I WOKE UP THIS MORNING AND FOUND A MOUSE IN A TRAP RENEE had laid in the kitchen. This might have been manageable had it been a regular trap, but it wasn’t; it was a rectangle of white plastic, covered in a sort of yellow goo, to which the poor thing was stuck, very much alive, twitching horrifically. Even the side of her face was caught in the nasty stuff. In her frantic struggle to escape, she was straining every muscle under her command, but so far all she’d managed to do was shit. I hate to think how long she might have been there.
Renee is the official exterminator at our house, just as Mom once was, but she was out on a morning mall crawl and unlikely to return for hours. I opened the cabinet under the sink and made a frantic search for the mousetrap box, in the dim hope it would tell me what to do next. When I couldn’t find it there, I flung open the cupboard and spotted a likely candidate on the top shelf: a red-and-yellow box with the name E-Z Catch printed on the end. I swatted at it with a broom handle until it tumbled toward me in a pungent avalanche of cleaning rags.
There were instructions, all right, printed in Spanish and English: Eche raton con trampa. Discard mouse with trap. There was also a charming illustration of a mouse caught in the sinister goo, rendered so playfully as to be almost a cartoon, complete with vivid little beads of mouse sweat (or were they tears?) popping from her head. No Springs, No Snaps, No Hurt Fingers, Disposable, Sanitary, Ready to Use.
What to do? If I hurled this living creature, ever so conveniently, into the garbage can, as advised, it would lie there for hours in the dark, panic-stricken and exhausted, until its life ebbed away and the ants came to eat it alive. There was no way I could be a party to that, so I filled my low-level kitchen sink with several inches of lukewarm water (thinking that might make it more pleasant) and drowned the little bandit.
It took her the longest time to stop moving; I held her down for a while after that, just to make sure. When I finally raised the tiny, dripping corpse, checking anxiously for signs of life, I flashed perversely on Glenn Close bursting out of the bathwater in Fatal Attraction. The mouse was perfectly still, though, so I took the trap outside and dumped it into the sunken garbage can by the street. Then I hurried back to the house, shuddering a little, and took a long, hot shower with a loofah.
I am not, as they say, a born killer. I was wasted for the rest of the morning. You’d think Renee would be the prissy one in this respect, but she’s not at all; she’s held her own mousy My Lai’s before, racking up deaths by the dozen, and it doesn’t faze her one bit. She can be downright cheery about it, in fact, when she’s checking her traps in the morning.
I’m writing this on the beach at Santa Monica. Renee has three more days of vacation left and plans to make the most of them. We’re encamped under a new floral-pattern beach umbrella she bought at K mart yesterday. I’m wearing my latest creation: a pink gingham bathing suit, heavily ruffled, that makes me look like a huge Victorian baby. Renee is in a royal-blue bikini, poring over the latest People for the juicy details of Annette Bening’s pregnancy by Warren Beatty. There’s a soft, lulling breeze off the water, and the sky is remarkably clear and blue. Though my housemate doesn’t seem to have noticed, a Chicano guy two blankets over has been giving her the eye for ages, with a nice boner in his Speedos to prove it. I guess I should tell her—sooner or later.
To catch up:
Jeff called the morning after I left that message on his machine. “OK, Cadence, what is it?”
Since he sounded edgy, I decided not to be coy. “Callum Duff is in town,” I said. “He’s been here for several months.”
He was silent for so long that I wondered if he was mad at me, though I couldn’t think of a reason he should be.
“You’re entitled to gloat,” I added.
“How do you know this?”
“I saw him. We talked.”
“But you don’t know it’s the same person.”
“No, but I’ve got a great way to find out.”
Another pause, and then, furtively: “He’s not there, is he?”
I chuckled. “No, Jeff. I’ve got a photograph. Taken yesterday.”
“Oh.”
“What’s the matter?” I said. “I thought you’d be overjoyed.”
“You didn’t tell him that I…?”
“I didn’t tell him a thing. Your name never came up.”
“Good.”
“The next move is strictly yours.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Well…whatever.” I let my tinder-dry tone convey the message that it was no big deal to me, since I was beginning to feel vaguely pimpish about the whole affair. He could find his own boyfriends, for all I cared.
“He had my number, you know, and he never called back.”
“So?”
“Well, I can’t just call him now, out of the blue like that. He never even told me where he lived.”
“Oh, I see.”
“There’s such a thing as pride.”
“Mmm.”
“Where does he live?”
“Does it matter?”
“Cadence…”
“The Chateau Marmont.”
He made a little murmur, or maybe a grunt, of recognition.
“That’s where you pictured him, wasn’t it? In a castle?”
“Very funny.”
“He’s a dreamboat, Jeff. I see what you mean.”
“Yeah, well, a fucked-up dreamboat.”
“Why? Because he didn’t call you back?”
No answer.
“Do you wanna see the picture or not?”
He emitted a protracted groan that meant yes, so I told him he knew where he could find me. He said he’d be on his way as soon as he finished his sit-ups. I hung up and went into the living room to fluff the pillows, feeling the glow I always feel when I lure someone I really like into the soul-sucking reaches of Yellow Ribbon Land.
He showed up an hour later, bearing wilted carnations he’d bought from “a Hispanic person at a stoplight.” He tried to stay cool about it, but his muffin-round, sandpapery face wore expectation like rouge. After kneeling briefly to bestow a ritual peck on my cheek, he went straight for the photograph.
“Where was this taken?”
I told him.
“I thought you hated it there.”
“I do. Renee made me go. Is it him, Jeff?”
He nodded.
“Are you surprised?”
“No. Are you?”
I shook my head and gave him a crooked, apologetic smile.
“Did he say anything that made you think he was gay?”
I told him about the girlfriends back in Maine.
“Oh, great.”
“Maybe he was just covering,” I suggested.
“That’s what I mean. He sounds fucked up. And if there really is a girlfriend, forget it.”
“I think he’s just young, Jeff.”
He sighed and dropped into the armchair. “Too young. I don’t feel like being a tutor. If he’s still in the closet, I haven’t got time to wait for him.”
His jaded world-weariness was beginning to annoy me. I settled into my pillow and pointed out that Callum was only ten years his junior.
“Well, yeah,” he said, “but look what happened in those ten years.”
I couldn’t argue with that. A decade of living with death and dying can certainly change the way you look at things. Given Callum’s cloistered New England upbringing and Jeff’s growing militancy, it was entirely possible that the two men weren’t on the same wavelength at all. I just thought they’d look cute together. Jeff thought so too, I know damn well, though he’d done his best to convince me otherwise.
“You know,” I said, after a pause, “people do lose phone numbers.”
He brooded a moment longer. “So if I called him, what would I say?”
I shrugged. “That you’d bumped into me, and that I’d told you about seeing him at Icon, and that had made you realize who he was.”
“At which point he hangs up on me.”
“Maybe not.”
“You don’t mind if I mention you?”
“Of course not.”
“That would at least be a conversation point. What a coincidence it was, and all that.”
“Sure.” I thought about this for a while. “If he told you his name was Bob, will he be freaked out that you know his real name?”
“Probably,” he said.
“Oh, well. Can’t hurt to say hello. You wanna borrow the phone? There’s one in Renee’s room, if you want privacy.”
“She’s not here?”
“Nope.”
He heaved another sigh. “This is going to be irretrievably humiliating.”
“Then don’t do it,” I said. “Or do it, anyway, and write a chapter about it.”
He gave me a sardonic, brotherly smile, then went into Renee’s room and closed the door.
I was making tea for us when Jeff returned to announce that Callum wasn’t in his room at the Chateau Marmont. He said he hadn’t left a message, since as far as Callum was concerned, he, Jeff, was just a one-night stand of several weeks back. How he’d come to discover Callum’s whereabouts, not to mention his true identity, wasn’t the sort of thing to be entrusted to a desk clerk. Even a desk clerk at the Chateau Marmont.
Jeff waved toward the teapot in my hand. “That isn’t for me, is it?”
“Both of us. Yeah.”
“I have to run, Cadence.”
“You dick.”
“I know. I’ll make it up to you.”
I set the teapot down. “Go on. Desert me. Leave me out here with all the wives.”
He laughed. “I’m meeting with an editor. Otherwise…”
“That’s OK. You’ll be sorry. When my video is all the rage on MTV, I’ll remember this.”
“What video?”
“Never mind. You’re in a hurry.”
“You’ve got a video?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. You want the picture of Callum?”
He hesitated for a moment. “To keep, you mean?”
“I’ve got two of ’em.”
“Oh…thanks, then.” He went into the living room and picked up the photo, giving it a once-over. “It’ll be nice to have. Mostly because you’re in it.”
“Right. Kiss my butt, now that you’re leaving.”
He smiled. “How’s Renee, by the way?”
I told him Renee was fine, that she was on vacation this week, that she was just out for a few hours. I didn’t put much into it, because I knew he didn’t really care. Jeff has always thought of Renee as a hopeless mess; especially since Easter, I think, when he caught a glimpse of her here in high Protestant drag, complete with handbag and corsage, on her way to church. They’re not enemies or anything; they’re just not exactly two peas in a pod. Most of my friends are that way; I’m all they have in common.
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“Sure.”
“Find out about his movie.”
“What movie?”
“The one he’s making. What he’s come here for.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t say I asked or anything. Just let it come up. I’m sure it will.”
“OK.” He thought for a moment before giving me a snaky look. “So that’s your stake in this.”
“I have no ‘stake in this,’” I said firmly. “This is just a favor you can do for me.” For a moment it sounded like something Rumpelstiltskin might say, a wicked dwarf’s decree, so I laughed self-mockingly to convince him of my innocence and offered my cheek to be kissed.
“I’ll call you soon,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “About a movie.”
“Oh.” He meant seeing one, I realized. “OK.”
“Did you read about Pee-wee, by the way?” (For a while, Jeff and I used to watch Pee-wee’s Playhouse together on Saturday mornings. We’re also serious fans of the movie—the first one, not that embarrassing sequel where they tried so hard to make him look straight.)
“What about him?” I asked.
“He was arrested in Florida for wagging wienie in a porn theater.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “With another man?”
“No. Alone.”
“Can they arrest you for that?”
Jeff was already out the door, heading for his car. “In Florida they can.”
I waved goodbye from the front door, watching until his rusty Civic had rounded the corner, out of sight. Back in the kitchen, as I searched for a vase for his carnations, I wondered if he really had a lunch date with an editor or was on his way to the Chateau Marmont for an all-day stakeout of the lobby. He wasn’t above that sort of thing, and I had noticed a certain gleam in his eye.
The following day, in an empty greenhouse on La Brea, we began shooting the video. It was the second time Neil and I had met with Janet Glidden, his American Film Institute friend. She was a tall, skinny white girl with enormous teeth and a slab of straight black hair, shimmering like spun acrylic, that she continually swatted from her eyes. Her manic, fidgety manner, which hindered her work at every turn, might easily have been mistaken by some for cocaine abuse or plain old tenderfoot jitters, but I knew better.
The greenhouse belonged to a friend of Janet’s, who had lent us the place for two days only. That would be pushing it, to say the least, even for a simple lip-syncing job, so I did my best to keep things moving along. This meant standing still, for the most part, resplendent in pink sequins on a tiny, thrown-together stage, while Janet from Another Planet skittered around the room in a terminal tizzy, endlessly apologizing. Her fingers were long and ivory-colored and trembled visibly as she adjusted and readjusted the various sources of light.
The lighting was all natural, she said, and she was very proud of it. She had a drop cloth on one slope of the roof, arranged in such a way as to send melodramatic little God-rays streaming down across the stage. From time to time, she would scurry up a ladder outside the greenhouse and poke at the cloth with a bamboo pole. She was building a set with light, she told me, just as Orson Welles had done in Citizen Kane; it was the only way to achieve “grandeur” on a limited budget.
Neil watched the grandeur from a distance, leaning against a potting table at the far end of the greenhouse. He was in slacks that day, dark-brown gabardine, and a white cotton sweater that hugged him like skin. While he didn’t talk much, he would catch my eye and wink from time to time, as if in acknowledgment of Janet’s loopy, befuddled nature. I think he’d realized, as early as I had, that she just didn’t have it in her to deliver the goods.
When she excused herself and flapped out of the building in search of a missing lens, Neil ambled down to the stage and took a seat next to me on the wobbly plywood.
“Is this safe?” he asked.
It took me a while to realize he meant the stage. “Is anything?” I replied.
He laughed. “You got that right.”
I asked him how it had looked.
“Well…it’s hard to tell, of course, without the music behind it.”
I grunted. “Yeah, well…I’m not holding my breath for MTV.”
He smiled.
“Or public access, for that matter.”
“You wanna bail out?”
I told him I was OK about it. There was only one more day, I said, and Janet’s poignant little film, whatever its quality, would work as a résumé I could show to producers. I was a good sport about it for Neil’s sake, since he’d had such high hopes for the project and seemed even more let down by Janet than I was. I also wanted him to see me as a nice person, someone far too magnanimous to pull a prima donna number, however justified, on some ditzy film student. I cared what he thought about me, I guess. Care. Present tense.
“She’s not usually this way,” he said.
I asked him where he’d met her.
“She was a friend of my ex-wife’s.”
I nodded soberly. “And you got her in the divorce.”
He smiled. “Not exactly. I ran into her on the street, and she told me what she was doing at AFI. She sounded so together about it.”
“Oh, well,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we should fix her up with Tread.”
He laughed. “He could use some of her energy.”
I told him not to mistake panic for energy.
“Panic?” Hieroglyphics formed on his forehead. “About the shoot, you mean?”
“About me.”
This seemed to rattle him. “I dunno, Cady. She’s pretty cool.”
“She may be,” I told him pleasantly. “But she’s also in the throes of dwarf panic.”
“But she was fine when we saw her before.”
“Sure,” I said. “And then she had a week to think about it. I’ve seen the pattern, Neil. I’ve known too many women like her.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah, I do.”
He asked if it was always women.
“Women empathize,” I said. “Some of them do it too much. ‘There, but for the grace of God…’ and all that. Janet looks at me and sees herself and can’t take it. She has to get away from it as fast as she can.” I smiled at him. “You must’ve noticed. She’s been running her little buns off all morning.”
Neil didn’t respond, just nodded blankly for a moment, then smiled at something in the distance. Turning, I saw that Janet had returned.
“Find what you need?” Neil asked.
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry, people. I was sure I’d brought it.”
“No problem.” Neil and I actually said this together, like a couple of cats who’d just shared a canary. I hoped Janet hadn’t heard my quickie analysis of her behavior, since it would only heighten her guilt, and she had way too much already. I found her exasperating, of course, but I knew she was doing her best, so there was no point in getting mean about it.
When you’re my size and not being tormented by elevator buttons, water fountains, and ATMs, you spend your life accommodating the sensibilities of “normal” people. You learn to bury your own feelings and honor theirs in the hope that they’ll meet you halfway. It becomes your job, and yours alone, to explain, to ignore, to forgive—over and over again. There’s no way you can get around this. You do it if you want to have a life and not spend it being corroded by your own anger. You do it if you want to belong to the human race.
“How are you?” Janet’s voice was just a tad too loud to be natural. “You must be tired.”
I told her I was fine.
“I can run out for coffee or something…”
“I think we should just finish up,” I said.
“Oh…OK.”
Neil bounded to his feet, making the little stage wobble a bit. “I’ll get out of the way.”
“I like what you did there,” I said. “Those slanting beams.”
“Oh…me?” Janet was so cranked up that the compliment had flown right past her. She wheeled around like a confused crane and examined the delicate play of light and shadow on the wall behind us. “Really? You think so?”
I told her it reminded me of those long shadows on the buildings in The Third Man.
“Well…” She allowed herself a quick shutter-flash of a smile and blushed violently. “That’s really nice, but I’m not sure it’s…Did you notice the latticework up at the top?”
I told her that I had, and that it must look wonderful in black and white.
“Oh, it does,” she said. “I mean, I hope. Would you like to see?” I’m sure she hadn’t considered the logistics of this exercise before making the offer, because she suddenly looked flustered again. “Unless…”
“Neil can give me a boost,” I assured her.
“Oh, well, then…if you’d really like…”
So Neil helped me down off the stage and held me in his arms long enough for me to look through the lens at Janet’s handiwork. Janet served as my stand-in, sitting cross-legged where I had stood, so I could see how the light would fall on my face. It was quite an effect, all right—starkly dramatic and spare—yet not nearly as memorable as the warm mahogany of Neil’s flesh through the nubby roughness of that white cotton sweater.
“Do they teach you that at AFI?” I asked Janet, after Neil had set me down.
“What?”
“Lighting. You seem to have a knack for it.”
“Oh…no. Well, yeah…some.”
“It’s amazing that you can do that with natural light.”
Janet looked at it again for a while, then back at me, a little calmer now that I had shifted the focus onto her work. In some ways, I think she was seeing me for the first time. “I’m so glad you like it,” she said.
Neil and I held a postmortem on the way back to the Valley.
“She might surprise us,” he said.
I agreed that she might and left it at that.
“I hope you aren’t pissed,” he said.
“About what?”
“That I roped you into this.”
I gave him a stern, half-lidded look and told him I was never roped into anything.
“Still,” he said.
I asked if his ex-wife was like Janet.
“No.” He turned and looked at me. “Why?”
“Well, you said they were friends, so I just wondered how much they have in common.”
“Not much,” he said. “Linda was organized. Is organized. That must be why Janet appealed to her. Another messy life to tidy up.”
“Did she tidy up yours?”
“As much as she could.”
“Is that why you broke up?”
“Not entirely.”
“What else?”
He seemed to resist for a moment, then said: “Are you scouting for Oprah or something?”
“No, but pretend I am.”
“She wasn’t much on romance,” he offered.
“Didn’t bring you roses?”
He shook his head. “Or expect them to be brought.”
“Ooh,” I said. “That is a problem.”
“It got to be.”
My teasing had begun to unsettle him, so I veered away from the tender spot. “Was she in show business?”
He shook his head. “Hospital administration.”
Immediately I pictured this chilly bitch with a clipboard; make that chilly stupid bitch with a clipboard, since she’d let Neil get away. I asked him how he’d met her.
“At Tahoe. When I played piano in a show lounge.”
“And she was a tourist?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you in love with her?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“For a while, yeah, I was.”
“You don’t sound that much alike.”
“We aren’t.”
I would have felt much better if he’d said “We weren’t,” but I didn’t remark on it. It was getting clearer all the time that Linda still weighed heavily on Neil’s mind, for whatever reason. “What did you love about her?” I asked.
He thought about that for a moment and then shrugged. “She made me feel talented.”
“You are talented.”
He smiled sleepily. “Not that talented.”
“She liked the way you played piano?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“No,” he said. “Unless it’s all there is.”
“Well…yeah.”
“There was more to it than that,” he said. “I’m making it simpler than it is. I was young then. I needed somebody to believe in me. My family wasn’t great at it.”
I asked him how long he’d been divorced.
“Almost two years.”
“Why don’t you see other women, then?”
Boy, did that rattle him. “Why are you so sure I don’t?”
“Do you?”
“Some. When I can. The job doesn’t make it very easy. And I spend a lot of time with my little boy.”
“Oh, right.”
“I will. I mean, I will more.”
“Will more what?”
“Date more.”
I nodded.
“Do you always pump people this way?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because people always answer me.”
He laughed. “They do?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Wanna see where I live?”
For a moment, I thought he was just being snide, underscoring my nosiness. “Look, I didn’t mean to…”
“No,” he said, “I mean it. Come by for a while.”
“Well…OK. Sometime.”
“What’s wrong with now?”
I couldn’t think of a thing.
He lived on the second floor of a motel-style apartment house in North Hollywood. It was a clean, serviceable place built of rough white bricks and ornamental iron, with a plastic NOW RENTING banner flapping noisily in the breeze. The front doors were painted either orange or cobalt blue. On the patch of lawn out front, a small child with red braids sat perfectly still on a yellow plastic trike. As we approached, I noticed the eerie fish-scale sheen of the lawn and realized it was plastic too.
There was an elevator, thank God, so I arrived at his apartment in a state of manageable breathlessness. He lifted me into an armchair in the living room, a pleasant, sunny space that had almost certainly been furnished on a single Saturday morning at Pier One Imports. There was lots of wicker stuff in plums and greens, matchstick shades, a preposterous trio of giant Italian wine jugs. The beige carpet smelled marvelously new. Beyond the sliding glass doors, the railed ledges overlooking the parking lot had been converted into twin ecosystems, rife with jungly potted things. Neil’s seven-year-old son, Danny, who was staying with his mom for the summer, was more than amply commemorated by a photo shrine on top of the TV set. Neil handed me one of the larger pictures to examine: the fruit of his loins seated at an upright piano, grinning infectiously.
“In Daddy’s footsteps, eh?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. If he wants to. I don’t push it.”
“Right.”
“I don’t. My old man did that to me.”
I asked what his father had done for a living.
“Does,” he corrected me. “He’s a pharmacist. In Indianapolis.”
I nodded.
“Puts you right to sleep, doesn’t it? We lived above the pharmacy. It was all he ever talked about. There was no way to get away from it.”
I pictured this wide-eyed, twerpy-voiced little kid sitting glumly among the towering shelves of pills, while a gray-templed patriarch a la James Earl Jones drones on endlessly about the glories of filling prescriptions. “What did he think of you and the piano?” I asked.
“Not much. He got better about it later.” He shrugged. “He came to Tahoe, anyway. Heard me play.”
“Well, that was something.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Something.”
“At least you know what your father looks like,” I said.
He hesitated for a moment, apparently confused, then said: “You don’t remember anything?”
“Well, I remember he existed, but the rest is a blur.”
“You never even saw a picture of him?”
“Nope. Mom just erased him after he left.”
“I see.”
“And believe me, I looked. I used to dig through Mom’s stuff when she was out of the house. She had this special drawer in her dresser—way up high where I couldn’t reach—with all her letters and snapshots and shit. When she went out shopping, I’d drag the step stool out of the kitchen and play detective.”
“But no pictures, huh?”
I shook my head. “The most I ever found was a gift card that said ‘To my darling Teddy.’”
“That was his name?”
I smiled. “Her name. Short for Theodora.”
“Oh.”
“I used to imagine it was from him. I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Oh, sure. Chapman. Sergeant Howard Chapman. At the time, anyway. He left the service just before he left us.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“No. But I used to think Mom did and just wasn’t telling me. One summer when I was about ten, we drove to New York and visited cousins. It was my first trip out of Baker, so Mom made a big fuss about it. Somehow, along the way, I convinced myself that she’d finally found my father and was bringing me to New York for a reunion. There was no evidence for that whatsoever, but that didn’t stop me. When we got to my cousins’ house in Queens, I even checked the phone books and found an H. Chapman in Manhattan. I was sure it was him.”
Neil smiled. “Did you call?”
“Oh, God, no. I wouldn’t have dared. I just thought of it as evidence. In case I worked up the nerve to ask Mom about it.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, but not for a long time. I kept thinking she might spring it on me one night, as a special surprise, when we went out for ice cream or something. We’d get off a bus somewhere and ride an elevator, and there would be the Sergeant. He’d be tall and redheaded and smell like pipe tobacco and be much nicer than we thought he’d be.”
“What made you think he’d be in New York?”
“Go figure. It just seemed like the place fathers would hide. Mom was great about it when I finally asked her. She took me to a deli and bought us big gooey desserts and let me drink coffee for the first time. She said she’d brought me there—to New York, I mean—because she wanted me to see where her family came from. She said she had no idea where my father was and that she wouldn’t take him back even if he did turn up. She said he was a bastard and a coward and she was deeply, truly sorry she hadn’t made that perfectly clear to me earlier.”
“How’d you take it?”
“OK, actually. It was kind of a relief.”
“It must have been.”
“It was the way she did it, I guess—from one grownup to another. She made a rite of passage out of it.” I smiled at him while an old reel played in my head. “You know what else I remember about that night?”
“What?”
“Well, Mom went out to flag a cab and left me cash to pay the waitress—one more thing I’d never done before. There was still coffee in my cup, which was Styrofoam, so I took it with me and finished it on the sidewalk while I waited for Mom. I was standing there holding the empty cup and feeling like the coolest person in the world, when this guy in a suit walks by and sees me and stops and stuffs a five-dollar bill into the cup.”
“Oh, no.”
“I had no idea what had happened. Not the slightest. I tried to give it back to him, but he just waved me off. I told Mom about it when she got back, and she was furious. I think she would’ve hit the guy if he’d still been around.”
Neil shook his head slowly. “Did that really happen?”
“That really happened,” I said.
I hadn’t told that story for years.
We polished off a few beers, and then a few more. We got pretty jolly, in fact, escaping in tandem from the debacle of our day. When it started to get dark, Neil offered to make supper, and I accepted without protest. It was scrambled eggs and toast and peanut butter and apple sauce with cinnamon—all we could scrounge from the kitchen. Neil spread a tablecloth on the floor, so we could dine at the same level. Afterwards we just sat there, propped up by one end of the sofa, while cicadas played for us in the bushes below.
“I should call Renee,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just to tell her where I am. Sometimes she holds dinners for me.”
He smiled. “I could use a roommate like that.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
He laughed. “How long has she been with you?”
This made Renee sound like an attendant or something, but I let it pass. “Three years,” I told him.
“Seems to work well.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not much alike, though.”
I smirked at him. “Can’t get anything past you.”
He chuckled.
I told him that Renee and I had learned to “respect each other’s differences.” My way of letting him know that I knew she wasn’t the brightest gal around but that we still managed to communicate. It was an awful thing to say, but there you go. I do weird things around Neil sometimes.
“You want me to get it for you?” he asked.
I had no idea what he meant.
“The phone. So you can call her.”
“Oh…sure.”
Neil retrieved a cordless unit from the bedroom, or what I guessed to be the bedroom, and laid it in my lap. Renee answered right away, as if she’d been waiting by the phone. All I said was that things had taken longer than we’d expected, so not to worry about dinner. I knew she would’ve giggled or something if I’d said I was at Neil’s house. She asked if anybody interesting had shown up at the shoot. I told her nobody much, just Princess Di and Marky Mark. She believed me for about a nanosecond, then said: “Oh, you!”
I hung up, then excused myself to pee. To my relief, the toilet was modern and low-slung, easily navigable, a graceful dove-gray oval that bore me in imperial splendor as I studied Danny’s artwork on the bathroom door. The walls held postcards from Hawaii and more snaps of the kid, plus an assortment of PortaParty shots, one of which featured yours truly onstage during the eclipse bat mitzvah. There was a sweet shot of Neil and Tread at the beach, and another one with a dignified older woman whom I guessed to be his mother.
I felt so cozy there in that small, personal space, so thoroughly embraced by my surroundings, by his surroundings, that I fell into a kind of reverie. My eyes slid from picture to picture, absorbing the march of his life, wanting to know it all. Outside, above the whir of cicadas, I could hear the comforting clatter of dishes as Neil cleaned up. I was a little drunk, I’ll admit, but something rather different was happening too. I felt such a part of him suddenly, such a perfectly natural adjunct to his life. I wouldn’t make a big deal out of that, I promised myself; it was enough just to know it was there.
When he drove me home, we talked about the scary new coup in Russia, about Pee-wee, about the white man’s black man Bush wants on the Supreme Court. Then, as if by some prearranged signal, we both fell silent. In the absence of our voices, the languorous night seemed to expand and spill into the van, a heady blend of diesel fumes and over-the-hill jasmine. From where I sat, there wasn’t much to see, of course, but I could hear sirens and boom boxes and Valley kids howling at the moon as if they owned the night. I knew just what they meant.