I introduced her as a friend who was staying with me. She was quiet and looked homely in a pair of inexpensive pajamas.
—For how long? he asked. I knew Lenny wanted to continue to unburden himself. I missed the jail of Lenny. How easily I could dip in and out of it. On top of that, my plan to pinch the watch was stalled.
—I don’t know. A bit.
—There’s a provision in the lease, no long-term guests.
I knew that he was upset because he would not feel free to come and see me as often as he wished. Eleanor was not beautiful. If Alice had been staying with me, he would have been fine with it. He would have been more than fine. He would have been excited.
—She’s not. She’s staying for a few days.
I was thrilled there was now an hourglass on her stay.
—In any case, Lenny said, trying to regain ground, I was coming to inform you that I have not received your August rent.
—It’s August twelfth. I have a fifteen-day leniency.
—Well, yes, but. I’m informing you.
—Thank you.
Belligerently he turned and walked away.
—I can’t leave, Eleanor said when the door closed behind him.
—At some point—
—I want to stay, she said, until the baby is born.
—You will be a part of its—his—life. I promise you that.
—But.
—Forever.
Then I sickened myself.
—He’s your brother, I said.
She began to cry. She said she had nowhere else to go. She didn’t want to go home. There was no home left. She asked me, through her tears, what her father had been like with me. Had he always been happy. I told her he talked about her all the time.
—In what way?
—He was very proud of you. When you learned how to drive, for example. How you parallel-parked so well.
She looked at me in that way all children do when hearing specific stories about how their parents felt about them. I’d had that look with Gosia many times.
—But what about how he was with you? Was he always happy to be with you?
—Yes, I suppose. But he was also sad.
—Because you didn’t love him back.
Eleanor was sitting on the couch with her legs bent to one side. The pajamas were tight around her thighs and chest. She’d come to Los Angeles with fourteen hundred dollars, which in that city was barely enough for several dinners. At least it was barely enough for dinner the way that I ate dinner. The way that I racked up debt to cool my fever.
I’d taken her to a giant discount clothing store in the Valley. We shopped beside a mother with stringy blond hair and twig legs in ripped jean shorts. Her child, a toddler with glorious green eyes, walked placidly beside her as the woman ranted into a flip phone, alternately cursing and crying. Eleanor and I were both greatly affected. We looked at each other and I knew we felt the same way. We wanted to pick the child up and bundle her in our arms and whisk her away. We could not abide selfish parents.
I bought Eleanor a pack of white briefs and several pairs of shorts and t-shirts, a yellow sundress that I’d seen her admiring. I bought her pajamas as well, but she wore mine nearly every night.
—He took it out on us because you didn’t love him back.
—How did he do that?
—There were just nights he’d come home and he was depressed. He’d say something went wrong at work, or when our grandpa—his dad—died, he said he was depressed about that for a really long time. Then he just started drinking a lot. Most nights he’d come home after Robbie was put to bed. A couple of times I heard my mom ask him to go in and kiss him good night. And Dad would say he did. But I knew he didn’t.
Vic never told me about his father’s death.
—I really don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am.
—Sometimes I hate you so much. Other times I think it’s not your fault. Like that stuff my dad wanted—you, whatever—he wouldn’t have done what he did if it wasn’t for how miserable he was at home. He was unhappy. I guess he always was, when I think back. He never loved my mom. I mean, he cared for her, like you care for anyone you live with or anyone who loves you. But he didn’t love love her. And after Robbie…
I took her hand in mine. I didn’t want to but felt I needed to.
—Before Robbie, he came to my softball games. Every single one. He wore a dumb PROUD DAD hat or whatever. We played catch every day after school. We made meatball sandwiches at night, after Mom went to bed. I knew he wasn’t totally happy, but he was happy with me.
I walked to my little tin and brought out three one-milligram Xanax pills. I swallowed two dry and offered her the third. Perhaps it was irresponsible of me but I didn’t see any reason for someone in her kind of pain not to take pills.
She took it from me. She had never done any kind of drug, had never smoked a cigarette. She told me she was a virgin, that she thought she would wait until marriage. And now she didn’t want anything. In one day, she told me, she’d gone from wanting a love story for herself to not believing in love at all.
—What about God? I asked.
—What about Him?
—Do you still believe in God?
—Of course, she said. Don’t you?
—No. I don’t.
—That’s weird to me. That’s kind of totally nuts.
—Why?
—Because how else are you going to see your parents again?
26
I’D BEEN WRITING TO ALICE for two weeks and she would write back sometimes an entire day later. Her replies would be friendly but distant. They were the sorts of replies I’d gotten from Big Sky toward the end.
It made me remember the way all my female friendships had exasperated me. I realized that was how Alice now felt about me. It was hard to believe. In the past, if a woman didn’t immediately hate me, then she would eventually develop an unsavory need for me.
There was Carly from college, whom I reconnected with during a dark spell, in between lovers. On my way back across the country, I stopped to see her and we spent a week pretending we were better friends than we’d been in school. We ate pressed sushi and read the same biography of Jackie Onassis on Butterfly Beach. She wanted me to sleep in her bed, but I took the couch every night, peppery with sand.
She had a crush on the bartender at the sushi place. That was what made him attractive to me. He was good-looking but not tall and not clean. She introduced me to him at a party. When she went to tap the keg, I let him bring me to a filthy couch with a bedsheet over it where we kissed. I wasn’t even a little drunk. I felt someone poking my arm and looked up to see it was Carly, rage and disbelief on her face. She downed her drink. The cranberry froth clung to the fine hairs on her upper lip. I’m going home, she said, waiting for me to follow.
I’m not finished with you yet, the young man whispered into my ear, gravelly, like a junkie. I was disgusted and humiliated. With the last spittle of my inheritance, I got a bungalow at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara. I drove us there in my rented car, leaving Carly to cab home. We didn’t fuck, I was too afraid he might carry disease. I halfheartedly blew him and let him finish on my chest. I remember the color was a terrible greenish hue.
In the morning I called my friend. I didn’t apologize but asked her to come to the pool. She was over in a flash.