The Cloud of Unknowing by Mimi Lipson Page B

look like much from the outside: torn cloth awning, soot-stained facade of imitation stone, a single barred window high up on the front wall. The door was propped open, but with the late afternoon sun backlighting the building she couldn’t see inside. She missed the type of bar she’d hung out in back east—taprooms with threadbare pool tables where you could settle in and get comfortable and chew the fat with the neighborhood rummies. People she met here, misunderstanding, kept directing her to places that looked promising but turned out to be imitations: fake English pubs, retro martini lounges.
    Her eyes were still adjusting to Los Angeles. She drove down legendary-sounding boulevards—Wilshire, Beverly, La Cienega—sweating into her vinyl car seat, impatient for the city to reveal its glamour. Sometimes as she drove, she spoke to herself in imaginary Raymond Chandler prose: “I followed the Nash west on Sunset and swung up Sepulveda, climbing until I lost his taillights in the fog.” She drove on and on, until she realized what should have been obvious from the start: vastness and anonymity were not impediments to her understanding of Los Angeles; they were the essence of the city. Once she accepted that, she started to notice things like the hand-painted Clorox and Palmolive bottles on the sides of Mexican markets, or the little fruit salad carts you saw at certain intersections, or sometimes, late at night, a coyote standing in the middle of a quiet side street.
    At a party a few weeks earlier, Kitty had found herself in the garden, one of those backyard shangri-las with Malibu lights and fan palms, in conversation with a man about her age. Like her, he had moved to Los Angeles from the northeast.
    â€œI’ve been here for almost ten years now,” he said when she asked.
    â€œDo you miss New York?”
    He shrugged as though the question were irrelevant. “How about you? How long?”
    â€œA little over six months. I moved for a software job.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œIt’s apocalyptic, isn’t it?” she said cautiously. “It’s beautiful.” He smiled in recognition. The flame from the citronella torch flickered in the lenses of his thick-framed glasses. “To tell you the truth, the thing I miss most about Philadelphia is the bars. Regular neighborhood bars.”
    He nodded, took out a pocket-sized notepad and a pen, and began writing. “Here are some places I think you should check out.” He tore off a sheet and handed it to her. “I’m sorry I can’t stay and talk more.” He had filled both sides of the page with a list of bars and their cross streets—mostly in East Hollywood, though a few had what looked like Skid Row addresses. He’d also written down his phone number, and a note: “Call me if you want a copilot.—Anton.”
    Something about his air of authority put Kitty off, but she tucked the paper in her wallet anyhow. Later she kept noticing bars from his list, like the Escape Room, or One-Eyed Jack’s on Beverly, or the Monte Carlo across from the Ralphs supermarket on Third and Vermont: such a generic sign that it had been invisible to her before. Or the Searchlite Lounge, which was just around the corner from her apartment on Fountain, and which she’d driven past hundreds of times on her way to and from the freeway until finally, today, curiosity overtook her.
    Kitty crossed Western and ducked in out of the glare. There were a few men in Carhartts sitting at the bar. An older Asian woman stood behind it, wiping a glass with a rag. No one looked up when she came in. They were all absorbed in a soccer game on the television. She sat on the last stool and ordered a beer. The room was small and seemed smaller because of the low ceiling, which, now that her eyes had adjusted, she saw was covered with what looked like black plastic trash bags. There was no decor to speak of. It looked