The morning light in hotel rooms is always synthetic, harshly clean as if the maid had let herself so quietly in, like a maid mouse, and put the light there by making phantom beds with strange sheets hanging in the very air itself.

She used to lie in bed and pretend that she was still asleep, so as to catch the maid coming in with the morning light folded in her arms, but she never caught her and finally gave it up.

Her father is asleep in the other room with a new lover. Her father is a famous movie director and in town to promote one of his pictures.

This trip to San Francisco he is promoting a horror movie that he has just finished directing called The Attack of the Giant Rose People. It is a film about a mad gardener and the results of his handiwork in the greenhouse working with experimental fertilizers.

She thinks the giant rose people are a bore. ‘They look like a bunch of funky valentines,’ she recently told her father.

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ had been his reply.

That afternoon he would have lunch with Paine Knickerbocker of the Chronicle and later on in the afternoon he would be interviewed by Eichelbaum of the Examiner and a few days later her father’s same old line of bullshit would appear in the papers.

Last night he rented a suite at the Fairmont but she wanted to stay at a motel on Lombard.

‘Are you crazy? This is San Francisco!’ he’d said.

She likes motels a lot better than she does hotels, but she doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s the light in the morning. That probably has something to do with it. The light in motel rooms is more natural. It’s not as if the maid had put it there.

She got out of bed. She wanted to see who her father was sleeping with. It was a little game of hers. She liked to see if she could guess who her father was in bed with, but it was a kind of silly game and she knew it because the women that her father went to bed with always looked just like her.

She wondered where her father kept finding them.

Some of his friends and other people liked to make little jokes about it. They liked to say that his lovers and his daughter always looked like sisters. Sometimes she felt as if she were the member of a strange and changing family of sisters.

She was 5–7, had straight blonde hair that went almost down to her ass. She weighed 113 pounds. She had very blue eyes.

She was fifteen years old but she could have been any age. With just the turn of a whim she could look anywhere between thirteen and thirty-five.