It was one of those pools that impresses people. Olympic and clean with coral grounds and white umbrellas and the private beach just below. I found it depressing and wished it were half the size. We ordered mimosas and shared a club sandwich. But eventually Carly couldn’t take it. She wanted more from me and tried to pick at my insides to get it. She didn’t know anything about my history—nobody did besides Gosia and, later, Vic—but anyhow turned to me with a piece of sandwich in her mouth and said, Are you the way that you are because of your mom or your dad?
I stood up. I was twenty-six and wearing a red bikini, my body was at its peak, the best it would ever look. Without another word I walked back to my room, my rear swinging, polo-shirted pool boys watching, packed up my car, and left town. I slurped some Belon oysters at a harbor bar on the way out because I’d already spent so much in one weekend that it didn’t seem to matter.
I never spoke to Carly again. I often wonder how she thought of that day. How long she hung by the pool after I’d left, expecting me to return. She’d become marvelously invested in me within mere days. Had it been me, had I been the one who was left, I’d have lain on the chaise through dusk. I’d have sucked the day down to its bone.
But now I was the jealous friend. I couldn’t even go back and look at our messages because my need was so shameful to me. The most recent one—
I am eating cilantro and thinking of you.
She didn’t reply for hours and then asked me if I’d ever been to the Santa Monica Pier and I said that I hadn’t. By bringing me to that place—thick with the tourists, their lips stained in Slurpee, their rotten children running wild—I knew it meant she was going to leave me for good. I didn’t know exactly why, but I was sure of it all the same.
We ate chili dogs and drank lime rickeys and headed for the Ferris wheel. She led me up the steel stairs of the ride, treating me like I was a dog and my arm was the leash. She was much taller than I, and even though she was slender, her bones took up a lot of space. Her hips were like my mother’s. I can’t be sure because it’s been so long, but my memory is that my mother’s hips were very wide. I pictured Alice on my father’s arm, not as his daughter but as his lover.
I reveled in that feeling of her holding my arm. I hadn’t loved a woman’s touch that much since my mother. I worried that when Alice left me, I would go looking for her forever.
Once I followed Big Sky. I waited outside of his office building on Wall Street for an hour until he finally emerged, laughing, with a well-dressed woman. Was he fucking her? No, probably not. But from afar it appeared they had that flirtation, the one we’d had at the magical start. I followed them to the nicest lunch spot in the area. I watched from the window as they ate. Frisée. Bald black olives. They each drank a glass of red.
Vic had followed me like that, probably more times than I could even imagine. In his too-large suits, his teeth gritted behind his thin lips.
Alice and I sat across from each other inside one of the cups of the wheel. The steel clanked with a risky noise as the wheel began to turn.
—I miss you, Alice said, but it didn’t sound genuine.
—Eleanor is going to leave soon.
—Good.
I wanted to know why it bothered her so much, why I wasn’t enough on my own, even with this barnacle on my back. Hadn’t we hit it off perfectly? Didn’t she realize our bond was deeper than a new friendship?
—She’s much younger-looking than I expected, and built like a circus strongman.
—She’s a little girl, I said.
—Joan, you don’t need to take care of her. Tell her you’re going on a trip. Tell her you’re going to see your parents.
—She knows I don’t have any, I said, thinking how strange it was that Eleanor knew my secret and Alice did not.
—Well, for God’s sake. You two sit up talking all night? You don’t think this is a bit fucked?
—Her father just killed himself, I said. Her mother is shattered. She had a brother with Down’s.
—You didn’t tell me that, she said.
—I thought I did, what does it matter?
—It matters a lot. That’s a big thing.
—Why?
—What do you mean, why? Did Vic agree to have a child with Down, I wonder?
—I don’t think he did.
—She kept it from him?
—She knew there was a one-in-three chance or something, and yes, she kept that from him.
—Let me ask you something. Can you imagine what it was like for the child, growing up as the only child her father could love? I have a second cousin with Down syndrome. In Maremma. It’s better there. Roman Catholics are more about the heart and less about the way something should look. I’m not religious, you know, but if both parents are the type to love whatever form something takes, then fine. Then you take the kid to the market and you don’t give a flying fuck who looks at him three times. But if you are a man like your Vic, who is upwardly mobile, who is more intelligent than the family he came from, than his wife who he married too soon, who got a taste of a woman like you, can you imagine the rage you’d feel? And now his daughter there—she knows that you were the reason her father stopped trying to get it up for his family. He met you and became even more withdrawn. Jesus Christ, it’s more than just her father cheated and now she wants to kill the slut who fucked her dad. It’s she wants to kill the slut who made her family seem like a pile of garbage. It’s not your fault, Joan, but this is worse than I thought. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about the boy. That girl will never leave you.
I told her it was worse than that. I told her the boy was dead and about the way it happened. Alice looked at me like I was the one who’d killed the child.
—Almost all of them, Joan. Someone else’s men.
—Fuck you.
—It’s weird.
—You don’t get me.
—You’re a fucking trope. There’s nothing more to get.
I felt my cheeks sinking, my mouth parting. She could barely look at me because she knew how much she was hurting me.
She said she should be getting home and I tried to say I would take a taxi but I wanted to be right beside her at the cost of my dignity. I thought of Eleanor at home. She’d be waiting for me with her crab pincers, just as her father had.
Alice and I made up, sort of. She apologized. On the way back up the canyon she told me she was thinking of going on a yoga retreat to a place called Feathered Pipe. That she needed to get out of Los Angeles. August in Los Angeles was for the birds, she said, as though I weren’t going to be there. Several weeks earlier, we might have been going away together. It wasn’t until I was about to get out of the car that I asked her where the retreat was.
She picked up her big cat-eye sunglasses from the dirty console and put them on. She smiled in a way I would never forget.
—Montana, she said. Then she winked and pulled away before I’d even closed the door.
Killing becomes something that isn’t outlandish. When you’ve seen what I have, a number of awful things become practical.
27
I GOT ELEANOR A JOB at the café working half my hours so that when she was gone, I was at home and vice versa. She wasn’t exactly happy with the arrangement, but at the same time she knew she had to contribute. It’d been over three weeks by that point. I spent my evenings cooking for the two of us, like we were a married couple. I increased her dose of Xanax to a full milligram so that she would fall asleep early. I laid a blanket over her body on the couch. She didn’t shower every day so sometimes she smelled of onions and I did a load of laundry nightly while she observed me from the couch or watched mindless television, reruns of old shows about high schoolers. I folded her clothes like I was her mother.