SOMETHING UGLY HAPPENED TO RENEE LAST NIGHT, SO SHE’S taken the day off from work, at my urging. She’s on the sofa now, stretched out in her ragged pink nightgown, all that yellow hair tangled up like last year’s Christmas lights, pressing an ice pack against her cheek. I made the ice pack myself, from a Ziploc bag and an old kitchen mitt. It seems to help a little, though Renee’s expression remains gloomy. Her depression has less to do with the incident, I think, than with the sudden, unflattering snapshot it provided of her life.
I’ve been pampering her all day to the best of my ability, dispensing her favorite instant coffee (Irish Mocha Mist—gag) and reading out loud from trashy magazines. I knew she required attention more than anything, so I called Neil this morning and canceled our lunch date, filling him in on the details. He got it immediately, as I knew he would, and even offered to swing by with takeout and leave us to our girl talk. Tempted though I was by a chance to see him again, I thought it best he stay away for a day or two. This is no time for Renee to be reminded of Neil’s surpassing sweetness.
Like most of Renee’s calamities, it happened on a date. This one was set up by Lorrie, her ditzy pal from The Fabric Barn, who knew a guy who had a friend who’d been “out of circulation for a while” (whatever that means—prison, if you ask me) and wanted his ashes hauled in the worst kind of way. Lorrie didn’t know this, of course, or claims she didn’t, and had no misgivings about leaving Renee alone with this dude after the four of them went out drinking in Venice. Renee insists he was “a perfect gentleman” all the way back to the Valley and didn’t show signs of actual derangement until they got here and parked in the driveway and she informed him as nicely as she knew how that the date was over.
At first he pleaded with her, she says, playing pitiful. When that didn’t work, he exploded in righteous anger, depicting himself as the victim of false advertising—Renee’s poor jiggly bod being the billboard, I suppose, and he the innocent motorist who’d been conned into taking the wrong exit off the freeway. From there it degenerated into “dirty words,” the shortest of which—“Cunt!”—slashed through the shrubbery like hedge clippers and invaded my bedroom, waking me from a light sleep. I heard a car door open and close, then another, and a sickening, high-pitched scream, unmistakably Renee’s. I flipped on the light, rolled out of bed naked, and bolted—or my own best imitation of that—to the front door.
Yanking the cord that enables me to open said door, I eased out onto the little brick porch. Renee lay on the lawn next to the driveway, propped up on one elbow and whimpering softly, having just been hit. Her dream date stood over her, snarling and cursing under his breath, a surprisingly skinny creature considering the ferocity of his voice. He had a pale, chinless, ferrety face that might have struck me as pitiful under other circumstances. Under these, it seemed like depravity itself.
“OK, cowboy, get the fuck outa here!”
This was me, thank you very much. I don’t know where that cowboy shit came from or who I thought I was—Thelma and/or Louise, I guess—but the sheer audacity of the act produced the desired effect. The guy wheeled around to find the source of this angry chipmunk voice and discovered under the porch light a fat child with tits and pubic hair, watching his every move.
“I mean it,” I said. “I’ve already called the police.”
As if in response to this invocation of authority, a light came on at the Bob Stoate residence. Renee’s date glanced toward it, then back at me, then down at Renee, who was stumbling to her feet finally, no longer whimpering. The mere sight of her naked rescuer had apparently been enough to stun her into silence.
“Do you know this asshole’s name?” I asked as she hobbled toward the stoop.
She made a feeble sound that meant yes.
“Get inside, then.”
She slumped past me into the house. Her assailant muttered something unintelligible—I doubt seriously that even he knew what it meant—and climbed into his car, slamming the door shut violently. By the time the little worm had scratched off into the street, spewing gravel, Mr. Bob Stoate, the Toyota salesman, had appeared on his own doorstep, wrapped in a terry-cloth Lakers robe and brandishing a pistol.
“It’s OK,” I yelled to him. “He’s gone.”
He peered at me, aghast, across his driveway.
At this point modesty seemed superfluous. “Sorry about the outfit,” I said.
“Did he hurt you, Cady?”
This is just about the nicest thing anyone from that house has ever said to me, and I came close to being touched and responding in kind, except that I wasn’t really dressed for it. “No,” I told him. “I’m fine. I think he hit Renee.” And I retreated into the house, feeling exposed for the first time.
Renee was crumpled on the sofa, sobbing.
“Did he rape you?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“I’ll run a tub,” I said.
I stood by the tub and scrubbed her back with a sea sponge. She had finally stopped crying, but she was still a mess.
“I think you should call Lorrie,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because that prick tried to knock your head off.”
“It’s not her fault,” she said.
“I’ll call the cops, then. What’s his name?”
“Skip.”
“Skip what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Renee…”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Lorrie will know.”
“No she won’t,” she said. “She only knows Barry.”
“Her date?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll call Barry, then.”
“No.” Renee shook her head dolefully. “Just leave it, OK?”
“He hit you, goddammit.”
“I know.” She started to sniffle again. “What’s the matter with me, Cady?”
“Nothing. Jesus, Renee, it’s not your fault.”
“I should’ve never went on a stupid blind date. They never work out.”
“Well…yeah. Maybe that’s true.”
“And the regular ones don’t, either.”
“Oh, c’mon. Some of them do. You’ve met some nice guys.” I couldn’t name any right offhand, but it seemed like the thing to say. Fortunately, Renee didn’t challenge me.
“But they never last,” she said.
“Well…”
“I have to find somebody.”
“Why?”
“Because…never mind.”
When Renee resorts to “never mind,” you know the truth is about to surface in some convoluted form or other. “C’mon,” I said, biding my time as I swiped the sponge across her spacious pink back. “You’re twenty-three years old. You’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Not if…” Again she cut herself off.
“Not if what?”
“If you move out.”
“Why should I move out? This is my house.” I saw it now, of course, ever so clearly.
“Yeah, but you’ve got a boyfriend now.”
“Not,” I said emphatically, appropriating one of her more asinine pop phrases.
“But I thought…”
“We’re seeing each other, Renee. That doesn’t mean we own each other.”
“You sleep with him.”
“So?”
“Well, I thought…”
“He has a kid, honey. It’s his whole life. He’s not gonna ask me to come live with him.”
“Maybe he will.”
“Yeah, and maybe the moon is cheese.”
“But if he came to live here…”
“With the kid?” I rolled my eyes for her. “I don’t think so.”
She giggled, mostly out of relief, I think. I wondered how long she’d been dwelling on this desertion/eviction fantasy and if it had actually driven her to go shopping for shitheads. I began to feel guilty about the lump rising on her face. “We’re a team,” I told her. “I thought you knew that.”
“Well…”
“Nobody else would put up with me, honey.”
“Oh, Cady!” In a rush of pure emotion, Renee pivoted toward me like an overaffectionate baby elephant, making me drop the sponge.
“Don’t hug me,” I said, stepping away. “You’re wet.”
So we’ve been bonding today, us girls. Renee’s spirits have lifted considerably since I started writing, but she still hasn’t left the sofa. Now that she sees Neil as less of a threat to us, she’s begun to extol his virtues, how nice he is and how talented and how cute.
“You should get Denzel Washington,” she said at one point. “He’d be so perfect.”
I looked up from this notebook. “For what?”
“For the movie.”
“Huh?”
She sighed as if I were the thickest person in the world. “You’re writing about him, aren’t you?”
“Some,” I said, feeling slightly invaded.
“Well…”
“I don’t think there’ll be a movie, Renee.”
“Why not?”
“Trust me on this, OK?” I had tried to picture me and Denzel playing the big love scene on Catalina, under the directorial eye of, say, Penny Marshall or Ron Howard or any of those seventies kids currently making sensitive movies, and I just couldn’t do it. Times had changed, true, but not that much. Besides, the real thing had been too perfect, too exquisitely internal, to imagine its cinematic counterpart. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re having a life: the real thing is the movie.
The phone just rang, and Renee says it’s for me.