The Decent Proposal by Kemper Donovan Page A

refused him the change, but she offered to buy him a coffee at Café Collage on the corner of Pacific and Windward Avenues, just off the Boardwalk. It was a crowded Sunday afternoon; there were people everywhere, and she was too curious to let him go without more of an explanation. She wasn’t averseto a little companionship, either. There were plenty of ways to occupy her time on the weekends, but every so often she felt unable to occupy her mind the way she did at work, and for this reason the weekends were occasionally a trial. It had been easier in New York, where she had friends who were always a subway ride away. In L.A. she had no one, not even the prospect of running into an acquaintance on the street, since everyone was spread so far apart. There was a reason why this anonymous homeless man had reminded her of a castaway: sometimes Los Angeles felt like a string of desert islands—millions of them, stretching to the horizon, and each holding a single exile. You had to take the initiative and affirmatively leave your island if you ever wanted to connect with another human being, or else wait for someone to come to you. And Elizabeth had grown tired of waiting.
    The homeless man grumbled, but agreed, retrieving the soiled suitcase she would learn never strayed more than a few feet away from him. As they walked from the courts to the café, a few people gawked, and she allowed herself a glance in their direction, as if to say, That’s right. I’m walking and talking with a homeless man. You got a problem with that? She hadn’t felt so bold in years.
    They sat on rusty metal chairs beneath a classical arcade—the kind meant for silent monks contemplating God rather than feverish teens committing videogame atrocities—built over a hundred years ago to evoke the arcades of the Piazza San Marco in the original Venice, in Italy. (When she had been forced to move back to L.A., Elizabeth had decided the only way to make her new reality tolerable was to live as close to the water as possible and become a “beach person.” To her surprise, she discovered an affinity for Venice’s peculiar atmosphere. Though the neighborhood’s interior portions had acquired a sheen of gentrification in recent years, the beachfront was as much of amodern ruins as it had been fifty years ago: the crumbly remains of a century-old amusement park populated largely by outcasts. On Fridays after In-N-Out, she parked in her tiny driveway and tried not to move her car again till Monday morning.) It was January, and even though the sun was shining it was chilly outside. Her companion cupped his hands around his coffee, dipping his grizzled chin into the warm current curling off the top.
    â€œHard to talk about that book,” he said, removing his fuzzy chin from the warmth and jutting it in the direction of her lap, where her copy lay. “Not like other books, where you say what happened, you said it all.”
    Elizabeth nodded encouragingly. “It doesn’t really have a plot,” she said. Who was this guy?
    â€œThat’s right. Power’s in the words.” His voice grew softer. “You talk about the words rather’n juss reading ’em, you lose something.”
    Elizabeth began leafing through her copy for the section at the dinner party, but before she could find it he had jumped out of his chair:
    â€œYo yo yo, my man !” he crowed. It was one of his homeless cohorts, who had wandered nearby. “You got anything on you, make this coffee a l’il more inneresting? Huh.”
    He made the universal booze sign (thumb pointed mouthward, fingers waggling), punctuating it with a puckish bray of laughter, his wide gray tongue flopping well past his bottom lip. The friend produced a plastic Poland Spring bottle from inside his coat, an amber liquid sparkling inside it.
    By this time Elizabeth was already across the street. One homeless man was enough of an adventure;