry of photos.
“You look like a supermodel,” I said, and passed her the phone to look through the images. She smiled sadly and flicked through each picture slowly.
“Something to remember me by,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I felt alarm from my toes to my knuckles. I tensed.
“Well, doll…” she shrugged, “I think it’s time for me to move home.”
“Is it your mom? Your other brothers? Are they doing okay?” I cursed myself for not having checked in on this sooner. I had given her the tools for my abandonment with this kind of neglect.
“They’re doing fine. It’s just me. I’m not sure what to do anymore. This city is just so hard. I can’t afford it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve lived here for two years and it hasn’t gotten easier. I never know how I’m going to make rent. I’m really sorry, but Los Angeles is just too hard. It’s too hard for someone like me.”
She sat patiently as I talked through thousands of solutions. I listed apartment share websites, friends who might be breaking up with their live-in boyfriends any day now, cheap deals. I offered to get her a job where I worked, started to send texts to any friends or friends of friends who could hire Amber. They could hire her. All of them!
“You’ve already done this before,” said Amber.
When the check was laid politely and inconspicuously on our table, Amber made a slight twitch toward her purse but I had already slid my credit card into the tray.
Ruby Elliott Zuckerman is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in the Beloit Fiction Journal, SARKA, The Quarterless Review, and others. She works at a wedding DJ company, writes for Hannah Hoffman Gallery, and co-owns Judaica Standard Time. She speaks Yiddish.