The Cafè
Chapter 15
SOPHIA
Maria does not let it go.
Not after the planning room, not during the last two classes of the day, not on the walk out through the main gates, and not now, sitting across from me in a café three blocks from the beach with a half-finished iced coffee in her hand.
"Please," she says. For what I am fairly certain is the hundredth time. "We're missing the game and I promise... if you want to leave at any point, we leave. "
I scoop a spoonful of chocolate ice cream and say nothing.
The café is exactly what I have needed without knowing I needed it.
It sits at the end of a small street running perpendicular to the boardwalk.
The door is propped open with a stack of old magazines, and through it comes that particular combination of sea air and coffee and something baking that reaches you before you have technically arrived.
Inside, time has made a decision somewhere around 1974 and stuck with it completely.
Ceiling fans turn slowly overhead the old wooden kind, the kind that moves air without making a performance of it.
The chairs are red and white vinyl, softened by years of use.
A television sits in the upper corner by the entrance, the screen slightly convex, showing something without sound.
The counter runs the full length of the back wall, lined with glass canisters that have probably been refilled so many times nobody remembers what the original contents were.
Behind the counter, an older couple moves around each other with the wordless efficiency of people who have been sharing a kitchen for decades.
I love it immediately.
"Earth to Sophia. Have you ever even watched an American football game? They're genuinely good. And the after-parties are on another level entirely."
I look up.
Maria is watching me with a pleading puppy lokk.
"Sorry," I say. "What."
"Are you coming tonight."
"Why does it have to be Lorenzo's party?" I say. "We could throw our own."
She laughs then Stopps and lokks at me with an serious expression
"Who," she says carefully , "is going to come to our party when the football team is throwing one on a yacht."
I lift an eyebrow. "He has a yacht?"
"His family has a yacht."
"Of course they do." I set my spoon down."You know what ... that's the thing. I don't fit in that world. All of it is just ... it's too much. The estate, our school, the yacht. It's all too much."
I look at my melting ice cream.
"I just don't trust it," I say.
Maria tilts her head. "Trust what."
"Any of it." I set the spoon down. "Think about it ... first he won't give me the measurements, makes me feel like I'm the problem for even asking. Then he walks into the planning room being almost normal, gives me the paper, invites me to his game and his after-party.
And before all of that he was telling me I didn't belong in his world , that I should stay out of his spaces, that I was ... what was it ..."
I say the last part in the flat, deliberate tone of someone quoting something they have memorized without intending to.
"The kind innocent that doesn't know how to be anything else."
"You remember exactly what he said," she observes.
"I have a good memory," I say.
"Mm."She smiles, completely missing my point.
"Maria."
"I didn't say anything." She defends herself.
"You were about to."She smiles into her iced coffee.
The fan above us turns. Outside, through the propped door, the sound of the boardwalk drifts in. The light through the window has gone gold, the way it does here, that particular Los Angeles version of early evening that arrives gradually and then all at once.
"I think," Maria says, setting her sunglasses down carefully, "that he's curious about you."
I look at her.
"And I think," she continues, ignoring my expression"that the fact that he keeps finding reasons to be in the same space as you is something worth paying attention to."
"He's doing it on purpose," I say. "He told me himself he thinks I follow him around."
"I don't like him," I say.
"I know," she says pleasantly.
"He is genuinely, consistently, one of the most infuriating people I have ever..."
"I know."
?...encountered in my life, and I grew up next to a boy who threw water balloons at me from a third-floor window every summer for four consecutive years and Lorenzo is definitely worse."
"Sure," she says.
I pick up my spoon and finish the last of my ice cream because for now I think I said everything i wanted to say and look at my watch.
Shit
"I have to go," I say, already reaching for my bag.
Maria blinks. "What? Where?"
"Job interview." I stand, pulling my jacket from the back of the chair. "I completely forgot ... it's in twenty minutes."
"A job?" She looks genuinely surprised. "Where?"
"It's a secret." I sling my bag over my shoulder and leave enough cash on the table to cover both of us. "Don't argue about the money."
"Okay but text me," she calls after me."And think about tonight"
"Goodbye, Maria."
I hear her laugh as the door swings shut behind me.
Outside, the evening has arrived while I wasn't looking soft and gold and salt-smelling, the kind of evening that makes you understand, briefly and completely, why people come to this city and then find they can't leave.
The boardwalk stretches out to my left, the pier to my right, the ocean running along all of it like something that has been there long before any of this and is quietly waiting for everyone else to finish.
Thanks to Google Maps confidently directing me down a street that no longer technically exists, I arrive at the building four minutes later than I have planned, slightly breathless and considerably less composed than I have intended to be.
The lobby is enormous. Modern. Black elevators, a chandelier that scatters light in every direction, the particular hush of a space designed to communicate something about the people who work inside it before anyone has said a word.
What catches my attention, though are the artworks.
Every surface holds something: modern pieces alongside older ones.
The receptionist lokks at me with an emotionless face "Can I help you, miss?"
"Miller," I manage, still slightly out of breath. "Sophia Miller."
"Of course. Follow me, please."We take a black elevator to the eighth floor.
I am shown to a small waiting room and invited, politely, to sit.
I go through my portfolio one more time.
When a woman in her mid-thirties appears and tells me Mr. Janson is ready, I stand up so fast I nearly knock over the chair.
On the way in, I pass someone coming . suited, expensive portfolio under one arm. And glance down at my own outfit and think, briefly, that perhaps I should have dressed differently. Then I decide there is nothing to be done about it, take a breath, and go through the door.
Just be yourself, Shopi.
The studio is not what the rest of the building has prepared me for.
The room is enormous — floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, natural light coming through at the kind of angle that makes everything glow slightly at the edges.
Canvases everywhere: leaning against walls, suspended on thin cables from the ceiling, stacked in long rows along the far end.
Paint on the floor in accumulated layers, each colour underneath a record of a different day.
The whole room smells of paint and turpentine and something underneath both.
Standing near the windows, his back partially to me and his attention on a large unfinished canvas propped against the wall, is a man I recognize immediately, not from having met him, but from years of looking at his work.
Alejandro Janson. His hair has gone grey at the temples since the last photograph I have seen, and there is paint on his forearms and on the edge of his collar.
He turns.
Looks at medirectly, without the social layer, the way you look at something when you are actually seeing it rather than processing it for later reference.
"You can come in," he says calmly, not minding that I am a bit late.
He gestures to two chairs near the window. And sits across from me, one arm resting on his knee, completely unhurried, and says: "So. Why do you want this?"
I have prepared for this. I have prepared for every version of this. I have run through answers in my head the night before until I was certain I could produce something coherent under pressure.
Every word is gone.
I look at the unfinished canvas behind him. Large, mostly undecided, a landscape that has stopped being a landscape somewhere in the middle and become something else that hasn't yet determined what it is.
"Can I ask what you're doing with that one Sir?" I ask instead .
He glances back at it. "I don't know yet," he says.
"That's what I want," I say. "That — the not knowing yet. The part before the thing becomes what it's going to be."
I stop, trying to find the right shape for it.
"I've been drawing since before I have clear memories of anything else. My mother gave me my first sketchbook when I was five and I filled it in three days and cried when it was done because I didn't understand that there would be more."
Something shifts in his expression attentive, present.
"I'm not interested in art as a product. I'm interested in it as a way of actually seeing of looking at something long enough to understand what it really is, rather than what you assumed when you first glanced at it."
The studio is quiet around us.
"Show me," he says.
I open the portfolio.
I lay out what I have brought not all of it, just the pieces that say what I can't say in sentences.
The charcoal study of my aunt's hands while she works.
The ink drawing of a street corner from the city I have left, done entirely from memory three weeks after leaving it.
The recent sketchbook pages. Prince asleep with his paw over his face, the olive tree in the school.
Mr. Janson looks at each one without rushing it.He nods. "You draw what you're trying to process," he says.
"Yes Sir" I say.
He looks at me. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Was there ever a moment — in all of this — where you lost it? The reason you started?"
He is quiet for a moment. Lokks at me and back to my Sketchbook "You don't lose it," he says finally. "You just let other things get too loud. The reason is always there. You have to keep everything else quiet enough to hear it."
I look at the unfinished canvas behind him.
"Is that what that is?" I ask. "Keeping things quiet?"
Something moves in his expression.
"Maybe," he says. He looks back at the work on the table between us.
"The internship is two days a week. You would be working with the team on the preparation for the November exhibition , framing, installation, documentation."
A pause. "And two hours a week in the studio. Your own work. Whatever you want to do with the time."
I look at him.
"The other candidates brought printed CVs and digital portfolios," he says. Not unkindly. Factually. "You brought a sketchbook."
"I wasn't sure if that was the right call," I say honestly.
"It was," he says.
He stands. Holds out his hand. I stand and shake it.
"We will call you," he says. "If you don't get a call by the end of next week..."
"Okay yes, of course, thank you so much." I am too excited to let him finish and almost drop my things when he brings me back to the elevators.
The elevator back down feels different from the one going up.
I stand in it alone, portfolio under my arm, and look at my reflection in the dark mirrored wall ,slightly windswept, the wrong outfit for a professional interview, charcoal still on my left hand from the morning.
I smile at myself anyway.
Well at least one thing worked out today.