Текст книги "Where It Began"

Автор книги: Ann Redisch Stampler

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

part three

LIV

IT IS ALL JUST SO STUPID BUT I AM COMPLETELY unhinged. It’s like having an emotional breakdown over an advertising jingle about aftershave or having your heart ripped out by the Pillsbury Doughboy. And it isn’t even the Spring Fling itself, the actual dance, which, when you think about it, has all sorts of genuine dramatic possibilities:

Maybe Huey would grope Lisa, maybe he would play with the buttons of the horrible sombrero sweater that her mom is so attached to, and she would experience extreme moral conflict over slightly spiked punch.

Maybe Anita would break out of her house, show up with her bra straps hanging off her shoulders, and introduce us to the cute French guy from Marseilles who, having renounced his priestly vocation, was holed up at the Bel Air Hotel feeding torn up croissants to the black swans and waiting for her to run away with him.

Maybe I’d lose my mind and go stag and maybe I’d see Billy across the room and maybe we would slow dance to “My Blue Heaven” and we would both remember who I am, swaying to Elvis, and maybe he would want me.

What does not cross the mind of the orbiting space cadet, my mind, is that he would nominate himself for King of Fling and not even mention it to me, and Aliza would run for Queen of Fling with not one single other Slutmuffin nominating herself, big conspiracy, so you know that the crowned and anointed couple dancing to “My Blue Heaven” is going to be pologuy, live and in person, with Aliza Benitez and not gabs123.

Thank you, Brynn McElroy, for your highly organized and complete Fling committee minutes, distributed to all committee members, present or innocently sleeping through Charlotte Ward’s planning extravaganza.

“This sucks,” Anita says. “This is a bit much even for him.”

We are sitting in the Winston School darkroom, Huey’s private domain, where we all go sit in the dark so we can eat inside somewhere other than the cafeteria on rainy days, with the glowing red lights and timer buzzers going off and Huey bouncing around hanging up wet, newborn photos by little clothespinthingies while Lisa gazes up at him and Anita and I try not to look at each other.

Only it’s sunny, and we’re hiding out in there because I know if I have to see Billy with anybody else, I’m not going to survive the day.

“Wait a minute,” Huey says, dipping photographic paper into a tub of chemicals. “Are you saying you still want this guy to be your boyfriend?”

“Leave her alone,” Lisa says. “She’s having a hard enough time.”

“I’m just saying, I think you’d have a lot easier time if you’d take care of yourself. Like if you’d take care of all the legal things . . .”

“Huey,” Lisa says. “She doesn’t want to talk about the legal stuff. Leave her alone.”

“I am taking care of the legal stuff!” I say. “I’m doing everything my lawyer says I’m supposed to be doing. Punctiliously! I’m staying away from Billy and I’m going to therapy and I’m having a meeting with the Probation Department and I’m pretending to get over my so-called drinking problem and soon I’ll have my record expunged, okay?”

“Not okay!” Huey shouts.

Lisa says, “Don’t raise your voice, Jeremy.”

Huey says, “I’m talking to Gabby.”

Lisa and Anita sit planted in their folding chairs.

Huey crosses his arms. “I need to talk to Gabby. Do you mind?”

This is a new, improved and updated, Ferocious Huey that I’ve never seen before. I have the feeling this is the most conflict he and Lisa have ever had in their entire relationship, such as it is—that she refuses to get up out of her chair. So I say it’s all right with me and watch Lisa and Anita march out of the darkroom, glaring back at him.

LV

HUEY SAYS, “I THINK YOU NEED TO SEE ANOTHER lawyer.”

“I already have a lawyer,” I say. “What’s your point?”

“I mean a lawyer who isn’t related to Billy Nash,” he says. “Also, I think you should see a lawyer who isn’t brainless.”

“I don’t see how having Albert Einstein for a lawyer could help,” I say. “The facts kind of speak for themselves.”

“Well, they don’t have much choice, do they?” Huey shouts at me. “Given that you don’t seem interested in speaking for yourself!”

“What am I supposed to say, Huey? Give it a rest. I don’t remember anything.”

“Right,” says Huey, hitting himself on the forehead with an exaggerated, dopey look on his face, his tongue hanging out. “You don’t remember anything! How could I forget?”

“Duh. And I don’t see how anyone could fix it at this point even if I did remember. I just have to pretend I have a drinking problem and then I have to pretend to get cured and then I have to pretend to grow and change and then my record gets expunged and it all goes away. Even a brain-dead lawyer could figure out this one.”

Huey looks amazed. “Is that what your lawyer told you?” he says. “Did someone actually tell you that that’s what you’re supposed to do? This is almost as mind-blowing as the part where you don’t have a drinking problem. Did he tell you that too? What is wrong with you?”

“Stop it, Huey. Just stop it! The lawyer thinks I’m fixing my so-called drinking problem and then he can feel all warm and fuzzy about himself when he gets my record expunged. It’s not rocket science.”

“Did your lawyer even ask if someone checked the steering wheel for fingerprints? Or did Agnes Nash pay him off before he got to that question?”

“Why would they want to do that? There’s no big mystery. It’s not like I was wearing gloves.”

Something in the darkroom buzzes and Huey starts swooping around sloshing things in big pans of liquid. The only light is this eerie red color and it looks as if he is a red angry burning spirit.

Huey hangs up two sheets of paper with clothespins and he sits down again and he says, “All right. How much do you really remember?”

I say, “Nothing. Nada, niente, zero, zilch, zip, zippity doo dah. This isn’t news. Everybody already knows this. Did you miss something when you were locked up in here playing with chemicals?”

“What everybody knows is that you’re saving Billy’s ass while he’s back with Aliza Benitez.”

“Are you insane? And he’s not really with her. He’s the one who’s saving my ass. In case you didn’t figure it out, it turns out that technically I stole his car. Just before I totaled it. For which the Nashes are not pressing charges. Colleges would love that one.”

Huey shoves his face so close to my face, my breath could have steamed up his glasses. “Don’t you remember anything?”

“No! Don’t you get it? No! I got hit on the freaking head when I wrecked Billy’s Beemer, just after I stole it! Why is this so hard for you to comprehend? I went spinning out drunk in the Valley, all right? There’s nothing to remember.”

Huey shakes his head. Then he takes me by the wrist and he pulls me out of the darkroom. He is such an exceptionally odd person, it’s hard to know what he has in mind.

Huey walks me through school and out to the parking lot and into his dopey-looking, ecologically good little car. People are staring at me the whole way. I’m not sure if this is because Huey is dragging me around by the wrist or because I’ve been crying so much that my eye makeup has run and I look like a raccoon.

A raccoon that’s about to cut sixth, seventh, and eighth periods.

LVI

WE DRIVE UP INTO THE HILLS TO HUEY’S HOUSE, which is a giant tan stone château that some captain of industry brought to Bel Air stone by stone from France. It is the size of the Beverly Hills Public Library, and it has matching dogs, three tan mastiffs that come racing and panting up to the car to jump all over Huey and drool on the ecologically good paint.

“This certainly takes my mind off things,” I say, trying to open the car door while a large dog pushes on it from the outside.

“Down, Daisy!” Huey says, causing the dog to wag her giant tail and hyperventilate, but not to get off my door. “Yeah,” he says, “I live in a parallel universe.”

Over by the side of the house, I swear I see a lamb. Two lambs, just walking around eating the grass.

“Is there a shepherd?” I say, only partly a joke, since I figure that if there is a shepherd, he could maybe pull the dog off my side of the car.

“My mother does animal rescue,” Huey says. As if this isn’t already a well-known fact. Then he climbs out of the car and grabs the dog by the scruff of its neck.

We crunch up the gravel path toward the house with the three dogs and a really pushy lamb. The front door is so tall, it seems as if you would need the eighteen-inch keys from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland to unlock it.

The inside of Huey’s castle involves a lot of sweeping, curved staircases and tapestries you could always use to tent normalsized houses when you spray for bugs and vermin. We climb up a bunch of these staircases while a uniformed lady follows at our heels, offering snack food. Through an open door on the way up, we see Huey’s mother in a room with a big table and cages and baskets, feeding what looks to be a tiny ferret with a baby bottle.

She says, “Hi, sweetie,” not looking up. You can’t tell if she’s talking to Huey or the ferret.

Huey says, “Mom? This is Gabby.”

This causes Mrs. Hewlett to look up fast.

“Yearbook,” Huey says. He doesn’t actually say what about yearbook, so it’s not like he’s technically lying.

“Well, keep your door open, Hewbo,” she says. Hewbo? And then she registers my face and the rivulets of eye makeup and the red eyes, and maybe I remind her of a wounded raccoon or maybe I’m just more pathetically enthralling than the ferret and a box of baby moles put together because she wipes her hands on the sides of her jeans and she hands her little ferret to the accommodating lady with the snack tray.

She is in animal rescue mode for sure and I am the unfortunate mammal.

“Madeleine Hewlett,” she says, extending her sticky hand, and all at once she’s got me in her grip, pulling me in for a hug. “Hello, dear.”

“Gabby Gardiner,” I say into her shoulder.

“My cousin Lolo used to visit Gardiner Island!” she says. “Lovely!” As if I were in line to inherit the place, or was in touch with rich and famous Gardiners, or knew them, or could recognize them in a crowd.

“Well then,” she says. “Tea!”

You can tell from Huey’s whipped demeanor that there’s no point in fighting this onslaught of maternal involvement no matter how weirdly crazed he is to haul me upstairs. He kind of leads me back down to his kitchen, which is the size of my house, and sits me down at a grotesquely long rustic table where Louis XVI probably had orange juice with his entire court dressed up as shepherds.

Only probably Marie Antoinette didn’t open the backdoor for the pushy lamb to come in and pour it a big bowl of livestock kibble.

The room is filled with black-and-white photos, Mr. and Mrs. Hewlett when they were still young and still hippies, posed in front of what appears to be their house when it was still in Europe, and a bunch of candid photos of someone you have to figure is either the Pope or a highly skilled Pope impersonator.

“I’m going to get your friend some tea,” Mrs. Hewlett says, looking at me quizzically, still in rescue mode. This involves silently telegraphing to the other maid that she’s supposed to make a cup of tea appear in front of me with a scone and a pot of jam.

“She’s upset about her boyfriend,” Huey says. It’s hard to tell if this is for parental consumption or if he thinks this covers it.

“Oh dear!” Mrs. Hewlett says, in the parental mode of being deeply concerned but even more deeply not getting it. “I was always upset about my boyfriend until I met Jeremy Jr.”

Mrs. Hewlett is still pretty without makeup at the age of fifty, wearing jeans and a sweater covered with ferret fur and wet spots you don’t even want to think about, a gazillionaire from birth, and married to a fellow gazillionaire who likes the Grateful Dead, writes music for a living, and puts up with a house full of rodents and farm animals because he loves her so much. It’s hard to relate to anything about her.

“Remember Buddy Murphy, Huey?” she says. Buddy Murphy is this two-hundred-year-old former studio head who everyone has heard of. “I was crazy about him, and then it turned out he was allergic to dander!” Mrs. Hewlett smiles with the faraway look of a woman imagining old Buddy Murphy doubled over and sneezing uncontrollably. Then she scoops up a cat and plops it on my lap.

“There,” she says. “That always makes me feel better.”

There you have it. Billy and Aliza are going to be coronated at Fling and I have a one-eyed cat on me, licking my scone. I can’t exactly throw her against the wall. She’s a one-eyed cat. So we all sit there at the grotesquely long table watching the cat eat my jam. It so does not make me feel better.

I don’t know what’s supposed to happen upstairs, and I only like surprises that involve candy, but I hand Mrs. Hewlett back the cat.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Yearbook,” Huey says.

And I can feel his mother watch me somewhat limp away, trying to figure out if she should report my condition to the Humane Society.

LVII

HUEY’S PHOTOGRAPHY ROOM IS A BIG, SUNNY octagonal place in the top corner of the house with a skylight and a black-and-white tile floor. It is the kind of room you design on purpose, because you want to be able to sit in exactly that space with those windows and that cold, hard floor whenever you feel like it, not a room you just end up with because it’s in the cheapest house on a ritzy street and you can just kind of afford it so you buy it and you’re stuck with it no matter how dreary it looks.

The room is filled with folding tables and metal shelves and cardboard bankers’ boxes labeled by year with the names of events and holidays, like he has records of every Christmas, Easter, and Fourth of July for his whole life. His equipment is strewn over a big, old fluffy couch covered with a faded yellow quilt and sat on by a couple of cats named Pinky and Cocoa Puff. Actually, it’s all sort of perfect.

And it’s not that I’m jealous thinking of Lisa sitting in this room with Huey doing whatever it is that Lisa and Huey do, which probably entails playing Boggle and Parcheesi and Monopoly and feeding ferrets for all I know. It’s just that it’s so nice in there.

Huey says, “Wait here.”

I walk to the bay window in the corner, which curves in a semicircle and lets you look down to the coast, out to the slate-blue water, and it just strikes me how happy Vivian would be to see me there. I might be a well-dressed slut of a drunken car thief with an unimpressive GPA and no Ivy League prospects whatsoever, but hell, if I didn’t mind suffocating Lisa, I could be queen of the castle. So then I stand there thinking about what a bad friend and really bad overall person I am to even be having this particular fantasy, but at least I know I wouldn’t actually do anything like that.

And then Huey comes back with the album and that particular chapter, the chapter where I knew what I knew and felt what I felt, ends.

LVIII

IT’S ONE OF THOSE CHEAP ALBUMS FROM RITE AID, the little plastic kind with cellophane sleeves that holds the pictures back-to-back. Labeled “April 11, Songbird Lane.” Neatly organized. You can tell that Huey is the prince of good organization, and he probably has hundreds of these little albums all lined up in order, and he could just pop open the Cataclysmic Disaster box and there this one would be.

So many of the pictures are shot from behind, you can tell the whole thing involves Huey skulking around and sneaking up on people, blowing his breath down toward his camera so they won’t feel him breathing on the backs of their necks. It’s creepy, but the pictures are creepier.

First, there is the house. A big, fake Tudor with maybe thirty kids on the front lawn with red plastic cups and bottles. The front door is hanging wide open and you can make out the shapes of more bodies in there, in the white light that seems to have engulfed them and blurred their edges.

“Is it coming back to you at all?” Huey asks.

“This isn’t some freaking Alfred Hitchcock movie, Huey! It isn’t coming back, all right? Ever. Do you want me to look at these or not?”

“You want to look at these,” he says.

Huey likes photographs with bodies crammed together in the frame, or maybe that’s all the party had to offer. Bodies curved and leaning into one another, arms dangling over rounded shoulders and around necks, hands and wrists and forearms disappearing into the dark folds of each other’s clothing. Bodies curved toward each other in doorways, leaning toward one another like arches, shapes with faces melting into darkness.

But you can always pick yourself out. Even years later, photographed from a distance in a group photo at summer camp, you can still tell that that’s the left side of your little-kid-self’s back in the Camp Tumbleweed T-shirt. Even two months later, you can tell it’s your profile, drinking in a corner in a chair and it looks as if you’re crying, sobbing actually, at a party you can’t remember.

“You need to look at them in order,” Huey says.

Why is that? Flipping through them backward and forward, from either direction, they tell the same story.

There I am from behind with Billy and the Andies, weaving our way through the crowd on the front lawn, heading toward the open door.

There we are in the kitchen, going for the bottles arranged helter-skelter on the counter, the only light reflected off the bottles and my earrings and off Billy’s pale hair.

There’s Jordie Berger mixing margaritas.

There’s Andie dancing for Andy in another corner, a dark expanse of silky skin between the top of her jeans and the bottom of her baby tee.

There are the Slutmuffins, all Louis Vuitton bags and attitude, standing by the pool house, lighting up with boys all around them, their personal fan club. Their heads all bent together, it is hard to tell who’s who.

Aliza Benitez on the deck chair with no blouse, breasts and arms and nipples darkened blurs, leaning into someone’s shoulder, on top of, under, and entangled with some boy, the boy with light glinting off his pale gold hair.

I appear to be yelling.

I appear to be crying.

I appear to be drinking straight out of a bottle like some bum under a freeway bridge. It is too dark to tell exactly what I’m doing. There I am drinking some more, only the bottle is a different shape. There I am drinking some more.

There I am, being hauled into the Beemer, half-carried, waving my bag in the air. Dropping my bag. Andy has me under the arms and I seem to be made of splayed rubber limbs and a big gash of a sad, drunk mouth.

There I am, getting into the car with Billy and the Andies, with Aliza Benitez kind of sitting on the trunk with her legs hanging over the back. There I am draped over Andy and Billy, who are maneuvering me into the front seat, the passenger seat, no seat belt, all of us looking exceptionally drunk, Billy trying to toss my purse in after me but missing.

There’s Billy, walking back around the car, sticking his hands wherever Aliza wants them, sticking his tongue down her throat.

There’s Billy opening the driver’s side door, holding up the keys, waving good-bye to Huey maybe.

Waving good-bye to me now, to everything I knew and wanted and believed about him and me and everything. Because I knew it was bad all along. I knew it was really bad. I just didn’t want to believe it. And I sure as hell didn’t know that it could get as bad as this.

And what’s worse is the simple fact of what must have happened next. What must have happened after Billy drove the car into the tree. What must have happened just before the sirens started and the police pulled up and I was lying on the ground with the keys in my hand and Billy was gone. Billy and Andie and Andy and Aliza Benitez were gone and I was still there, passed out on the ground.

“Who knows?” I say.

Huey does not look up, flipping forward and backward through the story of my life.

“Pretty much everyone,” he says.

“Everyone meaning the computer nerds and the manga club or everyone us?”

“Who’s us?”

It’s true. There is no us. There is my former us. The us in the pictures, the us I poured an entire bottle of vodka down my throat in front of. “Billy and the Andies and the Slutmuffins . . . you know.”

“Geez,” he says in this sarcastic tone of voice. “I don’t know. . . . Do you think they got hit on the head too?” Huey starts pacing around, completely overheated. “Do you think they came down with amnesia too? Do you think so? Because otherwise, yes, us knows.”

“You knew? Lisa and Anita knew?”

“Everyone knew. I thought you knew. Everyone knows and everyone thinks you know too. Everyone thinks you’re doing this on purpose to save Billy’s ass.”