Best to Laugh: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

refrigerator of anything that might be made into dinner, unless I could whip up something tasty with an almost empty box of raisins, a murky jar of pickles, and a couple packets of soy sauce.
    A LONG WITH SEVERAL INSTRUCTIONS about her car and a bill-paying reminder, Charlotte had left a roughly drawn map indicating necessary businesses like “bank” and “cheap manicures.” Under a big X she had written “Ralphs Supermarket.”
    It was to that Roman numeral I headed, and after stocking up on essentials, I bought from the store’s deli case something I had never before tasted—a ham and cheese croissant—and ate it sitting on the low concrete wall that faced Sunset Boulevard.
    Sunset Boulevard! Having discovered that the famous boulevards—Hollywood and Sunset—were just blocks apart and that they ran parallel to one another, I felt the little flare of confidence that comes when you start getting your bearings in a new place.
    “Whew!” said a woman whose shiny clothing might be considered skimpy if there’d been a little more of it. Her hoops-within-hoops earrings jangled as she half-sat against the wall near me. “You wouldn’t have a soda in there, would you?”
    Looking down at the grocery bag at my feet, I shook my head.
    “Coke, Pepsi, I don’t care.”
    “Sorry, I don’t—”
    “—starving, too,” she said, staring at the cars driving by. “Maybe I should run across the street and get a piece of pizza. Or some of that Pioneer Chicken. Nah, pizza’s easier to eat. I remember when pizza was sort of—how do you call it?” She snapped her gum; it sounded like a popgun. “Erotic.”
    She was talking more to herself than me, but I couldn’t help correcting her.
    “You mean ‘exotic’?”
    The woman chortled. “Yeah, yeah. Exotic. Course nowadays you can go just about anywhere and find pizza.”
    I nodded and agreed that, yes, you could go just about anywhere and find pizza, and when a navy blue Volkswagen swerved to the side of the curb, the woman next to me sighed and pushed herself off the wall.
    “Been real,” she said, offering a little flutter of her fingers as she sauntered to the car. She leaned into the open passenger-side window, exposing a view only the shortest of shorts can offer. After a moment, she stood up and ambled toward me, her hips moving with a definite attitude.
    “He’s asking for you.”
    I pointed to my chest. “Me?”
    The woman snapped her gum. “That’s what I said.”
    With a flick of her long black curls, she strutted east and I, grabbing my grocery bag, loped toward the car.
    “Hey!” I said, seeing the driver was my neighbor.
    “You want a ride home?” said Ed. “Or are you too busy working?”
    I T SEEMS NAÏVE that I didn’t know what trade the sociable woman in the shiny red hot pants and metallic silver tube top was plying, but as I told my neighbor, “I never met a prostitute before.” (I didn’t add, of course, that there were some people—most especially my Aunt Lorraine—who at one time thought otherwise.)
    Ed nodded, as if considering my point. “Still, weren’t her clothes sort of a giveaway?”
    “I just thought she was dressed up. This is Hollywood, after all.”
    He dropped me off in front of my apartment, and after I threw my perishables in the fridge, we met as planned in the back garage stalls.
    “What’s that smell?” I asked.
    “Night blooming jasmine,” said Ed, sniffing deeply. “And eucalyptus.”
    We passed the pool on our way to his apartment, making plans tocrack open a Scrabble board and the bottle of wine he’d intended to present to his date, had his date not stood him up.
    “There I was in Silver Lake,” he said, “banging on the door until a guy from across the hall sticks his head out the door and says, ‘Hey buddy, ain’t it obvious she bailed on you?’”
    “Ouch,” I said.
    “Tit for tat!” came a raspy voice.
    “Jeez, Maeve!” said Ed as the bodybuilder sprung from the shadows of